Duped Or Didn’t Care?

After I posted about the indictment of Rep. Movita Johnson-Harrell for theft from her own charity, I began to wonder about her campaign finances. One of the charges against her included failing to file a campaign finance report. What I found was interesting.

Johnson-Harrell was quoted in a fawning story by the Philadelphia Inquirer on her motivation to run for office as saying this:

“I ran because we need the bodies to stop dropping in every city across the nation,” said Johnson-Harrell, 53. “It’s our responsibility as legislators and leaders to do this.”

She made “gun violence” (sic) and gun control a centerpiece of her campaign in the special election. She was already known for having started the Charles Foundation to advocate for more gun control in memory of her murdered son. She was also the Vice Chair of Heeding God’s Call to Eliminate Gun Violence (sic). Thus, it was reasonable to assume she would get support from the gun prohibitionists.

And she did with a stirring endorsement from Everytown.

“After more than a dozen Moms Demand Action volunteers won elected office in 2018, I’m so excited to see yet another strong candidate emerge from our grassroots army of volunteers,” said Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America. “Movita Johnson-Harrell has been invaluable to our Pennsylvania chapter and I have no doubt that she’ll be an incredible leader at the statehouse, too.”

Endorsements are nice but modern campaigns run on money.

• $500 – Ceasefire PA PAC
• $250 – Shira Goodman, Executive Director, Ceasefire PA
• $100 – Shawn Kraemer, President, Ceasefire PA
• $100 – Bryan Miller, founder, Heeding God’s Call

Johnson-Harrell also received a $1,000 donation from Dana Bazelon of the Soros-bought Philadelphia DA’s Office and a $5,000 donation from the Committee for a Better Tomorrow which is the PAC for the Pennsylvania trial lawyers. She also received substantial donations from a variety of union-affiliated political action committees.

Johnson-Harrell’s financial issues were not a secret. Before she got the nomination by the Philadelphia Democratic Committee, she was grilled on her finances by ward leaders. Moreover, she only got the nomination because the more established candidates had issues with residency.

Going back to the headline, were those anti-gun stalwarts who donated to Johnson-Harrell duped by her? Or, could it have been that despite her known troubled finances, her fur coats, and her Porsche, they just didn’t care because they knew they would have a gun control advocate in Harrisburg? Would it have been, “Yeah, she’s a thief but she’s our thief” and the optics of having an African-American, Muslim woman who had family members murdered outweighed every thing else?

I doubt we will ever know and I know we would not get an honest answer if we asked.