Showing posts sorted by date for query Huckabee. Sort by relevance Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by date for query Huckabee. Sort by relevance Show all posts

Thursday, October 05, 2023

A $19,000 lectern for Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders sparks call for legislative audit



LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) — Sarah Huckabee Sanders rose to national prominence in part during her time at the lectern as White House press secretary, but the purchase of a $19,000 lectern for the Arkansas governor is undergoing scrutiny and prompting claims that records about it have been altered.

A legislative panel next week will take up a lawmaker's request for an audit to review the purchase of the lectern, which was bought in June for $19,029.25 with a state credit card. The Arkansas Republican Party reimbursed the state last month for the wood-paneled and blue lectern, which the state received in August.

“From my experience, where we're at with this particular thing is we need to allow legislative audit go in,” Republican Sen. Jimmy Hickey, who requested the audit, said. “Everyone knows them, they do their work, they're very thorough and then they produce a detailed report that comes to the Legislature through an open committee.”

Questions about the lectern, its cost, how it was purchased and even whether it existed has dominated political talk in Arkansas in recent weeks. The state's largest newspaper, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, ran a front-page photo of the lectern last week after Sanders' office allowed the paper to view it.

Sanders, who served as press secretary for former President Donald Trump, took office in January. The governor has said she welcomes the audit, but has also dismissed the questions surrounding the lectern's purchase. Sanders' office has said the reimbursement came from money she had raised for her inauguration.

“People want to manufacture a controversy where there isn’t one," Sanders told reporters Tuesday. “But this is something the state’s been reimbursed for, and I think there are some people who are always going to be angry and always looking for something to complain about and that’s what they’re picking for right now.”

The lectern's purchase was first uncovered by Matthew Campbell, an attorney and blogger who has sued State Police for withholding records he had requested about Sanders' travel and security. Days after Campbell filed his initial suit, Sanders called a special legislative session and proposed broad exemptions to the state's open records law.

Sanders signed into law a measure restricting the public's access to her travel and security records after she and lawmakers backed off more widespread exemptions that faced backlash from media groups, transparency advocates and some conservatives.

Campbell has said the concern isn't just about a lectern, but about how Sanders' office is spending state money.

“Without an audit and without some more information, we don't know whether this is a case of they're too incompetent to be trusted with a state credit card because they don't know what things should cost, or there's actual criminality,” Campbell said Wednesday. “Neither is a good answer but it's enough of an issue that has to be answered.”

Tom Mars, an attorney who served as director of the Arkansas State Police under Sanders' father, former Gov. Mike Huckabee, has also said that he has a client with firsthand knowledge that Sanders' office interfered with Campbell's open records requests.

In a letter he sent to Hickey after the lawmaker requested the audit, Mars said the client wishes to remain anonymous and is willing to give a confidential statement to legislative auditors and allow them to review relevant documents in the client's possession. According to Mars' letter, the interference includes the governor's office altering an invoice from Beckett Events LLC, the Virginia firm listed as the seller of the lectern.

Alexa Henning, a spokeswoman for Sanders, didn't specifically respond to the allegations in Mars' letter in a statement that nonetheless dismissed them.

“This is nothing more than a manufactured controversy by left-wing activists to distract from the bold conservative reforms the governor has signed into law and is effectively implementing in Arkansas,” Henning said in a statement.

Hickey's request also asks for an audit of all matters regarding security and travel records for the governor or her office that were retroactively made confidential by the law she signed last month. The law covered travel and security records going back to June 2022.

Republican Rep. Jimmy Gazaway, who co-chairs the Legislative Joint Auditing Executive Committee, said he supports Hickey's request.

“Given the fact that this has become a matter of public concern and that the governor says she welcomes an audit and hopes that legislators complete it without delay, yes, I think we should instruct audit staff to handle this matter," Gazaway said.

Andrew Demillo, The Associated Press

'Incompetent' or criminal? Even Republicans are calling for a legislative audit over AK gov’s $19,000 lectern

Story by Elizabeth Preza • ALTERNET

LITTLE ROCK, ARKANSAS - FEBRUARY 07: Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders waits to deliver the Republican response to the State of the Union address by President Joe Biden on February 7, 2023 in Little Rock, Arkansas.© provided by AlterNet

ARepublican state senator in Arkansas requested an audit of his own party’s governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, over the purchase of a $19,000 lectern with a state credit card, the Associated Press reports.

“From my experience, where we’re at with this particular thing is we need to allow legislative audit go in,” Republican Sen. Jimmy Hickey told the AP. “Everyone knows them, they do their work, they’re very thorough and then they produce a detailed report that comes to the Legislature through an open committee.”

The panel will convene next week to review the “purchase of the lectern,” the AP reports, which was “bought in June for $19,029.25.” In August, the Arkansas Republican Party “reimbursed the state” for the purchase, the report adds.

POLL: Should Trump be allowed to hold office again?

According to the AP, Hickey is also asking “for an audit of all matters regarding security and travel records for the governor or her office that were retroactively made confidential by the law she signed last month.”

As ABC News reported last month, Sanders overhauled the state’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and “[broadened] what security details from the governor's travel and other constitutional officers' are exempt from the law.”

The changes also included “a retroactive clause to June 1, 2022, before Sanders took office” and was signed at the same time “a lawsuit pends against the state for allegedly withholding information related to her travel requested under the FOIA,” ABC News reported.

Little Rock, AR attorney Matt Campbell, who filed the FOIA lawsuit against the state, told the AP the issue is larger than a lectern — and is instead a question of whether Sanders’ office is “incompetent” or engaged in “actual criminality.”

READ MORE: Acting Speaker McHenry did not have authority to evict Pelosi: top Democrat


Related video: Request for legislative audit leads to allegations of altered documents. (40/29 TV Ft Smith-Fayetteville)
Duration 2:23  View on Watch


“Without an audit and without some more information, we don’t know whether this is a case of they’re too incompetent to be trusted with a state credit card because they don’t know what things should cost, or there’s actual criminality,” Campbell said told the AP. “Neither is a good answer but it’s enough of an issue that has to be answered.”

Former Arkansas State Police director Tom Mars — who served under Sanders’ father, former Gov. Mike Huckabee — "has also said that he has a client with firsthand knowledge that Sanders’ office interfered with Campbell’s open records requests,” the AP reports.

Per the AP:

In a letter he sent to Hickey after the lawmaker requested the audit, Mars said the client wishes to remain anonymous and is willing to give a confidential statement to legislative auditors and allow them to review relevant documents in the client’s possession. According to Mars’ letter, the interference includes the governor’s office altering an invoice from Beckett Events LLC, the Virginia firm listed as the seller of the lectern.


Hickey’s request for an audit has support from other state Republicans, including Legislative Joint Auditing Executive Committee co-chair Rep. Jimmy Gazaway.

“Given the fact that this has become a matter of public concern and that the governor says she welcomes an audit and hopes that legislators complete it without delay, yes, I think we should instruct audit staff to handle this matter,” Gazaway told the AP.

Sanders’ office maintains the blowback is “nothing more than a manufactured controversy by left-wing activists to distract from the bold conservative reforms the governor has signed into law,” as Sanders spokeswoman Alexa Henning told the AP.

Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Sanders insisted “people want to manufacture a controversy where there isn’t one.”

"This is something the state’s been reimbursed for, and I think there are some people who are always going to be angry and always looking for something to complain about and that’s what they’re picking for right now,” she said.

Read the full report at the Associated Press.


Related Articles:


Sunday, October 01, 2023

Sarah Huckabee Sanders' office under scrutiny for spending: 'Clear and convincing evidence' of misconduct

Travis Gettys
September 30, 2023

Former White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders speaking with attendees at the 2019 Student Action Summit. (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)

A whistleblower has accused Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders' office of misconduct.

Rogers-based attorney Tom Mars sent a letter to state Sen. Jimmy Hickey (R-Texarkana) offering testimony from the whistleblower and documents to show the governor's office improperly altered and withheld public records related to its spending, reported News from the States.

"The letter says Mars’ client 'can provide clear and convincing evidence' that Sanders’ office altered and withheld documents that Little Rock attorney and blogger Matt Campbell of the Blue Hog Report requested in recent weeks," the website reported. "Campbell has been scrutinizing and reporting Sanders’ use of the Arkansas State Police airplane for in-state travel as well as her office’s spending habits and purchase of the lectern from an out-of-state events company with a state-issued credit card."

Hickey asked the Legislative Joint Auditing Committee on Wednesday to investigate the purchase of a $19,000 lectern and the retroactive shielding of government records after Sanders signed new exemptions for the Freedom of Information Act.

The whistleblower accused the governor's communications director Alexa Henning of altering a FOIA-accessible document to change the meaning and directed state officials not to share the original with the blogger and also withheld other documents that showed Amazon purchases by Sanders' office.

Sanders' staff also removed portions of FOIA-accessible email threads and directed an attorney who oversaw FOIA responses for the state to alter the contents of a flash drive for the governor's office.

Wednesday, August 30, 2023

Why right-wing billionaires and the GOP want a nation of uneducated, compliant serfs | Opinion

Story by Thom Hartmann •

Sheep in a meadow in the mountains© provided by RawStory

Republican politicians and the rightwing billionaires who fund them want a nation of uneducated, compliant serfs in their workforce, not a nation of well-educated union-conscious people who are willing to strike to get better pay and benefits.

Which means Job One is to get America’s kids out of the clutches of those evil unionized teachers. Education, after all, is a liberal value. The conservative vision is “quality education for the children of the wealthy, while ending child labor laws for all the rest.”

And they’re getting their way.

Florida and Arizona are well on the way to destroying their entire systems of public education with statewide private school voucher programs available to every child.

This June, Oklahoma approved the use of public-school taxpayer funds to pay for kids’ attendance at a private Catholic charter school: it’s the first explicitly taxpayer-funded religious school in modern America and a clear violation of America’s founding principle of the separation of church and state.

Meanwhile, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed legislation gutting that state’s prohibition on child labor. Now 14-year-olds can skip school and go straight to work at their local slaughterhouse.

Eight other Republican-controlled states have similar legislation pending.

Florida and Texas have approved animated cartoons produced by a hate radio talk-show host (with big bucks from fossil fuel billionaires) that reinvent Frederick Douglass as an opponent of the Black Lives Matter movement and downplay the role of fossil fuels in our climate emergency.

Last year, DeSantis’ Florida moved an estimated $1.3 billion in taxpayer money originally destined for public schools to pay for private school vouchers. This gutted public school budgets across the state by roughly 10 percent.

Florida is not unique in this: it’s happening in Red states all across the nation. Public education in about half of America is in a crisis and has been for some time. It’s a crisis Republicans across the country are doing everything they can to make worse.

In many ways today’s conservative war on public education dates back to the 1950s when, in 1954’s Brown v Board decision, the Supreme Court ruled that public schools must allow Black children to sit in the same classrooms with white children.

This so outraged white conservatives that public schools were shut down altogether in some states and counties, and private, all-white “academies“ were opened, many by religious figures, across the nation.

It was the beginning of a concerted, 75-year-long assault on public education that has now expanded from “whites only” schools to “rich and whites only.”

Because public education is the number-one driver of social and economic mobility, it has become the archenemy of conservatives who believe the “lower classes” should know their place and stay there.

The Republican war against public education moved from being purely about race to incorporating an ideological rationalization with the 1980 effort by billionaire David Koch to run for vice president on the Libertarian ticket.

Koch’s platform said of public schools:


“We advocate the complete separation of education and State. Government schools lead to the indoctrination of children and interfere with the free choice of individuals. Government ownership, operation, regulation, and subsidy of schools and colleges should be ended.”

Thus was set the formula that billionaires from David Koch in that era to Betsy DeVos in this day use to push for the destruction of public education. It works this way:

— Privatize public schools through charter schools and by offering vouchers to pay private school tuition.

— Withhold funding from public schools while pouring voucher cash into these new, private entities.

— Expand the nationwide propaganda campaign that public education is failing and/or is an instrument of an oppressive state.

— As public schools become starved of cash, use that crisis to destroy their teachers’ unions and ultimately to shut many of them down altogether.

— Once most primary and secondary schools have collapsed and the teachers’ unions are broken, begin to dial back money available through vouchers, so poor people must use special “cheaper” schools designed just for them.

— Over time cut back voucher funding so, just as Reaganomics has done with our colleges, low-income people have to borrow from banks to send their kids to good schools.

This is not a new model: Reagan began the process with colleges, from substandard junior colleges for low-income people to throwing average Americans who wanted to attend a good college into a $1.8 trillion debt hole.

It’s not even a unique conservative model just for education: we’re halfway through it with Medicare. George W. Bush introduced the Medicare Advantage scam in 2003, and now half of American seniors are routinely having their medical payments denied by these private plans.

Once they’ve destroyed Medicare altogether (probably within a decade) the “good deals” with things like dental and vision coverage available to people buying into the private Advantage plans will evaporate and America’s elderly will be right back where they were before Medicare was created by LBJ in 1965: on their own with private, for-profit insurance companies routinely denying healthcare.

There have been attempts to block GOP efforts to destroy public schools, but in most cases the billionaires got out ahead of them and shut them down.

In 2018, for example, in an effort to stop the GOP’s creeping privatization of public education in their state, parents in Arizona got a measure to save their schools on the ballot. Voters statewide overwhelmingly rejected an expansion of vouchers and charter schools in that state.

In response, Republicans in control of Arizona’s legislature passed the nation’s first statewide voucher program, rejecting the will of the voters and shoving privatized education down the state’s parents’ throats. DeSantis did the same in Florida last year. It’s a cruel scam but an effective one.

The strategy is simple and Republicans have been running it in Red states since the 1980s. Once public education is destroyed, over time the vouchers will be cut back to represent a smaller and smaller fraction of the cost of private education. Parents will have to cough up more and more, just like what happened with college tuition between 1980 and today.

And because most parents won’t be able to pay for private schools, they’ll send their kids to the remaining public schools that have been essentially ghettoized: starved of resources and barely limping along.

This, in turn, will further stratify and rigidify the class structure of American society, cementing the generational advantages of the morbidly rich and the generational disadvantages of the poor and working classes.

This is intentional: a core tenet of conservative ideology is the belief that society must be structured with “classes and orders.” Russell Kirk kicked it off in 1952 with his book The Conservative Mind, as I detail at length in my book on the American oligarchy.

Reflecting the neo-Calvinist belief that great wealth is a sign of their god’s blessing, wealthy conservatives have argued for centuries that society should be run by the rich and virtuous — and the rest of us should shut up and quietly do our jobs in the rich men’s stores and factories.

Republican President Dwight Eisenhower issued a direct challenge to that belief when he built thousands of brand-new schools across America and rolled out programs in elementary grades for gifted working class kids (I was in one in the 1950s).

After FDR laid the foundation for America’s first great middle class, Eisenhower’s promotion of quality primary education was rocket fuel to blast that middle class to two-thirds majority status in America by 1980 (it’s now been whittled down to 43 percent, the result of Reaganomics). He even invoked the national defense to get money for public schools: the 1958 National Defense Education Act provided billions to fund public school math and science programs.

Now, using loaded and deceptive language about “Critical Race Theory” and a “gay agenda,” conservatives have hit their groove. The GOP has picked up on the trend: multimillionaire and former Carlyle Group CEO Glen Youngkin was elected Virginia governor, polls show, mostly on the strength of his attacks on public education and unionized teachers.

They’re joined in this effort by religious fanatics who argue that public schools are teaching “the secular religion of big government.” The Washington Post yesterday ran a lengthy profile of a religious fanatic, Michael Farris, who’s spent decades trying to gut public schools:

“Now, speaking on a confidential conference call to a secretive group of Christian millionaires seeking, in the words of one member, to ‘take down the education system as we know it today,’ Farris made the same points he had made in courtrooms since the 1980s. Public schools were indoctrinating children with a secular worldview that amounted to a godless religion, he said.

“The solution: lawsuits alleging that schools’ teachings about gender identity and race are unconstitutional, leading to a Supreme Court decision that would mandate the right of parents to claim billions of tax dollars for private education or home schooling.”

So now we have the perfect storm.

The conservative white supremacists who’ve fought integrated public education since 1954 have found common cause with nationalist religious hucksters who want our children indoctrinated with their own brutal form of what they cynically call “Christianity.”

These two groups have been joined by billionaires committed to reducing social and economic mobility, along with a handful of hustlers (like the phony “university” producing rightwing cartoons for Florida and Texas schools) who want to make a buck off private education.

The good news is that most public schools in America are still largely controlled by local school boards, and anybody can generally run for those boards or simply show up for every meeting and offer their opinions.

Republicans have spent the past three years trying to exploit this, with considerable success: some school boards have even been taken over by local neofascist militia members. The Proud Boys have been particularly active in this space.

But average parents supportive of public education and progressive groups are stepping up. Red Wine & Blue, Defense of Democracy, and the Florida Freedom to Read Project, among others, are endorsing candidates, helping with the campaigns of pro-public education candidates, and training parents in how to show up and speak out at school board meetings.

They’re outspent by the massive, billionaire-funded effort to destroy our public education system, but they also represent the vast majority of American parents.

An NPR/Ipsos poll from last year found 88 percent of respondents said, “My child’s teacher(s) have done the best they could, given the circumstances around the pandemic.”

Seventy-six percent agreed with the statement, “My child’s school does a good job keeping me informed about the curriculum, including potentially controversial topics.”

Fully 80 percent of parents say they are either completely or somewhat satisfied with their child’s education in public schools.

Last year’s annual PRRI American Values Survey reported that 92 percent of Americans “favor teaching children history that includes both the good and bad aspects of our history so that they can learn from the past, versus refraining from teaching aspects of history that could make them feel uncomfortable or guilty about what their ancestors did in the past.”

America, in other words, is on the side of quality public education. And there’s a growing movement to stop and ultimately reverse the damage this billionaire-funded rightwing effort has done to our public school systems.

You can help, whether you have children in public school or not.

Show up for school board meetings and, if you have the time and inclination, run for your local school board.

Ask every candidate, from city council to the US Senate and the White House, their position on public education and vote accordingly. Write letters to the editor and speak out on social media. Make waves.

After all, our public schools are literally where America’s future is being created.

We can’t abandon them just because a bunch of well-funded bigots, militia bullies, and religious cranks are enjoying their moment in the media.

The stakes are just too high.

Saturday, August 19, 2023

WHITE SUPREMACIST PEDAGOGY
Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders under fire for pulling AP African-American studies

“There will be lawsuits,” said Chris Jones, who ran against Sanders in the 2022 gubernatorial race as the Democratic nominee.

April Ryan
Thu, August 17, 2023 

Critics of Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ executive decision to end an advanced placement African-American studies course in the state could face challenges in court.

“There will be lawsuits,” said Chris Jones, who ran against Sanders in the 2022 gubernatorial race as the Democratic nominee.

LITTLE ROCK, ARKANSAS – FEBRUARY 07: Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders waits to deliver the Republican response to the State of the Union address by President Joe Biden on February 7, 2023 in Little Rock, Arkansas. Biden tonight vowed to not allow the U.S. to default on its debt by calling on Congress to raise the debt-ceiling and chastising Republicans seeking to leverage the standoff to force spending cuts. 
(Photo by Al Drago-Pool/Getty Images)

Jones objects to his former opponent’s order to remove AP African-American studies. The decision came several months after she signed into law the state’s “LEARNS” education bill, which prohibits indoctrination and critical race theory in Arkansas public schools.

Arkansas Department of Education Secretary Jacob Oliva said the AP African-American studies course didn’t meet “rules that have long been in place.” Last week, the department took action to end the College Board curriculum, which is a two-year national pilot program. The action in Arkansas came just days before the start of school on Monday.

The AP African-American studies course would have given college credits to high school seniors. Now, the school districts a part of the pilot program are offering the course as an elective.

Arkansas is the latest Republican-controlled state to ban or restrict aspects of Black history in the classroom. The crusade against such courses has been led by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a current Republican presidential candidate.

Since learning of the change, College Board, which created the two-year pilot program for AP African-American studies, said it worked diligently to communicate with the Arkansas Department of Education about the decision.

Steve Bumbaugh, a senior vice president at College Board, told theGrio the course in Arkansas allowed students to “fulfill a social studies requirement” for college. He said the decision could cause problems for some high school seniors needing AP credits.

“Now that’s up in the air,” explained Bumbaugh. He added, “It’s possible that there are some students sitting in classrooms in Arkansas that are concerned about graduating in the spring.”


Books are piled up in the classroom for students takeing AP African-American Studies at Overland High School on November 1, 2022 in Aurora, Colorado. The AP African-American Studies course is part of a national pilot class that about 60 schools nationwide are participating in.
 (Photo by RJ Sangosti/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images)More

Bumbaugh said as many as 25,000 students nationwide participate in the AP African-American studies program. The students who meet the threshold to take the honors course would get high school and college credit traditionally.

He told theGrio he hopes the decision by Arkansas school officials to remove African-American studies from its advanced placement program is “not a trend.”

Ironically, Bumbaugh added, “the demand for this course is off the charts” across the country. “It was in 60 high schools last year. It will be in about 750 this school year,” he explained.

Another irony is that one of the schools that participated in the AP African-American studies pilot in Arkansas is Little Rock Central High School, where the nation famously witnessed the integration of nine Black students in 1957. The racial integration of the school resulted from a federal ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education.

However, resistance to racial integration at Central High was so great that the nine students, known as the Little Rock Nine, had to be escorted by the National Guard.



Forty years later, during an event commemorating the anniversary of the historical moment in September 1997, then-President Bill Clinton ceremoniously opened the doors for the Little Rock Nine, who were then adults.

As White House press secretary during the presidency of Donald Trump, Sanders told this reporter she witnessed President Clinton’s honoring of the Little Rock Nine as a student herself at Central High School. Sanders described it as one of the most impactful moments of her life to witness as a student of the school and the daughter of then-Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee.

Now, Sanders is leading an administration restricting an interdisciplinary studies program connected to that storied history. Jones, her former gubernatorial opponent, said her decision was a “rushed” one. “What’s next?” he queried.

Jones told theGrio that he is considering another run against Sanders when her term ends.

The College Board is said to have researched and pulled together some of the best scholars in African-American studies to create the curriculum. However, in the fall, there will be a review of the program. That review was previously planned before its collapse in Arkansas.

Saturday, July 29, 2023

Judge blocks Arkansas law allowing librarians to be criminally charged over ‘harmful’ materials


 Nate Coulter, executive director of the Central Arkansas Library System (CALS), looks at a book in the main branch of the public library in downtown Little Rock, Ark., on May 23, 2023. Arkansas is temporarily blocked from enforcing a law that would have allowed criminal charges against librarians and booksellers for providing “harmful” materials to minors, a federal judge ruled Saturday, July 29. (AP Photo/Katie Adkins, File)

 July 29, 2023

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) — Arkansas is temporarily blocked from enforcing a law that would have allowed criminal charges against librarians and booksellers for providing “harmful” materials to minors, a federal judge ruled Saturday.

U.S. District Judge Timothy L. Brooks issued a preliminary injunction against the law, which also would have created a new process to challenge library materials and request that they be relocated to areas not accessible by kids. The measure, signed by Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders earlier this year, was set to take effect Aug. 1.

A coalition that included the Central Arkansas Library System in Little Rock had challenged the law, saying fear of prosecution under the measure could prompt libraries and booksellers to no longer carry titles that could be challenged.

The judge also rejected a motion by the defendants, which include prosecuting attorneys for the state, seeking to dismiss the case.

The ACLU of Arkansas, which represents some of the plaintiffs, applauded the court’s ruling, saying that the absence of a preliminary injunction would have jeopardized First Amendment rights.

“The question we had to ask was — do Arkansans still legally have access to reading materials? Luckily, the judicial system has once again defended our highly valued liberties,” Holly Dickson, the executive director of the ACLU in Arkansas, said in a statement.

The lawsuit comes as lawmakers in an increasing number of conservative states are pushing for measures making it easier to ban or restrict access to books. The number of attempts to ban or restrict books across the U.S. last year was the highest in the 20 years the American Library Association has been tracking such efforts.

Laws restricting access to certain materials or making it easier to challenge them have been enacted in several other states, including Iowa, Indiana and Texas.

Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin said in an email Saturday that his office would be “reviewing the judge’s opinion and will continue to vigorously defend the law.”

The executive director of Central Arkansas Library System, Nate Coulter, said the judge’s 49-page decision recognized the law as censorship, a violation of the Constitution and wrongly maligning librarians.

“As folks in southwest Arkansas say, this order is stout as horseradish!” he said in an email.

“I’m relieved that for now the dark cloud that was hanging over CALS’ librarians has lifted,” he added.

Cheryl Davis, general counsel for the Authors Guild, said the organization is “thrilled” about the decision. She said enforcing this law “is likely to limit the free speech rights of older minors, who are capable of reading and processing more complex reading materials than young children can.”

The Arkansas lawsuit names the state’s 28 local prosecutors as defendants, along with Crawford County in west Arkansas. A separate lawsuit is challenging the Crawford County library’s decision to move children’s books that included LGBTQ+ themes to a separate portion of the library.

The plaintiffs challenging Arkansas’ restrictions also include the Fayetteville and Eureka Springs Carnegie public libraries, the American Booksellers Association and the Association of American Publishers.

Friday, July 28, 2023

The Mysterious Dark Money Group Connecting Trump, Christie, and DeSantis

Story by Roger Sollenberger •
The Daily Beast

Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty


In the early stages of the 2024 race, no other candidate—not even Donald Trump—has pushed the bounds of campaign finance laws as much as Ron DeSantis.

But the DeSantis campaign’s finances have suffered despite those hard-charging efforts. Or, perhaps, because of the people behind them.

Immediately after DeSantis officially declared his inevitable candidacy, he was challenging fundraising laws. That’s when his state-level PAC pledged to transfer more than $80 million to a pro-DeSantis super PAC, just weeks after DeSantis officially cut ties with the old group—a move Florida lawmakers changed the rules to accommodate and which quickly drew a federal complaint.

But Florida campaign finance statements show even closer ties between these three groups than previously reported—and they go to the top of the DeSantis operation.

Even with all the PAC money, the DeSantis campaign has been marred by financial trouble. Extravagant spending and an overreliance on large-dollar donors—71 percent of his total fundraising has come from people donating more than $2,000—prompted the campaign to cut more than a third of its staff earlier this week. And one person who has taken a lot of the blame for DeSantis’ questionable financial footing is a largely unknown figure with undeniable experience in the shadowy GOP circles of dark money: Generra Peck.

But in the months leading up to DeSantis’ pro forma campaign announcement, his top advisers, including Peck, were busy raising money in the background.

Brendan Fischer, deputy director of government watchdog Documented, told The Daily Beast that Peck’s involvement with that high-dollar fundraising is “further evidence that there is little distinction” between the groups backing DeSantis, which are not allowed to coordinate with each other.

“It is another example of how DeSantis has been circumventing the federal campaign finance rules designed to prevent corruption and protect voters’ right to know,” Fischer said.

Peck, a widely respected Republican strategist who prefers to operate in the wings, is DeSantis’ 2024 campaign manager, having quietly steered him to victory in 2022. But before she took the top job, she helmed a battery of low-profile conservative advocacy groups—where the funding is largely untraceable and the spending is exceedingly difficult to unravel, often by design.

Peck’s present, however, is distinctly different from her past. A presidential operation tasked with taking down the most powerful force in the Republican Party has to reckon with far more public scrutiny than Peck has dealt with previously. And the transparency demanded of federal campaigns is entirely different from the occult financials of the comparatively obscure dark money groups and consulting firms where she cut her political teeth.

Peck’s approach, and the complications she faces today, are captured in the story of one of those groups—a dark money nonprofit that Chris Christie started to support then-President Trump, but which in hindsight looks more like an incubator for a future DeSantis presidency.

“Right Direction America” was created in late 2019 to fight back against Democratic attempts to impeach Trump.

“I was tired of sitting around and waiting for someone else to do it,” Christie said at the time, promising seven-figure ad buys to combat impeachment.

He would leave the group a year later, long after the Senate had acquitted Trump of those impeachment charges. But RDA was far from finished.


Kevin Wurm/Reuters© Provided by The Daily Beast

In retrospect, RDA had strong ties to DeSantis from the beginning. Aside from Peck and Christie, one of the key forces behind the group was veteran GOP operative Phil Cox—a trusted DeSantis adviser and top deputy for his super PAC. The group also featured Catherine Chestnut Linkul, another senior DeSantis 2022 aide and the former director of Casey DeSantis’ Office of the First Lady.

The DeSantis campaign and Peck did not respond to detailed questions for this article.

But after Trump was acquitted and Christie was gone, the group assumed what seems like its true purpose all along: a nozzle to spray anonymous cash to a broad range of conservative groups, issues, and politicians.

RDA’s filings don’t appear in IRS searches, nor in any other public database that compiles those records. The Daily Beast previously obtained the group’s 2020 filing, which shows it doled out $700,000 in grants. Those funds went to two other secretive entities, both of which, like RDA, are classified as 501(c)(4) “dark money” groups—and both of which are directly tied to Peck.

When one of those groups, “Building a Better America,” emptied its coffers in 2021—the year Peck moved to Tallahassee to take over DeSantis’ 2022 campaign—the group poured almost all of its bank account into reforming a federal environmental policy of deep interest to DeSantis: a Florida mining project. BBA didn’t similarly explain the nature of any of its $2.1 million in grants on its previous year’s tax filing.

RDA—whose board also has ties to the GOP’s biggest megadonor, Dick Uihlein—took in three donations in 2020, for a total $2.12 million, the filing shows. All three were anonymous, with the largest being $2 million.

While Christie promised to spend big money fighting Trump’s impeachment, RDA dropped only about $35,000 on ads toward that endeavor, according to the Facebook advertising database. The group returned to the political fold that August with a contribution more than twice that amount to a super PAC backing the unsuccessful congressional campaign of a Christie ally.

A few months later, Christie dropped out of RDA. The reason is unclear, and Christie declined The Daily Beast’s request for comment.

His departure, however, came weeks before the most curious event in RDA’s curious life: a $100,000 gift in early 2021 from the campaign belonging to Rep. Matt Gaetz, for a time one of DeSantis’ closest allies.

The donation was double the amount of the Gaetz campaign’s second-largest contribution ever, and $22,000 more than its combined political gifts to DeSantis.

The campaign cut the $100,000 check when the congressman was on particularly shaky ground, and the Gaetz campaign’s explanation appears to defy belief, The Daily Beast previously reported. The contribution came about half a year after the Justice Department opened its investigation into whether the Florida congressman paid for sex with a 17-year-old girl, and weeks after Trump returned to civilian life at Mar-a-Lago, denying Gaetz the blanket pardon he had reportedly sought.

But there’s unsurprisingly scant publicly available information about RDA’s activities after Christie left. The group’s website was taken down sometime after The Daily Beast reached out for comment for this article; it was archived as recently as March 21.

RDA’s publicly available financial data is almost exclusively accessible through Federal Election Filings, which show a $250,000 injection from former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. One year later, a super PAC called “Right Direction Women”—whose branding is strikingly similar to that of RDA’s now defunct website—made a similar donation to yet another nonprofit, called “Right Direction Women Maryland.”

RDA Women’s lineup is also studded with close associates of Peck and her former consulting firm, P2 Public Affairs. The super PAC supports conservative women running for office, notably Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, who is now the central pillar supporting DeSantis’ primary efforts in that critical state.

But the force behind them all appears to be Peck. While the strategist rarely engages the media—who seem to have rarely engaged with her before she took over the 2022 DeSantis campaign—she took a major step into public life in September 2021, when DeSantis tapped her to run his upcoming re-election effort.

While Peck has long been close with both Ron and Casey DeSantis, her hiring was reportedly the work of yet another ghost from Right Direction’s past: Cox, who first took a shine to Peck while they worked together on former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell’s 2009 campaign.

Over the next decade-plus, Peck took on increasingly senior roles in the GOP national apparatus, building political bridges through the Republican Governors Association, where Cox served as a top official and which Christie chaired. (As if it’s not complicated enough, that organization also has its own “RGA Right Direction” PAC.)

However, Florida state filings don’t show 2022 DeSantis campaign payments to Peck personally or a number of known entities associated with her. They do, however, reveal $1.7 million going to Cox’s Ascent Media from the Republican Party of Florida, with that company clocking another roughly $207,000 directly from the DeSantis campaign.

Then, just two days after DeSantis won, Ascent Media was listed as one of a slate of firms forming a brand new consulting mega-conglomerate, GP3 Partners, LLC. The consortium features a number of DeSantis-world operatives, and its name—GP3—is shared by Peck’s personal firm, GP3 Strategies, LLC. Peck’s own name, however, was characteristically absent from the conglomerate’s press release, as was any mention of GP3 Strategies.

This January, DeSantis, Peck, and Cox began ramping up his predicted presidential bid in earnest. And the money began moving, too.

Early that month, Cox’s firm kicked about $562,000 back to the Florida GOP, state filings show, with the DeSantis 2022 campaign paying the company roughly $591,000 weeks later.

Notably, over the next five months Ascent Media hauled in another $151,500 from the Friends of DeSantis PAC—the group at the center of the disputed $82 million transfer. That PAC also sent $95,500 to Peck’s GP3 Strategies via a series of monthly installments beginning the last day of February.

Between March 1 and April 30, as DeSantis’ not-so-subtle shadow campaign carried him around the country and abroad, that PAC raised a staggering $3.8 million. Then, on May 5, DeSantis declared in a state filing that he would no longer fundraise through the group. That same day, the PAC, which paid GP3 Strategies its last installment the previous day, cut Ascent Media its final check. It rebranded 10 days later as “Empower Parents PAC.”

The contours of that fundraising effort are at the center of Campaign Legal Center’s federal complaint. The complaint, filed May 31, alleges that the PAC illegally coordinated with DeSantis to raise money in amounts exponentially higher than his campaign would have been able to.

Undeterred, the PAC made good on its $82 million promise the next month, announcing the unprecedented transfer to the pro-DeSantis super PAC “Never Back Down.” That group, of course, features Cox as a top official, alongside Jeff Roe, a longtime Republican campaign veteran who reportedly had his eyes set on the campaign manager slot—only to take a backseat to Peck.

Today, however, Peck’s cover has been blown. GOP insiders and megadonors have increasingly expressed frustration with the campaign’s flagging performance and runaway spending, and they’re hungry for a scalp.

According to multiple recent reports, they’ve set their sights on Peck, whose limited campaign experience has, through no fault of her own, made her vulnerable to those attacks.

When the campaign cut about a third of its workforce earlier this week—more than three dozen jobs—Peck took considerable heat.

A statement attributed to Peck said the layoffs were the result of a “top-to-bottom review,” but it’s unclear how effective the move will be. The campaign spent about $630,000 on payroll over its first six weeks, FEC records show, about 8 percent of its total expenses.

Fittingly enough, Peck’s own compensation with the campaign is its own mystery. Federal Election Commission filings show only about $10,000 going to her on the DeSantis campaign payroll over the campaign’s first six weeks. She received just the fifth-largest single payroll payment, and her total stands at about $5,000 less than the governor’s longtime communications guru, Christina Pushaw.

While it may seem like Peck is just doing the job on the cheap, she actually appears to have scored a hefty payday in the weeks before the campaign launched. Between late February and early May, Peck saw nearly $100,000 in combined regular payments from a high-rolling DeSantis state PAC, paid through her personal consulting firm, GP3 Strategies, LLC.

The Daily Beast.

Saturday, July 01, 2023

LIKE AN OLD TESTAMENT KING
Ex-aide: John Kelly was disgusted as Trump wondered what it might be like to have sex with Ivanka

Story by Tatyana Tandanpolie • Wednesday

Donald Trump Ivanka Trump 1413601062Bill Tompkins/Getty Images© Provided by Salon

Former President Donald Trump committed acts of "naked sexism" and made lewd comments about women — including his own daughter — working in his administration, according to the former aide who in 2018 anonymously published a scathing op-ed about Trump in The New York Times.

Miles Taylor, a former chief of staff in the Department of Homeland Security, detailed several incidents of the former president's behavior in his forthcoming book "Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump," an excerpt of which was obtained by Newsweek.

"Aides said he talked about Ivanka Trump's breasts, her backside, and what it might be like to have sex with her, remarks that once led John Kelly to remind the president that Ivanka was his daughter," Taylor writes in the "Blowback."

"Afterward, Kelly retold that story to me in visible disgust. Trump, he said, was 'a very, very evil man," Taylor added

Related
"It was really bad": Two ex-aides say they witnessed Trump's sexual harassment in the White House

The revelations in Taylor's book follow other former staffers telling media last month that they witnessed and reported Trump's inappropriate behavior toward women while at the White House. Last month a New York jury also found Trump liable of sexually abusing and defaming columnist E. Jean Carroll. Trump has denied any wrongdoing in the case and is appealing the jury's judgement.

"There still are quite a few female leaders from the Trump administration who have held their tongues about the unequal treatment they faced in the administration at best, and the absolute naked sexism they experienced with the hands of Donald Trump at worst," Taylor told Newsweek.

In the book, Taylor described witnessing Trump's "undisguised sexism" toward women of varying ranks in his administration, several instances occurring in meetings with the former president and former Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen.

"When we were with him, Kirstjen did her best to ignore the president's inappropriate behavior," Taylor writes. "He called her 'sweetie' and 'honey,' and critiqued her makeup and outfits."

In those moments, he claims Nielsen would whisper to him. "Trust me, this is not a healthy workplace for women."

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

He also recounted how Kellyanne Conway, who served as a senior counselor, once characterized Trump as a "misogynistic bully" following a meeting where he berated several female officials of his White House. A source familiar with the March 2019 meeting told Newsweek that Trump had snapped at Nielsen and other staffers about the border.

"That is a lie," another source, who works in Conway's office, told the outlet. "Despite trying to resuscitate the 15 minutes of fame, Miles Taylor should have stayed 'Anonymous.'"

In another instance, Taylor recalled how Trump commented on then-press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders' appearance when he mistakenly thought he saw her standing outside the room during an Oval Office meeting.

"Whoops," Trump responded when he realized the person was one of his assistants, according to Taylor. "I was going to say, 'Man, Sarah, you've lost a lot of weight!'"

Trump has a documented history of making what many say are inappropriate comments about his daughter going as far back as the early-to-mid-2000s. In a 2006 appearance on the The View alongside Ivanka Trump, the former president said that "if Ivanka weren't my daughter, perhaps I'd be dating her. Isn't that terrible? How terrible? Is that terrible?"

"She's really something, and what a beauty, that one. If I weren't happily married and, ya know, her father...," he reportedly said in a September 2015 interview with Rolling Stone.

But Ivanka Trump defended her father in a 2016 interview with CBS News, asserting that he is "not a groper," has "total respect for women" and "believes ultimately in merit."

Taylor said he fears Trump, who is the current frontrunner for the GOP nomination, and his behavior could be much worse if elected to a second term.

"He's a pervert, he's difficult to deal with," the source told Newsweek. "This is still the same man and, incredibly, we're considering electing him to the presidency again."

Sunday, June 18, 2023

CONFEDERATE STATES OF AMERIKA
More than 1 million dropped from Medicaid as states start post-pandemic purge of rolls




More than 1 million people have been dropped from Medicaid in the past couple months as some states moved swiftly to halt health care coverage following the end of the coronavirus pandemic.

Most got dropped for not filling out paperwork.

Though the eligibility review is required by the federal government, President’s Joe Biden’s administration isn’t too pleased at how efficiently some other states are accomplishing the task.

“Pushing through things and rushing it will lead to eligible people — kids and families — losing coverage for some period of time,” Daniel Tsai, a top federal Medicaid official recently told reporters.

Already, about 1.5 million people have been removed from Medicaid in more than two dozen states that started the process in April or May, according to publicly available reports and data obtained by The Associated Press.

Florida has dropped several hundred thousand people, by far the most among states. The drop rate also has been particularly high in other states. For people whose cases were decided in May, around half or more got dropped in Arkansas, Idaho, Kansas, Nevada, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah and West Virginia.

By its own count, Arkansas has dropped more than 140,000 people from Medicaid.

The eligibility redeterminations have created headaches for Jennifer Mojica, 28, who was told in April that she no longer qualified for Medicaid because Arkansas had incorrectly determined her income was above the limit.

She got that resolved, but was then told her 5-year-old son was being dropped from Medicaid because she had requested his cancellation — something that never happened, she said. Her son’s coverage has been restored, but now Mojica says she’s been told her husband no longer qualifies. The uncertainty has been frustrating, she said.

“It was like fixing one thing and then another problem came up, and they fixed it and then something else came up,” Mojica said.

Arkansas officials said they have tried to renew coverage automatically for as many people as possible and placed a special emphasis on reaching families with children. But a 2021 state law requires the post-pandemic eligibility redeterminations to be completed in six months, and the state will continue “to swiftly disenroll individuals who are no longer eligible,” the Department of Human Services said in statement.

Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders has dismissed criticism of the state’s process.

“Those who do not qualify for Medicaid are taking resources from those who need them,” Sanders said on Twitter last month. “But the pandemic is over — and we are leading the way back to normalcy.”

More than 93 million people nationwide were enrolled in Medicaid as of the most recent available data in February — up nearly one-third from the pre-pandemic total in January 2020. The rolls swelled because federal law prohibited states from removing people from Medicaid during the health emergency in exchange for providing states with increased funding.

Now that eligibility reviews have resumed, states have begun plowing through a backlog of cases to determine whether people's income or life circumstances have changed. States have a year to complete the process. But tracking down responses from everyone has proved difficult, because some people have moved, changed contact information or disregarded mailings about the renewal process.

Before dropping people from Medicaid, the Florida Department of Children and Families said it makes between five and 13 contact attempts, including texts, emails and phone calls. Yet the department said 152,600 people have been non-responsive.

Their coverage could be restored retroactively, if people submit information showing their eligibility up to 90 days after their deadline.

Unlike some states, Idaho continued to evaluate people's Medicaid eligibility during the pandemic even though it didn't remove anyone. When the enrollment freeze ended in April, Idaho started processing those cases — dropping nearly 67,000 of the 92,000 people whose cases have been decided so far.

“I think there’s still a lot of confusion among families on what’s happening,” said Hillarie Hagen, a health policy associate at the nonprofit Idaho Voices for Children.

She added, “We’re likely to see people showing up at a doctor’s office in the coming months not knowing they’ve lost Medicaid.”

Advocates fear that many households losing coverage may include children who are actually still eligible, because Medicaid covers children at higher income levels than their parents or guardians. A report last year by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services forecast that children would be disproportionately impacted, with more than half of those disenrolled still actually eligible.

That's difficult to confirm, however, because the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services doesn't require states to report a demographic breakdown of those dropped. In fact, CMS has yet to release any state-by-state data. The AP obtained data directly from states and from other groups that have been collecting it.

Medicaid recipients in numerous states have described the eligibility redetermination process as frustrating.

Julie Talamo, of Port Richey, Florida, said she called state officials every day for weeks, spending hours on hold, when she was trying to ensure her 19-year-old special-needs son, Thomas, was going to stay on Medicaid.

She knew her own coverage would end but was shocked to hear Thomas’ coverage would be whittled down to a different program that could force her family to pay $2,000 per month. Eventually, an activist put Talamo in contact with a senior state healthcare official who confirmed her son would stay on Medicaid.

“This system was designed to fail people,” Talamo said of the haphazard process.

Some states haven't been able to complete all the eligibility determinations that are due each month. Pennsylvania reported more than 100,000 incomplete cases in both April and May. Tens of thousands of cases also remained incomplete in April or May in Arizona, Arkansas, Indiana, Iowa, New Mexico and Ohio.

“If states are already behind in processing renewals, that’s going to snowball over time," said Tricia Brooks, a research professor at the Georgetown University Center for Children and Families. "Once they get piles of stuff that haven’t been processed, I don’t see how they catch up easily.”

Among those still hanging in the balance is Gary Rush, 67, who said he was notified in April that he would lose Medicaid coverage. The Pittsburgh resident said he was told that his retirement accounts make him ineligible, even though he said he doesn’t draw from them. Rush appealed with the help of an advocacy group and, at a hearing this past week, was told he has until July to get rid of about $60,000 in savings.

Still, Rush said he doesn’t know what he will do if he loses coverage for his diabetes medication, which costs about $700 a month. Rush said he gets $1,100 a month from Social Security.

In Indiana, Samantha Richards, 35, said she has been on Medicaid her whole life and currently works two part-time jobs as a custodian. Richards recalled receiving a letter earlier this year indicating that the pandemic-era Medicaid protection was ending. She said a local advocacy group helped her navigate the renewal process. But she remains uneasy.

“Medicaid can be a little unpredictable,” Richards said. “There is still that concern that just out of nowhere, I will either get a letter saying that we have to reapply because we missed some paperwork, or I missed a deadline, or I’m going to show up at the doctor’s office or the pharmacy and they’re going to say, ‘Your insurance didn’t go through.’”

___

Lieb reported from Jefferson City, Missouri, and DeMillo from Little Rock, Arkansas. Also contributing were AP reporters Anthony Izaguirre in Tallahassee, Florida; Marc Levy in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; and Arleigh Rodgers in Bloomington, Indiana. Rodgers is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

David A. Lieb And Andrew Demillo, The Associated Press