Tag: super pac
Trump PAC Is Raising A Fortune But Spending Little

Trump PAC Is Raising A Fortune But Spending Little

Former President Donald Trump has yet to say whether or not he will run for president in 2024. Regardless, his stranglehold on the Republican Party remains. And 14 months after Trump left the White House, his political action committee, Save America, is still raising a fortune.

Journalist Edward Helmore, in an article published by The Guardian on March 27, observes, “As of this month, Trump has $108,046,100 saved in his Save America political fund, more than the Republican and Democratic National Committees combined, and 12 times as much as the fund — PAC for the Future — for the Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. And all of that has been raised while Trump’s own ambitions remain unclear. Though his grip on the Republican Party remains tight — and he has waged an endorsement war against his opponents — the big question over whether Trump will run again for the White House remains unanswered.”

Save America, Helmore notes, is “registered as a leadership PAC,” meaning that if Trump runs for president in 2024, he “cannot easily spend the money on himself.” But Trump hasn’t been quick to spend Save America’s money on other Republicans.

“Since Trump founded Save America in November 2020,” Helmore observes, “the group has raised $124m — the largest war chest ever built by an ex-president — but spent only about $14m, or around 11 percent. In contrast, the main fund for supporting Senate Republican candidates has spent about 80 percent of the $135m it raised since the start of 2021, while its main fund for congressional candidates has spent half of the $162m it has raised in the same period.”

Democratic consultant Carly Cooperman wonders if Trump will spend more of Save America’s money as the November 2022 election draws closer.

“It’s consistent with Trump’s political priorities — Trump first above everything else — and makes him well-positioned for a presidential run in 2024,” Cooperman told The Guardian. “It’s possible he decides to make a big splash in competitive races as we get closer to the midterm elections, but above all, Trump’s immense popularity and ability to raise large sums of money makes him even more powerful in the Republican Party.”

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

Pro-Trump Group Blew By Basic Campaign Finance Laws

Pro-Trump Group Blew By Basic Campaign Finance Laws

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica.

A group that gave more money to one of President-elect Trump’s fundraising efforts than any other political action committee failed to disclose its donors before Election Day and exceeded caps on contribution amounts.

America Comes First PAC was created in early August. But for the next three months, it disclosed nothing about how much it raised, who its donors were or how it was spending its money.

That eventually prompted a warning from federal regulators.

“It is important that you file this report immediately,” read an October 31 letter from the Federal Election Commission.

But Election Day came and went — and still nothing.

As federal regulators continued to wait for the required disclosures, the group posted a photo two days after the election showing Trump meeting with America Comes First secretary David Schamens.

It wasn’t until this week that the group finally began filing the disclosure forms. The filings show that the bulk of individual donations to the group came from Schamens.

In the early 1990s, Schamens was accused by the Securities and Exchange Commission of securities fraud. In a settlement, he did not admit to the allegations but agreed to be barred from associating with investment companies or securities brokers. Schamens currently is director of a New Jersey technology company that caters to financial institutions and securities traders.

The money raised by America Comes First — $315,601 total — is a tiny fraction of what Trump and his supporters raised overall. But Daniel Weiner, an attorney at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, called the group’s actions “tremendously concerning.”

“Basically they’re not obeying any campaign finance law whatsoever,” Weiner said. “That’s why we have disclosure requirements, because we want to see who is influencing the election and we want that disclosed in a timely manner so voters can make an informed choice.”

Weiner said it’s hard to predict how much the group could be fined by the FEC. He urged Trump’s fundraising committee to return the contributions given the apparent problems, but said it’s not clear the law requires them to.

Schamens told ProPublica that waiting until after the election to disclose the source of the group’s funding was unintentional and caused by poor bookkeeping. (The PAC also had not filed another required report that was due midnight Thursday.)

“It’s not a big deal,” he said.

Schamens contributed at least $202,000 of the PAC’s total fundraising haul, according to FEC reports, although $45,000 of that appeared to be refunded to him.

Another $45,000 came from Sokal Media Group, an automotive advertising agency. The group’s filing attributed another $55,000 to “Kinderton Banjing Transfer” — with an address that corresponds to a Bank of America branch in North Carolina. Schamens could not explain what Kinderton Banjing Transfer was.

All those contributions exceed the $5,000 legal limit on donations to groups such as America Comes First PAC.

The group in turn donated to Trump Victory, a joint committee that raised money for the campaign, the national party, and state-level party groups. The America Comes First PAC donated $115,000 to Trump Victory, putting it ahead of the second largest PAC donor, Ohio mining corporation Murray Energy, at $100,000. (Here’s a helpful Wall Street Journal video explaining how the Trump Victory committee worked.)

Trump, like Hillary Clinton, also had a second joint committee that partnered solely with the national party, and not any state parties.

Trump’s transition team did not respond to a request for comment.

Along with donating to Trump’s joint committee, Schamens said the PAC produced ads targeting the Facebook pages and email inboxes of voters in the battleground states of Ohio, Pennsylvania and North Carolina. Thirty-second spots the group produced paint Hillary Clinton as insensitive about the Americans killed during the embassy attack in Benghazi and careless with sensitive emails.

“National security is not a joke,” stated one. “Trump takes it seriously.”

The filings also show a payment to the Lexington Dispatch, a daily newspaper in North Carolina, for “media expenses.”

None of those advertisements boosting Trump appear to have been reported as required. When committees spend at least $200 for independent advertisements intended to elect or defeat a candidate, FEC rules require disclosure of that specific spending within 24 to 48 hours of the ads running. America Comes First PAC has filed no independent expenditure reports with the FEC.

Any disclosures that come now, Weiner said, have little use.

“We want voters to be able to make the decision when they vote,” he said. “The damage is done and you can’t unring the bell.”

Schamens described his current company, TradeStream Analytics, as a technology company that optimizes and expedites securities trading. He said since 2008, his customers have been beleaguered by stricter regulatory enforcement, including on high-frequency trading.

“It’s incredibly unfair to our customers,” he said. “Our customers have been absolutely harassed to no end.”

Schamens said he has expressed those concerns — along with his frustrations about his company’s intellectual property not being protected — to the Trump camp in “just general conversations here and there.” When doing so, he said he was only representing himself, not the PAC. The PAC’s agenda, he said, focuses on curbing foreign aid, illegal immigration and wasteful military spending.

He said the photo of his meeting with Trump, posted two days after the election, was actually taken sometime in October, at a fundraiser he attended not representing the PAC, but as an individual donor. Schamens gave $27,000 to Trump Victory on Oct. 18, 2016.

The photo shows Trump seated at the center of a boardroom table, surrounded by 10 other men, all with bottles of water and leather portfolios.

“President-elect Donald Trump met with ACF’s Dave Schamens,” the caption reads, “to get insight on what he thinks will help make this country greater.”

Update, Dec. 10, 2016: David Schamens said Friday evening the PAC’s filings with the FEC were inaccurate, and that most of the donations did not come from him personally. As the group’s treasurer, he is responsible for accurately filing to the FEC. He said he would amend the filings next week.

IMAGE: Republican U.S. presidential nominee Donald Trump speaks during the third and final 2016 presidential campaign debate at UNLV in Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S., October 19, 2016.  REUTERS/Mike Blake

Right-Wing Media Fail In Effort To ‘Scandalize’ McAuliffe PAC Donation

Right-Wing Media Fail In Effort To ‘Scandalize’ McAuliffe PAC Donation

After initially failing to scandalize a Wall Street Journal story about political donations made by Clinton ally and Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s (D) political action committee (PAC) to the wife of an FBI official, conservative media are trying to revive the story. Now they’re trying to hype flawed, speculative allegations of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s alleged role in the fundraising for McAuliffe’s PAC in hopes of undermining the FBI’s investigation into Clinton’s emails.

In an October 23 article titled “Clinton Ally Aided Campaign of FBI Official’s Wife,” the Journal reported, “The political organization of Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, an influential Democrat with longstanding ties to Bill and Hillary Clinton, gave nearly $500,000 to the election campaign of the wife of an official at the Federal Bureau of Investigation who later helped oversee the investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s email use.” The piece implied that the McAuliffe PAC’s donation may have influenced FBI official Andrew McCabe, who is married to the donation’s recipient, Jill McCabe, in his later investigation of Clinton’s email use.

Not only did journalists deride the piece’s flimsy, “embarrassing” claim, but the Journal’s own reporting also failed to support the idea that there was any impropriety by McAuliffe or McCabe. Indeed, other media outlets noted that “there’s literally nothing” to the story, both because “the timing is complicated if you’re trying to prove a Clinton email connection” and because “McAuliffe’s support of Jill McCabe was part of a much broader effort at the time to try to win back a Democratic majority in the state Senate.”

That didn’t stop right-wing media figures from hyping the “appearance of impropriety” and claiming that McAuliffe “acted as a bag man to pay off people sniffing around Hillary’s emails.”

After briefly piercing into the mainstream media current, the toothless story seemed to fade away, until theDaily Mailreported on October 28 that “Clinton headlined a major fundraiser” for McAuliffe’s PAC “before the group steered nearly $500,000 to” Jill McCabe. The paper suggested that Clinton’s involvement in the fundraiser again “raise[s] questions about the impartiality of the FBI’s investigation.”

But just as the initial Journal story fell apart under scrutiny of the timeline — Andrew McCabe didn’t become involved in the FBI investigation until several months after McAuliffe’s donation to Jill McCabe — so too does the Daily Mail’s bizarre and complicated suggestion that Clinton headlined a fundraiser because she was able to foresee that resulting donations would months later go to the wife of a man who would later be promoted twice to play a lead role in an investigation that did not yet exist.

After organizing a timeline of the fundraiser, donation, and investigation — and lightly suggesting the optics don’t look good (a common media technique employed when investigating many of Clinton’s nonscandals) — Slate’s Ben Mathis-Lilley wrote:

What hasn’t been proven is that Hillary Clinton did anything improper. Clinton would have had to be a pretty advanced political chessmaster to do a June 2015 fundraiser with the knowledge that, in October 2015, it would benefit the wife of an FBI official who would be promoted to an oversight position into her email investigation the next February. And McAuliffe would have to be an even savvier operator to have recruited Jill McCabe to run for office in March 2015 in the hopes that, sometime down the line, her husband would get promoted to the point of overseeing an investigation that didn’t yet exist. There’s also no evidence Andrew McCabe actually influenced the email investigation in a way that benefited Clinton. For all we know, he could’ve been pushing for her prosecution only to be overruled by Comey.

Indeed, perhaps a much simpler explanation for Clinton’s fundraising appearance and the McAuliffe PAC’s donation is that a leading Democrat raised money for the Virginia state party and the governor’s PAC to try to swing the legislature to benefit the Democratic governor — who is also an old friend — during one of the few major off-year elections in the country.

Yet, even though almost nothing about the story has changed, right-wing media are now hyping the Daily Mail’s “exclusive” to suggest impropriety by Clinton and McAuliffe and a compromised FBI investigation. Fox News’ Tucker Carlson said the situation was “sleazy,” and the pro-Trump Breitbart News suggested the donations are “unusual” and raise questions, despite the continued lack of evidence of any wrongdoing.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters. 

Photo: mdfriendofhillary/Flickr

Our Poisonous Partisan Politics

Our Poisonous Partisan Politics

A recent study from the Pew Research Center shows that contempt across the partisan divide is bitter and widespread. Respondents displayed a nasty animosity for the opposing side and showed little sign of tolerance for conflicting views.

Party polarization has been underway for years, and the Congress has never been so divided. But the toxic, finger-pointing rabble has escaped like a demon from Capitol Hill and spread plague-like throughout the United States. The toxicity doesn’t stifle, it chokes. Discourse has become nearly impossible. Wherever one stands, the other side is no longer judged as merely wrong or misguided, but is now considered dangerously stupid and lazy; scary, dishonest, immoral, and more than anything, a threat.

In 2014, a Pew study of political polarization noted the “growing contempt that many Republicans and Democrats have for the opposing party,” and since then, “many” is now “most.”

This year, 58 percent of Republicans have a “very unfavorable impression” of Democrats, 12 percent more than two years ago and 26 percent more than in 2008. Democrats’ disdain for Republicans has followed a similar trajectory.

The 2014 survey asked Democrats and Republicans who offered “very unfavorable opinions” of the opposing party if they felt the other side was “so misguided that they threaten the nation’s well-being.” Thirty-seven percent of Republicans and 31 percent of Democrats felt this way, and in two years those numbers have increased by eight and 10 points, respectively.

Among Democrats, 55 percent say the Republican Party makes them feel “afraid.” Forty-nine percent of Republicans say that about Democrats. These numbers increase among the highly politically engaged, with 70 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of Republicans fearing their opposition.

Disdain for the other side is as strong, and sometimes outweighs, positive feelings about the party one belongs to. Majorities of Democrats and Republicans cite their party’s platform as their deciding factor for joining, but almost as many say they were driven by “the harm caused by the opposing party’s policies.” Even independent voters, who have come to outnumber members of both major parties and tend to lean Democratic or Republican, are overwhelmingly inclined to cite negative factors for their loose partisan ties.

On a “thermometer” scale of 0-100, where zero is the coldest rating and 100 is the warmest, Democrats give Republicans the mean rating of 31, and Republicans give Democrats a 29. Things get even colder for politicians: Democrats’ average rating of Trump is 11, and Republicans, on average, give Clinton a 12.

Among Democrats, the most resonating critique of Republicans is that members of the GOP are more closed-minded than other Americans; 70 percent of Democrats feel this way. Forty-two percent of Democrats say Republicans are more dishonest, 35 percent say they are more immoral, and 33 percent say they are more unintelligent. By contrast, more than half of Republicans, 52 percent, see Democrats as more closed-minded than other Americans and nearly as many say Democrats are more immoral, dishonest, and lazy.

Not surprisingly, respondents expressed approval for members of their own party. Sixty-seven percent of Democrats consider themselves more open-minded than other Americans, and 59 percent and 51 percent of Republicans, respectively, say GOP members are more hardworking and moral. Republicans and Democrats also show a tendency to view the opposing party as highly ideological, while considering their own less ideological.

There is some hope for social cohesion among diverging parties, but little hope for helpful political discussion. The majority of Democrats and Republicans think they could get along with a new neighbor from the other party, but 42 percent of Democrats and 43 percent of Republicans say it would be easier to welcome members of their own party into the neighborhood. Democrats and Republicans are about equally inclined to say political conversation with people whom they disagree with is “stressful and frustrating” as “interesting and informative” — and either way, an equal amount of Democrats and Republicans, 44 percent, say they “almost never” agree with the other party’s positions.

The cause for this divide is unclear, but researchers suggest a merging of politics, lifestyle, and choice of residence has limited many Americans’ exposure to people with different opinions.

Pew President Michael Dimock told NPR, “If we in fact are surrounding ourselves increasingly with like-minded people, that becomes another factor that can potentially create distance between ‘our side’ and ‘their side.’”

In a 2015 article for the Washington Post, titled The top 10 reasons American politics are so broken, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and political science professor Sam Abrams write, “Liberals and conservatives dress differently, decorate their rooms differently, read different books, take different vacations and drink different alcoholic beverages. As the differences between supporters of the two parties became ever more pervasive and ever more visible to the naked eye, it became easier to spot members of the other team and then dislike them for the way they live.”

There is also the strange relationship between policy positions and political parties that seems to decide voters’ stances on how to handle seemingly disconnected issues.

“The more conservative you are on foreign policy, the more likely you are to be conservative on social issues, on economic issues, on the role of government,” Dimock said. “These dimensions, many of which had very little correlation with each other in the past, are getting increasingly aligned.”

Haidt and Abrams say this is the result of a combination of geography, immigration, and what they call ideological purification, meaning a lack of intellectual diversity within both major parties. The Republicans are conservatives and the Democrats are liberals, which was not the case before 1980.

“The Democratic Party was historically an agrarian party with its power base in the South,” Haidt and Abrams write. “But with the political purification of the parties, the Democrats have become the urban party, focused on issues of concern to city dwellers and expressing more cosmopolitan and secular values. Rural areas, meanwhile, shifted toward the Republican Party. The GOP became much more hospitable to rural interests and values, which tend to be more religious, patriotic and family-oriented.”

So why is there so much hostility on the political landscape? As Haidt and Abrams note, “a basic principle in social psychology is that people will divide themselves up quite readily based on the most trivial distinctions” – and these are not trivial matters.

Photo: Protesters confront a woman, center, leaving a rally for Republican U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump in Fresno, California, U.S. May 27, 2016.  REUTERS/Noah Berger