PETE BUTTIGIEG - YES, I SERVE THE GLOBALIST BILLIONAIRE PARTY FOR WIDER OPEN BORDER TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED! - I'M A DEMOCRAT!!!

Mayor Pete’s Wine-Cave Problem

By Sarah Jones

Photo: Martina Albertazzi/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Days have passed since a photo of Pete Buttigieg inside a wine cave went viral. The reason isn’t mysterious. Voters rarely get such tantalizing glimpses into the high-end presidential fundraising circuit; the photo is something of a portal. It shows us Buttigieg at dinner with donors underneath a glorious crystal chandelier. To attend, people of means had to max out their donations to the Buttigieg campaign. The price of a plate, then, was $2,800, a small sum to a multimillionaire or billionaire, but out of reach for most. And what can $2,800 purchase?

The food was probably delicious, and the wine excellent. But nobody goes to dinners with candidates just to eat. The table conversation is what matters. Buttigieg, who’s since announced that future fundraisers will be open to the press, didn’t do anything markedly unusual by hosting a dinner in a Swarovski-bedecked wine cave. He was playing the game the way it’s usually played, especially when a presidential nomination is at stake. The only remarkable thing about Cavegate is the fact that it’s a controversy at all. During the last Democratic debate, Buttigieg faced fierce criticism from senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, the furthest-left candidates in the race. Even Andrew Yang got in a dig, as he touted his universal-basic-income plan. Americans shouldn’t have “to go shake the money tree in the wine cave,” he said.

Regrettably, the wine-cave defenders did log on. The excuses were varied, if not especially creative. Wine caves are an agricultural necessity; the wine did not actually cost $900 a bottle, as was first rumored; not everyone at the dinner was a billionaire. “Of the roughly 50 folks in attendance, plenty were people of means, and certainly all of us who were able to go to an event like that should consider ourselves lucky,” Buttigieg donor Bill Wehrle, who attended the wine-cave dinner, wrote in an editorial for the Washington Post. “But the whole experience fell short of proving Warren’s suggestion that ‘billionaires in wine caves’ will ‘pick the next president.’”

Wehrle’s editorial at least gave the Post an opportunity to get the most amusing correction of 2019 in right under the wire. Wehrle, a former executive for Kaiser Permanente, wrote that he is not a millionaire, but he’s wealthier than he let on; his home cost over $3 million. The entire event is shaping up to be a legitimate problem for Buttigieg, even though he is personally not as wealthy as other candidates in the race. There is no polling on Cavegate itself (thank God), but one FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll does show a post-debate Buttigieg slump. Buttigieg has defended his campaign’s fundraising practices. But his spelunking may be more costly than he anticipated.

The photo of Buttigieg in the cave, at the disposal of those who could afford to be there, affirms old fears about the order of the world. Voting is a mere formality. Somewhere in a secret and elegant place, the powerful decide who gets to join America’s ruling class. This is obviously a simplification. The Cigarette Smoking Man belongs to the world of The X-Files; he isn’t going to dinner with Pete Buttigieg. At its worst, this conspiratorial logic can manifest in anti-Semitism, phenomena like the cult of QAnon, or in the belief, widespread among supporters of President Trump, that impeachment is a coup in the making.

The infamous wine cave. Photo: HALL

But there’s a certain truth underlying this suspicion. America does have weak campaign-finance laws and an upper class that hoards wealth. Corporations and the wealthy do wield excessive power over the electoral process. Leaders of both parties accommodate that influence instead of challenging it, albeit to different extents, and their strategies undermine the structural integrity of democracy itself. An election ought to be a fair contest. Instead, they often resemble initiations, with a candidate anointed by unseen processes before a campaign ever formally launches. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, for example, favors candidates with access to big donors. The same candidates are, by default, more likely to be of means themselves; they encounter fewer obstacles in the road to victory. And while Sanders and Warren tout their reliance on small donors — a more recent development for Warren than for Sanders — most candidates at the federal and the state level still aggressively seek out donations from people like Craig Hall and Kathryn Walt Hall, the Democratic billionaires who own the now-infamous wine cave.

Voters aren’t entirely powerless, however. A sense of inevitability bedeviled Hillary Clinton in 2016, though the candidate and her aides never seemed to realize it was a problem. In Shattered, journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes reported that Clinton campaign aides even contemplated using the slogan “Because it’s her turn.” Clinton’s embrace of Wall Street and big money — her old speeches to Goldman Sachs, the glittering dinners in the Hamptons, the celebrity supporters — did harm her in the end. Though Trump himself is no man of the people, he didn’t have to work hard to convince anyone that Clinton was aloof, out of touch with the fears and needs of everyday people. Clinton may have defeated Sanders in 2016, but three years later, the Vermont socialist is now the one with a viable shot at the presidency.

Buttigieg, meanwhile, clings to business as usual. Axios reported over the weekend that H.K. Park, a top fundraiser for Buttigieg, promised a would-be donor influence in exchange for money. “If you want to get on the campaign’s radar now before he is flooded with donations after winning Iowa and New Hampshire, you can use the link below for donations,” Park allegedly wrote in an email. Sean Savett, a spokesperson for the Buttigieg campaign, told Axios that the campaign didn’t authorize Park’s language. “But it is ridiculous,” he said, “to interpret as anything more than asking potential supporters who may be interested in Pete to join our campaign before caucusing and voting begins.” Previously, Politico reported that the Buttigieg campaign omitted the names of 20 top fundraisers from a list it released to the public. The campaign called the omission a simple mistake. But neither incident helps Buttigieg dispel the nascent perception that he is more eager to court wealthy interests than he is in listening to the poor and the working class, and that, for Pete, is a problem.

Though his fundraising practices are identical to those of Joe Biden — to say nothing of Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer, two billionaires who essentially purchased their places in the primary — Buttigieg has more to lose. Nostalgia insulates Biden from outrage over his own dinners with the rich. That emotion is not available to Buttigieg, an inexperienced politician with no national profile. He’s losing, instead, not just to Biden but to Sanders and Warren, two candidates who have made redistribution and corruption the respective cornerstones of their campaigns. Buttigieg can’t afford his cave moment.

A new Gilded Age has emerged in America — a 21st century version.

The wealth of the top 1% of Americans has grown dramatically in the past four decades, squeezing both the middle class and the poor. This is in sharp contrast to Europe and Asia, where the wealth of the 1% has grown at a more constrained pace.

 

Josh Hawley: GOP Must Defend Middle Class Americans Against ‘Concentrated Corporate Power,’ Tech Billionaires

JOHN BINDER

The Republican Party must defend America’s working and middle class against “concentrated corporate power” and the monopolization of entire sectors of the United States’ economy, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) says.

In an interview on The Realignment podcast, Hawley said that “long gone are the days where” American workers can depend on big business to look out for their needs and the needs of their communities.

Instead, Hawley explained that increasing “concentrated corporate power” of whole sectors of the American economy — specifically among Silicon Valley’s giant tech conglomerates — is at the expense of working and middle class Americans.

“One of the things Republicans need to recover today is a defense of an open, free-market, of a fair healthy competing market and the length between that and Democratic citizenship,” Hawley said, and continued:

At the end of the day, we are trying to support and sustain here a great democracy. We’re not trying to make a select group of people rich. They’ve already done that. The tech billionaires are already billionaires, they don’t need any more help from government. I’m not interested in trying to help them further. I’m interested in trying to help sustain the great middle of this country that makes our democracy run and that’s the most important challenge of this day.

“You have these businesses who for years now have said ‘Well, we’re based in the United States, but we’re not actually an American company, we’re a global company,'” Hawley said. “And you know, what has driven profits for some of our biggest multinational corporations? It’s been … moving jobs overseas where it’s cheaper … moving your profits out of this country so you don’t have to pay any taxes.”

“I think that we have here at the same time that our economy has become more concentrated, we have bigger and bigger corporations that control more and more of our key sectors, those same corporations see themselves as less and less American and frankly they are less committed to American workers and American communities,” Hawley continued. “That’s turned out to be a problem which is one of the reasons we need to restore good, healthy, robust competition in this country that’s going to push up wages, that’s going to bring jobs back to the middle parts of this country, and most importantly, to the middle and working class of this country.”

While multinational corporations monopolize industries, Hawley said the GOP must defend working and middle class Americans and that big business interests should not come before the needs of American communities:

A free market is one where you can enter it, where there are new ideas, and also by the way, where people can start a small family business, you shouldn’t have to be gigantic in order to succeed in this country. Most people don’t want to start a tech company. [Americans] maybe want to work in their family’s business, which may be some corner shop in a small town … they want to be able to make a living and then give that to their kids or give their kids an option to do that. [Emphasis added]

The problem with corporate concentration is that it tends to kill all of that. The worst thing about corporate concentration is that it inevitably believes to a partnership with big government. Big business and big government always get together, always. And that is exactly what has happened now with the tech sector, for instance, and arguably many other sectors where you have this alliance between big government and big business … whatever you call it, it’s a problem and it’s something we need to address. [Emphasis added]

Hawley blasted the free trade-at-all-costs doctrine that has dominated the Republican and Democrat Party establishments for decades, crediting the globalist economic model with hollowing “out entire industries, entire supply chains” and sending them to China, among other countries.

“The thing is in this country is that not only do we not make very much stuff anymore, we don’t even make the machines that make the stuff,” Hawley said. “The entire supply chain up and down has gone overseas, and a lot of it to China, and this is a result of policies over some decades now.”

As Breitbart News reported, Hawley detailed in the interview how Republicans like former President George H.W. Bush’s ‘New World Order’ agenda and Democrats have helped to create a corporatist economy that disproportionately benefits the nation’s richest executives and donor class.

The billionaire class, the top 0.01 percent of earners, has enjoyed more than 15 times as much wage growth as the bottom 90 percent since 1979. That economy has been reinforced with federal rules that largely benefits the wealthiest of wealthiest earners. A study released last month revealed that the richest Americans are, in fact, paying a lower tax rate than all other Americans.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder. 

Economists: America’s Elite Pay Lower Tax Rate Than All Other Americans

JOHN BINDER

The wealthiest Americans are paying a lower tax rate than all other Americans, groundbreaking analysis from a pair of economists reveals.

For the first time on record, the wealthiest 400 Americans in 2018 paid a lower tax rate than all of the income groups in the United States, research highlighted by the New York Times from University of California, Berkeley, economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman finds.

The analysis concludes that the country’s top economic elite are paying lower federal, state, and local tax rates than the nation’s working and middle class. Overall, these top 400 wealthy Americans paid just a 23 percent tax rate, which the Times‘ op-ed columnist David Leonhardt notes is a combined tax payment of “less than one-quarter of their total income.”

This 23 percent tax rate for the rich means their rate has been slashed by 47 percentage points since 1950 when their tax rate was 70 percent.

(Screenshot via the New York Times)

The analysis finds that the 23 percent tax rate for the wealthiest Americans is less than every other income group in the U.S. — including those earning working and middle-class incomes, as a Times graphic shows.

Leonhardt writes:

For middle-class and poor families, the picture is different. Federal income taxes have also declined modestly for these families, but they haven’t benefited much if at all from the decline in the corporate tax or estate tax. And they now pay more in payroll taxes (which finance Medicare and Social Security) than in the past. Over all, their taxes have remained fairly flat. [Emphasis added]

The report comes as Americans increasingly see a growing divide between the rich and working class, as the Pew Research Center has found.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), the leading economic nationalist in the Senate, has warned against the Left-Right coalition’s consensus on open trade, open markets, and open borders, a plan that he has called an economy that works solely for the elite.

“The same consensus says that we need to pursue and embrace economic globalization and economic integration at all costs — open markets, open borders, open trade, open everything no matter whether it’s actually good for American national security or for American workers or for American families or for American principles … this is the elite consensus that has governed our politics for too long and what it has produced is a politics of elite ambition,” Hawley said in an August speech in the Senate.

That increasing worry of rapid income inequality is only further justified by economic research showing a rise in servant-class jobs, strong economic recovery for elite zip codes but not for working-class regions, and skyrocketing wage growth for the billionaire class at 15 times the rate of other Americans.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.

Census Says U.S. Income Inequality Grew ‘Significantly’ in 2018

 

(Bloomberg) -- Income inequality in America widened “significantly” last year, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report published Thursday.

A measure of inequality known as the Gini index rose to 0.485 from 0.482 in 2017, according to the bureau’s survey of household finances. The measure compares incomes at the top and bottom of the distribution, and a score of 0 is perfect equality.

The 2018 reading is the first to incorporate
the impact of President Donald Trump’s end-
2017 tax bill, which was reckoned by many
economists to be skewed in favor of the
wealthy.

But the distribution of income and wealth in the U.S. has been worsening for decades, making America the most unequal country in the developed world. The trend, which has persisted through recessions and recoveries, and under administrations of both parties, has put inequality at the center of U.S. politics.

Leading candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, including senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, are promising to rectify the tilt toward the rich with measures such as taxes on wealth or financial transactions.

Just five states -- California, Connecticut, Florida, Louisiana and New York, plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico -- had Gini indexes higher than the national level, while the reading was lower in 36 states.

 

 WHILE THE U.S. SQUANDERS HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS AND TROOPS TO DEFEND THE BORDERS OF MUSLIM DICTATORS WHO HATE OUR GUTS, MEXICO IS OVERRUN AMERICAN WITH DRUGS!

GRAPHIC: Gulf Cartel Gunmen Burn Rivals Alive in Mexico near Texas Border

https://www.breitbart.com/border/2019/12/08/graphic-gulf-cartel-gunmen-burn-rivals-alive-in-mexico-near-texas-border/

Point/Counterpoint: Should Mexican Cartels Be Designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations?

Washington, D.C (December 2, 2019) – The Center for Immigration Studies presents arguments for and against the Trump administration’s actions to designate some Mexican drug trafficking cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO).  An FTO designation triggers powerful American authorities to freeze financial assets, prosecute for activities that support terrorism, and bar entry into the country. CIS fellow Dan Cadman urges the designation of cartels as FTOs, arguing, “Nine dual-citizen U.S./Mexican Mormons were murdered recently in Mexico, U.S. diplomatic personnel have been brazenly attacked and U.S. enforcement agents murdered on the Mexican side when it suits cartel interests. In U.S. border states and major metropolitan areas, many drug-related murders are the direct result of struggles for control between cartels.” Cadman continues, “We must up our own game. Official designation brings with it a multiplicity of legal authorities and penalties that can make a difference in how the United States responds, in our own interest, to the struggle for control of Mexico.” CIS fellow Todd Bensman argues that the U.S. hold off designating Mexican Cartels as FTOs as the action could dilute “America's war on some 70 currently designated Islamic terrorist groups that aspire, emphatically unlike any of Mexico's cartels, to kill as many Americans as possible on American soil the present war on Jihadists.” He continues, “The sometimes shrill calls, with each new gun battle or atrocity, that Mexican cartels imminently threaten U.S. national security don't hold up under scrutiny, at least not without more evidence. If the U.S. government insists on adding a massive layer of new terrorists to existing U.S. counterterrorism systems, plans for how to resource it and allocate the greater burden among agencies, without taking from the war on terror, should be laid out first.” FTO designation is a powerful tool. So should the U.S. designate Mexico's major cartels as foreign terrorist organizations under Section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA)?  Section 219 provides that the secretary of state may designate a group as a FTO on finding that it engages in terrorist activity as defined at INA Section 212(a)(3) or terrorism as defined at 22 U.S.C. Section 2656f(d)(2). Does Mexican Cartel conduct meet the threshold definitions, including specifically as a threat to the national security of the United States?

Mexico Will Reject U.S. Designations of Cartels as Terrorists, Says AMLO

ILDEFONSO ORTIZ and BRANDON DARBY

Mexico’s president announced Monday that he will reject any designation of cartels as terrorist organizations by the U.S. government.

During his morning press conference, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) said he would not accept the U.S.’s potential designation of cartels as foreign terrorist organizations–which could enable direct actions in Mexico.

“We will never accept that, we are not ‘vendepatrias’ (nation sellers),” Lopez Obrador said.

The president’s statements come after the relatives of nine U.S. women and children who died in a cartel ambush in Sonora revealed they would be meeting with President Donald Trump. The family is expected to ask for some cartels to be labeled as terrorist organizations.

Last week, Tamaulipas Governor Francisco Cabeza de Vaca used the term “narco-terrorism” to refer to the brazen attacks on citizens of Nuevo Laredo by a faction of Los Zetas Cartel called Cartel Del Noreste. Cabeza de Vaca publicly called out Mexico City for past inaction in confronting Los Zetas.

Earlier this year, Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) filed legislation for the most violent cartels in Mexico to be labeled as a foreign terrorist organizations, a move that would limit cartel members’ abilities to travel and provide tools to better clamp down on financial transactions, Breitbart Texas reported.

On Monday morning, Lopez Obrador’s foreign relations minister Marcelo Ebrard called designations unnecessary and inconvenient, adding that the U.S. and Mexico have a healthy working relationship in fighting cartels. According to Ebrard, terrorist designations would give the U.S. the legal avenue to take direct action on cartels on Mexican soil.

Ildefonso Ortiz is an award-winning journalist with Breitbart Texas. He co-founded Breitbart Texas’ Cartel Chronicles project with Brandon Darby and senior Breitbart management. You can follow him on Twitter and on Facebook. He can be contacted at Iortiz@breitbart.com. 

Brandon Darby is the managing director and editor-in-chief of Breitbart Texas. He co-founded Breitbart Texas’ Cartel Chronicles project with Ildefonso Ortiz and senior Breitbart management. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook. He can be contacted at bdarby@breitbart.com.     

Enough Is Enough’: Josh Hawley Calls for Sanctions on Mexican Cartels

SEAN MORAN

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) said Wednesday that “enough is enough” and called on the U.S. government to sanction Mexican officials and cartel members complicit in trafficking meth and killing Americans.

Hawley called for harsh retribution against the Mexican cartels complicit in ambushing and murdering nine American women and children near the New Mexico border.

In the wake of the attack on Americans, as well as the Mexican cartels’ complicity in Missouri’s meth crisis, the Missouri conservative called for the U.S. government to sanction the cartel members who are “openly slaughtering American citizens.”

“With Mexico, enough is enough. US government should impose sanctions on Mexican officials, including freezing assets, who won’t confront cartels,” Hawley tweeted Wednesday. “Cartels are flooding MO [Missouri] w/ meth, trafficking children, & openly slaughtering American citizens. And Mexico looks the other way.”

Hawley said that just over the last 14 days, there had been over 40 drug overdoses coming from drugs across America’s southern border.

Hawley continued, “In SW Mo last two weeks alone, over 40 drug overdoses & multiple deaths from drugs coming across [the] southern border. Story is the same all over the state. Cartels increasingly call the shots in Mexico, and for our own security, we cannot allow this to continue.”

Josh Hawley

✔@HawleyMO

 · 6h

With Mexico, enough is enough. US government should impose sanctions on Mexican officials, including freezing assets, who won’t confront cartels. Cartels are flooding MO w/ meth, trafficking children, & openly slaughtering American citizens. And Mexico looks the other way

Josh Hawley

✔@HawleyMO

In SW Mo last two weeks alone, over 40 drug overdoses & multiple deaths from drugs coming across southern border. Story is the same all over the state. Cartels increasingly call the shots in Mexico, and for our own security, we cannot allow this to continue

556

8:48 AM - Nov 6, 2019

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Hawley spent much of his August recess traveling across rural Missouri, learning what matters to the average Missourian.

Josh Hawley

✔@HawleyMO

 · Aug 21, 2019

This AM I had the great privilege of meeting Brittany Tune, a nurse, a mother of two, a follower of God, and a remarkable woman. Born & raised in rural Shannon Co., she has raised two kids on her own while putting herself through nursing school & dedicating her life to others

Josh Hawley

✔@HawleyMO

Brittany says meth is hammering this community. She has many friends & family members who have been touched by this epidemic. She worries about what it means for her own kids, ages 15 & 10. It’s much worse now than when she was growing up, she says

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6:48 AM - Aug 21, 2019

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In an interview with Breitbart News in September, Hawley said that meth coming from Mexico is destroying local Missouri communities.

“Come with me to any town, any town in the state of Missouri of any size, and I will show you communities that are drowning in meth, drowning in it. It is literally killing people; it is destroying families it is destroying schools and whole communities,” he said.

“Missouri is a border state,” Hawley said, adding that “we have to got to secure the border to stop the meth” and “stop the flow of illegal immigration.”

Hawley’s remarks about the Mexican cartel attack on Americans mirrors that of President Donald Trump, who said Tuesday that the United States was ready for war against the drug cartels.

“This is the time for Mexico, with the help of the United States, to wage WAR on the drug cartels and wipe them off the face of the earth,” the president tweeted.

Trump has campaigned on cracking down on violence on the southern border as well as handling the drug cartels.

During an exclusive interview with Breitbart News, Trump said he is “very seriously” thinking of designating the drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs).

“It’s psychological, but it’s also economic,” Trump told Breitbart News in March. “As terrorists — as terrorist organizations, the answer is yes. They are.”

Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) told Breitbart News in May that he would back Trump’s potential designation of the Mexican cartels as FTOs and that seizing cartel leader El Chapo’s assets would build the wall and make the cartels pay for it. In a similar manner to Missouri, Daines told Breitbart News about how Montana has been ravaged by meth from Mexican cartels.

Daines said that by seizing “billions” of El Chapo’s assets, it “would absolutely fulfill President Trump’s promise to build the wall and make Mexico pay for it. In this case, it would be a Mexican cartel paying for it would be an excellent idea.”

Sean Moran is a congressional reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.

The architect of Mexico's war on cartels was just arrested in Texas and accused of drug trafficking and taking bribes

Business Insider•December 10, 2019

45 Comments

Genaro Garcia Luna Mexico

LUIS ACOSTA/AFP via Getty Images

·         Genaro Garcia Luna, who was Mexico's public-security secretary between 2006 and 2012, was arrested in Texas on Monday.

·         Garcia Luna, the architect of Mexico's campaign against organized crime in the late 2000s, is the latest Mexican official accused of corruption and involvement in drug trafficking.

·         Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

A former high-ranking Mexican security official who led the country's crackdown on organized crime in the mid-2000s was arrested in the US and been charged with drug-trafficking conspiracy and making false statements.

Genaro Garcia Luna, 51, was arrested in Dallas by US federal agents, according to the US district attorney for the Eastern District of New York, which said it plans to seek his removal to face charges in New York.

"Garcia Luna stands accused of taking millions of dollars in bribes from 'El Chapo' Guzman's Sinaloa Cartel while he controlled Mexico's Federal Police Force and was responsible for ensuring public safety in Mexico," US Attorney Richard P. Donoghue said in the release.

Garcia Luna faces three counts of conspiracy to import and distribute cocaine and a fourth count of making false statements with regard to an immigration naturalization application.

Garcia Luna began his career with Mexico's Center for National Security and Investigation in the late 1980s before moving to the federal police in the late 1990s. He was then head of Mexico's federal investigation agency, AFI, between 2001 and 2005 and secretary of public security, then a cabinet-level position in control of the federal police, between 2006 and 2012.

Genaro Garcia Luna Felipe Calderon Mexico

ALFREDO ESTRELLA/AFP/GettyImages

He was 38 when appointed to the latter position by then-President Felipe Calderon but already had nearly 20 years of experience in Mexico's security services, much of it spent tracking organized crime and drug trafficking.

"By his late 20s, he was considered something of a wunderkind," according to a 2008 New York Times profile.

"He really was the architect of Calderon's war on drugs," said Mike Vigil, former chief of international operations for the US Drug Enforcement Administration, who worked with Garcia Luna in Mexico in the 1990s.

That war comprised major military deployments inside the country and the kingpin strategy, which entailed targeting high-level cartel figures in an effort to weaken the cartels. This approach has been criticized for fostering more violence, both by state forces and fragmented cartels.

According to the release, Garcia Luna received millions of dollars in bribes from the Sinaloa cartel. In return, the release states, the cartel received safe passage for drug shipments, sensitive law-enforcement information about investigations targeting it, and information about rival cartels — all of which allowed it to move multiton quantities of drugs into the US.

Financial records obtained by the US government showed that by the time Garcia Luna relocated to the US in 2012, he had a personal fortune worth millions of dollars, according to the release, which said he is also accused of lying about those alleged criminal acts on an application for naturalization submitted in 2018.

'Another black eye for Mexico'

El Chapo Joaquin Guzman

Reuters

One detail in the release mirrors allegations made during the trial of Sinaloa cartel chief Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, who was convicted on drug trafficking and other charges in the Eastern District of New York in February.

"On two occasions, the cartel personally delivered bribe payments to Garcia Luna in briefcases containing between three and five million dollars," the release states.

During testimony in November 2018, Jesus "El Rey" Zambada — the youngest brother of Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada, who is considered Guzman's peer at the top of the Sinaloa cartel and now its de facto leader — said the cartel twice made multimillion-dollar payments to Garcia Luna.

A $3 million payment, which "El Rey" said was to Garcia Luna at a restaurant in Mexico City between 2005 and 2006, was to ensure he would pick a specific official as police chief in Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa state and the cartel's home turf.

"El Rey" said the other payment, between $3 million and $5 million, was in 2007 and was to make sure "he didn't interfere in the drug business" and that "El Mayo" was not arrested. Zambada also said that the Sinaloa cartel and its partners also pooled $50 million in protection money for Garcia Luna.

A press officer for the Eastern District of New York did not immediately respond when asked by email whether the charges unsealed Tuesday against Garcia Luna stemmed from allegations made during Guzman's trial.

At the time, Garcia Luna denied Zambada's claims, calling them a "lie, defamation and perjury." On Tuesday, Calderon said he had heard of Garcia Luna's arrest but was awaiting confirmation and further details, tweeting that his "position will always be in favor of justice and the law."

El Chapo Guzman home town

REUTERS/Roberto Armenta

Vigil, who was the DEA assistant country attache to Mexico during the 1990s, was skeptical of the allegations made during the Guzman trial and said he was "surprised" by the arrest on Tuesday.

"I worked with Genaro Garcia Luna," Vigil said. "We, DEA, had a very good working relationship with Genaro. At that time there were no allegations of corruption. There we coordinated investigations with them, and we never saw any evidence of compromise."

The allegations made during that trial seemed "less than credible," Vigil said, in large part because Guzman was arrested twice during the administration of President Enrique Peña Nieto, who followed Calderon into office in 2012.

But it was possible that a high-ranking Mexican official could obscure activities in one area from their work with the US in another area.

"In terms of what the US sees, [it's] very different than what occurs within the Mexican government, but through time if he were taking bribes, obviously some of those investigations, you would've known if they had been compromised," Vigil said. "But there's some areas that could be compartmentalized in terms of efforts by the Mexican government."

If convicted on the drug-conspiracy charge, Garcia Luna faces a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years and a maximum of life in jail.

"Today's arrest demonstrates our resolve to bring to justice those who help cartels inflict devastating harm on the United States and Mexico, regardless of the positions they held while committing their crimes." Donoghue, the US attorney, said in the release, thanking the DEA, the Department of Homeland Security Investigations, as well as police in New York City and New York state.

Regardless of the outcome of the case, it tarnishes a bilateral relationship in which cooperation against organized crime and drug trafficking has been a major component.

"I don't know what the evidence is against Genaro Garcia Luna," Vigil said Tuesday, "but it certainly is another black eye for Mexico."

Read the original article on Business Insider