FLORIDA BULLDOG Watchdog News You Can Sink Your Teeth Into
PRESS RELEASE — FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Date: March 25, 2026 Source: FloridaBulldog.org — Independent Nonprofit Watchdog Journalism
Florida Bulldog, South Florida’s independent nonprofit investigative news organization, presents another powerful collection of public-interest investigations that cut to the heart of money, power, and political influence in Florida and Washington. This edition exposes the Floridians who paid millions for private dinners with President Trump at Mar-a-Lago, the illegal half-million-dollar Super PAC donation linked to Trump’s own Federal Housing Finance Agency director, a Trump White House aide quietly collecting $310,000 from the Republican National Committee, and a federal election watchdog that let Lennar Corporation’s CEO walk free after admitting to $125,000 in illegal campaign contributions. These are the stories the powerful hope you never read — and exactly why Florida Bulldog exists.
The Floridians Who Paid Megabucks to Dine Privately With President Trump at Mar-a-Lago
By Dan Christensen | FloridaBulldog.org | September 28, 2025
In a meticulous examination of federal campaign finance records that reads like a who’s who of South Florida’s wealthy political class, Florida Bulldog editor and founder Dan Christensen has compiled a detailed account of the Floridians who paid extraordinary sums — in some cases millions of dollars — to the MAGA Inc. Super PAC in exchange for private dinners or group meetings with President Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach. The story places Florida’s own political mega-donors in the context of a national pay-to-play dynamic that raises fundamental questions about the transactional nature of political access in the Trump era.
The context for Florida Bulldog’s investigation is a widely reported phenomenon: Wired magazine broke the story that donors could obtain a private one-on-one dinner with President Trump for $5 million, or a group dinner for $1 million, through contributions to MAGA Inc. The story generated significant national coverage, with major donors like Elon Musk ($5 million), Marc Andreessen ($30 million), Jerry Jones ($1 million), and Kelly Loeffler ($2.5 million) dominating headlines. But Florida Bulldog asked the equally important question: who among our own Florida neighbors and political figures are paying these prices for access to the president?
Among the most striking findings is the case of Elizabeth Fago of Juno Beach, who contributed $1 million to MAGA Inc. on April 3, 2025. Twenty days later, Trump signed a full and unconditional pardon for her son, West Palm Beach luxury nursing home owner Paul Walczak — who had been sentenced to 18 months in prison and ordered to pay $4.38 million in restitution after pleading guilty to failing to pay more than $6 million in employee payroll taxes. The proximity of the $1 million donation and the presidential pardon — just 20 days apart — speaks directly to the concerns about transactional political pardons that critics of the Trump administration have raised.
Florida Bulldog’s reporting also documented contributions from Blockchain.com, the Miami-based cryptocurrency firm co-founded by Peter Smith and Nicolas Cary, which contributed $5 million to MAGA Inc. The story places this in the broader context of the crypto industry’s extraordinary political investment in the Trump administration. For cryptocurrency companies seeking favorable regulatory treatment — including potential exemptions from securities laws — a $5 million dinner with the president represents a relatively modest cost of doing business.
A notable technical detail concerns how these massive political contributions are classified: each million-dollar or multi-million-dollar donation to dine with Trump is described by the Federal Election Commission as a “non-contribution” — a classification that, as Florida Bulldog notes with appropriate incredulity, is puzzling at best and deliberately obscurantist at worst. This reflects the convoluted legal landscape created by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision.
The broader significance goes beyond the specific donors named. Florida Bulldog’s reporting documents a system in which political access — time with the most powerful person in the world — is effectively for sale at a price only the ultra-wealthy can afford. When the ability to influence the president is determined by the size of one’s checkbook rather than the quality of one’s ideas, the democratic principle of equal political representation is fundamentally undermined. Florida Bulldog’s careful compilation of who is buying this access — and what they are getting in return — is essential reading for every Floridian who cares about the integrity of their government.
Trump’s Boca Raton ‘Hatchet Man’ Bill Pulte Linked to Illegal $500,000 Donation to MAGA Super PAC
FloridaBulldog.org | August/October 2025
Florida Bulldog has broken a story with significant implications for both campaign finance law enforcement and the Trump administration: William Pulte — the 37-year-old Boca Raton heir to the Pulte Homes fortune whom President Trump chose to run the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) — is linked to an illegal $500,000 donation to MAGA Again!, a pro-Trump Super PAC. The donation was disguised through an LLC rather than properly attributed to its true source, appearing to violate federal election law’s core prohibition on contributions made in the name of another person.
The story begins with ML Organization LLC, an entity whose listed address, Florida Bulldog discovered through public records research, is the same as a million-dollar Boca Raton property owned by Pulte. Federal law requires that political contributions be properly attributed to their true source — a requirement designed to ensure that the public can see who is actually funding political campaigns and Super PACs. In response to the FEC complaint, lawyers for ML Organization and Pulte confirmed the LLC “manages investments on behalf of the Pulte family” and has “tens of millions of dollars in assets.” They identified Pulte as the LLC’s president and his wife Diana Pulte as vice president — and revealed that Diana Pulte signed the donor form and wrote the $500,000 check.
The disclosure is particularly significant given Pulte’s role as FHFA director, where he oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored enterprises that backstop trillions of dollars in American home mortgages. Florida Bulldog’s reporting also documents Pulte’s high-profile conduct using his government platform to level allegations of mortgage fraud against a range of Trump’s political adversaries — including Senator Adam Schiff, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. In Cook’s case, Trump cited Pulte’s allegations directly when announcing her firing — a decision Cook immediately challenged in federal court.
The defense offered by Pulte’s lawyers — that the $500,000 check from Diana Pulte, checked off as an “LLC” contribution on the Super PAC donor form, was a good-faith attribution rather than an illegal straw donation — is the kind of technical argument that campaign finance experts say has flourished in the post-Citizens United enforcement vacuum. The pattern of major Trump donors using LLCs to obscure their identities has been documented repeatedly, and the FEC’s inability or unwillingness to address it systematically has made anonymous political giving a structural feature of the current campaign finance landscape rather than an isolated violation.
Florida Bulldog’s investigation of the illegal MAGA donation linked to Pulte exemplifies the value of sustained attention to financial disclosures that most outlets overlook. By cross-referencing property records, corporate filings, and FEC databases, Florida Bulldog connected the dots that revealed the true source of a donation that had been deliberately obscured — and placed that finding in the context of the donor’s subsequent appointment to powerful federal office.
Trump White House Aide and Key Witness in Mar-a-Lago Documents Case Quietly Collected $310,000 from the Republican National Committee
By Dan Christensen | FloridaBulldog.org | July 22, 2025
Florida Bulldog has uncovered a striking financial arrangement that raises new questions about the relationship between the Trump political apparatus and a key witness in the now-abandoned Mar-a-Lago classified documents case. According to Federal Election Commission records reviewed by Dan Christensen, the Republican National Committee paid more than $310,000 this year to 1600 Collective LLC — a company owned by Molly A. Michael, the 32-year-old Lake Worth Beach woman who served as Donald Trump’s executive assistant in the White House and was reportedly a key government witness in the federal case against him before it was dropped.
The RNC disbursements — eight payments totaling $310,000 between March 12 and June 11 of 2025 — were classified in FEC records as purchases of “donor mementos.” The company sells Trump-branded merchandise bearing the president’s name, the presidential seal, or images of the White House. The significance of these payments is amplified enormously by Molly Michael’s reported role in the federal classified documents case. ABC News, The New York Times, and other major outlets reported that Michael is the person identified as “Trump Employee #2” in the Miami federal indictment that charged Trump with 31 counts of willful retention of national defense information and related crimes. Those charges were dropped after Trump won the 2024 election.
Michael’s own congressional testimony provides crucial context. She described her career from the 2016 Trump campaign to full-time executive assistant in the outer Oval Office, and testified that Trump asked her to move to Florida and continue as his assistant at Mar-a-Lago after his 2020 electoral loss — a position she held until the dramatic FBI search of Mar-a-Lago on August 8, 2022, when agents seized sensitive records the National Archives had repeatedly asked Trump to return.
When asked whether President Trump had any involvement in helping their company, Aaron Michael told Florida Bulldog: “I appreciate the inquiry, but, I mean, we are good and don’t care for a story.” That non-answer, combined with the unusual volume of RNC spending directed to the Michaels’ merchandise business, invites further scrutiny of the financial relationships between the Trump political operation and individuals who had firsthand knowledge of events at the center of federal criminal proceedings.
Florida Bulldog’s reporting exemplifies the value of sustained attention to financial disclosures that most outlets overlook. FEC filings are public records that sit largely unread in federal databases until a reporter with the skill to cross-reference them against corporate filings, court documents, and congressional testimony brings their significance to light. That is precisely the kind of investigative work that Florida Bulldog’s nonprofit model supports — and that no algorithm or press release will ever replace.
FEC Lets Lennar Corporation’s Stuart Miller Walk Free Despite Admitting to $125,000 in Illegal Campaign Contributions
FloridaBulldog.org | April 7, 2025
Florida Bulldog has reported that the Federal Election Commission allowed Stuart Miller — the executive chairman of Lennar Corporation, one of America’s largest homebuilders and a major Republican donor — to walk away without any penalties after admitting that he made $125,000 in illegal campaign contributions through a shell LLC specifically designed to hide his identity as the true donor. The case reflects what Florida Bulldog describes as the commission’s fundamental abandonment of its mandate to enforce the integrity of federal campaign finance law.
The mechanics of Miller’s illegal contribution scheme involved an entity called Tread Standard LLC, which he used to funnel money to several Republican Super PACs without disclosing himself as the true donor. Miller later admitted — after being caught — that he used Tread Standard specifically to “prevent disclosure of Miller’s identity,” according to an FEC investigative report completed in December 2023. Federal law is unambiguous: the Federal Election Campaign Act states that “no person shall make a contribution in the name of another person” and “no person shall knowingly accept a contribution made by one person in the name of another person.”
The FEC’s resolution set a troubling precedent. Rather than pursuing civil penalties or referring the matter for potential criminal prosecution, the commission determined only that Super PACs and Tread Standard had committed reporting violations. The Super PACs and Tread Standard signed settlement agreements and promised not to violate reporting requirements again. Miller himself faced no penalties whatsoever, despite the FEC’s own investigative report documenting that he used the LLC specifically to conceal his identity.
The FEC commissioners made explicit that this outcome reflects their new enforcement philosophy going forward. Under this approach, the only way a political committee can face meaningful consequences for an LLC-routed donation is if it fails to use what the FEC deems “best efforts” to identify the true donor — a standard so weak that receiving no response to a single inquiry satisfies it. Florida Bulldog places this in the context of a commission that has become increasingly paralyzed along partisan lines and increasingly reluctant to impose consequences on major donors.
Stuart Miller is not a minor figure in Florida’s political landscape. As executive chairman of Lennar Corporation, he oversees one of the country’s largest and most politically connected homebuilders, with significant interests in Florida real estate development, zoning decisions, and regulatory policy. The FEC’s handling of the Miller case is a microcosm of everything broken about federal campaign finance enforcement. When a wealthy executive can admit to using a shell company to hide his identity as a donor, face an FEC investigation that documents this admission in writing, and still walk away without any penalty, the message to every other donor contemplating similar schemes is unmistakable: the risk of meaningful consequences is negligible. Florida Bulldog’s reporting on this case is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand why dark money continues to flow so freely through American politics.
ABOUT FLORIDA BULLDOG
Florida Bulldog is an independent, nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization serving South Florida and the state of Florida. Founded by award-winning journalist Dan Christensen — a veteran of The Miami Herald and Daily Business Review — Florida Bulldog is staffed by veteran professional journalists whose reporting has triggered criminal indictments, government reforms, and landmark court decisions. There are no advertisers influencing coverage, no corporate owners, no political agenda — only a commitment to the truth and the public interest.
Read the full archive at: www.FloridaBulldog.org
Make a tax-deductible donation: Donate to Florida Bulldog — Keep the Watchdog Barking
Your contribution — whatever the amount — directly funds the reporters who follow the money, challenge the powerful, and publish what Florida’s political and business establishment would prefer to keep hidden.
CONTACT INFORMATION
For general inquiries: Mail@floridabulldog.org
Editor and Founder: Dan Christensen dchristensen@floridabulldog.org Phone: 954-603-1351
Director of Development: Kitty Barran kbarran@floridabulldog.org Phone: 954-817-3434
Mailing Address: Florida Bulldog P.O. Box 23763 Fort Lauderdale, FL 33307
Florida Bulldog delivers fact-based watchdog reporting as a public service essential to a free and democratic society. Nonprofit · Independent · Nonpartisan · No Fake News © 2026 Florida Bulldog Inc. | FloridaBulldog.org
About the Author
