The Trump campaign announced in April it had hired Ken McKay as a senior adviser, saying he would “support our delegate operations team and bolster our ground game efforts.” McKay left the Trump campaign in early June to join Rebuilding America Now. When the move was announced, a number of media outlets, including CNN and the Wall Street Journal, reported that McKay would have to go through a 120-day “cooling off” period before working with the super PAC, under federal elections rules.
That didn’t happen. Rebuilding America Now began paying McKay for “political strategy consulting” only days after it wasreported that he was leaving the Trump campaign, according to the group’s filing with the Federal Election Commission (FEC). The super PAC paid McKay $60,000 in June. As Rebuilding America Now’s political director, McKay has frequentlydiscussed his group’s messaging and advertising strategy with the media.
When MapLight asked Rebuilding America Now on Monday why McKay did not wait before starting to work with the super PAC, the group’s spokesperson, Melissa Stone, responded that McKay was a volunteer for the Trump campaign.
“Ken McKay volunteered to help pre-convention operations for a few weeks, but he was never paid by the Trump campaign. Rebuilding America Now works to ensure compliance within all respects of the law,” Stone said, before asserting that Hillary Clinton’s campaign is “peddling falsehoods to reporters” about her group.
Under the FEC’s “cooling off” rule, a super PAC is prohibited from making communications in support of a candidate based on a former campaign staffer’s knowledge of the candidate’s plans, strategies or needs, within 120 days of the staffer leaving a campaign. Lawyers at two campaign finance watchdog groups say the rule may apply to McKay’s work with the super PAC regardless of whether he was paid.