Yesterday Marcy Wheeler, the formidable and brilliant journalist who goes by “emptywheel” online, posted a list of potential witnesses in the upcoming trial of billionaire financier and close Donald Trump friend, Tom Barrack.
Federal prosecutors say that Barrack, while he was serving on Trump’s inaugural committee in 2017, was taking money from the United Arab Emirates on the one hand while he was lobbying Trump on behalf of the UAE on the other hand, and without registering as a lobbyist for the Middle East nation.
It’s a complex case that suggests Barrack was soliciting money from the UAE while trying to influence the Trump administration in what amounted to illegal lobbying.
Barrack has pleaded not guilty, but his high-priced legal team has been unable to prevent a trial from coming. It’s scheduled for late September in Brooklyn.
The witness list appeared at the end of a 52-page jury questionnaire that was filed to the court’s docket on July 26. Wheeler posted it to Twitter yesterday, saying, “Just for shits and giggles, I want to post the list of people who might be witnesses or get mentioned at Tom Barrack’s trial, which starts in 7 weeks.” She pointed out that among the people listed who might be witnesses or otherwise referenced in the trial were such names as Jared Kushner, John Kerry, Donald Trump Jr, Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, and even former President Donald Trump himself.
One of our readers also went through the list Wheeler posted and alerted us that Tommy Davis was on it.
We had wondered if Davis might get pulled into the trial in some way or another. Tommy has worked for Barrack at least a couple of different times since he left Scientology’s Sea Org, and it’s little wonder: Barrack was close friends with fellow investor William Davis, Tommy’s wealthy father, who died in 2015. Tommy appears to fill a role working for Barrack that is not too dissimilar from what he was doing for his boss in the Sea Org, Scientology leader David Miscavige.
While Tommy’s father was a rich investor, his mother is Anne Archer, the Oscar-nominated actress who, along with her husband, retired TV executive Terry Jastrow, is a longtime dedicated Scientologist. Tommy grew up immersed in Scientology; actor Jason Beghe, a former Scientologist, has told us how much he enjoyed seeing young Tommy around, and what a smart and talented kid he was. But Tommy spurned college to join the Sea Org, the dedicated inner hardcore of Scientology that requires members to sign billion-year contracts. By the early 2000s, Tommy had become a kind of Scientology majordomo for actor Tom Cruise, and then Miscavige thrust Davis into his most famous role, as pugnacious Scientology spokesman.
Davis became well known for his brawling interviews with the likes of ABC’s Martin Bashir, the BBC’s John Sweeney, and CNN’s John Roberts. He played a particularly prominent role in Sweeney’s 2007 special, “Scientology and Me.”
But then Tommy ran into Lawrence Wright. For his epic 2011 story in the New Yorker, “The Apostate,” Wright detailed Tommy’s attempts to foist bogus copies of L. Ron Hubbard’s military records on the magazine, and it made Tommy look incompetent and in over his head. Wright’s article came out on February 6, 2011. By late March, Scientology had registered the website “whoistommydavis.com,” which was a sign that Tommy had gotten the axe over Wright’s article and the church was prepared to smear him online if he raised a fuss about it.
Tommy later turned up in Austin, where his then-wife Jessica Feshbach’s family had some property, and in 2013 Davis testified in a court deposition that he was “on leave” from his job in the Sea Organization but was still a member of the Church of Scientology.
The next year, in 2014, the Davises moved to Los Angeles, as Tommy found work at Barrack’s Colony Capital (now DigitalBridge Group). But then in February 2016 Tommy left his job working for Barrack and became “general manager North America” for Australian billionaire James Packer, helping to run Packer’s Hollywood studio, RatPac Entertainment.
Davis and Packer knew each other from Scientology. Packer had been brought into the church around the year 2001 by his friend Tom Cruise, and according to Steve Cannane’s excellent book on Australian Scientology, Fair Game, Packer left the church around the year 2006. A decade later, he hired Davis to help him run his movie studio. But then 2016 turned into a nightmare year for Packer as he had setbacks to his gambling empire, broke up with fiancée Mariah Carey, and his studio also took a bath on a Ben Affleck flop. Packer ended up bailing out of RatPac, and in that chaos Tommy left his job and went back to work for Barrack as a consultant.
In May 2017, Tommy filed for divorce from Jessica, with whom he had two young daughters. Two years later Tommy remarried, this time to Egyptian actress Maie Ibrahim, with a lavish ceremony in Morocco. In March 2021, they welcomed a baby boy.
Tommy showed up numerous times in the 2020 tell-all Melania and Me, written by Melania Trump’s former adviser Stephanie Winston Wolkoff. The book in part focused on the debacle of missing money from the 2017 inaugural, which Winston Wolkoff had been blamed for. Her book suggests that she was a patsy, and that Barrack, represented by Davis, was more at fault for the bungled financing of the inaugural.
In 2021, Davis was seen in Barrack’s entourage as he was making a court appearance (see photo at top). But we don’t know what Davis might be called to testify about, or if he will be at all. Still, it’s fun to see him on the list, and we’ll be paying more attention to the trial, and his possible role in it, as the starting date nears.
——————–
Technology Cocktail
“Given a sudden overwhelming experience a ‘good person’ may be shifted violently in his own goals pattern and become evil. And a ‘bad person,’ acted upon powerfully by life, will become good. But they also become sick. Their illness stems from being moved out of present time into past heavy energy patterns. It is no cure to so move them despite the assertions of 19th Century mentalists and their shock ‘treatment.’ This shows why shock sometimes works and why changes of character come about. And it also shows why such changes are accompanied by severe illness and early death. The person is thrown violently out of present time into a painful past. The problem is not a problem of sanity and insanity. It is a problem of disastrous motives and constructive motives and the degree to which either is suppressed.” — L. Ron Hubbard, 1964
——————–
Now available: Bonus for our supporters
Episode 7 of the Underground Bunker podcast has been sent out to paid subscribers, and it’s a conversation with Geoff Levin about Scientology’s celebrities and which ones are most likely to defect. Meanwhile, we’ve made episodes 1 through 6 available to everyone, with Pete Griffiths on running a mission, Sunny Pereira dishing secrets of Scientology’s Hollywood Celebrity Centre, Bruce Hines on the crazy life in the Sea Org, Jeffrey Augustine on recent Scientology court cases, Claire Headley exposing Tom Cruise, and Marc Headley on what it must be like for David Miscavige living in Clearwater, Florida. Go here to get the episodes!
“You’d be surprised how often you find a wrong date. And you’re running the Helatrobus implants, so you think, and you go right into the next goal for which you’ve listed. And then you try to get ‘absolutably’ and you can’t get a rocket read, and you say, what’s happened? TA’s up and stuck. I’ve got this next goal ‘to be a goof.’ It’s obviously the next goal in line, only it isn’t here. Shucks, man, you’re probably running a Bear implant. It’s probably shot back on the track Lord knows where, because the one thing a GPM won’t do is properly time. You can duration a GPM and you can time a GPM and you can get the date of a GPM almost endlessly. Why? Because its primary basis is lousing up time. Those two opposing items fire against each other — sound like time to the PC — produces a no-change situation. So the GPM floats on the track and so it’s very difficult to time a GPM. So it’s just nothing to get the next GPM in line to run, and find out that it isn’t at forty-three trillion but at fifteen trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion. Embarrassing. Eventually you go back and start looking for wrong dates on the case, and you finally locate that ‘to be a goof’ is not the next Helatrobus GPM but a GPM which exists in the early limbos of nowhere.” — L. Ron Hubbard, August 7, 1963
——————–
“COMM EVS: Officers who fail to take full responsibility for their areas, divisions and sections without further orders will hereafter be comm eved for offenses after this date and will be reduced to swamper. Ethics is obviously out on this vessel and some of its officers are obviously more interested in being good fellows than putting a well run ship here.” — The Commodore, August 7, 1969
——————–
“I consider this Justin Craig guy to be a plant under DM’s control and on a mission to further mess up the FZ Field. His ‘tech’ is squirrel and specifically designed to mess up OT cases with a bunch of fancy sounding nonsense, very well disguised, sprinkled here and there with bits of truths which would potentially resonate to the OT’s reality, in order to pull them more into MEST, and of course onto his lines. It offers a mystery sandwich to those who, by having done their levels partly or fully on the church’s bridge, may of course still have unanswered questions and issues. I found myself that before doing Excalibur (100 percent LRH TECH despite the lies about it) a Thetan is still not an OT per LRH’s definition. The church does not allow their public this Tech as they of course do NOT want real OT’s but zombies who obey without arguing and keep forever coughing up the cash. I in no way intend to invalidate nor evaluate anyone’s case level, knowledge or accomplishments; I just found the above to be a fact.”
——————–
2000: The St. Petersburg Times reported that a Scientologist has attracted the attention of the Food and Drug Administration with an electric mask that is claimed to create a more youthful look. “Clearwater inventor George E. Springer introduced a battery-powered face mask to the world five years ago. He gave it a fancy, European sounding name, ‘Rejuvenique,’ and registered it with the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. Aesthetics. Inc. signed a deal with Housewares giant Salton/Maxim in January 1999 giving Rejuvenique widespread market exposure. Former Dynasty star Linda Evans became the paid spokeswoman for the mask, which has been claimed to tone skin and reduce fine lines and wrinkles by transmitting mild electric shocks to facial muscles. But now, federal regulators are raising serious concerns about Rejuvenique, saying Salton and Springer have never scientifically documented that it works. Because it is a medical device intended to affect the structure or function of the body, Rejuvenique ‘is not safe except under the supervision of a practitioner licensed by state law,’ the Food and Drug Administration wrote in a July 12 warning letter to the company. Without FDA approval, ‘marketing the Rejuvenique is a violation of the law,’ the letter to Salton and Springer’s Clearwater offices says.”
——————–
“My IP was blocked from the Washington Times comments because I kept bringing up the Rev. Moon connection so I started using Tor, then they started using an app that could tell you were using a proxy. Cults SUCK.”
——————–
Full Court Press: What we’re watching at the Underground Bunker
Criminal prosecutions:
— Danny Masterson charged for raping three women: Trial scheduled for October 11, pretrial conference August 17.
— ‘Lafayette Ronald Hubbard’ (a/k/a Justin Craig), aggravated assault, plus drug charges: Last hearing was on January 18, referred to grand jury. Additional charges also referred to grand jury after January 5 assault while in jail.
— Jay and Jeff Spina, Medicare fraud: Jay sentenced to 9 years in prison. Jeff’s sentencing to be scheduled.
— Rizza Islam and other family members, Medi-Cal fraud: Readiness hearing scheduled for August 22 in Los Angeles
— David Gentile, GPB Capital, fraud: Next pretrial conference set for September 19.
Civil litigation:
— Baxter, Baxter, and Paris v. Scientology, alleging labor trafficking: Complaint filed April 28 in Tampa federal court, Scientology moving to compel arbitration. Plaintiffs filing amended complaint on August 2.
— Valerie Haney v. Scientology: Forced to ‘religious arbitration.’ Selection of arbitrators underway. Next court hearing: February 2, 2023.
— Chrissie Bixler et al. v. Scientology and Danny Masterson: Appellate court removes requirement of arbitration on January 19, case remanded back to Superior Court. Stay in place, next status hearing October 25. Scientology petitioning US Supreme Court over appellate ruling.
— Brian Statler Sr v. City of Inglewood: Third amended complaint filed, trial set for December 6.
— Author Steve Cannane defamation trial: New trial ordered after appeals court overturned prior ruling.
— Chiropractors Steve Peyroux and Brent Detelich, stem cell fraud: Lawsuit filed by the FTC and state of Georgia in August, now in discovery phase.
——————–
THE PROSECUTION OF DANNY MASTERSON
We first broke the news of the LAPD’s investigation of Scientology celebrity Danny Masterson on rape allegations in 2017, and we’ve been covering the story every step of the way since then. At this page we’ve collected our most important links, including our four days in Los Angeles covering the preliminary hearing and its ruling, which has Danny facing trial and the potential sentence of 45 years to life in prison.
After the success of their double-Emmy-winning, three-season A&E series ‘Scientology and the Aftermath,’ Leah Remini and Mike Rinder continue the conversation on their podcast, ‘Scientology: Fair Game.’ We’ve created a landing page where you can hear all of the episodes so far.
LEAH REMINI: SCIENTOLOGY AND THE AFTERMATH
An episode-by-episode guide to Leah Remini’s three-season, double-Emmy winning series that changed everything for Scientology watching. Originally aired from 2016 to 2019 on the A&E network, and now on Netflix.
SCIENTOLOGY’S CELEBRITIES, from A to Z
Find your favorite Hubbardite celeb at this index page — or suggest someone to add to the list!
Other links: SCIENTOLOGY BLACK OPS: Tom Cruise and dirty tricks. Scientology’s Ideal Orgs, from one end of the planet to the other. Scientology’s sneaky front groups, spreading the good news about L. Ron Hubbard while pretending to benefit society. Scientology Lit: Books reviewed or excerpted in a weekly series. How many have you read?
——————–
THE WHOLE TRACK
[ONE year ago] Evidence from Danny Masterson’s preliminary hearing aired on KABC Ch 7 in Los Angeles
[TWO years ago] Clearwater Police release reports from closed Scientology child sex abuse investigation
[THREE years ago] Scientologists behaving badly: What’s prison time to a trillion-year-old thetan?
[FOUR years ago] Proof that the US government has all it needs to act on Scientology — and it has for 50 years
[FIVE years ago] ‘Scientology and the Aftermath’: Mike Rinder answers a few of our questions after TCA win
[SIX years ago] Scientology’s sneaky anti-psychiatry front has found a new way to target kids in Florida
[SEVEN years ago] How Scientology sets up its members to find themselves helpless in court
[EIGHT years ago] Camilla Andersson on Tom Cruise, and a gift for the Scientologist who has everything!
[NINE years ago] Scientology’s US Supreme Court Petition Gets Boost from National Council of Churches
[TEN years ago] Scientology’s Recruitment Film: The Version They Don’t Want You to See
[ELEVEN years ago] Scientology Goons Exposed: ‘Make Marty’s Life a Living Hell’
——————–
Bernie Headley (1952-2019) did not see his daughter Stephanie in his final 5,667 days.
Valerie Haney has not seen her mother Lynne in 2,749 days.
Katrina Reyes has not seen her mother Yelena in 3,254 days
Sylvia Wagner DeWall has not seen her brother Randy in 2,804 days.
Brian Sheen has not seen his grandson Leo in 1,794 days.
Geoff Levin has not seen his son Collin and daughter Savannah in 1,685 days.
Christie Collbran has not seen her mother Liz King in 4,990 days.
Clarissa Adams has not seen her parents Walter and Irmin Huber in 2,860 days.
Carol Nyburg has not seen her daughter Nancy in 3,634 days.
Doug Kramer has not seen his parents Linda and Norm in 1,965 days.
Jamie Sorrentini Lugli has not seen her father Irving in 4,438 days.
Quailynn McDaniel has not seen her brother Sean in 3,754 days.
Dylan Gill has not seen his father Russell in 12,320 days.
Melissa Paris has not seen her father Jean-Francois in 8,239 days.
Valeska Paris has not seen her brother Raphael in 4,407 days.
Mirriam Francis has not seen her brother Ben in 3,987 days.
Claudio and Renata Lugli have not seen their son Flavio in 4,249 days.
Sara Goldberg has not seen her daughter Ashley in 3,285 days.
Lori Hodgson has not seen her son Jeremy and daughter Jessica in 3,000 days.
Marie Bilheimer has not seen her mother June in 2,525 days.
Julian Wain has not seen his brother Joseph or mother Susan in 880 days.
Charley Updegrove has not seen his son Toby in 2,055 days.
Joe Reaiche has not seen his daughter Alanna Masterson in 6,606 days
Derek Bloch has not seen his father Darren in 3,755 days.
Cindy Plahuta has not seen her daughter Kara in 4,075 days.
Roger Weller has not seen his daughter Alyssa in 8,930 days.
Claire Headley has not seen her mother Gen in 4,049 days.
Ramana Dienes-Browning has not seen her mother Jancis in 2,405 days.
Mike Rinder has not seen his son Benjamin and daughter Taryn in 6,708 days.
Brian Sheen has not seen his daughter Spring in 2,814 days.
Skip Young has not seen his daughters Megan and Alexis in 3,212 days.
Mary Kahn has not seen her son Sammy in 3,088 days.
Lois Reisdorf has not seen her son Craig in 2,671 days.
Phil and Willie Jones have not seen their son Mike and daughter Emily in 3,166 days.
Mary Jane Barry has not seen her daughter Samantha in 3,420 days.
Kate Bornstein has not seen her daughter Jessica in 14,529 days.
——————–
Posted by Tony Ortega on August 7, 2022 at 07:00
E-mail tips to tonyo94 AT gmail DOT com or follow us on Twitter. We also post updates at our Facebook author page. After every new story we send out an alert to our e-mail list and our FB page.
Our new book with Paulette Cooper, Battlefield Scientology: Exposing L. Ron Hubbard’s dangerous ‘religion’ is now on sale at Amazon in paperback and Kindle formats. Our book about Paulette, The Unbreakable Miss Lovely: How the Church of Scientology tried to destroy Paulette Cooper, is on sale at Amazon in paperback, Kindle, and audiobook versions. We’ve posted photographs of Paulette and scenes from her life at a separate location. Reader Sookie put together a complete index. More information can also be found at the book’s dedicated page.
The Best of the Underground Bunker, 1995-2021 Just starting out here? We’ve picked out the most important stories we’ve covered here at the Underground Bunker (2012-2021), The Village Voice (2008-2012), New Times Los Angeles (1999-2002) and the Phoenix New Times (1995-1999)
Other links: BLOGGING DIANETICS: Reading Scientology’s founding text cover to cover | UP THE BRIDGE: Claire Headley and Bruce Hines train us as Scientologists | GETTING OUR ETHICS IN: Jefferson Hawkins explains Scientology’s system of justice | SCIENTOLOGY MYTHBUSTING: Historian Jon Atack discusses key Scientology concepts | Shelly Miscavige, 15 years gone | The Lisa McPherson story told in real time | The Cathriona White stories | The Leah Remini ‘Knowledge Reports’ | Hear audio of a Scientology excommunication | Scientology’s little day care of horrors | Whatever happened to Steve Fishman? | Felony charges for Scientology’s drug rehab scam | Why Scientology digs bomb-proof vaults in the desert | PZ Myers reads L. Ron Hubbard’s “A History of Man” | Scientology’s Master Spies | The mystery of the richest Scientologist and his wayward sons | Scientology’s shocking mistreatment of the mentally ill | The Underground Bunker’s Official Theme Song | The Underground Bunker FAQ
Watch our short videos that explain Scientology’s controversies in three minutes or less…
Check your whale level at our dedicated page for status updates, or join us at the Underground Bunker’s Facebook discussion group for more frivolity.
Our non-Scientology stories: Robert Burnham Jr., the man who inscribed the universe | Notorious alt-right inspiration Kevin MacDonald and his theories about Jewish DNA | The selling of the “Phoenix Lights” | Astronomer Harlow Shapley‘s FBI file | Sex, spies, and local TV news | Battling Babe-Hounds: Ross Jeffries v. R. Don Steele
Tony Ortega at The Daily Beast
