Charles Koch’s Money Is Being Used in Elections in Ways Only Orwell Could Have Imagined ALWAYS THE STICKY FINGERS OF KOCH!

KOCH = BIG POLLUTERS, worked to destroy the EPA to continue their pollution...

READ DARK MONEY by JANE MAYER about KOCH UNITING THE WEALTHY 

1% and concealing their involvement/conspiracy with 'charitable' pretense. 

DARK MONEY should be available from your local public library. Not new, 

but well worth reading to understand how the SNAKES conceal their involvement 

and protect their interests...such as opposing MEDICARE FOR ALL. 

Most of the 1% FREAKS stash their $$$$ offshore to avoid supporting government on any level...check out PARADISE PAPERS

FWIW - KOCH is still in RUSSIA!

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Charles Koch’s Money Is Being Used in Elections in Ways Only Orwell Could Have Imagined

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 4, 2024 ~

Charles Koch, Chairman and CEO of Koch Industries

On August 31, 2018 we broke the news that the fossil fuels conglomerate, Koch Industries, led by billionaire Charles Koch, had purchased i360 – an Orwellian political operation made all the more dangerous by the fact that it was affiliated with a billionaire who had been creating and funding political front groups for decades to push an anti-regulatory agenda and call it “liberty.” We wrote at the time:

“Quietly, and without any corporate press release on such an unusual acquisition, Koch Industries has purchased i360, a vast voter database and data harvesting operation. According to i360’s website, it has ‘1800 unique data points’ on 290 million American consumers as well as detailed information on 199 million voters from all 50 states. It brags that its data ‘shows you everything you need to know including the demographic and psychographic breakdown of your target market.’

“The propriety of a multinational industrial conglomerate with an anti-regulatory agenda having a stranglehold on a highly sophisticated voter data mining platform with unlimited funds to hire Ph.Ds., statisticians and computer scientists trained in artificial intelligence and machine learning, has yet to enter the national discourse.”

We decided to browse the most current Federal Election Commission (FEC) records and see what i360 has been up to lately. We learned that i360 has received $279,401.21 to conduct “surveys” for Americans for Prosperity Action (AFP Action), a Super Pac that hilariously calls itself a “grassroots” movement, notwithstanding that it’s funded by billionaires and multi-millionaires. According to FEC data, Koch Industries gave $25 million to AFP Action on May 19 of last year while Stand Together Chamber of Commerce, successor to the Koch-funded Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce (which folded its tent in 2019 after too much scrutiny) chipped in another $25 million eight days earlier. Alice, Rob and Jim Walton, billionaire heirs of the Walmart retail chain, each gave $5 million to AFP Action last year while former hedge fund titan, Stanley Druckenmiller, chipped in $1.5 million. (For those who have given $1 million or more thus far in the current election cycle, see here.)

Freedom Partners had a very large footprint in the Donald Trump administration.  In a document titled “Roadmap to Repeal: Removing Regulatory Barriers to Opportunity,” the Koch front group listed the laws and regulations it expected to be repealed in the first 100 days of Trump’s tenure as President. The Trump administration dutifully followed the prescribed agenda, repealing the Paris Climate Accord to the horror of our allies; passing tax cuts for the wealthy; and gutting federal regulations and the Environmental Protection Agency.

By the spring of 2018, 12 people who previously worked at Freedom Partners were working in the Trump administration. When we examined the makeup of Freedom Partners in 2018, we found that all but one of Freedom Partners’ 9-member Board of Directors was a current or former Koch company employee. The Board Chair of Freedom Partners at that time was the same Mark Holden that was the General Counsel of Koch Industries.

One of the Senate seats that AFP Action is currently targeting is that of Democrat Sherrod Brown of Ohio, the current chair of the Senate Banking Committee, who regularly calls out the moneyed interests’ attack on the working class. AFP Action is backing Republican Bernie Moreno, a man who has made “dubious claims” about his background in Bogotá, Columbia, according to The Guardian.

AFP Action attack ads against Senator Brown call him out for “a dangerous wide-open border.” What control the Chair of the Senate Banking Committee has over the border is not explained.

WACK-A-DING TENNESSEE MARSHA BLACKBURN defines the success of 

KOCH-FUNDED DISINFORMATION!                                                                      

Targeting immigrants was a very successful strategy used by i360 to elect right-wing Tennessee Republican Marsha Blackburn to the U.S. Senate in 2018, as explained in detail by Lee Fang at The Intercept in 2019. Fang writes:

“Then-Tennessee Rep. Marsha Blackburn aired at least four different television advertisements and a wave of social media advertisements focused on immigration, often with false or inflammatory language. She ended up beating out Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen, a Democrat, who had been leading in the polls for months.”

This would be far from a novel tactic by Koch-related groups. In 2010 we broke the story of how Donor’s Capital Fund, the dark money group with Charles Koch’s fingerprints all over it, had donated $17,778,600 to the Clarion Fund to distribute 28 million DVDs of a race-baiting, fear-mongering film just weeks before the 2008 presidential election — when the first black candidate in history, Barack Obama, was the Democratic presidential nominee. The DVD was stuffed into the Sunday edition of some of the biggest newspapers in America as well as distributed through a direct mail campaign.                                      

For additional background on how to prepare for what’s ahead in this election year, read our report: Charles Koch Attempts an Apology Tour after He and His Father Financed a Political Hate Machine for Six Decades.

Latest Grifting by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas Is Just Tip of the Iceberg

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Latest Grifting by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas Is Just Tip of the Iceberg

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 1, 2023 ~

Virginia (Ginni) Thomas at the Swearing In of Her Husband, Clarence Thomas, as Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1991. Former Associate Justice Byron White (right) Administered the Oath.

After the public interest news outlet, ProPublica, revealed more grifting by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in April, the Supreme Court finally released the much delayed financial disclosure form for calendar year 2022 for Thomas yesterday. Thomas grudgingly provided details of some of that grifting involving billionaire Harlan Crow.

But this latest grifting saga is just the tip of the iceberg for Thomas and his wife, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas.

In 2011 the watchdog group, Protect our Elections, filed a bar complaint with the Missouri Supreme Court. At the time, Thomas was admitted to practice law in the State. The complaint asked for the disbarment of Thomas on the following grounds:

“Clarence Thomas breached his legal duty and violated the Rules of Professional Conduct by knowingly and willfully failing for 20 years to state truthfully on required AO 10 Financial Disclosure Forms that his wife Virginia earned non-investment income. Clarence Thomas further labored under a financial conflict of interest by failing to disclose $100,000 in support for his nomination by the Citizens United Foundation when he sat in judgment of a case involving Citizens United. Finally, he made rulings that his wife benefited from financially and professionally, and by extension, that benefited him. In short, this unethical and criminal conduct violates the Rules of Professional Conduct, and undermines the rule of law, respect for the law and confidence in the law.”

The Citizens United decision from the U.S. Supreme Court is the decision that corrupted political campaign financing in the U.S. by opening the spigots to unlimited corporate money flooding into political campaigns. That, in turn, effectively handed the will of the people over to billionaire kleptocrats – those that Clarence Thomas can’t seem to get enough of.

Wall Street On Parade previously reported that Thomas failed to report at least $1,051,214 that his wife Ginni Thomas had received in compensation from the Heritage Foundation from 1999 through 2007. Heritage, in turn, was heavily funded by billionaires Charles Koch, his late brother, David, and foundations or trusts tied to them.

Charles Koch is a major owner of Koch Industries, a fossil fuels juggernaut whose front group, Freedom Partners, played a major role in the Trump administration’s decision to pull out of the Paris Climate Accord. The Kochs have also been major funders of the climate change denial front groups and the invisible hand, full of political dough, in every major election. (See our detailed analysis of the Koch machine here.)

In 2008, the same year that the Supreme Court accepted the Citizens United case, Thomas dined with one of the Koch brothers, Charles, and his wife, Elizabeth, at the private Vintage Club in Indian Wells, California, during a four-day stay on the West Coast.

At the time of our reporting in 2011, we confirmed with a spokesperson for the Vintage Club that it restricts dining to members and their guests. Membership requires owning a home in the private, high security community, where homes run in double-digit millions of dollars. The spokesperson confirmed at the time that Charles Koch is a member of the Vintage Club and owned a home in the community. The Supreme Court would not reveal to us where Thomas stayed during this four-day visit to California.

While the Citizens United case was pending before the Supreme Court, Ginni Thomas created a tax-exempt organization called Liberty Central, Inc., with a former lawyer for the Charles G. Koch Foundation, Sarah Field, acting as her General Counsel. A former Koch lobbyist, Matt Schlapp, served on the Board of Directors of Liberty Central at inception.

From 2009 to 2011, Liberty Central raked in more than $1.5 million in donations from dark money donors. According to Liberty Central’s 2010 public tax filing, it paid Ginni Thomas $120,511 in compensation that year.

Virginia (Ginni) Thomas

Liberty Central appears to have morphed into “Liberty Consulting.” From 2011 through 2022, Clarence Thomas shows on his financial disclosure forms that his wife was receiving “salary and benefits” from Liberty Consulting. But there is no dollar amount or range of salary and benefits shown.

It is an outrage to the American people that Clarence Thomas’s wife – who played a role in the effort to undermine the peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 presidential election — does not have to report her income or the dark money donors who fund that income as part of a sitting Supreme Court Justice’s financial disclosure forms.

Something tells us that we have not heard the end of this story.

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Meet Marc Short, the Former Koch Exec Who Has Now Testified Before a Grand Jury Investigating the January 6 Attack

 

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Meet Marc Short, the Former Koch Exec Who Has Now Testified Before a Grand Jury Investigating the January 6 Attack

Fox News Host John Roberts Interviews Marc Short

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 27, 2022 ~

Mainstream media has been abuzz over the past two days that Marc Short, the Chief of Staff to former Vice President Mike Pence, has testified under subpoena before a grand jury convened by the U.S. Department of Justice, which has now broadened its investigation of the January 6 attack on the Capitol to the masterminds. But is that really the headline?

We think the real headline is that Marc Short was previously an executive at the fossil fuels conglomerate Koch Industries, a private company run by billionaire Charles Koch who has been setting up political front groups for four decades. Short went on to become President of a Koch-related dark money group called Freedom Partners from 2011 to 2016. Freedom Partners plowed hundreds of millions of dollars into political operations in an effort to put fossil fuel friendly pawns in Congress and the White House.

Freedom Partners has shuttered its stealthy operations but when we looked at its Board of Directors in 2018, all but one of its 9-member Board was a current or former Koch company employee. The Board Chair at that time was Mark Holden, who served in the dual capacity as General Counsel of Koch Industries.

Dozens of individuals connected to Koch and/or Freedom Partners took up key positions in the Trump administration. That includes the 12 Jones Day lawyers who took their place in the Trump administration on his very first day in office. Jones Day had been outside counsel to Koch Industries. According to Public Citizen, two of the main hires from Jones Day, White House Counsel Don McGahn and Ann Donaldson, Chief of Staff to McGahn, both previously represented Freedom Partners.

Freedom Partners was not bashful about conveying its demands to Trump. And Marc Short served in the role of Director of Legislative Affairs for Trump (before becoming Chief of Staff to Mike Pence) to move that agenda along. According to a formal memo from Freedom Partners, it was demanding withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord, massive tax cuts for corporations, and the gutting of federal regulations. Trump complied with those demands.

Freedom Partners was organized as a 501(c)(6) tax exempt organization. As such, it did not have to reveal its dark money donors to the public. Its Vice President, Nathan Nascimento, was a registered Federal lobbyist for issues near and dear to the fossil fuels industry. It had an affiliated Super Pac, Freedom Partners Action Fund, which also did not have to reveal its donors. Charles Koch and his trust donated at least $14 million to the Super Pac since 2014 according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The Super Pac ran TV attack ads against Democrats in election years. Time Magazine’s Philip Elliott reported in January 2017 that “In seven of the eight up-for-grabs U.S. Senate races last year, the Koch-backed candidate won. In all, Koch-backed candidates at all levels of races prevailed 96% of the time—a record any outside group would covet.”

After leaving the Trump administration, Mike Pence and Marc Short established their own dark money group, Advancing American Freedom. It was launched on April 7, 2021. This spring, Advancing American Freedom launched a $10 million ad campaign targeting 16 Democrats whom it apparently felt were not adequately on board the fossil fuels bandwagon or were too supportive of climate change science. In a statement announcing the big ad buy, Pence said he wanted the Biden administration to restart the Keystone Pipeline and restore oil and natural gas leases – presumably he meant on federal land.

On June 22, Pence appeared on the Kudlow Show on Fox Business, where he said his goals were to “unleash American energy; open up federal lands to permitting; open up the Alaskan National Wildlife region; begin again Keystone Pipeline; begin to develop the infrastructure necessary to move energy…”

Likewise, Marc Short has shilled for the fossil fuels industry on Fox News. Advancing American Freedom has a link to that video here.

The Ohio Attorney General’s registry for nonprofits lists the business address of Advancing American Freedom as 47 South Pennsylvania Street, Suite 201, Indianapolis IN 46204. That’s the same Suite number and street address as M/O Strategies, whose President is Marty Obst (M/O). The website for M/O Strategies indicates that Obst “currently serves as Senior Political Advisor to Vice President Mike Pence as well as Chairman of the Vice President’s operation of the Trump-Pence re-election campaign. You can read his full bio here.

Obst’s bio also indicates that his firm “provides strategic and grassroots advisory services to over two dozen major corporations, coalitions and associations.” We emailed him yesterday, asking if his clients include fossil fuel companies or related groups. He declined to answer our email.

The Vice President of M/O Strategies is Danielle Cleveland, whose bio indicates that “Most recently, she served as Deputy Executive Director of the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA).” RAGA’s dark money arm, the Rule of Law Defense Fund, was one of the “Coalition Partners” that turned out the hordes of people at the Capitol on January 6. According to IRS filings made by RAGA, it has received $511,400 from Koch Industries and a subsidiary since 2014. (See our in-depth report: The Money Trail to the Siege at the Capitol Leads to Charles Koch and Koch Industries.)

Let’s hope that the U.S. Department of Justice peels this onion all the way to its corrupt core – the unbridled Koch money machine — something that the January 6 House Select Committee has yet to do. As we wrote on July 1:

Imagine a country that allows a private fossil fuels conglomerate (or its billionaire boss, Charles Koch, the 17th richest person in the world according to Forbes) to get away with the following:

Meet secretly with big political donors twice a year to plot a coordinated strategy to put their chosen people in public office;

Meet at his private club with a sitting Supreme Court justice who will then rule on key legislation that benefits his interests;

Fund an organization that then sluices money to the wife of the Supreme Court Justice;

Run a highly sophisticated voter registration database, data mining and get-out-the-vote operation called i360, in order to pack Congress with people who will pursue an antiregulatory agenda;

Install dozens of its lawyers and operatives into the highest offices of the federal government;

Run a sprawling, opaque trading operation that could potentially be raising the prices of the fossil fuel products it sells via the futures market;

Continue to operate major factories in Russia, ignoring sanctions and a murderous regime waging an unprovoked war on Ukraine, until a pressure campaign forced it to say it will look for an exit strategy;

Fund a sprawling network of taxpayer-subsidized front groups to deny climate change and foment hate;

Provide funding to groups involved in sending a mob to attack the seat of government of its own home country on January 6;

Fund groups that use dark money and propaganda to put lifetime justices on the highest court to pass legislation friendly to the fossil fuels conglomerate.

If this sounds like some kind of dystopian novel, welcome to the United States of Koch, circa 2022.

Related Article:

The Glue that Connects Jeffrey Clark, John Eastman, Ginni Thomas, and the Guy Who Was Air-Dropped into the DOJ, Is Charles Koch’s Money

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