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Nikki Haley Is Using Her YouTube Channel To Get Around Campaign Finance Laws [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-08-30

In the modern political era, nearly every political campaign, especially those for Presidential candidates, relies on the use of Super-PACs, which are allowed to spend unlimited amounts of cash, including dark money, to elect their preferred candidate for any office. Some of the more prominent Super-PACs that you might hear about in the news are Trump’s Super-PAC, the “Save America PAC,” or Ron DeSantis’ Super-PAC, “Never Back Down PAC.” President Biden’s largest Super-PAC is called the “Priorities USA Action PAC.”

The only catch about these independent organizations is that the law specifically bans them from directly coordinating with the campaign of the actual candidate themself. For example, if Joe Biden’s campaign chair were seen meeting with the head of his Super-PAC, she would be in a world of trouble with the law. Trump’s “Save America PAC” can make all the pro-Trump ads it wants, but it can’t get specific instructs from Trump headquarters.

But as you would probably expect, people have figured out creative ways to get around these rules in order to indirectly communicate with their dark money operations. See, as long as the footage within a Super-PAC’s ad or the campaign tactics released by someone was “public” and not hermetically sealed within the campaign, it’s not technically a violation. One of the first people to exploit this loophole was just about the man you’d expect: Mitch McConnell. In March of 2014, when we was facing a stiff challenge for re-election in both his primary and in the general, his campaign released what is arguably the weirdest campaign ad in history, and it’s actually still on his YouTube channel to this day.

Perhaps I should’ve put a trigger warning on that video for “EXTREMELY OFF-PUTTING.” Oh well. Sorry.

Just 10 days later (yes, it really was less than two weeks), one of McConnell’s Super-PACs, called the Kentucky Opportunity Coalition PAC, released a 30-second ad with - you guessed it - footage from McConnell’s cryptic stock video compilation.

Now, to be fair, McConnell was not the only person who engaged in this nefarious campaign behavior, and the list of culprits included Democrats too. I would show you the videos of their ads, but all of those people either lost that year or aren’t in the Senate anymore, and so their websites (and the videos on them) are defunct.

So fast forward to today, and we’ve actually already seen some hilarious instances of public-not-public interactions between candidates and their dark money operations. Just before the debate, we were treated to the release of an embarrassing 400-page memo by Ron DeSantis’ Super-PAC of his supposed “debate strategy” that included lines like “Attack Joe Biden and the media 3-5 times.” Because Ron DeSantis’ campaign manager, Jeff Roe, who was Ted Cruz’s campaign manager in 2016 and the campaign manager of Glenn Youngkin’s successful run for Governor of Virginia in 2021, has actually been working for the Never Back Down PAC, DeSantis can’t actually directly communicate with Roe. It’s one of the big reasons why DeSantis campaign has been circling the drain for the last few months - his campaign’s coordination strategy is just a mess.

But very quietly, Nikki Haley’s campaign has been using some tricks to coordinate with her newborn Super PAC, known as the “Stand For America Fund PAC.” Her main outlet for this is her low-views YouTube channel. On a normal campaign YouTube channel, you might find videos of a candidate’s stump speeches or the next wave of ads about to hit the TV stations, but Nikki Haley’s is a bit different. Instead, her channel consists of a very odd series of very short clips of various things relating to her. For example, a lot of her videos in the last week are 10-seconds of a TV commentator claiming she won the last debate. Here’s a screen shot of 16 of her newest videos on the channel:

If you look at the video length in the bottom right corner of each clip, you’ll notice fairly quickly that a lot of these are very tiny. They don’t really mean anything when you play one of these videos by itself. But here’s the thing: Because these videos can already be found on the internet, they are “public knowledge.” One does not even need to go to Haley’s website to find these clippings. What Haley’s campaign is doing with these videos is communicating with her Super-PAC the exact messaging they want in the next round of advertisements. It’s like they’re holding up a giant road banner saying “USE THIS FOOTAGE IN AN AD!”

In fact, it gets better. The Super-PAC has already started using some of these clippings of praise for her from Fox News (which are found on Haley’s YouTube channel), and making their own ads with it:

Money doesn’t always buy your way into winning an election, but this flood of dark cash influencing our politics is becoming more and more disgusting by the day. And until we can either elect a Congress that is willing to reform these holes, or appoint enough Supreme Court justices that refuse to put corporations on the same pedestal as the American voter, this garbage is not going to go away.

Haley probably can’t win solely on the back of her cash from millionaires and billionaires - if money could buy presidential elections, Jeb Bush would still be President of the United States. But Haley’s in it to win it, and the longer that Republican donors are fooled into believing that their MAGA base will actually support a pro-Ukraine, anti-federal abortion ban woman to be President (hint: they won’t) - the cash will keep flowing, and the out-of-context video clips on Haley’s YouTube channel will keep being uploaded every day.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/30/2190496/-Nikki-Haley-Is-Using-Her-YouTube-Channel-To-Get-Around-Campaign-Finance-Laws

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