Friday Round Up! 12/8/23
The spotlight is back on Hunter Biden. And why we need to care about Cuban spies in our midst.
You might have heard that the kale-eating, ultra-hippie, Marxist Deep State FBI just indicted Hunter Biden on nine counts involving his failure to pay taxes. Weird, right? I am still parsing the indictment, and will have more to say when Renato and I chat this week for our podcast. But among the many allegations that are made include one alleging that when Hunter finally filed returns for unpaid taxes in 2018, he took “false business deductions” that reduced his tax liability. Ummmm…am I the only one who remembers the revelation from the New York Times investigation into two decades of Trump’s tax filings that showed that he (among other things) paid Ivanka $700,000 in “consulting fees” and then took that fee as a deduction?? That story lasted all of about two days.
Look, if Hunter Biden engaged in criminal tax fraud of a kind that anyone else similarly situated would be charged for, then prosecutors should knock themselves out charging him. But it’s hard for me to see how if going after Hunter for tax offenses is entirely justified, then charging Trump for criminal tax fraud in New York for his fraudulent payment scheme to cover up his Stormy Daniels affair doesn’t fall in the same bucket (New York state prosecutors say that this is a bread and butter kind of case for the Manhattan DA’s office). Or how the New York Attorney General’s current civil case looking into Trump’s pattern of falsely inflating and deflating the value of his properties to get favorable loan terms and pay lower taxes isn’t the same kind of case, as well. (I wrote an earlier Substack piece about how these cases fit into an even larger pattern of financial fraud in Trump’s lifetime.) I don’t ask for much, people: I just want some consistency.
Anyhoo, more to come on that next week. In the meantime, Renato and I unpacked the D.C. Circuit’s and Judge Chutkan’s rejection of Trump’s absolute immunity claim, and what that means for the timing of his case. We also talked about the significance of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s intention of bringing in Trump’s prior and subsequent statements encouraging and supporting the insurrectionists as evidence of his motives for the conspiracy to obstruction Congress and deprive people of their right to have their votes counted.
Before moving into the reading recommendations for this week, I also wanted to highlight a story in the news that I thought deserved more attention: The arrest of Manuel Rocha, a former State Department official for over two decades and a former U.S. Ambassador, who has been accused of spying for Cuba for over forty years. Yes, forty years.
As a former FBI counterintelligence agent, I am always interested in learning how spies got recruited by our adversaries’ spy services, but I have a double interest in this case because Cuba is a fascinating intersection of two things I have studied: Latin American politics and Russian intelligence tactics and tradecraft — after all, Cuban intelligence were trained by the Soviets. I’ve also spent some time in Cuba. I tried to find a photo of me in front of a truck with Cyrillic lettering, but I can’t find it so here is me in 2016 in a vintage car in Havana:
Anyway, the criminal complaint against Rocha is worth reading as it is a fascinating account of how our policy in Latin America in the 70s shaped his views of the U.S. and made him open to recruitment by Cuba — Rocha was approached by Cuban intelligence in the aftermath of the 1973 presidential coup in Chile (in which the CIA had a hidden hand). In other words, in the M.I.C.E. (Money, Ideology, Coercion, Ego) paradigm, this appears to have been an ideologically-driven partnership. In fact, in his last post as U.S. ambassador to Bolivia, Rocha openly advocated for Bolivians to vote against the leading candidate, which gave a boost to the opposition candidate, a socialist who was backed by Cuba.
The other fascinating aspect of the indictment is its description of how Cuban intelligence actually steered Rocha into government service after recruiting him. This echoes their recruitment of another longtime Cuban spy, Ana Montes, who also soured on U.S. policy in Latin America in the 1980s and ended up taking a position as an analyst in the Defense Intelligence Agency at the direction of the Cubans and spied for them for seventeen years. (This also explains why, when I was first polygraphed to enter the FBI, they spent almost the whole time grilling me about my first trip to Cuba in the late 90s, and asking whether anyone had directed me to apply to the Bureau. I was totally confused at the time — I literally spent my entire time on the beach with an American girlfriend — but now it makes more sense.)
This might all seem a bit Cold War-ish, but it has implications for today. In particular, Rocha’s cover story as a “right-wing person” gave him traction in conservative circles. More specifically, according to the Times:
More recently, Mr. Rocha surprised friends and former colleagues by signaling fervent support for former President Donald J. Trump. The charging document quotes Mr. Rocha telling an undercover F.B.I. official who posed as a Cuban spy that his right-wing politics were part of a cover story.
In other words, Rocha’s “cover story” would be the perfect one to make him a welcome guest at a place like, say, Mar-a-Lago, where all he needed to do was excuse himself to go to the bathroom and then rummage through Top Secret U.S. defense information. Who knows how many spies are crawling all over that place.
Articles worth reading:
My weekend reading is basically this month’s entire issue of The Atlantic, which is headlined, “If Trump Wins” and is about the consequences in every part of the government if Trump wins a second term. I’m especially interested in reading the pieces by my friends Juliette Kayyem on violent extremism and Tom Nichols on the military. And yes, I know this means I’ll be depressed and wearing sweatpants all weekend.
Upcoming events:
Wine & Fries Club, Sunday, December 10, 8 p.m. EST: I am SO excited that I will be hosting a holiday Wine & Fries happy hour tomorrow night with Mary L Trump, author of theThe Good in Us by Mary L. Trump Substack and the amazing Backstory Serial! I always love talking to Mary and getting her thoughts on the Donald and everything else going on in the world. I hope you can join us! Zoom link will be sent to Wine & Fries members at 5 p.m.
Holiday Happy Hour, Wednesday, December 27, 5pm EST: In lieu of office hours for December, I want to do a fun happy hour for paid subscribers! NO TRUMP TALK. Just fun conversation about the holidays and plans for the New Year! Zoom link will be sent to paid subscribers at 2 p.m.
Freedom Academy Book Club, Wednesday, January 17, 12 p.m.: A discussion with by Scott Shapiro, author of Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks. Zoom link will be sent to paid subscribers at 9 a.m. The talk will be recorded and posted the following day.
Enjoy your weekend!
FWIW the logical flaw you were discussing in Trump's silly claim that being impeached but not convicted made him immune from criminal prosecution, because the law says if he IS convicted he can still be prosecuted, is a basic fallacy that in mathematical logic would be called "assuming the inverse." (I heard Chutkin called it something like "negating the antecedent", but same difference.)
So if you start with the statement 'p implies q', the inverse would be 'not-p implies not-q', and it's an elementary principle that a statement being true does not imply the inverse is true. Thus if you say all fire engines are red, that doesn't mean anything that isn't a fire engine is not red. I mean.... duh.
Beautiful picture!
The car's nice too. 👌