priorities usa
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">= </font><div><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></p><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">aha: kind of scary that a superpac (which is spozed to be indep?) is throwing around its wt as if it's a legit org, not a effing slush fund of dark $ whose main purpose is to give cover to funder and cand on neg attack ads (often right before election when cannot be countered/debunked?)</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">one wonders if this is local tv stations stading up for democracy and free speech, or their refusal to play ref, or more darkly, they just want the massive ad revenue flowing from dark money superpacs</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large;"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/how-trump-it-ratcheting-up-his-dangerous-war-on-the-first-amendment/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/how-trump-it-ratcheting-up-his-dangerous-war-on-the-first-amendment/</font></a></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large;"><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>How Trump is ratcheting up his dangerous war on the First Amendment</b></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Written by Bill Blum / Independent Media Institute April 24, 2020</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Donald Trump is at war with the First Amendment and the free press. The war is on full display nearly every day in his rage-filled press conferences on the COVID-19 pandemic, in which he regularly condemns the “fake news” media and bashes reporters who dare to ask the slightest probative questions about his handling of the ongoing public-health crisis.</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump’s war is also longstanding. And it is waged not only on television and in angry tweets and at campaign rallies (which have been put on hold because of the coronavirus), but also in courtrooms across the country in the form of defamation lawsuits designed to shame, silence and punish his critics.</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The latest victim of the president’s intimidation-by-litigation strategy is TV station WJFW, an NBC affiliate located in Price County in the rural reaches of northern Wisconsin. On April 13, Trump’s principal reelection campaign committee—</span><b style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Donald J. Trump for President, Inc., headquartered in New York City</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">—sued the station in the county’s circuit court. The suit alleges that the station had libeled the campaign and harmed the reputation of the president by airing an anti-Trump attack ad produced by </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">Priorities USA Action, a pro-Democratic Super PAC.</span></b></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Entitled “Exponential Threat,” the ad features audio and video clips of Trump downplaying the severity of the virus and disavowing any responsibility for his administration’s slow and incompetent response to the virus overlaid against a graph displaying the exponential rise in the number of COVID-19 cases in the U.S. since January.</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The lawsuit contends that the ad stitched together Trump’s statements about the virus in a false, misleading, deceptive and malicious manner to make it appear that he had called the virus a “hoax.” According to the complaint, Trump never termed the virus itself a hoax, but instead said at a rally in Charleston, South Carolina, on February 28, that the Democrats were perpetrating a hoax by politicizing his record on the virus.</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The lawsuit comes on the heels of other recent threats made by the Trump campaign to take legal action against TV outlets in Florida, Michigan, Minnesota and Pennsylvania for broadcasting the same ad.</b></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The president’s campaign committee has also been busy suing print media.</b> <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In March, the committee sued the Washington Post for defamation allegedly arising from opinion columns written by journalists Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman in June 2019 on the possibility of renewed foreign collusion in the 2020 election. And in February, Trump’s 2016 campaign committee sued the New York Times, claiming defamation stemming from an op-ed about Russian collusion written in March 2019 by Max Frankel, who had served as the paper’s executive editor from 1986-94.</span></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Sadly, the president’s latest round of defamation revenge is part of a pattern that dates back to his formative days as a real-estate developer and publicity-seeking huckster in New York City.</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">As detailed in a 2016 study published by the Media Law Resource Center, Trump filed his first major libel suit in 1984, when he took the Chicago Tribune and architecture columnist Paul Gapp to court, claiming that he had sustained $500 million in damages as a result of an article Gapp had written, maligning Trump’s plans to build a 150-story skyscraper in lower Manhattan. The case was dismissed the following year after the presiding judge determined Gapp’s article was a constitutionally protected expression of opinion.</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Media Law Resource Center study also summarizes Trump’s failed defamation lawsuit against writer Timothy O’Brien and the Time Warner Book Group, Inc. Now a senior columnist with Bloomberg Opinion, O’Brien asserted in a 2005 book—TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald—that Trump wasn’t actually a billionaire. O’Brien’s estimate of Trump’s net wealth so rankled the future president that he demanded “a whopping $5 billion in damages.” Like the lawsuit against Gapp, the case was eventually dismissed.</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>In addition, the study chronicles Trump’s case against comedian Bill Maher.<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> </span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Trump targeted Maher in 2013 for a disparaging joke he told on NBC’s Tonight Show, in which he offered to donate $5 million to charity if Trump could prove he was not “the spawn of his mother having sex with an orangutan.” After Trump sent a copy of his birth certificate to Maher and the comedian refused to pay up, Trump sued Maher for breach of contract in California. Trump voluntarily withdrew the case eight months later, however. Although his then-spokesperson, Michael Cohen, told Politico that Trump planned to amend and renew the lawsuit, he never did.</span></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Like most of Trump’s past defamation forays, the president’s latest round of defamation lawsuits seems destined to crash and burn. The cases will falter for one simple reason: they are utterly devoid of legal merit.</b></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Under the Supreme Court’s landmark 1964 ruling in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, criticism of public officials is entitled to stringent First Amendment protections. As the great liberal Justice William Brennan wrote for a unanimous court in Sullivan, the Constitution embodies our “profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks…”</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Public officials, Brennan instructed, must be precluded from recovering damages for allegedly defamatory statements related to official conduct unless they prove that the statements are made with “actual malice”—that is, that they are made with the knowledge that they are false or with “reckless disregard” of whether they are true or false.</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In subsequent cases, the Supreme Court extended Sullivan’s “actual malice” holding to defamation lawsuits initiated by “public figures” and business entities that have obtained public-figure status, such as Trump’s political campaign committees.</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sullivan is one of the Supreme Court’s most consequential decisions, providing the press with the safeguards needed to keep the public informed and hold the rich and powerful to account. Among the court’s current members, only Clarence Thomas has gone on record to suggest that Sullivan be reconsidered.</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Why, then, does the president persist? The answer, it appears, is purely political.</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">At a rally in Fort Worth, Texas, in February 2016, Trump told a throng of cheering red-meat followers, “I think the media is among the most dishonest groups of people I’ve ever met. They’re terrible. … If I become president, oh, do they have problems. They’re going to have such problems.”</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And then he added, in a veiled reference to Sullivan:</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“One of the things I’m going to do if I win, and I hope we do, and we’re certainly leading, is I’m going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money. We’re going to open up those libel laws so that when the New York Times writes a hit piece, which is a total disgrace, or when the Washington Post, which is there for other reasons, writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they’re totally protected.”</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As of now, the president is losing his war on the First Amendment and the free press. But as Trump’s improbable rise to power confirms, the future remains uncertain. If we have learned anything in the Trump era, it is that our constitutional rights can never be taken for granted.</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Bill Blum is a retired judge and a lawyer in Los Angeles. He is a lecturer at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication. He writes regularly on law and politics and is the author of three widely acclaimed legal thrillers: Prejudicial Error, The Last Appeal, and The Face of Justice.</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.</font></div></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/trumps-campaign-files-frivolous-lawsuit-against-tv-station-for-airing-attack-ad-slamming-his-coronavirus-response"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/trumps-campaign-files-frivolous-lawsuit-against-tv-station-for-airing-attack-ad-slamming-his-coronavirus-response</font></a></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
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</b></div><div><b>Trump campaign sues Wisconsin TV station over ad using his words on coronavirus</b></div><div>By Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America - Donald Trump, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=52647057</div><div>Written by Alex Henderson April 14, 2020</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">President Donald Trump’s initial response to the coronavirus pandemic has been the subject of various attack ads, including one from the Lincoln Project (a group of Never Trump conservatives that includes attorney George Conway) and one from Priorities USA (a Democratic super PAC). The theme of those ads is that Trump hasfailed to take the coronavirus threat seriously. And in Wisconsin, Trump’s reelection campaign has filed a frivolous lawsuit against WJFW-TV (which airs NBC programming in North-Central Wisconsin) for airing the Priorities USA ad — calling it “false and defamatory,” claiming that the ad takes Trump’s words out of context.</span></div><div>
</div><div>The campaign filed the lawsuit on Monday, April 13 in Price County Circuit Court. The ad by Priorities USA, called “Existential Threat,” depicts a graph and timeline that uses actual statements Trump made in January and February — for example, “This is their new hoax” and “We have it totally under control.” A variety of Trump critics, from liberals and progressives to centrists to Never Trump conservatives, have been using these quotes to tar and feather Trump and demonstrate that he spent months downplaying the severity of coronavirus. But the Trump campaign, in its lawsuit against WJFW-TV, takes issue with the way Trump’s words “the coronavirus” and “this is their new hoax” are used together — arguing that the ad makes it sound like Trump was saying “the coronavirus, this is their new hoax” as a single sentence. However, the intonation in Trump’s voice makes it sound like two different statements made at different times: Trump’s tone of voice is much lower on “the coronavirus” than it is on “This is their new hoax.”</div><div>
</div><div>Law & Crime reporter Jerry Lambe explains, “<b>The tone and deflection of the speech between the first and second phrases is quite different, but the Trump campaign’s lawsuit suggests the text on the screen contains a comma to connect the phrases in a way which suggests they were uttered together.”</b></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Trump’s “this is their new hoax” assertion was made at a South Carolina rally on February 28. Downplaying the threat that coronavirus posed in the U.S. — even though it had killed thousands of people in China — the president argued that Democrats were using coronavirus as a “hoax” just as they had used impeachment and the Ukraine scandal as a “hoax.” </span>Trump’s campaign is claiming that he was saying that Democrats were perpetrating a hoax, not that coronavirus itself was a hoax. But clearly, Trump was downplaying coronavirus’ severity and the threat that it posed in the U.S. — where, according to John Hopkins University in Baltimore and CNN’s coronavirus/Hopkins page, it had killed more than 23,600 people as of Tuesday morning, April 14.</div><div>
</div><div>In the lawsuit, Trump’s campaign argues that “Trump’s actual remarks demonstrate that he was specifically referring to the Democrats’ politicization of the coronavirus pandemic when he used the word ‘hoax.’”</div><div>
</div><div>Lambe also points out that although the lawsuit “refers to the defendant as WJFW-NBC,” it “is formally filed against Northland Television, LLC, the corporate owner of the local affiliate. The affiliate is not owned by NBC but broadcasts the network’s programming.”</div><div>
</div><div>The Lincoln Project’s attack ad, titled “Distraction,” is equally scathing. In that ad, anti-Trump conservatives tear apart the absurd claim that Trump, in January and February, was distracted from coronavirus because of his impeachment. That ad argues that when the World Health Organization (WHO) was warning that coronavirus was a “global health emergency,” Trump was too busy with “campaign rallies and golfing” to seriously address the crisis:</div><div>
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</div><div>Priorities USA has released an official response to the Wisconsin lawsuit, asserting, “This is pretty simple: Donald Trump doesn’t want voters to hear the truth, and he’s trying to bully TV stations into submission. The truth is that Trump ignored warnings from experts and his own team and downplayed the coronavirus even as it spread unchecked across the country and the world. Americans are now suffering as a result of his inaction. We will never stop airing the facts and holding the president accountable for his actions.”</div><div>
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</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">OMG</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/read-the-letter-trumps-campaign-sent-to-tv-stations-threatening-the-fcc-could-pull-their-licenses-over-coronavirus-ad/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/read-the-letter-trumps-campaign-sent-to-tv-stations-threatening-the-fcc-could-pull-their-licenses-over-coronavirus-ad/</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Read the letter Trump’s campaign sent to TV stations threatening the FCC could pull their licenses over coronavirus </b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Written by David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement March 26, 2020</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">Lawyers for President Donald Trump’s official Super PAC, America First Action, tried to get TV stations in key battleground states to stop airing an anti-Trump ad that focuses on his horrific mismanagement of the coronavirus crisis. </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The TV stations refused to pull the ad, placed by the pro-Biden Super PAC Priorities USA (PUSA), which rightly noted that the pro-Trump Super PAC did not even have standing to make the demand.</span></b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>So President Trump’s official campaign stepped in to do what his Super PAC could not.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Attorneys for the Donald J. Trump for President campaign sent a Cease and Desist letter to those TV stations demanding they stop airing the anti-Trump ad.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">Not only did they make that demand, but they threatened that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which the President controls in that he appoints its commissioners, could pull their broadcast licenses if they did not comply.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The letter reads in part: “your station has an obligation to cease and desist from airing [the ad] immediately to comply with FCC licensing requirements, to serve the public interest, and to avoid costly and time-consuming litigation.”</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>It also says “we formally demand that your station refuse to continue airing it to meet your responsibilities not to broadcast false information,” which is ironic given the number of falsehoods and lies Trump tells on a daily basis which are often broadcast by news networks.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">It adds, “your station has a responsibility to ‘protect the public from false, misleading or deceptive advertising,’” and threatens that “your failure to remove this deceptive ad … could put your station’s license in jeopardy.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">This is the ad the Trump campaign claims is “patently false, misleading, and deceptive,” says he did not call the coronavirus a “hoax,” and essentially claims the ad says he did.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump refused to take the threat of the coronavirus seriously, now he won’t take responsibility as his administration has been totally unprepared for this crisis. pic.twitter.com/Jdh1GY9HHS</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">— Priorities USA (@prioritiesUSA) March 23, 2020</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The letter can be read on the Trump campaign’s website.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: currentcolor none medium; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: all 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer; letter-spacing: 0px;">=</span></font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> James Simons – Estimated worth: $18 billion. Contributions (with wife Marilyn) since 1989: $46.1 million</font><p style="padding: 5px 0px; margin: 5px 0px;" open="Open" sans="Sans" helvetica="Helvetica" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">The founder of Renaissance Technologies </span>and his wife Marilyn gave out $26.8 million of their $18 billion in wealth in the 2016 cycle. About $11 million went to Priorities USA Action and $8 million to <a href="https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00484642&cycle=2016" target="blank" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">Senate Majority PAC</a>. They also gave directly to Dems in tight races, such as Senate candidates <a href="https://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.php?cid=N00038397&newmem=Y" target="blank" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">Maggie Hassan</a> (N.H.) and <a href="https://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.php?cid=N00027860&cycle=2016" target="blank" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">Tammy Duckworth</a> (Ill.), and Clinton.</font></p><p style="padding: 5px 0px; margin: 5px 0px;" open="Open" sans="Sans" helvetica="Helvetica" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></p><ul style="margin: 0px 0px 20px 30px; padding: 0px;" open="Open" sans="Sans" helvetica="Helvetica" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px"><li style="margin: 5px 0px; padding: 0px; list-style-position: outside;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong>Soros</strong> – Estimated worth: $25.2 billion. Contributions since 1989: $61 million</font></li></ul><p style="padding: 5px 0px; margin: 5px 0px;" open="Open" sans="Sans" helvetica="Helvetica" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The founder of Soros Fund Management shelled out $21 million last cycle, placing him twelfth on the biggest donor list. About $9.5 million went to <a href="https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00495861&cycle=2016" target="blank" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">Priorities USA Action</a>, which focused on boosting Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in her White House bid, as well as other liberal groups like <a href="https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00495028&cycle=2016" target="blank" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">House Majority PAC</a>, <a href="https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00489799&cycle=2016" target="blank" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">Planned Parenthood Votes</a> and the anti-Rubio <a href="https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00627141&cycle=2016" target="_blank" style="background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none;">United for Progress</a>. Soros spent more in 2016 than he had in any of the three previous election cycles.</font></p><p style="padding: 5px 0px; margin: 5px 0px;" open="Open" sans="Sans" helvetica="Helvetica" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="">==</font></p></div></div>