‘Gross Negligence’: MTG Camp Blasts Yiannopoulos for Kanye Website Fiasco

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02-donald-trump-MTG-RS-1800 - Credit: AP Photo/Seth Wenig
02-donald-trump-MTG-RS-1800 - Credit: AP Photo/Seth Wenig

The revelation that Kanye West campaign insider Milo Yiannopoulos charged the Marjorie Taylor Green congressional campaign $7,000 for the purchase of Ye24.com  — the website of the Nazi-loving rapper’s prospective 2024 presidential campaign — is rotten news for the MAGA lawmaker from Georgia.

Wednesday morning, Greene sent out a statement from her consultant Isaiah Wartman, whose credit card Yiannopoulos used to buy Ye24.com: “Congresswoman Greene knew nothing about the gross negligence made by a vendor and is being unfairly attacked as a result,” Wartman said. “The campaign was told the purchase was refunded. This wasn’t the case.”

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The damage control by MTG’s camp indicates the Georgia congresswoman may be worried about blowback. The payment to purchase a rival campaign’s website is damaging to Greene — a supposed Trump loyalist — both legally and politically, experts and sources tell Rolling Stone.

As a legal matter, there are strict limits on what one campaign can donate or gift to another, currently $2,000 a year under federal law. The purchase of a $7,000 website for Ye by the Greene campaign, executed by former “summer intern” Yiannopoulos, exceeds that limit by a factor of more than three.

“That is on its face an excessive, prohibited contribution,” says Saurav Ghosh, the Director of Federal Campaign Finance Reform for the Campaign Legal Center. “Whether Marjorie Taylor Greene or her senior staffers knew about it, the value was well in excess of the amount that one campaign can legally contribute to another campaign.”

As a political matter, the purchase of a vital campaign asset for a likely rival to Donald Trump is giving Greene’s detractors inside the MAGA movement fresh ammunition. A source friendly with the former president tells Rolling Stone that insiders are already grumbling about Greene’s links to the Ye-boosting Yiannopoulos.

The strange saga of the purchase of Ye24.com began to emerge last week. The far-right former GOP congressional candidate Laura Loomer tweeted redacted receipt images for the Nov. 22, 2022 purchase of the URL in an auction from the domain registrar GoDaddy.

The transaction date is notable. It’s the same date that Trump infamously dined at Mar-a-Lago with Ye and the white-nationalist Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes. Yiannopoulos later bragged that he’d orchestrated the event — a PR disaster for the former president — as an elaborate troll “to make Trump’s life miserable.”

The unredacted receipt image, reviewed by Rolling Stone, shows an American Express transaction for $7,020.16 charged by GoDaddy to an American Express card in the name of Wartman, the campaign consultant to Greene, but listing the cell phone number of Yiannopoulos. According to the GoDaddy receipt, the extraordinary sum for the website included $7,000 for the auction purchase, plus transfer and domain protection fees.

The “Greene for Congress” campaign, on the same day, recorded a GoDaddy translation with the Federal Election Commission, for the exact amount shown on the Ye24.com receipt — down to the penny, $7,020.16 — booked as a “domain registration and hosting” expense.

Yet on that same November day, the Kanye 2020 campaign also reimbursed Yiannopoulos for a domain transfer payment in an even larger amount — $9,955. (An insider in the Ye camp believed the higher charge may have included an additional domain.)

The Daily Beast was the first news outlet to publish details of the fishy website transactions on Tuesday. On Monday evening, Politico had teased them in a report on the recent resignation of Kanye 2020’s treasurer Patrick Krason, writing that Krason’s private resignation letter to the Ye campaign had raised concerns about potential campaign-finance violations by Yiannopoulos. Those included, Politico wrote, “an expense for a digital asset where Yiannopoulos allegedly sought reimbursement from both Kanye 2020 and the campaign of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.” (Krason did not respond to interview requests.)

Yiannopoulos vigorously denies any wrongdoing, telling Rolling Stone in a statement: “I charge nearly forty grand a month for my services. If I ever decide to steal from someone (and I never will), it will be for more than ten thousand.”

A notorious far-right political operative whom the Anti-Defamation League has labeled “a misogynistic, racist, xenophobic, transphobic troll,” Yiannopoulos had been advising Ye during his late-2022 antisemitic blitz, but was expelled from the rapper’s orbit around the time that Ye appeared on Alex Jones’ show to declare his love for Hitler. (FEC records show Yiannopoulos was paid $40,000 for his work.)

But in recent days, Yiannopoulos has returned to the Ye camp to become the political director of the prospective 2024 bid, which is still operating under the banner of the Kanye 2020 campaign. Yiannopoulos has attempted to seize exclusive control of the reigns by demanding the resignation of Fuentes and other Ye associates. (Rolling Stone reported last week on the Mean Girls” turmoil that has ensued.)

In Yiannopoulos’ version of events, the billing of Greene’s campaign for the Ye24.com site was an honest mistake. In his previous work for Greene, Yiannopoulos had set up a website for her podcast, and the credit card used to pay for that site remained active in his GoDaddy account. When it came time to pay for the Ye24.com domain, the staffer Yiannopoulos allegedly tasked with the purchase chose the same Amex.

Wartmans’s statement offers a similar sequence of events: “An individual previously contracted by my company had added a campaign card to their web hosting account to make legitimate campaign purchases relating to their duties during their tenure. This individual erroneously used the previously saved card for an inadvertent and unauthorized purpose.”

Rolling Stone was sent images of receipts that purport to show a replacement transaction on a different credit card by Yiannopoulos, processed two days later on Nov. 24, 2022. On his Telegram account Tuesday, Yiannopoulos asserted that “the wrong card was allegedly accidentally charged for 24 hours.”

The challenge with this notion of a second credit card transaction? There is no indication in the “Greene for Congress” FEC records reviewed by Rolling Stone that the $7,020.16 GoDaddy purchase was ever reversed. Pressed on this discrepancy, Yiannopoulos indicated skeptics would have to take his word. Wartman’s statement indicates the refund was never made.

Campaign finance experts suspect more than an innocent mistake at play. “For Milo Yiannopoulos, it seems like embezzlement — what under the law is called ‘conversion to personal use’ of the Kanye West campaign’s funds,” says Ghosh of the Campaign Legal Center. “In essence, he was getting reimbursed for something that he didn’t pay for.”

As for the Greene campaign? Ghosh says the money trail talks louder than any excuses. “They might argue, as grounds for mitigation, that this was an unauthorized transfer,” he says. “But the fact is they made an excessive contribution, and that still might be grounds for the FEC to impose a fine.” Wartman vowed in his new statement that the “clerical error will be corrected” in federal records “on the disclosure report covering the time period where the refund is attributed.”

Examining campaign disclosures, the $7,020.16 GoDaddy transaction sticks out like a sore thumb. The Greene campaign had more than 50 other transactions for “domain registration and hosting” during the ‘22 cycle. But none of the rest of those topped $330.

Politically, Greene now faces consequences from something far scarier than the Federal Elections Commission. The congresswoman, long a MAGA darling who has even been mentioned as a potential 2024 running mate, will have to explain to Trump World how her campaign’s money ended up buying the campaign website of a potential spoiler in 2024.

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