An Inside Look at the Trump Administration’s “Official Playbook of Grift and Fraud Planned for the 2025 Inauguration”

Part II: How do I love to bribe the president? Let me count the ways.

Donald Trump and former Senator Kelly Loeffler, co-chair of Trump Vance Inaugural Committee, Inc. As an incredibly corrupt multimillionaire and political grifter, there could be no better figurehead for the president’s fundraisng unit for the upcoming inauguration in January. Photo via Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain.

As recounted in Part I of this series, President Donald Trump raised a record $107 million for his 2017 inaugural bash, twice as much as Barack Obama’s 2009 haul, which had been the highest amount up until then. That’s still the record because Joe Biden raised $62 million, which outdid Obama by $9 million but came up short of Trump by $45 million. The success of Trump’s previous inaugural committee rested on some impressive never-before-seen fundraising innovations, but based on recent moves by Trump’s 2025 inaugural team, which I’ll discuss in today’s story, the president is all but certain to blow past the record-setting level established eight years ago.

Over the past three months President-elect Donald Trump and his trusted associates have created a trio of political-fundraising vehicles that at first glance appear to be standard models. Upon closer inspection it becomes clear the new entities have been turbocharged to take maximum advantage of the ten-week period between the election and the inauguration in January, which as emphasized in Part I is a peak period for political fundraising, and one that only comes around every four years, because during that stretch megadonors are especially receptive to pitches to get in on the ground floor of the incoming administration by making down payments towards future delivery of priority items on their shopping lists of government handouts.

The first of the three organizations is Trump Vance 2025 Transition, Inc., which was conjured into existence on August 13. The primary goals of transition committees are to work with the outgoing administration to ensure a peaceful transition of power to the incoming one, in this case Biden-to-Trump, and help the new president prepare to govern. They are allowed to solicit money from donors, but traditionally haven’t raised a lot; a separate committee is responsible for raising the cash to pay for the inauguration and plan and oversee the events.

Harris’s transition unit was established in accordance with the Presidential Transition Act of 1963, just like every other presidential campaign has since then with the probable impending exception of one, which you’ve probably already guessed is Trump’s team in 2024. The Act has been amended several times, but since 2010, the date of the most recent modification, the General Services Administration and presidential candidates have negotiated agreements that require the GSA to provide transition units with office space, funding for logistical support, and financial support to transition units if they agree to cap contributions at $5,000, disclose the names of their donors., and bar foreign money.

Trump’s 2016 transition unit signed a deal with GSA and raised $6.5 million in $5,000 donations – to be clear, that’s not part of the above mentioned $107 million his inaugural committee got that year – but his current team blew past the September 1 deadline to negotiate a deal by September 1 and still hasn’t. Trump transition team member Tulsi Gabbard, who’s also the nominee for Director of National Intelligence, has blamed the delay on the Biden administration’s attempts to infiltrate the President-elect’s committee, saying, “They're freaking out because they can't place their moles...to try to figure out what Donald Trump is doing so that they can spin up their media propaganda machines and try to preempt and undermine the work that we are doing to bring great patriots together to actually fix the government."

The more likely reason, which several of his advisors have acknowledged in off-the-record conversations with reporters, is that Trump ran the numbers and has been thinking he’d be better off by not entering into a deal with the GSA and therefore be freed of the restrictions it would impose of the size and origin of contributions to his transition outfit and the requirement to disclose the names of donors.

Meanwhile, the transition committee finally signed a separate agreement today with the Biden administration, as the predecessor to Trump’s upcoming one, that’s required under the Presidential Transition Act before it can request assistance from federal agencies. Hence, the FBI hasn’t been vetting prospective hires for senior jobs in the administration or running background checks on the candidates, so the Trump-Vance unit hired a private firm to handle those tasks in coordination with it.

It seems like things haven’t gotten off to a great start as Trump’s entire crack team of vetters apparently have been in comas since April of 2021, when newspapers across the country carried headlines about a Justice Department investigation of Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz for allegedly paying a 17-year-old girl for sex, trafficking her across state lines, and an assortment of other crimes. As a result, the president-elect had no clue about the troubling charges when he nominated Gaetz for attorney general, which would have made him the nation’s chief law enforcement officer had he been confirmed by the Senate, and Trump had egg of his face when he learned of the probe from news reports when it was too late and Gaetz was forced to withdraw his name from consideration.

Nobody’s perfect, though, so let’s assume that was a one-off and Trump hasn’t done anything else crazy like nominate a defense secretary who’d been credibly accused of rape, and return to the subject at hand by noting that the administration promised today that even though it hasn’t signed a deal with the GSA, it would voluntarily limit contributions to the transition unit to $5,000 and report the donors. I will only note here that based on its previous poor track record of keeping promises in general and specifically on inaugural fundraising, like in 2017 when it promised it would hold a “workmanlike” ceremony and proceeded to stage one vastly more expensive than any in history, a voluntary commitment doesn’t seem strong enough.

Trump has also selected transition committee officials primarily on the basis of their blind loyalty to him rather than attributes like their suitability for the position or personal integrity, as he often does when he hires political and corporate employees. Committee Co-chair Howard Lutnick, the billionaire CEO of the investment banking firm Cantor Fitzgerald, is a close friend of Trump’s who made an appearance on “The Apprentice,” and got the job two weeks after hosting a fundraiser for Trump’s 2024 campaign at his home on Long Island that netted about $10 million, and made combined personal donations to his run this year of the same amount. The president nominated Lutnick to be Trump II’s commerce secretary last week.

RFK Jr. is a leading member of Trump’s presidential transition committee as are Don Jr. and Eric Trump, and Tulsi Gabbard, so there’s absolutely nothing that go wrong. Other than is apparently slipped past the committee’s crack vetting team that there’s a lot of evidence the first nominee they green-lighted for attorney general, Matt Gaetz, paid a 17-year-old girl for sex, trafficked her across state lines, and an assortment of other crimes. Photo credit: Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain.

Linda McMahon, the other co-chair, is the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc. She donated $6 million to a pro-Trump Super PAC in 2016, landed the job of leading the Small Business Administration in Trump I and was recently nominated to be secretary of education in Trump II. In addition to Gabbard, Trump transition team members include Trump’s sons Don Jr. and Eric, Vice President JD Vance, and RFK Jr., who is the nominee for secretary of health and human services in Trump II.

Mark Paoletta, who’s leading Trump's Justice Department transition team, is typical of the MAGA hacks who were put in charge of finding candidates at other agencies. A close friend of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who he helped get confirmed in 1991, and of his right-wing activist wife Ginni Thomas, who he represented when she was questioned by congressional investigators about her involvement in the January 6, 2021 riots at the US Capitol. Paoletta is the genius who signed off on nominating Gaetz and recently warned career Justice Department lawyers, who are sworn to uphold the Constitution, they “must be fully committed to implementing President Trump’s policies” or quit their jobs now.

On November 7, less than 48 hours after the presidential election, a Massachusetts-based firm named Bulldog Compliance registered a new PAC named MAGA Inc. with the FEC, which is the second of Team Trump’s recently-created committees designed to enhance the cash flow into the broader pipeline under construction that will transport donor money extracted around the inauguration into Trump’s political treasuries, and from there directly into the personal bank accounts administration cronies.

I wrote a story about Bulldog and MAGA Inc. the day after the latter was created, which I’ll summarize here and add a bit of fresh information I’ve learned since then. Bulldog previously set up and helped manage, directly or indirectly, dozens of other Trump fundraising vehicles. Two top officials affiliated with it rank near the top of the list of Trump’s most devoted historic financial bagmen and have both been implicated in dubious practices.

Charles Gantt, who has the title of Bulldog’s “principal officer,” is the treasurer for a variety of Trump fundraising outfits, including Make America Great Again Inc. and Make America Great Again, Again! In December of 2021, when Gantt held that title at the first of the two PACs, it paid Melanie Trump $155,000 for a mysterious “speaking engagement” about which little is known. Gantt is also a vice president at Red Curve Solutions, which reportedly offered a job to Cassidy Hutchinson, a former Trump White House aide, when she was cooperating with a congressional committee investigating the January 6 events and withdrew it after she offered harsh opinions about the administration during her testimony.

Red Curve is owned by Bradley Crate, who over the past decade has worked for roughly 200 clients, all Republicans. Crate has registered or been the treasurer, or both, for a large assortment of organizations that raise money for Trump, which have brought in well over $2.5 billion combined since his successful 2016 campaign. Trump Victory, one of the firm’s Crate had a major role at, accepted potential illegal foreign donations from Cindy Yang, a Florida-based Chinese-American massage parlor entrepreneur who was investigated by the FEC on suspicion of selling access to Trump, who she knew and had been photographed with, and to Mar-a-Lago, where she’d been, to Chinese business executives who sent her money she laundered to disguise that it came from overseas.

The FEC’s six commissioners dropped the Yang investigation on a three-to-three vote, which is the outcome in almost all of its decisions because they invariably split evenly along partisan lines depending on which party appointed the commissioners. In the Yang case, the three Republican FEC members blocked the probe "despite a staff finding that laws likely were broken," according to a Miami Herald report.

A third point worth making is that Trump doesn’t need MAGA Inc. or any new PAC at all, because Bulldog and various other consulting firms that raise money for his political committees already have many existing vehicles up and running. MAGA Inc. won’t be raising money directly for the inauguration, but Bulldog obviously had the FEC registration ready to go on Election Day and hit return on filing it as soon as the vote count confirmed Trump’s return to the White House.

MAGA Inc. is categorized as a “Hybrid PAC” by the Federal Election Commission (FEC) so it can accept unlimited contributions just like a Super PAC, or take smaller-sized donations for Trump’s campaign account. Its executives and staff are unknown but In its most recent disclosure to the Internal Revenue Service, Bulldog, a nonprofit company, reported that its National Finance Chair is Kimberly Guilfoyle – Don Jr.’s longtime fiancee, though the wedding plans may be off after it was reported in September that Trump’s son was having a “dalliance” with a Palm Beach socialite – was paid $231,483 in 2022.

The nonprofit’s CEO at the time Pam Bondi, the former attorney general of Florida, lawyer for Trump at his first impeachment trial, and recently nominated to replace her close friend Gaetz as the attorney general nominee, its co-Vice President Richard Grenell, who was Acting Director of National Intelligence during Trump’s first term and is likely to get a senior position this time around too, and second co-Vice President Matthew Whitaker, the former president’s one-time acting Attorney General who was just named

MAGA Inc. has to file a post-election report with the FEC by December 5 – it hadn’t as of today – with the name of its donors and how much they gave between its creation earlier this month and yesterday. Its next report covering the small remainder of this year has to be delivered by next January 31. The one after that for 2025, when a large share of inauguration-related contributions will come in, doesn’t have to be turned in until January of 2026, so the information about MAGA Inc.’s donors won’t be known until then.

The third new pillar in the Trump fundraising pipeline currently under assembly is Trump Vance Inaugural Committee, Inc, which is procuring cash to pay the costs of the affair. As detailed in Part I, Trump’s 2017 committee, the winner and still champion of inaugural fundraising with its record $107 million haul, lifted all limits on the size of donations it would accept and left that up to the imagination of the contributors. It also offered a full menu of perks, such as private retreats and receptions with members of his administration and GOP lawmakers, to encourage the biggest imaginable donations, with the late casino mogul Sheldon Adelson coming it at No. 1 with $5 million.

Trump’s 2017 inaugural committee was also the first to accept hard-to-trace dark money, and it accepted plentiful donations from anonymously-owned LLCs, some whose owners were never identified. That year’s committee shelled out $97 million in bills for the inauguration, of which $26 million alone went to an event-planning company owned by Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, who at the time was one of First Lady Melania Trump’s dearest friends, that had been created a month earlier.

Trump Vance Inaugural Committee, Inc. has been following the same rough blueprint so far and has already begun soliciting $1 million contributions. Its two co-chairs are longtime friends and major financial backers of the president. Former Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler, a multimillionaire whose husband Jerry Sprecher is the chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, was appointed to the Senate in 2019 by a Republican governor after the incumbent, Johnny Isakson, resigned for health reasons. She lost her bid to retain her Senate perch in a special election the following year against Democrat Raphael Warnock, in part because she was so clumsily corrupt.

Loefller attended a private Senate briefing about Covid-19 in January 2020, at a time when most of us common riff-raff had no clue the US and global economy were going to get pummeled by the pandemic, and over the following weeks unloaded about $20 million in stock. Her investment decisions, which look like a form of insider trading based on nonpublic information, reaped Loeffler enormous personal benefits, but unfortunately since it would have been wrong for her to let anyone else know, those in the dark saw their portfolios tank by about 35 percent during the stock market crash between February 20 and April 7.

Inaugural committee co-Chair Steve Witkoff’s primary qualification for the job was that he’s a golfing buddy of Trump’s, but it could be worse, for example that’s also his primary qualification to be the new administration’s Special Envoy to the Middle East. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Inaugural committee Co-chair Steve Witkoff, a real estate magnate and golfing buddy of Trump’s, was appointed to be the new administration's Special Envoy to the Middle East, has no experience or any apparent significant knowledge about the region. On the other hand, his presence on the committee should attract a lot of inauguration money from donors who have interests in the Middle East.

Trump’s 2017 Committee got a nice pile from contributors with investments in the region and other parts of the world, though unfortunately a part of that turned out to be illegally funneled by straw numbers in the US on behalf of wealthy individuals who were citizens of countries in the Middle East. That will surely be a warning to this year’s committee, and I have no doubt it will have experts in place as good as the vetting team that greenlighted Gaetz to make sure that doesn’t happen again.

The upgrades made by members of the Trump team that’s orchestrating fundraising around the 2025 inauguration go beyond its failure to negotiate a binding agreement with the GSA three months after the September 1 deadline despite periodically mumbling and bleating it would since then, or profess a nonbinding commitment to standard limits on donations to its transition team until today. They also go beyond the near- immediate post-election creation of a Hybrid PAC directed by an All Star list of the president’s leading cronies and toadies that can hit up donors for cash without limits during the peak pre-inaugural fundraising period.

One tool that will be especially beneficial to Trump’s inaugural and transition committees, which was almost certainly designed to prevent a repeat of the unpleasantry the president suffered following the 2017 inauguration when the federal and local government in Washington investigated his fundraising operations. The one by the attorney general in Washington, Karl Racine, was particularly annoying because he filed a lawsuit against Trump’s Inaugural Committee, The Trump Organization, and the Trump International Hotel that accused the three organizations of conspiring to illegally enrich the former president and his family.

In one of a long list of transactions cited by Racine, the Inaugural Committee charged invoiced the hotel for more than $1 million dollars in bills that both parties knew were “vastly inflated,” including a $300,000 charge to host a private reception for the president’s children, and was paid without protest. The lawsuit attracted a lot of unwanted attention and three months later, the defendants agreed to pay the city $750,000 to resolve the charges, as is described in more detail in Part I.

To make sure something like that never happens again, Team Trump registered this year’s inaugural and transition committees in Florida, in contrast to 2017 when they were legally based in Washington, DC, which gave Racine the crack in the door to assert jurisdiction in the matter and investigate all the fundraising irregularities. There’s no chance state Attorney General Ashley Moody will investigate Trump’s inaugural fundraising or even ask any questions beyond where can I send a check, because she’s one of the president’s No. 1 fans and top surrogates in Florida.

Moody joined with 15 other state attorneys general who supported a lawsuit by Ken Paxton in Texas and 15 other state attorneys general that asked the Supreme Court to invalidate Trump's loss to Biden in the 2020 election. The 7 to 2 decision to reject hearing the case by the Court, which at this point resembles

A wholly-owned GOP subsidiary, is an indication of the lawsuit’s shambolic logic and the strength of the evidence offered to support it.

A second step to further limit the possibility of scrutiny was to have the two committees registered by West Palm Beach attorney Jacob Roth, who has years of experience “working with...conservative and libertarian institutions” and has represented Trump in political and election cases related to his conduct as president,” according to his firm’s website. No information about either of the committees is provided in their registration documents other than Roth’s name thanks to Florida’s paltry rules on corporate disclosure that’s made it one of the most popular states in the US to incorporate anonymously-owned shell companies.

Details about Trump’s fundraising for the inauguration won’t be impossible to find, especially because some of the committees involved, which may be more than the three I’m aware of, will be operating and soliciting donations in a number of states that require them to reveal more information than the FEC asks for, and in Washington too, which could lead to challenges by city officials again. But registering the inaugural and transition committees in Florida as nonprofit corporations – which other presidential candidates from both parties usually do as well, so that’s not a Trump precedent – will limit and scope and deadline for public disclosure.

The campaign finance lawyer I interviewed in Part I predicted Trump’s fundraising for the 2025 inauguration is going to outdo the unparalleled results of eight years ago in every measurable category. “There’s nothing subtle or original about whatTrump is doing, it’s the same scams as last time with some new ones added in,” he said. “I’ll be shocked if they don’t crush their own record from 2017 and if a bigger share of the money doesn’t come from donors that are impossible to identify.”

The lawyer expected there’d be an especially big jump in illegal foreign donations made through companies owned by naturalized citizens who received it from Egypt, Turkey, and other countries with a lot of wealthy people that have financial interests here, or money that originated in Russia and Israel that’s laundered for several cycles through US-based anonymously-owned LLCs.

“Trump has one more chance and he knows he’s not going to be audited by the IRS for the next four years, and they’re making it easy to bribe him 2 or 3 or 4 times, not just once,” the source said. “They raised $more than $100 million in 2017, so what’s it going to be this time? $150 million? $200 million? 250 million? Nothing would surprise me.”