Hello Dante? What Level Is This?

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Re: Hello Dante? What Level Is This?

#826

Post by Owendonovan »

‘We Will Hunt You’: Ugandans Flee Ahead of Harsh Anti-Gay Law
The bill, passed last month, calls for life in prison for anyone engaging in same-sex relations. President Yoweri Museveni congratulated lawmakers for their “strong stand” against L.G.B.T.Q. people.

April 20, 2023
Updated 5:21 p.m. ET
In a spartan safehouse with flimsy curtains and no furniture northwest of the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, people from neighboring Uganda clung to the few valuables they could snatch while fleeing harsh new legislation targeting them back home.

A gay man clutched the white rosary that he took to church every Sunday. A transgender woman brought her favorite shimmering blue dress. A lesbian couple clenched the one smartphone that held photos from happier days, going on dates and dancing in clubs.

They began leaving after Uganda’s Parliament passed a sweeping anti-gay bill in late March that threatens punishment as severe as death for some perceived offenses, and calls for life in prison for anyone engaging in same-sex relations.

“The government and the people of Uganda are against our existence,” said Mbajjwe Nimiro Wilson, a 24-year-old who fled with a single backpack days after a hostile crowd, including children, cornered him as he bought groceries near a gay shelter in the capital, Kampala.

“They kept saying, ‘We will hunt you. You gays should be killed. We will slaughter you,’” he said. “There was no option but to leave.”

The bill, which passed 387 to 2, punishes anyone who leases property to gay people and calls for the “rehabilitation” of those convicted of being gay. President Yoweri Museveni, who has commended the bill, sent it back to Parliament on Thursday for “improvement,” his party said in a statement.

The president congratulated lawmakers and religious leaders on what he called their “strong stand” against L.G.B.T.Q. people. “It is good that you rejected the pressure from the imperials,” he said, a reference to Western countries, in footage released by the public broadcaster. He spoke hours after the European Parliament denounced the bill.

The legislation follows a groundswell of anti-gay rhetoric that has swept African countries in recent years, including in Ghana, Zambia and Kenya. Last month, lawmakers from more than a dozen African countries gathered in Uganda and promised to introduce or pass measures in their own countries that they said would protect the sanctity of the family and children against “the sin of homosexuality.”

Same-sex acts were already considered illegal under Uganda’s penal code, but the bill introduces far harsher penalties and vastly extends the range of perceived offenses. And while anti-gay rhetoric has long existed in Uganda, it has taken a severe turn in the past year, with authorities removing rainbow colors from a park and parents charging into a school because they thought a gay person taught there.

The latest move to target L.G.B.T.Q. people in Uganda has drawn support from local Christian and Muslim groups, and for years the financial and logistical backing of some conservative evangelical groups in the United States. One of the key organizers of the parliamentary conference in Uganda last month was Family Watch International, an Arizona-based organization that spreads anti-L.G.B.T.Q. and anti-abortion stances, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The Ugandan bill has drawn condemnation from human rights groups and the United Nations, and the Biden administration has called it “one of the most extreme” anti-gay measures anywhere in the world.

Senator Bob Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, said the United States should reduce military aid and introduce sanctions against the government of Mr. Museveni, who has been in power for almost four decades. The East African nation, a close security ally of the United States, receives more than $950 million annually in health and development assistance.

After months of campaigning against it, gay rights activists in Uganda are now planning to challenge the measure in court if it is signed.

“What this law does is give homophobia a legal basis and framework,” said Fox Odoi-Oywelowo, a former senior counsel to Mr. Museveni, and one of two lawmakers who opposed it. Many lawmakers mocked Mr. Odoi-Oywelowo, accusing him of receiving money to promote what they said was an immorality of the West.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/20/worl ... lgbtq.html
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Re: Hello Dante? What Level Is This?

#827

Post by ponchi101 »

Owendonovan wrote: Fri Apr 21, 2023 1:13 am The latest move to target L.G.B.T.Q. people in Uganda has drawn support from local Christian and Muslim groups, and for years the financial and logistical backing of some conservative evangelical groups in the United States. One of the key organizers of the parliamentary conference in Uganda last month was Family Watch International, an Arizona-based organization that spreads anti-L.G.B.T.Q. and anti-abortion stances, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
How (expletive) unusual...
Senator Bob Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, said the United States should reduce military aid and introduce sanctions against the government of Mr. Museveni, who has been in power for almost four decades. The East African nation, a close security ally of the United States, receives more than $950 million annually in health and development assistance.
Reduce? REDUCE? How about eliminate?
And where do those $950MM go? Because it looks like nothing like development.
Ego figere omnia et scio supellectilem
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Re: Hello Dante? What Level Is This?

#828

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“Do not grow old, no matter how long you live. Never cease to stand like curious children before the Great Mystery into which we were born.” Albert Einstein
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Re: Hello Dante? What Level Is This?

#829

Post by ti-amie »

Image

Flexghost.
@flexghost@mastodon.social
Domestic terrorist Daniel Perry shot a BLM protester four times in the chest. He wrote about wanting to kill BLM protesters beforehand. He later admitted to killing a homeless man

And now it’s discovered he was texting children for sex

This is the man Greg Abbott wants to pardon.

This is Texas.

https://www.texasobserver.org/daniel-pe ... tt-foster/

https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/14/us/daniel-
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Re: Hello Dante? What Level Is This?

#830

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Re: Hello Dante? What Level Is This?

#831

Post by ti-amie »

What a charmer.
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Re: Hello Dante? What Level Is This?

#832

Post by ti-amie »

Prince Harry suit against Murdoch reveals secret Prince William payoff

By Karla Adam
Updated April 25, 2023 at 10:43 a.m. EDT

LONDON — Prince William was paid a “very large sum” by Rupert Murdoch’s British newspaper group to settle phone-hacking claims, according to court documents submitted Tuesday by the legal team of his younger brother, Prince Harry.

Harry is suing Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers (NGN) at the High Court in London for unlawful acts — including hacking his voice mails — that he alleges were committed on behalf of the Sun and the now-defunct News of the World tabloids from 1994 until 2016. The hearing is to determine whether the case should go to trial.

In documents submitted to the court, Harry’s legal team alleged there was a secret payment from Murdoch’s company to William. The submission doesn’t reveal the amount, nor the details of what William alleged happened, but said that NGN had settled with William “for a very large sum of money in 2020.”

The news of the payout to William surfaced after Murdoch’s Fox News agreed to pay an eye-popping $787.5 million in a defamation settlement with Dominion Voting Systems.

Harry claimed that the payment to his older brother was part of a secret deal between NGN and Buckingham Palace not to bring any further legal action against the Murdoch papers until other outstanding phone-hacking litigation was settled. NGN denies that there was a secret deal.

Kensington Palace, on behalf of Prince William, and Buckingham Palace, on behalf of King Charles III, declined to comment. It’s unclear whether Harry is on speaking terms with either his brother or father. He detailed his fractured relationship with them in his best-selling memoir, “Spare,” in which a major area of contention was his perception of the palace’s lack of action in the face of negative tabloid stories.

Harry says the deal was made because the palace wanted to keep members of the royal household from having to testify in court. In his witness statement, Harry said the royals wanted to avoid recounting “specific details of private and highly sensitive voice mails” in court, and he referenced the “intimate telephone conversation that took place between my father and stepmother in 1989, while he was still married to my mother.”

He was thought to be referring to the Sun newspaper’s “Tampongate” story published after the paper obtained a 1989 phone recording of an intimate conversation between then Prince Charles and Camilla.

NGN has previously paid out huge sums after journalists at its News of the World publication were jailed for phone hacking. The company is seeking to have Harry’s case dismissed because he waited too long to file suit. Harry’s side counters that the reason for the delay was the secret deal between the palace and NGN.

“It is important to bear in mind that in responding to this bid by NGN to prevent his claims going to trial, the claimant has had to make public the details of this secret agreement, as well as the fact that his brother, His Royal Highness, Prince William, has recently settled his claim against NGN behind the scenes,” the court filings said.

Harry is involved in several legal battles with British media groups. Last month, he caught the press off-guard when turned up in person for his case against the publisher of the Daily Mail. He is also scheduled to give evidence in a claim against the publisher of the Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror over phone-hacking allegations. That case is set to begin a few days after the May 6 coronation of King Charles.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/20 ... t-murdoch/
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Re: Hello Dante? What Level Is This?

#833

Post by Owendonovan »

Gunman Kills Five People in Texas Home, Authorities Say
Three others were wounded and the gunman remained at large, officials said. The attack on Friday night started after the man was asked to stop shooting in his yard, the authorities said.
By Euan Ward and Jesus Jiménez
April 29, 2023
A man who was asked to stop shooting in his yard because of the noise fatally shot at least five people, including an 8-year-old child, late on Friday night at a home north of Houston, the authorities said.

Four people were pronounced dead at the scene in Cleveland, Texas, which is about 45 miles northeast of Houston, and a fifth person died at a hospital, the San Jacinto County Sheriff’s Office said.
Officials said they believed they knew the identity of the gunman, who they said had fled the area and remained at large
Sheriff Greg Capers of San Jacinto County said his office received a harassment complaint from the neighbors around 11:30 p.m. on Friday.
He said investigators believed the gunman was drinking and firing shots in his yard when the victims walked over to ask him to stop because they had a young baby who was trying to sleep.
“He said, ‘I’ll do what I want to in my front yard,’” Sheriff Capers said of the gunman.
Sheriff Capers told reporters that the gunman was known to “frequently” fire an AR-15 in his front yard. It was unclear what type of firearm the gunman used in the shooting.
When deputies responded, they found multiple gunshot victims, Sheriff Capers told reporters.
A man and three women were killed, he said. The gender of the 8-year-old was not immediately known. Two victims were found by the front door, he said, and another in the living room.
Sheriff Capers added that the bodies of two women were found in a bedroom on top of two children, both of whom survived.
“Everybody that was shot was shot from the neck up, almost execution-style,”
Sheriff Capers said.

The victims were all from Honduras, the sheriff said, adding that 10 people were inside the home at the time of the shooting.
An arrest warrant has been issued for the gunman, the sheriff’s office said in a statement on Saturday morning.

How many of complaints about this man shooting his gun off would have been enough to remove his guns from him? What is the bar? Is there a bar? WTF?
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ti-amie United States of America
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Re: Hello Dante? What Level Is This?

#834

Post by ti-amie »

It's Texas Owen. Everyone there is free to do whatever they when it comes to firearms. I mean who doesn't stay up at night dreaming about shooting your neighbors execution style with a AR-15?

/sarcasm

They have released his name.
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Re: Hello Dante? What Level Is This?

#835

Post by ti-amie »




You can not fix stupid.
“Do not grow old, no matter how long you live. Never cease to stand like curious children before the Great Mystery into which we were born.” Albert Einstein
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Re: Hello Dante? What Level Is This?

#836

Post by Owendonovan »

I'd be more concerned with the sloppy penmanship.
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Re: Hello Dante? What Level Is This?

#837

Post by ti-amie »

The story from the WaPo on shady dealings by TFG, his family and sycophants is long and I know people are busy. Here's the tl;dr

Image

If you like true crime stuff here's an example of criming in plain sight and trying to bully your way past the guardrails.
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Re: Hello Dante? What Level Is This?

#838

Post by ti-amie »

Trust linked to porn-friendly bank could gain a stake in Trump’s Truth Social
ES Family Trust offered $8 million in loans to Trump Media in an unusual deal criticized for conflicts of interest
By Drew Harwell, Matt Bernardini and Matei Rosca
May 13, 2023 at 7:00 a.m. EDT

An obscure financial entity with connections to a Caribbean-island bank that bills itself as a top payment service for adult entertainment sites would gain a sizable stake in former president Donald Trump’s media company if its merger deal proceeds, according to internal documents a company whistleblower has shared with federal investigators and The Washington Post.

Yet the role ES Family Trust would assume in Trump Media and Technology Group has never been officially disclosed to the Securities and Exchange Commission or to shareholders in Digital World Acquisition, the special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, that has proposed merging with Trump’s company.

The companies also have not disclosed to shareholders or the SEC that Trump Media paid a $240,000 finder’s fee for helping to arrange the $8 million loan deal with ES Family Trust — or that the recipient of that fee was an outside brokerage associated with Patrick Orlando, then Digital World’s CEO.

Where ES Family Trust obtained the money, and who is behind the trust, remain publicly unknown, omissions that unnerved some of Trump Media’s top executives when they first learned of the loan in late 2021, according to Will Wilkerson, a whistleblower who at the time was the company’s executive vice president of operations.

Republican members of Congress and Trump supporters have complained for months that the SEC’s year-long delay in approving the merger has been fueled by anti-Trump bias and a “woke political agenda.” Trump Media’s primary business is the social media site Truth Social.

But the financial tangle offers a possible explanation for why the SEC has yet to approve the deal, said Michael Ohlrogge, a New York University law professor who studies SPACs. He called the deal unusual and rife with questionable decisions and potential conflicts of interest.

“This is definitely something that could cause problems,” he said. “At a minimum, if the SEC knew about this loan, it would insist that it be disclosed to [Digital World] shareholders. … And the company didn’t even do that.”


Representatives for Trump Media and Digital World did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

In a statement last month, a Trump Media spokeswoman said a Post report then on the company was based on “discredited hit pieces, defamatory allegations and false statistics” but did not dispute any specific claims. Digital World’s interim chief, Eric Swider, who assumed the role in March, said in emails last month that The Post report included “inaccuracies” but did not say what they were.

Messages sent to ES Family Trust’s only known trustee and an associated email account yielded no response. A person who answered a phone number listed for the bank that transmitted the loan, Paxum Bank, said the company declined to comment. Representatives for the bank’s owner, Anton Postolnikov, did not respond to requests for comment.

A spokesman for Trump’s 2024 campaign declined to comment.

A lifeline appears

Digital World has faced a troubled path since pledging to merge with Trump Media in October 2021, an announcement that sparked a massive trading frenzy. Almost immediately, the company faced suspicions that Digital World had held merger talks with Trump Media before going public, a possible violation of SEC rules.

Digital World told investors last month that it was cooperating with investigators from the SEC, Justice Department and Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (Finra) but did not provide details on what was being examined. The federal agencies and Finra, an industry group, declined to provide more detail.

The ongoing investigation has halted Digital World’s ability to merge with Trump Media and unlock more than $1 billion in investor funds. Digital World’s board fired Orlando as chairman and chief executive in March, saying in an SEC filing that the company was facing “unprecedented headwinds” and that his “departure enables the Board to appoint new leadership, which it believes will restore confidence to the shareholders.” Orlando did not respond to requests for comment.

In a separate SEC filing last month, the company said that, by the end of last year, it had just $989 in cash on hand and more than $17 million in debts. Most SPACs don’t rack up anything close to this level of debt, Ohlrogge said, because “the normal costs of running a SPAC, finding a target and negotiating with that target are not very expensive.”

In late 2021, the frozen merger was also raising concerns inside Trump Media over its ability to pay the bills, Wilkerson recalled. Then, he said, Orlando revealed he had made a breakthrough: a loan deal worth up to $8 million from an entity called ES Family Trust.

In a convertible promissory note dated Dec. 23, 2021, Trump Media was offered the money in exchange for agreeing to “automatically” convert the loan principal into “shares of Company Stock” once the merger with Digital World occurred, according to a copy of the document reviewed by The Post. The document does not say precisely how much stock ES Family Trust would receive. Trump estimated last month that the company, of which he owns 90 percent, is worth between $5 million and $25 million.

The document included blanks for signatures from Wilkerson’s fellow co-founders at Trump Media, Wes Moss and Andy Litinsky, as well as Angel Pacheco, the trust’s only named trustee.

Moss signed it, according to a copy reviewed by The Post, but Litinsky declined after expressing concerns that the company hadn’t undertaken enough due diligence on where the money had come from, Wilkerson said. Litinsky and Moss did not respond to requests for comment. Both men were on the company’s board at the time but left last year amid a company shake-up.

Pacheco also did not sign the document, a copy shows, and Wilkerson’s attorneys have not found a more updated document in a trove of 150,000 records they’ve shared with investigators. The money was sent anyway.

A wire transfer document dated that same day shows that $2 million was sent to Trump Media by Paxum Bank, whose main office is on the small Caribbean island of Dominica. A separate wire transfer document, dated Feb. 17, 2022, shows Trump Media being paid another $6 million by ES Family Trust.

No names, addresses or details are listed for ES Family Trust except for Pacheco’s name. Pacheco’s LinkedIn account says he has been a director at Paxum Bank Limited since 2019 and has “international payment expertise.” Pacheco did not respond to requests for comment.

In January 2022, Trump Media agreed to pay a cash referral fee — equal to 3 percent of the $8 million loans, or $240,000 — to a Houston-based brokerage firm called Entoro Securities, according to a referral fee agreement and an Entoro invoice provided by Wilkerson.

The referral fee agreement names “Anton Postolnikov and affiliated entities” as “Introduced Parties” who participated in the deal. Orlando is a registered broker at Entoro, according to a database run by Finra, and Orlando’s LinkedIn profile says he has been a managing director there since 2020.


Unease over the money

Questions around the sudden influx of cash fueled unease inside the company for months, Wilkerson said, but the executives ultimately decided against giving it back, deeming it too critical to keeping the business afloat.

It’s unclear how closely anyone inside Trump Media looked into ES Family Trust or Paxum at the time of the loans.

An attorney working with Trump Media, John Haley, sent a brief email about the first $2 million in December 2021 to Donald Trump Jr., before the former president’s son joined the company’s board, saying there was “no guaranty that these will get signed and funded, but we remain hopeful,” according to a copy of the correspondence shared by Wilkerson.

Trump Jr. responded, “Thanks John much appreciated. d,” the email shows. Trump Jr. and Haley did not respond to requests for comment.

A month after the second payment, Trump Media executives still knew little about the origin of the money. On March 8, 2022, the company’s chief financial officer, Phillip Juhan, sent an email to the then-chief legal officer of another Orlando-run firm, Benessere Investment Group, seeking contact information for anyone at ES Family Trust.

The information, Juhan wrote, was needed by the company’s outside auditors, BF Borgers, which required a confirmation statement from all noteholders who had lent Trump Media money. Trump Media had only Pacheco’s name, Juhan wrote.

The response from the Benessere executive, Alexander Monje, was a single sentence: “Hey Philip, it is ESFAMILYTRUST@PROTONMAIL.COM,” with no other names or addresses attached, according to a copy of the exchange shared by Wilkerson. Proton Mail is an encrypted email service based in Switzerland.

Juhan, Monje and BF Borgers did not respond to requests for comment. Emails sent to the Proton Mail address yielded no response.

Digital World did not tell investors about the $8 million in loans or Entoro’s referral fee in its filings submitted to the SEC, a review of public documents shows. Ohlrogge said the SEC could insist the loans should have been disclosed to investors, given that the concerns over its origins and Orlando’s finder’s fee could affect the value of the shares.

“The right way for him to have done this is to say: ‘I know this transaction looks potentially bad and may be enriching me at the expense of [Digital World] shareholders, but I really think it’s ultimately in their best interest,’” Ohlrogge said. “That’s the right way to do it. And he didn’t do anything of the sort.”


‘#1 trusted … for the adult industry’

The Post has been unable to find any registration documents for ES Family Trust. ES Family Trust has made no public statement.

Postolnikov, whose name appeared on the referral-fee document, is an owner of Paxum Bank and employs Pacheco, ES Family Trust’s named trustee. Postolnikov said in a 2018 federal court filing that he is “the principal of Paxum Bank,” and a company statement in March called him its “primary owner.”

Paxum itself remains a mystery. The company has promoted itself online as a way for video streamers of adult content to coordinate financial transactions across international borders and, in 2021, Paxum’s then-chief executive, Andrei Octav Moise, told BCAMS Magazine, a trade publication for the business of live webcam models, that the bank was “proud and happy to be considered the #1 trusted payment service for the adult industry!”

On Thursday, Moise insisted that he wasn’t familiar with Paxum’s activities or the Trump Media transaction and said he “never had any job or [ownership] or any control” in the bank. On Friday, the adult-industry trade publications AVN and Xbiz reported that Moise had decided to push for a sale of Paxum and would be “retiring” from the industry. He was quoted as saying, “It has been both a privilege and a pleasure to lead the development of Paxum into one of the premier global payment platforms.”

Before Paxum, Postolnikov worked as an entrepreneur in Russia, running a now-defunct online car-rental company in St. Petersburg, according to PitchBook, a corporate database. In 2016, he bought Dek-Co, a London-based payments firm, according to his online profile. In British business filings last year, Dek-Co said he is “the shareholder” of Paxum and Dek-Co’s chief executive and “ultimate controlling party.”

It’s unclear when Postolnikov moved to the United States. In the past two years, he has invested millions of dollars in luxury real estate on Fisher Island, a private enclave off the coast of Miami Beach that Bloomberg in 2020 named “America’s richest Zip code.” Miami-Dade property records show that a company he owns bought two waterfront condos: one for $6 million in April 2021 and another for $7 million in December 2021.

Postolnikov, in March 2021, also gave $30,000 to the reelection campaign of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), according to a contribution list published last year by the political committee Friends of Ron DeSantis.

DeSantis representatives did not respond to an email asking whether DeSantis and Postolnikov had a personal or business relationship. The governor filed a notice this week that he is no longer associated with the committee, a standard move due to his expected shift toward a presidential primary campaign in which he would compete against Trump.

Postolnikov is the nephew of Alexander Smirnov, a former deputy justice minister in the Russian government, according to a 2016 report by Delovoy Peterburg, a Russian business newspaper. Smirnov became general director of the state-controlled maritime company Rosmorport in 2021, according to published reports.

Postolnikov and his aunt, Smirnov’s wife, Elena Smirnova, previously worked together at Russia’s United Bureau of Credit History, according to Delovoy Peterburg. There is no evidence that Smirnov or Smirnova are involved in the Trump Media deal.

The Guardian reported in March that federal prosecutors in New York have been investigating whether the Trump Media loans violated money-laundering statutes, which mandate that companies and investment advisers take steps to learn basic information about their lenders and clients.

After the Guardian’s report, an online news outlet in Dominica called Nature Isle News published a response attributed to an unnamed firm representing Paxum and Postolnikov. That response said Postolnikov was a U.S. citizen and had for two years “been the subject of false media smears that have originated in Russia, all to blackmail Anton into paying bitcoin to remove the stories from the internet.”

The statement denied that Paxum and Postolnikov are “in any manner involved in ‘money laundering’ or loaning out Russian funds” and said that Paxum’s compliance department ensures all transactions adhere to money-laundering rules.

Trump Media’s chief executive, the former Republican congressman Devin Nunes, said in a lawsuit after the Guardian report that “the entire story is fabricated” and that neither he nor the company’s leaders had been involved in the transaction. Nunes did not respond to requests for comment.


Carlisle Jno Baptiste, the Nature Isle News’ managing editor, said a Paxum lawyer sent him the response after he asked the company for comment on the Guardian’s report. Baptiste said Paxum has an office in the center of Roseau, the island’s capital, but that it had rarely been a topic of local conversation before the money-laundering claims arose.

“There’s a lot of talk about that now,” he said.

‘Basically my life savings’
Company-SPAC mergers are traditionally quick and straightforward affairs, according to a 2020 presentation by lawyers at the firm Morgan Lewis. A SPAC submits a merger registration document called an S-4; the SEC reviews it and asks further questions, often within 30 days; the company sends in answers in an amended filing, the SEC responds within 14 days, and the whole process generally wraps up within a matter of months.

Digital World’s S-4, however, has been in limbo since May 16, 2022, SEC records show. The most recent correspondence from the SEC to Digital World, in August, was a terse boilerplate letter in which an agency official said, “We remind you that the company and its management are responsible for the accuracy and adequacy of their disclosures,” public SEC records show.

That delay has become the focus of Trump Media CEO Nunes and other Trump allies, who argue that biased regulators at the SEC have delayed the merger in hopes of suffocating Trump’s company and fueling a political witch hunt.

“The SEC and [SEC Chair Gary] Gensler have been holding this up. The guy clearly has a grudge against us, against Trump,” Nunes said last month on the right-wing news channel Newsmax. “This is a major scandal that’s brewing at the SEC: their willingness to play politics and discriminate against people who like our little company, our start-up company … [and] are being wiped out.”

At a House Financial Services Committee hearing last month, Gensler told Republicans who were grilling him about the delay that SEC officials were working to make sure all merger filings “are accurate and in compliance with the law.”

But Republicans weren’t calmed. The SEC is “focused on a woke political agenda rather than focused on their job,” Rep. Bryan Steil (R-Wis.), chair of the House Administration Committee, which oversees House management matters and U.S. Capitol security, said in a recent interview with John Solomon of the conservative media outlet Just the News.

Rep. Dan Meuser (R-Pa.) wrote last week in the Washington Examiner, another conservative outlet, that the delay was hurting “blue-collar people,” including “the millions of conservative investors who have put their hard-earned money into this project.”

Neither Steil nor Meuser responded to a request for comment from The Post.

Tom Sas, the 40-year-old founder of a cloud-computing start-up in Chicago who says he twice voted for Trump for president, counts himself among the injured.

In October 2021, when Digital World’s merger announcement sparked a stock-market frenzy, Sas bought nearly 1,200 shares at $70. Then, while listening to investing YouTubers predict that the stock could go to $300, he said, he felt a deep fear of missing out, saying, “FOMO hit me hard.”

He entered a market order to buy thousands more shares, expecting he would get them at $90, but the stock’s volatility led to a halt in trading. When the stock came back online, he said, his order was unexpectedly filled at the stock’s all-time high, $175 a share, draining his entire account.

All in all, he spent more than $516,000 in cash on Digital World shares, according to investment account documentation he provided. “This was basically my life savings,” he said, adding that he doesn’t own any property and drives a 2011 Ford Fiesta. Digital World shares now trade for about $13.


Sas said he was initially excited about the prospect of Truth Social being a “true, non-biased news outlet” and that he hopes “the people running Trump Media, if they see some things not going right, they get in there and fix it.”

He echoed other supporters of Digital World and Trump in blaming a “biased” SEC for stalling the merger. “I’m left holding the bag now, hoping something goes through and it doesn’t collapse,” he said.

Magda Jean-Louis contributed to this report.


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