Boy, things just keep getting worse and worse for Donald Trump these days.
According to a blistering report from the Daily Beast, federal authorities are now heavily scrutinizing an intentionally confusing web of numerous super political action committees that are all tied back to ex-President Donald Trump in some way or another, and it seems that it all boils down to a heap of corruption and a “staggering amount of cash.”
The Beast reports that the inquiry originates from a super PAC named “Make America Great Again, Again!” This super PAC was originally founded by former top Trump aide Corey Lewandowski, who was ultimately fired from a separate Trump PAC following allegations that he sexually assaulted one of their major donors only to refuse to step down from his position in the aftermath. The publication reports that federal authorities are now heavily looking into why so many of these groups are not properly reporting their payments — a nasty little illegal habit that seems to be extremely common in anything Donald Trump is involved with.
Deputy executive director of good government group Documented, Brendan Fischer said, “It is worth emphasizing: All of this is totally unprecedented for a former president. Even if Trump kept it simple, and just had one hard money PAC, a single super PAC, and a pair of 501(c)(3)/501(c)(4) nonprofits, there would be no parallel with any former president in American history.”
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At the end of the day, the corrupt former US president’s financial disclosures have revealed that his name is tied back to an astounding 500 or more entities, including almost 400 of which directly use his name or initials. To make matters that much worse, the majority of them are linked to each other in a tangled web. This tactic purposefully makes the structure of these entities highly confusing and difficult to keep up with — and virtually impossible to keep track of the billions of dollars he and his accountants keep moving around. It seems the former guy has implemented this same intentionally confusing tactic with regard to his political operations.
“Typically, former presidents focus on their presidential library, or start a charitable foundation, but Trump is staying in the political game and raising a staggering amount of cash,” Fischer explained.
These various super PACs who maintain a link to number 45 have raised staggering hundreds of millions of dollars just last year. However, until we reach midterms, it’s impossible to gauge how much of that money was raised by so-called dark money groups, or what all those funds were spent on. But a court filing this week served to prove that even Trump’s own campaign is unable to follow its own money at this point.
Brett Kappel, a specialist in campaign finance and nonprofit law at Harmon Curran, explained, “The central lesson of Watergate is ‘Follow the money,’ and this byzantine structure of different types of legal entities — which are subject to different fundraising restrictions and file different reports with different agencies according to different filing schedules — appears to be designed to make that task as difficult as possible.”
Featured image via Flickr/Gage Skidmore, under Creative Commons license 2.0
