Frauds and Swindling

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      How the Manhattan DA's Investigation Into Donald Trump Unraveled

      by

      On a late January afternoon, two senior prosecutors stood before the new Manhattan district attorney, hoping to persuade him to criminally charge the former president of the United States.The prosecutors, Mark F. Pomerantz and Carey R. Dunne, detailed their strategy for proving that Donald J. Trump knew his annual financial statements were works of fiction. Time was running out: The grand jury hearing evidence against Mr. Trump was set to expire in the spring. They needed the district attorney, Alvin Bragg, to decide whether to seek charges.But Mr. Bragg and his senior aides, masked and gathered around a conference table on the eighth floor of the district attorney’s office in Lower Manhattan, had serious doubts. They hammered Mr. Pomerantz and Mr. Dunne about whether they could show that Mr. Trump had intended to break the law by inflating the value of his assets in the annual statements, a necessary element to prove the case.The questioning was so intense that as the meeting ended, Mr. Dunne, exasperated, used a lawyerly expression that normally refers to a judge’s fiery questioning:“Wow, this was a really hot bench,” Mr. Dunne said, according to people with knowledge of the meeting. “What I’m hearing is you have great concerns.”The meeting, on Jan. 24, started a series of events that brought the investigation of Mr. Trump to a sudden halt, and late last month prompted Mr. Pomerantz and Mr. Dunne to resign. It also represented a drastic shift: Mr. Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., had deliberated for months before deciding to move toward an indictment of Mr. Trump. Mr. Bragg, not two months into his tenure, reversed that decision.Mr. Bragg has maintained that the three-year inquiry is continuing. But the reversal, for now, has eliminated one of the gravest legal threats facing the former president.This account of the investigation’s unraveling, drawn from interviews with more than a dozen people knowledgeable about the events, pulls back a curtain on one of the most consequential prosecutorial decisions in U.S. history. Had the district attorney’s office secured an indictment, Mr. Trump would have been the first current or former president to be criminally charged.Mr. Bragg was not the only one to question the strength of the case, the interviews show. Late last year, three career prosecutors in the district attorney’s office opted to leave the investigation, uncomfortable with the speed at which it was proceeding and with what they maintained were gaps in the evidence. The tension spilled into the new administration, with some career prosecutors raising concerns directly to the new district attorney’s team.Mr. Bragg, whose office is conducting the investigation along with lawyers working for New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, had not taken issue with Mr. Dunne and Mr. Pomerantz presenting evidence to the grand jury in his first days as district attorney. But as the weeks passed, he developed concerns about the challenge of showing Mr. Trump’s intent — a requirement for proving that he criminally falsified his business records — and about the risks of relying on the former president’s onetime fixer, Michael D. Cohen, as a key witness.Mr. Cohen’s testimony, the prosecutors leading the investigation argued, could help to establish that Mr. Trump was intentionally misleading when he exaggerated the value of his properties. The financial statements Mr. Trump submitted to banks to secure loans — documents that say “Donald J. Trump is responsible for the preparation and fair presentation” of the valuations — could also support a case.Mr. Bragg was not persuaded. Once he told Mr. Pomerantz and Mr. Dunne that he was not prepared to authorize charges, they resigned. Explaining the resignation to his team of prosecutors in a meeting a day later, Mr. Dunne said he felt he needed “to disassociate myself with this decision because I think it was on the wrong side of history.”Mr. Dunne and Mr. Pomerantz also bristled at how Mr. Bragg had handled the investigation at times. Mr. Bragg left the pivotal Jan. 24 meeting before the discussion ended, though several of his top aides stayed behind. And after that day, Mr. Dunne and Mr. Pomerantz — two of New York’s most prominent litigators, who had become accustomed to driving the case — were not included in closed-door meetings where decisions were made.Mark Pomerantz, one of two lawyers who were leading a criminal inquiry into former President Donald J. Trump’s business practices. The two resigned last week after the investigation came to a sudden halt.David Karp/Associated PressMr. Bragg’s choice not to pursue charges is reminiscent of the high hurdle that others have failed to clear over the years as they sought to hold Mr. Trump criminally liable for his practices as a real estate mogul. Mr. Trump famously shuns email, and he has cultivated deep loyalty among employees who might otherwise testify against him, a one-two punch that has stymied other prosecutors in search of conclusive proof of his guilt.In the Manhattan investigation, the absence of damning emails or an insider willing to testify would make it harder to prove that any exaggerations were criminal. Mr. Trump, who has a history of making false statements, has in the past referred to boastful claims about his assets as “truthful hyperbole.”The interviews with people knowledgeable about the Manhattan investigation also highlight the success of Mr. Trump’s efforts to delay it.He fought many of the subpoenas issued by the district attorney. In one of those battles — for Mr. Trump’s tax returns and other financial documents — it took nearly 18 months and two trips to the Supreme Court for Mr. Vance’s office to obtain the records. As a result, the ultimate decision of whether to pursue charges fell to Mr. Bragg, his more skeptical successor.A public uproar over his handling of the investigation has added to the turbulence of Mr. Bragg’s early tenure.As he was weighing the fate of the Trump investigation, Mr. Bragg was also contending with a firestorm over a number of criminal justice reforms he introduced in a memo his first week in office. The memo immediately embroiled his administration in controversy, a public relations debacle that worsened with a handful of high-profile shootings, including the killing of two police officers in late January.Although it is unclear whether those early travails influenced Mr. Bragg’s management of the Trump inquiry, there is no doubt that they contributed to his frenzied first days in office.Mr. Bragg’s decision on the Trump investigation may compound his political problems in heavily Democratic Manhattan, where many residents make no secret of their enmity for Mr. Trump.Mr. Bragg has told aides that the inquiry could move forward if a new piece of evidence is unearthed, or if a Trump Organization insider decides to turn on Mr. Trump. Other prosecutors in the office saw that as fanciful.Mr. Trump has long denied wrongdoing and has accused Mr. Bragg and Ms. James, both of whom are Democrats and Black, of carrying out a politically motivated “witch hunt” and being “racists.”Danielle Filson, a spokeswoman for Mr. Bragg, said that the investigation into Mr. Trump was continuing under new leadership.“This is an active investigation and there is a strong team in place working on it,” Ms. Filson said. She added that the inquiry was now being led by Susan Hoffinger, the executive assistant district attorney in charge of the office’s Investigation Division.Mr. Pomerantz and Mr. Dunne declined to comment.The Brain TrustCyrus R. Vance Jr., the previous Manhattan district attorney, began the investigation into Mr. Trump, including whether he had intentionally inflated the value of his assets to defraud lenders.Desiree Rios for The New York TimesMr. Vance and his top deputies were riding high last summer.They had just announced criminal tax charges against Mr. Trump’s family business and his longtime finance chief, Allen H. Weisselberg. The next step for Mr. Dunne, Mr. Pomerantz and their team was to build a case against Mr. Trump himself.The two were suited to the task. Mr. Pomerantz, 70, had once run the criminal division of the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan. He had also been a partner at the prestigious law firm Paul Weiss, and he came out of retirement to work on the investigation without pay.Mr. Dunne had begun his career trying cases as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, gone on to become a partner at another top firm, Davis Polk, and was a former president of the New York City bar association. As Mr. Vance’s general counsel, he had successfully argued before the Supreme Court, winning access to Mr. Trump’s tax records.Helped by lawyers from Ms. James’s office, which was conducting a separate, civil inquiry into Mr. Trump, Mr. Dunne and Mr. Pomerantz pressed ahead with their investigation into whether Mr. Trump had used his financial statements to deceive lenders about his net worth and secure favorable loan terms. Mr. Cohen had testified before Congress that Mr. Trump was a “con man” who “inflated his total assets when it served his purposes.”By the fall, a number of the prosecutors assigned to the investigation thought it was likely that Mr. Trump had broken the law. Proving it would be another matter.Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, has been leading a parallel inquiry focused on whether financial statements for Mr. Trump’s family company intentionally included false information.Todd Heisler/The New York TimesSoon, some of the career prosecutors who had worked on the inquiry for more than two years expressed concern. They believed that Mr. Vance, who had decided not to seek re-election, was pushing too hard for an indictment before leaving office, and that the evidence gathered so far did not justify the speed at which the inquiry was moving.The debate was born of painful experience from past investigations, including one involving the Trump family. In 2012, in the first of his three terms, Mr. Vance closed an investigation into accusations that Mr. Trump’s son Donald Jr. and his daughter Ivanka had misled potential buyers of apartments at one of the Trump Organization’s New York hotels, Trump Soho. The decision trailed Mr. Vance for years, subjecting him to criticism after Mr. Trump was elected president.Concern among the office’s career prosecutors about the investigation into the former president came to a head in September at a meeting they sought with Mr. Dunne. Mr. Dunne offered to have them work only on the pending trial of Mr. Weisselberg or leave the Trump team altogether.Two prosecutors eventually took him up on the latter.Mr. Vance pressed on, and in early November, convened a new special grand jury to start hearing evidence against the former president. Still, he had yet to decide whether to direct the prosecutors to begin a formal grand jury presentation with the goal of seeking charges. As his tenure drew to a close in December, he consulted a group of prominent outside lawyers to help inform what would be his final decision.The group was referred to internally as “the brain trust” — a handful of former prosecutors that included two senior members of Robert S. Mueller’s special counsel inquiry into Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign.Before they all convened for a meeting on Dec. 9, Mr. Dunne and Mr. Pomerantz circulated hypothetical opening arguments in advance: one for the prosecution; another for the defense.In the meeting, which lasted much of the day, the outside lawyers raised a number of questions about the evidence and the lack of an insider witness. Mr. Weisselberg, who has spent nearly a half-century working as an accountant for the Trump family, had resisted pressure from the prosecutors to cooperate.The brain trust puzzled over how to prove that Mr. Trump had intended to commit crimes, and the group questioned Mr. Cohen’s potential strength as a witness at trial. A former Trump acolyte turned antagonist, Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to federal charges of lying to Congress on behalf of Mr. Trump and paying hush money to a pornographic actress who said she had an affair with Mr. Trump.Mr. Bragg, who had not yet been sworn in, was not aware of the Dec. 9 meeting.And there are differing accounts of how well the brain trust responded to the evidence, with one participant calling the reaction “mixed at best,” but another saying that there was agreement that the prosecutors had credible evidence to support charges and that no one recommended against a case.The deliberations led prosecutors to simplify the charges they planned to seek to make it easier to win a conviction, and Mr. Vance was soon persuaded. Three days later, Mr. Dunne sent the team an email announcing that they would proceed. The plan, he said, was to seek charges from the panel in the spring. Most of the remaining career prosecutors were on board. But that week, a third prosecutor left the investigation into Mr. Trump.‘Time Is of the Essence’Carey Dunne, Mr. Vance’s general counsel. A leader, with Mr. Pomerantz, of the Trump inquiry, Mr. Dunne became frustrated, and he ultimately resigned, over questions about the strength of the case.Jefferson Siegel for The New York TimesWith Mr. Vance about to leave office, the investigators’ attention turned to their future boss.Born in Harlem and educated at Harvard, Mr. Bragg won a hotly contested Democratic primary last year with a campaign that balanced progressive ideals with public safety. He had served as a federal prosecutor in Manhattan and also in the state attorney general’s office, where he rose to become a top deputy managing hundreds of lawyers.Understand the New York A.G.’s Trump InquiryCard 1 of 6An empire under scrutiny. More

    • 88 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      Where the Investigations Into Donald Trump Stand

      by

      One of the highest profile investigations into the former president appeared to stall on Wednesday, but several other inquiries are in progress around the country.The abrupt resignation of the two prosecutors leading the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation into Donald J. Trump leaves the future of the inquiry, which had been put on a monthlong pause, in doubt.But that does not mean that the former president or his family business, the Trump Organization, are out of legal jeopardy.In addition to the Manhattan criminal investigation — which resulted in criminal charges last summer against the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer — Mr. Trump and his business face civil and criminal inquiries into his business dealings and political activities in several states.Mr. Trump and his family have criticized the Manhattan investigation, and the other investigations, as partisan or inappropriate, and have denied wrongdoing.Here is where each notable inquiry now stands.Manhattan Criminal CaseThe Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, has said that his office’s investigation is ongoing and that it will continue without the two prosecutors. How it will proceed is unclear, though the investigation has already produced criminal charges against the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer, Allen H. Weisselberg.In July, before Mr. Bragg’s election, the Manhattan district attorney’s office charged the Trump Organization with running a 15-year scheme to help its executives evade taxes by compensating them with fringe benefits that were hidden from authorities.The office, then under Cyrus R. Vance Jr., also accused Mr. Weisselberg of avoiding taxes on $1.7 million in perks that should have been reported as income.On Tuesday, lawyers for the company and for Mr. Weisselberg argued in court documents that those charges should be dismissed. The district attorney’s office will have a chance to respond before the judge overseeing the case decides whether to dismiss some of the charges.The case has been tentatively scheduled to go to trial at the end of this summer.New York State Civil InquiryThe New York attorney general, Letitia James, had been working with Manhattan prosecutors on their criminal investigation. But she is also conducting a parallel civil inquiry into some of the same conduct, including scrutinizing whether Mr. Trump’s company fraudulently misled lenders about the value of its assets.Ms. James, a Democrat who is running for re-election this fall, is expected to continue her civil investigation.The inquiry is focused on whether Mr. Trump’s statements about the value of his assets — which Ms. James has said were marked by repeated misrepresentations — were part of a pattern of fraud, or simply Trumpian showmanship.Last week, a state judge ruled that Ms. James can question Mr. Trump and two of his adult children, Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump, under oath as part of the inquiry in the coming weeks.The Trumps said they would appeal the decision. Even if their appeals are unsuccessful, it is likely they would decline to answer questions if forced to sit for interviews under oath. When another son of Mr. Trump’s, Eric Trump, was questioned in October 2020, he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against incriminating himself, according to a court filing.Westchester County Criminal InvestigationIn Westchester County, Miriam E. Rocah, the district attorney, appears to be focused at least in part on whether the Trump Organization misled local officials about the value of a golf course to reduce its taxes. She has subpoenaed the company for records on the matter.But the Manhattan investigation, in which prosecutors had been bringing witnesses before a grand jury before pausing in mid-January, appeared to be more advanced.Understand the New York A.G.’s Trump InquiryCard 1 of 6An empire under scrutiny. More

    • 75 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      Surprise! There’s No Voter Fraud. Again.

      by

      For those who spend their days operating within the constraints of empirical reality, the long-running voter-fraud scam peddled by right-wing con artists poses a dilemma: Respond to their claims and give them the veneer of legitimacy they crave. Ignore them, and risk letting transparent lies spread unchecked.I used to err on the side of responding as often as possible, in the belief that persistent fact-checking and debunking was the best way to inoculate the American public against a virulent campaign of deception. But it became clear to me, probably later than it should have, that this was always a fool’s game. The professional vote-fraud crusaders are not in the fact business. While they pretend to care about real election crimes, their purpose is not to identify whether voters are actually committing such crimes; it is to concoct a world in which the votes of certain people (and it always seems to be the same people) are presumptively invalid. That’s why they are not chastened by data demonstrating — again and again and again and again — that there is essentially no voter fraud anywhere in this country.Thanks to their efforts, about three quarters of Republicans believe the 2020 election was stolen, and they won’t be convinced by evidence to the contrary.That evidence continues to grow. Earlier this week The Associated Press released an impressively thorough report examining every potential case of voter fraud in six decisive battleground states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — where Donald Trump and his allies challenged the result in 2020. Voters in these six states cast a combined 25.5 million votes for president last year, and chose Joe Biden over Mr. Trump by 311,257 votes. The total number of possible cases of fraud the A.P. found? Fewer than 475, or 0.15 percent of Mr. Biden’s margin of victory in those states.Many of those cases the A.P. identified turned out not to be fraud at all. Some involved a poll worker’s error or a voter’s innocent confusion, such as the Trump supporter in Wisconsin who mistakenly thought he could vote while on parole. (“The guy upstairs knows what I did,” the man said after a court appearance. “I didn’t have any intention to commit election fraud.”)In the few instances of clear fraud — for example, a Pennsylvania man who cast two ballots, one for himself and, later in disguise, one for his son — local authorities were quick to act. In Arizona, officials investigated 198 cases of potential fraud, most involving double-voting. They invalidated virtually all of the second votes and have so far charged nine people with voting fraud crimes.That’s the thing about voter fraud: Not only is it rare, it’s generally easy to catch, especially if it happens on a larger scale. In 2019, North Carolina officials ordered a do-over of a congressional election after the winning candidate’s campaign was found to have financed an illegal voter-turnout effort. That candidate was a Republican, as were two of three residents of the Villages, a Florida retirement community, who were arrested and charged with double voting in the 2020 election earlier this month. (The third had no party affiliation.)Given how much Republicans bang on about the dangers of voter fraud, a little schadenfreude is in order here. But it misses the bigger point: To the extent there is any fraud, it is almost entirely an individual phenomenon. The A.P. report confirmed this, finding no evidence anywhere of a coordinated effort to commit voter fraud. That’s no surprise. Committing a single case of fraud is hard enough; doing so as part of a conspiracy is essentially impossible, once you consider how many people would need to be in on the scheme. “It’s a staggeringly inefficient way to affect an outcome,” said David Daley, the author of “Unrigged: How Americans Are Battling Back to Save Democracy.” “It simply doesn’t work.”To sum up once more for the folks in the cheap seats: Voter fraud is vanishingly rare. It is virtually never coordinated. And when it does happen, it is often easily discovered and prosecuted by authorities.I hold no illusions that any of these truths will matter to those who have invested themselves in tales of widespread fraud. After all, they weren’t moved when both Republican and Democratic officials in states around the country reaffirmed, in some cases multiple times, the accuracy and integrity of their vote counts. Even Bill Barr, the former attorney general and one of Mr. Trump’s most reliable bootlickers, could not bring himself to repeat the lie that there was any meaningful fraud in 2020.Alas, Republican voters don’t listen to Bill Barr. They listen to Donald Trump, who dismissed the A.P.’s report by doing his standard Mafia don impression. “I just don’t think you should make a fool out of yourself by saying 400 votes,” the former president told the news organization, insisting that the true number of fraudulent votes in 2020 was in the “hundreds of thousands.” His evidence? An unreleased report by a source he refused to name.This is how it goes with the vote-fraud fraudsters. The damning evidence is always right around the next corner, or the one after that. Recall that Mr. Trump established a voter-fraud commission soon after he entered office, with the goal of rooting out the supposedly massive fraud that led him to lose the popular vote by nearly three million votes. (Like everyone else, he knew that true democratic legitimacy comes not from the Electoral College, but from a majority of the American people.) The commission was led by Kris Kobach, the indefatigable vote-fraud warrior whom Mr. Daley once called “an Inspector Clouseau who gazes into his mirror and sees Sherlock Holmes.” In Mr. Kobach’s previous job as Kansas’s secretary of state, he spent years hunting for widespread vote fraud and won only nine convictions, most of them of older Republican men who had double voted. Under Mr. Kobach’s leadership, the Trump voter-fraud commission disbanded after less than a year of chaos and controversy, without having made any findings.That’s because, as the A.P. report affirms once again, there was nothing to find. American voters aren’t cheating, and certainly not in any coordinated way.And here lies the deepest irony of this strange, fragile moment we are living in. A very real threat is, in fact, looming over America’s electoral integrity. But it’s not coming from voters; it’s coming from the people braying the loudest about the importance of election integrity.Donald Trump turned fact-free charges of voter fraud into an art form, but the exploitation of the predictable public fear generated by that sort of rhetoric has been a central feature of the Republican playbook for years. Back in 2013, the then-North Carolina lawmaker Thom Tillis explained why Republicans in the Legislature were passing their strict voter-ID law. “There is some evidence of voter fraud, but that’s not the primary reason for doing this,” said Mr. Tillis, now a U.S. senator. “There are a lot of people who are just concerned with the potential risk of fraud.” Why are they so concerned? Because their leaders have been feeding them a steady diet of lies.That diet became an all-you-can-eat buffet in the Trump years, culminating in the “Stop the Steal” rallies after the 2020 election and then, horrifically, in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. Now the same people who subscribed to the lies about election fraud are running for, and often winning, jobs overseeing the running of elections across the country. They are representative of a new generation of Republicans, raised in the fever swamps of Fox News and other purveyors of disinformation, who believe elections are valid only when their candidate wins.The goal of the voter-fraud brigade, it turns out, was never to identify fraud that might have happened in the past; it was to indoctrinate voters with the terror of stolen elections, and to pave the way for a hostile takeover of American democracy in the future.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

    • 50 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Scams and Slippery Slopes

      by

      I’ve always believed that part of education — especially higher education — is learning to ask better questions about complex topics, knowing you might not have the right answers. In my graduate seminars, one of my favorite ways of prompting students to pursue deeper lines of inquiry is by asking this question: If we take off the table that something is racist, sexist or classist, what else can we say about it?Society is embedded with power imbalances and inequalities. Of course there are gender disparities and discrimination, of course there is a racial hierarchy and a racial order. But if we set that aside, what more can we say about a text, about a person, about a moment?I was thinking about this when reading a “rare interview” with Politico this week, in which Kyrsten Sinema weighed in on writing about her clothes, including our three-part discussion of her sartorial presentation as a form of political speech:“It’s very inappropriate. I wear what I want because I like it. It’s not a news story, and it’s no one’s business,” Sinema said. “It’s not helpful to have [coverage] be positive or negative. It also implies that somehow women are dressing for someone else.”The idea that women dress only for themselves is a truism in modern feminism, one that we could dispute or qualify. But let’s set that aside, for now, and stipulate that she’s right, generally speaking.It still remains that she is a politician. And part of the job of politicians is to court attention and manage their image. As I have argued, since presentation and style are part of the politician’s tool kit, the question for us is whether we are willing to allow this kind of political communication to go unexamined and without critique.Here, it’s important to consider the context when setting the bounds of appropriate discourse. The details of the Democrats’ social spending bill, Build Back Better, are in flux. But it has funds for Pell Grant increases, affordable child care, paid family leave and expanded health care coverage. It contains policy to slow climate change and mitigate its effects. It is not an exaggeration to say that lives hang in the balance with the fate of the bill.And Sinema has placed herself at the center of this political drama. So it matters how she marshals her power. It also matters how she manages attention.Sinema largely allows her performance to speak for her. She avoids interviews, and has been quite guarded about what she wants out of these negotiations. As Politico writes, “On policy, the first-term senator has remained almost completely quiet during breakneck negotiations to finish Biden’s agenda.”That silence puts a curtain between a powerful political actor and the public, who have a lot on the line. It also means it is more than fair to discuss and critique the political rhetoric coded in her performance, and that includes what she is wearing. Politicians should not be allowed to have a one-way dialogue with the American public. One-way political communication is a very slippery slope to a closed political process — one that trades real accountability for a process that appears transparent only because we can see the moving images on our screens.We get to talk back. And we should.Speaking of talking back, many of you wrote in and said we should be keeping our eye on what matters. A pair of reports, both from this month, got my attention. I think they point to an important trend.First, Politico reported that Sinema has received donations from the multilevel marketing industry:The political action committee associated with Alticor, the parent entity of the health, home and beauty company Amway, gave $2,500 to the Arizona Democrat in late June, as did the PAC for Isagenix, an Arizona-based business that sells nutrition, wellness and personal care products. Nu Skin Enterprises, another personal care and beauty company, gave $2,500 that month, as did USANA Health Sciences, which sells similar products. In April, Richard Raymond Rogers, the executive chair of Mary Kay, a Texas-based cosmetics company, gave $2,500 to Sinema. Herbalife, which also sells nutritional supplements, gave $2,500 in July. All are affiliated with the Direct Selling Association, a trade group that promotes multilevel marketing.These are not enormous sums of money, but it is notable for a few reasons. As Politico notes, it’s relatively uncommon for some of these companies to get involved in national politics at all. And Sinema has had a friendly relationship with the Direct Sellers Association, which represents 130 multilevel marketing companies, including Amway and Herbalife.This alliance is unusual for a Democratic senator given her party’s longtime alliance with unions and labor more generally. In multilevel marketing structures, the independent contractors who sell the product are paid commissions from their own sales of the product, but they also can receive income based on the sales or purchases of the sellers they have recruited. Sinema is the one of only three Democratic senators who do not co-sponsor the PRO Act, which would allow the “independent contractors” to unionize, as well as making it harder for companies to classify workers as independent contractors at all.Second, Dr. Mehmet Oz is reported to be considering running for Senate in Pennsylvania, to fill the seat being vacated by Pat Toomey. Through a very convoluted process of media culture that is possible only in the celebrity-obsessed American culture, Dr. Oz has become one of the most visible and wealthy endorsers of a host of scientifically questionable vitamins, herbal remedies and miracle cures.These news items brought to mind the way these kinds of businesses — on the border of illegality and not quite respectable — have gone mainstream in America. Donald Trump is perhaps the best example of this phenomenon. Among other things, he happened to be the founder and namesake of one of the most blatantly fraudulent for-profit school apparatuses that I have ever seen: Trump University, which National Review called a “de jure” scam.Donald Trump’s election seems to have opened the door to us not even pretending anymore that these kinds of scams aren’t legitimate parts of our political and economic system, and even pathways to power.Whenever I talk about multilevel marketing, people often make two suggestions of things to check out. One is a podcast called “The Dream” by Jane Marie. The other is a recent documentary about LuLaRoe, which sells leggings. Both of these tell stories about the mechanisms of multilevel marketers, how they work and why they work.With the holiday coming up, I’m going to spend some time on your behalf listening to the “The Dream” as I travel around by car. And I’m going to watch the LuLaRoe documentary. I have questions about why scamming has become mainstreamed as a legitimate part of national politics, and what it says about culture. We’ll be talking about that soon. I’ll be off next week to celebrate Thanksgiving, and I’ll see you the week after that.Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science, the author of “Thick: And Other Essays” and a 2020 MacArthur fellow. More

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      Gerald Migdol Is Charged in Campaign Finance Scheme

      by

      Gerald Migdol is accused of concealing contributions to a New York City comptroller candidate to get more public-matching funds.A Manhattan real estate developer was charged on Friday with scheming to conceal contributions to a candidate in this year’s New York City comptroller’s race in a bid to get as much public financing for the candidate as possible.The developer, Gerald Migdol, arranged for dozens of donations to be made to the campaign in the names of people who had not authorized the payments, according to an indictment unsealed on Friday by federal prosecutors in Manhattan.One contribution that prosecutors said Mr. Migdol arranged, a $250 money order, was made in the name of a relative who is a minor, prosecutors said.The indictment does not name the candidate Mr. Migdol sought to help. But the details of the case and publicly available information suggest it is Brian A. Benjamin, a Democrat who ran unsuccessfully for comptroller and is now New York’s lieutenant governor.The indictment does not indicate that the candidate knew of the scheme.Mr. Migdol, 71, was arrested early Friday on charges of wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and aggravated identity theft, officials said. He pleaded not guilty in an arraignment on Friday in Federal District Court in Manhattan and was released on bond. The wire fraud charges carry a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.“Free and fair elections are the foundation of our democracy, and campaign finance regulations are one way communities seek to ensure everyone plays by the same rules,” Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement.Reached by phone after Mr. Migdol’s arraignment, Joel Cohen, his lawyer, said his client had pleaded not guilty “and that’s appropriate.”“That says what we need to say,” Mr. Cohen added.A man who answered the phone at Mr. Migdol’s family-run real estate company, the Migdol Organization, declined to comment. The company, which is based in Harlem, owns and operates residential properties across New York City.In a statement, a spokesman for Mr. Benjamin’s comptroller campaign said that “neither Lieutenant Governor Benjamin nor his campaign are being accused of any wrongdoing and they are prepared to fully cooperate with authorities.”The spokesman added that “as soon as the campaign discovered that these contributions were improperly sourced, they donated them to the campaign finance board.”The office of Gov. Kathy Hochul referred all questions to Mr. Benjamin’s campaign. Ms. Hochul chose Mr. Benjamin as her lieutenant governor in August after she succeeded Andrew M. Cuomo.Mr. Migdol’s family has long supported Democratic candidates, according to the Migdol Organization website, which includes photos of family members with Mr. Benjamin and other politicians.Several Migdol family members, including Gerald Migdol, contributed to Mr. Benjamin’s campaign under their own names, campaign finance records show.The contributions at issue in the case against Mr. Migdol, the indictment says, were meant to allow the candidate’s campaign to qualify for public-matching funds through the city’s campaign finance system, potentially unlocking tens of thousands of dollars in additional money. The scheme ran from November 2019 to January 2021, the indictment says.A few of the contributions mentioned in the indictment were given to the campaign by a person at Mr. Migdol’s direction, prosecutors said. The indictment does not name the person, who is identified only as CC-1. The indictment also cites other unnamed “co-conspirators.”Mr. Migdol, prosecutors said, explained the scheme in a message to the unnamed people in July 2020, describing how the city’s public-financing system could multiply their contributions eightfold.“We get 8xl for money orders of $100,” the message said, according to the indictment. “For Money orders of $250=8×1 for first $100 and the other $150 is not matched. So a MO for $250 is worth $950 for [Candidate-1]. Hopefully our next City Comptroller.”A biography of Mr. Migdol on his company’s website says he has been involved in the real estate business in New York City for more than 40 years, primarily in Harlem and the Bronx.Mr. Migdol told The New York Post in 2006 that he started buying brownstones in Harlem in the early 2000s when they were selling for several hundred thousand dollars, far less than the prices such buildings can fetch today.In October 2019, Mr. Migdol received a community leadership award in Harlem that described him as “a true Harlem legend.” He said in his acceptance speech that Mr. Benjamin had nominated him for the award.“I am grateful to my new friend — our great State Senator Brian Benjamin,” Mr. Migdol said in the speech, which his company posted on its website. “At first glance my nomination would not normally be a popular choice. He then said but for the fact that what you guys do here is worthy of being honored.”Mr. Benjamin, a former state senator from Harlem, placed fourth in the Democratic primary for comptroller, well behind the winner, Brad Lander, a City Council member from Brooklyn.Many of the details in the indictment were first reported in January by the news website The City, including that several people whose names were listed on donations to Mr. Benjamin’s campaign said they had not made the payments.One donation reported by The City was a $250 contribution made in the name of Mr. Migdol’s 2-year-old grandson.Jefferson Siegel contributed reporting. More

    • 100 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      As Lev Parnas' Trial Begins, Trump’s Shadow Looms

      by

      Though Mr. Parnas played a key role in the events that led to the former president’s impeachment, the charges he faces involve accusations of campaign finance violations.For Lev Parnas, a Ukrainian American businessman living in Florida, 2018 was a busy year.Sometime around March, he began showing up at Republican fund-raisers. Then, in late April, he dined on cheeseburgers and wedge salads with President Donald J. Trump.By May, a fledgling energy company that Mr. Parnas started with a partner, Igor Fruman, was listed as giving $325,000 to a pro-Trump super PAC. Soon, Mr. Parnas was assisting President Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, as he oversaw a shadow diplomacy campaign to investigate Joseph R. Biden Jr., then a leading Democratic presidential candidate.Within a year, Mr. Parnas was under investigation, and in late 2019 he was arrested with Mr. Fruman at Dulles International Airport, where both held one-way tickets on a Lufthansa Airlines flight to Frankfurt.Now, Mr. Parnas is facing a trial on campaign finance charges that include contributions to the super PAC and a state candidate in Nevada, where he wanted to operate a cannabis business. And though the case has little to do with his dealings with the former president — who was not accused of wrongdoing in the matter — Mr. Trump’s shadow hangs over Mr. Parnas’s trial, which begins Tuesday in federal court in Manhattan.The trial is expected to fill in gaps in the story of Mr. Parnas’s improbable ascent and downfall, from humble beginnings in Brooklyn to playing a key role in a sequence of events connected to the impeachment of Mr. Trump over accusations that he had asked Ukraine to investigate unfounded allegations about Mr. Biden and a conspiracy theory that Ukraine, rather than Russia, had meddled in the 2016 election.“Parnas is an interesting figure because in many respects he was in the underbelly of the Ukraine story,” said Daniel S. Goldman, the House Intelligence Committee lawyer who led the Ukraine inquiry. “We understood that Parnas in particular was Giuliani’s liaison to a lot of the significant officials in Ukraine.”According to an indictment unsealed after the airport arrests, Mr. Parnas, along with Mr. Fruman and two other co-defendants, conspired to circumvent the federal laws against foreign influence “by engaging in a scheme to funnel foreign money to candidates for federal and state office.”Mr. Fruman pleaded guilty last month to soliciting a campaign contribution from a foreign national. Another co-defendant, David Correia, pleaded guilty last year to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and to making false statements to the Federal Election Commission.Igor Fruman, center, pleaded guilty in September to soliciting a campaign contribution from a foreign national.Go Nakamura/ReutersWhen jury selection begins on Tuesday, Mr. Parnas’s only remaining co-defendant will be a man named Andrey Kukushkin. He is described in court papers as a partner in the planned cannabis business and a participant in a conspiracy to make political donations using money from a rich Russian businessman, Andrey Muraviev.A prosecutor, Hagan Cordell Scotten, suggested during a recent court hearing that Mr. Parnas could be viewed as “something of a genius serial fraudster.”One man who lost money by investing in a company led by Mr. Parnas remembered him wearing diamonds and driving a Rolls-Royce. But behind the trappings of affluence was a history of debts and aborted businesses.As he entered the world of political donors, Mr. Parnas seemed to see it in purely transactional terms, using money to gain access to Republican influencers, then apparently hoping to use those connections to further various moneymaking efforts.While working with Mr. Giuliani in late 2018 and 2019, Mr. Parnas traveled to Kyiv to press officials there to investigate Mr. Biden’s son Hunter, who had served as a board member of a Ukrainian energy company.Records released by Mr. Parnas show that he maintained regular communication with Yuriy Lutsenko, then Ukraine’s chief prosecutor, who was urging the removal of the United States ambassador in Kyiv and promising to help obtain information about both Bidens.Mr. Parnas also exchanged text messages with a Trump ally, Robert F. Hyde, that appeared to include references to people conducting surveillance on the ambassador, who Mr. Trump eventually recalled from her post. Mr. Giuliani later said in an interview with The New Yorker that he wanted that ambassador, Marie Yovanovitch, “out of the way” because he feared she would complicate his attempts to dig up dirt on Joe Biden.After Mr. Parnas’s arrest, Mr. Trump denied knowing him. Before long, Mr. Parnas reversed his loyalties, saying he regretted trusting Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Trump and providing documents, including some related to Ms. Yovanovitch, to the House Intelligence Committee as part of its impeachment inquiry.Federal prosecutors in Manhattan are investigating Mr. Giuliani’s pre-election activities in Ukraine. He has denied wrongdoing.The schemes that prosecutors are planning to outline during the upcoming trial seem more brash than sophisticated.The $325,000 donation to the super PAC, America First Action, was made using money that an indictment said Mr. Fruman and others obtained through a private loan, prosecutors have said. Court papers said that the donation was falsely listed in the name of Global Energy Producers, the company Mr. Parnas and Mr. Fruman were starting, because they were eager to “make it appear that GEP was a successful business.”Mr. Parnas is also accused of making a maximum contribution of $2,700 to the re-election campaign of Pete Sessions, a Republican congressman from Texas and a critic of Ms. Yovanovitch, using a credit card registered to an account belonging to Mr. Fruman and another person.And, according to an indictment, Mr. Parnas was part of a conspiracy to make political contributions by a foreign national. As part of that, the indictment said, a businessman — identified by prosecutors in a separate document as Mr. Muraviev — sent $1 million to a bank account controlled by Mr. Fruman “for purposes of making political donations and contributions.”Among candidates who prosecutors said Mr. Parnas promised to support was Adam Laxalt, who in 2018 was running for governor of Nevada and after the presidential election spoke at a news conference announcing a lawsuit by the Trump campaign seeking to overturn Mr. Biden’s victory in the state. (That suit was dismissed by a state court judge for lack of evidence.)Prosecutors said in a recent court filing that Mr. Laxalt became suspicious about the origins of a $10,000 donation to his campaign identified as being from Mr. Fruman, and sent a check for that amount to the U.S. Treasury “in order to avoid continued possession of the illegal donation without returning it to a potential wrongdoer.”In court filings and during a recent hearing, prosecutors and defense lawyers offered some indications of what arguments they might advance and what evidence they could introduce during the trial.Prosecutors wrote that they intended to offer out-of-court statements made by both defendants, as well as Mr. Correia, Mr. Fruman and Mr. Muraviev. Most of those, they added, “were made in electronic communications, such as emails, text messages, and chats using WhatsApp.”Likely witnesses, they wrote, included Deanna Van Rensburg, who served as Mr. Parnas’s personal assistant from about April 2018 until his arrest, and Mr. Laxalt, now vying for the Republican nomination for a U.S. Senate seat.Mr. Parnas’s lawyer, Joseph A. Bondy, suggested during the hearing, on Oct. 5, that he might portray his client as someone with a “relative lack of education” in the area of election law.And a lawyer for Mr. Kukushkin signaled that he planned to portray his client as a victim of Mr. Parnas rather than as his co-conspirator.The lawyer, Gerald B. Lefcourt, described Mr. Parnas in a recent court filing as the perpetrator of a “con” who, along with Mr. Fruman and Mr. Correia, used a “dog and pony show” to dupe Mr. Kukushkin and many others.“They portrayed themselves as well-connected, powerful political power brokers, who could speak directly to the president of the United States, his children, his inner circle,” Mr. Lefcourt wrote. “Of course, it was all a ruse, one big fraud or Ponzi scheme.” More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      These Two Rumors Are Going Viral Ahead of California’s Recall Election

      by

      As California’s Sept. 14 election over whether to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom draws closer, unfounded rumors about the event are growing.Here are two that are circulating widely online, how they spread and why, state and local officials said, they are wrong.Rumor No. 1: Holes in the ballot envelopes were being used to screen out votes that say “yes” to a recall.On Aug. 19, a woman posted a video on Instagram of herself placing her California special election ballot in an envelope.“You have to pay attention to these two holes that are in front of the envelope,” she said, bringing the holes close to the camera so viewers could see them. “You can see if someone has voted ‘yes’ to recall Newsom. This is very sketchy and irresponsible in my opinion, but this is asking for fraud.”The idea that the ballot envelope’s holes were being used to weed out the votes of those who wanted Gov. Newsom, a Democrat, to be recalled rapidly spread online, according to a review by The New York Times..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}The Instagram video collected nearly half a million views. On the messaging app Telegram, posts that said California was rigging the special election amassed nearly 200,000 views. And an article about the ballot holes on the far-right site The Gateway Pundit reached up to 626,000 people on Facebook, according to data from CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned social media analytics tool.State and local officials said the ballot holes were not new and were not being used nefariously. The holes were placed in the envelope, on either end of a signature line, to help low-vision voters know where to sign it, said Jenna Dresner, a spokeswoman for the California Secretary of State’s Office of Election Cybersecurity.The ballot envelope’s design has been used for several election cycles, and civic design consultants recommended the holes for accessibility, added Mike Sanchez, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County registrar. He said voters could choose to put the ballot in the envelope in such a way that didn’t reveal any ballot marking at all through a hole.Instagram has since appended a fact-check label to the original video to note that it could mislead people. The fact check has reached up to 20,700 people, according to CrowdTangle data.Rumor No. 2: A felon stole ballots to help Governor Newsom win the recall election.On Aug. 17, the police in Torrance, Calif., published a post on Facebook that said officers had responded to a call about a man who was passed out in his car in a 7-Eleven parking lot. The man had items such as a loaded firearm, drugs and thousands of pieces of mail, including more than 300 unopened mail-in ballots for the special election, the police said.Far-right sites such as Red Voice Media and Conservative Firing Line claimed the incident was an example of Democrats’ trying to steal an election through mail-in ballots. Their articles were then shared on Facebook, where they collectively reached up to 1.57 million people, according to CrowdTangle data.Mark Ponegalek, a public information officer for the Torrance Police Department, said the investigation into the incident was continuing. The U.S. postal inspector was also involved, he said, and no conclusions had been reached.As a result, he said, online articles and posts concluding that the man was attempting voter fraud were “baseless.”“I have no indication to tell you one way or the other right now” whether the man intended to commit election fraud with the ballots he collected, Mr. Ponegalek said. He added that the man may have intended to commit identity fraud. More

    • 138 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      Trump’s Repeating Donation Tactics Led to Millions in Refunds Into 2021

      by

      Donald Trump and the Republican Party returned $12.8 million to donors in the first half of the year, a sign that their aggressive fund-raising tactics ensnared many unwitting contributors.The aggressive fund-raising tactics that former President Donald J. Trump deployed late in last year’s presidential campaign have continued to spur an avalanche of refunds into 2021, with Mr. Trump, the Republican Party and their shared accounts returning $12.8 million to donors in the first six months of the year, newly released federal records show.The refunds were some of the biggest outlays that Mr. Trump made in 2021 as he has built up his $102 million political war chest — and amounted to roughly 20 percent of the $56 million he and his committees raised online so far this year.Trailing in the polls and facing a cash crunch last September, Mr. Trump’s political operation began opting online donors into automatic recurring contributions by prechecking a box on its digital donation forms to take a withdrawal every week. Donors would have to notice the box and uncheck it to opt out of the donation. A second prechecked box took out another donation, known as a “money bomb.”The Trump team then obscured that fact by burying the fine print beneath multiple lines of bold and capitalized text, a New York Times investigation earlier this year found.The maneuver spiked revenues in the short term — allowing Mr. Trump to spend money before the election — and then caused a cascade of fraud complaints to credit cards and demands for refunds from supporters. The refunded donations amounted to an unwitting interest-free loan from Mr. Trump’s supporters in the weeks when he most needed it.New Federal Election Commission records from WinRed, the Republican donation-processing site, show the full scale of the financial impact. All told, more than $135 million was refunded to donors by Mr. Trump, the Republican National Committee and their shared accounts in the 2020 cycle through June 2021 — including roughly $60 million after Election Day.“It’s pretty clear that the Trump campaign was engaging in deceptive tactics,” said Peter Loge, the director of the Project on Ethics in Political Communication at George Washington University. “If you have to return that much money you are doing something either very wrong or very unethical.”The Trump campaign has previously defended its online practices, with Jason Miller, a spokesman, saying that only 0.87 percent of transactions were subjected to formal credit card disputes last year, which would be about 200,000 transactions. Mr. Miller did not respond to questions this week about the Trump refunds.An example of the prechecked recurring donation boxes Mr. Trump used in 2020.Of the refunds issued this year, $8.1 million came from Mr. Trump’s shared account with the R.N.C., the records show. An additional $2.2 million came from his re-election committee and $2.5 million was issued by the party itself. The party stopped operating in tandem with Mr. Trump earlier this year but still owed refunds from 2020; most of its returned donations came in January and February.The Times investigation had previously found that the Trump operation along with the party had refunded more than 10 percent of the $1.2 billion it had raised online through the end of 2020. President Biden’s equivalent committees refunded 2.2 percent of what had been raised online last year on ActBlue, the Democratic donation-processing site, records show.The Federal Election Commission has since unanimously recommended that Congress prohibit campaigns from prechecking boxes for recurring donations, and legislation to do so has been introduced in both the House and Senate. The state attorneys general in New York, Connecticut, Minnesota and Maryland have also opened investigations into WinRed and ActBlue’s practices.WinRed has sued in federal court to stop the investigation by saying that federal law pre-empts any state investigation. Last week, the attorneys general sought to dismiss the WinRed suit, arguing in a court filing that consumer-protection laws gave them jurisdiction.The prechecked recurring box has become increasingly widespread among Republicans using WinRed, including burying the disclosure under extraneous text; Democrats have moved to stop using such boxes entirely.The two Republican senators who lost the January runoffs in Georgia, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, used prechecked boxes to lead donors into weekly withdrawals, resulting in a rash of refunds. Ms. Loeffler and Mr. Perdue combined to refund $10.4 million from Nov. 24 through the end of June 2021 — out of a total of $68.5 million raised online during that time.The Democrats who defeated them, Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, raised tens of millions of dollars more online — and refunded less than one-fifth as much, around $2 million, during the same period.Overall, WinRed issued refunds that totaled 12.7 percent of what it raised the first six months of the year; ActBlue’s refunds were 3.3 percent of what it collected.The disparity was even more stark in January of this year, when refunds were surging for Mr. Trump and Georgia Senate Republicans. That month, refunds issued by WinRed equaled nearly 28 percent of what the platform collected in contributions, records show. There was even one day when WinRed issued more in refunds than it reported receiving in contributions.WinRed said there was simply a greater volume of refunds immediately after elections, and noted that refunds had slowed in recent months. In the first quarter of 2021, records show that refunds issued on WinRed equaled nearly 20 percent of what was raised; that figured dipped to 5.7 percent in the second quarter.Mr. Trump’s new political action committee, Save America, continues to precheck its “money bomb” and recurring donation box, taking out fresh donations monthly. In addition to the $12.8 million refunded by Mr. Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign and party committees tied to it, his new PAC issued nearly $800,000 in refunds in the first six months of the year, 3.75 percent of what it raised.ActBlue, which previously allowed campaigns wide latitude to opt donors into repeating contributions, has clamped down on the tactic. In July, the site implemented new rules essentially forbidding political candidates and groups from prechecking a recurring box unless the link to the donation page explicitly says there will be repeating withdrawals.Digital experts said that many donors do not notice the extra contributions for many months, if at all. Some decide pursuing refunds is too onerous or complex. Older contributors are seen as especially vulnerable to such aggressive digital tactics, campaign strategists say.For Republicans, prechecking is something some strategists defend as a useful tool to shrink the traditional Democratic advantage of online fund-raising.The three main Republican Party committees — one devoted to the House, one to the Senate and the R.N.C. — nearly matched the parallel Democratic groups in online fund-raising, collecting $68.8 million compared with $70.8 million for the Democrats in the first six months of 2021.At the same time, those Republican Party groups issued more than $5 million in additional WinRed refunds compared with the Democratic groups — 11.2 percent of what they raised online compared with 3.7 percent, records show.Rachel Shorey More