For most of the last two years, trucking has focused on eliminating foreign drivers who can’t speak English proficiently. Yet, the very foreign actors that hire those foreign drivers are finding ways to sidestep that accountability and enforcement process. That typically involves large donations to the political powers of both parties. What’s stopping common-sense reforms in the trucking industry that would promote highway safety?
We should start by saying I’m a Conservative. I voted for this administration. I appreciate General Flynn's service. I support our administration. After this deep dive, I question how much our Administration and General Flynn have been advised on the inner workings of the trucking industry, the fraud occurring within it, and who they’re sitting at the table with.
Dalilah’s Law cleared the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee 35-26 on March 18, 2026. It has waited 201 days for a floor vote. In that time, the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association has written to House Speaker Mike Johnson asking for one, most recently after Pennsylvania State Police Trooper Pahira was struck and killed during a roadside inspection on Interstate 81 on July 1. A bill moves to the floor when leadership decides it’s worth the time. Leadership decides that partly by listening to the people who give.
This installment is about some of those people.
A political action committee exists so that people who share an interest can pool their money and put it behind candidates in the open. The law that governs them rests on one idea: if money is going to buy a hearing, the public gets to see who paid. Contributions are itemized. Committees register. Foreign money is barred. Agents of foreign governments file with the Justice Department. The ledger is supposed to be the price of admission.
I started pulling these records because the names kept showing up in the wrong files. People whose careers I’d documented in crash records, lien indexes and federal dockets were turning up in Federal Election Commission filings, in photographs from Mar-a-Lago and in Serbian and Romanian newspapers talking about their access.
I’ve voted Republican my whole life. That matters here because the people in this story aren’t partisans. They gave to whoever held the chair, and when it looked like the chair might change, some of them gave to the other side too.
What 2026 was supposed to fix
This was the year Washington went after the labor side of the model. FMCSA’s non-domiciled CDL final rule took effect March 16, 2026, limiting those licenses to holders of H-2A, H-2B, and E-2 visas. English proficiency returned to an out-of-service violation at roadside. On Aug. 31, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, and the Justice Department announced Joint Task Force Crossroads of America in Detroit, along with emergency actions to pull 110 entry-level training providers from FMCSA’s registry and a nationwide audit of third-party CDL skills testers.
That work targets the driver in the seat and the school that trained him. It doesn’t reach the people who recruited him, leased him the truck, factored his invoices, wrote his insurance, and dispatched him. Those people have a different problem, and they’ve been working on a different solution.
Most political giving in trucking is ordinary. The American Trucking Associations runs Truck PAC. OOIDA runs its own. FedEx, UPS, Werner, Old Dominion, Schneider and ArcBest run registered corporate committees. Carriers, drivers and suppliers have every right to organize and give, and immigrant owners have every right to organize by community. Serbian and Romanian immigrants built real companies in this industry. Plenty started in the seat, bought one truck and did it right. That story is real and common.
The problem is at the margins, where the donor list and the out-of-service list start to share names.
The Romanian branch
Federal Election Commission contribution records list Dragos Sprinceana as president and CEO of Goldcoast Logistics Group, the trade name of DMG Consulting & Development Inc., USDOT 2190975. FMCSA’s live system shows that the carrier has been out of service since Aug. 27, 2023. FMCSA’s enforcement case records show two settled cases against it totaling $889,630, and the public record doesn’t show the money collected. Day 1 of this series walked through that record and corrected parts of my own.
FEC itemized receipts for Sprinceana and his wife, Gabriela, who is listed in FEC filings as Goldcoast’s safety manager, show contributions to the Republican National Committee, to then-Rep. Matt Gaetz and to Warrior Diplomat PAC, the leadership committee of then-Rep. Michael Waltz, from 2020 through 2024. The Waltz PAC checks include $3,400 on April 21, 2023, and $3,300 on May 6, 2024, both after the first FMCSA case closed with a $791,640 settlement. One Democrat was on the list: Andy Thomson, $1,000, on Nov. 3, 2022.
In April 2025, Romania’s then-prime minister, Marcel Ciolacu, said he had asked Sprinceana to explain Romania’s situation to the Trump administration, and said it wasn’t an official envoy role, according to Romanian national press. On April 3, 2025, Sprinceana hosted a gala at Mar-a-Lago that he told the newspaper Gândul had about 700 guests, with then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem at his table. Ciolacu’s government later distanced itself from his public statements.
Sprinceana’s vehicle for that work wasn’t an FEC committee. Florida’s corporate registry lists United Strategies of America Inc., a not-for-profit he incorporated June 13, 2022, at a Wellington mailbox address he later assigned to DMG. On May 16, 2025, an amended annual report removed his name. A search of the Justice Department’s Foreign Agents Registration Act database by name shows no registration for him, for United Strategies, or for DMG. Whether any of his activity required one is a legal question this piece doesn’t answer.
The Serbian branch
Super Ego Holding LLC, Aleksandar Mimic’s leasing company, gave $200,000 to Advancing Arizona Forward on Nov. 8, 2021, and $100,000 on Feb. 3, 2022. Advancing Arizona Forward was the super PAC backing Mark Brnovich, then Arizona’s attorney general, in his 2022 U.S. Senate race.
Others in the network followed into the same race. Antonije Keljevic, principal of AAA Freight and the TRU Funding captive lender, gave Brnovich for Senate $5,000 and $2,100 on Nov. 6, 2021; the $2,100 was refunded as over the limit. Ranko Ristic, founder of Zastava Arms USA, the exclusive U.S. importer of firearms made by Serbia’s state-owned Zastava factory, gave Advancing Arizona Forward $20,000 on June 28, 2022. Radomir Dobrasinovic was credited with a $5,504.84 in-kind contribution on June 26, 2022, for a facility rental, with the amount over the limit to be reattributed or refunded. Roy Dobrasinovic gave Brnovich $2,900 on June 30, 2022, from Naples, Florida.
Brnovich lost the primary. Trump nominated him as ambassador to Serbia in spring 2025, and the White House withdrew the nomination in October. He died Jan. 12, 2026, at 59. His spokeswoman said he died of a heart attack.
The access came in person. In early 2024, according to Deutsche Welle, Ristic and four other Serbian American businessmen attended a reception at Mar-a-Lago, where, Ristic told DW, Trump called Blagojevich a “great friend” and “close associate.” Serbian Times, as reported by Kosovo Online, described a lunch with Trump in early May 2024 that it said Blagojevich arranged, about 10 days after the checks described below. In December 2024, a second group attended a gala there. Keljevic told Serbian media that Trump knows who backed him, both the voters and the sponsors.
The committee
In February 2025, the diaspora newspaper Serbian Times profiled Filip Milivojević, a Chicago transportation executive, as a founder of a new Serbian-American Political Action Committee, which it called the first Serbian lobbying group in the United States. Milivojević told the paper that money is the price of a seat in high politics and that each founder had put up enough to sit at dinner with Trump and his incoming cabinet.
The federal record agrees with him on the money, and it shows he didn’t give alone. On April 24, 2024, five men in this circle wrote checks to the same Trump committees. FEC filings list Filip Milivojević of Miami, employer Denver Cargo Inc., giving the Republican National Committee $41,300 and $47,100, Trump’s Save America PAC $5,000, and Trump’s campaign two checks for $3,300 each, for $100,000. Goran Petkovich of Rochester Hills, Michigan, listed as CEO of Gemini Transport, wrote five checks in the same amounts that day, for another $100,000. Ristic, of Park Ridge, Illinois, gave the RNC $38,400, Save America $5,000, and the campaign two $3,300 checks, for $50,000. Zoran Beric of Arlington Heights, Illinois, employer Fiber Node Services, wrote four identical checks for another $50,000. Dan Micic of Chicago, CEO of Medical Shipment, gave $100,000 split the same way as Milivojević and Petkovich.
That’s $400,000 in one day, in round blocks of $50,000 and $100,000, from a trucking executive in Miami, a trucking CEO in Michigan, a medical shipping executive in Chicago, a gun importer and an engineer in the Chicago suburbs. The RNC’s main account capped an individual at $41,300 that cycle; amounts above that are reported to the party’s separate accounts, which have their own limits. None of it is illegal on its face. It’s what a table looks like on a ledger. In October 2024, the same donor and employer gave $3,300 to Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell and $5,000 to Remedy PAC, a Democratic committee.
The committee’s website lists five partners, including Denver Cargo and Zastava Arms USA, provides a mailing address in Beverly, Massachusetts, and invites donations. It is registered. FEC records list the Serbian American PAC as committee C00895003, a PAC with a separate account for money that can’t go to candidates. Its reports itemize $250,000 in, $50,000 from each of five founders between Jan. 22 and Feb. 21, 2025: Beric; Ristic, reported through Zastava Arms USA as a sole proprietorship; Petkovich; Medical Shipment Operating Company of Skokie, Illinois, Micic’s company; and Denver Cargo Inc. of Davenport, Iowa. FMCSA lists Denver Cargo as USDOT 3585416, doing business as Leader Freight System, with Milivojević as its officer. A motor carrier wrote that check. Only $15,000 of the $250,000 went into the account that can be given to candidates. The PAC booked the other $235,000 as non-federal money.
The reports itemize about $41,000 going out through March 2026. Tenney’s campaign got $5,000 on May 30, 2025. Michael Bouchard, a House candidate in Michigan’s 10th District, got $7,000 on March 25, 2026. NGO Serbia Online in Chicago got $3,000 for an event sponsorship. Red Curve Solutions of Beverly, Massachusetts, got $1,000 for compliance consulting. Red Curve is a Republican compliance firm; the PAC’s registration lists its address in care of Red Curve and its treasurer as Red Curve’s Jason Young, who is also assistant treasurer of the Whatley Victory Committee. The registration names no founder, officer or member. The five businessmen who told a newspaper they founded it appear on the PAC’s reports only as donors. The biggest check went from the non-federal account to SLF PAC, the Senate Leadership Fund, the Senate Republican super PAC: $25,000 on Feb. 23, 2026. Corporate money in a super PAC is legal. The ledger shows a trucking company’s money, pooled with four other founders’, landing in a Senate super PAC.
In May 2025, Goran Petković, identified as the committee’s founder and president, gave Serbian Times the price list. He said a Mar-a-Lago cocktail reception for Rep. Byron Donalds’ Florida governor campaign cost $10,000 to attend and the donor dinner that followed cost $50,000 a head, which each member paid. At a lunch that weekend, he said, Rep. Claudia Tenney, who chairs the congressional Serbian Caucus, Serbian Foreign Minister Marko Đurić and Blagojevich joined the group. On May 12, 2025, Ristic gave the Claudia Tenney for Congress Victory Fund $25,000 and Milivojević gave it $2,500. On May 30, the PAC gave her campaign $5,000.
The foreign agent
Blagojevich is a registered foreign agent. His firm, RRB Strategies LLC, holds FARA registration No. 7562 and provides communications and public affairs work for Republika Srpska, the Serb entity inside Bosnia, whose leader, Milorad Dodik, was under U.S. sanctions when the registration was filed. The Treasury Department lifted those sanctions on Oct. 29, 2025. RRB’s filings report two payments from Srpska: $625,000 on March 31, 2025, and $700,000 on Oct. 29, 2025, the same day as the delisting. That’s $1,325,000. RRB reported paying out $330,000 of it. Ristic, or a company he manages, got $230,000. A company spelled “Resilient Patriotic LLC” got $100,000 on Aug. 12, 2025, the date RRB lists as the start of Michael T. Flynn’s work on the account. Flynn filed a FARA short form under RRB on Oct. 12, 2025, at $100,000 a month, with an end date of Oct. 1. Florida records list a Resilient Patriot LLC with Michael G. Flynn as manager; whether it’s the payee is a question I’ve put to RRB Strategies. Trump pardoned Flynn in 2020 and Blagojevich on Feb. 10, 2025. Blagojevich registered as Srpska’s agent 49 days after the pardon.
The same account that paid the PAC’s founder paid a pardoned former national security adviser. Flynn’s short form gives a business address in Lakewood Ranch, Florida, on the same street as Resilient Patriot LLC, which Florida lists with his son, Michael G. Flynn, as manager and registered agent. A report released Sept. 15, 2026, by the Democratic staff of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe, “Pay for Play in the Balkans,” says Flynn was paid $100,000 for one month of lobbying for Srpska. It says the Flynn side of the relationship kept going after his registration ended: his Gold Institute for International Strategy sought corporate sponsors for an economic summit in Banja Luka in May 2026, and his brother, Joseph Flynn, and attorney Jesse Binnall formed AAFS Infrastructure and Energy LLC on Nov. 24, 2025, which the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina had named in legislation by April 2026 as the investor in the Southern Interconnection pipeline, a project the report values at about $1.3 billion with adjacent power plants. The report also says the Justice Department paid Flynn $1.25 million in March 2026 to settle his lawsuit over his prosecution. Those are the report’s characterizations of the records it cites, and I’ve asked Flynn’s representatives to respond. The same report counts 11 firms lobbying for Srpska since January 2025, at least $8.9 million, and puts Blagojevich’s share above $700,000. His own filings show $1,325,000.
On March 18, 2026, RRB Strategies filed an amendment to its supplemental statement for the six months ending Sept. 30, 2025, saying it had found an omission while preparing its tax returns. The amendment adds one disbursement, dated April 1, 2025: $62,500 to Ranko Ristic for consulting, advising, research, in-country interpreting, media liaison, travel coordination, and event planning on the Republika Srpska account. RRB’s May 12, 2026, supplemental statement adds two more payments with the same purpose language: $75,000 on Feb. 2, 2026, and $92,500 on March 2, 2026, to Strategic American Solutions LLC. Illinois records list that company as formed Dec. 4, 2025, with a registered address in Park Ridge and Ranko Ristic as manager. Ristic, the PAC founder, gives the same Park Ridge address on his FEC filings. The FARA filings themselves carry no address, so the match rests on the Illinois and FEC records together, and I’ve put the question to RRB Strategies and Zastava Arms USA.
The FEC records show what Ristic gave around those payments. Eight days after the April 1, 2025, payment, he gave the Republican National Committee $100,000. Three weeks after the Feb. 2, 2026, payment, he gave the Whatley Victory Committee $100,000, the same day the PAC sent $25,000 to the Senate Leadership Fund. Three weeks after the March 2 payment, he gave Whatley $25,000 more. From February 2025 through June 2026, he gave $455,541.02 to federal committees, about twice what RRB paid him. Money is fungible, and nothing in the record ties a fee to a check. It’s the sequence.
Seventeen days after RRB’s March 2 payment, the network hosted the candidate. On Thursday, March 19, 2026, Michael Whatley, the former RNC chair running for Senate in North Carolina, was in Chicago raising money. Politico’s Illinois Playbook reported that Blagojevich was there with a group of self-described “Trump-ocrats” and then co-hosted a dinner party at the O’Hare Hilton with Ristic. The Whatley Victory Committee’s own report lists a $3,200 in-kind contribution for catering services that day from Rada Ristic, at Ristic’s Park Ridge address, employer Zastava Arms USA. The committee’s next batch of Chicago-area checks is dated March 23. It includes $10,000 from Antonije Keljevic of AAA Freight’s captive lender, TRU Funding; $5,000 from Vladimir Vasiljevic, at the Burr Ridge address FMCSA lists for his carrier, Maxi Trans Inc., USDOT 3164581; and $50,000 from Daniel Rezko, president of DAC Developments and the son of Tony Rezko, Blagojevich’s top fundraiser, who was convicted on federal fraud and bribery charges in 2008. Ristic’s own $25,000 followed March 25. The report doesn’t say which checks came from which event.
That filing is the only place in this story where the law’s disclosure system worked as designed. A foreign principal paid an American agent, the agent paid someone, and the payment landed in a public database, a year late, on an amendment, because a tax preparer caught it.
The associations
Roy Dobrasinovic’s side of the network organizes through trade groups. The International Trucking Association lists its address as 115 55th Street in Clarendon Hills, Illinois. Compass Holding LLC, the Clarendon Hills parent of Compass Equipment Finance, Compass Insurance Group, Compass Funding Solutions, Compass Payment Services, and Compass Arena, lists the association among its affiliated companies and names Dobrasinovic as its founder and president. ITA’s events run at Compass Arena in Willowbrook.
The Romanian Moldovan Trucking Association of North America, which calls itself ROMOTANA, launched in April 2023 with a Washington gala attended by Romania’s ambassador and Rep. Tim Walberg of Michigan. It says it has more than 2,000 member companies. Its president and founder, Marcel Șomfelean, lists his day job as national sales manager for Compass Payment Services, the Compass fuel card company. Three of the seven events on ROMOTANA’s own calendar were held at Compass Arena, and its lead member benefit is a fuel card.
The PAC side and the association side meet at the same company. Milivojević’s 2020 federal contribution records list his employer as Compass Payment Services, where he is national account manager. Șomfelean’s day job is national sales manager at the same Compass fuel card company. A trade association is legal, and so is a party. I didn’t find a PAC registered to ITA or ROMOTANA. What the record shows is structure: the Serbian carriers’ association and the Romanian carriers’ association both put members in rooms owned by the same company, run by the same man, whose lending arm appears in UCC records as a secured creditor on Gold Coast entities.
Both sides of the aisle
If this were a partisan story, it would be short. Milivojević gave to the RNC and to Swalwell in the same year. Sprinceana gave to a Florida Democrat in 2022. Blagojevich was a Democratic governor before Trump pardoned him. The money follows the chair.
That’s why the enforcement side should worry. FMCSA answers to a secretary, the secretary answers to a president, and both answer to House committees whose members attend these dinners, and to a speaker who decides which bills get floor time. None of the contributions here are illegal on their face. The FEC doesn’t record intent. The record shows a sequence: penalties settled, penalties not shown paid, checks written to the party and to members who oversee the agency, a foreign agent at the table, and no public collection action on the $889,630.
How the model buys access
Here’s the build. How else? Throw on a hat. Raise money off exploited drivers and millions you owe to victims and insurers and vendors, and then go spend it on politicians who are ignorant of how trucking works and your part in it.
You run a fleet under an authority that doesn’t pay its fines, its lessors, or its workers, and when the record catches up, the number goes out of service, and the trucks move to another one. The money you didn’t pay goes somewhere. Some goes to the next authority. Some goes to a committee with a patriotic name and a mailbox in another state. The committee buys a table at a $50,000 dinner. The table buys a photo, a first name, and a phone number. The photo goes on social media, where the next driver you recruit, the next broker you pitch, and the next inspector who pulls your truck can see who you stand next to.
The cheapest input in a chameleon operation isn’t the truck, the driver, or the insurance. It’s proximity. A carrier that owes $889,630 to FMCSA and gives to the party and the lawmakers who set FMCSA’s budget has decided which invoice to pay, and so far the market has rewarded that choice.
Where Dalilah’s Law fits
Nothing in H.R. 5688 touches campaign finance, foreign agent registration or trade associations, and it shouldn’t. That’s not what the bill is for. But the bill’s own Section 6 shows what’s missing. It lets FMCSA suspend or revoke a carrier’s registration for knowingly using an unqualified driver. It doesn’t make an unpaid penalty follow the people who controlled the carrier, and it doesn’t ask who owns a carrier at all. The donors in this story don’t hold CDLs. Nothing in Dalilah’s Law will ever check their names.
What would close it
None of this requires a new law. The FEC can ask the Serbian American PAC who decided a trucking company’s money should go to a Senate super PAC. The Justice Department’s FARA unit can ask United Strategies of America whom it represents and who pays it. FMCSA can treat a principal’s unpaid civil penalties as a fact that follows the person, not the DOT number, and publish it. Campaigns already screen donors for foreign nationality and for embarrassment. They can check a donor’s company against FMCSA’s out-of-service and unpaid-penalty lists before they cash the check. And the speaker can schedule a floor vote on Dalilah’s Law, with an amendment that asks who owns the carriers, not only who drives for them.
Brokers and shippers can do their part for free. Every name in this piece is on a public filing. Before a load is tendered, the questions are who owns the carrier, who financed the trucks, and who the owner was photographed with last month.
The table
The settled penalties on the carrier whose owner’s household gave to the people who set the agency’s budget haven’t been shown as paid. Dalilah’s Law hasn’t been voted on.
The law says the ledger is the price of admission. For the people in this story, the ledger is the admission.