If you want to know what's really going on in America, ask the First Americans

Might an obscure and complex South Dakota bond scam that the press has systemically ignored be the key to the House investigations into the Bidens, "foreign influence", and related matters?

America’s hyperpolarized politics seems to come down to which political “tribe” – Republican or Democratic – each one of us chooses to identify with.

And if we identify with one particular tribe, we take an uncompromising “see no evil” approach to everything the people on its rolls believe and whatever its big chiefs do or say, while we embellish in our imaginations everything the people in the other tribe and its chiefs do or say as if they were the Great Satan incarnate, or something to that effect.

Lifelong academics like myself, of course, are supposed to be unswerving loyalists to the “progressive” tribe, whatever precisely that might be, simply by virtue of our profession. Our mastery of the art of learning is supposed to transform us ipso facto into enlightened beings capable of reasoned deliberation and what the educrats blithely term “critical thinkers” untainted by religious bigotry, social prejudice, puritanical morality, let alone the vicissitudes of popular opinion and prejudice.

We are also, as we enforce routinely on every college student the institution’s “honor code”, supposed to uphold the values of fair-mindedness, honesty, and integrity. 

But I long ago discovered quite a while back in circumstances that are no longer relevant or worth detailing here (it was during the time I served as a regional delegate to the convention that nominated Jimmy Carter for President) that “progressives” are often the polar opposite of the high-minded profile they insist on projecting to the public. 

Furthermore, I learned the hard way, perhaps not unlike the Catholic Bishops or lay leaders who first discovered the enormity of predatory sexual behavior among certain priests in their diocese, that those who try to speak truth to power will almost invariably be met with both harsh and insidious stratagems for exercising power to conceal the truth, mainly because the “tribes” which thinks they own the so-called “truth tellers” are far more concerned about maintaining the false façade of truth and righteousness than actually allowing the truth to come out.

Which is why as I perused in the national media the warring narratives in the two major warring political tribes over whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden was more evil or corrupt, I noticed a strange anomaly, one which the message crafters for my own presumed tribe seemed bent on keeping out of the public eye. 

It has to do with a certain real “tribe” – not a metaphor but an ethnographic fact – that has received, and continues to receive, the proverbial short end of the walking stick in this hypertoxic, hyperpartisan media melee.  

You’ve probably heard only indirectly, if at all, of the Wakpamni Lake Community, which is technically a tribal government entity, that is part of Oglala Sioux tribe whose land consists of 2.2 million acres in South Dakota covering the Pine Ridge Reservation.  The Oglala, or “Scatter Their Own”, in turn are one of the seven bands of the Titowan (Lakota) division of the Great Sioux Nation.

Less than a decade ago the Wakpamni Lake Community was swindled out of $64 million by various well-connected political and financial operatives in Colorado, California, and Washington DC through a massive fraudulent bond scheme. 

According to a press release form the United States Attorney’s Office of the Southern District of New York in 2016 , “the defendants induced an Oglala Sioux Native American tribal entity to issue bonds through lies about how the bond proceeds would be invested.  Instead of investing the proceeds in a way that would provide capital for development and help cover the interest payments, the defendants allegedly pocketed most of it to pay for their own personal expenses, homes, cars, travel, and jewelry.”

The USAO statement added: “the defendants’ alleged fraud has left devastation in its wake: a tribe with tens of millions in bond obligations it cannot pay, and investors out tens of millions, left holding bonds they did not want.” 

It should be noted that the Wakpamni Community is the poorest of the poor among Indian tribes in the entire United States, which makes the bond ripoff gambit even more reprehensible. Fortunately, those indicted in 2016 were convicted two years later and all but one have to date been serving prison time.

As it happens, the one person who has been able to stay out of jail, at least until now, is the same person who testified to a closed session of Congress about Joe Biden and the Burisma scandal – one Devon Archer, long-time friend and business partner of Hunter Biden. 

Archer, who prior to his arrest was a fund-raiser and bundler for Democratic Party donations in Southern California, was joined by a long list of obscure but prominent partners that included the notorious white collar criminal John Galanis, his son Jason, financiers Gary Hirst and Hugh Dunkerley, attorney Michelle Morton, and businessman Bevan Cooney.

As evidenced in numerous federal court documents and media accounts largely from American Indian news outlets, the bond scheme was engineered by Galanis with the explicit intent of facilitating a “roll-up”, or megamerger, of multiple financial services and investment companies on a global scale. 

The key player in the gargantuan and labyrinthine bond scam was a now defunct company known as Burnham Securities, Inc., which Galanis pitched as placement agent for the worthless bonds.  Dunkerley was managing partner for Burnham Securities at the time. 

Archer, as a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing indicates, “was either a director, officer and indirect owner of and/or investor in multiple entities affiliated with Burnham, including Burnham Financial Group, the holding company and owner of Burnham and BAM Holdings, LLC, the holding company for investment management companies operating under the Burnham name.”

But what has been conspicuously left unreported in so much of the already sparse mainstream media reporting (save the New York Post perhaps) of the scandal is that the company’s vice-president was Hunter Biden. Biden, however, was not named in any of the indictments, and he has denied any knowledge of what transpired.

However, as the Native Sun News reports from the trial of the conspirators, Hunter Biden’s “name…was used to legitimize sale of” the fraudulent bonds. In other words, the famous “brand” was not deployed merely to enrich Eurasian oligarchs, but to rip off obscenely and shamelessly one of the most destitute and historically mistreated ethnic populations in the country.

For what purpose?

The answer to that question to this day remains murky.  In hindsight is clear that the bond shenanigans was one key installment in the construction of the sprawling international financial empire that Archer, the Bidens, and others were in the process of building in the mid-2010s from Ukraine to China. 

The difference is that in the case of the Indian bond fiasco the damage was so extensive and the crime so flagrant that the federal government had no choice but to step in and prosecute the perpetrators.  But it is obvious at this point that that the well-documented, but little understood legal case is intimately linked to everything that the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability is investigating, and that in many respects it may harbor secrets that could shed devastating light on much of the political turmoil of the last decade.

It is also obvious, unfortunately, that the hapless Wakpamni Lake Community was only chosen because they were desperate and because the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975 made it much more difficult for federal regulatory agencies to poke their noses into the financial dealings of federally recognized tribes.

Whether Hunter, or even Joe Biden had anything criminally culpable to do with the Wakpamni Lake capers is beside the point.  There is no doubt that the racket itself was a venture of America’s progressive elite for the unvarnished enrichment of the progressive elite at the callous expense of the very “marginalized” elements of society they routinely claim to champion. 

Testimony at the trial from the chief executive of the tribal corporation underscores the Biden name was “thrown around” in order to convince the Native American victims of the boondoggle that the deal was credible.

John and Jason Galanis, career white-collar criminals who have been implicated in other fraud schemes and had links to the notorious Gambino mobsters of Los Angeles, were front and center in putting the moving pieces of the corrupt scheme together and making them work until they got caught red-handed.  

But they were also working closely, as court filings show, with one Jason Sugarman, whom the government in the case against the other perpetrators named an “unindicted co-conspirator” and the SEC later charged with implementing a $43 million securities fraud operation that was closely related to the Wakpamni Lake Community scheme.

Sugarman and Cooney were financial partners in the Viper Room in Los Angeles, an elite nightclub.  Sugarman, in turn, is married to actress Elizabeth Guber, daughter of wealthy film producer and sports owner Peter Guber who in the early 1990s came to be known as the “Clinton Cavalry” in their successful effort to take over and remake the Democratic Party with Hollywood money.

Along with Archer’s friend Chris Heinz and John Kerry’s spouse Teresa Heinz, heirs to the multi-billion-dollar ketchup fortune the “Clinton Cavalry” became major bankrollers for the election of Barack Obama in 2008 and his vice-president Joe Biden.  That reality is undeniable.

According to the minutes of an executive session of the independent trustees of the board of trustees of the Burnham Investment Trust Archer indicated that Sugarman’s wife and Larry Liu, executive vice-president of the China Development Financial Holding Company whom Hunter Biden and Archer solicited in 2011, were allegedly slated to contribute funding for the acquisition of Burnham Asset Management (BAM), the holding company for the sundry entities acquired in the bond scam roll-up.  

And then there is the matter of Russian billionaire oligarch Elena Baturina, who has past links to Vladmir Putin and the Russian mafia and whom bank records demonstrate dished out millions of dollars to Hunter Biden’s shell companies while escaping sanctions after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. 

A series of private email exchanges between Archer and Jason Galanis in January 2014, obtained by investigative journalist Matthew Tyrmand from the Gmail account of Bevan Cooney and uploaded to the internet, make it clear that the key principals in the Wakpamni Lake boondoggle, who were collaborating about the same time the bond scandal was in the works, were making an all-effort to get Baturina’s money into a Burnham account with Banc of Calfornia, for which Jason’s brother Steve Sugarman was the CEO. 

The Burnham trustees minutes mention that the Sugarmans were deeply involved with the Burnham Securities acquisition.

An email from February 14 sent by Archer to Baturina’s Russian business associate Marina Kouznetsova notes that a meeting had been set up for Feb. 18 to open the account. Representatives from Archer’s and Hunter Biden’s company “Rosemont” were also listed as having arranged to attend the signing.

The email states:

At the meeting the conversation will be brief. Limited to introductions and a brief description of the long history of Burnham as a Wall Street institution and the account custody and clearing of JP Morgan. Wet signatures will be required from EB [i.e., Elena Baturina] on two forms. Following execution of those forms accounts will be open and we'll follow up next week on the plan for funding.

What was the “plan for funding”?  Funding what? The emails themselves do not reveal the exact purpose, but the context indicates it probably had something to do with the Burnham acquisition, which was vetted in August of that year.

Yet another email dated March 5 from Bevan Cooney to Jason Galanis boasts that “we are live!” and exults that Baturina will soon be in New York whereby “she will wire a large amount of money upon arrival.”  An email earlier in the day to Galanis from a party named “Tim” (whose last name is redacted in the posted thread) states casually:

No worries on [Baturina], as you know she is coming back to NY in 10 days and she will then sit w Dev on the strategy and wiring a bigger amount (per Dev).

Could this be what the $3.5 million wired to Hunter Biden from Baturina, for which House investigators found actual records, was really all about to some extent?  An email dated March 16, which Archer sent to Cooney, complains that “Burnham managed to screw up the wire from Yelena” on account of a currency exchange issue, which would have made future bank to bank transfers impossible. 

Did that money, and future ones, therefore, end up going through Hunter, whose company Rosemont Bohai had already received a month earlier enormous tranches from Baturina?  How much of it, if any, was used to finance the fraudulent bond scheme?

One part of the progressive elite narrative seeking to distance the Bidens, Sugarmans, Devon Archer, Bevan Cooney et. al. from the fetid Indian bond mess is that it was all cooked up by the Galanises and that they themselves, as respected global finance entrepreneurs, were somehow snookered as well by the white collar con-artists.

Of course, the Galanises don’t see it that way at all.  Derek Galanis, who was not named in the Indian bond swindle but is currently serving time for a role he played in a related financial fraud escapade, claims in a self-published book available on Amazon.com that it was Bevan Cooney who brought the Wakpamni scheme to his family in the first place, most likely on behalf of the other “respected” group of high-rollers, including Hunter Biden.

Derek Galanis even insists in an interview with The U.S. Sun that

It’s clear that Hunter helped finance Burnham, got paid from it, promoted it. The emails also show that Hunter was aware of my brother Jason Galanis.

Finally, John Galanis in a 2020 filing for nullification of the verdict of his trial due to Judge Ronnia Abrams’ statement at the trial that “we have a mutual friend” in Hunter Biden and that “same foreign parties central to the Mueller inquiry were contemporaneously involved in similar schemes with the Burnham partners.”  It alleges, in fact, that Archer and Biden used the roll-up scheme to then “obtain a $5 Million investment in Burnham by a Chinese firm” and “continue using political patronage to gain control of assets”. 

The petition, which was turned down, essentially argues that Galanis, even though he already had a significant criminal record, was made the fall guy for the bond debacle.

It is absolutely impossible to cry “conspiracy theory”, or even “nothin’ to see here”, in any of this elephantine and sleazy farce because there are innumerable suspicious data points as well as an endless torrent of court documents, legal briefs, and intricate rabbit trails of influence peddling that add up to something far bigger than the partisan picture our information gatekeepers want us to have even a hazy glimpse of.

But what we do know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the same people who cruelly and indifferently screwed over the most abused among the first nations of this continent, against whom we had already committed genocide, were intimately connected with those “rich men north of Richmond”, who are currently in power and prate publicly as well as routinely about the imperative for social justice.

And that unforgivable hypocrisy stinks to the highest heaven!