[N]estled near the end of a suburban cul-de-sac in Alexandria, Virginia, is one of the most profitable media buying agencies in the 2016 primary race for the White House.
The unassuming two-story, single family home at 4507 Penwood Drive, is the registered address for Old Towne Media LLC — the media buying company that purchased more than $82 million in TV ad time for Bernie Sanders’ Democratic presidential campaign, Federal Election Commission reports through May show.
Old Towne’s income from the Sanders campaign has not been disclosed, but the industry standard for ad buy commissions is 15 percent. Based on that formula, the firm could have made $12 million.
The ad agency, established in 2014, has almost exclusively served the Sanders campaign, and the company keeps a low profile. It has no website and no listed phone number. A full list of principals isn’t publicly available.
Old Towne Media has another connection to Sanders: The two principal buyers for the company worked in the past with his wife, Jane. Jane Sanders, Shelli Hutton-Hartig and Barbara Abar Bougie were media buyers during Bernie Sanders’ 2006 Senate race.
In the 2006 Senate campaign, his Republican opponent suggested Sanders’ wife improperly profited from campaign ad buys. Richard Tarrant leveled the accusation a few months after news media reported that Jane Sanders had received $30,000 from 2002 to 2004 for work on her husband’s congressional campaigns, which is allowed under federal rules.
In response to Tarrant’s criticism at the time, Jeff Weaver, Bernie Sanders’ campaign manager, said Jane made the 2006 buys as a volunteer and gave her commission to the firm, Abar Hutton Media, which was run by Hutton-Hartig and Bougie.
During the 2016 primary campaign, Hutton-Hartig and Bougie signed media contracts for Bernie Sanders through their new company, Old Towne Media.
Very little public information about Old Towne is available.
Questions about the relationship between Old Towne and Jane Sanders have been met with silence from the Sanders campaign. At an event Tuesday in New Hampshire where Bernie Sanders endorsed rival Hillary Clinton, a spokesman declined to discuss the ad company and pointed to mandatory federal income disclosures for the couple.
Bernie Sanders released one year of tax information during the campaign. The federal disclosure forms from reporting periods through 2015 show that Jane Sanders received no income from Old Towne Media. Most of the media buys were made in 2016.
Recently reached by phone, Jane Sanders said she had a call on the other line and declined to discuss what her role in the campaign has been, or if she has made any money from her husband’s campaign in any capacity.
Asked about the media firm run by her former colleagues, she said, “I have no idea what Old Towne Media is” before hanging up.
Former staffers have said Jane Sanders was part of a small group of advisers for the Vermont senator that made media decisions.
What’s behind the curtain?
Lawrence Noble, a lawyer at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, said limited liability corporations — of which Old Towne Media is one — can raise concerns because of a lack of transparency.
“You can’t get into what’s happening in an LLC. It can act as a curtain to the public,” Noble said. “An LLC can be used legitimately or to hide things.”
Instead of having to report their salaries in Federal Election Commission reports, campaign officials can set up an LLC and take money in ad buying commissions without disclosure, he said, because the only public information is the name of the company.
Noble said political LLCs with similar characteristics to Old Towne raise a few red flags. He pointed to the company’s short history, with little other work and few clients. When these sorts of entities pop up and then quickly secure big work, Noble said, it’s a sign they may be closely connected to the campaign.
“The concern with LLCs, as opposed to a large corporation, is you really don’t know how much of a legitimate business it is versus a personal operation,” Noble said.
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Old Towne’s only other work besides the $82 million in Sanders ad buys was two months of work for liberal super PAC New Leadership for Ohio. The PAC placed $879,222 in ads.
The only public information about Old Towne Media is the company’s Virginia incorporation paper, which lists David Hartig as the registered agent. The company does not disclose its members and is not required to file annual reports.
Public records show Hartig owns 4507 Penwood Drive in Alexandria with his wife, Shelli Hutton-Hartig, one of the chief Sanders ad buyers throughout the 2016 primary calendar and a buyer on his 2006 campaign.
Calls to Hartig and Hutton-Hartig were not returned.
Digging into the documents
National news organizations have reported on Old Towne, but the stories have raised more questions than answers.
Maggie Haberman, a New York Times political reporter, tweeted about the firm in February, writing “Sanders’ filings have a listing for ‘Old Towne Media,’ which received more than $10 mill (sic) for what appears to be ad buying. No idea who owns the firm and email to Sanders team has gone unanswered.”
The Washington Post wrote about Old Towne’s profits in the spring. Several bloggers have asked questions about how a small company with so little experience landed such lucrative work. A Slate piece this week described the company as “a black box” and a “front company.”
Political media buys are disclosed in Federal Communications Commission reports filed by television stations. VTDigger reviewed hundreds of Sanders media contracts. Shelli Hutton-Hartig’s frequently signed off on the buys, as did Barbara Abar Bougie, her longtime media partner.
Jane Sanders’ name did not appear on contracts VTDigger reviewed.
Hutton-Hartig and Bougie placed ad buys for Sanders’ 2006 Senate race when they ran another firm, Abar Hutton Media. Like Old Towne, it was run out of Alexandria, Virginia.
In contrast, Clinton’s ad buying agency, GMMB, is a worldwide media planning company with dozens of employees, as well as a flashy website and offices in Washington, D.C., and Seattle.
The media money
In April, The Washington Post reported that the Sanders campaign was outspending Clinton on media strategy, creating “a financial windfall for his team of Washington consultants.”
One of those consultants is the campaign’s senior strategist, Tad Devine.
Bernie Sanders has been a client of Devine’s for decades. Devine was part of a firm that worked for presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004, and his current shop — Devine Mulvey Longabaugh — is a widely known in the world of political consulting.
Devine — whose company has received more than $5 million to create ads for Sanders’ primary campaign — told the Post that he had an additional source of income from the Sanders campaign: a percentage of the ad buys. Devine said he split a commission with Old Towne Media. The exact amount is unclear; the Post reported that he was “splitting a single-digit-percentage commission” with Old Towne.
Devine did not return multiple phone calls — both on his cellular and office lines — regarding the financial details of his media contracts.
The Post identified Old Towne Media as an agency run by two of Devine’s longtime buyers.
Devine could have given the 2016 media work to Bougie and Hutton-Hartig, who he worked with for decades, through Canal Partners Media, instead of Old Towne. Bougie and Hutton-Hartig merged Abar Hutton Media with Canal Partners in 2013, and they remain partners in the firm.
Canal Partners, which has locations in Washington, D.C., and Marietta, Georgia, has handled less than $1 million in ad buys for a few different clients during the 2016 cycle.
Neither Bougie nor Hutton-Hartig returned repeated phone calls to their D.C. offices at Canal Partners.
When VTDigger left a message Thursday at the Old Towne Media number that was posted recently by a similarly named Colorado company, a response came from Heather Hartig.
Hartig said in an email that she would pass the questions to “the owners,” but didn’t respond Thursday to an immediate reply asking who the owners were.
Old Town Media is a Colorado-based marketing company — without an “e” on “town.”
A previous call to the Colorado firm prompted a receptionist to say that VTDigger had dialed the wrong number. She added that she had been getting calls for months from people looking to talk to the other Old Towne Media.
A recently added post under the “Contact Us” tab on the Colorado firm’s site reads: “We are NOT the agency representing Bernie Sanders. Please stop calling. And sending us invoices. The hate mail isn’t great either.”
The media blowup
Although Bernie Sanders’ media buying practices landed him in some political hot water in 2006, officials said nothing violated FEC rules.
In addition to Jane Sanders’ payment for work on her husband’s congressional campaigns, her daughter from a previous marriage, Carina Driscoll, received about $65,000 for campaign work that election cycle. Much of the money came from commissions on media buys.
The media work was conducted under the umbrella of Sanders & Driscoll LLC, a Vermont consulting firm with three registered trade names: Progressive Media Strategies, Leadership Strategies and simply Jane O’Meara Sanders.
In campaign finance reports from 2002 and 2004, Driscoll’s name appears frequently on the payroll. But other than campaign reimbursements, Jane Sanders’ name did not show up in reports, as her money came in through her media firm.
In FEC reports from Bernie Sanders’ 2002 House race, payments were made to Progressive Media Strategies, while in 2004 money went to Leadership Strategies. They share the same address as the home the Sanderses owned at the time in Burlington: 72 Killarney Drive.
All of Jane Sanders’ commissions were perfectly legal, according to officials.
Federal Election Commission rules state that “campaign funds may be used to make salary payments to members of the candidate’s family only if: The family member is providing a bona fide service to the campaign (and) the payments reflect the fair market value of those services.”
Still, Tarrant made an issue of it. “Obviously, there’s questions of personal enrichment,” Tarrant’s campaign manager, Tim Lennon, told Seven Days in April 2006.
Lennon accused Bernie Sanders of “making money off of his wife’s actions,” adding, “He was personally enriching himself. He used his wife as his agent to do it, but that’s what he was doing.”
In response, Weaver — who was managing Sanders’ successful 2006 Senate run and is running his presidential bid — told Seven Days that Lennon’s charge was “a lie from top to bottom.”
Jane Sanders’ Vermont-chartered company had no official media work for her husband after the 2002 and 2004 races; her company is not listed on 2006 FEC reports for his first Senate run. Abar Hutton Media is on the 2006 reports, which received the $30,000 in commissions Jane Sanders said she transferred to the company.
In his 2012 re-election campaign, Sanders spent nothing on TV ads.
National media reports have characterized Jane Sanders as one of her husband’s closest advisers, and she is listed as one of three campaign directors in the nonprofit filing for Bernie 2016, his official campaign organization, along with Weaver and Sanders himself.
Although Jane Sanders said she didn’t know what Old Towne Media was, a number of former national staffers who declined to speak on the record dismissed that notion forcefully, saying she was a member of the core group of advisers who made decisions on everything from media to messaging.
In an interview with The Washington Post in March, the candidate described his wife as a close adviser on broader media strategy, asserting, “We do not put any TV ads on without Jane seeing it.” Bernie Sanders did not indicate she was involved in media buys.
In a tense exchange after Bernie Sanders endorsed Clinton on Tuesday, his spokesman Michael Briggs asked what had prompted VTDigger’s multiple phone and email inquiries regarding Old Towne Media.
Briggs said Jane Sanders was a close adviser on media and pointed to past federal disclosure reports that show no income from Old Towne Media.
Many people seeking or holding federal offices are required to file annual personal financial reports, as mandated in the Ethics in Government Act of 1978.
In Bernie Sanders’ most recent 2015 financial disclosure, filed by his Senate office last month, no income from Old Towne Media was reported by Jane Sanders.
Federal rules don’t require spouses of officials or candidates to disclose the company name and specific figures for their sources of income. Reports disclosing Jane Sanders’ media consulting work in the early 2000s have “N/A” written under the income tab.
However, the rules don’t require spouses to make any disclosure of having received income from companies that have no financial assets.
After Bill and Hillary Clinton released their federal disclosure report in May 2015, The Associated Press found the former president had omitted details of WJC LLC, an entity without employees used as a “‘pass-through’ company designed to channel payments” to him.
And while tax data could also shed light on Jane Sanders’ earnings from consulting, the candidate has released a joint return from only one year, 2014. Her only listed income that year was $4,900 for her service on a commission addressing radioactive waste disposal.
In the return, she listed that she also actively participated in her business, Jane O’Meara Sanders. The company is one of the trade names registered under the now inactive company Sanders & Driscoll. Two other inactive companies listed under Sanders & Driscoll include Leadership Strategies and Progressive Media Strategies.
In the 2014 return, Jane Sanders reported no income from the Jane O’Meara Sanders company, and the business address was redacted.
The Sanders campaign initially promised to release multiple years of tax returns, as Hillary Clinton has done. Asked in an April interview with Bloomberg Politics what sources of income would be in the promised returns, Jane Sanders demurred.
“There’s nothing,” she said. “We are really pretty boring.”