Harry Reid Gets $5 Mil from Billionaire with Stake in Shutting Down Keystone
Posted By Daniel Greenfield On May 19, 2014 @ 10:05 pm In The Point | 1 Comment
The Koch Brothers will never buy Harry Reid.
That’s a job for Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg had donated $2.5 million to Reid’s Senate Majority PAC (aka Keep Harry Reid Senate Majority Leader) and now Tom Steyer has doubled that with a $5 million donation.
Your move Bloomberg. The winner gets to own a real live (mostly) United States Senator.
Steyer recently donated $5 million to Senate Majority PAC, the pro-Democratic Super PAC run by former Reid aides, making him the single largest contributor to the group.
The transaction is related to Steyer’s broader effort to buy American democracy for $100 million and block construction of the wildly popular Keystone XL pipeline.
Listen up kids, billionaires influencing the political process is wrong. Absolutely wrong. Unless they’re liberal billionaires like Bloomberg, Steyer, Bezos, Soros and the rest of the Democracy Alliance gang.
As of last month, Mr. Steyer and his wife, Kat Taylor, were the top source of super PAC money in the country this election cycle, contributing a total of more than $11 million.
But umm… the Koch Brothers. Something, something.
At least we know that Harry Reid is an honest man who would never trade political favors for cash. Never!
Firms tied to the Reid family, the Los Angeles Times reported, earned more than $2 million from 1998 to 2002 “from special interests that were represented by the kids and helped by the senator in Washington.”
After a 2011 trip to China Harry Reid began touting the virtues of ENN Energy Group, a Chinese firm that sought to build a $5 billion solar farm in Nevada. Reid’s son Rory represented ENN, though Rory claimed in a 2012 Bloomberg article never to have discussed “the project with my father or his staff.” Somehow, though, commissioners friendly with the Reid family agreed to sell property to ENN for one-sixth of the land’s appraised value.
The Post zeroed in on an almost $22 million earmark, passed close to a decade ago, that financed a bridge over the Colorado River. The bridge connects the gambling resorts of Laughlin, Nev., to Bullhead City, Arizona. Harry Reid owns 160 acres in Bullhead.
Last year one of Reid’s longtime donors, Nevada lobbyist Harvey Whittemore, was sentenced to two years in prison after being found guilty of violating campaign finance laws. Whittemore used associates as “straw donors” to run around donation limits, giving more than $130,000 in dirty money to Reid’s campaign.
I’m sure Tom Steyer will get full value for his pet Senator.
Article printed from FrontPage Magazine:
http://www.frontpagemag.comURL to article:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/harry-reid-gets-5-mil-from-billionaire-with-stake-in-shutting-down-keystone/