“Kamala’s brother-in-law fleeced taxpayers for billions to give to left-wing groups and lawyers,” notes attorney Ed Whelan, who was deputy assistant attorney general during the Bush administration.
The New York Post reports on this depressing reality about Kamala’s brother-in-law, who is likely to hold a high-ranking position in the future Harris administration. “He invented a new form” of “graft” while in the Obama administration, as head of the Justice Department’s Civil Division, it notes. Prior to 1977, Congress had to approve any settlement of over $100,000 in lawsuits against the U.S. government. That ensured compliance with the Constitutional requirement that Congress control the government’s purse.
But in 1977, seeking relief from the ever-growing number of settlements to review, Congress removed the cap,
handing the Justice Department a permanent blank check to pay settlements unilaterally, in any amount, out of an account known as the Judgment Fund.” Run by the Treasury Department, the Judgment Fund’s secrecy is so complete that our often-penetrated CIA might study it for lessons. The limited data released omits recipients, the facts underlying the case, and often the lawyers involved. By statute, attorneys’ fees awarded need not be disclosed. A Government Accountability Office study concluded that “no one knows the number of claims processed by the federal government each year.”
Still, for three decades, the integrity of Justice’s officials sufficed to prevent abuse. Then, in 2009, Tony West took over the department’s Civil Division, the division that litigates and settles lawsuits. Once West arrived, his deputy emailed colleagues asking “can you explain to Tony the best way to allocate some money toward an organization of our choosing?” Settlements became the vehicle for paying off political allies.
For example, in late 2010, after a Supreme Court victory, DOJ lawyers were on the cusp of winning a decade-long fight against discrimination claims by 91 Hispanic and female farmers. That’s when West intervened and, as The New York Times put it, “engineered a stunning turnabout.” DOJ agreed to a $1.33 billion settlement which included thousands of farmers who had never claimed bias. The deal was made over the “vehement objections” of the department’s career lawyers. The Times’s investigative report described West’s settlement as a “runaway train, driven by racial politics . . . and law firms that stand to gain more than $130 million in fees.” The projected settlement size ballooned to over $4.4 billion as additional plaintiffs were added, including Native American farmers. The government’s statistical expert was appalled: “‘If they had gone to trial, the government would have prevailed . . . It was just a joke. . . . I was so disgusted. It was simply buying the support of the Native Americans.’” This dirty deal also inflated the number of claimants, creating a $60 million windfall for the plaintiff’s lead lawyer, a member of the Obama/Biden transition team.
But West did not just bilk taxpayers. He shook down corporations, too. In a series of bank settlements, his team added increasingly aggressive provisions requiring the institutions to make nearly a billion dollars in mandatory donations to Democrat-supporting activist groups. Donations were given double credit against required targets, incentivizing these payments over direct relief to victims of the housing crises.
West’s team specifically structured the terms to ensure that they would benefit only their political allies while leaving conservative groups ineligible. An internal email shows West deputies rewording a settlement’s donation provisions to ensure the bank could not select a “conservative” property rights organization as a recipient….The largesse delighted liberal groups. An email circulated saying they ought to build a “statue” to West and “bow down to this statue each day after we receive our $200,000+.” In this legal shakedown, California’s attorney general at the time, Kamala Harris, was an active participant, cosigning the agreements for her state.
The Biden-Harris Administration has also employed West’s corrupt strategy to reward its political allies using taxpayer money. This year, for example, the Justice Department paid $2 million to FBI Agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page for producing their anti-Trump texts to Congressional investigators. Strzok and Page claimed their rights under the Privacy Act had been violated, but their text messages were sent on government-provided cell phones that feature explicit banner warnings that users lack any reasonable expectation of privacy. As the New York Post notes, “DOJ had ample basis” to defeat this lawsuit in court rather than settling it. (Federal appeals courts have ruled that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in such devices, in cases such as United States v. Simons (2000)).
“This form of civic corruption is not bipartisan,” notes The Post. “At the start of his administration, President Trump’s Attorney General banned settlement slush funds, while one of the early acts of the Biden-Harris DOJ was to rescind that ban.”
So the Biden administration continues diverting billions of dollars of taxpayer money “into left-wing activist groups, and West is said to be Harris’s White House counsel-in-waiting.”
