President Donald Trump’s campaign moved swiftly last month to disavow a sizable political ad campaign that sought to build a super PAC’s email list under the banner of the president’s re-election.
The Trump Victory Fund spent more than $10,000 on about 750 Facebook ads last month attacking prominent Democrats such as Rep. Ilhan Omar (MN), Sen. Chuck Schumer (NY), and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro, now a presidential candidate. The ads directed readers to a petition page where visitors were prompted to provide their names, email addresses, and phone numbers.
The group behind the ads was actually a super PAC called C3 PAC. And within just a few weeks of the commencement of the ad campaign, according to a source familiar with the situation, the Trump campaign reached out to the group and requested that they stop branding themselves as a Trump-aligned organization. The Trump Victory Fund Facebook page has since been deleted entirely.
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The Trump campaign has actively distanced itself from similar advertising efforts in the past, officially disavowing outfits run even by the president’s close allies. Earlier this year, the campaign hammered veteran Republican operative David Bossie over fundraising by one of his groups, the Presidential Coalition, that invoked the president’s name but appeared to be doing little in actual political advocacy.
The Trump Victory Fund’s ads also appear to have run afoul of Facebook’s advertising disclosure policies. The ads say they were paid for by the Trump Victory Fund. In fact, C3 PAC was the entity that funded them. The ads are still viewable through Facebook’s political ad archive, but every one contains a message saying the company “took down this ad after it started running because the disclaimer doesn’t follow our Advertising Policies.”
Federal Election Commission records show the super PAC is almost entirely funded by technology executive Ron Gula and his wife, Cyndi, who together donated $500,000 to the group last year. C3 has received an additional $7,000 in small-dollar donations so far this year, but is largely operating on money left over from the Gulas’ contributions.
C3 PAC said the Trump Victory Fund ad campaign was the product of a vendor with whom the group will no longer work, but declined to identify the outfit.
As of the end of June, the group had paid just one political vendor this year, CapCor Strategies. That firm is run by Ryan Rhodes, the Iowa political operative who runs C3.
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