The Daily Escape:
Shenandoah Valley, Browntown, VA – December 2020 photo by Renee Kuenster O’Connell
Business Insider (BI) reported (paywalled) that Jared Kushner helped set up a shell company that was a vehicle for secretly enabling Trump family members to spend nearly half of his 2020 campaign’s funds:
“The company, which was incorporated as American Made Media Consultants Corporation and American Made Media Consultants LLC, spent $617 million of the campaign’s $1.26 billion war chest, according to campaign finance records.”
The board of the shell company included Lara Trump, Vice President Mike Pence’s nephew John Pence, and Trump campaign CFO Sean Dollman says the Insider:
“Despite its $617 million spending through AMMC, the Trump campaign publicly disclosed little information about the company, including how it used the money.”
The nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center (CLC) filed a civil complaint with the Federal Election Commission accusing the campaign of disguising about $170 million in spending “by laundering the funds” through AMMC. The CLC filed its civil complaint with the Federal Election Commission, which recently regained its powers to enforce and regulate campaign money laws after lacking enough commissioners to do so for 14 of the past 15 months.
BI reports that several sources from the Justice Department say that investigators may already be looking into the campaign’s activities. You can view a non-paywalled summary of the BI article here.
Two things strike Wrongo about this latest abomination. First, the Trump family is always looking for a loophole to extend the grift. Second, during the Trump era, we have slowly but finally lost our ability to be shocked and outraged by anything Trump, his family or his dead-ender supporters do.
We’ve been worn down by so much rule and norm-breaking that we no longer believe that outrage will stop the terrible behavior. To people like Wrongo who had extensive contacts in the NYC real estate market, this abominable behavior was knowable in advance. But Hillary’s emails put Trump in power. And he along with his minions have obfuscated, lied, and denied the reality of what we saw right in front of us for the past four years.
This is just the latest that we’ve learned about in a very long string of Trump and his team finding and exploiting loopholes. Imagine all that we don’t know yet.
Time to take a break from playing the game of what happened to the supply of the new vaccine? Or, why has the Pentagon stopped the Biden transition process? And focus on our Saturday Soother.
The snow that fell in Connecticut on Thursday has been plowed out of the Wrong driveway, and Wrongo shoveled a path in the dog run. Our tree has all of its lights, but only about 20% of its usual ornaments. That’s due to the clear absence of holiday visitors in this time of Covid.
Our annual note about the year has been sent to our overseas friends and some extra notes to local friends that we’ve seen only rarely. Later today, we’re having a Zoomtastic cross-country session with family and friends.
But there’s time right now to gaze on the winter wonderland (16.5” of snow) outside our windows. So settle back and brew up a vente cup of Columbian Supremo ($13.50/12 oz.) from Ini Sips, a New Britain, CT based coffee and tea brewer. It’s a small veteran and Black-owned business that, due to the pandemic, pivoted from being a local community cafe to online sales, with reasonable success.
They’re running a seasonal special: When you buy two bags, they give a free bag of their coffee to first responders, health care workers or community workers!
Now listen to the Celtic Women do their patented style on the Christmas classic, “Oh Come, All Ye Faithful”:
