As the coronavirus pandemic enveloped the country in early April, taxpayers shelled out as much as a million dollars to a Dallas company that said it was struggling to keep 100 of its workers employed.
The company’s industry was marked down in federal records as “All Other Miscellaneous Store Retailers (except Tobacco Stores).” In reality, the company, Support American Leaders, is affiliated with a network of fly-by-night political groups that have flooded Americans’ phone lines this year with dubious telemarketing calls asking for donations to support President Donald Trump’s reelection. And there’s little evidence that Support American Leaders directly employs more than a handful of people, if that.
The money that Support American Leaders secured was a forgivable, taxpayer-backed loan worth between $350,000 and $1 million. It came through the Paycheck Protection Program, which was designed to help businesses hit by the coronavirus-induced recession this year. In the months since the loan was approved, at least three political groups associated with the company and its founder, a man named Matthew Tunstall, have raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars more from a months-long telemarketing spree, according to federal campaign finance records. The groups’ phone calls have been so incessant that at least one state has permanently banned one of the groups from calling its residents. The calls ask people for contributions to support Trump and attack his Democratic opponents, but according to campaign finance records, a minuscule percentage of its funds have gone towards actual political activity.
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That’s a pattern typical of so-called “scam PACs,” or groups that do little but raise money and pay their own executives or consulting firms. But few of those running such groups have been brazen enough to simultaneously seek direct taxpayer subsidies to prop up the act.
According to federal records, Support American Leaders certified that its PPP loan would enable it to retain 100 jobs. According to FederalPay.org, a service that tracks federal government payroll and employment matters, the company’s total 2019 payroll expenditures would have to have been between $1.7 million and $4.8 million to qualify for that loan.
There’s scant evidence that Support American Leaders is anywhere near that large. It is classified as a sole proprietorship in federal PPP loan data. Corporate records in Delaware, where the company was formed in 2018, list no officers or directors beyond Tunstall. Its address, as listed in those records and in PPP loan data, is a WeWork coworking space. Not a single LinkedIn user lists Support American Leaders as a present or past employer. In fact, there’s no trace of the company online beyond records of its PPP loan.
Tunstall did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the details of his company’s PPP loan application.
The PPP program practically invited fraud, experts say, due largely to its reliance on the goodwill of its applicants. There was little oversight of the claims about revenue and payroll that companies submitted to their banks in PPP loan applications. And that’s already resulted in some high-profile criminal cases against people who authorities say falsely inflated the size of their business or workforce in order to maximize the money they could extract from the program.
But with such a huge number of companies receiving PPP loans, investigators generally focus only on egregious cases of apparent wrongdoing, according to Derek Cohen, a partner at the law firm Goodwin and a former senior official in the Justice Department’s financial fraud section.
“It would be impossible to audit all of them, so in a lot of ways law enforcement is sort of like traffic enforcement on a highway,” Cohen said in an interview. “They’re going to look for folks who are going 100 miles an hour and make examples of them, instead of pulling over everyone who might be closer to the line.”
“Without commenting on any specific company,” Cohen said, “the sorts of things that you identify here are the sorts of things that might kick off law enforcement interest.”
By the time Support American Leaders received its loan, one of Tunstall’s political groups, the similarly named Support American Leaders PAC, had already been blasting out robocalls using the coronavirus to attempt to raise money.
“President Trump needs your emergency support to pressure Congress to suspend all flights from China to the U.S. so we can stem the coronavirus outbreak,” declared the recorded message of calls the group made in March.
Audio of that robocall is available on the website nomorobo.com, as are clips of hundreds of other calls made since last year by Support American Leaders and two other PACs affiliated with Tunstall, the Campaign to Support the President and Patriots for American Leadership. The vast majority of the calls hew to the same template: They lead with a recorded, often poorly spliced-together clip of Trump speaking, followed by urgent-sounding pleas for money to help reelect the president or support key agenda items.
The use of Trump’s voice, first reported by CNN last year, so irked his reelection campaign that it officially disavowed Support American Leaders PAC in a notice to the Federal Election Commission. But the robocalls continued.
Trump’s defeat in this month’s presidential election hasn’t stopped them either. In fact, Tunstall’s political groups are using baseless claims of widespread election fraud to try to raise more money.
“The Democrats and radical left are trying to steal the election and President Trump needs your emergency support right now,” declared one recent Patriots for American Leadership robocall.
“First they try to steal the election,” another call from the Campaign to Support the President said this week, “and now, over the weekend, at the MAGA March in DC, they threw dangerous fireworks on Trump supporters.” The robocall asks for “an emergency contribution to the campaign. Even if you contributed before, please contribute again.”
Law enforcement authorities in at least one state have already gone after Support American Leaders PAC for its incessant robocalling campaign after receiving numerous consumer complaints. In July, the PAC paid $3,000 to North Dakota’s attorney general and agreed to permanently refrain from calling the state’s residents in order to settle allegations that it violated state laws on recorded telemarketing calls.
Such calls have nonetheless been extremely lucrative. Tunstall’s three political groups have raised more than $1.3 million since 2019, according to FEC records, largely in the form of donations of less than $200. But that might actually understate the total. Neither Support American Leaders PAC nor the Campaign to Support the President has filed legally required financial disclosure reports with the FEC since January, even as both of them have ramped up their robocalling campaigns.
What financial records do exist show that none of the three groups did much to actually support Donald Trump. Their roughly $150,000 in pro-Trump independent expenditures were mostly just payments for more robocalls, which the groups simply classified as political communications rather than fundraising overhead. Patriots for American Leadership raised more than half a million dollars from its formation in August through mid-October. The sum total of its reported political activity in that time was a $5,000 donation to Trump’s campaign and a $1,500 donation to Sen. Martha McSally’s (R-AZ) campaign.
Tunstall’s foray into politics began during the 2016 election cycle when he set up a pair of political groups on opposite sides of the political spectrum—Liberty Action Group, which catered to Trump supporters, and Progressive Priorities PAC, which courted donations from Democrats. Both groups used robocalls to attempt to solicit small-dollar contributions. And they paid six-figure sums to Tunstall and a pair of his friends, either directly or through consulting firms.
Progressive Priorities PAC remains active to this day, though it hasn’t filed a periodic financial disclosure report since February, despite repeated demands from the Federal Election Commission. Citing a pattern of dodgy financial reporting, the FEC administratively terminated Liberty Action Group in October 2018.
By then, Tunstall had already founded his next political outfit. In September 2018, he formed Support American Leaders and its political arm, Support American Leaders PAC. The former’s incorporation records listed just one other person, a Maryland accountant named Amber Vaughn. She also received regular payments from, and filled out a handful of FEC filings for, both Support American Leaders PAC and the Campaign to Support the President.
Vaughn recently pleaded guilty to a felony theft charge in Maryland after embezzling $130,000 in 2017 from her employer, a veteran-owned government security contractor. A warrant for her arrest was issued in April 2019. FEC records show that Support American Leaders PAC continued paying her until November 2019.
The Campaign to Support the President was formed in February 2019, shortly followed by the incorporation of another company in Delaware: Campaign to Support the President LLC. Then, late in the 2020 election cycle, Patriots for American Leadership popped up, also with an accompanying LLC in Delaware. Unlike the other two PACs, Tunstall’s name does not appear in Patriots for American Leadership’s FEC records. But its website is nearly identical to that of Support American Leaders PAC. In fact, source code for the former even includes large blocks of text, hidden from the public-facing part of the site, copied directly from the Support American Leaders website.
The vast majority of the money that Patriots for American Leadership has spent since its formation in October has gone to an Arizona-based telemarketing company called ANTT Promotions. That firm is run by a man named Eddie Shivers, who is also listed as the treasurer of Patriots for American Leadership. He did not respond to requests for comment on his involvement.
The only person beyond Shivers to whom this network of groups has reported shelling out “salary” payments is Tunstall himself. He’s received about $29,000 from the Campaign to Support the President and Support American Leaders since last year. A company run by a man named Rob Reyes, a friend of Tunstall’s who was also involved with Liberty Action Group and Progressive Priorities PAC, has been paid more than $75,000.
That’s far less than either of them reported pulling down from their network of political committees in 2016. But it also doesn’t include the last year of unreported finances for two of Tunstall’s three political outfits this cycle.
And of course it doesn’t include the massive sum he received from taxpayers in the form of a loan meant to stave off the financial hardships caused by the coronavirus.
