Naughty list for the right-wing sex pests and grifters

Celebrating a nice win for working people

Welcome to a Monday night edition of Progress Report.

During horrendous years like this one, in which every month felt like a minefield of bad news and misery, just arriving at Christmas Eve feels like a victory, even if the march of time is inexorable and nothing for which we can take credit. Nonetheless, with so much chaos on the horizon, I think we all deserve a little bit of a breather.

Of course, while most newsletters are on hiatus, I kept going, wanting to deliver more for readers ahead of taking a few days to spend with family. Tonight’s newsletter contains some major developments in stories we’ve been reporting on as well as a handful of other interesting news items.

I’ll be back closer to the end of the week (unless something gigantic happens in the news before then) — enjoy your holidays, milk any time off you may get from work, and stay warm!

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Self-dealing creep: Federalist Society VP and judicial fixer Leonard Leo has been using the more than $1 billion he controls to fuel right-wing causes — including the Leonard Leo’s bank account foundation. Newly obtained tax records show that his 85 Fund paid CRC Advisors, his consulting firm, $25 million in 2023 alone, and $80 million since 2020.

That represents only a fraction of Leo’s likely ill-gotten income, which he funnels through non-profits and trusts and all kinds of other dark money groups to avoid detection and taxes.

What did Ron know?: Confirming one of the worst-kept secrets in both Washington and Florida, a new report released by the House Ethics Committee asserts that “there is substantial evidence that Representative [Matt] Gaetz violated House Rules and other standards of conduct prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, impermissible gifts, special favors or privileges, and obstruction of Congress.”

The report, released on Monday after Republicans withheld it while Gaetz was Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general, is filled with text messages and other evidence proving that the former Congressman paid to transport young women across state lines (on Spirit Airlines) and paid them to have sex with him.

All told, Venmo and PayPal receipts indicate that he spent $90K between 2017 and 2020 on sex and drugs, including payments to a 17-year-old girl identified as Victim A. She was paid $400, which seemed to have been Gaetz’s usual rate. Gaetz did not ask her age, but was well-known for hanging out at high schools and often slept with 18-year-olds.

All of this brings us to two key figures: Merrick Garland and Ron DeSantis.

Garland’s Department of Justice investigated Gaetz, but declined to bring charges, reasoning that there was not evidence of any crimes being committed because the women he paid to cross state lines to have sex with him were over the age of 18. The Ethics Committee clearly disagreed with that legal opinion, which further cements Garland as this century’s most distinguished member of the Chickenshit Club.

During his time in Congress, DeSantis became close with Gaetz, who was his top advisor during the 2018 gubernatorial campaign and early days of his time as governor — right smack in the middle of the lurid period identified by the Ethics Committee. They eventually had something of a falling out, which a Florida GOP official described as a natural drift after DeSantis gained his footing in Tallahassee. Gaetz seemed to revel in DeSantis’s flop of a presidential campaign this year, suggesting there was more to it.

DeSantis was also close friends with Gaetz buddy Joel Greenberg, the former Seminole County Tax Collector who is serving an 11-year sentence for a litany of crimes, including sex trafficking with a child. Greenberg provided evidence and answers for the Ethics Committee. Back in 2022, a few friends and I sent a mobile billboard with a photo of the three amigos to a DeSantis fundraiser being held in Boca Raton. Here’s what the photo — which we obviously gave a new background — looked like:

Sadly, I guess you could say we were ahead of our time. But what’s most disturbing about all of this is that it doesn’t seem like it’s going to matter all that much. Maybe Gaetz will eventually face charges, but I have not seen one mention of DeSantis in any of the coverage around this salacious report, nor have I seen anyone demanding to know why Trump — who had to have known about the report — chose Gaetz to be his Attorney General.

There’s also been a real dearth of conversation around why Republicans on the House Ethics Committee originally voted to keep the report a secret. Were they really just going to stay quiet and allow a sex-trafficking statutory rapist become the nation’s top law enforcement officer?

Got heim out of here: New Jersey Rep. Josh Gottheimer has spent the past few years trying to kill Democratic legislation, weakening regulations on drug prices, going to bat for the private equity executives who fund his campaigns and personal bank accounts, filing bills that would silence college students, and perhaps most egregious of all, lying about being a Bruce Springsteen fan in a pitiful effort to appeal to Garden State voters as he runs for governor.

With such a busy schedule, Gottheimer has not had the time to even introduce the bill to protect abortion rights that he so valiantly promised during a flashy press conference at a Planned Parenthood all the way back in April. Woof.

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The rising continues: Workers at an Amazon warehouse in Garner, NC filed for a union election with the NLRB today, confident that they’d collected signed cards from at least 30% of eligible staffers.

It has been a difficult ride for Rev. Ryan Brown, the lead worker-organizer, and his small crew at Carolina Amazonians United for Solidarity and Empowerment (CAUSE). As an independent union in the state with the second lowest union density in the nation, they have had neither the resources nor the local institutional knowledge to really mount a major public PR campaign, though I’ve stayed in touch and covered them whenever possible. This video is from 2022:

I met Rev. Brown in person at a conference in Chicago in 2022 and quickly understood that he was the reason why the union stood a fighting chance. Charismatic and dedicated, he’s kept the charge going despite the turnover at the RDU1 warehouse and the fact that Amazon, as it does in many rural areas, pays slightly more than the local businesses that survive its invasion, which keeps workers afraid of speaking out until they’re either burnt out or fired. It’s a churn and burn business.

Brown himself was fired unfairly a few weeks ago, while other organizers — including some who’d been fired previously — were arrested by police for handing out food to workers in the parking lot. Those offenses galvanized people, further fueling a push that had begun in earnest on Labor Day. Now they wait to find out if they have the requisite number of signed cards, with the hope being that the NLRB can count them before the Trump administration takes root.

Michigan: The state legislature ended its session on a sour note, with the outgoing Democratic House majority failing to pass priority legislation due to infighting, dramatic walkouts, police calls, conflicts of interests, and caucus rivalries.

At the center of the dysfunction was outgoing Speaker Joe Tate, who, one source told me, turned out to be the one blocking many of the important pro-worker and voting rights bills that had made it through the state Senate. One legislator I spoke to called it “patent corruption,” noting that Tate is running for mayor of Detroit and needs to raise money going forward.

Both the Michigan NAACP and national UAW decried the failure of key bills, and on Saturday, the Detroit NAACP went one step further by demanding that the House reconvene to get their work done.

“Power means nothing if you don’t exercise it," Rev. Wendell Anthony, head of the Detroit chapter, said in the statement. "Leaving bills stacked on the table when they should be voted on, passed, and signed into law is your job undone."

“You left the Voting Rights Act, police accountability and reform, Black maternal health care, election misinformation, charter school reform, gun reform, minimum wage and sick leave, and certainly long-term road funding, naming only a few still on the table,” Anthony said.

Among the bills left on the table, were Senate-passed legislation banning "ghost guns" and bump stocks for firearms; bills to crack down on tobacco and nicotine sales to minors; bills to expand water affordability and crack down on mass polluters; and legislation to create pathways to obtaining state identification cards for undocumented individuals.

It’s a pretty gigantic list of failures, and had they been able to pass some of those bills, perhaps Democrats wouldn’t be losing their majority. They technically have until December 31st to get these things done, and perhaps Tate, who is Black, will decide it’s a good idea to not entirely alienate the NAACP ahead of his run for Detroit mayor.

Schemers: Immeasurably bitter about their total abortion ban being overturned by voters and no longer interested in following the law, Republicans in Missouri have filed a number of bills that would once again limit reproductive choice in the state.

In some cases, lawmakers want to game the system by doing things like defining “fetal viability” to mean as soon as an electric current that mimics a heartbeat can be detected (usually at six weeks). Others want to simply send voters new constitutional amendments that would once again ban abortion but add extremely narrow exceptions, such as when a woman is raped and reports it to the police within 48 hours.

Another particularly venomous (and no doubt impermissible) approach would combine bans on abortion and gender-affirming care, which presumes that people will give up their own rights to hurt trans kids.

Ending on some good news: The City of Los Angeles and wealthy residents lost a third attempt to block the development of affordable housing in affluent neighborhoods that are now zoned for single family units.

This loss should allow 220 affordable units to go up in Reseda, in the San Fernando Valley. It could also set an important precedent that allows projects that applied for permits before Mayor Karen Bass amended the law to prevent affordable multi-family housing from being built in nearly 75% of the city’s residential areas.

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