The establishment media is targeting donors to President Donald Trump’s campaign and various organizations and Super PACs supporting the president.
From pieces suggesting they are involved in wrongdoing they had no hand in, to allegations of them funneling money around in an untoward way, donors to right-wing causes in the era of Trump are being hit with some heavy-handed media treatment regardless of the veracity of allegations against them.
“The subtle — and sometimes not so subtle — threats and intimidation coming from the left-leaning media have become the new normal,” one Trump donor, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Breitbart News. “If you publicly support President Trump, you’ve got a big red target on your back. The liberal media has become the enforcement arm of the Democrat Party and their job is to scare and silence the president’s supporters.”
It’s not abnormal to see media pushing a biased or leftist agenda, promoting Democrats while undercutting GOP messages. What is new in the era of Trump, though, is a hardcore, sophisticated media effort to punish GOP donors while offering no such critical coverage of the other side.
Take for instance this latest story published late Wednesday on the Associated Press wires. The headline on the piece from Jake Pearson and Jeff Horwitz at the Associated Press about GOP donor Ahmad “Andy” Khawaja is: “Political donor helps fraudsters, bettors and pornographers.”
“One customer was a debt collector that threatened to jail people if they didn’t pay back loans that they never took out,” the opening of the AP story reads. “Another was an offshore gambling operation that hid bets behind innocuous-sounding websites, including one dedicated to orange cats. A third was a phone-sex business catering to men with diaper fetishes or fantasies of raping women. Ahmad ‘Andy’ Khawaja made his fortune in online payment processing for a host of companies, providing a key conduit in e-commerce for ‘high risk’ merchants by helping route customers’ credit card purchases to banks.”
Sounds brutal, doesn’t it? The piece goes on for nearly three thousand more words alleging, with internal company documents as back-up, that Khawaja’s company — credit card payment processing company Allied Wallet — set up schemes in different cases in order to facilitate payments from people engaged in illicit or potentially illegal activity. But the story never alleges that Khawaja himself, or Allied Wallet, did anything wrong — just that these other people who they processed credit card payments for had done wrong things.
In other words, the piece is just innuendo attempting to use the actions of a variety of other people to smear Khawaja over his credit card transaction processing company. In reality, Khawaja’s Allied Wallet has been in business for more than 13 years and serves more than 150 million customers worldwide in more than 190 countries. Think of it this way: If a criminal uses a Visa or Mastercard credit card to make a payment–and the payment is in and of itself legal–then are Visa and Mastercard responsible for what the criminal does that is not illegal?
While the AP does not tell the readers of the thousands-word-long hit piece on Khawaja that Allied Wallet processes payments in nearly every country on the planet for hundreds of millions of customers — and that it only found a handful of customers who had committed wrongdoing or engaged in illicit activities outside of what Allied Wallet does–the AP does tell readers a few interesting things about the motives behind such a smear.
First off, the lead photo on the AP story is one of Khawaja with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office where the two are shaking hands. Also, Khawaja and other Allied Wallet executives have since Trump’s inauguration “given nearly $1 million more to Republican candidates and committees, including $200,000 from Khawaja to Rep. Ron DeSantis, a Trump-backed candidate running for governor in Florida.”
“In April, Charlie Kirk, the outspoken head of the pro-Trump super PAC Turning Point USA, touted Khawaja on Twitter as a beneficiary of Trump’s tax plan,” the AP also said.
But here is the real kicker: Khawaja was a Democrat donor who had previously given to Hillary Rodham Clinton, the failed 2016 Democratic nominee for president, and he has since switched sides to the GOP under Trump. That makes him real dangerous to the left, as his story of benefiting from Trump’s policies — and switching allegiances to Trump, abandoning the Democrats, truly complicates matters for the resistance-fueled vehement anti-Trump leftist forces rising in the Democratic Party. While it also reports that this year Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer appointed Khawaja to a religious liberty commission, the AP makes the important reveal about his changed party allegiances in a roundabout way in the second paragraph, where the reporters write that “recently Khawaja has shared that wealth in the form of multimillion-dollar political donations, first to Hillary Clinton and then to Donald Trump.”
That means Khawaja “recently” switched teams from Democrat to Republican, from pro-Clinton to pro-Trump, and despite all of these allegations against a handful of Allied Wallet clients over its 13-year history in 190 plus countries with more than 150 million clients for which it processes credit card payments, the AP just now — after Khawaja switched to being pro-Trump — seems to have found all of this information. In fact, every single one of the major allegations against Allied Wallet’s various clients in the AP story occurred at the time Khawaja was a major Clinton and Democratic Party donor — before he switched teams to Trump. In 2016, back when he was a Clinton donor, Khawaja was awarded great press. Corporate Magazine even named him “CEO of the year,” for what they called him being the “pioneer of e-commerce solutions.” Despite his donations to a number of charities like Wounded Warrior Project, the Red Cross, Unicef and more, it seems all that glowing press changes when somebody comes out publicly for President Trump.
“Allied Wallet has existed in a highly-regulated industry for over 13 years without any issues. Any accusations of illicit or prohibited activities are misleading and categorically false,” the company told Breitbart News on Thursday in response to the Associated Press story. “Allied Wallet strictly adheres to the rules and regulations that have been set in place by the major card brand networks and countries in which it operates, and the majority of the merchant applications submitted to Allied Wallet are declined unless they meet or surpass the company’s strict underwriting and compliance guidelines. The entire narrative we have had with the Associated Press has been filled with innuendo, distortions, and is nothing more than a political hit job due to the Allied Wallet’s contribution to President Donald Trump’s inauguration and support of his tax cut agenda. The media has stooped to using a defamatory, fake news hit piece to try and bully Allied Wallet and its CEO into submission and trying to send a message to other potential supporters of the President that they too will be targeted if they publicly support him in any way.”
What’s more, this Allied Wallet hit comes right on the heels of the company announcing its planning for an initial public offering (IPO) of stock, which would obviously be a boon for the payment processing company’s bottom line. In fact, the AP story came out just a couple days after the July 30 IPO announcement in BusinessWire.
This Allied Wallet story, though, is hardly the only one in recent months. Jake Pearson, one of the same AP reporters behind the Khawaja hit this week, back in March published a piece alleging that pro-Trump donor Gentry Beach and Donald Trump, Jr. had some kind of untoward relationship that provided Beach access to National Security Council (NSC) staff in the White House.
“Donald Trump Jr. has a previously undisclosed business relationship with a longtime hunting buddy who helped raise millions of dollars for his father’s 2016 presidential campaign and has had special access to top government officials since the election, records obtained by The Associated Press show,” Pearson wrote. “The president’s oldest son and Texas hedge fund manager Gentry Beach have been involved in business deals together dating back to the mid-2000s and recently formed a company, Future Venture LLC, despite past claims by both men that they were just friends, according to previously unreported court records and other documents obtained by AP.”
The next two paragraphs jump into allegations that imply Beach had access to NSC staff he should not have had–or otherwise would not have had — if not for his business and personal relationships with the president’s son.
“Beach last year met with top National Security Council officials to push a plan that would curb U.S. sanctions in Venezuela and open up business for U.S. companies in the oil-rich nation,” Pearson wrote. “Ethics experts said their financial entanglements raised questions about whether Beach’s access to government officials and advocacy for policy changes were made possible by the president’s son’s influence — and could also benefit the Trump family’s bottom line.”
Despite all the smoke and mirrors in this eye-catching AP lead, that’s all it is, sources close to the president’s eldest son tell Breitbart News. “The AP story about Gentry was filled with innuendo (yet no actual facts) that he was using his personal friendship with Don, Jr., to make contacts in the federal government, when in reality nothing of the sort has ever occurred,” a source close to Donald Trump, Jr., told Breitbart News.
Khawaja and Beach are not the only Trump backers in the donor community targeted by the media, though. Back in late July, Bloomberg News published a triple byline hit piece on a company — Global Energy Producers — which intends to sell U.S. energy in Europe to counter Russian influence across the continent. That company made a sizable donation to the official pro-Trump Super PAC, America First Action, Inc., and Bloomberg reporters Bill Allison, Max Abelson, and Shahien Nasiripour alleged that it was some kind of shell company set up to funnel said donation through.
“Global Energy Producers LLC didn’t exist until April. A month later, before it had a working website, it was flush with enough cash to make one of the biggest donations of the year to America First Action Inc., a super-political action committee backing President Donald Trump’s agenda,” the Bloomberg reporters wrote to open their piece.
In the next paragraph, they cite a complaint filed by George Soros-funded Campaign Legal Center alleging impropriety with the donation to the pro-Trump Super PAC. Nowhere in the Bloomberg piece do the reporters mention that the Campaign Legal Center is in fact a Soros front group funded by the leftist billionaire.
“On Wednesday, the Washington-based nonprofit Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission accusing the company and two businessmen with connections to Ukraine of violating campaign finance laws,” they wrote on July 25, nonetheless. “It’s unlikely Global Energy Producers had enough revenue or capital to make a $325,000 contribution so quickly, the complaint says. Under federal law, donors to political committees must use their own funds.”
The piece from Bloomberg also quotes far left-wing former Federal Election Commission (FEC) commissioner Ann Ravel as bashing these folks, and goes on to name the different executives they think are behind the money to the pro-Trump group as Igor Fruman and Lev Parnas.
“The complaint identifies Igor Fruman and Lev Parnas as the most likely sources of the money, based in part on other campaign contributions listing the company as their employer, but acknowledges there could be others,” the Bloomberg reporters wrote. “Because Global Energy Producers was incorporated in Delaware, it didn’t have to immediately disclose directors or information about its owners, making it difficult to determine its financial backers.”
They even go so far as to allege via implication that Fruman and Parnas have some kind of nefarious Kremlin connections because one of them speaks Russian and did an interview with a Russian news outlet.
“Fruman is a Russian-speaking businessman who deals in international trade. He has ties to Ukraine through a charitable group and serves as a channel between Trump and Kiev’s Jewish community, according to an interview he gave to a Russian-language outlet that’s cited in the complaint,” the Bloomberg reporters wrote. “He and Parnas both met with Trump at a fundraising event, according to that outlet, which also published photographs of Fruman standing with Trump and the donor’s ID badge from a March event with the president at Mar-a-Lago. Parnas is a former stockbroker who was facing eviction from his house in Florida earlier this year, according to another lawsuit. He worked for five brokerages that shut down after regulators accused them of lying, cheating customers and breaking industry rules, records show, and co-owned one of them. That’s not mentioned in his biography on the website for his business Fraud Guarantee, which advertises tools to protect investors.”
In reality, though, according to a source familiar with Global Energy Proudcers’ operations, the story against them in Bloomberg “is nothing more than an attempt to malign immigrants who fled Eastern Europe to make a better life for themselves and who support the President’s pro-America policies.”
Why, one might ask? First off, the two men are anything but sympathetic to the Russians. Both fled Eastern Europe — Ukraine — to come to the United States and become American citizens. Parnas came to the United States in 1976, at age 4, with his family and grew up in Brooklyn in New York — and has been an American citizen ever since a couple years later, and has been in good standing for the decades since then. Fruman came later, and became a U.S. citizen in 2004 — 14 years ago — and remains in good standing as well.
Their business interests here, as well as around the globe, align with U.S. interests — particularly in Europe and against the Russians.
“The assertion that GEP is a shell company is simply not true. While it is a new company, significant capital, investment, and man-hours have been devoted to the mission of the company, which is to export American natural gas,” a source familiar with the company’s operations told Breitbart News. “Ironically, despite mainstream media trying to tie the founders to the Kremlin, the mission of their company will actually weaken Russia, because if successful it will cut into Russia’s share of the natural gas market.”
The source familiar with Global Energy Producers’ operations adds that the $325,000 donation to America First Policies is but a small fraction of the companies’ jump-start operating costs, which include salaries of employees, significant travel costs, and other usual business expenses — meaning that donation is but a fraction of the initial operating costs that Parnas and Fruman paid for to launch Global Energy Producer.
In an official statement from Global Energy Producers, the company told Breitbart News the insinuations by the media and the left against the company are nothing more than smearing of hard-working immigrants like Parnas and Fruman for becoming American citizens and fulfilling the American dream by voicing their opinions on matters of public interest.
“The donation to America First PAC was a 100% legal contribution made by American citizens who immigrated to this country to flee Eastern European oppression and chase their American dream,” Global Energy Partners told Breitbart News. “Any assertion otherwise is simply a xenophobic and politically-motivated response due to their commitment towards supporting the Administration’s pro-America energy policies. The amount donated to America First PAC represents only a small fraction of the operating costs of GEP. The implication that GEP is some sort of ‘shell company,’ couldn’t be further from the truth, as the company is committed to a longterm plan to export American LNG and is in the process of partnering with major industry leaders both domestically and internationally to achieve that end.”
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