Sheldon Whitehouse: How Right-Wing Dark Money Is Trying to Kneecap the Biden DOJ

[babylonsister]

https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-right-wing-dark-money-is-trying-to-kneecap-the-biden-doj?ref=home


How Right-Wing Dark Money Is Trying to Kneecap the Biden DOJ
TIME TO FIGHT
A shadowy group is fighting DOJ appointees Vanita Gupta and Kristen Clarke. Their crime? Their desire to use their skills to defend Americans’ right to vote.
Sheldon Whitehouse
Published Mar. 22, 2021 4:57AM ET

snip//

In Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell’s court-packing machine, this Judicial Crisis Network spent $7 million to oppose President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland, and then spent another $10 million to boost Trump’s nominee Neil Gorsuch. JCN pledged $10 million or more for Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination. It spent $10 million in under two months to support Amy Coney Barrett’s bid. These campaigns were funded with tens of millions of anonymous dollars, primarily through four separate donations of at least $15 million. Those donations may well have been the same donor.

Eye-popping as that is, those millions are a tiny slice of the funding behind the overall dark-money operation. A 2019 Washington Post investigation revealed JCN is one of a web of front groups coordinated by Leonard Leo, the long-time executive vice president of the Federalist Society. The Post tracked more than $250 million in dark money flowing through Leo’s groups.

snip//

This brings us back to Gupta and Clarke. Gupta once ran the Civil Rights Division. She prosecuted hate crimes and human trafficking, promoted disability and LGBTQ rights, and fought discrimination in education, housing, employment, lending, and religious exercise. But most important, she challenged voter suppression. Gupta, if confirmed as assistant attorney general, will supervise the Civil Rights Division she once ran.

Accomplished civil rights attorney Clarke will fill Gupta’s former role running the Division and enforcing voting rights. The Honest Elections Project, kin to the Judicial Crisis Network, wants no part of these two women, because they will be strong, motivated leaders against unlawful voter suppression. They preferred Trump’s Civil Rights Division, which didn’t bring one single Voting Rights Act case until late May of 2020.

That’s the motive. The donor-approved Republican appointees to the Supreme Court may handcuff the Civil Rights Division with further judicial assaults on voting rights. But Trump’s cronies at the Justice Department showed dark-money donors the value of a captive Department that would look away from voter suppression schemes. As Republicans hinge their election strategy on keeping Americans from voting, an active Civil Rights Division is a deadly threat.

I get it. If I were a right-wing special interest group, the last thing I would want is these two experienced lawyers wielding the power of the Justice Department to defend voting rights. But for everybody else, these women are two appointments to applaud.

[LymphocyteLover]

1. Is there a serious chanceGupta or Clarke won't get confirmed?

[SheltieLover]

2. K&R!

[2naSalit]

3. K&R

Expose all those whole facilitate the destruction of democracy.

[Solly Mack]

4. K&R

[jaxexpat]

5. Dark money from misguided millionaires is the heart of darkness.

non-millionaire QOP donors are more like the colon and appendix of darkness

[tiptonic]

6. Citizens

Thank you Citizens United. Your plan is working well. The GOP is drowning the country, in campaign contributions/bribes.

[jaxexpat]

8. Citizens United, Biden would have to overstep his mandate by light years to match that one.

I wonder, what greatness will the USSC come up with to top that? Legalized slavery? Debtor's prison? Land-bound serfdom? State enforced euthanasia? Certainly variants on these themes are to be expected.

This country was founded by slavers and anti-slavery advocates agreeing, in equal measure and for the benefit of the wealthy, to not fight among themselves. It's time to surgically remove the slavers from the body politic. For the good of the patient.

[RVN VET71]

7. Federalist Society is a nest of plutocrats and fascists

who have no interest in historical concepts of American self-governance. Leonard Leo, named here as “long time Vice President” of the Society, clearly has access to billions of plutocratic dollars and is using that access to upend the power of the “little people”, for whom plutocrats care neither feather not fig. To the Society we are all expendable parts of the plutocratic wealth machine.

Bear that in mind when you hear the Seditionists that are the GOP talk about constitutional originalism. These monkeys do not give a flying Trump about the constitution and want to allow the extremely greedy and psychopathic wealthy to have all the leeway needed to do whatever it is they want to increase their wealth and politico-economic power.

[msfiddlestix]

12. Right, and I read recently that Pence is on the Board of the Federalist Society

Last edited Mon Mar 22, 2021, 03:59 PM - Edit history (1)

That's where he landed and it's why I believe he wrote an OpEd downplaying the INsurrection, defending Trump's claims of voter fraud.

It's just unbelievable. But yet, must be cleared eyed about.

[hedda_foil]

15. Your spellcheck seems to have been playing games with what Pence was downplaying.

[msfiddlestix]

19. oops. you're correct. thanks for the heads up, fixed it.

[RVN VET71]

17. He can suck in all the Federalist Society Board love

because he has long wanted to be -- officially -- one of them. He speaks kindly of the monkeys who wanted to kill him and his colleagues (Dem and GOP)during the seditious insurrection because they represent the little people whose money helps keep fascist shitholes like the Federalist Society powerful.

All we can do is vote and hope. The GOP remains a powerful and very dangerous unAmerican force and must not be dealt with except with the back of the hand, so to speak. (I still feel sooooo strange calling the formerly YAF-Goldwater-Taft Conservative party the unAmerican Party. That monicker has always been applied to us, Democrats, from FDR, through Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton, Barrack Obama (of course!), Hillary Clinton, and now Joe Biden. But it is so clear, so very clear, that the Dems have always been pro-American, and pro-every-American. The GOP used to favor the rich, but Ike and Nixon both supported policies that reached out to the people of the middle and working classes. But the GOP of St. Reagan and the Blessed Gingrich favors the rich not on the basis of “individual freedoms” but, rather, on the basis of the belief that the wealthy, and the wealthy alone, deserve to rule.

Not all plutocrats are devils, of course. Some few are actually decent, caring, and compassionate people. Most, however, would burn the Constitution and favor a strong authoritarian leader, a fascist who will protect their right to greed, to economic totalitarianism, to exploitation of the working and middle classes, to the destruction of the atmosphere, the climate, and the world. The ex-president was too mentally deficient to be that person. (Thank the gods for that!)

[bronxiteforever]

9. Kick and recommend.

[multigraincracker]

10. We need some new laws to put some daylight on

that dark money.

[niyad]

11. KNR

[GoneOffShore]

13. Greg Olear has also writen about Leonard Leo and his creepy ties to Opus Dei & the Knights of Malta.

Here's the link giving some background on Leo the Cancer - Leonard Leo, Opus Dei & the Radical Catholic Takeover of the Supreme Court

WHAT LEONARD LEO wants you to know about Leonard Leo, first and foremost, is that he is a Knight of Malta. The Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM) is a lay Catholic order that claims descent from the Knights Hospitaller, founded in Jerusalem in 1099, at the end of the First Crusade. It’s an extremely selective group. Of the 1.2 billion Catholics in the world, only 13,000 are Knights of Malta—although most of them don’t go around bragging about it.
/snip
Leonard Leo, 56, has made himself one of the most powerful figures in the United States. He’s put five—count ‘em, five!—justices on the Supreme Court: Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, Sam Alito, and John Roberts. A sixth, Clarence Thomas, is one of his closest friends. And, perhaps most impressively, he quietly led the 2016 crusade to deny Merrick Garland a hearing, when Barack Obama nominated the highly-regarded jurist to replace the late Antonin Scalia (another of Leo’s pals). In the lower courts, he’s been even busier. He’s installed so many judges on so many courts, it makes you wonder if he really is the instrument of God’s will he believes himself to be. I mean, there are only three branches of government. One of those three—arguably the most important one—is Leonard Leo’s domain.

[ancianita]

14. Good news. Still, if I were a foreign donor I'd love this Citizens United States of America.

[dalton99a]

16. Kick

[Midnight Writer]

18. I know I keep plugging this, but I recommend Jane Mayer's book Dark Money.

It may change the way you look at our country and its problems.