Top Trump Priority Sees Wave of Support. There's Just One Catch. | The New Republic
Category: News & Politics
Via: hal-a-lujah • 3 months ago • 10 commentsBy: Hafiz Rashid (The New Republic)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
President Donald Trump's plan for moving Americans' retirement investments into cryptocurrency and private equity got a boost of support—from dead people.
The Department of Labor received public comments on the plan to fulfill Trump's executive order pushing for the financial changes, and close to 12,000 of the comments, all in support, show signs of being fabricated, with several being attributed to people who aren't alive. These comments don't include email addresses, the commenter's city and state, or signatures, Bloomberg reported Thursday.
Bloomberg attempted to contact some of supporters on the list, many of whom had unique names identifiable through public records, and found people who said they never made the comments attributed to them, or were dead. One comment made in May and attributed to Danna Oderman was clearly fake, her son Heath Oderman told Bloomberg, not only because she died in December, but because "the language is nothing she would ever have used while on this Earth."
Another May submission shows Lyngrid Rawlings supporting the president's plan, but the educator and U.S. Foreign Service officer died in 2024, her daughter Lauren told the publication.
"It's deeply disrespectful and dishonoring," Lauren said. "Her life was about service, and to have her name misused in this way is the antithesis of everything she lived for."
Living people also had comments falsely attributed to them, including Karl Gilberson, a retired Massachusetts professor, who said to Bloomberg that "those don't reflect my sentiments, at all."
All of these comments followed just five templates and were submitted from April 29 to May 5. The names differed, but line breaks, length, and punctuation were all identical, according to Bloomberg's findings. They also happen to make up the vast majority of supportive comments. In contrast, almost all 30,000 comments opposing the measure were spread out across the nine-week comment period and included differing language, email addresses, and signatures, as well as cities and states.
The plan was submitted as a draft rule to the Employee Benefits Security Administration on March 31, and has support from the private equity industry as well as other private sector industries. It seems that some entity or person who really wants American retirement accounts diversified into the private sector decided to manufacture support. The Trump administration considers the measure a top priority, with acting Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling telling senators in July that "this is how President Trump is going to make America wealthy again."
But they don't seem that concerned about fake comments. The Department of Labor's "focus when reviewing a comment is on the substance of the comment and not on the identity of the commenter or the number of commenters making the same point," a spokesperson told Bloomberg.
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Because of course Trump’s horrible ideas need overwhelming fake support.
gee, what a coincidence. trump wants to put the treasury into crypto and he and his sons have a new crypto bank ...
This is clearly felony fraud
maga!
Trump is a crook by nature and practice and a lot of his underlings want to help him be a sucessfull one.
He gets a taste of every transaction he plays a role in, no different than what a mafia boss expects. It’s all in your face and enabled by his criminal enterprise. When the House turns prepare for a nonstop hose of gasoline to be aimed at this dumpster fire administration.
Wait... If you can sign a petition shouldn't you be allowed to vote?
He’ll probably use this deceit later as a prop that magically proves voter fraud is rampant.
Yea, no doubt.
it's fun to watch maga scum conflate voter registration errors with actual voter fraud, which republicans commit 95% of ...