The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon
Posted: Fri Apr 14, 2017 7:12 pm
continuance of General Discussion thread
UH OH
Complaint: Bannon, Mercer Dodged California Taxes
A legal watchdog group has filed a complaint alleging Steve Bannon and Rebekah Mercer failed to properly register groups in California, avoiding corporate taxes as well as disclosure laws.
LACHLAN MARKAY
04.14.17 12:05 AM ET
A network of political groups tied to Donald Trump’s chief strategist may have dodged corporate taxes and shielded information about its executives by using Delaware shell companies to surreptitiously conduct business in another state.
The allegations involve a constellation of groups financed by the wealthy Trump-backing Mercer family: a super PAC called Make America Number 1 and two Delaware-incorporated political vendors, film production company Glittering Steel, and data firm Cambridge Analytica.
The super PAC has steered large sums to the two companies, which have in turn paid consulting fees to chief White House strategist Steve Bannon. The payments to and from Cambridge Analytica and Glittering Steel were sent to a single Beverly Hills address.
That indicates that the companies were engaged in intrastate commerce in California, according to a complaint filed with the state’s attorney general and secretary of State on Wednesday by the Campaign Legal Center, a legal watchdog group.
Out-of-state companies engaged in intrastate business in California must register as foreign corporations with the secretary of State, but that office has no incorporation records on file for either company.
Foreign corporate registration in California is designed to ensure that companies doing business in the state pay taxes on the income they earn there and disclose specific information about their corporate structures.
By failing to register with the California secretary of State, Cambridge Analytica and Glittering Steel may have escaped taxes on income derived in California and disclosure requirements that are far greater than those levied on corporations in Delaware, a state known for its corporate friendly business climate.
Out-of-state corporations and limited liability companies in California are required to disclose the names of their officers or managers. In Delaware, according to the Financial Transparency Coalition, “you need to provide more identification to obtain a library card than you do to create a company.”
Cambridge Analytica’s and Glittering Steel’s incorporation in Delaware adds another layer of opacity to the operations of a network of advocacy groups and political vendors backed by hedge fund magnate Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah that helped propel Trump to victory last year.
That opacity persists despite extensive business activities in California—activities that should, CLC says, force more information about the Mercer political network into public view.
Cambridge Analytica did not respond to questions about its corporate structure. Efforts to reach a representative for Glittering Steel were not successful. Bannon and his private spokesperson also did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Bannon has been deeply involved with both companies, according to recently released financial disclosure filings. Until August 2016, when he signed on as the Trump campaign’s chief executive, he was Glittering Steel’s chairman and Cambridge Analytica’s vice president and secretary.
As of January, Bannon had significant financial stakes in both companies. He reported holdings of as much as $5 million and $250,000 in Cambridge Analytica and Glittering Steel, respectively. Together, the two companies paid him nearly $300,000 in consulting fees last year.
The companies’ monthly payments to Bannon came by way of Bannon Strategic Advisors, a registered California corporation.
That corporation was headquartered at 8383 Wilshire Boulevard, Suite 1000, in Beverly Hills until late last year. Make America Number 1’s FEC filings show more than $2.1 million in payments to Glittering Steel and Cambridge Analytica sent to the same address.
CLC says that is evidence of a commercial domicile in the state.
On the same day that CLC filed a legal complaint last year alleging that the super PAC’s payments to the two companies were in effect illegal disbursements to the Trump campaign’s top operative, Bannon Strategic Advisors quietly filed amended incorporation documents (PDF) changing its address to a mailbox at a nearby UPS Store.
Make America Number 1’s FEC filings indicate that Cambridge Analytica and Glittering Steel maintained physical presences in California. Their payments to Bannon Strategic Advisors, which is incorporated in the state, may therefore have constituted intrastate commerce and required that both firms register with California’s secretary of State.
CLC’s complaint focused solely on Glittering Steel, but the same circumstances also apply to Cambridge Analytica, which shares the same incorporation structure and Beverly Hills address in FEC filings.
Public records indicate that in addition to their failure to register with the California secretary of State, both companies may have also improperly failed to file tax returns in the state.
Payments to the companies at their California address and their disbursements to Bannon’s consulting company both exceed the thresholds for officially “doing business” in California, a designation that requires out-of-state companies to file California tax returns.
CLC is asking state authorities to investigate the matter. It also pointed to additional information on Bannon’s relationship with both companies, revealed by his financial disclosure statement last month, to supplement an FEC complaint alleging that Make America Number 1 violated federal election laws by steering money to entities in which Bannon was invested while he ran the Trump campaign.
Information gleaned from incorporation documents in California would shed additional light on those alleged violations, according to Brendan Fischer, the director of CLC’s FEC reform program.
“Bannon’s company appears to have dodged the California disclosure requirements that would provide more public information that could inform whether it broke federal campaign finance law,” Fischer said in a statement.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2 ... taxes.html
#KEEPBANNON?
Alt-Right Ringleader Mike Cernovich Threatens to Drop ‘Motherlode’ If Steve Bannon Is Ousted
The Pizzagate conspiracy theorist claims to have a cache of dirty secrets that he’s willing to deploy.
Ben Collins
04.14.17 4:20 PM ET
A week after President Donald Trump began to publicly distance himself from White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, alt-right ringleader Mike Cernovich threatened to release a “motherlode” of stories that could “destroy marriages” if Bannon is formally let go from the administration.
Cernovich made the claims that he’d release a series of “scoops” if Bannon is officially pushed out of the White House on an eleven-minute, self-recorded Periscope Thursday night.
“If they get rid of Bannon, you know what’s gonna happen? The motherlode. If Bannon is removed, there are gonna be divorces, because I know about the mistresses, the sugar babies, the drugs, the pill popping, the orgies. I know everything,” said Cernovich.
“If they go after Bannon, the mother of all stories is gonna drop, and we’re just gonna destroy marriages, relationships—it’s gonna get personal.”
The Daily Beast reached out to Cernovich, asking who he meant by “they” and if he had documentation for the claims. He was on InfoWars’ radio show and livestream most of Friday afternoon, and did not respond at press time.
Alt-right leaders have spent the week pushing a #KeepBannon hashtag on Twitter, less than a week after a #FireKushner hashtag prominently amplified by Cernovich became the No. 1 trend in the United States on Twitter.
The hashtags refer to the falling out between Bannon and Jared Kushner that played out through planted quotes in websites like Breitbart, where Bannon previously worked as its CEO, after Trump’s son-in-law began to take over more responsibilities inside the Trump White House.
The proxy quote war led Trump to tell the New York Post on Tuesday that, “Steve is a good guy, but I told them to straighten it out or I will.”
The president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., tweeted just last week that Cernovich deserved a Pulitzer for his recent coverage of Susan Rice’s efforts to better identify Trump campaign officials in intelligence reports.
“Congrats to @Cernovich for breaking the #SusanRice story,” Trump Jr. tweeted. “In a long gone time of unbiased journalism he’d win the Pulitzer, but not today!”
Cernovich cited the Rice story and another piece about Trump National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, which were both scoops later picked up by Bloomberg’s Eli Lake, as proof of his sourcing inside the White House.
“I have more stories that I haven’t released. I haven’t released every scoop that I have. I release my scoops strategically. I’m sitting on way more stories,” he said on his Periscope.
Cernovich and many other alt-right leaders famously split from the Trump administration’s party line last week when Trump signed off on a 59-missile strike on a Syrian airbase. Alt-right and conspiracy websites like InfoWars echoed both Russian public officials and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s claim that the attack was a “false flag.” On Thursday, Assad floated to state media that the attack was entirely staged.
“I will go TMZ on the globalists. I will go Gossip Girl on the globalists. I will go Gawker on the globalists. So you mother-effers going after Bannon, just know I broke two of the biggest stories before anybody else,” Cernovich said on his Periscope. “If you think I don’t know the pills people are popping, the mistresses, the sugar babies—I know all of it. So you better be smart. Because the mother of all stories will be dropped because I don’t care.”
Cernovich has a long history of floating conspiracy theories about alt-right opponents and people he deems to be “globalists”. He was one of the leading peddlers of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which claimed Hillary Clinton and John Podesta were central figures in a fictitious child sex ring run out of the basement of a pizza shop. He also repeatedly claimed throughout the campaign that Clinton was dying of a litany of diseases, from syphilis to Parkinson’s.
Fox News ran an article on Friday commending Cernovich's recent stories, however, saying his "two recent scoops have been anything but fake."
“Hire public relations firms. Pay off (Trump supporting radio host) Bill Mitchell to call me names. Fabricate things about me. I don’t care,” said Cernovich. “You can’t kill what is already dead. What is dead cannot die.”
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2 ... usted.html
Rebekah Mercer Joins Board of Anti-Muslim Think Tank
by Eli Clifton
Earlier this month, Rebekah Mercer, the daughter of billionaire Trump backer Robert Mercer, was listed as a member of the “Board of Governors,” of the Gatestone Institute, a New York City-based anti-Muslim organization that has long opposed the immigration of Muslims to the West.
Gatestone promptly scrubbed its website of any mention of its board members after LobeLog reached out to it on April 11 for comment. But an archived version of the website captured by Archive.org on April 9 shows Mercer’s name. A March 24 capture shows the list without her name, suggesting that she was added to the board at some point between March 24 and April 9.
Gatestone has served as a reliable source of anti-Muslim immigration hysteria. The Intercept’s Lee Fang catalogued some of Gatestone’s more outlandish claims in an article published in February in which he profiled the group’s president, Sears’ heiress Nina Rosenwald. Fang wrote:
Gatestone Institute produces a regular drumbeat of articles and punditry. The institute claimed that the Obama administration refugee policy “exposes Americans to the jihad.” Muslim refugees in Western countries are depicted in Gatestone Institute posts as rapists and hosts of “highly infectious diseases” that threaten the health of the German people.
Fang detailed how Gatestone senior fellow Salim Mansur attacked Barack Obama for “coddling Muslims” and praised Trump’s campaign pledge to ban Muslim immigrants. Another blogger, Nonie Darwish, wrote, “citizens from Islamic nations” should be allowed into the U.S. “only when the war on Islamic terrorism is won and when Islamic governments prove to the world that they have fundamentally changed.”
The Mercers must have liked what they were seeing from Gatestone. The family opened its pockets to support the Gatestone Institute over the past two years. In 2014, the Mercer Family Foundation contributed $50,000 to Gatestone.
Gatestone donor rolls acquired by LobeLog (viewable here) show that the Mercer family doubled its funding level in 2015, contributing $100,000.
Rebekah Mercer is known for her close involvements in projects funded by her family. An Atlantic profile of the Mercers, published in January, highlighted Rebekah’s interest in the family’s philanthropic activities. Rosie Gray wrote:
Whatever her actual beliefs, there’s one thing upon which people who have worked with Rebekah Mercer agree: She has a keen understanding of politics and likes to be involved in the day-to-day running of projects she’s involved in. Many donors like to play strategist, much to the annoyance of the actual strategists in their employ. But Mercer appears to be more successful at it than most.
Gatestone did not respond to an inquiry about whether the Mercers’ support and Rebekah Mercer’s role on the board of governors is connected to any new programs or initiatives at the organization.
This isn’t the first time that the Mercer family has aligned itself with fringe members of the right who advocate ethno-nationalism. White House Chief Strategist Stephen Bannon previously headed up Breitbart, of which the Mercer family were co-owners. The publication regularly published anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant articles under Bannon’s leadership.
When the controversial deputy assistant to the president, Sebastian Gorka, immigrated to the U.S. from Hungary, Gatestone published a series of articles by him as “Sebastian L. v. Gorka,” the initial “v” signifying his membership in the ultra-nationalist and historically anti-Semitic Hungarian order, Vitezi Rend. Bannon later hired Gorka as a national security editor at Breitbart.
Praise for Trump and a track record of opposing Muslim immigration to the West suggest that Mercer found Rosenwald and her colleagues, who include Gatestone chairman and former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton as well as fellow board member and retired Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, to be friendly to the Mercer family’s blend of libertarian economic policies and social conservatism.
Rebekah Mercer, who served on Trump’s transition team, pushed unsuccessfully for Bolton to be named secretary of state.
On Wednesday, The New York Times reported “Mr. Bannon’s main political patron, the financier Rebekah Mercer, the daughter of Robert Mercer, a major Trump donor, holed up in her office at Cambridge Analytica in New York, discussing possibilities for Mr. Bannon should he leave, according to two people briefed on the meeting.”
Although serving in no official capacity with the Trump campaign or the White House, Alan Dershowitz has emerged as an apologist for the administration and a willing adviser for Trump. Dershowitz publicly defended Trump’s reference to a one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, acknowledged speaking with Trump about the administration’s efforts to ban immigrants from majority-Muslim countries, and slammed the Anne Frank Center for its recent call for White House press secretary Sean Spicer to be fired for his backhanded praise of Adolf Hitler in comparison to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Spicer said that even Adolf Hitler didn’t “sink to using chemical weapons,” apparently overlooking the use of poison gas to murder millions of Jews, as well as Roma and others, in concentration camps.
Dershowitz said, “I’m prepared to give a pass” to Spicer. But he bashed Anne Frank Center executive director Steven Goldstein as a “total phony” and described the Anne Frank Center as “a minor institution, no credibility within the Jewish community.”
With Mercer’s funding and membership on the organization’s board, the Gatestone Institute appears to be positioning itself as a hub for far-right anti-Muslim advocates and apologists for the Trump administration’s missteps in Middle East diplomacy, ant-Muslim discrimination, and casual adoption of Holocaust denial rhetoric.
http://lobelog.com/rebekah-mercer-joins ... hink-tank/