THREAD: If you're like me, you've probably been receiving a barrage of text messages this past week from random, generic sounding groups like Democratic Victory and Democratic Power that say they're raising money for Harris.
These are scam-ish PACs. They spend a small portion of the money they raise on the causes they claim to support and a lot on.... raising more money, often by enlisting firms they're tied to.
After getting several dozen of these text messages, I went looking into what was going on. Follow the journey on this thread. (AND READ HERE: )thebulwark.com/p/harris-camp-…
First, I asked the Harris campaign if these groups were giving their approval to do this. They were not. Not only that, the Harris campaign issued a rare public warning to donors to avoid them.
Then I tried to find folks who worked for the groups. No dice. They leave no digital trail. They're registered to a UPS store in southeast D.C. But federal records do show that these groups all seem to pay the same three vendors. So I tried them...
One of the vendors is PACtion, which is a major player in Democratic circles, specializing in list acquisition and maintenance. The group gets hundreds of thousands of dollars from these random PACs. It also is a vendor for the Biden-Harris campaign.
I got Ryan Morgan, the head of PACtion on the phone. He asked to talk off record. I said no. He then put me on hold for several minutes at the time. Eventually I just asked: do you have a leadership role with these PACs? He said he'd call me the next day.
The next day he sent me a text, acknowledging that he is an officer with one of the PACs (he appears to be an officer with at least one more, fwiw). He declined to get on the phone or elaborate further.
So, in short, the head of one of the biggest data firms in Democratic politics has started a number of PACs that raise money by making pleas for Kamala Harris, Biden and others but then spend it on his firm. But it goes BEYOND EVEN that.
PACtion has been paid more than $1m by the Biden-Harris victory fund to help them text and email donors. At the same time, PACtion is also assisting and even running PACs that target those same donors.
Democratic operatives have found this behavior beyond agitating. It's cannibalizing donor lists and diverting much needed campaign cash. The Harris campaign seems to share that view. They declined to say whether their relationship with PACtion continues.
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