Courtesy of Pam Martens
Don McGahn With Donald Trump and Melania
President Donald Trump’s White House Counsel, Don McGahn, has a long history of gutting campaign finance laws to the benefit of corporations. His wife, Shannon McGahn, also an attorney, has a long history in efforts to roll back financial regulations on Wall Street. They have become corporate America’s favorite power couple in Washington. We’ll get to the details in a moment but first some necessary background on how campaign finance law was brazenly corrupted at the U.S. Supreme Court.
In 2011, half of our research team (Pam Martens) filed an explosive exclusive with CounterPunch (which we now carry in our archives at Wall Street On Parade). The article revealed that a sitting justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas, had been entertained by billionaire Charles Koch and his wife, Elizabeth, at their lavish private club, the Vintage Club, in Indian Wells, California. The cozy meeting was part of an all-expenses-paid trip by Justice Thomas in January 2008 to attend the super-secretive Koch Brothers political network event in the Palm Springs area of California. According to Justice Thomas’ financial disclosure report, the Federalist Society paid his expenses for that trip, an organization that has received millions of dollars in funding from Koch brothers’ foundations. The meeting took place in the same year that the Supreme Court decided to hear the Citizens United case.
Charles Koch is not exactly the most wholesome billionaire for a sitting Supreme Court Justice to be meeting with. The company of which he and his brother, David, are majority owners is Koch Industries. In addition to paying tens of millions of dollars to settle violations of Federal and State laws, in 1999 60 Minutes aired a documentary showing that a jury found that Koch Industries had stolen oil from Federal lands “and lied about its purchases – 24 thousand times.” Bill Koch, a dissident brother and whistleblower in the case, said profits on that oil were a minimum of $230 million.
The Supreme Court decided the Citizens United case on January 21, 2010. It opened the spigots to unlimited corporate money in elections and effectively gutted representative government in which U.S. citizens have a voice. Since that time, multi national corporations and Wall Street have effectively owned Washington.
The case had the stench of corruption from day one. Four of the nine U.S. Supreme Court Justices wrote a scathing dissent that raised the issue of unprincipled behavior on the part of the 5-judge majority, stating that they had ruled on issues that were not legally before the court.
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