Financial disclosure documents obtained by The Daily Beast are raising questions about former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s ties to a company accused of paying bribes to the Trump administration in an effort to get approval on a massive construction project hampered by environmental rules.
The documents show that made an investment of $500,000 dollars in a limited liability corporation tied to El Dorado Holdings, a company that was the focus of a congressional investigation in 2019 that led to a criminal referral to the Department of Justice, “urging it to investigate what Chairman Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) described as a case of ‘criminal bribery,'” The Beast reports.
“Palin revealed her dealings with Scottsdale-based El Dorado Holdings in disclosures she made to the House clerk’s office as part of her bid for Alaska’s vacant congressional district,” according to the report.
As noted by The Beast, the company became “the epicenter of national controversy” when a U.S. Fish and Wildlife field supervisor claimed in 2019 that he’d come under “politically motivated pressure from then-President Donald Trump’s Department of the Interior to reverse his position on permitting requirements for a 28,000-unit planned development in Benson, Arizona.”
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“The committee’s investigation uncovered covert correspondence carried out over non-government channels between El Dorado executives and top staffers at the Department of the Interior in 2017. These communications culminated in an undisclosed meeting in Billings, Montana, between El Dorado founder Mike Ingram and then-Interior Deputy Secretary David Bernhardt, who would later assume the agency’s top job,” The report states.
The Beast cited a source close to the committee saying “they believed a third party acted as an interlocutor between Ingram, who formerly co-owned the Arizona Diamondbacks, and the presidential appointees.”
“That was something we wondered, how he got hooked up with the Trump administration, how he made those connections,” the Daily Beast’s source explained. “It seems clear it was somebody very high up who helped facilitate those introductions and meetings.”
The report does not say if Palin was the connection to the Trump administration.
Read it at The Daily Beast.
