A sketchy political group that has come under fire for its deceptive fundraising practices in the past is spreading coronavirus misinformation in an effort to lure in potential donors.
Support American Leaders PAC, a pro-Trump group that has been explicitly disavowed by President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign, has placed a host of robocalls this month asking people to sign a petition demanding that Congress support Trump’s efforts to shut down travel to the United States from China.
There’s just one issue with that call to action: Flights from China have already been effectively shut down for nearly two months.
These robocalls are just the latest round in a months-long SAL PAC campaign that has raised the group significant amounts of money. But despite bringing in about three-quarters of a million dollars last year, it’s donated a paltry $1,500 to political candidates this cycle—just one candidate actually: Rep. Jeff Van Drew, the New Jersey Republican who defected from the Democratic Party during last year’s impeachment fight.
Far more money has gone to Matt Tunstall, the Texas man who runs the PAC, and to a consulting firm owned by a friend of Tunstall’s with whom he’s collaborated on other dubious political groups in the past. SAL PAC has also paid an accounting firm run by a Maryland woman who is facing multiple felony charges for allegedly embezzling money from a veteran-owned federal security contractor.
In an interview late last year, Tunstall defended the group’s work, pointing to SAL PAC’s six-figure independent expenditures in support of Trump’s re-election. But almost none of those outlays have gone toward the type of political activity normally associated with legitimate PACs—things like digital or broadcast advertisements, direct mail, or other actual campaign expenses. Instead, the vast majority of its independent expenditures have financed the group’s telemarketing campaigns, which it uses to attempt to recruit more donors and harvest contact information that can be used for future outreach.
Now those telemarketing efforts are capitalizing on a story that’s dominating every headline in America—and pushing misinformation about a topic that, for thousands of Americans, is literally a matter of life and death.
“I would say they are not misleading and instead they are simply outdated,” Tunstall said of the coronavirus robocalls, which were still coming in as late as last week, a month and a half after flights from China to the United States were effectively shut down. “But the overall message and goal is to have conversations with supporters and voters.”
The script of the robocall sounds, at first, like a plea for help.
“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,” SAL PAC coronavirus robocall says. “If I have your permission to sign your name to suspend all flights from China to the U.S. and support President Trump, press one.”
In fact, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has already imposed heavy restrictions on travel from China. “Most foreign nationals who have been in China during the previous 14 days will not be permitted entry into the United States,” the agency says. And U.S. air carriers themselves suspended flights from the country in January after the administration said it would move to bar that travel anyway.
The group’s robocalls end with a legally required disclaimer noting that the PAC is not affiliated with a political campaign. But those who receive the calls are immediately greeted by President Trump’s voice.
“I’m Donald Trump,” a recording at the beginning of each call declares. “We have to fix this because it just doesn’t work.” The latter part of that sound bite is drawn from a Trump speech in November 2017, long before coronavirus was even identified.
The use of recordings of Trump’s voice has prompted legal scrutiny of past SAL PAC robocalls and their compliance with Federal Trade Commission rules on “impersonation.” Tunstall told CNN in a 2019 report that it took care to stay on the right side of the law and that its robocalls did not “impersonate” Trump or anyone else.
But its use of Trump’s voice drew a swift rebuke from the president’s re-election campaign. Shortly after CNN’s story on SAL PAC, the Trump campaign filed an official disavowal notice with the Federal Election Commission.
Team Trump said it was “concerned about the likelihood of confusion among the public, which may be led to believe [SAL PAC’s] activities are authorized by Mr. Trump or this committee or that contributions to such unauthorized committees are being made to Mr. Trump’s campaign, when they are not.”
SAL PAC’s latest round of telemarketing, undertaken in the days after its coronavirus calls, appears prone to just that sort of mixup, intentionally or otherwise. “This is an urgent message from the campaign to help elect President Trump in 2020,” one of the group’s most recent robocalls declares. It too begins with a recorded Trump soundbite.
“President Trump needs your support to fund our brand-new re-election campaign for 2020,” the call pleads. “Even if you contributed to help elect Trump before, in 2016, please contribute again so we can fund our campaign to get ahead and defeat the Democratic opponent in 2020.”
These are the sorts of robocalls that Tunstall and his group describes, in FEC filings and comments to the press, as pro-Trump “independent expenditures.” It’s a common tactic among so-called scam PACs, which frequently attempt to pass off their fundraising as political activity while doing little or nothing to actually support candidates for office.
Tunstall describes its tactics simply as self-sustaining advocacy in support of the president. “We do raise funds so that we can self-fund and re-broadcast independent expenditure messages to support President Trump and related issues of national importance (including at this time, President Trump’s leadership on the coronavirus),” he said in an email. “Thus the fundraising is more so to help cover the costs of being able to rebroadcast the independent expenditure messages to supporters and gather feedback.”
But the group’s more traditional political activity—as opposed to its extensive telemarketing campaign—is actually quite minimal. It’s spent nearly $350,000 since last year on independent expenditures that it classifies as “telemarketing” and “voter contact,” according to FEC records. That’s about 230 times the amount of its total reported political contributions, which consists solely of the $1,500 it gave to Van Drew on Dec. 31, 2019.
SAL PAC did report spending about $25,000 to produce and place pro-Trump ads, according to its FEC filings. But more than $20,000 of those expenditures went to a company, Modern Media Group LLC, run by a friend of Tunstall’s. The friend, Rob Reyes, also worked with Tunstall on a pair of PACs, one ostensibly Republican-leaning and the other favoring Democrats, during the 2018 cycle. Facebook photos at the time showed Reyes and Tunstall traveling the world together in the years before they apparently teamed up on political ventures.
Tunstall has also drawn checks from SAL PAC personally, FEC filings show. The $27,370 that the group paid him last year represented more than a third of all of its reported operating expenses, and was more than any of its non-IE vendors received that year.
SAL PAC also reported paying its accountant, listed in FEC filings as Amber Dior Accounting, about $2,700. On the PAC’s corporate records in Delaware, that accountant signed her name as Amber Vaughn. On her website, she used another last name, Gormley.
SAL PAC’s corporate records list her name as Amber Dior Vaughn, and her address is the same one listed in a Maryland arrest warrant issued for Vaughn in April 2019. That was the month before she officially incorporated SAL PAC. Vaughn drew her last payment from the PAC in November, a few weeks before the date of her indictment on felony theft and embezzlement charges. Prosecutors allege Vaughn stole more than $130,000 from her employer, a federal security contractor called Veteran Solutions Inc. She’s pleaded not guilty, and her case is set to go to trial this month.
Tunstall told PAY DIRT in December that he had no idea about Vaughn’s criminal troubles, and that the PAC had fired her by then anyway. He said he had found her through a Craigslist ad.
“We were looking for a new accountant, and she said she had FEC experience,” Tunstall said. He blamed Vaughn for SAL PAC’s spotty FEC reporting throughout last year—it’s received multiple notices about incomplete or nonexistent financial disclosures.
“The problem,” Tunstall said of hiring people to do FEC compliance, “is some of these guys are so expensive where it doesn’t even make sense to have somebody on full time.”
