by tyler | Aug 3, 2023 | CNN, politics
The day after former President Donald Trump was indicted over his efforts to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election, Trump repeated a lie that the indictment depicts as central to his attempt to obstruct the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s victory.
Trump posted on social media on Wednesday that he felt badly for former Vice President Mike Pence because of what Trump described as a flailing Pence campaign for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Trump suggested Pence was struggling because “he didn’t fight against Election Fraud.” Trump then added: “The V.P. had power that Mike didn’t understand, but after the Election, the RINOS [Republicans in Name Only] & Dems changed the law, taking that power away!”
Facts First: The final sentence of Trump’s post includes two false claims. First, his claim that Pence “didn’t understand” the power he had as vice president is not true; Pence was entirely correct when he repeatedly told Trump in late 2020 and the first days of 2021 that the vice president did not have the authority to reject Biden’s electoral votes on January 6, 2021 as Trump had demanded. Second, while it’s true that Congress passed a bipartisan law in 2022 that revised some vague and imprecise language from the 1880s law that had previously governed the electoral count, Trump was incorrect when he claimed this 2022 law took power “away” from Pence. Rather, experts say, the new law simply made more explicit something the old law had expressed less clearly: the vice president has only a ceremonial role in Congress’ electoral count session and cannot unilaterally decide which electoral votes to accept or reject.
Trump was also wrong when he insinuated in the Wednesday post that Pence’s refusal to reject electoral votes on January 6, 2021, amounted to a surrender to “Election Fraud.” As the indictment notes, even Trump’s own senior governmental appointees and campaign officials had found there was no fraud sufficient to have changed the outcome of the election in any state.
Pence’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment for this article. Before Trump’s post on Wednesday, though, Pence told reporters at the Indiana State Fair: “I want people to know that I had no right to overturn the election and that what the president maintained that day, and frankly has said over and over again over the last two and a half years, is completely false. And it’s contrary to what our Constitution and the laws of this country provide.” He added, “Sadly, the president was surrounded by a group of crackpot lawyers that kept telling him what his itching ears wanted to hear.”
The post on Wednesday was not the first time Trump had claimed that the existence of a congressional effort in 2022 to clarify the 19th-century Electoral Count Act proves that Pence did have the power in 2021 to reject Biden electors.
In reality, Pence is right that he never had that power. Three experts in election law told CNN that Trump was wrong, again, in his Wednesday post.
On January 6, 2021, “it was widely understood by all serious constitutional scholars (and all previous VPs who had ever been in that position) that the VP did not have the power to judge the validity of electoral votes,” Alexander Keyssar, a Harvard University professor of history and social policy, said in an email – but the Electoral Count Act “was poorly drafted in a great many ways (try reading it!)” and did not say explicitly that the vice president couldn’t do such a thing, so the new law included clearer wording.
“The ounce of plausibility in [Trump’s] claim, thus, is that there was some potential ambiguity in the original wording – if one ignored the history. But that does not mean that Pence had the power to do what [Trump] wanted; it means that the original wording warranted clarification so that no one in the future would try to misinterpret it in that way,” Keyssar said.
Similarly, Michael Thorning, director of structural democracy at the Bipartisan Policy Center think tank, said in an interview: “When Congress reformed the Electoral Count Act in 2022, it was merely reaffirming what was already the long-held and established practice – that the vice president does not and never has had unilateral authority to discard or disqualify a state’s electoral certificates.” Thorning said the record is clear that “Congress was not changing the status quo, Congress was reinforcing what was already the case.”
The new law says that, except as otherwise specified, the vice president’s role in Congress’s electoral count session “shall be limited to performing solely ministerial duties.” The new law continues that the vice president “shall have no power to solely determine, accept, reject, or otherwise adjudicate or resolve disputes over the proper certificate of ascertainment of appointment of electors, the validity of electors, or the votes of electors.”
The old law was far less direct, but it also laid out merely perfunctory duties for the vice president at Congress’ electoral count session – saying, in some convoluted sentences, that the vice president’s role was to “preserve order,” open “all the certificates and papers purporting to be certificates of the electoral votes,” hand them to members of Congress serving as “tellers,” call for any objections, and announce the “state of the vote.” The Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution, likewise, says the vice president “shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted.” It says nothing about the vice president intervening to change the count.
Constitutional law scholar Edward Foley, director of the election law program at The Ohio State University, said the fact that Congress clarified the procedures for counting electoral votes in 2022 “does not mean that Pence had the power Trump asserted before the clarification.” Foley continued in his email: “At most it can be said that there was some ambiguity in the law before the clarification, but the much better view (in my judgment, and that of many others) is that law constrained Pence to present to Congress only those submissions of electoral votes that were backed by official certifications from the state governments (which was Pence’s view).”
Because Trump keeps suggesting that Congress would not have passed a new law about the vice president’s powers if it was not substantially changing those powers, it’s worth noting that the 2022 electoral count reform law is much broader than this single section about the vice president’s role; it contains other provisions, beyond the scope of this fact check, that do make changes to different rules governing the count.
Not only is there widespread agreement among independent experts that Trump is wrong and Pence is right about what powers Pence had on January 6, 2021 – Trump’s own White House attorneys flatly rejected Trump’s stance during the lead-up to that day’s count. The House select committee that investigated the Capitol riot that day wrote in its final report that “no White House lawyer” under Trump “believed Pence could lawfully refuse to count electoral votes.”
Trump White House Counsel Pat Cipollone testified to the committee that he was certain he had conveyed his view that “the vice president did not have the authority to do what was being suggested.”
Another White House lawyer under Trump, Eric Herschmann, recounted to the committee an exchange he said he had with the outside lawyer, John Eastman, who was a driving force behind the idea of Pence rejecting Biden electors.
“And I said to [Eastman], hold on a second, I want to understand what you’re saying,” Herschmann said. “You’re saying you believe the vice president, acting as president of the Senate, can be the sole decisionmaker as to, under your theory, who becomes the next president of the United States? And he said, ‘yes.’ And I said, ‘Are you out of your F’ing mind,’ right. And that was pretty blunt. I said, ‘You’re completely crazy.’”
by tyler | Aug 3, 2023 | CNN, politics
Former President Donald Trump has pleaded not guilty to four criminal charges related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
His arrest and arraignment came in the same Washington, DC, courthouse that had a direct view of the violence that unfurled at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, and where over 1,000 Trump supporters who participated in the insurrection have also appeared.
The former president will be released on very minimal conditions, which include not being allowed to communicate with anyone known to be a witness in the case unless through an attorney.
The next hearing in the case was set for August 28, just five days after the first Republican presidential primary debate, underscoring the extraordinary times where the front-runner for the 2024 nomination has an unprecedented federal court schedule.
Trump, addressing reporters before boarding his plane to return to his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club, said the indictment is “a persecution of a political opponent. This was never supposed to happen in America.”
Thursday’s historic scene follows two other court appearances Trump has made over the past few months in criminal cases: the New York state charges brought by the Manhattan district attorney’s office for his 2016 campaign hush money scheme, and the federal prosecution in Florida that special counsel Jack Smith is leading as well, alleging Trump mishandled classified documents.
Unlike those other cases, however, this hearing played out in a building that has been the central vehicle of accountability for the January 6 attack on democracy.
Day after day, the E. Barrett Prettyman Federal Courthouse has been where judges, defendants, lawyers, witnesses, jurors and court officials have had to constantly revisit the significance of the assault on Congress and what drove it.
It’s a dynamic that has weighed on Judge Beryl Howell, who recently stepped down from her role as the DC district court’s chief judge, a position that put her in charge of deciding many of the privilege disputes that ultimately allowed federal prosecutors to access key evidence in Smith’s case
“Just outside this courthouse … are visible reminders of the January 6 riot and assault on the Capitol,” Howell said at a January 2021 sentencing of a rioter.
During that proceeding, she stressed that the Capitol attack “was not a peaceful protest,” but rather, it was “hundreds of people” who “came to Washington, DC, to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power.”
Trump has decried the ongoing special counsel investigation and charges as politically motivated since he’s the front-runner for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination.
He faces four counts, including conspiring to defraud the United States and to obstruct an official proceeding – the latter a charge that has already successfully been brought against rioters who breached the Capitol.
In another charge brought against the former president, prosecutors are relying on a Reconstruction-era civil rights law that prohibits conspiracies to deprive a person of their rights – in this case, “the right to vote and have one’s vote counted.”
Trump, the special counsel said in the indictment, “was determined to remain in power” after losing the 2020 election and, with six unindicted co-conspirators, orchestrated a plot to overturn the results on and leading up to January 6.
Prosecutors argue that Trump exploited the “chaos” and the “violence” of January 6 in a bid to keep alive their efforts to overturn his electoral loss.
The indictment also alleges that Trump and his co-conspirators effectively tricked individuals from seven targeted states into creating and submitting certificates asserting they were legitimate electors.
Prosecutors pushed for a speedy trial at the hearing on Thursday, and for the case to proceed just as others do. “This case will benefit from normal order, including speedy trial,” prosecutor Tom Windom said.
Magistrate Judge Moxila Upadhyaya said that federal Judge Tanya Chutkan – who will preside of the case – “intends to set a trial date at that first hearing on August 28.”
John Lauro, an attorney for the former president, highlighted the “massive amount” of discovery they would need to look through before suggesting a trial date.
“We don’t know the scope of it,” Lauro said of the massive amount of discovery they expect in the case. “We are going to have to go through information … in order for us to properly address” when a trial date should be set.
“These are weighty issues,” Lauro said. “Obviously the United States has had three and a half years to investigate this matter. And also, there are a number of agents and lawyers assisting the government in this proceeding, and all that we would ask your honor is the time to fairly defend our client.”
Trump has already been a feature in the proceedings against the rioters, whose conduct that day was motivated in part by the election lies that underlay the charges that the former president now faces.
Video of his speech at the Ellipse on January 6 have been played at numerous hearings. In the case brought against the Proud Boys, prosecutors fought aggressively to show the clip of the former president telling the far-right group at a September 2020 presidential debate to “stand back and stand by.”
As a legal defense, the efforts by Capitol rioters to pin their actions on Trump have had limited success. But the argument has nonetheless been prevalent in pleas by riot defendants and their families for leniency.
“My father’s name wasn’t on all the flags that were there that day, that everyone was carrying that day. He is not the leader,” the daughter of a rioter said tearfully at a sentencing proceeding last year.
The defendant, Guy Reffitt, was sentenced to 87 months in prison after bringing a gun to the Capitol during the riot and threatening House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Metropolitan and US Capitol police officers are regularly seen in the building, often to appear as witnesses. Victims of the riot have repeatedly testified to the serious physical and mental injuries they suffered as a result of the assault.
“My physical scars, bruises and wounds have healed, but my mental trauma haunts me to this day,” Metropolitan Police Officer Christopher Owens told the court ahead of the sentencing of several Oath Keepers leaders who were convicted of seditious conspiracy and other charges.
Some of the judges themselves have also opined on the role that Trump played, while his supporters who breached the Capitol that day have so far borne the brunt of the legal consequences.
After one rioter’s conviction, US District Judge Reggie Walton said that “our democracy is in trouble because unfortunately we have charlatans, like the former president, in my view, who don’t care about democracy and only care about power.”
The defendant, Dustin Thompson, testified that he felt as if he was entering the Capitol at the directions of Trump.
“If the President is giving you almost an order to do something, I felt obligated to do that,” Thompson said.
Another judge, Royce Lamberth, recently found rioter Alan Hostetter guilty of obstruction of an official proceeding – one of the charges Trump now faces – partly because of a minor leadership role Hostetter played among the crowd that day by shouting into a bullhorn to cheer on the crowd.
“No reasonable citizen of this country, much less one with two decades of experience in law enforcement, could have believed it was lawful to use mob violence to impede a joint session of Congress,” the judge said.
A throughline in approach that Chutkan, who will soon take over the Trump case, has had in the Capitol riot proceedings is her belief that the defendants’ punishment should serve has deterrence for any conduct aiming to undermine future elections, including in 2024.
That belief may be an impediment to any Trump efforts to delay a trial in his case until after voters go to the polls next year, as his lawyers have attempted to do in the classified documents case.
Some of the judges have sentenced misdemeanor defendants to long probation terms, at times to keep them within the justice system past the next election. But Chutkan’s sentences for January 6 rioters stand out as notably tough among the district court’s, according to data provided by the Justice Department. Every one of the three dozen Capitol rioters she has sentenced received jail time, even when prosecutors didn’t ask for it
“The country is watching to see what the consequences are for something that has not ever happened in the country before,” Chutkan said at an October 2021 sentencing.
The defendant in that case, she remarked, “did not go to the United States Capitol out of any love for our country. … He went for one man.”
This story has been updated with additional developments.
by tyler | Aug 3, 2023 | CNN, politics
Republican Rep. Dan Bishop of North Carolina will not seek reelection to Congress in 2024, instead opting to run for state attorney general, he announced on a local radio show Thursday morning.
“To have the news break that, in fact, I’m going to be a candidate, to come home in North Carolina and seek the spot of attorney general, and do that on WBT radio, I can’t think of a better place,” said Bishop, who was elected to Congress in a 2019 special election.
His decision not to seek reelection to the 8th District will create an open seat in a district that former President Donald Trump would have carried by 34 points in 2020, however North Carolina’s map is expected to be redrawn this year.
Bishop, a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, leaned into his legal background and support for law enforcement in explaining his interest in running for attorney general.
“I’ve practiced law for almost 30 years. I was a serious lawyer, still am. And I miss that as part of my life, and I think it’s a particular time to reinforce support for prosecutors and front-line law enforcement officers,” Bishop said.
“I think there’s an opportunity to use the influence of that office to restore law and order to our cities like Asheville, in particular, Charlotte, and some others,” Bishop added.
Charles Ingram and Tim Dunn are declared Democrats running for North Carolina attorney general – an office that has historically been held by elected Democrats. Bishop joins Tom Murry in running for the office on the Republican side.
“With so much at stake in 2024, and democracy itself on the line, North Carolinians cannot afford to have Dan Bishop serving as our state’s chief law enforcement officer,” North Carolina Democratic Party Chair Anderson Clayton said in a statement.
CORRECTION: This story has been updated to reflect Bishop’s current congressional district and Trump’s margin there in 2020.
by tyler | Aug 2, 2023 | CNN, politics
Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday dined with top Fox executives at his Bedminster golf club, during which Fox News president Jay Wallace and the network’s chief executive, Suzanne Scott, encouraged him to participate in the first presidential debate the network is hosting later this month, two sources with knowledge told CNN.
Trump, who earlier in the evening had been indicted for a third time, did not commit to participating in the debate, which will take place in Milwaukee.
Fox News did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The New York Times first reported on the dinner.
Trump has privately and publicly floated skipping either one or both of the first two Republican presidential primary debates, and pointed to his commanding lead in the polls as one reason he is hesitant to share the stage with his GOP challengers.
“Why would we debate? That would be stupid to go out there with that kind of lead,” one Trump adviser previously told CNN. However, not all of Trump’s allies feel this way. Some worry that an absent Trump would give an opportunity for a lower tier candidate to have a breakout moment.
Trump’s dinner comes after RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel and David Bossie, who is in charge of the debate committee, visited Trump at Bedminster in recent weeks to encourage him to participate, according to a Trump adviser. Trump was also noncommittal on his plans during this meeting.
Over the last year, Trump has trashed Fox News and Rupert Murdoch, the Fox Corporation chairman and controlling shareholder of the company, for not being sufficiently supportive of him.
Murdoch, who privately holds disdain for Trump, attempted early on in the 2024 campaign to shine a bright light on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis while casting the former president on the sidelines. The hope appeared to be to seduce the Fox News audience into falling for another Republican candidate.
But the DeSantis campaign has struggled since it officially got off the ground this year. Last month, Murdoch debuted a new Fox News lineup comprised of pro-Trump propagandists, a move that seemed to acknowledge Trump’s likely selection as the Republican Party’s presidential nominee.
Trump has also sharply criticized the way in which Murdoch has approached his legal problems, blasting the right-wing media mogul for not doubling down on his lies while in court.
Trump tried to call into Fox News after his supporters attacked the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, but the network refused to put him on air, according to court filings from Dominion Voting Systems in its defamation case against the company.
Still, Fox has amplified Trump’s lies about the validity of the 2020 election, even though Murdoch has said he did not believe Trump’s false statements, according to damning private messages revealed in the Dominion case. Murdoch floated the idea of having his influential hosts appear together in prime time to declare Joe Biden as the rightful winner of the election. Such an act, Murdoch said, “Would go a long way to stop the Trump myth that the election stolen.”
by tyler | Aug 2, 2023 | CNN, politics
Russia is forcing Ukrainians in Russian-occupied territories to accept Russian citizenship by engaging in a systematic push “to make it impossible for residents to survive in their homes” unless they do so, according to a newly released report from the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab.
The report details an extensive campaign of both laws from the Kremlin to “streamline applying for a Russian passport while simultaneously threatening those who refuse to apply with detention or deportation,” as well as de-facto restrictions on those who refuse to accept the passports.
The restrictions “include denial of medical services, social benefits, the ability to drive and to work, and overt threats of violence and intimidation,” said the report, which was released Wednesday and produced as a part of the US State Department-backed Conflict Observatory.
The violations detailed in the report “are classic war crimes in the sense that they are restricting or limiting through this process people’s ability to access critical services and resources that Russia is required to allow all people to access, such as healthcare, and humanitarian systems,” Yale Humanitarian Research Lab’s Nathaniel Raymond told CNN Wednesday.
“The second part here is that this is a unique and specific dynamic of the broader campaign by Russia to erase Ukrainian national identity and Ukrainian sovereign state existence,” he said.
Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab has done extensive work looking into Russia’s alleged war crimes, including its program of forced deportation of Ukrainian children – a crime for which the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant against Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“Now that we are able to share with International Criminal Court, we hope that the information about forced Russian nationalization will assist both ICC and Office of Prosecutor General (OPG) Ukraine with leads and evidence they have, that this may be a link in other investigations we don’t even know about,” Raymond told CNN.
Russian officials are instituting the forced passportization efforts in occupied Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhya regions. The United States does not recognize any of the occupied territories in Ukraine as belonging to Moscow.
According to one of the researchers who compiled the report, when residents in these areas are pressured into accepting Russian citizenship, they are also “strongly encouraged” to renounce their Ukrainian citizenship, and those with municipal or public jobs are required to do so.
Many of the policies described in the report can be traced to the Russian federal government, researchers said, with one noting that Putin “is clearly deeply involved in this.”
In April, Putin signed a law forcing residents in those occupied regions to accept or refuse Russian citizenship by July 1, 2024. Those who arrived after Russia’s annexation of those territories – which is believed to be a small population – must decide even earlier, by January 1, 2024. Those who do not accept citizenship by those dates will be considered “foreign citizens and stateless persons,” and may be subject to detention or deportation to unspecified locations, according to the report.
Beyond the laws, officials in the occupied territory have instituted official and unofficial policies to force residents to accept Russian citizenship.
“Russia’s occupation forces in Ukraine have made access to certain medicine and medical care conditional on accepting Russian citizenship. These restrictions force vulnerable persons (including residents who are elderly, have chronic medical problems, have disabilities, or have low income) to decide between accepting Russian citizenship and forgoing medical care, especially when they are unable to leave the occupied areas,” the report describes.
Access to social services has been restricted against those who do not accept Russian citizenship, a move that particularly affects parents, as it leaves them “ineligible for benefits to support their children.”
“Parents who accept Russian citizenship can receive at least 8,591 rubles per month for 18 months,” the report notes.
“Russia’s occupation administrations have also made access to a variety of critical municipal services,” including drivers licenses, vehicle registration and even access to the electrical grid, “impossible without Russian citizenship.”
According to the report, Russian officials also allegedly sought to take specific advantage of the chaos following the destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam in early June to force residents to accept Russian citizenship, making recovery aid contingent on citizenship and targeting evacuees from the disaster.
by tyler | Aug 2, 2023 | CNN, politics
Super PACs backing presidential candidates released their semi-annual financial disclosures on Monday, with the group supporting Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ bid for president leading the pack with a $130 million haul.
Meanwhile, former President Donald Trump’s political operation is burning through money as his legal troubles mount.
The new Federal Election Commission filings reveal which PACs – and billionaire or millionaire donors – are boosting the hopefuls’ bids for the White House. In many cases, just a few donors make up the bulk of the super PACs’ troves.
Super PACs cannot directly coordinate with presidential campaigns, so campaigns cannot touch the money these groups raise. But the super PACs can spend in support of candidates without their coordination.
Here are the takeaways from key groups supporting 2024’s presidential candidates.
Never Back Down Inc., the super PAC backing DeSantis’ presidential campaign, brought in a whopping $130 million in the first six months of 2023, according to a new FEC filing. However, most of that fundraising comes from a different PAC and a single donor.
Empower Parents PAC, which used to be DeSantis’ state political committee, contributed $82.5 million, and Robert Bigelow, the wealthy hotel magnate and space entrepreneur, donated more than $20 million. Those two contributions alone make up more than 78% of Never Back Down’s total receipts.
Bigelow has long supported DeSantis and previously contributed $10 million to the Florida governor’s state political committee.
A second group, Faithful & Strong Policies Inc., donated $5.5 million to Never Back Down, making it the third largest contributor the pro-DeSantis PAC. That organization is also based in Florida.
And Douglas Leone, a venture capitalist at Sequoia Capital, gave Never Back Down $2 million. In 2019, Leone contributed $50,000 to America First Action Inc., a PAC that supported Trump’s reelection effort.
Those four contributions – Empower Parents PAC, Bigelow, Faithful & Strong Policies Inc. and Leone – account for 84% of Never Back Down’s total fundraising.
Several other millionaire and billionaire donors, including Elizabeth Uihlein and Richard Uihlein, Stefan Brodie, David Millstone and Saul Fox, all contributed at least $1 million each.
The group spent nearly $33.8 million in the first half of the year, and as of June 30 had $96.8 million on hand.
While DeSantis’ super PAC commands a massive war chest, campaign finance rules prevent direct coordination between super PACs and campaigns, meaning DeSantis’ campaign can’t touch any of that money. So while Never Back Down will likely be able to continue to raise massive funds, it won’t be able to help with the staff layoffs and belt-tightening the DeSantis campaign has done in recent weeks.
Anthony Scaramucci and a GOP megadonor who paid for luxury trips for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas are among the donors to the super PAC supporting former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s 2024 presidential bid.
The Tell It Like It Is PAC reported receiving nearly $5.9 million in the first half of 2023, according to a report it filed Monday with Federal Election Commission. Monday marks the deadline for political committees to file financial reports covering the first half of the year.
The Christie-aligned PAC only reported receiving contributions between May 30 and June 30 in this filing. Christie formally announced his presidential campaign on June 6.
Harlan Crow, a Republican real estate magnate, contributed $100,000 to Christie’s PAC. Crow has made headlines recently for providing luxury travel for and engaging in private real-estate deals with Thomas.
Another noteworthy donor is Scaramucci, who served briefly as Trump’s White House communications director. He also donated $100,000 to the pro-Christie PAC, the new filing shows.
Super PACs can accept donations of any size from a wide array of sources, including corporations, but are barred from coordinating their spending decisions with the candidates they back.
The single largest donation was $1 million from a limited liability company called SHBT LLC that was established last year in Texas. A spokesman for Christie’s super PAC did not immediately respond to a request for more information about the donor.
Two of the PAC’s largest donors are Richard Saker, the CEO of ShopRite supermarkets in New Jersey, and Walter Buckley Jr., a political megadonor. The two donors each gave $500,000.
Billionaire Jeff Yass, the cofounder of one of Wall Street’s largest trading firms and TikTok investor, gave the pro-Christie PAC $250,000. Yass also donated $10 million in June to the political committee associated with the anti-tax Club for Growth. An arm of the Club has blistered former President Donald Trump with attack ads.
Another notable donor is Murray Kushner, the uncle of Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner. He has donated to Christie’s campaigns before and he’s contributed to several Democrats. In this round, Murray Kushner gave the pro-Christie PAC $10,000.
The presidential hopeful has a long history with the Kushner family. In the early 2000s, Christie prosecuted Charles Kushner – Jared Kushner’s father and Murray Kushner’s brother. Charles and Murray Kushner have feuded over business and are reportedly estranged.
Charles Kushner went on to spend more than a year in prison. Trump pardoned Charles Kushner in December 2020.
The super PAC spent less than half a million dollars – nearly $430,000 – in its month of reported expenses and ended the first half of the year with nearly $5.5 million in available cash.
A super PAC supporting Tim Scott’s bid brought in nearly $20 million in June, new FEC filings show, adding more financial firepower to the South Carolina senator’s well-funded political network.
The group, TIM PAC, has emerged as a major factor early in the campaign, and recently announced it would spend nearly $50 million on advertising boosting Scott’s bid through January.
The FEC filings show the group had spent about $4.3 million through the end of June, and entered July with over $15 million in cash on hand.
Notably, a significant portion of the funds received by TIM PAC, about $10 million, were transferred from other allied groups that had backed Scott’s previous campaigns for Senate. Larry Ellison, the Silicon Valley billionaire and co-founder of Oracle, was a major donor to those groups, contributing $35 million between 2021 and 2022, though records show he has not contributed directly to the pro-Scott super PAC in 2023.
The pro-Scott super PAC also received major contributions from other prominent donors. Benjamin Navarro, the billionaire founder of Sherman Financial Group, which owns Credit One Bank, contributed $5 million; James Haslam, the owner of the Cleveland Browns NFL Franchise, also gave $25,000; and his brother Bill Haslam, the former Tennessee governor, gave another $25,000.
Scott entered the White House race in an enviable position, with millions stockpiled in his Senate campaign account that was available to use for his presidential bid. The infusion of cash to his allied super PAC adds even more heft to his messaging effort, and between his presidential campaign and allied super PAC, Scott has been – and will likely remain – among the top advertisers in the critical early primary states.
Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley also saw millions flow into an allied super PAC in the first half of the year, with the group, Stand For America Fund, reporting that it had raised $18.7 million.
The pro-Haley group received contributions from several big-money donors, including Jan Koum, co-founder of the messaging app WhatsApp, who gave $5 million. Koum contributed $2.5 million on February 16, two days after Haley launched her presidential campaign, and another $2.5 million on June 22.
SFA Fund also received seven-figure contributions from other prominent business leaders and investors. Venture capitalist Tim Draper gave $1.25 million; Laurel Asness, the wife of hedge fund manager Clifford Asness, gave $1 million; Vivek Garipalli, a billionaire health care entrepreneur, also gave $1 million; Steven Stull, founder of the investment firm Advantage Capital, gave $1 million as well; and Ronald Simon, founder of RSI Home Products, was another million-dollar donor.
The pro-Haley group entered July with over $17 million in cash on hand after spending little in the first half of the year, just about $1.6 million. In recent weeks, however, SFA Fund has ramped up its spending activity, and according to data from AdImpact, the group has booked about $4.6 million in airtime over the month of August.
Wealthy Arkansans – including several Walmart heirs and the head of Tysons Foods – stepped up to fund the super PAC supporting former Gov. Asa Hutchinson’s longshot bid for the Republican presidential nomination, according to a new FEC filing.
America Strong and Free Action Inc. brought in a little less than $2.3 million in the first half of 2023, and spent a little more than $1.3 million in the same time frame, according to the filing. The super PAC ended the first half of the year with less than $950,000 on hand.
The single largest donor to the pro-Hutchinson PAC was Little Rock, Arkansas, businessman Warren Stephens, who contributed $1 million. Stephens is the CEO of a financial services firm in Arkansas and served on an “innovation council” Hutchinson created when he was governor.
Stephens has participated in national politics for years. He initially opposed Trump’s 2016 White House bid, but in September 2020, donated $2 million to a super PAC that worked to reelect Trump.
Hutchinson’s PAC also received $350,000 from John Tyson – the chairman of Tyson Foods Inc., one of the nation’s largest meat sellers.
Several members of the Walton family – the family that owns the largest share of Walmart – contributed to the Hutchinson PAC. Four Waltons – Alice, Jim, Steuart and Thomas – donated a combined $350,000 to America Strong and Free Action, the report shows.
Committed to America PAC, the super PAC backing former Vice President Mike Pence’s presidential bid, raised just $2.7 million in the first six months of 2023, and spent less than $910,000, according to a new filing with the Federal Election Commission.
The pro-Pence PAC didn’t have a single seven-figure donation with the highest single contribution coming from Ronald Cameron, an Arkansas businessman who donated $500,000.
Cameron has contributed millions of dollars to Republican candidates and super PACs over the years including $1.5 million in combined contributions between 2019 and 2020 to a super PAC that backed former President Donald Trump’s reelection.
Committed to America PAC also received a $100,000 contribution from Stephens, the Arkansas businessman.
The PAC garnered several $100,000 donations including from Indiana-based contributors like Charlotte Lucas, the executive vice president of Lucas Oil Products Inc., and Billy Bean, the owner of a real estate brokerage company.
One of the group’s largest donations came from another PAC, the Founding Principles PAC, which is headquartered in Anderson, Indiana. The PAC gave $400,000 to the Pence-aligned group.
Doug Burgum, the independently wealthy governor of North Dakota, is self-funding his presidential campaign, but new filings show that he is also drawing big business donors to an allied super PAC.
The group, Best of America, has raised over $11 million so far, with several donors contributing seven-figure sums.
Major donors include Frederick Burgum, a family member who gave the group $2 million; Miles White, the former CEO of Abbott Laboratories, who also gave $2 million; Robert Kagle, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, who gave $1 million; and Gary Tharaldson, a real estate and hotel developer who is the richest man in North Dakota, who also gave $1 million.
The pro-Burgum group has spent little while hauling in millions, reporting just $2,900 in expenditures so far. Early in the campaign, Burgum deployed his own fortune behind a surge of advertising that has since tapered off. Now flush with cash, reporting over $11 million in cash on hand, the pro-Burgum super PAC has begun to pick up the slack, making its first ad bookings of the campaign last week.
A super PAC supporting Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Democratic presidential campaign had raised $9.8 million as of June 30, according to new FEC filings, drawing nearly all its funds from two major donors.
The group, American Values 2024, received a $5 million contribution from Tim Mellon, a businessman and heir to the Mellon banking fortune, in April of 2023, and another $4.5 million from Gavin De Becker, an author, who contributed more than $4 million just before the filing deadline. American Values 2024 also received $100,000 from another historic fortune, via heiress Abby Rockefeller.
Mellon, the largest donor to the super PAC, has been a major donor to conservative campaigns and causes in previous election cycles, and has given millions to committees affiliated with Trump.
The two contributions from Mellon and De Becker accounted for nearly 97% of the total raised by the super PAC, which also reported that it had spent about $465,000 since the beginning of the year, and had about $9.8 million in cash on hand entering July.
In a statement touting its fundraising, the super PAC also shared that it had raised an additional $6.5 million after the most recent filing deadline, and about $550,000 last year, saying its total haul amounts to about $16.8 million so far.
This headline and story have been updated with additional reporting.
