Today, Rolling Stone is releasing my report on MeidasTouch, the super PAC that has become a social media phenomenon. The three brothers behind the group are darlings of the anti-Trump #resistance, but when I started asking tough questions, things got weird. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/meidastouch-2020-campaign-finance-trump-1152482/

In 2020, MeidasTouch spent more than a million dollars to air their viral videos on TV. But we found that they aired most of those ads in such limited quantities that in many places voters would have been lucky if they even saw them.

One media analyst calls the ad-buying approach “pissing in the wind.” Another political consultant says the ads were more an exercise in MeidasTouch
brand-building and fundraising than in voter persuasion.

MeidasTouch says it has “revolutionary” transparency. But Rolling Stone found that the group’s financial structure thwarts transparency and a former FEC
lawyer says the setup raises some of the same issues that recently got the Trump campaign in legal trouble.

Brett Meiselas, who makes most of the MeidasTouch’s videos, is being paid as a consultant to his PAC’s own consultant -- an arrangement a former top FEC
lawyer says is violates election law.

The Trump campaign had a similar payment setup (on a larger scale), which Brad Parscale and others allegedly
used to funnel $170 million in campaign spending to Trump family members and others.

Brett Meiselas is being paid by a company run by Adam Parkhomenko, a former aide to Hillary Clinton, who did political work for failed #resistance hero Michael Avenatti. MeidasTouch did not acknowledge its financial relationship with Parkhomenko until RS started asking questions

When we started asking questions to get behind the veil, Meidas Touch launched an all-out misinformation attack on Rolling Stone and me more than a week
before the article published.

They threatened to sue and made up all sorts of
bizarre conspiracy theories.

It turns out that when you dig into MeidasTouch, they respond a lot like, well, Donald Trump.