Zach Dembo wants you to know he is the clean guy. The former federal prosecutor and Navy veteran running for Kentucky’s 6th Congressional District has built his pitch around one simple idea: big business and the ultra-wealthy should not buy influence in Washington, and dark money needs to go.
Then a half-million dollars showed up from Reid Hoffman.
On September 24, Hoffman, the LinkedIn co-founder, cut a $500,000 check to Kentuckians Not Corruption, the independent super PAC supporting Dembo against Republican Ralph Alvarado. Federal Election Commission records confirm it.
The timing was not subtle. Advertising orders on Lexington’s WLEX-TV jumped from $14,650 in mid-September to $109,990 for the week of October 6, more than a sevenfold increase, according to Fox News reporting on FCC filings. By mid-October the PAC had spent roughly $1.6 million on ads promoting Dembo and attacking Alvarado.
“This is really, it’s dirty Epstein class money fueling Zach Dembo’s campaign,” Alvarado told Fox News Digital. “It’s offensive.”
Alvarado did not stop there. Hoffman was not a distant acquaintance. Justice Department documents and subsequent reporting show he visited Epstein’s private island, stayed at the Manhattan townhouse, and on Christmas Eve sent a shipment of ice cream with a note that the treat was “either for yourself or for the girls.”
The New York Post detailed those ties after the latest Epstein file releases. Hoffman has previously said he wishes he had googled first. That is not the same as never having gone.
Dembo’s website still says “big business and the ultra-wealthy shouldn’t be able to buy influence in Washington” and that we need to “get rid of dark money in politics.” He has criticized tax breaks for “billionaires and coastal elites” and promised to fight for working families instead. Fox News Digital asked his campaign repeatedly about the Hoffman money. No response came back.
This is the open seat left by Andy Barr, who is running for the Senate seat Mitch McConnell is vacating. Democrats see a chance in a district Republicans have held since 2013. Outside groups have flooded the airwaves. Kentuckians Not Corruption’s top funders include Hoffman and a largely dark-money vehicle called Government That Works, each at half a million.
The candidate who says he will not take corporate PAC money is fine with a super PAC that takes Epstein-adjacent billionaire money and spends it by the million on television.
Scripture does not grade on a curve for people who look clean while taking the money. “Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.”
The words are blunt because the conduct is. Dembo can keep running the anti-corruption ads. The FEC filings and the advertising invoices will still be there on November 3.
Alvarado has said he does not even expect Dembo to disavow it. He is probably right. The least a candidate who campaigns on purity could do is explain why half a million dollars from a man who mailed ice cream “for the girls” does not count as the influence he says he is against. So far the explanation is silence.
