ICYMI:
DJT contributed $5,000 to the "Re-Elect Attorney General Kamala D Harris 2014" campaign.
He has said that he contributed to Democrats and Republicans because he was a businessman and it's what business people do (unsaid: "in furtherance of business."
Wonder who solicited this donation from him, and perhaps also why he made it, since Kamala's AG race was internal to California with no (published) national ambitions evident at the time.
Moar: Politico claims DJT's 2011 check to Harris' 2014 AG re-election campaign in California was to gain access to Slick Willie Brown (to whom he was directed by Las Vegas' Wynn when DJT sought advice on building in Los Angeles)
> The check is for the 2014 Harris AG campaign but was dated 9/13/2011.
Here are the opinions on the issue from a Politico’s senior political columnist and politics bureau chief:
"And that, now-famous, check Donald Trump wrote to Harris for her reelection as California attorney general?
"Yes, it was access-if-needed money arranged by [Slick Willie] Brown. He [Brown] also claims to have first introduced Harris to Trump when the New York developer summoned Brown to Manhattan in the 1990s. Brown, Harris and a few other associates had been in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Brown was speaking at Harvard, when Trump sent up his plane to ferry the group to Teterboro, New Jersey.
Trump urgently wanted Brown’s advice on how to build a property in Los Angeles, having been told by fellow casino magnate Steve Wynn that the Assembly speaker was the man to see.
“Wynn told Trump that ‘If I was doing anything in California I’d talk to Willie Brown because anybody else will take your money and do nothing,’” Brown recalled at lunch (keep in mind that Brown was a high-ranking public official and not, necessarily, a lobbyist for developers at the time).
"In any event, Brown said Harris didn’t join the meeting with Trump but there is a picture of the Californians all on what’s now called Trump Force One. (“I have the picture,” he said, flashing a smile.)
"I’m not saying all roads lead back to Willie, but I haven’t even gotten to Kimberly Guilfoyle. That would be Newsom’s former wife, Donald Trump Jr’s current fiancée and a former deputy district attorney in San Francisco who Brown has known since she was a girl because of her father, who worked his way up from the local building trades to become a prominent real estate investor and political consigliere known as “The Godfather.”
"It all may seem impossibly cozy and the sort of politics that has led so many voters to embrace political outsiders — or ones purporting to be outsiders.
"But never having to face the voters again, Brown is happy to say what he thinks about why Trump has succeeded.
“He’s an entertainer, that’s all it is,” Brown argued.
"And that can overcome everything else, all of Trump’s manifest liabilities?
“Oh yeah, if the public is fascinated with your antics, you survive,” he said, before lowering the boom. “It’s unfortunate, but you can’t really tell the voters they’re idiots.” [Willie Brown said.]"
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/07/31/willie-brown-kamala-harris-campaign-column-00171885
Written by
By Jonathan Martin
07/31/2024
Jonathan Martin is POLITICO’s senior political columnist and politics bureau chief. He’s covered elections in every corner of America and co-authored a best-selling book about Donald Trump and Joe Biden. His reported column chronicles the inside conversations and major trends shaping U.S. politics.
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It is unclear if the timing works for the Politico columnist's theory about DJT seeking access to Brown through donation to Harris because Kamala and Harris were allegedly "all over" the night Slick Willie as elected as mayor-elect of S.F. in 1995 - 16 years before the check was written!
HERB CAEN – 'Twas the Day After [Slick Willie Brown was elected mayor of S.F., that his long extra-marital affair was “all over,” with Kamala Harris]
By Herb Caen Dec 26, 1995
"WILLIE WATCH: "It's all over." With those words, mayor-elect Brown let word get around over the weekend that his long affair with Kamala Harris, an Alameda County asst. district attorney, has ended. This news came as a shock to many, including those who found Kamala Harris attractive, intelligent and charming. As a mutual friend once observed, "Willie has finally graduated from girls to a woman." Also flabbergasted: the brain-trusters who found Kamala the perfect antidote to whatever playboy tendencies still reside in the mayor-elect's jaunty persona. The consensus: "Kamala and Willie just looked right together". . . Shortest interview of the year: Last wk., a KPIX reporter and cameraman wandered the downtown streets, picking up "Xmas color" for the news show. At Wilkes Bashford, the reporter couldn't believe his luck: there was Willie Brown's long-estranged wife, Blanche. Sticking his mike into her face, he asked with a big smile, "And what was it like to live with the future mayor of San Francisco?" "Difficult," said Blanche [Willie Brown's wife] . . . Scooplet: Looks like Willie will be sworn in Jan. 8 by his friend and admirer, ex-pres. Jimmy Carter."
Sauce for "It's all over" [between Kamala Harris and Slick Willie Brown]
https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/HERB-CAEN-Twas-the-Day-After-3017150.php
Slick Willie Brown worried recently (before the Trump/Biden debate) that Kamala has "Hillary syndrome," i.e., that people "don't like her" and that it is "not fixable."
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"Brown was far more candid about Harris at lunch, before the debate, when Biden’s renomination seemed inevitable and his vice president was more unpopular than he was.
"Brown worried out loud that Harris had “the Hillary syndrome” — that “people don’t like her” — and fretted it was not fixable. Thinking through Harris’s future if Biden were to lose, Brown said: “You need a Black woman on every goddamn corporate board in America!”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/07/31/willie-brown-kamala-harris-campaign-column-00171885