Title: Trump's Presidential Library Grift. Plus, the Hacker Behind the NYT's Mamdani Story.

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News clip: ABC News has agreed to pay $15 million toward Donald Trump's presidential library to settle a lawsuit.

Brooke Gladstone: The President has amassed millions of dollars for what may be a private presidential library. Lawmakers cry foul, and historians despair. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. This week, the Trump administration's attack on higher education ramped up.

News clip: The State Department has launched an investigation into Harvard University's eligibility to sponsor candidates for a government-run visa program.

Brooke Gladstone: Plus, the reporter who tracked down the hacker behind the flawed New York Times story on mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.

Elizabeth Lopatto: I feel like I tripped over a rock and uncovered a Nazi.

Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this. [MUSIC] From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. In another era, the story of the President's more or less perpetual grift could be headline news every single week. When you've got kids with cancer ripped from their parents and sent back to a place they've never seen, and the care they need is unavailable, when you have institutions that safeguard all of our health and welfare on the skids, FEMA, the National Weather Service, SNAP, Head Start, Medicaid. Well, even the most brazen money grabs of Donald J. Trump just kind of hum along in the background.

News clip: Trump speaking to the audience of a new line of sneakers bearing his name and selling for $399.

President Trump: I'm proud to endorse and encourage you to get this Bible. We must make America pray again.

News clip: It's only $59.99.

President Trump: My new Trump watch with more than 100 real diamonds. I love diamonds.

News clip: Former President Donald Trump launching his own NFT collection. Cards will cost $99.

News clip: The Trump Guitars were launched as the only guitar officially endorsed by Donald Trump. Is it worth $1,500?

News clip: The President's son is promoting a mobile plan for $47.45 per month. The Trump Organization also promising a $499 gold smartphone.

News clip: Trump has a new fragrance line called Victory 4547. $249 a bottle is steep for any fragrance.

Brooke Gladstone: Oh, not forget his newly acquired crypto mania.

News clip: Trump's crypto holdings are worth more than any single real estate asset in his portfolio.

News clip: The President's family business is building an expanding cryptocurrency empire, even launching a meme coin earlier this year.

News clip: He hosted a dinner for the biggest buyers of his meme coin.

Senator Elizabeth Warren: Binance and the foreign investment firm are going to use Donald Trump's stablecoin to finance their transaction, giving Trump a cut of that $2-billion deal.

Brooke Gladstone: Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren.

Senator Elizabeth Warren: The Senate is getting ready to greenlight the grift by passing the so-called GENIUS Act.

Micah Loewinger: The White House, saying GENIUS Act signed into law to unleash the immense promise of dollar-backed stablecoins.

Brooke Gladstone: But the story that we're going to focus on, which is certainly about money, but not just money, has to do with a number of major settlements the President has scored with media companies.

News clip: ABC News has agreed to pay $15 million toward Donald Trump's presidential lib to settle a lawsuit.

News clip: President Trump, we've learned, has signed an agreement with Meta to settle a lawsuit. The settlement we understand to be $25 million, most of which is going towards his future presidential library. X agreed to pay about $10 million to settle a lawsuit from President Trump.

Micah Loewinger: They are putting most of this money that they're getting from media companies towards the Trump presidential library.

Brooke Gladstone: We heard the resounding Ka-Ching of another windfall earlier this month.

News clip: Paramount agreed to pay $16 million to settle a lawsuit.

Micah Loewinger: That will go to President Trump's future presidential library. Independent legal experts say that the President really did not have a case here. Paramount in need of federal approval for a merger.

News clip: The President so far has raised up to $63 million for his future library, primarily from settlements with news organizations and social media organizations. That $63 million is probably just the tip of the iceberg.

Timothy Naftali: He's, in a sense, extorting money from media organizations he's sued and settled with.

Brooke Gladstone: Timothy Naftali is a senior research scholar at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs.

Timothy Naftali: The President is probably laughing at the fact that he's getting these media organizations to help him create a shrine to the Trump years.

Brooke Gladstone: Why does the President need to raise so much money for a library?

Timothy Naftali: That's a product of our beautiful constitutional system. The Article I branch, which is Congress, is not thrilled about building shrines to the Article II branch, which is the presidency or the executive branch. The way the system works, the President would build this facility, deed it to the American people, and then Congress would pay to curate the museum, preserve and make accessible the documents, and make sure that the roof got fixed.

Well, Congress gets stingier and stingier, decrees that anyone elected to the presidency after 2002 who's going to get a library has to raise the money to build it and has to raise an additional 60% of the cost for maintaining the building. You need to raise a lot of money.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm remembering that season of VEEP when the character Selina Meyer is spending almost all of her time trying to get money for her library.

Selina Meyer: I need a monument to Selina Meyer.

Andrew Meyer: An institution.

Selina Meyer: Selina Meyer belongs in an institution.

Brooke Gladstone: Bill Clinton famously pardoned Marc Rich after Rich's wife promised half a million dollars to Clinton's library. A Republican lobbyist was caught on camera allegedly arranging meetings between top Republican officials and foreign entities in exchange for donations to George W. Bush's library. Why are these libraries such ripe vehicles for this kind of deal-making? I assume part of it is that you can donate anonymously. It's actually impossible for us to know how much money Trump has already amassed.

Timothy Naftali: Well, your assumption is one of the reasons why it matters that President Trump has started to raise money so early in his second term. The opportunity for outside interests and foreign governments to make him happy is huge. Making him happy might lead to a change in his interpretation of our national security interests. Presidents understand it is easier to raise money while they still have power.

Just as their power begins to diminish as they become more and more lame ducks, so too does their ability to raise funds. Outside interests see that fact as a vulnerability in the system, and they take advantage of it. We are now living in an era which is more permissive of official corruption than we've seen since the 19th century.

Brooke Gladstone: Let's just go back to 1940, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the first to set up a presidential library. I've been to it. You can listen to his fireside tapes in a 1930s-style kitchen or living room. He deeded his papers to the American people, but he didn't have to, and he put restrictions on what was available.

Timothy Naftali: George Washington created the norm that presidents own their papers. The reason why presidential papers for the 19th century are scattershot is that presidential families owned them, and if they wanted to destroy them, they could. Franklin Roosevelt and the Presidents that followed him deeded their papers to the American people, but they did set some restrictions on access.

Because of Watergate, the Congress decided that presidents shouldn't own their papers anymore because they were untrustworthy custodians of their papers. There was reason to be concerned that Richard Nixon, if he controlled his papers and his tapes, would destroy some of them. Congress mandated, in the Presidential Records Act of 1978, that the next president their papers would be from Day 1, owned by the American people, and those records would be at a National Archives facility. It was assumed they would be at the Presidential library with the President's name over the front door.

Brooke Gladstone: Now, your experience was with Nixon's library. You were Director of it.

Timothy Naftali: Because of Watergate, Richard Nixon could not send his records to California, where he wanted a library. The records stayed in Washington, DC. Nixon's family and the President, who was still alive, wanted a library anyway, and they built one in his hometown of Yorba Linda. It was a private presidential library, and it didn't have any of his presidential papers.

The family then decided, in the early 2000s, to join the existing presidential library system. The federal government would take it over. The Presidential papers would be sent out to California, but they would be under the control of the National Archives. The museum library, which was infamous for its view of Watergate, would also come under federal control and would have to meet federal standards. I was recruited to be the first federal director, and that meant, in this case, that I would redo the Watergate exhibit.

Brooke Gladstone: What did you find that you changed?

Timothy Naftali: The museum exhibit argued that Watergate was an attempt by the Democrats to overturn the results of the 1972 election. Did not discuss the Plumbers, the spying on Daniel Ellsberg. Did not discuss in detail the role played by Republicans in deciding that the President had to leave office.

Brooke Gladstone: It accused The Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of bribing sources. Nixon's enemies list was portrayed as the product of a rogue presidential staffer. That was John Dean, Nixon's White House Counsel. Nixon was presented as not having done anything his predecessors had except get caught.

Timothy Naftali: The docents who had been there, fine people, but they had a list of books they could read, and they were discouraged from reading other books were encouraged to say to people, "Yes, President Nixon did things that were wrong, but he did nothing that no other president done, so it's okay." Rather than saying presidents shouldn't do this, we had a whole section on other presidents who had done secret taping.

Kennedy and Johnson, and actually Eisenhower and Truman, and even FDR had taping systems. That's all there, too. It's not up to the federal government to tell you what to think. It wasn't up to me to tell people what to think about Watergate. I had an obligation to make sure the evidence that was relevant to making your own mind up about Watergate had to be accessible.

Brooke Gladstone: You have said that the door to what Trump is doing in the creation of his library now was actually opened by Barack Obama.

Timothy Naftali: I was very disappointed when President Obama decided to privatize his library project, that his museum would be run by the Obama Foundation, because I believe it's very important for us to be capable of nonpartisan public history. Even though presidential libraries are tilted absolutely towards the President in their first iteration, over time, their museums get closer and closer to a nonpartisan view. These libraries are a test, a litmus test of our ability as Americans to be honest to ourselves about the most powerful people in our society.

Brooke Gladstone: What does Trump seem to be intending to do?

Timothy Naftali: If President Trump's approach to his library is like his approach to everything else, his library will be a Trump land with an alternative narrative about practically everything that happened in his first term. Now in his second term, President Trump has an open door to privatizing his museum.

Brooke Gladstone: What does it mean for the future of our cultural memory?

Timothy Naftali: Now, I'm really concerned about Trumpian predilections. He doesn't like to document what he does. In the first term, he had to be stopped from tearing up documents. He almost went on trial for having kept documents that belonged to the American people because of the Presidential Records Act, which meant that he doesn't have respect for the protection of our materials.

Given that he penalizes people who do not parrot his version of reality, I am concerned about the kinds of records his lieutenants are keeping, and I worry about our ability later to get good oral histories, such important supplements to documents. The archivists of the National Archives it's an understaffed team, but they're very professional. I think they can protect the documents that are already there, but I worry about them being able to ensure good archival practice during the life of this administration.

If a president knows that, ultimately, the people of this country, or at least their children, will know about their crimes and their abuse of power, it might be a check on their behavior when they're in office. President Trump's ability to now manipulate his own record because of this permissive climate is yet more license for misdeeds.

Brooke Gladstone: You wrote in The Atlantic back in 2022, you went to the George W. Bush Museum, and you found no mention of waterboarding, Guantanamo Bay, military tribunals, the digital surveillance of Americans.

Timothy Naftali: The National Archives was going to allow them to privatize that museum so there would be no National Archives involvement whatsoever. I pointed out weaknesses in the existing displays, and I thought it was a bad idea.

Brooke Gladstone: Why did they do that?

Timothy Naftali: To save money. The Bush Foundation runs that museum now. I learned that the Nixon Foundation wanted to take over the Nixon Museum. The National Archives promised Congress in 2022 that that wouldn't happen. It's possible that the leadership team at the National Archives will allow foundations to privatize their museums. The attempt to present a nonpartisan approach to Watergate may be short-lived.

Brooke Gladstone: We already see the President's efforts to whitewash the entire history of the United States by almost any means necessary. For instance, his executive order instructing national parks employees to flag displays that "disparage Americans." His ongoing effort to rewrite the January 6th insurrection. Really, how much do presidential libraries, which only a small percentage of us will ever visit, matter when it comes to keeping the truth front and center?

Timothy Naftali: If the only access a person had with a presidential library was a physical access, absolutely. Presidential libraries have the capacity, through the web, to interact with many more people. People in this country and around the world access the digitized, declassified records that presidential libraries put online. It's done by civil servants every day.

Brooke Gladstone: Let's follow the money for the moment. Senator Elizabeth Warren has introduced the Presidential Library Anti-Corruption Act to put some guardrails around presidential library donations.

Senator Elizabeth Warren: Nations, people seeking presidential pardons, and companies doing business with the federal government can dump tens of millions of dollars into these library slush funds while the President still sits in the Oval Office making decisions about their future. That is wrong. My new bill will put a stop to it.

Brooke Gladstone: In the exceedingly unlikely case that this bill is passed and signed, would it help address some of the problems we've been talking about?

Timothy Naftali: I do think it would be healthy if the public knew who was contributing to the building of a library. That's a check on the most overt forms of lobbying. The best way to eliminate this opportunity for corruption is for Congress to pay for these big buildings. I don't think that's likely. Some people with deep pockets will be doing this because they believe in public history or they believe in their man, and someday their woman. Others will have an ulterior motive. I think the only way to be realistic about those motives is for people who give money to be public.

Brooke Gladstone: In Trump's case, one of the two nonprofits set up to get library donations is called the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library Foundation, and it lists his son Eric and his daughter Tiffany's husband, Michael Boulos.

Timothy Naftali: It's not new for members of a presidential family to participate in a library foundation. What I think is new today is this enabling culture of official corruption. The President ran promising vengeance. He is using this opportunity to squeeze money from his enemies, and that money is being directed to his library. The President in this term isn't even trying to create the impression of a line between his personal and his financial interests. The problem is much bigger than just a library foundation. The problem is the climate we are living in and the fact that the American people don't seem to care about a president who's enriching himself while in office.

Brooke Gladstone: Tim, thank you very much.

Timothy Naftali: My pleasure, Brooke.

Brooke Gladstone: Timothy Naftali is a senior research scholar at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs.

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Micah Loewinger: Coming up, conservative media outlets are on the front line in the administration's war on universities.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. On Monday, Harvard University took the Trump administration to court over more than $2 billion in already promised but currently frozen research funding.

News clip: In court, lawyers for the government, asking the judge to dismiss the case, arguing the language in grant contracts allows termination if a university's actions don't align with government priorities like combating antisemitism.

Micah Loewinger: The lawsuit by the school arguing its First Amendment rights are under siege is the latest salvo in the fight with the White House. On Wednesday, the administration fired back.

News clip: The State Department has launched an investigation into Harvard University's eligibility to sponsor candidates for a government-run visa program.

News clip: They're investigating whether Harvard University should be able to allow foreign students to apply or attend Harvard University.

Micah Loewinger: Harvard has repelled the attacks in some ways and capitulated in others. The Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging is now called Community and Campus Life. Either way, it seems there's no placating the President. This week, Columbia University settled with the White House.

News clip: Columbia University is offering a major payout to the federal government, over $200 million in exchange for nearly $400 million in canceled research funding.

Micah Loewinger: Along with the check, the school has been ordered, among other things, to hire more faculty in Jewish studies and will be placed under the watchful eye of an outside monitor who will oversee hiring and admissions data. Of course, the President cannot legally compel private universities to comply with specific ideological stances or hiring practices.

Withdrawing billions of dollars in federal research grants has proven to be an effective threat. The Ivies are very much in the crosshairs. Other schools are also taking heat. Katherine Mangan is a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education. In a story for ProPublica, she spoke to Dr. Gregory Washington, President of George Mason University, who had just got a letter announcing that he and his university were under investigation.

Katherine Mangan: He told me that he was very surprised because he was under the impression that the University had been doing everything it could be doing to sort of tamp down any complaints about antisemitism. They hadn't had encampments or any vandalism of buildings. He was really perplexed.

Micah Loewinger: Yes. Hadn't the University been praised by Campus Hillel, praised by Jewish faculty? It seems like, at least compared to some other universities, it was relatively quiet at George Mason.

Katherine Mangan: Yes. There hadn't been any demonstrations or protests for over a year. Also, the University had been taking a lot of steps to reach out to the Jewish community. It had enacted some new protest rules that, if anything, a lot of people were saying were going overboard to satisfy the administration by making it really, really hard for students to protest, so the complaints coming from those who said the University was already cracking down too much.

Micah Loewinger: Despite that, here they find themselves under investigation for allegedly allowing antisemitic behavior to go unchecked. Then they got another complaint?

Katherine Mangan: Yes. This one was based on allegations that they had illegally been using racial preferences. This is sort of the DEI component that seems to be part of the one-two punch that the administration has been going after universities with.

Micah Loewinger: The investigation, to the best of our knowledge, has just begun. Is there any evidence that they broke federal law with regard to racial hiring practices?

Katherine Mangan: There doesn't seem to be. The administration has not been able to point to anything specific. The University has come out with a pretty strong statement saying that, in fact, it does not discriminate, and really pushing back against this whole notion that the University is guilty of what the Trump administration has been referring to as illegal DEI, the assumption being that anything that involves diversity, equity, and inclusion is therefore illegal.

Micah Loewinger: Gregory Washington is a Black man. He's at the helm of Virginia's most diverse university. Is there evidence that this is a racially motivated attack?

Katherine Mangan: There are a lot of people who suspect that might have something to do with it. A former governor of the state of Virginia, Governor Wilder, who himself is Black, put out a pretty strong statement, saying that Gregory Washington is not the first person of color to come under this kind of attack from the Trump administration. If nothing else, Gregory Washington is someone who has been unapologetic in his support of diversity efforts on campus. He points out that George Mason, with 40,000+ students, is the most racially diverse public university in the state. He says, "That's not something we run away from. Diversity is something we run toward."

Micah Loewinger: George Mason is not necessarily known for being like an ultra liberal university.

Katherine Mangan: No.

Micah Loewinger: The law school is named for Antonin Scalia. A New York Times piece in 2023 discussed how the department, in particular, had a deepening relationship with the conservative majority on the Supreme Court.

Katherine Mangan: Absolutely. It is not a university that, by any means, would be considered woke except that that's kind of the way it's being portrayed now in these current investigations. The Board of Visitors, almost all of the members, if not all of the members, are appointed by Governor Youngkin, who himself is fiercely opposed to DEI. Many of the board members also have deep connections with the Heritage Foundation.

Micah Loewinger: Yes, they're the authors of Project 2025. In fact, one of those board members appointed by Governor Glenn Youngkin is Lindsey Burke, the lead author on the Project 2025 chapter devoted to education.

Katherine Mangan: Right, and obviously still has a lot of connections on the board, but she left because Trump appointed her to a very senior position in the Department of Education. Again, that's part of what many people see as this coordinated attack both from within and from outside the University.

Micah Loewinger: Yes. When you spoke to President Gregory Washington, he told you that he believed there was an orchestrated effort to have him removed.

Katherine Mangan: Yes. He pointed out the time frame. The University received its letter from the Education Department on July 1st. There wasn't a public announcement of this investigation, but on July 2nd, Washington Free Beacon, which is a conservative publication, published a fairly lengthy article. Embedded in that article was a copy of the letter. Then the following day, there was another conservative publication called City Journal, linked to the conservative think tank Manhattan Institute.

It came out with a very, very harsh article about President Washington, calling him a disastrous president, specifically calling out his commitments to DEI and calling on him to resign. The fact that these all came in such quick succession made the President feel like this seemed to be a coordinated attack against him.

Micah Loewinger: As we've reported on our show, the Free Beacon helped lead the charge in reporting on former Harvard President Claudine Gay's plagiarism scandal. City Journal, as you note in your piece, is run by the Manhattan Institute, the think tank that's home to right-wing activist Christopher Rufo, who also helped oust Claudine Gay and has advised the Trump administration on its crusade against DEI. Of course, all of this comes on the heels of the recent ouster of James Ryan, who resigned as president of the University of Virginia.

News clip: James Ryan announced his departure today amid a Justice Department investigation into UVA's diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.

News clip: The controversial Jefferson Council launching the website ResetUVA, where it calls for Ryan's removal and a return to what the President of the Council told me are the core Values at UVA.

Katherine Mangan: There was a group of conservative alumni called the Jefferson Council, and they have been agitating against DEI activities and programs at the University of Virginia for some time. They started putting out a number of blog posts, and they took out full-page ads in the local newspaper with a cartoon lampooning and poking fun at, and criticizing President Ryan for a long list of things that they said that he had done wrong, saying that he needed to step down.

We discovered in our reporting a couple of the senior attorneys in the Department of Justice who were leading the investigation against the University of Virginia. They're both UVA alums who have been very fiercely opposed to DEI efforts. We were able to establish in our reporting that they were pretty closely connected to the work that this Jefferson Council was doing.

Micah Loewinger: One of these lawyers, Gregory W. Brown, had promised a few hundred thousand dollars for a scholarship in honor of his father. As The New York Times has also reported, it's pretty darn clear that he knew people at the Jefferson Council because he represented clients in lawsuits against the University, clients that the Council had referred to him. He was even scheduled to speak at the Jefferson Council's annual meeting this year, but he canceled after he was hired by the Department of Justice. What role exactly did he play in helping bring down the President of the University?

Katherine Mangan: Well, he definitely was clearly connected. So much of this happens and plays out on social media, too. He and the other DOJ attorney were following what the Jefferson Council was posting. Harmeet Dhillon, the person he worked with, was quoted as saying that one of the first things she does when she wakes up in the morning is to look to social media and look and see what papers are reporting. Clearly, it's the conservative papers that she's looking mostly at and immediately getting to work. They're very much taking their cues from what these conservative activists are circulating on social media.

Micah Loewinger: Both of them have, to my knowledge, denied coordinating with the Jefferson Council and vice versa. When you spoke with Gregory Washington, he told you that he had detected this, this very same pattern. Universities targeted by Donald Trump are hit with multiple investigations filed in quick succession, with leaks to conservative news outlets in tow.

Katherine Mangan: Yes, some of the critics who are very much alarmed about the way the Trump administration has been going after President Washington see certain similarities with what happened in Florida New College, a formerly very progressive college, which became increasingly conservative after the governor appointed a bunch of conservatives to the board overseeing the University. The faculty member that I spoke to at George Mason said she's very much worried that Governor Youngkin in Virginia might be planning the same kind of takeover in getting President Washington to step down.

Micah Loewinger: You actually kind of put this as a question to President Washington. Does he plan to resign?

Katherine Mangan: I asked him that, and he said, "Well, ultimately, I serve at the pleasure of the board," but I don't think he's going to voluntarily resign. I just don't see that happening.

Micah Loewinger: I was impressed that he spoke to you at all, because this is a highly sensitive moment where anything that he says in public will very likely be used against him in the conservative press and in the attempt to demonize his tenure at the University.

Katherine Mangan: He called back almost immediately and said, "I feel that these attacks are too personal. I can't just step aside and pretend they're not happening. Sunlight is the best disinfectant." I think one of the things that he was hoping that people would do is make the connection. It was four days after President Ryan had stepped down at Virginia that these attacks started. He thought it was so obviously a coordinated attempt to get him to step down.

Micah Loewinger: Is there anything important on this story that I haven't asked you about?

Katherine Mangan: Well, I think one of the things that really struck us was sort of the why George Mason? Like, why are they going after George Mason? For all the reasons we talked about. One of the theories that I've been hearing is that the very fact that it has this very strong core of conservatives, it has a lot of backing from the Koch Foundation, particularly in the Scalia Law School, the board that is almost entirely based on governors' appointees.

People are saying that perhaps the Trump administration, in looking for another head to topple, it was easier going after him. As one faculty member said, "The foxes are in the henhouse." It's an inside job in many ways, that makes the President quite vulnerable.

Micah Loewinger: Katherine, thank you so much.

Katherine Mangan: Thank you.

Micah Loewinger: Katherine Mangan is a senior writer at The Chronicle for Higher Education.

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, a Nazi hacker, a eugenicist Substacker, and The New York Times walk into a bar.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media.

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Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. We just heard about how conservative news outlets, activists, and Trump administrators have waged a likely coordinated attack on a growing list of elite universities. Mainstream outlets have played a part in all of this, too, including The New York Times, which raced to cover each new allegation levied against former Harvard President Claudine Gay. Earlier this month, another case study emerged.

News clip: Columbia University says a politically motivated hacker breached the school's data systems last week. The alleged hacker told Bloomberg, 1.6 gigabytes of data was taken. This included about 2.5 million applications that go back decades.

Micah Loewinger: A couple of days after the hack, The Times ran a story about one such application submitted by Zohran Mamdani, the leading mayoral candidate in New York, who applied to Colombia in 2009.

News clip: Mamdani, who was born in Uganda, checked a box that he was Asian, but also checked the box for Black or African American on his Columbia University application. Mamdani says it was an attempt to represent his complex background, given the limited choices before him, not gain an upper hand in the admissions process.

Greg Gutfeld: Both of his parents are Indian. What's interesting is he didn't say he was Indian because he knew they have the highest median household income in the United States, and he knew that wouldn't help him in the oppression Olympics.

Micah Loewinger: Fox's Greg Gutfeld, one of many right-wing pundits who piled on.

Greg Gutfeld: Which exposes the lie of identity politics. If it is so unfair to be Black in America, why are you pretending to be one?

Micah Loewinger: The Times article made clear that the candidate has never publicly identified himself as Black, leading many critics of the paper, including Mamdani's supporters, to question what exactly the piece was intended to reveal.

Chapo Trap House Host: I don't really even know what I'm supposed to be mad at in this story.

Micah Loewinger: This is one of the hosts of Chapo Trap House, a popular leftist podcast, who saw The Times article as the latest in a series of attacks against Mamdani from mainstream outlets and the Democratic political establishment.

Chapo Trap House Host: He didn't even get into Columbia, despite the fact that his dad is a professor there. It's like if Zohran Mamdani had lost the primary, or if his platform were merely just free buses and childcare, and they did not try to make this entire primary a referendum on his support or non-support for Israel, this article would not have been published.

Micah Loewinger: Mamdani has, in fact, been the target of many broadsides in The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, The Free Press, The New York Post, and The New York Times, whose editorial board effectively endorsed his competitor, Andrew Cuomo, despite calling for the former governor to step down during his sexual assault scandal in 2021, and despite supposedly swearing off local endorsements last year.

Regardless of how you feel about Mamdani or his policies, it's still worth paying attention to some dubious editorial decisions at the heart of The New York Times' story about the hacked Columbia application. For one, there was the man who gave the data to The Times' reporters, identified by the outlet not by name, but as Cremieux, a pseudonym he uses on Substack.

Noah Leonard: He is someone who has one of the most popular science substacks on all of Substack, has more than 250,000 followers on X.

Micah Loewinger: This is Noah Leonard, a reporter with Mother Jones, who has been digging into Cremieux, whose real name is Jordan Lasker.

Noah Leonard: What was striking about The Times article to me was that he was identified as Cremieux, even though at that time his name was already known, and he, in fact, just only a few days before that article had appeared on camera with his face as Cremieux on the Charlie Kirk Show.

Charlie Kirk: Are you okay with that name on there, Jordan, or not? Oh, Jay is probably better, yes. Can we [crosstalk]?

Noah Leonard: Initially, The Times identified him as an academic and an opponent of affirmative action. There was a lot of backlash about that online, and it later identified him as someone who writes about IQ and race. I would say there's a number of notable aspects about that description, one, first would be academic. He's had an affiliation in the past with Texas Tech University, according to what's online, but the University declined to confirm whether he's at all affiliated with them anymore, citing privacy reasons.

There's no evidence of him ever having been a professor there. Then secondly, he was identified as someone who writes often about IQ and race, and it leaves a lot of questions of "What does he write about IQ and race on his Cremieux feed, for example, frequently writing about Black people having lower IQs than members of other racial groups?"

Micah Loewinger: By now, a lot has been said and written about Lasker, Mamdani, and The Times, though far, far less attention has been paid to the person who stole the records from Colombia in the first place. Until this week

Elizabeth Lopatto: I feel like I tripped over a rock and uncovered a Nazi.

Micah Loewinger: Elizabeth Lopatto, a senior writer at The Verge, published a piece on Monday identifying the alleged hack. Well, she doesn't know his or her real name, but she did uncover a digital footprint that reveals quite a lot about the motivations for this person's crimes.

Elizabeth Lopatto: Well, they seem to be pretty racist.

Micah Loewinger: You referred to them as the Anime Nazi. That's the pseudonym we see in your piece. Why did you decide to give this person a pseudonym?

Elizabeth Lopatto: The actual handle on the account is a slur. It's a derivative of the N-word. This person seems to be pretty obsessed with getting people to say it. I didn't want to give this person that satisfaction, so I renamed him. In renaming them, I picked on two things that are emblematic of the account. The first is reposts of fan art of a character from a video game called Idolmaster Cinderella Girls.

The character's called Sachiko, and she has been renamed by the grossest corners of the Internet to this slur. That's the anime part. Then the Nazi part is because of all the swastikas. Just the lot of swastikas. Things like "Miss you, Hitler" and "Minorities have no place in our world" are among statements and images that this person reposts.

Micah Loewinger: The hacker has also bragged about targeting five universities, three of which were reported in that Bloomberg article from earlier this month: the University of Minnesota, New York University, and, most recently, Columbia University, which is how Mamdani's application information was leaked in the first place. The hacker was effectively trying to show that if admissions data showed anything other than white men being admitted to the University overwhelmingly, that this would be evidence of affirmative action or some kind of effort to suppress their admission.

Elizabeth Lopatto: The way that I understand it is that they were trying to show that affirmative action was still in place at NYU after the Supreme Court had ruled it was illegal by breaking down test scores and grades by race. There are a couple of things here. The first is that I don't know that any of the data they're showing is true. Thing 2 is that that's also a misunderstanding of how college applications work.

There are a lot of things that go into admitting people, whether it's admitting athletes, for instance, especially in specific sports, people who are talented at music, for conservatories, in-state versus out-of-state students, rural versus urban students. One of the things that has been true in admissions at a lot of schools for a long time is that the candidates who are actually being discriminated against are female because there are more women applying to college, and their test scores and grades tend to be higher. In order to get something like an even balance between the sexes, if you're a man, you're automatically getting boosted in your application.

Micah Loewinger: Yes, I read an article in Ms. Magazine which quoted data from Brown University, the class of 2028, and found that 4.2% of women were accepted in comparison to 6.8% of men. In fact, 11,984 more women applied to the University, but 14 more men than women were accepted. There's at least some body of literature that suggests there's a trend here.

Elizabeth Lopatto: That's right. If you're subscribed to this person's point of view, that GPA and test scores are the only things that matter for determining whether one is smart enough to get into a university, then you are also committed to saying that, overall, men are dumber than women. I don't believe that's true because I don't think that test scores and GPA are especially good ways of measuring intelligence.

Micah Loewinger: You ultimately did a deep dive on the hacker because you wanted to understand how Cremieux, the Substacker who was cited as a source in The New York Times' Mamdani story, originally got his information.

Elizabeth Lopatto: That's right. It also seemed important to me just who this hacker was, full stop.

Micah Loewinger: Yes. I want to talk to you about the kind of broader framing of The New York Times article. As you write in your piece, it's not unusual for journalists to use hacked materials, even from unsavory sources. In this particular case, though, there was no mention of the hacker in that piece. What's wrong with this picture in your mind?

Elizabeth Lopatto: There are a number of best practices around hacking that came out of the way that The New York Times handled Hillary Clinton's emails in 2016. One of them is that you do need to disclose the motivations of the hacker and where this stuff is coming from. In my story, I use hack materials. I'm aware that it's anti-fascists who are hacking this far-right instance of Mastodon that this hacker happened to be on. I had access to what I believe to be this person's DMs.

Micah Loewinger: When you say incidents, you mean like the server on Mastodon, which is a decentralized social media network?

Elizabeth Lopatto: That's right.

Micah Loewinger: In your piece, when you used hacked material, you made it clear to the reader what the motivations were for the hack in the first place, and you feel The Times didn't do this?

Elizabeth Lopatto: Absolutely not. One of the big questions that I have that The Times would not answer for me is whether or not they knew the identity of the hacker when they ran that story. They declined to comment on that. I am very curious about what the answer to that question is, because it's one thing if they didn't know until after the story ran where the materials came from, but it's something else entirely if they're aware that this is material coming from not one, but two pretty racist people. Omitting that information for the reader feels dishonest.

Micah Loewinger: You said that you reached out to The Times to ask them if the paper knew about the hacker and the motivations behind the hack.

Elizabeth Lopatto: I did.

Micah Loewinger: In the version of the article I see now, there is a hyperlink to a story from July 1st with the title, "Columbia Cyberattack Appears Politically Motivated, University Says," so it seems that elsewhere in the newsroom, The Times was aware of the Bloomberg story where the hacker was interviewed and some larger acknowledgement of a pattern of attacks.

Elizabeth Lopatto: If you look at that Times story that you reference, the lead art on it is a computer displaying Donald Trump's face. That was one of the features of that hack was that a number of computer screens were displaying Donald Trump's face. That's not referenced in this story at all.

Micah Loewinger: When you reached out to The Times for comment, a spokesperson told you that "Reporters receive tips from people with biases and bad motives all the time, but we only publish such information after we've independently verified it, confirmed it, done our own reporting on it, and judged it to be newsworthy. In this case, Mr. Mamdani himself confirmed the information. The information was valuable to the public in that it helped readers get a better understanding of the candidate." To translate, "Yes, we took this information from this racist hacker, but it's newsworthy. This guy's running for mayor." What do you think about that?

Elizabeth Lopatto: I would be a lot more sympathetic to it if this was a local paper, and it's not. I live in California. I don't care who the mayor of New York is. When it comes to all of the these hacked universities, that's a much bigger story. The other part of it was the unwillingness to answer any questions about the framing of the story, which is where my criticism is coming from.

At no point was I saying The Times shouldn't run the story. At no point was I saying that reporters don't use unsavory sources. The problem for me is the way that it is framed and the way that the story is set up. Both Bloomberg and The New York Times were ahead of me on this person's identity. Bloomberg had spoken to them. The New York Times was at least indirectly connected to them. Why did I beat them to the story?

Micah Loewinger: Why do you think you beat them to the story?

Elizabeth Lopatto: [laughs] Because I think that there was a significant failure of news judgment. In both newsrooms, a choice was made not to identify this particular hacker, their particular MO, and the fact that they had stolen data from millions of people and very likely might do it again. That is a tremendous journalistic failure.

Micah Loewinger: You wrote, "This alleged hacker's racial animus aligns with the recent Republican war on higher education. It also aligns with a turn from certain Silicon Valley circles against elite universities." How do you feel this all fits into the broader conservative project at work here?

Elizabeth Lopatto: Well, it seems like what these people want is for these universities to go back to what they were in the 1930s, before the GI Bill and the civil rights movement, where they were effectively finishing schools for the wealthiest parts of the elite. The reason I say that is that Stephen Miller's America First organization lodged a complaint against John Hopkins University.

In that complaint, they say that making medical school free for students whose families make less than $300,000 amounts to "masking racial preferences behind income thresholds," end quote. For what it's worth. In the lawsuit, they say that nearly two-thirds of all enrolled medical students qualify under this financial aid model. That's the majority of students. The majority of the student body at John Hopkins Medical School is going for free. [chuckles] That in and of itself is pretty striking to me.

Micah Loewinger: Why do you think right now, this Trump administration, conservative think tanks and media, and the whole apparatus is so obsessed with gatekeeping who gets to attend elite universities?

Elizabeth Lopatto: Well, because that's upward mobility, right? Those are power centers. It's where people make the kinds of connections that allow them to have political careers. If you limit that, again, it becomes much more difficult for anybody outside of the existing elite to make inroads.

Micah Loewinger: Why do you think this story is so important?

Elizabeth Lopatto: There are a couple of things. There's the direct consequence of an enormous crime against millions of people. The war on higher education is really important, again, because of how many people that affects. Also, it's not a secret to anybody that a lot of America has lost trust in the media. Incidents like this, with The Times misrepresenting the motives of the people who gave them the data, makes that worse, makes it more likely that people are distrustful of the media.

I don't think you fix that by pretending that you are an unbiased source. You fix that by telling people the truth. Right now, I think one of the difficulties for places like The Times is that the right wing has spun out so hard into such a weird place that if you write about it honestly, you sound biased, because calling somebody a Nazi, that sounds pretty extreme. As we were discussing, I don't know what else you would call somebody who is that interested in swastikas.

The media, if we want to win back trust, we have to figure out how to be honest. I don't think that the way that that story was conducted was honest. It is The New York Times further discrediting itself in ways that I think hurts us all.

Micah Loewinger: Elizabeth, thank you very much.

Elizabeth Lopatto: Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

Micah Loewinger: Elizabeth Lopatto is a senior writer at The Verge. In response to a request for comment, The New York Times told us, "With any story, we have to evaluate, is it true? Is it newsworthy? Do people have an interest in knowing?" And in this case, all three of those answers were yes." To read the entire statement, head to onthemedia.org. That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, and Candice Wang.

Brooke Gladstone: Eloise Blondiau is our senior producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger.

 

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