A Gross and Brazen ‘DOGE Check’ Scam
A conservative PAC with past ties to top Trumpworld figures is telling voters they can get a $5,000 DOGE check. It’s a lie.
Yesterday, Andrew guest-hosted for Mona Charen on Just Between Us to talk with JVL about where the Trump administration is succeeding and where it’s failing to break down the laws and norms that would otherwise restrain it, then went deep on the case of the small Trump-loyal Missouri town that has been turned upside-down by the detainment of a beloved pillar of the community who happens also to be an illegal immigrant. Check it out. Happy Wednesday.
The Check Ain’t in the Mail
by Andrew Egger
If the Republican party or the allied conservative movement happens to have your phone number, there is a good chance you received an interesting text message in recent days.
“You earned that $5,000 DOGE check,” the text read. “Say YES before it’s gone.”
Recipients who clicked the link were met with an alarming suggestion. “DOGE SAVED YOU $1 TRILLION—AND YOU SAID NO?!” the webpage blared. “Our records show you may have said ‘NO’ to your Trump Savings Check. This can’t be right!”
It went on from there, with increasingly detailed promises that you, the recipient, were owed some serious cash. “This isn’t a handout. It’s YOUR hard-earned money that corrupt bureaucrats STOLE from YOU,” the page went on. “You only have until midnight to update your response.”
So how would you get your hands on that hard-earned money stolen from you? By forking over your email address—and, of course, making a small donation to a PAC you’ve probably never heard of: Women for America’s Freedom (WAF).
I hope I don’t have to tell you that this is a scam. But just to clear away any possible confusion: It’s a scam.
President Trump and Elon Musk briefly floated the idea of DOGE “rebate” checks back in February. But DOGE didn’t have that authority, it certainly cut nowhere near $5,000 per American in spending, and they haven’t returned to the idea since. Even if those checks did happen, it’s pretty unlikely that receipt of them would hinge on giving a donation to WAF, a group with a total of three followers on Facebook.
FEC records suggest that WAF is primarily an open-and-shut scam PAC. Of the comparatively modest $370,000 the group brought in last cycle, only $10,000 was ultimately spent supporting candidates—$5,000 each for online ads on behalf of Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) and former Rep. Yvette Herrell (R-N.M.). Meanwhile, $327,000—95 percent of the group’s spend—went to “operating expenditures.”
These sorts of scam groups are one of the great illustrations of how slimy and cynical and abusive politics can be. In this case, the group’s proprietors have taken the concept of saving taxpayer money (DOGE) to swindle people (likely the elderly who don’t have the greatest internet know-how) out of their money, by convincing them that Elon and Trump want to give them money. It’s grotesque.
This stuff happens on both sides of the aisle. We’ve covered it here. But WAF is notable for some of the heavy-hitting names that were attached to it. A now-defunct website for the PAC lists as its president Mary Vought, vice president for strategic communications at the Heritage Foundation and former wife of top Trump budgeteer Russell Vought.1 And its three-person “advisory committee” included none other than White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who was then a penumbral Trumpworld figure whom the website describes as its “Women for America Ambassador.”
Whether any former WAF associates are still affiliated with the PAC is unknown. As an executive branch employee, Leavitt certainly no longer is. (Neither Vought nor Leavitt returned a request for comment.) [UPDATE (June 4, 2025, 2:30 p.m. EDT): After this newsletter was published, a spokesperson for the Heritage Foundation emailed to say that Mary Vought “is in no way affiliated with WAF”—but did not respond to follow-up questions about her apparent past affiliation with the PAC and when it ended.] The only person who definitely remains affiliated with WAF is Thomas Datwyler, the group’s treasurer, who filed a new Statement of Organization for the group with the FEC just this week.
Datwyler is an interesting figure, with a long trail of accusations of campaign-finance scammery.2 He worked as a “shadow treasurer” for Rep. George Santos’s re-election bid—handling Santos’s funds while taking steps to obscure his involvement with the FEC. In 2023, he worked with an apparent scam group called “Dan Cox for Congress”—which was dissolved when the real Dan Cox, a former GOP Maryland delegate, filed a complaint to the FEC. In a wire fraud complaint against him last year, a group called the Conservative Nevada Leadership PAC denounced what it described as his “knowing, willful, and intentional conduct” which “continues to cause substantial harm to our electoral process” and has recently become “even more out-of-control.”
Datwyler did not respond to my voicemail or my emailed request for comment yesterday. Shortly after I sent them, however, one of the DOGE solicitations issued by Women for America’s Freedom—the one I referenced in my email to Datwyler—vanished from Republicans’ WinRed fundraising platform. If it was a cleanup attempt, it was a sloppy one: Other similar solicitations from WAF to “claim your refund” before Congress can “let the swamp keep YOUR MONEY” remain live, for now.
The Peace Talks Charade
by Cathy Young
The latest round of Russia-Ukraine “peace talks” in Istanbul have offered more of the same farce: more Russian demands for de facto Ukrainian capitulation (not only the surrender of the four regions Russia has formally annexed but not actually captured, but the dismantling of Ukrainian military strength), an end to all sanctions against Russia, and so on.
But this pseudo-parley also featured one shocking moment that speaks volumes about the Kremlin’s stance.
Among the demands set forth by the Ukrainian side was the return of Ukrainian children systematically abducted by and taken to Russia since the start of the war. The Yale Humanitarian Research Lab, which estimates that there have been over 19,000 such abductions and that only 1,236 children have been returned so far, has specifically identified 8,400 children from Ukraine held in facilities in Russia, Belarus, and Russia-occupied Ukrainian territory. At yesterday’s meeting, the Ukrainian delegation presented a list of 339 children. Russia’s chief negotiator Vladimir Medinsky promised that Russia would look into it while insisting that “Russian soldiers don’t abduct children” and that the Ukrainian children taken to Russia had not been kidnapped but rescued.
The portrayal of Russia’s child-snatching as fundamentally benign is obscene even when measured against the extremely low bar of Russian “diplomacy” during this war. If those children were “rescued,” it was from war zones created by Vladimir Putin’s war—a war that, in many cases, killed their parents and destroyed their homes.
Yes, some cases of Ukrainian children taken to Russia are probably complicated, given that many Ukrainians have close relatives in Russia. But there is voluminous evidence of Ukrainian children being taken to Russia against their will and forcibly Russified.
Some of that evidence is provided by Russian officials who have bragged about it, including Russia’s children’s rights commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova, who personally adopted an orphaned Ukrainian boy from devastated and occupied Mariupol. Lvova-Belova (who has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for her role in these abductions) has freely acknowledged that, at first, her “son” expressed hostility toward Russians and proudly talked about celebrating Ukrainian holidays and going out with a Ukrainian flag—and that other Ukrainian children adopted by Russian families exhibited similar attitudes, such as insulting Vladimir Putin and singing the Ukrainian anthem. Eventually, Lvova-Belova has claimed, these children learn to love Russia. The older kids are reportedly pressured into “patriotic” and military training that effectively coaches them to fight against their own country.
There are also harrowing stories of Ukrainian families struggling to reclaim their abducted children—nearly all of them severely traumatized not only by war but by their experiences in Russia.
According to various sources, Medinsky capped his dismissal of the issue of child abductions in Ukraine with a sneering retort to Ukrainians: “Stop putting on a show for bleeding-heart European ladies [or ‘old ladies,’ in some versions] who have no children of their own.” It’s hard to say whether that was homegrown Russian sexism or an homage to JD Vance’s riff on “childless cat ladies.” Either way, it puts a bow on the ghoulish obscenity of these “peace talks”—and reminds the world of the true nature of the Kremlin regime.
AROUND THE BULWARK
The Myth of Trumpian Deterrence… Trump says Russia wouldn’t have attacked Ukraine if he were president, writes Will Saletan, but every time he says it, Russia attacks Ukraine again.
When Trump Jails MAGA’s Neighbor… On Just Between Us, guest host Andrew Egger is joined by JVL to talk about Carol in Kennett, Missouri and her neighbors.
Why Lilo & Stitch Is a Big Hit… In this week’s Across the Movie Aisle, Sonny, Peter, and Alyssa review Disney’s latest offering. Turns out families like having things to take young kids to, who knew. Make sure to swing by Bulwark+ on Friday for a breakdown of our favorite animated Disney movies.
Quick Hits
ELON UNCHAINED: On Friday, Elon Musk and Donald Trump appeared side by side for a chummy Oval Office meeting meant to signal all was well between the two men as Musk prepared to leave government. Yesterday, Elon went way off the reservation, tweeting that Trump’s “big beautiful bill”—the signature legislative pillar of his first-year agenda—is a “massive, outrageous, pork-filled . . . disgusting abomination,” and that House Republicans who supported it “know you did wrong.”
Asked to comment on Musk’s outburst, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt smiled through it: “The president already knows where Elon Musk stood on this bill. It doesn’t change the president’s opinion.”
But behind the scenes, the White House has plainly realized Musk’s increasingly hostile posture—which channels a real current of discontent from conservatives outraged by the bill’s effect on the deficit—needs addressing. Stephen Miller has been hard at work on X doing damage control. The big beautiful bill is “the most important legislation for the conservative project in the history of our nation,” the top Trump adviser wrote yesterday, with characteristic restraint. “The bill was designed by President Trump, his loyal aides, and his closest allies in Congress to deliver fully and enthusiastically on the explicit promises he made to the American People.” Remarkably, not everyone appears to be buying it: Just check out the general tenor of the replies to Miller’s post.
Of course, Musk is wrong to suggest—as politicians typically are—that the reason the bill blows up the federal bank is because it’s larded up with pork. The simpler deficit problem is that it cuts taxes too deeply without coming close to offsetting them with corresponding cuts to entitlement programs. It’s basic arithmetic: Not enough dollars in, too many dollars out.
BYTEDELAY: According to a U.S. law passed just last year, TikTok should be illegal right now—inaccessible in U.S. app stores and unable to be hosted on U.S. servers until it is sold by its Chinese parent company Bytedance. But Trump, who has credited TikTok with helping him improve his standing among young voters in 2024, has repeatedly balked at putting the ban into place. Yesterday, the New York Post reported Trump is “poised to extend the Tiktok ban deadline for the third time” out of concern that China wants to “hold this up as leverage in the trade talks.” Although it’s not a done deal:
A Wall Street banker involved in the deal to sell the app to US investors said Trump could be persuaded to let TikTok “go dark” and disappear from app stores on June 19 if he believes it will give him a strategic advantage in the complex and at times acrimonious trade deal negotiations with the Chinese.
Once more, with feeling: NOTHING in the law banning TikTok permits Trump to go on simply declining to enforce it, to say nothing of using it as a bargaining chip for tariffs he is also on shaky legal ground to pursue. It’s the latest illustration of the destabilizing effects of his desire to shape America into a place ruled by his edict rather than laws. Nothing is stable, everything is malleable, everything is up for negotiation. Just relax, he says, and trust the process.
THE KILLING FIELDS: The Center for Strategic and International Studies is out today with a new survey of the jaw-dropping scope of human carnage in the war in Ukraine. The New York Times reports:
Nearly one million Russian troops have been killed or wounded in the country’s war against Ukraine, according to a new study, a staggering toll as Russia’s three-year assault on its neighbor grinds on.
The study . . . said that close to 400,000 Ukrainian troops have also been killed or wounded since the war began. That would put the overall casualty figure, for Russian and Ukrainian troops combined, at almost 1.4 million.
It’s sometimes too easy to reduce the war in Ukraine to abstract terms: The international community can’t let that autocrat Vladimir Putin indulge his territorial ambitions. We care too much about democracy for that.
But internationalism and liberalism aren’t just forces in support of democratic government. They’re forces that work in support of global peace. Putin has turned eastern Ukraine into a charnel house. That our government is committed to a walleyed “realpolitik”—a pillar of which is “never judge Putin, because what, we’re better?”—is a moral abdication of the highest degree.
Cheap Shots
Correction (June 4, 2025, 10:40 a.m.): As originally published, this sentence referred to Mary Vought as the wife of Trump budget director Russ Vought; it has been edited to reflect the couple’s 2023 divorce.
He is also, as far as we can tell, neither a woman nor particularly concerned with America’s freedom.
If there is a Democrat in charge ever again, they need to appoint George Conway or someone like him as AG, who knows the labyrinthine of conservative inc. and investigate every single wrongdoing or illegal acts. Until there is accountability, grifters will not be deterred.
My husband got a live call yesterday from someone telling him he was eligible for Medicaid Part (?) because of Trump's actions and willingness to fight for his people. The caller got a rude reply, but the lies are just the WHOLE strategy now.