The $64 million mystery: How a wave of anonymous donations is fueling the 2024 presidential campaign
From CBS News:
In 2020, a single anonymous donation from an organization called the “Impetus Fund” (which is absolutely a name that a supervillain would use for their Evil Company), totaled more than $64 million. The money was routed through a number of accounts, and was used to help Biden defeat Trump in 2020. Investigative reporting since 2020 has turned up little about the source of the funds. That’s probably fine, though. Why would Americans need to know who’s spending tens of millions of dollars to influence them?
Warning signs for Biden and Trump in latest campaign finance reports
From POLITICO:
The sky is falling! The end is nigh! The Biden and Trump campaigns have raised slightly less than the previous month. Clearly this is the end of civilization as we know it. How can democracy possibly survive, if Americans are only subjected to attack ads most of the time instead of all the time? In order to correct this grievous injustice, Biden has plans to travel across the country to get money from billionaires and celebrities. Phew!
Prosecutors ask judge to deny George Santos’ bid to have some fraud charges dropped
From The Associated Press:
More George Santos! Everyone’s favorite former Congressman is back in the news. Sadly, he’s not running again, but still. Santos has been indicted on 23 criminal charges, including defrauding campaign donors, lying to Congress, collecting unemployment while employed, buying designer clothing with campaign funds, and aggravated identity theft. Santos’ lawyers have asked that the aggravated identity theft charges be dropped, because they claim that he didn’t steal people’s identity, he’s just accused of overcharging the credit card info he was given. So not identity theft, just regular theft. Well, that’s alright then!
Congress blocked SEC guidance on crypto as industry lobbying surged
From OpenSecrets:
Regular readers may remember the steady drip of crypto news we’ve had over the past few months, as cryptocurrency firms pour millions of dollars into PACs. That’s crazy, huh?
Anyways, in completely unrelated news, Congress recently blocked a new SEC guidance that would discourage banks from holding crypto assets, and require them to track those assets as a potential liability (because, you know, it’s fake internet money that has a tendency to crash into nothing). Many of the Members of Congress who voted to block the guidance are top recipients of money from the cryptocurrency industry.
