NEW: Ken Griffin gave $2 million to a Loeffler super PAC on Oct. 9, the day after the WSJ reported that his company made a major buyout that needed to be approved by the NYSE, which Loeffler's husband owns. Me @Salon

A month prior, Griffin gave her $1M. The day the sale went through, he gave to her & Perdue's runoff. No evidence of illegality, but Loeffler's conflicts of interest are inescapable: her husband owns NYSE, she used to work in the industry, & sits on the committee that oversees it
What's more, Griffin donated millions to the super PAC even though Loeffler didn't need the money: She was self-funding. (She loaned her own campaign $23 million — compared to raising a total $3.8 million from everyone else in the world not named Kelly Loeffler.)
The only other person to give more to Loeffler than Griffin was her husband — again, who owns the NYSE. And Griffin's $2M donation was the Republican megadonor's tenth-largest of all time. And this was after MONTHS of headlines about Loeffler's stock trades and conflicts.
Next, Griffin threatened to sue Salon for defamation if we pointed out the arrogance and ignorance of Wall Street on full display. Again, after months of headline reporting about this exact senator and this exact issue.
Who is Ken Griffin? Well, he's one of the 50 richest people in America. He runs a hedge fund and a company that executes trades for more than half of the stock listings on the NYSE. That company increased Griffin's wealth by $5 billion this year alone, in the middle of a pandemic
So Griffin threatened to sue if I pointed out the timing. In October, he hired a spokesperson who once ran as a Democrat in NJ & is pretty well known in journalistic circles. Why would a GOP billionaire megadonor hire a known liberal spox just before a Dem administration? 🤔
The irony — this spokesperson had only months before he was hired insinuated that Loeffler and Perdue had literally *committed crimes* with their stock trades, and also attacked Wall Street's greed.
In short, these people have the arrogance to believe, truly believe, that they can do what they want with their money — in fully disclosed campaign donations — and bully journalists into silence when they dare to point out what they did, knowingly and publicly.
lmao https://t.co/L1h13nsNtm

More from Politics

My piece in the NY Times today: "the Trump administration is denying applications submitted to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services at a rate 37 percent higher than the Obama administration did in 2016."

Based on this analysis: "Denials for immigration benefits—travel documents, work permits, green cards, worker petitions, etc.—increased 37 percent since FY 2016. On an absolute basis, FY 2018 will see more than about 155,000 more denials than FY 2016."
https://t.co/Bl0naOO0sh


"This increase in denials cannot be credited to an overall rise in applications. In fact, the total number of applications so far this year is 2 percent lower than in 2016. It could be that the higher denial rate is also discouraging some people from applying at all.."

Thanks to @gsiskind for his insightful comments. The increase in denials, he said, is “significant enough to make one think that Congress must have passed legislation changing the requirements. But we know they have not.”

My conclusion:
THREAD:
Good afternoon, followers of frivolous election litigation. There's a last-minute entry in the competition for dumbest pre-inauguration lawsuit - a totally loony effort to apparently leave the entire USA without a government.

We'll start with the complaint in a minute.

But first, I want to give you a quick explanation for why I'm going to keep talking about these cases even after the inauguration.

They're part of an ongoing effort - one that's not well-coordinated but is widespread - to discredit our fundamental system of government.

It's a direct descendent, in more ways than one, of birtherism. And here's the thing about birtherism. It might have been a joke to a lot of people, but it was extremely pernicious. It obviously validated the racist "not good enough to be President" crowd. But that wasn't all.

Don't get me wrong, that was bad enough. Validating racism helped put the kind of shitbird who would tweet this from an official government account into power. But it didn't stop


(Also, if you agree with Pompeo about multiculturalism - the legendary melting pot - not being what this country is all about, you need to stop following me now. And maybe go somewhere and think about your life choices and what made you such a tool.)

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