It's not illegal for two parties to have the same PR firm, provided that the two activities have some "firewall" between them. The media so far have just said, "Two parties had the same PR firm."
Now, PR firms often have some sort of bias or side that they're on. They have expertise in that particular area. So they'd naturally attract politicians, organizations, other individuals on that side. It's like politicians' getting support from lobbyists--lobbyists are going to support those that already tend to think like them, not those who'll never give them the time of day; on the other hand, it often looks like the money's amounted to a bribe, not pursuing common goals. The two things look the same and untangling them is difficult, except for those for whom suspicion is proof.
Now, what does that firewall look like? There's the question. The two PR campaigns have to have different people running them, at least at the planning stage. But if there's one person who manages media contacts and contracts and both funnel down to that person, who has no control over the content or amount, is that okay? Should they be in different branches? What if they're not but the two people don't talk? What if they're in different branches but worked together for 5 years and are friends so they *do* talk? How's that different from being in the same branch and talking because they run into each other on the way out of the building at the end of the day? And if they say that they talked about their families and not about those two clients, what then?
So you look at the policies and procedures that are in place to prevent coordination, knowing full well that coordination can still occur. You look at what was done, to see signs of coordination, but also knowing that what looks like coordination may not be, it may be because the two clients are merely similar or because the two executives in charge of the two campaigns worked on something similar together last year. Or maybe two low-level employees have adjacent cubicles, so the executives maintained the firewall but it broke down at the bottommost level. Then there are feedback loops, where you're doing one campaign, see the televized or print ads put out by your colleague one floor down while watching tv or reading the Post, and work off of what you saw. That *really* looks like coordination--but it's the kind of coordination that, say, Sanders' and Clinton's campaigns might have had in attacking Trump when Sanders' team saw something HRC's team put out and leveraged it.
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