The House of Representatives’ Committee on Oversight and Government Reform recently requested testimony from officials who worked in the White House under former President Joe Biden. The hearing, scheduled for September, will explore the question of whether aides to President Biden were actively running the government while he was cognitively impaired. 

This is an important question but, in getting to the bottom of it, Republicans on the committee have an excellent opportunity to expose several other related scandals, all pointing to the way Democrats in the deep state/big tech revolving door collude together to manipulate American politics and undermine republican government. One piece of low-hanging fruit here is the role then-Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg likely played in the 2018 hit on Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh—which is something one of the witnesses in the September hearing, former Biden Chief of Staff Jeff Zients can speak to. As I am unfortunately all too familiar with the details of the Kavanaugh hit, I recognize the players and the patterns of behavior. I believe there is sufficient evidence to show that Sandberg was deeply involved in the attack on Kavanaugh, to a degree underplayed and even covered up by the media.

In a letter to Zients and others coming to testify at this upcoming hearing, committee chair Rep. James Comer wrote:

The scope of your responsibilities—both official and otherwise—and personal interactions within the Oval Office cannot go without investigation, given the mounting evidence that President Biden was incapacitated for much, if not all, of his single term. If White House staff carried out a strategy lasting months or even years to hide the chief executive’s condition—or to perform his duties—Congress may need to consider a legislative response.

Given that usurping authority is something this crew appears to be practiced in, Comer and others on the committee might want to consider establishing the pattern.

In 2018, a woman named Christine Blasey Ford claimed that Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her when the two were in high school in 1982. The charge was false, but as it was about to die for lack of evidence, several people in Ford’s hometown of Palo Alto, California stepped up to do their bit to keep it alive by providing legal advice, funding, and connections to the media. I was a involved in that nightmare, and even wrote a book about it, The Devil’s Triangle, but six years later the Palo Alto cabal of leftists have never been called to account. Congressmen involved in the Oversight and Government Reform hearing have a chance to do just that.

Jeff Zients is a key figure here. After a stint at the Office of Management and Budget, Zients was tapped to be President Barack Obama’s fixer in the disastrous rollout of the healthcare.gov website. He then worked closely with the Obama administration until Trump’s inauguration in January 2017. In 2018,  he went to work for Facebook. At the time, Facebook was deep in the throes of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The social media giant was on the hook for a $5 billion fine because of a data breach that revealed the personal data of millions of users.

An article in the American Prospect described Zients’ role this way:

Zients also joined Facebook’s board of directors two months after the Cambridge Analytica scandal became public. He joined the auditing subcommittee that then–Federal Trade Commissioner Rohit Chopra would later castigate for doing nothing when the company ‘flagrantly broke the law even after it was ordered to stop—and that lawbreaking continued for years.” 

Zients left Facebook in March 2020. In 2021, he joined the Biden administration as the COVID-19 czar. “Zients’s record does not indicate similar political sophistication,” journalist Max Moran wrote at the time. “It primarily shows a talent for making his fellow elites like him, mostly by saying what they want to hear.” 

Meta shareholders would bring a case arguing that Zients and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg used personal email accounts to communicate about issues relating to a 2018 shareholder lawsuit that accused Facebook executives of violating the law—and their fiduciary duties—in failing to protect users’ privacy. Plaintiffs also alleged that Sandberg and Zients deleted emails from their personal inboxes despite being instructed not to do so by a court.

In a decision this January, a Delaware judge found the accusations to be convincing and Sandberg was sanctioned. The judge, Vice Chancellor Travis Laster of the Delaware Chancery Court, said evidence showed Sandberg used a personal account under a pseudonym and erased messages that were likely relevant to the shareholder lawsuit.

So what does all this have to do with Brett Kavanaugh and the upcoming hearing of the House Oversight Committee? 

On June 27, 2018, Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement from the Supreme Court. In July, President Trump nominated Kavanaugh to replace Kennedy. This caused a major freak-out on the left, particularly in liberal enclaves like Palo Alto, California, where professor Christine Blasey Ford lived. Ford tried to convince people that she had been sexually assaulted by Kavanaugh in 1982, but her claims, supported by no proof, initially went nowhere. “I started panicking,” Ford told Ruth Marcus, a reporter for The Washington Post. In her book Supreme Ambition, Marcus describes it this way:

In Santa Cruz, she and her friends spend hours in the ocean: Ford paddles her surfboard, looking out for sharks, while her friends swim. One morning, a few days after Kennedy’s retirement, the sharks were in the water, which meant no swimming. Ford pulled aside a beach friend, Jim Gensheimer, a photojournalist, and poured out her story. She felt a responsibility—”civic duty” was the phrase Ford used repeatedly—to alert someone.

One of those people who got the alert was Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. Marcus goes on:

In one example of the way the information circulated through the Palo Alto community, a friend of Ford’s knew someone who knew the sister of Sheryl Sandberg. The Facebook executive, without being given Ford’s name or the specifics of her allegations, suggested that she hire a lawyer, preferably one without partisan ties, and offered up a few names.

Notice the clever distancing—“a friend of a friend of a friend” knew Sandberg. However, there were people close to Sandberg and Ford who knew of me and Kavanaugh and our history as students at Georgetown Prep in the 1980s. One of them was Ford’s friend, the photographer Jim Gensheimer. Gensheimer had started his career as an intern at National Geographic in the early 1980s. At this time my own father, Joe Judge, was a senior editor of the magazine. I was at the office all the time and there is no doubt Gensheimer knew who I was.

In Supreme Ambition, Marcus explains how Ford and Gensheimer tried to figure out what to do:

She and Gensheimer imagined alternative scenarios, remote possibilities that seemed fanciful even at the time and that look even more so in retrospect. One possibility: Ford would call Mark Judge, remind Judge of what had happened, tell him to call Kavanaugh, and advise him to spare his family the ordeal. She dug up Judge’s Twitter handle but wasn’t sure how to go about contacting him.

At the time, I was a journalist with a wide social media presence. Ford didn’t know how to contact me? This is just silly. They never contacted me because they were planning an opposition research hit, and those don’t work if the target knows it’s coming.

In The Devil’s Triangle, I note that in 2018 Ford started working with an opposition researcher named Keith Koegler. According to The Education of Brett Kavanaugh, written by New York Times reporters Kate Kelly and Robin Pogrebin, Koegler had “spent many hours that summer poring over news coverage of the nomination process, biographical information about Kavanaugh, and writings and videos produced by Mark Judge. In combing through YouTube, articles, and social networks, Koegler had learned more about the house parties … and the lexicon of 1980s Georgetown Prep than he had ever thought he would care to know.”

The other person in this oppo research gallery is Jeff Zients. Zients was also in high school in D.C. the same time I was. I was at Georgetown Prep, and Zients was at St. Alban’s, a more elite school where people like Al Gore and Luke Russert went. Zients graduated in 1984, the same year as Christine Blasey Ford, who went to Holton Arms, an all-girls private school.

In The Education of Brett Kavanaugh,Kelly and Pogrebin describe the Palo Alto environment this way:

Ford’s was an unusual situation, given its intimately personal nature combined with the high political stakes, and they wanted to help her proceed thoughtfully. So [her operatives] canvassed fellow parents and professionals they felt they could trust to suggest ideas, without identifying Ford by name. Word quickly got to Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, who had long been rumored to be a candidate for Democratic political office, through her sister, Michelle, a pediatrician and clinical teacher at Stanford. Sheryl also advised retaining a lawyer. She put together a list of people who she had heard specialized in such cases and passed it back to Michelle, who shared it with one of Ford’s friends. Other suggestions came from family members and the office of Senator Feinstein, whom Ford had asked for referrals.

By early August, Ford was vacationing in Rehoboth Beach in Delaware. As I have written previously in Chronicles, with her was Monica McLean, a childhood friend and supporter. McLean was a 20-year FBI veteran whose lawyer was David Laufman, a major figure in the deep state. These days McLean will have no contact with Blasey Ford. McLean went so far as to demand that Ford not use McLean’s real name in Ford’s book One Way Back. When Ford broke with her accusation in September, right as Kavanaugh was posed to win confirmation, it turned the world upside down. The left tried to use my colorful past as a way to destroy my friend. When I refused to play their game, they tried to delay by tossing out Ford’s lie about being afraid to fly and thus unable to get from California to D.C. Ford did eventually make the journey, of course—on Sheryl Sandberg’s private plane.

So what was Jeff Zients, the man who got rich because he “tells clients what they want to hear,” doing during all of this? Were he and Sandberg criminally colluding against me and Kavanaugh, and is that why they destroyed their emails from the time?

These are questions Zients should be asked and forced to answer when he sits before the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform this fall. I expect they will demonstrate a pattern of behavior for the committee that will be useful in this and in all future investigations of this crew.

https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/exposing-the-palo-alto-deep-state-cabal/