That Bourbon Trail Tour that Ray Pickett Attended Has Now Produced Indictments

 

In May 2024, investigative reporter Bryan Anderson named Watauga Rep. Ray Pickett as among the North Carolina General Assembly Republicans who spent a wild time visiting distilleries around Frankfort, Ky., all expenses paid (which were considerable), but paid by whom? (The trip itself was outed on Reddit by a disgruntled employee at one distillery who described the visiting legislators as a bunch of swaggering Southern yahoos disturbing the peace and vomiting in sinks.)

The answer to who paid and was it legal came yesterday when a Wake County grand jury handed down four indictments of Raleigh lobbyists who induced companies they represented to underwrite the entire trip, thus violating the gift ban in North Carolina law that's supposed to keep our legislators from being wined and dined for legislative favors. (Or "Bourbon-ed and boiled" might be the better phrase.) 

After all, the pious, stated excuse for the whole trip to Kentucky was to celebrate "conservative business values," which (we've heard said by many people) are easier to celebrate in an alcoholic haze.

The charges against the lobbyists are mere misdemeanors, showing just how seriously our laws take gifting and grifting elected representatives, all of whom are scot-free in the affair. No NC lawmakers have been charged with anything, though some of them may have some 'splaining to do for not reporting everything on their disclosure forms.

Corruption Does Not Slack Off. Corruption Does Not Sleep

The breath-taking, totally-out-in-the-open grift and graft of Trump 2.0 has not yet come into focus for far too many low-info voters. So I'm especially grateful for compilations like this one by Heather Digby Parton:

Politics was immensely lucrative for the Trump family during the first term, but that looks like chicken feed compared to what they're doing now. This time it's no holds barred, straight-up grift and corruption in the billions, featuring foreign governments, sleazy scam artists and a big play in the arcane world of cryptocurrency.

Mind you, some things don't change: Trump is still promoting his properties every chance he gets. This time he's also involved in LIV Golf, which is also funded by the Saudis and holds several of its tournaments at Trump's golf resorts. Trump makes money from the tournaments coming and going, both as an investor and as the host. It's a sweet little grift that gives the Saudi sponsors an easy way to stuff more money into Trump's pockets. But honestly, that's nothing compared to the rest of Trump's ongoing involvement in the Middle East....

But that's not where the real action is. The Trump sons are heavily involved in crypto and are using every bit of their access to make some serious bucks. Lipton and company have reported extensively on their play with the presidential memecoin called $TRUMP, which seems like a quick and dirty con that has resulted in thousands of ordinary people losing lots of money while Trump and a few other investors made a bundle. Now they've taken it to another level, holding an auction in which whoever buys the most craptastic coins gets to have dinner with Trump and a select few get to visit the White House. This could hardly be a more obvious way for rich people to siphon money directly into Trump's coffers, and so much more convenient than a paper bag full of cash.

And then there's the Trump-owned crypto company, World Liberty Financial. Its co-founders, alongside Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., include the son of real estate magnate Steve Witkoff, who happens to be Trump's designated envoy to Russia, Israel, Iran and almost everywhere else. These guys have their hands different areas of the crypto world, but World Liberty's primary goal is to get the type of cryptocurrency called a stablecoin officially recognized as a legitimate financial instrument.

Trump has called on Congress to pass something called the GENIUS Act, which would do just that. Immediately thereafter, World Liberty started selling its own stable coin known as USD1; its price went through the roof, netting the Trumps another bundle. At the time, it was widely assumed that Congress would going to pass the law, but after the reporting in the Times, Democrats who'd previously backed it balked (along with a couple of Republicans) and this week the bill failed in the Senate. Apparently the stench of Trump at both ends of this deal — as the regulator in chief and the financier being regulated — was just too pungent.

 

A Tin Horn Dictator Corrupts Justice

 

If anyone out there was undecided on whether Trump is operationalizing a precise, coordinated plan to destroy our democracy so he can rule until he dies, the move to shut down ActBlue, the primary way Democrats’ campaigns are funded, should be the final proof point.

--Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.)

The tool

So Trump did a new ExecOrder addressed directly to Blonde Avenger Pam Bondi -- the Department of Justice is now clearly an important arm for retribution (or just plain ole persecution). Trump ordered the DOJ to investigate ActBlue, the fund-raising platform that practically every Democratic candidate uses to raise campaign cash. Now, when Bondi takes the first step in complying with Trump's desires -- which she's undoubtedly already done -- this is not the pursuit of justice. This is using government to harass and intimidate political enemies.

ActBlue was founded in 2004. According to Wikipedia,

Both the 2016 and 2020 Democratic presidential nominees, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, used ActBlue during their primary and general election campaigns. Bernie Sanders' 2016 and 2020 primary campaigns also used ActBlue for fundraising. Sanders' use of ActBlue was particularly notable as it represented the first time a major Democratic presidential candidate eschewed money from super PACs in favor of grassroots fundraising. This strategy would later be replicated by other Democratic political figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.If Pam Bondi does not only what Trump ordered, but also what Trump wants from an investigation of Act Blue, then we truly have arrived at a tyrant's picnic.

The cautious language of reporter Maggie Haberman et al.:

The Republican scrutiny of ActBlue has focused on claims — thus far unsubstantiated — that it allows straw and foreign donations. Federal election law bars straw donations [made in someone else's name], and it prohibits foreign citizens without permanent residency from donating directly to federal political candidates or political action committees.

A joint statement from the DNC, the DSCC, and the DCCC stated that Trump’s ExecOrder was “designed to undermine democratic participation .... He’s trying to block lawful grass-roots donations from supporters giving just $5 or $10 to candidates who oppose him while further empowering the corrupt billionaires who already control his administration.”

You see why Trump set out early to discredit and/or silence the judiciary. He's becoming invincible, he thinks. He can't be criminally charged for anything (thank you, John Roberts), and he has the entire mechanism of official prosecution at his beck and call. Good God Almighty! The midterms can't come fast enough.

"To Undo What We’ve Done.” Tim Moore Mis-appoints a Crony

 

Isn't cronyism inherently corrupt? I feel obliged to at least try to keep up with the new scandals that continuously sprout wherever House Speaker Tim Moore treads. His plans for Congress are well known, though he continues to play bashful about actually running for the newly drawn 14th CD that includes his home in Gaston County. Everyone even partially warm to the touch knows he's lusted for a seat in Congress, which he's now describing as only one of his many options. "Had we but world enough and time, this coyness, Timmy, were no crime." 

Kenneth Robert "Rob" Davis

According to Speaker Moore's fellow NCGA member Sen. Danny Britt (Lumberton), Speaker Moore hisownself put a name on a five-page list of appointments to important state government jobs, in particular an old college buddy and long-time friend Kenneth Robert Davis (goes by "Rob"), appointed to the Disciplinary Hearing Commission of the State Bar. All those appointments got voted on last week. Reporter Bryan Anderson discovered that the Disciplinary Hearing Commission (just this last May) found that as a lawyer Rob Davis had "failed to maintain accurate identification of all funds in his trust account, had mismanaged client funds, and fell behind on filing and paying several years of state and federal income taxes."

Sen. Danny Britt fingered Tim Moore as behind the appointment, because the appointment itself has become toxic enough already that fellow Republican Britt --also closely connected to Rob Davis in local politics; Davis is a county attorney for Robeson -- needed someone to blame not named Danny Britt. Britt's conversation with reporter Anderson included this:

 

Britt said Davis’s appointment came directly from Speaker Moore, and that Davis hadn’t requested it.

“He had not requested to be placed on this committee,” Britt said. “It kind of came out of the blue to him. He didn’t request to serve on it, but he appreciates being asked to serve on the committee. … I did not know he was nominated until I saw it in the appointment bill language. I know for a fact it was Tim Moore’s decision to put him on there and nobody else’s.”

For his part, Moore ain't talking (at least not to Anderson), though he did issue a statement last Wednesday that "he’d revisit the appointment" (whatever that means ... sounds juicy!). In the meantime the legal community and others involved in civic government are gaping at the appointment of a metaphorical jailbird to the new role as jailer (as political scientist Chris Cooper put it). Even though he was willing to finger Moore as culprit, Britt wants to peddle the narrative that Davis's transgressions were just "a minor bookkeeping thing."

Sen. Danny Britt

Rob Davis was a Republican member of the Bladen County Board of Elections during the great ballot harvesting scandal of 2018 to benefit the Rev. Mark Harris's campaign for Congress in CD9. After the State Board of Elections conducted its investigation of McCrae Dowless and his activities, the SBOE vacated all the sitting members on county BOEs involved in the Dowless multi-county shenanigans, just for a clean slate, apparently, and not because everyone was guilty of something. NCGOP Chair (at the time), Robin Hayes, appealed to the SBOE to keep Davis on the board but was denied. Asked very recently by reporter Anderson, Hayes now sez he has no memory of Davis. “The name doesn’t even ring a bell.” Ouch.

Lawmakers won't be back in Raleigh until November 29. In the meantime, Davis's appointment to the Disciplinary Hearing Commission is officially the law. Anderson reports that Davis himself is quite aware of the embarrassment and is seeking legal advice on how best to handle it, or simply not take the job. "Yeah! That's the ticket,"sez Britt, who actually did say out loud that Davis could "just choose to not participate in any commission activities":

“If he doesn’t get seated, doesn’t go to any meetings, doesn’t participate, then he’s a nonparticipating member and that’s really no issue,” Britt said. “I don’t think there’s anything we can do between now and [November 29] to undo what we’ve done.”

How to deal with the wounds cut by corrupt politicians: If a public servant doesn't do his job, that's a solution for a corrupt appointment!

These People Are Not What They Think They Are -- They Are What They Hide

 

"A legislator, while in office or after leaving office, shall not be required to reveal or to consent to reveal any document, supporting document, drafting request, or information request made or received by that legislator while a legislator." 

--A paragraph slipped into the new state budget (reporting of Travis Fain)

Because secrecy is next to godliness? 

The NC Open Government Coalition said of this particular provision that it "codifies a broad, sweeping legislative privilege that exempts members of the General Assembly from the public records law in its entirety."

Ah! Because secrecy is essential for authoritarianism.

The Republicans also erased an existing state law that makes communications behind redistricting decisions public once the process has wrapped up -- so voters can know which Democratic (or recalcitrant Republican) legislators were fingered for double-bunking or for simple elimination via partisan packing.

A pack of creeps in Raleigh mean to have it all their way. And they assume that the governor will sign the budget bill because he wants Medicaid expansion more than he hates the other shit, so Republicans take the opportunity to slip in all sorts of other mischief.

Public Corruption in North Carolina

 

Political corruption remains a big motivating factor for how voters view their government. We just came off four years of some of the most astounding, out-in-the-ever-loving-open political corruption in our nation's capitol, and that display of civic putrefaction must have had something to do with the resounding loss of power in Washington for a Republican Party that sold its moral compass to gain favor with a Golden Ass. That spectacle of money-grubbing self-interest rivaled nothing in our history so much as the Robber Baron period at the end of the 19th Century, which also happened to coincide with the Rise of the Corporations.

Not surprisingly, a new statewide poll commissioned by Carolina Forward finds overwhelming evidence that the voting public in North Carolina sees public corruption as "a major problem" (and how you choose to define "major" is the whole ballgame). Furthermore, this poll finds corporations, and their political $$, fingered as a major cause of public corruption. The money game in politics could spoil a nunnery, let alone a 25-year-old Congressman from Hendersonville, say.

I'm not able to reproduce the poll's handsome pie charts here, but they're worth studying. Some 67% responded that corruption in our state government is a major problem (vs. 21% "minor problem"), and a whopping 80% say that large corporations have too much power in the state legislature (vs. 8% "Not too much"). Since that watershed election of 2010 and the illegal gerrymandering that followed it, the state legislature has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Berger Moore, a casual partnership that operates with an iron fist and plenty of ruthlessness (another name for corruption, I could argue).

Item. The leader of a giant insurance conglomerate corrupts the chair of the NCGOP, who in turn attempts to corrupt the Secretary of Insurance. The insurance executive is now in jail, the GOP chair, pardoned by Donald J. Trump. Many others from both political parties (yuck!) also benefitted from the insurance executive's generosity and did not give the money back.

Item. Harnett County Rep. David Lewis, chairman of the influential House Rules Committee in Raleigh, charged with federal financial crimes -- essentially embezzlement from his own campaign funds to pay for his personal life, which had been (just incidentally) difficult to keep straight and even, so a bunch of money went into Lewis's pocket where it didn't belong. ("But he needed it, Judge!") Rep. Lewis pleaded guilty, took a deal, resigned his House seat, and served no time.

Item. The multitudinous "deals" House Speaker Tim Moore has allegedly made, based on his power to move shit. Moore is the Gaston County brass monkey who turned to gold in Raleigh.

Item. North Carolina's newest Secretary of Labor, Josh Dobson of McDowell County (Marion), has ethics allegations (double-dipping) filed against him with the Legislative Ethics Committee less than a month before last fall's election. Luckily, the Legislative Ethics Committee is also run by his fellow Republicans. Nothing has come of the complaint so far.

Item. The Ashe County Sheriff scandal of 2017, wherein a new Republican sheriff appointed to the office by the all-Republican Ashe County Commission to follow the administration of a popular Democratic sheriff who retired. Said new sheriff is pretty quickly facing felony charges, followed by misdemeanor charges for refusing to comply with a public records request from WBTV. That sheriff agreed to resign, with charges dropped.

I could go on. I haven't even touched on the voter suppression efforts of the Watauga County Republican Party, starting in 2013, and the never chronicled election of 1998 in Watauga, when the corruption of a local ambulance service fueled a Democratic flip of the County Commission. The stories I know!

The Utility of the Carolina Forward Poll

Whether that 80% who disdain the outsized power of corporations, overlapping with the 67% who say public corruption is "a major problem" in North Carolina -- whether those pluralities ever put two-and-two together and actually vote their ethics -- that's a well with no water in it. We've maybe become so used to public corruption, the plain daylight buying of votes and offices, that we hardly even notice unless the corruption touches us directly. (All public corruption does touch us directly, but that's a hair-splitting for another day.)

Raleigh Pay-To-Play

Clear and to the point:

The consumer finance industry, which recently succeeded in persuading the Republican-led state legislature to pass a bill that it wanted, has been a major contributor to GOP lawmakers in recent years.

An analysis of state Board of Elections data by Democracy North Carolina, a voter rights and campaign finance watchdog group, found that people associated with the consumer loan industry and two industry political action committees gave at least $530,000 to legislators and party committees over the past four years. Of that amount, 92 percent went to Republicans.

How Did Virginia Foxx Vote?

That didn't take long. Last night, in a secret vote, the Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives voted to gut the independent Office of Congressional Ethics, which was set up in 2008 following congressional scandals. We don't know what the vote was, because it was secret. We don't know how Rep. Virginia Foxx voted, because the vote was secret, peckerheads!

It was a preliminary vote involving the rules that the majority Republicans can -- and will -- impose on the operation of the House. The package of rules has to be voted on again today in the full body. One wonders whether enough Republicans opposed the very bad "optics" of this move to join the Democrats in voting this down. We do know from inside sources that both Speaker Paul Ryan and Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy spoke against the motion.

Power breeds corruption. We've known all along that the Trump administration is likely to be the most corrupt in history, with more self-serving conflicts of interest than genes in the human genome, and now the Republicans in the U.S. House seem to be paving the primrose path to hell. We look for weak accountability over wrong-doing.

The Office of Congressional Ethics was established following a string of "bribery allegations against Representatives Duke Cunningham, Republican of California; William J. Jefferson, Democrat of Louisiana; and Bob Ney, Republican of Ohio. All three were ultimately convicted and served time in jail."

Instead of an independent agency conducting investigations, we'll now have the House Ethics Committee, a bi-partisan bunch which has been more than just reluctant in the past to lower the boom on corruption. They pussy-foot, because they're foxes guarding the henhouse, and the American public are the chickens.