Who's funding who?
>> Bryan Schott: Howdy, partner. Hey, you didn't take
your meds, did you? Doc
Hatfield says all I need is to watch the salt
pork, tobacco, and m prostitutes, and I'm good to
go. Uh, take your meds.
Hey, there. Welcome to Special Session. I'm Bryan Schott. This is the
show where a surly, longtime Utah journalist.
That's me. Breaks down the important political
news from the last week. Helps you put it in
context and understand the larger
story and what it all means, and I guess this is as good
a place to start as any. On Saturday,
federal prosecutors decided to drop the case
against Utah plastic surgeon Dr. Michael
Kirk Moore, who was accused of
selling fake vaccination cards during the COVID
pandemic and for allegedly destroying somewhere around
2,000 doses of the COVID vaccine, which is
about $28,000 worth of
the vaccine. Attorney General Pam Bondi
announced Saturday that the justice was
dismissing the charges. She posted on social media.
Quote, Dr. Moore gave his patients a choice
when the federal government refused to do so.
He did not deserve the years in prison he was
facing. It ends today.
Also in her tweet thread, Bondi credited Senator
Mike Lee and Georgia Republican Representative Marjorie M.
Taylor Greene for bringing this case to her attention.
Now, understand this is not an acquittal. The federal
government just dropped the charges. They just ended the trial,
which was already underway. And Dr.
Moore, he admits that he did what he's
accused of, but his contention was
that the prosecution was unconstitutional. This
is what he told ABC4 this Week. Do you regret
any of what you did? No, not
at all. I did what was right. I did what my patients wanted.
Moore admits he provided real vaccination cards
with real lot numbers, but never gave the
shots. They were. They were real cards
and they had the real lot numbers on it. Um, I
just didn't give them, um, the injection. There's no
other way to look at this decision. It
was politically motivated, and
there's been a lot of reporting to substantiate that as well.
Bloomberg Law reported that
Bondi's weaponization of government task force.
You remember that when she came into office, they put together this task
force that was going to examine whether or not the
federal government was being used to target
Donald Trump, Trump and his supporters and
conservatives. So this weaponization of
government task force, they reviewed this
case. Dr. Moore's legal team reached
out to them right after Trump was inaugurated
and asked them to take a look at this case because
they believed he was being targeted. They
looked at this case and determined that was
not what was happening. They said that this prosecution was
justified and it could go forward. So what
happened here? It was politics. That's it. Plain and
simple. Nothing more than politics.
Uh, uh, according to that Bloomberg Law article, Stu
Waltz, who is a retired federal prosecutor
who served in that rule for almost 40 years in
Utah, he said, quote, it speaks
to the idea that politics and not the merits of
the case was the deciding factor. And I don't
know how anyone can argue otherwise.
And all you need to do is ask yourself this. If it were
another administration, had
Kamala Harris won the 2024 election,
do you think that the federal government, the Department of
Justice, would have come to the same conclusion about this
case and ended the trial, dismissed all of the
charges? I don't think that you can. I think that
you have to assume that this was
politically motivated. Also.
I still have some questions about this. Don't forget
that Utah House Speaker Mike Schultz
and Representatives Carrie Ann Lizzenby and Trevor
Lee showed up to show support for Dr.
Moore on the first day of his trial.
Again, Dr. Moore admitted what he did. He
admitted to destroying those
vaccines. He admitted to selling
the fake vaccine cards. He admitted to everything that he was
accused of doing. So why were those
officials there? Did they condone what he did?
They probably won't say that if you were to ask them, but
at least part of it, they are condoning this
behavior. Again, they cannot say that Dr.
Moore was acquitted because he wasn't. They just dropped the
charges. So why were they there?
We, uh, really need to get an answer from them as to
what motivated them to be there. Did they believe
his cause was just. Did they think it was a wrongful
prosecution, then say that? They haven't said that.
Those are some of the answers that I think that we deserve to
have, especially in a case like this. And again, it's
worth pointing out just one more time that Dr. Mo
was not acquitted. The Department of
Justice just dropped the charges against him.
This is how much of a sicko I am when it comes to
politics.
One of my favorite days is the 15th of
April, the 15th of July, and
so on and so forth every three months. And the reason why is
because it is FEC financial report
day. That's when federal candidates and office holders have to
disclose who donated to them and what they spent
their money on. There's always some interesting tidbits when you
dig into those reports, because you find
out who's funding your member of Congress,
who's donating to them, which packs,
which individuals, you always look for some interesting names
let's start with Representative Burgess Owens. One of the
things that we know about him is that he loves to
complain about the biased and
leftist media. He echoes the
attacks on biased media.
Cannot stop complaining about the media
he thinks is biased against conservatives. Well, he
took a $25,000 donation
from Chris Ruddy. And Chris Ruddy is the
CEO of the right wing news organization
Newsmax. You know, the same
Newsmax that paid $40 million
to settle allegations that it defamed
voting machine company Smartmatic after the
2020 election. You know, the same
Newsmax that a judge ruled earlier this year
broadcast false and defamatory
claims about the role another voting company,
Dominion Voting Systems, played in the 2020
election. You know that Newsmax.
Now you might have some questions about the $25,000
donation because it's more than the
FEC limit of
$3,500 per person per
candidate per election. Well, this
illustrates another mechanism that
office holders and candidates use to fund their campaigns.
And it's called a joint
fundraising committee. That's where candidates set up
an organization with the Federal Election Commission. This is all
totally legal. And what they do is
they take in donations that they then
distribute with other organizations. This
donation was made to the Burgess Owens
Victory Committee, which is his joint fundraising
committee. And the money that goes in there is
distributed to Owens campaign, his
leadership pack, which is called the Dream Big Pack.
That's another one of these kind of mechanisms where
candidates can take in
donations larger than the
$3,500 limit set by the
FEC and then they can take that money and donate
some to their campaign and other organizations.
And he also gives money from this Burgess Owens
Victory Campaign to the nrcc,
which is the National Republican Congress
Committee, and that is the campaign arm for Republicans in
the House of representatives. The $25,000 from
Chris Ruddy went to one of Owens
fundraising entities and then it'll be distributed to his
campaign, his leadership pack and
to the nrcc. And
not for nothing, I think it's worth pointing out that Owens is a
frequent guest on Newsmax show.
So the next time you hear Owens complaining about
media bias and the leftist media, just
remember he took $25,000 from
a news organization. There are a few other
interesting takeaways that I found in the report. Representative
Blake Moore, who is a member of the
leadership team in the House of
Representatives, is building a really big
war chest. Well, it's big for Utah, wouldn't be large in other
states, but he's got over $2 million in the bank
right now. And that's important because there
are rumors, there's talk of a number of people
considering challenging him for the Republican nomination
year. He is stockpiling money in
anticipation for that. And with him being in House
leadership, that helps him raise money that
gives him access to a lot of these big
donors. Took in a lot of money from political
action committees during this most recent quarter.
The last three months of the year, he raised
about $500,000, a little bit more than
$500,000. And just over half of
that came from political action committees, the rest from
individual donors. But PACs were a big
donor to campaign
operation. Senator Mike Lee had a few
interesting donors. He got individual
donations from people involved in
the private equity and technology business.
Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwarzman
gave money to his campaign and to his
joint fundraising committee. He also
got donations for his campaign
for a couple of the, uh, top leaders
at Palantir Technologies. That's the
organization that you've seen reports that they're
building a database of Americans. They
said they were going to use it for immigration purposes, but who
knows what this company is taking the
information from everyday Americans and putting in
to their system. That's Palantir Technologies.
Lee got donations from co founder Joe
Lonsdale. He gave Lee's campaign
$10,000 through his Mike Lee
Victory Fund. CTO the Chief Technology
Officer Shyam Sankar, gave Lee
$7,000. That was two donations
of $500. One can be for a
primary challenge and one can be for the general
election. Freshman Representative Mike
Kennedy, he raised about
$216,000 for the quarter, which is
okay, it's nowhere near the top. But I bring it up because
this is a very interesting issue. Kennedy
still has about
$600,000 worth of campaign
debt between his 2024
campaign for Congress and his unsuccessful 2018
U.S. senate campaign. And that debt
loans that he made from his own
money to the campaign. It's loans that he
made to his own campaign more than
$600,000. And those loans are listed
as obligations for his campaign because they
are unpaid. FEC rules allow
for those loans to be repaid
using campaign funds. Now, Kennedy has not done
that yet, but eventually he can start
reimbursing himself for those
loans he made to his campaign through other
campaign Don. And between the
two campaigns, he's got over
$600,000 in outstanding
loans. We talked about Blake Moore earlier.
He loaned his campaign his first campaign for
Congress in 2020, almost
$300,000. It was just over
$288,000.
Moore has completely paid off those loans to himself
using money from donors. If
a pack gives him money, if individual donors
donate to his campaign and you have that debt
that' you can pay yourself
back. Candidates can also charge
interest on those loans and actually make a profit off
of them. Kennedy has put a 0% interest rate
on his loans, uh, that he made to his campaign.
But he will be able to reimburse the more than
$600,000 that he loaned to his two
campaigns eventually down the line.
House Speaker Mike Schultz donated
$10,000 to Kennedy's
joint fundraising operation, his Victory
Fund. And that that entity splits
donations between his campaign,
his leadership pac, which is known as Heal
America, and the Utah Republican
Party. So $10,000 of that money came
from House Speaker Mike Schultz, which is unusual
because I don't see a lot of political donations in the
FEC database. He's made a couple of M$1000
donations this cycle. One
was to Steve Scalise, and the other one was for,
I believe, a PAC or an activist
organization on the right. Then he turns around and
gives $10,000 to
Representative Mike Kennedy.
Perhaps I'm overthinking it, but it is something that caught
my attention and I thought it was worthy
of pointing out.
Time now for our obligatory weekly update
on Senator Mike Lee. Last week we
talked about how Lee was trying to cope with
the fallout of the whole Jeffrey Epstein
situation. After the FBI and the Department of
Justice memo came out that concluded the
long rumored Epstein client list didn't exist
and that Epstein was not murdered, but he actually took
his own life in jail. Lee
suggested, without evidence, that
Epstein might be some sort of government asset, that
he was doing contract work for the government or some
sort of nonsense. It just fell apart if you thought about it
for five seconds. But as you
know, this issue has enraged
President Donald Trump's mega base.
They are furious that they are being told to ignore this
issue, to drop it, to forget about it,
because a lot of them have been absolutely fixated
on it for years. Trump called it
a hoax. This week he tried to shift blame
to the Democrats, saying they were responsible for this,
even though Epstein was arrested and died
during the first Trump administration. And
Trump is flailing trying to control the
fallout from this memo
that came out this week. Lee did a
short interview with conservative YouTube
personality Benny Johnson. And if you're
unfamiliar with Benny Johnson, let me refresh your
memory a little bit. He previously was part of
Tenant Media. Um, and if you remember, the Justice
Department in 2024 alleged that that organization
was part of a Russian funded influence
operation. During the election,
an IND unsealed last year in
September revealed that two employees
of the Russian state controlled media outlet
RT allegedly funneled $10 million
into Tenet to create content that was
favorable for Donald Trump. Johnson claimed that
he was a victim in the scheme. He was never charged, but
he was part of that whole thing. He was part of this group that got
duped to take a whole bunch of money to create
content that was favorable for Donald Trump.
Anyway, Senator Lee went on his show this week.
Johnson was broadcast from the Capitol at one
point and Lee was a guest.
And during that interview he suggested
that maybe Ghislaine Maxwell, who
is serving a 20 year prison sentence
for her role in sex trafficking related to the
Epstein case, maybe it'd be a good idea. To have her
testify before Congress is.
>> Mike Lee: A difficult topic and it's a topic that's not simply going to
go away easily. There are a number of ways around that
that, uh, including by uh,
uh, anything that will give the public a greater understanding
of what the government has, what it doesn't have, where
it doesn't have it or can't release it, a
robust explanation as to why what's not being
released can't be released either because it's privileged,
uh, grand jury, um, proceeding material
or to respect victim confidentiality or something like
that. Then finally, I think there are people who do
know, people who could talk. Imagine for example,
if we had Ghislaine Maxwell come and testify,
um, before a congressional committee. I think that could
go a long way toward helping the public gain some
insight into this long standing, uh,
criminal enterprise that people are afraid will be swept
under the rug. You have voiced this on social media,
but I want to ask right now, will you be in favor of Julian Maxwell
testifying? Absolutely. Absolutely. I've, uh,
posted on this and if, uh,
if she were to testify, I,
I think she could answer a lot of questions that could help put
all of this in perspective.
>> Bryan Schott: Lee's not the only one who's saying this. Missouri Senator
Josh Hawley said this week that Maxwell should
testify before Congress and a few House
Republicans have floated the same idea.
I doubt that's gonna happen, but it is an
acknowledgement at least. I see this as an
acknowledgement that this issue is
getting out of hand. It's already out of hand. Trump is
struggling to control the messaging and he just
can't do it. It's getting out of hand and it's going to get
worse. The Republican base, the MAGA
voters, are flat out pissed about
this. They are really upset that
this thing they have been fixated
on for years, they're now being told to ignore it. They're, uh, now
being told to drop it. So of course they're angry.
So you're seeing members of Congress trying to
find a way to control
this, move past it, do something
to quell that anger, to tamp
down that anger. As I'm recording this on Friday
afternoon, Axios is reporting that
Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky,
he's in the House. He and Senator Lee have been
allied on a number of things throughout the years. He's moving
forward with plans to force a vote
on requiring the release of the Epstein files.
Even though President Trump and other House
leaders, Leaders have tried to stop that. He said he's gonna
move forward. In fact, his quote was, he told his
colleagues, you're going to fundraisers, you're going to
town halls, you're going to the grocery store, you're going
to the beach, and you're going to hear from
people about this issue. This just shows that
Republicans are desperately trying to find a way
out of this. Have Ghislaine Maxwell testify. Let's
force a vote on the releasing of these
files. I don't know if it's gonna work. It has surprised
me that this is the thing that
has consumed the
Trump administration for three weeks. They're usually so
good at shaping the message, and
Trump is so good at bending reality to his own
will and changing the subject,
and everything he's trying is not working.
And now you're seeing members of Congress who are probably struggling with
this. They don't want to have to deal with this. You're seeing them try to
figure out ways to get around this as well.
That's the first part of our Mike Lee update for the week.
The second part, it's kind of sad. It is
officially over between Senator Mike Lee and his
former BFF Elon Musk. @ some
point in the last couple of weeks, Elon stopped following
Senator Lee's personal based Mike
Lee, uh, account on Twitter. Uh, uh. It was part of
what appeared to be a larger purge
of accounts by Musk, where he
stopped following quite a few Republicans
in Washington. Attorney General Pam
Bondi, Speaker Mike Johnson. And it was
over this Epstein thing. He was upset about
the fallout, or it was part of the fallout over
the Jeffrey Epstein situation. And that memo from the
Department of Justice, I wrote about it
this week in my Morning News Update newsletter. That is
a subscriber only newsletter, so if you're subscriber, you got to read that.
Thank you. So much. If you'd like to sign up for that, you can do it at
Utah Political Watch.
And it caught my attention because
Lee spent months desperately
trying to get Musk's attention on social
media. He established his personal Twitter account
in 2022, the summer of 2022.
And it didn't take him long to start
relentlessly tweeting at Musk, trying to get
the tech billionaire to interact
with him. Musk followed him in April of last year
when he finally did they to
really connect, Musk interacted with Lee.
He would reply to Lee, he would boost
his posts, which is great for Lee's engagement because
Musk has millions and millions of
followers. And now that's gone, Musk doesn't follow him
anymore. I don't know how much of a
negative this is going to be for Lee. I mean, obviously
it's a loss of prestige. Nobody likes
to break up with someone they've pursued for a long time.
In terms of online engagement, Lee has over
600,000 followers. I think a lot of them us would kill to have
even half that many followers. Lee has over 600,000
followers and if you look at his
engagement online, he's still getting thousands of
interactions whenever he posts. So I haven't seen
much of a drop off on
his engagement since
Musk stopped following him. And I
wouldn't expect to see that because that's the kind of content that is
extremely prevalent on X Twitter right now. Now,
if Musk were to
switch the algorithm to make it so
Lee's tweets don't get that much engagement, which
is something he has done to other accounts in the past,
that's where it would really sting. But for the most part,
this is just Lee losing a friend.
Musk is no longer following him on Twitter, no longer
interacting with him. And you know,
it's got to sting a little bit, but in the grand scheme of things, I don't
think it's going to impact Senator Lee all that much
other than the loss of, of prestige and the
cool factor that he was followed and
interacted with Elon Musk online. I think the
one thing that we can say about this is that
Musk's interactions with Lee were
different than what we normally see
from Musk on that platform. Because as has
been reported over and over again,
when Musk would interact with people online, it was usually
to try to convince them to have his child.
Pretty sure that didn't happen with Senator Lee.
Morning Consult does this quarterly
tracking poll where they measured the
job performance in each state of the
governor and the two US Senators. And we just got the
second quarter results for the entire
country. But specifically, I want to talk about what happened here in Utah.
According to their data, 54% of
Utah vote voters approve of the job that
Governor Spencer Cox is doing. 34%
disapprove. And that gives him a net
plus 20 approval rating, which is pretty good if
you think about it. But it's right near the middle of
the pack nationwide. In fact, there was only one
governor who had a negative approval rating, and
that was Iowa's Republican governor who was in
negative territory. But Cox was
right in the middle. There were, I think, 20 to 23
governors who had higher net approval ratings
than he did. If you look at the numbers that morning
Consult shared with me and I published those
Senator Mike Lee, his net approval was
plus 13. 49% of Utah
voters approve of his job performance,
36% disapprove. And
Senator John Curtis, in his first six months
in office, he's at a net plus 26.
So he has the highest net positive rating of all three of them
and at, ah, 51% approval and
25% disapproval. And while
that's interesting, I think there are some really interesting
partisan implications when you dig deeper
into these numbers. And that's what I want to talk about here a little
bit.
Let's start with Senator Mike Lee. There
is a segment of voters in
Utah who are really offended.
They recoil at his behavior,
which is mostly trolling, but sometimes it
gets really abhorrent on social media.
But it doesn't look like he's paying a price for it,
at least politically. We talked last week about
how the LDS church appears to be quite
concerned about the way he's behaving on social
media. But among Utah voters, it doesn't seem to be having
much of an impact at all. And why
do I say that? Well, his numbers
from this morning Consult tracking poll,
it's virtually unchanged from the first three months of
this year to the second quarter. He's at a
plus 13 net approval. I think he was
a plus 14 in the first quarter. In fact,
his approval rating, 49% was
consistent across both quarters. And his
disapproval ticked up just a little bit. It
was 35% in the first quarter,
36% in the second quarter. During
that time frame, Lee made those
truly awful posts on
Twitter, slash X, where he tried to make some
jokes about the assassination of a Minnesota
Democratic lawmaker and her
spouse and the attempted assassination of
another Democratic politician. And people were
really upset about that. They were outraged he took
the post down. It took about three days for him to take the post
down, but he finally took them down. But he hasn't
apologized. And if you're wondering why he hasn't apologized,
well, he doesn't need to. And he's not going to because
it's not impacting him very
much in terms of how voters
view his job performance. This is what Utah
voters want, apparently, because his job approval
rating has not, uh, moved. It is consistent across
the first six months of this
year. It's been more than a month since he made those comments,
and he still hasn't apologized. And he's not going to.
Apologizing might actually hurt his
standing with those supporters, the
voters who support him. And that's why he's not
going to apologize, and that's why it's a fool's errand
to expect him to apologize.
I was also interested in the numbers for
Governor Spencer Cox. Now, as you know,
Republican delegates absolutely
loathe him. They do not like him at all.
He was trounced by Phil Lyman
in the delegate vote at the 2024
Republican Party Convention. He didn't even show up to
the 2025 convention a few months ago because
he knew he would get a poor reception there from those
Republican delegates who do not like him.
But if you look at these poll numbers, that
displeasure, that discontent
with Cox does not extend
to the entire universe of Republican
voters, Republican voters as a whole. The polling
shows that Cox has a net
positive rating among Republican voters
of plus 56.
74% of Republican
voters approve of the way he is
handling his job as governor.
18% disapprove. That's a
substantial majority. So when you think of
Republican delegates who do not like
Spencer Cox, this just shows the disconnect
between the Republican delegates and the larger
universe of Republican voters. They have
wildly different priorities. And
that's why the delegates want to get rid of
SB54. They want to get rid of the
signature path because it dilutes their
power and it puts the kind of candidates that
they favor, think Phil Lyman,
who are often hardliners and extremists,
at a disadvantage if they are forced into a
primary election with a
candidate who gathered signatures
and has a larger appeal. They want
to be the deciders. They want to be the people who
decide which candidates, uh, make it to the ballot.
Them and them alone. And that's why they don't like
SB54. And this poll just underscores why.
Because they have wildly different
priorities than the larger universe of
voters. And as Long as the signature path is
there, you are going to see
more times than not the kind of candidate who is
favored by Republican delegates
have problems winning the nomination
in a primary. Their ultimate goal is to go back to the
old system where they were the ultimate gatekeepers of, uh,
who made it to the primary. And you would
see candidates like Phil Lyman have much more success.
But as long as SB54 is there, they
won't. And that's, that's why these poll numbers were
very notable to me, because it just shows how
far apart part Republican delegates
and Republican voters are
on their priorities and what kind of candidates they
favor. Because delegates hate Spencer
Cox, but Republican voters think he's doing a pretty
great job.
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