Uhhh… yeah.
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Involuntary pornography may be a lesser crime than terrorism, but it is sleazy and wrong AF.
Edit: people who do this, also tend to engage in trafficking. Perhaps that is the real crime, and source of income.
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Hawley is a dick.
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I don’t know. I think the antics in British government and royalty probably provided a fair share of material
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I was confused about whether the agent was buying or selling, but the document is clear that the fraudsters were giving the weapon the the agent. This is more than flashing a fake badge to get free rent.
It also claims that all this was being done to “ingratiate” themselves with USSS agents, but honestly that is not at all how it reads to me. This wasn’t a bottle of fine whiskey as a birthday present. Once those agents started accepting free rent and cars, never mind any hidden cameras or surveillance footage he had access to, they were subject to blackmail. He was monitoring their parking spaces, plus providing a car that he had every inclination to bug.
One of these compromised agents was on Jill Biden’s detail - so presumably in frequent company of the President. Another was assigned to VP Harris. This really does not look good.
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The main thing is the question that’s still stymieing everyone here: But why? What was the endgame?
If this were really a foreign intel op or a terrorist attack in progress, it was extremely unprofessional and it just dragged on for so long that someone finally sniffed it out. If a hostile intelligence had been pulling the strings, they wouldn’t have been so flashy and center-stage in the building.
Just my outside observations on this, but he seems much more a Frank Abagnale, using the “prestige” of a purported government ID to live large, but he never learned when to cut and run. Ingratiating himself with real government agents and their families could help deflect attention for a while since if he’s “best buds” with half the people living there, why would any of them question his credentials?
Until they present something that shows there was a clear end goal, my inclination is that he hadn’t thought that far ahead. He was just playing all these people and maybe he was getting high on pulling a fast one on all of them too. Some people just like the adrenaline rush from hoodwinking people who are supposed to be trained to know better.
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He had a lot of information on the inner workings of the president’s and VP’s detail, and engaged in behaviors that made himself extremely susceptible to compromise.
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Possibly, but he needed to get his seed money somewhere. Notably, prosecutors were mum on that:
Prosecutors are silent on where the money came from to fund all of this, but point repeatedly to the frauds that Taherzadeh admitted to in his plea agreement.
Could still be an attempted foreign intel op, just so badly run that it looks more like a scam. There are more threads to pull here.
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Yeah, it’s just so sleazy and haphazard, it really makes Maria Butina look like a class act. I’m really struggling to see how a foreign power would get into bed with this guy, unless he was conning them too. We definitely need to see more threads pulled.
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OT. Another example of tyranny following disarmament of the population…
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Cuff Cuffari!!!
(Methinks that would make an excellent bumper sticker…)
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This would be my guess.
Not like you can look up someone’s illicit spying operation experience on LinkedIn. My guess is that you have to take gambles with small initial amounts guys like this to try to weed out the professionals from the clowns. Would be a ripe opportunity for someone looking for a grift.
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ill-advised 
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You’re right. No foreign power would hire these numbskulls. Now, who do we know that WOULD hire idiots? That’s right… it’s republicans. This has Roger Stone’s fingerprints all over it. And it smells like Steve Bannon.
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Australia’s Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry said a “range of undeclared risk products,” including the fast food items, were detected in the passenger’s rucksack by a biosecurity detector dog named Zinta.
emphasis mine
Who was found drooling over the luggage.
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Though they have people who can vet potential assets. Isn’t one of Trump’s beefs that the KGB assessed him as a potential asset in the 80s and decided he was too unreliable to recruit? If someone were doing the same sort of vetting with this guy, it’s pretty likely he would be tripping those same red flags.
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Reminds me of the Tinder Swindler.
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Don Jr.?
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