NEW: FEC Complaint Alleges NRA Used Shell Company to Unlawfully Coordinate With Four U.S. Senate Candidates

In case you missed it, the Campaign Legal Center, a top election spending watchdog group has filed a formal Federal Election Commission (FEC) complaint into whether the NRA violated the Federal Election Campaign Act by illegally coordinating with Senate candidates using a shell strategy firm.

This news comes days after Politico Magazine reported that a consulting firm, OnMessage – a powerhouse GOP consulting firm, set up a shell corporation called Starboard Strategic Inc., located at the same address, and which appears indistinguishable from its parent company, for the apparent purpose of helping the NRA evade these rules.

The complaint alleges:

“Therefore, there is reason to believe that OnMessage/Starboard used strategic information derived from its work for the Cotton, Tillis, Gardner, and Johnson campaigns to develop NRA-PVF and NRA-ILA advertisements expressly advocating for those same candidates, and that the NRA-PVF and NRA-ILA made coordinated communications with those campaign committees through the use of a “common vendor.” Indeed, it appears that OnMessage created Starboard for the purpose of disguising the NRA-PVF’s and NRA-ILA’s coordinated communications. As a result, the NRA-PVF and the NRA-ILA made excessive and unreported contributions to those campaign committees, in violation of FECA’s reporting requirements and contribution limits.”

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