“You can get away with it if you are not foolish enough to put in writing that you’re all about candidate elections,” Mr. Ryan said.
RedStone Strategies was not the only group whose activity raised warning flags among campaign finance experts.
Rise NY is a state PAC created in December 2020 by Mr. Santos’s campaign treasurer, Nancy Marks, and his sister. A Twitter profile of the group describes its purpose as “new voter registration & education as well as raising election awareness & voter enthusiasm.” The PAC raised vast sums from donors who had otherwise maxed out donating to Mr. Santos’s campaign, as reported by Newsday. One donor contributed $150,000, according to New York State Board of Election records, well beyond the limits of $2,900 per election placed on federal campaign contributions for direct campaign activity.
Social media posts show that Rise NY organized demonstrations and voter registration events on Long Island. In a Twitter post from August 2021, Rise NY claimed it had “pulled in 7800+ new Republican voters on LONG ISLAND, NY alone.”
A close examination of the group’s spending, however, reveals that many of Rise NY’s actions would be considered unusual, if not a violation. PACs like Rise NY are allowed under New York State law to give directly to candidates or authorized committees, but may not spend in other ways to help a campaign.
Yet Rise NY issued payments for wages and professional services to Santos campaign workers, including Mr. Santos’s press secretary. It also directed $10,000 in payments to a company run by Ms. Marks, the campaign treasurer. And Ms. Santos earned $20,000 for her work as the PAC’s president. She did not respond to a request for comment.
Its expenditures took place at many of the spots that Mr. Santos’s campaign filings show he liked to frequent, including Il Bacco, a restaurant in Queens where his campaign spent roughly $14,000, and an Exxon Mobil gas station that is a two-minute drive from his former apartment in Whitestone, Queens.