15 April 21
We Are in Unnecessary Financial Trouble
We are scratching and clawing to make our budget every month. Because we cannot get 1% of our subscribers to contribute to our fundraising appeals.
Waiting until the situation is dire is abusive of the process.
Well it’s dire now.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
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15 April 21
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FOCUS: Bess Levin | Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump Are Already Working on Their Next Grift
Bess Levin, Vanity Fair
Levin writes: "Oh, sure, Kushner penned an op-ed in which he offered Joe Biden some unsolicited foreign policy advice, and Trump has made herself readily available for the paparazzi to catch her jogging with Kushner, eating ice cream with her kids, and pointing at things with her assistant. But otherwise, it’s been unusually quiet on the Javanka front."
The duo is advising a new group with “the mission of perpetuating former president Trump’s populist policies.”
ince departing Washington for Miami back in January, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner have maintained relatively low profiles. Oh, sure, Kushner penned an op-ed in which he offered Joe Biden some unsolicited foreign policy advice, and Trump has made herself readily available for the paparazzi to catch her jogging with Kushner, eating ice cream with her kids, and pointing at things with her assistant. But otherwise, it’s been unusually quiet on the Javanka front. And that’s probably by design as the couple attempts to rehab their image and shake off the taint of the last four years in general and the January 6 insurrection specifically, not to mention the unfortunate press that comes after forcing one’s Secret Service detail to go to extreme lengths to “find a bathroom.”
Of course, as a couple of people who see themselves returning to the White House in a presidential capacity—they’ve already determined Trump will be the first woman POTUS—the duo are no doubt planning their next moves behind the scenes, and on Tuesday, one of the projects they’ve been working on was revealed.
Per Axios:
A constellation of [Donald] Trump administration stars today will launch the America First Policy Institute, a 35-person nonprofit group with a first-year budget of $20 million and the mission of perpetuating former president Trump’s populist policies…. Two top Trump alumni tell me AFPI is by far the largest pro-Trump outside group, besides Trump’s own Florida–based machine. In the coming months, the group plans to take a large office space near the U.S. Capitol as a symbol that it’ll fight to be a muscular, well-heeled center of the future of conservatism…. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump are informal advisers.
The president and CEO is Brooke Rollins, a Texan who was head of Trump’s Domestic Policy Council. Rollins, who met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago last week to update him on plans for the group, told me the group wants to be “dreamers and…risk-takers.” The board chair is Linda McMahon, who was a member of Trump’s Cabinet as the administrator of the Small Business Administration, after winning fame as a pro-wrestling entrepreneur. The vice chair is Larry Kudlow, Trump’s economic adviser, a longtime CNBC personality who's now a Fox Business host. AFPI—now based in the Crystal City area of Arlington, Virginia—has been in the planning stages since December. The group will also have offices in Fort Worth, where Rollins remains based, Miami, and New York. Rollins plans to move the group to Washington to be closer to the action.
Rollins told Axios she hopes the group’s budget will double to $40 million in 2022. It’s not clear how AFPI plans to fundraise, though if it‘s anything like how Trump’s campaign did it, it’ll be wildly underhanded and deceitful. Earlier this month, The New York Times reported that over the course of the 2020 election, Team Trump ripped off unwitting supporters for tens of millions of dollars through a simple yet extremely shady scheme in which the default option for donations authorized the campaign to transfer the pledged amount from people’s bank accounts not once, but every single week. Later, the campaign introduced a second prechecked box that doubled a person’s contribution and was known internally as a “money bomb.” In order for people to have noticed this before it was too late, they would have had to wade through “lines of text in bold and capital letters that overwhelmed the opt-out language,” the Times wrote. Few people did, and in the final two and half months of 2020, the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee, and their shared accounts were forced to issue a staggering 530,000 refunds worth $64.3 million to online donors. Days later, the Times reported that the political arm of the House Republicans had upped the ante re: bilking supporters, with a truly psychotic prechecked box that warned “If you UNCHECK this box, we will have to tell Trump you’re a DEFECTOR.”
In other Trump fundraising ploys, a significant portion of the money the ex-president’s legal defense fund raised—ostensibly for 2020 election suits—went to his Save America super PAC, which he can tap to pay for all kinds of personal expenses. But we’re sure this group will be entirely above board and legit. Ivanka and Jared would never be involved with something that wasn’t.
According to expert called by Derek Chauvin’s defense, George Floyd was resisting arrest by attempting to breathe
Incidentally, Barry Brodd, the Chauvin team’s expert witness, is being paid for his testimony.
And speaking of some of the worst people in the world...
Meet Elvis Harold Reyes. Per The Washington Post:
In early 2018, a woman postponed cancer treatments so she could pay Elvis Harold Reyes more than $4,000 to sort out her immigration status and let her legally stay in Florida. She was just one of hundreds of immigrants who turned to Reyes for driver’s licenses and work permits. He represented himself as a philanthropist lawyer and pastor who had learned immigration law as a former FBI agent and who gave back to the immigrant community through his nonprofit ministry.
Instead, according to prosecutors for the Middle District of Florida, he was leading “a life of frauds and swindles,” that led his victims to financial ruin—and even caused some to be deported. Reyes, 56, was sentenced to more than 20 years in federal prison on Monday after pleading guilty to dozens of charges connected to a sophisticated scheme to con immigrants by filing fraudulent immigration documents and intercepting communications from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to conceal the fraud, all while stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars.
According to the Post, when immigrants would contact Reyes for help, he would promise to obtain driver’s licenses and work permits for them for roughly $5,000. Then, he would ask his victims to sign blank forms and would create fraudulent asylum claims without telling clients what he had told immigration officials. The forms would automatically initiate hearings and interviews, but Reyes listed inaccurate contact information so he could personally receive all the communications. When his clients didn’t show up for the required court dates, removal proceedings were automatically triggered.
According to prosecutors, Reyes filed at least 225 fraudulent forms, stole a minimum of $411,868, and caused at least six of his clients to be deported. “Some client-victims have already lost their life savings and there is no way to estimate the likely thousands of dollars that each victim will have to spend to try to undo the harm that Reyes inflicted on their immigration status,” prosecutors wrote in a memo.
Report: Andrew Cuomo thinks highly of, has bragged about his sexual prowess
So much so that, according to The New York Times, he mentioned it to his staff:
During his first term, Cuomo was leading a strategy session about Occupy Wall Street at the mansion, fearing that such gate-storming populism would imperil his agenda, when he interrupted himself, according to a person present. “If I have one gift,” he told his team—besides, he said, being told he was excellent at oral sex—“it’s being able to see around the corners of politics.”
A spokesman for the governor, who has denied accusations of sexual misconduct from a number of women, called the Times’ account “a disgusting and defamatory lie.” The Times also reported that Cuomo previously compared himself to Sonny Corleone, the violent, impulsive son in The Godfather, which the same spokesperson insisted never happened, writing that Cuomo “never uses Godfather references,” and adding, “This is an anti-Italian, bigoted, false, defamatory statement.”
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