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.
Before it was splashed all over the media, the Clarence Thomas smears were mostly generated by ProPublica with articles such as âClarence Thomasâ Secret Life of Luxuryâ then rebroadcast by the media in stories such as âProPublica: GOP megadonor paid private school tuition for grandnephew of Justice Clarence Thomasâ which keep the smear campaign going.
While the media is deeply interested in who paid for Thomasâ grandnephewâs education, itâs uninterested in where the money that funds ProPublicaâs 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 âethical watchdogâ 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, ââpeople who should be shotâ. (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 âmisleadingâ 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 âthe man who made ProPublica possible.â
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 âexpose abuses of power and betrayals of the public trustâ, 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, âwas considered to be one of the best managed financial institutions in the countryâ and âmost admired savings institutionâ. This is exactly the kind of âfearless journalismâ that has embedded ProPublicaâs privately-funded smear campaigns against Republicans in media outlets across America.
ProPublicaâs 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 ProPublicaâs directors, and the Sandler Foundation continues to fund ProPublicaâs smear campaigns of Republicans.
In addition to ProPublicaâs 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-Friedâs millions, ProPublica President Robin Sparkman claimed that the money would be used to âhold power accountableâ. The exposure of FTX did not come from ProPublicaâs vaunted âinvestigative journalism that holds power accountableâ 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 âone of the best managed financial institutions in the countryâ. Or was $10 million not enough to buy such shameless lies?
ProPublicaâs list of its âleadingâ 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 ProPublicaâs 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, thereâs 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 Zuckerbergâs lawyer, as well as the lawyer handling Bill Gatesâ divorce battle, is a ProPublica director and a major financial supporter. Olson is also a director at Buffettâs Berkshire Hathaway and a partner at Munger, Tolles & Olson. The âMungerâ is Charlie Munger: Buffettâs partner. Olson is also a Biden donor and sat on the board of Bill Clintonâs 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 âsuper-lawyerâ who is rated as being able to argue cases before the Supreme Court? Olson testified at Justice Clarence Thomasâ Senate hearings and, as the LA Times put it, âchaired the American Bar Assn. committee that rated Clarence Thomas barely qualified for the U. S. Supreme Court.â
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 Associationâs Charitable Trust which is supposed to be a charity funding âentertainment-related charitiesâ. Itâs not clear how smearing the only black man on the Supreme Court qualifies as an âentertainment-relatedâ 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 âFormer HFPA President Calls BLM a âRacist Hate Movement’â and âFormer HFPA president blasted over Black Lives Matterâ 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 HFPAâs 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.
