This is an amazing investigative story by Chris Moody at CNN.
The National Republican Congressional Committee is an official organ of the GOP. As a result, it is allowed to run ads directly supporting GOP House candidates, and to give money directly to congressional campaigns. As a tradeoff, the NRCC is not allowed to take checks greater than $32,400, and it must disclose all its donations and all of its expenditure.
American Crossroads is a SuperPAC run by Republican Party operatives and founded by GOP operative Karl Rove. It is not allowed to contribute to candidates, and it must disclose its donors. It is allowed to take checks far greater than $32,400, and it can directly advocate the election or defeat of a candidate.
American Action Forum is a 501(c)3, and so it is allowed to take very large checks and keep its donors secret. It is not allowed to directly advocate the election or defeat of a candidate, but it can do so indirectly (with a message like “call Senator Hagan, and tell her to stop killing jobs”).
Because there are so many differences in the laws governing the allowed activities and fundraising of these groups, there’s an additional restriction: the NRCC is not allowed to coordinate with these outside groups.
One form of prohibited coordination would be for an outside group to spend big money for a very precise, very expensive, secret poll and then share the results privately with the NRCC. On the other hand, any group is free to publicly share their internals — this publicity, however, would reduce the value of the internal poll.
If Moody is correct, it looks like these guys figured out a way to publicly share the polls, but in private.
In brief, individuals at the groups apparently tweeted out the results of internal polls. But they used something of a code in tweeting them. And they used anonymous Twitter accounts. So the results were, on some level, “published,” but unless you were reading these random accounts and understood the seemingly random string of numbers, slashes, and dashes, you didn’t know about it.
Looking at this as a non-lawyer, I’m not 100 percent sure it’s legal. It’s certainly clever, though.
