The Mysterious Dark Money Group Connecting Trump, Christie, and DeSantis
Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty
In the early stages of the 2024 race, no other candidate—not even Donald Trump—has pushed the bounds of campaign finance laws as much as Ron DeSantis.
But the DeSantis campaign’s finances have suffered despite those hard-charging efforts. Or, perhaps, because of the people behind them.
Immediately after DeSantis officially declared his inevitable candidacy, he was challenging fundraising laws. That’s when his state-level PAC pledged to transfer more than $80 million to a pro-DeSantis super PAC, just weeks after DeSantis officially cut ties with the old group—a move Florida lawmakers changed the rules to accommodate and which quickly drew a federal complaint.
But Florida campaign finance statements show even closer ties between these three groups than previously reported—and they go to the top of the DeSantis operation.
Even with all the PAC money, the DeSantis campaign has been marred by financial trouble. Extravagant spending and an overreliance on large-dollar donors—71 percent of his total fundraising has come from people donating more than $2,000—prompted the campaign to cut more than a third of its staff earlier this week. And one person who has taken a lot of the blame for DeSantis’ questionable financial footing is a largely unknown figure with undeniable experience in the shadowy GOP circles of dark money: Generra Peck.
But in the months leading up to DeSantis’ pro forma campaign announcement, his top advisers, including Peck, were busy raising money in the background.
Brendan Fischer, deputy director of government watchdog Documented, told The Daily Beast that Peck’s involvement with that high-dollar fundraising is “further evidence that there is little distinction” between the groups backing DeSantis, which are not allowed to coordinate with each other.
“It is another example of how DeSantis has been circumventing the federal campaign finance rules designed to prevent corruption and protect voters’ right to know,” Fischer said.
Peck, a widely respected Republican strategist who prefers to operate in the wings, is DeSantis’ 2024 campaign manager, having quietly steered him to victory in 2022. But before she took the top job, she helmed a battery of low-profile conservative advocacy groups—where the funding is largely untraceable and the spending is exceedingly difficult to unravel, often by design.
Peck’s present, however, is distinctly different from her past. A presidential operation tasked with taking down the most powerful force in the Republican Party has to reckon with far more public scrutiny than Peck has dealt with previously. And the transparency demanded of federal campaigns is entirely different from the occult financials of the comparatively obscure dark money groups and consulting firms where she cut her political teeth.
Peck’s approach, and the complications she faces today, are captured in the story of one of those groups—a dark money nonprofit that Chris Christie started to support then-President Trump, but which in hindsight looks more like an incubator for a future DeSantis presidency.
“Right Direction America” was created in late 2019 to fight back against Democratic attempts to impeach Trump.
“I was tired of sitting around and waiting for someone else to do it,” Christie said at the time, promising seven-figure ad buys to combat impeachment.
He would leave the group a year later, long after the Senate had acquitted Trump of those impeachment charges. But RDA was far from finished.
Kevin Wurm/Reuters© Provided by The Daily Beast
In retrospect, RDA had strong ties to DeSantis from the beginning. Aside from Peck and Christie, one of the key forces behind the group was veteran GOP operative Phil Cox—a trusted DeSantis adviser and top deputy for his super PAC. The group also featured Catherine Chestnut Linkul, another senior DeSantis 2022 aide and the former director of Casey DeSantis’ Office of the First Lady.
The DeSantis campaign and Peck did not respond to detailed questions for this article.
But after Trump was acquitted and Christie was gone, the group assumed what seems like its true purpose all along: a nozzle to spray anonymous cash to a broad range of conservative groups, issues, and politicians.
RDA’s filings don’t appear in IRS searches, nor in any other public database that compiles those records. The Daily Beast previously obtained the group’s 2020 filing, which shows it doled out $700,000 in grants. Those funds went to two other secretive entities, both of which, like RDA, are classified as 501(c)(4) “dark money” groups—and both of which are directly tied to Peck.
When one of those groups, “Building a Better America,” emptied its coffers in 2021—the year Peck moved to Tallahassee to take over DeSantis’ 2022 campaign—the group poured almost all of its bank account into reforming a federal environmental policy of deep interest to DeSantis: a Florida mining project. BBA didn’t similarly explain the nature of any of its $2.1 million in grants on its previous year’s tax filing.
RDA—whose board also has ties to the GOP’s biggest megadonor, Dick Uihlein—took in three donations in 2020, for a total $2.12 million, the filing shows. All three were anonymous, with the largest being $2 million.
While Christie promised to spend big money fighting Trump’s impeachment, RDA dropped only about $35,000 on ads toward that endeavor, according to the Facebook advertising database. The group returned to the political fold that August with a contribution more than twice that amount to a super PAC backing the unsuccessful congressional campaign of a Christie ally.
A few months later, Christie dropped out of RDA. The reason is unclear, and Christie declined The Daily Beast’s request for comment.
His departure, however, came weeks before the most curious event in RDA’s curious life: a $100,000 gift in early 2021 from the campaign belonging to Rep. Matt Gaetz, for a time one of DeSantis’ closest allies.
The donation was double the amount of the Gaetz campaign’s second-largest contribution ever, and $22,000 more than its combined political gifts to DeSantis.
The campaign cut the $100,000 check when the congressman was on particularly shaky ground, and the Gaetz campaign’s explanation appears to defy belief, The Daily Beast previously reported. The contribution came about half a year after the Justice Department opened its investigation into whether the Florida congressman paid for sex with a 17-year-old girl, and weeks after Trump returned to civilian life at Mar-a-Lago, denying Gaetz the blanket pardon he had reportedly sought.
But there’s unsurprisingly scant publicly available information about RDA’s activities after Christie left. The group’s website was taken down sometime after The Daily Beast reached out for comment for this article; it was archived as recently as March 21.
RDA’s publicly available financial data is almost exclusively accessible through Federal Election Filings, which show a $250,000 injection from former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. One year later, a super PAC called “Right Direction Women”—whose branding is strikingly similar to that of RDA’s now defunct website—made a similar donation to yet another nonprofit, called “Right Direction Women Maryland.”
RDA Women’s lineup is also studded with close associates of Peck and her former consulting firm, P2 Public Affairs. The super PAC supports conservative women running for office, notably Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, who is now the central pillar supporting DeSantis’ primary efforts in that critical state.
But the force behind them all appears to be Peck. While the strategist rarely engages the media—who seem to have rarely engaged with her before she took over the 2022 DeSantis campaign—she took a major step into public life in September 2021, when DeSantis tapped her to run his upcoming re-election effort.
While Peck has long been close with both Ron and Casey DeSantis, her hiring was reportedly the work of yet another ghost from Right Direction’s past: Cox, who first took a shine to Peck while they worked together on former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell’s 2009 campaign.
Over the next decade-plus, Peck took on increasingly senior roles in the GOP national apparatus, building political bridges through the Republican Governors Association, where Cox served as a top official and which Christie chaired. (As if it’s not complicated enough, that organization also has its own “RGA Right Direction” PAC.)
However, Florida state filings don’t show 2022 DeSantis campaign payments to Peck personally or a number of known entities associated with her. They do, however, reveal $1.7 million going to Cox’s Ascent Media from the Republican Party of Florida, with that company clocking another roughly $207,000 directly from the DeSantis campaign.
Then, just two days after DeSantis won, Ascent Media was listed as one of a slate of firms forming a brand new consulting mega-conglomerate, GP3 Partners, LLC. The consortium features a number of DeSantis-world operatives, and its name—GP3—is shared by Peck’s personal firm, GP3 Strategies, LLC. Peck’s own name, however, was characteristically absent from the conglomerate’s press release, as was any mention of GP3 Strategies.
This January, DeSantis, Peck, and Cox began ramping up his predicted presidential bid in earnest. And the money began moving, too.
Early that month, Cox’s firm kicked about $562,000 back to the Florida GOP, state filings show, with the DeSantis 2022 campaign paying the company roughly $591,000 weeks later.
Notably, over the next five months Ascent Media hauled in another $151,500 from the Friends of DeSantis PAC—the group at the center of the disputed $82 million transfer. That PAC also sent $95,500 to Peck’s GP3 Strategies via a series of monthly installments beginning the last day of February.
Between March 1 and April 30, as DeSantis’ not-so-subtle shadow campaign carried him around the country and abroad, that PAC raised a staggering $3.8 million. Then, on May 5, DeSantis declared in a state filing that he would no longer fundraise through the group. That same day, the PAC, which paid GP3 Strategies its last installment the previous day, cut Ascent Media its final check. It rebranded 10 days later as “Empower Parents PAC.”
The contours of that fundraising effort are at the center of Campaign Legal Center’s federal complaint. The complaint, filed May 31, alleges that the PAC illegally coordinated with DeSantis to raise money in amounts exponentially higher than his campaign would have been able to.
Undeterred, the PAC made good on its $82 million promise the next month, announcing the unprecedented transfer to the pro-DeSantis super PAC “Never Back Down.” That group, of course, features Cox as a top official, alongside Jeff Roe, a longtime Republican campaign veteran who reportedly had his eyes set on the campaign manager slot—only to take a backseat to Peck.
Today, however, Peck’s cover has been blown. GOP insiders and megadonors have increasingly expressed frustration with the campaign’s flagging performance and runaway spending, and they’re hungry for a scalp.
According to multiple recent reports, they’ve set their sights on Peck, whose limited campaign experience has, through no fault of her own, made her vulnerable to those attacks.
When the campaign cut about a third of its workforce earlier this week—more than three dozen jobs—Peck took considerable heat.
A statement attributed to Peck said the layoffs were the result of a “top-to-bottom review,” but it’s unclear how effective the move will be. The campaign spent about $630,000 on payroll over its first six weeks, FEC records show, about 8 percent of its total expenses.
Fittingly enough, Peck’s own compensation with the campaign is its own mystery. Federal Election Commission filings show only about $10,000 going to her on the DeSantis campaign payroll over the campaign’s first six weeks. She received just the fifth-largest single payroll payment, and her total stands at about $5,000 less than the governor’s longtime communications guru, Christina Pushaw.
While it may seem like Peck is just doing the job on the cheap, she actually appears to have scored a hefty payday in the weeks before the campaign launched. Between late February and early May, Peck saw nearly $100,000 in combined regular payments from a high-rolling DeSantis state PAC, paid through her personal consulting firm, GP3 Strategies, LLC.
