PAC is backing Donald Trump, despite campaign’s policy

At first glance, the fundraising email from TrumPAC could confuse a recipient. The solicitation that went out this week from what has been described in news media accounts as a super PAC, meaning it is barred from coordinating with the campaign, urges people to make a contribution of $5 that will “go straight to Donald Trump – we’ll eat all the processing costs so he gets 100 percent and YOU will show up on his FEC report!”

As it turns out, TrumPAC – which was founded by a donor with help from a Tea Party activist – has a classification that allows it to raise both super PAC money and hard-dollar contributions that it can direct to the campaign. What’s unclear is exactly how Trump’s campaign, which has denounced super PACs and has sent letters to others using his name asking them to shut down, feels about it.

The TrumPAC solicitation was signed by the group’s chairwoman, Amy Kremer, former chairwoman of the Tea Party Express, and sought low-dollar donations of $5 to $50. “We are witnessing a Revolution!” she wrote. On its own, the solicitation seemed strange, given that super PAC money can’t go directly to a campaign.

Dan Backer, an election lawyer working with TrumPAC, explained that the group is a “hybrid,” meaning there are two separate bank accounts: one that directs regulated donations to the campaign, and another that collects money for a super PAC, which can raise unlimited funds. He said several hundred dollars had been given to the campaign. He declined to say what kind of interactions the group might have had with the campaign in terms of directing donations to them.

All of this gets somewhat confusing, since Trump has repeatedly said he doesn’t want super PAC support and has made turning down large donations a staple of his candidacy. He often says he is funding his own campaign, a statement that is true to a point – he has loaned his campaign $12 million but has also raised millions in small donations.

Last year, it emerged that a super PAC using the same name as his campaign slogan – Make America Great Again – had ties to officials on his campaign. The person running that group, a Republican operative from Colorado named Mike Ciletti, has a company that has been used by the campaign over the past year for things like bumper stickers. When questions were raised about overlap between the two groups, Trump’s campaign urged that group and a crop of other super PACs hoping to support him to shut down. Ciletti complied.

Trump’s spokeswoman did not respond to an email asking about TrumPAC, which is being supported in part by William Doddridge, chief executive of the Jewelry Exchange.

But Friday afternoon, Backer said in an email that Kremer had authorized him to say “that the campaigns’ counsel reached out, my client appreciates the campaign doing so and their respect for the constitutional right of individuals to organize and engage in political speech and grass-roots activism, and my client is very quickly assessing its next steps out of respect for their concerns.”

This story was originally published February 12, 2016 at 3:45 PM with the headline "PAC is backing Donald Trump, despite campaign’s policy."