The two key players in the laptop affair teamed up on “The Biden Crime Family,” which was released last year before Joe Biden withdrew from the 2024 presidential race. “The arrangement was ‘ten percent for the big guy’,” Giuliani writes in the book, and claims the arrangement rankled Hunter who “complained that half his income went to dad.” In addition to having no evidence to support that allegation, Giuliani apparently needs to brush up on his math as ten percent is not half.

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Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney, struggles with a microphone at the start of the November 7, 2020 press conference he hosted four days after the presidential election at Four Seasons Total Landscaping in Philadelphia. Giuliani called the press conference to explain why he was certain the Trump campaign’s legal challenge to the results in Pennsylvania would reverse Biden’s apparent victory in the state. Unfortunately, CNN projected Biden would win Pennsylvania, and hence the election, before the event started. Screenshot from YouTube video of press conference/Public Domain.

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On October 14, 2020, less than three weeks before the presidential election between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, the New York Post published a front-page story on the squalid contents found on a laptop computer that had been discarded 18 months earlier by Hunter Biden, the black sheep son of the Democratic nominee. But the chief target of the Post’s exclusive report about the “massive trove of data” extracted from the laptop – which included salacious images of Hunter smoking crack and having sex with prostitutes, and immediately created one of the most sensational political scandals in recent memory – wasn’t the erstwhile owner of the computer, but his father, who the story implicated in egregious corruption.

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Congressman Cory Mills, war hero, as depicted in a drawing made by a highly informed source.

This is the fourth and final installment of this investigation into Congressman Cory Mills. You can read Part I here, Part II here, and Part III here.

So, what about Congressman Mills’ Bronze Star for combat service in Iraq during the invasion? There are three bright red flags that indicate that was a con as well.

No. 1: The Form 638 nominating him for the award, which the congressman turned over to the Daytona Beach News-Journal last year, said that during a battle in Baghdad, Mills sprang “forward under murderous enemy fire” and saved the life of First Sergeant Joseph Ferrand, his platoon leader, by overpowering an “enemy insurgent” who’d captured him.

There’s just one problem. The scene depicted in the Form 638 “is false and a fabrication,” according to a witness statement written by Ferrand himself. “The act never took place.”

No. 2: On March 31, 2003 at the Battle of Samawah, Mills risked “his own life” to save two “fallen comrades,” Corporal Alan Babin, a combat medic, and Private First Class Joe Heit,” states the Form 638. Both were badly wounded, but fortunately Mills managed to rescue them from the battlefield and assist “in their evacuation back to US forces.”

One of the most famous battles of the 2003 Iraq War, Samawah was covered extensively at the time and books have been written about the firefight. I’ve read or skimmed multiple accounts and Mills’ name doesn’t appear anywhere. Rosie Babin, the former’s mother, told the News-Journal Mills saved Alan's life, though it’s not clear how she knows that unless her source is the congressman, who’s struck up a friendship with her.

The source certainly isn’t her son, a combatwho won a Purple Heart and Bronze Star for his actions at Samawah, never fully recovered from the injuries he suffered that day and has no memory of what happened after he was injured. Alan was hit as he rushed to the aid of Heit and the bullet blew “a hole in his gut roughly the size and shape of a football,” reads a 10,000-word account published the following year in the Washington Post. He underwent more than 70 surgeries over the following seven months that “related to his still-gaping abdomen...and burns on his arms and legs [that] required a series of skin grafts.”

I saw witness statements or remarks posted on social media by half-a-dozen US soldiers who fought at Samawah. None recall Mills being on the battlefield; two confirmed that during the firefight, Mills was at a medical aid station five kilometers away.

Heit, who was struck by a bullet that hit him at the corner of his eye socket, remembers a number of other people coming to his aid, including Augest Berndt, who was next to him when he got shot, but not Mills. Berndt, a weapons squad leader, has a clear recollection of events, saying he yelled “Doc” to get the attention of Babin, who grabbed his medic bag and took “two steps” before he was shredded by enemy fire.

After bandaging Heit’s wound, Berndt ran to help Babin, and named four other soldiers who were desperately tending to him as well, he recounted in a statement taken down by Jade Murray, who created and conducts research for CoryMillsWatch.com. Berndt, who remained on the battlefield during the intense, chaotic firefight that continued for another six or seven hours, offered a lengthy account, which includes the section below, which I lightly edited for clarity:

Babin was going into shock. His blood pressure was so low we couldn’t give him anymore morphine. He was just grasping a picture of his girlfriend. A vehicle arrived and took Babin and Heit back to the aid station. About 20 US soldiers were wounded and three or four were medevaced back to Kuwait. They tried numerous times to get Heit to return to Kuwait, but he refused.

“[Mills] absolutely was not there to freaking treat Babin or Heit,” Sergeant Mike Johnson, another was also at Samawah, wrote in a note to Jay Dorleus, a retired Green Beret and popular podcaster who’s questioned Mills account of his military service. “That [Bronze Star] is a croc of shit.”

“We had a group of badass medics, some went on to do great things, some are no longer with us,” Johnson added.” Mills took “bits and pieces of all our stories” and stitched them together to win the Bronze Star.

No. 3: The Form 638 that nominated Mills for the Bronze Star was signed by Brigadier General Arnold Gordon-Bray Gordon-Bray, who as noted in Part II commanded the 82nd Airborne Division in Iraq when Mills was there. However, the form itself was written on a model that was introduced in 2021, nearly two decades after the Battle of Samawah. The congressman and general, who retired in 2012, have both refused to say precisely when when the document was prepared, though I’d lay odds it was last year, when Mills suddenly dredged up a bunch of phony records, as described earlier in this series, after he was challenged by political opponents and military veterans to prove his version of events is truthful.

Meanwhile, Bray-Gordon has sought to distance himself from responsibility for the integrity of the document he signed. Actions justifying the Bronze Star and other military decorations are "ordinarily submitted by the observing individuals,” he told the News-Journal, whose account generally bent over backwards to exonerate Mills. The general also hemmed and hawed when he was asked about the Form 638 by a skeptical retired officer who served under him in Iraq, writing in a text message, “I endorsed his Bronze Star as I did for all my NCO‘s. The specific actions had to come from the battalion. Please call me. Critical that I associate my name with facts.”

Incidentally, the Form 638 makes a passing reference that ostensibly bolsters the congressman’s patently fraudulent claim about serving in Iraq on numerous missions with Joint Task Force 20, the uber elite Special Forces unit that operated in Iraq before and after the 2003 invasion. However, given the highly dubious nature of the nominating document, the assertion in it about Mills being “sought after by every echelon” in Iraq, including TF 20 – which was quite handy as that and his oft-touted Bronze Star are two key items he’s ben accused of lying about – further undermines the integrity of the Form 638 and Mills’ already ridiculous fairytale about being a member of the Task Force.

What it strongly suggests instead is that General Bray-Gordon signed the Form 638 many, many years after it would normally have been submitted, and Mills dictated the contents based on what lies he most needed “evidence” to support his bullshit narrative.

Congressman Mills’ story about his alleged wartime service is obviously a steaming pile of dogshit. Nevertheless, he’s suffered no consequences for fabricating the story with President Trump and his GOP colleagues in congress, who profess to care so deeply about the military, veterans, and honor. Sad.

In May of 2010, Mills landed his first job after fleeing from the DynCorp compound in northern Iraq the year before to avoid being exposed as a serial liar, when he was hired by Special Tactical Services, LLC to be a Maritime Security Specialist and Anti-Piracy Advisor. That apparently served as the basis for his frequently repeated claim that when he was in the Army he deployed to Somalia, though according to his LinkedIn page he was based at the firm’s corporate headquarters in the terrifying badlands near Norfolk, Virginia.

Six months later, Mills “deployed” to Afghanistan and Pakistan with his new employer, beltway bandit Chemonics, though once again it appears he was based domestically, this time in the Washington, DC, metropolitan area. Miraculously, he survived despite facing the daily of bleeding to death from a paper cut or suffering a painful injury by tripping on the carpet on his way to the water cooler during a badly needed rest from the stress of “creating, improving, monitoring, and promulgating emergency action plans, operational manuals, security policies, and trainings for Chemonics employees,” who were actually living in Afghanistan and Pakistan while working on working on projects for USAID.

During his time at Chemonics Mills “played a vital role in the evacuation of 34 Chemonics field staff members in Egypt in February 2011 during Arab Spring movements as the Information Coordinator for the crisis management team,” according to his LinkedIn. In a rare lapse on the congressman’s part, he apparently forgot to convert the dramatic evacuation of the corporate employees – which may have happened I suppose, though as far as I can tell he made that up as well – into “deploying to Egypt during my military service, where I hunted the world’s most dangerous terrorists.”

Between June and November of 2011, Mills actually deployed to Pakistan, at least based on his LinkedIn profile. He worked with two US firms there during those six months: Management Systems International, who hired him to streamline “the security field staff recruitment process” and conduct “threat analysis and risk assessments,” and Pax Mondial, where his combat duties ranged from having responsibility for “contractual deliverables” to “capacity building of staff.”

In late-2011, Mills took a job with Pax Mondial as “the Director of its Information Operations Division” in Arlington, Virginia. A year later, General Mills was promoted to Senior Vice President of the company’s “most profitable department” and took part in combat operations while looking for ways to improve Pax Mondial’s “HR onboarding process” and “corporate protocol evaluations.”

Mills resigned his position in March of 2014 and later that year co-founded DC-based PACEM Solutions, which sells riot-control gear to law enforcement and security agencies at home and abroad.

Last August, a group of 50 congressional Republicans who served in the military, Mills among them, signed a letter accusing Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’s vice presidential running mate, of Stolen Valor for misrepresenting his 24-year-career in the Army National Guard.

“Repeatedly claiming to be a ‘Retired Command Sergeant Major’ when you did not complete the requirements was not honorable,” read the letter. “Nor was it honorable to claim to carry weapons ‘in war’ when you had not served in war, and abandoning the men and women under your leadership, just as they were getting ready to deploy was certainly not honorable either.”

Other than Walz’s claim that he carried weapons in war, which he deserved to be criticized for, most of the accusations in the letter were wildly overblown or simply ridiculous. Walz resigned from the National Guard in May of 2005 as a Master Sergeant, one rank below Command Sergeant Major. In March of that year, months after Walz submitted his retirement paperwork, his battalion was notified about a possible deployment to Iraq within two years, according to a report on Fox News.

But even if Walz was guilty of everything as charged, his sins still would have paled in comparison to the egregious fraud Mills perpetrated in fabricating his astonishing tale of Stolen Valor. Future Congressman Mills was scheming to get out of Iraq almost from the moment he arrived there from Kuwait in March of 2003 and used a loophole to flee Dodge City a few months later, when he waved farewell to the men and women who remained behind on the battlefield and headed home to Florida to get a college degree.

Two years later, he monetized the first draft of his fairytale about his military service when DynCorp hired him, and Congressman Mills has kept on lying about his Army heroics ever since.

But that’s hardly a surprise. Mills, who claims he decided to enlist in the Army due to the “sense of duty and gratitude” that’s been his guiding star since he was a teenager, has been lying for so long it’s doubtful he even knows the difference between fact and fiction at this point.

On February 19 of this year, a 27-year-old woman called for help from the local police in Washington, saying her “significant other” – Mills, it soon emerged – had “grabbed her, shoved her, and pushed her out of the door,” according to the initial report filed by the responding officer. Congressman Mills “vehemently denie[d] any wrongdoing” through his press office and his mistress later recanted her account, however, the first police report about the case, which reportedly remains under investigation, said the alleged victim had "bruises on her arm which appeared fresh" and that she let officers listen in on a phone call with her significant other, who told “her to lie about the origin of her bruises.”

So, to judge from the first account the congressman’s girlfriend told the police, it appears likely that in 2025, 22 years after he abandoned his comrades in Iraq without once engaging in ground combat while he served in the Army, Mills got his first real experience on the battlefield by beating up his mistress.

This is the third installment of this investigation into Congressman Cory Mills. You can read Part I here and Part II here.

Future Congressman Cory Mills was born in Winter Haven, Florida, a picturesque all-American small town blessed with “beautiful lakes, bountiful opportunities, and gorgeous weather,” but was largely raised in a nearby city by his loving but desperately poor grandparents because his parents were in and out of prison on drug charges during much of his childhood. Between 1999, after he enlisted in the US Army straight out of high school, and 2022, when he was elected to his first term in congress to represent a district that includes his hometown area, Mills had completed an improbable rags-to-riches journey from late-adolescence as a destitute, prospectless, preordained loser to early-middleaged adulthood as a multimillionaire businessman with boundless opportunities that exceeded his wildest dreams during his dismal origins in Winter Haven.

On the 2022 campaign trail, Mills rarely discussed the successes he won fighting enemies in corporate boardrooms and suites, though, but instead focused almost exclusively on the dramatic combat victories he achieved during his earlier career in the military, when he protected America’s “shores and freedoms” from the world’s worst dictators and terrorists for seven years in Iraq, three years in Afghanistan, and shorter stints in Kosovo, Pakistan, Somalia, and Ukraine. “After Al Qaeda and the Taliban” stopping radical Democrats like Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi “doesn’t scare me one damn bit,” Mills humble-bragged in a campaign ad that featured him wearing combat gear and holding a weapon.

In his enthusiastic endorsement of Mills, Donald Trump, who at the time was at the midway point of the four-year period he spent between being a past and future president, emphasized Mills’ combat experience as well. The heroism he displayed fighting “all over the world” demonstrated Mill’s love for the homeland and that he’d always “stay back and fight” even while lesser men fled when their courage immediately wilted under fire.

As noted in the two previous installments of this story, Mills was reelected to a second term last year, but was forced to present evidence in an effort to refute charges hurled by his political enemies and – in a much more menacing development – a growing chorus of retired military officers and veterans who worked alongside him overseas, that he embellished or completely fabricated the key details of his oft-repeated wartime chronicles. Last June, the congressman delivered a a 15-page booklet to the local Republican Party in his home district of Volusia County that unveiled explosive, never-before-seen photos of Mills smiling valiantly while standing next to an American flag; documents that irrefutably disproved allegations of subsequently proven allegations regarding unrelated matters, such as the “false claim” of the true claim that he’s under investigation for violating House ethics rules; and three documents he said exonerated him on charges of fraudulently claiming he took part in “active ground combat,” which were so comically fraudulent they could only have been convincing to morons with room temperature IQs.

Mills produced one document that seemed potentially legitimate at first glance, but appears to be equally tainted upon further investigation: the Form 638, the document used when nominating service members for military decorations. Brigadier General Arnold Gordon-Bray, who commanded the 82nd Airborne Division during the invasion, signed and submitted the one that recommended the congressman be awarded the Bronze Star for his combat role in Iraq.

Meanwhile, Mills has never released two genuinely critical documents, his Official Military Personnel File, or OMPF, and DD 214 form, which taken together would provide a comprehensive record of the basic details of his military career. Those items were obtained by a few reporters and critics of Mills, including retired Army combat veteran Sergeant Bobby Oller, a disabled combat veteran who’s part of a group of detractors affiliated with CoryMillsWatch.com, who received the congressman’s official records under the Freedom of Information Act, and provided me with the documents.

In Mills’ defense, he would have to be clinically insane to have disclosed his Army records unless compelled to with a gun pointed at his head, because after even cursory review they prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that Mills’ put together the longstanding account he’s offered about his military service – it’s important to note here that the congressman has periodically altered some details of his story depending on what day of the week he’s lying about it, as far as I can determine – using a sophisticated technique professionals call, “Fuck, there’s no way to back up this bullshit I made up with real facts, I guess I’ll just have to pull them out of my ass again and hope no one notices.”

Oller and other investigators provided a mountain of other information, most importantly Mills’ 2009 application for a job in Iraq with the private military contractor DynCorp, and I interviewed sources with eyewitness accounts and discovered additional data, which shredded pretty much anything that was left standing from the congressman’s story. After going through the new material I learned after writing Part II of this story, I’ve concluded there is only one way he can fully salvage his credibility at this point, but fortunately it’s a simple one Mills could accomplish by selecting whichever option he likes best among countless possibilities open to him.

All that Mills needs to do is change the name of publish a fresh account with a different, more accurate name than the one he slapped on the booklet he gave to the GOP affiliate in his home district last year, which he boldly titled, “The TRUTH and FACTS About Congressman Cory Mills.” I came up with three simple fixes in a manner of minutes that would work perfectly well.

Option I: “The New and Improved Adventures of Congressman Pinocchio.” Option II: “A Contemporary Version of Grimms' Fairy Tales.” Option III: “Cory’s Adventures in Wonderland: The Incredible Story of How a Disgraced Congressman Fabricated His Epic Tale of Stolen Valor.”

The Form 638 Congressman Mills has presented to prove he’s an honest-to-goodness war hero. It sure seems impressive but he and the general who signed it have refused to answer questions about some glaring defects in the document.

Next let’s lay out what the actual facts show Mills did when he was in the Army and then do a side-by-side comparison to highlight the discrepancies between a reality-based depiction of events and Mills’ long-peddled fantasy-based version. I’ll start with the macro, big picture issues – how much time did Mills actually serve in the Army before he was discharged, where and when did he deploy overseas during that period, and how often did he take part in combat operations – and in the next section I’ll turn to the more specific, micro issues, meaning what he in fact doing when he was overseas – was he a sniper, and did he get actually get “blown up twice” in Iraq and narrowly escape death? – and ask the same questions about the other specific claims the congressman has made about his battlefield heroism.

To quickly summarize things, Mills career with the Army officially kicked off in July of 1999, two months after he graduated from high school, when he reported to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. He completed basic training there six months later and after making a brief stop at an Army installation in Georgia, where he spent a few weeks at Jump School, Mills moved on to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the headquarters of the 82nd Airborne Division, in February of 2000, where he was attached to the 82nd Airborne’s 1st Battalion, 325th Airborne Infantry Regiment, the “Red Falcons.”

In January of 2001, Mills deployed overseas for the first time, to Kosovo, and returned to Fort Bragg six months later. Roughly 19 months later, Mills went abroad for the second time after enlisting, heading to Kuwait with the Red Falcons in February of 2003, the month before President George W. Bush ordered troops into Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein. He was back in the US by mid-June – that’s not clear from his military records, but in an Army document I’ll discuss shortly – and received an honorable discharge in August, retiring at the rank of sergeant.

The first thing that’s immediately apparent at this very early stage is that Congressman Mills wasn’t deployed in Iraq for seven years, as he’s asserted time and time again. That’s an obvious lie as the duration of his entire Army career, from boot camp to discharge, was four years and one month.

Nor did Mills spend three years in Afghanistan, or two-and-a-half years or even two years, as he has also said. In fact, according to his Army records, Congressman Mills wasn’t in Afghanistan for a single day when he was in the Army, and he wasn’t in Pakistan or Somalia either, which he’s routinely asserted as well. He didn’t set foot in Ukraine either, which he has occasionally added to the list of combat zones he allegedly served in.

The congressman’s Army records confirm he deployed to Kosovo, so a round of applause for Mills, it doesn’t happen often but every once in a while he tosses out an actual fact when describing his military service. Returning to form, though, Mills wasn’t a member of a “long range reconnaissance and surveillance scout recon team” when he was in the country, as he claimed in his LinkedIn bio, and he wasn’t decorated for his wartime service, which is one of the standard highlights of the congressman’s script of wartime chronicles.

He even brazenly lied about that in “The TRUTH and FACTS About Congressman Cory Mills,” the bullshit booklet he proudly shared with the local Republican Party in Volusia County, when he accused his enemies of falsely slandering him by saying he’d never fought on the battlefield during his Army career. To prove he “engaged in active ground combat” in Kosovo, Mills reproduced a certificate of a medal he won to honor his wartime service.

However, the certificate wasn’t for a Kosovo Campaign Medal, which is awarded by the Army for wartime service, but a NATO Medal, which the Alliance’s Secretary General authorizes for exemplary conduct during a post-war peacekeeping mission, and is the equivalent of a participation trophy as it was doled out to everyone who took part. Mills' certificate shows he received the medal for the role he performed after arriving in the country, as is reflected in his official Army records, in January of 2001 – 18 months after the Kosovo War ended.

A few of Mills’ critics have voiced suspicions that he was never in Iraq during his military career, but was stationed at the 82nd Airborne Division’s headquarters at a US Army base in Kuwait. However, I found a photograph posted on Facebook six years ago by an Army veteran that showed Mills and eight other Red Falcons in the country in late-March 2003, about ten days after the invasion began.

As in the case of Kosovo, however, other than Mills’ claim that he was in Iraq, the congressman fabricated nearly everything else he’s said about his time there. I’ll go through a longer list in the next section, but there’s one important issue that’s highly pertinent here. The second of the three documents from “The TRUTH and FACTS About Congressman Cory Mills” was a badge he won for ground combat in Iraq. It looked like Mills had found just what the doctor ordered to shut down his critics’ charges of Stolen Valor, but curiously he made strategic redactions to the certificate that blacked out the section that showed when he was deployed in Iraq.

As luck would have it, the Army provided the answer to that question when it issued a memorandum a month after Mills delivered his self-published booklet that allegedly verified the badge was one of four decorations the congressman won for “wartime service” in Iraq. According to the memorandum, Mills flew into the Iraqi theater on February 28, 2003 – but that was the date he arrived in Kuwait; the invasion didn’t get underway until March 20 and Mills’ unit didn’t deploy to Iraq until six days later – and flew out on June 15, two months before he processed out of the Army from Fort Bragg.

In other words, Congressman Mills exaggerated his battlefield history a wee bit when he won office in 2022 by promising to continue his legacy of defending America “against all threats,” whether foreign enemies such as lethal, bloodsoaked leaders of Al Qaeda and the Taliban or unarmed yet equally dangerous domestic foes like terror chieftains Sheikh Joe bin Biden and Mullah Nancy al-Pelosi. On the campaign trail, Mills told voters he spent more than a decade overseas in multiple foreign war zones, cheerfully staring death in the face while engaged in active ground combat.

In reality, as the Army memorandum revealed, Mills never deployed to four of the six countries he boasted of serving in, and lied about fighting on the battlefield in Kosovo, No. 5 on his list. The only time the congressman was in an active war zone during his Army career was his perilous excursion to Iraq, and he was in the country, not the theater, for no more than about 80 days.

Whether he ever was closer than five kilometers away from the battlefield when he was there, though, rests mostly on the Form 638 signed by General Gordon-Bray, however, neither the general or the congressman have deigned to answer questions about the document. As it stands, the Form 638 has such paltry credibility that an attorney who cited it as evidence during a trial would be laughed out of court.

Mills during an interview last July on CNN, which invited him on to share his expertise as a former sniper following the failed assassination attempt against then-former President Trump at a campaign stop in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Receiving the Bronze Star is one of the old chestnuts Mills trots out when inventorying his greatest hits on the battlefield. The other Top Ten tales on the congressman’s personal highlight reel of wartime courage unfold in Iraq as well: Deploying on numerous missions with Combined Joint Task Force 20 (TF 20), an uber elite Special Forces unit that implements top secret operations; training Kurdish forces to thwart terrorist attacks; and, of course, surviving the two roadside blasts in Baghdad, one “which resulted in numerous casualties” yet somehow managing “to stabilize himself and other members on his team who were injured in the explosion prior to evacuation.”

But that’s not even the half of it. In his spare time, Mills served in combat as an infantryman, sniper, and took part in counterinsurgency operations and “direct action” strikes against “high-value” enemy targets.

It’s hard to imagine how he was able to squeeze it all in since back on Planet Earth, Congressman Mills was only on Iraqi soil for less than three months when he was in the Army. The answer was provided in an article that ran in the Orlando Sentinel last October, which noted that when Mills chronicles his wartime history, he “rarely differentiates” between events that unfolded during “his actual military service” and those that took place afterwards when he was working for private contractors in “much higher-paid positions.” Mills didn’t spend years overseas due to patriotic fervor and love of country, retired Major General Randy Manner told the newspaper, he “was doing it for the Benjamins.”

That’s true, and it gets to the heart of the congressman’s grift, but the Sentinel completely missed the central point. Mills not only pretends that the heroic actions he brags about uniformly date to “his actual military service,” he fabricated all of them, whether they’re tenuously linked to events he saw or heard about when he was a soldier or when he was a private contractor.

Erasing the line enabled Mills to convert a real-life 15-year period comprised of three distinct eras – four years of military service, Army, two years in Florida, where the congressman was having fun in the sun while pursuing an Associate in Arts degree, and nine years with private firms – a fairytale that takes place during one continuous era when Mills was deployed overseas with the Army for a long period of undefined length, though clearly well over a decade as he claims to have spent that much time in Iraq and Afghanistan alone.

The new and improved timeline Mills cobbled together allowed him to pull off the immensely profitable Stolen Valor scam he’s been running for the past two decades, which was his broader goal all along.

Mills’ racked up his biggest score as a military impostor three years ago when he rolled out his bullshit military history on the campaign trail to win his initial run for congress. However, he’s been successfully monetizing his fictional record since at least 2005, two years after his discharge from the Army, when he turned his fictional war stories into a job protecting diplomatic personnel with DynCorp in Kabul. Mills transferred to Baghdad in 2006 to take the same position and three years later, when he was stationed in Erbil in northern Iraq, his annual salary was in the neighborhood of $180,000 to $200,000 when bonuses were included, according to one of his former supervisors I recently interviewed.

Will Kern, a former Recon Marine who worked for DynCorp with Mills met him for the first time at a former Republican Guard base south of Baghdad, where a group of company employees were testing their sniper skills on a shooting range. Kern quickly became suspicious of Mills boasts of being a first-rate military-trained marksman – which he’d listed in citing his qualifications in his initial job application in 2005 and another one four years later when he was hoping to be promoted to a position as Shift Leader – after watching his pitiful performance, and his bona fides were further undercut by his conversational banter as it was obvious he had no idea what he was talking about when he was talking up his sniper skills. “Cory sounded like a babbling idiot, based on the laws of physics,” Kern told me.

Yet last July, Congressman Mills told CNN he’d run a counter-sniper team during his military service and had conducted “thousands of operations” in not only Iraq but Afghanistan as well. As examples, he said his team had protected VIP political visitors from the US such as former First Lady Laura Bush when she was in Kabul for a ceremony inaugurating Afghanistan’s first women’s university,” and then-Vice President Joe Biden, who he’d been assigned to keep in one piece when he was in Erbil to meet ex-President Masoud Barzani of the Kurdistan Regional Government.

It took less than five minutes to confirm Mills was lying. Laura Bush visited Kabul in March of 2005, to inaugurate a women’s dorm, not a university. That was two years after Mills had been discharged from the Army and, according to his own 2009 Shift Leader application, he was still in Florida at the time the former first lady was in Kabul for the ceremony and didn’t arrive in Afghanistan to begin working for DynCorp for another two months.

Biden met with President Barzani in Erbil twice when he was vice president, in 2010 and 2011. At the time of Biden’s first visit, future Congressman Mills had already been out of the Army for seven years and out of DynCorp, and Iraq too, for one year. According to his LinkedIn profile, Mills was then in Norfolk, Virginia working for a different private military firm.

Mills stated on his DynCorp job applications in 2005 and 2009 that he deployed in Iraq during his military career with the Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment, a premier light infantry assault force that led the first wave of US troops that established beachheads at Normandy during the Allied invasion on D-Day. He made the same boast to his co-workers, at least until one – an actual Ranger veteran – warned Mills that if he persisted in repeating the claim he’d beat so badly he’d have to be medevaced back to the US, Kern and two other of the congressman’s erstwhile DynCorp colleagues told me.

His co-workers knew Mills’ self-proclaimed status as an ex-Ranger was pure garbage for the same reason it’s obvious his more recent boast of having deployed with TF 20 is also bullshit. Both of Mills’ proclamations, which by the way are refuted by his own official Army records, which makes no mention of either, were simply impossible to square with his woeful warrior skills, as Kern spotted immediately at the shooting range in regard to his claim of being a military-trained sniper.

During his actual military service, Mills wasn’t engaged in active ground combat with TF 20 – or the 82nd Airborne Division, which is the only unit he was actually attached to when he was in the Army – as an infantryman, or when he was taking part in counterinsurgency operations or direct action” strikes against “high-value” enemy targets. Mills’ main role in the military was as a medic, which he mentions far less frequently than the fairytale acts of heroism he routinely trots out at every available opportunity.

Serving as a medic during combat operations requires great skill and courage, but Mills clearly felt the truth wasn’t enough to make him an Official War Hero. Hence, he conjured up the facts that elevated him to the stature he desired, which not coincidentally paved the way for him to maximize his winnings from the larger Stolen Valor grift.

When he’s periodically pressed to back up his tall tales, Congressman Mills tries to weasel his way out of the predicament, as occurred during a January 2023 C-SPAN interview when he was asked to specify his military occupational specialty shortly after he casually claimed he’d been a combat infantryman and reconnaissance scout in Iraq during the invasion. “I was lucky enough to be able to cross-train and then just work directly with the teams,” Mills ad libbed moronically. “You’re really out for the mission first and then that medical background and experience” kicks in “after you’ve mitigated the threats and firefight and achieved the mission” – as if medics are just like every other soldier on the frontline except they double as health care providers if they don’t die on the battlefield.

In fact, to the contrary of his many breathlessly narrated fairytales, Mills never came face-to-face with death at any point when he was overseas with the Army, or with private contractors for that matter, including in either of the twin roadside bombings in Baghdad, the story he has milked more frequently and with greater success than any of his other creations.

Roadside IED attacks did take place on the two days Mills cites, but neither unfolded the way the congressman tells the story. Both occured in 2006 when Mills worked for DynCorp, where his primary title was medic just as it was in the Army, but he was a security specialist assigned to protect diplomatic personnel as well. The latter position provided him with the raw material for his fraudulent stories about running the counter-sniper team that kept Laura Bush and Joe Biden alive when they visited Kabul and Erbil, respectively.

On March 15, 2006, the date of the first strike and right around the time Mills transferred to Iraq after his short stint in Afghanistan, a US “embassy motorcade was [struck] by a roadside bomb,” according to a report prepared by a State Department agency. However, one vehicle was disabled by the attack, but it caused “no injuries,” said the report, which itemized all strikes against US diplomatic facilities and personnel during the period, and Mills wasn’t at the scene that day, according to multiple witnesses who were.

The second attack on April 19, was carried out by “unknown individuals” who attacked an embassy motorcade “with an explosive device and small arms fire, injuring two US Army personnel and two security contractors.” Mills was in a second motorcade that day that was in close contact with the one that was targeted, but he wasn’t in the immediate vicinity. Ergo, he didn’t miraculously “stabilize himself and other members on his team” before they were evacuated, wasn’t one of the four casualties of the attack, and didn’t suffer a single scratch as an injury.

Take a look at that picture in the above tweet, which Mills posted on January 3, 2021, the one-year anniversary of the assassination of Iranian General and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Commander Qasim Soleimani, in a drone strike ordered by President Trump during the final year of his first term in the White House. The caption was clearly meant to suggest that during his actual military service, the soon-to-be congressman had become such a potent threat to Iran’s allies in the Middle East that Soleimani issued an APB to all terrorists within 1,000 miles of Baghdad, ordering them to put everything else aside until Mills was eliminated.

Does it look like Mills, seen with his back to the camera with blood at the bottom of his right pants leg, narrowly escaped death just an hour or two earlier? No, it doesn’t, and as a matter of fact it’s not even the congressman’s blood.

The true story and the aftermath – as told in the words of three of Mills’ colleagues at DynCorp – Vietnam veteran and retired law enforcement officer Jesse Parks, Brian Simpson, who served in the 82nd Airborne Division in Afghanistan and Iraq before he was hired by DynCorp in early-2005, and former Army Sergeant Scott Kempkens, who in actual fact narrowly escaped death in the April 19 attack – appears below. I’d love to get Mills’ input, but since he hasn’t responded to requests for comments sent to his congressional office, I’ll have to include his take in the unlikely event he ever decides to share it.

Parks: I was the chief of operations in Baghdad and was reading reports in real time. Scotty almost had his head blown off, if he’d been leaning the other way he would’ve been shot in the head, not the shoulder. The other person who was seriously wounded was an Army National Guard sergeant who took a hot piece of metal in his ass.

Kempkens: The injured sergeant was with a reserve unit from Kansas that was stationed near the embassy and was working with the contractors to protect diplomats. He was pissed because it was the second time he’d taken shrapnel in the ass. There were two motorcades, three vehicles in each, I was in a military vehicle, a Hummer, it was the only vehicle that was hit. Corey was assigned as a team medic and was in a Suburban that was already around the corner when our vehicle was hit. A big chunk of my shoulder was taken off, I had burns on my neck and shrapnel in my left leg. Me and the sergeant hopped into Corey‘s vehicle after our vehicle got around the corner. We were treated at an aid station near the Interior Ministry; the sergeant’s blood got on Cory’s leg there or on the way there after we got into the Suburban.

Simpson: I was in Baghdad on April 19 and I visited Scotty in the hospital. I didn’t know him well then and I didn’t know Mills until we worked together in Erbil later, but he’s a liar. If he lied about getting injured to impress a girl or get a free beer at Hooters on Veterans Day it wouldn’t bother me, but he lied when he was running for Congress. It didn’t sit well with any of us.

Kempkens: If Mills had nearly died in the attack, he would have been awarded a Purple Heart if he’d still been in the Army, but since he wasn’t he could have won a Defense of Freedom Medal as a civilian working for a contractor. I have a certificate that shows I won the Defense of Freedom Medal; Cory doesn’t because he wasn’t wounded that day or any time during his time in Iraq with DynCorp. I know that because I was in Baghdad when he arrived there in 2006 and I was working for the company in northern Iraq when he left in 2009. Cory’s a lying sack of shit...If he was wounded at any time when he was in Iraq, it happened when he cut himself shaving.

Parks: When Cory was hired in 2005, DynCorp was desperate to hire people to work in Iraq on a contract it won from the State Department. A lot of people lied on their job applications back then, DynCorp hired anybody who wanted a job without bothering to confirm if their resume was true or not.

Simpson: Jesse ran Team Seven in Erbil, but when he was promoted I took over. We all had assumed Cory was telling the truth at the beginning because we thought he would’ve been vetted before he was hired, but his stories didn’t add up so people started asking around, and it became clear to everybody he was full of shit. Cory was a regular army medic assigned to headquarters when he was in the Army, if you got the sniffles, you went to see him at the clinic. At DynCorp, Cory got very lazy and bitched and moaned about everything. Every time we had a long ride ahead of us on a mission he came down sick beforehand. One of those times I heard he was running around as soon as the rest of us left, he was faking being sick like a little kid.

Parks: After the Nisour Square massacre in Baghdad, everybody had to basically reapply for their fucking job and resend their DD 21 fours and all of their awards and certificates. My wife scanned all of my certificates and sent them to me, I think there were about 33 of them. When Cory applied for the shift leader job [in 2009], I recommended he shouldn’t be hired for the new position and shouldn’t be retained in the old one, but he never submitted the verification paperwork.

Simpson: I kept telling him if you don’t supply the paperwork you’re gonna have to go home. After that, he left his weapons and gear laying on his bed, walked off the compound in the middle of the night, and was gone in the morning. He just disappeared and that was the last we heard from him.

Coming in Part IV: The true story about Mills’ fake Bronze Star, which was awarded by the Army two decades ex post facto on the basis of fictitious claims, apparently dictated by the congressman himself. Plus: The conclusion to Mills’ shameless tale of Stolen Valor, which never fails to become more nauseating just when it seems he’s finally hit rock bottom.

Congressman Cory Mill has always been a straight shooter so he wasted no time in addressing the questions raised by his critics with maximum transparency. Here’s the cover page of a brochure he sent to the local Republican Party where he proved he had nothing to hide by publishing an official Army document as evidence to bolster his case after carefully scrubbing it of information that undermined his oft-repeated account of epic battlefield heroism.

Part I of this story was published on March 11. You can read it here.

Ever since taking office for his first term in the House of Representatives in January of 2023, Republican Congressman Cory Mills of Florida has regularly regaled his political colleagues, Pentagon officials, and journalists with tales of his combat exploits in the US Army, when he deployed overseas for more than a decade to defend America’s “shores and freedoms” in war zones on three continents. The core of Mills’ account, which he’s chronicled at his official House website, on the campaign trail, at events on Capitol Hill, and to journalists, is that he deployed to Iraq during the US-led invasion of March 2003 and won a Bronze Star for his role in combat operations as an infantryman and reconnaissance scout.

During the post-war occupation, Mills took part in “high-threat operations” in Fallujah and other hot spots. In 2006, he was “blown up twice” in roadside bombings in Baghdad that caused multiple casualties, but fortunately “was able to stabilize himself prior to evacuation.”

In addition to Iraq, where he spent seven years, Mills deployed to hellholes like Afghanistan for more than three years – or sometimes two, depending on which day of the week he’s telling the story – and Kosovo, where he was decorated once again for battlefield valor. Mills has also filed war stories with datelines from Pakistan, Somalia, and Ukraine, where Mills said mysteriously when C-SPAN interviewed him for a profile piece in January of 2023, the month he was inaugurated to Congress, he’d traveled “to the front lines.”

Six months later, Congressman Mills cited his Army service, when he also gained experience” in counterinsurgency operations, cordon and search missions, and “direct action” and hunting high-value targets, at a hearing on Capitol Hill. “One of the reasons I ran for Congress, is I got tired of people who sit here trying to make decisions that impact us as war fighters on the ground but, yet, they have no accountability, no understanding, and no actual on the ground experience themselves,” he stated.

More recently, a growing group of retired military officers and veterans, including many who worked alongside Mills overseas, have asked pointed questions about just how much actual on the ground combat experience the congressman has himself. The skeptics have expressed doubts about whether he ever set foot in most of the countries he claims he deployed to during his Army career, and accuse him of fabricating his claims of combat heroism and narrowly escaping death on the battlefield.

Army veteran Scott Kempkens was with Mills during one of the congressman’s two supposed near-death experiences in the Baghdad attacks, and suffered serious injuries that day, but said the congressman didn’t suffer a scratch. “Cory’s a lying sack of shit and conman who could sell ice cubes at the North Pole,” Kempkens told me. “If he was wounded at any time when he was in Iraq, it happened when he cut himself shaving.”

Retired Recon Marine Will Kern, who met Mills in Iraq during the same period, offered a similar assessment of the future congressman, who he recalled making extravagant boasts about having first-class warrior skills that were impossible to reconcile with his awkward military lingo that “sounded like lines from movies,” and subpar performance in training. ”Cory is a POS,” Kern said. “He lied about everything.”

Retired US Army Sergeant Bobby Oller, a disabled combat veteran and another of the congressman’s critics, obtained a pile of documents and data that’s posted at CoryMillsWatch.com. The website accuses Mills of “Stolen Valor,” the term used to describe impostors who make false claims, orally or in writing, about their military service, achievements, and medals, which is considered to be particularly immoral if the guilty party’s motive was financial gain.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve read through the evidence posted at CoryMillsWatch.com and a lot of other material provided by Oller and Jade Murray, who created and conducts research for the website, provided me, including witness statements from soldiers who deployed with Mills, and interviewed Kempkens, Kern, and other sources. I also read through documents made public by the congressman – whose office hasn’t responded to requests for comment, but I’ll update this story if I hear from him – that he says debunk the allegations, and spent countless hours more conducting independent research.

I didn’t confirm all of the charges that have been made against Mills, and debunked one significant allegation he hasn’t been able to do himself. I believed the allegation was probably true when I wrote Part I and will correct that in Part III, where it has more relevance. The disproven accusation doesn’t undermine the thrust of the case against Mills, though, nor do the documents he’s presented that he claims exonerate him. Indeed, most of them are utterly farcical, of extremely dubious provenance, or tainted, in one case by redactions the congressman made for obvious reasons, that they strengthen the case against him rather than weaken it.

In lieu of Mills providing hard evidence, which he’s had plenty of time to do already, it seems abundantly evident the congressman egregiously and deliberately misrepresented his military service. In doing so, Mills, by all appearance, taffy-stretched the truth far beyond the breaking point long ago, but continues to berate his critics for indecency as he stands in public naked with his dick in his hand.

Very loosely based on the Army career of Cory Mills, emphasis on the word “loosely.”

As Mills tells the story, his fraught-filled years in Iraq began when he deployed to the country with the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division during the runup to the 2003 invasion, or more precisely to neighboring Kuwait, where he decamped at a US military base before crossing the border when fighting commenced. A rapid reaction force that conducts forcible entry parachute assaults and “leapfrogs enemy lines” to clear the way for advancing ground forces, the 82nd Airborne is headquartered at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

When he went into Iraq on combat missions, Mills was attached to Combined Joint Task Force 20, a Tier-1 organization that planned and directed top-priority black ops in Iraq by assembling “hunter-killer” teams on an ad hoc basis from a handful of ultra-elite special forces units and the CIA’s paramilitary division. A similarly named sister outfit was established to operate in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks and organized the raid ten years later that killed Osama bin Laden at his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

Mills’ post-invasion combat roles in Iraq included training Kurdish forces in northern Iraq in counterterrorism tactics, and, as the congressman said during an interview with CNN last July, he’d also “run a counter-sniper team” that protected VIP visitors from the US. As an example, he told the network, which invited him on to share his expert insights after a rooftop gunman tried to assassinate President Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, Mills’ said during the Obama years his crack team had been called on to protect then-Vice President Joe Biden during an official visit to Erbil to meet Kurdistan Regional Government President Masoud Barzani.

Mills hasn’t said nearly as much about his time in war-torn Afghanistan, but in the same interview he said his counter-sniper team had operated there as well. When First Lady Laura Bush visited Kabul to inaugurate the country’s first women’s university, he’d been entrusted with ensuring her safety, the congressman disclosed.

Mills saw combat in Kosovo even before he’d been called on to protect America’s freedoms by helping take out the Taliban and Saddam in the two major military operations during the Global War on Terror. The Army dispatched the congressman there during the bloody war that erupted in the late-1990s between a separatist militia and troops from the former Yugoslavia, which quickly ended in favor of the pro-Kosovo independence forces NATO and US troops intervened on their side by land, sea, and air. As in Iraq, Mills was decorated for his services, winning the Kosovo Campaign Medal for “exemplary military conduct.”

Perhaps owing to his humble, modest nature, Congressman Mills has been notably less voluble about his activities when he donned his battlefield fatigues to fight in the other trio of hardship posts he deployed to during his Army career: Pakistan, though he hasn’t breathed a single word about what he was up to there; Somalia, where he said little more than that he operated in the wilds of the Puntland autonomous region, and Ukraine, where he made his excursion to the “front lines.”

Despite all his selfless sacrifices after enlisting in the Army – a decision driven by the “sense of duty and gratitude” the congressman felt even as a wee lad walking the halls of high school in the small town of Eagle Lake, Florida, from whence he departed almost immediately upon completing his studies, as he emphasizes in his House biography – Mills’ foes have demanded proof that substantiates his war stories. To refute the naysayers’ baseless allegations, he’s come forward with a wide assortment of evidence, including a packet of defense material contained in “The TRUTH and FACTS About Congressman Cory MIlls,” which he sent to the local Republican Party in Volusia County last June.

Well, well, well, this ought to shut up the naysayers once and for all. Hold on, why did Congressman Mills redact key information from this copy of an Army award before making it public as part of his defense case?

“Thank you for giving me the opportunity to defend these defamatory lies,” Mills wrote weirdly, yet not entirely inaccurately, in the brochure. He provided three exhibits to clearly demonstrate he’d been “engaged in active ground combat and debunk the lies that Congressman Cory Mills was never deployed and never saw combat.”

The first was a Certificate of Appreciation he received from US Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad in recognition of Mills’ “prompt and brave actions” during the Baghdad bombings. The second was his medal for fighting in Kosovo. The third was a copy of a badge from the Army for taking part in “active ground combat.”

Unfortunately, the exhibits raised far more questions than they answered, if anyone had been paying attention anyway. The certificate from Khalilzad said the bombings took place in 2006, which as it turned out was three years after his discharge from the Army, when he waved farewell to his fellow warriors in Iraq and headed home to bunker down in the library while pursuing an Associate in Arts degree from the Florida State College in Jacksonville. That further showed he served in the Army for only four years, as he’d enlisted in 1999, and that was another head scratcher because Mills somehow managed to squeeze in ten years of service in Iraq and Afghanistan alone during that period.

The date of his discharge also was hard to square with Exhibit II in the packet, the congressman’s decoration in honor of his combat role in Kosovo, where he claimed he was a member of a “long range reconnaissance and surveillance scout recon team.” The mystery in this case was that the Kosovo War ended in June of 1999, a month before Mills started basic training. Furthermore, upon closer examination, the award wasn’t a Kosovo Campaign Medal for ground combat, but a medal for his service two years later during the post-war NATO-led peacekeeping mission.

Exhibit III, the combat badge, was equally problematic. Though Mills wanted to do everything possible to end the baseless slander campaign against him, the copy of the badge he included in his defense brochure was heavily redacted. Comparing it to an unredacted image shows there was nothing confidential about the sections he cleansed, however, for one reason or another Mills left in the reason he received the badge – his engagement “in active ground combat” – but scrubbed the line that identified how long his engagement lasted.

Never mind that, though. Mills dredged up all sorts of other exculpatory evidence he provided to shut down his critics, including several photos that showed him in an Army uniform during his deployment in Iraq. There wasn’t any way to know he was actually in Iraq when the photos were snapped or when they were taken, because in his zeal to be fully transparent Mills cropped most of the photos so they only showed him alone, not any of the warriors he was with at the time, or he subsequently deleted from his Instagram account, or they were images that he indicated showed him in combat, but were pulled from Wikipedia.

But hey, the guy’s a respected member of congress, let’s just take his word for it.

In any case, Mills had another ace up his sleeve – a Form 638, the document used to nominate service members for military decorations. The one Mills voluntarily forked over to the Daytona Beach News-Journal, was signed by Brigadier General Arnold Gordon-Bray, who commanded the 82nd Airborne Division in Iraq when Mills said he was there.

The Form 638 presented an impressive list of Mills’ achievements on the battlefield, such as his “exceptional bravery” in combat operations during the invasion and repeatedly exposing “himself to enemy fire” to rush to the aid of wounded coalition forces and civilians” during battles across Iraq. Even more impressive were Mills’ courageous actions at two firefights Gordon-Bray cited in the Form 638.

In one emotionally wrenching scene depicted by Gordon-Bray that took place during a battle in Baghdad, the audience finds Mills “bounding forward under murderous enemy fire” to rush into a building where his platoon sergeant was being held by an Iraqi fighter and throw “himself at the enemy insurgent and subdue him,” thereby saving his comrade’s life. The second scene, another five-hankie tearjerker, involved events that took place on March 31, 2003 at the Battle of Samawah, “the largest sustained urban combat...American paratroopers had been involved in since World War II.” Mills one again again paid no heed to the barrage of enemy bullets that whizzed past him and choose, “at great risk to his own life,” to come to “the aid of two fallen comrades” and save both of their lives by assisting “in their evacuation back to US forces.”

Game, set, match to Congressman Cory Mills, right? Well, it sure looked that way, but a few niggling issues soon emerged. For example, the Form 638 Gordon-Bray signed wasn’t in use until almost two decades after the events described in it had occurred. Also, why wouldn’t Mills or the general, who’d retired in 2012, say when the document was created and signed when they gave it to the News-Journal last year?

Relatedly, but in a question that applies to Mills’ general honesty and forthrightness in addressing the allegations of Stolen Valor, why has the congressman refused to this day to release his Army records, which would make it very simple to know if he’s telling the truth or not?

Coming in Part III: Game, Set, Match.

Retired US Army Sergeant Bobby Oller, a disabled combat veteran, has posted extensive material he obtained at CoryMillsWatch.com, including Army files Mills hasn’t made public to disprove his critic. Image from website/public domain.

Since his first run for political office in 2022 when he won a seat in the House of Representatives, Florida Republican Congressman Cory Mills has built his image around his steadfast dedication to the country, as exemplified by the long period he “hunted down terrorists to keep our shores and freedoms safe” while deployed in war zones around the world for the US Army. Mills often talks about his harrowing seven years in Iraq, when he was awarded a Bronze Star for taking part in combat operations during the US-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003, and narrowly escaped death during the post-war occupation when he was “blown up twice” by roadside bombs.

“After you take a hit like that, you don’t know if you’re going to survive or not,” Mills – who also served in Afghanistan, Kosovo, Pakistan, and Somalia, among other places – recounted in an ad for his reelection campaign last year. “Would you take a hit like that for your country? Would you risk your life for the Constitution?”

The congressman’s message resonates in Florida’s 7th congressional district, which is home to tens of thousands of veterans. After a close shave in the GOP primary during his 2022 campaign, which the Orlando Sentinel said he wouldn’t have won if not for “his military backstory,” Mills won the general election in a cakewalk and he cruised to victory again last year.

It helps that Mills isn’t only a hero on the battlefield, but a multimillionaire businessman as well. After returning home from his final overseas deployment in 2014, Mills and his wife, Rana Alsaadi, an Iraqi war refugee, co-founded Washington, DC-based PACEM Solutions, which sells riot-control gear to law enforcement and security agencies at home and abroad. Thanks to bountiful corporate profits, Mills was able to self-finance the lion’s share of the campaign costs during his initial bid for office and outspend his two Democratic opponents by a combined $4 million to $330,000.

PACEM’s success also helped Mills and Alsaadi buy a $4.4 million gated estate in the Virginia suburbs outside of Washington. When he’s in Florida on political business, the congressman shacks up at a lavish property just off the ocean in New Smyrna Beach.

A close ally of President Donald Trump, who appointed him to the Defense Business Board during the tail end of his first stretch at the White House, Mills sent a welcoming gift of commemorative grenades embossed with an elephant to his House colleagues upon being inaugurated to congress in January of 2023, which didn’t go over well with Democratic lawmakers. “Not even George Santos could make this stuff up,” remarked Connecticut Congressman Jim Himes.

Over the succeeding two years, Mills has relentlessly polished his brand as an alpha male warrior and overall “badass,” as he was once described by Matt Gaetz, his former colleague in Florida’s congressional delegation. The congressman uses his twin perches on the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs Committees to amplify his demand for stepped up efforts to confront China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran – the global quartet of official US enemies in the “Axis of Evil” Hall of Fame – and “their terrorist proxies.”

Mills also emits near daily warnings about the growing threat of a blitzkrieg invasion by the army of tired, poor, brown huddled masses the “Biden regime” rolled out a red carpet for on the US-Mexico frontier. Earlier this year, Mills said he was proud to support President Trump’s efforts to “secure the border and end the flood of drugs, crime [and] terror...that has plagued our nation for the last four years.”

Nor is Mills afraid to take on the military brass, as he demonstrated during a congressional hearing about how anti-abortion groups had been included on a list of potential terrorist organizations on a list used in coursework for a military training program. “I don’t think you’re deserving of four stars,” Mills told Army Deputy Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Patrick Matlock, who he accused of dodging questions about the list, which included the Earth Liberation Front and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and was drawn up by a low-level employee without the approval of senior military officials.

Shortly after the House reconvened in January, Mills announced he was already making plans to run for the Senate next year.” You can probably guarantee my hat is going to be thrown in the ring,” he declared. His entire reason for embarking on a political career was to be as “effective as possible,” he explained, and he felt sure he’d have a better chance to “deliver on the promises” he made to Florida voters in the upper chamber of congress.

Since then, Mills’ blossoming career prospects and reputation as a warrior have both become murkier. On February 19, a 27-year-old woman called for help from the local police in Washington, saying her “significant other for over a year” – Mills, it soon emerged – had “grabbed her, shoved her, and pushed her out of the door,” according to the initial report filed by the responding officer.

Mills said via an unnamed press spokesperson that he “vehemently denie[d] any wrongdoing,” and the woman recanted her account, which the congressman cites as evidence that bolsters his claim. However, the first police report about the case, which reportedly remains under investigation, said the alleged victim had "bruises on her arm which appeared fresh" and that she let officers listen in on a phone call with her significant other, who “instruct[ed] her to lie about the origin of her bruises.”

Mills often cites his years in Iraq as an example of his valor on the battlefield, as in this tweet that refers to one of the two times he was “blown up in Iraq” while defending the American Way of Life overseas. Public domain.

Meanwhile, questions remain unanswered about Mills’ version of his military service, which has drawn skepticism in a few Florida news outlets, most notably the Orlando Sentinel, and have been challenged by military officials and veterans. Among his strongest critics are soldiers who say they were at the scene of events that Mills depicts as displays of battlefield heroism and deride the congressman's accounts as fabrications, including his dramatic story about the bloody battle in Iraq that led the Army to honor him with the Bronze Star, and his oft-repeated claims about being “blown up twice” by roadside bombs.

During the early years of the “global war on terror,” retired US Army Sergeant Bobby Oller, a disabled combat veteran, deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq with the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, the unit Mills served in during the period he did. Oller, who lives in Texas, didn’t meet Mills when they were in the Army and knew little about him or his war stories until he heard him on Fox News one day “spouting off” tales about his military service that instantly triggered his bullshit detector. After watching a handful of Mills’ campaign ads and hearing him share other dramatic details about his battlefield experience, his suspicions shot up further.

“I went to asking guys from his unit and platoon, it’s not a big circle,” Oller told me. No one he spoke to who had first-hand knowledge vouched for Mills and some flat out called him a fraud. One of the people he called was a close friend Oller had known since they roomed together at Fort Bragg, where the 82nd Airborne is based, and worked for Dyncorp in Iraq after he left the Army, and supervised Mills when he was hired by the company as well. Oller remembered his friend mock Mills a few times, but he couldn’t recall the details. “I wasn’t paying attention,” he said “He’s like, ‘That’s the guy I’ve been trying tell you about’.”

Oller kept digging into the situation and discovered more and more evidence, including information he obtained under the Freedom of Information Act that Mills has not made public to prove the truthfulness of the narrative he tells about his military history, including the congressman’s Official Military Personnel File and DD 214 form, a post-discharge Report of Separation that contains the full record of service members’ time in the military and every piece of information they might need to verify it when the apply for “benefits, retirement, employment and membership in veterans' organizations.” Oller has posted a huge amount of the material he discovered at CoryMillsWatch.com and he sent me a lot of additional documentation he obtained, including witness statements from soldiers who served with Mills that accuse him of fabricating key details of about his military service – which he used as the launchpad for his political career – out of whole cloth.

In fact, based on the available evidence, including the congressman’s DD 214 and personnel file, Mills never took part in combat operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, or anywhere else, and despite to the contrary of his dramatic claims about hunting terrorists and fighting the enemy toe-to-toe on the battlefield, he was a mainly a medic and ambulance driver and spent the majority of his time in the Army at military installations in the US.

The only countries it’s clear he deployed to were Kosovo on a humanitarian mission in 2001, 18 months after the war in the country ended, and Kuwait shortly before the 2003 US invasion. It further appears Mills shouldn’t have received a Bronze Medal because he never set foot foot in Iraq until after his discharge – other members of the 82nd Airborne fought there but he remained in Kuwait – when he went to work for Dyncorp in 2005, two years after he returned to Florida following a brief stop at Fort Bragg to out-process from the Army.

Mills DD 214 shows he was only in the Army for four years and spent far more time employed by private defense companies and an NGO after his discharge, including periods he talks about that form the basis of tales that, as he tells them, appear to have taken place during his military service.

As an editorial published last October in the Orlando Sentinel stated, Mills’ version of his combat years “rarely differentiates between his actual military service and his time working for contractors.“ The newspaper interviewed retired Major General Randy Manner, a former deputy commanding general of the US 3rd Army in Kuwait, who said, “He wasn’t doing it for the Constitution. He was doing it for the Benjamins.”

Blurring the line between his military service and for-profit business employment significantly alters the reality of Mills’ story. His story is further skewed because, according to his official record and other documents, the facts typically didn’t unfold the way the congressman depicts things when he’s talking about his work with private contractors either.

Mills – whose office hasn’t responded to requests for comment for this story, but I’ll keep asking and include the response if I get one – issued a statement to the Sentinel denying allegations that he’d been less than forthcoming in describing his military service. “I received awards from the Army…and campaign medals recognizing my overseas service for the US government across the armed services, the State Department, and other agencies.” He’s described his critics as politically-motivated liberals or otherwise out to get him.

Oller stands by his claims and evidence and evidence he’s compiled, and some of the most important documents he’s obtained have been authenticated by independent sources or haven’t been challenged by Mills or anyone else, including the DD 214 and his Army personnel file. “There’s nothing personal about this and it’s not about politics, I’m a very, very conservative Republican,” Oller told me. “I’m angry because he made up the story and keeps lying and bragging about it.”

Coming in Part II: Mills says his battlefield skills have been tested in war zones around the globe. Based on documents cited by critics and accounts from witnesses who say they served with Mills, the congressman’s combat war stories don’t add up.

Gaetz with two other members of the MAGA aristocracy, Ivanka Trump and Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA. The photo was taken at an event held at the Trump Hotel to promote Kirk’s book, “The MAGA Doctrine.” Photo posted on social media/Public domain.

Part I of this story was published on February 18. This is the second and final installment.

The Trump International Hotel didn’t survive for long after Donald Trump’s first term as president ended in 2020, but during his initial four-year stretch at the White House it was the premier nighttime gathering spot for administration officials and GOP congressional leaders. During his first two years in office, at least 28 of the 37 cabinet members Trump appointed up until then had been to the premises, as had 35 of 65 Republican senators who held office during that period, according to a tally by Zach Everson, creator of 1100 Pennsylvania, which was essential reading for anyone tracking affairs at the property.

The routine presence of so many influential figures made the hotel an irresistible magnet of after-hours socializing for everyone looking to curry favor with the Trump administration, from GOP megadonors to corporate lobbyists. It also attracted flocks of the MAGA faithful from the local area and around the country, in particular devout Orthodox worshippers who made the pilgrimage to the property, which was considered to be the cult’s holiest shrine in Washington and second most sacred site anywhere after Mar-a-Lago. The “archetypal” post to social media from the hotel featured a “young white person sitting in the lobby...with a glass of champagne” with a caption saying something along the lines of “just having a little me time” or “thinking about how we can make America great again,” Everson told Washingtonian.

The Trump Hotel inevitably became the No. 1 pickup spot in the capital for Republicans seeking Republicans for long term romance or, more typically, a fast romp in the hay. A defense contractor who stayed at the property during a business trip to Washington at the midpoint of the president’s first year in office, was shocked by the carefree carousing. With families and kids strolling through the property, and customers hanging around who might well be liberal reporters or Democratic Party spies, it was only a matter of time before the situation created serious PR problems for the president, he feared. 

Ranking high among his specific concerns was Corey Lewandowski, who was fired from his job as Trump’s 2016 campaign manager five months before the presidential election following a series of embarrassing public screwups, including manhandling Breitbart News reporter Michelle Fields at a press conference. Lewandowski, who also had an extramarital affair with campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks before being shitcanned, “was always running his mouth off and after a few drinks you could see the pin starting to fall out of the grenade,” the contractor told me.

He shared his fears with White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, telling him the situation was “big trouble and he needed to nip it in the bud.” Bannon didn’t do anything to address the problem or didn’t get far in the unlikely event he tried, as the dumbfuckery continued unabated. In Lewandowki’s specific case, he slapped the buttocks of singer Joy Villa at a year-end holiday party in 2017, leading her to file a sexual assault complaint against him. 

In mid-2018, then-Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, became a nighttime fixture at the property. With the presence of Gaetz – who was forced to withdraw as Trump’s first nominee as attorney general in his current administration in the face of growing evidence of his chronic, abysmal past sexcapades – the seedy side of social life at the hotel reached new lows, based on the accounts of six GOP sources who were regulars at the venue during its heyday.

The sources collectively named eleven other conservative political and media celebrities they’d directly observed at the hotel conducting themselves in ways that would almost certainly have caused a scandal had word hit the press. Notwithstanding the contractor’s worries about imminent PR blowback for Trump, the media never covered the raunchy evening scene at the president’s hotel, so everything I was told – which was obviously a tiny slice of the full panorama of sketchy activities that occurred on the premises – stayed hush hush.  

The sources’ stories and other information I learned while researching this story reveals as much about Washington’s rancid political culture than it does about Gaetz himself. 

(Gatez didn’t reply to a request for comment sent via email.)

President Trump (third from right) at his hotel in early 2020 with a group that included White House Chief of Staff Mark Medows (to his right), House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy(to his left), and Congressman Jim Jordan, who like Gates was a leader of the House Freedom Caucus, the far-right group that worked closely with the administration. Photo posted on Instagram by McCarthy/Public domain.

Social intercourse at the Trump Hotel revolved around the Benjamin Bar & Lounge in the spacious marbled lobby, which had the feel of a big, comfortable living room. Couches and tables were scattered around the lobby, where customers assembled after ordering cocktails at the bar.

On a typical night, the women socializing at the hotel were, on average, a lot younger than the men. A sizable contingent were recent college graduates who’d come to town to work for the Trump administration, a GOP member of congress, or a conservative nonprofit organization. A smaller subset had just finished high school – maybe. 

A GOP insider who was at the hotel one night with a group of people asked the young woman sitting next to him if she wanted a drink as he was heading to the bar. “I didn’t know her so I asked how old she was,” he said. “She was 17 or 18, I don’t remember for sure, but not nearly old enough to drink so I bought her a soda instead of the gin and tonic she asked for.” 

The men drinking in the lobby tended to be a mix of “awkward nerds and guys trying to look important” and well known political figures with a lot of disposable income, one source said in characterizing the usual crew on the other side of the gender equation. Needless to say, members of the latter half were far more likely to behave badly, with the worst of the lot, easily exceeding government officials and members of congress, being big donors, in this person’s opinion. “A lot of them were married and the main reason they were at the hotel was to look for someone to go home with for a few hours or overnight if they had a good alibi,” he said.

A long list of high profile Trump Hotel frequenters had well known track records of egregious personal conduct, with Exhibit A in that regard being the property’s namesake owner. Fox News star Eric Bolling, who was given the boot by the network in 2017 for reportedly sending “unsolicited photos of male genitalia” to female colleagues, was in that category as well.

So, too, was North Carolina Congressman Madison Cawthorn, who became a customer after he took office in 2021, at which point overall business at the hotel had fallen off a cliff following Trump’s loss to Joe Biden in the prior year’s presidential election. In February of that year, the month after Cawthorn was sworn in, BuzzFeed ran a story that quoted four women who alleged he sexually assaulted or harassed them during his college days. In May of 2022, the month the Trump Organization sold the management and naming rights to the hotel, the Daily Mail revealed that Cawthorn had costarred in a sex video with a male staffer on his House payroll who he’d showered with gifts, which played a major role in his failed reelection bid six months later. 

Gaetz was pals with Bolling and Cawthorn – and Trump as well, though that’s less relevant in this context – though the sources I spoke with didn’t see him fraternizing at the hotel with either of them other than in passing. But just as in high school, where jocks, dweebs, druggies and other societal malcontents find their way to each other, birds of a feather flocked together at the hotel as well, and Gaetz’s social circles included an assortment of Grade A dipshits in the department of sexual misconduct. 

To name just two, I’ll start with Lewandowski, who Gaetz was known to hold court with in the lobby from time to time. In 2019, Lewandowski commenced an extramarital affair with South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, now Trump’s head of the Department of Homeland Security. Two years later, he got hammered at a Las Vegas fundraiser for an organization that fights substance abuse and crudely propositioned one of his tablemates, which was triply unfortunate. 

First, Noem was a keynote speaker at the event; second, the woman he hit on, in an unusual courting ritual that included boasting that his penis was four inches longer than normal, was the wife of a major Trump donor; third, Lewandowski had a lavishly-paid consulting gig at the time with a Trump Super PAC. Noem kept him around after the woman filed a police report, but the Super PAC fired him.

Rudy Giuliani in Sacha Baron Cohen’s second movie chronicling Kazakh reporter Borat Sagdiyev’s adventures in America, which was filmed during the 2020 election. In this much discussed scene, Giuliani lies flopped on his back on a hotel bed with a hand down his pants following an interview with Tutar, who was supposedly Borat’s daughter. Giuliani, who assumed the position after asking Tutar for her phone number, said he didn’t do anything inappropriate. Screenshot from movie trailer/Public domain.

The second dipshit I’ll mention here is Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney, who Gaetz periodically fraternized with at the hotel. Giuliani’s first marriage was annulled after he learned he’d wed his second cousin, his second wife found out he was divorcing her when he announced it at a press conference, and his third matrimonial partner filed for divorce a few days after she discovered he was cheating on her in June of 2018. 

The following January, Noelle Dumphy, who Giuliani hired to assist him on private business matters, sued him for alleged sexual harassment and assault. Dumphy submitted transcripts of audio conversations in court that found Giuliani telling her "I want to own you, officially;" “These breasts belong to me;” "I'm gonna make it a little painful;" and “Matt Damon is a fag...Coochie-coochie-coochie-coo."

Among those Gaetz was most frequently seen with at the hotel – was Vish Burra, a former producer of Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, who Gaetz hired in May of 2021 to run damage control after it was reported he was under federal investigation for sex crimes, and Sergio Gor, a top staffer for Senator Rand Paul who resigned in 2020 to take the job of chief of staff with the Trump Victory Finance Committee. An intimate and business partner of Don Jr., Gor currently is the director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office.

Raheem Kassam, a one-time adviser to right-wing British leader Nigel Farage and co-host of “War Room: Pandemic,” met White House digital strategist Noelle Garnier at the hotel and she said yes when he proposed to her at the White House in December of 2020, though they never tied the knot or their union didn’t last long if they did as she wed the son of Michigan Congressman Bill Huizenga three years later. Garnier is a lot younger than Kassam – she was in her mid-20s when they met, about half his age – but not so young that they needed to hide their relationship nor did they try to; Politico made a short, friendly mention of their engagement with a photo of Kassam on bended knee before her, and it’s still easy to find pictures of them together on social media. 

As was true of many of his dalliances in Florida, Gaetz had to be much more discreet about some of the intimate partnerships he struck up at President Trump’s property.

Gaetz’s official congressional portrait for 2019. Public domain.

On the advice of counsel, I’m not going to name or even hint at the identity of the twelve miscreants ID-ed by my sources, with the obvious exception of Gaetz – and to be clear, Gaetz is the only one of the Dirty Dozen who is mentioned anywhere in this story. No one else who’s named herein made the list, including Lewandowski, whose sins reported to me by the contractor were relatively minor and pales in comparison to the Las Vegas debacle and other previously reported cases of his misconduct over the years. 

Furthermore, I didn’t hear a word about Burra or Gor behaving badly with women at the hotel, or for that matter anything about their interactions with women at all, other than a favorable remark about Gor being involved in a long term relationship. The primary topic that came up in regard to Kassam was his relationship with Garnier, as noted above. 

(Burra declined to comment for this story. Kassam initially agreed to in a text message exchange, but failed to respond to subsequent requests. Gor did not respond to requests for comment sent via email in November, when I began working on the story, and one today to his Twitter page.)

Congressman Gaetz, on the other hand, was spotted chatting and drinking with a revolving cast of female companions, not infrequently young women he had met at the hotel on the very night in question. Two sources reported seeing him buy another round for his table or couch mate as soon as her cocktail glass ran dry. The congressman, incidentally, billed about $7,200 worth of his historic charges at the hotel to his political treasury, mostly for wining and dining, according to his campaign finance disclosure reports to the Federal Election Commission.

Gaetz was one of few members of congress who stayed at the hotel drinking until the late hours, and one of fewer still who was known to depart with a group of civilians after closing time in search of more fun. A favorite destination was the bar at the nearby Hotel Harrington, a cheap oasis in downtown Washington that became the Proud Boys’ favorite haunt during the final months of Trump’s first term as he tried to remain in the White House by hook or crook.

Sometimes, rather than tag along with the last crew of hotel revelers, Gaetz left with a female companion he hooked up with during the night’s festivities, typically one of the young recent arrivals to town. He wasn’t the only prominent figure in the political world who honed in on that sector of the hotel’s customer base – hitting on age-inappropriate women was by far the No. 1 type of sleazy behavior my sources cited when flagging members of the Dirty Dozen – but he did it more routinely and often looked to pick up one of the youngest available females on hand. 

Of course, for Gaetz, lining up barely legal sex partners was all in a day’s work and in at least one widely reported case, which eventually terminated his congressional career, the partner wasn’t quite legal. In 2017, his freshman year in congress, Gaetz attended a party in Florida where “call girls roamed the premises” and refreshments included alcohol, weed, cocaine, and ecstasy, and paid the 17-year-old girl – a year below the age of consent in his home state – he was with to have sex, twice, “at least once in the presence of other party attendees.” Being a gentleman, Gaetz reportedly picked up the teen’s drug tab, too.

So, every so often, Gaetz left the hotel arm in arm with a girl – and a few times with two – freshly out of high school, as was noted in Part I. The age of consent in Washington is 16 and none were younger than that, but a few were just above legal age in Florida, though that wasn’t always easy to know based on appearances alone. 

One of the sources saw Gaetz leave the hotel with two girls who he believed were 18 at best. He was right; after learning their names and determining their ages, it appears that the two, who are both deeply immersed in the MAGA-sphere politically and ideologically – had very recently turned 18 when the source first saw them at the hotel with Gaetz. “It was ludicrous,” he said. “He was a sitting member of congress buying drinks for girls who were too young to drink legally and going home to have sex with them when they were barely over the age of consent.”

None of this negatively affected Gaetz’s standing at the hotel. He spent most of January 2020 bunkered down at the hotel with Trump, his family, close friends and most fervent political supporters during the Senate debate on two articles of impeachment against Trump the House had approved a month earlier. On the night of January 29, Gaetz and Lewandowski grabbed “at a high-profile table right by the bar, shaking hands and posing for at least a dozen photos,” Everson, who’s now a reporter with Forbes, reported at 1100 Pennsylvania. “At one point, Gaetz left the table and worked the lobby, stopping at several other tables for more handshakes and photo ops.” A week later, Gaetz was at the hotel to celebrate Trump’s acquittal in the Senate with the president, members of his family, and administration officials.

Gaetz continued to be an honored guest during the remainder of 2020, Trump’s last year at the White House during his first term. In late August, he was one of a limited number of guests allowed into the hotel when the Republican National Convention was held there. Gaetz was also a VIP speaker at the convention along with other trusted members of Trump’s inner circle.  

Nor did Gaetz fall from grace at the property or in polite Republican society after it was reported that he was under federal investigation for sex crimes in April of 2021, three months after Trump’s reluctant departure from the White House. That August,  Gaetz married Ginger Luckey, who he’d met the year before at Mar-a-Lago, in a small ceremony on an island off the coast of California that was attended by Gor, who presided as the officiant and DJ, and Kassam.

Image from House Ethics Committee report on Gaetz. Public domain.

Most of the MAGA faithful stopped visiting the property soon after Biden’s inauguration, but Gaetz continued to trek to the hotel until the bitter end. In late March, he billed his campaign treasury  $418 for his final supper at the property; about six weeks later, The Trump Organization sold the management and naming rights to the hotel, which has operated under the Waldorf Astoria brand ever since.

Had Gaetz’s exploits become known outside of the friendly confines of the hotel and congress, it would have been just as fatal to his political career as his night at the 2017 party in Florida proved to be, even if the young women at the Trump Hotel were a tiny bit older and just north of the age of consent. Given the risk, it’s incredible how reckless Gaetz was in the capital and his home state. 

For example, he and his former best friend and partner in sex crimes Joel Greenberg didn’t make their Venmo transactions private so – as the Daily Beast reported days after it became known Gaetz was the target of a federal probe in 2021 –  suspicious payments to a woman who later dated the congressman for a $1,000 “salad” and $500 “ice cream” were  publicly available for all to see. “What’s the opposite of a criminal mastermind?” Jimmy Kimmel said mockingly of Gaetz.

However, a more interesting question than how Gaetz could be so careless in leaving evidence strewn around – short answer: like any man with a hobby, whether stamp collecting or sex with minors, Gaetz couldn’t shut up about his pet interest, even when he was addressing a group of Christian conservative leaders and told jokes "laced with sexual innuendo" – is why he didn’t get busted earlier despite being such an idiot. 

The main reason no one at the hotel called out Gaetz was the precise same reason he felt so at home there: given the owner, and the property’s client base of so many men like him the atmosphere was propitious to men behaving badly without having to worry that someone was looking askance. And so what if they were? What were they going to do, write a stern letter of complaint to President Trump demanding he shut down the fun and games?  

Gaetz felt compelled to portray himself as a moral titan when he made his initial run for Congress in 2016, saying in an interview during the closing days of the campaign, “The Bible, the gospel – these are our instructions from God. We are to follow faithfully.” But Gaetz didn’t give a rat’s ass about the bible, that was rhetorical garbage for the rubes in the Florida Panhandle whose votes he needed to win a seat in Congress. 

Four years later, he didn’t bother maintaining the pretense. Trump “doesn’t care for puritanical grandstanding or moralistic preening,” he wrote in his 2020 book, Firebrand. “If politicians’ family lives aren’t what really matter to the voters, maybe that’s a good thing. I’m a representative, not a monk.”

His secrets were equally safe in Congress, partly for the same reason. Virtually no one in either party seriously intended to follow through on their campaign promises to “Drain the Swamp,” crack down on special interest groups, or be good boys and girls, so there were also few members of the House or Senate who were likely to criticize their congressional colleagues for failing to live up to their rhetoric either unless forced to when public anger boiled over every once in a while. Better to keep a low profile than make enemies and risk becoming a target down the road.

But there was another related but separate issue that kept lips sealed about Gaetz in Congress, which is that political leaders are just as reluctant to cross the thin blue line and rat out their own as cops are. Former Congressman and current Senator Markwayne Mullin told CNN that in 2017, when he and Gaetz were both were going through freshmen orientation for House members, his Florida colleague bragged about snorting Viagra so he could "go all night," and showed other lawmakers photos of naked women he claimed he’d had sex with. 

But he didn’t reveal that until October of 2023, almost seven years later, after Gaetz succeeded in ousting Mulin’s close ally Congressman Kevin McCarthy as House speaker, and no one else did either. From that point going forward, Mullin, other supporters of the former speaker, and McCarthy, who resigned from Congress later that year, waged war on Gaetz by stoking the flames about his alleged sexual improprieties – even though McCarthy has long been dogged by rumors of extramarital affairs and he and one of his advisors both frequented the Trump Hotel, where the latter was said to prowl the premises for female companionship – and helped bring about his political downfall late last year. 

Gaetz’s GOP colleagues obviously knew more about his after hours exploits than Democrats, but it’s inconceivable that no one in the opposition party had any idea what he was up to. In fairness, Democrats aren’t any better than Republicans about policing their own ranks, which is why votes in the House Ethics Committee, which largely operates in secret, almost always split 5 to 5 on partisan lines and investigations rarely lead to punishment no matter how strong the evidence.

The Ethics Committee finally voted to release its report on Gaetz after two Republicans defected following a 5 to 5 split about two weeks earlier that kept it secret. The second vote that approved making the finding public – which was forced on the committee after lawyers who represented Gaetz’s alleged victims before the panel threatened to disclose their clients’ testimony and other suppressed information – came on December 5, after Gaetz had already withdrawn as Trump’s attorney general nominee when it became clear the Senate wouldn’t confirm him.

Otherwise, the Ethics Committee would simply have sat on the report, which concluded that between 2027 and 2020, Gaetz “made tens of thousands of dollars in payments to women that… were likely in connection with sexual activity and/or drug use, including the 17-year-old girl at the 2017 party in Florida. “The Committee determined there is substantial evidence that Representative Gaetz violated House Rules and other standards of conduct prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, impermissible gifts, special favors or privileges, and obstruction of Congress,” the report stated.

Meanwhile, following his failed nomination as attorney general, Gaetz has rebounded from rock bottom – though almost imperceptibly, so it may be more accurate to say he’s made a lateral move from rock bottom – to hosting his own show on One America News and becoming the nation’s most famous  ivermectin salesman. But Gaetz still has a lot of powerful friends in the Trump administration, including the president himself. 

Hence, like his buddy and fellow fuckup Lewandowski, who’s been repeatedly exiled from Trump’s inner circle but always manages to find his way back, most recently as a “special government employee” at the Department of Homeland Security working for Noem, who was still his paramour as of last year according to a soon-to-be-released book by Politico reporter Alex Isenstadt, Gaetz may not be permanently finished in national politics.

There’s been talk recently that The Trump Organization is seeking to regain the rights to operate the president’s former Washington hotel, and reports as well that Elon Musk is planning to buy The Line Hotel in Adams Morgan and turn it into a private club. 

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Photo of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell introduced at her trial in 2021. Photo submitted by US Attorney's Office/Public domain.

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Amy Booth is the managing editor of the Buenos Aires Herald and has written for the BBC, the Guardian, VICE, Al Jazeera, New Humanitarian, and many other publications. You can follow Booth, who previously lived in Bolivia, on Twitter and Instagram. Our interview was lightly edited for length and clarity.

Was Milei elected because the opposition was discredited or did voters support his campaign proposals?

Milei rose to fame as an off-the-wall TV pundit who made for great viewing because of his rants and his explosive or embarrassing comments - but from there to the presidency? His ascent took everyone by surprise.

The population was sick of the established political forces and desperate enough that they didn't care how wild the alternative was. Argentina had come from four years of Alberto Fernández's Peronist leadership. He implemented one of the longest COVID-19 lockdowns in the world, and after the pandemic, inflation went stratospheric. Fernández kept blaming the pandemic, the Ukraine war, and a huge drought that took out the soy harvest. A growing number of people were poor even though they had jobs, because money and salaries didn't hold their value.

Milei’s discourse about absolute freedom took root during the pandemic lockdowns. The state was a very visible presence that stopped you from going out and working and earning a living, so Argentines were receptive to a candidate who idolizes a minimal state and free markets. His victory marked the emergence of the far-right on Argentina's political scene, as political scientist María Esperanza Casullo told me shortly after his victory. The far-right has been in ascent all over the world during the past decade or so, from Trump in the US and Meloni in Italy to Bolsonaro in Brazil, but it didn't have a major political presence in Argentina until now.

Though merely one of Musk’s countless groveling toadies, figurehead US President Donald Trump is a big fan of Milei’s as well. This tweet by Milei’s office shows the three at Mar-a-Lago shortly after Musk swept to power last November.

That said, Argentines didn't vote for Milei because a majority of them support his most extreme proposals – that human organs should be a market like any other and the poor should be free to starve to death. Surveys show most people who voted for him wanted him to fix Argentina's economy.

What are the major economic policies Milei has introduced since taking office, and what’s been their impact?

Milei campaigned on a platform of eliminating inflation, balancing the budget with massive cuts to state spending, and dollarizing the economy. After he took office, he devalued the peso by 54 percent and passed legislation that sought to massively deregulate the economy. A decree, known as the decretazo, or mega-decree, cut labor rights, put state companies up for privatization, and stripped away all kinds of provisions that he considered “market distortions,” like price controls on basic goods and restrictions on landlords raising rent.

He closed around half of Argentina's ministries on taking office. Public universities have taken a massive hit in funding, pensions suffered huge cuts, and so did funding to state governments. In June, his Bases Law passed and it included the Incentive Regime for Large Investments, known as RIGI, its acronym in Spanish, an extremely generous package of pro-business rules for major investors. If you look at the macro statistics, things look great. Inflation peaked at 276 percent and it's now fallen to around 117 percent. The government ran a fiscal surplus in 2024 for the first time in 14 years and is projecting economic growth.

But on a human level? It's been horrific. Inequality spiked, and prices for utilities, public transport, and other essentials skyrocketed after he cut subsidies. Poverty soared to 53 percent in the first half of 2024, and 66 percent among children. A UNICEF report found that a million children were skipping meals every day because their families couldn't afford food. Doctors have said they're seeing children with scurvy, neurological disorders, eye injuries, and other hunger-related conditions that they haven’t seen in Argentina before.

Early statistics show poverty came down again in the second half of the year, but it's still visible everywhere. Milei cut aid to soup kitchens, and there are shocking numbers of people rifling through bins for food, and appalling levels of street homelessness.

What does Milei want? Are there elements of his program that would broadly benefit middle class and poorer Argentines, or is he more or less trying to implement the standard right-wing “shock therapy” similar to what Pinochet did in Chile?

If there was any doubt about Milei's ideological bent before he was elected, he's gone full mask-off in 2024, emboldened by the return of his ally, Donald Trump. During his speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, he said "wokeism is a cancer" and denounced feminism, trans and gay rights, climate change, and other causes that are typically identified with the left. He recently said there is no such thing as a market failure.

The economic elite want him to hurry up and lift capital controls, and he's been at odds with economists recently because they've said the peso is too strong. There's a tension there because if the economic authorities devalue the peso or stop spending dollars to stabilize the peso, inflation would likely rise again, and that's Milei's standout achievement. Agribusiness wanted reduced export taxes and the government did that.

Milei believes in the absolute libertarianism he preaches and that there's no point having the state put price caps on rent and food, because a healthy, functioning free market economy will allow everyone to compete based on merit and solve the problem better than the state ever could. But his government has attacked social movements by calling them "managers of poverty,” meaning that intermediaries within those organizations that direct social welfare corruptly, for example, by forcing recipients to march at protests in order to get money or by keeping some of it to finance their operations. In some cases, that was probably true, but he’s cut aid to people who genuinely need it. There have been reports that drug traffickers and organized crime have filled the gaps.

Milei holds the poor individually responsible for their situation in ways that don't stand up to the evidence. For instance, he believes people who are desperate enough will just go out and find a job eventually. He clearly doesn’t think much about people who are disabled or have family responsibilities, or other structural factors make it difficult for people to get the type of jobs that are available and suggest the state has more responsibility to ensure that.

How is his government doing in terms of transparency and cronyism which have been problems in the past with Argentine political leaders on the left and right. Is he doing any better?

I mean, he created the role of General Secretary of the Presidency and installed his sister in the job! His star assessor, Santiago Caputo, is the Economy Minister's nephew, and clearly has decision-making power that far outstrips his official role, with no accountability. Those two and the president are the decision-making triangle at the highest level. Nepotism is alive and well.

The government is highly selective in granting interviews and has shown a decided preference for outlets that are sympathetic to the ruling party. It also cut down on the sort of information that will be released via freedom of information requests. In general, access to information is a problem.

Milei has suggested he’d clamp down on protestors and opponents of his “reforms.” Is there a threat of a sharp authoritarian turn?

Milei rejected the existing consensus about crimes against humanity committed by Argentina's last dictatorship and disputes the number of victims, even though stolen children of the disappeared are still being identified today and people continue to be convicted for crimes committed during that era. His government fired more than half the staff at the Human Rights Secretariat, the INADI anti-discrimination watchdog has been shuttered, and there's virtually no support left for victims of gender-based violence.

So far, though, it hasn’t been necessary for him to make a full authoritarian turn even if he planned to if needed. He won the presidential election fair and square, has a legitimate electoral majority, and has governed with support from conservative opposition parties. Security forces have violently repressed demonstrators and a lot of people were injured by rubber bullets and tear gas, but there have been no fatalities, nor has there been a broader social uprising, like in 2001 during the economic crisis under President De la Rúa.

Milei has said and done things that are concerning, though. The Bases Law gave him extraordinary powers – although some of his elected predecessors have done that too – and has taken to effectively ruling by decree on funding issues. He vetoes laws congress passes if he doesn't like them and the opposition doesn’t have a two-thirds supermajority to overturn the vetoes, as opposed to the simple majority needed to pass laws in the first place. He's been extremely hostile to the press, personally attacking individual journalists and the profession as a whole, saying we’re corrupt and that any criticism of him is because we've lost ground.

I saw polls from Argentina a few months ago that show Milei is still pretty popular, particularly compared to the level of support recent former presidents had at the same point in their tenure. How do things stand at the moment?

When Milei took office, everyone thought we were in a countdown to a social uprising. Pizzerías printed place mats with the presidential chair on one side of a maze and a helicopter on the other, a reference to De la Rúa being forced to resign and escaping from the Casa Rosada in a helicopter in 2001. He has a lot of support from economic elites because his agenda is broadly business-friendly. But we've seen that he has support from all social sectors. It's worth noting that he's typically been more popular among men than women, especially young men. The midterm elections this year should show us how he's doing in that regard.

Biden visits Ukrainian refugees in Poland. Too bad that girl doesn’t work for Lockheed Martin, she’d be rich by now. White House photo via Wikimedia Commons/public domain.

Following a “highly productive” conversation yesterday with Vladimir Putin yesterday, President Donald Trump announced he and his Russian counterpart had agreed to “start negotiations immediately” to end the three-year-old war between Moscow and Kiev. Soon afterwards, Trump spoke to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and said their discussion also “went very well,” writing in a post on Truth Social that “He, like President Putin, wants to make PEACE.”

Joe Biden, Trump’s predecessor at the White House, promised to stand with Ukraine “for as long as it takes” and approved $183 billion in aid for Zelensky’s government, of which about two-thirds weapons shipments and other military-related assistance. The total exceeded the price tag of any US war in history and was $15 billion more than the combined expenditures of the post-9/11 invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, including “reconstruction” costs through 2010.

With Biden out of the way, the prevailing conventional wisdom in Washington political and media circles is that no matter what Trump says in public, he intends to quietly cut a sweetheart deal with Putin that throws Zelensky under the bus. That viewpoint is most commonly held by Democrats who believe the nation’s current president is a Russian intelligence sleeper agent, but a less extreme version is prevalent in less lunatic quarters, as was reflected in the New York Times coverage of Trump’s phone calls with Putin and Zelensky.

Trump’s discussion with Putin “was a major milestone” for the Russian president and “signified the collapse of Western efforts to isolate him” after he launched the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine that triggered the war, the newspaper reported. Their conversation exemplified “the Kremlin’s hope that the new American leader…[would] back away from supporting Ukraine.”

The Times noted that after he spoke to Zelensky, Trump remarked “I’m backing Ukraine” and intended to continue sending the country financial support, but the newspaper’s account suggested there were strong grounds to be dubious about his sincerity. “Trump has long been skeptical of Ukraine” and “never warmed” to Zelensky,” read the story, which emphasized that earlier in the day Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had said it would be “unrealistic” for Ukraine to think a peace deal with Moscow would pave the way for it to join NATO or restore its border to where it was before Russia annexed Crimea in 2014.

I’m not a fan of Hegseth but his view is not uncommon among Kiev’s supporters in the US and Europe, and could just as easily be seen as recognizing reality rather than evidence that Trump is in cahoots with Putin. Even Zelensky has acknowledged Ukraine may need to give up territory that’s currently occupied by Russia at least temporarily, which is the only way to make the idea politically palatable in Ukraine.

The entire framework of the Times story, and the broader idea that Biden was a far better guardian of Kiev’s interests than Trump, obscures a significant and obvious fact. Despite Biden’s eagerness to serve as Zelensky’s ATM card, the situation on the military front is far from rosy at the moment for Ukraine’s army or its citizens.

As theTimes reported in a story just a few weeks ago, the Russia-Ukraine war is “killing soldiers at a pace unseen in Europe since World War II.” It estimated battlefield deaths on Kiev’s side at 62,000 and put the body bag count for Moscow at about 150,000, but Russia, which has a bigger army that’s better equipped and financed, is winning the war on the battlefield and “the trends favor the Kremlin,” the story concluded.

Meanwhile, 12 million Ukrainian citizens, about a third of the population the year the war started, are internally displaced or refugees, and a quarter live in poverty, according to recent reports. The cost to rebuild the country steadily rises upward and is currently calculated at between $411 billion and $1 trillion.

All of which raises a number of important questions, such as:

–-What happened to all the cash Biden allotted for Ukraine’s army and how did it help or hinder its battlefield capacity?

–-How did the mammoth broader flow of US assistance impact political and economic developments in Ukraine?

—Is Trump in a hurry to end the war for hidden, nefarious reasons?

—Whatever the answer to the last question, if Trump was able to broker a peace agreement that forced both sides to make roughly equivalent concessions, wouldn’t that be better and more realistic than Biden’s stated goal of helping Ukraine win a military victory “for as long as it takes”?

Over the past few months, I’ve seen and heard a lot that’s relevant to those questions, including previously unreported information shared by sources who were recently in Ukraine or Russia and with few exceptions supported Kiev in the war. Putting aside the relative merits and feasibility of a military versus a diplomatic solution to the conflict, which I only directly discussed with a few of the sources, their collective opinion was that Biden’s strategy in Ukraine had been a less evident but similarly colossal failure as President George W. Bush’s military adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq during the glory days of the “Global War on Terror.”

Baghdad, 2004. Those were the days. Wikimedia Commons/public domain.

The largest and most important share of military assistance Biden allocated for Ukraine – roughly $66.5 billion – went for armaments, and the Pentagon helped rustle up at least the same amount for its armed forces through the US-led Ukraine Defense Contact Group, which musters defense officials from 50 countries.

The price of the US weapons was paid for from two different government accounts. The first was the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, which provided Zelinsky with a pile of cash to buy new equipment directly from arms manufacturers.

The second tranche was the Presidential Drawdown Authority (PDA), which Biden tapped to pull weapons from existing Pentagon stockpiles. Biden invoked PDA at least 55 times to send a combined $27.7 billion in arms to Ukraine, which were freebies to its government because US taxpayers footed the tab for the deals, which were a two-fer for manufacturers because all the old equipment shipped to Kiev had to be replaced with new materiel so it would be available to the US military in the event of an emergency.

The list of US-supplied weapons to Zelensky’s military forces includes, aircraft, air defense systems, anti-aircraft missiles, ballistic missiles, gun trucks, laser-guided rockets, patrol boats, radars, tanks, and a mountain of military munitions. A similarly long list of companies sold weapons to Ukraine, with the top five firms General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and RTX (formerly Raytheon) predictably racking up the biggest share of sales. All those companies have representatives on the US-Ukraine Business Council’s board of directors, as are a number of other defense and aerospace firms whose fortunes have benefitted from the war and collectively represent the largest industry contingent in the organization’s membership ranks.

The weapons sales pipeline arrangement had a few serious drawbacks from the Ukrainian perspective. First, the money in the US government’s benevolent military assistance program for Kiev never moved beyond US shores, but swelled the domestic bank accounts of American arms manufacturers. Second, what Ukraine most urgently needed wasn’t wildly overpriced equipment manufactured by US companies, but cheaper, more practical materiel it could have easily obtained from other countries. Third, a lot of the weapons the Biden administration shipped to Ukraine didn’t work well or at all.

As a report published last November by Defense Priorities, a Washington think tank, put it, a variety of the armaments shipped to Ukraine, in particular the big ticket items, didn’t produce the expected results and “led to operational failures…[and] wasted resources.” A US weapons vendor who operates in Ukraine, put things more starkly, saying, “A lot of the shit Ukraine got from Biden weakened the war effort and increased the chances of Russia winning. The defense ministry paid a lot more than it needed to for US equipment but troops routinely ran out of ammunition while their field commanders were begging American nonprofit groups for socks and soldiers’ families were buying a lot of gear at Amazon.com.”

Drones offer a perfect case study here because they were a key weapon in the arsenals of both Kiev and Moscow, and so important to Ukraine that Zelensky created a new branch of the Armed Forces called the “Unmanned Systems Force.” Both warring parties employed drones for multiple purposes, including intelligence gathering, surveillance, attack operations, target support for other systems, decoys, laying mines, and to detect, jam, and destroy enemy drones. Unmanned Aerial Systems, to use the term generally employed by the Pentagon and industry vendors, aren’t one of the top-priced items on a per unit basis, but Zelensky put several billion dollars in last year’s defense budget for drones, which are reportedly responsible for at least 80 percent of Russia’s frontline losses and the country’s military burns through its stockpiles at a furious pace.

A Northrop Grumman RQ-4 Global Hawk, which has been deployed in Ukraine. Wikimedia Commons/public domain.

Ukraine has bought a wide assortment of drones, along with munitions, radar systems and other related items, from US companies. The beneficiaries include brand name firms like Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and L3Harris; start up Shield AI, which recently opened an office in Kiev after Ukraine requested 200 of its V-BAT drones, which “typically cost about $1 million each, though they are cheaper when bought in bulk,” but even at a discounted price could double the country’s annual revenue of $163 million last year; and little known firms such as Fortem Technologies, which sold a small a small package of products to Ukraine that were paid for with money the government crowd-funded; and Aevex Aerospace, which was founded in 2017 and has received at least $582 million worth of contracts for sales to Ukraine, which reportedly is more than any other US drone manufacturer.

Headquartered in California, Aevex’s current customer list includes the Pentagon, the Special Forces Command, the “intelligence community,” US “allies and partners” like Ukraine, and other arms companies such as Lockheed Martin, General Atomics, and BAE Systems. In April of 2022, two months after the war started, the Pentagon announced that Aevex – which had “no prior experience in making unmanned aerial systems on its own before developing its family of Phoenix Ghost drones, according to Forbes – had produced a 121-item package designed “specifically to Ukrainian requirements” that was fast-tracked through “Big Safari,” an Air Force program that seeks to “marry talent and technology from private industry” to respond quickly to “emerging threats and operational requirements.”

By June 2023, Aevex had already expanded its manufacturing facility in Florida for the second time and had enough capacity to “overwhelm Russian air defenses and...knock out Russian air bases used for attacks on Ukraine – or help burn down vital strategic oil and gas facilities and bring down the war economy” and force Moscow to end the invasion,” the Forbes story said. That prediction obviously proved to be extremely optimistic, but Aevex expanded its Florida facility again in July of 2024 to keep up with demand, and reported total sales of more than 5,000 drones at the end of the year, at prices ranging from $49,000 apiece for the company’s Dagger to $69,000 for the Disruptor, with an upgraded version of the latter with a secret price tag.

The total value of drone sales to Ukraine by US companies isn’t known, but based on press releases issued by the Pentagon and State Department, the manufacturers, and news accounts, it appears to reach a minimum of several billion dollars. The bang has rarely been worth the buck. In addition to their wildly inflated price compared to options available from other countries, “most US drones brought to Ukraine have flown off course, fallen out of the sky or struggled even to take off,” said an October 2024 story in the Wall Street Journal.

“Our drones have been defeated in Ukraine by everything from Russian electronic warfare to bad weather,” a knowledgeable US source who regularly visits the region told me.

That led Kiev to first turn to China for drones, which it purchased for approximately $3,200 to $4,900 apiece, including extra batteries and chargers, and by last year it was meeting the overwhelming share of its needs by buying from its rapidly expanding domestic industry, which the Biden administration helped finance.

Drone sales to Ukraine have dropped sharply, but US companies continue to cut deals with Zelensky’s government and new contenders, at least a few that have intimate connections to the Trump administration, which will become more pertinent in Part II, have been trying to break into the market. Fed by steady sales of other defense goods to Ukraine – which Trump has given no indication thus far he intends to cut off until and unless a peace deal is reached, and US firms would also be well-positioned in a post-war setting – helped American weapons exports reach new records annually since 2021, the year before the war started. The total volume rose to $319 billion in 2024, more than doubling in value over three years.

Since 2019, the US share of the global arms market climbed from 34 percent to about 42 percent, which exports to Ukraine also played a primary role in, as did war-related exports to European allies. So, too, did sales to countries that previously relied on weapons from Russia, but with its foreign sales dropping due to increasing domestic demand caused by the war and sanctions imposed by the Biden administration, the Pentagon helped American companies snatch a valuable slice of business from Moscow’s traditional client base. “By transitioning countries off Russian equipment, we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity,” Assistant Secretary of State Jessica Lewis said in November of 2023. “This goes beyond arms — it includes maintenance, parts, training, military exercises and more.”

The combination of vast piles of US government outlays to support Ukraine’s armed forces, the Biden administration’s virtually nonexistent oversight of that money, and its preference to hide as much information as possible about the cost and scope of US involvement, has generated several additional lucrative profit streams for American companies and budding entrepreneurs. As invariably happens when so much money is sloshing around and a single score could net once-in-a-lifetime financial rewards, a stampede of wartime profiteers hoping to win Ukraine-related business, including some with no previous experience in military-related deals, and among that group, an assemblage of the usual grifters and con artists.

One of the potential routes to riches is the private arms market, which is far murkier than the official one and of unknown size, but clearly much smaller too. I’ve spoken to four sources familiar with the private side of the market, including two people who traveled to the country and met with Ukrainian defense officials. The deals I heard about, which weren’t concluded as far as I know, were highly confidential but not illegal – at least technically – as the would-be arms dealers involved obtained the proper licenses and paperwork from the US government to sell to Ukraine, typically material from military and law enforcement surplus stocks.

However, the business wasn’t strictly on the up-and-up either. One of the hopeful salesmen had a license to market Armored Personnel Carriers, Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicle, and Humvees. The ministry of defense in Kiev would have been the official buyer of the items, but private arms sales into active war zones are restricted, potentially illegal depending on the products, and embarrassing to the home countries of buyer and seller if exposed. Hence, the equipment would have been delivered to arms bases in Poland near the border with Ukraine and transported from there to their final destination, but rung up as sales to Poland in the official accounting books.

I also spoke to a US citizen who had a few brushes with the law in his not-too-distant past and no relevant background, but had business associates with experience in the arms market who he teamed up with on attempted sales to Ukraine. I can’t disclose the key details, such as who was involved or what type of equipment was discussed, but had the transaction gone through all of the participants would have made a small fortune. The source said there were numerous hustlers traveling back and forth between the US and Kiev, where he described the environment as “a Ukrainian version of the Wild West.”

The weapons trade was merely one part of the Biden administration-financed self-licking ice cream cone that generated far greater rewards for US companies and independent profit-seekers than their counterparts in Ukraine or the country’s armed forces. Another sketchy, underreported, and highly profitable slice of business went to private arms companies who won US government contracts to work with the Ukrainian army.

In March of 2022, just a month after the war began, the demand for private contractors in Ukraine was “rising by the day” due to “a frenzy in the market,” according to a post to a Facebook group for industry veterans and employees by a recruiting agency that was already advertising jobs. At the time, US companies were barred from operating directly in Ukraine – Biden lifted the ban soon before he left office – so the job site was a US military base in Poland, where American firms were setting up shop and Ukrainian officers and soldiers would be brought for training.

Help Wanted ads posted by the companies or recruiters during the first 18 months of the war were looking to hire employees with public and private sector experience in military and intelligence operations to drill Ukrainian troops in combat tactics, disarming IEDs, battlefield medical care, and using and maintaining the hideously expensive prone-to-break US weapons systems supplied by the Biden administration. Other available positions involved providing security to the CIA and other US agencies who had boots on the ground in the neighborhood,

One listing posted by a recruiter had multiple openings with an unnamed US firm for combat veterans, preferably with Special Forces background, to conduct "covert extractions and evacuations" from “active warzone battlescapes” with little or no support other than assistance the employees were able to rustle up on their own from "friendly forces, local authorities, or resistance fighters.” The work paid up to $2,000 a day – about three times the rate for similar positions in the US, Asia, and Central America – plus bonuses.

The US firm that currently has the largest presence in the region is probably Virginia-based Triple Canopy, which in 2017 paid $2.6 million to settle allegations that the company submitted false claims to the Pentagon on contracts issued during the Iraq War era and is now a subsidiary of Constellis, which bought the remains of Blackwater after it imploded following the 2007 murders of 14 Iraqi civilians by its employees at Baghdad's Nisour Square. Trump pardoned four of the employees for Blackwater, which is owned by GOP megadonor Erik Prince, during the dog days of his first term at the behest of Hegseth.

A source familiar with Triple Canopy’s operations told me the company had hundreds of employees working on its Ukraine contracts, some from the US but mostly from low-wage countries in South America, including Colombia and Argentina. Their work included supporting Ukrainian troops involved in combat operations, he said, adding, “It’s misleading to describe the war as between Russia and Ukraine. Both sides are heavily backed by private companies

The flood of assistance Biden approved for Ukraine also lined the pockets of US lobbyists, foundations and nonprofits groups, and all sorts of other beltway bandits. It was a cornucopia of riches for one and all – excluding, of course, Ukraine’s citizens, other than the small number who were in positions that allowed them to profit from the business of war.

Coming in Part II: Sex, Lies, and Corruption, byproducts of US military assistance to Ukraine. Plus: A look at the Biden vs. Trump approach to the Russia-Ukraine war.

Screenshot from 2020 TV report/Public Domain.

1. “While Democrats Sleep,” Edward Luce, Financial Times, February 4. “Donald Trump is burning America’s rule book. If he carries on like this, Democrats will have no choice but to send him a strongly worded letter.”

To claim that America’s minority party is too punch drunk to get its act together would be charitable. Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, is following the rules of a vanished age. Democrats could have blocked confirmation hearings for Trump nominees — many of whom would have been laughed out of the chamber in that bygone era. A single Republican, Alabama’s Tommy Tuberville, froze all of Joe Biden’s military appointments for almost all of 2023. But Democrats are following regular order.

It is not as if Schumer is being outshone by colleagues. A few days after Trump’s inauguration, Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leader in the House of Representatives, posted: “Presidents come and Presidents go. Through it all. God is still on the throne.” That is as may be. But fatalism has no track record of stopping revolutions.

Do not look to the Democratic National Committee either. Last weekend the DNC elected a new chair, Ken Martin, a Minnesota party official. But the hustings were noticed because of the outgoing chair Jaime Harrison’s plea that they reserve a place for a non-binary Democrat on its seven-member committee. Delegates also acknowledged that America is built on indigenous land. Words like “string quartet” and “Titanic” come to mind.

Were all things still equal, Schumer’s approach would seem reasonable. His view is that Democrats should separate the signal from the noise. An example of this would be fighting tooth and nail to stop Trump from occupying the Panama Canal Zone but ignoring his renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. Schumer recently predicted that “Trump will screw up”. Republicans would then lose the 2026 midterm elections and Trump then become a lame duck.

Schumer’s playbook is the 2006 Democratic midterm sweep just two years after George W Bush was re-elected. Barack Obama’s presidential launch came three months later. The hope is that Democrats can pull off a similar rebound now. But Trump is not Bush Junior. He is not even Trump 1.0. They say always pick your battles. Yet Democrats seem to overlook that they are in a full-blown war. Assuming that they will fight the next election on a level playing field is an act of faith. Trump has been in office for two weeks. There are 21 months until the midterms.

2. “There's No Auschwitz in Gaza. But It's Still Genocide,” Daniel Blatman and Amos Goldberg, Haaretz, January 30. “Genocide is any action that leads to the destruction of a collective's ability to exist, not necessarily its total annihilation.”

My first go at AI.

Genocide does not have to conform to the Nazi paradigm, which viewed every Jew as an enemy to be exterminated. Genocide is also never linear, and contradictory processes always exist within it. For instance, while Armenians were deported and massacred in vast areas of the Ottoman Empire, in major cities like Izmir and Istanbul, they were hardly affected. In certain cases, Heinrich Himmler, the architect of the Nazi Final Solution, temporarily halted the extermination of Jews at specific places or times due to economic or diplomatic considerations, which allowed for a narrow window of rescue. Similarly, Israel has allowed humanitarian aid into Gaza (which is often exploited by Israel to promote local crime gangs), while simultaneously killing innocent civilians there.

Almost always, the orders to carry out mass murders are vague, elusive and open to interpretation. This was also the case with the Germans' Final Solution. British historian Ian Kershaw, in his book "Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-1941" (2007), explains that the assertion that there was a decision to exterminate can be misleading, as it may create the impression that there was a specific moment in which an explicit order was given to commit genocide. No extermination order was issued from the top of the pyramid (Adolf Hitler) to the bottom; instead, complex interactions that included green lights to escalate violent measures, hints of approval for murderous acts, and grassroots initiatives combined to add up to a rolling escalation. Only at a later stage did the process crystallize into a clear resolution whose impact became visible on the ground. Here, the analogy to what is happening in Gaza is also relevant.

Yaniv Kubovich reported in Haaretz in December chilling testimony about what happened along the Netzarim corridor in Gaza. Anyone who crossed an imaginary line into this "kill zone," whether they are armed or just civilians who made a wrong turn, was shot dead by Israeli forces. Arbitrary violence reigns in a place where anyone can shoot any Palestinian who passes by, and every victim, even a child, is counted as a terrorist, just as every young or elderly person murdered by the Wehrmacht in villages deep in the USSR during World War II was defined as a partisan who was deserving of death. No one gave the soldiers on the Netzarim corridor, who are killing innocent people, an explicit order to do so. But those who do (and it is certainly not all soldiers) understand that no harm will come to them. A combination of hints from above (from politicians and military officers, such as Brig. Gen. Yehuda Vach) and murderous lawlessness from below – this is how genocide is carried out.

In March 2022, speaking at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared that the United States views the actions of Myanmar against the country's Rohingya Muslims as genocide. Blinken explained that he chose to make this declaration at the Holocaust Museum because the lessons of the Holocaust are still relevant today.

At the time, no one was scandalized that Blinken was trivializing the Shoah, or that such comparisons should not be made. This was the eighth case recognized by the U.S. as genocide, in addition to the Holocaust. The other cases are the Armenian genocide, the Holodomor famine in Ukraine in the 1930s; the Khmer Rouge's genocide in Cambodia in the 1970s; the genocides in Rwanda, Srebrenica and Darfur; and the genocide carried out by ISIS against the Yazidis a decade ago in Iraq. Just recently, on January 9, the Biden administration (again in a statement by Blinken) recognized a 10th case of genocide: that which is being committed by the Rapid Support Forces militia in the brutal civil war that has been underway in Sudan since the fall of President Omar al-Bashir in 2019.

In Myanmar, starting in 2016, some 850,000 Rohingya were expelled to Bangladesh, and about 9,000 were murdered. This means that there was no physical extermination of all Rohingya, but rather of only a small percentage of the group. Currently, a lawsuit against Myanmar is being heard by the International Court of Justice. It was submitted by The Gambia, which was joined by several other countries, including Germany and the United Kingdom.

The statements by Myanmar officials about Myanmar intent to exterminate the Rohingya are weak and incidental compared to the flood of genocidal statements heard from all corridors of politics, society, media, and the military in Israel, expressing extreme dehumanization of Palestinians, and a desire for their widespread extermination.

Genocide is any action that leads to the destruction of a collective's ability to exist, not necessarily its total annihilation. It is estimated that nearly 47,000 people have been killed in Gaza and over 110,000 injured. The number of those buried under the rubble may never be known. The vast majority of the victims are noncombatants. According to the United Nations, 90 percent of Gaza's population have been displaced from their homes multiple times and are living in subhuman conditions that only increase mortality levels. The murder of children, starvation, destruction of infrastructure, including that of the health care system, destruction of most homes, including the erasure of entire neighborhoods and towns such as Jabalya and Rafah, ethnic cleansing in the northern Strip, destruction of all of Gaza's universities and most cultural institutions and mosques, destruction of government and organizational infrastructure, mass graves, destruction of infrastructure for local food production and water distribution – all these paint a clear picture of genocide. Gaza, as a human, national-collective entity, no longer exists. This is precisely what genocide looks like.

3. “Four Reasons for a Mistake,” Matthew Yglesias, August 19, 2010, Think Progress. “I was 21 years old and kind of a jerk.” That may be the understatement of the millennium. I’m including a section of this old post by Yglesias about why he supported the Iraq War when he was a Harvard undergrad because I accidentally cut it from my recent story about him, “Matthew Yglesias Is The Banality of Evil,” and it’s so utterly revealing of his journalism two decades ago and today as well. Here are two of the four reasons he fucked up:

Erroneous views of foreign policy in general: At the time, I adhered to the school of thought (popular at the time) which held that one major problem in the world was that the US government was unduly constrained in the use of force abroad by domestic politics. More forceful intervention in Haiti, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Kosovo had all been called for. This led to a general predisposition in favor of military adventurism.

Elite signaling: When Hillary Clinton, Tom Daschle, Dick Gephardt, John Kerry, Joe Biden, John Edwards, etc. told me they thought invading Iraq was a good idea I took them very seriously. I knew that Carl Levin & Nancy Pelosi were on the other side, but the bulk of the leading Democratic voices on national security and foreign policy issues were in favor of the war. So was Tony Blair. These were credible people whose views I took seriously.

So that’s that. You can, however, always get more psychological. I was 21 years old and kind of a jerk. Being for the war was a way to simultaneously be a free-thinking dissident in the context of a college campus and also be on the side of the country’s power elite. My observation is that this kind of fake-dissident posture is one that always has a lot of appeal to people. The point is that this wasn’t really a series of erroneous judgments about Iraq, it was a series of erroneous judgments about how to think about the world and who deserves to be taken seriously and under which circumstances.

Their Man in Washington: Donald Trump, as seen in the eyes of Off Leash members.

Dear Erik et al,

How’s it going? I know your 2025 is off to a good start with your buddies Donald Trump and Elon Musk running the country, and Off Leash members Pete Hegseth and Seb Gorka being named to top jobs in the new administration. I know the crew hasn’t forgotten about me because Jean-Pierre Alumba Lukamba follows me on Twitter (Hi @AlumbaLukamba) and I periodically hear through the grapevine that you all periodically have fun at my expense during the group chat conversation by writing to me directly as if I’m a member myself since, the punchline goes, I’m probably reading along anyway (Happy Thanksgiving to you too, Saghar Erica Kasraie).

Just so you know, I did keep reading along, in a manner of speaking, for months after first exposing the group chat last May in the New Republic. I still could, but I largely lost interest and forgot about Off Leash.

The reason for my indifference had nothing to do with the group’s politics, as I have a lot of friends and sources on the far-right. Nor was it due to some sort of moral squeamishness — even though the flat out fascist lunacy of Nazi scion Sven von Storch, your business partner Michael Yudelson, and the Israeli psychos who wanted to “nuke Gaza,” to name the most obvious Off Leash members who should be immediately locked up in homes for the criminally insane — does tend to make a person despair of all hope for humanity.

Sven von Storch, whose aristocratic parents fled Germany after World War II and settled in Chile. Their son grew up to become a fan boy of former dictator Augusto Pinochet and returned to the land of his ancestors, where he married the granddaughter of the Third Reich’s last de facto head of state, who was convicted at Nuremberg.

As a journalist, I’ll talk to anyone who’ll talk to me and I almost always find that listening to opposing perspectives enriches and sometimes alters my own opinions. In fact, when it comes to morally dubious characters, I’ve talked to plenty of people arguably worse than any members of Off Leash, including Ernst Werner Glatt, a far right-wing German and black market arms dealer for the CIA, and Major General Salah Abdallah Gosh, the former head of Sudanese intelligence who was Osama bin Laden‘s minder when he lived in Khartoum back in the day.

I met both of those people and enjoyed talking to them so I guess I’m probably a bad human being too, but those two guys were genuinely fascinating and intelligent, and I’d certainly have a long conversation with Steve Bannon, to pull one of many possible names out of a hat, for the same reason. I don’t like his politics, but he’s no dummy, to understate matters.

That’s not the case with members of Off Leash, at least the crew of loony tunes that dominates most of the group chat’s conversation, with a few exceptions. For example, Nathan Jacobson is a longtime friend of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and I couldn’t disagree more with his views on the Middle East, but he’s a fascinating character and great storyteller who I’d buy drinks any day of the week.

Collectively, though, Off Leash’s members have done the seemingly impossible by making a private discussion between a group of black bag operators, influence peddlers, mercenaries, and intelligence operatives more boring than the average dinner table conversation at a retirement home for retired life insurance salesmen. I mean, is there a single country in the world not completely in the US/Western orbit you guys (overwhelmingly) don’t want to invade, bomb to smithereens, or overthrow? Because that’s pretty much all you talk about, and it’s hard not to nod off during your endless rantings about which foreign government needs to be put in its place next.

Anyway, Erik, I just wanted to let you know I haven’t completely forgotten about you, and I’ll be writing about you again soon as I’ve been researching your activities in Venezuela for quite awhile. Very curious. But Off Leash? Buy me a one-way ticket to the retirement home for insurance salesmen, that’s a far hotter story.

Cheers and best to you and the gang,

Ken Silverstein

Carbyne founder Ehud Barak, a former Israeli prime minister, second from left, and company executive Lital Lesham, an Israeli intelligence veteran, far right. Not your average tech startup. Photo by Yossi Seliger/public domain.

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Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald discussing the “new political divide” with venture capitalist David Sacks in 2022 event in Miami. There’s no better way to establish your anti-establishment street cred than kissing the ass of the tech oligarchy.

Eoin Higgins is a journalist from New England. “Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left,” was published today.

KS: Let's start with the tech billionaires. Who were they, and were they working independently or together in more of a coordinated strategy?

EH: The primary billionaires I'm talking about are Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Elon Musk, and David Sacks. There’s Mark Zuckerberg and a few others, but those four, and really the first three, are the main ones.They worked to effect a takeover, almost, of alternative media and create an alternative media ecosystem that wasn’t independent at all, but subservient to their interests. I don't want to sound overly conspiratorial and say they invested in websites like Twitter, Substack, Rumble, and Callin with the goal of destroying mainstream and independent media, but that was a byproduct. They saw something that they didn't like – critical media – and thought to themselves, “We like to move fast and break things, let's invest in a bunch of different media properties.”

I don't think it was coordinated, they came to the idea individually. So Andreessen invested in Substack, Sacks in Callin, Thiel in Rumble, and Musk bought Twitter. In a lot of cases, the companies they invested in gave money to established media figures and plucked them out of existing newsrooms and into these siloed alternative media sites, which gave the new platforms more credibility and damaged the institutions they plucked them from. That’s how it all started.

KS: Why did they target the media in particular as opposed to universities, for example, or some other influential sector?

EH: Like I said, I don’t think they sat down together and planned this out, but the reason these guys went after the media was they wanted good coverage but the media wasn't controllable the way it used to be, it was becoming more critical. There had been kind of an unspoken agreement that the media would write favorable articles about the newest tech gadget or whatever, and reporters would keep getting invited to the cool conferences the industry sponsored. And it worked for a long time, through the boom of the 90s and and into the 2000s, but Gawker came around and treated Silicon Valley differently, and the industry didn't like that.

Over time the media exposed spying and surveillance and these guys started to get bad press and attacked on social media and they weren't able to push back.That made them angry, the peasants were starting to talk back. Gawker certainly pissed off Thiel, it outed him, which wasn’t the only thing that pissed him off, but it was kind of fucked up from a personal perspective.

Andreessen has always been thin-skinned. He did this Time magazine cover shoot in the 1990s, he’d founded Netscape and he's on the top of the world, it was the first commercial browser that really took off. It was a huge thing and he was on the cover of Time in his bare feet and people were making fun of him and for somebody like him, that really stung.

Musk is finally getting adulation and adoring crowds now on the far-right, he also seems to be a very insecure person. So there were different motivations, but at the core they targeted the media because they’re all very aware of how they're perceived and they want to be taken seriously, and be adored. That’s the aspect of the media that obsessed them and why they wanted to control it, and, of course, controlling information in today's world also allows you to shape the political discourse, which was a huge motivator too.

KS: I was going to ask you about that because these tech oligarchs have similar politics so I was assuming it wasn’t just wanting not to be mocked, but that the media is also an extraordinarily powerful political tool. So who were the voices on the left they bought?

EH: I looked at the phenomenon through Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi. They were loud, affiliated with the left, and the book explains how they ended up where they are now.

KS: Did the tech oligarchs specifically pick those two? It seems like Musk, at least, picked Taibbi for the Twitter Files project? Was that strategic – was he thinking something like, this guy wrote that famous vicious piece on Goldman Sachs for Rolling Stone, it would be good to have him on our side? And what about Greenwald?

EH: It’s an interesting question, how calculated was it? I think it was a complicated web of different factors.The subtitle of the book suggests there may have been a very direct link, that the tech billionaires bought their words. If people are expecting that they're going to be a little disappointed because you can't really track decisions like this 100 percent to one thing alone.

What you can do is look and see Peter Thiel invested in Rumble in May of 2021 and in August Rumble signed a huge deal with Greenwald. Before then, Greenwald criticized Thiel at least every once in a while and after he didn’t. Now he talks about Thiel in a positive way, and certainly doesn’t talk to any great degree about the surveillance powers of Palantir, his baby.

I think Thiel picked Greenwald because his ideology is somewhat flexible on certain topics. He does have really principled takes on some stuff, like Gaza, but he started working with people like Thiel and people in the Thiel-verse, and Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson. I’m now doing this in reverse order, but after he left The Intercept in 2020 he joined Substack and he didn't get a paid deal, but it was a company that's heavily funded by Marc Andreessen and Glenn is not the type of person who's then going to attack Andreessen or his interests. I wrote an article in 2021 looking at how he talked about Fox News before and after he started appearing on it, and it's stunning. I hadn't expected the data to come back so sharply, but once he becomes a Fox talking head, he turns into a PR person for them.

If you were watching this, you’d think this guy will be a loyal soldier so it made sense for Thiel to invest in him even if he's going to say a lot of things he won't like. Because the overall effect is he’s mostly going to be against liberals and liberalism and the left in general, and people with Thiel’s politics basically believe anybody to the left of George W. Bush is a communist. Glenn has such antipathy to liberals that he’s happy to oblige.

As far as Taibbi goes, he's always been very successful but he's had his ups and downs, he was semi-canceled when he was on tour with the Eric Garner book, and he started tiling to the right and found a welcoming audience. Musk chose him for the Twitter Files in part because David Sachs recommended him – Andreessen recommended Bari Weiss – so Taibbi was already known to these guys, they knew that he would be a friendly voice and take these highly curated documents from Musk without objecting on any kind of journalistic principles and send the message that they wanted sent.

And it paid off. He turned that into a lot of Substack subscriptions and he stayed in Musk's good graces until he threatened his livelihood by suppressing Substack links on Twitter. Once he did that, Taibbi all of a sudden had moral problems about what he was doing.

KS: It was the same with Greenwald and Pierre Omidyar. He had no moral problems with him being a tech oligarch when he worked at The Intercept, Omidyar made him filthy rich, but when he was on his way out and after he left Omidyar became evil.

EH: It's pretty ridiculous that it’s so transparent, there's no attempt to hide it, it’s just blatant opportunism. So that's why these guys were selected by the tech billionaires, but it’s still more complicated than just drawing a direct line where you could say that it was the single definitive factor.

KS: Taibbi and Greenwald both insist, preposterously at this point, that they didn’t change, their critics have. Did they ever think they were cutting a deal with the devil or was it more like the frog in the boiling water? Or can they really believe that they haven’t changed at all?

EH: I asked Glenn that question about Matt – like what the fuck happened here? I can't remember now exactly how he phrased it, but I reproduced his answer almost in full in the book, because I thought it was so interesting, it seemed like he was talking about himself as well. He said something about how people begin to value different things as they get older, security and normalcy become things that become more important to hold onto.

With Glenn, a pivotal moment—he spoke about it when I interviewed him for the book—was watching the liberal blogosphere he had allied himself with during the latter Bush years support a lot of the same policies under Obama, and I think that's a legitimate complaint.

KS: It is.

EH: Where he loses me is that liberals are evil and the right is fine, or at least not as bad. And it's like, no, that's not what's going on here. When it came to Trump, Glenn and Taibbi both thought the Russiagate stuff was insane, and I can relate to that, but it reinforced the idea that liberals are the problem here, they’re the Deep State, or whatever terminology they would use, and that animus towards liberals became the most important thing.

The author. Photo by Molly Haley.

I criticize liberals and the Democratic Party all the time. One reason is that I don't care about Republicans in that way, is that I'm not expecting anything from them. Somewhere along the way, Glenn lost that and he probably justifies a lot of like what he does now by saying, I used to be allied with these people and they betrayed the principles that I believed in, so fuck them, and there’s probably some of that with Taibi as well.

KS: The irony is that if what bothered Greenwald was that liberals were unprincipled and unwilling to criticize their own side, he's just like that now. As you said, even when he’s critical the right is always better, so even on Gaza, where I share his general opinion, he was a lot more critical about AOC for not living up to her rhetoric, or selling out, than guys like Matt Gaetz. But overall AOC is a lot better on Israel-Gaza than Gaetz was when he was in congress, for example she boycotted Netanyahu’s speech to congress and Gaetz cheered throughout.

I try to keep in mind that my political views are outside of the mainstream, and people with my views would never be elected, so demanding that AOC and the rest of The Squad live up to my standards without compromising is ridiculous to expect. That’s not to say AOC should never be criticized, I also criticize liberals and Democrats all the time, and for the same reasons you do. I have a very negative view of the Democratic Party, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to be a Republican, and yeah, AOC is very ambitious and she does a lot of things that she should be criticized for, but comparatively a sellout AOC is preferable to Matt Gaetz fulfilling his destiny as a fascist. At least criticize both.

EH: I have a similar belief structure, I realize most people think my politics are insane, so I don’t expect liberals in the Democratic Party to adopt Eoin-ism as their ideology, although they should. But, yeah, Glenn manages to twist everything he says. On Gaza, the Democratic Party is not covering itself glory right now, but he’s just kind of ignoring the straight up genocide apology that's coming from the other side as well. He doesn't seem to care about that.

KS: So, how did the tech billionaires benefit from this deal they cut with, not just with Greenwald and Taibbi, but with their general investment in the media? Did they reap the rewards they wanted?

EH: The mainstream and independent are weaker and less critical than as long as I can ever remember, so they have a subservient media. They also helped create a media environment that relentlessly puts out huge amounts of information, but a lot of it’s untrue, and that has devalued the entire institution, which the tech oligarchs wanted. Musk certainly got what he wanted by buying Twitter; Trump’s president and he’s in the White House.

Thiel is a little more interesting than the other guys. One of the reasons is he invests in all kinds of different things, he throws everything at the wall. He's given money to art projects of weird hipsters in New York, he has money in different publications and think tanks all over the country and the world. He's probably pretty happy with how Rumble is doing, because at least it's providing a place for people who think like him to say what they want and push their message forward.

So to the extent these guys are ever happy with anything, they’re happy with the media they got.

As I noted January 31 in “Resolving the Mystery of Jeffrey Epstein: Case Closed,” I’ve been researching & writing about America’s most notorious sex trafficker-intelligence operative for more than a decade, and initially imagined that latest story would be no more than a 2,000-word update based on recent evidence I obtained. Instead, I turned the January 31 story into Part I of a planned two-part series and it came in at almost 6,000 words and it would’ve been quite a bit longer if I hadn’t made last-minute cuts so as not to exceed the maximum length for a Substack article that can be sent via email.

Since publishing Part I, I’ve been contacted by a number of excellent sources I hadn’t spoken to previously and I reviewed a small amount of the mountain of unused material I’ve accumulated since I started looking into the Epstein story, and decided to make another shift in plans, and a much bigger one. I’m going to publish Part II late tonight or tomorrow – me and the other two members of my household were wiped out with a nasty cold this weekend and are all still in the recovery phase – and a Part III and IV between now & March 1. From that point going forward, I’ll continue researching the mystery of Jeffrey Epstein, but I won’t write anything else on the topic until I publish a short-ish book later this year, ETA November, which I believe will definitively mark the “Case Closed” point. Meanwhile, I’ll return to focusing on more topical news here.

The book will be free to all Washington Babylon founding subscribers and annual subscribers of record when it comes out, so that includes anyone who signed up in those categories since Jan uary 31. Monthly subscribers will be able to buy it at 50 percent off and all other subscribers at 25 percent off.

I’m also going to have to paywall at least a little more content, which up until now has been in 95 percent free. I genuinely hate to do that, but I’m just not making nearly enough money to sustain Washington Babylon at the moment. Part I of the Epstein series was one of the best read articles I’ve published here and easily brought in more revenue than any other story because it was a rare item available only to paid subscribers. Thanks to Part I, I now have a Substack “Bestseller” badge for publications with “hundreds of paid subscribers.” In my case, that’s highly misleading: I’m rapidly heading towards 4,000 subscribers – and if the current pave holds I should be around 10,000 at the end of the year – but only 120 are paid.

I want to emphasize that I am extremely grateful to all subscribers, paid & unpaid, and totally understand financial constraints most of us face, myself included, that results in the lion’s share of Washington Babylon subscribers signing up at the free rate. That’s exactly why the option is there and I almost always check the free plan when I subscribe to most Substack publications too.

To all subscribers, paid and unpaid, I would be eternally grateful if you recommend Washington Babylon to family, friends, and politically independent fellow travelers by sharing my home page, profile, & subscription info widely. Just three referrals that bring in new subscribers – paid or unpaid – will get you the same benefits as paid subscribers, including the discount on the upcoming Epstein book, for one month, and that period grows quickly with additional new subs that come in based on your referrals.

Thanks again to all Washington Babylon subscribers, followers, and readers — and let me know if you’d be interested in a podcast and/or open conversation about the Jeffrey Epstein case. If there’s enough interest, I’ll set up one or the other, or both.

As a journalist, I often say I know a little bit about a lot of things, but not a lot about anything, however, during the nearly four decades that have passed since I published my first story, I’ve gained some expertise in a few subjects, such as lifestyles of the rich and powerful, espionage, prostitution rackets, and international criminal networks. All are highly pertinent to the case of Jeffrey Epstein, which explains why I’ve been mildly obsessed with unraveling his sordid saga since I first heard his name.

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Look at that pretty picture in the newspaper of US warplanes carpet-bombing Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. Read this story and you’ll have a better idea about how it got there. Photo via Wikimedia Commons/Public domain.

During the early-1960s, the CIA’s public image plummeted, beginning with the Bay of Pigs debacle in 1961, which was the first significant agency covert operation that was widely covered in the US media. The fallout led JFK to fire the CIA Director Allen Dulles, who he blamed for the debacle, and things went steadily downhill from there over the next three years, with 1964 being a complete disaster.

That April, to cite one particularly painful experience, the CIA schemed a way to get a pre-publication copy of “The Invisible Government,” which was co-authored by journalists David Wise and Thomas Ross, and were aghast by the contents. Not only did the book take a dim view of the agency overall, it disclosed a great deal of embarrassing information about its activities in Southeast Asia and Cuba that had never been reported, which set off alarm bells in the CIA’s senior ranks.

In an attempt to prevent the impending catastrophe, CIA Director John McCone called the authors in to see him at agency headquarters and demanded they cease and desist from publishing the book. When Wise and Rose refused, the agency pressured Random House to kill it and after that failed as well, the CIA mounted a preemptive campaign to discredit it, including dummying up fake reviews it planted in foreign news outlets and attempted to get published in the US, apparently without success.

One of the reviews was sent to Theodore Shackley – who’d directed Operation Mongoose, one of the agency’s early plans to overthrow Fidel Castro, and the "Phoenix Program" in South Vietnam, which ran paramilitary units that killed at least 25,000 suspected Viet Cong sympathizers and imprisoned and tortured tens of thousands more, and later became the No. 2 official at the division in charge of implementing the CIA’s covert operations – to get his input. The review opened by stating that the co-authors “admit that Communist subversion and espionage pose a unique threat to the American people and their government” and accept “the necessity under certain circumstances for secret American efforts to prevent Moscow and Peking from gaining control of new territories.” Despite that, it continued:

In this work, they are not directly concerned with the nature and extent o f the Soviet and Chinese subversive apparatus. The real villain makes a very brief appearance on the stage and then vanishes. The authors profess to believe that our own government's secret attempts to meet the Communist challenge constitutes the real threat to our own freedoms and democratic processes that must be exposed in as detailed and dramatic a way as possible. If the Soviets profit from these revelations, as they will, the authors apparently think that such self-inflicted wounds must be endured in their battle against excessive secrecy.

The CIA had been paying, coopting, and cultivating reporters since it was founded in 1947, and routinely violated its charter by doing so. With the agency taking a rare PR beating in the media, though, senior officials resolved to “explore new...methods of restoring the public’s diminishing faith in the Agency's competence,” an internal agency report dated September 17, 1965 stated.

To the best of my knowledge, the only journalist who’s written about the memo is Emma North-Best, who authored a story about it that was jointly published by Muckrock and Glomar Disclosure. I recently discovered it in the course of doing related reporting, and decided to write about it because I found additional information that adds to North-Best’s excellent story.

Outgoing CIA station in Saigon Ted Shackley (far left) in 1972 photo with his replacement, Thomas Polgar (far right), and General Creighton Abrams in the middle. Shackley was the gold standard among CIA book reviewers and excelled at mass murder too. Photo via Wikimedia Commons/Public domain.

Deputy Director for Intelligence Ray Cline, the man at the forefront of the effort to rectify the increasingly intolerable situation, had been cultivating the media for the previous eight years, but the focus of the September 1965 report, which was partly redacted when the agency declassified nearly four decades after it was written, were his enhanced “press relations activities” during the first nine months of that year. “Without self-interest and purely in the interest of the agency, Mr. Cline has been a source of information to certain members of the press,” stated the memo, which was sent to Deputy Director Richard Helms, a former reporter himself for UPI.

The memo left clear that the official who wrote it, who was unnamed but was likely someone in the press office, as well as CIA Director Vice Admiral William Raborn, Jr., who’d succeeded McCone, and Helms, who President Lyndon Johnson appointed to replace him the following year, knew and approved of Cline’s media influence op. Cline, who also left his job at CIA in 1966 and helped establish the rabidly anti-Communist, Taiwan-based World League for Freedom and Democracy, was confident “his methods of operation...benefit the general rapport of the agency” with his list of targets,” according to the memo. “Among newsmen who have had the benefit of Mr. Cline's viewpoints,” it said, were five reporters at the New York Times, four at the Washington Post, including publisher Katherine Graham, and three at the Wall Street Journal.

Ray Cline, fourth from left, in at 1973 meeting of the US Intelligence Board. Cline was Director of Intelligence and Research at the State Department at the time. Photo via Wikimedia Commons/Public domain.

Cline was also busy massaging Walter Lippman, who was generally a reliable government propagandist, who uncharacteristically opposed US intervention in Vietnam, and other targets – 20 prominent media figures in all – at Time, Newsweek, where Graham was also the publisher, the Christian Science Monitor, US News & World Report, Fortune and several other outlets.

At the New York Times, Cline was wooing Cyrus Sulzberger, who’d been covering foreign affairs since he graduated from college in 1939 and was the nephew of longtime publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who’d stepped down four years earlier, and Wallace Carroll, the newspaper’s Washington Bureau Chief. He was also working on reporters Barry Schwartz and Bill Shannon, who’d recently invited him to stop by the Times to meet Editor John Oakes.

Unfortunately, Oakes wasn’t on hand when Cline dropped by due to a death in the family, but the day hadn’t been a complete waste of time. Since he was there anyway, he took the opportunity to express his displeasure with “the manner” the Times had made use of information the CIA provided it with at an earlier press briefing, which “caused the Agency some embarrassment.”

The episode had been “well documented and I assume will not be repeated,” Cline had said. To drill home the point, he’d informed Schwartz and Shannon he would return “on a suitable occasion” and try to establish “a better understanding and cooperation between the Agency and the Times,“ and let them know that if they failed to become better stenographers, it would be “impossible for CIA to release data“ to them “as we had last year.”

In addition to Graham, Cline was buttering up Washington Post reporter Chamers Roberts, who he’d recently met for the first time when he accepted his invitation to have lunch at the newspaper with him and three of his colleagues. Roberts told Cline “he would like to have discussions from time to time on a completely discreet basis without any attribution” to him or the agency, and he’d agreed to see him “as time permitted and the subject matter was not delicate from either a security or a policy point of view.” Cline had nevertheless been annoyed with Roberts because he had been the only member of the quartet of reporters he met with that hadn’t been “extremely cordial.”

Roberts was part of the newspaper’s team that worked on the Pentagon Papers story, which the Post published in 1971 a few days after the Times. When the memo was circulating in the CIA’s upper echelons, Roberts’s work on Vietnam wasn’t as stellar.

Two years later, Noam Chomsky referenced Roberts in “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” the famous article he wrote for The New York Review of Books. In the story Chomsky cited, which was published in the Boston Globe in 1965, Roberts wrote “with unconscious irony” that February “hardly seemed to Washington to be a propitious moment” for negotiating with the enemy because President Johnson “had just ordered the first bombing of North Vietnam in an effort to bring Hanoi to a conference table where the bargaining chips on both sides would be more closely matched,” whereas at that moment Viet Cong leaders believed they were going to win the war.

“The date is important,” Chomsky stated caustically of the February 1965 timeframe Roberts and others in the press picked when writing about the issue, saying:

Had this statement been made six months earlier, one could attribute it to ignorance. But...it appeared after the UN, North Vietnamese, and Soviet initiatives had been front-page news for months. It was already public knowledge that these initiatives had preceded the escalation of February 1965 and, in fact, continued for several weeks after the bombing began. Correspondents in Washington [such as Roberts] tried desperately to find some explanation for the startling deception that had been revealed.

Cline had accomplished more direct success with reporters at other publications, including syndicated columnist Joseph Alsop, who was his only “regular official contact” in the target group. An “influential journalist and top insider in Washington who worked as a covert operative of the CIA,” as his Wikipedia page succinctly puts it, Alsop was a journalist the CIA normally didn’t have to worry about.

In times past, he’d traveled overseas to cover events at the agency’s request, such as a 1953 trip he’d made to the Philippines, which Carl Bernstein first reported in a groundbreaking 1977 story in Rolling Stone, which revealed that 400 journalists had “secretly carried out assignments” for the agency over the past 25 years. Some of Alsop’s recent reporting on Vietnam had troubled CIA officials, though, and Raburn had specifically requested Cline tend to his needs on the grounds that It “was better for him to write reasonable columns than to have misinformation published."

The tactic had been effective according to Cline, who had spoken to Alsop earlier in the year and it seemed like he was “on the verge of a public attack which might well have included some nasty references to CIA.” That “no longer seems likely,” Cline had reported to the memo’s author, “as long as we continue to maintain a discreet but generally cordial relationship with him."

The columnist’s brother, Stewart Alsop of the Saturday Evening Post, was on Cline’s list as well. He also had an extremely close relationship with the agency. "Stew Alsop was a CIA agent," an anonymous CIA source told Bernstein for his Rolling Stone story.

Unlike his brother, Stewart Alsop hadn’t caused any trouble as of late. In December of 1963, the memo recounted, then-CIA Director McCone had instructed a pair of agency officials to give Alsop a two-hour briefing “on the slow-down rate of the Soviet economy, which was the substance of a report [the CIA chief] had given to the National Security Council, and was similar to the package of information that had been provided more recently to the two New York Times reporters. Alsop had clearly been more proficient in taking dictation than they’d been, as Cline seemed satisfied the two-hours the agency devoted to Alsop was time well spent, but he was apparently keeping an eye on him anyway, just in case he unexpectedly rebelled against his lowly status as a CIA toady.

Juan Bosch, the Dominican Republic’s first democratically-elected president in photo from 1963, two years before he was replaced in a CIA-backed military coup. Photo via Wikimedia Commons/Public domain.

Cline achieved particularly excellent results with United Features syndicated columnist William White, who he’d “conferred at luncheon” with a few months earlier on May 28 and was one of four reporters the agency the agency official said he spoke to most often, Following their encounter, Cline fulfilled White’s request to get a general briefing at CIA headquarters “on how we go about our business.” Cline had suggested “a little quiet cultivation with White would do the Agency no harm,” and Raburn and Helms agreed “to have a general chat with him from time to time.”

It was almost certainly not a coincidence that Cline dined with White on May 28, two days after he’d written a column that saluted President Johnson for dispatching 22,000 US troops to invade the Dominican Republic a month earlier. LBJ’s timely action – which was ordered to put an end to a popular uprising demanding the return of President Juan Bosch, the first democratically-elected leader in the country’s history, who had been deposed in a CIA-backed military coup two years earlier – “halted a morally dangerous attempt to set up another Castro type of armed Communist, lodgment“ in the Western Hemisphere, to White’s immense relief.

The columnist was particularly pleased by LBJ’s muscular response because he had defied “all the small frightful complaints of the American left-wing and all the petty pacifist carvings from abroad.” That band of ne'er-do-wells had even made the ridiculous suggestion that CIA Director Raburn played a role in orchestrating the US invasion.

All agency leaders had to endure petty gripes from the usual rabble-rousers, but it was “a little odd” in this case because he “had absolutely nothing to do with the decision and did not even know of it until after it had been made.” Raburn had taken charge of the CIA the very day of the US invasion, which made the accusation completely laughable, White wrote.

Needless to say, White’s entire account was completely false. The evidence the Johnson administration presented to justify the invasion was so flimsy that much of the US public and media didn’t fully swallow it. To take one egregious example, LBJ presented a list of suspected Dominican Communists who allegedly were responsible for the chaos in the country, which included people who were dead or had never supported local leftist movements of any type.

Even LBJ “regretted sending US troops into the Dominican Republic...telling aides less than a month later, ‘I don't want to be an intervenor," according to White House tapes from 1965 that were made public by the National Security Archives half a century later. “Johnson's public explanation for sending the Marines into Santo Domingo was to rescue Americans endangered by civil war conditions in the Dominican Republic,” said a statement the Archives released at the time. “But his main motivation, the tapes and transcripts confirm, was to prevent a Communist takeover,” which was based “largely on assertions by the CIA and others in the US government that Cuba's Fidel Castro had been behind” the uprising calling for Bosch’s restoration as the country’s president.

White’s fairy tale version of events was just the sort of “independent” reporting the CIA loved to see – and the agency had almost certainly spoon-fed the content to White if it hadn’t simple handed him a rough draft to work from – to the contrary of the dangerous pro-Communist misinformation Wise and Shannon peddled in “The Invisible Government.” Though the memo didn’t mention the column, it said Cline’s press management duties had reaped rewards across the board, with the possible exception of the Washington Post, and even there it had “been no loss.”

“Mr. Cline's efforts on behalf of better understanding on the part of the Press of CIA and its duties and responsibilities are worthy of praise,” the memo concluded with satisfaction.

“A walking, talking pile of hair gel,” as Isenberg said of Hegseth, may be the most generous way to describe him. Photo via Wikimedia Commons/Public domain.

David Isenberg is an independent analyst and and writer on military, foreign policy, and national security issues. A Navy veteran and the author of "Shadow Force: Private Security Contractors in Iraq,” he has testified before Congress about private military and security contracting, which he writes about at his website. Isenberg recently replied to six questions about Pete Hegseth, President Trump’s nominee to be defense secretary. Our interview was lightly edited for length and clarity.

1. How do you rate Pete Hegseth’s qualifications to lead the Pentagon? Does he have the background and skills required for the job?

If confirmed, Hegseth would be the most grossly unqualified defense secretary to hold the job since President Harry Truman signed the National Security Act on July 26, 1947, which led to the creation of the Pentagon. The Secretary of Defense is not the Warrior-in-Chief. He is the CEO, nominally speaking, of a vast global business with an annual budget approaching one trillion dollars – more than a trillion if you include military-related expenditures in the national security budget – with a workforce of about 3 million military and civilian personnel, and hundreds of major facilities in over 80 countries.

Hegseth’s duties would include setting budgets, overseeing major weapons systems programs, implementing policies on topics ranging from operational deployments to health and welfare of the troops, as well as being the president’s lead advisor on military affairs, to name just a few of the responsibilities. It’s a staggering array of requirements that no single person could be truly qualified to handle, and even people who seemed reasonably well qualified have turned out to be screwups – cue McNamara in Vietnam or Rumsfeld in Iraq. But the responsibility is so great, you want to do everything possible to ensure you get the best possible person. Pete Hegseth is not that person. He's a walking, talking pile of hair gel.

When she announced she would vote against confirming Hegseth on January 16, Senator Tammy Duckworth said she disagreed with Trump about nearly everything during his first term, but she voted to confirm both James Mattis and Mark Esper when he nominated them for the same role, but Hegseth never ran the entire Army, like Esper, or even been the leader of thousands of people, like Mattis. She summarized things well when she said, “Mr. Hegseth likes to say our military is a great meritocracy. I agree. During his time in uniform, Pete Hegseth never commanded a unit with more than 200 personnel. Meanwhile, on the civilian side, both organizations he led went into debt. In fact, he so badly mismanaged one of them that they had to bring in a forensic accountant to clean up the mess he had made. That’s it. Those are his only supposed qualifications to head up one of the most complex, important organizations in the world.

2. Can you put that in practical terms? What are some of the biggest problems likely to arise if Hegseth is put in charge of the Pentagon? And why would Trump nominate him in the first place?

I’m going to defer to Chris Bassford, a military historian, former US Army artillery officer, recently retired professor from National Defense University and instructor at Fort Bragg Special Warfare Center. His 1988 book, “The Spit-Shine Syndrome,” is a must read for those wanting to understand how military mediocrities can survive and be promoted. Bassford recently told me that “given the sheer numbers of service members who might die in war, it is an absolute necessity that the defense secretary speaks his mind without fear or favor, even if means differing with the president.” Hegseth will not stand up to Trump if needed because he’s “a sycophant like all of Trump’s national security nominees, Bassford said — and that’s also why Trump picked him.

3. What about Hegseth’s personal conduct? How do they factor in to the question of his suitability to be defense secretary?

I read the police report regarding Hegseth’s alleged sexual assault. Here’s an excerpt: “Hegseth took her phone from her hands. Jane Doe stated she got up and tried to leave the room, but Hegseth blocked the door with his body. Jane Doe remembered saying ‘no” a lot.”

You can argue that since this was settled out of court nothing was proven, but given Hegseth’s frequent repetition that it’ an “anonymous smear” during the confirmation hearing, it’s important to note that it wasn’t in fact an anonymous allegation and there’s a lot of evidence that indicates something very bad happened. The redacted summary of the police report reads : “_________, a nurse at Kaiser Permanente in _________ reported suspicious circumstances to have occurred at the Hyatt Hotel at One Old Golf Course Road in Monterey, after a patient came in requesting a sexual assault exam. The patient was allegedly sexually assaulted at the Hyatt Hotel between 10-7-17 and 10-18-17. I recommend this case be forwarded to investigations for their review.”

As Hegseth was a civilian at that point the Uniform Code of Military Justice does not apply, so I’ll skip over the part about how that’s a court martial offense. Instead, I’ll just say that a leader of any organization, must lead by example, especially a military organization where terms like “honorable conduct” are not supposed to be just words.

4. What questions should Hegseth have been asked at his nomination hearing? What did the committee miss?

Here’s a list.

Did you read “On War” by Clausewitz? Ever read anything by Mahan, Mcinder, Jomini, Keegan, or Sun Tzu? Anything on former Secretary of Defense General Jim Mattis’s professional reading list?

What PME — Professional Military Education — did take during your time in the military? (Hint: That’s another rhetorical question, see this piece from the “Duffel Blog,” a military satire site.)

What are the existing unified commands?

You lobbied heavily in favor of releasing the Blackwater contractors who were found guilty of killing 17 and injuring 20 Iraqi civilians at Nisour Square in Baghdad in 2007. What’s your view on the Penatgon’s reliance on private military and security contractors?

How do you reconcile President Trump’s threat to use military force to acquire Greenland with the obligation to defend it under Article 5 of NATO?

If President Trump asked for your general opinion about the advisability of a US military strike on Iran, what would you tell him?

How do you reconcile your support for veterans with your claim they are getting unnecessary disability benefits?

What’s your opinion about the contribution US allies make?

How do your reconcile the US military's primary obligation to protect and preserve the Constitution and its emphasis on freedom of religion with your advocacy of Christian Nationalism and apparent tolerance of a revolutionary theocratic vision for the overthrow of the United States?

What do you think of Eisenhower’s farewell address and his warning that “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex?

5. Is there any chance Hegseth’s nomination will be rejected?

Senate Republicans seem poised to approve all of Trump’s picks for cabinet secretaries and other appointees that require confirmation. As long as they demonstrate proper obeisance and submissiveness, demonstrating that their primary qualification is their loyalty to Trump, he’s good. I asked Bassford the same question, and he agrees, even though he believes the email his mother sent him about the alleged sexual assault — which said “You are an abuser of women — that is the ugly truth and I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego” — should have done him in.” Bassford also said the Democrats are defeatist and are saving their ammo for other battles, though it’s hard to think what could be a more important battle than this one.

6. What do you anticipate in the way of Trump II foreign and military policy?

In respect to Ukraine, now that Trump successfully pressured to accept a ceasefire in Gaza, he’ll undoubtedly want to cut a deal with Putin. But he has far less leverage, so I expect the war will go on until Ukraine no longer is able to continue fighting.