Who is Valerie Jarrett? - Part IV of IV

Submitted by:  Veronica Coffin

Why is she running our country?

Collaborating with the National Endowment for the Arts to Advance the Obama Agenda

On May 12, 2009, numerous employees in Jarrett’s office—and possibly Jarrett herself—helped co-host a strategy meeting organized by the Nathan Cummings Foundation. At this event, some 60 artists were—in the words of one of the meeting’s organizers—“challenged to come up with promising and attractive ideas about how artists can work for the [Obama] administration’s agenda.” For details about the meeting and its attendees, click here.

The meeting was led by a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) official (Mario Garcia Durham), two representatives of First Lady Michelle Obama (Joseph Reinstein and Trooper Sanders), White House arts czar Kareem Dale (who reported to Valerie Jarrett), and three members of what was then known as the Office of Public Liason (headed by Jarrett). Those three were Buffy Wicks, Tina Tchen, and Mike Strautmanis (President Obama’s former chief counsel and a onetime paralegal at Michelle Obama’s law firm).

In the meeting, Strautmanis encouraged the group to think of “ways to communicate” the Obama administration’s agenda “with people and how to motivate them culturally.” Buffy Wicks asked briefing participants to “think through how their networks and organizations can participate in areas such as the arts in education, healthcare and preventative care, energy and environment, or economic opportunity.” And Tina Tchen added, “The administration wants to sustain energy from the election process and turn it toward the agenda.”

The notes of the meeting seem to suggest that Valerie Jarrett was present at some point as well.

Other noteworthy attendees included:

 

• Sally Kohn: This community organizer was a senior campaign strategist at the Center for Community Change and a former Ford Foundation employee. She likened the artists’ efforts to “a movement to create a climate for change, banging down that door.” In September 2007, Kohn had written an entry at Daily Kos praising Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for “speak[ing] some blunt truths about the Bush Administration” and the “horrors” for which it was allegedly responsible. 

• Alli Chagi-Starr: With ties to such groups as Green For All, the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Global Exchange, and Code Pink, this activist helped bring protesters to the violent anti-WTO demonstrations in Seattle in 1999.

• Judith F. Baca: This artist once noted that some of her Los Angeles-area public murals “were about drug abuse, including the government-supported influx of drugs into the communities, including the Las Tresissue in Los Angeles, where three people were imprisoned for shooting a narcotics agent who was bringing narcotics into the community.”

• John Malpeade: This founder of the Los Angeles Poverty Department traveled to Bolivia in July 2009 to perform Agents & Assets, a play focusing on “CIA involvement in cocaine trafficking into the Los Angeles area in the 1980s in order to support the Contra war in Nicaragua.” He once declared, “The hoarding of wealth and power results in the gross inability of American society to efficiently allocate its abundant resources to generate social capital or well-being for its citizenry.”

• Ian Inaba: The co-executive director of Citizen Engagement Lab, Inaba produced rapper Eminem’s videos “Mosh” and “White America.” As a blogger for the Guerrilla News Network, he eulogized Gary Webb, the man who, in a series of articles for the San Jose Mercury News, popularized the false story of the U.S. government selling crack to inner city youth to finance the Iran-Contra scandal.

• Dudley Cocke: This director of the Roadside Theater in Kentucky proudly boasts of having worked “with organizers with some training in the Saul Alinsky school — for example, the Industrial Areas Foundation.” Cocke shares their ideology.

• Rha Goddess: This female hip-hop artist and Code Pink ally declares, “I use my art as a vehicle for liberation and social change.” She co-founded the Sista II Sista Freedom School for Young Women of Color and is the former international spokeswoman for the Universal Zulu Nation (UZN), a group whose beliefs are expressed in a manifesto that echoes the Nation of Islam’s “white devils” theology: “To put one race over the other because you feel your one race is better than the other race) is wrong and when you do this, you indeed have become a race of Devils, causing destruction to everything that is life or truth on this planet so-called Earth or in the Universe.” UZN’s doctrinal statement contains numerous references to “this planet so-called Earth,” and to “bloodsuckers” in “secret societies.”

• Kim Hastreiter: This editor and co-founder of the PAPER Publishing Company once wrote: “I kept thinking about how after September 11th, every artist I knew agreed that the horror we had witnessed was actually a major piece of performance art that could not possibly have been conceived by a lawyer or a politician, but more likely by a jihadist with a wild imagination and an artist’s mind.”

• Matthew Brady: He is the creative director of Global Inheritance, a group that seeks to use “the power of creativity to create and push for progressive social change while rejecting conflict.” 

• Milly Hawk Daniel: She was vice president for communications at PolicyLink, a self-described “national research and action institute advancing economic and social equity.” 

Also in attendance were Maria Teresa Petersen, founding executive director of Voto Latino; Caron Atlas and Ryan Friedrichs of State Voices; Robert “Biko” Baker, executive director of the League of Young Voters; Michelle Miller, manager of popular media organizing at the SEIU; Denise Brown, executive director of the Leeway Foundation; and Michelle Coffey, senior philanthropic advisor with the Tides Foundation.

More Examples of Jarrett’s Influence on the Obama Administration

When President Obama publicly stated that Massachusetts police had acted “stupidly” in arresting Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates for disorderly conduct in July 2009 (click here for details), Jarrett urged Obama to walk back those remarks because she worried that they would be perceived as disrespectful to police.

In his book Leading From Behind, author Richard Miniter reveals that Jarrett, prior to the May 2011 U.S. killing of Osama bin Laden, repeatedly urged President Obama not to kill the al Qaeda leader, prompting Obama to cancel the mission on three separate occasions—in January, February, and March of 2011. Jarrett was concerned about the political damage that could result if the mission were to fail.

In 2010-11 Jarrett promoted the California-based solar-power company Solyndra, where one of her wealthiest Chicago connections, billionaire George Kaiser—a leading Obama bundler—held a 35% share in the company. On Jarrett’s advice, President Obama famously visited and publicly extolled Solyndra in 2010, even though auditors were already warning about the abysmal state of its finances. In September 2011 the company declared bankruptcy, but not before it had received a $535 million government-backed loan.

In September 2011, Jarrett said the following about what she viewed as the proper role of government: “We have to give people a livelihood so they can provide for their families…. His [President Obama’s] is a moral vision. It’s a vision based very deeply in values and taking care of ‘the least of these.’ And making sure that we are creating a country that’s a country for everybody, not just for the very, very wealthy. We are working hard to lift people out of poverty and give them a better life, a footing, and that’s what government is supposed to do.” A September 2012 New York Times report identifies Jarrett as the person responsible for a number of controversial Obama Administration policy decisions, including: (a) the Affordable Care Act’s call for an insurance mandate for contraceptives, abortifacients, and sterilization procedures; (b) President Obama’s decision to sue the state of Arizona for its immigration-enforcement statute (SB-1020); and (c) the president’s decision to allow illegal immigrants to apply for work permits.

 

 

In March 2012, Jarrett was a major presenter at J Street’s Third Annual Conference. In an interview with Walter Isaacson at the 2012 Aspen Ideas Festival, Jarrett recalled a meeting in which she had participated a year-and-a-half earlier with four “Dream Act kids”—young illegal immigrants who had walked from Miami to Washington, DC as part of the 2010 “Trail of Dreams” program sponsored by such groups as Students Working for Equal Rights and the Florida Immigrant Coalition. Said Jarrett:

“I call them kids. They’re actually young adults. They walked from Florida to Washington. Walked. And they wanted to see the president. And of course they couldn’t come into the White House because they’re here illegally, and they would have been picked up. And so I ventured across the street, across the park, to a church and I met them in the church. And I’ve now met with them four or five times. And each time I would leave in tears. Because they are exactly the kind of people we would want in this country…. They are the best that we have.”

In October 2012 it was revealed that for several months, Jarrett, who had no experience in international negotiations, had been leading secret negotiations with representatives of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, in an effort to develop normalized relations between the U.S. and Iran.

 

 

A few days before the November 2012 presidential election, a representative from Jarrett’s office quoted Jarrett as having told several senior staffers the following: “After we win this election, it’s our turn. Payback time. Everyone not with us is against us and they better be ready because we don’t forget. The ones who helped us will be rewarded, the ones who opposed us will get what they deserve. There is going to be hell to pay. Congress won’t be a problem for us this time. No election to worry about after this is over and we have two judges ready to go.”

Reports of Jarrett’s Role in Leaking the Information That Sparked the Hillary Clinton Email Scandal

In early March 2015, it was reported that throughout her entire four-year (2009-13) tenure as Secretary of State (SOS), Hillary Clinton — in baltant violation of government regulations — had never acquired or used a government email account, and instead had transmitted all of her official government correspondences via a personal email address that she registered on the very same day as her confirmation hearings for SOS began. The personal email address — hdr22@clintonemail.com — traced back to a private email server that was situated inside Mrs. Clinton’s home in Chappaqua, New York. (For additional details of this scandal, click here.) In mid-March, longtime author and journalist Ed Klein reported that according to his sources, Valerie Jarrett had leaked this information — embarrassing and potentially damaging to Clinton’s political aspirations — to the press. According to Klein, Jarrett “did so through people outside the ­administration, so the story couldn’t be traced to her or the White House.” Added Klein:

• “In addition, at Jarrett’s behest, the State Department was ordered to launch a series of investigations into Hillary’s conduct at Foggy Bottom, including the use of her expense account, the disbursement of funds, her contact with foreign leaders and her possible collusion with the Clinton Foundation. Six separate probes into Hillary’s performance have been ­going on at the State Department. I’m told that the email scandal was timed to come out just as Hillary was on the verge of formally announcing that she was running for president — and that there’s more to come….” 
• “The sabotage is part of an ­ongoing feud between the two Democrat powerhouses. Last fall, during the run-up to the 2014 midterm elections, Jarrett was heard to complain bitterly that the Clintons were turning congressmen, senators, governors and grassroots party members against Obama by portraying him as an unpopular president who was an albatross around the neck of the party. Jarrett was said to be livid that most Democrats running for election refused to be seen campaigning with the president. She blamed the Clintons for marginalizing the president and for trying to wrest control of the Democratic Party away from Obama. And she vowed payback.”
• “My sources say Jarrett saw an opportunity to hit back hard when Monica Lewinsky suddenly resurfaced after years of living in obscurity. Jarrett discreetly put out word to some friendly members of the press that the White House would look with favor if they gave Monica some ink and airtime.”
• “Relations have gotten even frostier in the past few months. After the Democrats took a shellacking in the midterms, the White House scheduled a meeting with Hillary Clinton. When she showed up in the Oval Office, she was greeted by three people — the president, Jarrett and Michelle Obama. With his wife and Jarrett looking on, Obama made it clear that he intended to stay neutral in the presidential primary process — a clear signal that he wouldn’t mind if someone challenged Hillary for the nomination. ‘Obama and Valerie Jarrett will go to any lengths to prevent Hillary from becoming president,’ a source close to the White House told me. ‘They believe that Hillary, like her husband, is left of center, not a true-blue liberal.'”
• “‘With Obama’s approval,’ this source continued, ‘Valerie has been holding secret meetings with Martin O’Malley [the Democratic former governor of Maryland] and [Massachusetts Sen.] Elizabeth Warren. She’s promised O’Malley and Warren the full support of the White House if they will challenge Hillary for the presidential nomination.'”

Alliance With the “Black Lives Matter” Movement

On September 16, 2015, Jarrett and some other administration officials met at the White House with Black Lives Matter activists Brittney Packnett, DeRay McKesson, Johnetta Elzie, Phillip Agnew, and Jamye Wooten. In a subsequent tweet directed to Miss Packnett, Jarrett wrote: “Great meeting, Brittany. Truly appreciate your leadership!!”