Rightwing Media Demand Investigation Of Gavin Newsom For Aggravated Charity.

Yes, that does take some balls!

Gavin Newsom at the 2019 California Democratic convention. Photo: Gage Skidmore, Creative Commons License 2.0

We aren’t going to shock anyone by saying that Donald Trump is so fantastically corrupt that it’s hard to comprehend the probably thousands of grifts he’s horned in on, though heaven knows journalists and good-government groups keep busy trying. He sells pardons. Nobody knows how many billions in quiet crypto he’s accepted from foreign governments and crimers trying to get ahead of the law. Taxpayers are going to be on the hook for his vanity ballroom-bunker, and his UFC kickwrasslin’ birthday party was put on by media companies who are eager to please him — and of course, Trump owns stock in TKO Group, the owner of UFC.

Naturally enough, it’s the perfect time for Trump’s Justice Department to launch a fishing expedition into the finances of California Gov. Gavin Newsom and his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, which Newsom revealed Monday. Newsom said that federal agents have been “abusing the grand jury process” and “digging through years and years of random documents” in search of anything that might be used against him in the upcoming 2028 campaign.

Always keen to help root out corruption at the highest levels when it isn’t Trump, rightwing media outlets are trying to figure out what the DOJ might be looking into. Yesterday, the Orange County Register ran a Very Concerned editorial column about how Newsom has “steered millions to favorite charities” — over the past 15 years. During that decade and a half, mandatory disclosure records show, “charitable contributions made at Newsom’s request totaled $347.2 million.” That included roughly $4.3 million to the “California Partners Project,” a nonprofit co-founded by Newsom’s wife.

Such donations, called “behested payments,” are legal under Californis law as long as they’re reported. Behested payments happen when an elected official loves a charity very much (or even a government agency), and requests that voluntary donations be made to that entity. As the Institute for Local Government ‘splainers, elected officials may “see a need in their community and they take steps to see that that need is met” by reaching out to donors.

For instance, following last year’s LA fires, Newsom asked for donations to the California Fire Foundation, which raised millions of dollars. To keep politicians accountable, behested donations over $5000 must be reported to the state. (As it turns out, in a bit of weird timing, Newsom agreed this week to pay a late-reporting fine of $31,500 to the California Fair Political Practices Commission for missing the 30-day reporting requirement for some of those very donations. There’s no indication that anything improper happened beyond the late reporting.)

Even with the transparency built into the system with the reporting requirements, Good Government types still worry that such donations are a way for companies and big money interests to signal their support for pols, while the pols point out that supporting charities is a good thing in itself, as long as it’s all aboveboard.

OC Register columnist Teri Sforza suggests that Newsom’s own behests for charitable contributions “may have something to do with the federal investigation into Newsom and first partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom.” She also explains why some ethics experts consider the practice potentially ethically questionable, not that there’s any evidence Newsom has done anything shady.

Oh, hey, speaking of ethically questionable, the OC Register column just happened to come two days after a Very Concerned report Monday in the California Post (a Murdoch NewsCorp spinoff of the New York Post) about how Newsom encouraged those charitable donations. The New York Post mothership ran its own version of the story, too, by Breitbart alum Joel Pollak. And in a complete coincidence, Fox Business also ran the story Monday to make sure it would get national exposure and injection into the rightwing mediasphere. All of it published as soon as Newsom said he was being investigated.

Oddly, Sforza’s OC Register editorial doesn’t mention the Murdoch tabloid origins of this “controversy.” After all, now that it’s a matter of national concern, no need. Forget we even implied that should have been mentioned. Serious journalism, legitimate public concern and all that. Ain’t nobody in that henhouse but some consent-manufacturing chickens.

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But with near-daily news breaking about how the Grifter In Chief is making billions for his family businesses at every fucking opportunity — and yes, that man who is somehow president of the United States of America in fact used to use his own “charitable” foundation to deal to himself until a judge said he wasn’t allowed to run a charity any more, that’s how fucking corrupt this son of a bitch is — it’s not exactly a Chief Inspector Gamache mystery why all of a sudden the rightwing press is trying to whip up a feeding frenzy around Newsom. (Besides, Gamache is with the Sûreté du Québec, and lacks jurisdiction.)

To her credit, Sforza includes in this ridiculous contretemps in which no lawbreaking has been alleged a disclaimer that this is “not to say that all politicians use behests with ill or nefarious intent. A lot of this money does indeed go to good causes — Newsom’s list includes groups working on wildfire recovery, public health initiatives, housing, education and much more.”

And she brings in legitimately nonpartisan good-government person Sean McMorris, of California Common Cause, to explain why this is a money-in-politics issue that should be addressed:

“Behests often go to good causes, but they are ripe for abuse,” he said. “Politicians in positions of power can direct money in a way that they otherwise would not be allowed to do under campaign finance or conflict-of-interest laws. They really exploded during the pandemic and afterward, a lot of politicians realized, ‘This is a kind of an avenue I can use.’”

But first, it’s probably a far bigger priority for America to eject the nation’s top Ethics Arsonist, take away his money-sucking apparatus, and get control over the raging five-alarm ethics wildfire consuming national politics. Gosh, there we go with our Trump Derangement Syndrome blinding us to Newsom’s alleged … well, not crimes, but maybe something that would be a crime if he broke the rules, which he hasn’t.

OPEN THREAD.

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[OC Register / California Post]

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