With Roger Sollenberger, Political Reporter

Pay Dirt is a weekly foray into the pigpen of political funding. Subscribe here to get it in your inbox every Thursday.

This week’s Big Dig . . . How Kyrsten Sinema’s Weird Spending Is a Clue She’s Retiring

Once upon a time, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) crusaded against politicians cashing in on perks of their office, even co-writing a bill seeking to down on lawmakers who use public funds for “first class air travel.”

But now, as Sinema reportedly considers whether to run for another term in 2024, it’s hard to overstate the degree to which she has become a caricature of the type of politician she once bashed.

Class act

On Monday, The Daily Beast reported on Sinema’s unusual spending of $210,000 in taxpayer funds on private chartered air travel since 2020—a practice that she herself had tried to ban just six years earlier.

But if Sinema pushes the envelope on her use of public funds, her latest campaign finance filings reveal her comfort with spending donor money on just about any perk under the sun—stays at five-star European hotels, luxury vehicles, first-class airfare, and splurges at plush West Coast vineyards.

On top of all of that, Sinema’s personal security expenses carry a staggering burn rate of more than $100,000 a month, most of it to one person—Tulsi Gabbard’s sister.

Federal Election Commission filings made public this week show that Sinema’s personal political action committee—the “Getting Stuff Done PAC”—spent over $5,800 on first-class airfare for the senator in the second half of 2023.

Unusually, the PAC paid nearly $4,000 in airfare in August not to an airline, but to the big tobacco conglomerate Altria. It also paid $1,800 in airfare to FedEx Corporation Travel. Both expenses note they were used for “first-class airfare at fair market value.”

According to Brendan Fischer, executive director of the watchdog group Documented, the specific language of the note very likely means Sinema’s PAC paid Altria and FedEx for travel on private corporate jets at a first class rate.

“When a Senator (or their staffer) flies on a private jet for a leadership PAC trip, the PAC must reimburse the jet’s owner for the cost of a first class ticket,” Fischer said. “So based on these FEC reports, Sinema or a staffer hitched rides on corporate jets owned by Altria and FedEx.”

A Sinema spokesperson didn’t respond to questions from The Daily Beast about the nature of these expenses.

European vacation

Beyond the private airfare, the PAC also underwrote the Arizona senator’s stays in July and October 2023 at the five-star Le Roch Hotel & Spa in Paris, for a total of $7,600, and paid the tab for her $2,500 stay in July at the Edition Hotel in Madrid, billed as a “luxury lifestyle urban five-star resort.”

Her campaign, meanwhile, shelled out thousands on travel expenses in Europe, including a $434 ticket on the Eurostar high-speed rail line, best known for shuttling passengers between London and Paris.

Under FEC rules, campaigns can pay for a candidate’s travel expenses if the purpose is related to campaigning or fundraising. In the past, Sinema has made liberal use of what is permitted under the letter of the rules. In May 2023, The Daily Beast reported on how Sinema appeared to add meetings with donors to trips she had planned for marathons and triathlon competitions, allowing her to pay for hotels and flights to her races with campaign funds.

It’s unclear to what extent Sinema was fundraising or conducting campaign activity in Paris or Madrid—but that doesn’t matter for the vast majority of these costs, because the PAC that paid them isn’t her campaign. Instead, “Getting Stuff Done” is a leadership PAC, a type of committee that is allowed to pay for just about anything, essentially doubling as a personal slush fund for the candidate. (A spokesperson did not respond to questions about the spending on Europe travel, either.)

Security deposit

More so than her spending on luxury travel, Sinema’s outlays for personal security have been truly mind-boggling—an average of more than $100,000 a month.

In total, Sinema’s campaign spent more than $350,000 on security and related expenses from July to December 2023, while her leadership PAC spent over $280,000 on those same costs. Combined, that’s more than $630,000 for personal security services over the last six months of the year, or $105,000 a month.

That total represents more than one out of every six dollars spent by her campaign and PAC—a remarkably high share for a time period where a battleground state senator like Sinema would be expected to ramp up her political activity.

“That amount of money,” Fischer said, “is just mind-boggling.”

Saurav Ghosh, director of campaign finance reform at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, noted that in today’s political climate, where some high-profile lawmakers like Sinema no doubt face many legitimate threats, the FEC has “shied away from second guessing the decisions that officeholders are making about spending their donors’ money on security.”

Notably, Sinema continues to steer huge sums of cash for security to Vrindivan Bellord, the sister of Sinema’s former colleague Tulsi Gabbard. TOA Group LLC, the organization registered to Bellord, raked in $232,000 from both Sinema’s campaign and leadership PAC from August to December 2023.

Because the payments to Bellord are aggregated into large lump sums—and not reported out separately and specifically, as is the typical FEC standard—it is extremely difficult to ascertain exactly what Sinema’s campaign funds are being spent on. Since March 2022, Sinema’s campaign and PAC have paid over $1.2 million to TOA Group.

Ghosh said the continued business relationship between Sinema and Bellord “doesn’t look good from an optics standpoint.”

The security costs go even further. Her leadership PAC lists dozens of charges for “security lodging” or “security travel;” there are $6,870 in hotel stay charges alone. Between both committees, there are also over $3,200 charges to StubHub, TicketMaster, and the famous Red Rocks Amphitheater in Colorado, all of which are listed as security detail “tickets” or “event admission”—presumably for a security guard to accompany Sinema at a concert. There’s even a $342.40 campaign payment to Clearwater, Florida-based Mumu Cycling Apparel LLC in August, marked as “security detail equipment.”

“It happens all the time, unfortunately—you have a family member or friend with a connection to a candidate, who has no prior experience providing the service, that obviously looks like a sweetheart deal,” he said. “It’s something donors should think about when deciding who to give their money to.”

Sign of the times

Political insiders in Washington and Arizona are parsing Sinema’s every move to figure out if she will file for re-election by the April 8 deadline. The optics of the senator’s spending habits, plus the anemic $594,000 she raised in the fourth quarter, suggest a battle against Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) and GOP candidate Kari Lake could be even tougher for her than anticipated.

In the fourth quarter of 2023, Sinema’s campaign committee raised $594,000—less than Sen. Mark Kelly (D), her fellow Arizonan, who is not up for re-election until 2028. The campaign spent $141,000 on digital ads—her largest campaign expense by far, besides payroll, but still half what she spent on security. Leadership PACs are generally for spreading cash around to allied politicians, party organizations, or other political causes. But in all of 2023, Sinema’s PAC only spent $25,000 to support other candidates—$10,000 each for Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Jon Tester (D-MT), and $5,000 to Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM). 

“That’s why leadership PACs supposedly exist, which is to make contributions to other candidates,” said Fischer, of Documented. “But she is not making contributions—it’s just like a vehicle for Sinema to hold a fundraiser at a five-star resort with corporate lobbyists, and use the proceeds to fund the next fundraiser at a five-star resort.”

“It’s just nuts,” he said.

Read the full story here.

Advertisement

From Roger’s Notebook...

The most wonderful time of the year… That would be FEC filing day. Which will now occur more frequently than last year, since 2024 is a national election year.

But Wednesday was the big day, when every federal political committee filed financial reports covering the end of the year. Some of those groups hadn’t publicly disclosed their raising and spending activity since June 30—including major players like Trump’s “Save America” leadership PAC, his “MAGA Inc” super PAC, and the Ron DeSantis “Never Back Down” super PAC.

Here are the toplines on the presidential level.

For all the handwringing and headlines about the money on the GOP side, the clear fundraising frontrunner is still President Joe Biden. His campaign raised more than $33 million over the last three months of 2023, for a $65.2 million haul on the year. He spent about $19.3 million over the same three months, and ended the year with about $46 million in the bank.

The Trump campaign clocked just $19.1 million between October and December, less than 60 percent of Biden’s donations. But Trump also has to contend with a (slightly) more competitive primary, and he outspent Biden, shelling out roughly $23.6 million to finish 2024 with $33 million on hand, $13 million behind his top political rival.

Nikki Haley’s campaign wasn’t far behind Trump, posting about $17.3 million in contributions. While she didn’t spend as much as Trump, she also didn’t have his fundraising head start, and finished the year with about $14.6 million to put into the first primary states.

DeSantis is now officially moot, but his third-quarter numbers would have been a bad sign, reflecting less than $6 million in contributions. Combined with $9.3 million in expenses, the DeSantis campaign ended the year with less than $10 million cash on hand. He dropped out about two weeks later, but we won’t know until April whether he did so under a complete cash crunch. That absolutely seems possible.

Air support. Super PACs also filed on Wednesday, providing the first financial snapshot of the most well-funded groups in the country since the end of June.

After a much mythologized launch drew an initial $130 million, the DeSantis-aligned Never Back Down saw just $14 million come through since June 30. That reflects a remarkable falloff in donor interest—over those last six months, the super PAC could only manage to raise about 11 percent of what it collected in the spring.

NBD had so much in the bank, however, that over the summer it began to take on what would traditionally be campaign costs, in an effort to ballast the wounded DeSantis operation. That contributed to its nearly $97 million in spending over the back half of the year, with just $14.5 million to throw at the looming Iowa caucuses. NBD put $29.6 million into ads and outreach over that period, with another $9.6 million in seed money for a super PAC offshoot, “Fight Right,” which formed in November after some serious infighting within the DeSantis universe.

The top pro-Haley super PAC, however, surged. That group, “SFA Fund Inc,” reported $50.2 million in receipts from July to December. But the super PAC also plowed an astonishing $61 million into ads and outreach, ending the reporting period with roughly $3.5 million in the tank.

Trumpworld’s “MAGA Inc” also cleaned up—at least on the fundraising front. The super PAC racked up nearly $46.1 million in donations over the second half of the year, about three times what it had raised previously. though more than 60 percent of that total came from just seven people, with one donor—Mellon banking empire heir Timothy Mellon—accounting for more than one of every five dollars raised.

Paying the cost to be the boss. MAGA Inc’s fundraising blitz, however, coincided with an unprecedented spending maneuver, which is shaping up to set the super PAC back $60 million.

That’s because Trump himself demanded a $60 million refund from the group—which, in theory, must run its finances and strategy entirely independently of Trump and his campaign. The unusual and statutorily murky request came in July, The New York Times reported at the time, when Trump’s “Save America” began to crack under the ever-mounting strain of indictments, lawsuits, and witness attorneys that it was funding.

Trump was asking the super PAC to return the money that Save America had transferred to MAGA Inc. in the weeks before he announced his candidacy—a move which, as Pay Dirt first reported, had itself appeared to cross legal lines that regulate “soft money” in elections. (CLC filed an FEC complaint shortly afterwards, and later supplemented it.)

MAGA Inc, it turns out, agreed. Its latest disclosures show $5 million “refund” transfers to Save America at the beginning of every month, starting in July, for a total $30 million so far—exactly half of Trump’s demand.

The scheme, however, raises questions about whether any of MAGA Inc’s donors—which include a number of devout, deep-pocketed Trump backers—are intentionally using the super PAC as a vehicle to funnel massive amounts of money to Trump’s personal legal defense. The regular monthly payment scheme gives rise to plausible deniability—that the refunds are independent of any spending decisions—but the super PAC is still a known pipeline that can carry money straight to the bank accounts of Trump’s many, many, many, many lawyers.

To that end, MAGA Inc did report one particularly conspicuous large donation—a $1 million contribution from the super PAC that had supported Trump’s first two campaigns, “America First Action.” After Trump left the White House, AFA has been more or less dormant, spending only around $16,000 in the first half of 2023, with the lion’s share of its outlays before that going to refund prior illegal contributions, along with two seven-figure transfers to another super PAC and a pro-Trump nonprofit a few months after his administration ended.

Since then, however, AFA has been quiet. Then, on Dec. 5, it channeled $1 million to MAGA Inc. That month, MAGA Inc’s regular $5 million payment was late, coming on Dec. 11.

Retaining wall. Trump’s political committees spent a total $50 million on legal services last year, The New York Times reported—a historic record that appears in no danger of being broken, at least not by anyone not named Trump.

Trump allies also spun up a separate legal defense fund last summer to help offset costs specifically for lawyers representing co-defendants and friendly witnesses. That group, the “Patriot Legal Defense Fund,” can raise unlimited amounts of money, and raked in $1.5 million last year. Only about $400,000 went to lawyers, however, with Brand Woodward Law LLP—the firm representing Trump’s indicted valet, Walt Nauta, among other Mar a Lago employees—accounting for more than half of that amount.

Nauta’s lawyer, Stanley Woodward, is also paid through Save America. Since the Mar-a-Lago search, his firm has received $660,000 from Save America, FEC data shows. The firm also clocked a $13,000 retainer in July from Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-TX)—Trump’s former White House physician and alleged domestic abuser who Oath Keeper militia members were reportedly seeking to protect during the attack because he had valuable information.

Across the aisle. While the GOP has almost rallied behind Trump to a nearly monolithic extent, Democrats are treating indicted Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) the opposite way.

Menendez’s legal defense fund has raised half a million dollars since its inception in July, according to its filing this week. The group paid about $370,000 to a variety of firms representing the senator and his wife, who were indicted last year on an array of bribery-related and national security charges. Another roughly $62,000 went to HaystackID, the data management company that Trump retained to handle legal discovery for his New York fraud trial.

But even larger costs appear in Menendez’s political filings. His campaign listed a staggering $2.1 million in legal fees in its year-end report this week, with a flat $1 million of it to Paul Hastings LLP. The campaign only saw $15,795 in donor support in the third quarter, while issuing $16,200 in refunds. Despite calls from fellow Democrats to resign, Menendez still hasn’t ruled out a re-election bid; he’s got $6.2 million left in the tank.

More From The Beast’s Politics Desk

Lone Star Wars. Roland Gutierrez, a Texas state Senator running for the Democratic nomination to take on Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) in November, was caught on tape saying his main rival, Rep. Colin Allred (D-TX), can’t win because he’s not Hispanic. The Daily Beast’s newest reporter, Reese Gorman, has the exclusive audio and the story. 

Border Blame Game. Republicans are calling the influx of immigrants crossing the border a “crisis,” but they’re also extremely resistant to do anything about it. That’s not because they don’t think they can make the situation better; they seem to not want to make the situation better. Republicans are openly admitting they shouldn’t hand Joe Biden a political or policy win and should preserve the political issue. Riley Rogerson has the details, with plenty of revelatory quotes from Republicans. 

Old Dominion. I took an extensive look at Speaker Mike Johnson’s extensive ties to Christian fundamentalists, particularly this one extreme strain—Christian Dominionism. Johnson has a long history running in these circles, and has had high praise for leaders way out of the norm for most Christians. Read the whole deep dive. 

We'll be back next week with more Pay Dirt.  Have a tip? Send us a note and subscribe here.