OceanGate CEO Missing in Titanic Sub Had History of Donating to GOP Candidates

Public campaign finance records indicate that Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate currently stuck on the missing Titan submersible that was running a tourist expedition of the Titanic wreck, has been a consistent Republican donor over the years.

Now a point of caveat here: According to these public finance records, Rush was not a Republican megadonor, but his donations over the years leaned heavily toward Republican candidates.

Federal Election Commission campaign finance filings show a Stockton Rush of Washington state employed by OceanGate giving $1,500 to Culberson for Congress, the principal campaign committee for now-former Republican Congressman John Culberson who represented Texas’s 7th district from 2001 to 2019. Culberson had a 100 percent scorecard rating from the conservative Family Research Council, a 92 percent lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union, and a 4 percent lifetime score from the League of Conservation Voters. Not exactly a RINO.

The FEC also lists donations from Stockton R. Rush III, Stockton R. Rush Jr., and Stockton R. Rush. While the home addresses for these donations are all the same, it’s not clear if these are close relatives or the same Stockton Rush (the employers for these donations vary depending on the specific donation and include “Remote Control Technology, Inc.,” “investor,” and “Mr Oil & Gas Company”). But altogether, those donations are consistently Republican and include George Bush for President in 1979, the Illinois Republican State Central Committee in 1980, Citizens to Elect Rick Larsen in 2022, and friends of Mike McGavick in both 2000 and 2005.

Separately, OpenSecrets filings show Stockton R. Rush donating to Dino J. Rossi, a perennial Republican candidate in Washington state who ran unsuccessfully for governor, United States Senate, and the House of Representatives. Rossi served in the state Senate from 2016 to 2017.

Washington state Democratic consultants told The New Republic they don’t regard these donations as a sign that Rush is anything like a GOP megadonor, just that he leans to the right.

As national attention has shifted to the missing submersible, there has been increasing scrutiny on OceanGate and its top executives. As I reported yesterday, according to court filings, a former employee at OceanGate voiced safety concerns about the Titan submarine that is now missing. The CEO reportedly knew about these safety concerns, and the employee voicing them was fired. That case was settled in court.

Health professionals say that maternal mortality has skyrocketed in the year since Roe v. Wade was overturned, a new survey from KFF found, a sign of how harmful abortion bans are.

The Supreme Court rattled the country when it rolled back the nationwide right to abortion on June 24, 2022. In the year since then, Republican-led states have cracked down on abortion access, imposing confusing restrictions or outright bans on the procedure. Many in the GOP argue that they are not limiting access to medically necessary procedures, but instead are saving lives.

KFF surveyed nearly 600 ob-gyns nationwide from March to May, and found that 68 percent say the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision worsened their ability to respond to pregnancy-related emergencies. The survey also found that 64 percent of ob-gyns “believe that the Dobbs decision has worsened pregnancy-related mortality” and 70 percent believe the ruling increased racial and ethnic inequities in maternal health.

Part of this could be due to the fact that all of the new laws surrounding abortion have left doctors confused about what they’re even allowed to do. Only 45 percent of ob-gyns in states with abortion restrictions say they understand the circumstances under which abortion is legal.

Many doctors also feel that their hands are tied. In states where abortion is limited, 59 percent of ob-gyns say they are worried about the legal risk when making “decisions about patient care and the necessity of abortion.” In states where abortion is banned, that number jumps to 61 percent.

The United States already has the worst maternal mortality rate among developed nations, and health experts have long warned that abortion restrictions would only cause it to rise. A study released in November by researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder found that if abortion is banned nationwide, maternal mortality will rise 24 percent. Maternal mortality among Black people will shoot up 39 percent.

Samuel Alito is the latest Supreme Court justice to come under fire for allegedly questionable ethics decisions, and his reasoning behind them is truly awful.

Alito was gifted a luxury vacation in 2008 that included flying on Republican billionaire megadonor Paul Singer’s private jet to Alaska, where they stayed in a fishing lodge that cost $1,000 a night, ProPublica reported late Tuesday. Right-wing activist (and then-head of the Federalist Society) Leonard Leo helped organize the trip, and also attended. Alito did not list the vacation on his annual financial disclosure statement.

The year before, Singer’s hedge fund had submitted its first request that the Supreme Court intervene in a business lawsuit. In 2001, the fund had purchased Argentina’s federal debt at a steep discount. Years later, after Argentina recovered from an economic crash, the hedge fund wanted the Argentine government to pay it back in full.

Singer first asked the Supreme Court to weigh in in 2007, the year before he took Alito on vacation. After the trip, the fund came before the court at least 10 times for the same case. Singer’s involvement was heavily documented in the press. The high court agreed to resolve the issue in 2014. Alito did not recuse himself, instead joining the 7–1 majority in Singer’s favor, earning the hedge fund a $2.4 billion payout.

And Alito himself confirmed everything.

Seeking to preempt outcry, Alito published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday—just hours before ProPublica published its report. His explanation for why he neither recused himself nor reported the trip was essentially, “I didn’t know I had to.”

“I had no obligation to recuse in any of the cases that ProPublica cites. First, even if I had been aware of Mr. Singer’s connection to the entities involved in those cases, recusal would not have been required or appropriate,” Alito wrote, arguing that he and Singer were not personally close, and so he could be considered unbiased.

But beyond that, “when I reviewed the cases in question to determine whether I was required to recuse, I was not aware and had no good reason to be aware that Mr. Singer had an interest in any party.” Again, Singer’s involvement was widely reported.

Alito said he did not report the Alaska trip because “until a few months ago,” justices did not report accommodations or transportation for social events. (This is not true. ProPublica found at least six other examples of justices disclosing gifts of travel on private jets.)

Alito also said that he was really doing the government a favor by taking Singer’s private jet. The trip had already been planned before Alito was invited, and “I was asked whether I would like to fly there in a seat that, as far as I am aware, would have otherwise been vacant,” Alito said. “Had I taken commercial flights, that would have imposed a substantial cost and inconvenience on the deputy U.S. Marshals who would have been required for security reasons to assist me.”

Not only is this terrible logic all around, but Alito also fails to mention the reason that financial disclosure rules changed a few months ago: ProPublica began releasing reports on Justice Clarence Thomas’s relationship with another Republican megadonor, Harlan Crow.

Thomas has received hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of gifts from the Nazi memorabilia–collecting billionaire. These include luxurious island-hopping vacations, tuition payments for Thomas’s grandnephew’s private school education, and even the purchase of Thomas’s family property, where the justice’s mother still lives.

If Alito’s shoddy defense of “we didn’t have to report it” is to be believed, we can expect more reports like this soon.

The Supreme Court has operated since its creation without a formal code of ethics, and largely without supervision. As more reports of shady dealings come to light, it’s no wonder that public trust in the institution is waning fast.

In the wake of Hunter Biden’s plea deal in Delaware, House Republicans are blind with rage that after all the buildup, the president’s son isn’t even going to be spending a single night in jail. And more than that, What—nothing about those alleged Burisma bribes? Joe Biden’s mysterious $10 million in unreported 2017 income? On Fox News and in the New York Post, the Daily Mail, and other outlets, they already had Hunter Biden—and for that matter, Joe Biden too—tried and convicted for what Fox’s Maria Bartiromo called “the biggest political scandal any of us has ever seen.”

The air shot out of that balloon in a big way Tuesday, with the plea deal. And now House Republicans want to call on the carpet the U.S. attorney in Delaware who accepted the deal, David Weiss. House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer wants Weiss to come in for a “briefing.” Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan said the House should wait until the plea is formally entered. “If there’s a plea entered and it’s done and then the investigation is over, then certainly we’re going to want to talk to him,” Jordan was quoted as saying.

The thread Jordan is hanging onto in that quote is the question of whether this investigation is truly over. Weiss introduced some ambiguity on this matter in his post-deal statement that the probe “is ongoing.” He did not elaborate. Did he mean simply that it’s ongoing in the sense that it’s still on until the plea is officially entered? Or did he mean, as Bill Barr suggested last week, that he’s still looking into the Burisma angle?

It’s the key thing to watch here. It would seem pretty weird for a U.S. attorney to close an investigation into an individual while still probing other charges against that individual. But a lot of weird stuff is happening in America these days.

Bear in mind: Weiss was appointed to his position by Trump. When he became president, Biden left Weiss in the post specifically so he could continue the investigation into his own son—because he saw, rightly, that installing his own person would be seen as a banana-republic-perversion-of-justice kind of move. So he left the fate of his own son to a potentially hostile federal prosecutor. Think Donald Trump would have done that?

And if this is really the end of Huntergate? Well, to most of us, it will prove that the right was overhyping this from jump street. In Wingnuttia, it will merely prove that the deep state is so pervasive, so many-tentacled, that it swallows even Republican prosecutors in its embrace. There’s always an excuse.

Donald Trump is predictably furious after Hunter Biden agreed to plead guilty on two misdemeanor charges of tax evasion and participate in a pretrial program for a gun offense in a deal that means the son of the current president will avoid jail time. “Wow! The corrupt Biden DOJ just cleared up hundreds of years of criminal liability by giving Hunter Biden a mere ‘traffic ticket.’ Our system is BROKEN!” Trump wrote on Truth Social, his bespoke, decrepit social network. “No crime, no case. Election Interference!” he continued.

This is an extension of the line Trump has repeatedly deployed about the dozens of federal charges he faces regarding his alleged mishandling of sensitive classified material related to U.S. national security. Trump has claimed, again and again, that he is facing a political witch hunt, that the charges he faces are a smokescreen intended to remove him from the 2024 presidential race, and that the real criminals—Joe Biden and his family—are getting off scot-free.

There are several problems with this. Setting aside the dubious nature of the allegations against the Bidens, the biggest issue is probably that Trump has all but admitted to refusing to hand back the classified documents for months after leaving office. But there’s another issue as well. Donald Trump could very well have gotten the same deal—and probably even a lighter one—if he had just listened to his lawyers’ advice. One of Trump’s attorneys reportedly tried to get him to return the documents after the Department of Justice’s investigation had begun. Had Trump done this—or if he had returned them months earlier, when the National Archives asked for them back—it is highly unlikely that he would have been charged at all.

If he took a plea deal like the one Hunter Biden agreed to on Tuesday, he would have also likely received a “slap on the wrist” or even less—the Justice Department really, really did not want to bring charges against a former president. He chose not to. The decision to refuse to return documents he had unlawfully retained and then, after an investigation had been opened, to refuse to even try to negotiate a settlement with the Department of Justice directly led to the dozens of charges he was hit with earlier this month.

Donald Trump could have gotten off with a traffic ticket too. The only person he has to blame for the legal predicament in which he now finds himself is Donald Trump.