Former Trump campaign deputy manager David Bossie, who Axios recently exposed as milking donors by flaunting President Trump’s name, is trying to repair and revive his controversial fundraising operation.
The bottom line: Bossie suspended fundraising after Axios revealed that very little of the money he was raising was going to political campaigns. Trump was livid, forcing the Bossie retreat. Now, Bossie tells us he is making several changes — presumably to get back into Trump’s good graces and back into the fundraising business.
The impact: Bossie directed his political group, the Presidential Coalition, to cease all fundraising on May 7, 2 days after Axios published the findings of its investigation, done in collaboration with the Campaign Legal Center (CLC).
- That's in part thanks to the president, who personally authorized the Trump campaign to issue a blistering statement, without naming Bossie, condemning "any organization that deceptively uses the president's name, likeness, trademarks, or branding and confuses voters," in the wake of our story.
- "The president was pissed," a Trump campaign official told Axios. "He doesn’t like the idea that his supporters would be tricked into donating to things they thought were the campaign ... and he doesn’t like it when people benefit from using his name, especially financially."
The fallout: Bossie told Axios that the group is "currently redesigning our fundraising programs, because of my longstanding relationship with the president and because of my desire to only help the president and the administration."
- The Presidential Coalition will no longer reference "The Trump Coalition" in its mailers and fundraising materials, Bossie said. He claims they were going to stop using that language after 2019 anyway, "due to the regulatory regime."
- The group will also be far more clear that the Presidential Coalition is an affiliate of Citizens United: "We will print it in our mailers and on the envelopes to be even more transparent," Bossie said.
- Despite these changes, Bossie still claims that he doesn't think "there was anything whatsoever that was done outside of the appropriate fundraising avenues."
- Read Bossie's full response.
By the numbers: The Presidential Coalition's average daily contributions plunged from over $20,000 per day in early May to under $2,000 per day by the end of June, according to a new Axios/CLC analysis of the organization's latest IRS filing from the first half of 2019....
- Worth noting: The majority of donations made to the Presidential Coalition (62%) in the first half of 2019 came from unitemized, small donors who gave less than $200 in a year — similar to the contributions from previous years. The dates of those small-donor