Perry Mason. Of all the Trump supporters in Congress, there may be none more enmeshed in the former president’s legal problems than Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA)—and his latest campaign disclosure shows it.
In the first three months of the year, Perry’s campaign paid JPRowleyLaw PLLC—the law firm run by former federal prosecutor John Rowley—another $62,000 for legal counsel, bringing Rowley’s total tab up to nearly $400,000 since Perry hired him in May 2022. Rowley represented Perry in his ultimately failed attempt to shield his communications from Justice Department prosecutors. Federal agents seized Perry’s phone in 2022 as part of their investigation into Trump and his allies’ efforts to overturn the 2020 election—with Perry serving as a key point person in those communications. After a wildly see-sawing legal battle, a judge ruled in December that the feds could access the bulk of Perry’s messages after all—a stunning reversal of a September decision in the congressman’s favor.
Perry isn’t Rowley’s only Jan. 6-related client. The one-time fed has represented former Trump White House advisers Stephen Miller and Peter Navarro, former Trump legal adviser Cleta Mitchell—who exchanged texts with Perry—and the former President himself. Rowley also counseled Trump in the Mar-a-Lago probe, resigning dramatically the day after Trump was indicted for unlawfully retaining sensitive government records and obstructing the investigation. The steady payments Rowley had been collecting from Trump’s “Save America” PAC, however, ceased about six months before then. No other federal committee has ever paid Rowley.
But that’s not where Perry’s legal expenses end. The records also indicate that his campaign paid another roughly $2,000 this year to Trustpoint.One, the same vendor that drained former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s pockets hosting documents from his own seized phones. Before 2022, the Perry campaign hadn’t paid a lawyer since 2017, FEC records show.
Joe’s Mansion. West Virginia Governor Jim Justice—a Republican coal mining magnate running to become his state’s next Senator, also owns the state’s ritziest resort—the historic Greenbrier. Many powerful people, including government employees and lobbyists, have shelled out cash there, raising questions about Justice’s potential conflicts of interest. The Greenbrier even hosted House Republicans’ retreat last month and will host GOP chiefs of staff in May. But the resort also appears to have hosted a more surprising guest: the Democrat whom Justice is running to replace.
According to FEC records, late last year, retiring Sen. Joe Manchin’s campaign committee paid more than $3,000 to the Greenbrier, described as “travel expenses.” The payment is dated Nov. 30—just three weeks after Manchin publicly announced he would not seek a third term.
Manchin—a former WV governor himself—has attended Greenbrier events before, including a state chamber of commerce meeting there in early September, Justice’s 2017 inaugural ball (the governor was still a Democrat), and more than one golf tournament. While the campaign filing doesn’t specify whether the November payment was tied to a particular event, other details raise questions about a potentially previously unreported meeting between the two officials. (Multiple Manchin staffers did not respond to Pay Dirt’s inquiries about the spending.)
For one, the $3,236.63 is itemized as part of a credit card payment made that day, for $4,956.10. The filing also shows a $5,128.20 “catering” payment on the same day to the Capital Yacht Club in Washington, D.C. It’s not clear if the Greenbrier “travel” is connected to the yacht club event, however—the campaign’s previous payment on that credit card came in late October, so the Nov. 30 payment could theoretically cover charges throughout the month.
While it was publicly reported that Manchin attended the Greenbrier’s Sept. 1 chamber event, that fell within the prior reporting period, which ended Sept. 30. Additionally, his campaign reported several payments on the same card in both September and October, suggesting that the Nov. 30 charge and payment was in fact connected to a more recent and apparently unreported event. Intriguingly, the campaign’s most recent prior credit card payment was on Oct. 25, with Manchin’s official Nov. 9 retirement announcement falling in the same period apparently covered in the Nov. 30 charges—suggesting that the intractable conservative Democrat may have visited his aspiring GOP successor’s resort either before or soon after he went public with the news.
This isn’t the first time Manchin has spent money at the Greenbrier. Through 2018, his campaign made numerous payments to the resort, mostly for catering expenses. But those payments halted in 2019, the same year Manchin suggested to ProPublica that Justice was using the resort for personal gain. Since then, the campaign reported just one other Greenbrier disbursement, about $1,700 in late 2021, also for travel expenses.
While Manchin has since ruled out a presidential run, last month he cracked the door back open on an independent bid for his current seat—calling the possibility “a long, long, long-shot scenario.” The filing deadline is in August.
Pump and dump. For years, the three Republican FEC commissioners have voted as a bloc to forestall investigations, deadlocking the six-member commission in dozens of cases where the agency’s own independent Office of General Counsel has found reason to believe violations occurred. These split decisions aren’t exonerations, because an equal number of commissioners saw it the other way—but the GOP’s side has the more powerful practical effect of killing the investigation. And a recent case shows just how powerful that can be—boosting the value of an individual company’s stock, and overpowering top-notch, document-based reporting.
Last month, NextEra Energy released a public statement touting some good news for the company: The FEC had just informed them that the agency had closed its inquiry into allegations that a NextEra subsidiary, Florida Power and Light, had secretly and illegally funded a number of “ghost candidates” in Florida’s 2022 elections. The statement made the narrow claim that the decision “concluded the FEC's consideration of the complaint without a finding that the commission had reason to believe that FPL violated the FECA.”
NextEra’s stock—which had plummeted from the news of the FEC inquiry—spiked up at the announcement, with Reuters picking up the corporate statement. Some even said, falsely, that the company had been cleared.
Importantly, the FEC notifies participants about its enforcement decisions weeks before disclosing them to the public—along with the underlying documentation.
In this case, NexEra’s claims were accurate, but they weren’t the full truth. That only came out this week: The company had not been cleared, and the matter hadn’t even been fully investigated. In a lengthy and extensively detailed report, the independent OGC had recommended that the commissioners find “reason to believe” that violations cited in the complaint—from watchdog CREW—had in fact occurred.
In a separate statement dated April 9—weeks after NexEra got the jump on the news—the commission’s three Democrats argued forcefully in favor of an investigation based on the merits of those OGC findings, of the complaint, and of the underlying investigative journalism that unearthed the shocking allegations to begin with. The statement from the three GOP commissioners, however, used the fact that the complaint had cited journalistic findings as a strike against its viability, voting to block even an official investigation into the scandal.
The Democrats’ statement noted that the paper, the Orlando Sentinel, was founded in 1876 and had been awarded multiple Pulitzer Prizes, including for investigative reporting. Its reporting on the FP&L scheme was “detailed and well-sourced,” the commissioners said, citing “internal emails and memoranda from the political consultants discussing the scheme” that the journalists had obtained.
“This Commission exists because of the intrepid investigative reporting that revealed the Watergate scandal,” the Democrats noted, adding, “Some of the most significant allegations that the Commission has considered were initially brought to light by investigative reporting.”
However, the nuances of bureaucratic protocol don’t travel well. Or fast. And in the end, ideology still beats journalism—no matter how convincing or accurate.
