Here’s are the Floridians who paid megabucks to dine with President Donald Trump

By Dan Christensen, FloridaBulldog.org

We’ve all read about the rich and the ultrarich who each paid a king’s ransom this year to the political action committee MAGA Inc. for a one-on-one candlelight dinner or group chat with Republican President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago.

Wired, which broke the story in March, reported that sources “with direct knowledge of the meetings” said business leaders could obtain the private dinner for $5 million. The cost for a group dinner: $1 million.

Some big names made the newspapers. Space X boss and ex-DOGE kingpin Elon Musk, who Federal Election Commission records show gave $5 million. Billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, $30 million. Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, $1 million. Cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder, $5 million. Former U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler, R-GA, the current head of the U.S. Small Business Administration, $2.5 million. United Healthcare Services, $5 million. Jeffrey Yass, the Pennsylvania billionaire co-founder of the global trading and tech company Susquehanna International Group, $17 million.

(Those numbers, of course, don’t include any other donations made to Trump and his abundant political committees.)

But what about Florida’s own, but lesser-known political influencers who have that kind of spare cash to throw around? Don’t they deserve the spotlight? Many are familiar names whose purchases of influence with other federal, state and local elected officials and candidates appear elsewhere in election records. Some aren’t so familiar.

Now for the fun part. Why do you think each of them donated? Post your thoughts as a comment at the end of the story.

Before we begin, you should know that MAGA Inc. is what’s known as a hybrid PAC, a combination of a regular federal PAC and a Super PAC that keeps two separate accounts to stash the money they raise.

One is called a contribution account. It is for the “hard money” that rolls in from individual contributions that are under the statutory limit, currently $5,000, and goes out to candidates. The other is a “non-contribution” or “soft money” account that can accept money in unlimited amounts from anyone except foreign nationals. It can spend unlimited amounts of that money on so-called “independent expenditures” to support or oppose political candidates and ballot measures. 

All the big money sent to Super PACs like MAGA Inc. is oddly designated by the Federal Election Commission (FEC). For example, each million dollar or multi-million-dollar donation to dine with Trump is described as a “non-contribution.” Go figure.

FLORIDIANS WHO PAID TO DINE WITH THE STAR

Anyway, here’s a list of our fellow Floridians who were non-contributor contributors to MAGA Inc. this year, according to the PAC’s most recent FEC filing. Note: You’ll see a bunch of crypto influencers who nevertheless paid MAGA Inc. using traditional checks for U.S. dollars.

• Blockchain.com Inc, 230 NW 24^th St. Miami, $5 million. Blockchain.com calls itself “The world’s leading crypto finance house.”  Crypto bros Peter Smith, CEO, and Nicolas Cary, president and vice chairman are the firm’s co-founders. In January, the company’s Cayman Islands parent, Blockchain.com Group Holdings Ltd Inc., hired Ballard Partners – specifically mega-lobbyist Brian Ballard and his colleague, Hunter Morgen, who served as special assistant to the president during Trump’s first term – to lobby on “crypto policy and regulatory framework.” The “GENIUS Act,” also known as the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act, established the first framework for regulating payment stablecoins, was passed by Congress July 17. Trump signed it into law the next day. Blockchain.com paid Ballard Partners $300,000 through June 30, according to U.S. Senate lobbyist records.
• Robert H. Book, 350 E. Las Olas, Suite 960, Fort Lauderdale, $1 million. Chairman of Book Capital Enterprises, a family office devoted to comprehensive wealth management and co-vice chairman of Axxes Capital Inc., a private markets investment management firm at 3011 Ponce de Leon Boulevard, Suite 1420, Coral Gables. Book’s diverse resume includes stints as chairman of Jet Support Services, a provider of private aviation maintenance, warranty and insurance services, The Franklin Mint and SMobile Systems Inc.

• Elizabeth W. Brodie, Fisher Island, Miami. $500,000. The “retired sole proprietor” of EWB Services LLC didn’t pay enough to qualify for a group get together under the rules uncovered by Wired. Today, state records list her husband, Stefan Brodie, as the sole manager of EWB Services. He is a co-founder of The Purolite Company, who in 2002 was found guilty by a jury of conspiring to trade with Cuba in violation of the American Cuban embargo under the provisions of the Trading with the Enemy Act. Brodie was denied a pardon by President Biden in December 2023.
• Frederick E. “Derick” Cooper, Vero Beach, $2 million. Cooper is the chief executive officer of Vero Beach’s QOL Medical LLC. The first paragraph of a Nov. 15, 2024 press release by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Boston suggests why Cooper wanted a face-to-face with the man who has virtually unlimited pardon authority: “Pharmaceutical company QOL Medical, LLC (QOL) and its CEO, Frederick E. Cooper, have agreed to pay $47 million to resolve allegations that they caused the submission of false claims to federal health care programs, in violation of the False Claims Act, by offering kickbacks, in the form of free Carbon-13 breath testing services, to induce claims for QOL’s drug Sucraid.”
• Elizabeth Fago, Juno Beach. $1 million. Fago, a “self-employed businesswoman,” scored quite a lot of press following her odiferous remittance. MAGA Inc. reported receiving her check on April 3. Twenty days later, Trump signed “a full and unconditional pardon” for her son, West Palm Beach luxury nursing home owner Paul Walczak. In between those dates, Walczak was sentenced to 18 months in prison, two years of supervised release and ordered to pay $4.38 million in restitution after pleading guilty to failing to pay more than $6 million in payroll taxes withheld from employees. If Fago’s $1 million donation alone wasn’t enough of a quid to obtain Trump’s quo, remember that Fago previously played a key role in surfacing Ashley Biden’s stolen diary in hopes of embarrassing Trump’s Democratic rival for the presidency, Joe Biden, shortly before the 2020 election.
• Florida Crystals Corp. 1 N. Clematis St. Suite 2000, West Palm Beach, $2 million. Florida Crystals is the privately held, “fully integrated” cane sugar company owned by the Fanjul Corp., which is in turn owned by Brothers Alfonso and J. Pepe Fanjul. Some of the traditional focuses of the Fanjul’s lobbying efforts have included keeping government subsidies and disposing of or altering costly environmental policies aimed at protecting the Everglades.

• Antonio J. Gracias, 3700 block of Collins Ave, Miami Beach, $1 million. Founder, CEO and chief investment officer at the multi-billion-dollar investment firm Valor Equity Partners. Described by The New York Times and “one of Elon Musk’s closest confidants,” Gracias was part of Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency [DOGE]” team which focused on the Social Security Administration. He told Fox News in April that DOGE had found “five plus million…illegals” had obtained Social Security numbers “through an automatic system” and had used them to obtain benefits. Further, he said that “thousands of them’’ were on the voter rolls in a “handful” of states and that “many of them had voted.” None of that has been publicly substantiated. Forbes estimates Gracias’s net worth at $2.4 billion.
• Marathon Digital Holdings Inc., AKA MARA, 1010 S. Federal Hwy. Suite 2700 Hallandale Beach, $1 million. MARA, a crypto mining company that listed a Fort Lauderdale address when it made its “non-contribution” in January, is run by chairman and CEO Fred Thiel. He has a brother named Peter, but not the Silicon Valley Peter Thiel (PayPal and Palantir) you’re probably thinking about. MARA’s January check to MAGA cleared by the time Thiel went to the White House in July to attend the signing of the GENIUS Act, which had been pushed by MARA’s Washington lobbyists.

• Daniel J. Newlin, Windermere. $500,000. A former Orange County sheriff’s deputy, Newlin is a personal injury lawyer who Trump nominated to be ambassador to Colombia in December when he was president-elect. Newlin has not been confirmed by the U.S. Senate, and the post remains vacant. Newlin, a major backer of President Trump, nevertheless appears to have come up short for a group get- together with the president at Mar-a-Lago.
• John Alfred Paulson, 180 Lake View Ave, Palm Beach. $250,000. He is listed as the president of Paulson Capital Inc. Paulson’s a billionaire – $4 billion, says Forbes – who made his fortune shorting subprime mortgages before the market bubble burst in calamitous fashion in 2007. He donated to MAGA on Jan. 2, but never followed up.
• Jeffrey Skoll, 1000 block of S. Ocean Boulevard, Lantana. $1 million. Manager of Goodlands (Florida) Property Management. Canadian-born Jeff Skoll was eBay’s first president in 1995 and, after making his fortune became a film producer via his Participant Media. Skoll, who Forbes says is worth $5.4 billion, is a major philanthropist through the Skoll Foundation which at the end of 2023 reported total assets of $803 million. The foundation’s federal tax filings show Skoll as having heavily funded philanthropic ventures in Africa and Asia, various health initiatives and given to groups like the Rosalyn Carter Institute for Caregiving and the Secure Democracy Foundation. Lately, though, his political tastes appear to have changed. Besides his million-dollar donation to MAGA on Jan. 9, he attended Trump’s inauguration two weeks later.

•  TG Holdings LLC. a Delaware corporation with Florida offices headquartered at 17895 Collins Ave., Suite 2600. Sunny Isles Beach. $1 million. The company and an affiliate, Transatlantic Group Ltd. – likewise listed in FEC records – are among a collection of companies known informally as The Trump Group and legally as Trump Holdings LLC. NO, NOT THAT TRUMP! South African-born brothers Julius “Jules” Trump and Eddie Trump, no relation to the president, are among South Florida’s most successful luxury real estate developers – beginning in the late 1980s with the creation of swanky Williams Island just south of Aventura and later the towering Acqualina Resort & Residences On The Beach in Sunny Isles.
• David Randall Winn, 7900 Glades Road, Suite 540 Boca Raton. $200,000.  Managing principal at FiveW Capital and managing member of the investment advisory firm 22C Capital LLC with $1.5 billion under management.
• Chase Zimmerman, the 2000 block of Queen Palm Road, Boca Raton. $1.5 million. The son of Fort Lauderdale wealthy advertising tycoon Jordan Zimmerman, Chase Zimmerman is an entrepreneur, venture capitalist and “car/watch aficiando” who identified himself to MAGA as the CEO of Miles Per Hour Inc. a Delaware corporation that registered to do business in Florida in December. Zimmerman, however, isn’t listed as an officer or director.

Oh, one additional note about Zimmerman. FEC records show he used the crypto currency Stablecoin (USDC) to make his $1.5 million donation to MAGA Inc. USDC, which is pegged to the U.S. dollar, is issued by New York-based Circle Internet Group, which went public in June (NYSE:CRCL).