Follow the Money, Keep the Receipts: AIPAC’s Midterm Winners and the Wiles-Blair-Budowich Network

Research

Nov 7

By Jordan Gold and Valery Gold

November 7, 2026 · Central Time (CT) · Public-records review

Power in Washington rarely leaves a signed confession. It leaves paper: a consulting invoice, an independent-expenditure report, an ethics form, a paragraph of statute tucked deep in a sprawling bill. Paper is the citizen’s best weapon, and it cuts only as far as it actually reaches. So this is a story about what the paper shows, what it does not show, and why the gap between those two things should keep reporters, not just partisans, up at night.

Four days after the November 3 midterms, two sets of records sit on the table. One shows candidates who won after receiving support from AIPAC’s political network. The other shows the private business histories of three of the president’s closest operatives: Susie Wiles, James Blair and Taylor Budowich. It would be easy to braid them into one rope. The records do not do that. We found no document linking the three operatives, AIPAC’s spending and any particular federal favor in a single chain. Each strand deserves scrutiny on its own.

The organizational chart has already changed

Start with who holds what job, because a stale chart corrupts everything downstream. On November 6, 2026, the White House announced “the appointment of Stephen Miller as the 33rd White House Chief of Staff, succeeding Susie Wiles.” The release itself gives no effective date. The Guardian’s November 6 report says Miller will begin on Monday, November 9. As of November 7, we therefore describe an announced succession scheduled for November 9, not a completed handover. [39] The same release quotes Budowich as “Former White House Deputy Chief of Staff.” Axios reported in September 2025 that Budowich planned to leave at the end of that month. The American Presidency Project records an April 10, 2026, announcement that Blair would take a leave of absence to work on the midterms, and the Guardian’s October profile says he “stepped away from the White House” to take charge of the super PAC MAGA Inc. A leave of absence is not a resignation; in the sources we reviewed we found neither an announcement of his return nor one of a permanent departure. Only Budowich’s exit is documented as complete. Readers should not be given a chart showing all three as the current, settled White House command. [1][23][2][22]

First, separate the checkbooks

“AIPAC money” covers several different kinds of transaction. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee Political Action Committee (FEC ID C00797670) is a registered PAC that gives limited contributions to candidates. United Democracy Project (FEC ID C00799031) is a separately registered super PAC that spends independently. They are separate accounts with separate legal rules. [3][4][5]

The FEC defines an independent expenditure as advocacy not coordinated with a candidate, campaign or party. A candidate who benefits from a $1 million ad buy has not received $1 million. A third category is individual donations earmarked through a conduit. A fourth is money from other pro-Israel groups. A tracker that adds all four together may show the size of a political ecosystem, but the total cannot honestly be relabeled “AIPAC.” And an American lobby that supports Israel is not the Israeli government. [6]

The FEC’s 2026-cycle summaries cover January 1, 2025, through October 14, 2026, which ends nearly three weeks before Election Day. For that period, AIPAC PAC reports $57,771,930.54 in receipts, $56,248,372.98 in disbursements, $53,289,529.53 in contributions to other committees and $0 in independent expenditures. UDP reports $112,820,861.12 in receipts, $85,057,423.26 in disbursements and $53,603,927.44 in independent expenditures. The candidate-level independent-expenditure table on UDP’s page has an even earlier cutoff, August 31, 2026, and FEC says those regular-report totals exclude 24- and 48-hour late-spending notices. These are big numbers, and they are documented. They are not a final bill for the election, and they are not a list of winners. [3][4]

Three winners: a sample, not a roll call

CBS News’ live results page, last updated November 7, projects that Democrats will control the Senate and reports that Alaska and Mississippi were still unresolved as of Thursday. NBC News’ November 7 live report likewise says votes in both races are still being counted. [40] A projection is not a certified result, and control of a chamber says nothing about who was paid by whom. Every name needs its own outcome source and its own money trail. [7]

Three names meet that test in this review. Each general-election outcome is reported as a win by news organizations; we do not represent any as certified. Each money figure is attributed reporting or a secondary tracker’s calculation, not our own line-by-line reconstruction of FEC filings. This is a three-candidate sample, not a complete universe of AIPAC-supported winners.

Wesley Bell (D), Missouri’s 1st District. St. Louis Public Radio reported that Bell won reelection over Republican Paul Berry III, 81% to 13% as of 10:30 p.m. CT on November 3. Bell had beaten Cori Bush in the August Democratic primary. Al Jazeera reports that “AIPAC-related groups provided more than about $3m” to support him and that most of that money went to the primary. The Who Funds My Rep tracker, using FEC filings through November 1, shows $2,408,990 received from its tracked pro-Israel PACs (a category that combines direct and earmarked contributions) and $685,626 spent supporting him, and attributes $3,060,649 of the combined total to AIPAC PAC and UDP. That makes Bell a reported beneficiary who won. It does not make him a candidate who received $3 million in AIPAC PAC checks, and it does not prove the money decided a race he won with 81%. [8][9][10]

Adrian Boafo (D), Maryland’s 5th District. WUSA9 reported Boafo’s victory on election night and noted that ballots were still being counted. Maryland’s State Board of Elections page, labeled unofficial, shows Boafo with 209,018 votes (69.57%) to 89,353 for Republican Chris Chaffee. Responsible Statecraft, published by the Quincy Institute, reports $5.73 million in UDP support for Boafo in the Democratic primary. The tracker attributes $5,734,013 of $5,734,395 in supportive outside spending to UDP and shows just $19,000 received from pro-Israel PACs. In other words, almost all of it was primary advertising paid for by a super PAC, not a $5.7 million deposit into Boafo’s campaign account. [11][12][13][14]

Ed Gallrein (R), Kentucky’s 4th District. WVXU reported Gallrein’s general-election win over Democrat Melissa Strange, after he defeated Rep. Thomas Massie in the May Republican primary. The National News Desk quotes a May post on X in which AIPAC celebrated that Gallrein’s primary victory put “outspoken pro-Israel voices” in seats “previously held by outspoken detractors.” That quote shows the organization claiming involvement. It is not an audited dollar figure. [15][16]

The tracker lists RJC Victory Fund, not UDP, as the largest supportive spender in its broader pro-Israel universe, and identifies UDP separately as a supportive spender. Its UDP figures are internally inconsistent, and we could not reconcile them against the official itemized filings in this review. We therefore publish no numerical UDP or AIPAC-only total for Gallrein. The general fact of reported support remains distinct from an audited dollar figure. [17]

These three are not the complete list. A full roster would require matching candidate IDs against AIPAC PAC contributions, earmarks, UDP expenditures and election designations, then updating the match after certification and late filings. We have not done that. AIPAC’s own claim, quoted by the National News Desk from a post on X, is that “More than 234 candidates supported by AIPAC members have already won.” Note the words: supported by AIPAC members, not “funded by AIPAC PAC.” We did not retrieve the original post and quote it only as reported. [16]

Defeats belong in the record too. Responsible Statecraft calculates that $84.1 million spent by UDP and several other PACs went into races decided at the time of writing, and that $55.3 million of it backed losing outcomes. That is one outlet’s analysis, from a publisher with a stated foreign-policy point of view, and not an FEC total. Still, it is a useful corrective to the idea that money simply buys the result. [13]

The three operatives: what their own disclosures say

The November 2024 transition announcement assigned Blair to legislative, political and public affairs and Budowich to communications and personnel. Budowich’s later disclosure lists communications and cabinet affairs. We quote the dated documents rather than pretend the titles never changed. [18][19]

Wiles. Her new-entrant financial disclosure, signed May 20, 2025, gives January 20, 2025, as her appointment date. It reports that Right Coast Strategies would stay inactive during her government service. It also reports that she ended her employment with Highstake 32, a subsidiary of MSGDMNSM Ventures XXV, and that she “sold my ownership interest back … for $1, consistent with a pre-existing agreement.” That dollar reflects a contract term. It is not a valuation, and it should not be sensationalized. Agency ethics officials certified the form on June 13, 2025, and the Office of Government Ethics followed on August 7. That certification rests on what the form disclosed. It is not a blanket clearance of everything she did afterward. [20]

Blair. His form, filed as Michael James Blair, lists him as founder of Rapid Loop Consulting from November 2013 to December 2024. It reports $600,000 in salary and bonus, $1,978,278 in owner’s distributions and a capital gain of $1,000,001–$5,000,000 from the sale of the business. A gain range is not a sale price. [21]

Budowich. He reported $1,695,418 in business income from Conservative Strategies Consulting and $140,000 in salary from MAGA Inc. The firm, he wrote, would stay inactive, and “all outstanding client fees will be fixed before I enter government service.” His current firm, The Sovereign Advisors, advertises “Government Affairs” and “Direct engagement” on a homepage that names no clients. Selling access is a legitimate subject for scrutiny. Advertising it is not evidence of an unlawful contact. [19][24]

Israel: a reported 2020 trip, not proof of foreign control

The clearest personal Israel connection we found involves Wiles. NDTV, writing on June 24, 2025, and citing The Washington Post, reports that Wiles, Corey Lewandowski and pollster Tony Fabrizio went to Jerusalem in 2020 to help Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud stage Trump-style rallies. By NDTV’s account, the effort “was short-lived” because “Likud couldn’t afford the team.” We did not retrieve the Post’s original story. This is NDTV’s secondhand account, not an authenticated contract. [25]

The episode belongs in Wiles’s professional history. It does not establish an AIPAC retainer, Israeli government employment, any current financial tie or any intervention in a later U.S. decision. None of the three 2025 disclosures mentions AIPAC, UDP, Israel or Likud anywhere, as we confirmed by searching the full text. These forms cover a limited reporting period and income above a threshold, though. They are not lifetime registers, and their silence proves only what they cover. [20][21][19]

Blair’s documented foreign-consulting controversy points somewhere else entirely. The Guardian reports that he and Chris LaCivita traveled to Republika Srpska, part of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and it cites the New York Times as reporting that they “received substantial payments” to advise the regional government. Trump called them “outside consultants” and warned he would “terminate them, immediately!” if he found a conflict of interest, after which Blair said they would donate their fee to the future Trump presidential library. We did not retrieve the contract or payment records. This is a reported outside-work controversy, not an established ethics violation, and it has nothing to do with Israel. [22]

Pharmaceuticals: real links, and a lazy shortcut to avoid

Public Citizen, an advocacy group, lists healthcare clients from Wiles’s lobbying career, including Laboratory Corporation of America, Children’s Hospital Association and Citrus Health Network. We checked the report itself, not every underlying lobbying filing. A lab company or a hospital association is not a drugmaker. [26]

Wiles’s own form lists “Lifepoints Health,” Brentwood, as a Right Coast client, and Swisher, the cigar company, as a client of the Mercury-affiliated entity. We kept the filing’s spelling and did not confirm whether the first entry means hospital operator LifePoint Health. Public Citizen ties Swisher to lobbying over FDA regulation of flavored cigars. FDA jurisdiction does not make a cigar company a pharmaceutical company. [20][26]

She also reported media consulting for National Media (Alexandria). That firm now advertises a “Healthcare & Pharma” practice that targets providers “by prescribing behavior.” The connection is real but indirect. It does not show Wiles handling a drug account or being paid by a drugmaker. Blair’s and Budowich’s forms contain no reference to pharma, drugs or health. That finding covers those forms only. [20][27][21][19]

The policy record does not lend itself to a cartoon either. Executive Order 14273 (April 15, 2025) targets drug competition, importation and pharmacy-benefit-manager transparency. Its section 3(c), however, directs HHS to work with Congress to align Medicare negotiation’s treatment of small-molecule drugs with biologics, closing a gap the order itself calls the “pill penalty.” Executive Order 14297 (May 12, 2025) sets most-favored-nation price targets and says the HHS secretary “shall propose a rulemaking plan” if significant progress is not delivered. An order to do future work is not proof the work happened. Neither order names any of the three operatives. [28][29]

Sugar: the sharpest overlap in the record

The most concrete intersection of private client and public law is in Blair’s own handwriting, so to speak. His disclosure lists U.S. Sugar Corporation of Clewiston, Florida, as a source of compensation for “Public Affairs Consulting & Marketing Services.” [21]

Public Law 119-21, enacted July 4, 2025, contains section 10312, “Sugar Program Updates,” at 139 Stat. 96–99. We read the enacted text:

(a) sets the raw-cane-sugar loan rate at 24.00 cents per pound for crop years 2025–2031, with beet sugar at 136.55% of that rate.
(b) sets minimum storage rates for forfeited sugar at 34 cents per hundredweight per month for refined sugar and 27 cents for raw cane, beginning with the 2025 crop.
(c) extends sugar estimates through 2031 and revises beet-sugar allocation and reassignment timing.
(d) requires reallocation of tariff-rate-quota shortfalls and a study of refined-sugar import terms. Any resulting rules are permitted only if they “do not have an adverse impact on the domestic sugar industry.”
(e) narrows the grounds for adjusting the tariff-rate quota, and (f) extends the program’s period of effectiveness to 2031. [30]

Read plainly, these provisions protect domestic producers. Whether they raise what American families pay for sugar, and by how much, is an economic question this review has not measured, and we make no estimate. Nothing in the text names U.S. Sugar, and we did not calculate the company’s benefit.

Blair publicly promoted the overall bill. On May 21, 2025, he called it “the single most important legislative achievement” of most members’ careers, and the Guardian describes him “working with Congress” to pass it. That documents his official role in the broader push. We found no memo, email, amendment record or testimony showing that he touched the sugar section. [31][22]

So the fair question is a narrow one, which is what gives it force: What role, if any, did Blair play on the sugar provisions, and what ethics screening applied to a former U.S. Sugar consultant? The records show the former-client relationship, his role in the overall legislative push and the industry-protective law. They do not show a violation.

Wiles’s agricultural links are older. Public Citizen’s table lists The Mosaic Company (2017–2018) and the New Mexico Cattle Growers Association (2018–2019) as Ballard Partners lobbying clients. These are historical links, not current retainers. [26]

Polling: follow the direction of payment

Blair’s form lists Spry Strategies of Knoxville as a source of compensation. Spry’s website calls the firm a polling and research company and lists MAGA Inc. among its 2024 partners. The direction matters: Spry paid Blair for services. That shows neither ownership nor government purchases of Spry polling. Wiles’s form lists Rapid Loop Consulting, Blair’s firm, as a client of Right Coast Strategies. That is one documented direction of business, not a two-way flow of payments. [21][32][20]

Budowich reported owning Opinion Architects, LLC from August 2023 to August 2024. The name does not tell us what the company did, and we found no federal polling contract. The Guardian describes Blair’s use of polling and voter modeling in 2024. That is campaign strategy. It has nothing to do with vote counting, and nothing here suggests any tampering with an election. [19][22]

What the law actually forbids

18 U.S.C. § 208 bars an executive-branch employee from participating personally and substantially in a particular matter that, to the employee’s knowledge, affects the employee’s own financial interest or certain imputed interests, subject to statutory exceptions and waivers. A former client is not automatically a continuing financial interest. [33]

5 C.F.R. § 2635.502 addresses appearances of partiality, including recent consulting relationships, mainly in particular matters involving specific parties. It is not a blanket ban on working on broad legislation, and a recusal does not always require a public memo. The absence of a published recusal does not by itself establish a violation. [34]

Trump’s January 20, 2025, rescission order revoked Executive Order 13989, the Biden-era ethics pledge. That removed an extra layer of restriction. The criminal statute and the standards-of-conduct regulations remain in force. 18 U.S.C. § 207 sets specific post-employment limits, not a lifetime ban on private work, so applying it to Budowich would require facts about his actual contacts that no homepage can supply. 5 U.S.C. § 553 exempts some rules from notice and comment, and both drug orders condition their directives on consistency with applicable law. Influence is real. Its mechanics must be shown. [35][36][37][29]

What we still don’t know, and why it matters

This was a public-records review, not a subpoena. It establishes no bribery, no foreign control and no illegal conflict by Wiles, Blair or Budowich. Its findings are bounded by the records reviewed and should be read that way. Several records are still missing: a complete candidate-level FEC reconciliation, certified results, the Republika Srpska contract and payments, ethics advice and recusals, and the documents showing who asked for the sugar language. No interviews or right-of-reply outreach were conducted. That is an editorial decision, not evidence that anyone declined to respond.

Here is what the records support. Bell, Boafo and Gallrein won after receiving support from AIPAC’s network, through very different channels. A presidential aide who had been paid by U.S. Sugar Corporation helped push through a law that shields the domestic sugar industry. A chief of staff came to the West Wing from a substantial pre-government consulting practice, which her disclosure says was wound down or made inactive. A deputy went from a super PAC to the White House and then to a firm that sells “direct engagement.” None of that is a crime on the evidence we have. All of it is the ordinary plumbing of concentrated power, and in a self-governing country the public has a legitimate interest in seeing where that plumbing runs, so that officials can be judged on the record rather than on rumor in either direction.

So keep the question sharp and the accusation no bigger than the evidence. Ask for the document that links the payment to the decision. If it turns up, publish it. If it doesn’t, say so.

Responses and corrections

Every person and organization referenced in this article is invited to submit a response or correction through our existing website question form. This is the response channel offered for this article; no direct outreach was conducted and no refusal to respond is implied.

References

All cited links were rechecked on November 7, 2026, Central Time, and their relevant text was read. References 11, 23, 25 and 31 returned HTTP 403 to direct requests but loaded in full through a public page reader. Reported claims remain attributed to the outlet that reported them. Secondary financial figures have not been independently reconstructed from every underlying transaction.

About the closing quotation: it is a complete one-sentence entry in Book VI of the Meditations, a private reflection on the inseparability of individual and common good. It is not a comment on modern politics, and we offer it in that spirit. Text checked verbatim against George Long’s public-domain translation.

“That which is not good for the swarm, neither is it good for the bee.”

— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book VI, §54, trans. George Long (public domain) [38]

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Jordan Gold