Raw Story

Former President Donald Trump appears to be getting into the cryptocurrency business, and the New York Times reports that the "serial entrepreneurs" he has brought in to helm his foray have checkered pasts.

According to the Times, Trump crypto business partners Chase Herro and Zachary Folkman have been "leaving behind a trail of lawsuits and unpaid debt and taxes" in their assorted ventures.

Herro, for one, describes himself as a "dirtbag of the internet" and an ace salesman, whereas Folkman once ran a pickup artist advice firm called Date Hotter Girls.

Despite the shadiness of their business histories, the two men have earned endorsements from Donald Trump Jr., who said recently that, "You could put them in a boardroom at Goldman Sachs, and they're going to smoke the people in the room."

RELATED: Voter exhaustion is part of Trump's grift

Some experts on the cryptocurrency industry who spoke with the Times, however, expressed skepticism that the two men could "smoke" anyone.

Eswar Prasad, an economics professor at Cornell University, told the Times that Herro and Folkman "did not appear to have the technical or financial savvy to make the venture work."

And John Reed Stark, a former senior Securities and Exchange Commission official, told the Times that Herro and Folkman's pitch for their brand of cryptocurrency is "a bunch of nonsense, and a terrible opportunity for investors."

To back up this point, the Times noted that Herro and Folkman have "a history of jumping from project to project" and "together or separately, they have formed at least 17 companies, gravitating to the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, both tax havens."

Read the full report here.

An appeal brought by Elon Musk's X (formerly Twitter) social media platform over special counsel Jack Smith's request for former President Donald Trump's Twitter records without him being notified was denied Monday.

According to NBC News, the case is connected to Smith's investigation into Trump's alleged interference in the 2020 presidential election.

"X's lawyers said the Supreme Court should intervene so that prosecutors cannot take similar actions in the future without the person involved being made aware that their data is being handed over to the government," NBC News reported.

In January 2023, Smith's team got a warrant letting him seize records without notifying Trump or his representatives. Smith argued that evidence could be destroyed if the seizure was known about.

Musk's company resisted and was fined $350,000 before it complied.

Although Smith already had the evidence, Musk's appeal was designed to stop such action from happening again. X's lawyers argued that Trump did not have a chance to say that his records should be protected because of his role as president.

A bombshell court filing by special counsel Jack Smith includes a key detail that shows Donald Trump is playing right into his prosecutor's hands, a legal expert argued Monday.

In their weekly "Jack" podcast, analyst Allison Gill and former Justice Department Assistant Director Andy McCabe cited a piece of the filing in which Smith points to Trump's "disregard for the truth."

"Jack Smith has all this proof. It's cited in redacted footnotes in this motion," Gill said. "The evidence includes [Mike] Pence, as his running mate, telling him they lost. To 'take a bow.'" He goes on to tell Trump they could run again in 2024."

Read Also: Behind the legal tactics Trump is using to dodge justice for January 6

Smith also said in the filing that he "intends to show a huge pattern of false voter fraud claims," summarized Gill.

"The defendant and his co-conspirators also demonstrated their deliberate disregard for the truth and thus their knowledge of falsity when they repeatedly changed the numbers in their baseless fraud allegations from day to day," Smith wrote.

"At trial, the government will introduce several instances of this pattern in which the defendant and co-conspirators' lies were proved by the fact that they made up figures from whole cloth," the filing continued.

"It's about the totality of the evidence. The pattern, right?" said Gill.

McCabe wondered how Trump's defense can prepare for that when the case goes to trial.

"How do you defend against that? Do you just say, 'Oh, we were dumb. We didn't know. We were mistaken all six times,'" McCabe speculated.

"I had seen those numbers somewhere," Gill chimed in with her own mock defense. "But they kept changing the numbers."

"From 32,000 to 250,000. I mean, it's that blatant," said McCabe.

"Yeah, and he does it all the time," said Gill before slipping into her Trump impression: "'We have 3 million illegal immigrants. Ten million. Twenty-five million, 345,000 children.' Like, he makes these numbers up. 'I had 107,000 people at my rally in New Jersey.'"

"He just makes them up out of whole cloth and the fact pattern here is what is important," said Gill. "He has a history and a pattern of creating numbers out of whole cloth that Jack Smith says will prove that these allegations of fraud are baseless."

Listen to episode 97 of the podcast here.

A beloved building belonging to former President Donald Trump appears to be drowning in debt as problematic financial deadlines loom, according to a new financial analysis.

Trump's 63-story high rise at 40 Wall St. in New York City is currently worth $2 million less than the $118 million Trump owes on his $160 million mortgage — and its income continues to plummet, according to a recent Forbes report.

"The building is simply not earning enough money to cover the loan," Forbes reported. "Adding to the headaches: Trump, who doesn’t own the land on which the building sits, has just nine years left until his ground rent escalates dramatically."

Trump, with $566 million of legal liabilities and just $413 million in cash, will reportedly have to pay his $118 million debt to Ladder Capital by July.

But the building's operating income has nearly halved from about $21 million in 2018 to $12.8 million in 2023, according to Forbes.

"That leaves the Republican presidential candidate in a tough spot as the November election approaches, short on funds to save one of his prized possessions," according to Forbes.

ALSO READ: White supremacist ideas go mainstream: How the GOP is embracing a dangerous narrative

Should Trump clear this hurdle, he'll face another in 2023, Forbes reported.

That's when the German company that owns the land underneath 40 Wall St. is scheduled to implement a near sixfold increase to the cost of Trump's lease, according to the report.

"That shift would cause Trump’s ground rent to soar from $2.8 million in 2032 to $16.3 million the following year," Forbes reported.

"If the rest of 40 Wall Street’s financial picture remained the same as it is today, that would leave Trump with a negative $5 million in net operating income in 2033."

Trump's options in July 2025 will be to seek another loan, use his own money or declare bankruptcy on the property, according to Forbes.

The Forbes analysis argued option one would represent a struggle, option two would be fiscally uncomfortable and option three would make history.

"It would be his seventh bankruptcy," Forbes reported, "although it’d break new ground for him by being his first not involving a hotel."

Residents of a California county are growing increasingly concerned as the election draws near — and a pro-Trump conspiracy theorist has been left to run voting administration, according to a report.

Shasta County, a community in the far north of California that includes the city of Redding, has been inundated with extremists and conspiracy theorists vying for local control of the government for years. Their ability to actually govern is about to be put to the test in a big way, reported the Guardian.

For years, the elections office in Shasta County had been run by Cathy Darling Allen, the only Democrat in county office. But since 2020, despite having majority support from the county, she has been stalked and harassed by Trump supporters who believed the election was stolen, according to the report.

Some accused her of witchcraft in public meetings, tailed her to her car and bugged her office, the Guardian wrote. She resigned this year following a medical diagnosis of heart failure.

The obvious candidate to replace Darling Allen as election registrar ought to have been Joanna Francescut, noted the report. The assistant elections clerk in the county, Francescut "had worked in elections for more than 16 years, oversaw the office of the county clerk and registrar of voters for months after her boss went on leave, and was endorsed by elections officials and prominent area Republicans alike."

But the far-right county supervisor board "selected Tom Toller, a former prosecutor who had never worked in elections and vowed to change the office culture, improve public confidence, and 'clean up' voter rolls."

ALSO READ: Retired judge grades Trump's appointees —and finds some have 'lost their way'

Even conservatives in the county are raising alarms that this could lead to disruptions within the voting process. Robert Sid, a supporter of Francescut, said, “People are worried about it. If there was any hint of scandal [at the elections office], I’d be the first one down there. But there’s never been anything.”

This is the latest in a long string of far-right takeovers in Shasta County.

In 2022, Reverge Anselmo, a Connecticut film industry millionaire frustrated by Shasta County approving developments on a winery he owned there, bankrolled the successful recall of a moderate Republican county supervisor, tipping the majority of the county board toward extremists tied to local militias.

This new board proceeded to hire unqualified radicals to a number of key offices, the Guardian reported. In 2023, to run the local mosquito control district, they selected Jon Knight, a man present at the January 6 Capitol insurrection who has proclaimed that Japanese scientists bankrolled by Microsoft founder Bill Gates engineered mosquitoes into "flying syringes that will mass-vaccinate the populations."

Some voters in Shasta County, fed up with the chaos, have started to fight back. Earlier this year, voters ousted Supervisor Patrick Jones, a local gun store owner who has tried to abolish Dominion Voting Systems equipment based on 2020 election conspiracy theories.

Donald Trump and his family are setting the stage for post-election chaos with increasingly violent rhetoric, according to panelists on MSNBC's "Morning Joe."

The former president returned to Butler, Pennsylvania, to rally at the site of his first apparent assassination attempt, which he and his family baselessly blamed on Democrats, and host Joe Scarborough and his guests agreed that Trump was stoking the possibility of violence if he loses the election to Kamala Harris.

"I rarely agree with Lara Trump, but this election is about good and evil," said panelist Donny Deutsch. "She just has it reversed, where the good and evil is. The table is being set. The day after election day will be sobering, one way or the other. If Donald Trump wins, it's going to be extremely sobering. Even if Kamala Harris wins, it'll be sobering because the streets are going to be flooded. You see it, I mean, it's being set up. I don't think there's any gray areas here. For Trump to have gotten up there and say that the Democrats were responsible, when we know for a fact that the lone assassin voted for Trump before, his family had Trump signs in their backyard, is disgusting, vile and just dangerous."

ALSO READ: White supremacist ideas go mainstream: How the GOP is embracing a dangerous narrative

Trump was joined at the rally by tech mogul Elon Musk, who owns the social media platform X and increasingly spreads right-wing disinformation ahead of the election.

"Elon Musk I find to be like a Bond villain, one of the most dangerous characters to come along," Deutsch said. "The richest guy in the world that controls a major social media platform, to get up there and actually say Donald Trump is the one who is going to save democracy. The thought that that guy could be in Donald Trump's pocket is just terrifying."

Scarborough pointed out that it's not clear who 20-year-old Thomas Crooks, the gunman who fired a shot at Trump in July, actually voted for, although 58-year-old Ryan Routh, who has been charged with plotting another assassination attempt against him, did vote for the former president in 2016.

"I mixed them up," Deutsch said. "I'm sorry – my bad."

However, Scarborough agreed that Trump was priming his supporters to carry out violence on his behalf if he loses next month's election.

"What we have, though, here is, again, we have this vile political punchline that Donald Trump, vice president nominee [J.D. Vance], and his members were getting at," Scarborough said. "But the recurring theme about everything Donald Trump says, it's wrong. The lies we have seen over the past week, so many lies. Let's just focus in on three – lies about the 2020 election, Donald Trump continues to lie about it, J.D. Vance continues to lie about it, won't answer questions and then is chased down and says he did win. Then you have lies from so many other people, despite the fact that Republican officials in Georgia, the governor, the secretary of state, Republican officials in Pennsylvania, Republican officials in Michigan, Republican officials in Arizona, in all the swing states saying Donald Trump lost, yet, four years later, still undermining American democracy and telling all of his supporters, we got robbed."

"Then lying about dogs and cats being eaten by immigrants in Ohio, even when the governor, the Republican governor, the lifelong Republican governor, who was the Republican senator before and now is a two-term Republican governor, is saying that's a lie," Scarborough added, "and asking Vance, an Ohio senator, to stop lying about his own constituents and making their lives more dangerous. Then the lie about Democrats trying to kill Donald Trump, again, as a vile political punchline that all but invites Trump supporters to launch a civil war if he loses this campaign."

Watch the video below or at this link.

- YouTube youtu.be