Joe Sanberg, a top California Democrat activist who decried the corruption of big Wall Street banks and started a company marketed as the “cleaner” alternative, actually propped that company up through blatant fraud, he admitted Thursday.
Sanberg and other high-profile Democrats started the carbon-credit platform and online banking app Aspiration Partners Inc., promising to plant trees and not invest in polluting industries. Its motto was “clean rich is the new filthy rich.” It was once a star of the “environmental, social, and governance (ESG)” movement that blended corporate finance with leftist politics, and counted actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert Downey Jr. as investors.
But it was instead a scheme as corrupt as any on Wall Street, with Sanberg concocting fake customers for his tree-planting services to try to dupe investors into a $2 billion valuation, the Department of Justice said. Sanberg faces up to 40 years in prison after pleading guilty to two counts of wire fraud, according to the Department of Justice.
Sanberg is a key player in California politics, a Gavin Newsom donor who personally spent $11 million backing a ballot initiative to raise the state’s minimum wage to $18 an hour. Voters blocked the initiative by one percentage point in 2024. A 2019 Atlantic story headlined, “Joe Sanberg Dares Trump to Call Him a Socialist,” said “the multimillionaire investor says the Democrats’ progressive agenda is best for jobs and economic growth.”
But “this so-called ‘anti-poverty’ activist has admitted to being nothing more than a self-serving fraudster, by seeking to enrich himself by defrauding lenders and investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars,” according to Bill Essayli, the Acting U.S. Attorney of the Central District of California.
Aspiration was set up to have companies pay it for “carbon credits,” with Aspiration promising to pay third parties to plant trees in Africa that would offset their emissions. But the United States Postal Inspection Service said Sanberg “built a business on a lie to boost the company’s value and line his own pockets.”
The findings raise questions about the broader world of “carbon credits” and whether they amount to one big company paying another big company money in exchange for fantasy indulgences, based more on partisan marketing than any real-world impact.
Sanberg also faces civil Securities and Exchange Commission charges that say he propped up fake customers to bolster his appearance.
“To make it appear as though Aspiration’s business was rapidly growing, Sanberg recruited friends, associates, small businesses, and religious organizations and presented them to Aspiration as bona fide customers who were fully committed to paying large sums of money” for the tree-planting services,” the SEC charging documents explain.
In reality, they were not going to pay, and Sanberg himself funded initial payments purporting to be from the customers to make them look real.
“Through his fraud, Sanberg raised more than $300 million from investors who falsely believed Aspiration had a thriving environmental sustainability services business,” it says. Sanberg owned 30% of the company and took $100 million in loans backed by his shares.
Sanberg founded the company with Andrei Cherny, who worked for Bill Clinton and Al Gore, ran the Arizona Democratic Party, and ran for Congress in 2024. The SEC complaint said Sanberg texted Cherny in 2020 saying, “if you don’t get me the money tomorrow we are all f…ed. Get me the money. Your turn to figure it out like I have for so long. Wire it to the [Sanberg-entity] account. If you don’t then [the lender] will foreclose. This will give you a good taste of what I have to experience every day. I hate you and I hate this company and I don’t want to work anymore with you [ ]. You are so oblivious to what you’ve forced me to have to do.”
In 2021, Aspiration attempted to go public through a SPAC, giving prospective investors projections based on the fraud, the SEC said. The “greenwashing” firm touted that revenue was “up 584%” due in part to “Enterprise Sustainability Services.” That year, the company funneled $3.6 million to Sanberg, with Cherny signing a $475,000 contract, for example, “in exchange for Joseph Sanberg’s services related to Aspiration’s Sustainable Impact Services.”
Sanberg aligns himself publicly with unions, but privately, management sacked the company. In January 2022, the board gave him an $8 million cash bonus, “despite having low cash reserves.” That year, Aspiration had $104 million in revenue that didn’t actually exist, and its outside auditor resigned due to “characteristics of fraud.”
The effort to go public through a SPAC collapsed in 2023, but not before taking $300 million from investors, including former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.
The investigation that began during the Biden administration after Sanberg and another investor, board member, and high-profile Democrat donor, Ibrahim Alhusseini, stiffed a lender. When the lender sued, documents unearthed in discovery showed that Alhusseini had gotten the loans based on fake financial statements.
Actress and activist Jane Fonda embraces Ibrahim AlHusseini at a Champions of Our Planet’s Future gala in 2016 in Beverly Hills. (Photo by Michael Buckner/Variety/Penske Media via Getty Images)
That matter was referred to the FBI, which said that AlHusseini sent investors falsified bank statements that made it seem like he had assets “worth between approximately $80 million to $200 million…. In fact, AlHusseini’s brokerage account during this period held between approximately $2,000 and $15,000.” The fake bank statements had a telltale sign of all ending in dollar amounts with 43 cents.
The Daily Wire exclusively reported that AlHusseini, who is from Saudi Arabia and was a board member for the far-left, anti-Israel group CodePink, was arrested last October and held in jail until December, when wealthy Democrat environmentalists, including CodePink founder Jodie Evans, put up their homes as $3 million bail.
Prosecutors said AlHusseini was a flight risk as he transferred $300 million to Saudi Arabia, and put his Venice mansion in his brother’s name. A New York civil court found him in contempt of court for avoiding paying the lender he stiffed, while—as the lender told the judge—he “donated at least US $22,100.00 to United States political candidates” such as Cori Bush and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and spent $16,000 at the Four Seasons hotel in Greece and $10,000 on Gucci clothes in New York.
Alhusseini turned on Sanberg, who was himself arrested in March, The Daily Wire reported.
Sanberg was reportedly considering a Democratic presidential run ahead of the 2020 election, traveling to meet with party activists in early primary states. He was a fierce defender of California’s Newsom during the 2021 attempt to recall the governor.
