Six days after the Supreme Court lifted restrictions on corporate money in U.S. elections with its January 21, 2010, ruling in Citizens United, President Obama warned in his State of the Union address that it would “open the floodgates for special interests, including foreign corporations, to spend without limit in our elections.”

But as unlimited contributions have coursed through the election system, no one has been able to point to a specific example of foreign money flowing into U.S. presidential politics as a result of the Supreme Court’s decision.

Until now.

The Intercept has determined that a corporation owned by a Chinese couple made a major donation to Jeb Bush’s Super PAC Right to Rise USA — and it did so after receiving detailed advice from Charlie Spies, arguably the most important Republican campaign finance lawyer in American politics.

As Robert Weissman, president of the nonprofit advocacy organization Public Citizen, said, “We know that Citizens United opened the door for foreign money to influence U.S. elections. This case appears to be the first instance in federal elections where the money trail is clear and documentable from publicly available records.”

Spies presented his advice in a memo, obtained by The Intercept, which he prepared for Right to Rise USA, where he served as treasurer and general counsel. “We conclude,” he wrote, “that a domestic subsidiary corporation may now directly contribute to a Super PAC in connection with a federal election.”

The Spies memo was dated February 19, 2015. One month later, American Pacific International Capital Inc., a California corporation owned by Gordon Tang and Huaidan Chen, a married couple who are citizens of China and permanent residents of Singapore, made a $1 million donation to Right to Rise USA. APIC subsequently gave the group an additional $300,000, its total donation of $1.3 million making APIC one of the Bush Super PAC’s largest contributors.

APIC had, quite literally, gotten the memo.

Wilson Chen, Gary Locke, and Gordon Tang.

Photo: Apicincus.com

The company, which invests in real estate and industries in Asia and the U.S., is well-connected across the American political scene. Neil Bush, the brother of both Jeb and George W. Bush, is a member of APIC’s board. Gary Locke, U.S. ambassador to China from 2011 to 2014 and previously secretary of commerce, serves as senior adviser to APIC. In October 2013, while Locke was still ambassador, APIC co-owner Huaidan Chen purchased Locke’s Washington, D.C.-area home from him for $1.68 million.

In an interview, Wilson Chen, Huaidan Chen’s brother and president of APIC in 2015, compared APIC’s political donations to the Chinese tradition of gong cha, or paying tribute to the emperor. Chen repeatedly emphasized that APIC “did not want to do anything illegal” and made the donations with the guidance of the Spies memo and the company’s own in-house lawyer.

It’s not clear, incidentally, that APIC followed Spies’s memo to the letter. Spies warned that foreign owners could not be involved in the decision-making process for political contributions by their U.S.-based companies. But based on statements Gordon Tang and Wilson Chen both made to The Intercept, Tang may have crossed this line by authorizing the Right to Rise USA donation from APIC.

In any case, for campaign finance experts, Spies’s roadmap provides compelling evidence of a phenomenon many already suspected was well-entrenched. “Spies’s memo is an explicit how-to guide for foreign nationals to get money into U.S. elections through U.S.-based corporations that they own,” said Paul S. Ryan, deputy director of the campaign finance watchdog organization Campaign Legal Center. “It shows that although Obama was attacked in public for misleading Americans about Citizens United, in private people like Spies and others like him seemingly realized that Obama was right and set to work making his prediction a reality.”

Reached for comment by phone, Spies stated that the memo had been prepared “to ensure compliance with the law,” but he declined to say anything further about the circumstances leading to its writing or about APIC itself.

When asked whether Obama’s remarks in 2010 were vindicated by his memo, Spies grew agitated. After a short discussion, he said, “I don’t think there’s any point in our continuing this conversation,” and then abruptly hung up the phone.

The story of APIC captures the bizarre reality of the U.S. political system: George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush between them appointed three of the five members of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United majority; this majority opened up a loophole allowing foreign money to flow into U.S. elections; and this loophole was used to grab foreign money in an attempt to make a third Bush president.

Whether this loophole will continue to exist may largely depend on the outcome of the 2016 presidential race. The Democratic Party has lambasted the Supreme Court’s decision in its campaign rhetoric, and Hillary Clinton has promised to call for a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United in her first 30 days as president.

Gordon Tang and Huaidan Chen, now in their late 40s, have over the past several decades built a business empire largely based in Asia but with some branches in the United States.

The couple are the majority shareholders of SingHaiyi, a publicly traded Singapore-based corporation with a market value of about $250 million. SingHaiyi describes itself as “a diversified real estate company” owning condominiums and commercial property in Singapore, Malaysia, and the U.S.

Tang began his career in the 1990s, developing a large distribution network for duty-free goods. According to a SingHaiyi corporate disclosure, in the early 2000s, “leading trade importers and their staff” in the southeastern Chinese city of Shantou, including Tang’s trading businesses and Tang himself, were investigated by the Chinese authorities over “custom matters.” While “many in Shantou [were] convicted,” the disclosure states, including individuals “who were staff in Mr. Tang’s import and export business,” in the end Tang himself faced “no penalties or convictions imposed by the Chinese courts.”

When contacted by Elaine Yu, a Hong Kong-based journalist and contributor to this series, Tang offered to give her 200,000 dollars in an unspecified currency (Hong Kong and Singapore both denominate their money in dollars) if The Intercept did not reference unverified claims on Chinese-language websites that he had been accused of criminal activity.

Though Tang was most concerned about the resurfacing of these old rumors, which arose out of the government investigation into his trading businesses in China, they are actually far less pertinent to this story than his ownership of the U.S.-based APIC. According to a 2016 corporate filing by APIC, it is wholly owned by another corporation, “Jag Pacific Ltd.,” which appears to be incorporated in the Bahamas. But whatever Jag Pacific’s provenance, a 2012 SingHaiyi corporate circular states that APIC was ultimately “100 percent owned” by Tang and Chen. SingHaiyi’s 2014 annual report also says that APIC was owned by the couple, and its 2016 report states APIC is “controlled” by them. (APIC’s general counsel declined to discuss the company’s ownership structure on the record.)

Now headquartered in San Francisco, APIC calls itself a “diversified international investment holding company.” It currently owns, among other properties, five hotels and several residential developments in San Francisco, and three luxury hotels in China.

SingHaiyi has described APIC as its “sister firm” in news releases, a term that means they have the same ultimate owners.

Neil Bush as shown in a screen grab from SingHaiyi’s 2015 annual report.

Neil Bush is a member of the board of APIC and in 2013 joined SingHaiyi’s board as a nonexecutive chairman. Bush owns a small percentage of the Singapore company.

(Bush, like his business partner Tang, has been the subject of government investigations. Bush was famously sued by the federal government for his role on the board of Silverado Savings & Loan in Colorado from 1985 until 1988, when it collapsed with over $1 billion in debts. Silverado made $141 million in never-repaid loans to two investors in Bush’s oil exploration business; one of them used his free Silverado money to buy the entire company from Bush. Bush never faced criminal charges but did have to pay $50,000 to help settle the federal lawsuit and was reprimanded by government regulators.)

“We are very lucky to know them,” Wilson Chen said of the Bush family. “We talk to them as friends.” He noted that the Bushes have always been kind to China and said that “because of our generosity,” he was invited to attend a Right to Rise USA fundraising event hosted by Jeb Bush in April 2015 at the Mandarin Oriental, a luxury hotel in San Francisco.

APIC, which was initially incorporated in Oregon, made contributions between 2010 and 2014 to state and local Oregon politicians, mostly Democrats, totaling about $25,000. The earlier donations include $9,500 given to John Kitzhaber, a Democrat who was elected governor of Oregon in 2010 and 2014 and resigned last year in an unrelated ethics scandal.

“You know the politicians,” said Wilson Chen about the company’s history of donations. “They always ask for help.”

Wilson Chen, who unlike his sister and brother-in-law is a U.S. citizen, stated that APIC has never asked for anything specific in return for its money. However, he said, the connections between the company and prominent U.S. politicians gave those involved with APIC stature in Asia.

When asked whether Gordon Tang was unhappy with the donation to Rise to Rise USA given Jeb Bush’s quick defeat, Chen said no: It was simply about helping a friend. (Right to Rise USA did not spend all of the money it received, and when Bush withdrew from the race, it sent refunds to contributors on a pro rata basis; APIC got back $152,230.)

In Politico’s 2015 list of the 50 most influential people in U.S. politics, Charlie Spies is tied for second place with David Bossie, president of the organization Citizens United, and behind only Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, author of the Citizens United majority opinion.

Before Spies was general counsel for Right to Rise USA, he co-founded Restore Our Future, the main Super PAC supporting Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. Spies was also chief financial officer and counsel for Romney’s first presidential run in 2008.

As Politico put it, Spies “has mastered the art of helping candidates benefit from Super PACs. … His work created a playbook that allows candidates to maximize the new flood of money into politics.”

For instance, Spies advised Jeb Bush to launch Right to Rise USA months before the official start of his presidential campaign in June 2015. This allowed Bush to spend that time directly raising unlimited contributions for his Super PAC, something that would become illegal once Bush was a declared candidate. APIC’s initial donation to Right to Rise USA was made during this period.

Spies’s stature in Republican circles is further enhanced by his wife, Lisa, a prominent GOP fundraiser in her own right. Lisa Spies is known to use a famous quote from Gilded Age powerbroker Mark Hanna as her email signature: “There are two important things in politics. The first is money, and I can’t remember what the second one is.”

Memo by Charles Spies.

Charlie Spies’s Super PAC memo is in some ways a peculiar legal document. It is from Spies, to his client Right to Rise USA, with the subject “Contributions by Domestic Subsidiaries of Foreign Corporations to Federal Super PACs.” But it is not marked as being a confidential communication covered by attorney-client privilege. Moreover, says Ryan at the Campaign Legal Center, the legal questions it addresses generally do not arise “in the abstract. … Instead, such memos are typically sought when a client has a particular course of action in mind.” Taken together, this suggests the memo was created to be given to potential donors, like APIC.

The memo begins by noting that U.S. law strictly forbids any “foreign national” from “contributing, donating, or spending funds in connection with any elections in the United States.” The term “foreign national” includes foreign individuals, corporations, and governments.

However, as Spies helpfully explains in the memo, a company incorporated in the U.S. is not considered foreign. The law prohibiting donations by “foreign nationals” defines the term as equivalent to that of “foreign principals” found in 22 U.S.C. § 611(b). That, in turn, clearly states that a corporation is not a foreign principal if it is “organized under or created by the laws of the United States or of any State.”

By that standard, it doesn’t matter that APIC is owned by Chinese citizens. It’s incorporated in California and therefore counts as an American company that can spend money in U.S. elections just like any other.

And that means it can spend a lot. By striking down prohibitions on corporations and unions engaging in “independent expenditures” on elections, the Supreme Court declared in Citizens United that they can spend as much of their money on engaging in political speech as they want — as long as it is not explicitly coordinated with federal candidates. But as it has turned out, despite the court’s stated intentions, Super PACs like Right to Rise USA are, in all but name, arms of presidential or congressional campaigns.

Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens warned about the potential dangers of this in his dissent in Citizens United. “Unlike voters in U.S. elections, corporations may be foreign controlled,” he wrote, and the decision “would appear to afford the same protection to multinational corporations controlled by foreigners as to individual Americans.”

There are, however, a few hoops foreign-owned corporations in particular need to jump through. Spies’s memo explains how to do the jumping.

For example, Federal Election Commission advisory opinions have held that any donation from a company must be, as Spies put it in the memo, “wholly derived from the net earnings generated within the United States [and] spent from segregated accounts not subsidized by the foreign parent corporation.”

In theory, this guarantees the corporation must be a functioning, profitable U.S. business and not simply a shell corporation passing money through into the American political process.

APIC was presumably able to pass that test — its U.S. holdings are large enough that they likely generate considerably more in U.S. profits than the $1.3 million it gave the Super PAC.

But as the enormous amount of corporate tax avoidance demonstrates, multinational corporations can transfer money to subsidiaries in ways that appear legitimate but are not. “It’s often hard to prove those type of things,” said Larry Noble, general counsel of the Campaign Legal Center and previously longtime general counsel of the FEC.

Moreover, money is fungible. The donations to Right to Rise USA made Tang and Chen $1.3 million poorer, whether the money officially came out of their APIC pocket in the U.S. or their pockets in Singapore.

Another hoop: FEC regulations state that foreign nationals may not “directly or indirectly participate in the decision-making process” on political donations. As Spies writes, FEC advisory opinions have held that foreign nationals may decide to create a special segregated account for contributions and set a maximum budget, but that’s it. After that point, all decisions must be “made by a Special Committee comprised solely of U.S. citizens” — including the composition of the committee itself.

But that’s hardly enforceable. As Noble points out, it’s “a fiction” that U.S. citizens in that position could ever make truly independent decisions. “Of course the person is going to be aware of what the board wants, what the company wants, and its interests,” he said.

In any case, in interviews with The Intercept, both Wilson Chen and Gordon Tang made statements that suggest Tang may have violated the relevant FEC regulations.

According to Chen, “I proposed to make a donation to the Republican Party and then let the board of directors approve it before sending the donation.” APIC’s board includes Chen himself and Neil Bush, both U.S. citizens, but also Chinese citizens Tang and Huaidan Chen.

For Tang’s part, when asked why APIC made the donation to Right to Rise USA, he responded: “Wilson said to donate, so I did, I don’t really mind.”

As Paul Ryan points out, this indicates that Tang “was the ultimate decision-maker” even if he made his decision at Wilson Chen’s suggestion. Tang’s statement also has significance beyond the narrow legal question, said Ryan, because it “makes clear that the legal fiction that a U.S.-based corporation that is wholly owned by foreign nationals is a U.S. donor, not a foreign national donor, is ridiculous.”

So APIC — to its potential detriment — may not have followed Spies’s playbook in every respect. But there’s no question that Spies’s analysis was correct: The Intercept asked numerous lawyers from both parties who specialize in campaign finance law to examine Spies’s reasoning, and all agreed with it. As long as a foreign-owned U.S. corporation follows the rules, it can legally go ahead and give an unlimited amount of money to a Super PAC.

While this would likely seem like an alarming conclusion to most Americans, it is the law of the land.

When Obama predicted during his State of the Union address that Citizens United would open the door to foreign money in elections, the television cameras cut to Justice Samuel Alito, part of the majority in that decision. Sitting in the second row, Alito could clearly be seen shaking his head and mouthing the words “not true.”

Bradley Smith, a former chairman of the FEC and key intellectual architect of the deregulation of campaign finance, wrote that “the president’s statement is false.” PolitiFactfound Obama’s claim to be “mostly false.”

As for Spies, he told The Intercept that if any Americans are truly concerned about foreign influence on U.S. politicians, they should look to donations by foreign governments to the Clinton Foundation. “That’s a real problem,” he said, “not the three or five steps removed like you’re trying to pigeonhole the situation into here.”

Of course, however troubling contributions to the Clinton Foundation by foreign governments may be, such donations do not violate any laws. So there, at least, Spies and Obama find common ground on money in politics: Both believe something can be completely legal yet deeply wrong.

In response to detailed questions about APIC’s political activities, a representative for Tang and Huaidan Chen responded, “APIC is a legal American company. Our donations are all legal and approved by lawyers. We won’t break the law for our donations.”

The Campaign Legal Center told us it plans to file a complaint with the FEC asking it to open an inquiry into APIC’s contributions, but the reality is that the FEC has largely stopped enforcing even what few campaign finance limits still exist. The FEC has six commissioners, no more than three of whom may come from any one political party. The three current Republican commissioners philosophically object to most restrictions on political spending, which has led to frequent 3-3 deadlocks on important votes, including ones on whether to investigate possible foreign influence on U.S. elections.

“These days, the FEC doesn’t investigate anything,” said Noble. “The way things stand today, you’d probably have to hand them an email that says, ‘I’m directing you to make this contribution out of our foreign money.’”

There is just one known inquiry in the six years since Citizens United into a situation similar to that of APIC, but it was conducted by the Justice Department, not the FEC: A Mexican businessman was charged in 2014 with funneling $100,000 to a Super PAC he created via a U.S. shell corporation in an attempt to elect Republican Bonnie Dumanis as mayor of San Diego.

If Congress wanted to do something about foreign money in elections, it could have passed the DISCLOSE Act of 2010, which would have prohibited corporations with greater than 20 percent foreign ownership from putting money into the U.S. political process. But the act failed when first introduced, even with Democrats controlling the House and Senate. And this foreign ownership provision was stripped out of the most recent version of the bill.

And passage of such a law might make little difference given the partisan gridlock at the FEC; the law hardly matters if it isn’t enforced. Moreover, foreign ownership of a corporation can easily be disguised. As Donald Tobin, dean of the University of Maryland Law School, noted at a June 23 FEC event on the subject of foreign money in elections, “A foreign individual could create a Wyoming corporation. The Wyoming corporation could be the sole owner of a Delaware corporation that could own a Nevada corporation. The Nevada corporation could then engage in independent expenditures on behalf of a candidate. … It’d be incredibly difficult for any government entity, including the FEC, to have any idea that the funds in question” ultimately came from a foreign national.

So are there many more APICs, quietly putting their thumbs on the scale of elections for president, Congress, and state houses across the country? The reality is that America’s system of big-money politics exists in such darkness that it’s impossible to know for certain. And this door to foreign influence will likely remain open unless Citizens United is overturned by a new Supreme Court or invalidated by a constitutional amendment.

“When the president condemned Citizens United and warned that it would open the floodgates to corporate money, including foreign money, he was contemplating this,” said Norman Eisen, who was special counsel to the president when Obama delivered his 2010 State of the Union address. “I think he was prescient. I’m sure there are many more secret examples out there. It’s a sad state of affairs, but the worst scandal in the United States is what’s legal.”

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Did the GOP lawyer also help the Clintons sell MISSILE DEFENSE TECHNOLOGY TO CHINA? What about Uranium to Russia? What about killing Americans and saying “what difference does it make”. Closet server emails were hacked (if not why did the US extradite the Romanian hacker Guccifer to the US and now in prison). What about Gadaffi? ” “We came, we saw, he died” Yes, and now look at the Middle East. Oh, I guess it’s fine though to evil criminals making money from the running of weapons and wars.

EVERY WAR IN HISTORY SINCE 1600’s HAS BEEN FUNDED BY THE ROTHSCHILD’s.
They fund both sides to make money on interest and to destabilize regions to gain more control.

IF THEY GET THEIR NWO, these evil bastards will destroy all civilizations. Culture, ect…
You will be slaves for them.

Things like this were foretold by the movie Network in 1976. “There is no democracy. There is only IBM, IT&T, AT&T, and Dupont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon.” Same goes for not being any countries, just mega rich people and their corporations.

1.3 mill down the Bush drain (though they probably got a tax write-off). Money buys elections? I haven’t seen it yet; it sure didn’t help Jeb.
Trump allegedly has gotten enough small donor funds to match Hillary’s corporate donors. Looks like democracy to me. You can bash Trump all you like, but you are also bashing a large segment of society who will give you the middle finger in response and double down on The Donald.
Regardless who wins, we’ll get the president we deserve.

Come on, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are both terrible candidates who will create huge disasters in office. No, they are not the same – Hillary will go with expanded foreign military budgets and will try to start more wars, as GW Bush did, while Trump will wage his domestic wars against immigrants and Muslims; but both are pro-fossil fuel, which is a step backwards in the modern world (Hillary lies about this, but her fossil fuel lobbyists and fossil fuel investors show where her loyalty lies); in general Hillary Clinton is a complete tool of Wall Street interests and Trump is very similar in his push to cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans. These are not people with high credibility ratings, either.

One thing they do share is that their proposals don’t add up fiscally; without major cuts to the foreign military budget, domestic programs such as infrastructure repair will not be funded, not under Clinton or Trump. They are both bullshit artists running smoke-and-mirror campaigns. Regardless of which is (s)elected, their disastrous agendas will have to be opposed by anyone with a shred of common sense.

In contrast, there is one candidate and party with a platform that adds up fiscally: Jill Stein and the Green Party; but the Democrats and the Republicans have nothing to offer but lies and BS.

Sounds like you’re saying the American public deserves a strict British-style cane beating followed by an IMF-style austerity package? I can live with that, as long as we apply it to the wealthiest 0.01% first, and work down from there.
See Michael Moore on this fine British tradition:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BVR3UswjHY

I think either candidate will contribute to further American declines in civil rights, economic security, and the environment and further enrich the uber-rich. Hillary will incrementally advance fascism while Trump will move faster. Or not. He may also be less pro-war than Clinton. Or not. If I lived in a battle-ground state I might give Mr. AngryOrangeHead a shot. Who knows what he’d do? Or not?
But it looks like I’m doing what I did in 2012: Standing Up for Stein.

“Of course, however troubling contributions to the Clinton Foundation by foreign governments may be, such donations do not violate any laws.”

Are you kidding or merely a liberal shill pretending to be a journalist…..they are all disgusting and should all be illegal, but to make statement like that in your article simply wipes away any journalistic your entire article might have contained.

i would like to see corporations and even groups forbidden to donate money to politicians. just individual donations limited to 2000 dollars should be allowed.
the problem is politicians make the laws. and politicians are corrupt.

reading the lead article I am reminded how blessed we are the bush criminal empire was unable to buy their way back into the white house. this gives me hope that “w” and his slimy band of war criminals and profiteers may still be tried for their crimes. the let’s not look back murderous assassin currently occupying the residence has failed to “look back” perhaps in expectation that he will be given the same pass for killing American citizens who were convicted of no crime. the fact that neil bush (wasn’t he the financial fraudster from the s&l days million dollar no payback loan) is in the “circle (square) of life diagram reminds me of just how entrenched the ruling elite (aka mfing scumbags) are.
MORE importantly, will someone please get on the “Clinton sleaze machine” before she gets much further! the white outfit of puerility (:) accepting the anointing of the “criminal enterprise” called the dnc is beginning to give me nightmares. perhaps ed snowden could shed some assistance on how to retrieve/access (no doubt directly from the nsa) the missing emails (which likely contains interesting Clinton foundation crimes)could be instrumental in removing this cancer from the American political scene.
i’m sure I would sleep better with dreams of the bush and Clinton crime families being tried for their crimes against the united states and all of humanity.
the intercept is the best example of “truth” I have found (except/accept the bible). thank yo all.

Please expose the criminal backgrounds of some Indians who have donated to Hillary Clinton through the Clinton Foundation. One big name is Amar Singh, who is a well known sleaze under criminal investigation for money laundering and many other things and has donated to the Clinton Foundation.

Any man is Jignesh Shah under criminal investigation for fraud. money laundering etc., who received an award from Hillary followed by a personal meeting.

“But the act failed when first introduced, even with Democrats controlling the House and Senate. And this foreign ownership provision was stripped out of the most recent version of the bill.”

This scandalous situation has nothing to do with the SCOTUS.

Congress has every power necessary to change the law and won’t do it. If they wanted it changed, they could get it done in short order by a voice vote in both houses and a president willing to set quill to paper to make it law.

Not going to happen. But do be sure to vote early and vote often this November.

A new arena has been established in the beltway, it’s virtual and ervery 2 years lawyers will strut their stuff in completition as contestants in the first round draft to be bid on by other countries looking for their best players to be placed for election by the people. The sign on bonuses and salaries are huge and the performance awards are even bigger. Certainly the US supreme court had to see this coming.

money out of politics? i dont think so. Hillary is basking in dough.
opensecrets*dot*org/pres16/candidate.php?id=N00000019
And yet the real champion of getting money out of politics is Donald Trump. Is that why the msm is dumping on Donald?

Proliferation of weapons is not confined to the continental US. Coincidentally, the proliferation of weapons in the continental US puts the US on top of everyone in that category. Littering the world with weapons. Perhaps Hillary rivals Kashogi, the man who sold his boat to Donald.
vocativ*dot*com/242979/how-the-u-s-floods-the-world-with-weapons-and-makes-billions/
United States: 31%
Russia: 27%
China: 5%
Germany: 5%
France: 5%
U.K.: 4%
Spain: 3%
Italy: 3%
Ukraine: 3%
Israel: 2%
source SIPRI. org
Yet DT opposes war as a losing proposition. But wallstreet favors war and ruin as a primer for their currency loan monopoly – is that what scares the Military Industrial Complex and the wallstreet about DT?

Now that the USSC has made influence peddling legal, lawyers occupy WDC. D.C. Has Nation’s Highest Concentration Of Lawyers.
huffingtonpost*dot*com/2011/10/31/dc-has-nations-highest-co_n_1067215.html
Naturally Mr. Kahn is one of those on Hillary’s team of influence peddlers. WDC lawyers are in an ideal position to broker deals to other countries on behalf of America’s foreign war policy. Is it that DT is not a lawyer that so scares the other politician lawyers?

Some countries are busy backing their currency in gold. One of them, China, was innaugurated by the IMF as a reserve currency. This will rival the dollar and in my opinion, overtake it unless the US has a plan to force the purchase, retention and use of the USD. Certainly the combination of buying weapons and influence peddling is a help in that area. Exporting protectionism may be bad for the planet, but good for the USD. But i see a problem with the way Hillary does it.

It’s one thing for a country to buy USD, then use those dollars to buy arms and influence. But it is a whole different ballgame when you have people like Hillary Clinton brokering deals whereby the US GIVES AMERICAN PRODUCTIVITY – which is better used to build American owned infrastructure and services, the common property of the citizens of the u.s., – to foreign countries who turn around and hand that money back to the draft picked politicos for influence and their corporate military sponsors. In the business world, THAT IS CALLED EMBEZZLEMENT.

Hillary Clinton alone may not be the mastermind behind the weapons and war business. She may be just a flunky, or their whore, or a simple messenger. But as with any drug cartel, she is doing her part. And as long as ISIS is in play, that criminal enterprise is booming.

A new arena has been established in the beltway, it’s virtual and ervery 2 years lawyers will strut their stuff in completition as contestants in the first round draft to be bid on by other countries looking for their best players to be placed for election by the people. The sign on bonuses and salaries are huge and the performance awards are even bigger. Certainly the US supreme court had to see this coming.

money out of politics? i dont think so. Hillary is basking in dough.
opensecrets*dot*org/pres16/candidate.php?id=N00000019
And yet the real champion of getting money out of politics is Donald Trump. Is that why the msm is dumping on Donald?

Proliferation of weapons is not confined to the continental US. Coincidentally, the proliferation of weapons in the continental US puts the US on top of everyone in that category. Littering the world with weapons. Perhaps Hillary rivals Kashogi, the man who sold his boat to Donald.http://www.vocativ.com/242979/how-the-u-s-floods-the-world-with-weapons-and-makes-billions/
United States: 31%
Russia: 27%
China: 5%
Germany: 5%
France: 5%
U.K.: 4%
Spain: 3%
Italy: 3%
Ukraine: 3%
Israel: 2%
source SIPRI. org
Yet DT opposes war as a losing proposition. But wallstreet favors war and ruin as a primer for their currency loan monopoly – is that what scares the Military Industrial Complex and the wallstreet about DT?

Now that the USSC has made influence peddling legal, lawyers occupy WDC. D.C. Has Nation’s Highest Concentration Of Lawyers.
huffingtonpost*dot*com/2011/10/31/dc-has-nations-highest-co_n_1067215.html
Naturally Mr. Kahn is one of those on Hillary’s team of influence peddlers. WDC lawyers are in an ideal position to broker deals to other countries on behalf of America’s foreign war policy. Is it that DT is not a lawyer that so scares the other politician lawyers?

Some countries are busy backing their currency in gold. One of them, China, was innaugurated by the IMF as a reserve currency. This will rival the dollar and in my opinion, overtake it unless the US has a plan to force the purchase, retention and use of the USD. Certainly the combination of buying weapons and influence peddling is a help in that area. Exporting protectionism may be bad for the planet, but good for the USD. But i see a problem with the way Hillary does it.

It’s one thing for a country to buy USD, then use those dollars to buy arms and influence. But it is a whole different ballgame when you have people like Hillary Clinton brokering deals whereby the US GIVES AMERICAN PRODUCTIVITY – which is better used to build American owned infrastructure and services, the common property of the citizens of the u.s., – to foreign countries who turn around and hand that money back to the draft picked politicos for influence and their corporate military sponsors. In the business world, THAT IS CALLED EMBEZZLEMENT.

Hillary Clinton alone may not be the mastermind behind the weapons and war business. She may be just a flunky, or their whore, or a simple messenger. But as with any drug cartel, she is doing her part. And as long as ISIS is in play, that criminal enterprise is booming.

There’s quite a bit of comedy gold here. Starting with the role of “Charlie Spies” in giving Chinese money power over U.S. elections. Then there’s the assertion that “Unlike voters in U.S. elections, corporations may be foreign controlled…” Has no one noticed the lengths to which the non-Trump politicians have gone to get the “Latino vote”, or the cost Trump paid by refusing to endorse unlimited Latin American immigration?

Even so, there are far more obvious openings for political influence. Al-Jazeera and RT literally broadcasting the news, for example. Multinational corporations that might cut checks to candidates, or sponsor “educational” content about issues, or just go to their workers with newsletters and say you need this or there are tough times ahead. The U.S. is supposed to protect itself from this kind of influence by having a freer, hence more trusted press than the foreigners can manage. And if it doesn’t… there’s not much it can do then.

I am very hopeful that, before November, a news outfit like The Intercept will undertake to comprehensively reconstruct and review the influence-peddling (patient/agent) relationship that has by now long existed between the Clintons & the Clinton Foundation, and Fethullah Gulen, his many Gulenist followers in the US, and the so-called Turkish Cultural Center — and all this apparently brokered by HRC’s long-time assistant, Huma Abedin, the wife of the notorious dick-pic politician Anthony Weiner.

Recep Tayip Erdogan, whose AKP Party gladly collaborated with Gulen & his Hizmet organization in gaining & consolidating power in Turkey during the decade or so prior to their deeply acrimonious schism in December 2013, is fully aware of Gulen’s dealings with & sponsorship by the CIA (and it seems likely Mossad, too) during and since the 1980s; and this goes directly to why he now identifies Gulen with the recent attempted coup, given also that certain American individuals within NATO would seem in retrospect to have been suspiciously cognizant of just what was in store, suggesting then that authorship of the coup is to be attributed to individuals high up in the US government acting in league with Gulen (resident @ PA since 1999) and any number of his followers both in the US and Turkey. To many & perhaps most in the west, such a scenario might sound perfectly paranoid; but Byzantine intrigue is (as I well know at first hand) so much the lived reality in the former Ottoman empire, and there is actually excellent reason, in this instance, to lend countenance to Erdogan’s version of recent events.

In any case, guaranteed is that, in the event of a HRC presidency, Erdogan will sever Turkey’s collaboration with the US and NATO and likely affiliate with Russia instead (also perhaps before very long with Greece – sic! – should the EU soon collapse, given that is Greece’s geographic contiguity, its potentially overlapping economy, & its historic ties with Russia). It seems to me, then, that the Clintons’ financial (and hence moral) incumbency to the Gulenists @ the US is in urgent need of some clarity (via some inspired investigative journalism). Would HRC deny a priori the persistent insistence by Erdogan that Gulen and some of his senior followers be extradited to Turkey to face ‘terrorism’ charges?

Those interested might like to follow up on the above by referring to recent items @ ‘The Corbett Report’ website, also @ Sibel Edmonds’ ‘Boiling Frogs’ website. And I do believe a speech given (surely for a hefty fee) by Bill Clinton to the Turkish Cultural Center, which he closes by conveying thanks on behalf of HRC too, is to be found on YouTube. —- P.S. #JillNotHill

Many among my readers might be unaware of Turkey’s rapprochement with Russia, as now projected, and in the wake of the downing of that Russian aircraft some nine months back might find wacko what I here foresee.. But just such a rapprochement is by now very much on the cards — indeed, Erdogan is scheduled to meet with Putin in St. Petersburg on August 9, which meeting will already of course have rattled many in Washington and in NATO.

I see from a couple of today’s articles found at the link provided by Breaking News that one or more members of the Turkish government are, for the sake of enlightenment and by way of comparison, characterizing the Gulenists as a kind of Free Masonry outfit, in that secrecy is fundamental to its operation, its tactics, and its strategy (just as, indeed, Free Masonry is basic to the survival and perpetuation of the British Tory party, the UK police, the GB royal family, and so much else besides in that insular bastion of quasi-feudal privilege). In my own estimation, just such a comparison goes right to the point, for it stands to facilitate US readers in surmounting any cognitive obstacles to what the Useless Yidiot endeavors to stress (just above) — viz., that Erdogan is not paranoid, at least in his perception of the existence of such a Gulenist conspiracy against his government.

I myself would be tempted to elaborate a bit on the Free Masonry analogy but am loath to do so because, in Vienna in the year 1897, I joined the B’nai B’rith — an exclusively jewish version of the goyim’s Free Masonic Brotherhood, with which in fact it was loosely affiliated — and would not now want to compromise any number of my jewish Bros, many though by no means all of them early Zionists, by breaching fraternal discretion. I can, though, for the benefit of US readers, appeal to another analogy which lies close and ready to hand that might even better illustrate the very ontology of the Gulenist phenomenon, both in Turkey and in the USA and even to some extent amidst the highest echelons of the Washington / Clintonian political establishment (cf. Huma Abedin).

Just imagine, if you would, on the model of the Manchurian Candidate, that the so-called Church of Scientology had laid out an agenda back in the days of L. Ron Hubbard whereby its devotees would completely infiltrate the organs of government, the media, hollywood, and even the Pentagon, and then implement a particular self-interested agenda while seizing control of all those instruments of power upon their sudden receipt, some day in the future, of a clandestine signal to do so. That then, more or less, is what has happened of late in Turkey with the Gulenists — and this, it would seem, with the infernal complicity & cooperation of quite a number of nefarious persons invested with power in the USA and in NATO.

I think here I would be remiss were I not to mention that, to a not inconsiderable extent, my understanding of all of this has been enhanced by features of the very sect and/or cult, psychoanalysis, for which I am myself responsible. However, other than to allude to the pretty yuge role played by insider information routinely tendered by analysts in [dis]respect of their star patients, I am weary of developing this theme here, but nevertheless cannot resist the opportunity of claiming credit for being the first to point out in print that what I created was, structurally speaking, a massive ponzi scheme, in that the very function of psychoanalysis was always, essentially, to produce more analysts — this, of course, right up to the very apex of the pyramidal scheme with its ever-expanding base that served to ensure the welfare of all those higher up (just like how that pyramid on $ bills vividly testifies to the 1% vs the 99%).

I venture that, structurally speaking, many more or less profound comparisons might be drawn between religions, cults, and sects, on the one hand, and a ponzi scheme, on the other, with no more than a combo of credulity, belief, and devotion as the essential commodity at play (as indeed is overwhelmingly the case in the discipline of which I was myself the one & only creator). What, you might well ask, has all this got to do with the Clintons? Well, only really the fact that the two have been beneficiaries of just such a ponzi scheme that has for a long time now been enriching their Foundation and campaigns with money vacuumed up from members of a largely unsuspecting public by a load of Manchurian Gulenist candidates — Turkish-style, that is. ‘And I know’ — here I mean to paraphrase Wink Martindale (cf. YouTube) — ‘for I was one such suction-pump’.

In Steele’s piece, the important point is made in so many words that, instead of ever trying to float their agenda in the public marketplace and then running for office in political elections, instead Turkey’s Gulenists sought to secure a certain undue influence behind the scenes and to secretly consolidate this through the exploitation of insider information. This model can be said to have been prevalent and even the norm in the pre-20th century middle east, when Sufic dervish brotherhoods like the Naqsbandi (from which the Gulenists are descended) were in effect the power-brokers between the elites and the plebs. And it also obtained in northern Europe — hence, the proto- Free Masons as the architects and builders of any number of Europe’s great cathedrals and churches. But these kinds of secret societies and the undue influence that they can wield stand in stark antithesis to the very principle of democracy, albeit that the very notion of ‘democracy’ has become worse than a bad joke in those nations that continue monotonously and ever-more-vacuously to champion it: the US, the UK, and the EU. Thus, in colluding with the Gulenists for a decade or so, Erdogan sought to achieve and consolidate ‘democratic’ control of Turkey through a profoundly undemocratic means — hence, just recently there arrived, inexorably, the comeuppance which, right now, has induced his public self-mortification before the Turkish nation, albeit not his resignation from office.

I would be very curious to learn of Sufi Muslim’s response to all this, but she would appear to have disappeared off the map here of late — I do hope she’s okay. Also I miss that consummate maniac of a time-gone-by, Louise Cypher. Has anyone encountered any news of her lately, or is she just water long gone under the bridge by now?

Excellent Journalism. Gentlemen you elevate the Fourth Estate, I thank you. I look forward to reading your Reporting on the ” Clinton Foundation” the “Clinton Global Initiative” revealing the depth of curried Favor sold by WJC and HRC. Is Chelsea Clinton now ordained as the next in Dynasty for continued American digression ? The President Obama and Family to be neighbors to John Podesta ?

Did this response require reading TI’s article? Aside from you also using the word “foreign” I’m guessing the answer is no.

But the conjecture pulled from the deepest reservoirs of your ass does present a good point: Obama isn’t American. And after he leaves his throne will probably build a diabolical Kenyan corporation (Private Global Domination Inc.) where he can steer his foreign dollars into one of PGC’s US-based subsidiaries to be spent on SuperPACs espousing “corporatist” stuff. His dislike for Citizens United? Mere lip service according to the all knowing Clark.

While Obama decried Citizen’s United in 2010, he completely embraced it by 2014 as a practical necessity. In contrast, Bernie Sanders managed to run a well-funded campaign based on small individual donations by opposing the elite corporate agenda that Obama and Clinton and Bush all serve.

Now, if you’re going to serve a corporate agenda that harms the interests of the vast majority of the American public, you have no choice but to rely on those corporate elite interests to fund your political campaign; if you were limited to individual donations then populists like Bernie Sanders might crush you in an honest and fair election. Hence, Obama’s “practical necessity.”

And yes, Democrats, like Republicans, excel in giving lip service to notions that the general public agrees with, while secretly supporting opposing agendas favored by their corporate paymasters, regardless of the damage those agendas do to the American public. Clinton’s public stances on renewable energy, climate science, the TPP, student loan debt relief, etc. are all good examples of this.

Everyone is revolted by the amount of money sloshing around the political system (corruption!). But the fundamental problem — and this is a weakness of all democracies — has nothing to do with campaign finance. It’s simply that the country and the world has too many very rich people, causing a disjunction between the need to fund the political process and the basic equality of citizens. The simplest regulatory scheme is to stop this silly attempt to draw lines of who can donate and how much they can donate. It doesn’t work, and it just pushes the funding into a shadow world as depicted in these pieces. The appropriate model, instead, is securities regulation — sunlight is the best disinfectant. If the laws required full and complete disclosure of donors, the check on excesses and possible corruption comes from the political process. Look at Sanders and Trump: pointing out where your opponent gets his or her money, while lauding your own ability to fundraise from the grassroots, is an effective strategy.

(By the way, there needs to be a more complete theory of what the harm in foreigners donating to Super PACs is, if the practice is going to be so widely reviled. What is the difference between, for example, a resident of New York donating money to the campaign of a governor in Kansas, and the donations that the Chinese nationals directed in this article? There is a donor class in the United States that resides in essentially 10 zip codes, but fund elections all over the country. That fact to me seems more harmful than a foreign couple donating $1.3 million to a losing Super PAC. I think the evidence would bear out that the Koch network of donors, for example, has neglected the actual needs of constituencies in order to serve an ideological agenda unmoored from the particular district.)

Both the Koch’s and foreign entities’ ability to influence U.S. politics and governance with huge sums of money are both corrosive, only the former is legal. As for the link I sent:

The three-judge district court’s decision rests on a straightforward application of settled legal principles. This Court has repeatedly affirmed the power of state governments to prohibit aliens from engaging in a wide range of conduct that might interfere, even indirectly, with American democratic governance. The Court has also recognized that Congress has significantly broader authority than do state legislatures to regulate the conduct of aliens within this country.
The long and well-documented history of attempts by foreign nationals to exert financial influence over American elections amply demonstrates that direct electoral spending is well within the range of alien activity that Congress has a compelling interest in preventing. Section 441e is narrowly tailored to further that interest by reaching only the specific categories of alien spending that Congress has found to pose the greatest risk to American self-government.

I think my comment was poorly organized, but I do think we agree? No matter the current legality, if we agree foreign citizens expending money within the political system is a bad, then why is the spending of a New Yorker on an election in Kansas not equally bad? Without a persuasive answer to that question, the Court’s invocation of “long and well-documented history” is circular. The attempt to classify practices as corrupting or less corrupting seems misguided to me, and, given the current state of campaign finance (not to mention the other side of the coin: lobbying), incredibly unsuccessful. “Corrosive” or “corruption” as harms are so vague that it appears to leave all these open questions. I gather from the article that lawyers have no problem navigating these traffic cones.

If we cannot answer the question of harm persuasively and precisely, then my thought was what I said in the first paragraph. Require disclosure of everything and let the candidates beat each other up for who their donors are. If voters care so much about who funds campaigns, they’ll vote accordingly, no? My sense is that the majority might think campaign finance is unseemly and unfortunate, but their attention and votes are much more focused on the distribution of wealth.

How so? I don’t see the analogy. Whatever your thoughts on the desirability, democratic political process requires money. Contributing and spending money on elections facilitates speech — airing television ads, hiring staff, engaging in GOTV efforts, printing pamphlets, managing websites, etc. Asking whether donating money is more or less like a bribe is rhetorically appealing but unhelpful to finding a solution.

Of course, public funding could replace private funding. But that’s never had much support in the US. Personally, I think much can be said for the way in which Obama and Sanders sought and obtained a large base of small donors, something that wouldn’t be possible under public financing.

“When the president condemned Citizens United and warned that it would open the floodgates to corporate money, including foreign money, he was contemplating this,” said Norman Eisen, who was special counsel to the president when Obama delivered his 2010 State of the Union address. “I think he was prescient. I’m sure there are many more secret examples out there. It’s a sad state of affairs, but the worst scandal in the United States is what’s legal.”

It’s less an opening of floodgates than a loophole. Tang after all appears to have violated the FEC regulation. But you’re right, the FEC guidance cannot be reasonably enforced. Elimination of Citizens United is the long term goal, but if the FEC got off its butt, they could mitigate this in the short term.

We just need to clean up the election laws, that’s all, to make them consistent with the Citizens United ruling. Our conservative Supreme Court majority was pretty clear in their ruling that corporations are only exercising their rights to free speech, and if the corporations are US corporations, it is immaterial who their owners are. I suppose that in the brilliant minds of Justices Scalia, Allito, Thomas, Kennedy and Roberts the foreign owners of those corporations are no different than the foreign ancestors of DNA-based citizens.

By extension, nobody should be any more upset if it was the FSB that broke into the DNC e-mail server than if it was some teenager in Muncie. If the Chinese can participate in our election process, why not the Russians too?

Under the corporate position that “spending money is free speech,” why is this a problem? A foreign company can spend money on advertising their product in the U.S. corporate media, and that’s free speech, so why can’t they spend money on advertising for a politician who will serve their interests once in office? It is merely buying access to politicians, aka legalized bribery; and what is a ‘foreign-owned corporation’ in the globalized world, anyway? Halliburton is now headquartered in Dubai; “America” beer (Budweiser) is now in Brussels; their shareholders are based all over the world. Similarly, large private foundations controlled by politicians are regular recipients of huge foreign handouts (the Clintons took as much as $25 million from the Saudis via this route, and McCain took $1 million); all with no restrictions at all.

The counter-argument is obvious: isn’t bribing a police officer, prosecutor or judge to get out of criminal charges also an example of “spending money is free speech?” One can certainly say to a police officer, prosecutor or judge, “I am innocent and should be released” – so why isn’t handing out thousands of dollars to those entities also legal? How would that be different from corporate bribery of politicians?

What we really have here is just gross widespread corruption in government; why any average American would support or donate to these corrupt politicians is beyond me.

When contacted by Elaine Yu, a Hong Kong-based journalist and contributor to this series, Tang offered to give her 200,000 dollars in an unspecified currency (Hong Kong and Singapore both denominate their money in dollars) if The Intercept did not reference unverified claims on Chinese-language websites that he had been accused of criminal activity.