On first blush, the fund-raising solicitation sure looked like it was coming from US Senator Adam Schiff, the California Democrat well known for tangling with Donald Trump.
“Hi — this is Adam Schiff,” the email read, according to a screenshot shared with the Globe. “Josh Kraft said I could reach out with this urgent message.”
But the email came from “[email protected]‚” and it was paid for by the campaign of Josh Kraft, who is running for mayor of Boston, several thousand miles east of Schiff’s district.
And, it turns out, Schiff never said Kraft could reach out with that urgent message.
The Kraft fund-raising email sporting Schiff’s name and likeness is one of at least five the campaign has sent in recent weeks that feature prominent national Democrats who have not publicly weighed in on the Boston mayor’s race. At least two of those politicians have now asked the Kraft campaign to stop using their names and likenesses in the email fund-raising solicitations.
“Immediately after being informed that the Kraft campaign sent an email we did not approve of in Schiff’s name, we reached out to the campaign to ask them to stop,” said a spokesperson for the Schiff campaign. “While an unfortunate situation, the Kraft campaign let us know that it would not happen again.”
While some political and campaign finance experts called the Kraft campaign’s fund-raising blitz unorthodox or even potentially misleading — and rival Mayor Michelle Wu’s campaign questioned whether it violated campaign finance laws — a spokesperson for the Kraft campaign defended its legality.
The unauthorized emails were “an error on the part of our vendor,” said the spokesperson, Eileen O’Connor.