[ed. American terrorists... making their nut and enjoying authority (incognito, of course.) (South Park).]
Showing posts with label Crime. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Crime. Show all posts
Monday, August 11, 2025
Tuesday, August 5, 2025
Border Patrol Wants Advanced AI to Spy on American Cities
The recent passage of Trump’s sprawling flagship legislation funnels tens of billions of dollars to the Department of Homeland Security. While much of that funding will go to Immigration and Customs Enforcement to bolster the administration’s arrest and deportation operations, a great deal is earmarked to purchase new technology and equipment for federal offices tasked with preventing immigrants from arriving in the first place: Customs and Border Protection, which administers the country’s border surveillance apparatus, and its subsidiary, the U.S. Border Patrol.
One page of the presentation, describing the wishlist of Border Patrol’s Law Enforcement Operations Division, says the agency needs “Advanced AI to identify and track suspicious activity in urban environment [sic],” citing the “challenges” posed by “Dense residential areas.” What’s considered “suspicious activity” is left unmentioned. (...)
The reference to AI-aided urban surveillance appears on a page dedicated to the operational needs of Border Patrol’s “Coastal AOR,” or area of responsibility, encompassing the entire southeast of the United States, from Kentucky to Florida. A page describing the “Southern AOR,” which includes all of inland Nevada and Oklahoma, similarly states the need for “Advanced intelligence to identify suspicious patterns” and “Long-range surveillance” because “city environments make it difficult to separate normal activity from suspicious activity.”
Although the Fourth Amendment provides protection against arbitrary police searches, federal law grants immigration agencies the power to conduct warrantless detentions and searches within 100 miles of the land borders with Canada, Mexico, or the coastline of the United States. This zone includes most of the largest cities in the United States, including Los Angeles, New York, as well as the entirety of Florida.
The document mentions no specific surveillance methods or “advanced AI” tools that might be used in urban environments. Across the Southwest, residents of towns like Nogales and Calexico are already subjected to monitoring from surveillance towers placed in their neighborhoods. A 2014 DHS border surveillance privacy impact assessment warned these towers “may capture information about individuals or activities that are beyond the scope of CBP’s authorities. Video cameras can capture individuals entering places or engaging in activities as they relate to their daily lives because the border includes populated areas,” for example, “video of an individual entering a doctor’s office, attending public rallies, social events or meetings, or associating with other individuals.”
Last year, the Government Accountability Office found the DHS tower surveillance program failed six out of six privacy policies designed to prevent such overreach. CBP is also already known to use “artificial intelligence” tools to ferret out “suspicious activity,” according to agency documents. A 2024 inventory of DHS AI applications includes the Rapid Tactical Operations Reconnaissance program, or RAPTOR, which “leverages Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enhance border security through real-time surveillance and reconnaissance. The AI system processes data from radar, infrared sensors, and video surveillance to detect and track suspicious activities along U.S. borders.”
The document’s call for urban surveillance reflect the reality of Border Patrol, an agency empowered, despite its name, with broad legal authority to operate throughout the United States.
“Border Patrol’s escalating immigration raids and protest crackdowns show us the agency operates heavily in cities, not just remote deserts,” said Spencer Reynolds, a former attorney with the Department of Homeland Security who focused on intelligence matters. “Day by day, its activities appear less based on suspicion and more reliant on racial and ethnic profiling. References to operations in ‘dense residential areas’ are alarming in that they potentially signal planning for expanded operations or tracking in American neighborhoods.”
[ed. See also, via The Intercept:]
The reference to AI-aided urban surveillance appears on a page dedicated to the operational needs of Border Patrol’s “Coastal AOR,” or area of responsibility, encompassing the entire southeast of the United States, from Kentucky to Florida. A page describing the “Southern AOR,” which includes all of inland Nevada and Oklahoma, similarly states the need for “Advanced intelligence to identify suspicious patterns” and “Long-range surveillance” because “city environments make it difficult to separate normal activity from suspicious activity.”
Although the Fourth Amendment provides protection against arbitrary police searches, federal law grants immigration agencies the power to conduct warrantless detentions and searches within 100 miles of the land borders with Canada, Mexico, or the coastline of the United States. This zone includes most of the largest cities in the United States, including Los Angeles, New York, as well as the entirety of Florida.
The document mentions no specific surveillance methods or “advanced AI” tools that might be used in urban environments. Across the Southwest, residents of towns like Nogales and Calexico are already subjected to monitoring from surveillance towers placed in their neighborhoods. A 2014 DHS border surveillance privacy impact assessment warned these towers “may capture information about individuals or activities that are beyond the scope of CBP’s authorities. Video cameras can capture individuals entering places or engaging in activities as they relate to their daily lives because the border includes populated areas,” for example, “video of an individual entering a doctor’s office, attending public rallies, social events or meetings, or associating with other individuals.”
Last year, the Government Accountability Office found the DHS tower surveillance program failed six out of six privacy policies designed to prevent such overreach. CBP is also already known to use “artificial intelligence” tools to ferret out “suspicious activity,” according to agency documents. A 2024 inventory of DHS AI applications includes the Rapid Tactical Operations Reconnaissance program, or RAPTOR, which “leverages Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enhance border security through real-time surveillance and reconnaissance. The AI system processes data from radar, infrared sensors, and video surveillance to detect and track suspicious activities along U.S. borders.”
The document’s call for urban surveillance reflect the reality of Border Patrol, an agency empowered, despite its name, with broad legal authority to operate throughout the United States.
“Border Patrol’s escalating immigration raids and protest crackdowns show us the agency operates heavily in cities, not just remote deserts,” said Spencer Reynolds, a former attorney with the Department of Homeland Security who focused on intelligence matters. “Day by day, its activities appear less based on suspicion and more reliant on racial and ethnic profiling. References to operations in ‘dense residential areas’ are alarming in that they potentially signal planning for expanded operations or tracking in American neighborhoods.”
by Sam Biddle, The Intercept | Read more:
Image: Jenny Kane/AP[ed. See also, via The Intercept:]
***
~ Guess Who’s Eligible for Student Loan Forgiveness: New ICE Agents
The Department of Homeland Security announced on Tuesday it will offer student loan forgiveness and repayment options to new Immigration and Customs Enforcement recruits — along with a $50,000 signing bonus.
The announcement comes as the Trump administration works to limit the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program for groups the president considers political enemies.
***
~ National Guard Ordered to Do ICE Paperwork at Immigration Facilities in 20 StatesThe Trump administration authorized the deployment of National Guard troops to immigration facilities in 20 states beginning early next month, further entwining the military in civil and law enforcement functions.
The move undermines long-standing prohibitions on the use of the armed forces in domestic operations, sidestepping the Posse Comitatus Act and accelerating the U.S. transition into a police state, experts said.
The National Guard will be deployed in Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Nebraska, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and Virginia, among other states, according to a defense official who was not authorized to disclose the information. (...)
Guard members will assist ICE officials in “alien processing” – administrative work preceding detention — in 20 states while ICE leadership will “direct” troops assigned to the mission, which will begin in early August, according to a memo first revealed on Wednesday by the New York Times.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said the agency had taken “significant actions” to protect public health and the environment while working “to Power the Great American Comeback.” The agency said it was also working to fulfill Trump’s promises to revitalize the auto industry, “restore the rule of law,” and give decision-making power back to the states.
In practice, the agency has done the opposite, several EPA staffers told The Intercept.
Under Zeldin’s leadership, the EPA announced a set of new core priorities that includes making the U.S. the artificial intelligence capital of the world and revitalizing the auto industry. (...)
“A lot of us are really confused about what our new mission is, when they’re coming out with these pillars of serving the auto industry and bringing back auto industry jobs,” Hagen said. “I don’t know how we fit into that.”
The EPA’s role is not to create jobs; it’s to regulate and protect people from pollution, she said.
“Our mission is not to promote AI or energy dominance,” she said. “That’s not our mission.” (...)
Last week, the agency said it is planning to dissolve the Office of Research and Development, which does life-saving research on toxicity and developing sampling protocols, and helped in emergencies after the East Palestine train derailment in Ohio and the Covid-19 pandemic.
As a result, more than 1,500 scientists will have to compete for 300 jobs, Hagen said.
“It’s essentially like lobotomizing our agency. If we don’t have the brain — the research behind protecting the environment — we can’t do that effectively, and I think that’s exactly what they want,” she said. “They’re doing all this under the guise of efficiency, but what they really are doing is dismantling this agency from doing its job.”
Thursday, July 31, 2025
‘Quishing’ Scams Dupe Millions
QR codes were once a quirky novelty that prompted a fun scan with the phone. Early on, you might have seen a QR code on a museum exhibit and scanned it to learn more about the eating habits of the woolly mammoth or military strategies of Genghis Khan. During the pandemic, QR codes became the default restaurant menu. However, as QR codes became a mainstay in more urgent aspects of American life, from boarding passes to parking payments, hackers have exploited their ubiquity.
“As with many technological advances that start with good intentions, QR codes have increasingly become targets for malicious use. Because they are everywhere — from gas pumps and yard signs to television commercials — they’re simultaneously useful and dangerous,” said Dustin Brewer, senior director of proactive cybersecurity services at BlueVoyant.
Brewer says that attackers exploit these seemingly harmless symbols to trick people into visiting malicious websites or unknowingly share private information, a scam that has become known as “quishing.”
The increasing prevalence of QR code scams prompted a warning from the Federal Trade Commission earlier this year about unwanted or unexpected packages showing up with a QR code that when scanned “could take you to a phishing website that steals your personal information, like credit card numbers or usernames and passwords. It could also download malware onto your phone and give hackers access to your device.”
State and local advisories this summer have reached across the U.S., with the New York Department of Transportation and Hawaii Electric warning customers about avoiding QR code scams.
The appeal to cybercriminals lies in the relative ease with which the scam operates: slap a fake QR code sticker on a parking meter or a utility bill payment warning and rely on urgency to do the rest.
“The crooks are relying on you being in a hurry and you needing to do something,” said Gaurav Sharma, a professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Rochester.
On the rise as traditional phishing fails
Sharma expects QR scams to increase as the use of QR codes spreads. Another reason QR codes have increased in popularity with scammers is that more safeguards have been put into place to tamp down on traditional email phishing campaigns. A study this year from cybersecurity platform KeepNet Labs found that 26 percent of all malicious links are now sent via QR code. According to cybersecurity company, NordVPN, 73% of Americans scan QR codes without verification, and more than 26 million have already been directed to malicious sites.
“The cat and mouse game of security will continue and that people will figure out solutions and the crooks will either figure out a way around or look at other places where the grass is greener,” Sharma said.
Sharma is working to develop a “smart” QR code called a SDMQR (Self-Authenticating Dual-Modulated QR) that has built-in security to prevent scams. But first, he needs buy-in from Google and Microsoft, the companies that build the cameras and control the camera infrastructure. Companies putting their logos into QR codes isn’t a fix because it can cause a false sense of security, and that criminals can usually simply copy the logos, he said.
Some Americans are wary of the increasing reliance on QR codes. [ed. Me!]
“I’m in my 60s and don’t like using QR codes,” said Denise Joyal of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. “I definitely worry about security issues. I really don’t like it when one is forced to use a QR code to participate in a promotion with no other way to connect. I don’t use them for entertainment-type information.”
Institutions are also trying to fortify their QR codes against intrusion.
Natalie Piggush, spokeswoman for the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, which welcomes over one million visitors a year, said their IT staff began upgrading their QR codes a couple of years ago to protect against what has become an increasingly significant threat.
“At the museum, we use stylized QR codes with our logo and colors as opposed to the standard monochrome codes. We also detail what users can expect to see when scanning one of our QR codes, and we regularly inspect our existing QR codes for tampering or for out-of-place codes,” Piggush said.
Museums are usually less vulnerable than places like train stations or parking lots because scammers are looking to collect cash from people expecting to pay for something. A patron at a museum is less likely to expect to pay, although Sharma said even in those settings, fake QR codes can be deployed to install malware on someone’s phone. (...)
Low investment, high return hacking tactic
A QR code is more dangerous than a traditional phishing email because users typically can’t read or verify the encoded web address. Even though QR codes normally include human-readable text, attackers can modify this text to deceive users into trusting the link and the website it directs to. The best defense against them is to not scan unwanted or unexpected QR codes and look for ones that display the URL address when you scan it.
Brewer says cybercriminals have also been leveraging QR codes to infiltrate critical networks.
“There are also credible reports that nation-state intelligence agencies have used QR codes to compromise messaging accounts of military personnel, sometimes using software like Signal that is also open to consumers,” Brewer said. Nation-state attackers have even used QR codes to distribute remote access trojans (RATs) — a type of malware designed to operate without a device owner’s consent or knowledge — enabling hackers to gain full access to targeted devices and networks.
Still, one of the most dangerous aspects of QR codes is how they are part of the fabric of everyday life, a cyberthreat hiding in plain sight.
“What’s especially concerning is that legitimate flyers, posters, billboards, or official documents can be easily compromised. Attackers can simply print their own QR code and paste it physically or digitally over a genuine one, making it nearly impossible for the average user to detect the deception,” Brewer said.
“As with many technological advances that start with good intentions, QR codes have increasingly become targets for malicious use. Because they are everywhere — from gas pumps and yard signs to television commercials — they’re simultaneously useful and dangerous,” said Dustin Brewer, senior director of proactive cybersecurity services at BlueVoyant.
Brewer says that attackers exploit these seemingly harmless symbols to trick people into visiting malicious websites or unknowingly share private information, a scam that has become known as “quishing.”
The increasing prevalence of QR code scams prompted a warning from the Federal Trade Commission earlier this year about unwanted or unexpected packages showing up with a QR code that when scanned “could take you to a phishing website that steals your personal information, like credit card numbers or usernames and passwords. It could also download malware onto your phone and give hackers access to your device.”
State and local advisories this summer have reached across the U.S., with the New York Department of Transportation and Hawaii Electric warning customers about avoiding QR code scams.
The appeal to cybercriminals lies in the relative ease with which the scam operates: slap a fake QR code sticker on a parking meter or a utility bill payment warning and rely on urgency to do the rest.
“The crooks are relying on you being in a hurry and you needing to do something,” said Gaurav Sharma, a professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Rochester.
On the rise as traditional phishing fails
Sharma expects QR scams to increase as the use of QR codes spreads. Another reason QR codes have increased in popularity with scammers is that more safeguards have been put into place to tamp down on traditional email phishing campaigns. A study this year from cybersecurity platform KeepNet Labs found that 26 percent of all malicious links are now sent via QR code. According to cybersecurity company, NordVPN, 73% of Americans scan QR codes without verification, and more than 26 million have already been directed to malicious sites.
“The cat and mouse game of security will continue and that people will figure out solutions and the crooks will either figure out a way around or look at other places where the grass is greener,” Sharma said.
Sharma is working to develop a “smart” QR code called a SDMQR (Self-Authenticating Dual-Modulated QR) that has built-in security to prevent scams. But first, he needs buy-in from Google and Microsoft, the companies that build the cameras and control the camera infrastructure. Companies putting their logos into QR codes isn’t a fix because it can cause a false sense of security, and that criminals can usually simply copy the logos, he said.
Some Americans are wary of the increasing reliance on QR codes. [ed. Me!]
“I’m in my 60s and don’t like using QR codes,” said Denise Joyal of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. “I definitely worry about security issues. I really don’t like it when one is forced to use a QR code to participate in a promotion with no other way to connect. I don’t use them for entertainment-type information.”
Institutions are also trying to fortify their QR codes against intrusion.
Natalie Piggush, spokeswoman for the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, which welcomes over one million visitors a year, said their IT staff began upgrading their QR codes a couple of years ago to protect against what has become an increasingly significant threat.
“At the museum, we use stylized QR codes with our logo and colors as opposed to the standard monochrome codes. We also detail what users can expect to see when scanning one of our QR codes, and we regularly inspect our existing QR codes for tampering or for out-of-place codes,” Piggush said.
Museums are usually less vulnerable than places like train stations or parking lots because scammers are looking to collect cash from people expecting to pay for something. A patron at a museum is less likely to expect to pay, although Sharma said even in those settings, fake QR codes can be deployed to install malware on someone’s phone. (...)
Low investment, high return hacking tactic
A QR code is more dangerous than a traditional phishing email because users typically can’t read or verify the encoded web address. Even though QR codes normally include human-readable text, attackers can modify this text to deceive users into trusting the link and the website it directs to. The best defense against them is to not scan unwanted or unexpected QR codes and look for ones that display the URL address when you scan it.
Brewer says cybercriminals have also been leveraging QR codes to infiltrate critical networks.
“There are also credible reports that nation-state intelligence agencies have used QR codes to compromise messaging accounts of military personnel, sometimes using software like Signal that is also open to consumers,” Brewer said. Nation-state attackers have even used QR codes to distribute remote access trojans (RATs) — a type of malware designed to operate without a device owner’s consent or knowledge — enabling hackers to gain full access to targeted devices and networks.
Still, one of the most dangerous aspects of QR codes is how they are part of the fabric of everyday life, a cyberthreat hiding in plain sight.
“What’s especially concerning is that legitimate flyers, posters, billboards, or official documents can be easily compromised. Attackers can simply print their own QR code and paste it physically or digitally over a genuine one, making it nearly impossible for the average user to detect the deception,” Brewer said.
by Kevin Williams, CNBC | Read more:
Image: Fongfong2 | Istock | Getty Images
[ed. Not surprised at all. I've avoided using them from the start.]
Image: Fongfong2 | Istock | Getty Images
[ed. Not surprised at all. I've avoided using them from the start.]
Saturday, July 26, 2025
L'affaire Epstein Update: July 23, 2025
[ed. Crisis management 101: deflecting attention/responsibility.]
At a press briefing today, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt pushed this story, insisting that Democrats led by Obama had tried to sabotage Trump’s first administration and had done “grave material harm to our republic.” She called it “one of the greatest political scandals in American history.”
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard followed Leavitt to talk about today’s release of a report drafted in 2020 by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee to push back on the idea that Russia preferred for Trump, rather than Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, to win the 2016 election.
Despite her claims that it is a damning bombshell, the material in the newly released report in fact does not challenge the conclusion of the U.S. intelligence agencies, the Mueller report, and the Senate Intelligence Committee that Russia preferred a Trump presidency to a Clinton presidency and worked to get Trump elected in part by attacking Clinton and spreading lies about her health.
What the report did do was deliver red meat to the MAGA base by spreading the same sorts of rumors about Clinton the Russians spread in 2016.
Gabbard compounded that effort at the White House press conference by reading material in the report as if it were fact, saying that Russia had “high-level [Democratic National Committee] e-mails that detailed evidence of Hillary's ‘psycho emotional problems, uncontrolled fits of anger, aggression, and cheerfulness.’ And that then-secretary Clinton was allegedly on a daily regimen of heavy tranquilizers,” along with a number of other charges that Clinton had broken the law. Gabbard did not mention that these allegations were in fact identified in the report as material prepared by Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Services.
Just to be clear: The director of national intelligence for the United States of America is making allegations against a former U.S. presidential candidate based on material from Russia’s intelligence services.
This seems to be another unforced error, reminding Americans of another story the administration would prefer they forget, since opponents of Gabbard’s nomination for her post noted that she has a long history of repeating Russian propaganda. While Trump seems determined to reach back to the rhetoric that got him elected in 2016, it’s hard to see that as a powerful distraction from the Epstein story, since Americans have now had eight years to contemplate the many times Trump has deferred to Russian president Vladimir Putin and weakened Ukraine’s ability to fight back against Russia’s incursions. And claims about the health of a losing presidential candidate from nine years ago seem pretty weak sauce, especially since today she seems far more stable than Trump.
In any case, the distractions seemed to be for naught, since Sadie Gurman, Annie Linskey, Josh Dawsey, and Alex Leary of the Wall Street Journal dropped a story just after 3:00 this afternoon, reporting that Attorney General Pam Bondi and her deputy informed Trump in May that his name appeared “multiple times” in the Epstein files. They told him they did not plan to release any more documents from the investigation because the files contained both the personal information of victims and child pornography.
Ohio’s David Pepper noted that this timing checks out with the feud between Trump and billionaire Elon Musk, who tweeted on June 5: “Time to drop the really big bomb: [Trump] is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!” Musk followed that tweet with another: “Mark this post for the future. The truth will come out.”
While that “sort of felt like old news,” Pepper wrote, “for the White House, that was Musk revealing something that had only recently been confirmed (and that clearly had hopes to bury). So it was a far more brutal tweet than we realized at the time. And the reason why Musk took it down two days later.”
The Department of Justice set off the current firestorm on July 7 when it announced it would not release any more information from the Epstein files. When an ABC News reporter asked Trump on July 15 what Bondi had told Trump about the review, he denied any knowledge that he was in the files. The reporter asked, “specifically, did she tell you at all that your name appeared in the files?” and he responded, “No, no, she's—she's given us just a very quick briefing.” Then he claimed the files were created by Democrats. (...)
Today, under pressure from Democrats, the House Oversight Committee voted to subpoena Maxwell. The Department of Justice also wants to talk to Maxwell, sending Trump’s former personal lawyer Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, to talk with Maxwell’s lawyer, who appears to be his personal friend. Alan Feuer of the New York Times notes the job fell to Blanche after the department fired Maurene Comey, the prosecutor of both the Epstein and Maxwell cases, last week. Maxwell is appealing her conviction, giving her incentive to say what the president wants to hear.
by Heather Cox Richardson, Notes from an American | Read more:
[ed. Best to lay low, go golfing in Scotland (on the taxpayers dime), and let the lawyers do their job with Maxwell. See also: July 25, 2025; and, Before the Flood (Epsilon Theory):]
***
I am aware that the Department of Justice under Joe Biden was even less interested, if that’s imaginable, in identifying the rapists of more than a thousand young women, many of them children. Why? Because the Biden administration was pathetic and weak. That’s the short answer. The slightly longer answer is this:- Because there are incredibly wealthy and/or influential men — Dem-coded, GOP-coded, nonpartisan-coded and everything in between-coded, men like Leon Black, Jes Staley, Glenn Dubin, Les Wexner, Bill Gates, and Larry Summers — who we know from publicly available documents and legal filings regularly ‘socialized’ privately with Epstein after his 2009 conviction and engaged in financial transactions with Epstein.
- Because there are so many more load-bearing names of wealth and power found throughout the publicly available Epstein record, including two American Presidents, an Israeli Prime Minister, and the brother of the King of England, and I suspect there are so many more load-bearing names in the sealed FBI records.
- Because I strongly doubt that any of the circumstantial evidence and grainy videos in the FBI records would hold up in a criminal proceeding against any of these incredibly wealthy and/or influential men, especially now that the only source of direct testimony was found dead in his jail cell while in Federal custody.
- Because I am certain that because of the aforementioned Presidents and Prime Minister, both US and Israeli spy agencies were at a minimum aware and in my opinion more likely up to their eyeballs in this
covert intelligence operationsystematic rape of children, and while circumstantial evidence and a grainy video may not work for a criminal trial, it is absolutely enough to turn a billionaire or a politician into an asset.
The difference for Trump is that he can’t run away from it. He made Epstein a core part of the meaning of his candidacy and his Presidency in a way that was never part of the meaning of Biden’s candidacy and Presidency. Also, of course, the difference for Trump is that one of those load-bearing names of wealth and power that runs throughout the public Epstein record is his own.
There’s only one way for Trump to play this out from here, and it’s exactly what he’s doing: masks off!
All you Trump lieutenants and factotums and mouthpieces and hangers-on, time to toe the line and shut up about Epstein. You don’t like it? Tough. Case closed and we’re moving on. Bigger fish to fry. The ‘base’ is confused and angry? Who cares. Eff ’em.
Friday, July 25, 2025
The Bitcoin Coup
How Crypto Accelerationists Engineered America’s Financial Collapse. JD Vance and the Tech Oligarchs Who Want to Burn Down the Dollar.
There are conspiracies that sound too outrageous to believe, and then there are conspiracies so brazen that they hide in plain sight, documented in government filings and boasted about on podcasts. What I’m about to expose falls into the latter category: a systematic effort by some of America’s most powerful tech billionaires to accelerate the collapse of the American financial system because they believe they’ll profit from the chaos that follows.
This isn’t speculation. This isn’t connecting dots that don’t exist. This is based on direct conversations with people inside this movement, people who have explicitly told me that they view the destruction of the dollar as both inevitable and desirable, who see the suffering of ordinary Americans during financial collapse as an acceptable cost for achieving their vision of a Bitcoin-dominated economy, who have positioned JD Vance as their primary vehicle for implementing policies they know will undermine American monetary stability.
To understand how we reached this moment—where crypto accelerationists are actively working to engineer dollar collapse from within the highest levels of government—we need to trace the intellectual evolution I documented in ”The Plot Against America.” What began as abstract criticism of democratic institutions during the 2008 financial crisis has become a concrete blueprint for dismantling them through cryptocurrency-enabled financial sabotage.
The Philosophical Foundation
Peter Thiel’s own public statements reveal the framework driving this project. Speaking at Libertopia in 2010, he described PayPal’s founding vision as an attempt “to overturn the monetary system of the world.” He continued: “We could never win an election,” but technology could “unilaterally change the world.” In 2021, he declared that “Bitcoin is the most honest market we have in the country. It’s a canary in the coal mine. It tells us that this decrepit regime is about to blow up.”
This represents more than economic analysis—it’s a declaration that existing monetary systems are fundamentally illegitimate and that technological alternatives should replace democratic currency governance. Thiel isn’t merely predicting dollar instability; he’s advocating for conditions that would accelerate it. (...)
The Network of Coordination
The financial relationships between these figures make coordination clear. After their PayPal exit, Sacks, Thiel, and Musk’s wealth became deeply interwoven. Sacks launched Craft Ventures and frequently co-invests alongside Thiel’s Founders Fund, with stakes in companies like Palantir and SpaceX. They didn’t just get rich together—they coordinated their investments in ways that create mutual dependencies and shared interests.
As White House AI & Crypto Czar, Sacks holds a special ethics waiver that allows him to influence digital-asset and tech policy while maintaining investments in companies that benefit from those policies. Despite divesting from crypto assets upon entering government, he likely retains holdings in SpaceX and Palantir—companies building infrastructure that could replace traditional government functions with privately controlled systems.
The audacity of their approach is revealed even in their naming choices. The Department of Government Efficiency—DOGE—wasn’t just an acronym chosen for bureaucratic convenience. It was deliberately named after Dogecoin, the cryptocurrency that Musk has relentlessly promoted. When a government department takes its name from a digital currency promoted by the man running it, the agenda becomes transparent.
Dogecoin was itself based on a popular internet meme, but by strange irony, the term “Doge” originates from the title of rulers of Venice and Genoa—elected elites who presided over commercial republics for life. Whether intended or not, this historical reference reflects their vision of governance: efficient, corporate-style rule rather than messy democratic processes.
The Scale of Their Vision
What distinguishes this from ordinary corruption is the scope of their ambition. These men aren’t simply seeking to accumulate more wealth within existing systems. If their vision succeeds—if government currencies collapse and Bitcoin becomes dominant—their early cryptocurrency positions would transform them from billionaires into something unprecedented: controllers of the fundamental infrastructure of human exchange.
This represents the complete transformation of the American political economy. When they speak enthusiastically about dollar collapse, they’re not just making investment predictions—they’re describing a world where their cryptocurrency holdings make them the effective central bankers of whatever system emerges from the wreckage.
The temporary chaos of currency collapse becomes acceptable when viewed as the price for establishing permanent control over the monetary system itself. They’re not just betting on America’s financial decline—they’re positioned to profit regardless of the human cost.
JD Vance: The Ideological Convert
JD Vance’s role represents something more dangerous than typical political opportunism. His transformation from Trump critic to cryptocurrency advocate reflects his genuine conversion to neoreactionary ideology under Thiel’s decade-long cultivation.
Vance has publicly praised Curtis Yarvin, the neoreactionary theorist who advocates replacing democracy with corporate-style governance. Discussing Yarvin’s ideas, Vance has suggested that Trump should “Fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people....And when the courts stop you...stand before the country, and say...the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”
This isn’t standard conservative rhetoric about limited government. This is advocacy for the systematic elimination of constitutional constraints on executive power—exactly what would be necessary to implement the kind of monetary policy changes that could destabilize the dollar.
Vance understands what Yarvin calls “neocameralism”—the vision of society run like a corporation rather than a democracy. In this framework, citizenship becomes shareholding, elections become obsolete, and governance becomes a technical matter for qualified executives rather than a democratic process. (...)
The Succession Strategy
As constitutional crises consume the Trump presidency—particularly around the Epstein revelations where promised evidence has failed to materialize—the crypto accelerationists appear to be positioning for the next phase of their plan.
They have invested over a decade in positioning Vance not as an emergency replacement for Trump, but as the natural evolution—someone who shares their fundamental critique of democratic governance but possesses the intellectual framework to implement systematic change.
Where Trump operates through impulse and grievance, Vance would operate through ideology and systematic planning. He arrives not needing to learn how to subvert democratic institutions, but with a fully developed philosophical framework for why such subversion is necessary and justified.
The Constitutional Trap
Evidence suggests that Sacks may have positioned Trump for exactly the kind of constitutional crisis that would necessitate succession. The mechanism appears to be cryptocurrency-related violations of the Foreign Emoluments Clause.
TrumpCoin and World Liberty Financial create potential constitutional violations because they allow foreign entities to provide financial benefits to the president. The Foreign Emoluments Clause prohibits the President from receiving any gift, payment, or benefit from foreign governments without explicit Congressional approval. World Liberty Financial’s investor rolls include entities like the UAE, whose purchases could constitute exactly this kind of prohibited foreign benefit.
Cryptocurrency’s structure makes such violations both easier to commit and harder to hide—blockchain creates permanent, traceable records of every transaction. Sacks, with his University of Chicago law degree, would understand these implications perfectly.
While ensuring his own conflicts were addressed through narrow divestitures, Sacks never publicly warned Trump about these constitutional landmines. Instead, he legitimized TrumpCoin on television, describing it as “a baseball card or a stamp” rather than acknowledging its potential regulatory implications. (...)
[ed. For a good summary of where we are and how we got here with crypto, see also: From Truth Social to bitcoin empire: Trump’s $2 billion pivot (PI):]
There are conspiracies that sound too outrageous to believe, and then there are conspiracies so brazen that they hide in plain sight, documented in government filings and boasted about on podcasts. What I’m about to expose falls into the latter category: a systematic effort by some of America’s most powerful tech billionaires to accelerate the collapse of the American financial system because they believe they’ll profit from the chaos that follows.
To understand how we reached this moment—where crypto accelerationists are actively working to engineer dollar collapse from within the highest levels of government—we need to trace the intellectual evolution I documented in ”The Plot Against America.” What began as abstract criticism of democratic institutions during the 2008 financial crisis has become a concrete blueprint for dismantling them through cryptocurrency-enabled financial sabotage.
The Philosophical Foundation
Peter Thiel’s own public statements reveal the framework driving this project. Speaking at Libertopia in 2010, he described PayPal’s founding vision as an attempt “to overturn the monetary system of the world.” He continued: “We could never win an election,” but technology could “unilaterally change the world.” In 2021, he declared that “Bitcoin is the most honest market we have in the country. It’s a canary in the coal mine. It tells us that this decrepit regime is about to blow up.”
This represents more than economic analysis—it’s a declaration that existing monetary systems are fundamentally illegitimate and that technological alternatives should replace democratic currency governance. Thiel isn’t merely predicting dollar instability; he’s advocating for conditions that would accelerate it. (...)
The Network of Coordination
The financial relationships between these figures make coordination clear. After their PayPal exit, Sacks, Thiel, and Musk’s wealth became deeply interwoven. Sacks launched Craft Ventures and frequently co-invests alongside Thiel’s Founders Fund, with stakes in companies like Palantir and SpaceX. They didn’t just get rich together—they coordinated their investments in ways that create mutual dependencies and shared interests.
As White House AI & Crypto Czar, Sacks holds a special ethics waiver that allows him to influence digital-asset and tech policy while maintaining investments in companies that benefit from those policies. Despite divesting from crypto assets upon entering government, he likely retains holdings in SpaceX and Palantir—companies building infrastructure that could replace traditional government functions with privately controlled systems.
The audacity of their approach is revealed even in their naming choices. The Department of Government Efficiency—DOGE—wasn’t just an acronym chosen for bureaucratic convenience. It was deliberately named after Dogecoin, the cryptocurrency that Musk has relentlessly promoted. When a government department takes its name from a digital currency promoted by the man running it, the agenda becomes transparent.
Dogecoin was itself based on a popular internet meme, but by strange irony, the term “Doge” originates from the title of rulers of Venice and Genoa—elected elites who presided over commercial republics for life. Whether intended or not, this historical reference reflects their vision of governance: efficient, corporate-style rule rather than messy democratic processes.
The Scale of Their Vision
What distinguishes this from ordinary corruption is the scope of their ambition. These men aren’t simply seeking to accumulate more wealth within existing systems. If their vision succeeds—if government currencies collapse and Bitcoin becomes dominant—their early cryptocurrency positions would transform them from billionaires into something unprecedented: controllers of the fundamental infrastructure of human exchange.
This represents the complete transformation of the American political economy. When they speak enthusiastically about dollar collapse, they’re not just making investment predictions—they’re describing a world where their cryptocurrency holdings make them the effective central bankers of whatever system emerges from the wreckage.
The temporary chaos of currency collapse becomes acceptable when viewed as the price for establishing permanent control over the monetary system itself. They’re not just betting on America’s financial decline—they’re positioned to profit regardless of the human cost.
JD Vance: The Ideological Convert
JD Vance’s role represents something more dangerous than typical political opportunism. His transformation from Trump critic to cryptocurrency advocate reflects his genuine conversion to neoreactionary ideology under Thiel’s decade-long cultivation.
Vance has publicly praised Curtis Yarvin, the neoreactionary theorist who advocates replacing democracy with corporate-style governance. Discussing Yarvin’s ideas, Vance has suggested that Trump should “Fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people....And when the courts stop you...stand before the country, and say...the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”
This isn’t standard conservative rhetoric about limited government. This is advocacy for the systematic elimination of constitutional constraints on executive power—exactly what would be necessary to implement the kind of monetary policy changes that could destabilize the dollar.
Vance understands what Yarvin calls “neocameralism”—the vision of society run like a corporation rather than a democracy. In this framework, citizenship becomes shareholding, elections become obsolete, and governance becomes a technical matter for qualified executives rather than a democratic process. (...)
The Succession Strategy
As constitutional crises consume the Trump presidency—particularly around the Epstein revelations where promised evidence has failed to materialize—the crypto accelerationists appear to be positioning for the next phase of their plan.
They have invested over a decade in positioning Vance not as an emergency replacement for Trump, but as the natural evolution—someone who shares their fundamental critique of democratic governance but possesses the intellectual framework to implement systematic change.
Where Trump operates through impulse and grievance, Vance would operate through ideology and systematic planning. He arrives not needing to learn how to subvert democratic institutions, but with a fully developed philosophical framework for why such subversion is necessary and justified.
The Constitutional Trap
Evidence suggests that Sacks may have positioned Trump for exactly the kind of constitutional crisis that would necessitate succession. The mechanism appears to be cryptocurrency-related violations of the Foreign Emoluments Clause.
TrumpCoin and World Liberty Financial create potential constitutional violations because they allow foreign entities to provide financial benefits to the president. The Foreign Emoluments Clause prohibits the President from receiving any gift, payment, or benefit from foreign governments without explicit Congressional approval. World Liberty Financial’s investor rolls include entities like the UAE, whose purchases could constitute exactly this kind of prohibited foreign benefit.
Cryptocurrency’s structure makes such violations both easier to commit and harder to hide—blockchain creates permanent, traceable records of every transaction. Sacks, with his University of Chicago law degree, would understand these implications perfectly.
While ensuring his own conflicts were addressed through narrow divestitures, Sacks never publicly warned Trump about these constitutional landmines. Instead, he legitimized TrumpCoin on television, describing it as “a baseball card or a stamp” rather than acknowledging its potential regulatory implications. (...)
The Seditious Nature
What we’re witnessing constitutes sedition in its most systematic form. When government officials use their positions to undermine the financial systems they’ve sworn to protect, when they engineer constitutional crises for personal and ideological benefit, when they work to replace democratic governance with privately controlled systems—they’ve crossed the line from legitimate political activity to betrayal of their constitutional obligations.
David Sacks, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and JD Vance are actively working to subvert the constitutional order of the United States. Not through dramatic rebellion, but through the patient capture and systematic undermining of the institutions that make democratic self-governance possible.
Their sedition is particularly dangerous because it operates through legal mechanisms and maintains the appearance of legitimate governance while systematically destroying its substance. They’re not overthrowing the government—they’re reprogramming it to serve their interests rather than democratic publics.
What we’re witnessing constitutes sedition in its most systematic form. When government officials use their positions to undermine the financial systems they’ve sworn to protect, when they engineer constitutional crises for personal and ideological benefit, when they work to replace democratic governance with privately controlled systems—they’ve crossed the line from legitimate political activity to betrayal of their constitutional obligations.
David Sacks, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and JD Vance are actively working to subvert the constitutional order of the United States. Not through dramatic rebellion, but through the patient capture and systematic undermining of the institutions that make democratic self-governance possible.
Their sedition is particularly dangerous because it operates through legal mechanisms and maintains the appearance of legitimate governance while systematically destroying its substance. They’re not overthrowing the government—they’re reprogramming it to serve their interests rather than democratic publics.
by Mike Brock, Notes From the Circus | Read more:
Image: Jp Valery on Unsplash***
On Monday, Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), a publicly traded company majority-owned by Trump, announced that it had acquired $2 billion in bitcoin. Trump is turning a failing media company into a bitcoin holding company. TMTG, the parent company of Truth Social, lost over $185 million on just $3.6 million in revenue in 2024. (...)
Trump’s embrace of crypto provided a sizable fundraising boost. The New York Times reported that Bailey raised $30 million for the Trump campaign from fellow crypto executives. Sacks also hosted a multimillion-dollar fundraiser with San Francisco tech executives. Major crypto investors like Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, and Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss donated millions of dollars to various pro-Trump super PACs. In total, the crypto industry accounted for over half of all corporate money in the 2024 election across federal races, raising $245 million. (...)
The financial conflicts in the White House go beyond Trump. Sacks, Trump’s crypto czar, is continuing to work as a partner at Craft Ventures, a venture capital firm co-founded by Sacks that has investments in crypto companies.
A memo released by the White House in March states that Sacks and Craft Ventures divested over $200 million in digital-asset related investments. However, the memo also states that Craft Ventures continues to hold “private equity of digital asset-related companies that are highly illiquid and thus not easily divested.” At the time of the memo, Sacks also had a direct interest in a venture capital investing platform “that may presently have some minor digital asset industry holdings or might in the future.”
Normally, government employees are subject to conflict of interest laws. But the White House has issued multiple waivers to allow Sacks to work in the Trump administration while maintaining his investments. The first waiver, released in the March memo, allows Sacks “to participate as a special government employee in certain particular matters regarding regulation and policy related to the digital asset industry, including cryptocurrency.”
The White House memo acknowledges that Sacks’ work in the Trump administration could affect his investments, but argues that his personal financial interest is “not so substantial as to be deemed likely to affect the integrity of [his] services.”
Trump’s embrace of crypto provided a sizable fundraising boost. The New York Times reported that Bailey raised $30 million for the Trump campaign from fellow crypto executives. Sacks also hosted a multimillion-dollar fundraiser with San Francisco tech executives. Major crypto investors like Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, and Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss donated millions of dollars to various pro-Trump super PACs. In total, the crypto industry accounted for over half of all corporate money in the 2024 election across federal races, raising $245 million. (...)
The financial conflicts in the White House go beyond Trump. Sacks, Trump’s crypto czar, is continuing to work as a partner at Craft Ventures, a venture capital firm co-founded by Sacks that has investments in crypto companies.
A memo released by the White House in March states that Sacks and Craft Ventures divested over $200 million in digital-asset related investments. However, the memo also states that Craft Ventures continues to hold “private equity of digital asset-related companies that are highly illiquid and thus not easily divested.” At the time of the memo, Sacks also had a direct interest in a venture capital investing platform “that may presently have some minor digital asset industry holdings or might in the future.”
Normally, government employees are subject to conflict of interest laws. But the White House has issued multiple waivers to allow Sacks to work in the Trump administration while maintaining his investments. The first waiver, released in the March memo, allows Sacks “to participate as a special government employee in certain particular matters regarding regulation and policy related to the digital asset industry, including cryptocurrency.”
The White House memo acknowledges that Sacks’ work in the Trump administration could affect his investments, but argues that his personal financial interest is “not so substantial as to be deemed likely to affect the integrity of [his] services.”
Sunday, July 20, 2025
She Exposed Epstein, and Shares MAGA’s Anger
The reporter who took down Jeffrey Epstein on what’s still hidden.
Julie K. Brown thinks Jeffrey Epstein didn’t act alone. On this episode of “Interesting Times,” Ross talks to Brown, the investigative reporter whose work ultimately led to Epstein’s re-arrest, about what the government could release that it hasn’t and how the story is bigger than Epstein.(...)
Below is an edited transcript of an episode of “Interesting Times.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYT audio app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
Ross Douthat: Julie K. Brown, welcome to “Interesting Times.”
Julie K. Brown: Thank you.
Douthat: So for the last couple of weeks, ever since the Trump administration decided it was a good idea to tell the world that there was nothing more to say about the Jeffrey Epstein story, which has not been true, I feel like we’ve had a lot of these metaconversations about the case, conversations about Trump administration politics, MAGA infighting, theories about conspiracy theories.
I just keep coming back to the man himself and all of the weird questions that, to me as a journalist and news consumer, still hang over this whole story. So I’m really hoping that together we can walk through the story — the actual story of how Jeffrey Epstein the man became Jeffrey Epstein the mythic villain of the early 21st century. I want to start in the middle for him or maybe near the end for him but at the beginning for you. How did you first get drawn into this story? What prompted you as a journalist to start looking into Jeffrey Epstein and his crimes?
Brown: Well, my background was mostly crime reporting. I was on The Miami Herald’s investigative team, and I was covering prisons. I needed a change of pace, so I thought I would try to find a mystery to write about. And the Jeffrey Epstein case had been written about before, mostly focused on the celebrity aspect of his life, who he knew, his plane, his private island.
But whenever I ran across a story about him, it never really explained fully to me why he was able to get away with the crimes that he did. And as I was looking for something to do around that time, Donald Trump, who was our newly elected president, nominated a guy by the name of Alex Acosta as his labor secretary. I knew that Acosta was the prosecutor who signed off on this sweetheart deal, so to speak, that Epstein had gotten way back in 2008.
So I thought at the time that at Acosta’s Senate confirmation hearing, they were going to ask him a lot of questions about this case. And to my surprise, it seemed like everybody had almost forgotten about it. They asked him maybe one or two questions, and I don’t really think he gave very good answers, but they satisfied the senators because he was ultimately confirmed. (...)
So at that point, I thought: I wonder what these victims, who we knew were there — at least a dozen or so — they were children when this happened. But now, with the passage of time, they were in their late 20s, early 30s. And I wondered what they thought about this man who had given their predator really such a lenient deal, and he was now in charge of one of the largest agencies in the country, with oversight of human trafficking. So the story really began as: I thought I would do a reaction of the victims to Acosta being appointed labor secretary. But once I started digging into the story, it was like an onion. I found out more and more and more. (...)
Douthat: And so at that point, the official narrative of Epstein was he had taken a plea deal related to early-teenage girls. What was the actual nature of that deal?
Brown: Well actually, one of the many things I came to find out — which hadn’t been reported before — was that they manipulated and downplayed the scope of his crimes. He only pleaded guilty to a charge of soliciting one underage girl. And they purposely picked a girl who was a little older so that the crime that was on the books, so to speak, was downplayed.
It was only one girl, even though it was clear that he had done this to many, many girls. They also hid what they were doing from not only the public but from the victims. They went out of their way to keep this whole deal secret. He sort of slid into a courtroom, pleaded guilty. Nobody knew what he was pleading guilty to because all the records were sealed. (...)
Douthat: And to clarify, he ends up pleading guilty to two counts of solicitation of prostitution, one of which was with a minor.
Brown: That’s correct.
Douthat: And how long was his sentence?
Brown: Eighteen months.
Douthat: But he only served about 13 months. And so, now you start reporting on the story. You’re talking to the victims that were sort of part of the initial prosecution, and then it becomes clear that there were many more victims. (...)
Douthat: By the late 1990s, he is building out a playboy intellectual lifestyle. Can you describe the lifestyle that Epstein has?
Brown: Well, he had a lot of salons, so to speak, at his Manhattan home and also at his other homes.
He owned the island off the coast of St. Thomas. He would fly Nobel Prize winners in, for example, to talk about science. He started a couple of foundations and started giving a lot of money away through these foundations.
He really cultivated a number of high-profile scientists. He fancied himself as a little bit more of a scientist and mathematician than I think he really was. But he had so much money, and he dangled a lot of that money. Remember all these scientists and academics — M.I.T., Harvard — they usually need money for some of their projects. So he had money, lots of money. So they kind of entertained him or ——
Douthat: Humored him.
Brown: Yes, in some cases. Some of them felt like he was really just full of it, but they were willing to take his money. (...)
Douthat: I mean, as you said already, it’s pretty straightforward why scientists and intellectuals were interested in hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein. Initially, it’s because he was rich and was willing to fund and donate to universities and donate to research and so on. So that itself is not a special mystery.
What about the general cast of celebrity politicians, figures that rode on his plane or supposedly rode on his plane and ended up on his island? People at the level of Tony Blair, Bill Clinton — we’ll get to the Donald Trump connection in a little while. But these people are also just pulled in by the normal reality that rich people like to hang out with famous people and vice versa. What’s your sense of how that worked?
Brown: Well, Epstein was donating political money to a lot of campaigns. So of course he would attract the kind of people that need political donations, and Clinton was certainly one of them. Even after Clinton left the presidency, there was the Clinton Foundation, and so he was seeking donations for the Clinton Foundation as well.
So they went on a long trip overseas on Epstein’s plane to travel to various areas to understand the AIDS epidemic and what could be done. And Epstein envisioned himself as this person that could maybe find things that would help cure cancer or AIDS. So, he felt like he could be a part of that in some way.
Douthat: So let’s make these timelines overlap. At what point does he become connected with Ghislaine Maxwell, whom you’ve already mentioned was his paramour for a while and then ultimately his accomplice in predation? When, when did they first start hanging out?
Brown: After her father died, Robert Maxwell, who was a British publisher. He died under suspicious circumstances himself.
Douthat: Very suspicious circumstances on a boat.
Brown: They think he just fell off. They found him floating in the water. He had a yacht — he was off the Canary Islands — and they couldn’t find him. And then eventually, someone saw him floating in the ocean. So there are a lot of questions, because after they found him dead, investigators realized that he had essentially raided his whole company — including the employees’ pension fund. Ultimately his sons had to stand trial for this.
Her father had passed away, and Epstein was at an event honoring her father after his death. At the time, Maxwell’s family was in ruin. They had no money, and her mother really was in danger of losing everything. Her mother later wrote a book and explained that there was this New York financier who helped the family. She doesn’t name who that is, but there’s enough of an indicator there that it sounds like it could have been Epstein that came in to rescue the family and helped provide a house for her mother to live in. It is thought that it was probably Epstein that helped the family, and that’s how they met.
Douthat: So Robert Maxwell passes away in 1991 in suspicious circumstances. Epstein is there to help his family. It’s worth noting that Maxwell himself had ties to the Israeli government and to Israeli intelligence operations, I believe. And that’s a thread that then also connects to the conspiracy theories.
You said that Epstein and Maxwell date and then at some point she transitions into this role as procurer for him. At what point does Epstein actually become a serial sexual predator?
Brown: We know that some of his first victims were from like 1996, 1998. There were people that came forward that told me and others that Maxwell realized that she was never going to be able to marry him. There were a lot of rumors at the time that maybe they would get married, but she realized that as she got older that this was not going to satisfy him because he wanted younger and younger girls.
So she was dependent on him somewhat for finances at that point. So she began this quest to find him girls, essentially. That’s how it all started.
Douthat: So Epstein is the playboy financier hanging out with intellectuals and politicians in Florida on private jets, on his private island. And he’s bringing all of these girls through his house, through his life, and taking advantage of them.
Presumably, these things are happening at the same time — up until the point we already talked about, when he’s actually charged and, in a very limited way, convicted in 2008. What happens to his social world — all his high-flying connections — after he gets out of that Club Med-style stint in prison?
Brown: Well, once he gets out of jail, he hired all these P.R. people to remake his image, and there are press releases in archives. The Jeffrey Epstein Foundation put out press release after press release after press release. First it started with, he was giving money here. He was giving money there. So as time went on, he started being able to once again resume the life that he had built before this happened, and he was able to do this in part because of the plea deal.
Because the plea deal was only the solicitation of one underage girl. He was able to say to people: Yeah, I did this. It was bad, but it was only that. And to them that was sort of OK, he served his time. They accepted that explanation that it was just one girl and he made a mistake. Of course, he said he didn’t know she was underage. So it was plausible to a lot of people that he was not this monster that we later know he was.
Douthat: Right. But it was also plausible to people because they knew that he liked to hang out with teenage girls. There’s this now famous line that Donald Trump himself has said that appeared, I believe, in a piece in New York magazine, long before Epstein’s first conviction. He’s talking about Epstein’s social life, and he says something like: He likes women as much as I do, but he likes them on the younger side. So it seems like that was always part of his reputation.
Brown: Right. I had some of the victims tell me that they would be invited to parties with a lot of wealthy people and well-known people, and they would just be told to stand there like statues and to just look pretty and say as little as possible and just kind of fawn over him. He would put some of them on his lap. So yes, people could see. (...)
Douthat: Just Epstein’s behavior alone looks like a version of the Harvey Weinstein story, where you have this rich and powerful man who has all this misbehavior that people tolerated over a long period of time. He gets away with some stuff legally because he has all these connections, and then finally, because of your reporting, because of a change in climate, it come crashing down. (...)
So from your perspective, then, it is likely that there are some set of men in the world who move through Epstein’s mansion — Epstein’s island and so on — who are guilty, who are guilty of essentially having girls trafficked to them and, in part, having sex with minors whose names have not been successfully accused in a court of law.
Brown: That’s correct.
Douthat: OK. So the next question, what do you think about the evidence and speculation that Epstein intended to blackmail people? Because that is the next phase of the theorizing, that Epstein wasn’t just trying to woo and befriend these men, but he also liked the idea of having dirt on the people who had done bad things around him.
Brown: I think he did, but I don’t think he blackmailed people directly like that. I mean, if you just really think about it, if you send a girl over to have sex with one of these men, it’s not like you write it down or that you — I don’t believe he had a list. I just think that he used these women, girls, as pawns in order to ingratiate himself with people that he wanted to do business with.
It was a business transaction to him. That’s what this was. I don’t think that he had this operation where he was essentially saying: If you don’t do this for me, I’m going to reveal that you had sex with so-and-so. I don’t think it was like that in the traditional sense. But if you’re a man and you know that you’ve been doing this ——
Douthat: You know and he knows that you know.
Brown: Exactly, and I think it was more like that. I don’t think it was an official or an outright blackmail scheme like that. I think it was more like: He knows this about me, maybe I better do this.
Douthat: So that leads into the next open question, which is Epstein’s alleged ties to intelligence agencies — either American intelligence agencies or the Mossad in Israel. Earlier, we were talking about Epstein’s lenient plea deal and why Alex Acosta ended up giving it to him. There’s now a famous secondhand quote from Acosta, where he was reportedly told — by someone else in the first Trump administration — to back off Epstein because Epstein belonged to intelligence.
Acosta has never publicly corroborated that quote. And in other settings, he said he didn’t know anything about Epstein’s possible intelligence connections. But first: Do you think that some form of the intelligence world — and Epstein’s connections to it — played any role in why he got off so lightly the first time?
Brown: I don’t know, and I don’t think anybody really knows except the people in the government that have these files. And I think that’s, in part, one of the unanswered questions about Epstein, because I just don’t know. I know there’s a lot of supposition about that, but as you said, I try to stick to the facts, and so it’s just something we don’t know for sure.
Douthat: Yeah. I’m drawing on your view about your skepticism around the blackmail narrative. There’s two intelligent stories you could tell: One, Epstein is literally an intelligence agency trying to gather dirt on famous people to get them to do what the U.S. government wants or what the Israeli government wants. That’s the most extreme. In the second one, which I find somewhat more plausible, Epstein is operating in a world where Les Wexner, his patron, is a Zionist and a supporter of Israel. Robert Maxwell, as we mentioned earlier, had connections to Israeli intelligence.
So this is a world of people who overlap with Israeli intelligence, and maybe Epstein is useful as a conduit of information. But it’s not that he’s being run as a kind of entrapment ring. If we don’t think that Epstein was running actual blackmail operations, then the idea that he is doing some kind of full-scale intelligence operation seems much less likely.
Brown: Well, let me put it to you this way: You’re talking about what’s plausible, what’s not plausible. It’s the job of our government to find out what’s plausible or what’s real and what’s not real. And the question here, if we’re talking about things that we don’t know and things that maybe we should look into, the question is — there certainly was enough there that the federal government, the D.O.J., at some point should have launched a counterintelligence investigation into what was true, and on that end, are not true.
We’ve known long enough about this Acosta statement that he made. They’ve heard everything that we’ve heard that we’ve just talked about. So we don’t know the answer to those questions, but it’s the job of our federal government to look into those kinds of things. And at some point, one would hope that they did look into some of that. We just don’t know whether they did or not.
Douthat: Good. So that brings me to either my last or next-to-last unanswered question, which is: What do you think, if anything, the government has in its possession, the Department of Justice or anyone else that could shed further light on this case?
Brown: Well, they absolutely have files that they can release. They could release his autopsy report, for example. They could release his plane records, for example — the F.A.A. records of where he flew. They could redact the names of victims, but they could release information gathered by the U.S. Marshals Service, which was supposed to monitor him.
He was a convicted sex offender, but yet he was allowed to fly his plane all over the world, come back into the United States with girls or young women aboard his plane on a regular basis. So this is, to me, more of a story not necessarily about Epstein but about our government and what our government did or didn’t do.
This was a man that was allowed to abuse girls and women for two decades. How did that happen and why did it happen, to me, is the question. Epstein is the character in this, but really these questions, I think, the public and especially the victims deserve to know whether our government did the job that they were supposed to do. (...)
Douthat: If there were a group of powerful men who abused women together with Epstein, who have gotten away with it, why wouldn’t Maxwell have given up some of those men for the sake of some kind of plea bargain?
Brown: I think for the same reason that probably Trump doesn’t want to release the files; I think that it’s just a place where nobody wants to go. These are very powerful men, important men and possibly even, quite frankly, G.O.P. or Democratic donors.
Douthat: But why does Maxwell — we’re going to end with Trump — but why would Maxwell care about giving up a powerful Democratic or Republican donor if it would buy her time off prison?
Brown: You’ll have to ask her. (...)
Douthat: Now Trump himself. We’re going to enter the realm of speculation, but it’s not just that the Trump administration has sort of shut down the investigation or said: Well, we’ve disclosed everything we can disclose. It’s that Trump has come out swinging and saying that this is a hoax. He’s essentially treating a story that had been taken up by a big part of his own base as a story that he wants to not just ignore but publicly discredit.
First, what is your understanding of Trump’s connections to Epstein? (...)
Brown: He was friends with Epstein in the 1990s, and they were in the same social circles together. We see the video of him at a party at Mar-a-Lago. My understanding is there were two things that led to their falling out. One was that Epstein hit on a member’s daughter at Mar-a-Lago and Epstein was banned from Mar-a-Lago.
Douthat: Once again, Donald Trump is standing up for sexual ethics in America.
Brown: Right. And the other involved a real estate transaction, of course, money where they were bidding on the same property — a very big property. And Epstein lost, and Trump won the deal, and so they had a falling out over that property. So those were the two things. But up until then, Trump had been flying on Epstein’s plane. He entertained some of Epstein’s family at one of his casinos. So they were somewhat friendly. (...)
Douthat: He gave an interview during the campaign — I think during the campaign. He was asked about the files, and in part of the answer he said something like: Well, we should release something. But then he said: You don’t want to release things that aren’t true.
My perception was always that other people in his coalition were much more enthusiastic about this story. That this was never one of Trump’s obsessions. This was something his supporters were obsessed with. So it didn’t surprise me that in the end, they didn’t want to do some version of what you’re describing and say: We’re going to go back and find a bunch of other records to release. That doesn’t surprise me. I am surprised, though, by the vehemence of Trump’s reaction to the negative reaction — that is something of a mystery.
Okay. I’ve been trying to cover the unanswered questions. Do you have any other specific questions that you would like answered?
Brown: I wish I understood why our government isn’t treating this like the crime that it is. It’s a serious crime that happened here. I don’t think there’s any dispute. I mean, this is something that actually happened. This isn’t a hoax. This happened to these women when they were very young.
It is surprising to some degree that they’re treating this as such a political issue and not treating it like it should be treated, which is a crime. And if the files are unsatisfactory or don’t contain credible evidence, then maybe they need to look a little deeper.
Maybe the answer is that we still have questions and we’re going to look into this more. But that’s not the answer the government gave. The answer they gave was: There’s nothing here. There’s nothing more to investigate. We’re done with this story. And I think the answer should be that obviously the public has a lot of questions and the victims still want justice, so we’re going to look at this a little further.
Douthat: But in the end, for that to be worth doing, Epstein himself is dead, so your assumption in making this argument — and I think it’s a very compelling argument — but the core of the argument is there are other people out there who are guilty ——
Brown: That’s correct.
[ed. After all the gaslighting and lying Trump has done throughout his life and as president, MAGA finally gets indignant about this? Guess it just goes to show how much conspiracy theories fuel their engines.]
Julie K. Brown thinks Jeffrey Epstein didn’t act alone. On this episode of “Interesting Times,” Ross talks to Brown, the investigative reporter whose work ultimately led to Epstein’s re-arrest, about what the government could release that it hasn’t and how the story is bigger than Epstein.(...)
Below is an edited transcript of an episode of “Interesting Times.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYT audio app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
Ross Douthat: Julie K. Brown, welcome to “Interesting Times.”
Julie K. Brown: Thank you.
Douthat: So for the last couple of weeks, ever since the Trump administration decided it was a good idea to tell the world that there was nothing more to say about the Jeffrey Epstein story, which has not been true, I feel like we’ve had a lot of these metaconversations about the case, conversations about Trump administration politics, MAGA infighting, theories about conspiracy theories.
Brown: Well, my background was mostly crime reporting. I was on The Miami Herald’s investigative team, and I was covering prisons. I needed a change of pace, so I thought I would try to find a mystery to write about. And the Jeffrey Epstein case had been written about before, mostly focused on the celebrity aspect of his life, who he knew, his plane, his private island.
But whenever I ran across a story about him, it never really explained fully to me why he was able to get away with the crimes that he did. And as I was looking for something to do around that time, Donald Trump, who was our newly elected president, nominated a guy by the name of Alex Acosta as his labor secretary. I knew that Acosta was the prosecutor who signed off on this sweetheart deal, so to speak, that Epstein had gotten way back in 2008.
So I thought at the time that at Acosta’s Senate confirmation hearing, they were going to ask him a lot of questions about this case. And to my surprise, it seemed like everybody had almost forgotten about it. They asked him maybe one or two questions, and I don’t really think he gave very good answers, but they satisfied the senators because he was ultimately confirmed. (...)
So at that point, I thought: I wonder what these victims, who we knew were there — at least a dozen or so — they were children when this happened. But now, with the passage of time, they were in their late 20s, early 30s. And I wondered what they thought about this man who had given their predator really such a lenient deal, and he was now in charge of one of the largest agencies in the country, with oversight of human trafficking. So the story really began as: I thought I would do a reaction of the victims to Acosta being appointed labor secretary. But once I started digging into the story, it was like an onion. I found out more and more and more. (...)
Douthat: And so at that point, the official narrative of Epstein was he had taken a plea deal related to early-teenage girls. What was the actual nature of that deal?
Brown: Well actually, one of the many things I came to find out — which hadn’t been reported before — was that they manipulated and downplayed the scope of his crimes. He only pleaded guilty to a charge of soliciting one underage girl. And they purposely picked a girl who was a little older so that the crime that was on the books, so to speak, was downplayed.
It was only one girl, even though it was clear that he had done this to many, many girls. They also hid what they were doing from not only the public but from the victims. They went out of their way to keep this whole deal secret. He sort of slid into a courtroom, pleaded guilty. Nobody knew what he was pleading guilty to because all the records were sealed. (...)
Douthat: And to clarify, he ends up pleading guilty to two counts of solicitation of prostitution, one of which was with a minor.
Brown: That’s correct.
Douthat: And how long was his sentence?
Brown: Eighteen months.
Douthat: But he only served about 13 months. And so, now you start reporting on the story. You’re talking to the victims that were sort of part of the initial prosecution, and then it becomes clear that there were many more victims. (...)
Douthat: So now I want to go back in time. So this is a flashback, and I just want you to help me through this storytelling. So it’s the 1970s. Jeffrey Epstein is a teacher at the Dalton School, a very prestigious prep school in New York City where the headmaster is Donald Barr, who is the father of Bill Barr, who would be the attorney general when Epstein killed himself in prison. And I cite that detail only because it’s an example of how Epstein’s story is filled with these little grace notes that are gifts to would-be conspiracy theorists.
So as I understand the story: a parent there is friendly with him, helps him get an interview for a job at Bear Stearns, the investment firm, as a trader. Between there and the 1990s, he becomes insanely wealthy.
How did that happen? How did he get rich? You mentioned earlier that this was an open question when you started reporting. But if you were going to tell the story now as you understand it, how did he get rich?
Brown: Well, he was a very smart man. He was a very intelligent man. I think the key to Epstein’s real success is the fact that he would find the weak point that anybody had — whatever they needed or wanted — and he would exploit that. And I don’t know what he had on Les Wexner, who became one of his primary clients.
Les Wexner is a billionaire who owned Victoria’s Secret and also the Limited retail stores at the time. And he somehow met Les Wexner, and Wexner was really his primary client. And as a result of that, his wealth just ballooned.
Douthat: But he wasn’t just an adviser. He wasn’t, like, Les Wexner’s financial adviser. He had power of attorney. He was effectively the hand of the king in “Game of Thrones,” or he’s just making any kind of deal for Wexner.
In some of the arguments about the mystery of Epstein’s wealth, I’ve seen people say: Well, it’s kind of a mystery why Wexner gave him this kind of power, but that does explain how rich he got. Wexner is a billionaire, and I guess Epstein makes tens or hundreds of millions just off this connection. Does that seem plausible to you? Do you feel like the Wexner connection — even if why Wexner loved him is a mystery — suffices to explain how much money he seemed to have by the end of the 1990s, let’s say?
Brown: No, it doesn’t make any sense. And it certainly is something that authorities should have investigated, if not back then, then in the advancing years, they should have looked into it. I always felt like they relied too much on victims to help make their case when they should have followed the money. (...)
So as I understand the story: a parent there is friendly with him, helps him get an interview for a job at Bear Stearns, the investment firm, as a trader. Between there and the 1990s, he becomes insanely wealthy.
How did that happen? How did he get rich? You mentioned earlier that this was an open question when you started reporting. But if you were going to tell the story now as you understand it, how did he get rich?
Brown: Well, he was a very smart man. He was a very intelligent man. I think the key to Epstein’s real success is the fact that he would find the weak point that anybody had — whatever they needed or wanted — and he would exploit that. And I don’t know what he had on Les Wexner, who became one of his primary clients.
Les Wexner is a billionaire who owned Victoria’s Secret and also the Limited retail stores at the time. And he somehow met Les Wexner, and Wexner was really his primary client. And as a result of that, his wealth just ballooned.
Douthat: But he wasn’t just an adviser. He wasn’t, like, Les Wexner’s financial adviser. He had power of attorney. He was effectively the hand of the king in “Game of Thrones,” or he’s just making any kind of deal for Wexner.
In some of the arguments about the mystery of Epstein’s wealth, I’ve seen people say: Well, it’s kind of a mystery why Wexner gave him this kind of power, but that does explain how rich he got. Wexner is a billionaire, and I guess Epstein makes tens or hundreds of millions just off this connection. Does that seem plausible to you? Do you feel like the Wexner connection — even if why Wexner loved him is a mystery — suffices to explain how much money he seemed to have by the end of the 1990s, let’s say?
Brown: No, it doesn’t make any sense. And it certainly is something that authorities should have investigated, if not back then, then in the advancing years, they should have looked into it. I always felt like they relied too much on victims to help make their case when they should have followed the money. (...)
Douthat: By the late 1990s, he is building out a playboy intellectual lifestyle. Can you describe the lifestyle that Epstein has?
Brown: Well, he had a lot of salons, so to speak, at his Manhattan home and also at his other homes.
He owned the island off the coast of St. Thomas. He would fly Nobel Prize winners in, for example, to talk about science. He started a couple of foundations and started giving a lot of money away through these foundations.
He really cultivated a number of high-profile scientists. He fancied himself as a little bit more of a scientist and mathematician than I think he really was. But he had so much money, and he dangled a lot of that money. Remember all these scientists and academics — M.I.T., Harvard — they usually need money for some of their projects. So he had money, lots of money. So they kind of entertained him or ——
Douthat: Humored him.
Brown: Yes, in some cases. Some of them felt like he was really just full of it, but they were willing to take his money. (...)
Douthat: I mean, as you said already, it’s pretty straightforward why scientists and intellectuals were interested in hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein. Initially, it’s because he was rich and was willing to fund and donate to universities and donate to research and so on. So that itself is not a special mystery.
What about the general cast of celebrity politicians, figures that rode on his plane or supposedly rode on his plane and ended up on his island? People at the level of Tony Blair, Bill Clinton — we’ll get to the Donald Trump connection in a little while. But these people are also just pulled in by the normal reality that rich people like to hang out with famous people and vice versa. What’s your sense of how that worked?
Brown: Well, Epstein was donating political money to a lot of campaigns. So of course he would attract the kind of people that need political donations, and Clinton was certainly one of them. Even after Clinton left the presidency, there was the Clinton Foundation, and so he was seeking donations for the Clinton Foundation as well.
So they went on a long trip overseas on Epstein’s plane to travel to various areas to understand the AIDS epidemic and what could be done. And Epstein envisioned himself as this person that could maybe find things that would help cure cancer or AIDS. So, he felt like he could be a part of that in some way.
Douthat: So let’s make these timelines overlap. At what point does he become connected with Ghislaine Maxwell, whom you’ve already mentioned was his paramour for a while and then ultimately his accomplice in predation? When, when did they first start hanging out?
Brown: After her father died, Robert Maxwell, who was a British publisher. He died under suspicious circumstances himself.
Douthat: Very suspicious circumstances on a boat.
Brown: They think he just fell off. They found him floating in the water. He had a yacht — he was off the Canary Islands — and they couldn’t find him. And then eventually, someone saw him floating in the ocean. So there are a lot of questions, because after they found him dead, investigators realized that he had essentially raided his whole company — including the employees’ pension fund. Ultimately his sons had to stand trial for this.
Her father had passed away, and Epstein was at an event honoring her father after his death. At the time, Maxwell’s family was in ruin. They had no money, and her mother really was in danger of losing everything. Her mother later wrote a book and explained that there was this New York financier who helped the family. She doesn’t name who that is, but there’s enough of an indicator there that it sounds like it could have been Epstein that came in to rescue the family and helped provide a house for her mother to live in. It is thought that it was probably Epstein that helped the family, and that’s how they met.
Douthat: So Robert Maxwell passes away in 1991 in suspicious circumstances. Epstein is there to help his family. It’s worth noting that Maxwell himself had ties to the Israeli government and to Israeli intelligence operations, I believe. And that’s a thread that then also connects to the conspiracy theories.
You said that Epstein and Maxwell date and then at some point she transitions into this role as procurer for him. At what point does Epstein actually become a serial sexual predator?
Brown: We know that some of his first victims were from like 1996, 1998. There were people that came forward that told me and others that Maxwell realized that she was never going to be able to marry him. There were a lot of rumors at the time that maybe they would get married, but she realized that as she got older that this was not going to satisfy him because he wanted younger and younger girls.
So she was dependent on him somewhat for finances at that point. So she began this quest to find him girls, essentially. That’s how it all started.
Douthat: So Epstein is the playboy financier hanging out with intellectuals and politicians in Florida on private jets, on his private island. And he’s bringing all of these girls through his house, through his life, and taking advantage of them.
Presumably, these things are happening at the same time — up until the point we already talked about, when he’s actually charged and, in a very limited way, convicted in 2008. What happens to his social world — all his high-flying connections — after he gets out of that Club Med-style stint in prison?
Brown: Well, once he gets out of jail, he hired all these P.R. people to remake his image, and there are press releases in archives. The Jeffrey Epstein Foundation put out press release after press release after press release. First it started with, he was giving money here. He was giving money there. So as time went on, he started being able to once again resume the life that he had built before this happened, and he was able to do this in part because of the plea deal.
Because the plea deal was only the solicitation of one underage girl. He was able to say to people: Yeah, I did this. It was bad, but it was only that. And to them that was sort of OK, he served his time. They accepted that explanation that it was just one girl and he made a mistake. Of course, he said he didn’t know she was underage. So it was plausible to a lot of people that he was not this monster that we later know he was.
Douthat: Right. But it was also plausible to people because they knew that he liked to hang out with teenage girls. There’s this now famous line that Donald Trump himself has said that appeared, I believe, in a piece in New York magazine, long before Epstein’s first conviction. He’s talking about Epstein’s social life, and he says something like: He likes women as much as I do, but he likes them on the younger side. So it seems like that was always part of his reputation.
Brown: Right. I had some of the victims tell me that they would be invited to parties with a lot of wealthy people and well-known people, and they would just be told to stand there like statues and to just look pretty and say as little as possible and just kind of fawn over him. He would put some of them on his lap. So yes, people could see. (...)
Douthat: Just Epstein’s behavior alone looks like a version of the Harvey Weinstein story, where you have this rich and powerful man who has all this misbehavior that people tolerated over a long period of time. He gets away with some stuff legally because he has all these connections, and then finally, because of your reporting, because of a change in climate, it come crashing down. (...)
So from your perspective, then, it is likely that there are some set of men in the world who move through Epstein’s mansion — Epstein’s island and so on — who are guilty, who are guilty of essentially having girls trafficked to them and, in part, having sex with minors whose names have not been successfully accused in a court of law.
Brown: That’s correct.
Douthat: OK. So the next question, what do you think about the evidence and speculation that Epstein intended to blackmail people? Because that is the next phase of the theorizing, that Epstein wasn’t just trying to woo and befriend these men, but he also liked the idea of having dirt on the people who had done bad things around him.
Brown: I think he did, but I don’t think he blackmailed people directly like that. I mean, if you just really think about it, if you send a girl over to have sex with one of these men, it’s not like you write it down or that you — I don’t believe he had a list. I just think that he used these women, girls, as pawns in order to ingratiate himself with people that he wanted to do business with.
It was a business transaction to him. That’s what this was. I don’t think that he had this operation where he was essentially saying: If you don’t do this for me, I’m going to reveal that you had sex with so-and-so. I don’t think it was like that in the traditional sense. But if you’re a man and you know that you’ve been doing this ——
Douthat: You know and he knows that you know.
Brown: Exactly, and I think it was more like that. I don’t think it was an official or an outright blackmail scheme like that. I think it was more like: He knows this about me, maybe I better do this.
Douthat: So that leads into the next open question, which is Epstein’s alleged ties to intelligence agencies — either American intelligence agencies or the Mossad in Israel. Earlier, we were talking about Epstein’s lenient plea deal and why Alex Acosta ended up giving it to him. There’s now a famous secondhand quote from Acosta, where he was reportedly told — by someone else in the first Trump administration — to back off Epstein because Epstein belonged to intelligence.
Acosta has never publicly corroborated that quote. And in other settings, he said he didn’t know anything about Epstein’s possible intelligence connections. But first: Do you think that some form of the intelligence world — and Epstein’s connections to it — played any role in why he got off so lightly the first time?
Brown: I don’t know, and I don’t think anybody really knows except the people in the government that have these files. And I think that’s, in part, one of the unanswered questions about Epstein, because I just don’t know. I know there’s a lot of supposition about that, but as you said, I try to stick to the facts, and so it’s just something we don’t know for sure.
Douthat: Yeah. I’m drawing on your view about your skepticism around the blackmail narrative. There’s two intelligent stories you could tell: One, Epstein is literally an intelligence agency trying to gather dirt on famous people to get them to do what the U.S. government wants or what the Israeli government wants. That’s the most extreme. In the second one, which I find somewhat more plausible, Epstein is operating in a world where Les Wexner, his patron, is a Zionist and a supporter of Israel. Robert Maxwell, as we mentioned earlier, had connections to Israeli intelligence.
So this is a world of people who overlap with Israeli intelligence, and maybe Epstein is useful as a conduit of information. But it’s not that he’s being run as a kind of entrapment ring. If we don’t think that Epstein was running actual blackmail operations, then the idea that he is doing some kind of full-scale intelligence operation seems much less likely.
Brown: Well, let me put it to you this way: You’re talking about what’s plausible, what’s not plausible. It’s the job of our government to find out what’s plausible or what’s real and what’s not real. And the question here, if we’re talking about things that we don’t know and things that maybe we should look into, the question is — there certainly was enough there that the federal government, the D.O.J., at some point should have launched a counterintelligence investigation into what was true, and on that end, are not true.
We’ve known long enough about this Acosta statement that he made. They’ve heard everything that we’ve heard that we’ve just talked about. So we don’t know the answer to those questions, but it’s the job of our federal government to look into those kinds of things. And at some point, one would hope that they did look into some of that. We just don’t know whether they did or not.
Douthat: Good. So that brings me to either my last or next-to-last unanswered question, which is: What do you think, if anything, the government has in its possession, the Department of Justice or anyone else that could shed further light on this case?
Brown: Well, they absolutely have files that they can release. They could release his autopsy report, for example. They could release his plane records, for example — the F.A.A. records of where he flew. They could redact the names of victims, but they could release information gathered by the U.S. Marshals Service, which was supposed to monitor him.
He was a convicted sex offender, but yet he was allowed to fly his plane all over the world, come back into the United States with girls or young women aboard his plane on a regular basis. So this is, to me, more of a story not necessarily about Epstein but about our government and what our government did or didn’t do.
This was a man that was allowed to abuse girls and women for two decades. How did that happen and why did it happen, to me, is the question. Epstein is the character in this, but really these questions, I think, the public and especially the victims deserve to know whether our government did the job that they were supposed to do. (...)
Douthat: If there were a group of powerful men who abused women together with Epstein, who have gotten away with it, why wouldn’t Maxwell have given up some of those men for the sake of some kind of plea bargain?
Brown: I think for the same reason that probably Trump doesn’t want to release the files; I think that it’s just a place where nobody wants to go. These are very powerful men, important men and possibly even, quite frankly, G.O.P. or Democratic donors.
Douthat: But why does Maxwell — we’re going to end with Trump — but why would Maxwell care about giving up a powerful Democratic or Republican donor if it would buy her time off prison?
Brown: You’ll have to ask her. (...)
Douthat: Now Trump himself. We’re going to enter the realm of speculation, but it’s not just that the Trump administration has sort of shut down the investigation or said: Well, we’ve disclosed everything we can disclose. It’s that Trump has come out swinging and saying that this is a hoax. He’s essentially treating a story that had been taken up by a big part of his own base as a story that he wants to not just ignore but publicly discredit.
First, what is your understanding of Trump’s connections to Epstein? (...)
Brown: He was friends with Epstein in the 1990s, and they were in the same social circles together. We see the video of him at a party at Mar-a-Lago. My understanding is there were two things that led to their falling out. One was that Epstein hit on a member’s daughter at Mar-a-Lago and Epstein was banned from Mar-a-Lago.
Douthat: Once again, Donald Trump is standing up for sexual ethics in America.
Brown: Right. And the other involved a real estate transaction, of course, money where they were bidding on the same property — a very big property. And Epstein lost, and Trump won the deal, and so they had a falling out over that property. So those were the two things. But up until then, Trump had been flying on Epstein’s plane. He entertained some of Epstein’s family at one of his casinos. So they were somewhat friendly. (...)
Douthat: He gave an interview during the campaign — I think during the campaign. He was asked about the files, and in part of the answer he said something like: Well, we should release something. But then he said: You don’t want to release things that aren’t true.
My perception was always that other people in his coalition were much more enthusiastic about this story. That this was never one of Trump’s obsessions. This was something his supporters were obsessed with. So it didn’t surprise me that in the end, they didn’t want to do some version of what you’re describing and say: We’re going to go back and find a bunch of other records to release. That doesn’t surprise me. I am surprised, though, by the vehemence of Trump’s reaction to the negative reaction — that is something of a mystery.
Okay. I’ve been trying to cover the unanswered questions. Do you have any other specific questions that you would like answered?
Brown: I wish I understood why our government isn’t treating this like the crime that it is. It’s a serious crime that happened here. I don’t think there’s any dispute. I mean, this is something that actually happened. This isn’t a hoax. This happened to these women when they were very young.
It is surprising to some degree that they’re treating this as such a political issue and not treating it like it should be treated, which is a crime. And if the files are unsatisfactory or don’t contain credible evidence, then maybe they need to look a little deeper.
Maybe the answer is that we still have questions and we’re going to look into this more. But that’s not the answer the government gave. The answer they gave was: There’s nothing here. There’s nothing more to investigate. We’re done with this story. And I think the answer should be that obviously the public has a lot of questions and the victims still want justice, so we’re going to look at this a little further.
Douthat: But in the end, for that to be worth doing, Epstein himself is dead, so your assumption in making this argument — and I think it’s a very compelling argument — but the core of the argument is there are other people out there who are guilty ——
Brown: That’s correct.
by Ross Douthat, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images; @JudiciaryDems/X via:[ed. After all the gaslighting and lying Trump has done throughout his life and as president, MAGA finally gets indignant about this? Guess it just goes to show how much conspiracy theories fuel their engines.]
Saturday, July 5, 2025
July 4th, 2025
Profiles in cowardice.
Images: Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP; AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson; uncredited
[ed. Do any of these people look like they give a shit about anything but pleasing their Dear Leader (and protecting their asses)? Fuck 'em all. See also: Fake Patriots Are Destroying Everything That Made America Great (Nation).]
Monday, June 30, 2025
Saturday, June 21, 2025
American Brownshirts
Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” that the House passed is objectionable for many reasons, most obviously because it is the most regressive economic bill of my lifetime, the class war condensed in legislative form. Its tax policies and spending cuts will erode the well being of Americans slowly for decades to come. Its most immediate destabilizing impact, however—the one that has the potential to push our democracy to the brink—is its vast expansion of the Homeland Security budget, which will be used to build ICE into a huge national army of loyalists under Trump’s control. The money to build America’s brownshirts is in the pipeline. Whereas our military-industrial complex is a threat to the rest of the world, this force will be a direct threat to all of us in the USA. This is the Proud Boys, at national scale, with badges. It is a very dangerous prospect.
Everything I am writing about here has been previously reported in the past few weeks since the House sent the bill to the Senate. But, from my vantage point, the public has not quite grasped just how horrifying a precipice we are on. When you consider the scale of protest already unleashed by the ICE raids in LA; Trump and Stephen Miller’s clear intent to double and triple and quadruple down on the ICE raids and crush the protests with military force; Trump’s unhinged declaration yesterday that “we must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York” to achieve “the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History”; and then connect this deep well of poisonous intent with the staggering expansion of ICE’s size and scope that will occur if this bill’s funding comes through, what you will see is the setup for not just a mass deportation program, but a violent national clash between a militarized, government-sanctioned army of Trump loyalists and everyone else. (...)
Let’s focus on the most dangerous funding of all: the direct funding for law enforcement agencies. To level-set you here, understand that right now, before this bill passes, the combined funding of the FBI, DEA, ATF, Secret Service, and all other federal law enforcement is only half the size of the federal funding for immigration and border enforcement. So we are already pouring an inordinate amount of money into stalking immigrants. If the new bill passes, we will add $167 billion to immigration enforcement. Cato helpfully produced this chart to illustrate just how insane this would be: (...)
Part of this funding increase would go to hiring 10,000 new ICE agents, and more than 8,000 new Customs and Border Patrol agents. That would give ICE more agents than the FBI has in the field. It goes without saying that this would be a disaster for not only undocumented immigrants, who would be ruthlessly hunted down like fugitives, but also to any brown-skinned person in America, who can expect to be subjected to harassment by agents sent out to please Stephen Miller’s insatiable desire for public displays of racism at all costs.
It’s even worse than that. Think about this expansion of ICE in the context of the entire arc of Trump’s rise to power. This man falsely claimed to win the 2020 election, tried to have his supporters overthrow the government to keep him in power, came back and won again, and pardoned the people who tried to overthrow the government on his behalf. The main thing he learned from his first term was to surround himself only with fanatical loyalists. The entire top level of the federal government is now staffed with a buffet of lunatics, incompetents, and extremists whose defining characteristic is their loyalty to Trump above the law. This includes the military and the federal law enforcement agencies.
Within the ranks of the military and law enforcement, however, absolute loyalty cannot be achieved so quickly. Even though those constituencies are strongly Republican, there is also some significant level of anger at Trump as well. FBI agents have seen colleagues purged just for working on January 6 cases; Army soldiers were forced to march in Trump’s stupid parade; Marines, many of them from immigrant families, have been outrageously deployed to patrol Los Angeles. These things create dissatisfaction in the ranks that is hard to measure, but real.
So how can Trump be sure that the absolute loyalty he demands extends all the way down to his foot soldiers? By hiring new ones. Who do you think those ten thousand fresh new ICE agents will be? Well, one thing we can say for sure is that they will be people who are okay with the proposition of taking a job with ICE as it is run under Donald Trump. This is not a job anyone will take by accident. It’s on the news every day. Hundreds of thousands of people are in the streets protesting against it. This creates a self-selecting pool. It will attract only those who are not repulsed by it. Job applicants will consist of those who see pictures of dudes wearing tactical vests and face coverings jumping out of unmarked trucks and grabbing people and think to themselves, “that looks cool.”
The new and expanded version of ICE will not just be immigration enforcers. They will be the most ideologically reliable armed branch of government for Donald Trump. They will be the 2025 parallel of the brownshirts. They will be the most obvious place for the president to turn for dirty work in the streets. Because of this, I guarantee, once they are in place, you will see their sphere of activities expand. Enforcing immigration laws will be defined to include “going after those who try to impede the enforcement of immigration laws”—a group that, according to Trump and Miller, includes protesters, journalists, and Democratic politicians. The increasingly outrageous expansion of ICE activities will certainly be rubber stamped by a Republican Congress which is already busy trying to make it illegal to report the identities of the masked men who have come to arrest your neighbor.
The question to ask yourself about what is coming is not, “Is that legal?” It is, “With Donald Trump and Stephen Miller fully in control of the government, and with no checks on their power within the government’s three branches, what is the next thing they need to achieve their agenda?” What they need is a loyal private army. And that is what they’re building.
Let’s focus on the most dangerous funding of all: the direct funding for law enforcement agencies. To level-set you here, understand that right now, before this bill passes, the combined funding of the FBI, DEA, ATF, Secret Service, and all other federal law enforcement is only half the size of the federal funding for immigration and border enforcement. So we are already pouring an inordinate amount of money into stalking immigrants. If the new bill passes, we will add $167 billion to immigration enforcement. Cato helpfully produced this chart to illustrate just how insane this would be: (...)
Part of this funding increase would go to hiring 10,000 new ICE agents, and more than 8,000 new Customs and Border Patrol agents. That would give ICE more agents than the FBI has in the field. It goes without saying that this would be a disaster for not only undocumented immigrants, who would be ruthlessly hunted down like fugitives, but also to any brown-skinned person in America, who can expect to be subjected to harassment by agents sent out to please Stephen Miller’s insatiable desire for public displays of racism at all costs.
It’s even worse than that. Think about this expansion of ICE in the context of the entire arc of Trump’s rise to power. This man falsely claimed to win the 2020 election, tried to have his supporters overthrow the government to keep him in power, came back and won again, and pardoned the people who tried to overthrow the government on his behalf. The main thing he learned from his first term was to surround himself only with fanatical loyalists. The entire top level of the federal government is now staffed with a buffet of lunatics, incompetents, and extremists whose defining characteristic is their loyalty to Trump above the law. This includes the military and the federal law enforcement agencies.
Within the ranks of the military and law enforcement, however, absolute loyalty cannot be achieved so quickly. Even though those constituencies are strongly Republican, there is also some significant level of anger at Trump as well. FBI agents have seen colleagues purged just for working on January 6 cases; Army soldiers were forced to march in Trump’s stupid parade; Marines, many of them from immigrant families, have been outrageously deployed to patrol Los Angeles. These things create dissatisfaction in the ranks that is hard to measure, but real.
So how can Trump be sure that the absolute loyalty he demands extends all the way down to his foot soldiers? By hiring new ones. Who do you think those ten thousand fresh new ICE agents will be? Well, one thing we can say for sure is that they will be people who are okay with the proposition of taking a job with ICE as it is run under Donald Trump. This is not a job anyone will take by accident. It’s on the news every day. Hundreds of thousands of people are in the streets protesting against it. This creates a self-selecting pool. It will attract only those who are not repulsed by it. Job applicants will consist of those who see pictures of dudes wearing tactical vests and face coverings jumping out of unmarked trucks and grabbing people and think to themselves, “that looks cool.”
The new and expanded version of ICE will not just be immigration enforcers. They will be the most ideologically reliable armed branch of government for Donald Trump. They will be the 2025 parallel of the brownshirts. They will be the most obvious place for the president to turn for dirty work in the streets. Because of this, I guarantee, once they are in place, you will see their sphere of activities expand. Enforcing immigration laws will be defined to include “going after those who try to impede the enforcement of immigration laws”—a group that, according to Trump and Miller, includes protesters, journalists, and Democratic politicians. The increasingly outrageous expansion of ICE activities will certainly be rubber stamped by a Republican Congress which is already busy trying to make it illegal to report the identities of the masked men who have come to arrest your neighbor.
The question to ask yourself about what is coming is not, “Is that legal?” It is, “With Donald Trump and Stephen Miller fully in control of the government, and with no checks on their power within the government’s three branches, what is the next thing they need to achieve their agenda?” What they need is a loyal private army. And that is what they’re building.
by Hamilton Nolan, How Things Work | Read more:
Image: Getty
Thursday, June 12, 2025
Deport Dishwashers or Solve Murders?
I understand being concerned about illegal immigration. I definitely understand being concerned about murder, rape, and robbery. What I don’t understand is being more concerned about the former than the latter.
Yet that’s exactly how the federal government allocates resources. The federal government spends far more on immigration enforcement than on preventing violent crime, terrorism, tax fraud or indeed all of these combined.
Moreover, if the BBB bill is passed the ratio will become even more extreme. (sere also here):
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that immigration enforcement is about going after murderers, rapists and robbers. It isn’t. Indeed, it’s the opposite. ICE’s “Operation At Large” for example has moved thousands of law enforcement personnel at Homeland Security, the FBI, DEA, and the U.S. Marshals away from investigating violent crime and towards immigration enforcement.
I’m not arguing against border enforcement or deporting illegal immigrants but rational people understand tradeoffs. Do we really want to spend billions to deport dishwashers from Oaxaca while rapes in Ohio committed by US citizens go under-investigated?
Almost half of the murders in the United States go unsolved (42.5% in 2023).
Boldly calling into question our most basic assumptions about American politics, Caplan contends that democracy fails precisely because it does what voters want. Through an analysis of Americans' voting behavior and opinions on a range of economic issues, he makes the convincing case that noneconomists suffer from four prevailing biases: they underestimate the wisdom of the market mechanism, distrust foreigners, undervalue the benefits of conserving labor, and pessimistically believe the economy is going from bad to worse. Caplan lays out several bold ways to make democratic government work better--for example, urging economic educators to focus on correcting popular misconceptions and recommending that democracies do less and let markets take up the slack.
The Myth of the Rational Voter takes an unflinching look at how people who vote under the influence of false beliefs ultimately end up with government that delivers lousy results.
I’m still fascinated and befuddled by what drove so many founders and investors to support Trump in 2024. Most of these folks are not deep Republican partisans or racist caricatures; many are even intelligent, well-intentioned, and politically engaged—yet voted in a way I consider deeply and destructively wrong.
I trawled my group chats for someone willing to have a candid conversation. This person is a founder, immigrant, and Bernie-to-Trump supporter. Below, we discuss “country club Democrats,” why founders see themselves in Trump, and why he turned on the current administration.
Tell me about your background.
I’m a startup founder. I’m originally from Chile, and grew up across Chile, the US, and France.
How would you describe your political orientation?
Heterodox is one way to put it.
My parents are the children of wealthy, left-leaning intellectuals. I discovered Marxism around 14, and that really opened my eyes. The idea of human dignity really mattered to me. When you read stories of the US factories and the meat producers, it’s fucking nuts.
Bernie announced his candidacy in 2015, when I was finishing high school in the US. He was the first politician who really touched me. I would cry at Bernie speeches. His theory of economics felt so true, about a class being left behind. The 2016 election was very unexciting at first because the polls were all Jeb Bush vs. Hillary Clinton. It felt so trite and boring. Then Bernie announced, and I became a complete aficionado. I had a Bernie Instagram account. It was his authenticity.
My disillusionment with establishment Democrats started during that primary, because it felt rigged. You could see television actively lying about who Bernie was, using sound bites incorrectly, picking favorites. I never felt Hillary Clinton was elected. She was just appointed.
Anyway, Bernie loses. Trump is in the race at that point, and you get to the actual election. At that point, I'm basically a Trump supporter. I always think of politics as having a candidate of hope and a candidate of the status quo. I felt that Trump was the candidate of hope, weirdly enough.
Yet that’s exactly how the federal government allocates resources. The federal government spends far more on immigration enforcement than on preventing violent crime, terrorism, tax fraud or indeed all of these combined.
Moreover, if the BBB bill is passed the ratio will become even more extreme. (sere also here):
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that immigration enforcement is about going after murderers, rapists and robbers. It isn’t. Indeed, it’s the opposite. ICE’s “Operation At Large” for example has moved thousands of law enforcement personnel at Homeland Security, the FBI, DEA, and the U.S. Marshals away from investigating violent crime and towards immigration enforcement.
I’m not arguing against border enforcement or deporting illegal immigrants but rational people understand tradeoffs. Do we really want to spend billions to deport dishwashers from Oaxaca while rapes in Ohio committed by US citizens go under-investigated?
Almost half of the murders in the United States go unsolved (42.5% in 2023).
[ed. Also - this book:]
The greatest obstacle to sound economic policy is not entrenched special interests or rampant lobbying, but the popular misconceptions, irrational beliefs, and personal biases held by ordinary voters. This is economist Bryan Caplan's sobering assessment in this provocative and eye-opening book. Caplan argues that voters continually elect politicians who either share their biases or else pretend to, resulting in bad policies winning again and again by popular demand.
The greatest obstacle to sound economic policy is not entrenched special interests or rampant lobbying, but the popular misconceptions, irrational beliefs, and personal biases held by ordinary voters. This is economist Bryan Caplan's sobering assessment in this provocative and eye-opening book. Caplan argues that voters continually elect politicians who either share their biases or else pretend to, resulting in bad policies winning again and again by popular demand.
The Myth of the Rational Voter takes an unflinching look at how people who vote under the influence of false beliefs ultimately end up with government that delivers lousy results.
-----
[ed. Finally, this irritating interview with a newly political tech bro: Fit to Rule (@jasmin):]
"Elon has left the Trump White House to pursue the full-time venture of Twitter canceling his former boss. Silicon Valley and MAGA conservatism were always an odd fit—tied more by who they hated than what they support.
"Elon has left the Trump White House to pursue the full-time venture of Twitter canceling his former boss. Silicon Valley and MAGA conservatism were always an odd fit—tied more by who they hated than what they support.
I’m still fascinated and befuddled by what drove so many founders and investors to support Trump in 2024. Most of these folks are not deep Republican partisans or racist caricatures; many are even intelligent, well-intentioned, and politically engaged—yet voted in a way I consider deeply and destructively wrong.
I trawled my group chats for someone willing to have a candid conversation. This person is a founder, immigrant, and Bernie-to-Trump supporter. Below, we discuss “country club Democrats,” why founders see themselves in Trump, and why he turned on the current administration.
Tell me about your background.
I’m a startup founder. I’m originally from Chile, and grew up across Chile, the US, and France.
How would you describe your political orientation?
Heterodox is one way to put it.
My parents are the children of wealthy, left-leaning intellectuals. I discovered Marxism around 14, and that really opened my eyes. The idea of human dignity really mattered to me. When you read stories of the US factories and the meat producers, it’s fucking nuts.
Bernie announced his candidacy in 2015, when I was finishing high school in the US. He was the first politician who really touched me. I would cry at Bernie speeches. His theory of economics felt so true, about a class being left behind. The 2016 election was very unexciting at first because the polls were all Jeb Bush vs. Hillary Clinton. It felt so trite and boring. Then Bernie announced, and I became a complete aficionado. I had a Bernie Instagram account. It was his authenticity.
My disillusionment with establishment Democrats started during that primary, because it felt rigged. You could see television actively lying about who Bernie was, using sound bites incorrectly, picking favorites. I never felt Hillary Clinton was elected. She was just appointed.
Anyway, Bernie loses. Trump is in the race at that point, and you get to the actual election. At that point, I'm basically a Trump supporter. I always think of politics as having a candidate of hope and a candidate of the status quo. I felt that Trump was the candidate of hope, weirdly enough.
Did going from Bernie to Trump feel like a dissonant thing to do?
No. It was like, fuck these people that stole the election from Bernie. They're not on our side. If you look at where Bernie versus Hillary stood in 2016, she was essentially a Republican in ways that were the worst of both worlds. She had the elitism of Democrats, and also all the bad neoliberal policies that Bernie fought against. The pitch was literally, "My name is Hillary Clinton." And it's like, "Says who?" Trump winning was the revenge of the Internet, in some ways.
Trump 1.0 was very much about immigration. You're an immigrant from Latin America. Was that weird?
No. I wasn't in the US for most of Trump 1.0, so it never came my way. I knew he delayed visas. I never took it as a big deal. My perception of Trump 1.0 was that the first year was really tumultuous, and the other three years were actually really good. (...)
Trump has this unpredictability, the willingness to do shit that maybe you shouldn't do. That worked with his foreign policy. He knows how to empire.
No. It was like, fuck these people that stole the election from Bernie. They're not on our side. If you look at where Bernie versus Hillary stood in 2016, she was essentially a Republican in ways that were the worst of both worlds. She had the elitism of Democrats, and also all the bad neoliberal policies that Bernie fought against. The pitch was literally, "My name is Hillary Clinton." And it's like, "Says who?" Trump winning was the revenge of the Internet, in some ways.
Trump 1.0 was very much about immigration. You're an immigrant from Latin America. Was that weird?
No. I wasn't in the US for most of Trump 1.0, so it never came my way. I knew he delayed visas. I never took it as a big deal. My perception of Trump 1.0 was that the first year was really tumultuous, and the other three years were actually really good. (...)
Trump has this unpredictability, the willingness to do shit that maybe you shouldn't do. That worked with his foreign policy. He knows how to empire.
Sunday, June 8, 2025
The Man Putin Couldn’t Kill
He identified the secret police agents behind one of the most high-profile assassination plots of all: the 2020 poisoning of the Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny. That revelation put Grozev in President Vladimir Putin’s cross hairs. He wanted Grozev killed, and to make it happen the Kremlin turned to none other than the fugitive financier, who, it turns out, had been recruited by Russian intelligence. Now the man that Grozev had been tracking began tracking him. The fugitive enlisted a team to begin the surveillance.
The members of that team are behind bars now. The financier lives in Moscow, where several times a week he makes visits to the headquarters of the Russian secret police. Grozev — still very much alive — imagines the man trying to explain to his supervisors why he failed in his mission. This gives Grozev a small measure of satisfaction.
On May 12, after a lengthy trial, Justice Nicholas Hilliard of the Central Criminal Court in London sentenced six people, all of them Bulgarian nationals, to prison terms between five and almost 11 years for their involvement in the plot to kill Grozev, among other operations. The group had spent more than two years working out of England, where the ringleader maintained rooms full of false identity documents and what the prosecution called law-enforcement-grade surveillance equipment. In addition to spying on Grozev and his writing partner, the Russian journalist Roman Dobrokhotov, the Bulgarians spied on a U.S. military base in Germany where Ukrainian soldiers were being trained; they trailed a former Russian law enforcement officer who had fled to Europe; and most embarrassingly for Moscow, they planned a false flag operation against Kazakhstan, a Russian ally.
In the past two decades England has been the site of at least two high-profile deadly operations and more than a dozen other suspicious deaths that have been linked to Russia. Yet the trial of this six-person cell appears to be the first time in recent history that authorities have successfully investigated and prosecuted Russian agents operating on British soil. The trial and its outcome, then, are victories. They are small ones, however, relative to the scope of the threat. The Bulgarians seem to be only one part of a multiyear, multicountry operation to kill Grozev. That in turn is only a small part of what appears to be an ever-broadening campaign by the Kremlin, including kidnappings, poisonings, arson and terrorist attacks, to silence its opponents and sow fear abroad.
The story of the resources that were marshaled to silence a single inconvenient voice is a terrifying reminder of what Putin, and beyond him the rising generation of autocratic rulers, are capable of. The story of how that single voice refused to be silenced — in fact redoubled his determination to tell the truth, regardless of the very real consequences — serves as a reminder that it’s possible to continue to speak and act in the face of mortal danger. But the damage that was done to Grozev’s own life and the lives of the people around him is a warning of how vulnerable we are in the face of unchecked, murderous power.
by M. Gessen, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Hokyoung Kim[ed. Fascinating. A real-life spy thriller (that even includes George Clooney). If you can't get around the Times' paywall, the whole story can be found here.]
Monday, May 26, 2025
The Most Corrupt Thing Any President Has Ever Done
[ed. For this guy that's really saying something, and it's hardly even a news story...]
Yet this and more is what Donald Trump just did, and unless you follow the news quite closely, it’s possible you’ve not even heard about it. Or if you have, it was probably in passing, one of those second-tier, “this is kind of interesting” headlines. But it’s a lot more than that. As Democratic Senator Chris Murphy noted Wednesday: “This isn’t Trump just being Trump. The Trump coin scam is the most brazenly corrupt thing a President has ever done. Not close.”
Trump announced this week that the top 220 buyers of his $Trump (strump, as in strumpet) meme coin between now and mid-May will be invited to an exclusive dinner on May 22 (“a night to remember”) at his golf club outside Washington, D.C. The Washington Post and other outlets have reported that in the days since the announcement, “buyers have poured tens of millions of dollars” into the coin; further, that the holders of 27 crypto wallets have acquired at least 100,000 coins apiece, “stakes worth about a million dollars each.” Holders of crypto wallets are anonymous, if they want to be, so the identities of these people (or businesses or countries or sovereign wealth funds or whatever they might be) are unknown and will presumably remain so until the big dinner or, who knows, maybe for all time.
It’s also worth noting that Trump launched this meme coin just a few days before inauguration. Its value quickly shot up to around $75. It steadily declined through the first month of his presidency, and by early April, as Americans grew weary of a president who was tanking the economy, it had fallen to $7.14.
Mind you, a meme coin is a thing with no intrinsic value. It’s just some … thing that somebody decides to launch based on hype because they can get a bunch of suckers to invest in it. As Investopedia gingerly puts it: “Most meme coins are usually created without a use case other than being tradable and convertible.” It should come as no surprise that some meme coins are tied to right-wing politics. Elon Musk named his Department of Government Efficiency after his favorite meme coin, dogecoin (which, in turn, was indeed named after an actual internet meme in which doge is slang for a Shiba Inu dog).
So, to go back to my opening analogy—this isn’t even like Joe and Hunter Biden starting a company from the White House. A company is a real thing. It makes a product or provides a service. It files papers with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It pays taxes. It employs people. Assuming that it’s a good corporate citizen and that it exists at least in part to solve some problem or offer the public some innovation, it contributes to the general welfare.
Not so a meme coin. It’s just a hustle. It may make certain investors rich, but it does the world no good whatsoever.
So stop and think about this. First, Trump, preparing for the presidency, purportedly busy thinking about how many millions of people he’s going to deport and how he’s going to bring “Jina” to its knees and how he’s going to hand eastern Ukraine to Putin and how he’s going to cut Meals on Wheels, for Chrissakes, takes time out from all that to stop and think: Now, how can I profit from returning to the White House? So he launches, naturally, the griftiest Christmas present ever.
It starts out great. Then its value drops by 90 percent. So in April, while he’s illegally deporting legal U.S. residents to El Salvador and roiling the world’s financial markets, he stops and takes the time to think: Hey, what happened with my meme coin? I had better figure out a way to goose this grift. So he comes up with this dinner. As well as showing just how tawdry his mind is, how he just automatically and intrinsically thinks it’s his right to make a buck from the presidency, it’s unspeakably corrupt. (One small silver lining here is that after peaking Wednesday at almost $15, it’s now under $12.)
Who knows who these “investors” are? Will we ever know? Inevitably, on May 22, people will be invited to that dinner. Will we know the guest list? Will the list be sanitized? Will a few Russian oligarchs be among the top 220 but send surrogates to keep their identity hidden?
This doesn’t create the “appearance” of corruption or set up the “potential” for conflict of interest. It is corruption, and it’s a standing conflict of interest. Patently, and historically. Chris Murphy is right: This is the most corrupt thing any president has ever done, by a mile.
by Michael Tomasky, TNR | Read more:
Image: Samuel Corum/Sipa/Bloomberg/Getty Images
[ed. Grifters gotta grift, it's just like breathing. See also:Trump’s Crypto Dinner Guests Admit They’re Trying to Buy Him Off; and, Here’s What Happened at Trump’s Shady Cryptocurrency Dinner (TNR): (more here, with video!). Really awful.]
***
"The dinner was held at Trump’s private golf club in northern Virginia on Thursday evening for the top 220 holders of the president’s meme coin cryptocurrency—after an auction that brought in $147,586,796.41. Protesters lined the entrance to the building, chanting “Shame, shame, shame!” and holding up signs while attendees arrived.The event was promoted as the “most EXCLUSIVE INVITATION in the world,” according to an email. While the top 220 buyers got into the gala, the top 25 buyers received a much more personal, “ultra-exclusive private VIP reception” and “Special VIP Tour” with Trump, allowing them unfettered access to the president. (...)"
“Donald Trump’s dinner is an orgy of corruption. That’s what this is all about,” Senator Elizabeth Warren said that evening. “Donald Trump is using the presidency of the United States to make himself richer through crypto, and he’s doing it right out there in plain sight. He is signaling to anyone who wants to ask for a special favor—and is willing to pay for it—exactly how to do that.
***
Guests at Trump’s supposedly “intimate” gala for the 220 top buyers of the $TRUMP memecoin gathered at the Trump National Golf Club in Virginia Thursday night, hoping for a little facetime with the president. But they were left entirely unsatisfied.
Nicholas Pinto, a 25-year-old social media influencer who spent a whopping $360,000 on the president’s memecoin, told Fortune that he was distinctly underwhelmed by the affair.
Trump, rather than cozy up to his guests, gave an address to the room that was “pretty much like bullshit,” Pinto said. Most guests struggled to get any face time with the president, according to Pinto. The event’s host Caitlin Sinclair, an anchor at OANN, said that she didn’t even get a picture with the commander-in-chief, Pinto recalled.
Christoph Heuermann, who shared a series of photographs from the event on his Instagram page, wrote that Trump gave a brief 20-minute speech “and didn’t interact with the crowd other than enjoying being celebrated.”
Only the 25 biggest investors were given access to a small VIP reception with Trump. The rest were left with only their halibut or filet mignon.
During the banquet, Pinto texted Fortune to say that the food was “trash.”
“Walmart steak, man,” he wrote." (...)
On average, each person had spent roughly $1.8 million on the president’s meme coin, in what many critics have called a blatant pay-for-access scheme.
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