There’s a common misconception in the public that there are briefcases full of cash changing hands in Washington, DC, and votes of Members of Congress are for sale to the highest bidder. Make no mistake, the votes are still for sale, but the direct cash payments are (mostly) gone. While bags of bills may have been how it worked in the past, that’s not how corruption happens anymore. A lot of money still changes hands and people are getting rich, but it’s now done legally through intermediaries.
Hunter Biden knew as much about Ukraine and the oil and natural gas business as he did about not smoking crack, so of course him getting a position with a Ukrainian gas and oil company for $50,000 per month was a pay-off to his dad. Every parent wants their kids to do well, few are in a position to actually make that happen. Or, in the case of the former vice president, in charge of a US administration’s policy for a country most people couldn’t find on a map.
But Biden’s shady dealings are not unique to him, or to Democrats. It’s political grift by proxy. You can’t pay off a politician anymore because there are digital fingerprints everywhere, so you find other ways to achieve the same outcome.
Children and spouses of politicians are raking in cash from campaigns and corporations seeking to buy influence. And it’s all legal. Remember: these are the people who write the rules.
Board seats and sweetheart “consulting” and lobbying contracts are the new bags of cash. Want a chairman of a specific committee to look favorably on your bids for government contracts? Put someone close to them in a position to benefit from it. Want protections from regulators or to use regulators to harm your competitors or guard against foreign competition? Make the livelihood of someone who matters to the people in power dependent upon getting your way. Watch the seas part.
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Campaigns are not the cash cows corporations are, no one is raking in more than the average American family’s annual income every month from them like Hunter Biden was from Burisma. But for the closest to direct payoffs you can get, look no further than campaign cash.
Politicians beg for money every single day. If you have the misfortune to end up on a campaign’s email list, you find yourself getting emails begging for money from big name politicians and people you’ve never heard of.
They all breathlessly try to spin the reader up about how important it is you give, even just a couple of dollars, to them to keep or get them in office. You likely laugh at them, they’re absurd to normal people. But they must work on someone because they keep sending them and the money flows.
Much of that money goes to politicians who have a better shot of waking up naked on the moon than they do losing their reelection bids. After they contract with the necessary powerbrokers and kick “walking around money” to the required people, a good chunk of that cash ends up in the pockets of their family members.
Here’s just one example: Maxine Waters won reelection in 2018 with 78 percent of the vote even though she doesn’t live in her district. Her job is so safe that she could hold a press conference the week before the vote and call her constituents morons while whipping puppies into a woodchipper and she’d still win in a walk. But she still raises a fortune for her campaign.
Being Chair of the House Financial Services Committee has its perks, people with a lot of money want to suck up to Waters so they can make even more.
To remain in the good graces of Waters or any Member of Congress you gotta cut a check, whether their campaign needs the money or not. In the case of Waters, she hired her daughter to handle campaign mailing to voters. Why mail voters who are going to reelect you no matter what when mailing constituents is budgeted for in every congressional office? Because your campaign can pay family a ton of money to do it.
The Washington Free Beacon reports Karen Waters, Maxine’s daughter, was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to send out mailers for her mother’s campaign. Those campaign contributions don’t go directly into the pockets of the politicians, they’re laundered through the campaigns to family members, sometimes spouses. And it’s all legal.
Waters is not alone, not by a long shot.
Say what you want about President Trump, none of his kids have set up “consulting firms” or lobbying shops to capitalize on their father’s presidency. If they did, the left would never stop screaming about it. Yet, right out in the open, there are payoffs, kickbacks, and graft happening every day. Hunter Biden is in the spotlight right now, and with good reason, but he’s just the tip of the iceberg. It’s all legal, all out in the open, corrupt as hell, and no one is saying a damn thing about it.
Derek is the host of a free daily podcast (subscribe!) and author of the book, Outrage, INC., which exposes how liberals use fear and hatred to manipulate the masses.
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