At the top of this page is a SEARCH FEATURE that should bring up old articles about the Chicken Hawk, WAR MONGER, PNAC co-founder JOHN BOLTON.
JOHN BOLTON couldn't secure REPUBLICAN votes to be appointed UN Ambassador.
Lotsa baggage with this Whack-A-Ding.
John Bolton’s Super PAC Spent Millions On Senators Who Might Vote To Confirm Him
WASHINGTON ― President-elect Donald Trump is reportedly close to announcing that he has selected former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton for the No. 2 job at the Department of State.
One of the most pro-war members of the Republican foreign policy establishment, Bolton has served in numerous roles, including acting U.N. ambassador and an assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice, under the last three Republican presidents. He’s also been raising millions of dollars to elect some of the senators who would now get to vote to approve his new position.
Bolton launched the John Bolton Super PAC in 2013, which some speculated was a way to promote himself ahead of a potential 2016 president run. That run never materialized, but the PAC, which could raise an unlimited amount of money, enabled Bolton to bring in huge contributions from wealthy benefactors while lending his hawkish credentials to congressional candidates. In the 2014 and 2016 election cycles, Bolton raised $11.3 million and spent $5.6 million on independent expenditures in support of Republican candidates.
Three of the candidates whom Bolton’s super PAC boosted ― Sens. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Richard Burr (R-N.C.) ― could now be in a position to vote for his confirmation as deputy secretary of State. That would create an unprecedented situation: The director of a super PAC would be seeking votes to secure a prominent government position from the very same senators he helped elect.
It’s unclear whether those senators would recuse themselves from voting on his nomination. Tillis got the most support of any candidate in the past two elections from Bolton’s super PAC with $1.4 million to boost his 2014 election. Tillis defeated incumbent Sen. Kay Hagan (D-N.C.) in the 2014 election by 1.7%. The Hagan-Tillis Senate race was the first Senate race to top the $100 million mark, largely on the back of spending by super PACs and nonprofit groups.
Bolton’s super PAC also boosted Cotton in his first Senate election campaign in 2014. The group spent $825,687 to support Cotton’s campaign, which he won easily.
The only successful race that Bolton’s super PAC spent money on in 2016 was incumbent Burr’s. The John Bolton Super PAC spent $740,675 to support Burr and oppose his challenger, Democrat Deborah Ross. Burr won his election by 6 percentage points.
“Donald Trump’s creating trickle-down conflicts of interest,” Adam Smith, communications director for the campaign finance reform group Every Voice, said in an email. “Whether it’s John Bolton and his super PAC or a mega-donor like Betsy DeVos, there will be several Senators who have received financial support from nominees they’ll be voting on and it’s fair to ask whether those donations will play a role in their votes.”
The offices of Burr, Cotton and Tillis did not respond to requests for comment.
Bolton’s super PAC has largely been financed by the same wealthy benefactors over the two years it has been active. The largest donor is billionaire hedge fund manager Robert Mercer, who gave $4 million over the past four years. Mercer is perhaps the most influential big donor in Trump World. After backing Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) during the primary, Mercer and his daughter Rebecca Mercer threw their weight heavily behind Trump. They were behind the mid-campaign revamp that brought on KellyAnne Conway as campaign manager and Steve Bannon as campaign chief executive. Conway was previously paid by the Mercers through a pro-Cruz super PAC. Bannon’s Breitbart is partially financed by contributions from Mercer.
Other major Trump backers supporting Bolton’s super PAC include Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus and Los Angeles real estate magnate Geoff Palmer.
Bolton will need every vote he can get from Republicans if he is nominated. Republicans hold a slim 52-48 majority in the Senate. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has already stated that he will oppose Bolton’s nomination. When Paul was running for the Republican presidential nomination, Bolton’s nonprofit group the Foundation for American Security & Freedom ran an advertisement attacking Paul for questioning the fear-mongering about Iran’s nuclear program. The ad showed an American family being evaporated by a nuclear bomb.
Bolton’s 2005 nomination to be U.N. ambassador was highly controversial. Bolton was a known opponent of the U.N. with a stated view that “it wouldn’t make a bit of difference” if the U.N. building in Manhattan lost 10 of its 38 floors. During his confirmation hearings he was faced with accusations of harassment from a former USAID employee. He could not clear a Democratic filibuster and was recess-appointed by President George W. Bush. Numerous Senate Republicans stated at the time that they would not vote for his confirmation.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story said Bolton was an assistant director in the Justice Department. He was an assistant attorney general.
VIDEO ON LINK
MEET JOHN BOLTON: THE MERCER-BACKED TRUMP ADVISOR PUSHING FOR POST-BREXIT DEREGULATION
Publica Editor: I’m not going to start by saying I told you so, but I have been warning for some time about what you are about to read. The clear link between ultra-right-wing political and corporate forces from America to push a hard Brexit through continue in the background. Liam Fox, Britain’s Secretary of State for International Trade whose loyalty to the USA is indisputable is assisted by others in influential roles in government. They are now just a few weeks away from realising their dream of an American outpost in the north Atlantic. Britain is not just another new market to exploit – it is the sixth largest economy on earth and America can almost smell the scent of its latest conquest.
By Chloe Farrand – DeSmogUK: A close advisor to Donald Trump who wants to slash environmental regulation and regards Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro as a “like-minded partner” is acting as the go-between the White House and hard-Brexiters at the top of the UK government.
John Bolton, President Trump’s national security advisor and a pro-guns, pro-war advocate, has been cheerleading for the UK to leave the EU, cut red-tape and strike a free trade deal with the US.
The former US ambassador to the UN, who has had long held anti-EU views, has been revealed to regularly speak on the phone with International Trade Secretary Liam Fox and Transport Secretary Chris Grayling — two hard-Brexiters inside Theresa May’s cabinet.
In the US, Bolton is connected to some of President Trump’s biggest financiers. His activities have received millions from billionaire businessman Robert Mercer, the man who bankrolled the Trump campaign and worked with data firm Cambridge Analytica. He also held a senior fellowship at the American Enterprise Institute, which is funded by fossil fuel magnates the Koch brothers, notorious for backing climate science denial worldwide.
Described by Financial Times columnist Simon Kuper as “possibly Washington’s most aggressive hawk”, Bolton sits at the heart of a transAtlantic network pushing for deregulation post-Brexit to advance US right-wing libertarian interests.
BREXIT PUSH FOR DEREGULATION
Bolton has made no secret of his contempt for the EU and has been publicly calling for a clean cut Brexit which would allow the UK to strike its own free trade deal with the US.
He was pictured with Daniel Hannan, one of Vote Leave’s founders and a senior campaign operative, at the Vote Leave headquarters on the night of the results.
Speaking on Fox News after the referendum result, Bolton said: “Britain can now rid itself of the sclerotic over-regulation of the Brussels bureaucrats. It can reduce its taxes, reduce regulation, be a much more attractive place for foreign investments.”
A month after the EU referendum, Bolton met with the unofficial Leave.EU campaign at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, including Nigel Farage and Andy Wigmore, a businessman and prominent associate of Farage and Arron Banks, the campaign’s main funder.
The group’s most prominent supporters including Jacob Rees-Mogg, former Brexit secretary David Davis, Steve Baker and Boris Johnson all backed the launch of an alternative Brexit plan, which called for the UK to realign its regulatory framework, particularly by cutting environmental protection, to strike free trade deals with the US, China and India.
If these hard-Brexiteers have their way, US products which currently do not meet the EU’s regulatory food and environmental standards — such as hormone-fed beef and chlorine-washed chickens — could enter the UK market.
American agri-businesses recently responded en masse to a consultation by US government’s trade agency demanding food standards be lowered post-Brexit. Some of the responses included dropping safety threshold for pesticides, abandoning existing risk process regarding biotech, getting rid of traceability and and colour warning labelling and removing safety restrictions on beef, pork and poultry.
THREAT TO THE ENVIRONMENT
Bolton’s endorsement of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who appointed a foreign minister who believes climate change is a “Marxist plot” to stifle western economies and wants to open up the Amazon to miners, farmers and construction companies, highlights the thin line between deregulation and the rejection of the scientific consensus on climate change.
Until he took his post as a Trump advisor, Bolton was a senior fellow of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), one of the most influential right-wing think tanks in the US that has consistently opposed environmental regulation and spread disinformation about climate change.
The AEI has been largely funded by oil giant Exxon Mobil and Koch-related foundations, which aim to advance the world view of fossil fuel magnates Charles and David Koch.
Bolton has also been a long-time critic of international efforts to reduce emissions and tackle climate change, accusing the UN climate talks of using global warming as an excuse to establish supranational structures of governance.
Speaking to Fox News, Bolton hailed President Trump’s intention to withdraw the US form the Paris Agreement “an excellent decision”.
“The [Paris Agreement] overall objective is more international governance and less national sovereignty,” he said, adding: “We could be dealing with global cooling here […] and these people would be asking for the same [international] structures”.
“We are not going to engage in more blue smoke and mirrors in order to get to more international control,” he said.
BIG DATA AND BIG MONEY
Besides his ideological push for a populist low-tax and low-regulation society, Bolton has used data harvesting and micro-targeting to achieve his political ends. This has led him to work closely with Robert Mercer and Cambridge Analytica.
In 2015-16 — in the final stages of the US election campaign — John Bolton’s Super PAC (political action committee) received $3 milllion from Mercer through his hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, according to OpenSecrets data. Between October and December 2017 alone, Mercer gave an additional $1million to Bolton’s Super PAC.
Bolton’s Super PAC was set up to support right-wing Republicans running for election.
Documents provided by whistleblower Christopher Wylie and released by the House of Commons’ Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee also reveal how both SCL Group, Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, and Aggregate IQ, the Canadian digital marketing outfit used by the Vote Leave campaign, worked for Bolton during the US 2014 mid-term election.
In one email exchange between the SCL Group, Bolton is described as “a very important client”.
The Super PAC suspended all its political activities when Bolton became a Trump advisor.
In the UK, there remains a host of investigations to establish Aggregate IQ and Cambridge Analytica’s exact role in Vote Leave and Leave.EU’s campaigns.
Cambridge Analytica and Leave.EU insists the discussions were preliminary and the company did not carry out work for the Leave campaign. The Met Police is yet to decide whether to launch criminal investigations months after the campaign groups were referred by the Electoral Commission.
via True Publica
John Bolton’s Cambridge Analytica Connection
The embattled data firm earned more than $1.1 million from Bolton’s super PAC.
John Bolton speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Oxon Hill, Maryland, on Feb. 24, 2017.
Joshua Roberts/Reuters
If President Donald Trump taps John Bolton as his next national security adviser, the former U.N. ambassador will be forced to reckon with the fate of his political empire, which includes a super PAC that has spent heavily on the services of embattled voter profiling company Cambridge Analytica.
Bolton’s super PAC has paid Cambridge Analytica more than $1.1 million since 2014 for “research” and “survey research,” a Center for Public Integrity analysis of campaign finance filings shows.
So far during the 2018 election season, Bolton has announced his super PAC will spend $1 million boosting Republican Senate candidate Kevin Nicholson in Wisconsin. Nicholson is challenging incumbent Sen.
Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat.
Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat.
Bolton’s super PAC spent roughly $2.5 million during the 2016 election cycle to support the bids of Republican U.S. Senate candidates, according to Federal Election Commission filings. The press release announcing support for Nicholson said that “Ambassador Bolton looks to increase those contributions for the 2018 midterm elections.”
Bolton — eyed to replace Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster as national security adviser should McMaster step down or be fired — would be the latest in a string of Trump administration insiders with strong links to big-spending, conservative political groups largely funded by an elite group of megadonors. It’s a list that includes Kellyanne Conway, a counselor to the president; White House Director of Legislative Affairs Marc Short; and Nick Ayers, the vice president’s chief of staff.
Bolton, who visited the White House last week, would also be the latest Trump official with ties to GOP megadonor Robert Mercer, a key supporter of Trump’s presidential bid and investor in Cambridge Analytica who is also the largest donor to Bolton’s super PAC.
“All of this makes clear that the Supreme Court was wrong in Citizens United when it unleashed big money in our elections with the promise it would be independent of candidates and office holders,” said Paul Ryan, vice president for policy and litigation at the nonprofit watchdog group Common Cause.
Bolton’s super PAC was among the first political committees to report paying Cambridge Analytica, the voter profiling company in which Mercer is an investor.
Last week, the New York Times and the Observer of London jointly reported that Cambridge Analytica had misused data gleaned from the profiles of tens of millions of Facebook users.
Facebook suspended Cambridge Analytica and its parent company, citing concerns that it had failed to delete improperly obtained data. Cambridge Analytica said the data was improperly obtained by a contractor and has been deleted. It also said none of that data “was used by Cambridge Analytica as part of the services it provided to the Donald Trump 2016 presidential campaign.”
But the statement did not specifically address whether the data was used to provide services to other political committees that retained Cambridge Analytica, including Bolton’s super PAC.
In a related matter, Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating Russian involvement in the 2016 presidential election, in December asked Cambridge Analytica to turn over emails of any employees who worked on Trump’s presidential campaign.
Cambridge Analytica did not respond to questions from the Center for Public Integrity. Bolton did not respond to an interview request submitted through his PAC or to questions regarding whether he was investigating whether Cambridge Analytica used improperly obtained data in its work for his super PAC.
As of Feb. 28, Bolton’s two political groups — the John Bolton Super PAC and John Bolton PAC — reported $3.6 million in combined cash on hand, with roughly $3 million of that amount in the super PAC’s coffers, according to disclosures filed Tuesday with the FEC.
Super PACs may raise and spend unlimited amounts of money to advocate for or against political candidates.
Much of the super PAC’s money has come from a handful of political megadonors, and the group has supported candidates also favored by its benefactors.
Mercer has given $5 million to Bolton’s super PAC since 2013. He was the Bolton super PAC’s largest donor during the 2016 election cycle and so far is also the largest donor for the 2018 election cycle, an analysis of federal campaign finance filings show. Mercer has also financially backed Cambridge Analytica.
Eight federal political committees that have received contributions from Mercer or his daughter, Rebekah, have reported paying Cambridge Analytica in the past, including Sen. Ted Cruz’s presidential committee and the North Carolina Republican Party. None, including John Bolton Super PAC, have yet reported paying the company during the 2018 election cycle.
Bolton created the political action committee and super PAC that bear his name in 2013. During the past three election cycles, the super PAC poured six- and seven-figure sums into the bids of Republican politicians such as Sens. Richard Burr and Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Tom Cotton of Arkansas. Tills and Cotton’s campaigns have also reported paying Cambridge Analytica.
Mercer is by far the Bolton super PAC’s biggest donor, but it has also drawn money from a small pool of other Republican megadonors, including shipping supplies CEO Richard Uihlein, Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, private equity magnate John W. Childs, and real estate developer Geoff Palmer.
Bolton’s foreign policy views have been controversial, with detractors citing his willingness to use military intervention. “It is perfectly legitimate for the United States to respond to the current ‘necessity’ posed by North Korea’s nuclear weapons by striking first,” he argued in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece last month.
The position of national security adviser doesn’t generally require Senate confirmation (although McMaster faced a Senate vote in order to keep his military rank while serving in the Trump White House).
Therefore, it’s unlikely Tillis, Cotton, Burr, and other senators Bolton has financially supported would be put in a position to vote on Bolton were Trump to select him as national security adviser. Bolton could, however, face a confirmation hearing were Trump to tap him for another administration post.
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