Trump is Controlled Opposition (and mystery of Teneo Strategy LLC )
Part 1, What I got Right:
Part 2, What I got wrong:
Part 3, The DNC, Citigroup, and Trump’s Birth Certificate Crusade:
Part 4: The Rest of the World (where the non-white people live) and the Future of Reality Television Democracy
Part 1, What I got Right:
On April 5th 2017, after Steve Bannon was removed from the National Security Council, I hurriedly wrote “How Chelsea Clinton and Ivanka Trump took over Washington (and why nobody will cover the Teneo Scandal)” because I wanted to have myself on record as quickly as possible. This article has unfortunately proven to be prescient:
Two days later, on April 7th, the United States bombed Shayrat Airbase in Syria. Almost immediately the Trump family identified Ivanka Trump as a decisive factor.
In late May, President Trump took a 180 degree turn from his 2016 campaign rhetoric, planning his first foreign trip for Saudi Arabia.
“Trump, by contrast, will visit Saudi Arabia, following some groundwork laid by key advisors including Jared Kushner, Dina Powell, and Defense Secretary James Mattis. The Emiratis want the president’s visit to go well and for the administration to send a clear message on behalf of the United States that the country stands by its Sunni Gulf partners against Iranian malign activity in the region”
“‘I think there’s an enormous opportunity in Saudi Arabia to bring the whole Arab world together,’ said U.S. Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) , chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who met last week with other senior members of the committee and national security advisor H.R. McMaster, deputy national security advisor Dina Powell and senior advisor Jared Kushner to discuss the visit.”
After cutting an arms and infrastructure deal with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates worth several hundred billion dollars, the Saudi and the UAE governments agreed to give a small fraction of a penny on the dollar to Ivanka’s women’s fund.
In my April 5th article, I explained that Dina Powell’s “10,000 Women” initiative at Goldman Sachs was a PR operation to help rebuild the bank’s reputation after it attempted to break even on the housing market collapse by defrauding and siphoning money from its own investors. Powell’s role in the Saudi-Emirati deal followed an all too familiar PR pattern. Soon after the deal was cut, Saudi Arabia and the UAE began a blockade of Qatar. This crisis in the Persian Gulf remains unresolved three months later.
Several weeks before the blockade began, I identified Trump’s connections to Dubai as particularly troublesome.
Bannon and his allies are gone from the White House and have been replaced by the team I predicted would take over. It’s also the team that Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman publicly endorsed in the Washington Post just prior to Trump’s Saudi Arabia trip:
“rather than building a team of professionals who can check the president’s impulsive behavior and worst instincts, the president has surrounded himself with a squad of enablers. There are talented individuals working at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, such as National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn, national security adviser H.R. McMaster and his deputy, Dina Powell. But too many key roles are filled by people whose talent seems to be damage enhancement rather than damage control.”
Despite the flurry of high profile firings that have marked the first seven months of the The Apprentice Washington DC, the friends of the Clintons remain protected. Generals McMaster, Mattis, and Kelly “convinced” the president to let the Armed Forces and the National Intelligence services take the wheel, while Clinton acolytes from Goldman Sachs play the heroes who slay alt-right dragons — while also continuing to fix problems for the president. Why has Trump’s White House become a hub for Pentagon officials and Clinton/Bush public relations agents who enjoy bipartisan support in Washington? Why have Podesta’s three favorites outlasted the likes of Priebus, Bannon, Gorka, Spicer, etc.? Why are the Clinton-Bush contestants still on a show that had no room for early campaign allies like Christie and Gingrich?
When I wrote “How Chelsea Clinton and Ivanka Trump took over Washington (and why nobody will cover the Teneo Scandal)”, it was clear to me that the Trumps and Clintons made some sort of friendly deal pertaining to their mutual political aspirations, at some point. The last five months have confirmed my suspicions.
Though some in the right-wing American press have examined Teneo, no one will cover the global consulting firm’s ties to the Trump administration. For that reason, and because of a crucial mistake I made in the timeline; I’m compelled to re-examine Teneo’s role in American electoral politics and global geopolitics.
Part 2, What I got Wrong:
Officially, Teneo was founded on June 15th 2011 at Citigroup Center in New York City. Secretly, Teneo Strategy Consulting was founded as a Limited Liability Company in November 2009. By over-looking this nineteen month gap, I missed a turbulent time frame with far-ranging implications. Let’s start with the real formation of Teneo shortly after Declan Kelly was appointed to lead as US economic envoy to Ireland.
This article by Huffington Post Washington Bureau Chief Ryan Grim was published two days (TWO DAYS!) after Doug Band’s panicked November 2011 email to Secretary Clinton’s current Chief of Staff and future Campaign Chairman:
The story Doug Band didn’t want to get out wasn’t just that Chelsea Clinton found the interim audit report for the Clinton Foundation and blabbed about it to one the Bush daughters. It was also that Teneo Strategy was celebrating its two year anniversary nineteen months too early.
Before Richard Powell became president of Teneo Strategy, before he hired Trump Campaign Communications adviser Jason Miller, and before his wife Dina Powell became America’s first ever Deputy National Security Adviser “For Strategy” in the Trump administration, Teneo Strategy Consulting LLC was privately cutting deals across the globe. Today Teneo has seventeen offices worldwide. Two of them are in Dublin.
“Michael Coakley, senior vice-president of Teneo’s strategy team, was an adviser on that U.S bid as well as Qatar’s unsuccessful bid to host the 2020 Olympic Games.
The co-president of Teneo’s sports division, Terrence Burns, has worked on a number of sports event bid proposals including the successful Russian bid to host the 2018 World Cup.”
Teneo: global reputation experts who will work for anyone; secretly operating as an LLC since 2009:
“Organisations, and their leaders, operate in an increasingly challenging environment.
Teneo Blue Rubicon intimately understands this, and provides comprehensive strategic advisory services addressing complex business and reputational challenges. We support chief executives, their boards, and the communications, corporate affairs, investor relations, and marketing teams of the world’s largest organisations. Our consultancy delivers a material contribution to sustained growth, sector differentiation and improved valuation.
We meet the growing demand from business leaders for comprehensive, strategic advice to inform sound business decisions. At the centre of this is understanding how to build, maintain and transform reputations.”
In June 2016 I wrote a short-lived blog “Solipsistopia”, before the conventions, before the DNC leaks, before the Podesta leaks, and before Trump said “Russia, if you’re listening…”
Though I assumed Trump would win the election, there’s a lot in Solipsistopia that doesn’t age well. I wasn’t being cynical enough:
“The Huffington Post spent nearly five months covering the Trump presidential campaign in their Entertainment section in order to ‘not’ take his bait, then blamed ‘the media’ for empowering him by failing to take him seriously.”
News outlets like The Huffington Post did not ‘accidentally’ elevate Donald Trump to the GOP nomination; they did so as part of a deliberate coordinated effort to help ensure that the Clinton campaign would face one of the beatable “Pied Piper” candidates (as revealed by the DNC leaks in July 2016).
Though Politico calls this a year long effort to make Trump the Republican nominee, the truth is that team Clinton and their friends at the DNC had many years to prepare a strategy that would distract the public if/when damaging information came out during the election. What better plan than having Trump build a reputation as the perfect enemy of modern left politics?
Part 3, The DNC, Citigroup, and Trump’s Birth Certificate Crusade:
Officially, Teneo was founded on the ten year anniversary of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (essentially the Russian-Chinese version of NATO). Teneo is undeniably intertwined with Russia and China’s trade union BRICS, boasting offices in Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong, and Sao Paulo.
I previously reported Teneo’s connections to the Russia government via Andy Somers, but there’s much more:
It may be a coincidence that Teneo falsely claims the ten year anniversary of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization as its startup date. However, the nineteen month gap between the founding of Teneo Strategy LLC and the opening of their worldwide headquarters in New York City presents a multitude of other “coincidences”. For all appearances, Teneo wasn’t “born in America”. It was created in Ireland by members of Secretary Clinton’s State Department. But let’s back up to 2008.
A month before Barack Obama was elected president, an executive from Citigroup contacted Hillary Clinton’s future Campaign Chairman to say who would be in Senator Obama’s White House cabinet. Citigroup’s list was almost completely accurate. Obama was given three choices for Treasury Secretary, all of whom served in Bill Clinton’s treasury department.
In January 2009, Hillary Clinton’s future running-mate became the new DNC Chairman.
Then in November 2009, Teneo Strategy Consulting LLC was quietly founded:
One year later, the aforementioned Co-President of Teneo Sports Terrence Burns helped Russia and Qatar secure the 2018 and 2022 World Cups.
Burns would go on to consult for the Los Angeles Olympic bid.
But back to Tim Kaine and the Teneo coincidences. Nine months into Kaine’s tenure as DNC Chair, Teneo Strategy Consulting was formed on the down-low. Then in March of 2011, Donald Trump began his campaign to pressure Obama into releasing his long-form birth certificate.
“senior adviser Jason Miller said in a statement Trump had compelled Obama to release his birth certificate in 2011 to dispel questions about the fact he was born in Hawaii in 1961.”
Three months after Jason Miller made that statement, he was hired by Teneo Strategy.
In 2011 when Trump took to the airwaves to challenge Obama to release his long form birth certificate, Tim Kaine resigned as DNC Chair. Then Donna Brazile became interim DNC Chair. It was during this brief interim period that President Obama held a public press conference to release his long form birth certificate.
A week later, Debbie Wasserman Schultz was elected DNC Chairwoman. Six weeks after that, Teneo had its public founding at the Citigroup Center, nineteen months after Teneo Strategy Consulting LLC had actually begun its reputation management work.
We now know that Wasserman Schultz and the Clinton campaign conspired from the start to preclude any and all outcomes besides a Clinton nomination. Judge William Zloch writes:
“The Court thus assumes that the DNC and Wasserman Schultz preferred Hillary Clinton as the Democratic candidate for president over Bernie Sanders or any other Democratic candidate. It assumes that they stockpiled information useful to the Clinton campaign. It assumes that they devoted their resources to assist Clinton in securing the party’s nomination and opposing other Democratic candidates. And it assumes that they engaged in these surreptitious acts while publically proclaiming they were completely neutral, fair, and impartial.”
Judge Zloch’s ruling effectively grants political parties the right to rig their primaries, regardless of what’s written in their charters. Primary donors do not have legal standing to challenge primary rigging, nor does any court have jurisdiction. According to Judge Zloch, anyone who objects to the DNC rigging the 2016 Presidential primary can voice their displeasure by using their free speech or by voting for another party. Zloch’s ruling is unambiguous: the delegates can privately pick the nominee of their choice regardless of who the voters want. The DNC charter is a series of political promises, not a set of legally binding rules.
The DNC Fraud Lawsuit dismissal was then buried, released just hours before Hurricane Harvey made landfall in Texas (and the same day President Trump pardoned Sheriff Arpaio and fired Sebastian Gorka).
In other words, a Federal Judge ruled that the 2016 Presidential Primary was rigged, but there’s nothing illegal about that — and Trump responded by helping the DNC bury the story. This fits a pattern. Three days (THREE DAYS!) after Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned as DNC Chairwoman in the wake of the DNC email release by Wikileaks, Trump publicly asked Russian hackers to help him win the election. And once again, Donna Brazile took over as interim DNC chairwoman.
Given all of this, it’s only logical to ask what Teneo Strategy Consulting LLC knew about the DNC’s collusion with the Clintons and about Trump’s birth certificate controversy. Teneo COO Paul Keary donated to Debbie Wasserman Schultz during the same election cycle when Trump suddenly became birth-certificate obsessed and stopped donating to Democrats.
“Clinton, the Democratic front-runner and former New York senator who had some say over policy that could have impacted Trump’s vast business dealings, received donations from both him and son Donald Trump Jr. on separate occasions in 2002, 2005, 2006 and 2007, according to state and federal disclosure records.
Trump has also been generous with the Clinton Foundation, donating at least $100,000, according to the non-profit…
Beginning with the 2012 cycle, however, financial disclosures show that Trump has donated exclusively to Republican candidates and groups.”
I’ve long wondered why President Obama gave in to future President Trump by releasing his long-form birth certificate just before the start of the Republican primaries. But there’s another question that the preceding information begs: what if Trump had guessed right? What would have happened in the 2012 presidential election? I think the answer is all too obvious: Donald Trump would have been the Republican nominee four years earlier, and Hillary Clinton would have resigned from the state department to primary challenge President Joe Biden in the midst of a constitutional crisis (with the benefit of allies Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Donna Brazile at the DNC). It would have been Clinton vs. Trump in 2012.
Limited Liability Companies (LLC) are structured to insulate their members and owners from being held responsible for the company’s actions. The mystery of those nineteen months of Teneo Strategy Consulting LLC holds the key to understanding the origins of Donald Trump as a controlled opposition candidate for the Clintons. But as a wrote five months ago, no one in the press will cover this story…
Part 4: The Rest of the World (where the non-white people live) and the Future of Reality Television Democracy
Stop me if you’ve heard this joke before:
An Egyptian, an Indian, and a Jew walk into a bar.
The Egyptian says: The Saudi and Emirati governments love women!
The Indian says: Death to Russia! Death to Iran! Death to North Korea!
The Jew says: Do as I say, or else Goldman Sachs will crash the economy!
The Bartender says: Who the hell are you guys?
The Egyptian, Indian, and Jew say in unison: Trump hired us. We’re the Resistance!
This is a better joke than the punch-line I predicted in Solipsistopia about a Haitian-American running-mate and Trump-Love campaign posters.
Nikki Haley gets to play the Colin Powell role from the George W. Bush administration, lending social credibility to the White House’s push for increased military presence in the Middle East and Asia. She’s the public face.
Privately, Dina Powell has been one of the most powerful people in Washington DC for more than a decade. She was responsible for staffing virtually the entire Bush white house, before going to Goldman Sachs to earn a Black-Belt in identity politics. And now she consults for Trump…
She embodies the type of enemy I began publicly warning about in June 2016. I first learned who she was about three weeks before I published “How Chelsea and Ivanka took over Washington”:
An anonymous twitter user named “Alan Smithee” has taught me more about politics than the combined wisdom of the “Resistance” press. Smithee got my attention last summer simply by posting this July 2014 interview with Donna Brazile.
“What’s your feeling about Hillary running?
Technically, I’m neutral, but neutrality is something that gets you in trouble because, you ever notice someone who stands on the white line in the middle of the road? They get run over. And I don’t want to get run over. So I’m not neutral. I have to tell people that I’m neutral, but I’m ready for Hillary.
You know this recorder is on?
I know. I saw you turn it on. I know those gadgets.”
Richard Powell, Dina Powell, Jason Miller, and the rest of their friends at Teneo Strategy are the Reality Television producers for modern American democracy, working behind the scenes to ensure the daily news narrative goes as planned.
As Americans “punched Nazis” during the summer of 2017, most on both the Left and Right were blissfully unaware of the escalating tensions between the world’s two largest armies: India and China. For two months, soldiers from the two most populous nations fought in the Himalayas using their fists and feet, and by throwing stones at each other.
After two months, Japan voiced support for India. Then hours after China agreed to end the border standoff in Doklam, North Korea sent a missile buzzing across Japanese territory.
China and India are both members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, both allies of Russia, and both members of BRICS (which is holding its annual summit as I write this). Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and their gulf allies continue their blockade of Qatar.
Teneo, with its several offices in BRICS countries as well as offices in Doha, Qatar (Blue Rubicon) and Dubai, UAE (Strategy), is at the center of several major geopolitical conflicts with the potential to quickly spiral out of control.
With 99% of U.S. congress in agreement on waging full-fledged trade war against Russia, a free independent press would be explaining the consequences to the American people. They’d be educating the public on post-cold war geopolitics; on what happened to Russia in the 1990’s before the Vladimir Putin government began, and on the alliances Russia has crafted.
It doesn’t fit the reality TV news narrative that the same countries Trump publicly threatens with military action (North Korea, Iran, Qatar, China, Pakistan, etc.) are allies of the Kremlin.
It doesn’t fit the reality TV news narrative that Clinton friends from wall street and the pentagon are calling the shots in the Trump White House.
It doesn’t fit the reality TV news narrative that Trump obviously cut a deal with people in Washington who are untouchable on both sides.
It doesn’t fit the reality TV news narrative that global consulting companies, global banks, and global media conglomerates, can tell the Reality TV villain president which nationalist he has to fire each week.
The narrative is reputation management, courtesy of the secret eight year old love child of Wall Street and the U.S. State Department.
This is how the United States does news now. This is how America does elections. Most importantly, this is how it does diplomacy now. And there’s bipartisan agreement.
Before former FBI director James Comey testified to congress, Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein warned that Chuck Grassley was telling the truth. Comey was going to testify that there was no Trump-Russia FBI investigation at the time of his firing.
A few days ago, Senator Feinstein reiterated her doubts that Trump will get impeached.
“Look, this man is going to be president, most likely for the rest of this term,”
Trump has perfected a new type of propaganda, one where the press hates him for whatever reasons his friends in Washington need him to be hated. He’s George Orwell’s Emmanuel Goldstein. But instead of two minutes of daily hate, it’s nonstop hate.
The twenty four hour reality TV news cycle is frying people’s brains. The attention spans are gone. The American presidency has jumped the shark and there’s no coming back from this. Let Trump be the last president.
The states must decide what to do next. Washington is finished.
