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But one name has raised flags for campaign finance watchdogs. A Saturday panel on “media insight” will feature American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS co-founder Karl Rove. The Crossroads reportedly plan to spend a stunning $300 million to help Romney defeat President Barack Obama this November, but they are legally prohibited from coordinating this effort with Romney’s campaign.

Back in December, Romney decried the rise of Super PACs like Rove’s American Crossroads, saying they have been a “disaster” for the political system. He said at the time:

Super PACs have to be entirely separate from a campaign and a candidate. I’m not allowed to communicate with a super PAC in any way, shape or form… If we coordinate in any way whatsoever, we go to the big house.

Mary Boyle, vice president for communications at Common Cause, told ThinkProgress that having one of the leaders of an allied Super PAC at at campaign event with major donors “seems to make a mockery of the rule that bans coordination between a super PAC and a candidate.”

Tara Malloy, senior counsel at the Campaign Legal Center agreed that this presents appearance issues, but would probably not violate any coordination rules. She told ThinkProgress that “the coordination rule is a pretty slim reed between candidates and the SuperPACs that support those candidates. It’s not by any means and airtight barrier between those two.” In order to violate the rules, a candidate would have to have a “substantial discussion” about the Super PAC’s advertising strategies — something Romney and Rove are unlikely to do at this retreat.

“The scandal in Washington,” Malloy observed, “is what is legal, not what’s illegal.” As such, while Romney’s inclusion of Rove at the event open him up to questions of judgment and hypocrisy, is unlikely either will end up in the “big house.”

Justice Anthony Kennedy

Salon’s Alex Seitz-Wald has identified a similar situation with a much bigger player:

Last week, Crossroads GPS, one of the conservative political nonprofits tied to Karl Rove, dropped $70,000 in ads attacking North Dakota Democratic Senate candidate Heidi Heitkamp, bringing their spending to approximately $140,000 in the race so far. Heitkamp’s opponent is Republican congressman Rick Berg. It would be totally illegal for Berg’s campaign to talk to Crossroads GPS and tell them, say, where he thinks it would be most helpful for them to buy ads. But that doesn’t mean the message can’t be conveyed through an intermediary.

Last month, Berg’s campaign finance filings to the FEC showed that his campaign paid the Black Rock Group, a small but powerful Republican strategic consulting firm in Virginia, thousands of dollars for “communications consulting.” Meanwhile, American Crossroads, the “twin” organization of Crossroads GPS (they have the same staff, same offices and the same mission, just different tax and legal structures), is paying thousands of dollars each month to the same firm for “advocacy [and] communications consulting.”

While a Black Rock spokeswoman told Salon that Black Rock too has had “firewalls in place” to ensure the firm can “legally engage in federal campaign and independent expenditure or issue advocacy campaigns,” Seitz-Wald notes that the firm has just three partners — making it hard to imagine that the Crossroads team and the Berg team are completely unaware of what the other is doing. But, due to weak Federal Election Commission regulation, even if they were, it would likely be completely legal.

Justice Anthony Kennedy’s 5-4 Citizens United majority opinion argued that “The appearance of influence or access, furthermore, will not cause the electorate to lose faith in our democracy. By definition, an independent expenditure is political speech presented to the electorate that is not coordinated with a candidate.” This loophole — and the overwhelming public opposition to the outside groups their ruling enabled — show just how wrong he was.

The Karl Rove-linked American Crossroads Super PAC and Crossroads GPS 501(c)(4) organizations have the same president, same spokesman, same mailing address, and same right-wing ideology. Both groups can, thanks to the Citizens United and SpeechNow.org rulings, accept unlimited sums of money from individuals and corporations — a privilege they’ve wielded to raise $100 million for the 2012 cycle alone and to run millions of dollars worth of political television ads. But one key difference separates the two entities: disclosure. While American Crossroads must publicly identify its major contributors, Crossroads GPS does not make the names of any of its donors public.

A Center for Public Integrity analysis of the two groups reveals that of the combined $123 million raised by the two groups in 2010 and 2011, $76.8 million, or 62 percent, was secret money contributed to Crossroads GPS. That money came from fewer than 100 individual donors — meaning an average donation of more than $750,000.

Crossroads GPS has made more than $1.3 million in “electioneering communications” — independent broadcast ads referencing federal candidates, run shortly before an election — since its formation. While the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (commonly known as McCain-Feingold) required that groups identify the donors who pay for these types of ads, a 2007 Federal Election Commission regulation effectively neutered this requirement.

A recent federal court ruling struck down that regulation, but the Commission has yet to implement the ruling and says it may appeal. It is unclear whether this ruling might force groups like Crossroads GPS to disclose their donors, retroactively. But, to this point, citizens have had no way of determining who is really behind these ads.

The combined $123 million raised in two years, it is worth noting, is more than Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) spent on his entire 2008 presidential general election campaign. And in addition, American Crossroads has already raised another $49 million in the first quarter of 2012, giving the Super PAC about $100 million for this cycle, according to Politico. Crossroads GPS only reports its fundraising totals once a year.

With giant corporations and billionaire activists dominating the airwaves and overwhelming the political process, Crossroads and similar organizations continue to show just how wrong the Supreme Court’s 5-4 majority was in thinking “independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.”