When federal prosecutors leveled corruption charges against a North Carolina insurance executive this year, they submitted reams of evidence showing how the executive tried to bribe regulators for more favorable treatment of his companies. And while not central to the case, one little-noticed email filed with the court pulls back the curtain on a totally unrelated scheme to funnel undisclosed money into American elections.
The email was between Greg Lindberg, who is now serving seven years in prison on bribery and wire fraud charges, and an executive at one of his companies, Global Bankers. In it, they discussed various potential political contributions that Lindberg might make, and how those contributions could be structured.
One potential beneficiary of their political largesse was former Rep. Scott Taylor, a Republican from Virginia who lost his reelection bid in 2018 and lost again last month after running to represent his old seat.
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A Taylor fundraiser named Kyle Sisk had requested the contribution from Lindberg. But in the email, Rod Perkins, the Global Bankers executive, wrote that Sisk wasn’t just working for Taylor’s campaign itself. He was “leading [Taylor’s] fundraising efforts via a 501c4.”
That one sentence pointed to a complex and potentially problematic fundraising structure involving networks of political campaigns, super PACs, and 501c4 nonprofits, commonly referred to as dark money groups. At the center of those networks is Sisk, who has worked for multiple campaigns that have benefitted from the same sort of structure: a dark money group that donates to a super PAC, which then immediately spends that money in support of candidates that employ Sisk for fundraising services.
Campaigns are legally required to operate independently of supportive super PACs. A vendor can work for both but must put in place a “firewall” to ensure that its work for the campaign remains separate from its work for the super PAC. That happens frequently, and it’s also common for donors to give to dark money groups with the understanding that their funds will end up supporting particular political candidates.
But in this case, the Lindberg email suggests that an ostensibly independent political group wasn’t independent at all; that the Taylor campaign’s fundraising effort was essentially using the outfit to finance it “via”—as stated in the email—untraceable contributions. That structure, which appears to have been replicated by at least two other campaigns that employed Sisk, highlights the ways in which political consultants can circumvent laws that both limit donations to political candidates and ensure that contributions are publicly disclosed.
Sisk did not respond to multiple phone calls and emails seeking comment for this story. After those inquiries, he blocked this reporter on social media.
It’s not clear whether Lindberg ended up donating to Sisk’s pro-Taylor outfit. By their nature, donations to dark money groups remain hidden from public view. In his email to Lindberg, Perkins expressed misgivings about the donation.
"We've done research on Sisk and are being told to avoid him," Perkins wrote. He didn’t go into any detail, but Sisk was the subject of a federal investigation years ago that probed his and a business partner’s fundraising practices. Neither was found to have committed a crime, though a resulting scandal blew back on their clients in Ohio state politics.
A few months after that email, money began changing hands between groups backing Taylor’s candidacy. In late October and early November 2018, a nonprofit called the Government Integrity Fund donated $110,000 to the super PAC, American Jobs and Growth PAC. The latter immediately turned around and spent almost that precise sum, $107,000, supporting Taylor and attacking his Democratic opponent, Rep. Elaine Luria, who unseated Taylor in 2018 and fended off his challenge again this year.
Sisk had been receiving fundraising fees from the Taylor campaign throughout the 2018 election cycle, during which Taylor was dogged by revelations that his staff had helped an independent candidate collect signatures to get on the ballot and that many of those signatures had been forged. Sisk’s firm, Capital Cornered, was also paid by the Government Integrity Fund in previous years for fundraising services, making it the only 501c4 active in Taylor’s race that had a documented connection to Sisk. And ten days before that string of pro-Taylor transactions began, American Jobs and Growth PAC paid Sisk’s company, Capitol Cornered, a $20,000 fundraising commission.
According to the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility in Washington (CREW), that series of transactions provides circumstantial evidence that Sisk was both being paid by Taylor’s campaign and simultaneously soliciting undisclosed donations for an ostensibly independent group backing his candidacy.
“There is no other 501(c)(4) organization connected to Mr. Sisk that made expenditures, including contributions to super PACs or then-Rep. Taylor’s campaign, to influence then-Rep. Taylor’s 2018 congressional election,” CREW wrote in a complaint filed with the Federal Election Commission last month. “Accordingly, on information and belief, Mr. Sisk used the 501(c)(4) organization, the Government Integrity Fund, as a pass through for funds to the super PAC, American Jobs and Growth PAC, to fund the super PAC’s independent expenditures backing then-Rep. Taylor.”
Those efforts to hide the true source of funds supporting Taylor’s candidacy, CREW argues, constitute an illicit “straw” donation, or a donation knowingly made in the name of another person or entity. The Government Integrity Fund’s donation to American Jobs and Growth PAC, the group argues, was in effect a donation from whoever provided the funds to the dark money group and was improperly laundered through the group in order to mask the true sources of the funds.
While the email released in the Lindberg trial provides a rare glimpse into the nature of those transactions, PAY DIRT found at least two other cases of similar strings of financial transfers benefitting Sisk’s clients. And they all follow the same model: a dark money group donates to a super PAC, which immediately spends almost precisely the same sums supporting candidates who’ve paid Sisk for fundraising services.
Republican John Ward’s campaign paid Capital Cornered about $35,000 in 2018 as Ward sought the GOP nomination in Florida’s sixth congressional district. About two weeks before the primary contest in that race, a dark money group called the Jobs and Progress Fund donated $75,000 to American Jobs and Growth PAC. On the same day, the super PAC spent $66,000 boosting Ward and attacking his two primary opponents.
During the 2020 election cycle, Sisk’s clients included Jake LaTurner, the former Kansas state treasurer who was elected to the House of Representatives last month. In July 2020, as LaTurner sought the Republican nomination in that race, the Jobs and Progress Fund donated $250,000 to a super PAC called Fighting for Kansas PAC. The super PAC immediately spent $235,000 supporting LaTurner and attacking his primary opponent, the outgoing Rep. Steven Watkins.
Who provided the funds for those transactions is unknowable. But the pattern suggests an effort by these campaigns’ fundraising consultant to route large, undisclosed donations into groups that can back Sisk’s clients unencumbered by contribution limits and disclosure requirements designed to prevent and root out corruption in the nation’s elections.
