Did Kamala Profit From Communist Cuba?

During the 2020 primaries, Kamala Harris told the Tampa Bay Times that she wanted to end what she called the “failed trade embargo” on Cuba. Few outside the Cuban American community paid attention to her answer and it was assumed that her willingness to prop up the Communist dictatorship was consistent with her general left-wing views on foreign policy.

No one in the media was asked whether she had a financial stake in keeping Cuba open.

When the Biden campaign released the 2019 tax returns for Kamala and her husband Douglas Emhoff, it was very clear that while Doug might be auditioning to be the ‘Second Gentleman’, the entertainment lawyer was by far the primary breadwinner with $2.7 million from his current law firm DLP Piper and $115,258 from his partnership stake in his old law firm Venable LLP.

The 2020 tax returns reflected another $181,627 from Venable.

Venable, which bought Emhoff’s old law firm and made him a partner, casts a wide net and boasts that it “helped a client obtain the first licenses for commercial shipping between the United States and Cuba.” When cruise lines were sued for “trafficking” in stolen property by using a port confiscated from its rightful owners by the Communist dictatorship. Venable represented one of them, and represented a ‘red’ and ‘green’ case involving wind turbines being transformed from China to Cuba after the Trump administration brought back Cuban sanctions that allowed lawsuits by Americans against companies profiting from their confiscated property.

While lawyers can take on all sorts of clients, Venable appears to have had a longstanding interest in the embargo on Cuba, issuing client alerts, hosting a conference and offering to help clients explore options for doing business in the Communist dictatorship.

Venable was even registered at one point as lobbying on Cuba trade.

But the most explosive Cuba case in which Venable took a hand involved accusations of human trafficking went on even while Kamala was serving as vice president and aiding the defendant.

In 2022, the Biden-Harris administration announced that it would provide $100 million to train 500,000 medical personnel with the UN’s Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) even as the organization was being sued by Cuban doctors who had been used as medical slave labor.

At the Ninth Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, attended by Biden and Kamala Harris, there was no mention of the disturbing allegations against the organization. Or the fact that it was being represented by the law firm where the Harris-Emhoff family had made a fortune.

The allegations against the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) were laid out again in a congressional letter last year from Rep. Maria Salazar, the daughter of Cuban refugees, and Rep. Carlos Giménez, a Cuban exile. The letter noted that Cuban doctors are suing “PAHO for playing a major role in trafficking over 10,000 Cuban doctors”, that “PAHO also funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to the Cuban government and pocketed at least $75 million” and that PAHO is “receiving tens of millions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer funding every year.”

In 2020, PAHO hired Venable to conduct an “independent review” of its dealings. The congressional letter noted that “it is now close to three years since that announcement, and PAHO has not released the Venable, or any, report to the State Department, to Members of Congress, or to the Plaintiffs’ lawyers in the litigation”.

The allegations are serious. The lawsuit by the trafficked doctors claims that the UN organization took in hundreds of millions of dollars from Brazil in exchange for their services, “remitted 85% to Cuba, paid 10% or less to the doctors, and kept 5% for itself.”

Like most slave labor, the doctors “were forbidden to move about socially, have visitors from home, or go out after a strict curfew. Minders were assigned to surveil them around the clock.”

While Cuba’s Communist dictatorship made billions selling them into slavery, they had little.

PAHO allegedly received millions from this scheme and retained Emhoff’s old firm.

While Emhoff is best known as an entertainment lawyer, at Venable he had represented everyone from a pharmaceutical company to an arms dealer to an accused sexual abuser, his partnership stake of almost $1.2 million allowed him to benefit from Venable’s work, at the very least its financial viability, even when he was no longer actively working at the firm.

Douglas Emhoff had not been eager to leave behind his extremely lucrative legal practice which paid in the millions. When Kamala first ran for president, he did not appear to budge, only when Biden announced that she had been chosen as his veep, did he take a “temporary leave”. He did not actually quit until after the election when he had no real alternative since DLA Piper represented “numerous foreign governments” including Afghanistan, Qatar’s Al Jazeera terrorist propaganda network and the PLO’s ‘Palestine Monetary Authority’ money laundering operation.

The partnership stake at Venable was also in the rear view mirror.

Emhoff’s legal career paralleled his wife’s political career. Kamala, then attorney general, had met Emhoff while he was a partner at Venable. Before their relationship, Kamala received few donations from Venable lawyers, but afterward dozens of lawyers from her new husband’s firm were suddenly writing big checks to her.

And the same thing happened again when Emhoff moved from Venable to DLA Piper.

After Kamala was elected to the Senate and moved to D.C., Emhoff also moved on from Venable, which had previously acquired his firm, and joined DLA Piper which has a sizable D.C. and government footprint.

And the donations to his wife’s political campaign from DLA Piper lawyers massively increased.

After 2020, Emhoff followed government retirees and spouses into a position teaching at Georgetown. While his $174,994 for teaching a class or two is a far stretch from his millionaire roots, it still comes out to over $3,000 for an hour of ‘work’. Not bad.

What will Emhoff do after his wife leaves public life? Likely he will go back to a law firm.

Considering his careful career transitions which paced those of his wife, but in which he also took few risks and did not leave any established position until he had to, he likely knows. And it’s likely that Kamala knows too. Will that influence the political positions that she takes?

Kamala’s opposition to the Cuban embargo neatly matched the economic concerns of her husband’s old law firm which the Harris-Emhoff family continued profiting from for an extended period. Was that a coincidence? There is no way to truly know. But what we do know is that Cuban doctors trafficked by an organization Kamala supports are still waiting for justice.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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