David L. Cohen, CFE on LinkedIn: Can America's spy services survive a second Trump presidency? (2024)

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Not the biggest fan of Ms. Goldberg; too far to the left to suit me, but when she's on target, she's on target."‘Lock Her Up’ Was Not Just a Slogan"https://lnkd.in/etQEg8sx"A truism of the Trump era is that every accusation is a confession. When Donald Trump hurls wild charges at his opponents, he is telegraphing what he plans to do to them, pre-emptively justifying the breaking of laws and norms by casting himself as the victim of the very misdeeds he’s going to commit.That is how we should understand Trump’s ranting in the wake of his 34 felony convictions last week. After he was found guilty, hetoldreporters gathered outside the courthouse, “This was done by the Biden administration in order to wound or hurt an opponent.” It’s tedious to fact-check such claims — the MAGA movement doesn’t care what’s true and what’s not — but President Biden had nothing to do with the state case brought by Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney. And as if to underline Biden’s refusal to interfere in Justice Department decisions, the federal prosecution of the president’s son Hunter Biden began this week. In spinning this fantasy about Biden, Trump is telegraphing that, should he return to the White House, he will try to use the Justice Department in exactly the way he’s pretending it was used against him. When the former presidentcompareshimself to the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died earlier this year in an Arctic prison colony, he’s giving himself permission to act like Vladimir Putin.In aninterviewwith three Fox News hosts on Sunday, his first since his conviction, Trump all but promised that his second term would be even more corrupt and vindictive than his first. In his telling, he never called for Hillary Clinton to be imprisoned, and magnanimously resisted the entreaties of others to punish her. Next time, he suggested, he won’t be so nice. “They always said lock her up, and I felt — and I could have done it, but I felt it would have been a terrible thing,” he said. “And then this happened to me, and so I may feel differently about it.”Speaking to the Fox hosts, Trump denied saying the words that were the refrain to his first presidential campaign: “I didn’t say, ‘Lock her up.’” That is, of course, apreposterous lie, the kind that demonstrates Trump’s strongman ability to get his followers to accept absurdities. And “lock her up,” it’s important to remember, was never just rhetoric. As the Mueller report revealed, Trump demanded that his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, who’d recused himself from investigations involving the 2016 campaign, go after Clinton. “According to Sessions, the President asked him to reverse his recusal so that Sessions could direct the Department of Justice to investigate and prosecute Hillary Clinton,” the Mueller reportsaid."

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"Epoch Times Executive Accused of Laundering $67 MillionWeidong Guan was charged with three counts in a scheme that the Justice Department said caused revenue to surge for the company, which has promoted Donald Trump and conspiracy theories."https://lnkd.in/er2cFpt3https://lnkd.in/e3HzwH7Dhttps://lnkd.in/eEijPApU"A top executive at The Epoch Times, a right-wing media company, has been arrested and charged with laundering at least $67 million in stolen money through company accounts in a multiyear scheme to lift financial returns.A federal grand jury indicted Weidong Guan, also known as Bill Guan, on one count of money laundering, as well as two counts of bank fraud. The accusations say he lied to a financial institution about the source of the cash, some of which was allegedly pilfered through fraudulently obtained unemployment benefits. The money increased The Epoch Times’s revenue by nearly 400 percent in just one year, according to the Justice Department.Mr. Guan, its chief financial officer, was arrested on Monday and the indictment, handed up on May 23, was unsealed. He entered a plea of not guilty. His lawyer, a federal public defender, declined to comment. If convicted, Mr. Guan faces a maximum sentence of 20 years for the money-laundering charge and 30 years for each bank fraud charge.The Epoch Times is affiliated with Falun Gong, a spiritual movement banned in China, and was for years an obscure, free print newspaper dedicated largely to criticizing the Chinese Communist Party. In recent years the outlet transformed itself into a prominent supporter of Donald J. Trump and his allies on the right.""During the 2016 election, the publication embraced Mr. Trump’s candidacy, in the hope that as president he would bring down the Communist Party, former Epoch Times staff memberstold The New York Times in 2020. After Mr. Trump’s victory, the news organization served as an enthusiastic supporter, amplifying the administration’s messaging and establishing itself as a prominent outlet on the right.It also became a prominent spreader of right-wing conspiracy theories, particularly on social media, and especially on Facebook, where the company built an extensive and complex network of pages that drew sometimes-enormous audiences with viral content and extensive advertising.In 2019, Facebook banned the company from advertising on the platform after it was found to be obscuring its ad purchases in violation of transparency requirements, but it continued to thrive on other platforms.""In January, Ron Johnson, the Republican senator from Wisconsin, hosted a screening of “The Real Story of January 6,” a film produced by The Epoch Times’s streaming platform that promotes a variety of right-wing conspiracy theories about the 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol."

"The paraphrased collection of statements is sometimesincorrectly citedas a direct quote. However, as displayed in the meme shown here, the portions within the quotation marks are statements Trump made in November 2016, and the paraphrased portions accurately reflect these statements' intent. As such, the claim is True."

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"Wisconsin brought felony charges on Tuesday against three onetime advisers of former President Donald J. Trump in connection with a fake electors plot there in 2020, becoming the fifth battleground state to prosecute his allies for their attempts to overturn his defeat that year.Kenneth Chesebro, an architect of the Trump campaign’s plans to impanel slates of bogus electors in several states that Mr. Trump lost, was named as a defendant in the action by Wisconsin’s attorney general, Josh Kaul, a Democrat.The other men charged were James R. Troupis, a former judge who was working for the campaign in Wisconsin, and Michael Roman, who was Mr. Trump’s director of Election Day operations.All three face a single count of forgery-uttering, a felony in Wisconsin that carries a penalty of up to six years in prison and a $10,000 fine.During a news conference in Madison on Tuesday, Mr. Kaul said the state’s investigation into the matter was continuing. He declined to elaborate on the details surrounding the charges, which were laid out in complaints filed in Dane County Circuit Court.“We feel confident in the charges we’ve brought,” Mr. Kaul said.In total, 52 people have been charged in criminal cases in five states stemming from efforts to overturn the 2020 election, a group headlined by Mr. Trump, who was indicted last year in Georgia under a state Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act law, and who also faces a federal election-interference case. He was also named as an unindicted co-conspirator in Michigan.Several defendants have already pleaded guilty or reached cooperation deals, including Mr. Chesebro, who in Octoberpleaded guiltyin a criminal racketeering indictment in Georgia and agreed to cooperate with state prosecutors. He has emerged as a key witness for prosecutors in other states.""Wisconsin is the third state to charge Mr. Roman, after Georgia and Arizona, where he is scheduled to be arraigned on Friday."Mr. Troupis hasdrawn attentionfor having recruited Mr. Chesebro to Mr. Trump’s legal team and for an email exchange between him and Mr. Chesebro after the 2020 election in which the two discussed how the Trump campaign could get false-elector documents into the hands of members of Congress.""Wisconsin’s governor, Tony Evers, a Democrat, praised the charges against Mr. Trump’s allies in a one-word statement on Tuesday.“Good,” said Mr. Evers, whose office pointed out that he had been calling for those involved in the fake electors plot to be held accountable.Wisconsin will host the Republican National Convention next month in Milwaukee. There, Mr. Trump is scheduled to accept the party’s presidential nomination, just days after he is set to be sentenced in his New York hush-money case. A Manhattan jury on Thursday convicted him on all 34 felony counts."https://lnkd.in/eAkHRAxJ

Gail Collins and Brett Stephens have a weekly conversation column in the New York Times. Not a big fan of either of them (she's too liberal/ progressive on a lot of issues, he's too far to the right, yet often comes off phony in his attempts to appear moderate; though he seems to be sincerely anti-Trump), but the column is occasionally informative, or at least, entertaining. In todays column, Ms. Collins asked Mr. Stephens to come up with slogans for President Biden; he did a good job IMO. "I’d advise him to own up to his supposed weaknesses and repackage them as strengths. As in:“I don’t have a cure for everything, but I know that bleach isn’t one of them.”“I sometimes forget the names of foreign leaders, but I didn’t forget my oath to the Constitution.”“The only person who hates the idea of Trump losing more than Trump is Putin.”“Stormy Daniels isn’t my type. My wife of 47 years is.”“Whaddya want, a little bit sleepy or full-blown crazy?”“This election isn’t just a choice. It’s a choice about having a choice.”“I might lose, but at least I’ll admit it.”“Restore reproductive rights. Abort a second Trump term before it’s too late.”"Ms. Collins had a good one as well; "“Biden’s Got Guts, and He’s Not Nuts.”"

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