Former JPMorgan executive quits board of company that collected data for Trump 2020 campaign By Stephen Gandel
April 1, 2021 / 5:42 PM / MoneyWatch
Blythe Masters, a former top executive at JPMorgan Chase, is quitting the board of Phunware, a company that created a controversial voter data collection app for Donald Trump s 2020 re-election campaign.
Masters, who is chair of Phunware s board, plans to exit the company on May 1. She informed the company of her resignation on March 24, Phunware disclosed in a filing this week.
In a separate filing, Phunware revealed that it was paid $3.2 million in 2020 by its largest customer, which the Associated Press has identified as American Made Media Consultants, the limited liability company controlled by Trump family members that directed the campaign s spending.
A new political spending analysis released Wednesday shows that former President Donald Trump s 2020 campaign and its joint fundraising committees paid more than $3.5 million to the individuals and firms involved in organizing the January 6 Stop the Steal rally that presaged the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Investigators at OpenSecrets, a project of the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics that examines how money influences U.S. elections and public policy, analyzed recent Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings and found newly identified payments. [that] show people involved in organizing the protests on January 6 received even larger sums from Trump s 2020 campaign than previously known.
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The Trump campaign can continue to raise money after claiming more than $2.7 million in debt in its last federal finance report of the year, with nearly half that deficit owed to a shell company that was created and run by top campaign officials.
The filing, submitted Sunday to the Federal Election Commission, also said that the campaign refunded more than $11 million in illegal donations to nearly 4,300 contributors after the November election, even though, as a senior campaign official told Salon, the Republican National Committee automatically redirected excessive repeat donations from the Trump campaign to the RNC.
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In broad terms, perhaps the most notable information from the latest report is the steep drop in revenue. In the first 19 days after Trump s electoral defeat, his campaign and the RNC together pulled in more than $207 million with a fundraising rampage tied to the false allegation that Democrats had stolen the election, s
Trumpâs sleight of hand: shouting fraud, pocketing donorsâ cash for future
By Shane Goldmacher and Rachel Shorey New York Times,Updated February 1, 2021, 9:33 p.m.
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Then President Trump spoke at a campaign rally in Valdosta, Ga., Dec. 5, 2020.Doug Mills/NYT
Former President Donald Trump and the Republican Party leveraged false claims of voter fraud and promises to overturn the election to raise more than a quarter-billion dollars in November and December as hundreds of thousands of trusting supporters listened and opened their wallets.
But the Trump campaign spent only a tiny fraction of its haul on lawyers and other legal bills related to those claims. Instead, Trump and the GOP stored away much of the money â $175 million or so â even as they continued to issue breathless, aggressive and often misleading appeals for cash that promised it would help with recounts, the rooting out of election fraud and even the Republican candidatesâ cha