Howard Lutnick and the Commandeering of the Department of Commerce
Trump’s pick for Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, is poised to further facilitate the now long-standing
by Mark Goodwin and by Whitney Webb
On November 19, President-Elect Donald Trump announced that Howard Lutnick, CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald and co-chair of his transition team, would be his nominee for Commerce Secretary. Lutnick’s company Cantor Fitzgerald and its subsidiaries are multinational in scope, promote the implementation of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (which have major implications for debt politics and economic activity), and are even directly partnered with foreign state-owned firms that recently came under scrutiny following the release of the contents of the laptop of the current (and recently pardoned) First Son, Hunter Biden.
Lutnick had previously been angling for a job as incoming Treasury Secretary, an unsurprising ambition given Cantor Fitzgerald’s outsized role in the U.S. Treasury market (i.e. the U.S. government debt market) and its relationship to dollar stablecoins, which are rapidly becoming one of the main purchasers of U.S. debt. It is unknown currently why Lutnick was passed over for Treasury, despite endorsement for the position from Elon Musk and RFK Jr., and appointed to Commerce instead. However, Trump’s previous Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross, was widely believed to have been given the role to repay a past favor of major significance. In Ross’s case, it was his assistance in rescuing Trump from bankruptcy in the early 1990s. At the time, Ross worked for Rothschild Inc., and when clarifying why the European banking dynasty had bailed out the future President, Ross stated “the Trump name is still very much an asset.” Shortly before, Rothschild Inc. had been bankrolling the entry of Robert Maxwell, intelligence asset for Israel and arguably the Soviet Union, into the American economy, with a specific focus on New York City.
During and following the campaign, Lutnick has been a major supporter of Trump’s prospective plan to implement an extensive tariff regime in lieu of income tax. If confirmed, Lutnick will also oversee the approval of the export of sensitive technology of national security interest abroad, negotiate free trade agreements, and oversee the patents office, among other roles. While mainstream reports on his appointment have noted his “hawkish” trade stance with China and his connections to the cryptocurrency agency, much has been left out about Lutnick, his current business entanglements and historical connections to intelligence networks that have sought to undermine the Commerce Department specifically to facilitate the transfer of sensitive U.S. military technology to ostensible adversary states, like China.
Satellogic: Observation is Preservation
In exploring these issues, it is useful to look at one company now closely tied to Lutnick – Satellogic. Lutnick sits on Satellogic’s board, as does former Treasury Secretary from the previous Trump administration Steve Mnuchin and former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump, General Joe Dunford. Mnuchin and Dunford invested heavily in Satellogic through the private equity they now work for, Liberty Strategic Capital. Mnuchin has led that firm since its founding. Liberty Strategic Capital’s first investment was in a controversial Israeli intelligence-linked cybersecurity firm called Cybereason. Cybereason’s co-founder and CEO Lior Div has described Cybereason as a continuation of his work in Israeli intelligence outfit Unit 8200, where Div worked on offensive cyber attacks targeting foreign nations. The firm became controversial in the lead-up to the 2020 election for simulating, along with U.S. security agencies like DHS, the necessary threshold of cyberattacks that would induce the cancellation of a U.S. presidential election and the imposition of martial law. Lutnick himself has significant ties to Israel and is a well-known billionaire mega-donor to Israeli and Zionist causes (discussed in detail later in this article).
Satellogic, for its part, employs a former Israeli intelligence officer, Aviv Cohen, as its head of “special projects.” Cohen previously co-founded Fraud Sciences Corp. with Unit 8200 alum Saar Wilf, which was later sold to PayPal and now forms the “back-bone” of its anti-fraud algorithm. Prior to that, Cohen worked for Core Security Technologies, the firm previously co-founded by Satellogic’s co-founders that contracted for numerous U.S. intelligence and military agencies. Since we reported on Cohen’s ties to Satellogic earlier this year in April, Satellogic has made Aviv Cohen’s biography on the company website private.
In an interview with Bloomberg in January 2022, Lutnick and Mnuchin expressed the reasoning behind their venture into Satellogic via Liberty Strategic and CF Acquisition Group V, a subsidiary of Lutnick’s Cantor Fitzgerald. “We felt that space and the satellites in particular is really the next coming gigantic market for data,” explained Lutnick. “I mean, to have images of the whole Earth – data on the whole Earth – the amount of decisions that will unlock, and the ability and the economics of how that will unlock, was extraordinary.” Lutnick furthered that their proprietary lens technology allows customers of Satellogic to “count the containers on the ships,” “count the cars,” “count the trees,” or “count the number of [panels] working and what’s not working in a solar farm,” which “unlocks a vast, vast sea of opportunity in marketplaces.”
In the same interview, Mnuchin expressed similar excitement about the opportunities downstream of such detailed Earth observational technology, but with a telling insight on how said data, when paired with artificial intelligence, can advance the interests of the national security state and increase government-led markets. “We’re very focused on investments where not only can we bring capital but we can bring our expertise. And we’re particularly focused on the technology area, national security, and other forms where we can add a lot of value,” Mnuchin articulated. “So what we liked about this is great technology, very scalable, very affordable, and the combination of having a lot of data with a lot of AI really will enable both very big government markets, and more importantly, very big commercial markets.”
Lutnick’s Cantor Fitzgerald, one of 24 primary dealers of the New York Federal Reserve, is no stranger to participating in the financing of the data broker industry, having given $100 million in equity financing to Near Intelligence Holdings’ effort to go public in May 2022. Near was founded by Idealab’s Bill Gross, the first institutional investor in PayPal, and currently boasts being “the world’s largest source of intelligence on people, places and products.” An October 2023 report by the Wall Street Journal revealed that Near had “provided data to the U.S. military via a maze of obscure marketing companies, cutouts, and conduits to defense contractors.”
While Near business model operates in the shadows, feeding off data scraped from clever advertising mechanisms and unread user agreements behind mobile applications, Satellogic is directly attacking the billions of potential revenue from “creat[ing] all new types of markets” downstream of “scalable, affordable imagery,” according to Mnuchin. Lutnick, in the same conversation with Bloomberg, boasted that Satellogic can “take a video from space of more than a minute of an airport and tell you the brand of plane that is taking off,” in his argument that “this kind of data is such a big market.” Lutnick added that “imagery from satellites” is “one of the world’s great marketplaces.” Echoing that same line of thinking, the former Treasury Secretary stated that he views Satellogic “as more of a data company than necessarily just a space company,” which can leverage “vast amounts of data” in order to “really analyze climate issues, energy supply, food security,” and “supply chains.”
In regards to climate issues, Lutnick claims that Satellogic’s technology will “finally end the concept of climate change” by “literally remap[ing] the Earth every day.” The death of the specific concept of climate change alluded to by Lutnick seemingly refers to the popularized “left wing” modeling of the climate emergency, versus the likely incoming “right wing” carbon market, as articulated in previous reporting from Unlimited Hangout. An unspoken wrinkle in the pricing of carbon, as proposed independently by Lutnick and fellow-Trump advisor Elon Musk, is the dollar denomination and thus the implications on the sale of United States’ Treasuries. In an idea to be explored later in this article, a carbon market denominated in dollars may not solve the “climate crisis,” but it just might help solve the ever-looming debt crisis.
This position has already been taken by Lutnick’s Tether, as the purchasing of government bonds by the stablecoin issuer continually increases in volume and remains poised to become systemically important, as covered in previous reporting by Unlimited Hangout. While Lutnick’s immense connection to the Treasury market – whether through Cantor Fitzgerald itself or its custodial relationship and investment in Tether – led many to believe he was in position to become Treasury Secretary, Trump picked him for Commerce Secretary, and thus placed him in a management position over many public sector entities directly related to his private-sector activities such as Satellogic.
The “very strong, patentable technology” built by Satellogic, as explained by Mnuchin, takes on a new meaning with the appointment of Lutnick to the Department of Commerce (DOC), due to the DOC management of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). This is far from the only conflict of interest within Lutnick’s venture into the public sector, as the DOC manages many bureaus directly impacted by the proliferation of a U.S.-based, private-sector Earth observation company such as Satellogic. Some of the dozen bureaus under the DOC relevant to Satellogic – not to mention Lutnick’s position within the digital asset space via Cantor’s relationship with Tether – include the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), the International Trade Administration (ITA), the National Technical Information Service (NTIS), and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), not to mention the aforementioned NOAA, and USPTO.
Interestingly, the DOC also established the U.S. AI Safety Institute dedicated to upholding the asks within the October 2023 Biden-Harris executive order on “the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence.” In October 2024, the Biden-Harris administration issued the first ever national security memorandum on AI, empowering the DOC to “harness power of AI for U.S. national security.” Previous U.S. government-sponsored commissions, such as the National Security Commission on AI, had concluded that it was necessary to ensure U.S. military and economic hegemony by forcing American consumers off of “legacy systems” and onto AI-powered alternatives, lest American AI companies lag behind their Chinese counterparts, particularly in the fields of e-commerce and finance. They also made the case for increased, AI-powered mass surveillance – such as that facilitated by Satellogic – as a means of advancing this cause.
In August 2021, the Lutnick-linked Tether, via its subsidiary Northern Data, purchased over 223,000 GPUs (graphical processing units) used in AI computing from the cryptocurrency firm block.one, which was founded by Tether co-founder Brock Pierce. A month later, the stablecoin issuer spent nearly half a billion dollars purchasing Bitcoin miners from block.one in a deal facilitated by Christian Angermeyer, a long-time friend of Palantir’s Peter Thiel. Palantir, which has long-standing and very close ties to the CIA, is a Satellogic partner and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale donated heavily to Trump (as did Palantir itself) while Thiel has extremely close ties with the incoming Vice President J.D. Vance.
Since Lutnick’s Cantor Fitzgerald helped take Satellogic public via SPAC, Satellogic – founded in Argentina and previously based in Uruguay – has now redomiciled in the United States in an effort to obtain lucrative government contracts. The company’s move to Delaware was prompted by Satellogic’s poor financials after going public. However, government contracts have been slow to appear for the firm, with Satellogic securing its first government contract with NASA just this past September. However, a Lutnick-run Commerce Department could alter Satellogic’s chances in securing future contracts. This conflict of interest between Lutnick’s private sector dealings with his newfound government appointment was noted by Politico in October 2024, which claimed that Lutnick was “improperly mixing his business interested with his duties standing up a potential administration.” According to the report, Lutnick took meetings on Capitol Hill under the guise of transition team matters, then “allegedly us[ed] the opportunity to talk about matters impacting his investment firm, Cantor Fitzgerald,” which also included “high-stakes regulatory matters involving its cryptocurrency business.”
This conflict of interest is notable in part because some of the bureaus Lutnick will oversee as Commerce Secretary, such as the NOAA, are targets of Satellogic’s contracting ambitions. For instance, Satellogic markets itself as able to measure carbon emissions from space and has promoted its recent NASA contract as part of the government effort to target climate change. NOAA and other agencies housed under the Commerce Department collect climate data for the U.S. government. As will be noted again shortly, Lutnick was an early pioneer of electronic carbon emissions trading and his company is a major advocate for the implementation of the UN’S SDGs, part of an over-arching UN-supported plan that includes using space satellites to measure carbon emissions.
Last year, the NOAA granted Satellogic a remote sensing license, helping secure “Satellogic’s strategy to capitalize on high-value opportunities in the U.S.,” specifically as it relates to U.S. government contracts. The license grants Satellogic NOAA oversight and the ability to secure contracts with U.S. defense and intelligence agencies, a major goal of the company per Satellogic president Matt Tirman.
Satellogic was co-founded in 2010 by CEO Emiliano Kargieman and CTO Gerardo Richarte after spending “some time” at the NASA Ames Campus in Mountain View, CA. Both Kargieman and Richarte previously worked for Core Security Technologies, which was co-founded by Kargieman and boasted national security state clients such as Homeland Security, NSA, NASA, Lockheed Martin, and DARPA. In 1998, Core Security was recognized as an “Endeavor Entrepreneur” by the Endeavor Foundation, whereas Satellogic’s eventual seed round raise was funded by Endeavor’s Santiago Pinto Escalier, in addition to Ariel Arrieta and NXTP Ventures, and the Kargieman-advised Starlight Ventures. Kargieman later founded Aconcagua Ventures in a joint venture with Craig Cogut’s Pegasus Capital, and served as a Member of the Special Projects Group at the World Bank. Pegasus Capital became the main funder of Satellogic-partner CC35, a group seeking to impose a fraudulent carbon market on much of Latin America, as covered in previous reporting from Unlimited Hangout.
Another Core Security Technologies employee that migrated to Satellogic with Kargieman and Richarte is Aviv Cohen, the aforementioned ex-Israeli intelligence officer who is now Satellogic’s head of “special projects.” Chinese tech giant Tencent, which owns a significant stake in Elon Musk’s Tesla, also invested in Satellogic’s Series A, as did Endeavor Catalyst, which is run by LinkedIn/PayPal’s Reid Hoffman, and Valor Capital, whose partners include figures tied to U.S. military and intelligence activities in Latin America, a former CEO of PayPal, as well as CBDC development on the continent. Valor is also advised by Brian Brooks. Brooks was a former employee at OneWest Bank alongside Mnuchin, and was made Acting Comptroller of the Currency in May 2020 via Mnuchin’s designation, where he introduced “regulatory initiatives that provided banks with the green light to offer cryptocurrency custody services and stablecoin payment systems.”
In February 2022, Palantir – a private sector intelligence firm led by PayPal-founder Peter Thiel and created with CIA funds to replace a controversial DARPA mass surveillance and data-mining program – committed to a five year strategic partnership with Satellogic. Satellogic’s partnership with Palantir enables its “government and commercial customers”, which include the CIA and J.P. Morgan, access to Satellogic’s Aleph platform APIs to feed raw satellite imagery to Palantir’s MetaConstellation and Edge AI. This partnership builds on a previous collaboration between Satellogic and Palantir to “field unique AI capabilities to the orbital edge,” including “live upgrades to the satellite’s onboard AI” that enables “an ultra-low-latency maritime use-case.” Palantir and Satellogic customers, which include the Pentagon’s Space Systems Command, Space Force, SpaceX, the government of India, and others, will soon have access to the Edge AI platform running on Satellogic satellites “to offer customers tailored AI insights.” This is expected to increase Satellogic’s business of “data products, streamline pipeline management, and further scale customer delivery required for weekly and daily world remaps.” Some of their customers, like the government/military of Ukraine, have been applying both Palantir and Satellogic “insights” directly to the battlefield for over two years. This underscores that Satellogic’s technology is clearly intended for use in both civilian and military settings.
Epstein Entanglements
In 2022, Satellogic signed a far-reaching agreement with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, itself a major U.S. military and intelligence contractor. SpaceX remains Satellogic’s “preferred launch provider” for launching its satellites into near-Earth orbit. During the campaign and since the election, Lutnick and Musk have collaborated extensively, with Musk even endorsing Lutnick for his preferred nomination as Trump’s incoming Treasury Secretary.
Notably, Musk’s SpaceX was allegedly infiltrated by Lutnick’s former next-door neighbor, intelligence asset, pedophile and sexual blackmailer Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein reportedly introduced a member of his “entourage” to Musk’s brother Kimbal, then on the board of SpaceX. That young woman, who had previously “dated” Epstein and lived at the 301 66th St East apartment complex now known to have housed women Epstein trafficked, then dated Kimbal Musk from 2011 to 2012. As a consequence, the relationship with Kimbal “brought Epstein into contact with the Musk family and its businesses.” This allegedly culminated in Epstein touring SpaceX facilities in 2012, a claim a SpaceX attorney very belatedly denied after the incident was first reported by Business Insider. Kimbal Musk is also on the board of another of his brother’s companies – Tesla – and, prior to his 2019 arrest, Epstein confirmed claims from sources that he was privately advising Tesla in 2018 to journalist James Stewart. After Epstein was infamous, Musk denied the claims. Per Stewart, Epstein was apparently part of the attempted deal to take Tesla private with Saudi money in 2018. Epstein was also a very close advisor at that time to the then and current de facto leader Muhammad bin Salman. Since then, an Epstein associate turned venture capitalist, Nicole Junkermann, has become a significant investor in SpaceX.
In addition, Elon Musk himself was subpoenaed as part of the now-shuttered USVI lawsuit against the bank JP Morgan for its role in facilitating Epstein’s crimes and is known to have socialized with Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell on several occasions prior to Epstein’s 2019 arrest and death later that same year. In one such meeting, brokered by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, Musk was reported to have introduced Epstein to Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook/Meta. Musk also attended the Edge Foundation’s “billionaire dinners,” which courted top figures in Silicon Valley and operated as a de facto front for an Epstein-run influence operation for several years, coinciding with the genesis of the “billionaire dinners.” Furthermore, Richard Sorkin, the CEO of Elon and Kimbal Musk’s first company Zip2, joined an Israeli intelligence-linked tech company headed by Ghislaine Maxwell’s sister Isabel Maxwell shortly after the sale of Zip2 to Compaq in 1999.
In addition, Musk shares some business links to Epstein associates. For instance, a major supplier to Tesla, LS Power (via its subsidiary EVgo), and its affiliated hedge fund Luminus Management are closely linked to Jonathan Barrett, who was a managing director of LS Power and has led Luminus Management since 2011. Barrett also held several other senior roles at LS Power between 2003 and 2008. Barrett is a former protégé of Jeffrey Epstein’s who started his career working at Epstein’s firm J. Epstein & Co. and also became the CFO and Vice President of Ossa Properties, the real estate firm run by Epstein’s brother Mark and co-founded by Barrett’s brother Anthony. Barrett listed his legal address for many years as being 301 66 St East in Manhattan, an apartment complex that is majority owned by Ossa that housed many of the women actively being trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein and which was frequented by Epstein’s associates, including several who stayed overnight, like former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.
LS Power, where Barrett was a top executive, has been investigated “for fraudulent conveyance of assets” in several bankruptcy cases. In addition, LS Power’s founder, Mike Segal – whose son Paul is now the firm’s CEO, did business with the Bufalino crime family. Luminus Management was also the largest shareholder in Valaris, which sold $650 million in oil rigs to Musk’s SpaceX in 2020. In addition, another firm closely linked to Luminus – Luminus Capital Management and the Luminus Capital Partners Master Fund – counts Alex Erskine as a director. Erskine was previously a director for the Jeffrey Epstein-chaired financial vehicle Liquid Funding, which was partially owned by Bear Stearns before its collapse during the 2008 financial crisis.
As recently noted, Howard Lutnick was the long-time next-door neighbor of Epstein’s now infamous New York townhouse at 9 E. 71st St. Lesser known perhaps, is Epstein’s long history with that property and that connection of the entity that ultimately sold the home to Lutnick. Lutnick’s address, 11 E. 71st St., was first purchased by a Leslie Wexner-controlled entity called SAM Conversion Corp in 1988, a year before the Nine East 71st Street Corp. (of which Epstein was president) bought the neighboring home. In 1992, SAM Conversion Corp. – with Epstein now its Vice President – sold the 11 E 71st St property to the 11 East 71st Street Trust – where Epstein was a trustee – for “ten dollars and other valuable consideration paid by the party of the second part,” according to Crain’s New York. During this time, Leslie Wexner “refurbished” the property at 9 E. 71st St. for tens of millions of dollars, which included adding an unusual “security system” reportedly later used to record videos, allegedly for the purposes of blackmail, once Epstein inhabited the residence. It is unknown if similar “refurbishments” were made to the neighboring house later bought by Lutnick that was also under Epstein/Wexner control at the same time.
In 1996, with Epstein already inhabiting 9 E. 71st St. for at least a year, the neighboring home at 11 E. 71st St. was sold to Comet Trust for “ten dollars and other valuable consideration.” Some reports have suggested the price paid for the home was around $6.2 million. The trustee of Comet involved in the sale was Guido Goldman, the son of famous Zionist Nahum Goldman, a very close friend of Henry Kissinger and founder of the German Marshall Fund, which later spawned the controversial Alliance for Securing Democracy. Goldman was also the apparent liaison between the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the CIA. At the time the sale was made to Goldman and the Comet Trust, Epstein was also part of the CFR and, according to a 2001 report in the UK’s Evening Standard, told people that he had once worked for the CIA.
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U hit tge nail on the head CF is buying us debt to swap out to land stolen by USDA