Thread by @rpyers

The mid-year ScamPAC filings are still coming in, but there's a new and growing problem for money in politics reporters trying to keep tabs on political independent expenditures in House and US Senate races. A quick thread...

https://twitter.com/CATargetBot/status/1420842859691798530

Over the last few years, there has been an explosion in the number of charity telemarketing scamPACs soliciting money for causes that pull at the heartstrings.
reuters.com/investigates/s…

These groups typically rake in millions from small donors, then plow nearly all of the money they raised back into fundraising, siphoning off most of what remains for themselves and spending little to nothing on political expenditures.
publicintegrity.org/politics/chari…

The charity ScamPAC operators have started to push back, insisting that these are legitimate enterprises and that any insinuation that they are self-enriching pieces of human offal who prey on confused retirees is 'fake news'.

At the beginning of July, six clusters of ScamPACs, all of which previously plowed most of their money into firms operated by Las Vegas telemarketing kingpin Richard Zeitlin, adopted a new strategy, seemingly in unison.

To address the criticism that they spend next to nothing on political expenditures, the cluster of 20 or so charity scamPACs began reporting their telemarketing expenditures as political IEs supporting an array of candidates.

Over the last month, these groups have unleashed a torrent of FEC independent expenditure filings purporting to show over $2 million in political IEs, but which are really nothing of the sort.

After just one month of this change in strategy, fake independent expenditures are already providing a distorted view of the level of outside spending in a number of races, a problem which will only grow more severe over time.