As the vice president for public policy and government affairs at FreedomWorks, Max Pappas was one of the most important people working in the ‘Kochtopus’ during the early, hype-filled days of Tea Party organizing. But Pappas was a close ally of FreedomWorks co-chairman Dick Armey, so when his mentor lost a power struggle with president Matt Kibbe during the most crucial electoral weeks of 2012, Pappas resigned from the organization. Luckily, he was unemployed just in time to become a key staffer for Ted Cruz, the incoming freshman senator from Texas. Fulfilling that role, Pappas participated in the ‘Groundswell’ meetings of May, 2013 when a host of right wing activists met at the offices of Judicial Watch to formulate the talking points that became the fake IRS ‘targeting’ scandal and the infamous Benghazi Select Committee. With Pappas’s help, Cruz has become the single most disruptive influence in Congress — and now, he’s an unexpectedly-strong competitor in the 2016 GOP presidential nominating horse-race.

  • During 2009, Pappas maintained close contact with a diarist at Red State during a key cloture vote in Republicans’ bid to hold up passage of the Affordable Care Act, aka ‘Obamacare.’ The writer was Dan Perrin, a former Senate staffer who runs the Health Savings Account Coalition on behalf of banking and insurance interests.
  • During the debt limit brinkmanship of September 2013, Pappas told a meeting of the Republican Study Committee that in the event of a government shutdown, GOP legislators could just pass a simple funding bill for military paychecks and other bare-bones priorities. He was arguing with an aide to Eric Cantor, the same House Whip who suffered a 2014 primary upset to ‘Freedom Caucus’ extremist and political neophyte Dave Brat in a sign of growing conservative grassroots dissatisfaction with the GOP establishment. Upon hearing his argument for a stopgap bill, a staffer for Texas Republican John Culberson reportedly told Pappas that he was “not dealing in reality.”
  • Curiously, Pappas also stopped tweeting in September 2013, when most of the recent content in his timeline consisted of retweeting his boss’s account.
  • As a former FreedomWorks expert on Political Action Committees, Pappas is likely playing a key advisory role in the Ted Cruz presidential campaign, which relies on the support of super PACs funded by hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer.

In the unlikely, but terrifying event of a Ted Cruz presidency, Max Pappas will undoubtedly bring his skill-set and ideology to the White House, where he can please his billionaire masters with ‘wild west’ deregulation, install a fantasy-based economic policy, and smash whatever firewalls remain between corporate lobbyists and executive authority.

VIDEO: MSNBC host Chris Matthews tells Max Pappas that FreedomWorks are “frauds” in 2009.

One thought on “Max Pappas Taking Koch Values To The White House With Ted Cruz”
  1. Wow. That there is quite a resume. All the more reason to keep everyone even remotely associated with FreedomWorks as far away from the levers of power as possible.

    Less seriously, it isn’t exactly a surprise that Max Pappas, after resigning from his cushy position at FreedomWorks, would gravitate to Ted Cruz. Everyone knows, shitbirds of a feather flock together. *rimshot* (“I laugh about everything for fear of crying.” –Beaumarchais, “The Barber of Seville”)

    –alopecia

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