Corruption, Fake Deaths, and Lawyers Having a Very Bad Day
I’d hoped to have a piece out tonight about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, but the last few filings in both cases concerning him have been filed under seal. Is that good or bad? Well, we just don’t know yet. There could be motion here to bring him home the government does not want made public yet.
As I will be offline for the next few days, here’s a few quick updates.
Far from divesting from his businesses, Trump started NEW ones shortly before taking office. One of those is a crypto coin. I won’t go into the technical details, but it’s now possible to funnel money directly to the president while remaining completely anonymous. This ALONE presents a massive conflict of interest as instead of funneling money into Trump’s businesses, which happened in the first term, foreign governments can simply directly send him money. He’s announced a contest regarding it. The top purchases of Trump’s crypto coin will get to have dinner with him next month. The value of the currency, which is mostly controlled by the Trump family, surged on this news. Just 27 people have purchased ONE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS worth of the coin just in the last few days. Like so many other things he does, this would be one of the worst bribery scandals in history. It will barely make a blip in the news because of all the other scandals.
The USDS team (DOGE) under Musk found a novel way of dealing with immigrants that doesn’t involve arresting them - declaring them dead. They changed flags on thousands of accounts of immigrants in the Social Security Database to show them as deceased. Getting declared dead is a huge financial burden which results in difficulties banking, renting, working, basically every aspect of your life. They are hoping these difficulties mean those people just leave the country. As these people are NOT dead you may recognize declaring them so by its more common name, “fraud.” But they didn’t stop with immigrants. Musk’s USDS team has flagged ten million people as dead in the Social Security database. Millions of those came after a court order barring USDS from accessing the database entirely. They have been misinterpreting errors in this database for months now and openly recognize they are adding Americans who are alive to the list of those who are dead. Instead of fixing what they broke, their solution is for those people to show up, in person, at Social Security offices to digitally resurrect themselves. That process is a nightmare in the best of times. Seniors who rely on those checks to live are going to miss them because of Musk’s incompetence and disregard for the courts.
We found out Pete Hegseth was texting highly secret information about our Yemen attack to ANOTHER Signal group chat, this time including his wife who has no government role. Security experts have been curious to know how Hegseth was copying the information at all as it should not be available on any unsecured devices which would not have Signal installed. We now know. Hegseth had a separate Internet connection installed in his office so he could use personal devices and apps like Signal while inside the Pentagon. He has been copying information from the most secure computer systems on the planet onto his own devices so he can let his wife and the occasional Atlantic journalist know which planes were launching at which times to bomb Yemen. This sort of breach is a testament to how unqualified he is and also a great example of how the Republicans who constantly attacked Hillary Clinton over her private email server were completely full of it.
There have been NUMEROUS court victories since my last update which I am not going to detail here, but right now the courts have been a fantastic place to look if you are in need of hope.
I’m closing with one of my favorite examples of incompetence so far. The MTA, New York City’s transit authority, is suing Sean Duffy, the Secretary of Transportation, over the federal government trying to kill New York’s wildly successful congestion pricing. Lawyers for the Department of Justice filed a letter to the judge yesterday. Or rather they intended to file a letter to the judge. What they actually filed was a private correspondence to the Department of Transportation explaining that they did not think they could win the case and the government’s position was not legally sound.
Oops.
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