A $25 Zoom Class, a Hidden Camera and a Reported Justice Department Probe in Texas

The Justice Department is investigating a Democratic political committee in Texas after one of its organizers was caught on a hidden camera describing a program that pays people to sit through a class about voting, Fox News Digital reported Wednesday, citing two sources familiar with the matter.

The department has not announced an investigation, and none of the coverage names an official or a statute. The group, Texas Majority PAC, says the employee described its program incorrectly and that he no longer works there.

What the camera recorded

The video was published Sept. 16 by Townhall, which said it was recorded by an undercover reporter. In it, Sky McAdams, then an organizing manager for the PAC, explains the program in plain terms. "We are paying people $25 to attend a one hour Zoom class to learn why voting is important," he says, according to Townhall and Fox.

Then came the sentence that has followed the group ever since. McAdams called the arrangement "a roundabout way of paying people for their votes, essentially," and added, in cruder language, that he considered it shady.

The PAC's answer

Texas Majority PAC did not dispute that the recording is genuine. Townhall reported that spokesman Eddie Vale confirmed the video was real and had not been altered or deceptively edited. The PAC fired McAdams on Sept. 17, the day after the video appeared, saying he had mischaracterized the program.

Vale told Fox that participants were "compensated for their organizing work," and described the effort as relational organizing, a common campaign practice in which people are recruited to contact friends and family. On the PAC's account, the $25 pays for work, not for a ballot.

Where the legal line sits

That distinction is the whole case. Federal law makes it a crime to pay or offer to pay someone for voting or for registering to vote in an election with federal candidates on the ballot. Campaigns of both parties lawfully pay canvassers, phone bankers and organizers every cycle. A payment for showing up to a class sits somewhere between those two, and which side it falls on depends on what participants were actually told and asked to do. An investigation would be the way to find out. A viral clip is not.

Rep. Pat Fallon, a Texas Republican, asked for one. Two days after the video surfaced he wrote to the Justice Department requesting an investigation, Townhall reported. "Free and fair elections are the backbone of our constitutional republic," Fallon wrote.

The money behind it

Texas Majority PAC is not a small operation. Fox, citing the campaign finance tracker Transparency USA, reported that the group had raised nearly $10 million by the end of the second quarter this year, spent about $9 million and had $1.3 million on hand. It was founded by Texas campaign veterans Jason Lee, Katherine Fischer and Crystal Zermeno, and its stated goal is to make the state reliably Democratic.

No one has been charged, and a reported inquiry is not a finding. What is on the record is narrower: a paid organizer for a well-funded partisan group said on camera that his own program looked like paying for votes, and his employer answered by firing him and saying he was wrong. Texans who care about clean elections are entitled to know which of them had it right, and the people who took the $25 are the ones who can say.