News Analysis
As radio host Mark Levin recently noted, when it comes to Democrats and real campaign violations, “there is no justice.” In contrast to the weak charges leveled against former President Donald Trump, Levin provided a series of concrete examples of Democrat campaign violations, including the
$719,000 in fines against participants in the 1996 Democratic Party fundraising scandals.
In that scandal, Democratic fundraisers set specific prices for foreign nationals, including those from China and Korea, to make illegal campaign contributions in return for meetings with then-President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore. Foreign individuals and organizations are barred from contributing to federal elections. Those penalized included the Democratic National Committee (DNC), the Clinton–Gore campaign, and roughly two dozen people and corporations acting as conduits for the illegal contributions.
Despite the magnitude of the crimes, the DNC was fined only $115,000 and the Clinton–Gore campaign was fined just $2,000.
As was reported at the time, the total in fines would have been significantly higher except that some of the corporations had folded and others were simply shell corporations—dummy operations, with no assets—set up as conduits for money from China, Venezuela, Canada, and other countries.
In some cases, foreigners who would have been subject to fines couldn’t be located and served with papers. In other cases, the individuals pleaded guilty in criminal cases and were already bankrupt. The Federal Election Commission (FEC) decided to drop cases against contributors of more than $3 million in illegal DNC contributions because the respondents were either “out of the country and beyond ... reach, or corporations that are defunct.”
Levin also highlighted fines levied by the FEC against former President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign—
$375,000 in total fines for campaign reporting violations. According to the
audit report, Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign failed to properly report almost $2 million of last-minute campaign contributions by
refusing to file mandatory notices for about 1,300 contributions received just before the 2008 presidential election.
Most of the missing 48-hour notices came from a transfer on Oct. 24, 2008, from the Obama Victory Fund, a joint fundraising committee of the Obama campaign and the DNC. Notably, the FEC’s audit report wasn’t released until April 2012, even though it was Obama’s 2008 campaign that was being audited. There were zero repercussions for Obama personally.
Levin is right, of course, and while he provided a litany of other examples, there are even more. In 2008, Obama’s
campaign admitted it miscategorized the purpose of an $832,598 payment for
get-out-the-vote efforts to Citizens Services Inc., a consulting firm affiliated with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN).
ACORN was the DNC “community organizing group” that endorsed Obama, who had earlier “acted as one of their lawyers” and had been involved in teaching “community organizing classes” for the organization. ACORN claimed that it was nonpartisan, but its highly questionable voter registration efforts always seemed to focus on groups friendly to Democratic candidates. Amid
mounting charges of
voter fraud, ACORN became a
target for Republicans and
finally closed in 2015 under the weight of the charges.
Although ACORN was forced to close its operations, Obama’s campaign made sure to provide funding for DNC-affiliated groups that were directly modeled after ACORN—many of which are active to this day. Obama’s
self-described “wingman,” Attorney General Eric Holder, created what came to be known as the
DOJ’s Slush Fund, which arose through the establishment of the “Working Group,” which was created in 2012, supposedly as a means of prosecution and punishment for those perceived to be responsible for the financial crisis of 2008.
At the formation of the Working Group,
Holder foreshadowed the new direction of the Justice Department (DOJ), saying, “When we find evidence of criminal wrongdoing, we bring criminal prosecutions. When we don’t, we endeavor to use other tools available to us.”
Holder was using the power of the DOJ to punish behavior and activities that he didn’t like—even though those behaviors weren’t actually illegal.
With the full weight of the DOJ behind it, the Working Group reached
multibillion-dollar settlements with virtually every major bank in the United States. In total, $110 billion was collected in fines. According to a
congressional committee report, the DOJ was pushing and even requiring settling defendants to donate money to left-wing political activist groups.
The committee found that these “donations” could earn up to double credit against defendants’ overall payment obligations, while credit for direct relief to consumers was merely dollar-for-dollar. The committee also found that the activist groups that stood to gain from these mandatory donations had actually lobbied the DOJ to include them in settlements.
These payments, which
should have been slated for injured consumers, occurred entirely outside of the congressional appropriations and grant oversight process. And in some cases, DOJ-mandated donations were used to restore funding that Congress had specifically cut.
Some of these funds were even used to pay the interest in Obama’s “settlement” with Iran. Of the $110 billion that was actually collected by the DOJ, only $45 billion was slated for consumer relief. The use of the remainder of the proceeds has never been fully specified. However, it’s clear that many of the left-wing political activist groups that are so prevalent and active today received direct funding from Holder’s DOJ Slush Fund.
Notably, it was also Obama who enlisted the early and willing assistance of social media companies. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg infamously
privatized elements of the 2020 presidential election when he sent nearly half a billion dollars to local election boards in key states to turn out likely Democratic voters.
To put that into perspective,
Zuckerberg alone spent almost as much money funding government election offices as the entire federal government spent on the 2020 election. Zuckerberg’s payments were supposedly made to fill so-called funding gaps from the federal government, but the reality is that the so-called Zuckerbucks
were distributed on a highly partisan basis with the goal of electing Joe Biden and other Democrats.
Zuckerberg essentially mounted a private takeover of government election offices, which affected all of the key states that helped Biden “win” the election. In Wisconsin, the Zuckerbucks payments were later found to have violated bribery laws. A study also found that without those payments, Trump would have prevailed in Wisconsin.
As we noted earlier, despite the efforts of Zuckerberg and Facebook on behalf of Biden, the collusion between government officials and Big Tech didn’t start with Biden. It goes back to at least 2012, when Facebook shared its user data with the Obama campaign.
On Feb. 17, 2012, the Guardian ran a story headlined
Obama, Facebook and the Power of Friendship: the 2012 Data Election. The article noted that Obama’s reelection team was building a vast digital data operation that “for the first time combined a unified database on millions of Americans with the power of Facebook to target individual voters to a degree never achieved before.”
The Guardian
breathlessly wrote that “At the core is a single beating heart–a unified computer database that gathers and refines information on millions of committed and potential Obama voters.”
At the time, the reaction to the news was glowing acclaim for the sophistication of Obama’s digital campaign. But the reality of the situation was simple. Obama’s election team apparently had full access to Facebook’s data in 2012, access that wasn’t—and wouldn’t have been—granted to conservatives. Nor is this mere hyperbole.
In 2018, Facebook faced a huge political backlash because
it was reported that Cambridge Analytica, a political data firm with links to President Trump’s 2016 campaign, was able to harvest private data from Facebook profiles without the social network alerting those whose information was taken. Never mind that the
Trump campaign never used the data in question from Cambridge, relying
solely on the Republican National Committee (RNC) database once Trump became the GOP nominee.
Amid political uproar from the left, Facebook
immediately suspended Cambridge Analytica for scraping the data from Facebook. But the political firm was hardly the only one doing so. In a surprising bout of honesty, The Washington Post
rightly noted that thousands of other developers—along with political consultants from Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign—also siphoned huge amounts of data about users and their friends, developing deep understandings of people’s relationships and preferences.
At the very end of the article, the
Post revisited the assistance that Facebook had previously provided to Obama’s 2012 digital campaign, noting that in 2011, Carol Davidsen, director of data integration and media analytics for Obama for America, built a database of every U.S. voter using the same Facebook developer tool used by Cambridge.
As the article stated, any time people used Facebook’s log-in button to sign on to the campaign’s website, the Obama data scientists were able to access their profile and their friends’ information. That allowed them to chart the closeness of people’s relationships and make estimates about which people would be most likely to influence other people in their network to vote.
“We ingested the entire U.S. social graph,” Davidsen said in an interview. “We would ask permission to basically scrape your profile, and also scrape your friends, basically anything that was available to scrape. We scraped it all.”
Davidsen expanded on the situation in a series of posts on Twitter,
writing, “Facebook was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn’t stop us once they realized that was what we were doing.”
Davidsen also highlighted the favoritism that Facebook gave to Obama’s campaign,
writing, "[Facebook] came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side.”
This raises an important question. If Facebook gave the Obama campaign access to valuable data worth millions of dollars to bolster Obama’s chances of winning the election, why wasn’t it counted as in-kind political contributions by the Obama campaign?
