Trump’s social media company went public relying partly on loans from trust managed by person of interest to prosecutors

Donald Trump’s social media company Trump Media managed to go public last week only after it had been kept afloat in 2022 by emergency loans provided in part by a Russian-American businessman under scrutiny in a federal insider-trading and money-laundering investigation.

The former US president stands to gain billions of dollars – his stake is currently valued at about $4bn – from the merger between Trump Media and Technology Group and the blank-check company Digital World Acquisition Corporation, which took the parent company of Truth Social public.

Through leaked documents, the Guardian has learned that ES Family Trust operated like a shell company for a Russian-American businessman named Anton Postolnikov, who co-owns Paxum Bank and has been a subject of a years-long joint federal criminal investigation by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) into the Trump Media merger.

  • Ranvier@sopuli.xyz
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    7 months ago

    I hear you, and I’m very frustrated with the justice system too. But you’re constantly conflating the “justice system” and “the justice department” which are totally different things. Prosecutors don’t decide who gets bail or not, judges do. Prosecutors do not seize things, judges make rulings allowing prosecutors to do so. Neither prosecutors nor judges write these laws, congress does. Are you advocating for some totally lawless system where prosecutors can go around acting as their own judges doing whatever they want? If prosecutors acted like how you’re advocating here, every little thing they did would get reversed and Trump would get off totally free due to all the prosecutorial malfeasance.

    Most of your anger would be better directed at lawmakers, judges, and the people who appointed terrible judges, than the prosecutors, at least when it comes to Trump’s current ongoing cases (not Barr burying the Mueller report as much as he could to provide political cover for Trump obviously)