Sludge

💸 Share this on Bluesky and President Trump gathered cryptocurrency executives, crypto lobbyists, and their federal regulators at the White House on Wednesday to advance policies benefiting an industry that has become a major source of income for his family—including companies that directly do business with his crypto ventures.

As the House cleared out of Washington for August recess, congressional aides working on major policy fights on Capitol Hill were being flown out to corporate headquarters by a dark money group with deep ties to industry. The staffers took sponsored trips to companies with stakes in the lobbying battles, including a fusion startup seeking to power AI data centers and Big Pharma firms as they fight President Trump’s push to tie U.S. drug prices to lower prices overseas.

👀 Share this on Bluesky and X Third Way, the centrist group that is launching a $15 million campaign to fight the left wing of the Democratic Party, is being funded by health care industry interests that have long opposed one of the left’s primary goals: Medicare for All.

💥 Share this on Bluesky and X For the second cycle in a row, AIPAC has surpassed $100 million in federal election spending, according to a Sludge review of campaign finance records. As recently as 2021, AIPAC had never directly donated to a federal candidate—its PAC made its first donations in January 2022, and that same month it formed its own super PAC.

💡 Share this on X and Bluesky! Freedom 250 LLC, the entity behind many of President Trump's 250th-anniversary celebrations, publicly lists its sponsors but does not disclose how much they paid. New federal lobbying reports filed this week are now providing the first look at some of those contributions, revealing multimillion-dollar payments made by Chevron, RTX and United Airlines.

💡 Share this on X and Bluesky! Five years after helping President Trump pressure Georgia officials to overturn the 2020 presidential election, conservative lawyer Cleta Mitchell is overseeing a nonprofit that has quietly become one of the largest financial backers of the Republican Party's election fights.

💡 Share this on X and Bluesky! Democratic fundraising consultants working for Senate campaigns, including those of Sen. Jacky Rosen and Rep. Haley Stevens, also run a nonprofit backed in part by Google and Amazon that has become one of the AI industry's primary channels for cultivating relationships with the congressional staff overseeing federal AI legislation.

👀 Share this on X and James Carville has spent the last month calling for the Democrats to expel what he sees as the left wing of the party, attacking recent primary winners who are progressives and democratic socialists. “These people are so f—-ing stupid, I don’t know what to say about it,” he said of the wave of leftist Democratic nominees in a podcast video. Viewers of his diatribes are likely unaware of his financial interests in promoting centrist candidates and slamming progressives.

🌀 Share this on X and Bluesky! A natural gas company that did not exist five months ago is already paying $380,000 a quarter for a lobbyist who, until this spring, ran oil and gas leasing policy at the Interior Department. A former White House liaison to the Senate left in February and by summer was lobbying U.S. senators for a German utility. A director of operations in Susie Wiles' office was working in the West Wing as of April, but by July she'd registered to lobby on behalf of a lithium mine.

💡 Share this on X and Bluesky! The shadow super PAC bankrolling ads for Rep. Haley Stevens in her race to be the Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan is almost entirely funded by Center Forward, a centrist “dark money” group headed by corporate lobbyists, a new FEC filing reveals. A Stronger Michigan was formed in early June and has spent over $13 million in its first seven weeks, all on ads backing Stevens.