FIRST IN PI — GONZALEZ’S CONSULTANT’S SHADY PAST: Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D-Texas) uses a political consulting firm that is owned by a Texas man who previously served around three years in prison after pleading guilty to Medicare and Medicaid fraud, Daniel reports. — Gonzalez’s campaign currently pays $3,000 a month to Southern Texas Strategies for “strategic consulting services” and has used the firm since 2021, paying it $134,000 in total over that time, according to FEC records. Gonzalez represents a district in southeastern Texas that national Republicans are targeting. — Southern Texas Strategies doesn’t have a website but is owned by Valente Alaniz, according to its “assumed name certificate” filed with the state of Texas. Alaniz has also personally received more than $60,000 from the campaign since 2016 for “door-to-door get out the vote services” and “administrative services,” according to FEC records. — Alaniz and his sister Velma were arrested in 2011 on charges of defrauding the U.S. government after the two illicitly made money off of Medicare and Medicaid in claiming that they had sold power wheelchairs prescribed by doctors when in fact the doctors hadn’t ordered them and the wheelchairs never even got delivered. The Department of Justice said they also submitted false bills to Medicare and Medicaid that they had provided such power wheelchairs to other patients, when instead they provided less expensive scooters. — The two pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit health care fraud and Valente Alaniz received a sentence of 37 months in prison, while his sister got a year less. A court also ordered them to repay Medicare and Texas’ Medicaid program $160,000 in restitution. — Gonzalez said in a statement to PI that he had first hired Valente Alaniz to work at his law firm after he finished serving his prison sentence. “I was apprehensive at the beginning, but he has really turned his life around and has been a good husband, father, son and employee to me ever since,” he said. “He has paid his debt to society and is an example to others who have been in his situation. I wish I had more employees like him.” — In his own statement, Alaniz thanked Gonzalez for giving him a “second chance.” “Those were mistakes of my past, which I regret. I have paid for those mistakes and have turned my life around,” he said. “And he has kept me employed for over 10 years now. For that, I will forever be grateful.” WHAT MEENA HARRIS HAS BEEN UP TO: “Last month, minutes after President Joe Biden endorsed his running mate to succeed him, chants of ‘Ka-ma-la’ rang out from the audience at Broadway’s Music Box Theatre. They were there for a matinee performance of ‘Suffs,’ a musical about women’s suffrage co-produced by the vice president’s niece, Meena Harris, who promptly posted a video of the moment for her 700,000 Instagram followers.” — “For Meena Harris, who has spent the last seven years building a for-profit business branded on the empowerment of ‘women and underrepresented communities,’ it was another fortuitous crossover between her private ventures and her family’s political endeavors,” our Ben Schreckinger writes in a rundown of that sprawling business empire. MUSK READS: “Electric vehicle billionaire Elon Musk has said he is ‘super pro climate,’ called global warming ‘a major risk’ and claimed to have done ‘more for the environment than any single human on Earth,’” E&E News’ Corbin Hiar and Chelsea Harvey write. — “Since then, the Tesla chief executive has endorsed the presidential bid of Donald Trump, who has dismissed climate change as a ‘hoax’ and vowed to roll back federal subsidies for EVs while promoting oil and gas drilling. As heat continues to smash global temperature records, Musk has also expressed new doubts about the need to limit warming.” — “The world’s richest man is perhaps the one person who could sway Trump on climate policy if the former president returns to the White House, according to GOP lawmakers. … Musk could also influence a second Trump administration on policies for energy, self-driving cars, space and artificial intelligence — in some cases to his own benefit, experts say.” THE FIGHT OVER RETIREMENT ADVICE: “To protect older Americans’ life savings, President Joe Biden pledged in October to crack down on financial advisers who recommend investments just because they pay higher commissions. Then the insurance industry got to work,” The Washington Post’s Tony Romm reports. — “Lobbying groups representing New York Life, Lincoln Financial Group, Prudential Financial and other companies first pushed back against the newly proposed regulations before suing to topple them entirely. Now the government’s latest attempt to protect retirees is in political and legal limbo, facing the possibility that it may never take effect.” — The skirmish “centers on a basic question: Should federal law require more financial professionals to put retirees’ needs above all else — including their own paychecks — when they offer advice about how to invest?” A BOLD STRATEGY, COTTON: A report over the weekend from The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan chronicling the “worst three weeks” of Trump’s campaign includes an eyebrow-raising detail about a feud between two of the Republican Party’s biggest donors. — According to the Times, last month Trump “stunned one of his wealthiest patrons, Miriam Adelson, the widow of the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, by having an aide … fire off a series of angry text messages to Mrs. Adelson in Mr. Trump’s name, according to three people with knowledge of what took place.” — “The texts complained about the people running Mrs. Adelson’s super PAC, Preserve America, into which she is pouring millions of dollars to support Mr. Trump. … The texts said that the officials running Preserve America were ‘RINOs’ — Republicans in name only — and that Mrs. Adelson’s late husband would never have tolerated that, the people said,” a move that prompted fears Adelson “might scale back her support” of Trump. — Making matters more interesting: “According to two of the people, aides to Mrs. Adelson later discovered that the outburst against her had been encouraged by another major Trump donor, Ike Perlmutter, the former chairman of Marvel Entertainment, who had hoped in vain that Mrs. Adelson would contribute to a rival super PAC that he backs.”
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