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The Continuing Financial Muddle At A Pro-Trump Political Committee

The Continuing Financial Muddle At A Pro-Trump Political Committee

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica.

A political action committee that backed Donald Trump’s bid for the presidency is continuing to flout campaign finance laws.

Earlier this month, ProPublica reported that the America Comes First PAC had violated the rules by not disclosing the source of its funding before Election Day and by exceeding caps on contribution amounts.

America Comes First gave $115,000 to Trump Victory, a group that raised money for the Trump campaign and for national and state-level Republican groups. It now ranks as the second-biggest PAC contributor to Trump Victory, according to a list compiled by the nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics — behind GEO Group, a private prison company.

After the ProPublica article was published, the treasurer of the PAC, David Schamens, said the group’s filings with the Federal Election Commission were inaccurate, and that they would be amended. Last week they were — but the amended filing includes new irregularities.

For example, the original filing lists Schamens as the top donor to the PAC. The new documents show the top donor as Tradedesk Financial, a firm that lists an address on Wall Street. (Schamens didn’t respond to questions about Tradedesk Financial or other information in the new filings. One online record indicates that a woman named Piliana Schamens was linked to Tradedesk in 2010.) However, a PAC is not permitted to receive direct corporate support. Perhaps recognizing that restriction, America Comes First’s new filings now identify the group as a super PAC, meaning that moving forward, it can receive unlimited corporate money.

Yet declaring itself a super PAC created a new problem for America Comes First, because super PACs can’t donate directly to a political campaign such as Trump Victory. A super PAC can make independent expenditures, such as on advertisements that support a candidate, but those can’t be made in coordination with the campaign. To reconcile this problem in its new filings, America Comes First reclassified the $115,000 it gave as independent expenditures. Yet the payee is still Trump Victory, meaning the expense went to a campaign — in violation of the rules for super PACs.

Schamens, who attended an October fundraiser with Trump as federal regulators waited for any disclosure from his PAC, was accused by the Securities and Exchange Commission of securities fraud in the early 1990s. 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 optimizes and expedites securities trading for financial institutions and traders.

In an interview with ProPublica before the amended filing, Schamens said that among the concerns he related to the Trump camp was the over-enforcement of securities regulations since 2008.

Read more of ProPublica’s coverage of campaign finance, lobbying and politics in our ongoing series, The Breakdown.

IMAGE: A supporter of Donald Trump at a rally in Norcross, Georgia. REUTERS/Tami Chappell

Clinton Ad Blitz Outpaces Trump As His Super PACs Bow Out

Clinton Ad Blitz Outpaces Trump As His Super PACs Bow Out

By Michelle Conlin, Grant Smith and Ginger Gibson

NEW YORK (Reuters) – In the crucial last weeks of the U.S. presidential campaign, Democrat Hillary Clinton has dramatically widened her advantage over Republican rival Donald Trump in ad spending, according to campaign finance reports released on Thursday.

The newest filings showed Clinton’s campaign and Super PAC outspending Trump in the first three weeks of October by a factor of two to one on everything from national TV ads to local outreach on smartphone screens.

At the same time, the two Super PACs associated with Trump’s White House bid have seen their fundraising start to stall out, with one of the groups reserving no broadcast or cable ads between Oct. 20 and Election Day, according to data from ad-tracking firm SMG Delta.

Clinton and Priorities USA, the Super PAC that supports her, have spent $360 million on all types of advertising since the beginning of the campaign, said the new reports, which covered spending through Oct. 19.

That total blows away the $147 million spent on advertising by Trump and his two affiliated Super PACs during the same period.

What’s more, for the period beginning Oct. 20 and running through the Nov. 8 election, Clinton and her Super PAC have reserved an additional $55 million in TV ads, according to SMG Delta, including $30.5 million from her campaign and $25 million from her Super PAC.

A Super PAC is a fund-raising group that must operate separately from political campaigns but can raise unlimited sums.

The Trump campaign has committed to spending $32.4 million during the same period, with the Trump Super PAC known as Great America PAC saying it would also contribute another $2.35 million in broadcast and cable ads.

The newest batch of campaign finance filings also reveal that the celebrity businessman’s recent vow that he would contribute in excess of $100 million to his campaign out of his own fortune has also fallen short.

Trump contributed $56 million through the end of September, chipping in an additional $31,000 since then.

Spending on television commercials does not decide an election. Trump, with his controversial statements and inflammatory tweets, has mastered the art of garnering free media coverage, which is expected to top $5 billion by Election Day, more than double the amount Clinton is likely to earn, according to data analytics tracker mediaQuant.

But ever since Trump’s campaign began to falter last summer after he criticized the family of a slain U.S. soldier, Clinton has been able to use her ad spending juggernaut to repetitively pound at criticisms of Trump, which several strategists said had exacerbated his slide in polls, where he now lags Clinton by eight percentage points.

Trump could pour more money into his ad operation in the final 11 days of the campaign. Republican presidential campaign operatives said areas where Trump could still spend included battleground states, national ad buys and digital outreach and phone banking.

But they also said it may be too late for such outlays to make a difference.

“The stations would gladly take his money,” said Fred Davis, a major Republican ad maker. “I just don’t think he will.”

During the Republican nominating contests, Trump vanquished 16 opponents in part by eschewing campaign finance mainstays such as ads and pollsters.

“He felt he won the primary with basically no ad spending by being a larger-than-life TV personality. It worked,” Davis said. But the general election, he added, was “a whole new ballgame.”

ADS DON’T MATTER ‘UNTIL THEY DO’

Many of Clinton’s TV ads have focused on upbeat messages featuring her work on behalf of women and children. She’s also spent a large amount of her advertising budget attacking Trump, including a commercial that showed children listening to some of his most demeaning remarks about women.

Trump’s ads, by contrast, paint a dark picture of America, besieged by violence and on the brink of economic destruction.

Rick Wilson, a former strategist for Republican Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign, said “ads don’t matter, until they do,” adding that comments by Trump that critics have called racist and sexist were providing maximum ammunition for Clinton.

Trump may not be able to rely on his small cadre of big donors, either: Make America Number 1 PAC – a super PAC formed by conservative mega-donor Robert Mercer – raised nothing between Oct. 1 and 19.

At the same time, Trump has also stopped doing high-dollar fundraisers.

Overall, the reports released on Thursday night showed how much Trump and his lean campaign operation have been dwarfed by Clinton’s big money juggernaut. In total, Trump has raised $292 million between his campaign and affiliated Super PACs, including his own contributions, whereas Clinton has hauled in more than twice that, at $718 million.

(Editing by Peter Cooney)

Photo: U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton gestures to supporters at the IBEW union hall in Commerce, California, U.S., May 24, 2016. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

There’s One Good Thing About Donald Trump–As Long As He Loses

There’s One Good Thing About Donald Trump–As Long As He Loses

Donald Trump has shaken American politics to their very core. And in the process, he has, maybe without knowing it, completely re-aligned the positions and appeals of the two major parties. That’s because Trump is an opportunist: He chases political victories where he knows his opponents would be called hypocrites for defending themselves.

He pushed the entire Republican Party to flip its position on free trade (all of his “establishment” picks for vice president supported NAFTA and TPP, until he told them not to) because the party’s now-called “globalist” trade wing was vulnerable in a year of economic populism. He did the unthinkable by calling out George W. Bush for lying about weapons of mass destruction before the Iraq War — in South Carolina, the most military- and Bush-friendly state in the union! — because it’s clear now that that war led to the rise of ISIS and other extremist groups.

And he’s done the same with the Democratic Party, capitalizing on its mistakes. As long as Trump doesn’t become president, his exploitation of the weak spots in our political system can make the whole thing stronger.

For Democrats, that means three things: Drones, deportations, and donations.

 

While Trump is all over the map on foreign policy, from calling for America-first isolationism to pledging to “bomb the shit out of” ISIS, he has continued to poke at one of the greatest hypocrisies of the Obama era: the Democratic notion of a compassionate counterterrorism policy.

Trump gets to play the war-hungry madman because President Obama, for all it has done to de-escalate George W. Bush’s imperialist atrocities, has spent eight years raining terror on Muslim populations across the Middle East with a brutal drone war. Obama and Clinton can decry Trump’s temperament, which would surely lead to even more death, but they cannot decry his proposed aggressions without talking about their own unpopular war from above.

The same applies to Obama’s role as “Deporter in Chief”: The president has made huge strides in protecting undocumented immigrants and their families with his DAPA and DACA programs, recent Supreme Court ruling aside, and with his announcement this week that the United States would expand a program to accept Central American asylum-seekers.

But he has also broken the record, by a lot, of deportations by a U.S. president: More than 2.5 million people have been deported since Obama took office. And though that pales in comparison to Trump’s proposal that all 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States be essentially ethnically cleansed, Obama can’t make much of a case that deportations themselves are un-American, given his history with them.

Trump is especially effective on driving home the black mark of corporate sponsorship in the Democratic Party. Trump has in fact forgiven the $47.5 million he had previously only loaned to his campaign. And though he has recently begun fundraising like any other desperate, big-shot presidential candidate — multi-thousand dollar dinners, Super PACs, fundraising emails — the image of Trump as a “self-funder” has forced Hillary Clinton, bank-rolled by big donors and PACs herself, to pledge to overturn Citizens United and work to control money in politics.

So much for the notion that Democrats had to “fight fire with fire” on corporate campaign donations: Donald Trump’s insistent prodding on the corruption issue has forced Democrats to fall back on their ideals as a party; on the notion that they ought to be a crowd-funded party of working people.

We can only hope that, facing the prospect of a new wave of Republican nativism, Democrats are pressured to re-establish their ideological high ground: by ending inhumane deportation policies that split families up, by ending a counterterrorism policy which disregards civilian deaths as “collateral,” and by reckoning with their own financial distance from working class America. Unless they account for the ways in which they have strayed from their ideals, Democrats will continue to be vulnerable to Trump’s brand of demagoguery, which capitalizes on ideological weak points with populist appeals to frustrated voters.

And, not for nothing, such a shift to the left would not only neutralize Trump, but it would also incorporate Bernie Sanders’ movement — and future iterations of it — into the party’s mainstream. Bernie capitalized on many of the same weaknesses in the Democratic Party that Trump has, and perhaps his supporters’ reluctance to support Clinton is a symptom of his attempts to delegitimize what he saw, perhaps correctly, as a corporatist party.

It will be up to Hillary Clinton, and the Democrats who ride her coattails to Washington, to capitalize on Trump’s and Sanders’ greatest vulnerability: Underestimating the capacity of the Democratic Party to change.

 

Photo: Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally in Scranton, Pennsylvania, U.S., July 27, 2016.  REUTERS/Carlo Allegri

Decoding Trump’s Disastrous May Campaign Finance Report

Decoding Trump’s Disastrous May Campaign Finance Report

The New York Timescalled it “the worst financial and organizational disadvantage of any major party nominee in recent history.”

At the beginning of June, Donald Trump’s campaign had just $1.3 million in cash-on-hand, after paying for the previous month’s campaign expenses. Hillary Clinton had $43 million. Trump raised just $3 million in May. Clinton raised $26 million.

An FEC fundraising report published yesterday from the Trump campaign answered the one question that has hovered over Donald Trump’s fundraising operation for a year:

Where is it?

Turns out… nowhere. When Trump pledged early on to “self-fund” his entire campaign, he either didn’t believe he would make it this far, or he knew he was lying at the time. Even if Trump’s cartoonish claims about his net worth are true, he doesn’t have nearly enough cash to fund an entire election effort on his own. In 2012, including super PAC spending, both presidential candidates spent around a billion dollars on their campaigns.

Trump, for the past few months, has bragged endlessly about loaning (not donating) his campaign tens of millions of dollars, all while insulting the GOP donor class and their money. (He has also paid his own companies over $6 million for campaign expenses thus far.)

“Every single person that gave every single dollar is expecting something for that money, every single person. And that’s not good for the country,” Trump said on MSNBC in July, referring to Jeb Bush’s super PAC fundraising, as reported by Politico. He added, “Somebody that’s reliant on all of these lobbyists and special interests and donors, they have no power to make a decision, because they feel obligated to all these people.”

Now, after spending a year repeating that message against a backdrop of increasingly unappetizing religious tests, immigration bans, and overt policy cluelessness, most Republican donors don’t want to touch Trump with a 10-foot pole.

Trump has had a valid point this entire election: The way we fund our elections corrupts our politicians and distorts our political process. Political scientists have shown that Congress’ legislative priorities reflect those of wealthy donors, not average constituents.

But Trump’s messaging in relation to that fundamental flaw — isolating himself from donors and convincing supporters that not only did he not need their money, he didn’t even want it — has created a struggling campaign fueled on hot air and anger alone. Trump says he’ll use “free media” to fill the fundraising gap, but the media has increasingly treated this general election candidate like the serious threat to our system that he really is.

That leaves Trump between a rock and a hard place: He hasn’t released his tax returns, and every email “ask” further undermines his claims that he is a billionaire able to completely self-fund his campaign (though he never has). He could beg at the feet of GOP elites, turning his back on early campaign messaging. Or he could spend hundreds of millions of dollars of his own money in “loans” to his campaign, which he could try to pay himself back eventually with donor money.

But one thing is for sure: As it stands, Donald Trump’s campaign is far too cash poor to compete financially in any major way with Hillary Clinton.

 

Photo: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump addresses an audience at The Fox Theatre in Atlanta, Georgia, June 15, 2016.  REUTERS/Chris Aluka Berry