The
country is witnessing the second high-profile lynching effort of
Justice Clarence Thomas. Even while the media ignores the millions from
foreign nationals passing through shell companies to the Biden family,
it has pushed invented scandals for Thomas while demanding his
resignation to make way for a radical leftist Biden court appointee.
While
no one expects anything but lies and smears from the media, few are
aware of how the smear campaign against Justice Thomas was organized and
who is funding it.
While the media is deeply interested in who paid for Thomas’ grandnephew’s education, it’s uninterested in where the money that funds ProPublica’s smear campaign is coming from.
ProPublica has amplified the coverage of Harlan Crow, a conservative donor who is friendly with Thomas, but is less interested in discussing some of the men who back its operations. Its leftist smear campaigns are funded by the man who helped bring down the economy with his abusive tactics, a former Enron executive and FTX crypto-fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried.
The money that brought down banks is now trying to bring down a Supreme Court Justice.
ProPublica is a leftist nonprofit set up as an “ethical watchdog” by Herbert Sandler, listed by Time Magazine, as one of the 25 people to blame for the financial crisis of 2008, and more bluntly by Saturday Night Live as, ““people who should be shot”. (In a sign of the power and influence of the Sandlers, the SNL skit was quickly censored and cannot be found on NBC.)
Flush with billions from selling off their Golden West mortgage company, which had used “misleading” ads to prey on minority borrowers, to Wachovia Bank, tanking it and helping cause the financial crisis, Herbert invested his money in social justice.
And that made him “the man who made ProPublica possible.”
ProPublica had gotten its initial funding with the money harvested by Sandler from taking down Wachovia, and, more recently, it was promised $10 million by Sam-Bankman Fried whose collapse of FTX helped bring down Silicon Valley Bank and cause the worst wave of bank failures since the Wachovia collapse. When bad men bring down banks with their financial abuses, they write a check to ProPublica while their victims lose everything.
ProPublica, which claims that its mission is to “expose abuses of power and betrayals of the public trust”, makes no mention of any of this in its profile of Sandler: its beloved founder and chairman whose corrupt greed destroyed the financial security of millions of Americans.
Instead, ProPublica claims that Golden West, which took down the economy, “was considered to be one of the best managed financial institutions in the country” and “most admired savings institution”. This is exactly the kind of “fearless journalism” that has embedded ProPublica’s privately-funded smear campaigns against Republicans in media outlets across America.
ProPublica’s shameless lies are understandable as Sandler chaired the leftist smear group until his demise and Steve Daetz, the deputy general counsel at Golden West, and president of the Sandler Foundation, serves as one of ProPublica’s directors, and the Sandler Foundation continues to fund ProPublica’s smear campaigns of Republicans.
In addition to ProPublica’s origins in the money that helped take down the economy, its leading supporters include John D. Arnold, a former Enron executive who became the youngest billionaire in the country, and the leftist smear group was recently forced to give up $1.6 million from FTX crypto-fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried that was originally part of a $10 million grant.
When taking Bankman-Fried’s millions, ProPublica President Robin Sparkman claimed that the money would be used to “hold power accountable”. The exposure of FTX did not come from ProPublica’s vaunted “investigative journalism that holds power accountable” and the leftist group dragged its feet on giving up its latest pile of dirty money until late December 2022.
No word from ProPublica on whether FTX was also “one of the best managed financial institutions in the country”. Or was $10 million not enough to buy such shameless lies?
ProPublica’s list of its “leading” supporters is uniquely tilted to wealthy men in the financial industry who may be in a position to profit from a shift in the Supreme Court. The list of backers for ProPublica’s public smear campaigns includes hedge fund, private equity and venture capital figures. And those who are closely associated with them and their financial interests.
In a word, Wall Street and the Bay Area. Unlike Sandler and Bankman-Fried, there’s no scandal or investigation attached to the majority of such funding sources, but they do raise questions.
While ProPublica draws on money from the usual lefty foundations including Carnegie, W.K. Kellogg F, John S. and James L. Knight, James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Foundation, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation whose money can usually be found around nearly every leftist cause, it also draws on a large number of financial industry donors including S Donald Sussman, a hedge fund executive and party megadonor, Tom Unterman, a venture capital firm founder, Mark Colodny, a managing director at Warburg Pincus, a private equity firm, Bruce Golden, a venture capital firm founder, and Mitchell Lasky, a general partner at a venture capital firm.
Ronald Olson, famous as Warren Buffett and Mark Zuckerberg’s lawyer, as well as the lawyer handling Bill Gates’ divorce battle, is a ProPublica director and a major financial supporter. Olson is also a director at Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway and a partner at Munger, Tolles & Olson. The ‘Munger’ is Charlie Munger: Buffett’s partner. Olson is also a Biden donor and sat on the board of Bill Clinton’s defense fund for his Whitewater and Paula Jones scandals.
What impact would removing Justice Clarence Thomas from the Supreme Court have on the finances of Berkshire Hathaway and the potential cases of a ‘super-lawyer’ who is rated as being able to argue cases before the Supreme Court? Olson testified at Justice Clarence Thomas’ Senate hearings and, as the LA Times put it, “chaired the American Bar Assn. committee that rated Clarence Thomas barely qualified for the U. S. Supreme Court.”
Another financial mastermind backing ProPublica is Sir Michael Jonathan Moritz, a Sequoia Capital partner, and major Democrat donor who has also funded dirty operations like Pacronym, American Bridge and the Lincoln Project.
The ProPublica money that raises the most questions comes from an unlikely source: the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.
Best known for its Golden Globe awards, the HFPA is a collection of foreign reporters that cover Hollywood. The Golden Globe awards are used to fund the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s Charitable Trust which is supposed to be a charity funding “entertainment-related charities”. It’s not clear how smearing the only black man on the Supreme Court qualifies as an “entertainment-related” charitable cause.
I ended up playing a small role in the leftist hijacking of the HFPA when a former president sent out one of my Front Page Magazine articles which discussed the connections between Hollywood and BLM, only to be promptly purged and denounced by the organization..
The ugly act of political censorship, widely covered in headlines such as “Former HFPA President Calls BLM a ‘Racist Hate Movement'” and “Former HFPA president blasted over Black Lives Matter” played into a pressure campaign by leftist groups to which the HFPA surrendered. Its funding of ProPublica, a leftist attack dog group which has nothing to do with scholarships for filmmakers or protecting the culture of film, its stated goals, may have been one of the payoffs.
But the funding from HFPA raises its own legal and ethical questions.
The HFPA’s members are not necessarily American citizens and cannot fund political campaigns. While ProPublica is a 501(c)(3) which currently can be funded by foreign donors, at least until necessary reforms prevent the infusion of foreign money into American politics are put into place, its campaigns are obviously directed at achieving Democrat political goals.
While there is currently nothing technically illegal about foreign donors funding a campaign to force a Supreme Court justice off the bench, the problems with such a move are obvious.
Despite claiming to follow ethical standards and even to impose them on others, ProPublica has failed to distinguish which of its political activities are financed by American or foreign donors.
Could foreign money be financing its lynching of Justice Clarence Thomas?
We certainly know that dirty money, the cash that brought down two waves of banks, that destroyed the livelihoods and incomes of millions of Americans, is now trying to bring down a Supreme Court justice. Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.
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