Majority Forward Dark Money Pac call to Digg

Schumer-Tied PAC Received $1.7 Million From Dark Money Group

A political action committee linked to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) has received $1.7 million from a liberal dark money group for shared staff and office space since 2015, tax and Federal Election Commission forms show.

—Schumer, who has said that dark money is "casting a shadow over our political process," has condemned groups on the right that do not disclose their funders. He also demanded one right-leaning organization release a list of its donors, saying the public "deserves to know who is funding" campaigns against Democrats.

—Despite the condemnation of dark money groups, the Schumer-linked Senate Majority PAC, which works to elect Democrats in the Senate, is closely affiliated with Majority Forward, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit that does not disclose its funders.

—From June 18, 2015, to late 2018, Majority Forward paid the Senate Majority PAC for the "sharing of facilities, equipment, mailing lists, or other assets" and employees. The group pushed $487,870 to the PAC for office space while disbursing another $1.2 million for employees, three years‘ worth of tax forms and FEC records show.

—Majority Forward was the biggest dark money spender of the 2018 election cycle and is currently launching attacks against Republican Senate candidates up for election in 2020.

—Throughout the 2018 election cycle, Majority Forward poured $46 million into independent expenditures for Democrats, which accounted for nearly a third of the $150 million total spent by all groups who do not disclose their donors.

Majority Forward has laid out plans to attack Sens. Cory Gardner (R., Colo.), Susan Collins (R., Maine), David Perdue (R., Ga.), Martha McSally (R., Ariz.), and Joni Ernst (R., Iowa) for the 2020 election cycle. It began pouring hundreds of thousands into ads against the vulnerable Republicans in early 2019, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The group on Tuesday launched a six-figure television and digital ad campaign against Collins.

—The Senate Majority PAC did not respond to a request for comment on the money it has received from Majority Forward since 2015 for its shared staff and office space.

—Schumer and other Democrats have chastised Republican dark money groups such as the Judicial Crisis Network, a right-leaning organization. Schumer and Democratic senators earlier this year demanded JCN make public the names of individuals who have given the group more than $10,000 since 2017. The senators released a letter in response to a $1.1 million ad campaign from JCN that called on the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates to release their lists of judges.

—"The American public deserves to know who is funding these attacks, and whether the same individuals are financing litigation before the Court that will ultimately be decided by the Justices and judges they helped to confirm," the letter said.

https://freebeacon.com/politics/schumer-tied-pac-received-1-7-million-from-dark-money-group/

Trump prioritizes fight against Iran-backed narcoterrorist network Obama neglected: DEA official

The Trump administration is prioritizing the threat posed by Hezbollah and the rest of Iran’s terrorist proxy network in ways President Barack Obama's administration never did, said the DEA’s top narcoterrorism agent.

John Fernandez, the assistant special agent in charge of the Special Operations Division's Counter-Narcoterrorism Operations Center, told the Washington Examiner it was clear Trump had a stronger approach to combating and dismantling Iranian-backed terrorist operations, especially those of the Lebanese Hezbollah, and said that was good for the country’s safety.

“I think it’s safe to say that under the previous administration it was not prioritized as the threat that President Trump has prioritized it as,” said Fernandez, who has been with the agency for decades, including during the Obama administration. “And President Trump’s approach on it has been on a comprehensive scale, hitting it from every resource and every tool and every authority that the U.S. government has — not just military, not just intelligence community, but law enforcement as well.”

The DEA official pointed to ramped-up coordinated efforts from his agency as well as Customs and Border Protection and the Treasury Department and said he thought that, when comparing the Trump and Obama strategies, the “more robust approach has had a bigger effect and a bigger impact on the overall criminal network” and “a more positive effect for our national security.”

Fernandez made the comments during a discussion last week at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy in response to a question about allegations that the Obama administration had slowed or stalled the U.S. government's effort to combat Hezbollah’s lucrative drug trafficking networks (dubbed “Project Cassandra”) during negotiations leading up to 2015’s Iran nuclear deal. The special agent had little doubt Trump’s approach was more serious than Obama’s, but he said, “It’s not a black and white issue like, ‘this administration totally screwed up and everything they did was wrong,’ and I think a lot of our good investigations were being conducted during the previous administration.”

Hezbollah was founded in the 1980s in Lebanon, but it now operates on six of seven continents on behalf of Iran, from whom it receives the vast amount of its funding, although money from Hezbollah’s criminal operations makes its way back to Iran’s coffers too. Hezbollah is responsible for a spate of terrorist attacks against the United States, including the 1983 Marine barracks bombing which killed 241 U.S. service members. Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its Quds Force, guided many of Hezbollah’s operations. The Iranian general, who also oversaw efforts which took the lives of at least 603 U.S. military members in Iraq, was killed in a U.S. airstrike earlier this month.

“They killed more Americans than any other criminal organization before 9/11 — and possibly since 9/11,” Fernandez said of Hezbollah. “And they are a major proxy for Iran — part of its Iran threat network with its military wing deployed to Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere.”

Fernandez said that, since 2017, the DEA’s efforts against Hezbollah’s criminal support network have resulted in an additional 17 indictments, 14 arrests, and three extraditions as well as nine Treasury Department terrorism designations….

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/trump-prioritizes-fight-against-iran-backed-narcoterrorist-network-obama-neglected-dea-official