On the one hand, it's 2020, Trump is President and the Democratic Party is super focused on defeating him – candidates that have attacked others haven't fared well.
There is no other hand. https://t.co/7iLcr1xxnu
— Neera Tanden (@neeratanden) January 13, 2020
Warren is an unelectable whore! Biden is an elderly racist! Buttigieg is a larval robot! Sure, it’s crunch time in Iowa, but I had been expecting this kind of noisy media-friendly shite-flinging from the Sanders campaign ever since a certain AP article appeared last week — “Shadow group provides Sanders super PAC support he scorns”:
Bernie Sanders says he doesn’t want a super PAC. Instead, he has Our Revolution, a nonprofit political organization he founded that functions much the same as one.
Like a super PAC, which is shorthand for super political action committee, Our Revolution can raise unlimited sums from wealthy patrons that dwarf the limits faced by candidates and conventional PACs. Unlike a super PAC, however, the group doesn’t have to disclose its donors — a stream of revenue commonly referred to as “dark money.”
Now, with less than one month to go before the Iowa caucuses, Our Revolution appears to be skirting campaign finance law, which forbids groups founded by federal candidates and officeholders from using large donations to finance federal election activity, including Sanders’ 2020 bid.…
…[W]hile Warren has come under fire for courting wealthy financiers in her past Senate campaigns, Sanders and Our Revolution have largely avoided scrutiny during the primary, even as he has accelerated his criticism of others, among them Biden, for relying on super PACs founded by their allies.
In the case of Our Revolution, which aims to boost voter turnout for Sanders, the Vermont senator was the founder…
The campaign finance act says groups “directly or indirectly established” by federal officeholders or candidates can’t “solicit, receive, direct, transfer, or spend funds” for federal electoral activity that exceeds the “limitations, prohibitions, and reporting requirements” of the law. Those limits are currently set at $2,800 for candidates and $5,000 for political action committees.
Our Revolution has taken in nearly $1 million from donors who gave more than the limits and whose identities it hasn’t fully disclosed, according to tax filings for 2016, 2017 and 2018. Much of it came from those who contributed six-figure sums.
It won’t have to publicly reveal its 2019 fundraising until after this year’s presidential election. And money it raises between now and then won’t have to be disclosed until the following year…
Read the whole thing. I’d been waiting to see how much this story would be amplified outside sources like the Daily Caller, or whether the Sanders campaign would mount a defense. But that defense, as ever with St. Bernie, turns out to be “I HAVE NO FLAWS, unlike every other Democratic candidate!”
So, no, I don’t expect to hear Word One about this during tomorrow’s debate — the other candidates can’t afford to waste resources fighting a million bad-faith assaults on their staff and volunteers from the Bernie mob, and the media has no interest in damping down such an ‘exciting’ candidate. They’re saving their ammo until, in Chris Cillizza’s dreams, it’s a two-army battle between the Oval Office Occupant and his mirror-world doppelganger. And as long as he can keep squirreling away money for his ongoing, never-ending national campaign (and his fourth house), Sanders is perfectly happy to take advantage.