“On the Holmes Front,” with Frank Holmes
In an economy reeling from two years of “Bidenflation,” the best gig anyone can have is as the child of a politician.
It worked for Hunter Biden, who spent years hammering out multimillion-dollar, influence-peddling deals with corrupt foreign regimes (and probably still is).
It worked for Chelsea Clinton, who cashed in as a “producer,” “writer,” “philanthropist,” and self-described “social scientist” on her last name thanks to her parents’ connections.
And it worked out for a name you may not know as well: Karen Waters.
Karen is the child of one of the longest-serving, most left-wing members of Congress: Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif.
Rep. Waters’ official biography says she has “more than 40 years of public service,” but it’s obvious whom she’s really serving… and it isn’t her impoverished, inner-city constituents.
Karen Waters has become a very wealthy woman — thanks to her powerful mother.
During the last election cycle alone, Karen Waters cashed in $192,300 off of her mother’s campaign.
That’s nothing compared to Karen’s lifetime haul, thanks to an operation set up decades ago by the congresswoman.
Maxine Waters’ campaign pays her daughter, Karen, to run a “slate mailer”: The candidate mails voters a glossy, personalized list of all the candidates she endorses in each, and every, election.
What voters don’t know is that the candidates paid Waters to have their names listed. As we shall see, often they pay tens of thousands of dollars each for a place on her mailing list. As she told the Federal Election Commission in 2004, “federal candidates who do not pay a proportionate share of the expenses will not be included” in the mail.
But the FEC ruled 19 years ago that this arrangement is not bribery, because the candidates are just reimbursing Waters for the “fees” she has in printing and mailing the endorsements.
Ever since then, Waters’ family seems to have been flush with cash.
Waters campaign has made 168 separate payments to her daughter between January 2004 and December 2022, according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) campaign finance records reviewed by The Horn. That includes $48,500 between June and the end of 2022.
“Waters received the green light to run the operation from the Federal Election Commission in the fall of 2004. Since then, Karen Waters has received more than $1.2 million in payments from her mother’s campaign,” reported Fox News.
That actually understates the scope of the grift pulled off by Karen Waters and her company, Progressive Connections, by hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The congresswoman’s daughter had a hand in Waters’ mailers before 2004, when the election program operated through a group called L.A. Vote—and she made money hand over fist.
L.A. Vote raked in $1.7 million and gave Karen Waters a cool $450,000, bringing her total “earnings” from her mother’s mailers to $1.65 million.
The mailers are practically an invitation to print money, and all the Golden State’s top Democrats have their hands in it.
Kamala Harris’s campaigns for statewide office made two payments, for a total of $60,000, to Waters—in ways that experts say appeared to bend, or break, campaign finance laws.
Current Governor Gavin Newsom paid $45,000 to Waters during his 2010 race for lieutenant governor.
Soros-funded, soft-on-crime Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón paid $36,500 to the Waters’ family business in 2020.
Former Senator Barbara Boxer and L.A.’s ex-mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, also got their names on the mailers after paying tens of thousands of dollars.
Waters’ mailers give off such a dirty scent of corruption, nepotism, and pay-to-play that watchdogs on both the Left and the Right have condemned her.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), which is a dependably liberal organization, named Waters the “Most Corrupt Member of Congress” five times — in 2005, 2006, 2009, 2011, and 2017; the conservative National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC) has filed multiple ethics complaints against Waters.
To make matters worse, Karen Waters isn’t the only one getting paid in this decades-long deal.
Waters’ son, Edward, also scored $115,000 off the LA. Vote operation.
In “Third World countries,” said Tucker Carlson on Thursday night, “power derives from proximity to power, and that means the second most powerful people in a country like that are the children of the president” and those in his party.
Congressional Republicans will have their hands full for the next two years, investigating the Biden family and the Deep State.
But if they can spare a detective, they might look into the way their California colleague runs her business.
Until then, this is Waters’ World.
Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”