A Donald Trump-backed congressional contender says he and his campaign just couldn’t get the name of the company he works for right.
Two days after The Daily Beast reported that American Enterprise Solutions—the company Washington State House candidate Joe Kent has identified as his employer on 34 political donations, two personal financial disclosures, and in at least one public appearance—did not appear to exist, the Republican asserted that he and his team had been saying and writing it wrong the whole time. According to Oregon Public Broadcasting, Kent produced heavily redacted materials on Tuesday indicating the company’s name was in fact “Advanced Enterprise Solutions.”
“There’s a good chance I screwed it up,” the PBS and National Public Radio affiliate quoted Kent as saying, regarding the donations and his own public statement. He blamed the repeated errors to the firm supposedly using the name “American Enterprise Systems” in the past.
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Meanwhile, a campaign staffer took responsibility for the repeated inaccurate financial disclosures, describing the name mix-up as a “typo,” and vowing to submit corrected materials to the House Ethics Committee “post haste.”
An attorney for “Advanced Enterprise Solutions” told OPB that it is a “U.S. company” that “does not wish to be identified.” The law firm did not immediately reply to a phone call from The Daily Beast.
The Kent campaign did not immediately respond to a request that it forward these materials to The Daily Beast. Nor did it immediately answer a question about why it didn’t send these documents when The Daily Beast first inquired about the firm a week ago, or in response to multiple subsequent calls, text messages, and emails directed to its spokesman Ozzie Gonzalez.
Kent asserted OPB that he sets his own hours at the firm, but does maintain a full work schedule on top of his campaigning. However, his own former campaign manager told the outlet his gig is a “phantom job,” and that Kent does little other than work to replace Rep. Jaime Herrera-Beutler (R-WA), who he defeated in the August GOP primary.
