As President Donald Trump’s former White House physician Ronny Jackson mounted a Republican congressional bid this year, he got a huge assist from a pair of local businessmen who not only financed a super PAC backing Jackson’s candidacy but also rented office space to his campaign and joined the campaign’s “district leadership team.”
Now it appears Jackson has helped those two businessmen position themselves for a piece of what they say is potentially billions of dollars in pharmaceutical manufacturing business that soon could come to Amarillo, the north Texas city that would be part of Jackson’s district should he win.
The businessmen working with Jackson are Alex Fairly and former Amarillo mayor Jerry Hodge. And they’ve made no secret about their desires to bring in taxpayer funding for the industry.
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“The federal government is going to provide probably, ultimately, billions of dollars in funding” for domestic pharmaceutical manufacturing efforts, Fairly declared at an event in May unveiling the effort. “There are going to be a lot of cities that would like to have that. We need to be at the front end of that. There’s going to be a competition for that money, and that’s why we have to go fast.”
Last year, Fairly founded a pharmacy benefit management company called FairosRX. In May, he teamed up with Hodge, who founded the pharmaceutical services company Maxor. Together, the two planned to attract massive new investment in Amarillo’s pharmaceutical sector, an idea that Hodge says Jackson proposed to them.
Hodge and Fairly established a “task force” in May to promote Amarillo as a destination for pharmaceutical manufacturing investment.
Jackson said at the time that he plans to support the effort whether or not he wins his congressional race next week.
“Knowing Ronny the way I know him, Fairly said at the May event, “I think Ronny will keep helping us no matter what.”
While Jackson’s deep personal relationship with the President of the United States makes him an asset to anyone looking to score favors with the government, the potential of him having a seat in Congress was a potential boon to such efforts. And, sure enough, Fairly and Hodge quickly turned their attention to getting Jackson elected.
Two weeks after the event unveiling what Hodge and Fairly dubbed their “America First Pharmaceutical Relocation Plan,” they teamed up to form a new super PAC. It was dubbed the Miles of Greatness Fund, and the address it listed in its statement of organization with the Federal Election Commission matches publicly available addresses for both Maxor and Hodge’s Hodge Management Group.
Hodge’s LinkedIn page says he is the “owner” of Maxor, and recent news reports describe him similarly. A Maxor spokesperson said he “has had limited involvement in Maxor for a number of years,” but did not address more specific questions about his ownership interest. The spokesperson provided a phone number for Hodge, but multiple calls to that number went unanswered.
On June 3, the day of its formation, Miles of Greatness received its first financial contribution: a $5,000 donation from Fairly. Five days later, Hodge donated $100,000. On the same day, the super PAC took out a $200,000 loan from the Amarillo National Bank. Miles of Greatness listed Hodge and Fairly as the loan’s guarantors. (The loan was repaid in full last month.)
Including that loan, about 80 percent of the more than $1 million the super PAC raised from its inception through mid-October came from Hodge and Fairly.
“We started the Miles of Greatness Fund to bring attention to Ronny’s Panhandle values, his leadership and experience, and his amazing wife, Jane… and also to bring some balance to [Republican primary opponent Josh Winegarner’s] overwhelming financial advantage,” reads a statement on the group’s website, co-signed by Hodge, Fairly, and Amarillo oil magnate Harold Courson.
Jackson’s race is the only one in which Miles of Greatness has gotten involved. The super PAC spent about $715,000 backing Jackson’s congressional bid and attacking Winegarner’s. It also paid Fairly’s company for “administrative consulting,” and reported receiving in-kind contributions from both the company—for “overhead and administrative services”—and Fairly personally, for legal services provided to the group.
While Miles of Greatness operated out of the offices of Hodge’s company, Jackson’s campaign operated out of Fairly’s. According to Jackson, his campaign headquarters is located at the same address as the Fairly Group and his pharmacy benefit manager company. A photo of the building taken by a passerby in June shows a huge Jackson for Congress sign outside. In September, Jackson’s campaign began paying rent to the Fairly company that owns the office space.
About two weeks after Fairly began financing Miles of Greatness, the super PAC hosted Jackson at a “meet-and-greet” at Amarillo’s minor league ballpark. The park, Hodgetown, is named after Hodge, who brought the double-A Sod Poodles to Amarillo last year with help from Fairly and Richard Ware, the chairman of Amarillo National Bank—the bank behind Miles of Greatness’ $200,000 loan.
Hodge got the name of the ballpark, but Fairly got naming rights to its club-level seating. And the Jackson super PAC’s meet-and-greet event took place in Hodgetown’s Fairly Group Club Level. A publicly available invite for the event asked attendees to RSVP to a Fairly Group employee. The super PAC later reported paying the Sod Poodles for facility rental and catering.
All the connections between Jackson, two of his top supporters, and the super PAC they’re simultaneously bankrolling are “not necessarily unlawful,” according to Brendan Fischer, the director of federal and FEC reforms at the Campaign Legal Center. “But it is an oddly cozy relationship between a candidate and a supportive super PAC, and if Jackson is elected, it sure seems like he would be deeply indebted to Fairly and Hodge.”
Jackson is considered a shoo-in in the heavily Republican 13th congressional district. If Donald Trump is re-elected on Tuesday, it would make Jackson one of the most powerful freshman members of the House GOP caucus. Trump has lavished praise on his former White House physician, whom he nominated to be Secretary of Veterans Affairs (Jackson withdrew amid questions about his credentials and allegations that he improperly dispensed prescription drugs to White House staffers, charges he vehemently denied).
Jackson “is a spectacular man” and “a brave and loyal warrior,” the president gushed in a rare multi-tweet endorsement of his candidacy over the summer. Jackson, in turn, has helped out Trump, appearing recently on a campaign conference call to raise speculative doubts about Joe Biden’s mental acuity.
The Amarillo pharmaceutical investment plan that Jackson, Hodge, and Fairly have pushed since the spring echoes much of the president’s rhetoric on the issue. “By relocating pharmaceutical manufacturing from China to Amarillo, we will create a boon for our local economy,” Hodge said in a statement on the launch of the task force.
In a statement a few months earlier on his broader effort to land more pharmaceutical investment for Amarillo businesses, Jackson too sounded the alarm on China. “As the former White House Physician to President Trump and member of the White House Pandemic Task Force, I am calling for a massive America First pharmaceutical investment in our country with national production and distribution capabilities based right here in Amarillo,” he said.
For Jackson, it was an opportunity to simultaneously boast of his Trumpworld bona fides and pledge to bring home the bacon for his would-be congressional district.
“I have been in contact with members of the Trump administration,” he said, “and have been working with Amarillo business leaders to make this happen.”
