If surveillance and sexual blackmail are being used to control political operatives at the state level, what are the odds they are not being utilized in a similar fashion at the much more significant level of national politics?
US federal officials have charged a Maryland Democratic state senator with extortion for allegedly masterminding a blackmail scheme involving secretly filmed explicit videos, according to an indictment unsealed on Thursday. Dalya Attar, who was first elected to the Maryland House of Delegates in 2018 and was re-elected in 2022, became the first Orthodox Jewish woman to serve in the Maryland State Senate earlier this year.
Court documents allege that Attar devised a plan to stop a former employee from speaking out against her 2022 re-election bid. Prosecutors say she conspired with her brother, Joseph Attar, and Baltimore police officer Kalman Finkelstein, who had worked on her campaign.
Staring in 2020, they worked to threaten the ex-employee into silence, using covertly taken videos of her in bed with a married man, the court documents alleged. The group allegedly conspired to follow the ex-consultant’s movements using a tracker on her loaned car, and to secure intimate videos of her with her lover by installing cameras disguised as smoke detectors, the court documents said. The victim was staying at an apartment owned by Finklestein’s family at the time.
I tend to doubt the ethnic aspect of the case will escape anyone who understands what the motivation behind the Jeffrey Epstein operation appears to have been. Political ethno-nepotism, which is observable from the earliest Irish immigrants in New York City to the Somalis in Minneapolis today, is the reason civic nationalism is, and will always be, a complete non-starter.