New: They Begged Dems for Money—Then Spent Lavishly on Hotels and Entertainment
New reporting from Sam Stein.
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Sam Stein: They Begged Dems for Money—Then Spent Lavishly on Hotels and Entertainment
ON NOVEMBER 13, 2023, the political action committee Democratic Victory emailed out a fundraising solicitation expressing concerns about its financial wellbeing.
“We’re falling short of last week’s goal by 18%,” the group’s note read. “If we can’t make up that gap asap, it’ll mean we can’t send full support into battleground states to help President Biden and Democrats win.”
The email asked recipients to chip in $20 or more.
That same day, federal disclosure records show that Democratic Victory also filed an expense. But not to Biden or any other Democratic candidate. Instead, it spent $213,093.83 on lodging at the ARIA Resorts & Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada as well as $11,300 for venue rental at the same on-the-Strip hotel.And it wasn’t done there. Democratic Victory would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars building out a November event in Vegas around the Grand Prix, one of the most highly anticipated, lavish, and expensive races on the Formula 1 calendar. Among its purchases: $736,545 for “event space rental,” $41,235 for help putting together “a VIP private viewing suite,” and thousands of more in separate hotel fees—all as the group was telling prospective donors it was struggling to meet its fundraising goals.
Such expenditures would be considered sizable for the Democratic party’s premier political groups or campaign committees. But Democratic Victory is not that. Since its founding in 2020, it has operated in near obscurity, part of a constellation of generic-sounding PACs secretly run by a group of Democratic operatives and infamous within digital-fundraising circles for their unscrupulous methods.
That changed last week. Kamala Harris’s rise as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee has brought a fresh round of scrutiny to groups like Democratic Victory, which have issued a barrage of emails and texts pleading with donors to support the vice president’s campaign. Party officials say those solicitations are scams. They’ve accused the groups of trying to take advantage of the groundswell of support for Harris in order to line their pockets. The Harris campaign, in a statement to The Bulwark, called the PACs “bad actors” and urged supporters to avoid them.
In response, one of the main officers involved with Democratic Victory and similar groups—Ryan Morgan, the founder of the data list firm PACtion—defended their work as critical for Democratic party operations in a statement last week. This week, he declined repeated requests to answer additional questions…
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He brushed aside that point. “They were convicted by a very, very tough system,” he scoffed.
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🚨OVERTIME🚨
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