The grift that keeps giving
Jordan Libowitz, communications director for government watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, was stunned at the overall amount raised—about $250 million, all told.
“It really stands out how lucrative it was for team Trump to deny the election loss,” Libowitz said. “That’s really counterintuitive, because why would you give money for an election that was over? It only makes sense if you truly believe this will change the outcome of the election. He was essentially grifting his donors.”
Congressional investigators agreed, concluding that Trump’s “Big Lie” about a stolen election “served a dual purpose.” While Trump and his allies peddled inaccurate claims to convince supporters to back their attempts to reverse the election defeat, the report says, they exploited those same claims to raise money, “misleading donors into thinking their donations could alter the election results.”
But the vast majority of that fundraising did not go to those efforts. Instead, the report says, it went “to fund the former President’s other endeavors and to enrich his associates,” a switcheroo the report refers to as “the Big Rip-off.”
T-MAGIC
Investigators also implicated top campaign staff and the Republican National Committee, which partnered with the Trump campaign on these fundraising efforts, saying “the RNC knew” Trump’s claims had no basis in fact, and that no amount of money would change the election’s outcome.
The Trump-RNC fundraising hub was a joint vehicle called “Trump Make America Great Again Committee”—referred to internally as TMAGAC (pronounced “T-Magic”). The RNC and Trump campaign were so tightly knit in 2020 that they shared staff and office space in Arlington, Virginia. By the end of the year, the report says, the operation employed 20 or 30 people across multiple teams, for copywriting, text messages, analytics, advertising, and graphics.
The Trump machine blasted out hundreds of different fundraising appeals in the months between the election and Jan. 6, sometimes hitting up supporters more than two dozen times a day. According to the report, the copywriters drew inspiration from the real world, “watching the messaging coming out of [the RNC] and the campaign and from the President himself and what his family was talking about.”
Low approval rating
Those claims quickly grew problematic, even within Trumpworld.
The TMAGAC fundraising copy could not go out without approval from legal, communications, and research teams. But those groups passed the buck about who was ultimately responsible.
According to committee transcripts, top officials internally expressed concerns about Trump’s claims of a stolen election, which they knew to be inaccurate. In response, investigators found, the TMAGAC team—which had approval processes in place—began to make something of an effort to curb the incendiary language in their emails. But no one seemed to want to take responsibility before the committee.
Instead, the report states that the evidence shows that the RNC and TMAGAC team “walked as close to the line as they dared,” making changes to minimize the RNC’s legal exposure “while still spreading and relying on President Trump’s known lies and misrepresentations.”
The fine print
In the three days after the election, the Trump campaign and RNC racked up more than $100 million, claiming to raise the money for something they called the “Official Election Defense Fund.” The small problem? Witnesses told investigators that the “Official Election Defense Fund” did not exist; it was just “a marketing tactic.”
As it turns out, the report says, the “Trump campaign was raising too much money to spend solely on their legal efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.” Yet, they continued to raise more. And since federal law limited campaign spending to recount efforts, debt retirement, and other election expenses, they created Trump’s “Save America” leadership PAC and linked it to TMAGAC’s fundraising efforts—and began directing most of the money its way. (Trump son-in-law and then senior adviser Jared Kushner “had the most interest in the digital program,” the report says.)
Notably, while the leadership PAC allowed Trump to keep the money and apply it to a wide range of expenses, it was not permitted to spend more than $5,000 on recount and election-related costs—the very thing they were asking supporters to fund.
Ultimately, Save America spent exactly zero dollars on those things. However, it wasn’t just prohibited from funding Trump’s post-election efforts—it also can’t bankroll his 2024 bid. But in recent months, Save America has transferred tens of millions of dollars to a new super PAC tied to Trump.
Campaign finance experts previously told The Daily Beast that this appears to be a way to skirt the laws that would otherwise prohibit Trump from putting that money into his 2024 comeback.
Read the full story here.
