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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 25, 2024

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The Matt Gaetz Story: Blackmail Operation, Distraction Attempt, or A Bunch of Convenient Coincidences involving a Naughty Congressman?

Let's go over some of the people involved:

  • Joel Greenberg: Tax Collector of Seminole County, naughty boy
  • Matt Gaetz: Sitting US Congressmen for the 1st District in Florida, bee-hive poker and boat rocker
  • David McGee: Former Federal Prosecutor for Northern District of Florida, now works in Big Law
  • Bob Levinson: Retired FBI Agent and CIA contractor who disappears in 2007 and becomes an Iranian hostage
  • Don Gaetz: Matt Gaetz father, Florida politician, sold his company 20 years ago for a half-billion dollars
  • Stephen Alford: Felon, client of David McGee
  • Bob Kent: Former Air Force Intelligence Officer and cold-case Hostage Finder

Let's start somewhere in Florida with an ascendant failson of a wealthy family named Joel Greenberg. He gets elected as Tax Collector of Seminole County in 2016. He quickly becomes a social center for well-to-dos in central Florida. He then engages in an almost comical level of naughty behavior.

Well, it doesn't take long for authorities in FL and the federal government to take an interest in our new hotshot Tax Collector. Rumors are awash in Seminole County of the sort of behavior their first term public servant is up to, so a middle school teacher decides to challenge Mr. Greenburg in the upcoming Republican primary by the name of Brian Beute. Now, Greenberg couldn't have this interloper ruining his fun, so he set out to ruin his reputation by crafting ever escalating smears which he released on social media, e.g., pretending to be former students posting in comments on Facebook. This eventually escalated to Greenberg writing handwritten letters sent to Beute's place of employment accusing him of sexually assaulting his students. Well, those letters were turned over to the local sheriff who found both Greenberg's fingerprints and DNA on the letters and he was arrested and charged by the federal DOJ with stalking. During his arrest, the DOJ seized his cell phone and computers and discovered the mountain of naughty behavior he had been up to, the worst of which was Greenberg paying tens of thousands of dollars to at least one underage girl, 17 at the time, to have sex with him and others, including paying for their travel, which is also known as sex trafficking. As part of this scheme, Greenburg was issuing fraudulent real Florida IDs to at least one woman he was paying for sex off a sugar daddy website.

And that's where Matt Gaetz comes into the story. Matt Gates and Joel Greenberg had become friends, perhaps even good friends, years before in around 2017 after Greenberg started his term as Tax Collector for Seminole County. During his prosecution around June 2020, Greenberg or his lawyer, approached the Bill Barr DOJ claiming he can provide evidence a sitting Congressmen had engaged in sex acts with a minor. The Barr DOJ then opens a secret investigation into Matt Gaetz which remains secret for months and isn't known in public until it is leaked to the NYT in March 2021. Matt Gaetz then immediately goes onto Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News that night to respond to the leak and it's a gem for those who would like to watch. Some may remember this bizarre story being told by a sitting US Congressmen about his father being blackmailed for $25,000,000 to help free an American hostage in Iran. Many wrote this off as nuts and attacked Gaetz as crazy and yet years later the story has proved to be true. And in that bizarre story, Gaetz doesn't hesitate to name the person who tried to extort his father: David McGee.

Now who is David McGee? David McGee is a former federal prosecutor who now works at a large firm in Florida. David McGee is involved in this story because a man he had worked with while at the DOJ named Bob Levinson. Bob Levinson was a retired FBI agent who allegedly became a spy for the CIA against Iran. He disappeared in 2007 while in Iran. In the early years of the Obama administration, the FBI was trying to covertly get the retired FBI agent back by selling favors to a Russian Billionaire named Oleg Deripaska. David McGee was the liaison to work out a deal with Deripaska who would give $20,000,000 to the FBI to pay for the hostage rescue/ransom and the FBI would get him and his entire family green cards in the US. The point man for the FBI was a guy named Andrew McCabe. This deal is shut down at some point during the Obama administration and Levinson disappears. Nothing is heard about him to the point where documents confirming Levinson's employment by the CIA get leaked to the Associated Press in 2013. And still nothing comes up about Bob Levinson. Obama negotiates the Iran deal and gets 4 American hostages back from Iran as part of the negotiation, but none of them are Bob Levinson. This creates quite the scandal which received a fair amount of press because Levinson is now the longest currently held US hostage in the world. No one hears about Bob Levinson for more years and he's written off as dead. His wife sues Iran in US federal court, gets a $1,200,000,000 judgment, and the US government declares Levinson dead.

And then a former intelligence officer named Bob Kent claims to have received information that Bob Levinson is still alive. That intelligence officer contacts David McGee, the man who had previously attempted to rescue his former colleague through a scheme to sell favors to a Russian billionaire. And so a plan is hatched and now we finally get back to how this involves Matt Gaetz and the Gaetz family.

Stephen Alford, a man with a criminal record and a former client of David McGee, contacts Matt Gaetz's father Don Gaetz on March 16, 2021. The new plan is for Don Gaetz to give David McGee $25,000,000 to finance a rescue mission for Bob Levinson and in exchange unnamed government officials were going to secure a presidential pardon for Matt Gaetz who was going to be charged with sex trafficking because there is currently a secret grand jury investigation into him. Don Gaetz calls Matt Gaetz who tells him to contact the local FBI office which he does. The FBI convinces him to wear a wire and talk to McGee. The details of the investigation had been kept quiet. Luckily for the Gaetz family, Don requested from the FBI a written agreement detailing the purpose of the investigation, the meeting, and the cooperation, and the FBI eventually agrees and Don Gaetz gets this in writing.

And what do you know? By pure coincidence, the NYT runs a story the next day detailing the case against Matt Gaetz. A media frenzy ensues.

There are so many questions. Two months later, Joel Greenburg pleads guilty and is sentenced to 11 years in prison. The DOJ doesn't close its case against Matt Gaetz until late 2022 without ever explaining sufficiently why Gaetz wasn't charged. Matt Gaetz is now permanently tarred and his fellow congressmen are more interested in using this secret investigation to smear Gaetz instead of what could be a honeypot extortion scheme. Stephen Alford pleads guilty and is sentenced to 5 years in prison.

Joel Greenburg recruits women off of sugar daddy websites, gives them fraudulent real Florida driver's licenses listing their age as 18, he then pays them to have sex with men (at least one rising star in US House of Representatives), and then uses this information to negotiate a deal with the DOJ, the DOJ uses that information to open up secret investigations into sitting Congressmen, the corrupt Florida official case is put on hold, and then at least one former DOJ official attempts to blackmail the father of a sitting congressmen with this information from a "secret" investigation, and then when the target gets solid exonerating evidence and the FBI cannot further entangle them in situations which can be portrayed against them, they then likely leak the investigation to the NYT, and the corrupt FL official pleads guilty and gets a near mandatory minimum deal on sentencing.

No one is apparently interested beyond how this could damage Matt Gaetz. David McGee and Bob Kent are uncharged. As far as I know, they weren't even seriously investigated beyond being questioned. Any time Matt Gaetz does anything, details of his case find its way to the media and a media blitz starts anew with a buzz for Matt Gaetz to resign and whatever else. The set-up, the blackmail, and the stitch-up when it fails.

Joel Greenburg recruits women off of sugar daddy websites, gives them fraudulent real Florida driver's licenses listing their age as 18, he then pays them to have sex with men (at least one rising star in US House of Representatives), and then uses this information to negotiate a deal with the DOJ,

This seems like a much less likely course of events because if Greenberg had never spread lies about his primary opponent (and thus been investigated) the government would next have found the relevant evidence. Maybe he set that up himself, but it seems unlikely given his general sloppiness and failson nature.

It seems much more likely that Greenberg and Gaetz both enjoyed underaged hookers from SeekingArrangement and that when Greenberg’s ridiculously corrupt behavior got him caught by the Feds he offered the only thing of value he had. They then looked up Gaetz’ dad and saw an opportunity to get some off the books money for whatever wacky op this is.

Given how comically sloppy Greenberg was, I doubt he would have escaped investigation and discovery for long. Part of the reason his primary opponent ran was because of rumors spreading about the naughty behavior and fed investigation.

Gaetz wasn't the only one who was implicated by our Icarus as he was plummeting back to Earth. Greenberg sang like a bird about at least multiple people he had been paying 17 year olds to sleep with and not just Gaetz. If one were to set-up a honeypot, you would do it like Greenberg minus the sloppiness. It's like this dude watched a movie and thought, "I can do that!" You recruit girls, you give them real fraudulent IDs, you pay them to attend parties, you invite rich or otherwise powerful men and/or their progeny, you pay the girls to sleep with them, and then you use then you go with the, "oh no, I have something horrible I have to tell you but we can deal with this together" conversation afterwards. The rich and connected men pay Greenberg for the "party" with a wink wink knowing the girls were brought to sleep with them. And that's exactly what he did, except the problem was Gaetz refused to play ball because he claimed none of it was true.

Greenberg wasn't only caught dead-to-rights sex trafficking, he was also caught in dozens of millions of dollars embezzlement, hiring his groomsmen for multiple million dollar "consulting" fees, millions of dollars real estate scam, and more. This guy wasn't looking at 10 years, he was looking at dozens of years. And so when caught, he sang like a bird, his case was delayed for years and then he plead out and got 1 year above the mandatory minimum sentence on sex trafficking a minor as the federal government rushed to tie off the loose ends.

And the evidence against Gaetz is bad; the reason the women witnesses against him had credibility issues is rumored to be that they were caught lying with some of the details they claimed happened and which Gaetz can prove were lies. And that's why parts of the witness statements were leaked (sorry, I mean "hacked" and given to the media) but not the conclusions of the House or DOJ because that is rumored to be in them. It's also the reason why they won't be released (not to mention, Gaetz doesn't want them to be released because they contain true embarrassing information as well as the damage has already been done). It turns out there is evidence Gaetz was one of the people Greenberg didn't succeed in honey-potting and it explains why he refused to cower and dared the DOJ or House to do something about it, not to mention naming a powerful Florida lawyer and former DOJ prosecutor on national TV and accusing him of attempting to extort his family. If Gaetz was lying, why didn't this powerful lawyer threaten and then sue him with defamation? We can speculate, but you sure as shit do not do that unless you have at least some of the goods. And judging by how the Gaetz handled themselves once being extorted and the documents they smartly kept (and obtained from the FBI), we know the Gaetz are not sloppy.

I haven't seen anything connecting Greenberg to our three musketeers McGee, Kent, and Alford, although I wonder if someone spent the time to find Greenberg's other victims you may discover they were also targets of our three opportunists. Maybe they were also directed to pay $5m to $25m to a company set up by McGee for Stephen Alford. Doesn't every partner at a prestigious lawfirm keep in his close orbit a man convicted multiple times of felonies for fraud and extortion and help him set-up his schemes by incorporating his intermediary companies?

If it was as simple as Gaetz and Greenberg just love banging out 17 year old prosties together, I don't think this is how it would play out. Frankly, I think Gaetz has far more credibility than the other actors in the story and has produced evidence to support things he says, e.g., his contemporaneous unhinged interview on Tucker Carlson which came out to be completely supported over a year later. He may be saying lies which he knows cannot be disproved or is betting they won't be disproved, but it takes a special amount of gusto to lie this much about powerful people on national tv to do so.