Zoë Schiffer: Our colleague, Dell Cameron, reported that according to the findings, the 2,000 total files include people who’ve actually never been formally charged with a crime, and about 95 minors. There were also dozens of cases where CBP agents left the charges field blank in the paperwork. In other files analyzed by Georgetown, officers invoked civil penalties as the justification for taking the saliva swabs, which were how they were getting the DNA samples, that federal law typically reserves for criminal arrests.
Jake Lahut: Oh, and this is a recurring theme with Dell’s reporting, but it’s hard to separate a lot of this stuff from basic things we gave up in terms of personal liberties, the ability of law enforcement to collect all sorts of evidence after the war on terror. And suddenly, you end up in a situation like this, where it’s unclear what anyone can really do about it.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, I think that that’s the issue, is just we don’t exactly know what they’re doing with this information because it does appear, at least according to this report, to be taking place outside the confines of the statute and there isn’t a lot of oversight. And so we just don’t know, and I think that that’s the problem. Turning to the White House, President Trump appears to have a new favorite billionaire, and this headline comes from your reporting. You wrote this week about tech billionaire, Larry Ellison’s increasingly cozy relationship with President Trump. In your piece, one of your sources even refers to Ellison as the shadow president, which really stuck out to me because I feel like that’s a term we typically have reserved for Elon Musk. So, talk to me about how these two men got this close.
Jake Lahut: So, that’s the interesting thing about Ellison, is that he’s sort of been orbiting on the periphery of Trump world for a while. He used to be a really reliable supporter of Democrats. Now notably, even though he is a centibillionaire, he’s always actually been a little stingy as far as the donations go, of someone of his caliber. He’s not like Elon, pumping $300 million into a campaign. But his transformation starts around the Obama era, where the former president’s relationship with Bibi Netanyahu starts to deteriorate. Ellison is a very staunch supporter, not just of Israel and the Israeli government, but particularly the IDF and the Israeli military, and he starts to become a more reliable donor for Republicans. So, I have a source who knows the Ellison family telling me in this story that about 10 years ago, Larry Ellison was going around telling people that he wanted Marco Rubio to be president.
Zoë Schiffer: Oh, wow.
Jake Lahut: In the 2024 primary, he backs Tim Scott, which seemed like, OK, you’re supporting a rival of President Trump’s, that should make you persona non grata. Turns out, a lot of Trump advisors, and they were telling me this at the time during the campaign, they thought Larry Ellison supporting Tim Scott was actually basically a favor for them, and he was pledging a lot of money. How much of it actually ended up with Super PAC supporting Tim Scott, separate story. But essentially, Tim Scott was like an insurance policy in the event that the primary was closer and it got drawn out and people like Ron DeSantis and particularly Nikki Haley would’ve still been around, both Tim Scott and Nikki Haley are from South Carolina. So then he kind of comes in with the rest of the tech guys over the summer, and the difference with Ellison is that one, he kind of has eyes and ears everywhere, is what I hear from people who are familiar with how he operates. He doesn’t use donor advisors and a whole entourage to give him the lay of the land with politics. Instead, he likes to scout his own candidates, and he’s made some early bets on people who were in the Trump Administration. Most notably, he was an early donor and fundraised for Tulsi Gabbard back when she was a Democrat. Perhaps uncoincidentally, Larry Ellison owns 98% of the Hawaiian island of Lanai among other flashy purchases he has made. So at this point, with the Oracle server business, it allows him to fly a little under the radar because servers and software as a service, not really the most sexy business compared to a lot of these other guys who are around Trump. And then you add in his son, David, who is running the Skydance parent company of Paramount, which might also acquire Warner Brothers, Discovery. That means the Ellison family wouldn’t only be in control of CBS and all these entertainment properties, but also potentially CNN. And suddenly, when you zoom out, you’re looking at a family that has begun to consolidate in the areas of data and human attention in the way that a Gilded Age family like the Vanderbilts or the Rockefellers would’ve done for railroads and oil. So, it was a really fascinating piece to report on just in terms of how Ellison doesn’t even necessarily need to say things to Trump to make things happen. He’s just that well-connected, you know?
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