Donations to Rep. Chris Collins’ Campaign Plummeted After His Indictment on Insider Trading Charges

“If it wasn’t so shameless, it would be unbelievable.”

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Since Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.) was indicted on insider trading charges in August, donations to his reelection campaign have plummeted, according to his latest quarterly filing to the Federal Election Commission this month.

The National Republican Congressional Committee cut him off, resulting in a 71 percent drop-off in donations from July. Nonetheless, Collins still clings to a lead in his ruby-red upstate New York district.

The three-term incumbent still has his supporters. On September 29, he reported receiving $1,000 from Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers (PhRMA), an industry trade group. This was less than eight weeks after he had been charged in an insider trading conspiracy that centered around a pharmaceutical company where he served as a board member. Collins has denied the charges and remains on the ballot, because of some quirky state election laws that makes it all but impossible for the party to remove him. He is not expected to stand trial until February 2020.

Holly Campbell, a spokesperson for PhRMA, disputed this report in an email to Mother Jones, noting that the group’s own filings show a donation being made to Collins on July 31. “It’s also odd that their filing has aggregate [donations] from PhRMA at $2062.50,” she added. “As you can see in our report, all of our contributions are round numbers. So something does not seem right there…”

The Collins campaign did not respond to a request for comment. 

No matter the timing of the donation, it did not go unnoticed by Collins’ Democratic challenger, Nate McMurray, the 43-year-old town supervisor of a small community near Niagara Falls. 

“Let me get this straight: Chris Collins sat on the board of a drug company, then conspired to make sure he didn’t lose money when a drug trial failed, then lied about it to the FBI, then decided he’d run for re-election because his lawyers thought it would keep him out of jail and now the only financial support for his campaign comes from pharmaceutical special interests?” McMurray, 43, said in a statement. “If it wasn’t so shameless, it would be unbelievable.”

Once considered a Republican lock, Collins’ seat in New York’s 27th District, which includes the suburbs of Buffalo and Rochester, is now a ripe Democratic target. McMurray, who told Mother Jones last month that party fundraisers would not return his calls before Collins’ indictment, was added to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s “Red to Blue” list last week, which guarantees him more institutional party support.

On July 16, McMurray reported just over $46,000 in donations the preceding quarter. Earlier this month, he reported $519,846.94—more than 11 times that amount—helped in part by more than $325,000 raised from ActBlue, the progressive fundraising platform.

This story has been updated to note that a spokesperson for PhRMA disputed the date of the group’s donation to Collins’ campaign.

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AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

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