Rats, sinking ship, yadda yadda yadda


Some bad guys are getting betrayal for Christmas. There are hints that Mark Meadows may have been turned. Meadows was Trump’s chief of staff, and there are already piles of incriminating memos and text messages during the insurrection that have turned up, so maybe he’s seeing some advantages of turning into a witness for the prosecution.

“There is a very tantalizing comment in the executive summary,” said Weissmann, a former assistant U.S. attorney who worked on Mueller’s team. “It’s hard to call it that because it’s 160 pages, but in that executive summary there’s a reference to why the Department of Justice may not have sought to charge Mark Meadows and Dan Scavino with contempt.”

“If you recall, they were both referred by the committee to the Department of Justice for contempt failing to comply with a subpoena, and one of the things the report says, is it sort of speculates, but odd that it says it may be that they’re already cooperating,” Weissmann added, “and with Mark Meadows, that would be huge. I mean, he is in the place to know everything so, obviously, if not cooperating already, there is a ton of pressure that is going to be put on him.”

Meadows is a real sleaze, but I’d be happy to trade him for a more robust criminal prosecution against the big orange guy.

Also in the news — Sam Bankman-Fried has been arrested, but the question has been…where is his partner-in-crime, Caroline Ellison? While SBF has been babbling to everyone, including minor league youtubers as well as the big money press, Ellison has been lying low, silent. The answer has been revealed: she’s been singing like a canary to the feds.

Two former colleagues of disgraced cryptocurrency mogul Sam Bankman-Fried pleaded guilty to federal criminal charges that they helped him orchestrate a years-long scheme to defraud investors in FTX, the crypto trading platform that collapsed last month, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York said Wednesday.

The executives — Caroline Ellison, who served as chief executive of Alameda Research, a hedge fund owned by Bankman-Fried, and Gary Wang, FTX’s former chief technology officer — are cooperating with prosecutors, said Manhattan U.S. Attorney Damian Williams.

You dirty, yellow-bellied rat!

I’m not complaining. None of the rats will ever be trusted again.

Comments

  1. weylguy says

    All the evidence in the world will be of no consequence if the DOJ refuses to prosecute and convict.

  2. says

    I want all of them behind bars, though. Letting minor figures escape can have terrible consequences — Karl Rove was a minor figure in Watergate, who was permitted to escape prosecution (because “the public is tired of Watergate”) and was thus able to help George W. Bush become president in 2000.

  3. says

    @1: But it’s them dang lib-ruls who do all that there voter fraud! Until it isn’t…

    The cryptocurrency crap makes me laugh. So many douche-bros on Twitter “Har har, be poor, dumb lib!” until I say “I have an adult job and a bank account, Spanky. What do you have, other than blips on a server?” 🤣

  4. drew says

    None of the rats will ever be trusted again.

    That’s not how capitalism works. When regular workers fail in any way, it’s shameful. When management fails, it’s a valuable “learning experience.” Rats fail upward.

  5. tacitus says

    The cryptocurrency crap makes me laugh.

    Seeing TSLA plunging another $9 (7%) today makes me laugh too.

  6. birgerjohansson says

    Do not insult rodents.
    The Trumpians rather remind me of the weasels in Monthy Python’s version of The Wind in the Willows. They just ooze nastiness.

  7. birgerjohansson says

    Another analogy for these persons might be ‘Edmund Blackadder clones’. Evil but too pathetic to succeed.

  8. birgerjohansson says

    My mistake. The Wind in The Willows only had Terry Jones and Eric Idle. But the weasels were so cartoonishly sinister they definitely voted for Trump.

  9. says

    What I (still) find funny is all those libertarians who used to adamantly insist that gold was the only “real” money that could ever be trusted, but then turned on a dime and started singing the praises of crypto, which is even less “real” than all those gummint-created “fiat currencies” they’d been screaming about since the 1970s.

    Libertarians are blatantly stupid and dishonest about everything, but it always seems most blatant (to me at least) when they talk about monetary policy.

  10. keithb says

    To add to the Yellow Bellied Rat meme:
    From The Thin Man:
    “I don’t like crooks. And if I did like ’em, I wouldn’t like crooks that are stool pigeons. And if I did like crooks that are stool pigeons, I still wouldn’t like you! “

  11. robro says

    Amused to read in Wikipedia that Rat Meadows claimed for some years in his official bio that he earned a BA from the University of South Florida. Turned out he only has an AA degree from there. Small difference, but still…what? he didn’t know the difference? Reminds me of George Santos, the new Republican congressman from New York who seems to have invented some aspects of his biography.

  12. unclefrogy says

    it is not very surprising really that some of these people are turning into cooperating witnesses.
    They are to a man not courageous principled true believers in some kind of cause or morality they are just all small minded greedy people who will lie, cheat and steal when they think they can get away with it. The only things that ever keeps them “loyal” are money and fear present them with real inevitable unavoidable dire consequences one or more of them will crumble first That takes time I guess not like fiction.

  13. Akira MacKenzie says

    @ 10

    Yes, paper money is “worthless” because, unlike precious metals, it doesn’t have any “intrinsic” value. However, cryptos do have value because of the magical block chain.

  14. says

    They are to a man not courageous principled true believers in some kind of cause or morality

    Not a G. Gordon Liddy in the whole sorry bunch.

  15. unclefrogy says

    @14
    I once got into an argument with a “gold bug” who was harking back to Rome and railing about inflation and gold was stable and shit but he could not grasp that even in roman times prices could and did rise which is by definition inflation??

  16. quotetheunquote says

    @birgerjohansson #9-
    Ah, I loved that version! Jones was just brilliant as Mr. Toad, and I was surprised to find out (just now) that that was Steve Coogan (before he became well-known, at least on this side of The Pond) as Mole.
    Funny about the weasels, I can’t remember a thing about them. It’s almost as if Toad didn’t even need antagonists, being his own worst enemy…
    One small correction about the “Pythons” in this; Michael Palin and John Cleese did have small roles (as the Sun and Mr. Toad’s barrister, respectively) so it was almost a full-Python production.