Posted on 10/17/2020 8:32:12 PM PDT by 11th_VA
@RudyGiuliani : A meeting is coming out in 1-2 days in State Dept. in which Hunter snuck in the back door ... That meeting took place with Tony Blinken."
(Excerpt) Read more at mobile.twitter.com ...
There are a lot of GOPe scumbags on that list.
NEW YORK, NY - OCTOBER 30: Evan Ryan, Former Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Vera Blinken, 47th Vice President of the United States Joe Biden, and NCAFP Trustee and Former U.S. Ambassador to Hungary Donald Blinken attend the National Committee On American Foreign Policy 2017 Gala Awards Dinner on October 30, 2017 in New York City. (Photo by Mike Coppola/Getty Images for National Committee on American Foreign Policy )
This counts as acting as an unregistered foreign agent. This is EXACTLY what Paul Manafort was sent to prison for.
So...when is the DOJ going to arrest Hunter Biden for this?
Yeah - Raid his house at 5 am ...
[Caption: "Tony Blinken, second from left, has been Joe Biden's right-hand man for almost two decades"]
Sergio Aguirre and Nitin Chadda had reached the most elite quarters of U.S. foreign policy. Aguirre had started out of school as a fellow in the White House and a decade later had become chief of staff to U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power. Chadda, who joined the Pentagon out of college as a speechwriter, had become a key adviser to Secretary of Defense Ash Carter in even less time. Now, Chadda had a long-shot idea.
They turned to an industry of power-brokering little known outside the capital: strategic consultancies. Retiring leaders often open firms bearing their names: Madeleine Albright has one, as do Condoleezza Rice and former Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen. Their strategic consultancies tend to blur corporate and governmental roles. This obscure corner of Washington is critical to understanding how a President Joe Biden would conduct foreign policy. He has been picking top advisers from this shadowy world. . .
Michèle Flournoy had served as undersecretary of defense for policy from 2009 to 2012. Both Aguirre and Chadda had known her well in the Obama administration. Since leaving office, she’d spent several years in consulting and was hitting her stride. With Flournoy as senior adviser, Boston Consulting Group’s defense contracts grew from $1.6 million in 2013 to $32 million in 2016. Before she joined, according to public records, BCG had not signed any contracts with the Defense Department.
Flournoy, while consulting, joining corporate boards, and serving as a senior fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center, had also become CEO of the Center for a New American Security in 2014. The think tank had an annual budget of about $9 million, and defense contractors donated at least $3.8 million while she was CEO. By 2017, she was making $452,000 a year.
If a Democrat were to win office, she would likely become the first woman defense secretary. She had considered an offer to serve as deputy to Trump’s first secretary of defense, Jim Mattis, but ultimately withdrew from the vetting process and stuck to consulting. “That’s more of a labor of love,” she told me. “Building bridges between Silicon Valley and the U.S. government is really, really important.”
Intrigued by Aguirre and Chadda’s idea of starting her own shop, she had one condition: find another big name, so it wouldn’t just be Flournoy and Associates.
They needed another co-founder. . .
He had been Vice President Joe Biden’s right-hand man for almost two decades and finished out the Obama administration as deputy secretary of state. He was known for his unimpeachable ethics. Having written Biden’s speeches for years, he had started to enunciate with the vice president’s drawl when he appeared on CNN. He had never cashed in on his international connections, years of face time with Saudi, Israeli, and Chinese leaders.
His name was Tony Blinken. With his commitment to join Flournoy as founding partner, a new strategic consultancy was born. They called it WestExec Advisors.
WEST EXECUTIVE AVENUE runs along the West Wing of the White House, the connection between presidential power and the offices where aides sit and do the real work. The name WestExec Advisors trades on its founders’ recent knowledge of the highest echelons of decision-making. It also suggests they’ll be walking down WestExec toward 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue some day soon. . .
AGUIRRE AND CHADDA RENTED an office suite three blocks from the White House. The newly hired operations director drove over card tables, folding chairs, and a Wi-Fi router in the trunk of her car. But this was hardly a scrappy startup.
WestExec promised to be more boutique than conventional consultancies like Albright Stonebridge Group or RiceHadleyGates. Most clients would have direct access to either Blinken or Flournoy. They also recruited an assortment of former colleagues as contractors to chip in, among them Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work, Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro, and Deputy CIA Director Avril Haines, who had helped design Obama’s program of using drones for extrajudicial killings.
Now, they needed clients. The first step was hosting a party.
At their April 2018 launch, Aguirre and Chadda stood with drinks across the hall from WestExec’s now furnished suite. It had a clubby feel thanks to purple lights and concrete walls. It must have been heartening to look across the room at Susan Rice, Tom Donilon, and Denis McDonough eating canapés as a DJ spun.
The next day, they were back to reaching out to venture capitalists and corporate leaders. Their whole approach was based on word of mouth and the power of their founders’ reputations. Initially, WestExec’s website, with its cool black-and-white portraits in dark suits, simply listed Blinken by his role in the firm. By April, a boldfaced title had been added under his name: “Former Deputy Secretary of State and Former Deputy National Security Advisor to the President.” It must have appealed to clients.
To look more established, WestExec found partners in a private equity group and a Google affiliate.
The private equity firm Pine Island Capital Partners was incorporated a year earlier by John Thain. Blinken and Flournoy joined a startlingly high-profile roster of former policymakers, including four retired senators and the former chair of the Joint Chiefs. (Pine Island declined to comment.) Thain, an investment banker, had tanked Merrill Lynch, sold it off to Bank of America, and paid himself several bonuses along the way. At the height of the subprime mess, he spent $1.2 million remodeling his office, installing a $35,000 golden toilet. He seemed like a less-than-ideal partner for public servants.
Another partnership was with Google’s in-house think tank, Jigsaw. WestExec’s Robert Work, during his time at the Pentagon, collaborated with the tech company in an artificial-intelligence venture, as first reported by The Intercept. That AI initiative, known as Project Maven, led to an insurrection among Google staff upset about collaborating with the military. (“WestExec has done no work on Project Maven. Period,” said Flournoy.) Though Jigsaw has since been removed from WestExec’s list of partners, the Prospect has learned that Blinken and Flournoy have continued to work quietly and informally with Google engineers and executives, spitballing potential geopolitical threats. Schmidt Futures, Google founder and billionaire Eric Schmidt’s philanthropy, has also hired WestExec. . .
One was an airline, another a global transportation company, a third a company that makes drones that can almost instantly scan an entire building’s interior. WestExec would only divulge that it began working with “Fortune 100 types,” including large U.S. tech; financial services, including global-asset managers; aerospace and defense; emerging U.S. tech; and nonprofits.
The Prospect can confirm that one of those clients is the Israeli artificial-intelligence company Windward. With surveillance software that tracks ships in real time, two former Israeli naval intelligence officers established the company in 2010. Gabi Ashkenazi, former chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, serves on its board. Windward also claims former CIA director David Petraeus as an investor, as well as a Hong Kong billionaire (most U.S. military-tech companies avoid money from China, experts told me, so they turn to investing in Israel). . .
LAST YEAR, WESTEXEC’S corporate interests and their policymaking at last collided. On January 7, 2019, Tony Blinken and Michèle Flournoy chaired the biannual meeting of the liberal organization Foreign Policy for America. Over 50 representatives of national-security groups gathered in a boardroom at the Madison hotel in Washington. Blinken and Flournoy’s roles with WestExec were not listed on the invitation or on the FP4A website.
The group worked through 24 agenda items, and the last one was “The War in Yemen.” Many Obama diplomats had expressed remorse for enabling Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s destructive campaign in the Arab world’s poorest country. In 2015, Obama had dispatched Blinken to tell Mohammed bin Salman that the U.S. supported Saudi Arabia’s right to defend itself and nothing more. But four years later, the U.S., through its arms sales, was party to an ongoing war. The death toll was over 100,000 in an asymmetric conflict, and the defense contractor Raytheon had sold Saudi Arabia more than $3 billion worth of bombs.
Four hours into the marathon policy discussion, many former officials joined progressive advocates in urging an end to weapons sales. The starting point, per FP4A’s agenda, was to “ask Congress to halt U.S. military involvement in the conflict.” Most participants supported cutting all weapons sales, but one person stood apart: Flournoy tried to persuade the group that an outright ban on arms sales to Saudi Arabia wouldn’t be a good idea. Putting conditions on their use was a better compromise, she said, one that defense contractors wouldn’t lobby against, according to two attendees. Flournoy told me she had made a distinction between offensive and defensive weapons, saying that Saudi Arabia needed advanced Patriot missiles to protect itself.
It was an argument she had been making around the capital, but it didn’t resonate among the left-leaning room and didn’t affect the group’s recommendation. To two people present, it sounded like Flournoy was working for Raytheon, which produces Patriot missiles.
Flournoy would not confirm whether WestExec currently works for them. “Raytheon was not being considered as a client at that point,” she said. “When I take a policy position, I do so because I think it is in U.S. interests, and the views I express are solely my own, no one else’s.”
Another WestExec staffer wouldn’t comment on whether the consultancy has Raytheon as a client but would only say the defense contractor is “in the ballpark,” noting they work for a “defense prime,” meaning one of the top five defense firms among which Raytheon ranks. (WestExec’s own Robert Work has served on Raytheon’s board since 2017.)
WestExec is only one of Blinken and Flournoy’s overlapping roles, which keep them updated on trends that others lack access to. Flournoy, for instance, previously served on the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, and the CIA director’s External Advisory Board; each of these positions gives members access to sensitive information, which in turn provides insights useful to attracting and serving corporate clients. Membership requires ethics disclosures, though none of those documents are publicly available, adding another layer of opacity.
Flournoy also joined the board of Booz Allen Hamilton in October 2018, and it has signed 61 contracts with the Defense Department since. Last year, the role earned her $192,474 ($76,986 as cash, $115,488 in equity). She previously was a board member of the nonprofit Mitre Corporation, the IT company CSRA, and Rolls-Royce North America. She now serves on the board of Amida Technology Solutions and is a senior adviser to SparkCognition Government Systems, a new subsidiary that feeds the company’s AI to government agencies.
“When we do take on a defense firm, we’re careful and just thoughtful about the nature of the work that we do,” Flournoy told me. “There’s work we would do, and there’s work we wouldn’t do.”
AGUIRRE AND CHADDA FELT their strategic consultancy had far surpassed their hopes. As Joe Biden launched his presidential campaign in spring 2019, they were committed to the firm they had built. If Democrats took the White House, they won’t close up WestExec.
“Think about it: If Biden were to win, we do think that companies will start coming to WestExec, for ‘Hey, what is the commerce secretary thinking?’” one of the firm’s members said. “Because we likely have a history with that person or that staffer in our network somewhere. That will be something we can provide that we just don’t provide right now.”
Blinken is back to consulting for the vice president. In a video on Biden’s Twitter feed this April, he was introduced as senior foreign-policy adviser, explaining the candidate’s China policy. At the same time, WestExec advertises on its website that it will “develop a strategy for expanding market access in China” for clients. And a recent post on WestExec’s LinkedIn page displays Obama and Blinken chatting at the end of the board table.
Chadda denied that Blinken was having it both ways. “Volunteering for a political campaign, much like any other private pursuit, is done outside of formal employment and should never be implicated,” he told me. . .
https://www.vox.com/2015/7/31/9078755/biden-allies-give-to-clinton
Tony Blinken and Evan Ryan, who are married to each other. He’s a deputy secretary of state; she’s an assistant secretary of state. They both donated to Clinton in late June, just before the most recent deadline for campaigns to file finance reports with the Federal Election Commission. Given the tradition of giving for political gain, it’s not surprising that one of the rare true power couples would part with a total of $5,400.
It’s really a small investment when you think about it. Blinken could be in line for any number of jobs in a Clinton administration, including the one he has, secretary of state, or national security adviser to the president. Ryan would certainly be under consideration for at least an undersecretary post at State or perhaps a high-ranking White House job.
What’s surprising about their contributions to Clinton is that Blinken and Ryan couldn’t be much closer to Vice President Joe Biden, who hasn’t said yet whether he will seek the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016. Blinken was a top aide to Biden on Capitol Hill and the vice president’s national security adviser. Ryan handled intergovernmental affairs for Biden at the White House. Both of them moved over to State after Clinton left. The facile read — and one we admit was our first thought — is that they just unintentionally signaled that Biden won’t run.
But Blinken and Ryan are too smart for that.
Thanks for posting!
Pingout!!
Article + posts 8 & 10
https://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3894970/posts?page=1#1
https://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3894970/posts?page=8#8
https://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3894970/posts?page=10#10
Disgusting list of corrupt swamp dwellers.
Thanks for that info.
Evan (female) is also an Executive VP of Axios which is a news gathering service. Pretty healthy one too with two recent fundings of $30 million. Will look up to see what Axios does.
Nickles went into lobbying and is now on the board of Chesapeake Energy, which has been the subject of several investigations, including one which was called off after the accused CEO was killed in a car crash. Chambliss took money from Abramoff; he’s with DLA Piper now.
We seem to be getting near the center of the swamp.
There’s more in the link in #25.
Bookmark
I don’t understand any of this. For this to be helpful before the election it needs to be put in a simple outline that voters can understand.
Re: Bain
Myth Romney’s national security adviser, J. Cofer Black, recently served on the board of Burisma (has since resigned).
Aguirre, Chadda and Blinken....what a prolific, tangled web they weave
Bookmarking to re-read, in the a.m.
Thanks, again for posting this article and info.
Certainly helps explain Mitten’s disdain for POTUS.
What does Cris Wray know and when did he know it?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.