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Madison - Wisconsin unions and businesses gave $1.3 million to a national Democratic Party committee, which then returned much of it to an organization prosecutors say Sen. Chuck Chvala illegally ran to skirt state campaign-finance laws, a new report released Thursday charged.

Using new Internal Revenue Service data, the non-partisan group Common Cause in Wisconsin was able for the first time to list donations from Wisconsin - including $430,000 from the state's largest teachers union - to the Democratic Leadership Campaign Committee in Washington, D.C., before state elections in 2000 and 2002.

Wisconsin contributors gave more to the national committee than any other state and - in a move that Common Cause described as "laundering" - the committee returned $695,470 of it to Wisconsin political groups over a 30-month period.

Of that amount, the report says, $322,000 was sent to Independent Citizens for Democracy, a front group that prosecutors say Chvala used to illegally help fellow Democrats running for the Senate.

The FBI said last month that it was looking into whether the Democratic Leadership Campaign Committee violated federal money-laundering laws in a campaign-finance scheme that led to state felony charges against Chvala.