Last week’s guilty plea by former Iowa State Sen. Kent Sorenson wasn’t the end of the federal investigation into the 2012 Iowa caucus payola scandal — not by a longshot.

OpenSecrets Blog has learned that FBI agents have been interviewing a slew of witnesses connected to Ron Paul’s presidential campaign and grand jury subpoenas have been issued for email records from campaign officials. And in addition to payments to a Maryland video company that were routed to Sorenson in exchange for his endorsement, OpenSecrets has identified an additional suspicious payment by Paul’s campaign that may be linked to a $25,000 check to Sorenson from a jewelry store connected to a Paul operative.

Sources say two grand juries are looking into the 2012 campaigns of Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), whom Sorenson originally endorsed, and Paul, to whom Sorenson switched his support just days before the Iowa caucuses. A number of individuals confirmed to OpenSecrets Blog that they had been interviewed by FBI agents, the grand juries, or both.

In late July, one of the grand juries issued subpoenas for emails and financial transactions between at least seventeen individuals, including Paul, Bachmann and Jesse Benton, who was Paul’s campaign chairman at the time and who resigned as campaign manager for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell‘s (R-Ky.) re-election bid late last week after news of Sorenson’s plea broke. A focus of the probe appears to be Dimitri Kesari, Kesari’s brother and several Maryland audio/video companies they are connected to. Kesari was a Paul operative who later was employed by the McConnell campaign.

An earlier Iowa Senate Ethics Committee investigation found that a Maryland documentary film company called ICT Inc. had paid Sorenson $73,000 in a series of transactions through early 2012. As first reported by OpenSecrets Blog last week, the Paul campaign sent ICT $82,375 in payments that almost exactly match payments to Sorenson. Sorenson’s plea agreement acknowledges that he took payments from a campaign, made to him through a film production company, in exchange for changing his endorsement, .

Kesari Connection

In Sorenson’s plea, he admits that the film company that paid him had never done any actual work for the campaign. The company’s involvement was purely as a pass-through — and $9,300 appears to have stayed with ICT, FEC records indicate. The company’s owner, Noel “Sonny” Izon, has at least one connection to Kesari: Kesari’s brother, Pavlo, who allegedly tried to convince a former associate in a separate video production firm to work for his brother, Dimitri, and the Paul campaign.

The former associate, Carroll Platt, of Washington, D.C., told the FBI Pavlo Kesari tried to convince him in August 2011 that their company, Performance Video, should work for the Paul campaign. Platt provided OpenSecrets Blog with a copy of a statement he gave to FBI agents, who interviewed him in June. According to the statement, Platt refused to get involved because the work didn’t seem entirely legitimate. That led to a fallout with Pavlo Kesari.

According to Platt, at an annual meeting of the firm’s co-owners, Pavlo Kesari announced that Dimitri had been hired by the Paul campaign and “Dimitri has work for us.” Platt says he told Kesari and their other partner that any political work had to be legitimate and paid in advance. The details of the proposed work were never shared with Platt, but he said it was clear to him that something unusual was afoot.

“We don’t have to do anything and we make money doing it,” Pavlo Kesari told Platt, according to the statement he provided to the FBI.

“The three of us got into a screaming match over this with [the third partner] eventually saying, ‘We will work with Dimitri Kesari — with you or without you.”

Shortly after, Platt said his two partners pushed him out of the business by abruptly transferring the company’s assets to a new company, Control Video. Neither Performance Video nor the new company are listed in Paul campaign records, but Izon’s ICT Inc. is. Platt said that he is sure Pavlo Kesari is the link between the Ron Paul campaign and ICT.

“The only way Sonny knows Dimitri is through Pavlo,” Platt said.

In a brief interview, Pavlo Kesari said he knew Izon, but knew nothing about Sorenson, Iowa or any payments from the campaign.

“I don’t do political stuff,” Pavlo Kesari told OpenSecrets Blog.

Izon’s attorney, James P. Ulwick, said his client is “just a witness” in the investigation. He noted that Izon had cooperated with federal investigators but declined to say if he has testified before a grand jury.

Grand Jury

Federal investigators appear to be examining the connections between the men. A copy of a subpoena issued by a grand jury in the Southern District of Iowa, obtained by OpenSecrets Blog, confirms Platt’s claims that federal investigators are looking into the Kesari brothers and the company Platt previously owned with Pavlo Kesari. The subpoena, which appears to have gone to a number of individuals, covers any correspondence between 17 individuals, including both Kesari brothers, about any relationships between the Paul campaign, Sorenson, ICT, Performance Video and Control Video.

A number of Bachmann campaign officials are also listed on the subpoena, such as Guy Short, a campaign consultant, and Andy Parrish, who was her chief of staff and later said publicly that Bachmann’s campaign paid for Sorenson’s support. Bachmann’s spokesperson did not return calls seeking comment.

Below is a partial copy of the subpoena.



SorensonSubpoena (PDF)

SorensonSubpoena (Text)

The subpoenaed records include “the contents of all emails associated with the Subject Accounts.” That supports a post earlier this month by libertarian blog EconomicPolicyJournal.com claiming that sources close to Ron Paul said that his personal email account had been subpoenaed; those sources denied Paul had engaged in any wrongdoing. Paul did not respond to attempts to contact him, nor did his daughter, Lori Pyeatt, who is listed as the treasurer of his 2012 presidential campaign. A spokesman for the Department of Justice would say only that “an investigation is ongoing.”

The subpoena lists several possible crimes being investigated including false reporting of campaign finance data by federal campaign committees, false statements to the FEC, obstruction of justice and concealing a federal crime.

The subpoena also demands emails showing any discussions between Jesse Benton — Ron Paul’s grandson-in-law who was chairman of the 2012 campaign and until last week ran Mitch McConnell’s campaign — and John Tate, Paul’s campaign manager, who now runs Campaign For Liberty, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit set up by Paul. Megan Stiles, a spokesperson for Campaign For Liberty, did not respond to a call seeking comment.

Help us keep government accountable by making a donation today.

Last August, OpenSecrets Blog and TheIowaRepublican.com published several internal emails from the Paul presidential campaign and a proposal from a Sorenson surrogate asking for money from the campaign. Aaron Dorr, Sorenson’s representative, wrote to Tate, the campaign manager, saying that Sorenson would need $8,000 a month from the Ron Paul campaign to replace money he was paid by the Bachmann campaign and a donation of $100,000 to a PAC he would start up. Dorr also writes that Sorenson could not switch his endorsement until after Nov. 10, 2011, because that was the date of a meeting of the Iowa state senate GOP caucus and Sorenson was considering running for a leadership position during the meeting.

On Nov. 14, Benton wrote to Dorr: “I hope the senate leadership meetings went well for Sen. Sorrenson [sic]. With those meeting in the rear-view mirror, I though [sic] now might be a good time to revisit Kent and your brother joining our team.”

The email from Benton does not mention any payment, but a reply from Dorr 10 days later makes it clear that Benton was aware that negotiations were occurring:

“Considering that Dimitri had dinner with Kent at his home over the weekend, I’ll assume that you guys are taking a more direct role in this process. As I’m no longer needed to facilitate a conversation at this point, I’ll bow out and let you, John, Dimitri and Kent work this out. “

Benton did not return requests for comment. In a statement accompanying his resignation from the McConnell campaign, he wrote: “Recently there have been inaccurate press accounts and unsubstantiated media rumors about me and my role in past campaigns that are politically motivated, unfair and most importantly, untrue.”

More Secret Payments?

In Sorenson’s plea agreement, he admitted having met with an operative from Ron Paul campaign on Dec. 26, 2011 at a restaurant in Altoona, Iowa, and said the operative gave him a check for $25,000, written in the name of a business owned by the operative’s wife. That matches with an audio recording of Sorenson saying that Kesari tried to give him a check for $25,000, written in the name of his wife’s jewelry story — Designer Goldsmiths Inc. — at a restaurant in late 2011.

Sorenson said in his plea agreement that he never cashed the check, but it was later used as security to ensure that other payments — those from ICT — were made. A copy of the uncashed check was turned over to the Iowa Senate Ethics Committee investigator.

While Sorenson may never have cashed that check, it appears that the campaign did in fact paid Kesari’s wife’s jewelry store $25,657, OpenSecrets Blog has found. The payment was made on Feb. 16, 2012, just eight days after the campaign’s first check to ICT — bound for Sorenson — was written.

The recipient is listed as DGI — the same initials as the jewelry store — and the address is a post office box in Washington D.C. that Kesari used as his personal address in earlier election cycles. The P.O. box turns up once again in federal campaign records for the 2014 cycle. A company called Hyllus LLC, which was paid $73,000 by the Mitch McConnell campaign, is at that address. The McConnell campaign later confirmed that Hyllus was Kesari.

Kesari was also paid $162,000 under his own name by the Paul campaign; $124,000 of that was salary and $38,000 was reimbursement for expenses, according to FEC records.

Neither Kesari nor his attorney responded to calls asking for comment.

FEC Complaints Led to Investigation

The investigations seem to have been launched following formal complaints made to the FEC by Peter Waldron, a political operative who was employed by the Bachmann campaign. Sorenson was initially the co-chairman of the Bachmann campaign in Iowa, and Waldron, who was the national faith-based coordinator for the Bachmann campaign, worked closely with him in 2011 to connect the campaign with religious voters.

Waldron initially filed a FEC complaint against the Bachmann campaign in February of 2013, alleging that it had paid Sorenson $7,500 per month for his endorsement. Waldron later filed a complaint with the Iowa Senate Ethics Committee. It is illegal for an Iowa state senator to accept payment from a presidential campaign for an endorsement. This year, he filed yet another complaint with the FEC, detailing his concerns that Sorenson had been paid by the Paul campaign as well.

Since making his complaints to the FEC, Waldron said he has been interviewed by Federal Bureau of Investigation agents “two or three” times, and was informed by multiple people he knew from the Bachmann campaign that they had been subpoeaned to testify before at least two grand juries — one in Washington, D.C. and one in Des Moines, Iowa.

When Sorenson abruptly announced his departure from the Bachmann campaign and endorsed Paul, Waldron told OpenSecrets Blog, he and others on the campaign were blindsided.

“It was more than a big deal, it was an epic moment,” Waldron said of Sorenson’s switch on Dec. 28, 2011, six days before the caucuses. “He betrayed Michele. It was a shock to Michele, devastating to the campaign and earth-shattering to the supporters.”

Waldron — who spent time in a Ugandan prison in 2006 after being arrested there with assault rifles — said the final days of the campaign were spent trying to manage the crisis and calm supporters.

At the time, Bachmann publicly said that Sorenson had privately told her he had been paid by the Paul campaign to switch parties, a charge he denied publicly. Waldron said he and other staffers were never paid by Bachmann’s campaign for the final weeks of work, and after the campaign tried to have him sign a nondisclosure agreement, he decided to go public with concerns over the campaign’s internal workings.

“The commandments say ‘Thou shall not bear false witness’, which means more than thou shall not lie,” Waldron said. “It was my obligation to report a crime to which I was a witness.”



For permission to reprint for commercial uses, such as textbooks, contact the Center: Feel free to distribute or cite this material, but please credit the Center for Responsive Politics.For permission to reprint for commercial uses, such as textbooks, contact the Center: [email protected]





Support Accountability Journalism At OpenSecrets.org we offer in-depth, money-in-politics stories in the public interest. Whether you’re reading about 2020 presidential fundraising, conflicts of interest or “dark money” influence, we produce this content with a small, but dedicated team. Every donation we receive from users like you goes directly into promoting high-quality data analysis and investigative journalism that you can trust.Please support our work and keep this resource free. Thank you. Support OpenSecrets ➜