Show Notes
After President Joe Biden’s disastrous performance in the debate last week, Democratic politicos have been frantically gaming out alternatives to a Biden candidacy against former President Donald Trump. The media wing of the Democratic Party, shocked by Biden’s feeble performance, has editorialized for the 81-year-old Biden to step aside.
Biden and his family met at Camp David this past weekend and emerged, reports say, determined to press on with the campaign, calling the President’s mumbling debate appearance just “a bad night.” Major party donors like John Morgan, however, have expressed frustration and doubt about Biden’s viability and advisors. Reliable media mouthpieces such as Joe Scarborough of MSNBC, who just weeks ago told his viewers that the octogenarian was “the best Biden ever,” walked it all back the morning after the debate and glumly observed, “if [Biden] were CEO, and he turned in a performance like that, would any corporation in America keep him on as CEO?”
As co-host Eric Eggers quips on the most recent episode of The Drill Down, the media angst was a joy to behold: “Schadenfreude is a real thing for me.”
Democratic party leaders are meeting to discuss all of this and two names bubble to the top as potential replacements for Biden on the Democratic ticket – Vice President Kamala Harris, and California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Peter Schweizer, host of The Drill Down podcast, knows a lot about the history of both, and brings the receipts. The Government Accountability Institute researched Harris’s background for the 2020 book, “Profiles in Corruption.” The name of Gavin Newsom, who was previously the mayor of San Francisco, came up repeatedly in researching GAI’s next book about Chinese corruption of American politicians, “Red Handed,” and yet again in Schweizer’s most recent, #1 bestselling “Blood Money,” so GAI has researched both these two contenders in depth.
As the sitting VP, Kamala Harris may seem the most obvious choice to be the party’s replacement candidate, should Biden bow out. She began her political career in the office of the San Francisco city attorney and became the extra-marital girlfriend of the city’s mayor, Willie Brown, who had been the very powerful Speaker of the California House previously. He was then 60 years old and married. She was 29 at the time.
With the help of his political machine, she ran against the city’s incumbent District Attorney Terence “TKO” Hallinan, who just happened to be investigating several cronies of Willie Brown’s. Harris won that race, wooing wealthy donors and with some questionable assistance from city employees pressed into attending her campaign rallies. After her election, as Profiles discusses, those investigations simply went away.
“I think the far more insidious piece of this… is that among the cases then that Kamala Harris because of political connections did not prosecute included the friends of Willie Brown, but is not limited to the friends of Willie Brown,” Eggers said. “This is the most shocking and damning thing. To be honest, if Kamala Harris had been a more viable political candidate in 2019 and 2020, some of this would have been vetted and more publicly proclaimed” at the time, he added.
When Harris married Douglas Emhoff and then rose to become the state’s Attorney General, there were cases on her desk that involved Emhoff’s law firm, called Venable, that she chose to set aside, as also detailed in Profiles.
Gavin Newsom’s history, especially regarding relationships with the Chinese, is even worse. As Schweizer and GAI documented in Blood Money, Gavin Newsom has ties to Chinese organized crime figures. He has business partnerships with Chinese businessmen who have been linked to the triads and other Chinese organized crime. “We’re not stretching this. We’re not stretching the definition of relationship. We’re not stretching the definition of organized crime figure. I mean, literally that’s the case going back to when he became San Francisco mayor,” Schweizer says.
In 2006, then-Mayor Newsom created a nonprofit group called “ChinaSF” to lure Chinese companies to the Bay Area. ChinaSF was highly favorable to the Chinese entities involved: any investment they made in an American company would grant them intellectual property rights in China for the technology developed. It “would involve U.S. companies handing over their secret formulas.” Many of the Chinese companies and businessmen that were involved in ChinaSF and benefited from the program had ties to Chinese organized crime.
Blood Money tells the story this way:
Newsom’s links to the Chinese triads go well beyond ChinaSF. Mayor Newsom worked with a San Francisco businessman named Allen Leung and reappointed him as chairman of the Chinatown Economic Development Group. But Leung was no ordinary businessman; he was the dragonhead of the “ominous” Chee (variously “Ghee” or “Gee”) Kung Tong, “transpacific incarnations of criminal Triad gangs originating in China.” Members of his gang were involved in the drug trade. Leung was brutally murdered in 2006.
“If you were in Gavin Newsom’s shoes, and you were going to pick a partner, wouldn’t you pick an upstanding businessman who had a clean reputation?” Schweizer asks.
Eggers says, “I’m remembering when you talked about Gavin Newsom and these same ties to his ex -wife, Kim Guilfoyle. She’s like, ‘wait, what? I didn’t know about that. I should have gotten more money in the settlement!’”
