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Erwin Dreessen's avatar

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").

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Justin Ling's avatar

Thanks, as always, for reading, Erwin! The feedback is a nice reminder that people are taking time out of their lives to actually read it all.

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ABossy's avatar

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.

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Kathleen's avatar

WoW! That was enlightening. Trump corruption is known generally, but this level of detail is mind boggling in its depth. Thanks for presenting this info.

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Jim Stewart's avatar

Your treatise is a welcome expansion to that tangled web of affiliations that Anne Applebaum revealed in Autocracies Inc.

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Justin Ling's avatar

It's such a brilliant (and succinct) book.

Imagine how much I was bowled over when I saw my name in the endnotes. (A super minor citation, but still!)

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Jim Stewart's avatar

Well earned Justin!

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Catherine Boucher's avatar

Wow. The strategy of this three cup monte of greed is indeed hard to follow. As intended. Thanks for slowing it down a bit so my brain can process. Now I just need to understand bitcoin.

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Andrew's avatar

I remember reading all about Trump and family's corruption during the first administration: Trump Tower in Moscow, Jared Kushenr with the Saudis, Mar-a-Lago fees, etc. It was a terrible amount of corruption and it got lots of media attention.

Now, things are 10x worse (at least) and so few people are talking about it. It's getting drowned out by equally bad or worse things happening in the US.

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Brenda St. Jean's avatar

Justin, why is your media company owned by Halliburton, a company associated with services to oil and gas industry? Is there another Halliburton?

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Justin Ling's avatar

It's just a joke, Brenda!

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Brenda St. Jean's avatar

There was a time, Justin, when I would have registered that but, in my 75th year, I am beset by infirmities, chief among them a herniated credulity, a response to the sheer number of outrages announced daily. I now need to resort to the excuse of my Maritime-born mother who, in her later years, excused such misunderstandings by saying: “Excuse me for living, I just fell off the hearse.” Keep up the good work.

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Justin Ling's avatar

Ahaha! Thanks Brenda

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Brenda St. Jean's avatar

Duh, I should have recognized that. However, in a world where credulity is strained hourly, my eyes crossed and I missed it. Too much time on Substack. I’ll take a walk. A bush is still a bush; a tree a tree. Keep up the good work. I appreciate the work you do.

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Neil P.'s avatar

double-like!

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