A corporate and personal identity thief whom a high-priced offshore corporate lawyer in Dubai and former US Justice Department representative in Bogota installed as Democrats Abroad Panama's unelected chair, a regime that lasted about two months.

To boldly go where hustlers have never gone before

by Eric Jackson

[The author was a protagonist in these events. If you take a survey of Democrats Abroad, you will find that notwithstanding the more than 2-1 victory that it gave to Bernie Sanders in its global primary, its international leadership was solidly composed of Hillary people, which stacked its Berlin conference to choose convention delegates and DNC members with Hillary majorities and it orchestrated retaliatory actions in a number of its dwindling collection of country chapters (53 in mid-2013, 40 now). This is the long story of one of those corny little retaliatory moves. It matters because the people who pulled this stunt say that they have everything under control and planned out through 2020. This article first appeared in The Panama News, which the author publishes and has edited since 1994.]

Many things were done by a corporate faction, led by Debbie Wasserman Schultz, rig the presidential nominating process in favor of Hillary Clinton, who at the outset was shown by polls to be quite unpopular within the party, let alone with independents and Republicans. As the primary season wore on, this faction imploded at the top because some of its more unsavory behavior was revealed by way of leaked emails. Wasserman Schults and three other top DNC officers were forced to resign in the middle of a campaign year, a staggering organizational blow from which the Clinton campaign never recovered. But the sorts of behavior that decapitated the DNC in the summer of 2016 had been ongoing within the party at many levels and in the wake of the stunning Democratic defeat in November there are now stuggles ongoing for control of the party at various levels. What happened in Panama has its unique features but it's also a microcosm of larger things. Some of the people involved in setting up a disastrous two-month interregnum in Democrats Abroad Panama are as these words are written seeking to regain, retain or increase their power and influence within the Democratic Party. Rank-and-file Democrats ought to know, and should not have to depend on the propaganda judgment of Russian hackers -- or some such -- to know.

In short summary, Democrats Abroad international counsel Orlando Vidal, supported by three members of a seven-member board of directors, against the opposition of a fourth member with three vacancies, purported to fill the chair without an election and in violation of the Democrats Abroad Panama bylaws. They placed secretary Sean Hammerle in the post by way of the vice chair succeeding to the chair after the chair's resignation, appointing Hammerle as vice chair, then herself resigning and being appointed vice chair once more. But precisely to avoid such maneuvers the bylawas specify that unique among all other board positions, a vacancy in the vice chair post must be filled by an election.

Who is this guy?

It was not a mere procedural argument as it unfolded. This writer's objections to Hammerle were because he was a repeated saboteur of decisions made by the Democrats Abroad Panama board of directors and because the story he told about himself was incredible.

Not "incredible" in the Hollywood meaning of something akin to sensational, that which is so extraordinary as to seem impossible. "Incredible" in the sense of being unbelievable on the level of requiring the suspension of the faculties of observation and reason in order to accept as true.

[You have heard of The Panama Papers, which gave the world specific examples of how the Republic of Panama has an entire industry of attracting foreigners to the isthmus to run tax fraud shell games and other deceptions? Read on for the tale of how one hustler, with the intervention of a high-priced lawyer whose bread and butter has for years been largely about dealing with -- and dishing out -- legal problems for those who don't know their clients and customers, foisted one of these hustlers upon the Panama chapter of Democrats Abroad.]