By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 15, 2024 ~
Dave McCormick, the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate from Pennsylvania, was sitting in the front row at Donald Trump’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on Saturday and narrowly missed being in the line of fire according to an interview he gave to CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday morning.
McCormick told Tapper that Trump had called out from the podium, asking McCormick to join him on the stage and he “started to walk up onto the stage” when Trump said: “No, no, I will have you up in a little bit. And then the shooting started a minute or two later. And so, had he not changed his mind, I think I would have been up on that stage.”
According to the PBS video of Trump’s opening remarks at the rally, which also capture the gunfire, Trump called McCormick a “great, great gentleman” and said these exact words about him coming up to the stage: “So we’re gonna bring him up. Can we bring him up for a couple of minutes later?”
Trump did not change his mind about the timing. He simply added the word “later” at the very end of his sentence, a word that McCormick apparently initially missed hearing.
McCormick is correct about this: just 2.8 minutes after Trump indicated McCormick would be called up later, the gunshots rang out and Trump ducked for cover under the podium with Secret Service agents piling on top of his body.
Democrats currently have majority control of the U.S. Senate while Republicans control the House. Flipping the Senate red while holding onto the House’s Republican majority is a major goal of hedge fund and private equity billionaires who are funneling tens of millions of dollars into key Congressional races. These billionaires benefit from a tax loophole known as “Carried Interest,” where they are able to pay lower taxes than teachers and plumbers. The carried interest loophole has been under attack by progressive Democrats for years, thus there is a big push by billionaires to elect more right-wing Republicans to Congress.
A Super PAC created solely for the purpose of boosting McCormick’s chances and attacking his opponent for the Senate seat, incumbent Democrat Bob Casey, is called Keystone Renewal PAC. (Pennsylvania is known as the “Keystone State.”) The wealthiest billionaires in the hedge fund and private equity arena are major donors to Keystone Renewal.
An attack ad from Keystone Renewal uses the same demonization of immigrants language that Trump was actually in the process of talking about in the very seconds that the shots rang out at his rally on Saturday. (See the video of the ad here.) The ad promotes McCormick as a combat veteran. He is, more recently, the former CEO of Bridgewater Associates, one of the largest hedge funds in the world.
The largest donor to Keystone Renewal, by a wide margin, is hedge fund titan Ken Griffin of Citadel. According to records from the Federal Election Commission (FEC), Griffin wrote out a check for a cool $10 million to the Super PAC on September 25, 2023. In April of last year, Hank Tucker at Forbes wrote this about Griffin:
“Ken Griffin is riding high, after posting the most profitable year of any hedge fund in history. He’s worth an estimated $35 billion, $7.8 billion more than a year ago and nearly triple what he was worth in 2020.”
For how Griffin is making his billions, scroll down at this link for our extensive reporting on the matter.
Paul Singer, founder and President of Elliott Management, an investment firm and hedge fund, also chipped in $2 million on November 2 of last year. Jeff Yass, the richest man in Pennsylvania, has also donated $1 million to Keystone Renewal. Yass is the co-founder and Managing Director of Susquehanna International Group, a hedge fund and trading firm. Forbes puts Yass’ net worth at $28.5 billion.
Other notable donors to the Keystone Renewal Super PAC include Steven Schwarzman, Chairman and CEO of private equity firm, Blackstone, who contributed $500,000; Henry Kravis, Executive Chairman of private equity firm KKR, who donated $250,000; Paul Tudor Jones of hedge fund Tudor Investment Corp. who added another $250,000 to the coffers; Thomas Peterffy, founder and Chairman of Interactive Brokers, provided $300,000 in support along with dozens of other notable one-percenters from Wall Street.
Of the $21.5 million that Keystone Renewal has thus far reported in donations, just two donors live inside the state of Pennsylvania: Jeff Yass who contributed the $1 million and a retired individual, Joseph Wesley, who donated $25,000. The bulk of the money attempting to elect a Republican Senator to represent the people of Pennsylvania is coming from residents of New York and Florida. Under the U.S. Supreme Court’s twisted Citizens United decision in 2010, this is legal.
According to Politico, citing data from AdImpact, Keystone Renewal has booked $30 million in ad buys through the summer and fall to boost McCormick’s chances in the November election. On top of that, Politico reports that another Super PAC tied to Mitch McConnell, the Senate Leadership Fund, has reserved $24 million in ad buys to help McCormick unseat Casey. The ad spend includes network and cable TV, radio, and digital advertising, according to the report.
The Senate Leadership Fund could be quite dangerous to the Democrats’ hopes of holding onto the Senate and preventing the wholesale deregulation of Wall Street, the fossil fuels industry, and other powerful industries. According to FEC records, as of March 31, 2024, the Senate Leadership Fund had $59.5 million in cash on hand. That’s likely a very lowball number. The FEC should be updating that information for the most recent quarter any day now.
The hedge fund billionaire, Ken Griffin, has given another cool $10 million to the Senate Leadership Fund. A significant part of that Super PAC’s money, however, comes from the fossil fuels industry, with names like Koch Industries, the American Petroleum Institute, Chevron, and Occidental Petroleum on the list of large donors. A Dark Money group, One Nation, ranks among the largest donors, giving two donations that tallied up to more than $7 million.
