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      DeSantis Campaign Raises $20 Million in Race to Beat Trump

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      The Florida governor had an impressive quarter, but the fund-raising numbers also raised questions about his ability to keep pace over the course of the Republican primary.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida raised $20 million in the first six weeks of his presidential run, his campaign said Thursday, a substantial sum that solidifies his place as the leading rival to former President Donald J. Trump.While the number falls short of the $35 million that Mr. Trump’s campaign said the former president raised in the three months ending June 30, Mr. DeSantis had only half the time to bring in campaign funds after officially entering the race in mid-May.In addition to the $20 million the DeSantis campaign said it had raised, a super PAC backing Mr. DeSantis, Never Back Down, said Thursday that it had collected $130 million since March. But nearly two-thirds of that sum was transferred to the group from a state committee that had supported Mr. DeSantis’s re-election bid last year.The totals supplied by the campaigns — more detailed numbers don’t have to be filed with the Federal Election Commission until July 15 — provide the first glimpse into the fund-raising battle between the leading candidates for the Republican presidential nomination, a race that could set records for spending.The $20 million raised by Mr. DeSantis includes $8.2 million that his campaign said it had taken in on its first full day of fund-raising in late May, suggesting that the pace of its fund-raising tapered off significantly thereafter.Excluding the transfer from Mr. DeSantis’s state committee, the latest numbers also show that Never Back Down raised more money in its first three weeks than it did over roughly the last three months.The fund-raising slowdown comes after a bumpy campaign rollout that has brought about questions from donors and supporters about its direction.But Kristin Davison, chief operating officer of Never Back Down, said that the money raised “shows an unparalleled, unprecedented and massively successful fund-raising operation no other candidate in this race has.”Mr. Trump has raised most of his campaign’s cash through his leadership PAC, Save America. In recent months, The New York Times reported, Mr. Trump has diverted a greater portion of donations he receives to the PAC, which he has used to pay his personal legal fees.Mr. Trump’s campaign said on Wednesday that it had raised a total of $35 million between April and June — nearly double what the committee had raised in the first quarter of the year, reflecting hefty fund-raising bumps in the wake of his two indictments, in New York City and Florida.Shane Goldmacher More

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      Pro-Kennedy Super PAC Says It Has Raised $10 Million

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      A super PAC backing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said an even mix of Republicans and Democrats contributed to its $10.25 million haul. A political action committee supporting Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign has raised a total of $10.25 million, one of its leaders said on Monday, a signal that his long-shot challenge to President Biden has gained traction among donors, including many Republicans.The precise level of fund-raising by the super PAC, American Values 2024, will not be known until later this month, when political action committees file midyear reports with the Federal Election Commission. But Tony Lyons, Mr. Kennedy’s publisher and the super PAC’s co-chair, said that the $10.25 million included two “very large” donations that each exceed $1 million, and that the contributions came from a “right down the middle” mix of Republicans and Democrats.Mr. Kennedy, a 69-year-old environmental lawyer and prominent skeptic of vaccines and prescription medications, often cites contorted statistics and unfounded theories. He has gained a foothold in the race, even as he has railed against the Democratic Party, accused public health authorities of corruption and increasingly embraced conservative figures and causes.Mr. Kennedy will not come close to summoning the kind of financial support that will flow to Mr. Biden, who as the incumbent has the might of the Democratic National Committee and a robust donor infrastructure behind him. Mr. Kennedy’s support among Democrats has reached as high as 20 percent in polls, although a poll conducted in June by the Saint Anselm College Survey Center put his Democratic support in New Hampshire at 9 percent. He has also appealed to prospective voters outside the party: A Quinnipiac University poll in June found that 40 percent of Republicans viewed him favorably, compared with 31 percent of independents and 25 percent of Democrats.Mr. Biden’s campaign has not yet announced fund-raising numbers. The super PAC American Values 2024 was formed last year as the People’s Pharma Movement, and was initially financed by $500,000 in contributions from Mark Gorton, a New York City investor, records show. Mr. Gorton, who is supporting Mr. Kennedy’s candidacy, has said he knows Mr. Kennedy through the “health freedom” movement, which broadly opposes vaccinations and the regulation of health practices.The committee was renamed this past spring, after Mr. Kennedy entered the race for the Democratic nomination in April. A majority of the $10.25 million has come since then, Mr. Lyons said. As recently as the first week of June, the PAC’s total haul was $5.7 million, committee officials said, indicating that nearly $5 million more arrived in the weeks before the June 30 reporting deadline. The range of political affiliations among the donors, Mr. Lyons said, showed that “there really are people across the political spectrum who feel he’s going to fight corruption in government and corporate takeover of government agencies.” In recent speeches and appearances, Mr. Kennedy has leaned on his family’s storied political history, and framed his race as a bid to “heal the divide” in American politics, which he has described as being captive to corporate power.The PAC is separate from his campaign, which last week sent out requests to hit a $5 million goal to close out its first full quarter of fund-raising. On Friday, the campaign boasted of a $1 million haul in a 24-hour period. Dennis Kucinich, the former presidential candidate and former Ohio congressman who is serving as Mr. Kennedy’s campaign manager, said the campaign expected to make a fund-raising announcement this week. Official numbers will be filed with the F.E.C. this month.A second group supporting Mr. Kennedy, Common Sense PAC, was formed in Los Angeles in April by Sofia Karstens, an actress who has been active in the health freedom movement. Common Sense hosted a fund-raiser for Mr. Kennedy last month in San Francisco along with two tech investors, David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya. That event raised nearly $1 million, Ms. Karstens said.Ms. Karstens did not have the PAC’s latest total fund-raising immediately available on Monday. More

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      Robert Kennedy Jr. Reports Income of $7.8 Million

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      The presidential candidate and anti-vaccine activist made nearly $1.6 million from consulting work for a law firm known for litigation against pharmaceutical companies, a filing showed.Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the political scion and prominent vaccine skeptic who is challenging President Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination, reported an income of $7.8 million in the year leading up to his entry into the race, including nearly $1.6 million from his consulting work for a personal injury law firm known for litigation against pharmaceutical companies.The details came in a financial disclosure form filed Friday with the Federal Election Commission. It shows that Mr. Kennedy earned $5 million at his environmental law firm, Kennedy & Madonna, and a $516,000 salary and bonus as chairman and chief legal counsel of Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit group he formed that has campaigned against vaccines. (The disclosure says he has been on leave from the organization since April, when he announced his campaign.)Mr. Kennedy, a leading skeptic of vaccinations and prescription medications, has gained a foothold in the race even as he has contorted facts about vaccine development and public health authorities and increasingly embraced conservative figures and causes.His support among Democrats has reached as high as 20 percent in polls, although a more recent Saint Anselm College Survey Center poll in June put his Democratic support in New Hampshire at 9 percent. He has also appealed to prospective voters outside the party: A Quinnipiac University poll in June found that 40 percent of Republicans viewed him favorably, compared with 31 percent of independents and 25 percent of Democrats.Friday was also the final day of campaign fund-raising for the second quarter for the presidential race. Mr. Kennedy’s campaign sent out solicitations asking donors to help him meet a $5 million goal by the end of the day. His campaign highlighted a $1 million haul in the 24 hours leading up to Friday’s final push.Official numbers will be available in two weeks, when the campaign files reports with the F.E.C.On his disclosure form, Mr. Kennedy reported nearly $1.6 million in consulting fees from Wisner Baum, a Los Angeles-based personal injury law firm formerly known as Baum Hedlund Aristei & Goldman. The firm’s website lists him as co-counsel on ongoing litigation over Gardasil — an HPV vaccine manufactured by Merck — as well as lawsuits over Monsanto’s Roundup weed killer and California wildfires.Mr. Kennedy also reported $150,000 in consulting fees from the Marwood Group, which describes itself as a health care advisory firm based in New York. And he reported $125,000 from Skyhorse Publishing, which publishes his books and, according to the disclosure, pays him as a consultant.Dennis Kucinich, the former congressman and Mr. Kennedy’s campaign manager, said the disclosure “speaks for itself.” More

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      Koch Network Raises Over $70 Million for Push to Sink Trump

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      Americans for Prosperity Action is wading into a Republican presidential primary for the first time, and waiting to see which candidate it will get behind for 2024.The political network established by the conservative industrialists Charles and David Koch has raised more than $70 million for political races as it looks to help Republicans move past Donald J. Trump, a Federal Election Commission filing will show, according to an official with the group.According to a preliminary draft of the filings for the group, Americans for Prosperity Action, its major donors include Art Pope, a North Carolina businessman who attended a policy retreat hosted by former Vice President Mike Pence before he joined the presidential race; Craig Duchossois, a Chicago businessman; Jim and Rob Walton, brothers and heirs to the Walmart fortune; and Ron Cameron, an Arkansas poultry magnate.Two groups closely affiliated with Charles Koch contributed $50 million of the money. Mr. Koch is a major shareholder in Koch Industries, which contributed $25 million to Americans for Prosperity Action, the draft of the filings shows. Another $25 million was donated by Stand Together, a nonprofit he founded.With this large sum to start, the network plans to throw its weight into the G.O.P. presidential nominating contest for the first time in its history. The network spent nearly $500 million supporting Republican candidates and conservative policies in the 2020 election cycle alone.The Koch network’s goal in the 2024 presidential primaries, which has been described only indirectly in written internal communications, is to stop Mr. Trump from winning the Republican nomination. In February, a top political official in the network, Emily Seidel, wrote a memo to donors and activists saying it was time to “have a president in 2025 who represents a new chapter.”Since then, Republican voters have rallied around the former president, with his support in polls strengthening his front-runner status after his two indictments. Some of the biggest donors in Republican politics, including some in the Koch network, had been hanging their hopes on Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida as Mr. Trump’s most promising rival. But Mr. DeSantis has disconcerted many donors with his early campaign stumbles and a slip in his poll numbers.With seven months until the primaries, the Koch coalition of conservatives is still searching for who its influential and wealthy donors believe can take down the former president, a reflection of a broader paralysis among anti-Trump Republican donors who have watched in shock as Mr. Trump’s poll numbers have held despite two indictments. A memo that circulated inside the Koch network this month made the case that Mr. Trump’s renomination was not inevitable, arguing that the issue of electability could still weaken him.Some Republican donors see Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida as the candidate most likely to defeat Mr. Trump in the primary. But Mr. DeSantis’s early campaign stumbles and slip in his poll numbers have concerned other donors. Christopher Lee for The New York TimesSome top Republican donors, who routinely write seven- or eight-figure checks to support candidates, are keeping their checkbooks closed as they wait to see whether Mr. DeSantis can improve or whether another candidate, like Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, pops during the summer debates. Their paralysis has benefited Mr. Trump, who is begrudgingly viewed by many top party donors as the inevitable nominee.Yet officials in the Koch network profess optimism that 2024 will not be a repeat of 2016, when Mr. Trump began winning statewide races with roughly a third of the party’s Republican base behind him in a fractured, crowded field.The notion of Mr. Trump’s inevitability “is being pushed by left-leaning media outlets, political operatives and the Trump campaign itself,” Michael Palmer, president of the Koch-affiliated voter data group i360, wrote in a memo this month.Mr. Palmer sought to dispel that narrative: “The country is in a much different place than it was eight years ago. Voters of all stripes (including G.O.P. primary voters) have a changed base of knowledge regarding the former president, and other candidates will most certainly treat him differently in the primary this time around.”Yet save for a handful of rivals, most have walked fairly gingerly around Mr. Trump, or have defended him over his two criminal indictments.Mr. Palmer argued that Mr. Trump was weaker than he appeared. He noted how much time was left in the campaign, the fact that early polling often doesn’t predict the winner, that many voters express concern about Mr. Trump’s general-election viability, and that a chunk of the former president’s voters have signaled openness to another, “more electable” candidate.Mr. Palmer wrote that “support for DeSantis at this time likely represents a generic Republican as his policy positions are not well known outside of Florida.”The group is expected to make a new round of digital advertising on the issue of electability in the presidential race, in addition to sending out its first piece of direct mail in the coming days.The group has also made a series of endorsements in down-ballot races, where it plans to spend significant sums. Americans for Prosperity has 300 full-time employees within states and 800 part-timers, officials said. It is about to make its first round of congressional endorsements.Some conservative donors want to see if Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, or another candidate, can gain momentum.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesIt’s not clear how soon before the Iowa caucuses early next year the group will decide on the best candidate to back against Mr. Trump.Mr. DeSantis has taken several positions that are ideologically at odds with the network, including his promise to repeal the First Step Act — a criminal justice reform bill that was passed during the Trump presidency with the strong backing of the Koch network. Yet the group’s officials may ultimately choose pragmatism over strict agreement on key issues if it looks as though a candidate could win.As they wait for the Republican field to winnow, top network officials are trying to pull off a difficult feat: changing who votes in Republican primaries. The network has a vast army of door-knockers, backed by tens of millions of dollars, who fan out across competitive states each election cycle to support candidates.During these early months of the Republican presidential primaries, the network is dispatching these same activists to engage voters who are open to supporting somebody other than Mr. Trump. They are beginning a conversation with those voters, collecting data on them and raising doubts about Mr. Trump’s chances of winning a general election. They intend to return to these voters’ doors closer to the primaries to try to persuade them to vote for the network’s preferred candidate.“A key part of our strategy to elect better leaders is to empower more people’s voices in the primaries,” Ms. Seidel said in a statement. “We’re asking general election voters to show up in the primaries to support better candidates — and in speaking to tens of thousands of those voters already, they are enthusiastic to get engaged earlier to support a candidate who can win.”This well-funded effort to defeat Mr. Trump represents something of a do-over. Ahead of the 2016 Republican primaries, Marc Short, a senior Koch official at the time, argued internally that the network should spend heavily to stop Mr. Trump and support a rival with a more conservative policy record, such as Senator Ted Cruz of Texas or Senator Marco Rubio of Florida.Top officials and donors killed the idea, but some in the network regretted it. Mr. Short has come full circle. He went on to join the Trump-Pence campaign and served in the Trump administration as legislative affairs director and then chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence. Mr. Short is now advising Mr. Pence as he runs for president against his former boss. More

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      Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Draws Support From Outside the Democratic Party

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      His family name, libertarian bent and support from the tech world, along with his views on censorship and vaccines, have given Robert F. Kennedy Jr. a foothold in the 2024 contest.Speaking at a festival hosted by a libertarian group in New Hampshire, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. railed against the “mainstream media” for serving as “propagandists for the powerful.” Each time he mentioned the perfidy of the press — for silencing dissent, for toeing the government line, for labeling him a conspiracy theorist — he drew a supportive hail of jeers.It was a page out of the playbook of Donald J. Trump. But for Mr. Kennedy, who is running a long-shot challenge to President Biden for the Democratic nomination for president, it was more than a rhetorical flourish.Censorship is a central theme of his campaign, uniting an unlikely coalition that includes longtime acolytes in what is known as the “health freedom” movement; donors from Silicon Valley; and new admirers from across the political spectrum.“The mainstream media that is here today is going to report that I, you know, have paranoid conspiracy theories, which is what they always say, but I’m just going to tell you facts,” Mr. Kennedy said at the event last week. He added, “When the press believes it is their job to protect you from dangerous information, they are manipulating you.”Indeed, Mr. Kennedy, an environmental lawyer and scion of the storied Kennedy Democratic clan, is now a leading vaccine skeptic and purveyor of conspiracy theories. He has twisted facts about vaccine development by presenting information out of context; embraced unsubstantiated claims that some clouds are chemical agents being spread by the government; and promoted the decades-old theory that the C.I.A. killed his uncle, former President John F. Kennedy.The idea that the press has a stranglehold on public information is a core, animating belief in the health freedom movement, which broadly opposes regulation of health practices, including vaccinations. Two political action committees supporting Mr. Kennedy were formed by people who knew him through this movement, which accounts for some of his most ardent support.Censorship, and specifically disdain for attempts to regulate the flow of disinformation and hate speech, is also a motivating factor for his powerful backers in Silicon Valley. Tech executives and investors have amplified Mr. Kennedy’s anti-establishment message and celebrated his willingness to challenge liberal orthodoxies and scientific consensus — never mind that in doing so, he has often spread widely discredited claims about vaccines and other public health measures.And, for many prospective voters drawn to Mr. Kennedy, anger about censorship is a natural outgrowth of a deep distrust of authority that accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic, particularly in response to the lockdowns that public officials called on to halt the virus’s spread.It is the latter group that is most diverse. Some are libertarians, searching for a standard-bearer; others are disaffected Democrats; some are Republicans looking for an alternative to Mr. Trump. Mr. Kennedy’s audience in New Hampshire of at least 250 people included at least one person wearing a Trump 2020 hat.A fund-raising email from his campaign on Tuesday said it had raised “less than $4 million” since he entered the race in April. Official figures will be released in July, along with numbers from his PACs, which have separately said they brought in several million dollars.Mr. Kennedy’s recent public appearances have tended to be before conservative or libertarian audiences. Last week, he spoke about environmental stewardship at a sold-out dinner hosted by the Ethan Allen Institute, a free-market, right-of-center think tank in Burlington, Vt. This week, he had been scheduled to speak at an event hosted by Moms for Liberty, a conservative organization that has, among other things, pushed for the banning of books that discuss race, gender and sexuality, but later canceled that appearance, citing a scheduling conflict, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer.“We are here to protect the soul of America,” said Debra Sheldon, 48, a registered Democrat from New York State, who attended a Kennedy event in Lancaster, N.H., with her son, Cass Sheldon Misri.Ryan David Brown for The New York TimesDespite this rightward tilt, Mr. Kennedy has emerged as a persistent thorn in the side of Mr. Biden, posing not so much a serious threat to the president’s renomination as a high-profile reminder that many Democratic voters would prefer new blood.Mr. Kennedy’s support among Democrats reached as high as 20 percent in polls in recent months, but a Quinnipiac University poll this month also found Mr. Kennedy’s standing among Republicans to be fairly high: 40 percent viewed him favorably, compared with 31 percent of independents and 25 percent of Democrats. In New Hampshire, a Saint Anselm College Survey Center poll put his Democratic support in June at 9 percent.Mr. Kennedy’s longtime admirers are not surprised. Debra Sheldon, 48, a Democrat from New York State, campaigned for Barack Obama in 2008. But when she had a child, she said, Mr. Kennedy’s Children’s Health Defense — a nonprofit group he formed that has campaigned against vaccines — “really helped inform me, as a new mom, about what was good for my kid.”Children’s Health Defense has been widely criticized for spreading disinformation about vaccines, included discredited claims linking them to autism.Ms. Sheldon is now a volunteer for Mr. Kennedy’s campaign, and was in New Hampshire selling his books and other materials about autism at the libertarian retreat, the Porcupine Freedom Festival. She described her mission in almost spiritual terms: “We are here to protect the soul of America.”Some of Mr. Kennedy’s newer supporters said they were drawn to what they saw as his message of unity and fairness, an almost nostalgic perspective he often anchors in stories of his childhood in one of America’s most famous political families. But others described feeling “awakened” during the pandemic by questions Mr. Kennedy posed about vaccines, masks and school lockdowns, issues they felt were ignored — or, worse, stifled — by the mainstream media.“All of those people watched over many years where Bobby was censored in every mainstream venue,” said Tony Lyons, whose company, Skyhorse Publishing, has picked up authors deemed unsavory or risky by other presses, including the filmmaker Woody Allen, the former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, and Mr. Kennedy. Mr. Lyons is a co-chair of a PAC supporting Mr. Kennedy.“Every TV show, venue — they just wouldn’t let him on to talk about his views on what Big Pharma companies were doing to the American public,” Mr. Lyons said. “He then kind of became a hero of the freedom of speech people,” a group that includes many political identities, he said.Mr. Kennedy was kicked off social media platforms during the pandemic on the grounds that he had spread debunked claims about the virus. Instagram lifted its suspension in June, citing his presidential candidacy, after Mr. Kennedy complained about the suspension on Twitter. The complaint prompted Elon Musk — who calls himself a free speech absolutist — to invite him to a discussion on Twitter Spaces.Mr. Kennedy at the Porcupine Freedom Festival in Lancaster, N.H.Ryan David Brown for The New York TimesMr. Kennedy has embraced cryptocurrency, as well: He spoke at a major Bitcoin conference in Miami last month, and his campaign is accepting Bitcoin donations.He has also embraced podcasts, and recently recorded a more than three-hour-long appearance with Joe Rogan, whose immensely popular show reaches 11 million listeners per episode. The show, which has been criticized for spreading misinformation, largely caters to young men, and many of his listeners fall on the center-right of the political spectrum.On the show, Mr. Kennedy described the modern Democratic Party as the “party of censorship.”Jason Calacanis, a co-host of a popular podcast on which Mr. Kennedy appeared in May, said in response to questions about Mr. Kennedy’s appeal that his willingness to talk for hours on a podcast stood in contrast to Mr. Biden, who has held few news conferences.“In the age of podcasting, Americans want someone sharp and willing to engage in vibrant debates,” Mr. Calacanis said. “Trump won in 2016 because of social media, and the next president will win because of podcasts.”Mr. Kennedy and his PAC are drawing significant support from the tech world, including Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter who endorsed Mr. Kennedy, and David Sacks, a venture capitalist who has raised money for Republicans and Democrats alike.Mark Gorton, a New York City trader who created the file-sharing service LimeWire, helped create and fund a PAC supporting Mr. Kennedy. The PAC, American Values 2024, has taken in at least $5.7 million, its leadership says — official numbers will be released next month.Mr. Gorton said the pandemic “unlocked all this energy” among a “very marginalized group” of people pushing back against public health protocols who found themselves ostracized or “de-platformed” on social media. In Mr. Kennedy, they saw a hero.Bill Barger, a 31-year-old from Manchester, N.H., who attended Mr. Kennedy’s speech Thursday, said he was “definitely interested” in Mr. Kennedy. But he wasn’t yet sold on Mr. Kennedy’s commitment to free speech.He said he would like to see Mr. Kennedy debate Mr. Trump, whom he described as “funny as hell.”On a radio show Monday, Mr. Trump hailed Mr. Kennedy’s poll numbers, calling him a “very smart guy.”The two candidates share common fixations. During his speech in New Hampshire, Mr. Kennedy repeatedly invoked The New York Times as an example of corrupt media.“The New York Times, which is in this room today,” he said, as an audience member pointed down at the Times reporter’s seat, prompting a chorus of boos so angry, Mr. Kennedy’s campaign manager — the former Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich — told the audience member to stop it.Mr. Kennedy smiled for a few moments, then walked back across the stage. “I’m not saying the reporter who is here. She’s a very sweet person, by all accounts.”Ruth Igielnik More

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      Ron DeSantis Helicopter Photo Spurs Questions About Campaign Ethics

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      It’s not the first time that the Florida governor has faced accusations of inappropriately blurring the lines between his official duties and his presidential campaign.It was a photo op intended to turbocharge Republican voters, one showing Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida posing in front of a helicopter on Sunday at the southern border in Texas.But the display is creating an unwanted spotlight for Mr. DeSantis: The helicopter is funded by Texas taxpayers, raising questions about the political nature of the flight and its cost.Federal law requires presidential candidates to pay the fair-market rate for noncommercial air travel and reimburse providers of flights. In this case, the Texas Department of Public Safety owns the 2008 Eurocopter, according to a Federal Aviation Administration database of aircraft tail numbers.Additionally, ethics rules in Texas bar officials there from using state resources in support of political campaigns.Mr. DeSantis’s office suggested that he was visiting the border in a dual capacity, as both governor and presidential candidate, but his official schedule as governor omitted mention of it. Jeremy Redfern, a spokesman for Mr. DeSantis in the governor’s office, referred questions on Wednesday about the helicopter flight to the Texas Department of Public Safety.That agency said Mr. DeSantis was briefed during his visit about joint immigration enforcement activities between Florida and Texas at the border, part of a program known as Operation Lone Star.“The briefing included an aerial tour which was provided by D.P.S. in order to give Gov. DeSantis a clearer understanding of how Florida’s resources are being utilized along our southern border and see the challenges first hand,” Ericka Miller, a spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Public Safety, said in an email on Wednesday. Mr. DeSantis’s campaign shared the helicopter photo on Twitter on Monday, the same day that he proposed a series of hard-right immigration policies in a campaign speech in Eagle Pass, a small Texas border city.Reflecting the split nature of his duties, Mr. DeSantis on Sunday wore a short-sleeve white shirt that said “Governor Ron DeSantis” on the right and “DeSantis for President” on the left.Mr. DeSantis’s use of the taxpayer-funded helicopter was first reported by The Daily Beast, which also noted that he took a boat tour of the Rio Grande as part of his visit. A Fox News reporter accompanied him by air and by water.That boat is owned by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, The New York Times confirmed. The state agency had already deployed the vessel there through a mutual-aid arrangement, and as part of the Operation Lone Star program.Mr. Redfern, in a statement, challenged that there was anything inappropriate about Mr. DeSantis’s ride on the Florida taxpayer-owned boat.“Participating in a routine patrol with F.W.C. is not outside the purview of the governor’s job as the state’s chief executive,” he said.Myles Martin, a spokesman for the Federal Election Commission, said in an email on Wednesday that he was not able to comment about specific candidates or their activities. But he pointed out that federal campaign finance rules require candidates to reimburse federal, state or local government entities when using aircraft owned by them to campaign.Political committees must also pay back costs associated with others means of transportation, including boat travel.Mr. DeSantis has previously faced accusations that he is inappropriately blurring the lines between his official duties and his campaign.As Mr. DeSantis prepared to sign Florida’s record-breaking budget earlier this month, lobbyists and state lawmakers said the governor’s staff called them seeking either campaign contributions or political endorsements — outreach that would normally be made by members of Mr. DeSantis’s campaign. The conversations left the lobbyists and lawmakers afraid that Mr. DeSantis would veto their projects from the budget if they did not comply, they said.And when Mr. DeSantis signed the budget, he vetoed several projects sponsored by state Senator Joe Gruters, a Republican who has endorsed former President Donald J. Trump, the Republican front-runner. Mr. Gruters accused the governor of retribution, calling him “meanspirited” and saying he had chosen to “punish ordinary Floridians” because of a political disagreement.The governor’s office denied that the vetoes were political. And at a news conference in Tampa last week, Mr. DeSantis said there was nothing wrong with aides in his office supporting his campaign in their “spare time.”But Nikki Fried, the chair of the Florida Democratic Party, filed state ethics and elections complaints against three top staffers in the governor’s office. “Any reasonable person could infer from the reporting that our governor was holding the state budget hostage in exchange for political endorsements and donations — actions that are both unethical and illegal,” Ms. Fried said in a statement.Earlier this year, Mr. DeSantis also signed a bill shielding his travel records from public disclosure, preventing an accounting of the taxpayer funds being used to cover security and other costs during his campaign trips. More

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      How Vivek Ramaswamy Made the Fortune Fueling His Presidential Run

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      On the campaign trail, as he lays out why he is a different kind of presidential candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy calls himself a Harvard-trained “scientist” from the lifesaving world of biotechnology.“I developed a number of medicines,” Mr. Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur and conservative writer, told a gathering at a construction firm this month in Davenport, Iowa. “The one I’m most proud of is a therapy for kids, 40 of them a year, born with a genetic condition who, without treatment, die by the age of 3.”The reality of Mr. Ramaswamy’s business career is more complex, the story of a financier more than a scientist, and a prospector who went bargain hunting, hyped his vision, drew investment and then cashed out in two huge payouts — totaling more than $200 million — before his 35th birthday.Mr. Ramaswamy’s enterprise is best known for a spectacular failure. As a 29-year-old with a bold idea and Ivy League connections, he engineered what was at the time the largest initial public offering in the biotechnology industry’s history — only to see the Alzheimer’s drug at its center fail two years later and the company’s value tank.But Mr. Ramaswamy, now 37, made a fortune anyway. He took his first payout in 2015 after stirring investor excitement about his growing pharmaceutical empire. He reaped a second five years later when he sold off its most promising pieces to a Japanese conglomerate.The core company Mr. Ramaswamy built has since had a hand in bringing five drugs to market, including treatments for uterine fibroids, prostate cancer and the rare genetic condition he mentioned on the stump in Iowa. The company says the last 10 late-stage clinical trials of its drugs have all succeeded, an impressive streak in a business where drugs commonly fail.Mr. Ramaswamy’s resilience was in part a result of the savvy way he structured his web of biotechnology companies. But it also highlights his particular skills in generating hype, hope and risky speculation in an industry that feeds on all three.“A lot of it had substance. Some of it did not. He’s a sort of a Music Man,” said Kathleen Sebelius, a Democrat and former health secretary during the Obama administration who advised two of Mr. Ramaswamy’s companies.For his part, Mr. Ramaswamy said that criticism that he overpromised was missing the point. Although he promoted the potential of the doomed Alzheimer’s drug, he now says he was actually selling investors on a business model.“The business model was to develop these medicines for the long run. That’s the punchline, that’s the most important point,” he said.Mr. Ramaswamy’s wealth is now underwriting a long-shot run for the Republican nomination that includes a campaign jet, plush bus and $10.3 million of his own money and counting. On the campaign trial, he sells what he calls “anti-woke” capitalism, skewering environmental, social and corporate governance programs and dismissing debates about racial privilege.He is the child of Indian immigrants, and “privilege,” he said recently in Iowa, “was two parents in the house with a focus on education, achievement and actual values. That gave me the foundation to then go on to places like Harvard and Yale and become a scientist.”With an undergraduate degree in biology from Harvard, Mr. Ramaswamy isn’t really a scientist; he made his name in the world of hedge funds and his graduate work was a law degree from Yale.Along the way, he invested in biotech and became enamored with an idea for developing high-risk prescription drugs: scour the patents held by pharmaceutical giants, searching for drugs that had been abandoned for business reasons, not necessarily for lack of promise. Buy the patents for a song, and bring them to market.Mr. Ramaswamy made his name in the world of hedge funds and his graduate work was a law degree from Yale.Forbes MagazineIn 2014, Mr. Ramaswamy founded Roivant Sciences — incorporated in the tax haven of Bermuda and backed by nearly $100 million in funding from investors including QVT, a hedge fund that employed Mr. Ramaswamy after college.Using his connections and his confidence, Mr. Ramaswamy assembled a star-studded, bipartisan advisory board. A friend from Harvard helped him recruit Democrats, including Ms. Sebelius; Tom Daschle, a former Senate majority leader; and Donald M. Berwick, a former administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.The Republicans included former Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine and Mark McClellan, a prominent former health regulator.Ms. Sebelius said she was swayed by Mr. Ramaswamy’s promises of bringing critical drugs to market affordably.“It was an entrepreneurial view of how to lower drug prices,” she said of his pitch. “We shared a lot of the mission and vision.”But in making his pitch to a different crowd, Mr. Ramaswamy was blunt about Roivant’s chief aim.“This will be the highest return on investment endeavor ever taken up in the pharmaceutical industry,” he boasted in a cover story in Forbes.The “Roi” in the company’s name stands for return on investment.In late 2014, the Roivant subsidiary that would be called Axovant bought for $5 million upfront — pocket change in the biotech industry — an Alzheimer’s drug that GlaxoSmithKline had given up on after four failed clinical trials.Mr. Ramaswamy speaking in 2015 at the Forbes Under 30 Summit.Lisa Lake/Getty ImagesSix months later, before starting any new clinical trials for the drug, Mr. Ramaswamy took Axovant public in a debut that sent the company’s market value to nearly $3 billion.Around that time, the company reported it had just eight employees, including Mr. Ramaswamy’s mother and brother, both of them physicians.Mr. Ramaswamy was a powerful salesman. He talked up the Alzheimer’s drug, intepirdine, as a potential breakthrough that “could help millions” of people. “The potential opportunity is really tremendous for delivering value to patients,” he said on CNBC.Patrick Machado, a former director of Roivant and Axovant, described Mr. Ramaswamy as “brilliant and audacious.” Others said Mr. Ramaswamy was overpromising.Thanks to the public stock offering, Mr. Ramaswamy held a large and suddenly extraordinarily valuable stake in Axovant through its parent company Roivant, which was still privately held and controlled about 80 percent of Axovant.With the drug headed into a crucial clinical trial, he set out to raise more money to finance his broader ambitions with Roivant.In late 2015, Mr. Ramaswamy sold off a portion of his Roivant shares to an institutional investor, Viking Global Investors, that wanted in. The sale was a major payday: On his 2015 tax return, Mr. Ramaswamy claimed more than $37 million in capital gains.In an interview, Mr. Ramaswamy said he cashed out only to make room for Viking, not to hedge his bets ahead of intepirdine’s clinical trial.“We were forced to sell,” he said, “and in some ways it’s a regret because the shares would be more valuable today if they hadn’t been sold.”In 2017, Mr. Ramaswamy made his pitch to Masayoshi Son, the founder of the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank who runs the world’s largest tech investment fund. His presentation included slides mimicking ones Mr. Son is known for, with charts showing an arrow shooting up and to the right, according to a person familiar with Mr. Ramaswamy’s pitch who was not authorized to speak publicly.In August 2017, SoftBank led an investment of $1.1 billion in Roivant. The investment wasn’t about getting in on Axovant; SoftBank thought intepirdine was unlikely to succeed, the person said. But SoftBank was seeking to invest in Mr. Ramaswamy’s wider drug portfolio, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.SoftBank declined to comment.A few weeks later, the Alzheimer’s drug’s clinical trial failed. The stock price plunged, losing 75 percent of its value in a single day. The stock slid further in the months that followed and never recovered before the company was dissolved this year.Mr. Ramaswamy declined to disclose how much he lost on paper because of the drug’s failure.Thanks to the way he structured his biotechnology empire, he did not hold a direct stake in Axovant. His personal stake was through Roivant, allowing Mr. Ramaswamy to weather the storm. QVT, the hedge fund where Mr. Ramaswamy once worked, had also invested in Roivant, insulating it from much of the fallout. QVT did not respond to a request for comment.But some investors lost real money on Axovant. One large public pension fund, the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, sold its stake months later, when it was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars less than in the days leading up to the disappointing clinical trial news. (The fund declined to comment.)But for many Axovant shareholders who lost money, many of whom were sophisticated institutional investors, the loss was one missed gamble on a high-risk, high-reward stock within a large portfolio of safer bets.Mr. Ramaswamy campaigning in Iowa this month. On the campaign trail, he sells what he calls “anti-woke” capitalism, skewering environmental, social and corporate governance programs and dismissing debates about racial privilege.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesWith intepirdine’s failure, Mr. Ramaswamy ran into the hard reality of biology, said Derek Lowe, a longtime pharmaceutical researcher and industry commentator. “The patients’ diseased cells that you’re trying to treat don’t really care how hard-charging you are,” he said.“I think whipping people up into thinking this was a wonder drug was unconscionable,” he said. (Mr. Lowe bet against Axovant’s stock and made about $10,000 from the drug’s failure, he said.)Mr. Ramaswamy has expressed regret for years about the failure of his drug for Alzheimer’s, a disease that has long bedeviled researchers. And the criticism that he profited while his investors lost angers him, he said.“On a personal level, it grates on me a little bit,” he said. “The business model of Roivant was to see these drugs through the market, and we could have cashed out big, and employees could have cashed up big, but that was not the business model.”But Mr. Ramaswamy did eventually cash out on Roivant.In 2019, Roivant sold off its stake in five of its most promising spinoff companies to Sumitomo, a giant Japanese conglomerate.That proved to be Mr. Ramaswamy’s biggest payday. His 2020 tax return included nearly $175 million in capital gains.In recent years, Mr. Ramaswamy has stepped back from Roivant, leaving his roles as chief executive in 2021 and chairman in February. He remains the sixth largest shareholder in the company, with a stake currently valued at more than $500 million. (He has yet to file personal financial disclosures for his presidential run, but he has released 20 years of tax returns, which were provided to The Times by Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld and Steven Tian, two Yale Business School academics who have studied Mr. Ramaswamy’s business record. The candidate has also called for his competitors in the Republican race to do the same.)Mr. Ramaswamy’s pitch that his business model would lead to affordable drug prices has not come to pass. One example is the product for which he has said he is most proud, a one-time implant for children with a rare and devastating immune ailment. When Enzyvant, the Roivant spinoff company by then controlled by Sumitomo, won regulatory approval in 2021, it set a sticker price of $2.7 million.Sumitomo declined to comment. More

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      Trump Steers Campaign Donations Into PAC That Covers His Legal Fees

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      A previously unnoticed change in Donald Trump’s online fund-raising appeals allows him to divert a sizable chunk of his 2024 contributions to a group that has spent millions to cover his legal fees.Facing multiple intensifying investigations, former President Donald J. Trump has quietly begun diverting more of the money he is raising away from his 2024 presidential campaign and into a political action committee that he has used to pay his personal legal fees.The change, which went unannounced except in the fine print of his online disclosures, raises fresh questions about how Mr. Trump is paying for his mounting legal bills — which could run into millions of dollars — as he prepares for at least two criminal trials, and whether his PAC, Save America, is facing a financial crunch.When Mr. Trump kicked off his 2024 campaign in November, for every dollar raised online, 99 cents went to his campaign, and a penny went to Save America.But internet archival records show that sometime in February or March, he adjusted that split. Now his campaign’s share has been reduced to 90 percent of donations, and 10 percent goes to Save America.The effect of that change is potentially substantial: Based on fund-raising figures announced by his campaign, the fine-print maneuver may already have diverted at least $1.5 million to Save America.And the existence of the group has allowed Mr. Trump to have his small donors pay for his legal expenses, rather than paying for them himself.Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, did not answer detailed questions about why the Trump operation has changed how the funds he is raising are being split. Save America technically owns the list of email addresses and phone numbers of his supporters — one of the former president’s most valuable assets — and the campaign is effectively paying the PAC for access to that list, he explained.“Because the campaign wants to ensure every dollar donated to President Trump is spent in the most cost-effective manner, a fair-market analysis was conducted to determine email list rentals would be more efficient by amending the fund-raising split between the two entities,” Mr. Cheung said in a written statement.Mr. Trump gave the keynote speech at the state Republican convention in Georgia this month. Onstage, he mentioned the indictments against him, which have become intertwined with his fund-raising efforts.Jon Cherry for The New York TimesThe different rules governing what political action committees and candidate campaign committees can pay for are both dizzying and somewhat in dispute. But generally, a PAC cannot spend money directly on the candidate’s campaign, and a campaign committee cannot directly pay for things that benefit the candidate personally.For more than a year, before Mr. Trump was a 2024 candidate, Save America has been paying for bills related to various investigations into the former president and his allies. In February 2022, the PAC announced that it had $122 million in its coffers.By the beginning of 2023, the PAC’s cash on hand was down to $18 million, filings show. The rest had been spent on staff salaries, on the costs of Mr. Trump’s political activities last year — including some spending on other candidates and groups — and in other ways. That included the $60 million that was transferred to MAGA Inc., a super PAC that is supporting Mr. Trump. And more than $16 million went to pay legal bills.Mr. Trump’s rivals are not similarly splitting their online proceeds with an affiliated PAC. The websites of former Vice President Mike Pence, former Ambassador Nikki Haley and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina direct all the proceeds to their campaign committees. The same goes for Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey and Vivek Ramaswamy.Mr. Trump at a campaign event in Manchester, N.H., in April. On his campaign website, supporters can buy an “I Stand With Trump” T-shirt and other merchandise alluding to his costly legal troubles.Sophie Park for The New York Times“I think in this particular situation, specifically because of the use of the leadership PAC to pay legal expenses and potentially other expenses that would be illegal personal use of campaign money, there’s an unusual incentive for the leadership PAC to take in more than it normally would,” said Adav Noti, senior vice president and legal director of Campaign Legal Center.In the run-up to Mr. Trump’s latest campaign, his legal bills exploded in size. Save America spent $1.9 million in what it identified as legal expenses in the first half of 2022. That figure ballooned to nearly $14.6 million in the second half of last year, federal records show.In late 2022, a Trump adviser said that about $20 million had been set aside by Save America PAC to cover legal expenses.Since then, Mr. Trump has been indicted twice, once by a Manhattan grand jury on charges stemming from a hush-money payment to a porn star, and once by a federal grand jury in Florida on charges including violations of the Espionage Act arising from Mr. Trump’s possession of classified material and government records long after he left office.A prominent attorney, Todd Blanche, left his white-collar law firm in April to join the former president’s legal team and is now representing him in both cases, and Mr. Trump recently met with about a half-dozen lawyers in Florida.Mr. Trump’s legal troubles are deeply intertwined with his political campaign and fund-raising efforts. His campaign store is selling an “I Stand With Trump” T-shirt showing the date of his indictment in Manhattan (“03.30.2023”) for $36; it recently added a second shirt with his Florida indictment date (“06.08.2023”) for $38. Half the featured items on the store’s landing page show a fake mug shot and the words “not guilty.”And Mr. Trump’s usual legal strategy — delay, delay, delay — could prove costly as overlapping teams of white-collar lawyers defend him in the federal case and the Manhattan criminal case, as well as in the investigation in Georgia, where Mr. Trump could face yet another indictment this summer for his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election. He is also facing an intensifying investigation by the special counsel Jack Smith into his efforts to cling to power after losing the election.It remains unclear whether Mr. Trump will try to use his campaign funds to pay for lawyers, should he run into difficulties with the political action committee — and whether such a move would run afoul of spending rules.“He can use the campaign to pay for legal bills that arise out of candidate or officeholder activity — and of course, some of the current legal matters fall into that category, and some do not, and some are in a gray area,” Mr. Noti said. “It really depends on what matter we’re talking about.”Jason Torchinsky, a Republican election lawyer, said he believed Mr. Trump was barred from using Save America donations to pay his personal legal expenses now that he’s a candidate, arguing that doing so would be “an excessive contribution” under Federal Election Commission precedent. And he said Mr. Trump could not use campaign money at all, because it would qualify as personal use.There have been signs that Mr. Trump’s campaign has been carefully monitoring its expenses.He has mainly attended events organized by other groups, as opposed to staging his own large-scale political rallies, which were the lifeblood of his two past runs for president and are one of his favorite parts of campaigning. Those rallies are expensive, costing at least $150,000 and usually more than $400,000.Mr. Trump has held only one full-scale rally in the seven months he has been running, with a second scheduled on July 1 in South Carolina, his first in an early-nominating state. (A rally in Iowa on May 13 was canceled after a tornado warning, though the weather cleared and Mr. DeSantis pointedly held an impromptu event nearby.)People familiar with the Trump campaign’s plans have said that the dearth of rallies was as much about husbanding resources as it was about getting Mr. Trump to engage with voters in a more traditional way. The people also suggested that more large-scale events might come in the fall, as the primary race heats up.But the fund-raising surges that Mr. Trump experienced after his first indictment at the end of March and again in June are expected to obscure a broader fund-raising slowdown. His campaign announced that he had raised $12 million in the first week after his first indictment and $7 million in the week after his second one. He will next disclose the state of his PAC and campaign’s finances in federal filings in July.Mr. Trump is unusually dependent on online fund-raising. He has held only one major campaign fund-raiser that was billed as such by his team: the event at Bedminster on the evening of his indictment. It raised $2 million. More