Kamala Goes West to Seek Her Fortune
Spilling the Beans of Kamala's Brother-in-Law
Tony West, Kamala’s brother-in-law, is playing a major role in Kamala’s campaign and he is being lightly marketed as a hard-liner against big business. If you haven’t heard of him before, it’s because the Harris machine would rather keep him and his wife as much under wraps as possible. But don’t think Kamala doesn’t have a machine. In fact, it may be more sophisticated than Biden’s crime family’s racket.
Just as Barack Obama had a behind-the-scenes advisor in the person of Valerie Jarrett, the short enigmatic Iranian, Kamala has a little sister who is playing a giant role in her campaign. Maya is no newbie to politics. She was a senior policy advisor for Hillary in 2016 and chaired the ill-fated Presidential Campaign Kamala ran in 2020. In 1998, Maya Harris married Tony West.
Among Maya’s liberal bona fides are PolicyLink, the American Civil Liberties Union, and Center for American Progress. Maya has one child, a daughter named Meena by a father that Maya has never publicly named. Meena Harris graduated Harvard Law School in 2012.
Like Kamala, Maya holds a law degree but, unlike Kamala, Maya graduated from Stanford Law School “with distinction.” (Kamala failed the bar exam in California on her first go-round.) Maya clerked for District Court Judge James Ware in California and later moved on as adjunct law professor of the University of California San Francisco School of Law where she also taught gender discrimination.
In 2008, Maya was appointed to Vice President for Democracy, Rights, and Justice at the Ford Foundation, where she dispensed up to $150M in grants every year. You don’t get much deeper into the Deep State than the Ford Foundation. Maya has written a bunch of policy books that nobody has ever heard of, mainly on liberal buzzwords like change, activism, felony disenfranchisement, and women of color.
So let’s get back to Tony West. In 1998, Maya Harris married Tony West, a guy she met at Stanford Law School when they were together in the Class of 92. Their romantic relationship began after they both graduated.
Tony West’s real name is Derek Anthony West and he, too, is a high-powered, high-dollar attorney. He worked in the corporate world as Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer of Uber but he dabbled in politics early on, doing a gig as Associate Attorney General of the United States. He also worked for the Department of Justice (DOJ) as Assistant Attorney General, Civil Division, which is the largest division of the DOJ. It handles litigation. He’s been in the trenches with courtroom battles with financial Goliaths, such as Bank of America and Merrill Lynch.
If you ever hear of Tony West at all, it’s as the smart young attorney who does battle with Big Business.
But Tony West is Big Business. Tony West fighting Big Business is like saying Pfizer is going to take on Big Pharma.
Tony West isn’t a poor downtrodden guy who has been oppressed and victimized by a racist nation. He isn’t a Superman fighting for truth, justice, and the American way. In 2020, his compensation from Uber alone was $12.3M. That’s a million a month with a bonus on top. A lot of that was in stock, so it’s amazing Tony West is signing on to support a candidate like Kamala who wants to tax unrealized capital gain. Of course, it’s good to be the brother-in-law of the Queen, I’m sure she will make provisions for her brother-in-law.
Tony West earned his undergraduate degree from Harvard and, like his wife and sister-in-law, has worked various high-level Democrat political gigs. As a young man, Tony West was treasurer for Michael Dukakis’s presidential campaign and he was finance director for the Democrat Governors’ Association. He got his law degree from Stanford (where he met Maya Harris), chaired the Democrat Party finance committee in California, and served as Special Assistant Attorney General to the California Attorney General, who at the time was Bill Lockyer. In California, Tony West was co-chair of Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008. In other words, Tony West and the Harris girls ran in the same circles.
(Don’t believe Kamala’s shtick that she and Maya were raised in humble circumstances to a single, struggling middle-class mom. They were daughters of privilege dabbling in politics as soon as they could left their tony Montreal prep school to enter the Ivy League.)
Tony West ran for office himself and lost, although he was defeated after making a decent showing. Now Tony West is playing a major albeit mostly silent role in Kamala’s campaign. He has already taken a leave of absence from his current job at Uber to devote himself full-time to the Harris campaign. Any time a smart lawyer turns down $1M a month to work for nothing—there’s payola or the promise of payola involved.
Maya and her husband Tony West are very smart people. But they were also the dream team that in Kamala’s ill-fated 2020 campaign, whose crash-and-burn arc was described by some insiders as the result of dysfunctional family dynamics. If presidential campaigns are like movies, then Kamala’s 2020 campaign was Thelma and Louise. It’s unlikely Maya will be campaign manager this time around, but there’s no doubt she’s a close advisor to Kamala.
In fact, as far as I can tell as an outsider, few people are closer to Kamala right now than Tony and Maya West.
Tony West’s role at Uber is a bit ironic, since the Biden/Harris regime pushed hard to force Uber and other gig-economy companies to hire workers as employees rather than independent contractors. The distinction between an employee and a contractor is not apparent to consumers, but it has a lot of tax ramifications. Employees are entitled to benefits but they also get paychecks through the company, meaning taxes are deducted before employees see their money. If you’re employed by a company, you never see your full paycheck—taxes are already taken away. After a while, you sort of forget that there even are taxes—it’s all academic. If taxes are deducted in that way, tax increases can sneak in and people do not really recognize what they’re paying. Governments like “employees” since they get their hands on the paycheck before the actual employee does. Independent contractors, on the other hand, get every dime they make. They have to pay their own taxes on a quarterly basis (using the 1099 form) and they get no benefits. But many people prefer the subcontractor lifestyle and companies like it too, because it simplifies their payroll. Subcontractors can work their own schedules and many hold multiple subcontractor jobs at once.
The Biden/Harris regime wanted Uber and other gig employers to hire people only as employees. Uber and many Uber employees wanted to stay on as subcontractors. Tony West led the lawsuit that allowed Uber to keep gig employees on the 1099 form. So, in an interesting turn of events, Tony West has already fought the Biden/Harris regime and won.
Apparently, there are no hard feelings.
When Tony West was working at Obama’s DOJ, he had to deal with the financial meltdown that resulted from the mortgage crisis. Those settlements were more than strange. Investigations were promised, but never delivered. The DOJ talked tough but did nothing. A few strongly worded letters may have been written, but nobody went to prison. Nobody even really got in any trouble. People who were foreclosed got settlements but some of them did not even cash their settlement check because the payouts were so puny. Funding was channeled to states to help foreclosure victims, but was quickly gobbled up by states for other purposes—with no penalties. Many of the actual victims of foreclosure scams got robbed. Settlements by banks for the way they packaged and sold mortgages were trivial, if they were imposed at all, and the victims of mortgage fraud saw little to no compensation. Some say that Tony West put corporate interests and government protection above consumer protection. Of course, the whole thing is complicated, so you can argue either side. However, Tony West was knee-deep in the mortgage meltdown and all I know is that those who suffered most did not get much compensation and those who caused the problem walked away whole and, in some cases, rewarded.
Now comes a new scandal. Tony West had been accused of channeling billions of taxypayer dollars into left-wing causes back when he worked for Obama. And it’s no secret that Tony West has been a major fundraiser for Harris. In fact, one of the main things Tony West does for his sister-in-law is keep the money spigot open.
New allegations claim that Tony West had used grants, contracts, and other government assistance programs to funnel taxpayer dollars to lefty causes.
It has to do with the Judgment Fund.
Up until 1977, any time the government made a settlement with a citizen or group in civil court for more than $100,000, Congress had to approve it. This backs up the quaint notion that the “power of purse” belongs to Congress
However, this became burdensome (God forbid Congress has to do any work) so the Judgment Fund was created
The Judgment Fund is a big slush fund of money set up by the Treasury Department, and the DOJ can make payouts using this money with no oversight
There is no transparency here at all. It’s like a big checkbook filled with an unlimited supply of blank checks
The money in the Judgment Fund is taxpayer money. It belongs to us
A few sporadic attempts have been made to get some clarity as to what’s happening to our money. What data the Judgment Fund has released omits certain small bits of information, like the recipient of the money, the lawyers involved, and the subject of the case.
What this means is that nobody knows how many claims are processed in a year, much less who receives the money, how much money was handed out, and why recipients got the money. We also don’t know if claims against the Judgment Fund were ever rejected. It’s just a big black box of secrets.
In 2009, Tony West took over the Civil Division of the DOJ, which is one of the groups that draws on the Judgment Fund. In other words, Obama handed Tony West the checkbook full of blank checks to use against the Judgment Fund.
Here’s an example of how Tony West used the Judgment Fund.
In 2010, there was a discrimination lawsuit brought by a group of 91 Latino farmers against the government. After a multi-year legal fight, the lawsuit was nearly won by the Latino farmers when Tony West got involved.
The government had first agreed to pay $1.3B out of the Judgment Fund to the 91 famers, but when Tony West came on the scene, they added thousands of people to the lawsuit. Some of these new add-on people had never claimed any discrimination and had not participated in the lawsuit up to that point. Tony West just decided the Judgment Fund could pay out a bunch of beneficiaries at the same time. Like I said: some of the people who were added to the lawsuit had never made a claim or asked to be added to the lawsuit.
One reason to add lots more people to the lawsuit is to make the lawyers rich, or should I say, richer. The law firms involved quite likely generated over $100M in fees; the exact amount may never be known, since law firm fees are not subject to disclosure. Let’s just say $100M in legal fees is a conservative estimate for an enormous lawsuit of this nature with thousands of plaintiffs involved.
Pretty soon, Native Americans were added to the suit (they had not participated previously, they were just lumped into the group) and now the payout jumped to $4.4B. That’s OK, the Judgment Fund was taking the hit. (Have you ever heard of a lawsuit that right before settlement was made, thousands of new people were added to it? Welcome to Washington, D.C. where the laws don’t matter.)
According to msn.com, the lead lawyer on the original case allegedly could claim $60M as compensation. The taxpayers picked up the tab (including legal fees) and the administration just put some dinero into the hands of potential Democrat voters and some major cash into the hands of a bunch of Deep State attorneys.
Tony West also set things up so that the Judgment Fund can favor left-leaning organizations and shut out taxpayers, the government, aqnd conservative groups. For instance, in 2016, Volkswagen (VW) had a lawsuit against the U.S. government. When VW lost the suit, Tony West insisted that VW pay the $2B settlement … but not to the government. He wanted that $2B to go to an EV car initiative, ironically, an initiative that Congress had recently rejected. But who needs Congress? VW paid the money to a private concern although the government technically won the case and that money should have gone back to the taxpayers.
But the taxpayers never missed it. Heck, we taxpayers never even heard about it!
In 2021, illegal immigrants sued the U.S. government for $1B for emotional distress. Even in commie-town Washington, D.C., this lawsuit was a non-starter. When the taxpayers got wind of a lawsuit that could result in paying $1B to illegals for emotional distress, the case got tossed. But Tony West and his DOJ pals managed to keep it going long enough to generate hefty payotus to the attorneys at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) who initiated the lawsuit. In other words, this was a bogus suit, but Tony West kept it going long enough to generate tons of billable hours.
Remember the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) lovebirds Peter Strzok and Lisa Page? They were big in the news in the 2016 election. Part of their adulterous affair involved denigrating Trump and also suggesting that there was an “insurance plan” to keep Trump out of office and assure Hillary got the White House. Their “insurance plan” was documented in texts they sent to each other. The texts got released, Strozk and Page got fired, but then they have slowly started to reappear in swampy contexts
The DOJ (who looks out for the Deep State) said we should pay Strzok and Page $2M in compensation, because the FBI released their “private” texts. How were they private? Well, Strzok and Page said the texts were private. And because they said they were private, releasing this information violated the Privacy Act, whatever that is. I would dispute this notion, since the texts were sent on government-issued phones that bore clear banner warnings that they had no expectation of privacy on such devices. The texts were written on government time on government devices by government employees. Besides, Strzok and Page were both legal eagles at the FBI—they know about privacy laws. They just opted to try to get their greasy hands on a couple of million bucks. After all, they have a friend who controls the Judgment Fund.
The DOJ could have fought this case and likely won, but nobody wanted the government (or taxpayers to win). Tony West and his DOJ quickly cut fat checks to their Democrat allies. It’s good to be in charge.
When Trump got into office in January of 2021, his Attorney General made settlement slush funds illegal. This put the Judgment Fund out of business! Hallelujah! But the victory was short lived.
Biden rescinded Trump’s order before Jill had time to scream at the housekeeping staff at White House for not calling her Dr.
And Tony West is back nosing around the White House. If Kamala gets in, the Judgement Fund will make overseas corruption unnecessary—they can just tap into the taxpayer cookie jar with zero oversight.