Welcome to Pay Dirt—exclusive reporting and research from The Daily Beast’s Lachlan Markay on corruption, campaign finance, and influence-peddling in the nation’s capital. For Beast Inside members only.
Despite some murmurs from the remnants of the GOP’s Trump critics, Republicans are more or less united behind the president headed into his re-election contest. But a lack of conflict is lousy for fundraising, so some conservative moneymen are scrounging for dollars by hyping nonexistent Republican challengers—and their equally nonexistent efforts to fight them.
“Establishment lackeys plotting to PRIMARY Trump,” blared the subject line of a fundraising email sent this month by a group called Defeat the Establishment PAC. The group needs money, it begged recipients, to support its pro-Trump advocacy, which has included “phone calls, fax petitions, targeted mail and email blasts, [and] Facebook and Google Internet banner ads.”
But the group hasn’t bought a single Facebook or Google banner ad, according to the respective platforms’ political ad databases. And there’s no record of Defeat the Establishment PAC spending a dime supporting Trump or any other candidate; it’s reported literally $0 in spending since its inception in the summer of 2017.
Defeat the Establishment PAC is, it appears, a project of a right-wing GOP fundraiser named Reilly O’Neal. The donation page is nestled under the website of his firm, Capital Square Funding Group, and the PAC is registered to a Raleigh, North Carolina, post-office box shared by a handful of other PACs with which he’s associated, and which pay him hefty sums every year.
It is, in other words, a fundraising front that’s done little in the way of actual political advocacy, let alone “leading the effort to mobilize a groundswell of grassroots support” as its email claims. Expect more groups like this to pop up as the 2020 campaign kicks into gear, and opportunities abound to siphon small-dollar donations from unsuspecting Americans on both sides of the aisle.
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