I found something in Mike Rogers’s Senate campaign filing from last Thursday that nobody else has reported.
Rogers is running in Michigan as someone who’ll stand up to China. His campaign just took money from a man Trump pardoned after he admitted secretly lobbying the Trump regime for foreign interests, including China’s.
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Trump Pardoned Him. Rogers’s Campaign Took His Check.
I went through all 40,000 lines of the donor report Mike Rogers’s Senate campaign filed last Thursday. One name caught my eye: Elliott Broidy. $3,500. August 17. Nobody reported on it—until now.
Rogers built his entire campaign on being China’s toughest critic. He used to chair the House Intelligence Committee. At the 2024 Republican convention he warned that you can’t build an electric car “without getting into bed with the Communist Party of China.” Last year he demanded a federal investigation into possible Chinese spying at the University of Michigan.
Here’s who wrote the check. In 2020, Broidy, one of Trump’s top fundraisers, pleaded guilty to conspiring to act as an unregistered foreign agent. That means he secretly lobbied the Trump regime on behalf of foreign interests without telling anyone, as required by law.
A Malaysian financier paid Broidy $9 million to try to kill a fraud investigation. After meeting a senior Chinese government minister in China, Broidy sent a memo meant for the attorney general passing along China’s “one request”: that a Chinese man living here be “deported … or extradited.” Broidy agreed to forfeit $6.6 million. Then Trump pardoned him. This April, the DOJ gave a company Broidy founded and runs a $106 million contract to monitor prison phone calls. The company says he played no role in the bidding.
It wasn’t his first guilty plea. In 2009, he admitted showering New York pension officials with nearly $1 million in gifts while they put $250 million of retirees’ money into his investment fund. The state’s attorney general called it “an old-fashioned payoff.”
Ten years ago, my team dug into the campaign of the official who controlled that pension money. We found Broidy and his wife had given it at least $126,800. That official went to prison.
So follow the circle. Trump pardoned his fundraiser. The DOJ gave that fundraiser’s company $106 million. And that fundraiser wrote a check to the GOP Senate nominee’s campaign in Michigan. Rogers swears he’ll stand up to China. His campaign took money from a man who admitted carrying China’s request to DC, and it kept the money.
Michigan’s open seat is one of the few that will decide who lands in control of the Senate. Rogers’s campaign finance report shows no refund through September. He can do the right thing. He can give it back today and tell Michigan why his campaign accepted it in the first place. I won’t be holding my breath, but I’ll make sure millions of people see this anyway.
Michigan already said no to him when he ran against Senator Elissa Slotkin in 2024. In 15 days, it gets to say it louder.
The Rogers campaign did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.
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Onward!
Scott
Should Mike Rogers give the money back?
Be sure to share this on social media, send it to reporters, make sure folks in Michigan see this! Let's get the word out! Thank you!
You know what I find so interesting? When Democrats accuse someone of doing something not on the up and up, they always bring receipts to show the proof of their accusations. When republican accuse someone of the same thing, they expect you to just believe it because they said so. Yes, I do believe Mike Rogers should give the money back. Will he? No, because republicans don't see anything wrong with that.