Rapid City Journal: Super PAC Attacking Johnson Has Connection to Krebs

Date
Expert

Connections between an out-of-state political action committee and U.S. House candidate Shantel Krebs have provoked questions of propriety.

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Adav Noti, senior director of trial litigation for the Campaign Legal Center in Washington, D.C., and a former associate general counsel for the FEC, said delaying donations until after a super PAC's last pre-election reporting deadline is a growing trend. The Campaign Legal Center has a pending complaint to the FEC about a similar situation in last year's hotly contested special U.S. Senate election in Alabama.

Noti blames the FEC.

"This is almost exclusively weak enforcement," he said. "The laws could be clarified to make evasion harder, but even under existing law, FEC has authority to prevent that sort of circumvention."

Regarding coordination, Noti and Mayersohn each said there are ways that the Krebs campaign, Axiom Strategies and Hold Washington Accountable could structure their connections to be considered legal. A key method would be the implementation of internal "firewalls" at Axiom Strategies to prevent the super PAC, which appears to have Axiom COO Phillips as its treasurer, from coordinating with the Krebs campaign, which is paying Axiom as a consultant.

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