BY DAN FRIEDMAN
excerpts:
Before Guo Wengui was charged in a massive fraud scheme, his followers commissioned Karoline Leavitt to byline fawning op-eds.Leavitt, an aide in the first Trump administration who ran unsuccessfully for Congress in New Hampshire in 2022, is stepping into a job previously held by officials with more substantial resumes, some with backgrounds in serious journalism. But Trump’s selection of Leavitt, who said recently that she is prepared to take on a “hostile media,” suggests his preference for messengers who engage in performative combat with journalists. In the United States, Guo is perhaps best known for bankrolling Steve Bannon. Years earlier, he’d made a fortune as a real-estate developer in China. He fled that country in 2014 to avoid pending criminal charges there and settled in a Manhattan penthouse. Beginning in 2017, he fashioned himself as a prominent critic of the Chinese Communist Party. He posted videos full of mostly uncorroborated allegations of Chinese government corruption that won him a large following in the Chinese diaspora. After partnering with Bannon that year, Guo launched Chinese language news outlets, nonprofits, and other organizations. He used those groups to promote himself, spread disinformation about Covid and other topics, and, in 2020, to push false claims aimed at helping reelect Trump.
Leavitt’s articles praising Guo appeared shortly before his March 15, 2023, arrest on fraud charges. Prosecutors said that Guo stole investments made by people who believed he would use the funds as part of an effort to oust the Chinese Communist Party. Instead he used them for items including a $25 million mansion, $1 million worth of chandeliers, $978,000 of rugs, a $3.5 million Ferrari, and two $36,000 mattresses. A Manhattan jury convicted Guo in July 2024 on nine counts, including racketeering conspiracy and securities fraud. Guo’s claim to be “a key Chinese freedom fighter,” the verdict suggested, was part of a massive con.
Asked if she stood by her cheerleading for Guo, Leavitt did not respond.
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BY DAVID CORN
MUST READ!
excerpts:
In the middle of the Thanksgiving holiday stretch, Donald Trump announced what might be his most extreme and controversial appointment yet: Kash Patel for FBI director. There are many reasons why this decision is outrageous. Patel is a MAGA combatant who has fiercely advocated Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump and who has championed January 6 rioters as patriots and unfairly persecuted political prisoners. (The still ongoing January 6 case, including scores of prosecutions for assaults on police, is one of the FBI’s largest and most successful criminal investigations ever.) Patel is also a fervent promoter of conspiracy theories. At the end of Trump’s first presidency, when he was a Pentagon official, he spread the bonkers idea that Italian military satellites had been employed to turn Trump votes to Joe Biden votes in the 2020 election. And he has falsely claimed that the Trump-Russia scandal was a hoax cooked up by the FBI and so-called Deep State to sabotage Trump. Moreover, Patel has been supportive of the most loony conspiracy theory in MAGA land: QAnon. The QAnon theory, which arose in 2017, holds that an intelligence operative known only as Q has revealed through cryptic messages that a cabal of global, Satanic, cannibalistic elitists and pedophiles is operating a child sex trafficking operation as it vies for world domination and conspires against Trump. This evil band supposedly includes Democratic politicians, Hollywood celebrities, business tycoons, and other notables. Those who believe this bunk see Trump as a hero who is secretly battling this conspiracy in a titanic, behind-the-scenes struggle. It is pure nuttery. Worse than that, QAnon has sparked multiple acts of violence.
Yet Patel repeatedly has hailed QAnoners and promoted this conspiracy theory. In early 2022, when he sat on the board of Trump’s social media company, Truth Social, Patel amplified an account called @Q that pushed out QAnon messaging. As Media Matters reported: “Patel’s catering to the QAnon community has also gone beyond the @Q account. In July, he posted an image featuring a flaming Q on Truth Social and starting in at least April, he went on numerous QAnon-supporting shows to promote Truth Social—urging viewers to join the platform, praising hosts for being on the platform, and promising to promote the hosts there.” On one show, Patel declared, “Whether it’s the Qs of the world, who I agree with some of what he does and I disagree with some of what he does, if it allows people to gather and focus on the truth and the facts, I’m all for it.” |
BY JULIANNE MCSHANE
excerpt:
What do anti-vaxxers and abortion opponents have in common? They both see an ally in David Weldon, who is now President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to run the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The physician and ex–Florida congressman’s track record includes introducing legislation that would have stripped the CDC of its authority to conduct research on vaccine safety and instead given it to an independent agency within the Department of Health and Human Services. Weldon has also promoted the unfounded theory that vaccines lead to childhood autism—a false claim boosted infamously in the past by Trump’s pick for HHS Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. And on abortion, Weldon is responsible for an eponymous federal law that prohibits HHS from funding any entities that “discriminate” against health care providers, hospitals, or insurance plans who opt out of providing abortion care—which the Trump administration “weaponized” to enact its anti-abortion agenda during his first term, according to the National Women’s Law Center. Weldon introduced the amendment in the House in 2004, and it has been passed as part of the HHS spending bill every year since 2005. While in Congress, Weldon also co-sponsored legislation that sought to bar HHS from providing any Title X family planning funding to entities that provide abortions. (Then-Rep. Mike Pence sponsored that bill, and Trump enacted that policy in office, when Pence was vice president.) Weldon also supported a bill that proposed studying unsubstantiated links between abortion and depression.
Neither Weldon nor Trump have been shy about acknowledging these positions. On Weldon’s campaign site for his unsuccessful run for the Florida statehouse earlier this year, he promotes his record on so-called “vaccine safety,” as well as his “100% pro-life voting record” and the anti-abortion amendments he passed in Congress. When Trump announced Weldon as his choice to run the CDC on Nov. 22, he noted Weldon’s history “addressing issues within HHS and CDC,” including that he “worked with the CDC to enact a ban on patents for human embryos.” |
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