Steven Vecchiarelli

Some of the finds from within our latest piece for Unlimited Hangout: *Current Commerce Secretary and former Cantor Fitzgerald head, Howard Lutnick participated in "war games" from 1996 to 2001 that were co-hosted by the Naval War College and Cantor. Together, they gamed out, among other things, how "terrorists" might attack the US financial system by launching an attack on the World Trade Center, where Cantor's offices were housed. Top Pentagon and CIA figures were involved. While those "war games" were on-going, Lutnick gave an interview where he stated that his firm's traders and brokers "may not survive the electronic revolution" as he planned to replace them all with an electronic trading system called eSpeed. Nearly all of Cantor's traders and brokers were killed on 9/11/2001, whereas Lutnick, other top Cantor executives who were part of the "war games" alongside Lutnick, and a handful of eSpeed's top management happened to not have been in their offices that morning and survived. *The top suspect in the 9/11 insider trading scandal, Mayo Shattuck III, helped create and is a long-time board member of company that was behind the creation of the Trump sons' Bitcoin mining firm, American Bitcoin. Shortly after leaving his banking leadership positions after the insider trades were made, Shattuck took over Constellation Energy/Exelon, now one of the top nuclear power companies powering AI data centers. One of Shattuck's first moves at Constellation was to take over Enron contracts shortly after it collapsed and emulate its controversial electricity trading strategy. *An early data center built by Enron was liquidated during its bankruptcy and purchased for under a million dollars by the sole bidder, Switch, after costing the now infamous energy company millions of dollars. After being owned for a short while by Tom Barrack's Colony Capital, today Switch is owned by OpenAI's Stargate partner, Softbank. *As part of a bid to accelerate the re-opening of decommissioned nuclear power plants (something initiated in large part by Mayo Shattuck while he led Constellation) in order to power AI data centers, the Trump administration is seeking to eliminate several rules and regulations that protect the public and environment from dangerous levels of radiation. One of the rules they are looking to eliminate is the 50-year-old rule standard was “As Low As Reasonably Achievable,” which requires the nuclear industry to drive radiation exposure for workers and the public as low as possible. One of the plants they seek to reopen is the controversial Three Mile Island plant, owned by Constellation, the firm formerly run by Mayo Shattuck.