The Dark Money Trail
Echols invoked dark money. So I followed the trail and this is what I found:
On Sunday, April 26, State Rep. Michael Echols posted to Facebook that “as we head to the runoff the attacks are just going to ramp up. There will be even more dark money coming from Wall Street and Washington DC trying to block me from getting to Congress.”
He didn’t name names. He didn’t have to. As a journalist who has reported on Echols’s network recently, I took the cue and went looking for the dark money he was talking about.
The trail did not lead to Wall Street. It did not lead to Washington. And surprise, it didn’t lead to me. It led, in part, back to him.
**What is actually attacking Echols**
The outside group running ads against Echols is fronted by Scott Wilfong, a Baton Rouge-based Republican operative. Wilfong told NOLA.com last week that his group is hitting Echols over legislation and votes that “benefit his commercial construction business.” Wilfong declined to identify his donors. NOLA described the operation plainly: a “dark money” group that does not have to disclose them.
From what I could find, the dark money attacking Echols is real. It is also Louisiana-based, run by a longtime Louisiana operative, and focused on a Louisiana question: whether his commercial construction business has benefited from his legislative work. None of that is Wall Street. None of it is Washington. And again, not me.
Where the dark money on his side of the ledger sits-
Echols for Congress, the federal committee Echols registered on February 10, is run by RightSide Compliance, a national political compliance firm based in Austin and Bethesda. The original treasurer was the firm’s president, Cabell Hobbs. On April 28, the committee filed an amended Form 1 replacing Hobbs with another RightSide treasurer, John Plishka. The committee email address, compliance@rightsidecompliance.com, stayed the same.
This same compliance ecosystem has notable other clients. Plishka is also the current treasurer of Ken Paxton for Senate, which has received at least three Federal Election Commission letters since last summer questioning the legality of contributions in the hundreds of thousands of dollars across the inquiries.
More directly relevant to the dark money question: Hobbs’s separate firm, the Compliance Consulting Company of Virginia, was the registered incorporator of People Over Party, a 501(c)(4) that according to reporting by Floodlight News spent money helping Cornel West gain ballot access in several states in 2024. Plishka was listed as a director. Asked about it by Floodlight, Plishka said, “I am simply the CFO. I do the books. That’s all,” and added that he was under a non-disclosure agreement.
People Over Party is, by definition, a dark money operation. Its donors are not publicly disclosed. Its purpose, as documented in the Floodlight reporting, was to assist a third-party presidential candidate in ways that benefited Republicans.
**What this means**
Echols told his Facebook followers the attacks on him are coming from Wall Street and Washington. The actual outside money attacking him is coming from a Republican operative in Baton Rouge seemingly concerned about his policy for personal profit (my opinion based on my personal research). Meanwhile, the federal compliance infrastructure he chose for his own congressional bid runs through people who have, in a separate documented case, helped operate the kind of dark money Echols claims to be a victim of.
Voters in the 5th District deserve to know who is actually moving the money in this race. They also deserve to know the difference between an opposing operative running disclosed-by-name attack ads on a substantive policy question, and an undisclosed-donor 501(c)(4) operating through national compliance firms.
As readers of this publication know, Rep. Echols has publicly stated he will not respond to my questions. My line remains open if that changes.
