Jerry Falwell, Jr. Has Been Very Christian-- Towards Handsome Young Men He Has Physical Contact With

No one knows for sure if the pool boy was screwing Jerry Falwell, Jr. or Ayatollah Falwell was screwing the pool boy. I'll keep my theories to myself until there's further evidence, even if circumstantial evidence would lead one to believe that Jr. may have a sore tuchas from time to time. But anyway... it appears that Falwell, Jr.-- when he isn't selling President Satan to gullible evangelicals-- has been double timing the pool boy-- with his personal trainer. Come on, admit it, the personal trainer, Benjamin Crosswhite-- a 23 year old recent graduate from Liberty-- when Falwell was wooing him-- is pretty hunky.

Aram Roston and Joshua Schneyer broke the story for Reuters yesterday, although they were more hung up on how much Falwell was fleecing the flock than on what he was getting up to with young Mr. Crosswhite. They wrote that "Evangelical leader and prominent Donald Trump backer Jerry Falwell Jr personally approved real estate transactions by his nonprofit Christian university that helped his personal fitness trainer obtain valuable university property, according to real estate records, internal university emails and interviews. Around 2011, Falwell, president of Liberty University in Virginia, and his wife, Rebecca, began personal fitness training sessions with Benjamin Crosswhite, then a 23-year-old recent Liberty graduate. Now, after a series of university real estate transactions signed by Falwell, Crosswhite owns a sprawling 18-acre racquet sports and fitness facility on former Liberty property. Last year, a local bank approved a line of credit allowing Crosswhite’s business to borrow as much as $2 million against the property." Nice! All Falwell gave the pool boy was a shabby male brothel!

A Florida lawsuit brought public scrutiny to a relationship between the Falwells and Giancarlo Granda, a young man they befriended while he was working as a pool attendant at a luxury Miami Beach hotel and later backed in a business venture involving a youth hostel. Falwell filed an affidavit in 2018 saying he used his own wealth to lend $1.8 million to the $4.65 million project with Granda.

And U.S. President Trump’s now-jailed fixer, Michael Cohen, has said he helped the Falwells suppress racy personal photos, as Reuters reported this May, in the months before Cohen persuaded Falwell to endorse Trump’s 2016 White House bid. There is no evidence that Cohen’s efforts to suppress the photos were a quid pro quo for Falwell’s vital political backing.

The support Falwell provided to the two young men, Granda and Crosswhite, has some parallels. Both were aided in business ventures and both have flown on the nonprofit university’s corporate jet.

One difference: When Falwell helped Crosswhite, he used the assets of Liberty, the tax-exempt university he has led since 2008. Among the largest Christian universities in the world, Liberty depends on hundreds of millions of dollars its students receive in federally backed student loans and Pell grants.

In 2016, Falwell signed a real estate deal transferring the sports facility, complete with tennis courts and a fitness center owned by Liberty, to Crosswhite. Under the terms, Crosswhite wasn’t required to put any of his own money down toward the purchase price, a confidential sales contract obtained by Reuters shows.

Liberty committed nearly $650,000 up front to lease back tennis courts from Crosswhite at the site for nine years. The school also offered Crosswhite financing, at a low 3% interest rate, to cover the rest of the $1.2 million transaction, the contract shows.

...“The concern is whether the university’s president wanted to do his personal trainer a favor and used Liberty assets to do it,” said Douglas Anderson, a governance specialist and former internal audit chief at Dow Chemical Co, who reviewed both the transaction and Liberty’s explanation of it at Reuters’ request. That would be bad governance, he said. “At a minimum, the terms suggest the buyer got a great deal and Liberty got very little.”

Falwell, Jr. Is A Dangerous Crook-- Perfect For White Evangelical Trump Sheep Waiting To Be Shorn. Also, Why Does The Falwell Billion Dollar Financial Empire Still Get Away Without Paying Taxes?

Falwell "invests" in personal trainers, pool boys & gay brothels-- cool, huh?

Today, Jerry Falwell, Jr. claimed he's asking the FBI to investigate what he termed a "criminal" smear campaign orchestrated against him by several disgruntled former board members and employees. Falwell claimed he has evidence that the group improperly shared emails belonging to the university with reporters in an attempt to discredit him. He said the "attempted coup" was partially motivated by his ardent backing of President Trump.

"I’m not going to dignify the lies that were reported yesterday with a response, but I am going to the authorities and I am going to civil court," Falwell said, referring to the reporter as a "little boy."

He added that Liberty has hired "the meanest lawyer in New York," whom he declined to identify, to pursue civil cases. Falwell also declined to identify the people he said were spreading the emails.

No one at Liberty "University" wants to rat Jerry Falwell Jr. out but, according to a stunning post by Brandon Ambrosino, a graduate of Liberty, published by Politico yesterday, Falwell is "all anyone can talk about." Ambrosino says things are starting to change and now people are willing to rat him out. Despite non-disclosure agreement Liberty forces employees and trustees to sign, some ratted him out to Ambrosino. “It’s a dictatorship,” one current high-level employee of the school said. “Nobody craps at the university without Jerry’s approval.”

He wrote that "based on scores of new interviews and documents obtained for this article, concerns about Falwell’s behavior go well beyond [racy photos and suspicious business deals]-- and it’s causing longtime, loyal Liberty University officials to rapidly lose faith in him. More than two dozen current and former high-ranking Liberty University officials and close associates of Falwell spoke to me or provided documents for this article, opening up-- for the first time at an institution so intimately associated with the Falwell family-- about what they’ve experienced and why they don’t think he’s the right man to lead Liberty University or serve as a figurehead in the Christian conservative movement. In interviews over the past eight months, they depicted how Falwell and his wife, Becki, consolidated power at Liberty University and how Falwell presides over a culture of self-dealing, directing university resources into projects and real estate deals in which his friends and family have stood to make personal financial gains. Among the previously unreported revelations are Falwell’s decision to hire his son Trey’s company to manage a shopping center owned by the university, Falwell’s advocacy for loans given by the university to his friends, and Falwell’s awarding university contracts to businesses owned by his friends. 'We’re not a school; we’re a real estate hedge fund,' said a senior university official with inside knowledge of Liberty’s finances. 'We’re not educating; we’re buying real estate every year and taking students’ money to do it.'" But nothing about the pool boy and the personal trainer? There is a little something about the Falwells owning a gay whore house in Miami gay-friendly youth hostel in Miami.

Liberty employees detailed other instances of Falwell’s behavior that they see as falling short of the standard of conduct they expect from conservative Christian leaders, from partying at nightclubs, to graphically discussing his sex life with employees, to electioneering that makes uneasy even those who fondly remember the heyday of the late Rev. Jerry Falwell Sr., the school’s founder and Falwell Jr.’s father, and his Moral Majority.

In January, the Wall Street Journa reported that in the run-up to Trump’s presidential campaign, Cohen hired John Gauger, a Liberty University employee who runs a private consulting firm, to manipulate online polls in Trump’s favor. Not previously reported is the fact that, according to a half-dozen high-level Liberty University sources, when Gauger traveled to New York to collect payment from Cohen, he was joined by Trey Falwell, a vice president at Liberty. During that trip, Trey posted a now-deleted photo to Instagram of around $12,000 in cash spread on a hotel bed, raising questions about his knowledge of Gauger’s poll-rigging work. Trey did not respond to requests for comment.

...“Everybody is scared for their life. Everybody walks around in fear,” said a current university employee who agreed to speak for this article only after purchasing a burner phone, fearing that Falwell was monitoring their communications. The fear is not limited to Liberty’s campus. Several people who lack any tie to Liberty but live in the school’s hometown of Lynchburg, Virginia, refused to go on the record for this story, fearing Falwell would take revenge upon them and their families. “Fear is probably his most powerful weapon,” a former senior university official said.

But even those who fear have their breaking points.

In speaking out, said one longtime current university employee with close ties to the school’s first family, “I feel like I’m betraying them in some way. But someone’s gotta tell the freakin’ truth.”

“We’re talking about the difference between right and wrong,” a current high-ranking university official said. “Not even ‘being a Christian,’ but being a good person, versus people who manipulate the system”

...Liberty University has transformed under Jerry Falwell Jr.’s leadership. When he took over as president in 2007, the school, which is a nonprofit, had listed assets of just over $259 million on its then most recent IRS Form 990; in its filing for the fiscal year ending in June 2017, its assets surpassed $2.5 billion. That number is now more than $3 billion, according to public statements Falwell made in 2018.

That growth is driven largely by a vast increase in the number of online students at the school, who now number some 95,000. Many Falwell confidants are concerned with where they see that university tuition money going: into university-funded construction and real estate projects that enrich the Falwell family and their friends.

...The line between where the Falwell family’s wealth begins and Liberty’s finances end is blurry.

University officials describe Liberty loaning money to the Falwells’ friends, even when these loans arguably are not in the school’s financial interests. According to emails and loan documents obtained for this article, in 2014, the university gave loans of at least $200,000 to Prototype Tourism LLC, a “destination marketing” company founded by Liberty graduate Josh Oppenheimer, whom Jerry Falwell Jr. described to me as “a friendly supporter.” According to emails I’ve reviewed, several high-ranking Liberty officials knew about the loan, including Vice President Trey Falwell. The graduate had difficulty repaying the loan—“not surprised,” Trey wrote in an email.

When asked about the loan, Jerry Falwell Jr. clarified the school’s role with Prototype Tourism. “Liberty University was not simply a lender, but was a minority investor in Prototype Tourism, LLC,” he wrote. Falwell described the company’s goal as promoting tourism to Lynchburg. “Due diligence was performed by multiple individuals who discussed the pros and cons and the consensus was that it was worthwhile to proceed,” Falwell wrote. “In the end, I reluctantly agreed with the recommendation and allowed the transaction to proceed. In hindsight, it was not a good decision. … LU lost its investment and the loan portion of the deal was only partially paid back.”

Other loans were precursors to massive contracts. In 2013, Robert Moon, a friend of Falwell’s with deep family ties to the Falwells, founded Construction Management Associates Inc., a construction company devoted to work on and around campus. Previously unreported is the fact that Liberty gave Moon a loan of $750,000 to form the company before awarding it more than $130 million in contracts and selling it land owned by the university.

...In July 2014, Falwell, Trey and Moon traveled to Miami together. Falwell said in his statement that he recalls “discussing University business” on the trip.

During the trip, photos were taken of Jerry and Trey Falwell partying at a Miami nightclub-- photos that multiple Liberty University officials said Jerry Falwell tried to make disappear.

...In a statement on August 21, Jerry Falwell denied the existence of any photo of him at the club. “There was no picture snapped of me at WALL nightclub or any other nightclub,” Falwell wrote. “I’m sure you already knew that though.”

When told that I had obtained a photo of him for this article, Falwell said I was “terribly mistaken.” “If you show me the picture, I can probably help you out,” he wrote. “I think you are making some incorrect assumptions, or have been told false things or are seeing something that was photo--shopped.”

After I sent him the photo, as well as a photo of Trey at Wall, Falwell responded: “I never asked anyone to get rid of any pictures on the internet of me and I never have seen the picture you claim is of me below. If the person in the picture is me, it was likely photo-shopped.” In a second email sent 23 minutes later, Falwell wrote: “But the bigger question, Brandon, is why would I want a picture like that taken down if I had seen it?”

According to several people with direct knowledge of the situation, Falwell-- the president of a conservative Christian college that frowns upon co-ed dancing (Liberty students can receive demerits if seen doing it) and prohibits alcohol use (for which students can be expelled)—was angry that photos of him clubbing made it up online. To remedy the situation, multiple Liberty staffers said Falwell went to John Gauger, whom they characterized as his “IT guy,” and asked him to downgrade the photos’ prominence on Google searches. Gauger did not respond to requests for comment.

Gauger has worked at Liberty since earning his MBA from the school in 2009. In 2016, he was promoted to become the school’s chief information officer about a year and a half after he was named deputy CIO. To several university sources, his rapid rise to the C-suite was shocking.

“I’m not being disrespectful, but John was a nobody,” one longtime Liberty official said. “And the next thing you know, he’s high up in IT.”

Longtime Liberty officials describe Gauger as a sort of fixer for Falwell, a man promoted because he would do what Falwell asked of him without complaint. But Gauger is more than just a university employee: Since 2009, Gauger has also run RedFinch LLC, an online business he founded that specializes in search-engine marketing and does lucrative contract work for Liberty. Tax records show Liberty paid RedFinch $123,950 during 2016, for what sources described as search-engine recruitment of online students for the university. Gauger did not respond to requests for comment.

...In January, the Wall Street Journal reported that in 2014 and 2015, Michael Cohen hired Gauger’s side business, RedFinch LLC, to rig online polls in Donald Trump’s favor while he considered a run for the presidency. Gauger’s work consisted of writing a computer script to repeatedly vote for Trump in two online polls; his company would get paid $50,000 in return. Instead, Gauger told The Journal that after a meeting at Trump Tower in Manhattan, Cohen paid Gauger roughly one-fourth of that amount-- between $12,000 and $13,000 in cash-- and gave him a boxing glove worn by a mixed martial arts fighter.

Through his lawyer, Cohen, who is serving a three-year prison sentence for tax fraud, making false statements to Congress and violating campaign finance laws, declined a request to comment for this article.

Previously unreported about this incident is that Trey joined Gauger on the January 2015 trip to New York, and posted a photo to Instagram showing a large amount of cash spread atop a bed in a hotel room. Liberty officials who saw the since-deleted post and described its contents said it raised questions about Trey’s involvement in the pro-Trump poll-rigging effort.

“The idiot posted [a picture of] money on a bed?!” one current senior Liberty official said. “Why do that if you’re not involved with it?”

Liberty officials also pointed to a tweet sent out by the university’s Twitter account on January 23, 2014, linking to one of the polls that the Wall Street Journal reported Gauger had rigged. The poll was conducted by CNBC and asked readers to vote for the top American business leaders.

As a nonprofit, Liberty University is legally prohibited from engaging in “political campaign activity,” to use the IRS’ phrase, at the risk of losing its nonprofit status.

When asked about the tweet, Falwell told me he authorized the university’s marketing department to send it as way of thanking Trump for speaking at Liberty. “A representative of the Trump business organization asked for Liberty University to use Twitter to encourage followers to vote for Donald Trump in the annual CNBC poll. We often get requests from Convocation speakers to promote their books, movies, music and other projects. And we do it all the time,” Falwell said. “After speaking for free at [a 2012 Liberty] Convocation and being so complimentary to our University in his remarks, I considered Donald Trump to be a friend of Liberty University and was happy to publicize the poll in hopes that Liberty followers would be willing to vote for him on the heels of his very positive recent campus appearance.”

Falwell noted that at the time the tweet was sent, “Donald Trump was not a candidate for president and no one at Liberty even knew he would run for President.” However, as the Wall Street Journal reported-- and as several sources independently confirmed in the course of my reporting for this article—Cohen had hired Gauger, a Liberty employee, to rig the poll in Trump’s favor for the purposes of garnering support ahead of his presidential bid.

“A 501(c)(3) organization trying to influence a poll so that a candidate’s fortunes are promoted or demoted is not permitted,” said Eve Borenstein, an attorney and tax expert known as the “Queen of the 990,” a moniker used to introduce her ahead of congressional testimony she gave about the IRS Form 990 in 2012.

While 501(c)(3) organizations are permitted to “do objective analysis of [an] electoral horse race,” said Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, a professor at Stetson University College of Law, “tweeting out a rigged poll if Liberty knew it was rigged probably does not fall into that safe harbor.”

Liberty officials said that the arrangement is characteristic of how Falwell wields power. “This paints a picture of how Jerry operates,” one former high-ranking university official said. “Gauger gets promoted, [Liberty] contracts for RedFinch for online recruitment … and [Gauger] gets hooked up with people like Cohen to make more money via RedFinch.” And in the end, Falwell gets what he really wants: “A guy that will do whatever he is told.”

In May 2019, Reuters reported that Cohen helped Falwell contain the fallout from some racy “personal” photos. Later that month, Falwell took to Todd Starnes’ radio talk show to rebut the claims.

...Longtime Liberty officials close to Falwell told me the university president has shown or texted his male confidants-- including at least one employee who worked for him at Liberty-- photos of his wife in provocative and sexual poses.

At Liberty, Falwell is “very, very vocal” about his “sex life,” in the words of one Liberty official—a characterization multiple current and former university officials and employees interviewed for this story support. In a car ride about a decade ago with a senior university official who has since left Liberty, “all he wanted to talk about was how he would nail his wife, how she couldn’t handle [his penis size], and stuff of that sort,” this former official recalled. Falwell did not respond to questions about this incident.

More than simply talking with employees about his wife in a sexual manner, on at least one occasion, Falwell shared a photo of his wife wearing what appeared to be a French maid costume, according to a longtime Liberty employee with firsthand knowledge of the image and the fallout that followed.

Falwell intended to send the image to his and Becki’s personal trainer, Ben Crosswhite, as a “thank you” for helping his wife achieve her fitness goals, the employee said. In the course of texting, Falwell accidentally sent the message to several other people, necessitating a cleanup.

...The Falwells’ close relationship with Crosswhite is the source of consternation for some of Liberty’s top brass because of what they characterize as a sweetheart business deal Falwell had the university offer Crosswhite.

On July 23, 2013, Liberty University began renting space to Crosswhite for use as a fitness center. “The facility was specifically built into the old Racket Club for Jerry and Becki to train privately” with Crosswhite, a longtime university official familiar with the arrangement said. Over the course of the Falwells' private training, Liberty began to pay for expensive upgrades to the facility, according to documents reviewed for this article. Eventually, in 2015, Falwell had a university executive draft a proposal for Liberty to sell the property to Crosswhite at a discount, paying him up front for Liberty’s use of the facility for the next seven years.

“We raised his rent some to cover the investment. LU then sold it to Ben,” one senior university official said. “Nobody else was allowed to bid on it.”

In a September 2015 email, Liberty University Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Randy Smith wrote Crosswhite to let him know the terms of the deal. The university would sell Crosswhite “the club and all real estate associated with it” for $1,216,000. Liberty employees would be allowed to use the facility, Crosswhite could decide what the value of that was-- roughly $82,000 per year, he decided-- and the school would pay in advance for seven years of use.

At closing, per Falwell’s approval, Liberty would pay Crosswhite approximately $575,000, which effectively cut Crosswhite’s total cost for the $1.2 million property in half. “The net amount that you would need at closing is $641,062 more or less,” Smith wrote. “After reviewing, if the terms are acceptable to you, then I will get final approval from Jerry to proceed,” Smith wrote Crosswhite.

“Hell of a deal,” a former high-ranking Liberty official told me. “We gave Ben everything he asked for.”

... It will be a surprise to no one that Jerry Falwell, Jr. is a Republican. He has that in common with the vast majority of people connected to Liberty. But sometimes his partisan allegiances manifest in ways that directly influence the governance of the school-- which, as a nonprofit, must not endorse or oppose candidates for public office.

Just days after the 2008 election of Barack Obama, top university officials were already considering ways to ensure that Liberty students voted in 2010 local elections in Lynchburg. Falwell and university officials weren’t simply talking about the sort of voter-registration drives common at many college campuses; they wanted students to tilt the balance of the election.

In emails obtained for this article, top school officials shared a local newspaper article documenting “concerns in some quarters [of Lynchburg] about the overwhelmingly conservative LU students and the possibility they could alter the balance of power on council and change the course of the city.”

“FYI-- The challenge we will have in 2010 is [Lynchburg’s local Election Day] is finals week,” a top Liberty official wrote in a November 9, 2008, email to Falwell and other school leaders. “We would either need to get a polling station at LU or try and make this a reading day to get the kids out to vote.”

Falwell responded to the message just under four hours later, announcing that the problem was now solved: “We changed the calendar by one week. School will now let out on May 14 instead of [M]ay 7.”

This wasn’t a fluke. According to a former high-ranking university official who participated in some of these discussions, Falwell often takes “aggressive efforts … to register students in an effort to gain political influence.”

Similarly, in a 2014 email exchange, Falwell complained that Liberty’s commencement date meant that most students would be gone for the summer by the time voting began for Lynchburg’s local elections. “Why did we schedule commencement a week earlier this year?” he wrote in an email to several school executives. When one replied that commencement usually happened during the same weekend each year, Falwell pushed back. “We need to get that corrected for the 2018 graduation or else we will have no students in town to vote in local elections again,” Falwell wrote. “Let’s work on it.”

In the past, Falwell has defended any political actions he’s made as personal stances disconnected from his leadership of Liberty University. “I think our community is mature enough that they understand that all the administrators and faculty have their own personal political views,” he told the Washington Post after endorsing Trump. But it is as the president and chancellor of Liberty that Falwell changed the academic calendar to influence local politics.

In a statement, Falwell admitted to amending the academic calendar “so that students would not be prevented from voting in local municipal elections that used to be scheduled after their spring term exams.”

“They and their parents pay some of the highest taxes in the nation when it comes to the City meal and hotel taxes,” Falwell said. “It’s only fair that they have some say about who is elected to represent them.”

When I shared my reporting on the school’s date changes, legal experts reached different conclusions as to its propriety.

“This paints a picture of an organization that is intervening on campaigns more than it should,” said Pitt Law’s Hackney, although he added that other universities have “presumably” taken student voting into consideration when creating their schedules.

“Doing anything with the resources of a 501(c)(3) organization to promote or oppose candidates for elective public office is not a permitted operation by a 501(c)(3)-qualified organization under federal tax law,” Borenstein, the tax attorney specializing in nonprofit organizations, wrote in an email.

Still, Falwell’s actions here are “likely fine,” said Torres-Spelliscy, the law professor at Stetson University. “Many schools try to cancel classes or hold no classes on Election Day to encourage students to vote or be poll workers or engage in election protection activities. Though the IRS might consider Falwell’s stated partisan motivation if the IRS investigated Liberty to challenge its 501(c)(3) status, this type of investigation is highly unlikely.” In fact, according to Ellen April, a professor of tax law at Loyola Law School, a very small number of 990 Forms are ever investigated. “The IRS is able to do very little enforcement of the rules applicable to 501(c)(3) because of their limited" resources.

Observers nicked when Donald Trump visited Liberty's campus in 2016, veered off script and infamously referred to the Bible's Second Corinthians as “two Corinthians”—making it appear as if he were learning of the biblical book for the first time. But his promises to religious conservatives—chief among them, his guarantee that he would fill Antonin Scalia’s Supreme Court empty seat with a justice who opposed abortion rights—and his choice of Mike Pence as his running mate mobilized evangelicals to support him in 2016. In CNN’s exit poll from that November, 26 percent of the electorate described themselves as white born-again or evangelical Christians; 80 percent of them voted for Trump.

In 2017, with Trump in office and evangelicals strongly supporting him, the Falwells saw a branding opportunity, according to emails obtained for this article.

That spring, after Trump was invited to deliver the school’s commencement address, Becki Falwell asked university counsel Corry to look into whether Liberty could “permit third-party vendors to sell t-shirts and hats [on campus] during commencement weekend.” Corry advised that because of a contract between the university and Barnes & Noble, which had the exclusive right to sell “clothing, including any and all such items bearing Liberty University emblem, logo, insignia, or other identifying mark” on campus, the answer “depends upon who is selling them and whether Barnes & Noble consents.”

“I want to make sure that we have a lot of options available to purchase,” Becki Falwell replied, adding additional Liberty officials to the email thread. “It’s great advertising for Liberty to be on products with Trumps name.”

In a follow-up email to the Liberty officials, Becki wrote, “I spoke to Michael Cohen and he said to make sure any shirts we buy are made in America! He loved the designs!”

The school ended up printing and selling Trump T-shirts and hats. The shirts, in MAGA red with white type, read “TRUMP” in large block letters and “Liberty University Commencement 2017” in a much smaller font size. Another design, used on both hats and T-shirts, borrowed Trump’s campaign slogan and signature style: an all-caps “Making America Great Again,” then in a script font: “One degree at a time.”

...Told about the merchandise, experts suggested that the Trump-Liberty T-shirts might cross that line. “A 501(c)(3) organization cannot be selling those shirts or gifting space to someone selling t-shirts with a candidate’s name on it, since that is advertising for a candidate,” Borenstein said.

Ever since Falwell endorsed Trump ahead of the 2016 Iowa caucuses, political pundits have speculated that Trump was simply using Falwell to achieve his own political ends. That might be true: From his regular appearances at evangelical events to his claim that he single-handedly brought back the phrase “Merry Christmas,” Trump seems to be keen on shoring up his evangelical base. What better way to do that than to cultivate a very public relationship with the late Rev. Jerry Falwell Sr.’s son?

But multiple associates of Jerry Falwell Jr. said the popular narrative is backward: It’s not Trump who has the most to gain from the relationship, it’s Falwell. Trump just went along with the arrangement.

Falwell has become known as a Trump loyalist who is willing to put his-- and his school’s-- reputation on the line to defend the president from any critic. In Trump, Falwell said in 2017, “evangelicals have found their dream president.” When asked by the Washington Post late in 2018 if there were “anything President Trump could do that would endanger that support from you or other evangelical leaders,” Falwell said “No.” In a May 2019 tweet about the Mueller investigation, Falwell appropriated the language of reparations for descendants of slaves to argue Trump’s term should be lengthened: “I now support reparations. Trump should have 2 yrs added to his 1st term as pay back for time stolen by this corrupt failed coup.”





In Trump, Falwell has found the opportunity to secure his own status as one of America’s preeminent Christian political leaders-- the chance to finally obtain the national relevance of his father. Now, Falwell is a national figure-- a friend to a president, a man prone to outspoken statements that rile critics and endear him to supporters, a major leader on the religious right despite not being a pastor. He is closer than ever before to the kind of status the Rev. Jerry Falwell Sr. wielded.

But for those at Liberty who know both Falwell Jr. and his late father, there’s no comparing the men.

"Jerry’s daddy was a respectable, honest, decent, hardworking man,” said a longtime Liberty official who worked for both father and son. “Big Jerry hired people that were smart and capable and put them around himself. He made sure you knew you were appreciated. There was never an ego involved. You knew you were working for a higher calling. Jerry’s father was very generous and promoted all of us in an enlightening way.”

With Falwell Sr., "you could feel his passion and love for the Lord and others. He knew everyone’s names, their stories and struggles. He was genuine and loving. And that love bled from the campus,” a former longtime university official said. “It’s a cold place now.”

“With [Jerry’s] dad, there were never questions about his business dealings or whether he was profiting from a business deal,” said still another former longtime high-ranking Liberty official who worked closely with both men. “There was never a hint or suspicion of that because Falwell Sr. was only doing things that were for the benefit of the university or church-- not for himself.”

The feeling is different with Junior in charge.

One source pointed to a tweet Jerry Falwell Jr. sent out in June 2019 criticizing David Platt, an evangelical Virginia pastor who apologized for welcoming Trump to his church. “I only want to lead us with God’s Word in a way that transcends political party and position, heals the hurts of racial division and injustice, and honors every man and woman made in the image of God,” Platt said. “Sorry to be crude,” wrote Falwell in a since-deleted tweet, “but pastors like [David Platt] need to grow a pair.”

After Falwell came under criticism for his tweet about Platt, he responded to critics with a two-part Twitter thread, which, in the words of one current high-ranking Liberty official, “a lot of people found troubling.”

“I have never been a minister,” Falwell tweeted. “UVA-trained lawyer and commercial real estate developer for 20 yrs. Univ president for last 12 years-student body tripled to 100000+/endowment from 0 to $2 billion and $1.6B new construction in those 12 years. The faculty, students and campus pastor @davidnasser of @LibertyU are the ones who keep LU strong spiritually as the best Christian univ in the world. While I am proud to be a conservative Christian, my job is to keep LU successful academically, financially and in athletics.”

To those who worked for Liberty under the late Rev. Falwell, the sentiment appeared to signal a serious departure from his father’s legacy. “Bragging about business success and washing his hands of any responsibility for spiritual life at the university—that was frankly a pretty Trumpian line of commentary,” said one former university official with longstanding ties to both Liberty and the Falwell family.

Under Falwell Jr., Liberty University is “a totally dysfunctional organization,” one board member wrote in an email reviewed for this article. “Very similar to Trump’s White House.”

Is there hope in the post-Falwellian evangelical world? Reporter Jeffrey Cimmino did a piece on a very different kind of evangelicalism a day or two ago for the Washington Examiner: Liberal pastors optimistic Democrats can rebound with faith voters after lackluster display in 2016. "Doug Pagitt, executive director of Vote Common Good, an organization focused on mobilizing liberal evangelical and other Christian voters, noted a shift in Democratic politicians’ discourse compared to recent election cycles. 'The biggest shift I’ve noticed from 2016, and even from 2014 and 2012: The Democratic Party as a whole and candidates are actually talking about faith voters, talking about their own faith, trying to include someone who organizes their life around their faith considerations, that that’s something you can bring to the Democratic Party,' Pagitt told the Washington Examiner." Some are even smart enough to see where Jesus' message is actually coming from in politics:

“I know that Bernie Sanders is really resonating with a lot of progressive Christians who are concerned about issues of poverty, lack of affordable housing, labor abuses, things like that,” Sarah Trone Garriott, an Iowa-based Lutheran pastor and state senate candidate, told the Washington Examiner.

Rev. John Cager, pastor of Ward AME Church in Los Angeles, was impressed by Sanders’ “message of inclusion and participation” after he spoke at the Islamic Center of Los Angeles in March.

“I have to say it was impressive for me because to this point Sanders has seemed the least likely of the Democratic candidates to appeal to a faith community,” Cager said.

As If 2020 Hasn't Be Sick Enough... The Falwell Games

 

Last week, Fox News reported that Jerry Falwell Jr is suing Liberty University for defamation and, a Trumpier shit-storm of corruption, perversion and hucksterism isn't likelier to be found anywhere in the grand ole year of 2020.

Falwell left Liberty in August after Giancarlo Granda, a younger business partner of the Falwell family, said he had a years-long sexual relationship with Falwell's wife, Becki Falwell, and that Jerry Falwell participated in some of the liaisons as a voyeur. There have also been charges that Falwell participated in more ways than voyeurism, both with Granda (aka, the pool-boy) and Ben Crosswhile (aka, the gym guy), booth of whom have become wealthy because of their sexual relationships with the Falwells. "[T]here have been concerns that the lines between Falwell’s personal profits and that of the school’s have been blurred and, shortly after his departure, Liberty announced it was opening an independent investigation into his tenure as president-- a wide-ranging inquiry that would include financial, real estate and legal matters." And all of this is tied up with the Trump campaign and Trump presidency.

The Virginia lawsuit asserts that "When Mr. Falwell and his family became the targets of a malicious smear campaign incited by anti-evangelical forces, Liberty University not only accepted the salacious and baseless accusations against the Falwells at face value, but directly participated in the defamation. This action seeks redress for the damage Liberty has caused to the reputation of Mr. Falwell and his family... Liberty’s actions are antithetical to the teachings of Christ by playing right into the hands of sinister operatives with ulterior motives."

Perhaps Falwell will sue Politico as well after Sunday's mega-exposé pounded another rusty nail into his repetitional coffin. Just as word was coming out about how Trump is continuing to tank with Catholic voters, reporters Maggie Severens, Brandon Ambrosino and Michael Stratford took a solid wack at the underpinnings of the biggest Trump support group: white evangelicals. The beginning of the trio's piece was amazing: "When Jerry Falwell Jr. and his wife Becki strolled around the Lynchburg, Va., campus of Liberty University, the evangelical school which Falwell led as president, they would play a secret game called 'Would you rather.' The middle-aged couple would point to students, men and women, and imagine what it would be like to have sex with them, according to a former student who said Becki told him about the game. The former student, a member of a band with the Falwells’ son Trey, has said that Becki initiated oral sex with him while he stayed overnight at the Falwell home, following other attempts to seduce him. She confided to him the details of the game she and her husband would play, and told him multiple times how she and Jerry would take note of students' appearances. 'Her and Jerry would eye people down on campus,' the former student, who was 22 when Becki performed oral sex on him and is now 32, said."

Now, following an episode this summer in which Falwell posted a photo of himself with his pants unzipped and arm around his wife’s assistant, Falwell has left his job and withdrawn from public life. Supporters of the university, which boasts it has more than 100,000 students, are left to wonder how to disentangle its reputation from that of the Falwell family, given that the two were synonymous for generations. And some are wondering why it took so long-- and until a direct act by Falwell like posting a photo-- for the university’s trustees to take any action.

A Politico investigation, including interviews with dozens of Liberty officials from Falwell’s time as president, found a university community so committed to the Falwell legacy that even trustees considered it unthinkable to exert power over the son and namesake of the university’s revered founder. Plus, the university employed at least 20 relatives of stakeholders-- defined as senior administrators and the 32-member Board of Trustees, according to federal tax disclosures-- which gave many leaders an incentive to stay on Falwell’s good side.

...Falwell experienced so little oversight that he regularly used the university’s private jet for personal travel, often to Florida; kept five of his immediate family members on the payroll, including his 31-year-old son Trey at a salary of $234,310; sold a university-owned home to Trey; extended a university-backed loan to a family friend; rented university property on favorable terms to his former personal trainer; and used the university’s employees for renovations on his home, for which he repaid $175,000, among many instances when Liberty’s resources benefited the Falwells and their allies.

While Falwell’s personal behavior and self-dealing raised alarms among some Liberty loyalists, including people close to his father, they would leave the university-- sometimes in exchange for severance agreements that included non-disparagement clauses-- and keep quiet about their misgivings. Like many evangelicals, they had a skepticism about the mainstream media and feared outside retaliation against the university.

“The church has a bad habit of keeping things secret. They want to keep it in house, take care of it in house. And Liberty’s the same way. It wants to suppress things and keep things quiet-- and that’s what they did with Jerry,” said Mark Tinsley, a former Dean of the College of General Studies at Liberty University who left in 2017.

No one doubted that Falwell, backed by the power of his last name, exerted more control than his nominal bosses, the trustees.

One of Liberty’s most high-profile supporters, board member Mark DeMoss, whose father had donated $20 million to Liberty for construction of DeMoss Hall, one of the largest buildings on campus, was pushed off the board in 2016 after questioning Falwell’s endorsement of Donald Trump over other Republican contenders for president.

DeMoss had once served as Jerry Falwell Sr.’s chief of staff, and chaired the executive committee of Liberty’s trustees when he was abruptly pushed out of the Liberty fold.

After Falwell surprised much of the evangelical world by choosing the twice-divorced Trump, an infrequent churchgoer, over numerous Republican presidential candidates with strong religious backgrounds and evangelical ties, DeMoss made the rare move of speaking publicly about the decision. He told the Washington Post that Trump’s behavior is “not Christ-like behavior that Liberty has spent 40 years promoting with its students.”

...The Moral Majority was both a fundraising behemoth and a rallying point for Christians to get involved in politics. As the group's most high-profile leader, Falwell Sr. travelled the country, staging rallies and parades and helping to register new voters at churches. In 1980, the group threw its support fully behind Republican Ronald Reagan against the evangelical Democratic President Jimmy Carter. After Reagan won a surprisingly large victory, the Moral Majority took credit for mobilizing a new bloc of voters that helped him win Southern states that had four years earlier supported Carter, their fellow Southerner.

“You can almost draw a line from his endorsement of Trump in early 2016 to his being much more, not just comfortable, but feeling invincible,” said one former Liberty administrator. “Because he was on an airplane with Donald Trump, and he’s at a rally, and he’s on TV.”

The Falwells were, increasingly, living glamorously. Falwell would speak to faculty about attending Elton John and Justin Bieber concerts, and sometimes going backstage, one former faculty member said. He told a reporter from Slate that he and Kanye West had “struck up a little friendship.”

Falwell’s children posted photos on Instagram of themselves travelling on private jets. And on more than one occasion, Falwell shared photos of his family’s yacht vacations in exotic destinations like Greece and the Bahamas, one of which-- the photo that featured Falwell with his arm around his wife’s assistant-- attracted national attention last summer and led to Falwell being placed on leave from Liberty.

“They all got careless in the social media age, and Liberty was doing so well financially that Jerry began to think he was invincible-- and the board was satisfied with the school’s success in other financial metrics, and wasn’t paying attention,” the former Liberty administrator said.

...Financial success seemed to embolden Falwell in his willingness to cut deals with family members and friends. Back in 2013, the university had extended a $750,000 loan to Falwell’s friend Bobby Moon to form a private construction company to work on Liberty’s upcoming billion-dollar expansion. The company, called Construction Management Associates, became Liberty’s biggest outside contractor, drawing in up to $75 million per year. Liberty also hired a crane company long owned by Moon and his family, CSE Inc., to work on Liberty's library, adding to the payouts.

Falwell, most often with CMA, tackled lavish renovations for the university. Liberty rebuilt its football stadium, baseball stadium and nearly all of its major sports facilities. It built a new concert hall and added a gun club near campus on Liberty Mountain, where students can join a shooting team or take free concealed carry classes. Liberty renovated its basketball stadium at an estimated cost of $20 million, and then added a second, smaller basketball stadium next door for lower-profile games. Under Trey Falwell’s oversight, the Carter Glass house that used to be the older Jerry Falwell’s office was renovated into a “five-star” bed-and-breakfast for Liberty’s guests.

But Moon wasn’t the only person in Falwell’s orbit who received business while Falwell was running Liberty. Family members, board members and university administrators also landed jobs, contracts and other benefits.

Jerry and Becki Falwell’s former personal trainer, Ben Crosswhite, was sold a fitness facility on Liberty’s campus in 2013 that Crosswhite then partially leased back to Liberty for $575,000 over eight years, a sum that significantly cut the cost of buying the fitness center. (Liberty officials maintained the deal was still advantageous to them from a business perspective.)

Crosswhite declined to comment. In a recent interview with Lynchburg’s WSET news, he denied that the deal was to his advantage.

...In 2019 multiple news outlets reported that Cohen, Trump’s fixer, had bragged about helping to bury nude photos of Becki that had circulated among people involved in the youth hostel deal. In September of that year, Politico published an extensive exposé that covered many of Falwell’s self-dealings and recounted inappropriate behavior by Jerry.

“All he wanted to talk about was how he would nail his wife, how she couldn’t handle [his penis size] and stuff of that sort,” Politico quoted a former university official as saying in that September 2019 piece.

Since then, more stories have come to light. Becki’s friend recalled how the Falwells had an old Price of Admission sign decorating their home, and how Jerry told her, “Yeah, every time someone comes in, I say ‘Oh, that’s for blowjobs.’ ”

 

When It Comes To Political Melodrama, Virginia Doesn’t Disappoint

Five States have Legislative elections in 2019: Virginia, New Jersey, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Louisiana. All are important; however, only Virginia stands a reasonable shot to flip their Legislature’s majority from R to D, giving the Dems the right to the  redraw the state's congressional and state legislative boundaries and prevent another GOP gerrymander. Just remember the attendant, associated institutional power, for possibly the next 20 years.

Big Deal-- Big Drama.

Republicans have an acute recognition of this fact. They very nearly shattered the Democratic base coalition with their dirty tricks op-- on the first day of Black History Month-- the "February Flim-Flam," which included: accusations of a "racist past," against Governor Ralph Northam, evidenced by racially inflammatory Medical School yearbook photos; followed by: allegations of sexual assault and rape against Lt. Governor Justin Fairfax around 36 hours later; followed by: Attorney General Mark Herring’s necessary disclosure of college-age racial insensitivity, again after an additional approximately 36 hours.

The first week of February was filled with a toxic stew of racial angst and sexual strife. Start the op on Feb. 1st, deny the Virginia Black population even one day of celebrating their heroic Virginia history and heritage; peel off women of all races with hideous accusations of sexual impropriety-- by the only Black Statewide Elected Official-- deny the Dems their 3 top statewide fundraisers; start an internecine squabble amongst a historically loosely bonded cohort of Dem base voters... BINGO!!!

If you’re the GOP, sit back and get some popcorn. Nice job; well done.

BUT, nobody resigned, despite heavy pressure. The coalition is still squabbling, but it’s holding together. Apparently, the law firm tasked with investigating the Northam Medical School "photo," has identified the two subjects, and determined that neither is Ralph Northam... a fly in the ointment, oh my!

Where does that leave all of the breathless "concern trollers" and "virtue signalers" who have been baying for "accountability and resignation?" Don’t know, don’t care.

In the face of this sturm und drang, some Virginia. Dems have remained focused and on task, and need only recruit 14 more House candidates and 4 more state Senate candidates in order to go, "Full Boat"-- 140 for 140-- contesting every race, (100 House and 40 in the Senate ), leaving the Virginia Republican Party zero (0) "freebies" for 2019-- no "walkovers," no "nolo contenderes." If Virginia Dems accomplish this "full ballot mission" by the candidate filing deadline, June 11th, the band should start warming up, Turn Off the Lights.



Democrats only need to flip one state Senate seat, and two seats in the House of Delegates to effectively take over the majority; any more than that is pure gravy. That is if they can hold onto all their gains from 2017.

Democrats don’t have a monopoly on drama in Virginia. In fact, the Virginia Republicans are the reigning rulers of reprobates; it’s not even close. The most recent drama involves Jerry Falwell, Jr. and his wife, and their... very interesting exploits, "ministering" to the needs of young folk... in the, um... hospitality industry-- which subsequently required some "legal consultation" from then-Trump lawyer/fixer Michael Cohen-- very alarming, very salacious and sordid stuff. There may be a lot of campaign contributions being returned or contributed to charity.



Falwell, Jr. has supported politicians throughout Virginia over the years; some are even graduates or patrons of his college, Liberty University. One such candidate is D.J. Jordan, running in Prince William County’s HD 31. Jordan is the GOP’s choice to unseat freshman Delegate Elizabeth Guzmán, who defeated a long-term Republican incumbent in 2017 to become the first Latina to serve in the history of the Virginia Legislature-- and we’re talking about 1600s "House of Burgesses" history. That’s historic. So far, Blue America has endorsed four Virginia legislative candidates, one being Elizabeth Guzmán. That thermometer on the right is for candidates running for state legislatures and we'd appreciate it if you tapped on it and considered contributing to Elizabeth and any of the other candidates on the list.

That win by a Latina over one of their own stalwarts would seem to be too much for the Virginia GOP to abide; so they recruited a Black male, Liberty University grad; dressed him in Blue, placed him against a Blue background, built him a nice website that conveniently neglects to identify his political party, filled his campaign account with large dollar offerings, and sent him out to preach about "infanticide and family values."

Good stuff! Except for Jerry Falwell’s "Pool Boy" buffoonery. D.J. Jordan is going to have some explaining to do; not only a stealth Republican, but, a Liberty University grad to boot; INCONVENIENT!!! We’ll see how it shakes out for him.

Washington Post reported that Falwell Jr. was blaming a "conspiracy" of Republican Party establishment leaders for the leak of Trump's now infamous 2005 "grab-'em-by-the-pussy" video. "We're all sinners," he said in defense of Trump, who had helped him get rid of the pictures that supposedly show him with a male penis-- presumably the pool boy's-- in his mouth. There is also a felching shot that Michael Cohen hasn't discarded and has hidden away. Falwell's fellow charlatan-cum-grifter, James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family and now host of the show Family Talk also stood by his Trumpanzee endorsement.

Don't forget, back in 2016, a few weeks before election day, the

Falwell, who is president of the nation's largest Christian university, provided one of Trump's first key endorsements from an evangelical leader. Trump's candidacy, however, has divided evangelicals, who have no formal leadership. Some evangelical leaders continued to back Trump after the video leak, while a prominent theologian pulled back his support Sunday and other leaders continued to condemn the nominee.

...In comments made to WABC Radio in New York City, Falwell said he thinks the leak was part of a conspiracy by GOP establishment leaders.

"I think this whole videotape thing was planned, I think it was timed, I think it might have even been a conspiracy among the establishment Republicans who've known about it for weeks and who tried to time it to do the maximum damage to Donald Trump," Falwell told reporter Rita Cosby on her podcast after Sunday night's debate.

Prince William County is rapidly becoming a Democratic stronghold, much like it’s neighbor to the North; Fairfax County. In 2014, the district went for Gillespie (R) over Warner (D), narrowly, in the U.S. Senate race. But it's been all blue since then. In 2016, Hillary beat Trump in the district, 51-44%. The following year Democrats swept-- Herring (D) beat Adams for AG, 56-44%; Fairfax beat Vogel for Lt. Governor, 56-44% and Northam beat Gillespie 56-43% for Governor. Last year, voters in HD-31 gave Kaine (D) a fat 59-39% win over Trumpist reactionary Corey Stewart. And of course-- sweetest of all-- was that Elizabeth Guzmán ousted GOP incumbent Scott Lingamfelter 15,466 (54.1%) to 12,658 (44.2%).

And, by the way, other sleazy, corrupted politicians will have to answer for their Falwell associations as this story evolves... and they won’t all be Virginians, will they?

Pericles, from Act I, Scene I-- Pericles, Prince of Tyre by William Shakespeare:

Great king,
Few love to hear the sins they love to act;
'Twould braid yourself too near for me to tell it.
Who has a book of all that monarchs do,
He's more secure to keep it shut than shown:
For vice repeated is like the wandering wind.
Blows dust in other's eyes, to spread itself;
And yet the end of all is bought thus dear,
The breath is gone, and the sore eyes see clear:
To stop the air would hurt them. The blind mole casts
Copp'd hills towards heaven, to tell the earth is throng'd
By man's oppression; and the poor worm doth die for't.
Kings are earth's gods; in vice their law's
their will;
And if Jove stray, who dares say Jove doth ill?
It is enough you know; and it is fit,
What being more known grows worse, to smother it.
All love the womb that their first being bred,
Then give my tongue like leave to love my head.

One more little tiny thing. Is the biggest political scandal of the year being hushed up because the media doesn't like asserting that a white conservative man of stature-- Falwell, Jr.-- is a sex maniac who bought the services for a 21 year old pool boy? Almost $5 million dollars of Church money-- spent on buying a gay "hotel" (whore house). This is an amazing story! You've got to watch this whole video:

When Will It Be An Unambiguous Rout?

How would the media sell ads if the narrative of the 2020 election was just "anti-Republican tsunami ahead" every day? And how would the two parties motivate their bases to turn out if that was the story?


New York Magazine's Alex Carp looked to Frank Rich for an explanation of how to navigate a news cycle on steroids. He noted, as many of us have, that, "Just as the revelations in Jeffrey Goldberg’s reporting on Donald Trump’s insults to veterans have begun to fade from the headlines, details from Bob Woodward’s latest book on the president, including his intentional downplaying the risks of coronavirus and lies about how it is transmitted, have begun to appear. Will either of these reports have long-term impact?"

And what about Michael Cohen’s tell-all memoir, which was on constant rotation on MSNBC during the brief interim between Goldberg and Woodward? And whatever happened to The Times reporter Michael Schmidt’s book of a week earlier, with its revelation that Mike Pence was put on standby alert during that murky unscheduled Trump stopover at Walter Reed? The cavalcade passes by so quickly it’s hard to gauge what long-term impact any revelations have. We hardly got to know the Fontainebleau hotel pool boy who brought down the randy architect of Trump’s Evangelical base, Jerry Falwell Jr., before we moved on.

If the voluminous press coverage of the widely distributed advance copies are to be believed, Woodward’s Rage is adding details and Trump’s own blithe recorded confirmation to a horrific story that we already knew: The president deliberately falsified and downplayed the epic severity of the pandemic. As Jennifer Szalai writes in her Didion-worthy dissection of Rage in The Times, the book’s portrait of Trump would be “immediately recognizable to anyone paying even the minimal amount of attention.” In a blow-by-blow account in April, for instance, The Times reported that “throughout January, as Mr. Trump repeatedly played down the seriousness of the virus,” both “top White House advisers” and experts in Cabinet departments and intelligence agencies were telling him the lethal facts and sounding constant alarms.

That’s why by this late date Trump’s indifference to matters of life and death has long since been baked into most voters’ verdicts on this president, including his own voters. Even as the Woodward revelations started to pour out, Trump was brazenly showcasing his immutable callousness and narcissism in public view, violating local mandates (as well as White House guidelines) on mask wearing and social distancing at a rally in North Carolina and conspicuously ignoring the devastation, pain, and suffering as fire tore through America’s most highly populated state.





National and battleground-state polling on the presidential election has remained largely stable since before either party’s conventions. One wants to believe that Woodward and Goldberg will move the needle, transforming a Biden lead that still leaves Democrats anxious into an unambiguous rout. In the immediate aftermath of Goldberg’s Atlantic piece, the White House’s panicky, all-hands-on-deck pushback suggested that the Trump campaign was worried. Even Melania Trump’s Twitter account was immediately enlisted in an overnight effort to denounce the article as fake news. But again, you have to wonder if The Atlantic’s additional anecdotes can move voters who have long since absorbed Trump’s contempt for generals, for John McCain’s wartime heroism, and for the Gold Star parents of Humayun Khan, an Army captain killed by a car bomb in Iraq.

What gives one a bit of hope about the Woodward book’s ability to sway some of the few still-persuadable voters is the recordings. Trump just couldn’t stop himself from performing for the most bold-faced name among reporters. While we can’t rule out that he may yet claim, as he did about the Access Hollywood video, that the recordings are a hoax, the sheer volume of his verbal diarrhea makes it unlikely that anyone will fall for it except his QAnon faithful. To get voters to listen to them all, Sarah Cooper may have to bring out a box set.

Does Fox News show the results of their polling on the channels? Fox's polls are legitimate-- nothing like the Republican Party manipulated polling that Rasmussen and Trafalgar do. The most recent Fox polls show Trump losing in key battleground states: down 8 in Wisconsin, down 9 in Arizona, down 4 in North Carolina-- and dragging Republican incumbents down with him, with Arizona Senator Martha McSally (R) losing to Mark Kelly by 17 points and North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis (R) losing to Cal Cunningham by 6 points. Fox's most recent national poll had Trump losing by 5-- 51-46%.

And what about the ultimate swing state, Florida? The RealClearPolitics polling average has Trump losing by 1.2%, although that average includes concotted polling from Trafalgar. Florida is always going to be close. Trump can't win the presidency without its 29 electoral votes; Biden can. But the Biden campaign isn't taking any chances. It was big news yesterday that Mike Bloomberg is about to pour $100 million into Florida. Trump freaked out immediately:

Michael Scherer reported that this "massive late-stage infusion of cash" could reshape the presidential contest in a costly toss-up state central to Señor Trumpanzee's reelection hopes. $100 million goes a long way-- even in Florida, a state where TV ads still seem to work. I wonder how that kind of spending is going to effect down-ballot races. I asked some of the Blue America-endorsed candidates running for Congress and for the state legislature.

Kathy Lewis' district will determine whether the Florida state Senate is controlled by the Democrats or the GOP. Last time she ran-- against an incumbent who has retired (and with ZERO help from the Florida Democratic Party-- she scored 46.5% and nearly ousted a right-wing nut. This time she's up against a Trumpist and looks like she can flip the seat. She told us this morning that "An infusion of cash in the Florida Senate District 20 Democratic campaign will be the boost we need to flip this critical Florida seat. The SD-20 seat may well determine if Democrats get a say in Florida redistricting for the next decade. I am running a truly grassroots campaign, and this money could be the lift that pushes Democrats to a position of power in Florida."

Joshua Hicks, the progressive state House candidate running for a Nassau-Duval county seat told me he thinks "most candidates in Florida will welcome Bloomberg spending $100 million on GOTV efforts. It's sorely needed in an expensive state, and could be the difference between a Trump re-election or a Biden presidency. That said, it would be nice if Bloomberg or any major donor would invest in actual down-ballot candidates as well. The 140 Democratic candidates running throughout Florida are doing real work on the ground, contacting and turning out real voters-- even in tough districts-- but sadly, many are being ignored. Hopefully Bloomberg's investment will trickle down into the districts where it is needed and where moving even a couple thousand votes can make a big, big difference for the statewide results. We are all in this together and I am glad Bloomberg is finally arriving at the party."

Cindy Banyai won her primary in August and is contesting an open congressional seat in southwest Florida. (In the primary she got 28,749 votes and the Republican victor, Byron Donalds, won 23,480 votes. "We are going to need to get out the Democratic vote," she told me last night, "as well as win the hearts and minds of independent voters and non-Trump Republicans. Investments made across Florida will help us defeat Trump and flip down ballot districts from red to blue, ensuring the voice to the people is truly heard. Grassroots candidates like me can really make our dollars stretch. Television ads make a huge difference, but cost a lot up front. An influx of funds for television could really help us flip this district and defeat the latest aspiring Trump sycophant."

Bob Lynch, way down in Miami-Dade and also running for a state House seat held by a Republicans said that "The thing that gives me the most hope is that almost all of Bloomberg’s decisions are data driven. And I don’t mean Robby Mook and the guys who read Moneyball in college and thought political campaigns were as easy as playing fantasy baseball data driven. Bloomberg is the real deal. Mike built his empire on data. The Bloomberg service we use on Wall Street is incredible in its breadth, depth, and sophistication. There is no doubt that he crunched all the numbers and decided that Florida was a good investment. The fact that he is doing this so late in the cycle is great news as it will leave the GOP scrambling to assemble a counter strike. Spanish language television ads will make a huge difference and close the gap between Democratic outreach and the GOP’s advantage in tv ads. I’ve been watching almost all of the NBA Playoff games on TNT and it still amazes me to see how many personal injury lawyers advertise, in laughably bad Spanish, during the commercials. But they try. I’ve yet to see a Biden ad in Spanish, despite spending last month religiously watching European soccer on Telemundo. If the Bloomberg effort surgically targets Latino areas on channels and programming they watch, it will pay dividends. If they follow the same tired playbook that sunk Bill Nelson and Andrew Gillum, it will be a colossal waste of money."

Lynch continued that he's "hoping it will help my district, HD-116, which is 90% Hispanic, at the top of the ticket but it is still unclear how that will affect down ballot races. Ideally, Bloomberg would have plugged into the unprecedented slate of down ballot candidates 90 for 90 and The Florida Democratic Environmental caucus recruited to run in almost every race, but that doesn’t seem to be the plan. We know our communities far better than out of state consultants who were deployed to Florida. $100 million is a lot of money and Bloomberg’s operation has always been far more efficient than the DNC or state party. I remain both hopeful and skeptical. The ground work still needs to be done on the local level. Mailers, text, phone banking, targeted digital (Facebook and YouTube). Myself and my fellow candidates will continue this effort and do our best to draft in Bloomberg’s wake."





Fergie Reid and Janelle head, respectively, 90 For 90 and the Florida Environmental Caucus-- and they were responsible for recruiting dozens of Florida candidates in seats the Florida Democratic Party is always happy to cede to the GOP without a fight. Reid told me that it's great news that Bloomberg is spending $100 million in Florida to help assure a Biden/Harris Democratic victory there. "Much of this money," he said, "will be spent on T.V. ads and statewide GOTV efforts, possibly targeted at specific regional voter populations. An historic slate of 140 Florida Democratic 2020 state legislative candidates will appear on the ballot. 84 of these are challenging currently GOP held seats. Around $2 million of this planned $100 million dollar expenditure should be spread throughout these 84 districts. Dems need to flip 3 state Senate seats and 13 state House seats to 'share power.' Flips of 4 and 14 respectively would give Dems an outright majority in both chambers. The Florida Senate and House Dems are currently playing to flip 2 & 19 respectively; which means 63 challenger contests are being almost completely ignored by the party bodies with oversight of these races. 63 state legislative contests equates to roughly HALF of the STATE of FLORIDA! Mike Bloomberg would do well to invest in this half of the state, using these candidates contests as the vehicles."

Janelle Christensen couldn't agree more. She said that "If Bloomberg deigned to give $140,000, that would be $1000 per Democratic candidate running in the state legislature. Each one of those candidates could use that money to reach at minimum 2,000 NPA or new voters. 

Bloomberg made the decision to focus his final election spending on Florida last week, after news reports that Trump had considered spending as much as $100 million of his own money in the final weeks of the campaign, Bloomberg’s advisers said. Presented with several options on how to make good on an earlier promise to help elect Biden, Bloomberg decided that a narrow focus on Florida was the best use of his money.

The president’s campaign has long treated the state, which Trump now calls home, as a top priority, and his advisers remain confident in his chances given strong turnout in 2016 and 2018 that gave Republicans narrow winning margins in statewide contests.

“Voting starts on Sept. 24 in Florida so the need to inject real capital in that state quickly is an urgent need,” Bloomberg adviser Kevin Sheekey said. “Mike believes that by investing in Florida it will allow campaign resources and other Democratic resources to be used in other states, in particular the state of Pennsylvania.”

The last Republican to win the White House without Florida was Calvin Coolidge in 1924, and a loss of the state’s 29 electoral votes would radically shrink Trump’s paths to reelection. With Florida in his column, Biden would be able to take the presidency by holding every state that Hillary Clinton won in 2016 and winning any one of the following states: Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and North Carolina, all of which Biden leads in current public polling averages.

In recent weeks, polls in Florida have narrowed, with the Cook Political Report recently shifting the state from “lean Democrat” to “toss up.” A Washington Post average of public polls since August finds Biden up by one percentage point in the state, well within the margin of error. While he has been doing better than past Democratic candidates with Whites and seniors, Biden has struggled among the state’s Latino population, which Republicans have focused enormous resources on courting over several election cycles.

“If you have the ability to make sure that you are able to speak directly to all of these different communities and where they live then you are going a long way to securing the states for Biden in this election,” Rep. Ted Deutch (D-FL) said. “I’m glad that Mike Bloomberg recognized this and is prepared to make an investment to make sure that every one of those communities will be aware of the importance of this election.”

The spending will focus mostly on television and digital ads, in both English and Spanish.

Bloomberg’s aim is to prompt enough early voting that a pro-Biden result would be evident soon after the polls close. Florida, unlike other swing states, reports almost all early ballots shortly after voting ends.

Democrats and Republicans have worried that early results will dictate public perceptions of who will ultimately win the election. In many states, the first reported votes are more Republican, but the numbers turn more Democratic over time as more mail-in and early votes are added to the tally.

“It would give lie to what we expect to be Trump’s election night messaging that Democrats are stealing the election, because unlike other battleground states, Florida counts its absentee ballots on or by Election Day,” Bloomberg adviser Howard Wolfson said. “We think Florida is incredibly close but winnable.”

A recent report by Hawkfish, a voter data firm funded by Bloomberg, predicted that even in a scenario where Biden wins 54 percent of the final vote, partisan differences in mail voting preference could lead to an initial count that shows Trump winning with 55 percent of ballots tabulated nationally on Nov. 3. In public polling, Republican voters have reported far less interest in voting by mail or voting early than Democrats.

A prominent Democratic consultant in Florida, not aware of the Bloomberg decision, said Saturday that Democratic outside groups have mostly focused on Midwestern states because of the prohibitive cost of advertising in Florida. This person, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss strategy, estimated that it would take $15 million to $20 million to significantly move Biden’s numbers among Latinos, and $60 million to $70 million to get on television across the state over the next 51 days and have a real impact.

Between March 24 and Sept. 11, the Biden campaign and Democratic groups outspent Trump and Republican groups in the state on television by a margin of $42 million to $32 million, according to data from a Democratic tracking firm. But future reservations suggest that gap is set to narrow, in part because of increased investment by wealthy Trump backers operating independently of his campaign.

Preserve America, a new super PAC backed by Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, announced $30 million in spending in seven states this month, including Florida, with more spending expected to be announced soon.

Bloomberg’s advisers described the spending plan as “nine figures” and declined to say how much higher than $100 million Bloomberg might be willing to go, if at all. They said Bloomberg is hopeful that his commitment will push other wealthy Democratic donors to further open their pocketbooks for other states in the final months of the campaign. Bloomberg’s money will be spent through Independence USA, his own super PAC, and other Democratic groups.

Between November and March, Bloomberg spent more $1 billion on his own failed bid for the Democratic nomination, including about $275 million on ads that criticized Trump. When he endorsed Joe Biden, he announced that he would “work to make him the next President of the United States.” Bloomberg subsequently received a prime speaking slot on the final night of the Democratic convention this year.

But just what Bloomberg, who is estimated to be worth more than $50 billion, planned to do with his money has remained a significant source of suspense among Democratic strategists. After flooding local and state Democratic Party accounts with money during his campaign, Bloomberg transferred about $20 million in cash and prepaid office leases to the Democratic National Committee, taking advantage of a provision of campaign finance law that allows candidates to donate leftover money. He also spread his money to benefit state and local Democratic candidates.

A group he helps to fund, Everytown for Gun Safety, has pledged to spend $60 million on elections this cycle, and he has committed another $60 million to help preserve or strengthen the Democratic House majority. Swing Left, a group focused on winning state legislative seats, and Fair Fight, a voter protection effort led by former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, have also received millions. Bloomberg has not yet announced any spending to help elect a Democratic Senate, after allotting $20 million to the effort in 2018.