John Adams

So people's inbox is just filling up with these campaign mailers with some really heinous messaging and allegations, sometimes just a week before the election.

Right.

Just a few days before the election.

So the person on the other side of that attack didn't even know.

have a chance to respond.

You didn't know who the attacks were coming from and you didn't have an opportunity to respond.

And it turned out, and the documentary kind of really spells all this out, but it turned out that there was a kind of a group that was

orchestrating all of this on behalf of candidates and in some cases illegally coordinating with those candidates campaigns so they weren't disclosing they were providing um very valuable uh political resources to a campaign very valuable um uh you know uh

attacks and other services, but those weren't being disclosed.

And so we, you know, those of us who like to spend time digging around in files in the basement of the Commissioner of Political Practices office, we couldn't see who, like, this was a totally undisclosed money.

We didn't know how much they were spending.

We didn't know who was spending it.

We didn't know...

whether or not these candidates were directly involved with it.

Fast forward a few years, there was a series of trials that aimed to bring some of these elected officials to account for this illegal coordination.

And during that period of time, I had also been laid off at the Great Falls Tribune.

And so I'd followed this story as a political reporter for one of the state's largest dailies.

And then I found myself without a job in the middle of the 2015 legislative session.

And that was what sort of gave birth to the idea of Montana Free Press because I looked around the state at, you know, where could I continue to do this kind of brand of journalism?

And I didn't really see any viable options.