Grifts, scams, payoffs, and power: Weekend reads for June 8, 2024
Witness payoffs, the meaning of calling Trump a felon, cracking down on rents, and auditioning a lost Wu-Tang album
In America today, money and power bend the law. And impunity begets impunity.
It’s not just the way former President Donald Trump’s conviction on 34 counts in his New York hush-money trial highlighted the criminality of his entire modus operandi, but also how unchecked malfeasance underscores so many of the challenges Americans face, from landlords raising prices to giant tech firms eroding privacy rights on up to the way Congressional maneuvering threatens basic civil protections.
So for our subscribers to enjoy this weekend, we’ve collected a bunch of tales of skullduggery torn right from the headlines, covering everything from the Trump team’s alleged payoffs of witnesses to the A.I. industry’s silencing of critics, to the resurfacing of a cultural artifact long thought lost in a whirlpool of stock manipulation and cryptocurrency grifting — the single extant copy of the Wu-Tang Clan’s Once Upon a Time in Shaolin.
Plus, we’ve got a great documentary film recommendation for you to stream this weekend, exploring the life of the legendary activist and photographer Corky Lee.
In case you missed it
This week, we’ve focused on two conversations you won’t want to miss:
First, we have our in-depth interview with the author and activist Naomi Klein, discussing her recent book, “Doppelganger,” and what its central mystery — why people confuse Klein with the feminist author turned conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf — implies for the way we understand American politics, international fascism, and ourselves. Listen to the full recording of the conversation below, or read our edited transcripts (Part I, Part II).
We also talked to retired U.S. Court of Appeals Judge David S. Tatel about his forthcoming book, Vision: A Memoir of Blindness and Justice, and dug into everything from how to understand how the courts became so political to what it means to work with a guide dog. And we’ve got an excerpt from the book itself.
We hope the articles we’ve collected below for our subscribers to read challenge you to see the world in new ways. Thanks, as always, for reading The Ink and continuing to support us.
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The con artists looking to shape America
Donald Capone, Part II
Kenneth Notter, an attorney at MoloLamken who specializes in white-collar defense, said that a defendant should have a good explanation for a major increase in pay like Epshteyn’s. “Any change in treatment of a witness is something that gets my heart rate up as a lawyer.” [ProPublica]
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