A lawyer for Gov. Kate Brown’s campaign sent a letter to 10 Oregon television stations on Monday claiming that an ad titled “Scary”,  issued by Priority Oregon, a business-oriented nonprofit, contains an allegation that “is a clear, unambiguous false statement of fact.”

If the governor is looking for false statements in political commercials, she should be looking at her own.

A campaign committee calling itself Defend Oregon’s Values is identified as the purchaser of a current television ad  attacking Republican gubernatorial candidate Knute Buehler. The ad aims to convince Oregonians that Buehler would be a threat to abortion rights.

If you look up Defend Oregon’s values on the Oregon Secretary of State’s website you find it is a committee established by Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 49. But if you look deeper you find that the committee  is actually an arm of Gov. Kate Brown’s campaign. According to the state Elections Division, the group is a “candidate-controlled committee” working on Brown’s behalf.

Its financial report shows that the committee was initially seeded with a July 13, 2018 contribution of $100,000, all of it from the Kate Brown Committee. Three days later, on July 16, the committee paid $96,000 to Targeted Platform Media LLC of Annapolis, MD for broadcast advertising on television and radio.

So Defend Oregon’s values is hardly an independent committee. But who would know that without digging deeper?

So much for truth in advertising.