Left-wing billionaire George Soros donated $1 million to Beto O’Rourke’s bid to unseat Gov. Greg Abbott (R) in Texas, contributing to the Democratic candidate’s feat of outraising the incumbent during the past fundraising quarter.
Nearly half of O’Rourke’s record-breaking $27.6 million fundraising haul came from out-of-state donors, with Soros’s hefty donation helping the Democratic challenger best Abbott in fundraising over the past six months, according to filings by the Texas Ethics Commission reported by the Hill. The sum also helped O’Rourke reach a milestone of making the most money a Texas candidate running for a statewide office has ever raised in a single fundraising period.
Soros, a Hungary-born American who became a hedge fund manager for clients in New York, has a net worth of $8.6 billion, according to Forbes. He has become a bogeyman of sorts to the Right, particularly for his millions of dollars in campaign donations to prosecutors.
Soros made the donation to O'Rourke one day before the Supreme Court announced its highly anticipated decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which handed the issue of abortion access back to individual states, prompting criticism from the 91-year-old financier-turned-philanthropist.
“The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn #RoeVWade ends federal protections for abortion, diminishes human rights, and greatly threatens reproductive care,” Soros wrote in a tweet. “We have invested in reproductive rights organizations that are fighting back at this moment.”
Texas has a "trigger ban" that prohibits abortions from the moment of fertilization, with rare exceptions to save the life of the mother, set to go into effect at the end of July, according to the New York Times.
O’Rourke received a handful of large donations costing more than $100,000, although the majority of his haul came from small donations, according to his campaign. Comparatively, Abbott had 62 donors who contributed six-figure sums that made up more than half of his total second-quarter haul, according to the Dallas Morning News.
Overall, O’Rourke raked in $27.6 million from more than 511,000 individual donors between Feb. 20 and June 30, according to his campaign. That puts him ahead of Abbott’s gains during the same time period. The incumbent raised $24.9 million from nearly 113,000 donors.
Abbott boasts nearly $46 million in cash on hand. O’Rourke’s campaign did not disclose how much money it has on hand, though the campaign reported about $6.8 million as of mid-February.
The Texas gubernatorial race has been closely watched ever since O’Rourke announced his bid to unseat Abbott last November, criticizing the state’s “extremist policies” over the past few years.
Despite the record-breaking fundraising numbers, O’Rourke faces an uphill battle in his efforts to flip the governor’s mansion blue in the deep-red state. O'Rourke was a U.S. congressman from El Paso who ran ill-fated campaigns for Senate against Ted Cruz (R) and for the White House before announcing his gubernatorial campaign.
Nearly 50% of voters are leaning toward voting for Abbott in the general election, compared to O’Rourke’s 44%, according to recent polling from the University of Houston’s Hobby School of Public Affairs. Another 5% are undecided. The poll, conducted between June 27 and July 7, surveyed 1,169 YouGov respondents who are registered to vote in Texas and had a confidence interval of plus or minus 2.9 percentage points. The election is set for November.
George Soros’s Conservative Renaissance
Leftist prosecutors prevailed at the ballot box but are now stirring a revolt.
By Karl Rove
Give George Soros his due. He knows how to get political results.
Rather than waste time and money convincing state legislatures and governors to enact laws decriminalizing offenses, loosening bail requirements, and making it tougher to send bad guys to jail, Mr. Soros is skipping straight to the office that enforces the law—district attorney. Political-action committees he bankrolls are pouring money into the campaigns of left-wing candidates who, once elected as prosecutors, can implement soft-on-crime policies by administrative fiat.
District-attorney races are traditionally low-budget affairs, so influencing their outcome doesn’t cost much. Most big cities and populous counties are reliably Democratic, so these offices often are decided in primaries, which are smaller and less expensive than general elections. Showering left-wing candidates with hundreds of thousands of dollars is often enough to dramatically alter how justice is administered in a jurisdiction with millions of citizens.
Using this model, PACs largely funded by Mr. Soros have donated more than $22 million to bankroll the election of at least 23 district attorneys, according to data collected by the Capital Research Center and the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund. These prosecutors serve cities or counties that have a combined population of 38.4 million Americans. His money has helped put prosecutors in office from Los Angeles to Philadelphia, St. Louis to the Virginia suburbs of Washington, Manhattan to Chicago. Four of the five most populous counties in Texas have prosecutors these Soros-funded PACs backed.
But an action in politics can provoke a reaction. Aroused citizens in affected communities—including some of the nation’s most liberal cities—are saying enough is enough. The election of antipolice, anti-law-and-order prosecutors often has led to increases in violent crime and a growing sense among ordinary citizens that their communities are less safe and quality of life is worsening.
Consider last month’s recall of San Francisco’s district attorney, Chesa Boudin. The anti-recall effort received indirect support from Mr. Soros by way of a PAC funded by the Smart Justice California Action Fund, to which he has given $3.65 million, according to the Washington Free Beacon. Mr. Boudin was ousted with 60% of the vote by San Franciscans fed up with feces and needles on their streets, a rising tide of hate crimes against Asian-Americans, and frequent brazen snatch-and-grab thefts everywhere from pharmacies to luxury stores. Now there’s another recall effort underway in California for Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón, who got off to a bad start by establishing a policy of never seeking the death penalty or trying a minor as an adult, no matter how heinous the crime.
There’s also a new national organization that seeks to counter the Soros strategy. The Protecting Americans Action Fund is organized by Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares, a Republican former local prosecutor, and led by an impressive board of three state attorneys general, two county prosecutors, and a pair of former U.S. attorneys. The fund will help law-and-order prosecutors get into office in key counties and stay there.
PAAF is backing Cyndi Carrasco’s bid for prosecutor of Marion County, Ind., which includes Indianapolis. The daughter of legal immigrants from Mexico, she served as state inspector general before becoming deputy general counsel and ethics adviser for Gov. Eric Holcomb. Her opponent, incumbent Democrat Ryan Mears, refuses to prosecute certain drug crimes, won’t charge minors accused of nonviolent offenses, and presided over two record years of murders in 2020 and 2021.
PAAF will play defense in Tarrant County, Texas, home to Fort Worth and Arlington, where the incumbent GOP district attorney is retiring. Republicans nominated Phil Sorrells, a criminal-court judge and former prosecutor. He’ll face Democrat Tiffany Brooks, who surprisingly beat a Soros-backed candidate, Albert Roberts, in her primary. Mr. Roberts got nearly $700,000 from Mr. Soros via the Texas Justice and Public Safety PAC but spent only around $34,000 of it, husbanding the rest for the fall election, in which he won’t compete. It’ll be interesting to see if the unspent portion of that donation goes to Ms. Brooks.
If PAAF puts more law-and-order prosecutors into office, it may achieve something greater too. As Democrats see PAAF’s victories, some of them may realize that their party’s antipolice and soft-on-crime attitudes are a political problem.
Take last November’s election of Ann Davison as Seattle city attorney—the first Republican elected citywide in 30 years. When Democrats lose the Emerald City, the times are changing. Who could have guessed George Soros would help spur a conservative renaissance in one of America’s bluest towns?
Mr. Rove helped organize the political-action committee American Crossroads and is author of “The Triumph of William McKinley” (Simon & Schuster, 2015).
Joe Biden, Hunter Biden and the Colombia Collection
By Byron York
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.
The Hunter Biden story has always been a Joe Biden story. It has been clear all along that Hunter Biden, like some other relatives of high officeholders, spent years trying to cash in on his father's government position. And we've known for a while that Justice Department investigators are looking into whether Hunter paid taxes on the money he got from various overseas deals, and whether he fully complied with foreign agent registration requirements.
What we still don't know is what Hunter's father, former vice president and now President Joe Biden, knew about his son's business dealings. It's hard to imagine a son traveling all around the world, trading on his father's name and position, and the father not knowing a single thing about it. And yet that is what Joe Biden claims.
"I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings," Biden said in Iowa in 2019, during the Democratic presidential primary campaign. That's a pretty definitive statement. Since then, Biden or his spokespersons have stood behind that denial; so today, in July 2022, the president's position is that he has never spoken to his son about his son's overseas business dealings.
Now there is a new story that will test Biden's denials once again. What follows is based on reporting by Jon Levine and Joshua Rhett Miller in the New York Post:
Among his many other foreign business interests, in 2011 and 2012, Hunter Biden pursued a possible lucrative deal in Colombia. He was actually trying to get in with a Brazilian construction company called OAS. An article in Reuters described OAS as "one of many Brazilian engineering and construction groups accused of paying bribes and rigging public contracts in Brazil's biggest-ever corruption scandal."
OAS was exploring a number of projects in Colombia, including "two wastewater treatment plants estimated to [cost] $380 million and $350 million ... a $1.8 billion hydroelectric power plant, and a $3 billion upgrade to the Bogota subway system," according to the Post.
How could Hunter and his business partners get a piece of it? By using Hunter's father's connections, of course. Joe Biden, then the vice president of the United States, had a longtime relationship with Andres Pastrana, who was president of Colombia from 1998 to 2002. During that period, Biden was a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and had dealings with Pastrana. The relationship was a long one; on Nov. 7, 2020, the night Biden was declared winner of the U.S. presidential election, Pastrana tweeted congratulations with a picture of himself, Sen. Biden and another Foreign Relations Committee stalwart, Republican Sen. Jesse Helms. Pastrana called Biden a "great friend" of Colombia. And former President Pastrana remained an influential man in Colombia -- the kind who could help a well-connected friend get a big contract.
According to documents found on the Hunter Biden laptop, Hunter and his partners began corresponding about the OAS/Colombia business in February 2011. They planned to pitch OAS -- $20,000 a month, plus a 5% "success fee" -- for Hunter's help in getting the Colombia projects.
"If it works, we'll all be rich," one of Hunter's partners emailed to him in August 2011. In September, Hunter signed a contract with OAS for $25,000 a month. Hunter and his partners estimated their part of a "success fee" would be around $5 million.
In November 2011, Hunter went to Bogota, where he had dinner with Pastrana. "Emails contained on the hard drive suggest Mauricio Cardenas Santamaria, the country's minister for mines and energy, shared the meal," reports the Post. "That same day, Hunter also met with Catalina Crane Arango, a counselor to Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos, according to the calendar."
Soon it would be time to bring Vice President Biden into the deal personally. In February 2012, according to the Post, Hunter wrote a note to Pastrana: "Dear Mr. President, I look forward to seeing you when you are in Washington. I was hoping we could meet for lunch or coffee depending upon your schedule ... I'd like to discuss an opportunity that I think you have already been initially briefed regarding OAS. I am checking on my dad's schedule."
"I am checking on my dad's schedule." Sure enough, Pastrana visited Washington and met with Joe Biden the next month, on March 2, 2012. Hunter Biden's calendar shows that Eric Schwerin, a business partner of Hunter's, was invited to "Meet with Pres. Pastrana and Dad at NavObs," according to Hunter's calendar on the laptop. "NavObs" was a reference to the Naval Observatory, which is the vice president's official residence. After the meeting, Hunter scheduled a lunch with Pastrana at Washington's Cafe Milano, according to the Post.
By May 2012, Pastrana was back in Washington, this time with his son, Santiago. Father and son met with Hunter Biden. In an interview with the New York Post, Santiago Pastrana said, "The conversation was around the gratitude my father had for then VP Biden and all his support towards Colombia."
Did it all pay off? That's where things are a little murky. The Post reported: "The Colombian infrastructure projects were eventually built but it is unclear if OAS won any related contracts, or if Hunter Biden and his business partners pocketed 'success' bonuses."
But here's the bigger question: Did Joe Biden really not say a word to his son about Pastrana and the Colombia project? Did Hunter not say a word to his father about it? Did the vice president not know that his son and Pastrana were involved in a business initiative, whether or not it resulted in contracts and payouts at the end?
And what of Hunter's other business deals? The New York Post reported that Hunter "met with his father at least 30 times at the White House or the vice president's residence, often just days after he returned home from overseas business jaunts." The Post continued: "Eric Schwerin ... is named as a calendar invite recipient on 21 of 30 listed meetings, with a green check frequently indicating his confirmed receipt of the invite for meetings with the vice president."
Remember what Joe Biden said: "I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings." At some point, at some time, the president will have to explain himself.
This content originally appeared on the Washington Examiner at washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/sounding-the-alarm-over-joe-biden.
(Byron York is chief political correspondent for The Washington Examiner. For a deeper dive into many of the topics Byron covers, listen to his podcast, The Byron York Show, available on the Ricochet Audio Network at ricochet.com/series/byron-york-show and everywhere else podcasts are found.)
Finally:
Hunter Biden probe reaches 'critical stage,' as officials weigh possible charges: source
A source says officials are weighing possible charges for tax violations, foreign lobbying and false statements
By Brooke Singman , David Spunt , Bill Mears | Fox News
Judge Jeanine on Hunter Biden scandal: Joe Biden is now 'caught in the lie'
'The Five' co-host Judge Jeanine Pirro slams the Biden family and ties President Biden into Hunter's shady business dealings.
BeyondWords
The federal investigation into Hunter Biden and his tax affairs has reached a "critical stage," a source told Fox News, as officials are looking into whether to charge President Biden’s son with various tax violations, possible foreign lobbying violations and more.
Hunter Biden has been under federal investigation since 2018, according to a source familiar with the matter.
A separate source told Fox News that the federal grand jury looking into Hunter Biden’s business dealings wrapped up its latest term late last month, but said no charges have been filed.
The investigation is being conducted by Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, a prosecutor appointed by former President Donald Trump.
HUNTER BIDEN REQUESTED KEYS FOR NEW 'OFFICE MATES' JOE BIDEN, CHINESE 'EMISSARY' TO CEFC CHAIRMAN, EMAILS SHOW
The source told Fox News on Wednesday that Weiss and Justice Department officials were looking into whether to charge Hunter Biden with various tax violations and, more seriously, possible foreign lobbying violations. The source said Hunter Biden could face possible false statements charges.
But the source said no final decision has been made on whether to charge Hunter Biden, and stressed that the investigation is ongoing.
Fox News first reported in December 2020 that Hunter Biden was a subject/target of the grand jury investigation, according to a well-placed government source. According to the source, a "target" means that there is a "high probability that person committed a crime," while a "subject" is someone you "don’t know for sure" has committed a crime."
The federal investigation into Hunter Biden was predicated, in part, by Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) regarding suspicious foreign transactions.
Another source familiar with the investigation told Fox News in December 2020 that the SARs were regarding funds from "China and other foreign nations."
FEDERAL INVESTIGATION CONTINUES INTO HUNTER BIDEN EVEN AFTER HE PAID HIS TAX BILL
A Treasury Department official, who did not comment on the investigation, spoke broadly about SARs, telling Fox News that SARs are filed by financial institutions "if there is something out of the ordinary about a particular transaction."
The official told Fox News that the mere filing of a SAR does not mean there has been a criminal act, or violation of regulations, but instead, flags that a transaction is "out of the ordinary" for the customer. The official noted, though, that a SAR could be part of a money laundering or tax investigation.
HUNTER BIDEN UNDER FEDERAL INVESTIGATION FOR 'TAX AFFAIRS;' LINKS TO CHINA FUNDS EMERGE, SOURCES SAY
Hunter Biden, weeks after the 2020 presidential election, released a statement acknowledging the federal investigation of his "tax affairs."
"I take this matter very seriously, but I am confident that a professional and objective review of these matters will demonstrate that I handled my affairs legally and appropriately, including with the benefit of professional tax advisors," he said in the December 2020 statement.
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I sent this To The White House
+++
Dear Mr. President: The Manhattan Institute came up with the atomic bomb so seems to have some scientific credibility. Thus, perhaps, this presentation might be of interest:
How Much Energy Will the World Need?"
Watch this one
"https://www.youtube.com/embed/wDOI-uLvTnY"
Respectfully,
Richard Berkowitz
6 Pineside Lane,
Savannah, Ga. 31411
912 598 9251
+++
Dufus probably never was allowed to listen/watch this
“How Much Energy Will the World Need?"
Watch this
because Susan Rice may have concluded it would be too difficult for him to understand.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
A little humor.
Now that i have a second hip, I tried this and am e mailing from the Nursing Home: Food not bad. They accepted me as a full time resident patient after I was wheeled in strapped on a stretcher
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Stephens fesses up about his view of Trump voters:+++
I Was Wrong About Trump Voters
By Bret Stephens
The worst line I ever wrote as a pundit — yes, I know, it’s a crowded field — was the first line I ever wrote about the man who would become the 45th president: “If by now you don’t find Donald Trump appalling, you’re appalling.”
This opening salvo, from August 2015, was the first in what would become dozens of columns denouncing Trump as a unique threat to American life, democratic ideals and the world itself. I regret almost nothing of what I said about the man and his close minions. But the broad swipe at his voters caricatured them and blinkered me.
It also probably did more to help than hinder Trump’s candidacy. Telling voters they are moral ignoramuses is a bad way of getting them to change their minds.
What were they seeing that I wasn’t?
That ought to have been the first question to ask myself. When I looked at Trump, I saw a bigoted blowhard making one ignorant argument after another. What Trump’s supporters saw was a candidate whose entire being was a proudly raised middle finger at a self-satisfied elite that had produced a failing status quo.
I was blind to this. Though I had spent the years of Barack Obama’s presidency denouncing his policies, my objections were more abstract than personal. I belonged to a social class that my friend Peggy Noonan called “the protected.” My family lived in a safe and pleasant neighborhood. Our kids went to an excellent public school. I was well paid, fully insured, insulated against life’s harsh edges.
Trump’s appeal, according to Noonan, was largely to people she called “the unprotected.” Their neighborhoods weren’t so safe and pleasant. Their schools weren’t so excellent. Their livelihoods weren’t so secure. Their experience of America was often one of cultural and economic decline, sometimes felt in the most personal of ways.
It was an experience compounded by the insult of being treated as losers and racists —clinging, in Obama’s notorious 2008 phrase, to “guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.”
No wonder they were angry.
Anger can take dumb or dangerous turns, and with Trump they often took both. But that didn’t mean the anger was unfounded or illegitimate, or that it was aimed at the wrong target.
Trump voters had a powerful case to make that they had been thrice betrayed by the nation’s elites. First, after 9/11, when they had borne much of the brunt of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, only to see Washington fumble and then abandon the efforts. Second, after the financial crisis of 2008, when so many were being laid off, even as the financial class was being bailed out. Third, in the post-crisis recovery, in which years of ultralow interest rates were a bonanza for those with investable assets and brutal for those without.
Oh, and then came the great American cultural revolution of the 2010s, in which traditional practices and beliefs — regarding same-sex marriage, sex-segregated bathrooms, personal pronouns, meritocratic ideals, race-blind rules, reverence for patriotic symbols, the rules of romance, the presumption of innocence and the distinction between equality of opportunity and outcome — became, more and more, not just passé, but taboo.
It’s one thing for social mores to evolve over time, aided by respect for differences of opinion. It’s another for them to be abruptly imposed by one side on another, with little democratic input but a great deal of moral bullying.
This was the climate in which Trump’s campaign flourished. I could have thought a little harder about the fact that, in my dripping condescension toward his supporters, I was also confirming their suspicions about people like me — people who talked a good game about the virtues of empathy but practice it only selectively; people unscathed by the country’s problems yet unembarrassed to propound solutions.
I also could have given Trump voters more credit for nuance.
For every in-your-face MAGA warrior there were plenty of ambivalent Trump supporters, doubtful of his ability and dismayed by his manner, who were willing to take their chances on him because he had the nerve to defy deeply flawed conventional pieties.
Nor were they impressed by Trump critics who had their own penchant for hypocrisy and outright slander. To this day, precious few anti-Trumpers have been honest with themselves about the elaborate hoax — there’s just no other word for it — that was the Steele dossier and all the bogus allegations, credulously parroted in the mainstream media, that flowed from it.
A final question for myself: Would I be wrong to lambaste Trump’s current supporters, the ones who want him back in the White House despite his refusal to accept his electoral defeat and the historic outrage of Jan. 6?
Morally speaking, no. It’s one thing to take a gamble on a candidate who promises a break with business as usual. It’s another to do that with an ex-president with a record of trying to break the Republic itself.
But I would also approach these voters in a much different spirit than I did the last time. “A drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall,” noted Abraham Lincoln early in his political career. “If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend.” Words to live by, particularly for those of us in the business of persuasion.
My response:
Bret: Sooner or later we all fall on our swords:
"For every in-your-face MAGA warrior there were plenty of ambivalent Trump supporters, doubtful of his ability and dismayed by his manner, who were willing to take their chances on him because he had the nerve to defy deeply flawed conventional pieties.
As for myself I voted for Trump because I was fed up with the failures of the hypocrite elites (beginning with Wilson) who believed they could drink their own bath water and decided I needed to separate the persona from the hope Trump would accomplish what he committed to and so, he mostly did. And, I might add,
against the most contemptuous of circumstances and mean spirited odds which persist as I type.
How could I find disgust withTrump and not with Pelosi, Schumer, Schiff, Waters, et al? In 2024, I plan, at the current time, to vote for a team consisting of DeSantis and Pompeo. Both are bright, have proven they can execute and give the nation domestic and foreign balance.
It is critical the anti-Semitic, radical current Democrat Party be smashed or we "deplorables" will never recapture whatever is left of our troubled, challenged and diminished republic.
I trust you are well and accept your apology on behalf of those who voted for Trump, held their nose and hope he runs for Governor of Fla. to keep busy.
Had you continued to read my "infamous" memo it might have given you some balance. Kim does along with several other nationally recognized journalists. Me
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