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Some very disturbing details are emerging about Democrat presidential nominee Kamala Harris’s brother-in-law, Tony West, who is married to her sister, Maya.
According to the Washington Free Beacon, West “is a longtime ally of former president Barack Obama, having raised $65 million for him during the 2008 campaign cycle. His loyalty earned him a spot as the Justice Department’s number three attorney.”
From the New York Post: 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 20th centuries Tammany boss George Washington Plunkett famously called “Honest Graft.”
The New York Post explains that up until 1977, any settlement of a civil suit against the Federal government over $100,000 had to be approved by Congress, which “preserved the Constitutional requirement that Congress control the government’s purse.”
However, Congress was overwhelmed by the growing number of lawsuits they had to review, and so they removed the $100,000 cap in 1977 and turned the entire matter over to the Justice Department. This allowed the DOJ to pay any settlements out of a secretative account known as the Judgment Fund, which is run by the Treasury Department.
According to the report, the DOJ was not even required to provide details on the recipients of the payoffs, facts on the cases or even the lawyers involved. The program continued for over 30 years.
Then in 2009, during the Obama administration, Tony West was assigned to lead the DOJ’s Civil Division, which litigates and settles lawsuits. West also inherited the purse strings, and reportedly started using it to pay off political allies.
The New York Post wrote:
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 payoff was so shocking that even the New York Times called them out, in an April 2013 report titled, “U.S. Opens Spigots After Farmers Claim Discrimination.” The Times wrote:
On the heels of the Supreme Court’s ruling, interviews and records show, the Obama administration’s political appointees at the Justice and Agriculture Departments engineered a stunning turnabout: they committed $1.33 billion to compensate not just the 91 plaintiffs but thousands of Hispanic and female farmers who had never claimed bias in court.
“Acting Associate Attorney General Tony West, who supervised the civil division and oversaw the handling of the cases, canceled an interview. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. also declined to comment,” the NY Times wrote.
The entire settlement ended up swelling to over $4.4 billion, the NY Post noted, adding, “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.”
More jaw-dropping examples of the settlement abuses under West:
- 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.
- A 2016 Volkswagen settlement required the company to fund a $2 billion White House electric car initiative that Congress had specifically rejected. In this legal shakedown, California’s attorney general at the time, Kamala Harris, was an active participant, cosigning the agreements for her state.
West, now 59, served in the role as U.S. Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division from April 2009 until March 2012. He was then promoted to “Associated Attorney General” in the DOJ until September 2014.
The report notes that the Biden-Harris administration has continued the practice of using the unlimited settlement program to reward political allies, at the expense of the American taxpayer:
- 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.
More about Tony West’s past, and what he’s doing now….
The Washington Free Beacon reported earlier this month:
Vice President Kamala Harris has a “powerful” new campaign adviser: her brother-in-law Tony West, the former Obama Justice Department attorney who defended a convicted terrorist sentenced to 20 years in prison for fighting with the Taliban and colluding with al-Qaeda.
West is now “a powerful adviser” to Harris’s “new campaign,” Axios reported Friday. Roughly 20 years prior, West held a different role: attorney for a Taliban terrorist.
West in 2002 signed on to defend “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh, who was captured in Afghanistan one year earlier and subsequently indicted for providing services to the Taliban and al-Qaeda—and for conspiring to murder Americans. During the trial, West—then an attorney at the San Francisco law firm Morrison & Foerster, which was known for defending enemy combatants detained by the United States—dismissed claims that Lindh was a terrorist.
“He is not a terrorist,” West said of Lindh during a 2002 Washington Post interview. “He did not go to Afghanistan to kill Americans.” Lindh, who also goes by Sulayman al-Faris and Abu Sulayman al-Irlandi, was later sentenced to 20 years in prison. He has refused to renounce his Islamic extremist ideologies.
🚨 Taliban Lawyer Tony West Has a New Client: His Sister-in-Law Kamala Harris https://t.co/WpnWaperUd
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) August 2, 2024
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