Gee, Why Would The White House Want To Keep DHS From Seeing Andrew Tate's Computer?
Tate's former lawyer, that WH staffer with the 'Nazi streak,' asked DHS to leave his pal alone.
Last week, the White House finally found an official home for Paul Ingrassia, the deeply creepy lawyer who previously represented deeply creepy misogynists Andrew and Tristan Tate (for the 16 months he had been practicing law). He will now be serving as deputy general counsel at the General Services Administration, the agency that previously tried its darndest to keep Trump in power by refusing to let the Biden transition team get to work after he won in 2020.
As you may recall, the White House had initially tapped the 30-year-old newbie lawyer to run the Office of Special Counsel, but his name was withdrawn after leaked messages revealed him to be incredibly racist with what he described himself as “a Nazi streak.”
Not because they had a problem with this, mind you! They just thought they wouldn’t be able to get him through a senate confirmation hearing, as even some Republicans might not be too jazzed to spend their next re-election campaigns explaining why they supported the nomination of a guy who said that Martin Luther King Jr. Day ought to be “tossed into the seventh circle of hell.”
But what has he been doing all this time? Well, he’s been working as the White House liaison for the Department of Homeland Security. And what did he do as the White House liaison for the Department of Homeland Security?
Well, according to documents obtained by ProPublica, he immediately used his DHS powers help out his old pals, the Tate brothers. Because sure! Why not help out some accused sex traffickers?
As you probably know by now, both Andrew and Tristan Tate are facing sex trafficking charges in Romania (where they initially moved, Andrew Tate said, because they believed the government didn’t bother to investigate sex crimes) and sex trafficking and rape charges in the United Kingdom. After Donald Trump was elected, the Tate brothers were temporarily released from Romania to come to the United States, perhaps due to some intervention from the Trump administration. They landed in Florida back in February — whereupon customs agents seized their electronics for inspection.
Not long after, DHS officials received a message from Ingrassia telling them that the White House sure would appreciate it if they could just give the Tate brothers their items back and not inspect them at all. After all, without their electronics, how would Tate be able to record all of his riveting content about how men are amazing and women are stupid and should be ignored and physically assaulted?
Via ProPublica:
Interviews and records reviewed by ProPublica show a White House official told senior Department of Homeland Security officials to return the devices to the brothers several days after they were seized. The official who delivered the message, Paul Ingrassia, is a lawyer who previously represented the Tate brothers before joining the White House, where he was working as its DHS liaison.
In his written request, a copy of which was reviewed by ProPublica, Ingrassia chided authorities for taking the action, saying the seizure of the Tates’ devices was not a good use of time or resources. The request to return the electronics to the Tates, he emphasized, was coming from the White House.
Is this a normal thing for the White House to do? According to current and former DHS officials ProPublica spoke to, it very much is not.
“I’ve never heard of anything like that in my 30 years working,” said John F. Tobon, a retired assistant director for Homeland Security Investigations, which typically analyzes the contents of electronic devices after they’re seized by Customs and Border Protection. “For anyone to say this request is from the White House, it feels like an intimidation tactic.”
Because it is!
Ingrassia and his lawyer told ProPublica that absolutely none of this happened, which seems unlikely given that there is a paper trail.
“There was no intervention. Nothing happened,” Ingrassia told reporters. “There was nothing.”
“Mr. Ingrassia never ordered that the Tate Brothers’ devices be returned to them, nor did he say — and nor would he have ever said — that such a directive came from the White House. This story is fiction, simply not true,” Ingrassia’s lawyer, Edward Paltzik, said in a text message.
Again, there is a paper trail. There are multiple DHS officials who saw the directive and discussed it with reporters from ProPublica, there are screenshots of messages. There is no question that this happened.
Similarly, when questioned about the leaked messages sent by Ingrassia, Paltzik claimed they were fake, but if they were real, they were “clearly satirical.”
Which, you know, they weren’t.
“Looks like these texts could be manipulated or are being provided with material context omitted,” Paltzik wrote in a statement to Politico at the time.” However, arguendo, even if the texts are authentic, they clearly read as self-deprecating and satirical humor making fun of the fact that liberals outlandishly and routinely call MAGA supporters ‘Nazis.’”
Because what’s more self-deprecating than using old-timey racial slurs and disparaging Martin Luther King Jr.?
And how did Tate respond when his electronics were seized? By calling himself “one of the most innocent people on the planet” and then talking about how he doesn’t keep evidence of his crimes on his phone.
“You think I sleep with a phone full of evidence? You think I don’t wipe my phone every night? You think I’m dumb? Come get me,” he said, just like “one of the most innocent people on the planet” would say.
(It should not be lost on anyone that the Tate brothers have been charges with sex trafficking, and that messages and emails to and from sex traffickers have been something of a thorn in the administration’s side, as of late.)
One of the hallmarks of Trump and his acolytes is a fondness for gaslighting, for telling overt lies straight to people’s faces. My instinct is that it’s not that Ingrassia or his lawyer are lying because they are worried about anyone believing he would do such a thing, but rather because it is a fun game for them to play. They think they’re mischievous scamps and that there is nothing they can’t get away with, so long as they keep being just as terrible as Donald Trump.
They’re not entirely wrong about that. Trump has purposely put many random internet trolls into positions of power, because that is what he is into. He likes upending norms, he likes that he can put this racist twerp in the White House and no one can do anything about it. Just that he likes that he can call a reporter “piggy” or suggest that the murder of Jamal Khashoggi was justified because “not everybody liked him.”
The more shit these people get away with, the more norms they destroy, the more boundaries they push, the more they feel like they are #WINNING.
There will likely be no consequences for this, for Ingrassia, even if it is 100 percent proven that he is guilty. If anything, Trump will likely thank him for helping out his pals. At this point, it seems like the best we can hope for is that once Trump is out of office, all of the old norms revert back to being norms and we never have to hear from any of these people ever again.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
Op/ed Title:
𝐓𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐩𝐥𝐞 𝐓𝐫𝐮𝐦𝐩 𝐯𝐨𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐡𝐚𝐬 𝐟𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐡𝐚𝐝 𝐞𝐧𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡. 𝐘𝐨𝐮 𝐧𝐞𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐫 𝐡𝐢𝐦.
No.
No, I do not.
Fuck him.
Fuck him because, like the thousand others you want me to look at, when push comes to shove, they'll just vote for the next monster.
My take away from all of the current events is this: the Trump Administration really, really, REALLY likes sex trafficking.