I can’t be reached, only had one Tweet.

[edit: as a quick note this is in reference only to the public database, not the full info provided to numerous media outlets.]

This week the The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) provided the public with a large database consisting of both the scrubbed information from the Offshores Leak release a few years back combined with the equally-scrubbed data from the Panama Papers. The internet, much like that time it knew the identity of the Boston Bomber, was primed and ready for the challenge of assuming it knew what it was talking about and sharing its incorrect findings in a Brian Eno-like echo chamber. Before anyone gets too grumpy about that statement, let’s talk about why this data means something completely different than its popular interpretation.

We have a lot of ground to cover together before we get to that point so I’ll try to keep it interesting.

You look like a Clovis. Or a Foghorn.

The tale of Gorge Stephanopoulos

Pretend for a moment that I am a lawless bank robber that calls himself Gorge Stephanopoulos (because of my gorge-like emptiness that I must fill with both stolen money and puns I have to explain). I have been reasonably lucrative at robbing banks because I’ve got the whole bank robbing gig down more or less to an autopilot routine. Going to bed one night around the “We’re going to sleep angry” emergency landing stage of a marital dispute my wife says, “You went to all the work of changing your name to a political pun but no one knows who you are. No one looks at me and says, ‘Oh, it’s the wife of fearsome Gorge Stephanopoulos’ — you know my mother was right. I should have married Ross ‘Lobez’ Perot.” It’s my last thought going to bed and, when I wake up in the morning before my 9am robbery, I decide that everyone will know Gorge Stephanopoulos. I practice my speech during my hair wash. I get the Q&A about why I picked that name down while I lather myself with my wife’s peach-scented body wash because I am a lazy manchild. I arrive at the bank, announce my name, give my Team Rocket speech, and a few hours later I am arrested now that the world knows Gorge Stephanopoulos.

The reason I made you read through that is because it brings up a very valid question that, after reading amature synopsis after irrational conclusion, I felt the need to string along for a moment: if I am a criminal and I am good at what I do — why would I offer to place myself in a situation where someone could figure out that I (by name) am a criminal? To tie off the second portion of that thought: if my organization makes its money from ensuring that criminals can do criminal things, how good am I at my job if my client is one international subpoena away from being exposed? Offshore tax evasion is a series of (slowly) opening and (slowly) closing doors. The individuals who utilize that and offer it as a service have been doing this long enough to make their first two sons partners in Dick, Dick, and Dick Trust Inc. Searching for just the name of the person you hope did something bad isn’t going to work. At all.

Everyone tries to kill Hitler their first time

100% proof Donald Trump is bad. I’m not sure how. But that’s definitely his last name. Arrest him, officer.

I see you did a thing there. I’d actually like to reach out to the ICIJ at some point to ask if they have statistics on what the first search was for each first-time view IP. I don’t have to even have those numbers in front of me to tell you it’s ‘Trump’. Call me cocky. Call it a theory based on anecdotal hunches. Call it whatever you’re going to call it when you comment and say that your first search was actually Gorge Stephanopoulos. It’s still, by my analysis, correct.

The problem with just searching for Trump is that you’re not going to find anything personally damning in that search. This is Donald Trump’s 2015 FEC Financial Disclosure. Starting on page two, it lists the assets that Trump either owns or co-owns. That’s not quite what it states but hopefully anyone who would point that out understands this is the half dollar tour of a few multi-Benjamin topics.

That release isn’t as big of a list as it looks (zing) — really it’s just 11 pages of information stated and reiterated a few different ways. If you’ll notice, that’s enough companies to be considered a “pretty good” turnout if companies were attendees at a small music venue. Surely Donald, slithering through tax code like a nimble centipede, has used this tangled web of companies to hide his profits into offshore savings. How else will he purchase the explosives necessitated to deep-detonate the Yellowstone Caldera his first day of office — thus creating the lake of fire and a series of “Told you so” statements from fundamentalists. “Revelations was both literal and a metaphor, should have come to our potluck. Later, sinner: peace oooooout-” as they rise into the sky to get good seats to a live-action Walking Dead.

The problem is that being tied to a large number of shell companies isn’t immediately an indication of wrongdoing. After a week of trying to explain this and being called a plant for quite literally every candidate running, every party PAC, and once as a political operative for bankers — I’m going to make an effort to approach this a different way. I understand it’s an ad geekum use of rhetoric but I also need you to understand why part of this is functional.

I’ve made a huge mistake.

Help Computer; stop all the downloading

You hate your daily grind job and, one day sitting around drinking your day away at a bar, an older gentleman you’ve sort of bonded with over snarky political humor asks how hard it would be to build a new computer for him. You get an idea of what he’s coming from, what he’ll use it for, and his price cap and then you price everything out and come back with the list for approval. He approves, you build it, it works, you get $500 out of it for being trustworthy, your knowledge, and a few house calls. He tells a friend. You drive 45 minutes out there because it’s an emergency. She has a virus, it’s ransomware, and you’re pretty sure you can fix this. She watches everything you do while telling you how that computer is her life. Confident to save the day and get out of there before alcohol specials change, you say that you’ve got this and just need to type in the correct code at this point: you’ve seen many a g1bson and you’ll h@x0r this one like all the others. Except you mistype the code. It was written down correctly. You just fat-fingered it. And you’re now both watching as the data that was already BitCrypt’d is deleted.

The person behind you, now escalating in anger at an exponential rate while openly questioning why she let a Busch League tech address her problem for half the price, has a few options. She can come to the realization that data is data and, while those were the last and only pictures of her and her father before his abrupt and tragic death, we as humans hold too many mementos close to remind us of what we think we should remember versus experiencing life to make fresher memories. Or she could put together that she asked you to fix a thing, you assuredly said you could fix it, you totally screwed up, and that she’ll be at a financial loss due to this: then file a claim against you for damages.

Standing in court with confidence, because there’s no way anyone will decide against a guy who was just trying to help and make a little spare money on the side, the judge asks if the title on top of your first invoice — The Friendly Geek — is your company. You ramble off about how you thought it was a good name and that you’d like to look into making it a company one day. He rephrases. “Is The Friendly Geek a company that you own?” It is not. Should have made one of those evil shell companies in Delaware because now, instead of bringing this charge against The Friendly Geek LLC and its assets: it is against you and your assets. You were acting as an individual and not as a company. I’m not a subscriber to the concept of wholesale corporate personship; however, when a $15,000 wage loss suit isn’t resolved in your favor for an accident any one of us (myself included) could have made: limited liability structures ensure you do not get completely obliterated by a vengeful patron who just watched a very real parable about Best Practices in Backing Data Up unfold.

Now back to the centipede.

Fact: The word ‘nimble’ is used 92% of the time solely in nature documentaries.

A juicer is just a citrus reamer

Donald Trump isn’t a novice at business ownership or management. If you force yourself to objectively look at the situation, regardless of liking him or disliking him with or without irony, he probably knows how to structure something so that the doesn’t end up… say, bankrupt. Even if that happened a few times: you either pick up on best practices or hire someone who went to school where they learned them. Trump Citrus, an umbrella venture that manufactures Only The Best citrus reamers? Let’s make that an independent entity from Donald Trump — Trump Pulp and Reaming. Let’s say that the market is sort of back-and-forth for citrus reamers so sometimes there are occasional hangups that result in late payment which enrages the volatile Pulp Reaming puppet masters of this industry (PULPEC) and they threaten to file suit for rational complaints that can’t be helped due to market fluctuation. Maybe it’d be a good idea to put the effort into making your accounts payable arm into a partnered LLC. That’ll keep those pulp-lickers away from your patent pending reaming mechanism and a portion of your company’s assets.

There are a few jerk moves in this whole description. I’m not trying to place a halo on the concept of shells: offshore or local. There’s a whole series of cool liquidity moves that would allow Trump Pulp and Reaming to reallocate assets from one thing to another which isn’t tax evasion so much as “I guess you can win whatever I have left in this arm of my company in the event this suit is in your favor.” But let’s stay on point with one of the legitimate reasons one would want to have a shell versus getting into how just about everything can be used in a bad way if you are creative enough. Also, again, if you’re carefully crafting how things are a little more complex than I’ve stated: this is post attempting to cover a vast amount of information in the most digestible way possible without offering a business certification to print out at the end.

Back to the submission: this is why there are around 11 pages of things that Captain Don of the USS Ivanka runs (or are generally stable enough to list as successful things he ‘personally runs’). It’s a reasonably well-constructed architecture that progressively distances his assets from liability and then furthers the assets of the child accounts from liability as well. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that unless you want to personally blame each individual for their mistake, demand their personal assets, and watch business as a whole grind to a halt nationwide. But then we’d be living in an Ayn Rand book and I think we can all agree that there is something inherently wrong with that.

Ignoring how dumb it’d be to list an offshore asset in an FEC filing because “those folks in the liberal media” just won’t stop asking about it: this goes back to shouting your name before a robbery. There’s plainsight and then there’s stupid. If you’re going to handle weirdness in the public eye, you either unload the asset on a family member or have an entity serve as agent on your behalf.

Look at this perfectly legal shell organization that you wish you had searched for after ‘Trump’.

Registering in Delaware, Florida, Nevada, or even offshore is a pretty easy process and in most cases the information necessities are pretty loose. One series of rules in Delaware insists that a prerequisite for completion is listing at least one entity that knows the owner of the shell listed. What makes that kind of funny is that this agent doesn’t have to be a person. It can be a company or another shell — and that company or shell doesn’t have to know the name of the person at the center of the registration: it can just know the name of the company or shell that registered it. That’s both good and bad. It’s bad because… I mean, read through that last sentence. It creates a labyrinth.

Welcome to FEC.gov.

Then again, if I’m KidCo Toys and I’d like to diversify my portfolio by investing in and distributing both Hulk Fists and floppy-wobbly-sausage sex toys shaped like fists: it allows me to do that without a parent questioning what those Hulk Fists saw before leaving my distribution facility. “Psht. Did he just justify a use of this corporate evil by referencing a hypothetical situation with toy company for a one in a billion circumstance?” I did, hypothetical mental conversation with reader. If you want to discuss who owns what in an embarrassing way sometime: drop me a line so we can arrange a time when you have a whiteboard, three bottles of whiskey, and around five hours open. It’s kind of a mix between Glenn Beck before he started eating again, that Always Sunny episode where Charlie works in the mailroom, and NOVA.

MyBrowserWindowsRightNow.jpg

Can it be used for less than noble reasons? Of course it can. Almost every thing, concept, or law can be. Your toothbrush can also be a shiv: used for a Grand Theft Gorge killing spree. You have to be willing to process the legitimate purposes for a thing before jumping immediately to the conclusion that every time it is used it is for unlawful intent and that every person named is one of them there tax-evadin’ Wall Street types that us hur’ Main Streeters don’t take kindly to.

You can’t allow yourself to be so easily convinced that something you don’t fully have a grasp on is bad (always) simply because the AP Style Guide didn’t mention that bank laws (US and elsewhere) changed in a way that makes the use of ‘tax haven’ a reasonably disingenuous descriptor, or because some 19-year old with a Guy Fawkes mask and a copy of Adobe CS3 he grabbed from (*.)Torrents made a YouTube video that cites sources from a PasteBin, or because Nancy Grace already crocheted a noose for whoever she feels murdered a photogenic child that week and it’s a total bummer when you tell her a trial by media doesn’t count as judicial process. Like, baby seal eyes bummer.

An astronomical number of conveniently-your-view ‘news’ sites have popped up over the past 15 months with the single goal of using you, your voice, your share, and your friends to propagate subtle narrative changes. Worse yet, even if you vehemently disagree with the clickbait title: you’ll still share it telling everyone what a false narrative you just read and encouraging others to do so. If the battle theater of information is that cluttered in terms of signal-to-noise ratio: you’re going to need to start hitting publicly-available, searchable on-site or via Google (‘site:whatever.com’), primary “no really here’s the friggin law: I’m going to quote it to you before I hyperlink the quote” sources.

That isn’t a direct criticism; I’m likely preaching to a choir of all eleven people that made it this far; I totally realize that; but dang, watching this happen so flippantly because the narrative is convenient for your views is starting to go way off the map in terms of reasonable and anticipated actions.

The way that you always see the FedEx arrow? That’s how Nixonabee will be from now on for you.

So you’re saying Donald is playing by the rules?

Oh, God no. His camp is on television as I type this paraphrasing, “Mr. Trump refuses to show you his finances until you elect him. But since you all are all obviously concerned he isn’t as wealthy as everyone says, I’ll tell you: he is actually more wealthy than that.” What he’s doing in the action of stalling proves that the information will either be hard to spin or it contradicts his FEC filing. Especially if his broadcast nodes are already suggesting that, were it to be released, all you need to do is look at the number in Box 13 on the first page of a 300 page filing. That may be released at least seven months from now. In the event we elect them. If they feel like releasing it. When we get tired from winning.

On top of (murky thing that probably isn’t that bad but has obviously been flagged as something an opponent could use as a cornerstone for a very uncomfortable talking point for at least three news cycles or two weeks), it’ll likely also show that Donald isn’t as inherently charitable as he has stated: at least from his personal assets. Almost all of donations orbiting around Trump push from the Donald J. Trump Foundation, his 503. With that in mind, understand that somewhere between one and two-thirds of the donations he talks about are actually payouts from The Apprentice.

When I pretend you’re talking to me using a weak narrative technique, I imagine us like this.

“But you can’t search his personal filing! How do you know he didn’t donate from DJT Foundation and his personal assets? Did George Sorros put you up to this? Do you write for KOS, FreeRepublic, or Snopes? Speak you shill!”

Why would I wait on the formal filing that will likely never be released, in terms of checking for charity donations, when I can just aggregate pretty much every 990 submission from pretty much every 503(c)(3) charity provided to the government (because they’re required to)? I understand that it isn’t the official list but these PDFs are indexed, online, available, and you’re a few BUT/OR/AND/site: strings away from pretty much pulling a single search with every donation a 503 itemized from Trump. Don’t call it official, explain how you pulled the information, it’s still a primary source.

I guess what I am saying is that I’m glad we’re having this talk.

Wait.

Do you guys hear that rumble under the eart-… like a thousand angels just sighed at onc-…

Oh my God, Emma Watson is in trouble.

I AM HERE AT YOUR SERVICE M’LADY I AM SORRY IT TOOK SO LONG I NEEDED MORE VAPE JUICE

White Knights in White Satin

I’ve never seen a Harry Potter movie nor have I read the books. Also the aggregate of my erotic fantasies revolve around fetish concepts like “the cute secretary at work says good morning as I walk to the office at a job that challenges me and I find reward in utilizing my talents” versus a Deus Ex Cadavra run-in where a question about a panel location turns into locating a hidden horcrux. I really don’t know what either of those two references mean past Wikipedia. The point I’m getting at is that I don’t know or care about Emma Watson past a global conference she spoke at recently. And that my masturbatory fantasies are intricately detailed and profoundly depressing.

Now the internet demands an answer. Why has the Queen Witch of Potion Stuff [ed: she does potions, right?] flipped her middle finger at not only fan base, not only at the hardworking taxpayer, but JK and The Queen Mother, herself? Public record and creepers, mostly.

If I’m a celebrity and I want to buy property but I want to make the guy selling Maps to the Stars maps work for my address through word of mouth and stalking the mailman versus being able to just pull up the parcel owner (thanks Internet), it would be in my best interest to purchase that property through a shell if I want to remain anonymous. I get that it’s a far more tantalizing concept to imagine a celebrity looking to ensure those sweet and delicious Potter dollars aren’t touched by the Taxation is Theft Nintendo Hand of Government: but that immediate and uninformed emotional snap-judgement conclusion is why publications like Weekly World News exist. Because it isn’t substantiated, doesn’t take into account that those profits are likely already declared even though it wasn’t used for profits, that the house purchased was paid off including land tax, and the single premise it uses is “Look, I found a name. This is a name we know.”

Let’s look at the structure for a second.

SHOULD EMMA BUY A HOUSE THE WORLD CHIMES IN ON THIS IMPORTANT ISSUE

This structure shows that a Trust in Jersey, on behalf of a client, requested an offshore shell be created with the requesting party being the sole shareholder. At a real address. Using their real name. Something you’d really only do if one layer of protection was fine. If I had to guess, and I’m just throwing this out there, it’s probably named Falling Leaves LLC because the home is on Falling Leaves Rd/Ln/Ave/Ct/Name of the complex/whatever. That’s a guess versus one of those “I’m calling it a guess but actually being cocky” statements.

Considering the results of your first ‘Trump’ query lacking anything easily linkable to Donald Trump, what’s more likely: someone used a third party to make an unimaginatively-named shell to proxy-buy a house that appropriate taxes have been paid on while using their actual name which they didn’t have to use — or you’re looking at the sloppiest effort ever made to hide dollars that don’t need to be hidden in a place that doesn’t really generate interest and created in a way where one breach of one dataset exposes your client immediately.

Really mull that answer around for a second.

If you still want to pretend your Sherlock moment of typing in a famous person’s name, pressing enter, and seeing that same last name in a list somehow entitles you to a signed photo of Ed R. Murrow’s never-mentioned but always suspected pierced nipples: you and I need to collaborate on the POTUS’s involvement in Ashley Madison since President@Whitehouse.gov was an email address listed that some person creating a burner account typed in. Which is almost the exact same concept: shells can also be burner accounts used because you just wanted to see the pictures on forum.

Man, how did The Intercept miss that Obama-Madison revelation. Someone call Greenwald. And send this when you talk to him because I’m too embarrassed.

I still have our Best Investigative Journalist Friends Forever bracelet, Glenn.

You’re searching the data like you understand how, why, what reasons, and with what structure someone sets up a thing that can take several forms. Someone posted yesterday on r/PanamaPapers that “Reagan Foundation” is listed as one of the companies. “Good catch,” says one reply. They typed in a name and pressed enter. A monetary component that wouldn’t be named after Ronald (if representing his posthumous interests for dark money), wouldn’t be linked to him by name due to lawyers knowing what they’re doing and no one daring to sully the Gipper’s name, but definitely has five letters arranged the same way as the last name of a former president.

Good catch, gumshoe. On to the next round where we watch you forget the name of every country in Africa.

Looks like you’re walking home with the encyclopedia set, Robby. Disney World is for closers. Not little racists that focused on Europe. This is going to be all over Tumblr.

That’s data pareidolia. It’s OK to say, “I didn’t fully understand what I was looking at because the explanations online are pretty sparse past ELI5.” Because that wasn’t a good catch. That wasn’t investigative. And unless you’re throwing a theory out on why what you’re looking at is bad, you’ve demonstrated little more than the ability to input and post on The Internet.

Pretty much nothing with three nodes and no further connections is the strong base you’ll need to pin an action, discrepancy, accusation, or wrongdoing upon.

Let me phone in a structure I already had a portion of information about from a dataset I was King CSV of many years ago and, conveniently, already took screenshots of to attach to my “CALLED IT. TOTALLY CALLED IT.” email to an old friend.

Say the word Enron. When did you last say that word? God, you’re old.

Since I’m likely running low on both our attention spans and items I wanted to clarify and address in this particular Steaming Stephanopoulos, I’ll keep it brief. One entity pulls up under Enron and it’s an entity that was difficult to nail down back in the early 2000’s when the internet collectively lost its mind as the entire Enron email database was released and we all learned what members of middle management had bets on nailing interns.

One of many offshore money mills was set up, they were using a number of different registrant groups (so that learning about one wouldn’t blow the whole thing), they were using names that you wouldn’t be looking for (although Mohd and Azizul Yunus have a very interesting past if you’re willing to read through a lot of translated Arabic), and the same two individuals also created a company using the same address: “Hanwah Finance LTD” — a company that doesn’t exist anywhere on the internet other than this dataset and that was conveniently named after one of South Korea’s largest energy firms: Hanwha. Guess you should have learned the difference between your money going to Hanwah in Malasya and Hanwha in South Korea.

Additionally the address is misspelled.

15 JALAN TEBING LIMA 8E SEKSYEN 8 40000 SHAH ALAM SELANGOR MALAYSIA doesn’t exist because, and I appreciate a decade of decoding Chinglish for use when writing English consumer electionics manuals that no one ever read before calling in to have it read to them: ‘Seksyen’ is ‘Section’.

Thankfully the location this operation is being run from instills knowledge that it is being handled by a number of professiona-

oh.

I’d be happy to detail why terms like ‘Tax Haven’ are a distortion of the truth due to a number of rules, how these structures can be used to make payment on capital gains a little lighter, and Glenn Greenwald’s answer to my steamy love note; however, I’m at the last half-if-not-quarter of this story’s news cycle and I wanted to push this Stephanopoulos out of my Brocktopus before it went totally stale.

Literally me.

You have a noodle on your shoulders that can process fact and detail with a remarkable throughput. Don’t waste your noodle grabbing a pitchfork when you could equally spend way too much time writing a dumb thing few people will read on Medium.

❤.