Blue America operates the old-fashioned way. We make a case for progressive candidates and then ask people on our mailing list to contribute directly to the candidates we endorse. Contributors who want to can also give to Blue America itself, money that we use to buy ads for our candidates. In the most recent fundraiser we did— the Green Day contest for 5 progressive running for the Virginia legislature— we raised $3,855.16 from 124 contributors. 61 of them contributed to our PAC ($503.82) and the rest went to the various candidates— between $1,291.96 for Jessica Anderson to $509.66 to the candidate who got the smallest haul. Blue America is also writing a check for $1,000 to the winner— Anderson, who had 119 individual contributors. Digby, John and I— the Blue America principals— have never taken a dime from the PAC. We don’t get salaries or expenses or dinners or anything like that. All the money goes for our candidates and to pay our lawyer and an assistant who formats, send our e-mails and manages the Blue America social media accounts.
Yesterday’s NY Times explained a very different kind of model of political fundraising— a profitable business for the fundraisers themselves. In short, it’s a rip-off model. The Times concentrated on 5 right-wing groups tricking conservative donors. But, truth be told, there are the same kinds of crooked operators working the blue side of the aisle as well.
The Times focused on “a political nonprofit called a 527, after a section of the tax code, that can raise unlimited donations to help or oppose candidates, promote issues or encourage voting. In reality, it is part of a group of five linked nonprofits that have exploited thousands of donors in ways that have been hidden until now by a blizzard of filings, lax oversight and a blind spot in the campaign finance system. Since 2014, the five groups have pulled in $89 million from small-dollar donors who were pitched on building political support for police officers, veterans and firefighters.” They’re referring to the American Police Association Alliance (whose former president admitted “We’re misleading people who have given hard-earned money”), Firefighters and EMS Fund, National Police Support Fund, American Veterans Honor Fund and Veterans Action Network.
They raised 89 million but just $826,904 (about 1 percent of the take) went to help candidates. “About 90 percent of the money the groups raised was simply sent back to their fund-raising contractors, to feed a self-consuming loop where donations went to find more donors to give money to find more donors. They had no significant operations other than fund-raising, and along the way became one of America’s biggest sources of robocalls… The groups also paid $2.8 million, or 3 percent of the money raised, to three Republican political consultants from Wisconsin who were the hidden force behind all five nonprofits, according to people who worked for the groups and who in some cases were kept in the dark by the consultants about the finances of the operations. Those three consultants helped organize the nonprofits, the people said, then billed them— through shell companies that obscured the connection.”
In their calls, the groups identified themselves to potential donors as political organizations. Beyond that, they were often vague about whom they supported and how. The American Police Officers Alliance told donors it was “supporting efforts to elect lawmakers to advocate for those who protect our nation's citizens.”
Ryan Meyer, who was president of the American Police Officers Alliance from 2017 to 2021, said the three Wisconsin consultants used him as a figurehead and ousted him after he learned that most of the money raised by the group went back into more fund-raising and demanded changes in the organization’s direction.
“It made me sick to my stomach,” Meyer said. “We’re misleading people who have given hard-earned money.”
The Times found their connections— to each other, and to the three Wisconsin consultants— by following their money through a web of shell companies and corporate aliases.
The Times’ analysis showed that the five nonprofits had paid a combined $985,000 to a company in Baltimore called “Voter Mobilization LLC.” It was registered in Delaware— where corporate-secrecy laws meant its owners did not have to be disclosed.
In reality, the Baltimore address was just a virtual office, where the company received mail but kept no staff. Voter Mobilization LLC was actually owned by an obscure political firm called Campaign Now, which was in turn owned by a 37-year-old Republican consultant from Wisconsin named John Connors, a central figure who appears to connect all five nonprofits.
Tax records show that the five groups paid $1.1 million to companies where Connors was either the owner or a partner. The payments were part of a pattern in which the nonprofits paid firms connected to the three consultants for “political support services” and other tasks like bookkeeping and consulting.
“I do this to help people without a voice organize, raise money and design a platform,” Connors said in a statement. He confirmed his company’s ownership of Voter Mobilization LLC. “Yes I am paid for what I do (everybody is) but my real compensation is the satisfaction of Americans getting involved in the system,” he said.
In another instance, the nonprofit groups said they had paid six different vendors spread across Illinois, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Nevada, Texas and Tennessee. But corporate records showed a common thread: All of those companies were actually aliases for— or a subsidiary of— a single Wisconsin firm owned by Kyle Maichle, another of the consultants behind the nonprofits.
Maichle, 40, was a researcher for Connors in 2011 and 2012. In 2017, with Connors’ help, Maichle started his own company, Precision Compliance Consulting. The nonprofits paid Maichle’s companies about $860,000.
“I created the trade names to protect my newly formed companies in a radicalized political environment,” Maichle said in an email.
The analysis by The Times also found about $830,000 in payments from the nonprofits to other companies owned by Lewis, the third of the consultants and another former employee of Connors.
A captain in the Wisconsin Army National Guard’s military police, Lewis, 37, embodies how these groups and their vendors are intertwined: He is president of one nonprofit group, the National Police Support Fund, was an officer of another and has been a vendor to all five.
He also illustrates the secrecy that shrouded those connections. The National Police Support Fund repeatedly told the IRS it had not engaged in business transactions with any board members— even as it did so with him. In one case, the filing attesting that there had not been insider transactions was signed by Lewis himself, as president.
“This appears to be a scrivener’s error on the part of the accountant. This happens,” the National Police Support Fund said in a statement.
Connors, Lewis and Maichle were all active in college conservative politics in Wisconsin about 15 years ago, when Connors was the leader of campus Republicans at Marquette University.
Connors founded Campaign Now before he graduated, and built it into a firm that handled robocalls and voter outreach. He hired Lewis and Maichle, but made clear who was in charge: the firm’s website gave his title as “Boss Man.”
…In the 2014, 2016 and 2018 election cycles, Veterans Action Network spent a higher percentage of the money it took in on fund-raising than any other large 527 group in the country, according to the campaign watchdog OpenSecrets. Most of the others spent far less, under 33 percent.
… In the 2022 election cycle, OpenSecrets tracked 202 similarly large groups organized as 527s, and found that only 13 percent of them spent more than a third of their expenditures on fund-raising. Among them, the four connected to Connors and his associates ranked first, second, fourth and sixth in total fund-raising expenditures.
The groups’ biggest contractor over the years, receiving $20 million, was Residential Programs, which has no known ties to Connors, Lewis or Maichle. Many of the other call centers they hired were hard to track. They did not respond to requests for comment, or were registered in states where their ownership and contact information was kept secret.
… In recent years, the Justice Department has prosecuted a handful of people for running “scam PACs— political action committees that diverted most of their donors’ money to insiders and endless fund-raising.
…Meyers, the former president of the American Police Officers Alliance, said that after learning about his group’s spending patterns he sought to bring about a change. “If we’re going to run this thing, we’re going to run it legit,” he said, describing his feeling at the time. “We’re not going to run it as a half-assed grift.”
But he said he was removed from the board in 2021.
Matthew Gutmann, a friend of Meyer’s, said Maichle had recruited him to be treasurer of the American Veterans Honor Fund.
“I was never in a board meeting. Not one bleeping second,” Gutmann, who was treasurer from 2017 to 2020, said. “I was excluded from virtually everything, other than signing other documents, which I was given the impression were on the up-and-up.”
Gutmann said he eventually learned how the group spent its money, and also concluded that Connors was actually in control. He said he, too, was ousted after raising questions.
Now, he said, he warns people to avoid phone solicitations. “I tell my folks, ‘Do not donate over the phone,’” he said.
In statements, American Police Officers Alliance and American Veterans Honor Fund said that Meyer and Gutmann had been removed for policy violations, including for making “false statements to outside third parties that consultants run the organization.”
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