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A series of last-minute direct-mail pieces are seeking to depress Republican turnout in key congressional races, and whoever is behind the mailers is a mystery, drawing allegations of illegal politicking.
A pair of recent mailers sent to voters in Montana targets Republican Senate candidate Matt Rosendale.
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“If Matt Rosendale gets his way, Montanans will have government drones and patrols hovering outside our windows, keeping an eye on our private lives,” one of the glossy postcards warns. It offers words of support for Rick Breckenridge, the Libertarian candidate who on Wednesday threw his support behind Rosendale’s candidacy.
That mail piece, and another one hitting Rosendale on trade policy, contain no “paid for by” disclaimers as required of any political committee sending such mailers. But they do list one key piece of information: the U.S. Postal Service code WC MLG 08899. The numbers are simply a ZIP Code—this one an area in Edison, New Jersey—but the preceding letters correspond to a specific sender.
That doesn’t necessarily tell us who paid for the mailers, but it does suggest at the very least a common vendor with other recent mail pieces that have used the same code.
In a memo released to reporters Wednesday, the Rosendale campaign identified the company Allied Printing Resources as its suspected culprit, citing its offices near Edison and its work with Democratic organizations this cycle and in the past—particularly the League of Conservation Voters, for which Allied produced direct-mail pieces backing Sen. Jon Tester’s 2012 re-election bid.
Allied Printing didn’t respond to a request for comment. The company has worked this cycle with the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and EMILY’s List, a high-dollar super PAC supporting Democratic efforts to retake the Senate.
Whoever is behind the mailers is attacking other Senate Republicans in competitive races in like fashion. Nearly identical mail pieces in other races are missing information about who is paying for their distribution.
A similar anonymous mailer recently went after another competitive Republican Senate challenger, Missouri’s Josh Hawley. “We just can’t count on Josh Hawley to protect our gun rights,” the mail piece claimed. Like the Rosendale mailer, it went on to promote the Libertarian candidate in the race.
The same sender appears to have mounted a similar campaign last cycle. In 2016, mailers targeting then-Senator Kelly Ayotte (R) flooded New Hampshire mailboxes attacking her supposed “disavowal” of then-candidate Donald Trump in a similar effort to depress Republican support. The mailers boosted Aaron Day, a libertarian challenger to Ayotte running on the Free State ticket.
At that time, the mail vendor responsible for those pieces appears to have been working with both major 2016 Democratic presidential candidates. Publicly available copies of mail pieces for the campaigns of both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders also used the “WC MLG” code.
Whoever is using that code has apparently been engaging in similar tactics for some time, and was the subject of a 2010 complaint to the Federal Election Commission that, due to the mailers’ anonymity, was not able to actually identify the alleged culprits behind them. Those mailers went after Alabama Republican Rep. Martha Roby. The FEC declined to investigate and dropped the matter. One of the votes against proceeding with an investigation came from then-FEC commissioner Don McGahn, who went on to serve as President Donald Trump’s White House counsel.
The toothlessness of rules governing the disclosure of direct-mail ads that fall just short of an explicit call to vote for or against a candidate make it difficult to determine the full scale of this opaque mailing campaign. Neither does relying on postal codes necessarily tell the full story, as the same group can use multiple vendors to mount a direct-mail campaign—or simply send the mail itself. A recent direct-mail piece attacking Republican Indiana Senate candidate Mike Braun, for instance, is largely identical to those going after Hawley and Rosendale, right down to its support for the Libertarian candidate.
The Rosendale campaign dubbed the mailers “illegal” due to the lack of a “paid for by” disclaimer. But the rules aren’t so cut and dry. The piece attacking him, like those going after Braun and Hawley, doesn’t explicitly call for a vote for or against a specific candidate. Such mailers don’t require disclosure if they’re paid for by an entity or individual other than a registered political committee.
But if such a committee—say, the DSCC, EMILY’s List, or the League of Conservation Voters—did pay for the ad, it would be nearly impossible to prove, precisely because the mailers don’t include that disclosure.
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