When You Can Rent a Newspaper to Deceive a Federal Judge
On September 15, 2026, in federal court in St. Louis, a 38-year-old pseudo-money manager named Siddharth Jawahar living illegally in the United States was sentenced to eleven years for running a $35 million Ponzi scheme. Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, aka Mr. Taylor Swift, was among the victims, which is why you may have seen the headline. The scheme itself was ordinary. He told clients their money was diversified, put 99 percent of it into Philip Morris Pakistan, watched it collapse, and then paid old investors with new investors’ money while flying private and eating well.
Of the $35.6 million he raised, roughly $10 million was ever invested. He pleaded guilty in January to three counts of wire fraud and owes $31.35 million in restitution, of which he has paid, to date, nothing.
That is not the story. The story is what he did with the money he did have in the three weeks before sentencing, and who he gave it to.
$10,000 went to the guy who brought us Cambridge Analytica in U.S. campaigns
According to the government’s sentencing filing, on August 24 Jawahar signed an agreement with Axiom Strategies, the Kansas City political consultancy founded by Jeff Roe, for $10,000. The scope of work, quoted by KCTV: to “assist with the development and coordination of approximately one to two advocacy or support letters for consideration in connection with Client’s forthcoming sentencing.”
If you don’t follow Missouri politics, Jeff Roe might look like just some local electioneer. He ran Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign, the one that made foreign PsyOp vendor Cambridge Analytica famous by paying it millions before any other presidential campaign would. He was the strategist behind Glenn Youngkin’s win in Virginia and the chief of the super PAC that spent nine figures failing to make Ron DeSantis president. His claim to fame before that was a Missouri governor’s race ad against Tom Schweich, run through a front group, that was followed by the suicide of both the candidate and his press secretary within a month of each other. He is, by any measure, one of the most powerful Republican operatives in the country, and repeatedly proximate to sketchy practices. He may have finally stepped over a significant line.
This past August, Roe was caught on a recorded jail line with a convicted fraudster, workshopping how to get a fake story in front of a federal judge.
Roe has not yet been charged with anything. Neither has anyone else in this story except Jawahar. But what he has done could very well be over the line into Federal felony territory for conspiring to produce fake news.
Step one: launder a knowingly false tale through a newspaper
On August 28, four days after the Axiom contract, the Jefferson City News Tribune, the daily newspaper of Missouri’s capital city, published a profile headlined “Beyond the Concrete Walls: Sid Jawahar Redemption and the Radical Work of Rebuilding Lives From the Inside Out.” It described a philanthropist and jailhouse educator who had built “a comprehensive, peer-to-peer academic and vocational academy” inside the Ste. Genevieve County Detention Center, whose “heart, mind and perseverance” had transformed the lives of his fellow detainees. This glowing little portrait of a model inmate was defective in two regards. First, it did not mention the $35 million Ponzi scheme nor the attempt to rip off one of Missouri’s favorite athletes. Second, it was complete horseshit.
The Ste. Genevieve County Detention Center, asked about the academy, told KMOV: “We have never had an incarcerated individual, including this particular detainee, start any programs within our facility.” Not only did Jawahar not do that thing, nobody has ever done it. This is a somewhat glaring problem in terms of journalistic tradecraft.
The byline belonged to Jake Kroesen, who was not a News Tribune reporter. He was the editor of The Missouri Times, a Capitol press-release-and-opinion shop owned by Scott Faughn, who bought the News Tribune from WEHCO Media in December 2025. Faughn was mayor of Poplar Bluff at 22, was convicted of three felony forgery counts in 2007, and in 2018 testified to a Missouri House committee that he had personally delivered $120,000 in cash, in installments, to the lawyer for the ex-husband of the woman at the center of the Eric Greitens scandal, money he said was for recordings for a book that never appeared. The Capitol press corps expelled his outlet over it. Then he bought the capital’s newspaper.
So the profile was written by the editor of one Faughn property and published in another Faughn property, about a client of Jeff Roe, four days after Roe’s firm was paid to produce sentencing advocacy. Neither Kroesen nor Faughn answered questions about how the story originated. After the Missouri Independent started asking, the News Tribune quietly gutted the piece and appended a publisher’s note saying references to work Jawahar “may have done while in jail” had been removed.
In other words, it was horseshit, everybody knew it was horseshit, and it was horseshit manufactured for cash.
Step two: get a Congressman to amplify it
On September 3, one week after the profile ran, U.S. Representative Sam Graves, the retiring chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, wrote to Judge Zachary Bluestone on congressional letterhead, urging a 48-month sentence for a man who had stolen $35 million. Why? Because he’s such a great guy, according to the complete horseshit manufactured for cash by Jeff Roe and Scott Faughn.
Graves said he wrote “in his personal capacity.” Of course, he still used his Congressional letterhead. He assured the judge that a light sentence would let Jawahar “re-enter society as a productive economic agent capable of continuing that restitution,” which is a remarkable sentence to write about a man the court record says has been in the country unlawfully since 2005, whom the government intends to deport the day his sentence ends, and who has continued no restitution because he has begun none.
Graves and Roe have worked together since 1994. Roe ran his state Senate race, served as his congressional chief of staff, and made him one of Axiom’s first clients when the firm launched in 2005. Federal Election Commission records show the Graves campaign has paid Axiom $1.77 million since 2006. On a recorded call on August 31, Jawahar asked Roe whether the promised letter would come from a “state senator.” Roe’s reply: “it’s gonna be someone good.”
The horseshit claims from the jailhouse profile reappeared in the congressman’s letter. That is what step one was for. A newspaper story is not evidence. A newspaper story cited by a member of Congress on official letterhead, sitting in a judge’s sentencing file, is something a judge has to read and take seriously, and the whole design was that he would never learn where it came from.
Step three: use advanced cyber operations to target the judge specifically
This is the part that ought to keep every judge in America up at night. On the same recorded call, according to prosecutors, Roe told Jawahar what he planned to do with the article: “I’m gonna take that and I’ll put a little money around it and geofence his house and so he’ll see it.” And then: “I know he’ll see it.”
A geofence is a digital advertising perimeter. You draw a polygon on a map, in this case around a federal judge’s home, and every phone that enters it gets served your content. It is how a furniture store reaches people at the mall across the street. Roe proposed to use it so that a specific Article III judge, scrolling on his couch, would happen upon a heartwarming story about the defendant he was about to sentence, and would not know it was an ad. Jawahar, in the filing, described the article’s purpose to Roe plainly: “to influence the judge.” When Roe observed the whole thing seemed “overly calculated,” Jawahar answered, “which of course it is.”
Judge Bluestone, from the bench, called the notion that any of this would move him a “ludicrous idea,” and said simply: “The plot was unsuccessful.” Then he gave Jawahar eleven years, which is not 48 months.
Step four: the victims pay for all of it
Here is the accounting. Jawahar’s victims are owed $31.35 million. He has paid zero. In another recorded call, he told his fiancée that restitution “never gets paid” and that he expects it to eventually “get commuted.” He did, however, find $10,000 for Jeff Roe. Which means the last discretionary dollars of a Ponzi schemer went not toward the people he robbed but toward manufacturing a newspaper story designed to reduce the penalty for robbing them. The victims financed the campaign against their own restitution. It’s Ponzi all the way down.
The societal cost of fake news
Jeff Roe and Scott Faughn manufactured, and Sam Graves amplified, the worst sort of fake news. It’s not fake because it’s flattering or unflattering or on-message or off-message. It’s fake news because it’s completely, knowingly false. And it was produced to reduce the prison time for a foreign criminal here in our country illegally who did nothing but hurt Americans. These U.S. citizens used their position in our society to help a foreigner get away with harming us.
This is journalistic failure in its most weaponized form. It’s why I refer to it as horseshit and not journalism. Nobody called the jail. Nobody mentioned the guilty plea. The story was not written to inform anyone; it was written to be cited, by a congressman, and delivered, by an ad network, to an audience of one. The readers of the News Tribune were not the audience. They were the cover to reach a Federal judge, with the ultimate goal of lowering the price paid by foreigners who want to come to America illegally and attack our citizens.
Jeff Roe is in legal jeopardy by Federal prosecutors if they choose to bring charges under 18 USC § 1001, § 1503 or § 1512. He has no immunity the way the party or his counsel does in attempting to deceive a Federal District Judge for the purpose of corruptly affecting an American tribunal. Depending on the evidence available to the FBI, Faughn or Graves could be similarly liable, but the jailhouse phone is most incriminating to Roe.
This case is the most legible example of how corrupt media harms the United States. Hopefully, the U.S. Department of Justice takes steps to protect our Republic.
Keep thinking.
First published on Game Theory Today (Substack), September 22, 2026.
