In 2010, the Tea Party movement enabled rightwing Republicans to win both houses of the North Carolina state legislature, called the General Assembly. For a time Republicans held a supermajority and could do whatever they wanted. They used their power to limit the authority of the governor when he was a Democrat. And they did terrible damage to the state’s public schools and teachers.
North Carolina was once considered the most progressive Southern state, but Republicans forfeited that claim. Teachers’ salaries fell behind other states, public school funding stalled, while the legislature approved charter schools (including for-profit charter chains) and vouchers.
In the November 3 election, the blue wave swept North Carolina. Democrats gained control of the House, and Republicans retained a majority of the Senate by only one vote.
With most of the vote counted by late Tuesday night, it appeared as though Democratic candidates flipped 25 Republican seats. However, some races remain too close to count. Democrats also maintained every one of their incumbent legislative seats.
Democrats’ state House win will restore power to Democratic Gov. Josh Stein’s veto. During the 2025-2026 legislative session, House Republicans were one seat shy of a supermajority, but were able to secure enough swing Democrats’ votes to override key governor vetoes on DEI policy, immigration issues, energy legislation and more.
One of the members of the House who was defeated was Tricia Cotham. She served in the House as a Democrat from 2007-2017. As a Democrat, she supported abortion rights and opposed vouchers. She gained a certain notoriety when she campaigned and won as a Democrat in 2022, but then switched to the Republican Party in 2023, giving it a supermajority and the votes it needed to restrict abortion and enact vouchers, immune to a gubernatorial veto. She was given a safe red district by her new party, but that district went blue on Tuesday.
You gotta give Trump credit: He has figured out how to cash in on the Presidency. want a Presidential pardon? Make a large donation to the right person. Want a membership at Mar-a-Lago? They are available, for a price. Can’t afford a major contribution? Go to the Trump Store, where you can buy all sorts of Trump-branded stuff.
The level of corruption in the federal government is unprecedented. Pardons are sold; conflicts of interest are ignored. Trump’s net worth increased by more than $2.2 billion in his first years. His sons are investors in companies that land big defense contracts.
Now Trump is selling early access to posts on his social media site Truth Social. Since his posts can move the stock market up or down, this heads-up is valuable.
NEW YORK – Truth Social, the social media platform founded by U.S. President Donald Trump, has signed up news and data provider Bloomberg and two Wall Street firms for faster access to the president’s posts, which it sells for up to $100,000 a month, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter.
The firms are Susquehanna International Group and Jump Trading, both high-frequency trading firms focused on algorithmic and automated strategies.
The service gives subscribers a timing advantage in access to Trump’s posts on Truth Social, which has the potential to create swings in financial markets and to give Wall Street traders an edge not available to everyday investors.
The companies’ purchases of the Truth API service hasn’t been previously reported. An API is a programming interface that is used as a digital bridge that allows one system to connect to another.
Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG) announced its fastest-access product in July, and pitched it to trading firms and other financial institutions. The deals likely mark the first time a business tied to a sitting president has sold access to their statements, which some critics have called unethical.
While Truth Social’s pay-for-access plan ventures into untested legal territory, Intercept Media and the Freedom of the Press Foundation sued Trump in August, seeking to block the White House from posting official government announcements exclusively on Truth Social while the paid feed exists. The suit, which is ongoing, alleges that erecting a financial barrier to government information is potentially unconstitutional and favors wealthy Wall Street firms.
Bloomberg, Jump Trading and Susquehanna declined to comment.
In a statement, Trump Media said: “Truth Social offers an industry-standard API product for which there is significant demand across industries. We take customer confidentiality seriously. This reporting is based on misleading information being peddled by anonymous sources aimed at harming our company, customers and shareholders.”
The president’s family trust owns 41% of Trump Media, and Trump is the trust’s sole beneficiary.
Shares of the company have fallen more than 50% so far this year. The market value of Trump Media has been volatile since it went public; it closed at about $8 billion in its March 2024 debut, but is now worth about $1.8 billion. The company has lost about $1.76 billion since 2024, including noncash charges.
Kinzinger was a Republican Congressman from Illinois and a military veteran. He and Liz Cheney were the only Republican members of the January 6 Commission. They knew they would pay a price. Cheney lost her Congressional seat in Wyoming to a Trump-aligned conservative. Kinzinger retired from Congress.
He writes here about the importance of limiting the power of wealthy individuals in politics.
Both parties are susceptible to the lure of big campaign contributions. Democrats and Republicans have accepted money from AIPAC to shape government policy toward Israel.
Trump openly courted specific industries to give money to his campaign in exchange for favorable policies. He promised to protect the fossil fuel industry if they gave significant sums to his campaign. As president, he has delivered. He opened protected federal lands to drilling and has canceled government contracts for wind power and other alternative sources of energy. He has encouraged the revival of coal mining. He has gutted environmental regulations to allow pollution of water and the air. A payback to his donors.
And then there is the case of Elon Musk. He has become the richest man in the world with the help of munificent government contracts. In the past few years, he has deployed his riches to try to buy the government and its policies.
Adam Kinzinger details here the case for getting big money out of politics, or at least limiting its power to buy the government it wants.
He writes:
Last Wednesday, the richest man in the world logged on to the social media platform he owns and issued an ominous threat.
“Live by the sword, die by the sword,” Elon Musk wrote. “Those who pick fights with me should understand that I will find out who is really pulling the strings and come for them, not just their puppets…”
What set him off was a story in Politico reporting that if Democrats win control of Congress next week, they plan to investigate him: his time running DOGE, the federal contracts his companies hold, and reports that he ordered Starlink service slowed for Ukraine’s military. When journalist Kara Swisher suggested on her podcast that he could end up facing legal trouble, he shot back that she “really wants to go to prison.”
To recap, a man whose company is paid billions of dollars by the federal government is warning members of Congress that if they look into how he got that money, he will come after them, and after whoever he decides is behind them.
And he isn’t just posting. He’s paying.
The Wall Street Journal captured it in a single chart. One line belongs to George Soros, the liberal megadonor who has spent the better part of two decades as the right’s favorite villain. It climbs slowly, step by step, over more than twenty years, to roughly $624 million. The other line belongs to Musk. For twenty years, it sits flat at zero. Then, around 2024, it turns and shoots almost straight up, past Soros, to roughly $759 million. Two decades of Soros, overtaken in about two years.
Graph courtesy of the Wall Street Journal.
According to a Washington Post analysis of federal filings, Musk has now put about $446 million into this year’s midterm elections alone. That’s the most any individual donor has ever given. It’s well beyond the roughly $290 million he spent electing Donald Trump in 2024. In September, he gave $158 million to the main super PAC backing Republican Senate candidates in just two checks. He’s put another $10 million into a group backing Ken Paxton in Texas.
We have never seen anything like this. And we absolutely should not accept it.
Money has distorted American politics for a long time, and both parties have their megadonors. I spent years in Congress watching how much time members spent dialing for dollars instead of doing their jobs, and how much influence followed the checks. If you’ve ever felt like Washington listens more to the people with money than to people like you, you’re not imagining it. That’s why broad campaign finance reform is needed.
I also believe companies and the people who run them have a right to take part in our political process. That’s part of living in a free country. This column isn’t about that.
This is about something different, and it’s much more dangerous.
Buying the Government That Pays You
Elon Musk isn’t just the richest man in the world. He got there, in large part, with the help of the American taxpayer. SpaceX has received more than $20 billion in federal contracts, with NASA and the Pentagon among its biggest customers. Starlink has become essential infrastructure for our military and our allies. His companies depend on decisions made by the very government he’s now spending hundreds of millions of dollars to shape.
Think about what that means. The man whose company is paid billions by the federal government is spending a fortune to decide who runs the federal government. The senators he helps elect will vote on defense budgets that include his contracts. The agencies that regulate his companies answer to the president he helped put in office. Even if every one of those decisions were made in good faith, how could anyone know?
Here’s the part most people don’t realize: we already decided, decades ago, that this kind of thing is wrong.
For more than 75 years, federal law has barred government contractors from making political contributions. The whole point is to avoid even the appearance that taxpayer-funded contracts are for sale. Courts have upheld that ban even as they’ve struck down other campaign finance laws. Regulators have enforced it against contractors who tried to give to super PACs.
So how is Musk allowed to do this? Because of a loophole. The ban covers the company holding the contract, and federal regulators read it narrowly. In their view, Musk’s spending doesn’t count, because it comes from him as an individual rather than from SpaceX or Tesla. The company can’t spend a dime.
But the man who controls the company can spend nearly half a billion dollars in a single election.
Sell to It or Buy It. Not Both.
I support sweeping campaign finance reform. But the fix for this particular problem isn’t radical, and we don’t have to start from scratch because some states already do it.
New Jersey has a pay-to-play law that doesn’t stop at the company holding the contract. It covers the company’s principal owners, officers, and directors, and anyone who controls 10 percent or more of the business.
Connecticut goes further, covering any shareholder with a stake of 5 percent or more.
Both laws were passed after real scandals, by legislators who saw what happens when contracts and campaign cash get tangled together. And they’ve worked. New Jersey’s own election watchdog said its law was achieving exactly what it was meant to do: reducing political contributions from the people doing business with the government.
Congress should do the same thing at the federal level. Extend the existing contractor ban to cover the owners, executives, and major shareholders of companies that take big federal contracts. Apply it to everyone, on the left and the right, no matter which party they support.
Nobody needs to take anything away from Elon Musk. This is just a very reasonable choice: if you want to keep selling to the United States government, you don’t get to buy it too. If you’d rather spend unlimited money on elections, you’re free to stop bidding on taxpayer contracts.
Pick one.
What Money Can’t Buy
Elon Musk can buy a lot of things. He can buy television ads in every market in America. He can buy a social media platform and tilt it toward the candidates he likes. He can fund a get-out-the-vote operation bigger than some political parties.
What he can’t buy is your vote. Not unless you let him.
A week from now, Americans will decide this election, not Elon Musk. Every ad he pays for still has to convince a person. Every dollar he spends still has to get past the voter in the booth. That’s the one place in American democracy where the richest man in the world and a retired schoolteacher in Ohio count exactly the same.
So show up. Bring someone with you. And then let’s get to work making sure that no one, no matter how rich, can ever again buy the government that pays them.
Julian Vasquez-Heilig is a scholar and activist who has been a leader in studying and promoting equal access to educational opportunity for all students.
Abbott has been a forceful advocate for privatization of public schools, pushing the Republican-controlled legislature to authorize charter schools and vouchers. Rural Republicans opposed vouchers, so Abbott got $12 million from Pennsylvania billionaire Jeff Yass to defeat the anti-voucher Republicans.
If Abbott wins, expect a doubling of the voucher budget from $1 billion a year to $2 billion a year. That increase was recently proposed by Don Huffines, the state’s chief financial officer. Expect an increase in funding for privately-managed charter schools and less oversight. Expect a steady erosion of public schools and low pay for teachers.
Vasquez-Heilig describes what to expect if Hinojosa wins:
The midterm vote in the United States could do more than change who holds political power; it could determine the future of education.
First, congrats to Lula for his big victory this week in the national Brazilian elections! Incidentally, a Brazilian university recruited me for a Fulbright project that past year examining how Brazil was recovering and reinventing its education system after Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency. After the invitation, I applied and Fulbright faculty peer reviewers scored and approved the proposal. Unfortunately, the U.S. State Department then rejected it. I was not given an explanation establishing why they rejected the invited and reviewer approved Fulbright, although I couldn’t help wondering whether examining the innovation of the education system after Bolsonaro was an uncomfortable subject for the Trump Administration.
The experience left me thinking about questions much closer to home. What would it take to reimagine and rebuild education in the United States after the midterms? More specifically, what might be possible in Texas after more than a decade under Governor Greg Abbott as a case study?
I spent eight years as a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, studying educational equity, civil rights, school accountability, and privatization. During my time in Texas, I witnessed how nakedly political decisions shaped educational opportunities for millions of students and the educators who served them. With State Representative Gina Hinojosa now challenging Abbott for governor, I have examined her official education platform and considering what could change if Texas takes a different political direction.
The possibilities extend well beyond one state, considering that the Republican’s ideas for education are all over the place (charter schools, vouchers, banning curriculum etc). Texas offers a compelling case study of how shifts in political leadership after the midterms could reshape educational policy, governance, and public investment in states transitioning from Republican to Democratic control. What happens in Texas could offer important lessons for the future of public education across the country.
For my case study, I examine ten possibilities. Some of the ideas below are commitments Hinojosa has publicly made. Others are reforms I believe deserve consideration, particularly in higher education and financial accountability.
1. The Texas Education Agency Would Get an Educator as Commissioner
Hinojosa has explicitly promised to remove Texas Education Agency non-educator Commissioner Mike Morath and appoint an educator. This could fundamentally change the agency’s relationship with schools. The next commissioner would bring direct experience with teaching and learning to an organization responsible for overseeing millions of students, school accountability, state interventions, and billions in education spending.
The consequential question would be whether that professional background will actually translate into different institutional priorities. Texas educators have spent years operating under accountability pressures, staffing shortages, and extensive state requirements. A commissioner with educator experience could approach those challenges with a different understanding of what teachers and students need, although successful administration would also require considerable policy and management expertise.
Earlier I provide some persepctives on California’s newly implemented commissioner position here.
2. Houston and Other State-Controlled Districts Could Return to Their Communities
Hinojosa promises to end state takeovers and restore local governance. Houston ISD offers the most consequential example, with state-appointed leaders making major decisions about instruction, staffing, and campus operations after the 2023 state takeover ostensibly due to single test score in a single high school. For the Republican in Texas, local control has meant controlling people locally.
The educational record deserves careful examination. State officials and takeover supporters cite improved academic ratings at historically struggling campuses in Houston, while critics have raised concerns about teacher turnover (about 12,000 have left the district), instructional restrictions and canned curriculum, elimination of an elected school board, and the manipulation of student populations to show fake results. A transition back to community governance would produce actual improvements while restoring democratic accountability.
Fort Worth, Austin, and other districts facing or experiencing state takeover present similar questions about who makes decisions and how communities regain authority over their schools.
3. Testing and Accountability System Would Be Revised
Hinojosa has proposed ending STAAR, pausing A through F accountability ratings, and developing a new system. Her campaign reports that TEA has awarded more than $1.7 billion to testing vendors during Abbott’s governorship.
During my years at UT Austin, I studied how high-stakes accountability affected schools serving historically marginalized communities in Texas. That research shaped my advocacy for community-based accountabilityand multiple measures of school success. This revised system could place greater emphasis on academic growth, graduation, student engagement, access to advanced coursework, and the opportunity to learn. Such changes would require legislation and a credible replacement system that gives families actually useful information about school performance.
4. Voucher Spending Could Face a Comprehensive Audit
Texas has committed $1 billion to its new private school voucher program, which Hinojosa proposes to end. A comprehensive financial review could examine who received funds, what providers charged, whether expenses met legal requirements, and whether safeguards adequately protected taxpayers.
Other states offer reasons to investigate. In Arizona, the media has reviewed records showing that education savings account money had been spent on travel-related expenses across 44 states and 13 countries. More than 100 accounts were associated with at least $21,000 in spending at Disney parks, Disney stores, and Disney’s streaming service. Some expenditures may have been approved under existing program rules, which makes the distinction between legal spending and appropriate public spending particularly important.
Texas investigators could carefully examine whether its own program permits comparable purchases, whether vendors are properly screened, and whether families and providers comply with spending restrictions. Arizona’s experience is a warning about oversight. I recently heard at the Network for Public Education conference that Florida has a $1 billion state budget deficit due to unlimited vouchers; that’s another warning.
5. Charter School Financial Misconduct Could Face Stronger Enforcement
Texas already has a documented history of serious charter school spending controversies. Consider IDEA Public Schools, one of the nation’s largest charter networks. Its leadership faced scrutiny over plans involving private aircraft and expenditures of approximately $400,000 on premium San Antonio Spurs tickets and luxury seating. Reports also described a proposed private jet lease, executive travel expenses, related-party business arrangements, and the acquisition of a boutique hotel. Former CEO Tom Torkelson departed with a reported $900,000 severance package. In 2024, TEA placed IDEA under conservatorship following a years-long investigation into financial and operational misconduct.
Texas could strengthen financial disclosure requirements, investigate conflicts of interest, recover improperly spent funds where legally possible, and refer substantiated fraud to law enforcement. Prosecutions should follow evidence of criminal violations rather than assumptions about an institution’s charter status.
6. Abbott’s University Regents Could Be Replaced
Texas governors exercise substantial influence over higher education through appointments to university governing boards. At the University of Texas System, nine regents serve staggered six-year terms and require Senate confirmation. A new governor would inherit those existing terms. However, three UT regent terms are scheduled to expire in February 2027, creating an early opportunity for appointments if successors are confirmed.
New appointments could change the governing boards’ approach to presidential selection, academic freedom, institutional performance, and faculty governance. They could also prompt closer examination of whether political relationships have been given undue weight in university leadership appointments.
Hinojosa has not announced a comprehensive regent replacement agenda, and current regents cannot simply be dismissed for their political associations in theory. Nevertheless, governing board appointments would be an important part of any change in Texas higher education policy.
7. University Presidents, Provosts, and Deans Could Face New Evaluations
Changes to governing boards could eventually produce changes in university leadership. Presidents are selected and evaluated through governing structures, while presidents exercise substantial authority over the appointment and dismissal of provosts, deans, and other academic administrators. The University of Texas System’s rules generally delegate responsibility for appointing and dismissing institutional administrative officers to university presidents.
A new governing board could examine whether presidents were selected through credible processes, whether administrative appointments emphasized academic qualifications, and whether leaders delivered results in enrollment, research, student success, and institutional governance. Where community-wide evaluations establish serious leadership failures, governing boards and presidents could make personnel changes consistent with applicable rules and contracts.
8. Black, Latino, Indigenous, and Gender Studies Could Regain Support
Texas universities have faced substantial political and legislative pressure concerning diversity initiatives, academic programs, and the teaching of race and gender. A change in state leadership could reopen discussions about the important place of Black Studies, Latino Studies, Indigenous Studies, Gender Studies, and related fields within public universities in our democracy.
These disciplines contribute to historical understanding, scholarship, public policy, and students’ ability to examine complex social questions. Decisions about their academic standing should involve faculty expertise, scholarly standards, student demand, and institutional missions.
Restoring programs affected by state policies could require legislative changes, governing board action, institutional funding, and faculty recruitment. Hinojosa has not explicitly promised these restorations, but her administration’s approach to higher education appointments and governance could influence their future.
9. Teachers Could Receive Higher Pay and Greater Professional Influence
Hinojosa’s education platform calls for raising teacher salaries and reviewing vendor contracts that her campaign considers wasteful or improper. She proposes using recovered resources to support educators.
Texas would need to determine how much money contract reviews could actually recover and whether those savings would support recurring compensation increases. Significant statewide salary changes would likely require legislative appropriations.
10. We Can Reconsider the Relationship Between Education and Political Power
For too long, political leaders, including the governors, education commissioners, and state legislatures, have used the power of government to exert oppressive pressure on public schools, educators, universities, and the communities they serve. Through state takeovers, punitive accountability systems, restrictions on academic freedom, increasingly centralized decision-making, and privatizing our schools, communities have too often been treated as problems to be managed rather than partners capable of developing solutions. Political authority has been used to impose decisions while diminishing the voices of parents, teachers, students, and locally elected representatives.
A different approach in Texas and elsewhere after the midterms would begin by recognizing that communities are the solution, not the problem. That principle should apply equally to red and blue communities, rural towns and major cities, and neighborhoods across every region. Families and educators understand their local schools, their children’s needs, and the challenges facing their communities. Their knowledge deserves meaningful influence over educational decisions. Restoring public trust requires moving away from political coercion and toward shared responsibility, meaningful local governance, transparent accountability, and genuine community participation.
After the midterms we will have an opportunity to reconsider how political power is exercised in education. Governors, commissioners, and legislators should use their authority to support communities, expand educational opportunity, and provide the resources schools need to succeed. The ultimate measure of leadership should be whether public institutions strengthen the capacity of people to shape their own futures. Regardless of whether a community votes red or blue, its children deserve excellent public schools, its educators deserve professional respect, and its residents deserve a meaningful voice in the decisions affecting their lives. A stronger education system can emerge when state leaders begin trusting communities as essential partners in educational improvement.
Years from now, our children may not remember who won the midterms. But they will live with what the winners chose to build, whose voices they listened to, and whose futures they believed were worth investing in.
Expanding on the story that Heather Cox Richardson told in the previous post, the following story in The New York Times explained the deal-making arranged by Jard Kushner and Howard Witkoff, two amateurs chosen by Trump to negotiate a peace plan to end the war that Russia started when it invaded Ukraine in 2023.
Now we know why Kushner and Witkoff emerged from their meetings with Putin wreathed in smiles. They got no concessions from Putin about ending the war. Their “peace plan” is to demand that Zelensky give Putin everything has done. Their peace plan is to demand that Zelensky surrender whatever Putin wants.
What they did get was Putin’s commitment to a massive project between the US and Rymussis to drill for liquified natural gas in Alaska.
The New York Times reported:
At first blush, the proposed venture looks like it would further the Trump administration’s goal of global “energy dominance.”
An American energy company intends to buy Russian technology and use it to access a massive supply of natural gas in Alaska, liquefy it and export it to allies abroad.
The Kremlin and the White House were interested in the idea. President Vladimir V. Putin discussed the plan last month with President Trump’s peace envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, people familiar with the negotiations said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy. It is one of a series of energy deals White House officials believe could help smooth relations with Moscow and eventually pave the way to end the war in Ukraine.
But it turns out that the company was not an all-American affair. The multibillion-dollar project has received secret funding from the same powerful Russian company that was to provide the technology, according to the energy executive who until last month led the U.S. firm and two others involved in company negotiations.
Joel Riddle, who was chief executive of the company, Polar LNG, until he resigned in September, said he had been misled about the sources of the start-up funding, which ostensibly came from a company in the United Arab Emirates.
Instead, Mr. Riddle said he learned, the true source of at least some of Polar LNG’s money was Novatek, a Russian energy giant under partial U.S. sanctions.
“It’s not only unlawful, but it’s not in the U.S. interest to have Russian technology controlling the commercialization of Arctic gas in the North Slope,” Mr. Riddle said in a brief interview.
These previously unreported tensions were also detailed in legal memos that Mr. Riddle attached to his resignation letter, which was reviewed by The New York Times. The memos, prepared by Baker Botts, an international law firm, said the Treasury Department’s sanctions enforcement unit had raised concerns that Polar LNG had ties to Novatek that might present “potential Russia-related sanctions concerns.”
Polar LNG on Friday issued a statement announcing a new acting chief executive, Tim Talkington, and described Mr. Riddle as a “disgruntled former employee.”
The project, if it happens, is a long way off. In addition to the sanctions issues that would have to be negotiated, the technology envisioned is highly complex and must overcome some of the most brutal weather conditions in the United States. It also is competing with another Alaska gas plan that already has the support of the Trump administration. But that the Polar LNG deal is being discussed at all shows how business deals of almost any stripe are on the table during the talks with the Kremlin.
The sequence of events illustrates the unorthodox, opaque mixture of deal-making and high-stakes diplomacy that has defined Mr. Trump’s attempts to end Europe’s bloodiest conflict since World War II.
There is no indication that Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner were aware of Polar LNG or its ties to Novatek, even as the broad outlines of the deal came up in their talks with Mr. Putin beginning last year. A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the closed-door talks, said that the deal had only been broadly mentioned and that no granular discussions had occurred.
The project, should it ever come to fruition, would doubly help Novatek, one of Russia’s biggest energy companies, first by using Novatek’s technology and second because the company would own an equity stake.
The Alaska gas discussions have taken place alongside talks to sell off part of another Russian energy giant, Lukoil, to the U.S. government and other investors, including some with business ties to Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner, causing consternation among some Washington lawmakers and outraging some of Ukraine’s supporters. The pair have also discussed the possibility of U.S. involvement in future Russian gas exports to Europe. (The administration has said that Mr. Kushner and Mr. Witkoff were guided only by U.S. interests.)
Geoffrey R. Pyatt, who served as an assistant secretary of state for energy resources during the Biden administration, said the idea of bringing Novatek into the high north of Alaska is a terrible one. “It is terrible on environmental grounds, it is a terrible idea on economic and geopolitical grounds, and most importantly this feeds the belief that Putin can get an out-of-jail-free card.”
The efforts to bring Novatek equipment to Alaska have also included a businessman, Gentry Beach, with ties to the Trump family. A college friend of Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, Mr. Beach served as a finance vice chairman for Mr. Trump’s 2017 inauguration. Mr. Beach said in February that he had held negotiations with Novatekabout bringing its natural gas technology to Alaska.
Mr. Beach could not be reached for comment. It was not clear if he remained involved in the project, or whether he was aware of Novatek’s potential ownership stake in Polar LNG.
A spokesman for Donald Trump Jr. said the two men were no longer close, adding that Mr. Trump was not involved in the Polar LNG project. Novatek’s statement said that Mr. Beach had no role in its discussions to take a stake in Polar LNG. The U.S. official said Mr. Beach was not involved in the administration’s discussions related to Novatek.
Mr. Riddle is one of at least three Polar LNG executives who recently resigned. As they departed, Trump officials were notified about their concerns related to the secret Russian financing. Mr. Riddle said the executives had urged administration officials to investigate the matter. The Energy Department, where the warning was sent, did not respond when asked about the matter.
“I felt like I did the right thing to notify authorities at the appropriate time,” Mr. Riddle said.
Buried Riches
The Polar LNG plan called for the company to tap into the giant load of natural gas available in the northern reaches of Alaska, a byproduct of extensive oil extraction underway in the region.
Polar LNG’s proposal calls for it to buy a giant, 640,000-ton concrete-and-steel device from Novatek called a gravity-based structure that would be placed on the seabed just above the northern coast of Alaska, in an area known as Milne Point.
Map locates Milne Point, Alaska.
On top of that platform, equipment will be installed that would refrigerate gas supplied by an area oil producer, transforming it into a liquid that can then be loaded onto ships that travel through icy waters and deliver it to customers in Asia.
Novatek uses a similar approach to export natural gas from the Russian Arctic in a project called Arctic LNG 2. Mr. Putin said publicly last year that “we are discussing with our American partners” the possibility of using Novatek technology to produce liquefied natural gas in Alaska.
Korean-made ships with a special ice-breaking design that Polar LNG plans to use were initially built for Novatek, but delivery was stopped by the manufacturer after the United States imposed sanctions on the Arctic LNG 2 project.
From the start, Novatek was slated to supply the gas liquefaction station. But financing for the project was not supposed to come from Russia, according to executives involved in the effort.
Emphasizing the point, Polar LNG features images of the American flag and a bald eagle on its website, boasting that “Polar LNG helps ensure the United States leads,” adding that the project is “America’s Arctic Advantage.”
The company hired lobbyists in Washingtonand in Alaska to help push the project, according to federal and state records. In Washington alone, the company is spending $380,000 a quarter on lobbying, hiring a former Trump-era Interior Department acting assistant secretary, Adam Suess.
Novatek is already under U.S. sanctions that would require the Treasury Department to issue a license for its equipment to be used in Alaska. Recently passed sanctions legislation named after deceased Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, makes things even harder: The bill specifically targets Novatek, as well as its Arctic LNG 2 project, because of the company’s ties to Mr. Putin.
However, Mr. Trump temporarily waived the law’s Russia sanctions last week, presenting the move as necessary to keep peace talks going.
During a meeting held at the Four Seasons Hotel in late August in Abu Dhabi between executives of Polar LNG and its parent company, Tech Wave Industrial Projects Management, top executives from Novatek were present. That was when Mr. Riddle began to appreciate that Novatek was directly involved in approving funding to keep the effort going, text messages reviewed by The Times indicate.
Tech Wave is an Abu Dhabi-based company that specializes in managing oil, gas and construction projects. Its chief operating officer is Bjorn Gundersen, who a decade ago was listed in oil industry trade publications as a senior executive at Novatek supervising LNG projects.
Tech Wave, in a statement, confirmed that Mr. Gundersen had worked for Novatek before 2022, the year the war with Ukraine started. It also said Novatek “has no ownership interest” in the company. The statement did not address questions from The Times as to whether Novatek money helped finance the Polar LNG efforts.
Denis Solovyov, Novatek’s deputy chairman, and Leonid Mikhelson, the company’s chief executive, discussed their company’s providing as much as $15 million to Tech Wave to bankroll Polar LNG, the messages say. Asked about the messages and the Abu Dhabi meeting, Novatek said it could not comment on private correspondence, but that the company and Polar LNG had agreed to “provide each other with open communication.”
“All the necessary decisions were made at the meeting in Abu Dhabi,” Mr. Solovyov wrote in one message to Mr. Riddle sent in early September. “The first 5 million were supposed to arrive by today.”
It was several weeks after this exchange that Mr. Riddle resigned. Two other top Polar LNG executives, Dan Chandra, the company’s chief financial officer, and Jim Smith, a former Exxon Mobil executive who served as Polar LNG’s executive vice president, also have left in recent weeks.
Polar LNG, in a statement Friday, said that “Riddle was recently terminated from the company for cause,” adding: “The company is investigating claims concerning Riddle that may result in litigation.”
But Mr. Riddle resigned six days before the company issued him a letter saying it would terminate his employment immediately, in part because he had raised concerns that some of the company’s actions could be “subject to sanctions,” documents obtained by The Times show.
Questions about the potential ties to Novatek had by late this summer already reached Trump administration officials, according to a memo prepared by an outside law firm for Polar LNG, Baker Botts.
“Concerns regarding a perceived connection to Novatek will likely affect licensing or other regulatory approvals,” Baker Botts wrote in a memo to company executives that was shared with The Times.
In addition, the letter said that federal officials had already made clear in communications with the company that they were concerned that an investor in Polar LNG “has ties to Novatek and may be acting on Novatek’s behalf with respect to the project.”
Paul Luther, a Baker Botts lawyer who worked on the matter, declined on Friday to discuss it further.
Polar LNG would need a series of approvals from the federal government before the deal could move ahead, including a sign-off from the Treasury Department authorizing it to acquire the Novatek seabed platform, given that parts of the company are under sanctions. It would also require a permit from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to build a gas export facility.
Questions have already emerged about whether the Novatek device will function at the planned Milne Point location because of shallow waters there and the “potential disruption to traditional whaling and local opposition, particularly from the local native Alaskan population,” a lawyer for Polar LNG wrote in an internal company memo.
Certain Trump administration officials had already expressed skepticism about the Polar LNG plan, according to internal company documents seen by The Times and interviews with some of the people involved.
Part of the concern is that the Polar LNG project would be pitted against an even more ambitious plan to build a $50 billion, 800-mile natural gas pipeline to move natural gas from the northern slope to the southern coast of Alaska, where it could be more easily shipped out from existing ports there. That plan would also potentially supply Asian markets.
Both the Biden and Trump administrations enthusiastically embraced the gas pipeline project, which Japan and Korea may help finance to increase their reliable supply of natural gas.
“The pipeline makes far more sense,” said Matthew McManus, who until April 2025 served as a deputy director at the State Department’s Bureau of Energy Resources and is now at the National Center for Energy Analytics. “The Polar LNG project would face years of permitting and concerns about ties to Russia.”
Mr. Talkington, Polar LNG’s acting chief executive, said his company sought to seize “a generational opportunity to advance U.S. energy dominance, unlock profound benefits for the state of Alaska, and strengthen American Arctic navigation.”
The fact that discussions are even going on about using Russian equipment — and potentially a Russian-financed company — to move American natural gas to international markets is a further insult to Ukraine, and should not be a part of talks over a possible end to the war, said Ilya Zaslavskiy, a gas industry consultant who previously worked in Moscow and New York who now does research on Russian sanctions and energy issues out of Washington.
“Any approach by Novatek to transfer technology should be seen as a Kremlin attempt to co-opt U.S. policymakers in order to undermine U.S. foreign policy toward Ukraine and our allies,” Mr. Zaslavskiy said.
Heather Cox Richardson reports on the deals that Trump is making with Putin. The U.S. is going into business with Russia! Where is Lindsey Graham when we need him?
Trump can’t understand why Zelensky is unwilling to sell out Ukraine, as he is selling out the U.S.
Profits galore! Someone will make billions! But not you!
Despite Trump’s statement yesterday that billionaire Elon Musk had removed the restrictions from Starlink and Starshield that are crippling Ukraine’s ability to protect itself from Russia, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky said today the restrictions continue.
An article published tonight by Anton Troianovski and Eric Lipton in the New York Times sheds a spotlight on the oil deals that lie behind Trump’s rush to normalize relations with Russia at Ukraine’s expense, as well as repeated statements from him and his cronies that they want to open up business transactions with Russia as incentives for Russia’s president Vladimir Putin to stop his war on Ukraine—an argument that, on its face, never made sense.
Troianovski and Lipton report that a project designed to liquefy natural gas in Alaska and export it would not only use Russian technology but also be funded with money from a Russian company close to Putin that is currently under U.S. sanctions. That company, Novatek, told the reporters that it is planning to take “minority shareholder” status in the Polar LNG project, a move the reporters call “a striking effort by the Russian energy giant to seek ownership of American gas production.”
U.S. sanctions against Novatek mean Polar LNG would need special permission from the Treasury Department to use Novatek’s equipment. The Graham Act sanctions bill Congress recently passed specifically targets Novatek because of its ties to Putin—a likely reason that Trump just waived the new sanctions just two days before they were to go into effect.
Joel Riddle, the chief executive officer of the company, Polar LNG, resigned when he learned that the funding came not from the United Arab Emirates, as he had been told, but from Russia. “It’s not only unlawful, but it’s not in the U.S. interest to have Russian technology controlling the commercialization of Arctic gas in the North Slope,” Riddle told the New York Times reporters. At least two other Polar LNG executives have also resigned, citing their concerns about the Russian financing.
Talks about gas in Alaska were joined with talks about the sale of parts of Russian energy giant Lukoil to the U.S. government and investors, some of whom are tied to Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and special envoy—and business partner—Steve Witkoff. Also involved in the Alaska project is Gentry Beach, who was a college friend of Donald Trump Jr.
It seems that Trump, Putin, and their allies in the administration are trying to replace the post–World War II international order and carve the world up into the system of spheres of influence they want as quickly as possible before the midterms. Central to those systems are private deals that enrich Trump and his cronies.
On October 20, Cate Brown, Aaron C. Davis, and Sebastian Rotella of ProPublica reported that the deal to capture Venezuela’s oil sets up a strategic partnership between the U.S. and a Venezuelan oligarch, Alejandro Betancourt, who has been accused of money laundering. A deal signed by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio calls for the U.S. to take a 35% stake in Betancourt’s firm, North American Blue Energy Partners, by buying shares in a parent company that’s registered in Barbados.
A source told the ProPublica reporters that the people making the deal wanted to work with Betancourt because a publicly traded company would have to report to shareholders. They wanted flexibility and secrecy. The registration of the parent company in Barbados enables the identities of its investors, who could make fortunes from the deal, to remain hidden.
In exchange for the investment, the U.S. can buy up to 20% of the oil produced at a steep discount, but that cost doesn’t factor in moving the oil, which is so thick it has to be blended with other products to flow through pipes. Betancourt’s company currently produces only as much oil in one year as the U.S. uses in three days.
The U.S. insists the deal is a good one for both countries, but it appears to violate Venezuelan law, which prohibits oil concessions longer than 25 years, and to lock in U.S. control. The deal creates a powerful seven-member board to oversee the venture for 15 years. A majority of the board members must be U.S. citizens. The U.S. government can appoint a single, nonvoting member of the board, and it can oust Betancourt only with a supermajority of five votes from the board. Any disputes over the company must be resolved not in Venezuela, but in Texas.
The administration is also suggesting it will take steps to control Cuba. At 4:35 today, Secretary of State Rubio posted on social media: “To those who seek to create positive change in Cuba—now is the time. The disappointment of failed promises, corruption, and the privileged lives of only a few; seize this opportunity to create the change you desire through a discrete [sic] partnership with the CIA.”
It will be years before we have a full account of the Trump family’s profiteering, but we already know that President Trump’s personal wealth increased by more than $2 billion in 2025. His sons, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, and other cronies have also made big financial gains while investing in sweetheart deals.
Heather Cox Richardson recounts some of the latest financial shenanigans. One of the shadiest deals entangles the interests of Trump and Putin.
She writes:
A new report from Anton Troianovski and Eric Lipton of the New York Times Saturday revealed that the administration’s talk about doing business deals with Putin while he continues to strike Ukraine was not hypothetical. As they have allegedly been negotiating for an end to Russia’s war on Ukraine, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff—neither of whom are diplomats—have been talking with Russia’s president Vladimir Putin about a multibillion-dollar deal to buy the assets of Russian oil giant Lukoil at the rock-bottom prices to which they have sunk because of U.S. sanctions.
Because such a sale would immediately remove those assets from U.S. sanctions, they would instantly become far more valuable. Those looking to benefit financially from the purchase would include a major Trump donor, as well as Middle Eastern investors tied to the Trump family and the Witkoffs. The U.S. government would take a stake in the company as well, through the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, which Congress authorized in 2018 to invest in development projects in lower- and middle-income countries.
While Lukoil is technically a private company, observers believe Putin has control over it. And while the deal would have to be approved by the U.S. Treasury Department, it seems unlikely that Trump loyalist Bessent would stop it.
According to Troianovski and Lipton, Putin suggested the deal on September 5. It was likely not coincidental that the offer came after Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) died on July 11. Graham, who was close to Trump, was firmly behind Ukraine as it tried to fight off Putin’s invasion. Until Trump, Democrats and Republicans both felt strongly that American national security depended on stopping Putin’s aggression, and they stood behind Ukraine.
Trump’s ties to Russia are extensive and well known, but this apparent attempt to buy Trump’s support for Russia even as the war drags into another winter and Ukraine’s drones are destroying Russia’s oil sector seems especially blatant. It puts a spotlight on the fact that, under Trump, U.S. national security is for sale. A Democratic-led Senate would undoubtedly object to what the Republicans have permitted.
Indeed, under Trump there does not appear to be a line between foreign affairs and Trump family business deals. On October 1, Allegra Goodwin, Katie Polglase, and Majlie de Puy Kamp of CNN reported that while in discussions about ending the war in Gaza, Kushner has major financial interests in the Israeli military.
Kushner’s private equity firm, Affinity Partners, has invested in Phoenix Financial, a firm based in Tel Aviv, Israel, that, in turn, has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in at least nine companies that provide equipment for the Israeli military. The CNN journalists report that the stock values of all the nine companies grew last year and that many of the companies attributed the growth to the war in Gaza. Kushner’s firm sold a quarter of its stock in Phoenix in July for more than $340 million, more than five times the value of its initial purchase.
If he were a government employee, Kushner would have to disclose his finances, but he is a “volunteer” negotiator. One of Kushner’s lawyers told the reporters that Kushner has “never participated in or directed Phoenix’s decisions” about investments, but, as the journalists note, Kushner told Forbes that he meets with the leaders of the financial group every few weeks and maintains “a very active dialogue” with them.
Kushner’s lawyer confirmed that was true a year ago when Kushner said it, but that since he has been “substantially more engaged in volunteer public-service and diplomatic efforts,” he has scaled back that contact significantly.
It’s not just Kushner. The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal on October 2 warned that “Don Jr.’s Star Turn Is Coming,” noting that the “Trump family businesses will be in the spotlight on Capitol Hill for the next two years.” “Does the Trump family know what is about to hit them?” the board asked. It noted that even Republicans are upset at the news that an oligarch close to Putin had paid for Don Jr.’s wedding celebration. Senator John Curtis (R-UT) has called for the Senate to subpoena Don Jr. to find out how that financial underwriting came to happen. While they’re at it, Curtis wants to learn more about the family’s cryptocurrency and prediction market ventures.
The corruption of the administration is matched by its incompetence, and neither will come out well in congressional investigations.
In September, hackers broke into the FBI jobs portal and stole information about nearly every FBI employee as well as more than 8,000 state and local law enforcement officers who had worked with the FBI agents. On Saturday, Ken Dilanian and Carol Leonnig of MS NOW reported just how devastating that breach was. The hacked data included “names, home addresses, cell phone numbers, FBI email addresses and employee ID numbers, in addition to personal identifying information for emergency contacts, including Social Security numbers and personal email addresses.”
According to FBI officials and outside experts, Dilanian and Leonnig report, the breach is a counterintelligence disaster—one of the worst in U.S. history. The information not only exposes the people involved, but also enables adversaries to figure out U.S. priorities and who is working on what.
One cybersecurity expert at the FBI said the cause of the breach was “definitely incompetence.” The information should never have been linked to the internet, the expert said. “It belonged on our internal system and some dumbass moved it all” to a system connected to the internet. The expert told Dilanian and Leonnig that in chats the FBI obtained, the hackers wrote they couldn’t believe that the hack of such important information was so easy.
Speaking at a high school gymnasium in Ohio Saturday night, Trump told an audience: “Just get out and vote. If you do that, we’re going to win, and we’re going to win big, and we’re gonna shove it up their *ss.”
Which is more appealing; Trump’s profiteering or his vulgarity?
The Network for Public Education is dedicated to the preservation and improvement of public schools. Public schools are a foundation stone of our democracy. Nearly 90% of American students are enrolled in public schools.
Every community needs high-quality public schools but diverting public money to private alternatives weakens public schools.
Public money should be spent in public schools.
The Trump administration does not like public schools. It encourages public funding for religious schools, vouchers, charter schools, for-profit schools, and home schools. Research and experience teach that these alternatives choose their students and they discriminate. And they get worse academic results than public schools.
Voucher schools are free to reject students with disabilities. Unlike public schools, students in special education have no rights.
Do not fall for the machinations of the Trump regime against public schools. Their intentions are not good. They loathe public schools, the schools that educated 90% of all Americans and created the greatest nation in the world.
From NPE executive director Carol Burris:
October 2, 2026
The Network for Public Education Urges Governors Not to Opt-in to the Federal Voucher Program
On October 1, the U.S. Treasury Department released regulations for the federal tax creditvoucher program that was slipped into the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and pushed through reconciliation.
The rules confirm that this program will advantage sending public dollars to private and religious schools, including schools that freely discriminate. Governors must decide whether to opt-in by January 1.
We make our recommendation that states not opt-in based on the following:
Opting in allows federal tax dollars to fund discrimination against children.
When a state opts in, federal tax dollars can flow to private and religious schools and other providers that discriminate against students based on disability, academic challenges, LGBTQ status, or religion. States are expressly forbidden from adding protections of their own.
Opting in pushes cash-strapped public schools toward “pay to play.”
The regulations allow scholarships for public school students to cover services such as tutoring or extra special education services. However, nothing in the regulations stops public schools from turning programs they now fund into paid services that would require families to scramble to cover with scholarships.
A struggling district could convert elementary band, middle school art, or high school SAT prep into programs paid for with these vouchers. Here is the catch: to do that, the district must first charge parents. Some students will get a voucher. Others will not. Children whose parents cannot pay will be shut out.
This moves us one step closer to libertarian Milton Friedman’s vision, in which parents pay to educate their children and public education disappears. Make no mistake. This has been the far right’s goal for decades.
Opting in now creates a blind commitment to a program designed by those who actively undermine public schools.
At this point, the regulations are not final nor has Treasury released its Guidance regarding what expenses will be eligible under the program. That Guidance is expected “by the end of the year,”according to Kevin Salinger at Treasury. Without the Department’s Guidance for what qualifies as an eligible expense, a governor may opt-in, only to find out that virtually any spending that makes its way to public schools or districts has been disallowed. And then they’re stuck, because it’s clear that once in, states cannot back out until the following year.
Opting in fuels the growth of schools without rules.
As privatization has expanded, NPE has documented the fraud, abuse, and chaos that charter and voucher programs have produced. Dangling more tax dollars with few restrictions will draw more bad actors into education, opening low-cost, experimental schools that mislead parents and shortchange children.
States cannot block money from flowing to schools with poor fiscal or academic records. They cannot require public reporting on how funds are used or which students are served. They cannot add safeguards against waste and fraud.
Opting in adds to an unsustainable federal deficit.
Treasury projects that by 2030 the program could cost $26 billion a year in lost federal revenue.
That is more than Title I or IDEA, the largest federal programs supporting public schools.
Opting in will drain donations from charities American families depend on.
Large, respected charities like St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, and smaller ones that fund suicide prevention centers and domestic violence shelters, will now compete with a program that offers a dollar-for-dollar tax credit instead of a deduction. In an affordability crisis, donors will be drawn to giving that returns their entire contribution.
We encourage friends of public education to act today. Write your governor with a simple message: Do not opt our state into the federal voucher program. Then urge your members of Congress to repeal it. Join the millions of Americans who treasure public education and recognize this voucher program for what it is—a stealth attempt to destroy our beloved public schools.
Starting on January 1, 2027, the federal government will sponsor its own voucher program. In this post, Peter Greene explains how the new program will work. You can be sure that every dollar spent on charter schools and vouchers will be taken away from public schools.
One of the persistent questions has been how much flexibility will states have in how the program is administered. The answer that came today is “Not very much.”
The basic structure of the tax credit voucher program works like this: a taxpayer redirects $1,700 to a scholarship granting organization (SGO) and receives a dollar-for-dollar tax credit. The SGO uses that money (minus an up-to-10% administrative fee) to grant scholarships to students, who may then use the money for educational expenses.
While the state must require SGOs to meet the state’s requirements for charitable organizations, the state may not put restrictions on how the SGO operates “such as by limiting the type of school that scholarship recipients may attend or the types of qualified elementary or secondary education expenses for which scholarship funds may be used.”
The rules appear to solidify the idea that an SGO cannot be removed by the state for reasons other than failure to comply with the law’s SGO requirements. These requirements simply require an SGHO to serve at least ten eligible students and spend the appropriate amount of money on the vouchers. Nothing in the law requires SGOs to monitor or assess the educational quality of the vendors who receive the money.
The rules issued do indicate that an SGO can choose to limit its scholarships “to specific subject matter” or to students whose household income is less than 80% of the area median gross income, but it appears that those limits would be placed at the SGO’s discretion and not the state’s.
The federal voucher program caps eligibility at 300% of area median gross income, a generous cap that would make the vast majority of American families eligible for the voucher.
The rules published today show that if a state wanted to, for instance, add restrictions that directed vouchers only to low-income students or students in particular communities, they could not do so. Nor could they impose any restrictions that would keep the voucher dollars from going to religious schools.
In short, any governors who expected to use these redirected taxpayer dollars in ways that aligned with their own policy goals may need to reconsider. If they opt in, their hands are tied.
There are other details to be dug out and discussed, but one rule guarantees that these discussions may go on forever. While some “stakeholders” recommended restricting state’s ability to opt out after opting in, the rules indicate that a governor will opt in for just one year at a time.
Bruce Baker taught for many years at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He now teaches education policy at the University of Miami. He will have many opportunities to observe and document edu-grifting in Florida.
In this post, he identities the five biggest charter scandals and explains how they worked. Much of what you will read was called “legal graft” by past pundits. In other words, the charter operators collect millions in public funds while providing a dubious education, and they get away scot-free.
In other words, take the money and run. No consequences.
He writes:
Five cases, four mechanisms, one ranking: this post lines up the biggest fraud prosecutions, the biggest company-store combination, and the biggest sweeps contract in the charter sector’s history against the single largest real-estate deal any operator has ever built, and asks which one moved the most money. The answer isn’t the one with an indictment attached.
In The Grift Model I group the ways charter operators route public money into private hands into four repeating types: enrollment inflation (getting paid for students who aren’t really being educated — phantom seats, unverifiable attendance, ghost enrollees); related-party transactions (a school’s own board or executives sitting on both sides of a contract); the company store (a captive vendor a school is required to buy from — curriculum, credentials, back-office services — that happens to be owned by the people running the school); and real estate (buying, or arranging for a related party to buy, the very buildings public dollars already financed, then leasing them back at a markup).
What I hadn’t done before is put the five biggest documented cases — regardless of category — on the same page and rank them by dollar figure. A caveat before I do: these numbers come from different kinds of documents (a criminal restitution order isn’t the same instrument as a municipal bond prospectus), cover different time spans, and in a couple of cases reflect an auditor’s or a prosecutor’s counting choice as much as anyone’s. I’m ranking them anyway, because the comparison itself is the point — and because the single largest number on this list isn’t attached to anyone’s indictment.
Here they are, five to one.
5. White Hat Management, Ohio: about $100 million over a decade
White Hat’s “sweeps” contracts with ten Hope Academy and Life Skills Center campuses in Cleveland and Akron routed roughly 95 percent of each school’s state funding to the management company, which then handled teacher salaries, facilities, and operations with minimal board oversight — company-store logic applied to an entire school’s back office rather than one vendor line. Over a decade that added up to something like $100 million. When several of the nonprofit boards tried to switch management companies, White Hat argued the computers, furniture, and classroom equipment it had bought with that money belonged to White Hat, not the schools — meaning the boards would have to buy back the property their own public funding had already paid for once.
In 2015, a divided Ohio Supreme Court sided with White Hat, 4–3, upholding the buy-back scheme as an enforceable contract term. Justice Paul Pfeifer’s dissent put it about as plainly as a judicial opinion gets: “the contracts require that after the public pays to buy those materials for a public use, the public must then pay the companies if it wants to retain ownership of the materials.” Justice William O’Neill called it, in a dissent The Progressive covered in full, “a fraudulent conversion of public funds into personal profit.” Neither dissent changed the outcome. Nobody broke a law here — a state’s highest court looked at the arithmetic and, on the merits, said it was fine. (Court News Ohio’s case summary has the full procedural history.)
4. ECOT, Ohio: $117 million ordered repaid
Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow was, at its peak, Ohio’s largest online charter school. Ohio funds schools on a formula built around enrollment and documented hours of learning activity — a formula that works fine when “attendance” means a body in a classroom, and considerably less well when it means a login timestamp nobody is verifying. A state audit covering fiscal years 2016 through 2018 found ECOT couldn’t substantiate the participation hours behind a large share of the funding it had claimed. The Ohio Auditor of State’s officeultimately found the school owed $106.6 million to the Ohio Department of Education, plus additional findings against ECOT-affiliated management entities, for a combined total just over $117 million. ECOT shut down in January 2018 rather than pay it back; Ideastream’s coverage of the final audit and the Dayton Daily News both note the state has spent the years since trying to collect. A related judgment against affiliated entities separately reached $161.6 million. It remains the largest attendance-fraud clawback in the sector’s history: virtual schools, virtual kids, real dollars.
3. Chester Community Charter School / CSMI, Pennsylvania: roughly $122 million combined
This is the case I use to show what happens when the company store, related-party real estate, and plain self-dealing all show up in a single school under a single owner. Chester Community Charter, Pennsylvania’s largest brick-and-mortar charter, is managed by CSMI, a company controlled by Vahan Gureghian. A 2009 Philadelphia Inquirer public-records fightestablished that CSMI had been paid roughly $60.6 million in management fees since 1999. In 2010, Gureghian sold the school’s buildings — which he owned personally — to a newly created nonprofit, for the specific and sole purpose of leasing them back to the school, for $50.7 million, financed through municipal bonds and requiring roughly $4 million a year in lease payments; Pennsylvania’s Auditor General found the school had also improperly claimed $1.27 million in state lease reimbursements on buildings the program’s own rules made ineligible, because the “related parties” on both sides of the lease were, functionally, the same person before and after the sale. Then, in 2016, a federal Office of Inspector General audit found that the school’s CEO — Gureghian himself — had written checks to himself totaling $11 million without board approval. Add the pieces up and you get a single owner, across roughly fifteen years, sitting on every side of upward of $122 million in transactions with the school he ran. No criminal charges resulted from any of it.
2. The A3 charter network, California: $400 million generated, about $80 million allegedly diverted
Between 2015 and 2019, Sean McManus and Jason Schrock used a network of 19 online charter schools, partnerships with struggling private schools, and summer athletic programs to enroll thousands of students who, per prosecutors, never took a class. The scheme generated roughly $400 million in California public education funding; investigators alleged about $80 million of it was funneled into companies the two men controlled. Voice of San Diego’s account calls it, by the state’s own description, one of the largest charter-school fraud cases in the country’s history — and yet neither man served a day in prison. McManus, an Australian citizen, was sentenced to four years but served it under house arrest with an ankle monitor in Australia; Schrock’s ankle-monitor time was credited against his sentence. Nine other defendants pleaded to reduced or misdemeanor charges. Both men paid roughly $19 million each in fines and restitution, and the California State Controller’s office says the state has recovered more than $240 million overall — real money back, on a fraud whose architects never spent a night in a cell.
1. National Heritage Academies, Michigan and six other states: $853.6 million
In 2021, National Heritage Academies — the country’s third-largest for-profit charter operator, with more than 90 schools — arranged to sell 69 of its campuses across seven states to Campus Partners 1, a nonprofit newly created for the transaction, with no operating history and, at the time reporters looked, no registration on file with Michigan’s attorney general. NHA’s owner, J.C. Huizenga, controls both the seller’s side (through Charter Development Co., which retained the facility-maintenance and ground-lease contracts) and, through his general counsel installed as the new nonprofit’s president, effectively the buyer’s side as well. The purchase was financed through $853.6 million in tax-exempt municipal bonds, issued by an industrial development authority in La Paz County, Arizona — a jurisdiction with no obvious relationship to any of the seven states where the schools actually sit. The schools then signed 30-year leases back to the very entities that had just “sold” them. Network for Public Education’s account and NCSPE’s coverage at Teachers College, Columbia University both flag the same detail: nothing about this required hiding anything, and no one has been indicted. Local commissions in Michigan raised transparency objections and briefly slowed a few approvals, but the deal closed.
It is, by a wide margin, the largest single dollar figure on this list — more than double the other four cases combined — and it’s the cleanest illustration in the sector of this project’s core argument: the extraction that scales isn’t the kind that needs a prosecutor. It’s the kind a bond market is happy to underwrite.
