Tag: campaign finance

Talarico to Fundraise with Wall Street Financiers, Jeweler Who Called America a ‘Sh*thole’

Texas Democrat U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico is scheduled to attend a high-dollar fundraiser in New York City on Monday alongside former Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), with Wall Street financiers, Hollywood figures, and a jewelry designer and filmmaker who has publicly criticized the United States and its flag among those involved in the event.

The September 28 fundraiser, hosted by actor Robert De Niro and other prominent Democrat donors, is scheduled to take place at an undisclosed location in downtown Manhattan, with top tickets costing $27,000. Actress Gina Gershon is also expected to attend.

The event comes as Talarico promotes his campaign as a “people powered” movement to “take back Texas,” despite receiving a majority of his campaign contributions from outside the state.

According to figures reported by the Texas Tribune in July, more than 55 percent of Talarico’s contributions came from out-of-state donors, while approximately 44 percent came from Texas. By comparison, Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton received 82 percent of his contributions from Texas and 18 percent from outside the state.

The New York fundraiser’s host committee includes Charles Alaimo, a Democrat megadonor and managing director at Group One Trading; Cedomir Crnkovic, a former managing director at investment firm D. E. Shaw & Co. and current board member of Inclusive Abundance; and Charles Myers, founder and chairman of Signum Global Advisors and a former adviser to Hillary Clinton.

Other participants include Jane Rosenthal, cofounder of the Tribeca Film Festival, who has lived in a $40 million condominium on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and Bill Derrough, a corporate banker at Jefferies.

Also listed on the host committee is Alexis Bittar, a jewelry designer and filmmaker who has publicly supported several progressive Democrat candidates and criticized the United States and its flag.

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Abdul El-Sayed Benefiting From $15 Million Via ‘Epstein Class’ Donors

Michigan Muslim Socialist Abdulrahman El-Sayed promises in his campaign to get money out of politics and campaigns with far-left surrogates like Rep. Ro Khanna railing against the “Epstein class.” But he is secretly benefitting from over $15 million from those associated with the late disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

After meeting with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer in Washington last week, his Senate Majority PAC (SMP) invested an extra $10 million into Michigan’s Senate race, bringing the group’s total investment to $30 million boosting El-Sayed.

SMP has been funded by the same “Epstein class” billionaires that Democrats like El-Sayed say they want to get out of politics. In total, $15,150,000 of SMP donations are linked to Epstein-associated individuals, which now go towards electing candidates like El-Sayed in November.

Those donors include:

Vinod Khosla

  • A February 8, 2011 email from Boris Nikolic to Epstein listed Khosla as a great dinner invitee according to a document in the Department of Justice’s online repository.
  • Later, Khosla helped Nikolic receive office space. Epstein advised Nikolic through the arrangement, saying “take your office at Khosla… it will come together.” Epstein later advised to “find what infrastructure of khosal you can use… find a place where you can have someone over for dinner.” (Department of Justice, 6/14/14 ; Department of Justice, 5/31/14 ; Department of Justice, 6/5/14)

Jon Stryker

  • In 2014, an Epstein associate suggested that he copy Jon Stryker’s playbook to bury his negative press post-conviction.

In addition, George Soros’ Democracy PAC and Michael Bloomberg’s American Opportunity Action, have both contributed to SMP:

George Soros

  • A 2007 article preserved in the DOJ production lists Soros and Epstein among people involved in a group seeking to establish a $10 million endowment led by Henry Jarecki.
  • In an FBI victim statement, George Soros was implicated for being on a yacht with Jeffrey Epstein, in which he witnessed the victim being sodomized and raped, in a heavily drug induced state, with the bottoms of his feet being slashed.

Michael Bloomberg

  • Reporting based on the 2026 DOJ release found that Epstein and Maxwell had contact with Bloomberg’s assistants, invited him to events, and appeared on invitations with him.

Monday is also the day of a major Hollywood fundraiser for El-Sayed at the home of Jeffrey Soros, the nephew of George, with co-hosts including Pod Save America hosts Jon Favreau, Tommy Vietor, and Hamas fanboy Ben Rhodes, according to an invitation.

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Watchdog Says Trump Control of $400 Million Political War Chest a ‘Clear-Cut Violation of Campaign Finance Law’

An election spending watchdog on Friday accused President Donald Trump of committing a “clear-cut violation of campaign finance law” through his stated control over spending decisions made by the MAGA Inc. super political action committee.

Citing decades of legal precedent, the Campaign Legal Center (CLC) argued that federal office holders are prohibited from directing spending for super PACs, which raise money outside the scope of federal campaign laws.

Saurav Ghosh, director of federal campaign finance reform at CLC, noted that Trump has stated publicly on multiple occasions that he will decide where MAGA Inc.’s $400 million war chest will be deployed in the 2026 elections—which Ghosh said would be flatly illegal.

“Our laws are clear: No federal officeholder or candidate is allowed to direct the money raised or spent by a super PAC,” said Ghosh. “President Trump, MAGA Inc., and anyone else who breaks campaign finance laws must be held accountable to help ensure that our political system is free of corruption.”

Last week, CLC filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) that cited statements Trump made to reporters, whom he told funds raised by MAGA Inc. were “my money that I control.”

This statement alone, the group said, was “a remarkable admission of a serious campaign finance violation.”

The complaint then asked the FEC to seek “appropriate sanctions for any and all violations” of campaign finance law committed by Trump and MAGA Inc., “including civil penalties sufficient to deter future violations and an injunction prohibiting the respondents from any and all violations in the future.”

While MAGA Inc. has a formidable stash of campaign cash at its disposal, it is unclear how much of an impact it will have on the 2026 midterms given that polls show the president and his party are in a deep hole with voters.

A report from The New Republic published last week revealed that the pro-Trump super PAC is plugging significant money into at least 17 districts that the president won by more than five points in 2024, and six districts that he won by more than 10 points.

David Wasserman, elections analyst for Cook Political Report, told The New Republic that this spending in pro-Trump districts is “an acknowledgment that things have shifted in a huge way since 2024.”

“Republicans have hemorrhaged support among independent voters, they’ve got a real enthusiasm problem,” said Wasserman, “and as a result, districts that ordinarily would vote handily for Trump and Republicans are now in play.”

A Friday report in The Washington Post examined the states where Trump is preparing to campaign in the coming days, and found the president is being deployed in deep-red states such as Alabama and Oklahoma.

“Oklahoma is a state Trump won in 2024 with 66% of the vote—and won all 77 counties,” the Post reported. “In Alabama, Trump won with 65%.”

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Democratic megadonor who gave to Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris linked to murky honeypot spy saga

A California family who has injected millions of dollars into Democratic campaigns are facing renewed scrutiny over their connections to people and organizations tied to suspected Chinese spy Fang Fang.

The Yin family, who made a fortune operating McDonald’s franchises in the state, has donated more than $4.4 million to state and federal political causes — including hundreds of thousands of dollars to Gov. Gavin Newsom, former Vice President Kamala Harris and other prominent Democrats, according to campaign records, CBS News reported.

The family’s political connections have drawn attention following the release of FBI files concerning Fang, also known as Christine Fang, whose relationship with disgraced former California Rep. Eric Swalwell became the subject of a major national-security controversy.

The documents released by the White House in August describe a working relationship between Fang and CC Yin, the 89-year-old patriarch of the Yin family, through the Asian Pacific American Public Affairs (APAPA) organization, which he helped establish.

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All 10 ActBlue Witnesses Take The Fifth As GOP Says Probe Is “Far From Over”

All ten ActBlue employees and board members deposed by House investigators have invoked the Fifth Amendment rather than answer questions about the Democratic Party’s dominant fundraising platform. Five of the ten are board members, all deposed in the past five weeks, and the three committees running the probe say they are not done. Their third report, released last week, alleged ActBlue accepted a substantial volume of foreign and fraudulent donations with minimal scrutiny.

The investigation’s third report, released last week, alleged ActBlue accepted a substantial volume of foreign and fraudulent donations with minimal scrutiny.

It builds on the first report, released in April 2025, which found that ActBlue skipped standard verification steps such as CVV checks, identified at least 22 significant fraud campaigns, and documented 237 prepaid-card donations from foreign IP addresses in a single month before the 2024 election.

Investigators found that skipping those checks opened the door to smurfing, the practice of dressing up one illegal mega-donation as a parade of small contributions filed under real people’s names. ActBlue’s much-touted “passport verification” process appears to have checked nothing against any government database. Fraud analysts inside the company faced pressure to wave through foreign-flagged donations, in one case clearing a donor on the strength of a LinkedIn profile.

House Oversight, House Administration, and House Judiciary are still working the case now, and none of them show signs of backing off. “Whether it’s allowing fraudsters to steal taxpayer dollars or accepting illegal foreign donations through ActBlue, Democrats have proven themselves to be the party of fraud,” Oversight Chairman Rep. James Comer told Fox News Digital. “Our investigation into ActBlue is far from over. We expect more documents and testimony in the weeks ahead.”

Republicans have complained about ActBlue’s verification standards for years, and the company insists it has tightened those safeguards since the investigation began. That claim falls apart against the committees’ own findings. The report says ActBlue took “a more lenient approach” to fraud prevention in 2024, after Steil first questioned its practices in October 2023, and the internal records released last week show employees approving donations despite unresolved red flags about the money’s origins.

ActBlue still denies wrongdoing and has given no indication it plans to return any flagged contribution.

“ActBlue’s own admissions raise serious questions about its fraud prevention practices, including a so-called passport verification process that did not actually verify or check entries against any government database,” Committee on House Administration Chairman Rep. Bryan Steil told Fox News Digital on Friday. “All options are on the table to ensure we get to the bottom of what is going on at ActBlue.”

A spokesperson for Judiciary Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan confirmed to Fox News Digital that the panel “will continue aggressive oversight of ActBlue, including additional depositions.”

Co-founder Matt DeBergalis was among the ten who took the Fifth, and CEO Regina Wallace-Jones did the same during a public hearing. In a letter to Steil cited by the report, she claimed donors with non-U.S. addresses must submit a passport number to get verified. The GOP report picked that claim apart, noting the system only confirms the number contains the right count of characters, not that it belongs to an actual passport.

In one internal ActBlue memo, a donation with a Hong Kong IP address was described as a “great accept,” reasoning that none of the donor’s other signals raised eyebrows. Another argued a previously denied contribution should have gone through because the name, email, and billing address all lined up, even though it was a foreign contribution. A supervisor waved through a donation that had set off a lot of alarms because the donor deserved the benefit of the doubt. In one case involving a Missouri billing address with every sign pointing to Canada, an analyst approved the donation because “Twitter seems to confirm that they are a real person.”

Now the National Republican Congressional Committee wants House Democrats to cut ties with ActBlue. “House Democrats cannot claim ignorance while continuing to rely on a fundraising platform facing serious allegations,” NRCC spokesman Mike Marinella said. “The National Republican Congressional Committee officially calls on every House Democrat to cut ties with ActBlue and return any illegal contributions funneled to their campaigns through the platform.” Asked whether it would return any donations, ActBlue pointed back to its own statement instead of answering the question.

“There’s nothing to see here,” ActBlue said, arguing a third-party forensic analysis had undercut a central GOP claim and accusing Republicans of “orchestrating another political stunt before rushing out of town weeks early to go campaign.” That review of ActBlue’s 2023 data found 99.99% of contribution dollars came from donors who gave a U.S. address or a passport number, according to the company’s release, though it did not test whether either was genuine. The company framed the entire affair as an effort “to silence organizations they believe threaten their agenda.”

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Soros-Linked Political Groups Pour Millions Into Democratic Efforts Ahead Of Midterms

Political committees tied to the Soros family have directed tens of millions of dollars to Democratic-aligned organizations during the 2026 election cycle, including a group spending heavily in Michigan’s closely watched U.S. Senate race.

Democracy PAC and Democracy PAC II had distributed more than $40 million to Democratic-aligned organizations as of the end of June, according to campaign finance records.

Recipients include Senate Majority PAC, House Majority PAC and J Street Action Fund.

Federal Election Commission records show Democracy PAC II alone reported more than $6 million in total disbursements through June 30.

The spending has drawn attention in Michigan, where Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed is running against Republican Mike Rogers.

Senate Majority PAC, which received $9 million from Democracy PAC this cycle, has committed $30 million to supporting El-Sayed in Michigan, according to recent reports.

The outside support comes as El-Sayed has made reducing the influence of wealthy donors a prominent campaign theme.

“The fundamental corruption of our politics has been the system that allows corporations and would-be oligarchs and billionaires to buy politicians,” El-Sayed said in a 2025 interview.

Republicans are highlighting the contrast between that rhetoric and outside spending supporting his candidacy. Alyssa Brouillet, a spokeswoman for Rogers, accused El-Sayed of being inconsistent on political money and criticized his connections to wealthy donors.

The Soros network has also supported organizations involved in congressional races, environmental issues, voting efforts and campaigns for progressive prosecutors.

George Soros transferred control of his philanthropic and political organization to his son, Alex Soros, in recent years. Additional disclosures could provide a more complete picture of the family’s political spending during the 2026 election cycle.

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Data Center Attack Ad From Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown Features Google Facility – While Brown Takes Thousands From Google Lobbyists

Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown goes after data centers in one of his latest attack ads. Data centers are all the rage on the left right now. They’re like the new climate change.

Most of these people don’t even understand the technology behind data centers, they just know that if they’re on the left, they’re supposed to hate them.

In Brown’s ad, there is a Google facility, which is kind of funny, considering that Brown has taken thousands in donations from lobbyists for Google.

FOX News reports:

Dem’s data center attack in critical Senate race hits snag when money trail surfaces: ‘Jekyll-and-Hyde’

Former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown is targeting Republican Sen. Jon Husted over Ohio’s growing data center industry in a new campaign ad that features a facility owned by Google, whose corporate PAC and lobbyists have contributed thousands of dollars to Brown’s campaigns.

The Sept. 4 ad features an Ohioan blaming Husted for spearheading “the push to bring data centers to Ohio” and linking their expansion to “higher electric bills.”

The facility featured in the ad, which opened in Lancaster in 2023, is owned by Google.

Campaign finance records reviewed by Fox News Digital show Google’s corporate PAC contributed $20,000 to Brown over his political career. Brown also received thousands of dollars from individuals who lobby for Google, including two whose firms have worked on permitting, grid reliability and energy affordability issues.

“Apparently, Google is terrible enough to put in a campaign attack ad, but perfectly acceptable when the political contributions are coming in,” Mehek Cooke, a GOP strategist and attorney in Ohio, said in a statement to Fox News Digital. “That is the contradiction Brown needs to answer. If Google’s Lancaster investment is so bad for Ohio, why was Google political money acceptable to Sherrod Brown?”

Do as I say, not as I do.

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“Dead To Rights”: Internal ActBlue Records Show Foreign-Flagged Donations Waved Through, Whistleblower Messages Deleted

For years, the left has lectured Americans about the dangers of “foreign interference” and dark money in our elections. But a sweeping congressional investigation has laid bare a vast Democratic fundraising apparatus that paved the way for just that: ActBlue, the billion-dollar financial engine of the Democratic Party, created a mechanism that encouraged illicit foreign cash – and then, investigators say, covered it up. Read on.

On Wednesday, House investigators released “Part III” of their bombshell investigation into ActBlue’s fundraising practices. The findings outline a staggering pattern of willful blindness, internal censorship, and a frantic race by executives to plead the Fifth.

Here is how the Democrats’ top fundraising platform built a system that welcomed very questionable cash, and how their own staff tried to bury the evidence.

Step 1: The “Smurfing” Machine

The scandal was officially brought to light in April 2025, when the House GOP released Part I of its staff report. Lawmakers detailed a structural nightmare: ActBlue had intentionally bypassed standard banking security measures, such as requiring CVV verification codes for credit card donations.

That gap is what made “smurfing” plausible – a money-laundering technique in which a large, illegal contribution is chopped into thousands of small donations, each attributed to a real person who, allegedly, never made it. The prepaid cards obscure where the money came from; the borrowed names make it look like a stream of legal small-dollar gifts from ordinary Americans. The donations themselves aren’t hidden – as a conduit, ActBlue itemizes every one in its FEC filings regardless of size, which is how the donor lists cited below were compiled. The question is whether anyone at ActBlue was checking whose names were being used.

The allegation itself predates the House probe. It surfaced in March 2023, when James O’Keefe’s O’Keefe Media Group – working from FEC-record analysis compiled by Peter Bernegger’s Election Watch – published videos of elderly donors listed in federal filings for thousands of small ActBlue contributions far beyond anything they said they’d given. Sen. Ron Johnson wrote the FEC in April 2023; Chairman Steil’s committee ran its own analysis of FEC records and in September 2024 referred its findings to five state attorneys general, citing anomalous donor profiles consistent with unwitting “straw donors”; President Trump’s April 2025 memorandum directed DOJ to investigate “straw” and “dummy” donations. ActBlue calls the inquiry politically motivated. The House reports don’t settle it. What they document is that ActBlue’s own records show at least 22 significant fraud campaigns, account takeovers used to make straw donations that appeared to come from regular donors, and 237 prepaid-card donations from foreign IP addresses in a single month before the 2024 election – and that when investigators asked former Associate General Counsel Aaron Ting under oath whether smurfing is prevalent on ActBlue, he took the Fifth.

Step 2: The Cover-Up and the Fifth Amendment

When ActBlue’s own legal and compliance teams realized the potential scale of illicit foreign donations flowing through the platform, panic set in. But instead of correcting the record with Congress, as its own lawyers advised, the execs allegedly moved to suppress the findings, as outlined in the committee’s Part II report.

Internal records show what happened to the last lawyer who escalated the foreign-donation problem. After the 2024 election, ActBlue’s outside counsel had warned the company in two memoranda that its screening of overseas contributions lacked the rigor it had described to Congress, and that its November 2023 letter to Chairman Steil may have been false or misleading. On February 25, 2025 – his first full day running the legal department – legal counsel Zain Ahmad put those memoranda in front of ActBlue’s board of directors and executive team.

The silencing began the next day. He was locked out of his email and Google Drive, against ActBlue’s own leave policy. When he objected in a 277-person IT channel – calling it retaliation and citing the company’s whistleblower and anti-retaliation policies – IT director Hanna Bonin deleted the messages as fast as he posted them: his request to restore access, his policy citations, the policies themselves, and finally his plea to “stop deleting my requests,” which vanished five seconds after it went up. Six deletions in one night. An HR staffer told the chief people officer it “look[ed] like blatant retaliation.” When his email came back the next day, HR was discussing how to “key in on him” using the company’s security tools.

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Abdul El-Sayed Refuses to Return Donations From Groups Linked to Terrorism.

WHAT HAPPENED:Michigan Democrat Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed defended accepting campaign contributions from donors affiliated with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), rejecting calls from Republican opponent Mike Rogers to return the money. On Tuesday, El-Sayed was asked whether he would give back donations from CAIR-linked individuals, and insisted he would not.

 DETAIL: El-Sayed’s campaign received more than $115,000 from at least 41 people who have worked for, previously worked for, or held leadership positions with CAIR. Rogers has argued that the contributions should be returned, citing CAIR’s history of alleged ties to Hamas and its designation as a terrorist organization by the United Arab Emirates (UAE), as well as Florida and Texas. CAIR was also named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the federal Holy Land Foundation terrorism-financing case. El-Sayed claims CAIR is a civil rights organization and accused Rogers of attempting to make the Senate race about his ethnicity and Muslim faith. The controversy comes as El-Sayed also faces scrutiny over his association with far-left streamer Hasan Piker, who has previously said “America deserved 9/11” and openly supported the terrorist Houthis. 

 KEY QUOTE: “That civil rights organization [CAIR] exists because people like Mike Rogers want to make this race about the color of my skin or how I pray.” – Abdul El-Sayed IMPACT: The controversy could intensify scrutiny of Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign financing and his relationships with Islamic advocacy groups as the Michigan Senate race moves toward its fall debates. It also gives Republicans an opportunity to focus the campaign on questions surrounding terrorism-related allegations and associations.

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Elon Musk PAC Steps Up with Big Bucks to Fund Key Swing-State Races

With the midterm elections less than two months away, Elon Musk’s America PAC is funneling money into Maine congressional races to help maintain GOP control.

Musk’s PAC has dedicated $170,000 to ads, phone calls, mailers, and text messages supporting GOP Sen. Susan Collins, who is running against Democrat Troy Jackson, according to The Center Square.

Collins’ seat is crucial for Republicans and could determine which party controls the upper chamber for the final two years of Trump’s presidency. Republicans currently hold a 53-47 seat majority but have little room for error, given the Senate map.

Initially, Collins’ seat was thought to be safe after her original challenger Graham Platner was marred by scandal.

When he dropped out of the race in July, however, Jackson took his place and gave Democrats a fighting chance.

Platner was initially hailed as a populist hero and was able to survive revelations about a Nazi tattoo on his chest, offensive social media posts, infidelity, and allegations of abuse against former girlfriends.

The straw that broke the camel’s back came when he was accused of rape by Maine Democrat Jenny Racicot.

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