After losing to U.S. Rep. Patrick Kennedy in 2004, congressional candidate Dave Rogers and his campaign manager, Christian Winthrop, continued raising money from Republicans across the country, to build their conservative political action committee.

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To review lists of recipients and donors, look into the books of David Rogers' political action committee at opensecrets.org

With written pleas for cash to help put “hard-charging, fearless, battle-tested Republican veterans in the U.S. Congress,” they raised more than $415,000 in the 2005-06 election cycle.

Two percent of that money went to federal candidates: a total of $9,000 in two years.

In that same time period, Rogers and Winthrop paid themselves $144,000 from their fund, mostly in “political consulting” fees.

Winthrop, listed in documents as the fund’s treasurer, collected more than $113,000 from the PAC — named the Special Operations Fund. Winthrop had been working in the presidential campaign of U.S. Sen. John McCain, as deputy campaign manager of New Hampshire operations. His job with McCain ended Tuesday — the day The Journal contacted the campaign about the PAC, according to a McCain campaign official.

Rogers, of Portsmouth, a Navy SEAL veteran and a former aide to Governor Carcieri, is a two-time Republican nominee for Congress in the 1st Rhode Island District. He got $31,000 in “consulting” fees.

How could so much money — given by conservatives to elect like-minded people to Congress — have ended up in the pockets of two political associates running a PAC from a P.O. box in Middletown?

There’s no law against taking large consulting fees from your own political action committee, according to a spokeswoman for the Federal Elections Commission, and according to Anthony J. Corrado Jr., a professor of government at Colby College, in Maine, and an expert in campaign finance.

“As the famous adage goes: what’s outrageous is not what’s illegal when it comes to federal campaign-finance law — but what’s legal,” said Corrado. “There’s nothing technically illegal. … The issue is whether individuals would want to continue giving to this PAC, given that they do so little for candidates.”

Eighty-two-year-old Dorothy Crozier, of Waco, Texas, gave $210 last March to the Special Operations Fund, after receiving a fundraising letter from Rogers.

“My husband told me we didn’t have the slightest idea what they were doing with that money,” Crozier said in an interview. “It was dumb of me not to know what it went to.”

Rogers said in a brief interview Tuesday that Winthrop ran the fund with a consultant from Florida, and that Rogers was not involved in the day-to-day operation.

“My role in it was specifically the use of my name, the use of my story, and the use of my mailing lists,” Rogers said. “Those are all things I could authorize and then allow to just happen.”

Rogers, 41, promised to “make a couple calls” to investigate how the fund spent its money. “It does seem odd,” Rogers said, that the PAC would spend so little on candidates and so much on fees, “and what I’m hopeful of is that I’m going to find something out that gives it a much more rational explanation.”

He followed up with an e-mail the next day: “We started a political action committee after the ’04 election cycle to help further the political process and help candidates get elected. Our hope was that this would be a self-sustaining multi-cycle endeavor. Consulting fees were paid to those who helped build the PAC, but unfortunately our efforts weren’t as successful as we would have wished. The message that was used in our fundraising was a decidedly pro-military, pro-war message. Quite obviously this message lost almost all of its effectiveness over the course of the last year.”

Winthrop, 34, a Newport native with a long resumé of campaign-related work, did not return messages left on his cell phone, at an e-mail address for the PAC, and with the McCain presidential campaign in New Hampshire.

WITH WINTHROP on his campaign team, Rogers won a three-way Republican primary in 2002, for the right to take on Kennedy, the incumbent Democrat.

Campaigning on his military experience as a former Navy SEAL, Rogers, a private-sector mathematical analyst, ran a hard, well-financed race, spending $1.9 million. The contest included a controversy over claims that somebody loosened the lug nuts on Rogers’ car. Kennedy accused his opponent’s campaign of inventing the lug nut story. Rogers enjoyed wide media exposure that campaign season, especially on talk radio, and debated well — but got thumped in November by more than 20 points.

Rogers announced in 2003 that he would run again. He swam portions of Narragansett Bay as part of his campaign and spent $2.1 million on the race.

Kennedy rolled over Rogers again, by 28 points, in November 2004.

Shortly after that loss, Rogers and Winthrop formed the Special Operations Fund, a political action committee to support Republican candidates. They began the 2006 election cycle with $78,720 on Jan. 1, 2005 — the amount Rogers had left over in his congressional campaign account, according to disclosure forms on file with the FEC.

The Special Operations Fund is a multi-candidate political action committee, which allows Rogers and Winthrop to raise political donations to support the candidates or political parties they favor. The PAC is required in disclosure forms to list names and addresses of contributors. A number of contributors interviewed over the past week did not recognize the name Special Operations Fund — even though they gave money to it.

Most recalled giving to Rogers.

Several said they were surprised that Rogers was not a candidate in 2006.

“He did not run last year?” said Wilburn Luna, a 79-year-old retiree from Vernal, Utah. Luna contributed $1,000 to the Special Operations Fund in September, because, he said, he thought Rogers was on the ballot.

“As far as Rogers is concerned, I thought he was running against Kennedy,” said William Clayton, a retiree from Brielle, N.J., who gave $902 to the Special Operations Fund in the 2005-’06 cycle. Clayton, a Republican, said he contributed because he’s “very interested in getting the Kennedys out of office.”

The Kennedy political dynasty has long been a juicy target for Republicans. To encourage political donations, Rogers and Winthrop frequently cited the Kennedy name to conservative donors:

“As a combat veteran myself, I still know that my race against Ted Kennedy’s liberal son, Congressman Patrick Kennedy, was a battle I simply had to fight and a battle that America deserved to win!” Rogers wrote in what was apparently the PAC’s most recent fundraising letter, dated Nov. 16.

That letter, under the heading “U.S. Navy SEAL Dave Rogers,” goes on to say: “My friend, in my race against Patrick Kennedy I was so close to winning that he and his liberal henchmen deployed over a million dollars in negative ads trying to destroy me.” (Rogers lost by 35,000 votes in 2002 and by 55,000 in 2004.)

The PAC’s letter came with a dollar bill, and encouraged recipients to “take this $1 bill and send it back to me along with $500 of your own to help elect more conservative Republican military veterans to the U.S. Congress.” The letter also claimed that the PAC was “desperately short on funds to fight back” against “left-wing groups.”

Rogers said Tuesday that the PAC’s ability to raise money was slowing, and that he and Winthrop had expected to close it. “I’m not positive,” he said, “but we anticipated that at the end of this most recent cycle, that would be pretty much it.”

The letter the PAC sent out in Rogers’ name after the November election makes no mention of shutting down. It says, “… If I can raise $50,000 in the next 30 days to help fund our endorsed candidates for 2008, I’m sure we will help win many races and make a real impact!”

The four-page letter is signed: Dave Rogers.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the last one,” Rogers said of the letter. “The ability of our letters to raise money was sort of waning over time.”

PACs are supposed to record the occupations of their donors. While the information is not complete on the disclosure forms for the Special Operations Fund, the available information suggests that a large percentage of contributors to the PAC are senior citizens. For the information available, 70 percent of those who donated at least $200 listed their occupation as “retired.”

Virginia Larsson, of Louisville, Ky., is 97 years old. She gets as many as 40 political fundraising letters from various groups per day, she said. She donated $200 in May and $225 last August to “Friends of David Rogers in care of Special Operations Fund,” she said last week, after consulting her checkbook. Those sums are recorded in the fund’s disclosure reports under a checking account in the name of Larsson’s husband. “My husband told me, ‘You don’t know who you’re sending this to,’ ” she said.

Another contributor, Margaret Draper, of Edinburg, Texas, gave $1,025 to the Special Operations Fund last cycle, but did not recognize its name. “I’m 86 years old and I’m very ill and I don’t think I can help you,” she said.

The Special Operations Fund spent more than $300,000 in the last cycle on the mechanics of raising money, including: $111,000 on postage; $76,000 on printing and production; $19,000 on payroll taxes and fees; $6,700 on acquiring donor lists.

In 2005, the PAC also made 11 political contributions, each for $250 — which satisfied the FEC requirement of at least five donations to federal candidates.

All the money went to Republicans running for Congress, including Representatives J.D. Hayworth of Arizona and Rob Simmons of Connecticut. The fund gave $250 in September 2005 to U.S. Senate candidate John Spencer, the Republican challenger to Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y. Winthrop worked for Spencer on that campaign.

In 2006, the fund made six political contributions totaling $6,250. By far the largest was $5,000 on March 17 to Don Stenberg, a Republican running for U.S. Senate in Nebraska. He did not win his party’s nomination.

In all, the PAC contributed a total of $3,000 to nine U.S. House candidates and $6,000 to five U.S. Senate candidates in the last cycle.

In the same time frame, Winthrop collected $113,082 from the Special Operations Fund.

The 22 payments Winthrop received were reported as salary or political consulting fees, except for an $11,531 “fund raising bonus” in January 2005. Many of his payments came monthly in lump sums of $5,000 or $6,000. He collected two $5,000 consulting payments in November 2006.

Rogers collected $31,000 in consulting fees from the fund during the 2005-’06 cycle.

His one payment listed for 2005 was for $6,000 in March.

From January to August last year, Rogers received five payments totaling $25,000; the largest was $9,000 in June.

The Special Operations Fund spent $489,700 during the 2005-’06 election cycle, according to FEC filings, and ended the year with $4,405 in cash on hand.

marsenau@projo.com