Greetings from Puck, where this frontrunning, late-in-life Niners fan is still recovering from Kyle Shanahan’s decision to not go for it on 4th inside the 10 against Mahomes in overtime.

Before diving into today’s main stories—how Biden bundlers are reacting to the Hur report mess, and a highly unusual mega-donor arrangement inside the R.F.K. super PAC—here’s a few nuggets of reporting from my notebook…

• Thiel’s inside man: The surprise exit of Wisconsin Rep. Mike Gallagher from Congress is a massive blow for Silicon Valley’s hawkish, anti-China donors and personalities. Gallagher and Peter Thiel have become close over the last few years, I’m told, and he also maintains relationships with Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen. I bet he keeps it up as a donor-whisperer to these ascendant Silicon Valley political players. Hell, he’s only 39… if you’ve got a startup idea, congressman, call Founders Fund or a16z.

• Learning from S.B.F.: Fairshake, the $80 million, pro-crypto super PAC backed by Coinbase, Andreessen Horowitz, and Ripple, announced today that it’s going after Katie Porter in California in its first big political spend of the cycle. I’ll have more on crypto money in the coming weeks, but the group is essentially trying to pick up where the S.B.F./FTX-led crypto political push of ’22 left off, but better. They have a tremendous amount of money at their disposal, which is good because California is an insanely expensive media market. The California primary election is March 5, only three weeks away.

• Haley’s surprise backer: A few months ago, I wrote about Rory Gates, the highly educated scion of Bill and Melinda who is beginning to dabble in big-money Democratic politics. But the other day, one of you wrote to me noting that Rory has made only one major disclosed political contribution in his life, and it was a max-out check to a Republican, Nikki Haley. (Occupation: “Unemployed.”) This kid isn’t Reid Hoffman (yet), but you know the Trump team loves to pick on the Democratic donations to Haley, and some MAGA influencers have already gone after Haley for positive comments she’s made about Gates the elder.

• Finally, a few sightings from the G.O.P. money trail: Trump has a series of fundraisers forthcoming over the next week—including its big be-there-or-be-square Mar-a-Lago event on Friday; an evening reception on February 20 in Greenville with V.I.P.s like Lindsey Graham; and an event alongside Kid Rock in Nashville on February 22.

  Haley, meanwhile, had a fundraising reception last night in Columbia and has another tonight in Charleston. Then she heads off to Texas for three fundraisers this week, according to invites I’ve seen. She won’t have Kid Rock perform for her—though I am told that Tim Draper did lead a rendition of his country-rap song at her event last week in Atherton, song sheets included.

Gee, I wonder what the 20 or so couples who paid $100,000 to get a seat at the table next to Biden, Pelosi, power-bundler Ron Conway, or real-estate honcho and event host George Marcus are thinking about these days? Talk about dignity, power, and senescence: The Democratic donor class has thought about almost nothing else since Biden was strafed last week by special counsel Robert Hur as old and mentally unfit.

That bombshell was only exacerbated by the president’s regrettable sparring session with the press, and Peter Doocy, where he agilely defended himself but also misspoke and confused the leaders of Egypt and Mexico. “What was the need to do the press conference? You need to do the press conference to prove you’re mentally fit, and you did it wrong,” moaned one Biden bundler, who watched it live. “It was a bad press conference. It was bad judgment for the team to allow him to come back. That was the goof-up.” This bundler then spent the rest of the evening watching Fox News to soak in the outrage.

These Democratic elites are often what some people have in mind when they babble about who’s really pulling the strings in Washington—you know, the puppet masters who could tell Biden to step aside for Gavin Newsom or Michelle Obama. The shadowy “they” who should “do something.” Obviously, that’s not how it works. First of all, Biden isn’t stepping aside. And if you actually talk to people who raise money for the president, they’ll tell you there’s nothing they can do, anyway. They’re stuck with Biden, and they’re terrified of Trump. And so all that’s left is to complain, really, and white-knuckle their way to November.

They can’t make Biden any younger, everyone dutifully notes, and few of them are suggesting anything significant that the White House or political team can do. There are minor tactical moves—more surrogate work by cabinet officials, more Jill, more TikTok, more talking about the Inflation Reduction Act or record low unemployment or how the S&P 500 just hit an all-time high—but these are donors and fundraisers, not experts on marketing a product that seemingly every user is telling the manufacturer is out-of-date. “We’re not going to defend the age of the president because there’s no miracle in the world where we can lower his age to 60,” one bundler told me. Another noted the challenges of Biden’s perceived physicality. “He has definitely gotten noticeably weaker over the last few years. He’s still fit. But he’s frail. He’s got that elder gait, where he walks gingerly,” the fundraiser told me. “Trump doesn’t have that.”

In my conversations, major donors alternate between defeatism and whataboutism when the subject inevitably turns to Biden’s age. “Obviously Biden is old. So is Trump. The thing that I’m frustrated with is that Trump has had, in the past couple of weeks, more fuck-ups than Biden has had,” said one adviser to a major Democratic donor. Why was the media freaking out about Biden flubbing up Egypt and Mexico, this donor-adviser stressed, when Trump wants to restrict abortion access, destroy NATO, embolden Putin, and gut America’s democratic tradition? Especially when the other guy is almost as old.

Biden donors are repeating the party line in part because they believe it, yes, and because they have seen Biden beat Trump in 2020 and have faith that he can do it again. But they’re also saying this because there are no other options. The chance for major Democratic donors to have found themselves a fitter nominee was in 2022, not mere months before the convention. And this isn’t the sort of self-reflective crowd that admits mistakes.

In the end, their only move is to help, where they can, by raising money for their man. Biden is headed to the 40-person event with the Gettys and Marcus families, and then to the Los Altos Hills home of Bob Klein and Danielle Guttman Klein next week, according to an invite I’ve seen. He’ll also drop by Southern California, the backyard of Biden campaign co-chair Jeffrey Katzenberg. Bundlers are raising good money, the pro-Biden super PACs are humming along. “I’m still getting the donation,” said one bundler. “Am I getting enthusiasm for them? Fuck no. I am getting donations to protect democracy. I am getting donations from people who historically like the president, and who think he’s old. He might be old as fuck but he’s doing a great job.”

I’ve been fascinated by a campaign-finance subplot revolving around this super PAC and the security consultant Gavin de Becker, as have been some Kennedy allies. De Becker is a prominent personality in celebrity and media culture—the Times called him a “Guardian to the Stars” after he led Jeff Bezos’s attempt to discover whether the Saudis hacked his phone in the wake of the Khashoggi killing. De Becker offers personal security services to Kennedy, a longtime friend, and he had also “donated” $10 million to the super PAC, making him its second-largest supporter. Okay, then.

But in the second half of last year, the group refunded him $9.5 million of that cash in several installments. I’ve never seen anything like this. De Becker told me two weeks ago, when I first reported this, that he saw this as “bridge funding.” “When not needed during some particular period, they returned some money to me. I continue to provide bridge funding; for example, I am donating $4 million on February 15. I’m committed to continue funding assistance if they need it until R.F.K. Jr. is elected president,” he told me.

I reached out to a few people last week to ask what they thought about the legality of this arrangement. A few campaign-finance lawyers told me they did not think it was illegal, just highly weird and unethical. Essentially: These are loans, not contributions. And semantics aside, this matters because the super PAC, of course, spent a year or so pretending that these were normal contributions—issuing press release after press release in 2023 about the money they “raised” and never mentioning that the money could be refunded. “FINANCIAL SUPPORT FOR ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR. SURGES AS SUPERPAC RAISES MORE THAN $16M,” read one press release last summer that got copious coverage, including a canned quote from De Becker.

Almost half the money the group said they raised… they didn’t really raise. Or at least, there was a massive asterisk missing. The group didn’t respond to a request for comment.

De Becker argued to me on Tuesday that he wanted the ability to request refunds if the PAC decided to “switch candidates or make changes in direction.” He continued: “A loan is something that has collateral and some means of enforcement. The donations I have made to American Values have no collateral and no means of assuring that they will ever be returned. I simply have the right to ask for some monies to be returned, but it can only happen if they have the money.”

Two campaign-finance lawyers were baffled when I shared de Becker’s logic. “This explanation makes no sense,” said Brendan Fischer. “It appears that he is asking the PAC for his money back while it is still supporting the same candidate, in some cases just weeks after the contribution was made.” Plus, people make loans to political committees without collateral or interest all the time. “What one contributor calls ‘bridge funding,’ everyone else calls a loan,” added Dave Mitrani. “Ultimately, a contribution is not required to be refunded.”

Anyway, De Becker told me a few weeks ago that he planned to “donate” another $4 million the day after Valentine’s Day to support R.F.K. He said Tuesday he’s still planning to do so. But he might get the money back in a few weeks. Who is to say?