“Donor List Suggests Scale of Trump’s Pay-for-Access Operation”

campaign finance, campaigns, lobbying

NYT:

When the cryptocurrency entrepreneur Eric Schiermeyer heard that President Trump was holding small group dinners with major donors, he saw opportunity.

Mr. Schiermeyer reached out to a lobbyist with connections in Mr. Trump’s orbit, who arranged for him to attend a dinner with the president at his private Mar-a-Lago club on March 1 in exchange for donations to a pro-Trump PAC called MAGA Inc. totaling $1 million.

The personal and corporate donations were among dozens of seven- and eight-figure contributions to MAGA Inc. from crypto and other interests revealed in a campaign finance filing on Thursday night that hinted at the access Mr. Trump accords those willing to pay.

At the dinner, Mr. Schiermeyer, who had never given a federal political donation before, presented an idea for a cryptocurrency called “U.S.A. Token” that would be distributed to every citizen, according to interviews and a flier he distributed to attendees that sets out details of the proposal. He hoped it could be supported through a federal contract with his company.

“I don’t usually put time and attention on politics,” Mr. Schiermeyer said in a text exchange with The New York Times. But, he added, “I was able to say my piece, and the idea is clearly making the rounds, so mission accomplished from my view.”

While the Trump administration has not given Mr. Schiermeyer any indication it is pursuing the U.S.A. Token idea, the episode underscores the face time that Mr. Trump has been willing to grant to deep-pocketed interests seeking business, preferential treatment or protection from him and his administration.

It also reveals how lobbyists, political consultants and others in the influence industry have capitalized on Mr. Trump’s aggressive fund-raising while in office to deliver for clients and earn chits with a president who keeps close tabs on who is delivering cash and listens to their appeals. It is a cycle that has helped Mr. Trump fill the coffers of his political groups, defying the gravity that sometimes drags down the fund-raising of term-limited presidents….

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“The Great Political Money Gap; When it comes to attracting mega-donors, Republicans are crushing Democrats.”

campaign finance, campaigns

NYT:

There are many signs that the Democratic and Republican Parties are in different places. Here’s one: The main Republican presidential super PAC controls almost $200 million. The main Democratic presidential super PAC is still repaying millions of dollars it accepted from someone who is now a convicted felon.

Such is the state of big-dollar political fund-raising, as last night’s filings with the Federal Election Commission made clear. When it comes to attracting mega-donors, Republicans are crushing Democrats. That could mean a lot more ads for conservatives than for liberals in next year’s midterm elections.

MAGA Inc., President Trump’s super PAC, collected about $177 million in the first half of 2025, in large part from cryptocurrency interests eager to curry favor with Trump.

The corresponding group for Democrats, Future Forward, had a slightly different tie to crypto: It spent the last six months disbursing $3.4 million to what is known as the FTX Recovery Trust, repaying money it had accepted during the 2022 election cycle from crypto-exchange executives like Sam Bankman-Fried. (Last year, Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison after being convicted of stealing billions of dollars from his customers.)…

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“Top Biden Aide Had $4 Million Incentive to Secure a 2024 Win”

campaigns

NYT:

Mike Donilon, the longtime strategist and confidant for former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., told congressional investigators Thursday that he would have received a $4 million bonus had Mr. Biden won re-election last year.

That shows how Mr. Donilon held a financial interest in Mr. Biden’s remaining in the presidential race, all while Mr. Donilon was part of a very small inner circle of aides who kept damaging information from Mr. Biden. Mr. Donilon had also warned him that his “biggest issue is the perception of age.”

The admission from Mr. Donilon, revealed by a person briefed on his testimony who also confirmed that Mr. Donilon said he was paid $4 million for his work on the campaign, came during testimony before a House Republican-led Oversight Committee investigation into Mr. Biden’s mental acuity during his term in office. It was earlier reported by Axios.

Mr. Donilon was among the Biden aides who resisted calls for him to end his re-election campaign even after a debate performance that prompted a swell of opposition from within the Democratic Party. As recently as March, well after Mr. Biden left office, Mr. Donilon told The Harvard Political Review that Mr. Biden should have remained in the race and could still serve as president. “I still think he’s the best person to be president today,” Mr. Donilon said then….

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Breaking: Supreme Court, in Order Asking for Additional Briefing in Louisiana Voting Case, Appears to Put the Constitutionality of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act into Question

Supreme Court, Voting Rights Act

The Supreme Court just issued this order:

Louisiana had to create that second majority-minority district in order to comply with the Voting Rights Act, as it had been found to face Section 2 VRA liability for not creating that district. What the Court seems to be asking, without directly saying it, is whether Section 2 of the VRA, at least as to how it has been applied to require the creation of majority-minority districts in some circumstances, violates a colorblind understanding of the Constitution.

The stakes here are enormous; I was worried the Court would put the VRA’s constitutionality into question when there was this great delay in the Court ordering supplemental briefing. Something big was happening behind the scenes. And now we know.

This Court is more conservative than the Court that in 2013 struck down the other main pillar of the Voting Rights Act in the Shelby County case. This is a big, and dangerous, step toward knocking down the second pillar.

There was a LOOOOONG delay in SCOTUS issuing the supplemental briefing order, burying it after 5 pm on a Friday in August rather than at the end of the Supreme Court term when everyone was paying attention.

UPDATE: Page 36-38 of appellees’s brief, referenced in the order above, make it clear that Section 2’s constitutionality is being put into question:

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“Eligible Voters at Risk: Examining Changes to USCIS’s SAVE System.”

election administration

New issue brief from the Fair Elections Center:

Changes fueled by election-denier conspiracy theories are in the works for a system created by the Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”) nearly forty years ago to verify citizenship status and legal presence in the United States. DHS recently announced major modifications to its Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system, or SAVE, for the state and local election agencies that use it in the voting context (not to be confused with the anti-voter SAVE Act which is pending in Congress and fueled by the same conspiracy theories ). Most significantly, state and local agencies can now query the system using Social Security numbers and submit queries in bulk uploads. Though technical in nature, these changes may impact voters across the country, especially as more states sign up to use the retooled system.

The SAVE system is administered by DHS via U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (“USCIS”). Originally created by the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 and then expanded by the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, the SAVE system is used to verify or determine citizenship in response to inquiries from federal, state, and local officials, usually related to applications for public benefits. In recent years, state and local election officials in certain states have used SAVE to verify the citizenship of voter registrants and currently registered voters who provide a DHS-issued immigration identifier. User agencies sign a memorandum of agreement (“MOA”) with USCIS and, in the past, were charged a fee for each case they submitted to SAVE. Prior to the Trump administration, ten states had MOAs to use SAVE for voter registration and/or list maintenance purposes: Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Mississippi, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia….

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