I’m a fool to do your dirty work Over that time, the PAC posted hundreds of pages of valuable information—including strategic assessments, messaging proposals, opposition research, video footage, internal polling data, and even a draft script that Vance later mirrored in a late-game ad. The deal was mutual, according to the filing, pointing to pages of evidence that the Vance campaign accepted and used the material to the candidate’s benefit. The complaint lays out an argument that the information directly helped Vance land ex-President Donald Trump’s endorsement and leapfrog to the front of competition he had trailed for months. This is America? Federal law prohibits coordination between campaigns and super PACs. And the watchdogs lay out a remarkably brazen scheme that spanned several months, accusing the groups of unlawful coordination, reporting violations, and impermissible in-kind donations with a value in the millions of dollars. “This abuse is perhaps one of the clearest and most flagrant examples of a candidate and a super PAC skirting campaign finance laws,” End Citizens United president Tiffany Muller said in a statement, adding that the super PAC functioned as “an all-inclusive and paid-for arm of the campaign.” Saurav Ghosh, director of federal reform at CLC and a former enforcement attorney at the FEC, said in a statement that the influence of wealthy special interests “threatens our First Amendment right to have our voices heard.” “The FEC, which is responsible for enforcing campaign finance laws, should protect American voters against inequity and corruption in our elections,” he said. Cash Rules Everything Around Me Super PACs, which can raise unlimited amounts of money, including from corporations, have a literally infinite financial advantage over campaigns. But the Citizens United Supreme Court decision that legalized super PACs in 2012 also held that such an advantage foreclosed coordination between the groups. Campaigns and super PACs have tried a number of inventive ways to sidestep that rule over the years. But the extent of the Vance arrangement—even if ultimately found to be within the law—is unheard of. Carry me Ohio An immense amount of work went into reams of documents and personalized posts on the Protect Ohio Values website, which is still accessible as of this writing. But the site was never publicized and essentially impossible to find through Google searches, revealed only in a Politico report on May 3—the day of the primary election. By contrast, the official Protect Ohio Values website consists of a single bare-bones homepage featuring two substantive sentences. When Politico published a sensitive internal poll in February, Protect Ohio Values leadership suspected a server breach, and even tried to smoke out an internal “leaker,” according to Politico. Paranoid android There was no leaker. A rival campaign accidentally unearthed the site several months before the election, according to the staffer who happened across the page. The staffer told The Daily Beast the discovery was a pure stroke of luck, the result of one of countless late-night Google deep-dives. “While I have seen sites like these, both Democratic and Republican, where campaigns and super PACs make information public, the sheer amount of information shared on this site was absolutely unprecedented,” the staffer said, estimating the value at “over a million dollars.” A little help from my friends Thiel, a billionaire tech mogul who has funded Vance’s investment firm, has reportedly met with Trump multiple times on Vance’s behalf, including around the time the PAC proposed a pivot to immigration. In all, Vance’s business partner and mentor contributed more than $13 million to the group—nearly its entire bankroll—including $10 million in seed money about four months before Vance officially launched his campaign. Over the course of the campaign, the super PAC spent more than $7.5 million in direct support of Vance, along with other expenses totaling more than $620,000 for data management, $750,000 for polling, and $600,000 in consulting fees. The Vance campaign and Protect Ohio Values didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
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