Trump dropped a dime on Epstein way back when

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m referring to this:

Newly unsealed Department of Justice documents reveal that in July 2006, then businessman Donald Trump was one of the first to call police to warn them about sex predator Jeffrey Epstein.

The documents include a previously unreported 2019 FBI interview summary with former Palm Beach police chief Michael Reiter. Trump had contacted the department shortly after reports of Epstein’s criminal sex investigation became public.

The future president contacted Reiter to express relief that authorities were finally acting, suggesting his associates in New York had described Epstein’s behaviors as “disgusting,” and advised investigators to focus on Ghislaine Maxwell, whom he described as “evil.”

The Epstein document dump isn’t working out quite as the left had hoped.

Nor is there evidence of a pedophile sex ring operated by Epstein, or videos of the perps, or blackmail.

Trump, corruption, crypto, and the UAE

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Bauxite” has a question:

Barry Meislin- Nah. If [the Democrats are] smart they’ll impeach [Trump] for this:

The UAE Quietly Poured a Half-Billion Dollars into Trump’s Crypto Venture Four Days Before Inauguration

Of course that means that they’ll probably impeach him for ICE or something stupid and political.

Anyway, I’m curious to know what the regulars think of Trump’s crypto business.

Here’s my response.

Remember when Trump and his family were debanked, during the time that they were also being attacked through lawfare? The left was trying to destroy their lives, including taking away their wealth.

The Trumps are on record as saying they got into crypto because they realized their money wasn’t safe in the banking system. See this:

“Every major banking institution, the people that, two weeks before we were debanked, we could’ve called and gotten a loan in five seconds. They disappeared. We were left high and dry,” he said.

“Basically, during the first term, certainly after the…let’s call it January 6… all the nonsense, it got significantly worse,” he said …

“We weren’t even early crypto guys, but we figured, if they can debank the Trump Organization, if they can debank us, who can’t they go after? And more importantly, who won’t they go after?” he continued.

Trump Jr. said that instead of going home and “go cry in a corner,” they decided to launch World Liberty Financial, which he described as the future of banking.

Read the whole article. One of the most interesting aspects of it is that, although it was written in the summer of 2025 when the facts of J6 were well known, it repeats these lies, including calling the mob on J6 “deadly”:

Five people, including one police officer, died and several more were injured when the pro-Trump mob breached the Capitol building.

The police officer, Sicknick, didn’t “die when the pro-Trump mob breached the Capitol building.” I’ve written many times about what really happened. Another was killed by the deadly Capitol Police, Of the other three, two died of heart attacks and one of those wasn’t ever at the Capitol but merely at the earlier rally. The third person of those three who died, Rosanne Boyland, was reported variously to have been beaten to death by police, to have been trampled in the crowd, and on autopsy to have died of an overdose. So the article is purposely misleading; what else is new?

As for the article you linked, about the UAE – I’m not at all in favor of that sort of thing. At the very least, it gives the appearance of corruption and certainly might be true corruption. However, I also agree with the writer of this comment at the article:

What [Andrew C. McCarthy, the piece’s author] fails to understand is the potential behind WLF. It very well could become the first crypto bank, which is more and more likely to be the future of currency. I’d also add that when you have lots of money to throw around…you throw it around. Maybe it’s for favor later or just to perhaps get lucky and make more money off the next big thing. There are also a lot of assumptions in this piece. For instance, the not naming of the UAE reps. on the board is supposedly for nefarious reasons – to hide them. OR, in typical Trump style, he wants his name on almost everything and doesn’t want others to get the credit. While I say all this, aren’t most big business and political dealings suspect at best? I feel like this is just how the world works these days…

And also this one:

It’s nice to have a leader who wants us to be proud of our country rather than ashamed of our past. I’m not at all surprised that he’s acting as one of the elite. He’s been one of the elite his entire life. He joins the ranks of Pelosi, Omar, Biden (and pretty much every other politician) in enriching himself through his position.

The UAE is actually one of the best of the Arab countries in terms of reforming the hatred it used to teach, by the way. Also, here’s a not-all-that-bad article in, of all places the Guardian. Excerpt:

Documents seen by the Journal indicate that Tahnoon paid the Trump family and entities affiliated with Steve Witkoff, co-founder of World Liberty and Trump’s envoy to the Middle East, half of the investment up front, with $187m going to Trump entities, and $31m going to Witkoff’s. The payment came from Aryam Investment, a Tahnoon-backed company.

A White House official said the president was “not involved in running his businesses and has turned them over to his children, so these business endeavors do not involve him”.

Claims that the president had breached the constitution’s federal emoluments clause, designed to safeguard against corruption, are “bogus and irrelevant”, the official argued. “Mere appearances of business deals with which he has no involvement plainly cannot violate the Emoluments clause.”

In a statement, the White House counsel, David Warrington, added: “President Trump performs his constitutional duties in an ethically sound manner and to suggest so otherwise is either ill-informed or malicious.”

Government ethics experts have long been alarmed over the way that Trump and his family structured his companies before he started his second term. Typically, a president puts his assets into a blind trust overseen by an independent third party. But Trump handed over control to two of his sons, Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump.

While it’s no different from how Trump structured his companies during his first term, Trump spent the years after he left the White House expanding his family business. Now Trump entities are dabbling in social media, streaming platforms, nuclear fusion, financial services and, through World Liberty, crypto. …

The Guardian has not identified evidence of the president explicitly offering the chip exports in exchange for the investment in his family’s crypto venture.

Richard Briffault, a law professor at Columbia, said while there was no direct allegation of a quid pro quo, “the situation of a major investment by a foreign power in a major company that the president has a major stake in, that creates a structural conflict of interest”.

“The concern is that we can never be sure why certain decisions are being made,” Briffault said. When Trump allowed the UAE to import AI chips, “it could have been a shrewd geopolitical move, or it could have been influenced by the fact that the country has a major investment in a Trump family business. We just can’t know for sure.”

Indeed. That’s why I believe the entire Trump family should have avoided even the appearance of corruption.

But it surprises me not at all that they have plunged into it. It’s one of the things I don’t like about Trump; there are others. But they are overshadowed by how much worse the Democrats are for the country (and the world) as a whole.

Appeals Court rules on the detention of illegal aliens without bond

The New Neo Posted on by

The Trump administration has scored this legal victory:

:A decision on Friday by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, if sustained by the Supreme Court, will allow the Trump Administration to detain pending removal as many illegal aliens arrested by DHS as it has the physical capacity to hold. Currently that capacity is only around 65,000. But DHS is building more detention facilities, and the expectation is to increase that number to 200,000 by the end of 2026.

Until Friday evening, the effort by the Trump administration to engage in “mass removals” of illegal aliens — a Trump campaign promise — has suffered from two primary hampering factors: 1 ) limited bed space in detention facilities that created a bottleneck; and 2) a practice in place for nearly 30 years that illegal aliens arrested in the interior of the country were almost always released back to their lives while being given a Notice to Appear to initiate removal proceedings against them at some time in the future.

A General Accounting Office Report in December 2024 — at the end of the Biden Administration and based on data from the Biden DOJ’s “Executive Office for Immigration Review” (EOIR) — disclosed that 34% of all removal proceedings ended with an “in absentia” removal orders from 2016 to 2023, meaning the illegal alien failed to appear. This meant to carry out the removal, the illegal alien had to be located and arrested a second time.

Further, as of July 2024, there was a backlog of 3.5 million removal cases pending before immigration judges — almost entirely as a result of more than three years of “Open Border” policies during the Biden Administration.

Now the Fifth Circuit has said it’s not a requirement to send them back to the community while waiting deportation. The decision was 2-1.

If you’re interested in the court’s reasoning, please see the opinion.

Basically, the idea is that the government has the authority to do this under statute, even if many previous governments declined to do it. The dissenting judge noted that, “some of the people detained are ‘the spouses, mothers, fathers, and grandparents of American citizens.'” For a substantial portion of that group, that would almost certainly be because their American-citizen children and grandchildren were born here after the parents or grandparents had entered illegally. If Congress wants to exempt the older generations and grandfather (literally) them in to citizenship or amnesty, all Congress has to do is pass a law to that effect.

I assume this ruling will ultimately be appealed to SCOTUS.

The traffic counter …

The New Neo Posted on by

… seems to be back to normal, now that I’ve installed the updated code.

For those of you who didn’t see the original post on the subject and don’t know what I’m talking about, please go here.

And once again I want to thank everyone who posted a comment in that thread. It’s heartwarming, comforting, and inspiring to hear from you.

The not-so-Super-bowl

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m no football fan, but even I could tell that last night’s Superbowl game was more boring than usual. And for Patriots’ fans, it was more painful and even embarrassing.

I also watched some of the halftime “entertainment,” curious about Bad Bunny. I didn’t expect to like it, and I didn’t – it’s very rare for me to like current popular (?) music. But the degree of tuneless awfulness of this particular selection was nevertheless surprising.

As for the Spanish – I can understand a fair amount of Spanish, but this sounded garbled. Turns out that was a plus, because apparently the lyrics often went like this (a sample) when translated:

Hell, what safaera
You have a f**king amazing a*s
Anything that gets you breaking the highway
Move it, move it, move it, move it

More translations can be found here, if you care to see them. Let’s just say that the one I offered above is the mildest by far. I didn’t check to see if they’re authentic – but if they are, ugh.

Bad Bunny is from Puerto Rico and his other theme is that “America” means not the US but the two continents, north and south. Apparently the NFL is trying to reach out to Latin American audiences, and Bad Bunny is very popular in that neck of the woods, whereas football (American style) is not. Thus, the Bad Bunny halftime.

The incomparable Baryshnikov

The New Neo Posted on by

He had it all – perfect technique combined with utter ease and freedom of movement, musicality, “attack,” charm, sex appeal, and acting ability:

I was fortunate enough to see him dance many many times in person.

I also once stood next to him for about ten seconds. We were both in flat ballet slippers, and I have to say that although his height has been variously reported as 5’5″ or 5’6″, I suspect he might actually be more like 5’4″ because he seemed to be exactly my height.

No matter. The man is a giant.

Another temporary injunction is removed

The New Neo Posted on by

See this:

The Trump administration has been racking up some solid wins before the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals of late. Another was added to the list on Friday as the appellate court vacated a District Court preliminary injunction regarding the administration’s ban on DEIA initiatives. …

… [T]he matter is remanded back to the District Court for further proceedings consistent with the 4th Circuit’s opinion. As with so many of these rulings, this is not the end of the road. The plaintiffs may decide to seek rehearing en banc and/or appeal today’s decision. And even if they do not, the case may still proceed on the merits in the District Court (at least as to the latter two provisions). Still, as they say, a win’s a win. And this is a solid win for the administration.

To me, the most interesting thing about this ruling is that two of the three judges who made the decision were appointed by Obama.

Revisiting Georgia, November 2020

The New Neo Posted on by

The left has tried to bury the controversy, but it’s reared up again.

For example:

The Fulton County Report of Investigation into the 2020 General Election outlines numerous allegations of election irregularities, including the unauthorized ordering of over one million absentee ballots, failure to perform mandatory signature verification, and discrepancies in ballot counts. It details how Fulton County’s election processes violated Georgia law, leading to potential fraud and manipulation of election results. The report raises serious concerns about the integrity of the election, citing missing records, unauthorized access to election systems, and the counting of ballots without proper verification.

It’s long; I haven’t read it. But that summary is disturbing. And here’s a tweet that claims to show a Grok summary of the document’s ten main points:

1. Systems reprogrammed before election, causing failures.
2. Untested systems used for advance voting.
3. Over 1M extra absentee ballots ordered without stubs.
4. Absentee signature verification neglected.
5. 35 tabulator memory cards unlawfully swapped.
6. Security seals cut, fraudulent returns printed.
7. 20,713 unaccounted ballots from advance tabulators.
8. Election records destroyed or not preserved.
9. Absentee ballot image files removed.
10. Qualified write-in votes discarded.

Are these allegations verified, and by whom? It’s hard to get the facts, and the MSM is concerned mainly with the FBI seizure of related documents.

From Roger Kimball:

The FBI has a lot of sifting and sorting to accomplish in the weeks and months ahead. An ongoing court case claims that 150,000 mail-in ballots in Fulton County were suspicious (my cautious word for “fake”) because they weren’t creased and didn’t look like they were marked by hand. Officially, Sleepy Joe was the first Democrat to gain more than 70 percent of the vote in Fulton since Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1944. The FBI analysis of mail-in ballots might show him to be as popular in Fulton as Castro was in Cuba or Stalin was in the Soviet Union.

There are also hard drives to be inspected and electronic voting machines to be vetted. Remember the allegations that voting machines made by Dominion Voting Systems had been hacked? Dominion (now “Liberty Vote”) collected some $787 million in damages from Fox News over the story. It will be interesting to see what sort of follow-up there is to those allegations.

Meanwhile, the Democrats have not been idle. New York Representative Dan Goldman has filed an amendment to prevent the Trump administration from investigating election records, ballot boxes, and voting machines across the country. Yes, really.

I don’t know whether anything will come of this. I do know that without election security that people can trust, there will always be significant doubt. And I also know that the legal system is inadequate to address allegations of election fraud after the fact, which gives extra motivation to those who would commit such fraud.

Benghazi: “Find them and bring them to justice” said Hillary many years ago

The New Neo Posted on by

You may remember Hillary as saying, about the Benghazi killings of four Americans, “What difference, at this point, does it make?” It was infuriating. The context was that she was shrugging off (and misrepresenting) the details, including the motives of the perps, as though it didn’t matter, and supposedly focusing on future prevention. But of course it mattered. If you want to prevent something you have to know who did it and why.

Hillary followed it with the statement that the perps needed to be found and brought to justice. Here’s her testimony;

The Trump administration decided to do just that: find them and bring them to justice, all these years later. That is, at least one of them has been apprehended:

Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Friday that Zubayr Al-Bakoush was flown to the United States overnight and will face federal charges tied to arson, murder, and terrorism for his alleged role in the assault that killed four Americans. …

“We will prosecute this alleged terrorist to the fullest extent of the law,” she said, adding that the message is simple: time does not erase accountability.

Pirro echoed that warning, stressing that the case is not over simply because years have passed. “The Benghazi saga was a painful one for Americans. It has stayed with all of us,” she said. “And let me be very clear, there are more of them out there.” Pirro said she and Patel have remained in contact with the families of the four Americans killed and vowed that investigators will continue hunting down those still at large. “Time will not stop us from going after these predators, no matter how long it takes,” she said. “We owe that to the families who suffered horrific pain at the hands of these violent terrorists.”