Remember the fake story about illegal immigrants in a luxury hotel?
It was used as a pretext for El0n to steal $80 million dollars from NYC's Citibank account
https://www.crisesnotes.com/can-the-trump-administration-arbitrarily-take-money-from-anyones-bank-account/On February 11, 2025, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), an agency housed in the Department of Homeland Security, removed $80.5 million from New York City’s main bank account, which is an account with Citibank. Well, that’s not exactly accurate. They “debited”, the financial way of referring to “subtracting”, New York City’s “central treasury account” for 80.5 million dollars. According to public statements by Brad Lander, New York City’s comptroller, this could only be covered by a line of credit facility to the tune of 79.5 million dollars. In short they, in essence, sent New York City’s main bank account to negative 79.5 million dollars. Citibank kindly agreed to forgive the overdraft fee. On February 18th a FEMA branded letter authored by Cameron Hamilton, a person described in the letter as a “Senior Official Performing the Duties of the [FEMA] Administrator”, was sent to the New York City Office of Management and Budget. The letter explained that the money was “clawed back” because of a range of claims about illegal activity which the New York Post alleged took place in the hotels the city paid to put Venezuelan refugees in. I can’t really communicate to readers what this letter reads like, so I will simply quote an important paragraph to provide the “flavor”:
The Department of Homeland Security has significant concerns that SSP funding is going to en ies engaged in or facilitating illegal activities. For example, a substantial portion of your award goes to funding alien housing at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City. According to media reports, the vicious Venezuelan gang Tren De Aragua has taken over the hotel and is using it as a recruiting center and base of operations to plan a variety of crimes. According to these same reports, these crimes include gun and drug sales as well as sex trafficking, which can reasonably be presumed to be conducted in the hotel itself. One of the groups responsible for these activities refer to themselves as “diablos de la 42,” which means the devils of 42nd St., a street near where the Roosevelt Hotel is located. DHS/FEMA has a responsibility to ensure that it does not make payments that fund criminal activity.This justification for denying congressionally appropriated funds is extremely legally dubious. This justification for “reversing” the disbursement of already disbursed funds is far beyond legally dubious. It brings up profound and basic issues about the functioning of our society which I will unpack throughout the rest of this article.
tl;dr
Trumplandia is abusing agency rulemaking authority to alter finality of payments through ACH to punish disfavored recipients of grants and appropriations
Messing with payment systems can have catastrophic effects in the wider economy
Which brings me back to ACH. Given the complexity, and relative obscurity, of this area of law and the immense amount of reporting and research I already had to do for this story, I decided to commission a full length legal memo- similar to the legal memos a staff attorney at a financial regulatory agency or white shoe law firm might produce- on the “Federal Government Use of the Automated Clearing House System”. The attorney I commissioned, Ashley Burke, did an excellent job and I have uploaded “Notes on the Crises Legal Memorandum No. 1”to my website to make it widely available and free to anyone who is in need of detailed legal analysis in this suddenly crucial area of law. Ashley is, of course, not responsible for any of the claims I make in this article and can’t attest to the accuracy or reliability of my reporting. Nor can her memo be construed as legal advice.
Recognizing the importance of payment finality, the National Automated Clearing House Association has promulgated rules in this area. Meanwhile, the laws congress has passed about ACH payments are broad and vague. However, as Ashley lays out in her legal memo, Nacha rules can and are currently superseded in a variety of ways by what is called “agency rulemaking”. Generally speaking, when congress passes laws that are subject to varying interpretations- and when is law not subject to varying interpretations?- administrative agencies engage in the “rulemaking” process to “interpret” the law for practical use by government, businesses, civil society and the world at large.
This “agency discretion” over interpreting the law is the core of the “administrative state” that right wing think tanks say they are aiming to destroy. Yet in this situation, they may begin to use discretion in interpreting payments law to fundamentally undermine the reliability of payment finality and capriciously “take back” or even “take” from groups and people they disfavor. Thus, there is nothing in payments law that provides a clear or unambiguous check on the Trump administration’s actions if they decide to reinterpret payment statutes in order to weaponize the Federal Government’s legal authority over the ACH system.
It is hard to explain how explosive degrading- let alone destroying- the legal reliability of payment finality is. Mark Flood, a research scholar at the Center for Financial Policy at University of Maryland with two decades of financial regulatory & policy experience in Federal Government tells me:
Uncertainty about payment finality has the potential to degrade insidiously the performance of the financial system. If there is generally a nonzero chance that even settled payments might be reversed, then the most liquid of assets (cash balances) could lose reliability and therefore value: $1 of 'cash in the bank' may no longer be regarded as worth $1.Along similar lines, A former Federal Reserve Lawyer tells me:
Our monetary system depends on a strong concept of payment finality. Exceptions must be reserved for only truly extraordinary cases. From what I understand of the facts of this case this is not an extraordinary situation. Reversing of final payments, in a stable financial system, should never be in the ordinary course of business”These quotes may read as subtle to many lay readers. I can tell you that to payment experts- , as a payments expert- these quotes make our eyes widen with alarm. Part of what I have been trying to accomplish with my reporting these past six weeks is to serve as a translator for the panic many experts truly feel, but do not feel at liberty to express openly.
in principle, El0n/Trump could with anyone's bank account
So could Biden and the Magic Negro.
But they didn't, can you guess why not?
That is certainly a worry.
Since they have ceased actively going after the russian mafia, who are responsible for a lot of ransomware, and they are holding all sorts of data in some really unsecure servers, it is a matter of time before some enterprising mafioso or hacking group hits it.
El0n hired black hat hackers for his supposed forensic audit directed by the president, allegedly
if Trumplandia can debank immigrants with lawful SS numbers by declaring them "dead", it can debank anyone else that it wants to
College students who support the wrong ideas, or people who criticize Trump in the media for example
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/10/u...rity-doge.html
Boiled down:::"I'm President...and their not."
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