Things to Keep an Eye On
IDF spox breaks from Netanyahu, Norcross indictment, Fincantieri chair found dead, Neugebauer lawsuit, a few cartel indictments, Israel updates
Destroying Hamas isn’t realistic
As this blog has been saying since around October 7, the goal of destroying Hamas is probably not realistic, and and IDF spokesman is now admitting it as of a few days ago:
IDF Spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari admitted on Wednesday that it would be impossible to eliminate Hamas.
"Hamas is an idea," he explained in an interview with Channel 13, "Whoever thinks that it's possible to make it disappear is mistaken. It's the Muslim Brotherhood."
When asked if the Palestinian Authority could replace Hamas in the Gaza Strip, he answered that "the political echelon has to decide. Saying that it's possible to destroy Hamas and to make it disappear is to throw dust into the public's eyes."
The problem as far as things go here in the U.S. is that the Israel lobby will hurt you if you say things like that, so everybody has to lie.
Two interesting cartel indictments
One having to do with La Familia:
Rodolfo Maldonado-Bustos, also known as Don Jose, and Euclides Camacho-Goicochea, also known as El Quilles, who occupy leadership roles in the La Nueva Familia Michoacana drug cartel, were charged by a federal grand jury with conspiracy to possess with the intent to distribute heroin and conspiracy to import heroin into the United States.
Earlier today, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) announced financial sanctions against Camacho-Goicochea and Maldonado-Bustos, who are fugitives believed to be residing in Mexico.
And the other having to do with Chinese financial infrastructure being integrated with Sinaloa:
The Justice Department today announced a 10-count superseding indictment charging Los Angeles-based associates of Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel with conspiring with money-laundering groups linked to Chinese underground banking to launder drug trafficking proceeds. During the conspiracy, more than $50 million in drug proceeds flowed between the Sinaloa Cartel associates and Chinese underground money exchanges.
Following close coordination with the Justice Department, Chinese and Mexican law enforcement informed United States authorities that those countries recently arrested fugitives named in the superseding indictment who fled the United States after they were initially charged last year.
The multi-year investigation into this conspiracy—dubbed “Operation Fortune Runner”—resulted in a superseding indictment returned on April 4 and unsealed on Monday charging a total of 24 defendants with one count of conspiracy to aid and abet the distribution of cocaine and methamphetamine, one count of conspiracy to launder monetary instruments, and one count of conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business.
So with Sinaloa, there is the problem of Chinese money laundering, Israeli tech, and Mexican drugs. This is very bad.
South Jersey Democrat honcho indicted
The George Norcross indictment is going to shake things up in New Jersey quite a lot, the fallout touches on the Rutgers board:
Fallout from the sweeping criminal indictment of George E. Norcross is rattling board rooms across South Jersey as the Democratic Party leader and five co-defendants face racketeering and extortion charges.
Norcross business partner John J. O’Donnell, the chief executive officer at The Michaels Organization, a residential housing developer in Camden, stepped down to focus on fighting the charges announced Monday by New Jersey Attorney General Matthew J. Platkin.
“John has taken the leave of absence to focus on vigorously defending himself against allegations,” the company announced in a press release Tuesday.
Another defendant, noted Camden County Democratic attorney William Tambussi, is facing renewed calls to resign immediately from the Rutgers Board of Governors, an influential post he has held for the past eight years.
Neugebauer lawsuit
This is pretty interesting, it has to do with these competing anti-woke business platforms. The one the right-of-center Silicon Valley financiers preferred was clearly Public Square, but Neugebauer’s GloriFi was in the mix. It looks like the backers never intended for it to succeed, or at least that’s his contention. Forbes has a big story:
The pitch worked: GloriFi raised $55 million from a who’s who of Republican billionaires and bigwigs: Ramaswamy, Griffin, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale, TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts, Intercontinental Exchange CEO Jeffrey Sprecher (husband of former U.S. Senator for Georgia Kelly Loeffler) and Atlanta-based megadonor Rick Cameron, among others.
Just 12 months later, in November 2022, GloriFi shut down. It then filed for bankruptcy in February 2023 with $40 million in liabilities and just $600,000 in assets. Now, more than a year later, Neugebauer is suing his former partner Nick Ayers, his billionaire backers and even former GloriFi employees. The 53-year-old Texan, along with a group of investors that lent the startup money, claim in a lawsuit brought May 24 in the U.S. District of Northern Georgia that GloriFi’s powerful investors — operating through Ayers (a GloriFi board member) and Kari Findley, an associate of Peter Thiel (and also a board member) — torpedoed GloriFi’s business over a period of months. The centimillionaire Neugebauer claims that his even-wealthier backers tried to gain control of his startup, and that when their coup attempts failed, they took GloriFi’s ideas, launched competing companies and trashed Neugebauer’s reputation to kill off his company.
Toby Neugebauer is the son of a Texas Republican congressman, an evangelical who’s close to the oil and gas business in the state. So watching these types of people break up with Silicon Valley is interesting.
Chair of Italian state-backed shipbuilder found dead
It looks like a suicide. From FT:
The sudden death of Claudio Graziano, chair of the Italian state-backed shipbuilder Fincantieri, sent shockwaves through the country’s political and business establishment on Monday.
The loss of Graziano, 70, had left a “great irreplaceable void”, the company said. The police are investigating suicide as one of the possible causes of his death, said a person close to the company.
The retired general, who had been chair of Fincantieri since May 2022, had been mourning his wife, who passed away a year ago after a battle with cancer, the person said.
Graziano’s death comes less than two weeks after Fincantieri approved a €500mn capital-raising to finance the company’s acquisition of the submarine unit of Italian defence group Leonardo. Shares in Fincantieri fell 3 per cent on Monday.
Sundry Israel-related items
On Monday Netanyahu dissolved his war cabinet:
Benjamin Netanyahu has dissolved the Israeli war cabinet that had been overseeing the conflict in Gaza, rebuffing his far-right allies who had been seeking seats, and apparently moving to solidify his grasp on decision-making over the fighting with Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah across the Lebanese border.
The prime minister announced the move to ministers, saying the war cabinet had been established as part of an agreement in which the moderate politician Benny Gantz and his National Unity party joined an emergency coalition last year.
The ADL is facing a Wikipedia ban:
Wikipedia’s editors have voted to declare the Anti-Defamation League “generally unreliable” on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, adding it to a list of banned and partially banned sources.
An overwhelming majority of editors involved in the debate about the ADL also voted to deem the organization unreliable on the topic of antisemitism, its core focus. A formal declaration on that count is expected next.
In general the thing I’m most concerned about with respect to the ADL is the uses of their anti-antisemitism campaigns against specific tech companies being used as a means to install assets from 8200 in the companies. The way it works is, you claim a company has an antisemitism problem, then force them to hire assets who are alums of IDF signals intelligence, a division well known for producing tech start-ups. And if you think about the ADL’s mob history, this sort of extortion is not at all outside the MO.
Pegasus’s manufacturer NSO Group claims in court that it’s OK for them to target high-level government and military officials. I think in general Americans would take a dim view of this:
The manufacturers of the powerful commercial spyware Pegasus argued in a Friday court filing that it is appropriate for its global clients to target any high-ranking government or military official with the technology because their jobs categorically make them “legitimate intelligence targets.”
The statement is a revelatory admission from the typically tight-lipped Pegasus manufacturer, NSO Group, regarding who it believes can justifiably be targeted with its zero-click and all-seeing surveillance product.
Israel’s most libertarian MK Moshe Feiglin quoted Hitler last week in the course of saying he wants to “turn Gaza Hebrew”:
Former Israeli MK Moshe Feiglin quoted Adolf Hitler while commenting on the war in Gaza saying: "We can't live in this land if one Islamo-Nazi remains in Gaza," while speaking to Channel 12 news.
Feiglin continued, saying that Jews "are not guests in our own land, it is entirely ours," adding that he wants to "turn Gaza Hebrew."
There was a thread posted to Twitter and then removed by Musk, showing a briefing packet for Senator Cruz’s meetings with donors, most of whom, surprise surprise, are from the Israeli side of things like Ronald Lauder and Len Blavatnik. Ken Silverstein has a write-up detailing a lot more about the Cruz fundraising machine, and here is the reporter’s thread posted to Substack.