At an event in February, supporter Brett Smith told Ohio Gov. and GOP presidential hopeful John Kasich about the significant challenges he’s faced in life and how he’s handled them: “I found hope in the Lord and in my friends, and now I’ve found it in my presidential candidate that I support. And I would really appreciate one of those hugs you’ve been talking about.” Kasich obliged.
New Day for America, the pro-Kasich super PAC for which Smith volunteers, took full advantage of the emotional moment. The hug graces an ad that has run in several states. But then Kasich put himself in the middle of a super PAC controversy when he appeared to admit to legally prohibited coordination between his campaign and New Day.
Kasich told Fox News he wasn’t a fan of the ad. “Well my immediate reaction in hearing about that ad is, I don’t like it…Look, I’m not going to yell at my people, I’m not even connected to, to take something off the air, but I’m not comfortable with that,” he said. Kasich was forced to backtrack quickly: By saying “I’m not going to yell at my people,” he’d implied that he had some control over the super PAC; that would be a clear violation of the FEC’s coordination rules, which bar groups making independent expenditures from strategizing with the campaign they support. A candidate can’t influence what ads a super PAC runs.
And it’s no accident that Kasich would refer to “my people.” As is true with other candidates, his super PAC is staffed by individuals close to him. New Day’s executive director Matt Carle managed Kasich’s re-election campaign; Press Secretary Connie Wehrkamp was a Kasich spokeswoman in the governor’s office and worked on his last campaign; another staffer, Dave Luketic, was political director on that campaign.
But that’s not the only instance of New Day for America and Kasich for America crossing paths. Kasich’s campaign hired Arena Online, a digital media company, to do “online web consulting” from Aug. 18-Sept. 22, 2015, paying the firm $138,658.At exactly the same time, New Day for America, the pro-Kasich super PAC, paid the same company $74,180 — almost 86 percent of New Day’s independent expenditures during that time frame — for digital media buys.
When pulling away from his verbal blunder about “the hug” ad, Kasich said nothing about the fact that both his official campaign and a group legally required to be completely unaffiliated with his campaign hired the same company, at the same time, for what appeared to be a similar purpose.
It’s not the first time that a campaign and a super PAC have paid the same vendor, of course. Most provide services like travel and food. But on some occasions the vendors are companies that work in the realm of strategy, and for those, the FEC has specific rules.
One way to keep it all on the up-and-up, according to the FEC, is for the vendor in question to establish “firewalls” so that different employees work for the different clients and information isn’t shared between them. That’s what New Day says is the case with Arena.
“Arena is a consultant and has the appropriate firewalls in place to ensure full compliance with all applicable laws and regulations. Both New Day and its consultants have written policies prohibiting the sharing of information,” a spokesperson for New Day for America said in an emailed statement.
But even when such supposedly ironclad separations are established, there’s no requirement that the vendors or the committees paying them provide a copy of the written firewall policy to the FEC.
OpenSecrets Blog reached Arena Online, but an employee declined to discuss the company’s firewall policies.
Ultimately, then, it’s virtually impossible to know whether the FEC’s coordination rules are being followed. Larry Noble, general counsel at the Campaign Legal Center, says that while firewalls are a common tool for many businesses, not just campaign vendors, they’re not a failsafe in the realm of campaign finance.
If the FEC doesn’t have a copy of a vendor’s firewall policy, the agency will have a hard time knowing if coordination is taking place, Noble said. “[I]t becomes somewhat of a sham.”
Of course, one problem “is that the FEC doesn’t investigate anything” these days, Noble added.
And there’s something to that, especially in the coordination area. The agency has never brought a case of coordination; the one time the federal government has done so, it was the Department of Justice that acted.
A request for comment from the Kasich campaign went unanswered.
Reporter Will Tucker contributed to this post.