Fraud

In the financial world, most frauds are short-lived. Ponzi schemes such as Bernie Madoff’s eventually run out of new suckers to provide enough funds to pay the phony “returns” promised to earlier investors. When the cash flow dries up, the scam collapses. The con artists at the non-profit Southern Poverty Law Center have a different racket, and a different problem. Instead of swindling the public with promises of unrealistic, too-good-to-be-true investment returns, the fear-mongering SPLC sold “paranoia porn” to credulous donors, convincing them – falsely – that the country is full of dangerous right-wing extremists who need to be identified and brought to heel.

Where is it that the chickens go to roost? If you said “home,” you don’t quite get it. The correct answer is “Fulton County, Georgia.” At least, that’s where the chickens were congregating at the end of January when the FBI raided a Fulton County election office and made off with some 700 boxes of ballots and other election materials. Seven hundred, kemo sabe. According to the official search warrant, the G-Men were there to seize “all records relating to violations of Title 52, United States Code, 20701 and 20511.” It’s always scary when people start talking about “United States Code this and that” because at the end of the day you know that it’s all so much foreplay culminating in the word “felony.” In this case, the FBI was hoovering up: a.

I suspect that Somalis around the country – especially, but not exclusively, in Minneapolis – wish about now that they had spent more time studying the wit and wisdom of Gertrude Stein.  Stein, had she lived in our own day, might well have become commissioner of New York City’s Fire Department. She had the one qualification that Zohran Mamdani seems to deem essential to the post.  Sadly, that was not to be. But there is no denying that, on certain matters, Stein was a font of practical wisdom that remains as pertinent today as it was when she was pontificating in Paris a century ago. It is important, Stein warned those aspiring to be part of the avant garde, “to know how far to go when going too far.” This is true of all the arts.

We’re led to believe that America was once Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, a place of cardigans and kindness where everyone got along just swell. Then it all went wrong. MSNBC hosts talk of a “crisis in authority” while New York Times columnists blame corrupt Republicans for a “lost faith in liberal governance.” Right-leaning commentators point to mass migration as the great trust killer. Illegal aliens, we’re told, have a “fragmenting effect on shared cultural norms” and are “importing distrust.” No doubt these arguments contain an element of truth: America is a less trusting society than it was a few decades ago. But soon such arguments are going to appear as quaint as Mister Rogers’s model Pennsylvanian town.

The barbarians — along with a $464 million judgment against Donald Trump —are at at the gates of Mar-a-Lago. On Monday, Trump's attorneys in his civil fraud case said securing a large enough bond is a "practical impossibility."  Despite bragging about the depths of his pockets, Trump doesn’t have the money on hand to post bond, nor can he use his properties as collateral. According to his lawyers, nearly thirty insurance companies have already declined to underwrite a bond backed by real estate. Whatever stockpiled cash Trump does have on hand has already taken a hit. Last week he posted a $91 million bond in the second E. Jean Carroll defamation case.

While Donald Trump’s excessive rhetoric often evokes eye rolls, in the case of Friday’s record-setting $350 million judgment against the Trump Organization, he is spot on. “Disgraceful.” “Lawfare.” “Banana republic.” All three apply.  It’s hard to imagine a more perverse and vindictive misuse of the justice system than that which New York attorney general Letitia James has committed. While campaigning in 2018, James promised to vigorously investigate Trump and his business. True to her word, once in the office James spent three years seizing and scouring through Trump’s tax and financial records for anything she could use as the basis for legal action.

George Santos is frustrated. In an hour-long interview with The Spectator, Santos tried to make it clear he came to Washington with the hope to get things done. But he’s been “slapped in the face” with the reality that there is so much red tape. “Washington, DC is performance art,” he says. “This is a master course on performing arts... everybody here is acting.” Santos of course knows a thing or two about acting; his exploits have been well publicized since his election. Perhaps the most well-known of his roles took the form of his popular drag performances in Brazil. A fan of drag for many years, it’s surprising to learn that Santos only began watching RuPaul’s Drag Race only once the coronavirus pandemic hit.

It's been a bumpy month or so for newly elected Congressman George Santos, if that is his real name. Shortly after his upset win in November that flipped a key New York district from blue to red, reports began to surface showing he had told a few wee lies to voters on his way to Capitol Hill. He had not attended the prestigious college he said he had, he hadn’t worked at the big Wall Street firm, and, in the most humorous example, he had to admit he wasn’t Jewish but rather "Jew-ish." Politicians have always been known to have a tenuous relationship with the literal truth, but they used to be creative, even talented at it. Today they resemble a toddler claiming he did not steal the cookie from the jar as he’s chewing it.

New York attorney general Letitia “Tish” James has a lot on her plate just now. Sadly none of it has anything to do with fighting the surging crime throughout the state and the nation’s largest city. Instead James has her sights narrowly set on a civil lawsuit against Donald Trump and his family. She even found the time last week to fire off a tweet angrily complaining that a Yankees game was not being broadcast live. Clearly keeping New Yorkers safe is not on James’s agenda. In fairness, James’s persecution of the Trump clan is a campaign promise kept. On the night she won the AG race in 2018 she told her adoring crowd that, “I will be shining a bright light into every dark corner of his real estate dealings, and every dealing, demanding truthfulness at every turn.

Outspoken Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King has unleashed his Grassroots Law PAC campaign finance disbursements, and it appears he used $40,000 of donor money to buy a dog for his family. The financial disclosures reveal that the “PAC” paid Potrero Performance Dogs in California a total of $40,650 over the course of two months. The Washington Free Beacon reports that a few days after the second and final payment was made, “King welcomed a ‘new member of the King family’: an award-winning mastiff bred by Potrero named Marz.” (King’s Facebook post about the pup is now gone.

Election audits of the 2020 election are under attack in the media. It’s easy to see why some calls for audits have drawn criticism. But audits can serve a very useful purpose. Glenn Youngkin, the Virginia Republican nominee for governor, is calling for an ‘audit’ of the state’s voting machines. The former co-CEO of the Carlyle group says: ‘I grew up in a world where you have an audit every year, in businesses you have an audit. So let’s just audit the voting machines, publish it so everybody can see it.’ Kari Lake, a former Phoenix news anchor whose candidacy for governor of Arizona has been endorsed by Donald Trump, said she would not have certified the 2020 election results in the state. She cited ‘serious irregularities and problems with the election’.