Tech billionaires are plotting sweeping, secret plans to boost Joe Biden

Joe Biden has a problem. Silicon Valley billionaires think they have a solution.

Election Day is less than six months away, and Democrats are scrambling to patch the digital deficits of their presumptive nominee. And behind the scenes, Silicon Valley’s billionaire Democrats are spending tens of millions of dollars on their own sweeping plans to catch up to President Donald Trump’s lead on digital campaigning — plans that are poised to make them some of the country’s most influential people when it comes to shaping the November results.

These billionaires’ arsenals are funding everything from nerdy political science experiments to divisive partisan news sites to rivalrous attempts to overhaul the party’s beleaguered data file. They are pushing their favored, sometimes peculiar, fixes to a political ailment just like they might if on the board of a struggling startup.

This is all unfolding as the pandemic forces campaigns to pivot away from door-knocks and packed rallies and toward data mining and influencer marketing — which in many ways play to the strengths of these tech titans, making them even more influential at a time when many in the Democratic Party are uneasy with just how powerful some in tech have become.Their investments matter all the more because of the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee they inherited. Biden is rushing to hire more aides, create more engaging content, and build better ties with the Silicon Valley donors and talent that evaded him during the primary.

“Because the Biden campaign is the Biden campaign,” said one Democratic operative involved in these efforts, “what we are doing on the independent side matters a hell of a lot more than it would previously.”What makes this all the more difficult is that Democrats have long struggled to coordinate their big-money spending like Republicans have, and that atomization has been exacerbated by the arrival of Silicon Valley money, whose hubristic entrepreneurs often prefer to do things their own way.

In Silicon Valley’s new political moment, four billionaires in particular — LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, philanthropist and Steve Jobs’s widow Laurene Powell Jobs, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt — have the most ambitious plans, according to Recode’s interviews with over 20 donors and operatives. The chess moves of this power set are instrumental to fulfilling Democrats’ — and much of Silicon Valley’s — four-year quest to oust Donald Trump.

And yet each of these billionaires is moving their pieces with varying levels of secrecy, and often with minimal disclosure, scrutiny, or accountability.

Inside the Democratic data war

Four years after the Democratic Party’s data was described by Hillary Clinton as “bankrupt” and “on the verge of insolvency,” tech billionaires are regrouping and pouring millions into the party’s digital infrastructure, even to the point of building competing power centers that threaten the Democratic establishment.

Republicans have invested far more steadily as of late than have Democrats in the data that powers modern campaigns. And so, a decade after a generation of tech wizards helped usher in a new era of digital campaigning that helped elevate Barack Obama to the presidency, it is Democrats who are left playing catch-up. Even if it was self-identifying progressives that created today’s digital tools, it was conservatives who mastered how to use them, and none more than Donald Trump.

Cont.

https://archive.is/478Ia

https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/5/27/21271157/tech-billionaires-joe-biden-reid-hoffman-laurene-powell-jobs-dustin-moskovitz-eric-schmidt

>>9333414

>MP Pressures Boris to Delay Brexit

>>9333439

>https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/larry-kramer-longtime-aids-activist-dies-84-n1215571

Interesting, he wrote a play with a character based on Fauci

>>9333596

Republican Sens. Graham, Cornyn, Crapo, Risch, Rounds, Young, Murkowski, Sullivan and Lankford write President Trump to urge him not to restrict temporary, work-based visas, which they say will help the economic recovery

https://twitter.com/MHackman/status/1265701369211748352

New book claims Bill Clinton had an affair with Ghislaine Maxwell

The relationship between Clinton and Maxwell was not confined to these overseas junkets. It continued in New York City, where Clinton on multiple occasions visited Maxwell’s own private townhome at 116 East Sixty-fifth Street, an $11 million pad that runs a touch below seven thousand square feet, much more modest than Epstein’s palatial townhome a few blocks north. (Maxwell purchased it in 2000 for a mere $4.95 million.)

The coziness between the former president and the charming British socialite drew notice in New York social circles. Clinton and Maxwell were spotted dining together at the Madison Avenue Italian mainstay Nello, according to a 2002 New York magazine article, which described Maxwell as a “man-eater” in the same paragraph. When Clinton went stag to a New York education charity gala in late 2001 — Hillary declined to attend — Maxwell was reportedly at his side.

The relationship also carried over to the Clinton Global Initiative and Clinton Foundation. Maxwell became somewhat of a fixture at these events. It was there where she was even served court papers about her participation in Epstein’s abuse.

On July 31, 2010 Maxwell was among the few guests to attend Chelsea Clinton’s wedding at the former Astor estate in Rhinebeck, New York. This auspicious event followed an embarrassing incident for Maxwell.

“Only a few months earlier, while attending the Clinton Global Initiative in New York City, at the end of an Indian summer, in September 2009, a process server walked through the packed lobby of the Sheraton Hotel…and served Ghislaine Maxwell papers for a deposition,” the journalist Conchita Sarnoff recalls.

“Maxwell…was huddled in a small group talking to other guests” as the server approached her. He “called out her name and…with so many people surrounding her, Maxwell was unsuspecting. She confirmed her identity and he served her notice. The deposition was in relation to Epstein’s sexual abuse case. The server left at once,” Sarnoff writes in her book, TrafficKing. “Ironically, photographs of Maxwell taken by a private investigator who accompanied the process server showed Maxwell receiving notice while standing beneath a human trafficking banner. Human trafficking was the Conference’s theme at the 2009 Clinton Global Initiative,” she writes.

“Maxwell never appeared at the deposition claiming, the day prior to her testimony she had to immediately return to England to care for her dying mother. At the time of that trip,…the elder Mrs. Maxwell was not gravely ill. Not long after the deposition was scheduled, Maxwell was spotted again in New York. As a British subject there was nothing the attorneys could do to force her to take the deposition.”

Clinton, though he has a long history of being accused of sexual misconduct, has never been accused of engaging with an underage female with Epstein. Despite rampant speculation, in fact Clinton’s appetite was being fed by someone else entirely.

“I have seen reports saying or implying that I had sex with former president Bill Clinton on Little Saint James Island,” [Epstein accuser Virginia] Giuffre has said in court documents. “Former president Bill Clinton was present on the island at a time when I was also present on the island, but I have never had sexual relations with Clinton, nor have I ever claimed to have such relations. I have never seen him have sexual relations with anyone.” Clinton has denied visiting Little Saint James, Epstein’s private “orgy island” in the US Virgin Islands, but Giuffre’s claim is bolstered by a new Netflix docu-series, “Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich,” out Wednesday. It features an interview with the island’s former longtime IT worker, Steve Scully, who claims to have seen Clinton and Epstein lounging on the porch of Epstein’s sprawling villa at a time when there were no other guests present. Clinton has acknowledged taking a “total of four trips” on Epstein’s plane, but has said he was completely unaware of the “terrible crimes” committed by the financier, who died Aug. 10 in an incident officially deemed a suicide by hanging in his Manhattan jail cell. During one trip, a 2002 excursion to Africa that also involved actors Kevin Spacey and Chris Tucker, Clinton was photographed posing with Maxwell in the plane’s doorway. His spokesman, Angel Urena, said of Clinton’s reported affair with Maxwell, “It’s a total lie today, it’s a total lie tomorrow, and it’ll be a total lie years from now.” Maxwell’s lawyer, Laura Menninger, didn’t return an email seeking comment.

https://nypost.com/2020/05/27/book-claims-bill-clinton-had-an-affair-with-ghislaine-maxwell/