Oklahoma’s former Secretary of Public Safety and his business partner were the main funders of a political action committee that bought attack ads to help unseat a state lawmaker who was next in line to lead the Oklahoma Senate.   

The state political action committee Advance Right is part of a tangled web of shadowy political groups that try to hide the identity of donors and influence elections in Oklahoma. The Frontier used interviews, corporate records and campaign spending reports to trace the ties between them. 

Advance Right campaigned to unseat Sen. Greg McCortney, R-Ada. McCortney was set to become the next Senate President Pro Tempore before losing in the June Republican primary to challenger Jonathan Wingard. The group spent $91,826 on mailers, text messages, yard signs and cable television ads campaigning against McCortney.

Advance Right purchased a television ad claiming McCortney had a “liberal” voting record, donors tied to President Joe Biden and was in favor of “drag queen parades, defunding police threats,” and “helping illegals get a license.” McCortney hit back in a Facebook post and an ad of his own, saying “a life-long government bureaucrat and his dark money buddies in Edmond” were behind the attacks. 

Wingard won the primary with 51% of the vote and will become the next senator for District 13 because there were no other candidates in the race. 

Before the vote, Chip Keating, son of former Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating and former Secretary of Public Safety for Stitt, and real estate developer Michael Mallick funneled $100,000 in donations to Advance Right through a Texas-based company they own, records show. 

In a telephone interview with The Frontier, Keating confirmed that he and Mallick were the primary funding source for Advance Right’s attack on McCortney. 

Keating targeted McCortney with attack ads after the senator suggested putting a second round of funding for a planned law enforcement training center in Lincoln County on hold during the Legislature’s public budget negotiations this year

Keating is chairman of the nonprofit Oklahoma State Troopers Foundation and a former Highway Patrol officer. He had been working for about 15 years to bring the need for a new state law enforcement training center to the attention of public officials, and viewed McCortney’s suggestion to halt spending and possibly claw back earlier funding as a threat.

“To me, he’s trying to defund the police,” Keating said. “The work we do as citizens is to benefit the men and women in blue and our first responders. And Senator McCortney was going to be a direct threat to that, and so we wanted to get involved.”

In a phone interview with The Frontier, McCortney said he had heard rumors that Keating was funding the ads.

McCortney said he has never met Keating. 

“I don’t know if he’s ever even driven a car through Senate District 13 — to decide to dump a bunch of his money to take out a senator … it’s a pretty sad state of affairs in politics,” McCortney said. “It wasn’t a campaign between two people for Senate District 13. It was a guy from Senate District 13 being attacked by a rich guy from Nichols Hills.”

Keating said he funded Advance Right for the attacks so he could decide what the ads against McCortney would say. This was one reason a governor’s task force earlier this year recommended removing caps on political contributions to candidates and easing other campaign spending rules.  

“You can’t control the messaging when you give a direct donation to the campaign, so when you’re doing it this way, I mean, we were the funders of this PAC, so we got to control the message,” Keating said.

It can be a challenge for voters to find out who is behind independent political groups like Advance Right. The Frontier found ties between Advance Right and other political groups that didn’t report spending, donors, or used only partial names or initials to identify their organizers.

Advance Right’s only other donor was Liberty Action Fund Inc., a nonprofit dark money group incorporated in Delaware that is not legally required to disclose its donors.

The Frontier was able to trace Advance Right and Liberty Action Fund to the Tulsa-based political consulting firm Tomahawk Strategies through corporate records, interviews and campaign finance reports. Firm co-founder John Fritz declined to answer questions.

Liberty Action Fund also gave to another political action committee called Oklahomans for a Positive Change PAC. The PAC sent out mailers during this year’s Tulsa County Commissioner Democratic primary, records show. 

Oklahomans for a Positive Change spent at least $18,336 in support of candidates Maria Barnes and Sarah Gray and opposing candidate Jim Rea. The group lists itself as a political action committee, but was not registered with either the Oklahoma Ethics Commission or the Federal Election Commission and did not file organizational paperwork with the Tulsa County Election Board, which is tasked with collecting independent expenditure reports in county-level races.

The group identified itself with only a long acronym on political ads — OKFAPCPAC — and only provided the first initials and last names of its officers on campaign filings.  

Luke Paulson is another name that shows up in Advance Right campaign reporting records. He is the treasurer for the separate, federally-registered PAC named Advance Right Super PAC, which is the state-registered Advance Right PAC’s sole donor. Paulson told The Frontier that he also helped organize Liberty Action Fund.

Records show Liberty Action Fund was established in 2022 in Delaware, a state with notoriously opaque corporate registration laws. 

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Former Muskogee mayor and attorney John Tyler Hammons used only the initials “JTH” on Liberty Action Fund’s corporate filings in Oklahoma. Paulson, who is listed as the nonprofit’s secretary, only used the initials “LJP.”

Hammons was elected as mayor at age 19 in 2008 but now serves as city attorney for Tahlequah and Checotah. He has also been an attorney for Tomahawk Strategies since at least 2020, records show. Hammons confirmed to The Frontier that he created Liberty Action Fund, but said he stepped away shortly after it was formed and did not know who was running it now.

Asked who was running the group when he created it, Hammons said he could not recall.

“G. Harjo” is listed as the chairman and treasurer of the state-registered Advance Right PAC. The name also shows up as an in-kind donor together with Liberty Action Fund for Oklahomans for a Positive Change. G. Harjo is also listed as the chairperson and treasurer of “Fed Up Conservative Families PAC,” or FUCFPAC, which sent out mailers opposing Republican Tulsa City Council candidate Phil Lakin this election cycle. In one mailer, FUCFPAC recycled the same image of a drag queen that Advance Right used in its television ad against McCortney.  

Five days before the election, FUCFPAC still hadn’t reported what it had spent on the mailers. State ethics rules require independent groups to report any spending over $5,000 by the next business day if occurs within two weeks of an election.