“Trump dines with top meme coin holders, shrugging off ethics concerns”

chicanery, conflict of interest laws

WaPo:

President Donald Trump dined with the top purchasers of his meme coin at a black-tie gala Thursday night, demonstrating his willingness to cross what was once seen as an ethical red line: profiting off the presidency while in office.

Presidents of both parties have long granted special access to wealthy political donors and participated in private dinners to raise funds for their parties or their own campaigns. But campaign money comes with legal restraints, and donors must disclose donations to political candidates or committees.

Trump’s crypto venture is different: He and his family profit personally when people buy his meme coin, and crypto transactions are often shrouded in anonymity. The venture has collected millions of dollars in crypto transaction fees from the attendees eager to gain access to Trump, who has described himself as the “crypto president.”

Since the meme coin’s debut in January, Trump-affiliated businesses have received $312 million from crypto sales and $43 million in total fees, according to a Washington Post analysis of data through last week. Crypto wallets linked to Trump and his partners have earned about $3 million in transaction fees charged to coin buyers since the dinner was announced last month, The Post’s analysis found.

The White House has argued the dinner poses no conflict of interest because the president’s assets are in a blind trust managed by his adult sons. Asked whether the administration would commit to releasing a list of the dinner attendees, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Thursday she would “raise that question” internally. Leavitt argued that the event “is not a White House dinner” and that “the president is attending it in his personal time.”

The Chinese-born crypto billionaire Justin Sun, former National Basketball Association player Lamar Odom and a crypto investor known as “Ogle” are among the top 220 buyers of the meme coin who qualified to attend the Thursday dinner at Trump’s golf club in Virginia. Sun, who had been under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission over 2023 allegations that he had tried to manipulate markets, invested millions in one of Trump’s other crypto ventures after the November election. In February, shortly after Trump took office, the SEC asked a court to halt the case against the crypto baron. Sun did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this story….

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“Trump’s $600 million war chest: How he plans to wield his power in the midterms and beyond”

campaign finance

AP:

Between a barrage of executive orders, foreign trips and norm-shattering proclamations, Donald Trump has also been busy raking in cash.

The president has amassed a war chest of at least $600 million in political donations heading into the midterm elections, according to three people familiar with the matter. It’s an unprecedented sum in modern politics, particularly for a lame-duck president who is barred by the U.S. Constitution from running again.

Trump is keeping an aggressive fundraising schedule with the ultimate goal of raising $1 billion or more to back his agenda and hold the House and Senate next November, according to the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity to share internal details of the fundraising efforts.

The preoccupation with fundraising might seem highly unusual for a president who was notably averse to dialing for dollars when he first ran. But according to people familiar with his thinking, it makes perfect sense: By amassing money, Trump amasses power.

Trump is eager to reverse the tide of Democrats routinely outraising GOP candidates and wants to maximize his own impact as president. Any money left over after his term could help him maintain enormous influence over the Republican Party, cementing his status as its most influential kingmaker — and potential patron — through 2028 and beyond….

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“FTC probes Media Matters’ exchanges with ad groups, stoking fears of retribution”

authoritarian threats in US

CNN:

The Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday sent Media Matters for America a letter demanding communications between the progressive media watchdog and advertising entities as the commission probes whether the watchdog colluded with advertisers to pull funding from Elon Musk’s X.

Media Matters was notified in a letter dated May 20 from the FTC that it is being investigated, a source familiar with the letter told CNN. The letter, which CNN has viewed, directs Media Matters to turn over all documents, materials and communications with a range of ad entities and related organizations — including the World Federation of Advertisers and the Global Alliance for Responsible Media — regarding brand safety and disinformation, the source said.

Media Matters is a media watchdog whose reporting tracks conservative and far-right news publications and personalities. The organization was sued by Musk in 2023 after it published a report detailing antisemitic and pro-Nazi content on the social media platform he owns, X. That lawsuit accuses the media watchdog of hatching a “media strategy to drive advertisers from the platform and destroy X Corp.”

In keeping its request for assorted materials vague, the FTC is effectively throwing the kitchen sink at the wall to see what sticks, the source told CNN.

The move by the FTC sees the commission’s chair, Andrew Ferguson, make good on comments he made in December, mere days before Trump nominated him for the job.

“We must prosecute any unlawful collusion between online platforms, and confront advertiser boycotts which threaten competition among those platforms,” then-Commissioner Ferguson said about a different case…..

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“The weighty lesson from Arizona’s ‘fake electors’ stumble”

electoral college

Jason Willick in the Washington Post:

After the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, Donald Trump’s opponents had a dilemma. The president’s behavior had been egregious, but the Senate acquitted him in an impeachment trial. He had to be criminally charged — but for what? His role in the riot seemed to entail First Amendment-protected speech, such as sharing falsehoods about the 2020 election on social media and delivering a rowdy political speech on the Ellipse.

It took a while for Trump’s opponents to figure out a hook for a criminal prosecution: “fake electors.” In states Trump lost, such as Arizona and Michigan, his supporters had gathered in December 2020 to simulate an electoral college vote as if he had won. The “alternate electors,” as they were then called, got some media coverage, but no one confused them for the electors certified by state officials.

. . .

The idea is that sending Congress a slate of electors representing the losing candidate is a political act, not a crime. And in Arizona, Judge Sam J. Myers ruled that state prosecutors had given that defense short shrift. The Electoral Count Act is “central to the Defendant’s claims that they were acting lawfully and without an intent to defraud,” Myers wrote in orders released Monday. Yet “the actual text and provisions of the ECA were never provided to the grand jury.”

As a result, the judge concluded, the grand jury proceeding did not comply with due process. If the state’s Democratic attorney general, Kris Mayes, wants to press forward with her case, she’ll need to get the ruling reversed on appeal or go back to seek the indictment again. Mayes also said in February that she would appeal the judge’s finding that her prosecution might interfere with the electors’ free-speech rights.

Nor have liberal prosecutors been cruising to convictions of “fake electors” in other states. In the Michigan electors case, the Detroit News reported last year that “prosecutors have struggled to supply evidence to back up charges that made national headlines” in pretrial proceedings. In Nevada, a judge ruled that charges against Trump electors — filed in 2023 just before a statute of limitations ran out — were brought in the wrong place. That will move the trial to a more conservative jury pool.

Wisconsin’s justice department doubted that the Trump elector slate was criminal in 2022, only to bring charges in 2024 against operatives who organized it. Georgia’s case — which immolated spectacularly because of an ethics complaint against the district attorney — has paradoxically been the most successful, producing a handful of guilty pleas.

Some of these state-level prosecutions might still make their way to trial and conviction in the coming months and years. But even then, they will confront novel issues on appeal because of the First Amendment right to petition Congress and the ambiguity of the Electoral Count Act (which Congress clarified in 2022). At the end of it all, cases about the 2020 election probably won’t be resolved until the 2030s.

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“Trump’s crypto dinner cost over $1 million per seat on average”

chicanery, conflict of interest laws

NBC News:

More than 200 wealthy, mostly anonymous crypto buyers are coming to Washington on Thursday to have dinner with President Donald Trump. The price of admission: $55,000 to $37.7 million.

That’s how much the 220 winners of a contest to meet Trump spent on his volatile cryptocurrency token, $TRUMP, according to an analysis by the blockchain analytics company Nansen.

The top $TRUMP coin holders at a specific time — determined by the dinner’s organizers — secured a seat.

In total, the winners spent $394 million on Trump’s official cryptocurrency, Nansen found, though some have sold portions of or all of their holdings since the contest ended. The amount varied significantly by spender, with the top seven winners each spending more than $10 million and the bottom 24 each spending less than $100,000. A third of the winners — 67 of them — spent more than a million dollars, the research shows. The average winner spent $1,788,994.42.

Like many meme coins, $TRUMP’s value fluctuates wildly, according to CoinMarketCap, which tracks cryptocurrency prices. Nansen tracked how much each of the contest winners spent on their $TRUMP at the time they purchased it.

The top 220 contest winners were invited to the black-tie optional dinner at the Trump National Golf Club Washington, D.C. While the website for the contest claims that Trump “is appearing at the dinner as a guest and not soliciting any funds for it,” it also says that 80% of the $TRUMP coin project is owned by two Trump-affiliated companies, CIC Digital and Fight Fight Fight LLC.

The personal cryptocurrency and associated contest, which ended last Monday, adds to the litany of ways Trump has appeared to use the office of the presidency to profit personally. His business interests are in a trust controlled by his son Donald Trump Jr., and he has intertwined many of his family businesses with his activities as president, including holding events, like the crypto dinner, at his social clubs, and issuing exclusive political statements on his social media app Truth Social. …

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