Education
Incoming USC trustee’s company at center of NRA, Trump campaign money allegations
A company headed by an incoming University of South Carolina board of trustees member has been accused of facilitating illegal campaign finance donations to President Donald Trump, The State has learned.
National Media Research, Planning & Placement facilitated donations between the National Rifle Association and Trump’s campaign by providing the gun rights organization and its affiliates a means to exceed allowable campaign donations, according to a complaint filed with the Federal Election Commission. National Media denies the allegations.
The president of that company is Robin D. Roberts, a Republican political strategist and president-elect of the USC MyCarolina Alumni Association. As Alumni Association president, Roberts will have a vote on the school’s board of trustees, which sets tuition rates, chooses the school’s president, approves the budget and allocates money for buildings and maintenance, according to the board’s bylaws.
Roberts was unanimously approved to be the next president of the Alumni Association in May 2018 — seven months before these allegations surfaced — by the association’s board of governors, Alumni Association CEO Wes Hickman said in a statement.
Roberts assumed office as president-elect on July 1 of last year and will become the association’s president on July 1, 2020, Hickman said.
Hickman’s statement did not comment on the allegations, but defended the association’s choice of a political strategist to represent it on the board of trustees, citing the benefits of having a diverse set of backgrounds representing alumni.
National Media was more direct.
“For over 35 years, our firm has always followed the letter of the law without exception,” according to a statement from Senior Vice President Evan Tracey. “Furthermore, the activity and clients of National Media have zero bearing on Mr. Roberts’ service to the Alumni Association.”
Politics at USC
The allegations against Roberts’ companies, and his overall role as a longtime GOP strategist, inflamed critics of USC’s presidential search.
“This university is already under scrutiny. Why would they invite more politics?” said Bethany Bell, a USC professor who protested USC’s presidential search process.
The scrutiny Bell was referring to is a formal review by USC’s accreditation body, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, for alleged “undue political influence” in the search.
“This makes me even more scared for the future of our university,” Bell said. “Politics has no place in a flagship university.”
Roberts has overseen “strategic media research, planning, and placement for hundreds of campaigns, including the 2000 and 2004 Bush-Cheney presidential campaigns,” according to his bio on National Media’s website.
Ethan Magnuson, a junior who helped organize protests against the presidential search earlier this year, said he was not surprised to see a top Republican strategist in line to become a voting member on the board.
“What’s going on is just a continuation of what has been going on,” Magnuson said. “There is a very conservative coalition that clearly exists in the administration.”
What the allegations say
Under campaign finance laws, organizations can give as much money as they want to a political campaign, so long as the organizations do not coordinate with a political campaign. However, the way these donations were structured makes them appear to have been illegally coordinated, according to a Federal Election Commission complaint filed by the Campaign Legal Center.
“It looks like a corporation called Red Eagle Media group is placing the NRA’s ads and it looks like an organization called American Media and Advocacy Group is placing the campaign’s ads, but in reality those seem to be effectively shells of National Media,” Campaign Legal Center Investigator Maggie Christ said in a video posted to the organization’s website.
It’s not inherently illegal for one company to handle political advertisements from both a politician and interest group, so long as there is a “firewall” at the company preventing the politician and the interest group from coordinating campaign expenses.
However, the same National Media employee would sign off on advertising deals with both the NRA and Trump’s campaign, Christ said in the video.
“That is some of the clearest evidence of coordination that I’ve ever seen,” Brendan Fischer, the director of federal reform for the Campaign Legal Center, said in the video.
The story was originally broken a year ago by The Trace, a nonprofit news organization dedicated to covering gun violence, according to the organization’s website. The Trace documented the allegedly illegal coordination by using more than 1,000 pages of publicly available documents, interviewing a former attorney and a former chair of the Federal Election Commission, according to the article.
After the investigation was published, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-RI, and Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-MD, sent a letter addressed to Roberts on Congressional letterhead seeking additional information on the donations.
An attorney representing the NRA, National Media and affiliates of the two companies, responded, through a separate letter, dismissing the allegations.
“The NRA is fully confident its vendors are appropriately firewalled and that all of its ad buys are fully independent.,” the letter said.
Comments