The Massachusetts Republican Party says that its own audit of its whopping debt shows that at least $262,620 in media invoices should properly be billed to the campaign of Geoff Diehl, who lost his campaign for governor last year.
“Thus far, while we continue to review various documents, we have determined that at least two invoices that were included in the total billed to the MassGOP for Diehl campaign TV ads should in fact be billed to the Diehl for Governor campaign,” MassGOP Chairwoman Amy Carnevale wrote to Bruce Mittman, the president of Needham marketing agency MITTCOM, in a letter dated Thursday.
In total, MITTCOM had billed nearly $440,000 to the state party — part of the huge $600,000 debt the state Office of Campaign and Political Finance (OCPF) said the party was on the hook for.
At the time of the audit finding, Carnevale — who beat out former Chairman Jim Lyons, who was running for a third term, in January — wrote that $404,000 of the unpaid invoices she inherited upon assuming office were actually media-related expenses from the Diehl campaign “but incredibly were billed well after Election Day to the MassGOP.”
The Diehl campaign, which was strongest at roughly $153,000 at the start of February 2022, closed last month at a $0 balance, according to OCPF records.
Diehl did not respond to repeated Herald efforts for comment on this story.
In particular, Carnevale finds, according to Thursday’s letter, two ads that ran on WBZ-TV in October and November ahead of the gubernatorial election for the Geoff Diehl campaign, which total $17,825 between them. The Federal Communication Commission filings associated with the ads were signed by two employees of the Diehl campaign.
“Based on the research of MassGOP staff, we have conclusively determined that these invoices are not the responsibility of the party,” Carnevale wrote, later adding, “Therefore, the MassGOP could not legally pay this invoice even if it wanted to do so.”
The MassGOP also challenges spots that they say MITTCOM claims were placed on the History Channel on behalf of the state party, adding that the party’s executive director John Milligan emailed Mittman with a series of questions to back up these spot claims.
Herald reporter Chris Van Buskirk contributed to this report.
