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      Trump’s business empire could collapse ‘like falling dominoes’ after ruling

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      Donald Trump’s real estate empire could collapse “like falling dominoes”, experts believe, following a New York judge’s ruling that the former president’s business fortune was built on rampant fraud and blatant lies.According to Michael Cohen, his former attorney and fixer, Trump is already effectively “out of business” in New York after Judge Arthur Engoron on Tuesday rescinded the licenses of the Trump Organization and other companies owned by Trump and his adult sons, Eric and Don Jr.“Those companies will end up being liquidated … the judge has already determined that the fraud existed,” Cohen told CNN, hailing Engoron’s pretrial ruling in a civil case brought by Letitia James, the New York attorney general.On Wednesday morning, in a confrontational post on his Truth Social website that branded the judge a “political hack”, Trump said Engoron “must be stopped”.At a hearing on Wednesday afternoon, Trump’s legal team asked Engoron if his ruling meant Trump’s assets and businesses must be sold, or if they could continue to operate under receivership.Engoron said he would address the issue at the non-jury trial beginning on 2 October, and extended to 30 days his original 10-day deadline for both parties to suggest names to act as receivers for the various companies.The lawyers have said they will appeal the rescinding of the licenses, the appointment of receivers, and Engoron’s assertion that Trump and executives lived in a “fantasy world” of routinely, repeatedly and illegally overvaluing property values and his personal net worth to gain favorable loan terms and reduced insurance premiums.But if the appeals are unsuccessful, the collapse of the Trump empire, upon which the former reality TV host staked his reputation as a successful business tycoon, could be imminent.It would probably start with the sale of Trump’s most prestigious real estate assets, experts say, including Trump Tower in New York, golf courses and resorts around the US, and possibly his prized Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, if it is determined to be a business operation instead of his primary residential home.In his post on Wednesday, Trump decried the judge’s $18m valuation of Mar-a-Lago, claiming it was worth “100 times more than he values it”.William Black, a white-collar criminologist, corporate fraud investigator and distinguished scholar in residence for financial regulation at the University of Minnesota law school, said: “In finance, once the dominoes start falling, it becomes basically impossible to save it.“These properties are even more damaged goods today because of the success in demonstrating they are massively overvalued. The most likely thing, if you get an honest agent or receiver, they’re going to sell the properties at a loss. And when you’ve got a whole bunch of properties, with the first one you just desperately need to get some action and that gets discounted the most.”Black, who helped expose congressional wrongdoing in the Lincoln Savings and Loans scandal of the 1980s, in which the financier Charles Keating inflated his company’s worth to bilk taxpayers for billions, called Engoron’s ruling “devastating”. He believes Trump insiders and employees would have incentive to come forward with more information if he loses his wealth and influence.“What we experienced in the Savings and Loan debacle, we would put in an honest manager and employees would start coming to that person over time and say, ‘You know, you really ought to look at this,’” Black said.“Trump is monumentally, stupidly greedy in that he isn’t actually paying for a number of key lieutenants in terms of their legal needs, and they’re facing financial collapse of their own, [such as] the Rudy Giulianis of this world. But a lot of folks can sink Trump.“Having this ability to control all these assets, even if they’re massively overvalued, meant hope springs eternal among the Trump folks that he can use that money and influence to help them, but if Trump instead ends up bereft of control over the overwhelming bulk of his assets, and has lots of liabilities, sugar daddy goes away.”Engoron’s independent court-appointed monitor for the Trump Organization, the retired federal judge Barbara Jones, reported last month she had identified inconsistency and incompleteness in financial disclosures.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOthers also see the writing on the wall.“Donald Trump is no longer in business,” David Cay Johnston, author of the Trump-themed book The Big Cheat, wrote in DC Report.“Barring a highly unlikely reversal by an appeals court, Trump’s business assets eventually will be liquidated since he cannot operate them without a business license. The various properties are likely to be sold at fire sale prices and certainly not for top dollar when liquidation begins, probably after all appeals are exhausted.“I give Trump’s chances of prevailing on appeal at somewhere between zero and nothing except perhaps on some minor procedural point, which you can be sure Trump will describe as complete vindication.”Joyce Vance, a retired US attorney and University of Alabama law school professor, called Engoron’s ruling “justice”.“This is New York’s corporate death penalty, applied to Trump because of years of misconduct,” she wrote on X, formerly Twitter.Black said Trump’s downfall would be self-inflicted.“The key to these frauds is not genius, it’s audacity, but Trump never wanted to do it himself, he’s too lazy, right?” he said.“And now he doesn’t control the people who have to actually do the deals. So they’re now forced into thousands of discussions, first with this judge, now this receiver, and that can’t work.“You won’t be able to do the scams, and you won’t be able to do things quickly, either. That means a domino effect in credit failings and bankruptcies. As people start taking action against your properties, the liquidity you’re boasting isn’t going to be there and you’re going to get a bankruptcy.” More

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      in US Politics

      Chuck Schumer says he is ‘disturbed’ by Bob Menendez bribery charges

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      The Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, said on Wednesday he was “disturbed” by the fraud indictment against his fellow Democratic Senator, Bob Menendez, and that the New Jersey lawmaker has fallen “way short” of senatorial standards.Menendez pleaded not guilty earlier in the day to charges of taking bribes from three New Jersey businessmen, as calls for his resignation from his fellow Democrats escalated.He was released on a $100,000 bond and then left federal court in New York without speaking to reporters.Federal prosecutors in Manhattan last week accused Menendez, 69, and his wife, Nadine, of accepting gold bars and hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash in exchange for the senator using his influence to aid Egypt’s government and interfere with law enforcement investigations of the businessmen.Schumer was the most senior Democrat yet to comment on Menendez’s alleged crimes, though he stopped short of calling for the senator to resign, as almost 30 of his colleagues in the congressional upper chamber have done.However, Schumer, from New York, said: “Tomorrow, he will address the Democratic caucus and we’ll see what happens after that.”The majority leader said he was disappointed and disturbed by the indictment.“We all know that … for senators, there’s a much, much higher standard. And clearly when you read the indictment, Senator Menendez fell way, way below that standard,” Schumer said.Menendez entered the plea at a hearing before the US magistrate judge Ona Wang in Manhattan. Wang said Menendez could be released on a $100,000 personal recognizance bond.The Democratic senator will be required to surrender his personal passport, but may retain his official passport and travel abroad on official business. His wife, Nadine Menendez, 56, and businessmen Jose Uribe, 56, and Fred Daibes, 66, also pleaded not guilty. A third businessman, Wael Hana, 40, pleaded not guilty on Tuesday.Menendez, one of two senators representing New Jersey, stepped down from his role as chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, as required under his party’s rules.But on Monday he said he would stay in the Senate and fight the charges. More than half of all US Democratic senators – including Cory Booker, the junior senator from New Jersey and historically a close ally – have called on Menendez, a powerful voice on foreign policy who has at times bucked his own party, to resign since the charges were announced on Friday.Dick Durbin of Illinois, the number two Democrat in the Senate, on Wednesday joined his colleagues in urging Menendez to step down, saying on X, formerly known as Twitter, that he believed he could no longer serve.Democrats narrowly control the Senate with 51 seats, including three independents who normally vote with them, to the Republicans’ 49. The Democratic New Jersey governor, Phil Murphy, who would appoint a temporary replacement should Menendez step aside, has also called for him to resign.The indictment contained images of gold bars and cash investigators seized from Menendez’s home. Prosecutors say Hana arranged meetings between Menendez and Egyptian officials – who pressed him to sign off on military aid – and in return put his wife on the payroll of a company he controlled.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe investigation marks the third time Menendez has been under investigation by federal prosecutors. He has never been convicted.Pete Aguilar, chair of the House Democratic caucus, called for Menendez to resign during a news conference with House Democratic leadership.Menendez has had “an incredible track record” of service to the people of New Jersey and of having “lifted up issues that the Latino community cares about”, Aguilar said.“It doesn’t bring me or any of us joy to say that he should resign. But he should for the betterment of the Democratic party. For the people of New Jersey. It’s better that he fights this trial outside of the halls of Congress.”Almost 30 Democratic senators had called on Menendez to resign by mid-morning on Wednesday.On Wednesday, the judge ordered him not to have contact outside of the presence of lawyers with his co-defendants except for his wife.He also cannot have contact outside of the presence of lawyers with members of his Senate staff, foreign relations committee staff or political advisers who have personal knowledge about the facts of the case, though it is unclear how those restrictions would impact his work.Reuters and the Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      in US Politics

      Donald Trump committed fraud as he built his real estate empire, New York judge rules

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      Donald Trump committed fraud for years while building the real estate empire that catapulted him to fame and the White House, a New York judge ruled Tuesday in a strongly-worded rejection of the former president’s bid to throw out a civil lawsuit against him.Judge Arthur Engoron found that Trump and executives from his company, including his sons Eric and Donald Jr, routinely and repeatedly deceived banks, insurers and others by massively overvaluing assets and exaggerating his net worth on paperwork.His ruling came in a civil lawsuit brought by Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, days before the start of a non-jury trial that will hear accusations that Trump, and the Trump Organization, lied for a decade about asset values and his net worth to get better terms on bank loans and insurance.“The documents here clearly contain fraudulent valuations that defendants used in business,” Engoron wrote.James has said Trump had effectively engaged in a “bait and switch” operation, inflating his net worth by as much as $2.23bn, and by one measure as much as $3.6bn, on annual financial statements given to banks and insurers.Assets whose values were inflated include Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, his penthouse apartment in Manhattan’s Trump Tower, and various office buildings and golf courses, James said in the lawsuit filed in September 2022.Trump’s legal team had previously asked Engoron to dismiss the case against him, arguing James lacked authority to file the lawsuit because there was no evidence the public was harmed by Trump’s actions, and that many of the allegations were beyond the statute of limitations.But the judge indicated last week he was not inclined to be sympathetic, rebuking Trump’s lawyers for making “frivolous arguments” and stating he was considering sanctions against them.Chris Kise, who is also representing Trump in a federal indictment in Florida over the former president’s handling of classified documents after leaving the White House, argued: “What is happening here is what happens every day in complex business transactions”.Engoron was not swayed.“The fact that no one was hurt does not mean the case gets dismissed,” he said. In his ruling Tuesday, he granted a motion by James seeking sanctions against Trump’s legal team for repeatedly making arguments already rejected, fining five attorneys $7,500 each.Manhattan prosecutors had looked into bringing a criminal case over the fraudulent conduct but declined to do so, leaving James to sue Trump and seek penalties that could disrupt his and his family’s ability to do business in New York.Engoron’s ruling, in a phase of the case known as summary judgment, resolves the key claim in James’s lawsuit, although six others remain.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe non-jury trial is scheduled to start on 2 October. James is seeking $250m in penalties and a ban on Trump doing business in New York, his home state. The hearing could last into December, Engoron has said.The judge has penalized Trump before. In early 2022, the former president paid $110,000 in fines after failing to meet case deadlines.The case is one of several that Trump, the runaway leader in the race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, must navigate while appearing on the campaign trail. He faces 91 criminal charges under four indictments, for hush-money payments to an adult movie star, illegal retention of classified information, and election subversion at the federal and state levels.In civil court, he also faces a second defamation trial involving the writer E Jean Carroll, who said he sexually assaulted her in the 1990s. Found liable for defamation and sexual abuse, Trump has already been fined about $5m and adjudicated as a rapist.
      Martin Pengelly contributed reporting More

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      in US Politics

      AOC joins calls for Bob Menendez to resign from Senate over corruption charges

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      Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has joined the calls for Bob Menendez to resign, after the Democratic US senator from New Jersey was charged with accepting gold bars, a Mercedes-Benz and other gifts as bribes.Speaking on Sunday, Ocasio-Cortez said the charges against Menendez were “extremely serious” and he should step down.A growing number of Democrats are calling for Menendez, who has represented New Jersey in the Senate since 2006, to resign.Menendez is accused of using his position to aid Egypt’s authoritarian government and pressuring federal prosecutors to drop a case against a friend.Over the weekend, John Fetterman became the first US Senate Democrat to suggest Menendez should quit, while a Democratic New Jersey congressman announced he would run against Menendez in next year’s primary election.Asked about Menendez on CBS’s Face the Nation, Ocasio-Cortez said:“The situation is quite unfortunate, but I do believe that it is in the best interest for Senator Menendez to resign in this moment.“Consistency matters. It shouldn’t matter if it’s a Republican or a Democrat. The details in this indictment are extremely serious. They involve the nature of not just his but all of our seats in Congress.”Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks on Menendez come after she has previously called for a federal investigation into Clarence Thomas, the conservative supreme court justice, over his acceptance of undeclared gifts from wealthy rightwing donors.In August, ProPublica reported that Thomas had taken “at least 38” undeclared vacations funded by billionaires and accepted gifts including expensive sports tickets.Ocasio-Cortez had also previously called on Republican congressman George Santos to step down after he was indicted earlier this year for fraud, money laundering and other federal charges.Fetterman was another high-profile progressive who had called for Menendez’s resignation.“He’s entitled to the presumption of innocence under our system, but he is not entitled to continue to wield influence over national policy, especially given the serious and specific nature of the allegations,” Fetterman, of Pennsylvania, said in a statement on Saturday.“I hope he chooses an honorable exit and focuses on his trial.”Menendez denies the charges against him. In a statement on Friday he said: “I am not going anywhere.”But that has not stopped a burgeoning movement calling for his departure.Since then, Phil Murphy, the Democratic governor of New Jersey, has joined the calls for Menendez to resign.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMurphy would be in charge of appointing a replacement for Menendez if the senator leaves office. The replacement would be in office until a special election is held.Also on Sunday, Josh Gottheimer, a Democratic New Jersey congressman, repeated his previous call for Menendez to quit.“I called on him, given the gravity of the charges, to step aside,” Gottheimer told CNN.“Given how we’ve got elections coming up, there’s a lot of distractions; obviously giving the senator time to defend himself, I think what’s best is that he step aside and we focus on issues.”Menendez has been charged with accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes, in connection with alleged intervention on behalf of Egypt, and in allegedly pressuring federal prosecutors to drop a case against a friend.The indictment against Menendez alleged that he and his wife were paid a series of bribes by three New Jersey businessmen in exchange for corrupt acts. FBI agents investigating Menendez discovered “a lot of gold”, allegedly provided by businessman Fred Daibes, in the senator’s home, as well as about $500,000 in cash.Some of the money was “stuffed into envelopes and closets”, and some was “stuffed in the senator’s jacket pockets”, the FBI said.On Saturday, the Democratic New Jersey congressman Andy Kim said he would run against Menendez in the 2024 primary election.“After calls to resign, Senator Menendez said: ‘I am not going anywhere,’” Kim said in a statement.“As a result, I feel compelled to run against him. This is not something I expected to do, but I believe New Jersey deserves better. We cannot jeopardize the Senate or compromise our country’s integrity.“I believe it’s time we restore faith in our democracy, and that’s why I am stepping up and running for Senate.” More

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      in Elections

      US Capitol rioter who attacked photographer sentenced to five years

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      A man who attacked an Associated Press photographer and threw a flagpole and smoke grenade at police officers guarding the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, was sentenced in a federal court on Friday to five years in prison.Rodney Milstreed, 56, of Finksburg, Maryland, “prepared himself for battle” on January 6 by injecting steroids and arming himself with a four-foot wooden club disguised as a flagpole, prosecutors said.“He began taking steroids in the weeks leading up to January 6, so that he would be ‘jacked’ and ready because, he said, someone needed to ‘hang for treason’ and the battle might come down to hand-to-hand combat,” prosecutors wrote in a court filing.A prosecutor showed US district judge James Boasberg videos of Milstreed’s attacks outside the Capitol, as supporters of Donald Trump marched on and later invaded the Capitol in the vain hopes of preventing Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory over Trump in the 2020 election.“I know what I did that day was very wrong,” he said.Capitol police officer Devan Gowdy suffered a concussion when Milstreed hurled his wooded club at a line of officers.“January 6 is a day that will be burned into my brain and my nightmares for the rest of my life,” Gowdy told the judge. “The effects of this domestic terrorist attack will never leave me.”Gowdy told Milstreed that he “will always be looked at as a domestic terrorist and traitor” for his actions on January 6. The officer has since left the police.Milstreed was arrested in May 2022 in Colorado and pleaded guilty in April to assault charges and possessing an unregistered firearm.A cache of weapons and ammunition was found at Milstreed’s Maryland home and in his Colorado hotel room investigators found 94 vials of probably illegal steroids.Milstreed spewed violent, threatening rhetoric on social media in the weeks before the insurrection.He attended Trump’s rally near the White House earlier on January 6 and then, with the president urging his supporters to overturn the election result, followed the crowd of supporters of the Republican to the Capitol.Milstreed was “front and center” as rioters and police clashed outside the Capitol, prosecutors said. He tossed his wooden club at a police line and a video captured him retrieving a smoke grenade from the crowd and throwing it back at police across a barricade.Milstreed then joined other rioters in attacking an AP photographer, grabbing the photographer’s backpack and yanking him down some steps.Milstreed used Facebook to update his friends on the riot in real time.“Man I’ve never seen anything like this. I feel so alive,” he wrote, sharing photos of blood on a floor outside the Capitol, also writing it “felt good” to punch the photographer.More than 1,100 people have been charged with January 6-related federal crimes. More

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      in US Politics

      US senator Robert Menendez and wife charged with bribery offenses

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      The US senator Robert Menendez, a Democrat from New Jersey, and his wife have been charged with bribery offenses in connection with accepting gold bars, cash and a Mercedes-Benz, among other gifts, in exchange for protecting three businessmen and influencing the government of Egypt.FBI special agents discovered “a lot of gold” provided by Fred Daibes – a builder, and one of the three businessmen – during a search of the Menendez couple’s home in New Jersey, according to Damian Williams, US attorney for the southern district of New York.In a press conference on Friday, he said agents discovered approximately $500,000 of cash “stuffed into envelopes and closets”, some of which was “stuffed in the senator’s jacket pockets”.The FBI also found the Mercedes-Benz car that Jose Uribe, another of the three businessmen and a former insurance agent, had provided the couple, he said.“We are not done,” said Williams. “And I want to encourage anyone with information to come forward and to come forward quickly.”Menendez, who has been in the Senate since 2006, and his wife face three criminal counts each, including: conspiracy to commit bribery, conspiracy to commit honest services fraud and conspiracy to commit extortion under color of official right. The senator’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Menendez, the chair of the US Senate committee on foreign relations, had previously been charged in New Jersey with accepting private flights, campaign contributions and other bribes from a wealthy patron in exchange for official favors, but a 2017 trial ended in a jury deadlock.The federal government now seeks the forfeiture of assets including the Menendezes’ New Jersey home, a 2019 Mercedez-Benz vehicle, about $566,000 in cash, gold bars and funds from a bank account.The businessmen in the case – Wael Hana, Uribe and Daibes – were also charged in the scheme.Prosecutors said Hana, who is originally from Egypt, arranged dinners and meetings between Menendez and Egyptian officials in 2018 at which the officials pressed Menendez on the status of US military aid. In exchange, Hana put Nadine Menendez on his company’s payroll, prosecutors said.The New Jersey senator is also alleged to have “improperly pressured” a senior official at the Department of Agriculture to “protect a lucrative monopoly that the government of Egypt had awarded to [Wael] Hana” and that Hana used to “fund certain bribe payments”, Williams said.The indictment also alleges that Menendez used his power and influence to try to disrupt a criminal investigation and prosecution undertaken by the New Jersey attorney general’s office related to “an associate and relative of [Jose] Uribe”.Egypt at the time was one of the largest recipients of US military aid, but the state department had withheld $195m in 2017 and canceled an additional $65.7m until the country could demonstrate improvements on human rights and democracy.Menendez at a meeting in 2018 told Hana non-public information about the status of the aid, prosecutors said. Hana then texted an Egyptian official: “The ban on small arms and ammunition to Egypt has been lifted,” according to an indictment made public on Friday.Reuters and the Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      in US Politics

      Rudy Giuliani ‘mob scene’ turned Elon Musk off seeking advice, new book says

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      Elon Musk backed away from a plan to recruit Rudy Giuliani as a political fixer to help him turn PayPal into a bank in 2001 after he and an associate found the then New York mayor “surrounded by goonish confidantes” in an office that felt “like a mob scene”.“This guy occupies a different planet,” Musk, who would become the world’s richest man, said of Giuliani, then approaching the peak of his fame.Giuliani left office at the end of 2001 after leading New York through the 9/11 attacks, then ran for the Republican nomination for president in 2008, a campaign which soon collapsed.He became an attorney and ally to Donald Trump but missed out on a cabinet appointment when Trump won the presidency in 2016.Trump’s first impeachment was fueled by Giuliani’s work in Ukraine, seeking political dirt on opponents. Now 79, Giuliani has pleaded not guilty to 13 criminal charges of racketeering and conspiracy, regarding his work to advance Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia.The irony of the former mayor and New York US attorney being indicted on charges often used against figures in organised crime has been widely remarked. As a prosecutor, Giuliani made his name chasing down mafia kingpins.The latest picture of Giuliani as gangster is included in Elon Musk, a new biography of the 52-year-old Tesla, SpaceX and X (formerly Twitter) owner and sometime world’s richest man, by Walter Isaacson, whose other subjects include Leonardo Da Vinci and Steve Jobs.Isaacson’s book was widely excerpted in the US media before publication on Tuesday.The brief meeting between Musk and Giuliani came about, Isaacson writes, as Musk sought to turn PayPal, the online payments company he co-founded, into “a social network that would disrupt the whole banking industry” – a vision he now harbours for Twitter, which he bought in October 2022 and renamed as X this year.“We have to decide whether we are going to aim big,” Musk told those who worked for him, Isaacson writes, adding that some “believed Musk’s framing was flawed”.Describing stymied attempts to rebrand, Isaacson writes: “Focus groups showed that the name X.com … conjured up visions of a seedy site you would not talk about in polite company. But Musk was unwavering and remains so to this day.”Such discussions, Isaacson reports, led Musk and an investor, Michael Moritz, to go to New York, “to see if they could recruit Rudy Giuliani, who was just ending his tenure as mayor, to be a political fixer and guide them through the policy intricacies of being a bank.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“But as soon as they walked into his office, they knew it would not work.“It was like walking into a mob scene,” Moritz says. Giuliani “was surrounded by goonish confidantes. He didn’t have any idea whatsoever about Silicon Valley, but he and his henchmen were eager to line their pockets.”“They asked for 10% of the company, and that was the end of the meeting. ‘This guy occupies a different planet,’ Musk told Moritz.”Giuliani succeeded in lining his pockets after leaving city hall, making millions as a lawyer and consultant and giving paid speeches around the world.That picture has also changed. Faced with spiraling legal costs arising from his work for Trump and other cases including a $10m lawsuit from a former associate who alleges sexual assault, lawyers for Giuliani have said he is struggling to pay his bills. In New York, his luxury apartment was put up for sale. More

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      in US Politics

      JFK assassination witness questions whether shooter acted alone

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      An ex-Secret Service agent who was feet away from John F Kennedy when the former president was shot dead has broken his decades-old silence to cast doubt on the single-bullet theory held by the commission which investigated the assassination.In an interview published by the New York Times over the weekend, Paul Landis said that he long believed the official finding that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he killed Kennedy.But, based on discrepancies between things he saw on the day of the assassination and the report from the commission, “I’m beginning to doubt myself,” Landis said. “Now I begin to wonder.”Landis’s recollection of Kennedy’s death is bound to fuel those who believe multiple shooters killed the late president in Dallas on 22 November 1963. Yet his remarks – coming about a month before he releases a memoir – differ from two written statements which he turned in shortly after the assassination, surely keeping one of the darkest chapters in US history shrouded in mystery.Landis was on the running board of a car trailing the open-top limousine that Kennedy was riding when – as he tells it – he heard a barrage of gunshots and a bullet struck the president from behind. The Warren commission, convened to examine the investigation, concluded that one bullet then continued forward, striking fellow passenger and Texas governor John Connally in his back, thigh, chest and wrist.As the New York Times noted, the main reason for that conclusion was because the bullet was found on a stretcher used to move Connally around a hospital afterward.Enter Landis’s new interview and his upcoming memoir, The Final Witness: A Kennedy Secret Service Agent Breaks His Silence After 60 Years. Landis told the New York Times that he was the person who discovered that bullet, which he remembers being stuck in the limousine seat behind Kennedy’s seat after the president had been brought to the hospital.Landis also said he did not think the bullet went too deeply into Kennedy’s back before “popping back out” prior to the president’s removal from the car he was in. Worried someone would try to pocket it as a souvenir, Landis said he took the bullet and placed it next to a stretchered Kennedy.“It was a piece of evidence that I realized right away [was] very important,” Landis said. “And I didn’t want it to disappear or get lost. So it was, ‘Paul, you’ve got to make a decision’ – and I grabbed it.”Realizing in 2014 that the location of the bullet’s recovery cited by him was different than the one cited by the Warren commission, Landis checked with multiple officials, according to the New York Times’s story. He was generally met with skepticism, largely because of two written statements that he filed himself.Neither statement mentioned his finding the bullet in question, and he reported hearing only a pair of gunshots at the time of the assassination, the Times wrote.Landis said he was in shock and suffering from sleep deprivation at the time he filed those reports. He said he expected those reports to have mistakes and omissions because his focus at the time was on supporting the first lady Jacqueline Kennedy through her grief.Going public with his contradictions of the official Kennedy assassination narrative was not an easy decision, as his lengthy wait to do so suggests, Landis said.“I didn’t want to talk about it,” said Landis, who left the Secret Service about six months after the Kennedy assassination. “I was afraid. I started to think, did I do something wrong? There was a fear that I might have done something wrong and I shouldn’t talk about it.”The Final Witness is set to be released on 10 October. Its scheduled arrival comes less than a year after Biden’s White House directed the National Archives to publish about 12,000 documents pertaining to Kennedy’s assassination – a move that more than 70% of Americans favored, according to a new poll at about that time. More