A Kleptocracy, If You Can Keep It
Donald Trump is following the thievery playbook. The job now is to follow the money.
In a conference room in London, Bill Browder was shown a disquieting image.
It was a photo of a document, which had been photographed the day before in St. Petersburg. The document seemed to show that one of Browder’s many investment funds, housed in a limited liability company called Mahaon, had about $71 million worth of rubles in it.
Trouble is, Mahaon was supposed to be dormant. There shouldn’t have been a single kopeck in there. Browder worried one of his accountants had misplaced the pile of cash.
This was 2007. Browder was amongst the wave of hungry capitalists who surged into Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The fire sale of state assets had been a boon for Wall Street, but it had also engendered rank corruption at every level. Browder’s fund, Hermitage Capital, had made a killing, and it had also helped expose some of the most brazen corruption. For that, he had become an unlikely ally of President Vladimir Putin, who seemed interested in stopping the wholesale looting.
But Browder was now facing the corruption first-hand. “Mahaon’s been stolen, Bill,” his accountant said.1
Browder was dumbstruck. “How do you steal a company?”
It was, as it turns out, quite easy. In the weeks prior, Browder’s companies had been raided by Russian police, and they had carried away the companies’ books. Charges had been drawn up, filed surreptitiously, alleging fraud big and small. Now, someone had used all that information to forge documents, re-register companies, and move huge sums of money around. With the switch made, Mahaon technically belonged to a two-bit criminal from Kazan who had served time for manslaughter.
“So the police raid our offices, seize a ton of documents, and then use a convicted killer to fraudulently re-register our companies?” Browder asked.
“That’s exactly what happened,” responded one of his tax advisers, a studious man named Sergei Magnitsky. The bad news continued. This seemed to be a conspiracy between the bureaucracy, the courts, the cops, and organized crime. A Russian investment firm appeared out of thin air, offering to help Browder liquidate his entire company to avoid the legal nightmare.
Browder was convinced that this was the work of petty Napoleons, and that if only they could get word to the Kremlin, this corruption scheme would be shut down.
Magnitsky warned him not to get his hopes up. “Russian stories never have happy endings,” he said.
Their pleas to Putin went unanswered. Then, news agencies began to report on Browder’s supposed fraud. They had the full details of this complicated, inscrutable scheme to pilfer money from the Russian state. They named Magnitsky as an evil mastermind of the scuzzy accounting. Browder suddenly discovered that he was persona non grata in Russia — most of his Russian staff got the message and fled not long after.
The extent of this scheme finally came into view. In the same way that American finance had been invited by the Kremlin to come liquidate the Soviet state, the Russian government was now inviting its criminals to come in and liquidate the American investors.
Even as they realized that the whole state was in on this graft, Magnitsky refused to leave. “The law will protect me,” he said. “This isn’t 1937.” He proved and documented how the theft and screw-job had been enabled by all levels of the Russian state, how Moscow was working with criminals to steal from private industry, how oligarchs and corrupt officials were personally profiting from this dark economy, and how it flowed up to the highest levels of the state.
It didn’t matter. Magnitsky was wrong about the purpose of Russian law. He was arrested, prosecuted, convicted, tortured, and killed in a Russian prison.
After his death, Magnitsky’s name became synonymous with combating corruption.
Those who had come forward to help Magnitsky unravel this conspiracy met untimely ends: One fell off a balcony, a common affliction in Putin’s Russia. Others kept dying of sudden heart and liver diseases at early ages.
Inside Russia, the corruption has rotted the entire state and nobody is capable of stopping it.
When Boris Nemtsov exposed how roughly half of the eye-watering $50 billion price tag for the 2010 Sochi Olympics ended up in bank accounts close to Putin, he was shot dead. When Alexei Navalny revealed how the price tag for Putin’s sprawling and secretive palace had risen past $1.3 billion, he was sent to prison and murdered.
Vladimir Putin maintains an extraordinary machine of theft. Its cogs are greased with the blood of those who call attention to it.
“Putin’s Russia was not an old-fashioned totalitarian state, isolated and autarkic, nor was it a poor dictatorship, wholly dependent on foreign donors,” writes journalist and historian
. “Instead, it represented something new: a full-blown autocratic kleptocracy, a mafia state built and managed entirely for the purpose of enriching its leaders.”2His is just one model. Around the world, illiberal leaders are engaging in industrial-scale corruption and their citizens are either powerless to prevent it, or are cheering on the crimes.
The board of directors for this global kleptocracy has a new member: Donald Trump.
This week, on a very special Bug-eyed and Shameless: Donald Trump is stealing bigly. It is very, very important that we understand where the cash is flowing if we ever hope to defund this operation and put the money back. So let’s take a quick tour of the myriad corruption schemes being run by the president.
Other People’s Money
On December 11, 2024, it was announced that the Trump family name, after years of being removed from towers around the world, would be affixed to a brand new building: In Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
The same day that DarGlobal, Trump’s partner in the project, announced the deal, their stock price nearly doubled.
DarGlobal had already launched several Trump-branded projects in Oman, and it was readying the announcement of a Trump Tower Dubai and the Trump International Golf Club in Doha, amongst other projects. So close is the partnership that DarGlobal’s American offices are listed as the 19th floor of Trump Tower in New York.
If all goes according to plan, Trump-branded projects will add north of $1 billion in assets to DarGlobal’s books. And that news is, in turn, great for Saudi Arabia. (DarGlobal’s parent company Dar Al Arkan Real Estate Development Company, is the largest real estate developer in Saudi Arabia and has ties to the Saudi royal family.)
Months later, Trump departed for the first foreign trip of his second term: To Saudi Arabia. There, he announced a $600 billion investment package from Riyadh, including $300 million from DarGlobal, to finance their U.S. expansion plans. From there, he went to Qatar to announce an absurd $1.2 trillion economic deal with Qatar plus another $200 billion deal with the UAE.
Not long after, Qatar gifted Trump a big, shiny $400 million plane.
While the investment deals are so massive that it can be hard to even appreciate the composite parts, one bit of the deal jumps out: Riyadh will invest “$20 billion in AI data centers and energy infrastructure in the United States,” the White House said.
Funny, just weeks before Trump’s Gulf junket, Eric and Donald Trump Jr. announced a new venture: American Data Centers. The company had no clear product or staff, and seemed to exist only as a press release and a registered company. But they had capital.
American Data Centers was a collaborative effort between the Trumps and Dominari Holdings, which is run by Kyle Wool, a friend and financial advisor to the Trump brothers. Shortly before the data center deal, the company welcomed the Trump brothers as directors.
Dominari has a pretty clear modus operandi: Buy up small, unprofitable, public companies with miserable share prices for cheap. Then, try and get publicity to make them attractive investments. That has always been the Trump family effort as well, so it was a great fit.
The partnership leveraged this strategy to great effect this summer when Dominari acquired a money-pit toymaking company, SRM Entertainment. Days after the acquisition, Dominari rebranded their acquisition as Tron Inc, a cryptocurrency company. The name was no coincidence: They quickly announced that they were bringing aboard Justin Sun, a Chinese crypto entrepreneur behind the TRON Foundation — who had largely been off the radar since he was sued by the SEC for fraud. Shortly before the deal, the SEC quietly dropped the prosecution. The addition of Sun set the stock price rocketing upwards, guaranteeing the windfall for Dominari.
Dominari made $120 million trading on the deal.
With Dominari, the Trump brothers also launched New America Acquisition I Corp: An investment fund looking to raise $300 million to put into American manufacturing, or so says the press release. That mission was undermined by the structure of the company: A SPAC, a vehicle which exists mostly to merge with existing, successful, businesses.
Despite existing solely to cannibalize another firm, this shell company got a leg up with a $6 million placement from New America Sponsor I LLC.
One of the directors of New America, John Darwin, is also managing director of an investment fund owned by the ARC Group — a Shanghai-based firm owned by Mexican-born entrepreneur Abraham Cinta. It’s not the first time he showed up to provide capital to Trump business ventures.
In 2022, when the then-former president was looking to bring Trump Media & Technology Group public through a SPAC, another company — Digital World Acquisition Corp — sprung up with $2 million to finance that effort. That cash also came from the ARC Group.
The ARC Group has a history of SEC investigations for marketing shell companies, pitching them as functioning businesses despite having no employees, revenue, or, well, business. They got in trouble for the Digital World project as well: The Securities and Exchange Commission charged that ARC failed to disclose its intentions to merge the company with Trump Media when it began fundraising for the effort. The SEC slapped them with an $18 million penalty.
This kind of corporate shell game is increasingly common on Wall Street, particularly amongst a particular kind of quick-return investment fund. But the Trumps are bringing a special kind of energy to the effort.
Remember American Data Centers? They never actually got into the data center business, so they merged with a Canadian “energy infrastructure platform firm, Hut 8, to relaunch the effort as American Bitcoin Corp — which hopes to be “the world’s largest, most efficient pure-play Bitcoin miner.”
In announcing the effort, Eric Trump called Hut 8 “a recognized leader in the Bitcoin space.” Which is a big claim for a company that was running a Bitcoin mining rig out of a trailer in Drumheller and which has a litany of securities violations underneath it.
No matter: The operation has raised $70 million despite having meager operations — it lost $5 million last quarter.
But this is just the beginning of the Trump clan’s crypto obsessions.
Last year, Trump announced he would be launching an investment service largely based on cryptocurrencies: World Liberty Financial. It had a pathetic start. World Liberty began by offering nearly $300 million in coins, but sold a paltry $2.7 million by October of last year, shortly before the election.
And then Trump won the election. In a matter of weeks, Justin Sun announced he was plowing $30 million into World Liberty Financial. Then, the day before Trump’s inauguration, Sun spent another $45 million. It was a month later that the SEC prosecution against Sun was suddenly dropped.
The Trumps aren’t picky when it came to investors. When he was in Dubai last year, Eric Trump was making a clear pitch: Buy $20 million in tokens from World Liberty Financial, and you’ll be part of something grand. It was a big ask, considering World Liberty Financial hadn’t really done anything to that point. But after the president returned to office, with Sun backing the effort, money rolled in. One of the biggest fish was Chinese investor Guren Zhou — under investigation in the U.K. for money laundering — who put in $100 million through a company called Aqua1 Foundation, per Reuters. Zhou’s previous business was carpets.
Sun was remarkably influential in crowding-in investors into the hitherto dud company founded by Trump. And his support kept coming: When the president-elect launched $TRUMP, a meme coin, Sun bought up $20 million worth — which made him the winner of a contest to see who could buy the most of the meme coin. (Fun, right?) As a prize, he snagged an invite to a private dinner party at Mar-a-Lago and a $100,000 gem-encrusted watch.
$TRUMP skyrocketed in value upon its release, rocketing from 18 cents to $75, before seeing a massive sell-off and a price crash. The coin — which has no inherent value or purpose, beyond to be an investment vehicle owned by a holding company controlled by the president — has bounced around between $5 and $15 since then.
Lots of people lost huge on $TRUMP. A small number of crypto speculators, however, walked away with $100 million in profit. ($MELANIA was a similar story.) Adding up both the value in the coins held by the first family and the fees collected on the $30 billion trade volume, Trump stands to pocket more than $350 million.
But wait, there’s more. Just weeks after Trump’s inauguration, Trump Media & Technology Group announced it was launching a whole other financial services company, providing the public an exciting opportunity to buy Bitcoin and shady cryptocurrencies in the safety and comfort of totally different Trump-branded investment funds.
The whole operation would be managed by billionaire investor Charles Schwab — who, in turn, has pumped some $15 million into this new company, probably to be named Truth.fi.
Schwab has also, over the years, donated tens of millions of dollars to the Trump cause: To his campaign, to his legal funds, to MAGA downballot candidates. Here’s Trump introducing Schwab in the Oval Office, bragging that his policies earned the man $900 million.
Trump Media has, even up to the second quarter of this year, posted a pathetic $900,000 in revenue, for a net loss of $20 million. And yet when it announced plans to raise $3 billion in capital to buy Bitcoin and other crypto assets, investors (including Schwab) jumped.
According to financial statements filed in August, the company has already raised $2.3 billion to support its “Bitcoin treasury plan.” The company is promising to offer ETFs, set up a betting market to compete with Polymarket, and do all manner of other stuff — it just hasn’t, as of yet, begun to do any of it. Investors are giving Trump’s company (which currently sits in a trust of which he is the sole beneficiary) billions of dollars so he can buy Bitcoin and do whatever he his totally-independent executives want with it.
This Bitcoin treasury plan will, ex-Congressman-turned-Trump-Media-CEO Devin Nunes explained, enable the company to “expand its reach throughout the America First economy.” Even after Trump took office and began accepting pledges of fealty from American media, tech companies, law firms, and major investors, Nunes contended that this massive fund would be necessary to “defend our Company against harassment and discrimination by financial institutions.”
Lots of firms scurried in to make money off these deals. One is Cantor Fitzgerald, of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. The law firm handling the deal is Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough — where Attorney General Pam Bondi’s brother is a partner. One of the main agents of the deal is Yorkville Securities, a tiny suburban investment firm which has tangled with the now-indicted New York Attorney General Letitia James and which has a $1.2 billion equity deal with pro-Trump network Newsmax. (Trump Media signed a streaming deal with Newsmax a week after the Bitcoin reserve plan was unveiled.)
Flying back to the Gulf: The Emirates love the crypto focus. So much so that, when they announced a $2 billion investment in crypto firm Binance, they used stablecoin $USD1,3 issued by World Liberty Financial.
That whole deal struck many as odd. Binance and its founder Changpeng Zhao were facing an absurd amount of legal trouble. They had been sued by regulators for violating securities law and facilitating money-laundering by Hamas. In 2023, Zhao pled guilty to criminal money laundering charges, with Binance paying out over $4 billion in fines.
But that all went away with Trump back in office, as he denounced the prosecution as emblematic of “the Biden Administration[‘s] war on cryptocurrency” and pardoned Zhao — who may now retake control of Binance.
We now know, thanks to the Wall Street Journal, that Zhao actively lobbied for his pardon by having Binance build the technology to support World Liberty Financial’s $USD1.
So Zhao had his company design a coin for World Liberty Financial, then Qatar used that coin to buy a huge stake in Zhao’s company — and then Trump pardoned him.
Around the same time, the White House shrugged off the clear national security concerns and approved a deal giving the UAE access to high-end and scarce chips.
A rough estimate put together by the New Yorker calculates that Trump’s personal worth has increased by $3.4 billion over just the first eight months of his presidency, to say nothing of the wealth funneled into the accounts of his party, sycophants, and allies.
And he’s just getting started.
Plundering the State, Using the State to Plunder
Donald Trump has never made it a secret that he sees himself as a victim: Of electoral fraud, of media smears, of malicious prosecution. Earlier this month, he started negotiations on how the system could rectify these injustices: With $230 million.
“I was damaged very greatly and any money I would get,” Trump said, “I would give to charity.” (That doesn’t mean much: The Trump Foundation was fined $2 million for misusing charitable donations, with at least one million dollars worth of money destined for a children’s cancer charity ending up in Trump Organization coffers, per Forbes.)
Whether or not Trump ever sees that $230 million is immaterial: He’s testing how and where he can move money from the state to his bank account. Because, as most kleptocrats do, he now sees himself as the state and the state as intrinsically his.
To date, much of Trump’s graft has run parallel to the state, not through it. There are some exceptions.
Take the billions in Pentagon and ICE contracts going to his pals and supporters.
Palmer Luckey, a tech mogul who has backed Trump from the very beginning, is now looking at around $25 billion in long-term Defense Department contracts. Palantir, Peter Thiel’s security firm, posted a 45% year-over-year increase in revenue from government. And then there is, of course, Unusual Machines, a small startup that recently exploded with news of $15 million in deals directly or indirectly with the Pentagon — deals that were signed shortly after Donald Trump Jr. took out a substantial investment in the firm and joined the board.
Trump is also using the state to take positions in major publicly-traded companies: Converting a $6 billion grant to Intel into a 10% equity stake; pushing the Pentagon to take a 15% ownership in rare earth company MP Materials; restructuring a loan to Lithium America into a 10% stake; and so on. The administration suggests more is to come. This fusion between private enterprise and the state could allow for substantial theft to the president’s own bank accounts, though we don’t yet know how.
Perhaps the single greatest illustration of this self-dealing bonanza is Executive Branch, the Donald Trump Jr.-led private club with a $500,000 membership fee. (Double, if you want off the waiting list.) Inside, you’ll have the opportunity to pitch and flatter family of Trump cabinet ministers and advisors, connect with MAGA lobbyists, and perhaps even bump into David Sacks, the White House AI and crypto czar.
Trump has made clear to the Saudis and his oil magnate friends that he is happy to waive whatever barriers exist to their investments, including environmental laws. You can manage all that, and more, either in the executive branch or at the Executive Branch.
But Trump isn’t above bending the rules directly to help his own companies.
One of the Trump Media executives is a man named Vladimir Novachki, a coder from North Macedonia who had been hired by a Canadian tech outsourcing company co-founded by Chris Pavlovski, who runs the video platform Rumble — which also helps manage Truth Social’s advertising backend. (Dispatch #119) In 2022, the company decided to relocate Novachki to the United States. To do so, they leaned on Don Bacon, a Republican congressman from Nebraska, to ensure that Novachki got his O-1 visa — a special class of immigration document meant to recognize “outstanding talent,” per ProPublica. It worked, and Novachki is now happily relocated.
But to fully understand how Trump stands to profit from his own taxpayers, we must return once more to crypto.
In March, the White House announced it was establishing the much-talked-about “strategic Bitcoin reserve” and the less-focused-on “digital asset stockpile.” The order required every government agency to hand over their digital currencies to the Treasury, which would hold those assets in a fund.
Today, this strategic reserve holds about 325,000BTC, worth around $37 billion — most or all of it seized through criminal enforcement. It is estimated that America is aiming to hold about three times that amount in the near future, roughly 1 million BTC. To do so, it will probably have to start buying up coins.
When it comes to the stockpile, Trump has named five other coins he wants the U.S. government to own. (The administration has yet to report how much of these coins it holds, despite promising to do so months ago.) One of those coins is $SOL, which operates on the Solana blockchain used by $TRUMP and $MELANIA; and Ether, which World Liberty Financial suddenly started buying up this summer, just months after selling off its reserves at a $125 million loss.
Trump’s election juiced the price of Bitcoin measurably, and his suite of crypto-friendly policies have only driven up the price further — a single BTC is now worth about 40% more than it was on November 1 of last year. If the Treasury starts buying up hundreds of thousands of coins, the price is certain to keep climbing.
This directly helps Trump who, in holding about $870 million in the crypto coin, is now one of the largest Bitcoin investors on the planet. In controlling two of the biggest stockpiles of Bitcoin in the world — which, in turn, influence just about every other holder of Bitcoin — there are many ways in which Trump could make absurd sums of money.
Once the Treasury purchase is complete, Trump could simply exit his positions — locking-in his massive gains, and driving a sell-off which could crash the market and wipe away billions in value from the government’s books. If he wanted to be really devious, Trump Media could short its position in advance of the sell-off. This would be illegal, but that would require the SEC to investigate. The Trump administration has shut down the SEC’s crypto enforcement unit and made clear that it is to ease up on the crypto space.
That is the extreme scenario. More likely, Trump will hold on to his Bitcoin — perhaps selling some to the Treasury, or issuing smart contracts or Bitcoin-backed loans to earn a massive amount of passive income.
Whatever it looks like, the fact is clear: Trump’s policies will directly enrich himself, his family, and his friends with taxpayer money, as he encourages regular Americans to enter into a shell game that they cannot possibly win.
Craze Recognizes Craze
I spend a lot of time bemoaning the state of the media in this newsletter.
Bug-eyed and Shameless is, fundamentally, a place to think about information most broadly. And there is no doubt that there is a breakdown of the distribution of good information and trust in it. I’ve argued that this is an issue of producer, distributor, and consumer. (Dispatches #83, #90)
But it bears underlining that the coverage of Trump’s multiplicity of ethical imbroglios — said more simply, corruption — has been largely fantastic.
This dispatch isn’t covering much in the way of new ground. While I combed through plenty of financial disclosures and corporate records myself, I am basically just retracing the steps of Forbes, Bloomberg, the New Yorker, the Verge, WIRED, the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, the New York Times, and so on. Other efforts, like SNF Agora’s Kleptocracy Tracker and the Democrats’ running tally of self-dealing, are also incredibly useful.
The trouble is, this coverage is not translating to the general public. That’s, in some part, because it is simply too complicated and wonky to attract a wide readership. It is also because the people who most need to hear this news are the least likely to seek it out or believe it. It is also because Trump has fired or frustrated the watchdogs who would normally add official backing to these allegations.
But there is one more factor to underline: Our critical coverage of Trump’s multiverse of graft is being constantly undermined by a huge volume of crypto, AI, and hucksterpreneur news outlets — sometimes housed inside the very outlets that are doing some of the most critical work.
For every article in Fortune underscoring the ethics concerns of Trump’s crypto empire, there are dozens of cozy reports treating his crypto investments as exciting business developments. To read every Trump-linked crypto story in Forbes requires you to believe that this administration is on the cusp of a decentralized and bottom-up financial revolution and also that they are highwaymen, robbing us blind.
And that’s just the mainstream press. Looking for crypto news online means being deluged with AI-generated images of attractive men standing in a futuristic city around giant floating Bitcoin; ads for get-rich-quick schemes based on meme coins that began two days ago; podcasts featuring the pseudo-rich explaining how you, too, can cash in; and sycophantic Trump-worship that borders on religious.
Much in the same way that the generation of conspiracy theories has become a broad participatory effort, millions of Americans are tolerating Trump’s wholesale self-enrichment because they have been led to believe that they, too, will get rich. And they are being coddled in this fantasy by an array of junk news outlets hoping to make money off them.
This is grifting all the way down.
State of the Robbery
I appreciate this dispatch was a wholesale waterboarding — of dollar figures, LLCs, random investment funds, Saudi investment deals, crypto coins, shell companies, and SEC investigations: Because that’s exactly the point. Kleptocrats succeed not by fully hiding their misdeeds, but by obscuring them in levels of complexity, in legal gray zones, and in layers of arcane details that make it impossible to convey the depth and scope of the corruption.
We are talking about industrial-scale corruption, occurring with such speed and volume that it is impossible to fully understand or describe.
Vladimir Putin worked to pioneer this model, but he didn’t perfect it.
Viktor Orbán of Hungary claims to be a man of modest means, and his official declarations claim he owns essentially nothing. Yet he has nakedly diverted billions in EU contracts to his friends and family. Over his time in office, the wealth of some of his closest friends has multiplied many times over: His closest pal and consigliere is now the country’s richest person, with an estimated wealth of $3.6 billion.
Paul Kagame is probably one of the world’s richest heads of state, as he rules Rwanda through a thinly veiled autocracy. He has made himself rich by using brutal militias to plunder rare earth minerals from the Congo, all while disappearing and jailing anyone who calls attention to those facts.
It can be hard to oust these autocrats, but it is not impossible — and it is imperative to act early. Jair Bolsonaro, the Trump of Brazil, was pocketing about $5 million in profit from money laundering, investigators say, until he was pushed from office. He, like Trump, organized an insurrection to stay in power and, unlike Trump, he faced real consequences for it.
Here's another thing about kleptocracies: They're not just a problem for the citizens of the kleptocracy. This plundering often targets foreign companies first — often in such a way that bolsters the kleptocrat’s nationalist bona fides. This theft can, in turn, finance economic development, mercenary firms, global media operations, corrupt multinational firms, and so on. The theft of foreign assets becomes a tool of economic populism.
But once you start stealing, you never stop. As Applebaum writes, this endemic stealing also works to perpetuate and spread itself.
Applebaum: Unlike the fascist and communist leaders of the past, who had party machines behind them and did not showcase their greed, the leaders of Autocracy, Inc., often maintain opulent residences and structure much of their collaboration as for-profit ventures. Their bonds with one another, and with their friends in the democratic world, are cemented not through ideals but through deals — deals designed to take the edge off sanctions, to exchange surveillance technology, to help one another get rich.
It’s no wonder that Trump has tried repeatedly to mend ties with Putin, that he is successfully cozying up to Orbán, nor that he has trumpeted a fake peace deal that has given political cover to Kagame.
Worse still, Trump used the American Magnitsky Act — adopted to sanction corrupt officials abroad — to target a Brazilian judge who convicted Bolsonaro.
The extent of Trump’s self-enrichment is staggering, and it is only just beginning. It is a boon for others like him abroad, and bad news for free enterprise, the welfare state, and global order.
True, he’s not jailing or killing those who call attention to these facts. But simply declaring “the law will protect me” does not make it true.
It is going to be very important that the scrutiny of this graft continues and intensifies, and that we find ways to alert the American public about just how much they are being taken for a ride.
That’s it for this week! I’ll skip the usual outro and leave you with a simple: Go Jays.
Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice, Bill Browder (2015)
Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, Anne Applebaum (2025)
A stablecoin is a cryptocurrency whose value is tied to a real asset.
You are too modest saying "This dispatch isn’t covering much in the way of new ground," Justin. Who among us would have the wherewithal to "comb[...] through plenty of financial disclosures and corporate records," "retracing the steps of Forbes, Bloomberg, the New Yorker, the Verge, WIRED, the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, the New York Times, and so on. Other efforts, like SNF Agora’s Kleptocracy Tracker and the Democrats’ running tally of self-dealing, are also incredibly useful." Your post is a superb piece of synthetic investigative reporting and I am immensely grateful to you for it.
I'm cross-posting this to https://erwindreessen.substack.com/p/trumps-memecoin-the-backstory, my own take on the out-and-out corruption emanating from the Trump regime (let's not honour it with the term "administration").
Thanks for another outstanding piece of journalism. I’ve been reading so much on this yet you managed to bring in more information and even better, place it within the context of history.
I don’t think anything is going to happen fast to stop any of this corruption. As we know, the SEC has been neutered. I feel most people, including the democrats, are simply too stunned at the speed and efficiency with which this has all occurred. How discouraging to hear how the trump family corruption is being covered as a great achievement by some of those crypto finance jackals.