Lawrence Ferber @🏠 retweetledi
Lawrence Ferber @🏠
24.2K posts

Lawrence Ferber @🏠
@LawrenceFerber
Travel and arts journalist. @logotv @Tripsavvy, @EdgeMediaNet @queerty @PASSPORTmag, @NYPost, @NatGeoTravel & more! Co-wrote 2010 gay romcom BearCity!
NYC Katılım Ağustos 2009
3.9K Takip Edilen1.2K Takipçiler

@RobertGarcia You all realize she’s laughing at you right? Toothless threats as long as Trump is POTUS and every agency bows down to the dictator.
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If Pam Bondi does not testify, we are going to hold her in contempt. Time’s about to be up.
Oversight Dems@OversightDems
Even after being fired, Pam Bondi is trying to cover for Donald Trump. We are demanding that she come and answer our questions. If she continues to refuse, we will hold her in contempt. Oversight Dems will get answers.
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@RobertGarcia Just keep moving the goalposts. ‘It’s may 2027 and if bondi keeps not showing we are totes gonna really for reals hold her in contempt but first let’s give her one more chance and the she’s totes gonna maybe get contempt thingees”.
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@RepYassAnsari She has no plans to. She will move to Mar a Lago or a country with no extradition treaty if she need to.
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Pam Bondi must testify under oath in front of the American people. No exceptions.
Scott MacFarlane@MacFarlaneNews
NEW: House Oversight Cmte Democrats ask GOP to set new deposition date for Pam Bondi: About GOP leaders, Rep Robert Garcia (D-CA) says, “There’s zero evidence that they’ve even spoken to her. Every day that goes by is one more day the former Attorney General is failing to fulfill the lawful, bipartisan subpoena”
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Lawrence Ferber @🏠 retweetledi

BREAKING: The biggest investor in the Trump family's crypto company just turned on them publicly.
He claims they built a "trap door" into the code to freeze investor money at will.
And they just secretly borrowed $75 million against tokens that aren't theirs.
Here's the crypto scandal unfolding right now:
World Liberty Financial launched in 2024 during Trump's third presidential campaign.
Co-founded by Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Barron Trump, and Zach Witkoff, the son of US envoy Steve Witkoff.
Donald Trump was listed as "co-founder emeritus."
The Trump family company was structured to receive 75% of net revenues from token sales.
On Trump's 2025 financial disclosure form, he listed more than $57 million in income from World Liberty alone.
By December 2025, the family had booked roughly $1 billion in profits.
And held another $3 billion in unsold tokens.
Now that empire is cracking open from the inside.
One of the first, largest, and loudest investors in the project was Justin Sun.
The Tron founder. Chinese-born crypto billionaire.
He put in between $30 million and $75 million starting in late 2024.
Sat as an advisor. Attended Trump's memecoin gala dinner.
Held roughly 545 to 595 million WLFI tokens at peak, worth over $100 million.
He was the whale the project pointed to as validation.
On April 12, he went to X and publicly torched them.
He called World Liberty "a trap masquerading as a door."
He accused the project of building hidden controls into its smart contracts.
Controls that let the company unilaterally freeze any wallet without notice, without warning, without due process.
His own wallet was frozen last September, after he moved $9 million in tokens to a new address.
He says he was running routine exchange deposit tests. No buying. No selling. No market impact.
The wallet got blacklisted anyway.
Hundreds of millions in tokens, locked for months.
And according to Sun, the ability to do this was never disclosed to investors before they bought in.
"This is the opposite of decentralization," he wrote.
He called the Trump family "bad actors."
He accused them of treating investors as a "personal ATM."
World Liberty's official account fired back within hours.
"Does anyone still believe Justin Sun?"
"Justin's favorite move is playing the victim while making baseless allegations to cover up his own misconduct."
"We have the contracts. We have the evidence. We have the truth."
"See you in court pal."
The biggest backer of a Trump family crypto venture.
Publicly accusing them of a scam.
Being told "see you in court" by the company.
In public. On X.
But the timing is the part nobody's putting together.
In February, blockchain data later reported by CoinDesk showed something that never made it into a press release.
World Liberty took out a $75 million loan from a crypto lending platform called Dolomite.
The collateral?
Five billion WLFI tokens.
That's 5% of the entire supply.
Borrowed against, quietly, while the same company was blocking regular holders from selling their own tokens.
Think about what that means.
Investors like Sun were told their tokens were locked. Couldn't be sold. Couldn't be moved.
Meanwhile, the company was taking 5 billion of its own tokens and using them as collateral to borrow $75 million in stablecoins.
Austin Campbell, a crypto consultant and NYU instructor, told NBC News:
"If you took this conduct and translated it to traditional markets, you would have some problems."
That is as close as a sober industry voice gets to saying "this is not supposed to be legal."
Then on Tuesday, April 15, it escalated again.
World Liberty filed a new governance proposal.
It would unlock 62.3 billion WLFI tokens that were previously locked with no vesting schedule.
Early supporters holding 17 billion tokens would keep all of theirs, with a two-year cliff.
Founders, team, advisors, and partners would see 10% of their 45.2 billion tokens burned.
The remaining 40.7 billion would unlock over five years.
Sun called it a "trap door" the second it hit the forum.
He warned that the proposal involves billions of dollars in assets.
That it could reshape vesting rights, burn billions of tokens, and shift governance power permanently.
All without the minority protections or independent review a public equity would require.
His words: "These steps would never pass in traditional markets, where investors expect clear legal rights and due process."
Meanwhile the token itself is bleeding.
WLFI has lost 74% of its value since August.
As of this week, it trades at around 8 cents.
Down from a high of 40 cents at launch.
But the Trump family has not been hit the way retail investors have.
A Wall Street Journal analysis found the Trumps have cashed out at least $1.2 billion in real dollars from World Liberty Financial over the past 16 months.
Not paper wealth. Not locked tokens. Actual cash.
The separate TRUMP memecoin, launched days before the second inauguration, has crashed roughly 90% from its high.
It now trades around $2.81. It was once $45.
And there's the foreign money trail.
Days before the inauguration, an investor linked to the UAE government paid $500 million to acquire nearly half of World Liberty Financial.
A UAE government fund later used $2 billion of World Liberty's USD1 stablecoin to invest in the crypto exchange Binance.
Allowing the Trump-linked entity receiving those dollars to hold them in bonds or money market funds and keep the interest.
Shortly after, the Trump administration reversed a Biden-era restriction and gave the UAE access to advanced US chips.
Binance's founder, Changpeng Zhao, received a presidential pardon despite his prior guilty plea for failing to stop illicit money flows tied to terrorism and trafficking.
World Liberty publicly denied any connection between the UAE deal and the chips policy.
But the paper trail is a paper trail.
And now add this:
Justin Sun's own SEC fraud case from 2023, charging him over crypto trades and illicit promotion, was quietly dismissed in March.
He paid a $10 million fine.
The case disappeared.
One of the first investors in a Trump family crypto venture, under SEC fraud charges, had his case dropped months into the new administration.
That same investor is now the loudest public critic of the company.
Because he believes they built a kill switch into the code to lock him out of his own money.
Here's the broader picture:
World Liberty Financial holds a stablecoin, USD1, that ranks among the 10 most heavily used in the world.
It runs on Binance and Kraken. It settles billions in transactions.
The project's governance token, WLFI, has now collapsed in value while the company borrows against its own supply.
The biggest institutional backer is calling it a trap.
The House Judiciary Committee has published a report accusing the family of running a multi-billion-dollar self-dealing machine.
The Committee documented $11.6 billion in Trump family crypto holdings and over $800 million in crypto income in the first half of 2025 alone.
Democrats have accused the administration of dismantling the DOJ's National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team to shield these ventures from exactly this kind of scrutiny.
The White House denies any wrongdoing.
The Trump Organization has not responded to media requests.
World Liberty is threatening its biggest investor with a lawsuit over his public accusations.
This is not a crypto story anymore.
This is an ownership story.
About who owns the tokens.
Who owns the code.
Who owns the switch that freezes the wallets.
And who owns the 75% cut of every dollar that flows through it.
Retail investors are holding an 8-cent token down 74% from its high.
The biggest whale is publicly accusing the company of a scam.
The company just announced it secretly pledged billions of its own tokens as collateral for a $75 million loan.
And the founding family has already cashed out $1.2 billion in real money.
One of these things is not like the others.
The question now is not whether this ends in court.
Justin Sun vs. World Liberty is coming.
The question is which courtroom.
A civil dispute between two crypto parties?
Or the first real securities case testing whether a sitting president's family business structure qualifies as a legal enterprise at all?
Because "see you in court pal" works both ways.
And Sun's lawyers have been waiting for him to give them something to file.
He just did.
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Lawrence Ferber @🏠 retweetledi

Trump is about to lock 157 million Americans out of their own bank accounts.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent confirmed an executive order forcing every US bank to collect proof of citizenship is "in process."
And he just doubled down: "If Treasury and the banking regulators say it's their job, it's their job."
This sounds irrelevant but here's what this really means:
Per the Congressional Research Service, only 48% of Americans hold a US passport.
That leaves over 170 million Americans without one.
REAL IDs don't count. Driver's licenses don't count. Social Security cards don't count.
Per Wall Street Journal reporting, banks will need a passport or birth certificate.
The Brennan Center found 21.3 million voting-age US citizens don't have documents proving their citizenship easily available.
These are Americans who are about to lose access to their own bank accounts.
And here's the thing:
The order applies to new AND existing customers. Banks could be forced to close accounts of people who can't produce documents.
Your 78-year-old grandmother born at home in 1948. Your naturalized dad who lost his papers 30 years ago. Your cousin mid-passport renewal.
The official story is that this stops illegal immigrants from accessing banking.
But the actual reality:
Illegal immigrants can't open US bank accounts anyway. Know Your Customer rules already require SSNs or ITINs. The existing system ALREADY blocks what this order claims to block.
So who does this actually target?
The half of Americans without a passport. Rural Americans. Elderly Americans born before centralized record-keeping. Black Americans in Southern states where birth records were historically unreliable. Low-income Americans who can't afford $225 for an expedited passport.
The American Action Forum, a center-right think tank, estimates this adds 33 to 73 million paperwork hours and $2.6 to $5.6 billion in compliance costs.
Guess who pays those costs?
You do. Through fees. Through closed accounts. Through denied loans.
Bessent's defense quote: "I have a place in the UK, they want to know who lives in every apartment."
Bessent's net worth: $600 million.
He has a "place in the UK."
He will not be affected by this.
So this isn't really about immigration.
For the first time in American history, access to the banking system would be conditioned on proving citizenship to the federal government. That creates a permanent database linking every American's finances to their citizenship status.
Once that database exists, it gets used by ICE, voting enforcement, tax enforcement, Social Security, and future administrations for purposes nobody has announced yet.
Every future government gets the keys to decide who has a bank account based on paperwork.
And Wall Street's reaction tells you everything:
Bank execs privately called it "unworkable" and "a complete nightmare." One researcher called it "a way to weaponize the banking system to achieve political ends."
They're not pushing back because they love immigrants. They just KNOW the compliance costs are catastrophic and half their customers will walk.
Tom Cotton also introduced a companion bill in March making it a federal crime for any unauthorized person to "open or maintain a US bank account." Maintain. Meaning existing accounts.
These things are literally being drafted right now.
I'm surprised that all of this went under the radar.
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@Franklin_Graham @realDonaldTrump Trump doesn’t care about you. He doesn’t remember Herman Cain or his own brother. He will never care about you. Ever.
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I had received some questions about President @realDonaldTrump's recent posts, and here are my thoughts:
I do not believe President Trump would knowingly depict himself as Jesus Christ—that would certainly be inappropriate. I’m thankful the President has made it very clear that this was not at all what he thought the AI-generated image was representing—he thought it was a doctor helping someone, and when he learned of the concerns, he immediately removed the post.
When I looked at the illustration, I didn’t jump to the same conclusion as some. There were no spiritual references—no halo, there were no crosses, no angels. It was a flag, soldiers, a nurse, fighter planes, eagles, the Statue of Liberty, and I think this is a lot to do about nothing. There is so much ill-intended speculation. I think his enemies are always foaming at the mouth at any possible opportunity to make him look bad.
And the illustration from someone else he reposted on Truth Social yesterday, I must say that I like the fact that this is a picture of Jesus whispering in his ear, or at least His hand on his shoulder, guiding him. We all need that—we all need to be listening to Jesus. Again, I think there is an attempt to spin this into something that it isn’t. Remember, President Trump didn’t draw this, he didn’t create it, he reposted it on his social media because he thought it was nice—I would have to agree.
I’m not a Catholic, I’m an evangelical, but I appreciate how President Trump has defended religious freedom for people of all faiths, including millions of evangelicals and Catholics in the U.S. and around the world. He is the most pro-Christian, pro-life president in my lifetime, and he doesn’t shy away from it. I would hope that the President and Pope Leo can meet at some point, and that the Pope would have the opportunity to thank the President for his efforts to protect religious liberty for Catholics and people of all faiths.
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Lawrence Ferber @🏠 retweetledi
Lawrence Ferber @🏠 retweetledi
Lawrence Ferber @🏠 retweetledi

Thomas Massie just went nuclear on Trump’s DOJ for bringing zero “charges, arrests, or investigations” over the Epstein files.
“Who should be investigated?”
“I’ll name them right here.”
“Leon Black... Jes Staley, accused of terrible things... Leslie Wexner.”
“Why did the FBI list him as a co-conspirator in their own documents in a child sex trafficking case, and then tell him that they had no questions for him?”
“Over 3 million documents describing horrible things, unspeakable things, much of it redacted.”
“Over two dozen people have resigned, CEOs, members of government worldwide.”
“But I haven’t seen any arrests or investigations here in the United States.”
“Prince Andrew, Duke of York, who has since been stripped of his royal titles due to his affiliation with Jeffrey Epstein, has been arrested.”
“Peter Mandelson, who previously served as UK’s ambassador to the United States, resigned in disgrace from UK’s House of Lords and the Labour Party, and he’s been arrested.”
“Former Prime Minister of Norway, Thorbjørn Jagland, has been charged.”
“But we don’t see any charges, arrests, or investigations in the United States.”
“What do we see?”
“We see our FBI director celebrating in the locker room at the Olympics overseas.”
“We need justice.”
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@Franklin_Graham @realDonaldTrump Those are Olympic level cognitive gymnastics. Glad you're ok with him raw dogging a porn star while married to Melania and his endless lies and continued series of AI depicting him as either Jesus or WITH Jesus.
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Lawrence Ferber @🏠 retweetledi

Your smart TV is taking screenshots of your screen every 15 seconds.
Not a guess. Not a theory.
A peer-reviewed study by researchers at UC Davis, UCL, and UC3M tested it.
Samsung TVs: every minute.
LG TVs: every 15 seconds.
Even when you're just using it as a monitor.
Here's how to turn it off for every brand:
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Lawrence Ferber @🏠 retweetledi

@RepJasmine I don't see leniency for anyone else who doesn't show up when subpoenaed. Why be lenient and do this "we will now maybe kinda sorta consider possibly moving forward maybe someday!"
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Pam Bondi refused to show up for today’s Oversight deposition — defying our lawful subpoena.
We couldn’t care less that she was fired from her job as Attorney General. She is responsible for leading the White House cover-up of the Epstein files.
Since she didn’t show up, Oversight Democrats will move to hold her in contempt of Congress.
The survivors deserve justice — and we will get answers. Enough is enough.
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@Johnny777xx @rshereme BOT WITH TWO MONTH OLD ACCOUNT. BOT.
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The ice is finally breaking, and I am truly hopeful.
In the past two days, two of my friends who were diehard supporters of Trump called me and said they were wrong.
One of them told me his trucking business is falling apart because of Trump's immigration policy, tariffs, and high fuel costs. He was disappointed that Trump did not deliver on his promises. He said he would not vote for Trump if he had known then what he knows now.
My second friend asked me for forgiveness. He said he had been deceived by the promises Trump made to Christians. He even compared Trump to Putin and added that he now understands how the antichrist could deceive believers.
I had a really good conversation with both of them. I was not angry. Honestly, I never thought this day would come, when eyes would open and the ice would begin to break.
So yes, I am hopeful.
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@rshereme But do they add the caveat "am Harris would have been worse!l"? Seems like even the MAGAs leaving still say they would never have voted for Harris or ANY Democrat EVER.
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@BrittanyinTexas @AdamKinzinger It would be funny except the evangelicals and Christian's etc have already pivoted and think he's still most awesome ever no matter what blasphemy he commits.
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Lawrence Ferber @🏠 retweetledi

@LucasSa56947288 He’s planning to bomb and invade another country. Probably Cuba or Greenland. He usually disappears right before they start bombing.
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