Editor’s Note: The same question still remains: When will the Trump administration quit focusing on everything under the sun and actually bring justice (indictments, arrests and prosecution) to the guilty? I’m not holding my breath as I simply think the man is one of them.
“We had so much money it was hard to get it out the door.”
“We had so much money it was hard to get it out the door,” a Kamala ally said after the election even as her campaign was still sending out texts to donors begging them to send more cash.
“Hi Team, It’s Kamala, The election isn’t what we wanted, but I will never give up the fight,” a post-election text message solicited donors to replace all the money that went out the door. In Jan 2025, even as President Trump was preparing for his inauguration, the ‘Harris Fight Fund’ was still milking recurring donations even though there was nothing left to fight for anymore.
Whether or not Kamala was giving up the fight, she certainly wasn’t giving up fleecing donors.
Kamala Harris didn’t get much done, but she did manage to get $1.5 billion in 3 months out the door. Her new book, 107 Days, frames her limited campaign as an accomplishment and an excuse. As she prepares a soft launch for 2028, she’s suggesting to supporters that she could have gotten a whole lot more done in more days. But there are two things she did get done.
She raised and spent record amounts of cash while suffering the worst Democrat defeat in 20 years. Where did the money go? It didn’t go to field offices or local campaign operations, which by some accounts were badly neglected, millions went to Kamala friends and allies, and $20 million more to the Kamala Harris Fund for Meeting Underprivileged Celebrities.
While the campaign couldn’t figure out minor matters like a platform or a slogan, it rounded up all the celebrities it could find anywhere in the country to put in appearances at Kamala rallies.
Kamala spent $2.5 million on an event with Oprah including a $1 million payment to the celebrity talk show hostess’ production company. Beyonce, Bruce Springsteen, Katy Perry, Jon Bon Jovi and Lady Gaga were among the other celebrities who also came out for Kamala. While Kamala did not pay the celebrities directly, as with Oprah, Lady Gaga and Beyonce, her campaign sometimes made payments to their production companies, and most intriguingly, nearly $100,000 to Renegade44, an Obama company, to supposedly cover their ‘expenses’.
Al Sharpton, a former racist hate group leader with blood on his hands, who had come to be seen as for sale, got $500,000 from the Kamala campaign through his organization. Areva Martin, a Los Angeles lawyer and Kamala pal who had threatened that black women would “blow the party” if it didn’t choose her, got a $200,000 payday to act as a ‘consultant’.
Millions of dollars kept going out the door to consultants, some qualified and some not, and while Kamala and her people might want to blame some of the dubious payments on the rushed schedule after Biden dropped out, but her Senate campaign had worked the same way (on a smaller scale) dispensing a shocking $600,000 to 19 consultants in a barely contested race.
During her Senate campaign, Kamala squandered the haul on luxury hotels and first class airline tickets, during her presidential campaign she spent $2.6 million on private jets in just the final weeks of the campaign after spending $12 million on jet travel in total.
“Kamala demands a life of luxury,” a former aide revealed. “She treats the campaign like a personal checking account to fund a lifestyle she aspires to,” another aide warned. “Staff has always worried about Kamala’s spending, but she is adamant about using campaign money as she wants,” that aide on her former Senate campaign said.
But all this was chump change compared to the $690 million spent on campaign ads with $2.5 billion in total media spending by the campaign and its political allies. A good deal of that spending revolved around Future Forward, a PAC founded by Obama vets and funded by Big Tech, which became the single biggest election PAC in the 2024 campaign.
In the first two months of Kamala’s campaign, Future Forward funded 655 trial ads vetted by a “close-knit network of Ph.D.s” while taking in over $100 million in dark money, but like so much of the political ad business, the Obama group turned out to be a self-serving operation paying millions to companies controlled by its founders.
While the Kamala campaign’s baffling decision to spend $900,000 to spotlight her head and the slogan “A New Way Forward” on the Las Vegas Sphere got a lot of attention, it was just a fraction of hundreds of millions of dollars in ad spending that were vetted and approved by an insular secretive operation whose leaders had figured out how to cash in on ad spending.
By the end, Kamala had not even been told the campaign was in debt so that the spending spree of $100 million a week would continue until the final days and hours until her defeat.
Fundraising worked the same way. Raising a lot of money was the campaign’s claim to fame. The campaign broke massive fundraising records, and that fundraising prowess was treated as a validation of Kamala’s popularity, but it actually reflected the amounts of money and resources that the campaign was spending on fundraising.
The Biden and Kamala campaigns raised $2.15 billion in total, not because either one of the candidates was popular, but because the Democrats had built a fundraising operation that excelled at milking and sometimes outright defrauding its donors with warnings about Trump.
The Kamala campaign spent $111 million just on online ads soliciting donations and another $70 million on direct mail. The campaign set a record for fundraising in one quarter, but it wasn’t raising money to run a better campaign, but raising money to make money by raising money.
What looked like a political campaign had really become a money laundering operation.
Kamala can once again plead that she only had 107 days to figure it all out, but her first presidential campaign ended the same way, impressive fundraising followed by even more impressive spending. After burning through $40 million during the primaries, her campaign couldn’t even afford to buy Facebook ads during the 2020 Democrat primaries.
“Where did the $35 million go?” CNN quoted someone “close to Harris”.
Except that this time it wasn’t $35 million, it was $1.5 billion. Where did it go?
The campaign pros lavished millions on Kamala’s personal appearances, spending $100,000 just for a podcast set, surrounding her with celebrities, and ferrying her around on private jets, to distract her from what was really happening to much of that $1.5 billion campaign war chest.
This wasn’t a normal campaign. Not because it had to take place within 107 days, but because the professionals didn’t bother with doing any of the things a serious campaign tries to do.
Kamala came to the Democratic National Convention with a platform that still talked about Biden, not her, the campaign couldn’t settle on a slogan or manufacture lawn signs, but it could raise and spend huge amounts of money because it didn’t expect Kamala to win anything.
The Kamala-Walz 2024 campaign wasn’t fought to win, but to profit. Kamala’s book pitching her new campaign shouldn’t be called 107 days; it should be called $1.5 billion dollars. Anyone can campaign for 107 days; no one else could waste $1.5 billion while doing it.
Article posted with permission from Daniel Greenfield
The post Kamala’s $1.5 Billion Money Laundering Operation appeared first on The Washington Standard.
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