Date: 2024-08-16 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00020054
The Trump Saga
All about money and wealth
Trump Lawyer’s Firm Gets In On His Most Lucrative Asset
Peter Burgess
Pay Dirt
12:45 PM (1 hour ago) to me
Some bittersweet news: after 126 newsletters and the better part of three years, this will be my final PAY DIRT. I’ll have more news soon on what’s next for me. But for now, my deepest thanks to all of you who’ve subscribed and followed me into the weeds of Washington’s influence industry. I only hope that you’ve had half as much fun reading these weekly dispatches as I have writing them. —Lachlan
Trump Lawyer’s New Firm Gets In On His Most Lucrative Campaign Asset
A few months before the 2020 election, the vendor that President Donald Trump’s campaign used to rent out its behemoth email list quietly transferred a key asset to a different company, which was created just 10 days earlier by a lawyer close to the Trump family.
What followed were more than $1 million in payments from Trump’s political operation to that same company, DataPier LLC. Altogether, the string of transactions suggests that the political operation worked in the latter months of the campaign to consolidate some of the president’s most valuable political assets—at the expense of the Republican establishment in Washington.
As PAY DIRT reported last year, the Trump campaign was brokering the rental of its email list by way of a firm called Excelsior Strategies. It rented out the list to groups that included America First Action, the ostensibly independent super PAC supporting Trump’s re-election bid, and Turning Point USA, the pro-Trump youth outfit.
Emails sent to the Trump list by Excelsior’s clients used a specific web domain: ourpresident45.com. But on Sept. 21, that domain changed hands. According to website registration data, it was transferred to DataPier, which describes itself as “a leading provider of high-quality data solutions to Republican and conservative campaigns, political committees, and advocacy organizations.”
So far, just two federal political committees have reported paying DataPier: the Trump campaign, and its RNC joint fundraising account, the Trump Make America Great Again Committee. From October through late November, the most recent period for which public campaign-finance information is available, they steered nearly $1.2 million to DataPier for “political consulting,” “online advertising,” and “digital consulting & email services.”
DataPier had been formed in Delaware just 10 days before it took control of the ourpresident45.com domain. According to corporate documentation on file with regulators in Virginia, the company’s chief executive officer is Trump campaign lawyer Alex Cannon. He did not respond to multiple inquiries about DataPier. The Trump campaign also did not respond to a request for comment.
Cannon is a top deputy of the president’s son Eric. And he was instrumental in the creation of another company, American Made Media Consultants, through which the Trump campaign routed hundreds of millions of dollars, including payments to members of the Trump family, during the 2020 election cycle.
The transfer of the ourpresident45.com domain to DataPier—and out of the hands of Excelsior, which is run by a top digital consultant for the RNC—suggests an effort to house some of the president’s most valuable political assets in entities more closely tied to Trump’s inner circle.
That email list is the most valuable grassroots fundraising commodity in Republican politics—and perhaps American politics altogether. Thought to contain contact information for tens of millions of his most fervent supporters, it’s a tool that could allow Trump to maintain his substantial influence and fundraising prowess in national Republican politics after leaving office—and to cash in on continued grassroots support for his personal brand.
In the two months since Trump lost the 2020 election, his email fundraising blasts have become a symbol of his often dubious efforts to continue milking those supporters for every dime he can. Through tactics such as the phantom donation “matching” offer, the president and his political team have continued to rake in money with appeals to supporters whom Trump has convinced can help overturn an election or otherwise tip the scales of power in Washington.
The last email from the ourpresident45.com domain came on Nov. 9, and asked Trump supporters to donate to his “Election Defense Task Force,” a made-up entity used simply to pad the campaign’s post-election fundraising appeals. Those sorts of dollar asks have continued. But the vast majority of the money they’ve raised has gone not to any sort of task force, or even to the Trump campaign itself. Instead, in mid-November, the campaign began steering 75 cents of every dollar donated through its online fundraising platform to a new Trump political group called Save America, which is expected to house his post-presidential political efforts.
For a Republican Party officially led by Trump, devoting resources to his individual political pursuits—and specifically his re-election—was naturally and mutually beneficial. But with Trump on the way out, his interests and those of his party may begin to diverge.
Indeed, the president’s urgent-sounding fundraising appeal emails have irked some Republicans, who say he’s using the party’s larger political mission to pad the bottom line of his own political efforts.
In the weeks before Republicans in Georgia voted in a pair of U.S. Senate run-off contests on Tuesday, Team Trump sent out a host of fundraising texts and emails imploring supporters to chip in and help Republicans hold their Senate majority.
“Having the resources to WIN BIG in Georgia is essential. The Runoff Election is on January 5th and WINNING is critical to SAVING AMERICA from the Left,” declared one fundraising email sent two days before the run-offs. But 75 percent of money donated went to Trump’s Save America group. None went to the Republican Senate candidates in Georgia.
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