Corruption. It’s like an operating system running in the background on the Computer of Life that inflects and infects everything we do and what is done to us. Corruption is epidemic, endemic, and systemic. Universal, it is everywhere and all at once.
When he was the director of the FBI, Robert E. Mueller III gave an address to the Citizens Crime Commission of New York and opened a new window on the operating system of corruption: transnational organized crime. He called this new operating system an “iron triangle.” Its three sides: organized criminals, corrupt government officials, and business leaders.
In her June 17, 2025, Substack, Heather Cox Richardson recalled Mueller’s address in an account of foreign investment in President Trump’s businesses. She wrote:
Eliot Brown of the Wall Street Journal reported that Mukesh Ambani, the richest man in India, is now one of the many wealthy foreign real estate developers “pouring money” into the Trump Organization. Brown noted that the Trump family is aggressively developing its businesses while Trump is in the White House, reaching past real estate into cryptocurrency and other sectors.
The growing power of international oligarchs to use the resources of the government for their own benefit recalls a speech Robert Mueller, then director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, gave in New York City in 2011. In it, he explained that globalization and modern technology had changed the nature of organized crime. No longer regional networks with a clear structure, he said, organized crime had become international, fluid, and sophisticated, with multibillion-dollar stakes. Its operators were cross-pollinating across countries, religions, and political affiliations, sharing only their greed. They did not care about ideology; they cared about money. They would do anything for a price.
These criminals “may be former members of nation-state governments, security services, or the military,” he said. “They are capitalists and entrepreneurs. But they are also master criminals who move easily between the licit and illicit worlds. And in some cases, these organizations are as forward-leaning as Fortune 500 companies.”
These criminal enterprises, he noted, were working to corner the market on oil, gas, and precious metals. [MKJ: Today it’s also tech, AI, cryptocurrency and other digital enterprises.] And to do so, Mueller explained, they “may infiltrate our businesses. They may provide logistical support to hostile foreign powers. They may try to manipulate those at the highest levels of government. Indeed, these so-called 'iron triangles' of organized criminals, corrupt government officials, and business leaders pose a significant national security threat.”
What Mueller didn’t address is that one or more of the sides of the triangle may be represented by the same person or organization.
For example, a corrupt government leader may also support an international terrorist organization. Consider Netanyahu. Not only is he personally accused of massive corruption in office, but he is also known to have "provided logistical support to a hostile foreign power." How? By quietly approving the funneling of money from Qatar to Hamas, an avowed enemy of Israel and a quasi-client state of Iran, which in turn is recognized as a state sponsor of terrorism. Netanyahu’s objective? To strengthen Hamas as a terrorist organization and thereby eliminate the possibility of Gaza and the West Bank unifying into a single Palestinian state. As a result of Netanyahu’s treachery against his own people and his unilateral torpedoing of the two-state solution, a strengthened Hamas developed the wherewithal to attack Israel, precipitating the IDF’s reduction of Gaza to rubble, while simultaneously giving Netanyahu the cover of war as a pretext to delay his corruption trial. Smooth operator. The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu, accusing him of war crimes. The U.S. has condemned the issuance of the warrant, while tacitly approving the ethnic cleansing by providing the "defensive" weapons.
Or, in some cases a figure on the iron triangle might "infiltrate our businesses" in order to dabble directly in organized crime. Consider Ross Ulbricht, the former CEO of the Silk Road, an online marketplace for the sale of illegal drugs. As reported in The New Yorker, Ulbricht was serving two consecutive life sentences for his cybercrimes until he was pardoned on the second day of President Trump’s second term. He issued the pardon because, as he put it, Ulbricht is a member of the Libertarian Movement which supported the President "heavily", adding, “The scum that worked to convict [Ulbricht] were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me.” When votes are what counts, consumer protection, public safety, and the rule of law become casual collateral damage.
Then again, you might have a business leader who "manipulates those at the highest levels of government" by making a quarter of a billion dollars in presidential campaign contributions, earning him presidential permission to run an illegal government program, vulnerable to international hacker gangs, as an unelected government official. Consider Elon Musk (above), whose DOGE operation stole confidential personal data held by the Social Security Administration, without the consent of the owners of that data and without the consent of Congress, and then made that stolen data available to Palantir, a defense and intelligence contractor run by Peter Thiel (above), Musk’s former business partner.
The stated purpose of the illegal government program was to consolidate, cross-reference, and digitize the collected data across all government agencies with the goal of government efficiency and elimination of waste, fraud, and abuse. The program did none of that and it cost more than it alleged to have saved. This is an example of your government working through businessmen acting as unelected government officials ostensibly to represent your best interests, but along the way, knowingly or irresponsibly, they have made your private data accessible to international hackers from Iran, North Korea, and Russia, who are just as clever as they are.
But apart from these twofer examples of overlapping roles in the iron triangle, what if you had a business leader who is a corrupt government official involved in organized crime occupying each of the three sides? Then you would have a trifecta! A candidate for that triple crown of transnational crime who checks all the boxes is the President of the United States. Here’s the basis for his candidacy and where it gets interesting.
An investigative report by the New York Times, the fake news Trump loves to hate, lays down a trail of breadcrumbs outlining a previously unreported provision in the deal between El Salvador President Nayib Bukele and President Trump to deport illegal migrants from the U.S. to CECOT, the maximum security prison in El Salvador where Kilmar Abrego Garcia was mistakenly deported, in exchange for millions of dollars.
The little-known provision of the deal reported in the Times required that high-level MS-13 gang leaders under U.S. federal indictment or investigation be returned to El Salvador, allegedly “to face justice” in their home country. In reality, it appears that the real reason for the deportation is altogether different: Bukele wanted to prevent the gang members from testifying to a pact between Bukele and the gang.
According to the Times report, based on government documents and interviews with 30 people knowledgeable about the U.S. criminal investigations into the transnational gang or the El Salvador-U.S. relationship, the pact went like this. Bukele gave gang leaders on the street cash (sometimes siphoned off from USAID), and he provided mobile phones and prostitutes to gang members in prison. In exchange, MS-13 tamped down the homicide rate in the country and extorted votes for Bukele’s party.
What does that have to do with President Trump? Quite a lot, since he knew (or must have known) about the pact, making him an aider and abettor of a corrupt government official and a transnational criminal gang, in a transaction for money. Ding, ding ding! We have a winner.
The Times report, corroborated in more detail in ProPublica, tells us why Trump had to have known about the pact between Bukele and MS-13: The Trump Administration had begun to investigate the pact during his first term. From the Times:
In his first term [in 2019], Trump established a group of prosecutors and investigators known as Task Force Vulcan that brought expansive cases against MS-13. U.S. officials have had strong indications for years of the troubling relationship between the Bukele administration and MS-13 and its leaders — and had begun scrutinizing Mr. Bukele himself.
The man selected to oversee Vulcan was a scion of a Justice Department stalwart: John J. Durham, the son of John H. Durham [above], a longtime federal prosecutor…best known for having investigated the investigators who scrutinized connections between Russia and Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign.
The first Trump administration received a warning about the secret pact as early as August 2020 from a top Salvadoran official who showed up at the United States Embassy in San Salvador to share information.
Within months, Vulcan issued its first significant indictment against the highest reaches of MS-13’s leadership. In December 2020, prosecutors charged 14 men, including 10 who were part of the gang’s founding cadre, the 12 Apostles of the Devil. The indictment was unsealed on Jan. 14, 2021, less than a week before Mr. Trump’s successor, Joseph R. Biden Jr., was inaugurated.
The charging document revealed, among other acts of violence, that MS-13 had sought the murder of an F.B.I. agent. The agent had been assigned to El Salvador as part of an anti-gang task force helping Vulcan gather intelligence when the hit was put out on him, according to three people with knowledge of the case. He and his family had to be rushed out of the country.
The indictment also had a section titled “Political Influence in El Salvador,” which laid out how MS-13 leaders had helped secure votes for the party that governed El Salvador before Mr. Bukele took over, in exchange for cash and other perks.
The following year [during the Biden Administration, which continued Task Force Vulcan], the Treasury Department imposed sanctions on that same official and another top Bukele aide after determining they had offered MS-13 leaders money, mobile phones and prostitutes in jail in exchange for their help bringing down the homicide rate and securing votes.
During the Biden Administration, El Salvador consistently refused to extradite high-ranking MS-13 gang leaders to the United States, even going so far as to help them leave the country, making Durham’s investigations very difficult. Still, in February of 2023, Durham was able to arrest Vladimir Arévalo Chávez (below). And then suddenly, soon after Trump’s inauguration, the wheels came off the bus. From the Times report:
Known as “Vampiro,” [Arévalo] has been accused of overseeing killings in at least three countries: of migrants in Mexico, rivals in El Salvador and his own compatriots in the United States.
His arrest in February 2023 was a major triumph for American investigators, who only months earlier had accused him and 12 other gang leaders of terrorism, bloodshed and corruption in a wide-ranging federal indictment on Long Island.
But this April, the prosecutors who brought those charges suddenly — and quietly — asked a federal judge to drop them. Citing “national security concerns,” they said they needed to return Mr. Arévalo to El Salvador, his homeland.
The surprising reversal came shortly after a deal the Trump administration struck this year with Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s president, who agreed to accept more than 200 migrants expelled from the United States into a prison he built for terrorists.
The United States paid El Salvador millions of dollars to help President Trump carry out his deportation agenda, adding an important sweetener at Mr. Bukele’s request: the return of key MS-13 leaders in American custody.
ProPublica has even more details on this matter, but neither the Times nor ProPublica connect the most important dot to the Bukele-MS-13 pact: President Trump. So, let’s look closer at this deal.
What does Bukele get? He gets an estimated $6 million for accepting run-of-the-mill, undocumented migrants, PLUS the return of high-level MS-13 gang leaders, who will no longer present a risk of testifying about the MS-13 pact. Moreover, these potential witnesses are now available to be killed or disappeared so they will never threaten Bukele again.
What does Trump get? He gets a place to park deportees, making his immigration agenda look like it’s succeeding. But wait. Something isn’t quite right here. Trump is transactional, and according to the Art of the Deal, he always gets at least as good a deal, if not a better deal, than his counterparty. To me, in this deal on its face, Trump got less than Bukele got.
Or did he? Was there more to the trade than meets the eye?
This is pure speculation on my part, but we know that every foreign policy Trump promulgates, from tariffs to trade deals to weapons deliveries to Ukraine, to scraping Gaza and turning it into Disneyland on the Mediterranean, is transactional and monetized. So, what was available to be monetized here?
I’m going with cryptocurrency.
Criminals love it. Why?
Companies issuing cryptocurrencies and providing block chain services make much ado about the security and transparency of their transactions. That is misleading, because while each transaction on the block chain is made peer-to-peer without an intervening mediator (like a bank), is visible as a block on the chain, and can be “verified” by a series of computers (which is what bitcoin mining does), who is doing the transacting (known as the "wallet") is virtually anonymous.
The ownership of the wallets can be
determined only by extensive, sophisticated analysis of algorithms describing
the pattern and frequency of transactions to identify the wallets
involved. In other words, an analysis of
who is buying and who is selling crypto is feasible only by well-funded and well-staffed
law enforcement agencies. And the prosecution of illicit transfers discovered by law enforcement agencies cannot be effectuated without the cooperation of the judicial system. That makes
cryptocurrency extremely attractive to money launderers and other criminals. It is tailor-made
for the iron triangle.
Back to the hypothetical deal.
Trump is a loud cheerleader for cryptocurrency. He and family are heavy investors in crypto, starting with the meme coins $TRUMP and $MELANIA launched shortly before the second inauguration in a brilliant display of the President’s timing. He made a small fortune, while his buyers lost a lot of money when the coin’s value dropped like a hot rock.
Shortly after his second inauguration, the President announced he wanted to make America the bitcoin capital of the world and mused about the need to create a strategic national reserve of bitcoin, both of which announcements boosted the value of cryptocurrencies and not incidentally the value of his crypto holdings and those of his friends and fellow government officials, like Scott Bessent, Treasury Secretary, and Howard Lutnick, Commerce Secretary.
Surfing the crypto wave, the President’s sons next launched World Liberty Financial. It seems to be a trading platform, but its promo announcements mention crypto lending, too. What exactly the company does, as reported by Reuters, is murky at best:
World Liberty’s goal is to allow people to access financial services using cryptocurrencies and without intermediaries like banks in what is called decentralized finance, or DeFi. But it has yet to launch a public platform and has reported only a small staff, a review of the project shows.
Even so, World Liberty said in mid-March it had raised $550 million selling so-called governance tokens. Most of those sales took place after Trump’s election win in November, Reuters calculations show.
The tokens, which go by the symbol $WLFI, give holders the right to vote on changes to the project’s underlying code and to signal their opinion on its direction and plans. They cannot be traded.
Overall, the Trump family now has a claim on 75% of net revenues from token sales and 60% from World Liberty operations once the core business gets going. The arrangement means the Trump family is currently entitled to about $400 million in fees. After World Liberty's co-founders take their cut, the crypto venture will be left with 5% of the $550 million raised to date to build the platform, according to Reuters calculations.
The Trump Family sure knows how to make a buck out of thin air.
Now the Trump Family has moved into bitcoin mining. Don and Eric, Trump’s avatars, recently incorporated American Bitcoin, a merger between Hut 8 and American Data Centers, which was backed by the Trump Boys. After the incorporation, Gryphon Digital will acquire American Bitcoin in a stock for stock deal. At the end of all this convolution, the name of the company will be American Bitcoin and it will specialize in bitcoin mining.
Mining is a lucrative operation that makes money regardless of whether the value of a bitcoin rises or falls. A bitcoin miner operates a computer network that validates a block chain transfer of cryptocurrency between wallets. The cost charged by the miner to the wallets is a transaction cost, which is a form of rent not dissimilar to licensing one’s name to a hotel or a golf course. The licensor makes money on the branding, irrespective of the success of the underlying business. The miner makes money on validating the transaction, regardless of whether the trade made money for the wallets. It’s a great way to cash in without taking risk.
Like Trump, Bukele has his own meme coin, and he is a big fan of cryptocurrencies too. Per Wiki:
El Salvador became the first country in the world to use bitcoin as legal tender, after it was adopted as such by the Legislative Assembly of El Salvador in 2021. It has been promoted by Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, who claimed that it would improve the economy by making banking easier for Salvadorans, and that it would encourage foreign investment.
The adoption has been criticized both internationally and within El Salvador, due to the volatility of Bitcoin, its environmental impact, and lack of transparency regarding the government's fiscal policy. In 2024, El Salvador agreed to partially limit its involvement with Bitcoin as part of a deal made with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In March 2025 [Hmmm. Same time as the Trump-Bukele deal], The Economist wrote that El Salvador's bitcoin experiment had been a failure, bringing more costs than benefits to the El Salvador economy.
Some critics suggested that bitcoin's anonymity would make it easier to engage in money laundering and criminal activities. In particular, the potential use of Bitcoin to evade taxes, and in transactions related to transnational gangs and human trafficking in El Salvador was noted.
So, given two fervid crypto dudes playing at foreign policy, probably for their own accounts, what did Trump receive to sweeten the CECOT deal and at least even the score?
Did Trump get an emolument from Bukele in the form of the purchase of the meme coin $TRUMP? Or did Bukele trade some bitcoin on Trump’s trading platform World Liberty Financial, netting Trump a transaction fee? Or did he invest in Trump’s bitcoin mining operation? Or was it something else my law-abiding mind can’t conjure? I guess we’ll never know, unless Bukele or Trump touts it, as tyrants are wont to do, because what good is making the best corrupt deal ever if you can't brag about it?
And that is where a silver lining in this leaden story may lie. Corruption can come back and bite you in the ass. To quote Tyranny 101, a February 2017 essay about tyrants and corruption:
As his reign progresses, his pathology — grandiosity, aggression, paranoia, inner split (fragmentation), and disinhibition — grows. With time, his corruption too will become more apparent and eventually impossible to hide. And it’s usually the corruption rather than any of his inhumane and murderous policies, which are a given but easily overlooked when directed at The Others, that becomes a major factor in his collapse and that of his regime, as it will provoke jealousy and rage of both The People and his rivals eager to replace him.
Let’s hang on to that happy thought.
Keep it real!
Marilyn
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