Dems Accuse Freedom’s Watch of Working with GOPEverybody knows what Freedom’s Watch is looking to do this election: get Republicans elected. But there’s a line that can’t be crossed and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee says that they crossed it. From The Washington Post:
Democratic Party officials said they will file a complaint today with the Federal Election Commission alleging that a conservative political group has illegally coordinated its advertising with a Republican Party campaign committee in advance of a May 3 special election in Louisiana.The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the fundraising and campaign arm for House Democrats, alleges that the script for a television ad purchased by Freedom’s Watch, an independent conservative political committee, can be traced to the National Republican Congressional Committee.
You can see details of the DCCC’s complaint here, including a side by side comparison of an ad run by the National Republican Congressional Committee and Freedom’s Watch’s ad, which according to the DCCC started running immediately after the NRCC’s ad ceased. There are indeed some remarkable similarities.
But Patrick McCarthy, the media consultant who put together Freedom’s Watch’s ad, tells the Post that there’s an innocent explanation.
McCarthy, who used to work at the NRCC, says that he pulled up an old Microsoft Word document that he’d used when he was at the NRCC and had cut and pasted the Freedom’s Watch ad script over it and then sent it out. “They’re grasping at straws if they’re saying recycling an old Word document is illegal,” he says.
McCarthy is not the only old NRCC hand now at Freedom’s Watch. There’s Carl Forti, the group’s executive vice president was the NRCC’s spokesman for many years, and also Ed Patru, who succeeded Forti at the NRCC. The question is whether that group of old NRCC hands ever quite left.
Of course, the complaint won’t result in any action by the FEC anytime soon.