By K. R. Claviger
Earlier this week, Kirsten Gillibrand, the junior U.S. Senator from New York State, announced on The Stephen Colbert Show that she was running for President.
The next day she made the same announcement in Troy, NY – which is where she plans to base her campaign.
Accompanying her at the Troy, NY announcement were her husband, Jonathan – and her two sons, Theodore and Henry. Also standing next to her was her mother, Polly Noonan.
Notable by their absence at the second announcement were Gillibrand’s father, Doug Rutnik – and her step-mother, Gwenn Bellcourt.
As reported first in Frank Report – and followed up later in several other publications like the New York Post and The Daily Mail – Rutnik and Bellcourt both have ties to the NXIVM cult and two of its leaders, Keith Raniere and Nancy Salzman.
Back in 2004, Rutnik was hired as a consultant/lobbyist by the cult at a rate of $25,000 per month.
One of Rutnik’s first NXIVM-related assignments was to smooth over the problems that resulted because Raniere had reneged on his promise to pay $40,000 to the Office of the New York State Attorney General in conjunction with the shutting-down of his Consumers Buyline operation.
Rutnik was reportedly also tasked with getting Toni Natalie and Rick Ross indicted – which he was apparently unable or unwilling to do. In fairness to Rutnik, this all happened before David Soares became Albany County District Attorney – and started indicting anyone who was on Raniere’s “Enemies List”.
Bellcourt, who happens to be Rutnik’s significantly younger second cousin, got involved with NXIVM when she was hired by Rutnik to take a 5-day intensive in order to determine if NXIVM needed to be licensed as an educational institution.
But instead of just completing her assignment, Bellcourt became enamored with the cult – and kept taking more and more sessions on her own.
Raniere and Salzman kept pressing for Bellcourt to drop everything else she was doing – and work for NXIVM full-time. They also pressed her into breaking off her engagement with her then-fiancé – which she did.
When Rutnik tried to convince Bellcourt to leave the cult, NXIVM responded by firing him for his alleged sexual harassment of Salzman – and suing him for all the money he had been paid. He quickly settled the lawsuit by paying back $100,000 – and signing a Non-Disclosure Agreement.
But Rutnik exacted his own revenge by eventually convincing Bellcourt to leave NXIVM. He then poured salt in the wounds that he had inflicted on Raniere and Salzman by marrying Bellcourt.
While all this was going on, Kirsten Gillibrand had become a partner in David Boies’ law firm – and was working in its Albany, NY office just a couple of blocks away from Rutnik’s office.
In 2006, Gillibrand quit the law firm – and defeated the incumbent Congressman, John Sweeney, in the 20th Congressional District.
In 2009, she was appointed by then-New York State Governor David Patterson to fill the U.S. Senate seat that had been occupied by Hillary Clinton (Clinton resigned when she was confirmed as Barack Obama’s Secretary of State). Since then, Gillibrand has won a special election in 2010 – and two 6-year terms in 2012 and 2018.
But although her political acumen has been steadily improving over the past decade, the same can not be said for her memory.
First, she claimed back in March 2018 that she “…had never heard of this group [NXIVM] until she recently read about them in the newspaper.”
Next, she promised in an October 25, 2018 televised debate with her opponent, Chele Farley, that she was not interested in running for President – and promised: “I will serve my six-year term”.
And now, she forgot to bring her father and her step-mom to her announcement that she’s running for President.
If you didn’t know any better, you’d think that Kirsten was overly-sensitive when it came to the subject of her family’s ties with the NXIVM sex-slaver cult.
Either that – or she has a really bad memory…
