Free Republic

The super PAC supporting the presidential campaign of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida spent nearly $34 million in recent months, pouring money into voter outreach, advertising, polling, consultants and other expenses as his standing in the polls steadily slipped.[cut]Mr. DeSantis and his allies, however, are testing the limits of the campaign finance system. Never Back Down isn’t just supplementing the campaign’s work; it has taken over nearly every aspect of the DeSantis campaign — staging events that the candidate attends as a “special guest,” running a bus tour through Iowa and paying people to knock on voters’ doors to...

Watch this video as this elderly Atlanta couple tells the interviewer that they didn't make these multiple "small dollar" political donations to ActBlue. If we had an honest federal law enforcement agency, there would be an investigation into who is making and who is accepting and approving these daily small donations and pretending they are being made by regular once a year or so political donors. I suspect it is illegal foreign campaign donors,(Hunter's buddies? Joe's handlers?) but someone employed by and in control of ActBlue is spreading these donations out in small increments while reporting they are made by...

As the machinations continue between Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and former President Donald Trump over Bragg’s allegation that Trump broke multiple federal campaign finance laws, a former commissioner of the Federal Election Committee asserts that Bragg lacks the authority to go after Trump.If true, the development makes Bragg look even more like a partisan hack than the TDS-riddled prosecutor has made himself look, assuming that’s possible.As reported by Just the News, legal expert Hans von Spakovsky, manager of the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Election Law Reform Initiative, argues that Bragg is going after Trump for alleged federal election crimes that...

Federal prosecutors have announced four more criminal charges against Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the crypto trading platform FTX, expanding his potential liability in what authorities allege is a billion dollar fraud. Bankman-Fried was charged in December in an eight-count indictment. On Thursday an indictment was unsealed adding new charges for a total of 12-counts, including conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business, conspiracy to commit bank fraud, and securities fraud. Bankman-Fried, who was released on a $250 million bond, previously pleaded not guilty to charges announced in December, including one count of conspiracy to violate campaign finance laws....

Leftist billionaire George Soros was apparently more heavily involved in the 2022 electoral cycle than previously thought. CNBC reported that Soros’ Open Society Policy Center "quietly" spewed $140 million “to advocacy organizations and ballot initiatives in 2021,” which is in addition to the over $170 million he "personally" spent to bolster Democratic candidates and campaigns in the 2022 midterm elections. It gets worse. CNBC noted that the new numbers bring Soros’ multimillion-dollar agenda to buy up elections and political influence to roughly $500 million since January 2020.

Oakland, California, is set to give adult residents vouchers to donate to candidates for local office every other year, according to The San Francisco Chronicle. Nearly 74% of the city’s voters approved Measure W, mandating that the city biannually send four $25 dollar vouchers to residents 18 years of age and older for donations to mayoral, City Council or school board candidates, the outlet reported. The program will be paid for with city general funds and include legal permanent residents who lack U.S. citizenship. (RELATED: San Francisco Fires Long-Time Elections Official To Meet Its Racial Equity Goals) Seattle enacted a...

SEATTLE (AP) — A Washington state judge on Wednesday fined Facebook parent company Meta nearly $25 million for repeatedly and intentionally violating campaign finance disclosure law, in what is believed to be the largest campaign finance penalty in U.S. history. The penalty issued by King County Superior Court Judge Douglass North was the maximum allowed for more than 800 violations of Washington’s Fair Campaign Practices Act, passed by voters in 1972 and later strengthened by the Legislature. Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson argued that the maximum was appropriate considering his office previously sued Facebook in 2018 for violating the same...

Vice President Harris hauled in nearly half a million dollars in book royalties during her first year in office, ethics disclosure forms show. Harris reported $325,000 in royalty earnings from her 2019 book “The Truths We Hold,” and another $130,000 for her children’s book “Superheroes Are Everywhere,” Bloomberg reported Friday. The cash far outstripped President Biden’s, who reported between $15,001 and $50,000 in royalties for “Promise Me, Dad,” — a heartfelt 2018 memoir about his late son Beau Biden, who died of brain cancer in 2015.

The New York Times appeared to celebrate a liberal think tank tied to leftist billionaire George Soros for spreading its influence in Washington, D.C. The Times propagated how Data for Progress, a pro-Green New Deal and Medicare-for-All group, “has grown comfortable with mainstream influence.” The group is a project of the dark money group Tides Advocacy, The story, headlined “Born on the Left, Data for Progress Comes of Age in Biden’s Washington,” championed how “President Biden mentions it in private calls. The White House reads its work. And Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, teams up with its leaders for...

It turns out that the left has no problem taking “dark money” when it benefits their own political ends. The New York Times published an explosive report naming liberal Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss as “one of the most important donors to left-leaning advocacy groups and an increasingly influential force among Democrats.” New tax filings showed that two of Wyss’s organizations “donated $208 million from 2016 through early last year to three other nonprofit funds that doled out money to a wide array of groups that backed progressive causes and helped Democrats in their efforts to win the White House and...

The story of former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is a one of a whole lot of money spent on broken promises, no results, and a bad reputation.The story of former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is one of a whole lot of money spent on broken promises, no results, and a bad reputation. Bloomberg’s late entry into the crowded Democratic Party presidential primary last fall was marked with the intrigue of a well-financed and well-known candidate deploying a unique strategy in an unusual race. One of the richest men in the world, who built a financial empire...

In “The French Connection,” the iconic 1971 film starring Gene Hackman as the grisly New York City detective Popeye Doyle, the bad guy is a wealthy Frenchman operating the world’s largest heroin-smuggling syndicate. In what could be its sequel, the Chinese government has been operating the world’s largest influence-peddling syndicate for decades. The drug of choice is no longer heroin but money - and lots of it. Starting in the mid-1990s with the Clintons, it has grown in both size and audacity and now seems to have ensnared the Biden family, as well. There is a straight line from China’s...

“Seinfeld” cast members Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Jason Alexander along with the co-creator Larry David are reuniting on Friday for a virtual fundraiser for the Texas Democratic Party. The aim of the event, titled “Fundraiser About Something,” is to raise money in the hopes of getting Texas to vote blue in the 2020 presidential election. Hosted by NBC’s Seth Meyers, the cast of the sitcom will discuss their favorite episodes of “Seinfeld.” Tickets for the event are donation based. “Most people are chipping in $38 for Texas' 38 electoral votes,” the website states. Higher donations come with perks such as a...

Are Jack Dorsey, who has lied to Congress, and Mark Zuckerberg, who has no love for freedom, democracy, and the Constitution, Russian assets? President Donald Trump was accused of being a Russian asset because Moscow’s operatives tried to influence American opinion by buying a few thousand dollars of Facebook ads while fake Twitter accounts planted dubious stories. So how are Twitter and Facebook not meddling in our elections by suppressing a major American newspaper’s URL for a story deemed harmful to one candidate in a presidential election? If there ever was any doubt that the social media tech giants Twitter...

Are Jack Dorsey, who has lied to Congress, and Mark Zuckerberg, who has no love fot freedom, democracy, and the Constitution, Russian assets? President Donald Trump was accussed of being a Russian asset because Moscow’s operatives tried to influence American opinion by buying a few thousand dollars of Facebook ads while fake Twitter accounts planted dubious stories. So how is Twitter and Facebook not meddling in our elections by suppressing a major American niewspaper’s URL for a story deemed harmful to one candidate in a presidential election? If there ever was any doubt that the social media tech giants Twitter...

White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany on Wednesday was locked out of her personal Twitter account for sharing The Post’s bombshell cover story on Hunter Biden’s alleged hard drive and an email linking Joe Biden to his son’s job at a Ukrainian energy company. “Your account has been locked,” a message from the social media network informed McEnany, whose account has more than 1 million followers. “We have determined that this account violated the Twitter Rules,” the network said, highlighting her prior tweet with a link to The Post’s article. Without providing any evidence, Twitter said McEnany — who shared...

Less than two months ahead of the presidential election – with concerns of foreign interference again at the forefront – a conservative political group is raising "serious concerns" about millions of donations reported by a major Democratic fundraising platform. A preliminary computer analysis by the Take Back Action Fund, obtained exclusively by Fox News, has found that nearly half of all 2019 donations to ActBlue were made by people claiming to be unemployed. Action Fund President John Pudner questioned the veracity of those donations and called it a loophole that must be closed for the sake of election integrity. "After...

A third of Americans fear being fired for their political beliefs. Unfortunately, for those who wish to support political campaigns, federal and state laws leave no place to hide. “Cancel culture” has divided First Amendment advocates. Some argue that private actors must tolerate differing views for free speech to survive, while others say the only concern should be government intrusions on speech. But when private individuals target and harass other Americans for their political donations, the government can’t say it plays no role. Campaign contributions are public because the law requires it. Every American who gives more than $200 to...

We should have learned our lesson by now. In elections, it’s not what you pay; it’s what you say. Hillary Clinton spent almost twice as much as Donald Trump only to lose the 2016 election, even while independent groups supporting Clinton outspent those supporting Trump by 3-to-1. In the spirit of making the same mistakes, many 2020 hopefuls have taken “you get what you pay for” as a given. Billionaire Tom Steyer dumped more than $300 million from his own pocket into his campaign and failed to score a single delegate. Michael Bloomberg somehow did both better and worse, spending...

Former First Lady Michelle Obama has been given a show by PBS starting next week, the taxpayer funded network announced Friday. The timing of the announcement comes after Democrats marked $75 million for PBS’s parent the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in the coronavirus relief bill that passed at the end of March. Newsbusters reported the $75 million is on top of the $465 million given CPB in the current year’s federal budget, which is an increase of $20 million over the previous year.