If the Obama administration was blithely going around giving out money to progressive and left-wing voter advocacy causes and organizations, you would likely hear about this in the news, and it would probably be called illegal, correct? Well, what if the Obama White House managed to do just that, but somehow found a way to make it “legal” — at least according to some interpretations of the law?
What is now being alleged by various news sources is that indeed, since at least 2015, the Obama administration seemed to have found a way to create a “slush fund” — in the words of Fox News — for various activist and advocacy organizations of its choice via a shady method of diverting restitution money won in government settlements against big banks in cases involving — among other crimes — consumer and bank fraud.
According to critically lauded author Peter Schweizer of the New York Times bestselling book and film Clinton Cash, “What [happened] here is simple. You’ve got large financial institutions on Wall Street, you’ve got banks like Bank of America, who have in some cases committed financial crimes… The Department of Justice [as directed by former Attorney General Eric Holder] has gone after them and basically said, ‘You committed these offenses, you’ve got to pay restitution in the form of billions of dollars.’”
Schweizer detailed how the restitution was made. “Ostensibly that money, those billions of dollars, are supposed to go to the victims of their financial crimes. If your Wall Street broker committed fraud, you’re supposed to be made whole with this money, and the rest of it is supposed to go to taxpayers. The problem is the Obama Justice Department has been diverting literally more than $650 million to left-wing groups.”
But, conservatives may ask, how is this possible? Schweizer explains: “They do it under the guise of, ‘Well, you know, if this bank discriminated against lenders racially, we’re going to give this money to these left-wing quote-unquote housing groups to help deal with the problem.’ But that’s not what’s going on. These housing groups are advocacy groups. They’re left-wing organizations. They are registering voters and getting voters out to the voting booth. And they specifically target what they call quote-unquote progressive voters.”
Specifically, Schweizer said he believed that this had an impact on the popular vote that Hillary Clinton claimed she won last November. “So this is taking the Department of Justice, which we’ve experienced so much in recent years has been politicized by this Administration, even further, to where now the Department of Justice is transferring money to left-wing groups — in an effort, frankly I think, to influence elections.”
As early as 2015, various media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal called attention to this practice, albeit briefly and not very prominently. Writer Kimberley Strassel said the program was “a scheme to undermine Congress’s spending authority by independently transferring dollars to President Obama’s political allies.”
In a recent report that touched on the issue, Fox News claimed that up to $3 billion had been paid out through this scheme. Breitbart News labeled it “extortion,” while the government’s own Government Accountability Institute (GAI) had in 2016 produced a study entitled, “Follow the Money: How the Department of Justice Funds Progressive Activists.”
Even more outrageous than the facts in this case is that according to some members of Congress, this practice is unbelievably still occurring, despite the fact that Obama is no longer in office!
Fortunately for conservatives, Republican lawmakers are on the case. Last year, there were efforts made to squash the unregulated handouts, but they died in committee.
However, this year, bills are being introduced in both houses of Congress — by Republican Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma and Republican Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee Bob Goodlatte of Virginia. Said Lankford, “Democrats thought it was an attack on Obama. This is not a Republican or Democrat issue, but one of good government. Actions settled by the federal government should go back to the federal government — back to the taxpayer.” Lankford’s bill is called the Stop Settlement Slush Fund Act of 2017.
Conservatives angered by this practice should write to their Congresspersons to support both Lankford’s and Goodlatte’s bills; there’s no reason why a Republican administration should be supporting progressive groups that are actively working against it.
Like President Trump’s recent efforts to “clear out the dead wood” in the form of appointees left over from the Obama administration, this detritus needs to be swept out of government as well — and the sooner, the better.
~American Liberty Report
