#actblue

I honestly thought the President of the United States using the Department of Justice to potentially take away an opposition party's ability to fundraise for elections would have gotten more attention.

Act Blue

Buyer beware, Newsom is a Scammer!

Posted Wednesday, February 05, 2025 6Am ESTd

Tuesday, January 06, 2026 5Am EST

@Sec_Noem @AGPamBondi @FBIPatel @realDonaldTrump @DOGE

Lauren Egan at The Bulwark:

The Shadow (Docket) Campaign

DEMOCRATIC LEADERS ARE CONFIDENT they can retake the House in the 2026 midterms. But that optimism is increasingly clouded by fear that a blitz of legal challenges from Republicans could complicate or even upend their wins. In conversations with leading campaign operatives and Democratic-allied lawyers, there is a growing concern that the party is not effectively focused on—and resourced-up for—the legal fights ahead around voting rights, election laws, and election certifications.

Such legal warfare has popped up in every recent election cycle. But these Democrats warn that Republicans’ post-election legal challenges in 2026 could be substantially more aggressive than in the past. Already, the party has seen how that could play out. North Carolina Democrats have been quietly struggling to regain their financial footing after the contentious legal battle to defend Justice Allison Riggs’s November election to the state supreme court. Riggs’s GOP opponent, Judge Jefferson Griffin, spent six months attempting to get thousands of votes tossed out in order to reverse his loss. Riggs ultimately prevailed when Griffin finally conceded in May. But that win—celebrated as a positive sign that the legal system would ultimately protect the integrity of elections—came at a cost.

Riggs’s campaign alone spent over $1 million on legal fees, according to a person close to her campaign. And the state party is still sorting out how to pay off its own bills related to defending the court seat. Party officials accused Griffin and allied Republicans of deliberately using the legal challenge to try and bankrupt them. “I absolutely believe that one of the strategies in the Riggs case was to try and reduce the amount of resources that the party had to work with because if you’re spending money on lawsuits, you can’t spend money on other things that are just as important,” said Reyna Walters-Morgan, a North Carolina-based member of the Democratic National Committee who serves as the vice chair for civic engagement and voter participation.

Incumbent GOP Sen. Thom Tillis’s announcement on Sunday that he would not run for re-election in 2026 underscored that point. The midterms in the state would be contentious no matter what, but with Tillis’s seat now up for grabs, there will be a spotlight on races further down the ballot, too. Yet state Democrats have been slow to get moving: Despite Riggs’s victory, the legal challenge ultimately limited Democrats from being able to get a headstart on raising money for the midterm cycle. The fear among some Democratic officials is that Republicans will attempt similar challenges on a mass scale next year—and that the national party won’t be able to underwrite the defenses against them. The North Carolina Democratic Party received very little financial help from the Democratic National Committee, according to an operative in the state. And the future prospects for a cash infusion from the national party appear even bleaker. The Republican National Committee reported entering June with $72 million on hand, nearly five times the DNC’s $15 million stockpile. “I don’t think that [DNC officials] are fully prepared to help states even do the basic litigation prep work that it takes,” said the operative. “We are going to lose a lot of races probably in states where if they had the money, they could contest what Republicans are doing.”

Beyond the DNC’s coffers, there are additional fears about the election law battles to come. Among them is that the party is too reliant on one big law firm—Elias Law Group—to handle the bulk of the legal strategy and hasn’t invested enough in creating a network of lawyers in the states most likely to see GOP challenges. (ELG, it should be noted, did not represent Riggs in the post-election contest.) There is also fear that the incumbent president will go to extraordinary lengths to hold on to power. And not without reason: The country is only four-and-a-half years removed from January 6th.

[...] The DNC also recently created a new litigation department, hiring Dan Freeman, a veteran of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, to lead a team of three lawyers. Freeman, who started in his role last week, told The Bulwark he plans to hire more lawyers in the coming months—describing it as a significant investment compared to just a few years ago, when the DNC did not employ any lawyers in-house. “The law requires free and fair elections. I think we are well positioned to successfully protect them, but it’s going to require a lot of work—and that’s exactly why we are staffing up inside the DNC in a way that we have not done for at least thirty years,” Freeman said. He added that a more foolproof way to avoid getting bogged down in fraught legal disputes would be to take back the House by such a decisive victory as to make those GOP challenges frivolous. “If we win by wide margins, it makes it very hard to try to knock out votes in court,” said Freeman. “If all of our elections are outside the ‘margin of litigation,’ we will have a restful November and December next year, but I’m not expecting that that will be the case in every election that counts, in every election that matters to us.” Other voting rights advocacy organizations said they are getting better at coordinating across groups and with state parties, putting a particular emphasis on streamlining their operations in anticipation of the midterms. They worked together to raise national attention during Riggs’s case and were still focused on holding Griffin accountable well after the fact. One of the groups involved in Riggs’s defense, the Justice Project, is planning to run ads attacking other justices on the state supreme court who issued legal decisions helpful to Griffin’s challenge.

[...] But private conversations among Democrats about the need to invest more in legal operations have grown more urgent as Trump has ramped up his targeting of his perceived political opponents, including big law firms, universities, and Democratic campaign groups like the fundraising platform ActBlue. While some party officials are bracing for a dark turn from Trump next year should it become clear that Democrats will retake the House, other voting-rights experts say that the election threats are already happening. They point to reports that Trump’s political team has pressured Republican officials in Texas to redraw their district lines (which typically only happens at the start of each decade) to make it harder for Democrats to pick up congressional seats there next year. Republicans in Ohio are also considering redrawing their maps to knock out Democratic seats.

US Attorney General Pam Bondi announced federal charges against Cooper Frederick, 24, in the firebombing of the Tesla dealership in Loveland, Colorado.

BONDI: "There will be no negotiating. We are seeking 20 years in prison. I’ve made it clear, if you take part in the wave of domestic terrorism against Tesla properties, we will find you, arrest you, and put you behind bars."

🚨 This may be the biggest campaign-finance scandal in U.S. history — and it’s being buried. 🚨

On the PBD Podcast, Vinny held up a receipt that should have blown the doors off the story: a campaign donation tied to Minnesota — not Washington — flowing back into the political orbit of Tim Walz.

That’s when the picture snaps into focus.

What’s happening in Minnesota doesn’t just look like welfare fraud anymore — it looks like a money-laundering pipeline.

🎙️ PBD Podcast:

“We’re seeing public assistance money routed through small networks… and then pieces of it come back into campaigns.”

Here’s the pattern investigators are now circling:

1️⃣ Massive public funds pour in (childcare, Medicaid, COVID relief).

2️⃣ Shell nonprofits and care centers bill for kids and patients who don’t exist.

3️⃣ Money moves offshore.

4️⃣ Fragments return as small political donations — the same smurfing mechanics critics accuse ActBlue of using.

5️⃣ Oversight freezes. Media goes silent.

🎙️ PBD Podcast:

“If he talks, they show where the money came from. If he doesn’t, the system stays intact.”

So ask the obvious question: Why aren’t the networks touching this?

Because campaign money doesn’t stop with politicians.

Every two years, it flows straight into network television ad buys. Elections are insanely profitable for media.

🎙️ PBD Podcast:

“If this story breaks wide, it doesn’t just hurt politicians — it destroys the revenue model.”

Think about it.

When government dumps trillions into the economy, it ends up on Wall Street.

Same principle here.

Public funds → offshore → campaigns → media.

That’s the loop.

That’s why this story is radioactive.

And if these dots connect, Minnesota becomes ground zero for the biggest campaign-finance reckoning ever.

Sunlight fixes this.

Accountability fixes this.

The text reads:

Robert Reich here. Social Security is in the worst crisis of its history.

And not because it's running out of money or fraud or administrative costs. This crisis was created by Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

Field offices are being shut down. Hold times for customer service calls are hours-long. The website crashes. More than 12% of the staff has already been pushed out. And Trump plans to ultimately fire nearly half of its workforce.

I served on the Social Security board of trustees. I know how critical this program is for the 73 million Americans who rely on it. We cannot let Trump and Musk destroy Social Security.

Trump swore he wouldn't touch it. But he and Musk have a step-by-step plan to destroy one of our nation's best and most popular public programs:

1. Lie to create a pretext for actions undermining beneficiaries' access to benefits.

2. Impose deep cuts to staff and services to sabotage its ability to serve seniors.

3. Jeopardize the reliability of its systems by sharply reducing staff with tech expertise.

4. Threaten the security of our sensitive personal information by giving Musk's untrained DOGE minions access to it.

The final step? Watch the entire system collapse.

Inequality Media Civic Action has launched a major campaign to sound the alarm and mobilize people to contact Congress.

Will you donate $50, $25, or even just $3?

>> https://ineq.us/s/BAkpHk

Thank you for all you've done and continue to do to help us educate the public and stop Trump and Musk's attack on Social Security.