Real Clear Politics
New Polls Show Trump Ahead in Six of Seven Swing States
“The Federalist has used the same address that Real Clear Politics uses as the location of its Chicago office.”
“The discussion also veered at one point to Haley backers who are still voting for her in the primary even though she’s dropped out of the race. On Tuesday night, for example, during the second day of the donor retreat, Trump won the Maryland Republican primary with 80% of the vote; almost 20% of GOP voters chose Haley.”
FROM:
CNN
At donor retreat, Haley avoids talking about Trump and her political future
By Daniel Strauss and Kylie Atwood, CNN
Published 5:23 PM EDT, Wed May 15, 2024
“For three days after every major news organization declared Joe Biden the victor of the presidential election, one widely read political site maintained that Pennsylvania was still too close to call.
The delay was welcome news to allies of President Donald Trump like Rudy Giuliani and friendly outlets like The Gateway Pundit, which misrepresented the site’s decision in their efforts to spread false claims that Biden’s lead was unraveling.
That site, Real Clear Politics, is well known as a clearinghouse of elections data and analysis with a large following among the political and media establishment — and the kinds of political obsessives who might now have all the counties in Georgia memorized. It markets itself to advertisers as a “trusted, go-to source” admired by campaign and news professionals alike. Its industry benchmark polling average is regularly cited by national publications and cable news networks.
But less well known is how Real Clear Politics and its sister websites have taken a rightward, aggressively pro-Trump turn over the last four years as donations to its affiliated nonprofit have soared. Large quantities of those funds came through two entities that wealthy conservatives use to give money without revealing their identities.
Real Clear’s evolution traces a similar path as other right-leaning political news outlets that have adapted to the upheaval of the Trump era by aligning themselves with the president and his large following, its writers taking on his battles and raging against the left.
As the administration lurched from one crisis after another — impeachment, the coronavirus, a lost election the president refuses to concede — Real Clear became one of the most prominent platforms for elevating unverified and reckless stories about the president’s political opponents, through a mix of its own content and articles from across conservative media…
From 2016 to 2017, donations to the Real Clear Foundation more than quadrupled to $1.7 million, with nearly all of that coming from two entities that conservatives use to shield their giving from public disclosure requirements, Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund. In 2018, the Real Clear Foundation had its best year yet, reporting more than $3 million in donations. One donor whose identity is disclosed on tax filings is Andrew Puzder, who was briefly Trump’s nominee for labor secretary and writes opinion pieces for Real Clear.
Public records from those years and interviews show how the leadership and donor base of Real Clear and The Federalist overlapped.
One of The Federalist’s major financial backers is the conservative, pro-Trump businessman Richard Uihlein, according to two people with knowledge of the website’s finances. Uihlein and his wife, Elizabeth, who runs their family’s multibillion-dollar packaging business, have been known to steer money toward hard-right candidates that many other Republicans have avoided, like Roy S. Moore, the former Alabama judge whose Senate campaign unraveled after women accused him of pursuing them and fondling them when he was in his 30s and they were teenagers.
Elizabeth Uihlein was also known for her outspokenness against public health lockdowns and revealed last week that she and her husband had contracted the coronavirus.
Together the couple have become one of the biggest sources of investment in conservative politics in recent years. They have given $250,000 to the Real Clear Foundation through their family nonprofit, tax records from 2017 and 2018 show.
The Federalist’s funding remains opaque, but its ties to Real Clear are detailed in public documents. Two top executives at Real Clear Politics were named in disclosures filed by Federalist entities. McIntyre, the Real Clear co-founder, is listed as a director of The Federalist’s umbrella corporation on a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that also bears his signature.
The Real Clear publisher David DesRosiers was listed as a director with The Federalist’s nonprofit foundation. And as reported by BuzzFeed and others, The Federalist has used the same address that Real Clear Politics uses as the location of its Chicago office.
In recent days, as Trump and his loyalists repeated baseless claims of rampant voter fraud and counting errors, Real Clear Politics gave top billing to stories that reinforced the false narrative that the president could still somehow eke out a win. Headlines on Monday — more than a week after Biden had clinched the race — included “There’s Good Reason Not To Trust Election Results” and “Trump Attorney Says Results in Several States Will Be Overturned.”
MORE AT:
By Hartford Currant and The New York Times
November 17, 2020 at 2:24 p.m.
Why the 2024 election could have 'robust' voter turnout for Biden vs. Trump
May 15, 2024
“He's told the world that he has a potential security risk. That he is a president for sale.”
“We have a white house for sale. We have a president for sale.
A presidential candidate for sale who has told the world that he is in such dire financial shape that the entire financial Services community in America and globally has turned their back on him.”
“You know what that sounds like to our enemies? You know what that sounds like to foreign agents around the world? That's a target. That is somebody that we can turn. That is somebody that needs money and will do anything in desperation including sacrificing on the altar of his desperation American foreign policy and American Security."
FROM:
Wednesday, March 20, 2024
“Trump RECONNECTS with CONVICTED FELON For Help
Do you like felons convicted of obstruction of justice and money laundering who do business with the Chinese and Russians back in the White House? Then you are going to love mini-Trump Paul Manafort, his convicted felon of a 2016 campaign director being brought back by Trump to develop foreign policy. Michael Popok explains the role that Manafort whom the senate declared a “counterintelligence” threat, will play for Trump, and link Manafort to Trump’s lead criminal lawyer Todd Blanche.”
“Shortly before Trump’s inauguration, according to Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman, Israeli intelligence officials gathered at CIA headquarters, where they were told something astonishing: Russia, the agency believed, had “leverages of pressure” over the incoming president. Therefore, the agency advised the Israelis to consider the possibility that Trump might pass their secrets on to Russia. The Israelis dismissed the warning as outlandish. Who could believe that the world’s most powerful country was about to hand its presidency to a Russian dupe? That the United States government had, essentially, fallen?
A few months later, Trump invited Russian diplomats into the Oval Office. He boasted to them that he had fired “nut job” James Comey. “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.” At the same meeting, Trump passed on to the Russians a highly sensitive intelligence secret Israel had captured from a valuable source inside ISIS. It was the precise danger Israel had been cautioned about.
Like many of the suspicious facts surrounding Trump’s relations with Russia, it was possible to construct a semi-innocent defense. Maybe he just likes to brag about what he knows. Maybe he’s just too doddering to remember what’s a secret. And as often happens, these unwieldy explanations gained general acceptance. It seemed just too crazy to consider the alternative: It was all exactly what it appeared to be.”
FROM:
Will Trump Be Meeting With His Counterpart — Or His Handler?
What If Trump Has Been a Russian Asset Since 1987?
A plausible theory of mind-boggling collusion
*This article appears in the July 9, 2018, issue of New York Magazine”
“'Paul Manafort, former President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman whom he later pardoned, is backing away from a role with the Republican National Convention following media scrutiny and questions over his involvement in the planning process, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
Manafort had been in discussions with Trump’s team to help with the convention in Milwaukee, CNN previously reported.
In a statement provided to the New York Times, Manafort said he was offering “advice and suggestions” to the Trump campaign on the Republican National Convention.
“As a longtime, staunch supporter of President Trump and given my nearly 50 years experience in managing presidential conventions, I was offering my advice and suggestions to the Trump campaign on the upcoming convention in a volunteer capacity,” Manafort said…
Manafort’s departure from the support position comes after The Washington Post reported that he was helping launch a Chinese streaming platform.
Manafort spent close to two years of a 7.5-year sentence in prison for bank and tax fraud, illegal foreign lobbying and witness tampering conspiracies before being released in 2020 because of the Covid-19 pandemic, spending the remainder of his sentence under home confinement prior to his pardon.”
FROM:
CNN
Alayna Treene
May 11, 2024
