Mike Huckabee Accepted, and Donated, $10,000 for Texas Mega-Church Speech
Mike Huckabee accepted $10,000 in payment for speaking at a San Antonio mega-church Sunday before Christmas, but donated the money to his own church in Arkansas, the Politico newspaper reported Wednesday.
The payment is not out of the ordinary for the Republican presidential candidate, who unlike other White House contenders has kept up his speaking career during the campaign. Politico reported that Huckabee gives churches a break from his usual fee of up to $25,000, but that he’s booked two or three paid speeches in February, and already delivered that many in November.
Click here to read the Politico story about Huckabee’s speaking gigs.
Huckabee told Politico that the pastor at the 25,000-member Cornerstone Church in Texas called him “personally” to set up Sunday’s speaking engagement. He said the church insisted on paying him $10,000, even though he did not expect it, and that he then donated the money to his Church at Rock Creek in Little Rock.
Huckabee’s speech at the Texas church received heavy attention because of questions about mixing politics and faith, an issue that has followed the former Arkansas governor.
As to why he continues to accept speaking fees, Huckabee told Politico that speaking income “is all I have.”
We Americans… bear the ark of liberties of the world.
NEWSWEEK, ”The moralist candidate who has made character the foundation of his campaign is having a far harder time explaining away persistent questions about his alleged ethics lapses as governor. During his time in the statehouse, Huckabee faced 16 ethics complaints that resulted in $1,000 in fines for failing to properly report outside income and payments from his campaign fund. He was also investigated—but never admonished—for using state aircraft for personal and political travel.
But no complaint was more controversial than his involvement with a secretive nonprofit group called Action America. In 1994, a group of Huckabee supporters set up Action America to help the new lieutenant governor advance his political career. At the time, Huckabee was broke. He’d spent everything he had on his failed Senate race. His new job paid just $24,000 a year. During Huckabee’s time as lieutenant governor, the group raised $119,916. Of that, according to tax returns, $71,500 was paid directly to Huckabee as payment for speeches and traveling expenses. When the press discovered the fund, Huckabee refused to disclose the names of Action America’s donors—oddly claiming at the time that doing so would somehow violate federal law.
“It’s not like there was something nefarious going on,” Huckabee tells NEWSWEEK. “It was an upfront, legitimate effort to travel around and drive up interest in politics.” In fact, there was a bit more to it than that. Two of Action America’s directors, J. J. Vigneault and Greg Graves—both former Huckabee political consultants—tell NEWSWEEK that the group was substantially funded by one source: R.J. Reynolds, the tobacco giant. Vigneault and Graves—who were both also R.J. Reynolds consultants—say the company hoped to use Huckabee’s political skills to drum up grass-roots opposition to the national health-care plan then being pushed by First Lady Hillary Clinton.
The idea was that Huckabee would fly around the country persuading evangelicals to come out against the Clinton proposal, which included a cigarette tax. The two Action directors say Reynolds pitched in $40,000, making it the fund’s largest contributor. Vigneault, a Little Rock lobbyist who served as one of Huckabee’s chief strategists, says the idea for the group was hatched in the Admirals Club of the Dallas-Ft. Worth airport, where Huckabee had mentioned his financial troubles to Vigneault. Vigneault says the group was incorporated in Texas because “we didn’t want anybody to find out about it.”