The Florida campaign finance system, allows the public to access what can be a labyrinth of byzantine electronic entries giving even the best researchers headaches. So forgive me if this entry gets squirrelly as the system Florida gives us is as squirrelly as they get. So I start this by saying this is only an analysis of publicly available documents, it is not a fully reported piece of journalism where I reached out to the Donalds people to answer some of the questions I’ll raise in this entry.
On January 3, 2020 two transactions occurred within the Friends of Byron Donalds state campaign committee:
Friends of Byron Donalds made an $87,000 contribution to another state PAC called Conservatives for Effective Government.
On the same day a letter was sent to the State of Florida Division of Elections from the Friends of Byron Donalds stating that he had resigned as Chair of the organization.
The Friends of Byron Donalds PAC was essentially ended at this point as most of the money in the PAC was expended in the one $87,000 contribution to the Conservatives for Effective Government PAC, and he was no longer the Chair of the organization.
What is interesting is a few months later after no activity from the Friends of Byron Donalds PAC, a huge donation came in from Conservatives for Effective Government PAC. On May 28, 2020, months after Donalds resigned as Chair of the PAC, $107,038.66 was sent as a contribution from CEFG PAC to Friends of
Byron Donalds (If you look closely the Conservatives for Effective Government PAC list the contribution being done on June 28, 2020 so it’s hard to understand how the Friends of Byron Donalds PAC could have accepted it a month earlier according to their filing):
Here are the totals for Friends of Byron Donalds, as you can see there’s a ton of money in there that is unaccounted for:
As per the Florida campaign finance database one can see all Friends of Byron Donalds PAC expenditures stop on June 4, 2020 showing they spent a total of $98,082.66:
On June 4, 2020 the Friends of Byron Donalds PAC sent a letter to the Florida Division of Elections disbanding the PAC.
The question is where did the $107,038.66 go? There may be an explanation here as the state of Florida doesn’t allow access to the actual documents the PACs filed, so this could be a system error. I went through the documents filed with Florida from Friends of Byron Donalds and the entries don’t shed any new light on this very strange grouping of filings.
I want to reiterate, this may have a very simple explanation as I haven’t reached out to any of the people involved with these organizations. This is where members of the media come in I guess. In the meantime, I will be curious to see how this turns out if it really is an issue.
Donald’s is nothing but a Tom, number three in fact. Clarence is #1 and Tim #2. They r not about “ for the people” especially Black and brown people. They r like confederates , we only serve white folks. Sad!