Tom Siver Lent His Own Campaign $113,200. One Consultant Got Most of the Money.

The first itemized filing from Tom Siver’s 57th District Court campaign is in. Nearly 90 cents of every dollar came from Siver himself, and most of it went straight to one consulting firm.

In September, I reported that Tom Siver’s campaign would not show voters its money until October. Someone close to the campaign said so publicly. I said that was the point.

It is October.

The filing is in.

And it turns out the reason there was so little to show is that there were so few people giving.

When Siver launched his campaign, he said he had bought a house on a lake in Allegan, and “now I’m going to buy a judge seat.”

He wasn’t kidding.

The Candidate Is the Campaign

Siver is running against Judge Christopher Burnett for the 57th District Court seat in Allegan County, a partial term ending in 2031. The election is November 3.

His committee’s filing lists 47 receipts. Seven of them are cash loans from Siver: $10,000 on January 7, $7,400 on May 26, $5,000 on June 27, $10,500 on July 20, $300 on September 14, $40,000 on September 23, and $40,000 on October 9. Three more are in-kind loans, meaning Siver paid for something himself and booked it as a loan to the campaign: $201.90 in candy and $17.90 in volunteer lunch on July 4, and $73.13 in business cards on August 4.

The other 29 contributors gave $12,919.80 in cash and $1,381 in donated goods, a banner install and tablecloth worth $1,040 and $341 in drinks and appetizers for a September fundraiser at Schaendorf Brewing. Two more receipts are refunds: a $50 deposit back from Dorr Township and a $5 returned bank fee.

The only repayment to Siver on the filing is $73.13, the business cards, on August 7. None of the loans is marked forgiven. As of this filing, the committee owes its candidate $113,419.80.

Self-funding is legal. Michigan’s contribution limits restrict what other people can give a candidate, and the filing reports the loans. But a judicial campaign that is nearly 90 percent the candidate’s own money tells voters something a yard sign does not. Outside his own bank account, the support behind this campaign comes to about $14,000.

Where the Candidate’s Money Lives

A campaign this dependent on one man’s money puts that man’s money habits on the ballot too.

In August, former employees told Clutch Justice on the record that Siver kept stacks of cash in his office instead of depositing client money into a trust account. Since then, more former employees and people close to Siver have told Clutch Justice that he keeps cash in safes, both at work and at home, instead of running everything through business accounts.

The campaign filing reports each of Siver’s seven cash loans as coming from Siver. Michigan’s disclosure system stops there. The Bureau of Elections’ candidate manual requires a candidate’s money to be reported as a loan, and nothing more. A candidate lending his own committee money is not required to show where that money came from. Voters get the date and the amount, and nothing about the source.

For most candidates, that gap is academic. For a candidate whose former employees describe client money kept in an office and cash kept in safes, it is the whole question. The filing shows $113,200 arriving in the campaign account. It does not show where those dollars were sitting before they got there.

Every Time the Account Ran Low

I put every itemized receipt and expenditure in date order and ran the balance. The pattern is hard to miss.

On June 22, after paying $150 to rent a pavilion from Dorr Township, the campaign had about $206 left. On June 27, Siver loaned it $5,000. Two days later, Greenlee Consulting was paid $3,894.33 for signs and printing.

On July 20, with about $1,086 in the account, Siver loaned it $10,500. On July 21, Greenlee was paid $10,500. Same number, to the dollar.

On September 23, with about $1,087 in the account, Siver loaned it $40,000. On September 24, Greenlee was paid five times: $12,756.56 for an “RtL mailing,” $9,028.74 for “Av mail,” $5,563.94 for signs and banners, $3,500 in retainers, and $905.13 for design. That is $31,754.37 in one day.

On October 9, with about $5,930 in the account, Siver loaned it another $40,000. The same day, the campaign paid Rural AM FM LLC $5,000 for radio placement.

A campaign that runs on contributions spends what supporters send. This campaign spent what its candidate deposited, usually within a day of the deposit.

One Firm, 82 Cents of Every Dollar

Greenlee Consulting appears 14 times on the expenditure side. Together those payments total $71,142.09. Every other vendor on the filing combined received $16,014.70.

The Greenlee entries cover nearly everything a campaign does. Monthly retainers of $3,500, plus a $7,000 two-month retainer and $10,500 in July for “retainers, in house printing.” $6,673.02 for “design, print (in house), and consulting to make ballot” in March, and $3,200 for petition verification in May. Signs, banners, a banner distributor, extra signs in October. Absentee mail. And the single largest line on the entire filing, $12,756.56 for the “RtL mailing.”

So the firm that was paid to get Siver on the ballot was also paid to design his signs, print them, mail his voters, and advise him monthly. The other recurring vendor, Pacesetter Marketing, was paid $3,200 across the year for social media and web services.

One Vendor Name, Every Vendor Hidden

Running nearly every purchase through one consultant has a second effect. The filing shows what Greenlee was paid. It does not show who Greenlee paid.

Signs, banners, a “signs and banners distributor,” absentee mail, the Right to Life mailing, design, and printing all appear as payments to Greenlee Consulting at a Grand Rapids PO Box. Several entries are labeled “in house” printing. The printers, mail houses, sign shops, and postage behind those payments do not appear anywhere. Neither does how many pieces went out, what they actually cost, or how much of $71,142.09 Greenlee kept for itself.

Michigan law is supposed to prevent exactly that. Under MCL 169.243, when an agent or independent contractor spends money on a campaign’s behalf, other than for its own overhead or normal operating expenses, the committee must report that spending as if it had made it directly. The contractor is required to give the committee everything it needs to report. MCL 169.226 requires a committee to itemize every expenditure over $50 with the payee’s name, address, amount, and purpose.

The Bureau of Elections spells out what that means in Appendix L of its Committee Manual, which covers media buyers and other vendors purchasing goods for a committee. Vendors must give the committee a list of every subcontractor or other person they paid more than $50, with name, address, date, purpose, and amount. If the subcontractor subcontracts the work again, that layer gets itemized too.

In practice, that means memo itemization. If a consultant is paid $10,000 and spends $4,000 of it with a mail house on the campaign’s behalf, the mail house goes on the campaign’s report underneath the consultant’s payment, with its own name, address, date, purpose, and amount. The consultant does not have to account for its own profit or its own operating costs, and small amounts of $50 or less can be lumped together. Everything else it passes through to someone else is supposed to show.

Siver’s filing has no memo itemization under any of the 14 Greenlee payments. Not under the $12,756.56 Right to Life mailing. Not under the $9,028.74 in absentee mail. Not under the $5,563.94 labeled “signs and banners distributor,” a description that names a third party without naming it. Mailings that size carry postage, and postage is paid to someone other than Greenlee.

Some of what Greenlee billed may truly be its own work: retainers, design, and printing it describes as done “in house.” That part does not have to be broken out. But a distributor, a mail run, and postage are not a consultant’s overhead. If Greenlee paid any of them on the campaign’s behalf, Michigan law required the campaign to report who got paid, and the filing Jason Watts signed reports none of them.

A knowing violation of section 243 is a misdemeanor. Whether one happened here depends on records only the campaign and Greenlee hold: what Greenlee paid out, to whom, and for what. Those are exactly the records the law says voters were supposed to see.

The Consultant Who Talked to the Reporter

Greenlee Consulting is the firm of Scott Greenlee, the veteran Michigan Republican consultant running Siver’s campaign. Greenlee has worked Republican campaigns since 1988 and ran U.S. Rep. Lisa McClain’s 2020 race. That is the context for what happened in September.

On September 3, the Allegan County News published a story on Siver by reporter Elizabeth Ferszt. The story named Watson Township Supervisor Kevin Travis. Travis told Clutch Justice he had asked not to be part of that story. He also said Ferszt told him the paper had received a tip, and that she spoke with Greenlee before she ever called Travis. According to Travis, Greenlee suggested to Ferszt that Travis might not be a real, independent source at all, and might be me writing under another name. Nobody from the campaign or the paper ever asked me.

Ferszt never disclosed any of that to her readers. Not that Siver’s paid consultant was part of how her story came together. And not that she herself ran for Congress in 2022 as a Republican write-in candidate from Jackson.

That obligation was hers. A reporter who builds a story on a call with a candidate’s own consultant tells readers so. A reporter with her own recent partisan candidacy tells readers so. Those are the most basic disclosure duties in journalism, and they belong to the person whose byline is on the story.

In September, that looked like a sourcing problem. The filing shows how big it was. The man in that sourcing chain is not a volunteer or a friend of the campaign. He is its single largest expense. By the day the story ran, his firm had already been paid $35,490.86. Three weeks later, on September 24, it was paid $31,754.37 more. In total, Greenlee’s firm has received 82 cents of every dollar this campaign has spent.

Then there is the other side of the ledger. On October 15, the campaign paid Wilcox Newspapers, publisher of the Allegan County News, $1,100 for “news ads.” Campaign ads in a local paper are legal and ordinary, and the payment came six weeks after the story. It does raise the stakes of what Ferszt left out. Readers of that paper got a story about Siver that ran through his paid consultant, and later saw ads paid for by his campaign, without ever being told the first part. Disclosure costs one sentence. Ferszt did not write it.

Right to Life and the Republican Party, in a Nonpartisan Race

Judicial candidates in Michigan appear on the nonpartisan section of the ballot. Party labels do not appear next to their names. That is by design.

Siver’s filing shows where his campaign put its money anyway. The $12,756.56 Greenlee “RtL mailing” is the biggest single expense of the campaign. The committee also paid North Allegan Right to Life $160 for a table, and paid Otsego Plainwell Right to Life $50 for two tickets and another $100 for the “remainder of table.” Right to Life-labeled spending totals $13,066.56, about 15 percent of everything the campaign spent.

The committee paid the Allegan County Republican Committee $500 on April 23, described as an “LD sponsor,” and $26 more on April 30 for a “flag purchase.”

That payment did not go to a party the campaign was a stranger to. Jason Watts, who runs Siver’s campaign, is heavily involved in the Allegan County Republican Party. He is the person who put the proposal to endorse Siver before the county party. In making the case, he cited incorrect information about Judge Burnett’s rating on a Republican website. The endorsement did not hold. As Clutch reported in August, a delegate vote on endorsing Siver reportedly failed 33 to 19 before the executive committee endorsed him anyway, and on August 27 the executive committee reversed that endorsement, 12 to 4.

So the man who keeps this campaign running sits inside the party the campaign paid. He asked that party to back his candidate, and he misstated the other candidate’s record to do it. In a race that appears on the nonpartisan ballot, the party side of this campaign was never at arm’s length. It was the campaign manager’s own operation.

Michigan’s Code of Judicial Conduct lets a judge or judicial candidate contribute to a political party, and a judicial campaign can seek endorsements. None of this is prohibited. It is a choice, and the filing shows which voters this campaign chose to spend on. The person on the ballot is asking to be the judge every party appears before.

Who Else Gave

Outside money is thin, and it is concentrated. Two contributors each gave $2,450 in mid-February. Under the Bureau of Elections’ lower-court contribution limits, $2,450 is the per-person maximum for a district court in the 57th District’s population tier. A third contributor gave $2,350 on February 28. Those three checks, $7,250, are half of every outside dollar the campaign received. Two of the three came from Illinois: a University of Chicago executive and a nurse at Northwestern’s health system, both with Chicago-area home addresses. The Committee for Good Judges mailer, sent from a PO Box tied to the Supreme Court committee Watts keeps the books for, told outside groups to stay home. Siver’s own biggest backers are out of state.

Two more contributors gave $1,000 each. One more gave $840. Most of the rest gave $50 to $250, many of them at a March 30 kickoff at Schaendorf Brewing. The campaign reports 25 attendees there and $2,600 raised, against $500 for the venue. A second Schaendorf event on September 25 drew 35 attendees, according to the filing. It raised $100. The drinks and appetizers were worth $341.

One of the kickoff contributors is Damian Nunzio, a Grand Rapids defense attorney, who gave $500. Clutch has reported that Nunzio worked alongside Siver on the Whitmer kidnapping plot cases, and that Siver copied Nunzio on a June 2022 evidence preservation letter in the Joseph Nagle matter. Lawyers giving to judicial candidates is legal in Michigan and common. It is also the reason disqualification rules exist, because a lawyer who funds a judge’s campaign may one day stand in that judge’s courtroom.

Then there are the Watts entries. Jason Watts, who runs Siver’s campaign, appears five times as a contributor: $10 on January 8, three cents on April 1, $1.91 on June 24, $8.83 on August 26, and $7.12 on October 13. Two other contributors named Watts gave $100 each at the kickoff, and one of them also gave $1.91 on June 24, the same day and amount as Jason Watts. Contributions of three cents and $1.91 are not how people support a candidate. The filing does not explain them.

The January 8 receipts matter for a second reason. Michigan’s Code of Judicial Conduct, Canon 7, permits a judicial candidate’s committee to solicit contributions beginning February 15 of the election year. The $50 from Justice for Allegan County and the $10 from Watts are dated more than five weeks earlier. The amounts are small. The rule is not.

And look at the address. Siver’s filing lists Justice for Allegan County, checked as a PAC, at PO Box 163 in Allegan. That is the same PO Box that appears as the return address on the unsigned Committee for Good Judges mailer attacking Judge Burnett, and the same PO Box the Morse-Bills Supreme Court committee lists as its own, as Clutch reported October 14. Watts is treasurer of the Morse-Bills committee. He is also treasurer of record for Siver’s committee, and he signed this filing. One PO Box now ties a PAC that funded Siver, a mailer attacking Siver’s opponent, and a Supreme Court campaign, all through the man who keeps Siver’s books.

The filing’s own paperwork has gaps, too. Contributors who list an employer are given placeholder business addresses: “1 Self Way, Self, Michigan 12345” for the self-employed, including attorney Damian Nunzio, and “1 Retire Way, Retired, Michigan 12345” for retirees. There is no town called Self, and 12345 is not a Michigan ZIP code. This is the treasurer who files complaints with the state when other committees get their disclosures wrong.

Candy, Helium, and Money Orders

The smaller entries fill in the picture of a campaign run largely on parades and fairs. The committee reports $1,818.45 in entries it labeled parade expenses, including $1,077.52 in candy from Oriental Trading Company, plus Siver’s own $201.90 candy loan. There is helium, balloons, chalk, flags, caution tape, and buckets. There is $350 to sponsor derby cars and a $100 bike sponsorship.

At the Allegan County Fair, the filing shows $325 for booth rental, $100 for booth insurance, and $120 for passes. In September, I estimated the visible branded spending at Siver’s fair booth at $1,400 to $2,800. The filing does not let anyone check that number against a single line, because the signs and banners were billed in bulk through Greenlee. The $1,040 donated banner install, dated September 30, is the only display item reported on its own.

The committee also paid $24.45 in post office money order fees across four entries. A campaign with a Huntington Bank account and a card processor paid at least some of its bills by money order. The filing does not say which bills.

Why This Matters

Here is what I keep coming back to.

In September, the line from inside the campaign was that the filing would come in October.

It did.

It came after the mail went out.

After the signs went up.

After the ballots went out.

And what it shows is a campaign with about $14,000 in outside support and more than $113,000 from the man asking for the robe.

He said he was going to buy a judge seat.

The filing is the receipt.

A judge is supposed to answer to the public, not to a bank balance. Voters have 11 days to decide whether this filing tells them who Tom Siver’s campaign answers to. Siver has not answered my prior questions. The record has.