Everything’s Bigger in Texas, Even Political Donations From Sex Offenders

Seventeen individuals on the Texas Sex Offender Registry have supported Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico with campaign donations, including three who gave more than $1,000 each, a New York Sun comparison of federal and state records found.Mr. Talarico has fought back against criticism of his campaign for accepting millions of dollars in donations from Reid. Hoffman, the Linked-In cofounder who was closely associated with convicted child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.But the Sun’s analysis of donations from competitive Senate races found that political donations that appear to be from sex offenders are rare and small, except in Texas, where Mr. Talarico received more than $5,000 from three such donors and more such donations than any Senate candidate nationally. His Republican opponent, Ken Paxton, received such donations from two men, one for $50 and dozens of donations from a single man totalling about $500.The analysis does not suggest that Mr. Talarico was aware of the troubling donations, which come as the Texas Senate campaign shattered records for the most expensive non-presidential campaign in history, driven by Mr. Talarico’s small dollar donations and Elon Musk’s support for Mr. Paxton. The challenge of overseeing that tidal wave of cash, much of it in the last weeks of the campaign is enormous. Texas sex offender donors giving $1,000 or more are:Thomas Aaron Clark Jr. of Belton, Texas, who gave $3,250 to Mr. Talarico’s campaign. He lives at the exact same address as the Belton, Texas, resident Thomas Clark, who is on the Texas Sex Offender Registry for exposing himself to two boys ages 13 and 15. The man, who lists himself as “not employed” in federal records, did not return calls seeking comment on why he was backing Mr. Talarico.David Michael Wynne of Plano, who gave Mr. Talarico $1,000, was convicted of the aggravated sexual assault of two girls ages 2 and 6. A male answering the phone hung up after a question about the donations. Further calls were not answered. He listed himself in federal records as “unemployed.” Venkata Rao Yeleti, a $1,000 donor to Mr. Talarico according to FEC records from the campaign that have been filed but not indexed yet, was convicted of repeatedly raping his daughter from 1975 to 1977. He admitted his guilt in recorded telephone calls with his daughter who is now a state legislator in the Midwest. He was convicted in 2019 of two counts of raping a child under 14 for which he served 10 years. The retiree did not respond to emails and phone calls.The three men will remain on the sex offender registry until they die. Clark, the largest donor, is listed as being at “high risk” to reoffend.Neither Mr. Talarico’s campaign nor Mr. Paxton’s responded to a request for comment by publication time. “Most likely this is just bad luck, there isn’t really an easy way to screen for stuff like that,” a former Democratic fundraiser told the Sun. She asked not to be named in a story about sex offenders. The fundraiser, who has worked for candidates in Texas, noted that when the election is all over Mr. Talarico could well have more small dollar donors than all the Republican Senate candidates combined.Almost all of the suspect contributions from outside Texas came through ActBlue, the Democrat’s digital donation portal that processes the majority of Democratic donations. ActBlue did not respond to an email sent to their press office. A smaller number came to Republicans through WinRed.“I don’t think there are people sitting around thinking ‘I’m a pedophile who needs a break, Talarico is going to give it to me,’” longtime Texas journalist Ryan Rusak told the Sun. “I am little surprised that Talarico’s donor vetting is so poor, because they have been much better at other aspects of the blocking and tackling of a campaign.”The RealClear Politics Polling Average puts Mr. Talarico barely ahead of Mr. Paxton by 1.8 percentage points within most polls’ margin of error with less than a week to go before the election. Mr. Hoffman made a fresh $5 million donation to a pro-Talarico Superpac this month, bringing his total to more than $16 million. He spent time at Epstein’s private island and Upper East Side townhouse in the years after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for soliciting an under-age prostitute and has apologized for his role in rehabilitating the sexual predator’s reputation.Mr. Paxton’s extramarital affair, his wife’s subsequent divorce filing, and allegations that he used the powers of his position as Texas Attorney General to benefit his mistress have all been issues in the campaign. So has a plea deal Mr. Paxton’s office made with an accused child molester.The Sun examined campaign donations at the FEC which include addresses and other identifying information and compared them with similar data from state-run websites that alert communities about the location of potential predators. We looked at the Senate races in North Carolina, Michigan, Nebraska, Georgia, Ohio and Texas. We also looked at donations from California and New York residents given to the out of state Senate candidates.“Talarico’s been running digital fundraising ads all over the country so it’s not surprising to me that random people with sketchy backgrounds would donate to him, just by the sheer volume of his small dollar donations,” the fundraiser said. “He’s got a huge small dollar machine and has spent a ghastly amount of money on online fundraising ads.”Mr. Rusak agreed but said “that is the risk of the model Democrats have been using. Small dollar donations are good, until suddenly they are not.”

Everything’s Bigger in Texas, Even Political Donations From Sex Offenders

Everything’s Bigger in Texas, Even Political Donations From Sex Offenders

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