Justice Dept. $75K to Hillary Campaign

Posted on May 10, 2016May 10, 2016 by Denise Simon

Ah…exactly how does conflict of interest not become part of this discussion? At this point, when evidence and testimony piles up against Hillary, which it has for years going back to Arkansas, she has built her own Teflon wall. It is becoming clear that Hillary has with great effort and favors made an end run around the FBI investigation. Your thoughts? You gotta begin to wonder how come Bernie is not using this ammo on her campaign.

Former Attorney General Eric Holder endorsed Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination on Wednesday, praising his former administration colleague’s plans to tackle a wide range of issues, from gun violence to college affordability.

“Our next president can’t shy away from building on the progress of President Obama, which is why Hillary Clinton is the candidate that we need in the White House,” Holder said, according to The Associated Press.More from Politico.

By the way, it has been suggested often that one of the San Antonion, Texas version of the Castro brothers could be on the short list for her VP….imagine if she chose Eric Holder, Tom Perez, Xavier Becerra, Deval Patrick, Corey Booker, Bill Richardson, Kamala Harris or Susan Rice?

Terrifying isn’t it? Tim Kaine maybe?

or John Podesta? George Clooney?

Or maybe Valerie Jarrett in exchange for Obama’s added protection for her Clinton Foundation and email-gate crimes.

Yikes…..

Hillary Rakes in Nearly $75,000 From Justice Department Employees

Calls continue for appointment of a special counsel

FreeBeacon: Hillary Clinton has received nearly $75,000 in political contributions from employees at the Department of Justice, the agency that would decide whether or not to act if the FBI recommended charges against Clinton or her aides following its investigation into her private email server.

Justice Department employees have given Clinton far more money than her rivals, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) and Donald Trump, according to a review of federal campaign contributions for the 2016 presidential cycle.

Clinton collected $73,437 from individuals who listed the “Department of Justice” as their employer. Twelve of the 228 contributions were for $2,700, the maximum individual amount allowed by law.

The fundraising haul marks a dramatic increase over Clinton’s unsuccessful presidential run in 2008, when she took in 23 contributions totaling $15,930 from employees at the agency, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Trump, by comparison, has received little help from Justice Department employees, recording just two contributions for a total of $381.

Sanders has taken 51 donations totaling $8,900 from Justice Department employees.

David Bossie, president of the watchdog group Citizens United, told the Washington Free Beacon he is not surprised by the donations, and renewed his call for Attorney General Loretta Lynch to appoint a special counsel to handle Clinton’s case.

“I’m not surprised in the least to see more evidence that shows the politicization of the Justice Department,” Bossie said in a statement to the Free Beacon. “How can Democrat political appointees fairly investigate someone who is about to become their nominee for president? That’s why last July I called on Attorney General Lynch to appoint an impartial special counsel to investigate the private Clinton email server.”

“Today, I renew my call that Attorney General Lynch must appoint a special counsel to determine if Hillary Clinton or her agents broke the law and compromised our national security,” he continued. “This investigation needs to be conducted free of political influence once and for all.”

Bossie has questioned whether Lynch could remain impartial due to her past political donations. Lynch gave $10,700 in contributions to Democratic candidates between 2004 and 2008.

Howard Krongard, who was inspector general for the State Department from 2005 to 2008, predicted earlier this year that even if the FBI referred Clinton’s case to the Justice Department for prosecution it would “never get to an indictment.”

Krongard said the case would have to go through “four loyal Democratic women,” including Lynch, top White House adviser Valerie Jarrett, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, and Assistant Attorney General Leslie Caldwell, who heads the department’s criminal division.

The FBI is expected to interview Clinton in the coming weeks about her email practices. Clinton maintains that she has not been contacted by the FBI about an interview. However, the FBI has interviewed Clinton’s aides, including top adviser Huma Abedin.

The Justice Department did not return a request for comment.

Update 05/10/16: After publication, former U.S. Attorney Matthew Whitaker, who directs the watchdog group Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, called for a special counsel to investigate Hillary Clinton.

“The report out today that Hillary Clinton received almost $75,000 in political contributions from Justice Department employees is yet another reason why the Justice Department cannot and should not decide whether to bring a case against Hillary Clinton for her reckless handling of classified information while Secretary of State,” Whitaker said in a statement. “The decision of whether or not to bring a case against Clinton will be a difficult one for Attorney General Loretta Lynch, as I don’t believe she has the fortitude to oppose President Obama, who has publicly said Clinton’s behavior didn’t put our national security at risk. Since this Administration has shown no ability to be impartial, looking the other way at every turn of this investigation, I’m renewing an urgent call for the appointment of a special counsel in this case.”

A Yemeni Gitmo ‘Forever Prisoner’, Approved for Release

Posted on May 9, 2016May 9, 2016 by Denise Simon

So much for the ‘forever prisoner’ as this will likely apply to the rest of the forever prisoners.

Parole board OKs Yemeni’s release from Guantánamo on fifth review

MiamiHerald: The Guantánamo parole board has approved the release of a Yemeni “forever prisoner” on his fifth review, the latest sign that showing up at a Periodic Review Board hearing actually helps a captive win release from the downsizing war-on-terror prison in Cuba.

The decision, released by the Pentagon Monday, means 27 of the 80 captives currently held at the U.S. detention center in Cuba can leave to a transfer deal that satisfies Secretary of Defense Ash Carter.

Salem bin Kanad, about 40, got to Camp X-Ray in the second week of its existence and was profiled as a veteran jihadist who left his homeland for Afghanistan a year ahead of the 9/11 attacks.

He was initially captured by the Northern Alliance in late 2001 and held at a prison fortress near Mazar-i-Sharif where captives staged an uprising in which CIA agent Johnny Spann was killed, according to a leaked 2008 prison profile. Fellow revolt survivor John Walker Lindh at one point cast Kanad as a commander of their Taliban-linked force, the profile said.

But subsequent U.S. intelligence assessments recast him as having a “low-level leadership role” in a Taliban front-line unit. It cast him alternately as “mostly compliant” with his guards and having “an extremist mindset” that “has continued to praise terrorist groups and activities.”

The Periodic Review Board first considered Kanad’s case in January 2014 and concluded that his release could present a “significant threat to the security of the Untied States.” He didn’t go to his hearing and neither did he offer information about his family or a plan for employment after Guantánamo. The board reviewed his file three times in 2015 and upheld that opinion.

Then he went before the board April 5 but it is not known what he told them. At Kanad’s request, according to the Pentagon, the transcript of his hearing was withheld from the public.

But, according to his file, a military officer assigned to his case provided the board with information about his family, their commitment to help him reintegrate into an Arabic-speaking society and his agreement to participate in a rehabilitation program — an argument that apparently won the favor of the board. He has a father and siblings in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and would like to join them, study English and computer science and launch a career in sales to support them there.

“The board encourages the detainee to continue regularly attending classes” at Guantánamo, it wrote in its May 5 decision to approve his transfer, “and continue engaging with family members to prepare himself for transfer.”

The decision comes at a busy time — as the board is hearing from an unprecedented nine captives in a single month, May. It follows the Pentagon’s April 16 transfer of nine Yemenis with similar close family in the Saudi Kingdom to a rehabilitation program there.

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JTF-GTMO Assessment:

(S) Recommendation: JTF-GTMO recommends this detainee for Continued Detention

Under DoD Control (CD). JTF-GTMO previously recommended detainee for Continued

Detention Under DoD Control (CD) on 1 January 2007.

(S//NF) Executive Summary: Detainee is a member of al-Qaida. Detainee served as a

sub-commander in Usama Bin Laden’s (UBL) 55th Arab Brigade during hostilities against

US and coalition forces.1 Detainee is assessed to have commanded the Tameem Center on

the Khwaja Ghar front lines and received basic and advanced training, including tactics and

artillery, at probably the al-Qaida al-Faruq Training Camp in Afghanistan. Detainee

acknowledged traveling to Afghanistan expressly for jihad in 2000, and his name was found

on al-Qaida affiliated documents. Detainee’s passport was used to attempt entry into Iraq by

suspected al-Qaida operatives and his true identity is in question. JTF-GTMO determined

this detainee to be:

A HIGH risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.Prior History: Detainee belongs to the Bin Kinad tribe. Detainee finished high
school and then worked on a small farm for approximately six months before leaving for

Afghanistan. Detainee was issued a passport on 31 July 2000 in Aden, YM and departed

Yemen for Afghanistan in approximately October 2000. For his full summary file, go here.

DoJ and North Carolina Trading Lawsuits Over Bathrooms

Posted on May 9, 2016May 9, 2016 by Denise Simon

Really? How did we get here after all these years? Loretta Lynch, U.S. Attorney General made her official statement today and one key word she used was ‘privacy’….exactly whose privacy is protected? This is so twisted.

The Justice Department had alleged the North Carolina law violated Title IX, the federal law that bars sex discrimination in education. But the lawsuit is silent about Title IX, likely because of a recent decision by the Richmond, Virginia-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. This could place North Carolina in jeopardy of billions of dollars of federal aid…..nothing about violating the 10th Amendment…..

North Carolina Turns to Prominent Conservative Lawyer to Defend ‘Bathroom’ Law

Provided by the National Law Journal:

Judge assigned to the case is a Reagan appointee whose nomination to the Fourth Circuit stalled amid Democratic opposition.

The 10 page lawsuit is found here.

A go-to lawyer for Republican governors facing scandal and controversy will represent North Carolina Gov. Patrick McCrory as he defends a state law that requires transgender state employees to use the bathroom that corresponds to the gender on their birth certificates.

Karl “Butch” Bowers Jr. of Bowers Law Office in Columbia, South Carolina, is part of the legal team that sued the U.S. Department of Justice on McCrory’s behalf on Monday. Last week, the Justice Department threatened legal action over the law, known as HB2.

Bowers is a lead attorney in one of three lawsuits filed on Monday related to the contested North Carolina law, known as HB2. Several hours after McCrory filed suit, two state legislators sued the Justice Department in defense of the law. Then the Justice Department sued McCrory, several days after threatening legal action.

A former special counsel for voting matters in the Justice Department under President George W. Bush, Bowers is also representing McCrory in separate litigation over the state’s voter identification law in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

Gupta last week called HB2 discriminatory and in violation of the federal Civil Rights Act. She asked McCrory to respond by Monday with a pledge not to enforce the law. McCrory struck back with Monday’s lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina. The complaint seeks a ruling that HB2 is lawful.

Bowers did not immediately return a request for comment, nor did his co-counsel, Robert Stevens, general counsel in the governor’s office, and William Stewart Jr. of Millberg Gordon Stewart in Raleigh.

The case is before U.S. District Judge Terrence Boyle, appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1984. A former legislative aide to former North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms, Boyle repeatedly faced Democratic opposition when two presidents—the elder Bush and the younger Bush—unsuccessfully tried to nominate him to the Fourth Circuit.

Boyle was nominated to the Fourth Circuit in 1991, and then six more times between 2001 and 2006, according to judiciary records. The Senate never voted on his nomination. Legal Times reported in 2007 that Democratic opposition to Boyle was in part political payback for Helms’ blocking of judicial nominees during the Clinton administration.

Governors’ go-to lawyer

McCrory is the latest in a line of Republican governors to seek Bowers’ help.

Bowers represented South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley in ethics proceedings in the state Legislature about whether she illegally lobbied for private companies while she was a member of the House. The ethics committee cleared her of wrongdoing in 2012.

Bowers counseled former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, who faced impeachment after he disappeared for several days in 2009 on what was later revealed to be a trip to Argentina to visit his mistress. Sanford also faced an ethics investigation into his use of state resources for personal travel. South Carolina Republicans ultimately censured Sanford but did not vote to impeach him.

In 2007, Bowers took a one-year leave from private practice to serve as special counsel for voting matters in the Justice Department. The following year, he served as a lawyer to the presidential campaign of Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, in Florida.

In 2012, Bowers joined a team of lawyers representing South Carolina in litigation over the state’s voter identification law. A special three-judge panel in Washington found that the law was not discriminatory, although the judges blocked it from taking effect for the November 2012 election.

Less than a year later, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a key section of the federal Voting Rights Act that in effect eliminated the requirement that states such as South Carolina seek court approval before making changes to election processes.

There are now four lawsuits pending over HB2.

Updated at 4:05 p.m.

In March, the American Civil Liberties Union, joined by Jenner & Block and Lambda Legal, filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina arguing that the law is unconstitutional.

The two North Carolina legislators who filed suit on Monday in the Eastern District of North Carolina—Phil Berger, president pro tempore of the state Senate, and Tim Moore, speaker of the House of Representatives—are represented by Gene Schaerr and S. Kyle Duncan of Schaerr | Duncan in Washington.

Schaerr in 2014 left a partnership at Winston & Strawn to defend Utah’s same-sex marriage ban. Kyle is the former general counsel of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.

In remarks on Monday announcing the Justice Department’s lawsuit, Lynch said that discriminatory measures against transgender individuals that followed the Supreme Court’s ruling last year legalizing same-sex marriage was akin to the Jim Crow laws that followed the Emancipation Proclamation and the backlash to the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954.

Addressing the transgender community, Lynch said that the Justice Department and the Obama administration “want you to know that we see you, we stand with you, and we will do everything we can to protect you going forward.”

Updated with information on additional lawsuits filed on Monday. North Carolina’s lawsuit is posted below.

Facebook Suppression of Conservatives Revealed

Posted on May 9, 2016May 9, 2016 by Denise Simon

Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News

Gizmodo: Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project. This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site’s users.

Several former Facebook “news curators,” as they were known internally, also told Gizmodo that they were instructed to artificially “inject” selected stories into the trending news module, even if they weren’t popular enough to warrant inclusion—or in some cases weren’t trending at all. The former curators, all of whom worked as contractors, also said they were directed not to include news about Facebook itself in the trending module.

In other words, Facebook’s news section operates like a traditional newsroom, reflecting the biases of its workers and the institutional imperatives of the corporation. Imposing human editorial values onto the lists of topics an algorithm spits out is by no means a bad thing—but it is in stark contrast to the company’s claims that the trending module simply lists “topics that have recently become popular on Facebook.”

Related reading: I Asked a Privacy Lawyer What Facebook’s New Terms and Conditions Will Mean for You

These new allegations emerged after Gizmodo last week revealed details about the inner workings of Facebook’s trending news team—a small group of young journalists, primarily educated at Ivy League or private East Coast universities, who curate the “trending” module on the upper-right-hand corner of the site. As we reported last week, curators have access to a ranked list of trending topics surfaced by Facebook’s algorithm, which prioritizes the stories that should be shown to Facebook users in the trending section. The curators write headlines and summaries of each topic, and include links to news sites. The section, which launched in 2014, constitutes some of the most powerful real estate on the internet and helps dictate what news Facebook’s users—167 million in the US alone—are reading at any given moment.

“Depending on who was on shift, things would be blacklisted or trending,” said the former curator. This individual asked to remain anonymous, citing fear of retribution from the company. The former curator is politically conservative, one of a very small handful of curators with such views on the trending team. “I’d come on shift and I’d discover that CPAC or Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck or popular conservative topics wouldn’t be trending because either the curator didn’t recognize the news topic or it was like they had a bias against Ted Cruz.”

The former curator was so troubled by the omissions that they kept a running log of them at the time; this individual provided the notes to Gizmodo. Among the deep-sixed or suppressed topics on the list: former IRS official Lois Lerner, who was accused by Republicans of inappropriately scrutinizing conservative groups; Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker; popular conservative news aggregator the Drudge Report; Chris Kyle, the former Navy SEAL who was murdered in 2013; and former Fox News contributor Steven Crowder. “I believe it had a chilling effect on conservative news,” the former curator said.

Another former curator agreed that the operation had an aversion to right-wing news sources. “It was absolutely bias. We were doing it subjectively. It just depends on who the curator is and what time of day it is,” said the former curator. “Every once in awhile a Red State or conservative news source would have a story. But we would have to go and find the same story from a more neutral outlet that wasn’t as biased.”

Stories covered by conservative outlets (like Breitbart, Washington Examiner, and Newsmax) that were trending enough to be picked up by Facebook’s algorithm were excluded unless mainstream sites like the New York Times, the BBC, and CNN covered the same stories.

Other former curators interviewed by Gizmodo denied consciously suppressing conservative news, and we were unable to determine if left-wing news topics or sources were similarly suppressed. The conservative curator described the omissions as a function of his colleagues’ judgements; there is no evidence that Facebook management mandated or was even aware of any political bias at work.

Managers on the trending news team did, however, explicitly instruct curators to artificially manipulate the trending module in a different way: When users weren’t reading stories that management viewed as important, several former workers said, curators were told to put them in the trending news feed anyway. Several former curators described using something called an “injection tool” to push topics into the trending module that weren’t organically being shared or discussed enough to warrant inclusion—putting the headlines in front of thousands of readers rather than allowing stories to surface on their own. In some cases, after a topic was injected, it actually became the number one trending news topic on Facebook.

“We were told that if we saw something, a news story that was on the front page of these ten sites, like CNN, the New York Times, and BBC, then we could inject the topic,” said one former curator. “If it looked like it had enough news sites covering the story, we could inject it—even if it wasn’t naturally trending.” Sometimes, breaking news would be injected because it wasn’t attaining critical mass on Facebook quickly enough to be deemed “trending” by the algorithm. Former curators cited the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 and the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris as two instances in which non-trending stories were forced into the module. Facebook has struggled to compete with Twitter when it comes to delivering real-time news to users; the injection tool may have been designed to artificially correct for that deficiency in the network. “We would get yelled at if it was all over Twitter and not on Facebook,” one former curator said.

In other instances, curators would inject a story—even if it wasn’t being widely discussed on Facebook—because it was deemed important for making the network look like a place where people talked about hard news. “People stopped caring about Syria,” one former curator said. “[And] if it wasn’t trending on Facebook, it would make Facebook look bad.” That same curator said the Black Lives Matter movement was also injected into Facebook’s trending news module. “Facebook got a lot of pressure about not having a trending topic for Black Lives Matter,” the individual said. “They realized it was a problem, and they boosted it in the ordering. They gave it preference over other topics. When we injected it, everyone started saying, ‘Yeah, now I’m seeing it as number one’.” This particular injection is especially noteworthy because the #BlackLivesMatter movement originated on Facebook, and the ensuing media coverage of the movement often noted its powerful social media presence.

(In February, CEO Mark Zuckerberg expressed his support for the movement in an internal memo chastising Facebook employees for defacing Black Lives Matter slogans on the company’s internal “signature wall.”)

When stories about Facebook itself would trend organically on the network, news curators used less discretion—they were told not to include these stories at all. “When it was a story about the company, we were told not to touch it,” said one former curator. “It had to be cleared through several channels, even if it was being shared quite a bit. We were told that we should not be putting it on the trending tool.”

(The curators interviewed for this story worked for Facebook across a timespan ranging from mid-2014 to December 2015.)

“We were always cautious about covering Facebook,” said another former curator. “We would always wait to get second level approval before trending something to Facebook. Usually we had the authority to trend anything on our own [but] if it was something involving Facebook, the copy editor would call their manager, and that manager might even call their manager before approving a topic involving Facebook.”

Gizmodo reached out to Facebook for comment about each of these specific claims via email and phone, but did not receive a response.

Several former curators said that as the trending news algorithm improved, there were fewer instances of stories being injected. They also said that the trending news process was constantly being changed, so there’s no way to know exactly how the module is run now. But the revelations undermine any presumption of Facebook as a neutral pipeline for news, or the trending news module as an algorithmically-driven list of what people are actually talking about.

Rather, Facebook’s efforts to play the news game reveal the company to be much like the news outlets it is rapidly driving toward irrelevancy: a select group of professionals with vaguely center-left sensibilities. It just happens to be one that poses as a neutral reflection of the vox populi, has the power to influence what billions of users see, and openly discusses whether it should use that power to influence presidential elections.

“It wasn’t trending news at all,” said the former curator who logged conservative news omissions. “It was an opinion.”

[Disclosure: Facebook has launched a program that pays publishers, including the New York Times and Buzzfeed, to produce videos for its Facebook Live tool. Gawker Media, Gizmodo’s parent company, recently joined that program.]

Drudge and Breitbart Wont Tell You this on Trump

Posted on May 6, 2016May 6, 2016 by Denise Simon

Mnuchin’s had a hand in the Southern California regional bank that was drowning in bad mortgages after the financial crisis of 2008. Mnuchin and a group of investors, including John Paulson and George Soros, bought the bank for $1.55 billion and turned it around changing the name in the process. OneWest now has assets of $25 billion and $14 billion in deposits.

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Trump’s new finance chair Steven Mnuchin was sued over Madoff fraud profit

Donald Trump’s new national finance chairman was sued in 2010 for the return of $US3.2 million ($4.3 million) in fake profit from his mother’s account with Bernard Madoff, the mastermind of a $US17.5 billion Ponzi scheme. More here.

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Trump Finance Chair Ran a Bank That Cashed in on Taxpayer Bailouts

FreeBeacon: Donald Trump’s newly-appointed national finance chairman, Steven Mnuchin, ran a bank that made billions of dollars off of taxpayer bailouts and cost the federal government an estimated $13 billion.

Mnuchin, a hedge-fund manager, worked as a partner for Goldman Sachs before assembling a group of billionaires to take over IndyMac Bank, based in California, after its subprime mortgage business collapsed in 2008.

Mother Jones reported:

Mnuchin’s group paid roughly $1.55 billion and received a promise from the [Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation] FDIC to cover a portion of the losses on bad loans within the IndyMac pool. The FDIC’s losses on these assets have since ballooned to an estimated $13 billion. The FDIC took on most of the risk, but Mnuchin and his partners, who named their new bank OneWest, ended up doing spectacularly well. They parlayed their $1.55 billion investment into a $3.4 billion payday last year, when Mnuchin engineered the sale of OneWest to another California bank, CIT. Along the way, OneWest issued more than $2 billion worth of dividends to shareholders. The tremendous profits the bank made, with taxpayers on the hook for IndyMac’s bad bets, raised eyebrows across the industry.

Furthermore, OneWest has been accused of risky and predatory loan practices, which prompted California community groups and a legal aid agency to ask Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen to halt the sale of OneWest to CIT last year before the bank paid reparations.

Trump’s criticism of big banks, Wall Street, and hedge-fund managers appears to conflict with his appointment of Mnuchin to a top post in his campaign.

Last year, Trump characterized hedge fund managers as “paper pushers” who are “getting away with murder” by not paying their fair share of taxes under the current tax code.

“The hedge fund guys didn’t build this country. These are guys that shift paper around and they get lucky,” Trump said during a phone interview televised on CBS News. “They are energetic. They are very smart. But a lot of them–they are paper-pushers. They make a fortune. They pay no tax. It’s ridiculous, OK?”

Mnuchin’s contributions to Democrats further complicate his position on the presumptive GOP nominee’s campaign. Mnuchin has contributed thousands to committees supporting Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and other Democratic politicians, the Washington Free Beacon reported Thursday.

“Steven is a professional at the highest level with an extensive and very successful financial background,” Trump said in a statement announcing Mnuchin as his finance chair. “He brings unprecedented experience and expertise to a fundraising operation that will benefit the Republican Party and ultimately defeat Hillary Clinton.”

**** Deeper dive from Heavy.com

Steven Mnuchin: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know

A Wall Street banker and Hollywood movie producer, who has contributed to the campaigns of Hillary Clinton and other Democrats in the past, has been named as Donald Trump’s national finance chairman.

Steven Mnuchin, 53, was added to the presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s team on Thursday, Trump’s campaign announced in a press release.

“It’s a great privilege to be working with Mr. Trump to create a world class finance organization to support the campaign in the general election,” Mnuchin said in a statement.

Here’s what you need to know:

1. He Contributed to Hillary Clinton’s Senate Campaigns & 2008 Democratic Presidential Campaign but Has Also Supported Republicans

Steven Mnuchin has contributed more than $120,000 to both Democrats and Republicans over the past two decades, Politico reports. About $64,000 of those contributions went to Democratic candidates and $40,000 to Republicans, according to Politico.

He gave $7,000 to Clinton’s 200 and 2006 Senate bids, and also contributed to her 2008 Democratic presidential campaign. He contributed $2,300 to President Barack Obama’s 2007 presidential campaign.

In 2011 he contributed $2,500 on two occasions to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign and gave $20,000 to the Republican National Committee in 2012. He has also contributed to John Edwards, Chuck Schumer, Rudy Giuliani, Al Gore and John Kerry, Politico reports.

Mnuchin’s political past does not differ much from that of his new boss.

Trump has also contributed to Clinton’s campaigns in the past. The presumptive GOP presidential nominee has said it was important for his business interests to support political candidates on both sides.

2. He Began His Career at Goldman Sachs Before Working for the George Soros-Funded OneWest Bank Group LLC

Mnuchin, a Yale University graduate, began his career at Goldman Sachs, rising to become a partner, according to the press release from Trump’s campaign.

After working at Goldman Sachs for 17 years, Mnuchin became the chairman and CEO of OneWest Bank Group LLC, a bank holding company, from 2009 to 2015. According to Politico, OneWest Bank Group was funded partly by George Soros, a major Democratic donor who has given millions to Hillary Clintons super PAC.

He is currently the chairman and CEO of Dune Capital Management LP, a private investment firm.

3. Trump Says Mnuchin Brings ‘Unprecedented Experience & Expertise’ to the Campaign

Trump praised Mnuchin in a statement announcing his new role with the campaign.

“Steven is a professional at the highest level with an extensive and very successful financial background. He brings unprecedented experience and expertise to a fundraising operation that will benefit the Republican Party and ultimately defeat Hillary Clinton,” Trump said.

The campaign said, “Mr. Trump is the presumptive Republican Nomination for President of the United States and is taking steps to gear up for a General Election against Democratic Nominee Hillary Clinton. Mr. Trump has self-funded his successful primary battle and will likewise be putting up substantial money toward the general election.”

4. He Was an Executive Producer for ‘American Sniper,’ ‘The Lego Movie,’ & ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’

In addition to his extensive ties to Wall Street, Mnuchin is also connected to Hollywood.

Mnuchin has been an executive producer on several films since 2014, including “American Sniper,” “The Lego Movie,” “Mad Max:Fury Road,” “Black Mass,” “The Intern” and “Entourage,” according to his IMDB.com page.

5. He Is Divorced & Has 3 Children

Steven Mnuchin and his wife, Heather Crosby, divorced in 2014.

They have three children together. The couple married in 1999, according to their New York Times wedding announcement.