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2025-10-01 04:53:31

On Tuesday, William G. Young—a federal district court judge in Massachusetts and a Reagan appointee—issued a decision filled with obvious contempt for the unconstitutional actions of the current president of the United States.

The ruling comes in a case brought by academic associations seeking to block the Trump administration’s policy of targeting and arresting noncitizens protesting Israel’s actions in Gaza. Judge Young’s decision makes it absolutely clear that the First Amendment rights of students like Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk were violated when federal agents detained them and sent them to faraway immigration detention centers.

The legal conclusions of the decision, which come after a nine-day trial involving 15 witnesses and hundreds of exhibits, are significant. As is the evidence uncovered in the case. It was revealed that the Trump administration was relying on information from shadowy websites like Canary Mission to determine who to target.

The judge wrote that a hearing on how the government can remedy its unconstitutional conduct will be scheduled “promptly.”

But what sets the ruling apart is its mix of unapologetic evisceration of Trump and admiration for the rights he has trampled on. That it is no ordinary ruling is apparent from the first words of the 161-page decision.

Young, who is 85 years old and was appointed to the bench four decades ago, begins by quoting a postcard he received on June 19 that reads: “TRUMP HAS PARDONS AND TANKS …. WHAT DO YOU HAVE?” Young replies in the ruling:

Dear Mr. or Ms. Anonymous,

Alone, I have nothing but my sense of duty. Together, We the People of the United States—you and me—have our magnificent Constitution. Here’s how that works out in a specific case—

The judge goes on to write that the case he is deciding is “perhaps the most important ever to fall within the jurisdiction of this district court.” He concludes that there was not an “ideological deportation policy” targeting pro-Palestine speech. Instead, there was something more sinister:

[T]he intent of the Secretaries was more invidious—to target a few for speaking out and then use the full rigor of the Immigration and Nationality Act (in ways it had never been used before) to have them publicly deported with the goal of tamping down pro-Palestinian student protests and terrorizing similarly situated non-citizen (and other) pro-Palestinians into silence because their views were unwelcome.

By defending that policy, Young writes, the president has violated his “sacred oath” to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” That Trump is “for all practical purposes, totally immune from any consequences for this conduct,” Young adds, citing the Supreme Court’s 2024 immunity decision, “does not relieve this Court of its duty to find the facts.”

The Reagan appointee is similarly disdainful of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s conduct under Trump. As he puts it:

Despite the meaningless but effective “worst of the worst” rhetoric, however, ICE has nothing whatever to do with criminal law enforcement and seeks to avoid the actual criminal courts at all costs. It is carrying a civil law mandate passed by our Congress and pressed to its furthest reach by the President. Even so, it drapes itself in the public’s understanding of the criminal law though its “warrants” are but unreviewed orders from an ICE superior and its “immigration courts” are not true courts at all but hearings before officers who cannot challenge the legal interpretations they are given. Under the unitary President theory they must speak with his voice. The People’s presence as jurors is unthinkable.

Young is particularly disturbed by ICE agents’ use of masks while detaining Öztürk and others—calling the government’s defense of the practice “disingenuous, squalid and dishonorable.” He explains:

ICE goes masked for a single reason—to terrorize Americans into quiescence. Small wonder ICE often seems to need our respected military to guard them as they go about implementing our immigration laws. It should be noted that our troops do not ordinarily wear masks. Can you imagine a masked marine? It is a matter of honor—and honor still matters. To us, masks are associated with cowardly desperados and the despised Ku Klux Klan. In all our history we have never tolerated an armed masked secret police.

Elsewhere in the decision, Young quotes an almost surreal defense mounted by the government at trial. While cross-examining Bernhard Nickel—a German citizen and Harvard philosophy professor who censored himself and abandoned a trip to visit a terminally ill brother abroad following Öztürk’s arrest—a government lawyer seemed to imply that Nickel was simply imagining things. Specifically, the lawyer quoted the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s maxim that “anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” As Young notes dryly, “It is an odd kind of freedom that compels one to leave writing unpublished, leadership positions unpursued, and terminally ill relatives unvisited.”

It is apparent throughout the decision that Young’s horror is born out of patriotism. He laments that the blatant First Amendment violations so carefully catalogued in the case are unlikely to inspire all that much outrage, but calls for a return to what he considers America’s ideals:

The United States is a great nation, not because any of us say so. It is great because we still practice our frontier tradition of selflessness for the good of us all. Strangers go out of their way to help strangers when they see a need. In times of fire, flood, and national disaster, everyone pitches in to help people we’ve never met and first responders selflessly risk their lives for others. Hundreds of firefighters rushed into the Twin Towers on 9/11 without hesitation desperate to find and save survivors. That’s who we are. And on distant battlefields our military “fought and died for the men [they] marched among.”

The final pages of the decision are as unorthodox as its first. They begin with a quote about how “[Trump] seems to be winning. He ignores everything and keeps bullying ahead.” The line, Young explains, comes from a “very wise woman.” Specifically, his wife.

Young then dissects its meaning and its consequences: “The Constitution, our civil laws, regulations, mores, customs, practices, courtesies—all of it; the President simply ignores it all when he takes it into his head to act.”

Young wraps up by quoting Reagan’s lines about how freedom is a “fragile thing” that is “never more than one generation away from extinction,” and that, as a result, it must be “fought for and defended constantly.”

Pulling out all the stops, the veteran judge writes:

As I’ve read and re-read the record in this case, listened widely, and reflected extensively, I’ve come to believe that President Trump truly understands and appreciates the full import of President Reagan’s inspiring message—yet I fear he has drawn from it a darker, more cynical message. I fear President Trump believes the American people are so divided that today they will not stand up, fight for, and defend our most precious constitutional values so long as they are lulled into thinking their own personal interests are not affected.

Is he correct?

Finally, on page 161, there is a coda addressed to the anonymous letter writer who boasted about Trump’s pardons and tanks. “I hope you found this helpful. Thanks for writing. It shows you care. You should. Sincerely & respectfully, Bill Young.”

2025-09-30 23:22:26

More than 800 members of the US military’s top brass, including hundreds of generals and admirals, gathered for an extraordinary meeting in Quantico, Virginia, on Tuesday, where they were greeted by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s order to return to “the highest male standard” in military fitness tests and training exercises.

In the same breath, Hegseth disparaged women serving in the military, claiming they were physically incapable of meeting the same physical standards.

“I don’t want my son serving alongside troops who are out of shape or in combat units with females who can’t meet the same combat arms physical standards as men,” Hegseth said as the crowd remained virtually silent throughout the meeting. The former Fox weekend host included references to “woke garbage” and fat-shaming—”It’s completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals”—before all but announcing an end to formal processes that allow military personnel to register complaints of abuse.

“We are overhauling an inspector general process that has been weaponized, putting complainers and poor performers in the driver’s seat,” he said. “We are doing the same with the equal opportunity policies. No more frivolous complaints, no more anonymous complaints.”

A similar silence greeted President Donald Trump as he aired a characteristically discursive speech that at turns featured self-praise for his decision to send the National Guard to Portland, Oregon, suggesting that such cities be used as “training grounds” for the military, misguided claims that he ended eight world wars, love for his own signature, and comparisons of “nuclear” power to the “n-word.”

Together, the dual speeches appeared to confirm suspicions leading up to Tuesday’s meeting that the country’s top military commanders were being forced from their posts around the world in order to attend what essentially boiled down to a MAGA pep rally—absent the cheering crowds.

2025-09-30 21:00:00

In early June, Sasha, who was around 16 weeks pregnant, started to bleed vaginally. She went to the emergency room, where doctors told her she was suffering from a “subchorionic hemorrhage,” diagnosed her with a “threatened miscarriage,” and sent her home.

A couple of weeks later, Sasha (whose name has been changed to protect her privacy) miscarried a tiny, non-viable, 18-week-old fetus in a South Carolina motel room. She later told a county coroner that she didn’t call for help at the time because she “was scared and did not know what to do.”

As it turned out, she was right to be fearful. The day after her miscarriage, Sasha continued to bleed and suffered from severe abdominal pain, so she returned to the hospital. There, her medical providers reported her to the state’s Department of Social Services, whose staff alerted the county sheriff’s office about a possible “child abuse” case, as they complied with South Carolina’s reporting mandates. According to the hospital, failure to report any suspicion of harm to a fetus, viable or not, can result in the provider being criminally liable. The sheriff’s office began an investigation and eventually found the pregnancy remains in a trash receptacle near the motel. 

The Mayo Clinic estimates that 10 to 20 percent of known pregnancies end in miscarriage. Nonetheless, Sasha was arrested and jailed for the improper disposal of hers. A local abortion fund that had heard about the arrest on the news provided Sasha’s $10,000 bail.

Sasha’s arrest was not an isolated incident. A report released today by Pregnancy Justice—a research, legal, and advocacy group—shows that between June 2022 and June 2024, at least 412 people across the country have been charged for crimes related to their pregnancies, pregnancy losses, or even live births. Sasha’s case is not included in the report because her arrest occurred a year after the researchers’ 2024 cut-off date, as were at least four criminalization cases Mother Jones has identified. But collectively, experts say, these types of arrests show a concerning pattern: Amid a conservative movement to enshrine rights to fetuses, being pregnant is not just a health status. Sometimes, it’s a criminal liability. 

“Four hundred and twelve women were charged with crimes that would not have been crimes if they were not pregnant,” says Dana Sussman, senior vice president at Pregnancy Justice. “That is exactly what happens when we give rights and status to embryos and fetuses.”

The pregnancy-related prosecutions tracked by Pregnancy Justice span 16 states, most having taken place where Republican state legislatures or courts have conferred legal rights to eggs, embryos, and fetuses: a conservative movement known as “fetal personhood.”

The 62 prosecutions that took place before Sasha’s in South Carolina followed a 1997 state supreme court decision that held child endangerment charges also applied to fetuses. In Oklahoma—where Pregnancy Justice identified 112 prosecutions—a state appeals court made a similar decision in 2020. 

Pregnancy Justice counted 192 pregnancy-related prosecutions in Alabama, which was the first state to enshrine rights to unborn children in its constitution via a 2018 ballot measure. The Alabama state supreme court used this ballot measure to support its 2024 decision that even frozen embryos are considered “extrauterine children” with inalienable rights. (This ruling had vast implications for Alabama fertility clinics, some of which paused IVF services out of fear they’d be held liable for the “wrongful death” of embryos on ice. Facing backlash, Republicans spoke out in support of IVF. Alabama subsequently passed a law shielding fertility providers from liability.)

Roughly 90 percent of the charges catalogued by Pregnancy Justice accuse pregnant women of abuse, neglect, or endangerment—accusations that are bolstered by the conservative perception of fetuses having the same rights as children that result from live births.

Many of the abuse, neglect, and endangerment cases involved allegations of substance use during pregnancy. Evidence of meth and cocaine use was noted in some of the charging documents, according to Pregnancy Justice. So was the presence of marijuana, nicotine, and alcohol. In 68 of the cases, the nonprofit says, the only substance use alleged was marijuana. 

Some defendants were charged for pregnancies they did not know existed. This was the case for Catherine, a 31-year-old woman in Alabama, who was arrested in 2023 for a pregnancy-related drug charge.

Catherine, who asked not to be identified by her last name, previously spoke to Mother Jones reporter Madison Pauly about her years-long ordeal. She said what began one day in 2021 as severe stomach pain quickly escalated to an intensity that led her to collapse in her bathroom, where she lay on the floor surrounded by blood and holding a stillborn baby. After calling 911 and being transported to a local hospital, law enforcement confiscated her phone, and the nurses asked for her password. They all were seeking evidence in order to charge her with “chemical endangerment” of her “unborn child.” 

For many reasons, Catherine said she was shocked. She never tried to hide that she had a controlled substance in her system. (She admitted to battling drug addiction.) Nor was she trying to hide a pregnancy. 

“I never knew that I was pregnant,” she told Mother Jones. “My body never showed signs. I never gained weight. I felt completely normal.”

Generally, most health experts would recommend that individuals battling substance abuse try to avoid becoming pregnant. But in real life, Sussman says, the scenarios are often far more nuanced. Some investigations have arisen from pregnant individuals using medications they had been prescribed; there have even been cases in which mothers who consumed poppy seed bagels were falsely charged with opioid abuse. In circumstances where pregnant women are actively battling addictions to substances like methamphetamines or fentanyl, Sussman argues that criminalization can be more harmful than helpful.

 “Criminalization does not improve health outcomes,” Sussman says. “Ensuring that people can access prenatal care and go to the hospital when they need to, without worrying that they will be charged with a crime—that is the best intervention possible.”

A law Tennessee passed in 2014 illustrates the risks of criminalization. The statute allowed prosecutors to bring aggravated assault charges against women for using illicit narcotic drugs while pregnant, with penalties of potentially up to 15 years in prison. 

While the law intended to reduce Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome and other complications, reproductive care advocates such as Pregnancy Justice say it discouraged pregnant people from seeking prenatal care or drug treatment, out of fear of prosecution.

According to a review by the Georgetown Law Journal, there was a “sharp decline in the receipt of prenatal care” around the time the fetal endangerment law was implemented, and fetal deaths increased. The law was also seen as being responsible for having a disproportionate impact on women in poverty and those with more limited access to treatment programs. As a result, the law was sunsetted in 2016. 

The Trump administration’s recent amplification of a narrow research study suggesting that acetaminophen use during pregnancy can cause autism gives Pregnancy Justice additional concerns about what else could make pregnant women vulnerable to prosecution in the future. “We are moving into a place, potentially, where pregnant people’s behavior and exposure of their pregnancy to any risk—whether perceived or actual, justified by science or not—can further diminish their rights,” Sussman says. 

As seen with both Sasha and Catherine, medical facilities and personnel potentially can play a significant role in the pregnancy criminalization surveillance system. In 264 of the 412 prosecutions Pregnancy Justice tracked between 2022 and 2024, health care providers contributed information to police that eventually was used as evidence against the defendants during their prosecutions. 

Brittany Watts is one example. In September 2023, she repeatedly went to her local hospital in Ohio after her water broke prematurely. Her 22-week-old fetus registered a heartbeat, but doctors determined it was nonviable. Despite physician concerns that Watts could contract sepsis, hemorrhage, or even die, staff at the hospital delayed inducing her as they awaited input from the hospital’s ethics board. (Ohio banned abortion at 22 weeks.) Over the course of two days, Watts waited 18 hours at the hospital for an induction that never came. Frustrated by the delays, she went home to be more comfortable.

Less than 48 hours later, she miscarried in the toilet, attempted to flush, and returned to the hospital, where she was treated for dehydration and blood loss. But hospital staff also took it upon themselves to report Watts to the police. 

“The nurse comes in and she’s rubbing my back and talking to me and saying, ‘Everything’s going to be OK. You’re going to be OK,'” Watts told CBS News last year in her first sit-down interview. “Little do I know, there’s a police officer who comes into the room a short time later. And I’m wondering, ‘Why is a police officer coming in here? I don’t recall doing anything wrong.’ And little do I know, the nurse comforting me and saying that everything was gonna be OK was the one who called the police.”

As Watts lay in a hospital bed, police searched her home, where they rummaged through her trash and disassembled her toilet to find evidence of the fetal remains, investigatory files obtained through public records requests show. 

Photos taken by police as a part of the investigation reveal what anyone who has endured the trauma of a pregnancy loss might expect: blood-stained pants, soiled rags, a drug store receipt for Tylenol, and a discarded hospital bracelet. For the purported crime of experiencing a pregnancy loss in her bathroom, Watts could have faced a year in prison. Instead, a grand jury declined to indict her, leading prosecutors to drop the charges against her.

Amari Marsh risked a much longer sentence for her 2023 home miscarriage. Prosecutors initially charged the South Carolina woman with homicide through child abuse. Police erroneously suspected she had tried to induce an abortion. They also claimed that a proximate cause of death was her not removing the fetus from the toilet fast enough. An autopsy later determined that an infection had caused the pregnancy loss, and a grand jury declined to indict Marsh. Had she been convicted, she could have faced 20 years to life in prison.

Fueling the issue, Sussman argues, is the public’s lack of knowledge around miscarriages: “How common it is, what it looks like, where it happens, how it happens.” Law enforcement might find something suspicious that is, in fact, “completely normal,” she says.

Pregnant women also can be in the dark, Sussman notes: “No one is given a pamphlet in their doctor’s office when they go for their first prenatal appointment that’s like, ‘By the way, if you miscarry, here’s the number to call, here’s the coroner’s office that you’re required to call.'”

Even when charges don’t result in convictions, pregnancy-related prosecutions can have enduring consequences for those accused. In a civil lawsuit Watts recently filed against the city that prosecuted her and the hospital that she went to for medical help, Watts claims to have suffered “deprivation of liberty, reputational harm, public humiliation, distress, pain, and suffering, for which she is entitled to compensatory damages, including damages for mental and emotional distress.”

And in the midst of dealing with legal issues, some women who have been prosecuted for pregnancy-related crimes are also mourning pregnancies they lost. According to her civil suit, Watts’ pregnancy was “very much wanted.” Catherine, who is in remission from drug addiction, says she misses her stillborn daughter every day. Sasha and her lawyer declined to be interviewed while her case is active, but in police records, she asserts that she was taking prenatal vitamins—another indication that she, too, was trying to have a healthy pregnancy.

Contained in these stories, experts say, is a painful irony. Pregnant women who fear becoming the next Watts, Catherine, or Sasha may choose to forgo medical help altogether, risking even worse outcomes for both them and their fetuses. “It’s not surprising,” Sussman says, “that the states that represent a lot of the arrests also have poor infant health outcomes.”

—Additional reporting by Sheena Samu, Rachel de Leon, and Laura Morel

2025-09-30 19:30:00

This story was originally published by Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The United States is hurtling towards a potential government shutdown if Congress does not pass a budget or short-term funding bill by the end of the month, and the fate of the federal government’s Earth and climate science programs may hang in the balance.

President Donald Trump has proposed vast, devastating cuts to these agencies, many of which target programs dedicated to studying and preparing for climate change. In the event of a shutdown, the Office of Management and Budget, or OMB, has told agencies to consider layoffs or reductions in force for “all employees” in all “programs, projects, or activities” with lapsed funding that are “not consistent with the President’s priorities.”

As Sophia Cai notes in Politico, this is starkly different from how previous government shutdowns were handled, when federal workers were temporarily furloughed and returned to work when funding was restored. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer characterized the memo as an “attempt at intimidation.”

Bobby Kogan, a former OMB official with the Biden administration, said the direction may not be legal. “It doesn’t seem to me that they would really be able to legally do that additional work during a shutdown—and it doesn’t seem to me that they’d be able to get it all done beforehand,” Kogan told the Federal News Network. “So either this is something they were planning to do anyway, and they are just using this as a pretext, or it’s a threat to try to get what they want.”

Organizations that represent the interests of public workers have been more explicit: “The plan to exploit a shutdown to purge federal workers is illegal, unconstitutional, and deeply disturbing,” Tim Whitehouse, the executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, said in a statement. “A shutdown triggers furloughs, not firings. To weaponize it as a tool to destroy the civil service would mark a dangerous slide into lawlessness and further consolidate power in the Executive Branch.”

But illegality (or possible illegality) would not necessarily stop the Trump administration from choosing the layoff route if a budget deal is not reached. In any case, the memo obviously creates uncertainty and anxiety for the federal scientists whose work has been singled out for steep funding cuts or even elimination by the Trump administration.

“Either we all go home or it’s business as usual…nobody knows what’s going to happen,” one NASA scientist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told the Bulletin.

Earlier this year, the president submitted a budget request to Congress that would slash NASA’s overall 2026 budget by 24 percent. It is the clearest indication of what his priorities are going into a possible government shutdown. The steepest cuts were within science programs, which the president proposed reducing by more than 46 percent. Funding for Earth science programs specifically would be cut by more than half.

Proposed cuts to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) research are also severe, outright eliminating the entire budget for climate research, weather and air chemistry research, and the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR). (In addition to cuts to Earth and climate science, the proposed budget recommends cutting all funding for habitat conservation and research, as well as ocean, coastal, and Great Lakes research.)

Although the White House recommended cutting NOAA’s budget by up to 30 percent, members of the House Appropriations Committee have recommended a much smaller cut of 6 percent. But by telling agencies to conduct layoffs based on the president’s priorities, the Trump administration could try to preempt Congress and reshape the federal government in line with their own vision and budget proposal during a shutdown.

Even without a government shutdown, a third of the US Geological Survey’s Climate Adaptation Science Centers could wind down or cease operations this week because the Interior Department is refusing to submit paperwork to release funding.

“This is a dismantling of efforts in the United States on climate science, and in fact, in large swaths of environmental science. And I don’t think that people know that,” Elisabeth Moyer, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Chicago, told the Bulletin. “This is wholesale destruction, what’s proposed.”

There are at least 14 NASA Earth science missions that the Trump administration has proposed terminating. These include an array of satellite-related research (see: NASA missions at risk under the Trump administration).

The worst-case scenario would be if the government shuts down and agencies begin to comply with the administration’s budget proposal, including the termination of missions. According to a NASA scientist, people have already been instructed to do the preparatory work for ending these satellite and instrument programs, so this is not an impossibility.

The list of projects and programs that the Trump administration has proposed terminating at NOAA is, frankly, shocking. It includes the National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science, which conducts wide-ranging research on everything from aquaculture to corals to pollution; the National Coastal Resilience Fund; Habitat Conservation and Restoration; and OAR’s Regional Climate Data and Information program, which helps communities develop plans for dealing with climate crises like droughts and heat waves.

The budget also recommends terminating funding for OAR’s Climate Laboratories and Cooperative Institutes, which would result in the closure of the Atlantic Oceanographic & Meteorological Laboratory; the Air Resources Laboratory; the Chemical Sciences Laboratory; the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory; the Global Monitoring Laboratory; the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory; and the Physical Sciences Laboratory.

NOAA has already been hard hit under the Trump administration this year. Rick Spinrad, a NOAA administrator under President Biden, said the agency has lost around 2,000 of its 12,000 employees to layoffs, buyouts, resignations, and retirement this year. (Exact figures are remarkably hard to find, but in March the New York Times reported that the agency was planning to fire another 1,000 workers in addition to the 1,300 workers that had already resigned or been laid off.) Some of the vacancies within the National Weather Service (which is part of NOAA) have resulted in reduced operations at some forecasting stations across the country.

Monica Medina, a principal deputy administrator of NOAA in the Obama administration, compared the work the National Weather Service does to issue weather forecasts to a mosaic. “When you cut holes in the mosaic…you’re losing pixels, and so the picture gets fuzzier,” she said. “It has an impact on people’s lives and their livelihoods. When key vacancies happen, when we cut holes, we are really hurting our civil defenses.”

The Trump administration has already withheld or rescinded several hundred million in funding for NOAA operations this year, Spinrad said. The Senate Appropriations Committee has been tracking federal funding that the Trump administration has frozen or cancelled (last updated September 8) totaling more than $400 million in NOAA funds, including those earmarked for disaster response and the procurement of weather radars and satellites.

“There are programs like the phased array radar program that have been pulled back—that was undoubtedly going to be one of the most important efforts in trying to improve observational capability for the National Weather Service,” Spinrad said. “So many of those kinds of programs are suffering, and that’s just what’s been done in [fiscal year] ‘25, I’m not even talking about the ‘26 budget.”

“We are not talking about trying to find water on Mars,” Medina said. “We are talking about understanding what’s happening on our planet, impacting people in their day to day lives today. We could be improving that in the face of these forces that are changing in our global environment. And instead, we’re taking away funding at the very moment when we need it most.”

2025-09-30 07:33:30

This story was originally published by Popular Information, a substack publication to which you can subscribe here.

Last week, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced a $20 billion package to rescue the Argentinian economy. The risky taxpayer-financed deal, which involves trading US dollars for Argentine pesos, has little upside for ordinary Americans. Argentina is not a significant US trading partner, and its economy, long in turmoil, has little impact on the United States.

However, Bessent’s announcement had massive economic benefits for one American: billionaire hedge fund manager Rob Citrone, who has placed large bets on the future of the Argentine economy. Citrone, the co-founder of Discovery Capital Management, is also a friend and former colleague of Bessent—a fact that has not been previously reported in US media outlets. Citrone, by his own account, helped make Bessent very wealthy.

Since Javier Milei, a right-wing populist, became president of Argentina in December 2023, Citrone has invested heavily in Argentina. Citrone has bought Argentine debt and purchased equity in numerous Argentine companies that are closely tied to the performance of the overall economy. Due to Argentina’s massive debt load and chaotic economic history—in 2023, Argentina’s inflation rate was over 200 percent—Citrone purchased Argentine bonds with an interest rate of nearly 20 percent. (Citrone has declined to detail exactly “how much of the $2.8 billion he manages is invested” in Argentina.)

Citrone, who is also a minority owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers, is effectively betting on Milei’s right-wing economic program, which emphasizes deregulation and sharply reduced government spending. Citrone viewed “the probability of default as minuscule,” even though Argentina has defaulted on its debts many times in the past.

In the short term, this appeared to be a savvy investment. After taking office, Milei fired tens of thousands of government workers, cut spending on welfare and research, and achieved fiscal balance. Inflation was reduced to around 40 percent, which spurred economic growth and foreign investment. Argentina’s economic rebound contributed to Discovery Capital’s 52 percent return in 2024.

Then it all came crashing down.

The austerity measures slowed economic growth, and unemployment spiked to nearly 8 percent. Millions had a harder time making ends meet after Milei reduced or eliminated subsidies for transportation, medicine, and other necessities. Milei’s popularity slumped, leading to speculation that his party could be routed in the 2025 midterm elections, which would hamstring Milei’s ability to implement his agenda. This created an economic panic, with investors dumping the peso and liquidating other Argentine assets.

Milei has desperately attempted to keep inflation in check. Last week Argentina’s “central bank spent more than $1 billion to shore up the peso.” But Argentina was running out of foreign currency. That spelled trouble for Citrone.

Then Bessent and the Trump administration came to the rescue, floating a $20 billion economic package that helped stabilize the Argentine peso and functioned as a political lifeline for Milei.

In early September, days before Bessent’s announcement, Citrone purchased more Argentine bonds.

Bessent’s personal and professional relationship with Citrone has spanned decades. In a May 14 appearance on the “Goldman Sachs Exchanges” podcast, Citrone revealed how he delivered a financial windfall for Bessent. They were both working for investor George Soros in 2013 when Citrone convinced Bessent and Soros to bet on the US dollar against the Japanese yen.

I think there’s special times every five or ten years where there’s a really spectacular trade in investment that we then will concentrate in a meaningful way. 2013, the dollar-yen, where we made over a billion dollars long dollar-yen. And, in fact, you know, we discussed it quite a bit with George, and I kind of convinced George and Scott Bessent at the time to go big in that. And, you know, Scott says I’m responsible for 75 percent of his bonus at Soros, kind of jokingly, over that time.

CE Noticias Financieras, a leading Latin American economic publication, describes Citrone as “a friend of the Secretary of the Treasury.” El Cronista, citing government sources, reported that Citrone “has a personal relationship as well as a past working relationship” with Bessent.

Citrone has also reportedly leveraged his relationship with Bessent to gain access to Trump. According to CE Noticias Financieras, in November, “Citrone gave a case of four red wines to Javier Milei during his visit to Mar-A-Lago, in Palm Beach, in his first meeting with Trump.”

When Argentina’s economy began to falter in April, it was Citrone who “intervened before Scott Bessent…to advocate for an IMF agreement with Argentina,” CE Noticias Financieras reported. Bessent subsequently played a key role in convincing the IMF to extend a separate $20 billion currency stabilization package. (That package ultimately proved insufficient to stabilize the Argentine peso.)

Shortly after the IMF deal was secured, Bessent traveled to Argentina to meet with Milei and other top Argentine officials. It was an unusual choice for the Treasury Secretary’s first foreign trip. Citrone arrived in Argentina at the same time as Bessent, meeting with Milei just before Bessent. During those meetings, Bessent emphasized US support for Argentina’s economic agenda.

Bessent’s September 24 announcement, thus far, has had the desired impact, increasing the value of Argentine assets, including bonds, stocks, and the peso. “It has helped tremendously that the US has come in to support Milei, and it will pay dividends for the US strategically,” Citrone said in an interview with Bloomberg.

Whether the US improves the prospects over the long term is a separate question. Propping up the value of the Argentine currency beyond what the market will support with yet another influx of foreign currency gives wealthy Argentines an opportunity to cash out. The Argentine elite now have the ability to convert their peso assets into dollars and move them abroad. This phenomenon, known as “capital flight,” is why the previous IMF bailout package proved insufficient.

Discovery Capital did not immediately return a request for comment about Citrone’s role in securing the US assistance package for Argentina.

Another overlooked aspect of the rescue package is the role of the organizers of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), an influential right-wing political group.

In November 2024, shortly after Trump’s election, key CPAC officials, including Matt Schlapp and Mercedes Schlapp, founded a new lobbying firm called Tactic Global. This is the same group that organized CPAC Argentina in December 2024, an event that featured Milei, Lara Trump, and other right-wing luminaries. CPAC has long played a key role in Trump’s political operation.

In February 2025, Tactic Global began representing the Argentine government as a foreign agent. According to the filing, “Tactic will serve as a liason [sic] between Presidencia de la Nacion de la Republica Argentina and its counterparts in the U.S. Tactic will coordinate meetings between officials of the two countries and offer strategic counsel to the Secretaria de Inteligencia de Estado.”

The contract specifies that Argentina pays Tactic $10,000 per month.

Tactic Global’s official name is Tactic COC because its parent company is COC Global Enterprise. Leonardo Scaturice, an Argentinian businessman and lobbyist who lives in the United States, is the chairman and CEO of COC Global Enterprise and a principal at Tactic Global.

In April 2025, Matt Schlapp traveled with Citrone to meet with Milei and other top Argentine officials, according to news reports. They arrived together in Scaturice’s private jet, a striking black Bombardier Global 5000. Also participating in the meetings was Soledad Cedro, the Managing Director of Tactic Global and the CEO of CPAC Latin America.

Scaturice once worked for Argentine intelligence, which may explain why Tactic Global’s contract was routed through the Argentine Secretariat of Intelligence. More recently, CE Noticias Financieras reported that Barry Bennett, a former Trump advisor and current Tactic Global principal, “became directly involved” in securing the US rescue package.

Although CPAC promotes itself as an “America First” organization, Tactic Global represents not only the government of Argentina but also Kyrgyzstan and Vietnam. After Bessent announced his rescue package for Argentina last week, CPAC promoted the deal on its social media accounts.

2025-09-30 04:41:20

Sam Bankman-Fried was once called the “crypto king.” But in November 2022, his company, FTX, imploded within a matter of days. All around the world, customers of the cryptocurrency exchange were suddenly cut off from their money. 

“I tried to withdraw an amount, you know, and it would spin and say, your, your withdrawal is pending,” says Tareq Morad, an investor from Canada. “I remember myself doing that around 7, 8 o’clock at night, checking back, going to look: Okay, did it go through? Did it go through? No. No. No.”

Meanwhile, inside the company, employees were panicking. “All that we were told was there’s been a run on the bank and, somehow, money is missing and we don’t know who to trust,” remembers Caroline Papadopoulos, part of FTX’s accounting leadership at the time. 

This week on Reveal, through prison interviews with Bankman-Fried, his parents, FTX insiders, and customers, we take you through the frantic week of FTX’s collapse and the controversial and less well-known bankruptcy that followed. At a cost of nearly $1 billion, it has become one of the most expensive in history.

Read the FTX bankruptcy estate’s on-the-record statement to Reveal.