Funny That Congress Is "Investigating" TikTok, But Not Gettr
Some of the richest men in Germany supported— financially— Hitler's rise to power, some from the very earliest years of its existence, and this support played a role in helping the party to gain power. Fritz Thyssen, who inherited a vast steel and coal empire, was one of the earliest backers, although he fled Germany in 1939. Like other German elites, He had hoped Hitler would restore order and protect them from the Communists— and restore Germany to it’s pre-WWI prominence (Make Germany Great Again). Others from Germany’s wealthiest families who backed Hitler’s rise were banker Hjalmar Schacht (who later served in Hitler’s cabinet), Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, steel magnate Albert Voegler, coal magnate Emil Kirdorf and Wilhelm Keppler. After the war, they basically all got off Scott free. David De Jong wrote about that in great detail in his recent book, Nazi Billionaires: The Dark History of Germany's Wealthiest Dynasties. In raising questions about the accountability of the wealthy and powerful, De Jong made it clear that the actions of these rich families including their evasion of accountability had a lasting impact on German society. But what about on American society?
Some of the wealthiest families in America have been financing Trump and the MAGA movement just as unpunished war criminals like Thyssen, Krupp and Schacht aided Hitler. The worst include the Mercers, the Adelsons, the Kochs, the McMahons, the Fertittas, Peter Thiel, Steve Schwartzman, Ken Griffin, Foster Friess, Diane Hendricks, Stephen Ross, Joe Ricketts, Dan Snyder, Kelly Warren, Steve Wynn, Bernard Marcus, Harold Hamm, Isaac Perlmutter, Willis Johnson, Ron Perelman, Jayson Addair, Charles Johnson, Jim Justice, Phil Ruffin, Thomas Peterffy, Jeffrey Hildebrand, John Morris, Mark Rowan, John Catsimatidis, Stephen Winn, H. Ross Perot Jr., Dennis Washington, Robert Duggan, Stewart Rahr, Stephen Feinberg, Charles Dolan, Farris Wilks, Ken Fisher, Julia Argyros, Andrew Beal, Ronald Lauder, Darwin Deason, Safra Catz, Ronald Wanek, Ira Rennert, Jimmy Liautaud, Douglas Leone, George Bishop, Jerry Moyes, John Paulson, Kenny Troutt, Christopher Goldsboro, Joseph Liemandt, David Katzman, Benjamin Lewis (Jane Goldman), Julian Robertson, Wayne Hughes, Bill Austin, David Duffield, Charles Simonyi, Richard LeFrak. Those are all billionaires who gave 6,7 and 8-figure contributions to Trump and to MAGA entities. Will they ever be he’d accountable for what they have done to America?
Patriots owner Robert Kraft, a Jewish multi-billionaire, has helped fund the dangerous rise of the anti-semitic MAGA movement, donating millions of dollars to Trump, Trump-related committees and even more to Republican-supporting AIPAC. Now Kraft feels forced to fund a $25 million television ad campaign fighting anti-semitism, with a goal of every American adult to see the 6 ads, debuting tonight on The Voice, at least 10 times over the next six weeks. Here's one of the ads:
This morning Joseph Menn looked at one of the criminal billionaires who has been financing Trump and MAGA, recently arrested fugitive Guo Wengui, who has funneled 6-figures into Trump’s campaign. But that isn’t the only way he’s been helping the rise of fascism in America. Menn exposed his ties to neo-Nazi social media platform Gettr, which he “used it to promote cryptocurrencies and propaganda.” Former employees told Menn that Guo and “his longtime money manager, William Je, called the shots at the company while Donald Trump senior adviser Jason Miller was its chief executive and public face. Miller served in that capacity from before Gettr’s July 4, 2021, launch until this month, when he returned to work on his third Trump presidential campaign.”
Gettr doled out tens of thousands of dollars to right-wing figures including Trump adviser Stephen Bannon, sent money to contractors affiliated with Guo, and altered information on Gettr users that law enforcement agencies had sought, according to the former employees and internal company documents obtained by The Post.
The revelations show that a man accused of massive fraud on two continents climbed high into Trump’s political sphere and dictated messaging at a social media site that reaches millions of Americans.
Guo was arrested March 15 at his Fifth Avenue penthouse in New York, where a fire broke out as agents hunted for documents. Je, who lives in London, remains at large.
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan have charged both men with 11 counts of securities and wire fraud, money laundering and related offenses and Je with an additional count of obstruction. The legal documents do not allege any wrongdoing at Gettr; prosecutors did not return a call seeking comment Friday.
Guo was known to have been a Gettr investor, but his dominant financing role and ability to influence hiring and content decisions at the platform have not previously been reported.
Miller has said previously that Guo invested in Gettr indirectly through a family foundation and that an international fund was another part-owner. But two former Gettr employees told The Post that Miller told them that the international fund was Hamilton Investment Management, where Je is founder and chief executive.
Miller “publicly mentioned an international investment fund. To me, he specified the name Hamilton Investments,” Ben Badejo, Gettr’s former director of trust and safety, said in an interview.
The second former employee, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation, said that they had asked Miller about Guo’s backing before joining the company and that Miller misled them by saying Guo had an indirect, minority stake. They said that after they had been working there for a time, Miller said another significant investor was Hamilton.
“He had this line, ‘Gettr is backed by an international consortium of investors.’ It was very clear it was not true. I don’t think there was any other investor. I would have known,” this person said.
Now claiming nearly 7.5 million users, Gettr was among the conservative alternatives to Twitter, along with Trump’s own Truth Social, that sprang up after the major platforms banned Trump’s accounts following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Gettr had 3.1 million page visits in January, down from 5.4 million in November, according to SimilarWeb. The same period saw Truth Social fall to 5.7 million from 8.3 million.
Miller declined to answer questions about Gettr and its financing, referring questions to the company’s chief financial officer, Robin Mokhtar, who did not respond to a phone call and email seeking comment. Gettr did not reply to an email sent to its public relations department.
Attorneys for Guo did not respond to a request for comment and have given no statement in court or in public since the indictment. Je spokesman Richard Merrin declined to answer questions about Gettr, saying only: “Mr. Je is deeply disappointed to learn of the actions by the United States Department of Justice and Securities and Exchange Commission initiated last week. Mr. Je vehemently denies all the allegations in these actions.”
According to the recent indictment and the Securities and Exchange Commission, Guo duped thousands of his followers into investing in private stock sales of his companies or cryptocurrencies, then spent much of the money on himself, including $40 million on a New Jersey mansion, nearly $1 million on rugs and $53,000 on a fireplace log holder. Though the filings focus on Guo’s other networks, Guo also promoted digital currencies via Twitter and live streams on Gettr.
Federal agents seized more than $300 million in bank accounts marked Hamilton Opportunity Fund or Hamilton Opportunity Funds in a forfeiture proceeding. They also took another $2.7 million from an account marked Gettr USA, without saying who controlled it, court documents show.
Gettr played up its Americanness from the beginning, launching on Independence Day. The site declares that it “champions free speech, rejects cancel-culture, and provides a best-in-class technology platform for the marketplace of ideas.”
Internally, it prioritized U.S. politics, according to an undated internal spreadsheet that tracked how much it paid influencers to post on its network and attract new users.
Over varying periods ending as late as December 2022, Bannon’s War Room podcast received $50,000, according to a screenshot of the spreadsheet Badejo gave to The Post. It was the largest sum of 18 payment streams listed. Bannon did not respond to requests for comment.
Turning Point USA leader Charlie Kirk’s Resolute Media received $18,000, according to the document. About $15,000 each went to firms marked as connected to well-known conservative commentators Dinesh D’Souza and Jack Posobiec and to British rightist Tommy Robinson, the document said. Smaller amounts went to the podcasting duo of Lynette Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson, known as Diamond and Silk, and to activist Andy Ngo. Kirk, D’Souza, Posobiec, Richardson and Ngo did not respond to requests for comment. Robinson could not be reached.
The former employees said they were unnerved that the money for Gettr came from a foreigner, especially because some exiles have accused Guo of being a double agent for the Chinese government working at co-opting opposition, noting that he was close to high officials before leaving.
“It’s really kind of scary how a Chinese billionaire can create this,” the second former staffer said. “It’s important that this is talked about as a potential national security issue.”
Also known as Miles Guo, Miles Kwok and Brother Seven, Guo made a fortune in mainland China real estate development before coming under government scrutiny there and fleeing to the United States ahead of fraud and bribery charges. Since then, he has positioned himself as a leading foe of the ruling Chinese Communist Party, amassing hundreds of thousands of followers on various platforms, including his own. Guo’s networks have also promoted Trump, QAnon conspiracy theories and false claims about coronavirus vaccines and treatments, The Post has reported.
“The network stands out for its cross-platform coordination, breadth of technological sophistication, ideological alignment, and sheer output of high-quality content,” said disinformation analyst Kyle Weiss of Graphika, which tracks propaganda networks for social media companies. He said Guo sets the messaging, which is amplified by affiliated media outlets such as GNews and GTV and then followers coordinating on Discord, GitHub and elsewhere using thousands of social media accounts.
In 2021, Graphika reported that Guo had pushed people to attend the Jan. 6 rally, using the #StoptheSteal hashtag. When the attack failed, Guo switched to amplifying claims that the violence that day had been the work of antifa infiltrators, Graphika said.
Guo also has encouraged followers to protest in person against other Chinese expatriates, including other anti-Communists he sees as rivals, and even court officials who have ruled against him.
Guo formed a close alliance with former Trump adviser Bannon; Bannon was arrested on Guo’s family yacht in 2020 on fraud charges. He was pardoned by Trump.
At Gettr, Guo’s influence extended beyond financial matters to hiring, relationships with other businesses and content decisions, the former employees said. Badejo, who describes himself as a conservative, provided internal emails, instant messages and other documents to back up his claims.
Gettr is based on the 20th floor of 3 Columbus Circle in New York. The same floor houses Guo operations including G Clubs, which prosecutors said was used in the alleged money laundering. Still other Guo operations worked on contract for Gettr or shared resources, and some engineers who worked at Gettr maintained their email addresses at a domain designated “GCoders,” which also served other Guo entities, Badejo said.
Many on the Gettr staff were Guo acolytes, the two people said. Guo’s presence on the Gettr side of the floor became more frequent toward the end of last year, when he would walk through the Gettr section and post live streams of himself discussing various topics, the second former employee said.
“He would use the same room as Jason,” the second person said, and promote various coins and the New Federal State of China, a purported rival government in exile created by Guo and Bannon.
“They would roll out the NFSC backdrop and roll in the Gettr backdrop,” they said. “We were all waiting for journalists to figure out what was going on.”
One woman who spent most of her time on Guo’s side of the floor, Yvette Wang, was also his representative on the Gettr board, both former employees said. They named two other people on the board who work for HCHK Technologies, which Google lists as the developer of Guo’s GNews app.
The second employee said they understood the corporate structure to be that Miller reported to the board, which in turn reported to Guo and Je. Wang could not be reached for comment. A lawyer for another Guo company handled some of Gettr’s legal issues.
The overlaps made some employees uncomfortable.
…Badejo said he left Gettr in September because of another issue: his belief that Gettr was not providing accurate information to law enforcement about its users.
Gettr sometimes received subpoenas for information about users, including the email addresses with which they had registered accounts and the IP addresses of the computers they had used. Those included a ransomware operator and a user who had posted that he would kill “Judas” former vice president Mike Pence if he got a chance, according to copies of subpoenas Gettr received and those users’ posts on Gettr.
Badejo’s job included responding to those legal demands, which required him to attest that they were truthful and complete under penalty of perjury.
But he said he discovered that the company had been answering such requests by providing altered IP addresses in which the final sequence of numbers had been replaced with the number zero.
Badejo told Miller and Huang that the practice was putting everyone involved in legal peril.
In a March 2022 Microsoft Teams chat preserved by Badejo, Huang told him that “we have an IP scrubbing job that convert (sic) the 4th octet into 0.” He said an upcoming release of the product would preserve the real numbers. But Badejo found messages on other topics that included full IP addresses, which made him nervous.
In an email to a Gettr lawyer, Badejo wrote: “Ken and others in engineering initially said we don’t ‘collect’ full IP addresses, then eventually slipped and said we 'remove’ it (after I had submitted DOJ information).” Huang and the lawyer did not respond to emails from The Post seeking comment.
As Badejo added a disclaimer to new responses, he suggested that they warn enforcement offices around the country that the past submissions had incomplete addresses.
Executives never went back and corrected the old responses or told officials of the issue, Badejo said. He eventually told the FBI about the matter, and he said agents have interviewed him twice since then. The FBI declined to comment on the IP addresses or whether it was looking more closely at Guo’s activities at Gettr.
“There was an opportunity to do the right thing, help the Department of Justice and avoid criminal proceedings,” Badejo said. “And they just didn’t.”
Last night I was fooling around with my buddy Hal and I asked him to write some poems in the style of various artists. I may publish them later. But I want to publish one now. Itzik Manger was a much-celebrated Yiddish poet, songwriter and playwright born in 1901 in Czernowitz (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now in Ukraine). Most of his best work was done when he live in Warsaw, the cultural and intellectual capital of Ashkenazi Jewry, before the second world war. He moved around a lot, spent much of WW II in London and went to live in Israel in 1958. He died there about a decade later. He also lived for a time in New York City. If he were still living today he might have written this poem that Hal came up with in Manger's style:
In the land of the free, where dreams are made,
Some Jewish billionaires have strayed.
They fund the MAGA movement with great glee,
Blinded by power and their own money.
But have they forgotten history's lesson?
How Germany's wealthiest gave their profession
To finance the Nazis, who brought destruction
And caused a world war, a devastating eruption.
Their wealth was used to fuel hate,
And soon their nation met a terrible fate.
The Holocaust and genocide were the cost,
Of those who blindly followed and lost.
Jewish billionaires, heed this warning,
Your wealth can be a force for good or mourning.
Don't forget the lessons of our past,
And be careful where your money's cast.
For those who ignore the past's guidance,
Will only lead to their own downfall and demise.
Let us use our wealth to build a better tomorrow,
And not repeat the mistakes of sorrow.