O’Keefe Media Uncovers who is really running the White House.

Soooo... hmm this is the most powerful person in Washington DC. Wow, this is some eye opening information.Show more

The Intercept 1/24/2023: PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN is naming Jeff Zients to be his next chief of staff. Zients, a corporate Democrat, was previously in the White House helping steer its pandemic response and leading vaccination efforts. Before that, Zients helped oversee two health care companies embroiled in Medicare and Medicaid fraud allegations, which they paid tens of millions to settle. This week on Deconstructed, Intercept reporter Daniel Boguslaw and The American Prospect’s Robert Kuttner join Ryan Grim to discuss Zients’s past in the world of for-profit health care. Zients is also a former Facebook board member, worrying progressives pushing for the administration to rein in Silicon Valley.

Ryan Grim: Hi, I’m Ryan Grim. Welcome to Deconstructed.

Over the weekend, we learned that White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain will be leaving his job, making way for Jeff Zients, who played a variety of different roles in the Obama administration but has spent most of his time in the private sector. 

Now, Bob Kutner, writing in The American Prospect, described Zients like this on Monday: “For starters, Zients is from the plutocratic wing of the Democratic Party, having become very rich from taking two David Bradley ventures public, the Advisory Board Company and the Corporate Executive Board. When he was 35, Fortune estimated his net worth at $149 million.”

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And so the guy who takes over the negotiations is Jeff Zients, who had been OMB director, who had been acting OMB Director, then OMB director, then director of the National Economic Council, and was a dedicated deficit hawk, along with Bruce Reed, and so you’ve got the deficit hawk-wing [laughs] of the Biden administration really taking over at a time when the Democrats have a pretty good hand if they play the hand they’ve been dealt.

RG: And Dan, there’s a little bit of irony in Zients being an austerian, particularly when it comes to Medicare, given that what you’ve uncovered in your own reporting is that some of the healthcare companies he owned were alleged to have committed Medicare fraud.