Courtesy of Pam Martens
Michael Bloomberg
Billionaire Michael Bloomberg is used to getting his way. After serving two terms as New York City’s Mayor as a Republican, he used his own vast stash of cash to repeal term limits and give himself another four-year term, running as an Independent. Now he has promised to do the unprecedented: spend $1 billion of his own money to install himself as President of the United States, running on the Democratic ticket.
Bloomberg’s campaign increasingly resembles an octopus with money gushing out of its tentacles into anything and everything that will inject Michael Bloomberg into the presidential dialogue on the local, national or social media stage. And there is an unusually dark curtain being drawn around the early days of that spending.
While there has been much media ado about the first Federal Election Commission filing that Bloomberg made in January, covering expenditures through December 31, 2019, there has been little to no acknowledgement of the fact that $81.8 million of the $188 million in disbursements were actually contributions in kind from Michael Bloomberg or his business, Bloomberg L.P., or were to simply acknowledge expenditures they had made on behalf of the campaign by one of the two. For example, an entry dated December 31, 2019 shows a “disbursement” to Bloomberg L.P. from the campaign committee, Mike Bloomberg 2020 Inc., for an even $10 million categorized as “Prepayment of Campaign Expenses.” There is no granular details on this or any of the other myriad disbursements to a “Bloomberg” entity.
We reached out to the Bloomberg campaign and asked what was going on. The campaign’s response came from Stu Loeser, whom Lee Fang at the Intercept reports was previously “retained by Purdue Pharma, makers of OxyContin, to combat widespread criticism that the company had fueled the opioid addiction crisis.” Loeser explained the disbursements as follows:
“None of what you are seeing are reimbursements to the campaign, they are all in-kind contributions — expenditures Mike made personally before he decided to run for President that had to be accounted for in our first filing. So, for instance, Mike paid for the ad we released to announce his candidacy personally and our filing counts it as an in-kind contribution.”
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