The Problem With John McEntee

Lots of potential corruption issues here

The first thing about John McEntee is that he talks like someone who makes too many TikTok videos. The only thing worse than a theater kid is a theater kid with no dramatic training, and that’s kind of what this is. It’s what gives a lot of meme videos that funny Chinese quality.

McEntee has shown up in the Stormy Daniels trial in New York. I happen to think this trial is another weird triple-bankshot that doesn’t really work. Nothing about the Trump Organization’s finances has ever made any sense, it’s already been ruled to have been based on a fraud, but for sure there’s interesting testimony coming out of it. It’s much more interesting as a fact-finding exercise than a criminal prosecution.

Stormy Daniels has changed her story a few times, and these insinuations that maybe he assaulted her, maybe he didn’t, from a woman who’s as, let’s just say experienced and familiar with where the lines are, as she is, without ever making the claim in a way that can be adjudicated, seems a little problematic. On the other hand, it’s probably good for hush money payments not to work, and indeed it clearly hasn’t.

Into the mobbed-up milieu in which Trump has been swimming his entire career—it’s actually pretty unsurprising that he would have sex with a porn star—we add Johnny McEntee. This guy is very clearly fucked, and the populists who bet on him, as it were, as the guy who finally cleaned up the White House’s staffing problems are probably backing the wrong horse.

McEntee is from a family that has been involved in the casino business fairly heavily, connecting celebrities with casinos is a classic mob thing. He himself has a gambling problem that was recognized to be a security risk during his time in the White House—he was fired for it, then brought back. His underling was James Bacon, whom we haven’t seen hide nor hair of in quite some time. It was Ann Coulter who connected McEntee to Peter Thiel.

So you have a guy with significant gambling debts doing the staffing for Trump, in a milieu that has all this casino cash flowing around, from the Adelson network, Wynn, and so forth. Then afterward he and a few other Trump White House people get a payout from Thiel in the form of a “dating app” that nobody uses.

The testimony from Rebecca Manochio today suggests that McEntee is handling some of these payments. If a guy’s in debt to a casino, you can make him do things like this:

There’s a lot of other weirdness with McEntee. This meeting in particular scheduled for November 10, 2020, is deeply strange, which McEntee adds Mike Benz to, and Morgan Warstler is on the schedule. McEntee says the meeting was cancelled in the email thread, but Warstler says that they met in the White House:

Kris Ruby has been discussing some of this with Warstler. There’s a lot of weird stuff with Benz, too. It looks like he was involved in efforts to contest the election in a way the J6 committee appears to have missed. Some of the other emails show Benz was involved in a fair amount of the post-election stuff. So if Benz is being kept out of the J6 committee’s inquiries, he’s probably an Israeli asset, given that Schiff and Cheney were on it, and the fact that he’s close to Bernie Marcus’s world. He’s already on the record claiming his information ops propagating anti-semitism were actually a brilliant method of fighting it.

At the very least there appears to be a dispute about whether this meeting actually happened, which is pretty strange. Benz seems to be ignoring Warstler.