With Roger Sollenberger, Political Reporter

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The Big Dig this week… How Trump’s New Song Is Topping the Sales Charts With Hardly Any Listens

Former President Donald Trump, one of the most prolific liars, self-promoters, and exaggerators in American history, recently claimed that a song featuring his voice just hit No. 1 on Billboard. Miraculously, that’s true. But what may be false is that anyone is actually listening.

The song, as Trump claimed, topped the charts earlier this month, including on iTunes and Billboard. But those were very specific charts: Digital sales—not popularity, where the track has been getting absolutely crushed. In fact, even though the song is the most purchased, the recording has never cracked Billboard’s coveted Hot 100.

Master of Puppets

The track is a propagandistic recording called “Justice for All”—not to be confused with the Metallica banger “And Justice for All.” It mixes the “J6 Choir” of imprisoned insurrectionists singing the national anthem with Trump reciting the pledge of allegiance—appears to have peaked at 105 on Billboard. While it topped sales charts, it drew only about 1 percent of the online listens and less than half of 1 percent of the radio play for the most popular songs at the time, according to the publication.

The fact that no one is really listening to it hasn’t stopped Trump from repeatedly bragging about the success of the song. He played the music video to open his rally in Waco, Texas, last weekend, which juiced sales again—the track had fallen from No. 4 to No. 33 in two days.

Sad But True

That video includes violent scenes from the Jan. 6 attack—shown over “the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air”—including the fatal shooting of Trump supporter Ashli Babbitt as she tried to breach the House. Fox News host Brian Kilmeade said the decision to play it at the rally was “insane.”

The song did lead in sales, though, and those proceeds are alleged to be distributed among select families of Jan. 6 prisoners. But as with everything in Trump world, you’ve got to keep your eye on where the money is going.

Ride the Lightning

The day before the song’s March 3 soft release, Forbes revealed that in addition to Trump—who recorded the pledge at his Mar-a-Lago resort compound—the production effort was led by former administration appointee and post-presidential lackey Kash Patel, along with former Fox News commentator Ed Henry.

Coincidentally, Patel and Henry are both facing the prospect of mounting legal fees. Patel, who recently set up his own nonprofit, has found himself in the sights of the Justice Department, most specifically for his involvement in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents investigation. And Henry has been fighting a rape lawsuit in New York for more than two years. An amended version of the original complaint was just filed against him at the end of December, under the state’s new “survivor’s law.”

The sales proceeds, Forbes reported, would first go to an LLC helmed by Henry, who will then distribute the money. The profits will allegedly wind up with the families of some of the people imprisoned for their role in the Jan. 6 violent attack on the U.S. Capitol, according to Forbes.

The Unforgiven

The setup doesn’t seem quite so clean on paper.

Henry does seem to have an LLC—an entity called “EH42 Productions,” which he incorporated for “journalism” in Maryland eight years ago, according to state records. However, Henry also appears on a new nonprofit with a conspicuous name: “The Justice For All Project,” which attempted to incorporate as a 501(c)(3) in Florida on March 14—a dozen days after the Forbes report and three days after the recording began racking up big sales numbers.

But if the nonprofit is handling the proceeds, it may be under questionable legal conditions. The state of Florida rejected the organization’s initial application, citing improper signatures, and as of Wednesday the group hasn’t filed a corrected version, according to state records.

A spokesperson for the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, which regulates charity activity in the state, told The Daily Beast on Wednesday that The Justice For All Project “is not registered with the department to solicit contributions.”

For Whom The Bell Tolls

Patel has also hucked the song. A promotional pop-up clouds the home screen for the website of his own murky nonprofit, which also sells song-related t-shirts with “all net proceeds” going toward “select cases” of Jan. 6 prisoners, calling them “victims.”

It’s unclear whether a t-shirt sale counts as a (tax-deductible) contribution to the nonprofit or as a private transaction. The checkout page doesn’t clarify, and it also solicits a donation on top of the purchase.

Patel—who played a central role in Trump’s attempts to overturn his election defeat, as well as in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents scandal—established the nonprofit last year. The entity has drawn questions from legal experts in addition to criticism for paying thousands of dollars to so-called “FBI whistleblowers,” ABC News reported this month.

Enter Sandman

But the song wasn’t apparently a surefire hit. According to a source who spoke with Billboard, the recording was first released on March 3 with “a soft marketing rollout” to test the public’s response “before ramping up promotion.”

Those promos kicked in about a week later. Right-wing streaming channel Real America’s Voice got the first crack on March 9, after which the official video debuted on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast. The video was then featured exclusively on right-leaning platform Rumble on March 9 and 10. Of the 33,000 sales that week, about 39 percent came the next day, the outlet reported.

Fade To Black

That’s not many. As Variety reported earlier this month, online sales represent “a minuscule fraction” of the music industry.

“Politically based songs often register high No. 1 on iTunes, where it usually takes only a few thousand sales a day to command the chart,” Variety reported.

The article also pointed out that Kid Rock’s 2022 anti-Biden track “We the People” hit No. 1 for iTunes sales, as did rapper YG’s 2020 song “FDT (Fuck Donald Trump).”

Read the full story here.

From Roger’s Notebook...

Reputation laundering. Ousted Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe has already cobbled together a new media sting operation, and—this may come as a shock—it’s already pushing misleading information.

On Tuesday night, the new group posted a Twitter video of O’Keefe interviewing prolific small-dollar Democratic donors, claiming that their thousands of donations—of which the donors appeared to not have full awareness—could be evidence of “massive money laundering.” The video has 63,000 likes and 5.7 million views as of Thursday afternoon.

There’s a real scandal here, but there’s no evidence it’s money laundering. Instead, O’Keefe appears to have discovered what campaign finance reporters have covered for years—how fundraising solicitations exploit elderly and low-information voters, most specifically via the scourge of pre-selected automatically recurring donations. And that problem is worse, statistically, on the Republican side, as The New York Times reported in 2021.

In reality, a number of small-dollar donors (to both parties) make thousands of small contributions a year, and some aren’t fully aware of it. The money sometimes goes out in tiny increments, and over time it can really add up. I’ve spoken to several of these donors, on both sides of the aisle. Like this Texas GOP donor, who gave tens of thousands of dollars in 2022 through thousands of small donations. He told me that he thought he was showing “support,” as he was asked in fundraising emails—that he was merely “voting” in polls—when he was really making automatically recurring donations. He gave so much so frequently that his bank called him.

Unlike O’Keefe, I’ve asked donors to check their bank statements, to see whether they’d actually been making these donations. Every time, they had. Thing is, it’s legal. The FEC doesn’t regulate it. At least, it’s legal for now. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison is investigating WinRed under state consumer protection laws for deceptive marketing.

The ol’ switcheroo. My colleague Jose Pagliery just reported that the Trump Organization cut off CFO Allen Weisselberg’s old attorney because the lawyer was more concerned about Weisselberg’s well-being than about Trump’s. While some people initially saw this as a possibility that Weisselberg flipped in the Manhattan DA’s investigation, the move actually suggests the opposite.

However, the new attorney, Seth L. Rosenberg, does have campaign finance experience—a likely valuable skill-set given that the grand jury investigation is said to revolve around campaign finance violations. Rosenberg once represented the chair of the New York Republican Party in an FEC investigation in the late 1990s regarding payouts to GOP operatives. In the end, the FEC came down against the state party, imposing a $128,000 fine—steep, especially for that era.

Sure as shootin’. The National Rifle Association’s Political Victory Fund is in hot water for not appropriately reporting independent expenditures, specifically hundreds of thousands of dollars in support of failed Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker.

In its response this week, the committee blamed “human error,” and said it had fired the responsible staff member and hired an outside compliance firm—likely a move to convince the FEC to go easy on any civil penalties, which considering the amount of money involved, could run quite high. The NRA said it would respond to our questions about the firing, but did not.

Grahamstanding. Sen. Lindsey Graham is the first sitting Senator since 2018 to receive a public opprobrium from the Senate Ethics Committee. The committee reprimanded Graham in a letter last week regarding his attempt to raise money for Walker’s campaign during a November interview in the U.S. Capitol complex—even though lawmakers are not allowed to use federal resources for political fundraising. The committee noted that Graham had made “repeat violations,” citing the fact that they had put him on notice after engaging in the same behavior in 2020.

“The public must feel confident that Members use public resources only for official actions in the best interests of the United States, not for partisan political activity. Your actions failed to uphold that standard, resulting in harm to the public trust and confidence in the United States Senate,” the letter said. “You are hereby admonished.”

Operation Boebert. After eking out a surprisingly narrow 546-vote midterm victory, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) is getting some advance air support. Last week, the Colorado GOP asked the FEC to allow them to create a separate legal fund to help finance a constitutional challenge to the state’s primary election system, which allows unaffiliated voters to participate in either the Republican or Democratic primary.

As Colorado Public Radio reported, the federal request comes after a separate effort two years ago failed to gain the required 75 percent of party support. The report also noted that unaffiliated voters represent the largest bloc in the state.

More From The Beast’s Politics Desk

As noted earlier, Jose Pagliery has been crushing the Trump investigation beat. Read his exclusive on how Manhattan prosecutors are trying to pressure the Trump Organization’s jailed finance officer to turn on Donald Trump.

Last week, Sam Brodey reported on why Rick Scott (R-FL) is the Senator everyone loves to hate. This week, Ursula Perano follows up—even with that reputation, she reports, Democrats aren’t raising their hand to challenge him in 2024. Read about the Dems’ dilemma here.

Ron DeSantis’ unofficial pre-presidential campaign saw its first shakeup, losing its top event coordinator. Jake LaHut, Zach Petrizzo, and myself report that Republicans are now saying that his armor is already starting to crack.

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