Protégé of Roger Stone runs organization dedicated to helping Dems

Although there’s a trend in this year’s primary of Democratic groups running ads to boost far-right candidates — and then defeating them — it’s not unusual for campaign consultants to have a different political affiliation than their candidate.

What is remarkable is the story of Elnatan Rudolph.

An acolyte of the infamous Republican operative and self-described “dirty trickster” Roger Stone, Rudolph formed an entity dedicated to electing moderate Democrats to the New York State Assembly — and it appears to have failed to file the required fundraising paperwork with the state on time, a Daily News analysis of public records shows.

In April, a GOP operative and protégé of Stone filed documents registering the Committee for a Fair New York as a so-called independent expenditure, a designation that allows it to raise unlimited amounts of cash for political causes as long as it isn’t coordinating directly with the politicians it’s trying to help.

Creating an independent expenditure in New York carries with it a requirement to report contributions within a 24-hour timeframe if those donations total $1,000 or more and are made within 30 days of the election in question.

But according to the state Board of Elections website, the Committee failed to disclose donations along the legally proscribed timeframe. It eventually did disclose contributions it received, records show, but only did so after the required time period.

“Based on state Board of Elections data, the Committee for a Fair New York has frequently failed to comply with the board’s 24-hour and weekly disclosure requirements, which require contributions of $1,000 and expenditures of $5,000 to be reported within 24 hours,” said John Kaehny, head of the good government group Reinvent Albany. “We cannot tell from available state Board of Election information if the committee has reported incorrectly to the Board, or the Board has published the disclosure data incorrectly.”

Jennifer Wilson, a spokeswoman for the Board of Elections, told The News that the data on its website is accurate. Wilson declined to say whether the matter is being probed, and referred questions to Michael Johnson, the Board’s chief enforcement counsel. Johnson did not immediately return messages.

But Rudolph said he filed the paperwork, and that while it didn’t “go through” at first, it was ultimately received by the Board of Elections.

“We followed all the rules,” he said.

According to two sources with direct knowledge of the situation, Rudolph is working on his fundraising vehicle with a close friend since childhood, Michael Cohen, ex-chief of staff to former state Sen. John Sampson.

Sampson was expelled from the Senate in 2015 after being convicted of making false statements to the feds. Cohen has been raising money for Rudolph’s entity, according to the sources. And Rudolph and Cohen both confirmed that Cohen connected him with friends who donated to Rudolph’s fundraising entity.

Like Sampson, Rudolph has reportedly had his own headaches with the federal government. In 2013, according to Crain’s, Rudolph’s firm Cornerstone Management Partners was identified in a federal complaint as “Vendor #1″ for allegedly helping bilk the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee out of $100,000 in 2010. Democratic consultant Melvin Lowe was convicted for arranging to have Rudolph’s firm “submit a false invoice to the DSCC for $100,000 in printing services,” according to federal prosecutors.

At the time, it wasn’t entirely clear why Rudolph’s firm received the money from the Dems in the first place, given the fact that his only other client in New York back then was controversial Republican gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino. But his connection to Paladino and a lack of Democratic bona fides fueled speculation that Cohen was the connection between Rudolph and Senate Dems — especially considering that Cohen’s boss Sampson helped control the DSCC at the time.

Aside from his connection with Sampson, Cohen has his own brush with questionable optics. As a former lobbyist for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, he denied any wrongdoing in connecting Jona Rechnitz with municipal legislators who locked down $300,000 in City Council funding for a police training program at the Museum of Tolerance as identified in the Fiscal Year 2015 Schedule C, which details the awarding of discretionary funding

“All I did was make the introduction to them. That was the limit of my involvement.”

Rechnitz admitted to bribery and cooperated in an investigation into former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s fundraising practices and NYPD corruption — a case that Cohen was not involved in.

While serving on the Englewood City Council in New Jersey, Cohen was also accused by a fellow Council member of “purposefully inciting hatred between Jews and African Americans.”

When contacted by The News, Cohen denied helping Rechnitz and said the accusation against him in Englewood stemmed from a “personal issue” and “just wasn’t true.”

According to Rudolph, his ties to Stone date back to 2006 when they worked on their first race together. Stone, who worked on political campaigns for former Presidents Donald Trump and Richard Nixon, was convicted in 2019 for obstructing a congressional inquiry, lying under oath and witness tampering — but he skated on doing prison time when Trump commuted his sentence a year later.

When asked about his ties to Stone, Rudolph tried to distance himself.

“I haven’t been connected or spoken to Roger Stone in many, many years,” said Rudolph.

He went on to say he’s a Democrat.

But a public records search showed that Rudolph registered to vote as a Republican in Florida in 2010, and the South Florida Sun Sentinel reported in 2018 that a political committee for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis paid at least $268,000 to a company owned by Rudolph.

Some of the candidates backed by the Committee for a Fair New York include Assemblywoman Inez Dickens and Hercules Reid, both of whom also got backing from Mayor Adams in their recent campaigns. Reid ultimately lost his election, as did another moderate supported by Rudolph’s committee, Johanna Carmona.

Juan Ardila, a progressive who emerged victorious in the primary against Carmona, said support from the Committee for a Fair New York was tainted by Rudolph’s involvement — and he warned that other Democrats should reject it.

“Any real Democrat who sees this and is approached by this group — the first thing they should do is renounce it,” he said. “We’re not bound by these Republicans. They should not be the ones influencing Democratic primaries. Show good faith and reject this kind of support.”