Archive for the ‘Mike Pence’ Category

Is Mike Pence betting it will all come crashing down on Trump? – Washington Post (blog)

Vice President Pence is spending considerable time cultivating big-money Republican donors at small, private events, including hedge fund managers and executives from brokerage houses, chemical giants and defensecontractors, Kenneth P. Vogel reports at the New York Times. Many of these events, whose participants are kept secret from the media and are omitted from Pences public schedule, have been taking placeat the vice-presidential residence at the Naval Observatory, as well as other nongovernment venues.

While cultivating support from deep-pocketed business interests is nothing new in GOP politics, Pences activities raise the question of whether he is doing this for Trump-Pence 2020 or for himself. As Vogels piecepoints out, Pences intimate confabswith wealthy donors and conservative power brokers have fueled speculation among Republican insiders that he is laying the foundation for his own political future, independent from Mr. Trump.

From the Michael Flynn scandal to James Comey's firing, Vice President Pence has repeatedly had his official statements defending the Trump administration contradicted - sometimes by the president himself. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)

All of this suggests something important about President Trump. Despite Pences protestations to the contrary, the vice president looks to be preparing for his own political future.Beyond this clear signal about his ownpolitical ambitions, Pences actions raise the question of whether he has lost confidence in Trumps ability to come out of the Russia investigation unscathed.

This is not the first time that Pence, in his short tenure as Trumps vice president, has sparked chatter about his political ambitions unyoked from Trump. In May, Pence filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission, forming his own political action committee, the Great America Committee, marking the first time a sitting vice president has formed such a separate political arm, NBC Newsreported at the time.

The Great America Committee is apparently not wasting any time. Vogel reports that last Thursday, itheld a reception for prospective donors at the Washington offices of the powerful lobbying firm BGR.

In holding donor events, Great America Committee will do nothing to quell speculation about Pences intentions. When he first launched the PAC in May, Pence aides attempted to play down the move by saying itsresources will be used to support Republican congressional candidates in the 2018 midterms. But that characterization didnt diminishhow unusual this was: Traditionally, vice presidents tap the resources of their party to support congressional candidates, rather than create their own fundraising organization.

Its highly unusual, if not unprecedented, for a first-term vice president to appear to separate hiselection activities, even if aimed at congressional races, from the president he serves. But the timing of Pences formation of the Great America Committee suggests the move may have something to do with judgments about Trumps future, too.

Pence filed the paperwork on May 17, eight days after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, and the same day that Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein appointed Robert S. Mueller III to be special counsel in the Russia investigation. Indeed, the two weeks before Pence filed the Great America papers were rife with some of the most explosive news stories about the Russia scandal to date.

To review: On May 8, former acting attorney general Sally Yates testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee that the White House kept former national security adviser Michael Flynn for 18 days after she told the White House counsel that he was vulnerable to Russian blackmail. (Pence has always sought to distance himself from the Flynn affair: After Trump asked for Flynns resignation in February, Pencemaintainedthat Flynn misled him about the conversations he had with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, playing the part of the duped, but loyal, soldier.)

Then, after that Yates testimony on May 8, Trump engaged in probably the most self-destructive sequence of actions of his presidency. On May 9, he fired Comey. The next day, he met with Kislyak and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov in the Oval Office, telling them that firing the real nut job Comey had eased great pressure on him from the Russia investigation. And the day after that, Trump admitted on national television that he had fired Comey because of the Russia thing. Finally, on May 12, Trump posted his tweethinting that he may have recorded his conversations with Comey. (He hadnt.)

One week later, Pence filed the Great America Committee papers, marking his break with the traditional arrangement for political fundraising between presidents and vice presidents.

The traditional arrangement is based on the expectation that the president and vice president will together run for reelection. But Pences activities seem to signal doubts about whether there will even be a Trump-Pence ticket to run in2020. We are not yet six months into Trumps term, and each new revelation in the burgeoning Russia investigation seems to heighten the possibility that Trump could either no longer be president, or at least no longer be a viable reelection candidate, in 2020.

Pence is perhapspreparing for just that potentiality. If he were confident that the Russia investigation is fake news or a hoax, as Trump has maintained, he would be hewing to the traditional vice-presidential path. Instead, hes making his own plans which may show just how worried he is that the Russia investigation is going to come crashing down on his president.

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Is Mike Pence betting it will all come crashing down on Trump? - Washington Post (blog)

Organizing in Mike Pence Country – BillMoyers.com

Hoosier Action is on a mission to counteract the Pence legacy in Indiana by creating political power and economic justice for those the now-vice president's policies left behind.

Then-Gov. Mike Pence holds a press conference on March 31, 2015 . (Photo by Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images)

This Q&A is part of Sarah Jaffes series Interviews for Resistance, in which she speaks with organizers, troublemakers and thinkers who are doing the hard work of fighting back against Americas corporate and political powers.

Jaffe speaks with organizer Jesse Alexander Myers, a former Occupy leader who recently moved from New York City to Bloomington, Indiana, to work for Hoosier Action, a new community organization focusing on economic-justice, formed in the wake of Donald Trumps election. Back in 2008 Barack Obama narrowly won Indiana, the state that gave us Mike Pence. But in 2016, the state continued its shift to the right, with 57 percent voting for Trump.

Myers talks about how political gerrymandering impacted Indianas election results, the legacy of Pences actions as governor and how his organization hopes to bring about change. Myers hosts From The Heartland, a podcast about organizing for social and economic transformation in the Rust Belt, the Great Plains and the South.

Sarah Jaffe: Indiana has been at the center of a lot of things over the last year. You are in (what was formerly) Mike Pence country. You are not that far from where the Carrier plant and the Rexnord plant and all of the things that Trump paid attention to for a minute were. Give people the lay of the land of what is going on in Indiana specifically.

Jesse Myerson: Indiana is thought of differently from the other states in this area, like Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania, because it is almost never included when people talk about swing states. It is often thought that it is just too far gone and too reactionary here. But it wasnt very long ago, in 2008, that Barack Obama won the state. Of the nine people that we sent to the US House back then, five of them were Democrats. We have one Democratic senator and one Republican senator. It was very much a swing state at that point.

People who used to have good union jobs in manufacturing are now working 30 hours a week at Walmart.

In the interim, because of the tea party insurgency in 2010 and the super-ruthless gerrymandering that that subjected the state to, things have changed dramatically in the last 10 years also because of Gov. Pence and his predecessor, Mitch Daniels. For instance, Indiana is now a right-to-work state. As I said, the gerrymandering is really terrible and then theres the voter-ID law. Of course, this is a state that is still reeling from NAFTA and a lot of terrible poverty that began [after it was implemented.] People who used to have good union jobs in manufacturing are now working 30 hours a week at Walmart.

The state of Democratic peoples power in Indiana is really, really weakened by all of these reforms. If you look at electoral maps, you have places in 2008 that were blue are now salmon and places that were salmon are now red and places that were red are scarlet. Donald Trump won the state, the governor is Republican and both state legislature houses are supermajority Republicans.

Seven out of the nine members of the congressional delegation are Republicans. We still have a split between the senators Democrat and Republican but the Democrat, Joe Donnelly, is up for a very, very tough re-election next year. The Koch brothers are already running ads against him. He is definitely the most vulnerable Democrat coming up. He voted for Gorsuch and has not done very much to endear himself to Democratic voters.

SJ: And Donnelly endorsed anti-abortion bills when he was in the House.

JM: If only there was some better person who would replace him, but as far as it looks, the person likeliest to replace him is a far right-winger named Luke Messer, who will probably run against him in 2018. The state of politics here is very difficult, but I think that underneath, the state is still very much a swing state the way that it was in 2008. With some diligent organizing of the working class, that can be reflected much more in the coming two election cycles. Perhaps we can pull out of supermajority in time to get a much more fair at least bipartisan agreement around redistricting next time, and then open up possibilities for a more dramatic transformation in future years.

SJ: Organizing that working class around working-class interests was the reason that you moved to Indiana. Tell us about Hoosier Action.

JM: Hoosier Action was founded by a remarkable woman named Kate Hess Pace, who is from Bloomington, Indiana. Her family stretches back five generations in New Albany, Indiana, which is a small town just across the Ohio River from Louisville, in the same congressional district. For the last seven or eight years, SHE has been up in Minneapolis-St. Paul doing faith-based organizing with a group called Isaiah, which is part of the PICO Network, organizing congregations around economic justice issues. She was instrumental in some really big campaigns including winning the toughest foreclosure protections.

After the cataclysm of the 2016 elections, she felt very strongly the urge to come home and start something here in southern Indiana, because the state of organizing in Indiana has been greatly debased. This is especially true in southern Indiana, where there was never particularly high union density I was also moved by the cataclysmic election results and felt very strongly that my efforts would be more efficiently deployed in the middle of the country, in places where there wasnt as significant a progressive infrastructure as there is in my hometown of New York City

Basically, I wanted to go to a place that had voted for Obama and then voted for Sanders in the primary and then went to Trump in the general. And there were plenty of places like that. That was the sort of cross-section of people who, in having voted for Obama, showed that the vitriolic racist organized white supremacist faction wasnt so powerful there that it was dictating the course of the state that had this sort of anti-establishment bent that led the Democrats of the state to prefer Sen. Sanders. And then, ultimately the state went to Trump, and thus, needs considerable organizing out of that situation.

A mutual friend connected me to Kate. We have been building this thing now for three months. We have a small but growing base of dues-paying members. We have teams around operations, administration and fundraising. We have been running a test canvass program to gear up for our first big canvass, which we start on July 8. We did a day-long boot camp training for organizers in Indiana. People from all over the southern half of the state came. We did one action at Donnellys office around Medicaid cuts and infrastructure. We have been collecting Medicaid stories, first-person accounts that people, mostly mothers in the region, have written, and are trying to get them placed in national press outlets. As Kate says, Power is organized people plus organized money. So, that is what we are trying to do: collect a lot of people and a lot of money. It is the only way we are going to make an impact in Indiana or nationally.

A lot of this organizing is based on having long one-on-one discussions with people.

SJ: You got one of those stories in The Washington Post, right?

JM: Yes, from a woman named Audi McCullough. I went to a die-in protest at Bloomington Town Hall that was sponsored by a bunch of groups, including the Monroe County chapter of the National Organization for Women. Audi is a member of that. It is a fledgling organization as well, it started after the Womens March.

At the protest, Audi got up with her child, Kaden, and told her story of his extremely complex medical needs [Kaden has a congenital heart condition as well as a bleeding disorder] and the health scares that they had both faced. She talked about the absolute necessity of Medicaid as a basic pillar for them to live free and dignified lives. I said to her, You are a natural leader. She wrote up her story and we got it placed in The Washington Post.

SJ: Telling these stories is an important part of this kind of organizing, but you can also end up with people thinking that just telling a sad story is going to be enough to move their senator and then wondering why that doesnt work. I would love you to talk a little bit more about the way this storytelling does and doesnt fit into your organizing strategy.

JM: It is definitely integral. As you imply, it is not sufficient unto itself, but basically, the essence of the organizing we are doing is relational. Organizing that takes place absent the building and deepening of relationships between people is going to be basically facile. It is one thing if you can get 12 people in a room to talk to us and it is another thing if you get 400 people and 400 really only comes when people have deepened their relationships with one another.

A lot of this organizing is based on having long one-on-one discussions with people: what their lives are like, what they are interested in, what they are concerned about, what they are afraid of, what they are angry about, what they are hopeful for and growing relationships that way. Those stories are important in the actual day-to-day organizing, talking to people and letting them know who you are and finding out who they are. As a kind of public expression, what we hope to do is to mobilize people with that, but ultimately that mobilization should turn into a person becoming a dues-paying member, coming to monthly member meetings, joining a team and taking on work. That can be knocking on doors, doing data entry, helping to promote issues or taking on a shift at the farmers market or at a county fair. Ideally it is not a high-temperature sort of organizing like what we saw at Occupy Wall Street where it is lots of marches, lots of heat and lots of intensity.

Really, that emotional heat is being channelled into really well-functioning systems that allow people to take on discrete amounts of work that makes sense for them in terms of their working and personal lives.

SJ: A lot of people will say, Is this movement dead? or Is this movement gone? and actually, a lot of important work is the work you cant see.

JM: We think of Hoosier Action as a vessel or a basket that we are all collectively weaving so that it can be strong and hold all of the people and money that we are trying to bring together to create power. Weaving that basket or making that vessel water-tight that requires all sorts of maintaining spreadsheets and sending follow-up emails and doing lots and lots of unglamorous behind-the-scenes work. It may not look like it is actually waging class struggle in the way that we want to imagine it cinematically unfolding, but that is actually vital for building the kind of power that we need. If it were a weak basket or a vessel with some holes in it, the power that we would be able to accumulate would be greatly diminished.

SJ: There have been very particular public health issues that are worth bringing up, because they are issues that are prominent around the country, perhaps especially in places like Indiana that have been hit really hard by the decline of manufacturing. I am talking about, of course, the HIV outbreak that Mike Pence is basically responsible for and the opioid crisis.

The Pence approach to public health is basically to decimate it.

JM: These two are linked. There is actually a third one which I would cite, which is water contamination. All three of those crises were really, really deepened by the Pence approach to public health, which is basically to decimate it. In Scott County, which is in this part of the state, there is a very high poverty rate and there is a lot of opioid usage. Pence, being the radical ultra-right-wing Christian fundamentalist theocrat that he is, waged war on Planned Parenthood during his tenure as governor and shut down the Planned Parenthood in Scott County, which did not offer abortion services but was the only facility in the county that delivered HIV testing. So, with that gone, this HIV outbreak occurred, which is the biggest in the states history and the first in the United States that we know to be associated with sharing needles from injecting prescription painkillers.

Pence was extremely resistant to the idea of allowing needle exchanges. Eventually, he relented he didnt make them legal statewide, but he did start a program whereby counties could appeal to him for a waiver against the prohibition. Eventually, that got a little better. Then the new governor, who is less of an ideologue but still a Republican operative, Eric Holcomb he has been more lenient on that still.

The other one being the water contamination crisis in East Chicago, Indiana due to industrial byproducts. Pence wouldnt call a state of emergency, which would have freed up some funds to help relocate people who couldnt live there without getting poisoned. Gov. Holcomb has relented on that and called the state of emergency.

Holcomb has proposed a new modification to the Medicaid program here. It is called HIP 2.0: the Healthy Indiana Plan 2.0, which Mike Pence reluctantly expanded under the Affordable CARE ACT. Holcomb is hoping to add a new provision that adds a work requirement so that either you have to be working or you have to be actively searching for work if you are able-bodied under this new plan. That necessitates a big bureaucracy to determine who is able-bodied, who isnt, whether they are sufficiently looking for work, and all these sorts of things that wind up meaning that the program will cost more and cover fewer people. So it is not as though his public health record is shaping up to be any better than his predecessors.

SJ: And that is if Medicaid doesnt get decimated by federal government.

JM: Right. They are talking about cutting the thing in half in a decade. There is significant poverty in this region and people really rely on it as a basic pillar of their lives. If they cut it and people get kicked off it, they are just going to be underwater. There are a lot of people who just cannot work. If they cut Medicaid and these people get kicked off, then they are going to die.

SJ: How can people subscribe to your podcast, support your work, and, if they are in Indiana, join Hoosier Action?

JM: Hoosieraction.org is the website, and you can follow us on Facebook or Twitter Hoosier Action, both cases. I am taking a Twitter hiatus right now, but normally I am @JAMyerson on Twitter and you can follow me there.

Interviews for Resistance is a project of Sarah Jaffe, with assistance from Laura Feuillebois and support from the Nation Institute. It is also available as a podcast on iTunes. Not to be reprinted without permission.

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Organizing in Mike Pence Country - BillMoyers.com

Mike Pence: ‘We are close’ on healthcare – Washington Examiner

Vice President Mike Pence struck an optimistic tone Monday to say "we are close" to getting a deal on healthcare.

"Every Republican in the House and the Senate as well as this administration promised the American people we would repeal and replace Obamacare," Pence said on conservative talk radio host Laura Ingraham's radio show. "The Senate is within weeks of being able to deliver on that promise."

Ingraham brought up Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's comments last week in which he said Republicans would have to work with Democrats to fix Obamacare insurance markets if the Senate health bill doesn't get passed.

Pence said a deal needs to happen soon as he believes the law is collapsing.

"We all know that and we are not getting it done," Ingraham responded.

The vice president aimed to gin up support for repealing the law this week as the Senate returns to work on Monday.

"I would tell your millions of listeners that this week is critical," he said. "You want to see Congress repeal and replace Obamacare now is the time to have your voice heard."

Pence's comment comes as the Republicans conference remains at odds over how to approach repeal. Close to 10 senators are opposed to the bill in its current form, making it a nonstarter for a vote as it exists now. Conservatives angry that it doesn't do enough to repeal Obamacare and centrists worried about erasing Medicaid coverage gains.

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Mike Pence: 'We are close' on healthcare - Washington Examiner

At Private Dinners, Pence Quietly Courts Big Donors and Corporate Executives – New York Times

If nothing else, the assiduous donor maintenance by Mr. Pence and his team reflects his acceptance of a Washington reality that Mr. Trump sharply criticized during the campaign, when he assailed some of his partys most generous donors as puppet masters who manipulated the political process to further their own interests at the expense of working people. Mr. Trump frequently said that because of his own real estate fortune, he didnt need or want support from wealthy donors or the political groups known as super PACs, to which donors can give seven-figure donations and which Mr. Trump blasted as very corrupt.

Mr. Pences aides point out that he also has dinners at the residence for groups other than donors, including members of Congress, world leaders, military families, civic leaders and friends. They cast the donor dinners as an effort to build support for the administrations agenda, not for Mr. Pence personally.

Mike Pence is the ultimate team player and works every day to help the president succeed, said Robert T. Grand, an Indianapolis lawyer who helped raise money for Mr. Pences campaigns in Indiana for Congress and for governor. Mr. Grand attended a dinner at the vice presidents residence in June. There were a lot of folks who, if you were vice president, you would want to meet, Mr. Grand said. Corporate executives, other government leaders, people from past administrations, not just donors.

He added that any administration, past and present, has an interest in getting to know folks. If youre an incumbent president and vice president, then thats part of what you do.

Mr. Pences office declined to release the lists of guests invited to the dinners, which have not appeared on schedules released by the vice presidents office to the news media. Marc Lotter, Mr. Pences press secretary, called the dinners private and said that the vice president had not held any political fund-raisers at his residence, which would be complicated by a law barring the solicitation of political contributions in government buildings.

But the dinners fit a long tradition of presidential administrations leveraging the grand trappings of the office to reward loyal supporters or to induce influential people to become supportive. President Bill Clinton drew ire for inviting major donors to his 1996 re-election campaign to stay overnight in the White Houses Lincoln Bedroom, for instance, though his team drew an explicit link between the contributions and the rewards, one that Mr. Pences advisers have been careful to avoid. President Barack Obama also entertained donors at the White House, as did former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. when he lived at the Naval Observatory residence.

Mr. Pence typically kicks off his dinners with a cocktail hour at which he recounts the history of the taxpayer-funded residence, followed by a brief assessment of his administrations legislative and foreign policy agendas and a question-and-answer session, according to guests. After people are seated for dinner at four or five separate tables, they said, Mr. Pence makes his way around the room, chatting for a few minutes with each guest.

Mr. Pences willingness to use his residence to host wealthy donors has been reassuring to Republican finance and political operatives, who worry that their congressional candidates could be severely hampered if they faced financial shortfalls during 2018 midterm elections, when Mr. Trumps unpopularity is expected to create strong headwinds.

The dinners are a smart way for Vice President Pence and his team to recognize major supporters of his and the presidents agenda, and build resources that are going to be necessary for the upcoming battles, said Charles Spies, a leading Republican election lawyer.

Mr. Pence, who came to Mr. Trumps ticket with a reputation as an enthusiastic cultivator of wealthy patrons, has worked to win over donors who clashed with Mr. Trump during the campaign, among them the billionaire industrialist Charles G. Koch. Mr. Pence spent nearly an hour last month with Mr. Koch in a private meeting at a Colorado Springs hotel, where the vice president praised Mr. Trump for his leadership in pushing to fulfill campaign promises and in selecting strong cabinet nominees, according to James Davis, an executive at a Koch-backed group who attended the meeting.

Mr. Pence also summoned about a dozen megadonors, including some who had not supported Mr. Trump during the campaign, for a legislative briefing in the White Houses Roosevelt Room on June 9. Mr. Trump stopped by the gathering briefly to greet the donors, according to an administration official and others briefed on the gathering.

Associates say Mr. Pence has discussed with the president the importance of encouraging major donors to support America First Policies. Mr. Pence signaled his own support for the group by appearing with his wife at a reception in Washington this spring for prospective donors to America First Policies that was hosted by a fund-raising consultant, Jeff Miller.

The group was founded soon after Mr. Trumps inauguration by political operatives outside the administration, including two close advisers to Mr. Pence Nick Ayers and Marty Obst who helped arrange the Naval Observatory dinners and attended some of them.

In March Mr. Obst, who was a top fund-raiser for Mr. Trumps campaign and inauguration, told Politico that America First Policies had received $25 million in commitments and had collected more than half that money. In recent weeks, America First Policies has spent money on one advertising campaign questioning the national security bona fides of the Democratic nominee in a special election for a Georgia congressional seat, and another chastising Senator Dean Heller, Republican of Nevada, for his opposition to the Senate health care bill that would supplant the Affordable Care Act.

While Mr. Ayers has stepped away from America First Policies and related groups in recent days as he prepares to take a position as Mr. Pences new chief of staff, the team behind the political groups is ramping up its efforts.

In May, Mr. Obst and Mr. Ayers founded Great America Committee, a political action committee to fund Mr. Pences political operation an unusual step for a sitting vice president. Typically, vice presidents rely on their respective party committees for such functions. This past Thursday Great America Committee held a reception for prospective donors at the Washington offices of the powerful lobbying firm BGR.

America First Policies, a nonprofit required to spend the majority of its money on costs unrelated to partisan political campaigns, has in the meantime spun off a super PAC called America First Action that will have more legal flexibility to directly advocate for the election of Mr. Trumps allies and the defeat of his opponents. As a super PAC, America First Action is required to publicly disclose its donors but America First Policies is not.

Katie Walsh, a senior adviser to America First Policies who has attended some of Mr. Pences dinners, said the group did not use the gatherings to prospect for donations.

Although Ms. Walsh said that some attendees happen to support groups backing the administration, a lot of those folks have never given to anything related to Trump or Pence, and are leaders of businesses and industries that have worked, and continue to work, with the administration to get things done.

Some dinner guests including Andrew N. Liveris, the chief executive of Dow Chemical, and Gregory J. Hayes, the chairman and chief executive of United Technologies have donated either primarily to Democrats or to a mix of Democrats and Republicans.

Other guests including the hedge fund manager Mr. Griffin and the investors Ronald Weiser of Michigan; Lewis Eisenberg of Florida and Doug Deason, Ray Washburne and Tom Hicks Jr., all of Texas were significant donors or fund-raisers for Mr. Trumps campaign and the committees supporting it. Mr. Trump has since nominated Mr. Washburne to head the Overseas Private Investment Corporation.

Jack Begg contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on July 10, 2017, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Pence Hosting Private Parties To Woo Donors.

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At Private Dinners, Pence Quietly Courts Big Donors and Corporate Executives - New York Times

Pence Drains Swamp by Inviting Donors to Vice-President’s Residence – New York Magazine

Vice-President Mike Pence practices his hosting skills at the Naval Observatory on March 16, 2017. Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images

Fueling speculation about your own political ambition is one of the vice-presidents key duties, and Mike Pence is doing a stellar job. Thanks to all the talk of Trumps potential impeachment people are already talking about what a Pence administration might look like, but the veep isnt letting the Russia investigation do the work for him. In May he launched his own PAC, which is a first for a sitting vice president, and now the New York Times reports that hes been quietly courting key donors, business executives, and Republican political leaders.

The effort is said to include one-on-one talks with wealthy donors who have yet to embrace Trump, like billionaire Charles Koch, and appearances at receptions with potential donors to the pro-Trump group America First Policies. But according to the Times, dining chez Pence is the veeps favorite tactic:

The centerpiece of the effort is a string of dinners held every few weeks at the vice presidents official residence on the grounds of the Naval Observatory in Washington. Mr. Pence and his wife, Karen, have presided over at least four such soires, and more are in the works. Each has drawn roughly 30 to 40 guests, including a mix of wealthy donors such as the Chicago hedge fund manager Kenneth C. Griffin and the brokerage firm founder Charles Schwab, as well as Republican fund-raisers and executives from companies like Dow Chemical and the military contractor United Technologies.

Close Pence advisers who are involved in America First Policies and America First Action help select the guest list, and many of the invitees happened to help raise millions for the Trump campaign. However, Pences press secretary Marc Lotter described the dinners as private events, rather than political fund-raisers which could be problematic, as soliciting political contributions in government buildings is illegal.

Obviously wooing important GOP donors helps Pences political prospects, but it doesnt mean hes scheming behind Trumps back. As the Times notes, Trump does not like courting campaign contributors and may be happy to leave the task to Pence.

Its not unusual for presidents to offer perks to influential supporters, and Vice-President Joe Biden entertained donors at the Naval Observatory as well. But previous administrations did not run on the idea that they werent beholden to big donors, and would drain the D.C. swamp.

Hes been holding dinners for donors and other influential GOP figures at his home on the grounds of the Naval Observatory.

The president reversed himself after the idea was panned by both Democrats and Republicans.

The presidents son says he was lured into the June 2016 meeting with a Kremlin-linked lawyer under false pretenses.

Plague, famine, heat no human can survive. This is not science fiction but what scientists, when theyre not being cautious, fear could be our future.

Why does the president double-down every time it seems like he should retreat? Because Bannon is still his chief tactician.

There is no sign that the power-plant control systems were affected by the breaches.

It seems more than likely that Trump has just shrugged off Russias attack on last years presidential election, including to Putin himself.

Donald Trump Jr. arranged the previously undisclosed June 2016 meeting, which President Trumps lawyers are now suggesting was a setup.

If she werent my daughter it would be so much easier for her, the president also explained on Saturday.

A dirty little secret of GOP health policy is conservatives desire for a 1950s-style system with high out-of-pocket costs and limited insurance.

The nine nations that possess nuclear weapons did not participate in the treaty negotiations.

Congressman Mike Conaways family bought stock in UnitedHealth the same day that a bill repealing Obamacares taxes on insurers advanced in committee.

A viral moment from the G20 summit.

An op-ed co-authored by Clinton strategist Mark Penn tells Democrats to emulate a 1996 strategy the actual candidates did not pursue.

The First Lady was sent in to interrupt them during the G20 summit.

One Democrat in Trenton wants to make sure Beachgate stays in the news.

Rioters mixed with peaceful protesters as world leaders gathered in the German city.

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Pence Drains Swamp by Inviting Donors to Vice-President's Residence - New York Magazine