Born in 1948, Robert Creamer is the husband of Democrat Rep. Jan Schakowsky. He formerly served as executive director of the Illinois Public Action Fund (where his wife was the program director), and subsequently as a leader of Citizen Action/Illinois. He was also a lobbyist for George Soros’s Open Society Institute. Today Creamer heads the Strategic Consulting Group, a political consultancy whose list of clients includes ACORN, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the AFL-CIO, the United Steelworkers Union of America, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and dozens of other leftist or Democratic Party state organizations.

Pursuant to an FBI investigation, Creamer in 2006 was indicted for bank fraud and tax evasion. During his trial, he received some 200 letters of support from such notables as Richard Durbin, Carol Browner, Jesse Jackson, and David Axelrod. Creamer ultimately was sentenced to five months in federal prison plus eleven months of house arrest. Upon his sentencing, he publicly pledged: “For the rest of my life I will continue to do whatever I can to work for social and economic justice.”

While incarcerated — or on “forced sabbatical,” as he called it — Creamer wrote a 628-page political manual titled Stand Up Straight! How Progressives Can Win (published in 2007). In the Acknowledgements section of the book, Creamer stated that his political views had been deeply influenced by “the legendary community organizer” Saul Alinsky.

Stand Up Straight! advanced the notion that the Democratic Party could win a permanent majority in Congress by doing the following:

passing a national health care bill, thereby turning more people into wards of an ever-expanding government, and of the party that works to grow government; and

giving amnesty to all illegal immigrants, thereby creating, virtually overnight, a large new constituency of Democratic voters.

The author conceded that his desire “to reshape the structure of one-sixth of the American economy” (i.e., the health care sector) was contingent upon the Democrats being able to control 60 votes in the U.S. Senate, and upon the election of a “progressive Democrat” to the White House — conditions that could, in Creamer’s estimation, be achieved by the year 2009. Notably, his book was effusive in its praise of then-Senator Barack Obama.

Creamer’s book advocated a “public plan” that would guarantee every U.S. resident’s “right” to health care; this plan eventually would serve as a model for the “public option” in subsequent legislative proposals by Congressional Democrats.

In addition, Creamer laid out a “Progressive Agenda for Structural Change,” which included a ten-point plan to set the stage for implementing universal health care. “To win,” added Creamer, “we must not just generate understanding, but emotion—fear, revulsion, anger, disgust.”

Beyond the narrow specifics of health care, Creamer in his book advocated the “democratization of wealth” in America and “progressive control of governments around the world.”

Creamer also identified immigration as an issue that “will have an enormous impact on the battle for power between the progressive and conservative forces in American society.” He said:

“If the Democrats continue to stand firmly for immigrant rights, the issue will define immigrants’ voting loyalties for a generation. If we are successful, a gigantic block of progressive votes will enter the electorate over the next 15 years—a block that could be decisive in the battle for the future.”

Mirroring his approach to health care, Creamer stressed the importance of persuading religious leaders to lobby, on moral grounds, in favor of amnesty and expanded rights for illegal aliens.

Stand Up Straight! was endorsed by a number of leading Democrats and their political allies, including: Greg Galluzzo, director of the Gamaliel Foundation; SEIU president Andrew Stern, who said the book would “hopefully inspire more people to act”; political strategist David Axelrod, who said it “provides a blueprint for future victories”; Democrat operative John Podesta, who called the book a “straight-up shot in the arm for progressives”; political commentator Arianna Huffington, who said it would help “return America to its progressive roots”; and Congressman John Lewis, who said the book would help “create our society’s next historical movement.”

In 2008 Creamer worked for the Obama presidential campaign, training volunteers at “Camp Obama.”

Today Creamer writes periodically for the Huffington Post. On November 19, 2009, he penned a piece that said: “If we succeed in winning health insurance reform we will have breached the gates of the status quo. We will demonstrate that fundamental change is possible. Into that breach will flow a wave of progressive change.”

On November 24, 2009, Creamer attended a White House state dinner — along with high-level Obama advisors like Andrew Stern and David Axelrod — despite the fact that ex-convicts are usually barred from such events.

In a December 2009 interview, Creamer said the following with regard to Senator Joseph Lieberman’s opposition to government-run healthcare:

“The problem with Lieberman is …. he has kind of the suicide-bomber kind of advantage. He doesn’t care if he blows the whole house down. The best option for him, to a healthcare bill, is no bill; that’s fine [with him]. He doesn’t care if there’s no bill, because the insurance industry is happy to have no bill. And he is happy — gleeful — to try and punish the left wing of the party that he believes wronged him.”

When the interviewer interjected that Lieberman was “a vindictive, spiteful, little, miserable man who is taking a lot of money from the insurance industry,” Creamer said: “Absolutely miserable.”

In 2011, Creamer co-founded the political consulting firm, Democracy Partners.

From January 2009 through October 2016, Creamer visited the Obama White House 342 times; on 47 of those occasions, he met personally with President Obama.

Creamer is a board member of the Midwest Academy and the Sentencing Project, and is General Consultant to Americans United for Change.

Creamer’s Involvement in Provoking Violence at Republican Political Events

In October 2016, investigative journalist James O’Keefe’s “Project Veritas Action” (PVA) released a series of undercover, hidden-camera videos showing that Creamer was a leading orchestrator of an initiative where the Democratic Party and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign had been using trained provocateurs to instigate violence and chaos at Republican events nationwide – especially at rallies for then-presidential candidate Donald Trump and vice-presidential candidate Mike Pence – throughout that year’s election cycle. In one video clip, Creamer was shown emphasizing the importance of beginning these disruptions as soon as possible: “I’m not suggesting we wait around. We need to start this shit right away on every one of these fronts.” In a separate clip, Creamer affirmed that the Clinton campaign “is fully in” on his strategy, and that “Hillary knows through the chain of command what’s going on.” Creamer also revealed that his own organization, Democracy Partners, coordinated its efforts with the Clinton campaign via daily telephone calls.

Yet another video segment featured one of Creamer’s consultants, Scott Foval – the former national field director of Americans United for Change, a former employee of People For the American Way, and the founder of a political consulting firm called the Foval Group. He explained that his own Foval Group played a key role in training and organizing the aforementioned provocateurs to carry out a Creamer-approved tactic called “bird-dogging,” whereby these Creamer/Foval operatives planned, in advance, their confrontations with carefully selected, targeted individuals. Said Foval: “So the term bird-dogging, you put people in the line at the front, which means they have to get there at six o’clock in the morning because they have to get in front of the rally, so what when Trump comes down the rope line they’re the ones asking him the question in front of the reporters, because they’re pre-placed there. To funnel that kind of operation, you have to start back with people two weeks ahead of time and train them how to ask questions. You have to train them to bird-dog.”

Moreover, Foval stated that he – and, by logical extension, Creamer – sometimes recruited homeless and mentally ill people to serve as their provocateurs: “I’m saying we have mentally ill people that we pay to do shit, make no mistake. Over the last 20 years I’ve paid off a few homeless guys to do some crazy stuff …”

The purpose of bird-dogging, said Foval in the video, was to create a public perception of “anarchy” around Trump, on the theory that its shock value would undermine his political support.

Foval also explained that the Democrat bird-dogging operation was structured in a manner that – if the public were ever to find out about it – would allow the DNC and the Clinton campaign to pretend that they knew nothing about it. “The thing that we have to watch is making sure there’s a double-blind between the actual campaign and the actual DNC and what we’re doing,” said Foval. “There’s a double-blind there, so that they can plausibly deny that they heard anything about it.” To help ensure that this plausible deniability was not in any way compromised, Democratic funding for the Foval Group was channeled through a highly circuitous path. Said Foval: “The campaign pays DNC, DNC pays Democracy Partners, Democracy Partners pays the Foval Group, the Foval Group goes and executes the shit on the ground.”

In yet another video clip, Foval shed light on the relationship that existed between the Clinton campaign, the DNC, and the Creamer/Foval tactics: “We are contracted directly with the DNC and the campaign. I am contracted to [Robert Creamer] but I answer to the head of special events for the DNC and the head of special events and political for the campaign. Through Bob. We have certain people who do not get to talk to them, at all.”

Further, Foval explained that once his foot soldiers had either obtained their own video footage of a campaign-event disruption, or had caused various media outlets to cover the disruption, Creamer’s Democracy Partners would promptly provide the relevant footage to the Clinton campaign, the DNC, and numerous pro-Clinton super PACs and activist organizations that were “involved in this project.” Among these groups, he said, were Americans United For Change, the Alliance for Change, the Alliance for Retired Americans, and Priorities USA.

On the same day that this video was released, Creamer resigned in disgrace from his post as Clinton campaign manager, explaining that he was “unwilling to become a distraction to the important task of electing Hilary Clinton and defeating Donald Trump in the upcoming election.”

In a December 17, 2015 email that was later (in October 2016) made public by WikiLeaks, Mike Lux, who co-founded the progressive consulting firm Democracy Partners with Robert Creamer, revealed that Creamer had a “close” relationship with Robbie Mook, the manager of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. In an October 2016 interview with CNN, Mook falsely stated that Creamer and Foval had “never had a relationship” with the Clinton campaign.

Creamer’s Support for Voter Fraud

In a second PVA video that was released in October 2016, an undercover journalist with a hidden camera met with Creamer and proposed an elaborate voter-fraud scheme to him, saying: “…[W]hat do you need [in order] to be able to vote?… What makes you a citizen?… [I]f you look at that checklist, it’s an ID card of any kind that shows you who you are and a pay stub that shows you’re getting paid at a local address someplace…. So … if you have those two things, you’re registered to vote. So, let’s say I had business inside of say Illinois or Michigan and I hired people and I had addresses for them, I could write them checks for those, I could use them as day laborers or whatever and use them and find my way around the voter ID, the voter registration laws for Hispanics…. that sounds like something we could register huge numbers of people that way.”

As the journalist spoke, Creamer nodded repeatedly and was clearly interested. He replied to the proposed voter-fraud plot by saying: “Alright, let me, on that front, I’m gonna write down these options. Let me see if I can chat with these people who are most involved in Hispanic voter registration. And uh, I can see what their thoughts are. I mean there are a couple of different organizations that’s their big trick.… We’ll help you do this. I mean this is very important this stuff. Turnout is huge, huge, huge.”

In the same video, Scott Foval gave an elaborate explanation of how voter fraud could be committed on a massive scale by either bussing people to polling places, or, in order to avoid the appearance of voter fraud, organizing them to drive to the polls in separate vehicles. Regarding the possibility that some of the fraudulent voters might be caught in the act, Foval said: “The question is, whether when you get caught by a reporter, does that matter? Because does it turn into an investigation or not? In this case, this state, the answer is no, because they don’t have any power to do anything.” He also emphasized the importance of implementing voter-fraud schemes “on a much bigger scale.” “You implement a massive change in state legislatures and in Congress,” he said. “So you aim higher for your goals, and you implement it across every Republican-held state.”

Moreover, Foval spoke reverentially of Creamer: “Bob Creamer is diabolical and I love him for it. I have learned so much from that man over the last twenty years, I can’t even tell you. And he calls me to be his firefighter a lot of the time, because there are people who in our movement will not do what it takes to get shit done. And I’m not that person. I’m the one they send when everything has gone to shit.”