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They Were Prolific Donors. They Also Had Dementia.
CNN One Thing
Oct 27, 2024
A CNN investigation has revealed how Republicans and Democrats are taking millions of dollars in donations from elderly dementia patients to fuel their campaigns. In this episode, we look at how the reporting came together and how the practice could impact political fundraising going forward.
Guests: Kyung Lah, CNN Senior Investigative Correspondent & Yahya Abou-Ghazala, CNN Investigative Producer
Episode Transcript
David Rind
00:00:00
'We're coming up on one week until the presidential election. Let that sink in. One week to go. Take a deep breath if you need. The candidates, of course, are going to be blanketing the key battlegrounds. Canvassers will be going door to door trying to get out the vote and fundraisers will be looking for every last dollar to get Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump over the line. You've probably been bombarded with some of these text messages or robo calls asking for money. They're annoying as hell, but for most people, they're easy enough to delete or ignore altogether. But tuning out those political calls and solicitations isn't easy for everyone, especially older Americans whose memories aren't what they used to be, who may be lonely and looking for ways to connect. Think about it. Put yourself in their shoes for a second. How vulnerable would your finances be if the campaigns came calling over and over and over again and didn't stop? I guess our CNN's senior investigative correspondent, Kyung Lah, and investigative producer Yahya Abou-Ghazala today, how their team uncovered millions of dollars in donations to Republicans and Democrats taken from elderly dementia patients from CNN. This is one thing. I'm David Rind.
David Rind
00:01:26
Kyung, thanks for being here.
Kyung Lah
00:01:28
Thanks for having us. It's so fun to be here in New York with you.
David Rind
00:01:31
So you guys are here with another CNN investigation. Kyung where does this want to start?
Kyung Lah
00:01:36
So if you think about what your phone looks like during this time of the year, this is when you start getting all of these text messages about we are X number of days away from the election. You need to donate to save America.
David Rind
00:01:53
Hey, David, it's Kamala Harris. I need you to chip in. $5.
Kyung Lah
00:01:55
Exactly. And all of American democracy depends on that $5, right? That adds up to millions upon millions of dollars for these campaigns, and it fuels them across the finish line. So what we were trying to do is figure out where does all of this money come from? And two of our writers, Blake Ellis and Melanie Harken, just were poking around in the Federal Election Commission website because they had this feeling in their gut. Right. Just, you know, where is it all coming from? Why am I getting so many text messages? Why are you bombarding me? And then they started seeing names, these names that would drop these small dollar donations. And they kept showing up across the board. So what they wanted to do is figure out who are these people?
'Yahya Abou-Ghazala
00:02:51
So at that point, what we decided to do was take a look at some of the top grassroots donors who've donated hundreds of thousands of dollars, who are listed as retired in FEC data, and just try to figure out, you know, how do we translate this from these numbers we're seeing in these repeated donations and find out whether these donations were intended. And so it took a team effort of just picking up the phone, dialing number after number after number, trying to reach a family member, the donor themselves, and basically figure out, hey, did you donate this much money over the last couple of years? Did you know you donated this much money? And it became very clear very quickly that oftentimes we were the ones breaking the news to the family.
David Rind
00:03:40
Wow. Because you guys had a sense that seeing all these repeated numbers from the same people, that these weren't conscious donations in the way that somebody might, you know, pay for a bill month after month?
'Yahya Abou-Ghazala
00:03:53
Exactly. And I think from those conversations, the way they would very often go, it followed a pretty much a similar template every single time. You know, if especially if you reach the son or daughter of a retired elderly person who may or may not have been diagnosed with dementia or shown signs of cognitive decline, and you tell them something like, hey, you know, we've seen from public FEC records that your father has donated close to $150,000 in the last couple of years. Oftentimes, it's a silence and a very quick, my God, what are you. What are you talking about? And from there, often they will take a second say, Hey, I need to get a handle on this. Let me look into this and I'll get back to you. And you know, when they'd give us a call back, they would would often be a very devastating realization that to the extent of the financial damage that these donations had.
Kyung Lah
00:04:50
You know, the important thing to note is that these weren't millionaires, but these are these are your parents and your grandparents, ordinary people. Some of them were. When we spoke with a housekeeper, we spoke with somebody who had just an average teaching job. It's extraordinary how it's just regular people who were caught in this trap.
'Yahya Abou-Ghazala
00:05:14
One conversation that sticks out to me is a conversation I had with the wife of an elderly retired donor. And when I asked her if she knew how much money her husband had donated to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars, her response to me was, my God, I've never seen that kind of money in my life. I'm I'm afraid the lights are going to go out at home tonight if what you're telling me is true.
Kyung Lah
00:05:39
And remember the conversations that Yahya and our investigative team was having with these individual people? They're oftentimes just starting to realize that their loved one has dementia. My mom has dementia. So it became clear to me that she had a problem when she wasn't remembering that she had paid a bill or that she had bought a nutritional supplement. Nutritional supplements were was my family's problem. And it's it you just forget you forget you lose grasp of the basic structures. And that's a part of your brain that is in decline when you have dementia.
David Rind
00:06:22
So you have these people that are making these repeated donations. You find this out through reporting calling. Where is the money going to? Is it going to Republicans, Democrats, campaigns themselves, like where's it going?
Kyung Lah
00:06:38
It's going through two different funnels. I think we can call it funnels. Conduits, right?
'Yahya Abou-Ghazala
00:06:43
Yeah, I would say it's conduits.
Kyung Lah
00:06:44
'Conduits, right. So it's going through these two conduits and you may recognize the name if you've ever donated to a political campaign before Winred on the Republican side, ActBlue. On the Democratic side, if you think about it as a big pipe that all the campaigns go under this one umbrella and it is funneled through this pipe called Winred or ActBlue, then that money gets pushed to the campaign. So ultimately, your money does end up with the campaign of your choice or the PAC of your choice. But it has to go through this pipe that's called When Read or ActBlue. We found seven times the public complaints on the Winred side versus the ActBlue side. So there is a more well-known, persistent and angry problem among donors on the Winred side.
David Rind
00:07:37
Well, how is this happening? Is it just these people with memory problems mistakenly sending payment after payment, or is there something structural that is allowing this to happen?
'Yahya Abou-Ghazala
00:07:46
It's a combination of things. I think one of the primary reasons this ends up happening is when you sign up to donate, let's say for the first time and you want to give $10, you put in your email, your phone number, and from there, oftentimes your contact information gets pushed out to all sorts of campaigns across the country campaigns, PACs. And from there, your phone starts receiving dozens of text messages a day, emails, phone calls. And so every time, if you decide to open one of those links, donate through a survey, oftentimes there's an option for a pre checked box. That pre checked box can be very clear in some instances. In other cases, it can be very, very confusing. I mean, even to us looking at these ads, you know, I could miss it if I was looking over it. So when that box is pre checked, that essentially authorizes winred to charge your card on a monthly, oftentimes weekly basis.
David Rind
00:08:49
You're saying the boxes already checked when you sign up. So that is like the default setting that you're going to keep getting charged certain campaigns.
Kyung Lah
00:08:57
Not every campaign does this, not every email or text that you get has lists.
David Rind
00:09:02
But it sounds like a big problem for somebody who may have cognitive issues.
'Yahya Abou-Ghazala
00:09:07
Absolutely. Especially when if you have dementia. And one conversation I had with a donor told me that his wife will donate several times a day. Think about how many of those may have been pre checked recurring and the next day will come. She'll forget that she donated the day before and do it all over again day after day. So think about that amount of money, those ten, 15, $20 all becoming recurring donations. And how quickly that would snowball into tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Kyung Lah
00:09:40
And if you think that five, 10 or $20 can't pile up, we sat with the family of Richard Benjamin.
Kyung Lah
00:09:47
Let's just start by talking about your father.
Kyung Lah
00:09:50
Richard Benjamin is a veteran. He grew up in Iowa, a farmer. Conservative and he had worked his whole life. His wife had recently passed away.
Jason Benjamin
00:10:02
And then he was suddenly alone and kind of a lost soul.
Kyung Lah
00:10:07
He was alone during the pandemic, and that's when his children suspect that he was suffering from loneliness as well as cognitive decline. And then in this cycle, in this campaign, the 2024 campaign, he started receiving so many text messages.
Jason Benjamin
00:10:27
So being one of nine siblings, he was always very frugal and very responsible with his money.
Kyung Lah
00:10:35
The first signal that his kids had that something was awry is this man who had been a very conservative spender, he never donated to political campaigns. He would donate to the Catholic Church and Catholic Charities maybe 15, $20 at a time. He called his kids and said, I need $1,000.
Michelle
00:10:56
He had never asked me for money in my life, so I knew that was unusual and I was a little concerned. But I asked him, what's this for?
Kyung Lah
00:11:07
And they simply didn't understand what's going on. So his daughter opens up his account and was stunned.
Michelle
00:11:15
And that's when my jaw dropped because I saw hundreds and hundreds of transactions to winred.com.
Jason Benjamin
00:11:26
And so on. This statement here, this is a ten day period and I tallied up the number of donations and there were 1556 donations in that ten day period. And the total amount was $38,713. And so that's just.
00:11:59
It's absurd. Yeah. It doesn't make any sense?
Jason Benjamin
00:12:03
He's never spent $30,000 on that in a single month in his whole life.
Kyung Lah
00:12:08
And he's it was extraordinary looking at his bank account and his credit card charges. Those charges amounted to almost $40,000 in one month.
David Rind
00:12:19
Good Lord.
Kyung Lah
00:12:20
So in in the span of just weeks, he had managed to say goodbye to almost $80,000. But he didn't remember.
Michelle
00:12:29
We were the ones telling him we needed to help him because this was a bad, bad situation.
Richard
00:12:36
He just had no clue how this impacted him.
Kyung Lah
00:12:39
That's when his kids confronted him and showed him the documents and said, Dad, do you remember? Do you remember doing this? And they would have these conversations with him again and again and again, and he just didn't remember. These are all text messages from somebody, right?
Michelle
00:12:55
Yeah.
Kyung Lah
00:12:56
Do you know do you know who this is?
Michelle
00:13:00
uh...
Kyung Lah
00:13:01
Speaker John...
Richard
00:13:04
Speaker Johnson. He was and.
Kyung Lah
00:13:07
I tried to go over these accounts with him as well and our interview, and he just didn't remember.
'Yahya Abou-Ghazala
00:13:17
When you're dealing with these elderly donors who might be, you know, showing signs of cognitive decline, the nature of the messaging is such that when they receive them constantly in this barrage of texts, they almost feel from many of the conversations that we've had that they are personally in touch with the campaign.
Karen Kuo
00:13:38
My mother was a very multitalented woman. She was an artist.
'Yahya Abou-Ghazala
00:13:45
Karen, whose mother passed away, had donated nearly $200,000 left, you know, almost nothing for the children in terms of, you know, her life savings.
Karen Kuo
00:13:55
My mom had written this email to one of the candidates she was giving money to.
'Yahya Abou-Ghazala
00:14:02
At one point, she wrote a letter. She wrote a letter to some of the campaigns saying essentially, I'm sorry that I have nothing left to donate. I have surgery coming up.
Karen Kuo
00:14:13
She kept saying she was sorry. I'll try to give you the money next time.
'Yahya Abou-Ghazala
00:14:19
And, you know, until I get a handle on things, I'm going to have to hold off.
David Rind
00:14:23
She felt like she was letting the campaign down.
Kyung Lah
00:14:25
Right. And she felt bad. This is a woman who had stage four cancer and she was apologizing for not giving the money. What do you want to tell all those candidates you see on that report.
Karen Kuo
00:14:43
Gosh, I mean, I'm really angry. I want to tell them that this is not the way to go about it, that we need to honor the citizens that are voting for you and the people that believe in you.
Kyung Lah
00:14:58
And that's what her daughter described as absolutely disgusting behavior on the part of these campaigns.
David Rind
00:15:17
So what is Winred? ActBlue? What are they doing about it?
Kyung Lah
00:15:21
Shall we talk about our winred journey in trying to find them?
'Yahya Abou-Ghazala
00:15:24
We did try to find them. Yang did try to find them.
Kyung Lah
00:15:28
We called them. We found their personal cell phone numbers. We emailed them.
Voicemail
00:15:34
Your call has been forwarded to voicemail. The person you're trying to reach is not available.
Kyung Lah
00:15:38
At the time. Did not get a response. Excuse me, ma'am. Hi. We went to their corporate headquarters at listed in Arlington, Virginia. We're looking for suite 600. This is Suite 600. And guess what? It is a virtual office.
Woman
00:15:56
They have a virtual office here, so they're not located in the building onsite.
Kyung Lah
00:16:02
What does that. What does that mean? Meaning that it's simply. It's. It's like a modern version of the P.O. Box, that there's somebody there to answer the phone, but they don't exist.
'Yahya Abou-Ghazala
00:16:13
For the ways that we tried to reach them. Knowing that we sent the texts we've sent them, we have the right email addresses. You go to the office and not so much even as a willingness to engage or even get on the phone, on background or off the record to get an understanding. It's just been radio silence.
Kyung Lah
00:16:36
We did engage with ActBlue. They did call us. We did get a statement where they described this customer care line where you can reach out, talk to them. There are certain warning words that they hear where they think that, okay, maybe this donor is on cognitive decline. Let's elevate it to our elevated care team. The thing is, though, you heard Yale describing this as a conduit, right, That these are conduit companies, right? They are just the pipe. They say the money is going to the campaigns. And ActBlue, on its part says we will try to get your money back. But there's only so much we can do.
David Rind
00:17:17
This sounds like a broader problem. If these conduit companies, like you say, are arguing that once the money is on to them, they kind of funnel it up the chain and then it's out of their control. Like, is there anything that the Federal Election Commission is doing about this kind of Wild West of donations?
Kyung Lah
00:17:37
Well, political speech is protected speech under the First Amendment. So the FEC, the FTC, they may take your complaints, but ultimately trying to prove fraud is a very, very high legal bar. There are three attorney generals in three different states trying to sue the conduit companies in order to figure out how to control this behavior. But what we have heard on background from some of these agencies is that it is difficult to prove fraud is difficult to prove. So it's a very, very high bar.
David Rind
00:18:20
'Well, with these pre-check boxes that are already checked before you even do anything like that, sounds just inherently kind of sneaky to me. Is it legal?
'Yahya Abou-Ghazala
00:18:28
'Yeah. Currently, pre-check boxes for recurring donations are allowed in almost every state, despite widespread condemnation from consumer advocates who say it should not be legal.
Kyung Lah
00:18:39
And there is nothing in federal statute that says that it is illegal. And here is the big conundrum. The people who would say this is illegal, it would have to be a measure passed in Congress. So the various candidates who need money for their campaigns would be the ones saying, let's make it illegal. So how do you think that's going to go?
David Rind
00:19:06
Well, that's what I was going to ask, because the campaigns like they want as much money to flow in as possible.
Kyung Lah
00:19:13
Well, the campaigns, when we've reached out, how many campaigns have we reached out to? We reached the top five on either side.
'Yahya Abou-Ghazala
00:19:19
Ten in total.
Kyung Lah
00:19:20
Ten in total. Yeah, they know. I mean, they they know. And they also understand that recurring checked boxes, recurring payments, checked boxes, those are a way for them to have a sustainable level of income from grassroots donors. If they know 40 people are going to donate $5 every single week to the campaign, then they have a clear amount of money that's going to come in that doesn't rise and fall with the news if it's a single one time donation. So these campaigns want recurring donations.
David Rind
00:19:57
It gets back to this wider problem of money in politics, something we've been dealing with for years and years and years. But it's manifesting here in this little way that is having a ruinous effect on some people's lives.
'Yahya Abou-Ghazala
00:20:10
As part of the reporting process. We requested complaints from AGs offices in this country and we requested them from the FEC, the FTC, just to kind of read what kinds of complaints people were submitting about Winred and ActBlue and from combing through over a thousand of these public. Complaints and reviews. We would often read when people are, you know, rage typing, trying to find someone to listen to them saying, Hey, I'm never donating through this platform ever again. Please give me my money back. This can't be allowed to continue. So you're seeing in these complaints, oftentimes people writing that this is the last dollar you'll see from me. And so the fear is the downstream effect of this is less and less people will be inclined to donate through these conduits out of fear that they might be.
David Rind
00:21:01
The trust is just broken.
'Yahya Abou-Ghazala
00:21:03
Absolutely.
Kyung Lah
00:21:04
And then what it leads to when it comes to the money and politics question is the millionaires and the billionaires in this country? They're the ones, then, who will fund our politics, not the grassroots individuals, because of the mismanagement of the goodwill of a donor. We're in the height of the political season right now.
Kyung Lah
00:21:23
How has this soured your view of national politics?
Jason Benjamin
00:21:28
Well, they just look like predators with no conscience, period.
David Rind
00:21:32
Are there tips for people to kind of be on the lookout for this kind of stuff or how to deal with this, whether they're like involved in politics or not?
Kyung Lah
00:21:41
There's one very simple way you can check to see if this situation is happening to your parents or your grandparents. You go to FEC gov. That is a website that is publicly managed. All of these donations, if they total in all, more than $200, more than $200. All you have to do is type their name into the website with the zip code and it'll pop right up wherever that money has gone. You can isolate it to when Red or ActBlue if you want to do each one. But you can also just put their name in and find out if they've they've donated more than $200.
David Rind
00:22:20
That's really helpful.
Kyung Lah
00:22:24
One thing that we didn't touch on is I talked to, you know, in the trying to convince people to talk to us. I talked to a number of families who just wouldn't talk. They wanted to talk and tell us their story. But there's so much shame. Do you feel like they were praying for your father?
Kyung Lah
00:22:45
I think they had to have been because to to look at the amount of donations again, especially in such a short period of time and not see a problem there. Whether it was cognitive decline or just some sort of error like that should alert that they should know something is wrong. And for them to look past that and just keep sending the texts and keep sending the emails, that's taking advantage. Somebody is already.
'Yahya Abou-Ghazala
00:23:19
Giving. Yeah. Even when some of these kids would talk to their parents about it, they'd get back to us and say something like, Look, they are in cognitive decline. I've brought this up to them and my sense is they're embarrassed and ashamed to admit that they have given so much. And the people who did speak to us on the record framed it to us like this. This isn't about shaming our mother or father for the amount of money they've given. It's about shaming and blaming the people who took it from them and asking them to give it back.
Kyung Lah
00:23:53
We took care of our parents the best way we could. And they their intentions were good. They just didn't realize it was going to be manipulated and exploited.
David Rind
00:24:06
Well, it's fascinating reporting. Thank you both very much.
'Yahya Abou-Ghazala
00:24:08
Thank you so much.
Kyung Lah
00:24:09
For having us.
David Rind
00:24:20
One thing is a production of CNN Audio. This episode was produced by me, David Rind. Our senior producers are Felicia Patinkin and Faiz Jamil. Matt Dempsey is our production manager, Dan Dzula, as our technical director. And Steve Lickteig is the executive producer of CNN Audio. We get support from Haley Thomas, Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, John Dianora, Leni Steinhart, Jamus Andrest, Nichole Pesaru and Lisa Namerow. Special thanks to Patricia DiCarlo, Wendy Brundage and Katie Hinman. We'll be back on Wednesday I'll talk to you then.
