4 MOTHER JONES |^ JULY / AUGUST 2019
ADAM VIEYRA/GETTYthere’s an infamous saying often attributed to Josef Stalin:
One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. In the
Trump administration, you might say: One scandal is an
outrage, a million scandals is the new normal.
That’s something we’re thinking about as we work on how
Mother Jones can most effectively cover the critical 16 months
ahead. What do you, our readers, need us to do to get beyond
the day-to-day crazy and show the full picture? Where can our
work have the most impact?
There’s an idea we keep coming back to, and to illustrate it,
we wanted to open the box a bit about the way MoJo journalists
work. Rewind for a minute to early March. Amid the buzz and
speculation about the impending Mueller report, the Miami
Herald broke a story involving New England Patriots owner
Robert Kraft, who had been charged with soliciting prostitution
at a massage parlor. It turned out the former owner of the parlor,
Cindy Yang, had watched the Super Bowl with Trump at a party
in West Palm Beach. (Yang has since sued the Herald, claiming
the story implied she owned the parlor at the time of the alleged
solicitation. The paper stands by its reporting.)
The story didn’t make a huge splash, but in Mother Jones’
Washington, DC, bureau, ears perked up. When wealthy
donors and politicians hobnob, there’s usually more to the
story—especially when Trump’s involved. But the team didn’t
want to just repeat what had been reported elsewhere. They
set out to verify the key facts for themselves. Reporter Dan
Friedman, who covers foreign influence (thanks to the reader
support we received for this beat last year), dialed up every
phone number he could find for Yang’s businesses and home
to get her side of the story, to no avail. Deputy Bureau Chief
Daniel Schulman and senior reporter Stephanie Mencimer
started digging into Florida business records. And news and
engagement editor Inae Oh scoured Yang’s social media posts
and found a collection of selfies with top Republicans: Yang
with Trump, with Donald Trump Jr., with Sarah Palin; with
Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, Florida Gov. Ron
DeSantis, Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz; and on and on.
Soon Schulman discovered something else: On the website of
another company registered to Yang, called GY US Investments,
was what looked like an invitation to a Mar-a-Lago event fea-
turing Trump’s sister Elizabeth Trump Grau. With some more
digging (and translation help) the picture came into focus: Yang
was marketing access to the president and his family at high-
roller gop events and Mar-a-Lago shindigs to Chinese executives.After a whirlwind of additional reporting and fact-checking,
Schulman, Friedman, and Bureau Chief David Corn published
their story on Saturday, March 9. Rachel Maddow, Stephen
Colbert, usa Today, the Associated Press, and other media out-
lets covered it. ProPublica’s Charles Ornstein tweeted: “You’d
think this would be on the front page of every newspaper today.
If it isn’t, why?” Conservative commentator Bill Kristol shared
the reporting, and on the night of publication, inexplicably, even
the @realDonaldTrump Twitter account hit the “Like” button.
Soon, the MoJo team had another scoop showing that Yang
had worked with groups tied to the Chinese government and
Communist Party. A few weeks later, a Chinese national car-
rying a lot of electronic gear was arrested, supposedly on her
way to a Yang-marketed event. Then our reporters found yet
another entrepreneur who had tried to market Mar-a-Lago
access in China, and they spoke to Yang’s political mentor,
who said he couldn’t rule out that illegal foreign donations
had been made. As of this writing, Capitol Hill Democrats are
looking into the matter, demanding that the fbi open criminal
and counterintelligence investigations.
Here’s the big picture that all those stories add up to: The pres-
ident of the United States spends nearly one-third of his time at
his resorts, chiefly Mar-a-Lago, where anyone willing to shell out
around $200,000 plus annual dues can become a member—aCORRUPTION ISN’T JUST
ANOTHER SCANDAL.
IT’S THE ROT AT THE CORE.
We’re launching a new reporting project.
by monika bauerlein and clara jeffery