My column last Sunday raised questions about the legality of contributions made from legislative campaign accounts to Republican congressional candidate LaVar Christensen in 2006. After the column appeared, some legislators complained about being implicated. Nobody is saying they were deliberately duped, but some believe Christensen's campaign was sloppy in its efforts to ensure that all the campaign contributions were legal under federal election laws.

Christensen told me before I wrote the column that he had done his due diligence and had been assured the contributions were legal. He had asked state Rep. Glenn Donnelson to call the Federal Elections Commission and Donnelson had come back with what he thought was the FEC's seal of approval.

But Christensen admitted he hadn't explored all the nuances of the law or the details of the legislative contributions. One measure of Christensen's possible recklessness in checking to see if the contributions passed FEC muster is the fact that fellow Republican John Swallow did not accept contributions from legislative campaign accounts when he ran for Congress two years before Christensen.

Former Rep. David Ure, R-Kamas, said a $500 contribution he made to Swallow's 2004 campaign was returned because it came from Ure's campaign account and, he was told, that could violate federal law. Campaigns for federal office may only accept donations from individuals or federal political action committees, which list their individual donors with the FEC.

State law is not so strict, and corporations and PACs that don't necessarily reveal all their contributors can donate to state legislative campaigns. That complicates matters when contributions to federal candidates are made from the campaign accounts of state lawmakers.

Christensen, who was a state legislator in 2006, raised no red flags about the FEC rule, and 14 legislators donated money from their campaign accounts to Christensen's. Swallow, also a former state legislator, took no chances and returned any such contributions. Ure said he simply tore up the check from his campaign account and wrote a $500 check to Swallow on his personal bank account.

I wrote last week that nine of the 14 legislators didn't appear to have had enough individual contributions to cover what they gave to Christensen in 2006. But Rep. Mike Noel, R-Kanab, pointed out to me that in 2002, when he first ran for the Legislature, he received more than $18,000 in individual donations, including $14,000 from himself. Counting the balances carried over to 2004 and again to 2006, there was enough cash in individual donations to cover Noel's contribution to Christensen, even though Noel's campaigns since 2002 were almost wholly funded by corporate and state PAC contributions.

It's a little murkier, but in going back several campaigns and counting carry-over balances, it's possible that Rep. Brad Last, R-St. George; Rep. Curt Oda, R-Clearfield; and Rep. Merlynn Newbold, R-South Jordan, may have had enough individual money from their first campaigns to cover the contributions to Christensen.

That raises another issue. Before they were incumbents, many of the legislators, to a large extent, paid for their own campaigns. As incumbents, they can rely almost entirely on money from corporations funneled through lobbyists.