Political consultant faces charges over text messages targeting Polk School Board member

A campaign consultant for an opponent of Polk County School Board member Lisa Miller has been charged with sending anonymous text messages about her during last year’s election campaign.

The State Attorney’s Office for the 10th Judicial Circuit filed charges Friday against James Earl Dunn Jr., a Texas resident who consulted on the campaign of Jill Sessions. Dunn, 52, is charged with seven counts of violation of text message disclosure requirements, a first-degree misdemeanor with a maximum penalty of one year in prison.

Polk County voters received anonymous text messages in June falsely alleging that Miller and her husband, Bob Miller, were under criminal investigation. Miller, a Lakeland resident, was then involved in a three-way campaign for the School Board’s District 7 with Sessions and Dell Quary.

The text messages did not identify the sender, as required for campaign messages by state election laws.

In a court filing, the State Attorney’s Office charged that Dunn sent the text messages between June 20 and July 1.

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Miller, seeking a second term, finished first in the August election but failed to gain a majority. Sessions finished second, forcing a runoff election that took place in November.

Miller prevailed in the runoff, winning by a margin of 11.2 percentage points.

A complaint affidavit filed Friday says the State Attorney’s Office began an investigation July 1 based upon a complaint from Miller. The report says the text messages came from five phone numbers, three with the area code for Polk County and two from the 786 area code, which includes Miami-Dade County.

Miller told investigators she immediately suspected Dunn, as she told reporters last summer.

Details of the investigation

The affidavit offers these details:

The investigator found a copy of an email from Terry Clark, a candidate for the School Board in a different district, saying that Dunn had sent more than 20,000 text messages “all over the county.” Campaign records show that both Clark and Sessions made campaign expenditures of $7,500 to Dunn, and Clark referred to Dunn as his campaign manager.

The investigator interviewed Clark at his home on July 11. Clark denied involvement in sending the text messages attacking Miller and said he didn’t know who had sent them.

The investigator also interviewed Sessions, who said Dunn served as a “political strategist” for her campaign. She said that Dunn told her he planned to use text messaging as part of his strategy to help her campaign.

Sessions said Dunn told her he had sent text messages for her campaign but said she did not approve them and did not know of the content. When shown one of the text messages targeting Miller, Sessions said Dunn had told her that “he had somebody send it.”

Sessions said that after seeing the texts, she confronted Dunn and told him she didn’t want him to send any messages without her approval.

The State Attorney’s Office received a response in August to a subpoena from uCampaign, a company that provides applications for the campaigns of Republican candidates. The subpoena involved the three numbers with 863 area codes used to send the text messages.

The subpoena found that three payments for the sending of the texts had been made using an email address that contained Dunn’s name. An investigator determined that the credit card used to pay for the services was issued to Dunn through a Texas credit union. The material also listed Dunn’s cell phone number.

The investigator reviewed a document from uCampaign showing that the text messages matched ones received by Polk County voters describing Miller as an “extremist” candidate. The phone numbers with the 786 area code corresponded to Kayla Hensley and Grant Kiley, identified as founders of KAG Strategies, a political consultant company based in Houston.

Documents obtained by subpoena showed that a credit card linked to Hensley and Kiley was used to pay for the sending of text messages through Project Broadcast.

In January, the investigator called Kiley and left a voicemail. He reached Hensley by phone, and she said she would speak to a lawyer. Neither had called the investigator back as of the filing of the affidavit.

Circuit Judge Keith Spoto authorized a warrant to search for emails exchanged between Dunn’s email address and addresses used by Hensley and Kiley. The investigator found an email Dunn sent to Clark outlining his strategy for reaching voters and said that he had “2 folks working on that.”

In December, the investigator contacted Dunn by phone. Dunn said he wanted to talk to a lawyer and that either he or the lawyer would get back in touch. As of March, the investigator had not heard from either of them.

While Hensley’s and Kiley’s names were associated with the Project Broadcast account, the investigator wrote that he had “probable cause to believe that James Dunn orchestrated the sending of these illegal messages.”

'I have no comment'

Reached by phone Friday, Dunn said, “I have no comment.”

Dunn has a felony history in his home state of Texas. He pleaded guilty in 2008 to submitting fraudulent claims against the federal government. Dunn, then owner and operator of Rehab Specialist Inc., received contracts from the Texas Department of Assistive and Rehabilitative Services to provide vocational rehabilitation training to people with mental and physical disabilities, according to a news release from the U.S. Department of Justice.

The Department of Education awarded Dunn’s company more than $300,000, but the company did not provide the services, the release said. Dunn was sentenced to 33 months in prison.

Clark reportedly said in a text message to supporters that Dunn was also helping the campaign of Rick Nolte, who unseated School Board member Sarah Fortney. Nolte did not report any payments to Dunn in campaign reports.

The Polk County Republican Party endorsed and promoted Sessions, Clark, Nolte and another candidate, Justin Sharpless, in the nonpartisan School Board races. County Citizens Defending Freedom, a conservative political group based in Mulberry, hosted Dunn for a podcast interview early in the campaigns, during which he bragged about having a 25-0 record in Texas school board races for “Judeo-Christian Republicans.”

“It is unfortunate that the CCDF chose to bring a criminal here so my opponent could hire him to use illegal and damaging tactics to try and tarnish my reputation and the reputation of my husband with lies and slander,” Miller said in an emailed statement. “Polk County voters showed up for a record victory because they recognized campaigns should be about the commitment to servant leadership, not outside interest groups raising dark PAC money. Hopefully, this sends a message that the powers of justice are serious about protecting everyone and protecting the integrity of the democratic process in this county and state."

Steve Maxwell, CEO of the group, said that he met Dunn in Texas and introduced him to local candidates but that CCDF was not involved in any School Board campaigns. Maxwell said that Miller called him last year after the text message were sent, and he promptly began looking into the matter. He said he spent $10,000 of his own money on the effort and shared the results with the State Attorney’s Office.

Maxwell said both he and CCDF’s attorney asked Dunn about the text messages, and in both cases he denied any involvement.

“I can understand. Lisa maybe blaming us because we were the conduit that he got here,” Maxwell said. “But we had nothing to do with anything that he’s done, and I’m as upset with him as anybody.”

Sessions did not immediately reply to a voicemail left early Friday afternoon.

Gary White can be reached at gary.white@theledger.com or 863-802-7518. Follow on Twitter @garywhite13.

This article originally appeared on The Ledger: Political consultant charged over texts in 2022 Polk School Board race