Out of the shadows
Even with all the PAC money, the DeSantis campaign has been marred by financial trouble. Extravagant spending and an overreliance on large-dollar donors—71 percent of his total fundraising has come from people donating more than $2,000—prompted the campaign to cut more than a third of its staff earlier this week. And one person who has taken a lot of the blame for DeSantis’ questionable financial footing is a largely unknown figure with undeniable experience in the shadowy GOP circles of dark money: Peck.
Peck, a widely respected Republican strategist who prefers to operate in the wings, is DeSantis’ 2024 campaign manager, and she quietly steered him to victory in 2022. But before she took the top job, she helmed a battery of low-profile conservative advocacy groups—where the funding is largely untraceable and the spending is exceedingly difficult to unravel, often by design.
Peck’s present, however, is distinctly different from her past. A presidential operation tasked with taking down the most powerful force in the Republican Party has to reckon with far more public scrutiny than Peck has dealt with previously. And the transparency demanded of federal campaigns is entirely different from the occult financials of the comparatively obscure dark money groups and consulting firms where she cut her political teeth.
Peck’s approach, and the complications she faces today, are captured in the story of one of those groups—a dark money nonprofit that Chris Christie started to support then-President Trump, but which in hindsight looks more like an incubator for a future DeSantis presidency.
Right direction, wrong turn
“Right Direction America” was created in late 2019 to fight back against Democratic attempts to impeach Trump.
“I was tired of sitting around and waiting for someone else to do it,” Christie said at the time, promising seven-figure ad buys to combat impeachment.
In retrospect, RDA had strong ties to DeSantis from the beginning. Aside from Peck and Christie, one of the key forces behind the group was veteran GOP operative Phil Cox—a trusted DeSantis adviser and top deputy for his super PAC. The group also featured Caroline Chestnut Linkul, another senior DeSantis 2022 aide and the former director of Casey DeSantis’ Office of the First Lady.
The DeSantis campaign and Peck did not respond to detailed questions for this article.
But after Trump was acquitted and Christie was gone, the group assumed what seems like its true purpose all along: a nozzle to spray anonymous cash to a broad range of conservative groups, issues, and politicians.
Dark money maze
RDA’s filings don’t appear in IRS searches, nor in any other public database that compiles those records. And the group’s website was taken down sometime after The Daily Beast reached out for comment for this article; it was archived as recently as March 21.
The Daily Beast previously obtained the group’s 2020 filing, which shows it doled out $700,000 in grants. Those funds went to two other secretive entities, both of which, like RDA, are classified as 501(c)(4) “dark money” groups—and both of which are directly tied to Peck.
When one of those groups, “Building a Better America,” emptied its coffers in 2021—the year Peck moved to Tallahassee to take over DeSantis’ 2022 campaign—the group poured almost all of its bank account into reforming a federal environmental policy of deep interest to DeSantis: a Florida mining project. BBA didn’t similarly explain the nature of any of its $2.1 million in grants on its previous year’s tax filing.
RDA—whose board also has ties to the GOP’s biggest megadonor, Dick Uihlein—took in three donations in 2020, for a total $2.12 million, the filing shows. All three were anonymous, with the largest being $2 million.
Gaetzgate
Christie dropped out of RDA after only one year. The reason is unclear, and Christie declined The Daily Beast’s request for comment.
His departure, however, came weeks before the most curious event in RDA’s curious life: a $100,000 gift in early 2021 from the campaign belonging to Rep. Matt Gaetz, for a time one of DeSantis’ closest allies. That’s double the amount of the Gaetz campaign’s second-largest contribution ever, and $22,000 more than its combined political gifts to DeSantis.
The campaign cut the $100,000 check when the congressman was on particularly shaky ground, and the Gaetz campaign’s explanation appears to defy belief, The Daily Beast previously reported. The contribution came about half a year after the Justice Department opened its investigation into whether the Florida congressman paid for sex with a 17-year-old girl, and weeks after Trump returned to civilian life at Mar-a-Lago, denying Gaetz the blanket pardon he had reportedly sought.
Waiting in the wings
A dig through RDA’s tax and FEC filings reveals a fairly wide network of similar groups, who all boast similar membership and even similar names. But the force behind them all appears to be Peck.
While the strategist rarely engages the media—who seem to have rarely engaged with her before she took over the 2022 DeSantis campaign—she took a major step into public life in September 2021, when DeSantis tapped her to run his upcoming re-election effort.
Peck has long been close with both Ron and Casey DeSantis, but her hiring was reportedly the work of yet another ghost from Right Direction’s past: Cox, who first took a shine to Peck while they worked together on former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell’s 2009 campaign.
However, Florida state filings don’t show 2022 DeSantis campaign payments to Peck personally or a number of known entities associated with her. They do, however, reveal $1.7 million going to Cox’s Ascent Media from the Republican Party of Florida, with that company clocking another roughly $207,000 directly from the DeSantis campaign.
Countdown to launch
This January, DeSantis, Peck, and Cox began ramping up his predicted presidential bid in earnest. And the money began moving, too, with hundreds of thousands of dollars once again flowing from DeSantis’ world to entities associated with Peck and Cox—including from the DeSantis state-level PAC at the center of the disputed $82 million transfer.
The contours of that fundraising effort are at the center of Campaign Legal Center’s federal complaint. The complaint, filed May 31, alleges that the PAC illegally coordinated with DeSantis to raise money in amounts exponentially higher than his campaign could have along.
Today, however, Peck’s cover has been blown. GOP insiders and megadonors have increasingly expressed frustration with the campaign’s flagging performance and runaway spending, and they’re hungry for a scalp.
According to multiple recent reports, they’ve set their sites on Peck, whose limited campaign experience has through no fault of her own made her vulnerable to those attacks.
Fittingly enough, Peck’s own compensation with the campaign is its own mystery. Federal Election Commission filings show only about $10,000 going to her on the DeSantis campaign payroll over the campaign’s first six weeks. She received just the fifth-largest single payroll payment, and her total stands at about $5,000 less than the governor’s longtime communications guru, Christina Pushaw.
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