Missouri billionaire Rex Sinquefield gave $300,000 to the Republican State Leadership Committee in October, an RSLC filing with the federal Internal Revenue Service shows.
Sean Nicholson of the group Progress Missouri tweeted that information Thursday night, after he reviewed the RSLC's IRS Form 8872 filing for the period Oct. 1-Nov. 24, 2014.
Both the IRS filing and reports to the Missouri Ethics Commission show the national GOP group contributed more than $304,000 to its Missouri political action committee.
The Missouri documentation shows the Missouri PAC gave $10,000 to the Friends of House Speaker-designate John Diehl, R-Town and Country, and most of the rest of the money was spent on behalf of Republican Brian Stumpe, who unsuccessfully challenged Democratic incumbent Cole County Circuit Judge Patricia Joyce's re-election bid last month.
The RSLC-Missouri PAC gave Stumpe a $100,000 direct contribution in early October, and spent the rest on a television and postcard campaign raising questions about several decisions Joyce made during her career on the Cole County bench.
Sinquefield's $300,000 donation would appear to be a direct contribution to the RSLC, for its expenses in Missouri.
But his donation was just under 55 percent of the total $548,349 the RSLC received from Missourians during the Oct. 1-Nov. 24 reporting period.
Laura Slay, whose St. Louis-based public relations firm represents Sinquefield and his wife, didn't respond to a Friday request for a comment on the donation to the RSLC.
In early October - after the RSLC's first $100,000 donation had been transferred to Stumpe's campaign - spokeswoman Jill Bader told the News Tribune she couldn't identify any specific donor behind the contribution, and said: "We neither accept nor provide earmarked funds."
On Oct. 8, blogger Eli Yokley reported on his "PoliticMO" site that Bader told him the RSLC had "not received any money from Sinquefield this election cycle and that donors are not given the option to earmark their contributions."
Sinquefield's $300,000 donation to the RSLC is dated Oct. 9.
Some of the anti-Joyce postcard ads questioned her April 13, 2012, ruling on a challenge to the proposed ballot language on two initiative petitions seeking to replace Missouri's income tax with a higher sales tax.
Sinquefield supports that idea and had backed the petitions.
Joyce ruled that the fiscal notes prepared by State Auditor Tom Schweich's office for the petitions were "inadequate and unfair as a matter of law," and ordered the auditor's office to prepare new ones.
She also rewrote the petitions' ballot titles, finding the ballot summaries for both petitions violated state law because they were "insufficient" under state law, because they didn't tell voters that passage of the proposed amendments would cause state government to lose $7.5 billion in revenue.
Because her ruling was in mid-April, it effectively killed the effort to get the proposal on the 2012 general elections ballot, because initiative petitions can't be counted unless they have the correct ballot title and fiscal note attached to each page as the signatures are gathered - and completed petitions must be submitted to the secretary of state's office no later than the first Sunday in May.
In addition to Sinquefield's $300,000 donation, A.L. Henson of Cape Girardeau donated $215,000 to the RSLC on Oct. 22.
GOP political consultant Jeff Roe's Kansas City-based Axiom Strategies donated $20,000 on Oct. 24. A week later, the RSLC paid Axiom Strategies $15,000 for consulting services.
The Isle of Capri casinos company donated $12,000, and the ExpressScripts company gave $799.
Six other individual Missourians donated between $25 and $220 to the RSLC, for a total of $550.
The IRS filing also shows the national RSLC spent $38,469 in Missouri during the 7½-week reporting period.
The $15,000 to Axiom Strategies was the largest of those expenses.
The RSLC also paid $12,351 to the Kansas City-based Candidate Command company, for "mail postage and production," and $10,500 total (in three different payments) to Kansas City's Remington Research Group for polling.
The national group paid $618 to the MetLife office in Kansas City for employee benefits.