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SWAMP: Major GOP Donor Adelson Paid Jeff Sessions-Led Dept of Justice to Change Gambling Laws
This in fact is the swamp that needs to be drained. When the richest people in this nation can pay off OUR Department of JUSTICE to get rules reversed, we see clear evidence of the swamp that corrupts all. For it to be the Justice Department is a new level of shock.
Adelson, who has poured millions into a multiyear lobbying campaign....to curb online gambling.... spent tens of millions in the 2016 election backing Trump and has emerged as one of the most powerful and influential donors in GOP politics.
In April 2017, one of the lobbyists for casino magnate and top Republican donor Sheldon Adelson sent a memo to top officials in the Justice Department, arguing that a 2011 opinion that benefited online gambling was wrong. The Justice Department this week announced that its Office of Legal Counsel had, in an unusual move, reversed its position...
A Justice Department ruling in favor of online gambling risked everything Adelson has in Vegas, his empire of billions. So he paid up and worked endlessly to have the ruling reversed to pad his pocket. THIS. IS. THE. SWAMP.
The department’s new position was a victory for Adelson. Adelson’s company Las Vegas Sands Corp. operates casinos in Las Vegas, Macau and Singapore. He has long said that online gambling would decrease revenue at bricks-and-mortar casinos....
That 2011 decision prompted several states to allow companies to operate poker and, in some cases, other games over the internet for the first time. In some other states, lotteries began to sell tickets to jackpots and instant games online.
The specifics of the DOJ reversal spell out how Adelson's lobbyists paid for the result... by using the same words....
The lobbyists’s legal analysis.... was prepared in February 2017 by a law firm headed by lawyer Charles Cooper.... department officials said that they were in possession of the legal analysis from Mr. Adelson’s team....
The November 2018 opinion adopted arguments similar to those in the Cooper memo about the meaning of the words in the law as its primary reason for the new interpretation. Both writings pointed to some of the same case law examples.
The obvious influence from Adelson in the department’s legal interpretations represents the worst of our society and supposed democratic ideals.
“You have a situation where we are going back without any clear purpose and amending an opinion from eight years ago that simply no one was complaining about,” said Anthony Cabot, a law professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “There is no reason for this to happen and there’s only one person pushing it.”
Legal experts and companies that operate online gambling sites said they were unsure what the new decision would mean for the burgeoning online gambling business and weren’t sure how aggressively the Justice Department would become in trying to limit a market that already exists in some states.