Dead Drop – November 26

COULDN’T HAPPEN TO A NICER GUY: In last week’s Dead Drop we told you about Matthew Marshall, a Whitefish, Montana man who pleaded guilty to defrauding someone of $2.3 million by pretending he needed the money for CIA “off-the-books” rescue operations. Among the mysteries in that story was the identity of the fine citizen who put up his own money to save others. The Department of Justice did not identify the victim at the time – but we may now have a clue.  The New York Post suggests that the victim is Michael Goguen, a Silicon Valley billionaire who took up residence in Whitefish.  A civil complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Montana alleges a whole lot of things about Goguen that he hasn’t yet responded to, including an allegation that he may have some safe houses of his own.  Normally, a civil suit like this wouldn’t make The Dead Drop, but the N.Y. Post, (which apparently reached out to Goguen’s lawyer for comment but didn’t get one before the piece was published) says Matthew Marshall (who just pled guilty to fraud) is the lead plaintiff in the civil suit filed against Goguen. But it also says Goguen is the guy Marshall defrauded. The whole story is (almost) too wacky to believe.

THIS CENTURY IN CONSPIRACY THEORIES: Every late-November, you can count on a flood of stories about the JFK assassination. This year is no different. Among them is a piece in Rolling Stone by journalist Tim Weiner, “This is Where Oliver Stone Got His Looney JFK Conspiracy Theories From” which suggests that the Soviet’s active disinformation campaign might have had a lot to do with the looniness.  Meanwhile, Jefferson Morley, editor of the JFK Facts blog, had an OPED published in the Miami Herald sharing his frustration about the Biden White House announcing that the last of the JFK documents will not be released to the public until December 2022, “at the earliest”.  He also pointed to what he called the CIA’s “six-decade long history of deception, deceit and delay about assassination records” suggesting embarrassment or malfeasance might be the reason for the delay.