GOP Now Stands for Grifters, Opportunists, and Perjurers
Yesterday I covered the sadism of Republican politicians, who have decided that rooting against the well-being of the American people is a defensible position. In short, the default position in the party these days is to capitalize on natural disasters by making easily disproved claims holding non-believers responsible.
Today, I’ll focus on MAGA masochism in the form of the continual fleecing of the faithful. It’s true. Millions upon millions of dollars are regularly transferred from the bank accounts of True Believers to the pockets of leaders who wear their corruption like a badge of honor.
It seems as though any use of donor monies is justifiable as long as the argument can be made as long as it provokes angst or anger from globalists/liberals/non-believers/elites.
Former Trump advisor Steven Bannon's reaction to being indicted and arrested is just the latest affirmation of this cynicism.
Bannon is facing charges that he siphoned off more than $1m from the “We Build the Wall” fundraising effort that promised to send all proceeds towards underwriting the completion of the US-Mexico border wall to enrich himself and his associates, the 22-page indictment said.
The fundraising effort promised donors that its organizers would not draw any compensation. But, the indictment said, hundreds of thousands of dollars were funneled through nonprofit entities, including some controlled by Bannon, to pay a salary for Brian Kolfage, one of his associates.
Bannon walked into the district attorney’s office alongside his lawyer, David Schoen, shouting over assembled television cameras that he believed he was facing a political prosecution that sought to undermine his far-right talkshow, War Room, in the 60-day run-up to the 2022 midterms.
Although Bannon was pardoned for federal offenses by outgoing President Donald Trump for his role in the scam (his co-conspirators weren’t), these charges are being pursued by the State of New York. According to the indictment, prosecutors have text messages spelling out exactly how those charged were going to siphon off donor funds to quietly enrich themselves with a GoFundMe that promised to build Trump's Mexico border wall.
Exhibit #2 in this grifting spree concerns local boy made “good,” Dinesh D'Souza, who’s made a decent living by peddling conspiracy theories, making ahistorical claims, and denouncing the so-called cultural left.
D’Souza’s been in the news recently because of his latest book, an expose that’s supposed to flesh out claims made in the documentary 2000 Mules concerning election fraud. The book’s publisher Regnery, abruptly pulled the book from shelves and delayed the e-book release, citing an unspecified "publishing error."
NPR obtained a copy of the recalled book and discovered that the “publishing error” involved allegations naming specific non-profit organizations as participants in an illegal ballot harvesting scheme.
The book does, however, regurgitate the content of the film "2,000 Mules" including misleading claims, which have been thoroughly debunked by fact-checkers and critics across the political spectrum. Former Attorney General Bill Barr called the film's underlying premise "indefensible."
Despite those flaws, "2,000 Mules" has emerged as a leading theory for supporters of Trump's baseless claim that he actually won the 2020 election. For Trump and some of his most diehard fans - among them candidates for public office - the project has served as "proof" of the stolen election.
The film's allegations were often vague, and largely based on data that have not been made public. As a result, some elements of the film were difficult, if not impossible, to fully fact-check. The book adds new details, however, which NPR has been able to scrutinize.
NPR contacted organizations named in the book for comment about some of D'Souza's written claims. They referred to passages in the book as "malarkey," "inaccurate," and "trash."
Although the publication date of the book has been pushed back to November, I can just about guarantee it will make best seller lists, thanks in no small part to right wing organizations’ bulk purchases.
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Moving up the MAGA food chain from parasites to predators, ABC News and other media outlets are now reporting on grand jury subpoenas seeking documents, records and testimony from potential witnesses about former president Trump's leadership PAC, Save America.
Trump and his allies have consistently pushed supporters to donate to the PAC, often using false claims about the 2020 election and soliciting donations to rebuke the multiple investigations into the former president, his business dealings, and his actions on Jan. 6.
After the FBI raided Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate last month, Save America PAC sent out a fundraising email in which Trump urged supporters to "rush in a donation IMMEDIATELY to publicly stand with me against this NEVERENDING WITCH HUNT."
This grand jury is reportedly separate from the one empaneled to gather evidence about the so-called fake electors plan. This batch of subpoenas does, according to the New York Times, overlap with inquiries being pursued by the House Select Committee on January 6.
At a committee hearing in June, Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California, laid out the panel’s account of how Save America PAC and Mr. Trump’s campaign raised $250 million after the election by claiming they were fighting widespread fraud when they knew there was none.
“Throughout the committee’s investigation, we found evidence that the Trump campaign and its surrogates misled donors as to where their funds would go and what they would be used for,” Ms. Lofgren said. “So not only was there the big lie, there was the big rip-off.”
The committee’s investigation found that after losing the election, Mr. Trump’s team appealed to donors as many as 25 times a day to aid his attempts to fight the election results in court by contributing to his “Official Election Defense Fund,” even though no such fund existed.
All this bad fundraising news hasn’t fallen on deaf ears in some small donor quarters. According to Politico:
The number of online donors to the Republican Party unexpectedly dropped in the first half of 2022, according to a POLITICO analysis of campaign finance data — one in a series of setbacks that have tempered expectations of a red wave in November.
Online fundraising usually ramps up dramatically and predictably over the course of an election cycle. But campaign finance data show that in the first half of this year, the number of people giving federal contributions to Republican candidates and committees through WinRed — the GOP’s widely used donation processing platform — fell to around 913,000 down from roughly 956,000 contributors during the six months prior.
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