JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) – An ad criticizing Democratic candidate for Missouri governor Nicole Galloway that aired on nine television stations has been pulled and edited following complaints from her campaign.
Galloway’s campaign sent cease-and-desist letters to station managers across Missouri, arguing that the ad falsely accused her of committing a crime, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported Friday.
The campaign said stations removed the original ad, created by Uniting Missouri, an independent political action committee that supports Republican Gov. Mike Parson. But a spokesman for the PAC said the group voluntarily replaced the ad with an edited version.
The original ad said Galloway “flagrantly ignored ethics laws, failing to disclose her husband lobbied for state tax credits.”
The edited ad says, “Galloway ignored ethics laws, failing to disclose her husband lobbied for a company that got state tax credits,” a Uniting Missouri spokesman said. The group said it made “minor semantic changes.”
A lawyer for Galloway’s campaign said her husband never lobbied for state tax credits.
Jon Galloway, the auditor’s husband, was a registered lobbyist for the Mortgage Research Center, also known as Veterans United Home Loans, from September 2013 to March 2015.
In 2013, the company received $11 million in state tax credits from the Missouri Works and Quality Jobs programs.
A campaign spokesman said Galloway reported her husband’s lobbying to the state ethics commission, but it initially didn’t display correctly.
“The PDFs were filed correctly with the information, it just didn’t display correctly when produced,” spokesman Eric Slusher said in an email. “It got cut off.”
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