Subscribe now

Each week, there is at least one story that, in olden times, would have driven weeks of coverage and congressional investigations, but that under Trump just slips by with a shrug.

This week’s candidate: on Tuesday, the Times reported that the initial U.S.-Israeli plan for Iran was to decapitate the regime and install former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the country’s next leader.

Interesting choice. If you remember Ahmadinejad when he was in power from 2005 to 2013, you probably recall that he was a hardliner best known for his vile and cartoonish rhetoric about Americans, Jews, and gay people. He wanted to “wipe Israel off the map,” denied the holocaust, repressed internal dissent, and championed Iran’s nuclear program. Ahmadinejad’s radicalism was all anyone needed to point to when making the case for containing Iran.

In the West, he became a caricature of Iranian religious zealotry and broke into American pop culture, including on SNL.

But since then, he’s undergone a strange transformation. He fell out of favor with the clerical regime, became a mild critic, was repeatedly barred from running for president again, and ended up on house arrest. The Times hints that at some point along this journey, Ahmadinejad may have become an Israeli asset.

The US-Israeli plan was to kill Ahmadinejad’s security minders with an airstrike, springing him from house arrest, and then somehow install him as the country’s new leader.

The Times piece is studded with surreal details, but, given the latest moves around Cuba, this paragraph, about why Trump liked the plan, stands out as particularly relevant:

Mr. Trump was enjoying the success of the raid by U.S. forces to capture Venezuela’s leader, Nicolas Maduro, and the willingness of his interim replacement to work with the White House — a model that Mr. Trump appeared to think could be replicated elsewhere.

In Ahmadinejad, Trump apparently thought he had found an Iranian Delcy Rodríguez.

It did not quite work out. The plan went sideways on the first day of the war when Ahmadinejad himself was wounded in the Israeli airstrike on the Iranian security forces guarding him. “He survived the strike,” according to the Times’ sources, “but after the near miss he became disillusioned with the regime change plan.” He has not been seen publicly since.

Despite this fiasco, the pieces now appear to be falling into place for Trump to attempt another Maduro repeat, this time in Cuba.

First, military assets are moving into place. The USS Nimitz aircraft carrier strike group entered the southern Caribbean yesterday, “as part of the Trump administration’s campaign to pressure the Cuban government.” The amphibious assault ship Tripoli, which was part of the Maduro raid buildup, remains in the region (though many other pieces of military hardware from that operation departed for the attack on Iran). CNN recently revealed that the U.S. military has been conducting dozens of intelligence-gathering flights near Cuba’s big cities since February. And CBS adds that the U.S. intelligence community is “exploring how Cuba might respond to an American military action” as the Pentagon develops military options for Trump.

Second, a flimsy military pretext has been floated in the press. On Sunday, Axios, citing an unnamed U.S. official, reported that Cuba has acquired more than 300 military drones and has allegedly discussed using them on Guantanamo Bay, naval ships, and Key West. (As Sen. Ruben Gallego pointed out,

Third, a flimsy legal pretext was unveiled yesterday, Cuban Independence Day, when an indictment against the 94-year-old former president Raúl Castro for conspiracy to kill U.S. nationals, murder, and destruction of aircraft was publicly unsealed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche took time away from creating the new slush fund for J6ers to personally announce the indictment in Miami. Blanche also made what sounded like a threat: “There is a warrant issued for his arrest. We expect that he will show up here by his own will or by another way.” (Recall that Maduro was indicted in 2020 and captured by U.S. forces in January 2026.) Trump called the new Castro indictment “a very important moment” for Cuba.

All of this follows months of diplomatic threats and economic pressure. A U.S. oil blockade has been in place since January, and Cuba has run out of diesel and fuel oil, triggering rolling blackouts. The US announced new sanctions targeting Cuban military leaders on Monday.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has held direct talks with Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, a grandson of Raúl Castro known as “Raulito.” The U.S. has been pushing him and other members of the Castro family to remove Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, which, per the NYT, “would allow the Trump administration to argue it had successfully engineered political change in Cuba.” Meanwhile, CIA Director John Ratcliffe recently traveled to Havana and met with Raulito and intelligence officials. He told them that the Trump administration was offering “a genuine opportunity for collaboration,” but, as CBS ominously noted, the offer “would not remain open indefinitely.”

Yesterday, the same day as the Castro indictment and the Nimitz’s movement into the area, Rubio suggested that time was running out. He delivered a Spanish-language video address to the Cuban people, declaring, “President Trump is offering a new path between the U.S. and a new Cuba.”

There is, of course, no sign that Trump intends to seek congressional approval for the use of force in Cuba, as George W. Bush did before the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, or to bring the issue to the United Nations, as Barack Obama did before the bombing of Libya.

And why would he? After the attacks on Venezuela and Iran, Trump knows that there is no institution or countervailing force that will rein in his military adventurism, including popular opinion.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

1. Trump’s Gas Price Penalty

The new NYT/Siena poll is the latest evidence of Trump’s dramatic approval-rating collapse. Trump hit a second-term low of 37 percent.

Trump’s second-term trajectory is quite different from that of his first term. In this graph, his approval rating for both terms is aligned. The red line shows the second term so far, and this time it is basically a steady decline.

I would like to think the war in Iran, Trump’s many public acts of corruption, and his general contempt for democratic institutions are driving the recent slide.

But I think the simplest explanation is just gas prices.

If a foreign entanglement doesn’t produce American casualties or direct economic pain, then presidents usually do not suffer much blowback. So when people say it’s the war in Iran that’s harming Trump, what they are really talking about is the price of a gallon of gasoline—despite all the sophisticated commentary about Republicans turning against forever wars. (Nobody cared when Trump previously—and illegally—bombed Iran or snatched Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela.)

Presidential approval and gas prices are not perfectly correlated, of course. But the basic pattern is hard to miss: over the last 25 years, major gas-price spikes have done real damage to the approval ratings of Bush, Obama, Biden, and Trump.

How big is the effect? One oft-cited 2016 study estimated that a 10-cent rise in gas prices is associated with a 0.6-point drop in approval, though that relationship appears to have weakened as polarization has intensified. (Negative partisanship solves a lot of problems for modern presidents.) G. Elliott Morris recently estimated that “10% monthly jump in gas prices is associated with roughly a 1-point drop in net approval,” which he called “small potatoes.”

The key is that the spikes have to be steep to really bite—large increases over short periods. Trump’s first term is the exception that seems to prove this rule. There were no major spikes. Gas prices bounced around in a narrow band and didn’t have a noticeable impact on his approval rating.

This time is different. On the right side of the graph, it’s hard not to notice that Trump’s trajectory in his second term looks an awful lot like Biden’s. From June 2021 to June 2022, gas prices rose 64 percent, and Biden never recovered from the associated 14-point drop in his approval rating.

Under Trump, gas prices have risen 62 percent in just a few months, producing an even steeper spike than the one Biden faced. Given the history of these spikes, you would expect Trump’s approval to continue its decline in the coming weeks. The conventional wisdom about Trump’s supposedly high approval floor is about to be tested.

Either way, the bad news for Trump — and for Republicans in November — is that the political effects of gas prices are asymmetric: sharp increases drive sharp drops in approval, but sharp declines don’t produce equivalent recoveries.

2. Minneapolis Hasn’t Forgotten

You may remember that back in January, at the height of the ICE invasion of Minneapolis, Kristi Noem and her shameless DHS apparatchiks, such as Tricia McLaughlin, smeared a man named Julio Sosa-Celis after he was shot in the leg by an ICE agent.

Noem accused Sosa-Celis of “an attempted murder of federal law enforcement” and released a detailed account of his alleged actions:

As the officer was being ambushed and attacked by the two individuals, Sosa-Celis got loose and began striking the officer with a shovel or broom stick. Fearing for his life and safety as he was being ambushed by three individuals, the officer fired a defensive shot to defend his life. Sosa-Celis was hit in the leg. All three subjects ran back into the apartment and barricaded themselves inside. ICE successfully arrested all three illegal aliens.

Naturally, none of that was true.

There was no attack on the ICE officer. He actually shot into the apartment after the man he was chasing had retreated into his home. The bullet ripped through Sosa-Celis’s leg and lodged in the wall of a child’s bedroom.

Everyone inside the apartment was then pulled into a nightmare, as The Star Tribune detailed this morning:

ICE agents ultimately broke down the door and detained several people inside. Sosa-Celis and [his roommate Alfredo Alejandro] Aljorna were charged federally. Gabriel Alejandro Hernandez-Ledezma, a third man who lived in a different part of the duplex and had nothing to do with the situation, was publicly identified as attacking the officer and sent to Texas. He was detained for weeks without charges. Two women in the home, who had no criminal record and were never accused of a crime, were shackled and sent to a Texas detention facility where they remained for two weeks, separated from their two small children.

The ICE agent made up the entire story about being attacked, and the charges against Sosa-Celis, who was in the country legally, were dropped.

Yesterday, the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office issued a nationwide arrest warrant for the ICE officer, Christian J. Castro, charging him with several counts of assault with a dangerous weapon and falsely reporting a crime. The Trump administration has refused all cooperation with the Minnesota county’s investigation.

This is the second case that Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty has brought against ICE agents. She said yesterday that her office is still working on the better-known cases that led to the deadly shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, but the Trump administration has also refused to cooperate with those inquiries, even blocking access to the names of the officers who killed Pretti. (Though ProPublica has identified them as Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez.)

Given the complications of charging federal officers, the lack of public action on the Good and Pretti cases now appears more like rigor than negligence. Moriarty told reporters yesterday, “The last thing we want to do is make a mistake if we feel something is appropriately charged and get dismissed out of federal court.”

3. The Real Story of Trump’s Revenge Tour

Sen. Bill Cassidy, who was defeated by a Trump-endorsed opponent in a Louisiana primary on Saturday, was back on the Hill Monday and said he had no regrets.

“When I die, if that’s put in my obituary—‘He voted to uphold the Constitution’—that’s going to be a better obituary,” he told reporters. “[The impeachment vote] may have cost me my seat, but who cares?”

Cassidy was one of seven Republican senators who voted to convict Trump at his 2021 impeachment trial, and now only Sens. Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski have viable political futures.

The other Republican yes votes came from Sens. Richard Burr (NC), Ben Sasse (NE), Mitt Romney (UT), and Pat Toomey (PA), who all retired after sustained political harassment from Trump and his MAGA allies.

The broad trend in Congress over the last decade, especially in the House, has been for anti-Trump Republicans to be replaced by reliable MAGA politicians. But the history of the seven Republican senators who stood up to Trump is more nuanced than the usual revenge-tour narrative suggests.

Burr and Sasse were indeed replaced by reliable Trump supporters. But Murkowski survived a 2022 attempt by Trump to oust her. As for Toomey, Republicans lost his seat to a Democrat (at least for now!). Romney’s replacement, Sen. John Curtis, didn’t support Trump in the 2024 primary, has broken with him on tariffs, Ukraine, and climate, and was a crucial vote to help oust Matt Gaetz as a possible attorney general. Collins has continued to be very Collinsy about Trump, but she may end up losing her seat to a Democrat.

Cassidy is the only one of the seven whom Trump can claim as a clear victory in his five-year revenge campaign against senators who did the right thing after the Capitol was sacked.

Today in Kentucky, Rep. Thomas Massie will be the latest Republican to test the power of Trumpian vengeance. Polls close at 6 PM local time in Kentucky. (So 7 PM ET for the western counties of the state.)

Ben Jacobs has a fun piece on Massie from Kentucky.

Other things you should read:

MAHA!

• EPA wants to repeal limits on ‘forever chemicals’ in drinking water (WP)

Corruption:

• Top Treasury Lawyer Resigns After Creation of ‘Anti-Weaponization Fund’ (NYT)

• See How Trump’s Accounts Were Busy Trading Big Tech Stocks (WSJ)

AI:

• The American Rebellion Against AI Is Gaining Steam (WSJ)

• In Musk v. Altman trial, the AI industry lost (Axios)

Abroad:

• Russia’s War Is Going Badly—on the Ground and in the Air (WSJ)

The Dems:

• Tom Edsall: Is There a Door No. 3 for Democrats?

Around Substack:

• : On Love, Readers, And The Apocalypse (Again)

• : The Looting of America

• : Inside California’s ICE facilities: deaths, denied care, and “dog food”

• : A diverse “Odyssey” is the triumph of Western civilization

• : All non-drone militaries are obsolete

• : Georgia Supreme Court Candidates Under Fire for *Talking* About Abortion

• : The Problem with the 25th Amendment—And a Partial Fix

Finally, some new Bodhi content:

Have a great Tuesday. I’ll be back in your inbox a lot more frequently with this new format. Your feedback is always welcome.

Subscribe now

Share

Subscribe now

You can read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

Learning to Code, Part 3

Don’t Call It Vibe Coding

AI researcher Andrej Karpathy is a big deal in the tech world. He was a member of the original team at OpenAI, the former head of AI at Tesla, and the founder of Eureka Labs, an AI education startup. A year ago, he coined a term that helped launch an amateur coding…

Read more

Learning to Code, Part 2

Why Everyone Hates AI

My decision to create an alternative to TurboTax came at a good time. Fortunately, you don’t need to know how to code anymore to create software. Unfortunately, you have to use AI if you want to build anything decent, and I shared the same view as so many others: it suc…

Read more

Subscribe now

TelosTax

It’s tax filing season, and as I was making my way through TurboTax’s clunky, overpriced app, I started to get frustrated. I’d spent almost $200 on the software, and it kept interrupting my data entry with scammy upsell offers.

Then I hit a screen that blocked me from continuing until I decided whether to agree to a new set of terms. My experience using the app would be much better if I said yes. I read the tiny fine print.

Intuit, the $125 billion company that makes TurboTax, wanted all of my tax data for five years so it could share and monetize it across all of its software offerings, including Credit Karma, the fastest-growing part of Intuit’s data empire.

“Right now, we can only use your tax info to help you prepare and file your return,” an FAQ cheerily noted, “but with your consent, we can do a lot more.” I would be able to “work smarter,” “file faster,” and receive “an even higher level of service.” Buried in the last lines, I learned that my tax return data could be sent to something called the Intuit Product Development Center.

In India.

Unfortunately, the alternatives to paid tax prep software are limited. The IRS used to offer Direct File, a free online tax filing system that was popular and easy to use. But Intuit mounted a massive lobbying and influence campaign, convincing the Trump administration to kill Direct File, which makes the company’s aggressive attempts to monetize the most sensitive financial data of the 40 million Americans who use TurboTax even worse.

I found all of this extremely annoying. But over the winter, Intuit’s fellow tech industry oligarchs delivered a potential solution: AI-coding tools that enable anyone to create software.

So I decided to build my own TurboTax.

I should point out that I know nothing about coding. The last time I remember coding anything on a computer was in 1983, when my fourth-grade teacher, Mr. Bilitsky, taught our class how to use BASIC on a Commodore PET.

I have no specialized knowledge of U.S. tax law.

And yet, in just a few weeks, I created what appears to be a full-featured financial app that prepares complicated federal and state tax returns for free.

It’s TurboTax on steroids.

Naturally, I decided to call it TelosTax. The app guides you through your taxes step by step in an interview mode. If you’re a tax pro, you can enter your info directly on any of dozens of IRS tax forms. It can import your tax documents. It can organize your spending transactions by tax category. It has a dashboard where you can adjust sliders for over 20 different tax variables. It gives you a FICO-like score to assess your likelihood of being audited. The app produces pretty donut and bar charts summarizing your finances and flow visualizations that trace the trajectory of every dollar of your income, deductions, credits, and the taxes you pay.

Without any special skills, I was able to prompt coding tools to translate thousands of pages of U.S. tax law and regulations into an app that can produce a federal tax return for any American—from the simplest W-2 employee taking the standard deduction to a complex filer with, say, farm income, rental properties, asset depreciation schedules, AMT adjustments, crypto sales, a Roth conversion, net operating loss carryforward, and every imaginable combination of deductions and credits.

On the public repository where TelosTax now lives, I’m listed as the “author” of the app’s 234,000 lines of code, despite the fact that I did not write even one of those lines. I asked my new robot friend, Claude Code, the AI that wrote the whole thing, how long it would have taken a human to do the job.

“Without AI assistance,” Claude said, “I’d estimate 2-3 years for one person with the right skills.”

At first, that flattering response made me marvel that I had built something this complicated in just a few weeks.

But then it filled me with dread, because it hinted at the obvious limitations of using these tools without the proper training in coding or tax law. Two-hundred-thirty-four-thousand lines is a lot of code. Like good writing, good code is concise. The frontier AI models—Claude, GPT, Gemini—are trained to be useful and compliant, which makes them sycophantic. Did Claude actually build me a bloated, unmaintainable pastiche of features that proves the opposite of what I intended—that the big software companies have nothing to fear from vibe coding amateurs?

If the app holds up and works as advertised by Claude, I’ll never need to use TurboTax again. But the reverse could be true: maybe Claude, in its effort to please, created a Potemkin app that simply fooled me into thinking it was in the same league as a product designed by hundreds of engineers at a Fortune 500 company.

To help answer that question, I’m making the app public as a free open-source project so tax professionals and actual human coders can vet it. The idea behind this series is to explore two related issues:

• Whether new AI-coding tools are really up to the task of replacing premium software

• How journalists can use AI, which everyone seems to hate, for a positive public-interest goal

So consider TelosTax an experimental prototype and don’t use it to prepare your taxes unless your return is carefully reviewed by a professional. It’s possible Claude got everything wrong. If you’re a tax professional or programmer who would like to help stress-test the app, please email me at ryan@telos.news. But anyone can play around with it, dig into the code, and contribute to the project. You can check out the code and documentation on GitHub, and the app is now live at its new home: https://telostax.app. I’ll report back on how it holds up, and whether Intuit has anything to worry about.

The rest of this series is divided into four parts that track my own circuitous journey exploring these issues over the last month:

• Part 1 (Today): How Intuit Killed Direct File — The story of Intuit’s attack on a popular program—and how the Trump administration gave the company everything it wanted

• Part 2 (Wed): Why Everyone Hates AI — To build my own bespoke software, I had to confront my knee-jerk hostility to AI, which I had come to associate purely with slop and an impending jobs apocalypse—starting with journalism. I was wrong (mostly).

• Part 3 (Thu): AI Comes for the Coders — A look at how coders have navigated the end of coding and the lessons that journalists—and every other white-collar profession—can learn from them

• Part 4 (Fri): The AI Rabbit Hole — My own weird experience falling down the rabbit hole of AI-coding to build a tax app

It’s been a fun ride, and I’m glad to finally get to share all of the details with you.

Subscribe now

Part 1: How Intuit Killed Direct File

Why we can’t have nice things (tax-filing edition)

Intuit’s invasive privacy policies sent me on an odyssey to understand how the hell they get away with this. The simple answers are: money and Trump.

Since 2015, Intuit has spent $33 million on an influence campaign in Washington, D.C., to make it more expensive for Americans to file their taxes. The company’s number one goal, as laid out in lobbying disclosures and SEC filings, was to stop the federal government from providing a free, simple tax-filing system.

Read more

Read more

I threw a lot at it. At a certain point, it started cutting corners. The more I asked it to d…

Read more

—Ryan

Subscribe now

☀️ Afternoon Briefing — Wednesday, February 11, 2026

A 5-minute read on a day …

Read more

Yesterday’s experimental AI-assisted newsletter drew mostly negative reactions in the comments. Some of that is fair—it was way too long. But there’s a deeper issue: once something is labeled AI, it immediately changes how people experience it.

I’m not immune to that reaction. If I loved a new song and then learned it had been created with AI, I’d stop l…

Read more

Last week Anthropic, which makes the Claude chatbot, quietly released some plugins for Claude, including one that performs legal services. Wall Street freaked out.

Investors didn’t just punish companies tied directly to the legal profession. They dumped a much broader swath of stocks across software, financial data, and real estate. For two days, markets…

Read more

Alex Jeffrey Pretti was an unarmed protester who was shot in the back and murdered by federal agents, who continued to fire at him even after he was lying on the ground, lifeless.

One of the agents who surrounded Pretti literally applauded as his colleague murdered Pretti.

The videos are not ambiguous. They clearly show an agent …

Read more

Subscribe now

Chairman Trump

Over the last few days, with all the attention on Donald Trump trying to take over Greenland, his plan to create and lead an institution he said “might” replace the United Nations has escaped scru…

Read more

Combat Journalism

Given all the twists and turns of this long, multi-part story and the often bizarre and sensationalistic details, I realize that some readers may have lost sight of something: the biggest and most newsworthy revelation of this series is that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. conspired with a reporter to abuse a D.C. court so he could save his relationship with Trump and become the next Secretary of Health and Human Services.

We are living in a new era of combat journalism in which any high-profile political reporter will encounter ferocious bad-faith attacks from those in power. And during the Trump era, the attacks have intensified from harsh language—“enemy of the people”—to using the machinery of government to target reporters.

It started with civil lawsuits, usually defamation, to harass reporters with time-consuming litigation, intrusive discovery requests, and the depletion of bank accounts. Last year, it grew to encompass the unprecedented use of state power to shape the editorial policies of newsrooms within large companies subject to government regulation.

This week, the legal harassment escalated to the next step: the use of the criminal justice system to seize a Washington Post reporter’s laptops and phone, potentially giving the Trump administration access to all her confidential sources and other highly sensitive information.

Like most political journalists, I have witnessed plenty of hostile rhetoric, both from activists on the margins of politics and from high-level government officials. I’ve also been the target of a frivolous defamation lawsuit from one of the most powerful officeholders in Washington. And unfortunately, I have also seen up close how political actors can weaponize criminal charges against a reporter to prevent him from reporting unwelcome information.

In my case, a future cabinet secretary and one of Trump’s most important campaign allies persuaded his paramour, my ex-fiancée Olivia Nuzzi, to file a false complaint against me to stop me from writing about him in the weeks before the 2024 election.

The longtime legal and political writer Scott Lemieux, who correctly noted that the “heart” of this story is “that Nuzzi’s goal was to suppress damaging information about RFK Jr. both to help Trump and to protect RFK Jr.’s chances of becoming” HHS Secretary, has described these revelations as “almost certainly the biggest scandal in the modern history of American journalism.”

Bigger, he argues, than Judith Miller, whose pre-Iraq war reporting for the New York Times was part of “one of the worst systemic failures in the history of American journalism,” according to New York magazine.

Bigger than Stephen Glass, who committed “the most sustained fraud in modern journalism,” according to Vanity Fair.

Bigger than Jayson Blair, whose fabrications and plagiarism at the Times were “a low point in the 152-year history of the newspaper,” according to the Times itself.

“Why didn’t you tell anyone?”

Given the scale of the Kennedy-Nuzzi scandal, the question I’ve been asked most frequently is, “Why didn’t you tell anyone about all of this when it could have mattered?”

Maybe it could have changed the election.

Maybe it could have affected Kennedy’s confirmation.

Maybe it could have prevented several major media companies from hiring, publishing, and promoting the work of a journalist who crossed such serious ethical lines.

I’ve already explained, in excruciating detail, what happened to prevent the story from being told before the 2024 election.

But what about after that? Many of you have asked me what happened after Nuzzi was forced to withdraw her false claims in D.C. Superior Court on November 8, and I returned to Politico as its Chief Washington Correspondent.

Politico never ran an article about any of this. Why didn’t I tell Politico’s editors about what I knew, which would have been a sensational story for Politico to investigate and publish?

The answer is that I told Politico’s top editor everything.

After its investigation of Nuzzi, New York magazine issued a statement absolving her of wrongdoing. Why, given what I knew, didn’t I tell New York about Nuzzi’s journalistic fraud?

The answer is that I told a senior editorial staffer at New York everything.

Simon & Schuster allowed American Canto out into the world without basic vetting. I had a working relationship with the editor and publisher of Avid Reader, the imprint that published the book. Why didn’t I tell one of them what I knew?

The answer is that I told the publisher everything.

To help promote her book and her return to journalism, The New York Times published a puff piece on Nuzzi, accompanied by a glamorous video and photo essay. Political reporters at the Times, several of whom knew the real story, told me they were appalled by the article, which was eviscerated by Times readers as “hagiography,” “a toothless examination,” and “a fashion shoot” serving as “clickbait.” But I was quoted in the article, so why didn’t I tell the reporter what I knew, which could have saved him and the newspaper from embarrassment?

The answer is that I told the Times reporter who wrote the article everything.

Mark Guiducci, the editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, and his superiors at Condé Nast, hired Nuzzi as an editor and published a widely panned excerpt from her book without conducting basic due diligence about this scandal. The magazine claimed it was “taken by surprise” by the revelations of Nuzzi’s journalistic malfeasance. Shouldn’t they have known better?

The answer is, yes, they should have.

“Why didn’t they care?”

These media companies either knew about, or, in the case of Vanity Fair, should have known most of what I reported in this series, including:

• Kennedy’s role in weaponizing a domestic violence court against a journalist to prevent the publication of damaging reporting about him

• Kennedy’s alleged use of psychedelics and ketamine

• Kennedy’s toxic manipulation of a female reporter 39 years younger than him (I recommend this TNR piece by Nina Burleigh if you think this doesn’t matter.)

• Kennedy’s knowledge of the illegal recording of Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, from which he may have gained valuable information to aid him in his endorsement negotiations with Trump

• Kennedy’s extreme recklessness and poor judgment in regularly masturbating on camera for a reporter and soliciting and sending the reporter explicit pictures and graphic poetry both before and after his security adviser told him that his phone had been hacked (again, read the Burleigh piece if you recoil at the thought of this being part of the public discourse)

• Nuzzi’s year-long effort working as a political operative for Kennedy while covering the presidential campaign, including catching and killing negative stories and betraying confidential sources to Kennedy

The real question isn’t, “Why didn’t I tell anyone?” The real question is, “When I did, why did no one seem to care?”

I think I know the answer.

So I’m going to take you behind the scenes at each of these five institutions—Politico, New York magazine, Simon & Schuster, The New York Times, and Vanity Fair/Condé Nast—to explain how these pillars of the American media not only ignored this story, but tried to bury it, favoring instead the fictitious counternarrative spun up by Nuzzi and Kennedy to evade accountability.

Read more

Subscribe now

Read more

In this email are the two concluding sections of the series. The final installment of the Bamboo Series will land later this week. And I’ll also have something fun for you tomorrow. As always, thanks for reading!

—Ryan

VIII. Chain of Custody

Subscribe now

The subject line got right to the point: “MURDER COVER UP.”

On December 7, Cornwell sent an email to Volzer, the conservator; Elliott P. Park, Biss’s receiver; and Tenley Carroll Seli, the official handling Biss’s case at the Virginia State Bar.

“So anybody want to explain where Steve got 3 million dollars after Jim Dimartino’s death when he was suspended the entire prior year?” she wrote. “OH YEAH that would the 506 exception that they used to divvy up companies they stole using the SEC. So iam going to get steve’s tax returns today from where I store my stuff to demonstrate that at no time did steve ever make this kind of money. So enjoy the notoriety. You are covering up murder, there is an innocent man in jail.”

Read more

In this email is Part VII—where the plot takes a turn from weird to insane. I’ll send the ending to this piece tonight, and I’ll also post a podcast version in case you want to listen to the entire article.

The final installment of the Bamboo Series will land later this week. Thanks for reading!

— Ryan

Subscribe now

VII. The Conservator

Subscribe now

On August 30, two weeks after Biss’s stroke, Harvey J. Volzer, a Virginia lawyer, sent an email to Biss’s estranged wife, Tanya Cornwell.

“If you bring Steve’s lap top next Tuesday, I will get it to Kevin Hooks,” he said. “We also can discuss any additional documents/pleadings regarding Steve.”

Hooks is a prominent private investigator in Virginia whose firm, Interprobe, offers, among other services, “device data extraction.”

Cornwell responded early in the morning on September 5: “I took care if [sic] the computer last week.”

Read more

VI. Dodecahedron

Subscribe now

On the morning of August 16, 2023, Biss started his day the way he usually did, scanning right-wing news sites and posting on Truth Social. He had a signature formula in which he would write a pithy all-caps headline above a short summary of the article.

He started at 6:25 AM with “YOU’RE NEXT” about a Daily Caller article summarizing a Josh Hawley appearance on Fox News.

He posted a few items about Trump’s legal cases. “These are deeply corrupt Democrats acting in concert to harm one man,” he noted about the Georgia indictment. “Truth by any means is the only path to victory.”

He finished up at 7:48 AM with the last of several posts about trans issues. “Muslim transgender wants balls back,” he wrote.

It was the last thing Biss ever wrote on Truth Social.

Read more

V. Substantially, Objectively True

Subscribe now

What Colloton didn’t know, if indeed he had his eye on killing Sullivan, was just how bad our case would be for that cause. Back in Iowa, we got just about everything we wanted out of discovery: the results of an I-9 audit that NuStar had conducted after my article appeared, an order directing the Social Security Administration to provide us with information about every NuStar employee since 2006, and even some limited information about who might be funding the case.

We had an ex-ICE special agent, Claude Arnold, who was formerly the chief of ICE’s Transnational Gang unit at ICE Headquarters in Washington, DC, review the massive record we had assembled. He produced a devastating expert report that was not made public but has subsequently been unsealed.

Read more

IV. Never Tweet

Subscribe now

A rational person might have withdrawn the lawsuit at that point. This was clearly going to end in embarrassment for the dairy. But the case suddenly got new life.

Read more