In late March, as Florida State Rep. Dane Eagle vied for the Republican nomination for a U.S. House seat, his state-level political action committee emptied its bank account with a $453,854.60 donation to an obscure federal super PAC.
Eagle stepped back from his role at the eponymous Eagle Eye PAC last year to run for office. But within days of its donation to American Jobs and Growth PAC, a new political group called Concerned Conservatives Inc. was going to bat for Eagle’s candidacy. Just days before the Eagle Eye PAC donation, it had launched its first pro-Eagle ad buys in what has since grown into a $400,000 independent expenditure campaign to win Eagle the Republican nomination.
At first blush, Concerned Conservatives and American Jobs and Growth PAC don’t appear to be related. Nearly all the money that American Jobs and Growth has raised this cycle came from that single March 30 donation from Eagle Eye PAC, but the group hasn’t spent any of that money in Florida. Its only political activity this cycle has been a series of digital ads and direct mailers on behalf of an Oklahoma candidate for the House, and a $18,500 donation to a super PAC active in Alabama’s U.S. Senate race. Concerned Conservatives, meanwhile, has raised nearly all of its money from a pair of nonprofits ostensibly based in Virginia and Washington, D.C., and has spent that money exclusively on Eagle’s behalf.
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In reality, however, Concerned Conservatives and American Jobs and Growth are connected by a sprawling network of political action committees and “dark money” advocacy groups based out of Ohio and highly active in state and federal political contests across the country. PAY DIRT examined scores of tax filings and Federal Election Commission records to nail down the parties involved, none of whom would respond to inquiries about their involvement.
The timing of Eagle Eye PAC’s donation in March and the commencement of the independent expenditure campaign by Concerned Conservatives on Eagle’s behalf indicates that the network has now activated for his election. It also suggests that the huge sum his Florida political group shelled out in March may have been a down payment on a substantial advocacy campaign by a group of operatives notorious for flouting election laws and funneling untraceable money into political contests to help Eagle win the Republican nomination.
Eagle officially stepped down from Eagle Eye PAC in late October 2019. About a week later, he entered the race in Florida’s 19th Congressional District and transferred control to a colleague in the Florida statehouse, Republican Rep. David Santiago. Santiago and a campaign manager for Eagle did not respond to questions about the group’s support this year for American Jobs and Growth PAC.
Corporate records in Florida indicate Concerned Conservatives Inc. is run by Ashley McElheny, a Republican consultant and former official at the Florida GOP. It was formed shortly after Eagle declared his congressional candidacy but remained largely dormant until March. Late that month, it reported its first of many ads supporting Eagle, the only candidate the group has backed this cycle. But Concerned Conservatives didn’t yet have the money to cover that expenditure, and its initial ads were run entirely on credit. The group reported debts to its vendors equal to the sums of the ad buy.
Less than two weeks after that initial ad buy, Eagle Eye PAC made its $453,854.60 donation to American Jobs and Growth. Four days after that, Concerned Conservatives took out its next pro-Eagle buy—like its last one, entirely on credit.
Only in May did Concerned Conservatives receive its first major cash infusion. It got a $200,000 donation from a dark-money group called Prosperity Alliance. There’s not much public information about that group, but its most recent publicly available tax filing indicates it exists largely to funnel money to political groups, possibly in violation of Internal Revenue Service rules governing politically active nonprofit groups.
Prosperity Alliance’s annual tax filing covering May 2017 through April 2018 shows that it spent a total of $605,795 during that fiscal year. Of that, $475,000 was given directly to a political group called Growth and Opportunity PAC. Under IRS rules, politics cannot be the “primary purpose” of a 501(c)(4) nonprofit such as Prosperity Alliance, which is generally taken to mean that no more than half of its annual budget can be spent on direct politicking or donated to political organizations.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a left-leaning watchdog group, alleged in a complaint with the IRS last year that Prosperity Alliance had blatantly violated its tax status by funneling more than 78 percent of its budget to a super PAC. But according to IRS records, the group still enjoys its tax-exempt status.
If the web of money transfers wasn’t confusing enough, it gets even more convoluted. Tax filings indicate that the bulk of the money provided to Prosperity Alliance that year came from another dark-money group called the Government Integrity Fund, which also provided $110,000 to American Jobs and Growth PAC, the group to which Eagle’s state-level political committee donated this year during the 2018 election cycle.
And here is where actual human beings come into focus. The Government Integrity Fund is run by two Ohio-based Republican operatives, Joel Riter and Tom Norris, who are at the center of this sprawling network of political and advocacy groups. Neither of them responded to inquiries. As it happens, Norris is also the treasurer of American Jobs and Growth PAC, the super PAC backing Eagle’s congressional bid. That’s not his only tie to the group, either: The Jobs and Progress Fund, another dark-money outfit that’s listed Norris as its chairman and president, donated $3,500 to American Jobs and Growth about a week after Eagle Eye PAC’s contribution.
If all these connections have your head spinning, let’s bring it back to why they’re relevant. Public records indicate that the person, Norris, who runs the group to which Eagle’s PAC made far and away its largest-ever political contribution, also financed the largest donor to a separate PAC that, almost simultaneously, began pouring money into an effort to elect Eagle to Congress. We reached out to Norris, Riter, McElheny, Santiago, and Eagle’s campaign manager to ask if there was any sort of understanding that Eagle Eye PAC’s money would indirectly fund ads promoting his House bid, but none of them responded. The numerous ties between the various groups, and the timing of their financial transfers, is enough to warrant the question. And we haven’t even gotten to American Jobs and Growth’s other major donor yet.
The $200,000 that Prosperity Alliance donated to American Jobs and Growth is more than half of all the money it’s reported to have this cycle. Nearly all of the rest, $175,000, has come from another dark-money group with links to the same Ohio operatives called the Independence and Freedom Network.
That group’s role in Riter and Norris’ network requires getting even further into the weeds. While there’s minimal information about the people running the organization themselves, the ties are evident from the organizations that the Independence and Freedom Network has funded in the recent past.
Among the Independence and Freedom Network’s recent grantees is a group called Security Is Strength LLC, which tax filings show is directly controlled by Riter and Norris’ Government Integrity Fund. Another is MORCC Inc., an obscure nonprofit that lists its address as an Ohio property owned by Norris. The same address has been listed in public records for American Jobs and Growth itself.
Independence and Freedom Network’s only publicly listed employee is Ray McVeigh, a Great Lakes-region director of a concrete and cement trade association. It’s a seemingly odd and obscure affiliation for a node of a nationwide political influence network, but McVeigh and cement industry groups with which he’s involved are deeply enmeshed in Ohio-based efforts, led by Riter and Norris, to pour dark-money cash into elections in the Buckeye State.
In Ohio, these groups and others with which Norris and Riter have been involved represented one side of a bitter fight throughout 2018 between allies and opponents of Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder, who was indicted this month in a massive $60 million bribery scheme involving his own network of PACs and dark-money groups.
The anti-Householder network went after him so aggressively that it even drew a defamation lawsuit from Householder in 2018. The lawsuit, which has since been dismissed, targeted two groups: Conservative Alliance PAC, the one funded by Prosperity Alliance, and Honor and Principles PAC, which got funding from the Independence and Freedom Network.
One of the ads at issue in the lawsuit, Householder’s lawyers complained, “states that Plaintiff Householder is ‘the career political insider who is under Federal investigation for illegal financial dealings.’ This statement is false; Plaintiff Householder is not ‘under Federal investigation for illegal financial dealings.’”
