Back on June 2 of last year, I wrote a diary calling out a fraud and a con artist named Scott Dworkin who had been posting bullshit tales of “active resistance” at Daily Kos (making the Rec list over and over) while seeking to raise money for his organization, Democratic Coalition Against Trump:
A number of folks here would cite Scott Dworkin (no relation to our esteemed front-pager, Greg Dworkin) in their posts as a source of reliable and useful information on resisting Trump. Hell, Joy Reid would have Dworkin on her program from time to time and his backers here would rail against me for calling out this two-bit hack for being the con artist he is.
Well, lo and behold, journalists Lachlan Markay and Sam Stein from Daily Beast have just published a definitive takedown of Scott Dworkin’s efforts to line his own pockets while posing as a progressive “leader” of the resistance:
As Trump ran for president, the group raised money promising to stop him—while dedicating more than 90 percent of its expenditures to paying its own members.
Here are the opening two paragraphs from Markay’s and Stein’s piece:
Omar Siddiqui couldn’t make it to an August fundraiser in Beverly Hills for the Democratic Coalition Against Trump. But he ponied up the $2,000 ticket price after the group’s senior adviser, Scott Dworkin, sent him a personal invitation.
Months later, Siddiqui, the Democratic challenger to Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), was surprised to discover his money—or three of every four dollars of it—had gone to the coffers of consultants and lawyers the group leaned on to fight a libel suit, rather than pushing back against the president.
And here’s what I wrote back in June of last year after following the money and detailing how the main beneficiary of funds raised for the Democratic Coalition Against Trump was, in fact, Dworkin’s own “consulting firm,” Bulldog Finance Group. As I summarized in my diary after detailing the money trail:
See how this works? You start an organization with a great sounding name (and you live by the motto, “ABAFD” — Always Be Asking For Donations):
Democratic Coalition Against Trump
You start a corresponding super PAC to support your organization:
Keep America Great PAC
You pay most of the money you raise to yourself and your friends! It’s awesome!
And then you send out breathless tweets about how your organization asked the FBI to investigate Paul Ryan, and — Voila! — you start the whole circle jerk of donations all over again!
And the Daily Beast reporting notes just how lucrative these scams can be:
The Democratic Coalition, one of the many new progressive-minded organizations to bloom in the age of anti-Trump fervor, brought in nearly half a million dollars last year. Its donors include Siddiqui, a pair of Hollywood television producers, a former Real Housewife of Miami, and a member of the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors. The vast majority of its funds, however, have come from people whose names don’t make it into Federal Election Commission disclosures: the small, “unitemized” donors who give $200 or less.
As I detailed back in June, Markay and Stein highlight that Dworkin’s own company, Bulldog Finance Group, has been the primary beneficiary of all of this fundraising:
The Democratic Coalition paid more than half of the money it raised last year to its employees or their consulting firms, according to Federal Election Commission records. Dworkin’s Bulldog Finance Group was the chief beneficiary, drawing more than $130,000 from The Democratic Coalition.
The breakdown in 2016, when the Democratic Coalition declared its goal was “making sure that Donald Trump never became President,” was even starker. That year, Dworkin and other staff members received more than 90 percent of all of the Democratic Coalition’s expenditures, either personally or through a consulting company, according to FEC records.
There have been a number of these con artists working the “resistance” angle for some time, among them Dworkin, Louise Mensch, Claude Taylor, Palmer Report, John Schindler and Seth Abramson. As Brendan Fischer, the director of federal and FEC reform programs at the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center notes in the Daily Beast report:
“We saw the rise of ‘scam PACs’ during the Obama years, where grifters would tap into anti-Obama sentiment to raise mostly small-dollar donations from grassroots conservatives, and then pay themselves consulting fees rather than use the money to support candidates or causes. The Democratic Coalition seems to be using a similar playbook, only here they are tapping into anti-Trump sentiment.”
And the modus operandi of all of these grifters is similar. The article describes Dworkin’s tactics, and if they sound familiar it’s because a number of his fellow grifters (Abramson, Mensch, Taylor, Schindler) do the same:
The Democratic Coalition certainly has a reputation that exceeds its size or budget. The group, and Dworkin himself, are hyperactive on Twitter, crafting lenthy threads of tweets attempting to draw ties between Trump and the Russian government, or implicate other high-ranking Republicans. Those tweets are frequently punctuated with exclamations designed to draw the attention of journalists and news consumers—Exclusive! Breaking!—but occasionally report information that originated in the mainstream political press hours earlier. Dworkin is now raising money for a new project: an eponymous podcast. He’s brought in just under $15,000 of his $50,000 goal on crowdfunding platform Indiegogo, where his page declares that he and the Democratic Coalition “have worked to lead the Resistance.”
A lot of us here like to laugh at the aging Fox News viewers who flush their money down the scam “conservative cause” toilets peddled by the likes of Sean Hannity, Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee and other con artists on the right. The truth is, there are always grifters working the aisles. And usually, they’re pretty easy to spot.
My diary back in June on this clown was a fun read. Take a gander if you haven’t read it:
Diary promoting bullsh*t by self-aggrandizing hack Scott Dworkin spends all day atop Rec list