Subject: Trump campaign eyes #NeverTrump blacklist
From: POLITICO <[email-masked]>
To: <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 13 May 2016 03:14:10 -0600

Trump campaign eyes #NeverTrump blacklist
By Kenneth P. Vogel and Ben Schreckinger
05/13/2016 05:11 AM EDT

Donald Trump's campaign is considering hitting his Republican enemies where it hurts: Their wallets.
 
As Trump moves to work in closer concert with the Republican National Committee apparatus, some campaign aides and allies are pushing him to block lucrative party contracts from consultants who worked to keep him from winning the nomination, according to four sources familiar with the discussions.
 
"The Never Trump vendors and supporters shouldn't be in striking distance of the RNC, any of its committees or anyone working on behalf of Donald Trump," said a Trump campaign official.
 
The blacklist talk - which sources say mostly targets operatives who worked for Never Trump groups, but also some who worked for Trump's GOP presidential rivals or their supportive super PACs - strikes against a Republican consulting class that Trump has assailed as a pillar of a corrupt political establishment. It's a sweet bit of turnabout for Trump aides and consultants who in recent months were warned that their work for the anti-establishment billionaire real estate showman could diminish their own career prospects.
 
If Trump's team makes good on the blacklist, it could elevate a whole new crop of vendors, while penalizing establishment operatives who attacked him, often in deeply personal terms. But it also could put Trump's campaign at a competitive disadvantage as it scrambles to quickly beef up capabilities in highly technical campaign tactics that it largely eschewed in the primary, including voter data, direct mail and phone banking.
 
Newly minted presidential nominees typically install staff at their respective parties' national committees, and have been known to steer contracts to at least some of their favored vendors, which often provokes backlash. Since Trump all but clinched the GOP nomination this month with a lopsided victory in Indiana's primary, his staffers including political director Rick Wiley have spent considerable time at the RNC's Capitol Hill headquarters discussing joint fundraising and field operations.
 
The Trump campaign did not respond to questions about preferred vendors. Sources in and around the campaign told POLITICO that the campaign was not going to try to enforce a blanket blacklist for all consultants who opposed Trump, but rather would make contracting decisions on a case-by-case basis, with those associated with harder-hitting attacks more likely to be barred.
 
Some of the consultants and firms that worked against Trump are industry leaders in their respective fields, including strategist Katie Packer, pollster the Tarrance Group, online fundraiser Campaign Solutions and data vendors TargetPoint and Targeted Victory. Together, the consultants and firms this year have been paid at least $432,000 by the leading anti-Trump super PAC, Our Principles PAC - which pales in comparison to the $16 million their firms have collected over the years from the RNC - according to a POLITICO analysis of Federal Election Commission filings.
 
Packer, who helped run Our Principles PAC, said she has "no interest in working for (Trump), nor do those I know who worked against him," so it wouldn't bother her one bit to be on a Trump blacklist. "I just hope they put me at the top and spell my name correctly," she said, adding, "Winning a presidential election is hard. ... They should focus on that and worry about settling scores if they win."
 
But TargetPoint, which has been paid at least $156,000 this year by Our Principles PAC, as compared to at least $9.8 million over the years by the RNC, would welcome the chance to continue its relationship with the national party during Trump's campaign, said Brent Seaborn, a partner at the firm. "We have built a lot and have a lot planned, and I would hate to see that not developed, so I certainly hope that we continue with that work," he said. 
 
Officials from the Tarrance Group and Campaign Solutions declined to say whether they would work for a Trump-led RNC.
 
Zac Moffatt, president of Targeted Victory, said that his firm merely rented email lists to Our Principles, for which it has been paid $22,000 through the end of March, the period covered by the most recent FEC filings. The firm has been paid more than that - $141,000 - by the Trump campaign for processing online donations, Moffatt pointed out, though he acknowledged it was more involved in the presidential campaign of Trump's bitter rival Ted Cruz, which paid $5.3 million to Targeted Victory for digital advertising and fundraising.
 
Nonetheless, Moffatt said he hopes Targeted Victory will be able to play a role in the general election with the RNC, which over the years has paid the firm $3.3 million, with the party's convention committees paying Targeted Victory another $208,000 to assist with their web presences. That includes $8,000 from the 2016 convention committee for setting up a Tumblr page. 
 
"Of course we would work for the RNC under Trump," said Moffatt. "He is our nominee and we have been building our 120-plus-person company to prepare for the general for the past four years. I would think the party and the campaign would want to best team available to complement their efforts where they see needs."
 
RNC chief strategist Sean Spicer said that senior Trump campaign officials have assured him there is no list of firms they do not want the party committee to use. "There has been no discussion of not using any vendors, pro or con," he said.
 
But some of Trump's close allies are publicly accusing Republican leaders, including RNC chairman Reince Priebus, of trying to block Trump's campaign from making RNC contracting decisions, partly by withholding key endorsements like that of House Speaker Paul Ryan, with whom Trump met Thursday at the RNC.
 
"This is really about the money at the RNC," Trump confidant Roger Stone alleged in a little-noticed online interview this week. "Millions and millions and millions of dollars that Reince and Ryan want to hand out to favored vendors, so they are going to try to game plan Trump. They're going to try to barter Paul Ryan's endorsement in return for financial control and autonomy for the RNC, the Republican National Committee. That would be an egregious mistake, in my opinion. But this is part and parcel of the establishment effort to slow down Donald Trump."
 
The doling out of lucrative contracts to well-connected firms is a perennial source of friction in Washington politics. In past years, contracts awarded by the RNC to FLS Connect LLC while its former partner Rich Beeson served as the committee's political director have come under scrutiny, as have contracts awarded to operative Blaise Hazelwood's husband when Hazelwood worked at the RNC and the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

"This is again one of those issues that the RNC has to be cognizant of because those old, cozy relationships are part of the problem, and Trump has effectively run on that," said Michael Steele, a former RNC chairman who made discontent with the committee's handling of vendor relationships a theme of his campaign for that post. "You're probably going to see a lot of that stuff get exposed or dealt with in some way."
 
But another GOP digital strategist cast these political consulting blacklists as folly. He pointed to the relationship between an anti-Trump super PAC and a firm co-founded last year by Gerrit Lansing before he became the RNC's Chief Digital Officer. The firm, an online payment platform called Revv, processed donations at NeverTrump.com, the website for Never Means Never PAC, an anti-Trump group seeded with $100,000 from Pierre Omidyar, the founder of Ebay and First Look Media.
 
Lansing has had no ties to Revv since joining the RNC last summer. He did not respond to a request for comment.
 
"With Revv doing Never Trump, you have to ask yourself is the RNC on the blacklist, too?" asked the strategist. "The idea of a blacklist doesn't make any sense because No. 1 it's ill-informed and No. 2, it doesn't reflect the marketplace."

Plus, the Trump camp's desire for revenge could run up against the businessman's pledge to surround himself with the best people.

In the case of Lansing, who worked at the National Republican Congressional Committee before the RNC, Trump appears to be a fan. In February 2013, the New York billionaire tweeted, "I am hearing that @NRCC Digital Director @lansing is doing great work expanding and modernizing @GOP social media. Good - we need it."

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