I had never heard of this guy until yesterday, I think, and now he’s all over the news (and not always in a good way).
First, I heard here on the SDMB that he had been named Trump’s 2020 campaign manager, then I started reading about his involvement with Jared Kushner and the 2016 campaign.
And now comes news that Trump campaign chief lends name to penny stock tied to felon
The political strategist and online guru who was named President Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign manager Tuesday has a close financial relationship with a penny-stock firm with a questionable history that includes longstanding ties to a convicted fraudster, according to an Associated Press investigation.
Brad Parscale, who played a key role in Trump’s 2016 election victory, signed a $10 million deal in August to sell his digital marketing company to CloudCommerce Inc. As part of the deal, Parscale currently serves as a member of California-based company’s management team.
The company touts itself as “a global provider of cloud-driven e-commerce and mobile commerce solutions.” But records reviewed by the AP raise questions about its current financial picture and its rocky past.
CloudCommerce’s operations have not turned a profit in nearly a decade, the records indicate. The company’s most recent quarterly earnings showed it has spent more than $19 million in investor money since its creation nearly two decades ago and has only $107,000 in cash on hand.
And in 2006, a top executive at the company, which was operating under a different name at the time, was caught in an FBI bribery sting and later pleaded guilty to securities fraud. The company said the former executive no longer has any connection to the company, but documents reviewed by the AP indicate he has remained involved in CloudCommerce’s major corporate decisions in recent years.
Parscale did not answer written questions from the AP about what he knew regarding CloudCommerce and its history when he sold his firm to the company and joined its board of directors.
I’m constantly thinking about how Cody Johnston noted that it’s Weird How Everyone President Donald Trump Knows Does Crimes .
There’s a ton of shady stuff in just this AP article:
CloudCommerce did not acquire Parscale’s digital advertising business, however. That work has been transferred to another Parscale company based in Florida, which handles as much as $1 million a month in digital advertising for the Trump campaign alone.
Parscale is on the payroll of five campaign and political advocacy organizations tied to Trump, lucrative work that made him central to Trump’s campaign even before his appointment as campaign manager.
In addition, Parscale has hired Eric Trump’s wife, Lara, a move that reflects his close relationship to the family and shields how much she is being paid from public disclosure because she works for a private company. According to the terms of her hiring last March, she was Giles-Parscale’s liaison to the campaign, working out of Trump Tower.
Neither she nor Parscale responded to emailed questions about her current compensation.
And there’s this about CEO Andrew Van Noy; the company’s SEC filings don’t seem to comport with the facts:
CloudCommerce’s financial filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission give varying descriptions of Van Noy’s business career before he joined the company in the spring of 2011. They said he ran a “boutique real estate private equity firm” through the end of 2008 and oversaw more than $300 million of transactions during a roughly six-month stint at Morgan Stanley at the beginning of 2010.
But in a bankruptcy filing Van Noy made in Utah in August 2010, Van Noy said he was unemployed — and had earned less than $9,000 in each of the last three years. Along with six-figure debts from unpaid credit cards and repossessed cars, he also faced two real-estate fraud lawsuits. A judge ruled against him in one case and Van Noy agreed to settle the other for the full amount of funds he was accused of misspending.
After the AP asked Van Noy to reconcile the conflicting filings, he hung up and then emailed a request for written questions, which he did not answer. He did not respond to subsequent phone calls and emails.
Another CE, Jonathon Lei, was caught trying to bribe FBI agents that he thought were hedge fund managers, and then it appears that he’s been violating the terms of his probation:
As a condition of Lei’s probation, court records show he was barred from owning or involving himself with any publicly traded company during his probation. But securities filings in 2008 — during the period Lei was still under probation — showed he still owned over 25 percent of the company, which had been renamed Warp 9 Inc.
Lei maintained his public holding of company stock for years after his conviction. By the time CloudCommerce adopted its current name, however, his name was nowhere to be found in its annual reports.
Van Noy told the AP that Lei had not been involved in running the company for at least six years. But CloudCommerce emails with outside parties showed him actively involved in company affairs as recently as 2015 — and he continues to be included in internal communications regarding its business activities, according to a review of documents by the AP and two people familiar with the company who spoke on condition of anonymity due to concerns they could be sued over the disclosures.
CloudCommerce’s most recent disclosure of ownership shows that one of Lei’s relatives, Elaine Lei, owns 11.4 percent of CloudCommerce through a shell company located in Lake Tahoe, Nevada — a stake she received from Lei.
As recently as 2015, Lei himself also remained an investor through NewQuest Ventures LLC, another holding company, according to SEC filings. A person familiar with CloudCommerce provided the AP with documentation reflecting that Lei remains involved in the company’s major decisions, including acquisition targets.
jasg
February 28, 2018, 5:16am
3
I’m hoping Parscale is on Mueller’s radar. In addition to the iffy business dealings Snowboarder Bo’s posts mention, there’s the little question of how closely Parscale was working with the “Internet Research Agency,” the Russian troll factory headquartered in St. Petersburg. It seems implausible that no coordination occurred.
Sherrerd:
I’m hoping Parscale is on Mueller’s radar. In addition to the iffy business dealings Snowboarder Bo’s posts mention, there’s the little question of how closely Parscale was working with the “Internet Research Agency,” the Russian troll factory headquartered in St. Petersburg. It seems implausible that no coordination occurred.
I’m gonna guess that if you and I know about him, that he is definitely on the radar.
I wouldn’t be so sure… I’m gonna let him know, just in case.
Great idea.
But seriously, the right is working hard to apply the dismissive ‘conspiracy theory’ label to every reasonable question about the doings of the Trump campaign and administration. So perhaps it’s not so obvious that ‘we all know’ that Parscale is being looked at, after all.
Here’s one for you: did Parscale meet with the sanctioned Russians (their spy chief Sergey Naryshkin et al), during that last week in January, this year, in which the Russians were given entry to the US to meet with Mike Pompeo and Dan Coats?
Pompeo met with Sergey Naryshkin, the head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service or SVR, and Alexander Bortnikov, who runs the FSB, which is the main successor to the Soviet-era security service the KGB. The head of Russia’s military intelligence, the GRU, also came to Washington, though it’s not clear that he met with Pompeo…
… But current and former U.S. intelligence officials said they couldn’t recall so many heads of Russia’s espionage and security apparatus coming to Washington at once and meeting with a top American official.
None of that implies anything about Parscale, of course. But it would be interesting to know what he was up to, that week. It would have been an ideal time to coordinate plans for the midterms and for 2020.
