BOMBSHELL: Collaboration between Trump & FBI over Epstein files revealed Brian Tyler Cohen Jul 18, 2025 Brian Tyler Cohen BOMBSHELL #news - Collaboration between Trump & FBI over Epstein files revealed
Transcript
In a major revelation, Democratic Senator Dick Durban has sent a letter to the FBI revealing that FBI agents were told to flag mentions of Donald Trump in the Epstein records that they were collecting. The letter says, quote, "According to information my office received, you then pressured the FBI to put approximately a thousand personnel in its information management division, including the record information dissemination section, which handles all requests submitted by the public under the Freedom of Information Act and Privacy Act, on 24-hour shifts to review approximately 100,000 Epstein related records in order to produce more documents than could be released on an arbitrarily short deadline. This effort, which reportedly took place from March 14th through the end of March, was haphazardly supplemented by hundreds of FBI New York field office personnel, many of whom lack the expertise to identify statutorily protected information regarding child victims and child witnesses or properly handle foyer requests. My office was told these personnel were instructed to flag any records in which President Trump was mentioned. Notably, in 2002, Mr. Trump said of Mr. Epstein, "I've known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side."
Just yesterday, it was reported that the department previously reviewed a leatherbound album comprised of dozens of letters from Mr. Epstein's friends in celebration of his 50th birthday in 2003. The letters were collected by Mr. Epstein's partner, Ghislain Maxwell, and included one from President Trump that allegedly contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be handdrawn with heavy marker. And the future president's signature is a squiggly Donald below her waist.
Hey, can anybody watching right now let me know what you think it means when you task a thousand people with looking out for just one guy's name in a file that concerns the activities of a known pedophile? Does that strike you as something that a person who is completely and totally innocent might do? Take all the time you need with that one.
What's especially ironic here is that Trump has spent the last few days claiming that the files are the result of Democratic interference.
[Reporter] Mr. President, Mr. President, I know you want to move past all this intrigue over the Epstein files, but I do want to ask you to clarify something you said this morning. You said this was all a hoax. Has your attorney general told you this was a hoax? What evidence have you seen?
[Donald Trump] It's not the attorney general. No, I know it's a hoax. It's started by Democrats. It's been run by the Democrats for four years. You had Christopher Wray and these characters, and Comey before him. It's a bad group. It's all been a big hoax. It's perpetrated by the Democrats.
[Reporter] You lost a lot of faith in certain people.
[Donald Trump] Yeah, I lost because they got duped by the Democrats. The Democrats are good for nothing. Instead, they want to talk about the Epstein hoax. And the sad part is it's people that are really doing the Democrats work. They're stupid people. All my supporters want to talk about is the Jeffrey Epstein hoax. It's unbelievable. It's a disgrace. And I'm going to remember every one of these guys. They're my supporters, and they just love it. They love it. And it's all induced by the Democrats. The Democrats are the ones that are getting them to say this stuff. It's all the same scam. They could look at this Jeffrey Epstein hoax also because that's the same stuff that's all put out by Democrats.
[Reporter] Sir, what [inaudible] investigation?
[Donald Trump] I have nothing to do with it.
[Brian Tyler Cohen] And yet now we find out that in fact there was only one person who was interfering here, and it wasn't the Democrats. If what Dick Durban says is true, and Dick Durban isn't exactly Marjorie Taylor Green when it comes to seeking attention or throwing out unsubstantiated or outlandish claims, then it means that in fact we've got proof that Trump meddled in the investigation to protect himself or any damaging information about himself from getting released. When we say that every accusation is a confession, this is what we mean. Which should perhaps give you all reason to doubt whatever it is Trump and Bondi offer you up next since it's already clear that they are operating to protect not the victims, but rather a potential participant in the crimes that Epstein committed. So when Trump comes out and says:
[Donald Trump, Truth Social] Based on the ridiculous amount of publicity given to Jeffrey Epstein, I have asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to produce any and all pertinent grand jury testimony subject to court approval. This scam perpetuated by the Democrats should end right now!
[Brian Tyler Cohen] And Pam Bondi chimes in and replies,
[Pam Bondi] President Trump, we are ready to move to court tomorrow to unseal the grand jury transcripts.
[Brian Tyler Cohen] Perhaps we should offer a little bit of skepticism, because they are going to do things, like this, to intentionally confuse people and send them in the wrong direction. A point that Glenn Kirschner brought up here.
[Glenn Kirschner] You know, we may be getting exactly zero information, because the court would have to order the release of grand jury transcripts. This feels more like a Hollywood production, maybe another episode of The Apprentice, right? This is a reality show. It's not in fact reality. And here's why, Brian.
First of all, we have to start with the rules that govern grand jury transcripts, and all grand jury materials. It's federal rule of criminal procedure 6E. Here's what it stands for: Grand jury information. That means witness testimony, records that are produced pursuant to grand jury subpoenas, telephone records, photographs, videotapes, you name it. It is all protected by grand jury secrecy. And here's what everybody needs to know. The rules only provide that a court, a judge, may order the release of grand jury materials for only very specific and limited reasons.
[Brian Tyler Cohen] And of course, Trump and Bondi know that, but that's the point. They need to manipulate the base into thinking that they're getting transparency, when in fact they are getting obfuscation. It has become increasingly clear that the only goal of this administration is to prevent the release of these files. Which is why Donald Trump has leaned on Republicans in Congress and the Senate to block the release of the files. Not once, not twice, not three or four, but five separate times in just the last week. Twice in the rules committee, twice on the House floor, and once on the Senate floor. If Trump truly wanted transparency, he would release the files, just like he promised. But he doesn't. And so instead, his minions block the release of the files, and instead they offer up a different concession that isn't even a concession at all, but rather just a slight of hand. It is bad faith from beginning to end.
So look, my question for Trump supporters is this, and I ask this in 100% good faith. What's your goal here? Is it tribalism and protecting the leader of the Republican party at all costs? Or is it full transparency about what happened with Epstein, and accountability for everybody involved? Because you can want one or the other, but apparently not both. Because if that was a possibility, Trump would have already released the files. The fact that he won't, really does tell you everything you need to know.
Trump came into office with a mandate to expose the people who commit crimes with impunity. Not only is he failing to do that, he is entrenching the very system he vowed to dismantle. The president sold his supporters a bill of goods, and he's trying to convince you not to believe your lying eyes. And unless we all speak out, nothing is going to change.
Tucker's Epstein comments trigger official Israeli backlash by Max Blumenthal The Grayzone Jul 18, 2025 #TheGrayzone
Barak, Ehud Chairman Barak & Associates, L.L.C. 917 [DELETE] 212 [DELETE] Email: [DELETE]@barak-associates.com [DELETE] office in Israel 484 [DELETE] Barak's personal cell in US 011 [DELETE] Barak's cell 011 [DELETE]Shimnit (assistants call) 011 [DELETE] Fax number in Israel
The Grayzone's Anya Parampil and Max Blumenthal cover veiled threats by a former Israeli prime minister and a particularly insidious Israeli official against Tucker Carlson for his comments alleging that Jeffrey Epstein worked for the Mossad.
As a former Israeli Prime Minister, with the Mossad having reported directly to me, I say to you with 100% certainty: The accusation that Jeffrey Epstein somehow worked for Israel or the Mossad running a blackmail ring is categorically and totally false.
Epstein’s conduct, both the criminal and the merely despicable, had nothing whatsoever to do with the Mossad or the State of Israel.
Epstein never worked for the Mossad.
This accusation is a lie being peddled by prominent online personalities such as Tucker Carlson pretending they know things they don’t.
They just make things up, say it with confidence and these lies stick, because it’s Israel.
There’s a vicious wave of slander and lies against my country and my people, and we just won’t take it anymore.
5:32 AM · Jul 14, 2025
This is the former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett denouncing Tucker Carlson as a former Israeli prime minister with the Mossad having reported directly to me. I can say to you and with 100% certainty the accusation that Jeffrey Epstein somehow worked for Israel or the Mossad running a blackmail ring is categorically and totally false. So he he he uses very precise language which means that if Jeffrey Epstein had very close contacts with the Israeli government or was a Israeli government cut out moving money uh and didn't run a blackmail ring on their behalf but performed other services. Well that could be true but this is false. And then he but but the most interesting part is the last two lines. Napali Bennett says, "They just make things up, say it with confidence, and these lies stick because it's Israel." Sounds like uh something Israel does like every five minutes. There's a vicious wave of slander and lies against my country and my people, and we just won't take it anymore. So, that's to me an implicit threat against Tucker Carlson. And this was not the only uh threatening post directed at Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk who I mean they Tucker seems like kind of like a free man like he's just willing to say whatever right now. Uh he's just like at a stage in his life where he just doesn't care anymore. But Charlie Kirk has a lot more to lose. And as as I explained before and Ana explained, they kind of created him as a youth uh gra astroturf activist.
Amichai Chikli @AmichaiChikli An Open Letter to @charliekirk11
Dear Charlie,
Like many others, I’ve been following your remarkable journey from afar - your pursuit of truth, integrity, and love for your country.
Very few young people are as gifted as you, and even fewer possess such a strong moral compass.
I watched Tucker Carlson’s speech at your conference and your debate with Megyn Kelly, and I must admit I was filled with sorrow.
I don’t know whether Jeffrey Epstein was an intelligence asset for any agency. I would certainly like to know. In particular, I would like to understand his connection to the kind of people who sought to sell out the Land of Israel to the Palestinians, people like the former Israeli prime ministers Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert, who both appear in previously published Epstein-related documents.
Still, as you have noted, there is no evidence - none- that Epstein was acting on behalf of the State of Israel. Yet the message conveyed at your conference, with Tucker Carlson as keynote speaker just days after his sycophantic interview with the Iranian terror regime, was unmistakable: Israel was behind Epstein.
The audience applauded. Everyone seemed pleased, especially the Qataris and their jihadist terror channel, Al Jazeera. (By the way, it would be fascinating to uncover the depth and nature of their connection to influencers such as Tucker Carlson and others.)
We see Candace Owens publicly claim that “the Israelis knew in advance about 9/11 and didn’t warn the U.S.”; that “Israelis killed JFK”; that “Jews committed a Holocaust against Christians even worse than Hitler’s”; and that “Mengele never performed horrific experiments in Auschwitz.”
We see Daryl Cooper, Carlson's best friend, appear in friendly interviews with Carlson, insisting that the Holocaust was a form of “mercy killing” for political prisoners who would have otherwise starved to death - and suggesting that perhaps Hitler “wasn’t such a bad guy.”
We have a serious problem.
A wave of antisemitism - the likes of which America hasn’t seen since the 1930s- is gathering momentum.
And so I’m asking you: please stay true to your strong moral compass and speak out against antisemitism, whether it comes from the woke left or the woke right.
The conservative movement is a global movement. Its compass is the pursuit of objective truth and a deep respect for family, community, and faith.
There is nothing wrong with demanding complete transparency about Jeffrey Epstein. But there is something profoundly wrong with elevating Holocaust deniers and neo-Nazis like Daryl Cooper, and conspiracy theorists like Candace Owens. Owens, Cooper, and Carlson are not conservatives; they are full-blown wokists just wearing different costumes.
With respect, Amichai Chikli Minister of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism State of Israel
1:35 PM · Jul 13, 2025
Amichai Chikli, less well-known, deeply devious, insidious figure operating in the United States as the minister of diaspora affairs for Israel, sends an open letter to Charlie Kirk. Blah blah blah. you're so gifted and you're, you know, I've been following you and Tucker Carlson's speech and and your debate with Megan Kelly filled me with sorrow. And then he says, I don't know whether Jeffrey Epstein was an intelligence asset for any agency. I would like to know. And then he attacks Epstein for being friends with prime ministers who were on the so-called left in Israel, the genocidal left like Barack and Mr. [inaudible]
It goes on and on until he says to Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, and all these figures, Daryl Cooper are Nazis, who love Hitler and you just can't be platforming these people anymore.
So, they're basically telling Charlie Kirk, if you platform Tucker Carlson again, it ends with a photo of Tucker, we are going to take action.
And who is Amichai Chikli? I mentioned he's a minister. He's basically like an Israeli spy in the United State, or an intelligence asset. I'm not going to go so far down the rabbit hole, but in the Guardian, Jack Poulson and Lee Fang did a series of articles about how Guardian, Jack Pollson and Lee Fong did a series of articles about how Chickli is moving Israeli government money through NOS's set up in the US to skirt the Foreign Agents Registration Act, is moving Israeli government money through NOS's set up in the US to skirt the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which is what the forerunner to APAIC did under Isaiah Kennan in the early 60s, which got them under investigation by Senator Fulbright, an investigation that was eventually squashed. So, this is a guy who's basically running Israeli ops in the US.
Leaked Israeli Docs Reveal Effort to Evade Foreign Agent Lobbying Law. Former general counsel of Democratic National Committee secretly advised the Israeli government on how to avoid FARA registration of its U.S. propaganda program. by Lee Fang and Jack Poulson leefang.com Aug 17, 2024 https://www.leefang.com/p/leaked-israel ... eal-effort
This investigation was reported in collaboration with The Guardian. This reporting builds on our June 24th and July 11th investigations on covert Israeli government influence.
The Israeli government sought legal advice on a US federal law requiring the disclosure of foreign-backed lobbying campaigns, out of concerns that mounting enforcement of the law could ensnare American groups working in coordination with the Israeli government, leaked documents reviewed by the Guardian suggest.
Emails and legal memos originating from a hack of the Israeli justice ministry show that officials feared Israeli advocacy efforts in the US could trigger the US law governing foreign agents. The documents show that officials proposed creating a new American nonprofit in order to continue Israel’s activities in the US while avoiding scrutiny under the law.
A legal strategy memo dated July 2018 noted that compliance with the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) would damage the reputation of several American groups that receive funding and direction from Israel, and force them to meet onerous transparency requirements. A separate memo noted that donors would not want to fund groups registered under FARA.
FARA requires people working on behalf of a foreign government to register as foreign agents with the US Justice Department.
In listing reasons for avoiding FARA, the memo says that the law compels registrants to “flag any piece of ‘propaganda’ that is distributed to two or more parties in the US, with a disclaimer stating that it was delivered by a foreign agent and then submit a copy of the ‘propaganda’ to the US Department of Justice within 48 hours.”
To prevent FARA registration, and the stigma and scrutiny associated with it, the legal advisors suggested channeling funds through a third-party American nonprofit.
Liat Glazer, then a legal advisor to Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, writes that even though the nonprofit would not be formally managed from Israel, “we will have means of supervision and management” – for example, through grant-making and “informal coordination mechanisms” including “oral meetings and updates.”
The discussions around circumnavigating FARA focused on a “PR commando unit” formed by Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs in 2017 to improve Israel’s image abroad. The group, a private-public partnership, was originally known as “Kela Shlomo” (which translates to “Solomon’s Sling”) before being rebranded as “Concert” in 2018 and “Voices of Israel” in 2022. Its initial mission was to undermine the BDS movement targeting Israel with boycott, divestment and sanctions campaigns in protest of its policies towards Palestinians.
Over the course of its history, the group has supported American nonprofits advocating for anti-BDS laws and coordinated campaigns to push back against pro-Palestinian activities on US campuses.
The emails and documents were released by Distributed Denial of Secrets, or DDoSecrets, a US-based nonprofit responsible for disseminating a number of high-profile hacks in recent years. The original source for the documents was a group calling itself “Anonymous for Justice,” a self-described “hacktivist collective” which announced in April that it had infiltrated Israel’s Ministry of Justice and retrieved hundreds of gigabytes of data.
Amnesty International’s security lab analyzed the data set and "determined the files are consistent with a hack-and-leak attack targeting a series of email accounts." The group said "it was not possible to cryptographically verify the authenticity of the emails, as critical email metadata was removed by the hackers during a pre-processing step before release."
They added: "technical indicators in other files from the leak, including a sampling of PDFs and Microsoft Word documents reviewed by Amnesty International did not show obvious signs of having been tampered with."
Previous reporting in the Guardian on the hacked archive revealed Israeli government attempts to thwart discovery in a lawsuit brought by WhatsApp against the infamous spyware company NSO Group. Following the leak, Israel imposed a gag order to prevent the documents from being publicized.
Earlier this year, the Guardian exclusively reported that Voices of Israel was rebooted shortly after the outbreak of the Gaza war following the 7 October 2023 terror attacks by Hamas. Amichai Chikli, the Likud minister of diaspora affairs who oversees the latest iteration of the project, informed the Knesset that the group was set to go “on the offensive” against American students protesting the Gaza war.
The heightened concern over FARA around 2018 was sparked in part by a series of enforcement actions against Trump administration officials for unregistered lobbying for foreign interests.
The July 2018 Israeli legal memo noted that “in the past, FARA was applied to countries hostile to the US,” such as Russia and Pakistan. Glazer warned that the new atmosphere of enforcement, given the ties between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Trump, could lead to a formal investigation by the US Department of Justice.
In response, the documents show, the Israeli government retained Sandler Reiff, a prominent election and campaign law firm in Washington, DC, to analyze the FARA risks posed by Concert and other Israeli advocacy efforts to shape American policy and opinion. The two primary contacts for the engagement were Joseph E. Sandler, the former in-house general counsel to the Democratic National Committee, and Joshua I. Rosenstein, a widely-cited expert on FARA.
Another memo from 2018, which summarized a discussion led by then-deputy attorney general Dina Zilber, noted increased public attention to FARA due to “the investigation into Donald Trump and officials in his government suspected of operating as ‘foreign agents’ for the Russian government.”
The document notes advice from senior Israeli advisors who assert that “donors are not interested in donating to groups registered under FARA.” The memo recommended creating a new American nonprofit which Kela Shlomo / Concert could funnel money through, thereby providing distance between US nonprofits and the Israeli government – though the head of the nonprofit would also serve in Kela Shlomo’s leadership.
It also notes potential downsides of creating such an American intermediary: both weaker Israeli government control over any such group, and a mechanism that could be interpreted for what it was: an attempt to sidestep FARA.
The documents reference concerns on the part of US groups over triggering FARA enforcement, concerns that officials say hindered their ability to conduct advocacy in the US.
In 2018, the news outlet The Forward reported that several Jewish American organizations had rejected funding from Concert due to concerns over FARA risk.
In Glazer’s December 2019 email, she noted that if it became public that Israel sought legal advice on FARA, this could “raise claims that the state of Israel wants to unacceptably interfere in US matters and spark a public debate on a sensitive issue in Israel-US relations.”
To avoid the potential public relations fallout, Glazer urged secrecy surrounding the Israeli government’s hiring of Sandler Reiff, the American law firm engaged to study the issue. “Exposing the name of the law firm could thwart the entire relationship,” she cautioned, “as I understand it was agreed with them that the engagement with [Israel] would not be revealed.”
Multiple memos and emails show that Sandler Reiff analyzed FARA-related questions from 2018 through at least 2022. Mr. Sandler and Mr. Rosenstein did not respond to requests for comment.
Brig. Gen. Sima Vaknin-Gill, a former intelligence officer and former chief military censor for the Israel Defense Forces who was intimately involved in the creation of Kela Shlomo, was copied on many of the emails and named in key documents concerning how to avoid FARA.
Vaknin-Gill is now a board member of the Kansas-based nonprofit Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM). CAM was set up one year after the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, where Vaknin-Gill was director-general, proposed its strategy to mitigate FARA risk by setting up an American nonprofit funded by Concert.
CAM has publicly disclosed that it is a partner of both Concert and Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, but the organization has refused requests from journalists to disclose its funders. When reached for comment, CAM stated that it “was not established by, nor is it influenced by, the Israeli government” and emphasized that CAM is “a global interfaith coalition that unites over 850 partner organizations.”
"If there is a deliberate effort by Israeli governmental officials to influence American policy and/or public opinion on foreign affairs," noted Craig Holman, a lobbying expert with Public Citizen, "this would constitute a FARA violation not just by the US agents serving the Israeli government, but also by any person or nonprofit organization in the US who is a knowing participant."
Glazer, the author of one of the FARA memos who helped organize several meetings around the issue, left the government in 2021 and joined Google as one of the company’s lobbyists in Israel. Glazer did not respond to a request for comment through Google.
The secrecy surrounding the Ministry of Strategic Affairs’ US-focused advocacy campaigns was challenged through freedom of information requests by Israeli news outlets, particularly the independent media watchdog Seventh Eye. After years of denied requests, the newsrooms eventually prevailed and obtained a series of Concert-related funding documents from the ministry.
The documents showed Kela Shlomo / Concert grants to several American advocacy groups, including Christian Zionist organizations such as Christians United for Israel and the Israel Allies Foundation. The latter was involved in helping to pass anti-BDS state laws penalizing Americans from engaging in certain forms of boycotts targeting the Israeli government.
In 2018, Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs also approved a $445,000 grant to the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), which totaled about 80% of the organization’s reported annual budget. The nonprofit initially disputed the precise amount but conceded Israeli government support when reached by The Forward. FARA includes an exemption for “academic” projects that do not entail political activity.
Last year, Vaknin-Gill, the Israeli intelligence officer involved in the formation of Kela Shlomo / Concert and the discussions about avoiding FARA registration, joined ISGAP as its managing director.
ISGAP has expanded its advocacy role in recent months. The group took credit for influencing the contentious December 2023 congressional hearing with elite college presidents, which preceded Harvard University president Claudine Gay's resignation. In recent months, ISGAP has met with congressional leaders regularly as the group has urged investigations of pro-Palestinian student demonstrators.
In another email about the issue sent in December 2019, Glazer emphasized the need to find a solution that would alleviate FARA-related concerns on the part of American groups.
“There have already been requests by the US Department of Justice made of a number of pro-Israeli entities in the past,” the email says. “The ministry already faces real challenges in operating with groups in the US, and this could hurt the various groups that are willing to work with the ministry or with [Concert] and ultimately harm the office’s activities in dealing with the phenomenon of delegitimization and boycotts.”
Photo: Israel's Minister for Diaspora Affairs, Amichai Chikli, during an interview for Europa Press. (Photo By Carlos Lujan/Europa Press via Getty Images) Article updated on August 18 to reflect that Kela Shlomo was renamed “Voices of Israel” in 2022.
But this is this is also what gets to the c the issue of like did Jeffrey Epstein work for Mossad? Well, did he work for the MSAD or did he maybe just work for pro-Israel Jewish billionaires that were funding him to get him to do this like who were who themselves are Mossad? Exactly. That's the thing is all the way that these money men work is that there a lot of them are fronts. They might not be the MOSSAD. So they might be able to say like Jeffrey Epstein wasn't answering to Mossad, but what was he doing? What were all those cameras for? What was he filming people for? And what was the interest of the we I mean if he wasn't working for MSAD, which is totally possible, we pretty much do know that he was working for pro-Israel billionaires. Yeah. And I think that's the key point. Like even if there is no direct MOSSAD tie, the point is all these slime balls are pro- Israel and they're pretty much MOSSAD fronts. And it speaks to the like the the decay of our elite culture. Like these are funny people who do predatory things who also are all subservient to Israel. And that fact right there even without knowing all the missing details about Epstein is is damning enough because ultimately what they're supporting is one of the worst crimes in human history and one of the worst entities in human history, Israel, which you know we're going to talk later on the show. you know, the the the violence continues to expand. I mean, now attacking Syria, even though they're people that put even though they put the new government in Syria in power, now they're still even attacking them. Yeah. Attacking not just attacking Syria, they've been attacking Syria. Attacking Umayed Square. It's like attacking it's like the World Trade Center or something. It's crazy. Uh I, you know, I went I went to University of Pennsylvania. I think at the time that like Don, was it Ivanka was there or Don Jr. was there. Trump went to Wharton, you know, there like everybody wanted to go into finance from there. So, I I got to know like some of the the future leaders of the dying empire. And I remember the only time I saw a line around the block for a speaker there was when Warren Buffett was speaking on campus. It was like a very spiritually vapid place to be. Um but you know I you know carried on with some of my college friends. Some of them did go into finance and one of them told me that uh this guy he knew in New York who was an Israeli American uh I think not a venture capitalist but uh investment banker major guy I won't name him because I don't want to get sued. uh would brag about how the Mossad would just ask him to deposit tons of money into newly set up shell accounts and promise to pay him back later so they could fund foreign operations, black operations. And as an Israeli patriot, he would do it and then they would always pay him back. Like he could always count on them to pay him back. And this is a guy who's moving in very elite circles, has friends with like famous rappers and celebrities, and that's the way it works. So, it's not like someone is getting some like MOSSAD card and then being told like, you know, you're going on some operation with like uh guns and, you know, a bag of gold. It's much more uh sophisticated than that. And it's usually cutouts. [Music]
Eric Weinstein - My Experience With Jeffrey Epstein Liberty Vault Jul 19, 2025 Members first on July 18, 2025 3 products
I react to Eric Weinstein sharing his experience with Jeffrey Epstein.
Transcript
Um, my sense of it is is that somebody lost control of an agent. He believed his own mythology almost certainly. And you know, my sense of it is that somebody lost control of a monster. Eric Weinstein recently went on Pierce Morgan's show to share his experiences after meeting Jeffrey Epstein. What were some of the most striking parts of his personality and whether he buys the government narrative regarding Epstein and his death and what we can take away from that saga today. So, let's see what he has to say. Please like the video and subscribe to the channel.
I mean, you you met Epstein.
I never met him. I met Ghislaine Maxwell briefly at a book launch once and had no inkling of the stuff that was going on.
But when you met him, was he weird? Was he unusual? Or was he just a good actor?
He was able to come across in a perfectly normal manner. If you've seen any of my interviews, it was one of the most bizarre interactions I've ever had. I will remember it, you know, for the rest of my life, as being terrifying. You didn't sit down with him and think, "Wow, what a great guy." You thought, "Holy cow, this is the weirdest doorway into an alternate reality." And you know, in particular, he was absolutely more interested in my science than he was in anything I was doing with hedge funds and risk management, which is how nominally I came to be in his orbit. He was very connected to a major book agent. He was funding all sorts of scientists. He was obsessed by gravity. He knew things about my work that were essentially known to no one. He was very connected through at least one Harvard mathematician who I think became a dean of some kind at Harvard University. So he was connected to my graduate department. I never heard his name while I was there. And I was not only there until 1992. I was in Cambridge, Massachusetts at MIT, in the same ecosystem for years after that. Then I came back to Harvard. He was a very strange object, and the connection between Ghislaine's father, who really had an enormous impact on scientific publishing, and had the ability to sort of look at all science before it's published because of peer review. He ran Pergamon Press.
Yeah. There is no question that there's some transmission that is likely between Robert Maxwell of Pergamon Press and Jeffrey Epstein's science obsession, particularly with gravity, and maybe his experience and dabbling with the intelligence services of people that he surrounded himself with throughout his entire life. Many people connected to Mossad. Of course, we know that from his friendship with Ehud Barak and Robert Maxwell, who served as maybe the most prominent Israeli spy ever, you know, almost certainly a Mossad asset.
It's been widely publicized that he was given a special state funeral essentially, you know, buried in the Mount of Olives, attended by major prime ministers of Israel, etc.
But there's a lot of things that Brett said here that were striking. A lot of people do say similar things about Epstein that have met him that, you know, you didn't come away with thinking he was such a great guy, but that he was kind of mercurial and, you know, odd in some respects. But back then, when they interviewed a lot of people about Epstein, they didn't have the same things to say. And another thing that struck me that he talked about regarding Epstein is how he said that Epstein was much more interested in Weinstein's scientific knowledge or scientific endeavors than he was anything that he was dealing with in regard to money or financial transactions, and things like that. And that kind of checks out too, because you know the the mainstream narrative is that Epstein was a money manager, and he served as a money manager for Les Wexner, and that's about it by the way. Supposedly he wouldn't take clients that didn't have a billion dollars to invest with him, but there's no real evidence he even did that for Wexner, though he did exercise a lot of control over Wexner's companies, and was given elaborate wealth and property from Wexner for basically no reason. So, a lot of things interesting in Weinstein's response here.
Fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. In terms of the the alleged crimes that Epstein was accused of committing, how guilty do you think he was likely to have been? In other words, are we talking a small-time abuser, a gigantic serial abuser? What's your gut feeling about that side of him?
My sense of it is is that somebody lost control of an agent. And that this person was supplied with an enormous legend, you know backstories are typically called legends, I believe, in trade craft. Yeah. So he was he was a mythical creature who was supposedly so intelligent that you know he could discern the slightest tremor in the markets etc. etc. He believed his own mythology almost certainly. And you know, my sense of it is that somebody lost control of a monster, and that the actor that they hired to play this was not not well in the head. Now, that's my gut feeling.
The other thing that really concerns me is the people are bad at conspiracy theory. You know, we have a tremendous amount of background data on what conspiracy theories look like. There's a president before Epstein called Craig Spence that we almost never hear about. I don't know if that's something you know about, but this is not the first operation of its kind. And I think it's very important to recognize that once somebody set this thing up, at great expense I imagine, that this is a 9-figure fortune that was beaten into gold, beaten into gold file to look like gold foil, to look like a 12-figure fortune, or something remarkable. So he was acting rich in a way that even rich people don't act rich, and he was acting smart in a way that smart people don't act smart. So the whole thing was likely having a bunch of different activities funneled through it.
So for example, he seemed to be giving tax advice that would also potentially entrap people in ways that the IRS could get them potentially. Yeah. Leon Black specifically gave him $150 million with the justification that hey, Epstein did his taxes. Leon Black, a really rich individual. He owned an investment bank, and owned, you know, one of the wealthiest museums, art museums in the country. He was an art connoisseur, and he was involved in criminal activities too. There were some lawsuits against him saying that, you know, Epstein had essentially trafficked some victims to him, and some of those suits were dropped.
But yeah, Epstein was for sure a megalomaniac. He was obsessed with his own power. He lived like it. He lived to control others. And he clearly practiced a blackmail operation under the guise of some sort of connection to intelligence at some point. Whether or not you think that he was a, you know, Mossad asset, or CIA agent, or whatever, he sure did have so many interactions from his very youth with people from all sorts of intelligence services throughout his life. Whether it be Donald Barr, he was part of the OSS. Barr hired him to teach at Dalton. He got involved in with arms traffickers like Adnan Khashoggi, and Douglas Lease in the 1980s. And you don't really hear much about that anymore. Ehud Barak was a close friend and confidant with him. Even hung out with him 30 plus times. Stayed with him in his Manhattan apartment after his first conviction for child abuse and child sex abuses.
And he had a relationship with Robert Maxwell. Again, a Mossad asset who was Israel's most famous and prominent spy. So, he did live a lavish lifestyle, but around people in the intelligence communities. And this is why people still want answers about those things.
That was something that he was giving away. He was also, my guess is, providing non-pedophile sexual opportunities with young women who were over the age of 18, because I think his real product was silence. And I think people don't get that sex is readily available. Sex is always embarrassing. But I think that the key issue is that Epstein was able to guarantee silence when no one else could guarantee silence, and that's why people came to him.
Yeah, I think that's actually right. What the strategy is called is playing the box and it involves blackmail. But what it really means, and this is how Epstein thrived from his time at Bear Sterns forward. It wasn't even before that the most widely documented cases of sex trafficking and sexual abuse were documented with him. Playing the box involved committing crimes, but in the process of committing those crimes, you make things so embarrassing for the people around you that they're not going to prosecute you. They're not going to come forward and, you know, spill the beans to the authorities, etc. And that's the way that Epstein operated his entire life. That's why so many people believe, based on what we have evidence, you know, even in the search records, we have evidence that a safe was taken with printed media that said prominent people's names on those discs, you know, were blackmail , and that he may have accumulated enormous amounts of his wealth through blackmail transactions. Hey, I had this dirt on you. I demand this much money, otherwise, this is going to get out there.
So, that's where we're at. We don't have all the answers, but we certainly have a lot of circumstantial pieces of evidence, and a lot of missing gaps regarding his wealth, to explain how he became a billionaire. And I know it wasn't reported that he died a billionaire. He apparently died with only about $600 million, but at points he was documented to have been a billionaire. So, I also think that there's something about the way in which people have to agree to be compromised, in some sense, to enter the elite, because otherwise you're not considered trustworthy. So you have to surrender something, so that there's a kill switch on you. And I think that he in part specialized in installing the kill switch.
How do you think he died? Do you think he did kill himself, or are you at the very least, you know, not oblivious to the theory that maybe it was more nefarious as somebody arranged it? Why do you believe that he's dead? Why do you believe that he killed himself?
Well, I certainly don't think that he experienced shame the way normal people did. So I think the idea that he was so embarrassed that he took his own life is probably the only thing I feel I have anything to add. But, you know, let me just caution your listeners. All of this fun that people have with conspiracy theories is absolutely deadly when it comes to actually getting justice and calling this Pedophile Island and Lolita Express and talking about Epstein didn't kill himself is a joke like any of you know. None of you know. M and you know if you were serious about this and you you as a parent just let me specialize to all the moms and dads out there. If you're serious as a parent of wanting this sort of thing absolutely excised from our society. Don't go after the children. Don't go after the memes. Focus on one issue, one issue alone. Why will the press not report on the multi-billion dollar foreign currency hedge fund, which even if it has dummy compliance, I guarantee you any forensic accountant could determine whether this thing was real or fake. And my guess is that there are no former employees employed from the yeshivas of Brooklyn. This thing, I think, is a will of the wisp. It's a figment of our imagination. And it's a product of statecraft. And the fact that we have very long-standing relationships with our major news organs that they agree to have liaison to the covert operations group so that we don't constantly report. This is an issue called deconfliction. Many people don't know that word. This is a situation which escaped our deconfliction systems almost certainly, and it has the hallmark in the outline person you should have on, not me, is the person who is an expert in all of the legal aspects of having a free society with covert operations group. And in particular, there's a case of something like Al-Maseri versus Tenant which establishes that when somebody has a legitimate case in the courts, and their state secret privilege, that person may not be entitled to exculpatory evidence and information, that state secrets trump justice. And I think it's absolutely imperative that you have a lawyer who's competent to talk about this so this doesn't enter into the realm of conspiracy theory.
So, okay. So, there's problems with just castigating and rebuking the thought of conspiracy theories for the sake of rebuking conspiracy theories. I'd like to hear from Weinstein about what he thinks is consistent or inconsistent with the government narrative. It's not helpful to just call this a conspiracy theory, or things related to Epstein a conspiracy theory, without explaining your position. And that's how so many people dispose of some of these issues. I think he only partially addressed it here. Yeah, I have a problem with how victim's rights were violated in this. But we still need answers about Epstein's past, whether it was the money trail, whether it was his connections to potential intelligence services, etc. you know, he's right about the fact that we need to look into, you know, Epstein's past, his financials and the money movement aspects. I don't even think Les Wexner has ever been interviewed, not only by the Department of Justice or the FBI, but also by many journalists. He's essentially living in a cave. And this guy gave, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars to Epstein in property and money and essentially let him run his companies to the extent that some of his previous executives were essentially pushed out of the mix. So yeah, I don't really like Eric's response here very much, because it kind of deflects from what PICE is asking. You know, did you have any problems with the narrative, or how do you think he killed himself? Well, he doesn't answer that question. And he just points to the problem of conspiracy theorists, and you need a lawyer to sort that out. You don't have to be a lawyer to talk about this case or look about what's happened in it. So, I think that's kind of an evasive answer. I'm going to decline to speculate. Fascinating.
Elon Musk fell out spectacularly with Donald Trump, and posted on X in a bombshell. Trump's in the Epstein files. I know you're very close with Peter Teal, Elon's old boss. What do you make of what's happened there?
How do I put this? It would appear that Elon is very disappointed that we are not radical enough to understand the threat to the country. He has a very clear idea about what has to be surmounted. I believe he then apologized for that, which I found interesting. You shouldn't apologize for that, much the way you know Amy Robach had the famous hot mic incident, and then said oh that was nothing. Something in these files, something in the situation, causes people to reverse course. And I think that what you have to assume is that the public will never ever ever let this go, and that there is some equal and opposite pressure which says that the elite will do absolutely anything to keep it secret. And by elite I don't mean people who are actually elite. I mean people who are in the chairs that should be reserved for the elite, but have a lot to lose.
Yeah. I think I generally agree with them on the last part. There seems to be a bipartisan mentality in general toward this case, whether it was the Biden administration, whether it was a Trump administration that crosses political boundaries. They're both behaving essentially the same way when they're in office, saying like, "Hey, there's nothing there." There wasn't that much pressure from the Democrats to get anything released under Biden, but right-wing populist sure talked about this. Dan Bongino talked about this. Kash Patel, the director of the FBI, talked about this. Pam Bondi talked about this, how Biden wasn't being forthcoming and there was an an aura of secrecy revolving around this case from the start, and too many glaring inconsistencies that you couldn't hold over the American public and expect them to accept it.
No one could accept it. And you're still seeing that now. You're seeing Trump behave in that same way after he was purported to be the white knight to drive into Washington and deliver answers to the public. But Eric's right. There's something in those files that are causing the same people in the deep state, in the elite, in the presidential administrations, to behave the same way. And I think the most plausible reason is the connections to intelligence. Actually, at one point during this investigation weeks ago, you know, Pam Bondi was questioned, are there going to be any redactions or anything like that? And she said, and this was widely covered at the time, that there might be some redactions, but if there are, it will be for national security concerns. Well, why would there be national security concerns about sex trafficking operations unless it involved foreign influences, or foreign intelligence? That's yet another reason why so many people think that Epstein had intelligence connections.
And again, the most plausible to me is Mossad. He surrounded himself with very prominent people from Mossad, including the former Mossad chief who stayed at his house for prolonged periods of time and had obvious relations to Robert Maxwell, the most prominent spy in Israeli history.
So, yeah, Weinstein's right about that. There's something in these files and it won't go away until the government's completely forthcoming about it. But they can't be forthcoming about it if it compromises their rule and control over us. And that's what I really suspect. And that's the the harsh reality in which we live. If that something that would embarrass the US-Israeli relationship, you can guarantee it will never come out, because Trump is too owned by the Israel lobby. He's too close to Aipac, too close to Miriam Adelsen. He boasts about how pro-Israel he is. He moved the US embassy to Jerusalem, which was a huge Zionist cause that precludes in some ways some potential possibility for any potential of a Palestinian state, because they want part of Eastern Jerusalem for that. He signed the Abraham Accords, even though his own DHS said it was a bad idea. It would inflame tensions in the region. And he wants Netanyahu to be released from the charges of fraud and corruption against him. So in every regard, Trump has not only signaled, but lived the life of someone in office who is close to Israel. You know, bankrolling the genocide in Gaza too, and abandoning US foreign policy aims to normalize relations with Iran for the sake of bombing Iran, and placing regime change on the table.
So that's where we're at. I think his answer at the end was good. I don't believe that the right response to this whole thing is just to say, you know, there's too much conspiracy theory here, and only lawyers can sort it out, which might be a unfair reading of his answer to that question, but to me, it's just very dismissive. Like you can research this case, pick up information about it, you know, select information you think is particularly concerning, or would yield more answers in it, and address that, or address problems with the government narrative, because there are plenty in this case as we all know.
But what do you think? Do you think Eric Weinstein is correct about Jeffrey Epstein? Do you think that he had a good assessment of Epstein's personality, knowing what you do about Epstein? And what is the most missing angle of this entire case? Let me know in the comments down below. Peace out.
Jamie Raskin TAKES ACTION against Trump & Bondi over Epstein by Brian Tyler Cohen Jul 19, 2025 Brian Tyler Cohen
INTERVIEW: Jamie Raskin exposes Pam Bondi’s “grand jury testimony” con
Transcript
I'm joined now by Congressman Jamie Raskin. Thanks for joining me. I'm psyched to be with you, Brian. So, we have just found out that Donald Trump and Pam Bondi are asking uh a judge to release the grand jury testimony. This is not the Epstein files. This is something completely different really that no one is asking for. You have you have thousands upon thousands upon thousands of files. they opted not to have those even though they're already in their possession and are instead saying we're going to go through this lengthy process that may or may not work out where we're going to get some testimony that we can then choose what to release from within that testimony if a judge even opts to grant it. So for those Trump supporters and honestly uh you know left, right, and center people who want this information, are they being conned by virtue of what Trump and Bondi are offering them right now? Well, no, cuz I don't think anybody's buying it. I mean, I think you just did a great job debunking it. The only thing I would add is that the um the grand jury files uh relate only to the prosecution of Epstein himself for what he did and of um uh Maxwell for what she did. But it it doesn't include the whole universe of other people and criminal organizations and you know business organizations that we're interested in. But isn't that the whole point? Isn't that what we're looking for here? It it's a complete distraction. It's a red herring. It's a oh, don't look over here. Look over there kind of thing. And you know, even for that tiny subset of the materials we might be interested in, and they're pretty pretty much peripheral, but even within those, uh, rule 6E, um, will provide that much of it will have to be redacted to protect victims and other people. So look at all of that is just a decoy. They've got the materials within their possession and they can release everything just redacting the information that would be identifying information for the victims. Uh which is the only thing that should be redacted and that's what the Democrats have been asking for. All we're saying to Donald Trump is be true to what you've been asking for for years. Release the information in the possession of the government. And so can you talk about what efforts knowing full well that all he wants to put forward is this decoy. Um what can Democrats do? What are Democrats doing right now to compel this information? And I asked this because we've seen multiple efforts where Democrats have have sought uh have sought votes in the House both in the rules committee on the House floor even the Senate floor uh to compel the release of of these files. And two times in the rules committee Republicans voted it down. Two times in the House Republicans voted it down. one time in the Senate at the hands of Ruben Ggo. Uh Republicans voted it down. And so what are our options here moving forward? Well, we've also in the Judiciary Committee, the Democrats have demanded a full bipartisan hearing where we subpoena all of this information and we subpoena witness testimony from Attorney General Bondi, from FBI Director Cash Patel, from the Deputy Director Dan Banino. So they come forward and everybody tells us everything they know about this whole nightmarish scenario. Uh so that's one thing we can continue to press that. Now Chairman Jordan's answer was well yes we're going to have her in to talk about everything right implying therefore we can ask about those questions. All right. he said before the end of the year. And then when we were saying this is ridiculous, we're not waiting till December. People started saying September we could do. Um so who knows? We we'll keep uh we'll keep pressing on that. But here's the other thing I I want I got to salute my counterpart over in the Senate who's the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Durban, who has discovered apparently from a whistleblower. I'm not quite sure how, but that you remember they had they had actually conscripted a thousand FBI agents to be working around the clock 24 hours um going through more than a 100,000 of these Epstein documents in the the files um and apparently told them to flag any mentions or appearances or pictures of Donald Trump, anything that appears there of Donald Trump. They're supposed to flag it. Well, what were they supposed to do after they flag it? And we also heard separately, this was a couple weeks ago, that um the FBI director Cash Patel was using lie detector tests um against the FBI agents. And I I wonder whether you know these two things are related to each other. In other words, somebody finds something relating to Donald Trump, they turn it over. Are they then asked, "Are you loyal to Donald Trump? Will you do what we ask you to do? Are you gonna turn this over to anybody else?" And you know, this might be one of the most massive coverups in the history of the United States unfolding before our very eyes because Donald Trump is obviously freaked out about some stuff that's in there, right? And then the idea that you create this army within the FBI to scrape through everything just looking for mentions of Donald Trump. um is quite unusual and uh fascinating. Yeah. I mean, what does it say? Look, I'm no I'm no I'm no uh political genius here, but what does it say when you have to conscript a thousand people to scrub through these documents, all who answer to Donald Trump to search for Donald Trump's names, to search for Donald Trump's name within these documents? It probably doesn't send the message that you think it's sending. Um, it's worth asking too here, uh, a lot of the push back to all of this stuff is, and Trump has said this too in in so many ways. Granted, he's kind of muddled his own message because he's also claiming that all of this is a hoax written by uh, Biden, Comey, and and Brennan and and uh, and uh, and and Obama. So, kind of his message is whatever errant synapse fires in his brain at any given moment in time. But if there was a mention of Donald Trump in these files, why the Biden administration wouldn't have released it previously. So, I'm curious what what your response is on that because it's a talking point that we I mean, it's it's a it's a pretty unconvincing talking point because Trump is the president right now. He ran on this, but I'm still curious what your thought is on this. In other words, okay, well, let's start with this. Up until Donald Trump, everybody tried to respect the independence and the integrity of the Department of Justice. Up until Donald Trump, nobody was telling the Department of Justice what to do. And um the uh the Department of Justice under Biden brought the prosecution against Maxwell. So obviously Biden wasn't trying to suppress anything. The the GOP stories today make no sense. They're totally conflicting. They're saying on the one hand, Biden and Obama made all of this stuff up about about uh Donald Trump, but then they never released it. Why did they make it up if they never released it? Right. And then they say to us after Donald Trump campaigns on this that there's all this stuff in there that he knows about and he should know considering he was Epstein's best friend for more than a decade that it all should be released. After they're campaigning on it, we say fine, let's go ahead and release it. you seem to know there's all this stuff in there and then all they say no why didn't you release it. I mean it it just it it makes no sense what they're saying. They're just pointing fingers in a hundred different directions. The bottom line is here's what we do know. Uh Epstein was a convicted sex offender. There was a federal a 60count federal indictment waiting for him. And then Donald Trump's later labor secretary, Alex Aosta, who was then the US attorney for the Southern District of Florida, reduced that 60count federal indictment on conspiracy, sex trafficking, prostitution, pimping, all of this stuff. Reduced it to one state count of solicitation. That was the sweetest, sweetheart deal perhaps in the history of federal criminal prosecution. He gets this tiny gentle, I don't even want to say slap on the wrist, a massage on the wrist where he spends half of the day free, half of the day spending the night in a slumber party uh at the jail house. Okay. And then he also gets uh a get out of jail free card for four of his unnamed associates who were named and theoretically would have been either indicted or unindicted co-conspirators. somebody put the fix in for the guy. We want to get to the bottom of that. Then later, a federal prosecution starts over again. That's when he's in jail and that's when he takes his own life. And at that point, a lot of people were asking questions about whether this was truly suicide or not, including Donald Trump. Then it's Attorney General William Bar, Trump's attorney general, who goes over and says this is a perfect storm of mistakes and mishaps. Um, but he declares that it was a suicide, even though there was, you know, the momentary lapse in the videotape, which turns out not to have been one minute, but I think three and a half minutes. Uh, it's since been discovered there were two people who were assigned to watch uh, his cell who disappeared. So, who knows? I mean that you know at this point we're in like the fog of their conspiracy theory and a very strange sequence of events indeed. So Maxwell gets prosecuted. She's sentenced to 20 years and then the third co-conspirator in that particular case also takes his own life. This is the the French guy who takes his life. All right. Then Trump runs around the country saying we've got to release the complete Epstein file. JD Vance says that. Pam Bondi says that. Cash Patel says that. In fact, it's curious that all of the people who were talking about it suddenly get put into key positions in the Department of Justice and the administration and now they do perform a complete U-turn and they want to sweep the entire thing under the rug. Right. Ju just as a a a quick aside, what is the point of the sweetest of sweetheart deals for Jeffrey Epstein when normally these deals are given so that prosecutors can work their way up the ladder so that they can get as close to the big fish as they can? Epstein was the big fish in this scenario and so what do you get by give like isn't the whole point to try to get people like him? And so what do you what benefit do you derive as a prosecutor from Alex Aosta's perspective by giving him such a good deal uh when he's the person that that all the all the eye should be aimed at? Well, it suggests the possibility that there was in fact a bigger fish involved who wanted to put the whole thing to bed as quickly as possible because uh if there were other people that Epstein could be pointing the finger at and looping in as part of turning states evidence in order to get a better deal for himself, those people would have every interest in keeping Epstein on their good side, right? And so I mean what's odd about this is that you know like many criminals Donald Trump kept returning to the scene of this crime. So many of the key actors in this event were put into his administration. Um so many of the lawyers involved like Alan Dersowitz who helped broker the sweetheart deal later became a lawyer for Donald Trump. Um, and then Trump campaigned on it and we've seen how he loves to project onto other people his own his own anxieties and insecurities. Well, he was, you know, so if he is nervous about what Epstein might say, then he would say, "Oh, well, the Democrats are really nervous about Epstein, and we're going to blow the cover on this when we get in." Right. I I got to ask this because I I think we're starting to recognize that it's beyond clear Trump doesn't want these files released, that he's doing whatever he can to to make sure that we're not looking at this stuff, offering up whatever decoys he can find, sending us, you know, over to the grand jury testimony while he secretes, you know, 95% of the files that already do exist, that already are at Pam Bondi's disposal. Will we ever gain full access to the Epstein files? Or will it always be that Pam Bondi and and by association, by extension, Donald Trump will be the final arbiters of exactly what information comes out? Like are are those two people are really the only people that have the full range of all of the files that exist? And so even if the the discharge petition come August or September when it when it finally ripens and the House can vote on this thing and it passes, will Pam Bondi ultimately have the final say into what information exactly comes out or is there a way to circumvent her as as um somebody who could kind of meddle in what comes out so that we can get the full range of the files? The wheel is still in spin, Brian. We don't know the answer to your question. If you look at the the Democratic resolution or the rather the the resol democrat support the bipartisan resolution which has been uh put in by Massie and Vicana um there's a paragraph in there which says we want a complete accounting also of any of the destruction or altering or mutilation or aacement or impairment of different documents. In other words, we want a we want to know we want to see all the documents and if any of the documents have been altered or changed or removed in any way, we want a record of that. But but on that point, I mean, the cop on that beat is Pam Bondi and and and by by extension Donald Trump who may very well be implicated in this. And so he has every interest in if there is some alteration, if there is some destruction of documents, he's not going to say anything because he's the person that that destruction would presumably benefit. And so who's there to be the like there is all of these people are in the pocket of Donald Trump and so who's the cop on that beat? Well, if you look at the history of corruption scandals in the nation's capital, there are always people who are junior people who are interns who are staff associates who are basically invisible um and considered menial uh by the key actors. But they often times come forward and tell what they know. But I'm with you. I mean, if there's a full-blown effort of cover up and certainly mobilizing an army of a thousand FBI agents to go and find anything mentioning Donald Trump's name and then come and bring it to us. And at the same time, we hear that uh Cash Patel is administering lie detector tests against people in order to determine who's trustworthy and who's not. We have every reason to be afraid that there will be a cover up. But I just have to believe that there's so much information that has come from Florida, that's come from New York, that's come from other sources, that's come from journalists, that some people are going to be able to check them if their plan is just to obliterate the evidence, right? And presumably, if they had intended on on altering some information, doctoring some information, they would have already put it out there. So, there's something that must be blocking them from doing this. Because I think they probably rightly recognize that if they do try to mess with things and put it out there, then it becomes an even more obvious cover up. It becomes an even bigger scandal than what it likely already is. And so, they're probably just trying to do that calculation now with like, can we get away with this? How much could we get away with? Is it going to be an even bigger scandal? Shine an even hotter spotlight on us if we even try it. Yeah. because uh the cover up imports a whole new set of charges of obstruction of justice and conspiracy and that takes it to a completely different level. Um there are just some things that are probably in there that are very hard to permanently erase including emails uh which are going to be very important I believe in this case correspondence and photographs. I mean, you know, you've got Michael Wolf, who's a Trump biographer, who's written four books, I believe, about Donald Trump, who went on uh a podcast last week um and said openly that uh Epstein had shown him lots of photographs of them together, uh Epstein and Trump. Um, and that some of the photos included Trump with uh topless girls sitting on his lap and laughing and so on. Um, well, it's hard to make evidence like that go away. And if there are lots of people who have seen it or there might be other copies of it out there, it's hard to make it go away. So, you start destroying evidence like that, you start destroying uh emails and texts um and those things reappear. then it be it's become clear that not only were you involved in some way in the original events, but you're trying to cover it up, right? And you might be better off just making arguments about how, you know, well, yeah, the president may have been in compromising positions. It might not look good, but he didn't really do anything bad. Meanwhile, uh we don't want to lose sight of what's really going on here, which is this was a human trafficking, child sex abuse ring. And the Trump administration as an administration has been doing everything in their power to dismantle the antihuman trafficking, anti-child abuse programs and funding that we've got at the Department of Justice, at the Department of State, at HHS, uh in in agencies and departments throughout the government. Um they've been dismantling the funding to combat human trafficking. and the people who work on that have been um screaming from the rooftops that this is going to be a nightmare. Yeah. If you take America off the field. Yeah, that's that's an excellent often overlooked point in all of this. Let's finish off with this. Um among your Republican colleagues in in the GOP conference, what are these people saying behind the scenes? because these are people who've who've staked their reputations and built their brands and and spoken openly and proudly about their efforts to take down, you know, this this uh this deep state pedophile ring that that encompass the highest echelons of government. They uh Don Jr. spoke about it. JD Vance spoke about it. They've been talking about on podcast with with Tucker Carlson and all of their influencers. The president spoke about it from the highest levels of office. And now they find themselves taking vote after vote after vote, secreting this very information, preventing the release of the very information that they themselves put put themselves out there saying that they were going to deliver to their constituents. And so what are these people saying behind the scenes if you have the opportunity to speak to any of them? Well, um, a couple of them have taken the position with me that look um, this doesn't look good, but it was all conspiracy theory. Um and um given that it was conspiracy theory, all they can really do is to just let it all hang out and show that there's nothing there. Um and if indeed it it was all conspiracy theory and there are no names of the rich and powerful involved in this exploitative sex ring, they would let it all all hang out. But I think others understand what a dangerous territory Donald Trump has entered here. um because he brought all of the attention on this and the spotlight is now on him and I don't think they know where it's going to go, but they don't think that he's going to uh it's within his character to try to really release anything and disclose stuff. He's just going to try to fight it till the end of his presidency. And you know, he's going to go from talking about, you know, Russia, Russia, Russia or insurrection, insurrection, insurrection to just talking about uh Epstein, Epstein, Epstein. Yeah. I mean, I Yeah. I mean, I don't know how much Well, we we're about to get a get a a quick lesson in um in how potent the uh use of Biden's auto pen is as a distraction technique. So, with that said, um Congressman, I appreciate your time today. I appreciate you keeping this in the spotlight, and uh we'll talk to you soon. Thank you, Brian. Hang tough, man. All the best.
Epstein-QAnon EXPERTS issue BOMBSHELL update amid Trump's Epstein fallout Brian Tyler Cohen Jul 20, 2025 Brian Tyler Cohen
INTERVIEW: Brian interviews the hosts of QAnon Anonymous about Epstein, QAnon, and other conspiracy theories.
Transcript
I'm joined now by Jake, Travis, and Julian, the hosts of the QAnon Anonymous podcast. Uh, this is the the premier podcast when it comes to all things conspiracy theories, QAnon. And we spoke uh a couple of years ago, actually three years ago, almost to the day. Um, and and I wanted to get you guys back on. And I've been really looking forward to this conversation because because back then, a few years ago, and for the last several years, we've been kind of immersed in this world of conspiracy theory from uh largely a right-wing that has been out of power. Well, now we're in a situation where Donald Trump is in power, bolstered by the very people who thought that he would be the one to take down a lot of the a lot of the the the ideas at the center of of these conspiracy theories. and KQanon. And so I'm curious first and foremost, you know, we we have we have the QAnon conspiracy theory, which is which is that there is this Satan worshipping cabal of pedophiles at the highest levels of government. Nothing better exemplifies that than what we're seeing with all of the Epstein stuff. And yet now, whereas Donald Trump had the opportunity to to dismantle this system from the inside, which by the way was what his campaign was predicated on, he's instead opted to entrench that very system by refusing to release these files. So, I'm curious what the what the response has been like from that universe where now there seems to have been a bait and switch that took place at the highest levels of government from the people who were supposed to take this down. I I would say the the response has been mixed. There is a lot of dismay and confusion and um bewilderment that the man that they thought would uh take down Netstein and expose all the people he's involved with is all of a sudden saying it's a Democrat hoax. especially confusing considering his own attorney general at one point claimed that uh she had the Epstein list on her desk and now the official line from the DOJ is that it doesn't exist at all. Um but of course you know uh QAnon followers are you know really masters at cognitive dissonance. So at the same time many of them still trusting the plan thinking this is some sort of 5D chess move and you know the truth will still somehow come out. some of the uh the dieards, especially people who have like a pretty large following on on X, you know, for formerly Twitter, uh you know, they will do these kind of like long game theory threads about how uh uh Donald Trump is, you know, he's bringing awareness to Epstein that he's doing this on purpose so that he can draw attention to it. So, he's got Democrats calling for the release and then he can release and it will expose them and it's all a part of the plan for DHS. But your your sort of average like on the couch QAnon enjoyer at least at least anecdotally from what I've seen online is like hey wait a minute like wait a minute like this like I I have to go and defend this guy to like my other f like there seems to be like a a little bit more of a a dissatisfaction amongst your your average sort of like QAnon enjoyer whereas the influencers are still doing all of these like game theory threads to explain Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. No, this is still a good thing. I think they're getting to the point where it's like, well, how deep undercover is he? Did he have to actually do the things with the other pedophiles or, you Well, that that's the part that I'm that I'm having trouble with because when we spoke last time, again, this was a few years ago, but one of the things that was most striking that you said was that there's always some convenient new conspiracy theory to explain away any potential disappointment or any current disappointment, right? Like they if they there can never there can never be arrival because again, we're dealing with with like crazy conspiracy theories, but so there can never be arrival. There always has to be something to take you from, okay, yes, it didn't it didn't it didn't go to go where we thought it was going to go because X, Y, and Z. But I mean, this I guess what I'm having trouble with is this is so cut and dry. And I understand like like like a normal conspiracy theater, you can't get there because it's it's crazy and you're not going to be able to prove that somebody like unless we find a a sipping a Satan worshiping cabal of pedophiles in the woods somewhere at night that that consists of a group of like Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton and George Soros and Nancy Pelosi and like right unless we find that we're probably not going to get there. But this was an instance where we could get there. And you have, to your exact point, you have Pam Bondi who said, "I have the client list on my desk." And so I understand that it's always easy to explain away this stuff, but how do you explain away something where the finish line was in sight? I think that when the Wall Street Journal contacted Trump uh or at least his administration for comment, there was a certain amount of panic internally because pulling out the terms Epstein hoax that that's a that's a big failure I think and they're they're having to do a lot of uh damage control right now because he did run on the idea that he was going to expose all this stuff. But as soon as uh the Wall Street Journal said, "Hey, we have you drawing um you know, a a woman's shape and uh writing mysterious birthday poetry to Epstein." And it Yeah, it looks like your signature uh is the pubic hair on the w the drawing of the woman. I I think at that point he decided to uh just fold back on his usual, you know, it's like, well, this is just a hoax. And as soon as you try to sell in these people who've been waiting for years uh on the fact that the Epstein thing is actually just invented by Democrats, I think that that has been way more difficult. I think that even their you know very very well exercised muscle uh of of cognitive dissonance is not quite cutting it at this point. And there is there is a lot of debate I think internally. People are kind of splitting off. Something that's really struck me about all of this is, you know, if I was if I was a Trump supporter or an adherent to any of these conspiracy theories or QAnon or the I mean, look, the Epstein stuff is not a conspiracy theory. I know I keep dropping it into the same bucket, but but um but I think the throughine between all of this is it's hard to feel like Trump doesn't have utter contempt for his own supporters. Like to claim that you're going to release the list, to see Dan Bonino predicate his entire brand on releasing the list, Cash Battel on releasing the list, hearing Alina Haba say that it's going to be explosive, seeing Pam Bondi say that she has the stuff on her desk right now only for these people to all turn around suddenly and say, "Oh, there's no there there." And in fact, not only is there no there there, but to say on one day that the the case is closed and uh and and the whole thing is shut down and there was no client list, nothing ever existed. and then a few days later to come out and say just kidding it does exist but it's a forgery uh from Barack Obama, the Biden administration, James Comey, John Brennan who somehow had control of the federal government deep state when Epstein died in 2019 when the president was not any Democrat but rather Donald Trump himself. I mean it just strikes me as as so contemptuous for the people who support him. Is there some sense of that? Like again, I say this all couching my answer in understanding that there's always another answer to push the conspiracy theory down the road, but this again is so cut and dry. Are there any supporters of his that you're seeing, you know, deep in the world of this stuff that just feel like they are like they're being duped because they're being duped? I think I think this runs into the problem of the fact that a lot of people they turn to uh podcasters like Dan Bonito because it's uh pure entertainment for them and um and uh they just they just like hearing him say that the Epstein list is going to be explosive and when he was a mere podcaster he could promise anything he wanted. He wasn't really in power. He can he can chat up a storm. he can say whatever he wants about what's going to be revealed and that made his uh the people who listen to him feel very good but once he actually got in power once he had to face the actual political realities of like what to release and what not to release and how that might make uh Trump look you know that uh he he ran into a brick wall there because I mean my my my I think the most plausible theory is that there's something in the files that makes Trump look look pretty bad and so uh so as a consequence uh you know he he you He had he didn't reverse course. He he allegedly according to is some some reporting has some internal conflict because you know this is obviously now very bad for his brand. If he had talked to big game as a podcaster but once he got became the deputy uh FBI director he officially says that there's no Epstein client list at all. So, I mean, yeah, I mean, I think that I think that uh it's like a lot of them do feel very disappointed and dismayed, but at the same time, they do have a short attention span. And so, you know, you can sort of see the way that they're trying to um to deflect. Now, they're doing things like, for example, releasing some grand jury testimony, which like no one really asked for um and uh won't really resolve the issue. I mean the the when they released uh the the order releasing the grand jury testimony, they very specifically said that it wouldn't change um any of the sort of the facts uh discussed in that original memo, which they said they would not be prosecuting anyone else related to the Epstein scandal. So it's not going to really this whatever is going to be released, it's not going to change anything that's really substantial. It's not going to really give them what they want, which is like this big exposure and an arrest. Um, so but but yeah, they have they really have short attention spans if I'm being honest. And uh I think I think that these conservative commentators, these right-wing commentators, they'll do what they always do. They'll spin up a new scandal. They'll deflect. They'll um they'll they'll say, you know, they'll say that they'll do some negative polarization. They say like they're only saying these things to get Trump and don't you hate the people who want to get Trump and then they'll they'll move on. That's my prediction. Well, I guess that that boils down to what the what the question at the core of this is, which is are they there to protect Donald Trump and Republicans, or are they there because because of why they say they're there, which is like exposing this this deep state cabal of pedophiles, which, you know, the closest thing we have to that in real life is is the Epstein situation. And so, what's the goal at the end of the day? I know what it is for the Charlie Kirks of the world, right? It's just these these are these are political operatives. But the adherence more broadly, like there seems to be some conflict between are you are you here because in good faith you really want to expose some heinous behavior by by what may very well be some bipartisan group of deep state elites or are you here because really at the end of the day your your final goal is just making sure that Donald Trump is protected. I think there's a real mix among QAnon followers. I think there are some people who have always seen Trump as a kind of tool to get what they want and they're maybe reaching a point of disappointment. Um but I also think that there are some who yeah I mean that their very last hold out their very last uh kind of hope in politics that there is one man who is unscathed by all of these scandals was Donald Trump. And I think those are kind of hitting a wall and and some of them are falling in line and saying, "Hey, there's no way that, you know, I've fundamentally gotten this wrong for so many years. There has to be something more." Um, and it's worth also mentioning that the list was always uh a little bit of a a kind of phantom hope, right? I mean, this is uh along partisan lines. The hope was the list will show that your guys are more implicated than our guys. Uh but the idea of a list in the first place is not really accurate. I mean, we have the little black book. It was in PDF form before any of this even began, before QAnon was even uh you know, created. Um, and that's that's just u the people that Epstein had phone numbers for, sometimes multiple uh you know uh and and then there's of course the flight manifests which are Epstein's um planes uh you know records of who flew uh on them. Uh the list of clients as if this is some sort of cyber cafe where people check in and have to put their name down. I mean that that's that's an absurdity. And I think that that that's where we've we've kind of seen over time QAnon creating false versions of it, you know, where they where well where they'll add Tom Hanks or people that they just wish were part of it and people that they thought were a part of it uh as part of their QAnon beliefs uh formerly. So it's it is really a big mess and I'm not sure that anybody who's kind of waiting for more information about this really knows what exactly they're waiting for. I think uh I think a lot of QAnon and and you know Trump supporters or you know MAGA in general is put in like a really tough situation right now because they they have to sort of decide you know do I hate ped pedophiles more than I than I love Donald Trump. Right. Um and and so it is I I do I do and and as I've seen some some users on online discussing this whole thing. I do think that this is a potential off-ramp for QAnon QAnon believers or or Trump supporters in the same way that Jan 6 in some ways. I I had some family members who were proTrump and after Jan 6 they were like, you know what, I'm I'm not for this actually. Uh and and and they're off. Um I think that that calling, you know, as Julian mentioned earlier, saying the words Epstein and hoax in the same sentence. It's not that well the I'm fighting the deep state and I'm trying to get this released but we can't get it released. You know, he could have just strung that battle along for four years. And I'm fairly confident that his, you know, most fervent supporters would have kind of gone along for the ride. But to come right out and say, "No, this is a host. No, this is a hoax. It was made up by Democrats, made up by Obama." That really puts them in a in a in a tough position because the last thing they ever would have categorized Epstein was as a hoax. In fact, to a lot of conspiracy theorists, you know, when when they talk about the Epstein case, they use it to to to say that other conspiracies that are more outlandish are real. So, they'll say, "Well, Epstein is is is real, so what else are they doing?" It's kind of the foundation in which they can build upon the rest of what they believe that the cabal is up to and often times not even citing real facts from the Epstein case as their sources but saying well because of this you know we know that they're doing this. So to have that dismantled I I don't know it puts him in like a really tough position and I think we're we're going to see over the next couple of months how that shakes out. I think many people think many things about the Epstein situation. None of them are that it's a hoax. There is zero people out there that want to hear those words and go, "Wow, I knew it." Right. Yeah. There. Yeah. That is just a wild I think that is a wild defensive move. He He could have said anything. I think the appropriate thing if I were to write a script for Donald Trump on how to talk to his QAnon followers would have been to say, well, there's a deep state and what they've done is they've manipulated a lot of these documents to make them impossible for me to release because they've woven me into them. You know, uh that's the closest thing you're going to get at this point uh to to to a good way out of this. But unfortunately, it's too late. He he just uh fell back on on on some words that were extremely unfortunate and have zero base. Like there is nobody that wants to hear that. I guess like at the end of the day, I don't know for these Qanon adherence and those who kind of follow the Epstein situation. I don't know what the point of Donald Trump is because if he's there, you know, his warts notwithstanding, clearly this guy has has a pretty sorted past like with everything that he's done. I mean, he, you know, the sexual assault and and all of it, but I think that they viewed him as his vehicle to do something. And so now I don't understand what the point of him is if not only is he not going to be the vehicle to do the thing that he said he was going to do, but he seems very much implicated. I mean, um, one of the kind of jokes that I made in a video that I did this past week was, you know, if if, uh, if a husband comes home and sees his wife in the house and all of a sudden he hears like a noise in the closet and he's like, "Who's in the closet?" And she's like, "Oh, there's no there's nobody here in the kitchen. Look." And he's like, "Right, but who's in the closet?" And she's like, "Look, there's there's nobody there's nobody in the pantry. Like, I don't know what you're talking about." He's like, "Who's in the closet?" She's like, "I don't see anybody in the living room." eventually you're going to you're going to recognize that that she's cheating, right? Like there there's very clearly a there there. That's what Trump is doing here where where he won't I mean the the grand jury uh the the grand jury testimony is the perfect example because nobody asked for that and you're not going to get all of the Epstein files released. This is going to be a tiny fraction of the information that they have. And on top of that, uh Trump and Pam Bondi said that it would only be pertinent information. Well, who who is the the arbiter of what's pertinent in this case? Well, it's the guy who may very well be implicated in these files and the attorney general whose boss is the guy who may be implicated in these files. And so, they're going to be the arbiters of of what they deem pertinent here. So, we're never going to get any information uh that that shows uh Trump implicated in any of this stuff. And that's by design. And so when when you have this guy who keeps offering everybody something that they didn't ask for, uh very much in the same way how when you have, you know, this woman at home who's who's shown you every room other than the closet where you hear the sounds coming from, it becomes clear that that maybe the reason for this that the natural conclusion you can draw is that is that he himself is implicated uh uh in all of this. And so that's what makes it so difficult for me to understand, you know, what the point of Trump is for any of these people. Yes. Well, unfortunately, Brian, we're going to need a new Q Anon to come in and explain why Trump is unable to in fact in fact Julian made such a funny joke. We were talking we were talking the other day about this and Julian said that the funniest and dumbest thing that could happen is that one of these cuz this was supposed to be a QAnon government, right? We have Tulsi Cabern, we've got Cash Patel, Dan Ponino, all in these incredibly high levels of power. They are they are no longer uh you know on the campaign trail. they are, you know, pulling the levers. Um, and it the funniest thing that could happen if that is that one of his like goons or one of one of the, you know, bottom of the barrel people that, you know, he's he's sort of been stuck with on this on this second term that that they are they have to become the insider leaking out, you know, to that they become a new deep state, but this time to stop Donald Trump. And I think that's probably what's going to have to happen. uh or a new QAnon is going to have to come in and explain to people what the code was. They're going to have to break down the alpha numeric, you know, the the gumatria uh to show what hoax what hoax really meant when Trump said it in regards to Epstein. On the prospect of of deprogramming people, is this enough to get people off of of kind of the the QAnon train or does the fact that that you have yet another government? Yes, it was one that said that they were going to be the ones to release all of the damaging information. Um, or does that make it does that entrench them even more? Because then they're like, "Oh man, this deep state must be really bad. If even if even they could consume Donald Trump and Cash Patel and Dan Bonino, we have to redouble our efforts because the deep state is is a way bigger foe than we could have possibly imagined." Uh, yeah. Well, yeah. I know it's that old joke about uh a conspiracy theorist goes to heaven and then asks God, "So, I want to know really who um um who killed JFK?" And God says, "Well, I I hate to tell you, but it was Oswald and he acted alone." The conspiracy theorist says, "Boy, this goes up higher than I thought." So, uh I mean this is I mean you're really asking asking if people who've dedicated maybe like eight or nine years of their life to this whole world view to say actually I was totally off for a big chunk of my life. That's a big ask of anyone. It's not easy to do. It's extremely uncomfortable. It's not impossible to re-evaluate your belief system to re reorient your worldview. Um but um but uh it is very very difficult. Yeah, I would say I would say that there is uh one final out which is that we now have AI. We you know we are familiar with uh the term fake news. There's one final retreat which is that nothing you see is real. Well that's yeah of course but uh you know we've given them that out as well. you know, I mean, who who's to say that this isn't uh an elaborate set of of, you know, like uh AI that is that is beaming this information into you and that you need to go deeper into Telegram? A lot of these followers, they're already very much marginalized in terms of where they get their information. So, you know, um for some of them, it might be a dip even deeper into, you know, numerology and and gamatria and like seeing things in more uh religious or spiritual terms. Um, I think that the the the final retreat will be perhaps beyond politics. Um, because I think, and they're not the only ones, people are pretty disappointed in uh in politics currently. And it is pretty clear that if we ever do find out the full extent of Epstein's uh trafficking operation and the people who uh frequented it uh or or or were clients of it, quote unquote, um that we are going to find out that a lot of our ruling class um are deeply corrupt and uh open open to things like pedophilia, which which to most people are, you know, obviously like morally deeply wrong. So, it's a difficult one. When you first of all, I I have to ask where do you go to to get a sense of what everybody's thinking right now within like the the QAnon community. Uh yeah. Well, there there there are a few places. There's a community on True Social. There's still an active community on X. I mean there there is still if you can believe it on on 8chan there's what they call the key research board where they're still making threads. Uh I checked there fre those those are really uh you know the main hangouts. There's also a couple of uh media enterprises that are based around Q and there's a there's a business called uh Badlands Media. They produce multiple video shows and and podcast and you can you can see them on Rumble which is like you know you know kind of a YouTube competitor. Uh so yeah there's still still a very active sort of like social media community and media general media ecosystem around QAnon. There are some people also who've retreated to Telegram because Telegram offers a a kind of uh infinite group call. So you'll have people who will just be sitting like for 8 to 12 hours a day in these kind of group calls uh just kind of chatting about stuff that comes up and those are those are little like um I guess like buckets of community and information that uh are often times pretty isolated and we have seen uh people you know more charismatic people take advantage of that and you know kind of um start to pretend that maybe they they actually have access to privilege information um since everybody comes there believing that in the first place and people are getting more and more desperate and aren't you know getting any relief uh from it. In fact quite the opposite from the president they they they are kind of peeling off into these uh strange subcults that that sometimes manifest um even in in the physical world um and and kind of um yeah essentially create these strange little sectarian cults. So, so you've got you've got these websites, you've got these message boards, you've got the Telegram group chats. Um, I know that this is very much a live ball, but what is the sense right now? Like, is there is there some general consensus on what happens next? Are people just kind of sitting and waiting for some shoe to drop? And very much the way that mainstream audiences are just kind of sitting and watching for the next shoe to drop. Maybe that'll be, you know, some grand jury testimony, which of course is going to be but it's going to be the next thing to happen. You know, we'll also see there's a um there's legislation right now that's pending that would force that would compel uh um that would compel the release of the Epstein files, but that probably won't take effect until September. It's called a discharge petition. So, it takes um a certain amount of days to what's called ripen um which allows them to act on it. So, you know, again, like what what is the general consensus right now? Well, I think it's interesting. It's like the most devoted like Qanon followers is that is that uh I mean they've been rewarded for sort of uh taking positions that sort of like defy expectations. You know, when Trump was running, he was a joke. He had no chance. He wound up getting elected. When he was finally elected, thought that, you know, the Muller investigation would sink him and he didn't. And then they people thought like January 6 would like end his political career. I certainly thought that. Um and then and then um and then but then he was elect elected again. So I feel like feel like uh these people who have been been following him for years feel like like well you know he like you know he managed to rise to power uh despite all of these uh obstacles despite everyone else thinking he's like down for the count despite thinking that he was no good. So, they just feel like they don't understand why he's doing this and they don't uh they don't know where this is going exactly, but they just have faith because they feel like that faith has been rewarded before. And don't you know, Brian, that other shoes don't drop. That's right. Well, yeah. I I I think, you know, I think a lot of people are sitting and waiting and hoping for that save, right? either it's the release of the of the grand jury testimony that's more favorable towards Trump than it is towards say I don't know anybody else you know ideally a Democrat. Um just something where they can kind of latch on and go, you know, almost like a, you know, they like a life preserver uh where they can go, "Oh, thank God." Well, now we know that the reason he said hoax was to he the he had to let the Democrats think that uh you know, he had dropped the ball on this so that they asked for the relief. Oh few. It It's like they're waiting for that checkmate 5D chess move that allows them to go, "Uh, I don't have to like go to my friends and family and explain why all of a sudden the thing that I I was telling them that Trump was going to expose over the last 12 years, you know, however long is actually he thinks it's a hoax now and he's not going to do anything and potentially implicated himself." So, I I think people are just kind of waiting. But maybe if they wait long enough and something doesn't come, something else might might be able to come by and scoop them up. Hopefully something healthier. I I don't know. I you know, the way that I've been thinking about this because my kind of northstar in politics is is persuasion. And so I can I can talk to my, you know, my my left-wing audience all day and get pats on the head, but really the goal here in politics is to broaden your coalition so that you can gain power, so that you can enact your agenda and and do something on healthcare, on reproductive rights, on climate change, on gun violence, on the minimum wage, all of the things, right? And so as I'm thinking about persuasion here, I'm wondering whether you think it's worth it, like at least with this subset of people to say, okay, on on one hand, either he knew that he was never going to release the files and just straight up lied to you, or on the other hand, uh he can't release the files because he's in them, in which case it's a cover up. Either way, it's bad. Either way, for these people especially, it should be disqualifying. is given given like your extensive knowledge of this community, is are the persuasion efforts worth it? Uh I I say I I'm never willing to give up on anyone else. I just I don't I don't uh I I don't have a lot of hope just because like I know like the research um about uh you know about cognitive dissonance and resolving cognitive dissonance and and the the research says that when they're met with disappointment when the real world doesn't meet their expectations when the things that they see in actual physical reality isn't in aligned with the world they have in their head they kind of double down on the world in their head. you know, that's just that's just human nature. I think it's worth it because even if we don't, I don't know, pull them over to the left side of politics. Let's just say ju just to just to be general. Um, we might pull them away from politics in general. They might, and you know, somebody who's deep might go, "H, you know what? This feels bad to keep following it." And, you know, we we've seen this in some cases in the past. Feels bad. I'm constantly having to explain myself. You know what? I'm gonna focus on my other hobby, fishing. Yeah. Whatever. Spending more time with my family. You know, even if it's not getting them to to come to our side of of, you know, political policy, whatever, or convert them into Democrats, convert them into liberals, leftists, any anything. um if you can get them out of that trench and get them back more involved with their friends and their families and a world outside of you know political internet discussions. Um I think that that's worth it. Uh and and I think you know one thing that we've seen over time is that the more time people stay away from internet and don't submerse themselves in in these in these culture in these subcultures um that that their family you know family and friends can find a a a working healthy relationship with them. So, I I do think it's worth it even if it's not to to convince them uh that your side, you know, has a better idea just to to to pull them away from a lot of the negative uh you know, side effects that come with um idolizing somebody like like Donald Trump. Yeah. I mean, look, uh when it comes to the toxic stew that is the internet, take it from four guys who marinate in this stew on a daily basis. I I can I can assure you. Um, you know, the the ironic thing about that is just like from a psychological perspective, a few years ago when I first started this, it was really easy to compartmentalize and I was able I mean I started doing uh political videos in in the beginning of the Trump era in 2017 2018 and but I was writing uh doing articles and written politics uh prior to that for a few years and it was always like I was always very capable of doing my work and then coming home, turning that part of my brain off. And and granted, I was lucky enough to be able to do that because even in Trump's first term, he was doing things that had a a that had major consequences for real people. Um, and so so I I recognized the the privilege that I had to be able to be in a position where I could just turn it off. But even just from a psychological perspective, after having been in this for so long, it has gotten more and more difficult to the point where I mean, now almost a decade later that I'm doing this, it's it's all but impossible to be able to just flip it off like a light switch. I mean, you're you're immersed in this stuff all day. And I guess I guess in that way I can kind of I can kind of um empathize with with what you know these these folks who are immersed with you know immersed in these message boards and these Qanon conspiracy theories because it be it kind of consumes you and it's it's difficult to to get away from it and I and I do find that if I'm able to pry myself away from work and you know go on a vacation or or sometimes I'll literally invite friends over so that I can't work because I know that if my friends aren't over my house then I'm just going to keep doing it and I can sit in front of my computer until 1:00 in the morning because there's always more work to do. Um, and so, you know, I I think that in in that scenario, yeah, getting getting away like doing whatever you can to get away from this stuff, whether whether it's just, you know, regular politics or deep in the depths of these conspiracy theories, just having distance in and of itself kind of breaks the the the spell, the hold that that um that the internet has over so many people. I would caution as well that thinking about all of this in terms of narratives and persuasion I think misses the point that most people uh do still believe politicians can convince us of something but that not that they follow through. Uh we we have a real crisis in terms of being able to actually provide to make any difference in in what seems like a system on autopilot. And so as long as the narratives don't actually match the material reality that people are dealing with on a on a daily basis and we don't have a good uh uh narrative andor policies behind it, then we're really not going to be able to put this Humpty Dumpty back together again. We we we really have to uh uh find a way for our politicians u to follow through in some tangible policy way. It does not feel good to vote for your guy to make a big hub and then to lose something as fundamental as the the you know the federal level right to abortion. Um, we if we can't show people that it's worth tuning in to the mainstream narrative and that the mainstream narrative sticks to an actual reality behind it that that that we can accomplish something that your vote, your belief even uh is connected to the levers of power, then we have a problem. And I think that is uh really well exemplified in the Epstein case because what we're all ignoring is the FBI went to his house on his island. They opened by all accounts a safe that had information in it that would probably be interesting to almost any human being of any political persuasion pretty much anywhere in the world. And yet where is that information? So we can debate uh QAnon on this or did the Democrats do more or did the Republicans do more to expose this. At the end of the day, the belief that that we have something extremely rotten at the core of this system is going to continue if we have the Federal Bureau of Investigation and you know the very people that we allow to essentially spy on citizens that that we allow to kind of have access to our personal lives and have you know power real power over us that they can't figure out something internally to get past these blockages. packages and bring us some semblance of truth, right? It's it's been it's been sacrifice after sacrifice. You they chip away at at our privacy, like what we're willing to allow them to do. They have full cart blanch of of basically the the the complete power of the government. But but you expect something in return for that. And I think the bare the bare minimum that we expect is to your exact point like what was in the safe for example. But when you get nothing in return for all of the sacrifices that we've made, I think that creates I think that creates like a a foundation where people then become so disillusioned in government. And granted, it's not just in conspiracy theories, right? It's when you have when you have Democrats as well who come in office and say that they're going to do one thing, protect, you know, expand access to healthcare, protect abortion rights. And granted, there are specific reasons why why they're not able to do that. But just in in general, when you have, you know, from from the Democrat's perspective, if you're not fighting as hard as you can to get the things done because maybe you're more focused on on protecting the institutions of government, protecting the filibuster, whatever it may be, that really lends itself to this idea that, okay, now people are going to lose faith in government because you did say one thing and you didn't go to the wall to get it done. And and I know that look, when Trump wants to get something done, he he gets it done to I mean it's to his credit, but also it he strikes fear in the in the hearts of a lot of people, myself included, because he'll just ignore, you know, the separation of powers. He'll ignore court orders. He'll ignore all of this stuff. But I think what his followers like is that he just does it. He figures it the out. And for Democrats, that would be completely unheard of because, well, we have we have to respect the norms. We have to respect the institutions. we have to respect the filibuster and so we couldn't possibly do this stuff. But I think it's going to be incumbent um at least, you know, again on the persuasion front, it's going to be incumbent on Democrats to not feel so, I guess, bound by by um our our institutions and our norms, but rather to actually deliver for people because they don't care about the norms. They don't care about the institutions. They just want to see health care. They want to see less expensive groceries. they just want to see health uh uh uh prescription drugs that they can afford whatever it may be. Um and so this idea of like of like delivering so that people don't become disillusioned so that they can fall into these you know at the at the extreme fall into these conspiratorial camps but you know at the not extreme give up on politics and and I think at the end of the day that's what we have to prevent. Well said. So with that said, um I want to give you guys the opportunity now uh for folks who are watching and listening, how can they see and hear more from you and and what projects are you working on that might be interesting to folks? So obviously we continue with the QAA podcast which is what we've now come to call QAnon anonymous and uh you know you can go and find that anywhere where podcasts are distributed. But the thing we're really excited about right now is that we've started a miniseries network uh which will allow us to kind of pour deeper resources and more attention into you know these kind of limited series that are going to be uh entrusted to some of our internal talent and some pretty cool uh external talent. And we launched that uh it's now at cursed media.net net and basically for an annual fee people get access to all of the different miniseries and there will be three coming out this year the first of which is science in transition which is a really interesting deep dive that we've not seen anybody else do by Liv Agar and Spencer Barrows into the idea of transness as a kind of medical diagnosis um and the relationship of various institutions um you know especially in the fields of psychology the medical fields and of course politics uh into that have created a kind of backlash that uh you can actually trace back um all the way to the 60s and 70s. So yeah, that's all at cursed media.net. So definitely check that out. We're very proud of it and we think it's a one of the few totally independent uh projects of this type uh that also will be tackling um subjects that you don't see tackled anywhere else. Awesome. Well, I will put that link right here on the screen and also in the post description of this video if you're listening on the podcast. I'm going to put it in the show notes. So, uh, with that said, Jake, Julian, and Travis, thank you guys so much for, uh, for giving some insight into this very bizarre world. And, uh, let's not make it three years before we jump on again. Yeah. You know, it's messed up when the QAA guys have to come on. That's right. That's right. Yeah. We always have to apologize. We always have to apologize. if you're here. It It can't be a good thing. It can't be a good thing. But very grateful for your time and uh talk to you guys soon. Thanks very much, Brian. [Music]
BREAKING: Ron Wyden Details Investigation Into Epstein's Treasury Records, Demands DOJ Release Files Forbes Breaking News Jul 17, 2025
During remarks on the Senate floor Thursday, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) spoke about his investigation into Jeffrey Epstein's records at the Treasury Department and demanded the Department of Justice release all its files.
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Transcript
Ron Wyden, Senator from Oregon. Mr. President, Donald Trump has made some far-fetched statements over the last few months, but a stunner in the last few days was his claim that the Jeffrey Epstein matter was a hoax and a scam. Here is why the president is wrong. The figure at the center of this story was an ultra- well-connected sex trafficker. He was a serial rapist of women and young girls. And for some reason, the Trump administration that claimed they'd be the most transparent administration ever turned on a dime. The president had run on a campaign with a promise to expose the Epstein files. Now he and the attorney general, Pam Bondi, say nope, nothing to investigate when it comes to Epstein and sex trafficking. All these claims are just ludicrous. I want the American people to know that that's wrong. If you want to know why, just look at the latest report from our investigators that was discussed in the New York Times this morning. Now, somewhere in the Treasury Department, Mr. President, locked away in a cabinet drawer is a big Epstein file that's full of actionable information. follow the money details about his financing and operations that await investigation. Last year, the Biden administration allowed our investigators to look at portions of the file. We did that at the Treasury Building. Here is what it says. Treasury's Epstein file details, Mr. President, 4,725 wire transfers. Let me repeat that. 4,725 wire transfers adding up to nearly $1.1 billion flowing in and out of just one of Mr. Epstein's bank accounts. If you ask me, that is more than 4,000 potential lines of investigation right there. Hundreds of millions more flowed through other accounts. That's even a lot more to investigate. The file shows that Mr. Epstein used multiple Russian banks which are now under sanctions to process payments related to sex trafficking. A lot of the women and girls he targeted came from Russia, Belarus, Turkey and elsewhere. one shudders to think about the kinds of people who must have been involved in trafficking these women and young girls out of those companies and into the Epstein web of abuse. Again, these are all potential leads, Mr. President, the Department of Justice ought to be digging into. This is about years and years of international sex trafficking. None of this is a hoax. None of it is a scam. And I'd like to say I consider it in insulting to the intelligence of the American people for the Trump administration to simply say there is nothing to investigate here. Now, when the Trump administration came in with a lot of fanfare about transparency and openness, I said, I'm going to follow up on that. So I wrote to the attorney general, Miss Bondi, Treasury Secretary Bessant, FBI Director Patel, and I asked them all to produce the Epstein file to the Senate Finance Committee so it could be reviewed. In fact, I've made that request multiple times. The Trump commitment to transparency based on the response didn't mean a whole lot because they just refused. Here's what one Treasury official wrote back to me. I'll quote here. The Department of Treasury has previously made documents available relating to the matter in response to your inquiries. Accordingly, we understand that you have the information you seek from the Treasury related to this request. We thank you for your attention to this important issue. Mr. President, for anybody who's familiar with how these discussions go in Washington DC, what I just read was code for the bureaucracy saying, "You're asking for information. Go pound sand. The Trump administration may be trying to close the books on the Epstein sex trafficking, but I want it understood as a senior member of the Senate Finance Committee where we spend a lot of time looking at where substantial sums of money are going, particularly if they may be promoting wrongdoing and helping to evade taxes. We are going to stay on this fight to hold the wealthy individuals accountable for the harm that they clearly were involved in in injuring the young women and others in this sex trafficking. So I'm going to have more follow-up for Attorney General Bondi very quickly. As for today, Mr. president. If she doesn't want to do the investigating, doesn't want the DOJ to do it, let me just restate my original demand. Have that Treasury information given to the Senate Finance Committee and have us on a bipartisan basis do our work. That's what we do in important investigations. If the Trump people believe they need additional authority to carry out the requests that I make again this afternoon, let me offer to help them write the bill myself. the idea that there is nothing more to investigate. Not when you have 4,000 wire transfers, many of them associated with the possibility of wrongdoing and sex traffic promoting. The idea that you have that and there's nothing to investigate when it comes to the Epstein sex trafficking operation is ridiculous. Pam Bondi was the attorney general in the state of Florida where a lot of the Epste Epstein crimes were committed. The attorney general ought to know better of all people. Mr. President, I can't begin to understand the president's handling of this or why he thinks this is just going to go away. But I'm here to say that our investigators have spent three full years looking into this. And the reason why is because we feel so strongly about the horror of sex trafficking and our commitment to root it out. The president of the Senate is new to this body, but I'm sure he's dealt with these issues before. You can't have a much bigger horror in front of you than sex trafficking, abuse. So, we're talking about real evil, real evil done to women and girls by Jeffrey Epstein. And Mr. President, nobody gets to sweep that under the rug. I yel the floor.
How close was Jeffrey Epstein to Israel's Mossad? The Grayzone Jul 18, 2025 #TheGrayzone
The Grayzone's Anya Parampil and Max Blumenthal discuss allegations that late financier and trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was an Israeli intelligence asset.
Transcript
And the Epstein case goes so deep into the intelligence world. And Tucker Carlson kind of broke that open. I don't know if Jeffrey Epstein is a Mossad agent. He has connections to three former Israeli prime ministers. One especially is Ehud Barak, who visited his home 36 times. There are pictures of him kind of trying to disguise himself as he goes in and out. He started a surveillance company with possible help from Epstein. Ehud Olmert had met with Epstein. Shimon Perez had met with Epstein. Epstein hooked up meetings for JP Morgan executives with Netanyahu. And Epstein sought multiple passports to travel to Israel and Africa. He traveled to Israel in 2008 when he was fleeing prosecution.
And then there's also the whole issue of Epstein in the Virgin Islands where what what Epstein is known to have done and this is what he appears to have done with Les Wexner. Less Wexner who helped uh Harold Howard Lutnik buy his town home through a holding company he and Jeffrey Epstein controlled next to Epstein and less Wexner enabled Jeffrey Epstein to buy his own town home for0 down. What Epstein was would do is he'd go to places like the Virgin Islands and offshore their taxes. And when Jeffrey Epste came under investigation, remember that lady who was screaming at Matt Taibbe and Michael Shelonburgger for the Twitter files in Congress? Um Aaron, you're muted. She was the Virgin Islands um representative. Stacy Plask. Stacy Plask. uh she she uh has been has received I think $200,000 from Jeffrey Epstein to not investigate him. And the attorney general, Lee Fang, has been talking about this a lot. The attorney general in the Virgin Islands was paid off by Epstein and he's now currently the attorney general. I mean, there's so many angles to this story. I don't see the press actually going down there, but you know, Democrats are implicated, Republicans are implicated. There's an Israel angle for sure. And many people are wondering, you know, do do does is has Trump been told to shut this down by some of the foreign intelligence agencies and powerful people who are integrated into those agencies like Les Wexner is a proxy for Israel in the US in many ways. They've been told told Trump to shut this down for their own sake. It also indictes these prominent financeers. Who are they really? Where do they get their money from? How do they operate in the US? They're constantly just moving monies money around. Less Wexner and these other figures that are responsible for Jeffrey Epstein's for Jeffrey Epstein making his fortune. Uh they're all pro-Israel uh big money men. And so there's just a lot that like that could be a whole another uh in investigation. I know Max, you've talked about how the Israelis use figures like that. uh to move money in the United States. So I remember also during the initial raids on Epstein uh that they said in one of his uh safes they found a Saudi passport which was an odd one but that seems to suggest some sort of intelligence connection. I don't know how he otherwise would have just gotten a Saudi passport. It's not something that that most people could get their hands on. Yeah. I mean, it's it's it's what what it really is for sure. Let's pretend let's just say we have no evidence that Jeffrey Epste is a Mossad agent who worked for Mossad. And we're going to get into that in a second. But Jeffrey Epstein existed at the heart of the Zionist world. If he hadn't been exposed, he would have been one of those donors who would have been forcing Harvard University to uh criminalize its students for justice and Palestine group. Les Wexner did the same thing at Ohio State University. He was down with all those guys. Alan Dersowitz was his right-hand man and he uh was seeking to um start a kind of transhumanist center at Harvard University to perfect the human race and Durowitz would come and visit him there. Durowitz visited his island. Durowitz was asked by Netanyahu to represent Israel at the United Nations when Netanyahu came back in 2009, but Dersowitz didn't want to give up his US passport. So Epstein is deep in that world and that world doesn't want to talk about it at all. I mean, uh, Ohio State rad in $336,000 from Jeffrey Epstein through the Les Wexner center. And this is all moneywashing. It might have come from Wexner himself through Epstein back there. and Ohio State cannot remove even though Wexner stepped down as CEO of Victoria's Secret because of all these revelations accused by women of uh you know actually you know participating in the sexual abuse of Jeffrey Epstein Ohio State can't dislodge him because they depend on him so substantially for money he owns downtown Columbus Ohio and this is Epstein's right-hand man he was uh also tight buddies with uh what's his name? Lee Weiss, the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania uh business magnet, who is the father of Barry Weiss, who was just at a off thereord semi-secret retreat in Sun Valley with the uh you know top figures in tech finance. Chuck Schumer was there. Uh Allen and company, we talked about it last week. Allen is one of her top donors. So, what I'm saying is all these people are scratching each other's backs and Epstein was in the middle of it. So, it just it's perfect that this would have to be buried at some point along with the uh the missing minute. I mean, this videotape of Epstein's cell appears to have been manipulated. So, uh I want to talk about TPUSA though. I'm kind of like going down the rabbit hole too far, but I wanted to establish that. So, here's Tucker Carlson at uh TPUSA just like everything exploded after this point. not acceptable. And I think the real answer is not acceptable. And I think the real answer is Jeffrey Ebstein was working on behalf of intel services. Probably not American. And we have every right to ask on whose behalf was he working. How does a guy go from being a math teacher at the Dalton school in the late 70s with no college degree to having multiple airplanes, a private island, and the largest residential house in Manhattan? And Donald Bar, William Bar's father was the headmaster of Dalton school, hired Jeffrey Epstein, right? Yep. Yeah. Where did all the money come from? And no one has ever gotten to the bottom of that because no one has ever tried. And moreover, it's extremely obvious to anyone who watches that this guy had direct connections to a foreign government. Now, no one's allowed to say that that foreign government is Israel because we have been somehow cowed into thinking that that's naughty. And listen to the applause. There is nothing wrong with saying that. There is nothing hateful about saying that. There's nothing anti-Semitic about saying there's nothing even anti-Israel about saying that. I've spent my entire life pretty much in Washington where I knew and loved a number of people, including one very close person who worked at CIA. That has never prohibited me from saying I think the CIA has done some horrible things. Murdered a bunch of people, participated in the murder of a sitting US president. It's got a whole trail of crimes. That doesn't make me a disloyal American. It doesn't make me anti-American in any sense. I was born here. My family's been here for hundreds of years. I love this country. That's why I live here. So, criticizing the behavior of a government agency does not make you a hater. It makes you a free person. So, we get the point. And this was sort of the lecture that so many young I don't even know what to call them, America firsters had been waiting to hear delivered to the conservative movement. You know, don't trust the elites. The CIA is a secret government. This is not like hating America. And Israel is actually uh kind of evil and plays a malign role in US politics. But what what I mean people are you know I see liberals saying oh this is the stupid wing of the Republican party. This seems to me like this the the critical thinking wing. I would rather have Israel scrutinized in a different way. The US support for Israel scrutinized in a different way just in in terms of like morality like why are we supporting this insane mass murdering ethnostate and how does this serve our interests? I think that's where the focus should be. But if it has to be through the prism of Jeffrey Epstein, like I'll take it. Um, even if I I think, you know, I'm not ready to endorse some of the maximalist views on on Jeffrey Epstein and Israel and Mossad and all that stuff because I just I haven't seen the evidence to sway me in that direction. But whether I'm right or wrong, um, I do think this kind of scrutiny on Israel is healthy. Uh, and if this is the way this is the form it has to take, uh, then I'm all for it. And it I wish also what we're seeing at that conservative gathering would be mirrored on the democratic side. But uh whenever the issue comes whenever the issue of Israel comes up on the democratic side even as it's reflected in the polls with people being disgusted with Israel is doing the democratic leadership still will not budge. So so far right now we're seeing more movement it seems more openness inside the MAGA movement than we are on the Democratic side. Even though it's even though it's through this prism, this relatively narrow prism of of Jeffrey Epstein. I mean, I think Epstein, the way that these people discuss it, kind of gets to the heart that they're what they're getting at is US government manipulation by the Israelis. That's what they're getting at. And that exists whether Epstein is proven to be part of that or not. And if he's not working for the MSAD, I mean, what Max you already laid out a lot of the connected a lot of the the dots or just who was behind him. Uh the fact that they again seized all these cameras in every room and tapes that there was some sort of uh filming and all like that was going on. They won't tell us now what what they discovered in any of that in any of those seizures, but what was all of that for? I mean, and what what all of the the fleeing to Israel to avoid arrest? I mean, it could just be because that is where I guess pedophiles tend to go if they don't want to be it's where people who are Jewish go who don't want to be extradited uh no matter what they do because they just don't extradite. The only person who Israel has refused uh into its borders who is fleeing crimes was I don't know if anyone can guess this. Uh he was he was portrayed in the in the um in the uh Godfather. I know who it was but I can't remember. Meyer Lansky. [Music]
Tucker Carlson and Darryl Cooper on the True History of Jeffrey Epstein and Ongoing Cover-Up by Tucker Carlson and Darryl Cooper Streamed live on Jul 17, 2025 The Tucker Carlson Show [Lightly edited]
The true history of the Jeffrey Epstein case, from America’s most honest historian. Darryl Cooper, live.
Darryl Cooper is the creator of The Martyr Made Podcast, and is the co-host of The Unraveling w/Jocko Willink, and Provoked w/Scott Horton. He lives with his family on his farm in Idaho.
Transcript
Daryl Cooper, ladies and gentlemen. It feels so naughty and forbidden to be sitting here with you. It's like getting caught in a strip bar. Just kidding I'm so grateful that you came.
Not everyone feels that way.
I just want to dispense with the political aspect of this by reading a verbat. I don't have the tape for some reason, but this was my old friend Marc Levin on his show today. And this is the transcript that I got and it actually says in parentheses, "screaming like an old woman." I don't know if that was actually on Fox or not, but I'm quoting, "Why are these insane, knuckleheaded, know nothings, these propagandists, these demagogues, given platforms?"
Someone gave us a platform? Amazing "By God, I'm gonna take this crap on for as long as I live because it's destroying our youth and destroying their minds."
Glad he's standing up. Somebody has to.
That guy sounds like a monster. Who's he talking about? You and me? So I think it'd be really fun to spend maybe three hours, you know, being mean to Mark Levin. I've already done that. I want to create a documentary record. You've already done this with your podcast, but for people who haven't seen it, I want to create a documentary record here of everything that we know, or think we know, without too much speculation. Just like, stick to the facts about Jeffrey Epstein, the basic questions of Jeffrey Epstein. I feel like I know a lot about this topic. You know much more than I know. So without further preamble and just being clear, I'm not here to make political points about this, or comment on the unfolding drama around it, which is quite remarkable. I don't really understand it. So people tuning in to learn what is happening at the White House or in the Congress about this, I can't really say at this point. There will be time for that. But for right now, I'd really just like to learn about Jeffrey Epstein. So with that, who was Jeffrey Epstein?
Jeffrey Epstein just started out as a normal guy. Born in Coney Island, 1953, in the 1950s. First record we really have of him, when he appears for us, is in 1974, when he's hired to teach mathematics at the Dalton School, which is an elite private school in New York City. Now I'm not familiar with New York city K-12 education system, but I'm told it's a very elite place that can have their pick of mathematics teachers from all over the world if they want it.
And so they hire a guy who's 20 years old, who dropped out of college after two years at Cooper Union, with no teaching experience, to teach math at this school, basically at the age of 20?
At the age of 20, basically, on the strength of a meeting with the headmaster of the school at the time, a guy by the name of Donald Barr.
Who was Donald Barr?
Yeah, so that name might sound familiar. Donald Barr is a very interesting character, not least because his son, Bill Barr, was the Attorney General who had Jeffrey Epstein arrested and oversaw his death in the federal jail that he was in.
Can I just ask you. I already said I wouldn't interject, but I'm asking to pause already. What are the statistical actual odds that the Attorney General of the United States who arrested Jeffrey Epstein, oversaw his death, declared his death a suicide before the investigation ended, is the son of the guy who hired Jeffrey Epstein at age 20, with no teaching experience or college degree, to teach at one of the most prestigious schools in Manhattan? What are the odds? If you were like, hey, Grok, what are the odds? What do you think the odds are of that?
Well, whatever the odds are, let's add a few more zeros to that. Okay, so Donald Barr was also somebody who used to work for the OSS, which was the precursor to the CIA, back during World War II. So he has that connection. Donald Barr also dabbled in science fiction writing in his spare time. One of the books that he wrote is called Space Relations, and he wrote it right around this time that he hired Jeffrey Epstein. And I've read the book, and you can go read about it on Wikipedia. It's close enough to basically what the plot is, if you want to get the idea of it. The long and short is --
But you read the book?
Oh, yeah, I have. I have a copy. I make sure I get a copy of things like that. I've got a copy of it. You know, I went out and made sure I got a copy of the Architectural Digest in Washington, Life magazines that profiled Tony Podesta's house and art collection. Just in case, you know, just in case it disappears.
And so, yeah, I got a copy of it. I read it. It's not a good book. It's a pulpy kind of L. Ron Hubbard style science fiction book, sort of. But the basic plot of it involves the main character who is kidnapped and sold into slavery on this alien planet that's ruled by seven oligarchs who just have been corrupted by their power and their wealth to the point where they're basically insane. And they spend most of their time breeding young slaves and kidnapping children from around the universe to bring them home and use them as sex slaves. And the main character, he is given to the one female oligarch on the planet. And at first, you know, he's sort of one of her slaves and victims, but then she takes a liking to him and he joins her and, and participates in what's going on. And there are scenes in there right near the beginning, there's a scene of these grotesque aliens that kidnapped the guy, one of them makes the prisoners watch while he rapes a 15 year old virginal redhead. And so these are the books that Donald Barr, former OSS agent, father of Bill Barr, the Attorney General who had Jeffrey Epstein arrested and oversaw his death wrote. These are the kind of books that he was writing at the time that he hired the most notorious pedophile in American history. So whatever the odds of the first part were, you can probably add a few zeros to that. And we can keep adding zeros if you want.
I do. I mean, it's hard to believe that this is real, but it is real. What you're describing is real.
Yeah, totally real, totally verifiable. This is not stuff you're going to find on fringe websites. You can find it in any mainstream story about it, Wikipedia even, whatever.
So Bill Barr himself, you know, he was an intelligence connected guy, very deeply. His first job out of college was as an intern for the CIA in the mid-70s. And that doesn't sound like much until you learn that he was a legal intern with the CIA whose job was to be the liaison to Congress during the Church & Pike Committee hearings that were really like the first and only time that the CIA has faced a real threat of of oversight and and clamping down on its activities. And so this was a very, very critical time when a lot of the agency secrets were coming out and they were facing the possibility of, well, they didn't know. I mean, the Agency might have gotten shut down, you know, if this had gone badly for them. And so Bill Barr is the legal intern, who is the liaison. And what that meant was, you know, he was the guy that when Congress requested some documents, he goes back to the agency and says, here's what they want, okay, well, here's what we can give them. And he goes back and convinces them that this is all there is, or that they don't need the rest, or anything like that. He was that guy who smoothed that over and made it work. And he apparently did a very good job because the boss of the CIA at the time was George H.W. Bush. George H.W. Bush was elected president 1988, took over in 89, and he brought in Bill Barr to be his Attorney General, who's really who spent most of his time like, at least the big story that was going on at the time was cleaning up what was left of the Iran Contra affair. And so you have the guy who was the legal intern for the CIA during the Church and Pike Committee hearings brought in by the director of the CIA at the time to be the Attorney General who is cleaning up the Iran Contra affair that took place, obviously, while Bush was the Vice president. Bill Barre goes into the private sector for a while, then reemerges when Donald Trump needs an Attorney General of his own. Not for any particular reason, I guess, he just happens to arrest the guy that his father gave his first job to, a job that he was totally unqualified for, and to a guy who had proclivities that most of us find very strange and unacceptable and are very, very rare, but coincidentally happened to be the very topic that Donald Barr, Bill Barr's father, liked to write books about.
So very strange. It could all be a coincidence, but the odds are against that. That's a remarkable story.
And I believe, and I said it to him, that Bill Barr as Attorney General helped cover up Epstein's death, the details of his death.
Again, we hear the facts. The facts are that he declared it a suicide before they'd finished the investigation or even really began the investigation. So that alone suggests dishonesty, Or lack of rigor or something.
What happened to Jeffrey Epstein at Dalton? How long was he there?
He was there for about a year and a half, two years only, and then he was fired for poor performance, is how it got written up. And maybe it was that he had no teaching experience, and no college degree. It may have just been he was a bad math teacher. But there are people who had children as students at the time who actually say he was a good math teacher. So maybe it had to do with something else. Maybe it had to do with the fact that there were already allegations. So maybe it had to do with something else. Maybe it had to do with the fact that there were already allegations against Jeffrey Epstein by the girls he was teaching at this high school of inappropriate behavior. He would even show up to high school parties sometimes where kids were drinking and partying, and he would show up as the teacher, the adult, and kind of just try to join in. So there were those complaints that were going on. But while he was at Dalton School before he got run out, the father of one of the students he was teaching was the CEO of the investment bank Bear Stearns at the time. Ace Greenberg, he's known as. And Epstein approached, I've heard it was Barr himself. I don't know if that's the case, but he approached somebody who was one of his bosses, or one of the people who had brought him into the school, and asked if he would make the introduction to Ace Greenberg, and put in a good word for him. And so he meets Greenberg, and when he gets run out of Dalton, he brings him on at Bear Stearns and they put him to work. So by this point, Jeffrey Epstein's like 22, 21, thereabouts. This is 1976. I think he was born in 53. So yeah, 23 years old maybe. With no college degree, but two years of college at Cooper Union, and he's been a high school math teacher. And he got basically fired from that job. And he gets hired at Bear Stearns.
He gets hired at Bear Stearns. Is that normal?
I couldn't tell you, especially back then. I'm not really sure.
Does it sound normal? It doesn't sound normal, but whatever.
So he gets brought in and the story goes that they put him on the options desk at first, but he was not very good at it, or not very engaged or interested. And so they put him in their special products division where Jimmy Cain, who took over as CEO of Bear Stearns from Ace Greenberg, described what Epstein did there in the special products division. And basically, in Wall street financial speak, he said that his job was to help wealthy clients hide their money and to create tax advantageous transactions, that kind of thing. But it was to help wealthy clients hide their money. And while he was doing that, he met and came into contact with a lot of well known people who became very important for the rest of his life. Wealthy clients. And one of them was Edgar Bronfman, who will come up later in our story. He's one of the heirs to the Seagram's liquor fortune. A very connected guy. We'll probably get to that in a while. But that only lasts four years. He's there at Bear Stearns from 76 to 1980, and then he gets run out of Bear Stearns for a regulatory violation. And the story kind of goes like that. The official story from the people who were all involved in it at the time was that he was breaking the rules and they were very, very, very upset about it. But apparently he stayed friends, close friends, with Ace Greenberg and Jimmy Kane for a long time after that. And he banked with Bear Stearns all the way up until the time the investment bank collapsed in 2008. So there weren't that many hard feelings apparently. But he left. And I think the reason for it is probably pretty obvious. He just got a little too aggressive, and flew a little too close to the sun doing the job that they had hired him to do, and so he had to leave because there was a violation. They didn't want the attention and everything. But he landed on his feet. He stayed friends with the people who hired him, and this is where it gets really interesting.
So again, to go over his resume, he does two years of college, drops out, gets hired as a high school math teacher, is run out of that job ignominiously, either for poor performance or for harassing his female students. Then he goes to work for Bear Stearns, does that for just a few years, and gets run out of there for a regulatory violation. And that is his resume at this point.
There's nothing else I'm leaving out. The very next year, this would make him, I guess, 28 years old in 1981, we have him on a private airplane with a big time British arms broker named Douglas Lease, who was a very big player back in the 1980s. He's on a private plane to go to a meeting at the Pentagon with this guy.
Okay, not for the first time, I'm going to stop you and say it doesn't make any sense at all.
Not if you're looking at it in a conventional way, it doesn't. Not if you assume the world works in the ways that we're told it works. That doesn't make any sense, right? And so you have to ask what is it that a guy like Douglas Lease would want? What interest would he have in a guy like Jeffrey Epstein even if he was a money man of some kind? Presumably a guy like that can have any money man he wants. Why does he need a guy like Jeffrey Epstein? And I think the answer is, and this is the answer that a lot of researchers have come to over the years, and I think it's the most obvious one, at least the simplest, is that when you look at the kind of things that somebody like Lease would do, it's not as if Lease owned a weapons manufacturer. That's not what he did. He was a fixer. He was a guy who made the deals happen. He made sure the right people got paid off and that everything was kind of smoothed over so that these things would go through. He was mentioned, for example, in the UK Parliament in the 1980s in reference to the Al-Yamamah arms deal with Saudi Arabia, which is the biggest weapons deal in UK history, I think to this day. BAE Systems alone has made $46 billion off this deal over the years. And I think that was up through 2010 or something. So it's probably higher now. But there have been allegations from politicians, from lawyers, journalists, other weapons companies who were upset about their competition getting a leg up this way, that there was bribery, there was all kinds of shady stuff going on behind the scenes to make sure that the deal went the way that they wanted it to go. And, you know, you think a guy like Lease, whose job is to go around and make sure that people are being paid off with illicit funds that cannot be traced, because then you end up like Lockheed Martin did when they got caught bribing officials in Japan to sign off on a weapons deal there, and nobody wants that, you got to hide your money better. You got to figure out how to do that in a way that nobody's going to track it. And that's why you need a guy like Jeffrey Epstein. You're not going to be able to walk in the front door of Goldman Sachs and say, "I need to talk to one of your money managers. Hey, can you launder this money for me?" You need a guy who's morally compromised, who is willing to get down in the dirt and do this kind of work. And that is what Jeffrey Epstein had just spent the last four years at Bear Stearns doing. I can't remember ever coming across how it is he met Lease. It was probably through the wealthy clients that he was working for there at Bear Stearns. So that when he did get run out, they made sure he landed on his feet, and he was doing something that he could actually succeed at.
And so you go through the 1980s, and Lease is the guy who introduces him to Robert Maxwell. He introduces him to a lot of big players and figures in European politics and in the economy, and introduces him to Maxwell. And Maxwell introduces him to his daughter Ghislaine, who became his partner in crime, I guess you'd say, over the years. And Robert Maxwell's a super interesting character because, you know, this is the reason that I brought up near the beginning that there's a lot of people out there who just want to talk about the Epstein list. They want there to be a safe that the FBI opens up, or drills a hole and cracks into, and then there's a ledger signed in blood. "I, Jeffrey Epstein, compromise these famous movie stars and politicians on these days." That's what people want. They're not going to get that. That kind of thing doesn't exist. The really interesting aspect of it is encapsulated in just one incident, and I guess this came out after Epstein was arrested during the first Trump administration, that Alexander Acosta, who was Trump's Labor Secretary at the time, he had been the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of Florida in charge of prosecuting Epstein's first sex crimes case back in the mid 2000s. And we'll get to all this later, but Epstein was given a very, very, to call it a light sentence is being very generous. I'll get into the details of how it all came together and what the actual sentence was later. But he was asked in his vetting process, Alexander Acosta, "Hey, if this comes up, this is a potential scandal. You gave this pedophile with all these victims, and they had like 40 witnesses in the 2007, 2008 case on the record, corroborating each other's stories independently. I mean, this was the most open and shut case you can imagine." We'll get into the case here in a bit. But he was asked, "How could you? What's your excuse for giving this guy the deal that you gave him? Because it's kind of crazy." And he said, "Well, I was told that Epstein belonged to Intelligence, and to leave it alone." Now this is from an unnamed source in the administration who was involved in that vetting process, as told to the journalist Vicki Ward. I don't think Ward would make that up, and I don't think she would embellish it.
Well, I have something to add to this, which is true, and I would be delighted to talk to Mr. Acosta anytime, by the way, so I say this with a caveat that he's not said this to me, but I believe that he's been asked about that, and that he did not deny it. And that his response was, "That's true, but I don't remember who said it to me." Well, how many people can tell the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida to drop a case against a pedophile with 40 on the record witnesses corroborating each other's stories? There's not very many people who can tell them to do that. There's not many people who can murder an inmate in federal lockup in Manhattan either. I mean, who's Acosta going to take that order from that has enough juice that he's going to say, "Yes, boss," and actually go do that? The Deputy Attorney General and the Attorney General, maybe. I mean, there's just not that many people who can do that. And we'll get into this later. It was just incredibly shady how it was handled from day one. Anyway, I'll put that aside, because the interesting thing is, I don't know if they put people under oath when they do these vettings -- probably not -- but he told somebody in a setting where it mattered, and where he wasn't being watched. It's behind closed doors. He said that Epstein belonged to Intelligence, which could mean a lot of things. A lot of people want to hear that he worked for the CIA, or the Mossad, or something like that. But there's a lot of wiggle room there.
I think Naftali Bennett, the former Israeli prime minister, just came out recently and said, "I can say categorically that Jeffrey Epstein did not work for the Mossad." Okay, so he wasn't an employee of the Mossad. Was he an asset of Israeli military intelligence? You know, Bennett's not lying, but he's kind of not telling the whole truth either. And so you got to be careful with the wiggle room in the words that people use. Maybe I'm missing something here -- I'm not a journalist or anything -- but I would think that when there is a story like the Jeffrey Epstein story, that every time any little piece of information has dropped about the Epstein story ever since he was arrested, it doesn't matter what it is, any little drib and drab, it goes viral. It is the number one story that night. It gives the highest ratings of any show or anything. Whoever talks about it, whatever it is, everybody wants more information on this story. It's just too good to be true from like a network or newspaper perspective, right. You talk about a billionaire playboy who has connections with world governments and the U.S. Government, including wealthy famous people, business owners, people that everybody has heard of and sees on TV all the time, that he was running a mass pedophile ring. And the labor secretary under Donald Trump, who was the guy in charge of prosecuting him in 2007, said that he belonged to intelligence. I would think that every newspaper in the country, and every cable news channel in the country, would have a team of reporters camped out on that dude's lawn to stick a microphone in his face every time he left his house and say, "What did you mean by that? Can we get some kind of clarity on whether this pedophile belonged to Intelligence? But we don't get that. And when you don't get things like that, you get a lot of room for speculation. It's kind of justified speculation. And instead you get a lot of emphasis on the sex part, which deserves attention, of course. These are sex crimes that are in some cases against minors. It's horrible, not acceptable. But the other parts are completely ignored. Like what was this guy doing, this Cooper Union non graduate who worked at Bear Stearns? And then he's with an arms dealer flying to a meeting at the Pentagon. Like take three steps back. What is that? Hired by a guy in his first job who had connections to intelligence through the OSS, and whose son was a CIA connected guy.
So the reason I threw out all of these intelligence connections, all this circumstantial stuff that doesn't attach necessarily, the fact that Donald Barr worked for the OSS back during the war, that his son Bill Barr worked for the CIA, that doesn't mean anything about Epstein. I think his son Bill Barr spent six years at the CIA. So he wasn't just an intern, he was an employee. But it's not just circumstantial because you have apparently the former labor secretary, former U.S. attorney, federal prosecutor, saying he belonged to Intelligence. So anyway, I'm not trying to justify my interest in this, because I don't think it needs justifying. But I think the people who haven't covered the material parts of the story that actually matters, they need to justify their lack of interest in it. It's natural to start asking questions when a question that would occur to anybody who just heard a five minute synopsis of the story, and they're from Mars, and they have never heard any of it before, you tell them the short story, a five minute version of it that I just told you, and the first thing they're going to ask is, "Well, what did he mean when he said that Epstein belonged to Intelligence? What's going on there?" And you can't get a journalist to ask that question, right? And so it's natural for us to start wondering why that is. Because this bears on the purpose of this interview, the purpose of all questions that I've ever raised about Epstein, the central question is, "Who runs the world? Who's making the decisions, and on whose behalf?" This idea that there are 100, whatever, nation states, each acting on its own, that's not true. And so what is true? This may point us in that direction.
When we go back to the 1980s, I mean, it's just such a fascinating time, because in the Iran Contra deal, -- Mike Benz likes to point this out, and he's great on all of the Epstein stuff in the 80s, and a lot of the intelligence shenanigans in general going on back then -- is that it really provides a window into the question you're asking right now. "Who runs the world? Who's actually in charge of everything that's going on? How is power structured, and how does it operate? And if you go back to the Church and Pike Committee hearings, then you roll into the Carter administration where he brings Admiral Stansfield Turner to run the CIA, and basically gives him a directive to pare down the agency's operational commitments and the things that it does in the field, and you start focusing more on what Truman thought he was getting himself into, which was, you know, a bunch of analysts to help keep the President informed as he made decisions, and by all accounts, Admiral Turner tried to do that job with some enthusiasm, then you get to the point where by the 1980s, the CIA's ability to operate is under a lot of scrutiny, and limited in ways that it never had been before. I mean, if you go back to 50s, 60s and 70s, I mean, the CIA were just cowboys.
They're dosing elephants with LSD. They're visiting Jack Ruby in prison and turning him crazy.
And so it's right at the time their activities are being curtailed, and they are under a lot of scrutiny, that you start to see the emergence of the system that we have now that, that pops up again and again whenever we end up in a place like Ukraine, or just anywhere, where you have institutions like the National Endowment for Democracy, or USAID, a lot of these organizations that are not actually the CIA. You have like one of the former heads of the National Endowment for Democracy in an interview almost bragging in his tone, saying, "We do all the jobs that the CIA used to do." And so the CIA was outsourced. You know, the CIA is under scrutiny of course. And so that's when you get guys like Epstein who are, you know, they're not economists, or finance guys that are hired by the Agency and given an office in the CIA, a GS rank or something. They're freelancers; they're mercenaries. They work for the CIA today, they might work for MI6 tomorrow, and they might work for the Mossad or Israeli Defense Intelligence the next day. And so that's one of the things a lot of people want to hear, that he was an agent of this organization and have it nice and patent tight like that. And it may be that he did more work for one than the other, he had more loyalty to one than the other, and things like that. When you look at his various connections, that we'll get into, maybe there's conclusions to draw there. But he was one of these guys who was kind of a freelance fixer, that would be used by the intelligence communities of various countries. I assume he wouldn't go run off and do it for Russian intelligence back in the 1980s. But as you said, you know, the idea that there's 100 something independent nation states all acting in their own interest, that's a fiction today, and it was a fiction yesterday, and it was a fiction in the 1980s. So where exactly is the line? And it shifts from decade to decade depending on what's going on. But where exactly is the line between the CIA and MI6? They're different. They compete with each other in various ways and so forth. But to say that they're two just totally separate independent agencies that are acting alone, that's obviously just not true. And so Epstein was an asset of this network of intelligence agencies that would do these things together.
And you know, he was deeply involved with the money side of the Iran Contra scandal. One of the men that Douglas Lease introduced him to, besides Robert Maxwell, was Adnan Khashoggi, and the last name probably sounds familiar to people from the news recently. His nephew was the Washington Post columnist, or editorialist, who was chopped up into little pieces in the Turkish Embassy by the Saudi Embassy in Istanbul by the Saudis who had taken him. And Adnan Khashoggi was his uncle and he's the real Khashoggi.
They're only like four families that control the world. So far we have the Bush's, the Barrs, the Khashoggi's. So everybody's reoccurring in this story. Well, even the Khashoggis are kind of an example of what I'm talking about here where it's useful to not be a part of the royal family; he's a cutout. These people are cutouts, because that's what you need. But it gets to a point where. they get a little bit too loose, too public, they start doing things that are drawing too much attention, so you can cut them loose without cause real internal strife. And that's what happened with Adnan Khashoggi, who eventually went to jail.
So Adnan Khashoggi was like the comic book version of your Arab billionaire. Just sort of very decadent. Everything gold. A crazy giant yacht that was later bought by Donald Trump, actually. But Adnan Khashoggi had a harem, the whole thing. Like whatever you think that somebody like that would be like, that's what he was. And at the same time, he was apparently a very devout Muslim, which seems like a contradiction. But people I know who knew him say he's a good guy. Yeah, isn't that funny?
Immediately after he left, the tall blonde who had been talking to another man came over to sit next to me.
"I see you know my boyfriend," she said cockily.
"No, I don't know him. Is he your boyfriend? Who is he?" I replied innocently.
"Why, he is the host of this party. He owns this house. Really, don't you know him?"
"No. Tony invited me here, and he didn't tell me whose party this was."
The girl saw that I was obviously not competition.
"Why, that's Adnan Kashoggi," she replied as if I should know him.
"I never heard of him," I said.
She threw back her head and laughed.
"He is just the richest man in the world, that's all. Where are you from anyway? You will surely hear about him if you stay here very long," She left and went over to her "boyfriend," giving him a playful kiss on his bald head....
We met our most generous givers at parties where Sharon and Breeze were commissioned to sing. At one of these parties I met Adnan Kashoggi again. We had been invited by Salim to sing for a small affair to be held in a private room in the Hotel de Paris. By the way he described the event, I understood that we could flirt. I brought both Sharon and Breeze, and from the amount of money Salim gave me for the party, I knew this was important. It turned out to be a special dinner party for a rich Arab business associate of Salim, and his girlfriend. My experience had taught me that the presence of girlfriends had no bearing on anything. As soon as I entered the dark, paneled room, I recognized our honored guest as the famed Kashoggi from the Cannes party I had attended more than a year ago. His new girlfriend was a stunningly beautiful Italian. Kashoggi did not indicate that he had seen me before, but he was visibly impressed with our music and especially our message. He wanted to know what the lyrics meant, so I translated songs that were not in English for him.
Discussing the event afterward, we thought that Kashoggi had been making eyes at Sharon. However, when Salim met with me later that evening, he gave me surprising insight into the thoughts of the Arab billionaire.
"Adnan would like to know if Sharon is married," he said, when I arrived in his suite after midnight, as planned.
"Yes, she is," I answered. "However, she will be glad to spend time with him if he likes her."
"No. Adnan would not allow that to be," responded Salim gravely. "He will not willingly be with another man's wife."
"Is that because of his religion?"
"I cannot answer you truthfully. I have many friends who are Muslim, and this does not bother them. But Adnan will not do that."
"You know that I am still married," I said quietly, with my eyes averted. I was not sure if Salim had ever considered that fact.
"Of course I know. However, you have been separated from your husband for years, and he is living with another woman, who has his child."
"You know that?" I asked, surprised that Salim could remember details of my personal life with all the international business affairs he was involved in.
"Yes, I know more, too," he responded, looking deeply into my eyes. He broke into a warm smile. "And besides, I am not Muslim. I am Christian Lebanese, remember?"
"So, what did Adnan say? Was he interested in us?"
"Yes, he is very interested. He noticed that you and I pass forbidden glances to each other. He noticed that Sharon is a mother and a mother-to-be. He also notices that Breeze could be exciting in the bedroom."
"He can read people well," I said, amazed at the accuracy of judgment that Adnan achieved through such a brief contact.
"Of course, that is why he does so well in business. Do you think spirituality stops at the doors of religion?"
"Well, would he like Breeze to see him?"
"Yes. A chauffeur will come for her tomorrow night. Will she be at home?"
"I will make sure she is," I responded with my impresario authority. Of course, this transaction made me more of a madam than a manager, but it was for a good cause. Do the ends justify the means? That is always the big question, and I had decided that sometimes it does not have a yes or no answer. It depends on what ends and what means. Witnessing to Adnan Kashoggi, who clearly had great influence over a large number of people, seemed comparable to the role of Queen Esther, in the Bible, given in marriage to a heathen king in order to eventually save her people. And as with Queen Esther, who was only one of many wives available to the king, Breeze was pursuing a good end. If she hadn't been sleeping with strangers while here in the Family, she would be doing it out in the world and might end up with a terrible disease. Or a broken heart. At least here, she was protected by God's Spirit.
Breeze began a long and prosperous relationship with Adnan that lasted for years. Every time she met with him for a few hours, she returned with wonderful testimonies of his spiritual growth, and an envelope stuffed with thousands of dollars. With both Adnan and Salim as regular fish, we would never have had financial worries again, had it not been for Timothy's economic plan.
Good guy. But he was one of these fixers. He was in fact, probably in the 1980s for a long time, probably the most prominent fixer when it came to weapons brokering, and things like that. And this really kicked into super high gear in the 90s. But it's already going on in the 80s as the Soviet Union was starting to fall apart. Russia had a first world empire's military arsenal that was just going on sale by every colonel who had control of an armory or something, who were putting this stuff on the market because everybody could look around and realize that the ship's sinking, and they are pulling the nice brass doorknobs and sink fixtures off of things so they can escape. And that was happening even in the 1980s. And that's why, when you look around the world back then, there were civil wars, and militias kicking off revolutions. And everyone had AKs, and all the Russian made gear, because it was all being sold off by whoever could get their hands on it in the Soviet Union. We're talking billions, tens and hundreds of billions of dollars of weapons that are hitting the world black market, right? And Adnan Khashoggi, at this really critical time in the history of the post war order, but also the history of the intelligence communities in the west and other places, just like Douglas Lease, he doesn't own a weapons manufacturing company. He's the guy who makes the deals happen. He's a fixer. He's a guy who goes between different parties who maybe don't speak the same language, whatever. And he makes sure the right people get paid. He knows who gets paid for all these things. So, in the 1980s, when he was working on the books for companies like Lockheed Martin, there was one year where they paid him like $180 million, which in the 1980s was probably half a billion dollars in today's money. Another year, they paid him $210 million. And he's not manufacturing anything. He's not actually buying anything.
He's merely the middleman, correct?
He is the middleman, and the deal man. That's a lot. That's a big vig. And so a lot of that money is not being kept by him. It's being paid out to the people who will make all this happen. But a huge amount of it's going to him.
So after Jeffrey Epstein leaves Bear Stearns, and around the same time that he ends up on that private plane with Douglas Lease on his way to the Pentagon, he starts his own company. And as far as anybody's ever been able to find out, as far as I've ever been able to find out, and I have looked, he had one client, and that client was Adnan Khashoggi. And so that's just another connection.
So I was alive and reading the newspaper then. Adan Khashoggi was one of the most famous people in the world. He was in the New York Times and the National Enquirer and the New York Post. Like, everyone knew who he was. How does this guy with two failed jobs, and two years at Cooper Union, end up starting a company where his only client is Adnan Khashoggi? No, I'm serious.
Well, I think the answer is that the company was set up so that he could do a job, right?
So how does he get connected With Adnan Khashoggi?
Through Douglas Lease.
How does he get connected to Douglas Lease?
Well, I assume through his wealthy clientele when he was laundering money at Bear Stearns. That's how he met a lot of the people that would later become important to him.
So you got to admire his pluck. He was a hustler, man. You know, that's definitely true. I think when people get up to that level of power, even athletes, political figures, or anyone like that, there's often an obsessive impulse that drives them to be very successful, but often disorders the personality, according to people I know. But it's interesting. It's amazing how many people he intersected with.
I remember when Anthony Blinken became secretary of state. And I had been following the Epstein story, and all the connections with it, for a long time by then. So I knew that Anthony Blinken's stepfather was Robert Maxwell's closest confidant, his lawyer, and the last person to speak to him before he died, before he was murdered. And we'll get to that, too. But I've learned over the years not to place too many demands on our ruling class. I don't want to get all crazy. I'm not going to tell you guys to stop taking bribes. That's all fine. Just keep the bribes, whatever. Can we have one major public official that is not at least a single degree separated from Jeffrey Epstein? Is that possible? Because apparently it's not possible. You got Donald Trump talking about the issue the other day on camera, and the guy standing next to him is Howard Lutnick, who was Epstein's neighbor for years. Can we just get one important person who's not one degree or less separated from the most prolific mass pedophile in United States history? Is that possible? Because apparently it's not.
You may be answering the question, "Why is the press not as interested in this story as they would under other circumstances be?" I have the feeling if you were accused of being a mass pedophile, there would be more media interest in it than Epstein.
They would love that. Yeah. When you're somebody like me, or probably somebody like you, it's good that we don't drink, and we lead pretty boring lives.
So Douglas Lease ends up on this plane with Epstein, and goes to a meeting at the Pentagon, presumably about arm sales. We're not exactly sure how he got into the company of Douglas Lease, but we assume it's because he was set up by one of his clients at Bear Stearns, from which he was fired, and in a job that he was apparently set up by Donald Barr to get. Then he sets up this company to work with or for Adnan Khashoggi. What happens next?
So there's not a whole lot of detail on Epstein during this period, but there is a lot of detail on guys like Adnan Khashoggi. And so you can kind of read between the lines as he progresses through Adnan Khashoggi, who was the chief guy that we used in the Middle east to broker and fix the Iran side of the Iran Contra deal. And maybe younger people aren't familiar with what Iran Contra was. Probably a lot of people watching this are fans of Reagan, and the Reagan administration, and all that, and that's fine. But I mean, the Iran Contra deal, if it wasn't high treason, especially on the Iran side, it was an inch away from it. I mean, this is a declared enemy of the United States. We have a law, an embargo, forbidding the United States government, or any company that is in the United States, from selling weapons to the Iranians. And that's what we were doing.
So the brief summary of the Iran Contra scandal was we had two things that our intelligence agencies, our security establishment, wanted to do, but they were not allowed to do them. One was the Iran-Iraq wars going on. And our interest in that war, at the time at least, was just to keep it going as long as possible. There is something really evil, I think, about funding and providing support to both sides of a war for the express purpose of just making it go on longer. But from a cold hearted strategic perspective, you can understand what people were thinking at least. But that's what we wanted to do. Saddam Hussein was having success on the battlefield. We wanted to make sure that the Iranians stuck around a little bit longer, and Saddam didn't get too powerful, because that's what we were worried about at the time. And the other thing we wanted to do is provide support for The Nicaraguan Contras, who were fighting the Sandinista government down in Nicaragua. In the early 1980s, an amendment to a budget was passed in the House called the Boland Amendment, which passed 477 - 0 which, if you're a President, you can defy Congress to a degree, but if it's 477 - 0, you're probably playing with fire if you want to do that.
So we really, really, really wanted to support the Contras against the communist government in Nicaragua. And the Boland Amendment, what it said was you can't send any U.S. Government funds to the Contras. It can't go to them as weapons. It can't go to them as cookies.
So you got two things that the security establishment really wants to do that they're forbidden by law from doing. And they bring both of those things together, and figure out how to make one hand kind of wash the other. The idea was that we're going to sell weapons to Iran, which we're also not allowed to do, but we are allowed to sell weapons to Israel. And Israel has a lot of the same weapon systems that we want to send to Iran. So we're going to sell them to Israel, working through guys like Adnan Khashoggi, who are going to get those weapons to Iran. And we're not selling anything to Iran, we're selling to Israel. Iran's going to pay a premium for these weapons, and that premium is off the books. And that is going to be used to support the Contras. So that was basically the scheme.
Now when you're doing something like that, all you have to do is look at any big mafia court case, or watch a mob movie where they go to court, to see it's always the money. The money is how you get caught doing stuff like this. People think of money laundering as this boring sideshow when it comes to organized crime, or their cousins in the intelligence community. It's not a sideshow. It's right at the center of the thing. The whole operation relies on money laundering, because you have to be able to hide what you're doing. Following the money is the easiest way to trace out networks, and what they're doing, and who is a part of them. I mean, you can figure out everything from it. Who the most significant players are in the network, and all these things just by looking at their money. And so you have to have guys like Jeffrey Epstein, who spent four years at Bear Stearns, and a few years since then when he starts working for Khashoggi, who figure out how to move money offshore, move it around through different countries, over time, changing jurisdictions. Because, you got to remember, this was back before the Internet or anything like that. It was not exactly an easy process to just hop on your computer and look at how these transactions are being passed, right? Of course, the global financial system is a different world today for that reason, it's tougher. Back then, you probably had to send investigators to the country, go to that bank and look at their records kind of thing. But still, you needed a guy like Epstein who was skilled at moving money around, and hiding it in ways that would be hard to trace. And it would pass at first glance. If you get a really skilled forensic accounting team at the Department of Justice, who really dedicates themselves to it, they can figure it out, but it just needs to pass at a glance, so that some congressman's not taking a look at it, you know. So Epstein is one of the guys, presumably one of multiple guys, who was working the financial side. I'm not sure 100% about that, but I presume they weren't only relying on this one guy for all these things that were going on.
Who was handling the money and making sure that was done in Iran Contra?
Well, he was working for Adnan Khashoggi doing that. I don't have any document or anything that says Jeffrey Epstein specifically was working with the intelligence agency on Iran contra, or anything like that. We know he was doing work for Khashoggi that involved this kind of thing, because that's what the company did. And he's an American, who, due to Donald Barr, has rubbed up against people who are familiar with the intel world.
Also, if you're working with people like Douglas Lease, Adnan Khashoggi, Robert Maxwell, you're right in the middle of it. And that's the thing that just blows my mind, that there's a connection between Jeffrey Epstein and Iran Contra. I guess I shouldn't be surprised. I mean, Iran Contra, is sort of like Patient Zero for understanding the power structure in the modern world. In a lot of ways, it really is. It's so fascinating. I remember it well, and knew people who were involved in it very well. And I thought it was all fake. It was years before I realized it was a meaningful thing. And I think many conservatives and Republicans -- I'm still a conservative Republican, but I try to be more honest and thoughtful than I once was. So that is a big thing that the intelligence agencies did. And no one was ever really punished for it. And the people that were are kind of celebrities now. And I just want to say for the record, I think a lot of those people were patriots. But you get caught up in the cult of the Cold War. And sometimes I tell people that I don't like a lot of the stuff that went on in the Cold War. There are a lot of things that the U.S. did that I wish weren't in our history books, that historians 500 years from now are going to read about us. But for the people at the time, I knew them.
No, I agree. And Ollie north is the famous one. And what a nice man! What a good man! So I just want to say that, but Ollie north is not the one who designed the scheme. He was a colonel at the time, in the Marine Corps. He was doing what he was asked to do, whatever. So that's just amazing that Epstein was involved in that. So what does he do after that?
So let's pause here for a minute because there's a lot to unpack here. So Robert Maxwell was also one of the main money conduits for Iran Contra as well. Let's talk about Robert Maxwell. He was a really fascinating guy. He was another guy like Epstein who, when you look at him, he's kind of amoral, a beast in a lot of ways. But at the same time, he's a force of Nature who figured in history.
So Robert Maxwell was born in Czechoslovakia, and he was 18 or 19 years old, very, very young, when the Germans invaded Czechoslovakia, and he managed to escape. He wasn't called Robert Maxwell at the time. He changed his name eight or nine times over the course of the years. But he managed to escape to France in May 1940, which, if you know the story of World War II, is not the best time to escape to France. So he hooks up with what's left of the Czechoslovakian resistance in France, and follows the British retreat, and somehow manages to talk his way onto a boat and get over to Britain where he hooks up with the Czech government in exile in London. He becomes disenchanted with the government in exile pretty quickly. We'll get to that next part in a minute.
So at first, he's working for the Czech government in exile. He gets a little disenchanted, and joins the British army. He's part of the Normandy invasion. He was in heavy combat all the way to Berlin. He won the second highest medal that the British army gives out, not just to foreign volunteers, but to anybody. So it's the Distinguished Service Cross, or the Navy Cross here in the U.S. and you don't get those just for showing up on time every day for duty. He got it for storming a machine gun nest, and saving a bunch of people's lives. So he was a physically courageous guy, a very resourceful, ballsy guy, to make it across Europe at such a young age and do all these things.
After the war is over and we occupy Germany, he goes to work for British Intelligence, first as a translator. I don't know how many languages he spoke back then, but later on he allegedly was fluent in nine (9). Maybe that's an exaggeration, but he was fluent in five (5) and functional in four (4). That's pretty damn impressive. So he was a guy who had connections behind the Iron Curtain that was emerging. He's from that side of the line. He was a soldier who had fought valiantly for the British, and now he's working for British Intelligence. And he's actually pretty valuable to him. And he gets involved in some dirty work. He was involved in interrogating captured SS soldiers, for example, which I imagine weren't always pleasant experiences. This didn't come out till quite a bit later when he was an older guy. Soon before his death he was actually fingered in an investigation for murdering a bunch of unarmed German civilians while he was there. It never went to the point of having to be proven in court or anything, but it was something that was out there. He was named in the investigation.
So Maxwell is working for British Intelligence for a while in Berlin, which is a pretty hot assignment, especially as the Iron Curtain's starting to come down. And when the war ends, he goes back to Britain. He's changed his name to Robert Maxwell by this point, and gets British citizenship. And one of the first things we have him doing in the late 1940s, after the war, when he gets back to Britain, is from the other side of the line. He's got connections with people across Europe. He's involved with British intelligence. And he hooks up with the British Zionist movement in contravention of British law at the time, helping smuggle weapons, aircraft parts were his main bag, through Czechoslovakia, down to the Zionist movement in Israel to fight the Arabs. And he's 25 years old, something like that, at this point. Maybe 27, 28. He's a young guy. And not fighting just the Arabs, but the British also. And he's now a British citizen. That whole thing is a little bit of a tangent, but that stuff is interesting because if you have a situation like the Zionists in Palestine in the late 1940s, who were facing down the possibility of war with several countries around them, and you kind of drove the British out of the country, you got to figure out how to hold on to it. And the British were the main European foreign presence in the region, and there is a weapons embargo against you. You need to get weapons and supplies. How are you going to do it? Well, you need guys like Robert Maxwell, because not everybody knows how to do it. If they called me on the phone and said, "Hey, Darrell, we need you to get us 800 RPGs at this port, and blah, blah, blah," I'd be like, "Don't look at me, call Robert Maxwell. That was something he was able to do.
Lyndon Johnson did that. There were several articles written about it, one in the Times of Israel, a laudatory article, that is very grateful to Lyndon Johnson. But this is back when he was still in the U.S. Congress, back in the 30s and 40s. He was working with a Zionist friend of his in Texas to illegally, in contravention of American law, as a U.S. congressman, to ship weapons and other supplies to the Zionists in Palestine in crates marked Texas Grapefruit. And the main guy who did the research on this is a Jewish scholar named Louis Gamalek. And you can't find the paper online. It's only in the reading room at the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C., and fortunately, before I came on your show last time, I visited the place, and read it, but they might have somebody tackle me at the door if I tried to go there now. But I read it, and it's fascinating, because he really lays out in detail that you really can't deny that Lyndon Johnson was involved with this. And there's some evidence that Jack Ruby too was involved in that also, which I think that's where I was going to go next: how Lyndon Johnson smuggled weapons to Palestine. So who knows how to do that kind of thing? Organized crime knows how to do that kind of thing. So when the intelligence community and their cousins in the organized crime world, get into these kinds of things, and they've always been directly next to each other, intersecting, Maxwell is part of that, at the time Israel is founded. Then he kind of just moves on as a British citizen, making his way in the world.
Tucker Carlson and Darryl Cooper on the True History of Jeffrey Epstein and Ongoing Cover-Up by Tucker Carlson and Darryl Cooper Streamed live on Jul 17, 2025 The Tucker Carlson Show [Lightly edited]
He starts out creating a small publishing company that basically had a monopoly in getting scientific papers from behind the Iron Curtain, and translating, and editing, and distributing them in the West. So he starts making a lot of money doing that. He starts expanding out into what became the Maxwell empire, where he owned the New York Daily News, and the Daily Mirror. I mean, he was the Rupert Murdoch of the time, the tabloid king. And he became a billionaire back when a billion really, really meant something. He actually became a member of parliament in the 1960s. That was just 20 years after he got there.
And it was there in the 1960s that the Mossad representative in Great Britain at the time was Yitzchak Shamir, who later became the Prime Minister of Israel in the 1980s, but who started his career as the leader of the Stern Gang, a very infamous terrorist group that killed a lot of people back in the 1940s. They carried out the King David hotel bombing along with the Irgun, and killed 91 people, including 15 Jews, which, you know, if I was Yitzhak, I'd be pretty upset about that part at least. But many people, like Lord Moyne, a British diplomat in Egypt in 1946, sent mail bombs to several British government officials in Whitehall, London. And actually, we have two accounts of this next event, that may be drawing from the same source. So I don't want to say it with the same level of certainty, but they sent mail bombs to Harry Truman's White House, addressed to him. And we got that from a book that was written by a guy who ran the White House mailroom over the course of six presidents. He wrote a memoir about all the different things that he had seen. And one of the things he mentioned is these mail bombs coming from the Zionists in Palestine addressed to Harry Truman. That story was repeated in Harry Truman's daughter's memoir, and I don't know if that's independent of that other guy's book. But that's two sources that say that. So that's what Yitzhak Shamir was up to.
And he goes to Robert Maxwell, and he talks to him about his obligations as a Jewish billionaire and important guy with intelligence community connections in foreign countries, the obligations that he has to the Jewish state of Israel. And that can be very, very compelling to people who are mercenary types like Maxwell. And they appealed to him to do something really meaningful with his life. You see this a lot. For example, when I worked for the Department of Defense, everybody's who is watching this knows that I have a little bit of a troll in me, but usually my trolling has a purpose. And in this case, it did. We were doing a stand down, like a big training thing in an auditorium on what to look for regarding insider threats, right? So this is DOD employees who might be looking to spy, or pull classified information out for nefarious purposes or something. And they're going through this as part of the training, all of the actual cases that happened over the years. And out of the nine or ten that they showed us, there's one or two where the guy just had a gambling addiction, and needed money, and just didn't care, and he was going to do it. But literally, like the other 8 or 9, 90% of all the ones they showed us, were Chinese guys. Chinese Americans spying for China; Russian Americans spying for Russia; Jewish Americans spying for Israel. And this was pretty much a pattern, and nobody was talking about it. The trainers weren't talking about. They were just pretending like it didn't exist. So leave it to me. I raised my hand at the end, when they took questions, and I brought that fact up. I was like, "What are we supposed to exactly do with that information?" And to the guy's credit, he was honest. He didn't try to blow smoke at me or anything. He just said, "You're not to look at that at all. That's not something we consider." And I said, "okay." Everybody kind of looked around like, okay, that's just how it is. But the reason that pattern existed in the first place is that the appeal can be very powerful. Not everybody's going to respond to it. Most people of any ethnicity are loyal to the country they live in, but you can find people with buttons to push, and Robert Maxwell was one of those people.
So Yitzhak Shamir recruited him, and he became from that point on a very committed Zionist and asset to Israeli intelligence. And when I say he was an asset of Israeli intelligence, that doesn't mean he was on the payroll of Mossad. He didn't have a rank in the Israeli intelligence community or something. He was a freelancer. And he looked at himself this way. He was almost like a sovereign himself, not really a member of any country. He was like this free floating sovereign entity, that would work between the nation states in the world. And that's very often what he did.
For example, and this is an actual example, when the Israeli government wanted to meet with the heads of the KGB in the 1980s, you can't exactly put the head of the Mossad on a plane and send him to Moscow to go meet with the head of the KGB. So they would talk to Robert Maxwell. Robert Maxwell would go talk to them and be the go-between deal maker, and fixer.
Very common, right? And I imagine you probably need those people if you're going to do these kinds of things for sure.
So that's the kind of thing that he would do. There are allegations that are pretty well substantiated by now, that one of the things he would do was act as essentially like a slush fund for Israeli intelligence black ops. And what he would do is reach into his company's pension funds, and pull some money out so they could pull off an operation. And then six months or a year down the line, they figure out ways to get the money back to him.
"While our slush funds grew steadily, unusual overhead costs diminished the profits. True, we were selling weapons to the Iranians with a 50 percent to 400 percent mark-up on the ex-factory price, but the actual cost of procuring and delivering them was high, too. There was a huge network of arms brokers to be paid, money to be handed over to those involved in "smokescreen" deals, bribes to be paid to politicians and civil servants, campaign "donations" to be made around the world, and other expenses. The "donations" sometimes cost more than the weapons themselves.
Contributions were even made from the slush fund, albeit indirectly, to U.S. politicians, including Democrats on the Iran-contra panel. This may be one reason that the full story behind the Iran-contra scandal never materialized. Even though Israel leaked details about some of Oliver North's activities, the Democrats, many of whom were well aware of what was going on, kept quiet about the huge flood of arms that had been running to Iran through Israel. Tel Aviv, not wanting its own arms deals with Tehran to be exposed, had paid them off through various, often convoluted, contributions to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). I don't know who at AIPAC knew the ultimate source of these contributions, but it was clear someone did.
In Britain our committee passed money in the same fashion to the Jewish Reform Movement, confident that this money would be channeled to the Conservative Party. Because of the friendship with Britain, the Mossad European operations headquarters was moved in 1982 from Paris to London and set up in a building on Bayswater Road.
A further example of the very special friendship that Israel established with Britain came when the Falklands war erupted. Israel froze the sale of weapons to Argentina, despite existing contracts for Kfir aircraft. As a result, the British government, covertly but officially, reimbursed Israel for its losses on the contracts. Of course it was known throughout the intelligence community that Israel was also keeping British politicians happy through the Jewish Reform Movement's Torah Fund. The friendship soured, however, in 1988, when Margaret Thatcher supported the sale of military equipment for unconventional warfare to Iraq. It was particularly abhorrent for Israel that her son was involved in it.
Aside from the contributions being made in the United States and Britain, payments were being made all around the world, and those who received them kept their mouths shut -- even in faraway Australia. Australia was often used by the Joint Committee for "parking purposes," aircraft refurbishment, and stationing of slush-fund monies. In 1982 I first visited Australia to hire an accounting firm and open accounts in four major banks. Eventually monies deposited in Australian banks reached the amount of approximately $82 million U.S.
Starting in early 1986, 12 C-130 aircraft we had purchased from Vietnam were shipped to Western Australia for repairs and refurbishment. In 1987, while the Iran-contra hearings were going on in the U.S. Congress, some of the arms going to Iran were temporarily parked in Western Australia. Approximately 60 containers of artillery shells from North Korea were parked in Fremantle Port. Four thousand TOW missiles that went from the U.S. to Guatemala were shipped to Western Australia and held for approximately two months at a naval base on Stirling Island. Silkworm missiles purchased from China for Iran were also parked at Stirling Island for approximately two months.
In February 1987 a "contribution" was made to the West Australian Labor Party by our U.S. counterparts in the CIA. In gratitude for the use of Australian soil for the transfer of arms to Iran, Richard Babayan, a contract operative for the CIA, received a check for $6 million U.S. from Earl Brian, who was acting on behalf of Hadron, a CIA "cut-out." Babayan traveled to Perth and stayed at the home of Yosef Goldberg, an Australian businessman of Israeli origin who was well connected to Israeli intelligence and to the local Labor Party headed by Brian Burke, then premier of Western Australia. Babayan handed the check to Goldberg, who in turn gave it to Alan Bond in his role as the guardian of the John Curtin Foundation funds. This money was passed on by one of Robert Maxwell's companies in Australia to be held by the Pergamon Press Trust Fund in Moscow. Babayan later corroborated the details of this operation in a sworn affidavit.
Despite the high costs involved, profits were still made on the sales to Iran. At various times the fund reached peaks of more than $1 billion. At its height it stood at $1.8 billion, with money constantly coming in and going out -- a huge turnover that would have made a successful conventional enterprise very envious. The Likud leaders running the government intended to use the money for three main purposes.
The first was to finance activities of Yitzhak Shamir's faction of the Likud Party. Between 1984 and 1989 no less than $160 million was funneled to Shamir's faction, handled by the deputy minister in the Prime Minister's Office, Ehud Ulmart, who was very close to the prime minister. Other funds were contributed to the whole Likud Party, especially to its 1984 and 1988 election campaigns. That amount totaled about $90 million.
Second, the slush fund helped finance the intelligence community's "black" operations around the world. These included funding Israeli-controlled "Palestinian terrorists" who would commit crimes in the name of the Palestinian revolution but were actually pulling them off, usually unwittingly, as part of the Israeli propaganda machine.
A key player in some of these operations was the former Jordanian Army Col. Mohammed Radi Abdullah, the man who was with Pearson and Davies when I made our approach to Davies. Today in his early 50s, Radi was decorated by King Hussein of Jordan for his bravery in the 1967 Middle East war. However, his family fell out with the king because they were not willing to participate in the mass slaughter of Palestinians by the Jordanian Army in 1970. The family emigrated to London. The colonel married a woman related to Saddam Hussein and went about setting up a number of companies, including shipping offices in Cyprus and Sicily.
Radi became known as a businessman who championed Arab and Palestinian causes in Europe. But he missed his homeland and the days when he was lauded as a hero. He fell to the ways of the West, started drinking heavily and spent a fortune on gambling and women.
In the mid-1970s, to recoup his losses, Radi went to work for Pearson, who was supplying intelligence information to Israel. With Radi's unwitting help, Pearson began to acquire intelligence about Palestinian organizations in Europe. The way he did it was by selling arms to those organizations. An arms dealer named John Knight, who ran a company called Dynavest Limited, located at 8 Waterloo Place, London SWI, and another dealer who operated out of Sidem International Limited, Appleby House, 40 St. James Place, St. James Street, London SWI, acquired arms from Yugoslavia. They would sell them to Radi, who would in turn sell them to the Palestinian terrorist, [url=x]Abu Nidal, and other Palestinian groups.[/url] Radi was unaware of Pearson's Israeli connection, as were the others involved.
While it may seem curious that Pearson, a man working with Mossad, was encouraging a Jordanian to sell weapons to Israel's enemies, it was actually all part of a very cunning plot. In doing business with these groups, Radi learned what they were going to use their weapons for and unsuspectingly passed the information on to Pearson. Pearson, in turn, passed on to Mossad the intelligence about the movements of the groups and the number of weapons they had.
Based on Radi's unwitting tips, over a two-month period 14 or 15 Palestinians were wiped out. Word went out among the Palestinian groups that Radi was working for Israeli intelligence and, fearing for his life, he took a trip to Baghdad and presented his case to Abu Nidal himself. Abu Nidal believed his story that he had been used -- which he had -- and put the word out that Radi was "clean." The blame was placed on Yasser Arafat's group -- Palestinian factions at that time were warring among themselves.
Radi went back to his drinking and womanizing, and the money he made selling arms for Pearson all drained away. At that very vulnerable point, in 1978, Pearson stepped in again and offered Radi a £200,000 loan. This time, Pearson made it quite clear to him that the money was coming from an Israeli source. The desperate Radi accepted the loan and was recruited to work for an antiterrorist group in Israel run by Rafi Eitan.
The group's methods were rather unconventional, one could say heinous, but it had operated successfully for years. An example is the case of the "Palestinian" attack on the cruise ship Achille Lauro in 1985. That was, in fact, an Israeli "black" propaganda operation to show what a deadly, cutthroat bunch the Palestinians were.
The operation worked like this: Eitan passed instructions to Radi that it was time for the Palestinians to make an attack and do something cruel, though no specifics were laid out. Radi passed orders on to Abu'l Abbas, who, to follow such orders, was receiving millions from Israeli intelligence officers posing as Sicilian dons. Abbas then gathered a team to attack the cruise ship. The team was told to make it bad, to show the world what lay in store for other unsuspecting citizens if Palestinian demands were not met. As the world knows, the group picked on an elderly American Jewish man in a wheelchair, killed him, and threw his body overboard. They made their point. But for Israel it was the best kind of anti-Palestinian propaganda.
In 1986, Radi was involved in another slush-fund black operation -- the well-documented attempt to blow up an El Al plane. Or at least what was publicly perceived to be an attempt. In fact, it was a cold, calculated plan conceived by Rafi Eitan to discredit the Syrians. At a secret meeting in Paris, Eitan told Radi that he wanted to implicate the Syrian Embassy in London in terrorism and have all the Syrian diplomats thrown out of England. Radi had a 35-year-old cousin, Nezar Hindawi, living in London, who had two things going for him -- he was friendly with the Syrian Air Force intelligence attache in London, and he had a problem with an Irish girlfriend who told him she was pregnant.
Radi went to his cousin and offered him $50,000. At the same time he told Hindawi that he wanted him to do some work on behalf of Palestine that would also rid him of his troublesome girlfriend.
"This money I'm offering you," Radi told Hindawi, "is from our Syrian brothers on behalf of the Palestinians. We want to blow up a Zionist plane. All you have to do is make sure the girl gets onto an El Al plane with explosives in her bag."
Radi arranged for his cousin to meet the Syrian intelligence officer, and Hindawi later came away with the clear impression that what he was doing was for the Arab cause. In accordance with his briefing, Hindawi told his 32-year-old girlfriend, Ann-Marie Murphy, a chambermaid at the Hilton Hotel on Park Lane, that he loved her and wanted to marry her. He was eager to introduce her, his future bride, to his old Palestinian parents who lived in an Arab village in Israel. He told her to go and visit them and receive their blessing. Then, when she arrived back in England, they would get married. Overjoyed, she agreed to go, not realizing that the address he gave her in Israel was bogus.
As far as Hindawi knew, the woman was going to be sacrificed. All he had to do was tell her that he wanted her to take a bag of gifts to his parents. But because he didn't want to risk her being stopped for having too much carry-on luggage, he would arrange for a "friend" who worked at the airport to pass her the bag when she entered the El Al departure lounge. She would pass through the regular Heathrow security checks and then be given the package containing the bomb.
Hindawi had been told that a Palestinian cleaner would pass the deadly package to Ann-Marie. In mid-April 1986, he kissed her goodbye and watched her walk through passport control to what he expected would be her death, along with that of all the other 400-plus passengers on board the El Al jumbo jet.
In the El Al departure lounge, an Israeli security man dressed in casual clothes -- the "Palestinian cleaner" -- passed the girl the parcel. She took it. But within seconds she was asked to submit to a search. The security people, who were in on Rafi Eitan's plan, could not afford any accidents. When the bag was opened, plastic explosives were found in a false bottom.
Ann-Marie was rushed off to be interrogated by British security. Sobbing, she told the story of the rat of a boyfriend. Police arrested Hindawi at the London Visitors Hotel, between Notting Hill and Earl's Court, after his brother convinced him to give himself up. He spilled the beans and told them that a Syrian intelligence officer had asked him to carry out the task. But Radi was not implicated. He was under MI-5 protection. As a result, Margaret Thatcher closed down the Syrian Embassy in London. Rafi Eitan had had his way, Hindawi was jailed for 45 years, and Ann-Marie went home to Ireland where she gave birth to a daughter.
The third and last main purpose for the slush-fund money was to finance the housing projects in the West Bank and Gaza Strip for Jewish settlers who had been taking over Palestinian land there. Since many members of the U.S. Congress saw these housing projects as a provocation that would impede peace in the Middle East, a lot of U.S. aid to Israel prohibited the use of the money for building in the West Bank. As part of the coalition, the Labor Party, keen to participate in a peace conference, was also against a government project for West Bank housing.
The answer, as far as Likud was concerned, was to draw on the slush fund. Tens of millions of dollars were used in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to help build the foundations for new Jewish settlements and to buy the land from the Arabs. Although much land was simply confiscated and more taken through condemnation for government purposes, many Arabs, forbidden by the PLO to sell land to the Jews in the West Bank, nevertheless did so at inflated prices, even though they were putting their lives at risk should they be caught.
What they did was sell to various foreign Jewish front companies that were actually financed by the Joint Committee. Many West Bank Arabs became wealthy selling their land, taking the money and emigrating to other countries. As far as Likud was concerned, it was money well spent, because it was encouraging the Arabs to emigrate, while leaving land for the Jews to move onto. Their houses would also be subsidized by the slush fund."
It was soon clear that [Abu Iyad, PLO Intelligence Chief] had something else on his mind. He wanted to talk about terrorism -- and in particular about Abu Nidal.
The Western world, he said with a frown, was not yet persuaded that the PLO was the indispensable partner for Middle East peace. It had underestimated the importance of the historic resolutions passed by the Palestine National Council in November 1988 that, for the first time, never so much as mentioned "armed struggle" and spelled out with absolute clarity the PLO's readiness to negotiate a peaceful settlement with Israel.
But how to get the West to see this? To his mind, the great obstacle was terrorism, an issue with which Israelis confronted every mention of peaceful compromise. If there was one man responsible for blackening the reputation of all Palestinian factions, it was, Abu Iyad believed, the arch-terrorist Abu Nidal.
The Israelis, Abu Iyad continued, were masters at penetration and deception. He had been sparring with the Mossad for a quarter of a century, and since the early 1980s, he had begun to suspect that the Israelis had infiltrated Abu Nidal's organization and were making use of him. "Every Palestinian who works in intelligence," he told me, "is convinced that Israel has a big hand in Abu Nidal's affairs." His suspicions had now hardened into a conviction: Abu Nidal was not just an extreme rejectionist who sold his services to Arab regimes. Israel had gained control of him. That was the key to his persistent sabotage of Palestinian interests.
In Abu Iyad's mind there was no great mystery about it: Israel wanted to destroy the PLO and prevent negotiations that might lead to a peaceful solution involving an autonomous Palestinian state on the West Bank. Any genuine negotiations would necessarily involve the surrender of territory, which is why Israel had gone to such lengths to persuade the world that the Palestinians were terrorists with whom no deal could be contemplated. Abu Nidal, he believed, was Israel's prime instrument for this purpose, central to its strategy. Until Abu Nidal was exposed and defeated, he said, the PLO's credibility would continue to be questioned and the peace process could get nowhere.
Leaning forward and talking very fast as was his habit, he told me that there was no other plausible explanation for the evidence that had accumulated over the years. Abu Nidal had killed the PLO's most accomplished diplomats: Hammami, in London; Qalaq, in Paris; Yassin, in Kuwait; he had slaughtered hundreds of Palestinian fighters; he had debased the Palestinian national struggle with his senseless and savage terrorism and succeeded in alienating the Palestinians' best friends. He had made the word Palestinian synonymous with terrorist. He was either deranged or he was a traitor, and Abu Iyad did not think he was deranged. Abu Nidal, he told me, was the greatest enemy of the Palestinian people.
"He is a man wholly without principle!" he exploded angrily. "He would ally himself with the devil in order to stay alive and drink a bottle of whiskey every night!
"Try to see Abu Nidal," he urged me. "Go to Libya. Ask him to explain himself, and then make up your own mind."
He then made an extraordinary admission: "I feel very guilty that I was responsible for not facing up sooner to the threat from Abu Nidal. I should have killed him fifteen years ago. I confess this now. I wanted to believe that he was a patriot who had strayed from the path and that I could win him back. For far too long I was reluctant to accept that he was a traitor."
Abu Iyad's diatribe rather took my breath away. Abu Nidal an Israeli agent?
***
At about this time I was visited in London by a former general in Aman, Israel's military intelligence service, who was doing research on a quite different topic. After our talk I asked him pointblank whether Israel penetrated and manipulated Palestinian groups. He looked at me carefully. "Penetration, yes," he said, "but manipulation, no." He paused, then added with a little smile, "No one would admit to that."
***
A former CIA officer, who had served as station head in several Arab countries and whose attitude toward the Arab-Israeli conflict was detached and professional, was more explicit: "It's as easy," he said, "to recruit the man at the top as it is someone lower down the ladder. It's quite likely that Mossad picked up Abu Nidal in the late 1960s, when it was putting a lot of effort into penetrating the newly formed Palestinian guerrilla groups. My guess is that they would have got him in the Sudan when he was there with Fatah in 1969. Once they had set him up, funded, and directed him, he would have had nowhere else to turn. If he had tried to quit, he would have been a dead man."
***
In 1987, during a meeting between Abu Iyad and Abu Nidal in Algiers, Abu Iyad would bring up Fatah's main grievance: the long list of PLO men murdered by Abu Nidal -- or, as he believed, by some secret hand inside his organization. Abu Iyad later told me what he and Abu Nidal had said:
"'Why did you kill Isam Sartawi?' I asked him. 'He was your lifelong friend!' I told him I believed this was an operation in which the Israelis had pulled the strings. The whole affair stank of penetration and manipulation -- the way the weapons had been smuggled in, the escape of the killer, the arrest of a young accomplice traveling on a false passport whom the Moroccans could not charge with the murder. 'I know Israel is playing games with you,' I told him."
Abu Iyad told Abu Nidal that he began to suspect Israeli penetration when a Moroccan intelligence officer had given him a list of Abu Nidal's members in Spain -- nineteen names in all -- and said his source was the Mossad. Abu Iyad then checked out the list himself and found it accurate: Seventeen of the men on it, most of them students, were still living in Spain; two had graduated and returned home.
Abu Iyad told me: "I was amazed by Abu Nidal's answer. 'Yes,' he had responded calmly. 'You are right. Israel has penetrated us in the past. I discovered this from my Tunisian and Moroccan members. Israel used to plant them on me. But let me tell you that I send my own North African members -- the ones I really trust -- to France to turn and recruit Israel's North African agents! The flow of intelligence is sometimes to my advantage. These people have supplied me with truly astonishing information.'
"'Take for example the Sartawi case. They gave me all the detailed information I needed for the operation!'"
As he recollected their conversation, Abu Iyad could still hardly believe what he had heard: "Israeli agents were present in his organization. They had fed him information. He admitted it! His matter-of-fact tone astounded me. He added that he was trying to liquidate the Israeli agents one by one. That is what he said!" Though the admissions implied no more than penetration, Abu Iyad was convinced they also indicated collaboration between the Mossad and Abu Nidal.
Abu Iyad told me that he had thought about Israel's manipulation of Abu Nidal with North African agents. He knew for a fact that Khudr had been killed by a Tunisian member of Abu Nidal's organization. So had Hammami and Qalaq.
"We stopped terrorism in 1974," he insisted, "but the Israelis did not, although they convinced the world of the contrary. They continued to attack us. Sometimes they did so quite blatantly, as when they killed Abu Jihad in Tunis in 1988. More often they mounted operations that could be read in different ways. I must admit it confused us. On several occasions we weren't sure whether Abu Nidal or Mossad was responsible."
The Mossad agents that Abu Iyad had in mind were probably trained in Morocco, where the Moroccan government and the CIA run an unusual intelligence school that specializes in Palestinian affairs. I learned about this school from several intelligence sources, both Arab and Western. They told me that the CIA, which works closely with Israel on Palestinian matters, had brought the Mossad into the arrangement as well. The students are mostly young North Africans who are recruited in Europe and brought back to the Moroccan school to be trained as spies. They are put through courses on the various Palestinian factions, studying their leading personalities, their structure, ideology, and operations -- so that by the end of the course, they are able to use the arcane jargon of these organizations. All the principal groups -- Fatah, the PFLP, the Democratic Front, the PFLP-General Command, the Arab Liberation Front, and Abu Nidal's organization -- are studied.
Once their course is completed, the youths are taken back to Europe and instructed to hang about in cafes, meet other Arabs, and speak to them in the language they have been taught. The hope is that they will eventually get taken on by the groups they have learned to mimic, so that the Moroccans, the CIA, or the Mossad can use them. Some of the graduates of the school become informers, some plan operations, and some are even schooled to become ideologues for the groups on which they are planted. Some are killers.
A former Israeli intelligence officer named Ari Ben Menashe, a very controversial but interesting figure, and we'll talk about him more in a bit because he comes a lot into the Epstein story too, he and Victor Ostrovsky, who's another former Mossad official, who wrote a book about his experiences after he got kind of jammed up and blamed for some things, they both say that what happened is Maxwell, once he started reaching into his company's pension fund to help out Israeli intelligence, he started to think he could do it for his own personal reasons too, and of course, he'll pay it back. And he does that and gets himself into a lot of trouble. And by the end of his life, his empire was going to go bankrupt and he'd probably go to prison. He had robbed his company's pension fund blind for years at this point. And it was all getting to the point where it was just no longer solvent, and it couldn't be hidden anymore. And what Ben Menashe says is that he went to his friends in the Mossad and told them, look, I've done so much for you, and you are going to get me out of this somehow, one way or another, whether you give me the money, whether you deal with the issue in Britain, you're going to get me out of this. And he got a little too aggressive about it, Ben Menashe says. And shortly after that, they found him floating off of his yacht near the Canary Islands. The belief is that the boat was boarded by some group that threw him off. Yes, he had injuries. Three different doctors couldn't agree on the cause of death. And he had injuries consistent with a struggle. He was a big guy. He would have fought.
Yair Stern considered the Jews' fight against the British to be more important than the world war against the Axis powers. The organization's leaders made a brief attempt in 1940 to broker an agreement with the Third Reich that would permit the illegal passage to Palestine of Jews from Germany and Europe to continue the fight against the British, whose war effort was supported by David Ben-Gurion and even the Irgun, a rival terrorist group that would be taken over by Menachem Begin in 1943. (Irgun's founder, David Raziel, in fact was serving as a high-ranking officer in British intelligence and wearing a British uniform when he was killed while on a mission in Iraq in 1941.) The Stern group, resisting pressure to fight with the Allies, sought direct negotiations at one point with Otto von Hentig, a representative of the German foreign ministry. Nothing came of it. In his memoirs, von Hentig wrote of meeting with a Jewish delegation (from Stern) that offered to cooperate with the Nazis and, in essence, go to war against their pro-allied Zionist compatriots, if Hitler guaranteed the post-war independence of Jewish Palestine. Similar talks were held by Stern representatives with Benito Mussolini's Italy, calling on the Italians to provide transit camps and passage for Jewish refugees, as well as arms, in return for the Stern Gang's collaboration in expanding Italy's influence in the Middle East.
So another thing happened right before that too. For years people had speculated and presented little bits of evidence here and there that he was associated with Israeli intelligence. But right before he died, I think it was in 88, right before he died, Seymour Hersh went on the record with four independent sources that all fingered Maxwell and his number one in his media empire as active agents of Israeli intelligence. Two weeks later he was found dead. After that a lot of the problems that he had came out. Then there was a five year lawsuit against his two sons. And they actually brought a lawsuit against Seymour Hersh for defamation, and lost. And not only did they lose, they had to pay all of Hersh's legal fees for suing him. So the idea of Robert Maxwell being an Israeli intelligence agent is as well substantiated as anything gets in that world. I think he received a state funeral in Israel. He was certainly buried there. So you have this British citizen who has no connection to Israeli intelligence at all, just a British guy who's never lived in Israel, he gets a state funeral that's attended by every living Israeli Prime Minister and Intelligence agency head, and the President and the Prime Minister, and Yitzhak Shamir, actually, gave his eulogies. And Yitzhak Shamir said that this man has done more for the state of Israel than can now be told. And he was given a burial plot on the Mount of Olives facing the Western Wall, which is the highest honor that you can bestow when it comes to that kind of thing.
So clearly this was a guy who was very important to a lot of people over there, and it was because he was very important to Intelligence. And as time goes by, people started claiming that certain substantiated facts are not facts, and no one kind of remembers that. No, actually, that's been proven anyway.
What was his connection to Jeffrey Epstein? How does Jeffrey Epstein wind up in an orbit of a guy like that?
Douglas Lease introduced him And according to multiple sources from Israeli and U.S. Intelligence circles that have gone on the record to journalists like Vicky Ward, both of them were involved in weapons deals in the 1980s. Maxwell was the guy whose pension fund was used as a slush fund. Epstein was the guy who made sure that it moved around in ways that couldn't easily be traced. And so they worked together with Intelligence on these operations. And Robert is the one who introduced Epstein to his daughter. It's not something a father really wants to do, is to introduce your daughter to a guy like Jeffrey Epstein. But maybe she had problems of her own. I don't know. So just add another zero to the odds of all of these connections kind of piling up.
Robert Maxwell, his daughter just happens to be Jeffrey Epstein's partner in crime. Have you seen that famous picture of Prince Andrew with Virginia Roberts? She's a teenager. That picture was taken at Robert Maxwell's house in England. He and Epstein were close, obviously. And here's the funny thing. When Vicky Ward interviewed Jeffrey Epstein in 2002, and we'll get to her whole interview in 2002, in 2002, nobody knew who Jeffrey Epstein was. None of these conspiracy theories were out there, or anything like that. And she's got all kinds of stuff we'll talk about here in a second.
But in his interview, Epstein said that Robert Maxwell didn't ring a bell. He didn't know him at all. And they were incredibly close. So she didn't pursue it too much. He was also asked by his relationship to Douglas Lease, and he claimed not to know Douglas Lease. Douglas Lease's own son, Julian, said that his father was essentially, for many years, Jeffrey Epstein's mentor of sorts. And he expressed disbelief that Epstein would have claimed not to know him. So you have these connections that Epstein denies, which again, if they were innocent connections, he wouldn't have a reason to do that. All of these intelligence connections with people who were, like Donald Barr, he worked for the OSS in World War II. Great. Maybe it's a, "Once intelligence guy, always an intelligence guy," and he was still. But I don't know. All I have is that he worked for the OSS. So maybe that's all in the past, and it has nothing to do with it anything, but all these other guys, these are people who were not only active, but absolutely central to the most high profile operations that were going on in the 1980s. And Jeffrey Epstein is right there in the middle of all of them.
And they all seem to think that he's pretty damn important. Robert Maxwell pimps out his daughter to him. When you give your daughter to a guy like Epstein, what do you say about it? You know guys like Khashoggi and Douglas Lease, who was his mentor. I mean, these are guys who are right in the middle of the most high profile operations going on at the time.
So how does Epstein get rich from doing this stuff? Where did all the money come from? How did he get rich?
So one of the people that Vicky ward interviewed in 2002, none of which made it into her story, Vicky Ward was a Vanity Fair reporter at the time. She was writing for Vanity Fair. She wrote for Rolling Stone later And the whole story of the publication of Restoring Vanity Fair is a lot of fun. So we'll talk about that.
One of the people that Vicky interviewed was a guy that Jeffrey Epstein had helped send to jail, a guy named Steven Hoffenberg, who ran a company called Towers Financial. It was engaged in a Ponzi scheme. I think it was a $450 million Ponzi scheme. It robbed a lot of people of a lot of money. And Hoffenberg doesn't deny it. He took responsibility for it at the time, pled guilty, did his time, and he's open about all of it now. He says he was greedy and all these things. He gets a call from Douglas Lease and says, "I got a guy who can help you out." Because he knew Lease, he put him in touch with Jeffrey Epstein, who was just the kind of guy he was looking for. Epstein was very intelligent, knew a lot about offshore accounting and things like that, and had no moral compass whatsoever, Hoffenberg said. And that's what he told Vivky Ward at the time.
So one of the other things that he said is that what Epstein would do, and he did this to Hoffenberg himself, is the people that they would be moving money around for, they would take some of that for themselves. And Epstein had a scheme that he called Playing the Box, which I don't know where the name exactly comes from, but what it entailed is stealing money from people and making sure that he had compromising information on them so that even if they caught you doing it, they're going to be too embarrassed, or too afraid, to actually come out and go after you.
And so given what we know about Epstein's proclivities and his later activities, you can probably guess what some of those activities were. And this is what Hoffenberg said he would do. He confirms the story of Epstein being attached to Douglas Lease, because he knew Lease, and that's how they met. And he says that Epstein used to talk quite openly about his connections and dealings with the intelligence community, not just in the U.S. but in Israel as well. And again, none of this made it into the story, because this is 2002. Vicky Ward didn't know who these people were. She had on the record witnesses accusing Jeffrey Epstein of sexual assault, underage girls. That's what she was interested in. So all this other stuff, she doesn't even know what he's talking about at the time, but she kept all her notes and everything. And once it kind of came out later, she brought all that out into the public. There was even an NPR report about this several years ago as the Epstein thing was coming out. So she's running down this story, and she's got three on the record witnesses, two sisters, but then one totally independent, telling the same story about Jeffrey Epstein sexually assaulting them. And she's writing up this story as a profile piece, that's all. And then this stuff came out through the course of her reporting, and all of a sudden, she gets an interview with Jeffrey Epstein, and she asks him about the girls. And he gets really, really upset, and threatens her personally threatens her, like, says, I'm not coming after the magazine if you print this, I'm coming after you, because my relationship here is with you. Don't do this to yourself. Don't do this to your family. It's not worth it. And so she says, well, what a reporter supposed to do? You're not going to push me around like that. And you don't know who this guy is. He's just some rich guy who's trying to threaten you. And so she writes up the story, and it goes through legal. With three on the record witnesses corroborating each other's stories, it gets through legal. And then right before it goes to press, Graydon Carter, who was running Vanity Fair at the time, puts the kibosh on that part of the story. He just takes it out without even telling Vicky Ward. It's just a profile piece about Jeffrey Epstein. This international playboy minus the sexual assault allegations. Correct. Where it gets really interesting, and the testimony comes from not just Ward, but a bunch of people who worked there at the time, Jeffrey comes into Graydon Carter's office one day. He's the first person there. And Graydon Carter's office in the larger complex is blocked, but Jeffrey Epstein's already in there. He's the first person in, and he's waiting for Graydon Carter, and he threatens him and tells him, "You better not print this." And a short time later, Graydon Carter leaves his house in New York City, and finds a bullet on his stoop. And then a little while later, at his country house upstate, he finds a severed cat's head on the porch there. And according to the senior editor, and a lot of people at Vanity Fair, Graydon Carter and everybody in the office knew exactly what this was. These were threats from Jeffrey Epstein. So Graydon Carter axed the story because of that. And to intimidate somebody like that, and a magazine like that, with such direct and overt threats, showed what kind of confidence and hubris this guy had, that he felt confident doing something like this to Conde Nast, the biggest magazine publisher in the country at the time, who also published the New Yorker, thus making it a big deal place, and it worked, and the story got axed. And probably because of that, a lot more girls got sexually assaulted over the next several years.
So by the time Vicky Ward is interviewing Epstein in 2002, Vanity Fair was basically the in-house publication for the ruling class, or the emerging ruling class, anyway. Epstein is a rich guy. How did he get rich? I'm confused.
So to go back to Hoffenberg and Towers Financial, for example, Hoffenberg was running this Ponzi scheme with Epstein. Vicky Ward has a source in the Justice Department, who worked the case at the time, who told her about Epstein cooperating with the government against Hoffenberg, and said that if it had gone to trial for Epstein, it would have gone worse for him than it did for Hoffenberg. Because he had more fingerprints and was more deeply involved with the scheme than even Hoffenberg was. But what he had done was he had taken $100 million from Hoffenberg's company, and hidden it offshore. Then he went to the authorities to get Hoffenberg thrown in jail. And since Hoffenberg had pled guilty, there was no discovery or anything. He just went away for 18 years.
Hoffenberg did 18 years?
Yeah.
And Epstein, with 40 on the record witnesses accusing him of sexual assault in 2008, got 13 months and not even full time detention?
Well, let's talk about that.
So I just want to linger for a second on the money. So it's been reported repeatedly that there's a guy called Les Wexner, who owns the biggest house in Ohio. Who is Wexner, and what is his relationship to Epstein? And before you begin, because I want people to keep this in mind as they're listening, as far as I know, and I think this is correct, Wexner, who I think is still alive, has never been interviewed by the Department of Justice. So I just want to throw that out there.
Yeah, that's correct. As far as I know, Les Wexner owns Limited Brands, L Brands, and Victoria's Secret, Abercrombie and Fitch, and a lot of the clothing places that you see when you go into the mall. I don't think it's the case anymore, but for a long time, he was the largest clothing manufacturer and distributor in the United States. A billionaire, incredibly wealthy guy, who owns the largest and most expensive house in the state of Columbus, Ohio. And the second largest and most expensive house in the state of Ohio was owned by Jeffrey Epstein, whose house was directly behind Wexner's house.
So Epstein was introduced to Wexner through this network of people, and the nature of their relationship is still kind of a mystery, because it's so hard to explain in a way that is plausible. Wexner knew this Epstein guy for two years, right? We don't exactly know what he was doing during those two years, but he had known him for 2 years when he signed full power of attorney over his entire estate to Epstein. Les Wexner, with billions of dollars, the largest clothing manufacturing corporation in the country, and this wasn't even a limited power of attorney. Jeffrey Epstein gets power of attorney over everything Wexner has. Jeffrey Epstein could take out loans in his name.. He could sign Wexner's tax returns. He had full power of attorney over the Wexner estate.
Soon after that, Wexner's mother gets sick, and her spot on the Wexner foundation board, which is how Wexner disposed of most of his money, opens up. He puts Jeffrey Epstein there, and Epstein basically runs the foundation for about 15 years, controlling a lot of where that money went.
15 years?
Yeah. And Wexner alleged this was after everything kind of come out. So who knows? You know, everybody's trying to distance themselves from Epstein at this point, but Wexner says that Epstein stole a lot of money from him through his control of the foundation. You're positive Jeffrey Epstein had power of attorney over Wexner?
Yeah, you can read that anywhere. For 16 years, by the way.
Has Wexner ever been asked why he did that?
I don't think he's given any interviews about it.
Maybe he'll come here, and sit in my seat. I kind of doubt it. I would be polite. I'm genuinely fascinated by that detail, because all these people are extraordinary. By definition, if you build a billion dollar company, good or bad, you're not like everybody else. You're good in business, and therefore careful and judicious. You don't just hand power of attorney over to some guy who you've just met two years ago. Especially since he had his own executives and people who worked for him for decades, who were coming to him saying, "Boss, who is this guy? What are you doing? Why are you giving him so much authority and power?"
There was a guy that Wexner had known for decades. They went to Ohio State football games together, and had dinner together. They were good friends. And he tells this story about how Jeffrey Epstein comes into the picture, and he's meeting him for the first time. Epstein shows up an hour late for the meeting, and when he gets there, the first thing he does when he sits down in his chair is he kicks his feet up on the guy's desk. This guy's not Wexner's secretary, and it was quite a power move. So Wexner gets on the phone with both guys, and tells his friend that Jeffrey's family, and he should treat him like family. Eventually, later on, his friend has a disagreement with Epstein. They get into an argument about something. And from that moment on, he couldn't reach Wexner by phone. He got cut off immediately, completely, with no explanation. This guy had known him for decades. And because he had a tiff with Jeffrey Epstein, he was cut off from Wexner. So this guy clearly had some kind of powerful hold over Wexner, or they were working together in some other way. So Wexner is another one of these interesting cats, right?
His mentor was a real estate guy named Max Fisher. I think he was originally from Indiana, but lived in Ohio, I believe. Either way, he was Wexner's mentor for a while. Wexner's already rich by this point. His big thing was philanthropic contributions to Jewish and Zionist and Israel related causes, right? So the Wexner foundation would give a little bit of money to Ohio State University here and there, and a few other things locally in Columbus, and around the state of Ohio. But the vast, vast, vast majority of it went to Zionist organizations, Jewish organizations, things like that. Yitzhak Shamir did that with Robert Maxwell. But Les Wexner was told, "You've got an obligation to the Jewish state. You're a Jewish billionaire. You're a big important person in the most powerful country in the world. You have an obligation to your people." And this came to define Wexner's life after that. And so this is in the 1990s. This was in the newspapers and stuff during the Clinton administration.
Really, really interesting. Les Wexner and Edgar Bronfman ...
Sorry, I want to just pause. I was just handed this breaking news from the president of the United States released on Truth Social just now:
Based on the ridiculous amount of publicity given to Jeffrey Epstein, I have asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to produce any and all pertinent grand jury testimony subject to court approval. This scam, [all caps] perpetrated by Democrats, should end, right now [exclamation point].
All right, shut the cameras off, guys. We're done here. I have no idea where this leads, if anywhere, but I certainly hope it leads to greater disclosure. That's good for everyone, including the President. Disclosure is good. But it doesn't change, in my opinion, the need for anyone who's interested in the story to know what the story actually is. So I hope you will continue.
Yeah. So in the 1990s, Wexner and Edgar Bronfman, who I mentioned earlier, one of the heirs to the Seagram's liquor fortune, who was one of Jeffrey Epstein's clients when he was working at Bear Stearns, these two guys found a group called the Study Group, more commonly known as the Mega Group. That came out in the papers a little bit in the late 1990s. The group started at 20, but later expanded. Jewish billionaires in the United States and Canada would meet at least twice a year to coordinate how they were distributing their philanthropic money, what their focuses were for that year, and to make sure they were all acting in concert to help serve the interests of Israel and their respective countries. They would finance scholars and other professionals to write up papers, and studies, and analysis, for the Israeli government, and specifically Israeli intelligence. They were very plugged into that. So one more sort of connection to the intelligence world among people who are very, very, very close to Jeffrey Epstein.
Now, when you watch the Netflix documentary, or anything about Jeffrey Epstein, one of the things that really does stick out to you is that Jeffrey Epstein's very rich. When you see the pictures of the place he lived in in Ohio, the pictures of this ranch he lived on in New Mexico, and his seventy million dollar house, the largest private residence in New York City, in Manhattan ...
How did he buy that house?
Les Wexner gave it to him.
Lex Wexner gave him a $70 million house?
Yeah, I don't think it was worth 70 million at the time, but when he got arrested it was. Yes, he gave it to him. It's worth more now, probably.
And no one's ever asked Les Wexner, "Why did you sign a power of attorney over your whole life to Jeffrey Epstein, along with gifting him the biggest private residence in Manhattan?"
I don't think he's given anybody the opportunity. You know, Epstein had that big island. Everybody's seen the picture of the temple on the island, but that's just one little part of it. I think it was a 60, 80 acre island, something like that. Big, beautiful mansion, several outbuildings, that crazy temple. He had a fleet of airplanes, and not just a Learjet. He had a customized 727. So basically he was flying around in his own Air Force One. He had a mansion in Paris. He actually owned a second U.S. Virgin island.
Even Elon Musk doesn't live this way. He probably could, but he does not even, you know what I mean? Not even close. Elon sleeps on people's couches. So if you take the official story, which is that he was a money manager of some kind, the only client we know of was Les Wexner. But what he did for Wexner, nobody's really able to describe. So the official story is that he's a money manager, but it's hard to manage money in a country whose financial systems are as regulated as ours are. So if you're actually managing money, certainly if you're conducting trades, there's a record, and in some capacities you have to register. Is there any documentary evidence that Jeffrey Epstein was, in any recognizable sense, a money manager?
No, no documentary evidence. He was a money manager who only took accounts of a billion dollars or more. So you didn't just have to be a billionaire, you had to have a billion dollars to invest with him, right? And a guy who knew him back then thought he would do Epstein a solid, and brought him a client who had $600 million he wanted to invest with Epstein. This is 1980 money. That's like $2 billion today, inflation adjusted, right? You show up with that kind of money to Goldman Sachs, and the CEO is going to meet you at the front door and take you up his private elevator. And the company's vice presidents are going to give you a presentation about all the people that are going to be dedicated to you, and a foot massage, of course. The biggest investment banks in the world are going to audition for you. You don't audition for them, you know what I mean, if you have that kind of money. Epstein blew the guy off. He said, "Oh, no, it's too small. I don't deal with that kind of pocket change." So you say, well, that's obviously ridiculous. Obviously there is no fund manager in the world that would do that, so why would he do that? And I think ,when you look at the whole record, the answer is obvious. He wasn't a money manager. He didn't actually invest people's money. Hedge funds have teams of analysts and mathematicians, and it's a big business, you know. And people need to understand that nobody knows anyone who's ever worked for Epstein in this capacity. Never. You know, when you're operating at that level, if he was who he says he was, moving that kind of money around, you don't go buy shares in Microsoft so you can take a position in the company. These are things that are done through large institutions. You have to have institutional support so that they can gather up enough shares for you to purchase and structure the purchases in a way that it doesn't just suck all the liquidity out of the market and drive the market crazy on the stock price for a little while. This is a complex operation. There's a lot of people involved. Nobody has heard of anybody who's heard of anybody who's ever done any kind of business with Epstein.
And there's no record of anything? Him investing money, trading stocks, nothing?
No, nothing. Which is just impossible. I mean, it's just flat out impossible that he was doing what the official story says he was doing, and there's no trace of it. It's not possible.
