By Steve Haner

Revised June 5

The pro-green energy activist group Clean Virginia has announced a live television attack advertisement in opposition to Shannon Taylor, one of two Democratic candidates seeking the nomination for Attorney General. The ad (see it here) was authorized by the other candidate, Jay Jones. 

Taylor, currently Henrico County Commonwealth’s Attorney, accepted $300,000 in donations from the utility in the past few weeks. Jones, a former state delegate, has taken the pledge against Dominion bucks and was rewarded during the same period by Clean Virginia with $200,000 cash.  Democrats are choosing their nominee in a primary, with the polls open June 17.

The in-kind donation of the advertising for Jones will show up in a future report, presumably. The ad will could also inject a healthy debate on energy costs into the 2025 campaign. The focus is on the utility’s pending rate increase request, and the role played by the Virginia Attorney General as the designated counsel for the state’s consumers in front of the State Corporation Commission. Clean Virginia believes the money is disqualifying.

During the same period, Dominion gave the current Consumer Counsel, Attorney General Jason Miyares, another $300,000 for his campaign for a second term. Clean Virginia will be attacking him later this year, one expects, but that will be harder to do if Taylor is his opponent. Did I mention this is a rate-increase year?

Now here is the story within the story. All this was kicked off by a very useful report on fresh campaign donation documents from the Virginia Public Access Project. That information has now disappeared from their website, poof it’s gone. The links at the end of the post are dead. Luckily one reporter, Brandon Jarvis of Virginia Scope, did a detailed report on the information while it was still live yesterday. 

The reporting period covered started April 1, about the end of the General Assembly session, and ended May 25. The reports filed did not come from candidates, but from the donors who are organized as political action committees, including party committees, legislative caucus committees, unions and some companies who use PACs. 

As we all saw yesterday, and thank you Jarvis for taking notes, Dominion dumped in $2.6 million to a host of candidates during that reporting period, and Clean Virginia approached $1.5 million. The listings on the VPAP website yesterday detailed the list of which groups had given how much to which people or committees. Dozens of committees were listed.

Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell, D-Fairfax, had a six-figure check from Dominion and Speaker of the House Don Scott also showed up getting even more money from the utility. On the other side of the ledger, Clean Virginia’s “let’s try to look fair” donations to Republicans are creeping up to larger numbers, $20,000 in some cases I recall seeing. Oh, and Clean Virginia gave Democratic gubernatorial nominee Abigail Spanberger another $200,000 in the period.

Another possible story point from the report, which was going to depend on a second closer look today, is that the Republican nominee Winsome Sears appeared absent from all the donor reports.

Revisions begin at this point.

All that data in that original format is now gone. This reporter intended to dive into it, but no such luck.  Following complaints that the first version of this post was unfair, I learned something new about how VPAP packages its data.  Until a fairly recent change in the law, both the candidate donation reports, and the political action committee reports, were due at the same time. Now the PAC reports are sent in on a different schedule, in this case earlier than the candidates’ reports.  

Using one search path, by looking on the main VPAP page at “top donors”, you get a summary on a donor’s history that is based only on the reports from candidates.  Using that approach, the numbers from these PAC filings were not yet integrated and will not be until the candidate reports appear (in this case, fortunately, that is next week.)  For that reason, I erroneously reported they could not be found.  What was true is I couldn’t find them. 

But if you go to the main VPAP page and directly search on the donor, in this case Dominion or Clean Virginia, you can also find a “committee” page and then a page for “expenditures” and those had been updated with the new data. That was a new search path for me.  Having the most current numbers in one place but not the other can still lead to confusion, but data integration is beyond my basic computer skills and perhaps there is a reason to leave the “top donors” path to a report unchanged until the candidates report.  

It was pure speculation on my part that VPAP had deactivated the initial set of links because it had ticked off somebody, and for that I had zero evidence.  In a response to me the director of VPAP felt I had accused them of malfeasance, which I certainly did not do or even intend.  I suspected, again without evidence, that they responded to a complaint from someone. That is real life, not malfeasance.  My statements that data files were easily accessible on one day, and no longer on the page the next, remains correct.  VPAP had touted the existence of them in its own daily news summary, and no still explanation has been offered as to why they were taken down so quickly and left to read “page not found.”