Donald Trump will reportedly tell the Conservative Political Action Conference in Florida this week he is Republicans’ “presumptive 2024 nominee” for president.

The data is also being used to map links between suspects, which include members of Congress, they also said. (Capitol Police are reportedly investigating whether lawmakers helped rioters gain access to the Capitol as several Democrats have alleged they did, though Republican officials deny this.)
 
The Justice Department has publicly said that its task force includes senior public corruption officials. That involvement “indicates a focus on public officials, i.e. Capitol Police and members of Congress,” the retired FBI official said.

One day before the Georgia Senate runoff elections — and two days before the Capitol insurrection — a leadership PAC attached to Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to a mystery company that had previously bought copies of Cruz's book, according to recent filings with the Federal Election Commission. The expenses raise questions about whether the controversial conservative senator (and Cancún frequent-flyer) used those political campaigns, and Donald Trump's attempt to subvert the democratic process, to raise money for himself. That could push the FEC to issue a ruling on a pending issue that could have consequences for former President Donald Trump's fundraising.
 
Over the course of 2020, the Cruz-affiliated Jobs, Freedom, and Security PAC paid $1.2 million — nearly 80% of its operating budget — to a company called Reagan Investments LLC for "sponsorship advertising." The only other committee to register any disbursements to that company was Trump Make America Great Again, for a fundraising promotion for Cruz's books in December, according to The New York Times. However, the Trump group clearly marked the payment for "collateral: books"; campaign finance experts told Salon that the PAC's payment classifications — all of them for "sponsorship advertising" — were unusual and opaque.
 
On Jan. 4, 2021, the day Cruz traveled to Georgia before the runoff elections, his leadership PAC reported a $240,000 expense for "sponsorship advertising" to Reagan Investments, which appears to correlate with another series of small-dollar donations that poured into the PAC over the next few days. It isn't clear how much of the funds raised, if any, went to Republican runoff campaigns: Cruz's PAC only spent a few thousand dollars in support of former Sen. Kelly Loeffler. In fact, most of the contributions rolled in after the runoffs were over and as the events surrounding the Jan. 6 insurrection were playing out, while Cruz joined a handful of Republican Senators to object to the counting of Electoral College votes.
 
Legal experts tell Salon that if the money was for promotional book sales, as the filings may suggest, then the leadership PAC could be using Reagan Investments as a pass-through to allow Cruz to keep the royalties, which are generally between 10% and 15% for hardcover books, and about half that for paperbacks. Political candidates are not allowed to do that through their campaign committees. But the identity of Reagan Investments itself poses a mystery.
 
The PAC's filings claim that Reagan Investments LLC is located in an office building across the street from the Texas State Capitol in Austin. The company does not appear in Texas business registries. OpenCorporates records, however, show that a company by that name was organized in Missouri on Jan. 23, 2020 — two days after the PAC reported its first-ever payment to the company, of about $57,000. The agent on that registration, Jason Thomas III, was involved with a scheme that unlawfully funneled dark money from a conservative nonprofit to a political committee, resulting in a $350,000 FEC fine in 2018.
 
In a phone interview, Thomas claimed he was simply the organizing agent and could not immediately recall who operated the company, or its purpose.
 
The company's address in Austin, however, matches that of an office suite occupied by a Missouri-based consulting firm called Axiom Strategies, founded in 2005 by Jeff Roe, who managed Cruz's ill-fated 2016 presidential campaign and advised his successful 2018 re-election contest against Democratic challenger Beto O'Rourke. Roe was also connected to the dark money scheme, and although the FEC did not cite Roe for a violation, Thomas told investigators that he "primarily took direction" from Roe.
 
 
 

Scott MacFarlane  @MacFarlaneNews

TODAY:  Sen Josh Hawley (R-MO) will question the former US Capitol Police chief and former Sergeants-at-arms today about failures to prevent the insurrection on Jan. 6.  He's on Senate Homeland Security Cmte for today's hearing

Last year, I sat down with my good friend Bruce @Springsteen for a long and meaningful conversation that touched on so much of what we’re all dealing with these days. I’m excited to share it with you over the next few weeks:
 
https://open.spotify.com/show/42xagXCUDsFO6a0lcHoTlv

This is actually a really common tactic used by right-wing organizations to get conservative literature onto best seller lists.
 
Recently, the RNC spent $100k on copies of Don Jr's shitty book 'Triggered'
 
They've been doing it since at least the 60's, when the John Birch Society boosted the sales of a book by conservative activist Phylis Shlafly against abortion, officially sparking the culture war surrounding reproductive rights.
 
Haven't you ever wondered how so many shitty books sell so well to a target audience that doesn't fucking read?
 
 
 
 
 
EDIT:
 
If you read this and want to be the 126th reply to say "bUh deMoCratS do thiS too!" Why not just shut your corn hole instead...?
 
Some democrats do this too, like former democratic mayor of Baltimore, Catherine Pugh. (She got sentenced to 3 years in prison for it, so great example guys.)
 
But it's not nearly as prevalent or blatant as it is on the right, and we know this for a fact because it's disclosed in FEC filings.
 
Republicans also have access to an extensive think tank network and third party institutiond to grease their book sales that just aren't available to progressives at the same level.
 
So while Sarah Palin's Going Rogue sold almost half a million copies in it's first week alone thanks to Koch industries, Kamala Harris's The Truths We Hold sold only 50k in it's first six months.
 
This has become such a problem in the last few years that the New York Times started putting an asterisk next to it's best seller awards for books that got on the list through bulk wholesales.
 
This is another way that we know that this practice is way more prevalent on the right than on the left, because 15 of the 17 authors on the 2020 NYT Best Seller list that were awarded their spot because of bulk buys, are Trump Jr., Charlie Kirk, Glenn Beck, conservative commentator Dave Rubin, Fox News host Pete Hegseth, Dinesh D’Souza, Newt Gingrich, Freedom Center founder David Horowitz, fuckin' Ben Shapiro, goddamn Sean Hannity, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, journalism school drop out Candace Owens, Jeanine Pirro, the American Conservative editor Rod Dreher, and of course, our boy Cancun Cruz.  
 
This why you just don't see the crazy break out sales numbers from the left that you see from Republican politicians and right-wing pundits. Except for Obama. But that's cause it's fucking Obama.

Rocket attack in Iraq marks third in one week
 
Two rockets fell near the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad on Monday, the third such attack in Iraq in the span of one week.
 
(...)
 
The latest strike, which a defense official initially said involved three rockets before the military clarified that it was two, could increase pressure on President Joe Biden's administration to warn Iran against dangerous activity in the region. Although the Shia militia group that claimed credit for the first attack is widely known to have close ties to Tehran, the Biden administration has refrained from pointing fingers.
 
(...)