Daily Beast: Kobach Campaign Can’t Get Its Story Straight on Allegedly Illegal Fundraising Tactic

Former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach is being accused of illegally using a nonprofit group he advises to raise money for his 2020 Senate run. Faced with the accusations, Kobach’s campaign can’t seem to get its story straight. …

In an emailed statement late Thursday night, the Kobach campaign’s field director, Kerrick Kuder, denied any knowledge of the email. “That email did not come from the Kobach campaign or any association there of,” he wrote.

But the following day, the campaign released a statement implying that the email was in fact the work of a Kobach campaign vendor. “If any mistake was made with respect to the vendor’s failure to include a ‘Paid for by’ notice on any campaign email, that was immediately addressed by the sending of a correction email to all recipients of the original email,” the statement said.

As of Sunday afternoon, no such email had gone out to subscribers of the We Build The Wall list that Kobach used to solicit campaign contributions and the Kobach campaign had not provided a copy of the email they claimed was sent to The Daily Beast.

“I see no way to reconcile the statement that the ‘email did not come from the Kobach campaign or any association there of’ and the reference to whoever sent the email as a ‘vendor,’ presumably a vendor of the Kobach campaign,” said Paul S. Ryan, vice president of policy and litigation at the group Common Cause.

Ryan’s group filed complaints with the Federal Election Commission and the Department of Justice alleging “reason to believe that solicitations for campaign contributions to [Kobach’s] Senate campaign distributed by We Build the Wall, Inc. violated multiple campaign finance laws [and] the ban on corporate contributions to a federal candidate.” …

Kobach only declared his Senate candidacy last month, and will not have to file a financial disclosure report until October, making it difficult to independently determine whether it disbursed any money in connection with the We Build The Wall email. Both Fischer and Ryan said they would be watching closely for any clues in the campaign’s first FEC report.