In 2011 Terri Lynn Land bought an apartment complex from “Land & Co.” for a bit under a million bucks. This was a small investment to allow her to claim to be a small business owner and not part of Land & Co. itself, the “family business” she repeatedly touts in her campaign speeches and ads to prove her business acumen.
Land holds Land & Co. at arm’s length because the company closed down the trailer park she boasts about working in as a child and then did nothing to develop the land which now sits vacant and empty. A recent Detroit News exposé, however, showed just how deceitful her distancing is.
A Detroit News review of campaign contributions found 38 political donations Land made over 20 years in which her occupation is listed as an “owner,” “special projects manager” or “self-employed” at Land & Co.
Fifteen of the donations listing ownership in Land & Co. were attributed to the nearly $166,000 she spent on her successful 2002 secretary of state campaign, records show. Land’s campaign told The News the Land & Co. ownership title in her 2002 campaign records is erroneous — even though her husband was campaign treasurer at the time.
After The News inquired about Land’s business background, a Land & Co. spokesman acknowledged she has done unpaid work for the company when she was not in public office. […]
Records show campaign donations listing Land & Co. as her employer began in 1990 and continued until 2010…
When The News showed Land the records during a recent interview, she could not explain why her own campaign records listed her as an owner of Land & Co.
All of this puts the latest development into an interesting perspective. Despite claims that she is a simple “small business owner” with a little $900,000 apartment complex that she runs with her son, Land has donated nearly $3 million to her flailing, failing Senate campaign. This makes her one of the top self-funders in the entire country.
Not only that, she’s the richest Senate candidate in the land:
To rank Senate candidates, Bloomberg used the same methodology employed by the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that tracks money in politics, for members of Congress.
That method uses the midpoint of the range of net worth reported. Under that measure, Perdue and McConnell each has more than $30 million in wealth, tens of millions more than their opponents in Georgia and Kentucky. No. 1 on the Bloomberg list is Republican Terri Lynn Land of Michigan.
When ranked by their net-worth midpoint, Land comes out at $32.8 million. Perdue follows at $31.7 million, and McConnell is third at $30.4 million.
Land would like you to think that she’s massively outraising her Democratic Senate opponent Gary Peters. The most recent campaign finance reports show her clobbering Peters, raising $3.4 million to his $2 million in the second quarter of 2014. However, when you take out the $1.2 million of her own money that she gifted her campaign, the “small business owner” basically raised the same amount as Peters despite her massive backing by Koch brothers front groups Americans for Prosperity and the National Federation of Independent Business. In contrast, Peters contributed none of his own money.
Oh, one more thing: as LOLGOP pointed out yesterday, Land paid only 2.7% in taxes in 2013.
Putting all this together you could reasonably conclude that Terri Lynn Land is a multi-millionaire liar who uses her wealth to evade paying taxes and to buy a U.S. Senate seat.
And you would be right.
