United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York

Yeah, this is the Justice Department's first ever criminally charged superintelligence-assisted music streaming fraud.

Jamie McDonald, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, announced today that Michael Smith was sentenced to 18 months in prison for his role in a scheme to defraud music streaming platforms and musicians of royalty payments.

On March 19th, 2026, Smith pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud before U.S. District Judge John G. Coetti, who imposed today's sentence.

Michael Smith exploited superintelligence technology to generate...

Clayton has been a senior official across both Trump administrations.

He served as SEC chair during Trump I, and during the current administration, he began as a US attorney in the Southern District of New York before being appointed Director of National Intelligence.

Alongside Clayton, the administration will now have a cross-department AI task force as well, with that group including Emil Michael, Undersecretary of War for Research and Engineering, Scott Cooper, the Director of the Office of Personnel Management, and Andrew Ferguson, the Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission.

The FTC seems to be becoming an increasingly important regulator for the AI industry, although the task force also includes several officials responsible for AI implementation across the government.

On his podcast, Bannon said, "Clayton's a great lawyer, but I don't know how an Alibaba general counsel who got them through an IPO, a military info network for the CCP, ends up director of national intelligence." On the other end of the critique spectrum, Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm is pretty negative on what this likely means for open source in his estimation based on his personal experience with Clayton.

He wrote, "It doesn't look like we're headed towards a future that supports open source AI.

Jay Clayton headed the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, which prosecuted me." My instinct is that the two very different conversations we're having around open weights models, or maybe honestly even three, open models in terms of their implications for the enterprise, open models in terms of their implications for AI safety, and open models for their implications in terms of national security, are inevitably going to get a bit closer in one form or another given the new regulatory phase we're getting into.

Still, call me an optimist, but I think there are reasons to be excited about the future of American open models.

Not only was it done at his direction, but for his benefit.

All of a sudden, the Southern District of New York, Tom McKay, Nick Roos, this Andrea Griswold, uh, what's his name? Kazami, Robert Kazami, um, Geoffrey Berman, everybody steps away.

There's a whole slew of sealed indictments that were sitting there.

All of a sudden, they step away from it, and they say, "There's not enough information in order to pursue this case." This is why people are so angry with Merrick Garland.

Now, I know Merrick Garland has nothing to do with the Southern District of New York's corruption, has nothing to do with it at all.

It's just the fact that Donald Trump seems to be Teflon.

He seems to be able to get away with everything, and that's the reason why Merrick Garland has to step it up.

In July of 2025, he used that power to target a DOJ prosecutor whose father had a very public history with the president.

So Maureen Comey, the daughter of former FBI Director Jim Comey, was a highly regarded prosecutor in the Southern District of New York.

She had handled a number of high-profile cases, including the Jeffrey Epstein indictment, and she obtained the conviction of Jelaine Maxwell, his co-conspirator.

Here again is Joyce Vance.

This is not a phrase that any immigrant wants to hear.

The virtually infinite resources of the federal government driven by the Justice Department under Eric Folder and prosecuted by the head of the Southern District of New York, an Indian guy named Preet Bharara.

And the whole idea was we need to lock this guy up for a long time.

I won't go into the case.

And according to Bill Barr, we were 100% dead on when we were calling Prince Andrew at the very least a witness when it comes to Jeffrey Epstein and the investigation.

Now, if you remember going back to 2020, 2019, when Jeffrey Berman, who was a U.S. prosecutor at the time at the SDNY, told us that Prince Andrew was a person of interest, basically a suspect.

So much so that they reached out to their counterparts over in the UK.

to get some assistance when it comes to the investigation.

He most certainly was.

So Prince Andrew, the man who spent years cosplaying as untouchable, insulated by the velvet ropes of privilege, and the illusion that being born into a palace equates to moral superiority.

For the SDNY, he was always the guest of dishonor, hovering at the edge of the Epstein investigation like a bad smell nobody wanted to acknowledge in public.

A person of interest, absolutely, but one too gilded, too connected, too coddled, by centuries a pomp to ever feel the weight of handcuffs.

They say in paragraph 14 of the complaint, Katie Fang says, Jeffrey Epstein was a convicted sex offender.

I mean, who debates that? Who in 2019 was charged by the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York with sex trafficking and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking.

Investigative reporting by a range of news outlets revealed that dozens of powerful men and women socialized with Epstein, raising the possibility that other people had committed crimes too.

You should be admitting all, if not most of that.

If you want to know who's speaking, this is him.

He is a first assistant U.S. attorney and he is a U.S. attorney for the District of New York.

So what's really interesting is in this video right here, here he is.

You heard him say, how are we going to catch criminals walking around on the streets? That could be blowing up the Capitol or whatever other excuses he gave.

The triune living God, the true God, is outside of his creation, right? It's not God.

Creation isn't God.

But so many people made in God's image, like this guy, like this other guy who's certainly getting money, the New York district attorney there, your mayor, your city councilman, they're all getting kickbacks, whether it's direct or indirect.

I promise you they are.

In July of 2025, he used that power to target a DOJ prosecutor whose father had a very public history with the president.

So Maureen Comey, the daughter of former FBI Director Jim Comey, was a highly regarded prosecutor in the Southern District of New York.

She had handled a number of high-profile cases, including the Jeffrey Epstein indictment, and she obtained the conviction of Jelaine Maxwell, his co-conspirator.

Here again is Joyce Vance.

We published for three days.

And then I get a telephone call from Whitney North Seymour, who was the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York.

He calls me on the phone.

He says, hello, Mr. Sheehan? I said, yes.

And I said, Whitney North Seymour, Whitney North Seymour.

He said, am I supposed to know who you are? It'll come to me.

He said, I'm the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

I said, oh, right, right, right, right, right.