By Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst
This is Naked Capitalism fundraising week. You know the drill by now: the tin cup, the gratitude, the tasteful reminder that independent journalism does not run on the warm glow of your approval.
What follows is not that. What follows is a hostage situation, and the hostage is your retinas.
TOP SECRET // NAKED // NOFORN // ORCON HANDLING: Eyes Only. Disseminate as widely as humanly possible. Destroy after donating.
Let me be direct, because sentimentality is for blogs with worse commentariats.
I have a folder.
It lives on a thumb drive, the thumb drive lives in a drawer, and the drawer lives in a location I will be disclosing to neither you, the FBI, nor the Secret Service. The folder is labeled, in my own trembling hand, DO NOT OPEN. Inside are photographs — highresolution, unretouched, uncorrected for the merciful dishonesties of studio lighting — of Donald J. Trump as nature, gravity, and roughly eight decades of well-done steak have jointly arranged him. Corpulent. Unbound. Commander-in-Chief in the round. The
full Rushmore, so to speak, minus the granite and the dignity.
You do not want me to open the folder. I do not want to open the folder. In the entire sweep of recorded human desire, nothing has ever been wanted less than you want me to open this folder. And that, dear reader, is exactly why it is worth money to you, meaning going to the Tip Jar now.
Consider the position of the subject himself. Here is a man who has litigated over an unflattering camera angle, who regards the wrong lighting as a form of treason, who has spent a lifetime and an unknowable sum of money constructing a bronzed, architecturally ambitious public façade — the hair engineered like a suspension bridge, the spray-tan demarcation line where aspiration meets the jaw. This is precisely the individual for whom the unedited truth is the cruelest possible weapon. I am not proposing to lie about him. I am proposing something far worse: to show him to you accurately.
A word on provenance, since a discerning readership will ask. I spent a long stretch of my life at the Central Intelligence Agency, where one learns a number of durable habits, chief among them that a professional never burns a source and never explains a method. I intend to honor that training in full, right up until it becomes financially inconvenient.
How the folder reached me is, I regret to inform you, a matter of sources and methods — and sources and methods are sacred. I will carry the particulars to my grave, or failing that, to roughly the fourth donation tier.
What I am able to confirm, in broad strokes and with the requisite black bars, is that the folder came to me by way of a ██████ ████ outside a ████████ in ████████████, after six hours of dry-cleaning to shed a two-man surveillance detail who are, I am pleased to report, still standing on that corner. It changed hands exactly once, at a dead drop I will characterize only as ███████████████████. I have since sat for a polygraph on the entire affair. I passed. I have failed polygraphs before — on smaller matters, matters of the heart — but never on this.
I am cleared to disclose one further detail: the folder arrived as a single loose page tucked inside a much larger box, the very
box this administration has moved heaven, earth, and several abruptly-unemployed federal officials to keep sealed. The conventional wisdom holds that the President wants that particular archive buried for the reasons the entire commentariat breathlessly assumes.
I am here to propose a more charitable theory, and a far crueler one: he wants it sealed because of this photograph. Not the company he kept. The lighting he kept it in. Picture the scene — a man lying awake in a vault somewhere, losing sleep not over the guest list but over the exposure settings, prepared to torch a Justice Department rather than let the Republic see him in unflattering three-quarter profile. Vanity, not conspiracy. It would be almost poignant if it were not so eminently monetizable.
So here is how this works. Think of it less as a donation and, in the honored tradition of American public broadcasting, more as a ransom. See the Tip Jar to your right?
$25 keeps the folder closed for one more blessed day.
$100 restores tasteful digital blurring to one (1) additional region of the composition.
$250 and the file gets renamed to something innocuous, like “Q3_expenses.xlsx,”
where no one will ever look.
$500 and the drive goes into the burn bag, the burn bag goes into the incinerator, and I
stand there humming until there is nothing left to subpoena.
$1,000 and I forget the folder ever existed — which, I am advised by counsel, is the only
assurance I am legally able to offer.
(Per standard practice, the material is subject to automatic declassification in twenty-five years, at which point the subject will be ██ and the entire question academic. Donate now. Posterity is not a reliable partner, and neither, frankly, is my willpower.)
I recognize the ethical texture here is unusual for a fundraiser. Public radio merely threatens to keep asking. We have chosen to threaten you with the sublime. It is, if you squint, a more honest arrangement: at least you know what you’re buying.
And now the part where I ruin my own leverage, because this is Naked Capitalism and Yves insists we traffic in truth at rates the rest of the internet finds frankly eccentric.
There is no folder.
Probably.
What is actually being held hostage — the thing you would miss far more than your composure — is the site itself. A place that reads the OCC’s conditional charter letter so you don’t have to. That treats “dollar dominance” as a beat rather than a bumper sticker. That will tell you the diesel crack spread cleared $106 and precisely who is pocketing the difference, in plain declarative sentences, sourced, before your broker has finished his second coffee. A place with the peculiar and increasingly illegal habit of being right, and showing its work.
That is the genuinely naked thing on offer here — not the President, but the finances, the war math, the quiet machinery of who gets rich while the rest of us are handed a shortage and told to be grateful. It doesn’t fund itself. It funds itself, specifically,
through you, right now, in this pledge drive, via the mechanism to your right.
So give. Give because the work matters, because another world is possible, and because somewhere a man in a very long red tie is counting on your indifference.
Don’t make me open the folder.
The Tip Jar is right there. You know what to do.
(You give here. And thank you — the community that gathers in these comments is the least clothed, most honest room on the internet, and it is worth every dollar it costs to keep the lights on.)
████████████ // DOWNGRADED TO UNCLASSIFIED upon receipt of your donation. This appeal will not self-destruct. Your window of leverage, however, will.
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