More To Come

I think I'll believe it when I see it, but for now, a qualified "Yeehaw and away we go" seems in order.

House panel announces agreement to get Trump financial records -statement

A U.S. House of Representatives committee said Thursday it had reached an agreement with Donald Trump and accounting firm Mazars USA on handing over some of the former president's financial records.

"After numerous court victories, I am pleased that my committee has now reached an agreement to obtain key financial documents that former President Trump fought for years to hide from Congress," said Representative Carolyn Maloney, chairwoman of the Committee on Oversight and Reform.

The agreement ends litigation by Trump, the panel's statement said.

Representatives for Trump did not respond to a request for comment. Mazars said it could not discuss anything related to its clients without consent but would fulfill its professional and legal obligations.

In July, a U.S. appeals court largely upheld a congressional subpoena seeking financial records from Trump's accounting firm, but said some of the lawmakers' requests went too far. 

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit unanimously ruled that the Democratic-controlled House committee can obtain records from a period surrounding Trump's 2016 campaign and his time in office.

The committee in April 2019 issued a subpoena seeking eight years of accounting and other financial records as part of its investigation into what Maloney called Trump’s "unprecedented conflicts of interest, self-dealing, and foreign financial ties."

She said the agreement includes the handing over of "critical documents" that will help the panel in its investigation.

The committee's subpoena came in response to the testimony of Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer. Cohen said Trump had inflated and deflated certain assets on financial statements between 2011 and 2013 in part to reduce his real estate taxes.

The panel said it wanted to find out whether illegal actions had taken place. Cohen was sentenced to prison after pleading guilty to charges including violating campaign finance law, bank fraud, tax evasion and lying to Congress.

The July court ruling allowed the panel to obtain some records connected to the Trump hotel lease, as well as records tied to allegations that Trump violated financial disclosure laws and may have breached the U.S. Constitution's "emoluments" clause, which prevents federal officeholders from accepting payments from foreign governments without congressional approval.

The Thread

It bears repeating.

Throughout the course of having to deal with the shit sandwich that is the very existence of Donald J Trump on the national political stage -

through ...

• The Mueller Investigation
• Impeachment 1
• Impeachment 2
• Jan6

... and those are just the highlights - but through this whole fucked up mess, this one truth has remained:

THE PEOPLE TELLING US TRUMP IS GUILTY HAVE ALL TESTIFIED UNDER OATH, WHILE THE PEOPLE WHO INSIST ON HIS INNOCENCE EITHER REFUSE TO TESTIFY AT ALL, OR PLEAD THE FIFTH IN RESPONSE TO EVERY QUESTION.

Hunter Biden's Laptop

The chain of custody is a problem, which leads to problems of file integrity and the fact that it's an open question on the possibility someone added files to the laptop at a time when the thing was not in Hunter Biden's possession.

Of course, none of that matters. What matters is the innuendo - the public negative you can attach to your opponent's image.

Remember, these Trump goons are always way more interested in cultivating the appearance of impropriety on the part of their opponents than they are in discovering what the truth is.

And also too:

Daddy State Awareness

Rule 1. Every accusation is a confession.

(pay wall)

Here’s how The Post analyzed Hunter Biden’s laptop

Two experts confirm the veracity of thousands of emails, but say a thorough examination was stymied by missing data

Thousands of emails purportedly from the laptop computer of Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son, are authentic communications that can be verified through cryptographic signatures from Google and other technology companies, say two security experts who examined the data at the request of The Washington Post.

The verifiable emails are a small fraction of 217 gigabytes of data provided to The Post on a portable hard drive by Republican activist Jack Maxey. He said the contents of the portable drive originated from Hunter Biden’s MacBook Pro, which Hunter reportedly dropped off at a computer repair shop in Wilmington, Del., in April 2019 and never reclaimed.

The vast majority of the data — and most of the nearly 129,000 emails it contained — could not be verified by either of the two security experts who reviewed the data for The Post. Neither found clear evidence of tampering in their examinations, but some of the records that might have helped verify contents were not available for analysis, they said. The Post was able in some instances to find documents from other sources that matched content on the laptop that the experts were not able to assess.

Among the reasons for the inconclusive findings was sloppy handling of the data, which damaged some records. The experts found the data had been repeatedly accessed and copied by people other than Hunter Biden over nearly three years. The MacBook itself is now in the hands of the FBI, which is investigating whether Hunter Biden properly reported income from business dealings.


Most of the data obtained by The Post lacks cryptographic features that would help experts make a reliable determination of authenticity, especially in a case where the original computer and its hard drive are not available for forensic examination. Other factors, such as emails that were only partially downloaded, also stymied the security experts’ efforts to verify content.

Inside Hunter Biden’s multimillion-dollar deals with a Chinese energy company

The contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop computer have sparked debate and controversy since the New York Post and other news organizations in the closing month of the 2020 presidential campaign reported stories based on data purportedly taken from it.

Many Republicans have portrayed this data as offering evidence of misbehavior by Hunter Biden that implicated his father in scandal, while Democrats have dismissed it as probable disinformation, perhaps pushed by Russian operatives acting in a well-documented effort to undermine the elder Biden. Facebook and Twitter in 2020 restricted distribution of stories about the drive’s contents out of concern that the revelations might have resulted from a nefarious hacking campaign intended to upend the election, much as Russian hacks of sensitive Democratic Party emails shaped the trajectory of the 2016 election.

The Washington Post’s forensic findings are unlikely to resolve that debate, offering instead only the limited revelation that some of the data on the portable drive appears to be authentic. The security experts who examined the data for The Post struggled to reach definitive conclusions about the contents as a whole, including whether all of it originated from a single computer or could have been assembled from files from multiple computers and put on the portable drive.

At The Post’s request, Matt Green, a Johns Hopkins University security researcher who specializes in cryptography, and Jake Williams, a forensics expert and former National Security Agency operative who once hacked the computers of foreign adversaries, separately examined two copies The Post made of the portable drive Maxey provided.

The portable drive provided to The Post contains 286,000 individual user files, including documents, photos, videos and chat logs. Of those, Green and Williams concluded that nearly 22,000 emails among those files carried cryptographic signatures that could be verified using technology that would be difficult for even the most sophisticated hackers to fake.

Such signatures are a way for the company that handles the email — in the case of most of these, Google — to provide proof that the message came from a verified account and has not been altered in some way. Alterations made to an email after it has been sent cause the cryptographic signatures to become unverifiable.

The verified emails cover a time period from 2009 to 2019, when Hunter Biden was acting as a consultant to companies from China and Ukraine, and exploring opportunities in several other countries. His father was vice president from 2009 to 2017.

Many of the nearly 22,000 verified emails were routine messages, such as political newsletters, fundraising appeals, hotel receipts, news alerts, product ads, real estate listings and notifications related to his daughters’ schools or sports teams. There was also a large number of bank notifications, with about 1,200 emails from Wells Fargo alone.

Other emails contained exchanges with Hunter Biden’s business partners, personal assistants or members of his family. Some of these emails appear to offer insights into deals he developed and money he was paid for business activities that opponents of his father’s bid for the presidency sought to make a campaign issue in 2020.

In particular, there are verified emails illuminating a deal Hunter Biden developed with a fast-growing Chinese energy conglomerate, CEFC China Energy, for which he was paid nearly $5 million, and other business relationships. Those business dealings are the subject of a separate Washington Post story published at the same time as this one on the forensic examinations of the drive.

The drive also includes some verified emails from Hunter Biden’s work with Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company for which he was a board member. President Donald Trump’s efforts to tie Joe Biden to the removal of a Ukrainian prosecutor investigating Burisma led to Trump’s first impeachment trial, which ended in acquittal in February 2020.

The Post’s review of these emails found that most were routine communications that provided little new insight into Hunter Biden’s work for the company.

The laptop’s journey begins

John Paul Mac Isaac, the owner of the Wilmington repair shop, has said he received the 13-inch MacBook Pro on April 12, 2019, when Hunter Biden asked him to recover data from the computer because it had been damaged by liquid.

According to Mac Isaac’s attorney, Brian Della Rocca, recovering the data was challenging for Mac Isaac.

“He would boot the computer and transfer as much as he could before the computer shut down. Then, he would boot up the computer again, verify what was copied, and then transfer more data until the computer shut down again. This process repeated several times,” Della Rocca said in a prepared statement.

When his work was completed, Della Rocca said, Mac Isaac repeatedly attempted to contact Hunter Biden, who had signed a repair authorization, to advise him the laptop was ready to be picked up, but Hunter never responded. Della Rocca added that Mac Isaac finally came to regard the MacBook as abandoned property.

In July 2019, when news of Hunter Biden’s business dealings with Ukraine was gaining attention — largely because Trump’s private attorney, Rudy Giuliani, was making public allegations of wrongdoing — Mac Isaac contacted the FBI about the MacBook.

Hunter Biden confirms he is under federal investigation

Lemme say - if Hunter Biden is dirty, he should burn for it just like anybody else, but this looks more and more like it falls under the heading "Awful But Lawful" (at worst) - the typical nuthin' burger that the wingnuts are always cookin' up for the rubes.

On Dec. 9, 2019, FBI agents from the Wilmington field office served a subpoena on Mac Isaac for the laptop, the hard drive and all related paperwork.

“He willingly gave it to the FBI and was happy to see it go,” Della Rocca said.

He added that Mac Isaac, before turning over the computer, made a copy of its hard drive “in case he was ever thrown under the bus as a result of what he knew.”

By then, Trump’s first impeachment trial, which ran from Jan. 16 to Feb. 5, 2020, was underway and Mac Isaac attempted to contact several members of Congress, none of whom replied.

He later contacted Giuliani, whose attorney, Robert Costello, responded almost immediately.

In an email with the subject line “Why is it so difficult to be a whistleblower when you are on the right?” written on Aug. 26, 2020, Mac Isaac told Costello that he had copies of the hard drive from Hunter Biden’s laptop.

“For my protection I made sevral copies and I have been trying quietly to bring it to peoples attention. I am reaching out to you for assistance and making sure the people that need to know about this do.”

Costello said he received a copy of the laptop’s hard drive from Mac Isaac. Giuliani has said he provided that data to the New York Post.

After the New York Post began publishing reports on the contents of the laptop in October 2020, The Washington Post repeatedly asked Giuliani and Republican strategist Stephen K. Bannon for a copy of the data to review, but the requests were rebuffed or ignored.

In June 2021, Maxey, who previously worked as a researcher for Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, delivered to The Washington Post a portable hard drive that he said contained the data. He said he had obtained it from Giuliani.

Responding to findings from news organizations that some material on the drive could be corroborated, Mac Isaac said in a statement: “I am relieved that finally, after 18 months of being persecuted and attacked for my actions, the rest of the country is starting to open their eyes.”

What the experts found

In their examinations, Green and Williams found evidence that people other than Hunter Biden had accessed the drive and written files to it, both before and after the initial stories in the New York Post and long after the laptop itself had been turned over to the FBI.

Maxey had alerted The Washington Post to this issue in advance, saying that others had accessed the data to examine its contents and make copies of files. But the lack of what experts call a “clean chain of custody” undermined Green’s and Williams’s ability to determine the authenticity of most of the drive’s contents.

“The drive is a mess,” Green said.

He compared the portable drive he received from The Post to a crime scene in which detectives arrive to find Big Mac wrappers carelessly left behind by police officers who were there before them, contaminating the evidence.

That assessment was echoed by Williams.

“From a forensics standpoint, it’s a disaster,” Williams said. (The Post is paying Williams for the professional services he provided. Green declined payment.)

But both Green and Williams agreed on the authenticity of the emails that carried cryptographic signatures, though there was variation in which emails Green and Williams were able to verify using their forensic tools. The most reliable cryptographic signatures, they said, came from leading technology companies such as Google, which alone accounted for more than 16,000 of the verified emails.

Neither expert reported finding evidence that individual emails or other files had been manipulated by hackers, but neither was able to rule out that possibility.

The full Trump-Ukraine impeachment timeline

They also noted that while cryptographic signatures can verify that an email was sent from a particular account, they cannot verify who controlled that account when the email was sent. Hackers sometimes create fake email accounts or gain access to authentic ones as part of disinformation campaigns — a possibility that cannot be ruled out with regard to the email files on Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Williams wrote in his technical report that timestamps on a sampling of documents and operating system indexes he examined were consistent with each other, suggesting the authenticity of at least some of the files that lacked cryptographic signatures. But he and Green agreed that sophisticated hackers could have altered the drive’s contents, including timestamps, in a way difficult and perhaps impossible to detect through forensic examination alone.

Analysis was made significantly more difficult, both experts said, because the data had been handled repeatedly in a manner that deleted logs and other files that forensic experts use to establish a file’s authenticity.

“No evidence of tampering was discovered, but as noted throughout, several key pieces of evidence useful in discovering tampering were not available,” Williams’ reports concluded.

Among the emails verified by forensic analysis were a batch of messages from Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company for which Hunter Biden was a board member. (Obtained by The Washington Post)

Some contents matched data from other sources

Out of the drive’s 217 gigabytes of data, there are 4.3 gigabytes of email files.

Green, working with two graduate students, verified 1,828 emails — less than 2 percent of the total — but struggled with others that had technical flaws they could not resolve. He said the most common problems resulted from alterations caused when the MacBook’s mail-handling software downloaded files with attachments in a way that made cryptographic verification of those messages difficult.

Williams verified a larger number of emails, nearly 22,000 in total — which included almost all of the ones Green had verified — after overcoming that problem by using software to correct alterations in the files. But he encountered obstacles with other emails that were only partially downloaded onto the drive, creating incomplete files that could not be verified cryptographically. Most of these files, he said, were probably just snippets of emails that would allow a user to preview the messages without downloading the full files.

The cryptographic verification techniques worked only on incoming emails, not ones that were sent from Hunter Biden’s accounts. Because the purpose of these signatures is to verify the identity of senders, only the records of an incoming email would contain signatures.

In addition to emails, the drive includes hundreds of thousands of other documents, including more than 36,000 images, more than 36,000 iMessage chat entries, more than 5,000 text files and more than 1,300 videos, according to tallies made by Williams, who, like Green, could not definitively verify any of them. In a small number of cases, The Post was able to establish the veracity of some of these files, such as bank documents, by obtaining copies from other sources.

Among the emails verified by Williams and Green were a batch of messages from Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company for which Hunter Biden was a board member. Most of these emails were reminders of board meetings, confirmation of travel, or notifications that his monthly payment had been sent.

Both Green and Williams said the Burisma emails they verified cryptographically were likely to be authentic, but they cautioned that if the company was hacked, it would be possible to fake cryptographic signatures — something much less likely to happen with Google.

One of the verified emails from Pozharskyi, which was the focus of one of the initial stories from the New York Post, was written on April 17, 2015. It thanked Hunter Biden “for inviting me to DC and giving me an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together.”

When the email first emerged in the New York Post about three weeks before the 2020 election, the Biden campaign and Hunter Biden’s lawyer both denied that Pozharskyi had ever met with Joe Biden. Asked recently about the email, the White House pointed to the previous denials, which The Post has examined in detail.

Some other emails on the drive that have been the foundation for previous news reports could not be verified because the messages lacked verifiable cryptographic signatures. One such email was widely described as referring to Joe Biden as “the big guy” and suggesting the elder Biden would receive a cut of a business deal. One of the recipients of that email has vouched publicly for its authenticity but President Biden has denied being involved in any business arrangements.

New folders created on drive given to The Post

The Post spent months reviewing the data on the portable drive in its entirety and seeking forensic verification of its contents. It made two new copies of the portable drive provided by Maxey so the experts could analyze them.

Green examined the drive first and, based on his initial findings, urged The Post to seek a second review to verify more of its contents. The Post then hired Williams, who has conducted forensic analyses for Fortune 100 financial services companies and also did similar work during his time at the NSA. He is now on the faculty of the information security research group IANS.

Many questions about the drive remained impossible to answer definitively. That includes what happened during a nearly year-long period of apparent inactivity from September 2019 — about five months after Hunter Biden reportedly dropped off the laptop at the repair shop — until August 2020, when the presidential campaign involving his father was entering its final months.

Soon after that period of inactivity — and months after the laptop itself had been taken into FBI custody — three new folders were created on the drive. Dated Sept. 1 and 2, 2020, they bore the names “Desktop Documents,” “Biden Burisma” and “Hunter. Burisma Documents.”

Williams also found records on the drive that indicated someone may have accessed the drive from a West Coast location in October 2020, little more than a week after the first New York Post stories on Hunter Biden’s laptop appeared.

Over the next few days, somebody created three additional folders on the drive, titled, “Mail,” “Salacious Pics Package” and “Big Guy File” — an apparent reference to Joe Biden.

Attempts to verify the emails relied mainly on a technology called DKIM, which stands for DomainKeys Identified Mail. DKIM is a cryptographic technology used by Google and some other email services to verify the identities of senders.

Williams also used a second cryptographic technology called ARC, for Authenticated Received Chain. It was created to make cryptographic verification possible even when email moves through multiple services.

Williams said ARC, though slightly less reliable than DKIM, was a worthy alternative for emails for which DKIM verification was not possible. Overall, his list of emails included 16,425 verified by DKIM and 5,521 verified by ARC.

There are limits to cryptographic verification of emails, both experts said. Not all email services provide cryptographic signatures, and among those that did, not all did so with the care of Google, which is regarded within the technology industry as having strong security protocols. Green and Williams said the only realistic way to fake Google’s DKIM signatures would be to hack the company’s own secure servers and steal private cryptographic keys — something they considered unlikely even for nation-state-level hackers using the most advanced techniques.

Today's Beau

We know there has to be some number of Dems doing shitty things like this fund-raising scam in Tennessee, but we don't hear very much about them very often.

And I really do think that's not because of a liberal bias in the political media. Cuz fake lord knows the Press Poodles are always willing to jump on a good old-fashioned Both Sides story so they can countervail their reputation for being a buncha leftie stooges.

So anyway, for now, Republicans are the ones who keep showing up as dog-ass crooks, uninterested in anything but lining their pockets with money that they haven't come by honestly.

Justin King - Beau Of The Fifth Column

Reality has a well known liberal bias.

Liberals have a well known reality bias.

Former Tennessee speaker, top aide arrested in corruption probe

Aug 23, 2022

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Tennessee’s former House Speaker Glen Casada and his top aide were arrested Tuesday on federal charges including bribery, kickbacks and conspiracy to commit money laundering involving federal funds.

Their indictments come months after a Republican legislator, Rep. Robin Smith, abruptly resigned while facing federal wire charges that involved Casada. Casada was not directly named in those court documents, but her March indictment kicked off speculation that more charges would come from the corruption investigation.

U.S. attorney says FBI agents searched offices and homes of Tennessee lawmakers

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Casada and former Chief of Staff Cade Cothren face a 20-count indictment. FBI agents arrested both at their homes Tuesday morning.

The charging document alleges Casada and Cothren exploited their positions of power by working with another unnamed lawmaker to funnel money to themselves using a political consulting firm that concealed their involvement.

more at NYT (pay wall)

Ex-Tennessee Speaker and Aide Charged With Bribery and Conspiracy

F.B.I. agents arrested Glen Casada and Cade Cothren at their Tennessee homes on Tuesday.

A former Tennessee speaker of the House and his former chief of staff were arrested on Tuesday at their homes on federal charges in connection to a bribery and kickback scheme, prosecutors said.

Former Speaker Glen Casada, 63, a Republican, and his top aide, Cade Cothren, 35, were charged with conspiracy to commit theft from programs receiving federal funds; bribery and kickbacks concerning programs receiving federal funds; honest services wire fraud; and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

The charges were announced by U.S. Attorney Mark H. Wildasin for the Middle District of Tennessee and Assistant Attorney General Kenneth A. Polite Jr. of the Justice Department’s criminal division in a joint statement on Tuesday.

Mr. Casada and Mr. Cothren appeared in federal court on Tuesday. Mr. Casada entered a plea of not guilty “and will present a vigorous defense at trial,” Ed Yarbrough, a lawyer for Mr. Casada, said on Tuesday. He did not comment further. It was not immediately clear who was representing Mr. Cothren. If convicted, Mr. Casada and Mr. Cothren each face up to 20 years in prison.

The arrests came months after the resignation of Representative Robin Smith, a Tennessee Republican who pleaded guilty to a federal wire fraud charge over involvement in the political consulting scheme with Mr. Casada and Mr. Cothren, according to The Associated Press.

Around October 2019, Mr. Casada, who represented Tennessee House District 63 in Williamson County, and another conspirator, who was also a Tennessee representative but was not named in the prosecutors’ statement or court documents, launched a scheme “to enrich themselves” by using their positions to obtain state approval for a company called Phoenix Solutions as a vendor to provide mail services to members of the state’s General Assembly and political campaigns, according to the statement.

Mr. Casada, Mr. Cothren and the third associate then sought to pull state funds for Phoenix Solutions, a political consulting business that was run by Mr. Cothren, according to court documents, one that Mr. Casada and the third individual profited from.

“Casada and the other conspirator are alleged to have enriched themselves by obtaining bribes and kickbacks from Cothren, in exchange for securing the approval of Phoenix Solutions as a mailer program vendor,” according to the statement.

The associates told members of the state’s General Assembly that the company was run by a man named “Matthew Phoenix” who was described as “an experienced political consultant,” but was actually a fabrication, prosecutors said.

Mr. Casada, Mr. Cothren and the third conspirator concealed their involvement in Phoenix Solutions “by submitting sham invoices to the state of Tennessee in the names of political consulting companies” owned by Mr. Casada and the other conspirator to funnel funds to the company from the state, prosecutors said.

In all, Phoenix Solutions received nearly $52,000 through the mailer program, according to court documents.

Mr. Casada was first elected to the Tennessee House of Representatives in 2003 and was re-elected as a representative in each subsequent General Assembly, according to court records.

In 2019, Mr. Casada resigned as speaker from the Tennessee House after it was revealed that he and Mr. Cothren had “exchanged sexually explicit text messages” about women, according to The Associated Press.

Waste Fraud & Abuse

Here's the cautionary tale that always goes with big attempts to do big things.

There's a shitload of problems with the programs intended to help the people who really need - and really deserve - help.

But instead of addressing the problems created by the shitty behavior of bad actors who always jump in looking for a quick score at other people's expense, we're bound to hear that somehow that shitty behavior is proof that we should never even try to help people - that we should just leave it all to the pros - the guys who have that shitty behavior down to a science, and can pull it off better cuz they've got dark money sponsorship and political cover from the usual rent-seeking plutocrats.

And we'll be right back to groveling for a few crumbs as we slouch towards authoritarian rule.

WaPo: (pay wall)

Millions in covid aid went to retrain veterans. Only 397 landed jobs.
Nearly $400 million went to a veteran retraining program as part of the American Rescue Plan

The offer to military veterans left unemployed by the coronavirus pandemic was tantalizing: A year of online courses courtesy of the federal government. Graduates would be set up for good jobs in high-demand fields from app development to graphic design.

“I jumped at it,” said Jacqueline Culbreth, 61, an Air Force veteran laid off in 2020 from her job as a construction estimator in Orlando. “I was looking forward basically to upping my earning power.”

But more than a year after enrolling at the Chicago-based Future Tech Career Institute, Culbreth is no closer to her goal of landing a job in cloud computing. Like many former service members enrolled at the for-profit trade school under a pandemic relief program run by the Department of Veterans Affairs, she soon found herself immersed in discouraging chaos.

Schedules were disorganized and courses did not follow a set syllabus. School-provided laptops couldn’t run critical software. And during long stretches of scheduled class time, students were left without instruction, according to interviews with Culbreth and 10 other veterans who attended the school.

In February, VA cut off tuition payments to Future Tech, leaving Culbreth and more than 300 other veterans in the lurch.

The disarray at Future Tech is the most painful example of broader problems with the $386 million Veteran Rapid Retraining Assistance Program, or VRRAP. Many schools proved unable to attract students or deliver promised services. In addition to Future Tech, nearly 90 schools have had their approvals yanked, according to VA officials, including several that were actively serving about 100 veterans. Some schools were cut off amid allegations of predatory practices, while others simply went out of business.

As of Aug. 1, only about 6,800 veterans had enrolled in the program, far fewer than the 17,250 Congress created it to serve, the agency said; just 397 had landed new jobs.
The

The story of VRRAP illustrates Washington’s often losing battle to effectively spend the torrent of cash Congress threw at the coronavirus pandemic starting in March 2020. In all, lawmakers approved more than $5 trillion for covid relief, an unprecedented wave of emergency loans, grants and other assistance intended to fight the virus and pull America out of its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. But haste and carelessness in crafting the aid created a wellspring for fraud and waste — a mess that hundreds of federal investigators are still trying to clean up.

In VRRAP’s case, Congress bungled both the program’s design and its timing, critics said, diminishing the likelihood of attracting students. As of last week, roughly half the money had been spent, leaving VA on track to return tens of millions of dollars to the U.S. Treasury when the program expires in December.

Lawmakers didn’t address VA’s long struggle to police for-profit schools that engage in deceptive practices, as they set up a program that attracted many for-profit entities. Future Tech had been barred from receiving VA tuition payments for several courses in 2012 after Illinois officials concluded that the school — then doing business under a different name — had submitted false reports and misled veterans. The school regained its eligibility in 2017, Future Tech said in a statement. Under VRRAP, it charged VA more than $25,000 per student per year, according to a tuition statement seen by The Post — just under the federal cap of $26,000 and about $7,000 higher than other computer boot camps approved by the program.

Future Tech said the school saw “tremendous success” with the pandemic program. The company described its earlier loss of eligibility for VA funding as the result of “minor” violations that have since been resolved. Its tuition and fees for VRRAP were appropriate, the statement said, for a year-long, 18 hour-per-week program that includes a laptop, practice exams and vouchers to take certification exams.

Future Tech acknowledged that illness and supply-chain snarls caused by the pandemic disrupted some courses for some students, but said the impacts were limited. It castigated Illinois officials for moving too hastily to shut off VRRAP funds.

“This decision disrupted the training for more than 300 veterans when just a handful had issues that could and should have been dealt with individually,” the company said. “We will never know what could have been achieved.”

‘We wanted to help them’

The troubles with VRRAP were achingly predictable: A similar program rolled out in 2012 — the Veterans Retraining Assistance Program, or VRAP — also failed to attract students and was widely regarded as a flop. Nonetheless, veterans advocates began pushing for another education benefit after the pandemic plunged the economy into free-fall, leaving many veterans unemployed.

Lawmakers did not include the program in the first covid aid package, the $2-trillion Cares Act signed by President Donald Trump. Instead, they waited until 2021, adding it to the $1.9-trillion American Rescue Plan Act signed by President Biden.

By then, VRRAP was a solution to a problem that no longer existed. At the height of the pandemic in 2020, veterans experienced a jobless rate of 6.5 percent, compared with 8 percent for nonveterans. By 2021, the unemployment rate among veterans had fallen to 4.4 percent. Last month, it stood at 2.7 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, hovering near record lows.

“We wanted this done sooner than it actually got passed. Now you have people saying, ‘Is it really needed? No one is using it,’ ” said Tom Porter, executive vice president for government relations for the nonpartisan Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, which was involved in crafting the legislation.

James Ruhlman, VA’s deputy director for program management for education, acknowledged that the agency had a limited view of veteran unemployment during the pandemic. He said that even the Labor Department struggled to understand employment trends.

VA officials had other concerns about the program, which also provided students with a substantial monthly housing allowance, current and former agency officials said. In recent years, a swell of soldiers returning from the post-Sept. 11 conflicts have gotten an education using GI Bill benefits, and hundreds of schools have been vetted by state officials. But the VA inspector general also issued repeated warnings about duplications, delays and “financial risks” from the agency’s reliance on for-profit schools, including an emergency warning in 2018 that many states were failing to properly monitor the schools and getting poor oversight from VA.

To avoid repeating that troubled history, the agency structured tuition payments to be spread out, so the final check of three would be sent only after a student finds a job. But multiple schools with spotty track records that had qualified for other education programs got the green light to serve VRRAP students.

Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) publicized the Future Tech case after officials in Illinois investigated student complaints. “I don’t know if they did their due diligence,” he said of VA. “For-profit schools by and large are a fraud on the public, and the victims in this case are veterans, thinking that they were taking advantage of a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic opportunity.”

Asked about the timing of the program, Durbin said lawmakers were rushing to respond to an emergency. “We didn’t know if this pandemic was going to last two months or two years or longer,” the senator said. “We saw some very vulnerable people who had served our country. We wanted to help them. We just went to the wrong place.”

There were other issues. The narrowly drawn legislation limited tuition support to veterans who were not eligible for other educational benefits and were not receiving unemployment insurance or enrolled in any other federal or state jobs program — which risked leaving very few eligible applicants.

Meanwhile, the Veterans Benefits Administration, which oversees employment and training programs, did little to market the initiative, according to congressional aides and veterans’ advocates.

“You would think something like that would be put out,” said Kevin Keller, an official with the Illinois Marine Corps League and other state veterans groups. “But the word never got out from VA.”

Some school administrators described a labyrinth of red tape as they tried to get paid or get questions answered, with emails languishing for months in no-reply inboxes at VA.

“Collectively, we feel like it was too big of a program [for VA] to quickly launch without understanding the space they were entering into,” said Alicia Boddy, chief operations and development officer at Code Platoon, a Chicago computer coding boot camp. She meets monthly with a group of other school administrators.

“Everything that could have gone wrong went wrong,” Boddy said.

A study in chaos

Future Tech grabbed an opportunity. Biden’s signature on the legislation was barely dry when the school began trumpeting the new benefit to veterans. In one May 2021 email, it advertised a “12-month program to fully utilize the 12 months of eligibility awarded you by VA.”

Opened in 2006 as the Computer Training Institute of Chicago, Future Tech now operates from a high-rise office building across Michigan Avenue from the Art Institute of Chicago. In a 2012 interview with one of its alumni, then the host of a local TV show on technology, program director Paul Johnson touted the school’s track record of connecting students with high-paying jobs.

“We network with the VA, we network with a number of different corporate organizations,” Johnson said.

In 2012, the school received approval from Illinois officials to provide VA-funded courses to veterans. (VA authorizes officials in each state to vet local educational institutions.) Within 10 months, however, the state had stripped Future Tech’s eligibility for federal funding for the courses after concluding that administrators were submitting false reports and misleading veterans about costs.

Details of that decision were revealed after Johnson sued VA in federal court in 2013; the lawsuit was dismissed. In a statement, Future Tech said the 2012 violation “was regarding a statement on our website. The other violations mentioned were also minor. FTCI has added several new leaders and staff and strengthened our oversight” and regained VA eligibility in 2017.

As the pandemic deepened, the school switched to an online format. Last year, Johnson changed its name to Future Tech Career Institute, according to Illinois business records, and began welcoming VRRAP students.

It didn’t take long for dissatisfaction to settle in. “People were complaining to VA: ‘Hey they’re not teaching us,’” Culbreth recalled.

Promised a year of comprehensive training, many students said they found only disorganization as swelling enrollment outpaced instructors and administrative support.

“We literally didn’t know what class we were taking next,” said one veteran, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he did not want to be publicly associated with the school.

Tyra White, a former Air Force police officer now living in New Orleans, enrolled in Future Tech in June 2021 to study graphic design. She said students were continually added to her course on Adobe Creative Suite with no notice, taking the instructor off guard. Two other students in the course confirmed her account.

“We’d be in the middle of something, maybe in the third week of the program, and then someone would enter the program brand new and then just be thrown into the third week’s content,” White recalled. The instructor “would have to teach them on the break everything that was presented to us on week one.”

Two days a week, students were assigned to “lab time,” White said, when they were supposed to work independently with access to instructors to ask questions. But instructors were usually teaching an entirely different course and therefore unavailable, she said.

“The entire atmosphere while we were there was totally discouraging,” White said. “It was so disorganized.”

Even the promised laptops were a problem: In an email sent to Johnson that was reviewed by The Post, a student complained that some students had yet to receive their computers weeks into classes, while others had been given machines with insufficient memory.

In some cases, the school did not give students access to basic software programs, said Kenneth Bainey, a retired information technology professional based in Canada who teaches project management part-time at Future Tech.

“There were terrible issues with administration,” Bainey said. Textbooks “took a month to get,” he said, adding that he was forced to search for some chapters online.

Last week, Bainey placed blame on the students, saying some veterans were “terribly destructive.”

“They came to class, never did any assignments and expected certification,” he said. “We had to get rid of them, and then they complained.”

Future Tech blamed the chaos on the pandemic. “We did have some staffing challenges and online challenges — COVID made the world very difficult for all,” its statement said.

While illness caused staffing shortages that forced instructors to take on extra classes, this was done “for the shortest time possible,” the company said. Book delays were “isolated cases, not the norm.” Like the problems with laptops, delays were caused by “supply chain issues we are all sadly familiar with.”

Under VRRAP’s strict rules, students couldn’t switch schools without losing benefits. Many veterans complained bitterly to VA — and to Johnson, according to emails reviewed by The Post. By February, with rumors spreading that Future Tech might close, Johnson admonished students not to gossip, saying it could trigger “anxiety, PTSD or trauma.”

“Everything will work out,” he wrote in an email reviewed by The Post. “All of you will be fine.”

‘I’m so disappointed’

Three-and-a-half weeks later, VA cut off payments to Future Tech.

A VA claims processor in Muskogee, Okla., had become suspicious after spotting a tenfold spike in enrollment in December 2021, VA officials said. Years of experience suggested that exploding enrollment at a for-profit school could be a sign of trouble.

VA notified the Illinois Department of Veterans Affairs, which found serious problems at Future Tech, including missing instructors, changing course lengths, students forced to take night courses when they had requested a day schedule, instructors who lacked certifications, “substantial misrepresentations” and sloppy record-keeping, according to a letter sent to Johnson in February.

For Future Tech students, the decision abruptly cut off not only tuition payments but also a housing allowance of more than $2,000 a month. Culbreth said she briefly was forced to live out of her car and in a homeless shelter.

Frustrated by the lack of instruction, Culbreth had joined other students in an independent study group and managed to earn specialized certification in cloud web services. But she had hoped to earn certification in three or four other areas. Today, she works as a project coordinator for a tech company, a less technical position that doesn’t pay enough to rent her own apartment, she said.

“I’m drowning here,” said Culbreth, who has been staying with a friend. “I’m so disappointed. I would have finished. I would have gotten my certifications. I wouldn’t have let anything stop me.”

The program’s disappointing showing has prompted two congressional hearings. In February, Rep. Mike Levin (D-Calif.), chairman of a House subcommittee focused on economic opportunity for veterans, pressed for data on education quality at for-profit schools and asked how VA defines “successful employment.” Program integration officer Ricardo DaSilva conceded that the agency does not study job retention.

In May, a senior VA Education Service official objected to Levin’s proposal to boost enrollment by adding four-year colleges to VRRAP’s roster of schools, saying the change would cause “new administrative burdens” months before the program expires. Levin fired back: “The status quo is entirely unacceptable.”

A month later, Congress passed legislation authorizing VA to recover at least $4.2 million in tuition and fees from schools whose approvals were pulled, including Future Tech. Nothing has yet been recovered, and Ruhlman said he is not confident anything will be.

“I wouldn’t say it will be easy to get it back,” he said.

Asked about the program’s failures, Ruhlman said “there are hurdles and a number of administrative problems to be solved in the rollout of any federal program.” He noted that VRRAP was created “in a very fairly short period of time.”

In July, Future Tech changed its name yet again: It is now the Institute of Business and Technology Careers, according to Illinois business records. The school said it has been told by state officials that it could reapply for future VA programs.

Ruhlman predicted VA officials would “put that application … under extreme scrutiny.”

“Given what has happened,” he said, “I would say that the bar would be fairly high.”

Today's Government Crook

1. In 79 days, we're going to have an election that could be a deciding factor in determining whether or not our little experiment in democratic self-government will be allowed to continue
2. The outcomes in that election - maybe more than even the last one - could hinge on mail-in ballots getting out to the voters, and back in to the people who count the ballots
3. The guy Trump appointed to fuck up the Postal Service is still in charge of it, and he hasn't grown any more trustworthy

USPS is a service - says so right there in the name. We fund it with tax dollars and it's there to provide a vital service to Americans (again, it's right there in the name of the joint - United States Postal Service).

I want the Post Office to do it's thing the best it can, and to continue being a symbol of a civilized nation.

I don't need it to be a profit center any more than I need the FDA to be a profit center - or the prison system, or the FBI, or public schools, or any of the other services I pay for with my tax money.

The privatization of government is part of a plan to install plutocracy - it's strangling this country - and it has to stop.

WaPo: (pay wall)

DeJoy maintains financial ties to former company as USPS awards it new $120 million contract

XPO Logistics pays DeJoy and family businesses at least $2.1 million annually to lease four office buildings in North Carolina

The U.S. Postal Service will pay $120 million over the next five years to a major logistics contractor that Postmaster General Louis DeJoy previously helped lead and with which his family maintains financial ties, according to DeJoy’s financial disclosure statements and a federal contracting database.

The new contract will deepen the Postal Service’s relationship with XPO Logistics, where DeJoy served as supply chain chief executive from 2014 to 2015 after the company purchased New Breed Logistics, the trucking firm he owned for more than 30 years. Since he became postmaster general, DeJoy, DeJoy-controlled companies and his family foundation have divested between $65.4 million and $155.3 million worth of XPO shares, according to financial disclosures, foundation tax documents and securities filings.

But DeJoy’s family businesses continue to lease four North Carolina office buildings to XPO, according to his financial disclosures and state property records.

The leases could generate up to $23.7 million in rent payments for the DeJoy businesses over the next decade, according to a person who shared details of the agreements with The Washington Post but spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential financial arrangements. In 2018, when DeJoy sat on the company’s board, XPO reported similar figures with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The leases run until 2025 and can be extended until 2030, according to those filings.

Postal Service spokesman Jeffery Adams said that DeJoy did not participate in the procurement process for the XPO contract, which was competitively bid. The DeJoy company leases to XPO were cleared by ethics officials before DeJoy took office in June 2020, according to a previously unreported Postal Service inspector general investigation, because the properties were rented to a contractor and not the agency itself. DeJoy is recused from any matters involving XPO, Adams said.

DeJoy’s personal spokesman, Mark Corallo, referred most questions to the Postal Service.

DeJoy’s USPS slowdown plan will delay the mail. What’s it mean for your Zip code?

DeJoy’s leases have alarmed some ethics watchdogs.

“There’s no question he’s continuing to profit from a Postal Service contractor,” said Virginia Canter, chief ethics counsel at watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “He can comply with these technical legal requirements … but it does create an appearance issue about whether it’s in his financial interest to continue to make policy that would benefit contractors like XPO.”

The agreement will see XPO take over operations at two crucial sorting and distribution facilities in Atlanta and Washington, D.C. The agency awarded the company the contract in April, but XPO is a longtime postal vendor with dozens of other active contracts with the Postal Service for trucking and logistics assistance.

DeJoy’s 14-month tenure at the Postal Service has faced controversy throughout. Congressional Democrats and independent postal experts accused him of slowing mail delivery ahead of the November 2020 presidential election — accusations he denied. He is under federal criminal investigation over alleged campaign finance abuses. A DeJoy spokesman in June said DeJoy “has always been scrupulous in his adherence to the campaign contribution laws and has never knowingly violated them.”

Louis DeJoy’s rise as GOP fundraiser was powered by contributions from company workers who were later reimbursed, former employees say

DeJoy has said repeatedly in congressional testimony that he would abide by all ethics requirements.

“LDJ Global Strategies, of which Mr. DeJoy is a majority shareholder, leases certain commercial buildings to XPO. Such leases were disclosed by Mr. DeJoy in his public financial disclosure report,” Adams said in a statement. “In addition, the Office of Government Ethics endorsed Mr. DeJoy’s recusal agreement concerning XPO as an appropriate remedy to resolve any issues concerning the possible appearance of a conflict of interest concerning this landlord/tenant relationship.”

XPO spokesman Joseph Checkler said the company’s contracts with the Postal Service were awarded through regular procurement mechanisms. The company bid for other postal facilities, but was not awarded those contracts.

“In some cases, we’ve won. In other cases, we’ve lost,” Checkler said.

DeJoy has deep connections to the logistics industry. He built his family’s trucking business into a shipping juggernaut after a breakthrough contract with the Postal Service in the early 1990s. He sold the business to XPO in 2014 for $615 million.

DeJoy generally held commercial properties leased to XPO and shares in the company through individual limited liability companies and his family foundation, according to his financial disclosures, his wife’s financial disclosures and SEC filings. (DeJoy’s wife, Aldona Wos, was then-President Donald Trump’s ambassador-nominee to Canada, and filed separate ethics forms in 2019.)

Three limited liability companies — 4000 Piedmont Parkway Associates LLC, 4035 Piedmont Parkway Associates LLC and LMD Properties LLC — own the leased buildings, according to North Carolina property records. DeJoy lists himself as a “managing member” of all three businesses in his financial disclosures.

Another limited liability company, the Louis DeJoy Family Partnership LLC, held his XPO stock.

The three limited liability companies that lease buildings to XPO did not hold XPO shares. DeJoy’s family charitable foundation did hold XPO assets, according to the inspector general report, though the investigation did not include how many shares or their value.

The inspector general report said a Postal Service ethics lawyer recommended DeJoy divest of certain assets to avoid conflicts of interest — including stock in XPO, Amazon and UPS — or that he sign a recusal memorandum reassigning issues involving those companies to other agency leaders.

Within nine days of taking office, DeJoy sold between $565,000 and $1.2 million of stock in UPS and Amazon, two of the Postal Service’s top competitors, according to his financial disclosures. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Post.)

But the inspector general report stated that DeJoy initially explored alternatives to divesting XPO assets while remaining in compliance with ethics regulations. DeJoy assigned Michael Elston, secretary to the agency’s governing board, and Heather Clarke, DeJoy’s chief of staff who was previously employed at DeJoy’s former companies, to screen issues involving companies with which DeJoy held investments, including XPO, according to the inspector general investigation.

Those issues were to be directed to David E. Williams, the agency’s chief operating officer. Williams retired in January. The Postal Service declined to provide The Post with DeJoy’s updated screening processes.

On Aug. 13, 2020, though, DeJoy notified postal ethics officials that he would begin to divest from 14 companies in which he held assets and which officials said could present conflicts of interest, including XPO.

Over the ensuing four months, he sold between $27.7 million and $107.8 million in shares from those companies. The vast majority — between $26 million and $103.6 million — were of XPO assets.

Postal ethics officials initially determined that DeJoy did not need to disclose his family foundation’s assets because the organization held nonprofit tax status, according to the inspector general inquiry. But investigators found subsequently that the foundation held a previously unknown account primarily consisting of XPO assets.

The inspector general’s office informed postal ethics officials of this account, and those officials instructed DeJoy to hire an independent asset manager for the foundation, the report stated, which Corallo, DeJoy’s personal spokesman, said the foundation has since done.

When DeJoy left XPO’s board of directors in 2018, according to SEC filings, the foundation owned 484,340 XPO shares. Those shares would have been worth $38 million when DeJoy took office. With the approval of postal ethics officials, the foundation’s assets were not included on DeJoy’s ethics forms. Adams said the foundation has sold all of its XPO shares, though the Postal Service did not respond to questions about when those sales occurred.

What’s in Louis DeJoy’s 10-year plan for the USPS

The divestiture process and the Postal Service’s growing relationship with XPO raise new concerns for some ethics experts about DeJoy’s long history with the logistics industry.

“He could, in fact, divest himself of those but he chooses not to. That’s a choice that he’s making,” said Lisa Graves, executive director of True North Research, a private ethics research firm, and former chief counsel for nominations to Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.). “That choice means that even if he himself is not the one making a decision affecting XPO, other people within the Postal Service know that it could benefit him, and that could curry favor with him.”

Others question whether DeJoy’s ties to the logistics industry make him more apt to see advantages in outsourcing.

“He comes from a company that made much of its fortune working as one of the places where the Postal Service had outsourced work,” said Steve Hutkins, the founder and editor of the Save the Post Office blog, which has tracked the agency since 2011. “He knows all about outsourcing postal work to private industry. He was one of them.”

Under the new Postal Service contract, XPO will take over two “surface transfer centers” that organize mail shipments and load them on trucks.

The Postal Service struck the deal with XPO in April, but did not publicly discuss the agreement until late June. The agency will contract out work in four more facilities in San Francisco, Los Angeles, western Massachusetts and New Jersey in the coming months.

In each case, according to a presentation agency executives made in June before a postal stakeholder group, the Postal Service will relocate operations to buildings that can accommodate more package-sorting machines.

Close to a dozen employees in each facility will move to the new buildings to manage the work of XPO contract workers, union officials involved in the moves said.

The plans have sparked renewed fears of privatization, long a boogeyman in postal policy debates. The Trump administration in 2018 recommended transitioning the Postal Service “from a government agency into a privately held corporation.”

What you should know about USPS — and how it descended into crisis

But those positions have mostly been rejected by congressional Republicans whose constituents in rural and suburban areas require postal services more than those in liberal-leaning urban ones.

Adams, the Postal Service spokesman, said that the Postal Service’s commitment to operating as a public entity was reinforced by DeJoy’s 10-year plan.

“The U.S. Postal Service does not believe in and has not advanced the idea that it should operate as a private entity. In fact, we have advanced the opposite idea,” he said. “To carry out our universal service mission, and given our role as a fundamental part of the nation’s critical infrastructure, we believe that we must remain an integral part of the United States government.”

Dena Briscoe, president of the American Postal Workers Union branch for Washington and Southern Maryland, said contracting out the work felt like a “slap in the face” to her union’s members.

“This is the work that they’ve been doing for years and years and years,” she said, “and you’re going to segregate it away from them, put in another building, give it to a company that previously had a [top executive] that is now our postmaster general. A lot of our members are taking offense to that.”

But Don't Get Happy

“If they were a corporation, the CEO would be fired and investigated,” said a national Republican consultant working on Senate races. “The way this money has been burned, there needs to be an audit or investigation because we’re not gonna take the Senate now and this money has been squandered. It’s a rip-off.”

Republicans are having kind of a hard time. I'll go along with most of the conventional wisdom here (ie: the primaries - where the internal squabbles are supposed to get worked out - have been brutal), but I have to add what should be obvious. Trump has captured a big chunk of the fund-raising infrastructure, and, as is his usual MO, he's taking a nice fat cut for himself, while using the money as leverage against anyone who won't toe the Trump line.

Check in with the shittiness of the GOP's Trump's WinRed money machine - The Professional Left podcast, starting at about 7:10

So it's pretty sweet to hear "the party of good business" is kinda crapping out because it's being run so poorly, and it's pretty good news when Republicans continue to eat their own, which could translate to positive outcomes in the mid-terms, but we can't let up.

Keep the balls to the wall, kids.

WaPo: (pay wall)

‘It’s a rip-off’: GOP spending under fire as Senate hopefuls seek rescue

A cash crunch at campaigns and the NRSC set off a panic as GOP candidates emerged from bruising primaries playing catch-up in polls and advertising

Republican Senate hopefuls are getting crushed on airwaves across the country while their national campaign fund is pulling ads and running low on cash — leading some campaign advisers to ask where all the money went and to demand an audit of the committee’s finances, according to Republican strategists involved in the discussions.

In a highly unusual move, the National Republican Senatorial Committee this week canceled bookings worth about $10 million, including in the critical states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Arizona. A spokesman said the NRSC is not abandoning those races but prioritizing ad spots that are shared with campaigns and benefit from discounted rates. Still, the cancellations forfeit cheaper prices that came from booking early, and better budgeting could have covered both.

“The fact that they canceled these reservations was a huge problem — you can’t get them back,” said one Senate Republican strategist, who like others spokes on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters. “You can’t win elections if you don’t have money to run ads.”

The NRSC’s retreat came after months of touting record fundraising, topping $173 million so far this election cycle, according to Federal Election Commission disclosures. But the committee has burned through nearly all of it, with the NRSC’s cash on hand dwindling to $28.4 million by the end of June.

As of that month, the committee disclosed spending just $23 million on ads, with more than $21 million going into text messages and more than $12 million to American Express credit card payments, whose ultimate purpose isn’t clear from the filings. The committee also spent at least $13 million on consultants, $9 million on debt payments and more than $7.9 million renting mailing lists, campaign finance data show.

Trump's dominance in GOP comes in focus, worrying some in party

“If they were a corporation, the CEO would be fired and investigated,” said a national Republican consultant working on Senate races. “The way this money has been burned, there needs to be an audit or investigation because we’re not gonna take the Senate now and this money has been squandered. It’s a rip-off.”

The NRSC’s chairman, Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, has already taken heat from fellow Republicans for running ads featuring him on camera and releasing his own policy agenda that became a Democratic punching bag — leading to jokes that “NRSC” stood for “National Rick Scott Committee” in a bid to fuel his own presumed presidential ambitions.

Other spending decisions, such as putting about $1 million total into reliably blue Colorado and Washington earlier this month sparked fresh questions after the committee turned around and canceled buys in core battlegrounds.

The NRSC invested heavily in expanding its digital fundraising and building up its database of small-dollar donors. But online giving to Republicans, not just the NRSC, sagged earlier this year from what consultants said was a combination of inflation, changes to Facebook advertising policies, concerns about emails caught in spam filters, and complacency with an anticipated Republican wave. Some Republicans also suspect former president Donald Trump’s relentless fundraising pitches and cash hoarding has exhausted the party’s online donor base.

Pennsylvania Republican Senate candidate Mehmet Oz, who is struggling in his race against Democrat John Fetterman, meets with attendees during a Republican Jewish Coalition event in Philadelphia, on Aug. 17, 2022. (Matt Rourke/AP)

The NRSC still has tens of millions of dollars in reserved airtime, and its next filing, which covers the month of July and is due to the FEC on Saturday, will show millions more in ad spending. The group said its total spending on TV so far topped $40 million. On Friday the NRSC said it added more than $4 million of airtime across Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Arizona.

“Our goal was to keep our candidates afloat and get them to this point where they’re still in the game in all our top states,” NRSC spokesman Chris Hartline said. “So when the big spending starts now we have a fighting chance.”

That big spending is coming from a super PAC aligned with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), which this week announced a whopping $28 million rescue effort in Ohio, where Republican candidate J.D. Vance raised a dismal $1 million in the second quarter and has spent less than $400,000 on ads.

Pa. race no longer a tossup as Fetterman memes zero in on Oz's wealth

The super PAC, known as the Senate Leadership Fund, also moved up by three weeks its spending in Pennsylvania and added $9.5 million there, for a total of $34 million. Recent surveys show the Keystone State’s Senate race drifting toward Democratic Lt. Gov. John Fetterman over the Republican nominee, celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz.

McConnell himself acknowledged the challenge of reclaiming the chamber’s majority, telling reporters in Kentucky on Thursday that the House was likelier to flip. “Candidate quality has a lot to do with the outcome,” he said, according to NBC News, a comment that was widely viewed as a swipe at some of the primary winners and their lagging fundraising performance.

The NRSC opted not to pick favorites in this year’s primary contests, a break from the past decade when the committee worked to avoid out-of-the-mainstream nominees who cost the party wins in 2010 and 2012. Many of this year’s Republican candidates haven’t run for office before and emerged from nasty, expensive primaries that left their favorable ratings underwater. A string of recent polls showed Republican candidates in many battlegrounds trailing or in a dead heat with well-funded Democratic opponents.

Democrats are outspending Republicans by more than double in the Arizona Senate race; by almost two-to-one in Nevada and by four-to-one in Ohio, according to the media tracking firm AdImpact. Republicans are also being outspent by about $14 million in Georgia.

“Everything came together at once, and everyone woke up like, ‘Oh my God,’” said one Republican consultant. “It’s been an absolutely disastrous two weeks for GOP Senate stuff on all fronts.”

After The Washington Post discussed this story with the NRSC on Friday, five Senate campaigns reached out to praise the committee’s help.

“They are focused on bringing the fight to the Democrats everyday,” said Gail Gitcho with Herschel Walker’s campaign in Georgia. “Whoever says otherwise is nuts.”

Zack Roday with Joe O’Dea’s Senate campaign in Colorado added, “The NRSC has been a great partner, everything we’ve asked for.”

Democrats point to signs of a newly energized base and a national political environment that is, at the very least, less bad for them. The party in power typically loses ground in midterms.

Democrats more hopeful for midterms — but brace for GOP spending surge

JB Poersch, president of the main Democratic Senate super PAC, pointed to the Jan. 6 hearings, recent mass shootings, the Inflation Reduction Act and the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade as changing the dynamics in the past two months.

“It’s surprising and says a lot about the Republican brand that their candidates have struggled to raise money,” Poersch said. “With extreme candidates and extreme positions, maybe Republican donors are finding these candidates are out of step with where they are. Maybe voters are feeling the same way.”

Vance’s disappointing financial report touched off new urgency for air support from the McConnell-aligned super PAC, a person familiar with the planning said. The size of the buy reflects the expense of advertising statewide in Ohio with its multiple media markets, and that Republicans view the state as both winnable and as a must-win. An affiliated nonprofit known as One Nation is spending an additional $3.8 million to help Vance against his Democratic rival, Rep. Tim Ryan.

Several public polls recently showed Ryan leading, and internal Republican surveys found Vance with an even bigger deficit, according to people familiar with the findings.

A Vance campaign adviser rejected suggestions that the super PAC’s intervention showed weakness, saying the race was always going to be competitive.

“If the Washington punditry thinks Trump won the state by 8 so it should be a slam dunk, they’re sorely mistaken,” the adviser said, referring to Trump’s margin of victory in Ohio in 2020. “Them putting money in this race shows they believe this is a race they can win.”

Vance benefited in the primary from about $10 million by an allied super PAC funded by technology billionaire Peter Thiel. But people involved in the race said it’s unclear whether Thiel, whose style in the past has been to invest early and then bow out, will put money behind Vance in the general election. Thiel also funded the Arizona Senate bid of Republican nominee Blake Masters, his former employee.

A spokesman for Thiel declined to comment.

The Senate Leadership Fund, which typically expands spending in the final stretch after Labor Day, finished June with more than $100 million in the bank. Starting in September, the PAC has reserved $14.4 million in Arizona, $37.1 million in Georgia, $15.1 million in Nevada, $27.6 million in North Carolina, $15.2 million in Wisconsin and $7.4 million in Alaska.

The Great Hollowing

We've heard plenty of horror stories about how the Russian military has been hollowed out.

Fairly reliable reporting has shown how thousands of tanks and other fighting vehicles have been found to be in disrepair, less than fully operational, and in many cases, without vital components - like engines and transmissions - because the corruption in the Russian military is rife.

Task & Purpose

There was one story about the explosives that every infantryman in every army loves more than his mom. It was found that a significant percentage of the packages contained lumber - literally chunks of wood - 2x2s and inch-and-a-half dowels - wrapped in the standard brown craft paper, stamped with the official seals of the manufacturers and the whole bit. Wood.

And now this - the Explosive Reactive Armor - the stuff that should provide a little extra protection for the crew - is actually pieces of sponge rubber.