I am not yuge on figuring out complex campaign donation schemes. But after reading this article on the Hillary Victory Fund, and with a little encouragement, I thought it deserved my humble attempt at a diary.
Link to article.
Apparently, it’s all legal, but it sure smells fishy. According to the author, at the 2015 Democratic Party convention in Minneapolis, 33 states made deals with HRC’s campaign and “a joint fundraising entity called the Hillary Victory Fund.”
The author, Margot Kidder, is upset about this because Montana was one of those states, and it looks like she’s done her homework—there’s a list of the beneficiaries at the bottom of the article.
It’s a little confusing, and the article is worth the read, but basically, state Democratic Parties would receive tens of thousands of dollars and transfer it back to the DNC in Washington. It’s legal, but it’s a way around the rules on campaign financing, and thus brings into question HRC’s commitment to campaign finance reform. In Kidder’s eyes, it also brings into question her Governor’s opposition to Citizen’s United and Sen. Tester’s neutrality in the primary.
The Democratic spokespeople for the17 states that refused to go along with the Clinton campaign’s plan, even though many of them were as broke as the Montana State Democratic Party was (Nebraska springs to mind), were clear that it seemed less than democratic to be choosing sides in a primary that hadn’t happened yet. That the very purpose of a primary was to let the people choose which candidate they wanted to represent them and to not let the party establishment load the dice in their own favour. They made it obvious that they were choosing democracy over kick-backs.
“A joint fundraising committee linking Hillary Clinton to the national Democratic Party and 33 state parties is routing money through those state parties and back into the coffers of the Clinton campaign and all its PACS and Funds” “It is a highly unusual arraignment if only because presidential candidates do not normally enter into fundraising agreements with their party’s committees until after they actually win the nomination. And second, Clinton’s fundraising committee is the first since the Supreme Court’s 2014 McCutcheon v FEC decision eliminated aggregate contribution limits and congress increased party contribution limits in the 2014 omnibus budget bill” said Paul Blumenthal, a writer for The Huffington Post.
A loud article in the NYT in March proclaiming that elected officials in 22 states would not support Bernie Sanders conveniently left out that those 22 states had signed agreements with the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Hillary Victory Fund.
Kidder believes that the Fund has had a “dampening effect,” because either neutrality or support for HRC came out so early from these states, adding to the media-fed aura of “electability” (which national polls refute). And Kidder adds names of several lobbyists for media giants giving money to the fund.
And, as Kidder says, the “perception of fraud and corruption is glaring.”