Today was a surreal day in the surreal case of accused (though not yet criminally-charged) Texas ponzi schemer Allen Stanford, even by the standards of Stanford. First came a credulity-straining BBC report that Stanford somehow bought himself 10 years of amnesty from SEC scrutiny by serving as an informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration. Then Fox Business News piped in, excerpting a strange paragraph from a letter it had received as part of a Freedom of Information Act request from someone claiming that two of Stanford’s clients were part of the Venezuelan mafia. CNBC replayed the segment of its interview with Stanford in which reporter Scott Cohn asks if the disgraced financier had ever assisted “federal authorities” — to which Stanford blurts out “You mean the CIA?” before declining to comment further. (It’s embedded after the jump.)
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=142895