A flurry of unsolicited anti-Obama text messages have been linked to a conservative activist and former Republican candidate for Virginia State Senate.
The messages ranged from “Re-electing Obama puts Medicare at risk” to “Obama supports same-sex relationships. Voting for him will destroy the sanctity of marriage,” according to various DC area residents, including many journalists, who began receiving them Tuesday evening. By Wednesday morning, GoDaddy.com suspended and released the registration information for the domains tied to the spam text messages – including gopmessage.com, obamaliesett.com and many others – listing ccAdvertising and its owner Jason Flanary. Flanary ran an unsuccessful campaign for Virginia State Senate in 2011.
New York Times reporter Jonathan Weisman tweeted that his 13-year old daughter received one text that read “Obama denies protection to babies who survive abortions. Obama is just wrong.”
The initially anonymous text messages appear to fall into an FEC loophole according to Politico, because they were sent by email addresses rather than phone numbers, which are required to identify their origin.
This is not ccAdvertising’s first brush with controversial political messaging. The company is one of the many aliases of FreeEats, a company called one of the “king[s] of the political robo-call” by MotherJones, after its launch of automated push-polls leading up to the 2006 election. The company lists Rep. Roy Blunt, McDonalds, the Alaska Republican Party, and Americans for Tax Reform as clients on its website. If you received one of these text messages, please contact the PoliticsNation production staff at PoliticsNationViewers@nbcuni.com
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