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Election 2024 live updates: Harris picks Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, will appear together at Pennsylvania rally [1]
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Date: 2024-08
Harris’ running mate pick is good news for man who owns rights to HarrisWalz.com
Jeremy Green Eche was in the middle of getting his toddler dressed the moment news broke that Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris had selected Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz to be her running mate.
And he was amped.
Eche was uniquely invested in Harris’ pick. He currently owns the rights to HarrisWalz.com, a site he bought in 2020 — along with a slate of other Harris sites — when the would-be vice president was in the midst of a primary campaign for president. Four years and one vice presidential pick later, Eche is willing to sell the slate of Harris websites, including the one featuring Walz, for $15,000.
“I was constantly refreshing four different news sites on my phone,” he told The Associated Press on Tuesday. “I was very excited.” He said he “almost immediately” began getting calls from both journalists and “friends I hadn’t heard from in a while.”
This is not a new scenario for the 36-year-old trademark lawyer in Brooklyn, New York. Eche is a cyber squatter, someone who buys a domain with someone else’s name or brand in it for very little money, hoping to sell it to that person or brand for a large profit in the subsequent months or years. In 2011, when it looked likely that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would be the Democratic nominee in 2016, then Jeremy Peter Green – he took his wife’s last name – purchased ClintonKaine.com.
After the former secretary of state picked Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, the squatter offered it to the campaign for a hefty return. They declined, so he sold it for $15,000 to a digital marketing company that turned out to be the Trump campaign. The website pushed anti-Clinton news with “Paid for by Donald J. Trump for President, Inc” emblazoned at the bottom.
Eche supported Clinton in 2016 and supports Harris today. The prospect of something like that happening again doesn’t give Eche pause, however.
“The Harris campaign has hundreds of millions of dollars, so if they don’t buy their own domain, that is kind of on them,” he said Monday. But he isn’t convinced they will buy the domain.
“I don’t want to be too confident that somebody will reach out,” he said after Walz was selected. “I would say there’s a 75% chance that one of the campaigns, or a PAC, will buy it from me.”
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[1] Url:
https://apnews.com/live/trump-harris-vp-pick-election-updates
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