NEW YORK – Wealthy donors who want to support Donald Trump's campaign for the White House are finding it difficult to decide where their money should go.
There's a behind-the-scenes conflict as veteran GOP strategist Ed Rollins attempts to position his Great America PAC as Trump’s top Super PAC, despite the efforts of several individuals close to Trump to form the recently organized rival PAC, the Committee for American Sovereignty.
In a May 4 radio interview with Brian Kilmeade, Rollins said that while the Great American PAC was not the “officially, anointed Donald Trump Super PAC at this point of time,” he hoped it would be so “in a week or two.”
Two weeks later on the morning show he co-hosts, "Fox & Friends," Kilmeade said Rollins was heading the “number one Super PAC for Donald Trump.”
Trump 'disavows' all Super PACs
The Great America PAC website, in a “Donate Today” page, declares: “The Wall Street Journal knows Great America PAC is the real deal.”
This claim evidently traces to a series of articles written by Wall Street Journal reporter Rebecca Ball.
In her most recent article, May 19, Ball wrote that Great America PAC was in the process of “rolling out a new list of wealthy backers as it seeks to solidify its status as the primary outside group backing the New York businessman,” Trump.
For months, WSJ articles authored by Ball have proclaimed Great America PAC as “the only reliable Super PAC backing Mr. Trump.”
Yet, in her May 19 article, Ball acknowledged the Committee for American Sovereignty, “a new Super PAC launched to back Mr. Trump” headed by Doug Watts, who previously worked for retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson’s presidential campaign. The PAC also has signed on longtime GOP donor Kenneth Abramowitz, investor Nick Loeb and Nicholas Ribis Sr., a former top executive at Trump Hotel, Casino & Resorts.
Carson has joined the Trump campaign as an adviser reportedly assisting in the vice-presidential search effort.
On May 21, the Dallas Morning News reported that after the formation of the Committee for American Sovereignty, energy entrepreneur T. Boone Pickens had decided to cancel a June 11-13 fundraising event for Great American PAC at his Mesa Vista ranch
Adding to the confusion among donors, the Trump presidential campaign – still struggling to shift message from Trump’s previous claims he would finance his presidential run from his personal financial wealth – has taken a stand-offish posture regarding which, if any, Trump-supporting Super PAC will be unofficially sanctioned.
Asked about the PAC controversy, Trump campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks told WND: “Mr. Trump continues to disavow all Super PACs.”
It was the identical response Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski gave to the Washington Post on May 16, leading to what the newspaper reported as confusion among potential Trump donors as to where to send their money.
The Post noted that the three Super PACs supporting Hillary Clinton had raised $80 million through the end of March, compared with just $8 million by “several potential Republican players,” including the American Crossroads Super PAC headed by GOP strategist Karl Rove.
Rollins ties to Clintons
Despite his stellar GOP credentials, including having served as the national campaign director to President Reagan in his 1984 presidential campaign, critics are pointing to Rollins' connection to a Clinton-affiliated company.
On May 6 – when announcing that Rollins was joining Great America PAC after the controversial exit from the group of its Tea Party-affiliated founder, Amy Kremer, the New York Times noted Rollins has served as a senior adviser to the consulting firm Teneo, established by Bill Clinton’s former “body man” Doug Band.
Band, who has reportedly become a multi-millionaire from corporate and government clients shared freely between Teneo and the Clinton Foundation, purchased in 2003 a $2.1 million condo at the Metropolitan Tower on West 57th Street in New York City. He sold it in 2008 in favor of a more expensive $4.1 million condo in the Essex House on Central South Park, according to the New York Post.
Teneo and Band were a focus of Peter Schweizer’s allegations of Clinton Foundation financial crimes in the 2015 book “Clinton Cash,” a theme WND picks up in the forthcoming WND Books release “Partners in Crime: The Clintons’ Scheme to Monetize the White House for Personal Profit,” authored by this reporter, Jerome R. Corsi.
On May 15, 2013, Politico broke the story that longtime Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin spent her final months at the State Department working as a “special government employee” in a part-time consultancy, beginning during her pregnancy in the summer of 2012, while she worked a second job as a part-time consultant to Teneo.
The New York Post, in September 2013, reported Abedin was being paid $355,000 as a consultant to Teneo, while receiving $135,000 in government pay as a part-time consultant for Hillary.
WND reported in September 2015 that the 7,000 Hillary Clinton emails the State Department made public earlier that month provide evidence that Abedin was the nexus between the former Secretary of State and various Clinton Foundation scandals, with numerous emails forwarded by Abedin to key people within the Clinton sphere of influence, including Band at Teneo.
WND reported the emails reveal Abedin continued to interact with individuals connected with Teneo and the Clinton Foundation, even after she was deemed a "special government employee": in a part-time consultancy with the State Department in the summer of 2012, following her return from maternity leave.
Great America PAC’s fundraising questioned
Federal Election reports show that from Jan. 1 through April 30 of this year, Great America PAC raised only $610,457 from individual contributors, with nearly half that amount, $300,000, coming from a loan. But questions were raised when analysis of the PAC’s FEC filings showed it had a cash deficit of $685,0000 and, while reporting campaign expenditures of more than $1 million, largely for pro-Trump television ads, it apparently had not spent anything close to that amount.
The discovery prompted a March 23 letter from Jones Day attorney Donald F. McGahn II, acting as legal counsel to the Trump presidential campaign, to Dan Backer, the treasurer of the Great American PAC. The letter demanded that the group stop using any reference to Trump in connection with fundraising activities in order to remove any confusion that Great American PAC might be sanctioned or otherwise endorsed by the Trump campaign.
The loan originated from Goldenwest Diamond Corporation in Tustin, California, the parent company of The Jewelry Exchange, one of the nation’s largest jewelry store chains. It is founded by Bill Doddridge, the co-founder along with Amy Kremer of the Great America PAC, which originally was called “TrumPAC” until the Trump campaign objected.
The Great America PAC was first registered with the Federal Election Commission on Feb. 1, noted left-leaning Mother Jones in a March 8 article published March 8. “But it paid to run pro-Trump radio ads in Iowa in January – which is legal.”
The Mother Jones article reported the radio ads, costing a total of $25,000, were produced and placed on air by “a mysterious ad-buying firm called GRP Buying LLC, using a rented mailbox at a shipping center in Columbus, Ohio.”
Rebecca Ballhaus, in a Wall Street Journal article May 16 titled “Ed Rollins Says His Pro-Trump Super PAC Is Tops,” quoted a Rollins memorandum that claimed the group had raised and spent more than $2 million on Mr. Trump’s behalf in the past four months. The article said the PAC had built an “army of nearly two million active, newly engaged Trump supporters across the country.”
Arguing that no other PAC “is even remotely close to this level of activity and success,” Rollins boasted his PAC would out-perform the newly created Committee for American Sovereignty PAC.
“With Trump having emerged as the presumptive Republican nominee, it is not surprising to see competing organizations emerging – that’s how the political world works,” Rollins wrote in his memo, as quoted in Ballhaus’ Wall Street Journal article.
“However, as a veteran of nine presidential campaigns and with our strong finance team and unmatched grass-roots infrastructure, I fully expect us to be the best funded, most effective independent committee supporting Trump’s candidacy,” Rollins stressed.
Watts has claimed the Committee for American Sovereignty PAC will raise $20 million by June, for a total of $100 million over the course of the election. He said an estimated 85 to 90 percent of the money raised is directed to voter contact efforts, including “strategic registration” and “strategic get out the vote,” rather than “just throwing the money at the TV screen.”