Sheldon Adelson is a Republican “mega donor” and hates online gambling. On the surface, there’s nothing necessarily unusual about his donation, made public this month, of $20 million to a GOP super PAC called the Senate Leadership Fund.

His recent donation of $25 million to the Trump campaign makes him the biggest donor of either party of the 2016 election cycle, even if it was short of the $100 million he initially pledged. Over the years he has contributed well over nine figures to Republican causes.

But eyebrows were raised at the Washington Post this week by the timing of the donation, just one day before three GOP senators introduced a bill to ban online gaming in the US. Sheldon Adelson has previously declared he would spend “whatever it takes” to wipe online gambling off the face of the earth.

As the WP noted, the donation was made public on September 20, while, on September 21, Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) filed bill S.3376 in the US Senate. S.3376 was co-sponsored by longtime Senators Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Lindsey Graham (R-S. Carolina).

The contents of this bill remained unpublished until yesterday, but the brief description that accompanied it on the Congressional website was enough to reveal we were dealing with the latest incarnation of the Restoration of America’s Wire Act (RAWA). RAWA sought to dismantle the fledgling regulated online gambling sectors of Nevada, New Jersey and Delaware, and to ban all other states from regulating in their wake.    

More on Adelson and his crusade against online gambling at Casino.org