The now-former manager of Troy Jackson’s Senate campaign fund in Maine, which swapped him out on Wednesday hours after a Washington Examiner inquiry, is also the treasurer of the main super PAC supporting Michigan Senate candidate Abdul el Sayed.
Registration paperwork for Jackson’s newly established Senate fundraising committee shows that Peter Sarasohn, the former budget director of Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign, was the Maine Democrat’s treasurer and custodian of records as recently as Wednesday — until a fresh disclosure filing removed all mentions of Sarasohn.
Sarasohn simultaneously serves as the treasurer and bookkeeper of Fighting for Michigan, the super PAC specially formed to elect el Sayed to the U.S. Senate.
On the day that the Washington Examiner contacted Jackson’s campaign about Sarasohn’s dual positions, the Jackson campaign filed paperwork declaring 75-year-old retired librarian Beth Edmonds, a former Maine state senator, as its treasurer.
Jackson’s campaign did not answer follow-up emails asking exactly when that declaration was filed and whether it was before or after the Washington Examiner reached out for comment on Wednesday morning about Sarasohn.
The change-of-leadership filing, submitted sometime Wednesday, had not yet populated on the Federal Election Commission’s website under the Jackson campaign’s organizational statements at the time of the Washington Examiner’s initial inquiry at 11:51 a.m. EDT.
However, the disclosure document switching out Sarasohn for Edmonds was time-stamped over four hours later at 4:05 p.m. EDT on Wednesday.
A spokesperson for the FEC confirmed that the time stamp on the upper right-hand corner of the filing’s cover page refers to when the digital upload was first received by the FEC’s system upon passing validation.
“Typically, the time between when an electronic document is submitted and when it appears on the FEC’s filings page is minimal,” the spokesperson told the Washington Examiner.
In most cases, the FEC’s press office explained, a submitted document should be viewable by the public “almost immediately” after it is received. “It’s usually minutes or less than that,” the FEC spokesperson said.
Prior to Wednesday, Sarasohn was actively involved in Jackson’s campaign operations. Just a day before, Sarasohn signed an FEC form on Tuesday that added as an affiliate committee the Maine Victory Fund, a joint fundraising PAC that shares the same Capitol Hill address as the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, one of the fund’s collaborators.
According to Maine campaign finance records, Sarasohn was collecting $3,000 monthly from Jackson’s gubernatorial committee for “compliance consulting” services through Sarasohn’s firm, Victory First Consulting, which he appears to run out of his suburban residence near the nation’s capital.
State election expenditure reports reflect that Sarasohn started submitting disclosure reports in April on behalf of Jackson’s gubernatorial campaign, although Knox County District Attorney Natasha Irvine was the Jackson campaign’s stated treasurer as of February.
Sarasohn continues to serve as a paid political operative for the Bernie Sanders campaign, receiving roughly $3,000 a month from the Vermont socialist’s reelection committee, salary receipts show.
Jackson and el Sayed, who share the senator’s tax-the-rich, “Medicare for all” platform, have both been endorsed by Sanders and flooded with support from Sanders-aligned progressive groups. Jackson worked for Sanders’s presidential campaign in 2016 and cast his superdelegate vote for him at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, one of the few superdelegates to do so. El Sayed served as a campaign surrogate for Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign, speaking on the senator’s behalf at campaign events and to the press.
Using his Victory First Consulting email address, Sarasohn set up Jackson’s exploratory Senate committee on July 7 to “test the waters” for a potential bid, following the exit of then-Democratic nominee Graham Platner from the Maine Senate race due to a rape allegation. Jackson had lost the state’s gubernatorial primary in June but in late July became the Maine Democratic Party’s pick to replace Platner on the ballot.
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Sarasohn created bank accounts for Jackson’s formal Senate committee and Fighting for Michigan at the same Wells Fargo branch based in Washington, D.C.
Victory First Consulting and Fighting for Michigan both operate out of a townhome in Silver Spring, Maryland, a suburb outside Washington, D.C. Sarasohn previously listed that four-bedroom townhouse as his home address, according to Sarasohn’s own past contributions to other left-wing PACs.
While el Sayed has repeatedly characterized his campaign as a “grassroots organizing operation” and vowed not to accept PAC money, Fighting for Michigan was created specifically to boost el Sayed’s electoral chances. The pop-up super PAC has deployed a multimillion-dollar marketing campaign explicitly in support of el Sayed, with more than $2.8 million spent in digital advertisements, direct mailers, voter-targeted text messaging, and TV promotions ahead of the Aug. 4 primary.
Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI), el Sayed’s sole and more centrist opponent in the Democratic primary on Tuesday, clashed with el Sayed on the debate stage earlier this week over outside spending groups pouring money into the high-stakes, head-to-head contest.
Fighting for Michigan’s top two donors are el Sayed’s father-in-law, Tayeb Jukaku, and the California-headquartered Institute for Middle East Understanding, an anti-Israel organization whose communications director served as legal adviser to the Palestine Liberation Organization. Jukaku and IMEU each gave Fighting for Michigan a total of $300,000, the most any donor has contributed so far to the pro-el Sayed super PAC.
Jukaku currently sits on the Islamic Society of North America’s founders committee as well as the board of the Council on American-Islamic Relations’s Michigan chapter. ISNA and CAIR were named as unindicted co-conspirators in the 2007 federal terrorist-financing case, USA v. Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, which resulted in the foundation’s conviction for funneling $12 million to Hamas. Jukaku, who has been serving on ISNA’s founding body since at least 2007, and other committee members are required to contribute a minimum of $5,000 annually to ISNA in addition to the Founders Legacy Fund.
The Washington Examiner contacted el Sayed’s and Sanders’s campaigns. Fighting for Michigan did not respond to a request for comment.