Move over, George Santos—there’s another Republican politician with a taste for the finer things in life.
Royce White, the leading Republican candidate for the Senate in Minnesota, reportedly spent campaign funds from a previous failed political campaign on strip clubs, posh hotel stays, limousine services, and many other items that could only be described as personal expenses, reports The Daily Beast.
White, a retired NBA player, racked up the aforementioned ritzy expenditures, including more than $1,200 to a Miami strip club called “Gold Rush Cabaret,” during a failed run for Congress in 2022 while also taking part in Ice Cube’s “Big3” three-on-three professional basketball league at the same time. He might have gotten away with his two-year-old spending spree if he hadn’t decided to run for the Senate, as his violations of campaign finance law—which seem to rival Santos’s—went unnoticed in 2022.
“In nearly a decade of reviewing FEC disclosures, I’ve never seen a mess quite like White’s disbursements,” Jordan Libowitz, vice president for communications at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said to The Daily Beast.
White is a notorious conspiracy theorist, who’s gone from being a Black Lives Matter protester to an acolyte of Steve Bannon. He has also been accused of publicly opposing abortion while pressuring a woman to have one. Thanks to Bannon’s endorsement, White earned the endorsement of the Minnesota Republican Party in a landslide victory last weekend, garnering more than two-thirds of the vote.
With Minnesota’s Republican Senate primary set for August, Royce is not guaranteed to end up as the Republican nominee who will face incumbent Senator Amy Klobuchar in November. But the fact that he has made it so far to get a state party’s endorsement is telling. It’s anyone’s guess whether he makes it to November without criminal charges.
