May 03, 2023 12:30 PM UTC

Colorado GOP Chair Appears on Conspiracist ScamPAC Podcast, Promotes Election Denialism

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• by: Erik Maulbetsch

(Dance with the crackpots who brung you — Promoted by Colorado Pols)

When Colorado GOP Chair Dave Williams hit the airwaves last month for his victory tour of right-wing talk radio, he insisted that he would unify the clearly divided Republican Party. He offered leadership roles to the other chair candidates he defeated, including Tina Peters and Erik Aadland.

However, Williams also appeared on a far-right podcast that is the antithesis of unity: the “Primary the Ruling Class” show, which is unique in that it promotes an independent political expenditure committee of the same name (PRC PAC for short). As the name indicates, PRC PAC claims to exist exclusively to primary Republicans.

Supporting a grassroots effort to “take back control of the Republican Party from the Professional Political Class” would seem to contradict Williams’ promise to unify a party currently split between far-right activists and a dwindling “establishment” faction.

His interview is also an odd choice for someone who, given his two paid positions as party chair and legislative aide, is absolutely a member of the “professional political class,” whether he likes it or not.

Prompted by PRC PAC founder and host Bill Luznicky to ask Williams about election integrity, co-host Todd Workman jumped right into election denialism. He began by praising former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, who’s currently facing multiple felony charges for her role in leaking secure voting data to a QAnon website. Workman then claimed that members of his PRC PAC group are currently knocking doors in search of “phantom voters” in Phillips County.

“I don’t have any trust in our elections,” said Workman. “We’ve had Tina Peters on the podcast. She’s a friend of the podcast. She’s a friend of mine. And had it not been for her doing what she did, I think a lot of us, especially in Colorado, would still be in the dark. There’s been a new light shined into the darkness of election integrity.

“And we are doing canvassing right here in Phillips County. Today, I think there’s a team canvassing right now, as we’re on the podcast.  So we’re trying to get to the bottom of it, and we want to hold our elected officials here locally accountable, for if we find fraud and they’re unwilling to go away from the Dominion voting systems, go back to counting at the precinct locally, paper ballots, one-day vote, I believe they’re going to be recalled. We’re going to try to recall them and get them out of there. What’s your opinion on recall? How are you on election integrity? How big of an issue is that for Republicans?”

“It’s a top priority,” replied Williams. “Here’s the deal. If no one trusts our elections, then they’re not they’re not going to vote. I mean, everyone wants the state party or even county parties to get out the vote and run up the numbers for our candidates. But I’ll tell you right now, there’s a lot of grassroots folks that won’t even bother. They’re throwing up their hands and they’re saying, ‘It’s crooked, it’s rigged, there’s cheating going on! My vote’s not going to count.’ And so that puts people like me in a very interesting position. When I was in the state legislature, right after the 2020 election, I was all in on election integrity. I was one of the few Republicans who said ‘Joe Biden is not legitimate.’ I was one of the few Republicans that forced an audit committee. Even though that audit committee didn’t go as well as I’d hoped, it was still something that was within my power to push for. And I even ran bills to try and get a handle on this, or at least elevate the issue in the Legislature. And I got ridiculed for it. Now that I’m party chair, I not only have to still worry about the election integrity issues that we’re facing, but I also have to still do the normal traditional things that a party chair or a party organization would want to do.”

The Colorado Times Recorder first reported on the Texas-based PRC PAC two years ago, when Luznicky and Workman started promoting it on RNC Committeeman Randy’s Corporon’s KNUS talk show. Founder Luznicky runs PRC PAC and co-hosts the podcast from Texas, while Workman lives in Phillips County on Colorado’s Eastern Plains. As it did then, the PRC PAC website blurs the line between a traditional political action committee and a multi-level marketing scheme, where members are encouraged to sign up other members into “cells” and possibly even get rewarded financially for their recruits’ donations, which would clearly be in violation of campaign finance laws.

When the Colorado Times Recorder asked Luznicky about the commission structure at the time, he dismissed it as an idea they considered, but never implemented, before deleting the “Sales Goals” webpage from the PRC PAC site. Nevertheless, other references to MLM-style recruitment and financial incentives remain on the site to this day, such as this line from the introductory post “What Is a Political Union? It’s an Idea Whose Time Has Come … .”

“Instead of paying establishment consultants millions of dollars to ‘guide us’ through the political process, we will offer internal financial incentives to members willing to help us organize and grow.“

Neither Williams nor PRC PAC responded to email requests for comment. This article will be updated with any response received.

In the two years since Colorado Times Recorder last examined PRC PAC’s spending, the overall amount has increased, but the largest recipient remains the same: Medsabi, LLC, which is also owned by Bill Luznicky. Over the 2021-2022 cycle, PRC PAC raised about $102,000, nearly twice as much as it did in 2019-2020. It spent essentially all of that money, with the vast majority ($76,000) going to Medsabi.

In all of these reports, the expenditures to Medsabi are listed variously as “digital services,” “custom coding,” and “welcome packs.”

Since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision legalized super PACs, shady so-called “scamPACs” have exploded in popularity. These entities typically use scare tactics to raise money from gullible donors and then spend most of those dollars paying the entity’s founders rather than supporting candidates. They’ve become such a problem that there’s a bipartisan bill to regulate their activity.

PRC PAC claims its mission is to primary RINOs, but its website shows only one example of a primary ad, an 80-second Rumble video of Luznicky and Workman urging any Republican viewers in Wyoming to vote for Harriet Hageman, who easily defeated incumbent U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney last November. There isn’t any evidence the ad was run as actual paid media, but the Rumble view counter indicates it was watched 53 times.

PRC PAC does show a few hundred dollars of spending on Facebook ads, though none more recently than 2019. Every single one of the 34 ads it purchased is for PRC PAC itself.

It’s unclear exactly how familiar Chairman Williams is with PRC PAC, but he might do well to heed the advice he himself offered the show’s viewers when they decide whether or not to trust politicians.

“The number one thing I think folks should always be aware of is that whenever you’re dealing with a politician, you have to have a healthy amount of skepticism,” said Williams on the Primary the Ruling Class show. “You should always ask yourself, what do they have to gain if I believe them? And when you start asking that question and start to have that skepticism, you’ll be able to understand your politician more and more.

“… When you start asking the ‘follow the money’ questions, then it makes perfect sense on why they do what they do. And the reason I want to stress this to folks is because there are a lot of goodwill people who just want to trust the elected official. Because they’ve been conditioned to think these people are good people. They have our best interests at heart. And there are some that do. But by and large, we can no longer operate under that paradigm. We have to shift away from that and start to realize that these people are left to their own devices. They’ll screw us over.”

CORRECTION: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Wyoming Congresswoman Harriet Hageman defeated U.S. Sen. Cynthia Lummis in the GOP primary; she beat former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney. The Colorado Times Recorder regrets the error.