On March 31, David Flippo, the Republican nominee for Congress in northern Nevada, loaned his campaign $600,000, according to federal records. In doing so, he massively increased his topline fundraising numbers for a quarter—the last before Nevada’s primary elections—in which he brought in less than $20,000 from outside supporters. Within weeks, Flippo’s campaign repaid him $12,000 of the money he had lent. Two days later, Nevada public records show he was listed as a debtor to a company that specializes in financing home improvement projects. The agreement was collateralized by “FLOORING” at the Flippos’ Las Vegas home.
The financing statement is one of many transactions, detailed in records obtained by Mother Jones, that do not typically fit the profile of an independently wealthy candidate who has reported providing his campaign operation nearly $2.5 million over his past two congressional bids. Adding to the mystery over the source of his funding: Flippo, dating back to his first run for Congress, has failed to submit the required disclosures that would illuminate his personal financial position.
Flippo’s campaign did not respond to a request I sent on September 14 to discuss the missing financial disclosures. The campaign also did not respond to a follow-up that included detailed questions about Flippo’s personal and campaign finances.
Between January 2025 and June 2026, FEC records show Flippo making numerous loans to his campaign committee worth more than $1.6 million in total. About two-thirds of that money came on the final days of the quarterly FEC reporting periods that help shape perceptions of a campaign’s relative strength.
While running for Congress in 2023, Flippo was required to file a financial disclosure form listing his assets. In 2024, the Nevada Republican should have provided the House Clerk with a second report. By May 2026, after launching a new congressional bid, Flippo should have submitted two additional financial disclosures.
Instead, Flippo has submitted nothing, according to House financial disclosure records. The result is that the public has no way of knowing through the normal disclosure channels what assets the Nevada candidate may hold and what conflicts of interest they may raise. Without financial disclosures, there is no clear way to determine where the money he has loaned his campaign may have come from. Nor does his employment history provide an obvious answer.
Previously unreported Nevada records I obtained raise further questions about how Flippo would have been able to loan so much to his campaigns. In Clark County, where Flippo lived until earlier this year, property and mortgage records show the candidate owns one home: a property in Las Vegas that he and his wife purchased in 2020 with a 30-year mortgage for $565,000. Financing statements also show Flippo being named as a debtor in relation to two apparent home improvement projects during the 2026 election cycle.
In most years, Flippo would be a shoo-in to join Congress next year. In June, the retired Air Force lieutenant colonel won his Nevada primary by 12 points after securing an endorsement from Donald Trump. In the general election, he is running to replace retiring Rep. Mark Amodei in a district Trump won by 14 points in 2024.
But Flippo’s right-wing politics, the fact that he moved to the district only earlier this year, and Trump’s unpopularity have made the seat unusually competitive. He has also drawn a strong Democratic opponent in Teresa Benitez-Thompson, a former state assembly majority leader and social worker who once represented Nevada in the Miss America pageant.
Flippo’s status as a recent transplant led to predictable accusations that he was a “carpetbagger.” In the primary, Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo and Amodei endorsed former State Senate Minority Leader James Settelmeyer. Amodei, who has represented the district since 2011, also made his distaste for Flippo clear. The district’s next representative, he argued, “should not be a 30-day ‘move in’ backed by a Vegas-paid manager.” (Amodei has since refused to endorse Flippo in the general election and has accused him of running an “absolutely scurrilous” primary campaign.)
Flippo ran well to the right of Settelmeyer and Amodei, who is conservative but not especially so by the standards of the Trump-era GOP. Flippo gave Trump’s second term an A+, announced that his first bill in Congress would seek to ban Islamic religious law, and relied on a campaign aide best known for attempting to recruit members of the Proud Boys to protest ballot counting in Nevada in 2020.
His hard-right stance has attracted the support of Republicans like Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), a Freedom Caucus member with ties to the white nationalist influencer Nick Fuentes. Other primary supporters included former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), the far-right former Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino, and former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio.
Earlier this month, the Center for Politics—a nonpartisan election forecaster—shifted its rating of the race from “Safe Republican” to “Likely Republican.” In the event of a November blue wave, the race would be on the outer edge of what Democrats could hope to win.
Brendan Fischer, the director of strategic investigations at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, explained that financial disclosures are particularly important for helping to establish whether candidates actually have enough money to make the loans they are reporting. “The clearest example of that is George Santos,” Fischer said. “An early indicator that something was amiss was the fact that the large personal loans that he reported making to his campaign did not match the meager assets that he listed on his financial disclosure report.” (Santos filed three financial disclosure forms before entering Congress in 2023.)
Flippo’s campaign treasurer, Thomas Datwyler, also serves as the treasurer for scandal-plagued Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) and has been accused of hiding the fact that he served in the same role for Santos. Both Santos and Ogles reported nonexistent loans.
It is illegal to report fake loans to the Federal Election Commission. The main advantage of doing so is that it can make a campaign appear stronger than it actually is. Fischer said that a “candidate might report fake loans to artificially inflate their fundraising numbers, but that is only possible if the money is actually fake.” He explained that the “much more concerning possibility is that the money is real, but came from a source other than the candidate—for example, that a wealthy donor secretly gave excessive contributions to the candidate, which the candidate then falsely reported as personal loans to their campaign.” (Santos reported the fabricated loans while working with a different treasurer, who pleaded guilty in 2023 to conspiring with Santos to lie to the FEC.)
When The Washington Sun reported on Flippo’s missing financial disclosures in August, Datwyler said that it was because Flippo was in the process of closing a business and moving assets into a blind trust. He added, “That is a complicated process, and his financial disclosure will be filed once that is complete.”
Datwyler’s explanation “does not add up at all,” Fischer said. He noted that setting up a blind trust does “not give you license to ignore financial disclosure deadlines.” Fischer added that Flippo is still legally required to disclose the assets he held while campaigning before any blind trust may have been set up.
Earlier this month, the Campaign Legal Center requested that the House Ethics Committee investigate missing disclosure reports from more than 60 House candidates. The letter highlights Flippo and two other House candidates who failed to submit financial disclosure forms despite each reporting loaning their campaigns more than $1 million. A day earlier, a Reno voter also requested that the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section investigate Flippo for failing to file his financial disclosures.
Flippo has put his service in the Air Force between 1985 and 2009 at the center of his campaign biography. After leaving the military, he spent the next decade doing preventive maintenance work for BP’s oil operations in Alaska. In 2014, while still working for BP, Flippo and his wife purchased their first home in Las Vegas, according to Clark County records. Three years later, the Flippos sold that home and bought another Las Vegas property for $385,000. Clark County records show that they took out a $375,000 mortgage to buy it. (The document does not disclose the interest rate.)
That same year, Flippo became the owner of a hobby shop in St. George, Utah. According to public records, Flippo’s personal property in the city consists of a parking space for an RV. He is in the process of selling the lot for about $80,000, per a listing posted on Zillow. Flippo and his wife bought that property after the retired Air Force officer pivoted to a new career as an financial adviser in 2019 for First Command, a financial company that works with military families.
At least initially, Flippo does not appear to have had substantial liquid assets while working as a financial adviser. In early 2020, Clark County records show that a representative for a Nevada LLC signed paperwork to sell the Flippos the Las Vegas home they currently own. Two days later, Flippo and his wife took on $68,000 of debt. About two weeks later, the couple officially bought their Las Vegas home for $565,000 with the assistance of a $423,750 mortgage, according to public records. They then sold their previous Las Vegas residence and satisfied the $68,000 debt. The sequence suggests that Flippo may have needed the assistance of a bridge loan for his 2020 home purchase. A few years later, when he launched a bid for a Las Vegas-area congressional district, he began reporting hundreds of thousands of dollars of personal donations to his campaign.
Flippo was still working for First Command during the 2024 congressional run, when he narrowly lost a primary after reportedly putting in more than $700,000 of his own money. Later in 2024, First Command fired Flippo after he allegedly “violated numerous company policies and regulatory regulations related to electronic communications, books and records,” according to a disclosure filed with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. (The firm reported that “no client harm was involved.”) In March 2025, after about four months of unemployment, he began his current job working for an affiliate of the wealth management firm LPL Financial.
Flippo initially filed last year to run again for Nevada’s 4th Congressional District, which is located in and around where he lived in Las Vegas. But after Amodei announced his retirement this February, Flippo said he would run to replace the congressman in the northern Nevada district. He soon moved into a rental property in the district.
Between January 2025 and June 2026, FEC records show Flippo making numerous loans to his campaign committee worth more than $1.6 million in total. About two-thirds of that money came on the final days of the quarterly FEC reporting periods that help shape perceptions of a campaign’s relative strength.
Public records reveal that Flippo entered into financing agreements for what appear to be home improvement projects during the same period he reported having enough liquid assets to bankroll much of his campaign.
In September 2025, according to FEC records, Flippo’s campaign repaid the candidate $4,000. Two days later, a financing statement, which I obtained from the Nevada secretary of state’s office, listed the Flippos as debtors to Hatch Bank as part of an agreement under which “SOLAR EQUIPMENT” serves as collateral. Similarly, on April 28, Flippo received a $12,000 loan repayment from his campaign, according to FEC records. Two days later, Flippo was named in the financing statement collateralized by “FLOORING” at his Las Vegas home.
The campaign has also reported receiving eyebrow-raising donations from Flippo’s relatives. About a dozen members of the Flippo family and members of the family his sister married into are recorded as having donated the legal maximum of $7,000 to his current campaign.
In one case, Flippo’s niece and nephew were both reported as donating $7,000 on the same day in June 2025. No other donations from those relatives appear in FEC records. Both are listed in Flippo campaign records as being students. One graduated from college earlier this year, according to her LinkedIn page. Her younger sibling, who appears to have attended high school as recently as 2023, is an actor whose credits include minor roles.
It is not clear where the money for these reported donations came from. Under campaign finance law, it is illegal for individuals to make so-called straw donations that are funded by someone else. Fischer noted that it can raise “red flags when people who would not otherwise appear to have the finances to make a contribution are all of a sudden making large contributions for the first time.” (Flippo’s brother, niece, and nephew did not respond to requests for comment sent to numbers listed for them in public records.)
Flippo’s campaign reported spending $2.1 million through June. According to FEC records, about 70 percent of that money has been routed through a campaign firm founded by Rory McShane, a GOP consultant with a long history of working for far-right election deniers including Gosar and former Nevada secretary of state candidate Jim Marchant. (In 2022, I reported on questionable loans Marchant made to his campaign and what appeared to be violations of Nevada campaign finance law on his part. McShane did not respond to the questions sent to him and the Flippo campaign.)
Political ad spending records maintained by the Federal Communications Commission show more than $500,000 of television advertising contracts and invoices in the Reno area for the Flippo campaign during the primary. Those records are submitted to the FCC by local television stations and cable providers. They help confirm that significant sums are being spent by the Flippo campaign, but they do not show the source of the funds the candidate has reported loaning to his campaign.
Flippo has also benefited from the more than $350,000 that two of his siblings are reported to have donated to a super PAC called American Honor. His previous campaign committee and the super PAC share many ties: They were established on the same day in 2022 and have both paid companies affiliated with McShane, the right-wing political consultant through whose firm most of Flippo’s spending has been routed. Flippo and the super PAC also use the same treasurer: Datwyler, who was accused in a 2024 complaint submitted to the Justice Department of having a “long history of running roughshod over federal campaign finance law and the regulations of the FEC, where he has repeatedly filed or caused to be filed false reports.” (There is no indication that the Justice Department pursued the matter.)
Datwyler is perhaps best known for having been named in an FEC filing as Santos’ new treasurer while the disgraced then-congressman’s career imploded. At the time, Datwyler’s attorney told me, other reporters, and the FEC that his client was not Santos’ treasurer and that his name had been added incorrectly. But the attorney later retracted that claim after the Daily Beast reported that Datwyler had been Santos’ de facto treasurer, doing the work while a friend held the title on paper.
Datwyler also kept working Ogles after it was revealed that the Tennessee congressman had reported a nonexistent $320,000 loan to his 2022 campaign. (Ogles lost his August primary despite a Trump endorsement.) “He’s a sitting member of Congress, so, you know, you don’t want to lose them as clients, right,” Datwyler told congressional investigators looking into Ogles’ campaign finance practices. “So, you kind of just have to deal with certain things sometimes.” (Datwyler did not respond to questions sent to him on Friday.)
It has now been more than a month since Datwyler said that Flippo was tying up some loose ends before finally filing a financial disclosure. Last week, Flippo’s campaign told a Reno TV station that the process was still ongoing and would be completed soon. It was better, the campaign claimed, to be right and late than wrong and early. Flippo’s first disclosure was due in May 2023.
