A Toledo man was found guilty of wire fraud and three counts of money laundering by a jury after a six-day trial this week for stealing donated money to his Black Lives Matter (BLM) organization and using it for personal gain, according to the Northern District of Ohio U.S. Attorney’s Office.
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Knoxville Utilities Board (KUB) announced its program that provides emergency heating assistance to those in need will run through February 6.
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The Metro Nashville Police Department’s (MNPD) Horse Mounted Patrol Division will hold a toy drive this weekend at the Nashville Zoo as part of the department’s annual Christmas Basket Program.
“We need your help!!! This weekend we will be hosting our annual toy drive at the Nashville Zoo! These toys will be delivered by our fellow MNPD Officers to families and children across Nashville on Christmas Eve. Please help us fill our horse trailers for the kids,” MNPD’s Horse Mounted Patrol Division wrote in a Facebook post.
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Tennessee Governor Bill Lee and First Lady Maria Lee announced that the state’s annual official Christmas events, including Christmas at the Capitol and “Heaven and Nature Sing” tours of the Tennessee Residence, will begin next week.
As part of the First Lady’s Tennessee Serves initiative, the Lees are inviting guests to bring requested items to the state’s Christmas events in support of five nonprofit organizations including Creative Aging Memphis, Birthright of Memphis, Jonathan’s Path, Dismas House, and Sevier County Food Ministries, according to a press release by Lee’s office.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign reminded supporters on Wednesday that the Democrat challenger to President Joe Biden is facing a “crucial deadline” on Friday. It will be the first time the presidential hopeful’s campaign donations will be made public.
In an urgent appeal for contributions, the Kennedy campaign disabused the notion that the Kennedy Family scion is running a “$100 million campaign.”
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The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) recently announced that it is providing $50,000 for supplies and equipment at two Tipton County Schools destroyed by the March 31st and April 1st tornadoes that swept through 10 Tennessee counties.
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Arizona State Rep. David Livingston (R-Peoria) sent another letter to Gov. Katie Hobbs (D) Wednesday demanding more answers regarding where she is placing funds for 2023 inauguration events. While Livingston did receive answers to his first letter, he said those have only led to more questions.
“Those records have not alleviated my concerns regarding your administration’s solicitation of inaugural funds. Instead, they have prompted new concerns and this supplemental request for more information,” Livingston wrote.
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Arizona’s new Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs is facing criticism for secrecy surrounding the amounts of money that donors contributed to her inauguration events, which previous governors have disclosed in the past. It’s also been revealed that Hobbs asked the donors to contribute a quarter of a million dollars, with no explanation where the money is going. Arizona Senate President Pro Tempore T.J. Shope (R-Coolidge) said he may conduct an investigation.
“I would think it might be something we would look into,” Shope told AZ Family. “We should have the right to know as a citizen what kind of contributions they’re getting.” State Senator John Kavanaugh (R-Fountain Hills) said he agreed.
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Tennesseans planning on visiting the Tennessee Department of Motor Vehicle (DMV) before the new year are encouraged to bring a non-perishable food item to help those in need.
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New York Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik on Friday alleged that United States Postal Service workers stole up to $20,000 in campaign contributions and illegally opened her mail to do so.
“On four separate occasions between June 2022 and November 2022, packages sent by Elise for Congress containing campaign contributions were ripped open and the contents stolen while in the custody of USPS or its contractors,” her lawyers wrote to Postmaster General Louis Dejoy in a letter the Daily Wire obtained. “Three of these incidents occurred in a single week.”
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Following the release of a $500,000 TV ad Friday from Liz Cheney’s Political Action Committee (PAC) urging Arizona voters to stay away from Republican nominees Kari Lake and Mark Finchem, Lake said her campaign received a huge boost in donations. Lake thanked Cheney for contributing to the campaign.
“Thank you [Cheney] for your generous in-kind contribution to my campaign. Your recent television ad urging Arizonans not to vote for me is doing just the opposite,” Lake said in a letter to Cheney. “Our campaign donations are skyrocketing and our website nearly crashed from traffic as people rushed to learn more about my plan to put Arizona first and join our historic political movement.”
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The City of Sevierville Police Department (SPD) announced this week that it would participate in the national No-Shave November program. SPD is extending its participation in the national program to include October.
No-Shave November is a ”web-based, non-profit organization devoted to growing cancer awareness and raising funds to support cancer prevention, research, and education,” according to its website. No-Shave November is a “month-long journey during which participants forgo shaving and grooming in order to evoke conversation and raise cancer awareness.”
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Republican Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, who is leading the GOP primary race, accused opponent Karrin Taylor Robson of tricking elderly Arizonans into donating to her campaign by pretending the money would go for “Trump, Truth Social & the Wall.” She also accused the mostly self-funded candidate, who is the other main contestant left in the primary, of fooling donors into committing to automatically renewing their donations each month.
In a video, Lake holds up over 1,000 pages of “potential victims.” She said she is warning retirees or those married to a retiree about “a fundraising ploy that they could have very likely gotten caught up in, especially if they are patriotic and worried about the direction this country is going.” She went on, “Thousands and thousands of Americans, most of them retirees, most of them living on Social Security, got tricked into donating to my opponent in one of those recurring donation schemes.”
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TRANSCRIPT: McCabe: Investigative journalist Peter Schweizer, in his new book Red-Handed, reports how the Chinese Communist Party has targeted American institutions of higher learning. Schweizer told The Star News Network how these institutions, after receiving funds from communist China, have worked to suppress criticism of the communist regime there and also have misreported or even failed to report millions of dollars received from China. Schweizer: Section 117 of the Education Act in 1965 is very explicit. It says that if U.S. colleges and universities take in foreign donations, substantial foreign donations, they are required to report those to the federal government. McCabe: Many American colleges fail to report any or all of their Chinese cash haul, Schweizer said. Such as Yale University and the millions of dollars it received from Joseph Tsai, co-founder of Alibaba and owner of the Brooklyn Nets. Schweizer: This is particularly applicable to China today, because hundreds of millions of dollars are flowing to American colleges and universities from Chinese nationals, many of them linked to the Chinese Communist Party and to the Chinese state. He’s donated hundreds of millions of dollars to Yale. He says that they come from his foundation based in California. The…
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Newly-released IRS filings show that a foundation funded by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg injected $7.1 million into local Minnesota electoral systems in 2020.
The Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) is funded by Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. The CTCL is a left-wing organization that spent a total of $350 million during the last presidential election on “grants to various jurisdictions throughout the United States to help them hire more staff, buy mail-in ballot processing machinery, and other measures they deemed necessary to properly handle the election amid the COVID-19 pandemic,” per Influence Watch.
The efforts of the CTCL have been honored by Time Magazine in its infamous article on how activists “fortified” the 2020 election and drawn the ire of Republican legislators who are calling for more transparency about the group’s activities and intentions.
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Following the deadly weekend tornado that swept through the South on Saturday, a Murfreesboro-based lawn company is collecting donations for families affected in and around Mayfield, Kentucky. Advanced Lawn Solutions will be accepting donations Wednesday, December 15 and Thursday, December 16 at the Advanced Lawn Solutions and Mikey’s Motors in Murfreesboro and Franklin.
“I grew up in Mayfield, so this hits me very hard,” Divisions Manager Ronnie Bone said in a statement shared with The Tennessee Star. “I still have lots of family there and fortunately they survived. But many children in the area were left with absolutely nothing. We will be loading ‘children-focused’ donations into our work trailers and delivering to those hardest hit by this tragic tornado.”
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On October 21st, the Giles County Sheriff Department announced that they will be hosting a spaghetti dinner and online silent auction benefit to help Lt. Shane Hunter with medical expenses.
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Thursday morning on the Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed Tennessee State Senator Kerry Roberts to the newsmakers line to talk about his upcoming 100-mile ride to help raise money for Waverly flood victims.
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Country music legend Dolly Parton is joining her friend Loretta Lynn in providing donations for flood victims of Humphreys County through her Smoky Mountain businesses.
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On Friday, The Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation announced the addition of 144 acres to T.O. Fuller State Park, a donation to the park by philanthropists Hugh and Margaret Jones Fraser and the Carrington Jones family of Memphis.
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On Thursday, country music artist Loretta Lynn revealed that her Hometown Rising concert on Monday raised more than $930,000 for middle Tennesseans impacted by the deadly flood in August that killed 20, left more than 270 homes destroyed, and damaged more than 500 structures.
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Thursday morning on the Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed former Congresswoman Diane Black and her husband, Dr. David Black, in studio to discuss their humble beginnings and the inspiration for 2ndvote.com.
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The political action committee for former Georgia state lawmaker and gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams has raised over $100 million in the first two years of its existence, making it one of the top fundraising PACs in the country.
The Fair Fight PAC was created by Abrams after she failed to win the 2018 Georgia governor’s race. She has since devoted much of her efforts toward fundraising and get-out-the voter efforts for fellow Democrats running for office.
Of the $104 million so far raised, $90 million was part of the 2020 election cycle, $8 million was for this year’s special Senate elections in Georgia, in which Democrats took both GOP-held seats, and the other $6 million has been raised since February, according to The Hill newspaper.
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Toyota announced Thursday that it will stop donating to Republicans who objected to certifying President Joe Biden’s victory in January.
The company said in a statement, first reported by The Detroit News, that its previous donations to Republican election objectors “troubled some stakeholders.”
The statement comes two weeks after an Axios report revealed that the Japanese automaker’s corporate PAC donated more to Republicans who contested Biden’s victory than any other company, doing so by a significant amount. It donated $55,000 to 37 objectors, over $25,000 more than any other corporation.
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U.S. Senate candidates Bill Hagerty and Manny Sethi have said much about each other’s political donations in recent weeks as they seek to prevail over the other in the upcoming Republican primary.
The Tennessee Star examined both candidate’s political donations at the state and federal levels since 2000. Members of the public may review the records for themselves at the Federal Election Commission’s website and at the Tennessee Online Campaign Finance website.
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President Donald Trump’s presidential campaign said Wednesday night that it raised over $5 million on the day House Democrats voted to impeach the president.
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Democratic Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren has made her opposition to pricey fundraisers a staple of her presidential campaign. “I don’t do big-dollar fundraisers at all,” she told “Tonight Show” host Jimmy Fallon on Wednesday.
But Warren has carved out a workaround to her pledge by speaking at high-dollar fundraisers for the Democratic National Committee (DNC), whose financial support in the general election will be crucial to Warren if she is the party’s nominee.
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by Andrew Kerr Vermont Sen. and 2020 presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’s charitable contributions fell far under the average for his income bracket the first year he reported earning more than one million dollars. Sanders released 10 years of tax returns Monday, revealing that he earned an average of $280,975 per year from 2009 through 2015, and that his income skyrocketed to $1,062,626 in 2016 due to sales of his best-selling book, “Our Revolution.” Sanders reported $10,600 in charitable contributions in 2016, making up slightly less than one percent of his reported income and falling under the $21,365 average charitable contribution for Americans who earned $250,000 or more that year, according to the latest available IRS data. The self-avowed Democratic-socialist purchased his third home in 2016 — a $575,000 lake-front property in Vermont, according to Fox News. The following year, Sanders donated $36,300 of his adjusted gross income of $1,131,925 to charity. Year Adjusted Gross Income Charitable Gifts Percent to Charity 2018 $561,293 $18,950 3.38% 2017 $1,131,925 $36,300 3.21% 2016 $1,062,626 $10,600 1.00% 2015 $240,610 $6,150 2.56% 2014 $205,271 $8,350 4.07% 2013 $278,779 $6,800 2.44% 2012 $280,954 $1,900 0.68% 2011 $324,870 $5,500 1.69% 2010 $321,596 $5,750 1.79% 2009 $314,742…
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Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) revealed Monday that her presidential campaign raised $5.2 million in the first fundraising quarter of 2019, which ended Friday. The Minnesota senator currently has $7 million in cash on hand after transferring some funds from her Senate campaign account. Klobuchar announced her candidacy on February 11, meaning she was able to raise the $5.2 million in roughly seven weeks, but the figure pales in comparison to some of her more high-profile competitors. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), for instance, raised $6 million in just the first 24 hours of his campaign. Former Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke, meanwhile, raised $9.4 million in the 18 days between announcing candidacy and the close of the quarter, according to Business Insider, which reports that O’Rourke raised $6.1 million in the first 24 hours. Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), who declared candidacy in January, raised a total of $12 million, while Sanders led the pack with $18.2 million in total donations. Klobuchar does have a slight lead over Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), who raised $5 million since launching his campaign. Dark-horse candidate Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana, raised $7 million in the first quarter of 2019. Klobuchar’s campaign said it had nearly…
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On Tuesday’s Tennessee Star Report with Steve Gill and Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 am to 8:00 am – Gill and Leahy talked to Veteran and the Trump Wall point man, Brian Kolfage about he and his teams new position on how to get the wall built. The men when into detail and touched upon how the funds would be transferred via a 501 (c) (4) non-profit initiative, who’s involved, and the price it would cost to get it done and the new position to build it instead of fund it. Kolfage also described how he was impressed by those conservatives billionaires who have donated their money and want to support and help push through this goal of a border wall. “None of us are being paid. We’re knocking this out and doing it for the American people,” confessed Kolfage. Gill: A guy who’s not willing to be patient and wait for the government to move things ahead on securing America’s borders, Brian Kolfage. He started a GoFundMe account to do the private sector construction of some wall and he’s joined us on the phone lines this morning. Brian…
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On Thursday’s Tennessee Star Report with Steve Gill and Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 am to 8:00 am – Steve and Mike spoke exclusively with Air Force veteran Brian Kolfage, a triple amputee and recipient of the Purple Heart, about his GoFundMe account in which, at the time of the interview (7:15 am central time) had raised over $4 million the four days since its launch to help “build the wall.” As the morning conversation continued, a donor made a contribution in the amount of $10,000 which was then the largest single donation so far. Later on Thursday, an anonymous donor topped that with a $50,000 donation. As of 10 p.m. central Thursday night, contributions had grown to over $10 million. You can see the current status of the GoFundMe account here. You can read the full transcript here: Leahy: We are joined now by Brian Kolfage who has a verified blue check Facebook page as a public figure, he’s a purple heart recipient, a triple amputee veteran. He put up this page, GoFundMe account just a couple days ago and already has three point one million dollars to…
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by Kevin Daley Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh will not accept a $600,000 award from a GoFundMe page established to support him as he faced allegations of sexual misconduct from several women. Conservative blogger Josh Hawkins, who launched the GoFundMe effort on Sept. 24, received a statement from former Kavanaugh law clerk Travis Lenkner indicating that the justice was flattered by the support but precluded from accepting the donations. Justice Kavanaugh will not accept any proceeds from the campaign, nor will he direct that any proceeds from the campaign be provided to any third party, the statement reads. Although he appreciates the sentiment, Justice Kavanaugh requests that you discontinue the use of his name for any fund-raising purpose. Supreme Court justices are not bound by the Code of Judicial Conduct, but ethics rules generally preclude judges from using their name and likeness for fundraising purposes. Hawkins hoped the donations would finance personal security for the Kavanaugh family and legal expenses incurred to mount the judge’s defense. Mrs. Ashley Kavanaugh received several death threats at her professional email address during the confirmation process, and the U.S. Marshal’s Service told reporters that they were tracking an uptick in threats against the…
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by Jason Hopkins Billionaire activist Tom Steyer is reportedly preparing to drop one final money bomb before the midterm elections as he attempts to boot as many Republicans from office as possible. Steyer, together with his wife, has given over $42 million this midterm election cycle to Democrats and other progressive causes, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. That sum makes him the most prolific Democratic donor by far, and the second highest political donor across the partisan spectrum, behind Republican booster Sheldon Adelson. Beyond supporting various Democratic campaigns and initiatives, Steyer has used his millions to spearhead two of his own campaigns: NextGen Climate Action and Need to Impeach. However, Steyer isn’t finished yet. Steyer is reportedly set to spend another $16 million in a last-minute campaign push before the Nov. 6 elections, according to a Steyer aide who spoke with CNBC. A large chunk of Steyer’s donations also have gone toward an enormous get-out-the-vote effort. His GOTV campaign is largely targeted toward young adults, a demographic group that typically doesn’t show up to the polls in large numbers. “We have 4 million people who we’re in contact with every day, he said to a local California news outlet…
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by Jason Hopkins Stacey Abrams, the Democratic nominee in Georgia’s gubernatorial election, is refusing to disclose the origin of millions of dollars donated to two foundations that helped propel her political career. Former Georgia House of Representatives Minority Leader Stacey Abrams is remaining mum on who funded two tax exempt non-profit organizations. Voter Access Institute and Third Sector Development, both created and led by the Democrat, received a total of $12.5 million in donations from 2013 to 2016. The purpose of Voter Access Institute was to locate “low-propensity” voters and persuade them to go to the polls. Third Sector Development organized a voter-registration initiative that targeted people of color. The two foundations paid Abrams nearly half a million dollars over the course of three years and introduced the former state representative to a national fundraising network. However, the gubernatorial nominee has refused to publish the names of donors involved in her non-profit work. In response to media inquiry, the campaign wouldn’t explain the reasoning behind withholding the names, but instead took a swipe at Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, her Republican opponent in the election. “I’m proud of New Georgia Project’s efforts to register, advocate for, and mobilize…
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