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Sunday, April 19, 2020

Imprisoned serial scammer Kevin Trudeau: is freedom nigh?


Earlier this month -- April 10, 2020, to be exact -- an announcement appeared on the "official" Facebook fan page of imprisoned serial scammer Kevin Trudeau, aka KT, aka Katie on my Whirled. Posted by the pseudonymous "Rahelios," the post read:
Kevin told me something last night, and I don't know if I'm supposed to release it... But I just have to say SOMETHING, because I'm sure you would all find it so freakin' EXCITING...

Something is happening... Kevin is VERY hopeful... And what is in the works will be EXPLOSIVE news! In a GOOD way!

Nothing is "for sure" yet, so I don't want to "jump the gun". But as Kevin always says, "Get EXCITED NOW! Pop the champagne!"

I will keep you all posted...
Without even questioning just what the big announcement might be, several folks responded with excited, supportive comments about popping champagne and whatnot, spiking their comments with emojis just in case their meaning wasn't clear, and one person even praised Jesus Christ for the good news, whatever it might be.

But my first guess, which I posted to the thread, was that Kevin had learned that he will soon be released from the minimum-security federal prison camp where he has spent the past few years: FPC Montgomery, Alabama, aka "Camp Cupcake" in Katie parlance. It was only a guess, of course, but my comment led to a bit of excited speculation, abundantly reinforced with emojis, about Kevin being set free.

GINtruth's Bernie O commented that if Kevin is indeed due for release soon, it will almost certainly be due to the scare over the coronavirus disease known as COVID-19. After all, there have been numerous reports of various detention facilities all over the US that are either moving prisoners or releasing them early -- particularly nonviolent offenders -- in order to comply with social distancing guidelines. Be that as it may, the exchange on that April 10 Facebook thread has led to no firm answers, thus far, about what the good news might actually be.

That wasn't the first time in recent memory that the Kevin Trudeau forums were abuzz with rumors of his release. As
reported here in January, Rahelios wrote an excited post announcing Kevin's first public appearance après release, making it sound as if the release were imminent. While officially Trudeau is not eligible for release until May 2022 -- or July of that year, depending upon the source you're reading -- the January post indicated that it could very well be "sometime this year," though "no one knows exactly when" (sort of like the Second Coming of Jesus, I guess).

It seems, though, that the manufactured excitement was chiefly an effort to shore up membership in the "success club" GIN (the Global Information Network), which Trudeau founded and which
is still owned by some of his closest grift-buddies. And the come-on was that qualifying GIN members will get to see Kevin himself deliver the GIN "Level 8" training for free, at some undetermined time in the future, after Kevin is sprung. I don't think that COVID-19 had anything to do with the January excitement, because at that time the full import of the virus had yet to hit most of the world.

Of course, Kevin and his fans and followers have been campaigning nonstop for his freedom ever since he began serving his ten-year sentence back in 2014. The campaign gathered new strength after
Donald Trump, whom Trudeau greatly admires, asuumed the throne, as Trudeau and his minions began a multimedia effort to persuade Trump to commute Kevin's sentence and even pardon him. I've written about that several times, one of the most recent efforts being this February 2020 post.

Sadly, Trump hasn't responded yet to the impassioned pleas; it's almost as if he either doesn't know or doesn't care that Kevin Trudeau
has bravely allowed himself to be martyred to the cause of free speech and truth-telling.

But all is not lost. What Trump cannot or will not do, that pesky coronavirus just might be able to accomplish. When searching for more info yesterday regarding early release of minimum-security prisoners, particularly from FPC Montgomery, I came across an
April 11, 2020 Forbes piece that did indeed mention that facility. It's not a staff article but an opinion piece by a Forbes personal finance contributor, Walter Pavlo, who writes, consults, and lectures on white collar crime. Wrote Pavlo:
At FPC Montgomery located on the Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, AL, one inmate told me that they held a town-hall meeting and informed about 80 inmates that they would be put in an isolation protocol for home confinement. The same story was told to me about the minimum security camp for women in Coleman, FL.

Politico
is reporting and I have confirmed from my own sources that the BOP has again expanded its consideration of inmates for home confinement. According to a BOP staff person at Coleman, case managers are working to identify those who can go to home confinement and some of those have multiple years until their release.
Naturally, I shared that link on the KT Facebook fan page, with few responses so far, most likely because my thread is relegated to the "Community" section and doesn't show up on the main page at all. But oh, well, I tried. At any rate, that little snippet of information from the Forbes piece has raised some questions for me:
  1. Assuming that the inmate's info shared with Walter Pavlo is accurate, is Kevin Trudeau among the FPC Montgomery inmates who are being prepped for release to home confinement?

  2. If Trudeau is one of those prisoners who is released to home confinement, will his release remain in effect after the pandemic is deemed to be over (whenever that may be), or will he have to go back to Camp Cupcake and serve out the rest of his sentence? Will he be determined to have served enough of his sentence that this would indeed be an "early release," and not just a temporary measure to comply with social distancing guidelines? Reading the Politico piece that Walter Pavlo cited in his Forbes commentary raises as many questions as it answers. According to the Politico article, fast-moving policy changes are causing confusion in some prisons, and there have been numerous cases of prisoners sent to pre-release quarantine, only to later be told they are ineligible. As well, "The prison system does not consider transfers to home confinement to be 'releases.' Such convicts are normally put on GPS monitoring, but [Attorney General William] Barr has waived that requirement for now because of the volume of transfers and the logistical difficulties related to the pandemic."

  3. If Trudeau is bound for "home confinement," exactly where will he go? Does he still officially even have a home? He can't retreat to those stately digs stuffed with pretentious furnishings in Ojai, California, because the house and its contents were sold years ago, presumably in order to help pay off his FTC fine. He can't go to his Oak Brook, Illinois McCastle because it too has been sold, presumably for the same purpose. (The pic linked to in the previous sentence was from an October 2012 Whirled post.) And the slave ship/ship of tools (called, ironically enough, FREEDOM), which is part of Trudeau's grand vision for his exclusive "Club," is most likely not yet in existence. Moreover it's doubtful that his reportedly estranged wife, Ukrainian-born filmmaker Nataliya/Natalie/Natasha Babenko, wherever she may be (her current web site says she is based in LA and NYC), will take him in. Of course, given the level of Katie worship that is evident by even a cursory reading of the Kevin Trudeau Facebook fan page (or a number of other online forums), there are probably scads of folks who would love to host The King in their own home. So it may not be a problem -- that is, unless the residence to which he wants to go does not fit the Bureau of Prison's definition of "home."

  4. Once Trudeau is out, either temporarily or permanently, what exactly will he legally be able to do to make a living -- and more importantly, what all is he going to try to get away with? Early this year he apparently tried to get Judge Robert Gettleman, who for years presided over his civil case, to spell out what he can do once he's out of the joint. I wrote about that here. As far as I know, Gettleman hasn't answered him, but clues can be found in the 2014 sentencing guidelines document, screenshots of which are in the blog post linked to in the previous sentence. To my knowledge, until and unless Trudeau can wrangle a pardon from Trump, he is still subject to five years of supervised release (probation) once he's out.
There will be more than a bit of irony if it does turn out that Kevin Trudeau is among the white-collar criminals released from prison early, or at least furloughed, because of the coronacrisis. After all, in numerous Covid-19 "updates" (posted by proxies, at Trudeau's behest, to Facebook and to the Kevin Trudeau dot com site), Trudeau has expressed utter disdain for what he views as an extreme over-reaction to the virus. But it is that very "over-reaction" that could be directly responsible for springing him from the joint. If so, his release (or furlough) will have been set in motion not by the divine intervention of King Donald, nor by any official vindication of the absurd and commercially motivated free-speech-hero/martyr narrative that Trudeau has been pushing for nearly 20 years... but rather by the brouhaha over a silly little virus.

Stay tuned for more info as I get it.


Related on this Whirled:

Kevin Trudeau's "COVID-19 Updates":


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