DHS Responds to 'Cartel-Tok' Videos of Drug Smuggling Going Viral
Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has responded to viral videos glamorizing cartel activity and drug smuggling, with officials emphasizing the ongoing efforts to crack down on what they call "depraved" criminal networks.
The content, some of which shows what appears to be cocaine being processed and transported, includes footage of what seem to be dismembered limbs, allegedly belonging to a cartel-affiliated smuggler. The videos have drawn widespread attention and alarm, contributing to what online users have dubbed the "Cartel-Tok" trend, where criminal groups glorify cartel life and showcase violent or illegal activity.
"While DHS has not verified the authenticity of the content this particular account has shared, our brave ICE officers, CBP agents and U.S. Coast Guard are working day-in and day-out to protect Americans from the threat of these depraved cartel members who glorify violence," DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin told Newsweek.
File photo shows cocaine.
File photo shows cocaine.
AP
Why It Matters
President Donald Trump signed an executive order designating Mexican drug cartels and other Latin American groups as terrorist organizations.
Trump's order says that these groups "threaten the safety of the American people, the security of the United States, and the stability of the international order in the Western Hemisphere."
What To Know
"On day one of his presidency, President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order designating cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. These depraved thugs rape, maim, torture and poison Americans," McLaughlin said.
Dubbed "Cartel-Tok" by social media users, a growing number of videos posted to platforms like TikTok depict people allegedly affiliated with Latin American drug cartels showcasing large drug shipments. Some videos have racked up millions of views.
A TikTok account under the username @$rugcoin has shared several videos depicting what appears to be a drug smuggler with a video caption that reads "POV: You Work for the cartel."
The videos often portray illegal smuggling as daring or heroic, raising fears that they may be influencing young viewers or aiding recruitment efforts by cartels.
One video text caption reads: "Family business on Colombia," and another says: "We are hiring more people."
The account under $RUGCOIN is also promoting a new memecoin project.
DHS has not confirmed whether the people shown in the viral content are actual cartel members.
Arturo Fontes, a retired FBI agent, told Newsweek that the social media videos can "entice" young people.
What People Are Saying
Arturo Fontes, a retired FBI agent, told Newsweek: "These videos glamorize the role of drug dealers and violent crime, particularly appealing to young people—often referred to as "fresas," or middle-class youths—who lack motivation for education or employment. Unfortunately, many of these individuals are disillusioned with the traditional path and are enticed by the allure of fast money, luxurious lifestyles, and superficial beauty without any effort or hard work."
DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin told Newsweek: "Under Secretary Noem's leadership, DHS has near complete operational control of the border that the Biden administration recklessly left wide-open for cartels to exploit by trafficking humans and drugs into the U.S. Our personnel will continue to dismantle and disrupt nefarious criminals who pose a threat to the safety of our country."
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USA Today
32 minutes ago
- USA Today
Trump's golf trip to Scotland reopens old wounds for some of his neighbors
BALMEDIE, Scotland − Long before talk of hush-money payments, election subversion or mishandling classified documents, before his executive orders were the subject of U.S. Supreme Court challenges, before he was the 45th and then the 47th president: on a wild and windswept stretch of beach in northeast Scotland, Donald Trump the businessman was accused of being a bad neighbor. "This place will never, ever belong to Trump," Michael Forbes, 73, a retired quarry worker and salmon fisherman, said this week as he took a break from fixing a roof on his farm near Aberdeen. The land he owns is surrounded, though disguised in places by trees and hedges, by a golf resort owned by Trump's family business in Scotland, Trump International Scotland. For nearly 20 years, Forbes and several other families who live in Balmedie have resisted what they describe as bullying efforts by Trump to buy their land. (He has denied the allegations.) They and others also say he's failed to deliver on his promises to bring thousands of jobs to the area. Those old wounds are being reopened as Trump returns to Scotland for a four-day visit beginning July 25. It's the country where his mother was born. He appears to have great affection for it. Trump is visiting his golf resorts at Turnberry, on the west coast about 50 miles from Glasgow, and at Balmedie, where Forbes' 23 acres of jumbled, tractor-strewn land, which he shares with roaming chickens and three Highland cows, abut Trump's glossy and manicured golf resort. On July 28, Trump will briefly meet in Balmedie with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to "refine" a recent U.S.-U.K. trade deal, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said. Golf, a little diplomacy: Trump heads to Scotland In Scotland, where estimates from the National Library of Scotland suggest that as many as 34 out of the 45 American presidents have Scottish ancestry, opinions hew toward the he's-ill-suited-for-the-job, according to surveys. "Trump? He just doesn't know how to treat people," said Forbes, who refuses to sell. What Trump's teed up in Scotland Part of the Balmedie community's grievances relate to Trump's failure to deliver on his promises. According to planning documents, public accounts and his own statements, Trump promised, beginning in 2006, to inject $1.5 billion into his golf project six miles north of Aberdeen. He has spent about $120 million. Approval for the development, he vowed, came with more than 1,000 permanent jobs and 5,000 construction gigs attached. Instead, there were 84, meaning fewer than the 100 jobs that already existed when the land he bought was a shooting range. Instead of a 450-room luxury hotel and hundreds of homes that Trump pledged to build for the broader community, there is a 19-room boutique hotel and a small clubhouse with a restaurant and shop that sells Trump-branded whisky, leather hip flasks and golf paraphernalia. Financial filings show that his course on the Menie Estate in Balmedie lost $1.9 million in 2023 − its 11th consecutive financial loss since he acquired the 1,400-acre grounds in 2006. Residents who live and work near the course say that most days, even in the height of summer, the fairway appears to be less than half full. Representatives for Trump International say the plan all along has been to gradually phase in the development at Balmedie and that it is not realistic or fair to expect everything to be built overnight. There's also support for Trump from some residents who live nearby, and in the wider Aberdeen business community. One Balmedie resident who lives in the shadow of Trump's course said that before Trump the area was nothing but featureless sand dunes and that his development, carved between those dunes, made the entire landscape look more attractive. Fergus Mutch, a policy advisor for the Aberdeen and Grampian Chamber of Commerce, said Trump's golf resort has become a "key bit of the tourism offer" that attracts "significant spenders" to a region gripped by economic turmoil, steep job cuts and a prolonged downturn in its North Sea oil and gas industry. Trump in Scotland: Liked or loathed? Still, recent surveys show that 70% of Scots hold an unfavorable opinion of Trump. Despite his familial ties and deepening investments in Scotland, Trump is more unpopular among Scots than with the British public overall, according to an Ipsos survey from March. It shows 57% of people in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland don't view Trump positively. King Charles invites Trump: American president snags another UK state visit While in Balmedie this time, Trump will open a new 18-hole golf course on his property dedicated to his mother, Mary Anne MacLeod, who was a native of Lewis, in Scotland's Western Isles. He is likely to be met with a wave of protests around the resort, as well as the one in Turnberry. The Stop Trump Coalition, a group of campaigners who oppose most of Trump's domestic and foreign policies and the way he conducts his private and business affairs, is organizing a protest in Aberdeen and outside the U.S. consulate in Edinburgh. During Trump's initial visit to Scotland as president, in his first term, thousands of protesters sought to disrupt his visit, lining key routes and booing him. One protester even flew a powered paraglider into the restricted airspace over his Turnberry resort that bore a banner that read, "Trump: well below par #resist." 'Terrific guy': The Trump-Epstein party boy friendship lasted a decade, ended badly Trump's course in Turnberry has triggered less uproar than his Balmedie one because locals say that he's invested millions of dollars to restore the glamour of its 101-year-old hotel and three golf courses after he bought the site in 2014. Trump versus the families Three families still live directly on or adjacent to Trump's Balmedie golf resort. They say that long before the world had any clue about what type of president a billionaire New York real estate mogul and reality-TV star would become, they had a pretty good idea. Forbes is one of them. He said that shortly after Trump first tried to persuade him and his late wife to sell him their farm, workers he hired deliberately sabotaged an underground water pipe that left the Forbes – and his mother, then in her 90s, lived in her own nearby house – without clean drinking water for five years. Trump International declined to provide a fresh comment on those allegations, but a spokesperson previously told USA TODAY it "vigorously refutes" them. It said that when workers unintentionally disrupted a pipe that ran into an "antiquated" makeshift "well" jointly owned by the Forbeses on Trump's land, it was repaired immediately. Trump has previously called Forbes a "disgrace" who "lives like a pig." 'I don't have a big enough flagpole' David Milne, 61, another of Trump's seething Balmedie neighbors, lives in a converted coast guard station with views overlooking Trump's course and of the dunes and the North Sea beyond. In 2009, Trump offered him and his wife about $260,000 for his house and its one-fifth acre of land, Milne said. Trump was caught on camera saying he wanted to remove it because it was "ugly." Trump, he said, "threw in some jewelry," a golf club membership (Milne doesn't play), use of a spa (not yet built) and the right to buy, at cost, a house in a related development (not yet constructed). Milne valued the offer at about half the market rate. When Milne refused that offer, he said that landscapers working for Trump partially blocked the views from his house by planting a row of trees and sent Milne a $3,500 bill for a fence they'd built around his garden. Milne refused to pay. Over the years, Milne has pushed back. He flew a Mexican flag at his house for most of 2016, after Trump vowed to build a wall on the southern American border and make Mexico pay for it. Milne, a health and safety consultant in the energy industry, has hosted scores of journalists and TV crews at his home, where he has patiently explained the pros and cons − mostly cons, in his view, notwithstanding his own personal stake in the matter − of Trump's development for the local area. Milne said that because of his public feud with Trump, he's a little worried a freelance MAGA supporter could target him or his home. He has asked police to provide protection for him and his wife at his home while Trump is in the area. He also said he won't be flying any flags this time, apart from the Saltire, Scotland's national flag. "I don't have a big enough flagpole. I would need one from Mexico, Canada, Palestine. I would need Greenland, Denmark − you name it," he said, running through some of the places toward which Trump has adopted what critics view as aggressive and adversarial policies. Dunes of great natural importance Martin Ford was the local Aberdeen government official who originally oversaw Trump's planning application to build the Balmedie resort in 2006. He was part of a planning committee that rejected it over environmental concerns because the course would be built between sand dunes that were designated what the UK calls a Site of Special Scientific Interest due to the way they shift over time. The Scottish government swiftly overturned that ruling on the grounds that Trump's investment in the area would bring a much-needed economic boost. Neil Hobday, who was the project director for Trump's course in Balmedie, last year told the BBC he was "hoodwinked" by Trump over his claim that he would spend more than a billion dollars on it. Hobday said he felt "ashamed that I fell for it and Scotland fell for it. We all fell for it." The dunes lost their special status in 2020, according to Nature Scot, the agency that oversees such designations. It concluded that their special features had been "partially destroyed" by Trump's resort. Trump International disputes that finding, saying the issue became "highly politicized." For years, Trump also fought to block the installation of a wind farm off his resort's coast. He lost that fight. The first one was built in 2018. There are now 11 turbines. Ford has since retired but stands by his belief that allowing approval for the Trump resort was a mistake. "I feel cheated out of a very important natural habitat, which we said we would protect and we haven't," he said. "Trump came here and made a lot of promises that haven't materialized. In return, he was allowed to effectively destroy a nature site of great conservation value. It's not the proper behavior of a decent person." Forbes, the former quarry worker and fisherman, said he viewed Trump in similar terms. He said that Trump "will never ever get his hands on his farm." He said that wasn't just idle talk. He said he's put his land in a trust that specified that when he dies, it can't be sold for at least 125 years.
Boston Globe
38 minutes ago
- Boston Globe
A Kennedy toils in Mississippi, tracing his grandfather's path
Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Kennedy nodded to the history. 'I know a bit about my grandfather's visit to the Delta back in the '60s, and how it changed and outraged him to see this in the richest country in the world,' he said. 'I'm proud that my family has spent a lot of their years in office advocating for these people.' Advertisement Kennedy is on a mission to continue the legacy of an American political family that has in recent years lost some of its liberal luster. It angers him that his uncle Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health and human services secretary, is a key figure in an administration that is overturning core values of his family. Advertisement The health secretary has defended work requirements for Medicaid recipients, 'which do not work,' the younger Kennedy said. 'The only thing they succeed at is kicking people off Medicaid who need it.' On the elder Kennedy's efforts to ban food dyes, his nephew dismissively replied, 'It's not the dyes that are making people obese.' Still, he shares with his uncle the belief that Democrats are increasingly captive to an urban elite. 'I think the Democratic Party has lost touch with this reality,' he said, staring out at the Delta landscape. Joe Kennedy III and his wife, Lauren Anne Birchfield, arrived at the JFK Library, Sunday, May 4, 2025, in Boston. Robert F. Bukaty/Associated Press Kennedy's response is not to run for president as his grandfather did and his uncle might, or at least not yet. Instead he has formed the Groundwork Project, a nonprofit that seeks to develop a network of grassroots resistance in four deep-red states -- Mississippi, Alabama, Oklahoma and West Virginia -- that have received little attention from left-leaning organizations. Without any meaningful opposition, Kennedy said, those states have become havens for right-wing initiatives, ranging from the evisceration of the Clean Air Act in West Virginia to legislation in Mississippi that banned abortions after 15 weeks and led to the Supreme Court's decision overturning Roe v. Wade. 'The only way to change the power structures in those states is to organize people,' Kennedy said. 'That's not a short fix. But what else can you do?' The slow grind of organization-building in hostile territory that Kennedy envisions has been done before, mostly by conservative groups like Americans for Prosperity, which was formed in 2004, operates in 35 states and has an annual operating budget of more than $186 million. In contrast, the Groundwork Project operates on a relatively modest $2.8 million a year, much of it disbursed as $25,000 annual grants to about 40 local groups that have fought uphill battles in areas like environmental justice and reproductive rights. Advertisement But the famous name helps. During a three-day trip to Mississippi to observe the efforts that Groundwork Project is helping to underwrite, locals sometimes referred to its founder in awed tones as 'a Kennedy.' During one gathering of local officials, at a diner in Yazoo City, Kennedy addressed the subject of health care by invoking his lineage, saying, 'My family has focused on this for a long time.' In the next breath, Kennedy pointedly brought up another relative: 'My uncle is now part of an administration that is cutting Medicaid.' Jim Kessler, the executive vice president for policy of the centrist Democratic organization Third Way, speculated about the political subtext of Kennedy's criticisms of his uncle. 'It's all but certain that Bobby Jr. is going to run for president as a Republican in 2028,' Kessler said. 'Maybe part of what the younger Kennedy is doing is reclaiming the family legacy as a way to remind people, 'This is who we really are.'' Joseph P. Kennedy III spoke at Atlantic Technical University in Letterkenny, Donegal, Ireland on Oct. 2. Conor Doherty The Oral History of Family Lore Kennedy was not yet born when Sen. Robert F. Kennedy's quest for the presidency was cut short by an assassin's bullet in California in June 1968. The 42-year-old candidate left behind his widow, Ethel, and their 11 children, among them Robert Jr. and Joseph, Joe Kennedy III's father, who would go on to serve in Congress from 1987 to 1999. Kennedy said that he has never read a book about his grandfather, since from infancy he marinated in the oral history of family lore. Inculcated in him were RFK adages such as, 'The gross national product can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.' Advertisement His own trajectory followed the meticulously laid Kennedy path of public service merging with political advancement. He spent his childhood in Boston before attending Stanford University and subsequently serving two years in the Dominican Republic as a Peace Corps volunteer. He returned home to Massachusetts, graduated from Harvard Law School and then worked as an assistant district attorney in Middlesex County. It came as little surprise in February 2012 when he announced his desire to fill the congressional seat soon to be vacated by Rep. Barney Frank. Kennedy -- an earnest and energetic 31-year-old scion with a genetically distinctive aquiline nose, a toothy grin and wavy red hair that deviated from the family's physical template -- coasted to victory without serious opposition. The freshman won over many colleagues in the House, several of whom said in interviews that they had been braced for an entitled brat and instead encountered someone who was thoughtful and unpretentious. He set out to lead on mental health issues as his cousin, Patrick Kennedy, had done before retiring from Congress in 2011. But Kennedy said he grew dismayed by the chamber's partisan divisions and inexplicable lethargy, recalling, 'Even in the majority, I couldn't move my own bills.' By Kennedy's fourth term, restlessness had gotten the better of him. In September 2019, he announced his candidacy for the Senate, a body in which three Kennedy legends -- his grandfather; his great-uncle, the former president; and his great-uncle Ted -- had previously served. He garnered the support of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the Democrat who was then the minority leader. Advertisement But the 73-year-old Democratic incumbent, Sen. Edward J. Markey, outfoxed his younger opponent by recasting himself as a rabble-rousing progressive in the manner of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who endorsed Markey. Kennedy, whose tendency is to speak in carefully constructed paragraphs, struggled to come up with his own pithy pitch to voters. Markey won the September 2020 primary by 11 points, and Kennedy became the first in his family to be defeated in a senatorial contest. President Donald Trump gloated on Twitter, 'Pelosi strongly backed the loser!' Being spurned and disparaged by liberal activists was unfamiliar terrain for a Kennedy, and he spent the remainder of 2020 contemplating his options. 'Losing sucks,' Kennedy said. 'But I made the decision to try to build something that keeps you engaged and energized. And if something comes up, perhaps you take it, but you're not sitting around waiting for that to happen.' Joe Kennedy delivered his election-night in Watertown on Sept. 1, 2020, in his unsuccessful Senate race against Ed Markey John Tlumacki/Globe Staff 'You Democrats Think We Don't Know How to Work?' Rejected by progressive activists, Kennedy turned to forgotten agrarian lands like the Mississippi Delta, which has only one major city (Jackson), and is therefore difficult to organize. It's 'what I call a hard-to-fight state,' said Charles Taylor, the executive director of Mississippi's NAACP chapter. Similar impediments exist in Oklahoma, where Republican legislators have passed severe restrictions on abortion and on what can be taught in public school classrooms about racism. Alabama, a third Groundwork Project state, benefits from a more urban population than Oklahoma or Mississippi. But Democratic get-out-the-vote organizers have been reluctant to operate in a state where there is no in-person early voting and where absentee ballots must be signed by a notary or two voting-age witnesses. Advertisement West Virginia is by far the most challenging for Kennedy. Its overwhelmingly rural and white population was long Democratic, but the collapse of the coal and steel industries in the state have spawned a profound distrust of party elites, Kennedy said. He recalled a visit to West Virginia just after he founded the Groundwork Project, when a bearded young man asked him, 'How come you Democrats think we don't know how to work?' To every such question, Kennedy's implicit answer was to organize. 'I think Mississippi has so much to teach our nation about resilience, never losing focus and not giving up when your government is actively working against you,' he said at an event in Indianola. Kennedy is applying the same calm resolve to his own political future. He and his wife, Lauren Birchfield Kennedy, an attorney and children's advocate, have a 6-year-old son and a 9-year-old daughter. Kennedy laments having missed so much of their infancy while serving in Washington. 'The question is, is what I would get out of going back into elective office worth the sacrifice that I asked my family to go through again?' For now, Kennedy is content to leave the question unanswered. 'I'm 44,' he said. 'And at some point down the road, I wouldn't necessarily rule anything out.' This article originally appeared in
NBC News
39 minutes ago
- NBC News
Ghislaine Maxwell's meetings with Justice Department shrouded in secrecy
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche completed nine hours of meetings over two days with Ghislaine Maxwell on Friday but made no public statements about what she said or the next steps in the Justice Department's much-criticized Jeffrey Epstein investigation. Former prosecutors said it was highly unusual — and potentially unprecedented — for a the department's No. 2 official to personally interview a witness. Secrecy in a criminal investigation is normal, but the prosecutors involved in the case would typically be included in questioning. 'I've never heard of a deputy attorney general doing anything like this before,' said a former senior Justice Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Victims of Epstein and Maxwell, who was convicted in 2021 of recruiting and grooming multiple teenage girls to be sexually abused by the late financier, questioned the lack of transparency as well. Jack Scarola, a lawyer representing roughly 20 Epstein victims, said he asked to attend the Maxwell interviews but was not included. Berit Berger, a former federal prosecutor in New York, said the interviews by Blanche, who worked as Trump's former defense lawyer, may be performative. 'It may be just a way of being able to say, 'Look, we dotted every I and crossed every T,'' she said. 'There's value to being able to say that we've tried to speak to everyone we possibly could, including the co-defendant.' Attorney General Pam Bondi, Blanche and President Donald Trump himself have struggled to quell the uproar since the DOJ and FBI announced on July 6 that an exhaustive Epstein case review had not uncovered evidence that justified investigating other individuals. FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino — who haveboth spread conspiracy theories about the Epstein case — backed those findings and a DOJ decision to release no other Epstein case documents. Catherine Christian, a former Manhattan assistant district attorney and an NBC News legal analyst, said the Maxwell interviews could also be an effort to protect Trump, who now faces one of the largest political crises of his second term in the furor over the Epstein investigation. Trump, like dozens of other wealthy Americans, socialized with Epstein. He is among hundreds of individuals whose names appear in 100,000 pages of Epstein case documents reviewed by the DOJ and the FBI. 'It's hard to believe this is anything but performative,' Christian said. 'Or Todd Blanche, just wanting to have her on the record saying, 'Yes, President Trump had nothing to do with any of this. He was not a client.'' What was Maxwell asked? Maxwell's lawyer, David Oscar Markus, is a top Florida criminal defense lawyer and a friend of Blanche's. Blanche appeared on Markus' podcast in 2024, where the host praised Blanche's legal skills. After Friday's meeting with Blanche and Maxwell, Markus told reporters that the deputy attorney general 'did an amazing job' and asked Maxwell thorough questions. 'She was asked maybe about 100 different people,' said Markus, who did not disclose which individuals Maxwell was questioned about. 'She answered questions about everybody, and she didn't hold anything back,' he said. 'They asked about every single, every possible thing you could imagine, everything.' A senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said that Maxwell was granted limited immunity by the Justice Department to answer questions about the Epstein case. Granting limited immunity is common in criminal cases and allows defendants to provide information without fear that it will be used against them in court. The immunity is 'limited' because it only applies if the defendant is telling the truth. If it is determined that a defendant lied during the interviews, then the agreement becomes void. Prosecutors can take into consideration a defendant's cooperation and recommend a plea deal or a reduced sentence. This is not expected in Maxwell's case, as she has already been convicted and sentenced to 20 years in federal prison. Maxwell's lawyer, Markus, has argued that Maxwell's trial was unfair and an appeal of her conviction is pending before the Supreme Court. Potential pardon or commutation Trump, like all presidents, has the power to pardon or commute the sentence of anyone convicted of a federal crime. Asked about Epstein's case on Friday morning, Trump said the focus should be on other people who socialized with Epstein, such as former President Bill Clinton and Larry Summers, the former treasury secretary and Harvard University president. 'You should focus on Clinton,' the president told reporters. 'You should focus on the president of Harvard, the former president of Harvard. You should focus on some of the hedge fund guys.' 'I'll give you a list. These guys lived with Jeffrey Epstein. I sure as hell didn't,' Trump said. Asked if he was considering granting Maxwell a pardon or commuting her sentence, Trump said, 'It's something I haven't thought about.' 'I'm allowed to do it,' he added. Mimi Rocah, a former federal prosecutor in New York, said she believes the recent firing of Maurene Comey, a lead prosecutor in the Maxwell case and the daughter of former FBI Director James Comey, was an effort to give Trump appointees full control of the Maxwell case, limit transparency and silence dissent. 'That does not seem coincidental. It seems like they wanted Maurene not to be present in the Department of Justice,' Rocah said. 'To be able to say, 'What the heck, you can't go talk to my client or my defendant.'' Rocah, a Democrat who served as Westchester County district attorney from 2020 to 2024, criticized Blanche's meetings with Maxwell, saying his apparent failure to include a prosecutor with deep knowledge of her crimes was unfair to Epstein's victims. 'The head of that entire institution that is supposed to be about protecting victims is talking to her, giving her a platform to say God knows what, without much way to verify it or not,' Rocah said. 'The real people who could test her truth-telling are the people who worked on the case, not Todd.'
