Newspaper Covers Up Iowa Democrat’s Wild Beer-Filled Partying…From Its Own Archives
Peter D'Abrosca
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A Democratic candidate for Governor of Iowa has a reported history of wild partying, but the Des Moines Register won’t run a proposed ad from a college Republican group sourced directly from the newspaper’s own archives.
According to an archived August 20, 1987Â report from the Des Moines Register, insurance heir Fred Hubbell, now the Democrat gubernatorial candidate running against Republican governor Kim Reynolds, was a member of his family’s renowned “Mad Dogs” softball team, which was known more for its annual end-of-season bash than for its on-field acuity. The team’s logo showed a pair of dogs in a “canine embrace.”
The paper described the annual gathering at the elegant Des Moines Club as having a “fraternity party aura,” and the highlights of the 1987 party included one member of the team wearing a World War II Nazi helmet “racing across the room, dropp[ing] to his knees behind an unsuspecting guest, and bit[ing] her on the rump.” Hubbell was in his mid-thirties during this “swashbuckling,” as the paper called it. The Hubbell boys even recounted one of their wilder bashes from years prior for the Register’s story, when a “100-person line formed and bunny-hopped through the women’s restroom.”
“Boys will be boys,” the columnist wrote.
“If pool hall rowdies somehow got into these elegant quarters and behaved like this, the cops would be summoned,” the paper said. “But management, realizing it’s dealing with pedigrees, winks and rakes in the profits from what is the club’s biggest beer night of the year.”
When the University of Iowa College Republicans made an ad with these revelations, the Des Moines Register refused to run the ad, even though the information comes from the Register‘s own archives.
The newspaper said, “This ad is presenting personal attacks, some previously unaired, with little substantiation.”
“It is completely hypocritical for the Des Moines Register to reject our ad showing real sexual harassment from the Register archives, considering their coverage of the allegations against Brett Kavanaugh,” Iowa College Republicans president Kyle Apple tells Big League Politics.
It turns out a rowdy softball team and frat-like festivities are not the only thing Hubbell inherited.
He was President of Equitable of Iowa, founded by his great-great grandfather Frederick M. Hubbell in the 1860s, during the 1980s and 1990s. According to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Hubbell sold the company to ING Bank, N.V., an Amsterdam-based financial institution. The deal was agreed-upon in 1997, but the paperwork was signed in 2002. During the merger, Hubbell negotiated a senior position at ING.
But from the early 1990’s through 2007, ING laundered billions of dollars through the U.S. financial system on behalf of sanctioned Cuban and Iranian interests.
“ING Bank N.V., a financial institution headquartered in Amsterdam, has agreed to forfeit $619 million to the Justice Department and the New York County District Attorney’s Office for conspiring to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and the Trading with the Enemy Act (TWEA) and for violating New York state laws by illegally moving billions of dollars through the U.S. financial system on behalf of sanctioned Cuban and Iranian entities,” said a Justice Department statement. “The bank has also entered into a parallel settlement agreement with the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).”
“According to court documents, starting in the early 1990s and continuing until 2007, ING Bank violated U.S. and New York state laws by moving more than $2 billion illegally through the U.S. financial system – via more than 20,000 transactions – on behalf of Cuban and Iranian entities subject to U.S. economic sanctions. ING Bank knowingly and willfully engaged in this criminal conduct, which caused unaffiliated U.S. financial institutions to process transactions that otherwise should have been rejected, blocked or stopped for investigation under regulations by OFAC relating to transactions involving sanctioned countries and parties.”
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