# Evidence Package — "The FRAM Financial Kingpins"

National Ledger Report · Published 2026-07-11

This is the full research record behind our video on the First Brands
Group fraud collapse (United States v. James, 26 Cr. 29). We're
publishing it so you can check our work directly, not just take our
word for it.

## What's in here

- **CASE_FILE.md** — our complete research file: every claim in the
  video, where it came from, and an explicit honesty check on what's
  attributed reporting vs. primary documents we hold ourselves.
- **SOURCES.md** — every outlet cited, by name, with links.
- **DOCUMENT_CHECKLIST.html** — a working log of every court document we
  looked for, what we found, what we couldn't get and why (open it in
  any browser).
- **court_documents/** — real, downloaded federal court filings tied to
  this case (Peter Brumbergs' charging document, notice, and waiver of
  indictment), pulled from the public CourtListener/RECAP archive.
- **verified_images/** — the one photo of Patrick James we could verify
  and felt comfortable using (`AI_Yearbook_Patrick.png`, AI-upscaled from
  a 1983 high school yearbook photo), paired with a screenshot of the
  source article itself (`TheEdgeMalaysia_ArticleScreenshot.png`) so you
  can see the original caption and outlet directly. Full identification
  trail documented in CASE_FILE.md — three other candidate photos were
  checked and rejected as either misidentified or rights-restricted
  before this one held up.
- **research_notes/** — our own research-assistant queries and their
  findings, kept as-is, including the parts that turned out to need
  correction. We'd rather show the messy process than a cleaned-up
  version that hides how we actually got here.

## Our standard

We follow the money, not the politics. If we got something wrong, tell
us — this package exists so you can find out if we did.
