It’s what Hillary Clinton was (wrongly) accused of doing for her family’s global charity.
GDS actually auctioned off his time to big money donors. He might as well have opened up an Only Fans account:
Florida governor and 2024 Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis was “personally involved” in “efforts to effectively auction off leisure time” to wealthy donors who were seeking to “influence” policies in the Sunshine State — and much of it was recorded in writing by DeSantis staffers, Isaac Arnsdorf and Josh Dawsey reveal in Sunday‘s Washington Post.
After “DeSantis took office in 2019, his political team made a list of the state’s top 40 lobbyists and about 100 of their ‘Suggested Clients to target’ for political contributions, according to a fundraising document reviewed by The Washington Post,” the correspondents write. “Next to the name of each lobbyist was a dollar figure, an ‘ask’ that the DeSantis team hoped they would raise based on their book of clients, whose names were also listed in the document and included large corporations such as Disney and Motorola, as well as sports organizations, billionaires and interest groups with extensive business before the state.”
DeSantis’ “fundraisers,” Arnsdorf and Dawsey explain, “hoped that nine lobbyists would raise at least $1 million each for DeSantis’ political action committee, the state and the Republican Governors Association, according to the document, which was drafted by Heather Barker, a top DeSantis aide and his primary fundraiser, and shared with others.”
DeSantis’ affinity for hitting the links was the bedrock of his team’s plan to woo financial contributors, whom the Post says “envisioned that some golf outings with the governor would net contributions of $75,000 or more, according to other emails among DeSantis’ political advisers.”
Golf, however, was not the only activity with the governor that was dangled in front of DeSantis’ monied supporters.
“The 2019 document detailed other avenues for securing contributions. ‘METHODS FOR FIRMS TO DELIVER SUPPORT: Golf, lunch, meetings, dinner, tours, events, etc. — Each have a threshold (ex. Golf $25k per person, which is a deal),’ reads the document, whose authenticity was confirmed by multiple people with knowledge of it,” per the Post. “Like others interviewed for this story, the people spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.”
Arnsdorf and Dawsey note that while legal experts told them that DeSantis’s actions may not be explicitly illegal, they “undermine his attempt to portray himself as someone who would do a better job taking on special interests than former president Donald Trump, the polling leader in the GOP race. ‘We’e drained the swamp in here,’ he said in a recent Fox News interview about his time as governor in Florida. ‘One of the things he did not do was drain the swamp.'”
He is the swamp. So is Trump. This whole “drain the swamp” thing by Republicans is absurd.