Catch and Kill Protection Rackets: Trump, Weinstein, Epstein and Wall Street

[Gunnar Larson]

https://wallstreetonparade.com/2024/04/catch-and-kill-protection-rackets-trump-weinstein-epstein-and-wall-street/


By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: April 26, 2024 ~

Editor’s Note: This article has been edited and updated from an earlier
version, published in 2020.

Donald Trump -- Pied Piper to Wall Street (Thumbnail)Trump and Catch and
Kill: Yesterday, David Pecker, the former Chairman and CEO of American
Media Inc. (AMI), the parent company of the National Enquirer tabloid,
testified for a third day in the 34-count criminal trial of former
President Donald Trump in New York. Pecker continued to expand on the
sordid details of a catch and kill operation he had agreed to operate with
the active involvement of Trump and his then attorney, Michael Cohen. The
operation involved buying up stories about Trump’s salacious affairs with
women and then killing them from publication in order to help Trump’s
campaign for the presidency in 2016. There was also an understanding that
Pecker would run negative articles about Trump’s political opponents in the
National Enquirer.

During opening arguments in the trial on Monday, Prosecutor Matthew
Colangelo explained the case to the jurors as follows:

“The defendant, Donald Trump, orchestrated a criminal scheme to corrupt the
2016 presidential election. Then he covered up that criminal conspiracy by
lying in his New York business records over and over and over again.”

While Pecker was mapping out more of the slimy details of his catch and
kill operation yesterday, shocking news broke that the New York Court of
Appeals had overturned the sex crimes conviction of Hollywood producer
Harvey Weinstein. The court ruled with a 4-3 vote (and scathing dissents)
that the trial judge had erred by allowing witnesses to testify about other
alleged crimes committed by Weinstein that were not part of the case. The
Manhattan District Attorney’s office promised to retry the case.

Weinstein, who has been serving time in prison in upstate New York, was
also sentenced last year in California to 16 years in prison for rape and
sexual assault. That sentence is not impacted by the Appeals court ruling
in New York.

There have also been allegations in the past of a catch and kill operation
to protect Harvey Weinstein.

Ronan Farrow and the Harvey Weinstein Investigation: Ronan Farrow has
previously cast a harsh light on NBC, suggesting that it may have been
involved in a nuanced form of catch and kill during his investigation of
Harvey Weinstein’s alleged sexual assaults on women. NBC failed to
broadcast Farrow’s story despite having filmed witness interviews. After
NBC told Farrow that his story wasn’t reportable, Farrow took it to the New
Yorker, where the article was published on October 10, 2017. It won Farrow
a Pulitzer Prize in 2018. That article includes allegations of three rapes
by Weinstein.

Farrow appeared on the MSNBC Rachel Maddow program shortly after his
article ran in the New Yorker. Farrow was asked by Maddow why NBC did not
air the story. Farrow responded:

“I walked into the door at the New Yorker with an explosively reportable
piece that should have been public earlier. And immediately, obviously, the
New Yorker recognized that and it is not accurate to say that it wasn’t
reportable. In fact, there were multiple determinations that it was
reportable at NBC.”

Jeffrey Epstein and the U.S. Attorney’s Office: Catch and kill is also the
only logical way to view what happened to sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein at
the hands of Alex Acosta, then U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of
Florida when Jeffrey Epstein got the sweetheart deal of a lifetime.

In July of 2006, the Palm Beach, Florida Police Chief, Michael Reiter,
delivered a deeply investigated case against Epstein to the FBI, according
to the November 2018 (paywall) intrepid reporting of Julie Brown in the
Miami Herald. Brown indicated that it took just eight months of FBI
interviews for the U.S. Attorney’s office in Florida to have a 53-page
Federal indictment ready to file against Epstein involving sexual assaults
against dozens of underage girls.

But the indictment was never filed. A deal was worked out by Acosta, and
Epstein’s well-connected lawyers. Federal charges were dropped against
Epstein and he was allowed to plead guilty to only Florida state charges:
one count of soliciting sex from a minor and one count of soliciting sex
from an adult woman. Epstein was allowed to serve just 13 months in jail,
during which time he was given a work release program to sit in his
well-appointed office 12 hours a day, and driven around by his chauffeured
limo. The deal was so outrageously constructed that it even denied his
dozens of victims knowledge of the terms of the deal.

Had Julie Brown not conducted that courageous investigation for the Miami
Herald, had the Miami Herald declined to publish it in 2018, the U.S.
Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York would not have been
embarrassed into bringing the new charges against Epstein on July 8, 2019.
Acosta, who had morphed into Trump’s U.S. Labor Secretary, was embarrassed
into resigning as a result of the public uproar.

JPMorgan’s Catch and Kill Deals with the Department of Justice: On November
19, 2013, the Department of Justice and other regulators settled their
mortgage securities fraud case against JPMorgan Chase for an unprecedented
$13 billion. One year later, we would learn from Matt Taibbi’s reporting at
Rolling Stone that the Justice Department had a highly reliable
lawyer-whistleblower that had worked at JPMorgan Chase, Alayne Fleischmann,
who had hard evidence that she had warned the bank that it was peddling
defective mortgages.

The Statement of Facts offered to the public by the DOJ along with the
settlement strongly suggested a catch and kill operation. There were none
of the typical smoking gun internal emails; there were none of the internal
documents showing an intent to defraud; there were none of the documents
that Alayne Fleischmann had provided to Justice Department investigators.
And there were no names of employees who had engaged in the fraudulent
practices.

The DOJ and other regulators brought the mortgage fraud case as a civil
matter – not a criminal matter. But the following year, in 2014, the DOJ
brought two criminal counts against JPMorgan Chase for its role in
laundering money for Ponzi kingpin Bernie Madoff. This became the first of
a series of deferred-prosecution agreements for criminal charges brought by
the DOJ against JPMorgan Chase.

These deals functioned very much like catch and kill arrangements. Only the
skimpiest of details were released to the public; the bank admitted to the
criminal charges but the public was never given the salient details about
how the bank and its management carried out the frauds.

In November 2016, units of JPMorgan Chase agreed to pay more than $264
million to the U.S. Department of Justice, the Securities and Exchange
Commission and the Federal Reserve in what was widely known as its Chinese
“Princeling” scandal. In announcing the settlement in the Princeling
scandal in 2016, officials at the Justice Department said this:

“The so-called Sons and Daughters Program was nothing more than bribery by
another name…Awarding prestigious employment opportunities to unqualified
individuals in order to influence government officials is corruption, plain
and simple. This case demonstrates the Criminal Division’s commitment to
uncovering corruption no matter the form of the scheme…

“In this case, JPMorgan employees designed a program to hire otherwise
unqualified candidates for prestigious investment banking jobs solely
because these candidates were referred to the bank by officials in
positions to award business to the bank. In certain instances, referred
candidates were hired with the understanding that the hiring was linked to
the award of specific business. This is no longer business as usual; it is
corruption.”

What the case actually demonstrated was the Criminal Division of the DOJ’s
willingness to uncover fraud but not prosecute fraud. The DOJ handed
JPMorgan a non-prosecution agreement, hammered out by the Big Law firm,
Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison.

Naturally, this emboldened the bank. It was charged with two more felony
counts in 2020 for rigging the precious metals markets and the U.S.
Treasury market. And, once again, it was given a deferred-prosecution
agreement by the DOJ.

Sitting at the helm of the U.S. Department of Justice is the U.S. Attorney
General. While on the stand yesterday, David Pecker revealed that in 2018
his publishing company had received a letter from the Federal Election
Commission. Pecker testified that he took this letter to mean “We committed
a campaign violation.” Pecker said when he shared his concerns with Michael
Cohen, that Cohen had indicated he wasn’t worried and said this: “Jeff
Sessions is the Attorney General and Donald Trump has him in his pocket.”

In a CBS interview in December of last year, former Republican
Congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming said this: “One of the things that we
see happening today is a sort of a sleepwalking into dictatorship in the
United States.”

The mushrooming transmutations of catch and kill today involve not just
public relations flacks, high-priced lawyers, publishers, and mainstream
media. Increasingly, catch and kill includes the highest law enforcement
office in the land, the U.S. Department of Justice. Is it any wonder
millions of Americans are sleepwalking?
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