A political action committee named SEALS for Truth contributed $1.975 million to Republican gubernatorial candidate Eric Greitens July 18, just in time to help Greitens continue the multi-million dollar advertising campaign that launched the former Navy SEAL to the GOP nomination.
The PAC's October financial disclosure report, filed Friday with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) indicates that when it comes to SEALS for Truth, there are likely no SEALS and no truth.
The report shows the PAC only received one contribution, $2 million from something called the American Policy Coalition, on July 18, with most of that passed on immediately to the Greitens campaign.
The American Policy Coalition would appear to be a 527 committee, which is not allowed to contribute money directly to candidates, but which can participate in a laundering process by giving the money to another group, in this case, SEALS for Truth.
The American Policy Coalition website is only one page and has only three words- American Policy Coalition- on it, in bright red, accompanied by an American flag.
The FEC report only shows a Washington, D. C. post office box for the American Policy Coalition's website- P. O. Box 26445.
Coincidentally, the only address shown for SEALS for Truth is also a Washington, D. C. post office box- P. O. Box 29525.
In addition to the $1.975 million it contributed to the Greitens campaign, SEALS for Truth also paid $6,305.50 to the Clark Hill law firm for legal services and $5,000 to the Jackson-Alvarez Group for "research/consulting services."
Jackson-Alvarez has been involved with campaigns in Maryland and New York in which FEC complaints were filed, charging candidates with coordinating with PACs in violation of federal law.
Incumbent Rep. John Delaney, D-Maryland, filed an FEC complaint September 21 alleging that the husband of his Republican opponent Amie Hoeber was funding her campaign through the Maryland USA PAC, which was not spending money on any other candidate. Hoeber's husband, who was also working on her campaign, contributed $2.1 million to the PAC, which only received $1,000 from any other source.
Jackson-Alvarez also provided its services to the New York Jobs Council PAC, the recipient of an FEC complaint, which noted that not only was the firm advising the PAC, but also advising the Congressional candidate, Andrew Heaney, with money from companies owned by Heaney being funneled through the PAC.
The SEALS for Truth contribution also brought on a complaint, this one filed with the Missouri Ethics Commission by former Rep. Carl Bearden, who claimed Greitens did not follow the procedures for accepting contributions from out-of-state committees and was playing fast and loose with state laws.
The Ethics Commission ruling, issued August 31, said the Greitens campaign did not violate state law because contributors to SEALS for Truth would be named when the PAC filed its FEC disclosure report.
It appears that Bearden was correct in his assessment of how the Greitens campaign was dealing with state laws, though not necessarily in his belief that state law had been violated.
The SEALS for Truth FEC filing only indicates that the Greitens campaign violated the spirit of Missouri election laws by keeping Missourians from being able to trace the source of nearly $2 million by laundering it through two committees that appear to have been created solely for that purpose.
12 comments:
This guy is a front for big business and the right-to-work faction. Since my wages have been stagnant since the Recession, I'll vote for the party that might support unions and labor. That means I won't vote for Greitens.
Unfortunately its all legal, so what...fix it or let it go.
But he slept on a cot!
I'll vote for the party that might support unions and labor.
That's a pretty weak endorsement!
I think it's wishful thinking to imagine the establishments of either party care about stagnant wages, both have had complete control of the national executive and the Congress during the decades when this happened and neither did anything to improve this, quite to the contrary they made it far worse.
Exceptions to this rule include our state legislature and Trump, and I suppose there are bound to be a few more states who's governments are miniature versions of the national Uniparty, but....
So I'm too not voting for Greitens, but mostly because he strikes me as a weasel much worse than his Democratic opponent, and I'll be voting for Trump on the same wishful basis, I know we'll lose big, perhaps catastrophically with Hillary.
Just her burning desire for a hot war with Russia with her history of supporting and fomenting wars that have left way too much of the world in flames is enough, but in general, with Trump, we also might get someone who supports the working class and in general the middle of the country, economically and geographically, which our national political establishment can't hide it's disdain all the way to hatred of. E.g. we certainly can't expect anything good from someone who considers 1/4 of the country to be "irredeemable" and "not America", and only regrets honestly stating that, but has refused to even pretend to retract it.
Considering how many working people and contractors Trump has stiffed and left bankrupt over the years, I'm afraid you are sadly disillusioned if you think he really cares about people's wages. If he really cared, he wouldn't have his suit and tie businesses located in 3rd world countries and he wouldn't bring foreign labor in to build and operate his resorts. I'm not a Hillary fan, so don't everyone get all crazy, but be realistic about the man you're voting for. This is just an ego trip for him. I would never trust anyone who leased a NY condo to Libya's Qaddafi in hopes of building a resort there, not to mention his businesses in Saudi Arabia and other countries whose people he claims to distrust.
5:26 AM:
You're not getting my point: Hillary is a sure lose, Trump is a maybe.
Or look at it another way: Bill Clinton was "unimpeachable" (technically, no chance of losing in the Senate trial after impeachment for good cause), Obama has been, and Hillary will be the same, Democrats just don't impeach their own, and Senate Republicans have no appetite for convicting them after impeachment. So Hillary in the Oval Office, besides almost certainly resulting in a lot more war, will mean all but total lawless government, and will continue to crush the working and middle classes, either by continuing the economic repression of flyover country, filled with us deplorables (is there any possible way she can she make her intent more clear? Ah, she did with coal.), or by continuing policies that put a tremendously high cost of living wall around their favored parts of the country.
Trump won't have the support of the Uniparty, he'll be on probation from the moment he finishes his oath of office (one law professor who should be fired because it's procedurally impossible claimed he could be impeached before taking office). If he's elected, we'll have, for at least a brief time, a return to vaguely Constitutional government in the executive, and and even if I stipulate your claims against Trump (which I certainly don't, on balance), one of the ways to keep that threat at bay will be doing things that are good for us, vs. good for our ruling class, for it's clear the only thing that keeps the Republicans in the Congress in check is the threat that they'll do something so unpopular they'll be sent back home to spend more time with their families.
(Ha ha, who am I kidding, Eric Cantor was hired by an investment bank for a cool $3.4 million a year in what I assume is base salary, then again, Tom Foley wandered in the wilderness for a while before his rehabilitation.)
You're telling me in a wager where one side is a sure loss and the other is a possible one, you're going to bet on the sure loss?
Just remember who brought you those wars. The last war we got into under a Democrat was Korea in 1950. Hell Eisenhower had troops in Indochina in 1953 and the stage was set for Vietnam well before Kennedy took office. Fast forward to Granada, Panama, Afghanistan and Iraq. Those were all Republican wars.
5:26 AM: Let me try this: you say Trump is bad, so let's stipulate that (I'm certainly not going to make a serious argument about how trustworthy he is).
However, if you fail to vote for Trump, however you do or don't vote, you're implicitly or explicitly voting for Hillary.
You can't pretend your position is one in isolation, it's a binary decision set, Hillary or Trump.
So you're telling us you prefer Hillary in the Oval Office.
You're welcome to try defend that choice, me, I'll be updating my nuclear war survival supplies.
5:26 AM: And more!
Considering how many working people and contractors Trump has stiffed and left bankrupt over the years
Where are they? If there are so many due to him being evil vs. not always being successful in business, the Democrats and their media would be parading them for all to see.
I'm afraid you are sadly disillusioned if you think he really cares about people's wages. If he really cared, he wouldn't have his suit and tie businesses located in 3rd world countries
Thus my economic repression argument: businesses do this nowadays because the cost of doing it in the US has been made so high by the Uniparty, that coupled by a lack of tarrifs, that they have no other choice. If he tried to manufacture them in the US only people as rich as him would be able to afford them. Heck, even LA is rapidly deindustrializing, including it's last bright spot in US garment manufacturing, down a third in production and employment since 2005, with the rest making for the exits.
he wouldn't bring foreign labor in to build and operate his resorts.
I'd like specifics on the former (although I'm willing to Google; I think I remember a report of a subcontractor doing that, but that was in violation of it's contract), but for the latter, all I've heard is that when he opened a resort in the middle of the holiday season when the local labor pool was already committed, he had to bring in H2 foreign workers. You'd prefer no one, American or foreigner, being employed until the next holiday season?
I'm not a Hillary fan
But you're still going to vote for her, implicitly or explicitly as I noted in my previous posting.
so don't everyone get all crazy, but be realistic about the man you're voting for. This is just an ego trip for him.
And it's not for Hillary? She's physically pushing herself to the point of literal collapse because history? Whereas Trump's vanity critical, he's not the sort who wants to cap a long and mostly successful career with failure. Whereas everything Hillary has done in her life starting with college graduation, except for accepting Bill's offer of marriage when she had no better choices in her life (she managed to burn her planned career in D.C.), has been an abject failure. Except of course for acclimating money and power.
I would never trust anyone who leased a NY condo to Libya's Qaddafi in hopes of building a resort there
Vs. the person who, after Qaddafi started cooperating with the West, including his invaluable surrender of his WMD program, rewarded him with murder? "We came, we saw, he died", she laughed!
not to mention his businesses in Saudi Arabia and other countries whose people he claims to distrust.
You can do business with people you distrust, like he essentially proposes to do with Putin, vs. making war on him and Russia. At least he's not proposing to take "donations" from them and rewarding them with political favors, as, you know, Hillary actually did.
6:31 AM: Oh really now?
You're trying to claim the 900 men in Vietnam when Kennedy inherited what was originally a French mess made the catastrophe inevitable? It wasn't his deposing and assassination of the leaders of South Vietnam that turned it from a low level mess into a "you broke it, you own it", which is what LBJ at least believed when he poured in 100,000s of thousands of troops.
Anyway, we're not talking about Eisenhower, Reagan (Grenada? Really, just one tiny conflict in the Protracted Conflict that started when Wilson was in office?), Bush or Bush, we're talking about Trump, not a member of the ruling class which gave us those conflicts, and Hillary, a full member who has a proven record of starting wars that result in multi-region wide catastrophes.
I mean, it's one thing to make the Middle East more chaotic, but destabilizing Western Europe in the bargain? And again I come back to Russia, the only country which can end the United States in 30 minutes, how's that "reset" button working? Team Hillary and Team Obama sure reset US-Russia relations, all the way back to hotter periods of the Cold War.
It's not labels like "Republican" or "Democrat" that matter, it's the actual people, and in this case what classes they belong to. You choose to double down on our current ruling class and its increasing dangerous incompetence, I choose to make a gamble with Trump. Which in the case of existential foreign policy is not much of a gamble at all.
AND THEN HIS CAMPAIGN POSTS THIS....
Chris Koster is counting on Hillary Clinton to prop up his campaign. I'm counting on you to have my back.
Clinton campaign investing in Chris Koster in Missouri - St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Money will buy mailing, digital ads for Koster
"Clinton campaign investing in Chris Koster in Missouri" is unfortunately a lie by Greitens, who as I've already noted, is a weasel. The real headline, and it's the original one based on the URL having the same words, is "Clinton campaign investing in Missouri", and I'd say this is a lot more likely to be targeted at Roy Blunt, as the lead sentence implies: "Hillary Clinton’s team is targeting Missouri in an attempt to boost the prospects of Democratic candidates such as U.S. Senate contender Jason Kander and gubernatorial nominee Chris Koster.".
She needs a Democratic Senate and therefore Kander a lot more than she needs a Democratic governor in a state with an non-ruling class Republican super-majority legislature. Which makes voting for Koster safer since he'll be kept in check and most likely veto overridden like Nixon has been (the latter assumes he doesn't work with the legislature like Nixon didn't).
That members of a political party work together, especially on Get Out The Vote (GOTV) efforts like this one, is not exactly news, it's news when a party is in a state of civil war like the Republican establishment (GOPe) vs. their ostensible candidate Trump. Who's GOTV efforts the GOPe is actively sabotaging....
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