On the political right, Putin’s role in damaging American societal cohesion by putting Trump in the White House will always be the “Russia Hoax” and sadly there are some on the left fringe who see it the same way that the crackpots on the right do. They’re wrong and they’ve always been wrong. In 2020, as part of the cover-up Trump granted a shady Republican operative, Jesse Benton, a pardon in an unrelated corruption and bribery scandal. By then, Benton had already been funneling cash into Trump’s campaign from the Kremlin.
Yesterday Benton was sentenced to 18 months for laundering Russian money into the 2016 Trump campaign. It’s just the tip of the iceberg but it’s all the prosecutors had evidence for. Russ Choma reported that what federal judge sentenced Benton for was taking $100,000 from Roman Vasilenko and putting $25,000 of it into the RNC to get tickets to a private Trump fundraiser. (Benton, true to form, pocketed the rest of the cash.)
Jesse Benton, a longtime aide to both Ron and Rand Paul, was convicted in November on six related charges. The court found that he and another GOP operative accepted $100,000 from Roman Vasilenko, a St. Petersburg-based influencer who wanted photos with Trump to display on his social media accounts. Benton kept most of the money for himself but donated $25,000 to the Republican National Committee as part of a plan to secure two tickets to a fundraising event for Trump in Philadelphia. At the event, Vasilenko was allowed to sit close to Trump at a roundtable discussion and later took a photo with him. Foreign nationals, like Vasilenko, are not allowed to donate to US political campaigns or committees, and it is illegal to make a donation on behalf of someone else.
Benton, who is married to Ron Paul’s grandaughter, was previously convicted in 2016 of a scheme to pay an Iowa state senator to switch his endorsement from Michele Bachmann to Ron Paul ahead of the state’s 2012 republican presidential caucus. In that case, Benton, after pleading that he had reformed and had a family to support, was sentenced to home confinement. Just six days later, the Trump fundraiser at which Vasilenko met Trump took place. A few weeks after that, Benton was caught in an undercover sting orchestrated by the British newspaper The Telegraph, whose reporters posed as representatives of a Chinese businessman who wanted to donate $2 million to Trump’s campaign. Benton told them he could arrange it. He apparently violated the terms of his home confinement in the Iowa case to meet with the undercover reporters.
In a letter submitted to the judge before his sentencing this week, Benton said he had suffered enormously in the face of federal investigations over the last eight years, which he said had nearly bankrupted him and ruined his good name. Benton wrote that he currently delivers for DoorDash to make ends meet, and, in asking for more home confinement instead of prison time, argued that being separated from his family would be painful for them, including his young daughter. In pleading for leniency, Benton cited his Christianity and claimed he was no longer involved with politics. (In 2016, he had also pointed to his faith and claimed to be out of the business.)
At Benton’s sentencing hearing Friday, U.S. District Court judge Trevor McFadden, a Trump-appointee whose light sentences of January 6 defendants have been controversial, was not in the mood for Benton’s argument.
“Sir, I will tell you, frankly, it’s difficult for me to read your letter talking about your integrity and faith with this pattern of deception,” McFadden told Benton. “I cannot ignore you were engaging in this incident here while you were facing sentencing in another case for political conspiracy. The judge in that case gave you a real break, it’s shocking to me you would take that break and the mercy you sought from him and only six days later mail in this false contribution.”
At trial, Benton’s attorney Brian Stolarz attempted to argue his client had been given bad legal advice from another lawyer that making the donation was acceptable, but the jurors weren’t buying. At sentencing, Stolarz suggested that Benton’s actions didn’t indicate he was aiming to influence the Trump campaign on Vasilenko’s behalf: After Vasilenko gave Benton the $100,000, Benton stalled in donating any part of it. He eventually had to be pursued by the RNC— weeks after the event took place— to make the payment he had promised. Benton offered numerous excuses to the RNC, including that he had just dropped the check in the mail and that he would wire the money immediately. He also only ever paid $25,000, not the $50,000 that he and the other operative had originally agreed to donate on Vasilenko’s behalf. Benton kept the remaining $75,000 himself. (Doug Wead, who was originally named as a co-defendant with Benton, died in late 2021.)
Stolarz told McFadden that Benton was panicked about his legal troubles in the other case and was trying to keep the money. “The money was for him,” Stolarz said.
In court, McFadden was willing to entertain that notion. “One could think that the defendant had no intention of providing any money to the RNC, that he was actually fleecing the RNC and Mr. Vasilenko, or both,” McFadden said. “But he got pushed into a corner by the RNC repeatedly asking, ‘Where’s our money?'”
But ultimately, McFadden told Benton, he did do the crime and it did harm the integrity of the 2016 election. “I do believe your actions undermined the rule of law in this country,” McFadden said, adding that they had undermined the transparency of the Trump campaign and the broader electoral process.
Benton was ordered to report to prison on June 1. While Stolarz told McFadden that Benton would appeal, the judge ruled that he will not be allowed to stay free on bail through that process.
When the reactionary Tennessee state legislature decided to steal a Democratic House seat, they sliced up Nashville and combined the pieces with backward rural parts of the state, leaving Nashville’s 715,000 with no representation in Congress. Instead, the city has 4 extremist crackpot MAGAts undermining its residents interests, John Rose, Mark Green, Scott DesJarlais and, worst of all, Andy Ogles. Before the incredibly unconstitutional, racist gerrymander TN-05 had a D+17 partisan lean. It is now R+15. Ogles, who won a highly contested primary with 36.9% of the vote, beat state Sen. Heidi Campbell 123,558 (55.8%) to 93,648 (42.3%)— although Campbell kicked his ass in the Davidson County (Nashville) part of the district.
Ogles comes out of the American fascist movement, having been a staffer for both the Koch Network and Club for Growth. Before being handed the new congressional district he was a perennial candidate on the fringes of the far right. He was endorsed and financially supported by the fascistic House Freedom Caucus and the 5 extremist billionaires— Bernard Marcus,Paul Singer, Stephen Schwartzman, Antonio Gracias and Daniel Loeb— who contributed $2,750,000 to the neo-Nazi USA Freedom Fund spent nearly $800,000— the most in any House race— to elect Ogles. Another neo-fascist outfit, the Conservative Americans PAC, spent $705,700 on electing Ogles. So no one was surprised when he joined the Freedom Caucus and voted against Kevin McCarthy for speaker 11 times. This was his statement before the 12th ballot:
Anyway, it turns out that, predictably, Ogles is, like Anna Paulina Luna and Herschel Walker, a junior version of George Santos. His local TV news station (WTVF) broke the story on their Pinocchio congressman. “If you believe Middle Tennessee's newest congressman,” reported Phil Williams, “he's not only a businessman, he's also an economist, a nationally recognized expert in tax policy and health care, a trained police officer, even an expert in international sex crimes. But an exclusive NewsChannel 5 investigation discovered that Andy Ogles' personal life story is filled with exaggerations, a story that's often too good to be true.”
Ogles lied over and over that he’s an economist. “Yet, like some of the questions surrounding his controversial colleague, New York Congressman George Santos, there's little evidence that Ogles ever received any formal training in economics. His congressional bio says he obtained a degree from Middle Tennessee State University, ‘where he studied policy and economics.’ Yet, the school refused to confirm Ogles' degree, citing a provision of federal law that allows students to block the release of their educational credentials. So why would Congressman Ogles not want Tennessee voters to be able to verify that he is who he claims to be? ‘I would think that if he has a block that there must be something wrong,’ said state Sen. Heidi Campbell, a Nashville Democrat who lost to Ogles in a campaign in a district that Republicans redrew to help their own candidate. NewsChannel 5 Investigates checked and, back in 2002, Ogles' website claimed he had ‘studied foreign policy and the constitution’ at Western Kentucky University and Middle Tennessee State. There was no mention of economics… Ogles actually majored in English and Allied Language Arts.”
They found an old résumé from 2009— two years after he graduated from MTSU— where he listed a degree in international relations, with minors in psychology and English. One top Financial Services Committee staffer told me Ogles is already standing out as the stupidest member of the committee and is already considered a joke by his fellow committee members on both sides of the aisle. “He’s a bigger idiot than Barry Loudermilk,” the staffer told me, “and that is no mean feat.”
Ogles touts his connection to supply-side economist Arthur Laffer.
His LinkedIn resume shows he once worked as "executive director" for the Laffer Center — not as an economist. That job appears to have been an administrative position. A search of the center's website shows no economic reports authored by Ogles.
The congressman's website also claims that "while working at the Laffer Center, Andy became a nationally recognized expert on tax policy and healthcare, having been featured in numerous publications, including the Wall Street Journal and Investor’s Business Daily."
But a search of those sites shows only three columns he wrote, in two cases with another person, when he was a lobbyist for the conservative Americans for Prosperity— nothing independently citing him as an expert.
All three were published before he went to work at the Laffer Center.
"It might be a bit more credible if a news organization had called him and quoted him on the basis that he was a national expert," said MTSU political science professor John Vile.
Vile noted that the publications of those columns— like one predicting the imminent demise of Obamacare— might not have that much to do with Ogles' personal credentials.
"When you publish an article like this and it's under the name of your organization, you might be publishing it as much because it reflects the views of the organization as because it reflects the particular expertise of the writer," Vile explained.
Then, there are Ogles' claims to be a trained police officer and international sex crimes expert.
During one GOP debate, the candidate prefaced one answer "as a former member of law enforcement, worked in international sex crimes, specifically child trafficking...."
In another forum, he claimed, "You know, my midlife crisis, I went into law enforcement. I worked in human trafficking."
Interviewed on C-SPAN after he took office in Congress, Ogles spoke about human trafficking over the Southern border, claiming: "This is from firsthand experience of someone who worked in that space. I turned gray because of it."
Again, on the night of the State of the Union, he told C-SPAN, "You know, part of my career, I worked in human trafficking."
In fact, our investigation found Ogles was sworn in as a volunteer reserve deputy with the Williamson County Sheriff's Office in July 2009.
Records show he lost that position two years later for not meeting minimum standards, making no progress in field training and failure to attend required meetings.
"There is nothing in Mr. Ogles training or personnel file that indicates he had any involvement in 'international sex trafficking' in his capacity as a reserve deputy," Williamson County sheriff's spokesperson Sharon Puckett told NewsChannel 5.
…Curiously, Ogles went through a contested Republican primary without his claims ever being challenged.
Just like with George Santos, Professor Vile blames a weakening of the political parties.
"One of the downsides of political parties was the notion of people meeting in smoke-filled rooms and coming to decisions, but one of the advantages was some of these sort of old timers had a better idea of, you know, people's reputation outside of the media," he said.
And just as Ogles largely avoided the media during his campaign, he also ignored our questions about his questionable claims.
And, also like Santos, Ogles is a campaign finance fraudster. Perfect for the House Financial Services Committee!
as time goes on, you'll find that more and more are grifters... until you get to the point where ONLY grifters can get elected. voters elect the best liars instead of the best people.
this only happens when there is no opposition doing their job; there is no accountability; BECAUSE all who vote are dumber than shit.
and the worst kind of true shithole is one where nobody cares and nobody does "merrick garland" to fix it. like this one.
and when this happens, given the causes, you get a truly irreversible shithole.
the only change will be when the nazi reich commences. very soon.
who will prevent it?