Republican money funds fake Monte Akers site

MonteAkers.com seems designed to make local state senate candidate Monte Akers unappealing to Republican voters, because it was designed to make him unappealing to Republican voters—and it was funded by a Republican interest group.

MonteAkers.com looks like an official candidate website, but it doesn’t really have any content other than an out-of-context quote from a Hillsboro Signal article, used to make Akers, a Republican, look like an ardent supporter of tax increases.

Here’s Caleb Diehl, writing for OregonBusiness.com:

Infighting in the Republican Party primaries reached a new level a week ago.

The Senate Republicans’ Leadership Fund, a political action committee that finances Republican candidates for Senate, set up a website masquerading as the campaign site for Senate candidate Monte Akers, a Republican from Hillsboro.  The fake site, monteakers.com, contains a press release implying that Akers advocates raising taxes. The release quotes a Hillsboro Signal article about Akers’ support for a bond measure to fund Hillsboro public schools.

And that’s not all: someone is buying ads to make sure this fake website comes up first when you search for Monte Akers online.

Akers, who lost his Hillsboro School Board seat last year in a progressive wave, is running for State Senate as a Republican. His opponent in the primary, Alexander Flores, also ran for school board last year, and also lost to that same progressive wave. Why these people think they can unseat Democrat incumbent Chuck Riley in 2018, after losing school board races, is another topic of conversation entirely.

Republican money is being used to attack Akers, apparently in support of Flores. The funny thing: our profile of Flores also has a potentially useful out-of-context quote:

Either that, or we start raising their taxes.

I’ve removed the nuance from that sentence. Putting that on a website that pretends to be the homepage for Flores wouldn’t be fair at all, would it?