John Adams

that new constitution was really aimed at limiting the role of outside corporate influence in our politics.

It had strict limits on campaign finance.

And what we saw in 2013, 2015 and beyond was, you know, my reporting had started to reveal like how this dark money was really infiltrating these local legislative elections, primarily- Super local, it was a stunning-

Yeah.

I mean, candidates were coming out of nowhere and just getting enormous support through, you know, mostly through postcards.

Right.

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.