DL Open Thread: Tuesday, May 19, 2026

Koch Brothers Go After Delaware’s Campaign Finance Laws.  You know, so they can flood the state with dark money:

A conservative advocacy group has filed a lawsuit challenging a key instrument of election transparency in Delaware, which, if successful, could upend nearly 15 years of campaign finance law months before the November midterm elections.

Americans for Prosperity, a nonprofit advocacy organization funded by the influential Koch brothers, filed the lawsuit in federal court on April 17, seeking to overturn the Delaware Elections Disclosure Act on the grounds that its extensive campaign finance transparency requirements serve to discourage political speech and thus violate the First Amendment. 

Ross Connolly, the Northeast regional manager for the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, said the group is not currently working in Delaware due to its disclosure laws, but would like to get involved in ongoing education and property tax debates.

“We would like to be in Delaware,” he said. “We just will not put our small or large donors … at risk of being singled out in an unfair way and being attacked because they believe in the cause of Americans for Prosperity and they want to help us in our mission.”

Along with its lawsuit, Americans for Prosperity also filed a motion seeking a preliminary injunction to prevent the state from enforcing its disclosure requirements while the case moves through the legal process. A hearing on that motion has yet to take place.

In a statement to Spotlight Delaware regarding the lawsuit, Attorney General Kathy Jennings condemned the Koch brothers, whose conservative network raised and spent over $500 million during the 2024 election cycle, as “a disease in America’s campaign finance system.”

Jennings and Delaware Election Commissioner Anthony Albence are named as defendants in the suit.

“Americans on both sides of the aisle hate dark money groups and the blank check that the Supreme Court handed them in Citizens United,” Jennings said in a statement. “Now the people who perfected the Super PAC and embodied our corrupt campaign finance laws are in Delaware fighting to keep dark money dark. Delawareans deserve to know who’s trying to buy their elections.” 

Albence’s office declined to comment.

Looks like Colm Connolly might yet again get the chance to flex his new MAGA bona fides.

The Department Of Justice And The IRS Are Hopelessly Corrupt.  Because Trump is relentlessly corrupt:

The Department of Justice is finalizing a deal to launch a so-called “Truth and Justice Commission” and establish a compensation fund of $1,776,000,000 to pay claims made by alleged victims of government “weaponization” in exchange for President Donald Trump dropping his ongoing lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service, sources told ABC News. 

Sources told ABC News that the proposed deal — which is likely to face legal hurdles and has already been criticized by Democrats as a “slush fund” for Trump’s allies — arose after months of deliberations between the White House and DOJ officials who originally attempted to craft a legal justification for the settlement to compensate Trump directly.

Internally, DOJ lawyers believed they could ignore the conflict of interest outright, privately arguing that Trump has both the right to sue as a private citizen and the power to command the executive branch as president, according to sources familiar with their discussions.

In a court filing this week, the attorneys identified serious issues with the lawsuit, arguing that Trump has “extraordinary” control over the defendants in the case and that the “circumstances raise the specter that Defendants and their attorneys may instead be operating at the President’s direction.”

Sources said the “President Donald J. Trump Truth and Justice Commission” would include five commissioners — four of whom are appointed by the attorney general — that Trump would have the right to remove without cause. The commission would also be under no obligation to disclose the process for awarding the nearly $2 billion.

Oh, and the proceeds from the slush fund would go to, among others, the seditionists who attacked the House Of Representatives on January 6, 2021.  Looks like this could end up in the Supreme Court.  Betcha you know how that will turn out.

Trump’s Corrupt Stock Trading–Everything he does and says is predicated on his making money off this trading:

Just this week, we found out that in the first quarter of the year, Trump made more than 3,700 financial trades, worth tens of millions of dollars. That averages out to 59 trades a day and nine trades per hour.

The conflicts of interest and personal corruption are simply astonishing. Many of the companies do business with the federal government. In fact, Trump allegedly bought stock in Amazon and Microsoft months before the Pentagon announced agreements with both companies.

Earlier this year, Trump bought a sizable amount of Nvidia stock right before the artificial intelligence chipmaker received permission to export its advanced H200 AI processors to China. Not surprisingly, Nvidia’s stock shot up, earning Trump a tidy profit.

Trump also bought a significant share of Intel, the chipmaker the Trump administration took a 10% stake in last year. The company’s stock is up 178% since the beginning of the year. According to Popular Information, an independent newsletter that reviewed the disclosures, Trump bought between $1 million and $5 million in Dell stock, and then nine days later, in a speech in Georgia, told people to “go out and buy a Dell computer.”

Trump and his family have invested heavily in cryptocurrency, so the Trump administration has relaxed regulatory standards on the crypto industry.

Earlier this month, Trump met with a group of executives from the tobacco industry, which has given millions in campaign contributions to Trump-related causes, including his proposed White House ballroom. They complained about the Food and Drug Administration’s regulation of e-cigarettes, and Trump immediately called Dr. Marty Makary, who ran the agency, and demanded a regulatory change. Less than a week later, the FDA issued new guidance that relaxed federal rules on the sale of flavored vapes. Makary resigned in protest.

Perhaps the most egregious example of corruption is Trump’s manipulation of the president’s unilateral and unreviewable pardon power into a pay-for-play system in which lawbreakers hire lobbyists to persuade the president to let them avoid justice. The lobbyists’ going price, according to The Wall Street Journal, is $1 million. Meanwhile, those without deep pockets, who have followed the standard rules for pardon applications, are left waiting.

According to one estimate by The New Yorker, Trump and his family have taken in nearly $4 billion since he took office in January 2025.

You commit crimes all the time while you’re the President, and the sheer repetitive nature of the corruption makes it–forgettable–apparently.

Can The US Get Whiter Fast Enough?:

The US government has said it will increase the number of white South Africans it admits as refugees this year from about 7,500 to 17,500, claiming that “unforeseen developments in South Africa created an emergency refugee situation.”

Since starting his second term in office last year, Donald Trump has repeatedly made false claims that white Afrikaners are racially targeted and face a “white genocide”, which South Africa’s government has furiously rebutted.

Perhaps the Supreme Court will grant them citizenship in time to vote in November…

He’s Not Insane.

What do you want to talk about?