Hoisted by his own petard.
(an op-ed piece with links to reporting of actual news items)
Blurb:
COMMERCE SECRETARY FORBES MAGAZINE DAN ALEXANDER FORBES DAN ALEXANDER FORBES 400
Wilbur Ross Giving Young Whippersnappers Masterclass In Being A Robber
Five Dollar Feminist August 08, 2018 09:25 AM
upload.wikimedia.org
Word to the wise, kids: DO NOT FUCK WITH FORBES! Just ask Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who convinced a Forbes magazine reporter that he was a real life billionaire 15 years ago so they'd let him on the Forbes 400 list. Ross leveraged the notoriety that came with inclusion on the prestigious Vulture Capitalists Roundup to get gullible rich people to hand him even more money, until pretty soon he really was a billionaire. Of course by then he'd convinced Forbes (which should have known better!) that he was a multi-billionaire. But the charade continued for another decade until Trump tapped Ross to be Commerce Secretary, forcing him to fill out a public financial disclosure.
After some initial fuckery where Ross claimed to have magically given $2 billion to his kids without leaving a paper trail, Ross was forced to admit -- sort of -- that the $2 billion never existed, and he'd been inflating his income for 15 years. Ooopsie!
Forbes was righteously pissed, and since then reporter Dan Alexander has been so far up Ross's ass he can see the Secretary's dentures. When Ross told "fibs" on his financial disclosure claiming he'd sold all his stocks before taking office, Alexander was there with his calculator to tally the $1.2 million dollars Ross netted by delaying the sale. When Ross held on to stocks "in companies co-owned by the Chinese government, a shipping firm tied to Vladimir Putin's inner circle, [and] a Cypriot bank reportedly caught up in the Robert Mueller investigation," Alexander was there to spread the word. When Ross shorted stock in that Kremlin-linked company days before the Forbes story went public, well, you know.