Donald Trump continues his full employment program for billionaires by appointing Stephen Feinberg to conduct a purge of the intelligence community.
President Trump plans to assign a New York billionaire to lead a broad review of American intelligence agencies, according to administration officials, an effort that members of the intelligence community fear could curtail their independence and reduce the flow of information that contradicts the president’s worldview.
Feinberg is a co-founder of Cerberus Capital Management, a fund with deep political connections (the chairman is Dan Quayle. Yes, that one). Feinberg also has connections to both Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner. And, in Trump terms, he has great credentials.
When it comes to suppressing information over disastrous entanglements with foreign governments, Feinberg has experience from a deal to profit on the effects of the Bush Recession on Northern Ireland. And if that’s not enough, he loves guns. Really loves them. So much so that he turned Ceberus into "Big Gun" and the driving force of the NRA.
The industry was fragmented, consisting of numerous small, private manufacturers like Bushmaster scattered across the American Northeast. There had been Big Pharma, and Big Oil, but never Big Gun.
Cerberus set out to create it. A catalyst was the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, pushed by NRA lobbyists and passed by a Republican-controlled Congress in 2005. PLCAA granted gunmakers broad immunity from lawsuits from victims of gun violence.
How much does Feinberg love guns and love the fact that gun manufacturers have special protection from lawsuits? After Sandy Hook, he personally bought the manufacturer of the gun behind the massacre.
Feinberg also fancies himself a bit of an action man. In 2005, he paid a visit to Blackwater, the “security firm” owned by Betsy DeVos’s brother and Trump friend Erik Prince. There he went through training in how to hit targets from over 1,000 yards away. Even that wasn’t enough. Eventually he funded the formation of another military training camp that out Blackwater’ed Blackwater.
Cerberus put up the capital, purchasing a shooting range on the outskirts of Memphis for Tier 1’s facilities, a sprawling 800-acre private military base with a half-dozen shooting ranges, on-road and off-road driving courses, a parachute-drop zone, and an “urban-combat compound” designed to look like an Afghan village. Tier 1’s biggest customer was the United States Special Operations Command. Navy seals, Army Rangers, and other elite military operatives trained there in preparation for clandestine missions across the globe.
So … you have a pseudo-tough guy at the heart of the NRA who also conducts shady international finance deals and who has connections to Trump, Bannon, Kushner, DeVos, Trump’s collection of Goldman Sachs alum, and the some of military contractors who were behind the Bush administration. It’s a web of connections that deserves a chart to unravel.
Oh, and Feinberg also shares Trump’s attitude toward workers and their masters … er, job creators. Bushmaster, the makers of that Sandy Hook gun, had been a small business where the owner, Dick Dyke, treated his workers well and had a generous profit-sharing plan.
Each month, he paid an equal share of Bushmaster’s gross profits to every employee, from the CEO to the guy who cleaned the toilets.
Once Feinberg came in, that changed.
One of the first things it did was cancel the profit-sharing plan.
Feinberg was also personally responsible for the expansion of military-style rifles into supposed “hunting” roles. As his gun portfolio grew, he ended up owning both Bushmaster and Remington. This allowed him to take Bushmaster’s AR-15 military assault gun, and relabel it as a Remington “sporting rifle.”
There was no disguising its military heritage, but by stamping a storied brand onto this menacing instrument, Cerberus was able to expand Freedom Group’s business in both the traditional gun-store market and the family-friendly sporting retailers. Soon, Remington-branded assault rifles were available at Walmart.
The massive expansion in the number of these types of rifles in American homes isn’t just a measure of the “oh, no, Obama might take away this thing I’ve never before realized I needed” market, it’s a result of marketing and availability that put what was an uncommon item in front of people on a grocery run.
So, Feinberg ...
- Fancies himself a pretend SEAL who likes to participate in military games.
- Personally created the modern Big Gun industry by buying out smaller firms, screwing over their workers, and turning them into a juggernaut that’s now the core of the NRA.
- Purposely constructed his company to benefit from laws that protect gun manufacturers from being sued by victims of gun violence.
- Co-founded an equity firm that was involved in shady deals around the globe.
Sure. Perfect choice.
Bringing Mr. Feinberg into the administration to conduct the review is seen as a way of injecting a Trump loyalist into a world the White House views with suspicion. But top intelligence officials fear that Mr. Feinberg is being groomed for a high position in one of the intelligence agencies.
Mr. Bannon and Mr. Kushner, according to current and former intelligence officials and Republican lawmakers, had at one point considered Mr. Feinberg for either director of national intelligence or chief of the Central Intelligence Agency’s clandestine service, a role that is normally reserved for career intelligence officers, not friends of the president. Mr. Feinberg’s only experience with national security matters is his firm’s stakes in a private security company and two gun makers.
What this country needs at the helm of the intelligence community is someone whose “experience” comes from running around with Betsy DeVos’s brother and a conviction that more guns is always the answer.