GOP used anonymous Twitter accounts to dodge campaign finance laws

[eridani]

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/11/17/1345469/-GOP-used-anonymous-Twitter-accounts-to-dodge-campaign-finance-laws

Trust Republicans to push the bounds of already lax campaign finance laws regarding coordination between party organizations and dark money groups. Campaigns and outside groups routinely get around the prohibition on coordination by simply going public with information they want their allies to know: It's legal, for instance, to do what North Carolina's Thom Tillis did, and post a wish list for outside ad buys. But is it legal to set up an anonymous Twitter account and post poll results in formats that won't make sense to anyone who doesn't already know what they're seeing? Because CNN reports that Republicans have been doing that for four years:

A typical tweet read: "CA-40/43-44/49-44/44-50/36-44/49-10/16/14-52-->49/476-10s." The source said posts like that -- which would look like gibberish to most people -- represented polling data for various House races. [...]

At least two outside groups and a Republican campaign committee had access to the information posted to the accounts, according to the source. They include American Crossroads, the super PAC founded by Karl Rove; American Action Network, a nonprofit advocacy group, and the National Republican Congressional Committee, which is the campaign arm for the House GOP.

This goes beyond just making information public that will only be useful to certain people. Groups on both sides had to know what Twitter accounts to look at—and we're talking about accounts like @TruthTrain14, not official accounts for American Crossroads or the NRCC—and know how to read the information in the cryptic tweets.

Beyond coordination, the social media operation could also raise questions about whether the polling data contained in the tweets constituted a donation to the NRCC that should have been reported. The groups could have violated election rules by not reporting the information in the tweets as a donation.

The Twitter accounts were deleted as soon as CNN asked the NRCC about them, so you know that the groups involved think they have something to hide. But as wobbly as campaign finance rules are, and as broken as the Federal Election Commission is, it's unlikely these Republican groups will pay any penalty.

[anti partisan]

1. The GOP unethically stretching the law?

No way...