Monster of the Week: Hakeem Jeffries
Hakeem Jeffries is the genocidal pro-ICE successor to Nancy Pelosi as the leader of the House Democrats. If the Democrats take back the House in the midterms this year, Hakeem Jeffries is the first in line to become the Speaker of the House. Jeffries is the billionaires’ chosen golden boy for the “next generation” of corporate warhawks to helm the Democratic party.
Jeffries is bankrolled by massive tech companies, private equity, and the big banks. To name a few, he’s taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from the likes of Blackrock, Microsoft, Blackstone, Lockheed Martin, Comcast, and JPMorgan Chase. One of his top donors is the Apollo Group, one of the largest private equity firms in the world.
He has received over $5.5 million from the genocidal pro-Israel lobby. One of the largest corporate law firms in the U.S., Paul Weiss, is a massive donor to Jeffries, having given over $300,000 to him throughout his career. Jeffries worked as a lawyer at Paul Weiss from 1998 to 2004.
The firm’s chairman Brad S. Karp was also a close associate of Jeffrey Epstein. In a 2015 email to Epstein, Karp wrote, "I can’t thank you enough for including me in an evening I'll never forget. It was truly 'once in a lifetime' in every way, though I hope to be invited again."
In a 2021 report on the top 100 law firms’ involvement in defending fossil fuel companies, Paul Weiss was singled out as one of the worst, having defended fossil fuel companies in 30 cases over the previous 5 years. In 2023, the firm defended ExxonMobil in a horrific case accusing ExxonMobil of hiring soldiers in Indonesia to abuse, torture, and murder workers at one of the world’s largest natural gas fields.
Jeffries is beholden to all of the forces that are actively killing people around the world. He voted to ban US funding for UN food aid to Gaza. He’s voted to send tens of billions to fund the genocide in Gaza. In the wake of the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, he opposed ANY cuts to ICE funding. He voted for Trump’s $900 billion military budget that is now funding the war in Iran.
He is deeply in the pocket of the ruling class that is responsible for the hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths caused by lack of healthcare, housing, and food. Working people are struggling under the burden of the ever-increasing cost of rent, food, and healthcare, while he is raking in money from the rich to prevent us from winning any of the things we need to survive.