Here’s a story the House January 6 Select Committee revealed yesterday, which we really don’t want you to miss.
On that day, Kimberly Guilfoyle reportedly got $60,000 to say nice things about her gross boyfriend Donald Trump Jr. for two whole minutes, as she was introducing him during the now-infamous hate rally that preceded the Trump Capitol Terrorist Attack.
This might seem unreasonable, and it seemed like it at first to us, but then we took a second to think of how difficult it would be to fill two minutes saying nice things about Donald Trump Jr. and then we were like OK yeah, maybe that is just the going rate for that.
This isn’t something that was revealed during the hearing, but rather that Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren said in an interview with Jake Tapper. But it was very much related to all the election “fundraising” Trump was doing in the weeks and months leading up to January 6, which the committee exposed at the end of yesterday’s hearings. “It’s a grift,” Lofgren told Tapper. “Sixty-thousand dollars for two and a half minutes,” she said.
“People were conned,” said Lofgren. “They were conned into believing that the election had been stolen.”
“The ‘Big Lie’ was also a big rip-off,” Lofgren said both in the interview and during the hearing.
During the hearing, Lofgren explained that Trump raised $250 million off his followers for an “official election defense fund.” Did that fund even exist? LOL please.
Here’s a big block quote summary from CNN on the presentation that came at the very end of yesterday’s hearings:
Instead, the committee claimed that most of the money raised went to the “Save America PAC,” which Trump created on Nov. 9 2020, less than a week after the election.
The PAC then made a series of large donations to a handful of other groups. More than $5 million went to Event Strategies Inc., the company that ran President Trump’s Jan. 6 rally on the ellipse that preceded the attack on the Capitol, according to the committee.
Also among the groups that received donations from Trump’s newly-created PAC was the Conservative Partnership Institute, a political organization led by former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows that the committee said received $1 million from the Save America PAC.
The committee also claimed that $1 million went to the America First Policy Institute, a conservative organization which employs several former Trump administration officials. More than $200,000 was also donated to the Trump Hotel Collection.
The Trump team sent out as many as 25 fundraising emails a day, according to the committee’s financial investigator Amanda Wick. “They knew the claims were false,” said Wick during the video played during Monday’s hearing.
“I don’t believe there is actually a fund called the Election Defense Fund,” said Hannah Allred, a former Trump campaign staffer, in a video played during Monday’s hearing.
In that same video presentation, Gary Coby, a former Trump campaign digital director, responded “yes” when asked if the election defense fund was a marketing tactic.
“Thirty minutes after the last fundraising email was sent, the Capitol was breached,” Lofgren said during Monday’s hearing.
Here’s that presentation, for your viewing edification:
As CNN notes, neither Lofgren nor committee chair Rep. Bennie Thompson said out loud that all this means Trump and Co. committed financial crimes. “We’re a legislative committee,” said Lofgren. “And it’s clear that he intentionally misled his donors, asked them to donate to a fund that didn’t exist and used the money raised for something other than what is said. Now it’s for someone else to decide whether that’s illegal or not. That’s not the purview of a legislative committee.”
Committee member Adam Schiff agreed that this is something the Department of Justice needs to investigate, but also said it’s not for him to say what is and what is not “crime.”
But you know how they are over there on MSNBC, they’re like “CRIME! CRIME! CRIME! CRIME! CRIME!” So here’s a tweet from MSNBC legal analyst Barb McQuade:
Whole bunch of people using words like “wire fraud,” actually.
Oh, but what if Trump really really believed he had won the election and grifted off that? Here’s some more TV legal analyzing, tearing apart the so-called “Costanza defense,” wherein George Costanza argued on “Seinfeld” that “it’s not a lie if YOU believe it.” As MSNBC host Ari Melber shows here, the committee has more than proven that Trump knew he was lying, from the very beginning, and he knows he’s lying now.
Or in the words of legal expert Daniel Goldman, who prosecuted one of Trump’s impeachments:
So, will Attorney General Merrick Garland do anything about it? He says they’re watching the hearings over at DOJ.
Hopefully they’re jotting down a few notes.
[CNN]
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