On Wednesday, The Dispatch reported that federal investigators are looking into the finances of the American Conservative Union, the pro-Trump group run by GOP lobbyist Matt Schlapp, which hosts the annual Conservative Political Action Conference.
The investigation appears to have been kicked off by a complaint from the Campaign Legal Center (CLC), a nonpartisan watchdog group.
"Sources tell The Dispatch that federal investigators are currently looking into possible criminal campaign-finance misdeeds at ACU during Schlapp's tenure," reported Andrew Egger. "As part of the investigation, the FBI has interviewed former and current ACU employees about the financial dealings of the organization and its leaders — and in particular, as one source said, about their 'knowledge of the events leading up to the endorsement of Brian Kelsey.'"
Kelsey is a Tennessee state senator whose suspicious campaign financing while running for Tennessee's open 8th Congressional District in 2016 caught the eye of federal officials. According to The Tennessean, Kelsey's state Senate campaign gave $100,000 to the Standard Club PAC, which then gave $30,000 to the ACU and $36,000 to another PAC that then sent the money to the ACU as well. The ACU then spent $80,000 in a radio campaign endorsing Kelsey's unsuccessful congressional run.
Investigators are now trying to determine whether this was a pay-for-endorsement scheme Kelsey arranged with the ACU, which would run afoul of federal campaign finance laws, wrote Egger: "Recently ... federal investigators' attention has turned to the ACU itself. Several sources with knowledge of the ACU's operations at the time tell The Dispatch they have been interviewed by the FBI in recent months about their knowledge of the events leading up to the Kelsey endorsement."
ACU denies any wrongdoing, blasting the CLC as a "Soros-funded group" and saying in a statement, "We continue to believe ACU's activities, which took place more than five years ago, were legally compliant. We have been assured that ACU is not a target of any review by the government at this time." However, noted Egger, "Schlapp and the ACU did not respond to specific questions about the nature of the investigation."
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