WASHINGTON — Two weeks after Sen. Jerry Moran won his third term representing Kansas in the U.S. Senate, his campaign treasurer Timothy Gottschalk called the Republic County Sheriff’s Office and asked an officer to come to his office.
In the final six weeks leading up to the election, Moran’s campaign spent more than $2 million to have his face featured on television screens across the state. To get its ads on TV, the campaign used a Virginia-based company called SRCP Media. The media buyer reserved time slots for the ads in Kansas media markets and invoiced the campaign. The campaign then sent the money to SRCP Media, sometimes as much as $788,959 at a time.
So much money was moving from the campaign that it didn’t notice on Oct. 25, when an invoice for $345,000 for payment to SRCP Media came from an email address the company hadn’t been using. The campaign didn’t notice when it happened a second time, either, for the same amount, a day after the election.
