Tag Archives: blackmail

Injustice in Our Justice System

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Author:  R. Alan Harrop, Ph.D   

There is an old saying that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. We are seeing glaring examples of this in our justice (maybe better our injustice system).    As any sensible person can see, President Trump is being singled out by the Democrat’s for persecution not prosecution. Their fear of him is palpable and they will do anything to stop him from running again. We must make sure they fail, or our constitutional republic will never recover. 

Some judges have become political pawns rather than fair arbiters of facts and truth.  The case in New York is a prime example. The judge issued a summary judgement  against President Trump before even hearing his defense. The judge is a lifelong Democrat as is the prosecutor Latisha James.  As in the other three cases against President Trump, this judge placed a “gag” order on President Trump that violates his first amendment right to free speech. The case in Atlanta about election interference also includes a gag order. There is no legal justification for preventing a defendant from commenting critically about the trial process or the motivation of the judge or prosecutor. The only legal justification for a gag order by a judge is based on 18USC1512 which is concerned with violence, threats and intimidation of witnesses. It says nothing about criticizing the judge, clerk or prosecutor. In today’s judicial system the outcome of a case often has more to do with the judge who tries the case than the facts presented. This is not blind justice. It is right out of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and Communist China. 

Another troubling development, as shown by the fraudulent cases against the former president, is the prosecution or threat of prosecution of his attorneys and staff.  Prosecutors in the Atlanta case are using what is called RICO tactics that were designed to be used against organized crime. What they do is threaten the defendant’s attorney with felony prosecution if he or she does not reveal supposedly privileged conversation with their clients. The enormous cost of defending oneself is often sufficient to bankrupt the attorney. This actually amounts to blackmail. Who can trust the truthfulness of a person who is threatened with jail time, professional ruin and financial destruction if they do not go along with the prosecutors and turn states evidence against their client who came to them, expecting  attorney/client privacy? This is not the justice that our Founding Fathers expected would occur in our country. 

So what do we do about this trend?  First, as stated above we must support the re-election of President Trump to show the leftist Democrats that these tactics will not work in this country. Second, we must get our state legislators to pass legislation that makes the communication between attorney and client  absolutely privileged and cannot be used by any prosecutor in a trial or lawsuit. It should be similar to the spousal rule that a wife cannot be forced or coerced into testifying against her husband and vice versa. In fact, an attorney should not be allowed to testify willingly against a client based on privileged communications. Third, there should be an independent  process that can review the actions of a judge to ensure that political motivations are not influencing the judge’s actions and decisions.   

Without these or similar actions to protect the integrity of the justice system, the citizen’s confidence that we can receive justice before the law will continue to be undermined. 

A Question That Should Have Been Asked Long Ago

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According to Michelle Clarier.com:

Michelle Celarier is an award-winning journalist who writes about the world of money and power for New York magazine, Fortune magazine, Institutional Investor, Worth and Slate. She has reported on hedge funds and the men who run them for over a decade, including a four-year stint as a tabloid scribe with the New York Post. She was previously the editor of Absolute Return and its successor Absolute Return + Alpha (AR), which won several magazine awards under her leadership.

Ms. Celarier recently posted an article at New York magazine about Jeffery Epstein.

The article notes:

Long before Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty to prostitution charges in Florida more than a decade ago, his fellow Palm Beach resident and hedge-fund manager Douglas Kass was intrigued by the local gossip about his neighbor.

“I’m hearing about the parties, hearing about a guy who’s throwing money around,” says Kass, president of Seabreeze Partners Management. While stories about young girls swarming Epstein’s waterfront mansion and the sex parties he hosted for the rich and powerful were the talk of the town, Kass was more focused on how this obscure person, rumored to be managing billions of dollars, had become so wealthy without much of a track record.

Kass was well-connected on Wall Street, where he’d worked for decades, so he began to ask around. “I went to my institutional brokers, to their trading desks and asked if they ever traded with him. I did it a few times until the date when he was arrested,” he recalls. “Not one institutional trading desk, primary or secondary, had ever traded with Epstein’s firm.”

When a reporter came to interview Kass about Bernie Madoff shortly before that firm blew up in the biggest Ponzi scheme ever, Kass told her, “There’s another guy who reminds me of Madoff that no one trades with.” That man was Jeffrey Epstein.

“How did he get the money?” Kass kept asking.

For decades, Epstein has been credulously described as a big-time hedge-fund manager and a billionaire, even though there’s not a lot of evidence that he is either. There appears little chance the public is going to get definitive answers anytime soon. In a July 11 letter to the New York federal judge overseeing Epstein’s sex-trafficking case, Epstein’s attorney offered to provide “sealed disclosures” about Epstein’s finances to determine the size of the bond he would need to post to secure his release from jail pending trial. His brother, Mark, and a friend even offered to chip in, if necessary.

The article notes some unusual things about Jeffery Epstein’s investment success:

To begin with, there is much skepticism among the hedgies Intelligencer spoke with that Epstein made the money he has — and he appears to have a lot, given a lavish portfolio of homes and private aircraft — as a traditional money manager. A fund manager who knows well how that kind of fortune is acquired notes, “It’s hard to make a billion dollars quietly.” Epstein never made a peep in the financial world.

Epstein was also missing another key element of a typical thriving hedge fund: investors. Kass couldn’t find any beyond Epstein’s one well-publicized client, retail magnate Les Wexner — nor could other players in the hedge-fund world who undertook similar snooping. “I don’t know anyone who’s ever invested in him; he’s never talked about by any of the allocators,” says one billionaire hedge-fund manager, referring to firms that distribute large pools money among various funds.

The article notes one very believable theory on how Jeffrey Epstein became a billionaire:

Given this puzzling set of data points, the hedge-fund managers we spoke to leaned toward the theory that Epstein was running a blackmail scheme under the cover of a hedge fund.

How such a scheme could hypothetically work has been laid out in detail in a thread on the anonymous Twitter feed of @quantian1. It’s worth reading in its entirety, but in summary it is a rough blueprint for how a devious aspiring hedge-fund manager could blackmail rich people into investing with him without raising too many flags.

Kass and former hedge-fund manager Whitney Tilson both emailed the thread around in investing circles and both quickly discovered that their colleagues found it quite convincing. “This actually sounds very plausible,” Tilson wrote in an email forwarding the thread to others.

“He somehow cajoled these guys to invest,” says Kass, speaking of hypothetical blackmailed investors who gave Epstein their money to invest, but managed to keep their names private.

The fact that Epstein’s fund is offshore in a tax haven — it is based in the U.S. Virgin Islands — and has a secret client list both add credence to the blackmail theory.

The article concludes:

In the 2015 filing, Giuffre claimed that Epstein “debriefed her” after she was forced into sexual encounters so that he could possess “intimate and potentially embarrassing information” to blackmail friends into parking their money with him. She also said photographic and video evidence existed — an assertion that looms especially large now that federal investigators have found a trove of images in Epstein’s home safe.

There are other theories about how Epstein made his money–a Ponzi scheme, work for the intelligence community, money laundering, and offshore tax schemes. Now that Epstein’s New York City residence has been cleared of evidence by authorities, it will be interesting to see who is involved in his financial dealings (and other activities).