Oh, You Poor Delicate Snowflake

Tony Podesta has a sad, because he's a corrupt lobbyist, and people call him a corrupt lobbyist, because he did corrupt things. (Yeah, I know, technically legal, but the real scandal is what is legal with these rat-f%$#s.)

He had to stop lobbying for a while, because his (frequently unregistered) lobbying for foreign dictators, oligarchs, and mobsters came out as a part of the investigations of Trumps dealings with same in Russia and the former Soviet Union nations.

The collapse of Tony Podesta’s $42-million-a-year lobbying and public relations firm in 2017 amid a federal investigation shook K Street and rendered him toxic — a rare Democratic victim of the Trump-era scandals.

But that was only the beginning of his troubles.

Mr. Podesta, long an outsized character in the influence industry and Democratic fund-raising, turned to his enormous collection of modern art for solace and income. But when the pandemic sent the art market reeling, he sold the penthouse condo in Washington he had been using to show and sell his collection, and secured a loan from the government’s Paycheck Protection Program for struggling small businesses.

Discussions about consulting gigs and a return to a fund-raising circuit that had turned its back on him were halted by a combination of his declining income, pandemic restrictions and an infection from knee surgery that left him hooked to an intravenous antibiotic drip for months.

To top it off, he said, his email accounts and website were frozen after Chinese cyberthieves launched a wide-ranging phishing campaign using one of his domain names.

“It’s not been an easy time,” Mr. Podesta said in an interview, recalling a low point when he was being attacked on Twitter by former President Donald J. Trump and a television crew was on his block anticipating an indictment.

………

Now Mr. Podesta is exploring a return to a landscape he once dominated.

You have been a corrupt influence peddler for years, cashing in on your brother John's political positions.  Just go.

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The reception he gets could help answer some questions about life in Washington after Mr. Trump. Did the backlash to the open access-peddling and corporate influence of the Trump era result in brighter lines between corporate lobbying, fund-raising and governing? Or has the capital simply returned to the clubby culture in which lobbyist fund-raisers like Mr. Podesta held sway?

It's probably returned to the clubby culture, but given that John is no longer proximate to the levers of power, your done, dude.

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Mr. Podesta, who has known Mr. Biden and some of his closest aides for decades, noted approvingly that the Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee had accepted a combined $2,750 in donations from him last year, and that he had been welcomed at a virtual fund-raiser hosted by the campaign’s chairman, Steve Ricchetti, a longtime friend who once sold his lobbying firm to Mr. Podesta.

Mr. Ricchetti is now a counselor to Mr. Biden in the White House, while his brother Jeff Ricchetti, a former employee of Mr. Podesta’s lobbying firm, has seen his lobbying income increase significantly.

“They hire all these former lobbyists,” Mr. Podesta said. “They shouldn’t not take money from another former lobbyist.”

(Emphasis mine)

Do you understand just how f%$#ing toxic you and your whole clique of grifters are? 

You are toxic to the Democratic Party, and toxic to the nation, but the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) wants a share of the proceeds from your corruption, so you continue to be a fixture inside the Beltway.

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Over the course of three decades, he built one of the highest-grossing firms in Washington, representing companies and interests across industries and ideologies, including military contractors like Lockheed Martin and Boeing, big banks, a tobacco company, pharmaceutical makers and foreign governments including that of Hosni Mubarak, the authoritarian former Egyptian leader, Myanmar’s military junta and entities connected to the Saudi government.

His firm benefited from the perception that he had access to Democratic administrations and congressional offices — a perception enhanced by his fund-raising and personal connections to top Democrats. In 2016, Mr. Podesta donated or raised nearly $900,000 for the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton.

Her presidential campaign chairman was Mr. Podesta’s younger brother John, himself a stalwart of Washington’s Democratic establishment.

Both Podesta brothers became characters in the Russia investigation that loomed over much of Mr. Trump’s presidency. Emails stolen from John Podesta’s personal Gmail account by Russian intelligence revealed embarrassing rifts roiling Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign and Washington’s Democratic establishment.

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His primary residence now, a 7,000-square-foot house in Washington’s Kalorama neighborhood, houses a rotating display of his art, as well a wine cellar with thousands of bottles.

7,000 square feet? Al Capone should be so "poor".

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His firm’s demise stemmed primarily from its involvement in one strand of the special counsel’s investigation. The firm took on a client with ties to Viktor F. Yanukovych, who was president of Ukraine, in 2012, but initially failed to register with the Justice Department under foreign lobbying laws and found itself in the midst of a tangled investigation involving the Republican lobbyists Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, who had worked for Mr. Yanukovych’s political party before joining the Trump campaign and becoming central targets of the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.

………

Mr. Manafort and Mr. Gates were charged with unregistered foreign lobbying, tax fraud and other crimes in October 2017. The indictment identified the Podesta Group and a firm with which it worked on the Ukraine effort, Mercury Public Affairs, though not by name, as having worked as part of a “scheme” with Mr. Manafort and Mr. Gates to gain support for Mr. Yanukovych, while evading foreign lobbying disclosure requirements.

………

“We lost some clients over this, but the bank stuff was the killer,” Mr. Podesta recalled.

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Mr. Podesta said he was relying on art sales as his primary source of income, supplemented by Social Security and some investment income.

But when the pandemic hit, “the buyers all sort of left,” he said.

He sold the penthouse condo at a slight loss, unloaded his Flatiron district condo and secured a P.P.P. loan of nearly $43,000 to help cover his own salary, Ms. Corrie’s [his professional art curator] and that of a part-time employee, as well as rental fees and utilities at a professional art storage facility.

Even after all that, you are a corrupt SOB, and you went and sucked up taxpayer money.

He said he did not think the loan ran afoul of the program’s mission of helping small struggling businesses. “Lots of people much bigger than I got loans,” he said, including Washington lobbying shops, high-priced law firms and special-interest groups like those with which he used to work.

Basically, he is subscribing to the life philosophy of subscribing to the philosophy of Ayn Rand crush William Edward Hickman, who said, "What is good for me is right." (William Edward Hickman also  kidnapped a 12 year old girl, ransomed her, and dismembered her)

You art a profoundly contemptible contemptible excuse for a human being, and any misfortune that you have experienced is of your won making.

Please, Mr. Podesta, could you do me the kind favor of dining on excrement and expiring?