Amelia Warren Tyagi, daughter of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), piggybacked off her mother to cash in on corporate clients for her new company during the presidential hopeful’s time chairing the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) oversight committee, Government Accountability Institute (GAI) president and Breitbart News senior contributor Peter Schweizer reveals in his investigative book, Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite.
Profiles in Corruption details how Warren’s daughter, Amelia, demonstratively benefited from her mother’s position of power, using Warren’s influence to grow the company she co-founded in 2007.
Amelia, alongside business partner Jody Greenstone Miller, founded the Business Talent Group (BTG) in 2007, “a temp firm for specialized and highly skilled employees.” The business played a role in what has been dubbed the “gig economy,” centralized around independent contractors and part-time workers. In other words, “people are hired for part-time jobs rather than full-time employment” — something Warren has railed against.
BTG did not have a smooth start. As Profiles in Corruption points out, temp businesses are “largely about corporate connections” — connections which exploded after Warren landed her job as the chair of the TARP oversight committee, which “played a central role in the federal government’s bailout of financial firms”:
In its early years, the firm struggled. Executives admitted that they had to be “extremely resourceful” in order to find new business. Executive recruitment and the temp business are largely about corporate connections. As Clare Malone of the Daily Beast pointed out, BTG is “a hybrid headhunting and consulting firm— industries whose bread and butter is leveraging connections.” Now they appeared to have some in abundance.
Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) called Warren, knowing her reputation, during the financial crisis in 2008, asking her to serve as chair of the congressional oversight panel to “keep track on the government bailout.” She brought Amelia, who co-founded her business the year prior, to the meeting.
As Schweizer reported, Amelia was actively “in search of capital investors, board members, clients, and partners” at the time.
Schweizer documents how Warren’s work as chair of the TARP oversight committee coincided with her daughter’s efforts to raise money and sign up advisers from investment banks being bailed out by TARP.
“As we will see, they were doing business with some of the largest corporations in the country, as well as government agencies,” Schweizer revealed:
At the same time that Elizabeth Warren was meeting and talking with major Wall Street investment firms, her daughter’s firm BTG was adding high-profile advisors with connections to the same companies who would benefit and face possible scrutiny from TARP. According to BTG’s website in late 2008 these included:
- Robert A. Kindler—Global head of Mergers and Acquisitions at Morgan Stanley, former global head of M&A at JPMorgan Chase. Ironically, Kindler boasted a vanity license plate for his Porsche that read “2BIG2FAIL.” Morgan Stanley would receive $10 billion from TARP.
- Edward J. Mathias—Managing director at the Carlyle Group, former member of management committee and board of directors at T. Rowe Price. The Carlyle Group grabbed $154 million in TARP funds for an affiliate.
- William I. Jacobs—Former senior executive vice president and chief operating officer at MasterCard International.
BTG went from a $4 million in revenue, with 200 people in its talent pool in 2009, to over $11 million in revenue and roughly 1,800 in its web over a three-year span.
In 2010, former President Barack Obama appointed Warren as assistant to the president and special adviser to the secretary of the Treasury. She was tasked with setting up a consumer protection bureau:
The new $550 million agency would have enormous power. It was created to enforce rules on banks, collection agencies, Wall Street brokerage firms, credit unions, payday lenders, student loan servicers, and others. As the Treasury secretary at the time, Timothy Geithner, put it, “It got the authority to write and enforce consumer rules for much of the financial system.”
Warren moved to establish “direct lines of communication with the executives of the most powerful financial firms in the country.” While she attempted to project a hardline, no-nonsense attitude against Wall Street giants, she struck a friendly tone behind closed doors, as Schweizer documented:
Communication with the CEOs of major Wall Street firms was in “stark contrast to the battle that [was] waged in public.”96 Warren has met in private with Wall Street moguls that she publicly criticizes. This duality in her public utterances and private tone continued well into her tenure in the U.S. Senate. In July 2017, she joined a private donor retreat held at the Martha’s Vineyard home of Robert Wolf, the former UBS Investment Bank CEO.97 Wolf told the New York Times: “I think she is very different in a conversation than when she’s on the stump.” She also held private meetings with JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon.98 In public, she has excoriated Dimon and pointedly asked for his resignation from the New York Federal Reserve Bank’s board of directors.99
All of that, Schweizer noted, “occurred while her daughter Amelia was building BTG.”
The revelation comes just days ahead of the Iowa caucuses, where Warren has been struggling to gain support. The latest Emerson College poll examining the race in the Hawkeye State shows the Massachusetts senator falling underneath the required 15 percent threshold with just 11 percent support. Notably, the poll also showed her falling to fourth place, behind Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), who saw a notable boost with 13 percent support.
Schweizer’s book, Profiles in Corruption, is available for online purchase in hardcover, paperback, or e-book.
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