Jared Kushner approved the creation of a shell company that operated like a “campaign within a campaign” and secretly funneled millions of dollars in campaign cash to Trump family members, Business Insider reports. The company, American Made Media Consultants Corporation and American Made Media Consultants LLC, took more than half of the Trump campaign’s massive $1.26 billion war chest and was largely shielded from having to publicly report financial details. However, a source told Business Insider that Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump was the company’s president, Vice President Mike Pence’s nephew was its VP, and Trump campaign CFO Sean Dollman was treasurer and secretary.

The mysterious company caused consternation among other campaign staffers, who had no idea how it was spending money, and the Campaign Legal Center filed a civil complaint with the FEC in June accusing the Trump campaign of laundering $170 million largely through it. A campaign spokesperson denied that AMMC paid Lara Trump or Pence’s nephew for being on its board.

No wonder Trump ran short of money for television ads.

Here’s some more from Raw Story:

Trump’s top advisers and campaign staff told Insider they were unaware of how the shell company operated, and campaign officials even conducted an internal audit of its operations under former campaign manager Brad Parscale but never reported those findings, and the next campaign manager Bill Stepien had little involvement with AMMC.

“Nothing was done without Jared’s approval,” said a former advisor to Trump’s 2016 campaign. “What Stepien doesn’t know is because Jared doesn’t want him to know.”

The nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center filed a civil complaint in July with the Federal Election Commission accusing the campaign of disguising” about $170 million in spending “by laundering the funds” through AMMC.

“[It’s a] scheme to evade telling voters even the basics on where its money is really going [and a] shield to disguise the ultimate recipients of its spending,” said Brendan Fischer, the center’s director of federal reform.

Here’s the best part:

The Department of Justice may open a criminal investigation if the government suspects the payments were a “knowing and willful” violation of election law.

Several sources from the Justice Department and FEC told Insider that investigators may already be looking into the campaign’s activity.

Oddly, the New York Times also reported on the shell company but buried it several paragraphs down in another story about how much money Trump will have when he leaves the White House. Also oddly, the Times doesn’t mention Jared Kushner.

Mr. Trump has long acted with few inhibitions when it comes to spending other people’s money, and he has spent millions of campaign dollars on his own family businesses in the last five years. But new records show an even more intricate intermingling of Mr. Trump’s political and familial interests than was previously known.

Lara Trump, Mr. Trump’s daughter-in-law and a senior campaign adviser, served on the board — and was named on drafts of the incorporation papers — of a limited liability company through which the Trump political operation spent more than $700 million since 2019, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times.

The arrangement has never been disclosed. One of the other board members and signatories in the draft papers of the L.L.C., American Made Media Consultants, was John Pence, the nephew of Vice President Mike Pence and a senior Trump adviser. The L.L.C. has been criticized for purposefully obscuring the ultimate destination of hundreds of millions of dollars of spending.

Ms. Trump and Mr. Pence were originally listed as president and vice president on the incorporation papers, documents reviewed by the Times showed. Sean Dollman, the campaign chief financial officer, was the A.M.M.C. treasurer.

“Lara Trump and John Pence resigned from the AMMC board in October 2019 to focus solely on their campaign activities, however, there was never any ethical or legal reason why they could not serve on the board in the first place,” said Tim Murtaugh, a spokesman for Mr. Trump. “John and Lara were not compensated by AMMC for their service as board members.”

It sounds to me as if Lara Trump and John Pence bailed out of AMMC so as not to be caught in legal jeopardy. If AMMC was a Jared Kushner production, who knows where that money is now, and who knows if Trump himself knew what was going on?

And the Republicans think Hunter Biden is a problem? duh.

Meanwhile, as predicted, the Trump Administration is somehow screwing up vaccine distribution. Erick Lutz, Vanity Fair:

The White House reportedly turned down “multiple” offers from Pfizer over the summer to set aside additional doses for the United States. And of the vaccines the U.S. does have, a shitload are apparently just sitting in a warehouse somewhere, ready to be delivered, if only the Trump administration would give the company the word.

“This week, we successfully shipped all 2.9 million doses that we were asked to ship by the U.S. Government to locations specified by them,” Pfizer said in a statement Thursday. “We have millions more doses sitting in our warehouse but, as of now, we have not received any shipment instructions for additional doses.”

The company’s statement came after the Trump administration informed several states that they would receive up to 40 percent fewer vaccine doses next week than they’d been expecting. The White House implied the problem was on Pfizer’s end, but the company contradicted that explanation. “Pfizer is not having any production issues with our COVID-19 vaccine,” it said in the statement, “and no shipments containing the vaccine are on hold or delayed.”

This probably is just incompetence, a quality Trumpers possess in abundance. But I also wondered if Jared was involved in this somehow. Pfizer and (probably) Moderna need to be careful with inventory, or vast quantities of vaccine will somehow disappear into a deep underground black market. Along with a lot of PPE confiscated a few months ago ….