Trump Is More Dangerous Than Butch Cassidy in Bolivia / David Corn Is Russia’s Newest Bot / The Never-Ending Kushner Grift / The Endless Epstein Cover-Up / Hegseth Makes Two Tech Bros (Plus Gingrich!) His Warfare Visionaries
Trump Orders Arrest of Bolivia’s Attorney General and Lead Prosecutor, Bolivia Does as Demanded
Bloomberg / El Diario
Scott: So what, exactly, is Donald Trump up to in Latin America? Today he has furnished an excellent demonstration of his intention to reduce the nations of Latin America to neocolonial dependencies. And, as ever, a “war on drug lords” is the pretext. Does this really have anything to do with drug lords? Journalists in Bolivia are more than merely skeptical.
Police have arrested Bolivia’s attorney general, Roger Mariaca, and the chief prosecutor in Santa Cruz, Alberto Zeballos, based on charges made by the Trump administration that they were involved with drug lords. This is reported in US media. But what isn’t reported is amazing.
Trump has launched an operation named MAGA SUR and placed it under the direction of his campaign chief, Brad Parscale. A lawyer who works for Argentine autocrat Javier Milei named Fernando Cerimedo is Parscale’s partner in the operation. Cerimedo was romantically entangled with Bolivian lawyer Nadia Beller, but thought she was talking too freely about MAGA SUR. So he hired a hit man to liquidate her. The assassin shot Beller three times, but she survived and went to the police, and in turn to the chief prosecutor of Santa Cruz, who concluded evidence was sufficient to open a criminal case against Cerimedo. Search warrants issued in connection with the probe led to discovery and the subsequent leaking to the public of a large cache of documents involving the Trump White House, Parscale, Cerimedo and their various plots and schemes all across Latin America. As today’s actions were going down, prosecutors disclosed to the press a series of further documents showing the criminal accused, Cerimedo, meeting and traveling with Trump’s son, Don Trump Jr, who has apparently taken a role in the MAGA SUR operations. Trump has been pressing the Bolivian government to shut down the whole criminal investigation and remove the prosecutors in charge. So he had the US Justice Department produce criminal accusations against both, insisting that all the embarrassing disclosures they made were simply at the behest of “drug lords.” And the US is, of course, battling “drug lords.”
Is there any validity to these accusations? They are just as likely to be accurate as the US Justice Department’s claims that an Olympic athlete was sabotaging the reflecting pool. As a retired senior DEA officer told me “throughout the history of our war against drug lords in Latin America, the US has consistently allied itself with other drug lords. You might think that’s counterproductive. You’d be right.”
Bolivia arrested Attorney General Roger Mariaca in an operation Wednesday night after the US government accused him of corruption.
Interior Minister Marco Antonio Oviedo said early Thursday that police dismantled a criminal organization embedded in the public prosecutor’s office that aimed to protect and encourage drug trafficking. A total of 14 people were arrested, including four senior officials from Mariaca’s office, the minister added. Santa Cruz Department Prosecutor Alberto Zeballos was also among those held.
Mariaca, who was named to the post during the administration of Bolivia’s left-wing former president, Luis Arce, is under investigation for criminal organization, money laundering and drug trafficking, Oviedo said.
The crackdown by President Rodrigo Paz’s government on officials labeled by the US as corrupt drew immediate praise from Washington. The Trump administration stands firmly with Paz and “Bolivia’s democratically elected government as it takes bold and decisive actions to combat narco-trafficking, systemic corruption and transnational organized crime,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a post on X.
Earlier this week, the US State Department revoked the visas of 17 Latin American officials, including judges and prosecutors, as well as other individuals it accused of corruption. Mariaca was one of those targeted for allegedly accepting bribes to facilitate drug trafficking.
The attorney general denied the US allegations at the time and said they were part of an attempt to influence the prosecutor’s office in cases involving outside interests, including the investigation into Fernando Cerimedo. Known as “MAGA’s man” in Latin America, Cerimedo served as an adviser to Paz and is at the center of an alleged assassination plot that’s roiling politics in Bolivia and across the region given the strategist’s ties to other right-wing leaders, including Argentine President Javier Milei and Jair Bolsanaro in Brazil.
Russian Bots Make David Corn Part of Their Disinformation Machine
Charles: The great David Corn, long time Washington Bureau Chief for Mother Jones, has just published a very important book: How Russia Won: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Fight for America.
So far the mainstream has mostly ignored it, which is outrageous.
You can tell how accurate the book is by the way the Russians have reacted to it: they have rewarded Corn by making him the star of its latest disinformation campaign.
Corn’s book summarizes the evidence that proves what those of us who have studied the literature have recognized for years: all the stories about Russian interference with American elections and collaboration with Trump and his minions are absolutely true.
Here’s Corn’s summary of his findings from an interview he did with Al Leston of Reveal, the investigative radio show heard by more than 1 million people each week on more than 500 public radio stations”
There have been many investigations of what happened in 2016. We know that Putin attacked by having his operatives hack Democrats and leak embarrassing material that impeded the Clinton campaign, and that throughout that campaign, Donald Trump denied this was happening. So in essence, he aided and abetted a Russian attack on American democracy. And for the last decade, he has continued to deny and say that there was no Russian attack. But key point here is that it didn’t stop then. It didn’t stop in 2016. As my book shows, in 2020 and 2024 and in the 2018 midterms, Russian intelligence ran disinformation and influence operations to affect the American elections and almost always to benefit Donald Trump. So what we have here is not a one-off in 2016. We have a continuous campaign, sort of a twilight war, gray zone warfare, the experts call it, that Putin has been waging against the United States in all this time, and Donald Trump and Republicans and others have failed to recognize it and they have helped by continuing to deny that anything of the sort is happening.
The Russians have redoubled their efforts to try to help the Republicans retain control of Congress in the currentelection cycle by inventing new libels about every Democratic Senate candidate in a swing state. Corn reported covert operatives were “posting fake videos that appeared to be CNN spots with damaging information on Democratic senatorial candidates. James Talarico (Texas) “despises” Hasidic Jews because they don’t allow gender affirmation treatment. Sherrod Brown (Ohio) owns a business that has “caused the bee population in Ohio to decline by a factor of nine.” Jon Ossoff (Georgia) has “called for a complete halt to military aid to Israel and for all resources to be redirected to Ukraine.”
David Corn
But then Corn discovered the Russians were just getting started:
On Friday, @antibot4navalny informed me that Matryoshka—through an obvious bot account on X—had posted a purported CNN video of me promoting a new book. But the book isn’t How Russia Won. It’s supposedly called Enemies of Democracy for Dummies, and the video declared, “The book will feature over 300 stories related to crimes committed by members of the Democratic Party.”
This counterfeit video displayed the text of a made-up quote from me: “Apparently, there’s a fissure somewhere in the US that leads straight to hell; otherwise, I don’t understand where all these devils from the Democratic Party are coming from.” That’s quite the analysis. The video noted that “information from David Corn’s book will further damage the Democrats’ reputation and standing ahead of the elections.”
So after writing a book about Putin’s disinformation efforts and noting they posed a threat to the current elections, I am being used by a Russian disinformation network to influence the midterms in Trump’s favor. This is a bizarre snake-eating-its-tail situation.
Trump Corruption Watch
Jared Kushner, Merchant of Death: Americans Get a First Glimpse at Kushner’s Commercial Relationship with Israel
CNN
Scott: As Le Monde observes today, Trump’s “diplomacy of family and friends” rarely assigns any role to defined national interests which are the subject matter of foreign relations theory. Rather it’s a donnybrook—a rush to obtain profits and rewards from foreign governments and businesses in exchange for delivering some US benefit or service. Jared Kushner is a perfect demonstration of how all this works. As we know, Kushner is Trump’s personal representative in every conflict that matters. And he simultaneously is the recipient of huge sums from Saudi Arabia (almost certainly a large multiple of the $2.2bn we’ve heard about) and understands his role to be that of an advocate for Israel and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Today for the first time, CNN has sketched out a bit of what his relationship with Israel means in strict terms of dollars and cents. All of this reflects a sweeping betrayal of confidence and trust, and certainly entails the breach of a long list of criminal statutes. But Kushner can count on Todd Blanche to insure the law is not upheld or enforced.
At the same time Jared Kushner has acted as a key negotiator in the war in Gaza, his private equity company, Affinity Partners, has held the largest stake in an Israeli firm backing businesses involved in Israel’s military campaigns, a CNN investigation has found.
Kushner has skirted deeper scrutiny of this potential conflict of interest by acting as a volunteer envoy, rather than accepting a government job that would require him to disclose his finances.
In the process, Kushner has carved out an unprecedented dual role under the Trump administration – one that blends lucrative business and high-stakes politics amid a devastating war.
CNN used Israeli financial transparency laws to trace some of the military-linked investments of Phoenix Financial, a Tel Aviv-based firm that Kushner’s investment group doubled its stake in last year, shortly before Donald Trump returned to the Oval Office. Kushner later described Phoenix as Affinity’s “best investment.”
