Part 9: Who TF Am I Working For?? | The Leaked Marco Rubio Emails

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Part 9: Who TF Am I Working For?? | The Leaked Marco Rubio Emails

Oct 07, 2025

I want to start by saying something that might sound strange: I’m genuinely grateful to whoever leaked these emails.

Not because I think leaking is inherently good. Not because I don’t understand the ethical complexities. But because these particular emails (sitting in someone’s archive for a decade, apparently forgotten) suddenly make sense of a pattern I’ve been documenting for nine months.

The emails are from 2015. Between Larry Ellison and Ron Prosor, who was then Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations. (Today he’s their ambassador to Germany.) And they document, in real time, Larry Ellison vetting a presidential candidate on behalf of Israeli interests.

That candidate was Marco Rubio. Who is now Secretary of State. Who is now personally signing visa revocations that have devastated universities nationwide.

Except for one.

The same university where Ellison’s phantom wife allegedly studied. The same university that just lost its president to run Ellison’s Oxford operation. The same university whose international student numbers somehow increased while every comparable institution hemorrhaged enrollment.

The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

The Setup: Spring 2015

It’s April 2015. Marco Rubio has just launched his presidential campaign with a speech attacking the Obama administration’s “hostility toward Israel.” He’s a rising star in the GOP: young, charismatic, fluent in both English and Spanish, with a compelling personal story. The betting markets have him as a serious contender.

Larry Ellison and Ron Prosor are already close. Close enough that Prosor emails Ellison asking for a copy of Rubio’s campaign speech. Close enough that they’re having dinner together in late April.

Here’s what the emails show:

There it is, folks.

Everybody laughed last year when I said Larry Ellison was running this country. But look at the language here: “Did he pass your scrutiny?” Not “what did you think of him.” Not “did you enjoy meeting him.” Did he pass your scrutiny.

The language of vetting. Of evaluation. Of… quality control.

Ellison is being asked to assess whether a presidential candidate will adequately serve Israeli interests. And he delivers: sets Rubio up with Tony Blair, confirms Rubio “will be a great friend for Israel.” And if Tony Blair sounds familiar to you, it’s because he’s the one that Trump just announced as being on the head of the board of the peace unity thing between Gaza and Israel. He’s administering the reconstruction of Gaza. And many of you may recall that a few days ago, I wrote in Part 7 about all the plans for the tech utopia city stuff they’re going to put into fallen Gaza.

TL;DR- They’re going to turn it into a blockchain city.

The Investment

Larry Ellison donated $5 million to Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign. That single donation represented one-fifth of all the money Rubio’s super PAC raised during the entire primary.

Let that sink in. Rubio was a serious candidate with national name recognition, and Larry Ellison personally funded 20% of his operation. Rubio didn’t win; but that was never the point.

The point was building a relationship. Creating an obligation. Positioning someone who would eventually hold real power and remember who helped them get there.

Ten years later, Marco Rubio is Secretary of State—arguably the most powerful foreign policy position in the U.S. government after the presidency itself. And he’s implementing policies that just happen to serve interests that were documented in emails a decade ago.

This is how power actually works. Patient. Transactional. Built through relationships that compound over time.

The Crisis: 2023-2025

Fast forward to 2023. Five Chinese students from the University of Michigan’s joint program with Shanghai Jiao Tong University are arrested for photographing military installations. Espionage charges. Major headlines.

The Trump administration, with Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, uses this as justification for a massive crackdown on student visas. They specifically target Chinese nationals in what Rubio calls “critical fields”: artificial intelligence, nuclear science, engineering.

Rubio doesn’t just implement policy. He gets personal. He’s signing deportation orders directly. Students whose social media posts don’t “fall in line” with administration messaging find their visas revoked without appeal. Universities are told to expect losses of 30-40% of their international student populations.

This isn’t subtle. This is a sledgehammer.

And the impact is immediate. NYU, Boston University, USC, Cornell (schools with significant international programs) see applications crater. We’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars in lost tuition revenue. Some programs face existential threats.

Then, in June 2025, Michigan has what I’m calling “a very convenient crisis.”

The Michigan Crisis: June 2025

June 4, 2025: The Department of Justice announces the arrest of two Chinese nationals connected to the University of Michigan. They were caught with a fungus the DOJ describes as a “potential agroterrorism weapon.”

June 8: Another arrest. A PhD student from Wuhan (yes, that Wuhan) caught smuggling biological materials.

June 10: A third arrest.

Three arrests in one week. All Chinese nationals. All connected to Michigan. All described as biological weapons threats. The headlines write themselves: “University of Michigan: The New Espionage Pipeline?” “Chinese Bio-Weapon Smugglers Infiltrate Top University.” Cable news runs with it. Senators demand investigations.

It’s terrifying. It’s exactly the kind of story that justifies even harsher crackdowns on international students. So I did what I always do when a narrative feels too perfect.

I looked at the details.

The Timing Problem

Here’s what most people missed: The first arrest announced in June 2025 didn’t actually happen in June 2025. That individual was arrested in July 2024: eleven months earlier, during the Biden administration.

They sat on it for almost a year, then announced it alongside two more recent arrests to create the appearance of an ongoing, escalating crisis. Why announce a year-old arrest now? Why present it as breaking news when it’s actually old news being recycled? And when you actually read the full articles (not just the scary headlines) you find something interesting buried at the bottom. Plant pathology experts went on record saying this fungus was “on the lower end of the spectrum of risk.” One expert compared it to the same family as yeast used to brew beer or bake bread. “Normal agricultural science material.”

Maybe that’s why the Biden administration didn’t announce it when they made the arrest. They investigated, determined it wasn’t actually a terrorism threat, arrested the person out of precaution, and moved on. Standard protocol. But the Trump administration saw something else: an opportunity. Dust off an old arrest. Reframe it as urgent and current. Bundle it with two new arrests to create a pattern. Use the manufactured crisis to justify policies that were already planned.

This is crisis management in reverse. You’re not managing a crisis; you’re manufacturing it to manage public opinion.

The Exception

Given that Michigan was being portrayed as ground zero for Chinese espionage (five students arrested in 2023, three more “arrests” announced in June 2025) I wanted to see how badly the visa crackdown had hurt their enrollment. Universities across the country were hemorrhaging international students. Surely Michigan’s numbers would reflect catastrophic decline, right?

So, I pulled the data. And here is what I found:

While universities nationwide watched their international student applications collapse, the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor’s international student applications increased. Not held steady. Not declined slightly.

Increased.

I thought I was reading it wrong. So I checked Michigan’s other campuses:

University of Michigan-Flint: decreased
University of Michigan-Dearborn: decreased
Michigan State University: decreased

Every Michigan institution saw declining international enrollment. Every campus in the state system. Except one.

The flagship. Ann Arbor. The campus at the supposed center of a national security scandal. The one that should have been hit hardest was the only one that wasn’t hit at all. The same campus where Jolin/Keren Zhu allegedly studied from 2010-2012, though no one remembers meeting her. The same campus where Ang Zhu (her only alleged human connection) got his nuclear engineering PhD. The same campus whose president, Santa Ono, just left to run Larry Ellison’s Ellison Institute of Technology at Oxford. The same campus that receives significant Oracle infrastructure support and partnerships.

That campus got a pass.

The Architecture

So now we’ve got this clear line of interests serving interests.

You’ve got Ellison vetting Rubio for Israel interests. He connects him with Tony Blair, who Ellison has funded to the tune of $350 million at this point. And it was strategic, because even though Rubio didn’t end up winning, he was still put in a very important position as Secretary of State.

And now, ten years later, he’s the one implementing visa policies that devastate universities nationwide; hundreds of millions in lost revenue, 30-40% drops in international enrollment… but somehow Michigan-Ann Arbor is untouched. Not just surviving. Thriving.

The crackdown creates a crisis. The crisis creates leverage. The leverage creates exceptions. And the exceptions reveal who really holds power.

What This Actually Means

I want to be really clear about something: I don’t think Marco Rubio wakes up every morning thinking “how can I help Larry Ellison today?” That’s not how this works.

Rubio probably believes he’s implementing good national security policy. The decisions are likely justified through normal bureaucratic processes. There are probably reasonable-sounding explanations for everything.

But that’s exactly the point. When infrastructure is positioned correctly, when relationships are built early enough, when dependencies are embedded deep enough, explicit deals become unnecessary. The system produces the desired outcomes naturally because the architecture itself is aligned.

You don’t need a smoking gun when the entire building is designed to emit smoke.

What Comes Next

I know I promised Part IX would be all about Ang Zhu; The roommate, the nuclear engineering connection. How it all ties together with the Ellison Institute and the nuclear reactors.

And we’re getting there. I promise.

But I found these leaked emails yesterday. They were breaking news. And they reveal the decade-long architecture behind the pattern I’ve been documenting. I had to tell you about them immediately.

Part 10 will pull in Ang Zhu and the nuclear engineering angle. The full timeline of how Michigan’s international student programs connect to Oracle’s infrastructure. How Santa Ono going from Michigan’s president to running Ellison’s Oxford operation fits into all of this.

But now you see the mechanism. You see how a dinner in 2015 becomes an exception in 2025. You see how $5 million buys you influence that compounds over a decade.

You see how power actually works when it’s built into infrastructure nobody’s supposed to notice.