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The Matt Gaetz Story: Blackmail Operation, Distraction Attempt, or A Bunch of Convenient Coincidences involving a Naughty Congressman?
Let's go over some of the people involved:
Let's start somewhere in Florida with an ascendant failson of a wealthy family named Joel Greenberg. He gets elected as Tax Collector of Seminole County in 2016. He quickly becomes a social center for well-to-dos in central Florida. He then engages in an almost comical level of naughty behavior.
Well, it doesn't take long for authorities in FL and the federal government to take an interest in our new hotshot Tax Collector. Rumors are awash in Seminole County of the sort of behavior their first term public servant is up to, so a middle school teacher decides to challenge Mr. Greenburg in the upcoming Republican primary by the name of Brian Beute. Now, Greenberg couldn't have this interloper ruining his fun, so he set out to ruin his reputation by crafting ever escalating smears which he released on social media, e.g., pretending to be former students posting in comments on Facebook. This eventually escalated to Greenberg writing handwritten letters sent to Beute's place of employment accusing him of sexually assaulting his students. Well, those letters were turned over to the local sheriff who found both Greenberg's fingerprints and DNA on the letters and he was arrested and charged by the federal DOJ with stalking. During his arrest, the DOJ seized his cell phone and computers and discovered the mountain of naughty behavior he had been up to, the worst of which was Greenberg paying tens of thousands of dollars to at least one underage girl, 17 at the time, to have sex with him and others, including paying for their travel, which is also known as sex trafficking. As part of this scheme, Greenburg was issuing fraudulent real Florida IDs to at least one woman he was paying for sex off a sugar daddy website.
And that's where Matt Gaetz comes into the story. Matt Gates and Joel Greenberg had become friends, perhaps even good friends, years before in around 2017 after Greenberg started his term as Tax Collector for Seminole County. During his prosecution around June 2020, Greenberg or his lawyer, approached the Bill Barr DOJ claiming he can provide evidence a sitting Congressmen had engaged in sex acts with a minor. The Barr DOJ then opens a secret investigation into Matt Gaetz which remains secret for months and isn't known in public until it is leaked to the NYT in March 2021. Matt Gaetz then immediately goes onto Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News that night to respond to the leak and it's a gem for those who would like to watch. Some may remember this bizarre story being told by a sitting US Congressmen about his father being blackmailed for $25,000,000 to help free an American hostage in Iran. Many wrote this off as nuts and attacked Gaetz as crazy and yet years later the story has proved to be true. And in that bizarre story, Gaetz doesn't hesitate to name the person who tried to extort his father: David McGee.
Now who is David McGee? David McGee is a former federal prosecutor who now works at a large firm in Florida. David McGee is involved in this story because a man he had worked with while at the DOJ named Bob Levinson. Bob Levinson was a retired FBI agent who allegedly became a spy for the CIA against Iran. He disappeared in 2007 while in Iran. In the early years of the Obama administration, the FBI was trying to covertly get the retired FBI agent back by selling favors to a Russian Billionaire named Oleg Deripaska. David McGee was the liaison to work out a deal with Deripaska who would give $20,000,000 to the FBI to pay for the hostage rescue/ransom and the FBI would get him and his entire family green cards in the US. The point man for the FBI was a guy named Andrew McCabe. This deal is shut down at some point during the Obama administration and Levinson disappears. Nothing is heard about him to the point where documents confirming Levinson's employment by the CIA get leaked to the Associated Press in 2013. And still nothing comes up about Bob Levinson. Obama negotiates the Iran deal and gets 4 American hostages back from Iran as part of the negotiation, but none of them are Bob Levinson. This creates quite the scandal which received a fair amount of press because Levinson is now the longest currently held US hostage in the world. No one hears about Bob Levinson for more years and he's written off as dead. His wife sues Iran in US federal court, gets a $1,200,000,000 judgment, and the US government declares Levinson dead.
And then a former intelligence officer named Bob Kent claims to have received information that Bob Levinson is still alive. That intelligence officer contacts David McGee, the man who had previously attempted to rescue his former colleague through a scheme to sell favors to a Russian billionaire. And so a plan is hatched and now we finally get back to how this involves Matt Gaetz and the Gaetz family.
Stephen Alford, a man with a criminal record and a former client of David McGee, contacts Matt Gaetz's father Don Gaetz on March 16, 2021. The new plan is for Don Gaetz to give David McGee $25,000,000 to finance a rescue mission for Bob Levinson and in exchange unnamed government officials were going to secure a presidential pardon for Matt Gaetz who was going to be charged with sex trafficking because there is currently a secret grand jury investigation into him. Don Gaetz calls Matt Gaetz who tells him to contact the local FBI office which he does. The FBI convinces him to wear a wire and talk to McGee. The details of the investigation had been kept quiet. Luckily for the Gaetz family, Don requested from the FBI a written agreement detailing the purpose of the investigation, the meeting, and the cooperation, and the FBI eventually agrees and Don Gaetz gets this in writing.
And what do you know? By pure coincidence, the NYT runs a story the next day detailing the case against Matt Gaetz. A media frenzy ensues.
There are so many questions. Two months later, Joel Greenburg pleads guilty and is sentenced to 11 years in prison. The DOJ doesn't close its case against Matt Gaetz until late 2022 without ever explaining sufficiently why Gaetz wasn't charged. Matt Gaetz is now permanently tarred and his fellow congressmen are more interested in using this secret investigation to smear Gaetz instead of what could be a honeypot extortion scheme. Stephen Alford pleads guilty and is sentenced to 5 years in prison.
Joel Greenburg recruits women off of sugar daddy websites, gives them fraudulent real Florida driver's licenses listing their age as 18, he then pays them to have sex with men (at least one rising star in US House of Representatives), and then uses this information to negotiate a deal with the DOJ, the DOJ uses that information to open up secret investigations into sitting Congressmen, the corrupt Florida official case is put on hold, and then at least one former DOJ official attempts to blackmail the father of a sitting congressmen with this information from a "secret" investigation, and then when the target gets solid exonerating evidence and the FBI cannot further entangle them in situations which can be portrayed against them, they then likely leak the investigation to the NYT, and the corrupt FL official pleads guilty and gets a near mandatory minimum deal on sentencing.
No one is apparently interested beyond how this could damage Matt Gaetz. David McGee and Bob Kent are uncharged. As far as I know, they weren't even seriously investigated beyond being questioned. Any time Matt Gaetz does anything, details of his case find its way to the media and a media blitz starts anew with a buzz for Matt Gaetz to resign and whatever else. The set-up, the blackmail, and the stitch-up when it fails.
My understanding of 'sex trafficking' was roughly 'to get someone through either false pretenses or outright violence into a different country with the intent of using their helplessness in that country to force them into prostitution', which seems despicable enough.
If 'paying for travel accommodations for your escort' is sex trafficking, why do we need a law against it?
Also, here is something I don't understand: why would anyone ever hire a 17 yo as a prostitute? I mean, I can understand why some pedophile might risk a lengthy and well-deserved prison sentence to fuck some kid instead of an 18 yo, but if you are into young adult women, why risk a prison sentence? Is that some jailbait fetish I don't get?
Why I am sure that the law is written in a way that puts all the risks of the prostitute being unable to legally consent firmly on the person buying sex, this sounds like we could say that the wrong Matt Gaetz did intentionally was to pay for sex, which does not seem like a moral failing to me. (If it turns out that the prostitutes in question were foreigners who barely understood any English and were obviously physically abused and scared, then I would revise my judgement, but from the facts you mentioned that was rather not the case?)
There are I think about a half dozen statutes which are pertinent at the federal level for "sex trafficking"; e.g., in the case of a minor, it's defined as illegal sex trafficking of a minor to pay a person who you know to be a minor or one you showed reckless disregard as to whether or not they were a minor for a sex act
others, for e.g., 18 USC § 2421, simply require someone pay for the transportation of a prostitute to cross state lines for the purposes of engaging in prostitution and most states have laws which define the same conduct as "sex trafficking"
Greenberg was charged with the former. The crossing state lines is required because in a bygone era long ago, the federal government had to demonstrate someone crossed state lines for a court to claim it satisfied the "commerce clause" of the constitution which allowed justifies federal government jurisdiction, but now we barely even care and "affecting interstate commerce" is enough
they don't, they almost always believe the 17 year old to be over the age of 18 for various reasons, mostly because the 17 year old doesn't mention it or she lies, but many state and federal laws do not in practice care if the person actually knows the prostitute is 17 years old
the typical tactic is for the honey-potter to find 17 year olds, give them fake ids, and then pay them to have sex which someone, and then they claim, to their horror, to find out the person was actually 17 and now you're both guilty of federal sex trafficking and subject to 10 year mandatory minimum sentences on federal trafficking
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You misunderstand. One of the reasons the AOC is higher than is realistic/appropriate is specifically so that it may be used as a gotcha in this way, in combination with...
His crime was that, through this action, he made the price of sex legible. That is the true crime of prostitution.
Merely putting a price on sex devalues sex, and thus is an offense against the sex whose entire evolutionary-biological specialization revolves around selling themselves to the highest bidder, regardless if they need to use that capacity or not. Trads and progs understand that intuitively, as they both agree that the social role of men is to work hard so they can buy sex from women, and the social role of women is to be maximally deserving of that price (certain progressives will even just outright state they "don't owe you femininity" as a direct attempt to re-negotiate "maximally deserving" in their favor- contrast the well-trod stories of how 19th-century traditionalists extracted owed, outstanding femininity from women they have
an exclusive prostitution agreement withmarried, usually with the same pimp hand).Younger women are more feminine, thus more desirable, thus the AOC is very literally a minimum wage. Therefore, hiring one, either knowingly or not, is now explicitly violating the [female] labor laws as well as implicitly doing so as explained above- it's a natural focus point, and over-emphasized because what women [and men] actually want punished is devaluing women [and daughters] that way, but it's also not something they can realistically make illegal (compare why Al Capone gets maximally prosecuted for tax evasion where the actual crime was "he was a gangster", or why Tesla gets maximally prosecuted for a black guy saying 'nigga' in some meeting where the actual crime was "being disliked by Blue tribe").
Sex trafficking is bad because it means domestic women lose out to more-feminine-for-cheaper foreign women, just like how other illegal immigration is bad because it means domestic men lose out to more-masculine-for-cheaper foreign men. This is why women prefer illegal immigration and hate purchased/captured (by some constraint of reality, financial in this case) brides, and the ones that rent themselves hourly are far more destructive because of the above.
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I would argue that given from the context, this is likely a very non-central use of the word 'hostage'. If Iranian operatives had captured him in the middle of the night in his home in (say) Langley, that would be a central example of the word hostage.
Instead, what likely happened was that he voluntarily entered Iran and did spy for the US government.
Spying for a foreign government is illegal pretty much anywhere. If he had been spying in the US for the Iranian government and got caught, he would be in US prison instead. This would not make him a hostage of the US government in any meaningful sense.
Being caught and spending the rest of your life in a shitty cell (or being executed) is part of the risk profile of being a CIA asset in a hostile country. Sometimes you will get traded, sometimes you won't. Sometimes you get the bear and sometimes the bear gets you. (Also, I am sure that before going for hare-brained con jobs, they actually tried to sell their rescue plan to the CIA, and the CIA went 'nope'. I assume it was not 'we would really like to help, but all our black funds are booked out four years in advance, so we must decline.')
Hostage has a certain moral connotation. If someone pulled a con job to rescue the hostages in the 1979 crisis or the Hamas hostages of today, we could say 'their end goal was noble' (which would put them on a level with SBF, at least). The neutral word for what Levinson is is prisoner. Without knowing the details of his spook work, I have no opinion if the world would be better if he was back in the US or if he kept rotting in some Iranian jail.
You're right, it's a bit dishonest to say he was a "hostage." He was captured in Iran almost certainly by the Iranian government likely spying for the CIA (and probably others). He was originally called a "hostage" because the US denied he was a CIA contractor, but then his likely CIA contract relationship was leaked to the press in 2013.
In my defense, I was trying to balance between giving up all the goods in the first minute of reading and revealing details like the above later down in the narrative.
It’s kind of weird though. White American guys are very bad spies in Iran. It’s not like in China where they could conceivably be Western businessmen and don’t stand out too much. Every middle aged white American man in Iran with no Iranian ancestry is either in the service of a Western government or a particularly adventurous tourist. Neither is going to be infiltrating anything or gaining classified intelligence without being extremely suspicious. The CIA certainly has spies in Iran, but they are either Iranians or - at most - Americans of Iranian descent who might plausibly have returned to their ancestral homeland for non-suspicious reasons. Kish Island, where Levinson disappeared, is a weird kind of free trade zone / resort that caters to mainly international Shia tourists and rich Iranians, plus some non-Shia gulf visitors. Americans still very much stand out.
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While I don't have much comment on this, I want to thank you for summarizing the story so far. It was really difficult for me to find a condensed version.
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Even weirder aspect: why was the Israeli consulate privy to info about Gaetz’ Dad?
That consulate employee is now the spokesperson for Betar USA. Why would an employee at Israeli consulate know all of this? What did he mean “my efforts”, “funding us”, “we only asked”, “we came way down”. This indicates that an employee at Israeli consulate (who now works at major Zionist org) was somehow intimately involved in an operation to extort Gaetz. Which in a normal world would be a huge deal. Did this have to do with Gaetz’ opposition to Jewish lobby / Israel?
Right — in Gaetz perception, nothing he was doing was illegal and plausibly nothing he was doing was immoral. The “payment” can be simply reimbursing for the girl’s travel expenses or time off work, which wouldn’t be unusual for a man to do for his girlfriend or wife. As in, if you have a girlfriend and you want her to vacation with you, but she planned to work during this period because she needs money, there is nothing off or suspicious about providing her with money so she can join you and also be able to eat next semester. There’s no evidence that the payments were for sex.
Another weird thing: Oleg Deripaska, the oligarch, paid 20 million to the FBI in 2009 for the same “operation to free Bob Levinson”.
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This seems like a much less likely course of events because if Greenberg had never spread lies about his primary opponent (and thus been investigated) the government would next have found the relevant evidence. Maybe he set that up himself, but it seems unlikely given his general sloppiness and failson nature.
It seems much more likely that Greenberg and Gaetz both enjoyed underaged hookers from SeekingArrangement and that when Greenberg’s ridiculously corrupt behavior got him caught by the Feds he offered the only thing of value he had. They then looked up Gaetz’ dad and saw an opportunity to get some off the books money for whatever wacky op this is.
Given how comically sloppy Greenberg was, I doubt he would have escaped investigation and discovery for long. Part of the reason his primary opponent ran was because of rumors spreading about the naughty behavior and fed investigation.
Gaetz wasn't the only one who was implicated by our Icarus as he was plummeting back to Earth. Greenberg sang like a bird about at least multiple people he had been paying 17 year olds to sleep with and not just Gaetz. If one were to set-up a honeypot, you would do it like Greenberg minus the sloppiness. It's like this dude watched a movie and thought, "I can do that!" You recruit girls, you give them real fraudulent IDs, you pay them to attend parties, you invite rich or otherwise powerful men and/or their progeny, you pay the girls to sleep with them, and then you use then you go with the, "oh no, I have something horrible I have to tell you but we can deal with this together" conversation afterwards. The rich and connected men pay Greenberg for the "party" with a wink wink knowing the girls were brought to sleep with them. And that's exactly what he did, except the problem was Gaetz refused to play ball because he claimed none of it was true.
Greenberg wasn't only caught dead-to-rights sex trafficking, he was also caught in dozens of millions of dollars embezzlement, hiring his groomsmen for multiple million dollar "consulting" fees, millions of dollars real estate scam, and more. This guy wasn't looking at 10 years, he was looking at dozens of years. And so when caught, he sang like a bird, his case was delayed for years and then he plead out and got 1 year above the mandatory minimum sentence on sex trafficking a minor as the federal government rushed to tie off the loose ends.
And the evidence against Gaetz is bad; the reason the women witnesses against him had credibility issues is rumored to be that they were caught lying with some of the details they claimed happened and which Gaetz can prove were lies. And that's why parts of the witness statements were leaked (sorry, I mean "hacked" and given to the media) but not the conclusions of the House or DOJ because that is rumored to be in them. It's also the reason why they won't be released (not to mention, Gaetz doesn't want them to be released because they contain true embarrassing information as well as the damage has already been done). It turns out there is evidence Gaetz was one of the people Greenberg didn't succeed in honey-potting and it explains why he refused to cower and dared the DOJ or House to do something about it, not to mention naming a powerful Florida lawyer and former DOJ prosecutor on national TV and accusing him of attempting to extort his family. If Gaetz was lying, why didn't this powerful lawyer threaten and then sue him with defamation? We can speculate, but you sure as shit do not do that unless you have at least some of the goods. And judging by how the Gaetz handled themselves once being extorted and the documents they smartly kept (and obtained from the FBI), we know the Gaetz are not sloppy.
I haven't seen anything connecting Greenberg to our three musketeers McGee, Kent, and Alford, although I wonder if someone spent the time to find Greenberg's other victims you may discover they were also targets of our three opportunists. Maybe they were also directed to pay $5m to $25m to a company set up by McGee for Stephen Alford. Doesn't every partner at a prestigious lawfirm keep in his close orbit a man convicted multiple times of felonies for fraud and extortion and help him set-up his schemes by incorporating his intermediary companies?
If it was as simple as Gaetz and Greenberg just love banging out 17 year old prosties together, I don't think this is how it would play out. Frankly, I think Gaetz has far more credibility than the other actors in the story and has produced evidence to support things he says, e.g., his contemporaneous unhinged interview on Tucker Carlson which came out to be completely supported over a year later. He may be saying lies which he knows cannot be disproved or is betting they won't be disproved, but it takes a special amount of gusto to lie this much about powerful people on national tv to do so.
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I'm not sure what exactly you're getting at here. You make a few points, however, that I need to address:
What exactly do you charge them with? To be clear, while Gaetz threw the word "extortion" around, there is no extortion in this case. Extortion is when someone threatens to inflict harm unless they are paid. When the threat is to inform the authorities of criminal activity or otherwise make sensitive information public we call it blackmail, but it's still extortion, and the underlying principle is the same. There is nothing in the record suggesting that either Alford, Kent, or McGee ever threatened to do anything to either Gaetz if Don didn't come up with the money.
Alford was convicted of wire fraud. The essence of the charge is that he made false statements in order to get Don Gaetz's money. To wit, he claimed that he had contacts in the Biden administration who could secure a pardon for Matt when, in fact, he had no such contacts. Kent never made any such claims; he claimed to know someone who did, namely Alford, but unless you can prove that he had specific knowledge that Alford was lying there's no case against him for fraud. McGee's participation was minimal; when Don Gaetz brought up the pardon scheme he said that he didn't know anything about it. Alford, meanwhile, repeatedly told elaborate stories about how people owed him favors and he could get anything he wanted if they were able to bring Levinson back.
Here's the thing, though: The Feds only had jurisdiction over Alford because he made fraudulent statements via text message. If he had simply texted Don Gaetz that he wanted to meet and made the statements in person, there wouldn't be anything here other than a state level fraud charge. The Gaetz case was ultimately dropped due to evidentiary issues involving the credibility of witnesses, but there is still strong evidence of two things. First, Gaetz had surrounded himself with people who had no apparent moral compass, and, second, he was buying prostitutes off of a known sex trafficker. Whatever else has been said about him may or may not be true, but the probability of it being true is higher than it is for almost anyone else who would be considered for his position. The allegations are at least plausible enough that, in the eyes of the public, it disqualifies him from being the nation's top law enforcement officer.
Getting back to your contention that this was some kind of setup, I don't know how deep you think this goes or what it was supposed to accomplish. Gaetz's actions date to several years prior to the investigation, including those supported by documentary evidence. Are you suggesting that they were setting him up in 2017? Furthermore, if you have that evidence (or fake that evidence), then what was their goal? If the goal is to destroy Matt Gaetz's public career, just charge him and move on. What's the purpose of the hare-brained fraud scheme? Or is it your contention that the Federal Government was in such dire need of somewhere between 5 and 25 million dollars that they resorted to phonying up an investigation into a congressman so they could use a twice-convicted con man and two confederates to bilk the money out of him? Neither scenario makes sense.
Tipping off someone that his son is under investigation by a secret grand jury might be against some law. Or it could be that it is only criminal if you are an official, so they could only go after the (presumably unknown) source who gave the info to McGee, and McGee was free to blab all he wants.
It's not illegal unless you're in a position that prohibits disclosure, which none of the trio were. Based on what's available they didn't really know any details, just that there was a rumor about it.
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No, the public doesn't really care about this and even if they did care about this after they've had a bullhorn directed at them telling them they should care about it, it's not the reason why Gaetz stepped down or wasn't able to be confirmed without huge political capital being spent. It was because Washington DC hates him for a few reasons having nothing to do with these alleged "ethics" violations. The main reason was he took out GOP leadership McCarthy when the majority of the conference wanted the McCarthy gravy-train to keep rolling. The reason why they hate him is he doesn't play ball the way the way they all play ball and admits too much about how Washington actually works. He has money and he has grass-roots support so he doesn't need them. Full stop. This isn't about the pearl clutching and jowl-shaking politicians on TV claiming it's because he paid women to have sex with him and it's high time we stop playing along like it is.
Also, with the long list of people who have occupied the position of "the nation's top law enforcement officer," a man whose worst skeleton is he paid women to have sex with him and may have had sex with a 17 year old who had a real Florida ID confirming her age was 19 would be a big improvement over the majority of lawless, vindictive clowns who have occupied it over the last 5 or 6 administrations.
And the sad thing is the allegations about him paying women to have sex are nonsense. The "credibility" issue with witnesses is they were caught lying about details in their allegation and it looks like they were paid for it in the first place and it's also why the complete DOJ and House report won't be released.
Bullshit. I wanted a Trump Attorney General who'd round up and publicly execute all of the political insiders (probably hundreds of thousands of them) who participate in the secret organized mass abduction, enslavement, rape, torture, and murder of children and adolescents. (Epstein. Pizzagate. Not QAnon. QAnon was an obvious feint for retard boomers who just want to be told to relax.) It's already been pretty obvious since early in Trump's first term that he was in fact one of those political insiders, but the ridiculously sleazy Gaetz ever getting anywhere near the Attorney General position is one of the most blatant fuck yous to the American public I've ever seen. Rotten, the lot of them.
Unfortunately, I think Matt Gaetz may have been the most likely person to do that. If politicians banging prosties qualifies for "ridiculously sleazy," boy do I have something to tell you about your typical Washington DC upstanding politician. When Madison Cawthorn tattled to everyone about the regular drug-fueled sex parties, he wasn't talking about some small minority in the hallowed halls of Congress.
Sadly, it looks like the smear campaign has convinced you Gaetz is one of them when it looks like he wasn't and that's the problem. The Beltway GOP doesn't care that Gaetz bangs out prosties (even if they thought it was true), they don't like that he toppled McCarthy and threatened harmed their gravytrain by demanding they do the things they promise their voters. Both sides don't like Gaetz because he doesn't play the game the way they want it played. That's it.
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This isn't a disagreement about possible charges because it's not hard to think of any number of about a dozen federal charges if a connection between Alford and Kent and McGee is made. It's about your belief there are no facts to support such a connection, except there are some small ones: Alford told the Gaetz to direct the money towards a trust account in care of David McGee, Alford claimed he was working with Kent, McGee, and others to rescue Bob Levinson, Alford's company to handle this exchange was incorporated by... David McGee. Kent is the one who handed Don Gaetz the "Project Homecoming" document which implies a promised presidential pardon or the investigation/indictment would be ceased. Could this all be innocent connections? sure!
It's entirely possible a former DOJ prosecutor currently working at a large, prestigious law firm continues to involve himself in various schemes of a long-term client who has been convicted multiple times of fraud and blackmail. Perhaps McGee just takes his bar oath to heart. Of course if McGee did want to put together a blackmail scheme, a person like Alford would be the perfect bridge because his word is shit, he's a repeated felon, and he already has a history of taking the blame if the scheme falls apart.
The scheme would be David McGee would accept the money to fund the rescue effort. Kent is the one who handed Don Gaetz the "Project Homecoming" document which implies a promised presidential pardon or the investigation/indictment would be ceased. Alford was the person who connected the payment with the reward. In the middle of this investigation by a local FBI office right as it's about to get to the McGee stage, the Gaetz charges get released to the NYT and then everything stops. As soon as the scheme falls apart, Alford falls on his sword and takes all the blame.
I wonder when the FBI is going to release the full tapes or transcripts of the meetings between Don and the trio. Matt Gaetz claims there is far more on those tapes and in other documents which substantiate his accusations about McGee and Kent. I have seen nothing to convince me these allegations were seriously investigated and instead the FBI was happy to charge Alford and move on.
In the particular charge the picked, sure. That doesn't mean this was the only way they could have established jurisdiction over Alford or possible co-conspirators. This isn't some strong limitation or even much of a hurdle in the modern day and how and what communication devices are typically used. I'm not implying there is strong evidence to currently available to prove McGee or Kent knew Alford was going to send fraudulent text messages to Don Gaetz or fill out the conspiracy.
On a side note, I'm disappointed no one has made an "Alford plea" pun. It's too bad he didn't even attempt to obtain one.
Who is "they"? Our three muskateers currently being discussed? The government at large? No, I doubt it. As far as I know, there is no connection between Joel Greenberg and the trio. I'm speculating about some facts I find interesting and thought others would find them interesting as well. Other than my characterization of Joel Greenberg as looking like a honeypot operation, I'm not arguing anything in particular.
To have leverage over Matt Gaetz in order to control him in some way in the the future. I find it hard to believe you cannot fathom some other purpose of having blackmail material on someone other than to burn your blackmail material to harm that person.
The federal government wasn't in dire need of $20,000,000 in 2010 when David McGee was attempting to sell favors to a Russian Oligarch, but they did and the contention was the operation needed to be kept off of official books because the government had not admitted Bob Levinson was a likely CIA contractor or they couldn't get official approval and were attempting to save their buddy.
I don't think the entire scheme was hatched to bilk money out of Gaetz family starting from back in 2017. A plausible narrative is Greenberg was attempting to get leverage on him. Later on as that leverage was falling apart because our naughty boy Greenberg couldn't help but be a sloppy criminal who couldn't help himself to not commit a laundry list of crimes, a group of people who clearly had non-public knowledge saw an opportunity to get money out of the Gaetz family. Whether that group was large or confined to one, two, or a few is unknown.
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I believe what OP is alleging/implying is that Greenberg may have made a false allegation against Gaetz in order to save his own skin (offer to point the finger at a juicy target of a Congressman to lessen his own sentence). The implication is that tbe FBI knows that this is a weak or bogus allegation, but proceed with the investigation anyway, or at least conclude as a result of the investigation that it is bogus.
McGee, who is contected to both the Federal Prosecutor's Office and the CIA, attempts to use this knowledge to blackmail the senior Gaetz (through Alford) to get money to rescue Levinson in exchange for using his connections to get the case dropped against the junior Gaetz.
I think most people would agree that "we will drop a bogus/weak case against you in exchange for money" amounts to extortion. Rephrased, it can be "give me money and I'll won't charge you". Even with a legitimate crime being prosecuted it can still amount to extortion, as it's clearly an attempt to violate the defendant's due process rights.
Especially in the case of a high profile figure like a Congressman, there doesn't even have to be a a charge or conviction, the mere reporting that a Congressman js being investigated can be extremely damaging, which is what happened here.
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I've said it before, Gaetz has exonerated himself from being a criminal, he hasn't exonerated himself from being a sleazebag. The person in this story whose nocence of an actual crime is easiest to prove is in jail, and these kinds of investigations take forever.
The biggest scandal here appears to be sugar daddy websites allowing women under 18 to make profiles.
So ?
Great men are rarely good men. Gaetz seems to be pretty eloquent and an enemy of the bureaucracy. Until that is purged and once again accountable to elected representatives, you'd do well to ignore any wrongdoing short of large scale fraud, actual forcible rape or murder.
I’m not saying this precludes Gaetz from being in the trump admin. I’m saying investigating him was probably not politically targeted.
If it hadn't been political it'd never have leaked or even gone anywhere after the grand jury found out about the fake driving licenses. Instead it was talked and hinted about for years.
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I assume this was supposed to be David McGee.
I'm missing a connection here. How are McGee or Kent connected to Greenberg? How did they become aware of a secret investigation into Matt Gaetz that they could use as leverage? Is the implication that Greenberg was running a honeypot on behalf of the DoJ, and McGee was aware of it from his previous job? Did McGee even work in a position where he would be aware of a secret investigation?
How would the FBI leak an investigation being conducted by the DoJ? Isn't it more likely that someone in the DoJ found out about what the FBI was about to do with Don Gaetz (whether through official or back channels), and the DoJ leaked it instead to prevent the FBI and Gaetz from getting a wire recording of their attempted blackmail?
Thanks! I kept making that mistake for some reason and I fixed it.
I don't know of any connection between Greenberg and McGee or Kent. I don't know how McGee or Kent became aware of the DOJ investigation, but they were the people implicated in the blackmail scheme to get Don Gaetz to give them $25,000,000 to allegedly rescue the declared dead Bob Levinson. Stephen Alford was the person who allegedly initially contacted Don Gaetz to make the blackmail offer and directed him to David McGee. There is no reason to think McGee would need to be working on a secret investigation to become aware of it from his previous job, he could have simply been told by someone else.
The implication I'm making is that Greenberg's behavior looks like a honeypot operation: he was recruiting underage women, giving them fraudulent real FL ids he has access to because of his "public service," he's paying them with money no one is quite sure where it all came from, and he's paying these girls to have sex with rich and politically connected people in central Florida which he appeared to instigate friendships with. Joel Greenberg can't help himself but be a ridiculous criminal who is sloppy and gets caught.
The FBI could leak details to the NYT about an investigation they at the very least became aware of when Don Gaetz showed up at a local FBI office and told them he was being blackmailed even if we're going to pretend the FBI and DOJ don't work hand-in-glove. I'm not implying the FBI is the one who made the leak. There are all sorts of narratives one could string together with known facts and they would be supported. What's interesting is no one seems particularly interested in all these loose threads; there is a startling lack of interest in tying any of them up and instead they want to use it to attack and smear Matt Gaetz. The "loose threads" are Stephen Alford and Joel Greenberg who are both going to prison on plea deals.
I'm not trying to make any particular argument, really. I just find the whole story to be interesting and thought others may as well.
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