BY Mark Tapscott
It’s an unchallengeable fact that the Sun appeared over the horizon this morning. It’s also a fact that Dr. Anthony Fauci is paid more than any other federal employee, ever. Publish the former in Forbes, hey, no problem.
But if your name is Adam Andrzejewski and you publish the latter fact on the digital pages of Forbes, you get terminated by spineless editors who fear offending the powerful in government.
And, oh, by the way, this is also the Forbes that around the same time it was kicking to the curb a guy who has done more for transparency and accountability in government than any other person in the last decade made this announcement:
“Forbes and Mika Brzezinski announced today that Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will headline its inaugural Forbes 30/50 Summit, a global event gathering generations of women from both the ’30 Under 30′ list and ’50 Over 50′ list in Abu Dhabi in March of 2022 to mark International Women’s Day.
“Clinton will receive the Forbes International Women’s Day Lifetime Achievement Award to commemorate her leadership and influential voice on the global stage in advancing the cause of women and fighting for gender equity.”
Readers who recall the years in which Hillary Clinton used her position as Secretary of State to enrich her family’s front, the Clinton Foundation, will no doubt recognize it’s no coincidence that the Forbes event honoring her will be held in the United Arab Emirates.
This from a Daily Mail story in 2016 provides a small reminder of Abu Dhabi’s role in the morass of Clinton Foundation corruption:
Abu Dhabi offered to make its first ever donation to the Clinton Foundation while the oil-rich state was lobbying the State Department for a major airline deal, according to emails obtained by the Daily Mail – and foundation officials pressed a top Hillary Clinton aide for permission to take the money.
The Clinton Foundation, which says it has no record of actually accepting the donation from TAQA, Abu Dhabi’s state-run oil company, asked Clinton’s chief of staff Cheryl Mills for approval to take the $50,000 first-time donation in March 2012 …
The emails raise questions about Mills’s close involvement in the State Department vetting process for Clinton Foundation donations and Bill Clinton’s outside financial arrangements, including whether the foundation used her as a back-channel around the official ethics review process.
“Documents previously released in response to a Judicial Watch public records request showed that Mills was often copied on memos between State Department ethics officials and the Clinton Foundation regarding the vetting of Bill Clinton’s speaking requests and consulting contracts.
“Mills maintained a close relationship with the Clinton Foundation officials during her time at the State Department. She was a member of the Clinton Foundation board from 2004 to 2009, the year she joined the State Department, and rejoined it in 2013 after her role as Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff ended.”
Somebody should remind Forbes that when you sleep with dogs, don’t be surprised to wake up in the morning with fleas. But enough about Clinton corruption, let’s resume our examination of Fauci, Forbes, and the Forbiddance of Facts.
Check out this recent segment on Fox News in which Andrzejewski explains what happened:
And guess what Forbes published the same day Andrzejewski was terminated — a sickening panegyric to Fauci!
Now let me tell you a little about Andrzejewski. He’s the founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Open The Books, a Chicago-based non-profit dedicated to one purpose: “Every Dime. Online. In Real Time.”
There are hundreds of non-profits devoted to bringing greater transparency and thus accountability to American government at all levels, many of which do important and necessary work.
But Andrzejewski and Open The Books have achieved more to make government transparent and accountable since 2009 than all of the rest of them combined. Here’s why:
“At OpenTheBooks.com, we work hard to capture and post all disclosed spending at every level of government – federal, state, and local. In 2020, we filed 40,000 Freedom of Information Act requests and successfully captured $6 trillion in public expenditures.
“We are rapidly growing our data in all 50 states down to the municipal level. We won’t stop until we capture every dime taxed and spent by our government. As a government watchdog organization, we accept no government funding.”
In other words, when Open The Books says it seeks “Every Dime. Online. In Real Time,” they mean it. And bureaucrats like Fauci know it. That’s why they will go to any lengths to cancel people like Andrzejewski.
Open The Books is achieving the vision first laid out in 2005 by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) who said all federal spending should “be within a few mouse clicks for every citizen with a computer and Internet access.”
That’s what the USASpending.gov website was supposed to do. But it has never come close to fulfilling Coburn’s vision. Thanks to Andrzejewski, the vision of the former Oklahoma Republican who was known as the Senate’s “Dr. No” for his determined opposition to waste and fraud in government spending is becoming a reality.
And that’s precisely why people like Fauci and the thousands of bureaucrats getting rich off of “public service” and “journalists” at places like Forbes are terrified by people like Andrzejewski.