>> In the final months of Trump's campaign,
it was big news that he had burned through campaign cash and had to pull ad buys that
the campaign was planning on doing in order to try to win reelection.
And there was a lot of questions regarding where all that money went, he fundraised quite a bit.
Well, now we're learning through Business Insider that Jared Kushner created a shell company,
and then funneled campaign money to that shell company. And because that money was funneled to
a shell company, we don't know exactly who it was paid for or to, or what it was used for.
So let me give you details that we know so far. Kushner personally approved the
creation of the company incorporated as American Made Media Consultants Corp.,
and American Made Media Consultants LLC in April of 2018. From there, Eric Trump's wife,
Lara Trump, was named president and Mike Pence's nephew John Pence, serving as vice president.
It allowed the campaign to avoid federally mandated disclosures concerning what
it was spending considerable amounts of money on. And by considerable, we mean nearly half of
the $1.26 billion raised for Trump's reelection. And so, as Business Insider reports, for months,
Trump's aides, top advisors in the campaign just didn't know, where is this money going to?
How does this shell company function? Which by the way,
of course, casts an air of mystery around the shell company in this whole operation.
Campaign law experts have long accused the Trump team of using a corporate pass-through
to hide payments. The nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, led by former Republican Federal Election
Commission Chairman Trevor Potter, filed a civil complaint with the FEC in July.
Accusing the Trump campaign of disguising about $170 million worth of campaign spending
in large part by laundering the funds through AMMC. And then one other quote,
Cenk. Brendan Fischer, the Campaign Legal Center's director of federal reform,
said the payments to AMMC were a scheme to evade telling voters even the basics on where its money
is really going and a shield to disguise the ultimate recipients of its spending.
And so, some of the staffers on the campaign team believe that, okay, well, maybe this money
is being used toward buying ads and doing things like that. But again, because of the nature of
this shell company, it's really hard to determine exactly where the money went and how it was used.
There's a lot of mystery around it, and should be investigated.
>> Okay, let me break this down, there's actually two different ways that the Trump
team appears to have potentially funneled money to themselves. So let me first handle
this one that we're talking about, but there's another one that's related to it.
So why would you do a shell company that's, as they described it, a campaign within the campaign?
Well, the number one reason is to hide where the money is going. So if the campaign spends money,
that's public, so if they spend money on advertising, everybody can see it.
And in fact, there's a lot of stories written about how campaigns spend their money.
But if the campaign then gives it to just this shell company,
that's all the information you get, that shell company got $415 million. Well,
what did they do with it? We don't know, and they don't have to say.
So already massive problem and if you don't know, Bill Stepien was technically
the campaign manager after Brad Parscale. But everyone acknowledges that the actual
campaign manager was Jared Kushner, and Stepien in this case, according to Vanity Fair, didn't
even wanna ask about the slush fund. He's like, if Jared wants me to know, he'll let me know.
Who's the campaign manager then? Clearly Jared, right? And so Jared then
sets up the slush fund, and pours hundreds of millions of dollars into it. Now, the second
part of that is, well, how do you take money out of the slush fund and how do you profit from it?
Number one, if it's an outside company, people can work at that company. So what do you do,
you put Lara Trump, Eric Trump's wife, as Ana told you, as the president. And then I like this twist
where Pence's nephew's the Vice President, okay, just to keep it all in the family.
Now, these are the same guys who told you, can you believe what Biden did for Hunter Biden?
Now they set up a 400 million some odd dollar shell company,
they put their kids in charge of it, or their nephews and their in-laws, etc., in charge of
it. They can take any salary they like, and then they can disperse it any way they like.
But on top of all that, and then of course,
there's so many layers to it. One, is the salaries. Second is,
well, I mean, we had to do all of this obviously from all the Trump properties,
where we were running the campaign or the shell company, so we had to pay giant rent to Trump.
There's nothing we can do about it, nothing we can do about it.
And by the way, you can't even find out, cuz it's a shell company. And the third thing is,
we take, these companies, any normal consultant, if they're doing TV ad buys or any ad buys,
usually it takes about 15% as their commission.
Now, that's already a scam that we've talked about on the show in a lot of ways, but it's
legal and that's the fee that they charge for the service. But now if the people taking the 15% are
Trump family members and Pence family members, well, you can do the math on 15% of 415 million.
That's over $16 million that would go to their families, that is highway robbery.
The only good news about that is that they robbed MAGA and rich Republicans. So hey,
you wanna be a sucker and you wanna give Trump money? How many times does he have to rob people?
Trump charity, Trump University, six bankruptcies,
where he says it's good business not to pay back your debts. So boo hoo, he robbed you blind,
but I do hope they catch them if that's what happened, if, and of course, if it's illegal
there should definitely be consequences. And lo and behold, what happened the other day?
Right, Trump started talking about a preemptive pardon for Jared Kushner,
from out of nowhere. Hm, I wonder why he did that. >> Man, these people are not in any way savvy,
right? Because I mean by essentially hinting that you're gonna do that,
you're admitting that there's been some potentially illegal activity, right?
And so we've been waiting to see what it is, cuz at the time that Trump talked about a potential
pardon for his family members, yeah, I mean, they've engaged in some pretty sketchy stuff.
But there wasn't anything big in the news that you could really tie Jared Kushner to specifically.
But if this gets investigated and you find that they were misusing campaign funds and breaking
campaign finance laws, well, yeah, I mean, this is a serious issue if they're breaking FEC laws,
but it would have to be investigated. And so remember, a preemptive pardon is the
President's ability to pardon someone even before they've been charged with a crime.
And there has been precedent for that, with Gerald Ford pardoning Richard Nixon before he had been
charged criminally for the Watergate scandal. But yeah, I mean, there's that and then you
think back at the fact that they ran out of cash, and no one knew where the money went.
They ran out of money in the last few months of the election, and as you can see,
Trump had a giant hall, where did that money go? And you're right, Cenk. I mean,
there's been so many different instances of them stealing money from their own supporters.
They did it with this false accusation of widespread voter fraud, claiming that
they're fundraising in order to help financially support the legal challenges to the election.
You read the fine print, you find out that that money actually goes straight into Trump's pocket,
to his super PAC and all of that, and this is just another example of them-
>> Yeah. >> Potentially ripping off their supporters.
>> Yeah, that was the second thing I wanted to mention real quick.
That was called Save America. So when you gave to his legal defense fund, you thought you were
giving to that, you weren't, the first $5,000 did not go to the legal defense fund. They
explained that in an asterix, and 75% of that money went to something called Save America.
And they explained that Save America is not a campaign PAC, where they would have to spend
the money on the campaign. It's a leadership PAC, which is another slush fund, and they could spend
it anywhere they like, including on million dollar salaries. So is anybody ever gonna find
out about whether money went for Save America or the new shell company from Jared Kushner?
We don't know. But the final piece of irony on all this,
Jared's dad went to jail. He went to jail for illegal campaign contributions.