David Corn's Blog, page 22

Another Santos Scandal? He Diverted Voter Registration Money to a GOP-Allied Gay Rights Site.

During Rep. George Santos’ second run for a congressional seat on Long Island—he lost his first—he helped raise money for and direct a political action committee called Rise NY that was set up in 2020 under New York State law. Its declared mission was to focus on voter registration, education, and turnout. The PAC collected over $430,000 in donations for its operations. Yet Santos, the disgraced Republican fabulist, used a large chunk of those funds—$55,800—for a purpose other than voter registration and engagement and sent this money to a Washington, DC, nonprofit to fund a new conservative gay rights site associated with Richard Grenell, a prominent gay Republican who served in the Trump administration and who endorsed Santos and helped him gather campaign money. 

Rise NY was officially headed by Santos’ sister, Tiffany, who was listed as its president and on its payroll. Nancy Marks served as the PAC’s treasurer, the same role she held on Santos’ House campaigns. Rise NY engaged in actions that the New York Times characterized as “unusual, if not a violation” of law, which included paying workers for Santos’ House campaign. As Newsday reported in an exposé of Rise NY, it made two payments totaling $5,200 to the landlord of the building where Santos lived in Whitestone, Queens. The PAC also sent $35,000 to Marks and two of her companies, reporting on its campaign filings that these payments were for “reimbursement” and “professional services.” When the PAC donated $62,500 each to the Nassau County Republican Committee and the Town of Hempstead Republican Committee, Santos personally handed the checks to Joseph Cairo, the Nassau County GOP chair—an indication Santos had a role with the PAC, though he had no official position with the group. Rise NY is one of the many elements of the bizarre Santos saga that has raised significant questions about his personal ethics and his handling of big amounts of money. 

“While I support gay rights, that’s not the purpose for Rise NY that was represented to me. I was told several times that Rise NY funds were going to efforts to register Republican voters in traditionally Democrat voting districts.”

One of the top recipients of money from Rise NY was the Liberty Education Forum, a small nonprofit in Washington that is affiliated with the Log Cabin Republicans, an organization of gay Republicans. The donations Rise NY sent the group had nothing to do with voter registration efforts. According to Charles Moran, a spokesperson for the forum, Rise NY made three payments of $18,600 to support a new project the group started called Outspoken Middle East, an international LGBTQ human rights program. Rise NY also paid the group $1,800 for three tickets to its 2021 annual gala.

Moran, an officer of both Log Cabin Republicans and the Liberty Education Forum, says that in the summer of 2021 he approached Santos, who was well known within gay Republican circles, and asked if Santos could help fund a program that would provide news coverage of the treatment of gay and lesbian people in the Middle East. “We had solicited support from George as any nonprofit would from people of influence,” Moran notes. He adds, “I don’t know what formally was George’s technical designation with Rise NY PAC. I do know he was involved in some way, shape, or form.”

Moran did not talk to anyone else at Rise NY PAC about the possible contribution. When the first donation from Rise NY came in, Moran recalls, he did not question why a voter registration outfit in New York state would send tens of thousands of dollars to a media project focused on gay rights overseas: “I did not look at the purpose of the mission of Rise NY…I looked at it legally. It is legal for a state PAC to make a donation to a nonprofit. So I took it.”

Brett Kappel, a campaign finance lawyer, says that New York, like most states, “allows PACs to spend their funds for any lawful purpose, short of converting the funds to personal use.” 

Grenell, who was Trump’s ambassador to Germany and then served as his acting director of national intelligence, was one of the initiators of Outspoken Middle East. He was also a key endorser of Santos during Santos’ successful congressional race. 

Rise NY made its first $18,600 donation to this initiative, according to its campaign filings, on September 13, 2021. This was two months before Grenell, in a guest column for Newsweek, announced the launch of Outspoken Middle East. The project, Grenell and its editor Chadwick Moore noted in this piece, would provide “a news and information platform with translations in Farsi and Arabic” and post articles from “a team of LGBTQ+ citizen journalists in Tehran, Kabul, Beirut and around the region and world to tell human stories about the realities of being gay in parts of the world that liberals and corporations have left behind.” (In the Newsweek article, Grenell and Moore took credit for launching Outspoken Middle East and assembling its contributors, but Moran says “it is not accurate at all to call [Grenell] a creator of Outspoken.” Outspoken Middle East has noted that Grenell is an adviser to the project.)

On October 4, 2021, Grenell was the featured guest at a fundraiser for Santos’ congressional campaign. In the ensuing six months, Rise NY made two more $18,600 donations to the Grenell-backed enterprise. In July 2022, Grenell officially endorsed Santos’ congressional bid. 

The Rise NY donations to the Liberty Education Forum were significant money. In 2020, the last year for which tax returns for this nonprofit are available, the group raised only $106,700. According to Moran, other donors helped fund Outspoken Middle East.

Most of the money that Rise NY pocketed came from two Republican funders. One was Andrew Intrater, a wealthy New York fund manager and cousin to sanctioned Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg. At Santos’ behest, Intrater also invested hundreds of thousands of dollars with a firm where Santos worked that was accused by the Securities and Exchange Commission of running a Ponzi scheme. Intrater donated $175,000 to Rise NY in several installments across 2021 and 2022. Robert Mangi, the president of a Long Island-based insurance company, was the other main backer of Rise NY, pumping in $150,000. 

In a statement provided to Mother Jones, Intrater noted he was surprised to learn that 40 percent of Rise NY’s funding had come from him and that Santos sent a significant portion of the PAC’s funds to a gay rights program in Washington, DC.  “While I support gay rights,” Intrater said, “that’s not the purpose for Rise NY that was represented to me. I was told several times that Rise NY funds were going to efforts to register Republican voters in traditionally Democrat voting districts. George introduced me to Rise NY but I didn’t discuss its activities with him after he made the introduction. Until the reports came out indicating that George’s sister was involved with Rise, I had no idea George or his people had anything to do with it other than having made the introduction to benefit the NY Republican party.”

In Intrater’s telling, Santos hit him up for money for a voter registration project in New York, without revealing his close connection to the endeavor, and then used a large amount of the PAC’s funds for an entirely different purpose. Intrater has told the New York Times that he “has reached out to the Department of Justice offering information on Mr. Santos and has also provided information about Santos to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Mangi did not respond to a request for comment. He told Newsday that Santos was a “fraud,” adding that “donors on all sides of the political aisle will now respond to requests for campaign donations with the question, ‘What do I really know about this person, issue, or PAC?'”

Asked about Santos using Rise NY funds to underwrite this gay rights project, Joseph Murray, an attorney for Santos, said, “It would be inappropriate to comment on this matter due to the ongoing investigations.” Santos is reportedly being investigated by local, state, and federal authorities. 

Santos’ congressional office did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did Tiffany Santos or Nancy Marks. 

Queried about the Santos donation to Outspoken Middle East, Grenell emailed Mother Jones a statement praising the work of this project and blasting “the gay left” for failing “the gay community with their anti-American campaigns in West Hollywood and Chelsea.” He acknowledged that Santos is a liar. But Grenell did not reply to a list of questions regarding his relationship to Santos.

When Santos won the election in November, Grenell celebrated, tweeting, “Historic. @Santos4Congress becomes the first openly gay Republican to win a congressional seat (all others came out after elected). It took too long to reach this moment. But big congratulations to George.” This onetime acting head of US intelligence has not tweeted about Santos since. 

Another Santos Scandal? He Diverted Voter Registration Money to a GOP-Allied Gay Rights Site

During Rep. George Santos’ second run for a congressional seat on Long Island—he lost his first—he helped raise money for and direct a political action committee called Rise NY that was set up in 2020 under New York State law. Its declared mission was to focus on voter registration, education, and turnout. The PAC collected over $430,000 in donations for its operations. Yet Santos, the disgraced Republican fabulist, used a large chunk of those funds—$55,800—for a purpose other than voter registration and engagement and sent this money to a Washington, DC, nonprofit to fund a new conservative gay rights site associated with Richard Grenell, a prominent gay Republican who served in the Trump administration and who endorsed Santos and helped him gather campaign money. 

Rise NY was officially headed by Santos’ sister, Tiffany, who was listed as its president and on its payroll. Nancy Marks served as the PAC’s treasurer, the same role she held on Santos’ House campaigns. Rise NY engaged in actions that the New York Times characterized as “unusual, if not a violation” of law, which included paying workers for Santos’ House campaign. As Newsday reported in an exposé of Rise NY, it made two payments totaling $5,200 to the landlord of the building where Santos lived in Whitestone, Queens. The PAC also sent $35,000 to Marks and two of her companies, reporting on its campaign filings that these payments were for “reimbursement” and “professional services.” When the PAC donated $62,500 each to the Nassau County Republican Committee and the Town of Hempstead Republican Committee, Santos personally handed the checks to Joseph Cairo, the Nassau County GOP chair—an indication Santos had a role with the PAC, though he had no official position with the group. Rise NY is one of the many elements of the bizarre Santos saga that has raised significant questions about his personal ethics and his handling of big amounts of money. 

“While I support gay rights, that’s not the purpose for Rise NY that was represented to me. I was told several times that Rise NY funds were going to efforts to register Republican voters in traditionally Democrat voting districts.”

One of the top recipients of money from Rise NY was the Liberty Education Forum, a small nonprofit in Washington that is affiliated with the Log Cabin Republicans, an organization of gay Republicans. The donations Rise NY sent the group had nothing to do with voter registration efforts. According to Charles Moran, a spokesperson for the forum, Rise NY made three payments of $18,600 to support a new project the group started called Outspoken Middle East, an international LGBTQ human rights program. Rise NY also paid the group $1,800 for three tickets to its 2021 annual gala.

Moran, an officer of both Log Cabin Republicans and the Liberty Education Forum, says that in the summer of 2021 he approached Santos, who was well known within gay Republican circles, and asked if Santos could help fund a program that would provide news coverage of the treatment of gay and lesbian people in the Middle East. “We had solicited support from George as any nonprofit would from people of influence,” Moran notes. He adds, “I don’t know what formally was George’s technical designation with Rise NY PAC. I do know he was involved in some way, shape, or form.”

Moran did not talk to anyone else at Rise NY PAC about the possible contribution. When the first donation from Rise NY came in, Moran recalls, he did not question why a voter registration outfit in New York state would send tens of thousands of dollars to a media project focused on gay rights overseas: “I did not look at the purpose of the mission of Rise NY…I looked at it legally. It is legal for a state PAC to make a donation to a nonprofit. So I took it.”

Brett Kappel, a campaign finance lawyer, says that New York, like most states, “allows PACs to spend their funds for any lawful purpose, short of converting the funds to personal use.” 

Grenell, who was Trump’s ambassador to Germany and then served as his acting director of national intelligence, was one of the initiators of Outspoken Middle East. He was also a key endorser of Santos during Santos’ successful congressional race. 

Rise NY made its first $18,600 donation to this initiative, according to its campaign filings, on September 13, 2021. This was two months before Grenell, in a guest column for Newsweek, announced the launch of Outspoken Middle East. The project, Grenell and its editor Chadwick Moore noted in this piece, would provide “a news and information platform with translations in Farsi and Arabic” and post articles from “a team of LGBTQ+ citizen journalists in Tehran, Kabul, Beirut and around the region and world to tell human stories about the realities of being gay in parts of the world that liberals and corporations have left behind.” (In the Newsweek article, Grenell and Moore took credit for launching Outspoken Middle East and assembling its contributors, but Moran says “it is not accurate at all to call [Grenell] a creator of Outspoken.” Outspoken Middle East has noted that Grenell is an adviser to the project.)

On October 4, 2021, Grenell was the featured guest at a fundraiser for Santos’ congressional campaign. In the ensuing six months, Rise NY made two more $18,600 donations to the Grenell-backed enterprise. In July 2022, Grenell officially endorsed Santos’ congressional bid. 

The Rise NY donations to the Liberty Education Forum were significant money. In 2020, the last year for which tax returns for this nonprofit are available, the group raised only $106,700. According to Moran, other donors helped fund Outspoken Middle East.

Most of the money that Rise NY pocketed came from two Republican funders. One was Andrew Intrater, a wealthy New York fund manager and cousin to sanctioned Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg. At Santos’ behest, Intrater also invested hundreds of thousands of dollars with a firm where Santos worked that was accused by the Securities and Exchange Commission of running a Ponzi scheme. Intrater donated $175,000 to Rise NY in several installments across 2021 and 2022. Robert Mangi, the president of a Long Island-based insurance company, was the other main backer of Rise NY, pumping in $150,000. 

In a statement provided to Mother Jones, Intrater noted he was surprised to learn that 40 percent of Rise NY’s funding had come from him and that Santos sent a significant portion of the PAC’s funds to a gay rights program in Washington, DC.  “While I support gay rights,” Intrater said, “that’s not the purpose for Rise NY that was represented to me. I was told several times that Rise NY funds were going to efforts to register Republican voters in traditionally Democrat voting districts. George introduced me to Rise NY but I didn’t discuss its activities with him after he made the introduction. Until the reports came out indicating that George’s sister was involved with Rise, I had no idea George or his people had anything to do with it other than having made the introduction to benefit the NY Republican party.”

In Intrater’s telling, Santos hit him up for money for a voter registration project in New York, without revealing his close connection to the endeavor, and then used a large amount of the PAC’s funds for an entirely different purpose. Intrater has told the New York Times that he “has reached out to the Department of Justice offering information on Mr. Santos and has also provided information about Santos to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Mangi did not respond to a request for comment. He told Newsday that Santos was a “fraud,” adding that “donors on all sides of the political aisle will now respond to requests for campaign donations with the question, ‘What do I really know about this person, issue, or PAC?'”

Asked about Santos using Rise NY funds to underwrite this gay rights project, Joseph Murray, an attorney for Santos, said, “It would be inappropriate to comment on this matter due to the ongoing investigations.” Santos is reportedly being investigated by local, state, and federal authorities. 

Santos’ congressional office did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did Tiffany Santos or Nancy Marks. 

Queried about the Santos donation to Outspoken Middle East, Grenell emailed Mother Jones a statement praising the work of this project and blasting “the gay left” for failing “the gay community with their anti-American campaigns in West Hollywood and Chelsea.” He acknowledged that Santos is a liar. But Grenell did not reply to a list of questions regarding his relationship to Santos.

When Santos won the election in November, Grenell celebrated, tweeting, “Historic. @Santos4Congress becomes the first openly gay Republican to win a congressional seat (all others came out after elected). It took too long to reach this moment. But big congratulations to George.” This onetime acting head of US intelligence has not tweeted about Santos since. 

The Corruption at Fox News Is Worse Than You Assumed

Editor’s note: The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter is written by David twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories about politics and media; his unvarnished take on the events of the day; film, book, television, podcast, and music recommendations; interactive audience features; and more. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial of Our Land here. Please check it out. And please also check out David’s new New York Times bestseller: American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy.

Isn’t it comforting to have your worst suspicions confirmed?

Last week, the release of a legal filing in Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation case against Fox News disclosed text messages, emails, and deposition testimony of Fox hosts and executives that provided a rare look at the inner workings of a propaganda outfit that masquerades as a news network. They revealed that Fox and its on-air personalities relentlessly validated and amplified Donald Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election, even though they knew his claim of a stolen election was utter bullshit. The network, which has billed itself as “fair and balanced,” endorsed and advanced Trump’s dangerous disinformation campaign and actively aided his effort to subvert American democracy. The result? A violent attempt at insurrection at the US Capitol.

By now, you may have read about the specific examples cited in the legal document. Fox’s top hosts and network executives were texting each other and noting that the election conspiracy theories—especially the crap pushed by lawyers Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani about Dominion supposedly rigging its voting machines to deny Trump victory—were bogus. Undeterred, Fox kept promoting this nonsense. When a Fox reporter fact-checked these notions and found them baseless, host Tucker Carlson texted host Sean Hannity, “Please get her fired. Seriously….What the fuck? I’m actually shocked…It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.” When then–White House correspondent Kristin Fisher vetted the absurd claims made by Powell and Giuliani, she received a call from her boss who told her the “higher-ups at Fox News were also unhappy with it” and Fisher “needed to do a better job of respecting our audience.”

According to the legal filing, the most bonkers of Fox hosts—Maria Bartiromo, Lou Dobbs, and Jeanine Pirro—provided a platform for the most deranged allegations, even when they had good reason to know they were unfounded. Bartiromo hosted Powell and gave credence to her cockamamie charges after Powell had sent her a bizarre email from a supposed source for the Dominion allegations who claimed, “I was internally decapitated, and yet, I live….The Wind tells me I’m a ghost, but I don’t believe it.”

Carlson repeatedly told his Fox colleagues that Trump was dangerous, suggesting the network could not honestly and accurately cover his election lies without risking terrible consequences—not for democracy but for Fox. “What [Trump]’s good at is destroying things,” he said in one message. “He’s the undisputed world champion of that. He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong.” In a text sent to his producer late on January 6, 2021, Carlson called Trump “a demonic force, a destroyer.” Did he ever share this view with his audience? Of course not. And even though he privately denigrated the 2020 election conspiracy theories as rubbish, Carlson still had Mike Lindell, the My Pillow guy, on his show and handed him a platform to spout his usual crackpot accusations about Dominion conspiring with the Deep State and other nefarious entities to falsify the vote count in Joe Biden’s favor.

“What [Trump]’s good at is destroying things. He’s the undisputed world champion of that. He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong.”

No other self-proclaimed news organization has ever been so fully discredited as Fox has been with this one legal brief. (You should read the document.) This is not the case of one reporter, one editor, or one story going off the rails. This is an indictment of an entire outfit. The full barrel of apples is rotten to the core. What this filing demonstrates is that the Fox universe is racked with corruption, greed, fear, irrationality, cynicism, and ignorance—from top to bottom. That ought to be the ultimate takeaway.

Let’s start at the top with Rupert Murdoch, the hands-on, 91-year-old ruler of this evil empire. The filing notes that Murdoch and his son Lachlan Murdoch were regular participants in the twice-daily editorial meetings for the network during the 2020 postelection period. One email Murdoch sent Suzanne Scott, the Fox CEO, on November 16, indicates that he helped shape the network’s strategy for covering Trump’s falsehoods. Responding to a Wall Street Journal article about Newsmax, a far-right website that was leaning hard into election conspiracy claptrap and that Fox execs eyed warily as competition, he wrote, “These people should be watched, if skeptically. Trump will concede eventually and we should concentrate on Georgia, helping any way we can. We don’t want to antagonize Trump further, but Giuliani taken with a large grain of salt. Everything at stake here.” Helping any way we can. For Murdoch that was a remit that did not call for honest and straightforward reporting.

Murdoch comes across as a real-life version of Succession’s Logan Roy, fully in charge of Fox, fully dominating the corporate hierarchy, and fully capable of stopping its coverage of what he privately called “really crazy stuff.” According to the filing, Murdoch at one point asked Scott whether it was “unarguable that high-profile Fox voices fed the story that the election was stolen and that January 6 [was] an important chance to have the results overturned.” Fox executives responded with 50 examples of such instances when it did precisely that. Yet Murdoch, as far as we know, never gave the order to knock off promoting Trump’s garbage. The network continued to push this unfounded paranoia. Why? The irrational ignorance of its viewers—and the network’s money-grubbing.

As I noted in my recent book, American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy, for seven decades the GOP has been both exploiting and encouraging the grievances, resentments, and fears of its conservative base. Fox has been doing the same for the past 26 years. It has presented a steady stream of paranoia and conspiracy theories to its audience, constantly declaring that the Democrats and the left are out to destroy America with death panels, a war on Christmas, CRT, Antifa, open borders, gay rights, the replacement of white people, climate change actions, a secret-socialist-Muslim president, and anything else that will inspire rage and fear. No surprise, the network’s viewers, with their extreme biases confirmed by Fox, believed all this bunk and craved more. Fox had long catered to viewers who lived in an alternative and frightening reality—Joe Biden is a pedophile commie!!!—and recklessly reinforced their fact-free anxieties. After Trump was declared the loser and falsely insisted the election had been rigged against him, these viewers, assuming the worst of the God-hating and USA-despising libs, fully accepted his lies and expected the network to bolster them and lead the charge.

Just as the GOP had become hostage to a base that had been radicalized over the years—thanks to the divisive and demagogic politicking of Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, and then Trump—Fox now was dependent upon a rabid and Trumpified audience for ratings and, thus, revenue. Its host and personalities feared the wrath of Fox viewers who had been conditioned by years of Fox’s Manichaean and skewed coverage to yearn for even bloodier red meat and who now demanded the network champion the Big Lie. They were enraged that Fox on election night called Arizona for Biden and then days later declared Biden the ultimate victor. And that ire, the Fox team worried, could lead these viewers to switch off Fox and head toward Newsmax.

The filing is filled with texts and emails between Fox executives and hosts emphasizing they had to kowtow to their incensed viewers. Carlson told Scott directly, “I’ve never seen a reaction like this, to any media company. Kills me to watch it.” In an exchange with Lachlan Murdoch, Scott stated that in order to maintain the “trust” of viewers, the network had to let them know “we hear them and respect them.” Which meant play to the Trump-fueled, unfounded belief that the election was crooked. In another message to another Fox exec, she termed calling Arizona for Biden a failure “to protect the brand.” In a different message, Scott noted, “The audience feels like we crapped on [them] and we have damaged their trust and belief in us…We can fix this but we cannot smirk at our viewers any longer.” Put simply, Fox could not tell the audience the truth. Their viewers could not handle it.

“The audience feels like we crapped on [them] and we have damaged their trust and belief in us…We can fix this but we cannot smirk at our viewers any longer.”

Carlson realized this. After Fox declared Biden the winner, he texted his producer: “Do the executives understand how much credibility and trust we’ve lost with our audience? We’re playing with fire, for real…an alternative like Newsmax could be devastating to us.”

Hannity viewed the situation the way a politician—not a journalist—would. He told fellow host Steve Doocy that the network was facing a “major backlash” from the audience, adding, “You don’t piss off the base.” He texted Carlson and Ingraham, “The network is being rejected.” Carlson responded, “I’ve heard from angry viewers every hour of the day all weekend, including at dinner tonight,” to which Hannity replied, “Same same same. Never before has this ever happened.”

Carlson, Hannity, Ingraham, and the rest of the Fox crew had trained their viewers to believe the worst of the Democrats and accept the flood of lies from Trump and his comrades on the right. Now they couldn’t flip the switch. And they worried about their livelihoods: If they told their viewers the truth—there was no significant election fraud; the conspiracy theorists were hurling hogwash—their audience would turn to Newsmax and the network would suffer financially. So, as Dominion’s lawyers claim in this brief, Fox hosts and execs spoonfed their viewers more lies and falsehoods, knowing this was all one big con.

This cynical hustle was in sync with Trump’s brazen attempt to torpedo the US Constitution and prevent the peaceful transfer of power. Days after the election, Steve Bannon, the former Trump adviser, sent a message to Bartiromo: “71 million voters will never accept Biden. This process is to destroy his presidency before it even starts; IF it even starts…We either close on Trump’s victory or del[e]gitimize Biden….THE PLAN.” Bannon was not passing information to a journalist looking to report on what the Trump crowd was plotting. This was a note shared with a partner who Bannon expected to join the Trump scheme to sabotage democracy. Given the evidence cited in this filing, Bannon was right to expect this.

To some, it is no big shock to discover that Fox is driven to inflame not inform its audience. But if there were ever any debate over that, this document settles the matter. For financial profit, Fox has for years radicalized its viewers and reaffirmed their most profound apprehensions and most malevolent biases. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Fox had to pander to what they had created or risk losing audience share. It chose the latter, opting for demagoguery over democracy to make a buck.

With these revelations, Fox ought to be permanently branded a fraud. Yet that won’t happen on the right. It remains too useful for Republicans and still has a hold on the party’s far-right and extremist base (which itself has a hold on Fox). On Monday, Axios reported that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has given Carlson exclusive access to 41,000 hours of Capitol surveillance footage from the January 6 riot. McCarthy, who once promised more accountability in Congress, is handing this booty only to a broadcaster who promoted the idea that the January 6 assault was a false flag operation mounted by the Deep State and who has been revealed in this filing as a scheming phony who knowingly promotes lies for profit.

In its brief, Dominion accurately declares: “Broadcasters make choices about what to air. While that platform comes with tremendous power, it also carries an obligation to tell the truth. Fox…decided to use its megaphone to spread falsehoods. It deceived millions of people.” Its coverage of the 2020 election was no anomaly. This episode illuminates the fundamental nature of Fox. Defamation lawsuits are often threats to reporters and journalism overall. But in the Dominion case against Fox, Murdoch’s company is being exposed for what it is: a disinformation-for-profit noise machine controlled by a vile billionaire and operated by a pack of jackals who distort and pervert the national discourse. Whatever happens with this case, that’s a win for the truth.

How the Case of Arrested FBI Agent Charles McGonigal Is Tied to a Russia-Linked Influence Effort

It was shocking news: Charles McGonigal, a former counterintelligence chief for the FBI, was arrested for his alleged role in two separate schemes. In one, he purportedly accepted $225,000 from an Albanian-American businessman, while he was still in the FBI, and did favors for that businessman and Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama. In the other, McGonigal, after he retired in 2018, allegedly provided investigative services to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who was sanctioned in 2018 for assisting the global “malign” activities of Putin’s regime. McGonigal’s indictments raise a boatload of questions and has spurred the bureau to scrutinize his actions when he was in charge of monitoring and thwarting the intelligence efforts of foreign powers (including Russia) aimed at the United States. In spy-movie parlance, the FBI will want to know when did he go bad (presuming he did go bad). 

The McGonigal case also has cast attention on one of the more bizarre foreign influence operations to occur in Washington, D.C., in recent years—a little-known and underreported Russia-linked effort to influence American politics about Albania.  

The tale of this influence operation is a complicated one that Mother Jones revealed in 2018. The main disclosure was that a mysterious shell company registered in Scotland called Biniatta Trade—which was created by two Belize companies that were partly controlled by two British companies that were each controlled by a different Russian national—paid $150,000 in early 2017 to a Washington lobbyist named Nick Muzin to promote in the United States the Democratic Party of Albania, the conservative party opposed to Rama’s government.

Muzin, who had worked on Trump’s winning presidential campaign, used his influence to gather support within the Republican Party and the US conservative movement for Lulzim Basha, the DPA leader, who was campaigning for prime minister. Muzin set up a visit to Washington for Basha that included meetings with GOP House members. Basha attended the National Republican Congressional Committee’s annual dinner, which featured Trump as the speaker. Muzin contacted Steve Bannon, then a top White House adviser, and other White House officials on Basha’s behalf. He arranged for Basha to be interviewed by Breitbart News. 

The aim was to round up backing in the United States for Basha, who was running in Albania as a populist nationalist and Trump fan and pushing the slogan “Make Albania Great Again.” As an ardent foe of Rama, a pro-West critic of Putin who had warned about Russia’s attempt to gain influence in the Balkans, Basha, presumably, was the Kremlin’s preferred candidate.  

At one point, Muzin brought Basha to a GOP fundraiser in Wisconsin where Trump was the main speaker. At this event—where a $20,000 donation earned an attendee a VIP seat and a photograph with Trump—Basha had his photo snapped with Trump. In Albania, the DPA widely disseminated the picture, and Basha claimed he’d had an “extraordinary meeting” with Trump.

The Trump connection that Muzin helped Basha forge did not win the day for the Albanian. In the Albanian election that year, Rama’s Socialist Party picked up seats and won a full majority of the parliament.  

In some ways, Muzin’s work for Basha and the DPA was not unusual. Foreign politicians and political parties often retain American lobbyists in the pursuit of support and influence in the United States. What was odd was that Biniatta Trade picked up much of the tab for Muzin’s toils.

There were no public signs this company was engaged in any commerce. It had a phony looking, generic website that was linked to similar websites for other companies that had no public footprints. (The Biniatta Trade website is no longer functioning.) The company shared a British phone number with an “international online dating service” that offered “beautiful Ukrainian women for dating and marriage.” 

The only information on Biniatta Trade we could find was a paper trail of other shell companies that eventually traced back to two Russians who had controlled defunct enterprises and who could not be reached. A Russia-linked shell company is not the usual source of funding for American lobbying efforts, and this uncommon arrangement suggested that some Russian entity was trying to influence US politics to benefit Basha and the DPA. 

A spokesman for Muzin told Mother Jones at that time that Muzin believed Biniatta Trade was a private company owned by supporters of the Democratic Party of Albania. Muzin declined to explain how he had first come into contact with Biniatta Trade. 

Last fall, a US intelligence finding noted that Russia had spent about $300 million since 2014 to influence politics in other countries to its favor. An administration source told the AFP that this included spending “around $500,000 to back Albania’s center-right Democratic Party in 2017 elections.”

How does all this connect to McGonigal? The Justice Department indictment alleges that in or by August 2017 McGonigal struck up a business relationship with “Person A,” a naturalized US citizen who had been born in Albania and who had worked for an Albanian intelligence service decades earlier. Albanian news reports have identified this person as Agron Neza, a New Jersey businessman. In a letter to Albanian outlets, Neza admitted giving McGonigal money and called Rama an “acquaintance,” but he said he handed the funds to McGonigal for personal reasons.

According to the indictment, McGonigal and Neza made several trips together to Albania, where McGonigal met with Rama, the prime minister, and “Person B,” who, according to the New York Times, was Dorian Ducka, a former Albanian official and an informal adviser to Rama. 

Neza allegedly paid McGonigal $225,000 in the fall of 2017, in three installments, including one in which Neza passed the FBI man $80,000 in cash in a car parked outside a New York City restaurant.

After McGonigal had met a second time with Rama, Ducka, according to the indictment, passed information to McGonigal about a “a U.S. citizen who had registered to perform lobbying work in the United States on behalf of an Albanian political party different from the one in which the Prime Minister was a member.” McGonigal conveyed this information to a Justice Department prosecutor for possible criminal investigation. He subsequently received more information about the lobbyist from Neza and Rama and transmitted the material to FBI investigators. 

On February 26, 2018, the indictment reads, “the FBI-NY formally opened a criminal investigation focused on the U.S. citizen lobbyist at defendant McGonigal’s request and upon his guidance.” Neza and Ducka later provided assistance to the inquiry. McGonigal, according to the Justice Department “had not at any time disclosed [to the FBI] his financial relationship with Person A [Neza] to the FBI, nor had defendant McGonigal disclosed his ongoing contacts with Person B [Ducka] as required.”

The timing of events described in the indictment indicate Muzin was the lobbyist McGonigal was targeting. As the New York Times has reported, “The events detailed in the indictment and other public records seem to match the description of the lobbyist Nicolas D. Muzin.”

It’s uncertain how far any FBI investigation of Muzin proceeded. No charges were ever brought against him. Muzin told the Times in a statement that he had “no reason to believe that I was the victim of this false investigation. But if I was, that is unfortunate, and I hope that justice will be served.” Muzin did not respond to numerous requests for comment from Mother Jones.

The Mother Jones report in 2018 sparked front-page stories in Albanian newspapers. The following year, Albanian prosecutors charged Basha with money laundering and falsifying documents in connection to the Biniatta Trade matter. Basha denied accepting Russian money. The case was later suspended under murky circumstances. His party has insisted it paid Muzin only $25,000, offering no explanation of why another entity (that is, Biniatta Trade) would pay a US lobbyist a hefty amount to help the DPA.

In the 2021 Albanian parliamentary elections, Rama led his party to another victory over Basha’s DPA and earned a third term as prime minister. Basha left the DPA a year ago and was replaced by the party’s founder, Sali Berisha, who is barred from entering the United States due to what the State Department says is his “involvement in significant corruption.”

There remain plenty of questions about this episode. Why was the Albanian government so worried about the pro-DPA lobbying effort? What information did it pass to McGonigal? Did it involve the funding that went to Muzin? Did the FBI fully investigate Muzin? Did that inquiry include tracing the origins of the money that underwrote his lobbying? There still has been no explanation of why a mysterious Russia-linked shell company paid for a Republican lobbyist to use his clout with the GOP and conservatives to assist a right-wing Albanian political party.

The intersection of McGonigal’s tale and that of the financing of Muzin’s lobbying by Biniatta Trade makes two mysterious stories even more so. A US lobbyist received money tied to Russia to help a political party in a small Balkan nation. And an allegedly crooked FBI agent was involved in investigating that lobbyist, seemingly at the behest of a rival Albanian party. Albania, like Russia, is famously corrupt, wracked with allegations that many officials, including judges and prosectors, are on the take. The merged sagas of Biniatta Trade and Charles McGonigal show how easily that corruption infiltrated the United States.

Columbia Journalism Review’s Big Fail: It Published 24,000 Words on Russiagate and Missed the Point

Misdirection, an essential tool for magicians, is not usually a component of media criticism. But in a lengthy critique of the coverage of the Trump-Russia scandal published this week by the Columbia Journalism Review, veteran investigative reporter Jeff Gerth deflects attention from the core components of Russiagate, mirroring Donald Trump’s own efforts of the past six years to escape accountability for his profound betrayal of the nation. Though Gerth’s target is media outlets, particularly the New York Times (where he worked for 29 years), Gerth ends up bolstering Trump’s phony narrative that there was no Russia scandal, just merely a hoax whipped up by reckless reporters and Trump’s enemies in the press, with the assistance of the Deep State. 

In a massive 24,000-word, four-part article, Gerth dissects how the Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and other news organizations during the 2016 election and afterward reported on Trump’s and his campaign’s interactions with Russia. (He briefly references, without criticism, the story I published that first revealed the existence of the dossier compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele and that reported that the FBI was investigating its allegations.) Gerth does probe genuine errors committed by his former employer and others. The Times, for instance, reported shortly before the 2016 election that the FBI’s investigation had found no link between Trump and Russia, when the bureau had barely begun its inquiry and had reached no final conclusions. And after the election, the Times produced a report in early 2017 that seemingly went too far in the opposite direction when it reported that US intelligence had evidence that “Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election.” (Trump’s campaign chair, Paul Manafort, we later learned, had been huddling with a suspected Russian intelligence official during the campaign, but FBI officials handling the Russian investigation at the time saw this Times article as going too far.)

Ultimately Gerth does a disservice by failing to cast Russiagate accurately. Putin’s attack succeeded, with help from Trump and his crew. That has always been the big story.

Gerth finds plenty of ammo for his assault on the media. But here’s where he goes wrong: He misrepresents the scandal that is the subject of the media coverage he is scrutinizing. He defines the Trump-Russia affair by only two elements of the tale: the question of Trump collusion with Moscow and the unconfirmed Steele dossier. This is exactly how Trump and his lieutenants want the scandal to be perceived. From the start, Trump has proclaimed “no collusion,” setting that as the bar for judging him. That is, no evidence of criminal collusion, and he’s scot-free. And he and his defenders have fixated on the Steele dossier—often falsely claiming it triggered the FBI’s investigation—to portray Trump as the victim of untrue allegations and “fake news.” Gerth essentially accepts these terms of the debate. 

Yet the focus on collusion and the Steele material has been a purposeful distraction meant to obscure the basics of the scandal: Vladimir Putin attacked the 2016 election in part to help Trump win, and Trump and his aides aided and abetted this assault on American democracy by denying such an attack was happening. Trump provided cover for a foreign adversary subverting a US election. Throughout the thousands and thousands of words Gerth generates, he downplays or ignores these fundamentals and how the media in 2016 covered them (which was shoddily). Instead, he zeroes in on the reporting related to collusion and Steele. In doing so, he offers an examination predicated on a skewed view of reality.

Gerth sets off a worrying signal in the fifth paragraph of this opus, when he writes that there was “an undeclared war between an entrenched media, and a new kind of disruptive presidency, with its own hyperbolic version of the truth.” Hyperbolic version of the truth? What does that mean? Gerth does acknowledge that the Washington Post “has tracked thousands of Trump’s false or misleading statements,” but to cast Trump’s lies as “hyperbolic” truth—as if there are two morally equivalent sides here—indicates this analysis is not going to fare well. (Trump, of course, lied repeatedly about his doings in Russia.)

Throughout the four parts, Gerth lowballs the Russian attack on the election and Trump’s assistance. He quotes academic studies that conclude the secret Russian campaign to exploit social media—Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube—to influence the election did not have a significant measurable impact. Yet he barely mentions the Russian hacking operation that led to WikiLeaks releasing daily derogatory material about Hillary Clinton in the final month of the campaign—including a trove of stolen documents dumped on the day the Washington Post revealed Trump’s Access Hollywood comments. (That move appeared to be a naked attempt to distract from Trump’s “grab ’em by the pussy” remark.) This is where Moscow undoubtedly got its biggest bang, producing weeks of negative stories that prevented the Clinton campaign from advancing its own messaging. The American political press eagerly lapped up these tidbits without highlighting the larger story that the scoops were the results of Russian information warfare mounted to shape the election. In a race as close as 2016, those weeks of bad press were likely one of several decisive factors that determined the outcome.

And Gerth does not acknowledge how Trump and his campaign assisted Moscow’s attack. He writes that “Clinton and her campaign would secretly sponsor and promote an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that there was a secret alliance between Trump and Russia,” suggesting the media assisted this underhanded plot. But, in a sense, there was a secret alliance. At least, in a wink-and-a-nod fashion. In June 2016—after Trump for months on the campaign trail had defended or spoken highly of Putin—his top advisers (Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Manafort) met in Trump Tower with a Russian emissary who, they were told, would deliver them dirt on Clinton. In the emails setting up this rendezvous, the Trump men were informed that this meeting was arising from a secret Kremlin effort to help Trump. (“I love it,” Trump Jr. emailed the business associate who helped broker this get-together.)

Gerth accurately notes that, as far as we know, the meeting yielded no solid opposition research on Clinton for the Trump campaign to use. He thus describes the meeting as a flop. But he misses the point: With this confab, Team Trump signaled to Moscow that it was willing to accept Putin’s covert assistance. It did not report to the FBI or anyone else that the Kremlin was aiming to intervene in the election. This may not have been collusion; it was complicity. (The New York Times admirably broke the news of this meeting a year later.)

The complicity got worse. The following month, as the Democratic convention was about to convene, WikiLeaks dumped thousands of documents and emails Russian hackers had pilfered from the servers of the Democratic National Committee. The hack had been publicly revealed weeks earlier, and cybersecurity experts had fingered the Russians as the culprits. At the convention, Clinton aides pushed the plausible contention that Moscow was doing this to help Trump. Gerth depicts this move as the campaign promoting “the Russian narrative to the media”—as if it was improper. 

Yet he ignores what the Trump campaign did. Manafort and Trump Jr. denied Russia was behind this dirty trick. They insisted the Clinton camp was peddling a hoax. But these Trump advisers, who had attended the meeting with the Russian emissary, had been told Moscow wanted to clandestinely help Trump. They had no factual basis for their denials. Rather, more than most people, they had reason to believe the Russians were indeed behind this. Here was the Trump campaign aiding Putin by disseminating baseless information. Gerth, though, is concerned only with the Clinton campaign reaction. (He does note that Trump infamously called on Russia to hack Clinton to find the purportedly personal emails she had destroyed after leaving the State Department, but he characterizes this as a “playful” quip. He fails to mention the crucial fact that hours after Trump made that statement Russian hackers, according to special counsel Robert Mueller, did try to penetrate Clinton’s computers.)

Trump’s denials of the Russian attack, which continued through the 2016 campaign, were consequential. With the GOP presidential nominee declaring no such thing was occurring, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to join President Barack Obama in developing a robust and bipartisan response to Putin’s assault. Trump might not have been directly colluding with Putin, but he was running interference for him. This was a narrative the media largely missed, and now it escapes Gerth’s attention.

Throughout his long exegesis, Gerth downplays the interactions between the Trump gang and Russia. He does so regarding Trump’s secret effort through much of the 2016 campaign to strike a deal to develop a tower in Moscow that could bring him hundreds of millions of dollars. (A matter Trump lied about to the public.) And he does so regarding Manafort’s relationship with Konstantin Kilimnik, a onetime business associate based in Ukraine.

In 2020, the Senate Intelligence Committee, then chaired by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), released a bipartisan report that said that during the campaign Manafort “directly and indirectly communicated with Kilimnik (as well as Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska and several pro-Russian oligarchs in Ukraine). The report characterized Kilimnik as a “Russian intelligence officer” and stated that he “likely served as a channel to Manafort for Russian intelligence services.” Manafort, according to the committee, “sought to secretly share internal Campaign information with Kilimnik.” But that wasn’t all. Kilimink pressed Manafort to secure Trump’s endorsement of a proposal that would hand Russia influence over a large swath of Eastern Ukraine. Andrew Weissmann, a prosecutor for Mueller’s investigation, later called this deal the “quo” that Putin wanted for the “quid” of helping Trump’s campaign. Gerth pays this no notice.

Ditto for another potentially explosive disclosure from the committee’s report. It revealed, “The Committee obtained some information suggesting Kilimnik may have been connected to the [Russian intelligence’s] hack and leak operation targeting the 2016 U.S. election.” And the report noted that the committee found “two pieces of information” that “raise the possibility” that Manafort himself was tied “to the hack-and-leak operations.” The report’s discussion of that information was redacted. Whether or not this was confirmation of collusion, it was a big deal: Trump’s campaign chair and his Russian intelligence friend possibly involved with Moscow’s attack on the United States. Yet Gerth neglects to mention the more eye-popping findings related to Kilimnik and Manafort. 

Instead, he emphasizes that there has been no public information that proves the Senate panel’s assessment of Kilimnik or the Treasury Department’s subsequent statement in 2021 that Kilimnik was “a Russian and Ukrainian political consultant and known Russian Intelligence Services agent implementing influence operations on their behalf”—as if to dismiss this entire part of the story. 

The Senate Intelligence Committee also affirmed that Trump had assisted Putin’s plot against America: “The Trump Campaign publicly undermined the attribution of the hack-and-leak campaign to Russia and was indifferent to whether it and WikiLeaks were furthering a Russian election interference effort.” This is another key point that Gerth does not address. 

For Gerth, the whole Trump-Russia scandal is mainly just a mess, with the Times and other news outfits misreporting the Steele dossier and often overstating the case for collusion. He does score points on these fronts, and readers who care about media reliability will find much to ponder in this long takedown. But ultimately Gerth does a disservice by failing to cast Russiagate accurately. Putin’s attack succeeded, with help from Trump and his crew. That has always been the big story. The media did miss much of that or got it wrong, especially during the 2016 campaign. Gerth fails by ignoring that failure.

His ultimate hot-take is that this supposed media failure on the Russia investigation triggered Trump’s attack on journalists (“enemy of the people!”) and widespread public distrust in news organizations. Yet the loss of trust in the media is nothing new. It’s been declining steadily since 1978, long before reporters began pursuing Trump and Russia stores. And the Pew Research Center notes that trust in national news organizations has precipitously dropped among Republicans since 2016, not all Americans. 

What’s worse is that Gerth ties this questionable conclusion to Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. He writes:

After the [2020] election, Trump refused to acknowledge the results, seeing them as the latest chapter in the “hoax,” or “witch hunt,” that began with Russia… As Trump became more isolated and undeterred by court rulings and news accounts that shot down his claims the election was rigged, he listened to people who, like him, had been caught up in the Russia inquiry. One was Giuliani and another was Flynn.

Gerth seems to be suggesting that the Times and other media helped create the monster that tried to annihilate the constitutional order.

If the goal of media criticism is to ensure that journalists convey an accurate picture of reality to news consumers, Gerth falls far short of that mark. His version of Russiagate echoes Trump’s distorted narrative and lets the man who assisted an attack on the United States off the hook. Trump may have been the victim of occasionally errant reporting. But he was no victim of a hoax or an off-the-rails media witch hunt. He helped an adversary sabotage an American election. The true media failure is that Trump got away with it and that articles like this one that you are now reading are still necessary. 

Top illustration: Dmitry Azarov/Sipa/AP; Carolyn Kaster/AP (2);  Jeff Roberson/AP

George Santos Relative Says They Never Gave $5,800 Reported by the Campaign: “I’m Dumbfounded”

Last week, Mother Jones reported that more than a dozen top donors to Rep. George Santos’ first congressional campaign did not appear to exist. The donations from people whose names or addresses could not be confirmed totaled more than $30,000. This pattern of questionable contributions, Mother Jones has learned, extends to Santos’ successful campaign last year.

According to Santos’ campaign filings with the Federal Election Commission, his recent campaign pulled in more than $45,000 from relatives who lived in Queens. This included a mail handler who gave more than $4,000, a painter who donated the maximum of $5,800, and a student who also contributed $5,800. One of Santos’ relatives, who was recorded as giving $5,800, says that they did not make any donation to Santos.  

When a Mother Jones reporter contacted Santos’ sister on Tuesday, she would not confirm whether she or her relatives had made the contributions attributed to them by Santos’ campaign.

On Tuesday, a Mother Jones reporter visited the Queens home of this relative. Informed that two donations of $2,900 each were listed under this person’s name and address in Santos’ campaign finance reports, the relative, who asked not to be identified, said, “I’m dumbfounded.” The relative had no idea where the money for these donations came from and remarked, “It’s all news to me.” This person added,  “I don’t have that money to throw around!”

The relative’s account raises the possibility that money was improperly donated to Santos’ most recent campaign. Under federal campaign finance law, it is illegal to make a contribution using a false name or the name of someone else. “It’s called a contribution in the name of another,” Saurav Ghosh, the director for federal campaign finance reform at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan watchdog group, recently told Mother Jones. “It’s something that is explicitly prohibited under federal law.”

Neither Santos nor his attorney replied to requests for comment. 

Santos’ 2022 campaign filings list his sister Tiffany giving more than $5,000. (She also ran Rise NY, a political action committee that paid her more than $21,000.) When a Mother Jones reporter contacted her on Tuesday, she would not confirm whether she or her relatives had made the contributions attributed to them by Santos’ campaign. Last month, the Daily Beast reported that New York court records show that Tiffany was facing potential eviction for failure to pay rent.

In the previous story, Mother Jones detailed instances of suspicious donations to Santos’ 2020 campaign, which he lost by 12 points. The examples included maximum contributions from Victoria and Jonathan Regor, who were listed as residing at 45 New Mexico Street in Jackson Township, New Jersey. A search of various databases found no one in the United States named Victoria or Jonathan Regor. Moreover, that address does not exist, according to Google Maps and a resident who lives on that street. One of Santos’ New York relatives is named Victoria Devolder Rego. There is no record of her living on New Mexico Street. (Santos’ recent campaign reported donations made under the name of Victoria Devolder for $5,800.)

Santos’ 2020 campaign finance reports also listed Stephen Berger as a $2,500 donor and noted that he was a retiree who lived on Brandt Road in Brawley, California. But the homeowner who lives at that address, William Brandt, a prominent rancher and Republican donor, said, through a spokesperson, that he “does not know Stephen Berger nor has Stephen Berger ever lived” at the address listed in Santos’ FEC filings. Brandt also said he never contributed to Santos. 

According to FEC records, a donor named Stephen Burger contributed $21,600 to Santos’ campaign and political committees supporting Santos during the 2022 campaign. The address listed for him could not be confirmed through public records. 

In the requests for comment sent to Santos and his lawyer, Mother Jones inquired about the Burger donations.

The questions sparked by contributions to Santos’ campaign add to a number of money mysteries dogging Santos. He has yet to identify the source of $705,000 he loaned his 2022 campaign. Nor has he explained his curious personal finances. In 2020, he declared on his financial disclosure form that he had made $55,000 in salary that year working for a company that organized investor conferences. In 2022, his financial disclosure filing stated that he had made between $3.5 million and $11.5 million through a company he set up in May 2021, after another firm he worked for had been accused by the Securities and Exchange Commission of operating a Ponzi scheme. Santos has not detailed how the firm he created generated so much money for him in such a short time. And he has repeatedly lied about his career, education, family history, and much more. 

On Tuesday, Santos said he would recuse himself from his committee assignments—House Speaker Kevin McCarthy had placed him on the Small Business and Science committees—until his assorted ethics issues are resolved. Last week, Nancy Marks resigned as Santos’ campaign treasurer. She had held this post for both his 2020 and 2022 efforts. She has been treasurer for many Republican candidates and political action committees and also struck a curious business deal with Santos in 2021.

As Mother Jones previously reported, Marks and her relatives contributed more than $30,000 to Santos’ 2022 campaign. This included Marks’ two children who were, respectively, 19- and 22-year-old students when they started donating to Santos, according to public records. They and other relatives ended up maxxing-out at $5,800 each. Marks’ family members gave to no other candidates during the 2022 campaign. Marks has not responded to repeated requests for comment.

Several complaints regarding Santos’ campaign finances have been filed with the FEC. He is under investigation by local, state, and federal law enforcement. The Justice Department recently told the FEC to stand down as federal prosecutors pursue a criminal investigation of Santos’ campaign finance practices. 

Additional reporting by Isabela Dias

We Tried to Call the Top Donors to George Santos’ 2020 Campaign. Many Don’t Seem to Exist.

In September 2020, George Santos’ congressional campaign reported that Victoria and Jonathan Regor had each contributed $2,800—the maximum amount—to his first bid for a House seat. Their listed address was 45 New Mexico Street in Jackson Township, New Jersey.

A search of various databases reveals no one in the United States named Victoria or Jonathan Regor. Moreover, there is nobody by any name living at 45 New Mexico Street in Jackson. That address doesn’t exist. There is a New Mexico Street in Jackson, but the numbers end in the 20s, according to Google Maps and a resident of the street.

Santos’ 2020 campaign finance reports also list a donor named Stephen Berger as a $2,500 donor and said he was a retiree who lived on Brandt Road in Brawley, California. But a spokesperson for William Brandt, a prominent rancher and Republican donor, tells Mother Jones that Brandt has lived at that address for at least 20 years and “neither he or his wife (the only other occupant [at the Brandt Road home]) have made any donations to George Santos. He does not know Stephen Berger nor has Stephen Berger ever lived at…Brandt Road.”

The Regor and Berger contributions are among more than a dozen major donations to the 2020 Santos campaign for which the name or the address of the donor cannot be confirmed, a Mother Jones investigation found. A separate $2,800 donation was attributed in Santos’ reports filed with the Federal Election Commission to a friend of Santos who says he did not give the money.

Under federal campaign finance law, it is illegal to donate money using a false name or the name of someone else. “It’s called a contribution in the name of another,” says Saurav Ghosh, the director for federal campaign finance reform at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan watchdog group. “It’s something that is explicitly prohibited under federal law.”

These questionable donations, which account for more than $30,000 of the $338,000 the Santos campaign raised from individual donors in 2020, have not been previously cited in media reports. Mother Jones identified them by contacting (or trying to contact) dozens of the most generous donors to Santos’ 2020 campaign, which he ended up losing by 12 points. 

Santos did not respond to a detailed list of questions Mother Jones sent to his lawyer and his congressional office that included names of donors whose identities could not be verified.

The donations are the latest in the Long Island fabulist’s seemingly endless series of political mysteries. Santos has already been caught lying about various elements of his biography, including the schools he attended, his religion, his previous employment, his family history, his mother’s death, and having been a volleyball star. He also has yet to explain how he acquired the more than $700,000 he loaned his most recent congressional campaign. 

During the 2020 campaign, he reported making only $55,000 a year in salary in a federal financial disclosure. Yet in September 2022, he reported that he had made between $3.5 million and $11.5 million from a company he had formed in 2021 after the Florida investment firm where he worked was accused in a complaint by the Securities and Exchange Commission of operating a Ponzi scheme. Soon after, as Mother Jones has reported, Santos and other veterans of the Florida company—none of whom were named in the SEC’s complaint—created a political consulting company that recruited Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s most recent Republican challenger as a client.

The contribution is one of more than a dozen major donations to the 2020 Santos campaign for which the name or the address of the donor cannot be confirmed, a Mother Jones investigation found. 

During Santos’ first run for Congress, only about 45 people maxed out to his campaign during the primary and general elections. In nine instances, Mother Jones found no way to contact the donor because no person by that name now lives at the address listed on the reports the Santos campaign filed with the FEC. None had ever contributed to a candidate before sending Santos the maximum amount allowed, according to FEC records. Nor have any of these donors contributed since. The Santos campaign’s filings list the profession of each of these donors as “retired.”

Two other donors who contributed $1,500 and $2,000, respectively, were listed in Santos’ FEC filings as retirees residing at addresses that do not exist. One was named Rafael Da Silva—which happens to be the name of a Brazilian soccer player.

Another suspicious donation was attributed to a woman who shares the name of a New York doctor who has made dozens of donations to Democrats. The Manhattan address listed for this donation does not exist. The doctor did not respond to a request for comment.

The donations came to the Santos campaign through WinRed, an internet-based service many GOP candidates use to receive contributions. A GOP operative familiar with WinRed confirmed that a person must list his or her name and occupation when donating through the site to comply with federal election laws, but the credit card he or she uses does not have to match that name. 

An additional maxed-out donor to Santos’ 2020 campaign tells Mother Jones that he did not make the $2,800 contribution attributed to him on Santos’ FEC filings. This person, who asked not to be identified, says that he had made a small contribution to Santos in early 2020. Santos, he notes, is a friend who supported him while he went through a divorce and battled cancer. 

His small contribution via WinRed does appear in an FEC filing, and he says that this week he located a record of it on his debit card statement. He adds that he could find no record on his debit or credit card statements of the $2,800 attributed to him in both WinRed and Santos FEC filings. The initial small-dollar donation that he made on WinRed accurately listed his employment information. The $2,800 WinRed contribution made months later listed a different place of work for him: an aborted hand sanitizer venture that only he and Santos had worked on together.

Last week, the friend contacted Santos about the $2,800 donation. Santos, he says, warned him about speaking to reporters and asserted that the media was pursuing clicks, not the truth. According to the friend, Santos told him over the phone that any donation he didn’t agree to would be reimbursed.

After the friend subsequently advised Santos to talk to Mother Jones for this story, Santos texted him, “I’m letting my legal team handle this stuff. I’ve never been involved in the financial aspect or the filing aspects of the campaign.”

One of the eight supposed retirees who contributed the maximum amount to Santos is Carlos Suarez. He is listed in Santos’ FEC filings as residing in a two-unit building in Flushing, New York. According to a resident at that address, no one named Carlos Suarez lives there. She says she does not know anyone by that name. A Nexis search found no Carlos Suarez residing within the zip code.

A second retiree named Steven Caruso who topped out to Santos is listed on Santos’ FEC records as living on West Fingerboard Road in New York City. There is no West Fingerboard Road in Manhattan, but there is one on Staten Island. The home there that corresponds to the street address on the FEC filings belongs to a Polish immigrant. He tells Mother Jones that no Steven Caruso lives at his address and that he knows nobody by that name. Public records show no Steven Caruso ever residing at the address. 

The retirees listed as big donors for Santos include Jason and Lesley Goodman. They jointly donated $5,600 in late September 2020. A search of public records unearthed no one named Lesley Goodman living in New York. According to Santos’ FEC filings, the Goodmans reside at 220 Central Park South, a luxury skyscraper on Billionaires’ Row. The building’s penthouse sold for a record-breaking $238 million in 2019. Two employees at 220 Central Park South said that no one named Jason Goodman lives in that building.

These donations suggest a troubling pattern. In campaign filings, names and addresses of contributors are occasionally wrongly recorded. Campaigns do have an obligation to file accurate reports, and they often make efforts to confirm information for major donors, people with whom they want to maintain contact. It is unusual to find a significant number of high-level donors on a campaign filing who cannot be identified or located. The existence of such donations raises questions about the source of these contributions. Talking Points Memo has also reported a case of a Santos donor being charged for contributions he or she did not approve.

Brett Kappel, a campaign finance attorney with the law firm Harmon Curran, explains that it is a campaign treasurer’s duty to examine contributions for evidence of illegality. “If the treasurer determines that a contribution was made illegally in the name of another person,” Kappel says, “the treasurer is supposed to refund the contribution within thirty days.”

Nancy Marks, a veteran Republican campaign operative, served as Santos’ treasurer in 2020 and 2022. On Wednesday, Santos’ campaign committees filed paperwork with the FEC stating that Thomas Datwyler was replacing Marks. (Marks did not respond to requests for comment.)

But as Mother Jones reported, Datwyler’s attorney said that Datwyler had told Santos’ team that he did not want the job. For now, Santos appears to be effectively without a treasurer. On Friday, Datwyler sent a letter to the FEC requesting the commission refer the matter to the “appropriate law enforcement agency to determine whether a crime has occurred.” Also that day, the Justice Department asked the FEC to hold off on any enforcement action against Santos, according to the Washington Post—a sign the feds are proceeding with their investigation of Santos.

If any of these contributions becomes of interest to the local, state, and federal investigators now mounting probes of Santos, these investigators could potentially obtain records from WinRed that include the credit card numbers used to make these donations and determine if the names of the donors match those of the credit card holders. Gerrit Lansing, who launched WinRed in 2019, and other executives at his company did not respond to a request for comment.

Mother Jones did contact several top donors to Santos’ first campaign who confirmed they had made their contributions. One reported giving to the Santos campaign in 2020 after requesting that a campaign fundraiser have someone from the National Republican Congressional Committee contact him and vouch for Santos. Within an hour, the donor said, a man who identified himself as being with the NRCC called to affirm its support for Santos. “I had and still have no reason to believe the call was not legitimate,” the donor says.

The Santos fundraiser later arranged for this donor to have breakfast with Santos at a restaurant about an hour’s drive from the donor’s home. The donor arrived for the meeting, but Santos stood him up and, afterward, ignored his calls, according to the donor. Santos later phoned this donor to ask for more money. He did not give again.

Additional reporting by Russ Choma

Remembering Victor Navasky, the Unflappable Ringmaster of The Nation

It was a usual day in the offices of the Nation, a collection of cluttered warrens overflowing with stuffed filing cabinets, piles of books, and file folders containing who-knows-what in an undistinguished building below 14th Street on Fifth Avenue. This was four decades ago, and I was an editorial assistant for the liberal political and literary magazine that had been founded in 1865 by abolitionists. (The first line in the first issue: “The week has been singularly barren of exciting events.”) I had two main tasks. One was dealing with what we called the “slush pile”—the unsolicited manuscripts and story pitches that never stopped pouring in. I had become well versed in composing rejection notes designed not to be encouraging. (Thank you for allowing us the opportunity to read your article on how post-war monetary policy in Italy has influenced the current economic crisis in Uruguay, but I’m afraid we can’t use the piece at this time.) The other was doing whatever Victor Navasky wanted me to do.

After a successful career writing for the New York Times magazine and other prestigious publications, Victor, who died at the age of 90 this week, had taken over as editor in 1978 and revived a once-mighty publication that had been on the verge of financial liquidation and irrelevance. I had met Navasky at a conference for student journalists and he had encouraged me to apply for an internship at the magazine—no pay! no listing on the masthead! From that internship he had plucked me for a lowly staff position, in which I did research for him, read articles he didn’t want to bother with, circulated and deciphered his impossible-to-read handwritten notes to staff, and tended to a wide assortment of odds and ends. As an aspiring journalist now in the middle of the clubby New York literary-political-journalism world—is that Allen Ginsberg in Victor’s office?—I was in heaven.

On this day, I was bringing to Victor the latest piece that humorist Calvin “Bud” Trillin, a Nation columnist and New Yorker writer who occasionally appeared on Johnny Carson’s late-night show, had submitted. The ever-droll Bud was one of Victor’s closest pals. He had accepted Victor’s offer of a column with the stipulation that he could lampoon the editor, and a running joke in the column became depicting Victor as a cunning cheapskate. In Bud’s columns, he was always the “wily and parsimonious Victor S. Navasky” who paid Bud in the “high two figures.”

As I walked from the copy department toward Victor’s office, I perused the copy; yet again Bud had poked at Victor for his penny-pinching ways. But this column—which also disparaged Victor’s basketball-playing days in high school—was especially harsh. The money shot was a line that went something like this: “It takes a true exploiter of the masses to run a left-wing magazine.” As one of the exploitees, I quietly cheered the piece, but I feared how Victor would react.

After handing him the column, I hovered at the entrance to his office, watching him read and waiting for a response. He finished, placed the article on his desk, and looked up at me. “It’s not true,” he said plaintively. “It’s not… I was a good basketball player in high school.” That was it.

And that was Victor’s secret sauce. He never got upset. He often described his job as overseeing an outlet in which liberals and radicals could duke it out. He knew things could get rather messy on this playground. But he loved being the guy who provided a platform for the clash between feminists who wanted to censor or even ban pornography as violence against women and civil libertarians who contended free speech rights covered porn. The Nation was famous for hosting left-of-center columnists and contributors who often targeted their fellow left-of-center columnists and contributors. Years later, when I was the magazine’s Washington correspondent, Alexander Cockburn would occasionally direct his poison pen at me and inaccurate claims would appear in the very magazine for which I toiled so hard. When I complained to Victor, he would simply say, “Feel free to respond.” That was his ethos: Let a thousand feuds bloom. Which meant, if he was being personally honest about all this, he, too, could not take offense at the slights. Once Betsy Pochoda, the fierce literary editor of the magazine, observed that Victor was like a “a beach ball. It has no handles. You can’t piss him off. You can’t please him. You can’t be an enemy. You can’t be a friend.” I often thought of him as a sandbag. One could punch him hard, trying to cause a dent, but the sand would just return to fill the space. He was an Upper West Side, Jewish Buddha, ever calm, often hard to read, rarely angry, usually wearing a wry smile, with that bearded rabbinical facade hiding a great many calculations and ideas whirring within him. He knew everyone, and everyone seemed to like him.  

Victor saw the Nation as the guardian of both progressive journalism­—he relished it when we would break news—and intense political debate about the most weighty topics of the day (say, race relations, economic injustice, and possible nuclear Armageddon). As he saw it, the role of journals of opinion, as small as they might be in terms of subscriptions, was to attain disproportionate influence on the political discourse. They were—he never put it to me this way—the tugboats nudging the larger national discussion in this or that direction.

Though he often seemed more a referee than a boxer—he was indeed a boxing fan—Victor did have his pet causes and obsessions, which included the Cold War, particularly the victims of the Red Scare. He was long a defender of Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs. Though history and subsequent revelations have not been kind to their champions, Victor did much to force a reckoning concerning the excesses of the Cold War that led to ruined lives and cultural damage. Naming Names, his award-winning 1980 book on the Hollywood blacklist, was a magnificent and balanced work of history that illuminated the injury done to the nation by the paranoid cold warriors.

Though Victor tended to stay out of specific frays and internecine battles, this particular crusade was his passion. At times, I wondered if he devoted too much energy to looking backward. But he demonstrated that the never-ending fights over history are critical. They define and shape the present. That’s why I ended up one day, while still his factotum, in the bowels of the Columbia University library, standing over an antiquated copying machine that I believed was wheezing out carcinogenic fumes. I had been sent there by Victor. But it was Susan Sontag’s fault.

It all began with a Nation-sponsored rally at Town Hall organized in early 1982 by liberals to support the Polish workers who were rebelling against the Soviet-backed government. Kurt Vonnegut, Gore Vidal, Pete Seeger, and others spoke to praise the Solidarity movement’s uprising in Poland—and to decry the Reagan administration’s support of repressive right-wing governments in Latin America and elsewhere. (How hypocritical of the Reaganauts to celebrate the Polish freedom-fighters while backing regimes that crushed dissidents and killed unionists.)

Sontag, essayist, critic, philosopher, and archetype intellectual, was on the bill. She had been part of the left of the 1960s that often over-praised such communist societies as Cuba and North Vietnam, but now she sought to distance herself from the other speakers by noting that the left had failed to recognize the evils within communist nations in the 1950s and 1960s. “Many of us, and I include myself, did not understand the nature of communist tyranny,” she said. She zeroed in on the Nation: “Imagine, if you will, someone who read only the Reader’s Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone in the same period who read only the Nation or the New Statesman,” she asked. “Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of communism? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?”

This meant war. Sontag was booed and hissed at the event. She triggered a kerfuffle, in which conservatives poked fun at her for finally becoming an anti-communist, and liberals lambasted her for providing ammo to the Red baiters and justifying the witch hunts of the 1950s. Victor swung into action. He commanded me to find back issues of Reader’s Digest, a mass-audience magazine with a decidedly conservative bent, and dig up examples of how it had covered communism in those decades. That led me to the Columbia library.

Several floors below the ground level, I pulled out from the stacks old copies and searched. To save energy, the lights automatically turned off every 10 minutes. I was there for several days. When I returned to the office with the booty, he flipped through the copies and quietly said, “This will work.”

Never one to miss an opportunity, Victor published Sontag’s speech in the Nation, with commentaries from a half-dozen writers. She asked that he excise the Reader’s Digest remark, explaining it had been an extemporaneous comment. Victor did but cited it in a preface to the transcript. And he also fired back with a piece in the magazine that cited the hyperbolic, Red fear-fueling articles I had found: “Red Slave Drivers and Sadists”; “Stalin’s Plans for the U.S.A.”; and “Red Spy Masters in America.” It was pure Victor: he used an attack on the Nation to exploit an intellectual spectacle and demonstrate the essentialness of his magazine. For the literary set, this was hot stuff. 

Victor was part showman, always playing the angles, often with mischievous intent.  That was not surprising given that he had in the late 1950s and early 1960s edited a humor magazine called Monocle, which he had started when he was a Yale law student. Victor had a wealth of stories about a wide range of journalistic accomplishments, such as his coverage of Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department, which led to his tremendous book Kennedy Justice. But his eyes would truly light up when he told stories of the old Monocle days. He relished recounting one of the magazine’s most notorious capers: It published Report from Iron Mountain, supposedly the product of a government task force that had concluded that the US economy could not thrive in peacetime and the nation required war for prosperity. The book, full of footnotes and written in think-tank-ese, read as if it were the real deal, and, upon its release, the New York Times reported it might be an actual government report. For years, many did not realize this was a hoax. (In the 1980s and 1990s, far-right hate groups and militias cited it as an authoritative source.) Victor was quite proud of this scam. He once told me he and the Monocle gang wanted to launch a magazine that would entirely be about parking in New York City. Its title: The Good Spot.* He regretted they never got to that.

He was impish. So serious about such matters as the Cold War assault on civil liberties, yet so mirthful about much else. And he was a conniver. He taught me how to run out on a check. In 1984, I was covering the Democratic convention at San Francisco for the Nation (where I had one wild night with Hunter Thompson—but that’s another story). One day, Victor, Andy Kopkind, a wonderful political journalist who was a Nation mainstay, and I were having lunch with Robert Scheer, a prominent and much-hailed reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Toward the end of the meal, Scheer left the table to schmooze with some folks across the room. “Now,” Victor said, “now.” He indicated we should get up and leave. As we exited the restaurant, he found our waiter. “Bring the check to that man,” he said, pointing to Scheer. To me he said, “The Los Angeles Times can afford it.”

Another Victor trick: At that convention or another one, he would examine the list of receptions and pick those he wished to attend. He then would call the phone number for the hosting organizations and ask if he could be placed on the guest list. Often the person on the other end would say, “Let me take your information, and someone will get back to you.” Okay, he would respond and ask for his or her name. If the answer was “Jennifer,” he would then sign off, “Thank you, very much,  Jennifer.” Later, he would show up those receptions and if there was any trouble getting in—often there was not—he would say, “I talked to Jennifer in your office about this.” That sometimes did the trick. At least before the days of email invitations and electronic RSVPs.

Another memory: One evening, Victor took me along to a dinner where he was to receive an award from a civil liberties organization. I was seated at a table with people I didn’t know. Old people. These were ancient New York City lefties. Not exactly my crowd. Eventually, I began to make conversation with the fellow next to me. He was a rabbi. But not just any rabbi. He had married playwright Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe. He was happy to share stories about that event. (“A very nice and polite young lady,” he recalled.) Later, I asked Victor why he had not told me I was dining with the guy who presided at this historic wedding. “Wasn’t it more fun finding out yourself?” he replied.

Victor delighted in being the ringmaster of the Nation circus. Oh, he wasn’t always easy. His inscrutability could be aggravating. And he and I did clash over how best to bring the Nation into the modern world of the internet. At one strategic planning session for the magazine, when asked to summarize the Nation, Victor said, “An artifact of the written word.” That did not bode well for the digital age. But it summarized his devotion to the traditional values that had long animated journals of opinion: thoughtful analysis, deliberate writing, quality over speed. But perhaps his most important legacy is that he encouraged and inspired hundreds of young journalists. I count myself among that crowd. When he was awarded the Richard M. Clurman Award for his dedication to mentoring young journalists, I was honored that he asked me to attend the luncheon as one of his guests—one of his prized pupils, perhaps—even though I had years earlier left the Nation for my current job at Mother Jones.

While researching this remembrance, I came across a 1990 article in the Los Angeles Times reporting on the state of the Nation as it celebrated the 125th anniversary of its founding that I had forgotten. This was the lead:

A dark-haired young man in a striped shirt has been stalking Victor Navasky, editor of the scrappy, left-wing magazine known as the Nation. At the moment, the two men are in the belly of the publishing beast, the grimy white warren of office space on lower Fifth Avenue where America’s oldest weekly does its provocative thing. Everywhere there are bare bulbs, teeny offices, a sink, a refrigerator, mountains of file cabinets, and shelves and shelves of books, books and more books.

“Let’s continue our argument,” says the young man, a writer named David Corn. “Our discussion,” Navasky says, whipping out his mental blue pencil.

That was Victor. Life—politics, journalism, literary tussles—it was all a rollicking discussion, best enjoyed by the archly curious and those with sharp tastes and strong views. He was a disrupter before there were disrupters and showed us how much fun could be had within a ruckus—and within an earnest magazine that addressed the most somber and serious of matters, all in the hope of changing the world. 

* As it turns out, Victor’s comrade-in-humor Bud Trillin and a few pals did publish at least one issue of a parking magazine that was called Beautiful Spot. The premier issue announced that it was “edited by and for the alternate street parker” and that an annual subscription would be $1.50 and a lifetime subscription would be $1.00. It noted, “As readers will probably notice, the Beautiful Spot masthead carries no publisher, advertising manager, business manager, circulation promotion director or advertising space salesman. This is no accident.”

NY Fund Manager Linked to Russian Oligarch Invested Big With Santos. Now He Claims He Was Conned.

There is something odd about the relationship between GOP fabulist George Santos and Andrew Intrater, a sophisticated and wealthy New York financier, Republican donor, and cousin to sanctioned Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg. Intrater was one of Santos’ top political donors. At Santos’ behest, he invested hundreds of thousands of dollars with a firm where Santos worked. And even after this company was accused by the Securities and Exchange Commission of running a Ponzi scheme that threatened Intrater’s investment, Intrater and his domestic partner continued to pour money into Santos’ political campaign. What’s the explanation for his curious and sustained support for Santos? Intrater, Mother Jones has learned, the wealthy head of a sizable investment fund—seemingly as savvy an investor as they come—has told associates that he, like others, was conned by Santos. 

The bizarre tale of Santos, the world-champion Long Island liar and conniver who’s now in Congress, has myriad subplots: his alleged criminal past in Brazil, the mysterious origins of millions of dollars he claims to have earned in the past three years, his suspicious campaign finance shenanigans, and much more. One of these involves his interactions with Intrater, who hit the headlines in 2018 for having hired Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, as a business consultant after Intrater made a whopping $250,000 contribution to Trump’s inauguration committee. Intrater ran an investment business then named Columbus Nova that had deep and direct ties to Vekselberg’s Renova Group conglomerate. In April 2018, Vekselberg and the Renova Group were sanctioned by the Treasury Department for assisting Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “malign activity around the globe.” After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year, Spanish authorities seized Vekselberg’s $90 million yacht at the request of the United States.

Intrater has been one of Santos’ most generous patrons. During Santos’ first congressional bid in 2020, Intrater and his girlfriend, Diana Pentinen, each donated the maximum amount of $5,800 to his campaign. In 2022, they went much further, sending over $67,000 to Santos’ campaign and political committees backing Santos. Though Intrater made donations to over two dozen other Republican House and Senate campaigns that year, Santos, by far, received the most support. Intrater also donated $100,000 to Rise NY PAC, a New York state political committee connected to Santos. (Santos’ sister, Tiffany, was paid by this PAC.) Pentinen donated to no federal candidates other than Santos. Intrater and Pentinen each also donated $60,829 to then-Rep. Lee Zeldin, the GOP candidate for New York governor. 

And there’s more: Intrater had a significant financial connection to Santos. 

In 2020 and 2021, Santos worked as the New York representative for a Florida-based investment firm called Harbor City Capital. But on his financial disclosure forms covering those years he listed no income from the company. (Santos, though, did receive some form of payment this firm.)

In April 2021—while Santos was mounting his second bid for Congress—the SEC filed a complaint charging that Harbor City and its CEO, JP Maroney, had mounted an extensive Ponzi scheme. The agency asserted that Maroney had pocketed more than $4.8 million of the $17.1 million he raised from investors. Santos was not named in the complaint, and he has denied any wrongdoing. Harbor City was essentially forced out of business at this point. 

Santos went on to form a mysterious company that supposedly earned him millions—but that’s another story. One intriguing thread in the Harbor City Capital narrative is the Intrater angle.

As the Washington Post reported, Intrater paid $625,000 to Harbor City. The money didn’t come from Intrater’s main company, which is now called Sparrow Capital. Its source was a firm registered in Mississippi named FEA Innovations that lists Intrater as its only officer. It’s unclear what FEA Innovations does. The company seems to have no website and no internet presence.

The payment from FEA Innovations occurred before the SEC publicly accused Harbor City of being a fraudulent outfit. In an exhibit attached to the SEC complaint, a SEC accountant who reviewed the financial records of Harbor City noted that the “deposit does not identify what it is for.” But a person in contact with Intrater says this money was an investment in Harbor City made by Intrater at Santos’ urging. Intrater, this source tells Mother Jones, believed he “was going to get a return on his investment.” 

Though Intrater is a successful fund manager, he was fooled by Santos, the person adds: “Santos presented this thing to Andy that here is a great investment.”

If that’s the case, the con went on for a while. Santos was able to hornswoggle Intrater even after the SEC alleged Harbor City was a Ponzi scheme. According to Federal Election Commission filings, Intrater and Pentinen made most of their donations to Santos following the SEC’s filing of its complaint against Harbor City on April 21, 2021. Even though Santos was connected to a company credibly accused of fraud that might have swindled $625,000 from Intrater, Intrater and his girlfriend dramatically increased their donations to Santos. 

The pair, in 2021, gave $10,000 to a pro-Santos PAC on March 3—weeks before the SEC complaint. In December of that year and in May and September of 2022, they donated $57,400 to Santos’ campaign and other entities supporting him. Of the $100,000 Intrater contributed to Rise NY, half of it came in June and August 2022, over a year after Harbor City had been accused of running a scam. 

Intrater and Pentinen continued their donations to Santos after the SEC complaint in part because Santos told them that he also was a victim of the firm’s alleged misdeeds, the Intrater associate says. As the Wall Street Journal reported, Santos had said to people that he had invested millions of dollars of his own family’s money in the firm. He also claimed to have raised $100 million for the company, though, according to the SEC complaint, Harbor City raised only $17 million.

Intrater did not respond to a request for comment. When a Mother Jones reporter reached Pentinen by phone, she said, “I don’t want to talk about it.” She hung up and did not respond to a follow-up text.

On the internet, you can find people who point to Intrater’s support of Santos and declare that there is a nefarious Russian connection to Santos. That could well be a stretch—especially if Intrater’s account of being scammed by Santos is accurate. (Vekselberg remains under sanctions. Intrater cannot legally use his cousin’s money. After suing the Treasury Department in 2019 over the sanctions’ impact on his own business, Intrater reached a settlement that allowed him to sell off investments he previously made in partnership with the Renova Group.) But the Santos-Intrater link, given the money involved, deserves scrutiny.

As of now, the holy grail in the Santos saga is a clear account of these unanswered questions: how and whether Santos truly earned between $3.5 million and $11.5 million in income and dividends from a company called the Devolder Organization, which he set up after the SEC filed its complaint against Harbor City and where Santos got the $705,000 he loaned his winning campaign. Santos has refused to provide a thorough explanation for these crucial points. Instead, he has offered vague and contradictory accounts. Consequently, every stone deserves turning over, including those that lead to or from the cousin of a Russian oligarch.

Meanwhile, Intrater has told associates that he is trying to get back from Harbor City his $625,000. 

Why Ron DeSantis Won’t—or Shouldn’t—Run for President

Editor’s note: The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter is written by David twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories about politics and media; his unvarnished take on the events of the day; film, book, television, podcast, and music recommendations; interactive audience features; and more. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial of Our Land here. Please check it out. And please also check out David’s new New York Times bestseller: American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy.

Donald Trump cannot accept rejection. Donald Trump is fueled by vengeance. And this is why, as of now, it would be foolish for Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis to run for president in 2024.

It is fashionable these days for pundits to guffaw about Trump’s declining influence within the GOP. In polls asking Republican voters to state their preference for next year, DeSantis often beats the former guy, occasionally by a hefty margin. Last month, Trump, who in November announced his third White House bid, hit record lows for his approval rating among all voters (31 percent) and GOP voters (70 percent). Axios noted, “A raft of new polls shows former President Trump is losing juice among core Republican voters—a rare but unmistakable drop in base support that would jeopardize his 2024 comeback bid.” Trump’s own supporters and allies mocked and scorned him for his grifty NFT trading card venture. (Fortune reported this week, “The trading volume of Donald Trump’s Digital Trading Cards, which feature images of the former president dressed as a superhero and as an astronaut, has fallen off a cliff, according to data from CryptoSlam.”) Trump is “fading fast,” former GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan told CNN on Thursday. “He is a proven loser.” Yes, Rep. Kevin McCarthy fulsomely hailed Trump for helping him (barely) prevail in the chaotic House speakership contest. Even with that, the conventional wisdom is that Trump is trending in the wrong direction. With a touch of glee, New York Times columnist Charles Blow observed days ago, “Donald Trump is essentially being put out to pasture” by the GOP.

Yes, but. And this is the but: Trump remains dangerous. To the nation, to the GOP, and to DeSantis and other potential Republican rivals. That is because, as January 6 demonstrated, if Trump cannot be king, he will burn down the palace— with everyone in it, especially those who denied him the crown.

No matter what the polls say now, DeSantis or any other GOP aspirant who enters the race against Trump will have a tough time. Hitting below the belt is what Trump does best. He is not bound by rules or decency. He demonstrated this during the 2016 GOP sweepstakes. Conventional politicians were no match for his mean-spiritedness and constant streams of lies. One by one, he bested the pipsqueaks, several of whom had been touted as powerhouse candidates of depth, intelligence, and talent. (Jeb!) None of them could figure out how to compete against a scoundrel who refused to follow political conventions (as low as they might be). And then there were none.

It’s easy to argue that a forewarned DeSantis will be a forearmed DeSantis. Trump’s tricks are now well known, and, like an old boxer, he seems to have lost a step or two. Surely, a savvy and crafty fellow like the Florida governor can figure out how to rope-a-dope or sidestep the Marauder of Mar-a-Lago. Perhaps. But there is no telling if DeSantis can devise the right footwork before he gets in the ring with Trump. And Trump will do whatever it takes to destroy DeSantis. He will approach him as an existential threat and fire away. Again and again and again. He will make up stories about DeSantis. He will hurl horrible and baseless claims at him. He will go for blood.

Trump will force DeSantis—or any other opponent—into the gutter. And this is the problem for his rivals: Trump likes being in the gutter. He wears it well. That’s a talent, and it’s not possessed by many politicians—or people. My father used to tell me: Never get in a fight with a skunk; you both end up stinking, but the skunk likes it. 

Can DeSantis withstand such a pummeling? Can he wrestle with a skunk without becoming too malodorous? The polls pitting Trump against DeSantis are worthless until the Trump treatment begins. Who knows how Republican primary voters—the base—will react to such an ugly face-off? Will they be moved by Trump’s accusations (whatever they may be) about DeSantis? Given Trump supporters’ endless and bottomless credulity regarding his claims about himself, his political opponents, and just about everything, it’s probable that a sizable bloc of Trumpish voters will buy his bunk and join his jihad against DeSantis or any other GOP foe. Of course, the dynamics of the race will be shaped by how many GOP candidates sign up for this spectacle. If other credible contenders beside DeSantis show up for this free-for-all, the we’ve-had-enough-of-Trump vote will be divided.

But let’s assume the pre-season reviews that depict DeSantis as a dynamo candidate pan out. Say he finds a way to dance around Trump’s assaults and escapes being damaged or tarnished. Say Republican voters dump Trump for this new anti-woke, libs-trolling, immigrant-kidnapping prince of the right. That will be when DeSantis’ troubles will really start.

Does anyone believe Trump will abide primary contest results that cast him as a loser? He will claim once again that he is the victim of a rigged system. He will challenge tallies. He will denounce the RINO establishment and blame the Deep State, the media, and who knows who else. He will accuse DeSantis of conspiring with dark and nefarious forces. He will not recognize DeSantis as the legitimate GOP nominee. Trump will send a message to his voters: You cannot support this man and his party: not with votes, not with money. Some will shrug and move on. But millions of Republican voters will fall for Trump’s latest con.

As I’ve written many times, Trump is motivated by spite. In public talks and speeches Trump gave in the years before he ran for president, he hailed retribution as an essential element of success. His top advice for people who wanted to succeed was this: “Get even with people. If they screw you, screw them back 10 times as hard. I really believe it.”

Apply that to Trump losing the nomination to DeSantis. He will not preach party unity and do whatever is necessary to help DeSantis land in the White House. (Remember Trump’s approach to the special Senate elections in Georgia in early 2021?) He will be bent on crushing DeSantis. At that point, the only thing worse for Trump than losing his White House bid would be for DeSantis to win his.

Would Trump form a third party or continue running as an independent candidate? I doubt it. That would take too much organizing. But it’s not difficult to envision him promoting his own grievances and doing whatever he could to subvert DeSantis. The skunk would keep on skunking. In the general election, the Florida governor could end up essentially having to run against both the Democratic nominee and a deposed and enraged mad-king. No matter Trump’s standing in the polls then, if he could swing a modest percentage of his supporters against DeSantis—or even only encourage them to sit it out—that could doom DeSantis.

This boils down to an obvious point: Running against Trump will be a miserable endeavor. If DeSantis manages to survive the primaries and triumph, he will not be free of Trump. This broken man will continue to try to make life hell for DeSantis and the GOP. He will blow up whatever he can blow up. His attitude toward DeSantis will be, if I lose, you will lose bigger. There likely is no path to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for a Republican that avoids Trump’s DEFCON-1 assault.

Who needs this? DeSantis is young. He can have a clearer and (likely) Trump-free shot at the White House in 2028. Does he or anyone else in Republican politics want to go through all this pain? (The answer for Liz Cheney is probably, hell yeah! But if she leaps in, it will be to smack Trump not to win primaries.)

Certainly, a more severe decline in Trump’s political support—or maybe a Trump indictment—might fundamentally alter the landscape and create a smoother road for DeSantis. External events can do so, as well. For the moment, though, Trump retains the power, ability, and inclination to turn the 2024 GOP primary and the subsequent general election into a mega (and MAGA) shitshow, with no regard for the fortunes of the party or any other candidate. Can DeSantis stand in front of Trump’s firehose of crap for 18 months or so and emerge as the new leader of the United States? I know what Trump would say.