Red Lines

The red line is blood, and the US is letting it run.

There’s a document on my desktop called “Trump Murder Stuff.” It is full of red lines.

There’s another document called “Blinken-Maxwell.” It is also full of red lines.

The red lines are proper nouns about improper activity. The red lines reference foreign and criminal infiltration of American institutions.

The red lines pop up on my documents because they are thought to be mistakes, but they are not: they are history. They are not typos any more than they are accidents. They are the names of the people trying to kill America, and the names of the victims.

Red lines are blood — blood ties, and blood spilled.

Should I write about these things? I ask. Maybe someone will ask me first, and when I answer, it’ll seem less like I’m looking for trouble than trying to protect people from it. Because that’s all I’m seeking to do. Americans deserve to know the backstories of our ostensible public servants.

The truth tangled up like a vine, a vine of red lines.

I wrote an article about Merrick Garland, a true tale of his dark ties, and some folks threatened to kill me. I get the same threats in regard to my books, which describe journalists from the 1980s and 1990s getting murdered for covering the same topics as I do now.

I get the same threats because the same people are involved for decades on end, the same mafia state corporate hybrids. That's what I hate about these crime syndicates, man: I get older, they stay the same age.

There’s a sticker on my laptop that says, “Mama Tried.” I bought it in a junk shop in Muskogee, Oklahoma. It’s the chorus of a Merle Haggard song I belt out when we’re on the run from problems caused by red lines:

No one could steer me right, but Mama tried, Mama tried
Mama tried to raise me better, but her pleading I denied
That leaves only me to blame, 'cause Mama tried!

I can hear my mom hectoring me to write about something safe, like all the pretty places I visit when I flee. I can see the fear in my children’s eyes every time the topic of threats arises.

If I write down the facts and something bad happens, it’s my own fault — or is it? Maybe it’s the fault of the people who did dirty deeds, and a culture that encourages people to kill the messenger.

I remember when that phrase was a metaphor instead of a promise.

*          *          *

It’s not like I haven’t told these stories before. It’s not like the evidence isn’t in the public domain — or, at least, it was, back when the public domain existed and wasn’t blocked by paywalls and deletions and algorithms steering you into lies.

But we’re way worse off than the first time I told them.

Judges and juries are once again being threatened by Donald Trump, the career criminal presidential candidate on trial. There are no meaningful consequences for violating a gag order and stoking violence, just ruminations on how murder threats affect poll numbers and a debate invite from Joe Biden.

Murder threats are being normalized, like sedition and the plague.

We are told voting will preserve our “democracy”. But a “democracy”, under the Biden administration, consists of protesters being beaten in the streets for opposing genocide. In this “democracy”, Americans are expected to pledge allegiance to a foreign country.

The House passed a bill criminalizing criticism of Israel. Another new bill will defund US national security operations unless Biden gives Israel unconditional aid. A new law criminalizes mass protest by making an “organizer” (loosely defined) at a demonstration responsible for any alleged illegal act committed by a single person present. A social media network, Tik Tok, may be shut down because it reveals Israeli war crimes.

Americans speaking out against genocide risk having their careers destroyed, and US officials — many of whom are funded by Israeli lobbying groups — won’t defend US citizens. The Israeli government is murdering international journalists and aid workers, including Americans. American doctors are starving to death in Gaza, and Israel won’t let them out or allow them food and water. They have been begging the Biden administration to help them, to no avail.

It’s one thing to live in a rising autocracy. It’s another to live in an increasingly autocratic proxy state beholden to a foreign country’s genocidal invasion.

In this backward “democracy”, Jewish Americans are admonished for not having dual loyalty, and Israelis of conscience are punished by America for criticizing Israel.

In the last 24 hours, Israeli historian Ilan Pappe was detained by the FBI at the airport for criticizing Israel’s war crimes. In a humane and courageous letter, Jewish-American presidential appointee Lily Greenberg Call quit in protest, condemning the Biden administration for both abetting the massacre of Palestinians and for “making Jews the face of the American war machine.”

Biden had claimed that Israel invading Rafah — the southern city to which the remaining population of Gaza had fled — was a “red line” that would end his unconditional support of Israel.

A “red line” is supposed to be a line that one does not cross, one that brings meaningful consequences for those who dare to do so. But when Israel invaded Rafah, Biden sent them another billion dollars.

On Twitter a new photo of Palestinian toddler with its head blown off by an Israeli soldier is circulating. I won’t look at it. It would make me cry with pain and horror and shame.

The red line is blood, and all of them — Netanyahu, Biden, Trump, and their operatives — let it run.

*          *          *

There is no more pressing story than genocide in Gaza. But there is a background to that story that remains underexamined and helps explain the US role.

Both Biden and Trump have decades-long ties to Netanyahu and his regime. Biden as a fanatical Zionist whose bloodlust was too much even for Israeli warmongers in the 1980s, and Trump in an even more personal way, through his son-in-law Jared Kushner, whose family is so close to Netanyahu’s, Netanyahu used to sleep in his bedroom while visiting the US.

Trump is a lifelong lackey of the Kremlin, to which Soviet officials first escorted him on July 4, 1987. But the network to which he is linked is transnational, and Israel is a key hub. For it was Israel that allowed the leaders of this crime network to leave the USSR in the late 1980s by abusing Israel’s “right of return” law, getting an Israeli passport, and then using it to launch criminal initiatives around the world — solidifying a mafia network that dominates global politics today.

It is important to emphasize that this is not a Jewish network: Jewish people are often its victims. This is a multiethnic criminal network in which some top members weaponize Israel’s laws for crime, a dynamic in place since the days of Meyer Lansky. I wrote a book about this mafia enterprise and the complicity of the US government, Hiding in Plain Sight, excerpts of which are at the bottom of this article. It’s a complicated story.

My document “Trump Murder Stuff” is a list of the many people close to Trump who died in mysterious and violent ways. This does not mean that Trump killed them. It’s unlikely he did, though Trump’s bodyguard admitted in Harry Hurt’s 1993 book Lost Tycoon that Trump made him promise he’d murder if Trump requested it.

Mysterious deaths go with the territory of being immersed in organized crime for over half a century. It is so common for someone in Trump's inner circle to die under suspicious circumstances that when I wrote Hiding in Plain Sight, I had to add a disclaimer that Wayne Barrett, a journalist Trump despised, died of natural causes.

One of the most notorious men on my Trump murder list is tied to a prominent member of the Biden administration. The man’s name is Robert Maxwell and he was an Israeli “superspy” who socialized with Trump and a variety of Iran-Contra operatives in the 1980s. Working publicly as a UK publishing magnate, Maxwell was a Mossad agent who had a side hustle with the Russian mafia before falling off a yacht in 1991, after which he was feted by Israeli officials at a lavish state funeral. His children say he was murdered.

One of his children is Ghislaine Maxwell, the criminal partner of child trafficker — and blackmailer of powerful adults — Jeffrey Epstein.

The last person alleged to see Maxwell alive was his best friend, American political operative Samuel Pisar. Pisar was also Maxwell’s lawyer. After Maxwell died, Pisar became Jeffrey Epstein’s advisor.

Pisar was also the stepfather of Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

Being the stepson of the best friend of an internationally known mobbed-up superspy would disqualify any American for a high-level security clearance under normal circumstances. But normal circumstances are gone, as is protecting US sovereignty. Jared Kushner is another operative whose ties to organized crime and Israel should have denied him a clearance, but he received it anyway, despite lying on his forms.

Blinken should not be judged by his stepfather’s actions — but his ability to be an effective Secretary of State should be.

Blinken could be an honorable man — which he is not — and his entry into the highest echelons of political life would still pose a threat to US national security. It is dangerous to have a Secretary of State who grew up with Robert Maxwell as a family friend. The wealth of information Israel has on his family — information that could be shared or traded with hostile entities — make him uniquely vulnerable to compromise. That Maxwell was not referenced during Blinken’s confirmation hearings shows how taboo this topic is.

It appears that Blinken does not need to be coerced: when it comes to abetting Israeli war crimes, he is a volunteer. Biden and Blinken’s collaborative efforts to destroy Israel’s proclaimed enemies date back decades. In 2003, they sought to partition Iraq along ethnic lines; their destructive plan was rejected. Since October 2023, they have repeatedly defended Israel’s war crimes and played down the enormous Palestinian death toll. Blinken has been accused of violating the Leahy Law by refusing to sanction Israeli soldiers who committed rape and murder.

Blinken’s absolutist stance on Israel is part of why people quit the Biden administration.

“If we had been applying Leahy effectively in Israel like we do in other countries, maybe you wouldn’t have the IDF filming TikToks of their war crimes now because we have contributed to a culture of impunity,” said Josh Paul, a State Department staffer who quit in October 2023.

I tend to believe Blinken rose to villainy on his own accord. But if he were to change his mind about Israel — what would the Israeli government, notorious for its use of blackmail and threats, do with the information they had gathered over the decades?

One could reasonably say this is why Blinken should have never been made Secretary of State. It is, of course, possibly why Biden did make him Secretary of State.

The red line is a Red Sea, where Biden and Blinken can float to infamy. Netanyahu and his fanatical regime have their eye on taking the West Bank and then other slices of the Middle East after they’re through with Gaza. It’s unlikely that the US will stop them, regardless of whether Biden or Trump are in power.

*          *          *

There are too many dark stories that are lightly told.

They are hard to vet, because they are about people who prefer the shadows. They are tough to swallow, because the operatives who do not hide don a suit and tie and stand in the sun, basking in the glow of nepotistic prestige and purchased merit. That is how Blinken and Kushner and so many others insert themselves into power.

Trump is an easier story to tell since he confesses his crimes openly, yet the media still ignores his most serious offenses to focus on trite scandals: out of greed, out of laziness, but also out of fear.

Because this is a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government — and it stayed that way even after Trump left office.

That is why Trump and his wealthy cohort were never punished. That is why Trump policies paved the way for Biden policies which are now paving the way for more Trump policies. This applies to everything from policing to covid to sedition and to Israel, most of all.

When there is near uniform agreement in Congress, and it is in support of genocide, something awful is afoot.

I gave you the cliff notes version of my documents of red lines. I realize there is a small window in which I may be able to tell it, due to impending new laws and other factors, like my possible defenestration through that window.

But I’ve got my own red line I don’t cross, which is lying.

I wish I could have wrapped this information in something beautiful, but these are the ugliest times, so you get it straight.

I’ve got another document on my laptop that’s called “Death Threats 2024.” That’s what happens when you make everyone mad at once. I believe this is what our legislature calls “bipartisanship.”

Maybe I’ll follow up, and maybe they’ll follow me down. But I do not blame myself: this mama tried.

Thank you for reading! This newsletter is funded solely by voluntary paid subscribers. I don’t paywall in times of peril and I appreciate everyone who allows me to keep it open and to pay my bills! If you like my work, please subscribe:

Photograph credit: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA

Below are excerpts from my book Hiding in Plain Sight about Robert Maxwell, Israel, Epstein, Trump, and the Russian mafia. You can get the whole book here.