Tag Archives: John Podesta

The Company You Keep

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On Wednesday The Washington Free Beacon posted an article about some of the people in Joe Biden’s transition team. While it is not new information that Joe Biden is an experienced Washington swamp creature, some of the political connections of his team are concerning.

The article reports:

Joe Biden’s transition team includes several people affiliated with organizations bankrolled by the left-wing billionaire George Soros.

Biden’s “Agency Review Teams,” which include lists of individuals “responsible for understanding the operations” of each government agency, will prepare “President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris … to hit the ground running on Day One.” Soros is well represented on those lists.

Sarah Cross, an advocacy director at Soros’s Open Society Foundations, received a seat on Biden’s State Department transition team. Michael Pan, a special adviser in the executive office of the Open Society Foundations, will join the United States Mission to the United Nations team. Diane Thompson, who is listed as “self-employed” and a member of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau team, is a current Leadership in Government Fellow at the Open Society Foundations.

Soros poured more than $70 million into election activity backing Biden’s candidacy this past cycle, more than three times his previous high of $22 million in the 2016 election cycle. Soros and the Democracy Alliance donor club previously enjoyed close access to the Obama administration; under a Biden administration, that access will likely return.

Other members of Biden’s transition team work for groups that receive heavy funding from the billionaire. Sharon Burke and Viv Graubard, both at the New America think tank, will join Biden’s Department of Defense and Department of Labor teams. Soros’s Open Society Foundations gave New America more than $1 million last year, according to the group’s disclosures. Soros’s son, Jonathan, sits on New America’s board emeriti.

Biden’s team also includes six employees from John Podesta’s Center for American Progress who are sprinkled across the Treasury, Federal Reserve, Department of Labor, Department of the Interior, National Security Council, and Office of the United States Trade Representative. Soros’s most recent tax forms show that nonprofits in his sprawling network gave more than $1 million to Podesta’s group in 2018.

I don’t know how many Americans actually voted for Joe Biden or how many votes came from sources that were not quite legitimate. However, if a majority of Americans voted for Joe Biden, I wonder if they understood who he is or who his friends are. The people Joe Biden is choosing to make up his administration are not people who are looking out for the good of the country–they are people who will support programs that go against the American Constitution and against freedom-loving Americans. Unfortunately many of them will also be open to the idea of lining their own pockets at America’s expense. The programs that President Trump put in place to bring manufacturing back to America will disappear under Joe Biden. I wonder if many Americans understood that.

What The Transcripts Tell Us

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Just the News posted an article yesterday listing the top six revelations from House Russia probe’s newly declassified witness interviews. Please follow the link to the article to read the details, but here is the list of the six revelations:

  1. No Collusion: The U.S. intelligence community never had any evidence of collusion between Russia and the 2016 Trump presidential campaign.
  2. FBI didn’t have a case: Former Deputy Director of the FBI Andrew McCabe admitted during his testimony that the agency knew from the start that Trump associate George Papadopoulos wasn’t in contact with Moscow, thereby undermining the agency’s entire basis for opening Crossfire Hurricane, i.e., the Russia investigation. “Papadopoulos, didn’t particularly indicate that he was the person that was interacting with the Russians,” McCabe told the House Intelligence panel.
  3. Podesta and Clinton knew about funding for Steele Dossier: John Podesta, chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, testified that he and Clinton were aware in general terms that the campaign was paying for opposition research to link Donald Trump to Russia, but he said neither of them knew specifically who had been hired to conduct the effort.
  4. Clapper, Comey, and McCabe provide conflicting narratives: Clapper testified that he did not brief then-President Obama on former Michael Flynn’s conversation with the Russian ambassador in January 2017. However, both former FBI Director Comey and McCabe say otherwise.
  5. CrowdStrike says evidence of DNC hack was “not conclusive”: The president of CrowdStrike, a data security company retained by the DNC after it was hacked, testified to the House panel that there were “indications” of a hack into the DNC servers, but not concrete, irrefutable evidence.
  6. DNC lawyer ordered to tip off the CIA: Michael Sussmann, a Perkins Coie lawyer who represented both the Clinton campaign and the DNC in their response to presumed Russian hacking, testified that in February 2017, he went to the CIA, on behalf of a client whom he did not name, in an attempt to tip them off about the Trump organization’s ties to Russia.

The more we learn, the more this looks like a coup.

If You Depend On The Mainstream Media For Your News…

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There are a lot of Americans who depend on The New York Times for their news. Generally these are well-educated people who respect the tradition of the Times as the newspaper of record. They are either unaware or unconcerned about the amount of false reporting that the Times has done in recent years. Essentially, the Americans who depend on The New York Times for their news are uninformed about what is true and what is false. Recently a story appeared in the news that illustrates the problem. The Russians have hacked into the records of Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company the hired Hunter Biden. The New York Times has the story and PJ Media has the story. It’s not the same story.

The New York Times notes:

It is not yet clear what the hackers found, or precisely what they were searching for. But the experts say the timing and scale of the attacks suggest that the Russians could be searching for potentially embarrassing material on the Bidens — the same kind of information that Mr. Trump wanted from Ukraine when he pressed for an investigation of the Bidens and Burisma, setting off a chain of events that led to his impeachment.

The Russian tactics are strikingly similar to what American intelligence agencies say was Russia’s hacking of emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman and the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 presidential campaign. In that case, once they had the emails, the Russians used trolls to spread and spin the material, and built an echo chamber to widen its effect.

Note that the emphasis is on the election–the corruption that has already been proven is not mentioned–it’s all about embarrassment.

PJ Media notes:

GRU is responsible for other high-profile hacks of the DNC and John Podesta. Seven GRU officers were indicted in 2018 for conspiring to interfere with the 2016 election.

The hacking attempts against Burisma began in early November, as the Democrats’ impeachment efforts increased the profile of the company and Biden’s conflict of interests.

It is not yet known what the hackers found or what they were looking for. The New York Times says that “experts say the timing and scale of the attacks suggest that the Russians could be searching for potentially embarrassing material on the Bidens.”

The PJ Media article concludes:

So what does this mean? Scott Rosenburg of Axios believes that awareness of the hacks “cuts both ways politically.” There are huge negative implications for Joe Biden and his presidential campaign, since “it means document dumps could happen at any time, with accompanying media frenzy and potentially damaging revelations.” Many on the left still believe—despite all evidence to the contrary—that Trump colluded with Russia in 2016, so Russian involvement with the hacks “means that any such revelations will come pre-tainted with a Russian label,” according to Rosenburg.

Despite the Russian connection, should damaging information be revealed, Biden’s campaign has the most to lose, as his repeated denials of knowledge of his son’s business dealings could be undercut by documentary evidence. New details about how Hunter Biden’s position on the board gave Burisma access to the White House during the Obama years may also be brought to light.

The New York Times is still beating the dead horse of collusion with the Russians (no evidence found in Mueller Report or since).  Unfortunately Americans are being misinformed by what was formerly ‘the paper of record.’

I Don’t Have Enough Imagination To Come Up With This

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The following appeared in The Daily Caller yesterday:

This is real. I am not kidding.

The article notes:

Hillary Clinton, who used a private email server as secretary of state, will speak at a cyber defense summit later in 2019, it was announced Thursday.

FireEye, a cybersecurity company based in California, announced Clinton will give the keynote speech at its annual summit in Washington, D.C., in October.

The article continues:

The FBI investigated Clinton for mishandling classified information, but she was not charged in the probe.

James Comey, who served as FBI director during the investigation, called Clinton’s use of the server “extremely careless.” He said it made more vulnerable to cyber attack by foreign powers, though investigators did not find evidence that the server was hacked.

Clinton has also asserted the hacks of her campaign chairman’s emails and that of the Democratic National Committee led to her defeat at the hands of Donald Trump in the 2016 election.

The Russian government allegedly hacked into the DNC’s computer systems and released nearly 20,000 emails through WikiLeaks. The same Russian intelligence operation also stole John Podesta’s emails through an unsophisticated spear-phishing attack.

I would like to note that the FBI was never allowed to examine the DNC’s computer systems to confirm how John Podesta’s emails were accessed–it was done by an organization called CrowdStrike, considered an ally of the Democrat Party. There has always been speculation that the Podesta emails were leaked by a Democrat. Julian Assange of Wikileaks has stated on numerous occasions that he did not get the emails from the Russians.

At any rate, would you attend a cyber security conference with Hillary Clinton as the featured speaker?

 

The Strange Case of Julian Assange

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Yesterday NewsbustersNewsbusters posted an article reminding us that the media once loved Julian Assange. Now, not so much.

The article reminds us:

Before the hacking of the DNC during the 2016 Campaign, WikiLeaks was responsible for many document dumps that harmed American national security, the most infamous case involving a U.S. Army private then known as Bradley Manning. WikiLeaks also put at risk the lives of informants working for U.S. and allied forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was during that time, when WikiLeaks endangered lives and undermined U.S. war efforts, that the press sang its praises as a truth-telling and information-gathering organization.

The article lists a number of examples of news stories praising Assange for revealing ‘behind the scenes’ information on military matters. They chose to ignore the fact that American lives were put at risk by what he did. Then came the hacking of the DNC. Somehow the story changed–then Assange became a villain in the eyes of the media.

The article concludes:

Even if it wasn’t known in 2010 that WikiLeaks was an arm of Russian intelligence, Jullian Assange was enemy of the United States before, during, and after the 2016 hack into the e-mails of John Podesta and the Democratic National Committee, but the media only uniformaly came out against Assange when it appeared that his work would hurt Hillary Clinton and the Democrats, not when he was endangering lives by undermining U.S. war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

There are a few things I want to remind people of as this story unfolds. Jullian Assange has repeatedly stated that the DNC leaks did not come from Russia. There is speculation that they may have come from a lost cell phone of John Podesta (with the password ‘password’) or from a leaker inside the DNC who was concerned that the primary election was being rigged for Hillary Clinton (Seth Rich?). I would also add that if you supported the leaking of the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times by Daniel Ellsberg in 1971, then you should probably support Jullian Assange. Just for the record, Daniel Ellsberg was indicted for stealing and holding secret documents, but the judge in the case declared a mistrial and dismissed the charges.

I don’t support leaking military information, but when there are shenanigans going on in a political campaign, I am grateful when it is revealed.

 

The Tactics Are Definitely Over The Top

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The internet is buzzing today with the arrest of Roger Stone, someone who evidently had contacts with the Trump campaign at various points. Nothing he did in that context was illegal, but it seems that when questioned by Congress he did not tell the entire truth. Funny, other people who have recently lied to Congress are still walking around free.

The Washington Examiner posted an article today about Roger Stone’s arrest.

The article reports:

FBI agents arrested longtime Trump associate Roger Stone in a paramilitary-style raid at his home in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., early Friday morning. A CNN producer on the scene said the arrest involved “heavy weaponry.” Stone was taken into custody without incident.

The arrest followed action by a grand jury in Washington, D.C., under Trump-Russia special counsel Robert Mueller. On Thursday, the grand jury indicted Stone on seven counts of lying to Congress, witness tampering, and obstructing a congressional investigation.

Roger Stone is 66 years old. The paramilitary-style raid was an abuse of power and was dangerous. It was also a waste of money. I have no doubt they could have simply waited until after breakfast, knocked on the man’s door, and taken him into custody. This is another example of the over-the-top tactics used by Robert Mueller.

The article goes on to explain what Roger Stone is charged with. Basically it is process crimes connected to the Special Counsel’s witch hunt. I suspect his real crime was supporting President Trump.

The article continues:

All the counts stem from Stone’s Sept. 26, 2017, interview with the House Intelligence Committee investigating Russia’s attempt to influence the 2016 election and the response by U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Stone is not charged with lying to or attempting to obstruct the Mueller investigation.

The special counsel’s charges involve Stone’s House testimony about WikiLeaks and its release of hacked material from the Democratic National Committee and, later, from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta during the 2016 campaign. The indictment does not say Stone communicated with Wikileaks head Julian Assange. Rather, it says Stone lied about his attempts to learn Assange’s intentions through two intermediaries: journalist and provocateur Jerome Corsi and radio host Randy Credico.

Meanwhile, crimes involving lying to a FISA court go unpunished, misuse of government agencies to spy on Americans goes unnoticed, and destruction of evidence that was subpoenaed goes unpunished.

Unless the new Attorney General is sworn in quickly and deals with the unequal justice currently being practiced in America, we will have become a banana republic.

Equal Justice Under The Law?

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It has become very obvious in recent years that people close to the Clintons who break the law are held to a different standard than the rest of us. The amount of evidence destroyed in the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private server is amazing–and no one was ever charged with destroying evidence. Now we have a new example of how to break laws with no consequences if you are a supporter of the Clintons.

The American Thinker posted the following today:

Tony Podesta, the Democratic über-operative and brother of Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, has been offered immunity from Special Counsel Robert Mueller in exchange for his testimony against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.  The two men were doing the exact same “crime,” which was acting as unregistered lobbyists on behalf of the Ukrainian government, but Podesta skates, while Manafort goes to prison for the rest of his life.

As Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, who broke the story, pointed out, the only difference between them is that Manafort worked for Donald Trump.

Is there anyone honest enough in Washington to call ‘shenanigans?’ This should chill every person who has ever done business overseas or worked in Washington. I have news–if this is allowed to stand, it could happen to anyone in the future if the tables are turned. I would hope the political right would be too honest for this sort of thing, but this sets a precedent that is frightening.

The article concludes:

What we are seeing is one set of laws for Democrats and another set of laws for Republicans.  Its analogy in the press is media bias – one kind of coverage for Republicans, and another kind for Democrats, as we recently saw with the undocumented children case, which it turns out was President Obama’s doing, not President Trump’s, but guess who got the wall-to-wall coverage.  People notice things like that.  The Deep State doesn’t, but normal people do see these double standards.  Double sets of laws for the elites and masses are precisely why voters turned to Donald Trump back in 2016.

This Manafort-Podesta thing isn’t about justice.  It’s about the Deep State’s bid to preserve its power.  It can only serve as rocket fuel for Trump.

I hope this injustice encourages voters to vote out of office anyone who has supported this witch hunt.

The Best Question Asked On The Sunday Morning Shows

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The following video was posted at YouTube yesterday:

Most of the interview is a classic example of media bias and rehearsed talking points, but the question as to why the Democrats did not focus on the places the Russians knew to focus on is wonderful! Just for the record, there is no evidence that the Democrats were behind the hacking of the DNC. Remember that the DNC would not let the FBI examine their computers.

The Conservative Treehouse has a few relevant comments on this intervieiw:

Interesting interview. The Russians didn’t keep Hillary out of Wisconsin; the Russians didn’t make Hillary use personal email; the Russians didn’t hire Fusion-GPS; the Russians didn’t pay Christopher Steele; the Russians didn’t make a dossier or deliver work product to the State Dept; the Russians didn’t do the unmasking of campaign officials.

The Russians didn’t apply for a FISA warrant; the Russians didn’t lie to a FISA court; the Russians didn’t leak Mike Flynn monitored phone calls; the Russians didn’t use DOJ and/or FBI databases to download FISA 702(16)(17) queries and extract the data to private contractors; the Russians didn’t hire Nellie Ohr and Russians didn’t approach president-elect Trump and warn him of politically weaponized intelligence surveillance…

The… wait…. then again, THAT’S ENTIRELY THE MOTIVE to blame the Russians:

If the Russians were actually successful in influencing the 2016 election, it was because Americans were not paying close attention to what was going on. The Russians will always try to influence our elections. We will always try to influence elections in other countries. We live in the world of Spy v. Spy illustrated by Mad Magazine in the 1950’s. It is our responsibility as Americans to do our own research into what we see on social media. The best defense against foreign meddling in our elections is an informed electorate!

 

A Very Different Perspective On Yesterday’s Indictments

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Yesterday Conservative Treehouse posted a very intriguing analysis of the indictment of Paul Manafort. I strongly suggest that you follow the link to read the entire article, but I will try to highlight it here.

The article reports:

As the Special Counsel Robert Mueller indictment documents show with increasing clarity, the entire enterprise surrounding the Washington DC Russian Investigation is not about law, it’s about creating and controlling leverage.

…The 2016 election caused the balance of power to shift favorably toward political forces that are external to the DC machine, ie. President Trump and the deplorables.

The subsequent action by Robert Mueller, Democrats, the Media (writ large), and President Trump is a confrontation over political goals and objectives. The DC machine, the “swamp” per se’, is attempting to frame leverage against actions adverse to their political interest.

…Paul Manafort is being leveraged toward a political objective; his legal jeopardy is negligible. The documents, and the underlying charges, are intended to make life miserable for Mr. Manafort – not to end with some traditionally framed criminal consequence, ie. prison.

Mr. Manafort’s wealth is being held as leverage, compliance, toward his acquiescence within the game; nothing more. He’ll likely end up with some misdemeanor charge, a financial fine good enough for media optics and perhaps -at worst- some probation for not following the FARA rules. That’s it.

Conversely, on the other side of the political continuum, Tony and John Podesta are just now entering the process of being leveraged toward compliance on the Clinton side of the equation. Like Manafort, Tony Podesta most likely will not face legal jeopardy beyond a similar outcome.

In the backdrop to the Clinton dynamic you have Mueller putting the deeper part of the Deep Swamp and remaining black hat intelligence community, on notice to knock-it-off with the selling of U.S. policy toward gaining their own financial indulgences.

The article concludes:

Senator Schumer wants to keep his leverage right where it is currently; and stop ‘his side’ from feeling the effects of Mueller’s omnidirectional legal admonishments. If Mueller indicts Tony Podesta senator Schumer loses political leverage.

Nothing about the current dynamic is factually encompassing President Trump; it is all about optics, narratives and political leverage. However, everything about this dynamic is factually encompassing the existential threat that outsider Trump represents to the established way of life in the DC Swamp.

Toward the end goal of disrupting DC swamp-life, Mueller and Trump appear aligned in common cause. Robert Mueller from the perspective of trying to get the external influence agents to the U.S. stopped; and President Trump from the policy perspective of America-first, which coincidentally is in alignment with Mueller’s patriotic goals to stop influence agents.

That’s the bigger part of the BIG picture. Everything else is smoke and mirrors.

Washington is all about power (and a swamp that does not want to be drained).

The Connections Just Keep On Coming

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Yesterday Breitbart reported that energy firm Joule Unlimited has collapsed.

The article reports:

“The investors walked away,” former Joule Unlimited CEO Brian Baynes told The Digest, a biofuel publication.

First revealed in research from Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large and Government Accountability Institute (GAI) President Peter Schweizer, Podesta joined the executive board of Joule Unlimited Technologies — a Boston, Massachusetts-based firm that received $35 million from the Russian government while Clinton served as secretary of state — in June 2011. Podesta received 75,000 common shares of Joule stock options, according to an email uncovered by WikiLeaks.

Podesta failed to disclose his presence on the board of the Dutch-registered Stichting Joule Global Foundation before he became President Obama’s senior adviser in January 2014 — a possible violation for federal law.

Did the investors walk away because when Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election, they realized that any influence they might have had on American foreign policy was gone? There are simply some amazing connections between Russia, the Clinton Foundation, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The Future In America?

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Yesterday Lifezette reported that Julian Assange’s internet connection at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London was severed Sunday, according to WikiLeaks.

The article includes the following:

“Julian Assange’s internet link has been intentionally severed by a state party. We have activated the appropriate contingency plans,” the organization tweeted around 10:30 p.m. on Sunday evening.

WikiLeaks has not pointed a finger directly at any specific government, nor has it provided any evidence that a state actor is indeed responsible for the attack on Assange’s internet link.

Wikileaks has been a major player in the American presidential campaign. One can only speculate as to who actually cut the cord.

The article states:

However, WikiLeaks has been a major inconvenience for the Clinton campaign and the Obama administration of late, releasing a hoard of hacked emails from Clinton’s campaign Chairman John Podesta. So far over 12,000 of the alleged 50,000 Podesta emails in WikiLeaks’ possession have been released.

Both the U.S. government and the Clinton campaign have blamed these leaks on Russia and have sought to paint WikiLeaks as some sort of satellite department of Russian intelligence. If a state actor is truly responsible for pulling the plug on Assange’s internet connection, current events strongly suggest the actor with the most motivation would be the United States.

You have to wonder if the American government cut the cord. The thing to remember when viewing this is the degree to which Donald Trump is a threat to the status quo and the establishment. There is little doubt that his presidency would involving cleaning house in Washington and removing a lot of dead wood. It is quite likely that some of that corruption and dead wood had something to do with cutting the WikiLeaks internet connection. Is this the direction freedom of speech will take if Hillary Clinton is elected?

Using The Press To Try To Steal An Election

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It has long been obvious that the press is biased toward the liberal end of the political spectrum, but that bias has really been extreme during the current presidential primary. On Thursday, Kim Strassel at The Wall Street Journal posted an article noting the difference in the press coverage of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. The media spent a lot of time covering allegations of inappropriate behavior by Donald Trump despite the fact that these allegations had not be made during the thirty years he has been in the public eye and despite the fact that some of the circumstances of the allegations are extremely questionable. Meanwhile, Wikileaks leaked many of the emails that Hillary Clinton had destroyed as ‘personal’ or simply not turned over in response to subpoenas for those emails and the press pretty much ignored the contents of those emails.

The article reports:

But even if average voters had the TV on 24/7, they still probably haven’t heard the news about Hillary Clinton: That the nation now has proof of pretty much everything she has been accused of.

It comes from hacked emails dumped by WikiLeaks, documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, and accounts from FBI insiders. The media has almost uniformly ignored the flurry of bombshells, preferring to devote its front pages to the Trump story. So let’s review what amounts to a devastating case against a Clinton presidency.

 Start with a June 2015 email to Clinton staffers from Erika Rottenberg, the former general counsel of LinkedIn. Ms. Rottenberg wrote that none of the attorneys in her circle of friends “can understand how it was viewed as ok/secure/appropriate to use a private server for secure documents AND why further Hillary took it upon herself to review them and delete documents.” She added: “It smacks of acting above the law and it smacks of the type of thing I’ve either gotten discovery sanctions for, fired people for, etc.”

…The leaks show that the (Clinton) foundation was indeed the nexus of influence and money. The head of the Clinton Health Access Initiative, Ira Magaziner, suggested in a 2011 email that Bill Clinton call Sheikh Mohammed of Saudi Arabia to thank him for offering the use of a plane. In response, a top Clinton Foundation official wrote: “Unless Sheikh Mo has sent us a $6 million check, this sounds crazy to do.”

The article concludes:

Mrs. Clinton has been exposed to have no core, to be someone who constantly changes her position to maximize political gain. Leaked speeches prove that she has two positions (public and private) on banks; two positions on the wealthy; two positions on borders; two positions on energy. Her team had endless discussions about what positions she should adopt to appease “the Red Army”—i.e. “the base of the Democratic Party.”

Voters might not know any of this, because while both presidential candidates have plenty to answer for, the press has focused solely on taking out Mr. Trump. And the press is doing a diligent job of it.

That should concern all of us.

 

Funding The Green Agenda At The Executive Level

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It would be nice if we were all very honest people who were not swayed by money or the promise of influence. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the way the world works. Today’s Daily Caller posted a story about White House Counselor John Podesta, who will be leaving the White House to take a position in Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

The article reports:

But his work came into fuller view earlier this week when he emerged as one of the architects of the new White House policy that seeks to end any future drilling for oil on Alaska’s coastal plain.

In fact, Podesta personally announced the policy in a White House blog post Sunday, waxing poetic that the move would ensure “this wild, free, beautiful, and bountiful place remains in trust for Alaska Natives and for all Americans.”

Shielding public lands from oil and gas drilling also is one of the main occupations of Hansjorg Wyss, a mysterious Swiss billionaire who personally hired Podesta as a “consultant” in 2013 just before he entered the White House, according to his White House disclosure form.

The problem is that because of the timing involved, there is a violation of federal ethics rules.

The article explains:

But it may be Wyss’s decision to personally hire the White House Counselor in 2013 as a “consultant,” and paying him $87,000 that could cause Podesta the most trouble.

A number of federal ethics rules, including President Obama’s “ethics pledge,” signed into law by the president on his first day in office, preclude political appointees from engaging in issues of interest to a former employer.

The period of disqualification applies to all work done within two years before entering the federal government. Podesta worked at Wyss’s HJW Foundation in 2013 and joined the White House in January 2014.

Wyss has a history of working to put federal lands off limits for energy exploration and for use as grazing property.

The article details more of Wyss’ activities:

He famously ponied up $35 million in 2010 to set aside 310,000 acres of land from development in Montana.

In January 2013, Wyss contributed $4.25 million to purchase oil and gas leases on 58,000 acres of land in Wyoming’s Hoback Basin.

Wyss sits on the governing council of the Wilderness Society, and on the boards of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance and the Grand Canyon Trust.

In addition to Podesta, Wyss also hired Molly Mcusic to be his foundation president.

Mcusic served in the Clinton administration as a top assistant to Interior Secretary Bruce Babbit. She is best remembered for using the Antiquities Act to designate lands as “National Monuments.”

I wish we had someone in Washington uncorrupt enough to take on this sort of corruption. Americans are being denied the use of land that would add to the prosperity of the average citizen, and someone from another country is pulling the strings within an American administration. Would anyone be willing to wager how much of this story will make the major news outlets?