Pandora Papers Expose South Dakota Republicans

In 2020, the finance, insurance, real estate, rental, and leasing industry added the most real value to the gross domestic product of South Dakota. That year, this industry added about 10.3 billion chained 2012 U.S. dollars to the GDP of South Dakota.

The Council for National Policy has infiltrated Pierre and the extremist South Dakota Legislature because banks in my home state are hoarding nearly $4 TRILLION for its members including Robert Mercer, a CNP member and Long Island hedge-fund manager who bankrolled Donald Trump's presidential campaigns. According to accountant and former State Senator Susan Wismer (D-Britton) there are about $900 billion in 105 trusts alone.

Long before she became a fixture at NRA conventions, and years before she allegedly attempted to set up a back channel between the Kremlin and Republican officials, Maria Butina got her foothold in the US in South Dakota. Butina made Sioux Falls, the state’s largest city, her home base in the US for several stays in 2014 and 2015 before moving to Washington on a student visa. It was there that she got her first US cellphone, with a South Dakota area code, and wrote detailed observations of how American institutions worked, from local elections to college campuses. While the FBI has focused on “the groundwork that Butina and the Russian official laid to influence high-level politicians” in 2015, her time in South Dakota was mainly spent with average Americans. [Accused Russian Agent's Journey To Washington Began In South Dakota]

Republican South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem addressed a meeting of CNP last August. Noem is also a graduate of the Koch Brothers' American Legislative Exchange Council or ALEC, an anti-think tank think tank that teaches how wedge issues raise campaign dollars for the nut wing of the Republican Party. 

Minutes before he was driven from the White House Herr Trump pardoned Butina's lover, Paul Erickson at Noem's request. Butina was deported for being a Russian agent.

The U.S. government has condemned prominent offshore financial centers, where promises of discretion have long drawn oligarchs, business tycoons and politicians. But the Pandora Papers expose how foreign political and corporate leaders or their relatives moved money and other assets in recent years from international tax havens to even more secretive American trust companies, including those in South Dakota. [Key findings from the Pandora Papers investigation]

It's obvious this phenomenon is no accident: it has been manufactured to make the state a corporatist tax haven for an exclusive set of Republicans while some $4 trillion languishes in South Dakota banks so why is John Thune talking about abandoning the national spotlight? Because he has flip-flopped on the Trump presidency. 

Read it all from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.