How an identity thief and fraud artist was installed as the unelected chair of Democrats Abroad Panama, and the tale of his short reign and ugly downfall

To boldly go where hustlers
have never gone before

by Eric Jackson

The author was a protagonist in these events, and things in any way autobiographical are always inherently suspect. Moreover, 2016 was the year that American politics — “American” in the narrow gringo sense which Latin Americans often find annoying — gave rise to the Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year, “post-truth.” Even if scrupulous loyalty to the facts prevails, in tales of political conflict there are layers of context and differences of perspective, such that which facts are important is a matter of opinion. Take those things as given, and perhaps you will hear wounded shrieks and allegations of libel that are evidence of different perspectives. I stand by this story.

One of the major contexts, it seems to this writer, is what makes this tale of things that mostly happened between March and May still topical in December. Many things were done by a corporate faction of the Democratic Party, led by Debbie Wasserman Schultz, to 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 Schultz 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 struggles 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 the disastrous two-month interregnum in Democrats Abroad Panama are as these words are written seeking to retain, regain 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 the seven-member board of directors, against the opposition of a fourth and 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 post of chair after the chair’s resignation, appointing Hammerle as vice chair, then herself resigning and being appointed as vice chair once more. But precisely to avoid such maneuvers the bylaws 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?

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

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

For an initial pair of demonstrations, do a Google advanced search of the key phrase “Sean Hammerle.” Among the 1,500 or so links that come up you will find a few news stories that were not his creations, but in general the impression will be that this is someone who has gamed the Google algorithms to fill the search results with self-promotion.

It’s a common enough technique for companies and even governments. Just about every foreign hustler who sets up shop in Panama does this, too. Then, go to his website that he attempted to erase when called upon it last May, a March 29, 2016 version that, unbeknownst to him, was scanned and stored on the Wayback Machine Internet Archive here. When collated with claims he made to this writer and other members of Democrats Abroad Panama, the man’s story gets more outrageous — but just take that document, with its jump pages, and consider:

• He claims “over 20 years in corporate coaching” yet lists no business degree and no business management position held before coming to Panama a few years ago.
• He claims to be “an advanced development professional for organizations ranging from budgets with less than $1 million to over $250 million,” and on the “about” page mentions “over $150 million raised globally” — and he’s working in a call center in Santiago?
• He claims to be a graduate of Louisiana State University — sort of. The way he puts it, he’s “a Phi Kappa Psi alum (LSU – ’90),” but the initials he habitually sports are not those of any academic degree but rather “Sean D. Hammerle, CFRE.” A CFRE? That’s “Certified Fund Raising Executive” a “credential” that you essentially buy from the Association of Fundraising Professionals, one that indicates no degree and involves no governmental licensing. So if he’s a university graduate, why this display?

Sean’s story became even more questionable when he claimed to this author that he had worked with the Clinton administration; that he had been on college speaking tours and running into students who said that the Bernie Sanders campaign told them that they would not have to repay their student loans; and that he was owner of the OnQ call center in Santiago.

An Internet search elicited no connection between Sean Hammerle and the Clinton administration. There was one posed Obama-era photo of Bill Clinton with Sean Hammerle in front of an Association of Fundraising professionals banner, but no indication of any tie with the Clinton Foundation.

There was no online record of Sean Hammerle having addressed any campus organization anywhere. Not even as a warm-up speaker for somebody else.

Look up OnQ online and you run across a website for the company and an article on the call center by Ricardo Martinelli’s broadsheet daily, El Panama America. The company website lists Hammerle as number four in the management pecking order. The newspaper story mentions the company’s CEO, but not Hammerle.

All this being rather strange to this writer, who looked up the companies with which Hammerle claimed a tie. The Panamanian records open to the public would not show the beneficial ownership of OnQ, which is found in the Registro Civil as “ON Q CONTACT CENTER, S.A.” But look up “Plaid Consulting LLC” and you find another Texas company in another line of business that has nothing to do with Sean Hammerle. This hits an alarm bell. Taking the name of an existing company that’s unrelated and registering it in Panama is one of the hallmarks of fraud. That Sean Hammerle claimed to also be a Texas company of the same name? State and national laws and their prohibitions may vary, but this is a variant of corporate identity theft, commonly used in Panama to deceive and misdirect.

Houston has the distinction of being the first major US city to elect a lesbian mayor, and Sean Hammerle claimed to be a part of that. Indeed, he had been a delegate to Demcratic country conventions and was a sacrificial lamb Democratic candidate for a county office in a very Republican district. In that race he was supported by local gay organizations and publications. But a source in Houston said that Hammerle was not a significant player in either local politics or the area’s gay movement.

And why did this writer look that stuff up anyway?

It was because Hammerle played the persistent role of campaign obstacle interposed by the Clinton camp. When Debbie Wasserman Schultz was trying to suppress debates by limiting their number and scheduling them for times when few people would be likely to watch them, the Democrats Abroad Panama board of directors twice voted to hold debate watching parties. The chair at the time, Hillary Clinton supporter Michael Long, said both times that Sean Hammerle, having these alleged good business connections, would find the place. That never happened.

(It turns out that Hammerle was not a member of the American Chamber of Commerce or connected in any of the significant business circles of Panama. Of course not. Those folks have seen so many fraud artists over the years that exposure to them would have led to exposure of himself. The Panama Papers, after all, are about a country putting out the welcome mat for the world’s hustlers. If you are a Panamanian doing business here and you are defrauded by a foreigner, you may have recourse to the law. If you are a foreigner who gets defrauded, the authorities will laugh at you. American businesspeople who are survivors here tend to have well-tuned BS detectors.)

As primary day approached, the board voted that when the results came in this writer would get press releases in English and Spanish out to the respective media. Hammerle, who hardly speaks any Spanish, objected to the Spanish release and said that “his company’s” translator would have to look at it. We never heard back and the delay was enough to kill any publication of the local results in Panama’s Spanish-language mainstream media.

Why this game with a press release?

The press release and debate party obstruction should be estimated along with Michael Long limiting in-person voting to a few hours on one day in one location. But as it turned out, more people voted in the Democrats Abroad Panama primary than had done so ever before, and 71 percent of them voted for Bernie Sanders. It was that news that Hammerle suppressed in the Spanish-language media.

En route to the primaries, there were problems from above and within. This writer, who runs the Democrats Abroad Panama Facebook pages, had been asking the international organization since August of 2015 about the dates for the primary voting. We finally got notice of early voting on January 23 — about how early voting had begun on January 11. Later this writer was told by a Democrats Abroad member in France that they had received notice BEFORE early voting began. Meanwhile in Panama, past chair and board member Ramona Rhoades had sent out an email urging people to vote for Bernie Sanders. Michael Long threatened to expel her from the board, and this writer challenged his power to do such a thing under the Democrats Abroad Panama bylaws. That challenge was in a two-paragraph email:

Were Long’s and Hammerle’s vote and information suppression actions with respect to the Democrats Abroad primary in consultation with or at the direction of the international leadership, which was almost all Hillary people? Certainly the practice of driving people out of party posts for supporting Bernie Sanders came right from the top, with Debbie Wasserman Schultz driving congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard out of her position as DNC vice president for going with the senator against the anointed one. So was Long’s threat an imitation of what he saw, or was it ordered or suggested by somebody at the international level? It’s an unanswered question for this writer.

In any case, this writer used The Panama News and pro-Bernie Facebook groups to drum up support for the senator from Vermont, while playing the two candidates very even-handedly in the Democrats Abroad Facebook groups. Social media gag orders issued from the international level of Democrats Abroad in 2013 and blatantly fashioned to favor Hillary Clinton — no discussion of foreign policy, no discussion of electronic eavesdropping, “There is no advantage of drawing unnecessary attention to Democrats Abroad” and so on — were not defied on the local DA Facebook pages.

(In a way, it’s tragic that some of these gag orders were issued and followed. The ban on any discussion about the NSA, for example, prevented Democrats from talking among themselves like adults about how the Snowden revelations confirmed that at least five countries have the capability to intercept the electronic communications of almost everybody in the world. So would a prudent recognition of that and a realization of how long these technologies have existed suggested to Democrats that surely the Russians and Chinese, and probably the French, the Japanese, the Israelis and others, have similar capabilities? Might, instead of the DNC’s fatal hubris, there have been the caution that comes with the expectation that what goes around comes around?)

Bernie won big in the Democrats Abroad primary — 68 percent internationally and more than that here. Michael Long, complaining that “You won the primary by 38 points, it’s not illegal to have some class about it,” announced that he was quitting as soon as he could arrange a transition.

Rules?

But the Democrats Abroad Panama bylaws don’t allow a chair to select his or her successor and quit If the chair resigns the vice chair moves up to be chair. If the vice chair position becomes vacant, there must be an immediate election for that post. The rule was written that way precisely to prevent the sorts of maneuver that Long suggested, and those bylaws had been approved by Democrats Abroad international.

The vice chair, Francis Wilson, is a missionary who travels a lot and an Intenet semi-illiterate who never figured out how to attend an online meeting. She said that she just could not do the job of chair.

Sean Hammerle wanted to be chair, Michael Long wanted him to be chair, and this writer tried to convince Ramona Rhoades and Francis Wilson, both Bernie supporters in the primary, to oppose this. The suggestion from this part was that Hammerle showed by his actions and his improbable claims that he was a dishonest person, someone unsuitable to head the organization. This writer called for an election instead. Rhoades and Wilson were not convinced.

Mental and social conditions

What was THAT all about? As best this writer, who has a childhood history of surviving domestic violence and as a consequence has dysfunctional instincts about trust, can tell, the reasons for that were psychological and social:

• Sean Hammerle is a charming con man, who had wowed not only the other members of the Democrats Abroad board with his claims of wealth and accomplishment, but had also done that in the American Society of Panama. This writer has been hoodwinked from time to time, but the “look you straight in the eye and say what you want to hear” sort of ordinary con man does not do well with this writer, whose emotional instinct or desire to trust just does not work. (It’s terrible for relationships of all sorts, but does at least afford a bit of protection in other situations.) To this writer the claim by a guy who got out of LSU in 1990 that he had worked with the Clinton administration — without leaving any record of it — just screamed out “Con man!” To Ramona and Francis, Sean was this well-mannered and impeccably and expensively dressed for success young professional. They didn’t want to hear from a scruffy old hippie — with no money, whose household is shared with dogs and cats but not people, who has written about his bipolar condition and his troubled childhood, who only has a bachelors degree in history and political science and a doctorate in law — that the guy in the expensive suit flaunting the CFRE is a fraud. They instinctively KNEW that Sean Hammerle was trustworthy because he was very good at pushing all of the emotional buttons to make them believe that. But those buttons don’t work with this old freak.
• Michael wanted Sean and may have wanted him even knowing that the guy’s a fraud. There was a certain ideological and social affinity there. Very likely Sean exuded the wealth and status to which Michael aspires. Sean certainly projected the profile of the sort of corporate creature that many in the Clinton wing of the party would like to have replace all of the long-time party activists.
• Ramona and Frances were very inward-looking with respect to Democrats Abroad. A succession issue wherein Ramona is a term limited ex-chair, there are two vacancies on the board, Michael is quitting and Francis won’t take the job leaves the choice as smooth Sean versus crazy Eric. Looking outside the universe of the board as it then existed was anathema to them. Francis — with the support of others — had long opposed this writer’s suggestion to reach out to younger people. Dolores Huerta’s claim that Bernie people were demanding “English only” at a casino in Las Vegas was a lie, but Ramona is one of those rare Bernie folks who believe in English only — she opposes Spanish-language ballots, the right of Spanish-speaking people born in the USA to vote, and outreach by Democrats Abroad Panama to dual citizens in Spanish. Although there are probably 20,000 US citizens in Panama, the social horizons of Ramona and Francis are no more than a few hundred people who might be encountered at the American Society, the English-speaking churches, the Theatre Guild, the Navy League and the predominantly white Elks Lodge 1414. It’s an inward-looking, insular, shrinking social world of possibilities to them. Considering an election that involved more than Eric and Sean was unthinkable to them.
• This writer has long had a difficult relationship with the American Society of Panama. For the author to join it would be out of the question. It was a problem between this writer on the one hand and Ramona and Francis on the other. Their social worlds centered on this organization that has perhaps two or three hundred members. But over more than two decades of covering Panama, this reporter has time and again seen how American hustlers have flaunted wealth in that crowd, been swooned over, and trolled for new marks for their latest schemes. If the American Society of Panama is your in crowd, you will hear negative things about Eric Jackson if you ask. If that crowd is almost all you know of Panama’s American community, your “polling data” will be skewed.

Enter Orlando Vidal

Olando Vidal has, in December 2016 communications purporting to speak for the Democrats Abroad members of the DNC and for Democrats Abroad in that capacity, been the top signer. He is term-limited out of continuing as Democrats Abroad international counsel when the next slate of officers is chosen, but there is a group in the DA leadership that seems to be eternal, shifting from top post to top post within the organization notwithstanding term limits.

Vidal is the author of the 2016 delegate selection rules by which a more than 2-1 Bernie majority in the primary was rendered into majorities of Hillary electors in the Berlin conference to select both Philadelphia convention delegates and DNC members, and at which he was chosen to be a member of the Democratic National Committee. During the general election campaign when people working in the various Democrats Abroad country chapters were faced with a bewildering variety of questions about election laws and deadlines in various states, however, the office of Democrats Abroad counsel was not sending out any advice, interpretations or warnings.

The man thinks highly of his services. In his self-promotion to Berlin electors en route to the DNC, he sent an email that said:

When Michael Long sent out an email saying that he was resigning, he said that he had consulted with Orlando Vidal about his succession plan.

In his first email to board members after being installed, Sean Hammerle wrote:

When this writer questioned Vidal about the basis for him overturning the Democrats Abroad Panama bylaws, he replied to this writer:

Vidal copied this message to Sean Hammerle, to acting Americas Region chair Jody Quinnell and to the other members of the board. Appended to the bottom was this warning:

…as in, his party boss communications are claimed to be protected by attorney/client privilege. This one, of course, could not be. This writer is not and never agreed to be Vidal’s client. Allow a non-client to be privy to a privileged communication and that privilege is lost. This habitual appending of a threat to emails about Democrats Abroad business will work to keep many a person without any legal sophistication from revealing this party business — it’s quite the attack on transparency within the organization.

But let us take at face value, for the sake of argument, Vidal’s claim that one of the recipients, Sean Hammerle, is or was his client. Here we have a highly paid offshore corporate lawyer and former US Department of Justice representative in the American Embassy in Bogota involved in a secretive political process that carefully excluded this writer in a transaction wherein the other board members were all kept in the loop, and thus who did not ask this writer about what was then known about Sean Hammerle, including that he was most probably a corporate identity thief and that there were things about him that raised common warning flags about fraud. Nor did Orlando Vidal do any investigation of Sean Hammerle on his own. A simple question or two and he could have begun to “know his client.” And both in US legal dealings in Colombia and in the offshore corporate law business in particular, “know your client” is a constant mantra and preoccupation.

So Orlando Vidal is a highly paid lawyer with a power resume? That’s not a defense to legal malpractice.

The Hammerle administration and its one membership meeting

Sean Hammerle immediately sent out a notice to the DA Panama members, prominently featuring his portrait with the halo and a link to his website. This presented an ethical problem for this writer, a conflict between what was known and reasonably suspected and the duty to Democrats Abroad Panama to post party communications on the Facebook pages. This was imperfectly resolved by posting the announcement with the photo, but without the website link.

Hammerle went upscale for an April 17 general membership meeting, to which he sent out an email to only some of the membership, arguing that for those living outside of Panama City or whom he thought had other commitments it would be inconvenient to attend. The venue, the Wyndham Trypp hotel in Albrook, broke with the Democrats Abroad practice of having easy access to those with limited mobility. While the Wyndham and the Albrook Mall to which it is attached can indeed claim compliance with Panama’s barrier free design rules, for somebody using a walker to get from the huge and crowded parking lot, to the elevators and to the upstairs meeting room would be a daunting challenge. There were 15 people at the meeting, seven of whom had ever attended a Democrats Abroad meeting before. This writer was the only person in the room who was not a member of the American Society. Sean welcomed everyone and acknowledged that he had made some phone calls to get people to the meeting. There was a speaker set up in the room and Sean announced that a dozen people from “his company” were attending the meeting by a telephone connection. He sat at the table with the speaker with Ramona and Francis, making their ostentatious “in crowd” physical statement. People seated in chairs around the room were called to introduce themselves — but nobody on the telephone connection was.

The meeting was ridiculous, discussing the purchase of expensive mainstream media advertising with money that the organization did not have, the sending of things in English to Miami to be translated into Spanish, and nothing about filling vacancies on the board or setting up the actual nuts and bolts of waging a general election campaign once the party had its nominee. A fundraising forum on the FATCA and FBAR rules, something that Democrats Abroad Panama had done before, was decided upon without a vote. Nothing was voted upon at the meeting. This writer held his tongue during the meeting and decided not to stick around in the bar and drink with these people afterward.

The forum was poorly publicized, poorly attended and a money loser. In the meantime Ramona Rhoades resigned from the board.

For representation at the Berlin conference to select DA convention delegates and DNC members, Sean certified the remaining board members, plus one of the American Society socialites he had brought into the organization, Phyllis So. It was a two-day affair, both online and in person in Berlin, with Francis and Phyllis the only electors for the “global” conference on the second day. But that was done with the knowledge that Francis never attended anything online. As it turned out, Francis didn’t get accredited because she didn’t register, and when this writer told her that she treated it as if this writer lied to her. So Panama, with its 71 percent Bernie majority in the primary, was left with Hillary supporter Phyllis as its only elector in the global round at which Hillary supporter Orlando Vidal was elected to the DNC. Ramona somehow thought that because she knew everybody, even though she wasn’t even a Democrats Abroad board member anymore and hadn’t been appointed or registered, she could be a voting elector in Berlin.

The attempted purge

Sean went upscale again, using the Democrats Abroad mailing list to invite members to happy hours at bars where people in suits mingle. No way does this writer take buses from his rural abode into the city to such places for such events.

(Moreover, the author runs The Panama News and posts information about cultural events that take place in bars with some frequency. This has over the years prompted some bar owners to figure that if the musicians playing get a free announcement, then this pendejo who runs The Panama News is also going to post free ads for their happy hour drink specials. It got to the point that email box settings were adjusted to send anything about happy hour to the spam folder.)

On May 12 Hammerle use the Democrats Abroad mailing list to send out a happy hour ad for a Panama City hotel bar, and buried below it in small print — the transcript here is not a screen shot and does not do justice to how well hidden the addendum was — was a notice that in 30 days there would be a meeting to remove this writer from the board of directors. Very carefully and conveniently, there was no location given and all of Sean Hammerle’s supporters maintained a wall of silence about the venue.

But there was already opposition research “in the can” from this writer’s previous investigations, and five people — lawyers, journalists, computer nerds, a librarian (most of whom are or were more than one of these things) — were called upon to do various aspects of opposition research to flesh out the story of Sean Hammerle. Dutch journalist Okke Ornstein discovered, after about 15 minutes looking at Hammerle’s website that the claimed “staff” for his claimed consulting company were photographs taken from business organizations and employment agencies in the Sacramento, California area, with new names and invented biographies to go along with the photos on Hammerle’s website.

This information was immediately published, in emails and on Ornstein’s Bananama Republic website and in The Panama News. Hammerle’s American Society crowd scoffed and accused this writer of libel. But Hammerle blinked. Now outed as a thief of both another company’s identity and the personal identities of several individuals. Worse yet from Hammerle’s legal perspective his victims were Californians, residents of a state that has strong laws about that sort of thing and with Hammerle living outside of the USA they would have proper venue to sue him in California. So Hammerle erased his website and replaced it with something not so incriminating. Or so he thought. He had not counted on the existence of The Wayback Machine Internet Archive, which stores a copy of what he tried to erase and deny.

Phyllis So and the rest were still spitting venom at this writer, but other voices in Democrats Abroad Panama began to be raised in opposition to what Hammerle and his clique were doing. The most important of these was that of former vice chair Phil Edmonston. Those who support versus those who oppose party purges at meetings held at secret venues became a dividing line that will surely last for a long time among local Democrats.

Finally David Young, the veteran Welsh-born Canadian journalist and his Newsroom Panama website weighed in. In his moderate and understated way he confirmed that there really was something to what this writer and Ornstein had published. There were perhaps still some English-language media in Panama that might have supported Hammerle — or might not have because he’s gay and he’s at least nominally a Democrat — but when Young took the allegations of identity theft seriously, so did a number of members of the American Society of Panama.

The people “upstairs” in Democrats Abroad were also getting this in close to real time. The California primary had yet to take place and this writer suggested to one of the Democrats Abroad international officials that if Orlando Vidal and his Hillary vipers insisted on going through with this purge, there was the possibility of turning Sean Hammerle into Hillary Clinton’s California running mate.

Did the folks upstairs tell Hammerle and his secret “executive committee” to go away, or was it a matter of Hammerle taking flight and the others going with him? In any case they all resigned, and in a parting email screed said that they did so after consultation with the international leadership of Democrats Abroad. Perhaps some day WikiLeaks might make us privy to those communications.

And then?

This left the author as the one remaining board member, and Ramona and some others in panic mode thought that the position would be converted into a self-declared chair. This was never contemplated, but perhaps their minds were in totalitarian mode after their support of the coup and purge. With only one member there was no quorum, the old board was dissolved and a new one needed to be elected. This writer wanted to make sure that the local Democrats had an effective campaign in the face of a growing white supremacist threat from the Republicans, and kept on running the Facebook pages throughout. The preference was not to grab for the chair, nor even to seek a position on the board if other people with democratic values and the commitment could be found. When elected to the board in early 2015, this writer expressed a preference for a candidate other than Hillary Clinton — Elizabeth Warren was in mind — but vowed to support the ticket in the general election given the increasingly extreme GOP alternatives. Ramona at that time denounced Clinton and declared that she would not work for her in the general election campaign if she were the nominee.

The chapter was back together with this writer becoming communications director but not a board member. We campaigned as hard as we could, in English and Spanish, to get out the vote for Democrats in November. The Democrats lost, and are now picking up pieces at all levels. Those who gamed the nominating process and promoted maneuvers like what we saw in Panama are looking to consolidate and extend their control over a party they led to defeat. The election is over and it’s never a good time to tear the party apart, but it is time to discuss what happened and to assess who served the party and the cause well and who did not.

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