By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 25, 2016 

Arthur Levitt, Former Chair of the SEC, Promised to Be Wall Street’s Uncle, and Delivered

Yesterday, former SEC Chair Arthur Levitt penned an OpEd for the Wall Street Journal, effectively telling Senator Elizabeth Warren to stop criticizing Mary Jo White in public. White is the current Chair of the SEC that Senator Warren publicly asked President Obama to fire this month for her bad leadership.

Senator Warren is a genuine champion of the investing public and understands how the SEC has become a lapdog to Wall Street under White’s inept leadership. Levitt is part of the Bill Clinton machine that de-regulated Wall Street and turned it into a massive looting racket in the 1990s through today. It’s important to take note of Levitt’s effort to muzzle Warren in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Expect to see more of this coming from a lot more of Wall Street’s cronies.

Arthur Levitt was appointed as SEC Chair by President Bill Clinton in 1993. Levitt served until 2001, making him the longest serving SEC Chair. Levitt had previously been Sandy Weill’s business partner in a Wall Street brokerage firm. In 1998, when Weill wanted to create Citigroup by merging his Travelers Group, which owned an insurance company, brokerage firm and investment bank, with Citibank, an insured depository bank – an illegal merger at the time under the Glass-Steagall Act — Levitt and his other cronies in the Bill Clinton administration eagerly got the ball rolling.

During his long tenure, Levitt presided over the serial looting of the public by Wall Street. Levitt was in charge when two university professors discovered that the Nasdaq stock market had been fleecing investors for more than a decade in an illegal price-fixing scheme. Levitt was in charge when Wall Street’s fraudulent research and IPO pump and dump schemes led to the great tech bubble crash, wiping away $4 trillion in market value. Levitt was there when JPMorgan and Citigroup helped Enron cook its books.

So when Levitt tells readers of the Wall Street Journal that “Mary Jo White has been a firm, thoughtful SEC chairman who, through speeches and a carefully chosen agenda, has made herself a capable steward of an essential agency,” one should take it with a grain of salt.

In 1994, a year after taking the reins at the SEC, Levitt let his pals on Wall Street know they did not have to fear “Uncle Arthur.” Speaking at the industry’s trade association in Boca Raton, Florida, Levitt said:

“As I meet you and greet familiar faces, I recollect previous visits to this Boca meeting — memories of Morgan Stanley’s parties, dinners with Congressional staffers, hot dogs in the St. Louis Room, and gala, invitation-only dances for honored guests and members of the old guard…I find myself looking at the industry now from a very new perspective — no longer a member of the immediate family, more like an uncle viewing the family from afar…”

In the Gary Weiss’ book, Wall Street versus America, Weiss calls Levitt “the terminally shame-deprived Levitt…who can spin the most laughable cop-out into an investor victory…” Indeed, thanks to a big public relations push, Levitt tried for years to rehabilitate himself as the champion of the little guy. After the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act on his watch brought about the greatest Wall Street collapse in history in 2008, he somehow got himself a seat to testify at the Senate Banking Committee. On March 26, 2009, Levitt told the Committee the following:

“The public may demand that you act over some momentary scandal, but you must not give in to bouts of populist activism. Your goal is to serve the public not by reacting to public anger, but by focusing on a system of regulation which treats all market actors the same under the law, without regard to their position or status… Specifically, some have suggested that we should re-impose Glass-Steagall rules regarding the activities and regulation of banks. Those rules kept the nation’s commercial banks away from the kinds of risky activities of investment banks…Perhaps we were too hasty in doing away with it, and should have held onto several key principles that made Glass-Steagall an effective bulwark against systemic risk in America’s banking sector. That does not mean we should pursue ‘turn-back-the-clock’ regulation reforms and re-impose Glass-Steagall.”

Mary Jo White should never have been confirmed by the Senate as SEC Chair because both she and her husband, at their two respective law firms, had represented every major Wall Street bank. (Under Federal law, the conflicts of the spouse become the conflicts of the Federal regulatory head.) Levitt should never have become SEC Chair because of his close working ties to Wall Street.

The Wall Street Journal is undermining its own credibility and further undermining the culture on Wall Street by promoting efforts to silence Senator Warren.

By Pam Martens: October 23, 2016 

John Jones

Julian Assange, founder and Editor-in-Chief of WikiLeaks, is the man responsible for the daily release of emails showing the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign to be an unprecedented machine whose tentacles and snitches reach into Wall Street, big corporations and big media. Earlier this year, WikiLeaks released emails showing that the Democratic National Committee had maliciously conspired to undermine the presidential campaign of Clinton challenger, Senator Bernie Sanders, in order to elevate Hillary Clinton to the top of the ticket.

Now it has emerged that two of the top lawyers representing Assange, John Jones in London and Michael Ratner in New York, died within less than a month of each other this year. And, Assange’s closest confidant in London and a Director of WikiLeaks, Gavin Macfadyen, died just yesterday.

Wall Street On Parade has carefully investigated the similarly unprecedented banker deaths over the past two and one half years. What is noteworthy about the banker deaths is that at the time of the deaths, Wall Street banks and their global brethren were under the largest investigations for criminal rigging of markets to occur in the past century. Even during the Senate investigations of the early 1930s when crooked business journalists touting fraudulent Wall Street stocks and crooked Wall Street bank execs manipulating stock prices were regularly revealed through subpoenaed documents, there was no similar rash of deaths or series of alleged suicides. (See related articles below.)

Now there is WikiLeaks leaking emails and documents that show that the same kind of cartel-like behavior that has corrupted Wall Street to its core has also infested the top of the Democratic Party. And, amazingly, three key members of the Assange/WikiLeaks support network have died within six months of each other this year. The statistical probability of this being a natural occurrence is slim.

The first WikiLeaks lawyer death to occur was on April 18, 2016. John Jones, a 48-year old father of two with a loving wife, was said to have thrown himself in front of a train at West Hampstead Thameslink station in a borough of London. The coroner who conducted the inquest was Mary Hassell, the same coroner who conducted the inquest into the bizarre death of Gabriel Magee, a happy, healthy, 39-year old technology Vice President at JPMorgan Chase in London. (See related articles below.) While London newspapers had first reported that Magee had jumped from the top of the JPMorgan building to the horror of thousands of onlookers below, it turned out at the inquest that there was not one eyewitness to the alleged jump. Nonetheless, Hassell ruled that: “I am wholly satisfied that Gabriel jumped off the 32nd floor with the intention of killing himself.” In the case of Jones, the Coroner’s Court said he suffered from “obsessive overthinking.” Jones had been receiving treatment at a local mental health facility and had gone out for an early morning walk.

Michael Ratner

The next death of a key WikiLeaks attorney came on May 11, 2016. Renown civil rights attorney, Michael Ratner, was said by the New York Times to have died of “complications of cancer.” Ratner was 72 years old. Ratner was extremely dangerous to the U.S. government because he had a unique, long-term knowledge of institutional wrongdoing within government, the U.S. intelligence apparatus and Wall Street. Ratner was the long tenured President of the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) which took on the cause of Guantánamo prisoners who were being held in indefinite detention without being charged. Ratner served as co-counsel in the 2004 landmark US supreme court case, Rasul v Bush, which gave the Guantánamo prisoners the right to challenge the legality of their detention in a court of law.

Ratner also had encyclopedic-style knowledge of the government’s surveillance, suppression, policing and intimidation before and after 9/11. After I published two articles on Wall Street and the NYPD’s jointly operated surveillance center in Lower Manhattan, which was spying on Occupy Wall Street protesters and other law-abiding citizens, I was invited onto a radio show Ratner co-hosted, Law and Disorder, on November 7, 2011, to discuss my findings and the ramifications for civil rights in America. (You can listen to the interview at 32:20 on the audio tape here.)

Gavin Macfadyen

Yesterday, Gavin Macfadyen, a close friend and confidant to Julian Assange died of lung cancer, according to a statement posted at The Center for Investigative Journalism (CIJ) which Macfadyen had founded in 2003. Macfadyen, like Ratner, was dangerous to government because of his institutional knowledge base. Prior to founding CIJ, Macfadyen had been an investigative TV reporter in London for more than two decades. Many of his programs involved reports from whistleblowers on human rights abuses by governments or corporations. In 2014, Macfadyen helped to organize a group to provide legal, emotional and mental health support to whistleblowers. Those whom he had assembled were dangerous to the U.S. government: former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, who had led a widespread effort to expose the war in Iraq as based on fraudulent intelligence with the real reason being oil; Thomas Drake, a former senior executive at the National Security Agency who blew the whistle on the government ignoring the impending 9/11 attack and violations of civil rights through secret mass surveillance. (You can watch Macfadyen’s discussion with his whistleblower team here.)

Related Articles:

Sanders Supporters Stunned by Sudden Death of 38-Year Shawn Lucas Who Served the Lawsuit on the DNC and Wasserman Shultz

Banking Deaths: Why JPMorgan Stands Out 

Suspicious Deaths of Bankers Are Now Classified as “Trade Secrets” by Federal Regulator 

Swiss Insurers and JPMorgan Have More Than “Suicides” in Common 

JPMorgan Vice President’s Death in London Shines a Light on the Bank’s Close Ties to the CIA   

Suspicious Death of JPMorgan Vice President, Gabriel Magee, Under Investigation in London      

As Bank Deaths Continue to Shock, Documents Reveal JPMorgan Has Been Patenting Death Derivatives   

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 21, 2016

Michael Froman

If there is any truth to the allegation that Russia is behind the hacking of emails being released by WikiLeaks, then the American public owes Russia a huge debt of gratitude. At a time when the American people are sharply focused on how the leader of the free world is chosen, WikiLeaks is giving us an unprecedented, historical opportunity to understand how corporate money in politics has corrupted everything we believe in as a democracy.

This week, for example, emails from WikiLeaks show that President Obama, using the email address of bobama@ameritech.net, was communicating directly with Michael Froman of Citigroup in 2008, who fed Obama lists of recommended appointments to his cabinet. In an email from Froman dated October 6, 2008, with Froman using his Citigroup email address of fromanm@citi.com, Hillary Clinton shows up on Froman’s list for Secretary of State or head of the U.S. Department of  Health and Human Services (HHS). In a separate list attached to the email, Eric Holder was recommended for U.S. Attorney General at the Department of Justice or as White House Counsel. (See the email and the attachments here.)  In less than a month after Obama’s election as President on November 4, 2008, Obama had nominated Clinton to be his Secretary of State and Holder as his Attorney General. Despite the unprecedented corruption rooted out on Wall Street by regulators, Holder failed to prosecute any of Wall Street’s top executives for the crimes that led to the greatest financial crash since the Great Depression.

Froman had served as Chief of Staff to Robert Rubin when Rubin was Secretary of the Treasury in the Bill Clinton administration. Rubin led the effort to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act, which barred investment banks and brokerage firms on Wall Street from merging with commercial banks that held FDIC insured deposits for savers. The Glass-Steagall Act had been in force since 1933, after Congress had conducted three years of hearings showing the recklessness and corruption of the major Wall Street banks. Rubin left the Treasury Department and promptly took a job at Citigroup, the primary beneficiary of the repeal in 1999. Over the next decade, as Citigroup was serially charged by its regulators for abusing the public trust, Rubin collected compensation of $126 million.

Froman followed Rubin to Citigroup where he served as Chief Operating Officer of Citi Alternative Investments and later as Managing Director of Citi Infrastructure Investors, a unit of Citi Alternative Investments. The latter is the division that blew up the bank in the same month that Obama was elected President. Froman had been a major bundler for Obama, raising funds that USA Today placed at $200,000 to $500,000.

Just seven days after Froman sent his Hillary and Holder recommendations to Obama in 2008, Citigroup received $25 billion in a bailout. Other Wall Street banks received similar amounts. But what happened just 19 days after Obama’s election was unprecedented in the annals of U.S. financial history. Citigroup received an additional infusion of $20 billion in equity from the government, assets guarantees on more than $300 billion of its toxic assets, and, it was secretly receiving billions of dollars in low-cost loans from the Federal Reserve – an amount that would cumulatively add up to $2.5 trillion from 2007 to 2010. This is how we reported in November 2008 on Citigroup’s teetering status as the President-Elect was secretly receiving his personnel marching orders from one of Citi’s executives:

“Citigroup’s five-day death spiral last week was surreal. I know 20-something newlyweds who have better financial backup plans than this global banking giant.  On Monday came the Town Hall meeting with employees to announce the sacking of 52,000 workers.  (Aren’t Town Hall meetings supposed to instill confidence?)  On Tuesday came the announcement of Citigroup losing 53 per cent of an internal hedge fund’s money in a month and bringing $17 billion of assets that had been hiding out in the Cayman Islands back onto its balance sheet.  Wednesday brought the cheery news that a law firm was alleging that Citigroup peddled something called the MAT Five Fund as ‘safe’ and ‘secure’ only to watch it lose 80 per cent of its value. On Thursday, Saudi Prince Walid bin Talal, from that visionary country that won’t let women drive cars, stepped forward to reassure us that Citigroup is ‘undervalued’ and he was buying more shares. Not having any Princes of our own, we tend to associate them with fairytales. The next day the stock dropped another 20 percent with 1.02 billion shares changing hands. It closed at $3.77.”

Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone would report that “In January 2009, just over a month after the bailout, Citigroup paid Froman a year-end bonus of $2.25 million. But as outrageous as it was, that payoff would prove to be chump change for the banker crowd, who were about to get everything they wanted — and more — from the new president.” Jack Lew, who worked in the same division at Citigroup as Froman and had also worked in the Bill Clinton administration, received a bonus from Citigroup of $940,000 following its massive bailout. An insolvent bank, existing on a lifeline from the taxpayer, was paying those bonuses. Lew became U.S. Treasury Secretary in Obama’s second term, following Obama’s appointment of Tim Geithner as U.S. Treasury Secretary in his first term. Geithner was President at the New York Fed at the time it was funneling much of the secret $2.5 trillion in loans to Citigroup. (See related articles below.)

Froman was not just involved in recommendations on top level cabinet posts, he was also overseeing rank and file positions. In an email dated Saturday, October 18, 2008, Froman, again using his official Citigroup email address, sent the following email to Obama’s advisers:

“Review Teams

“Attached is the latest version of the Agency Review teams. It is a closely held document, so please treat it with the same sensitivity as ours. If you all could take a quick look at the lists for the agencies in your area, that would be helpful. I think the hope is that, while there are no guarantees, some of the people on these lists might make their way into the agencies ultimately. Our role, therefore, is to check whether there is much overlap between the names here and the names were seeing/generating for sub-cabinet positions in each agency. There doesn’t need to be total overlap, but if there is a total disconnect, it would probably be better to rectify that now vs. later.

“I hate to ask, since I just send you another long spreadsheet to check, but if you could do this tomorrow and get back to Lisa (copied here) and myself, that would be great. Thanks.”

Early in Obama’s first term, Froman was appointed as Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Adviser for International Economic Affairs. Today, Froman is U.S. Trade Representative and the man behind the highly controversial and highly secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.

This is how Politico sums up how trade deals are being deliberated under Froman’s command:

“If you want to hear the details of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal the Obama administration is hoping to pass, you’ve got to be a member of Congress, and you’ve got to go to classified briefings and leave your staff and cellphone at the door.

“If you’re a member who wants to read the text, you’ve got to go to a room in the basement of the Capitol Visitor Center and be handed it one section at a time, watched over as you read, and forced to hand over any notes you make before leaving.”

If Russia is behind these leaked emails and keeping Americans informed on how their government actually works behind the scenes, then it’s not a smear against Russia but a smear against how miserably corporate media has failed in this job.

Related Articles:

Democrats Disgrace Themselves With Jack Lew Confirmation for Treasury Secretary

Was the U.S. Justice Department Sold to the Highest Bidder

As Citigroup Spun Toward Insolvency in ’07- ’08, Its Regulator Was Dining and Schmoozing With Citi Execs

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 20, 2016

CNBC’s David Faber Asks Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein If There’s a Secret Banking Cabal, October 19, 2016

There’s a new mantra making the rounds of Washington and Wall Street. No matter how big the lie you’re caught in, no matter how much documented evidence exists against you, just deny, deny, deny. That’s how Democratic National Committee Interim Chair Donna Brazile handled the email released by WikiLeaks showing that she leaked a debate question to Hillary Clinton; that’s how Hillary Clinton handled revelations about sending classified government material over an unclassified server in the basement of her home; and that’s how Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein is handling the widespread public perception that there’s a banking cabal meeting in secret to plot its continued dominance over the interests of the average U.S. citizen.

Yesterday, CNBC’s David Faber interviewed Blankfein and asked about the suggestion that Donald Trump had made on October 13 in a speech in West Palm Beach, Florida that there is an international banking conspiracy undermining the sovereignty of the United States. Faber asked Blankfein: “So am I to take it that you weren’t meeting in secret with international banks and Hillary Clinton to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty?” Blankfein responded: “We could parse that clause by clause, but to every clause, the answer is no, we weren’t doing it. We weren’t meeting in secret and we certainly weren’t plotting destruction.”

The first half of Blankfein’s answer is flatly false and he knows it. The big Wall Street banks do meet in secret and have been doing it for decades. His own General Counsel, Gregory Palm, part of the Management Committee at Goldman Sachs, is part of the secret cabal.

Just five days before Blankfein made his false denial, Bloomberg News’ reporters Greg Farrell and Keri Geiger had landed the bombshell report that the top lawyers of the biggest Wall Street banks had been meeting secretly for two decades with their counterparts at international banks. At this year’s secret May meeting at a posh hotel in Versailles, the following were among the big bank lawyers in addition to Palm according to the Bloomberg report: Stephen Cutler of JPMorgan (a former Director of Enforcement at the SEC); Gary Lynch of Bank of America (also a former Director of Enforcement at the SEC); Morgan Stanley’s Eric Grossman; Citigroup’s Rohan Weerasinghe; Markus Diethelm of UBS Group AG; Richard Walker of Deutsche Bank (again, a former Director of Enforcement at the SEC); Robert Hoyt of Barclays; Romeo Cerutti of Credit Suisse Group AG; David Fein of Standard Chartered; Stuart Levey of HSBC Holdings; and Georges Dirani of BNP Paribas SA.

The Bloomberg report indicates that the meetings are secret and that this is the first time their existence has been reported to the public. But this is hardly the first time there have been reports of Wall Street banks huddling in secret.

Just this past July we raised the question as to whether the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, was violating anti trust law by meeting secretly with competitors following a February 1 report in the Financial Times of  “secret summits.” As we reported at the time:

According to guidelines published by various trade associations and law firms, the following rules must be followed when conducting meetings between competitors to avoid the perception, or actual charges, of antitrust violations:

– Meetings must be regularly scheduled and should never be secret.

– A properly designated Chairman shall prepare and follow a formal agenda which should be reviewed in advance by legal counsel.

– Legal counsel should be present at all meetings.

– Formal written minutes of meetings should be taken and archived.

– Properly instituted bylaws should be followed.

– A Board of Directors should be properly instituted.

– Any company meeting the requirements of the bylaws should be allowed membership in the group.

Secret summits that are by invitation-only, have no boards or bylaws, no public minutes would certainly appear to be both violations of anti trust law as well as fueling the public perception of conspiratorial meetings.

The top Federal regulator of the Wall Street bank holding companies, the Federal Reserve, has also fueled the perception of banking cartels by allowing the New York Fed to sponsor its own bank groups like the Foreign Exchange Committee, which has been operating for the past 38 years and whose members, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup, each pleaded guilty on May 20, 2015 to a felony count brought by the U.S. Justice Department for – wait for it – engaging in rigging foreign exchange markets. The New York Fed-sponsored group, among other things, writes best practices rules for Wall Street.

The New York Fed also bizarrely sponsors the Financial Markets Lawyers Group. Its web site is an extension of the New York Fed’s web site. Members of the group are from the same Wall Street banks whose General Counsels are meeting secretly in posh hotels once a year.

While the New York Fed sponsored groups (see its latest one here) have regularly scheduled meetings, bylaws and minutes, it’s an affront to common sense to suggest that Wall Street banks serially charged with crimes against the public should be writing their own best practices rules. This Ayn Randian concept that businessmen will do what’s best for the public interest without any interference from government has twice in the past century nearly bankrupted the United States – in the Great Depression when Wall Street banks were allowed to hold savings deposits and again in 2008 when the Wall Street banks crashed with the taxpayer on the hook for the trillions of insured savings deposits they held, thanks to the mass de-regulation of Wall Street in 1999 under the Bill Clinton administration.

We don’t believe that Wall Street banking executives have ever plotted the destruction of the United States. We believe the majority want their children and grandchildren to grow up in a socially stable America. But we also believe they have been blinded by their greed, their multi-million dollar bonuses, their mansions in Greenwich, their yachts and penthouses, from consciously acknowledging that their actions brought us to the brink and continue to endanger America’s economy and future.

Congress has known for some time that the structure of Wall Street and its Federal regulators is contributing to egregiously harmful cartel activity. In August 1976, the House of Representatives Committee on Banking, Currency and Housing released a report titled: Federal Reserve Directors: A Study of Corporate and Banking Influence.  The report drills down to one of the ongoing problems today:

“The big business and banking dominance of the Federal Reserve System cited in this report can be traced, in part, to the original Federal Reserve Act, which gave member commercial banks the right to select two-thirds of the directors of each district bank.  But the Board of Governors in Washington must share the responsibility for this imbalance. They appoint the so-called ‘public’ members of the boards of each district bank, appointments which have largely reflected the same narrow interests of the bank-elected members. The parochial nature of the boards affects the public interest across a wide area, ranging from monetary policy to bank regulation.  These are the directors, for example, who initially select the presidents of the 12 district banks—officials who serve on the Federal Open Market Committee, determining the nation’s money supply and the level of economic activity. The selection of these public officials, with such broad and essential policymaking powers, should not be in the hands of boards of directors selected and dominated by private banking and corporate interests.”

Following the financial crash in 2008, the Federal Reserve battled in court for years to avoid providing details of the money it funneled to the Wall Street banks and their global brethren during the years of the crisis. When the Federal Reserve lost that court battle, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) eventually issued a detailed report in 2011 that chronicled the mind-boggling secret Fed loans, all of which had been made at super low interest rates, many below 1 percent, without any public disclosure or authorization from Congress. The final tally came to $16.1 trillion in cumulative loans. (See Table 8 below from the GAO report.) It was not just Wall Street banks that got the bailout but their foreign competitors as well, as millions of families in the U.S. were foreclosed on by the same banks.

Since the crisis, the U.S. national debt has skyrocketed from $9 trillion to $19.5 trillion, more than doubling in just eight years while the $9 trillion took 232 years to accumulate while financing major wars and the Great Depression. In no small part, that debt growth came from the fiscal stimulus needed to shore up the economy as a result of the Wall Street-fueled financial collapse.

America needs to get its house in order before it loses its credit rating and its international reputation as a sane, well-managed country. Denying that we have a serious banking cartel problem is not going to get the job done.

GAO Data on Secret Emergency Lending Programs During Financial Crisis

Update: This article has been updated to reflect that Richard Walker of Deutsche Bank was also a former Director of Enforcement at the SEC. Are you noticing a pattern here?

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 19, 2016

Wendy Clark Appears at a Fortune Magazine Forum, October 2016

Emails released by WikiLeaks have led to the outing of an elaborate scheme to scour, buff and shine the decades of scandals attached to Hillary and Bill Clinton using the marketing, branding and messaging tricks employed by corporations to resuscitate a stale, discredited or sagging brand. We’ve also learned that at least one of those re-branders, Wendy Clark, had to sign a non-disclosure agreement with the Clinton camp, agreeing not to divulge details of her work. Clark acknowledged that agreement at a recent Fortune Magazine forum.

Clark is widely considered a corporate branding genius, having been responsible for the “Share a Coke” campaign at Coca-Cola which featured folksy names on the side of their cans and bottles. In January of 2015, it was reported that Clark was taking a three-month leave of absence from her demanding and high-level position as President of sparkling brands and strategic marketing in North America for the Coca-Cola Company. On April 6, 2015, a week before Hillary Clinton announced that she was a candidate for President, Coca-Cola announced that Clark was returning to her post at the company. (Clark is now CEO at DDB Worldwide, North America, a global advertising agency.)

But emails released by WikiLeaks show that Clark was consulting with the Clinton team before she took her leave from Coca-Cola. In this email dated December 8, 2014, long-time Clinton attorney and adviser Cheryl Mills writes to Clark about polling and branding. Mills indicates that Clark will be playing a major role, writing: “The process memo you are working on for today will help as I assume it will speak generally to the research you would need to do the branding or need to have done with you shaping it.”

In a February 14, 2015 email to a broad swath of corporate marketers, branders and polling experts that were already actively engaged in the Clinton campaign (despite the fact that Clinton had failed to alert the Federal Election Commission that she was conducting a campaign), Clark fleshes out more of her branding strategy. Clark writes:

“In the meeting last week the Secretary seemed to associate with what we had identified: fresh yet familiar, tenacity, resilience, empathy, creativity, action-oriented, future focused.”

In describing the logo, or “mark” that was in the works for the Clinton campaign, Clark writes in the same email:

“…the mark is, at the same time, anchored on the unassailable truth of Secretary Clinton’s life and career — being in service of others. It’s not about her, it’s about you…”

The logo, the “H” with the forward-facing arrow, was created by Michael Bierut, a partner at the international design firm, Pentagram. Bierut has worked on major corporate branding campaigns for Saks Fifth Avenue, Billboard Magazine, and the New York Jets, among numerous others.

Two of those copied on Clark’s February 14, 2015 email were Jim Margolis of GMMB and David Binder of David Binder Research. GMMB bills itself on its web site as follows:

“You may have a name. You may have a logo. But you move people with a brand…The road o building that brand can be loaded with emotional potholes, so we offer a proven process that gets everyone in your organization to a simple, inspiring idea to drive everything you do.”

The David Binder Research web site says it has “enjoyed a long-term ongoing partnership with President Barack Obama’s White House, providing award-winning messaging work and conducting research on a number of different initiatives.” Other clients, it says, include “large corporations.”

On March 26, 2015, Clark sent another email to Cheryl Mills and John Podesta, the man who would become Chair of the Clinton campaign. In it, she said there was more work to be done on “Humanizing Hillary with more films and avenues to do so.” Clark also included in this email a link to films that the Clinton team had reviewed that day, indicating that significant work on films and marketing had been done well in advance of Hillary Clinton filing with the Federal Election Commission to alert them that she was a fully functioning candidate for Federal office.

According to Federal election law, after a candidate spends $5,000 or more on their campaign, it must file a notification with the FEC and begin reporting contributions and disbursements. Hillary Clinton filed her notification with the FEC on April 13, 2015, but when her first quarterly filing was made, the FEC web site lists payments to Clark Advisory Services, LLC at the home address of Wendy Clark in Atlanta, Georgia in January 2015 and March 2015, when according to the FEC, there was no Hillary for America campaign account from which to make those payments, and another payment on April 14, 2015, one day after Clinton filed with the FEC. (The total of the three payments to Clark came to $49,998.)

FEC filings also show that Huma Abedin, a long time aide to Hillary Clinton, was paid from the Hillary for America campaign account at the rate of $6,769.25 every two weeks, beginning in January 2015 – three months before the campaign had established the Hillary for America campaign committee with the FEC.

Marc Elias at Perkins Coie is the lawyer for the Clinton campaign. Wall Street On Parade emailed him last evening to inquire how the campaign was able to make payments in January, February and March – when, according to the FEC, it didn’t exist. Thus far, we have not heard back from Elias. We will update this article should he choose to respond. (See related article below.)

Screen Shots from the Federal Election Commission for Payments Made by Hillary for America Campaign Committee

Related Article:

Death of Shawn Lucas Brings Attention to DNC Role of Prestigious Law Firm