A little-noticed tidbit in Donald Trump’s epically anemic financial disclosures for May could tell us a lot about his campaign. His web advertising firm appears to be an obscure company with a joke name run out of a house in New Hampshire, and may have helped a super PAC break the law.
Think Progress’ Judd Legum noticed that on May 27, the Trump campaign paid $35,000 to a New Hampshire-based firm called Draper Sterling LLC for “web advertising.” That immediately raised a red flag, since Draper and Sterling are the lead characters in the hit AMC series “Mad Men.” He got even more suspicious when he searched for the address in Londonderry, New Hampshire. This is what turned up.
This is the address listed for "Draper Sterling," the entity Trump paid $35,000 in May for advertising pic.twitter.com/TnDDf0OPyY
— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) June 21, 2016
Not exactly where you’d expect a major-party presidential campaign to turn for crafting web ads.
But it turns out that Draper Sterling is actually a real company. It was founded in March by Jon Adkins, who apparently runs the company out of his house in Londonderry. However, according to Huffington Post, many New Hampshire Republicans haven’t even heard of him. Apparently Trump liked him enough to pay him $3,000 for “field consulting.”
Now here’s where things really get interesting. Adkins’ day job is serving as president of XenoTherapeutics, a Boston-based biotech startup that he founded with Republican operative Paul Holzer, who also got $3,000 from Trump for “field consulting.” However, it appears that XenoTherapeutics is based out of an apartment in Boston. Even more telling is that Holzer lists Adkins’ Londonderry house as his home address. According to a neighbor, however, it doesn’t look like Holzer actually lives there.
It turns out that Draper Sterling is under the microscope for some potentially illegal financial activity in Missouri. Last month, Aaron Hedlund, an economics professor at the University of Missouri, filed a complaint with the FEC against Patriots for America, a super PAC involved in the Missouri gubernatorial race. Hedlund claims that Patriots for America claims no receipts or disbursements in its FEC filings, but has over $56,000 in debt to Draper Sterling for “business consulting.” In a colossal understatement, Hedlund thinks it’s “highly unusual” at best that a PAC that supposedly has no money would need to spend any money on “business consulting.”
Patriots for America is helmed by Adam McLain, who is Paul Holzer’s brother. The number listed for Patriots for America is the same as the number for a cafe in Grantham, New Hampshire owned by Atkins. When Legum called the cafe, McLain answered with a blizzard of “no comments.” Holzer told Fortune that he works for Draper Sterling on the side–but can’t elaborate on it, per a nondisclosure agreement. When Think Progress and HuffPo started digging into this tangled web, XenoTherapeutics’ Website briefly went offline, but is back online as of Tuesday night.
So Trump, who is supposedly a billionaire, is so cheap that he not only has a paltry $1.3 million on hand, but is relying on a two-person firm run out of a house to build his web advertising campaign. And said firm is caught in a web of shady deals, and may have also broken federal campaign finance law. The closest parallel I can draw is to Bernie Madoff using a two-person firm in rural New York to audit his books. Fitting, since like Madoff, Trump is trying to swindle his way to power.
(Featured image courtesy Michael Vadon, available under a Creative Commons BY-SA license)
