Dark Money Group Runs Fake Local News Sites

A dark money group tied to Senate Republican leadership is running at least six websites built to pass as independent local news outlets in states with competitive Senate races, backdating articles with a tool marketed for generating "fake and dummy content" and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to push them into voters' Facebook feeds — three months before the November 3 midterms.

The network was uncovered by Judd Legum at Popular Information, which identified the sites through disclosures attached to Meta advertisements. The six: Alaska Navigator, Maine Policy Updates, Ohio Pulse, Iowa Voice, Peach State Post, and New Hampshire Daily. All are owned and operated by One Nation, the 501(c)(4) nonprofit that functions as the issue advocacy arm of the Senate Leadership Fund, the super PAC of Senate Republicans. Both organizations are run by Steven Law, a former chief of staff to Mitch McConnell, out of the same Washington address.

Rhode Island is not on the list. Senator Jack Reed's re-election contest is not competitive, and no state that borders Narragansett Bay has drawn One Nation's attention this cycle. Maine and New Hampshire have.

That distinction is worth holding onto, because the operation is not a low-budget experiment. Collectively, One Nation has spent between $198,900 and $274,640 promoting the sites on Meta platforms, with most of the spending beginning in June. It has also directly contributed more than $70 million to the Senate Leadership Fund this political cycle. As a 501(c)(4), One Nation is not required to disclose its donors — meaning the public has no way of knowing who is paying for websites designed to look like their hometown paper.

The construction of the sites is where the intent shows. Alaska Navigator's domain was registered on March 20 of this year. The site carries articles dated back to January. The backdating was accomplished with FakerPress, a tool its own developers describe as "a clean way to generate fake and dummy content." Meta ads for the site disclose that One Nation paid for them; they do not disclose that One Nation owns the outlet whose articles they promote. That admission appears only in small, faint type at the bottom of the website itself.

The content matches the packaging. An Alaska Navigator piece promoted with an ad announcing a "New Bill to Crack Down on Fentanyl Trafficking, Supported By Dan Sullivan" rests entirely on Sullivan's March 2025 vote for the HALT Fentanyl Act — legislation he did not sponsor and was not among the 16 original co-sponsors of, signing on roughly a week before the Senate passed it. Iowa Voice ran a story headlined "Iowa Farmers Say Potential 'Death Tax' Threatens Family Succession Plans," praising Republican candidate Ashley Hinton for co-sponsoring the Death Tax Repeal Act. It quotes no farmers, and omits that the estate tax touches 0.3% of farms. A July 30 Peach State Post article suggesting Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff opposes increasing the Child Tax Credit ran while a One Nation television ad making the same attack blanketed the state.

Peach State Post also published the full text of a story from Atlanta television station 11Alive, on former city officials denied clemency, with nothing indicating the content was not its own reporting.

One Nation did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

None of this is illegal on its face, and no federal or state agency has announced an inquiry. That is the point. The Brennan Center for Justice estimates groups concealing their donors poured more than $1.9 billion into the 2024 federal election cycle, nearly double the previous record of $1 billion set in 2020, and the trajectory has not bent since. One Nation's own history is the model: tax filings show it raised more than $172 million in 2020 from anonymous contributors, including one donor who gave $33 million and another who gave $13.5 million, and passed $77.5 million of it to the Senate Leadership Fund.

Robert Maguire, research director at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, has described the group as "a political entity masquerading as a nonprofit" that "only exists to help Republicans in the Senate, it's not a social welfare organization."

Rhode Island's delegation has spent years on the other end of this argument. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse has made donor disclosure a signature issue, reintroducing an updated DISCLOSE Act with Representative Chris Pappas in March. The bill would require disclosure of donors giving $10,000 or more, extend "stand by your ad" requirements to online advertising, and treat payments to social media influencers as political spending. When the DISCLOSE Act last reached a Senate floor vote in September 2022, it failed on party lines — every Democrat for, every Republican against.

Until that changes, the disclosure a Rhode Island voter gets is the disclosure One Nation chooses to print: faint gray type, at the bottom of a page, below the fold.