The Weekly season 1, episode 5 recap: Inauguration, Inc.

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THE WEEKLY “Inauguration, Inc.” Episode 5 (Airs Sunday; June 30, 10:00 pm/ep) — Pictured: New York Times Reporter Ken Vogel sits at Paval Fuchs’ table. CR: FX

Follow the money

The Weekly then picks one example to show where this money went. WIS Media Partners received $1.6 million for eight weeks of work. That company? Created mere weeks before the inauguration and run by an event planner friend of Melania Trump.

That event planner, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, made $500,000 for her work—more than previous senior staff members made, as Kerrigan points out.

Jenkins does couch this segment in the fact that no, it’s not illegal…it’s just a dumb way to spend money.

This is one example, but as The Weekly points out, there were other major vendors with connections to the Trump family or to people close to the Trump family. Those vendors collected a third of the money raised for the inauguration—including $1.5 mil to the Trump hotel in Washington.

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Jenkins then notes how much money was spent on private events for donors. Events like a candlelight dinner were thrown for donors who had given between $250,000 and $1 million.

The Weekly then jumps to Jan. 19, 2017, the day before the inauguration, to talk more about that candlelight dinner. The episode highlights some of the extravagant spending that went into the $675,000 in decorations for that event (one of eight donor events that week).

Craziest expense: Makeup treatments for staff working the event, coming in at $500 each.

While showing pictures of the event, the episode highlights just how much some top donors spent, since there was no cap on donation amounts. Then, Mazzetti asks a big question: if you’re giving someone millions of dollars, what are you expecting in return?

This shifts The Weekly‘s focus to some of the attendees of these events, including a Russian oligarch with ties to the Kremlin (later brought up in the Muller investigation), a Russian agent who infiltrated the NRA and a lawyer linked to the Kremlin who offered dirt on Hillary Clinton in a Trump Tower meeting.

But they’re brought up for the sake of mentioning that there were many people outside of the United States who were trying to get into these events and weren’t able to.

One Ukrainian/Russian businessman (worth $250 million) had worked with Trump in the early 2000s when trying to build a tower in Moscow with him. He had wanted to go to the inauguration events, but it’s illegal for foreigners to donate to an inaugural fund. So, he tried to go through a Ukrainian-American donor who offered him tickets to an event for a $50,000 discount.

But, after wiring the $200,000 for the tickets, the businessman was then told that he could be introduced to Trump for $500,000 more—smartly, he turned that down. He should have turned down the first offer because, like buying tickets from a bad scalper, the businessman didn’t get anything for his money.

The Weekly brings up this example to point out that people were willing to drop hundreds of thousands of dollars for events like these. And with the willing come those content to take their money.

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