Did Trump Make Up “Bill Jones” to Justify Costly Overhaul of Navy?

Did President Donald Trump invent a fictional sailor in order to justify wasting billions of dollars to put old-fashioned technology on naval aircraft carriers?

Speaking at a campaign rally in January 2024, Trump told a story about a sailor aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier who argued on behalf of steam catapults over their more modern electromagnetic counterparts. Trump had been telling the same story since at least 2019—but this time he gave his source a name: Bill Jones.

Trump claimed that “Bill Jones” had lamented the shift to electromagnetic catapults: “They’re no good, sir. They don’t work. And if they break, we have to send to MIT to get a genius to come in and fix them. Whereas the steam, I could fix it with a hammer and a blowtorch.”

The Wall Street Journal attempted to track down the mysterious sailor who informed Trump’s directive to install old-fashioned steam catapults on aircraft carriers. The Journal contacted former Navy officials, White House aides, lawmakers, and industry executives—but no one knew anything about the sailor at the center of Trump’s story. A Navy spokesperson told the publication that without more information, they “cannot accurately locate this Sailor in our records.”

In August, Trump turned this complaint of dubious origin into real policy. The president signed a memo directing the U.S. Navy to redesign the Doris Miller, the newest Gerald R. Ford class aircraft carrier, and all remaining ships, to install steam catapults.

In a statement at the time, the White House claimed that steam catapults were more “resilient and robust,” and that the move would reactivate parts of the maritime industrial base that are “easier to scale.” In reality, steam catapults have been out of production for decades.

Before Trump’s directive, the Navy’s official position was that the electromagnetic launchers have allowed their Ford-class carriers to launch and recover aircraft at a higher rate than previous classes of ships. Additionally, the maintenance on steam catapults is considered labor intensive and costly, compared to newer models. In a late August memo, now-acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao wrote that it was not the military’s place to question Trump—but what about Bill Jones, the supposed source behind the president’s plan? By all accounts, Bill Jones doesn’t even exist.

Last year, Russian American investor Konstantin A. Sokolov donated an undisclosed sum to President Trump’s $300 million White House ballroom project. He also gave $12 million to the MAGA Inc. super PAC and hundreds of thousands to the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the Senate campaigns of Susan Collins and Pete Ricketts. Since all those donations, he’s only been rewarded.

Reporting from Talking Points Memo finds that a company that Sokolov manages, called Dynamic Frontier Holdings LLC, was rapidly awarded a license that allowed them to purchase a copper mine in Armenia owned by by VTB Bank, which is sanctioned by the federal government due to its role in supporting the Russian financial system. Sokolov’s company was able to bypass the sanctions in October last year and receive a license from the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Controls in just 10 days, a remarkably quick turnaround.

Then, in July, Sokolov was also handpicked by the State Department to lead a $201 million Trans-Caspian enterprise fund looking to invest public funds into the south Caucus.

“He hardly would be my first choice,” former State Department sanctions coordinator Daniel Fried told TPM, highlighting how his business interests in the region could interfere with the fund. “You have to ask yourself whether his involvement in [the Trans-Caspian Enterprise Fund] is going to lead to conflicts of interests.”

Sokolov, who is originally from St. Petersburg, has also met with 1789 Capital, the investment firm where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner.

This report comes just days after another major corruption scandal, where U.S. Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle attempted to convince a Republican donor to pay off her American Express card in exchange for access to the Trump administration. On Tuesday, she resigned at the president’s request—but that’s clearly not the end of pay-to-play schemes in this administration.

The Trump administration ordered federal financial regulators to retract a report flagging suspicious oil trades. 

Only 15 minutes before President Trump decided not to strike Iranian power plants on March 23, a few traders sank billions of dollars into predicting that the S&P 500 would go up and oil prices would fall, making a hefty profit, Bloomberg reports. The traders reportedly used a two-minute window at 6:49 a.m. that day to make the massive deals in futures markets. 

“The fact that this trading preceded a headline driven sell-off means that either someone got very lucky or knew something,” Tim Skirrow, head of derivatives at Energy Aspects, said to Bloomberg. 

As is standard practice, analysts with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the federal agency responsible for regulating derivatives markets, flagged these trades and referred them to the commission’s Division of Enforcement, to decide whether a further investigation into insider trading was necessary. 

But then Mel Gunewardena, an adviser to the Trump-appointed chair of the CFTC, Michael Selig, told a supervisor on the commission’s market oversight team to retract the referral, according to unnamed sources cited by Bloomberg. 

This kind of move was unprecedented. The oversight team reportedly didn’t know what to do, as such a retraction had rarely, if ever, been ordered before. Career agency employees on the oversight team gather data and write reports, and, as a matter of procedure and expertise, send them to the enforcement team, which has expert attorneys on the subject, to make the legal decisions. 

“In every previous administration I’m familiar with, that would not just have been unusual—but never done,” Aitan Goelman, who worked as the agency’s director of enforcement from 2014 to 2017, told Bloomberg when asked a general question about Gunewardena’s kind of move. “It makes it harder for the staff, if they know that any moment the rug can get pulled out from under them.”

Sources told Bloomberg that Gunewardena, a former Goldman Sachs and State Streets Corp. executive who worked for the CFTC during Trump’s first term, was trying to scrap the referral and take over gathering the data on the trades himself. Weeks before, he was hired by the agency as head of the Office of International Affairs and senior markets adviser to the chairperson. 

Bloomberg reached out to the CFTC, which declined to comment, as well as Gunewardena, who did not respond to the outlet. The Trump administration is trying to make the agency the main oversight body for prediction markets such as Kalshi and Polymarket, and this incident won’t help the White House beat accusations of insider trading, with suspicious events becoming all too common  since the Iran war began in February. 

A military archbishop is urging enlisted Catholics to recuse themselves from the execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan.

Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio issued his own orders to America’s military members Monday, imploring them not to participate in Hasan’s death, either by being in the firing squad or by watching Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s planned livestream.

“I oblige any Catholics assigned to the firing squad to request to be excused from this action contrary to the teaching of the Church,” Broglio said in a statement.

Broglio said he opposed capital punishment—in line with the stance of the larger church—and that Hegseth’s plan would “imitate the terrorists” by making a “public spectacle of barbarically killing our adversaries.”

“The Catechism was already clear and Pope Francis made it even clearer. The dignity of the human person is again at stake,” Broglio noted.

Hasan opened fire on Fort Hood in 2009, killing 13 people and injuring 32 others at a processing facility readying troops for deployment in Afghanistan. Hasan was an Army psychiatrist at the time.

Last week, Donald Trump paved the way for the military to execute Hasan by firing squad, marking the first time since World War II that the military is expected to use the method. Shortly thereafter, Hegseth pledged the December 23 event would be livestreamed—a decision that has faced nationwide bipartisan blowback from the public as much as the streaming companies expected to host the state-sponsored brutality.

“The crime committed by Nidal Malik Hasan was heinous, but does exposing the public to his execution serve any purpose?” questioned Broglio in his statement. “Has the potential moral injury, which the members of the firing squad might experience, been considered? Will the exposure of a live-stream to the young and impressionable during the 250th anniversary year of our independence be able to be repaired?

“The US military generally enjoys a good reputation in the world. Is there really a value to throwing them in the same boat with terrorists by broadcasting the image of the execution of a man in a wheel chair to the whole world? Does this decision reflect the dignity of the human person?” he continued, calling “upon all men and women of good will” to prompt the government to reverse its decision.

Hegseth, who has deeply infused his leadership of the Pentagon with his right-wing Christianity, has not yet responded to Broglio.

A federal judge has once again blocked President Donald Trump’s federal takeover of a public golf course in Washington.

District Judge Ana Reyes issued a temporary two-week injunction Tuesday barring the National Parks Service from cutting down any more trees on the East Potomac Golf Links. The tree clearing is part of a plan to transform the public golf links into an exclusive, high-end course.

During an emergency hearing Monday, a furious Reyes tore into the Trump administration for proceeding to cut down more trees over the weekend. The government had only notified the court of its intentions shortly before 5 p.m. on Friday, and at the start of a holiday weekend.

“I trusted you all not to do precisely what you have done,” she said during the hearing, declaring that the government had “lost credibility” by defying her instructions to give advance notice of any renovations.

When Justice Department attorney Marissa Piropato argued the actions over the weekend were “not a renovation,” Reyes slammed her excuse as “preposterous,” “doublespeak,” and “completely beyond the pale.”

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller took to social media Monday to hit back at Reyes. “I missed the part of the Constitutional Convention that put federal judges in charge of golf course maintenance,” he wrote.

It’s funny, I must’ve missed the part where the Constitution gave the president permission to order expensive demolition and renovation projects without receiving a whiff of congressional or legal approval. And yet, that is what Trump has done time and time again.