Workers’ Pensions Are Funding Congress’s Far-Right Extremists
Billionaire Trump adviser and Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman charges public workers exorbitant fees to manage their pensions, then uses those profits to bankroll Republicans bent on screwing those workers over.
Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman is the single largest donor to the Republican Congressional Leadership Fund this year. (Jose Sarmento Matos / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Immediately after the January 6 insurrection last year, billionaire Donald Trump adviser Stephen Schwarzman tried to distance himself from the mayhem, declaring that the violence was “appalling and an affront to the democratic values we hold dear as Americans.”
Yet Schwarzman, CEO of the private equity firm Blackstone, is now wholeheartedly bankrolling the lawmakers who boosted that insurrection — and the resources come from teachers, firefighters, and other government workers whose pension systems enrich the billionaire.
Schwarzman is the single largest donor this year to the Congressional Leadership Fund (CLF), a super PAC closely linked to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) that is dedicated to winning GOP control of the House. A majority of House Republicans, including McCarthy, voted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election last January, and McCarthy himself was subpoenaed earlier in May by the House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol after refusing a request to appear.
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