(Source: MIRS.news, Published 03/02/2024) (GRAND RAPIDS) – Newly recognized Michigan Republican Party Chair Pete Hoekstra said Saturday he’s confident that establishment donors who stepped away from the party will return, but they all must now play catch up.
When asked about conversations with establishment donors, like the DeVos family, Hoekstra said conversations have been ongoing, and “they have not stepped away" from Republican politics.
“They stepped away from giving to the Michigan Republican Party,” he said. “But they've been very active in forming other groups to carry out the functions that they normally would have expected the MI GOP to do.
“The good thing is, the work didn’t stop,” he said. “It just went through other vehicles.”
Now, his faction of the party is beginning to plan for the next eight months ahead, and on how to best bring the GOP back into that network, Hoekstra said.
But, he believes his faction’s recent track record is going to be a big point of attraction for these donors, including an initial win in court, an endorsement by former President Donald Trump, who won nearly 98 percent of the vote at today’s nominating convention and a Republican National Committee (RNC) certification of the state committee’s action to remove former Chair Kristina Karamo.
“A lot of these major donors are business people,” he said. “They would look at this track record and say, ‘Yeah, we think it’s probably pretty likely that this is the Michigan GOP that we’re going to see through the election.'”
When asked about fundraising efforts so far, and if he believes the party has begun to “catch up,” Hoekstra responded, “Are you kidding me? I just got the court order on Tuesday.”
“The donors that sat on the sidelines, they want(ed) to make sure that if they wrote a check to the MI GOP, that there was no possibility it…might go back to the old MI GOP," he said, explaining how the party has since begun to fundraise.
Hoekstra said his faction of the party has set up an alternate process to collect funds, because until 5:30 p.m. Friday, they didn’t have access to the bank.
“So we’re making progress,” he said, though he added that he does not yet have access to all the party’s bank accounts, due to the state party’s lawsuit with the owners of the trust.
Hoekstra said former Congressman and legal counsel Mike Bishop filed the paperwork this week to “establish himself as attorney of record for those lawsuits.
“As soon as the judge rules on that, then we will . . . work with Comerica and the trust to remove those lawsuits, and then, you know, we still need to get access to some social media accounts and those types of things.”
For now, he said, “We’re just going to come back on Monday morning and go back to work, putting in place the plans and the organization and the money to run a successful campaign in November."
For her part, Karamo fired off a couple of shots on social media today. On Hoekstra's post on X that he was looking at ways to credential some delegates because rules weren't followed, Karamo wrote, “Rules . . . what a joke. They did follow the rules and submitted their delegate list to the elected party secretary. Additionally the Call to Convention filed with the county clerk per Michigan law listed the purpose as being a convention at the Huntington Place in Detroit. What about that law!"
Karamo also responded to a tweet from reporter Jonathan Oosting about the lawsuit regarding MRP Party headquarters where she wrote, “Really . . . we never said our objective for the lawsuit was to sell the building. That was the talking point the corruption-club had to put out as a straw man, to distract people from the merits of the lawsuit. We want clarification over who owns assets and liabilities. Asking for a friend, how can an LLC, DBA as a political party? They would be conducting business, for example potentially taking out loans in the party’s name without our knowledge. I think that’s a problem. However I guess if a former congressman tells us it’s ok, and that our concerns are “insane”, we should stop asking questions!”
