Republished from Closer to the Edge.

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I have spent enough time staring at campaign-finance reports that the letters PAC have begun appearing when I close my eyes. This is not healthy. Neither is what I found. Somewhere underneath Seth Bodnar’s clean independent-candidate story, beneath the West Point biography, Green Beret credentials, mountain vistas, and promises to clean up America’s diseased political system, there is a pipe. Follow that pipe and it disappears behind a wall. Tear down the wall and you find another pipe, then another, then a nonprofit, then another nonprofit, then Wyoming, then a super PAC, then a polling firm, then another super PAC with the same treasurer as four other super PACs. Eventually you realize you are no longer examining a Senate campaign. You are standing underneath the political equivalent of the plumbing in a century-old Montana farmhouse, except somebody installed seventeen shutoff valves, none of them are labeled, and several disappear through the foundation toward Washington, D.C.

And upstairs, standing beside the faucet, is Seth Bodnar, “independent” candidate for the United States Senate, campaigning against dark money.

So I brought a wrench.

What started as a question about who was spending money around one Montana Senate candidate became something considerably larger: a glimpse at a national political infrastructure built to move money, polling, personnel, and influence around candidates while making the original source increasingly difficult for voters to see.

START WITH THE STRANGEST PIPE

Read the remainder HERE at Closer to the Edge.

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