Back in October, Bacon’s Rebellion wrote in detail about a $200,000 donation by Dominion Energy to Virginia Accountability PAC, a benign-sounding but nefarious super PAC determined to keep Glenn Youngkin out of the governor’s office by any means necessary.
The PAC had a particularly dastardly plot, even by the low standards we’ve come to expect in contemporary American politics. Namely, to suppress the Republican vote in conservative-dominated rural Virginia through a disinformation campaign on Facebook with targeted ads falsely alleging that Youngkin didn’t support gun rights.
Axios, a reputable media outlet, though hardly a conservative one, described the campaign to undermine the election as “sneaky sabotage.”
We now know Dominion’s involvement in that “sneaky sabotage” went even further than first reported.
As Bacon’s Rebellion reports:
The severity was greater partly because Dominion actually sent $250,000 to Accountability Virginia PAC, which posed as a right-leaning group in order to raise doubts about Youngkin’s 2nd Amendment credentials with rural voters. The political strategy was to diminish enthusiasm – and therefore turnout – for the now-governor.
But the degree of deceit has even more to do with the timeline of the contributions rather than the aggregate amount.
Though Axios first reported the story on Sept. 28, at that time Dominion had only donated $125,000 to Virginia Accountability PAC — less than half of its total contribution.
Bacon’s Rebellion adds:
But that didn’t deter the utility and its CEO. Three days later, on Oct. 1, another $75,000 was sent from Dominion’s PAC to Accountability Virginia PAC. Two weeks after that, on Oct. 15, an additional $50,000 was transferred from Dominion to the Virginia PAC.
Personal donations from Dominion executives flowed to the PAC as well. Blue sent $5,000 on Sept. 9 and then another $5,000 on Oct. 18 – again, well after the media latched on to the connection between the utility, Accountability Virginia PAC, and its deceitful ads. Fellow Dominion officials William Murray, Carlos Brown, and Edward Baine also kicked in $5,000 each of their own money, $12,500 of which came on Oct. 12 or later.