Bernie’s Billionaire: How the Richest Man in Hawaii Funds Bernie’s PR and Opposition Research
Bernie’s Billionaire: How the Richest Man in Hawaii Funds Bernie’s PR and Opposition Research
And what does the Soros ally expect in return?
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
If there’s one thing everyone knows about Senator Bernie Sanders, it’s that he hates billionaires.
Now a newly minted millionaire and member of the 1%, Sanders reserves all his old hatred for millionaires, exclusively for billionaires.
Billionaires shouldn’t exist, he insists.
And while Bernie virtue signals about not having a PAC or taking money from billionaires, a big chunk of his media operation is financed by Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, and the richest man in Hawaii.
Omidyar, a Franco-Persian who lives in Hawaii, pledged $250 million to First Look Media. FLM’s signature project is The Intercept, a radical leftist, anti-American, and anti-Semitic media hate site.
And The Intercept has a clear and definite candidate in the 2020 race.
The Intercept’s election coverage is filled with hysterical Sanders cheerleading, recent samples include, "The Power of Solidarity Is How Sanders Will Beat Trump", "At Iowa Debate, Bernie Sanders's Biggest Opponent Was CNN", and "Bernie Sanders's Secret to Attracting Latino Support."
But, more significantly, The Intercept acts as the opposition research arm of the Sanders campaign.
Its stories about Bernie Sanders are universally gushing, but its stories about the other candidates are undisguised hit pieces, passed off as journalistic investigations that are recirculated by the media. That includes recent stories about Bloomberg’s plagiarized campaign material and prison labor.
The technical term for this is opposition research.
The difference between journalism and opposition research is motive. Journalists follow a story where it goes. Opposition researchers are out to help a particular campaign win by damaging their opponents.
And there’s no ambiguity about what motivates The Intercept’s hit pieces about politicians like Buttigieg that the tech billionaire’s pet radical site had never bothered slinging mud at until now.
This opposition research financed by a tech tycoon who is the wealthiest man in Hawaii is then retweeted by the Sanders campaign account, staffers, surrogates, allies and assorted Bernie Bros.
Beyond the assembly line of hit pieces on Buttigieg, "Pete Buttigieg's Mostly White Mayoral Cabinet", "Pete Buttigieg Dodges Questions on Black Marijuana Arrests", and "Buttigieg Used Mechanical Turk Workers for Polling", or Klobuchar, "Amy Klobuchar Defended Prosecutions of Khat Possession", "Sen. Amy Klobuchar Sought Earmark for Anti-LGBT Ministry", and "2020 Candidate Amy Klobuchar Pushes Bill to Fund Police", is The Intercept’s role as the conspiracy theory spin room for the Sanders campaign.
The Intercept hysterically pushed claims that Sanders was winning in Iowa, and when victory failed to materialize turned to spreading conspiracy theories meant to prop up the lie that Sanders had won. It’s now already preparing the ground for a brokered convention with multiple stories attacking the legitimacy of a process that risks denying its chosen candidate the 2020 Democrat nomination.
Billionaires funding political sites that support their views is just politics. But the closeness between the Sanders campaign and a billionaire’s hate site that supplies him with PR and opposition research ought to be discussed, especially in light of the millionaire socialist’s posturing about his hatred for billionaires.
The Intercept doesn’t just happen to supply content that the Sanders campaign finds useful.
Briahna Joy Gray, Bernie's National Press Secretary, was the senior politics editor for The Intercept. Gray was hired by the tech billionaire's site after becoming a vocal supporter of Sanders in 2016. When the campaign officially hired her, she stated that, "It was the progressive vision embodied by Sanders' 2016 campaign that sparked my writing career." Her final article was, “Bernie Sanders Asks the Right Question on Reparations.” Next month, she was officially working for the Bernie Sanders campaign.
The Intercept has a very clear political identity. But it’s also the media arm of a movement bent on electing and promoting lefty candidates. And nobody asks who is financing all of it and why.
Pierre Omidyar, the richest man in Hawaii, has spent a fortune on The Intercept. He’s also a major donor to Soros’ Open Society Foundation. Not coincidentally, The Intercept has vigorously defended Soros. The site, whose hatred of the Jewish State frequently verges on anti-Semitism, and whose co-founding editor, Glenn Greenwald, had defended Hamas and Hezbollah, accused Soros critics of anti-Semitism.
At a time when digital media is running out of money, The Intercept is awash in the stuff while being extremely unprofitable. With only $156,857 in revenues, Greenwald was making over half-a-million a year. Nearly $10 million was spent on salaries in one year.
These are not normal numbers in journalism, but they are for influence operations.
One obvious difference between journalism and an influence operation is cyberwarfare. Greenwald was recently charged with cybercrimes in Brazil for allegedly coordinating with hackers to undermine an investigation into the corruption by the country’s former left-wing government. The Intercept has made use of stolen emails and messages to target political opponents, including Elliott Broidy, the former RNC finance chair and Trump ally, whose emails were hacked by Qatari agents.
The Qatari connection is not incidental. The Intercept acts as a mouthpiece for the wealthy terror state.
Beyond its anti-American and anti-Israel politics, The Intercept has very transparently waged an informational campaign against the UAE on behalf of Qatar backed by hacks and cyberwarfare.
Headlines like, "UAE Ambassador Yousef al Otaiba's Sordid Double Life", "Leaked Document Outlines Plan for UAE Financial War", and ironically, "Think Tanks Take UAE Money To Push Dictatorship's Agenda", make that all too plain. The Otaiba story was, predictably, the work of Qatari hackers.
The Intercept's Qatari stories read like straightforward regime propaganda, "Leaked Documents Expose Stunning Plan to Wage Financial War on Qatar - And Steal the World Cup", "At Neocon Think Tank Steve Bannon Bashes Qatar and Praises Saudi Arabia", and, "Saudi Arabia Planned to Invade Qatar Last Summer, Rex Tillerson's Efforts to Stop It May Have Cost Him His Job."
This sort of stuff makes RT, Xinhau and even Al Jazeera seem subtle and understated. Foreign influence operation sites have been forced to register as foreign agents even when they were more discreet.
Why was The Intercept pushing foreign influence operations in this country? Ask its funder.
Pierre Omidyar provided $87 million of The Intercept’s $90 million in funding. Despite the claims of editorial independence, of which there is no sign in the party line publication, it’s his baby.
And that amounts to a media shop for the Sanders campaign that’s worth tens of millions of dollars.
The Sanders campaign shares a media shop with Qatar. It’s funded by a tech tycoon who has spent a good deal of money to influence political outcomes in this country, using the façade of journalism.
These are question worth asking. It’s a shame that no one is.
Bernie Sanders claims that billionaires have too much influence over this country’s political system. Yet he hired the political director of a billionaire’s pet political organization and his accounts tweet opposition research from that same organization. And, just as with his houses and his 1% status, he can’t have it both ways. If he really thinks billionaires have too much power, he should disavow The Intercept.
But he can’t and won’t.
The official Sanders campaign, with its shrill claims that it is financed by small donors, is a front. Not only are those small donors coming from the wealthiest zip codes in America, but the campaign is the tip of a much larger political iceberg of non-profits that form a far bigger movement than the campaign.
Bernie Sanders doesn’t need a PAC. He doesn’t need to do fundraisers with billionaires. The millionaire socialist benefits from a much more sophisticated infrastructure that actively promotes his campaign while targeting his rivals. Its operating cost far outweighs the PAC spending of other candidates.
The Intercept and the shadowy motives of its backer is one example. It is far from alone. And the people with the money to fund these massive networks, like Omidyar or Soros, have to be billionaires.
Nobody asks Bernie about them. No one talks about what they might want from his administration.
They should.
Biden Rising
Biden Rising
Will he be able to save his party from its communist odyssey?
Former Vice President Joe Biden had a superlative Super Tuesday. Although his closest challenger Bernie Sanders won in California, the largest state up for grabs on Tuesday, Joe Biden ran the table virtually everywhere else in the country. He won in the Northeast with victories in Massachusetts and Maine. He won the second largest state contested on Tuesday, Texas. He won Minnesota in the upper Midwest and swept across the South in Virginia, Alabama, North Carolina, Tennessee and Arkansas. He also picked up Oklahoma. In addition to California, Sanders won his home state of Vermont, as well as Utah and Colorado. Sanders, the front runner going into Super Tuesday, is now behind Biden in the delegate tally – 566 to 501 as of the writing of this article. With Mike Bloomberg’s decision to drop out of the race and endorse Biden, following Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg who dropped their candidacies and endorsed Biden before Super Tuesday, Biden is now in a commanding position as the sole survivor navigating the so-called “center” lane.
Bernie Sanders significantly underperformed. Last minute undecided voters went in large numbers for Joe Biden, including in delegate-rich Texas where Sanders had been leading in recent polling. Minnesota, known for its ultra-liberal streak, became Joe Biden country after its home state Senator Amy Klobuchar dropped out of the race. Elizabeth Warren's candidacy is on life support after her humiliating third place finish in her home state of Massachusetts. She is reportedly reassessing her next steps.
On the surface at least, it looks like the socialist wing of the Democratic Party took it on the chin. A National Review column called Tuesday night’s results “the biggest setback for socialism since the dissolution of the Soviet Union.” The more “moderate” wing coalesced in support of Joe Biden, who pulled together a broad coalition of African Americans and other centrist voters older than 45. Bernie Sanders was unable to broaden his own coalition beyond the young voters, Latinos and leftists who want to fundamentally transform America’s economic and political systems from the bottom up.
However, before prematurely writing an obituary for socialism in this country, consider this. While socialism’s messengers have faltered, their radical message remains very much alive. Bernie Sanders, along with Elizabeth Warren, have moved ideas considered too far out for prime time just four years ago to the mainstream of today’s Democratic Party.
For example, Democrat-Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez popularized an ambitious Green New Deal plan that would drastically remake the U.S. economy by transitioning the United States to a 100 percent renewable energy system by 2035. Joe Biden’s website states that “Biden believes the Green New Deal is a crucial framework for meeting the climate challenges we face.” He would take 15 more years than Rep. Ocasio-Cortez to reach the same objective of ensuring that “the U.S. achieves a 100% clean energy economy and reaches net-zero emissions.” Biden would also recommit the United States to the disastrous jobs-killing Paris Agreement on climate change, under which China committed to lax greenhouse gas emission targets by 2030 deemed “highly insufficient” by the Climate Action Tracker.
Joe Biden is pushing for a roadmap to citizenship for nearly 11 million of those he calls “undocumented” or “unauthorized” immigrants – i.e., illegal aliens. Mike Bloomberg agreed with this sentiment, by the way. Here is what this ex presidential candidate-turned-Biden supporter said when he was still running for president: “One of the things in immigration is you’ve got to do some things quickly in immigration. Stop this craziness with 11 million people living in a shadow. You’ve got to give them a clear path to citizenship. You’ve got to staple a green card on every degree when they get out of college…”
Joe Biden, it should be remembered, raised his hand in the affirmative during the first Democrat primary debate last summer when asked whether his government health plan would provide coverage for “undocumented immigrants." Democratic-Socialist Sanders, as well as other debate participants in the so-called center lane such as Pete Buttigieg, also raised their hands. Biden may not yet embrace the Sanders version of “Medicare for All,” but he is willing to use taxpayers’ money to subsidize health care for illegal aliens. As President Trump tweeted at the time, “How about taking care of American Citizens first!?”
Biden’s alternative to the Sanders “Medicare for All” program, in which Biden offers massive new subsidies and a government-run “public option” plan, would still move the needle in the direction of much further government involvement in the health care industry. Its estimated cost is at least $750 billion over 10 years. Biden’s public option plan would cover abortion. At the same time, Biden is opposed to even modest incremental pro-life laws such as clinic regulations, waiting periods, and parental involvement laws, just like the extremists in his party.
Meagan Day, a writer for the socialist magazine Jacobin, and Bhaskar Sunkara, the socialist magazine’s editor, wrote an opinion column for the New York Times, entitled “Modern Day Debtors’ Prisons.” They wrote in support of Bernie Sanders’ call for an end to cash bail across the country. The authors observed that there was evidence of “the idea’s transformation from activist demand to mainstream policy proposal.” Joe Biden has proved their point. “Cash bail is the modern-day debtors’ prison,” Biden’s website says.
Joe Biden does not espouse communist ideology like Bernie Sanders does, and Biden has proclaimed that he’s “not the socialist” in the race. It is true that Biden does believe in some form of a capitalist system, although with far more burdensome government regulations and higher taxes. But the Democratic Party’s establishment “savior” will either lead, or be led by the nose, in the direction of the ideological base of today’s Democratic Party, which is built around socialist ideas including those he has already embraced.
Biden was enriching more family members than just Hunter
NY Post: ‘Profiles in Corruption’ Reveals How the ‘Biden Five’ Made Millions Off Joe Biden Connections
Biden was enriching more family members than just Hunter
On January 21, Peter Schweizer’s newest book, Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite, will be released. It should sell well given that pre-sales have already put it at #14 on the Amazon charts. As a preview of coming attractions, the New York Post published an extract from the book detailing “How five members of Joe Biden’s family got rich through his connections.”
According to Schwiezer, Biden was fibbing when he announced last year, “I never talked with my son or my brother or anyone else — even distant family — about their business interests. Period.” The truth is that Biden’s business conversations not only benefited Hunter, they also benefitted Biden’s son-in-law Howard, his brothers James and Frank, and his sister Valerie. Loose lips enrich sibs.
James Biden was a welcome friend in the Obama White House. “Sometimes, James’ White House visits dovetailed with his overseas business dealings, and his commercial opportunities flourished during his brother’s tenure as vice president.” For example, just three weeks after Biden’s longtime friend Kevin Justice, president of HillStone International, a subsidiary of a huge construction management firm, visited the White House, HillStone announced that James Biden was its new Executive Vice President.
No one cared that Biden had no experience in construction management. What might have mattered was that, six months later, the firm got a contract to build 100,000 homes in Iraq, plus a $22 million U.S. federal government contract to manage a State Department project. An executive in the parent company later told investors it helped to have the vice president’s brother as a partner.
The book excerpt also tells how Hunter -- a man known for drugs, alcohol, taking up with his brother’s widow, fathering a child on a stripper, dumping the stripper and his child, and marrying another woman –made bank in Ukraine thanks to his father’s connections. It’s a complicated, unsavory story, but the bottom line is the same as for James: Hunter got an immensely profitable job for which he was completely unqualified because Biden allowed Hunter to piggyback off of Biden’s connections.
When it came to his kids, Biden didn’t stop with Hunter. His daughter, Ashley, married a doctor, Howard Krein. Howard and his siblings open StartUp Health, an investment consultancy firm. In 2011, when the firm had just opened, two of the firm’s executives were invited to meet with Obama and Biden. The next day, this barely hatched entity hit the big time:
The following day the new company would be featured at a large health care tech conference being run by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and StartUp Health executives became regular visitors to the White House, attending events in 2011, 2014 and 2015.
How did StartUp Health gain access to the highest levels of power in Washington? There was nothing particularly unique about the company, but for this:
The chief medical officer of StartUp Health, Howard Krein, is married to Joe Biden’s youngest daughter, Ashley.
For years after, including his years in the White House, Biden made a point of promoting the company.
James also wasn’t the only one of his siblings Biden helped. In March 2009, Biden went to Costa Rica. The last time a high-ranking American official went to Costa Rica was in 1997 when Bill Clinton traveled there. Biden’s trip may not have been a coincidence:
Joe Biden’s trip to Costa Rica came at a fortuitous time for his brother Frank, who was busy working deals in the country. Just months after Vice President Biden’s visit, in August, Costa Rica News announced a new multilateral partnership “to reform Real Estate in Latin America” between Frank Biden, a developer named Craig Williamson, and the Guanacaste Country Club, a newly planned resort.
[snip]
As it happened, Joe Biden had been asked by President Obama to act as the Administration’s point man in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Frank’s vision for a country club in Costa Rica received support from the highest levels of the Costa Rican government— despite his lack of experience in building such developments. He met with the Costa Rican ministers of education and energy and environment, as well as the president of the country.
The same amazing coincidences played out with Biden’s sister Valerie, to whom his campaigns ended up paying $2.5 million in consulting fees in 2008 alone.
Considering that the New York Post article is merely a short excerpt from Peter Schweizer’s Profiles in Corruption, readers can expect to be exposed to a massive, but readable data dump, explaining how taxpayer funds and political connections have been funding the lifestyles of the rich and progressive.
18 Jan 20202,346
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Five family members of former Vice President Joe Biden have scored “sweetheart deals” and “favorable access” thanks to their connection to the 2020 Democrat White House candidate, reveals the forthcoming investigative book Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite by five-time New York Times bestselling author and Breitbart News senior contributor Peter Schweizer.
The Biden family’s apparent self-enrichment involves no less than five family members: Joe’s son Hunter, son-in-law Howard, brothers James and Frank, and sister Valerie.
When this subject came up in 2019, Biden declared, “I never talked with my son or my brother or anyone else — even distant family — about their business interests. Period.”
As we will see, this is far from the case…
Joe Biden’s younger brother, James, has been an integral part of the family political machine from the earliest days when he served as finance chair of Joe’s 1972 Senate campaign, and the two have remained quite close. After Joe joined the U.S. Senate, he would bring his brother James along on congressional delegation trips to places like Ireland, Rome and Africa.
When Joe became vice president, James was a welcomed guest at the White House, securing invitations to such important functions as a state dinner in 2011 and the visit of Pope Francis in 2015. Sometimes, James’ White House visits dovetailed with his overseas business dealings, and his commercial opportunities flourished during his brother’s tenure as vice president.
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