Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick was fiercely scolded Tuesday over his financial ties to Rumble, the video platform popular among the far-right and a hotbed of conspiracy theories, including some that “demean” the memory of Lutnick’s own brother who was killed in 9/11.
Lutnick was the CEO of the financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald until his appointment in the Trump administration earlier this year when he handed off the company to his sons. Lutnick has continued to promote projects that financially benefit Cantor Fitzgerald, which has deep business ties to Tether Limited, a financial technology company.
Tether Limited, in turn, has invested $775 million in Rumble, which regularly promotes disproven conspiracy theories on topics like vaccines and the Holocaust. Another popular topic on the platform is the 9/11 attacks, with some videos on the topic promoting the idea that Jewish people had advanced knowledge of the attacks — videos that were explicitly promoted by the platform.
Lutnick’s own brother, Gary Lutnick, was among the 2,977 people killed on 9/11, as were 658 employees at Lutnick’s company, Cantor Fitzgerald. And, with Cantor Fitzgerald having a “direct stake” in Rumble, political author and ex-State Department official Kristofer Harrison hammered the Commerce secretary for his “large financial stake” in a company disparaging his own brother’s memory.
“A company in which Howard Lutnick has a large financial stake, makes money by pushing propaganda that not only demeans the murder of 658 Cantor Fitzgerald employees – and even Lutnick’s own brother – by pushing gross theories about Jews receiving advanced knowledge of 9/11,” Harrison wrote in an analysis published Tuesday on his Substack dekleptocracy.
“It also lets the true authors of this horror off the hook. Lutnick, to the best of our knowledge, has never objected.”
Cantor Fitzgerald saw its most profitable year in history since Lutnick was appointed to Trump’s cabinet, largely around its investments in cryptocurrency.
Harrison, who’s also the founder of Dekleptocracy Alliance – an organization which aims to “accelerate transparency and anti-corruption organizations” – also went as far as to accuse Rumble of having “killed Americans,” and “a lot of Americans” due to its promotion of COVID-19 misinformation, including one debunked documentary viewed more than 18 million times that claimed vaccines were part of a “global elite” plot to depopulate the earth.