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      in US Politics

      Trump 'money bomb' scheme raised millions from unwitting donors – report

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      Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign used pre-checked boxes and obscure design on fundraising emails to wring millions of dollars out of unwitting supporters, detonating a “money bomb” which allowed the Republican to compete against Joe Biden in the last months of the race.The practice, pursued by the campaign and WinRed, a for-profit company, was detailed in an extensive report by the New York Times on Saturday. It is legal, but Ira Rheingold, executive director of the National Association of Consumer Advocates, told the paper it was “unfair, unethical and inappropriate”.Another expert quoted by the Times said such “dark pattern” digital marketing “should be in textbooks of what you shouldn’t do” in politics.The “money bomb” did not bring victory, as Trump lost the electoral college by 306 votes to 232. He also lost the popular vote by more than 7m ballots.But, the Times said, “the recurring donations swelled Mr Trump’s treasury in September and October, just as his finances were deteriorating. He was then able to use tens of millions of dollars he raised after the election, under the guise of fighting his unfounded fraud claims, to help cover the refunds he owed.”Trump still claims his defeat was caused by massive electoral fraud. It was not, as a succession of court cases concluded.After escaping conviction in his second impeachment trial, for inciting the Capitol riot of 6 January, the former president is free to run for office again. He continues to seek donations, leading to friction with the party he dominates.The Republican WinRed operation was conceived as a response to ActBlue, an online fundraising platform set up by Democrats to attract small-dollar donations.As the Times reported, refunds to donors are not unusual and can be made when individuals give more than the legal limit. The paper said that at the end of 2020, after Trump’s defeat, the Biden campaign and Democratic bodies made 37,000 online refunds worth $5.6m.The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee made more than 530,000 refunds, returning $64.3m.“In effect,” the Times wrote, “the money that Mr Trump eventually had to refund amounted to an interest-free loan from unwitting supporters at the most important juncture of the 2020 race.”Jason Miller, a Trump spokesman, told the Times: “Our campaign was built by the hardworking men and women of America and cherishing their investments was paramount to anything else we did.”The Times reported that the practice was used for the Georgia Senate runoffs in January and continues to be used by the Republican party.It also detailed distressing experiences affecting Trump donors hit by surprise deductions and consequent trouble with banks and credit card companies.Victor Amelino, a 78-year-old from California, donated $990 in September. It recurred seven times for a total of almost $8,000, the Times said.Calling the Trump campaign and the RNC “bandits”, Amelino told the paper: “I’m retired. I can’t afford to pay all that damn money.” More

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      in Elections

      Dominion Voting Systems sues Fox News for $1.6bn over election fraud lies

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      The North American voting machine company Dominion has hit Fox News with a $1.6bn defamation lawsuit, accusing the network of spreading election fraud lies in a misguided effort to stop an exodus of enraged viewers after Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss.The complaint accuses some of Fox’s biggest personalities Maria Bartiromo, Tucker Carlson, Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro “and their chosen guests” of spreading “defamatory falsehoods” about Dominion.Fox supercharged false conspiracy theories about Dominion, the lawsuit says, by plucking the lies from relatively obscure corners of the far-right internet and broadcasting them to tens of millions of viewers on television and online.“Fox took a small flame and turned it into a forest fire,” the complaint says. “As the dominant media company among those viewers dissatisfied with the election results, Fox gave these fictions a prominence they otherwise would never have achieved.”Fox vowed to fight the case in a statement Friday morning: “Fox News Media is proud of our 2020 election coverage, which stands in the highest tradition of American journalism, and will vigorously defend against this baseless lawsuit in court.”Dominion, a large US and Canadian voting machine company, earlier sued Trump lawyers Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani for $1.3bn each for spreading election lies during weeks of legal challenges to Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in what officials have called the most secure election in US history.On Tuesday, Powell defended herself against the Dominion suit by arguing in court that “no reasonable person” could have mistaken her wild claims about election fraud last November as statements of fact.A Dominion employee separately sued the Trump campaign after receiving death threats. The company also sued the chief executive of a pillow company, Mike Lindell, a Trump friend who produced a video about election conspiracies.Baseless conspiracy claims about Dominion accusing the company of using technology that flipped votes away from Trump appear to have originated in anonymous comments on a pro-Trump blog.But in an effort to steal the presidential election, Trump himself gave the claims the broadest possible platform, including with a 12 November tweet in which he wrote in part: “REPORT: DOMINION DELETED 2.7 MILLION TRUMP VOTES NATIONWIDE.”Dominion said the lies had threatened its reputation and business.“Dominion brings this lawsuit to set the record straight, to vindicate its rights, and to recover damages for the devastating economic harm done to its business,” the company said in the Fox lawsuit.Fox is fighting a legal battle over spreading election lies on multiple fronts. The voting technology company Smartmatic earlier brought a $2.7bn lawsuit against Fox and network commentators accusing them of a “disinformation campaign”.Fox has filed multiple motions to dismiss the Smartmatic case.Dominion’s lawsuit says that after the 3 November election, “viewers began fleeing Fox in favor of media outlets endorsing the lie that massive fraud caused President Trump to lose the election.“They saw Fox as insufficiently supportive of President Trump, including because Fox was the first network to declare that President Trump lost Arizona,” the complaint continues. “So Fox set out to lure viewers back – including President Trump himself – by intentionally and falsely blaming Dominion for President Trump’s loss by rigging the election.”Dominion brought the suit in Delaware, where Fox is incorporated.“Fox recklessly disregarded the truth,” the lawsuit says. “Indeed, Fox knew these statements about Dominion were lies …“Fox sold a false story of election fraud in order to serve its own commercial purposes, severely injuring Dominion in the process. If this case does not rise to the level of defamation by a broadcaster, then nothing does.” More

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      in US Politics

      Pro-Trump lawyer says ‘no reasonable person’ would believe her election lies

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      A key member of the legal team that sought to steal the 2020 election for Donald Trump is defending herself against a billion-dollar defamation lawsuit by arguing that “no reasonable person” could have mistaken her wild claims about election fraud last November as statements of fact.In a motion to dismiss a complaint by the large US-based voting machine company Dominion, lawyers for Sidney Powell argued that elaborate conspiracies she laid out on television and radio last November while simultaneously suing to overturn election results in four states constituted legally protected first amendment speech.“No reasonable person would conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact,” argued lawyers for Powell, a former federal prosecutor from Texas who caught Trump’s attention through her involvement in the defense of his former national security adviser Michael Flynn.Powell falsely stated on television and in legal briefs that Dominion machines ran on technology that could switch votes away from Trump, technology she said had been invented in Venezuela to help steal elections for the late Hugo Chávez.Those lies were built on empty claims that apparently originated in anonymous comments on a pro-Trump blog, only to be amplified on a global scale by Trump himself in a 12 November tweet in which he wrote in part “REPORT: DOMINION DELETED 2.7 MILLION TRUMP VOTES NATIONWIDE.”Citing lost business and reputational damage, Dominion filed a $1.3bn defamation lawsuit against Powell and her colleague on Trump’s legal team, Rudy Giuliani. A Dominion employee separately sued the Trump campaign after receiving death threats.Thousands of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol on 6 January in an effort to stop the certification of an election they considered invalid, killing a police officer in violent clashes in which four others died.But lawyers for Powell argued her false statements about election fraud in the months preceding the Capitol insurrection were unmistakably not presented as true facts.“It was clear to reasonable persons that Powell’s claims were her opinions and legal theories on a matter of utmost public concern,” her legal motion says. “Those members of the public who were interested in the controversy were free to, and did, review that evidence and reached their own conclusions – or awaited resolution of the matter by the courts before making up their minds.”The filing brought expressions of disbelief from Trump critics.“This is her defense. Wow,” tweeted the Republican representative Adam Kinzinger.“Bad argument!” tweeted Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen. “[Powell] should have gone with an insanity defense due to #TrumpDerangementSyndrome.”“Shorter Sidney Powell: suckers!” tweeted Charlie Sykes, an editor of the anti-Trump conservative publication the Bulwark.As Trump fought to reverse his election loss in November, the former president himself reportedly supported Powell’s claims in private – and trumpeted them in public, touting Powell two weeks after the election as a key part of “the legal effort to defend OUR RIGHT to FREE and FAIR ELECTIONS”.Powell was publicly exiled from the Trump camp a week after that tweet, after she appeared at a news conference hosted by the Republican National Committee alongside Giuliani, whose hair dye memorably ran down his face, and Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis.The group was “an elite strike force team that is working on behalf of the president and the campaign”, Ellis announced.Then Powell faced the cameras and claimed to have identified “massive influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba and likely China in the interference with our elections here in the United States”.Aides reportedly told Trump that Powell was not helping, and Giuliani and Ellis issued a subsequent statement announcing, “Sidney Powell is practicing law on her own. She is not a member of the Trump legal team. She is also not a lawyer for the president in his personal capacity.”But that did not prevent Powell from filing lawsuits the next week on Trump’s behalf in Georgia, Michigan, Arizona and Wisconsin.In her defense against the Dominion defamation lawsuit, Powell argued that whatever “reasonable persons” thought of her wild claims, Dominion had failed to demonstrate that she herself thought them to be false as she spoke them – a key distinction in defamation cases.“In fact,” Powell’s motion reads, “she believed the allegations then and she believes them now.” More

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      in US Politics

      Polish writer charged for calling president a 'moron'

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      A Polish writer faces a possible prison sentence for insulting President Andrzej Duda by calling him a “moron” over comments the latter made about Joe Biden’s US election victory.Jakub Żulczyk, the screenwriter behind the popular TV series Blinded by the Lights and Belfer, said prosecutors had charged him under an article in the criminal code for insulting the head of state in a Facebook post.“I am, I suspect, the first writer in this country in a very long time to be tried for what he wrote,” he said on Facebook.In his post on 7 November last year, Żulczyk commented on a curiously worded tweet in which Duda congratulated Biden for his “successful presidential campaign” but said he was waiting for “the nomination by the electoral college”.Duda, who is supported by the populist rightwing Law and Justice (Pis) party, was a close ally of Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, who unsuccessfully contested the election result.Aleksandra Skrzyniarz, a spokeswoman for Warsaw district prosecutors, told Polish news agency PAP on Monday that charges had been filed against a man, naming him only as “Jakub Z”.“The defendant was accused of committing an act of public insult on 7 November last year on a social networking website against the president of the Republic of Poland, by using a term commonly recognised as insulting,” the spokeswoman said.She added that the charge had been filed earlier this month and that the suspect had been questioned but “did not admit to committing the alleged act and gave explanations”.“He indicated that the statement constituted a critical assessment of the president’s actions,” she said.In his post, published in the days immediately after the 3 November election, Żulczyk said that “there is no such thing as ’nomination by the electoral college’”, adding that Biden’s confirmation as US president was “a mere formality”.“Andrzej Duda is a moron”, the post said.Poland has been criticised repeatedly over its different insult laws, including one law on offending religious feeling and another on insulting the flags of Poland or other countries. More

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      in US Politics

      Russia targeted Trump allies to hurt Biden in 2020 election, US officials say

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      Russia tried to influence the 2020 US presidential election by proliferating “misleading or unsubstantiated allegations” largely against Joe Biden and through allies of Donald Trump, US intelligence officials said on Tuesday.The assessment was contained in a 15-page report published by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. It underscored allegations that Trump’s allies played into Moscow’s hands by amplifying claims against Biden by Ukrainian figures with links to Russia.In a statement, the Democratic House intelligence chair, Adam Schiff, said: “Through proxies, Russia ran a successful intelligence operation that penetrated [Trump’s] inner circle.“Individuals close to the former president were targeted by agents of Russian intelligence including Andriy Derkach and Konstantin Kilimnik, who laundered misinformation into our political system with the intent of denigrating now President Biden, damaging his candidacy.”Kilimnik has widely reported ties to Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign chairman in 2016 who was jailed under the investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller but pardoned by Trump shortly before the end of his term.Derkach worked closely with Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor who has acted as Trump’s personal attorney, in attempts to uncover political dirt on Biden and his family which were at the heart of Trump’s first impeachment.Biden beat Trump by 306-232 in the electoral college and won the popular vote by more than 7m. The electoral college result was the same as that by which Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016, despite losing the popular vote by nearly 3m ballots. US intelligence agrees that election was subject to concerted Russian attempts to tip the scales for Trump. Russia – and Trump – oppose and deny such conclusions.The intelligence report issued on Monday said Russian hackers did not make persistent efforts to break into election infrastructure, unlike past elections.The report found attempts to sway voters against Trump, including a “multi-pronged covert influence campaign” by Iran intended to undercut support for the former president.But it also punctured a counter-narrative pushed by Trump’s allies that China interfered on Biden’s behalf, concluding that Beijing “did not deploy interference efforts”.“China sought stability in its relationship with the United States and did not view either election outcome as being advantageous enough for China to risk blowback if caught,” the report said.US officials said they also saw efforts by Cuba, Venezuela and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah to influence the election, although “in general, we assess that they were smaller in scale than those conducted by Russia and Iran”.Schiff said: “No matter which nation seeks to influence our political system and who stands to benefit, both parties must speak with one voice and disavow all interference in our elections. We must guard against and seek to deter all attempts at foreign interference and ensure that American voters decide American elections.”Mark Warner, the Democratic chair of the Senate intelligence committee, said: “The intelligence community has gotten much better at detecting these efforts, and we have built better defences against election interference.“But the problem of foreign actors trying to influence the American electorate is not going away, and given the current partisan divides in this country may find fertile ground, in which to grow in the future.” More

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      in US Politics

      Lucky review: how Biden beat Trump – and doubters like Obama and Hillary

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      Seven million votes more was almost not enough. Had 45,000 gone the other way in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin, Donald Trump would still be president. Calls to defund the police nearly cost Joe Biden victory and led to a more than a dozen-seat loss for House Democrats.
      Biden had “separated himself from the orthodoxies of his party’s base” but “had no coattails” to spare, Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes write. As always, culture counts – even amid a pandemic.
      But “Unwoke Joe”, as the authors call him, was the one Democrat whose empathy and instincts matched the demands of the times. Lucky is an apt title for Allen and Parnes’s third book.
      “In 2016, Trump had needed everything to go wrong for Hillary Clinton to win,” they write. “This time, Biden caught every imaginable break.”
      Their joint take on Biden is a prism and scorecard that gives added understanding to the seemingly never-ending war of 2020. Allen is a veteran political writer at NBC News digital, Parnes reports for the Hill. They deliver.
      Subtitled How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency, Lucky is the first full-length campaign postmortem. It makes the silent parts of the conversation audible and reminds the reader the past is always with us.
      The authors convey the cultural dimensions of Biden’s win. He was an old-time north-eastern pol who repeatedly bore witness to personal tragedy. So long in the Senate, he prided himself on his capacity to compromise and reach across the aisle, a trait that Allen and Parnes report elicited scorn from Elizabeth Warren.
      Biden also sought to maintain a “close relationship with the police and the civil rights community”, in his own words. It was no accident South Carolina emerged as Biden’s firewall in the primary, or that James Clyburn, a 15-term congressman and the most senior Black member of the House, was pivotal in digging Biden out of a deep hole.
      In the election’s aftermath, Clyburn attributed Democratic underperformance to the move to defund the police and the mantras of the left.
      “I’ve always said that these headlines can kill a political effort,” he told NBC. For good measure, Clyburn added: “Sometimes I have real problems trying to figure out what progressive means.”
      On the other hand, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama come across as out of sync. We are told that Clinton, the “vampire in the bullpen”, harbored thoughts of another run – until late 2019.
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      The fact Clinton lost in 2008 and 2016 had not totally dulled her capacity to believe she could unify party and country. Lucky captures Biden in 2016, calling the former secretary of state a “horrible candidate” who failed to communicate what she actually stood for.
      Unlike Clinton, Biden understood that simply drawing a contrast with Trump would not be sufficient. Yet Clinton did see that the 2020 Democratic nominee, whoever it was, would be in a fight for “the very soul of the nation”. Charlottesville provided that epiphany to Biden.
      Obama too does not fare too well, a fair-weather friend to his vice-president on several occasions, overly concerned with protecting his own legacy. He got some very important stuff wrong. Biden was more attractive and viable than the 44th president and his coterie thought.
      In the authors’ telling, Obama was temporarily enamored with Beto O’Rourke. Like Kamala Harris, the former Texas congressman’s candidacy was over before the first primary. For both, stardom did not translate into staying power.
      Then, at an event with Black corporate leaders in the fall of 2019, Obama amplified Warren’s chances and trash-talked Pete Buttigieg, then mayor of South Bend, Indiana. Obama reportedly said: “He’s the mayor of a small town. He’s gay, and he’s short.” Unlike Buttigieg, Warren never won a primary. She also finished third in Massachusetts – her own state.
      As for Biden, one source describes Obama’s support as “tepid at best”. Obama tacitly backed Biden just days before Super Tuesday in March. Months later, he took his time congratulating Biden on his election win.
      Biden’s so-called “brother” failed to call him “on election day, or the next day, or the next, or the next”, according to Allen and Parnes. Obama waited until Saturday 7 November, “the day the networks had finally called the election”. The audacity of caution. More