With Roger Sollenberger, Political Reporter

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This week’s Big Dig is… The Republican Governor Who Has Been Appointing Top Campaign Donors to State Positions

When Republican Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves lifted the last of his state’s minimal COVID restrictions on April 30, 2021, the 2023 election was far from the thoughts of most of his constituents.

But not Reeves. 

He was fresh off a private flight to a fundraiser where lobbyists were eager to write his political operation checks. And the person who provided that flight—a $12,500 in-kind contribution—was a powerful businessman in the state whose son had been handpicked to advise Reeves’ COVID “Restart Mississippi” economic committee.

That flight, in addition to another flat $12,500 same-day contribution from the same businessman, would go on to account for $25,000 of the approximately $1.4 million the Reeves campaign has banked from his own government appointees, along with their immediate family members and associates, according to The Daily Beast’s review of Mississippi campaign finance filings.

Old man river

The news comes as Reeves finds himself in a surprisingly tight race for the ruby-red state’s top office. A Mississippi Today/Siena College poll released last month showed that a little more than one out of every five likely Republican primary voters actually preferred Reeves’ Democratic opponent, Brandon Presley—with Reeves clocking 70 percent support from his own party.

The Reeves campaign did not respond to a request for comment. Shelby Wilcher, press secretary for the governor’s office, told The Daily Beast “it’s not a surprise” that some of Reeves’ appointees are also donors.

“He has a lot of supporters across the state, so it’s not a surprise that some appointees may have also donated to his campaign,” Wilcher said, noting that Reeves divines appointments “solely based on the appointee’s qualifications.”

Tater salad

The campaign filings, however, underscore the extent of the longstanding, incestuous high-dollar network that has been keeping the increasingly beleaguered incumbent afloat, both politically and financially.

For instance, one Reeves backer—Doug Hederman, another Restart committee member who made an in-kind contribution to Reeves’ 2015 campaign for lieutenant governor—not only doubles as a Reeves appointee; he’s also an employee. His family company, Hederman Brothers, has received nearly $50,000 for work it has done for the Reeves campaign to date this year. Another Hederman family member has been paid nearly $250,000 for campaign consulting in 2023 alone, state records show.

The private fundraising flight, however, came at the expense of longtime Reeves supporter William Yates, Jr, who founded Yates Construction, a multibillion-dollar outfit headquartered in Philadelphia, Mississippi. His son, William Yates III, now the CEO, was appointed to the “Restart Mississippi” advisory board in 2020.

Since then, the two Yates men—along with the elder Yates’ wife, Nancy—have poured $70,000 into Reeves’ 2023 election efforts, campaign filings show. When Yates III was appointed, he, his company, other Yates executives, and an associated PAC had already donated around $110,000, the Mississippi Free Press reported at the time.

Crooked letter, crooked letter

That Free Press report found that, combined, Restart advisers and their immediate corporate and political networks had supplied more than $760,000 to Reeves since 2008, when he was state treasurer. The donor-appointee network has since fanned hundreds of thousands of dollars at Reeves, state filings show, including the contributions identified in the Mississippi Today report and another previously unreported $400,000.

Mississippi is one of 11 states that allows individuals to contribute unlimited amounts of money to candidates for state office, while simultaneously ranking 49th economically and in the bottom quartile for income equality.

Working on commission

All the same, Restart advisers sit on a range of committees. They include the gaming commission, the state lottery, the worker’s compensation commission, the community college board, and the Institutions of Higher Learning Board of Trustees—something of a crown jewel when it comes to gubernatorial appointments.

The gaming commission features Reeves’ largest individual donor, Franc Lee, who was appointed in 2021, Mississippi Today reported. That commission oversees the gambling industry, a key revenue stream for the state. Lee made his bones running a consumer loan financing company that settled a federal sex discrimination lawsuit in 2017, after the Securities and Exchange Commission charged the company unlawfully firing a transgender employee.

And Reeves may have wanted Lee to have a friend. In March, the governor appointed another campaign megadonor to the gaming commission: Kent Nicaud, president and CEO of Gulfport Memorial Hospital. Nicaud has donated upwards of $100,000 to Reeves, Mississippi Today reported, with $41,000 of that total coming the year before his appointment.

Nicaud’s wife, however, had by that point already landed a gig in the Reeves administration, as a judge on the state’s workers compensation commission. Their son has additionally tossed $36,000 Reeves’ way since 2018, when Reeves launched his first gubernatorial bid.

Barbourshop

The political intrigue escalates from there, though, because Reeves’ appointments share significant overlap with those of one of his top ally’s, former GOP Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour. But Barbour also holds a unique position in the campaign finance filings.

After leaving the governor’s mansion, Barbour founded BGR Group, a federal lobbying powerhouse. And while he has so far accounted for at least $3,500 to Reeves’ re-election campaign personally, he’s cast a wider net.

State filings indicate that BGR played host to the April 2021 fundraiser Reeves attended via donor jet, at a cost of about $3,000 for catering services on April 22. While it’s difficult to tell whether the fundraiser was a net gain for any of the participants, filings show that Barbour donated personally twice that month, with BGR’s PAC chipping in another $1,500 on April 15. 

Four other BGR members gave a combined $7,500, bringing the lobbying shop’s total individual monetary contributions at the time to $12,500—the exact amount of Yates’ in-kind flight, and the same sum Yates had donated personally. (Reeves’ campaign statements also show an April 20 gift exactly double that size—$25,000—from Tallahassee’s Robert Sheets, CEO of Government Services Group.)

The Reeves campaign also bought a $400 Southwest Airlines ticket on April 15, the day of the BGR PAC donation; state filings show that the purchase was refunded the next month.

Read the full story here.

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From Roger’s Notebook...

Fool me once… Former President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign is once again arguing that the so-called “witch hunts” that are designed to hurt him politically are actually helping him politically. On Wednesday, Politico cited a Trump campaign official to report that the political operation is claiming to have raised $35 million since the start of April—doubling the receipts over the first three months of the year, during a time period that covers both of Trump’s current indictments, in Manhattan and in Florida federal court.

Politico wrote that the fundraising haul “also underscores that the twin indictments [Trump is] facing—with the possibility of more to come—are mobilizing his base of online donors.” But until the campaign’s actual filing is released later this month, it will still be unclear how full and accurate that claim really is, something that undermined a similar Politico report last year.

Last September, Politico got a similar scoop ahead of a Trump financial filing, reporting that the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago “provided [Trump] with tools to raise boatloads of money,” citing Trump fundraising emails that were “strongly suggesting that there is serious money coming back in response.” Other outlets carried a similar line.

But a few weeks later, we reported that Politico’s sources had chosen not to reveal that the Trump operation was paying record sums to raise that money. In fact, fundraising costs alone ate up about 90 percent of the total haul—spending a dollar to make a little more than a dime, and further stoking concerns of donor fatigue.

This time, we also don’t yet know how much Trump spent on those fundraising efforts. And since we haven’t seen the full filing, we don’t know how much Trump’s committees are leaking for other costs, including legal fees associated with the indictments and the other seemingly innumerable lawsuits, investigations, and high-dollar settlements now facing the former president.

Draft dodger. Disgraced former Fox News star Tucker Carlson has successfully shut down the “Draft Tucker” Super PAC that popped up in the days following his ignominious ouster in April from the conservative network’s prime slot. On Wednesday, Draft Tucker filed its termination report with the Federal Election Commission, about a month after Carlson hit the group with a cease-and-desist, alleging they were raising money on his name and likeness without his approval—or any desire to seek the White House in 2024.

The super PAC’s termination report shows a total $54,200 in receipts: a $35,000 contribution in May from the group’s chair, Dallas investor and GOP donor-activist Chris Ekstrom, along with a $19,200 TV ad refund to Strategic Political Management, which helped run the super PAC. The group reported spending the same amount, sending about $14,500 to Ekstrom’s Courageous Conservatives PAC (which had previously endorsed Trump), $45,000 to other PAC-affiliated entities, and around $4,000 to GOP firm Politicoin for web services.

Mitch betta have my money. The FEC disclosed this week that it has fined Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s campaign for failing to return $100,000 in excessive donations to his 2020 re-election bid in a timely manner. The fine—a total $7,225—was administered by the Reports Analysis Division, not the evenly divided politically appointed commissioners.

The new giant sucking sound at the border. Kansas attorney general Kris Kobach’s failed U.S. Senate campaign has still not reported owing the FEC any money for the $30,000 fine they received last year, after accepting illegal corporate in-kind contributions in 2020 from Steve Bannon’s “We Build the Wall” fraudulent nonprofit scheme.

The erstwhile Kobach campaign settled the matter last November and reported paying the FEC about $5,500, but there is no record of any further FEC payments or debts in either its April filing or the latest report, which came in this week. Kobach finalized the agreement on November 16—the week after he won his 2022 election to attorney general.

House of pain. This week, a federal judge in Ohio sentenced former state House Speaker Larry Householder to a staggering 20 years in prison for his role in Ohio’s largest ever corruption case. A jury convicted Housholder in March for a sprawling racketeering and bribery conspiracy, involving more than $60 million in political bribes from nuclear energy company FirstEnergy, laundered through dark money groups. Householder received the maximum sentence; his chief accomplice is set to be sentenced on Friday.

Alamony. Last week, the leadership PAC for Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) asked the FEC to advise on whether the group—“Alamo PAC”—can accept donations in a separate account used only for funding independent expenditures, i.e., political ads and outreach.

While on the surface, this idea could suggest weaponizing leadership PACs as super PACs, Alamo PAC’s lawyers argue that other types of nonconnected committees—specifically “hybrid” super PACs—are allowed to operate such an account. The advisory request suggests that Alamo PAC’s new account would adhere to the same $5,000 annual contribution limit that already applies to leadership PACs, though it doesn’t seem to quite spell it out so explicitly.

On Thursday, nonprofit watchdog Campaign Legal Center filed a response urging the FEC to reject the proposal, citing a risk of corruption in raising donation limits to committees controlled by elected officials. CLC pointed out that the legal precedent Alamo PAC cites also expressly warned against applying that precedent to candidates with “his or her own political action committee.”

Fat cats, rejoice. The FEC unanimously cleared former Democratic New York mayor Michael Bloomberg of complaints that he had violated individual contribution limits in connection with the billionaire’s self-funded 2020 presidential feint.

Bloomberg, who put $1 billion of his own money into his campaign, was accused in the complaints of using his campaign to launder $18 million of that $1 billion through the Democratic National Committee and state parties, thereby circumventing contribution limits. But all six commissioners found that the law was on Bloomberg’s side, allowing candidates to contribute as much as they want to their own campaigns, while also allowing campaigns to make unlimited transfers to state and national party committees.

While the commission voted in lock step, Democratic Commissioner Ellen Weintraub released a separate statement of reasons. Weintraub agreed with her colleagues that in this specific instance, Bloomberg had clearly not made his campaign contributions “for the express purpose” of the transfers, adding that “[n]o one should read this case as a green light for circumventing the contribution limits.” But she also noted that, given the incentives and amounts of money flowing through candidates and campaigns, “ambiguous situations could arise in the future.”

Bupkis. The “zombie” campaign for former Rep. John Shimkus (R-Il.) reported making two $1,000 transfers to the Capitol Hill Club—a Republican-only establishment that caters to beltway insiders, elected officials, fundraisers, and lobbyists. The payments were reported as “donations” to the Capitol Hill Club nonprofit, designated as a 501(c)(7) “social club”—an exceedingly rare form of transfer to the popular haunt, which routinely draws cash from campaigns and PACs. FEC data shows only 25 such “donations” since 2004, compared to more than 46,000 payments in that same time.

However, the FEC has cracked down on how former officials spend their holdover campaign cash. The commission has fined two former GOP House members (Florida men Cliff Stearns and Ander Crenshaw) for dipping into their old campaign donations to pay Capitol Hill Club dues. Shimkus joined the KBS lobbying firm when he left Congress in 2021, following more than two decades in office.

More From The Beast’s Politics Desk

Georgia Governor Brian Kemp is sitting out the 2024 presidential race—or, at least, he is for now. Sam Brodey has a deep dive on Kemp and what he’s really thinking for 2024. 

A Democratic candidate for governor in New Hampshire is running on addressing the opioid epidemic. Unfortunately for her, she once worked as a lobbyist for Purdue Pharma, the maker of Oxycontin. Jake Lahut has a great look at the candidate and all of her past comments.

Trump aides are beginning to sour on Kari Lake, after she’s very transparently been hawking herself to the former president and anyone else who will listen. Zach Petrizzo has the details. 

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