The News You Need, Thursday, July 9th, 2026

FT's exposé of Palantir's politics, Chris Murphy on the Trump crime spree, Carney emerges as beacon of NATO leadership, Trump's mental breakdown in Ankara, Paxton exposed as vote fraudster.

Charles Kaiser and Scott Horton

Jul 09, 2026

∙ Paid

The Price of Palantir’s Politics

Financial Times

Scott: Nothing more perfectly exemplifies the tech bro attitude towards government and the markets than Peter Andreas Thiel’s Palantir. German-born and South Africa-raised, Thiel describes himself as a “libertarian,” but his libertarianism supposes huge, all-encompassing, highly authoritarian government in which he sits in the driver’s seat (though not to be viewed by the public, of course. His public facing avatar is JD Vance.) Palantir was built to realize this model. Its development was fueled at every stage along the way by taxpayer subventions, and it has a one-client model: the government (or more broadly, governments). It reinforces and develops this relationship the old-fashioned way, through influence peddling with the rich and powerful, and most significantly, through those who walk the corridors of power and whisper in the ear of decision-makers, and whose influence can be purchased for ready cash.

Peter Thiel is a platinum-card member of the Epstein class, as became apparent when disclosure of the DOJ Epstein files showed a broader public exactly how he goes about extending the Palantir government-client portfolio. In Britain, Lord Peter Mandelson, his Epstein colleague, played the central role, identifying the key points of weakness in the government decision-making process.

In a sweeping exposé charting Palantir from its origins to its current aspirations, the FT asks the right questions. Thiel believes his services and his political machinations will make him the indispensable partner, and potentially the master, of the government apparatus. And his dealings with Trump and elevation of JD Vance to the White House are the hallmarks of this strategy. But may such rapid success not also be planting the seeds of its own catastrophic failure? Can Palantir survive a bright, steady light that exposes its assorted hand puppets and techniques, its seedy business practices, and the palette of sordid and corrupt services it offers clients from Minneapolis, to Gaza and the Gulf?

The week after a US immigration enforcement officer killed an American mother of three on the streets of Minneapolis in January, Palantir’s head of “strategic engagement” posted on social media a slickly produced, AI-generated video set to a music track called “Clubbed to Death”.

In a series of flash frames, it featured the logo of the company — whose data intelligence platforms are used by the Trump administration to detain and deport migrants — in the midst of a cultist circle, alongside images of the grim reaper, a blood-soaked crucifix, all-seeing eyes and the mysterious slogan “Recon is watching you”.

Some Palantir staff, already concerned about their employer’s enthusiastic embrace of Donald Trump’s policies and its defence of Israel’s war in Gaza, were appalled. “The company had an absolute internal meltdown,” recalls one former employee, who watched the dispute erupt on an internal messaging platform. “You had people being like: ‘My customer is a children’s hospital — how am I supposed to explain this to them?’”

The video was taken down within days. But the episode encapsulated the deepening disquiet within the ranks of the $330bn company, which has become, if protests and political outrage are any measure, one of the most controversial tech groups in the world…

But while Palantir was becoming one of the biggest corporate winners of the Trump era, its success was increasingly inseparable from the controversial policies enabled by its technology, such as tracking undocumented migrants and drone warfare. As recently as 2020 the company “purposefully” declined to work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s deportation arm over the risk of disproportionate enforcement. That guardrail was now gone.

Even during the Biden administration, insiders including the head of Palantir’s privacy and civil liberties team, Courtney Bowman, warned about the risks of appearing ever more political. Executives later cautioned that Karp’s 2025 book The Technological Republic, which accused American allies of “self-righteousness”, would complicate its growth strategy in Europe and deepen the company’s dependency on the US.

Palantir and those associated with it increasingly picked a side in the culture wars and intervened more directly in politics. Joe Lonsdale, a Palantir co-founder turned Maga mega-donor who hosts fundraisers for vice-president JD Vance, called for the return of public hangings and suggested the company was founded to fight “commies”.

Karp publicly embraced the “disruption” caused by Doge, telling investors on an earnings call that “some people are going to get their heads cut off” due to the initiative. Shyam Sankar, the company’s chief technology officer, and architect of the forward-deployed engineer model, joined the US Army reserves and praised Trump as “a founder who can . . . lead us to a new golden age”. (Sankar was also given oversight of Palantir’s US government business.)

A comprehensive summary of the FT Palantir exposé can be viewed in this short documentary, released by the FT this morning.

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Trump Corruption Watch

Five Hundred Days of Plunder

Chris Murphy

Charles: Last month Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy took the Senate floor for half an hour to deliver a superb summary of the innumerable high crimes and misdemeanors committed during the first 18 months of the second Trump presidency:

Over the last year and a half, our president, Donald Trump, has turned the White House into a 24/7 corruption operation. This is a national crisis, and we should start acting like it. The president’s goal is to engage in so much corruption, so much self-enrichment, to hand out so many favors to his friends, his family, and his political allies, that it just becomes the pitter patter of rain. It’s normal. It’s constant. It’s neverending. Trump’s bet is that if there is a new story of corruption, of self-dealing every few days, that the press will stop covering it, or the public will just stop paying attention.

This moment is exceptional. It’s a one of one moment, and if it becomes normal, if people stop being outraged at what he is doing to enrich himself, then I fear there is no going back. The White House will just become a place to get rich.

So, I think it’s time to pull back and see the full picture - to not view this as just one isolated scandal after another, every single one popping up each week or every few days, but to understand the full scope of the illegality.”

Most of the mainstream press immediately proved Murphy’s point about corruption fatigue by completely ignoring his speech.

Here are a few of the bigger scandals he enumerated, any of which would have easily destroyed any of Trump’s predecessors.

Senator Chris Murphy

On April 7th, 2025, the current acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, issues a memo ordering the termination of several Biden-era DOJ investigations into crypto companies. Now, here’s the problem: the then Deputy Attorney General is a major investor in crypto companies, and he works for a president who is a major player in the crypto industry, but DOJ just drops these investigations, signals that the Department of Justice is no longer going to hold crypto companies accountable, but Blanche owns major investments in crypto stocks. The president is one of the biggest players in the industry. Blanche doesn’t actually stop there. He eliminates the entire enforcement team at DOJ dedicated to rooting out crypto-related fraud and money-laundering schemes. This is a crypto investor, who works for a President who owns crypto companies, shutting down the unit at DOJ that holds this industry accountable.
On May 27, Donald Trump pardons a man called Paul Walczak. This is a really bad guy. He stole millions of dollars from the nurses and healthcare aides at the nursing home he owned and he used the cash he stole from his employees to buy a $2 million yacht. He got convicted. He went to jail for fraud. BUT…his mother paid $1 million to buy a face to face meeting with Trump, and 3 weeks after that paid audience, her son was given a full and unconditional pardon that went SO FAR as to relieve him of any duty to repay the $4.4 million he stole from his employees.
Stephen Miller is more than just the architect of the administration’s hardline immigration policies: He has a personal financial stake in them. For instance, Miller owns up to $250,000 in Palantir stock, and just a month before Miller’s holdings became public, ICE announced that it was awarding a $30 MILLION contract to…you guessed it…Palantir! To provide “real time” surveillance information to ICE officers.

And you’ll be shocked to hear this. There was no competitive bidding process for that contract.

This may be the most corrupt thing that Trump is doing. He and his family own a crypto company that issues several crypto coins. There’s no disclosure on who is buying those coins. The president promotes them, invites people to official events to purchase the coin. On September 18th, though, we come to find out that Trump made $57 million selling crypto tokens to entities associated with the regimes in North Korea, Iran, and Russia - extraordinary investments being made by entities that are tied in with North Korea, Iran, and Russia into Trump’s crypto companies. It begs the question as we are currently debating an Iran deal that basically exists on Iran’s terms, why was there a flood of money from Iranian regime-backed entities into the Trump crypto companies? Why were they putting that investment in? What did they expect to get from the president? We’ve never, ever before had this exist. We’ve never had a backdoor mechanism by which foreign governments could just shovel money into the pocket of the president. It exists because of the Trumps, Trump’s memecoin and his stablecoin.

Trump closes the books on a criminal F.B.I. inquiry into one of his key advisors – Tom Homan. This is his border czar. The FBI had caught Tom Homan red handed engaging in naked corruption - undercover agents had handed him 50,000 dollars in cash in a bag and he agreed to give them government contracts. This was on video! This is the border czar getting a bag of cash, in exchange for contracts, on video.

But the administration, on September 20 [23], just makes the investigation go away because that kind of bribery, that kind of naked graft, is ok in this White House

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