Sep. 23, 2024: Broke Assassin Offered $150k Bounty for Trump

Fireworks in Lebanon; Rob Malley, phishing victim; Man who thinks everything is racist concludes Israel is racist

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The Big Story

The would-be Trump assassin, Ryan Wesley Routh, left a letter offering a $150,000 bounty to anyone who could murder the former president, according to a written factual proffer filed by the Department of Justice on Monday. 

According to the DOJ, Routh included the letter in a box of materials that he dropped at the home of an unnamed civilian witness months prior to the attempted assassination. The proffer includes an image of the first page of the letter, which we’ve transcribed here:

Dear World,

This was an assassination attempt on Donald Trump but I am so sorry I failed you. I tried my best and gave all the gumption I could muster. It is up to you now to finish the job; and I will offer $150,000 to whomever can complete the job. Everyone across the globe from the youngest to the oldest know [sic] that Trump is unfit to be anything, much less a U.S. president. U.S. presidents must at minimum embody the moral fabric [sic] that is America and be kind, caring and selfless and always stand for humanity. Trump fails to understand any of …

While Routh was known to be angry over what he perceived to be Trump’s Ukraine policy, the DOJ puts a special focus on his outrage on behalf of Iran. According to the filing, Routh writes later in the letter that Trump “ended relations with Iran like a child and now the Middle East has unraveled”— suggesting, among other things, that he was not a reader of The Scroll. The filing also notes that in his self-published book, Routh gave Iran permission to “assassinate” Trump for withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal.

Routh appears to have been contemplating the assassination for some time. Police found in his car a “handwritten list of dates in August, September, and October 2024 and venues where the former president had appeared or was expected to be present”; the DOJ further explained that on “multiple days” between Aug. 18 and Sept. 15, Routh’s cell phone accessed towers near the Trump International Golf Club and Trump’s residence in Mar-a-Lago. The location that he chose to stake out was particularly well-suited for the job, offering an unobstructed view of the sixth hole from close range. As we noted on Friday, a Secret Service whistleblower informed Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) that the location where Routh was discovered had been identified in advance as a security vulnerability and that it had been standard protocol to post agents there when the former president was golfing—a protocol that was ignored the day of the attempted assassination.

The bounty is also curious, to say the least. It could, of course, simply be bullshit, from a man who all reports indicate was a serial bullshitter. As we reported last week, Routh’s former business partner claimed that Routh frequently refused to pay his employees, so perhaps he was offering money he didn’t have. But Routh’s entire history with money is strange. Most reports suggest he was serially broke. According to reporting from the Daily Mail, he was ordered to pay $32,000 in back taxes by the IRS in 2008, and he was hit with more than “$160,000 in liens, judgments, and small claims” in North Carolina. In 2009, his ex-wife ceased requesting child support out of concern for his “financial situation.” The New York Times reported that in mid-2023, Routh claimed to be living in his car and to have only $68 in his bank account, and yet he was able to afford near-constant overseas travel, including to Ukraine, Taiwan, Poland, and Turkey. 

Routh claimed that his wife was funding his efforts in a June 2023 interview with U.S. Customs and Border Protection. But his wife, or fiancée, Kathleen Shaffer, who is listed as the editor of Routh’s self-published book, works at a “local hardware store” in Oahu, Hawaii, according to the New York Post. She nevertheless owns “several properties” in the St. Louis area, according to a report from the local news channel First Alert 4, and the two lived together in a house in Hawaii valued at $890,000, again per the Post. 

Routh did reportedly earn some money—about $174,000—from the sale of his North Carolina home earlier this year, and perhaps Shaffer has family money or some other source of income we don’t know about. Still, the whole thing is strange, and that’s not even getting to Routh’s seemingly miraculous ability to avoid both jail time, despite more than 70 arrests, and government scrutiny, despite being flagged as a security threat to multiple federal agencies. 

What does it all add up to? We’re not sure—other than that the story is deeply weird, and getting weirder.

IN THE BACK PAGES: Eitan Fischberger on the newest darling of U.S. journalism awards: PFLP propagandist Bisan Owda

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The Rest

→The Israeli Air Force continued to pound southern Lebanon on Monday, striking more than 300 targets in what one Israeli analyst described as an attempt to neutralize Hezbollah’s long-range missile arsenal. These strikes follow a weekend of heavy bombardment, with the Israeli military announcing Sunday that it had struck about 290 targets in Lebanon in the previous 24 hours. In a Monday statement, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel was trying to “change the balance of power in the north” by eliminating Hezbollah’s rockets and missiles. Lebanon’s health ministry is currently claiming that nearly 300 people have been killed and that Israel is targeting “medical centers and ambulances.” So there’s no doubt we’ll hear plenty of hand-wringing in the coming days about Israel’s targeting of “civilian infrastructure.” The problem with that line is that blowing up civilian infrastructure doesn’t typically cause hundreds of secondary explosions unless you’re dropping a bunker buster on Sky King Fireworks, home of the “Big Wick Energy” 500-gram repeater:

→While dramatic, these Israeli operations appear to be remaining within U.S. red lines. Various White House officials have issued warning against “escalatory actions” (Antony Blinken) and “escalating this military conflict” (John Kirby) and sparking a “wider war” (Joe Biden), but the Israelis have thus far insisted that the increased tempo of strikes is not a prelude to any wider operation. Unnamed Israeli officials told Axios’ Barak Ravid over the weekend that they are attempting to achieve “deescalation through escalation”—i.e., to force Hezbollah to settle in the north irrespective of deadlocked cease-fire negotiations in Gaza. U.S. officials told Ravid that they “recognize Israel’s rational[e] and agree with it, but stress this is an ‘extremely difficult calibration’ that could easily go out of control and lead to an all-out war.” 

→The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps has ordered all of its 190,000 personnel to stop using pagers and two-way radios following Israel’s dramatic detonation of Hezbollah’s devices last week, Reuters reports. According to the report, the IRGC is “concerned about infiltration by Israeli agents” and is now engaged in a “large-scale operation” to inspect “all devices, not just communication equipment.” 

→What happened to Robert Malley, the former Biden Iran envoy who had his security clearance revoked last spring? A Sunday story in The Wall Street Journal offers the beginnings of an answer, though it, too, is short on details. According to the Journal, Malley clicked on a phishing link, compromising a personal email account that he had been using to conduct government business. The story doesn’t say, but we assume that the Iranians sent the link, since material from Malley’s account later began appearing in the regime-aligned Iranian press. Limited hangout? We’re not sure, but the Journal does suggest that Malley’s desperation to reach a new nuclear deal with the Iranians ruffled feathers even among his colleagues in the Biden administration (one of Malley’s deputies, Richard Nephew, resigned in protest in January 2022 after the Malley-led negotiating team accepted the Iranian demand to start negotiations from scratch following the election of a new president, Ebrahim Raisi). The Journal also reports on conflicts between the FBI, which viewed Malley’s security lapses as “serious,” and the State Department, which attempted to defend him. 

→Stat of the Day: 54%

That’s how much the urban violent crime rate, excluding simple assault, increased between 2019 and 2023, the most recent year that statistics are available for the National Crime Victimization Survey. Compiled by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the NCVS asks 230,000 Americans if they have been victims of crime in the past year, and it includes crimes that haven’t been reported to the police—i.e., about half of violent crimes and more than two-thirds of property crimes. The numbers come from the latest NCVS survey, released this month and cited in a Sunday Wall Street Journal op-ed by Jeffrey Anderson, the director of the BJS from 2017 to 2021. 

→If you’ve visited Tel Aviv this past year, you’ve seen the enormous teddy bears, stained red, dotting the city’s public benches, an impromptu response to the unbearable tragedy of Oct. 7. They were more than a cri de coeur; they were a reminder that art is essential, all the more so as a tool to help us think and feel our way through life’s most difficult moments. A similar bear, made of blue and white patches and adorned with Stars of David, adorned a Chelsea gallery earlier this week, part of ArtUp Nation, a deeply moving initiative that brought more than 200 curated Israeli artworks by more than 70 artists to New York, showcasing the resilience and vibrancy of Israel’s contemporary art scene. One hundred fifty-three artworks sold, earning $503,587—all of which goes directly to the artists. As we approach the anniversary of the darkest day in contemporary Jewish history, it means a lot to know that even as the war rages on, we’ve begun to cope and heal in the most soulful and inspiring way imaginable, through art.

—Liel Leibovitz

→Do you remember Ta-Nehisi Coates? The former Atlantic writer was among the first to capture the progressive racial zeitgeist of the late Obama years. In his books (Between the World and Me) and essays (“The Case for Reparations”), Coates explained to his largely white readers that what they had long believed were a set of complicated questions around race in America—the relationship between past discrimination and present inequality, the failure of the civil rights revolution and the Great Society to erase racial performance gaps, the fraught role of crime in driving “white flight,” etc.—in fact had a very simple answer: White people, and white America, were racist, and they kept Black people down through greed and sadism motivated by their own psychological deformities.

Well, after a stint writing comic books and novels, Coates is back on the nonfiction beat, with a new book that focuses heavily on what American audiences have long known as the “Israel-Palestine conflict.” In a profile for New York magazine, Coates, nothing if not consistent, explains that the conflict actually isn’t so complicated after all: It’s exactly like the question of race in America, as interpreted by Coates. The Israelis, you see, are sadistic white racists, and they subject the Palestinians to a brutal form of “Jim Crow”—a phrase that appears five times in the profile—for … reasons that aren’t quite elucidated but that you can probably guess. As for all those people who insist the subject is complicated? That’s “horseshit,” according to Coates, who by his own admission knew nothing of Israel until visiting for 10 days in the summer of 2023. “It’s complicated when you want to take something from somebody.”

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TODAY IN TABLET:

A Cancellation Trilogy, by Sheluyang Peng

Jews take the lead in a new literary art form: The cancel-culture novel

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The New Rules of Western Journalism

Anti-Israel terrorist propaganda gets an Emmy nomination

By Eitan Fischberger

There’s an increasingly vague line between journalism and terrorist propaganda coming out of the Gaza Strip, where terrorists often masquerade as journalists. This is a distinction that you’d hope and expect would be easily discernible to seasoned media professionals like the heads of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS) or the editors, if that’s still a thing that meaningfully exists, of Time magazine, which was once the flagship of objective weekly news reporting. But unfortunately, the distinction between news reporting and simple-minded propaganda is no longer a meaningful one to America’s self-appointed political commissars who think that they know better than the facts.

In late July, NATAS nominated a Gazan journalist and apparent member of a terror group, Bisan Owda, for a news and documentary Emmy Award for her AJ+-produced It’s Bisan from Gaza and I’m Still Alive. The docu-short, which has already clinched Peabody and Edward R. Murrow awards, is up in the “outstanding hard news feature story: short form” category. The documentary presents the harsh realities experienced by the people of Gaza in the early days of the Israel-Hamas War, which was initiated when Hamas massacred 1,200 people 11 months ago in southern Israel and took 250 others hostage.

Remarkably, Bisan’s eight-minute documentary makes no mention of the medieval horrors inflicted upon innocent Israelis that terrible Oct. 7 day that started the war. Instead, Bisan presents her unsuspecting Western audience with a sanitized version of history in which Hamas and Gaza’s other terror groups are nonexistent, even inside the Hamas stronghold of Shifa Hospital, and in which she is somehow an objective journalist caught up in horrors being inflicted on innocents by Israeli “occupiers,” rather than an apparent adherent of a terror organization that deliberately murders innocent people, and helped bring about the events she depicts.

Even more troubling than the bizarre absence of Hamas in Bisan’s documentary and the subsequent episodes released by AJ+ from the standpoint of basic journalistic ethics and practice, is what she does choose to show. Interspersed throughout the footage of the immense and genuine human suffering in Gaza is propaganda straight from the Hamas media office. By deliberately mixing truth with lies, such as the assertion that “women, children, and the elderly make up 73% of the dead in Gaza,” numbers that several experts have referred to as “statistically impossible,” Bisan’s content is purposefully designed to sway the hearts and minds of millions of viewers who don’t know better toward the terrorists.

Bisan takes an even less nuanced approach, however, when uploading short videos to her Instagram account for her 4.7 million followers. There, she veers into outlandish antisemitic territory, such as the grotesque allegation that Israel is stealing the organs of dead Palestinian children of Gaza—which comes straight out the pages of age-old antisemitic blood libels. In a video from Oct. 18, the day after an explosion infamously rocked Gaza’s Al Ahli Hospital, Bisan filmed herself in tears over the “800 people killed” by Israel (300 more than Hamas’ number). In a now-infamous twist, the explosion turned out to be caused by an errant rocket fired by the Islamic Jihad terror group. European intelligence later placed the likely death toll at 50—or 93.75% less than the total Bisan claimed.

The fact that this propaganda is only thinly veiled as journalism is less surprising once you take a deeper look at Bisan’s background. Bisan appears to be a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a U.S.-designated terrorist organization that has American blood on its hands and openly gloated about its participation in the mass slaughter in southern Israel on Oct. 7. In 2018, the PFLP confirmed Bisan’s membership in the organization when it referred to her as part of the Progressive Youth Union, which the PFLP explicitly acknowledges is its “youth framework.” Two years prior, Bisan hosted a PFLP event honoring Palestinian terrorists injured or killed in confrontations with Israeli soldiers, which included Sami Shawqi Madi, who was the head of the PFLP’s media committee at the time of his death. In 2015, Bisan was one of the speakers at a rally celebrating the 48th anniversary of the founding of the PFLP, where she addressed the crowd while wearing a full PFLP military uniform and stated that “the people of Gaza, the people in the West Bank, and in Jerusalem ... will not back down at all from their cause and their revolution.” Bisan also served as the “master of ceremonies” the following year at the 49th-anniversary rally. In a since-deleted article published in Al-Hadaf, the PFLP’s official newspaper, Bisan is lauded as “a symbol of resistance journalism.”

Despite Bisan’s open affiliation with a terrorist organization, and reporting that violates every norm of ethical journalism, NATAS has defended the nomination. Bizarrely, NATAS President & CEO Adam Sharp stated that “NATAS has been unable to corroborate these reports, nor has it been able, to date, to surface any evidence of more contemporary or active involvement by Owda with the PFLP” and that the “content submitted for award consideration was consistent with competition rules and NATAS policies.” Sharp’s response completely ignores the ample evidence of Bisan’s terror ties (including her own confirmation that she participated in the PFLP rallies) and her propensity for spreading antisemitism and openly lying in the service of terrorist propaganda campaigns. In reality, multiple Gazan journalists working for Al Jazeera (which owns AJ+) have been linked to terror groups, while the PFLP and Hamas have been openly training journalists in the Strip for over a decade—some of whom participated in the Oct. 7 terror attack as combatants and even held Israeli hostages in their homes.

Sharp, NATAS, and the other journalistic institutions who honored Bisan are virtue-signaling, yes, But they are also displaying complete ignorance as to the nature of journalism in the Gaza Strip and a callous indifference to the lives of Jews and Americans who have been murdered by Hamas and by the PFLP. Moreover, Bisan’s manipulation of journalistic standards, and journalistic cover, mirrors the practices of her broadcaster AJ+, a U.S.-based subsidiary of Al Jazeera, which is funded by the government of Qatar, a longtime Hamas funder that provides safe haven for its leaders. In 2019, the media platform released a video questioning the Holocaust, and more recently, has repeatedly justified the Oct. 7 massacre.

AJ+’s content and ties to Qatar spurred the Department of Justice to mandate that it register as a foreign agent of the Gulf monarchy in September 2020. Nearly four years later, it has refused to do so, yet has faced no repercussions from the Biden DOJ. Does the academy not find Bisan and AJ+’s propaganda and terror support objectionable?

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One of the more outrageous consequences of Oct. 7 in the journalistic universe is the refusal to reevaluate commonly held shibboleths like the idea that Israel was being too paranoid about Hamas, when in fact it wasn’t being nearly cautious enough about the intentions of the foe on its border—whose statements about slaughtering Jews should in fact have been taken quite literally. What has happened instead is the widespread embrace of the terrorists’ own reality, which is then used to “fact-check” all Israelis, whether women and men who were raped, or parents whose children were stabbed, shot or set on fire.

Because Jews are such villains, Oct. 7 has apparently canceled normal journalistic requirements to even bother matching up quotes with transcripts of what the speaker actually said—a courtesy that is especially applicable to heads of state, unless they are Israeli. In a recent cover story for Time magazine, correspondent Eric Cortellessa quoted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as stating that “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas.” Yet while Netanyahu is one of the most quoted and aggressively fact-checked political leaders in the world, it is impossible to find a single quote in any public transcript or record, including Cortellessa’s interview, in which Netanyahu ever said anything remotely to that effect. In reality, Netanyahu led large-scale military operations against Hamas in 2012, 2014 and 2021. While one might criticize Netanyahu for not killing enough Hamas members in those prior campaigns, that hardly seemed to be the thrust of the Time correspondent’s conspiratorial criticism, whose point instead seemed to be that Israel had somehow sponsored the Hamas attack.

Time’s own “fact-check” of Netanyahu’s statement that Israeli security agencies agreed before Oct. 7 that Hamas was deterred is also demonstrably false. Right up to Oct. 7, no Israeli security agency ever assessed that Hamas was seeking war—an assessment that was enthusiastically backed by Israel’s supposed Western allies, including the United States, who repeatedly pressed Israel to allow more Gazan workers into the country, to relax controls at the border, and to accommodate the terrorist group’s demands for more heavy construction materials. Time’s accusation that Netanyahu has prolonged the Gaza war in order to avoid legal proceedings for personal corruption is also obviously false, as Netanyahu’s trials are continuing, and political leaders in Israel have no immunity from prosecution or legal procedures while in office.

What NATAS, the sponsors of the Peabody and Edward R. Murrow awards, and the editors of Time magazine have apparently agreed on is that there should be two sets of journalistic standards: one for them, and one for Jews. It’s hard to think of a more shameful development in the annals of modern journalism.