A Left-Wing Group Targeting Trump Accepted $100K in Stock from a Chinese-Controlled Tech Firm, Filings Show

A Democratic group expected to spend millions of dollars targeting President Donald Trump received over $100,000 in stock shares from an anonymous donor in a giant Chinese tech company, according to tax filings.

American Bridge 21st Century accepted a gift in 2018 of 450 shares into Baidu, a Google-like tech company closely affiliated with China’s ruling Communist Party, according to the group’s 2018 IRS filings. The Washington Free Beacon first reported on the donation Wednesday.

It is unclear if American Bridge sold the stocks during the past two years, according to the Free Beacon’s report. Democratic operative David Brock founded the group in 2010 and has raked in $23 million in 2020, with a reported $2 million of that money coming from mega-financier George Soros.

American Bridge announced plans to spend $50 million on ads and messages targeting the president. The group is cutting ads thrashing Trump’s handling of coronavirus, or COVID-19, which originated in China before hitting the U.S. shores, where it’s killed more than 25,000 people.

The group is running coronavirus-related ads in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, all of which are battleground states that the president won in 2016 but Democrats say are in play come 2020. The group’s Facebook ads lashing out at Trump are similar to other ads criticizing the president.

“Neglect. Botched responses. Cuts at the Centers for Disease Control,” American Bridge noted in an ad that ran March 18 to 30.

American Bridge also reportedly joined an alliance in March with super pac Unite the Country to support former Vice President Joe Biden’s presidential bid. Trump’s presidential campaign, for its part, is trying to use Biden’s past comments praising China as a hammer against the former vice president.

American Bridge has not responded to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment about the Baidu shares, nor has the group commented on the ads targeting the president, whose response has shifted from likening the virus to the flu to restricting travel to China.

“Further, Baidu is under a greater degree of party control than the average Chinese private firm because Baidu’s business is basically dissemination of information,” Derek Scissors, an academic at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, told the Free Beacon.

2016 ARCHIVES---Money Laundering Scheme Exposed: 14 Pro-Clinton Super PACs & Non-Profits Implicated
zerohedge.com ^ | Sep 20, 2016 / Posted by Helicondelta

David Brock has 7 non-profits, 3 Super PACs, one 527-committee, one LLC, one joint fundraising committee, and one unregistered solicitor crammed into his office in Washington DC. Uncovered records expose a constant flow of money between these organizations. The Bonner Group, Brock's professional solicitor, works off a commission. Every time money gets passed around, Bonner receives a 12.5% cut.

Follow the money: Say, for example, you donate $1,062,857 to Media Matters for America.
This is how David Brock would have used your charitable donation in 2014:
1- Media Matters would receive your $1,062,857 donation
The Bonner Group would earn a $132,857 commission
Media Matters would retain $930,000

2- Next, Media Matters would give what’s left of your entire donation, $930,000, to the Franklin Education Forum
The Bonner Group would ‘earn’ a $116,250 commission
The Franklin Education Forum would retain $813,750

3- The Franklin Education Forum would then forward the remaining $813,750 to The Franklin Forum
The Bonner Group would ‘earn’ a $101,718 commission
The Franklin Forum would retain $712,031

In the end, Brock’s solicitor would have pocketed $350,825, almost a third of your initial donation! That’s a far cry from the advertised 12.5% commission.

================================

DAVID BROCK----MEDIA MATTERS MONEY LAUNDERING SCHEME
How they move money around

SOURCE https://www.yahoo.com/news/chinas-baidu-pledges-improve-search-complaint-080207449--finance.html

China's Baidu pledges to improve search service after complaint
By Josh Horwitz, Reuters•January 23, 2019

FILE PHOTO: Baidu's logo is pictured at the 2018 Baidu World conference
and exhibit to showcase its latest AI technology in Beijing, China, Nov 1, 2018.
REUTERS/Jason Lee/File Photo

SHANGHAI (Reuters) - China's top search engine Baidu Inc said on Wednesday it will improve its media aggregating service after a complaint about the quality of the service and its search results went viral on social media, helping send its shares down sharply.

Baidu was placing low-quality pieces from its Baijiahao service, which selects articles from both legacy and independent media outlets for display on Baidu's own webpages, and other Baidu properties toward the top of its search results, journalist Fang Kecheng wrote in an article on Tuesday.

"Baidu no longer plans on being a good search engine. It only wants to be a marketing platform, and hopes to turn users searching for content into traffic for itself," he wrote.

The complaint comes after Baidu, often compared to Alphabet Inc's Google, underwent a restructuring and rigorous cleanup of illegal medical advertising that emerged in 2016 and led to regulation that slashed the number of eligible advertisers.

Fang's article was read over 100,000 times on the author's public WeChat account and shared by influential domestic media outlets.

Baidu on Wednesday acknowledged the article in a post on its Twitter-like Weibo account and said that Baijiahao articles account for roughly 10 percent of its search results. "The media attention suggests Baijiahao can be done better," the statement said.

"We will continue to court quality media outlets and creators and use positive mechanisms to encourage authors to spread high-quality original content," it said, adding Baijiahao was designed to optimize retrieval speeds for mobile users.

hares of U.S.-listed Baidu tumbled 6.4 percent on Tuesday, or about $4 billion by value, weighed down by earnings and target price downgrades from Citi and Jefferies, while the widespread sharing of Fang's article sparked concerns over its advertising practices.

"For Baidu over time, media exposure has been on the negative side," said Pacific Epoch analyst Raymond Feng, adding Baidu faces competition from other Chinese tech companies, many of which offer a broader range of ad placement styles than Baidu.

"These platforms are different in nature but they are competing for the same budget... I think Baidu is still in the basket, but not gaining too much traction for key accounts overall," he said. Baidu declined to comment on the market fluctuations.

(Reporting by Josh Horwitz and Shanghai newsroom, Additional reporting by Cate Cadell;
Editing by Miyoung Kim and Muralikumar Anantharaman)

China’s reliance making everything was being threatened by a change in leadership in America which was a major consumer of those products. When Americans hailed their leaders decision to make many of them in their country US. Their politburo worried. Worse yet opponents to the Chinese regime in power had its citizens protesting its policies since that change in American leadership wave the American flag and present his name when doing so. All of which presented those in power the need to destroy that leader,

Would a runaway plague created by a nation which could threaten populations of an enemy cause them to react by demanding extreme restriction of movement by its population to prevent its spread ? Thus wind up fragmenting its economy.The way this whole thing developed starting with the Italian fashion industry areas controlled by the Chinese commies hit by a runaway CoVid19. Sure looks suspicious particularly when crews of US naval vessels somehow wind up being infected by it when visiting Asian ports before the Italian hit.

To stop the return of manufacturing of products back to the US that went to China. China backers here who’s family members are making millions from China through their political connections will be hit hard are also claiming that Trump’s alleged stock ownership in a quinine pills maker claim its a controlling interest in a product to be totally ineffective and when used requires a severe restriction of movement when near a possible carrier known as a shutdown because of its rapid transmission .

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