March 22, 2016 11:40 AM UTC

Trump Slushes Up Controversial Local Mail Vendor

• 3 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

As the Washington Post reports, a Commerce City-based Republican aligned political mail shop known as WizBang Solutions keeps popping back up as a major vendor, for both Donald Trump’s official presidential campaign and a “SuperPAC” set up to help him:

Donald Trump’s campaign has paid more than $1.2 million to a small Colorado printing firm connected to a Republican operative who ran a short-lived super PAC in support of Trump — shelling out $624,000 to the company just last month, new filings show.

That made WizBang Solutions, where GOP operative Mike Ciletti works as a director, the campaign’s third-highest paid vendor in February. The Commerce City-based company — which was paid for printing and design services — collected more from the Trump campaign last month than it had in all previous months combined.

Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks did not respond to a request for details about what work WizBang Solutions is doing for the campaign. Ciletti did not return a call seeking comment.

As the story explains, Mike Ciletti also ran the Make America Great Again SuperPAC, who was closed recently after it became obvious that this PAC using Trump’s slogan was indeed closely connected to his campaign. And that’s not the only connection between Team Trump and WizBang:

Ciletti, the super PAC’s lead consultant, is a longtime business associate of Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s campaign manager. The two men worked together when Lewandowski was a top official at the conservative advocacy group Americans for Prosperity. WizBang Solutions was a major vendor to the organization.

While the super PAC was active last year, the Trump campaign paid two firms connected to Ciletti, including WizBang Solutions.

Now, we haven’t seen any examples of WizBang’s work product for the Trump campaign, but they have a dubious history. Back in 2013, the very same WizBang Solutions was caught sending mail pieces into Southwest Colorado in which numerous black faces in a crowd had been Photoshopped out of the image and replaced with white faces:

You’ll recall that WizBang came in for substantial criticism over this mailer, including national cable news. An employee of WizBang named “Mike,” who could be Mike Ciletti but we don’t know as he didn’t give a last name in 2013, responded (badly) to reporter questions.  We haven’t seen the connection made between Donald Trump’s mail vendor and these racially controversial Photoshopped mailers in the current news cycle.

Based on Trump’s increasingly unstoppable trajectory, it’s probably time to make the connection. Loudly.