i mean look on the one hand everyone deserves a second chance, good for them in a sense, on the other, what tech company employed this person "in the role of growth marketing and business development specialist" https://t.co/umYffB2Ojd
— flglmn (@flglmn) January 18, 2023
Last I remember, the general internet consensus was that ‘master criminals’ Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan’ were nothing more than crypto-mules holding the vaporware bag for the actual, professional GRU thieves. But this is America, land of second acts. Who knows, maybe the feds are using Morgan as an online ‘honeypot‘ to seduce other would-be cryptocriminals?
(From NYMag, cuz I know some of you would quite sensibly refuse to click on a NYPost link):
Last February, crypto skeptics rejoiced over the arrest of a married couple, Heather Morgan and Ilya “Dutch” Lichtenstein, who were charged by federal prosecutors with attempting to launder billions of dollars of stolen bitcoin. Their haul was grand, having somehow come into 119,754 bitcoin from the 2016 hack of Bitfinex, the largest-ever crypto heist. But most of the attention gravitated toward Morgan, better known as Razzlekhan — a rapper of questionable talent with a prolific social-media output who put out cringey songs about being a hacker nerd.
Since then, Morgan has been under 24-hour house arrest in her apartment on Wall Street and Lichtenstein has been in jail in Washington, D.C., as investigators continue to push the trial date back in order to consider a pretrial resolution — a timeline that suggests the pair could be cooperating. Meanwhile, Morgan has been looking for work, tweeting in September that she was seeking “remote” jobs for business-to-business tech companies. And according to a court filing Tuesday first reported by Bloomberg News, she has found one: A judge approved a request on January 17 to allow Morgan to work from her new employer’s office Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from 10 a.m. until 8:30 p.m.
There is no information in the filing as to who is employing Morgan. Her attorney, Eugene Gorokhov, stated in a court filing that her employer’s identity was secret because his client “has been subject to disparaging comments and harassment on social media as a result of the intense media coverage of this case.” Gorokhov did state that Morgan was offered a job “in the role of growth marketing and business development specialist.” Based on the hours, it’s probably a tech company…
I’m pretty sure this is satire, but I wouldn’t care to bet the rent money against its veracity…
I was almost Elon Musk's Twitter voice: https://t.co/M1SPqWs4EV
— Defector (@DefectorMedia) January 14, 2023
To complete the trilogy of high-dollar crypto-grifters, Sam Bankman-Fried:
Ok everyone, let’s remember he’s innocent until proven guilty https://t.co/pIkNd4pRJT
— Ed Zitron (@edzitron) January 19, 2023
scav
Just mildly enjoying that yet another judge has been rude rude rude to TFG & his pet land sharks with rubber teeth. Trump and lawyer ordered to pay $1m for bringing ‘frivolous’ lawsuit against Hillary Clinton (guard) or Politico.
eclare
@scav: Great!
As for all the crypto people, I got nothin’.
David 🌈☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
Only the best people
David 🌈☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
something, something… no honor among thieves
or
the gang who couldn’t
shootsue straightTony Jay
On the topic of awful people trying to bury legacies bulging with cynical fakery, the FTF Guardian has started dipping its toe back into genuine reporting on the fuckery of the Israeli Right and their allies worldwide. This is blackly funny for a number of reasons, but mainly because between 2015-2020 the FTF Guardian was absolutely 100% all-in on encouraging, mainstreaming and justifying exactly this kind of no-holds-barred reputational assault on the then Leader of the UK Labour Party and anyone else who dared to claim that Palestinians were human beings with rights that could be violated.
“The problem of people penalized for criticising Israel is not limited to me“, quotes the FTF Guardian. Damned tooting. It’s just certain values of hilarious to see stories like this creeping back onto its pages after it spent years acting as the ‘even the liberal’ conduit for every malicious propaganda screed vomited up by the hard-Right Jewish Chronicle and systematically banning any contrary viewpoints from its coverage, all because the prospect of the very rich having to pay a tiny bit more in tax to stop the UK turning into the shithole it has become simply could not be allowed to happen and the Establishment needed an angle to split the anti-Tory vote.
If this goes on they might even get around to covering the Forde Report that blew their entire 2015-2020 narrative out of the water. Ha! Just kidding.
Wankers.
Geminid
@Tony Jay: I’m curious: what is Mr. Corbyn up to now? Is he still in Parliament?
JAFD
@Geminid: I think he’s still Member for Islington (Would look it up, but am in middle of breakfast). Get his tweets in my feed occasionally.
Geminid
A report in this morning’s Politico Playbook says that Phoenix area Representative Greg Stanton has announced he will not run next year for the Senate seat held by Ms. Sinema. Representative Ruben Gallego is preparing his bid, and with Stanton out of the picture he should win the nomination easily. His Republican opponent could be the irrepressible Kari Lake. That matchup would make for some fierce debates.
Tony Jay
@Geminid:
Oh yeah, still MP for Islington and a member of the Labour Party, though Starmer continues to withhold the Party whip (for reasons that have edged away from the now fully debunked accusations of antisemitism towards equally bullshit accusations of being pro-Putin) from him and they’ve made it plain that under no circumstances will they allow him to stand as a Labour candidate in the next election, no matter what Islington’s voters think or how pathetic their ideological vendetta looks after the publication of the Forde Report.
Can’t have that man in the Nu New Labour Party. Oh heavens, no. Why, that would be tantamount to admitting that the five-year campaign to sabotage any chance of Labour ousting the Tories was always 100% about keeping a dirty Trot out of Downing Street, and we can’t have that.
Anyway
@JAFD:
Still in parliament but no longer the head of the Labo(u)r party,I think. Too early to look it up. I’ll let Tony Jay set me straight if I got it wrong.
Geminid
@JAFD: Thanks. I understand that Corbyn has been expelled from the Labour Party. I guess doesn’t affect his status as Member from Islington, just his prospects in the next election.
Eta: now I see Labour has witheld “the party whip” from Corbyn, not expelled him.
Baud
@Geminid:
I don’t know what that means but it sounds kinky.
Geminid
@Tony Jay: Would Corbyn have any chance if he were to run on Islington as an Independent?
Tony Jay
@Geminid:
Possible, he’s very, very popular in his constituency (as he is throughout the mainstream Labour Party). I don’t think he will, though.
His entire time as leader was centred on trying to keep the Labour Party as a big-tent organisation and a progressive alternative to the Tories, but if he sticks two fingers up to Starmer and his handlers and goes Indie they’ll just use it as an excuse to suspend and expel any MP, Councillor, member or affiliated organisation who so much as likes a tweet by someone who once attended a meeting of a group that published a newsletter that Corbyn was seen reading in 1995.
It’s what they want to do. That’s partly what their refusal to budge on denying him the whip is all about. They want an ‘excuse’ to purge the centre-left and complete their centre-right takeover of the Party and they’re nothing if not unimaginative and vindictive.
There go two miscreants
@Geminid: ”irrepressible”, while correct, has a much too positive vibe to apply to that whacko!
Enhanced Voting Techniques
That Defector article, I don’t know what’s more absurd; Musk hiring a team of professional memers to do his tweets or the stoner who wrote the article.
Ken
I thought “innocent until proven guilty” had a carve-out for when the accused has confessed on every social media conduit he could find, including a Substack he created for the purpose.
Brit in Chicago
@Geminid: Does anyone know what Sinema herself will be doing?
a) competing for the Dem nomination
b) running as an independent
c) riding off into the sunset
I’m hoping for c), but a) would also be good, as I’m pretty sure she’d lose to Gallego. But b) might be disastrous—I assume she’d get enough formerly Dem votes to assure a Rep win.
Brit in Chicago
Apologies, inadvertent double-post.
Geminid
@There go two miscreants: Yeah, I should have italicized irrepressible so as to convey irony.
That could be an interesting Senate primary for Arizona Republicans. Ms. Lake barely won the Governor primary over Governor Ducey’s candidate. I wonder if Ducey will run for Senate.
I think Ruben Gallego will be a strong candidate. I’m hoping this will be a two person race, with Sinema opting out.
Geminid
@Brit in Chicago: Sinema will likely not compete for the Democratic nomination. Polling showed that she would lose, and that probably influenced her decision to become an Independent. I think she still voted for Chuck Schumer to be Majority Leader, and I’ve read she still receives committee assignments through the Democratic caucus, as do Independents King and Sanders.
I think Sinema will pass on a reelection run, but I would not bet on it.
Brit in Chicago
@Geminid: Thanks. I certainly hope you’re right, and she does pass. Why don’t we have better people in politics? (Though a lot of Dems seem to be good, sensible, hardworking, and smart. Is that just my prejudice?)
kalakal
@Baud: It basically means he’s expelled from the party. He’s still an MP but is classed as Independent not Labour.
In the next election ( unless they reinstate him) he can’t stand as a Labour candidate, can’t recieve support from any Labour officials, funding etc. Any Labour party members who do support him can/will also be expelled.
British political parties have pretty small memberships, you don’t register in the way USians do.
Labour has about 450,000 members, the Tories about 175,000.
Geminid
@Brit in Chicago: When Sinema ran in 2018, Arizona had not elected a Democratic Senator sonce Dennis DeConcini in the 1980s. Democrats evidently thought Representative Sinema, a Blue Dog who won a purple district in 2012, was their best chance.
Since then Joe Biden and Mark Kelly, more standard moderate/liberal Democrats carried the state by a narrow margin, and that proved that a Democrat did not need Sinema’s special centrist sauce to win. Last year Mark Kelly proved that again. So Arizona Democrats decided she is expendable, or at least polling indicated this.
Polling now shows Sinema trailing badly in a three way race. She just has not built a loyal following in her state. Campaigns take a lot of time and energy, and she doesn’t seem to thrive on retail politicing, and seems a little lazy. She has good options for a post Senate career so I’m hoping she just moves on to her future career without detouring through a doomed campaign.
But who knows what goes on inside that horrible hoyden’s head.
Baud
@kalakal:
Thanks!
Brit in Chicago
@Geminid: Thanks for the useful background. Your last line deserves to be a rotating tag!
Betty
@Tony Jay: I was stunned by the documentary I saw of the war against Corbin and his allies by the entire British establishment. Tories, Starmer’s crew and the media. Just an onslaught of trumped up allegations.
Tony Jay
@Betty: Oh God, yeah, it’s absolutely disgraceful and horrific in its scale and the effect it’s had on the UK. Once it was clear that the centre-right in Labour wasn’t going to be able to oust Corbyn by democratic or pseudo-democratic means and 2017 signalled how electorally popular even an internally divided Labour Party was as long as the centre-left were in charge, the entire UK Establishment closed ranks to ensure that all anyone ever heard for the next three years was a 24/7 barrage of lies and hard-right propaganda.
The omerta continues to this day. Since the Forde Report and the Al Jazeera expose the UK Media simply WILL NOT TALK about any of it. That thread the other day about how the Media manipulate the narrative had it spot on. Don’t talk about it, so it didn’t happen, so there’s nothing to talk about.
People will hold their nose (mostly) and vote Labour to get rid of this Tory shower, but a huge chunk of the Labour Party’s membership and voting base are well aware that the blame for the Tories having remained in power for the last five years rests squarely on the heads of the people currently running the Labour Party, and there will be a reckoning.
Anyway
@Tony Jay:
Interesting that a country and party awash in Russian oligarch money and Brexit ratfucking moolah are concerned about someone being pro-Putin …
Tony Jay
@Anyway:
A mixture of projection and That’s Another Thing We Don’t Talk About in effect.