At five in the morning one week after Republican Royce White lost his 2022 Minnesota congressional primary, his campaign shelled out more than $1,200 in donor funds to a vendor 1,800 miles away not typically associated with political expenses—an all-nude strip club in Miami, Florida, called “Gold Rush Cabaret.”
That is just one among dozens of outlandish but previously unreported payments that The Daily Beast has identified from White’s 2022 Federal Election Commission filings. Several campaign finance experts characterized some of the expenses as potentially illegal spending.
And, by White’s own admission, tens of thousands of dollars in expenses supported what he characterized as a campaign entourage that accompanied him—a retired ex-NBA player—during the 2022 season of Ice Cube’s “Big3” three-on-three professional basketball league—up to the primary and beyond.
