A Republican fundraiser pleaded guilty Tuesday to using fraudulent promises of support for conservative candidates for office and military veterans to bilk donors out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The details of Kelley Rogers’ scheme were at once brazen and familiar, in which he and a cadre of unnamed consultants used a huge email marketing campaign to solicit mostly small-dollar contributions with promises that it would be spent on political and charitable causes. The money was actually used to continue building their own in-house list of donors that they could hit up in the future—and rent out to clients willing to pay them for access.
Rogers’ guilty plea represents one of the highest-profile convictions to date involving a scam PAC, or a political group created to funnel donor money to its own executives and consultants. But while the Justice Department has stepped up its prosecution of such groups of late, Rogers, unlike other recent targets, was not just an obscure grifter who found a way to make a quick buck; Rogers’ business for years epitomized the legal and ethical pitfalls of a sector of a political fundraising industry that has proliferated over the past decade. And at least in Rogers’ case, it existed for little purpose but to perpetuate and enhance its own financial prospects.
In early 2013, Rogers and others involved in the scheme began searching for causes they could latch on to as a way of boosting their email fundraising solicitations. Initially, they floated hot-button conservative issues of the day, such as the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi, Libya, immigration reform, and alleged political favoritism at the IRS.
But as the 2013 campaign kicked into gear, Rogers and a digital vendor he employed to assist with the effort found that Republican Ken Cuccinelli’s 2013 gubernatorial campaign in Virginia was a potent motivator for its email fundraising pitches.
“[Cuccinelli] is now tied!” declared a typical email sent in October 2013 at Rogers’ direction. “We are putting together one of the largest GOTV efforts in Virginia history… Now all we need is to pay for the massive phone banks, the absentee ballot campaigns, and the massive ‘knock and drag’ effort that will win this.”
None of Rogers’ political outfits were actually doing that work. Conservative StrikeForce spent nothing on get-out-the-vote activities or phone banking on Cuccinelli’s behalf. It made one perfunctory contribution to his campaign, a donation that prosecutors portrayed as a fig leaf designed to hide the fraudulent nature of its fundraising campaign.
Behind the scenes, Rogers and his colleagues were devising ways to use the money they raised not to support Cuccinelli, but for email prospecting, or the process of gathering and winnowing a list of donors that can be hit up for additional contributions in the future.
In the summer of 2013, Rogers and representatives of an unnamed digital vendor with which his firm worked devised a plan to use all of the money raised by Conservative StrikeForce’s Cuccinelli solicitations not to support to Cuccinelli, but to prospect for new donors that could be added to their “house list” for future email solicitations.
“At this rate, we’re still bringing in money faster than we can spend it,” one Rogers colleague said of the Cuccinelli prospecting effort, according to the guilty plea. “So the plan is to keep on churning, keep building this file, and keep staying in the black!”
“This is awesome,” Rogers responded. “We are very happy. Let’s roll.”
In 2014, after Cuccinelli lost his gubernatorial bid, he sued Rogers and Conservative StrikeForce, saying they’d raised money with fraudulent promises to back his campaign. The lawsuit was settled for $85,000. “We applaud the Department of Justice for pursuing this case,” Cuccinelli told PAY DIRT of Rogers’ guilty plea this week. “Hopefully it will be a deterrent for those on the left and the right who attempt to run scam operations.”
The fraudulent prospecting continued even after Cuccinelli’s defeat. But instead of a political candidate, it relied on support for the U.S. military to bilk donors out of their money. In 2014 alone, Conservative StrikeForce raised about $45,000 by promising the money would go toward “assistance and support for military veterans suffering from brain trauma and other injuries related to their service,” according to the plea agreement.
“In reality,” the agreement says, “the defendant never intended to, and did not, spend any money on causes to support veterans.” Instead, nearly 90 percent of those funds went toward additional email prospecting.
Rogers’ guilty plea notes other ways in which he was bilking money from donors to Conservative StrikeForce and other PACs that he controlled, including fabricating invoices supposedly performed by his companies, and enlisting others to do the same and send him kickbacks from the ill-gotten gains.
But the real value in the scam was in the prospecting that Rogers’ PACs performed for his ever-swelling email list. Donors who responded to the fraudulent fundraising pitches were added to the “house list” as someone who Rogers knew could be successfully solicited on behalf of future clients. A large, primed list of documented donors is a tremendously valuable commodity in politics. And indeed, Federal Election Commission records show that federal political action committees paid Rogers’ Strategic Campaign Group more than $1.3 million for fundraising, “voter contact,” and similar services from 2012 through 2018.
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