Grimm tales: Money kept rolling into NY congressman pre-indictment

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Head and shoulders shot of Michael Grimm, dark brown hair, side part,  blue eyes, smiling.
Rep. Michael Grimm, R-N.Y., is vowing not to quit despite a 20-count federal indictment. (Photo credit: U.S. Congress via GitHub)

Incumbency talks.

If you had any doubt, consider this: Three weeks before his Monday indictment on fraud charges, Rep. Michael Grimm hauled in more than $112,000 in campaign contributions in a single day, data downloaded from Sunlight’s Real-Time FEC tracker shows.

Although the two-term New York Republican already was under well-publicized ethics investigations and had threatened a TV news reporter who asked about it with bodily harm, political action committees affiliated with blue-chip corporations, labor unions and some of his Republican colleagues in Congress didn’t stop showering him with four-figure checks for his reelection campaign.

The haul came March 31, the last day of the first-quarter reporting period.

Donations to Michael Grimm, 2014 campaign cycle

The above timeline shows contributions to Grimm’s campaign committee since Jan. 1, 2013. Every three months there is a spike — typical for campaign committees, as political fundraisers rush to pad their totals before the deadline for quarterly campaign finance disclosures.

While Grimm’s take for the first quarter of 2014 showed a drop from the final three months of 2013, it wasn’t all that much considering the bad headlines that trailed the Staten Island representative early this year, most notably his well-publicized offer to throw a reporter off a balcony.

Despite a fever line suggesting that Grimm didn’t enjoy as much of an end-of-the-quarter bump in March as he had previously, a closer look shows that the contributions continued to arrive steadily.

Donations to Michael Grimm, last week of March

In the last week of March, Grimm collected $229,196 in donations, compared to $235,266 for the last week of December.

Donations to Michael Grimm, last week of December

Among political action committees donating big checks on March 31 were those with interests in front of the House Financial Services Committee, where Grimm served until stepping down Monday. Citgroup’s PAC gave $1,000 as did Pfizer’s. So did union PACs for the letter carriers and the Federation of Government Employees. The campaign committee of fellow Republican congressman Steve Womack of Arkansas was good for $1,000 as was the Come Back PAC, a leadership committee affiliated with Rep. Tim Murphy, R-Pa.

A full list of Grimm’s 2014 cycle contributors is here. Below is a list of contributors who gave $2,500 or more on the last day of March:

More Sunlight resources: