Anatomy of a smear campaign, Part 1: Who framed Brandon Whipple?
Note: This is Part 1 of a three-part Wichita Eagle series, “Anatomy of a Smear Campaign.”
The young women in an election attack ad targeting Brandon Whipple were filmed in darkened silhouette to hide their identities as they read from a script falsely accusing the mayoral candidate of sexual harassment.
But it was the men behind the scenes who went to extraordinary lengths to hide their identities and involvement in the fake ad that helped propel Whipple to Wichita mayor and prompted former Mayor Jeff Longwell to announce his retirement from politics.
The tangled interstate plot involved some of the best-known names in Wichita-area government.
Sedgwick County Commissioner Michael O’Donnell and Wichita City Council member James Clendenin, who originally denied involvement, now admit in interviews with The Eagle that they raised $10,000 that was ultimately used to create and promote the phony campaign video.
To do that, they tapped their contacts in the real estate and construction industries, who were and are doing business with the county and city governments.
Donations they gathered went to a nonprofit sports charity run by state Rep. Michael Capps, R-Wichita, according to court records and donors.
A shell company was created in New Mexico to manage and promote the production by video entrepreneur Matthew Colborn, 22, whom Whipple is suing for defamation.
The situation has opened a rare window into Wichita politics, exposing a network of local officials and well-connected business interests working together far from the public eye to influence voters.
In this case, they tried to create an ad that would be a game-changer for Longwell, who, as Clendenin put it, was “getting his rear kicked” in the election after an Eagle investigation uncovered his handling of the city’s water treatment plant contract.
But it backfired badly.
Voters were repelled by the sensationalistic allegations that were almost instantly proven false and the manipulation of a young actress who says she was tricked into appearing in the ad under the pretense that it would be a public-service announcement denouncing domestic violence.
O’Donnell, Clendenin raised $10K
O’Donnell and Clendenin said they raised $10,000 with the understanding that it would be used for billboards, but the billboard campaign never materialized and the money went to the attack video instead.
“I eventually found it was used for the video when the video came out,” Clendenin said.
Neither official would say who asked them to raise the money.
Nor would either disclose a complete list of donors.
Both said they were not involved in the planning and execution of the video.
O’Donnell, a former Wichita City Council member and state senator, said he’s had good returns on billboards in his own campaigns and thought that’s what Longwell needed to catch up to Whipple.
He said he expected the billboards would be a mix of content, with some focused on Longwell’s accomplishments and others criticizing Whipple, based on a Wichita State University Sunflower article. That story had criticized Whipple’s use of collegiate interns as designated drivers to legislative receptions while he served in the state House of Representatives.
Of the billboard campaign, Clendenin said, “I didn’t have an expectation of what the content would be, whether it would be anti-Whipple or pro-Longwell.”
The video came out about three weeks before the Nov. 5 election and featured paid actresses, shown in darkened silhouette, posing as Capitol interns.
They read a script of sexual harassment accusations and admonished voters to “Stop Brandon Whipple.”
The video was released and promoted on Facebook and YouTube under the auspices of “Protect Wichita’s Girls LLC,” a New Mexico shell company set up to take advantage of that state’s laws masking the owners of businesses.
The veracity of the video unraveled almost immediately.
The accusations were lifted from a story that had appeared in the Kansas City Star and Wichita Eagle in 2017. Those allegations had been made against Republican senators, not Whipple, who was a Democratic state representative.
The nasty allegations and shadowy origins of the ad prompted Whipple to file a lawsuit to find out who was behind it.
“Frankly, I think this lawsuit is a distraction,” Clendenin said. “I think the sooner the lawsuit is over with, and there’s some sort of resolution, the better.”
O’Donnell and Clendenin said their fundraising efforts shouldn’t be held against them, and that they’re both interested in repairing their relationships with Whipple.
Clendenin, a two-term council member who has been involved in politics for the past 10 years, said the incident has taught him a lesson about campaigning.
“If you’re going to support a candidate through a third party, you know, make sure you know where the money’s going to go,” he said. “If I ever support a campaign again, I don’t believe that I would support a third-party campaign. I think I would (contribute) support directly to the candidate.”
Capps connections
One name that surfaces repeatedly in the controversy is Michael Capps, a Republican state representative in a district that straddles Sedgwick and Butler counties and includes parts of north Wichita, Bel Aire and the city of Benton.
Capps lives in the same east Wichita house as Colborn, the video producer, according to recent election filings, and he shares an office at 300 S. Broadway with Colborn and Clendenin.
Protect Wichita’s Girls LLC used the same Wyoming-based anonymous incorporation service and mail drop as a Capps company, Krivacy LLC. Krivacy also purchased the web domain protectwichitagirls.com the day the video was released.
Clendenin is partnered with Capps in at least two businesses: VR Business Brokers of the Heartland, which sells businesses, and the No Bake Cafe, a snack shop that sells raw cookie dough.
Capps says he wasn’t involved with making the video.
After Sedgwick County Republican Party officers in November unanimously called for Capps’ resignation from the Legislature over the ad, Capps accused party Chairman Dalton Glasscock of masterminding the video project.
Glasscock, also a campaign aide to Longwell at the time, testified he’d heard rumors of a video that could upend the election, but said in a sworn deposition that he had no part in making or promoting it.
Glasscock testified he had worked with Colborn to try to make a Republican Party-funded, pro-Longwell ad during the campaign, but the first he saw of the anti-Whipple video was when O’Donnell showed it to him about the time it went public.
Text messages between Glasscock and O’Donnell appear to substantiate claims that Glasscock was in the dark about the operation. Clendenin, while he declined to say who asked him to raise money, said it was not Glasscock.
“I don’t have any knowledge, personally, of Dalton’s involvement,” Clendenin told The Eagle.
Video producer changing stories
One person who knows most or all of what happened is Colborn, but he keeps changing his story about who did what.
In December, Colborn admitted in a court affidavit to producing the video, but didn’t reveal who paid for it or helped him.
In March, Colborn said that County Commissioner O’Donnell was the driving force behind the video attack, a court document says.
Colborn told lawyers in the case that O’Donnell ran the operation and wrote the script containing the false allegations, according to a court filing by Whipple’s lawyer Randy Rathbun, a former U.S. attorney for Kansas.
Rathbun said in the filing that Colborn made that statement in a March 13 meeting with him, his paralegal and Colborn’s former lawyer, Ross Hollander. Although the meeting was informal and designed to facilitate possible settlement talks, Colborn made the statement under oath. O’Donnell denies that he had anything to do with production of the video.
Concerns about possible bribery also surfaced about that time.
Hollander had told Rathbun before the meeting that Colborn was worried because someone was “attempting to bribe him to change his testimony in the case to protect unnamed third parties,” Rathbun wrote.
During the meeting, “Colborn swore to tell the truth and disclosed the following: unnamed third parties were offering ‘gifts’ to get him to shade his testimony,” Rathbun wrote.
Then in April, in an affidavit filed in the lawsuit after he fired his attorney, Colborn changed his story to conform with the version of events Capps had previously described.
Colborn said Glasscock, not O’Donnell, masterminded the video project and provided the talking points. Also in April, he stated in a court filing that it was Glasscock who was trying to sway his testimony.
Glasscock denies having had anything to do with the video and says he never tried to bribe Colborn.
Colborn’s statements also have varied on who set up the dummy corporation to shield the donors and politicians involved with the video from public scrutiny.
In December, in his original answer to Whipple’s lawsuit, Colborn said he had no knowledge of the New Mexico shell company.
In May, Colborn says in an amended answer that he created and ran it himself.
Colborn attributes his reversal of stories to a rough relationship with his former lawyer. He is now representing himself after firing his lawyer for what he called in a court document “poor representation.”
“Previous counsel was pushing me to say things I neither agreed with or was comfortable with to make the entire thing go away,” Colborn said in an e-mail response to Eagle questions. “I am done being attacked by Mayor Whipple and his cronies. I am clearing my reputation and making sure the public knows the truth about Brandon Whipple’s past misdeeds.”
Colborn has no formal legal training.
“Many nights in front of Google and talking to Alexa and Siri have helped me understand some of the legal system,” he said in his e-mail.
Political payments from campaign accounts
Colborn has received payments from both Capps’ and Clendenin’s campaign accounts, according to expenditure reports.
He has received monthly payments from Capps’ campaign account throughout the controversy.
Capps made his first $500 payment to Colborn on Oct. 2, 2019, two weeks before the video appeared online. He has since been asked by the Kansas Governmental Ethics Commission to explain those payments, records show.
In a written response to the ethics commission, which investigates campaign finance violations, Capps disclosed that Colborn is his campaign manager and is paid a monthly $500 retainer, an arrangement that is ongoing.
Clendenin paid Colborn Media $1,500 out of his campaign account for “consulting services” in 2019, campaign finance reports show. Clendenin said he paid Colborn to help him with his messaging strategy surrounding Wichita’s new $75 million baseball stadium and the closure and redevelopment plan for Clapp Golf Course.
The account was otherwise dormant because Clendenin’s last race was in 2017 and he can’t run for council again because of term limits.
Wichita mayor: ‘dealing with bullies’
Although the lawsuit was proceeding slowly, Mayor Whipple said James Clendenin, now his colleague on the City Council, recently warned him to drop the lawsuit, “or else.”
Whipple said Clendenin told him that “other people involved wanted to go on the offensive, . . . pretty much if I didn’t stop the case, they would attack my character. He insinuated it was (Rep.) Michael Capps and people associated with him.”
Shortly after that conversation, Colborn started filing court papers with new allegations of sexual harassment against Whipple that were “absolutely in line with what James was saying,” Whipple said.
Whipple said O’Donnell also urged him to drop the lawsuit, in a conversation outside the county courthouse after a joint city-county coronavirus briefing in late March, telling him, “I can’t control Capps.”
In a court affidavit filed May 11, Whipple said that the release of the Protect Wichita Girls video led to a series of threats.
“Defendant Colborn gave my personal phone number out in the hit piece,” Whipple said. “Colborn achieved his goal — people called me and attacked me. I received a death threat. I felt like I had to move the family out of our home because of the calls. My wife and I spent time in the basement of our home with our children to be protected by the concrete foundation.”
Whipple said he’s letting his lawyer, Rathbun, handle the legal process while he’s focused on the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I think I’m just dealing with bullies, and I don’t have time for that,” he told The Eagle.
“The people responsible for this have been caught in a lie,” he said. “They are so deep in this hole that they’re trying to lie their way out of it and continue to try to intimidate me.”
Whipple said he has no intention of dropping the lawsuit.
“The stuff that’s come out so far — we’re just scratching the surface,” Whipple said. “There’s a lot of corruption yet to be exposed.”
Coming up in Part 2: “This is sleaze with a capital S.”
This story was originally published July 5, 2020 at 5:01 AM.
