Trump’s Precarious Truth Social Gambit Just Took a Turn for the Worse

The auditing firm for Donald Trump’s social media company Truth Social doesn’t look so clean.

On Friday, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged auditor BF Borgers CPA for “massive fraud” that affected more than 1,500 SEC filings. The firm is accused of “deliberate and systemic failures to comply” with federal standards between January 2021 and June 2023, according to an announcement by the SEC.

The accounting group and its owner, Benjamin Borgers, have agreed to pay $14 million in civil penalties and are permanently suspended from practicing as accountants.

“Ben Borgers and his audit firm, BF Borgers, were responsible for one of the largest wholesale failures by gatekeepers in our financial markets,” said Gurbir S. Grewal, director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement, in a statement. “As a result of their fraudulent conduct, they not only put investors and markets at risk by causing public companies to incorporate noncompliant audits and reviews into more than 1,500 filings with the Commission, but also undermined trust and confidence in our markets.”

“Because investors rely on the audited financial statements of public companies when making their investment decisions, the accountants and accounting firms that audit those statements play a critical role in our financial markets,” Grewal continued. “Borgers and his firm completely abandoned that role, but thanks to the painstaking work of the SEC staff, Borgers and his sham audit mill have been permanently shut down.”

The SEC order also accuses Borgers of failing to supervise the teams performing the audits and reviews, improperly preparing and maintaining documentation of the audits, and failing to get engagement quality reviews, which the agency notes are a necessary part of issuing an audit report.

The share price of Trump Media & Technology Group, the corporation that owns Truth Social, was down 9 percent after trading began.

The news is the latest blow to the GOP presidential nominee’s floundering social media venture, which went public in late March. Truth Social’s original valuation of $8 billion was expected to buoy Trump’s wallet through more than half a billion dollars in court judgments and legal fees, but the company’s value quickly plummeted after reports emerged that the stock was concocted as a pump-and-dump scheme. Just a few days after hitting the trading floor, Truth Social stock took another hit when two of its major investors were charged with insider trading.

This story has been updated.

After creating a stir by revealing that she killed her pet dog, Kristi Noem has now been caught in a lie claiming to meet world leaders, in new details released from her upcoming book.

In No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong With Politics and How We Move America Forward, the South Dakota governor claims she met North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during her tenure on the House Armed Services Committee, which lasted from 2013 to 2015, while she served in Congress. She also says she canceled a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron last year.

But, The Dakota Scout reported Thursday, neither of these supposed instances have records or outside sources to back them. Macron’s office told the Scout that there was never a meeting scheduled with Noem, and there are no congressional travel documents that indicate Noem met Kim. In fact, a meeting with the North Korean dictator was news to congressional staffers. 

“It’s bullshit,” said a House Armed Services Committee staff member who worked there during the period in which Noem says she met Kim. According to the Scout, that staff member was one of a dozen who had no knowledge of such a meeting or said Noem never mentioned it. Her book uses that meeting to inflate her leadership skills. 

“Through my tenure on the House Armed Services Committee,” she wrote, “I had the chance to travel to many countries to meet with world leaders. I remember when I met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. I’m sure he underestimated me, having no clue about my experience staring down little tyrants (I’d been a children’s pastor, after all). Dealing with foreign leaders takes resolve, preparation and determination. My experiences on those many foreign trips made me a better member of Congress and a stronger governor. It allowed me to hone my deal-making skills, which play a crucial role in leadership.”

Noem’s claim to have canceled a meeting with Macron coincided with a trip she made to France, according to her book. 

“While in Paris, I was slated to meet with French President Emmanuel Macron,” Noem wrote. “However, the day before we were to meet he made what I considered a very pro-Hamas and anti-Israel comment to the press. So, I decided to cancel. There is no place for pro-Hamas rhetoric.”

While the Scout confirmed with the French president’s office that a direct invitation was not made to Noem, she could have been scheduled to speak at a political event where Macron was also scheduled. On November 10, Noem spoke at an event on the same day that Macron called for a cease-fire in Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. 

Noem’s book is scheduled to be released on May 7. The revelation last month that she killed her pet puppy after it killed livestock led to widespread criticism, even from within the Republican Party. Noem has only doubled down, drawing even more ire. 

The move is said to have hurt her chances of becoming Donald Trump’s running mate, which no doubt stings, given how unpopular Noem already is at home. Several Native tribes in her state have banned her from their land for racist comments.  

One of Donald Trump’s attorneys tried to get the judge in his hush-money trial to greenlight every one of his online posts ahead of time to ensure they wouldn’t violate his gag order. Unsurprisingly, she was immediately rebuffed.

After the Manhattan district court’s lunch break Thursday, Susan Necheles presented a stack of news article printouts to Judge Juan Merchan, asking that the former president be allowed to post the articles to his Truth Social account.

“We think that they are perfectly fine,” Trump’s lawyer told Merchan. One of the prosecutors seemed puzzled, telling the judge, “It seems odd that they’re asking the court for an advanced ruling” on what would violate the order. Merchan seemed to echo that point of view.

“I’m not going to give advanced rulings,” Merchan said to Necheles, adding that “there is no ambiguity” in the gag order. “I think the best advice you can give your client is, ‘When in doubt, steer clear.’”

Necheles’s long-shot attempt was likely a response to Merchan’s chastisement of Trump lawyer Todd Blanche last week, who tried to claim that Trump’s online posts of news articles didn’t violate the gag order because he technically wasn’t the one who said it. Blanche was unable to provide case law to back up his claim, leading Merchan to warn, “Mr. Blanche, you are losing all credibility with the court.”

Trump is said to be angry with Blanche behind the scenes, perhaps in part for that reason. Trump is also reportedly claiming that the white-collar defense lawyer and former prosecutor does not follow his instructions and isn’t aggressive enough. That may be why it was Necheles who took the unusual step of trying to get advance approval from the judge to avoid yet another gag order violation. Trump already has to pay a $1,000 fine for every infraction, and could face jail time if he is undeterred.

Trump is facing 34 felony charges for allegedly paying off adult film actress Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election to try and cover up an affair with her, and the trial is not going well for him. The case’s latest witness, Daniels’s former lawyer Keith Davidson, is revealing damaging information in his testimony each day, even as stronger witnesses, such as Daniels herself and Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen, have yet to testify.

Courtroom revelations from Michael Cohen’s secretly recorded conversations with Donald Trump appear to have just blown his former boss’s legal defense out of the water.

“I need to open up a company for the transfer about our friend David,” Cohen said in part of the tape, according to reporters who attended Trump’s hush-money trial on Thursday. Cohen was referring to Trump in the third person by his documented pseudonym in the agreement, David Dennison.

That shell company would become Essential Consultants LLC, which Cohen used to pass along the $130,000 hush-money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels, whom Trump allegedly began an affair with in 2008.

In another section of the tape, Cohen informs Trump that he had “spoken to Allen Weisselberg about how to set the whole thing up,” referring to the former Trump Organization CFO. Trump responded that he’d like to be kept in the loop.

“Let me know what’s happening, OK?” Trump was heard saying.

In a separate recording, Cohen told Keith Davidson, who was Daniels’s attorney at the time, that Trump would continually say, “I hate the fact that we did it.” Davidson said he interpreted “it” to mean the deal with Daniels.

The recordings reveal precisely what the former reality TV star’s attorneys have attempted to disprove: that he was involved with the hush-money payments, and that the payments didn’t come from Cohen’s pockets, but rather from Trump’s.

Trump is accused of using Cohen to sweep an affair with Daniels under the rug ahead of the 2016 presidential election. The Republican presidential nominee faces 34 felony charges in this case for allegedly falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime. Trump has pleaded not guilty on all counts.

In a move that will surprise few people, Elon Musk announced Thursday that far-right commentator Nick Fuentes, known for racist, neo-Nazi, and antisemitic views, will soon be allowed back on X.

“Very well, he will be reinstated, provided he does not violate the law, and let him be crushed by the comments and Community Notes,” Musk said in a reply to a question from one of Fuentes’s fans. “It is better to have anti whatever out in the open to be rebutted than grow simmering in the darkness.”

Fuentes has been banned from X since July 2021. He and his supporters call themselves the “groyper army,” and push racist and white nationalist beliefs while also claiming to uphold Christian values. Groypers gained notoriety for disrupting conservative events and spouting racist statements to troll right-wing accounts on social media. Their activities have even influenced Kanye West, who joined Fuentes for a dinner at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in 2022. Despite accounts stating that Trump was impressed with Fuentes, he later blamed West for bringing Fuentes to the meeting.

Fuentes has denied the Holocaust and also expressed prejudice against Muslims, LGBTQ people, and even women. He attended the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, and was present outside the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., during the insurrection on January 6, 2021. He is still banned from other platforms, including Reddit and YouTube, but has a verified account on Trump’s Truth Social.

Musk apparently believes that these viewpoints and activities should not warrant a social media ban, but should be publicly challenged. When he first took over Twitter in 2022, Musk unbanned many accounts that spouted similar beliefs to Fuentes’s, and he has continued to reinstate such accounts, claiming free speech grounds. But Musk has also engaged in random suspensions of left-wing accounts and those critical of him, as well as the wife of deceased Russian dissident Alexei Navalny and the grandson of South African leader Nelson Mandela. At the same time, advertisers continue to flee the site as it is overtaken by newer platforms like Meta’s Threads.