White House press secretary Jay Carney called the controversial super PAC ad that suggested Mitt Romney was responsible for a woman's death a "third party ad that essentially had no money behind it," in a Thursday press briefing.
Priorities USA, the Obama-affiliated super PAC, is funded by a cadre of wealthy Hollywood and business Democratic donors, including Dreamworks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg and outsourcing pioneer Irwin Jacobs.
"A third party ad that essentially had no money behind it, never appeared except accidentally on one station once," Carney said of the Priorities ad.
Although the ad has not appeared on television outside the one reported instance, when it was released, Priorities co-founder Bill Burton said the ad was part of a $20 million campaign, had been shipped, and would air in "battleground ground states around the country," in an Aug. 8 interview with CNN.
The Free Beacon profiled Priorities' ten largest donors last week.
UPDATE: The Priorities ad has 819,000 Youtube views, more than 40 percent of which came from paid web ads, according to Buzzfeed.