The Marxist Brothers
Two things happened last week… the first to distract you from the second and the second to distract you from the Marxist takeover of America.
First, Judge Arthur Engoron imposed a fine of over $364M on Donald Trump plus denied him the right to do business in New York but not for committing any crime. In fact, what Trump did is more or less standard business practice. Nobody was defrauded, nobody complained, and the city of New York is pocketing the fine. (This was a bench trial with no jury and due to a poison-pill loophole in this obscure law used for the first time on Trump, Trump must put the fine in escrow to appeal!)
There is now an avalanche of highly credible evidence that Barack Obama initiated a campaign to spy on Donald Trump as far back as 2015. Spying on American citizens in not legal and spying on political opponents is treason. Treason is a death penalty offense.
These two events together are signs of the Marxist takeover of America. And the Marxists are in control because while the second event is the more earth-shaking, the first event grabbed all the headlines. That’s media manipulation.
Marxists, when they take over, do two main things. They take away private property, particularly the “means of production” or businesses, and they silence their political opponents by unleashing the government against its own citizens.
Those things happened last week almost simultaneously. And what is X or Twitter, our new “public square” talking about? Whether truckers will deliver to New York and Taylor Swift.
Let’s start with the looney-tunes trial in New York. In case you have not been following, the New York attorney general (AG) Leticia James ran for election based on a platform that she promised to “get Trump.” Trump was president, now is a private citizen, and nobody should ever be allowed to run on a platform that the goal is to put a certain former-President-turned-private-citizen behind bars. It would be OK if she had a crime—for instance, a woman recently stabbed her boyfriend 100 times after smoking pot. You could run on a platform that she belongs behind bars, because there is an actual crime. But the difference with the murderer here is that while we know the crime, we don’t know her name.
With Trump, we know the name and the man, we just don’t have a crime.
Leticia James did not campaign that she’d crack down on white-collar crime or carjackings or fentanyl dealers. Those are normal campaign promises. She promised she’d “get Trump.” That’s Marxist. She isn’t worried about crime, she’s trying to interfere with an election. (I say that because she could have pursued Trump in 2020, 2021, or 2022 … but she held off on this trial until it was election-adjacent.)
The crime Tish James and her gang of thieves concocted and brought before King Arthur’s Court (Judge Arthur Engoron) is that about a decade earlier, Trump took out a business loan with Deutsche Bank and he allegedly inflated the value of the property he was using as collateral. The bank did not take Trump’s valuations at face value; like all lenders, they appraised the properties themselves and decided to grant him the loan, which was paid back in full with interest. Deutsche Bank not only is not complaining, they spoke in court on Trump’s behalf. Deutsche Bank even said they would like to continue to do business with the Trump organization, so they don’t sound like they were defrauded. But the “crime” or fraud was that Trump’s real estate valuations were too high, according to Judge Engoron who is by his own admission not a real estate or business expert. One of those properties Trump used as collateral is his famous Mar-A-Lago resort, a historic landmark that trump valued at between $426.5 and $612M.
King Arthur said this was too much since the tax assessor said it was worth between $18M and $27.6M. This is a bit of a problem, since tax appraisals and actual values rarely coincide, in fact, many counties purposely undervalue properties for tax purposes. Anybody in real estate for more than two minutes knows that an appraised value is not the same as market value, and market values are what are used for collateral. Here is Judge Engoron when he’s not mugging for the cameras.
Besides, in America, organizations like banks or businesses or even individuals are free to lend money to whomever they want. If you wanted to borrow $100 from me, I don’t need to go to the courthouse and get a judge’s approval. Same with banks. And ten years later, some judge cannot arrest me and say that even though you paid my $100 back with interest, you committed fraud by asking me for the loan in the first place. (That’s how stupid this case is.)
Further, Mar-A-Lago is a unique property. Built by Marjorie Merriweather Post (of Post cereal fame) in the 1920s, it wound up bequeathed to the government who wanted to tear it down because they could not afford upkeep. Trump bought it in1985 and completely refurbished it as a national historic landmark. It has 126 rooms and it sits on 17 acres of prime South Florida waterfront real estate. In 1994, Trump converted part of the estate to a posh members-only club complete with spa and restaurants. It gets its name from Spanish for “from the sea to the lake” in that it sits between the Atlantic Ocean and the Lake Worth Lagoon. Since 2019, it has been the main residence of the Donald Trump family.
The zip code of Mar-A-Lago is 32459. You can use it to check on other properties in this neighborhood. A four-bedroom waterfront home on a lot less than half an acre costs $2.3M. A three-bedroom house under 3000 square feet not on the water is $1.3M. That is not comparable to Mar-A-Lago, of course, but it suggests that rating Mar-A-Lago at $18M is perhaps a bit of a underestimation.
Jeffrey Epstein owned a townhouse in New York—a townhouse with no waterfront acreage and about a tenth of the square footage—which was valued as high as $90M or triple the valuation Engoron set for Mar-A-Lago! (This was the price before Epstein’s infamous death.) But even if there was a price drop after Epstein’s prison death, a townhouse owned by a notorious criminal is worth twice as much as Mar-A-Lago? Epstein’s former townhome is not on the list of national historic places, either.
But let’s look at waterfront property. Barack and Michelle’s Martha’s Vineyard Home is worth an estimated $12M. However, the Obama’s home is much smaller, has just 16 bedrooms, and is not historic unless you think it’s historic because the Obamas bought it. Anyone who would pay $12M for the Obama compound (which the Obamas just did) would easily ante up 50% more to own a place like Mar-A-Lago which accommodates both a palatial residence and a club. That would be a bargain.
Clearly, Mar-A-Lago is worth more than $18M. Even the Palm Beach County appraisers valued it at $33M, so even for tax purposes, this property is worth much more than Engoron says. Trump said it was worth between $420M and $1.5B, but remember, Trump was not hiding Mar-A-Lago. The Deutsche Bank appraisers could see and evaluate the property on their own. And the fact is that Mar-A-Lago is a unique property, rather like Hearst Castle on the California Coast (valued at $700M), makes a price tag hard to ascertain.
In a cookie-cutter neighborhood where all houses are roughly the same size, built around the same time, and have the same general amenities, it is easy to name a property value. In a new development of houses that all cost between $400K and $550K, you can’t very well claim your cookie-cutter house is worth $10M. But what if your property is one-of-a-kind with a rare historical provenance? Trump bought this house when it fell into neglect and disrepair and saved it from the wrecking ball by investing a lot into the property. It’s stupid to trivialize the value of such a rare property.
But the court case is even stupider. There is no complaining party. Trump took out a loan and paid it back, years ago, and everyone was happy. But Leticia James and Judge Engoron are making the case that Trump overestimated his collateral. Not only is the judge clearly underestimating the collateral, but Deutsche Bank had no problem with Trump’s loan papers. Banks know that real estate tycoons at times inflate the value of their collateral, just like job seekers sometimes embellish their resumes, or young women on dates wear make-up and body-shapers. I do not know if Trump exaggerated the value or not—real estate pricing of unique properties is a science unto itself—but no bank gets as big or rich as Deutsche Bank by just stupidly accepting loan collateral without running their own appraisals. Real estate is one of those things that is real, so you can actually check up on properties. Deutsche Bank did this and was satisfied to make the loan.
This is America, it used to be this is how things worked.
But Engoron stepped in and said because Trump inflated the value of his real estate (which I do not think he did but even if he did—it is not a crime), this was fraud. And so he levied a fine of $364M, even though no one complained of fraud.
This makes me wonder—can you charge a person with murder when there is no body? Can you charge a person with drug dealing if there are no drugs? How can there be fraud when there is no defrauded party and no one is complaining?
He thinks Mar-A-Lago is worth $18M but an appropriate fine for taking out a loan and repaying it is $364M—in other words, an appropriate fine for overvaluing Mar-A-Lago (not a crime) would be to pay 20 times the price of the place. So if I used my home as collateral and said it was worth $500,000 when a judge thought it was worth $200,000, then the appropriate fine would be $4M. You can see how ridiculous this with smaller numbers. Let’s say I took out a car note and said my income (which the car loan company checked) was $60,000 a year but it turned out it was $50,000 a year. Judge Engoron would say that would merit a penalty of $2M even if I paid the loan back with interest and the car finance company said they’d like to do business with me again.
I would like to point out that the highest medical malpractice claim ever made in United States history was just under $217M for a misdiagnosis that led to brain damage.
As infuriating as all this is, it’s worse than you think.
This wasn’t about “getting Trump” as Leticia James promised New York voters, although I’m sure it was a nice bonus for her and her ilk. The real issue here is to set the precedent for the Marxist seizure of property. Trump was charged by the state who levied the fine, took away his right to do business, and kept the fine. (In most cases of fraud, the fine is paid to the aggrieved party but since there was no one complaining, New York pockets this money.)
This is how Marxists are going to steal our property. They start with rich guys. Trump is a great test case because some people despise Trump with a blind rage and it’s easy to get these Trump-haters riled up so much that they will support a case like this. But the real case is whether this verdict can stand so that the government can take money and property from business owners for the crime of just doing business. It starts with business people. Take away their money. Take away their businesses. Deprive them of licensure or permissions to do more business. Go after their kids (Trump’s two sons were fined as well.)
Imagine if they did this to you—let’s say 10 years ago you took out a mortgage. And your state decided that you overstated your income or did some other thing wrong on the paperwork. Never mind the lender could check up on all the information you provided. Never mind they gave you the mortgage, and never mind that you paid it back on time and with interest. Never mind no one complained. The state can now sue you for not doing the paperwork to their specifications, even going back 10 years, take all your liquid assets, and ban you from holding a job in that whole state for three years (or more). And it can take all of your money and keep it. You can’t even appeal the verdict (and it’s a bench trial so there’s no jury) without putting all of the money you owe plus interest into escrow. Let’s say your mortgage was for $200,000. The judge fines you $50M and you cannot even appeal without scraping up $50M somehow and putting it in escrow. Plus you can’t work anymore in that state for years.
This is a nasty case and those Trump-haters who are rejoicing right now have no idea what the case is really about. They think it’s just comeuppance for a bad orange man they don’t like. What they don’t realize is that it lays the groundwork for seizure of your property, your assets, and your businesses.
BUT THAT’S THE DISTRACTION. HERE’S THE REAL NEWS.
Almost simultaneously, we newshounds just found out that the revered former president Barack Obama may very well be guilty of treason but may not even be tried. The case gets very complicated, but in broad strokes, Trump accused Obama and others, including Hillary, of spying on his 2016 campaign for president. This was roundly and emphatically denied by every mainstream propaganda outlet until now.
But the spy case slowly gained momentum and by momentum I mean evidence. Real evidence.
Back in 2020, a guy named Richard Clinesmith lied to the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) court and got a warrant to spy on Carter Page, a mid-level advisor working for the Trump campaign. Carter Page is an unfortunate victim in all of this—he was not even getting paid for helping with the Trump campaign. Clinesmith lied to the secret FISA court and said that Page was a Russian spy and had previously not cooperated with the CIA. These were lies, but the warrant was granted. This allowed the Democrats to listen in on phone calls of Mr. Carter Page. Spying on Page was a clever move—the FISA courts would have never allowed Clinesmith to get a warrant to spy on Trump. But they did grant spying privileges on Carter Page, who due to the nature of his job, talked to many key people in the Trump campaign, including The Donald himself. Note that Carter Page was a U.S. Navy veteran and had cooperated with a CIA investigation into Russian spying… he was squeaky clean. So there was spying.
Enter Michael Schellenberger and Matt Taibbi (ever notice how major journalist good guys always work in pairs? Like Woodward and Bernstein?) Well, in this case they needed a trio, so they also worked with Alex Gutentag. Not that it matters, but Alex is a woman. You have to subscribe to their Substacks to get the lowdown—the best one for this story is called Public.
Shellenberger/Taibbi/Gutentag found more than one source that stated that before the summer of 2016, the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies were targeting multiple Trump advisors. This was not some one-off oddity, not some rogue agent getting an illegal warrant to spy on Carter Page. They had identified and spied on no less than 26 people in the Trump orbit. Carter Page was the first known but he was not the only one. This was not some fluke or a mistake; this was what they call in intelligence an “operation.”
The operation was directed by John Brennan, who was running the CIA at the time. Brennan got the spies of the “Five Eyes” alliance (spooks of the nations of the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) to spy on Trump, too, and funnel information back to him.
At this point, I would like to point out that Barack Obama was President, Joe Biden was Vice President, and Trump was a private citizen running for President.
This was a sophisticated scam, because Five Eyes was not just collecting information (and most of the 26 people they targeted were talking to Trump on a regular basis), they were also involved in a campaign for spreading misinformation.
This resulted in lots of what they call “raw intelligence” which are transcripts of phone calls, messages, texts, and other items. This information was gathered and, gadzooks, when Trump got into the Oval Office, this raw intelligence fell into his hands. It is allegedly stored in a 10-inch binder, which suggests a very thick collection of papers. The 10-inch binder is sometimes called the “Crossfire Hurricane” binder because like all intelligence operations, it got a cool-sounding name.
As Shellenberger/Taibbi/Gutentag say, if the ultra-super-top-secret documents do exist, it will prove that not one, not two, but multiple intelligence agencies in multiple countries, on multiple continents broke the laws to interfere with the 2016 election in the United States.
Most people laughed at the idea that Obama & Company were spying on Trump. In a way, I can understand their reticence to believe that treason was being so blatantly committed. After all, this is America. This is the land of fair elections and civil rights and due process. And Obama was so suave and charming, how could he possibly mastermind election fraud on such an egregious level?
Now let me explain something I learned from Dan Bongino, who may be credited with being first on this story having published two books thoroughly documenting these allegations years ago. The goal was to make it look like Trump was in bed with the Russians, even literally. Trump was to be portrayed as a Russian spy or a Russian asset or maybe just a Russian stooge. Maybe even a Russian himself. At any rate, the information had to be pumped into the press that Trump was colluding with the Russians but if it came directly from Brennan’s CIA it would not be credible. So they needed to launder the information.
Here’s how it worked.
John Brennan could not just write out a press release on CIA stationery stating Trump was Putin’s boyfriend. No, the information could not come from an intelligence agency or even a government source. It had to come from a more typical source for news like a media outlet or a newspaper. Or even a Senator or other politician.
This is like money-laundering where you take dirty drug money and make it seem legit. In this case, Obama was taking made-up stories and trying to pawn them off as genuine facts offered up as news.
Brennan and his crew used a system of “pipes” which is a great term since they all flowed one way or another into the sewer of the mainstream media. The thing is, information was fed into various pipes, but the source was so obscured it was untraceable. So the CIA might contact a friendly Senator (Harry Reid comes to mind, he’s implicated in this—so are Chuck Schumer and Adam Schiff) and dump some information on them… a “leak” from a classified document or some weird story.
Then the obliging Senator or agent or other person tells a reporter or somebody in the media. Keeping with the “pipes” metaphor, this is a “leak.” The various Senators and Congressmen and other players were never instructed to leak, but they did it for the sake of attention or votes or just plain nastiness. Who doesn’t love to tell a good story, particularly when it makes an enemy look bad?
The mainstream media dutifully reported the story, often repeatedly and breathlessly. I still remember Rachel Maddow practically writhing in delight talking about how Trump was going to be indicted for treason. This only works if you have a compromised press, which we do.
Here is a good example. According to one report, on August 25, 2016, CIA Director John Brennan called up Senator Harry Reid and several others in Congress and told them that Russia was interfering with the American election. Many in Congress took Brennan’s phone call, but only Reid took the bait and leaked the news to the media. It was one of those “sources say…” stories.
I am not certain that Reid was part of the “conspiracy,” in that he likely believed what he was told.
Robbie Mook, who has possibly the greatest surname of all Democrats, was running Hillary’s campaign back in 2016 and he became one of the “pipes.” Stories about how Trump was working hand-in-glove with Putin would come to Mook, who then swiftly reported them to the press or added them to Hillary’s speeches. There were lots of other players, and we may not know all of their names yet. As part of the “pipes,” Hillary’s people bought and paid a company called Fusion GPS for the bogus Steele dossier on Trump’s alleged antics with Russian prostitutes. But this phony-baloney document—which got a ton of press coverage and is still widely thought credible by many poorly informed Democrats—was just one of many, many “pipes” and was more likely intended to serve as patsy in case the press got wise. (If it was ever found out how the information-laundering worked, the Democrats could say it was all Fusion GPS’s doing. Sadly, our press never got wise, so this step was never taken.)
CIA Director John Brennan, under direction from then-President Obama, used foreign as well as domestic intelligence agencies to spy on Trump and his campaign. Bottom line, they wanted to prevent Trump from getting elected. In 2020, they wanted to keep him from getting re-elected.
Now the reason this is a big deal is that it is treason. It is election interference of the highest order. Dirty campaign tricks are one thing. Misinformation and smearing candidates is as American as apple pie. But launching a multinational intelligence campaign to spy on a private citizen running for office, well, that there is treason.
When it comes to the 2020 election, Republicans have been chasing their tails trying to round up evidence about suitcases of ballots drug out from under tables in the dead of night or hinky voting machines, when the real election interference was mounting a global intelligence operation to link Trump to Russia and take the election from him.
This was organized at the highest level, it was done to rig the election, and it is to my mind treason, which is a death penalty offense. In Marxist countries, political elites can commit treason and get away with it.
Some might argue that if this were true, it might possibly be election interference, but hardly treason. I would state that in the United States, no government agency can carry out surveillance against a U.S. citizen without a warrant and the warrant to spy on Carter Page was obtained by going to the secret FISA court and applying for a warrant based on lies. So the warrant was not valid. Many others were spied on as well. Plus Brennan got Five Eyes to spy on the Trump campaign (they don’t need a warrant to tap Trump’s phone if they can get the electronics in place) and feed the information to him. These are serious crimes.
(By the way, the CIA Director John Brennan hid from the Americans an important bit of actual intelligence—namely that Putin very much preferred Clinton as U.S. President to Trump. The whole idea that Putin and Trump were in cahoots is a myth—it was Hillary and Vladimir who were sittin’ in a tree… Hillary sold theRussians uranium, after all, she wanted to “reset” relations with Russia, and, in my opinion, she was quite willing to sell them any secrets they might care to buy.)
These same intelligence agencies buried the now-famous Hunter Biden laptop. The “laptop from hell” was found near election day in 2020 but over 50 intelligence big shots under the guidance of Mr. John Brennan signed an official letter that stated the laptop had all of the earmarks of Russian disinformation. What on earth does that mean? What is an “earmark of Russian disinformation”? After Biden claimed the election victory, they waited a couple years and admitted the laptop belonged to Hunter. It just couldn’t be exposed around the time it might influence voters.
We are starting to get enough evidence of 2020 election interference that one day, if the republic survives, we’ll need to expand the Smithsonian Institute in order to build the new “Attempted Marxist Takeover of the United States” wing.
Before Trump left office, he declassified what is called the “raw intelligence” (raw intelligence is like raw sewage) on which the operation Crossfire Hurricane was based. It was stored in the aforementioned “10-inch binder.” Here’s the news report of its declassification.
Here’s a head-scratcher … Where is this 10-inch binder? Does Trump have it? Clearly, he had it right before he left office in January 2021. There are some that say when the FBI raided Mar-A-Lago to find the alleged “classified documents” Trump had wantonly retained, the officers were in reality looking for that binder. (No one ever revealed, even obliquely, what documents were found—and it seems hinky that neither the Trump family nor their attorneys were permitted to be in the home while Mar-A-Lago was searched—and the search took hours and hours...) Did those agents find the binder? Or is the binder in Washington, D.C.?
But we don’t for sure that the binder ever at Mar-A-Lago. Did Trump keep it somewhere else? Does he still have it? And if the FBI agents grabbed it during the search of Mar-A-Lago, what did they do with it? Does the CIA have it? Does a Trump ally have it?
Here is a six-inch binder—figure almost twice this size.
Is there only one copy of the binder? Clearly, there is one original binder, but it’s easy enough to duplicate paper. Wouldn’t a smart person duplicate the binder for the sake of security? Or was that not allowed? Is the binder perhaps in a safe-deposit box somewhere? At some think tank? Maybe it is being stored at another Trump property? Perhaps it is in the hands of an ally, perhaps not even in this country?
US News and World Report and CNN have said that the “top-secret binder” is missing but they also say the binder contains information that the Russians were guilty of election interference. These outlets have said that Trump’s Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, at one time had the binder, and that seems plausible. But nobody’s talking. Might as well ask about the whereabouts of the Lost Ark of the Covenant.
Trump has stated in many rallies and as an off-hand remark when asked about efforts to thwart his 2020 campaign, “We got them all!” He made it sound like he had evidence. No one knew what he was talking about, which is nothing new at a political rally. But in light of the recent findings of Shellenberger/Taibbi/Gutentag, was he talking about the binder?
Doesn’t it seem bizarre that on the very days we are learning about how an international spy ring targeted Donald Trump at the behest of a sitting President (I must remind you this was Obama)—they take away Trump’s business and wipe this news out of the headlines!
Why is the bogus New York case getting all the press coverage and not the case about how Democrats spied on Trump?
Marxism. Get rid of it or get used to it.