Were you a Bernie supporter in Washington State? This guy probably sold your information to other campaigns.
Earlier this summer, Sheley Secrest, a candidate who is yet again in hot water (this time over allegations of an attempt to defraud the Seattle Democracy Voucher Program), was mysteriously sending many Washington State Bernie volunteers and national delegates unsolicited campaign emails. In early July, 2017, some received an email asking them “What would President Sanders do?” and soliciting financial contributions and support. This was odd, given that none of them had ever signed up to receive emails from Secrest’s campaign. Some, myself included, noticed that the unsubscribe link pointed at a page referring to the email list as “Sanders Delegates.”
This in itself is interesting because delegate lists, unlike voter registration lists, aren’t public record, and are only provided confidentially to the party and to presidential campaigns. To have access to this list, you would’ve had to have copied it from a campaign’s list.
I reached out to Secrest via Facebook, and was told that her campaign consultants sold her the list. According to PDC records, Sheley Secrest’s campaign consultant is B&B Strategies, headed up by Mario Brown and Garrett Havens. These just happen to be two individuals who, according to former Democratic State Party Chair, Jaxon Ravens, toured the state impersonating Bernie 2016 staffers, collecting e-mail lists and cash contributions intended for the actual Bernie 2016 campaign. At these stops, Brown and another individual, Chad Lupkes, often implied that they control who gets to be a delegate, attempting to barter favors in exchange for “getting people to [the DNC in] Philly.”
In Spring 2016, this problem started gaining attention, and the campaign stepped in. The fact that Mario and Chad were never staff was confirmed by the Bernie 2016 National Delegates Director, Joan Kato, who sent an internal campaign email specifying that Kelly McCurdy was the only staffer involved in delegate matters for all of Washington.
I can also personally confirm the misrepresentation and impersonation from my own interactions with another B&B Strategies employee and Chair of the 22nd Legislative District Democrats, Charles Adkins. Charles told me that he was a Bernie 2016 staffer, offered to prove it with “pay stubs,” and only admitted that he was lying when I pointed out that there were no records of the Bernie 2016 campaign ever paying him.
We’re lucky in Washington. Thanks to the efforts of former US Rep. and beloved environmental and transparency activist, Jolene Unsoeld, we have a state agency that deals with enforcement surrounding lobbying, campaign finance reporting, and ethics violations — the Washington Public Disclosure Commission (PDC). Any individual or campaign can file a complaint and have it investigated by the agency, referred for enforcement, or in extreme cases of fraud or negligence, handed over to the Attorney General for prosecution. After realizing what was going on, that Mario Brown and B&B Strategies were selling confidential Bernie 2016 email lists, which they had likely obtained by impersonation of campaign staff, I filed a PDC Complaint. In my complaint, rather than claim that they stole the list, I simply complained that the sale of the list was not reported in the Sheley Secrest campaign’s financial disclosures. This is where things turned hilarious.
Mario Brown’s public response, which can be found on the PDC website, alleges that he simply “miss-named” the list. He then admits that after receiving the complaint, he committed potential tampering of evidence and renamed the list to “Sheley and the Revolution, a play on Prince and the Revolution.”
Brown continues to dig himself into a hole, alleging that I had no part in the Bernie 2016 campaign, and he isn’t sure what “we” I am referring to when I stated in my complaint that a list of delegates wouldn’t have been given to an individual or another campaign, and thus it must have been stolen and sold, and that the sale or in-kind contribution was not reported. He goes on to condescendingly explain how MailChimp works.
Mario Brown continues, suddenly inventing a new reason for selling an email list of Bernie 2016 delegates to a completely unrelated campaign. He claims he was allowed to sell the list because it was a list that he himself built, working alongside Chad Lupkes and other figures from a Facebook group named “Washington for Bernie Sanders,” in which they, as explained above, misrepresented themselves as official campaign staff in order to gain the trust of individuals who provided their information for the list in question.
According to Brown, the list is his, even though he literally says a few sentences earlier that it was created by a team of individuals. He insists that since Sheley Secrest hired his firm, he is “entitled to share the list with Secrest in certain circumstances.” He does not explain which circumstances give him the right to violate the law. Oh, and then he says that since Sheley lost the election, clearly the list of potentially hundreds of individuals’ private information is not worth anything.
Brown then goes on to claim, in OJ Simpson style, that while he didn’t sell the list, if he did it, the sale is documented in the monthly fees Secrest pays to B&B Strategies. In doing this, he contradicts his earlier reasons and conflates his role as an employee of the consulting firm with his personal role in the Facebook group Washington for Bernie Sanders, where he impersonated a Bernie 2016 campaign staffer.
Confused yet? Mario keeps going: he claims that if he sold or in any way misused this private data, it was okay because he didn’t know that was against any laws. Being a registered lobbyist for the past 17 years and the founder of a political campaign consulting firm, touting experience working with politicians like US Rep. Pramila Jayapal, these are precisely the laws Brown should know extremely well. Even if he didn’t “sell” the list and it isn’t “delegates,” he still violated federal law: the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 says it’s illegal to send unsolicited email to a “harvested” list; in other words, a list that is shared from a different source and whose recipients did not sign up for the messages.
Brown then goes completely off the rails and brings in the fact that he and others were quick to switch to supporting Clinton in the 2016 primary, a completely unrelated topic, but another personal jab towards me that is hilarious of him to include, nonetheless.
Even if the Public Disclosure Commission chooses not to fine Sheley Secrest’s campaign, Mario Brown, “Washington for Bernie Sanders,” or B&B Strategies, there is now a public record of Brown and other individuals violating the trust of activists across the state. They have shown that they will blur the lines of what is and isn’t ethical with your campaign’s or initiative’s volunteer data in order to make a profit for themselves and their friends.
This is Part 1 of a multi part series on the corruption and questionable behavior within the political cliques of Washington.
Author’s note: The Facebook group mentioned in this article is a private/secret group, not to be confused with the public group “Washington State for Bernie Sanders.”
Update/Clarification: PDC records show that the Sheley Secrest campaign paid $3,500.00 to B&B Strategies for their services, which Mario Brown says (in his public response to the PDC complaint) includes access to the email list in question.
