"Follow the Money."

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

"We are confident in the security systems we have in place." - Iowa Democratic Party Chairman Troy Price, January 26, 2020

“The argument the party is using is effective at preventing public oversight, but it’s not effective at protecting against cyber threats." Douglas Jones, cybersecurity expert

My, my, what a difference a week and a half makes. If the Wall Street Journal reporter who'd written that piece on January 26th had any prescience, she would've entitled it, "Famous Last Words."

   Of course, that journalist couldn't have known about the actual origins of the app and its connections to Mayor Pete and two anti-Sanders billionaires unless she'd actually done some investigative reporting for the WSJ instead of engaging in the usual brainless stenography to which the MSM has been reduced the last several decades.

    By now, many of us who have been paying attention know that the app that replaced the one developed by Microsoft (that had tabulated 95% of the poll results four years ago in four hours flat) and used in the last Iowa Caucus was made by a firm with the brazenly sarcastic name of Shadow, Inc and that Shadow is run by several Clinton and Obama stooges as well as operatives from Silicon Valley.

    What most of you don't know (and you and our stenographic WSJ reporter can be forgiven for this lapse in knowledge, given the machine Democrats' lack of disclosusre) is that Shadow, Inc is owned and was founded by ACRONYM, a dark money Democratic nonprofit which midwifed, at around the same time as the app, an equally shadowy Super PAC called Pacronym. At last count, Pacronym had $7.7 million in its dark, cloistered coffers.

    Of course, that figure could have gone up considerably considering that Pacronym is largely funded by a hedge funder named Seth Klarman, one of the aforementioned anti-Sanders billionaires who had also contributed to Buttigeig's and Klobuchar's campaigns. Unlike the Koch Brothers and Sheldon Adelson, billionaires who freely and openly spread their countless billions in the form of largesse to right wing causes, Klarman has largely flown under the radar and, if you're Seth Klarman, that's exactly the way you like it.

    Klarman may give generously to machine Democrats but that hardly makes him a liberal smelling of patchouli oil. Klarman's also a huge pro-Israel booster of the illegal settlements in Palestine. Klarman's also the owner of the right wing Times of Israel, a rag that is so virulently anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian that it had once published an op-ed calling for Palestinian genocide that was taken down only after some serious public blowback.

     And just to dispel any lingering doubts as to whether or not Seth Klarman is a wild-eyed liberal, back in the day he used to donate heavily to right wing candidacies and supported Donald Trump until Trump began calling for Puerto Rico's debts to be forgiven. Maybe that's because Klarman owns about $911,000,000 of Puerto Rico's debt that he'd obviously acquired through a vulture fund and, well, he couldn't have that. That's when he began supporting Blue Dogs such as Klobuchar and Buttigieg, eventually getting access to His Honor's now-notorious wine cave. For good measure, he'd also thrown in some cash to the now-dead campaigns of Cory Booker and Kamala Harris.

     Not content with mere propaganda posing as journalism, Klarman's also a principle funder of the now-defunct Israel Project, Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) and the American Jewish Committee. And then there's also the Friends of Ir David Inc, which helped the US government expel large numbers of Palestinians in East Jerusalem. Not content to leave any bases uncovered, Klarman also has his grubby fingers in Birthright Israel, an AIPAC-founded Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), a neocon think tank that formulated Trump's "maximum pressure" campaign against Iran.

Sussinng Out Sussman

But don't believe me. The sudden reversals in the positions of Buttigieg and Klobuchar, two beneficiaries of Klarman's cynical largesse, are proof that money speaks louder than words or the will of the people. Until very recently, Mayor Pete used to be all for cutting Israel's $3.8 billion in annual US aid if they continued annexing the West Bank. That is, until eight days ago with this testy exchange with a Jewish voter and advocate of Palestinian human rights. And also last month, Amy Klobuchar suddenly vowed to support Trump's insistence on relocating our Israeli embassy from its real capital in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the real capital of Palestine.

    But, as proven four years ago, as much as Klarman loves Israel and its genocidal policy toward Palestine, even threaten to get between him and a massive payout like Puerto Rico's debt and he'll immediately start funding someone in a blue jersey, in this case, Hillary Clinton. And that brings us to Donald Sussman, another hedge funder who'd supported Queen Hillary four years ago.

    As with Klarman, he's also given a cool million smackers to Pacronym, the Super PAC of Acronym that created the app that slowed the Iowa Caucus results literally to a standstill. He'd donated to Hillary and even got tens of millions he plainly didn't need during the corporate welfare bailout 11 years ago.

    Sussman owns Paloma Partners, a typically shadowy organization that's actually composed of a bunch of offshore shell companies (Think Cayman Islands) set up to dodge US taxes. It's essentially a huge garbage bag full of empty water bottles that nonetheless saves Sussman countless millions in unpaid taxes. Unlike Paul Singer, who donates tens of millions exclusively to right wing causes, Sussman had donated nearly $42,000,000 to strictly Democratic causes, according to Open Secrets, in 2016 alone. But don't think Bernie Sanders got a penny of those bribes (Not that he would've accepted a penny.).

     Sussman and James Simons, who owns the hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, combined blew $7,000,000 in the 2016 cycle alone on Priorities USA Action, a so-called "liberal" money spigot that has a comically horrible success rate (20%) among those whom they support. They backed Obama in 2012 then Clinton in 2016. For good measure, Sussman's daughter, Emily Tisch Sussman, is a talking head on MSNBC who reliably sneers at Bernie Sanders every chance she can get, even saying that "if you still support Sanders over Warren, it's kind of showing your sexism."

     And then, just hours after the results hit the bottleneck ordered by the Iowa Democratic Party (but more likely Tammany Hall 2.0, aka the DNC), Mayor Pete, the one receiving the most bribes from Sussman and Klarman, began crowing on social media that he was the winner. It was eerily reminiscent of George W. Bush's sleazy confidence that he'd "won" the 2000 election as he sat smiling next to his Pappy George HW.

    So, the app brought into being by Clintonistas and Obamabots who'd helped run campaigns financially supported by two hedge fund billionaires, heavily funded by the same two tax-dodging billionaires, essentially brought in results that were in opposition to every exit poll that proclaimed Sanders and not Buttigieg would win. That would be the same app whose provenance was kept a state secret by the DNC. 

     Of course, all this doesn't actually prove anything and it would get knocked down even by the ambulance-chasing shysters who made up the Trump Impeachment defense team. But, as Mark Felt, aka "Deep Throat" once told Woodward and Bernstein, "Follow the money", a piece of fatherly advice that, in the wake of Citizen's United, has just gotten truer and more relevant with time.