The Keep America Great Committee always tried to be an impersonation of President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign. And now, like many of the president’s associates, it finds itself in trouble with the law.
Federal law-enforcement authorities this week seized websites associated with the fake political action committee, which had been imitating the Trump campaign in order to extract financial contributions from unwitting donors who thought they were supporting the president’s re-election.
At least two websites associated with the Keep America Great Committee have been taken down and replaced with a placeholder message from the FBI.
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“This domain… has been seized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation pursuant to a federal seizure warrant,” the notice reads. “If you donated to the Keep American [sic] Great Committee you may be a victim of fraud.” The message cites a federal law that allows authorities to seize assets derived from fraud or money laundering.
The message asks people who believe they’ve been defrauded to submit complaints to the FBI using a dedicated hashtag: #kagc. The FBI seizure appears to have taken place this week.
The move by the Feds marks an inglorious chapter to an already dubious history for KAGC. The organization has operated at least two websites since early this year that now bear that message: keepamericagreatcommittee.com and trump2020maga.com. It used both of them to solicit donations with websites that explicitly mirrored Trump campaign donation pages on the Republican fundraising platform WinRed.
As PAY DIRT reported in June, the source code for both websites was nearly identical to that of the Trump campaign pages. But the individuals running the PAC switched out the Trump campaign’s online payment processor information for its own. Through ads on Facebook and Google, KAGC attempted to solicit donations by passing itself off as the Trump campaign itself.
In fact, its Facebook ads, like its websites, were frequently copied, verbatim, from the Trump campaign and GOP groups such as the National Republican Senatorial Committee. It also ran ads on Facebook that solicited donations for a supposed coronavirus-related relief fund for frontline workers and vulnerable communities.
“This will support immediate and long-term relief and recovery in vulnerable communities during one of the most challenging times we have collectively faced,” the ads claimed.
In its sole financial-disclosure filing with the Federal Election Commission in July, KAGC claimed to have raised $28,650 in the second quarter of 2020. Despite repeated warnings from the commission that it was failing to file its periodic financial reports—and that the one it did file was improperly formatted—the group has not disclosed any other information about its finances.
The world of politics and campaigns may be about winning votes. But it runs on cash. And KAGC was clearly more interested in the latter than in the former. The group was run by a Nevada man named James Bell (he generally goes by his middle name, Kyle), an internet marketing pitchman who, along with a longtime business partner, has drawn numerous allegations of suspect business practices from former customers and clients. He did not respond to inquiries about the FBI’s seizure of his group’s websites.
Just days after PAY DIRT exposed KAGC’s apparently fraudulent advertising campaigns, the group amended its registration information with the FEC to remove Bell and his wife from its list of executives. It’s not clear whether the individuals who replaced them on FEC paperwork, Jim Searcy and Amy Ashton, actually exist. A message left at the phone number listed for Searcy was not returned. The number listed for Ashton is not in service.
It is increasingly common to see fraudulent political groups try to solicit donations from well-meaning donors with promises to back some popular political figure. But even by the standards of “scam PACs,” KAGC was remarkably brazen. Facebook and Google apparently caught on to the grift before the FBI did. Both sites removed KAGC advertisements en masse over the summer. On Facebook, KAGC quickly created another page on which to run its advertisements. That too was soon removed.
After The Daily Beast reported on the apparently fraudulent nature of the operation, KAGC converted its web properties into news-style websites, which its proprietors never bothered to update. On the keepamericagreatcommittee.com domain, every piece of “news” content appeared under the byline Dan Carpenter. But the web address of “Carpenter’s” author page on the site listed the author’s username as “kyle17,” corresponding to Bell’s name and email address.
