What's on Voters' Minds? Corruption!

The Truth is Out There. There's More Coming Our Way..

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In the final dash toward the midterms, both parties are frantically testing "messaging" strategies most likely to resonate voters. Republicans are settling on the economy and crime, while Democrats, having hoped that abortion and GOP-sponsored erosion of democratic rights would tide them to control of the Hill, are still striving for a winning theme. Pundit commentary is replete with earnest discussion of these approaches. Hardly anyone mentions corruption as a dominant issue in the run-up to the election. Voters think otherwise.  

Corruption is Number 1

Just over a year ago, POGO, the Washington-based Project on Government Oversight, polled voters in the battleground states of Michigan and Ohio about their primary concerns.  The results were striking.  Voters predictably reported that various high-profile issues were "very big problems," including crime and gun violence (63%) Covid-19 (61%) and climate change (46%.) But above all the others came "corruption in government." No less than 65% deemed it a "very big problem," while 89% said it was a "problem." (Ohio voters' minds may have been concentrated by recent news that local nuclear power utility First Energy had bribed Ohio legislators to the tune of $60 million to authorize punishing rate increases.) Subsequent surveys affirm that this bleak conclusion still holds true, and on a nationwide basis. In July this year the University of Chicago Institute of Politics reported that over half of those surveyed agreed with the proposition that the government is "corrupt and rigged against me." A New York Times-Siena poll released October 17 found 68% of registered voters agreeing that the government "mainly works to benefit powerful elites" rather than "ordinary people."  

If over two thirds of voting Americans think that way, recent headlines are unlikely to have changed their minds. Scores  of retired generals and admirals, already endowed with generous pensions, have been taking fat paychecks from foreign governments of the most noxious variety, especially Saudi Arabia. (The State Department, which had okayed their contracts, fought loyally for two years to keep them secret.)  Senior government officials are revealed to be routinely trading stocks in corporations whose prosperity they directly influence.  Raphael Bostic, President of the Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank has belatedly admitted that he, or at least his personal money manager, was trading heavily in stocks in March 2020 at just the time the Fed was intervening massively in the markets, a practice already exposed in the case of the Dallas Fed bank president.

Should voters need further confirmation of their views on government corruption, they should get it in spades if a criminal trial billed to kick off  in the DC District Court next March goes ahead as advertised. The accused are Haitian-American rapper Prakazreal ("Pras") Michel of the Fugees and Low Taek Jho, aka Jo Low. known for his role in the titanic robbery in which at least $4.5 billion were looted from 1MDB, a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund that had been created so that it could be robbed.

Much of the money was squandered by Low in service of a pretentious lifestyle, including lavish presents to celebrities he wanted to befriend. Leonardo DiCaprio got a Picasso and also starred in the Wolf of Wall Street movie, which was funded with 1MDB money.  $681 million was deployed to boost the electoral fortunes of then Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak, who had overseen the creation of 1MDB and recruited Low to run it. Malaysian corruption is unlikely to concern Americans that much. But the forthcoming trial, should it be allowed to proceed, will highlight how tens of millions of dollars from the robbery sluiced into the American political system.  That is why a list of witnesses the government may summon to testify, released October 9 by Justice Department prosecutors, makes such interesting reading, pointing as it does to the high level connections forged by the thieves to the upper levels of the Obama and Trump Administrations.

According to prosecutors, Michel and Low conspired to funnel tens of millions of dollars into the Obama 2012 reelection campaign, and further millions into Trump’s campaign coffers in hopes of recouping $1 billion in ill-gotten gains sequestered by law enforcement in 2017.  For good measure, they are also charged with attempting to suborn senior officials on behalf of the Chinese government in hopes of getting Trump to deport a fugitive Chinese billionaire on whom Beijing would like to get its hands.  Low himself will not be in the dock, having found safe harbor in China. But Michel, Low's functionary in the affair, has been out on bail since his indictment in 2019.

Number 1 on the witness list is Frank White.  White was the national vice chair of Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign, raising at least $500,000 for the race, and served as cochair of Obama’s Inaugural Committee. In 2012, he received a $10 million “consulting” payment from a firm owned by one of Low’s business partners. Further millions flowed into DuSable Capital, an "Energy and Infrastructure" company jointly owned by Michel and White.  Soon after, DuSable announced a partnership with 1MDB to build a $300 million solar plant in Malaysia, for which White received a fee of $506,000. By October 2014, there was little or no sign of any construction of the solar plant, but 1MDB nonetheless paid DuSable a handsome $69 million for its 49 percent share in the quiescent project.

A Sound Investment

Najib and Low must have thought their money well spent. On December 18, 2013, White escorted members of the Najib family, along with Leonardo DiCaprio, to a private Oval Office visit with Obama, at which they gave the president a Wolf of Wall Street DVD. Four months later, Obama made the first visit to Malaysia by an American president in fifty years. Eight months after that, on Christmas Eve, he hosted Najib for a round of golf in Hawaii. In a September 2014 address to the United Nations General Assembly, Obama hailed Malaysia’s culture of “vibrant entrepreneurship,” which was “propelling a former colony into the ranks of advanced economies.”

$9 Million Gets You Into the Oval Office. And Hopefully $Billion more.

Number 35 on the witness list is Elliott Broidy, which brings us to the Trump connection.  As Donald Trump moved into the White House, Low mounted a determined effort to retrieve $1 billion worth of laundered plunder targeted by the DOJ. Again the conspirators chose the tried and trusted route of political “contributions.” This time their conduit was Broidy, a Los Angeles–based defense contractor who back in 2009 had been convicted of bribing New York State pension officials . (His charge was reduced to a misdemeanor after he informed on others involved in the scheme.) Broidy had secured Trump’s affections by helping to raise $108 million for his campaign, eventually becoming vice chairman within that organization, and later serving in a senior role on Trump’s Inaugural Committee. (The two even shared the same fixer in matters of the heart: Michael Cohen, the go-between for Trump’s settlement with Stormy Daniels, who performed a similar service in negotiating a $1.6 million payoff to a Playboy Playmate whom Broidy had impregnated.)

On September 12, 2017, three months after DOJ prosecutors filed a formal 251-page complaint detailing the progress and scope of the entire fraud, Najib returned to the Oval Office. In preparation for the visit, Broidy had sent a colleague an email with the subject line “Malaysia talking points *Final*,” recommending that Najib emphasize to Trump that “Malaysia fully backed U.S. efforts to isolate North Korea.” Before the two leaders sat down for their private meeting, Trump remarked publicly that Najib “does not do business with North Korea any longer. We find that to be very important.” One month later, Michel sent Broidy at least $9 million from an account controlled by Low, using George Higginbotham, a DOJ attorney moonlighting as a money launderer, as the conduit. Broidy pleaded guilty for failing to disclose, as required under foreign agent registration laws, his work on behalf of the 1MDB crooks, but was able to secure a last-minute pardon from Trump as the latter exited office. Higginbotham (number 32 on the witness list) was not so lucky. 

Chinese Whispers

Higgenbotham pled guilty to money laundering charges in November, 2018, and has been awaiting sentence ever since. His "Factual Basis for Plea" as released by the DOJ at the time is replete with intriguing details, not least an admission that in July 2017 Pras sent him round to "Country Q's embassy" in Washington - quite obviously the Chinese - to inform the ambassador that "United States government officials" were working on returning "Foreign National 1," meaning fugitive billionaire Guo Wengui, and that there would shortly be more information on the matter.  This makes the prospect of testimony from former Trump Chief of Staff General John Kelly (number 5 on the list) and former National Security Advisor General H.R. McMaster (number 39) even more intriguing.  How, one wonders, could these high ranking former denizens of the West Wing have been involved in the affair?

         We may never find out. The trial was originally scheduled for November 4, this year but then postponed until March 27.  No one should be too surprised if further, infinite, delays may occur. Some matters are too sensitive ever to be discussed in front of the public, a fact of which, if those polls are to be believed, the public is all too well aware.