Bloomberg Is Starting His Campaign With A Big Asset—His Gun-Control Group’s Email List

His campaign is “temporarily renting” the addresses of Moms Demand Action’s supporters.


Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg officially entered the 2020 Democratic race Sunday with a potent asset: The vast trove of email addresses amassed by Moms Demand Action, the nonpartisan gun control advocacy organization hosted under the umbrella of Everytown for Gun Safety, which Bloomberg co-founded and largely finances.

The leaders of Moms Demand Action state chapters and local groups received the news from Aimee Tavares, a senior national organizing director for the group, who sent an email roughly three and a half hours after news broke that Bloomberg would formally announce his candidacy. “Given his unique role in launching Everytown, his leadership in advancing the cause of gun safety, and the significant investments he’s made in helping to grow our movement, Mayor Bloomberg’s campaign is temporarily renting access to our list of supporters so they can communicate his plans for achieving our shared goal of a nation free from gun violence,” Tavares wrote.

Tavares added the campaign would not retain access to Moms Demand Action’s email list at the conclusion of Bloomberg’s bid. Members of the group would be “under no obligation to take any action” in response to Bloomberg’s campaign missives, and that “it is entirely up to our volunteers how they spend their volunteer time in this election and which candidates they choose to support, up and down the ballot,” she wrote.

Tavares’ email gave no endorsement of Bloomberg’s candidacy, but noted that “his participation will ensure that our issue remains at the forefront during the remainder of primary season.” In a Twitter thread announcing his candidacy, Bloomberg shared that he had “founded the largest gun safety group in history” alongside a photo of him posing with Moms Demand Action volunteers.

...but undoubtedly his campaign underlings have access to every contact MAIG/MMM/
Everytown for Gun Safety/MDA have or ever had, and are trawling them as I write this.

No doubt Bloomie will poll well with the quiet (and some not-so-quiet) suburban racists that either
approved (or simply elided) his stop-and-frisk policies and racism towards Muslims

ICYMI, scoop from me last night:

@MikeBloomberg's campaign is renting the huge email list for @MomsDemand—the grassroots arm of gun control group @Everytown, which Bloomberg co-founded and funds—to build support for his late entrance into the 2020 race

While searching the car, state police said they found small baggies consistent with how heroin is packaged and a large amount of cash. They also located a black semi-automatic handgun on the floor near the driver's seat. The gun had a high-capacity magazine loaded with 15 9mm rounds and had no markings or serial number, consistent with what is referred to as a "Ghost Gun." These firearms cannot be traced and are illegal.

...Agents then executed a federal search warrant and found at least a dozen “large airsoft style weapons that had the appearance of real weapons” in his garage.

In a workshop area, agents found a hidden compartment with two milling plates, which serve “as a template to drill out a receiving for a firearm,” the affidavit states. They located a buffer spring, a firearm part used to assist with recoil of a rifle, and buffer tube, a piece of a rifle that the buffer spring fits inside, it states.

In a hidden compartment, agents say they found an AR-15 styled rifle “ghost gun,” one without any manufacturing or serial numbers to allow it to be traced.

... Still, the Obama camp has been encouraging Patrick to run for years presumably because they think he would be a great candidate—in a general election. Patrick, too, is not the sort to leave his elite private sector job solely to screw over Elizabeth Warren on behalf of his friends from the Obama White House. He seemingly plans to actually run for president with the intention of winning the presidency. But the inescapable fact is that his campaign does not make any logical sense as a conventional primary campaign.

Finally, let us consider Michael Bloomberg, whose bid makes even less sense. While he is able to completely self-fund a presidential campaign, giving him an advantage over Patrick (who is regular-rich, not plutocrat-rich), the former New York City mayor is skipping Iowa and New Hampshire and purchasing generically anti-Trump Facebook ads instead of Facebook ads promoting a Michael Bloomberg candidacy. He has apologized for stop and frisk, yes, but he is broadly doing things to make himself seem acceptable to Democratic voters, not (yet) to convince them to support Michael Bloomberg in enough primaries and caucuses to give him the nomination.

Bloomberg also very much wants to be president, and has only declined to run in the past because he was smart enough to know he couldn’t win as an independent and probably couldn’t win either party’s nomination the traditional way. How could Bloomberg win, then? If he was handed the nomination at a brokered convention. I know that invoking that term is going to touch off a wave of groans from people who, every election cycle, read countless pieces of glorified politics fanfic from pundits predicting brokered conventions that simply do not happen anymore. I said from the start that this was going to be annoying.

But this is the only way these two late entrants make any sense. The Patrick and Bloomberg campaigns are not mere long shots, or attempts to harm Sanders or Warren on behalf of the moderates. They are calculated bets on a brokered convention. These are well-connected people at the highest levels of Democratic Party politics (despite his independent status, Bloomberg has always surrounded himself with Democratic campaign veterans and aides), making it clear that they think there is a real chance that the nomination will be completely up for grabs next July...

U.S. Mayors' gun control group merges with Moms Demand Action


NEW YORK Thu Dec 19, 2013 12:03pm EST

(Reuters) - Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a gun control group founded and financed by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, announced on Thursday it will merge with another gun control group, Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America.

The mayors' group will unite its grassroots, policy and field forces with the mothers' group "to enact common-sense policies that respect the rights of gun owners while keeping firearms out of dangerous hands," the groups said in a statement.

Mayors Against Illegal Guns was formed in 2006 as the brainchild of Bloomberg and Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, both of whom will leave office at the end of the year. They argued that mayors were uniquely sensitive to gun violence as it often falls to them to comfort the families of slain police officers.

The group now includes more than 1,000 mayors.

In a major victory for privacy rights, a federal court in Boston today ruled that the government’s suspicionless searches of international travelers’ smartphones and laptops at airports and other U.S. ports of entry violate the Fourth Amendment. The ruling came in a lawsuit, Alasaad v. McAleenan, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and ACLU of Massachusetts, on behalf of 11 travelers whose smartphones and laptops were searched without individualized suspicion at U.S. ports of entry.

“This ruling significantly advances Fourth Amendment protections for the millions of international travelers who enter the United States every year,” said Esha Bhandari, staff attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “By putting an end to the government’s ability to conduct suspicionless fishing expeditions, the court reaffirms that the border is not a lawless place and that we don’t lose our privacy rights when we travel.”

“This is a great day for travelers who now can cross the international border without fear that the government will, in the absence of any suspicion, ransack the extraordinarily sensitive information we all carry in our electronic devices," said Sophia Cope, EFF senior staff attorney.