Billionaire 85-year-old Charles Koch now admits to the Wall Street journal that he and his late brother David did much damage to the country sponsoring the Tea Party and the highly partisan atmosphere that led to divided government, a major rift between the two parties. Charles Koch’s new book, “Believe in People: Bottom-Up Solutions for a Top-Down World,” expressed his regret over funding divisions between the Democrat and Republican Parties. Koch and his late brother David were part of 77-year-old former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s (R-Ga.) 2004 Republican Revolution, sweeping a new generation of zealous Republican leaders into Congress. Supplying much of the “dark money” for the Tea Party and other right wing groups, the Koch brothers thought at the time they were helping the country. “Boy, did we screw up! What a mess!” Koch confessed in his book, dealing with today’s toxic partisanship.
President-Elect Joe Biden, 77, ran on a platform to return the Congress to bi-partisanship, hoping to get beyond the adversarial atmosphere seen since the Koch brothers funded the Republican Revolution. Watching 74-year-old President Donald Trump lose the election was due in part to the public’s exhaustion with hyper-partisanship. Cleary, both parties are responsible for the toxic partisanship personified in 80-year-old House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) who coordinated the resistance in Congress the day Trump was inaugurated. House Democrats, led by Pelosi, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), worked feverishly to oust Trump from the White House, eventually impeaching him in 2019 for a phone call with 42-year Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky inquiring about Joe Biden and his son, Hunter.
At no time since the 2004 Republican Revolution was toxic partisanship worse than with Trump’s presidency. When Trump ran for president in 2016, he was investigated by the FBI using former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton bogus opposition research AKA “The Steele Dossier.” Former President Barack Obama and Biden were all in using the nation’s national security apparatus to prevent Trump from becoming president. Once Trump won the 2016 election, the persecution continued with the Special Counsel Robert Mueller spending 22-months and $40 million investigating wild speculation about Trump’s alleged ties to Russia. When Mueller concluded his report March 23, 2019, he found no Russian conspiracy. No surprise because the whole investigation was politically motivated from the start, showing how toxic partisanship had run wild.
When Biden’s transition team wonders why Trump wants to exhaust his legal remedies in the 2020 election, it’s not only about allegations of election fraud. It’s about the fraud that went on for four years without any legal consequences. No one inside the Obama White House, the FBI, CIA or National Security Agency every paid a price for putting Trump through an illegal investigation, never accepting from Day 1 his presidency. Koch brothers never understood how extremes partisanship could wind up imploding U.S. democracy, allowing the government to persecute a GOP nominee and president. “We did not create the Tea Party. We shared their concern about unsustainable government spending and we supported some Tea Party groups on that issue,” Charles admitted. Charles watched his “dark money” create hyper-partisan right wing groups eventually boomeranging.
Worth about $44.9 billion, Koch now wants to put his cash toward bipartisan projects, realizing backing the Tea Party and other right wing groups that led to the illegal push back of Democrats’ secret investigations of Trump and his 2016 campaign. “But it seems to me that the Tea party was largely unsuccessful long-term, given that we’re coming off a Republican administration with the largest government spending in history,” Koch said. Koch never dreamed that Democrats would use the power of the state to investigate with fake probable cause a GOP nominee and U.S. president. With Biden having his own corruption issues, there’s little chance that anyone involved in illegally investigating Trump will ever be held accountable. While it’s good that Charles Koch wants to promote more bipartisanship, there’s little hope that Democrats learned their lesson in 2020.
Charles Koch has done a real 180 when it comes to seeing the future of the country lies in bipartisanship. In an email to Wall Street Journal writer Douglas Belkin, Charles congratulated President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, offering his resources in “finding ways to work with them to break down the barriers holding people back.” Koch said he wanted to work together on the economy, criminal justice reform and immigration issues, all long overdue for bipartisan fixes. While Trump still reels from his big loss and four years of illegal investigations, Koch and growing numbers of Republicans have moved on, looking forward to finding common ground. “I hope we all use this post-election period to find a better way forward . . . “ looking forward to using his resources for the common good. Democrats must also work hard toward bipartisanship.
