AMY KLOBUHAR TAKES HER CASE TO NEVADA - "Klobuchar’s career as a senator has received blessings from large corporations. According to opensecrets.org, from 2013 to 2017, her campaign and PAC committee received donations from the likes of Facebook, Target, Comcast, Best Buy, Morgan Stanley, Alphabet Inc. (the owner of Google), Amazon.com, General Motors, Ford and more."

Those accomplishments, however, only underscore Klobuchar’s selective approach to exercising political power, as Profiles in Corruption exposes.

Amy Klobuchar Makes Her Case to Nevada Democrats in Late-Night Ramble

Joel Pollak / Breitbart News

JOEL B. POLLAK

13 Feb 2020333

3:05

LAS VEGAS, Nevada — Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) addressed a late town hall meeting Thursday night, speaking to a crowd of over 200 supporters and curious Democratic presidential primary voters.

The Minnesota Senator has not spent very much time in the state, but her campaign announced earlier this week that it was opening two field offices and hiring 50 local staff in the wake of her strong third-place finish in the New Hampshire primary.

On Thursday night, Klobuchar did not deviate too far from her familiar talking points and anecdotes, familiar by now from the debate stage and the campaign trail — though she did modify a few lines for the Vegas setting, denouncing President Donald Trump for treating ordinary Americans like “poker chips.”

Her plain-spoken style is exactly what her supporters like about her.

“She’s got common sense,” said Kim, who moved to Nevada from Michigan with her husband to retire.

“She’ll end the chaos and calm things down,” she added.

Tony, an African American event planner who told Breitbart News he was still undecided, said he was looking for “somebody real, somebody different, somebody who’s going to do something for the people.”

“We’ve had the same old white men in office running the country for hundreds of years,” he said.

He said he had been interested in Andrew Yang, the businessman who dropped out of the race after poor results in the New Hampshire primary last week and the Iowa caucuses earlier this month.

Asked whether he would ever support Trump, amidst the president’s push for black support, he said no.

“Trump is charismatic,” Tony said, “but all he did was shake things up.”

Another undecided voter told Breitbart News that he had supported Joe Biden, but was considering alternatives now that “it doesn’t look like Biden will make it.”

Klobuchar promised the voters in the room that she would produce results, and bring Republicans and Democrats together to achieve common goals.

As if to demonstrate her point, she rattled off a detailed explanation of her key policies. However, the jet-lagged Senator — who just arrived in the state from Washington, DC, and had spoken to a Latino voters’ forum earlier in the evening — seemed to lose herself in the details.

After more than half an hour, some people began heading for the exits. But dozens more stayed and waited patiently to take selfies with the candidate.

And though it was nearly 2:00 a.m. in her head, Klobuchar kept smiling.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

Amy Klobuchar: The favorite Democrat of Senate Republicans

Senator Amy Klobuchar’s presidential campaign exemplifies the anti-working class and right-wing politics of the Democratic Party. Her campaign platform addresses almost none of the pressing issues confronting millions of workers and youth in the United States. She is one of a group of candidates offering themselves as “center-left” substitutes in case the campaign of former Vice President Joe Biden should fall apart.

Like a company offering multiple products to saturate the market, often made using the same ingredients in minutely different proportions, she is one of many right-wing candidates fielded by the Democratic Party who is differentiated from the rest by a slightly varied hue of alleged progressive politics.

Klobuchar announcing her 2020 presidential campaign in Boom Island Park in Minneapolis, Minnesota on February 10, 2019. (Credit: Lorie Shaull)

In some ways, Klobuchar seems a candidate prepared in the laboratory to meet the specific requirements of the 2020 campaign: years of experience in the US Senate, check; background as a tough law-and-order prosecutor, check; female, check; visibly younger than Biden and Trump, check; represents a state in the Midwest, the key battleground of 2016 and likely of 2020, check. And one might add: proven defender of corporate America and US imperialism, check, check, check.

Corporate lawyer and defender of police 

violence

Born on May 25, 1960 in Plymouth, Minnesota, Klobuchar attended Yale University as an undergraduate. She was a member of the Yale College Democrats and the Feminist Caucus. While still an undergraduate, Klobuchar interned in the presidential campaign of Walter Mondale, former vice president and former Minnesota senator, who would go on to lose to Ronald Reagan in the 1984 presidential election.

After Yale, she attended the University of Chicago Law School, graduating in 1985 and becoming a corporate lawyer. She was a partner at the Minnesota law firms Dorsey & Whitney and Gray Plant Mooty, specializing in telecommunications law.

In 1994, Klobuchar first ran for Hennepin County Attorney in Minnesota but quit the race to support incumbent Michael Freeman. After Freeman stepped aside in 1998 to run for governor, Klobuchar ran again and won, narrowly defeating Sheryl Ramstad Hvass, making her the chief prosecutor in the largest county in Minnesota, including the city of Minneapolis, with a population of more than 1.5 million.

As county attorney, Klobuchar oversaw the 

systematic cover-up of police murders and 

violence. During her approximate tenure as county

attorney, the city of Minneapolis paid out $4.8 

million in legal settlement fees for 122 police 

misconduct incidents. Meanwhile, during this 

same period, local police and Hennepin County 

sheriffs killed 29 people.

Klobuchar did not once file criminal charges against police for misconduct, even when they killed people. Instead, she put such cases for decision by a grand jury, a process which was heavily criticized for its secrecy and for having the reputation of allowing testimonies in favor of police.

Tahisha Williams Brewer, whose 14-year-old son was killed by Minnesota police in 2004, wrote to Klobuchar at the time, “The grand jury is a way of hiding that the prosecutor is not giving the full information of guilt to the grand jury. I want this process out in the open, where everyone can observe it and make sure that it is fair to my son.”

Minneapolis police union leaders backed her candidacy for Hennepin County Attorney in both 1998 and 2002, when the Republican Party tacitly supported her as well, failing to field a candidate to challenge her reelection.

A friend to Republicans in the US Senate

In 2006, Klobuchar won election to the United State Senate, running as a member of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, Minnesota’s affiliate of the Democratic Party. As in 1998, she filled a vacancy left when a Democratic incumbent dropped out to run for governor, in this case, multi-millionaire Mark Dayton. She was reelected easily in both 2012 and 2018.

As a senator, Klobuchar has been identified as a “middle of the road” Democrat, that is, one who combined right-wing Democratic Party positions with excursions into bipartisanship, boasting of her ability to work closely with Republicans in Washington, both in the Senate itself and when the White House was in Republican hands.

Former President George W. Bush with Klobuchar in 2007. (Credit: White House)

This has won her a certain recognition as the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate with the most support among Republican leaders. A report on Politico.com after she announced her candidacy in February carried the headline, “Republicans gush over Klobuchar.”

It began: “Amy Klobuchar has an unusual constituency behind her as she launches her run for president: Senate Republicans … numerous Republicans are raving about Klobuchar—her personality, her respect for the other party, even her competitiveness in a general election.” The article went on to observe, “a dozen GOP senators were so effusive in interviews this month that some worried they might damage her candidacy.”

Conservative columnist George Will raved that Klobuchar was “the person perhaps best equipped to send the current president packing.” The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal agreed, arguing that because Klobuchar “hasn’t parroted lefty slogans … She may be the Democrat best able to beat Mr. Trump.”

Klobuchar actively promotes the anti-Russia hysteria which the Democratic Party has promulgated since the election of Trump. She once told ABC News, “You cannot compare any leaders in our country to what Vladimir Putin has done. This is a man and a regime that has taken down a passenger plane in Ukraine, killing hundreds of people … This is a regime that, we believe—17 intelligence agencies in our own country have said—has tried to influence our own election. I don’t think there’s any comparison.”

She backed investigating social media websites like Facebook on the pretense they swayed the 2016 US presidential elections in favor of Trump via Russian interference, telling the New York Times, “We need to know if Facebook, or any entity affiliated with or hired by Facebook, ever used any of the vast financial and data resources available to them to retaliate against their critics, including elected officials who were scrutinizing them.”

In June, Klobuchar blamed Russia on Twitter for online racist attacks against presidential candidate Kamala Harris. She tweeted, “These troll-fueled racist attacks on Senator @KamalaHarris are unacceptable. We are better than this (Russia is not) and stand united against this type of vile behavior.” Such an accusation implying Russia was responsible was made without the slightest shred of evidence and made to intentionally confound and whip up support to her campaign among right-wing elements. Referencing her tweet, a CNN anchorman asked her if she believed Russia was behind the attacks, Klobuchar responded she had “no idea.”

Klobuchar’s career as a senator has received 

blessings from large corporations. According to 

opensecrets.org, from 2013 to 2017, her campaign 

and PAC committee received donations from the 

likes of Facebook, Target, Comcast, Best Buy, 

Morgan Stanley, Alphabet Inc. (the owner of 

Google), Amazon.com, General Motors, Ford and 

more.

For the same period, the top contributors to her campaign and PAC committee were: Delta Air Lines at $85,314; her former law firm Dorsey & Whitney at $65,435; and Walt Disney Co. at $64,081.

A banal, right-wing presidential campaign

Klobuchar announced her candidacy for president in February 2019. In words presumably prepared in advance, she declared, “On a cold February day in Minneapolis on the mighty Mississippi River, with thousands of friends and supporters at my side I announced that I’m running for President of the United States. As I said that day in our nation’s heartland, we must heal the heart of our democracy and renew our commitment to the common good.”

Such forgettable words express the overall banality of her presidential campaign. A reading of her presidential campaign website says almost nothing significant. The cut and pasted stances fail to address the growing problems and struggles of workers in the United States.

Klobuchar with former Republican Senator John McCain and current Republican Senator Lindsey Graham. (Credit: Ernests Dinka)

But of what little is said, along with her history as senator, should be taken as a warning. For Klobuchar, the “common good” amounts to her nationalistic, pro-war agenda. Just two lines are devoted to the subject of foreign politics on her campaign website, one of which states Klobuchar “would invest in diplomacy and rebuild the State Department and modernize our military to stay one step ahead of China and Russia, including with serious investments in cybersecurity.”

But this says plenty. Klobuchar’s call to 

“modernize” a military whose budget already 

exceeds the next eight countries combined, would 

mean further attacks on the working class by way 

of slashing support programs to funnel more 

money into the military. To stay “one step ahead of China and Russia,” both nuclear-armed countries, implies Klobuchar fully supports the continued amassing and building of nuclear weapons.

Klobuchar’s voting record for military budgets is a consistent yes. She repeatedly voted in favor of continued funding for both wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2011, she supported the bloody intervention in Libya which left the country in ruins. This year, she supported the attempted coup in Venezuela by the Trump administration.

Recently, she voted against the new federal fiscal budget beginning October 1 that includes a record $738 billion for the military. The hawkish Klobuchar has not been reformed. Her “no” vote was made knowing full well the budget would pass regardless. It was a cynical attempt to distance herself from the militaristic policies of the Trump administration.

Klobuchar espouses the nationalistic politics of the Democratic Party and has fervently attacked China in an attempt to blame Chinese workers for the deepening impoverishment affecting American workers. In a 2017 letter to Trump, Klobuchar stated, “You have consistently reaffirmed your commitment to supporting steelworker jobs, and Chinese steel dumping is a major contributor to American manufacturing job loss.”

On domestic issues, Klobuchar has been careful to present herself as a “moderate,” opposed to the supposed extremes represented by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren—who themselves are limited entirely to the framework of the capitalist profit system.

As a Washington Post report in May put it, “The senator has been willing to say no to some of the purity tests being pushed by far-left activists. Klobuchar has expressed skepticism of packing the Supreme Court, for example, and she has said that some of her rivals who are promising free university tuition and college-debt forgiveness are not being straight with voters. On health care, Klobuchar endorses a public option but stops short of Medicare-for-all.”

On immigration, her campaign website states, 

“Amy supports a comprehensive immigration 

reform bill that includes the DREAM Act, border 

security and an accountable pathway to earned 

citizenship.”

Klobuchar surrounded by the Minnesota National Guard in Iraq. (Credit: Office of Amy Klobuchar)

With this generic right-wing profile, and her bland campaign, it is not a surprise that Klobuchar is running ninth or tenth in the polls and other measures of support for the Democratic presidential nomination. She participated in the first two debates without notable impact, and has met the slightly higher requirements to qualify for the third debate next month in Houston.

Minnesota is the state which supplied much of the leadership of the Democratic Party in the second half of the 20th century, including three senators who were major presidential candidates, two of them becoming vice president—Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale—and the third playing a key role in ousting a sitting president—Eugene McCarthy.

Humphrey, McCarthy and Mondale all represented the Democratic Party during the period when it was still associated with a program of limited social reform and improved living standards for working people, although Mondale, as vice president under Jimmy Carter, was part of a Democratic administration that broke with that tradition, inaugurating the steady shift to the right by the Democrats over the next four decades.

Some 35 years after Mondale went down to a landslide defeat to Republican Ronald Reagan, the current Minnesotan seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, Amy Klobuchar, is closer politically to Reagan than to the liberal politics of the Minnesota Democratic Party in its heyday.

 Amy Klobuchar, endorsed by New York Times, denounced for railroading black teenager to prison for life

3 February 2020

Amy Klobuchar is the senior US senator from Minnesota and a candidate for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, having received the endorsement in January of the New York Times (along with Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts).

The Times praised Klobuchar as someone “with an empathy that connects to voters’ lived experiences, especially in the middle of the country.” The newspaper has relentlessly promoted identity politics, an obvious factor in its endorsement of the two female candidates.

In fact, like Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris and, for that matter, Warren herself, Klobuchar personifies the manner in which gender and racial politics provides a phony “progressive” veneer to the malicious ambitions of middle class reactionaries of all colors, ethnicities, genders, and sexual orientations.

Amy Klobuchar speaking in Iowa [Credit: Gage Skidmore]

Various polls currently place Klobuchar fifth behind Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, and Warren in the Democratic primary race, but she has enjoyed a certain “surge” recently, the product of considerable promotion by the US media. As a result, some surveys put her in third place in Iowa on the eve of that state’s Democratic Party caucuses on Monday.

Now, a well-researched Associated Press (AP) story suggests that Klobuchar used the railroading of a black teenager, Myon Burrell, to prison for life as a springboard for her political career. Klobuchar was then the prosecutor in Hennepin County, which includes Minneapolis.

Various organizations, including the Minneapolis NAACP, the Racial Justice Network, Black Lives Matter Twin Cities, and Communities United Against Police Brutality, have called for Klobuchar to suspend her campaign for president.

In themselves, the allegations concerning Klobuchar are not astonishing. The Democratic Party teems with former prosecutors, CIA agents and military officers, enemies of the working class and the oppressed at home and abroad.

But there is something special and appropriate about the exposure and possible downfall of the wretched Klobuchar, recently described by the Times, in its inimical pompous jargon of deceit and dishonesty, as “the very definition of Midwestern charisma, grit and sticktoitiveness.”

Klobuchar has made the death of Tyesha Edwards, an 11-year-old girl killed by a stray bullet in 2002, and the subsequent conviction of Burrell, central to her campaign, proving supposedly both her toughness on crime and her sensitivity to the African American community and the problem of gun violence.

In regard to the Edwards-Burrell case, the AP explains that it went through more than 1,000 pages of police records, court transcripts and other documents, and interviewed dozens of inmates, witnesses, and family members.

Summing up, the AP notes that the case relied heavily “on a teen rival of Burrell’s who gave conflicting accounts when identifying the shooter, who was largely obscured behind a wall 120 feet away.” With no other eyewitnesses, the story continues, “police turned to multiple jailhouse snitches. Some have since recanted, saying they were coached or coerced. Others were given reduced time, raising questions about their credibility. And the lead homicide detective offered ‘major dollars’ for names, even if it was hearsay.”

The AP goes on: “There was no gun, fingerprints, or DNA. Alibis were never seriously pursued. Key evidence has gone missing or was never obtained, including a convenience store surveillance tape that Burrell and others say would have cleared him.” Burrell, now 33, has rejected all plea deals and insisted on his innocence.

A co-defendant, Ike Tyson, insists he was the triggerman: “I already shot an innocent girl,” said Tyson, serving a 45-year sentence. “Now an innocent guy—at the time he was a kid—is locked up for something he didn’t do. So, it’s like I’m carrying two burdens.”

To be blunt, the conviction and jailing of Burrell was a scandalous state frame-up, organized by the police and the prosecutors, including, centrally, Klobuchar.

Adding insult to injury, Klobuchar has since attempted to reap political gain out of the destruction of Burrell and his family. At the Democratic Party candidates’ debate in Houston in September, Klobuchar bragged about finding and putting in jail “the killer of a little girl named Tyesha Edwards who was doing her homework at her kitchen table and was shot through the window.” Zak Cheney-Rice in New York magazine suggested that Klobuchar in advertising Burrell’s case “as a special victory for black safety in Minneapolis … plumbs new depths.”

Both Burrell’s father, Michael Toussaint, and Tyesha Edwards’ stepfather, Leonard Winborn, see through Myon Burrell’s railroading. Toussaint expressed sympathy for Tyesha: “She didn't deserve to die … This is a child, studying at her table.” But he also wanted justice for his son, “a young man, just 16 years old ... convicted of a case that he didn't do.”

Explaining why he and others were demanding that Klobuchar suspend her presidential effort, Toussaint argued that “Amy used my son’s case” in her campaign. Toussaint said Klobuchar wanted a political advantage.

Winborn told the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder: “If that man [Burrell] hasn’t done nothing, then he doesn’t need to be in there at all … Whatever happens, I would never want to see somebody do some time for somebody else’s wrongdoing.”

Perceptively, Winborn also pointed to prosecutor Klobuchar’s political ambitions at the time: “Looking at it right now, it was an elevation thing … I know all the players. I think my family got hoodwinked.”

One publication notes that Klobuchar “is the most unapologetic hawk of the senators in the [Democratic Party] race.” It adds: “She has voted for all but one, or 95 percent, of the military spending bills since 2013… Klobuchar supported the US-NATO-led regime change war in Libya in 2011, and her public statements suggest that her main condition for the US use of military force anywhere is that US allies also take part, as in Libya … Klobuchar received $17,704 in ‘defense’ industry contributions for her 2018 reelection campaign.”

The Minnesota senator is a slavish supporter of Israeli violence against the Palestinians and an eager participant in the McCarthyite anti-Russia campaign, being one of six Democratic senators who introduced legislation in 2017 that would have created an independent counsel with the ability to probe potential Russian cyber attacks on political systems and investigate efforts by Russians to “interfere” in American elections.

The New York Times did not endorse her despite this reactionary record, but because of it. This “standard bearer for the Democratic center,” lyricized the Times, whose “vision goes beyond the incremental,” had “the best chance to enact many progressive plans.”

Given the most recent turn of events, the Times ’ observation that Klobuchar’s “more recent legislative accomplishments are narrower but meaningful to those affected, especially the legislation aimed at helping crime victims,” which “is not surprising given her background as the chief prosecutor in Minnesota’s most populous county,” is especially cynical.

The notion that Klobuchar must represent something progressive because of her gender should be an insult to the public intelligence by now. In April 2019, the New Republic, one of the unpleasant voices of self-satisfied, upper-middle class public opinion in the US, described the then-group of Democratic female presidential candidates, including Klobuchar—who were “already making history” and who represented “a profound shift in the political landscape”—as “Women of Substance.”

In fact, Klobuchar is something well known and horribly insubstantial — an unscrupulous big business politician, who, like Clinton and the rest of the Democratic Party hierarchy, would think nothing of climbing over heaps of bodies to make her career.

Hypocritical, conventional and cruel, Klobuchar might well step out of the pages of Main Street, Babbitt, It Can’t Happen Here or another of the novels of Sinclair Lewis, the Minnesota-born American author and social critic.

But in her role as ruthless and striving prosecutor, she may most closely resemble Orville W. Mason, the district attorney in Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, who anticipates a murder trial in the light of the “prominence and publicity with which his own activities in connection with this were very likely to be laden!”

Dreiser continues: “At once he got up, energetically stirred. If he could only catch such a reptilian criminal, and that in the face of all the sentiment that such a brutal murder was likely to inspire! The August convention and nominations. The fall election.”

This is the Democratic Party. This is contemporary American politics, including its utterly fraudulent “identity politics” wing, which has nothing remotely progressive about it.

 

Klobuchar Received Thousands from Corporations While Introducing Legislation That Benefitted Them

 

HARIS ALIC

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) has a troubling pattern of introducing legislation favored by major institutions in corporate America around the same they make large contributions to her campaign. 

The revelations are detailed in Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite—a new book by Peter Schweizer, a senior contributor at Breitbart News and president of the Government Accountability Institute.

As a senior member of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, Klobuchar is uniquely situated to impact the bottomline of corporate interests. Unlike her more progressive rivals, like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Klobuchar has not been reflexively opposed to such interests. Rather, as Schweizer details, the Minnesota Democrat has become particularly adept at using her legislative powers not only to benefit corporate institutions, but herself as well. 

A prime example of this occurred in May 2011 when Klobuchar introduced legislation to deter internet piracy. Although Klobuchar was first-term senator mainly known her being “Minnesota nice,” the bill sparked widespread controversy

The legislation’s critics alleged it was draconian, pointing to a provision in the bill that made it a felony to illegally stream TV shows or films off the internet. One of the most prominent critics, the pop star Justin Bieber, even suggested that Klobuchar was the one who deserved to be “locked up” for proposing such a strict law.

The response from the entertainment industry, though, was exactly the opposite. Many industry executives not only lined up behind the bill, but it seems that many had already begun favoring Klobuchar even before its introduction. 

“In the ninety days before she introduced the bill, something unusual started happening,” Schweizer writes. “Over a one-week period in February, seven executives from 20th Century Fox sent her donations. Three more wrote her checks in March.”

Other entertainment industry giants quickly followed suit. Warner Bros., which would have reaped huge benefits from the proposed anti-piracy law, donated $20,000 through its political action committee. Soon afterwards, no fewer than 15 of its executives donated thousands to Klobuchar. Individuals associated with the Motion Picture Association of America and Comcast similarly made large-scale donations in the weeks leading up to the bill’s introduction.

“In all, the entertainment industry sent her more than $80,000, a flow of cash she had not experienced before; all of it was collected in the brief period before she introduced the bill,” Schweizer notes.

That troubling pattern has been on display throughout most of Klobuchar’s tenure in the United States Senate. In 2011 and 2017, respectively, Klobuchar’s campaign coffers saw a flood of incoming donations from Xcel Energy, a Minnesota-based utility holding company.

The money would not have drawn much scrutiny if not for it arriving in what appeared to be a coordinated fashion.

“At the end of September 2011, over a six-day period, no fewer than twenty-one executives from Xcel Energy wrote campaign checks to Klobuchar,” Schweizer writes. “Weeks earlier, Klobuchar introduced legislation … to give a ‘renewable electricity integration’ [tax] credit to utility companies.

If enacted, the legislation would have allowed companies like Excel to claim thousands if not millions of dollars in federal tax credits for producing renewable energy.

Likewise, Klobuchar’s decision to co-sponsor the Clean Energy for America Act in May 2017, coincided with another surge of campaign donations from Exel’s executives.

“Beginning at the end of May 2017 over a ten-day period, twenty-eight executives from Xcel Energy sent her contributions totaling $12,500,” Schweizer writes.

The bill, if passed, would have extensively expanded the tax credits available to energy companies.

Klobuchar’s intermingling of legislative prowess and campaign finance has made her a powerhouse fundraiser among Senate Democrats. In her most recent reelection in 2018, she raised more than $17 million—thirty-eight times the amount brought in by her Republican opponent. The astronomical sum was made possible by Klobuchar’s strong backing from corporate America and their special interest representatives in Washington, D.C.

“She took in donations from the CEOs of eleven of Minnesota’s twenty-five largest corporations,” Schweizer writes. Klobuchar “has done particularly well with law firms and lobbyists—they have donated more than $3 million to her three Senate races.”

The revelations posed in Profiles in Corruption emerge as Kolobuchar’s 2020 campaign picks up steam, buoyed by a high-profile endorsement by The New York Times.

In announcing its endorsement the Times lauded Klobuchar for her legislative accomplishments, arguing she was “most productive senator among the Democratic field in terms of bills passed with bipartisan support.”

As Schweizer shows, however, those accomplishments often resulted in mutual benefit for the senator as well as the corporations donating to her campaign.

 

Schweizer: Warren, Klobuchar Have ‘Cashed in’ from Corruption

TRENT BAKER

 21 Jan 202023

2:10

Author Peter Schweizer on Tuesday’s “Fox & Friends” discussed his new book, Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite, which offers a look into some of the shady dealings of the United States’ political leaders.

After detailing the corruption seen among former Vice President Joe Biden and his family, Schweizer described how his fellow 2020 Democratic presidential candidates Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) had “cashed in” from corruption.

Schweizer said there is a “three-layer cake of corruption” with Warren.

“[Warren] was actually a government consultant paid by the U.S. Congress in the 1990s to rewrite our bankruptcy laws,” Schweizer outlined. “OK, that’s all fine and good, but she did the typical Washington crony move: She cashed in. After she rewrote those laws, what did she do? She went to the corporations who would benefit from the law and said, ‘Hire me, and I will help you interpret the law that I myself wrote.’ And she made millions of dollars doing that.”

He continued, “She’s also got a daughter who set up a business. She was setting up that business while Elizabeth Warren was head of the TARP Oversight Committee, and what ends up happening is the daughter gets her business financed and gets advisors from the very investment banks that Elizabeth Warren’s TARP Committee was bailing out.”

Schweizer said Klobuchar has “mastered the art of shaking down contributors and then pushing their legislation.”

He stated, “[Klobuchar] was a prosecutor before she was a U.S. Senator — very selective, did not go after people that were donors of hers, who were clearly engaged in corruption. And as a U.S. Senator, she has mastered the art of shaking down contributors and then pushing their legislation. There are instances where dozens of executives from a corporation over a three-day period will give her the donation, and then literally a few days later, she introduces legislation on their behalf.”

Follow Trent Baker on Twitter @MagnifiTrent

Amy Klobuchar Selectively Prosecuted White-Collar Crimes, Failed to Pursue Massive Ponzi Scheme—Despite Evidence

Win McNamee/Getty Images

HARIS ALIC

 

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) selectively enforced the law regarding financial crimes as a local prosecutor, often to the benefit of friends and political allies.

The bombshell revelations are detailed in Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite—a new book by Peter Schweizer, a senior contributor at Breitbart News and president of the Government Accountability Institute.

Klobuchar cut a profile as a tough-on-crime prosecutor during her tenure as the chief legal officer of Minnesota’s most populous county in the early 2000s. Not only did she push for locking up more juvenile offenders, but she was also a leading exponent of the “broken windows” theory of policing.

“What I’ve heard again and again is that no crime is a small crime and that we must enforce the law down the line,” she wrote in a policy paper at the time.

Left unsaid, though, is that certain “small” crimes were more likely to warrant prosecution than others, especially depending on one’s personal connection to Klobuchar. As Profiles in Corruption notes, that inequitable approach was nowhere more apparent than “white-collar” crimes.

While Klobuchar aggressively pursued small actors, like airline pilots not paying state income taxes or a home remodeler upcharging his clients, bigger and more nefarious financial crimes were ignored.

“But the largest financial fraud by far in her jurisdiction involved a massive conspiracy that she never even appeared to investigate, despite plenty of warning signs,” Schweizer writes. “It involved the second-largest Ponzi scheme in American history to date.”

The man at the center of the crime was Tom Petters, a Minnesota philanthropist and longtime Democrat campaign donor. Petters, who counted among his friends not only Klobuchar, but also former Vice President Walter Mondale, operated a series of shady investment funds.

Between 1998 and 2008, roughly the years spanning Klobuchar’s tenure as prosecutor, Petters raised nearly $4 billion for his hedge funds. More of than not, individuals entrusting him with their money would never see a penny of their investment returned.

As Schweizer elaborates, there were plenty of warning signs that something was off. Petters was consistently facing legal troubles, either from clients he had failed to repay or from his own improper conduct, like writing bad checks. More troubling, however, was the fact that his business associates kept getting convicted of wrongdoing, often by Klobuchar herself.

“In January 1999, just weeks into her tenure, potential evidence of the Ponzi scheme began to cross her desk,” Schweizer writes. “Officers from her office raided the home of Richard Hettler and Ruth Kahn. They were Petters investors.”

Documents seized during the raid reportedly implicated Petters in a “mutually beneficial and highly illegal financial scheme.” Despite securing convictions for both Hettler and Khan, Klobuchar seemed to make no attempt to move against Petters or “apparently even investigate” his part in the matter.

Klobuchar’s unwillingness to look into Petters coincided with a time their professional relationship was flourishing.

When Klobuchar first ran for county attorney in 1998, Petters and his associates only donated $8,500 to her campaign. By the time she was running for the United States Senate in 2006, Petters had emerged as one of Klobuchar’s most prolific financial backers. During that campaign alone, the Ponzi scheme operator donated more than $120,000, earning him the designation of being one of Klobuchar’s single largest campaign contributors.

The donations also seemed to signal a strong personal relationship. When the FBI finally caught up to the illegal operation and raided Petters’ office and home in 2008, he admitted on a wire-tap recording that Klobuchar had called him in the aftermath. Even though the confines of that conversation were never made public, the events that followed seemed to indicate Klobuchar was sympathetic to the plight of her longtime donor.

“Reportedly Klobuchar’s aides suggested a close family friend, Doug Kelley … provide legal help,” Schweizer writes. “Kelley had been a longtime friend of Klobuchar’s father, both as a lawyer to help him with legal issues and as a mountain-climbing partner.”

Ultimately, Kelley was unable to make much of a difference. Petters’ fate seemed to be sealed as soon as court proceedings began, especially when law enforcement and judicial officers expressed disbelief that he was able to operate for so long with so many red flags.

“But, it looks to me like [Petters] had friends in high places,” Garrett Vail, an attorney who initially worked on case against Kuhn in 1999, told the Daily Caller. “The only way he ran a $3 billion Ponzi scheme was [that] he had politicians in his pocket.”

In December 2009, Petters was convicted on 20 different counts of mail fraud, money laundering, and wire fraud. He was sentenced to more than 50 years in prison for defrauding investors of more than $3.7 billion.

Klobuchar, for her part, escaped the situation relatively unscathed. The senator was reelected overwhelmingly in 2012, despite attempts by her Republican challenger to make Petters an issue. Reelected again in 2018, Klobuchar is now vying for the Democrat presidential nomination on a platform that relies heavily on her accomplishments in public office.

Those accomplishments, however, only underscore Klobuchar’s selective approach to exercising political power, as Profiles in Corruption exposes.

Democrats in Nevada Ask Candidates: How Will You Counter Trump on Economy?

Joel Pollak / Breitbart News

JOEL B. POLLAK

13 Feb 2020669

6:10

LAS VEGAS, Nevada — The most frequent question from the audience to Democratic presidential candidates at a forum of Latino voters Thursday evening was: How will you counter President Donald Trump’s message on the economy?

Several candidates appeared at the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) forum at the College of Southern Nevada as the focus of the campaign shifted to the Nevada caucuses, to be held Feb. 22.

But few seemed to have an answer for concerns about Trump’s strong economic performance.

Billionaire left-wing donor Tom Steyer said that while unemployment was low, the Trump economy was not creating jobs that could support a family.

Joel B. Pollak

Volume 90%

 

Most candidates offered some variation on that answer.

Latinos are a growing share of the state’s population, and the Nevada caucus is the first early presidential contest that gives that community a significant voice in the selection of the parties’ respective nominees.

Though immigration is an important issue to many in the community, the economy remains a top issue as well.

Several hundred local voters came to hear the candidates’ pitches. Many were undecided — their task made more difficult, some told Breitbart News, by the sheer number of candidates in the field.

Steyer led off the program. He promised the LULAC audience that he would “corporate stranglehold on our government,” provide a “living wage” and “clean air and clean water.” He also pointed to his past work on the issue of climate change.

On immigration, he said he had been involved personally in the issue for decades: “My family has been supporting immigration to California for 35 years through our church.” He said he had personally given $3 million to help with the legal fees and other expenses of Latino migrants. And he said he wanted to “decriminalize the border” and “get rid of the wall.”

Steyer called President Trump’s border enforcement a “crime against humanity” and added: “He’s not opposed to immigration. He’s opposed to immigration by non-white people.”

Next, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) addressed the gathering via videoconference. He told the LULAC audience: “Your generation is the generation with the energy that we need to help us old people transform this country.”

South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg addressed the forum in person. He fielded questions about his health care policy, which differs from Sanders’s “Medicare for All” plan in that it would offer Medicare as a “choice” to non-seniors.

Buttigieg addressed the concerns of unions in Nevada, who have vocally opposed the idea of losing private health insurance plans provided through their collective bargaining agreements. “Who are we to tell them that they are to give up those plans?” Buttigieg asked. “I’m going to listen to workers who say that they want to be able to keep their plans. … I’m not willing to force it on people.”

The multilingual mayor switched back and forth between English and Spanish to the delight of the audience.

A member of the audience accused Buttigieg of “repeatedly dodg[ing]” questions about China’s concentration camps for Muslims and suggested that if he would not challenge China to close its camps, he would not close detention facilities at the U.S. border. The mayor, surprised, said that he had condemned China for that and that the U.S. should “engage[e] the entire international community” to stop the oppression of Chinese Muslims.

One of the moderators then asked Buttigieg directly if he would close the border detention facilities. Buttigieg dodged, saying, “There will always be some kind of facilities for people coming through.” He added, though, that there should not be for-profit facilities that detain children.

Asked by a member of the audience what his most important issue was, Buttigieg evaded the question — as he has in the past: “A little hard to pick one right now. But I think we need to fix our democracy.”

One member of the audience accused him of failing to stop police violence against minorities in South Bend. Buttigieg cited steps that he took to make sure that minorities were involved in decision making over public safety and to listen to the concerns of minority communities.

He drew cheers when he told a “DACA student” — one brought to the country illegally as a child and shielded from deportation by President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy — that America was his country, also, and that he would be first in line for citizenship when he implemented his “path to citizenship” for illegal aliens.

Klobuchar rounded out the program. She cited her work on the most recent immigration reform bill — also known as the “Gang of Eight” — which failed in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives because of concerns that it would allow some illegal aliens to achieve legal status before the border was fully secure.

Asked by a moderator whether she would “abolish” Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or merely “reform” it, Klobuchar chose the latter, saying it needed more congressional oversight.

A member of the audience accused Klobuchar of overzealous prosecution of minorities. Klobuchar disputed that, saying that black American incarceration rates had declined during her eight years as the lead prosecutor in Hennepin County. She did say, however, that if she could change one thing, it would be to avoid using grand juries to obtain indictments in cases involving police shootings.

The auditorium was only about two-thirds full, perhaps hinting at the challenges Democrats have faced with voter turnout thus far in the 2020 primary cycle.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

This story is developing.