State Attorneys General Who Dropped Trump U Fraud Inquiries Subsequently Got Trump Donations
Matthew Yglesias, Vox: State attorneys general who dropped Trump University fraud inquiries subsequently got Trump donations
Horwitz and Biesecker report that “Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi briefly considered joining with Schneiderman in a multi-state suit against Trump University.”
But it ultimately didn’t happen:
Three days after Bondi’s spokeswoman was quoted in local media reports as saying the office was reviewing the New York lawsuit, the Donald J. Trump Foundation made a $25,000 contribution to a political fundraising committee supporting Bondi’s re-election campaign. Bondi, a Republican, soon dropped her investigation, citing insufficient grounds to proceed.
Modeling campaign contributions as typically driven by this sort of quid pro quo corruption strikes me as mistaken. It’s not unreasonable to expect that Republican Party attorneys general typically have an ideological commitment to lax business regulation and that businessmen whose business models involve shady practices would just sincerely want to promote the careers of people with those ideological convictions.
But Trump himself has publicly and repeatedly explained his donations as driven by a crasser transactional model, and it would certainly be interesting to see him address what was going on in these particular cases.
And this is the reason the GOP exists; to enable the redistribution of wealth from all of us to the 1% richest Americans.