(Jeff Carter) – I saw Brittany Sheehan’s tweet about CD2 Candidate David Filippo being asked questions by the FEC. It piqued my interest. Here is a link to Brittany’s article about the CD2 affair.
I am hoping David has some good answers and receipts. There should be no rush to judgment. He has until August 12. The last thing you want is a Platner situation in any Republican race.
However, that’s not true of the State Treasurer’s race. Drew Johnson is a fraudster and not to be trusted. He is George Santos 2.0.
Turns out, Filippo, Johnson, and other Republican candidates use the same Treasury operation as George Santos. This operation has committed fraud after fraud. They only work for Republicans.
Why am I curious?
We submitted an FEC complaint against my primary opponent, Drew Johnson, or should we identify him as “Jason Johnson”? That’s the alias he used to commit campaign fraud in 2026.
When we did opposition research, we found huge gaps in his 2024 election reporting.
We took our data to Hutchinson Law and said, “Hey, are you seeing what we are seeing?” It turns out, they did. If they didn’t, they would have said so. So, we filed an FEC Complaint.
What Drew did isn’t a civil penalty. It’s criminal. It’s fraud.
So we paid for them to file. They did. Lawyers cost money. Hutchinson Law isn’t a fly-by-night lawyer that will do anything for a fee. They have principles. Mark was a Republican Lt Governor for Nevada, so he isn’t itching to turn in Republicans.
Drew not only defrauded Nevada. He defrauded Republicans across the country. I looked at who donated to his campaign besides me after the “Young Guns” designation, and some of them were my personal friends.
How?
Money that poured into his campaign after the Young Guns designation could have gone into viable Republican candidates in other parts of the country who would have won.
Those donors had no idea that Drew was going to withdraw $422K from his campaign, leaving it broke with 5 weeks to go. Their donations went to Drew – not to winning the race.
Not only that, door knockers and people who supported his campaign had no idea that Drew was withdrawing money with no intention of spending donor money to win the race. Anyone who lives in CD3 should be outraged.
There are opportunity costs in political races too.
Congresswoman Susie Lee didn’t do anything since she absolutely creamed him in the race. She let it go. She had no incentive to push it. Yes, she slaughtered him. Trump won his district by 1, and Drew lost by 3. That’s a four-point swing in a D+1 district, which is huge. 11 other races were closer across the country.
I hope Marty O’ Donnell finally sends her packing. In 2024, Drew unfairly trashed Marty just like he does every single person he runs against. He campaigns ugly and then loses in the general. He can’t win independents.
People with no talent and no skills resort to that kind of campaigning.
Let’s lay out the complaint. Here is an article about it, but I’d like to lay it out plainly. By the way, he has a long track record of being extremely shady, if not fraudulent.
Drew not only didn’t have the net worth to inject $422,400 into his campaign in August of 2024, but he also probably faked an entire stock portfolio, inflating his net worth.
Here is the data on the stock reporting.
When you report your stock holdings for federal election filings, you don’t have to record the exact price you own the stock at. Drew never reported, nor did anyone verify his reported stock purchases.
It’s possible to spend very little to construct a portfolio that looks big. Drew did that. In Drew’s case, he used about $16k to show a position of $280k.
How do you do that? You purchase a minimum amount of shares.
Based on Federal Election reporting laws, you don’t have to disclose the exact number of shares you purchased or own. You report a range, 1000-15,000 shares. Hence, you can purchase the minimum amount of shares, and use the highest point of the reporting range, and inflate your net worth.
He didn’t report any stock transactions in his reporting. From the FEC Complaint:
The 44 new stock positions appearing in 2024 but absent from 2023 were necessarily purchased between June 23, 2023, and April 15, 2024. At the maximum claimed values, these positions represent approximately $225,000 in stock purchases during that period. During that same period, Respondent Johnson’s disclosed household income was approximately $130,000 gross ($40,000 personal salary from Lambent Interactive, LLC, plus $90,000 spousal salary from the State of Nevada), or roughly $84,000 net after taxes. Against this income, he owed mortgage payments of approximately $1,800 per month and basic living expenses of at least $3,000 per month, leaving approximately $36,000 available for investment.
44 stock positions appear in the 2024 disclosure that do not appear in the 2023 disclosure. The two disclosures overlap by nearly six months. Any position not in the 2023 disclosure was necessarily purchased after June 22, 2023—squarely within the 2024 reporting period—and any such purchase over $1,000 is a required Schedule B transaction disclosure. The 2024 disclosure Schedule B states: “None disclosed.”
Respondent Johnson knowingly and willfully failed to disclose required securities transactions on Schedule B of his 2024 financial disclosure report, including cryptocurrency sales and stock purchases, in violation of the Ethics in Government Act, 5 U.S.C. App. §102(a)(5), and applicable House Rules.
Respondent Johnson faces an inescapable contradiction: If he claims his new stock positions were worth maximum values (needed to justify the $422,400 loan), he cannot explain where $189,000 in investment funds came from on a $130,000 household income with a mortgage. If he claims minimum values for the stocks (consistent with available income), his total disclosed portfolio shrinks to approximately $283,000—far too little to justify a $422,400 personal loan. Regardless, there is no valuation between these extremes that solves both problems simultaneously.
But where did the $422k come from?
I asked his wife on X, and she was mute. Must not have had enough to drink that night to be chatty.
“Respondent Johnson filed financial disclosure reports with the House of Representatives on June 22, 2023, and July 12, 2024. These disclosures, combined with public records and basic arithmetic, demonstrate that Respondent Johnson did not possess sufficient personal assets to fund a $422,400 loan.”
Let’s examine where he might have gotten the money. No straw donor would give it to him. Donors aren’t like that. They don’t want to get sucked into a fraudulent transaction. People who can put a chunk of change like that into a campaign aren’t stupid. No bank would loan it. No subprime lender would do it either. He couldn’t have gotten the money from an outside source. It’s impossible.
Only an FEC investigation can prove where he got the money because they can demand bank and brokerage records. We can only connect the dots and assume.
Drew put the money into his campaign in 64 separate transactions of $6600 each using a credit card on August 18th. He incurred $13,000 in fees. If it were his money, he wouldn’t have to do that. He could just put it in. Some government “watchdog”.
Remember, now he is running for state treasurer, where you handle taxpayer money. But do not be distracted by that. That’s the least of the fraud.
Drew has said it’s a “clearing issue”. Bullshit. This is outright fraud. The stenographers at the newspapers don’t understand finance and do not have the intellectual capacity to actually research a story when it’s lying under their nose.
His wife is just as much a grifter as Drew is. She has never done anything productive in the private sector in her life. Her mother has dementia. Her mom has an estate worth at least $1M. That’s the honeypot.
We assume, but cannot prove, that they borrowed the money from her estate, injected the money into the campaign to make it look like there were “broad-based donations”, and then repaid it as soon as they got the “Young Guns” designation from the House Republicans. They knew money would follow the designation.
Was Sarah the power of attorney for her mother, which would have allowed them to raid the honeypot? Only an FEC investigation can determine that.
But if true, it’s not just fraud; it’s elder abuse. Both are criminal.
We, and Hutchinson, would not put that in the complaint because no one can prove an assumption. But it seems like a reasonable assumption by a sleazy and desperate candidate who couldn’t raise money. He left his campaign with less than $60k with a month to go.
He was a guaranteed loser and quit on the race before it was over. All of his primary opponents in 2024 had the cash to run the race the way it was supposed to be run.
The next fraud happened in 2026. A zebra cannot change its stripes.
In our primary for Treasurer, Drew loaned his campaign just over $4k in December. In the next month, “Jason Johnson”, that’s Drew’s fraud alias, was paid the same amount as “campaign staff”, leaving the loan open so Drew could suck more money out of the donors who stupidly wrote a check to his campaign.
Let’s put this in perspective.
He raised $7000 in the first quarter based on the C+E’s he filed with the Nevada Secretary of State-assuming those numbers aren’t fraudulent on their own. He paid himself $4000. He and his wife took a trip to Italy to see the Olympics during the same period.
If you donated to his campaign, it looks like you paid for their trip to Europe.
The Nevada Secretary of State can ask questions about that one. Here is hoping they do.
The conclusion of the FEC complaint reads,
Based upon the publicly available information Complainant respectfully requests that the Commission conduct an investigation pursuant to 52 U.S.C. § 30109(a)(2) to determine if Respondents violated 52 U.S.C. § 30122 by making and accepting a contribution in the name of another. Based upon the misconduct identified herein, Respondents are likely liable for civil penalties as authorized by 52 U.S.C. § 30109(a)(5)-(6), including penalties not less than 300 percent and not more than 1,000 percent of the amount involved, as provided for § 30122 violations. Moreover, given the possible “knowing and will” violations of the law, this matter may also need be referred to the United States Department of Justice for criminal prosecution. (bold mine)
This wasn’t a campaign stunt by me, as a lot of people passed it off as.
This was reporting fraud and trying to keep a swindler/grifter’s sticky hands away from taxpayer dollars. No doubt, people like Drew and his wife are for sale.
Let’s hope the FEC starts asking questions. Let’s also hope that US Attorney Sigal Chattah asks some questions. I know she is a Republican, but she also enforces the law, and she should be doing it evenly for both parties. If anyone knows her, put a bug in her ear. I don’t know her. I’d suggest the FBI look into it too.
It’s easy to point fingers at Democrats and cry fraud. It’s harder to do it within your own party, but you have to have the character and intestinal fortitude to do it. You cannot look the other way.
Otherwise, you are no better than the Democrats.
The opinions expressed by contributors are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Nevada News & Views. This article was originally published via JeffreyCarter.substack.com on 7/10/2026.
