By Dan Christensen, FloridaBulldog.org
When Boca Raton’s Bill Pulte – Donald Trump’s hatchet man in the president’s push to seize control of the nation’s Federal Reserve System – appeared before the U.S. Senate Banking Committee for his confirmation hearing in February, he thanked his wife for her “unwavering support.”
Not surprisingly, Pulte didn’t mention the important and illegal $500,000 conduit contribution Diana Pulte secretly made to Trump’s Super PAC Make America Great Again, Again! Inc.
Important because it likely figured in Trump’s political calculus when he chose multi-millionaire Pulte in January to run the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), and illegal because the contribution violated federal law: the true source of the money was hidden because it was not attributed to her.
Federal records show the Pultes made other significant but lesser contributions to Trump that were more straightforward.
It’s also noteworthy given Pulte’s current high-profile work leveling allegations of mortgage fraud at Trump’s political adversaries, including Sen. Adam Schiff, D-CA, New York Attorney General Letitia James and lately Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook.
In Cook’s case, the president cited Pulte’s allegations last Monday when he announced he was firing her. Cook quickly claimed Trump had no proper cause to remove her and challenged the dismissal in federal court. Her attorney, Abbe Lowell, sought a restraining order at a hearing Friday that would allow her to stay in her Senate-confirmed post indefinitely, but obtained no immediate ruling, CNBC reported.
Since shortly after taking office, Trump has been demanding the Fed lower interest rates. He’s also unsuccessfully harangued Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell to quit. On Tuesday, after firing Cook, he told his Cabinet that he expects to soon have a majority of his own nominees on the seven-member Fed’s board of governors to slice interest rates.
THE BRIEFLY MYSTERIOUS LLC
The $500,000 contribution, made in November 2021 at the outset of Trump’s long march back to the White House, was attributed by MAGA Again! to a Delaware corporation called ML Organization LLC. But clues as to who was behind the company were abundant, and The Campaign Legal Center (CLC), the Washington-based nonprofit, quickly sniffed them out.
“There is reason to believe that ML Organization LLC was not the true source…and that one or more unknown person(s) – who may be William “Bill” Pulte and/or other persons – were, in fact, the true contributor(s),” wrote CLC attorney Saurav Ghosh in a complaint filed with the FEC in April 2022.
The complaint cited several reasons to think that was so. The real giveaway were public records showing that ML’s listed address was the same at a million-dollar Boca Raton property owned by Pulte. Pulte, 37, is the grandson of the late William J. Pulte, who 75 years ago founded the highly successful homebuilder Pulte Homes, now known as Pulte Group.
Federal law requires that political contributions be properly attributed to protect the integrity of the federal campaign process. “No person shall make a contribution in the name of another person or knowingly permit his name to be used to effect such a contribution, and no person shall knowingly accept a contribution made by one person in the name of another person,” says the Federal Election Campaign Act.
The FEC soon began its review, informing MAGA Again!, its treasurer Charles Gantt and William Pulte that a complaint naming them had been filed. It told them they “may have violated” the law and suggested they had better lawyer up.
In a response filed in June 2022 by Donald McGahn, a Washington-based lawyer you may recall, Pulte told the FEC that the CLC was wrong. “Simply put, Respondents have satisfied all their legal obligations at every step and the complaint’s allegations are meritless. The complaint is yet another example of the CLC filing a provocative, but baseless, complaint all so it can issue a press release designed to discourage further political participation protected by the First Amendment.”
The response also included some illumination about ML Organization. “The LLC, which manages investments on behalf of the Pulte family, has engaged in significant activities since it was established four years ago, and it has tens of millions of dollars in assets.” It identified Pulte as the LLC’s president and Diana Pulte as vice president.
The response included a copy of MAGA Again!’s donor form which includes Diana Pulte’s name and signature and identifies her as vice president of ML Organization LLC. Above that information, however, is a line that asks the person submitting the form to: “Check one for contribution type: __ Individual __Corporation __LLC __Partnership __Trust.” She checked the box for LLC, so MAGA Again! attributed the $500,000 to ML Organization LLC.
Paperwork filed in the case also says the $500,000 check provided to the Super PAC by Diana Pulte was “a check from the LLC.”
After the Super PAC was notified of the CLC’s complaint, it soon filed an amendment that attributed the contribution to Diana Pulte, records show.
MAGA Again!, represented by Michael Columbo of the Dhillon Law Group – the firm founded by Trump’s Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon – argued it did nothing wrong.
THE PULTES OFF THE HOOK
The FEC said last year that it has received “a range of complaints” alleging that political committees had erroneously disclosed LLCs as contributors instead of their beneficial owners – that is, actual human beings.
Lately, the FEC has said it is giving special scrutiny to LLC contributions both because it’s illegal to make political contributions in someone else’s name and because an LLC can make unlimited contributions to Super PACs. The goal is to ensure LLCs aren’t used as “straw donors” to get around campaign finance disclosure laws.
On April 28, three years after it began its review, the FEC made public that it had reached a settlement agreement in which MAGA Again! and Gantt stated they had chosen not to contest its finding but that there was “reason to believe” they had violated the act “by failing to report attribution information.”
MAGA Again!’s decision appears to have let the Pultes off the liability hook. Even though the FEC was aware that Diana Pulte instructed MAGA Again! that the $500,000 was to be considered a contribution from an LLC, not her personally, neither the Pultes nor ML Organization LLC was accused of any wrongdoing.
The consequences for the Super PAC: It promised not to do it again. That’s it. No hefty monetary fine, as has been typical in such cases.
That’s the same good fortune the FEC visited upon Miami billionaire and longtime chief of giant homebuilder Lennar Corp. Stuart Miller earlier this year after it determined he used a shell company, Tread Standard LLC, to secretly make $125,000 in illegal contributions to two Republican Super PACS in 2022. Dismissed without penalty.
Why? Because in February 2024 the FEC turned its policy regarding the seriousness of contributions made in the name of another on its head, which if they are for sums larger than $25,000 are felonies.
After considering a half-dozen of its recent cases involving conduit contributions made through LLCs, a bipartisan statement by a trio of FEC commissioners stated, “We rejected the premise that the contributions were made in the name of another and instead identified the issue as whether the respondents correctly attributed the contributions made by the LLCs.”
Translation: Instead of pursuing cases that are felonies, we’re just going to presume that it’s a reporting error on behalf of the Super PAC and send them a nasty letter telling them not to do that again.
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