Campaign Legal Center CLC

primary re oops 5 25

oops see clc, but this is main

see trevor potter

:{:{---}:

OMFG

AN PP 3 26

Several high-ranking federal election officials attended a summit last week at which prominent figures who worked to overturn Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election pressed the president to declare a national emergency to take over this year’s midterms.

According to videos, photos and social media posts reviewed by ProPublica, the meeting’s participants included Kurt Olsen, a White House lawyer charged with reinvestigating the 2020 election, and Heather Honey, the Department of Homeland Security official in charge of election integrity. The event was convened by Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, and attended by Cleta Mitchell, who directs the Election Integrity Network, a group that has spread false claims about election fraud and noncitizen voting.

Election experts say that the meeting reflects an intensifying push to persuade Trump to take unprecedented actions to affect the vote in November. Courts have largely blocked his efforts to reshape elections through an executive order, and legislation has stalled in Congress that would mandate strict voter ID requirements across the country.

The Washington Post reported Thursday that activists associated with those at the summit have been circulating a draft of an executive order that would ban mail-in ballots and get rid of voting machines as part of a federal takeover. Peter Ticktin, a lawyer who worked on the executive order and had a client at the summit, told ProPublica these actions were “all part of the same effort.”

The summit followed other meetings and discussions between administration officials and activists — many not previously reported — stretching back to at least last fall, according to emails and recordings obtained by ProPublica. The coordination between those inside and outside the government represents a breakdown of crucial guardrails, experts on U.S. elections said.

“The meeting shows that the same people who tried to overturn the 2020 election have only grown better organized and are now embedded in the machinery of government,” said Brendan Fischer, a director at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan pro-democracy organization. “This creates substantial risk that the administration is laying the groundwork to improperly reshape elections ahead of the midterms or even go against the will of the voters.”

Five of six federal officials who attended the summit didn’t answer questions about the event from ProPublica.

A White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said federal officials’ attendance at the gathering shouldn’t be construed as support for a national emergency declaration and that it was “common practice” for staffers to communicate with outside advocates who want to share policy ideas. The official pointed to comments Trump made to PBS News denying he was considering a national emergency or had read the draft executive order. “Any speculation about policies the administration may or may not undertake is just that — speculation,” the official said.

In the past, Trump has expressed an openness to a federal takeover as a way to stem projected Republican losses in November. This month, he said in an interview with conservative podcaster Dan Bongino that Republicans need “to take over” elections and “to nationalize the voting.”

Mitchell did not respond to questions from ProPublica about the summit. A spokesperson for Flynn responded to detailed questions from ProPublica by disparaging experts who expressed concerns, texting, “LOL ‘EXPERTS.’”

The 30-person roundtable discussion on Feb. 19, at an office building in downtown Washington, D.C., was sponsored by the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a conservative think tank. Afterward, activists and government officials dined together, photos reviewed by ProPublica showed.

Flynn, the institute’s chair, told a social media personality why he’d arranged the event.

“I wanted to bring this group together physically, because most of us have met online” while “fighting battles” in swing states from Arizona to Georgia, Flynn said to Tommy Robinson on the gathering’s sidelines. Robinson of these. “The overall theme of this event was to make sure that all of us aren’t operating in our own little bubbles.”

Flynn has repeatedly advocated for Trump to declare a national emergency and posted on social media after the event addressing Trump, “We The People want fair elections and we know there is only one office in the land that can make that happen given the current political environment in the United States.”

In addition to Olsen and Honey, four other federal officials from agencies that will shape the upcoming elections attended the event. At least four of the six attended the dinner.

One is Clay Parikh, a special government employee at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence who’s helping Olsen with the 2020 inquiry. A spokesperson at ODNI said Parikh had attended the summit “in his personal capacity.”

Another, Mac Warner, handled election litigation at the Justice Department. A department spokesperson said that Warner had resigned the day after the event and had not received the required approval from agency ethics officials to participate.

The department “remains committed to upholding the integrity of our electoral system and will continue to prioritize efforts to ensure all elections remain free, fair, and transparent,” the spokesperson said in an email.

A third administration official who attended the summit, Marci McCarthy, directs communications for the nation’s cyber defense agency, which oversees the security of elections infrastructure like voting machines.

Kari Lake, whom Trump appointed as senior adviser to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, was a featured speaker. Lake worked with Olsen and Parikh in her unsuccessful bid to overturn her loss in the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election.

Lake said in an email that she “showed up to the event, spoke for about 20 minutes about the overall importance of election integrity, a non-partisan issue that matters to all citizens — both in the United States and abroad. I left without listening to any other speeches.”

“Elections should be free from fraud or any other malfeasance that subverts the will of the people,” she added.

At the meeting, activists presented on ways to transform American elections that would help conservatives, according to social media posts and interviews they gave on conservative media, such as LindellTV, a streaming platform created by the pillow mogul Mike Lindell. They said the group broke down into two camps: those who wanted to pursue a more incremental legal and legislative strategy and those who wanted Trump to declare a national emergency.

Multiple activists left the meeting convinced Trump should do the latter, a step they believe would allow the president to get around the Constitution’s directive that elections should be run by states.

Former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, a prominent funder of efforts to overturn the 2020 election, told LindellTV that Trump has “played nice” so far in not seizing control of American elections. “But at some point,” Byrne said, “he’s got to do something, the muscular thing: declare a national emergency.”

Byrne responded to questions from ProPublica by sending a screenshot of a poll that he said suggested “2/3 of Americans correctly do not trust” voting machines, which the proposed national emergency declaration aims to do away with.

Will Huff, who has advocated for doing away with voting machines, told a conservative vlogger that Olsen, the White House lawyer, and other administration representatives would take the “consensus” from the gathering back to Trump. “It’s got to be a national emergency,” said Huff, the campaign manager for a Republican candidate for Arkansas secretary of state.

In response to questions from ProPublica, Huff said in an email that Olsen and Trump would use their judgment to decide whether to declare a national emergency.

“The President has been briefed on findings of shortcomings in election infrastructure,” Huff wrote. “I believe there are steady hands around the President wanting to ensure that any action taken is, first, constitutional and legal, but also backed by evidence.”

McCarthy, the cybersecurity official, expressed more general solidarity with fellow attendees in a post on social media about the summit. “Grateful for friendships forged through years of standing shoulder-to-shoulder, united by purpose and conviction,” she wrote. “The mission continues… and so does the fellowship.”

Last week’s gathering was the latest in a string of private interactions between conservative election activists and administration officials, according to emails, documents and recordings obtained by ProPublica. Many have involved Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network. Before taking her government post, Honey was a leader in the Election Integrity Network, ProPublica has reported, as was McCarthy.

Previously unreported emails obtained by ProPublica show that just weeks after Honey started at the Department of Homeland Security, she briefed election activists, a Republican secretary of state and another federal official on a conference call arranged by her former boss, Mitchell.

“We are excited to welcome her on our call this morning to hear about her work for election integrity inside DHS,” Mitchell wrote in an email introducing presenters on the call.

Honey didn’t respond to questions from ProPublica about the call. Experts said Honey’s briefing gave her former employer access that likely would have violated ethics rules in place under previous administrations, including the first Trump administration — though not this one.

The prior “ethics guardrails would have prevented some of the revolving door issues we’re seeing between the election denial movement and the government officials,” said Fischer, the Campaign Legal Center director. Those prior rules “were supposed to prevent former employers and clients from receiving privileged access.”

---

---

CLC

2 25

When only a small group of people with extraordinary wealth have power over the government, our system is not responsive to the will of the people, but rather to the will of a handful of wealthy donors whose biggest concerns are lining their own pockets.

Yet, President Trump is rewarding his biggest donors with political favors and countless opportunities to enrich themselves at the expense of the American people.

In addition to funding his 2024 campaign, billionaires — with a combined net worth exceeding $1.2 trillion — also bankrolled President Trump’s inauguration.

But this was only the beginning. Case in point: Despite not being elected by the American people, billionaire Elon Musk's rise to power represents a dangerous new way Trump is manipulating our system so his biggest donors can use the government to line their own pockets.

Our government should not work this way. Presidents creating positions of power for and granting access to wealthy special interests as a thank you for their political donations is corruption and makes the executive branch less responsive to the will of the people.

Campaign Legal Center (CLC) has pushed for stronger campaign finance laws because the American people deserve a government that is transparent and responsive to all Americans, not just a tiny group of billionaires.

We hold all government actors — including Elon Musk — accountable to the laws that make sure public servants serve Americans and not their own business interests.

Elon Musk being gifted a position of power after financially supporting the Trump campaign makes our work fighting corruption more important than ever.

We must ensure that wealthy special interests cannot gain power through illegal coordination schemes, and we must hold all government officials to high ethical standards.

Americans are far too familiar with the ultra-rich using their wealth to access the halls of power. Campaign Legal Center has repeatedly sounded the alarm on the longstanding trend of presidents rewarding their biggest donors with powerful positions such as ambassadorships in their administration.

Now we’re witnessing President Trump reward his wealthy donors not only with ambassadorships, but also with positions in the Cabinet and new roles such as Musk’s unelected position that is influencing government decisions in the shadows.

While the public has little clarity on President Trump’s newly established “U.S. DOGE Service” (CLC has filed public records requests to bring clarity to the matter), Musk has already begun to exert sweeping control over agencies and the sensitive information they hold.

The experts in government agencies, like engineers, economists and scientists, help improve Americans’ daily lives and shouldn't be subject to threats and harassment by an unelected donor.

The Trump administration has already signaled that avoiding conflicts of interest will not be a priority for its political appointees.

The ethics pledge signed between his appointees and the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) has raised eyebrows by allowing several wealthy members of his administration to oversee matters they clearly have a vested interest in.

Perhaps nowhere are the dangers of conflicts of interest more apparent than with Elon Musk clearly standing to gain personal wealth from holding influence over the government’s approach to the federal budget and setting regulations.

He has many business interests intertwined with federal policy — from the hefty government contracts with his SpaceX rockets to the regulation of his electric vehicle company.

Now, in his largely undefined role with DOGE, Musk even has access to information about his company’s competitors.

While Musk only has money to gain, the American people have everything to lose — allowing a private citizen with billions in personal interest to dictate government actions threatens the public service mandate of our agencies.

The Supreme Court’s weakening of our campaign finance laws, the Federal Election Commission’s refusal to hold bad actors accountable and the lack of independent and enforceable ethics enforcement in our government have all played a key role in our country’s allowing only a few wealthy individuals to consolidate power.

However, we have the ability to uphold a government by the people and for the people before it is too late.

CLC will continue to hold the Trump administration accountable by uncovering and exposing corruption and self-dealing. We will also strenuously advocate for strong ethics laws and transparency requirements that ensure our officials remain beholden to the public good, not personal gain.

Now is the time to enforce the guardrails of democracy that will ensure that executive power cannot be auctioned off to the highest bidder by any president to come.

Campaign Legal Center will continue to push for transparent, accountable government at every turn.

Support CLC's work to make sure our government serves the American people, not the business interest of wealthy donors.

ref report: From Dysfunctional To Destructive: The Federal Election Commission's Disastrous New Trend Opening The Floodgates To Big Money In Our Elections | Campaign Legal Center

Opening The Floodgates To Big Money In Our Elections

Date January 22, 2025

Campaign Legal Center’s new report, “From Dysfunctional to Destructive: The Federal Election Commission’s Disastrous New Trend Opening the Floodgates to Big Money in Our Elections,” examines the most consequential of the FEC's recent deregulatory actions.

50 pp DL 5/25

30 plus dec in 2 yrs

IN MORE THAN 30 DEREGULATORY DECISIONS OVER JUST THE PAST TWO YEARS, A MAJORITY BLOC, MADE UP OF FOUR OF THE FEC’S SIX COMMISSIONERS, HAS USED THE AGENCY’S POWERS NOT TO ADVANCE ITS VITAL MISSION BUT TO FUNDAMENTALLY UNDERMINE IT.

...

The 2024 election also came just weeks before the 15th anniversary of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, a Supreme Court decision, which, more than any other single event, ensured that spending on elections would skyrocket. In every election since that 2010 decision, wealthy special interests have spent increasingly more to influence voters, often through dark money channels that keep the sources of that spending concealed and often in coordination with the candidates and political parties intended to benefit from it.

:{:{...There is a direct line connecting these problems to the actions — and inaction — of the Federal Election Commission (FEC), a small regulatory agency with the vitally important mission of interpreting and enforcing federal campaign finance laws. Indeed, for more than 15 years, the FEC has been characterized by poor — and sometimes nonexistent — oversight and enforcement of those laws, which were enacted to ensure transparency and accountability in our elections, as well as to prevent corruption. }:

For years, routine deadlocks, usually three-to-three votes among the FEC’s six commissioners, resulted in the FEC’s failure to fulfill its core responsibilities, including investigating alleged violations, enforcing the law, and enacting sorely needed regulations and policies. Now, the FEC is failing in a new and even worse way: by proactively dismantling the laws it is supposed to uphold. In more than 30 deregulatory decisions over just the past two years, a majority bloc, made up of four of the FEC’s six commissioners, has used the agency’s powers not to advance its vital mission but to fundamentally undermine it. }:

1

:{:{COORDINATION BETWEEN SPECIAL INTEREST-FUNDED GROUPS AND CANDIDATES AND POLITICAL PARTIES}:

Texas Majority PAC Allows candidates to coordinate with super PACs on paid canvassing programs that advocate for or against candidates.

Maggie for NH Allows candidates’ campaigns to coordinate with super PACs on text messages seeking donations}:

:{:{2 FACILITATING THE USE OF SOFT MONEY TO INFLUENCE FEDERAL ELECTIONS}:

Nevadans for Reproductive Freedom Allows federal candidates to solicit unlimited amounts of soft money (funds that don’t comply with federal reporting requirements), which can be spent on registering and turning out their likely voters.

Waters Allows nonfederal candidates, committees, or organizations to pay for federal election activity with soft money.

Greitens Allows the use of state campaign funds, including money from corporate donors, to subsidize federal candidates’ campaigns.}:

3

:{:{UNDERMINING TRANSPARENCY}:

SQI Limited, LLC Allows wealthy special interests like corporations and billionaires to continue using “straw” donors to conceal their election spending from voters.

Allen Blue: Allows ultrawealthy donors to use living trusts to support federal candidates and parties without disclosing their involvement.

Online Disclaimers Rulemaking : Allows campaigns to pay for content promotion and possibly advertising on streaming platforms without “paid for by” disclaimers that provide voters with crucial information about who’s paying to influence their vote.

Last Best Place PAC Allows groups like super PACs to buy ads expressly advocating for or against candidates without filing reports that promptly disclose that spending.}:

---

How Does the Citizens United Decision Still Affect Us in 2025?

January 21, 2025

Voters have a right to know which wealthy special interests are spending big money to influence our vote and our government to rig the political system in their favor.

But years of living under the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (FEC), commonly known as Citizens United, has made it easier than ever for special interests like corporations and billionaires to funnel vast sums of money into our elections.

Often, they do so in secret, through tactics that keep Americans in the dark about who is paying to influence their vote, or while illegally coordinating with candidates’ campaigns yet facing no accountability.

On Jan. 21, 2010, the Court struck down existing limits on corporate independent expenditures — how much money a corporation can directly spend in support of a political campaign — which has since enabled corporations and other outside groups to engage in unlimited amounts of campaign spending.

The Court concluded that unlimited corporate campaign spending would not lead to corruption because it assumed this spending would be fully transparent and “independent” from how campaigns choose to spend their money.

Neither assumption, however, has held up: Citizens United has allowed big money to spend billions of dollars influencing elections and drowning out the voices of everyday Americans.

Just as we did in the 2024 election cycle, Campaign Legal Center (CLC) will work to identify bad actors, urge enforcement when the law is broken and partner with lawmakers to advance legislative solutions that restore transparency and accountability to our elections.

Increased Political Spending by Outside Groups

Super PACs have become a popular funding mechanism that can accept unlimited contributions — including money from corporations and unions — and spend unlimited amounts to influence federal elections.

These groups have become a pathway for wealthy special interests looking to influence elections and garner political influence and access — like Elon Musk, who contributed a quarter of a billion dollars to super PACs running advertising, door knocking and phone banking for President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign.

Super PACs are legally required to be transparent about where their money comes from by reporting their fundraising and spending to the FEC. But that transparency is frequently undermined because super PACs often report contributions from secretly funded “dark money” groups, which can keep their donors hidden from the public.

Dark money groups spent millions influencing the 2024 election. For instance, Future Forward PAC, a super PAC that supports Democratic candidates, reported a $205 million contribution from an affiliated dark money group. Voters had no idea who spent these millions of dollars trying to influence their vote in the 2024 election, and the true source(s) of this spending will most likely remain unknown.

Illegal Coordination and Straw Donor Schemes

In Citizens United, the Court reaffirmed the importance of laws requiring the disclosure of all contributions. The justices reasoned that prompt disclosure would ensure that voters could see who was paying for corporate-financed election ads, allowing them to “give proper weight to different speakers and messages.”

But wealthy special interests who want to keep their political spending secret use many ways to hide their identities from the public. One common tactic, a “straw donor scheme,” uses a shell company or other intermediary to conceal the true source(s) of political contributions.

In 2024, CLC identified an apparent straw donor, “Save Our Home Planet Action, Inc.” (SOHPA), that was established just days before being used to make over $1.4 million in political contributions — presumably to conceal who was behind these contributions and thus deprive voters of information essential to casting an informed ballot.

Another way that outside groups routinely break the law is by illegally coordinating directly with a candidate’s campaign. CLC Action recently obtained a judgment on behalf of Common Cause Georgia against the FEC for its failure to enforce the law and hold the Georgia Republican Party accountable for its illegally concealed activities in coordination with the nonprofit “True the Vote,” which were intended to influence the 2021 Georgia Senate runoff elections.

Our actions ultimately prompted a settlement agreement between with FEC and the Georgia GOP — a clear win for voters.

A Lack of Accountability From the FEC

Outside groups continue to get away with corrupting our elections as the FEC fails to crack down on candidates and super PACs that work together, and in fact has authorized new ways for them to coordinate with each other.

Recently, a bloc of four FEC commissioners have repeatedly undermined crucial legal limits on election spending, while declining to investigate clear violations of the law — such as blatant coordination between super PACs and federal candidates this year.

Campaign Legal Center issued a report that explains just how the FEC has opened the door for extensive coordination between outside groups and wealthy special interests.

Safeguarding the Future of Free and Fair Elections

The cost of our elections is only poised to grow, introducing more opportunities for corruption along the way. CLC is prepared to defend transparency and accountability by:

• Shedding light on bad actors. Those looking to covertly influence our elections thrive in secrecy. CLC seeks to identify and elevate these cases to showcase the weaknesses of our current system.

• Demanding accountability from the Federal Election Commission. For too long, special interests have gotten away with breaking the law because the FEC has failed to properly hold bad actors accountable.

• Working with lawmakers to advance legislative solutions. Bills like the Stop Illegal Campaign Coordination Act, which prevents super PACs and campaigns from coordinating, and the DISCLOSE Act, which would require all major political contributors to disclose their funds, are powerful tools that can stymie the erosion of our campaign finance laws.

Tweetable quote: For voters to make their voices heard in our democracy, we need real transparency about who is spending big money on elections so that politicians can no longer receive unlimited secret money from wealthy special interests to support their campaigns.

CNN —

Nearly three dozen of President-elect Donald Trump’s picks to serve in his incoming administration donated to his campaign or to the deep-pocketed outside groups that worked to elect him, a CNN analysis of federal campaign records shows.

They range from tech multibillionaire Elon Musk – who has emerged as the single largest, disclosed political donorof the 2024 presidential election – to others close to Trump tapped for key roles throughout government.

In all, eight of his Cabinet picks – led by Linda McMahon, the billionaire wrestling magnate Trump has selected to oversee the Education Department – and their spouses donated more than $37 million combined from their personal accounts to aid Trump, the review found, underscoring the proliferation of ultra-rich Americans now poised to shape US policy in the incoming second Trump administration.

(Two other Cabinet choices, New York Rep. Elise Stefanik and Florida Rep. Mike Waltz, transferred money from their campaign accounts to the pro-Trump effort.)

Musk has not been selected for a formal Cabinet job but is helping guide a new Department of Government Efficiency initiative and has played a pivotal role in the presidential transition – offering his views on job candidates, talking to world leaders and meeting with lawmakers on Capitol Hill as he weighs how to downsize the federal government.

In all, the SpaceX and Tesla chief executive donated more than $277 million to federal elections this cycle, the lion’s share of which – more than $262 million – benefited Trump. Most of Musk’s pro-Trump dollars flowed to a super PAC that the world’s richest man created to help turn out voters on the Republican’s behalf in key swing states.

Outside of self-funded presidential candidates, no individual has donated more to shape federal contests in a single election cycle, said Brendan Glavin, research director of OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan organization that analyzes money in politics.

Trump’s donors “are not just getting these sort of plum ambassadorships on the side,” Glavin said. “Major donors are getting positions that affect policy.”

The CNN analysis researched the more than 90 people that Trump had announced for high-level positions in the administration through Tuesday, which marked five weeks since his election victory. More than 30 of them had donated to his campaign or to one of the leading Trump-aligned outside groups, the review of FEC records found.

IFrame Content

“Millions of Americans fed up with failure in the White House and federal government joined President Trump in the movement to restore our nation’s greatness. Some who will work with President Trump are among those millions of people who supported the campaign and helped the President win a decisive electoral victory,” Brian Hughes, a Trump transition team spokesman, said in a statement in response to CNN’s inquiry about donors joining the administration.

The total donations from Trump’s current Cabinet picks marks a surge from Trump’s first term. Five members of his original Cabinet had donated nearly $8 million to his committees or to the major outside groups supporting him, a review of campaign reports shows.

Donations from McMahon, who served as Trump’s SBA administrator in his first White House term, accounted for more than 90% of that total in the 2016 election.

The sums spent to aid Trump in 2024 far exceed the donations that President Joe Biden’s Cabinet members contributed to help him win the White House in 2020, FEC records show.

A dozen members of Biden’s Cabinet reported donations to his campaign or major super PACs involved in the 2020 election, giving less than $100,000 in total.

Billionaires in the administration

Musk’s spending dwarfed that of other supporters.

McMahon was the largest donor among Trump’s Cabinet picks and the second most generous contributor, after Musk, among the administration members announced through Tuesday, the review found.

Most of the $21.2 million she donated went to Make American Great Again, Inc., the main Trump-affiliated super PAC that spent heavily on advertising to aid his campaign.

Other seven-figure donors among Trump’s Cabinet picks include Cantor Fitzgerald chief Howard Lutnick, whom Trump has tapped to serve as Commerce secretary; Scott Bessent, the hedge fund executive Trump has selected to oversee the Treasury Department; and former Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler, his choice to head the Small Business Administration.

Loeffler’s husband, Jeff Sprecher, also was a major donor, contributing more than $2 million to the pro-Trump MAGA Inc. super PAC and Trump’s joint fundraising committee.

Sprecher is the CEO of the Intercontinental Exchange, which owns the New York Stock Exchange, and was at Trump’s side when the president-elect rang the opening bell at the exchange Thursday.

In an email, Loeffler’s communication director Caitlin O’Dea said, “Senator Loeffler is proud to be one of President Trump’s strongest supporters for the same reason a historic landslide of Americans voted to put him back in the White House: he will restore American prosperity, security, and opportunity.”

The billionaire embrace marks a turnaround of sorts for Trump, who saw corporate America recoil from him after the violent January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. And he has seen new support from tech leaders who are pushing for fewer regulations from the federal government.

The staggering sums spent by Musk in this year’s election helped Trump close the financial advantage of his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, who swiftly raised $1 billion after becoming her party’s standard-bearer in late July.

Super PACs face no limit on the size of donations they can receive or spend, but technically are not allowed coordinate their advertising decisions with the candidates they support.

However, a ruling this year by the FEC granting campaigns the ability to coordinate with outside political action committees on paid canvassing efforts freed up Musk to guide a ground game for Trump.

“The campaign finance system is a joke,” said Fred Wertheimer, who heads the Democracy 21 watchdog group and is a longtime advocate for limits on money in politics. “Musk is the example now of how campaign finance laws have failed.”

He said he worries about government departments led by billionaires who have no “interest in doing the job that the agency was assigned.”

Musk did not respond to inquiries from CNN.

But Tom Davis, a former congressman from Virginia who chaired the House Republicans’ campaign arm for several years, argues “there is nothing inherently wrong about people who made a lot of money wanting to give back through government.”

“The fact that they have contributed shows a degree of loyalty,” he added.

Friends and family

Presidents often reward donors and allies with plum positions – often dispatching them to glamorous, low-conflict posts in Europe or the Caribbean.

Some of Trump’s early picks for ambassadorships follow that pattern and include billionaires who donated to his reelection effort. Among them: Arkansas investor Warren Stephens, named as the US’ envoy to the UK, and Charles Kushner, Trump’s choice for ambassador to France – one of several extended family members or close friends who has been chosen for diplomatic gigs.

Kushner, who donated $2 million to pro-Trump efforts and received a presidential pardon at the end of Trump’s first term, is the father-in-law of Trump’s daughter, Ivanka. Another donor, Tom Barrack, who oversaw the fundraising for Trump’s first inauguration, is his choice as ambassador to Turkey.

And incoming special envoy to the Middle East, real-estate tycoon Steve Witkoff, is a longtime Trump friend and a partner in the cryptocurrency businesses that Trump launched with his sons earlier this year.

He donated $250,000 to a pro-Trump super PAC.

//

White House billionaires have no idea how Americans live (and don’t seem to care)

---

no lnx

Trump staffed his Cabinet with wealthy advisers. Some stand to gain even more from recent policy shifts

By Isabelle Chapman, Curt Devine, Majlie de Puy Kamp, Casey Tolan and Kyung Lah, CNN

Thu April 24, 2025}:

CNN

After staffing the wealthiest presidential Cabinet in modern American history with energy and banking titans, President Donald Trump has spent his first three months in office boosting those industries while dismantling long-established guardrails against government corruption.

A CNN review of Trump’s actions as he approaches the 100-day mark of his presidency found that as his administration has slashed the federal workforce and shaken the global economy with tariffs, the president’s team has made changes that could also directly benefit his Cabinet members or their former companies.

At the same time, by gutting traditional oversight bodies and embracing historically lax ethics rules, Trump has enabled conflicts of interest and greased the revolving door between government and the private sector. At least eight nominees for executive branch positions would have been banned or had limited roles under previous administrations – including Trump’s first term – due to their recent work as lobbyists, according to an analysis by the watchdog Campaign Legal Center that was reviewed by CNN.

Some potential conflicts have played out in plain view – like when Trump used the White House lawn last month to produce what seemed like an elaborate ad for key adviser and top donor Elon Musk’s struggling Tesla brand. The Trump administration has also cleared the way for Musk’s Starlink business to win new government contracts.

President Donald Trump and Elon Musk depart after looking at Tesla vehicles on the South Lawn of the White House on March 11, in Washington, DC.:

But other examples of possible conflicts are found deep in Cabinet members’ ethics reports, such as Energy Secretary Chris Wright’s disclosure that he would receive a million-dollar bonus – after his swearing-in – from the fracking company he founded, led and now plays a role in regulating.

Even as they’ve agreed to divest, some Cabinet members have found a loophole: giving control of certain assets to their adult children. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick handed the reins of his financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald to his 27-year-old son, while Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said he would give his interest in litigation against a vaccine maker – part of an industry he is now tasked with regulating – to his adult son.

Some of Trump’s policies also could help his own business interests. By establishing a strategic Bitcoin reserve, the president is backstopping the value of the cryptocurrency, enriching existing holders of the asset, some of whom spent millions helping reelect the president. Meanwhile, Trump and his family have moved to expand their own crypto interests. And this week, Trump sent the value of his personal meme coin soaring by promising its top buyers a chance to dine with the president next month.

Many of the Trump administration’s early actions have pushed priorities that Republicans have sought for years, and the White House says its moves to slash regulations are needed to reduce spending and eliminate government inefficiency.

“The people elected me to do the job, and I’m doing it,” Trump said in March. “My administration will reclaim power from this unaccountable bureaucracy.”

But from cryptocurrency and energy policies to efforts as niche as rural internet access, some of the administration’s moves also closely align with the financial interests of his top advisers and the president himself.

“This administration seems entirely indifferent to ethics, and that contrasts certainly with the past several administrations, including Trump one,” said Richard Briffault, a Columbia University law professor who studies government ethics. “The level of complete indifference to it takes us back to before Watergate.”

‘Tearing down’ ethics rules

In the wake of the Watergate scandal, Congress passed sweeping ethics legislation to hold the executive branch more accountable.

Within weeks of beginning his second term, Trump flouted many of those decades-old protections – including by firing more than a dozen inspectors general and dismissing the head of the government’s ethics watchdog. He also signed an order making it easier for lobbyists to join agencies overseeing industries they used to represent.

The United States has spent years building up an “ethics infrastructure,” Briffault said. “In less than 90 days, this administration has been tearing (it) down.”

Trump’s unprecedented moves come as his Cabinet includes some of the richest people to ever hold the reins of power in the federal government. Many came straight from positions of power in key industries.

CNN analyzed dozens of financial disclosures and ethics statements filed by presidential appointees to track the wealth and potential conflicts of interest among Trump’s Cabinet members. The disclosures offer a limited picture of nominees’ finances: Officials are only required to list their assets in broad ranges.

Still, Trump’s leadership team appears to eclipse the wealth of any previous Cabinet going back decades. Of 21 Cabinet members, seven reported holding at least $10 million in assets, and some are even billionaires.

Lutnick – who has been a Wall Street power player since the mid-1990s – has an estimated net worth of $3.1 billion, according to Forbes. That’s roughly 15 times as much as the combined maximum reported net worth of former President Joe Biden’s entire outgoing Cabinet.

Five Trump Cabinet members reported holding individual assets worth more than $50 million, the highest range on disclosure forms. And that doesn’t include Musk, the world’s richest person with a net worth of about $371 billion, who as a special government employee is not required to publicly report anything about his wealth.

While Biden filled his Cabinet mostly with bureaucrats and politicians, Trump’s team also includes former CEOs who ran major energy and financial services companies before joining him in Washington.

“We’re seeing industry officials coming into the executive branch in a way that we’ve never seen in past administrations, including the first Trump administration,” said Danielle Caputo, senior ethics counsel for the Campaign Legal Center.

While supporters of Trump’s efforts say industry expertise helps officials better understand the fields they regulate, ethics watchdogs fear actions undertaken by highly-connected officials could benefit their former companies and colleagues instead of the American public.

Some moves could particularly benefit the super-wealthy. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, for instance, has taken a chainsaw to the Internal Revenue Service, which includes a unit that audits America’s ultrawealthy. Data obtained by CNN and first reported by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists revealed that the Global High Wealth unit was hit by layoffs at a far higher rate through March of this year than the IRS as a whole.

Trump has also rescinded a Biden-era executive order creating ethics requirements for political appointees.

Members of the past three administrations — including those who worked under Trump during his first term — previously had to commit not to accept gifts from lobbyists. They were also banned from working on issues they lobbied on in the two years before their appointment, and after leaving government, couldn’t lobby on behalf of industries they’d recently regulated.

Those rules would have banned or limited the roles of eight Trump nominees, including three officials tapped for Environmental Protection Agency roles who lobbied for fossil fuel groups in recent years, according to an analysis by Campaign Legal Center shared with CNN.

Additionally, CLC found Trump has named at least six political appointees to serve as senior ethics officials, a role normally held by nonpartisan career officials.

Inspectors general across more than a dozen different agencies were fired during Trump’s first week in office. The IGs act as independent watchdogs, and the president is supposed to provide a 30-day notice to Congress before removing them, which Trump failed to do. Trump defended the move by suggesting some IGs had been “unfair” and firing them was “a very standard thing to do.”

The crypto stakes

On the campaign trail, Trump promised to make America the “crypto capital of the planet.” He kicked off his second term with moves to boost the crypto industry such as establishing a national bitcoin reserve, dissolving a Biden-era task force that investigated crypto criminals, installing a Musk ally as “crypto czar” and revoking a banking rule that discouraged financial institutions from owning crypto.

At the same time, Trump and his family have gotten deep into crypto by launching a new firm and the president’s own meme coin, a digital asset that has no underlying value and trades largely on hype. Trump also installed Lutnick, a banker who before his swearing-in was overseeing more than $1.5 billion in crypto-related investments, as his commerce secretary.

Lutnick has long pushed to legitimize bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Last October, while he was still CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, he told a podcast host he had “hundreds and hundreds of millions” of exposure to bitcoin, presumably through crypto assets held by his firm.

Cantor Fitzgerald is now run by his son, which ethicists say leaves Lutnick with an improperly close tie to the firm’s success.

“By turning it over to a family member, you may not benefit directly, but you surely have an interest in the well-being of your child,” said Briffault.

Cantor Fitzgerald didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Howard Lutnick listens as President Donald Trump delivers remarks before Lutnick is sworn in as Commerce Secretary in February.

Meanwhile, Trump’s sons launched a digital currency company, World Liberty Financial, in 2024, and took an ownership stake in a bitcoin mining venture called American Bitcoin last month. Trump’s own media company announced plans earlier this year to potentially buy bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

At least eight top officials in the executive branch disclosed crypto holdings in their financial disclosures, although some agreed to divest the assets. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, HHS Secretary Kennedy and Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz each reported owning more than $500,000 in crypto assets.

An HHS spokesperson told CNN that “Secretary Kennedy continues to adhere to all ethical and legal requirements.”

So far, the Trump administration’s crypto moves haven’t led to a boom in valuations for digital assets. While the price of bitcoin, a bellwether for the $3 trillion crypto market, skyrocketed nearly 50% between Trump’s election victory and inauguration, it has fallen about 9% since then, mirroring broader stock market declines.

Still, Eric Talley, a Columbia University professor who studies corporate law, said he saw the Trump administration’s efforts to promote crypto, and specifically the strategic bitcoin reserve, as “particularly suspicious.”

“The economic stakes — if you were a heavy holder of crypto — would be huge and profoundly positive if you could cause the US government to essentially guarantee a big chunk of the stability of the market of at least some of the crypto issuances,” he said.

‘Energy dominance’

During his time in the private sector, former fracking executive Chris Wright was a zealous and vocal critic of government regulations meant to curb global warming. His company Liberty Energy filed a lawsuit that challenged a federal rule requiring companies to disclose details about greenhouse-gas emissions. In one video he posted on social media, Wright declared, “There is no climate crisis.”

Now, as energy secretary, Wright has authority to reverse some of the policies he railed against as Liberty’s CEO.

Wright has ordered the department to “build energy infrastructure and remove barriers to progress,” among other steps, to achieve US “energy dominance.” Under his leadership, the agency has ceased its pursuit of a net-zero carbon future, cut fossil fuel regulations and accelerated numerous natural gas export projects.

Inside the department, Wright has alarmed some staffers with his embrace of fracking over other energy projects. Four current Department of Energy employees, who spoke to CNN on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, described a general attitude of hostility toward most renewable energy. One staffer pointed to webpages that once promoted solar energy and have now been taken offline, and other employees described circulating lists of renewable energy programs that could be on the chopping block.

Having a former fracking executive run the energy department is “absolutely a conflict of interest,” one staffer said.

Some of Wright’s former Liberty colleagues have also followed him into the department, including his current scheduling director, one of his advisers and a Liberty board member who has been nominated to serve as an assistant energy secretary.

President Donald Trump holds an executive orders after signing a series of orders on American energy production during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House on April 8 in Washington, DC.

:

In the short term, falling oil prices due to economic turmoil under Trump could hurt fracking companies. But leaders at Wright’s former company have applauded the policy shifts. “We have an administration now that is working hard to remove some of the impediments that have been challenges,” Liberty Energy CEO Ron Gusek said at the New York Stock Exchange in March. “Those things give us a path forward to invest in our business.”

According to his ethics documents, Wright owned about $54 million worth of Liberty stock as of February, though disclosures show he sold off Liberty shares in recent weeks and moved money into general investment funds. He also disclosed that he would receive a roughly $1 million performance bonus for his work last year from the fracking company in March, after his swearing-in. A Liberty filing last month stated he received his bonus.

A Liberty spokesperson said, “To our knowledge, there has been no communication with Secretary Wright or any representative from the Department of Energy regarding Liberty Energy business.”

While the fossil fuel industry cheers Wright’s successes, some communities that expected financial help from the Department of Energy have faced roadblocks. Under a program funded by the bipartisan infrastructure law, for example, the department planned to disperse $500 million in grants to help schools in disadvantaged regions across the US improve their energy efficiency.

But multiple school district administrators told CNN that since Wright took over, the department has largely stopped communicating with them about federal funding from the program. Now, some districts fear they won’t receive all the money they were promised.

Brent Foster, who heads a committee to upgrade infrastructure at Mosier Community School in Oregon, points to the school’s century-old heater.

Mosier Community School, a public charter school in a rural Oregon county that voted for Trump, was awarded a roughly $870,000 grant from the program. That money could help replace the school’s unreliable century-old heater and windows that are currently held closed with tape, said Brent Foster, who leads a committee to upgrade the school’s infrastructure.

This year, the DOE has canceled meetings with the school about the grant and has not been processing requests related to the project, according to Foster, who said he doesn’t know whether the funds will ever come through.

Winning the grant “felt like a miracle,” Foster said. “The idea that the federal government would sign a contract… then pull the rug out from under us, it’s difficult to understand.”

An Energy Department spokesperson said the agency is reviewing all activities to ensure they follow the law and align with the administration’s priorities. “President Trump’s administration is advancing a strategy of energy addition – embracing all forms of energy that are affordable, reliable, and secure,” said the spokesperson, who added that Wright has complied with department ethics requirements.

A change that could help SpaceX

The federal government has earmarked tens of billions of dollars to close the digital divide, connecting millions of rural Americans to fast, reliable internet. And for years, Musk’s SpaceX has tried to become eligible for the funds, at times without success.

In 2022, the Federal Communications Commission rejected a nearly $900 million grant application by Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite internet system, saying the company failed to show it could deliver on the promised service.

Similarly, the $42 billion Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program was specifically designed to prioritize the gold standard of broadband internet – fiber-optic cables – over other technologies such as satellite service.

But that changed rapidly after Trump took office. Lutnick announced last month that the Commerce Department would end “woke mandates” and “favoritism towards certain technologies.” In practice, that means potentially opening up billions in funding for satellite internet companies.

Lutnick’s directive could enable Musk’s company to earn up to $20 billion from the amended BEAD program, according the Wall Street Journal. Today, Starlink is uniquely positioned to provide commercial satellite-based internet. However, other companies, including Amazon, may compete for BEAD grants in the future.

Musk has long criticized the federal government’s rural internet efforts, claiming that had the FCC not rejected Starlink’s grant application in 2022, “it would probably have saved lives in North Carolina” after Hurricane Helene decimated the area. The BEAD program, Musk said, is an “an outrageous waste of taxpayer money” that is “utterly failing to serve people in need.”

SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment.

Experts say satellite-based internet service could play a useful role in connecting low-density remote areas. But many argue a fiber-optic connection is more reliable and weather resistant than what satellite service can offer today.

“Fiber can handle an almost unlimited amount of bandwidth. Fiber is scalable in terms of speed. Fiber is what we call ‘future proof,’” said Christopher Ali, a professor of telecommunications at Penn State University.

Lutnick’s move to change the program is now prolonging delays in getting shovels in the ground, even as the GOP has blasted the Biden administration over its failure to spend the money more quickly. Senate Majority Leader Sen. John Thune and 12 additional Republican senators, for example, have said the program has “onerous regulations” and moves slowly due to “unnecessary government interference.”

The Commerce Department didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Some states with approved BEAD proposals are waiting for the green light from the federal government before starting work while others are amending their proposals.

A final draft proposal dated March 2025 from West Virginia obtained by CNN details a plan to bring a fiber-optic internet connection to every resident in the state. But after Gov. Patrick Morrisey met with Lutnick later that month, he announced West Virginia would revise the proposal to “evaluate a broader range of technology options, including satellite.”

“The West Virginia Broadband Enhancement Council has always supported fiber deployment and continues to do so,” said Bill Bissett, who heads up the council.

“Every day we delay is another day that West Virginians who are underserved or unserved will not have access to this critical resource,” he added.

Because of Lutnick’s change, government officials will “re-run a process they’ve already completed solely to put satellite service in places that were going to get fiber,” said Evan Feinman, who until recently oversaw the rollout of the BEAD program. “That service will be dramatically slower, less reliable in bad weather … and will cost at least $800 more per year (per household) than the fiber connections would have been.”

The change in direction of the BEAD program is the “poster child for why people should be concerned about conflicts of interest” in this administration, said Briffault, the Columbia law professor, who spoke about how members of Trump’s inner circle could be putting a thumb on the scale.

“You cannot be confident that the decision is being made on the policy merits, as opposed to the influence of a self-interested individual who stands to make a ton of money on it,” he said.

CNN’s Yahya Abou-Ghazala and Anna-Maja Rappard contributed to this report.

---

an 6 22

in a decision Monday that liberal Justice Elena Kagan warned will further corrupt the nation's money-dominated political system, the U.S. Supreme Court's right-wing majority struck down a campaign finance regulation limiting federal candidates' ability to use campaign funds to repay personal loans.

Established by the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, the rule barred candidates from using more than $250,000 in campaign funds collected after an election to recoup their loans to their own campaign.

The legal challenge to the cap was brought by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who intentionally violated the $250,000 cap during his 2018 reelection bid in order to pursue a repeal of the limit, which he characterized as a violation of free speech.

As CNNexplained:

A day before he was reelected in 2018, Cruz loaned his campaign committee $260,000, $10,000 over the limit—laying the foundation for his legal challenge to the cap... [H]e could have been repaid in full by campaign funds if the repayment occurred 20 days after the election. But Cruz let the 20-day deadline lapse so that he could establish grounds to bring the legal challenge.

The high court's 6-3 decision strikes another blow to the nation's campaign finance restrictions, which were already weak and rife with loopholes that big donors readily and frequently exploit.

"While the direct effects of this decision are limited to the narrow federal provision at issue in the case, it reveals a Supreme Court increasingly out of step with the American people—who overwhelmingly recognize that unchecked campaign giving poses profound risks to the integrity of our democracy," said Trevor Potter, the president of Campaign Legal Center. "More immediately, the ruling could imperil an array of similar restrictions on post-election loan repayments adopted at the state and local level out of legitimate concerns over corruption."

Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) added on Twitter that "the right-wing Supreme Court has issued yet another preposterous decision effectively legalizing government corruption at the request of Republicans."

In her dissent, Kagan argued that the court's ruling will make even more common the kinds of "crooked exchanges" that have long sullied the U.S. political system, which is awash in money from corporations and ultra-wealthy individuals.

"Political contributions that will line a candidate's own pockets, given after his election to office, pose a special danger of corruption," Kagan argued, pointing to the issue of recouping personal loans. "The candidate has a more-than-usual interest in obtaining the money (to replenish his personal finances), and is now in a position to give something in return. The donors well understand his situation, and are eager to take advantage of it. In short, everyone's incentives are stacked to enhance the risk of dirty dealing."

Kagan went on to contend that quid pro quos—political favors carried out in exchange for money, in this case post-election donations—could become more rampant thanks to the Supreme Court's new ruling, which was authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, who helped orchestrate the high court's infamous Citizens United ruling and other attacks on campaign finance law.

"Post-election donors can be confident their money will enrich a candidate personally," Kagan wrote. "And those donors have of course learned which candidate won. When they give money to repay the victor's loan, they know—not merely hope—he will be in a position to perform official favors. The recipe for quid pro quo corruption is thus in place: a donation to enhance the candidate's own wealth (the quid), made when he has become able to use the power of public office to the donor's advantage (the quo)."

"The politician is happy; the donors are happy. The only loser is the public. It inevitably suffers from government corruption," she continued. "In allowing those payments to go forward unrestrained, today's decision can only bring this country's political system into further disrepute."

In a statement, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) voiced agreement with Kagan's dissent, calling the high court's ruling "another victory for right-wing donors in their assault on our campaign finance system, and another step toward unlimited special-interest spending in our elections."

"Big Republican donor interests built their supermajority to deliver wins like this one," Whitehouse added, "wins that help special interests skirt our democratic process to achieve what they want."

===

:{:{

}:}:

vs Feingold?

:{:{

}:}:

:{:{

https://democracychronicles.org/lawsuit-nra/

from the Campaign Legal Center:

Today, Campaign Legal Center Action (CLC Action) filed suit on behalf of Giffords against the Federal Election Commission (FEC) for failing to announce any action against the National Rifle Association (NRA) for using shell corporations to coordinate campaign spending with seven federal candidates spanning three election cycles from 2014-2018. The lawsuit was filed two days before President Trump addresses the NRA’s annual convention for the third year in a row – the only time in American history a president has done so.

The NRA’s complicated scheme had the effect of evading campaign contribution limits and shielding millions of dollars of political spending – including up to $25 million coordinated with Donald Trump’s presidential campaign – from public scrutiny. The Trace first reported on the NRA’s scheme.

Campaign Legal Center (CLC) and Giffords filed four complaints with the FEC to address these violations. The FEC is the independent regulatory agency tasked with enforcing campaign finance laws in federal elections, the agency routinely deadlocks and fails to reach the required four votes necessary to open an investigation. Today, Giffords is asserting its right of action in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia after the 120-day period expired in which the FEC was legally required to respond.

“Our elections are awash in secret cash, and the federal agency charged with enforcing our nation’s election laws is asleep on the job,” said Trevor Potter, president of CLC, and a former Republican Chairman of the FEC. “Campaign finance laws are supposed to limit the influence of money in our politics. For our system to function properly, the FEC needs to enforce the laws that preserve the independence of campaigns and limit the influence of well-funded special interests.”

“When the FEC doesn’t do its job, groups like the NRA are able to get around the rules designed to limit the influence of money on our democracy,” said Brendan Fischer, director, federal reform at CLC. “The FEC’s failure to enforce the law sends a message to wealthy special interests that they can push the legal envelope and get away with it.”

“The FEC is supposed to be the nation’s election watchdog, but in this case it didn’t bite, bark, or even whimper,” said Adam Skaggs, Chief Counsel, Giffords Law Center. “Instead, it turned a blind eye while the NRA’s leadership made clear it’s more interested in handing bags of cash to candidates who will carry its water than following American laws or looking out for the interests of gun owners. In a desperate attempt to hold onto power and influence, NRA executives have flagrantly ignored our campaign finance laws and undermined the integrity of our election system. The FEC must bring illegal campaign conduct into the light of day and we are proud to join with CLC in calling on it to uphold the laws that protect the legitimacy of our democracy.”

, which explains the underlying story behind the NRA’s scheme.

Campaign finance law allows outside groups like the NRA to make unlimited expenditures supporting candidates only if the expenditures are completely independent of those candidates. To protect this independence, the FEC has rules prohibiting coordination between outside groups and campaigns, which include restrictions on how a vendor may work for both a candidate and an outside group supporting that candidate. Otherwise, the common vendor can act as a conduit to funnel strategic information to the outside group, and then that group’s expenditures are no longer independent.

The lawsuit implicates the NRA’s spending in support of the following seven candidates:

• Matt Rosendale (2018 campaign for U.S. Senate in Montana)
• Josh Hawley (2018 campaign for U.S. Senate in Missouri)
• Donald Trump (2016 campaign for President of the United States)
• Ron Johnson (2016 campaign for U.S. Senate in Wisconsin)
• Thom Tillis (2014 campaign for U.S. Senate in North Carolina)
• Cory Gardner (2014 campaign for U.S. Senate in Colorado)
• Tom Cotton (2014 campaign for U.S. Senate in Arkansas)

You can see the full video here:

}:}:

:{:{

}:}:

:{:{

}:}:

==

an 1021

The FBI has opened up a criminal campaign-finance investigation into possible "misdeeds" committed by the right wing organization headed by conservative lobbyist and Trump confidant Matt Schlapp.

The group, the American Conservative Union, is best known for its annual Conservative Political Action Conference (**CPAC**) event that attracts right wing politicians and activists from across the country.

Citing sources, The Dispatch reports "federal investigators are currently looking into possible criminal campaign-finance misdeeds at ACU during Schlapp's tenure. As part of the investigation, the FBI has interviewed former and current ACU employees about the financial dealings of the organization and its leaders—and in particular, as one source said, about their 'knowledge of the events leading up to the endorsement of Brian Kelsey.'."

Kelsey is a Tennessee state senator who in 2016 ran for the GOP nomination for a seat in Congress.

Since 2015 Schlapp has been the chairman of the ACU.

The allegations in our complaint—they're really quite bad," Adav Noti, chief of staff at the Campaign Legal Center, told The Dispatch. The CLC is the organization that filed the FEC complaint. "This is not run-of-the-mill shenanigans. It's true that $100,000 isn't an overwhelmingamount of money, but it's not nothing for a congressional race in Tennessee, either. And the two-part scheme to route it back to the campaign—if that is indeed what happened, it's a very serious violation. It's not a ticky-tack or a technical issue."

Read the entire report at The Dispatch.

===

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/facebook-pro-trump-groups/

salon no twt

Reporting on Friday revealed that Facebook knowingly allowed a digital marketing firm tied to a pro-Trump group to release a series of ads purporting to be from a fake left-wing organization ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, while election officials failed to investigate the group at the time.

As The Guardian reported, a right-wing marketing firm called Rally Forge ran a $5,000 ad campaign beginning just days before the2018 election, showing ads promoting Green Party candidates in an effort to split the Democratic vote and help Republicans in several close races. The ads were purported to be placed by a group called America Progress Now and expressed support for democratic socialism.

Facebook launched an investigation into the ads just after the election and quickly determined that America Progress Now's official page on the platform was run by the same three men—Jake Hoffman, Connor Clegg, and Colton Duncan—who were administrators for Turning Point USA, the pro-Trump college organization.

To the alarm of a number of Facebook employees, The Guardian reported, the company did not find Rally Forge or Turning Point USA to be in violation of any of its policies.

One product manager at the time said a case could be made for Rally Forge and Turning Point USA having engaged in voter suppression through the ads, and asked, "Can we strengthen our ads transparency policies so that political ads are indeed transparent to the user?"

After the election, Facebook deactivated several other right-wing accounts run by the administrators, but the move did not stop Rally Forge from establishing a "troll farm" out of Phoenix, Arizona in 2020. Working for Turning Point Action, a group linked to Turning Point USA, the firm hired teenagers to post pro-Trump messages on social media, some of which cast doubt on the integrity of the election system.

Sophie Zhang, aformer Facebook employee who participated in the investigation of the fake Green Party ads, wrote on Twitter Friday, "One wonders if [Rally Forge] would have escalated to troll farms, had FB deterred them in 2018." twt]

"This is egregious," tweeted the women's rights group UltraViolet on Friday.

Beyond Facebook's decision to allow the firm to remain on Facebook after determining the ads were fraudulent, the ads "appeared to violate federal laws that require independent expenditures to be filed with the [Federal Election Commission] and include proper disclosures on advertisements," The Guardian reported.

"This is an example of why disclosure is so important in elections: swing state voters who saw 'America Progress Now' ads promoting Green party candidates would've had no idea that they were the handiwork of Republican political operatives," Brendan Fischer, director of federal reform at CLC, told The Guardian.

The Campaign Legal Center (CLC) filed a complaint with the FEC in 2019 over America Progress Now and the administrators' failure to disclose the true source of the Facebook ads, only to have the case dismissed before the FEC could conduct an investigation.

The election commissioners declined to look further into the complaint after a man named Evan Muhlstein contacted them to take full responsibility to the ads, claiming he alone had failed to file the ad expenditures with the FEC and saying his "inexperience" was to blame.

"The FEC's job is to enforce the transparency laws and protect voters' right to know who is trying to influence them, but the agency here failed to conduct even a minimal investigation," Fischer said.

According to former FEC Commissioner Ann Ravel, who served on the commission from 2013 to 2017, Muhlstein's admission to the FEC appeared to amount to "clear fraud," as he never disclosed to the officials that the ads had been the work of Rally Forge.

At the time, though, Muhlstein's claim was enough to convince at least one FEC commissioner, James "Trey" Trainor, that the CLC had engaged in "wild speculation" by filing a complaint.

"This case wasn't about a 'fake political group … exploit[ing] Facebook rules … and hid[ing] spending from the FEC,'" Trainor wrote. "In fact, APN was established by an unsophisticated individual trying to show his support for several third-party candidates, but he got tripped by the myriad regulations governing online political speech."

Zhang denounced the FEC for failing to contact Facebook regarding Muhlstein's claim to verify that he'd administered the America Progress Now page—a cursory investigation which would have immediately revealed the true owners of the page.

"It's quite possible that FB would have blown the FEC off," Zhang said. "But many employees were upset over this case, and may have come forward if asked. I would likely have if I'd known."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

• Clarence Thomas' Wife Ginni Posts Far-Right Meme Mocking ... ›
• What Is ALEC? Dragging the Secretive Conservative Organization ... ›
• Tennessee Skewers Teaching of Evolution in Schools — Is Your ... ›

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

• Facebook Shuts Down Pro-Trump 'Stop the Steal' Group | Time ›
• Pro-Trump operatives coordinated viral #StopTheSteal events ... ›
• Inside the Pro-Trump Facebook Group Where First Responders Call ... ›

https://yyy.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jun/11/facebook-ads-turning-point-usa-rally-forge

no lnx many

Revealed: rightwing firm posed as leftist group on Facebook to divide Democrats

FEC investigation failed to uncover link to Rally Forge, a firm with close ties to Turning Point USA

Julia Carrie Wong in San Francisco

@juliacarriew

Fri 11 Jun 2021 06.00 EDT

A digital marketing firm closely linked to the pro-Trump youth group Turning Point USA was responsible for a series of deceptive Facebook ads promoting Green party candidates during the 2018 US midterm elections, the Guardian can reveal.

In an apparent attempt to split the Democratic vote in a number of close races, the ads purported to come from an organization called America Progress Now (APN) and used socialist memes and rhetoric to urge leftwing voters to support Green party candidates.

Facebook was aware of the true identity of the advertiser – the conservative marketing firm Rally Forge – and the deceptive nature of the ads, documents seen by the Guardian show, but the company determined that they did not violate its policies.

Rally Forge would go on to set up a pro-Trump domestic “troll farm” for Turning Point Action, a “sister” organization of Turning Point USA, in 2020,earning a permanent ban from Facebook.

“There were no policies at Facebook against pretending to be a group that did not exist, an abuse vector that has also been used by the governments of Honduras and Azerbaijan,” said Sophie Zhang, a former Facebook employee and whistleblower who played a small role in the investigation of the Green party ads.

She added: “The fact that Rally Forge later went on to conduct coordinated inauthentic behavior with troll farms reminiscent of Russia should be taken as an indication that Facebook’s leniency led to more risk-taking behavior.”

ads show AOC and Drake meme pix]

Some of the Facebook ads from America Progress Now. Composite: Facebook]

Devon Kearns, a spokesperson for Facebook, said: “We removed Rally Forge from our platforms for violating our policy against coordinated inauthentic behavior. Since the 2018 midterms, we have strengthened our policies related to election interference and political ad transparency. We continue working to make political advertising more transparent on our platform and we welcome updated regulations and help from policymakers as we evolve our policies in this space.”

The revelation that the ads were linked to a rightwing organization raises questions about the Federal Election Commission’s enforcement of campaign finance laws.APN and its ads appeared to violate federal laws that require independent expenditures to be filed with the FEC and include proper disclosures on advertisements, as ProPublica and Vice News first reported in 2018.

The non-partisan campaign finance watchdog group Campaign Legal Center (CLC) filed a complaint against APN and subsequently sued the agency in an attempt to force it to investigate the group. But in July 2020, the FEC voted to dismiss allegations that America Progress Now had violated federal law, after an individual, Evan Muhlstein, took responsibility for the ads and attributed the lack of proper disclosures and filings to his “inexperience”.

It is illegal to knowingly make false or fraudulent statements to federal agencies, and the FEC appears to have taken Muhlstein at his word that the ads were a sincere but novice attempt to support Green party candidates.

The former FEC commissioner Ann Ravel, who reviewed the case at the request of the Guardian, said that were she still on the FEC, she would now refer this “stunning” case to the justice department for investigation.

“It seems as if it’s a clear fraud,” Ravel said, noting that the FEC general counsel’s office appeared to have been “misled” by Muhlstein. “The requirement for the justice department to take on an electoral matter is that it be serious and willful, and clearly in this case it was willful, in my opinion.”

Brendan Fischer, director of federal reform at CLC, said: “This is an example of why disclosure is so important in elections: swing state voters who saw ‘America Progress Now’ ads promoting Green party candidates would’ve had no idea that they were the handiwork of Republican political operatives. The FEC’s job is to enforce the transparency laws and protect voters’ right to know who is trying to influence them, but the agency here failed to conduct even a minimal investigation.”

‘A crystal clear example of astroturfing’

On 27 October 2018 – just days before the 6 November election – America Progress Now began running a series of ads that used leftist motifs, such as the red rose emoji and images of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to rail against the “corporate, two-party oligarchy” and the “corporate, capitalist wage system”. Some of the ads urged voters to choose a third party, but others endorsed Green party candidates by name – triggering FEC rules for independent expenditures.

Following the 5 November publication of a ProPublica/Vice News report on the “mysterious” group behind the ads, Facebook launched a “hi-pri[ority]” escalation to investigate whether they constituted“coordinated inauthentic behavior” (CIB) – the name Facebook gives to the kind of deceptive tactics that a Russian influence operation used during the 2016 election.

The investigation was straightforward since Facebook has access to information that regular users do not: the names of the people who control Facebook Pages. Investigators quickly realized that America Progress Now was administered by three individuals – Jake Hoffman, Connor Clegg and Colton Duncan – who also served as Facebook Page administrators for Turning Point USA, the rightwing college group founded by Charlie Kirk in 2012. Hoffman and Clegg were also administrators for Kirk’s Facebook Page.

Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, left, with Donald Trump Jr and his girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, at a summit in 2019.]

“These admins are connected to Turning Point USA,” one staffer from the civic integrity team said, according to internal task management documents seen by the Guardian. “This is very inauthentic. I don’t know what the policy here is but this seems very sketchy.”Another staffer named Rally Forge as being responsible for the ads. APN had spent nearly $5,000 to have the ads shown to users nearly 300,000 times, a third staffer noted.

A rightwing political marketing firm that ran a $350,000 pro-Trump Super Pac in the 2016 election, Rally Forge was founded and run by Hoffman, an Arizona Republican who was at the time a member of the town council in Queen Creek, Arizona. In November 2020 Hoffman was elected to serve in the Arizona state legislature.

Clegg and Duncan were alumni of Texas State University, where they had been elected student body president and vice-president respectively in 2017. Clegg was impeached and removed from office shortly before his term would have ended in 2018. Duncan resigned from his post in 2017; he appears to have been hired directly by Turning Point USA in 2019.

Since 2017, Rally Forge has been Turning Point USA’s highest-compensated independent contractor, paid more than $1.1m over two years, according to the non-profit’s public filings. Turning Point Action, an affiliated organization also founded by Kirk, paid Rally Forge $700,000 for work supporting Trump and opposing Biden during the 2020 presidential campaign, and an additional $400,000 for work on the US Senate runoff races in Georgia.

Andrew Kolvet, a spokesperson for Turning Point USA, said that neither Turning Point USA nor Turning Point Action had “any involvement” with America Progress Now or its Facebook ads.

In addition to America Progress Now and Turning Point USA, Hoffman, Clegg and Duncan all also served as administrators for a number of other rightwing Facebook Pages. The trio each maintained two accounts to administer their Facebook Pages, one using their full names and one using their first and middle initials – a violation of the company’s policy that each user can only have one Facebook account. One of each of the three men’s accounts had been authorized by Facebook to run political ads, a process that required submitting a government ID to Facebook for verification.

One of Hoffman’s accounts had spent approximately $650,000 to run Facebook ads on behalf of 40 Pages, including the official Page of Donald Trump Jr.

The intention here is clearly to mislead users

Facebook civic integrity staffer]

Hoffman declined to answer detailed questions from the Guardian, including about the nature of Rally Forge’s relationship with Muhlstein. “The premise of your questions is either ill-informed or intentionally misleading,” he said in a statement. “Rally Forge is a marketing agency, not a compliance company. Furthermore, it is my understanding that the small handful of ads, totaling less than 2,500 dollars, which qualified as independent expenditures, have been fully disclosed by the responsible organization in coordination with the FEC.”

Duncan said that he had never heard of America Progress Now before the Guardian’s inquiries and had “zero knowledge or insight into the group”. When asked about the CG Duncan account, which had passed Facebook’s verification process and was an administrator of the APN page, he responded: “I urge you to reach out to JM [Hoffman]. Let me know what you find out, I’m as curious as you are.”

Clegg did not respond to multiple attempts to contact him.

Despite possessing clear evidence of inauthenticity, Facebook staffers determined the Green party ads did not violate existing company policies related to political ads or CIB. They decided to deactivate the three men’s extra accounts, but after the election and only after providing them with advance notice.

The episode inspired some disquiet among Facebook staff.

“What I find very problematic is that the intention here is clearly to mislead users,” said the civic integrity staffer. “The users in question clearly created a new FB page to hide their identity, which would be grounds for removal on most surfaces,” she added, referring to Facebook’s rules requiring people to use their real names on their accounts.

One product manager produced an internal postmortem of the incident in which she described it as “a crystal clear example of astroturfing” – deceptive campaign tactics designed to appear as grassroots actions – “… as well as playing both sides … and political ad opacity, since users cannot see who they are. Furthermore, I could see making a case for voter suppression.”

‘The users in question clearly created a new FB page to hide their identity,’ said a Facebook civic integrity staffer. Photograph: Olivier Douliery/AFP/Getty Images

“Unfortunately, it turned out there was nothing we could do against these ads,” she added. “We ended up only aiming to remove a few [duplicate] accounts under the fake account policy, but only after proper notice – and I believe we have not removed them yet.”

“Can we strengthen our ads transparency policies so that political ads are indeed transparent to the user?” she asked.

A Facebook spokesperson said that the company had indeed removed the duplicate accounts following the midterms, and that Rally Forge’s network of Pages and accounts had gone dormant after November 2018. The company made a number of updates to its policies on political ads before the 2020 elections, including requiring advertisers to provide more information about their organizations before being authorized to run ads. It also introduced a new policy to encourage more transparency regarding who runs networks of Facebook Pages.

Rally Forge reactivated its network of Pages and accounts in June 2020, according to Facebook. It established a domestic “troll farm” in Phoenix, Arizona, that employed teenagers to churn out pro-Trump social media posts, some of which cast doubt on the integrity of the US election system or falsely charged Democrats with attempting to steal the election, the Washington Post revealed.

Facebook said that its automated systems had detected and deleted fake accounts made by Rally Forge, which then created “thinly veiled personas” to carry out deceptive campaigning. In October 2020, the platform permanently banned Rally Forge and Hoffman for violating its policy against CIB, work that Facebook said the firm had undertaken “on behalf of Turning Point USA” and another client.

A spokesman for Turning Point USA disputed the characterization of the operation as a “troll farm” and noted that it was a project of Turning Point Action, which is a separate entity.

Facebook did not take any enforcement action against Turning Point USA, Turning Point Action or Kirk with regard to the Phoenix operation. Facebook also did not disclose Rally Forge’s connection to America Progress Now and the deceptive Green Party ads.

A forestalled investigation

In September 2019, CLC filed a complaint alleging that APN’s failure to register with the FEC violated federal law. The FEC responded by sending a letter to an inaccurate address that America Progress Now had listed on its Facebook Page, but it does not appear to have taken further action, prompting CLC to sue it in February 2020.

“If nothing is done, the FEC will instead be sending a message that anonymous or fake entities like America Progress Now can pop into existence just prior to an election, exploit lax registration and reporting requirements by digital platforms, spend unlimited sums of money, and then disappear into thin air once an election is over,” the group said at the time.

In April 2020, the FEC wrote again, this time to the address listed on an Arizona state business filing for America Progress Now.

On 15 April 2020, Evan Muhlstein responded to the FEC by email. Muhlstein described the lack of filing as an “error”,writing, “I believe that it is important for the commission to understand that any potential failure on either of those items is based entirely on my inexperience to the process.” He wrote that he had “assumed that Facebook’s ‘political disclaimer/disclosure’ was all that was necessary”, said his expenditures totaled “only $2,467.54”, and expressed surprise that “a spend as small as this would require any type of reporting”.

Donald Trump speaks at a Turning Point USA summit in 2019.]

“I again offer my sincerest apology for any potential errors in failing to disclose,” Muhlstein wrote. “Given the apparent obstacles and unknowns of participating in the election process in this manner (of which I am learning some of now), it is highly unlikely I will ever participate in it again. I feel terrible for having been so ignorant to the process.”

Muhlstein also expressed his desire to come into compliance “correctly and quickly”. At no point in the communication did Muhlstein disclose that the advertisements had been handled by a major political marketing firm.

“Muhlstein’s statement to the FEC is extremely misleading and might warrant a criminal investigation,” said Fischer, of the CLC.

Muhlstein did not respond to multiple attempts to make contact with him. His connection to Rally Forge is not known. He is a resident of Queen Creek, Arizona, the town where Hoffman also lives.

The FEC has the power to issue subpoenas and carry out serious investigations, but only after a vote of four of its five commissioners.

In a report dated 4 May, the FEC’s general counsel argued that, while it appeared that Muhlstein had violated federal law, the small amount of money involved and Muhlstein’s statement that he was unlikely to engage in further political spending led it to recommend that the FEC exercise prosecutorial discretion and dismiss the allegations with a warning.

In July, the FEC voted to follow the general counsel’s recommendation and dismiss the case, forestalling any actual investigation.

Commissioner James “Trey” Trainor went further, lambasting the CLC in a statement of reasons. “Contrary to CLC’s wild speculation, this case wasn’t about a ‘fake political group … exploit[ing] Facebook rules … and hid[ing] spending from the FEC,’” he wrote. “In fact, APN was established by an unsophisticated individual trying to show his support for several third-party candidates, but he got tripped by the myriad regulations governing online political speech.”

Trainor asserted that “there was no evidence to contradict” Muhlstein’s statement to the FEC “and no evidence to support CLC’s salacious theories about the ‘unknown person or persons’ behind APN”.

It would not be until 23 December 2020 – six months after the FEC had voted not to pursue the allegations of law violations and more than two years after the election – that Muhlstein would provide the FEC with that evidence, when he finally registered APN with the FEC and disclosed that the independent expenditure had been made through Rally Forge.

The FEC did not respond to questions from the Guardian, citing a policy not to comment on enforcement matters. Trainor did not respond to a request for comment. Fischer said: “It looks like we were right.”

Daniel Hernandez contributed reporting

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/transparent-political-ploy-florida-attorney-general-asks-fbi-to-investigate-bloombergs-efforts-to-restore-felon-voting-rights/

florida Attorney General Ashley Moody, a Republican, has asked the FBI and the state’s Department of Law Enforcement to investigate former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg‘s efforts to help felons in the state regain their voting rights by paying their court fees, citing “potential violations of election laws.”

Bloomberg has over the last week raised more than $16 million from individuals and private organizations, which he said would go towards paying down fines and fees for nearly 32,000 Black and Latinx Florida voters with felony records. A controversial Florida law forbids former felons from voting unless and until they pay off all money they owe the courts or other legal parties. Critics have called it a “modern day poll tax.”

Florida attorney general Ashley Moody said in the letter that the office of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis had asked her to look into the issue, CNN reported Wednesday.

“After preliminarily reviewing this limited public information and law, it appears further investigation is warranted,” Moody wrote in a letter to the agencies....

https://billmoyers.com/story/gop-led-legal-inquest-into-bloomberg-helping-florida-felons-vote-condemned-as-attempted-voter-suppression/

Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody’s call for state and federal investigations into billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s effort to raise millions to pay off court fees to help Florida felons restore their voting rights was a “gross abuse” of power, “voter suppression,” “a fear-mongering tactic used before” and based on a “fundamental misconception” of anti-corruption laws, according to experienced campaign lawyers and former federal election regulators.

“It’s not just that an investigative process and grand jury proceedings would likely extend past Election Day, but also that we’ve seen this fearmongering tactic used before,” said Jonathan Diaz, legal counsel at the Campaign Legal Center in Washington, D.C., founded by Trevor Potter, a Republican and ex-Federal Election Commission (FEC) chair. “There are countless examples of elected officials or law enforcement announcing ‘bombshell’ investigations like this with no evidence of actual wrongdoing (for example, recentlyin Texas and Georgia) and indeed, no actual conclusions that any misconduct has taken place.”

It’s “outrageous and likely an extortionate threat designed to suppress the vote and deny citizens their constitutional right to vote,” said Benedict Kuehne, the Miami attorney whose team recently won a settlement to save digital images of ballots if there’s a presidential election recount. “Not at all unexpected. But still an abuse of power.”

The fray is the latest development in one of the nation’s most important voting rights battles. Two years ago, a majority of Floridians approved Amendment 4, which restored voting rights for nearly 1.4 million former felons. Florida’s Republican-led state government responded by passing laws and going to court to impede the rights’ restoration, mainly by requiring former felons to pay off all court fees and fines before being eligible to register to vote.

As legal battles are continuing in the courts—where delays mean that these Floridians won’t necessarily be eligible to vote this fall unless they pay fees that typically are between $500 and $5,000—many celebrities and philanthropists have been making donations to the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition (FRRC), which led the Amendment 4 campaign, to help pay the fees.

The FRRC raised about $6 million in the past year for that effort, the Miami Herald reported, noting that celebrities like NBA star LeBron James contributed.To date, FRRC has helped about 4,000 people pay off their fines, NPR reported, noting that an estimated 775,000 former felons have unpaid fines.

But a September 22 Washington Post report that said Bloomberg had raised $16 million to help about 32,000 people clear those debtsprompted Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to ask the state Attorney General Ashley Moody (both are Republicans) to launch federal and state anti-corruption investigations into Bloomberg’s effort.

Political Theater

Beyond the obvious election-year politics, the issue is what constitutes illegal vote-buying.

“I sent a letter to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the Federal Bureau of Investigation into potential violations of election laws,” Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody said via email. “And I have instructed the Statewide Prosecutor to work with law enforcement andany Statewide Grand Jury that the Governor may call.”

On September 23, Moody asked state and federal authorities to investigate whether Bloomberg’s efforts, as reported in the Washington Post, violated state and federal laws that make it illegal to give another person anything of value in exchange for their vote. That Washington Post report quoted an unnamed Bloomberg adviser who said that paying the fines “immediately activates tens of thousands of voters who are predisposed to vote for Joe Biden.”

“Governor DeSantis has asked that my office review recent allegations found in the enclosed September 22, 2020 Washington Post article and relevant law,” began Moody’s letter to the FBI and Florida Department of Law Enforcement. The letter cited a 2016 advisory opinion from Maria Matthews, Florida Division of Elections director, to a now-defunct political committee, saying that “[e]ven otherwise innocuous offering of an incentive simply to vote could run afoul” of corruption laws. Moody concluded, “it appears further investigation is warranted.”

The preceding paragraph in that 2016 opinion, which was not cited in Moody’s cover letter but was found in attached documents, said that the Division of Elections had concluded in the 1980s that Florida law “does not prohibit a person from giving an elector ‘a gift certificate or other consideration if the consideration is not intended to buy or corruptly influence another’s vote.’”

That advisory opinion identifies a tipping point—whether a gift is tied to an explicit vote. Its ambiguity—“[it] could run afoul”—is the hinge upon which Florida Republicans have launched an investigation into Bloomberg, implying, but not concluding, that he has crossed a line into vote-buying. That peg was all that right-wing media needed to start attacking Bloomberg.

On the other hand, the clearer prior precedents in Florida Department of State advisory opinions, and Florida and federal laws that absolve Bloomberg of any wrongdoing, are what has drawn extraordinarily strong denunciations of Moody’s actions by voting rights attorneys, former campaign finance regulators and Florida Democrats.

“Let’s not forget that Florida has spent the last year telling federal courts that these legal debts are simply criminal penalties that have nothing to do with voting and are therefore not a poll tax—but as soon as someone like [former New York] Mayor Bloomberg shows up and offers to help pay them, Florida turns around and accuses him of illegally buying votes,” said the Campaign Legal Center’s Diaz. “The state can’t have it both ways: either it’s charging people to vote in violation of the Constitution and this is a poll tax, or it’s not, and Mayor Bloomberg has done nothing wrong by donating funds to help people become eligible [voters].”

Another former Federal Election Commissioner, Karl Sandstrom (appointed by President Bill Clinton), said that Florida Attorney General Moody was misapplying legal standards by citing an ambiguous state agency opinion to launch a federal and state anti-corruption probe.

“The Florida attorney general’s reading of the relevant statutes flies in [the] face of the rule of lenity which is [a] well-established principle of criminal statutory interpretation that requires a court to apply any unclear or ambiguous law in the manner that is most favorable to the defendant,” he said. “Under her interpretation, a corporation that gives employees time off to vote would be guilty of a felony if the corporation expected that were likely to prefer one candidate over another.”

“This [gambit] raises voter suppression to a whole new level,” said Chris Sautter, an election lawyer specializing in post-election recounts. “What next? Will they start prosecuting voter protection lawyers who advise voters on their rights to cast a ballot?”

Democrats and Florida Lawyers React

Outside of Florida, other seasoned election lawyers said that Bloomberg’s effort was legal.

“I’m not a neutral expert on this,” said Joseph Sandler, one of the Democratic Party’s top campaign lawyers. “But we do advise on this issue all the time, and there’s no doubt in my mind this is legal because payment of the fine is not tied to whether the person agrees or promises to commit to vote at all, let alone to vote for a particular party or candidate. The relevant statutes—which go to corruptly influencing a person to vote a certain way—do not remotely apply. The threats of prosecution for this are indeed a gross abuse [of power].”

Inside Florida, Democrats made the same point. Moody was wrong on the vote-buying law.

“I think the fundamental misconception (whether inadvertent or deliberate) is that enabling people to cast a vote is the same thing as telling them, or demanding of them, to vote in a particular way for a particular candidate. That is just not what is happening here,” said Joseph Geller, a Democratic state legislator and veteran of Florida’s 2000 presidential recount. “These potential voters are being freed to vote, but there is no insistence or requirement as to how they will exercise their discretion as to which candidates they will vote for.”

Of course, it is impossible to separate the timing of Moody’s call for state and federal investigations from the 2020 election cycle. Her action’s purpose was to deter voting by the roughly 32,000 former felons for whom Bloomberg was poised to clear the existing court fees.

“Our thoughts are: yes, donors can pay off the fines and fees of Floridians. The Florida AG’s outrageous letter is a blatant voter suppression tactic that has no basis in law,” said Corey Goldstone, a Campaign Legal Center spokesman. “We’re treating it more like a press release than a serious legal filing. None of these people have to vote, no one has been induced to take any particular action. The donors who are contributing to the Florida Rights Restoration Council merely allows people to be eligible to vote—something that most people enjoy cost-free.”

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/cover-up-house-democrats-subpoena-documents-nlrb-refused-to-share-in-ethics-investigation-propublica/

Starting in early spring, as the coronavirus took hold, a conservative lawyer at the forefront of raising alarms about voting by mail held multiple private briefings exclusively for Republican state election officials, according to previously unreported public records.

The lawyer, the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky, is a leading purveyor of the notion that voter fraud is rampant, claims that have been largely discredited.

Among the participants in these meetings has been an official from the office of Georgia’s secretary of state; the secretary, Brad Raffensperger,recently elevated concerns about voter fraud by contending that 1,000 Georgians had voted twice in elections this year.

gOP congressional staffers and a Trump administration appointee have also joined in these meetings, which were open to officials from states across the country, including Missouri and Nevada, the records show. No Democratic state election officials appear to have been invited.

The “goal” of the meetings, held remotely, is to “gather the chief state election officials together to strategize on advancing their shared goal of ensuring the integrity of the elections they administer in their home states,” an invitation to an early August event reads.

Most of the states declined to comment on the meetings, and it’s not clear what specifically was discussed. Von Spakovsky is highly influential in conservative circles. He has sent invitees copies of his published essays pushing for in-person voting and culling voter rolls as absentee balloting expands amid the pandemic, a situation that von Spakovsky argued will “make fraud far easier.”

The meetings come as voting access has become one of the central flashpoints of the upcoming presidential election. More Americans are expected to vote by mail this year than ever before because of the health risks posed by COVID-19. President Donald Trump has repeatedly and baselessly asserted that mail-in voting is rife with problems.Echoing von Spakovsky, he asserted on Twitter in July that the upcoming presidential vote will be the “most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history.”

Experts have said voting by mail carries little risk of fraud. Since it is widely believed that more Democractic voters will vote by mail than Republicans, von Spakovsky’s proposals, if adopted, could suppress Democratic turnout in one of the most consequential presidential elections in a generation.

Secretaries of state, who oversee statewide voting and work with county election officials, have broad leeway to act in ways that can limit or expand the franchise. While most are partisan elected officials, they are expected to carry out policies that benefit everyone.

The Heritage Foundation did not make von Spakovsky available for an interviewand didn’t address detailed questions about the meetings. In a statement, the nonprofit’s media director, Greg Scott, said election security was “crucial to our country’s future.”

“The Heritage Foundation is committed to making sure elections are free and fair,” he said. “Every eligible voter’s vote should be counted and not canceled out by fraudulent acts.”

The remote gatherings are an outgrowth of private, in-person meetings von Spakovsky has held with Republican election authorities each year since Trump took office, the records show. Participants have hailed from at least a dozen states, including battlegrounds like Ohio and Georgia. They typically dovetail with the national conference of secretaries of state in Washington, D.C., and take place at Heritage’s headquarters. Those pre-pandemic meetings did not primarily address voting by mail.

Jonathan Diaz, a lawyer for the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan voting rights group, said it’s one thing for von Spakovsky to make dubious claims of voter fraud in public but “another thing entirely for him to be circumventing official channels and making these presentations in private, where they’re not subject to public scrutiny.”

Diaz added that election authorities need to be “transparent about the information they’re relying on to make decisions about the ballot.”

Von Spakovsky has hosted at least two of these remote meetings in recent months. In April, there was an hourlong “Election Administration Forum Conference Call” that covered, in part, the expansion of mail-in voting and “ways to message these concerns to your constituents,” according to the invitation. The event included the ranking member of the U.S. House of Representatives committee that oversees elections and five staffers, one of whom went on to work for the Trump campaign two months later. An August meeting, conducted through a secure, virtual video conferencing platform, was scheduled to last for two hours, according to an invitation.

A staffer from the Georgia secretary of state’s office participated in the April call. Before that, the secretary himself, Raffensperger, met with von Spakovsky in the summer of 2019 at Raffensperger’s request. At the Georgian Club in Atlanta, the two discussed a new law that involved replacing the state’s voting machines, according to Raffensperger’s deputy, Jordan Fuchs. That statute contributed to problems during what was widely viewed as a troubled June primary.

This month, around the time Raffensperger went public about double voting concerns in his state, he also appealed a federal judge’s ruling that the state must count absentee ballots postmarked by Election Day, the kind of policy change von Spakovsky has argued Democrats are using to “game the system” ahead of November.

“Hans, to our office, is the ultimate voter integrity activist,” Fuchs told ProPublica. While von Spakovsky “hasn’t driven any policy decisions” that have taken place under the secretary, Fuchs said that she briefed von Spakovsky on her office’s actions regarding double voting and absentee ballots.

There are indications that von Spakovsky has been influential within the Trump administration as well. During the August virtual briefing, state election administrators were told that Cameron Quinn, a Department of Homeland Security official, would now be their “liaison to the election community,” according to emails that a participant from Washington state sent to his colleagues.

Quinn has worked as an elections official in Virginia with von Spakovsky and has co-taught a law school course with him. During the meeting, she provided her cellphone number to the attendees.

The announcement of her role apparently came as a surprise to Washington officials, including the state’s director of elections, the emails show. The director, a member of a five-person committee that regularly interacts with DHS over election security matters, told her colleagues that there is a point of contact within the agency — and it’s not Quinn.

It turned out Quinn participated in the meeting without notifying her new boss beforehand, according to people familiar with the matter. Her appointment to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a division within DHS that monitors election systems for foreign hacking attempts and communicates with state officials about them, had only been announced within the agency a day earlier, they said.

It’s not clear whether Quinn is still in contact with state elections officials. A division spokeswoman confirmed Quinn was not yet an employee in the division at the time she participated in the meeting but declined to answer additional questions.

Beyond Quinn, it’s not clear whether any executive branch officials have participated in von Spakovsky’s remote briefings. But in 2019, during his annual in-person gathering, the then-head of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, John Gore, and its chief of staff and counsel, Omeed Assefi, attended in their official capacities, according to an attendee list.

The division is responsible for protecting the rights of voters. An agenda from the event shows that Gore and von Spakovsky led an hourlong discussion on “election reforms in the states and messaging and update on civil rights division, U.S. Department of Justice.”

“This is highly inappropriate,” Vanita Gupta, who ran the division under President Barack Obama, told ProPublica. “That kind of closed-door session, where a head of the Civil Rights Division is secretly speaking about enforcement with partisan state officials, is unprecedented. The DOJ isn’t accountable to just one party.”

Gore declined to commenton what took place at the event or if he’d attended other von Spakovsky meetings in the past as head of the Civil Rights Division. The Justice Department didn’t respond to questions about the Civil Rights Division’s involvement in the meeting or Gore’s presentation at the 2019 event.

At the Heritage Foundation, von Spakovsky maintains a database of voter fraud cases and, emails show, regularly urges secretaries of state to contribute to it. At the moment, the database encompasses some 1,300 cases, stretching over a period that begins in 1982. As Reuters recently noted, billions of ballots were cast during that time.

Von Spakovksy’s writings on voter fraud carry the veneer of academic research. But when he was questioned about his work in a trial two years ago, he testified that none of it has undergone the stringent vetting process of peer review. The judge in that case dismissed his testimony, saying it was “premised on several misleading and unsupported examples” and included “false assertions.”

Before coming to the Heritage Foundation, von Spakovsky served on both the Federal Election Commission and in the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, where he drew scrutiny after approving a voter ID law in Georgia that a federal judge likened to a Jim Crow-style poll tax. In May 2017, Trump appointed von Spakovsky to a voter fraud commission that disbanded less than a year later without producing any evidence of voter fraud.

Do you have access to information about efforts by outside groups seeking to influence how election officials will administer the vote on Nov. 3 that should be public? Email Mike Spies at mike.spies@propublica.org, Jake Pearson at jake.pearson@propublica.org or Jessica Huseman at jessica.huseman@propublica.org. Here’s how to send tips and documents to ProPublica securely.

==

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/trump-campaign-laundered-money-through-corporations-to-hide-millions-in-payments-to-presidents-family-complaint/

On Tuesday, the Huffington Post reported that the watchdog group Campaign Legal Center is alleging President Donald Trump and his campaign are illegally making secret payments to the president’s family through a network of private companies that have dispensed over $216 million.

“According to the complaint, both Trump’s reelection campaign and a related fundraising group, the ‘Trump Make America Great Again Committee,’ are breaking federal campaign law by running payments through former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale’s private firms as well as American Made Media Consultants, a company created specifically to place ads and buy related services for the campaign,” reported S. V. Date.

“Parscale’s companies have already received $39 million from Trump’s campaign, the RNC and their joint fundraising committees, according to a HuffPost analysis of FEC filings from Jan. 20, 2017, through the end of June 2020. American Made Media Consultants has been paid $177.6 million from those same committees through that time period,” continued the report. “Among those payments: $180,000 a year each to Kimberly Guilfoyle, the girlfriend of Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., and to Lara Trump, the wife of his second son, Eric Trump.”

Tim Murtaugh, the Trump campaign’s communications director, denied this arrangement is illegal, saying, “AMMC is a campaign vendor responsible for arranging and executing media buys and related services at fair market value.” But CLC attorney Brendan Fischer disagrees, saying, “The money is being laundered through corporations run by top Trump campaign officials … this scheme violated the law and undermines the public’s right to know. What precisely is being hidden is unknown. We don’t know for sure."

questions have swirled around the Trump family’s use of political money ever since the president took office, with a recent criminal investigation focusing on how cash flowed from the Trump inauguration committee to businesses held by the Trump Organizatio

lee f

https://theintercept.com/2020/02/15/dark-money-irs-reporting-501c

DARK MONEY GROUPS backed by foreign corporate donors are supporting the Trump administration’s decision to roll back one of the last remaining ways for authorities to monitor the flow of unlawful campaign cash in American elections.

In recent years, 501(c) nonprofits have become the entities of choice for secret campaign spending.These nonprofit groups, which do not have to report any donor information to the public, can receive unlimited contributions from any source and, thanks to the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, spend unlimited amounts on elections.

Foreign spending, whether by a foreign national or a foreign-owned corporation, is still illegal under federal law. But the law has been poorly enforced, and the few instances in which penalties have been applied in recent years have come in reaction to publicly reported foreign corporate spending to Super PACs, such as The Intercept’s reporting on Chinese corporate donations in 2016 and the recent federal indictment over a shell company owned by a Russian national that gave to President Donald Trump’s Super PAC in 2018.

The one check on foreign contributions to dark-money groups has been the Schedule B form, which reports 501(c) donor information confidentially to the Internal Revenue Service. Under a new rule proposed last September by the Treasury Department and the IRS, nonprofits will no longer be required to report donor information, even to the government, allowing an unprecedented level of secrecy.

Lobbyists for foreign-funded groups have pushed the administration to move forward with the rule, which is close to being finalized.  The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the largest business lobby organization in the world, spent over $10 million to influence the last 2018 midterm election cycle using its general fund. The group, which has foreign corporate donors, has lobbied in support of the IRS rule to repeal the Schedule B requirement, claiming in a letter to officials that the accidental leak of donors could reduce corporate free speech rights.

“Identifying, harassing, and intimidating the organization’s supporters is a chief means of silencing that organization’s speech,” wrote Caroline L. Harris, the Chambers’ chief tax policy counsel, and Ryan P. Meyers, the deputy general counsel of the group, in a regulatory letter to officials overseeing the rule change. “The Chamber applauds the work of Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in eliminating onerous reporting requirements.”

The National Association of Manufacturers, which counts several corporations based in foreign countries as members, in a letter to IRS officials, similarly called the Schedule B requirement an “unnecessary administrative filings that raise the potential for misuse in a way that chills protected speech.”

Both NAM and the Chamber of Commerce, which spends more than $160 million a year, are organized as 501(c)(6) trade associationsand under no obligation to disclose donor money to the public — only to the government through the annual Schedule B form to its 990 annual filing. After the Citizens United decision, the two groups led an effort to defeat the DISCLOSE Act, legislation that would have forced groups engaged high-dollar election advocacy to reveal donor information. The Chamber also lobbied successfully to stop President Barack Obama from issuing an executive order to force government contractors to disclose grants to 501(c) groups.

Foreign-based firms such as Brazilian petrochemical firm Braskem, Al Zayani Investments in Bahrain, and Turkish conglomerate Tekfen are listed on the Chamber’s website as dues-paying members. Faced with criticism in the past that its foreign funding might bleed into the Chamber’s vast domestic lobbying and campaign spending budget, the group has claimed that any foreign donations are walled off from domestic funds, and that foreign donors make up a small percentage of its overall budget.

But the removal of the Schedule B requirement could make those claims impossible to verify. A large foreign national firm could provide multimillion-dollar donations for use in U.S. elections to the Chamber under the new rule and such giving would never be reported to government officials.

That’s precisely the danger of removing Schedule B forms, campaign finance experts warn. The Campaign Legal Center, a campaign finance watchdog that has filed the ethics complaints that led to enforcement action on foreign money in the past, cautioned the IRS that the rule would simply open the door to more foreign spending.

“Congress has failed to pass new transparency legislation, and the FEC has failed to enforce the transparency laws that are on the books,” said Brendan Fischer, director of Campaign Legal Center’s federal reform program. “As a result, the only donor disclosure reports that dark-money groups file with any federal agency are the confidential Schedule B reports filed with the IRS. These confidential donor reports are one of the few ways that federal agencies could detect and deter foreign money in U.S. elections.”

It’s not hard to comprehend the many ways in which completely secret legal entities could incentivize illegal election behavior. In 2016, reporters from the Telegraph conducted a sting operation on a Republican campaign operative working in support of Trump. The operative was offered a $2 million check from a Chinese businessman by the reporters. He responded by offering a plan for how to conceal the money, suggesting that it be routed through his consulting firm to a pair of 501(c)4 groups and then to a pro-Trump Ssuper PAC.

The FBI is also investigating the National Rifle Association over allegations that the group, which is organized as a 501(c)4, may have received financial support from Russian sources. McClatchy reported that counterintelligence officials believe that Russian interests may have contributed to the NRA’s $30 million election advertising campaign in 2016.

Foreign firms increasingly finance major American business associations. As The Intercept has previously reported, a major Chinese chemical company joined the American Chemistry Council, a 501(c)6 that routinely lobbies lawmakers and spends money in elections.

The Trump administration had originally tried to remove the Schedule B form last summer in a surprise decision. A federal judge in Montana, however, ruled that the IRS had failed to follow proper regulatory procedure and ordered the agency to conduct a formal rule-making to allow the public and stakeholders to weigh in on the change.

“The rise of ‘dark money’ in U.S. elections has made it easy for foreign entities to contravene these laws by funneling money into U.S. elections through groups that that [sic] do not publicly disclose their donors, such as 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations and 501(c)(6) trade associations,” wrote the Campaign Legal Center in a letter to the IRS.“This change would further enable foreign entities to donate millions of dollars to such organizations for the purpose of influencing U.S. elections without any risk of scrutiny by federal regulators.”

Republican-aligned think tanks have joined the business-backed push to eliminate the Schedule B.Several nonprofits backed by billionaire Charles Koch, including his marquee group Americans for Prosperity, testified on February 7 in support of the rule change. FreedomWorks, a conservative grassroots group backed by business interests, has also mobilized hundreds of letters to the agency.

Hans von Spakovsky, a former Federal Election Commission member now with the Heritage Foundation, appeared at the hearing alongside other conservative activists in support of the rule change.

Von Spakosvsky, an avowed critic of campaign finance regulations and voting rights laws, testified that “their claim that this will somehow allow foreign money to suddenly flood into American elections is absurd,” according to a transcript of his remarks. Von Spakovsky said the FEC had plenty of authority and expertise in combating foreign money during his tenure, despite the fact that the agency has historically only intervened to investigate foreign money through disclosed political action committees on a few occasions in its 45-year history. He did not cite any examples of the FEC investigating 501(c) groups.

==

axios

a political organization run by David Bossie, President Trump's former deputy campaign manager, has raised millions of dollars by saying it's supporting Trump-aligned conservative candidates — but has spent only a tiny fraction of that money supporting candidates.

Instead, federal records suggest the Presidential Coalition has spent nearly all its money — raised mostly from small-dollar donations — on more fundraising, as well as administrative costs, which include Bossie's salary, according to a new report produced by theCampaign Legal Center (CLC) in collaboration with Axios.

• The group's mailers and ads, obtained by Axios and reviewed by CLC, a campaign finance watchdog, repeatedly stress Bossie's relationship to Trump. Contributions to the organization increased after Trump's presidential victory and then skyrocketed in 2018.
• [nice grapf on viz scam eg 1006 penn ave]
• raphic: Harry Stevens/Axios

A senior Trump administration official told Axios: "The problem the president is going to have with this is 1) he does not like when people are perceived to be profiting off of him, and 2) these are not max out donors. This is money that many likely think is going towards the president's re-election effort when it is not. So effectively every dollar groups like Bossie's and similar groups raise is a dollar the campaign does not."

• Despite no longer working for the Trump campaign, Bossie is still close to the president. Bossie flew with him on Air Force One in March to a rally in Michigan.
• The Trump campaign declined to comment.

Why it matters: "There is a cottage industry of groups targeting vulnerable communities with self-serving borderline scams," CLC writes in its analysis. "What sets the Presidential Coalition apart is that it is explicitly — and successfully — capitalizing on Bossie's connection with the president of the United States."

• In response, Bossie called our story "fake news brought to you by a collaboration of the biased liberal media and unabashed left-wing activists."
• In a long statement, he charged that CLC cannot fairly assess his organization because the group has a "conflict of interest" because it "is a highly vocal and fierce critic of the landmark Citizens United v. FEC case." (Bossie runs Citizens United.) You can read Bossie's full statement here.
• Bossie also said the analysis "totally ignores the legitimate staff, infrastructure and other political activity costs associated with the organization’s work," adding that "it is expensive to raise substantial amounts in small donor contributions using direct mail, digital, and telemarketing."

Details: Onits website, The Presidential Coalition says it has been "dedicated to identifying and supporting conservative candidates running for office at the state and local levels of government" since its founding in 2005.

• The group's fundraising appeals also urge supporters to "grow the Republican 'farm team'" and "train and prepare conservative candidates to run and win in local elections."

But based on the 527 organization's IRS data, just $425,442 (or 3%) of the $15.4 million it spent during 2017 and 2018 went to direct political activity, which CLC defines as "direct donations to candidates or political committees, and a small number of state-level candidate ads."

• "There is no question that the money spent on programming is well below anything someone in the industry would consider a legitimate amount," said Walter Lukens, CEO of the Lukens Company, a direct response marketing agency.

At least $445,972 was spent on apparent book purchases. Copies of the Presidential Coalition's direct mailers — which Axios obtained and shared with CLC — show the organization offered people who donated above a certain amount (usually $45) a copy of one of Bossie's books, "Trump's Enemies."

• Bossie's response on the books: "In 2018, TPC spent a small amount on Trump's Enemies. The bulk of the book premiums, however, where [sic] for copies of Trump's America, which was authored by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. TPC members are very excited to receive these books and DVDs."

Data: Campaign Legal Center's analysis based on Presidential Coalition's forms 8872 from the IRS; Chart: Harry Stevens/Axios

The rest of the money appears to have been spent on more fundraising for the Presidential Coalition, largely via direct mail and telemarketing, expenses to support those activities (such as postage and donor list cultivation), payments to other groups run by Bossie, and administrative expenses.

• Compare that to the Republican Governors Association, another 527 organization supporting state-level Republican candidates, which spent about 80% of its funds on campaign contributions and political advertising over the same period.

Meanwhile, more than $650,000 of the Presidential Coalition’s 2017–2018 spending went to two affiliated organizations also run by Bossie, Citizens United and Citizens United Foundation — 1.5 times as much as the group spent on direct political activity.

• Those payments included personal salaries for Bossie: In 2017, Bossie earned a $105,541 salary from the Presidential Coalition.
• The remaining expenditures went to overhead and administrative costs.

The bottom line: There's a vast difference between what the Presidential Coalition is telling its donors and how it actually spends their money. And as the CLC writes, "Not only do these dubious practices mislead and potentially even prey upon vulnerable populations, but they also drain resources away from more effective political groups" — including Trump's campaign.

Go deeper: Elderly Bossie donors say they thought they were helping Trump

Counsel to Parnas, Richard L. Yellen in New York, did not respond to requests for comment before deadline.

While the fraud allegations against Parnas were dismissed, the breach of contract claim stuck. U.S. District Judge Arthur D. Spatt awarded the plaintiff $350,000, which became $510,434.70 with interest and costs.

Parnas is also a defendant in another lawsuit brought by Campaign Legal Center, a Washington nonprofit that accuses him, business partner Igor Fruman and Global Energy Producers LLC of violating campaign finance laws with a $325,000 donation to pro-Trump, super-PAC America First Action Inc.

==

Campaign Legal Center,