With Roger Sollenberger, Political Reporter

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The Big Dig this week… How James Comer’s Subpoena To Joe Biden’s Brother Invokes His Own Brotherly Business Dealings

On Wednesday, House Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-KY) subpoenaed President Joe Biden’s brother, James Biden, who Comer has implicated in unsubstantiated allegations of the Biden family’s “shady business practices.”

Comer has in particular been trying to make hay out of two personal loan repayments from James Biden to his brother, for $40,000 and $200,000—with all transactions occurring in 2017 and 2018, when Joe Biden was neither in office nor a candidate.

But if Comer genuinely believes these transactions clear the “shady business practices” bar, he might want to consider a parallel inquiry into his own family.

Family plan

According to Kentucky property records, Comer and his own brother have engaged in land swaps related to their family farming business. In one deal—also involving $200,000, as well as a shell company—the more powerful and influential Comer channeled extra money to his brother, seemingly from nothing. Other recent land swaps were quickly followed with new applications for special tax breaks, state records show. All of this, perplexingly, related to the dealings of a family company that appears to have never existed on paper.

Comer’s investigative efforts have so far failed to show that Joe Biden’s loans have any connection to family business dealings—let alone to actions while holding elected office. Comer, however, exercised government influence directly over his family’s industry for nearly 20 years. 

Comer has held important positions in agriculture oversight since 2003, while running a family farming business, and those roles overlapped in 2019, the year of the land swaps. He only stepped back from an agriculture oversight role recently, in 2020—one year after the family business pivoted away from farming.

Game on

Delaney Marsco, senior counsel for ethics at nonpartisan watchdog Campaign Legal Center, told The Daily Beast that Comer’s overlapping public and private roles raise concerns about whether he may be trying to “game a personal business advantage.”

“Conflicts of interest can occur when members serve on committees overseeing industries in which they are heavily invested or in which their business interests are intertwined,” Marsco said. “Voters have a right to know that lawmakers are using their considerable power in the interest of the public, not to game a personal business advantage.”

A Comer spokesperson did not return The Daily Beast’s comment request.

Oversight

Comer’s official positions afforded him both insight and power in the agriculture industry, and he held them while he and his family ran a multimillion-dollar farming business.

For instance, in 2018, Comer—a member of the House Agriculture Committee—was selected to negotiate the Farm Bill. He was the first representative from Kentucky to do so in 30 years, according to an office press release at the time.

Comer had held a seat on that committee since he was first elected to Congress in 2016. Prior to that, Comer was the Kentucky Agriculture Commissioner, and before attaining that office, he sat on the state legislature’s agriculture committee for eight years. The whole time, Comer, his brother, and his father were running a farming business, with Comer valuing his third of the company between $1 million and $5 million by the time he got to Congress.

Brothers in farms

After Comer’s father died in early 2019, Comer appears to have changed his business focus. He went from farming the land to leasing it, a move he touted in a podcast interview last month as the way he “accumulated wealth.” The next year, Comer left the House Agriculture Committee, with his official website no longer listing the committee by August. (He currently serves on the Education and Labor Committee, in addition to leading Oversight.)

The land swaps between Comer and his brother, Chad Comer, went down months after they lost their father, in January 2019. Comer’s father—also named James Comer—died without leaving a will, according to deed records in Monroe County, Kentucky. That left his two sons—who were also his business partners—as the legal heirs to his land, and, without the dictates of a will, they set about divvying up the inheritance.

Swap meet

But some of those transactions aren’t so transparent.

For instance, on July 8, Chad Comer bought out his brother’s half of a piece of inherited Kentucky property, paying $100,000, according to deed records in Monroe County. Five months later, James and his wife Tamara “TJ” Comer, bought the property out in full, this time paying Chad Comer $218,000. The buyout netted Chad Comer an unexplained $18,000 above the total value in July.

That purchase, however, had a third party in addition to James and TJ—their own shell company, “Farm Team Properties, LLC.” Comer’s financial disclosure that year describes Farm Team Properties, LLC, as a “land management and real estate speculation company” with a range of value between $200,000 and $500,000. In two years, its value had increased to the $500,000 to $1 million range.

The Comers have engaged in a number of other curious transactions and business moves. While the amount of money involved is not even in the millions, they’re comparable to the Biden loans. And the largest of those two loans, $200,000, is less than the 2015 value of Comer’s “exempt” purchase.

“Did he know that the same day James Biden wrote him a check for $200,000, James Biden had just received a loan for the exact same amount from business dealings with a company that was in financial distress and failing?” Comer wondered in a press release last month.

This is an excerpt from an investigative report. Read the full story here.

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From Roger’s Notebook...

You’re kidding me. You never know what you’ll find in Federal Election Commission filings.

On Wednesday, the FEC sent two notices to a Republican super PAC called “America Great PAC” inquiring about the circumstances surrounding repayments it made for a $16,500 Small Business Administration loan it received in June 2020 as part of the COVID relief program.

One major problem, among others that The Daily Beast uncovered about the group, is that PACs aren’t allowed to take SBA loans. In 2021, the Justice Department sentenced a Nevada man to 46 months in prison for “fundraising for fake political action committees (PACs) that he created, and the other involving COVID-19 relief funds he sought and received through fraudulent applications.”

That gets to another point. This super PAC—with a name heavily suggestive of Trump’s trademark campaign slogan—appears to be a vehicle for a wide-ranging scam PAC network. The group’s website has a donation form with sample text listing an address and phone number tied directly to several identical scam PAC websites, all with different names, but operating under America Great super PAC. Many of the sites use the names and images of Republican presidential candidates to raise money on their behalf—such as supportrondesantis.com, donatetrump2024.com, and donatevivek.com—with multiple sites for each candidate.

The network also runs a political merch operation called “US Party Supply,” and the PAC’s operator—D.C. area resident Jason Pallante—is also tied to groups with names like “Republican National Committee Donor Support” and “Republican National Hispanic Assembly.”

The Daily Beast attempted to contact Pallante and PAC operators at numbers associated with them in FEC filings and public records, but those attempts were unsuccessful. 

The PAC has raised more than $450,000 since it launched in May 2019, most of it during the 2020 election, FEC filings show. It has paid roughly $295,000 of that amount directly to Pallante, for administrative, fundraising, and other consulting and contracting services. It spent $17,000 on video equipment at Best Buy, about $14,000 with a drone company, and around $15,000 in domain website fees to GoDaddy—in about 120 separate transactions, likely reflecting the various misleading domains the PAC has established.

In 2020, the group reported $67,500 in contributions to federal committees that back Trump, including the America First super PAC, which last year was fined nearly $1 million in connection with a foreign donation. However, as a super PAC, the group is not allowed to make contributions to federal committees—which the FEC has reminded them about.

America Great PAC also clocked some major donations in 2020—one of them being a $100,000 gift from the CEO of a electrical contracting company, Carl Kasalek, who told The Daily Beast that he was scammed.

“I’m not surprised,” Kasalek said when The Daily Beast described the nature of the PAC. He said that he donated because he wanted to support Donald Trump in 2020, and had found the group because he had “looked online so I could give it directly” to the campaign, instead of going through a middleman. Kalasek said his original check donation was returned “because of something with the address,” so he called the PAC operators and ended up sending a wire transfer. Asked whether the operators had represented themselves as the Trump campaign, Kalasek said, “Clearly, obviously, yes they did.”

The FEC appears to be onto the group, but it’s unclear why it is still active. The agency has sent numerous notices—as recently as last month—which Pallante often answers with desultory explanations and excuses strewn with political propaganda. The PAC’s disbursements reveal $20,000 in administrative fines.

“AGPAC will always be completely transparent with our most generous donor’s hard-earned cash,” Pallante wrote in a response last February, adding that the group “takes great pride in its ability to connect and communicate with like-minded Freedom Loving Americans.”

“I apologize to anyone of my donor’s that might have questioned or gotten a false impression on how their money was spent or dealt with,” he continued. “Let me ensure you and the FEC that I work very hard to produce relevant content that matters to the people that matter to America First.”

Trump dump. The Internal Revenue Service has finally uploaded the 2019 annual filing from Donald Trump’s original legal fund, the “Patriot Legal Expense Fund Trust,” after the pandemic created agency-wide administrative delays. The filing reveals bottom-line numbers not available in periodic reports, showing that the fund nearly went broke. It spent about $130,000 on political campaign-related expenses, mostly in contractor payments, and raised just $425. The fund closed the year with $5,901 in the bank. Trump’s new legal defense fund, established this summer, will fill its first financial statement in January.

Lunar eclipse. Rep. Alex Mooney (R-WV) has been playing a little loose with donations to his own legal fund. Mooney—who the Office of Congressional Ethics found “likely” violated federal laws governing gifts and office staff—appears to have failed to report more than $25,000 in contributions to his legal fund over the course of two years.

The Alex Mooney Legal Expense Fund’s 2021 annual filing—which appeared last month in another delayed posting to the IRS website—shows $25,100 in contributions over the last two weeks of the year. But Mooney didn’t list those gifts on his original 2021 financial disclosure, and it took him two years to correct the record. They finally appeared in an amended version of that disclosure, which he filed on May 25 this year.

While the fund’s 2022 annual filing still hasn’t been posted, his personal financial disclosures show that he appears to have repeated the error that year as well. His original 2022 disclosure lists no gifts, but he filed an amended version—also on May 25 this year—showing the fund received $44,500 in donations.

Both amendments came almost exactly a year to the day after an independent OCE investigation released its report on Mooney. The report found that Mooney appeared to have violated House rules and federal law in connection with an Aruba resort trip underwritten by a direct mail fundraising company to which he has extensive ties. The OCE also found that Mooney likely made false statements and violated House ethics rules by making staffers babysit his kids and the family dog without pay.

Keep talking. Rep. George Santos (R-NY) gave an interview to CNN’s Manu Raju last week, in which the beleaguered congressman falsely pleaded ignorance to any possible campaign finance violations, passing the buck to his treasurer instead.

“Remember how a campaign works,” Santos said. “I’m a candidate. Candidates do not handle money. Candidates do not handle finances. Candidates do not handle filings.”

But prosecutors have evidence that Santos was directly and personally involved with their campaign-related charges. The indictment quotes text messages where Santos promises a National Republican Congressional Committee representative in March 2022 that he will be wiring his campaign a $500,000 personal loan, saying, “That’s getting done tomorrow.” That loan—as Santos himself has personally admitted—was fake, yet in the interview he blamed his treasurer at the time. (The loan was eventually real, The Daily Beast reported, but the source of the money is unclear and still unexplained.)

The indictment also quotes texts between Santos and his treasurer scheming up and executing on a series of entirely fake contributions from family members to his campaign. Prosecutors also say that they have texts between Santos and a contributor, showing that Santos did in fact personally handle contributions, taking the contributor’s credit card information and subsequently using it to break numerous federal laws governing campaign donations, as well as theft and identity fraud.

Maine justice. Citizens of Maine voted this week to close a loophole that allows foreign governments to put money into state elections and local referendums.

Maine Public Radio reported that the electioneering ban was largely in response to foreign spending for a 2021 referendum on a planned electricity corridor in the west part of the state. Corporations controlled by foreign governments have used that loophole to pour “tens of millions of dollars trying to influence referendum outcomes, including $14.5 million just this year,” the report noted.

Spamalot. Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr appears to have a problem, in that he’s attracting more Trump donors than Biden donors, Politico reported last week.

“His large-dollar donor base has a clear Republican lean,” Politico reported, noting that its analysis tracks with polls indicating Kennedy might draw a majority of his support from the GOP.

The Politico study also found that most of the $10 million RFKJ has received from major donors “came from voters who did not make any federal donations during either the 2016 or 2020 election cycles,” indicating that he is “activating people who have been turned off by what major parties have been offering.”

More From The Beast’s Politics Desk

Be Unhinged. If you missed the third GOP debate last night, you missed the Republicans all trying to one-up each other with attention-seeking behavior. Whether that was who could be the most hawkish on Israel, who could have the best zinger—Vivek Ramaswamy took aim at Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley’s heels, while Haley straight up just called Vivek “scum”—or Tim Scott just straight up calling for war with Iran, Wednesday night’s debate was one for the ages. Read all about it from Sam Brodey. 

Dear John. Rumors about Mitch McConnell’s future are causing his would-be successors—John Cornyn (R-TX), John Thune (R-SD), and John Barrasso (R-WY)—to all begin the jockeying to replace McConnell even before he’s gone. The Capitol Hill team has all the details. 

Dale Marjorie. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has been showing Congress how to lose friends and not influence people. With he best ally—Kevin McCarthy—out of the Speaker’s suite, lawmakers told Zach Petrizzo that MTG’s stock is way down. 

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