The Year’s Best Money-In-Politics Stories

This year was bound to be big in the world of politics, with or without a pandemic. No surprise, then, that many of America’s richest people got involved, providing fodder for plenty of money-in-politics stories, including these five favorites.

This summer, we dug into the finances of Senator Kelly Loeffler of Georgia, revealing that she and her husband are worth at least $800 million. Like Donald Trump, Loeffler refused to divest from her family business upon taking office. That left her, according to one government watchdog, as “a walking conflict of interest.” Now Loeffler and her finances are at the center of a runoff election that could determine which party controls the U.S. Senate.

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It can be difficult to keep track of all the donors and money moving around Washington. So after more than a year of reporting, Forbes launched a one-of-a-kind tracker that documented which billionaires were putting money into politics and who was receiving it.

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Less than a month before the election, President Trump suggested in a nighttime television special that he had about $400 million in debt. In fact, his businesses owed more than $1 billion. We detailed all of it the next morning in this story, which lays out the documents as proof.

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Given all the time that journalists and prosecutors have spent looking into Donald Trump’s fortune over the last four years, it would be easy to conclude that we now have a full understanding of his finances. We don’t. No mystery looms larger than the one involving Trump’s tower in Chicago, which remains confounding to this day. 

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Forbes first noticed something odd about Donald Trump’s re-election campaign two years ago. Although his businesses were continuing to charge the campaign for expenses, Trump wasn’t contributing any of his own money. The net effect: Donations from his supporters were turning into revenue for his companies. We stayed on the case with a series of stories that ran through the election. In the end, the president didn’t donate a dime, and his businesses received $2.7 million.

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