Last Friday, I wrote a story here, “Bilking the #Resistance: Michael Avenatti and Adam Parkhomenko Prove that There is a Sucker Born Every Minute,” which detailed the dubious fundraising activities of the two Scam PAC operators named in the headline. The disgraced Avenatti, who became a darling to the credulous anti-Trump crowd, rose to fame in #Resistance circles by representing porn star Stormy Daniels, who apparently had an affair with Donald Trump and was paid by the latter’s one-time fixer, Michael Cohen, to keep quiet about it. More recently, Avenatti, a bloated, crooked gasbag, was sentenced to prison time for extorting Nike.
The lesser know Parkhomenko, a Democratic Party hack and Hillary Clinton crony, ran a number of Super PACs which raised significant funds to allegedly combat the GOP and Trump. These PACs accomplished virtually nothing, though they did pay Parkhomenko quite nicely, thereby allowing him to live well on donations raised from credulous Democrats and big donors.
In the story last Friday I focused on Party Majority — I’ll have more on it below — which organized moronic protests outside the Trump White House, which it labelled the “Kremlin Annex.” However, the PACs primary purpose appeared to be the care and feeding of Parkhomenko. Between 2019 and 2020, it paid Parkhomenko — its treasurer and hence in control of the money spigot — $40,000. It also covered plenty of his expenses, including a stream of payments to Uber Eats and to a gas station near his home, reimbursing him for fuel and for Domino’s Pizza.
Party Majority wasn’t the only PAC Parkhomenko got paid by, though in some cases he sought to obscure his involvement. There was also, among others, Ready for Hillary, which fellow Clinton operative Robbie Mook saw as a threat and successfully destroyed, as he recounted in his book about the 2016 presidential campaign; the Cyber War Room; the extraordinarily shady MeidasTouch; the Fight PAC, which promoted Avenatti’s hopeless and never-launched 2020 presidential run and which spent heavily on the lawyer’s travel, hotel and dining expenses; and Lindsay Must Go, which raised piles of cash from dupable liberals who were convinced that South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham could be defeated in his bid for reelection in 2020.
There was never a possibility that Graham, who coasted to victory by ten percentage points, would lose his seat. But winning was not the point. The point was raising money — doomed Democrat Jaime Harrison, Graham’s opponent, raked in more than $30 million — to underwrite the lifestyle of Parkhomenko and other Democratic hangers-ons who work on political campaigns. Parkhomenko also supported and may have made money by working for other Democratic challengers who had no prayer of winning but raised wads of cash from Democratic donors because they ran against against Republicans, like Graham, that are red meat to the libtard crowd.
These so-called #Resistance Twitter candidates include Gregg Smith, a longtime Republican with close ties to former Blackwater chief Erik Prince and who earlier this year switched party affiliation to run against loony tunes Colorado GOP Congresswoman Lauren Boebert, a liberal punching bag who barely clings to the cliff edge of sanity. Parkhomenko supported Smith, who dropped out after 6 weeks. His friends and frequent collaborators at Jacobson & Zilber, a California media and strategy firm that ran Smith’s Titanic-like campaign, drained most of the its campaign funds. It collected $40,000 and produced a single ad that ran on Twitter, and which any teen would happily and quickly have created for $100.
Parkhomenko also promoted on Twitter the hopeless New Mexico congressional campaign race of Randi McGinn, who ran in the Democratic primary in 2021 against winner Melanie Stansbury. McGinn raised $500,000, three times more than Stansbury, and had many more Twitter followers, thanks once again to paying Jacobson & Zilber.
Unfortunately, being on Twitter does not mean that you can vote in New Mexico, or anywhere else for that matter. Stansbury, who eventually won against her GOP challenger with 60 percent of the vote and took over the seat of Biden administration Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, trounced McGinn and 6 other challengers. But for Jacobson & Zilber this pathetic resdult was a smashing victory. The McGinn campaign paid the firm about $100,000 to be beaten in humiliating fashion. (The Washington Post‘s terrific reporter Dave Weigel wrote about the Smith and McGinn campaigns in an article entitled “Click, donate, lose.” It detailed the rise of a number of bound-for-defeat #Resistance Twitter candidates.)
But let’s return to the Parkhomenko’s grift par excellence, Party Majority. Note something curious here. During the 2017-2018 election cycle, its treasurer Lazar Palnick. He’s a consummate Democratic National Committee insider and known for being a relatively straight shooter.
During that cycle, the PAC took in about $308,000. It paid out about $35,000 to Pakhomenko and another $7,500 to TRR Group run by Parkhomenko and Virginia-based political strategist Ben Tribbett, according to The Daily Beast. TRR Group also did some work for Avenatti’s sleazy Fight PAC, which the soon-to-be prisoner formed to explore his half-assed, short-lived 2020 presidential run.
But by 2019, Palnick had stepped down as treasurer of Party Majority, I’m told because he was uncomfortable with Parkhomenko and his PAC spending habits. I emailed Palnick to ask him if that was the case. When he failed to reply I called him. He brusquely hung up when I identified myself as a journalist, saying, “I’m not taking any calls.”
Check out what happened at Party Majority after Parkhomenko took over during the 2019-2020 election cycle. Donations more than doubled to more than $721,000.
By far the biggest donor was Alain Cohen, a tech entrepreneur who provided $190,000. TRR Group became the No. 1 recipient of the PAC’s cash, with its haul increasing more than 20 times over the prior election cycle, to $192,000. Parkhomenko also saw an increase in his direct take, which rose to $40,000.
My piece last week received an interesting response. Parkhomenko has now blocked me on Twitter, but the day after my story ran he posted a pitiful tweet lamenting that someone, who he didn’t name, was spreading terrible rumors about him. Mind you, I had asked him for comment via email prior to running the story but he had nothing to say in his defense. I emailed him today asking for comment as well. If he replies, I’ll update this story.
[Coming later this week. “Doing the Chalupa”: Meet Democratic über hack Alexandra Chalupa, who rushed to Parkhomenko’s defense after my story ran.]
