Tag Archives: democracy

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Missouri County Executive Candidate Using Deceptive Targeted Fundraising Tactics Nationwide


William C. (Bill) Eigel, a conservative former state senator from the 23rd District in Missouri’s St. Charles County, may have come in second place in 2024’s Missouri Republican gubernatorial primary.  And he may have lost in his push to be chairman of the state Republican Party in 2025. But he hasn’t abandoned his political drive or lost his fundraising bravado.

St. Charles Missouri County Executive candidate, Bill Eigel

 In October 2024, he filed paperwork with the Missouri Ethics Commission (MEC) that let him raise money for a possible run for St. Charles County Executive. On February 3, 2025, shortly after he lost his bid to become chair of the Missouri Republican Party, he confirmed that he would run for St. Charles County Executive in 2026. The election will be held on November 3, 2026, following party primaries on August 4, 2026.

According to the Missouri Independent, “no one sees the move as evidence that Eigel is ready to step off the statewide stage. To the contrary, the campaign is seen by Jefferson City denizens as Eigel simply looking for a political perch to mount another primary challenge against Kehoe in 2028.”

To support his Charles County campaign, Eigel is soliciting contributions for his Believe in Life and Liberty political action committee, BILL PAC. Why doesn’t the PAC’s name say it’s connected to Eiger?

“Some states require PACs backing single candidates or with specific donors to include the politician or the funders in their name,” the Missouri Independent has explained. “Not Missouri. Instead, PAC names can be a set of initials used for a reason no one can remember, a feel-good name that doesn’t have anything to do with the interest being promoted or even the name of a favorite television character.

On his Facebook page, Eigel is highlighting that “over 200 patriots showed up to our campaign event” on Sept. 27, suggesting high local enthusiasm for his candidacy. But what stands out when you examine the contributions in BILL PAC’s July 2025 report is how few are from locals. Most, in fact, are coming in from out of state. I haven’t contributed, but Eigel’s email came to me in Oregon.

Eigel faced criticism during his gubernatorial campaign for relying on nationwide out-of-state donors pursued by Targeted Victory, a Virginia consulting firm. This time he’s using a different firm for the same purpose. 

In a July 2025 Quarterly Report to MEC, BILL PAC reported total receipts of $209,659.91.

In a list of itemized expenditures over $100, BILL PAC reported fundraising expenses of $93,304.66 paid to Nineonesix, 2311 Wilson Blvd., Suite 200, Arlington, VA 22201. Nineonesix defines itself as a “mobile marketing agency” that serves only Republicans. “We design and execute media plans with a focus on emerging digital platforms, using thumb-stopping mobile creative to drive results,” it says.

BILL PAC’s only other fundraising expense over $100 identified in its that quarter was $2,388.83 to the Old Hickory Golf Club in St. Peters, Missouri. 

The July report to the MEC lists by name and address donations to BILL PAC from persons giving more than $100 to BILL PAC. 

One interesting anomaly with the contributions to BILL PAC in the July report, some as small as $3 and some as high as $500, is that more than 99% of them came from people who identified themselves as retired. That suggests retired people have been Nineonesix’s primary online target. Seniors are a prime target for online scams due to factors like social isolation a trusting nature and declining cognitive function. Many also live alone and have no one overseeing their spending. (By the way, I’m retired, which is probably why I’ve been getting Eigel’s emails.)

The report also showed many donors made multiple donations over time, resulting in aggregate donations of as much as $2,000, which suggests multiple email appeals driven by repeated responses. 

One donor, a retired woman from Abilene, Texas, typically gave $3.50 each time, for an aggregate of $194.16 as of April 27, 2025. Not to be outdone, a retired man from North Prince George, Virginia, gave a total of $83.50 in eleven separate donations ranging from $4 to $23 spread out over the quarter. In another case, a retired man from Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey made six separate donations ($10, $2.50, $2.50, $2.50, $2.50, $4.75) on  just one day, June 29, 2025. 

The PAC’s April and January 2025 quarterly reports to the Missouri Ethics Commission are similar in showing heavy reliance on retired out-of-state donors.

The oddest thing about BILL PAC’s appeals is that they don’t mention Bill Eigel’s name or even what office he’s running for. Instead, they rely on highlighting all sorts of hot-button issues and inflammatory stories that have nothing to do with the St. Charles race and are about issues over which a St. Charles County Executive would have no jurisdiction

On Oct.15, I received an email from BILL PAC calling on me to sign a petition calling for mandatory nationwide voter ID and to send money:

“Without mandatory voter ID in ALL 50 states, your vote will be replaced by an illegal alien. We need 2,500,000 signatures to our SECURE THE VOTE Petition before midnight to make a strong push to secure our elections ONCE AND FOR ALL:“

Another email I recently received from BILL PAC, labelled a “Voter Identification Survey” asks a series of questions, such as ” Do you believe Democrats are opposed to Voter ID laws because they negatively affect their chances of winning elections?” and “Should illegal immigrants be included in the US Census?” before asking for donations.

Then here’s this message I got from BILL PAC:

Friend, you can’t make this crap up!

A CRIMINAL, illegal alien FUGITIVE became a superintendent of a public school in Iowa.

When law enforcement caught him after he attempted to evade arrest, he was found in possession of a loaded handgun, $3,000 in cash, and a hunting knife.

This was the SAME MAN who was the superintendent of a public school. Radical Democrats have put the safety and well-being of our children SECOND to an illegal alien.

How many other invaders are in positions of power in our country? The open-border invasion Biden helped cultivate is damaging our safety, schools, communities, and country.

We MUST ramp up deportations for these illegal criminals ONCE AND FOR ALL.

We need a strong wave of support before MIDNIGHT TONIGHT, demanding that all illegals are deported ASAP>>

END THE ILLEGAL INVASION

SPEED UP MASS DEPORTATIONS NOW

Click on “We need a strong wave of support…” and you go to a donations page that also allows you to make a single or monthly recurring donation. 

At the bottom of the email in small print is the following:

Paid for by BILL PAC
1020 S Benton Avenue
St. Charles, MO 63301

That’s all. A recipient would have to be motivated to do some digging to find out the email is from a PAC supporting Bill Eigel’s run for County Executive of St. Charles County in Missouri.

I also got this email message from BILL PAC, along with an appeal for a donation:

Friend, the fate of the $5,000 DOGE checks can go one of two ways:

They can be paid to YOU and the American people.

OR: They can be revoked, and continue to fund liberal pet projects.

I’D PREFER A $5,000 CHECK

KEEP FUNDING LIBERAL PET PROJECTS

And this message from BILL PAC urging me to sign a petition supporting deporting Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Democrat from Minnesota, along with an appeal for a donation:

“If America is “so terrible,” and Somalia is “so great,” then let’s send her back! Sign the petition ASAP in support of deporting Ilhan Omar >>

 And this email from BILL PAC, including an appeal for a donation:

We tried emailing you last week, but received no response. 

We hope this isn’t a dead email, so this is your FINAL ATTEMPT to finalize your personalized DOGE Audit.

We can’t pass this audit over to the next patriot in your neighborhood until yours is complete, so we’re hoping you can end this logjam and complete the DOGE census of your area by TONIGHT!

COMPLETE DOGE AUDIT

HELP GET THE DOGE AUDIT TO OTHERS
So far, 1,076 patriots have completed this audit, so don’t be the first person to refuse to complete it and leave DOGE in the dust!

On his Facebook page, Eigel describes himself as “Christian, Husband, Father, USAF Veteran, Small Business Owner, Former State Senator for St. Charles County, and the conservative candidate for St. Charles County Executive.” 

The deceit and inflammatory messaging in his fundraising campaign aimed at vulnerable seniors doesn’t seem very Christian to me. 

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Trump/Vance Threaten The Competence of the Federal Civil Service

Donald Trump has made it clear he wants to overhaul the federal civil service and erode merit system principles. Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, Trump’s pick for vice president, has said that if Trump wins re-election, he should “…fire every single mid-level bureaucrat” and “replace them with our people.”

At campaign events, Trump has promised to “obliterate the deep state,” what he believes is a network of non-elected government employees working under cover to bypass elected officials and further their own contrary agenda.

I’m sure it sounds straightforward, simple and appealing to Trump’s ideological followers who think career civil servants would work to stymie Trump’s conservative policies if he’s re-elected.

But firing all the federal government’s mid-level bureaucrats and replacing them with political appointees would be a disaster for America.

I know that because I’m a former mid-level federal bureaucrat. I know that much of the work in multiple government agencies by U.S. civil servants is highly specialized, complex, and essential for an efficient government that serves the people. 

Under the U.S. General Service (GS) pay scale, the GS-1 through GS-7 range generally marks entry-level positions, mid-level positions are in the GS-8 to GS-12 range and top-level positions (senior managers, high-level technical specialists, or physicians) are in the GS-13 to GS-15 range.

I served in that mid-level band. As a Foreign Affairs Officer with the National Marine Fisheries Service during part of my professional career, I worked with the Department of State on international fisheries negotiations, principally with Russia, Canada and Asian nations. In preparing for that job, I earned a bachelor’s degree in International Relations, a master’s degree in Political Science and a master’s degree in Marine Affairs. I had also written a proposal for the United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea and worked for an international marine conservation non-profit in Canada.

Many others on my team had similar backgrounds. During my time in government I worked with a wide range of exceptional people with broad experience and academic backgrounds doing specialized work that advanced American interests. 

“Almost all Western democracies have a professional civil service that does not answer to whatever political party happens to be in power, but is immune from those sorts of partisan wranglings,” says Kenneth Baer, who served as a senior Office of Management and Budget (OMB) official. “They bring… a technical expertise, a sense of long history and perspective to the work that the government needs to do.”

Gutting the civil service and replacing experienced workers with political hacks, as Trump and Vance advocate, would be irresponsible.

Don’t let it happen.

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Could Sale of the Pamplin Media Group Threaten Local News?

The word is Pamplin Media Group, publisher of the Portland Tribune and 23 other local community papers in Oregon, is being shopped around for sale. 

Simultaneously, the Group is closing its Gresham Outlook printing facility and laying off its approximately 20 employees, an indicator of financial stress.

A Portland Tribune story noted earlier this year that the Pamplin Media Group “…has weathered numerous upheavals in the journalism business, three recessions that reduced advertising revenues and the COVID-19 pandemic that reduced revenues even more than the previous recessions.”

With all the bruising changes affecting the local newspaper industry, sale of the group may well lead to another upheaval. 

In early 2023, when Mark Garber handed off the position of president of the Pamplin Media Group to become president emeritus, he commented that when he’d started his newspaper career as a reporter in 1979, “We used manual typewriters and handed our copy to an editor, who marked it up, literally cut and pasted it, and then sent it to a human typesetter.”

The changes in the local newspaper business since those days have been massive, butchering a once robust news ecosystem in the United States.

The loss of local news has had far reaching implications. “As everyone knows, the internet knocked the industry off its foundations, ” James Bennet,  former editorial page editor at The New York Times, wrote in The Economist in mid-December. “Local newspapers were the proving ground between college campuses and national newsrooms. As they disintegrated, the national news media lost a source of seasoned reporters and many Americans lost a journalism whose truth they could verify with their own eyes.”

Just since 2005, the country has lost one-third of its newspapers and two-thirds of its newspaper journalists. So far in 2023, an average of 2.5 newspapers have closed each week according to a State of Local News Report by Tim Franklin, Senior Associate Dean and John M. Mutz Chair in Local News and Director of the Medill Local News Initiative at Northwestern University.  Most were weekly publications, in areas with few or no other sources for news.

“The underlying infrastructure for producing local news has been weakened by two decades of losses of newsrooms and reporting jobs,” noted an October 2022 report from the Agora Journalism Center at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication. “And news organizations today…often sense they are swimming against the tide of economic, technological, political, and cultural changes that threaten the long-term viability of local news production.”

In Oregon’s current troubling time, when misinformation is on the rise, the civic damage from a decline in trusted, quality local newspaper coverage can be particularly severe. Even more so when local papers rip more of their content from national news outlets or run stories to satisfy distant corporate owners. “Communities that lack robust local news also tend to experience lower rates of civic engagement, higher rates of polarization and corruption, and a diminished sense of community connection,” the report said.

The recent acquisition of many legendary local newspapers by hedge funds and private equity groups shows what could await the Pamplin Media Group. 

The Register-Guard in Eugene was locally owned until 2018 when it was sold to GateHouse Media Inc.  In 2019, GateHouse Media’s parent company, New Media Investment Group, acquired Gannett, the parent company of USA Today and more than 100 other dailies, creating the largest newspaper company in the country, with the combined company adopting the Gannett name. 

Management of the new company was left to Fortress Investment Group, a private equity firm in New York City. Fortress, which controlled New Media Investment Group, the parent of GateHouse, was owned by SoftBank, a Japanese conglomerate. 

There were about 21,255 employees at Gatehouse and Gannett at the time of the merger; Gatehouse had 10,617, Gannett 10,638. Gannett has since dramatically cut costs, reducing its headcount to 11,200 at the start of 2023.

Over the years, the Register-Guard has suffered right along with Gannett. At the time of its sale to Gatehouse in 2018 the Register-Guard had over 40 employees. Its website currently lists just 3 News reporters, 3 Sports reporters and 1 Multimedia Photo Journalist. Hardly enough for robust local coverage.

The Alden Global Capital hedge fund is another company eviscerating local newspapers. Alden, which owns about 200 publications, including the Chicago Tribune, is the second-largest newspaper publisher in the country, behind Gannett. Alden is perhaps best known for acquiring and then gutting the Denver Post.

In July 2023, Los Angeles billionaire Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong sold The San Diego Union-Tribune to an affiliate of the MediaNews Group, which is owned by Alden, for an undisclosed amount. The Voice of San Diego called Alden “the most terrifying owner in American journalism” and said the sale put the Union-Tribune “back in the American newspaper doom loop.” 

Word of cutbacks was swift. The same day as the sale announcement, the MediaNews Group sent an email to the paper’s employees saying cutbacks would be needed to “offset the slowdown in revenues as economic headwinds continue to impact the media industry” and informing staff that the new owner would be offering buyouts. If enough employees didn’t take buyouts, the company said it would lay off additional employees. 

As of the end of October 2023, employees estimated that somewhere between 60 and 80 people were left from the 108-person newsroom under Soon-Shiong.

The Voice of San Diego said the sale of the Union-Tribune to Alden put it “back in the American newspaper doom loop.” Let’s hope the sale of Pamplin Media Group doesn’t put its community newspapers in the same place.