Karen#1
Well-known member
[Trish Duggan and a friend]
We’ve been paying a lot of attention to Scientology leader David Miscavige lately, with some audio leaks of him from the LRH Birthday event, and his plans for buying a street from Clearwater falling through.
But we also like to keep an eye on the geniuses who fork over huge amounts of money to him to keep Scientology going through a difficult time. And we have a couple of fun updates about them for you today.
The last time we checked in on Trish Duggan, Scientology’s wealthiest donor, she had been appointed by President Trump to the board of the Kennedy Center in DC. And that story had showed up just a few days after we had pointed out that Trish was a major part of the America First Policy Institute, which Politico and the New York Times were crediting with having more to do with Trump’s transition in his second term than Project 2025.
The AFPI had been founded in 2020, and we had its tax filings from 2021 and 2022, showing that Trish was a director, and that the organization was run by several women who ended up on Trump’s cabinet.
Well, we just got our hands on the Institute’s latest tax filing, from the year 2023, and we just wanted to point out that once again, Trish Duggan is listed as a director, along with Linda McMahon (chair, and now Secretary of Education), Brooke Rollins (CEO, and now Secretary of Agriculture), as well as directors Larry Kudlow and Newt Gingrich and six others.
Also, AFPI paid Pam Bondi (now Attorney General) $251,338 in 2022, and $259,847 in 2023 for “advisory services.”
AFPI was also growing between 2022 and 2023 as the next election neared. It listed 81 employees and 50 volunteers in 2022, and the next year those numbers had grown to 94 and 437. The institute was taking in more money as well, from $23.1 million in contributions in 2022 to $28.7 million in 2023.
Where was the money coming from? We don’t know: AFPI is a dark-money organization, and it lists its contributors as “restricted” on its tax form.
However, we have a pretty good guess where a good portion of it is coming from.
In November 2022, the AFPI held its first ever awards ceremony, at Mar-a-Lago, and gave Trish a special award it called The Haym Salomon Philanthropist Award, “named after the principal financier of the American Revolution.”
You would imagine that Trish was being given such an award because she was, well, the principal financier of the AFPI, wouldn’t you?
[Trish getting her award with McMahon (left) and Rollins, both now Cabinet members]
So Scientology’s wealthiest donor (she and her ex-husband Bob Duggan have given Scientology at least a third of a billion dollars in donations — by their own estimate — since they hit it rich with a cancer drug in 2015) helped finance and run the organization that was most responsible for planning the second Trump administration, and as a reward President Trump named her to the board of the Kennedy Center. And yes, she was there when the president visited the center for a planning session with the board on March 17.
Lots More:
More Scientology big-donor shenanigans to keep us entertained
We’ve been paying a lot of attention to Scientology leader David Miscavige lately, with some audio leaks of him from the LRH Birthday event, and his plans for buying a street from Clearwater falling through.
tonyortega.substack.com
