We Untangled the Shady Effort to Elect a Florida Republican
State Rep. Dane Eagle’s group gave every penny it had to an obscure super PAC, just as a seemingly unrelated outfit started buying ads for him. It wasn’t a coincidence.
AP Photo/Steve Cannon
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.
