This is part three of a series of investigations into the nexus of money, corridors of power, special interests and mega-churches that surround CM Will Jawando. You can read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
In part one of our series, we looked into why nearly $500,000 in taxpayer money during FY23 was ‘granted’ without direct competition to “Kingdom Fellowship AME, Inc. [soon to be Kingdom Global Development Corp] to “oversee coordination of organizations in the County to provide comprehensive services to residents.”
Council Member Jawando’s wife is on the board of Kingdom Global Development Corp.
We also noted how CM Jawando has been involved in the ‘KF AME’ for a long time, and how the church seems to be at the nexus of his community outreach (and voter registration?) efforts [screenshot from prior Facebook event, below]:
And, it should also be noted that Reid Temple AME, which is part of the KF AME mega-church, received nearly $5,000 of taxpayer money in county fiscal year 2019 for “security staffing”. This was part of a $200,000 budget amendment that year by the County Council to respond to a despicable hate attack that happened thousands of miles away in… the country of New Zealand.
Today, in part two, we look into how Mr. Jawando got his start in politics, how he climbed into ‘elite’ Democrat (national) party circles, parlaying this access into a White House job and a run for Congress, and what might be influencing his privacy-busting policy ideas right now. His wife Michele L Jawando features strongly again.
Let us go back to April, 2016. A younger Mr. Jawando is running for the United States Congress after losing his run for the Maryland state house two years prior.
So blared the headline (above) at MTV.com. The puff piece mentions:
He wrote a three-page letter and got it delivered to Obama through a family connection to Democratic Congressman Gregory Meeks of New York. When Obama, by then a senator, learned of their similar histories, Jawando says he was greeted with a joke: “What are you, my brother?” said the future president. Jawando became a legislative aide in Obama’s senate office in 2005, and their relationship grew over the years; during his time as a White House staffer, Jawando, a former college basketball player, would join the president for games.
But just who or what was the ‘family connection’ to Democratic Congressman Meeks? It was Michele Jawando.
“Michele has also served as general counsel and senior advisor to United States Senator Kirsten Gillibrand as well as Foreign Relations Chair, Congressman Gregory Meeks, where she spearheaded bipartisan legislative achievements on behalf of each of the members..” reads the bio at Omidyar.com, which is the website for the Omidyar Network. Michele Jawando is a Senior VP of programs at the organization.
Prior to that, she was a VP for the Center for American Progress, a DC-based think tank that is extremely influential in national Democrat party (elite) circles.
The Omidyar Network calls itself a “social change venture” but others have called it Pierre M. Omidyar’s “political machine”. Politico reported in 2021 in an article on ‘liberal dark money’ that “Tech billionaire Pierre Omidyar and his wife, Pam, disclosed earlier this year that they were responsible for the $45 million gift, which went to Civic Action Fund, a fiscally sponsored project of the Sixteen Thirty Fund.” The Sixteen Thirty Fund is the non-profit network that funnels hundreds of millions to ‘progressive’ front groups and Democrat campaigns.
The Omidyar Network is involved in all kinds of “progressive” (actually, centralizing of power) policy pushes at the state and federal levels of government. Michele Jawando herself penned an article on Medium called “The Value of Connections” where she pushes “Reimagining Capitalism” and “Building Cultures of Belonging”.
Oh, and also the individual privacy-crushing “digital ID”, under the guise of “digital public infrastructure”?
She (Jawando) was also featured in 2021 on a World Economic Forum (WEF) panel that lauded the country of Togo’s “nationwide biometric digital ID scheme.”
As recently as January of 2022, CM Will Jawando was in support of both a vaccine mandate for county employees (one of only three CMs to support the idea) and a “vaccine passport” for Montgomery County residents.
Digital ID is at the nexus of international “immunity passport” schemes and privacyinternational.org warns “a digital ID that proves immunity will raise serious human rights issues. And the failure of the digital ID industry to deal with the issues of exclusion, exploitation and discrimination puts the entire industry under question.”
Digital ID is also being pushed by some as an innocuous way for “Universal Basic Income” (UBI) to be sent to the “ID’d” hoi polloi. CM Will Jawando is a big backer of Montgomery County’s ill-conceived “test” of UBI, but interestingly the “Boost” program right now seems to actively encourage participants not to provide a taxpayer identification number or social security number when signing up for the “free” cash.
More to come.
