WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 7 , 2019. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A
billionaire Darwin Deason; and
Wisconsin billionaire Diane Hen-
dricks.
The Trump 2020 campaign
and affiliated fundraising com-
mittees have raised $237 million
so far toward his reelection.
Among the special guests invit-
ed to appear at this weekend’s
events at the Hamptons, accord-
ing to the invitations: Commerce
Secretary Wilbur Ross; Treasury
Secretary Steven Mnuchin; White
House senior adviser Jared Kush-
ner, Trump’s son-in-law; the pres-
ident’s son Donald Trump Jr. and
his girlfriend, Kim Guilfoyle; Re-
publican National Committee
Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel;
Trump campaign manager Brad
Parscale; Sen. Lindsey O. Graham
(R-S.C.); and Rep. Lee Zeldin
(R-N.Y.).
[email protected]square-foot Bridgehampton es-
tate of Joe Farrell, a real estate
developer in New York. Tickets
are priced at $5,600 per couple
for the general reception, $11,
per couple for the VIP reception
and $35,000 per couple for a
photo opportunity.
Farrell’s estate, known as the
“Sandcastle,” was reportedly the
site of a birthday party this year
for the president’s personal attor-
ney, Rudolph W. Giuliani. The
fundraiser at Farrell’s home was
first reported by CNBC.
Trump Victory has raised more
than $67 million so far for the
president’s reelection and the
RNC. Among the biggest donors
so far are Marvel Entertainment
chairman Isaac Perlmutter and
his wife Laura; Te xas oil executive
Jeffery Hildebrand and his phi-
lanthropist wife, Melinda; Te xasnors are only permitted to give a
maximum of $5,600 per election
cycle to a candidate, they can
contribute as much as $710,
to national parties.
Several senior members of the
administration, party and cam-
paign are also scheduled to ap-
pear, as are some Trump family
members, according to the in-
vites.
The Friday luncheon in South-
ampton is scheduled to take place
at the home of New York real
estate developer Stephen Ross
and his wife, jewelry designer
Kara Ross. Tickets are priced at
$100,000 for a photo opportunity
and lunch, and $250,000 for the
package that includes the round-
table discussion, the invite
shows.
A reception is scheduled to
follow the lunch at the 17,000-- “Pretty much whoever is
president other than me.... And
they’ll say: ‘You have to do it.
They gave you a million dollars to
your campaign.’”
Money raised at these fund-
raisers will go toward Trump
Victory, a fundraising committee
for both the Trump 2020 cam-
paign and the Republican Na-
tional Committee.
Trump has made collecting six-
figure checks a centerpiece of his
reelection fundraising effort. The
day after his official reelection
campaign launch in June, Trump
appeared at a high-dollar fund-
raiser luncheon at the Trump
National Doral hotel in Florida
that officials said raised about
$6 million.
As the incumbent, Trump en-
joys a big fundraising edge over
his Democratic rivals. While do-
according to invitations obtained
by The Washington Post, with the
costliest tickets offering the
greatest access to Trump.
The Republican National Com-
mittee confirmed the events are
set to take place but did not offer
further specifics about them out
of security concerns.
Trump’s direct appeal to such
donors — some of whom are
longtime contributors to the Re-
publican Party who have given
millions over the years — stands
in contrast to the tone he struck
in 2016, when he sharply criti-
cized the influence of wealthy
donors over the political process
and derided his opponents for
accepting their money.
“Their lobbyists, their special
interests and their donors will
start calling President Bush, Pres-
ident Clinton,” he said in JulyBY MICHELLE YE HEE LEEPresident Trump is slated to
appear at a pair of fundraising
events in the Hamptons on Fri-
day, including one that charges
up to $250,000 for lunch, a photo
and a private roundtable with the
president.
The fundraisers are the latest
sign that Trump is embracing the
world of wealthy contributors
who served as punching bags in
his 2016 campaign.
One event is scheduled to take
place at the Southampton home
of a New York real estate develop-
er who owns the Miami Dolphins,
and another at a 17,000-square-
foot Bridgehampton mansion
that was once rented out to Be-
yoncé and Jay-Z.
The price of entry to the events
ranges from $5,600 to $250,000,
court in Palm Beach. As part of
the deal, Epstein was jailed in a
private wing of the Palm Beach
County stockade. But within a
few months, he was allowed to
have his own driver pick him up
and take him to an office he had
set up in West Palm Beach.
DeSantis, in announcing the
probe Tuesday, said he was doing
so at the behest of Bradshaw.
— Miami HeraldBrown’s father seeks new
probe : The father of Michael
Brown is seeking a new
investigation of the white
Ferguson, Mo., police officer who
fatally shot the black and
unarmed young man nearly five
years ago. Michael Brown Sr.
says that on Friday, the
anniversary of his son’s death, he
will speak at a news conference
in Clayton and urge St. Louis
County Prosecutor Wesley Bell to
reopen the case.Decision on Meek Mill retrial
postponed : A decision on
whether Meek Mill will be
retried in a 2007 drug and gun
case was delayed until Aug. 27
after his lawyer asked a judge in
Philadelphia on Tuesday for
more time. The rapper, 32, whose
real name is Robert Williams,
has been on probation most of
his adult life over the teenage
arrest.
— From news serviceshas ordered a state criminal
probe into the actions of the
Palm Beach sheriff and the
former Palm Beach state
attorney’s handling of the Jeffrey
Epstein underage sex trafficking
case.
DeSantis’s move comes as
Palm Beach Sheriff Ric Bradshaw
has come under increasing
scrutiny for his decision in 2008
to give Epstein, a politically
connected multimillionaire,
unusually lenient work release
privileges even though he was a
convicted sex offender who had
been accused of molesting
dozens of underage girls.
Epstein, 66, is now under
indictment in New York, charged
with sex trafficking minors —
both in Palm Beach and in
Manhattan, where Epstein owns
sprawling homes. Epstein was
investigated in Palm Beach,
starting in 2006, but then-State
Attorney Barry Krischer wanted
to charge him with a
misdemeanor.
The case was transferred to
the FBI, which discovered even
more alleged victims, and federal
investigators gathered enough
corroborating evidence to fill a
53-page federal indictment. The
indictment, however, was
inexplicably shelved under then-
U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta,
who signed off on an agreement
that allowed Epstein to plead
guilty to lesser charges in stateIn tweets Tuesday,
McConnell’s campaign
characterized the protesters as
“an angry left-wing mob” of a
Democrat rival. In another tweet,
the campaign referenced an
episode over the weekend in
which several McConnell
supporters wearing “Team
Mitch” T-shirts were
photographed around a
cardboard cutout of Rep.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-
N.Y.), with some groping it and
kissing it.
In a tweet Monday directed at
McConnell, Ocasio-Cortez asked
whether the Senate leader was
“paying for young men to
practice groping & choking
members of Congress w/ your
payroll.”
The McConnell campaign’s
tweets Tuesday suggested that he
faced a far greater danger: “Rep.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and
liberal Twitter personalities are
trying to dox some underage kids
for taking a photo with a cutout
at the Fancy Farm political picnic
and are cheering on thousands of
accounts calling for Senator
McConnell to ‘break his neck.’ ”
— Julie K. Brown and John WagnerFLORIDAState probe ordered
into Epstein caseFlorida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R)KENTUCKY
McConnell campaign
criticizes protesters
The reelection campaign of
Senate Majority Leader Mitch
McConnell (R-Ky.) on Tuesday
decried the actions of protesters
outside his Louisville home over
the weekend as “serious calls to
violence” and said it had notified
law enforcement.
A group of 20 to 30 people
gathered outside his home
Sunday night, with some voicing
threats and shouting profanities
during a protest that was
broadcast on Facebook Live,
according to an account in the
New York Post.
The protesters reportedly
were responding to McConnell’s
refusal thus far to allow the
Republican-led Senate to
consider bills passed by the
Democratic-led House that seek
to strengthen background checks
for gun sales.
The protest followed the mass
shootings over the weekend in El
Paso and Dayton, Ohio, which
left 31 people dead. The senator
was reportedly home recovering
from a fractured shoulder at the
time of the protest.
Facebook video captured a
moment where one of the
protesters urged another to stab
a voodoo doll representing
McConnell in the heart.
Hill.” Trump had repeatedly at-
tacked Strzok publicly and pri-
vately and called for his firing.
Strzok asserted in the suit that
his sentiments were “protected
political speech,” and that his
termination violated the First
Amendment. He conceded that
while the Hatch Act restricts the
political activities of some em-
ployees, he had not violated even
that law, and noted that Trump
had rejected a recommendation
to fire a senior White House
adviser, Kellyanne Conway, for
her violations of the Hatch Act.
The suit was filed in federal
court in the District of Columbia.
Justice Department and FBI
spokeswomen declined to com-
ment.
[email protected]Candice Will, who runs the bu-
reau’s Office of Professional Re-
sponsibility, ultimately deter-
mined Strzok should be demoted
and suspended for 60 days, ac-
cording to the suit. She was over-
ruled by FBI Deputy Director
David Bowdich, who determined
that Strzok’s “sustained pattern
of bad judgment in the use of an
FBI device” had called into ques-
tion the FBI’s decisions in the
Russia and Clinton email investi-
gations, according to the suit.
Strzok alleged in the suit that
others in the bureau had not
received similar discipline for
criticism of Clinton, and he
claimed Bowdich’s decision was
the “direct result of unrelenting
pressure from President Trump
and his political allies on CapitolNo he’s not. We’ll stop it.”
The Justice Department in-
spector general found that mes-
sage “implies a willingness to
take official action to impact the
presidential candidate’s electoral
prospects.” Strzok, who had been
assigned to work with special
counsel Robert S. Mueller III, was
removed from the Russia investi-
gation when the messages were
discovered, and in August 2018,
he was fired from the FBI.
The FBI had first proposed
firing Strzok a few months earli-
er, writing in a notice that the
messages would “be the subject
of damning public discourse for
days, months, and even years to
come, and the FBI will be recipi-
ent of the expressed outrage.”
But FBI Assistant Directorand he was a key figure in both
the investigation into Hillary
Clinton’s use of a private email
server while she was secretary of
state and the inquiry into wheth-
er the Trump campaign had coor-
dinated with Russia to influence
the 2016 election.
But in the course of that work,
Strzok began exchanging politi-
cally charged text messages with
an FBI lawyer, Lisa Page, with
whom he was having an affair.
The messages, sent on work
phones, were critical of numer-
ous politicians, but none more so
than Tr ump, who Strzok derided
as “abysmal” and a “disaster.”
In August 2016, after Page
wrote Trump was “not ever going
to become president, right?
Right?!” Strzok responded: “No.that his removal was “part of a
broader campaign against the
very principle of free speech,”
which he said was “initiated and
led by” t he commander in chief.
“It’s indisputable that his ter-
mination was a result of Tr ump’s
unrelenting retaliatory campaign
of false information, attacks and
direct appeals to top officials,”
Aitan Goelman, Strzok’s lawyer,
said in a statement. “Today, Pete
Strzok is fighting back, and send-
ing a message that the Adminis-
tration’s purposeful disregard for
constitutional rights must not be
tolerated.”
Strzok, who joined the FBI in
1996 as an analyst on terrorism
cases, was once one of the bu-
reau’s go-to agents for espionage
and counterintelligence work,BY MATT ZAPOTOSKYThe FBI agent whose anti-
Trump text messages got him
removed from the investigation
into Russia’s election interfer-
ence and ultimately fired from
the bureau asked in a lawsuit
Tuesday to be reinstated and
awarded back pay, arguing he
was unfairly terminated for criti-
cizing the president.
Peter Strzok asserted in the
suit that the Trump administra-
tion had “consistently tolerated
and even encouraged partisan
political speech by federal em-
ployees” — but only if that speech
praised the president and at-
tacked his opponents. The former
FBI agent who President Trump
has attacked repeatedly alleged
DIGESTLACY ATKINS/THE TENNESSEAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Cyntoia Brown, seen at a hearing in Nashville in May 2018, will be
released from prison this week. She killed a man in 2004, when she
was 16 and said she was a sex-trafficking victim. Celebrities lobbied
for clemency for Brown, who has served 15 years, and in January,
Te nnessee’s then-Gov. Bill Haslam (R) commuted her sentence.Politics & the Nation
FBI agent fired for anti-Trump texts sues to get job back
In Hamptons, Trump set to embrace wealthy donors he once railed against
(202) 816-8844 (703) 565-2375 (301) 841-