There are headlines everywhere in the legacy media that Bernie Sanders out-raised all Democrat candidates in the 4th quarter. Here are excerpts from one such article:

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) seems to be fond of money — for a socialist, that is. His presidential primary campaign brought in $34.5 million in the fourth quarter of 2019, topping the hauls of his 2020 Democrat opponents. It was an impressive $9 million more than he brought in during the third quarter of 2019 and was the largest quarterly donation figure brought in by a Democrat in 2019.

Why the “Bernie surge” now, and where did the money come from? The Bernie campaign would like us to believe that all the money is rolling in from $18 donors across the land (according to Faiz Shakir, Bernie’s campaign manager, but that is just a smokescreen, as that would require 1.9 million small donors to raise that much money. I wonder how many total entities actually donated? And by entities, I mean PACs and other non-profit organizations, too.

The Democrats are notorious for laundering massive campaign contributions through various non-profit organizations in order to get around campaign finance laws.

The 2008 Obama campaign was fined $375,000 for campaign finance “violations” in 2013. Note that the FEC is apparently not too efficient, and they waited until AFTER the 2012 campaign when it didn’t matter any more to make that announcement. By the way, that was the largest fine of any presidential campaign up to that point in time, but it only involved about $1.3 million in questionable contributions.

Leave it to the Clintons to prove once again that Barry is just a piker in grifting compared to them. The Clintons are still under investigation by the FEC for running an $84 million kickback scheme through state Democrat Party organizations in 2016:

A new legal complaint filed with the Federal Election Commission alleges that the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee used state chapters as strawmen to circumvent campaign donation limits and laundered the money back to her campaign. The Committee to Defend the President, a political action committee, filed its complaint with the FEC on Monday with the allegations that the Hillary Victory Fund (HVF) solicited cash from big-name donors, including Calvin Klein and “Family Guy” creator Seth MacFarlane — money that was allegedly sent through state chapters and back to the DNC before ending up with the Clinton campaign. Officials with the committee said their filing was spurred by their own analysis of FEC reports, where they said they discovered the HVF either never transferred the money to state chapters and back to the DNC, or did so without the state chapters having actual control. In its complaint, the CDP alleges that about $84 million was funneled illegally from the DNC through state party chapters and back into the war chest of the Clinton campaign. “Based on publicly available FEC records, repeatedly throughout the 2016 presidential campaign, HVF would purportedly transfer funds to its constituent political committees, which included between 34 and 40 state parties,” reads a passage from a copy of the complaint reviewed by Fox News. “On the very same day each of these transfers supposedly occurred, or occasionally the very next day, every single one of those state parties purportedly contributed all of those funds to the DNC.”

Think this is a fairy tale or a witch hunt? The Democrat Party organization in my own state of South Dakota got caught red-handed in the scheme, as reported here. And this is just one tiny state.

Newly revealed draft audit findings for the years 2015-2016 show that the South Dakota Democratic Party understated disbursements by $2.5 million, received $67,182 worth of contributions from unregistered organizations and failed to disclose $46,097 worth of debts and obligations. The audit was performed by the Audit Division of the Federal Election Commission.

Since Hillary Clinton is still a viable candidate at this point (albeit undeclared for now), the FEC is once again dragging its feet on fining the Clintons. We’ll probably see a final decision in 2021 – five years after the original violations – just like happened with Obama’s $350K fine.

The Democrats are big on money laundering schemes. Just ask the Ukrainians, Latvians, and others about that. How does Bernie figure into the equation?

Daniel Greenfield wrote a great article in Frontpagemag(dot)com that examined Russian interference in the recent UK elections on behalf of far-left Labour candidate Jeremy Corbyn. A couple of interesting names popped up in the article – Hillary Clinton and Christopher Steele – and also another Steele dossier aimed at undermining Boris Johnson! Greenfield explains why the Russians would put their thumb on the scale in favor of Corbyn:

The Russian campaign calculatedly tried to stir up animosity between the US and the UK in order to sabotage Brexit, prevent a trade deal between the US and the UK, and help Corbyn perform well enough to retain his leadership role in Labour. Why the Russians might have wanted those things is obvious. A dysfunctional EU serves Moscow’s purposes better than an independent UK able to set its own defense and foreign policies. Frustrated leavers would become radicalized, making them useful targets for provocateurs with ties to Moscow. And Corbyn’s Momentum was part of a British Left that had longstanding ties to the Soviet Union whose old KGB operatives were now running Russia. And were eager to tap into the old networks of fellow travelers that had been cultivated in the Communist days. The same media outlets smearing Trump and Johnson as Russian assets based on nothing, who had falsely claimed that Trump’s victory and Brexit were the work of the Russians based on deliberate misrepresentations about Russian ad campaigns, refused to make the obvious connections between an alleged former Russian asset, his circle of former Communists, and a Russian campaign to help them.

Now here is the connection Greenfield makes to US politics in that article. He makes a good case that there were at least two factions struggling for control of the Democrat Party in 2016 – “the Clintonites and the Sandernistas” – and that struggle continues to this day, with Sanders on the upswing. Check this out:

[A]fter the collapse of Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and his clique of socialists has a real shot at taking over the Democrat Party. Whom did the leaked emails help in the 2016 election? It wasn’t Trump. Voters didn’t care about internal Democrat dirty laundry in the national election. The internal Democrat conflict between Clintonites and Sandernistas, different factions of the Left, was used to frame Trump and Republicans when the real beneficiaries were Bernie Sanders, Keith Ellison, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, her squad and the rest of the Corbynized inner circle of Berniestan. The Sanders and Corbyn campaign share the same stable of activists. If the Russians were helping Corbyn, it’s a good bet that they were helping the socialist who honeymooned in the USSR.

That’s not a stretch at all! The conventional wisdom among leftist Democrats is that Bernie got screwed out of the nomination in 2016. Bernie backers are now firmly ensconced at the DNC. One of the hottest Democrat commodities, AOC, is a Bernie backer. Bernie is now polling #2 among the Democrats’ Star Wars bar scene presidential candidates. And he out-raised all Democrat candidates in the 4th quarter.

Where is the real push behind Bernie coming from, and who stands the most to gain? Bernie is a life-long Communist, for all practical purposes, just as his entire voting record and his positions on all of the issues elucidate. Calling himself a “socialist” is misdirection. Which Americans support a 78-year-old socialist/Communist who would destroy the Constitution and Republic? There are plenty of Millennials enamored of socialism these days, thanks to the Left’s takeover of the public education system, but that segment of the population doesn’t have the discretionary resources to power Bernie’s campaign. We should be looking overseas to find his real supporters. I suspect he took lessons from Obama and the Clintons on that score.

The end.

Stu Cvrk served 30 years in the US Navy in a variety of active and reserve capacities, with considerable operational experience in the Middle East and the Western Pacific. An oceanographer and systems analyst through education and experience, Stu is a graduate of the US Naval Academy where he received a classical liberal education which serves as the key foundation for his political commentary. He threads daily on Twitter on a wide range of political, military, foreign policy, government, economics, and world affairs topics. Read more by Stu Cvrk