NEW: More “Shady, Cozy” Coordination Between John James’ Campaign And Dark Money Group Led By His Former Top Aide

New Reporting Reveals Dark Money Group Supporting James Uses Same Vendors As Campaign, Adding To Tangled Web of Fishy Ties That Skirts Legal Lines

New reporting from The Daily Beast today shows that the ties between failed Senate candidate John James’ campaign and dark money group Better Future Michigan “go even deeper than revealed” in initial reporting last month. 

Records reveal that the James campaign and Better Future Michigan have used the same media buyer and the same digital consulting firm, a further indication of “shady” coordination that allows James to rely on the group to spread his message as he continues to hide from Michiganders. Because of Better Future Michigan’s legal status that doesn’t require it to disclose its donors, Michiganders will never know “‘which wealthy special interests are pouring unlimited secret money’” into James’ second Senate bid by way of a group that “‘appears to be operating as the dark-money arm of the James campaign.’” Meanwhile, a super PAC affiliated with Better Future Michigan that must disclose its donors has been financed entirely by the wealthy family of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

Last month, Open Secrets reported that James’ former campaign manager Tori Sachs failed to wait the required 120-day period between leaving the campaign and launching ads as the executive director of Better Future Michigan, which “exists solely to lob attack ads” at Senator Gary Peters. This led to a Federal Elections Commission complaint against James and his campaign, and represents a pattern of flouting the law for James, whose 2018 campaign the FEC’s nonpartisan general counsel recommended further investigating after allegations of illegal coordination with a super PAC. 

“John James is relying on a dark money group funded by secret special interests to communicate for him while he continues to hide from Michiganders,” said DSCC spokesperson Helen Kalla. “His sketchy coordination with Better Future Michigan shows just how far he’s willing to go to avoid coming clean on his toxic record and out-of-touch views.”

The Daily Beast: Shady, Cozy, and Legal: How a Top GOP Recruit Is Getting His Dark-Money Cash

By Lachlan Markay

February 28, 2020

Key Points:

• During his second run at the U.S. Senate this year, Michigan businessman John James has enjoyed the support of a deep-pocketed dark-money group that appears to be effectively operating as an extension of the James campaign itself.

• The group, Better Future Michigan (BFM), is ostensibly independent from James’ political team. But it’s run by James’ former campaign manager, who was drawing checks from the campaign just a few months before BFM ran its first broadcast ad attacking Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI), the Democratic incumbent that James, a Republican, is trying to unseat. 

• That overlap, first reported by the Center for Responsive Politics, has drawn allegations of illegal coordination. But the ties between BFM and the James campaign go even deeper than revealed in that report.

• PAY DIRT’s examination of public records indicates that the same individual has purchased ads for both James’ 2018 Senate campaign and the dark-money group backing him this time around. Digital fingerprints on BFM’s website, meanwhile, show that the group is working with a Republican vendor that has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the James campaign—beginning just weeks before BFM’s inception.

• All of that overlap points to an effort to support James’ Senate bid in a key 2020 swing state with an unknowable sum of income from undisclosed donors. And because BFM is a nonprofit group, not an explicitly political outfit, Michigan voters won’t get any details about its finances or structure until well after they go to the polls to choose their U.S. senator.

• “Better Future Michigan appears to be operating as the dark-money arm of the James campaign,” said Brendan Fischer, the director of federal and Federal Election Commission reforms at the Campaign Legal Center. “Yet voters don’t know which wealthy special interests are pouring unlimited secret money into James’ election effort by way of Better Future Michigan.”

• And here’s the kicker: Any coordination between the James campaign and BFM would be perfectly legal. “FEC rules governing coordination are narrowly focused and rarely enforced,” Fischer explained. “So despite this cozy relationship, Better Future Michigan appears to have carefully structured its activities to avoid crossing obvious legal lines.”

• Better Future Michigan was incorporated on June 12, 2019. That was just over a month after the group’s executive director, Victoria Sachs, who managed James’ 2018 Senate run, drew her last “management consulting” payment from the campaign.

• Outgoing campaign staffers are generally barred from joining supportive independent political groups for 120 days. Sachs’ speedy spin through the revolving door drew allegations of illegal coordination from Michigan Democrats.

• The group’s FCC filings also reveal another notable connection with the James campaign. The firm that BFM has used to place its broadcast ads is an Alexandria, Virginia, media buyer called Del Cielo Media. The company is actually a subsidiary of the Smart Media Group, the firm that the James campaign used to place its ads last cycle.

• What the James campaign appears to have done here is a bit different. Rather than running a parallel ad campaign to its dark-money adjunct, James’ political team appears to have relied entirely on the television advertising run by a group led by James’ one-time campaign chief. The James campaign itself hasn’t run any broadcast TV ads so far this cycle. But in that void, Sachs’ group has conveniently picked up the slack.

• That strategy has some significant advantages. Chief among them is the dark-money group’s near-total financial opacity. The group will never be required to publicly disclose the donors that have financed its ads. And even more general information about its structure and finances—how much money it’s raised and spent, which vendors it’s used, who staffs the group—won’t be public until it submits its first annual report with the IRS, which could come as late as 2022.

• But the overlap between BFM and the James campaign goes beyond the groups’ television ad buyers. The campaign’s largest vendor of the cycle so far is the Republican digital consultancy IMGE, to which it paid about $236,000 for “media placement” through the end of 2019.

• The first of those payments came on June 5 of last year. Less than three weeks later, IMGE created BFM’s website, according to web registration data. Hours after PAY DIRT asked the James campaign about that particular case of apparent vendor overlap, BFM’s website registration data was scrubbed of fingerprints tying it to IMGE.

Read the full story here.

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