Nury Martinez’s 2015 reelection campaign is the most recent to get attention for questionable small donations. This goes back to October of last year when staffers from Martinez’s campaign were summoned to a grand jury.
If you don’t recall, Los Angeles has a matching funds program designed to get candidates focused on their local constituencies instead relying so heavily on out-of-district/city donors.
The program calls for 200 valid donations from district residents, among other requirements, for the matching government funds to be given to a candidate. Once candidates fulfill the requirements, every donor living in Los Angeles has their contribution matched by as much as a 2:1 ratio.
Nury Martinez, for example, got $65,360 in public funds through the matching program, almost 20% of her campaign spending.
Even though the FBI has not discussed the matter, the issue with the Feds might be the validity of those 200 district-specific donations. Martinez only reported 220 contributions from residents in her district and investigators have found residents saying they had not donated nor given permission for someone to donate on their behalf. There was another candidate from the March 2015 elections who was accused of doing something similar.
Last May, the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission fined Robert Cole over $90,000 after the commission accused Cole of filed multiple contributions to dead people as part of the effort to get over the 200 district donations in his failed bid to replace Councilman Bernard C. Parks in South LA. Cole received more than $61,000 in taxpayer matching funds for his campaign.
For more on this investigation, see here and here.