WASHINGTON — In less than two years, Sacramento resident Charles Paulsen has written at least 10 checks to a Republican fundraising committee based in the Virgin Islands, but he’s not quite sure what it does or why he keeps giving.
“They got my name probably and since I was sympathetic to Republicans, I continued, I guess,” Paulsen, 89, said of his repeated donations to VIGOP, a political committee established by the chairman of the Virgin Islands Republican Party. In all, he's given more than $700 to the group, records show. “I don’t think I’ve ever been to the Virgin Islands. That’s in the Caribbean, isn’t it?”
Donations from hundreds of retirees such as Paulsen have helped make VIGOP, an obscure fundraising committee from the tiny U.S. territory, one of the top-spending political action committees in a constellation of groups tied to Virginia-based political treasurer Scott B. Mackenzie.
Mackenzie, whose spending practices have drawn intense scrutiny in recent years from campaign-finance watchdogs and political candidates, has served as treasurer of more than 20 PACs at some point in this election cycle. Three of them, including VIGOP, have collected more than $1 million so far for the 2016 election. In each case, more than half their contributions larger than $200 came from retirees. (Political groups don’t have to disclose the names and occupations of contributors who give less than that.)
At the same time, a large share of the donations these groups took in went to fund operating expenses instead of direct contributions to Republican candidates. In the case of VIGOP, more than half of its contributions went to Forth Right, a direct mail firm with ties to Mackenzie, and other firms that share its offices in downtown Washington.
Sheila Krumholz, who examines political spending as head of the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics, called Mackenzie an “outlier” in the world of federal elections. Her tally of some 1,200 political action committees that are aligned with Democrats or Republicans or other ideological groups shows that, on average, 26% of what they take in is spent on political contributions.
“Mackenzie is giving virtually zero percent in campaign contributions for his biggest committees,” she said. “He’s in a different league because he has a slew of these (PACs). People think they are giving to these various operations, but there’s a whole lot of self-dealing going on behind the scenes in terms of the vendors that he uses.”
In an interview, Mackenzie defended his practices, saying the PACs’ operating costs are high because “it’s expensive to fundraise.”
Both he and John Canegata, chairman of the Virgin Islands Republican Party, said the committee is not preying on the elderly. “The older generation remembers how great this country was, and knows it can be great again, and that’s why they are giving their money,” Mackenzie told USA TODAY. “They hate what they see going on now.”
Canegata said he’s not sure of donors’ ages but said “typically, folks from that World War II era” care about “preserving liberty.”
“That’s why they are targeted, and that’s why they donate,” he said.
VIGOP’s operations have been the source of considerable friction between Canegata and several other officials in the local party. The infighting over his arrangement with Mackenzie and other consultants, however, has gained more attention in recent weeks as Canegata and other party officers tussle over which delegates to send to the Republican National Convention in July.
Repeat donors
Many of the elderly donors to VIGOP are repeat givers, even if they don’t give large amounts.
Paulsen, for instance, contributed as little as $10 or $35 at a time. A USA TODAY review found 16 people had donated at least 20 times to VIGOP through the end of February. Fifteen were retirees, who gave a total of $28,027 to VIGOP. Thirteen of them also donated to other PACs associated with Mackenzie, contributing an additional $26,207.
The identities and occupations of the vast majority of VIGOP’s donors aren’t known publicly because they contribute in amounts too small to require reporting to the Federal Election Commission.
Canegata said the committee has had three complaints in a four-year period from the children of people who received the committee’s fundraising solicitations. He said party officials complied with the requests to remove their names from its mailing list.
Debbie Carrico of Buckhannon, W.Va., said she got help from the West Virginia Attorney General’s office to strike her father’s name from VIGOP’s mailing list in 2014 after he received multiple pleas for money from a “Stop Hillary Now” PAC associated with Republican political consultant Dick Morris. The fine print on the solicitation described itself as a “project of VIGOP.”
Carrico said she spent a year and a half working to remove her father, Dorse
Gillum, from hundreds of mailing lists and resorted to complaints with the West Virginia authorities when she couldn’t find phone numbers for the companies or political operations responsible for the mailings. Gillum does not appear as a donor in VIGOP’s filings, and Carrico said she doesn’t know whether he ever contributed to the group.
But she said she was eager to help her father, now 89, escape from the piles of junk mail inundating his home. Gillum received 30 to 50 pieces of mail each day and contributed to scores of groups, writing as many as 20 $10 checks each month, Carrico said.
Some groups masked their solicitations as political surveys with a reminder at the end, “not to forget your $17 donation,” Carrico said.
“It just made my blood boil," she said. "He actually thought it meant something. He thought his opinions got straight to Washington, D.C.”
'Sue the tar out of them'
Ann Ravel, a former chairwoman of the Federal Election Commission and a current member of the six-member panel, has sounded alarms about the rise of PACs she believes are engaged in "consumer deception" but says there’s little in current federal law that gives the Federal Election Commission authority to act.
Candidates themselves have taken aim at these groups with mixed results.
Former Florida congressman Allen West filed a complaint with federal election regulators against a Mackenzie-affiliated PAC, Conservative StrikeForce, and three others, saying they siphoned off money that could have been used to help his 2012 re-election bid by using his name and image in their fundraising pitches. In the end, he argued, the groups did little to advance his bid, which the Republican lost.
But FEC lawyers told West the agency couldn’t act because the PACs had complied with the commission’s requirements to file regular reports about their fundraising and spending and provided disclaimers on their solicitations that made it clear they were PACs, not candidate committees.
Virginia’s Republican former attorney general Ken Cuccinelli filed a civil lawsuit in federal court against Conservative StrikeForce PAC, Mackenzie and several others affiliated with the group, who he charged used his 2013 gubernatorial race purely as a fundraising tool.
The Conservative StrikeForce sent out urgent solicitations promising to support Cuccinelli’s bid for governor, but only $10,000 “of approximately $2.2 million” raised by group went to his campaign, Cuccinelli said in the lawsuit.
Cuccinelli, who lost the election by about 56,000 votes, reached a settlement last year in which Conservative StrikeForce agreed to pay $85,000 to Cuccinelli’s campaign and to surrender its email and direct mail lists to him.
Asked about the case, Mackenzie cast Cuccinelli as a sore election loser. “We tried to help him in his governor’s race, and when he lost, he decided to strike out at the people he felt didn’t help him enough,” Mackenzie told USA TODAY.
“Then, why did you concede we were right in this lawsuit?” Cuccinelli shot back.
“Their defense was ‘free speech,’ ” he said of Conservative StrikeForce. “But you don’t have the freedom to go tell little old ladies that if they give you $50, you are going to do ‘X’ with it and then not do it. You don’t have a First Amendment right of free speech to bilk them out of money.”
Cuccinelli offers this advice: Donors should steer clear of unfamiliar PACs and give their money directly to candidates they like. Candidates targeted by questionable PACs, meanwhile, "should sue the tar out of them," he said.
Jennifer Bell, a Southern California writer, chronicled her fight to stop the piles of consumer and political mail descending on an elderly friend in her "Drowning in Junk Mail" blog. She said it's hard for the average consumer to gauge whether committees are spending their contributions appropriately. Most third-party organizations that examine and rate groups' fundraising practices focus on charities, rather than PACs.
“It’s way difficult to stop junk mail, and political mail, doubly so,” Bell said. “The only way not to get on the list is to never give to any political group, ever. It’s really sad because money is your voice in politics now, but you are better off sending a $20 bill to the candidate of your choice.”
