Sixty-six days before Local Government Accountability Inc. (LGAI) filed a corporate charter saying it would not intervene in candidate campaigns as a nonprofit, the operation behind its website had already decided who it wanted voters to choose and assembled a trove of materials inside a file directory labeled “war-room-assets” according to new records obtained by the Florida Trident.
A law professor called the electoral advocacy “troubling” and said it likely violates federal law.
Hidden files on the Wyoming nonprofit’s website show a confidential March 30 strategy called for Sarasota County Commissioners Joe Neunder and Mark Smith to resign and laid out a “strategic framework” for the Aug. 18 Republican primary. Within hours, the same operation produced campaign brochures telling voters to replace Neunder and Smith with Jim DeNiro and Kristina Sargent.
The commands were blunt: “VOTE JIM DeNIRO.” “VOTE KRISTINA SARGENT.”
Other files attributed direct quotes to both DeNiro and Sargent.
Those files are the clearest evidence yet that the Facebook ads and website claiming to be a neutral nonprofit was conceived by someone as an election operation supporting DeNiro and Sargent before its Wyoming parent was incorporated.
The material surfaced in a publicly retrievable March 31 “war-room” manifest cataloguing hundreds of LGAI files, including financial records and metadata mixed with candidate files, political graphics, brochures and editorial material generated by artificial intelligence.
One of the files provided a small clue about the identity of who may be behind the Wyoming entity. “We are longtime Sarasota county residents” said the document titled “Srqcf brochure campaign v2” located in the war-room files.
The website’s source-code comments made the strategy explicit: “big red numbers,” “one-line gut punches,” an “anger hook,” incumbent attacks and candidate “solution” sections designed for visitors attracted by social media advertising.
Artificial intelligence ran through the same pipeline. Metadata tied dozens of first-party images to AI tools and the late-March creation dates, linking the internal inventory to the attack art that followed.
Metadata, often called digital fingerprints, is hidden data embedded within data that reveals information about its content and creation.
The files also show that AI warned some graphics and reports were misleading or unsupported, but those warnings were ignored and the material was published anyway.
The public-facing archive did not display that full history. Although the site described its sources page as containing the war-room files, its ordinary interface omitted the campaign brochures, candidate files, political graphics and raw workflow documents. The manifest itself remained accessible. That gap is significant.
Infographic contrasting the dual faces of LGAI | Source: Florida Trident using NotebookLM The confidential papers did more than criticize Neunder and Smith. Biographies and talking points for DeNiro and Sargent were assembled, attack lines in each candidate’s voice written and both challengers were assigned a shared seven-point “Day One” agenda. One brochure stated that both DeNiro and Sargent had committed to those expressed priorities.
Legal Issues
That raises a question the files do not answer: How did an anonymous operation know, by March 30, that both candidates had made the same detailed commitments without coordination?
The bigger problem for the mystery nonprofit organization is that its campaign efforts appear to violate federal law. The organization’s charter, filed in Wyoming on June 4, invokes section 501(c)(3) of the federal tax code, dedicates the entity to charitable, religious, educational and scientific purposes, and states that it “shall not participate in, or intervene in any political campaign” for or against a candidate.
As reported earlier by the Trident, the website was changed hours after a Trident reporter reached out to the Wyoming entity asking why it was running ads supporting candidates as a nonpartisan apolitical nonprofit.
The public website now says something different. It calls LGAI a 501(c)(4) social-welfare organization, labels Sarasota County Facts a “paid political advertisement,” reserves the right to endorse candidates and communicate with campaigns, and presents DeNiro and Sargent as the “way out.”
A 501(c)(3) organization “cannot explicitly or implicitly endorse or support a campaign or candidate,” says Lloyd Mayer, Professor of Law at Notre Dame Law School. “That’s a problem because their articles of incorporation control their legal status.”
“The penalty for doing so is loss of tax-exempt status,” Mayer said.
To be clear, the recovered material contains no email, message or shared-drive record showing that either campaign supplied or approved the language. It also does not rule out contact between the campaigns and the nonprofit. The origin of the commitments from the candidates in the war-room files remains unexplained.
DeNiro previously said he had “no clue” who was behind the anonymous Wyoming entity and denied knowledge of it, despite its steady support for his candidacy.
Calls and texts to Kristina Sargent about her knowledge of the Wyoming operation were not returned.
Another legal issue for LGAI is its failure to register as a political committee. No registration exists anywhere in Florida or Sarasota for LGAI as a political committee according to a public records search by the Trident.
“Entities have to register as a Florida PAC (Political Action Committee) if they spend over $500 on express advocacy in a Florida election. This would apply no matter where the entity is incorporated,” said Professor Ciara Torres-Spellicsy, at Stetson Law.
According to the Meta Facebook Library, LGAI and another associated Wyoming group have spent at least $20,000 running more than 100 ads in the campaign since early July.
One of the primary purposes of registration is that it allows the public to see who is the chair of the committee, where its funding is coming from, and what it’s spending money on to influence an election.
But the chronology is now clear. By March 30, someone had built the case, chosen the challengers, written their lines, declared their commitments, prepared their brochures and started generating the imagery.
LGAI would not formally exist for another 66 days.
But the war room did.
By the time LGAI finally filed its charter in early June, it promised not to intervene in the election its war room had already targeted.
About the Author: Michael Barfield focuses on the enforcement of open government laws. He serves as an investigative reporter for the Florida Trident and Director of Public Access at the Florida Center for Government Accountability. He regularly assists journalists across the country with collecting information and publishing news reports obtained from public records and other sources.
The Florida Trident is an investigative news outlet focusing on government accountability and transparency across Florida. The Trident was created and first published in 2022 by non-profit investigative, a non-profit organization that facilitates local investigative reporting across the state.
