Trump raises millions online even as damaging details emerge

By Jason LangeUpdated July 31, 2021 â€" 2.04pmfirst published at 4.53amNormal text sizeLarger text sizeVery large text size

Washington: Former President Donald Trump helped raise more than $56 million from online donors during the first six months of this year, a campaign finance disclosure showed on Friday in a sign of Trump’s power within the Republican Party.

Earlier, the Justice Department cleared the way to release his tax records and disclosed a memo showing he urged top officials last year to falsely claim his 2020 election defeat was “corrupt”.

Donald Trump has long fought to keep his tax records from congressional investigators.Credit:AP

The ex-president’s “Trump Make America Great Again Committee,” which raises money for the Republican Party and for fundraising groups controlled by Trump, brought in more than $US34 million during the period, according to a report filed by Winred, the dominant online fundraising platform for Republicans.

Additionally, Trump’s own fundraising committees, together with another group that raises money exclusively for them, raised more than $US22 million through Winred.

Most of the money came through donations of less than $US50, and the combined haul shows Trump maintains a powerful sway over the party’s rank-and-file even after his turbulent four-year term ended in January.

The Winred report, which details contributions made to dozens of Republican candidates and groups that use the online platform, showed that Trump-associated committees brought in more cash than the combined fundraising by the two main Republican committees tasked with supporting the party’s bid to win control of Congress in next year’s elections.

Trump has a tense relationship with some leading members of his party, including Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell and Representative Liz Cheney, who was ousted from a party leadership role after she joined Democrats in voting to impeach Trump for inciting rioters to storm the Capitol on January 6. Trump was acquitted by the US Senate.

He remains the party’s most popular politician, though he has not yet said if he will run for president again in the 2024 election.

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The Justice Department, reversing course from the stance it took when Trump was in office, paved the way for the Internal Revenue Service to hand over the businessman-turned- Republican politician’s tax records to congressional investigators â€" a move he has long fought.

Handwritten notes taken by Acting Deputy Attorney-General Richard Donoghue in December and released on Friday by the chair of the House of Representatives Oversight and Reform Committee paint a damning picture of Trump as he desperately sought to get the department to take the unprecedented step of intervening to try to upend his 2020 election loss to President Joe Biden.

The fact that the Justice Department allowed the handwritten notes concerning the election to be turned over to congressional investigators marked a dramatic shift from actions taken during the Trump administration, which repeatedly invoked executive privilege to skirt congressional scrutiny.

“Just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R. Congressmen,” Trump, referring to Republican lawmakers, told Jeffrey Rosen in a December 27 phone call days before Rosen was appointed as acting attorney-general.

The notes show Rosen telling Trump that the department could not and would not “change the outcome of the election”.

Trump’s representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Justice Department ordered the IRS to hand over Trump’s tax returns to a US House of Representatives committee, saying the panel has invoked “sufficient reasons” for requesting it.

The department’s Office of Legal Counsel declared the department had erred in 2019 when it found that the request for Trump’s taxes by the House Ways and Means Committee was based on a “disingenuous” objective aimed at exposing them to the public.

The moves illustrated that a department that was accused by Democrats of subverting itself to Trump’s personal and political goals during his four years in office is now taking a fresh path with Biden in office.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, welcomed the department’s action, saying access to the documents represents “a matter of national security”.

“The American people deserve to know the facts of his troubling conflicts of interest and undermining of our security and democracy as president,” Pelosi said in a statement.

Damaging week

The news comes at the end of a week that has brought bad news for Trump.

Four police officers who were beaten by his supporters during the January 6 Capitol riot testified on Tuesday about the violence that flared after he repeated his false claims that the 2020 election had been stolen from him through widespread voting fraud.

That same night, the candidate he endorsed to succeed a Texas congressman who died of COVID-19 in February lost her run-off election against a Republican state legislator even after Trump’s political organisation made a last-minute ad buy to support her.

And Trump fumed throughout the week in a series of statements as a bipartisan agreement on Biden’s $US1 trillion ($1.36 trillion) infrastructure bill advanced in the Senate. Trump failed as president to get infrastructure legislation through Congress.

The Justice Department’s actions will make it easier for congressional investigators to interview key witnesses and collect evidence against Trump.

The Justice Department this week decided that due to “compelling legislative interests,” it was authorising six former Trump administration officials to sit for interviews with the House Oversight and Reform Committee. These include Rosen and Donoghue, as well as former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, former Associate Deputy Attorney-General Patrick Hovakimian and former Assistant Attorney-General Jeffrey Clark.

“The committee has begun scheduling interviews with key witnesses to investigate the full extent of the former president’s corruption, and I will exercise every tool at my disposal to ensure all witness testimony is secured without delay,” the panel’s chairwoman, Carolyn Maloney, said in a statement.

Clark is at the heart of an ongoing inquiry by the Justice Department’s inspector general after news came to light he had plotted with Trump in a failed bid to oust Rosen so he could launch an investigation into alleged voter fraud in Georgia.

In the December 27 call with Rosen, Trump threatened to put Clark in charge, according to the handwritten notes, telling Rosen: “People tell me Jeff Clark is great, I should put him in. People want me to replace DOJ leadership.”

Throughout the call, Trump repeatedly pushed false claims that the election had been stolen. “You guys may not be following the internet the way I do,” Trump said.

Rosen and Donoghue tried to tell Trump his information was incorrect multiple times.

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