Rauner: Another Link in Ohio Dark Money Network

by Russ Choma on February 25, 2015

The Ohio group in question this time, the Mid America Fund, was formed in January 2014 as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit. Run by a former political aide turned university staffer named Roberta J. Mertz, within days it began lobbing sharp attacks at every Republican candidate for Illinois governor — except Rauner. The attacks immediately raised eyebrows because of their similarity to another mysterious Ohio nonprofit that attacked another potential GOP rival to Rauner a year earlier. In that case, as OpenSecrets Blog reported last summer, the nonprofit had very close ties to one of Rauner’s top campaign operatives.

But for most of the last year, Mertz remained silent, declining to return phone calls or emails. It appeared that Mid America Fund had ceased activity, with no source of funding ever publicly identified.

The trail would’ve stopped there, but in October, as first reported by the Sunlight Foundation, Mid America came back to life, firing off a salvo of attack ads aimed at the Democrat running to be governor of Rhode Island. Rhode Island campaign finance law, unlike federal or Illinois law, requires groups like this to disclose their funding sources. Mid America Fund reported it had received $735,000 from Government Integrity Fund, another Ohio-based politically-active nonprofit that shares a board of directors with yet another Buckeye State organization, Jobs & Progress Fund. It also brought in $125,000 from the Republican Governors Association.

The new filings create a link to a set of organizations with ties to at least one of Rauner’s top campaign consultants.

Jobs & Progress Fund

In Jan. 2013, in a strikingly similar scenario to the Mid America Fund attacks in 2014, Jobs & Progress Fund — a previously unheard of Ohio-based politically-active nonprofit — began attacking Rep. Aaron Schock (R-Ill.). Shock was recently re-elected to Congress but supposedly had been contemplating a bid for the Illinois governorship, lining him up for a showdown with Rauner.

Schock’s staff blamed Rauner, but no connection was proved. Schock announced he would not pursue the governor’s job. At that point, Jobs & Progress Fund appeared to go dormant.

Just as Mid America Fund attacked Rauner’s opponents and then appeared to go dormant until suddenly re-emerging in another race, Jobs & Progress Fund sprang back to life last summer, funding attacks on Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.), who was running against eventual winner David Perdue in the GOP primary for Georgia’s open Senate seat.

What Rauner and Perdue had in common, besides being politically inexperienced wealthy businessmen, was a connection to a political operative named Nick Ayers. Ayers was, by marriage, a cousin of Perdue, and one of his consulting firms, Target Enterprises, was hired by Perdue’s campaign. Target Enterprises also worked for Rauner’s campaign.

But Ayers also has connections to the outside groups involved.

The attacks on Kingston were made by a super PAC called Citizens for a Working America, an Ayers client. It received its funding from Jobs & Progress and the Government Integrity Fund, which, it turns out, Ayers has also worked for.

Some examples of the close ties Ayers has with these Ohio groups:

• In 2012, Citizens for a Working America, the super PAC backed by Jobs & Progress Fund that assailed Kingston in the Georgia Senate runoff, spent $455,000 on advertisements backing Mitt Romney. It was Ayers’ firm, Target Enterprises, that handled the buy.
• In 2012, Ayers’ other company, C5 Creative Consulting (which was paid $133,000 by the Rauner campaign) was paid $200,000 by Government Integrity Fund.
• In 2013, C5 Creative Consulting was paid $10,000 by a super PAC called Arkansas Horizon, which received funding from Citizens for a Working America. Arkansas Horizon paid Target Enterprises another $1.8 million to buy ads.
• In 2014, Government Integrity Fund paid Ayers’ Target Enterprises almost $1.1 million to make ad buys in Arkansas.

In short, there’s strong circumstantial evidence that it is more than a coincidence that these particular outside groups targeted opponents or potential opponents of Rauner — Ayers worked for Rauner and he also worked for groups that appear to either be funding or closely connected to both Jobs & Progress Fund and Mid America Fund.

At issue is a question of coordination. Groups like super PACs and politically active nonprofits can be active in political races in the post-Citizens United landscape, but they are not allowed to coordinate with the candidates who are benefiting from their work.

Ayers did not respond to questions from OpenSecrets Blog when we tried to contact him last year and he did not respond to our questions on his connection with Mid America Fund. He told the Atlanta Journal Constitution in 2014 that while his firms did work for both Perdue and the outside groups attacking Kingston, there was no coordination because he had established a “firewall” preventing him from knowing details of Perdue’s campaign, even though his firm was earning millions from it.

Rauner’s spokesman, Lance Trover, did not respond to a request for comment

The above is from:  https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2015/02/another-link-in-ohio-dark-money-network/