GOP ex-lawmaker using old campaign cash to bankroll law school bearing his name

When Lincoln Memorial University received a $5,000 contribution in October, it came from a familiar source — the old campaign committee account of former Rep. John J. "Jimmy" Duncan, a Republican who last served in Congress five years ago.

Over the past 19 years, Duncan has given more than $48,000 in leftover campaign donations to Lincoln Memorial University, a private school in Harrogate, Tenn.

That money has helped sustain Lincoln Memorial University and the law school that bears Duncan's name, the John J. Duncan Jr. School of Law.

While federal law prohibits congressional candidates from using campaign cash for personal use, donor dollars may be given to charitable organizations, including nonprofit institutes of higher education.

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But as Raw Story detailed in-depth last year, campaign finance experts consider the practice as ethically murky when political donations — directly or indirectly — enhance former lawmakers’ legacies with “monuments to me.” It’s even more problematic, they say, when the lawmaker is still in office.

Raw Story reached out to Duncan’s campaign committee and separate political action committees to ask if the former congressman believes his one-time donors would approve — or even know about — their contributions being used to fund a law school that carries Duncan’s name. Neither committee responded.

According to Roll Call in 2009, the decision to name the law school after Duncan was unilaterally made by Pete DeBusk, a friend of Duncan’s who was serving as chair of Lincoln Memorial University's board of trustees.

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“To my knowledge, there was no formal process in finding a name for that,” a school spokesperson told Roll Call at the time. “It was very informal. I don’t know that anyone else was considered.”

The law school is located in Knoxville, Tenn., which Duncan served as a congressman from 1988 to 2019. (His father, John Sr., held the congressional seat from 1965 until he died in 1988.) The Duncan School of Law ranks in the bottom 11 percent of law schools, according to the latest rankings by U.S. News & World Report.

The younger Duncan in part amassed a sizable campaign archest because he did not have expensive, hard-fought election victories. Most of his elections were routs that Duncan won by as many as 87 percentage points. His closest election was his first — a win by 12 percentage points.

Duncan, now 76, left Congress with $656,257 in his campaign account, according to Federal Election Commission records. His campaign account still has nearly half a million dollars in it as of Dec. 31, FEC records indicate.

Duncan has kept his campaign committee open and technically active since leaving elected office, and there's little in federal law that compels him to shut this "zombie committee" down.

Duncan has several other options for his campaign committee's leftover money, including transferring it to other political committees, refunding donors, disgorging it to the U.S. Treasury's general fund and donating it to nonprofit organizations that don't maintain an entity named after the congressman.

Regular patronage

Duncan’s excess campaign money started flowing to Lincoln Memorial University in 2005 with relatively small donations to the school’s athletic department.

The donations came from Duncan for Congress and through his Road to Victory political action committee.

In 2009, the year the law school opened, Duncan for Congress gave $7,700 to Lincoln Memorial University.

Eventually, the donations went to the Lincoln Memorial University Duncan School of Law. That included a $10,000 donation in 2016 and $5,000 donations in 2018, 2019, 2022, and 2023.

The total given to Lincoln Memorial from 2005 to 2023 was $48,125, according to federal records.

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Duncan’s use of campaign money was called into question in 2017 by the Nashville Post, which detailed potentially inappropriate payments from the campaign to various family members of Duncan.

The publication said the payments “raise questions as to how much one family is profiting from its long-term grip on a congressional seat.”

Later that year, the Office of Congressional Ethics issued a report questioning Duncan’s campaign committee expenses, including $27,584 for sports and concert tickets and $24,000 for personal travel.

The Office of Congressional Ethics board voted 5-1 to refer the report to the House Committee on Ethics after it found ”substantial reason to believe that Rep. Duncan’s campaign committee and leadership PAC expended funds that were not attributable to bona fide campaign or political purposes.”

Duncan supported Donald Trump for president in 2016.

In an interview with NPR, when asked about Trump’s temperament, Duncan said, “I think that Donald Trump is a very nice man and because he hadn't run for office before that he at times maybe has overreacted to a little criticism.”