Beijing Barry Diller Hasn't Gotten the Point

Astonishingly bad reporting from the Daily Beast

The Daily Beast, Beijing Barry Diller’s tabloid, is flailing around and kicking before they go down. The corruption here is so astonishingly blatant, you have to be a Washington lobbyist or a free-market guy to miss it. Roger Sollenberger, the reporter on a lot of the Gaetz stories, used to work for DJI, the Chinese drone company that Gaetz called out in Congress, and whose drones Bill Barr let in into the Justice Department.

The Sollenberger family has been involved with China at least since Roger’s grandfather. You can read his obituary here:

Mr. Sollenberger was born in Fort Wayne, Ind., and grew up in China, where his parents were missionaries of the Church of the Brethren. He attended Manchester College in Indiana before returning to China in 1938 as a relief worker with the Quakers and the Church of the Brethren, then returned to Manchester, where he received his degree in history and political science in 1940. During World War II, he was involved in conservation, health and training projects, eventually serving with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. He became a UNRRA liaison officer with the Chinese government before joining the State Department.

Roger Sollenberger’s brother works for Barstool Sports, which is moving into online gambling in a big way. There are certain conservative publishers who really seem to love Barstool. I wonder why? It’s because a lot of old-school conservative movement heads love Chinese-connected gambling operations—Adelson, Wynn, etc—a main source of Israeli and Chinese corruption in the Republican Party.

Yesterday the Daily Beast decided they want to die on the hill of the Gaetz scandal. I sort of can’t believe they published it. It’s really thin, and reflects a lot of inexperience with how these legal actions actually work. The document doesn’t remotely support the blaring headline, “GOP Lobbyist in Gaetz Case Accused of Rape in Court Docs.”

The whole point of the motion the Daily Beast is breathlessly trumpeting is to remove the woman in question from Dorworth’s RICO suit. It says she never told a third-party Dorworth raped her, and thus shouldn’t be liable, but it says she approached him and threatened to make the allegation. In other words, the Daily Beast is making the allegation for her. It’s pretty hard to overstate how irresponsible this.

The journalistic custom is to not name child sex abuse victims, but in this case it’s not clear she was a child at all. So the Daily Beast is trying to make a #MeToo situation out of a woman who has not made an on-the-record allegation, not filed any legal action against Dorworth, and who has been thoroughly investigated by the Department of Justice, which declined to press charges. I think this sort of thing cheapens the very real problem of sex trafficking.

This whole story is a mess, like a glimpse into an alternate universe, loaded up with factoids but with no narrative because to give it one would involve admitting they fucked this whole thing up big-time. Look at this graf:

Despite claims from Greenberg that Gaetz recruited and paid that teenager for sex, the high-profile investigation fizzled in February when the Department of Justice declined to prosecute the congressman.

It only “fizzled” if what you were expecting was for Gaetz to go down. A long prison sentence for Greenberg isn’t “fizzling,” they just don’t want to admit their sourcing came from his camp.

Let’s look at these two paragraphs:

Unexplored were the details that several sources briefed on the investigation had told The Daily Beast: that federal agents were also exploring whether they could target Dorworth for alleged sexual interactions with the same underage teen girl. As Dorworth would later describe in court papers, “the investigation progressed from allegations [of] sexual activity to allegations of obstruction of justice.” However, the DOJ never charged him with either crime—and he largely avoided the limelight.

That is, until Dorworth made the curious decision in April to sue Greenberg and the sex trafficking ring victim herself, who is referred to in the lawsuit only by her initials, “A.B.”

They’re treating this like some mysterious whodunit but if you’ve dealt with the problem of Israeli blackmail in the past it’s perfectly obvious what this is. This is just one of those operations, which happened to blow up in their faces, thanks be to God. It’s entirely possible the DOJ “explored” charges against Dorworth but didn’t pursue them because there wasn’t any basis for them. It isn’t a “curious” decision to sue, it’s an entirely rational one, someone needs to take these people on. Great going, sherlocks.

The Daily Beast hasn’t actually quoted from Dorworth’s lawsuit itself, which has been posted on this blog, you can read it. According to the initial filing, Greenberg’s family was involved in the fairly common Florida doctors’ racket of writing dope prescriptions.

For good measure, let’s also talk about the bigger picture here. The whole Joel Greenberg side of this is really only the blackmail half of the operation—the Daily Beast makes no mention of the extortion side, for which someone else has already gone to prison, and which has implicated employees at the Israeli consulate in New York.

One of the reporters desperately trying to keep this story alive worked for the very Chinese drone company Matt Gaetz called out from the floor of Congress.

For what it’s worth, this whole affair is a great demonstration of why we can’t have a president from Florida.

We’ve been over some of Daily Beast proprietor Barry Diller’s China problems. We’ve been over the casinos and dating apps, maybe we should talk about his insider trading of the Israeli-compromised Microsoft. Or the genetics. Diller has been a big booster of 23andMe, which was supported by the very Chinese venture firm Sequoia. When—not if—word gets out 23andMe data has gotten into the hands of the Chinese Communist Party, the public is going to be furious. They’re going to want to hang these treasonous oligarchs who put their ancestry and heritage in the hands of a hostile foreign power. I wouldn’t blame them.