Fleecing The Flock

Evil Incarnate I

Most people who have heard of David Bossie know him as the chief of the right-wing advocacy group, Citizens United, the well-funded operation that lucked out when it persuaded a deluded, corporatist Supreme Court to basically neuter campaign finance regulations. Bossie was donated by Robert Mercer, his ultimate boss, to Trump as a deputy campaign manager.

Currently, Bossie owns and runs a far right scam operation, the Presidential Coalition LLC, which pretends to collect contributions for Republican candidates from small donor Trumpists but uses the money to enrich itself. For example, of the over $11 million the Presidential Coalition LLC collected in the 2018 cycle, only $46,100 was given to candidates. Most of the rest made its way into the pockets of Bossie and his cronies. Almost all the donors are elderly, retired people who are stupid enough to want to give their money to Trump and his enablers. The only "big" donors were Summit Petroleum ($6,000), Acoma Oil ($6,000) and KapStone Paper and Packaging ($5,000).

According to a report out this past weekend from the non-partisan, non-profit Campaign Legal Center Bossie's group, which always emphasizes Trump in all requests for donations, targeted and misled vulnerable Americans who were tricked into contributing money they thought was going to Trump and Trumpist candidates.

Using fundraising appeals that capitalized on Bossie’s ties to President Trump, and drawing the majority of its donations from small-dollar and elderly donors, the Presidential Coalition achieved a fundraising explosion after President Trump’s upset victory in November 2016-- going from under $1 million in 2016, to a six-year peak of $5 million in 2017, and skyrocketing to $13 million in 2018. The Presidential Coalition raised more in 2017 and 2018 than it did in the previous six years combined.

Yet despite Presidential Coalition telling supporters in fundraising appeals that it needed money to “grow the Republican ‘farm team’ to support President Trump’s conservative agenda,” and to “train and prepare conservative candidates to run and win in local elections,” the group devoted only a very small proportion of its post-2016 spending to directly supporting candidates through contributions, independent expenditures, or other activities: a mere 3% ($425,442) of the group’s reported spending went to direct political activity in 2017 and 2018, according to our analysis.

Instead, the group has spent most of the funds raised on more fundraising, largely direct mail marketing and telemarketing. And $659,493 went to two affiliated organizations also run by Bossie, Citizens United and Citizens United Foundation. Those payments included a salary for Bossie himself.

The gap between what the Presidential Coalition claims to be raising money for and what it is actually spending it on is notable on its own. But the composition of the Presidential Coalition’s donor pool makes these activities even more concerning.

According to the Presidential Coalition’s reports on file with the IRS, approximately two-thirds of its contributions in 2017 and 2018 came from donors giving less than $200 in a single year-- and evidence suggests that older and retired individuals make up a sizeable portion of the Presidential Coalition’s fundraising base.

...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. Seniors on fixed incomes who give to the Presidential Coalition, for example, have less to give to President Trump’s campaign, or to a cash-strapped candidate running for local office, or to an organization engaged in the challenging work of grassroots mobilization.

Targeting President Trump’s supporters with promises of “grow[ing] the Republican farm team” while capitalizing on connections to the President may be an effective way of increasing a group’s fundraising more than tenfold in just two years, but serious questions are raised when the funds come largely from low-dollar and older voters and only a trifling proportion goes toward the stated purposes.

Unfortunately, these practices are not unique to the Presidential Coalition: there is a cottage industry of groups targeting vulnerable communities with self-serving borderline scams. 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.

...On the federal level, so-called “scam PACs” that raise substantial funds from small donors while spending little supporting candidates or causes have been increasingly recognized as a problem. The FEC and members of Congress have called for extending the statutory ban on using contributions for “personal use”-- like excessive salary payments-- to all federal political committees, which would help limit the worst abuses. (The FEC has so far interpreted the personal use ban to apply only to a candidate’s campaign committee.) But even a change in the law clarifying that all federal political committees are banned from using contributions for personal use would address only those scam operations organized as federal political committees-- it would not apply to the personal use of donations by 527 organizations primarily engaged in non-federal activity, like the Presidential Coalition.

The IRS could revoke the tax exempt status of 527s like the Presidential Coalition, under the theory that their primary activity appears not to be the kind of tax-exempt political activity section 527 is meant to cover. But such a move would be a rare one for the IRS, which has steered clear of enforcing the law against political groups.

State regulators, however, have shown an interest in addressing fundraising practices that mislead their state residents and abuse the tax benefits provided to nonprofit organizations. In Oregon, for example, if less than 30% of a charity’s spending goes toward program activities, it cannot take the state charitable tax deduction. States could consider implementing similar rules for 527 political organizations. Or states’ attorneys general could use their tools to investigate fraudulent fundraising practices in their state.

Groups like the Presidential Coalition take advantage of these legal grey areas: their fundraising practices are misleading, but may not be egregious enough to qualify as criminal fraud. At the federal level, they are registered with the IRS, but what limited political activity they do occurs at the state level, so they would not fall under the FEC’s jurisdiction even if the federal personal use prohibition were extended to all political committees. And at the state level, they may benefit from a wide range of state laws and competing enforcement priorities.

In the meantime, the Presidential Coalition’s ongoing activities practices not only mean that vulnerable voters are getting misled, but they also mean that the conservative movement’s limited financial resources are being diverted away from more effective political organizations-- or from President Trump’s own campaign.

Evil Incarnate II

Yesterday, Glenn Beck's and Mark Levin's neo-fascist propaganda outfit, The Blaze, reported-- celebrated-- a different kind of scammery. Caleb Howe declared one of Satan's creatures on earth, Jerry Falwell, Jr., "as devoted as (sic) fan of President Trump can get, a true acolyte." Why? A tweet... about a different kind of reparations:

2 more years?

Trump loves this idea and he's starting to actively talk about taking two more years regardless of how badly he's beaten in the 2020 election. His excesses are his own but blame can also be shared by Republican enablers in Congress and by a shameful Democratic speaker who adamantly refuses to do her job, which would be to impeach him. Is she waiting for him to start arresting members of Congress before she does her duty? House Democrats are getting to the point where they would be remisss in their own duty by not removing her.