REPORT: Bloomberg Staffers Brag About Ripping Off His Campaign, Covertly Canvassing For Sanders

Staffers for former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s failed presidential campaign say they went rogue and canvassed for Sen. Bernie Sanders after the Nevada debate debacle, The Nation reported Friday, citing anonymous sources.

People who worked with the team knew the campaign was over after Sen. Elizabeth Warren blasted Bloomberg during the Feb. 19 debate in Nevada, the report noted. They also said they were met with hostility from voters on the campaign trail, according to The Nation’s Ken Klippenstein.

“Most people knew this was a grift,” one campaign official noted, according to Klippenstein’s report. “At our first office meeting, my [director] said, ‘We don’t need to canvass. We can just make calls, right guys?’ And everyone was like, ‘Yeah, that’s sensible.’” The staffers could not go on record because they signed a non-disclosure agreement with the campaign, the report notes

The staffers spoke anonymously out of concern for professional reprisal and due to a non-disclosure agreement. Klippenstein obtained a leaked copy of the NDA in February — a representative with the campaign confirmed the copy was indeed from the campaign.

Several staffers said they actively tried to undermine Bloomberg’s campaign, even canvassed for Sanders.

“I would actively canvass for Bernie when I was supposed to be canvassing for Mike. I know of at least one team of ‘volunteers’ that was entirely fabricated by the organizers who had to hit their goals,” one staffer said, according to Klippenstein’s report.

The person added: “It was easy enough to fudge the data to make it look like real people put in real volunteer work, when in reality Mike was getting nothing out of it

Bloomberg’s campaign closed up shop shortly after Super Tuesday, when former Vice President Joe Biden won several states.

Biden fleshed out big wins in Minnesota, Alabama, Oklahoma and Tennessee, while Bloomberg managed to scrape together a win in American Samoa. Bloomberg spent roughly $500 million on ads leading up to Super Tuesday, plastering advertisements on Facebook and in the media ecosphere. The major digital push was all for naught, as it turns out.

Bloomberg’s campaign dumped more than $234 million into TV, radio and digital ads in the Super Tuesday states. He suspended his campaign Wednesday after a poor showing and tossed his unbridled support behind Biden.

https://dailycaller.com/2020/03/06/bloomberg-sanders-campaign-staffers-canvass-report/

Investigative Issues: Joe Biden’s Achilles Heel on Obamacare

Chris Jacobs, Juniper Research Group - March 6, 2020

Conventional wisdom might suggest that former Vice President Joe Biden has benefited from two recent news developments: The consolidation of moderate candidates like Sen. Amy Klobuchar around his presidential campaign, and the Supreme Court’s decision to take another Obamacare case next fall. Biden will likely use the court case to contrast his position supporting Obamacare with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ efforts to abolish it and establish a single-payer system. But one big fact makes Biden an ill-suited fit for this pro-Obamacare message: He deliberately avoided paying a six-figure sum in Obamacare taxes.

In mid-July, after Biden and his wife Jill released their 2016 through 2018 tax returns, press reports noted that, by characterizing over $13 million of income from speaking and writing engagements as profits from two corporations rather than wage income, the couple avoided paying nearly $500,000 in self-employment taxes. Tax experts interviewed at the time called the Bidens’ scheme “pretty aggressive” and not justified, given that the income came from their own intellectual work product, as opposed to any product or service created by a larger corporate entity

The development raises several fundamental questions about Biden, starting with his blatant hypocrisy. Biden’s ads have claimed that “Obamacare is personal to me,” and that when “others propose to replace it and start over—that’s personal to me too.” But of the 3.8% self-employment tax the Bidens avoided, 0.9% funds Obamacare, and the other 2.9% funds Medicare.

Biden claims that he will defend Obamacare—especially its provisions regarding pre-existing conditions—and other federal health programs. But when given an opportunity to put his proverbial money where his mouth is, by paying the self-employment taxes that fund Obamacare and Medicare, Biden and his wife declined to do so. Given the lengths Joe Biden went to avoid paying the taxes that fund Obamacare—including the insurance subsidies that support individuals with chronic conditions—his claim to support the law’s pre-existing conditions sounds like so much malarkey.

The individuals shown in Biden’s campaign videos praising Obamacare likely do not know that Biden failed to pay taxes used to fund that law. They, and other working-class individuals like them, may not take kindly to “Middle Class Joe” failing to pay nearly $500,000 in self-employment taxes—more than some working-class Americans make in a decade.

In presidential debates and elsewhere, Biden has repeatedly raised the specter of middle-class tax increases to fund Sanders’ single-payer system. He claims that his health care plan, unlike Sanders’, will take its revenue only from wealthy taxpayers. But Biden’s personal tax situation raises the question of whether other wealthy households will engage in the kind of evasive maneuvers Biden used to avoid his new tax increases, leaving the middle class holding the bag.

Over the years, Joe Biden has repeatedly used a simple phrase: “Don’t tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I’ll show you your values.” When it came time for him to “cash in” following years in the public sector, Joe Biden’s personal budget didn’t include the taxes to pay for the Obamacare law he claims to value. The press should question him on the yawning chasm between his claims and the values he expressed in his tax returns.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2020/03/06/investigative_issues_joe_bidens_achilles_heel_on_obamacare_122703.html