Reporter responds to Saylor letter on candidate funding

Mr. Saylor’s letter of Nov. 5 contains several inaccuracies which I will address here point by point.

First, as for this being a “last-minute hit piece,” as the head of his team’s political action committee, Mr. Saylor knows as well as I that the most recent campaign finance report period ends Oct. 23.

That filing only became available online from the Montgomery County Voter Services Department on Nov. 2.

The article was published online on Nov. 5., as quickly as the information could be verified and the candidates were given a reasonable opportunity (20 hours) to respond to the question the form raised — why did they say they had not received any money from an outside PAC when their own records their primary funding arm clearly did?

It would have been difficult to do the story as anything other than “last minute” given that the information only became known to me on Nov. 2 when a reader pointed it out to me.

Perkiomen Valley School Board candidate statements at odds with financial report

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Even given that turn-around time, we waited 20 hours to give the candidates a reasonable amount of time to explain the apparent disparity. The only one who did, Jay Cohen, did so by saying the team knows nothing about how the PAC’s finances work and Mr. Saylor handles those things.

I will leave aside Mr. Saylor’s insistence that this article was part of “my plan,” as he obviously has no way of knowing what I think unless I tell him, which I did not. In fact, I was not planning an article at all, until it was pointed out to me that the campaign finance report and the 5 for PV candidates’ own statements seemed to be at odds.

That also meant our company had published candidate statements that did not match their funding records. We had a responsibility to our readers and voters to correct the record.

Next, Mr. Saylor wrote: “When I asked Evan if he looked into where money comes from on the other side- where did the money from Joe Webster come from or others – no answer was given.”

This is patently untrue. I responded to Mr. Saylor’s email, on a Sunday when I was not working, within 30 minutes. I have a screenshot to verify this.

He submitted his letter to the editor containing this untruth two hours later.

Most importantly, his letter clearly misses the point of the story.

Had investigating campaign donors been my goal, I would have looked at both sides and would certainly have included information about Vote for 5 PAC’s single largest donor during this period, who donated a combined $26,000 since June — $31,000 total. That donor has been sanctioned by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority for, among other things, obtaining client signatures on blank or incomplete forms that he had filled out later.

But given that this donor lives locally and is not a PAC, his donation was not at odds with the statements of the four candidates who said they had not received PAC money.

Nor was the donation by the “Friends of state Sen. Tracy Pennycuick” truly relevant as she is a local Republican politician and the other candidates had received donations from the PACs of local Democratic politicians as well.

However, the donation from the Harrisburg-based Pennsylvania Future Fund, headed by longtime political operative Robert Asher, is clearly an “outside PAC.”

In contrast, we did not need to look into whether the PV Forward team of candidates had accepted money from PACS because, in their response to our questionnaire, they clearly said they had. There was no conflict between the facts on the forms, and what they said in the newspaper’s questionnaire.

Evan Brandt is a reporter for The Mercury.