Jeb Bush’s barely-legal data laundering entity may actually be illegal

Jeb Bush’s barely-legal data laundering entity may actually be illegal

by Jon Green at Americablog

http://americablog.com/2015/06/jeb-bush-data-laundering-entity-may-actually-be-illegal.html

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The bottom of the website for Right to Rise, the super PAC affiliated with supporting Jeb Bush’s 2016 presidential campaign, includes the disclaimer: “Paid for by Right to Rise PAC, Inc. Not Authorized by any candidate or candidate committee.”

But it doesn’t say anything about secret, semi-independent organizations designed to circumvent rules governing candidate committees.

Which is why it’s curious, to say the least, that a simple WHOIS search shows that Right to Rise PAC’s homepage, righttorisepac.org, is registered to Andrew Barkett:

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That’s presumably the same Andrew Barkett who used to be the Chief Technology Officer for the Republican National Committee, and whose LinkedIn profile currently lists him as the RNC’s “Special Advisor to the Chairman on Technology.” In other words, not with Right to Rise.

This is where the lines between party committee, campaign committee and political action committee get really, really blurry. In late April, The New York Times reported that Barkett had been tapped by Jeb Bush to lead a personalized “data trust” that would sell data to both Right to Rise and Bush’s official presidential campaign, allowing the two committees to share data by buying it from a purportedly independent source. While the RNC has set up similar “data trusts” before, this one would be unique in that it would be established specifically for one candidate; its data would be available to no one other than Right to Rise and Jeb 2016 until after the primaries were over, at which time data could also be shared with the RNC (assuming Jeb won the nomination). When the Times ran that story, they quoted a Bush spokesperson who refused to confirm the data trust’s planned existence, saying only that Bush “is not a candidate and has not made a decision to move forward with a potential campaign, so this speculation is premature.”



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