Things to Keep an Eye On
ICC warrants, Mike Benz and Musk's trip, Peter Daszak, Hunter Biden to maybe sue Fox, O'Keefe's latest, American Catholicism's conservative turn
I have to begin this post by doing something I should have done a while ago, which is credit Ken Silva for his work, which I’ve cited here a few times. My theory with these extremism cases, which comes from looking at a lot of them and understanding the mentality of most people who cover this stuff, is that there’s a salutary and public-spirited role for journalists to play in untangling some of these informant relationships where there are interagency conflicts and various other complicating factors.
Also that journalists should cover right-wing stuff the same way they would cover the left, which as a general rule is just not done—for instance, there are dozens of books about COINTELPRO and the left, but I’m not aware of a book-length treatment of the “white hate” portion of COINTELPRO that shows the same attention to civil liberties issues there. Even as a purely historical question at this point it would be very controversial, and to be sure most of the people targeted in it have odious beliefs and some are indeed dangerous, but they are entitled to constitutional protections enjoyed by any other citizen. It seems reasonable to think their odium makes it more likely that the authorities are able to get away with violating their rights.
In the last few years I think I’ve demonstrated proof of concept, but it’s incredibly satisfying to watch Ken take the idea and really run with it, and vindicate it beyond my wildest expectations. I read his work all the time. Civil liberties really are an “everybody has them, or nobody does” sort of thing, so whatever your beliefs are, it’s important to look closely at these difficult edge cases. There aren’t any shortcuts and there aren’t any easy answers.
Israel threatens the International Criminal Court
From Axios:
The Israeli government warned the Biden administration that if the International Criminal Court issues arrest warrants against Israeli leaders, it will take retaliatory steps against the Palestinian Authority that could lead to its collapse, two Israeli and U.S. officials said.
Why it matters: Israeli officials have grown increasingly concerned over the last two weeks that the International Criminal Court (ICC) is preparing to issue arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Israel Defense Forces chief of staff Herzi Halevi.
Peter Daszak on the Hill
A House panel interviewed Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance this week, the man who was part of the WHO probe of the Wuhan lab. I wrote about him in the New York Post in 2021. Feels like a little deja vu, after my reporting on Hunter Biden’s CEFC deals was published before the election, but House Republicans didn’t get around to it until years later they decided to make that the centerpiece of their impeachment. At a certain point the cynical calculus of holding onto this stuff to make an issue of once the president is in office is not very credible, so I’m fairly happy the impeachment has fizzled.
Hunter Biden to sue Fox
I suggested on this blog last year that Hunter Biden should sue News Corp. It appears Hunter Biden’s lawyers are preparing to do so:
Fox News has pulled down a six-part series in which it staged a mock trial of hypothetical criminal charges against Hunter Biden after the president's son threatened to sue the network.
The series, which was first posted on the cable network's right-wing streaming service back in October 2022, was removed only a day after Biden's legal team publicly made its threat. Biden says the network defamed him, among other accusations.
If you ask me the Murdoch empire is no longer really entitled to the presumption that their work is not significantly aided by illegal hacking. This story in the UK Prospect is pretty important:
Now something much bigger begins to emerge—a previously hidden side of the phone-hacking saga that may yet prove to be its most important revelation. Namely, signs that the Murdoch company was using criminal means to spy on the heart of democracy, targeting politicians of every rank, right up to the level of the government’s own law officer, Dominic Grieve, in 2010; and for five years—from 2005 to 2010—Gordon Brown, when he was chancellor of the Exchequer and then prime minister.
A couple of years ago, when new information came his way, Huhne sued. Various court orders eventually allowed him to see a collection of the Murdoch company’s internal records about him—invoices for the private investigators who had targeted him, emails that referred to him and, above all, the record of calls that had been made over five years to his mobile phone from Murdoch HQ in east London. There were 222 of them—far more than he had ever received from Murdoch journalists, who would usually speak to press officers, not to him directly—and they were striking in three ways. First, 218 of them were made through “hub” numbers, which meant that there was no clue as to which individual was making the call; second, over and over again, the calls were brief—far too brief to be a journalist legitimately interviewing a politician; third, they were all coming from the Murdoch building, whereas if ever political journalists did call direct, they did so from their mobiles or from the press gallery in parliament. Huhne and his lawyers concluded that the overwhelming majority were attempts to hack into his voicemail.
A Truly Horrific Story on Apollo Global Management
According to a lawsuit, they were wagering on human lives:
Apollo Global Management Inc. bet on the longevity of senior citizens by acquiring illegal life insurance policies and funneling the payouts through shell entities, according to a new lawsuit.
The private equity giant allegedly set up a web of sham trusts—using a secretive affiliate called Financial Credit Investment—to hold a portfolio of stranger-originated life insurance policies worth roughly $20 billion. Taking out life insurance on a stranger is “anathema to hundreds of years of public policy” and a violation of the Delaware Constitution, the suit says.
“Apollo has been carrying out a widespread fraudulent human life wagering conspiracy designed to not only hide its involvement, but to create the false appearance that the policies it owns are somehow legitimate,” according to the complaint. “Worse still, when Apollo senses a claim is going to be brought, it attempts to dissolve its shell entities to give itself yet another layer of protection.”
WeWork Shuts Adam Neumann Out of Bankruptcy Restructuring
This is worth keeping an eye on, WeWork was always better understood as an Israeli real estate play using SoftBank’s weird Asian cash:
WeWork has reached a $450 million restructuring deal that would help the co-working space operator emerge from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection by the end of May.
Why it matters: Company co-founder and former CEO Adam Neumann is not involved, despite having wanted to buy back his former company.
Neumann's $650 million buyback offer was via Flow, an apartment rental startup he launched with big backing from Andreessen Horowitz.
Mike Benz and Musk’s Traveling
Mike Benz has been covered here in a few places, and he recently appears to have been deleting tweets. What’s going on with him is his disinformation research—or his propagation of disinformation—is being used to set up a Supreme Court censorship case. Steven Hantler, the political guy for Bernie Marcus, a board member of the Republican Jewish Coalition, has been involved with him. The concerning thing about this is that as has been established in NBC reporting and elsewhere, what Benz was doing was propagating a lot of anti-Semitism online. If this is used as a pretext to crack down on free speech, that seems a little concerning. What I’m wary of is bad actors generating demand for speech crackdowns.
Kris Ruby has gone over in greater detail Benz’s activities in the Trump administration. It seems clear he was not well vetted, and he also has a Hungarian connection.
It seems fairly clear that Mike Benz is close with Elon Musk’s circle as well, he appears to have been constructed with hundreds of thousands of followers. Not to make it about me, but a lot of people have pointed out that I am obviously heavily throttled on Musk’s platform at the moment.
Elon Musk cancelled a trip to India this week and went to China instead, which seems relevant to the strange geopolitical intrigues that constantly orbit the man. He’s sort of a man without a country, and that’s not good.
Marjorie Taylor Greene Suggests She’ll Move on a Motion to Vacate Next Week
An anonymous report making reference to government documents suggests the administration is preparing to take refugees from Gaza. This would render the U.S. complicit in ethnic cleansing. It’s hard to come up with a more obvious parody of our broken foreign policy than this: taxpayers pay to bomb Gaza, then they pay for the resulting refugees’ social services. This is on Speaker Johnson’s shoulders now, because he capitulated to House Democrats to pass the military aid, and he deserves to lose his job for it.
The New O’Keefe Video
It’s a little hard to peg the significance of the latest James O’Keefe video, but here are my basic thoughts. This contractor says a lot of stuff was being kept from Trump, specifically by the likes of Gina Haspel and Mike Pompeo. That happens to every president to a certain extent, but in Trump’s case it was largely his own fault. What’s interesting about it is it appears to confirm what I suspected at the time, that if Trump put these neocons, who largely bought the Russiagate material, in his administration, they would treat him as if it was true. There’s a lot of weird kayfabe in the main MAGA narrative about Russiagate due to this. For instance, Devin Nunes is made out to be a hero, but he strongly supported Haspel’s confirmation.
Catholic Stuff
A few interesting things this week in Catholic matters that are worth paying attention to. A big AP story about the conservative turn in the American Church is making the rounds. It’s correct as far as it goes, and I love the lede: “It was the music that changed first.” But what it’s describing is not what is generally known as traditionalism per se. An emphasis on good music and the sacrament of confession is not traditionalism, it’s just Catholicism with taste.
The story identifies the phenomenon of younger clergy and younger converts and reverts, all of which tend to be more conservative than the older generation. One of the big things it’s missing is the global aspect of this. There are thousands of African clergy in America today for instance, and most of them are also considerably more orthodox than the older generation. In general one of the tensions of Francis’s pontificate is that he is himself fairly liberal, but many of the cardinals he has created from the third world, who will be involved in selecting the next pope, are accustomed to pastoral situations in which the niceties of European liberalism are less relevant.
It is being interpreted as a sign of where things may be heading that Cardinal Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem who has handled the crisis in Israel with remarkable courage and deftness, was celebrating Mass ad orientem this week when he took possession of his titular church in Rome.
Ken Klippenstein Leaves the Intercept
Ken Klippenstein has left the Intercept and posted to Substack the story they wouldn’t let him publish. He’s got the backing of his editor. The Intercept, like a certain right-of-center realignment-minded policy organization, is heavily backed by Pierre Omidyar, who is closely tied to the PayPal mafia. What’s weird about this is that the story they wouldn’t run involves a donation from Jeff Bezos to Admiral Bill McRaven, former head of JSOC. Whatever his reputation for smileyness and civility, JSOC was one of the most scandal-plagued parts of DOD for most of the War on Terror.