“We believe the failure to comply with the requirements of the campaign finance law was due in large part to a lack of understanding of those requirements,” wrote William Campbell, the director of the Office of Campaign and Political Finance.
Keohan worked as a consultant for the International Association of Fire Fighters ahead of the 2023 election, and that same fall, helped Boston City Council candidate Erin Murphy’s reelection campaign. In the span of about six weeks, he helped another consultant design campaign mailers for Murphy, while also crafting and distributing mailers for the IAFF backing Murphy and another candidate, according to state regulators.
The mailers “utilized similar fonts and layouts,” regulators said.
The labor group spent roughly $13,200 helping Murphy, who won another term. (Murphy, an at-large councilor, again won reelection last month, too.)
State campaign finance regulations say there is a “presumption” that such independent expenditures are illegally coordinated when a campaign and another entity use the same consultant for campaign strategy. But political operatives can “rebut” that by demonstrating there is a “firewall” policy in place.
While Keohan’s firm had a “verbal” policy about separating work between clients, regulators said it had nothing in writing spelling out how it puts a “firewall” between the two.
Both Murphy and the IAFF told regulators they were unaware that Keohan’s firm was working for both of them. They filed affidavits stating that they also did “not directly receive any strategic, non-public information from the other.”
In a phone interview Wednesday, Keohan said his firm has since created a written policy, and that “something like this will never happen again.”
“What they found was completely unintentional,” Keohan said of state regulators. “We still don’t believe there was truly actual coordination there, even in the accidental sense. But we wanted to get past that, and we took the responsibility that was necessary.”
The settlement was the second one concerning allegations of illegal coordination that regulators have released in recent weeks. Last month, the chair of a super PAC that worked unsuccessfully to elect Republican nominee Geoff Diehl as Massachusetts governor in 2022 agreed to pay a $60,000 penalty after state regulators said the PAC and Diehl’s campaign illegally coordinated on a slate of advertising.
In that case, regulators focused on a vendor — communications and marketing agency Mittcom, Ltd. — that both Diehl and the super PAC aligned with him, known as Mass Freedom, worked with during the 2022 race. But the firm acknowledged it “did not have a firewall in place to prevent the exchange of strategic, non-public information between Mass Freedom and the Diehl campaign, nor did its employees operate as though a firewall were in place.”
It was the head of the super PAC, Antoine Nader, who ultimately paid the penalty, however, Nader was required to pay $15,000 to the state and $45,000 to a charity or charities of his choice under the agreement.
Matt Stout can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @mattpstout.
