The photo above was taken at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in June of 2015. The occasion was a dinner to celebrate the founding of the Fred Sands Institute of Real Estate at Pepperdine University. Fred Sands is the gentleman in the blue tie. He standing next to his good friend Elliott Broidy.

Sands was (he died a few months after this picture was taken) a southern California real estate mogul. The ribbon cutting ceremony for the founding of the institute took place in February 2016, with the honors being performed by his widow, Carla Sands, a former B-movie actress who subsequently graduated from Life Chiropractic College.

If you look at Pepperdine’s current web site, you’ll find the Real Estate Institute, but no sign of Fred Sands’s name. That’s because Carla Sands decided not to give Pepperdine the second half of the founding gift after her husband’s death, and the university subsequently gave back the first half of the donation, which had been made while Fred Sands was still alive.

If you’re wondering what Carla Sands, star of Deathstalker and the Warriors from Hell, is up to these days, the answer is that she’s the new United States ambassador to Denmark.

I wonder what happened to that donation?

See too also, Marie Royce, the brand new assistant secretary of state for educational and cultural affairs, and Steve Stockman, former GOP congressman, current federal prison inmate, and recent aspirant to the ambassadorship to the United Arab Emirates.

But Elliott Broidy totally had an affair with Shera Bechard in his spare time. BTW, props to an LGM commenter for pointing out to me that Broidy’s “confession” sounds like it was crafted by a lot better lawyer than Michael Cohen to not actually be a confession to anything in particular.

What these various transactions suggest is that Elliott Broidy isn’t just a big GOP fundraiser: he’s the guy who is so well connected to the White House that people go to him to get (Sands) or try to get (Stockton) ambassadorships, and Assistant Sec positions in the State Department (Royce). He’s a favor-trading bribe-handling fixer in other words. The idea that he had an affair with Bechard, rather than being the guy who fixed that problem, is pretty ludicrous on its face, especially since there is literally zero evidence for such an affair other than his very cagey “confession.”