Pressure cooker
At the time, Santos was under immense pressure. His lies and troubled campaign finances were daily headlines, and multiple law enforcement agencies had already launched investigations into both him and his campaign. The pressure prompted his longtime campaign treasurer, Nancy Marks, to resign just before new reports were due, and her supposed replacement—professional Republican political treasurer Tom Datwyler—had allegedly just rejected the opportunity to file those dubious records under federal scrutiny.
Under the gun to file a batch of fundraising reports, the embattled New York congressman pulled a rabbit out of his hat. Within days, he found someone to process his year-end fundraising and spending and get it in under the Jan. 31 deadline, signing off—under penalty of law—that the reports were accurate.
But that person—Andrew Olson—was a ghost. Given the available information, watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington took the unprecedented step of filing a Federal Election Commission complaint alleging that Olson, like so much of Santos’ life, might be a fugazi.
The Olson twins
The Daily Beast can now report that Andrew Olson is, in fact, a real human being. But he’s fake in another respect; he’s not actually a treasurer.
This is the wild story of how Olson went from an account manager at a Minneapolis power tool retailer to simultaneously gracing some of the most notorious and legally dicey campaign finance ledgers in the country unscathed.
That is, nearly unscathed.
In reality—according to internal campaign communications, legal experts, state and federal filings, and multiple people familiar with the events—Andrew Olson appears to have simply been a front for the real accountant, afavor that Olson has actually performed multiple times before to help out a close friend. That friend also happens to be one of the most in-demand professional accountants in GOP politics: Datwyler, the same person who claimed to have turned Santos down.
Santos confirms
The Daily Beast reached out to Olson and Datwyler with detailed questions, but didn’t receive a reply. In a brief phone call, Olson said he likely wouldn’t respond to questions. Lawyers for Marks and Santos both refused comment.
Santos himself, however, confirmed the general arrangement. Speaking with The Daily Beast on Tuesday, the truth-challenged legislator asserted that Datwyler’s public repudiation of his campaign position was all a show—and that Datwyler had offered Olson as a stand-in.
“He then turns around and says, ‘No, one of my associates is going to be the treasurer, but we all work together and we’ll all take care of it,’” Santos said. “And that’s how Andrew Olson came about.”
Santos said he never spoke with Olson, and only ever exchanged a single email with him. Instead, he insisted he “dealt 100 percent” with Datwyler and genuinely believed the substitute treasurer was a partner in the money manager’s firm.
A-OK
But Olson was not a “partner” at Datwyler’s firm, 9Seven consulting. The email contact that Olson provided to Santos’ team, according to correspondence reviewed by The Daily Beast and people with knowledge of the events, was not a 9Seven email address. It was the same email Olson listed when Datwyler had swapped him in as treasurer for state-level PACs, with a domain suggesting Olson worked for a firm called “OK Consulting Group.”
Instead, Olson’s LinkedIn profile—and his cell phone caller ID—show that he’s an account manager for a power tool manufacturer. He’s also not 59, as his apolson1964 Gmail address suggests, and his middle name doesn’t start with a P.
Olson is 35 years old. He lives with his wife in western Wisconsin. Before that, he was a sales representative for an industrial plastics supplier and a marketer for the Oklahoma City Dodgers, a triple-A minor league baseball team. And his main qualification for the job appears to be his friendship with Datwyler, who he’s known since at least high school and lives nearby.
Spy vs. spy
It all came out in the wash this weekend, with a new Santos campaign filing that disclosed some bizarre payments to a prominent Republican political attorney. But those legal fees also shed some light on the identity of his secret campaign accountant.
First, the lawyer Santos paid is not some neophyte outsider; he’s a well-known GOP attorney and political operative named Charlie Spies, the Republican National Lawyers Association 2023 Lawyer of The Year.
While Spies doesn’t appear by name on Santos’ campaign expenses, his firm—Dickinson Wright—does. The Santos campaign previously paid Dickinson Wright relatively small monthly retainers for legal and compliance consulting. Between September 2021 and December 2022, the firm took in about $40,000 from the Santos campaign, FEC records show. After The New York Times first exposed Santos as a serial liar to a national audience last December, the Dickinson Wright payments stopped showing up in campaign expenses.
But Spies apparently kept working for the campaign without getting paid. A Jan. 17 email shows Spies communicating on behalf of the campaign, quarterbacking the transition to Datwyler. In May, The Washington Post reported that Dickinson Wright—which had been representing Santos in connection with FEC and congressional inquiries—had dropped him as a client.
Owe you one
On Sunday, however, the Santos campaign—which in May finally replaced Olson with professional GOP treasurer Jason Boles—reported a flat $20,000 to Dickinson Wright, in July, for “legal” services. But it wasn’t for new work. The $20,000 was the first installment towards nearly $90,000 in debt to Dickinson Wright, which the campaign had been accruing but not disclosing while Andrew Olson was signing its reports.
The current treasurer, Boles, explained in the payment description, “(TREASURER BECOIME [sic] AWARE OF PRIOR DEBT IN CURRENT PERIOD).”
It gets even weirder. While the payment went to Dickinson Wright in name, the address was for a different firm—a Hudson, Wisconsin, P.O. box belonging to 9Seven Consulting, which is Datwyler’s firm.
Datwyler has been in the business of politics for the past decade and a half. After the 2018 midterms, he began showing up in FEC filings as the money-manager for such GOP powerhouses as Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH). His company got scooped up by Jeff Roe’s Axiom Strategies last year.
Brendan Fischer, a campaign finance law specialist and deputy executive director of Documented, said that he couldn’t make sense of who the campaign truly paid—the law firm, Datwyler, or possibly both.
“These facts raise questions about whether any of the funds in the reported disbursements to the law firm are actually disguised payments to Santos’s off-the-books campaign treasurer,” Fischer told The Daily Beast.
While Olson’s name doesn’t show up on any other federal political committees, he does appear on three Datwyler state-level committees. One of them is in Minnesota, and two are in Oklahoma, where Olson once lived.
Doppelganger
Last year, Datwyler and Olson’s work in Minnesota was the focus of a state-level campaign finance investigation.
The probe centered on alleged coordination between GOP attorney general candidate Doug Wardlow and an aligned super PAC called “Rescue Minnesota.” Datwyler brought Olson on as super PAC treasurer after the coordination issue arose. It all ended with a conciliation agreement where Rescue Minnesota—and Andrew Olson, the PACs stated treasurer—admitted unlawful coordination and paid a fine.
The Daily Beast obtained records of that investigation from the campaign finance board. They include email correspondence with Olson’s OK Consulting address, though the investigator who handled the case told The Daily Beast that he had only communicated with Olson in writing.
That legal analyst’s name—coincidentally—was Andrew Olson.
Read the full story here.
