“Today, [VA AG Jason Miyares] lent the credibility of [his] office to a years-long disinformation and harassment campaign targeting ActBlue based on frivolous and false accusations”

As we all know, Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares is a far-right-wing hack, horrendous at his job in every way, and in competition with Ken Cuccinelli as THE WORST Attorney General in Virginia history. Just horrendous.  Also, of course, Miyares combines intense political ambition – namely, to win the Virginia GOP’s gubernatorial nomination next year, then be elected governor (I know, I know – hahahahahaha!) – with his incompetence, dishonesty, non-seriousness, etc.  In short, Miyares is just a complete f’ing joke.

So now, Miyares’ latest stunt – clearly, to try and win favor with the faaaar right – is to “[lend] the credibility of [his] office to a years-long disinformation and harasssment campaign targeting ActBlue based on frivolous and false accusations.” For more on why it’s “frivolous and false,” see here,  here and here. A few takeaways:

• In a March 2023 video, James O’Keefe claimed that ActBlue donors had unknowingly become victims of “a money laundering scheme” and that their names and addresses were being used by ActBlue without their permission to make thousands of donations. This is false. These claims rely almost entirely on misinterpreting FEC data in a way that inflates both the number and amount of donations made by any one individual.
• Campaign finance experts, including a former FEC enforcement attorney and current Director of Federal Campaign Finance Reform at the Campaign Legal Center, have repeatedly debunked these claims as unsubstantiated and the result of misreading FEC data.
• “[James] O’Keefe, a self-styled guerrilla journalist, is known for his heavily edited videos that present situations out of context for political purposes. His tactics, including surreptitious recordings, fall outside of professional journalism norms.”
• “…you see these donor patterns frequently in FEC filings. It’s not new. And it’s not, as O’Keefe suggests here, a Democratic problem. Not even mostly.”
• “O’Keefe is also likely misreading FEC filings”
• “This pattern repeats itself again & again, with confused donors—often elderly—not understanding that they’ve left a pre-checked box checked, automatically making their donation recur, deducting from their credit card or bank every month. Do this enough and it really adds up”
• “…as the NYT piece shows, it’s more common on the GOP side with the WinRed platform. The Dems’ ActBlue largely (if not entirely) stopped doing this when they got criticized for it after 2020. Not WinRed, though—they kept it up for a while. And the boxes have misleading text”
• “It turns out that James O’Keefe—and this will shock you—is pushing misleading information. He’s uncovered a real scandal, albeit long after others did, but apparently doesn’t know what he found. He’s implying that it’s Democratic money laundering. It’s (sadly) just fundraising”

So now, Virginia AG Jason Miyares – who, tragically, ousted the SUPERB AG Mark Herring from office in November 2021, albeit by a very slim margin – has leapt into action, after – as Sam Shirazi explains – “Charlie Kirk made allegations and…Miyares said he would look into it.” As for the faaaar-right Charlie Kirk, Wikipedia explains:

• Kirk “promotes the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory, and has described universities as ‘islands of totalitarianism'”
• Kirk “has said that the concept of white privilege is a myth and a ‘racist lie'”
• “On the Minnesota leg of the tour on October 5, 2021, Kirk called George Floyd a ‘scumbag’ and appeared to refer to the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol when he said that ‘if you dare walk into the U.S. Capitol building and take a selfie, they’ll put you in solitary confinement.'”
• Kirk “is a climate change denialist, falsely claiming that humans have no significant effect on global climate change.”
• “The New York Times argued that Kirk ‘[walks] the line between mainstream conservative opinion and outright disinformation’ and that “with a powerful ally in the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., Mr. Kirk both amplifies the president’s message and helps shape it.”
• “Kirk spread false information and conspiracy theories about COVID-19 on social media platforms”
• “Immediately after Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, Kirk promoted false and disproven claims of fraud in the election.^[75][76] On November 5, 2020, Kirk was the leader of a Stop the Steal protest at the Maricopa Tabulation Center in Phoenix. Charlie Kirk was considered a “Big name” social influencer in Rudy Giuliani‘s communications plan to Stop the Steal.”
• “Kirk has advocated for parents to never let their daughters receive prescriptions for birth control medication for any reason. He claimed that the medication makes women angry and bitter, which he alleged suited the political leanings of the Democratic Party.”

Etc, etc, etc. In short, Charlie Kirk is THE LAST person who Virginia’s Attorney General should be taking his marching orders from. And yet that’s exactly what Jason Miyares is doing – pandering to the likes of Charlie Kirk and James O’Keefe in his obsession with succeeding Glenn Youngkin as governor of Virginia. Our job is to make sure that NEVER happens, and that instead in November 2025, we overwhelmingly elect Abigail Spanberger as governor, while Miyares hopefully slinks off into obscurity (assuming, of course, that he is even able to win the VA GOP’s 2025 gubernatorial nomination over LG Winsome Sears – an unlikely prospect at the moment, but Miyares isn’t giving up!).