Three years after the Republican National Committee publicly sidelined the sullied firm, it paid an LLC with the same address $900,000 for “data services.” The RNC said it wouldn’t “waste any more breath explaining these innocuous issues.”
Last fall the Republican National Committee paid $900,000 for “data services” to a Delaware-registered limited liability corporation that had existed for only three weeks.
The company receiving the money has no online presence and has not been used by other campaigns or committees. But there is one clue about the company, Howler Insights LLC, in paperwork the RNC filed with the Federal Election Commission. Howler’s Arlington, Virginia, address and suite number are the same as a conservative data firm whose work for the RNC was placed on hold nearly three years ago after a massive data breach.
The incident left personal information such as voter registration details, names, addresses, phone numbers and potential ethnicities of about 200 million Americans accessible to anyone on the internet. At the time, the security consultant who identified the breach called it the “largest known data exposure of its kind.”
The Republican National Committee this week bragged about Donald Trump’s victory in Minnesota’s GOP primary Tuesday night — ignoring the fact that Trump was the only candidate on the ballot.
Richard Walters began his career at the lowest rungs of the Republican National Committee when he was 23. Now, at 30, he’s the RNC chief of staff, earning far more than any other official there, including his boss, the chairwoman, and the top officials at the Democratic National Committee.
As President Trump faces mounting legal bills from his impeachment trial, he is drawing on national party coffers flush with donations from energized supporters — unlike the last president to be impeached, who left the White House “dead broke.”
The Republican National Committee’s apparent selection of the Miami area property will again use political events to put money in Trump’s pocket.