As Townhall has been covering, Vice President Kamala Harris' losing campaign has come under some intense scrutiny over the way she's spent her money, including and especially with the money spent on the "Call Her Daddy" podcast set, concerts, and Oprah to do with the disastrous town hall event from September.The latest example is the $500,000 that Harris donated to Reverend Al Sharpton's National Action Network (NAN) before their interview last month.
As The Washington Free Beacon covered on Tuesday:
Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign donated $500,000 to Al Sharpton’s nonprofit organization just weeks before the anti-Semitic MSNBC host—who once said that "diamond merchant" Jews have the "blood of innocent babies" on their hands—conducted a friendly interview with Harris.
The campaign’s remittance to Sharpton’s National Action Network was part of a flurry of donations—$5.4 million in all—to black and Latino advocacy groups that seem aimed at winning Harris support from those constituencies. Harris’s campaign gave two payments of $250,000 to National Action Network on Sept. 5 and Oct. 1, according to campaign finance records.
On Oct. 3, Sharpton aired a video of Harris wishing him happy birthday on his MSNBC weekend show, PoliticsNation with Al Sharpton. "Happy birthday, Rev," Harris said, using Sharpton’s nickname. "You have been over all of your years such an extraordinary leader. You have been a voice of truth, a voice of conscience."
Sharpton, 70, conducted a glowing interview with Harris on Oct. 20 in which he touted her "extraordinary historic campaign" while referring to Trump as "hostile and erratic." His questions lined up closely with messages that Harris sought to highlight on the campaign trail. Sharpton addressed concerns among black voters—especially black men—about Harris’s record as a prosecutor in California, where she was given the nickname "Kamala the Cop." Sharpton brought up Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman elected to Congress, and one of Harris’s personal heroes, to put Harris’s candidacy in historical perspective. Sharpton asked Harris whether men who opposed her were "misogynistic."
Sharpton did not disclose payments from the Harris campaign during either segment with the candidate. National Action Network did not respond to requests for comment. MSNBC also did not respond to comment requests.
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Sharpton reportedly earns a seven-figure salary from MSNBC, and is paid handsomely by National Action Network, which he founded in 1991. The nonprofit paid Sharpton around $650,000 in 2021 out of $7 million in revenues, and spent another $940,000 that year for "transportation services" to the private jet firm Apollo Jets and the limousine company Carey International.
Not only does such a report touch upon Sharpton's antisemitic rhetoric, but also how the Harris campaign desperately tried to pander to black and Latino voters leading up to her election. Harris not only engaged in such pandering through interviews with Sharpton as well as audio-only town hall events with Charlamagne tha God last month, but with policy proposals she put out there. Her proposals targeting black men had to be walked back due to concerns they weren't even constitutional.
President-elect Donald Trump also won not just the Electoral College last week, but he won the popular vote and did so by making improvements with both black and Latino voters.
When it comes to the financial reports, Oprah is denying she received a "personal fee," but as Gabe Kaminsky, who wrote the Washington Examiner piece about the fundraising numbers, posted earlier this week, Oprah's people are trying to speak to what the report never claimed. Further, FEC records show that her company did indeed receive the money.
Except @gekaminsky never said Oprah received a “personal fee” — just that the Harris campaign paid Winfrey’s Harpo Productions $1M. Oprah’s spox are responding to a claim the Washington Examiner never made in order to lie about the authenticity of the story. https://t.co/KJEsXnTLs9 pic.twitter.com/lIqvuG4CPz
— Tiana Lowe Doescher (@TianaTheFirst) November 12, 2024
Also to note: nowhere does our story say that the money was quid-pro-quo for the endorsement -- which the TMZ reporter says.
— Gabe Kaminsky (@gekaminsky) November 11, 2024
This article has been updated to fix $500 million to $500,000.
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