This is the biggest scandal in higher education since the fake Indian Elizabeth Warren got two tenured Ivy League professorships as a “woman of color.”
What makes yesterday’s federal indictments in Boston so wonderful is that they confirm every single one of your prejudices about the Beautiful People — they are complete and utter frauds, and only a handful of the 30-plus charged are Republicans, mostly Romney moneybags.
The pampered pukes are all here, in the hundreds and hundreds of pages — moonbat TV star Felicity Huffman, a rich New York lawyer who lives in Greenwich, a California vineyard owner who gives tens of thousands to Democrats …
Then there’s the couple from Hillsborough, Calif., who wanted to get their kid into UCLA and so forked over $251,159 worth of Facebook stock in 2016, asking William Rick Singer, the Mr. Big of the conspiracy, “to confirm in writing that the $250,000 would be returned to them in the event his daughter did not receive final admission to UCLA.”
Facebook … Silicon Valley… gee, I wonder who these people vote for. Here’s the final giveaway:
“In or about November 2017, the Hillsborough Parents filed personal tax returns that falsely reported total gifts to charity in 2016 of $1,061,890 — a sum that included the purported contribution” to Singer’s fake foundation.
Try not to let this destroy your faith in the integrity of Silicon Valley.
The price for getting your worthless offspring into a decent school varies — the University of Texas is a relative bargain at $100,000 or so, while Yale can run you as much as $1.2 million (although if you haggle in a Boston hotel room with the coach, according to the indictment, you might get the price down to $450,000).
Stanford was a cool half-million.
Singer explained the system to the New York lawyer last June: “What we do is we help the wealthiest families in the U.S. get their kids into school.”
He compared getting below-average layabouts through the whole academic process to a series of doors into the colleges.
“There is a front door which means you get in on your own. The back door is through institutional advancement, which is 10 times as much money. And I’ve created this side door in.”
According to the indictments, the side door worked like this: Singer owned a couple of proctors for the SAT and ACT standardized tests in Houston and LA, and he had a guy who’d take the tests for kids. Just tell him how good a score your child needed.
The second way was to create athletes — excuse me, student-athletes — out of thin air. Singer would do that by bribing coaches and athletic administrators — one at the University of Southern California was put on a “sham consulting contract” for $20,000 a month.
According to the feds, Singer ran $25 million in payoffs through the foundation, just on the athletic side. It looks like the feds flipped him last year. There’s a lot of transcripts in these indictments.
I always say every big scandal somehow involves at least one person from Massachusetts, and sure enough, meet Gordon Ernst of Chevy Chase, Md. (wonder if he knows Ed Markey?) — and Falmouth. Until last year, he was the head men’s and women’s tennis coach at Georgetown University.
“Between 2012 and 2018, Singer paid ERNST bribes, falsely labeled as ‘consulting’ fees, totaling more than $2.7 million… In exchange for the bribes, ERNST designated at least 12 applicants as recruits for the Georgetown tennis team, including some who did not play tennis competitively, thereby facilitating their admission to Georgetown.”
In one case, Singer was making up a soccer profile for a dim-bulb female who wanted to go to Yale. But they needed one more thing to put her over the top — “need a soccer pic probably Asian girl.”
She’s the one whose family paid $1.2 million.
Jane Buckingham runs a boutique marketing firm in Los Angeles and has a needy child. She wants to know where to send her check, and Singer tells her: “We’ll send it so that you get your (IRS tax) write off.”
“Oh, even better!” she gushes.
And how about Felicity Huffman. Check out her Instagram account, if it’s still up. It’s a torrent of virtue signaling and photos of Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, etc. After she was indicted yesterday for allegedly buying her two daughters admission to USC, the blowback was instantaneous.
She had written about “gender equality” and “elevating the voices of women.”
“Elevate the voices,” responded one tweet, “or just good old fashioned bribery.”
Another one lectured the airhead actress: “Maybe you should’ve taught your kids to work harder instead of buying their way into college. Is that what you call equal and courageous? Hypocrite.”
It’s early yet in 2019, but so far I think this is my favorite story of the year.