Mod: Those miserly MAGAs just aren't coughing up the cheese for the World's Oldest Prom Date and the Queen of QAnon. Where is the love?The Matt Gaetz-Marjorie Taylor Greene Fundraising Tour Is Actually a Cash Fire (Daily Beastlink): At the height of the controversy surrounding Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and the revelations that he’s under investigation for sex trafficking, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) bet big on a nationwide joint fundraising tour with her embattled colleague. But new campaign filings show that not only did the gamble not pay off, but that the much-maligned Republicans actually spent four times as much as they raised.
Greene, the
House GOP’s top fundraiser, is now faced with a decision: She can continue to join forces with her beleaguered ally at the expense of her campaign war chest, or she can cut bait and let
Gaetz fend for himself.
Since Gaetz and Greene kicked off their joint fundraising committee with a May 7 event at The Villages in central Florida, their campaigns and joint fundraising committee have posted a combined loss of $342,000. And according to recent filings with the Federal Election Commission, that joint fundraising effort, “Put America First,” reported only $59,345.54 in contributions.
That sort of meager haul would be fine for a dinner or one-time event, but
Gaetz and
Greene have repeatedly held high-profile events and spent a whopping $287,036.19 to hold them—meaning they’re in the hole by more than $225,000. Both
Gaetz and
Greene contributed $150,000 apiece from their own campaigns to the joint fundraising committee. And they’ve raised money almost entirely from small-dollar donors. Only four people gave $500 or more to the shared committee. But their campaign tour of some of the most
Trump-friendly areas in the nation has been inordinately expensive.
In fact, the big winner from the
Gaetz and
Greene barnstorming appears to be
Gaetz’s PR firm.
The Logan Circle Group, which the campaign hired in early April, made off with more than a million dollars in the second quarter of 2021. While the majority of that money came from Gaetz—$825,000 over the course of one month—the firm nudged past the million-dollar mark with the $250,000 it received from Put America First. Those payments, nearly 90 percent of the committee’s total budget, were for “event production and management,” according to FEC filings.
Mod: More at the link.
Michael Cohen thinks Jared Kushner may have already flipped (
Palmer Reportlink): When former
Trump administration money man
Tom Barrack was indicted and arrested yesterday, we noticed something interesting. Even though
Barrack is a west coast guy, it was the
U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York– based in
Brooklyn– who ran the criminal investigation into him.
There are numerous reasons for how and why jurisdiction can play out the way that it does. But we did find it interesting that the
EDNY who charged
Barrack yesterday is the same
EDNY that – according to the
New York Times– was investigating
Jared Kushner’s finances back in late 2017.
Barrack and
Kushner’s financial interests in the
Middle East always seemed to be intertwined, particularly back in 2017.
The
EDNY’s Kushner investigation apparently didn’t go anywhere; perhaps the
Trump administration put a freeze on it. But now that the
Department of Justice is free from
Trump’s meddling, we’re suddenly seeing the
EDNY charging
Tom Barrack. We wondered if perhaps the
EDNY has brought its
Kushner case back to life, and is nailing
Barrack to try to get him to flip on
Kushner.
But
Michael Cohen, who knows the
Trump family better than just about anyone, has a different take. He tweeted this today: “Interesting how
Jared Kushner (#Secretary Of Everything) name appears to be absent from all the controversy, indictments and arrests. Is he next to fall or a cooperating witness? Knowing what a snake he is, I bet the latter!”
Mod: More on Kush's rat run at the link.
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