Amy Klobuchar wants to
abandon English as America's official language
For
Democrats frightened by either an openly socialist candidate or an untested man
whom blacks dislike, the seemingly “reasonable” choices are an ex-Republican,
sexist, anti-Second Amendment, micro-managing despot -- and Amy
Klobuchar, the meanest Senator in Washington . It’s time to remember
that Klobuchar has no fixed principles but will, instead, do whatever it takes
to advance herself in the Democrat Party.
On
Friday, Klobuchar’s latest opportunistic move was to announce at
a campaign event in Las Vegas that English should not be America’s official
language, even though she voted for a Senate bill that would have made English
the official language. She now says that she has “taken a strong position
against” the English language in America, although she cannot seem to explain
her past vote. One can certainly explain her current turnabout, though, despite
her efforts to keep her various immigration positions opaque:
Her policy shift comes a week before the caucuses
are set to take place in a state with a large Latino population and an area
where Klobuchar has about 10 percent support.
Klobuchar has flip-flopped on immigration
policies, once supporting projects like a wall and E-Verify to ban employers
from hiring illegal aliens back in 2006.
The Minnesota senator has also been open about
supporting amnesty but has hidden her support for
exporting college graduate-level jobs overseas.
This
conduct is typical Klobuchar. The PowerLine
blog , which is headquartered in Minnesota, has been reporting on Klobuchar
for years, revealing a calculating progressive who uses “Minnesota nice” as a
way to avoid being tagged for the controversial and often inconsistent stands
she takes.
In
September 2017, Scott Johnson summed up Klobuchar’s tactics when it came to
Trump’s nominating Judge David Stras to the Eighth Circuit. Although Stras
received bipartisan support in Minnesota from everyone who interacted with him,
Klobuchar was blocking him from consideration, instead using his
nomination as a cudgel to gain control over four other federal vacancies in
Minnesota.
While
the partisan Minnesota Star Tribune dutifully ignored
Klobuchar’s machinations, PowerLine’s reporting on the issue irked Mrs. Minnesota Nice :
She refused to comment on our reporting about
them. She chafed over our disclosure of them. She resented the bad attitude
with which we viewed them. She sought to keep the lid on. She denied that she
was blocking Stras’s nomination, although she was — pending some arrangement
with the White House that would reward her for turning in her blue slip.
Seeking to appease Klobuchar while it tried to
reach an agreement with her, the White House reached out to me. The White House
had a favor to ask. It requested that I knock off covering the moves of this
highly partisan politician with an incredibly thin skin while it worked
something out with her. After all, she prefers to present herself (in the title
of her memoir) as the Senator next door and the local media have been happy to
play along with her.
When
then-Sen. Al Franken eventually announced that he would not consider Stras’s
nomination, Klobuchar turned around and said that Stras ought to get a
hearing:
Or course, she left her use of Stras’s nomination
for leverage on the Minnesota vacancies unmentioned, and it remains unmentioned
in the Star Tribune story by Jennifer Brooks
and Stephen Montemayor today.
Klobuchar
then issued a public statement gushing about how wonderful Stras was, only to
end by stabbing him in the back:
Klobuchar wants us to believe she fits the mold
of Minnesota Nice. Her sayonara to Justice Stras in the concluding
paragraph, however, shows her to be worse than a phony politician. She is a
contemptible human being.
Klobuchar’s
habit of being cute in public and vicious behind the scenes was again on display with the Neil
Gorsuch nomination:
Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar specializes in
avoiding outspoken stands on important issues. She looks for opportunities to
lead the way on trivialities calculated to garner broad public support, such as
her crusade against the threat to life and limb posed by “The crisis of the detergent pod.”
Senator Klobuchar is a reliable vote for the
Democratic Party line, but she is quiet about it. She doesn’t want to upset
anybody. She wants to preside over an era of good feelings — of good feelings
about Amy Klobuchar. It’s a form of inanity that has won Klobuchar followers
among the mainstream media in Minnesota and elsewhere.
[snip]
Senator Klobuchar strongly supports the
Democrats’ partisan filibuster of Judge Gorsuch. Why? Senator Klobuchar isn’t
saying.
In addition, Senator Klobuchar strongly supports
the retention of the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees generally. Why?
Senator Klobuchar isn’t saying.
Klobuchar’s
turnabout on English as America’s official language reveals the same M.O.: She
presents a moderate front but generally works behind the scenes to
ingratiate herself with the extremists in the Democrat party.
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
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.
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 endorsement by The
New York Times
In announcing its endorsement
the Times
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
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.
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
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.
Demonstrably and irrefutably the Democrat Party became
the
party whose principle objective is to thoroughly transform
the
nature of the American electorate by means of open borders
and
the mass, unchecked importation of illiterate third world
peasants
who will vote in overwhelming numbers for Democrats and
their
La Raza welfare state. FRONTPAGE MAG
THE DEMOCRAT PARTY IS NOW
THE LA RAZA SUPREMACY GLOBALIST DEMOCRAT PARTY FOR BILLIONAIRES, BANKSTERS AND
WIDER OPEN BORDERS THE BILLIONAIRES DEMAND TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED!
The Democrat party is now becoming near
exclusive home of the ruling class, as can be borne out by recent Congressional
elections.
Democrats Don't Care About
American Lives
My
article about Pop Kern, an 89-year-old kind white gentleman and how
Democrats seek to punish him for bogus “white privilege” received
a tremendous amount of positive response. A young relative of Pop Kern
wrote informing me that Pop Kern is a loyal Democrat. This is not surprising.
My black dad who passed away at age 90 was also a lifelong Democrat. Dad
drilled into my head that Democrats are for the working man and Republicans are
for the rich.
Respectfully,
I tried to gently convince an elderly family member that her Democratic Party
has dramatically changed. It is now the party of all things amoral,
anti-Christian, anti-freedom, and anti-American. Looking me firmly in the eye,
she stubbornly spouted, “I'm votin' for Biden!”
The
singular intention of the Democratic Party is to obtain power to control every
aspect of our lives. ObamaCare gave them godlike power to decide who lives and
who dies. If you refuse to give up your Second Amendment right to own a gun, no
healthcare for you. If you hold firm to your biblical convictions, no
healthcare for you.
Fake
news media allowed Obama to lie to the American people 29 times that ObamaCare
would allow them to keep health-care plans that they liked. This huge lie won
Obama the
Politifact “Lie of the Year” award. ObamaCare became law against the will
of the American people and cancer patients lost their lifesaving doctors.
ObamaCare was a major step in Democrats' mission to transform America into a
totally government-controlled nation. The lives of cancer patients did not
matter.
American
lives do not matter either regarding the invasion of illegal aliens. In defiance
of federal law, Democrats host sanctuary cities which protect illegal alien
rapists, murders, drug dealers, and career criminals. Outrageously, illegals
are gifted driver's licenses, healthcare, attorneys, allowed to vote and
numerous handouts unavailable to U.S. citizens.
Democrats
deem coddling illegals more important than American lives. Kate Steinle was
shot and killed by an illegal alien while strolling with her dad on a lazy
Sunday afternoon in San Francisco. Kate's murderer had been deported numerous
times and repeatedly welcomed back to the sanctuary city. Democrats acquitted
Kate's murderer and even voted down a law to punish deported
illegals who keep coming back.
Democrats'
vision for the perfect America includes transforming her into a wild, wild west
of sex, a society in which every perversion is legalized and citizens are
forced to celebrate. A memo exposed Obama's DoJ plan to legalize
12 perversions including pedophilia and bestiality. Colleges are
laying the groundwork by scolding us about our bigoted intolerance of
pedophiles.
Democrats
are sexualizing children beginning in pre-k with a mandatory LGBTQ
curriculum. I Am Jazz , a book about a boy whose parents began his
so-called sex change at age three, is required reading.
Once
you realize that Democrats only care about furthering their agenda and American
lives do-not- matter, you understand their behavior. U.S. students are sick
with strange diseases due to untested illegal alien children being sent to public
schools.
Pediatricians
whose research confirms that transgender ideology is child abuse are persecuted,
fired, and blocked from media. Women who regret aborting their
babies are blocked from media. Women and little girls assaulted by men
posing as women in transgender-friendly restrooms are hidden from the public.
Feminists who fight transgenders destroying women’s sports are blocked from
media. Every truth that undercuts Democrats' lies and evil agenda is
blocked by fake news media.
President
Donald J. Trump is our only protection against Democrats and fake news media
implementing their vision of a new America, removed from her position as leader
of the free world. This is why they are repulsed by Trump's slogan, “Make
America Great Again.”
Their
only hope is to separate Trump from his supporters via a thousand cuts; lying
about him 24/7; spinning everything good he does into a negative; a reason to
impeach him.
By
reducing many of Obama's over-reaching regulations, Trump has our economy at
its strongest in 50 years. Black unemployment is at its lowest in U.S. history.
Democrats hate that blacks are doing so well under Trump. Clearly, black lives
matter to Trump, but not to their so-called advocates in the Democratic Party
and fake news media.
Iranian
terrorist Soleimani murdered and severely wounded hundreds of U.S troops using
roadside bombs. Soleimani planned attacks on U.S. Embassies to murder thousands
more Americans. Trump killed Soleimani. Remarkably, Democrats sought to spin
Trump acting to save American lives into a crime, a reason to impeach him. The
Democratic Party has become the home of pure hate and evil, obsessed with
gaining power.
Elderly
lifelong Democrats are unaware that their “working man” party has become an
anti-American and anti-Christian mob of hate-filled activists at war with
everyday Americans.
Straight
white men like elderly Pop Kern are number one on Democrats' hit list, targeted
for destruction.
I
ran into Pop Kern at the post office. With his great smile, he said, “I want to
thank you for what you wrote on that internet.” I asked, “Did you read it?” He
replied, “No, but I heard about it from Florida to Pittsburgh. Thanks for what
you wrote. I really appreciate it.”
Lloyd Marcus, The Unhyphenated American
THE DEMOCRAT PARTY IS NOW
THE LA RAZA SUPREMACY GLOBALIST DEMOCRAT PARTY FOR BILLIONAIRES, BANKSTERS AND
WIDER OPEN BORDERS THE BILLIONAIRES DEMAND TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED!
The Democrat party is now becoming near
exclusive home of the ruling class, as can be borne out by recent Congressional
elections.
Ruling Class Held Hostage
by Trump’s Impeachment
Every year 3 million
visitors make the pilgrimage to Ellis Island. It is estimated nearly
forty percent of all Americans can trace their ancestors to the 20 million
immigrants that were processed through New York and Ellis Island from 1892 to
1954. These prospective citizens were determined to escape
authoritarianism, soul grinding poverty, war and its aftermath, immutable class
structures as well as religious and ethnic persecution.
Once here they would
immerse themselves in learning English and the nation’s founding documents in
preparation for the most gut wrenching (passing the oral citizenship test) and
emotional (the swearing in ceremony) day in their lives. Thanks to their
life experience and their determination to be citizens of the only nation in
the history of mankind to be founded on the principle that all men are created
equal, these newly minted Americans were among the most loyal and most
well-versed in the nation’s founding.
What would the vast
majority of those that willingly left everything behind to travel for up to
three weeks, oftentimes across a storm-tossed ocean and relegated to the
unsanitary and wretched conditions in steerage, think of the impeachment of
Donald Trump?
Nearly all of the nations
whence these immigrants came were governed by an immutable class
structure. At the apex of this rigid class pyramid was either a monarchy
and its attendant birthright nobility or a dictatorship and its coercive administrative
hierarchy or a communist oligarchy and its implacable bureaucracy.
Class mobility was at the whim and discretion of the autocrat or the oligarchy.
These nameless and
faceless masses had virtually no say in their nation’s governance and they were
at the mercy of the economic and foreign policy of the ruling elites.
They were viewed as being grossly inferior, uneducable and deplorable --
thus mere pawns to be sacrificed in the country’s wars and were little more
than indentured servants to the ruling class.
On the other hand, thanks
to a Constitution constructed to prevent the ascendancy of any one faction into
a position of permanent power and the evolution of a rigid ruling class
hierarchy, the United States possessed the framework and opportunity for anyone
to succeed and live in peace and economic security thus attracting millions to
its shores.
However, beginning in the
1960’s many of those that came through Ellis Island began to notice a change in
the relatively benign and Constitution-oriented governing class. With the
exponential growth of government, a new and potentially destructive class
structure began to evolve, one that was reminiscent of ruling class supremacy
in those nations they had escaped.
A mindset, alien to 170
years of American history, took root amid overwhelming peace and
prosperity. A growing faction in the country began to believe that
they were pre-ordained to govern as they were superior to the unwashed masses,
particularly racial and ethnic minorities as well as those steeped in religion
and morality. Over the years the proponents of this belief infiltrated
the universities and the media-entertainment complex creating an ever-growing
army of narcissists and authoritarians which mutated into today’s American Ruling
Class.
Angelo Codevilla writing
in the American Spectator identified the characteristics of
the American Ruling Class as follows:
Today’s ruling class,
from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them
to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as taste
and habits. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their
road up included government channels and government money because, as
government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become
indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their
way into the private sector.
Its attitude is key to
understanding our bipartisan ruling class. Its first tenet is that “we”
are the best and brightest while the rest of Americans are retrograde, racist,
and dysfunctional unless properly constrained.
Our ruling class’s agenda
is power for itself. While it stakes its claims through
intellectual-moral pretense, it holds power by one of the oldest and most prosaic
of means: patronage and promises thereof. Like left-wing parties always
and everywhere, it is a “machine,” that is, based on providing tangible rewards
to its members. Hence our ruling class’s standard approach to any and all
matters, its solution to any and all problems, is to increase the power of the
government-- meaning of those who run it, meaning themselves.
By taxing and parceling
out more than a third of what Americans produce through regulations that reach
deep into American life, our ruling class is making itself the arbiter of
wealth and poverty.
The ruling class is
keener to reform the American people’s family and spiritual lives than their
economic and civic ones. It believes that the Christian family (and the
orthodox Jewish one too) is rooted in and perpetuates the ignorance commonly
called religion that is the greatest barrier to human progress. This
dismissal of the American people’s intellectual, spiritual, and moral substance
is the very heart of what our ruling class is about.
[Lastly,] America’s best
and brightest believe themselves qualified and duty bound to direct the lives
of not only Americans but of foreigners as well. Its default solution to
international threats has been to commit blood and treasure to long-term,
twilight efforts to reform the world’s Vietnams, Somalias, Iraqs and
Afghanistans.
Since the Reagan era, the
American Ruling Class has succeeded in electing George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton,
George W. Bush and Barack Obama, all of whom were members in good standing.
Thus, by 2016 the ruling elites were thoroughly entrenched and dominant
throughout the halls of power. They were prepared to govern this
nation for many years to come as one of the flaws in the magnificent governing
blueprint set up by the founding fathers was the reality that this government
can only function with just two major political parties. Both political
party hierarchies had and fully intended to continue nominating candidates for
the presidency and Congress who were either beholden to or members of the
ruling class. The rank and file voters were left with only superficial
differences in the choice of candidates.
The election of Donald
Trump in 2016 was an act of defiance and a rebellion by the deplorables and a
devastating blow to the ruling elites. With his election, President
Trump began the process of a Republican Party divorce from the establishment --
which is now well underway. Thus, the ruling class’s political
hegemony is severely threatened. They cannot achieve their endgame
without de facto control of both parties. Which is why Donald Trump may
well be the most influential President in modern American history.
The Democrat party is now
becoming near exclusive home of the ruling class, as can be borne out by recent
Congressional elections. Before the 2018 mid-term elections, the richest 66
House districts were split 38 Democrats and 28 Republican. After the
election the Democrats held 56 and the Republicans 10 In the 15 districts
where at least 50% of the population have a college degree, all are represented
by Democrats as of 2018, whereas the Democrats controlled 13 of 15 in
2016.
Being relegated
exclusively to the Democrat party means that the ruling class must accommodate
and adopt the radical tenets of the much larger Marxist/socialist wing of the
Party if they wish to win the Party’s nominations for elective offices.
A self-defeating and ultimately destructive path as militant socialists
will, in due course, consume them. Alternatively, and in league with their
propaganda arm, the mainstream media, the ruling elites have pulled out all the
stops and abandoned any ethical, moral or legal restraints to get rid of Donald
Trump and recapture their previous hierarchical influence in the Republican
Party.
The abominably fabricated
and unconstitutional impeachment farce is the culmination of three years of
frustration and determination to rid the nation of the “threat” that is Donald
Trump’s takeover of a major political party and transformation of it into a
vehicle of populism. Which would allow the citizenry and not the elites
to determine the course of the nation’s future. In reality,
impeachment, endless investigations, fabrications and the constant vilification
of Donald Trump are aimed at intimidating the nameless and unwashed masses who
had the temerity and insolence to vote against the wishes of the ruling
class.
Out of 20 million
immigrants there are perhaps less than 100,000 of us living today that have any
memory of being processed through New York and Ellis Island during the 60+
years it was the gateway to America. The determination to invalidate an
election and destroy the Constitutional foundation of this country for the sake
of achieving unfettered political supremacy is not the United States we have
come to know and love. Despite their protestations to the contrary, the
ruling class and their public face, the Democratic Party, does not love this
country and its people and are, in fact, little different than the ruling
elites that caused so many to seek refuge in America.
FEINSTEIN
HAS SPENT HER POLITICAL LIFE STALKING THE HALLS OF CONGRESS SNIFFING OUT DEALS
THAT PUT HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS IN HER POCKETS.
SHE HAS
AVOIDED PROSECUTION BY VOTING AGAINST ANY ETHICS BILLS AND HER HUSBAND, RICHARD
BLUM'S HANDING OUT "CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTION" BRIBES TO EVERY DEMOCRAT
OUT THERE!
IN THE
November 2006 election, the voters demanded congressional ethics reform. And
so, the newly appointed chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, Dianne
Feinstein, D-Calif., is now duly in charge of regulating the ethical behavior
of her colleagues. But for many years, Feinstein has been beset by her own
ethical conflict of interest, say congressional ethics experts.
“All in all, it was an
incredible victory
for the Chinese government. Feinstein
has done more for Red
China than
other any serving U.S.
“Our entire crony
capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy
approaching par with third-world hell-holes. This is the way a great
country is raided by its elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan AMERICAN
THINKER.com
Senator
Who Employed
Chinese Spy Endorses Joe
Biden for President
Win
McNamee/Getty Images
9 Oct 20192,419
5:44
A high-profile U.S. senator with professional and personal ties to
China — including once employing one of its spies — is backing former Vice
President Joe Biden amid mounting questions over his son’s business dealings
with the communist regime.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), a
former chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, announced her
endorsement of the former vice president on Tuesday, claiming to have
witnessed Biden’s “fortitude” and leadership during their overlapping tenures
in Congress.
Feinstein said in a statement:
I’ve worked closely with Vice
President Biden and I’ve seen firsthand his legislative ability, his
statesmanship, and most importantly his moral fortitud. During his time in
Congress and in the White House, Joe Biden has been a tireless fighter for hard
working American families.
The endorsement comes as Biden’s
presidential campaign is besieged by scandal regarding the lucrative business
dealings his youngest son, Hunter, had with foreign governments.
Only hours before Feinstein’s
endorsement, the Chinese government announced it would not
investigate how Hunter Biden ended up at the center of one its top private
equity firms. The Chinese foreign ministry made the decision after President
Donald Trump publicly called for a probe of Hunter Biden’s dealings with Bohai Harvest
RST (BHR). In particular, Trump has noted that the circumstances surrounding
BHR’s creation could have posed a conflict of interest for Joe Biden.
As Peter Schweizer, senior
contributor at Breitbart News, revealed in his bestselling book Secret Empires: How the American Political
Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends,
The timing of the lucrative deal has
been brought into question as it came only 12 days after Hunter visited China
with his father aboard Air Force Two. Officially, the then-vice president
was visiting the country amid escalating tensions over islands in the South
China Sea and decided to bring his granddaughter and son along. In a March
2018 interview with Breitbart News Tonight
In December of 2013, Vice President
Joe Biden flies to Asia for a trip, and the centerpiece for that trip is a
visit to Beijing, China. To put this into context, in 2013, the Chinese have
just exerted air rights over the South Pacific, the South China Sea. They
basically have said, ‘If you want to fly in this area, you have to get Chinese
approval. We are claiming sovereignty over this territory.’ Highly
controversial in Japan, in the Philippines, and in other countries. Joe Biden
is supposed to be going there to confront the Chinese. Well, he gets widely
criticized on that trip for going soft on China. For basically not challenging
them, and Japan and other countries are quite upset about this.
Since its creation, BHR has invested
heavily in energy and defense projects across the globe. As of June, Hunter
Biden was still involved with BHR,
sitting on its board of directors and owning a minority stake of the fund
estimated to be worth more than $430,000.
Such dealings at the center of
politics and business, while perhaps not illegal, are not exclusive to the
Biden family alone. As a few noted at the time of Feinstein’s endorsement, the
senator and her husband have their own close ties to the communist country.
During her tenure as mayor of San
Francisco in the late-1970s and early-1980s, Feinstein took advantage of the
newly normalized diplomatic relations between the U.S. and China by
establishing one of the first sister city partnership between San Francisco and
Shanghai. Through that partnership, Feinstein led trade delegations to China in
which she and her husband, Richard Blum, became acquainted with some of the
country’s most prominent political leaders.
As the Federalist noted in August 2018, Feinstein
and her husband leveraged those relationships to boost their own wealth. In
1986, Feinstein and Jiang Zemin — the then-mayor of Shanghai, who would later
ascend to the presidency of the People’s Republic of China — “designated
several corporate entities for fostering commercial relations.” One of those
firms was Shanghai Pacific Partners, which employed Blum as a director. Blum
reportedly had an interest of upwards of $500,000 in a project backed by
Shanghai Pacific Partners.
After Feinstein was elected to the
Senate in 1992, Blum continued profiting off their ties to China. A the same
time, the freshman lawmaker was pitching herself as a “China hand” to
colleagues, even once claiming “that in my
last life maybe I was Chinese.” Through her seat on the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, Feinstein led the fight on a number of initiatives seen as
being favorable to China, including granting the country permanent
most-favored-nation trading status in 2000.
Despite Feinstein and her husband
having a close relationship with Jiang, the Chinese government targeted the senator
as part of its espionage operations. In the early 2000s, the Chinese Ministry
of State Security (MSS) recruited a longtime employee of the senator to gather
information about the inner workings of her congressional and district offices.
Feinstein only learned of the staffer’s duplicity in 2013, after he’d already
been on her payroll for more than 20 years.
“While this person, who was a
liaison to the local Chinese community, was fired, charges were never filed
against him,” Politico reported in 2018,
speculating that because “the staffer was providing political intelligence and
not classified information—making prosecution far more difficult.”
Apart from the convoluted history of
the senator’s ties to China, the political timing of Feinstein’s endorsement
also caught many off guard. The California Democrat, who hosted a
fundraiser on Biden’s behalf last week alongside House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) daughter, is only the most recent figure from the
Democrat establishment to openly pledge support for the former vice president.
Feinstein’s endorsement, however, was not totally expected, especially since
her seamate, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), is mounting a bid of her own for the
Democrat nomination. In fact, earlier this year, Feinsten flirted with the
notion of remaining neutral in the 2020 contest out of respect for Harris.
Compounding the political picture is
that most polls show Biden no longer the favorite to win California,
having fallen behind Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA).
Feinstein, however, did not address
any of that when endorsing the former vice president on Tuesday. Instead, the
senator offered platitudes about Biden’s work to enhance gun control and how
his campaign was a “fight to restore the soul of the nation.”
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