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Brain Rot 2: Legal Corruption Edition

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The term brain rot has been applied to LLMs and long covid but it’s also a useful term to describe the American legal corruption system in the Trump 2.0 era.

I’ve written previously about the way the U.S. Supreme Court’s novel method of deciding cases without issuing formal rulings severs the top down lines of legal communication that guide lower courts.

That forces lower court judges, especially Republicans who would love to please the Trump administration to practice sontaku, the Japanese art of “obeying in advance” or “following unspoken orders” which I’ve posted about here before in other Trump 2.0 contexts.

So I thought this morning we could connect some dots on the history of how the American legal system became the American legal corruption system.

I’m going to through in a few round up items at the end to follow up on stories we’ve looked at this previously like the Maine U.S. Senate race, the New York City mayoral primary, the deep state roots of Palantir and more.

Legal Corruption Is Brian Rot Too

Without the traditional American legal methodology developed over centuries, lower courts find themselves having to guess at what the law might be.

The sly ones know to work backwards from the Trump-pleasing outcome, but nonetheless it’s a much less elegant system.

It’s also the outcome of decades of work to create legal corruption.

Slate had a piece looking back at the pivotal role of Justice Anthony Kennedy in that process.

On the bench, Kennedy quickly developed a reputation for being mild-mannered, polite, and pragmatic.

Unlike Reagan’s other doomed picks, Robert Bork and Douglas H. Ginsburg, Kennedy’s nomination was controversy-free. He was widely seen as the “nice guy” alternative to Bork’s combative demeanor and Ginsburg’s youthful indiscretions.
…
Chief Justice Roberts began drafting a narrow opinion that would grant Citizens United a win on narrow statutory grounds. However, Kennedy, never one to shy away from sweeping declarations, circulated a much broader decision—a blueprint to overturn Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce and McConnell v. FEC, landmark rulings that had previously upheld limits on corporate political spending.

It was Kennedy’s draft that changed everything. According to court watchers, Roberts was so taken with it that he scrapped his own opinion and let Kennedy write the majority. This would not be a minor clarification of McCain-Feingold. It would blow a giant hole that big-money donors could flow through.
Justice David Souter was reportedly furious. He had begun drafting a blistering dissent, calling out the majority for effectively inventing a new question in order to issue a sweeping decision that went far beyond the scope of the case. But before his dissent could see the light of day, Souter announced his retirement from the court.

What happened next shocked even veteran court observers. Rather than issuing a decision, Roberts hit pause. He ordered a rare reargument and instructed lawyers from both sides to submit new briefs addressing completely different constitutional question: Did corporations have a First Amendment right to spend unlimited money in elections, so long as the spending was “independent” and not directly coordinated with candidates? By signaling its intent to tackle such sweeping issues, the court was positioning itself to deliver a truly transformative decision.

When the court reconvened in September 2009, Justice Sonia Sotomayor had replaced Souter. Olson returned to the lectern with a new brief and a broader argument.

It was no longer about Hillary: The Movie. Instead, it was about whether corporations had a fundamental right to spend unlimited money on elections.

The government’s attorney tried to keep the case grounded: This was about a film funded by undisclosed donors, aired during a federal campaign. But the conservative majority was already down the rabbit hole, spinning hypotheticals about book banning and free speech.

Which brings us to a 2015 TIME piece by former U.S. Senator and presidential candidate Gary Hart cited in the Thomas Neuburger Augean Stables post we featured Thursday.

First Gary Hart from a decade ago:

From Plato and Aristotle forward, corruption was meant to describe actions and decisions that put a narrow, special, or personal interest ahead of the interest of the public or commonwealth. Corruption did not have to stoop to money under the table, vote buying, or even renting out the Lincoln bedroom. In the governing of a republic, corruption was self-interest placed above the interest of all—the public interest.

By that standard, can anyone seriously doubt that our republic, our government, is corrupt? There have been Teapot Domes and financial scandals of one kind or another throughout our nation’s history. There has never been a time, however, when the government of the United States was so perversely and systematically dedicated to special interests, earmarks, side deals, log-rolling, vote-trading, and sweetheart deals of one kind or another.

…
Recent months have seen, in effect, the legalization of Watergate. Who would have thought, forty years after the greatest political scandal and presidential abuse of power in U.S. history, that the Supreme Court of the United States would rule the practices that financed that scandal were now legal?

That is essentially the effect of the Citizens United decision. Bets may be taken as to the length of time that will expire before this tsunami of political money ends up in the pockets of break-in burglars, wiretap experts, surveillance magicians, and cyberpunks. Given the power and money at stake in presidential and congressional elections, it is inevitable that candidates or their operatives with larceny in their hearts will tap into the hundreds of millions of dollars that their campaigns are awash in to game the system in highly illegal ways.

Neuburger elaborated:

Corruption is “self-interest placed above the interest of all,” or in some cases, one’s legal or contractual obligation. [Hart’s work comes a year after Zephyr Teachout wrote her book on the subject, reaching the same idea.]

Thus, for example, some college football referees and refereeing groups are obviously corrupt. When Conference A plays Conference B using Conference B’s referees, and year after year the bad calls go Conference B’s way, especially with the game on the line, the referees are corrupt.

Are they betraying their obligation for money? Likely not. Are they betraying their obligation in order to satisfy animus against Conference A, or to make sure the “home teams” win? That’s an obvious explanation, and by his definition (and mine), that’s indeed corrupt.

Or take another situation. By this definition, the Supreme Court since at least 2000 and likely before has acted corruptly, if the definition is “self-interest placed above the interest of all.” No legal analysis of Bush v. Gore passes the “upholds the interest of all” test — the Republicans on the Court simply put a Republican (the home team candidate) in the White House because they could. Nor do their major decisions around money and corporate rights, like Citizens United or Buckley v. Valeo, the 1976 Burger Court decision that lifted restrictions on campaign contributions, and its follow-up, First National Bank of Boston vs. Bellotti, whose majority opinion was authored by Lewis Powell, of the infamous Powell memo.

By this definition — perverting an outcome to benefit a group in which one has a personal interest — the Supreme Court could be thought to have acted corruptly in each case mentioned above. It was likely corrupt in Buckley, Citizens United, and First National Bank of Boston, and certainly corrupt in Bush v. Gore, where Republican justices favored a Republican candidate for president over a Democratic one on no defensible grounds.

The Court wasn’t metaphorically “corrupt.” It was corrupt by definition.

Let’s look at story of the infamous Powell memo from this 2021 Slate piece:

The education director for the national Chamber of Commerce, Eugene B. Sydnor Jr., wanted a plan of action to counter these forces, and he reached out to a good friend to draw that up: Lewis Powell, then the head of the American Bar Association, an attorney for tobacco companies like Philip Morris, and a rumored Supreme Court nominee. Powell himself had faced down movements that were hostile to his clients, including anti-tobacco initiatives that flourished after scientists began linking smoking and cancer, and he was frustrated with growing influence of a young Ralph Nader and his burgeoning consumer protection movement.

In 1971, Powell wrote a lengthy, confidential memo to Sydnor and the Chamber, titled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” outlining ways that corporations could band together not only to fight off regulations but also to infiltrate American institutions—universities, publishers, magazines, ad agencies, TV networks, and even courts—to make them more broadly sympathetic to business. The tone of the prose indicates that this was a personal venture for Powell: “The time has come—indeed, it is long overdue—for the wisdom, ingenuity and resources of American business to be marshalled against those who would destroy it.”

Fifty years later, that vision has come to pass. A right-wing dark money network, financed over the decades by magnates from Bryce Harlow to Richard Mellon Scaife to Joseph Coors, has funded think tanks, media outlets and writers, college programs, legal organizations, and politicians dedicated to advancing pro-business causes. As journalists like Jane Mayer have documented, the strategy has worked all too well: Megacorporations now enjoy fewer regulations, lower taxes, more lobbyists, more businesspeople in power, and the ability to impede policy perceived as hurting their bottom line, whether that be related to climate protections or health care reform.

Many of the leaders of this counterinsurgency were directly inspired by Powell’s memo, which was circulated among Chamber of Commerce members and other CEOs, went public in 1972 after its author had been appointed to the Supreme Court, and inspired the establishment of various pro-business organizations and institutions that still hold major influence today, from the American Legislative Exchange Council to the Manhattan Institute. It’s clear, reading the hectoring language in the memo and the detailed steps it requires for Big Business to take the power back, that Powell—who would go on to serve as a Supreme Court justice for 16 years—helped lay the ideological groundwork for our current politics.

The Deep State Roots of Peter Thiel and Palantir

While we’re connecting historical dots, let’s check out what Whitney Webb had to tell Chris Hedges about the roots of Palantir in the infamous Reagan Administration Iran contra crew:

Whitney Webb: John Poindexter was one of um the national security advisers to Reagan and was the highest ranking member of his administration that was indicted as part of Iran Contra.

But he is also remembered as the “Godfather of modern surveillance.” This is in part because of his efforts in the immediate post 911 era pioneering the an office within DARPA that housed a program called Total Information Awareness.

After the Reagan administration, Poindexter was in various roles throughout these tech companies that were a prototype to what Palantir and Total Information Awareness would later do.
Defense contractors trying to basically create predictive analytics to determine what terrorists would do next.

All before 9/11 even happened and of course there was a renewed demand for that type of technology and these sort of innovative solutions in the immediate post 9/11 era.

When Total Information Awareness (TIA) was reported on, there was a huge outcry throughout US mainstream media and a lot of organizations including the ACLU, rightly noted that it would eliminate the constitutional right to privacy and create this very disturbing era of mass surveillance.

One of the mainstream media reports on it said that it would fight terrorism by terrifying US citizens and making everyone a suspect in this paradigm Poindexter was seeking to usher in.

And so TIA was under pressure. It was I think first announced in February 2003 and by May they attempted to change the name to Terrorism Information Awareness trying to move away from the idea that it would be total, that it would surveil absolutely everyone through a name change but obviously it didn’t change how the program actually worked.

It would still be focused on everyday Americans, a total drag net and in that same month where that name change happened Peter Thiel incorporated Palantir and as it was developing as a company Thiel and Alex Karp the Palantir co-founders, reached out to Poindexter directly through Richard Perle, a well-known neoconservative figure and one of the architects of the Iraq war at the Bush era Pentagon.

They hatched this plan to privatize this program. rightly calculating that if they turned it into a entirely private sector enterprise the outrage would essentially dissipate which it remarkably did because originally it was a public-private partnership housed within DARPA and then by making it this private sector enterprise a lot of the concerns about it disappeared.

Role of Terror in ICE Actions

The remark that the Total Information Awareness program would “fight terrorism by terrifying US citizens” made me think of this Pro Publica report on how twenty years later, a Palantir-equipped ICE is functioning:

Recordings of those calls, obtained by ProPublica, captured some of the terror residents felt as they watched masked men ambush people and force them into unmarked cars. In some cases, the men wore plain clothes and refused to identify themselves. There was no way to confirm whether they were immigration agents or imposters. In six of the calls to Santa Ana police, residents described what they were seeing as kidnappings.

“He’s bleeding,” one caller said about a person he saw yanked from a car wash lot and beaten. “They dumped him into a white van. It doesn’t say ICE.”

One woman’s voice shook as she asked, “What kind of police go around without license plates?”

And then this from another: “Should we just run from them?”

Deluded Centrists

We’ve been discussing various forms of delusion as part of our efforts to understand WTF is driving the decision making of the Trump era ruling elite.

Aurelian had some relevant insights in his latest piece “Forever Again:
Why the time is always Now.”

Pundits assume that actors, even in crises, behave with unimpeachable rationality, and are driven by entirely conscious motivations, most of them wholly materialistic. This is, to say the least, peculiar.

Part of the reason for that, as I’ve already implied, is that it is easy. This way of thinking fits comfortably into Realist and Neorealist theories of state behaviour, and into many rational actor paradigms of political behaviour. It plays well with attempts to reduce all political behaviour to economic factors, which began with Marxism, but didn’t end with it.

And most of all it avoids the need to think of political actors as living, breathing human beings with their own frailties, wants and needs, rather than cardboard cutouts acting according to some theoretical model.
…
It’s also the political science equivalent of theories of the rational economic actor with perfect information and, at least in theory, opens the way to finally treating political behaviour with the (spurious) intellectual rigour of economic theory.

…the runaway Ukraine crisis is being desperately and inexpertly steered from the western side by a group of leaders of strictly moderate abilities who frankly now have absolutely no idea what they are doing.

This is, of course a frightening prospect if you happen to be a westerner, and its understandable that some have sought solace in imagining a shadowy anonymous group of manipulators who Know What they are Doing, whilst others have maintained that wherever we happen to be at any given moment moment was The Plan All Along.
…
So here we are, led by people scarcely aware of what they are doing and why, living a collective hallucination and playing at making the decisions their great-grandparents should have made but didn’t.

Which led me to our next piece because no one loves the Ukraine war more than centrist American Democrats and they are ironically both in the eternal Now that Aurelian describes and out of step with the times.

Centrists Trapped In An Outdated Eternal Now

From Ettingermentum News’ The Center is Choking:

So how does one sustain high-level, long-term factional conflict when the on-paper disagreements on substance are so minimal? You train your focus on tactics, which is precisely what this new crop of centrists have done near-exclusively. They have spent years carefully crafting a story about how everything wrong in American politics today is a consequence of left-wing political missteps—an old and familiar argument that they have stretched far past its breaking point.
…
As of today, the Democratic Party’s leading centrists have not wavered from either this view of recent history or its inevitable conclusion that the most important thing that needs to be done in the broader effort to defeat the GOP is to wage a holy war against the left. It only took a few hours after the election was called for Trump before they started presenting this theory as THE explanation for the party’s failure and the roadmap for the path forward. Within a few weeks, they were in the pages of the New York Times with a snappy name—“The Groups”—for the left-liberal networks that they had long demonized and were now blaming for Harris’ loss. It was a full-on, no-holds-barred, coordinated push conducted before any other faction within the party had gotten its bearings together. At the moment, it seemed well and truly poised to allow the party’s moderates to once again define the narrative of the party’s loss to Trump before his second term even began.

It also had a major problem. By sticking so closely to Shorite doctrine, the center left itself stuck in the past. Quite a lot had changed over the past four years, and more than a few of the center’s ideas had actually been implemented by the Biden administration. Yet the center refused to acknowledge either of these facts. As far as they were concerned, Harris’ defeat had given them their long-awaited opportunity to relitigate the complaints they had harbored since 2020, and they were not willing to waste the opportunity.

David Sirota warned about this in 2020, saying “We Can’t Follow Obama Back to Brunch:”

Democrats are promising that if Trump is defeated, voters will finally be able to go back to brunch as the Washington establishment returns itself to power.

The former’s message is laughably dishonest, the latter’s message is profoundly cynical and potentially dangerous.
…
It is true that the Obama years were not defined by petty bullshit that is routinely called “scandalous.” However, his two terms were hardly free of actual scandals. They were just the type of scandals that ruin regular people’s lives, but not the lives of people who wear expensive suits to work in Washington.
Obama helmed a presidency bankrolled by Wall Street donors that refused to prosecute a single banker who engineered a financial crisis that destroyed millions of lives.

He turned promises of significant health care reform into legislation that included a few positive consumer protections, but also enriched and strengthened the power of private insurance companies and dropped a promised public option.
He acknowledged the threat of climate change, but then publicly demanded credit from the fossil fuel industry for helping boost oil production during a climate apocalypse.

He pledged to walk picket lines if workers’ union rights were under attack, but then he promptly walked away from promised labor law reform.

And yes, Obama’s administration slow-walked the response to the environmental catastrophe in Flint, Michigan.

These kinds of scandals sowed deep disappointment, disaffection and economic dislocation, which helped fuel the backlash energy that powered the Tea Party and eventually Trump’s presidential candidacy. And they happened because of the kind of disengagement Obama envisioned when he promised that if Biden and Harris win, “you’re not going to have to think about them every day.” In this vision, the new White House lets us all just go back to brunch.

That refrain represents a longing that has pervaded Democratic politics in the Trump years, embodied by the now-infamous protest signs insisting that “if Hillary was president, we’d all be at brunch.”

Ian Welsh explains why the American elite is so unmoored from the rest of the population:

The US now has the least inter-generational social mobility in the Western world (it used to have the most). The elites have become self-perpetuating, and they never had to stare in a mirror and know that they may never have more than minimum wage job; that probably this is as good as it gets.

As a result they have no real empathy or understanding of the vast majority of the middle and working class. The elites know they worked hard to be where they are, what they don’t see is that their feet were put on the path from birth, and that every opportunity was given to them.

Opportunities that were not so open to those below them, who have to virtually bankrupt themselves to go to university and whose schools were completely broken, even as the value of BA declines to multi-generational lows. Put yourself in debt for 20 years, and it may still not buy you the good life.

That existence, hand to mouth, with no hope, is something America’s elites have never experienced and don’t understand.
…
The elites don’t live in the same world as ordinary people. They have become completely disconnected from that world. This is entirely logical on their part, because for 30 years they’ve gotten rich, rich, rich at the same time as ordinary people haven’t had a single raise. When you’re sitting on the top it’s very clear that all boats don’t need to be lifted and that Americans aren’t all in it together. The elites have done just fine, for over 30 years, while the rest of society went to hell.

So there’s no empathy born of shared experience, of the knowledge that sometimes life sucks and no matter what you do, it’s going to suck, and that that’s the way many people live. And there’s no acknowledgment of a need to make America work for everyone, because for the elites, that’s simply not true: America doesn’t need to work for everyone for things to be good for them.

Gerontocrat Candidate at Eternal Brunch In Maine

I posted on the Democratic Senate primary earlier this week and wanted to update with the first polling done since the 77-year-old Governor Janet Mills got into the race. Looks like the “bad jacketing” didn’t work (yet) on oysterman Graham Platner:

Ryan Grim added:

Cuomo Goes Out on a Slop Note

Andrew Cuomo is running an all-time Hall of Fame bad campaign.

Campaigns Just Fun and Games in a Post-Constitutional Republic

This NY Times story makes it painfully clear that almost nothing is less relevant than a U.S. Senate election:

Since assuming office in January, Mr. Trump and his top aides, seasoned from their first stint in the White House, have aggressively and enthusiastically usurped congressional power with little resistance from G.O.P. leaders in the House and the Senate. In many instances, they have willingly ceded their prerogatives and cheered on the president.

Even as administration policies threaten economic harm to huge swaths of rural America that they represent, congressional Republicans have been mainly silent as Mr. Trump has unilaterally imposed and threatened tariffs to achieve his own strategic, political and economic goals. Never mind that the Constitution gives Congress chief responsibility for levying tariffs.

The administration has embarked on deadly military operations off the coast of Venezuela and Colombia without the consent of Congress and no call from Republican lawmakers to scrutinize any oversight of the activities, even as the Pentagon cracks down on media coverage and communications with Congress.
…
“We don’t need to pass any more bills,” Mr. Trump told Senate Republicans at the White House on Tuesday as they reveled in their unity in the shutdown fight over a cheeseburger-and-fries lunch. “We got everything in that bill.”

Political Blender Still in Effect

To follow up on the political blender effect of right wing opposition to genocide, some tweets featuring Tucker Carlson and U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene:

And then there’s Kentucky Senator Rand Paul emerging as the most outspoken opponent of Trump’s attacks on Venezuela:

The Personal Is Political for Senator Chris Murphy

Updating another of our recent themes about the personal being the political for so many of our leading characters is this nugget from another Ettingermentum News piece which pegs Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy as the leading contender to replace Chuck Schumer as the Senate Minority Leader:

A few years ago, however, Murphy decided that he needed to be something more than an anonymous mainline coastal liberal. Seemingly unsatisfied with just remaining in the Senate in perpetuity, he took it upon himself to find nothing less than the Final Solution to American Politics. Half a decade after everyone else, he quickly found his answer: that America’s social fabric had been shredded by decades of unfettered Third Way neoliberalism. It’s a drum that he’s only beaten harder since the 2024 election, when he made waves by calling for—all together now—big-tent economic populism and moderation on cultural issues.

Then he separated from his wife, started listening to Red Scare, and began dating a progressive media executive 12 years his junior.

At a personal level, I wish Murphy the best in his endeavor to find the emotional stability he so clearly lacks right now, even if restating the thesis of Bowling Alone to every late night host in America is an undeniably strange way to do it. As for national politics, his new stances would be a clear on-paper break from the politics represented by Chuck Schumer, who infamously promised that his party would more than make up Trump’s gains with working class voters by winning over moderate Republicans in the suburbs. But while this would be a definite improvement over the status quo, I’m very skeptical that it would be as revolutionary as Murphy might want it to sound.

And on that note from a different angle, Bari Weiss, the new boss of David Ellison’s CBS News seems to be collecting hot dudes:

Newly installed CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss had a phalanx of six bodyguards in New York City on Tuesday as she has faced heightened security concerns, a source with knowledge of the matter told The Post.

Weiss had guards described as “beefy” and “chiseled” as she attended a conference at the New York Historical Society put on by private equity giant RedBird Capital.

The source said the detail was hired because “there are enhanced security concerns.”

“It’s highly unusual for a news executive to have six bodyguards,” a former network exec told The Post.

And speaking of David Ellison, he appears to be allowing “Hollywood superagent” turned combat sports multi-monopolist billionaire Ari Emanuel, the political rabbi who helped get the Skydance-Paramount acquisition through Hollywood and the Trump White House, to take over the staffing at CBS Sports, from Blake “Axe” Avigon at my Substack newsletter, The MMA Draw :

The recent Paramount–TKO partnership redefined the American combat-sports map. The seven-year, $7.7 billion agreement places all UFC events: thirteen numbered cards and thirty Fight Nights per year, on Paramount+, with select broadcasts on CBS starting in 2026. The deal ends ESPN’s domestic control of UFC content and replaces the pay-per-view model inside the United States. This is not rivalry, rather integration, and that distinction will define how the next era of combat sports is built. Paramount now operates inside TKO’s distribution core, not around it.
…
Behind the scenes, multiple industry sources confirm that ESPN executives Matt Kenny and Glenn Jacobs are in advanced discussions to join CBS Sports, a move that would signal one of the most significant talent migrations in recent sports-media memory. The two were reportedly handpicked by Dana White, with David Ellison giving the green light to help construct CBS’s new combat-sports division under the broader Paramount framework.

Kenny has overseen ESPN’s global combat-sports programming since 2019: negotiating rights deals for UFC, Top Rank, and PFL; while Jacobs directed production for all MMA coverage across ESPN platforms. Together, they helped anchor the $1.5 billion UFC–ESPN deal that reshaped ESPN+. Their prospective transition to CBS would bring that same production DNA and operational muscle into Paramount’s ecosystem, marking the network’s first major reentry into combat sports since the Showtime merger realignment.

And this semi-political speech from Ari Emanuel client Stephen A. Smith regarding today’s arrest of an NBA coach and player for alleged involvement in gambling related shenanigans is of some interest since Smith has been touted as a potential presidential contender.

Transcript:

Stephen A. Smith: We know what world that I live in in terms of politics. How many times for one incident after another have I said Trump is coming.

He’s coming. I’m going to say it on national television again.

Bad Bunny is is is is performing at the Super Bowl and all of a sudden you hearing ICE is going to be there looking to engage in mass deportations. The Super Bowl disrupting things.

Big night for the NBA (they) put on a show that has now been smeared because we’re talking about this story. Okay, remember Trump has a long long history connected to the world of sports because he had those casinos.

Where do you think folks will come in half the time? I’m not talking about individuals. I’m talking about the culture.

When people want to want want to go to a casino, when people want to gamble, when people want to party or whatever the case may be, this was his kind of connection to that.

Why am I glad you’re here, Monica? Because don’t be surprised if the WNBA is next on his list.

Because when you’ve got all of these protests that have been going out there and people that have been protesting against him and what have you, this man is coming. He’s coming.

And I’ve been saying it for a long time. And to me, this is the latest nugget of evidence that we’re talking about right here.

That’s not to question the legitimacy of the case. We don’t know. We’re all sitting up here and we’re saying that we don’t know.

But anybody that has been around him, anybody that has talked to him, anybody that has seen his reactions from the sports leagues and the positions that people have taken, they are not surprised at what’s going on today.

I’m watching a press conference with the director of the FBI. Tell me when we’ve seen that. We’ve seen people We’ve seen accusations before. We’ve seen athletes get in trouble with the law before.

You don’t see the director of the FBI having a press conference. It’s not coincidental. It’s not an accident. It’s a statement and it’s a warning that more is coming.

And that’s what they’re saying here. And everybody better get I’m just telling you it’s it’s it’s it’s as serious as it gets. This ain’t the platform for me to get into it the way I’m going to get into it. But I’ve been saying he’s coming. He’s coming. Because in his eyes, folks try to throw him in jail. In his eyes, he’s innocent. They try to put me behind bars. I’m getting everybody. He’s not playing.

And so this in a lot of people’s eyes, talk to people in the NBA, talk to people in the NFL, talk to people in the world of sports, they think this is like the tip of the iceberg. These are the kind of words that are coming out of people mouths. It’s not a surprise. It’s very disheartening. It’s very concerning. We don’t know where this is going to go, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. Everybody’s better brace themselves because he’s coming.

And just what is this case about? From NPR:

“This is an illegal gambling operation and sports-rigging operation that spanned the course of years,” said FBI director Kash Patel at a Thursday press conference. “The fraud is mind-boggling. It’s not hundreds of dollars. It’s not thousands of dollars. It’s not even millions of dollars. We’re talking about tens of millions of dollars in fraud and theft and robbery across a multi-year investigation.”

One indictment — United States vs. Earnest, et al. — involved a scheme to place bets on NBA games based on non-public information, such as when a player planned to pull himself out of a game due to injury or illness.

Working with organized crime groups, NBA “insiders” such as Rozier and Jones would pass along confidential information in exchange for some of the proceeds, said Joseph Nocella, the interim U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York. “They relied on corrupt individuals, including Jones and Rozier. They also used misused information obtained during long-standing friendships they had with NBA players and coaches,” he said.
…
The second indictment, called United States vs. Aiello, involved a series of rigged poker games arranged by organized crime groups in New York. Victims were induced to participate in the games with the promise of playing against prominent former athletes, including Billups and Jones, Nocella said.

Then, using a variety of cheating technology — including rigged shuffling machines and an x-ray poker table designed to reveal the victims’ hidden cards — the crime groups would cheat the victims out of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per game, the indictment alleges.

Victims lost at least $7 million in the rigged games, officials say.

And just to tie in another recurring theme, here’s the headline of a July DOJ press release about a different NBA player arrested in a gambling bust, no idea if the various indictments and investigations are connected:

I’ll be back for Monday’s Coffee Break.

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