In 2010, the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United that unions, groups, and nonprofit corporations had a First Amendment right to spend as much as they wanted on political campaigns. The only caveat was that they could not coordinate with the actual campaign they were campaigning for.

But CNN said Monday that the GOP employed Twitter to "stretch" Citizens United by using anonymous Twitter accounts to publicly share internal polling data to "signal to the campaign committees where to focus on precious time and resources."

"The Twitter accounts were hidden in plain sight. The profiles were publicly available but meaningless without knowledge of how to find them and decode the information, according to a source with knowledge of the activities," CNN reported Monday.

The accounts—@brunogianelli44 and @TruthTrain14—were immediately deleted on November 3, minutes after CNN inquired about them to the National Republican Congressional Committee, the campaign unit of the House GOP, CNN said. One of the accounts is named after a character, Bruno Gianelli, who in the The West Wing argued for questionable campaign spending in the fictional show.

"A typical tweet read: 'CA-40/43-44/49-44/44-50/36-44/49-10/16/14-52-->49/476-10s.' The source said posts like that—which would look like gibberish to most people—represented polling data for various House races," CNN said.

On November 4, the House won its biggest GOP majority since Word War II and also regained control of the Senate.

Kenneth Gross, the former chief of the Federal Election Commission's enforcement bureau, said, "If it truly requires some sort of Ovaltine decoder ring to make heads or tails of the information, then there certainly is the possibility that there was some pre-arrangement."

The NRCC did not immediately respond for comment.