ALBANY, N.Y.—A probe swirling around New York City’s mayor has cast a harsh light on some of the nation’s most lax campaign finance laws, with contribution limits so easy to get around that even government watchdogs acknowledge a ring of truth to the familiar excuse: Hey, everybody’s doing it.
Mayor Bill de Blasio has been bedeviled by a criminal probe of an effort he helped organize in 2014 to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for Democratic state Senate candidates. He insists that he and his team have done nothing wrong and suggested they have been unfairly singled out for a common practice in New York’s famously opaque campaign funding system.
While New York law restricts individual donations to any candidate at just over $10,000—already among the highest such limits in the nation—party committees can receive individual donations of more than $100,000, and the committee can then transfer an unrestricted amount to the candidate.
