Daily Reformer: Demuth's billionaire

By Max Nesterak | Deputy Editor

Good morning, Reformers. 

If House Speaker Lisa Demuth becomes the Republican nominee for Minnesota governor in August, she’ll have one donor in particular to thank: Richard Uihlein.

Uihlein is one of the most generous Republican megadonors and owns one of North America’s largest distributors of shipping and packaging supplies, the Wisconsin-based and privately owned Uline. 

Michelle Griffith reports the Demuth-aligned Restore Sanity political action committee received about $1.1 million from a national PAC largely funded by Uihlein. The funding has given her a significant advantage over her two gubernatorial primary opponents: GOP-endorsed candidate Kendall Qualls and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.

Demuth’s campaign for governor did not respond to the Reformer’s request for comment about whether Demuth knows Uihlein or whether anyone affiliated with her campaign sought his support. Officials from Restore Sanity also didn’t respond to the Reformer’s voicemail seeking comment.

Read more about Uihlein and the other political campaigns he’s funded in Michelle’s story today. 

By Cami Koons

Farmers growing corn and soybeans for biofuels can now quantify the carbon intensity of crops grown with certain regenerative agriculture practices, due to a recently finalized federal rule. 

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Regenerative Feedstock Rule will allow farmers to “capture new value” from agricultural practices like cover crops and reduced tillage, according to a news release from the department.

According to the finalized rule, the production of corn accounts for more than 50% of the direct greenhouse gas emissions associated with producing corn ethanol, and nearly 50% of soybean biodiesel emissions are attributable to the feedstock crop production. 

NPR today has a stunning story about agents from Homeland Security Investigations tracking a man across the state of New York because he wrote an angry email about six months ago to Todd Lyons, the then-acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. 

David Streever was on vacation in Finland when the agents first appeared at his home in Rochester, N.Y. They told his wife, an Episocopal pastor, they were looking for him about a threatening email he sent to Lyons and left a form for him to sign warning that it was a crime to threaten federal officials. 

The agents are the same ones who showed up to a Syracuse polling place earlier that day to demand a poll worker delete a months-old Instagram post that named Jonathan Ross as the ICE agent who killed Renee Good.

Streever said his email wasn’t threatening. He warned Lyons that his conscience would torment him, called him a "monstrous human being" and predicted he would "go down in history as America's Reinhard Heydrich, the butcher."

Then, when Streever landed in New York City from his return flight, agents tracked him down at the airport hotel he was at with his 7-year-old daughter. They left a business card at the front desk for him. 

"One powerless citizen yelled into the void with a stern email to the former director of this agency six months ago," Streever told NPR. "And now there's agents at his door."

First Amendment advocates say Streever’s email was protected speech and the federal government’s investigation into him is out of line. 

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