After news outlets reported that a Republican campaign group had set up fake websites for Democratic congressional candidates, the group has fixed the sites to clarify that money donated through them will go to the GOP.
As TPM and other outlets reported, some donors said that they had been duped by the websites, believing they were giving money to the Democratic candidates instead of the National Republican Congressional Campaign, which is working to defeat them.
The sites have innocuous URL’s — johnbarrow2014.com, for example — and only a close read of the content would reveal that they are critical, not supportive, of the candidate.
But now the donation button on some of the sites re-directs to a page that clearly identifies the NRCC as the recipient of any contributions, CNN reported.
“We recently updated our contribution pages, as we frequently do, to highlight our efforts to defeat House Democrats in 2014 and prevent Nancy Pelosi from ever being Speaker of the House again,” a NRCC spokesperson said.
The home pages of the fake sites remain unchanged, according to CNN.
