The Justice Department has opened an investigation into Texas Majority PAC after a viral undercover video showed an operative calling cash Zoom payments a roundabout way of buying votes.
A source familiar with the matter confirmed the probe on Wednesday, following hidden-camera footage that captured the group’s organizing manager describing $25 payouts tied to a one-hour class on voting.
Fox News first reported the Justice Department inquiry into the Democrat-aligned PAC, which has raised nearly $10 million to turn Texas blue and back competitive races, including efforts tied to Democratic U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico.
Townhall released the undercover video earlier this month. In it, then-organizing manager Sky MacAdams walked through what he cast as a workaround to federal limits on paying for ballots.
“We are paying people $25 to attend a one-hour Zoom class to learn why voting is important and why the Republicans are causing all of these bad things,” MacAdams said on the recording.
“So it’s like a roundabout way of paying people for their votes, essentially.”
He kept going. He acknowledged the bright line, then sketched how to step around it.
“You can’t pay someone to vote for someone,” MacAdams said. “You can’t be like, ‘Here’s $25, go vote for me.’ You can say, ‘Attend a one-hour class and you can receive $25.’”
He even rated the optics himself: “If I was a Republican, I would be pissed. I would be like, that’s shady as f, k.”
Federal law bars payments in exchange for voting or not voting for certain candidates. Violators can face up to two years in prison. That is the statute Republicans say the video brushed up against, and why the tape did not stay a partisan sideshow.
Rep. Pat Fallon (R-Texas) did not wait for a quiet cleanup. Last week he wrote Attorney General Todd Blanche and demanded a full look at Texas Majority PAC and its partnership with political consulting firm Relentless.
“Texas Majority PAC, through its documented partnership with Relentless, has openly admitted to defying the law and purchasing votes in the US Senate race,” Fallon wrote.
“If this is true, this criminal behavior has no place in America and our elections.”
“The government has a responsibility to investigate and hold accountable those that seek to circumvent free and fair elections through bribery of voters,” the letter continued.
Blanche’s confirmation fight already put election rules and enforcement on the Senate calendar, including overnight clashes over voter ID before recess. Fallon’s letter put a concrete Texas case on the new attorney general’s desk.
Texas Majority PAC moved fast on personnel. It fired MacAdams over the remarks. Spokesman Eddie Vale told Fox News the fired staffer’s description was wrong and that the group’s program is ordinary campaign work.
“We hire Texans to join events where they are taught how to organize their friends and family,” Vale said. “They encourage their friends and family to turn out and vote and send them regular reminders. They are compensated for their organizing work, just like any other job.”
He called the effort a long-standing “relational organizing program” and a “standard part of every campaign’s playbook.” Then he drew a hard line on the tape: “Participants in the program are being paid for grassroots organizing work. The way it was described by one rogue employee is factually incorrect, not how we operate, and they were immediately fired.”
That defense will now be tested against the words on camera, not a press release. Paying people to organize friends is legal political work. Paying people, even indirectly, to produce a ballot is not. MacAdams’s own narration collapsed the two in plain English.
A state campaign finance report shows Texas Majority PAC paid Relentless $500,000 in May of this year for its Relational Organizing Program. Fallon’s letter treats that partnership as the documented backbone of the effort he wants investigated.
The New York Post sought comment from both the PAC and the Justice Department. Neither gave an immediate response.
No charges, arrests, or indictments have been announced. The probe’s public confirmation so far rests on a source familiar with the matter and the Fox News first report. Scope, targets beyond the PAC, and any charging theory remain unstated in the available record.
Still, the sequence is not complicated. May payment to the consulting firm. Video drop earlier this month. Fallon letter last week. DOJ interest confirmed Wednesday. Personnel action after the remarks. That is a clean paper trail for investigators who take election bribery statutes seriously.
Voters watching other states already know the pattern. Michigan charged six people over illegal voting from the 2024 cycle while House leaders pressed Democrats on basic election security. Cash-for-turnout shortcuts belong in the same integrity fight.
MacAdams framed the Zoom hour as civic education with a stipend. The curriculum, by his own account, taught “why the Republicans are causing all of these bad things.” The payment was the hook. The message was the product. The vote was the intended result.
Campaigns have used relational organizing for years. Hire locals. Train them. Pay them for time spent turning out people they know. Done cleanly, it is field work with a paycheck.
Done the way MacAdams described it, the class becomes a thin wrapper around a cash incentive aimed at the ballot box. He said the quiet part: you cannot hand someone $25 and say “go vote for me,” but you can hand them $25 for an hour that steers them there.
That is why Fallon used the words “purchasing votes” and “bribery of voters.” It is also why a fired “rogue employee” line does not end the story. The video is not a rumor. The $500,000 payment is on a state report. The PAC’s own spokesman confirms the program exists and pays participants.
Election offices elsewhere are already under pressure over staff conduct and integrity rules, from Missouri’s fight over a fired election integrity director to state pushback on federal monitors. Texas now adds a cash-and-class model that a staffer on tape called a roundabout purchase of votes.
James Talarico has not been quoted in the available reporting on the video or the probe. Relentless has not issued a public reply in that same record. Whether either becomes a formal subject is a question for the Justice Department, not a press office.
What is not in dispute is the incentive structure MacAdams described: money first, partisan pitch second, turnout third. Federal law exists precisely to stop campaigns from renting ballots with cash, gift cards, or creative “classes.”
Mail rules, voter ID, and ballot handling keep returning to the courts and the Capitol because small procedural gaps become large trust gaps. Kavanaugh’s signals on USPS mail-ballot rules show how long those fights last. A $25 Zoom stipend sold as civic duty is another gap dressed up as outreach.
Republicans who watched the tape heard a staffer admit the scheme would enrage the other side, and then shrug. Democrats who run paid relational programs now have to prove the guardrails are real, not rhetorical, when their own organizer narrates the loophole on camera.
Free elections are not a vendor category. When an operative boasts about the workaround, and a half-million-dollar consulting check sits on the finance report, the Justice Department’s job is to read the statute and the transcript together, and decide whether “relational” was just a prettier word for purchase.
