I look forward to seeing Politico use its considerable influence and resources to help expose the mind blowing corruption that Ritchie Torres and his associates are engaging in.

First Things First: The Setup

(stick with me, and I’ll do my best not to bore you to tears)

At first glance the campaign finance filings of Ritchie Torres, the 38 year old, 3 term Congressman serving New York’s 15th House District in the Bronx, look a lot like most members of Congress. He has a

• Principle campaign committee “Torres for Congress,” a

• Joint Fundraising Committee (JFC) “Torres Victory Fund,” and a

• Leadership PAC “La Bamba PAC”

Torres raises, transfers and spends money under each of them.

But unlike most other members of Congress, Ritchie Torres has significant links to another PAC, a hybrid PAC, called the Equality PAC, which is the official fundraising arm of the Congressional Equality Caucus- the House caucus dedicated to advocating for the rights of LGBTQ Americans

According to his Wikipedia page Ritchie is the first openly gay Afro-Latin American member of Congress. He joined the Equality Caucus as soon as he was sworn into office in January 2021 and by February 2023 he was appointed to serve as co-chair of the Equality PAC alongside Rep. Mark Takano (D-CA).

The Equality PAC is what is called a hybrid PAC- meaning it’s a 2-in-1. Hybrids are half Joint Fundraising Committee (JFC) and half SuperPAC. This requires them to maintain two separate bank accounts for donations AND expenses.

For those who don’t know, a Joint Fundraising Committee is a candidate sponsored committee that allows candidates to join together to raise money from big dollar donors. The concept was invented under the auspices of allowing donors to write one big check to one politician who would then dole it out friends rather than a bunch of small checks to everyone. Presumably there were concerns about carpel tunnel among the donor class.

For the 2026 cycle candidates can collect $7,000 for themselves and $7,000 for every other candidate running for federal office who joins their JFC. They can also collect $5,000 for every PAC attached and $5,000 for state party committees. (There are significantly higher caps when national parties and committees get involved but we’ll leave that for another article.)

For the 2026 cycle Ritchie’s JFC, the Torres Victory Fund, was eligible to collect a maximum of $27,000 from each donor. In the first 18 months of the 2026 cycle Torres Victory Fund has collected $7.358 million from about 1,600 different donors.

And, as the co-chair of the Equality PAC, Torres has transferred over $2.27 million from his Torres Victory Fund JFC to the Equality PAC so far this cycle.

Equality PAC has dozens of shell PACs operating underneath it, whose only purpose is to increase the amount of money donors can give to the JFC side of Equality PAC.

Last time I counted there were 28

The person in charge of Equality PAC and all the “Equality” PACs umbrella’ed under it, the executive director, is a man named Jeff Laviree

In 2024 Advocate Magazine identified Jeff Laviree as Ritchie Torres’ campaign finance director. Which makes sense since Ritchie Torres’ name is on many Equality PAC network filings and his campaign committees all use the same P.O. Boxes and treasurer as the Equality PAC network.

Now at first glance Equality PAC looks like every other grifting PAC out there. Operating expenditures outpace independent expenditures 3:1

Ridiculous amounts spent on hotels, airfare, events and software

.

And *obscene* amounts spent on consultants

But on closer examination I noticed that over 50% of Equality PACs operating expenditures were paid to a single company: Rolla Group LLC

A quick Google search of Rolla Group LLC returned nothing but a single page website with a contact link. There was no Rolla Group LLC registered with the DC city government. So I googled the billing address listed on the FEC filing. It returned a posh home on DC’s northwest side. City property records showed that home was owned by one Jeffrey Laviree. As in Ritchie Torres’ campaign finance director, Jeffrey Laviree.

When I googled Rolla Group LLC and Jeffrey Laviree together I was offered this bio on a website belonging to the Ibis Group Institute

You read that right: Ritchie Torres’ campaign finance director, Jeff Laviree, the guy who is the executive director of the Equity PAC… the same PAC Ritchie Torres is the co-chair of, also owns the “boutique consulting firm” that Equity PAC has been funneling millions of millions of dollars into.

Now as if that isn’t scandalous enough, Rolla Group is also the highest paid consulting vendor for Torres for Congress and La Bamba PAC (Ritchie Torres’ leadership PAC)

When I ran a disbursement search for Rolla Group LLC on the FEC website I learned that Rolla Group is the highest paid vendor for Equality Project PAC, another hybrid PAC in the Equality PAC network.

They’re also the #1 vendor for the No Vote Left Behind PAC, a “get out the vote” hybrid PAC in the Equality PAC network. They’ve billed No Vote Left Behind over $820,000 for “strategy/management consulting” so far this cycle.

They’ve billed the Resistance PAC, another hybrid in the Equality network, almost $200,000 for fundraising and PAC management consulting

And they’ve been paid over $300,000 from the Take Back The House PAC, another hybrid PAC in the Equality network!

As I was tracking all the money down another consulting firm caught my eye: Political Animals LLC.

I look at a lot of filings and I had not seen that one before. Yet it had collected almost $800k from Equity PAC for everything from management consulting to direct mail to polling.

Imagine my surprise when I learn that Political Animals LLC is owned by none other than Jeff Laviree’s husband Timothy Brian Pryzbylski!

That’s right, the executive director of Equality PAC is not only paying himself millions, he’s paying his spouse millions too!

Remember how I said the hybrid PACs have two separate bank accounts for their two separate purposes? Well it turns out Political Animals handles almost all of the Equality PAC network’s SuperPAC expenditures!

But wait!! There’s MORE!!

Last July a company called Rambleside LLC started billing Equality PAC between $11,750 - $23,000 per month in rent. They also billed over $100,000 for office furnishings and improvements.

I’ll give you 2 guesses who owns Rambleside LLC??!

Jeff Laviree and his husband Brian!

But it gets even better!! The address registered to Rambleside LLC is actually a private residence, a $2 million home in DC that Jeff Laviree bought last July right before he started billing Equality PAC rent!

(Addresses redacted)

So not only are these men billing Equality PAC for their posh new home, they also charged them for the repairs and new furniture! Lucky for us they were thinking of selling it a few months ago and their realtor shared a walkthrough video on Instagram!

Reminder: THIS IS THE PAC THAT RITCHIE TORRES IS THE CO-CHAIR OF!

Speaking of Ritchie Torres, let’s talk about his expenses for a bit, shall we?!

When ol Ritchie isn’t funneling to his buddies for their home remodel, he’s paying his Congressional Chief of Staff Angel Vasquez over $33,000/year for “strategy consulting.” This is quite the bonus considering the average income in Ritchie’s district is just $26,424.

And while it is legal to pay congressional staff for campaign work, there are some rules that come with it. First and foremost the staffer must actually do work for the campaign. Congressmen can’t use their campaign cash as a way to pay bonuses to staffers. All the work must be done on their own time, outside and completely separate from their congressional duties. They may not use any government facilities or resources to conduct this campaign work either.

Knowing all that, I’m curious what kind of campaign strategizing Mr. Vasquez has to offer Torres that’s worth $33,285? He already makes over $225,000/year as Torres’ chief of staff. Does Mr. Torres have a work product from Mr. Vasquez he can show for the services billed? I wonder if Politico will hound Torres for an answer on that like they did Jose?

Or perhaps Politico can ask Ritchie how it’s physically possible for one man to spend $53,625 in just a year and a half on Ubers and Lyfts?

Oooooh ooh I know, maybe Mr. Beeferman can get to the bottom of how Ritchie Torres spent $22,585 on office supplies and $9,045 on Apple computers and accessories for his campaign office…

WHEN HE DOESNT EVEN HAVE A CAMPAIGN OFFICE???

That’s right. Ritchie Torres doesn’t report renting a campaign office in his home district. Or anywhere for that matter. And to be fair, he doesn’t have any permanent campaign staff so why would he?

Sure hope he’s not running his campaign out of his district’s congressional office since that’s extremely ILLEGAL.

Anywho, that’s about all for now but I assure you, there’s lots more where that came from. I look forward to Politico and Jason Beeferman pursuing their newfound interest in campaign finance compliance and chasing down these leads!

Where did these people come from?

Alright friends it’s been a while so let’s dive back in and get to the bottom of where in the world did these people come from and how in the heck did they get so much power?

It took me a long time to finally admit we had to go back to the very beginning. I know this is the boring part but stick with me and I’ll try to make it as painless as possible. You’ll be glad you have this background when we get to the good stuff starting in the 70s.

First things first, some words you ought to know

Chapter 1.

Jesus aint comin’ back until y’all learn how to act right

That’s postmillennialism eschatology in a nutshell. And in 1860s America it was precisely this thinking that had helped drive the evangelical abolitionist movement in the decade before the Civil War. However, Englishman John Nelson Darby wasn’t impressed with the so-called accomplishments of the American postmillennialists when he arrived on our shores in the early Fall of 1862.

Born into British aristocracy in 1800, John Nelson Darby was 60 years old when he first came to North America to grow his “Exclusive Brethren” church in the New World. Unfortunately for Darby, most Americans weren’t interested. They were however interested in what Darby had to say about when the Lord was coming back.

Darby was a premillennialist, a pretty niche ideology for the time, but he had spent the bulk of his scholarship in the England modifying the old premillennialism with a newer, more exact version, that worked by breaking down biblical history and prophecy into eras- dispensations- and using them to map out everything that would/needed to happen before Jesus would return.

Now this is a HUGE topic and there are endless rabbit holes to go down, so for the sake of brevity (and my sanity) these are the Big 3 core concepts of premillennialist dispensationalists:

Over the course of the next 40 years, Darby and his associates/proteges/disciples worked to spread this new premillennialism theology via: Bible Conferences, Bible Institutes and Global Missions.

There are lots of important players but for the purposes of our research, these are the ones to know:

The most important evangelist of the movement in that time was Dwight L. Moody- founder of the Moody Bible Institute which is still located in downtown Chicago.

The most important scholar of the movement, after Darby, was a lawyer turned preacher named Cyrus I. Scofield.

It was at the 1888 Niagara Bible Conference where Scofield first floated his idea for reference bible with his suggested seven-dispensation structure. It was a massive hit.

Scofield was the pastor at a church in Dallas when he was called to assist pastor at Dwight Moody’s church in Massachusetts after Moody fell ill in 1895. He was there four years until Moody passed. Scofield returned to Dallas inspired to finally write his reference bible and spent 7 whole years from 1902-1907 doing just that.

In 1907 Scofield’s Reference Bible was released by Oxford University Press. It was a bestseller right away and helped to spread the theory of dispensationalist premillennialism across the world.

It’s okay if it doesn’t make sense, it gets much simpler in 1970. You’ll see.

It was at this time that cracks started to occur within the Presbyterian church eventually splitting along the lines of “modernists” and “fundamentalists.”

Modernists were less concerned with all this end-times stuff and much more concerned with social problems and helping society advance in the times, which often meant embracing scientific theories that ran contrary to biblical teachings.

In 1908 a group of 32 protestant churches of varying denominations banded together to form the Federal Council of Churches (FCC). The FCC was granted seed money by none other than John D. Rockefeller.

Fundamentalists were strict Bible literalists. They weren’t interested in anything Darwin had to say and the social problems could be solved if people just turned to Jesus.

Frustrated by what they saw as a perversion of the church by big money, a group of fundamentalists, funded by their own millionaire who happened to be archenemies with Rockefeller, Lyman Stewart, set out for California and in 1908 opened the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, known today as Biola University.

(The current Senate majority leader John Thune is an alumni of Biola.)

It’s out in California that the Pentecostals start getting in the mix. The Apostolic Faith Mission, one of the very few integrated places of worship for the time, was located just one mile down from Biola on Azuza Street. It was there that William Seymour, a black preacher from Louisiana with a gift for speaking in tongues, held his famous 3 year long Azuza Street Revival which is generally credited with kicking off the Pentecostal movement in America.

Flash forward a few years and now we’re in the mid teens of 1900s and all of a sudden there’s a World War. And what do you know, the Rockefeller family starts looking for a return on their investment in the FCC because it turns out a lot of Americans didn’t want to fight a war in Europe.

Rockefeller Sr. had retired from Standard Oil after the Supreme Court broke it up in 1911 and he was spending his retirement years growing the Rockefeller Foundation. Rockefeller Jr. was still running the family business and he was chomping at the bit to get his hands on all that oil still under Ottoman control.

And of course, then just like now, war was a bipartisan cause.

While the modernists with the FCC hawked war bonds, the fundamentalist dean of Biola university, Reuben Torrey, published tracts telling Christians that it was both their religious and patriotic duty to support this war. Nothing like a good ol fashioned guilt trip from the church to turn those attitudes around!

This particular tract from Torrey is interesting. Published in his “What the War Teaches Us” tract (February 1918). If published today he’d be accused of the ‘semitism.

As you can see, Torrey views the overrepresentation of “Israel” in all the nations as a fulfillment of Biblical prophecy. Funny enough, dispensationalists ended up shoving the whole “Gentile world-power must run its course” part of the prophecy to the very back of the pile sometime in the 1940s.

It’s around this time that Louis Brandeis, the first ever Jewish Supreme Court justice, stumbles across evangelist William E. Blackstone’s 1891 petition, the Blackstone Memorial. Blackstone, an early Christian Zionist and fan of Theodore Herzl, had collected hundreds of signatures in support of Zionism and given his petition to the McKinley State Department, where it was promptly ignored, archived and eventually lost.

Upon learning of its existence, Brandeis, a passionate Zionist himself, asked Blackstone to circulate another petition, which Blackstone eagerly did, this time presented to Woodrow Wilson, urging him to join the British in support of the Balfour Declaration.

So WWI ends, the Balfour Declaration is released and then fumbled by the Brits, the FCC helps get the 18th Amendment passed, wheeling in the era of Prohibition, and Cyrus Scofield’s protege, Louis Sperry Chafer, opens what is now the most famous dispensationalist institute in America: The Dallas Theological Seminary.

Back in early 2016 there were very few religious leaders who wanted anything to do with Donald Trump. Ted Cruz was their boy and they regularly declared Trump supporters to be “not real Christians.”

However there was one group of holy rollers who threw in early with the Donald and that was the televangelists.

A largely ignored segment of the Christian Right, prosperity preachers and charismatics pastors were actually a perfect fit for Trump.

There were even some who claimed Trump’s presidency had been prophesized a decade earlier.

While most people roll their eyes at stuff like this, Donald Trump shrugged his shoulders and said “meh, why not? Welcome to the team!”

Still, going into the Iowa Caucuses, the Trump camp was worried about how a smack down by Iowa’s notoriously fickle evangelical caucus goers would look on the national stage… they wanted an endorsement from a mainstream figure.

Well as luck would have it, there just so happened to be a mainstream evangelical figure who needed a little help of his own.

Enter: President of Liberty University, Jerry Falwell Jr.

Unlike his daddy, Jerry Falwell Jr. was not a preacher, or even a particularly religious man. He was a lawyer by trade who also dabbled in real estate development.

He was also a drinker and a man who enjoyed having unconventional “fun” w his wife when they vacationed in Miami.

Turns out the Falwell’s had a thing for kinky sex with cabana boys and as often happens in these kinds of situations, Ms. Falwell had found herself in a pickle when one of those cabana boys threatened to release naked pictures of her in the late Fall of 2015.

Fortunately for the Falwell’s they just so happened to know one of their most infamous fixers in the world, who specialized in these kinds of problems: the one and only, Michael Cohen. Long story short: according to Cohen, he paid the cabana for the pictures with $12,000 in cash, delivered in a blue Walmart bag and the whole thing went away.

Then… a few weeks later, and just 5 days before the Iowa caucuses, Jerry Falwell Jr, shocked the evangelical world by giving his endorsement to Donald Trump, and not Ted Cruz.

Both sides have denied any quid-pro-quo…

but this was quite the change of heart for Falwell considering that just 9 months prior Jerry had not only given Ted Cruz free use of Liberty’s basketball stadium to launch his campaign, he’d also required all students to attend

Regardless, that was the boost Trump needed to finish solid in Iowa and sail on to NH. And the rest is history.

In June 2016 Trump formed his Evangelical Executive Advisory Board, forging a working relationship between many fringe church leaders and the soon to be POTU

S

The New Apostolic Reformation & Charlie Kirk

Part I: What is NAR?

The New Apostolic Reformation, aka NAR, is a movement in evangelical churches started by C. Peter Wagner in the late 90s

.

NAR is not a denomination and it does not have any set or elected leaders or *official* ideology that defines it.

Rather NAR is a hodgepodge of beliefs, rituals and practices pulled from various traditions within mainstream charismatic and Pentecostal churches.

The core belief posited by Wagner was the Christians must engage in spiritual warfare to bring about Christian dominion over all aspects of society.

When this is accomplished, the road will be paved for Christ to return.

NAR is led by apostles believed to have been appointed by God. These apostles are delegated spiritual authority that grants them authority over the entire Church- which is one of the most controversial aspects of NAR.

NAR churches do not advertise that they are NAR. And just because a church adopts one or two NAR ideas, doesn’t mean they adopt them all.

Decentralization has been key to NAR’s rapid growth.

NAR rejects many traditional church teachings around the role of women in the church. Women can become apostles and pastors in NAR churches. The most famous one being Trump’s spiritual advisor, Paula White-Cain.

The 7 Mountain Mandate has become the most important idea with the NAR movement and the one to gain the most traction.

The 7MM dictates that Christians must engage in spiritual warfare to dominate the 7 most important aspects of society

:

This idea was conceived in the 1970s but revived and refined in the 2013 book “Invading Babylon: The 7 Mountain Mandate” by Lance Wallnou a televangelist and Bill Johnson, senior pastor of Bethel Church, a megachurch in Northern California.

As far as Charlie goes, these are the NAR names you need to know, in addition to those already listed above:

Rob McCoy: pastor of Godspeak Calvary Chapel in Thousand Oaks California

Sean Feucht: former worship leader at Bethel church and 2020 Congressional candidate

Jack Hibbs: senior pastor of megachurch Calvary Chapel Chino Hills

David Lane: longtime Republican consultant and activist, member of Rob McCoy’s Godspeak Calvary Chapel

For the purposes of my threads, I think that’s enough intro. If you want to go down the NAP rabbit hole, and trust me, it’s DEEP, here are a few intro links with lots of additional links of their own:

https://

perspectivedigest.org/archive/19-2/t

he-rise-of-the-new-apostolic-reformation

https://

hollypivec.com/blog/2013/07/t

he-changing-of-the-apostolic-guard-13-names-to-watch/3718

https://

acgc.us/news/new-apost

olic-reformation-nar-defined/

Alright friends I wanted to follow up on my post from June 2 where I detailed the egregious credit card merchant fees TPUSA has been submitting in their FEC filings each month.

After speaking with a couple insiders/campaign professionals, including a campaign manager for a federal PAC, I learned that there’s more to these filings than what meets the eye. Surprise, surprise right? Let’s dig in.

So it turns out that Anedot, the credit card company TPUSA has reported paying 57% of their 2026 contributions to has a feature that allows campaigns to pay vendors directly through Anedot before their contributions are transferred to their campaign accounts.

This is an industry standard feature, all the conduits (e.g. WinRed, ActBlue) have it.

Now what is *supposed* to happen is that campaigns are supposed to still itemize their expenditures with the FEC. That is the law. In fact, WinRed has an entire webpage dedicated to explaining this process:

And yet Turning Point PAC has decided against doing that and instead has simply submitted bills claiming to have paid Anedot, and only Anedot, millions of dollars in credit card fees. Here’s an example of just their April 2026 filing where Turning Point PAC reported $554,000 of the $732,000 (76%) they spent on operating expenditures went just to credit card merchant fees.

Now why would Turning Point PAC do this?

The short (easy) answer: they don’t want the public to know where their money is going. They don’t want to disclose who their vendors are.

The long answer: Turning Point PAC is registered with the FEC as a Carey Committee, aka Hybrid PAC. Carey Committees are PACs that maintain two separate contribution accounts, one for “Independent Expenditures” and one for making direct contributions to political candidates.

i.e. a Carey Committee is a regular PAC and a Super PAC in one.

Citizen’s United is one of the most poorly understood Supreme Court cases/decisions of all time. People think it allows billionaires to give unlimited money directly to candidates- that is false. Citizen’s United opened the door for billionaires to spend unlimited cash on what’s known as “electioneering communications.” Electioneering communications are any kind communications targeted at voters in an effort to persuade their opinion on a political candidate or issue (e.g. tv, radio, YouTube ads, flyers in the mail, billboards etc.)

These electioneering communications are listed as “Independent Expenditures” on FEC filings and political action committees that only deal with independent expenditures are known as Super PACs.

Super PACs are strictly forbidden from working/coordinating with candidates. One way that crooked politicians and Super PAC operatives get around this rule is by sharing vendors.

Tracking this coordination gets slightly more complicated when dealing with Carey Committees like Turning Point PAC because they have two bank accounts and two sets of disbursements, but only one FEC filing. Which means you have to comb the filing carefully.

The Super PAC account, which has no dollar cap on donations, is known as the non-contribution account because none of that money can be given to candidates. (Non-contribution account donations are denoted on the receipt.) For example William from Atlantic Beach gave $45,000 to the non-contribution account.

In theory most of these donations would be made via check, not through an online credit card processor and therefore not subject to credit card merchant fees. Also, the bulk about money actually came straight from TPUSA Action and therefore definitely wasn’t subject to credit card merchant fees

The regular PAC account, which is subject to the federal $5,000 donation cap, is known as the contribution account because money from that account can be used to make direct contributions to candidates. Anything not specifically marked for the non-contribution account goes into the contribution account. These are filed as “individual contributions.”

Here’s Wendy from Jasper who gave $5,000

Okay you say, what’s so complicated about that? And the answer of course is absolutely nothing. That’s the easy part.

It’s when it comes to disbursements that things get a little spicier. Because we have 4 kinds of disbursements. The two we already mentioned: donations to candidates and independent expenditures. But there’s also operating expenditures and non-federal expenditures (money spent on state and local elections/politicians) and both of these disbursements can potentially draw from either account. Thankfully all non-federal expenditures must be marked as such and they are listed under “other” on FEC filings.

So when looking through Turning Point PAC’s 2026 cycle FEC filings the first thing that popped out at me is how nearly all their federal operating expenditures were “Credit Card Merchant Fees” paid to Anedot but most of their non-federal expenditures were paid to a handful of vendors we’re all very familiar with: 1TEN LLC, Active Engagement and Mosaic Pro Events.

I was curious so I downloaded all the filings from the 3 cycles Turning Point PAC has been in operation and I sorted all the receipts and expenditures for each year.

Turning Point PAC was opened in May 2022 and their filings for that cycle looked pretty much exactly how I expected them to. For the cycle they reported a 2.3% credit card merchant fee rate

.

2023 was extremely uneventful.

It wasn’t until May 2024 where things got interesting. Turning Point PAC only reported raising $73,287 total in May 2024 yet somehow they paid out $63,599 in credit card merchant fees.

And from May-September CC Merchant Fees constituted over 90% of their total operating expenditures. Things fall kinda back down to earth in the pre-election filing but they don’t stay there long. By January 2025 the PAC is again reporting nearly 50% credit card fees on their donations. And by June 2025 credit card fees are nearly 100% of all operating expenditures.

But nothing compares to the shenanigans going on since the start of this year.

Over $1.7 million paid in cc merchant fees on just $3 million collected? And nearly all the non-fed disbursements disappeared too? ($200,000 of the $417,000 in other disbursements was a refund.)

Since we know Anedot has a flat rate of 3.3% plus $0.30/transaction, that would put their fees at around $120,000 give or take… so where did the other $1.63 million go? It’s not going towards “fundraising fees” because surprisingly Turning Point PAC actually itemized those each month. One of the few expenses they actually did that for.

I checked all usual places and turned up nothing but this morning I decided to go back and check the Facebook ad library one more time and that’s when I learned that there are actually two Turning Point PAC pages and I just clicked on the wrong one last time. Turns out the newer Turning Point PAC page, the one with only one post and less than 2,000 followers has spent over $651,000 on Facebook ads (targeted almost exclusively at seniors) since just this January- which is when they ran their very first ad.

And what kinds of ads are they running?

“Help us hire 700 ballot chasers!”

They are going to hire 700 ballot chasers….? Okay…. Except isn’t Turning Point Action already running that initiative? Why do the donation links on these ads not direct to their account?

And where is the other $1 million at? It seems to have vanished into thin air.