The Isaíases, led by brothers Roberto and William, are fugitives wanted by Ecuador for fleecing a bank there. Thanks to a lot of money donated to Obama's campaign coffers, USG has refused to extradite the pair, claiming, absurdly, a poorly written extradition request.
The Robles piece is a wonderful bit of reporting, a compact presentation of how corrupted our "pay-to-play" government actually is. You think Obama and Clinton are champions of clean, efficient government? Think again:
MIAMI — The Obama administration overturned a ban preventing a wealthy, politically connected Ecuadorean woman from entering the United States after her family gave tens of thousands of dollars to Democratic campaigns, according to finance records and government officials.
The woman, Estefanía Isaías, had been barred from coming to the United States after being caught fraudulently obtaining visas for her maids. But the ban was lifted at the request of the State Department under former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton so that Ms. Isaías could work for an Obama fund-raiser with close ties to the administration.
It was one of several favorable decisions the Obama administration made in recent years involving the Isaías family, which the government of Ecuador accuses of buying protection from Washington and living comfortably in Miami off the profits of a looted bank in Ecuador.
The family, which has been investigated by federal law enforcement agencies on suspicion of money laundering and immigration fraud, has made hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions to American political campaigns in recent years. During that time, it has repeatedly received favorable treatment from the highest levels of the American government, including from New Jersey’s senior senator and the State Department.
The Obama administration has allowed the family’s patriarchs, Roberto and William Isaías, to remain in the United States, refusing to extradite them to Ecuador. The two brothers were sentenced in absentia in 2012 to eight years in prison, accused of running their bank into the ground and then presenting false balance sheets to profit from bailout funds. In a highly politicized case, Ecuador says the fraud cost the country $400 million.
The family’s affairs have rankled Ecuador and strained relations with the United States at a time when the two nations are also at odds over another international fugitive: Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, who has taken refuge in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London.New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez played a crucial role in lobbying for the Isaías daughter:
For more than a year, Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, and his staff engaged in a relentless effort to help Ms. Isaías, urging senior government officials, including Mrs. Clinton’s chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, to waive the ban. The senator’s assistance came even though Ms. Isaías’s family, a major donor to him and other American politicians, does not live in his state.
The Obama administration then reversed its decision and gave Ms. Isaías the waiver she needed to come to the United States — just as tens of thousands of dollars in donations from the family poured into Mr. Obama’s campaign coffers.
An email from Mr. Menendez’s office sharing the good news was dated May 15, 2012, one day after, campaign finance records show, Ms. Isaías’s mother gave $40,000 to the Obama Victory Fund, which provided donations to the president and other Democrats.
“In my old profession as a prosecutor, timelines mean a lot,” said Ken Boehm, a former Pennsylvania prosecutor who is chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center, a government watchdog. “When a donation happens and then something else happens, like the favor, as long as they are very, very close, that really paints a story.”
In 2012, the Isaías family donated about $100,000 to the Obama Victory Fund. Campaign finance records show that their most generous donations came just before a request to the administration.
Ms. Isaías’s mother, María Mercedes, had recently donated $30,000 to the Senate campaign committee that Mr. Menendez led when she turned to him for help in her daughter’s case. At least two members of Mr. Menendez’s staff worked with Ms. Isaías and her father, as well as lawyers and other congressional offices, to argue that she had been unfairly denied entry into the United States.
Over the course of the next year, as various members of the Isaías family donated to Mr. Menendez’s re-election campaign, the senator and his staff repeatedly made calls, sent emails and wrote letters about Ms. Isaías’s case to Mrs. Clinton, Ms. Mills, the consulate in Ecuador, and the departments of State and Homeland Security.
After months of resistance from State Department offices in Ecuador and Washington, the senator lobbied Ms. Mills himself, and the ban against Ms. Isaías was eventually overturned.
Mr. Menendez’s office acknowledged going to bat for Ms. Isaías, but insisted that the advocacy was not motivated by money. [!]
“Our office handled this case no differently than we have thousands of other immigration-related requests over the years, and to suggest that somehow the senator’s longstanding and principled beliefs on immigration have been compromised is just plain absurd,” said Patricia Enright, the senator’s spokeswoman.
Ms. Enright said Mr. Menendez’s office worked on the case because Ms. Isaías had previously been allowed to travel to the United States six times despite the ban, and the decision to suddenly enforce it seemed arbitrary and wrong. She said the senator routinely acted on cases he got from across the nation.
Mr. Menendez is currently under investigation by the Justice Department for his advocacy on behalf of another out-of-state campaign donor, Dr. Salomon E. Melgen, who ran afoul of federal health officials for unorthodox Medicare billing.I cite at length Robles' well-written and well-sourced story because it is interesting to note that in the aftermath of Obama's announcement that the U.S. will normalize, after more than 50 years, relations with Cuba the go-to crtitical quote from a Democrat is from Bob Menendez, and nowhere is Menendez described as being under investigation for corruption. Take this Peter Sullivan story for The Hill, "Senate Dem: Cuba trade rewards 'brutal behavior'":
Sen. Robert Menendez (N.J.), the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is slamming President Obama over the deal to release an American held in Cuba.
“President Obama's actions have vindicated the brutal behavior of the Cuban government," Menendez, known for his tough stance on Cuba, said in a statement.
"There is no equivalence between an international aid worker and convicted spies who were found guilty of conspiracy to commit espionage against our nation."
American aid worker Alan Gross, who was held in Cuba for five years for trying to set up Internet for a small Jewish community, was released on Wednesday as the U.S. released three Cuban agents convicted of spying.
Menendez said the move "sets an extremely dangerous precedent."
"It invites dictatorial and rogue regimes to use Americans serving overseas as bargaining chips. I fear that today’s actions will put at risk the thousands of Americans that work overseas to support civil society, advocate for access to information, provide humanitarian services, and promote democratic reforms."
Obama's move to begin normalizing relations with Cuba is reverberating across the political world, with members of both parties blasting the decision.
Asked about Menendez's statement, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said that although the administration "obviously have tremendous respect" for the senator, they rejected his characterization of the deal.
"We fundamentally disagree, and there's no soft-pedaling that," Earnest said.
Earnest insisted Menendez was wrong to describe the release of the three Cuban spies as a swap for Gross. Earnest argued that Gross was freed humanitarian grounds, while the spies were freed in exchange for a U.S. intelligence asset who had been jailed in Cuba for nearly 20 years.
"There was no concession. Mr. Gross was released on humanitarian grounds."It is a bizarre world we live in when the White House spokesman is instructed to kiss the ring of a politician broadly acknowledged (the front page of the Gray Lady) to be venal, and it passes without comment. To me, this is proof that corruption is accepted as a normal and natural part of the functioning of the state. We are in a digital age of Robber Barons. We have plenty of muckrakers but no legislative apparatus to translate the investigative journalism into social change. It is what Nader said motivated him to run for president. Every day a new bombshell story would hit the front page detailing one element or another of corporate or state corruption and nothing was ever done about it.
Last Friday Naked Capitalism posted a short piece by Joe Firestone, "The Lawless Society." In introducing it, Yves Smith quotes from her Skunk Party Manifesto:
Corruption is the biggest single problem. Until we tackle that, frontally, it will be impossible to get any good solutions or even viable interim measures to the long and growing list of problems we face. Conduct that would have been seen as reprehensible 40 years ago, like foreclosing on people who were current on their mortgages, or selling drugs even when the company knows they increase heart heart attack and stroke risk enough to be fatal for a meaningful percentage of patients, barely stirs a raised eyebrow today.I agree. We need a political rebirth, the formation of a new party. We all need to read Plato's The Republic and Kant's Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. There is a Good that cannot be bought and sold. There is something higher and more noble than power and money. The people in power have lost all understanding of this.
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