THESE CORRUPT DEMO POLS LOVE THEIR BANKSTERS' "SPEECH FEES" BRIBES!
“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.”
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.
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.
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
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
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.”
Amy Klobuchar Selectively Prosecuted White-Collar Crimes, Failed to Pursue Massive Ponzi Scheme—Despite Evidence
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.
Rather than Hope and Change,
Obama is delivering corporate socialism to America, all while claiming he’s
battling corporate America. It’s corporate welfare and regulatory robbery—it’s
Obamanomics.
“Records show that four
out of Obama's top five contributors are employees of financial
industry giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806),
JPMorgan Chase ($362,207) and Citigroup ($358,054).”
Why
aren’t the Wall Street criminals prosecuted?
In
May 2012, only days after JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon revealed that his bank
had lost billions of dollars in speculative bets, President Barack Obama
publicly defended the multi-millionaire CEO, calling him “one of the smartest
bankers we’ve got.” What Obama did not mention is that Dimon is a
criminal.
JPMorgan
is not the exception; it is the rule. Virtually every major bank that operates
on Wall Street has settled charges of fraud and criminality on a staggering
scale. In 2011, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a
630-page report on the financial crash of 2008 documenting what the committee
chairman called “a financial snake pit rife with greed, conflicts of interest
and wrongdoing.”
These
multiple crimes by serial lawbreakers have had very real and very destructive
consequences. The entire world has been plunged into an economic slump that has
already lasted more than five years and shows no signs of abating. Tens of
millions of families have lost their homes as a result of predatory mortgages
pushed by JPMorgan and other Wall Street banks.
INCEST! The
case of bankster-owned Barack
Obama and
crony Jamie Dimon of JP
MORGAN…
their looting continues!
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