MeidasTouch is the group that is partnered with the twitter account that started the Rogan N-Word assault (patriottakes).
It’s interesting that they also have a podcast that they are pretty damn proud of.
https://www.meidastouch.com/
One of the owning brothers called it, “the top new news podcast in the world.” They’ve had guests like Eric Swalwell, Ted Lieu and Mary Trump. Yes… it can be found on Spotify. The appearance is kinda shady to say the least, having an association with an assault on the top podcaster in the country while, at the same time, trying carve out your own venture on the same platform.
The shadiness goes even deeper, and even RollingStone wrote a piece on them back in April 2021. Here’s the article:
There’s an opportunity here to show how we exposed BLM fundraising back before it was cool, and NOW they are getting dinged for shady fundraising. MeidasTouch has had similar scrutiny. Quoted from the RolingStone article:
On its website, MeidasTouch says it is “staffed solely” by the Meiselas brothers “with the primary goals of protecting American democracy, defeating Trumpism, and holding Republicans accountable.” And they were going to meet those lofty goals by building a massive online grassroots movement. “We just built up trust and we’re very transparent about who we are,” Brett Meiselas told Rolling Stone. “And we’re able to connect to people on a personal level because they knew who was actually behind it.” MeidasTouch says it holds regular, nothing-off-limits meetings with donors to take their feedback and questions on spending.
But MeidasTouch’s financial structure leaves room for third parties to receive undisclosed payments, a setup that Noti, the former top FEC lawyer, says thwarts transparency and violates campaign-finance law. A similar structure, involving far bigger sums, landed the Trump campaign in legal trouble.
At the heart of MeidasTouch’s opaque finances is an arrangement with a Virginia company called Prestige WW Inc. — a reference to the Will Ferrell comedy Step Brothers. Prestige received more than half a million dollars of Meidas’ donor money, FEC filings show. Prestige is run by Adam Parkhomenko, Meidas’ political strategist and a former aide to Hillary Clinton who later did political work for Michael Avenatti, a onetime anti-Trump hero who was convicted last year of trying to extort $20 million from Nike. (One of Ben Meiselas’ law partners, who was a witness to the events at the center of the extortion scheme, was subpoenaed in Avenatti’s criminal case in Manhattan, and Ben Meiselas is listed as an interested party in the case, as is Nike. According to Meiselas, he was listed as a result of being a managing partner in his firm at the time of the subpoena to his law partner. Rolling Stone is not aware of any facts suggesting that Nike, Meiselas, or his partner were implicated in any of the alleged wrongdoing.)
While Parkhomenko frequently promoted MeidasTouch on social media, his work for the Super PAC was not made clear until Rolling Stone started asking questions. Prestige WW has no public-facing website. Its owner could only be identified through a search of Virginia state corporate filings. Unlike MeidasTouch, Parkhomenko’s Prestige WW, as a private entity, isn’t required to disclose its spending.
Rolling Stone found no suggestion that any of the brothers are getting rich off of the PAC. Indeed, Ben Meiselas often points out that he works for free for MeidasTouch. However, in the course of reporting, Rolling Stone learned that Prestige has an unusual financial relationship with Brett Meiselas. In December, Brett said he was being paid for his work producing videos for the Super PAC and later volunteered that the payments were coming through Prestige. Brett, who holds legal authority for MeidasTouch as its treasurer, is being paid as a consultant to his own Super PAC’s consultant — an arrangement that Noti says flies in the face of transparency requirements mandated by federal law.
“That’s not OK,” says Noti. “If the PAC is paying the company just as a pass-through for the money to get to its treasurer or to some fundraising company or whatever, what they need to be disclosing are the ultimate payments to those recipients. And there are rules on the books that require that. The FEC has been derelict in enforcing them because the FEC is derelict in enforcing everything. But there are laws on the books that say you can’t do that.”
MeidasTouch says the arrangement gave Brett the option of securing health care because he gave up his career to work full time for the Super PAC. MeidasTouch explains it hired Parkhomenko to take care of, among other things, the administrative operations of a rapidly expanding Super PAC. “Prestige WW allowed MT to integrate its own infrastructure and resources within Prestige to keep costs extremely low,” MeidasTouch wrote in a response to Rolling Stone’s inquiries. The group says its total payments to Prestige of nearly $550,000 represent an “all-in” cost of operation and covers MeidasTouch’s compliance and health care costs. MeidasTouch says it hired an outside lawyer with FEC expertise to ensure “full compliance with its obligations and disclosures.”
But the payment structure, Noti points out, is similar to an arrangement the Trump campaign used, albeit on a much larger scale. Nearly $170 million in Trump campaign spending was allegedly funneled through firms headed by former campaign manager Brad Parscale, among others, according to an FEC complaint filed by the Campaign Legal Center. (At the time, MeidasTouch tweeted out its own blog post about the complaint. “The Trump campaign’s spending practices have the practical effect of masking payments — in violation of federal campaign-transparency rules — to various advertising contractors and senior Trump campaign staff and family members, including Lara Trump,” Meidas wrote in its post, quoting Business Insider.) The Trump case is pending before the FEC.
Despite MeidasTouch’s claims of transparency, inquiries about some of its spending were met with attacks and legal threats. The group says it paid Crossroads Campaigns, a Washington, D.C., consulting firm, $150,000 to knock on 30,000 doors in Georgia during the state’s two Senate runoff elections. That works out to $5 per door, a figure that MeidasTouch attributes to paying canvassers $15 per hour and providing them with personal protective equipment.
But in Wisconsin, where a consultant for another campaign also paid $15 per hour and had a doctor on staff and conducted hundreds of Covid tests for canvassers, it cost $2.75 per door to knock on 300,000 doors. In an email obtained by Rolling Stone, Crossroads’ founder, John Miyasato, quoted $1.10-$1.25 as a per-door figure for a similar door-knocking operation in a Southern state several years ago. The larger the operation, the lower the per-dollar cost, but a national Democratic field director who has worked with Meidas consultants and run canvassing efforts says the $5 per door was still too expensive. The only way he could imagine it getting that high was if management increased its fees. That appears to be “just profit taking,” the field director tells Rolling Stone.
Crossroads says it “has every reason to believe they did an outstanding job and provided Meidas an excellent value” in Georgia, saying the door-knocking campaign was performed in four Republican exurban counties where the houses were farther apart. The firm asserted the $5-per-door cost was relatively low, saying competing companies would likely have charged $7 to $9 per door. Crossroads declined to provide a breakdown of its expenses, saying through a lawyer it had a “sterling reputation in the field and in the progressive movement,” and threatened to sue Rolling Stone if the magazine implied it had overcharged.
After Rolling Stone reached out to Crossroads with these questions, MeidasTouch accused the publication of harassing its vendors.
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Rikki- follow-up....