How did the Lord Campaign miss something like this?

The Lord for Attorney General Campaign is priding itself on attention to detail and competence in management. Fair enough.

We at VUI believe that how a campaign manages it financial disclosures is an indicator of their managerial abilities. Frankly if you cannot find out the occupations of the people giving you money or who the people are that are giving you money, how can you manage a multi-million dollar agency? VUI finds that true for all candidates, not just the Lord campaign.

However, the Lord campaign was the campaign VUI recently searched. We pick at Lord with humor, but we respect his professional ability. Imagine our disappointment when we found that the majority of contributors on his last campaign disclosure listed their occupations as “unknown.”

What is even more disappointing was a donation we found made to the Lord campaign on March 25th, 2010 from Interior Access, located at 903 Vicar Lane Alexandria, Virginia. The donation was in the amount of $3500. VUI is always curious about people from out of state who give to state only races, so we took a look at that donor.

Though there very well might be a person named “Interior Access” in Alexandria, Virginia, we could find no such person in property or telephone records that we searched. From the information found on Google Maps, the address 903 Vicar Lane appears to be a residence in an upscale neighborhood. According to the Alexandria, Virginia Tax Assessors’s office, that property is owned by Peter T. or Megan C. Madigan.

Further, according to the Commonwealth of Virginia’s State Corporation Commission’s database, the only entity close to “Interior Access” in Virginia is Interior Access, L.L.C., which has a purged status.

What really is disheartening  is that Peter Madigan and Megan Madigan each gave the Lord campaign $3500 on September 21st, 2009. That forbade the Lord Campaign from accepting any more money from them in the primary cycle.

So how can a campaign pride itself on management ability when it accepted a campaign contribution from a business with questionable status which listed its address as the same as two people who already gave the maximum amount allowed by law? One would think a campaign that touts how dedicated it is to managerial expertise would have done the homework and said, “Thanks, but no thanks, this could look bad.”  Frankly, it does.