Free Republic

Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris is being slammed by Latino activists for refusing to investigate the Ponzi scheme operated by nutritional supplement marketer Herbalife in exchange for what amounts to bribes masquerading as “donations” from Herbalife lobbyist Heather Podesta. At the time, Harris was the Attorney General of California. Heather Podesta was then married to Tony Podesta, the high-powered lobbyist with longstanding ties to Hillary Clinton. Tony’s brother, John Podesta, was the campaign manager for Hillary 2016 presidential campaign. During her tenure as California attorney general, Kamala Harris refused to investigate the fraudulent pyramid scheme operated by Herbalife, which is...

A former colleague assesses one of the most dastardly Democrats of our time.In the course of the Trump wiretapping brouhaha and the Trump/Russian conspiracy claim, the face of one Congressman, Adam Schiff, seems to appear everywhere in the news. As the lead Democrat of the House Intelligence Committee, he has managed to attract a huge media following, who, not surprisingly, hang on every word he utters while never questioning any of his pronouncements. I happen to know him a little. When I served in the California State Assembly in the late ’90s, Schiff was a State Senator. He appeared to...

The police chief who oversaw Seth Rich’s unsolved murder case has socialized and been honored alongside key Hillary Clinton advisers and even Rich’s own boss at the Democratic National Committee. Rich is widely reported to be the source of Wikileaks’ damning 2016 email release that showed the DNC colluding to hand the nomination to Clinton at the expense of Bernie Sanders. He was gunned down in D.C. 12 days before Wikileaks’ release. Former Metropolitan Police Department chief Cathy Lanier resigned from her post the month after Rich’s murder to accept a position running security for the National Football League. She...

EXCLUSIVE: Amid the tumult of the 2016 presidential campaign, John Podesta is best known as Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman and the individual from whose private account WikiLeaks is presently publishing some 50,000 hacked emails. Released in daily batches, these documents have laid bare the inner workings and tensions of the Clinton campaign in an unprecedented way, while also offering insights into the operations of the Clinton Foundation and the State Department in the years when Clinton, now the Democratic presidential nominee, served as secretary of state. At that time, when Clinton was traveling to a record number of foreign countries,...

how obscene wealth can be amassed through rent-seeking and influence-peddling in Washington D.C., and of the hoary means by which the princelings of the capital and their consorts maintain and grow that wealth. They tell stories not only of an ugly divorce, but of the power of lobbying, of how one family maneuvered to the center of the nation’s dominant political party, of the transactional relationships, gargantuan self-regard, and empty posturing that insulates, asbestos-like, the D.C. bubble. That the broken couple now uses the tools of their trade—the phone-call to a friend, the selective leaking of documents, the hiring of...

The sister-in-law of John Podesta, President Obama's influential White House transition director, served as the lobbyist for a wind power firm that was just awarded a $135.8 million loan guarantee from the Department of Energy.

-snip- We've had the Summer of Love. We've had the Summer of the Shark. Now, get ready for the Summer of the Lobbyist. In a glum economy, the lobbying business feels kind of bubbly. Every new Obama proposal comes with acres of fine print for corporate powers, interests groups and lobbyists to haggle over, profitably. Three gargantuan legislative challenges -- health care, the environment, the economy -- crisscrossing at once on Capitol Hill. Major health-care interests alone are spending $1.4 million this year lobbying Congress . . . per day, according to Common Cause, a government watchdog group. A lobbyist's...

Social Connections, Political Savvy and Boundless Energy Have Made Heather Podesta The It Girl of a New Generation Of Lobbyists The chairman beams. So many people just dying to see him, the business guys, the pols, the lobbyists -- lots and lots of lobbyists. They circle Charlie Rangel -- birthday boy, Democrat and, of course, House Ways and Means chairman -- circles like rings on a tree planted in the party room here at Tavern on the Green. Simple math: the more powerful the pol, the more rings on the tree. This is a very thick tree. Not a problem,...