I hasten to add to that headline that he’s a Top Dem donor and Gavin Newsom backer, who raised $300 million by touting “Corporate ESG Business” based on fake revenue.
Joe Sanberg, a top California Democrat activist who decried the corruption of big Wall Street banks and started a company marketed as the “cleaner” alternative, actually propped that company up through blatant fraud, he admitted Thursday.
Sanberg and other high-profile Democrats started the carbon-credit platform and online banking app Aspiration Partners Inc., promising to plant trees and not invest in polluting industries. Its motto was “clean rich is the new filthy rich.” It was once a star of the “environmental, social, and governance (ESG)” movement that blended corporate finance with leftist politics, and counted actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert Downey Jr. as investors.
The guy is as dirty as the Democrat party itself.
But it was instead a scheme as corrupt as any on Wall Street, with Sanberg concocting fake customers for his tree-planting services to try to dupe investors into a $2 billion valuation, the Department of Justice said. Sanberg faces up to 40 years in prison after pleading guilty to two counts of wire fraud, according to the Department of Justice.
Sanberg is a key player in California politics, a Gavin Newsom donor who personally spent $11 million backing a ballot initiative to raise the state’s minimum wage to $18 an hour. Voters blocked the initiative by one percentage point in 2024. A 2019 Atlantic story headlined, “Joe Sanberg Dares Trump to Call Him a Socialist,” said “the multimillionaire investor says the Democrats’ progressive agenda is best for jobs and economic growth.”
But “this so-called ‘anti-poverty’ activist has admitted to being nothing more than a self-serving fraudster, by seeking to enrich himself by defrauding lenders and investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars,” according to Bill Essayli, the Acting U.S. Attorney of the Central District of California.
Now, I’ve said for many years that Democrats tend not to out other Democrats criminality unless they get to be too much an impediment to political power. In that direction lies Jim Trafficant, for example. Or, if you’d like something more recent, Robert Menendez. Here’s the thing; Governor Gruesome is mounting a presidential bid.
Given the pattern of behavior I’ve mentioned here, I suspect this is another such happening. Absent that, this arrest would never have occurred. Can’t have this bit with Sandberg, his corruption and his connections to the upper levels of Democrat power in California, given the danger to the continuance and expansion of that power. Particularly, Newsom’s presidential aspirations.
The obvious hope for the timing of going after Sanberg now, is that the voting public will have forgotten all about those connections and that corruption by the time the race for the White House takes center stage.
Yes, we’re dealing with the federal DOJ, and Bill Essayli is the guy running this show… and I acknowledge what is a rare thing in California, Bill Essayli is listed as a Republican. But without knowing more of his history, I’m suspicious. Is he more of a GOP establishment critter? Time will tell.
