NYPOST
Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, may be the current world-class champ of presidential-family shady dealings, but not for long.
If Kamala Harris wins the White House, her brother-in-law, Tony West, who is married to her sister Maya, is poised to claim the crooked crown.
Like Hunter, West learned his craft in the Obama years.
Then head of the Justice Department’s Civil Division, he invented a new form of what 19th-early 20thcenturies Tammany boss George Washington Plunkett famously called “Honest Graft.”
It was simple.
Until 1977, Congress had to approve any settlement of a civil suit against the Federal government over $100,000.
But in that year, seeking relief from the burgeoning volume of suits to review, Congress removed the cap, handing the Justice Department a permanent blank check to pay settlements unilaterally, in any amount, out of an account known as the Judgment Fund.
Run by the Treasury Department, the Judgment Fund’s secrecy is so complete that our often-penetrated CIA might study it for lessons.
The limited data released omits recipients, the facts underlying the case, and often the lawyers involved.
By statute, attorneys’ fees awarded need not be disclosed.
A Government Accountability Office study concluded that “no one knows the number of claims processed by the federal government each year.”
Still, for three decades, the integrity of Justice’s officials sufficed to prevent abuse.
Then, in 2009, Tony West took over the department’s Civil Division, the division that litigates and settles lawsuits.
Once West arrived, his deputy emailed colleagues asking “can you explain to Tony the best way to allocate some money toward an organization of our choosing?”
Settlements became the vehicle for paying off political allies.
For example, in late 2010, after a Supreme Court victory, DOJ lawyers were on the cusp of winning a decade-long fight against discrimination claims by 91 Hispanic and female farmers.
That’s when West intervened and, as The New York Times put it, “engineered a stunning turnabout.”
DOJ agreed to a $1.33 billion settlement which included thousands of farmers who had never claimed bias.
The deal was made over the “vehement objections” of the department’s career lawyers.
The Times’s investigative report described West’s settlement as a “runaway train, driven by racial politics . . . and law firms that stand to gain more than $130 million in fees.”
The projected settlement size ballooned to over $4.4 billion as additional plaintiffs were added, including Native American farmers.
The government’s statistical expert was appalled: “‘If they had gone to trial, the government would have prevailed . . . It was just a joke. . . . I was so disgusted. It was simply buying the support of the Native Americans.’”
This dirty deal also inflated the number of claimants, creating a $60 million windfall for the plaintiff’s lead lawyer, a member of the Obama/Biden transition team.
But West did not just bilk taxpayers. He shook down corporations, too.
In a series of bank settlements, his team added increasingly aggressive provisions requiring the institutions to make nearly a billion dollars in mandatory donations to Democrat-supporting activist groups.
Donations were given double credit against required targets, incentivizing these payments over direct relief to victims of the housing crises.
West’s team specifically structured the terms to ensure that they would benefit only their political allies while leaving conservative groups ineligible.
An internal email shows West deputies rewording a settlement’s donation provisions to ensure the bank could not select a “conservative” property rights organization as a recipient.
Over time, West grew even more brazen.
A 2016 Volkswagen settlement required the company to fund a $2 billion White House electric car initiative that Congress had specifically rejected.
The largesse delighted liberal groups.
An email circulated saying they ought to build a “statue” to West and “bow down to this statue each day after we receive our $200,000+.”
In this legal shakedown, California’s attorney general at the time, Kamala Harris, was an active participant, cosigning the agreements for her state.
The Biden-Harris Administration has continued West’s “Honest Graft” tactics to reward political allies on the taxpayers’ dime.
In 2021, a billion-dollar settlement with illegal immigrants claiming emotional distress was scotched only after public outcry.
Even then, DOJ quietly agreed to pay attorneys’ fees to the ACLU lawyers in the long-running case.
Recently, the Department agreed to pay $2 million to FBI Agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page for releasing their anti-Trump texts to Congressional investigators worried about political bias.
The pair claimed a violation of the Privacy Act, but the messages were sent on their government-issue phones which contain clear banner warnings that users lack any reasonable expectation of privacy.
DOJ had ample basis to litigate this case to completion before surrendering hard earned tax dollars to the disgraced FBI agents.
This form of civic corruption is not bipartisan.
At the start of his administration, President Trump’s Attorney General banned settlement slush funds, while one of the early acts of the Biden-Harris DOJ was to rescind that ban.
… Meanwhile, the Tony West-invented, Biden-Harris operated “Honest Graft” machine pours taxpayer billions into left-wing activist groups, and West is said to be Harris’s White House counsel-in-waiting.
Hunter Biden step aside.
