New Hampshire voters came home last night to find an alarming warning in their mailboxes. Voting for Democrat Maggie Hassan in her Senate race against incumbent Sen. Kelly Ayotte, they were told, would essentially mean voting for terrorists to target their children. The large glossy mailer warns on the front that radical Islamic terrorists are searching for their next city to target:
The crosshairs motif continues on the inside, which bashes Hassan for supporting the Iran nuclear deal and emphasizes—over a silhouette of a woman and a young girl walking hand in hand—that terrorists are “searching for soft targets…”:
The back of the mailer shows yet another crosshairs over an American flag outside a home, paired with a warning that terrorists are an imminent threat and support for Hassan could put “our families at risk”:
Where did the money come from to create the provocative mailer? We’ll probably never know. According to the fine print at the bottom, the mailer was sent by One Nation, a politically active 501(c)(4) nonprofit, also known as a dark money group. According to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, One Nation was taken over earlier this year by operatives from American Crossroads, Karl Rove’s outside money operation.
Federal Election Commission records show that One Nation paid about $44,000 for the mailer, but as a nonprofit organization, One Nation will never have to disclose who donated the money to fund the mailer. It’s not clear whether One Nation has sent similar mailings in other states, though FEC records show the group is spending money on mailers in Nevada, Indiana, and North Carolina.
