Media omission: Campaign-finance lawsuit turns up Koch activity in Woods/Sias race
Yesterday, I wrote about a couple of campaign-finance lawsuits, filed by conservative Matt Arnold’s Campaign Integrity Watchdog, which could possibly expose whether top Republicans in Colorado knew about GOP-funded attacks on gubernatorial candidate Tom Tancredo.
Arnold has filed numerous other campaign-finance complaints this year on a variety of topics. See them by clicking on “Complaint Search” here and typing “Campaign Integrity Watchdog” in the “organization” line.
One complaint, in particular, illustrates Arnold’s persistence and shows the public benefits of disclosures required by campaign finance laws. Its story starts during this year’s GOP primary after Arnold noticed a website and Facebook ads attacking Republican State Senate candidate Laura Woods. This was clearly direct campaign activity, said Arnold, but the website didn’t disclose who paid for it, as required by Colorado law.
But the website’s host was listed, and after Arnold’s Integrity Campaign Watchdog filed a lawsuit, a judge issued a subpoena requiring the company to disclose who paid for the site. Arnold said the hosting company disclosed that it was working for GOP operative Alan Philp, who’s now associated with Aegis Strategic, a Koch funded outfit set up to elect “winnable” candidates. Its president is talk-radio host and former Republican congressional candidate form Colorado Springs, Jeff Crank.
The case dragged on all summer, Arnold said, but eventually Philp “fingered Protect and Defend Colorado as responsible for the Woods website.”
So Arnold pursued a case against Protect and Defend Colorado, a registered campaign committee that supported GOP state senatorial candidate Lang Sias and opposed state senatorial candidate Laura Woods.
A hearing is scheduled, and Arnold, who’s not being paid for his work, says he now faces big bad lawyers from Brownstein, Hyatt, Farber, Schreck, who are representing Protect and Defend Colorado.
“It’a people playing dirty in primaries. I was a victim of it, when I ran for CU Regent,” says Arnold. “So I’m sensitive. When your whole point is to hide behind a proxy server while you’re smearing someone, I think that’s despicable. If you want to criticize someone, man up and do so publicly, but don’t hide behind a shield of anonymity.”
An earlier version of this article referred to Aegis Strategic as Aegis Consulting, and it did not name Jeff Crank as President of the company. Sorry for the error