Trump invites Sullivan to collect from $1.776 billion political slush fund
Victim Sen. Dan Sullivan will be able to collect cash from Donald Trump’s $1.776 billion political slush fund, according to a memo from the Trump Department of Justice.
Alaskans deserve to hear directly from Sullivan about the unethical slush fund created by an agreement that Trump made with himself. Trump’s Justice Department says it will apologize to Trump, Don Jr., Eric and Trump’s family business, though they can’t collect cash.
Sullivan and a select group of other Trump backers, however, are eligible.
So far Sullivan has refused to take a position on this scam, hoping that no one will notice. There has been no reporting in Alaska on Sullivan’s silence.
(UPDATE: Alaska Public Media posted this story early Friday afternoon about Sullivan’s refusal to talk about the slush fund and how he ran away from a question in Kodiak. We need more coverage of this sort. My only criticism of the story is the repetition of the claim that Sullivan and the equally reticent Nick Begich the Third “rarely” criticize Trump. No need for waffling. They never criticize Trump.)
Victim Sullivan qualifies for cash, according to the Trump administration, because his phone records were among those reviewed as part of the investigation into the January 6th insurrection.
The Department of Justice said that “Senators whose records were secretly subpoenaed” will be able to collect because they were “victims of lawfare and weaponization.”
Sullivan has played the victim card in the past, claiming that the federal government should not have checked his January 6th phone logs.
“This is a new low in the political weaponization of the Justice Department,” Sullivan claimed last fall.
Sullivan was not a victim of lawfare and weaponization.
The collection of phone logs is routine and it was warranted because Sullivan was one of the senators Rudy Giuliani called twice on January 6th, looking for help in illegally overturning the election of Joe Biden as president.
No one listened to Sullivan’s conversations. Federal investigators, however, had good reason to see what phone calls he made and received that day as I will explain below.
This is the second time that Sullivan has been made eligible for compensation for acts of “weaponization” that never occurred.
Last fall Sullivan voted for a bill that allowed him and eight other senators to sue the federal government and collect $500,000. Sullivan claimed he didn’t know it was in the bill until the day he voted for it. He said later he wouldn’t try to collect his gift.
Congress repealed the provision early this year, but Trump has now brought it back with no limit on the reward plan.
Last October 17, Sullivan and three other senators complained to Attorney General Pam Bondi that they were victims of Jack Smith’s “weaponized witch hunt.”
Sullivan said Smith was a “rogue Special Counsel” who “would do anything to stop President Trump.” Smith spied on Sullivan, according to Sullivan.
Smith would have been negligent had he not checked the phone records of Sullivan and the others, given Trump’s instigation of the insurrection and his illegal attempt to remain president.
Smith’s lawyers said the phone call records were part of “a focused effort to confirm or refute reports by multiple news outlets that during and after the January 6 riots at the Capitol, President Trump and his surrogates attempted to call senators to urge them to delay certification of the 2020 election results.”
Trump and Giuliani were on the phone January 6 asking Republican members of Congress—even during the Capitol attack—to delay a vote to approve Biden’s election while they tried to get other members of Congress to back Trump’s lies, the Select January 6th Committee found in its final report.
Sullivan was one of those beckoned by America’s mayor to push for a delay on January 6 along with Sens. Bill Hagerty, Lindsey Graham, Josh Hawley, Marsha Blackburn, Tommy Tuberville and Ted Cruz, the investigation found.
Giuliani at first refused to tell the House committee why he was calling members of Congress that day.
“Can you tell us why you were calling?”Giuliani was asked in his deposition.
“I was probably calling to see any—if anything could be done,” Giuliani said.
“Done about what?” he was asked.
“About the vote—the vote,” Trump’s attorney said.
Giuliani said in his deposition that he called and talked to Sullivan twice, but “I don’t know—I don’t—-I don’t—I don’t know why I talked to Dan Sullivan twice.”
“We know definitively what Giuliani was up to because he left a voice message for Senator (Tommy) Tuberville—inadvertently on Senator (Mike) Lee’s phone—recording his request,” the Select January 6th Committee found in its final report.
“The only strategy we can follow is to object to numerous states and raise issues so that we get ourselves into tomorrow—ideally until the end of tomorrow. So if you could object to every state and, along with a congressman, get a hearing for every state, I know we would delay you a lot, but it would give us the opportunity to get the legislators who are very, very close to pulling their vote,” Guiliani said in the misdirected voice mail released by Lee.
Sullivan didn’t reveal to the public that he had personally gotten calls that day from Giuliani until after the committee published its report and mentioned him by name, which led to questions from reporters.
“The senator received two phone calls from a number he did not recognize on January 6th,” Coyne told the Daily News. “The senator did not recognize the phone number and did not pick up the calls.”
“Because of the chaos that ensued on January 6th, it took at least two additional days for Sen. Sullivan to even listen to the messages that were left on his phone by this unknown number,” Coyne said.
“When he was able to listen, he realized they were from Giuliani. Giuliani actually had the wrong number, as the message made clear the calls were intended for another senator, not Sen. Sullivan.”
Coyne said, “Giuliani’s incoherent voice message said something about delaying the certification.”
If the message was about illegally delaying the certification of the election, then it was not incoherent.
Three months later, in March 2023, Sullivan gave a slightly different story in an interview on CNN with Jake Tapper.
“Yeah look, that was in the report, the January 6th report. I was even unaware of that. This was a phone call from somebody, I didn’t even know who it was—they left a message. I listened to the message a few days later. Ironically Jake, it was actually for the wrong senator, Rudy Giuliani had the wrong phone number. I mean I’ve never met him. I don’t know him. I, you know he was. I barely even understood what he was saying. So to, it was something about you know relooking at this. It was like I said, for another senator. I had listened to it a day, a few days after. And to be honest it was quite bizarre. And again I, I don’t even know Rudy Giuliani,” Sullivan told Jake Tapper.
Tapper said it seemed bizarre.
“Trust me. It was bizarre and it was the wrong number, to be perfectly honest.”
“Relooking,” as used here by Sullivan, is a euphemism for overthrowing the government. It’s illegal. Not bizarre.
Despite the efforts by Giuliani and Trump to force a stall, Congress resumed its joint session at 11:35 p.m. on January 6 and finished voting to confirm Biden’s victory at 3:41 a.m. on January 7, 2021.
Sullivan and 92 other senators approved Biden’s victory. Six senators, some of whom had been pressured that night by Trump and Giuliani, objected to the certification of Biden’s victory—Hawley, Cruz, Tuberville, Roger Marshall, John Kennedy and Cindy Hyde-Smith.
In the indictment that followed Smith’s investigation, the government said that Giuliani and Trump “attempted to exploit the violence and chaos at the Capitol by having Co-conspirator 1 (Giuliani) call lawmakers to convince them, based on knowingly false claims of election fraud, to delay the certification proceeding . . .”
One of the five senators Giuliani called between 6:59 p.m. and 7:22 p.m. was Sullivan.
America’s mayor says he talked twice to Sullivan that day. Sullivan says he never talked to Giuliani. He said he didn’t answer the two phone calls.
The questions remain: Did Trump and/or Giuliani think that Sullivan would help them overturn the 2020 election? Why?
Given these circumstances—including the conflicting claims by Giuliani and Sullivan—it was entirely appropriate for the special counsel to investigate what Trump and Giuliani were doing to try and get Sullivan’s help that day and overturn the election results.
Sullivan’s complaint that Jack Smith should be disciplined and disbarred for looking at a list of phone calls has no merit.
Sullivan is not a victim. He doesn’t deserve to collect any money from Trump’s unethical $1.776 billion slush fund.
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