Washington – The Air Force is investigating whether a two-star general violated military regulations by urging fellow Air Force Academy graduates to make campaign contributions to a Republican candidate for Congress in Colorado, Pentagon officials said Friday.
Maj. Gen. Jack Catton, who is on active duty at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, sent the fundraising appeal Thursday from his official e-mail account to more than 200 fellow members of the academy’s Class of 1976, many of whom are also on active duty.
“We are certainly in need of Christian men with integrity and military experience in Congress,” Catton wrote.
Defense Department rules prohibit active-duty officers from using their position to solicit campaign contributions or seek votes for a particular candidate.
Catton urged his classmates to support Bentley Rayburn, a recently retired Air Force general seeking the Republican nomination for a House seat being vacated this year by Rep. Joel Hefley, R-Colo.
An Air Force spokesman said Friday that “appropriate officials are inquiring into the facts surrounding these e-mails.”
Catton’s e-mail was provided to The Washington Post by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a nonprofit group founded last year by Michael “Mikey” Weinstein, a former White House counsel in the Reagan administration.
“This is not just a small thing,” said Weinstein, an academy graduate who is suing the Air Force to halt what he contends is pervasive proselytizing in the armed forces. “It’s evidence of a continuing attack on separation of church and state by evangelicals in the military.”
Both Catton’s e-mail and an accompanying note from Rayburn portrayed him as a candidate who would represent the military and conservative Christians.
“For those of us who are Christians, there is that whole other side of the coin that recognizes that we need more Christian influence in Congress,” Rayburn wrote.
Rayburn, a 1975 Air Force Academy graduate, said Friday that Catton’s only mistake was sending the message from his official e-mail account.
Catton said he realized after he sent the e-mail Thursday evening that it was “inappropriate” and attempted to recall it Friday morning.
“I’m traveling, and I was going through e-mails last night, on the airplane, and very excited about one of my academy brothers running for Congress, and forwarded the e-mail to my classmates to share the excitement,” he said.
“And when I got up this morning, I had an e-mail from one of my classmates who said, ‘Jack, do you realize you were on your work computer?’ I went, ‘Holy smokes!’ And so I immediately sent out a recall of that e-mail, because I shouldn’t have sent it out on my work computer, because it’s inappropriate.”
