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Consultants double-dip for Ohio Senate hopeful and his super PAC

30 April 2021
Dan Ackermann

A prominent political consulting firm is buying ads for both Republican Josh Mandel's Ohio Senate campaign and a new pro-Mandel super PAC required by law to operate independently of the campaign, records show.

Why it matters: Campaigns and super PACs can employ the same vendor as long as its work for each remains entirely separate. But that overlap in the pro-Mandel effort shows a tight connection to this new, ostensibly independent group.

What's new: The super PAC, dubbed the USA Freedom Fund, announced Friday it will buy a round of TV ads during the Kentucky Derby backing Mandel and attacking his GOP primary opponents.

  • That announcement came in a press release from the firm Axiom Strategies, which is serving as the Mandel campaign's ad buyer by way of a subsidiary called AxMedia.
  • The USA Freedom Fund reported paying a firm called Armada Strategies to place its ads. That firm's address is a Florida post office box. Its website is inactive, and its Delaware corporate records don't list any officers.
  • In Federal Communications Commission filings, though, the super PAC lists Armada's point of contact as a consultant named Sarah Blue. Blue is a senior media buyer at Axiom's AxMedia subsidiary.

Between the lines: Vendors must establish firewalls between their work for federal political campaigns and allied super PACs, in order to stay on the right side of laws barring candidates from coordinating with supportive independent groups.

  • "We do have an internal firewall," Axiom vice president Robert Uithoven said in an email. He did not immediately respond to requests for more detailed information.
  • Such vendor overlap has led to allegations of improper politicking by other high-profile political groups.

The big picture: Mandel, a former Ohio state treasurer, is competing in a competitive Republican primary where deep-pocketed independent spenders are already starting to emerge.

  • One of his opponents, “Hillbilly Elegy” author J.D. Vance, enjoys the backing of a super PAC financed by millions from prominent tech executive Peter Thiel.
  • Another opponent, former Ohio GOP chair Jane Timken, loaned her own campaign $1 million during the first quarter of the year.

Transcripts show George Floyd told police "I can't breathe" over 20 times

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Newly released transcripts of bodycam footage from the Minneapolis Police Department show that George Floyd told officers he could not breathe more than 20 times in the moments leading up to his death.

Why it matters: Floyd's killing sparked a national wave of Black Lives Matter protests and an ongoing reckoning over systemic racism in the United States. The transcripts "offer one the most thorough and dramatic accounts" before Floyd's death, The New York Times writes.

The state of play: The transcripts were released as former officer Thomas Lane seeks to have the charges that he aided in Floyd's death thrown out in court, per the Times. He is one of four officers who have been charged.

  • The filings also include a 60-page transcript of an interview with Lane. He said he "felt maybe that something was going on" when asked if he believed that Floyd was having a medical emergency at the time.

What the transcripts say:

  • Floyd told the officers he was claustrophobic as they tried to get him into the squad car.
  • The transcripts also show Floyd saying, "Momma, I love you. Tell my kids I love them. I'm dead."
  • Former officer Derek Chauvin, who had his knee on Floyd's neck for over eight minutes, told Floyd, "Then stop talking, stop yelling, it takes a heck of a lot of oxygen to talk."

Read the transcripts via DocumentCloud.