Wednesday, April 23, 2025

Today, two under-the-radar stories that should get far more attention.

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Crypto and Corruption

Molly White writes a newsletter on the crypto industry, which is also available as a podcast, that is well worth your time. In this edition, she recounts the Trump family's crypto ventures, which amount to corruption on a scale likely never before seen in American politics. Among other things, Trump received many millions of dollars from the crypto industry--in one instance he seems to have just been given an ownership stake in a crypto business for no legitimate reason--and he has terminated prosecutions and investigations of those who gave him money. Read the whole thing (and subscribe!), but here's a good summary by Molly herself:

The scope of the Trump family’s cryptocurrency conflicts illustrates a degree of corruption that makes the emoluments concerns of Trump’s first term seem quaint by comparison. Through his crypto ventures, Trump has created multiple avenues for personal enrichment: direct profits from cryptocurrency holdings and businesses, regulatory changes that boost his investments, potential insider trading, and opportunities for outside interests to buy favor through crypto “investments” that would be prohibited as campaign contributions. His dismantling of cryptocurrency oversight leaves consumers vulnerable to fraud and manipulation, while ensuring that neither he nor his benefactors will face meaningful scrutiny.

Bad DOGE

I'd been meaning to share this NPR story on the evidence that DOGE* is taking large amounts of highly confidential data from the NLRB for which they seem to have no legitimate use. It's not totally clear what's going on, but the possibilities include DOGE stealing data for private use, DOGE stealing data as part of a foreign intelligence operation, and DOGE stealing data for private use but then getting hacked by a foreign intelligence operation.

I haven't had time to write it up, but fortunately Heather Cox Richardson is top of things. She summarizes as follows:

On April 15, Jenna McLaughlin of NPR reported on an official whistleblower disclosure that as soon as members of the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) arrived at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), they appeared to be hacking into secure data. While they claimed to be looking for places to cut costs, the behavior of the DOGE team suggested something else was going on. They demanded the highest level of access, tried to hide their activities in the system, turned off monitoring tools, and then manually deleted the record of their tracks, all behaviors that cybersecurity experts told McLaughlin sounded like “what criminal or state-sponsored hackers might do.”

Staffers noticed that an IP address in Russia was trying to log in to the system using a newly created DOGE account with correct username and password, and later saw that a large amount of sensitive data was leaving the agency. Cybersecurity experts identified that spike as a sign of a breach in the system, creating the potential for that data to be sold, stolen, or used to hurt companies, while the head of DOGE himself could use the information for his own businesses. “All of this is alarming," Russ Handorf, who worked in cybersecurity for the FBI, told McLaughlin. "If this was a publicly traded company, I would have to report this [breach] to the Securities and Exchange Commission.” When the whistleblower brought his concerns to someone at NLRB, he received threats.

“If he didn’t know the backstory, any [chief information security officer] worth his salt would look at network activity like this and assume it’s a nation-state attack from China or Russia,” Jake Braun, former acting principal deputy national cyber director at the White House, told McLaughlin.

* * *

Sharon Block, the executive director of Harvard Law School's Center for Labor and a Just Economy and a former NLRB board member, told McLaughlin: “There is nothing that I can see about what DOGE is doing that follows any of the standard procedures for how you do an audit that has integrity and that's meaningful and will actually produce results that serve the normal auditing function, which is to look for fraud, waste and abuse…. The mismatch between what they're doing and the established, professional way to do what they say they're doing...that just kind of gives away the store, that they are not actually about finding more efficient ways for the government to operate.”

Those threats to the whistleblower include "someone 'physically taping a threatening note' to his door that included sensitive personal information and overhead photos of him walking his dog that appeared to be taken with a drone."

FN* I will never not be mad to have to say or write "DOGE."

More like Woke Rogan?

On due process, Joe Rogan gets it. I think this issue has legs. Worth a watch/listen.

Miscellanea

Pope Francis has shuffled off this mortal coil. In his meditations and prayers on Good Friday, he stated "Today’s builders of Babel tell us that there is no room for losers, and that those who fall along the way are losers. Theirs is the construction site of Hell." Wonder what that is about.

A thought I've had from time to time: "The purpose of a system is what it does, and the purpose of the Democratic Party is to absorb and dissipate the political energy of the majority of Americans who desperately need positive social change."