Monday morning, September 9th, 2019, conservative author, writer, and broadcaster Michele Malkin appeared on Fox and Friends to preview her upcoming book Open Borders, Inc. The fundamental premise of her book is that an amazingly large number of dollars that funded the open-borders debacle at the U.S. southern border came from hundreds of U.S. charities. That’s not really a bad thing in that charities exist so as to help poor and indigent people that for any number of reasons find themselves in unimaginable circumstances.
As you probably know, most donations made to any 501C-3 corporations are tax-deductible. That makes those donations federally tax-deductible and in many cases state tax-deductible as well. Congress made this possible years ago to encourage American citizens and commercial corporations to assist such charities to help less fortunate Americans. Individuals and corporations make donations to these charities and get to “write-off” the amounts donated.
However, as you will see here, the old adage “Show me a dollar and I’ll show you a way to cheat to get that dollar” is certainly applicable in a “Hush/Slush Fund” scam perpetrated by President Barack Obama and his Department of Justice.
The “Hush/Slush Fund” of which we reveal details today is the subject of Malkin’s new book. But her revelations are regarding non-profit organizations who receive some of these funds are specifically used to fund illegal immigration operations in egregious ways. Those we discuss below were used during the Obama Administration to — in many cases — help establish and/or prop-up left-leaning not-for-profits to fund other various liberal causes. You’ll cringe when you hear those disclosed below.
Later we will delve into Malkin’s information which is supposed to be exhaustive.
Let’s look at the Obama second term Hush/Slush fund story.
“Hush/Slush”
In a little-noticed November 2018 report, Bank of America announced that it had donated more than $60.1 million to various charitable funds and nonprofit groups.
The donations were a good deal for Bank of America. For every dollar the bank gives, an independent monitor for the deal credits the bank with $2 toward the record $16.6 billion settlement with the Justice Department on financial fraud charges it signed in August 2014. To date, the donations have reduced that penalty by $138 million. Ordinarily, this practice would be illegal. Not on the bank’s part, but on the government’s.
Federal law says that any funds obtained by a government official, such as a Justice Department prosecutor, must be deposited with the Treasury Department. Officials cannot instruct anybody making a payment to direct the funds anywhere else, much less offer them a deal if they do. Yet President Obama’s Justice Department found a legal workaround to do just that in two of the biggest financial fraud settlements the government has ever obtained. Left-leaning nonprofit groups who would be eligible for the donations lobbied for this, according to Republican critics.
Before Obama, any funds obtained from federal prosecutions that did go to the third party groups did so only after all matters relating to the people directly injured by the wrongdoing had been addressed. How does the Justice Department do this? By arguing that these are “voluntary” donations by the banks and therefore not funds that would otherwise go to the Treasury. Never mind that the banks would violate their plea agreements with the department if they did not make the payments.
Under the $7 billion settlement, Citigroup signed with the Justice Department in 2014 on financial fraud charges, the bank is obligated to pay at least $10 million in “community relief” to housing-related nonprofit groups from a list the government maintains, many of which are Democrat-friendly. It must also pay $15 million to legal aid funds and $25 million to public or private community development funds. Bank of America must pay at least $20 million to housing groups, $30 million to legal aid groups and $50 million to public or private community development funds. Not only do both banks get double credit toward their overall penalties for each donation, but there is also no explicit cap on the number of credits they can get. They could erase potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in federal penalties in this way. For every dollar Bank of America gives, an independent monitor for the deal credits the bank with $2 toward the record $16.6 billion settlement with the Justice Department. “The DOJ announces, ‘Oh, we have gotten these multibillion settlements,’ and then you look at the fine print and see the banks get more credit for giving to a slush fund than to the Treasury,” said Ted Frank, founder of the nonprofit Center for Class Action Fairness.
Republicans have fumed. “It appears that DOJ is systematically subverting Congress’s budget authority by using the settlements to funnel money to favored activist groups,” said House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., and House Financial Services Chairman Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, in a May letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
Even the Justice Department has conceded that they are skirting the law on this. In February of 2018, while giving testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Geoffrey Graber said, “This kind of relief could not have been ordered by a court, even if the government had prevailed at trial.”
The Obama Justice Department wasn’t eager to discuss any of this despite having touted both settlements when they were announced in 2014. “We will decline your interview request on money from the financial settlements,” spokesman Patrick Rodenbush told the Washington Examiner.
Who gets that money that is directed from settlements by the DOJ. The DOJ provides a list of “qualified” recipients that can receive those funds. Who are they?
In the case of Citigroup, the list provided by the DOJ was several hundred names long and includes numerous nonpartisan groups like Catholic Charities as well as exclusively local nonprofits. Others are more liberal. Reports by the monitor for the Bank of America settlement show that National Council of La Raza received $1.5 million, the National Urban League received $1.2 million, and New Jersey Citizen Action, a labor-backed activist group received $100,000.
Countrywide Financial Corporation doled out $335 million to settle its discrimination lawsuit with the feds. Under this DOJ agreement, Countrywide’s money was supposed to be distributed to more than 200,000 minority victims who supposedly were charged higher interest rates and fees than white borrowers based on their race, not their credit. Instead, a chunk of the money went to Democrat-tied groups not connected to the lawsuit, including the scandal-plagued Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and the open-borders National Council of La Raza (NCLR).
Many of the same groups got more money from a record $16.65 billion settlement with Bank of America. It’s a “historic resolution,” according to then-Attorney General Eric Holder, “and the money will help make amends to borrowers and communities that were negatively affected by the bank’s conduct. Besides settling civil penalties at the state and federal level, the billions will bring relief to struggling homeowners and communities by, among other things, offering new loans and providing financing for affordable rental housing. Delinquent borrowers in Democrat strongholds like Chicago, Oakland and Detroit will also benefit from debt forgiveness.”
Leftover funds were to go to politically-connected community groups—like the NCLR, Operation Hope and National Community Reinvestment Coalition—that intimidate banks into qualifying more minorities for home loans, even if they really can’t afford it. This part of the deal is conveniently buried in an annex to the 37-page DOJ agreement, but a publication dedicated to covering business, finance, and economics draws attention to it in a scathing editorial that refers to the arrangement as extortion. (click on the link “editorial” to see that arrangement)
This was not only a federal tool and used not only by Democrats. As a U.S. attorney in 2005, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie used a deferred prosecution agreement against drugmaker Bristol-Myers Squibb to get it to send funds to his alma mater, Seton Hall University School of Law. The funds were used to endow a professorship in ethics.
Summary
Have you wondered how ANTIFA has been funded? What about the “real” White Supremacist groups that have conducted protests that resulted in violence. Billionaire Trump-hater George Soros is known to have funded hundreds of small politically active leftist not-for-profits. It is certain that some of those millions of Soros dollars have ended up supporting these organizations.
Then there’s the Obama White House. Folks, BILLIONS of dollars in fines and penalties for major banks and other financial institutions, EPA violators caught and fined, and other major corporate offenders have been paid. If you thought the “pay-for-play” operations of the Clinton Foundation were bad, think about what Obama did and what people like Soros are doing today: billions of dollars that are supposed to be paid to the U.S. Treasury — taxpayer-owned — for the use of House of Representatives for the funding of various needs of the federal government were diverted by Obama to hand-picked not-for-profits to spend “as they saw fit.” Most if not all of those diverted funds have ended up in Democrat activist groups’ coffers.
Adding insult to injury, the Obama DOJ short-circuited the law to give those stupid discounts to offenders to entice the gifting to Democrat-aligned groups — sometimes 50 percent of the amount of fines and penalties they owe — to instead of those billions going to the U.S. Treasury to instead go as “donations” to Democrat non-profits!
House Democrats pontificate in outrage against any actions that are attempted by the White House to address Americans’ needs which the Democrat-led House of Representatives continually ignore therefore offering no funding for Americans’ issues like law-breaking at the southern border and the horrendous treatment of illegal immigrants because of the lack of authorized Congressional funding.
What’s going on? This process was put in place long ago. Its purpose is to allow powerful Congressional leaders to manipulate the system in coordination with Democrat “fellow law-breakers” to grow the Democrat Party!
The long-term goal: build and perpetuate a permanent Democrat voting majority. To achieve that goal requires a president that is complicit in signing bills that prop-up these Democrat tactics. A populist president like Donald Trump has totally obliterated the previous success of Leftist activists necessary to achieve this goal!
It’s happening, folks. And it has been doing well and diverting billions of taxpayer dollars away from the Treasury and to these leftist non-profits for more than a decade. Donald Trump may be the last great hope for Americans to preserve our nation of laws, freedoms, and certainly the balance of power between the three co-equal branches of government.
I’ll close by asking this question: If any issues like this were uncovered in the Donald Trump Administration, what would be happening right now? While you think of an answer to that, let me remind you, this story was uncovered and revealed to the general public in 2018. Where were CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, Washington Post?
And they expect Americans to believe and respect what they report, what they say, and information they give us.
The Washington Examiner and Judicial Watch contributed to this story.
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Wow! And we thought the illegal activities of the Justice Department were limited to the election. It is no longer a government of the people and by the people.