New Mexico Attorney General Gary King said Wednesday that it was legal for him to accept a $15,000 political contribution from a New York City law firm late last month despite a new state law that appears to prohibit contributions that big.
The 10-month-old campaign-finance law applies only to candidates, not to public officials elected to office, King said Wednesday.
Because he was no longer a candidate when the check arrived Sept. 22, King said, it was legal for him to accept the money to help pay off his campaign debt.
The state attorney general's acceptance of the money has come under scrutiny this week because the new law appears to have banned campaign contributions of $5,000 or more per election cycle as of Nov. 3, 2010.
Both King and his spokesman have said the $15,000 from Bernstein Litowitz Berger and Grossmann LLP of New York
is being used to pay off debt King incurred during last year's campaign.
Even though his campaign remains active, he is technically not a candidate, King said.
"The easy legal solution is that it applies to candidates in elections 2012 and after," King said in a telephone interview Wednesday afternoon. "And I am not a candidate. I went back and read the act this afternoon."
King, a Democrat, added that his GOP opponent in last year's attorney general race also could accept contributions of $5,000 or more.
That isn't Republican Matt Chandler's reading of the law.
"The law is very clear that any funds that were raised after Nov. 3 could not exceed $5,000 per election cycle," said Chandler, the district attorney in Clovis, who tried to unseat King last year.
Steven Robert Allen, executive director of New Mexico Common Cause, a good-government organization, allied with King during a multiyear effort to enact limits on what contributors could give to political campaigns in New Mexico. The New Mexico Legislature passed the law in 2009 after years of New Mexico being one of a handful of U.S. states that didn't restrict money going into political campaigns.
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