Jan. 13: Obama Bros Push Wildfire Charity Scam

Israel and Hamas "close" to deal; Bass broke promise not to travel; RIP WaPo

Jan 13, 2025

The Big Story

In our Dec. 16 edition, we highlighted comments by the Democratic fundraiser Lindy Li to the effect that Democratic donors were “pissed at Obama” and the former Obama aides who helped raise and spend more than a billion dollars on the 2024 election only to see Kamala Harris suffer the worst electoral defeat for a Democrat in decades. In Li’s telling, Obamaworld had become, in practice, a corrupt and “incestuous” money-laundering scheme, bilking donors for record-breaking amounts of cash in what they knew all along was a losing campaign. As she told journalist Mark Halperin, “There are people who are now multimillionaires as a result of the Harris campaign, and we know exactly who they are.” Now, another group of former Obama aides appears to be running a similar playbook—this time using the Los Angeles wildfires as the fundraising pretext.

On Friday, Jon Favreau of “Pod Save America”—the podcast hosted by several former Barack Obama aides that functions a bit like the Democratic Party’s version of the Arachnid brain bug from Starship Troopers—sat down for an interview with California Gov. Gavin Newsom to discuss the “catastrophic wildfires wreaking havoc in Los Angeles.” In a subsequent post promoting the episode, the “Pod Save America” X provided a URL for those who wanted to “help those impacted by the wildfires” by donating to a handful of local charities, including the Los Angeles Fire Department Foundation and the Los Angeles chapter of United Way.

We live in a golden age for easy, transparent online donations, meaning that all the “Pod Save” bros would need to do is either link directly to the donation pages for the charities or, perhaps, set up a GoFundMe. Instead, the URL went to a landing page for the Vote Save America Action PAC, a “dark money” 501(c)(4), that routed the donations through ActBlue Charities, the 501(c)(3) affiliate of the broader ActBlue Democratic fundraising and PAC empire. Why? Well, for one thing, ActBlue takes a 3.95% cut of all donations. But as the Republican consultant Luke Thompson pointed out in a series of blistering X posts over the weekend, the more serious problem is that the “Pod Save” bros are using the wildfires for lead generation.

How so? By directing users to the webpage controlled by the Vote Save America Action PAC, they can use cookies to track everyone who lands on the page to retarget them with digital ads later on. If someone gives money, ActBlue can save their payment information, including their credit card token, within a back-end library shared by every element of the broader ActBlue empire. That way, if the ActBlue 527 PAC or the ActBlue Civics 501(c)(4)—or another group using the ActBlue fundraising platform—makes contact with the donor in the future, they already have the donor’s payment and contact information on file, decreasing the friction of the transaction and making conversion easier.

That’s pretty scummy, but it’s not nearly as scummy as the possibility that Favreau et al could be using the charitable donations for the wildfires to increase their ability to spend on politics. A 501(c)(4), like Vote Save America Action, is technically a “social welfare” organization in the eyes of the Internal Revenue Service, meaning that it is legally required to spend more than half of its expenditures on charity, rather than on electioneering. (In practice, most c4s abide by a 40-60 rule.) So if, in theory, the wildfire donations went to a segregated account affiliated with Vote Save America Action, and the PAC then turned around and “donated” this money to 501(c)(3)s, those “donations” would count as charitable giving in the IRS, thus raising the amount of money the PAC can legally spend on electioneering. That’s just in theory, of course—but it is the sort of question you raise when you decide not to solicit the charitable donations in a normal way.

And it wasn’t just the “Pod Save” bros who got in on the action. On Saturday, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren posted a similar link, this time directing to a “Warren for Senate” landing page routing donations through ActBlue. Newsom himself got in on the fun, urging supporters to disregard fire-related misinformation by consulting californiafirefacts.com, a website set up by his campaign committee that similarly routes donations through ActBlue. Newsom was even less subtle than Warren or Favreau, leaving the following message at the bottom of the “contribution rules” listed on his website’s California Fire Foundation donation page:

The Campaign for Democracy is Newsom’s “leadership PAC,” a type of PAC used by ambitious politicians to donate to members of their party across the nation and to “lay the groundwork for their own campaigns for higher office,” according to OpenSecrets. In other words, Newsom is using the wildfires to fundraise for his own anticipated presidential run in 2028.

We find it hard to disagree with Thompson’s verdict that this is “impossible scumbaggery” and “completely irredeemable” behavior. We just hope that at some point, the voters of California will catch on.

IN THE BACK PAGES: Walter Russell Mead on how Trump destroyed the GOP establishment by taking Southern politics national

The Rest

→Israel and Hamas are “close” to a cease-fire deal, according to a slew of reports in the American and Israeli press. We’ve seemingly been close to a deal for about a year now, so we won’t be holding our breath on this one. What we know is that the Israelis have received a draft proposal from Qatar, one that is “broadly acceptable” to Israel (per The Times of Israel) and has been approved by the Hamas leadership abroad. It now needs the approval of Muhammed Sinwar, Hamas’ de facto ruler in Gaza. Confirmed details are scarce, but the deal is reportedly similar in broad terms to the deal floated by the Biden administration in May 2024; it would involve Hamas’ release of Israeli hostages in three stages in exchange for hundreds or thousands of Palestinian security prisoners (the numbers vary by report). One remaining sticking point, according to The Times of Israel, is whether the Israelis will commit to ending the war, which makes us think the deal isn’t as close as some reports suggest, given that this has been a sticking point since May. But The Times of Israel reports that Trump Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff had a “tense” meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the weekend “during which the former leaned hard on the Israeli premier to accept compromises necessary to secure a hostage deal by the January 20 U.S. presidential inauguration.” So we’ll see if Bibi is willing to offer more concessions to what he no doubt expects will be a much friendlier administration.

→We noted last week that when the Los Angeles wildfires broke out, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass was in Ghana to attend a presidential inauguration. One of our Tablet colleagues remarked to us at the time that she believed it was inappropriate for mayors to travel internationally while in office, which was an opinion apparently shared by none other than Bass, circa 2021. Here’s what Bass told The New York Times in an October 2021 interview, shortly after announcing her candidacy:

Not only would I of course live here [if elected], but I also would not travel internationally—the only places I would go would be D.C., Sacramento, San Francisco and New York, in relation to L.A.

In addition to traveling to Ghana, Mayor Bass has traveled once to Mexico, for the inauguration of President Claudia Sheinbaum, and three times to Paris, including for the 2024 Summer Olympics. As Tablet’s Armin Rosen noted in a 2020 profile, written when Bass was on the short list for Biden’s vice-presidential picks, the mayor has long been a left-wing globe-trotter. As a young activist in the early 1970s, Bass was a “leader” and “organizer” for the Southern California section of the Venceremos Brigade, which organized trips for American leftists to Cuba, where they were targeted for recruitment by Cuban intelligence. Bass later pivoted to nonprofit activism before becoming a California state congresswoman in 2005.

→Bass cut funding for the Los Angeles Fire Department, even after being warned by Fire Chief Kristin Crowley that the department was understaffed relative to the city’s population and that emergency response times had been increasing for years. “In many ways, the current staffing, deployment model, and size of the LAFD have not changed since the 1960s,” Crowley wrote in a November memo obtained by The Washington Free Beacon. She added that the city had only 0.91 firefighters per 1,000 residents, well below the 1.51-1.81 recommended by the National Fire Protection Association, and that 61% of the department’s firefighters “failed to meet the 4-minute first response time, a national firefighting standard,” again according to the Beacon. Nevertheless, in 2024, Bass cut the LAFD’s budget by $17 million, though her office has claimed that she increased the LAFD budget last year by subsequently securing $53 million in expected firefighter pay raises. According to an X thread from L.A. City Controller Kenneth Mejia, however, none of that $53 million has been transferred to the LAFD’s operating budget, and indeed $35 million of it has gone to “mainly pay for the City’s Liability Payouts and litigation / outside counsel costs.” The Beacon notes that the City of Los Angeles had scrubbed Crowley’s memo from its website by Saturday night, two days after it was cited in an article by The New York Times.

→Videos of the Day:

For all the deserved criticism directed at state and local governments, aerial firefighters from the LAFD, California National Guard, and even Quebec have been doing heroic work in suppressing the wildfires, some of which has been captured on camera. In the first clip, we can see a DC-10 Air Tanker, which can hold up to 9,400 gallons of water or fire retardant, doing a low drop in the hills outside of Los Angeles (we didn’t add the music, but it works):

In the second clip, a plane identified as a California Air National Guard C-130J Super Hercules modified with a Modular Airborne Firefighting System (credit to @sentdefender on X) can be seen dropping a line of fire retardant on the Palisades fire. Note the stall warnings at 0:17 and 1:22:

→Stat of the Day: 11%

That was The Washington Post’s average number of daily users in the middle of 2024, expressed as a percentage of its daily active users in January 2021 (2.5 million, down from 22.5 million), according to an item in the Monday edition of Semafor’s media newsletter. The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that the Post lost about $100 million in 2024, and the paper has recently seen an exodus of writers and reporters, including Jennifer Rubin, who announced on Monday that she would be leaving the Post to join “The Contrarian,” a new Substack launched by anti-Trump lawfare architect Norm Eisen to “combat, with every fiber of our being, the authoritarian threat that we face.”

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