Kanye West Under Fed Scrutiny For Campaign Finance Fraud

[Scandalust313]

Kanye’s Zombie Campaign Attracts Teen Donors—and Feds’ Scrutiny


“In five-plus years of doing this I’ve never come across something like this,” said Jordan Libowitz, communications director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics.
Roger Sollenberger
Political Reporter

Former Birthday Party presidential contender Kanye West has not yet terminated his campaign, but he has disabled donations and removed merch from his website after receiving a notice from the Federal Election Commission and numerous complaints about extended shipping delays from some of his zoomer donors hopeful that their federal contribution would return a black-market payday.

The unusual violations in the West campaign’s FEC reports include multiple donations from minors, multiple possible contributions from foreign nationals and several fake names and addresses that trace to drop-shipping warehouses on both coasts. On top of that, experts say, West himself may face an investigation for unlawful fundraising practices that pulled in nearly $100,000 in small donations this year.

West, of course, never had a chance. He launched his campaign in late July, marking the occasion with a meandering speech in South Carolina in which he said that “Harriet Tubman never actually freed the slaves,” cried, and posited that while abortion should be legal, “anyone who gives birth to a child be given $1 million.” The producer-cum-rapper-cum-serial entrepreneur was first hyped by Republicans hoping he would siphon young and minority voters from Democratic tickets, specifically by former President Trump’s top adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who in February confirmed reports that he had encouraged West to step into the ring during a “great discussion” at the rapper’s Wyoming ranch last summer.

West’s campaign was largely self-funded, through $12.4 million in loans. The self-identifying genius spent more than half of that—north of $7.86 million across 64 separate payments—just getting on the ballot. Half of his small-dollar fundraising, $1.3 million, went to legal fees, and he dropped nearly $1 million on merch-related services. His campaign also paid $94,677 in August to a company that charters private jets, and currently has $1.1 million in the bank.

The campaign has to date collected $2.2 million from small-dollar donors, nearly all of it in exchange for campaign swag, not out of support for a Yeezy administration. Some of it was snapped up by entrepreneurial zoomers intending to flip the limited-edition collectibles in online marketplaces, scoring a few thousand dollars in easy cash. Price points on the site ranged from a $40 hat to a $200 Kanye 2020 Vision hat/hoodie bundle, but they list higher than that today in online marketplaces.

But some recent donors aren’t happy.

“You know this was a scam, right?” Jennifer Bloom, mother of 16-year-old West donor Ian Bloom, said in a phone call. Her son, nursing strep throat, explained that he still hasn’t received the $3,280 worth of Kanye 2020 gear that he ordered from the campaign store in late January and planned to flip online.


“I don’t know what’s happening there,” Ian Bloom said. “I ordered like 20 hoodies off his campaign website, along with a lot of other people that I know. They said it would be three weeks, and after that I emailed the support team, and the email just wasn’t a thing.”

He provided a screenshot of an email that had bounced back from the campaign, showing that his address had been blocked. After that, Bloom said, he called his credit card company to dispute and cancel the charge, which he said is still under investigation.

Students account for more than 1,200 of the campaign’s 3,161 reported donations, contributing a total $349,160, with $26,540 of that coming in this year. Bloom, who communicates with other resellers on Discord social media boards, said that “I can say with confidence that at least half of us in the group have to be still in high school.”

It is illegal to knowingly solicit and accept campaign donations from anyone under the age of 18. The West campaign did not reply to a request for comment for this article.

The contributions are teeming with irregularities. Brandon Schrock of Laredo, Texas, told the federal government that his employer was “poop,” and his occupation was “pooper.” A number of donors appear to have given under assumed names, some of which appear at first glance as incomprehensible, such as the HDB family, first names NXSUS, JHWAT and EBHXE.
Those aren’t names, of course. They’re customer IDs kept on rolls by drop-shipping warehouses. Drop-shippers are online resellers who often buy in bulk and have the items delivered to warehouses such as Portland, Oregon-based HDB Network Technology, which store the items and then ship them directly to customers who buy from the reseller. Addresses traced to dropboxes or warehouses in multiple states, including Oregon, California, New Jersey, Delaware, Florida, New Hampshire and Hawaii.

While all of the donors that The Daily Beast spoke to for this article looked up to West as an iconoclastic artist and entrepreneur, none of them want him to be president.

“I just don’t think he is mentally capable of running a entire country, [sic]” said the 15-year-old Zapata.

“No way. I’m a big fan of Ye’s, but he’s just not fit to become president,” Bloom said, when asked if he would have voted for West in November had he been old enough. To sum up his recent experience, he quoted a lyric from “Gotta Have It,” a track from the superstar’s collaborative studio effort with Jay-Z: “Who gon act phonier?’”

“I certainly resonate with a lot of different ideas that Kanye projects, and they speak to me,” said Barfuss, but added that he thought West saw other reasons that were “more valuable,” such as media attention and spotlighting his clothing line, “and not so much being president.”

“No way I would’ve voted for him,” he said, “but I think that there were a lot of other intentions behind this.”

Entire article: https://www.thedailybeast.com/kanye...-him-in-deep-trouble-with-the-feds?ref=scroll

 

[Disanthrope]

He wanna be trump so bad