After watching hours of political ads from the Democrat Party, I just can’t believe how hypocritical Terry McAuliffe has been in trying to create a perception that Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin is a crook, especially considering McAuliffe’s scandalous background.
The majority of McAuliffe’s business deals have come about due to his place in the political cosmos, not because he possesses a wealth of business skill. That tangled history has linked him to a long list of unsavory characters.
In 1980 Richard Swann helped found American Pioneer Savings and Loan in Florida. Ten years later federal regulators seized the bank which was drowning in bad loans and foreclosed real estate. Swann settled charges with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which found that Swann and a partner had broken the law in selling $10 million worth of junk bonds to shore up its reserves. The bailout cost taxpayers more than $500 million and investors, mainly mom and pop depositors, lost their shirts.
Richard Swann and Terry McAuliffe joined forces shortly after he married Swann’s daughter, Dorothy in 1988. They “persuaded” the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers to use their pension fund to finance the purchase of Orlando strip malls and apartment buildings on the cheap in a highly risky investment scheme. The pension fund put up $38 million; McAuliffe put up nothing received a 50% share in the venture, meaning that if the deal went south, the pension fund would lose millions while all he would lose were his free shares in the partnership. The deal didn’t perform well, and the union never got its promised 9% preferred return.
McAuliffe however, walked away with $2.4 million after the pension fund bought him out. The Department of Labor sued the union and two of the pension officials were forced to pay six figures fines and the union itself was forced to reimburse the pension fund for the loss. Both Swann and McAuliffe escaped unscathed.
Tony Coelho, a former California congressman, resigned from office in 1989 after the disclosure that he had taken a loan from the operator of a troubled savings and loan and used the money to buy junk bonds from a man who had paid a record $650 million to settle criminal charges with the SEC for stock manipulation. He and McAuliffe were involved with a real estate firm in D.C. Former business associates accused the pair of using their political connections to win improper commissions on deals involving federal agencies. The matter was eventually settled confidentially, out of court.
In 1996 McAuliffe helped devise a political money cycling scheme that led to the downfall of several leaders of the Teamsters Union, including the president Ron Carey and his political director William Hamilton. At Hamilton’s trial on corruption charges, a former director of finance for the DNC testified that McAuliffe asked him and other DNC fundraisers to approach big Dem donors who could make at least a $50,000 donation to the reelection of Carey. Under McAuliffe’s scheme, the Teamsters union would later recycle those donations back into various Democratic Party accounts. Once again, as a close association of the Clintons, McAuliffe walked.
As chief fundraiser for the Clinton’s 96 reelection campaign, McAuliffe was behind some of the more risqué political fundraising operations since the Kennedy era. There were fundraisers at Buddhist temples in California; coffee klatches where a 6 figure contribution would get you some serious face time with Bill, Hillary and Big Al Gore; and slumber parties in the Lincoln Bedroom for top contributors.
The “Chinagate” fundraising scandal plagued the 1996 Bill Clinton-Al Gore campaign. It involves the transfer of America’s most sensitive technology, including but not limited to nuclear missile and satellite technology, possibly in exchange for millions of dollars in contributions to the 1996 Clinton-Gore re-election effort and the Democratic National Committee. As usual, the Clintons and McAuliffe all skated following the Chinagate revelations.
And Let’s not forget the John Huang scandal. Huang, a New Jersey businessman, whose place of birth is highly questionable, donated lavishly to various Democratic candidates and organizations while McAuliffe was with the DNC. Huang pled guilty to felony charges for arranging more than $150,000 in illegal campaign contributions. McAuliffe later gloated to the Washington Post that he had called Mort Zuckerman to get David Eisenstadt canned for breaking the story.
One Major donor McAuliffe courted was Charlie Trie who brought the head of a Chinese military owned weapons company with him to meet Bill Clinton at the White House. Not only did Trie donated $640,000 to Clinton’s legal defense fund but he was accused of illegally funneling $6 million from Communist China to the DNC for the Clintons. Trie pled guilty to federal authorities in 1999 but won leniency by giving information to the DOJ on how conduits like him were used to transfer foreign money to the 1996 Clinton campaign.
In 1997 McAuliffe was given the opportunity to invest $100,000 in a new company, Global Crossing, set up by Gary Winnick, a “deal” he secured because he was working as a consultant for the company before it went public. Winnick and other top executives, including McAuliffe, hid the company’s losses and cashed out more than a billion in stock before the company collapsed in 2002, causing a $54 billion in shareholder losses. McAuliffe‘s stock sale netted him a tidy $8.1 million.
In 2007, while acting as Hillary Clinton’s campaign fundraiser, McAuliffe raised $380,000 at a single dinner event in New York’s Chinatown. A LA Times investigation revealed that most of the attendees at the $1,000 a plate dinner were not registered to vote and listed low-paying jobs such as dishwasher on campaign filings, leading to the conclusion that these were being used as proxies by other big donors.
Joseph Caramadre was a Rhode Island estate planner who pled guilty to scamming terminally ill people by stealing their identities and buying annuities in their name. When they died, Caramadre and his investors would cash in. McAuliffe invested along with others that included a former RI Supreme Court justice, Gaythorne Angell, a long-time bookie and mob associate, and Monsignor Raymond Bastia, a financial planner for the Catholic Diocese in Providence. Caramadre was also a big donor and fundraiser for McAuliffe’s run for governor in 2009.
And there is GreenTech, McAuliffe’s government-subsidized electric car company. Using his connections and $20 million McAuliffe purchased a Hong Kong-based car manufacturer, promising to build a manufacturing plant in Virginia. After Virginia turned down his proposal, McAuliffe settled on building the plant in Mississippi with the help of $5 million in loans from the Mississippi Development Authority and Tunica County. He promised to invest $1 billion, create 1,500 jobs, and build 400,000 all-electric vehicles by 2013. In July 2017, the Mississippi state auditor demanded repayment of the $6.4 million in loans and interest for failing to fulfill promises. In turn, the company filed for bankruptcy in 2018.
McAuliffe had gone on a foreign fundraising spree to build the plant, raking in $141.5 million from nearly 300 investors between 2009 and 2013, according to the company’s bankruptcy filings. Many of those investors were Chinese, and invested in GreenTech under a federal “immigrant investor visa program” called EB-5. Those investors were brought in largely thanks to the efforts of Anthony Rodham, the brother of Hillary Rodham Clinton, and his EB-5 investment firm, Gulf Coast Funds Management.
As governor McAuliffe failed to vet a Chinese company before making an economic development deal that cost Virginia taxpayers $1.4 million. The company, Lindenburg Industry, received funds to open a $113 million factory at old furniture plant in Appomattox County but, never delivered a single job or the promised capital investment. Virginia still hasn’t gotten its money back, despite ongoing collection efforts, including legal action.
Then there was the 2015 deal with Tranlin Inc., another Chinese company, that promised to bring 2,000 jobs to the Richmond area with a $2 billion paper plant in Chesterfield County. When Tranlin didn’t deliver, the state lost the $5 million grant. Tranlin has only paid back $188,000 of its debt to date.
Power doesn’t corrupt people, people corrupt power. William Gaddis
source: GreenTech formula has made big profits for McAuliffe by Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten, Washington Post; Money for nothing: Sweet Appomattox deal turned sour for Virginia, McAuliffe, The Roanoke Times; Terry McAuliffe, Source Watch; I Can’t Believe Terry McAuliffe Is Going to Be Governor of Virginia, by Stephanie Mencimer, Mother Jones Magazine; Terry McAuliffe Has Been Involved in Shady Deals With the Chinese for Two Decades, Washington Free Beacon; Terry McAuliffe linked to Fraud Case in Providence, Rhode Island; Terry McAuliffe, A Political Hack, and In An Us vs. Them World – Them Is Winning, Franklin County Patriots; Lest We Forget Chinagate, The Most Serious Scandal in US History
