It’s been a long, delicious fall from grace for lawyer Michael Avenatti. Just a few years ago he was in the national spotlight for representing porn star Stormy Daniels, who convincingly alleged that in 2016, Donald Trump’s then-lawyer Michael Cohen arranged a payment of $130,000 to buy her silence regarding an affair she had with Trump a decade earlier.
A sleazy, glory-seeking, bloated gasbag, Avenatti became a hero to #Resistance cretins opposing President Trump, and who, through their moronic activities, only served to make him more popular. That was no small achievement given Trump’s own blundering antics and deranged behavior while in office.
Just a few weeks ago, Avenatti was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison for extorting Nike. Now he’s on trial again for allegedly “defrauding at least five former clients of his former law firm, one a paraplegic, by stealing nearly $10 million in settlement funds from them,” as CNN reported here. He is facing additional criminal charges later this year.
A remorseless and shameless grifter, Avenatti at one point was planning to run for president. He created a Political Action Committee, the Fight PAC, to promote his campaign but used much of the money raised to underwrite his lavish lifestyle. Donor funds were used to pay for his travel, hotel and dining expenses.
Avenatti has links to a number of other Democratic scam operations and operators, including MeidasTouch, a Democratic Super PAC. “Even as it continued to send out one fundraising plea after the next…MeidasTouch sat on a campaign war chest that it never emptied,” Seth Hettena wrote in a terrific April story in Rolling Stone. “The group ended 2020 with more than $467,000 in cash on hand. Its latest FEC filing shows that on January 25th, two weeks after the Georgia runoffs, it was sitting on more than $660,000.”
Then there’s a Democratic operative named Adam Parkhomento. “At the heart of MeidasTouch’s opaque finances is an arrangement with a Virginia company called Prestige WW Inc. — a reference to the Will Ferrell comedy Step Brothers,” wrote Hettena, who was viciously attacked by #Resistance trolls after his story ran. “Prestige received more than half a million dollars of Meidas’ donor money, FEC filings show. Prestige is run by Adam Parkhomenko, Meidas’ political strategist and a former aide to Hillary Clinton who later did political work for Michael Avenatti.” (Meidas political strategist. Former aide to Hillary Clinton. Political work for Michael Avenatti. Any sane person receiving a CV with those past jobs would immediately shred it and notify the FBI.)
Parkhomento has a simple business model. Set up a PAC targeting Republicans that Democrats love to hate — “Lindsay Must Go” — and then rake in contributions to put up billboards and run ads that accomplish little other than raising money that is funneled to wealthy political consultants and party hangers on. In other words, monetize #Resistance outrage and raise money, even if it siphons cash away from legitimate and needy Democratic candidates.
Parkhomenko also had a PAC called Party Majority. This preposterous entity allegedly existed to organize protests outside the Trump White House, which it called the “Kremlin Annex,” thereby stoking credulous libtards into a frenzy by playing off the bogus DNC-financed and created Russiagate narrative, which alleged that Trump was a Russian intelligence asset run by Vladimir Putin. This noxious narrative caused untold damage by outraging dimwitted Democrats about Trump’s phony ties to Putin, while — and this was one of its primary purposes — distracting people from the fact that Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer et al. are captives of Wall Street, the tech industry and other pillars of the American oligarchy.
The true primary purpose of Party Majority would appear to be the care and feeding of Adam Parkhomenko. He took in a notable chunk of the money raised by the PAC and it spent more on Uber Eats, at a gas station near his home and for Domino’s Pizza.
Note in the list of PAC expenditures below that between 2019 and 2020, Parkhomenko was paid more than $40,000 from PAC coffers. About $18,500 went to Global Tapas LLC, which operates an expensive Peruvian restaurant in downtown DC. Hey, ceviche isn’t cheap, looks like Parkhomenko got a deal by buying in bulk. Another $15,000 went to Ben’s Chili Bowl, though I’m told that was spent on food for the protestors Party Majority lured to the pointless, idiotic “Kremlin Annex” protests it organized.
Here are a few more of Party Majority’s disbursements. Note that this is a tiny sliver of the stream of payments to Domino’s Pizza and to the above-mentioned gas station. I should point out here that given the flaccid state of campaign finance laws, none of this is illegal and Parkhomenko is merely one of a countless number of political operatives engaged in this behavior. And he’s got a number of other shady outfits. To learn about one, read this story at Open Secrets about his “Cyber War Room.”
Parhomenko didn’t reply to a request for comment. If he does, I’ll update this story. I’ll be reporting more in the weeks ahead about other entities created by Avenatti, Parkhomenko, three brothers behind MeidasTouch, and other #Resistance profiteers.
