Profiles in Corruption

by Peter Schweizer

  Unlike the money that flows courtesy of the Majority Trust, some of those financial ties with rich donors are traceable. And those ties present a familiar if troubling picture: wealthy donors back a candidate who in return pushes for subsidies and taxpayer grants that enrich the already wealthy donor.

  David Blittersdorf is the founder of NRG Systems, a large power company in the United States. Blittersdorf lives in Vermont and is now the head of a green energy business called AllEarth Renewables.128 His company operates with the help of generous federal and state tax credits and subsidies.129

  Sanders has been outspoken for years about rich investors who are beneficiaries of corporate welfare. Blittersdorf certainly appears to fit that profile, receiving generous tax credits and benefits for his company. Blittersdorf financially and politically backs Sanders; Sanders supports legislation and champions grants that make Blittersdorf even wealthier.130

  Blittersdorf is a controversial figure in Vermont, even among renewable energy advocates, because of his aggressive tactics against residential landowners and his desire to build large, industrial-scale wind and solar projects even in the face of local opposition. Sanders has sided with Blittersdorf in these disputes.131

  Blittersdorf was accused of bullying residents who live near his projects and misrepresenting the size of his wind farms. When he announced plans to build massive wind turbines in Irasburg, a small northern Vermont town with about 1,000 people, he reportedly put false information on the application seeking approval, claiming that there was only one home within a mile of his proposed project. In fact, there were dozens of residents in the area. In another instance, he actually sued residents for being on their own property while he was constructing massive wind turbines nearby.132

  In addition to his wind projects, Blittersdorf has also constructed two community-scale solar farms in the Green Mountain State.133

  These projects have all enjoyed rich subsidies from both the federal and state governments. Many renewable energy advocates in Vermont are fed up, though, complaining about how ordinary taxpayers are subsidizing wealthy investors. “The people who are putting up the projects are millionaires or corporations held by very wealthy people, and the tax dollars are paid by all of us,” says Vermont state senator John Rodgers, a Democrat.134

  Doug Tolles, a then–select board member in New Haven, Vermont, said, “Corporate welfare is all it is.”135

  Sanders has remained steadfast in support of Blittersdorf and his projects, steering money to renewable energy and supporting legislation that benefits Blittersdorf’s companies. That support has made Blittersdorf even richer. In 2013, when Vermonters mounted a campaign to limit the size of massive wind projects in the state, Sanders opposed them and supported wind developers like Blittersdorf.136 Many landowners and longtime residents believed that the massive wind turbines would blight their beloved Green Mountains. In 2017, Vermont’s governor sought a moratorium on wind projects over 500 kilowatts, the very industrial-size wind projects that Blittersdorf wanted.137 Sanders sided with the wind developers like Blittersdorf.

  Over the years, Sanders has procured taxpayer money that has ended up benefiting Blittersdorf’s company. In 2013, Sanders took credit for securing $3 million in taxpayer money to fund the Vermont Regional Test Center (RTC), a solar energy testing facility. The center involved three Vermont businesses, one of which was owned by Blittersdorf. In 2018, Sanders took credit for securing another $4 million for the RTC.138 Some years earlier, when Sanders chaired Senate hearings on “green jobs,” he had Blittersdorf testify.139

  As we have learned, Sanders has consistently cosponsored or voted for tax subsidies and grants that happened to benefit Blittersdorf’s companies. For his part, Blittersdorf was an early endorser of Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign.140

  As a U.S. senator, Sanders has consistently railed against large defense corporations at rallies. But when it has come to bringing defense dollars into his state, he is all in favor of them, particularly for the benefit of those who are aligned with him. Much like when he was mayor, his rhetoric has been harsh toward the defense industry. On October 2, 2009, Senator Sanders stepped onto the floor of the U.S. Senate and gave one of his customary barnburner speeches. He took defense contractors to task for their “systemic, illegal, and fraudulent behavior, while receiving hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money.”141 During the 2016 presidential campaign, he explained, “We need a strong military, it is a dangerous world. But I think we can make judicious cuts.” He also added, “There is massive fraud going on in the defense industry. Virtually every major defense contractor has either been convicted of fraud or reached a settlement with the government.”142 During a Q&A in New Hampshire in 2014, he said, “In very clever ways, the military-industrial complex puts plants all over the country, so that if people try to cut back on our weapons system what they’re saying is you’re going to be losing jobs in that area. We’ve got to have the courage to understand that we cannot afford a lot of wasteful, unnecessary weapons systems, and I hope we can do that.”143

  Just as when he was mayor, Sanders sees the political benefits he accrues when supporting military projects in his own state.

  By far the biggest project for Lockheed is the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which is the largest budget project in the history of military aviation. The total budget is reportedly $1.5 trillion.144

  The project has been plagued with cost overruns and some important technological issues. These are the sorts of problems you would expect Bernie to rail against. And while he has declared that it is an example of the Pentagon’s “long record of purchasing weapons systems from defense contractors with massive cost overruns that have wasted hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars,” he has lined up for Vermont’s piece of the pie.145 Sanders pushed for and endorsed the idea of deploying eighteen of the fighters to Burlington, Vermont. The fighters are to be deployed at the Burlington International Airport and flown by the Vermont Air National Guard. Despite fierce local opposition to the deployment by locals over environmental and noise concerns, Sanders has been steadfast in supporting the deployment because of the money it brings to Vermont. “My view is that given the reality of the damn plane, I’d rather it come to Vermont than to South Carolina,” he said at a town hall meeting in 2014. “And that’s what the Vermont National Guard wants, and that means hundreds of jobs in my city. That’s it.”146

  Sanders’s ties to Lockheed go deeper than the F-35. About a month after he lambasted defense contractors on the Senate floor, Sanders was hosting a delegation of a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin, a major defense contractor. (He had mentioned Lockheed in that Senate floor speech decrying military contractor corruption.) The delegation from Sandia National Laboratories was in Vermont at Sanders’s invitation to talk about coming to the state to set up a satellite lab. The Department of Energy funds Sandia, which is managed by Sandia Inc., a Lockheed subsidiary. Sanders was supportive of creating a research facility in Vermont, but made efforts to distance Sandia from Lockheed Martin. One can only guess why. Interestingly, one of the delegation members who participated in those talks was Dave Blittersdorf, Sanders’s ally.147

  * * *

  Sanders has made the flow of campaign dollars to political candidates a major part of his critique of modern American politics. Such issues have often been obscured and blurred, however, when it comes to his own campaigns.

  During the 2016 Sanders campaign, we saw more evidence of blurred financial lines. Presidential candidates are required to file campaign donation disclosures and there are restrictions on how much an individual can contribute to a campaign. Sanders’s campaign seemed to ignore those rules. The Sanders campaign received excess donations from more than 1,500 donors—“unprecedented” in American politics.148

  Under federal law, individuals can make $2,700 in total donations per election. (That means in the 2016 presidential election, the most you could give was $2,700 for the primary and $2,700 for th
e general election to the same candidate.) The Federal Election Commission (FEC) threatened to audit the Sanders campaign. (Recall that Sanders’s previous run for Congress had been the subject of audits by election officials as well.) The FEC argued, “The illegal contributions should have been easy to identify.”149 And of course, the Sanders campaign was staffed by experienced professionals who certainly knew how to run campaigns. In the best light, the Sanders campaign was sloppy. “At the point they realized this person maxed out, they should have stopped accepting any contributions from them,” explains Larry Noble, the former general counsel for the FEC. “So at the very least, it’s sloppiness. But you question whether they had any safeguards to make sure people weren’t making excessive contributions.”150

  The Sanders campaign touted that its coffers were filled with small-dollar donations and the data seemed to confirm that 62 percent of Sanders’s donations were small—less than $200.151 But there is more to those numbers than meets the eye. Many wealthy donors chose to give numerous small donations rather than a single large one, creating the impression of an army of smaller donors. Houston lawyer and apparent Sanders fan James Bartlett gave fifty donations to the Sanders campaign on November 28, 2015, in increments from $5 to $414, creating the same impression. Katherine Klass of Wisconsin made thirty-eight separate donations. Even larger donors, like Ahmed Abdelmeguid, made multiple contributions—in his case totaling more than $12,000 over the course of a few months.152

  The FEC also found other problems. They investigated and discovered that the Australian Labor Party sent a delegation of volunteers to help the Sanders campaign. This was also a clear violation of election rules because the Labor Party had paid for their flights. Beyond the reach of the FEC, Australians in Sydney held “phone banking parties” and called tens of thousands of Americans encouraging them to vote for Sanders. As one Australian paper reported it, “the group would use Google Hangouts to call Americans with an automated dialing service to gain support for the Vermont senator.”153

  Bernie Sanders’s insurgent 2016 campaign brought in a huge sum of money. A large chunk of it—at least $83 million—flowed to a mysterious limited liability company with no website, no phone number, and no office space. Indeed, the LLC was registered to a private home on a cul-de-sac in suburban Virginia.154

  The mysterious company is called Old Towne Media LLC. Two known political operatives who are connected to the shell company are Barbara Abar Bougie and Shelli Hutton-Hartig. These two political consultants have a history with Sanders; they did media buys for Bernie’s 2006 Senate election. Back during the 2006 election, Sanders’s political opponent had accused Jane of profiting from the arrangement.155

  The Sanders campaign purchased a whopping $83 million in political ads through Old Towne Media, which could have earned the company a media fee of more than $12 million, based on the industry standard for ad buy commissions. Was Jane Sanders somehow involved in this financial arrangement? FEC disclosures make it easy to hide where media buying fees actually go. And Jane listed her income from her professional work at the time as simply “more than $1,000.”156

  When a highly respected Vermont reporter named Jasper Craven, working for the nonprofit VTDigger.com, asked Jane about Old Towne Media during a phone interview, she “hung up the phone.”157 The Sanderses have steadfastly refused to answer questions about the mysterious company and the tens of millions of dollars that flowed to it.158

  From the ashes of his 2016 presidential campaign emerged the Sanders Institute, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) charity designed to advance Bernie’s ideas.159

  Bernie Sanders has a curious history with nonprofit charities and failing to file the necessary documents with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The first of these was the American People’s Historical Society in 1977, which he launched before his first election as mayor. This nonprofit did not last long; the nonprofit status was eventually revoked.160 It was the beginning of a trend that held for most of the Bernie nonprofits.

  Sanders also was listed as one of the directors of the Vermont Patent and Trademark Depository Library in 1996. Unusually, this nonprofit managed to file a second time with Vermont in 2000, but still never filed the necessary documents.161

  In keeping with the family’s history when it comes to such things, Bernie’s stepson David Driscoll emerged as executive director of the Sanders Institute, with an estimated salary of $100,000.162 Jane Sanders insists that this is not nepotism. “Dave founded the institute. He’s raised the money to keep it going. When you found something, how can it be nepotism?”163

  It is unclear who actually runs the Sanders Institute, as corporate filings are wildly inconsistent. In corporate filings in Vermont, the directors of the Sanders Institute include his wife, Jane, David Driscoll, and close friend Huck Gutman. However, filings with the IRS during the same year tell a very different story. Here the board of directors includes chairman James Zogby and board members Meredith Burak and Sara Burchard.164

  Zogby was an interesting choice to serve as the chairman of the organization. Zogby, a longtime Sanders ally who advised Bernie in the 2016 campaign, has deep ties in the Middle East. He founded the Palestine Human Rights Campaign in Washington in the 1970s, but the organization apparently caught the interest of the U.S. Justice Department for its ties to Libya’s foreign agent in Washington.165 He has worked for the United Arab Emirates state-owned television network, and his research firm is Zogby Research Services. He counts among his largest clients the UAE’s ministries of Labor, Federal National Council Affairs, and Foreign Affairs.166

  Zogby is linked with foreign governments throughout the Middle East. As Obama transportation secretary Raymond LaHood explains, “[Zogby] knows all the Arab leaders, whether it’s [Yasser] Arafat or the king of Jordan or the president of Egypt or the prime minister of Lebanon.” But those close ties to Arab governments make him a controversial figure in Arab American circles. “Zogby is a TV host and columnist with several state-owned Arab media outlets [as of 2011],” said journalist Hussain Abdul-Hussain. “This puts Zogby on the payroll of Arab governments. When James Zogby addresses America, he does it on behalf of Arab autocrats, which makes him a foreign lobbyist.”167

  The Sanders Institute is a sister organization to another Sanders-run organization called Our Revolution. The Sanders Institute is a 501(c)(3). Our Revolution is a 501(c)(4) organization. Our Revolution got off to a rocky start when the staff revolted over the direction of the organization. On August 24, 2016, Bernie stood up and spoke at a community arts space in Burlington to announce the founding of a new political organization called Our Revolution. The speech was livestreamed to some 300,000 supporters. “Tonight I want to introduce you to a new, independent nonprofit organization that is called Our Revolution, which is inspired by the historic Bernie 2016 presidential campaign,” he told the local crowd.168

  But behind the scenes, not all was well. In what the New York Times described as a “staff revolt,” eight members of the new group quit over their concerns about the focus of the organization. They wanted the focus to be on grassroots organizing. Jeff Weaver, Bernie’s campaign manager, who was now leading the organization, had different plans. He wanted to raise money and buy a lot of advertising. With that, of course, would come all of the media buying fees going down some black hole.169

  “We’re organizers who believed in Bernie’s call for a political revolution,” said Claire Sandberg, a digital organizing director for Bernie who quit, “so we weren’t interested in working for an organization that’s going to raise money from billionaires to spend it all on TV.”170

  No word yet on who has those lucrative contracts for media buy commissions or whether the Sanders family will somehow get a slice of it.

  8

  Amy Klobuchar

  They call it “Minnesota Nice.” Residents of the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes have a propensity for hospitality. On the other hand, Amy Klobuchar, Minnesota’s senior senator, has a reputation for being anyt
hing but nice to her subordinates. Former Senate staffers recount humiliating and intense tongue-lashings from her. Emails reveal Klobuchar blasting a staffer in ALL CAPS, and she is prone to call staffers in the middle of the night. Others recount being sent over to her house to do the dishes, or to pick up her dry cleaning. Klobuchar reportedly threw a binder at another staffer.1 One aide for then-senator Al Franken, also from Minnesota, recalls a Klobuchar staffer showing up to explain why her boss was late for a meeting. “I’m supposed to tell you,” she reportedly explained with “terror on her face,” that “Senator Klobuchar is late today because I am bad at my job.”2 Perhaps Klobuchar’s most unique rumored humiliation? Forcing one female subordinate to dry shave her legs under the desk while she was on the phone. (Klobuchar denies that one.)3 Perhaps it is no surprise then that Klobuchar has the highest level of staff turnover in the U.S. Senate, according to a review of Senate employment records between 2001 and 2016. (Her annual turnover was an astonishing 36 percent.) That makes her, according to Politico, one of the “worst bosses” on Capitol Hill.4

  This is not something new. There have been complaints about her conduct in the past. In 2006, when Klobuchar was running for the U.S. Senate, she faced opposition from lawyers working for her in the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office, even though they might share her politics. Jim Appleby, an assistant Hennepin County attorney, who was also the head of the local chapter of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), wrote a letter to the national union about her abusive behavior. Appleby accused her of denigrating office lawyers publicly and privately, taking credit for their work, damaging morale, and creating a hostile work environment. According to Appleby, her hiring practices meant “qualified personnel from her own and other public offices have been rejected because her priority has been to choose candidates who support her ambitions.” He asked AFSCME headquarters not to endorse her candidacy because of the abuse. (They did so anyway.)5 Klobuchar said that Appleby’s complaints were just sour grapes over labor negotiations.6 But they appear remarkably consistent with what her Senate staffers would later report.