Legal experts said the email appeared to violate laws barring corporations from contributing to political campaigns and requiring campaigns to include “paid for by” disclaimers on their official communications.
In an emailed statement late Thursday night, the Kobach campaign’s field director, Kerrick Kuder, denied any knowledge of the email. “That email did not come from the Kobach campaign or any association there of,” he wrote.
But the following day, the campaign released a statement implying that the email was in fact the work of a Kobach campaign vendor. “If any mistake was made with respect to the vendor’s failure to include a ‘Paid for by’ notice on any campaign email, that was immediately addressed by the sending of a correction email to all recipients of the original email,” the statement said.
As of Sunday afternoon, no such email had gone out to subscribers of the We Build The Wall list that Kobach used to solicit campaign contributions and the Kobach campaign had not provided a copy of the email they claimed was sent to The Daily Beast.
“I see no way to reconcile the statement that the ‘email did not come from the Kobach campaign or any association there of’ and the reference to whoever sent the email as a ‘vendor,’ presumably a vendor of the Kobach campaign,” said Paul S. Ryan, vice president of policy and litigation at the group Common Cause.