Been too busy shepherding a loved one through harrowing times to post for a couple months but this awesome True Crime tale of Asshole on Asshole financial violence was too delicious and heartwarming to contain:
First, before the Pittsburgh Post Gazette gives us the facts, understand that Atty. Gutnick's middle name is "Yale".... and his occupation is "Professional Trustee for Trust Fund Fucks" (says it on his business card no doubt).
H. Yale Gutnick, chairman of the board of directors of the Tribune-Review
newspaper, contended that he was right to reveal the $560 million balance of a trust fund that pays $12 million a year, each, to Jennie and David Scaife. Their father owned the newspaper.
Mr. Gutnick in December detailed the so-called Grandchildren’s Trust, created by Sarah Mellon Scaife, grandmother to Jennie and David. He likened them to people who win the lottery every month.
Mr. Gutnick was a past trustee of those funds, and his attorney, E.J. Strassburger, is a current trustee.
Atty Gutnick is no Occupier. He is paid truckloads to steer the wealth of the Mean, the Stupid and the Rich into the Right Wing Soundmachine. His contention is that the Scaife "kids" (trust me, they're old) don't need the money he allegedly bilked their addled and venomous dad Richard Mellon Scaife.
Here's more backstory: In 1935, when EVERYONE was awash in money, Richard's mom, who had made tons in the "Inherit Tons Of Money Business" set up a trust fund for her baby boy. By 2005 that fund was worth $210,000,000 (note to self: check those bonds I got when I was born!). Apparently Richard, who practically created the Clinton Scandal Business in the early 1990s, didn't really care about all that cash dating back to the 1890s, so he bought a small Pittsburgh newspaper and told Gutnick to spend whatever it took to create a Clinton scandal along with the American Spectator and the Arkansas Project:
The Arkansas Project was a series of investigations (mostly funded by conservative businessman Richard Mellon Scaife through his staff at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review) that were initiated with the intent of damaging and ending the presidency of Bill Clinton. Scaife spent nearly $2 million on this anti-Clinton project.
The investigations included the reexamination of the death of White House aide, Vincent Foster (who committed suicide), the investigation of a 1970s' real estate investment that Bill and Hillary Clinton had made in a development known as Whitewater and the re-opening of allegations that then Governor Bill Clinton had sexually harassed an Arkansas state employee.
Yep, the whole Bill Clinton rap sheet was pretty much created in the Trib/American Spectator SkunkWorks. Scaife was an otherwise left of loony social moderate who, following in his family footprints, gave a lot of bling to social causes we might well endorse here at DKos. So what would his primary motivation be to slander a President who had yet to do anything in the office? It was the same as you would expect from the Koch Brothers (who claim to be socially liberal BTW), greed. Taxing the rich and regulating the polluters tended to ding trust funds and that was the family's annual "lottery ticket". The investigations where as seedy as you could expect from an HBO movie:
A story idea the Arkansas Project leaked?
Curious people want to know!
Project reporter/investigators were hired, including David Brock, a self-described Republican "hitman", and Rex Armistead, a former police officer with a white supremacist past who was reportedly paid $350,000 for his efforts. Also assisting the project were Parker Dozhier, a bait shop owner who was reportedly a hard line right winger obsessed with bringing down Bill Clinton. They were tasked with investigating the Clintons and composing stories tying the Clintons to murders and drug smuggling as well as adultery.
According to Brock, Armistead and Brock met at an airport hotel in Miami, Florida, in late 1993. There, Armistead laid out an elaborate "Vince Foster murder scenario", a scenario that Brock found implausible." Regardless, by the end of 1993, Brock was writing stories for the Spectator that made him "a lead figure in the drive to" get Clinton.
But we all know that. Just goes to show: never piss off a redneck bait shop owner!
As for the Trib, well, no one in Pittsburgh much cares for the Trib but they've practically been paying people to take it for two decades and the whatevers have come home to roost.
Three trustees, including Mr. Gutnick, allowed the publisher to drain that trust to support his newspapers, reducing its balance from $210 million in 2005 to zero upon his July death. The son and daughter argue that was counter to their grandmother’s wishes.
“To put it simply, it was reasonable for Gutnick to assume that Sarah Scaife intended the trustees to distribute all [1935 Trust funds] to her son, leaving her grandchildren nothing, because she later provided for them, and handsomely, in a separate trust,” stated Mr. Gutnick in objections filed with Common Pleas Judge Kathleen Durkin of Allegheny County.
So, in an attempt to hold onto as much coin as he could and protect the future of his trust fund family, Richard Mellon Scaife let Yale the Grifter and a generation of muck-makers/bait salesmen piss away his $210,000,000 legacy - don't even think about how much got sucked down the crazy-hole before then.
Now that daddy's dead and the money's gone I guess that will be the end of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy huh?
BWAAAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAA!!!!!!