Epstein Estate Documents - Batch 7 / TEXT / 002 from House

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HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_033299
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From: Barry Josephson
Sent: 6/26/2016 9:55:27 PM
To: Jeff Epstein [[email protected]]
Subject: www.washingtonpost.com: In new poll, support for Trump has plunged, giving Clinton a double-digit lead - The
Washington Post
Importance: High
What a difference a week makes!
In new poll, support for Trump has plunged, giving Clinton a double-digit lead - The Washington Post
www.washingtonpost.com
Read the full story
Best,
Barry J
Barry Josephson
Josephson Entertainment
11900 W Olympic Blvd.
Suite 620
Los Angeles, CA 90064
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 033299

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HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_033300
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From: Linda Stone
Sent: 6/27/2016 2:03:17 AM
To: Jeffrey Epstein [[email protected]]
Subject: Watching
Importance: High
chomsky's requiem for the American Dream. Fascinating. Brilliant guy.
Separately, trump is not a force for a civil society. EVERY taxi/uber driver I've encountered is FOR him.
really don't get it.
How are you?
xo
co-authored with iPhone auto-correct
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From: Barry Josephson
Sent: 6/27/2016 3:20:09 PM
To: Jeff Epstein [[email protected]]
Subject: FW: Trump Force One Vs. Air Force One
Attachments: F8796710-315E-4988-9D76-F47859C86983[1].png
Importance: High
Funny!
Best,
Barry J
Barry Josephson
Josephson Entertainment
1201 W. 5th St.
Suite F-300
Los Angeles, CA 90017
TIMISON
e rt
From: Niall McCarthy I Statista
Reply-To: Niall McCarthy I Statista
Date: Monday, June 27, 2016 at 7:34 AM
To: Barry Josephson
Subject: Trump Force One Vs. Air Force One
View this email in your browser here.
Chart of the Day - Economy and Society
June 27, 2016
Dear Barry,
When it comes to describing Donald Trump's private jet, the word
"impressive" would be an understatement. The presumptive Republican Party
nominee bought the Boeing 757-200 from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen
and he spared no expense kitting it out. Dubbed "Trump Force One," the
luxurious jet is equipped with a shower, gold-plated seatbelt buckles and a
52-inch flatscreen with a library of 1,000 movies. Built in 1991, the 757 is
estimated to have cost approximately $100 million. If Trump reaches the
White House in November, he'll have to exchange his personal jet for the
presidential fleet, two highly modified Boeing 747-200Bs. The aircraft used by
the president were built in 1986 and operate with the Air Force One callsign
when the president is onboard. Will switching jets prove one of Trump's few
regrets if he becomes president?
Even though it cannot boast gold-plated accessories, Air Force One is a
larger aircraft, seating 70 passengers in comfort compared to Trump Force
..11141,
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One's 43. The presidential jet is also slightly faster with a range of about
6,800 nautical miles compared to 4,100 for a 757. A VC-25A can also be
refuelled in mid-air by a tanker, extending its range even further.
The two presidential planes cost $325 million each and their cost of operation
comes to $179,750 per hour. The hourly cost of operation for a standard 757
is just over $8,000 by comparison, though the taxpayer will pick up the higher
bill for Air Force One. All that bling certainly inflated the cost of Trump Force
One but Air Force One is expensive because it's packed with equipment and
facilities to keep the president and his or her entourage safe at all times.
There is a hospital onboard, electronic countermeasures and heavy shielding
to afford protection in the event of an electromagnetic pulse during a nuclear
attack. All in all, if Trump does end up travelling regularly on Air Force One,
he probably won't regret trading in his gold seatbelt buckle for the presidential
suite on one of the most sophisticated airliners in the world.
https://www.statista.com/chart/5110/tru ... force-one/
+++ Advertisement ++
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 033302
6 Best Practices for Creating Effective Dashboards
If you're not using interactive dashboards to make fast data-driven decisions,
you're missing out! In this whitepaper you'll discover how to build those
dashboards that will transform your data into relevant, actionable, insights.
Download now.
Our charts are intended for public use in online articles and social media. Please feel free to share
them. If you do, we kindly ask you to refer to Statista using the URL given below the respective
chart.
Please feel free to contact me with any questions you may have. For data requests, please use
the search function on the Statista website.
Best regards,
Niall McCarthy
Statista creates infographics about your topic in your corporate design. For information about our
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From: Richard Kahn
Sent: 7/6/2016 8:12:44 PM
To: Darren Indyke ; Jeffrey Epstein [[email protected]]
Subject: Jared Kushner: The Donald Trump I Know I I Observer
Importance: High
http://observer.com/2016/07/jared-kushn ... mp-i-know/
Sent from my iPhone
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Jared Kushner: The Donald Trump I Know. Observer publisher Jared Kushner responds to charges that his father-in-law Donald Trump is anti-Semitic
By Jared Kushner
07/06/16 1:37pm
https://observer.com/2016/07/jared-kush ... mp-i-know/

[x]
Donald Trump is the father of Ivanka Trump, who is married to Observer publisher Jared Kushner.

My father-in-law is not an anti-Semite.

It’s that simple, really. Donald Trump is not anti-Semitic and he’s not a racist. Despite the best efforts of his political opponents and a large swath of the media to hold Donald Trump accountable for the utterances of even the most fringe of his supporters—a standard to which no other candidate is ever held—the worst that his detractors can fairly say about him is that he has been careless in retweeting imagery that can be interpreted as offensive.

I read the Dana Schwartz piece that appeared on Observer.com. As always, there are thoughtful points but journalists, even those who work for me at the Observer, are not always right. While I respect her opinion, I want to show another side to explain why I disagree.

In my opinion, accusations like “racist” and “anti-Semite” are being thrown around with a carelessness that risks rendering these words meaningless.

If even the slightest infraction against what the speech police have deemed correct speech is instantly shouted down with taunts of “racist” then what is left to condemn the actual racists? What do we call the people who won’t hire minorities or beat others up for their religion?

This is not idle philosophy to me. I am the grandson of Holocaust survivors. On December 7, 1941—Pearl Harbor Day—the Nazis surrounded the ghetto of Novogroduk, and sorted the residents into two lines: those selected to die were put on the right; those who would live were put on the left. My grandmother’s sister, Esther, raced into a building to hide. A boy who had seen her running dragged her out and she was one of about 5100 Jews to be killed during this first slaughter of the Jews in Novogrudok. On the night before Rosh Hashana 1943, the 250 Jews who remained of the town’s 20,000 plotted an escape through a tunnel they had painstakingly dug beneath the fence. The searchlights were disabled and the Jews removed nails from the metal roof so that it would rattle in the wind and hopefully mask the sounds of the escaping prisoners.

My grandmother and her sister didn’t want to leave their father behind. They went to the back of the line to be near him. When the first Jews emerged from the tunnel, the Nazis were waiting for them and began shooting. My grandmother’s brother Chanon, for whom my father is named, was killed along with about 50 others. My grandmother made it to the woods, where she joined the Bielski Brigade of partisan resistance fighters. There she met my grandfather, who had escaped from a labor camp called Voritz. He had lived in a hole in the woods—a literal hole that he had dug—for three years, foraging for food, staying out of sight and sleeping in that hole for the duration of the brutal Russian winter.

I go into these details, which I have never discussed, because it’s important to me that people understand where I’m coming from when I report that I know the difference between actual, dangerous intolerance versus these labels that get tossed around in an effort to score political points.

The difference between me and the journalists and Twitter throngs who find it so convenient to dismiss my father in law is simple. I know him and they don’t.

It doesn’t take a ton of courage to join a mob. It’s actually the easiest thing to do. What’s a little harder is to weigh carefully a person’s actions over the course of a long and exceptionally distinguished career. The best lesson I have learned from watching this election from the front row is that we are all better off when we challenge what we believe to be truths and seek the people who disagree with us to try and understand their point of view.

In December 1972, a month after Richard Nixon’s 49-state landslide, the New Yorker’s great film critic Pauline Kael gave a speech that said “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken.” I encourage Ms. Schwartz—and all reporters—to get out there and meet some of those people “outside their ken.” One of the reasons the Observer has more than quadrupled its traffic over the last three-plus years is that we’ve been actively broadening our perspective.

The fact is that my father in law is an incredibly loving and tolerant person who has embraced my family and our Judaism since I began dating my wife. His support has been unwavering and from the heart. I have personally seen him embrace people of all racial and religious backgrounds, at his companies and in his personal life. This caricature that some want to paint as someone who has “allowed” or encouraged intolerance just doesn’t reflect the Donald Trump I know. The from-the-heart reactions of this man are instinctively pro-Jewish and pro-Israel. Just last week, at an event in New Hampshire, an audience member asked about wasting money on “Zionist Israel.” My father-in-law didn’t miss a beat in replying that “Israel is a very important ally of the United States and we are going to protect them 100 percent.” No script, no handlers, no TelePrompter—just a strong opinion from the heart.

There’s real racism in the world. There’s real anti-Semitism in the world. These are pernicious, dispiriting truths. Some of the tweets that Ms. Schwartz has received, depicting her being thrown into an oven, for example, are beyond disgusting. I am appalled that anyone, let alone someone who works for me, would have to endure that kind of hateful rhetoric. But blaming Donald Trump for the most outrageous things done by people who claim to support him is no different from blaming Bernie Sanders for the people who stomp and spit on American flags at his rallies.

I tell people that Donald Trump is a Rorschach test. People see in him what they want to see—if they dislike his politics, they might see other things they dislike, such as racism. If they like his politics, they might imagine they’re hearing “dog whistles.” He will touch subjects politicians try to avoid. This is part of why he appeals to so many.

This notion that has emerged that holds my father in law responsible for the views of everyone who supports him is frankly absurd. Not only is this expectation completely unique to Donald Trump, but it’s clear how easily it could be used to manipulate the public. Don’t like a candidate? Hire some goons to go hold signs in favor of that candidate at a rally. A few months ago, my father in law completely and totally disavowed the support of one of America’s best-known racists. The issue immediately became whether the seconds it took for him to do so proved that he was insufficiently committed to fighting racism. It’s an insane standard.

If my father in law’s fast-moving team was careless in choosing an image to retweet, well part of the reason it’s so shocking is that it’s the actual candidate communicating with the American public rather than the armies of handlers who poll-test ordinary candidates’ every move.

Government is built with many layers to avoid making mistakes. The problem with this is that it costs a lot and little gets done. In business, we empower smart people to get jobs done and give them latitude on how to get there. I prefer to move forward and endure some small mistakes to preserving a stale status quo whose sole virtue is that it offends no one.

America faces serious challenges. A broken economy, terrorism, gaping trade deficits and an overall lack of confidence. Intolerance should be added to that list. I’m confident that my father in law, with his outstanding record of real results, will be successful tackling these challenges. That’s why I support him.

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From: Richard Kahn
Sent: 7/14/2016 5:13:01 PM
To: jeffrey E. [[email protected]]
Subject: good call on pence
Importance: High
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/15/us/po ... ident.html
Richard Kahn
HBRK Associates Inc.
575 Lexington Avenue 4th Floor
New York, NY 10022
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 033305

Donald Trump Postpones Naming Running Mate
By ALEXANDER BURNS, MAGGIE HABERMAN and ASHLEY PARKER
New York Times
JULY 14, 2016
https://web.archive.org/web/20160816001 ... ident.html

[x]
Donald J. Trump at a campaign event in Westfield, Ind., on Tuesday. Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times

Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign signaled strongly on Thursday that he would name Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana as his running mate, but abruptly postponed a long-planned unveiling of the Republican ticket after an attack that left dozens dead in France.

Mr. Trump said on Twitter that he was delaying his announcement after the “horrible attack” in Nice. He did not specify when the event would go forward.

In light of the horrible attack in Nice, France, I have postponed tomorrow's news conference concerning my Vice Presidential announcement.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 14, 2016

Before the attack in southern France, Mr. Pence, a mild-mannered Midwesterner popular with conservatives and evangelical Christians, appeared to be all but locked in as the Republican nominee for vice president — the last man standing after a madcap selection process unlike any in recent presidential politics.

But a certain resolution to the process remained elusive after several days of unusually frenzied and public deliberations by Mr. Trump and his family, as well as extraordinarily overt campaigning for the job by several potential running mates. After huddling with Mr. Pence in Indiana, flying multiple other candidates to Indianapolis for last-minute interviews, hinting to party leaders that his decision had been made and then frantically denying it to the news media, Mr. Trump delayed his decision entirely.

In a television interview, Mr. Trump insisted that he had not settled on a running mate yet. “I haven’t made my final, final decision,” he told Fox News, speaking by telephone.

Against a backdrop of images from Nice, Mr. Trump repeatedly described himself as the “law-and-order candidate” in the presidential race.

Mr. Trump’s advisers told national Republican officials that they were preparing to make an announcement with Mr. Pence, and people close to Mr. Pence notified his political allies that they expected him to be chosen, according to numerous people with knowledge of the conversations, who were not authorized to discuss them publicly.

[x]
National Polling Average
July 14, 2016, 12:58 PM
Hillary Clinton
41%
Donald J. Trump
40%

On Thursday afternoon, television stations in Indiana and New York reported that Mr. Pence had flown from Indiana to Teterboro Airport, arriving in New Jersey late Thursday afternoon for the planned Friday morning event in Midtown Manhattan.

A former congressman and radio host, Mr. Pence emerged over the last week as the strong favorite of Mr. Trump’s political advisers and senior officials in the Republican Party. He addressed a rally in Indiana alongside Mr. Trump on Tuesday night and met privately with him several times.

But Mr. Trump himself has sent conflicting signals in recent days, as he has subjected his potential running mates to a final round of screening. As of Thursday afternoon, he had not yet formally invited Mr. Pence to join his ticket, nor had he notified two other contenders, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, of his decision, according to people with direct knowledge of the process.

Mr. Trump has appeared to vacillate over his choice. Long accustomed to making important strategic decisions by sheer improvisation, he is now faced with the most permanent, and perhaps most important, decision of the campaign.

The delay has the potential to complicate a partnership with Mr. Pence, who must file papers in Indiana by noon on Friday withdrawing from his re-election campaign in order for Republicans to field a new candidate for the race.

[x]
Gov. Mike Pence introduced Mr. Trump at the campaign rally in Westfield, Ind., Tuesday. CreditDamon Winter/The New York Times

On Wednesday, Mr. Trump and his children threw together a hasty series of conversations with other finalists in the vice-presidential search, including Mr. Christie, Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama and Mr. Gingrich.

Paul Manafort, the chairman of the Trump campaign, said at midday Thursday that the campaign had not notified anyone of a final decision.

”We have not been reaching out to Washington to tell them to prepare for any particular candidate,” Mr. Manafort said by phone.

A low-key man largely defined in public life by his Christian faith, Mr. Pence, 57, is seen as a cautious choice — a political partner who is unlikely to embarrass Mr. Trump, and who may help him shore up support among conservative voters still wary of his candidacy.

Mr. Pence’s staunch conservative views on certain social issues, like gay rights and abortion, may inject a new set of concerns into the general election debate that have been largely overlooked with Mr. Trump at the top of the Republican ticket.

Mr. Gingrich, in a video broadcast on Facebook, said Mr. Pence would bring “Midwestern appeal” to the Trump ticket, and would pair Mr. Trump with a “relatively stable, more normal person.”

Mr. Gingrich added that he had told Mr. Trump that a Trump-Gingrich combination would be a bolder pairing of “two pirates” on the same ticket.

Selecting Mr. Pence, by contrast, might ease relations between Mr. Trump and Republicans in Washington, where party leaders have eyed his every move with grave apprehension.

Republicans on Capitol Hill spoke approvingly of Mr. Pence on Thursday: He is seen among his former colleagues there as a conventional politician with standard-issue conservative beliefs, including on some subjects where his policy instincts plainly conflict with Mr. Trump’s.

Mr. Pence has endorsed free-trade agreements, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an Asian trade deal that Mr. Trump has described as a “rape” of the American economy. As a House member, Mr. Pence also voted for the Iraq War, which Trump has condemned, and last winter he denounced Mr. Trump’s call to ban all Muslim immigration into the United States.

If those views place Mr. Pence at odds with Mr. Trump, they are in line with the outlook of Republican leaders in Congress.

“It’s no secret I’m a big fan of Mike Pence’s,” said Paul D. Ryan, the speaker of the House from Wisconsin. “We’re very good friends. I have very high regard for him. I hope that he picks a good movement conservative. Clearly, Mike is one of those.”

The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky, said picking Mr. Pence would be a “good move by Donald Trump.” Mr. McConnell, who has sharply rebuked Mr. Trump in recent weeks for his indiscipline on the campaign trail, said he would “look forward to enthusiastically supporting the ticket.”

To Democrats, Mr. Pence cuts an unimposing profile, and party officials said Thursday they considered him unlikely to transform Mr. Trump’s deeply unpopular public image. On the contrary, his archconservative social views could help motivate liberal voters and young people to turn out for Hillary Clinton in the fall.

At the same time, Democrats have looked with some dismay at Mr. Trump’s tenacity in the Midwest, and at his unusual popularity with white men. Mr. Pence could reinforce Mr. Trump’s strengths in both areas.

The Senate minority leader Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, indicated that the focus of the fall campaign would be Mr. Trump himself.

“It’s not going to help him that much, no matter who he picks,” Mr. Reid said.

For Mr. Trump, selecting Mr. Pence would be a sharp departure from habit, and the surest sign yet that he intends to submit to at least some standard political pressures in the general election.

Mr. Pence’s public audition for the No. 2 spot, when he appeared with Mr. Trump on Tuesday at a rally in Westfield, Ind., went well. Standing ramrod straight, Mr. Pence offered five and a half minutes of high-energy remarks, frequently turning his fire to Hillary Clinton in an apparent attempt to demonstrate that he could be an attack dog against her.

But in the past, Mr. Trump has leaned heavily on a tiny circle of trusted friends and advisers, and has crafted his major political decisions to shock and titillate the news media and Republican primary voters.

Mr. Pence is a laid-back personality who does not have the same set of showman’s instincts as Mr. Trump or other vice-presidential contenders like Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Christie.

And the Indiana governor has only the scantiest of personal relationships with the man whose political future has rapidly melded with his own.

David M. Herszenhorn, Jonathan Martin, Alan Rappeport and Katie Shepherd contributed reporting.

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From: Richard Kahn
Sent: 7/21/2016 12:00:41 PM
To: Jeffrey Epstein [[email protected]]
Subject: Peter Thiel's Embrace of Trump Has Silicon Valley Squirming - NYTimes.com
Importance: High
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/07/21/technology/peter-thiels-embrace-of-trump-has-silicon-valley-
squirming.html?referer=http://www.drudgereport.com/
Sent from my iPhone
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From: Richard Kahn
Sent: 7/25/2016 4:28:09 PM
To: jeffrey E. [[email protected]]
Subject: trump getting RNC bounce...
Importance: High
Monday, July 25
Race/Topic (Click to Sort) Poll Results Spread
General Election: Trump vs. Clinton CNN/ORC Trump 48, Clinton 45 Trump +3
General Election: Trump vs. Clinton CBS News Trump 44, Clinton 43 Trump +1
General Election: Trump vs. Clinton vs. Johnson vs. Stein CNN/ORC Clinton 39, Trump 44, Johnson 9, Stein 3 Trump +5
General Election: Trump vs. CBS News Clinton 39, Trump 40, Johnson 12 Trump +1
Clinton vs. Johnson
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From: Richard Kahn
Sent: 8/9/2016 8:14:10 AM
To: Jeffrey Epstein [[email protected]]
Subject: Trump Could Make the Deal of His Life and Defeat Clinton - Yahoo Finance
Importance: High
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-cou ... 00096.html
Richard Kahn
HBRK Associates Inc.
575 Lexington Avenue, 4th Floor
New York, NY 10022
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HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_033309
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From:
Sent: 8/18/2016 2:09:42 PM
To: Jeffrey Epstein [[email protected]]
Subject: Article on political trends
Importance: High
https : //www. theguardi an. com/news/2016/aug/16/sec ret -hi story-trumpi sm-donal d-trump?CMP=share_btn_tw
Co-authored with i Phone auto-correct
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The dark history of Donald Trump's rightwing revolt. The Republican intellectual establishment is united against Trump – but his message of cultural and racial resentment has deep roots in the American right
by Timothy Shenk
The Guardian
Tue 16 Aug 2016 01.00 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/a ... are_btn_tw

The Republican party, its leaders like to say, is a party of ideas. Debates over budgets and government programmes are important, but they must be conducted with an eye on the bigger questions – questions about the character of the state, the future of freedom and the meaning of virtue. These beliefs provide the foundation for a conservative intellectual establishment – thinktanks such as the American Enterprise Institute, magazines such as National Review, pundits such as George Will and Bill Kristol – dedicated to advancing the right’s agenda.

Over the last year, that establishment has been united by one thing: opposition to Donald Trump. Republican voters may have succumbed to a temporary bout of collective insanity – or so Trump’s critics on the right believe – but the party’s intelligentsia remain certain that entrusting the Republican nomination to a reality television star turned populist demagogue has been a disaster for their cause and their country. Whatever Trump might be, he is not a conservative.

That belief is comforting, but it is wrong. Trump is a unique character, but the principles he defends and the passions he inflames have been part of the modern American right since its formation in the aftermath of the second world war. Most conservative thinkers have forgotten or repressed this part of their history, which is why they are undergoing a collective nervous breakdown today. Like addicts the morning after a bender, they are baffled at the face they see in the mirror.

But not all of the right’s intellectuals have been so blind. While keepers of the conservative flame in Washington and New York repeatedly proclaimed that Trump could never win the Republican nomination, in February a small group of anonymous writers from inside the conservative movement launched a blog that championed “Trumpism” – and attacked their former allies on the right, who were determined to halt its ascent. In recognition of the man who inspired it, they called their site the Journal of American Greatness.

Writing under pseudonyms borrowed from antiquity, such as “Decius”, the masked authors described the site, called JAG by its fans, as the “first scholarly journal of radical #Trumpism”. Posts analysing the campaign with titles such as The Twilight of Jeb! alternated with more ambitious forays in philosophy such as Paleo-Straussianism, Part I: Metaphysics and Epistemology. More intellectually demanding than the typical National Review article, the style of their prose also suggested writers who were having fun. Disquisitions on Aristotle could be followed by an emoji mocking the latest outraged responses to Trump.

The authors at JAG were not all backing Trump himself – officially, they were “electorally agnostic” – but they were united by their enthusiasm for Trumpism (as they put it, “for what Trumpism could become if thought through with wisdom and moderation”). They dismissed commentators who attributed Trump’s victory to his celebrity, arguing that a campaign could not resonate with so many voters unless it spoke to genuine public concerns.

JAG condensed Trumpism into three key elements: economic nationalism, controlled borders and a foreign policy that put American interests first.

These policies, they asserted, were a direct challenge to the views of America’s new ruling class – a cosmopolitan elite of wealthy professionals who controlled the commanding heights of public discourse. This new ruling class of “transnational post-Americans” was united by its belief that the welfare of the world just happened to coincide with programmes that catered to its own self-interest: free trade, open borders, globalisation and a suite of other policies designed to ease the transition to a post-national future overseen by enlightened experts. In the language of JAG, they are the “Davoisie”, a global elite that is most at ease among its international peers at the World Economic Forum in Davos and totally out of touch with ordinary Americans.

Mainstream conservatives and their liberal counterparts were equally complicit in sustaining this regime, but JAG focused its attention on the right. Leading Republican politicians and the journalists who fawned over them in the rightwing press were pedlars of an “intellectually bankrupt” doctrine whose obsessions – cutting taxes, policing sexual norms, slashing government regulation – distracted from “the fundamental question” Trump had put on the agenda: “destruction of the soulless managerial class”.

A dissenting minority has been waging a guerrilla war against the conservative establishment for three decades

JAG unleashed salvo after salvo against “Conservatism Inc”, the network of journals and thinktanks that, along with talk radio and Fox News, has made defending the party of ideas into a lucrative career path. “If Trump ends up destroying the Republican party,” they wrote, “it is because the Republican party, as it exists today, is little more than a jobs programme for failed academics and journalists.”

News of JAG began circulating on the right shortly after its debut early in the primary season. “The first time I heard someone refer to it, I thought it was a joke,” says former George W Bush speechwriter David Frum. But it quickly found an audience. “They got a huge response almost immediately,” says conservative activist Chris Buskirk, who recalled excited emails and frantic texting among his colleagues. In June, the Wall Street Journal columnist and former Ronald Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan alerted her readers to the “sophisticated, rather brilliant and anonymous website”. A link from the popular rightwing website Breitbart News drove traffic even higher, and JAG seemed poised to shape the discussion over the future of conservatism.

Then it disappeared. Months of posts, totalling more than 175,000 words, were scrubbed from the internet, replaced by a note labelling the site an “inside joke” that had spiralled out of control. Within the right, rumours swirled about the real motives behind the vanishing act; fans of JAG took its self-immolation as further evidence that the conservative establishment would not tolerate any dissent. But the brief life of the Journal of American Greatness did more than provide grist for feverish speculation on Twitter. Patrolling the boundaries of acceptable thought on the right has always been one of the central duties of the conservative intellectual, and JAG’s voluntary purging was the latest chapter in a long battle to define the meaning of conservatism.

Conservatives tend to portray their cause as the child of a revolt against the liberal status quo that began in the aftermath of the second world war, gained momentum in the 1950s when a cohort of intellectuals supplied the right with its philosophical underpinning, attained political consciousness in Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign, and won vindication with Ronald Reagan’s election to the White House. Ideas have consequences, they proclaimed. Just look at us.

But there is another way of interpreting the history of the American right, one that puts less emphasis on the power of ideas and more on power itself – a history of white voters fighting to defend their place in the social hierarchy, politicians appealing to the prejudices of their constituents so they can satisfy the wishes of their donors, and the industry that has turned conservatism into a billion-dollar business.

[x]
White segregationist demonstrators protesting in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1959. Photograph: Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images

This is the explanation preferred by leftwing critics, who typically regard the Republican party as a coalition fuelled by white nationalism and funded by billionaires. But this line of attack also has a long history on the right, where a dissenting minority has been waging a guerrilla war against the conservative establishment for three decades. Now the unlikely figure of Donald Trump has brought in a wave of reinforcements – over 13 million in the primaries alone. Their target is the managerial elite, and their history begins in the run-up to the second world war, when a forgotten founder of modern American conservatism became a public sensation with a book that announced the dawning of a civilisation ruled by experts.

The Managerial Revolution: What Is Happening in the World was the most unlikely bestseller of 1941. The author, James Burnham, was a philosophy professor at New York University who until the previous year had been one of Leon Trotsky’s most trusted counsellors in the US. Time called Burnham’s work a grim outline of “the totalitarian world soon to come” that was “as morbidly fascinating as a textbook vivisection”.

The son of a wealthy railway executive, Burnham graduated near the top of his class in Princeton in 1927 before studying at Oxford and then securing his post at NYU. But the Great Depression radicalised him, and he began a double life, lecturing on Aquinas by day and polemicising against capital by night. By 1940, Burnham had lost his faith in the revolution of the proletariat. While Trotsky denounced his erstwhile disciple as an “educated witch doctor”, Burnham started work on the book that would justify his apostasy.

According to Burnham, Marxists were right to anticipate capitalism’s imminent demise but wrong about what would come next. Around the turn of the 20th century, he claimed, the scale of life had changed. Population growth surged, immense corporations gobbled up smaller rivals, and government officials struggled to expand their powers to match the growing size of the challenges they faced.

These structural changes fundamentally altered the distribution of power in society. In the 18th century, authority had rested with aristocrats; in the 19th century with capitalists; in the 20th century it had passed on to the managers, whose authority derived from their unique ability to operate the complex institutions that now dominated mass society.

Technocrats had become the new ruling class. According to Burnham, fascism, Stalinism and Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal were all products of this transformation, and there was no use struggling against the world that was coming into being – a world where state ownership of the means of production had become the norm, where sovereignty had shifted to a bureaucratic elite, and where the globe was divided into rival superstates.

Burnham was not the first to foresee a society run by managers, but the arguments he borrowed from others took on a different meaning when brought together in this form. His sweep was global, his narrative reached back centuries, and he almost seemed to welcome a totalitarian future. For Burnham, the only sensible response to the managerial revolution was to recognise that it had occurred and accept there was no point in trying to bring back a world that was already lost. This bleak forecast captured the public imagination. Fortune called it “the most debated book published so far this year” and it went on to sell more than 200,000 copies.

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William F Buckley Jr collects an honorary doctorate from Yale University, 2000. Photograph: Bob Child/AP

But Burnham quickly moved on to new territory. His true subject, he concluded, was power, and to understand power he needed a theory of politics. Marx had been his guiding influence in The Managerial Revolution; now he turned to Machiavelli, constructing the genealogy of a political theory that began with the author of The Prince and continued into the present.

For a Machiavellian, Burnham wrote, politics was an unending war for dominance: democracy was a myth, and all ideologies were thinly veiled rationalisations for self-interest. The great mass of humanity, in Burnham’s dark vision, would never have any control over their own lives. They could only hope that clashes between rival elites might weaken the power of the ruling class and open up small spaces of freedom.

Burnham’s newfound zeal for defending freedom led him, in 1955, to a conservative magazine called National Review, and to the magazine’s charismatic young founder, William F Buckley Jr. Buckley’s goal was to turn a scattered collection of reactionaries into the seeds of a movement. His journal set out to make the right intellectually respectable, stripping it of the associations with kooks and cranks that allowed liberals to depict it as a politics for cave-dwellers who had not reconciled themselves to modernity. Burnham was there at the start, one of five senior editors on the masthead of the first issue.

Soon Burnham was Buckley’s ranking deputy. But in an editorial staff riven by abstract debates between ardent libertarians and devout Christians, Burnham was the pragmatist who urged his colleagues not to ask politicians for more than the electorate would accept. For the right to win over working-class voters, Burnham argued, the movement had to embrace a more populist economic policy – contrary to the wishes of his anti-statist colleagues and their corporate backers, who wanted to lower taxes on the rich and roll back the welfare state. “Much of conservative doctrine,” Burnham wrote in 1972, “is, if not quite bankrupt, more and more obviously obsolescent.” Less than a decade later, Ronald Reagan was president, and it was Burnham who seemed like a relic of the past.

For a long time, the only major study of Burnham’s work was a slim volume published in 1984 by a minor academic press under the title Power and History. The book’s author, Samuel Francis, seemed a typical product of the insurgent conservative movement Burnham had helped to create – though by the late 1990s, when Francis published an updated version of Power and History, it made more sense to speak of a new conservative establishment. Outsiders who arrived at the White House with Reagan had become senior executives in Conservatism Inc. With the end of the cold war, the right had lost the glue that had bound its coalition, but there were still battles to be waged, and the money was better than ever.

Francis was never going to become a star in the emerging rightwing infotainment complex. Shy and overweight, with teeth stained from smoking, he had difficulty making it through cocktail parties. After completing a PhD in British history at the University of North Carolina, Francis left academia for Washington – first working at a rightwing thinktank, then serving as an aide to a Republican senator, and finally joining the editorial staff of the capital’s influential conservative daily newspaper, the Washington Times.

Francis retained his academic interests while he ascended into the ranks of the conservative establishment. He published six books in his lifetime, but he worked in private on one massive volume that he hoped would bring together all the disparate strands of his thought. Finished in 1995 but not discovered until after his death a decade later, the result was published earlier this year under the title Leviathan and Its Enemies. It is a sprawling text, more than 700 pages long, digressive, repetitive and in desperate need of an editor.

It is also one of the most impressive books to come out of the American right in a generation – and the most frightening. It is a searching diagnosis of managerial society, written by an author looking for a strategy that could break it apart.

Like much of Francis’s writing, Leviathan and Its Enemies began with Burnham – in this case, quite literally. “This book,” Francis announced in the first sentence, “is an effort to revise and reformulate the theory of the managerial revolution as advanced by James Burnham in 1941.”

Paleoconservatives depicted themselves as spokesmen for the forgotten residents of flyover country

Francis agreed that society had been taken over by managers, but he believed the new ruling class was far more vulnerable than Burnham had realised. Not everyone had benefited from the rise of the experts – and Francis saw this unequal distribution of rewards as the managerial regime’s greatest weakness.

For reasons he never quite explained, he insisted that the cosmopolitan elite threatened the traditional values cherished by most Americans: “morality and religion, family, nation, local community, and at times racial integrity and identity”. These were sacred principles for members of a new “post-bourgeois proletariat” drawn from the working class and the lower ranks of the middle class. Lacking the skills prized by technocrats, but not far enough down the social ladder to win the attention of reformers, these white voters considered themselves victims of a coalition between the top and bottom against the middle.

According to Francis, this cohort had supplied the animating spirit of rightwing politics since the death of Franklin Roosevelt in 1945. They had supported Goldwater – but Francis regarded Goldwater’s programme, like the “movement conservatism” of the National Review, as a “quaintly bourgeois” throwback to the oligarchic politics of the 19th century, with nothing to offer the modern working man. Their tribune was not Goldwater but George Wallace, the notorious segregationist and Democratic governor of Alabama – who won five southern states as an anti-civil rights third-party candidate in the 1968 presidential election. Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan had appealed to this group, too, but neglected their interests after taking office. Despite having elected multiple presidents, the post-bourgeois proletariat had yet to find a voice.

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Third-party presidential candidate George Wallace campaigns in Boston, 1968. Photograph: AP

Yet Francis had difficulty explaining why managerial society would generate so much opposition in the first place. In Leviathan and Its Enemies, he argued that resistance to the cosmopolitan elite would be driven by “immutable elements of human nature” that “necessitate attachment to the concrete and historical roots of moral values and meaning”.

He was more candid in a speech he gave while working on the book. “What we as whites must do,” he declared, “is reassert our identity and our solidarity, and we must do so in explicitly racial terms through the articulation of a racial consciousness as whites.” Where mainstream conservatives depicted the US as a nation whose diverse population was linked by devotion to its founding principles, Francis viewed it as a racial project inextricably bound up with white rule. The managerial revolution jeopardised this racial hierarchy, and so it must be overthrown.

Francis delivered his remarks on racial consciousness at a conference organised by American Renaissance, an obscure journal devoted to promoting white nationalism. Years earlier, Francis had struck up a friendship with Jared Taylor, who went on to found the magazine with Francis’s encouragement. From their first encounter, Taylor recalled, he and Francis “understood each other immediately”.

Francis’s employers at the Washington Times were not as sympathetic. The paper fired him after his comments were released, a move that was part of his larger expulsion from the respectable right. Buckley himself dismissed Francis as “spokesman” for a group that had “earned their exclusion from thoughtful conservative ranks”.

Yet Francis would not be so easily purged. For years he had cultivated a relationship with Pat Buchanan, a one-time Nixon protege who had become one of the country’s most recognisable conservatives thanks to his role as co-host of CNN’s popular debating programme Crossfire. In 1992, Buchanan launched a long-shot campaign against incumbent president George HW Bush that, against all expectations, garnered almost 3m votes in the primaries. While all this was going on, Buchanan was growing closer to Francis, whom he later called “perhaps the brightest and best thinker on the right”.

Francis and Buchanan were linked by their association with a breakaway faction on the right known as paleoconservatism. While mainstream conservatives had taken advantage of cushy gigs in New York and Washington, paleocons depicted themselves as spokesmen for the forgotten residents of flyover country. Francis urged Buchanan to make another run for the White House in 1996, this time as the candidate of the post-bourgeois resistance. That campaign would be based on three issues: protectionism, opposition to immigration and an “America First” foreign policy that repudiated global commitments and foreign interventions in order to focus on defending the national interest.

Buchanan listened, and he went on to a surprise win in New Hampshire’s pivotal early primary, convincing Francis that the managerial elite was more vulnerable than at any point in his lifetime. While mainstream Republicans and Democrats celebrated forecasts that the US population was on track to become less than 50% white as a sign of America’s capacity to adapt and grow, Francis believed that the members of his post-bourgeois proletariat regarded these shifting demographics as another reminder of their dwindling power.

Buchanan’s campaign fizzled after New Hampshire, but Francis had a ready explanation for the collapse: Buchanan was too loyal to the Republican party to seize the opportunity he had been granted. “Don’t even use the word ‘conservative,’” Francis told Buchanan. “It doesn’t mean anything any more.” The managerial class had absorbed Buckley and his followers. They, too, were the enemy.

After Buchanan’s defeat and his own exile from mainstream conservatism, Francis devoted himself to what he called “racialpolitik”. He was a regular contributor to outlets promoting white racial consciousness – becoming, in Jared Taylor’s words, “the intellectual leader of a small but growing movement”. Francis denied that he was a white supremacist, but he condemned interracial sex, warned of “incipient race war” and drafted a manifesto for a white nationalist group arguing: “The American people and government should remain European in their composition and character.”

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Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan at the Cross Roads of the West gun show in Phoenix, Arizona, 1996. Photograph: Jim Bourg/Reuters

When he looked ahead, Francis was especially concerned with the threat that one rising political star posed to his vision of the future. Barack Obama, he remarked in 2004, was “the model of what the New American is supposed to be”. Ivy League-educated, effortlessly cosmopolitan, promising to transcend barriers of race – Obama was the embodiment of the managerial elite. He represented everything Francis loathed about the contemporary United States.

The fact that Obama, Francis’s symbol for American decadence, became one of the most popular figures in the country brought the great contradiction of his thought into relief. The 19th century belonged to the bourgeoisie and the 20th century to the managers, he argued, because these rising classes had performed necessary social functions. His post-bourgeois proletariat, by contrast, were on the decline.

So was Francis. The supposed realist who cast hunger for power as the driving force of world history spent most of his time writing for journals with subscribers in the low five figures. In his last years, he was a lonely man. Before his sudden death from a cardiac aneurism in 2005, he had begun a study of conservatism and race. His masterpiece, Leviathan and Its Enemies, was still tucked away in a box of floppy disks; when it was published 11 years later, it would be under the auspices of a white-nationalist press. The right-leaning Washington Examiner ran one of his few obituaries. “Sam Francis,” it said, “was merely a racist and doesn’t deserve to be remembered as anything less.” It seemed just as likely that Francis would not be remembered at all.

“I want you to really listen to this,” Rush Limbaugh told his listeners in January this year. The king of rightwing talk radio was lecturing his audience, which averages around 13 million people a week, on Samuel Francis. Prompted by a magazine article casting Francis as the prophet of Trumpism, Limbaugh read aloud from one of Francis’s post-mortems on the Buchanan campaign. “What’s interesting,” Limbaugh said, “is how right on it is in foretelling Trump.” Before abandoning the subject, he added one point. Francis, Limbaugh noted, “later in life suffered the – acquired the – reputation of being a white supremacist”, a reputation Limbaugh insisted was undeserved.

The white nationalists who rallied to Francis in the last decade of his life disagree on that point, but they also see Trump as a vindication of their longtime inspiration. “Sam would have said that Trump is doing exactly what he advised Patrick Buchanan to do,” maintains Jared Taylor, who made news in the primary season when it was revealed that he had recorded automated phone messages endorsing Trump. (“White Supremacist Robocall Heartily Urges Iowa Voters to Support Trump,” reported a headline in the conservative Daily Caller.) According to Taylor’s American Renaissance, “Francis would be very pleased to see the GOP and conservative establishments mocked and destroyed.”

Even liberal commentators are looking back at Francis – whose prediction of a white working-class backlash against a globalist ruling elite seems to be coming true not just in the US but across Europe. “If you just drop the white nationalism a lot of Francis makes sense,” says Michael Lind, who once worked as an assistant to Buckley but now describes himself as a “radical centrist”. According to Lind, conservatives have been “spurning their natural constituency – the mostly white working class”, creating space for the rise of Trump.

Francis was also an inspiration for the team at the Journal of American Greatness, who called him “the closest thing to what could be described as the source of Trumpian thought” in their very first post. They admitted that Francis’s writing “overtly indulges various Southern nostalgias”, but insisted that his “deservedly criticised statements on race” could be separated from the core of his analysis. The managerial class was still the enemy, and only Trump seemed even dimly aware of what it would take to mount an effective challenge.

The authors of JAG looked at the problems facing the US and concluded that Donald Trump might be the answer

But the authors at JAG wanted to do more than add chapters to the history Francis had already sketched. While they remain anonymous, sources have identified them as part of a conservative establishment located outside the Washington-New York axis that dominates the intellectual life of the American right – probably associated with the California-based Claremont Institute and the midwestern Hillsdale College.

Trump the candidate, they admitted, was at best an imperfect messenger. But it was the message that counted: “The American regime – like nearly all its cousins in the west – has devolved into an oligarchy.” JAG was not just arguing that Trump’s campaign had a coherent agenda – a controversial assertion, given that many on both the left and right have dismissed Trump as an unhinged demagogue jabbing randomly at pressure points in the electorate. It was arguing that Trump succeeded because of his platform. Without those ideas, he would have been just another novelty candidate. Armed with them, any of Trump’s more disciplined rivals might have stolen the nomination from him – but instead they opted for recycled bromides from the Reagan era.

The site could be fiery in its defence of Trump, but the best moments came when its targets were the grandees of the right. There are plenty of scathing articles about rightwing thinktanks written from the left, but none of their authors could write a sentence such as “Seeing conservatives court billionaires – which I have had occasion to do dozens, if not hundreds, of times – is like watching dorks tell cheerleaders how pretty they are.”

For all that, the authors of JAG were still thinkers who looked at the problems facing the US and concluded that Donald Trump might be the answer. They denounced conservatives for accepting “the leftist lie” that having a “natural affinity for people who look, think and speak” alike “is shameful and illegitimate”. “The ceaseless importation of people unaccustomed to liberty,” they wrote – referring to “mass third world immigration” – “makes the American people less fit for liberty every day”. Islam was a subject of particular concern. “What good,” they asked, “has Muslim immigration done for the United States and the American people?” Francis would have approved.

With its archive deleted, JAG’s internet presence is now confined to the occasional mournful tweet from one of its former readers, but the problems it identified on the right are more glaring than ever. “The conservative movement’s mission has become providing comfortable professional livelihoods to literally hundreds of people,” David Frum told me recently. Although this behemoth has proved effective at turning a profit, the intellectual returns on the investment have been paltry. “Conservatism was a lot more creative and effective when it had less money,” Frum said.

This narrowing of intellectual ambitions has coincided with a crisis of authority. When asked to name the dominant theme of the right’s intellectual history since George W Bush left office, conservative journalist Michael Brendan Dougherty responded with one word: “disintegration”. Buckley has been dead for the better part of a decade, and no successor has emerged with the clout to take up his role as arbiter of the true faith.

Meanwhile, the little magazines that once set the tempo of debate have struggled to maintain their influence in the age of social media. “Twenty years ago if you got the summer internship at National Review you were high-fiving everyone you knew,” one conservative activist told me. “That was like getting the Goldman Sachs internship. You were set.”

Charles Kesler, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute and professor at nearby Claremont McKenna College, sees a generational change underway. His best students, he says, used to seek out three paths: some went into academia, others into politics, and a third group tried to navigate a path between the two as writers for middlebrow journals such as National Review. But that middle ground has eroded in the last decade, Kesler says. Now many feel “revulsion” at the state of public debate and take refuge in academia – or they succumb to a “populist tug” and end up at rightwing clickbait factories such as Breitbart News. That pull will only grow stronger now that Trump has shown how little influence establishment conservatives have over the constituency they claim to represent.

In Washington, a policy-minded cohort dubbed the reformicons has become the great hope for conservatives planning their response to the rise of Trump. Long before this year’s campaign, they had begun to devise a more populist agenda to appeal to the working-class voters who have become an increasingly significant part of the Republican electorate. With an eye to the future, they are also convinced that Republicans need to reject Trump’s brand of white identity politics if it hopes to win elections in a country becoming more diverse by the day.

From the reformicon perspective, Trump represents a pathological response to the legitimate complaints of voters whose concerns have been overlooked for too long. The challenge for savvy Republican politicians is to convert the impulses that have propelled Trump’s rise into a platform that can appeal to a multiracial coalition.

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Donald Trump speaks at the Republican national convention in Cleveland, Ohio, July 2016. Photograph: Mike Segar/Reuters

Yet the well-intentioned reforming wonks have struggled to find an audience outside the capital. Part of the problem is financial. “There’s no money from rich donors even for reasonable populism,” says Michael Lind. To the ears of conservative billionaires, pleas for economic policies that appeal to workers sound like the prelude to tax hikes on the wealthy. For a Washington-based movement offering what the sceptics at JAG called “managerialism with a human face”, a lack of wealthy donors is a potentially fatal obstacle.

Of all the forces unleashed by the rise of Trump, the one that may pose the greatest threat to the relevance of the conservative intellectual establishment is the gleefully offensive movement known as the alt-right. Nurtured by online forums such as Reddit and 4chan, along with white-nationalist standbys such as American Renaissance, the alt-right has become a vehicle for the simmering anger of mostly white and mostly young men – with strong links to the earlier varieties of racialpolitik promoted by Francis, who is sometimes cited as a founder of the alt-right. Mainstream conservatives have reacted with shock and horror to this development. “The nasty mouth-breathers Buckley expelled from conservatism have returned,” declared a typical response from Commentary, one of the major journals of the establishment right.

But the new iconoclasts of the alt-right can’t be purged from a conservative movement they have no desire to join, especially when they can reach an audience of millions on social media. If there is an heir today to the young William F Buckley – who launched his career with exuberant attacks on the hypocrisy of the liberal establishment and managed to make conservatism look like a stylish rebellion against the powers-that-be – it might be someone like Milo Yiannopoulos, a professional provocateur who has become a spokesman for the alt-right. At one typical event this spring, Yiannopoulos, who refers to Trump as “Daddy”, delivered a lecture with the title Feminism Is Cancer after being ushered into the auditorium on a throne held aloft by students wearing “Make America Great Again” hats. Yiannopoulos’s critics are rightly concerned that his main agenda is promoting himself, but Brand Milo is a booming business.

The future looks more precarious for the guardians of True Conservatism. They have strong support from leading figures in the Republican party such as Paul Ryan, and retain control over an infrastructure of donors, thinktanks and journals. A landslide defeat for Trump could still revive their cause, but they could just as easily be swept aside by a rising generation of rightwing activists with a more Trumpian set of concerns.

Their brand of conservatism won’t disappear, but it could become more a curiosity than a movement, as it was in the days before the birth of the modern right over half a century ago. “The whole Buckley experiment may have been a passing phase,” says Lind – a strange interlude when a cohort of writers mistook their ideological preferences for the will of the people and, even stranger, provided the basis for an industry based on that delusion. The anxiety that its time has passed lurks underneath all the conservative establishment’s impassioned denunciations of Trump: a fear that his unprecedented victory in the Republican primary has demonstrated it is already obsolete. “I’m a conservative,” Trump said in April, “but at this point who cares?”

But Trump may have unintentionally pointed the way for a new kind of American conservatism, driven by resentment at the globalist diktats of the hated managerial class. Over the last year, that anger has emerged in surprising venues. In language that Francis would have recognised, the billionaire PayPal co-founder and Silicon Valley guru Peter Thiel declared that America is no longer a democracy – since it has become a country “dominated by very unelected, technocratic agencies”.

Thiel has been an outspoken libertarian since his days as an undergraduate at Stanford in the 1980s, and in 2008 he supplied $500,000 for an attempt to create manmade islands that would provide an “escape from politics in all its forms”, but lately he has started to associate himself with a different crowd. In July, following an outpouring of criticism, he cancelled a planned appearance in front of a group that has provided a meeting ground for libertarians and white nationalists, including Francis’s close friend Jared Taylor. But a similar public outcry did not persuade him to drop another speaking engagement earlier that month: a speech on the final night of the Republican national convention, where he had come as a delegate to cast his vote for Donald Trump.

[admin]

HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_033310
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https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/9bq6uj0p ... tracking=1

From: Richard Kahn
Sent: 9/13/2016 5:36:29 PM
To: jeffrey E. [[email protected]]
Subject: LinkedIn's Hoffman Offers $5 Million for Trump's Tax Returns
Importance: High
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/ ... ump-s-tax-
returns
Richard Kahn
HBRK Associates Inc.
575 Lexington Avenue 4th Floor
New York, NY 10022
HOUSE OVERSIGHT 033310

LinkedIn’s Hoffman Offers $5 Million for Trump’s Tax Returns
by Sarah Frier
bloomberg
September 12, 2016 at 2:53 PM PDT
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... ax-returns

• He’ll quintuple money raised by Marine for veterans groups
• Trump must release tax returns by Oct. 19 to trigger giving

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Reid Hoffman. Photographer: Noah Berger/Bloomberg

LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman is the latest Silicon Valley heavyweight to get his money involved in politics. He’s offering to donate as much as $5 million to veterans if Republican nominee Donald Trump releases his tax returns in time for the final presidential debate.

Hoffman, who is chairman of LinkedIn Corp. and a partner at venture capital firm Greylock Partners, saw a crowdfunding challenge by a 26-year-old Marine Corps veteran, Pete Kiernan, who said he would donate any of the money raised to nonprofits that assist veterans if Trump releases his returns by Oct. 19, the date of the final debate. If Kiernan meets or beats his $25,000 target, Hoffman will match the total amount by five times, up to $5 million, he said in a post on Medium.

“There’s no real reason that Trump is keeping his returns secret, except that he sees them as a bargaining chip to utilize,” Hoffman wrote. “As Trump skirts his obligation to the American people, we must show him that we do value accountability and transparency.”

Hoffman didn’t say which candidate he supports, but appealed to Trump’s claims as a supporter of veterans. His pledge comes a few days after Facebook Inc. co-founder Dustin Moskovitz said he would commit $20 million to helping Democrats in the election, including presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. Moskovitz said it was his first open endorsement and donation to a candidate for president.

“We hope these efforts make it a little more likely that Secretary Clinton is able to pursue the agenda she’s outlined, and serve as a signal to the Republican Party that by running this kind of campaign -- one built on fear and hostility -- and supporting this kind of candidate, they compel people to act in response,” Moskovitz said, also in a post on Medium.

In July, more than 100 technology leaders signed a letter naming Trump a “disaster for innovation.” Twitter Inc. co-founder Ev Williams, Box Inc. Chief Executive Officer Aaron Levie and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla were among those endorsing the letter, which said Trump’s views on immigration, internet security and government investment would stifle the technology industry and divide the nation. Facebook board member Peter Thiel is one of the few Silicon Valley leaders to have publicly supported Trump so far.

Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg and Tesla and SpaceX co-founder Elon Musk are also among supporters of Clinton in Silicon Valley. In his post, Moskovitz hinted that others may become vocal. “We are not the only ones being activated so strongly during this election.”