Anti-Sanders billionaires, behind the app that delayed Iowa’s voting results
By Max Blumenthal
February 4, 2020- At the time
of publication, twelve hours after voting in the Democratic Party’s Iowa
caucuses ended, the results have not been announced. The delay in reporting is
the result of a failed app developed by a company appropriately named Shadow
Inc.
This firm
was staffed by Hillary Clinton and
Barack Obama campaign veterans and created by a Democratic dark money nonprofit
backed by hedge fund billionaires including Seth Klarman. A prolific funder of
pro-settler Israel lobby organizations, Klarman has also contributed directly
to Pete Buttigieg’s campaign.
The delay in
the vote reporting denied a victory speech to Sen. Bernie Sanders, the
presumptive winner of the opening contest in the Democratic presidential
primary. Though not one exit poll indicated that Buttigieg would have won, the
South Bend, Indiana mayor took to Twitter to confidently proclaim himself the
victor.
Iowa, you
have shocked the nation.
The bizarre
scenario was made possible by a mysterious voting app whose origins had been kept secret by Democratic
National Committee officials. For hours, it was unclear who created the failed
technology, or how it wound up in the hands of Iowa party officials.
Though a
dark money Democratic operation turned out to be the source of the disastrous
app, suspicion initially centered on former Hillary Clinton campaign manager
Robby Mook and his Russiagate-related elections integrity initiative.
Leveraging
Russia hysteria into lucrative election opportunities
While Iowa
Democratic Party Chairman Troy Price refused to say who was behind the failed
app, he told NPR that he “worked with
the national party’s cybersecurity team and Harvard University’s Defending
Digital Democracy project…” Price did not offer details on his collaboration
with the Harvard group, however.
The New York
Times reported that this same outfit had
teamed up with Iowa Democrats to run a “drill of worst-case scenarios” and
possible foreign threats, but was also vague on details.
Robby Mook,
the former campaign manager for Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential
campaign, was the co-founder of Defending Digital Democracy. His initiative
arose out of the national freakout over
Russian meddling that he and his former boss helped stir when they blamed their
loss on Russian interference. Mook’s new outfit
pledged to “protect from hackers and propaganda attacks.”
He founded
the organization with help from Matt Rhoades, a former campaign manager for
Republican Mitt Romney whose public relations company was sued by a Silicon Valley investor after it
branded him “an agent of the Russian government” and “a friend of Russian
President, Vladimir Putin.” Rhoades’ firm had been contracted by a business
rival to destroy the investor’s reputation.
As outrage
grew over the delay in Iowa caucus results, Mook publicly denied any role in
designing the notorious app.
Hours later,
journalist Lee Fang reported that a
previously unknown tech outfit called Shadow Inc. had contracted with the Iowa
Democratic Party to create the failed technology. The firm was comprised of
former staffers for Obama, Clinton and the tech industry, and had been paid for
services by the Buttigieg campaign.
FEC filings
show the Iowa Democratic party and Buttigieg campaign paid Shadow Inc.
An Israel
lobby moneyman’s path to Mayor Pete’s wine cave
Shadow Inc.
was launched by a major Democratic dark
money nonprofit called Acronym, which also gave birth to a $7.7 million Super
PAC known as Pacronym.
According
to Sludge, Pacronym’s largest donor is
Seth Klarman. A billionaire hedge funder, Klarman also happens to be a top
donor to Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar.
Though he
has attracted some attention for his role in the campaign, Klarman’s prolific
funding of the pro-settler Israel lobby and Islamophobic initiatives has gone almost entirely unmentioned.
Seth Klarman
is the founder of the Boston-based Baupost Group hedge fund and a longtime
donor to corporate Republican candidates. After Donald Trump called for
forgiving Puerto Rico’s debt, Klarman – the owner of $911 million of the
island’s bonds – flipped and began funding Trump’s opponents.
The
billionaire’s crusade against Trump ultimately led him to Mayor Pete’s wine
cave.
By the end
of 2019, Klarman had donated $5600 to
Buttigieg and pumped money into the campaigns of Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker and
Kamala Harris as well.
The
billionaire’s support centrist candidates appears to be not only by his own
financial interests, but by his deep and
abiding ideological commitment to Israel and its expansionist project.
As I reported for Mondoweiss, Klarman has been a
top funder for major Israel lobby outfits, including those that support the
expansion of illegal settlements and Islamophobic initiatives.
Klarman was
the principal funder of The Israel Project, the
recently disbanded Israeli government-linked propaganda organization
that lobbied against the Iran nuclear deal and backed the Israeli settlement enterprise.
Klarman has
heaped hundreds of thousands of dollars on the Middle East Media Research
Institute (MEMRI) and the American Jewish Committee. And he funded The David
Project, which was established to suppress Palestine solidarity organizing on
campuses across the US and battled to block the establishment of a Muslim
community center in Boston.
Through his
support for the Friends of Ir David Inc, Klarman directly involved himself in
the Israeli settlement enterprise, assisting the US-based tax exempt arm of the
organization that oversaw a wave of
Palestinian expulsions in the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan.
Other
pro-Israel groups reaping the benefits of Klarman’s generosity include Birthright
Israel, the AIPAC-founded Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and the
Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), a neoconservative think tank
that helped devise Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign of economic warfare on
Iran.
Klarman is
the owner of the Times of Israel, an Israeli media outlet that once published a call for Palestinian genocide.
(The op-ed was ultimately removed following public backlash).
In recent
weeks, Buttigieg has sought to
distinguish himself from Sanders on the issue of Israel-Palestine. During a
testy exchange this January with a self-proclaimed Jewish supporter of
Palestinian human rights, the South Bend mayor backtracked on a previous pledge
to withhold military aid to Israel if it annexed parts of the West Bank.
NEW: The day
after Trump unveiled his plan green-lighting Israeli annexation and Netanyahu’s
announcement of a cabinet vote on annexation this Tuesday, @PeteButtigieg
backtracked on his repeated promise that the "U.S. will not foot the bill
for annexation."
Another
recipient of Klarman’s funding, Amy Klobuchar, has taken a strongly pro-Israel
line, vowing to support Trump’s
relocation of the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Battling
Bernie with hedge fund money and sexism claims
Like
Klarman, Donald Sussman is a hedge funder who has channeled his fortune into
Pacronym. He has given $1 million to the Super PAC and was also top donor to Clinton in 2016.
Sussman’s
Paloma Partners operates through a
series of offshore shell companies, and
received tens of millions of dollars in the 2009 federal bailout of the
banking industry.
His
daughter, Democratic operative Emily Tisch Sussman, declared on MSNBC in
September that “if you still support Sanders over Warren, it’s kind of showing your
sexism.”
MSNBC pundit
says if you support Bernie Sanders over Elizabeth Warren it’s “showing your
sexism.”
As
Democratic elites like the Sussmans braced for a Bernie Sanders triumph in
Iowa, a mysterious piece of technology spun out by a group they supported
delayed the vote results, preventing Sanders from delivering a victory speech.
And the politician many of them supported, Pete Buttigieg, exploited the moment
to declare himself the winner. In such a strange scenario, the conspiracy
theories write themselves.
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