| Good morning, Early Birds. Andrew Yang says he's heard "whispers" that President Biden won't run for reelection, citing unnamed "folks in DC." What else is happening out there? Keep us apprised: earlytips@washpost.com. Thanks for waking up with us. šØ: A memo circulated among Trump allies advocated using NSA data in an attempt to prove the 2020 presidential election was falsely stolen. "The memo used the banal language of government bureaucracy, but the proposal it advocated was extreme: President Donald Trump should invoke the extraordinary powers of the National Security Agency and Defense Department to sift through raw electronic communications in an attempt to show that foreign powers had intervened in the 2020 election to help Joe Biden win," our colleagues Josh Dawsey, Rosalind S. Helderman, Emma Brown, Jon Swaine and Jackie report. | | |  | The campaign | | Here's who's giving big money to Trumpworld super PACs |  Former President Trump speaks at the "Save America Rally" in Conroe, Texas, last weekend, his first big MAGA rally in Texas since 2019. (Photo by Michael Stravato/For The Washington Post) | | | Who's funding a pro-Trump super PAC: Former president Donald Trump's army of small-dollar donors helped him raise tens of millions of dollars last year, giving his political operation a reserve of $122 million heading into this year. But campaign finance rules forbid Trump's PACs from accepting more than $5,000 a year from any individual. So a handful of Trump's wealthiest supporters have given to an allied super PAC instead. The super PAC — Make America Great Again, Again! Inc. — has raised more than $10 million since October, according to campaign finance disclosures filed on Monday, including $5.7 million transferred from another pro-Trump super PAC. The money raised by both super PACs came from a few dozen wealthy donors, three of whom told The Early they gave to support a potential Trump presidential campaign in 2024, to help Republican congressional candidates retake the House and Senate this fall or simply out of gratitude. "I'm just grateful to Donald Trump," said Don Ahern, a Las Vegas businessman who gave $250,000 to the super PAC in December. "While he was president he did a lot of beautiful things for this country. My way of saying thank you." Some of the super PAC's supporters are giving more now than they ever did while Trump was president. | | John Koffel, 77, the retired founder of an Illinois medical supply company, gave $70,000 during the 2020 cycle to Trump Victory, the joint fundraising committee that supported Trump's campaign, the Republican National Committee and state Republican parties, according to campaign finance filings. He gave more than twice that amount — $150,000 — to the super PAC last year. Koffel would love to see Trump run for president again in 2024. But he said he didn't expect the money he gave would be used to support a future campaign. "I gave it freely for his use to see at his discretion where it would be best used for America," he said. While Trump has given the super PAC his blessing, he's not running it himself. Its board of directors includes Pam Bondi, the former Florida attorney general turned lobbyist who briefly served in Trump's White House; Ric Grenell, Trump's ambassador to Germany and acting director of national intelligence; and Matt Whitaker, who briefly served as Trump's acting attorney general. Trump also hosted a dinner at Mar-a-Lago to raise money for the super PAC in December, and he's scheduled to headline another fundraiser for the super PAC there later this month, according to an invitation obtained by the New York Times's Maggie Haberman. The price of entry: $125,000 a person for donors who want to attend a private dinner with Trump. Koffel praised Trump's record — including Republican tax cuts, Trump's border policies and the accords his administration brokered between Israel and Arab countries — and criticized President Biden as a traitor. But he said he didn't appreciate Trump's recent remark lamenting that former vice president Mike Pence hasn't "overturned" the 2020 election results. "It's pretty obvious that the election was questionable," Koffel said. "But to belabor the past — I'm disappointed. I wish they would focus on what's good for the American people." One of the most generous donors to a Trump super PAC in recent months was David Frecka — although he gave to a different one. Frecka, the 68-year-old retired owner of an Ohio plastics company, gave $1 million in September to Make America Great Again Action, a pro-Trump super PAC run by Trump's former 2016 campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski. (Ahern also gave the super PAC $1 million.) But Trump allies started a Make American Great Again, Again! in October after Trashelle Odom, a Trump donor, accused Lewandowski of making unwanted sexual advances; Make American Great Again Action then transferred most of its cash to the new super PAC. | | Frecka gave as a way of supporting Republican efforts to retake control of Congress in the midterms, he said. "My expectation is to try to get the House back and the Senate back," he said. "That's why that money was spent." Make America Great Again Action spent more than $500,000 backing Mike Carey, whom Trump had endorsed, in a special election primary last year to fill a safely Republican congressional seat in Ohio. (Carey won.) But it's unclear how much the new super PAC plans to spend backing Republican in the midterms and how much it plans to stockpile for a potential Trump presidential campaign. It's not uncommon for supporters to start supportive super PAC before a presidential candidate announces his or her campaign. Allies of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, for instance, started the Right to Rise super PAC months before Bush announced he was running. But Mike Murphy, who ran Right to Rise and later became an avowed Never Trumper, said any similarities were only surface-level. "It's like a poodle and a lion both have four legs," he said. "They're both super PACs. But they're very, very different." | | Las Vegas businessman Don Ahern, who gave $250,000 to a Trump-allied super PAC in December | "I'm just grateful to Donald Trump. While he was president he did a lot of beautiful things for this country. My way of saying thank you." | | | | | | | | |  | On K Street | | Erin Billings tapped as partner at Global Strategy Group | | Moving up: The polling and consulting firm Global Strategy Group has promoted Erin Billings to partner. She was previously an executive vice president. She joined the firm in 2018 and previously worked for the Podesta Group. | | |  | From the courts | | Top Supreme Court pick Michelle Childs facing scrutiny from union leaders over past labor and employment work |  Judge J. Michelle Childs listens during her nomination hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on April 16, 2010. (Charles Dharapak/ AP Photo, File) | | | š: "Union leaders are increasingly wary of Biden's potential selection of Judge J. Michelle Childs as a Supreme Court justice, citing her time working on behalf of employers against worker claims," our colleagues Jeff Stein and Seung Min Kim report. "The situation sets up a potential rift with Rep. James E. Clyburn, a top Democrat who has been pushing for her nomination." | - "The labor leaders for now are mostly expressing their concerns in quiet back channels, but that could soon change."
- The American Federation of Government Employees: "She comes from an anti-union law firm where she spent time defending employers from claims of civil rights and labor law violations," David Borer, general counsel of the AFGE, told our colleagues. "That's not what we need."
- The Association of Flight Attendants: "There's a long list to choose from," Sara Nelson, president of the association, told them. "That's why it's great that President Biden can pass on a management-side lawyer like Childs, who has argued disdainfully against workers's rights in favor of several other candidates who have been in the trenches with workers and have a proven record of upholding worker rights."
| | |  | The Data | | | A roundup of Biden's environmental policies, visualized: How well do you know Biden's environmental track record? Take our quiz. | | |  | The Media | | | |  | Viral | | | Dining in NYC: |  "New York's very sociable new mayor cleared his busy schedule for a lengthy dinner meeting with run-out-of-office ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Tuesday night," Page Six's Ian Mohr and Bernadette Hogan report. Mayor Eric Adams dined with Cuomo "for about two hours at Midtown hotspot Osteria La Baia … Cuomo ordered the skate — which is apparently the restaurant's specialty … It was not clear what Adams, a former diabetic-turned-vegan, ordered." | | | Upsetting judges on a popular tv show: |  "Rudy Giuliani was unmasked as an exiting costumed contestant in last week's taping of the first Season 7 episode of Fox's popular primetime series The Masked Singer," Deadline's Mike Fleming, Jr. reports. "Deadline hears that as soon as they saw Giuliani, judges Ken Jeong and Robin Thicke quickly left the stage in protest." | | | Exiled in South Florida: |  | | | | | "The beachfront in Surfside, Florida, is one of the more peaceful and unexploited stretches of public sunning space in the entire sprawling South Florida metropolis," the Washingtonian's Bob Norman writes. "Grass-topped sand dunes and sea-grape trees hem the length of the beach and separate it from the town's semi-famous 'hard pack': a serene one-mile pathway of compressed sand beloved by runners." | - "One sunny day last June, a Surfside resident spotted a tall blond woman on the hard pack, with a little white dog on a leash. She watched as the woman led the dog off the pathway toward the beach, right past a sign that clearly said dogs weren't allowed."
- "The resident, a beach activist who finds high purpose in protecting Surfside's loggerhead sea turtles during nesting season, mobilized. 'I was speed-walking at her and yelling at her,' she recalls. 'I just opened my mouth and said, 'You can't go out there with the dog!'"
- "When the startled owner turned around, her face was immediately recognizable. It was Ivanka Trump — accompanied by her ten-year-old daughter, Arabella, and their ultra-white, blue-eyed pooch, Winter."
- "Oh-uh, I didn't realize," Trump said.
| | "A few months later, the woman bumped into the family once more — a rare kind of happenstance since the Kushners had sought exile in the Sunshine State." | - "Her encounters with Ivanka only reinforced a long-held impression: "She seems to be about … 'I live in this little cocoon where the rules don't apply to me' … in her own little world.'"
- "Ivanka's world has certainly gotten smaller. She's out of politics at the moment, out of her former executive job at the Trump Organization, out of the womenswear brand that bore her name, out of high society in New York, and cast out of Washington, too."
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