Grantham
The paper trail reporters followed led to a cafe that medical student Paul Holzer and his brother, Adam McLain, a former Marine who has also been active in politics, plan to open in Grantham.
After Trump filed his latest campaign disclosure report with the Federal Election Commission on Monday, ThinkProgress.org, a progressive website affiliated with the Center for American Progress Action Fund, focused on $35,000 in payments the Trump campaign made in May to Draper Sterling, a Londonderry, N.H.,-based limited liability company that took its name from the two central characters in the television show Mad Men. The payments, the FEC reports said, were for “web advertising.”
Draper Sterling LLC was registered by Jon Adkins, a friend and partner of Holzer’s in a medical device firm, XenoTherapeutics. In addition, ThinkProgress reported, Trump’s campaign also paid Adkins and Holzer $3,000 apiece for “field consulting” in May.
On top of that, Holzer, who worked for Republican Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker’s 2014 campaign, also worked on a gubernatorial campaign in Missouri where another outfit, a super PAC called Patriots for America, allegedly owed $56,234 to Draper Sterling, according to the ThinkProgress report. A professor in Missouri has filed a complaint with the FEC about Patriots for America, calling into question its finances, ThinkProgress reported.
McLain was the head of Patriots for America, and when the website’s reporter called a listed number, the phone rang to Grace’s Grantham Cafe, a soon-to-open eatery the brothers are starting off Route 10 near Interstate 89 in Grantham.
In addition to the brothers, the registered agent for the cafe is Adkins, the Londonderry resident.
“To recap, there is a nexus between Jon Adkins, Paul Holzer and Adam McLain that meets at the mysterious Draper Sterling,” the ThinkProgress story said. “We still aren’t sure what Draper Sterling actually does but these individuals are going to considerable lengths to obfuscate their activities.”
Several media outlets picked up the story — Londonderry is near the hometown of Corey Lewandowski, the campaign manager Trump just fired — and a handful of Democratic political activists emailed the story to the Valley News, given the Grantham connection.
A Valley News reporter visited the cafe at 151 Route 10 North, which was previously occupied by Uncle Joe’s Ice Cream and Candies, and spoke with McLain in person. Later on Thursday, she spoke by phone with McLain and Holzer in a joint interview.
The brothers said the campaign work was legitimately performed and the cafe is named after Holzer’s young daughter. He and his wife, Melanie, live in Enfield in part of the Eastman development, and McLain said he currently is staying at his brother’s home. McLain is listed as the manager of the cafe on town documents.
“I think it is an example of how people leap to conclusions, especially I think in the media today,” Holzer, who said he is now in London, said during the telephone call. “In a very short amount of time a concept or something that was very unclear was perpetuated.”
Holzer said he and Adkins, under the title Draper Sterling, earned the money provided to them by Trump through a “number-crunching” of sorts. The pair created spreadsheets, which help campaigns predict such things as voter turnout and race winners, among other thing. They also did other work related to web advertising.
It wasn’t the duo’s first rodeo — they worked for several other campaigns in the past — so they were a good candidate for the job, Holzer said.
“If you are good at it you keep getting bigger and bigger clients,” Holzer said. “The reason we got called was not because we were lousy at it.”
Holzer said in a January letter of intent filed with the town of Grantham that he was a Navy SEAL officer from 2003 to 2013 and completed post-graduate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He said he currently is a medical student at Dartmouth College’s Geisel School of Medicine.
The brothers said some of the money they’ve made from political work went into Grace’s Grantham Cafe, which they said they started to provide a good cup of coffee.
“Instead of going and taking out a loan, we raised the money to do it ourselves,” Holzer said.
The cafe’s website said it was to open Memorial Day, however permitting issues stalled the grand opening. The restaurant has obtained needed permits from the town and is currently pending its final health inspection from the state. The men said they hope to be open for the Fourth of July.
Holzer and Adkins have run businesses in the past, Holzer said, including XenoTherapeutics, which is registered as a nonprofit corporation with an address in Boston’s North End neighborhood. The firm’s website says it has “developed a humanitarian device from a genetically modified line of swine that provides a human tissue substitute.”
In 2013, Holzer and Adkins ran a business called Dynamic Solutions. Under that title, the two worked for other political campaigns — in a similar way that they helped in Trump’s campaign.
When that business closed in 2015, the pair began another start up. Having just created coffee mugs with the initials “DS” for Dynamic Solutions, Holzer said that they wanted their new firm to have the same initials, hence the name Draper Sterling.
Although Holzer said the scrutiny over the past few days has been unwanted, he said it has generated a lot of interest in the cafe. He urged people to be slower to judge in the future.
McLain said he spent some time before bed Wednesday night looking at the extensive social media traffic about the Trump-related filing, including a post to the cafe’s Facebook page which suggested Grace was a “fake child.”
“This is Grace’s cafe,” he said at the storefront Thursday afternoon. “It’s all for her.”
Jordan Cuddemi can be reached at jcuddemi@vnews.com or 603-727-3248.