The CIA Gold Bar Scandal Just Got a New Character — And Her Story Doesn't Add Up

Trump Pardoned Him on Monday. By Sunday He Was Dead.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com [https://michaelfanone.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7] A sheriff’s deputy in rural Indiana pulls over a speeder on a Sunday afternoon. Routine. Nothing about a stop like that should make the news, and nothing about it should end with a body on the shoulder of the road. Except the driver had been a free man for exactly six days. His name was Matthew Huttle. Forty-two, from Hobart, Indiana. On January 6th, 2021, he and his uncle Dale drove to Washington for Trump’s Stop the Steal rally — and didn’t stop at the rally. They marched on the Capitol with the rest of the mob. Dale beat two police officers with a wooden flagpole; one of them went down on the steps and slipped a disc in his back. Matthew went inside the building. Twice. The second time he stayed more than ten minutes, wandering through congressional offices and the crypt — the same restricted corridors where my brothers and sisters in uniform were getting the hell beaten out of them. Both men were arrested. Both convicted. And in twenty years carrying a badge, I never once had to wonder whether that was the end of the story. You assault a cop, you walk into a building you helped overrun, you do your time. That used to be the floor in this country. The bare minimum. Then Trump signed a stack of pardons that wiped out the convictions of roughly fifteen hundred January 6th defendants in a single afternoon. Cop beaters. Cop tasers. The men who dragged me down the Capitol steps, tased me in the neck, beat me unconscious, and sent me to the hospital with a heart attack and a brain injury. All of it, erased. Matthew Huttle was in that pile. Six days later, he’s doing seventy in a fifty-five in Jasper County. A deputy lights him up. And almost immediately, Huttle starts volunteering things he has no reason to volunteer. He tells the deputy about January 6th. About the conviction. About the pardon. And more than once, that he can’t afford to get in any more trouble. That’s not the voice of a man who thinks he got away with something. That’s a man doing math in his head about whether a pardon for one crime covers whatever he’s about to do next. The deputy tells him he’s under arrest as a habitual traffic violator. Standard. And Huttle makes the same call he made on the Capitol steps years earlier — that the rules are for other people. He bolts back to his van, starts screaming he’s going to shoot himself, and raises a loaded nine millimeter in the middle of a struggle. The deputy backs up and fires. A special prosecutor reviewed the body cam and the dash cam and ruled the shooting justified. As it should be. That deputy did exactly what he was trained to do, and he made it home to his family because of it. Barely. Hold onto that word. A deputy in rural Indiana nearly didn’t come home from a traffic stop. Not because of a cartel. Not because of a fugitive. Because of a man who’d spent four years marinating in the idea that he was a political prisoner — and six days earlier had been told by the President of the United States that everything he did inside the Capitol was just fine. *This is the kind of story the national press keeps filing under “local news.” Subscribe so you don’t miss the ones that connect. It’s free, and it keeps this independent.* That’s what the pardons actually did. They didn’t just spring fifteen hundred people from prison. They sent every one of them home with a message: the cops who arrested you were the bad guys. The prosecutors were the bad guys. The judges were the bad guys. Which means I was the enemy — and so was every officer who did their job that day. Hand a stable person that message and you get a quiet life and a chip on the shoulder. Hand it to Matthew Huttle and you get a loaded handgun on a roadside. And here’s the rot underneath all of it. The same movement that branded itself the party of Law and Order pardoned the people who tried to murder cops on live television. The same crowd that called protesters domestic terrorists cheered when Trump walked the men who tased me out of federal prison. There is no Blue Lives Matter movement in this country. There’s the MAGA cult, and the MAGA cult alone. It protects its own as long as you kiss the ring — and everybody else, cop or not, can go f**k themselves. The deputy in Jasper County learned that on a Sunday afternoon. And Huttle wasn’t the only violent offender who walked out and went right back to it. There are roughly fifteen hundred pardoned January 6th defendants out there right now, a serious share of them convicted of violence against police officers — including against me. The domestic violence calls, the DUIs, the weapons charges, the standoffs: the list keeps growing, and the press keeps treating each one as a small local story instead of the same story repeating itself in a new zip code. The next armed standoff with a pardoned insurrectionist has already happened by the time you read this. It will keep happening. And so far, this country has decided to do nothing about it. 🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for life You’ll get the link in your welcome email. GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

Everyone’s Asking If Jon Ossoff Will Run in 2028. They’re All Missing The Point..

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com [https://michaelfanone.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7] There’s a senator who keeps insisting he’s not running for president, and the more he says it, the harder the political class loses its mind over him. That alone should tell you something. Anybody who reads me knows I hate endorsing politicians. I’ve been burned too many times. So I’m not endorsing Jon Ossoff — not yet. But I can’t ignore what he’s doing, because he’s saying the thing I’ve been saying for months, and it’s about damn time a candidate said it out loud. When Ossoff launched his reelection in Georgia and went after Trump’s “Mar-a-Lago mafia,” the clips went everywhere overnight. Within hours the same crowd that lives for this stuff was floating him for 2028. Michelle Goldberg wrote a whole Times column under the headline “Why Everyone Wants Jon Ossoff to Run for President.” Newsweek asked if he’s the one Democrats have been waiting for. The prediction markets shoved him near the top of the field. And Ossoff keeps swatting it all down. He told Jen Psaki flat out he has zero interest in 2028 — he loves the Georgia job, he’s got two young daughters, and he warned everyone off playing fantasy football with the next election. He’s right to wave it away. Because whether he runs for president is the least interesting thing about any of this. Here’s the question nobody’s actually asking: what set the country off in the first place? It wasn’t his age or his looks or the fact that he’s from a swing state. It was one thing, and once you see it you can’t unsee it. He’s talking about corruption. And accountability. I’ve spent months on this page hammering those exact two words. So when a politician puts them dead center and the whole country lights up, I pay attention — because it tells me people are starving for somebody to just name this stuff. And watch how specific he gets. He calls the Trump White House the most corrupt administration of all time and then brings receipts. While your premiums climb and your hospital cuts services, the First Family is pulling in billions. He points to a tungsten mine — in Kazakhstan — that Trump’s sons took a stake in days before its parent company landed $1.6 billion in federal financing. Days before. He helped coin a name for the whole rotten club: “the Epstein class,” the rich of both parties who covered for a child sex trafficker. *If this is the kind of thing you want in your inbox, subscribe. It’s free, and reader support is the only reason this show answers to nobody.* Here’s what the consultants always miss, and it’s the whole ballgame: running on accountability isn’t just the right thing. It’s the smart thing. It wins. Goldberg’s column quotes a Stanford political scientist, Adam Bonica, and his point stopped me cold. Corruption, he says, has been the fatal weakness of authoritarian regimes for decades, across continents — outrage over looting is what brought down strongmen from the Philippines to Ukraine to Hungary. An anti-corruption message can do what normal partisan politics almost never does: unite an entire society against a rigged system. That’s not a left thing or a right thing. It’s a human thing. Everybody hates a thief. And you don’t have to fly to Hungary to see it. The Bulwark and Jacobin agree on basically nothing, and lately they’ve landed in the same spot — anti-corruption might be the most potent issue Democrats have. Ossoff is proving it in real time. The reason I trust him on it is that he didn’t discover the issue the second it started polling. As chairman of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, he ran a ten-month bipartisan probe into the federal Bureau of Prisons, exposed the abuse rotting the Atlanta facility, and wrote it into law — the Federal Prison Oversight Act, which actually passed. He was doing this work before it was cool. I spent twenty years as a cop, and here’s something that job taught me: real law and order means holding the people who enforce the law accountable too. Ossoff gets that in his bones. So set the 2028 parlor game aside and look at the contrast. The smart-money advice going around tells Democrats to soften up, tack to the center, maybe toss the president a compliment. Ossoff is doing the exact opposite, and it’s working. I’ve spent this whole stretch writing open letters to Democrats who had a chance to fight and went quiet — Fetterman, who’d rather lecture his own voters than swing at Trump; Spanberger, who ran on accountability and then walked away from it. The people telling this party to play it safe are getting it backwards. The electorate is screaming what it wants, and one senator can’t kill the presidential talk no matter how many times he says he isn’t interested. The only question left is who’s actually listening. If this hit home, do me a favor — subscribe, drop a comment, and send it to somebody who needs to read it. It’s the reason this thing keeps going. 🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for life You’ll get the link in your welcome email. GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

A Chinese Spy Got Elected Mayor in California. Nobody Noticed.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com [https://michaelfanone.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7] When Eileen Wang was sworn in as mayor of Arcadia, California — a quiet suburb outside Los Angeles — she gave the kind of speech that makes a room feel good. A small mountain village in China to American city hall. And then this line: our loyalty must always be clear, to this country, to our Constitution, to our residents, and to no one else. A few months later she pled guilty to being a foreign agent for the Chinese government. She resigned the same day. She’s facing up to ten years. Let me get the careful part out of the way, because there are two ways to butcher this story. One is to shrug and pretend foreign governments aren’t trying to worm their way into American politics. They are. The other is to treat every Chinese American who shows up to a community event as a suspect — the kind of red-scare garbage that wrecks innocent lives. I’ve watched that up close. My ex-wife and three of my daughters are American citizens of Taiwanese descent, and I saw what Trump’s “China virus” routine did to my kids — made them feel like targets on their own streets, scared of how they’d be treated over the color of their skin. So forget the movie version. Stick to what’s in the plea. Wang and a man named Mike Sun ran a website called U.S. News Center. From late 2020 into at least 2022, prosecutors say they pushed pro-Beijing propaganda on the direction of Chinese officials — and then reported the traffic numbers back up the chain, like employees turning in a performance review. There’s one detail that says everything. Chinese officials complimented Wang on a post that cleared fifteen thousand views, and she wrote back: “Thank you leader.” Thank you leader. Now here’s where it stops looking like a spy thriller. This isn’t some criminal mastermind. It’s a woman in her fifties who jumped into local politics — registered Republican first, then switched to Democrat to match her district. She knocked doors. She showed up to the Christmas tree lighting. She backed veterans programs. Her own colleagues on the council say they can barely remember how she voted on anything. So what did Beijing want with a suburban city councilmember? There are no state secrets in Arcadia. That’s the point. What they were running is what intelligence people call cultivation. You find a local with ambition. You help them climb. You build the relationship. And maybe in ten or fifteen years that person is in a state house, or Congress, and now you’ve got a friend in a room that matters. It’s patient. It’s cheap. And it doesn’t require your target to be brilliant — just useful and willing. The boyfriend is where it gets murky. Mike Sun was described at various points as Wang’s boyfriend, then fiancé, then campaign treasurer. Behind the scenes, court documents say, he was writing reports to Chinese officials describing her as a “new political star” and listing the American officials she was “familiar with.” He and another man even took credit for getting her elected. And then there’s the line that should stop you cold: another foreign agent told Sun, in an audio message, that they should not let Wang know what they were doing. So which was she — the operator, or the asset who didn’t fully know she was an asset? I don’t know. She pled guilty, so she’s admitting some level of fault in the eyes of the law. But the documents genuinely leave it open how much she understood about the machine she was inside. Her lawyers argue most of this predates her time in office, and that running a propaganda site isn’t the same as spying. That’s a real distinction, even if it doesn’t get her off the hook. What stays with me is how unglamorous the whole thing is. People who study Beijing’s influence operations say it’s nowhere near a flawless machine — it’s a loose web of local hustlers, each chasing their own status and money and connections, with the government sitting up top collecting whatever floats up. Some of it works. Most of it doesn’t. And that should worry you more, not less. A sleek professional spy ring is something the FBI knows how to hunt. A thousand small-timers blending into chamber-of-commerce dinners and flag ceremonies and charity drives? That’s a much harder thing to see, because it hides inside the normal texture of American civic life. There’s a perfect little prisoner’s-dilemma ending to this, too. When Sun got arrested, Wang turned on him fast — denied at a council meeting that he’d ever been her fiancé, called him an ex-boyfriend, dared anyone to prove otherwise. “Please prove it,” she said. Said she was proud of herself. Said she always stood with her country. Months later she pled guilty. So here’s what I want you to take from it. Foreign interference in our politics is real, and it’s happening at the local level, in places you’d never think to look. But it doesn’t show up as a villain in a movie. It shows up as an ambitious neighbor at a ribbon cutting. The defense isn’t paranoia about an entire community of Americans — it’s transparency, strong foreign-agent registration laws, reporters doing the digging, and the rest of us paying attention to who’s funding the people asking for our vote. That’s how you protect this country from foreign influence without becoming the thing you’re scared of. Follow the facts, not the conspiracy, wherever they lead — and never blame a whole race of people for what you find. 🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for life You’ll get the link in your welcome email. GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

The World Is On Fire And Nobody In Washington Is Telling You Why

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com [https://michaelfanone.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7] The deadliest year of war on this planet since the Rwandan genocide just happened, and I’d bet money this is the first you’re hearing of it. Nearly a quarter million people killed. The silence around that number is its own story. The count comes from Uppsala University in Sweden, where researchers track the world’s wars for a living. They’re the gold standard — the people governments and reporters trust to keep the tally honest. Their latest: sixty-five active conflicts, the most since the end of World War II. And the worse number is buried under that one. Wars between actual countries — nation against nation — doubled in a single year. Eight of them, the most since they started counting in 1946. Russia and Ukraine. Iran and Israel. The United States and Iran. Israel and Palestine. India and Pakistan. Thailand and Cambodia. Afghanistan and Pakistan trading fire across the border. The U.S. and Britain against the Houthis in the Red Sea. I’m not going to stand here and tell you the last eighty years of American power were clean. They weren’t. Thousands died because this country lied to its own people, and the world, to drag us into one war after another in the Middle East. I’ve got no interest in pretending otherwise. But here’s the other half of the truth. After World War II, out of the wreckage, we helped build something — alliances, treaties, a United Nations, real institutions with real money behind them. A structure that made attacking your neighbor a losing bet. People called it Pax Americana. It was never charity and it was never perfect, but it worked well enough that a war between countries became the exception instead of the rule. The researchers who count these wars are now telling us that structure is breaking. They don’t hint at it. They name the cause. They quote our own 2025 National Security Strategy and write that the United States is tearing down the institutions it spent eighty years building. Sit with the timing of that. A country founded on tolerance and individual freedom, on the edge of its 250th birthday, has become the country actively pulling the supports out from under peace around the globe. *If you want it straight — no spin, no team jersey — subscribe. It’s free, and it’s reader-supported, which is exactly why I can say all of this.* I’ll be honest about what this study does and doesn’t prove. The lead researcher said it plainly: the data can’t pin this on one president or one policy. The trend’s been building for a decade. This is bigger than any single administration, and I won’t insult you by pretending it started with one party. But twenty years as a cop taught me something about the world that applies here. Chaos is the natural state of things. Order is not. Order is something you build and defend on purpose, every single day, or it rots from the inside. Take the cop off the corner and you find out fast who steps up to fill the space. Right now the corner is the entire planet. And look who’s filling it. Russia and Ukraine is the deadliest war on earth, sixty-two percent of every battlefield death last year. Gaza, where atrocities against innocents have piled up. Sudan, where a paramilitary group overran a city and massacred tens of thousands of civilians — people killed for the crime of going to the hospital or trying not to starve. “Dramatic,” the study calls the surge in violence against people who weren’t fighting anyone. Dramatic doesn’t come close. So what’s Washington talking about while this burns? Ballrooms and “American flag blue.” Trans athletes and DEI hires. Anything but this. Nobody’s standing at a podium telling you you’re living through the deadliest year of war since Rwanda, or that it’s tied directly to choices we are making about our place in the world. You get culture-war noise and whatever manufactured outrage you were handed this week instead. That’s not an accident. A distracted public is an easy public to control. Here’s the part I actually need you to hear. The people taking apart the system that kept war between nations rare are betting on one thing — that you won’t notice. They dress it up as “America First” when the honest name is America Alone. Fewer alliances, weaker institutions, power vacuums, corruption. A world where the strong do whatever they please because nobody’s left with the spine to tell them no. We’ve seen that world. We lived in it in the first half of the last century, and it ended with sixty million dead. We spent the next eighty years building something so it couldn’t happen again at that scale. And the people who count these wars just told us next year already looks worse. The line is still climbing. You can’t end a war in Sudan from your couch. I know that. But you can refuse to be the distracted public they’re counting on. You can learn to tell the difference between a country that walks away from the world and calls it strength, and a country that understands what actually holds the world together. And you can vote like the structure matters — because the data just spelled out, in blood, what happens when it doesn’t. The peace was never free. It was expensive and exhausting and it never stopped being a grind. But one day of it beats one second of war. Somebody built it on purpose. And right now, on purpose, somebody is tearing it down. That somebody is the United States of America. 🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for life You’ll get the link in your welcome email. GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

They Tried to Bury Graham Platner. Maine Democrats Just Buried Them.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com [https://michaelfanone.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7] Spend a fortune trying to destroy a candidate and you expect to see it somewhere in the polls. The national party threw everything it had at Graham Platner — an oyster farmer and former Marine running for Senate in Maine — and it didn’t move him an inch. He took the nomination going away. A lot of people in Washington should be rattled by that. I’m not. Let me tell you what they missed. Start with who Platner beat. Janet Mills — two-term governor, the candidate Chuck Schumer personally recruited to knock off Susan Collins — never made it to the ballot box as a real contender. She walked away, and the reason she gave was money. Read that again. A sitting governor couldn’t out-raise a guy who farms shellfish for a living. The polls told the whole story: Emerson had Platner up 55 to 28, and some had it worse. Her name stayed on the ballot out of formality. It changed nothing. What makes it remarkable is the pile of opposition research he carried the entire way and still won. A Nazi Totenkopf tattoo on his chest — he says he got it drunk as a young Marine overseas, no idea what it meant. Hundreds of pages of ugly old Reddit posts. Cheating early in his marriage. The New York Times went and found his exes and printed what they called disturbing behavior. I’m not going to pretend any of that is nothing. It isn’t. But the people who dumped it all on his head misread the room completely. None of it moved a vote. He called the attacks what they were — a weaponizing of his past — and Maine nodded along. Bernie didn’t flinch. Warren didn’t flinch. The whole demolition job slid right off him. Online, this stopped being about Maine ages ago. It turned into a stand-in war over what the Democratic Party is even for, with the press fretting about a civil war on the left. None of that was on the ballot. The people who actually voted weren’t picking a faction. They were picking the guy who’d fight. Put yourself in that booth. On one side, a battered, scarred-up candidate with a file full of bad headlines. On the other, a careful, polished, two-term governor with a clean résumé. Maine chose the scarred one. Not out of recklessness — out of a decision that the only credential that counts anymore is whether you’ll climb into the ring with Donald Trump and throw hands. They looked at Mills, who’d have arrived in the Senate as a 79-year-old freshman, and didn’t believe she would. And don’t write this off as a few keyboard radicals. The man is a combat veteran who grows oysters and sounds like he’s never been within a mile of a political consultant. That’s exactly why the small-dollar checks came in faster than a governor could keep up with — and why the scandals never stuck. You can’t run an oppo campaign against people simply trusting somebody. This is the same fight I’ve been having in print for a while now. I’ve written open letter after open letter to Democrats who had the chance to swing and chose to go quiet. The consultant class keeps selling caution as wisdom. Maine just sent the bill back unpaid. They took the guy with the tattoo over the safe governor because the safe governor never once made them believe she’d actually fight. I’m not going to oversell it. Platner still has to beat Collins, and that race is tightening. The attack ads are coming, and there’s more than enough material to fill them. Nothing here is locked. But forget the oyster farmer for a second, because he’s not really the point. The point is that the appetite for Democrats who throw punches has gotten so strong it’s now surviving the kind of stories that used to end careers overnight. If you’re in the wing of this party that still thinks the answer is to play it safe, that should keep you up at night. Maine made itself clear. It is done being careful. It wants a fighter — and it just sent one to the general. 🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for life You’ll get the link in your welcome email. GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!