The Daily Beast explains the brazen scheme involving the Vance campaign and the Trumper-billionaire Thiel's super PAC, as laid out in a complaint by watchdog groups Campaign Legal Center and End Citizens United:
[The complaint] alleges that the Vance campaign and the Protect Ohio Values super PAC coordinated for months through a secret website, where 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 the campaign adopted in for a late-game ad.
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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.
The website was not technically secret but the material posted was clearly intended for Vance campaign eyes only.
For one thing, the site was nearly impossible to find if you didn’t already know the URL. The complaint notes that the site was published on Medium.com under the username @protectohiovaluesforms. Yet a Google search for the exact terms “protect ohio values” and “medium.com” one day before a Politico article publicized its existence did not return a result for the site. “In other words, before it was identified in the Politico article, the trove of information that Protect Ohio Values posted on Medium.com was essentially hidden from public view, even if someone knew exactly what to search for,” the complaint states.
The same Politico article also reported that the site published “a trove of sensitive documents,” including thousands of pages of polling data and “suggested lines for Vance to use on the campaign trail, and even guidance on how the candidate could win Trump’s endorsement.”
The complaint provides specific evidence that the Vance campaign used the material to its benefit, including adopting suggested language in one of its campaign ads.
As it turned out, a staffer from the Josh Mandel campaign discovered the site. According to The Daily Beast, the discovery was inadvertent. But after polling data from the site was leaked to Politico, “Protect Ohio Values treated this as a data breach: it initiated an internal investigation to find the ‘leaker’ responsible for this ‘serious blow,’” the complaint states.
However the FEC rules on the complaint, what’s very clear is that the Vance campaign and the super PAC deliberately skirted the law so that billionaire Thiel could help buy the election for Vance, a guy who is obviously willing to say and probably do anything for the money.
