Ford Foundation Gave $6.1 Million To Obama Transition Team Co-Chair Podesta's Think-Tank After 2009 Obama Inauguration

Tax-exempt foundations like the Ford Foundation are not supposed to be involved in politically partisan politics. Yet since the 2012 Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama was inaugurated in January 2009, the Ford Foundation (according to the grant data base on its website) has given 18 “charitable grants,” totaling over $6.1 million to the “Center for American Progress” think-tank of John Podesta—the co-chair of the Obama campaign’s transition team during and after the 2008 U.S. presidential election. As Jonathan Alter noted in his book The Promise: President Obama Year One:

“The Obama transition team was run by John Podesta, Bill Clinton’s last chief of staff…In mid-October [2008] Obama held a secret meeting in a…Reno hotel room to talk about the White House staff…It was important that no word of the meeting leak. Two of Bill Clinton’s chiefs of staff, Podesta and Erskine Bowles, flew out for the meeting, and a third, Leon Panetta, was on the phone…It sometimes seemsed as if Obama was staffing his administration through a single Washington think tank, the Center for American Progress, founded and run by John Podesta...More than 50 people from CAP would join the administration...”

The same book also indicated how the Democratic Obama Administration failed to restore economic prosperity to the United States during its first term in office:

“Obama’s debut was rocky by any standard…The official unemployment rate stood at 10 percent but that didn’t include discouraged workers no longer in the job market or those seeking longer hours…The stimulus, officially called the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, was…too slow in creating jobs…He failed…to convince the middle class that he was focused enough on their number one concern…jobs…He failed to attach more conditions to the bank bailouts…Obama…refused the pleas of liberals to nationalize the banks…”

  According to the website of the Center for American Progress's think tank:

“John Podesta is Chair and Counselor of the Center for American Progress and the Center for American Progress Action Fund….Prior to founding the Center in 2003, Podesta served as White House chief of staff to President William J. Clinton. He served in the president's cabinet and as a principal on the National Security Council. While in the White House, he also served as both an assistant to the president and deputy chief of staff…Most recently, Podesta served as co-chair of President Obama’s transition, where he coordinated the priorities of the incoming administration’s agenda, oversaw the development of its policies, and spearheaded its appointments of major cabinet secretaries and political appointees…..”