Google Red-Flagged Kentucky AG’s Taxpayer-Funded Ads

With less than a week to go before the Republican primary this May, the office of Kentucky attorney general Daniel Cameron launched a paid video ad campaign to raise awareness about human trafficking, featuring the gubernatorial candidate himself.

To be clear, the video was not the work of Cameron’s political campaign. Instead, it was part of a public outreach program conducted by the commonwealth’s office of attorney general (OAG). And the costs weren’t underwritten by voluntary donors, but by a $175,000 taxpayer-backed federal grant that the OAG received from the Department of Justice in January.

Cameron was only able to use those taxpayer dollars because the ads were public service announcements, not political ads. But at least one important arbiter said the ads were, in fact, political: Google.

Less than a month after the primary, Cameron’s office was notified that the ads had been “paused and flagged” after Google ruled that it was political advertising, according to internal communications shared with The Daily Beast.

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The internal records, along with publicly available government spending information and online advertising data, indicates that the incident wasn’t a one-off. Instead, The Daily Beast discovered a pattern in which promotional efforts paid for by Cameron’s state office appear to hew to the controversial rising GOP star’s political ambitions.

In flagging the ads, YouTube—which is owned by Google—cited Cameron’s personal appearance in the video, in close proximity to an election, as an indication that this was not simply a state government PSA. Google said the video was actually “political advertising mid-campaign,” according to the internal emails, which were obtained by a third party through an open records request and shared with The Daily Beast.

“IMPORTANT NOTE,” began a June 7 emailed update, sent to Cameron’s office from an employee of marketing firm Red 7 E, which according to state spending records collected $107,425 to run the public awareness campaign. “On YouTube, we were just notified that the ads that had been running were flagged for being considered political advertising mid-campaign, due to the fact that the Attorney General is in the video assets.”

The email noted that “as of immediate, the ads have been paused and flagged,” and recommended shifting the pre-allocated funds to another component of the ad campaign.

“Please reply to this email to let us know if we are approved to proceed with this recommendation and we can make the necessary adjustments ASAP,” the update concluded.

It’s not clear from the records how or even whether the office responded to the question. The full scope of the records include later documents, such as a Red 7 E slide deck from July summarizing the campaign’s overall impact, but the office does not appear to have included any written replies to the June 7 email when it fulfilled the records request.

In response to a detailed request for comment, a spokesperson for the Republican Party of Kentucky said that, since day one, Cameron has “worked to protect Kentuckians from human trafficking.”

“Instead of running with every pitch you get from the DGA or the Beshear campaign, how about a real investigation into who has politicized the government?” asked Sean Southard, the communications director for the state party. “How much money has Andy Beshear spent in taxpayer dollars literally branding each cabinet with his campaign’s Team Kentucky slogan and logo? Or license plates? Or his tornado and flood relief funds that are under audit?”

Previous reporting by The Daily Beast and other outlets has revealed apparent conflicts of interest between political donors and Cameron’s official duties as AG—including criminal investigations, pending legal matters involving the state, and a bizarre ongoing proposal to allocate tens of millions of dollars in state funds to help pharmaceutical firms develop an unproven and controversial psychedelic addiction treatment. The Daily Beast also previously reported that Cameron appears to have politicized dimensions of the office itself, citing OAG employees and state hiring data.

Obviously, efforts to stop human trafficking are commendable, and the public record demonstrates that Cameron has expressed a longstanding commitment to this specific issue. But when it comes to promoting the cause, the facts indicate a competing political motivation.

Anna Whites, a veteran Democratic political lawyer in Kentucky who frequently represents Democratic clients, called the paid promotions “concerning,” telling The Daily Beast that Cameron’s office appears to have violated state ethics rules.

“The focus of the advertisement being on the AG looks like he was using the advertising and grant budget intended to protect victims to instead advance his own personal goals and for his own personal benefit,” Whites said. “This is an ethical concern and one that I believe the Ethics Commission should review.”

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Whites, who once represented Breonna Taylor grand jurors in an effort to impeach Cameron, pointed to an array of statutes and advisory opinions to support that conclusion.

“9 KAR 1:025 Section 2 deals with conflicts of interest for public servants,” she explained, citing provisions that bar public servants from using their office to gain employment and prohibit the application of state resources to political campaigns. Other potential violations, she said, include a 2008 executive order—signed by the father of Kentucky’s Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear, former Democratic Gov. Steven Beshear—which the Kentucky Ethics Commission has affirmed and stipulates that government officials cannot use their position for personal advantage. Kentucky law also holds that public servants may not “use public office to obtain private benefits.”

The ad content, she said, includes another key detail about the intention: its focus on Cameron personally.

In 2021, the OAG also used a six-figure DOJ grant to underwrite a trafficking awareness campaign, called “Your Eyes Save Lives.” But Cameron, who wasn’t publicly running for office at the time, didn’t personally appear in any of the four videos released as part of that effort, though he did lend his voice to a radio spot. However, Cameron was a central figure in this year’s video.

Whites noted that the OAG has a dedicated human trafficking division, the Office of Trafficking and Abuse Prevention and Prosecution.

“The staff of that office would be persons who should have appeared in the ad, rather than the AG himself,” she said.

Whites allowed that it might be appropriate to run trafficking ads around high-risk events like the NCAA tournament or Kentucky Derby, even if the videos featured Cameron while he was also a candidate. But the OAG launched the campaign the week after the Derby, and more than a month after the Final Four. Absent that kind of connection, Whites said, the promotions may appear “created specifically to promote the AG in his current race for new office.”

Publicly available information appears to reinforce that notion, suggesting a pattern where paid promotions overlap with politics.

Over the last three years, Cameron’s office has spent more than $316,000 on ads, according to Kentucky records. That’s a more than a $315,050 increase over the previous four years, when Cameron’s political opponent and the state’s previous AG—current Gov. Andy Beshear—reported spending a combined $50 on ads.

The vast majority of Cameron’s OAG outlays came from two DOJ grants, a $100,000 allocation in 2021, with a second $175,000 grant coming in January this year. But much of the spending maps neatly onto a political timeline, specifically Cameron’s 2022 candidacy announcement, the primary election, and the pivot to the general.

For instance, nearly 80 percent of the OAG’s 2022 advertising spending (about $40,000 out of roughly $52,000 total) came shortly after Cameron announced his candidacy on May 11, according to state spending data. Nearly every dollar went to Red 7 E, a popular vendor with the Kentucky government.

A search of the Facebook ad library shows that Cameron’s office paid to promote four ads at the time. All four were removed for violating the platform’s disclaimer requirements for issue, election, and political ads. (Google also removed a Cameron campaign ad that ran in early May this year, but the content is no longer visible.) The OAG didn’t run any more Facebook ads until the new human trafficking awareness campaign in late May, which it began promoting about a week after Cameron won the nomination, the Facebook data shows.

In its 2023 proposal to Red 7 E, which the open records response shows was submitted in late April, the office stated that it wanted the new promotions to reach a “statewide audience.” But due to limited funding, six regions saw “most components” of the ad campaign, with only social media running statewide.

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While Cameron’s campaign was also up on Facebook around the time, the data shows that the OAG picked up after the political operation went dark. Between late April and early May, the campaign spent an estimated $5,000 or so on Facebook ads, but that spending stopped after the primary and didn’t pick up until this month. Between May 25 and July 8, however, Cameron’s office spent nearly twice that amount on its human trafficking ads.

At the time, Cameron appeared to be on financial fumes. The primary had all but exhausted the campaign’s cash supply, only rolling over about $15,000 to the general election. The campaign put roughly $220,000 into media just ahead of the primary—including a $175,000 line item for ad placement—but spent nothing on promotions in the following month.

Cameron, who has legally tapped state resources for security and travel during his campaign, has seen air support from outside groups as his fundraising and polling both cratered over the summer.

In August, a super PAC aligned with Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) began airing pro-Cameron ads in the state. The seven-figure effort was launched following a $3 million contribution to the super PAC from GOP megadonor Jeff Yass, who The Daily Beast reported has financial stakes in a state-backed AG project to fund experimental corporate pharmaceutical development. The Republican National Committee has also thrown in, allocating about $90,000 to the Kentucky GOP in September, bringing its total investment this year to about half a million dollars.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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