Sorry I’ve been gone for a while. It’s been a busy few months for me. Let’s do a recap on on Trump’s U.S. Senate candidate in Ohio. Last month, The Daily Beast helped shed light about “self-made” car dealership owner and U.S. Senate candidate, Bernie Moreno’s (R. OH) background:
As a leading Republican candidate for the highly competitive U.S. Senate race in Ohio, Bernie Moreno has leaned on his personal story as an immigrant from Colombia who built a national auto dealership empire.
But there’s been something missing from that story: Moreno’s falling-out with his longtime friend and business associate, Gabriel Despres, a man he once credited as central to his success.
According to previously unreported legal filings, Despres sued Moreno in 2015, alleging “unlawful and unscrupulous conduct in reneging on written and oral promises” Moreno made about the money Despres would make and the role he would have in their dealership group.
The core allegation from Despres was that Moreno scuttled an agreement entitling him to 10 percent of the net proceeds from the sale of any of his dealerships in exchange for Despres giving up a large share of his annual salary for Moreno to use as capital to expand the business.
Despite the group’s success—and Moreno publicly saying Despres was the “yin to my yang”—Despres claimed he was pushed out by Moreno before the sale of any dealerships, not because of his performance but because his old friend did not want to pay him.
Moreno, who is an immigrant from Colombia, has prided his reputation on being a “self-made” businessman who’s never needed the Government’s help. Well Business Insider proved that Moreno is a liar:
Yet when Moreno bought his first car dealership in 2005, he got some extra help as the result of the kind of diversity initiatives that Republicans now decry, according to his public comments in 2016 and court testimony in 2014.
After 12 years working for an auto dealership group in Boston, Moreno decided to buy a struggling dealership in North Olmsted, Ohio that was owned by Roger Penske, the founder of the Penske Corporation and a former professional race car driver.
As Moreno has publicly recounted himself, Mercedes-Benz pushed Penske to sell the dealership in exchange for essentially handing him another dealership in Arizona — and the luxury car dealership specifically wanted a "minority" to take over.
"The stipulation was that Mercedes got to choose the dealer, and the dealer had to be a minority," Moreno said during a "Forum on Race" organized by YWCA Greater Cleveland in February 2016. "That was the rules. So they had a few different candidates, they ended up choosing me."
But Moreno benefited from Mercedes-Benz's push for diversity in more ways than one.
In 2014, he testified during an unrelated lawsuit in Florida that Mercedes-Benz managed to get him a discount because auto companies like them faced "pressure to have more diversity among their dealership ranks."
"They wanted a minority operator there," Moreno said during the 2014 hearing, according to a transcript obtained by Business Insider. "So what they did is they went to Roger Penske and asked him to sell that dealership for a dramatically reduced price in exchange for Mercedes giving Penske an open point in Chandler, Arizona."
He’s also been lying about his background:
In an interview in 2020, about his success as a car dealer in Ohio, Moreno described himself as “somebody who moved to this country a long time ago to escape what happens in most South American countries, which is socialism and the absolute prison of those ideas”.
In 2021, as Moreno moved into national politics with a first run for a Senate nomination, the Cleveland Plain Dealer said he “says he came to the United States as a child with his mother and siblings to flee socialism in their native Colombia. He believes that same ideology is rising in the United States, and he wants to fight back.”
But when Moreno was born, on 14 February 1967, Colombia was nine years into the 16-year period of National Front government, in which conservative and liberal parties alternated being in power as a way to avoid violence between the two factions.
Furthermore, the first leftwing Colombian government in modern times is the current one, headed by Gustavo Petro and in power since 2022.
Colombia has long been home to leftwing guerrilla groups. As described by the US Congressional Research Service, when Moreno lived there, the country was home to “leftist, Marxist-inspired insurgencies … including the Farc, launched in 1964, and the smaller National Liberation Army (ELN), which formed the following year”.
Such groups, the CRS says, “conducted kidnappings, committed serious human rights violations, and carried out a campaign of terror that aimed to unseat the central government in Bogotá”.
Moreno, however, has described an early childhood far removed from such worries.
By his own description, his father was secretary of health under Misael Pastrana, a conservative and the last National Front president between 1970 and 1974.
“We had a very, very, very, very incredible lifestyle in Colombia,” Moreno said in 2019, at a business event in Cleveland, adding that his mother moved the family to the US – initially against his father’s wishes – because she “didn’t want us to be raised as pampered indoor cats”.
And now he’s been getting busted over this:
“We literally sold our middle class out to China so that rich people could make money selling you cheap garbage from China,” Ohio GOP Senate candidate Bernie Moreno said in an ad released last summer. It was meant as a condemnation of wealthy elites’ ties to China, but in retrospect, it sounds more like an admission.
Moreno, a multimillionaire who made his fortune in part as an owner of car dealerships, has repeatedly claimed he refused to sell a Chinese-made General Motors SUV, the Envision, as part of his principled defense of the U.S. auto industry.
But that wasn't exactly true — and Moreno is facing backlash for it. Labor leaders in Ohio, including those who support Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown’s re-election bid, are teeing off on Moreno for lying about selling the model. A spokesperson for Moreno told Spectrum News, “In response to the closure of the Lordstown Plant here in Ohio [in March 2019], Bernie made a decision to stop any new inventory of Envision’s from being sold at his dealership. After he sold off the inventory he already had on the lot, he refused to take orders for more Envisions. There is zero contradiction here.”
Here’s a little more info:
However, Moreno’s dealership did sell the Chinese-made SUVs for several years, and even promoted the vehicles on social media, according to numerous social media posts found by Spectrum News.
Those posts appeared from 2014 to 2019, a period before Moreno sold the dealership to Crestmont Auto Group in 2020. (The name of the dealership’s Facebook page was changed by Crestmont in March 2020)
“My name is Kayla McCullough. I purchased a 2017 Buick Envision from Buick GMC of Beachwood,” a customer said in a December 2016 video testimonial posted on the Bernie Moreno Companies YouTube page.
“I highly suggest that you visit the team at Buick and GMC of Beachwood, a Bernie Moreno Company,” the woman said at the end of the video, which features a Bernie Moreno Company logo.
In August 2017, the dealership shared a video ad on its Facebook page promoting the Envision.
“Command the road with the all new Buick Envision for just $279 a month, zero down,” the ad said.
GM, the parent company of Buick, confirmed to Spectrum News the Envision was only manufactured in China. The SUV became the first Chinese-made vehicle to be imported by a major U.S. automaker when it debuted in Michigan in 2016.
And union officials have been calling out his bull shit:
They say this pattern of lying makes the members of the UAW unable to trust Moreno when they are looking for a senator who has their back and can be transparent with the union workers.
"Something to be aware of if someone lies about something as simple as if they sold a vehicle or not that was made in China at their dealership they owned, that's a pretty serious lie to me. Also, you know, as I said during about the unemployment, Sherrod Brown was the only one that was there for us. He showed he's proved he's had our backs. Bernie Moreno proved he does not have our backs, especially as an auto worker selling vehicles made in China," stated Jeff Adams, UAW Local 1219 president.
"Well, Bernie, for more than a 5-year period, sold these Chinese-made cars. He sold it to people who didn't realize it was a Chinese-made car; with the Buick nameplate, it looked like an American car. And then, when Lordstown closed, he decided well, 'I'll quit selling them.' But when I was a kid, we were taught that 'you don't close the barn door once the horse is gone.' It don't do any good, and that's kinda what we tried to do," stated George Jeffries, UAW Lima/Troy area CAP council president.
Yeah, what a fucking hypocrite he’s being bankrolled by Silicon Valley thanks to this piece of shit, U.S. Senator J.D. Vance (R. OH):
Behind the scenes: Vance worked the phones with big donors, teeing up PAC leaders to close the deals. "It became a running joke how many times we heard 'JD sent me' from donors both in Ohio and around the country," said Cliff Sims, who co-led Buckeye Values PAC.
Zoom in: Axios is told Vance helped facilitate a $93,400 donation to Moreno from Purple Good Government PAC, which is funded by Silicon Valley founder and investor David Sacks — a star of "The All-In Podcast." Sacks has become a bridge between Silicon Valley wealth and Republican politicians.
- Vance also was influential with one of the heaviest hitters in politics — Steve Schwarzman, the billionaire founder and CEO of Blackstone Group who's a bellwether among top GOP donors. Schwarzman gave $375,000 to the Moreno super PAC.
Ohio Democrats have been wasting no time hitting Moreno over this and they recently released this ad:
FYI:
Ohio's senior senator, Democrat Sherrod Brown, has been in elective office for nearly half a century and he knows full well the power of incumbency.
Not the power of name recognition or the power of campaign fundraising; not the natural advantages an incumbent has when he or she walks in a room of voters.
For Brown, his 17-year tenure in the Senate affords him the power of knowing how to get legislation passed by Congress with bipartisan support.
In this case, it was the FEND Off Fentanyl Act, a piece of legislation introduced a year ago by Sen. Tim Scott, the South Carolina Republican who has been angling to be named Donald Trump's running mate.
But it took Brown's effort to shepherd the bill through Congress; and it was passed and signed into law this week as part of a $95 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.
The new fentanyl law declares trafficking in the often-lethal drug a national emergency. More importantly, it gives the U.S. Treasury Department more leeway to fight money laundering by the cartels who ship the drug into this country. And it gives the government the authority to make use of forfeited property of drug dealers to fund law enforcement.
It is an important win for Brown for two reasons — most importantly, the FEND Off Fentanyl Act could save lives. Secondly, it will be a boon to the tough re-election campaign the Democrat finds himself in this year.
And he’s been busted lying about this:
The other side: Moreno has said he would vote for a national abortion ban of 15 weeks with "commonsense restrictions that again eliminate late-term abortions."
- Following his victory, Moreno took aim at Brown, saying, "We have an opportunity now to retire the old commie ... and to save this country."
Reality check: Even though conservatives have advocated for a national abortion ban, former President Trump — the presumptive GOP presidential nominee — has said he thinks the issue should be left to the states to decide.
While Brown keeps racking up endorsements:
Health, Democracy and Freedom are on the ballot next year and we need to get ready to flip Ohio Blue. Click below to donate and get involved with Brown and his fellow Ohio Democrats campaigns:
U.S. Senate
Sherrod Brown
Congress
Emilia Sykes
Greg Landsman
Marcy Kaptur
Shontel Brown
Ohio Supreme Court
Lisa Forbes
Melody Stewart
Michael Donnelly
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