EPSTEIN 2 jeff
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SEE MAIN
merri ok
SEE THREE ON NETWORK FINANCIAL
SEE TRUST CRED RELIABLE: EPSTEIN INDUCED COGNITIVE DISSONANCE?
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SEDER 6 22 26
18 minutes, 59 seconds
Epstein files and he was so concerned how so many wealthy powerful people were close to Epstein, which was an insane thing for JD Vance to say given that
he's the vice president to Jeffrey Epstein's best friend, Donald Trump. But not only that, Vance is entirely a creation of Peter Teal, who was also in
deep with Epstein. In fact, Epstein gave $40 million to one of Peter Thiel's funds, an investment that has now ballooned to 170 million and according
to the New York Times, I believe, is the major chunk of his remaining estate. So, here's a guy who's basically JD Vance is a guy who's in a in a Epstein teal Trump
19:35
19 minutes, 35 seconds
sandwich here. So, it's not clear to me how he's going to be able to thread that needle convincingly when we can just get a real Republican to uh run who's
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an 3 26
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) walked through all of the details that connect trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and Russian intelligence. Those connections also link President Donald Trump.
According to Whitehouse, the pathway goes through Ghislaine Maxwell's father, which the senator read from his MI6 file that Robert Maxwell was "a thoroughly bad character and almost certainly financed by Russia."
Whitehouse walked through all of the relationships that Epstein had with international assets, including Israeli and U.S. intelligence. Recently released files prompted Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk to announce they would do a wide-ranging investigation into Epstein's possible links to Russian intelligence.
One of those was Epstein's relationship with Oleg Deripaska, who also had a close relationship with Trump's campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
The Senator walked through a number of documents and emails in the Epstein files showing that Russian girls were part of his recruitment for the men that he sought to manipulate.
Whitehouse cited one communication from French model scout Jean-Luc Brunel to Epstein saying he found "a teacher" to help Epstein with his Russian. "She is 2 times 8 years old and not blond," he said.
JPMorgan Chase & Co. identified more than $1 billion in suspicious transactions that it flagged to the U.S. government. The big bank identified about 4,700 transactions, saying that "they were potentially related to reports of human trafficking involving Mr. Epstein," reported The New York Times.
It also mentioned Epstein’s wire transfers to Russian banks, even referencing “his relationships with two U.S. presidents.”
Epstein also maintained connections with Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), a close friend of Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner.
"After Epstein's arrest in 2019, officials also discovered that he held an expired Austrian passport from the 1980s with his picture and a false name, which listed his residence as Saudi Arabia," CBS News and the New York Times reported.
Whitehouse cited one ex-girlfriend who recalled Epstein telling her, "I collect people. I own people. I can damage people."
Virginia Giuffre wrote in her book that Epstein had a "huge library of videotapes and a room in his home where monitors displayed in real time surveillance footage from his properties."
"He explicitly talked about using me and what I'd been forced to do with certain men as a form of blackmail so these men would owe him favors," she wrote.
She also recalled one instance in which he walked through his mansion and pointed out where all of the pinhole-sized cameras were. Epstein boasted that they recorded everything.
Florida police found two small cameras in clocks in his Palm Beach home, Whitehouse said.
He also said that former prosecutor Alex Acosta was quoted as saying that Epstein "belonged to intelligence" and that the decision to let him off easy in 2008 was made "above his pay grade."
Epstein's mentor, Steven Hoffenberg, told The National Enquirerin an account published three years after his death, "Wherever Epstein was entertaining, he and Ghislaine were taping." The report was released in the summer of 2025, alleging that more than two dozen people connected to Epstein have died under mysterious circumstances.
The Enquirer said that Epstein was running a honey-trap, taping videos of sleazy VIPs with underage girls for blackmailing them.
The same assessment came from an intelligence source who spoke to the Daily Mail, saying the operation was "the world's largest honeytrap operation" run for the KGB. Epstein would "procure" young women for his associates and then film their interactions.
He added that Epstein was a liar and a criminal who would exaggerate his own power and influence.
"The Epstein files need to be viewed through that lens," said Whitehouse.
There are still many unanswered questions, he said, but there are many very powerful men who were "very mixed up with Epstein at various times, and Epstein was very mixed up with Russia."
He closed by blasting the Justice Department and its ongoing efforts to conceal connections between these powerful men and Epstein.
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an 2 26
Ryan Goodman, editor-in-chief of"Just Security," uncovered a document in which the New York Police Department was told by the federal government to "stand down" on its investigation into Jeffrey Epstein.
In a video posted Monday, Goodman said that he found documents in which the FBI sent the instructions the NYPD just five days after Epstein's arrest. Goodman said he found it surprising that the order also applied to the SVU (Special Victims Unit). Goodman explained that it's the key part of law enforcement "that is specially trained and equipped to investigate crimes against minors and crimes of such abuse."
The documents show that the existing district attorney of New York was in an ongoing investigation into Epstein and was communicating with the victims. Some of those victims then began to speak out, including a 2019 interview with Savannah Guthrie on NBC.
Goodman said that they considered the DA reaching out to victims a "fire" that needed to be put out. All of this was during President Donald Trump's first administration.
"It's quite stunning because a large part of the allegations against Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and alleged co-conspirators happened in New York. That would be the epicenter of a lot of the crimes, of the trafficking of the young girls and women, the sexual abuse of the young girls and women happened in the townhouse of the Upper East Side in Manhattan," Goodman explained.
So, to close off such an investigation from those on the ground, he said, is "astonishing" as it would be the most productive avenue of getting at the other men involved in the crimes.
While the federal government may have assumed that the NYPD and DA stopped, they actually continued the probe through a "robust investigation," including speaking to the survivors through their attorneys. One part of that investigation focuses specifically on Leon Black, a private equity investor, whom Business Insider reported on last week. Black has never been charged.
The Office of the New Mexico Attorney General, Raúl Torrez, said last week that in 2019, it was also told to stand down.
The "investigation was closed in 2019 at the request of the U.S Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York," Torrez said. He wants them to be reopened. The U.S. attorney in 2019 was Geoffrey Berman, who was also actively investigating potential financial abuses related to Donald Trump's 2017 Presidential Inaugural Committee and pursuing investigations involving Michael Cohen from 2018 to 2019.
The documents show that on Dec. 6, 2018, the NYPD, SDNY and the FBIChild Exploitation Human Trafficking Task Force opened a case on Epstein.
On July 10, 2019 an Epstein survivor, Jennifer Araoz, was interviewed by Guthrie for the TODAY Show. She said the recruiter knew she was 14. After the interview aired, Araoz submitted a New York State court filing seeking information from Epstein about a recruiter who allegedly worked with him to "recruit" her. Her lawsuit against Maxwell and an assistant was filed on Aug 14, 2019, just four days after Epstein was found dead. So, she filed the suit against his estate.
The "stand down" directive came in 2019 on July 10 and 11. One month later, Epstein was dead.
By Jan. 2020, emails showed that the FBI was discussing the NYPD's probe of Epstein.
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an 12 25
President Donald Trump has hinted about the falling out he had with Jeffrey Epstein after their years-long friendship, but the Wall Street Journal revealed specifics about the story in an exclusive report late Tuesday evening.
According to the report, Mar-a-Lago wasn't merely a frequent hangout for Epstein; the country club would also send Epstein young women to handle his "massages, manicures and other spa services."
A former Mar-a-Lago employee told the Journal that the "services" went on for years. Trump's staff warned each other about the kind of person Epstein was, according to former Epstein employees.
The spa employees would frequently warn each other about Epstein's sexual suggestions, reporting that he would expose himself during appointments.
Epstein was never a dues-paying member of Mar-a-Lago, but Trump still gave his close friends the perks. He even went so far as to tell the spa staff to treat Epstein as if he was a dues-paying member. Epstein's longtime companion, Ghislaine Maxwell, would frequently book the appointments on his behalf.
Everything stopped when an 18-year-old beautician returned from a "house call" to Epstein and said that he had pressured her for sex, the ex-employees told the Journal.
"A manager sent Trump a fax relaying the employee's allegations and urged him to ban Epstein, some of the former employees said. Trump told the manager it was a good letter and said to kick him out," the report said.
The woman gave details to human resources, but the incident was never reported to the police.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt alleged the report was false.
"No matter how many times this story is told and retold, the truth remains: President Trump did nothing wrong and he kicked Jeffrey Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago for being a creep," Leavitt said after claiming the Journal was "writing up fallacies and innuendo."
Trump is currently in a lawsuit against the Journal for a report that Trump submitted a note for Epstein's birthday book that included the outline of a woman's body. Trump denied the report even as the birthday book entries were published.
CNBC's Carl Quintanilla highlighted an excerpt of the report that talked about Trump's ex-wife, Marla Maples, being so "uneasy" about Epstein's presence that she didn't want to spend time with him or Trump when they were together. Still, Epstein continued to party at Mar-a-Lago with Trump.
Mother Jones editor-in-chief Clara Jeffrey cited the ongoing lawsuit between Trump and the Journal. The paper, she said, "continues to break news about their relationship..."
Washington Monthly's politics editor Bill Schersaid he was speechless reading that Trump was willing to send young women to Epstein's mansion.
Linguist Luke Steuber remarked, "WSJ just blew this all up by carrying Trump's water. On a lot of people, I think it's going to work."
National security analyst Marcy Wheeler added, "What's interesting abt this story is 18-yo who returned to MAL saying Epstein had pressured her for sex is not clearly IDed as girl whose father was MAL member who really let Trump have it. She could still be, but if not, it would be THREE (known) MAL girls Epstein assaulted before he was reported."
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an 12 25
Florida cops wanted to arrest Epstein victims after they came forward: grand jury doc
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AN 12 25
New York Times writer Alan Feuer says pro-Trump influencers have “always had a lot to say about the Jeffrey Epstein files.”
Several called for the files release before President Donald Trump was re-elected, certain they would “expose a cabal of Democrats who had palled around” with Epstein after he’d been exposed as a convicted sex offender, said Feuer. Several more criticized Trump this year as he sought to block the files’ release, calling them a “Democratic hoax.”
“But many of them were conspicuously quiet on Tuesday, when the Justice Department released a batch of materials that contained hundreds of mentions of Mr. Trump," Feuer said. “Their silence contrasted with the uproar made over the weekend when the department’s first release focused on former President Bill Clinton, including an image, stripped of context, showing him reclining in a hot tub. MAGA influencer Laura Loomer – also known as Trump's unofficial "loyalty enforcer" — mocked Clinton on social media after the photos emerged.
“On Tuesday, however, Ms. Loomer said nothing about the newly released materials, which showed, among other things, that federal prosecutors had determined that Mr. Trump had flown on Mr. Epstein’s private plane more times than they originally knew,” Feuer noted. “Instead, Ms. Loomer seemed to post about everything except the Epstein files: immigrant work visas; ‘anti-white racism’; next year’s midterm elections; and Zohran Mamdani, the mayor-elect of New York.”
Feuer identified similar silence with conservative influencer Rogan O’Handley, who posts on X under the handle DC Draino. On Friday, O’Handley was also berating Clinton, writing how the Epstein files had depicted him “shirtless in a hot tub with a female that is not his wife.”
“But on Tuesday, Mr. O’Handley had nothing at all to say about the files,” said Feuer.
The same went for pro-Trump podcaster and “The Benny Show,” host Benny Johnson, who Feuer said much preferred posting about fired transgender instructors rather than Epstein.
“One Trump-friendly account did, however, post about the newly released files: the one run by the Justice Department,” said Feuer, adding that the department quickly jumped to defend the president as if they were his personal troupe of lawyers.
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11 25
The New Yorker's Jay Caspian Kang says that life after President Donald Trump may not be what people expect, as an "abrupt realignment" in politics may emerge from, of all places, the scandal surrounding deceased convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
Kang describes the situation surrounding the scandal as "Planet Epstein."
"That planet is an information ecosystem where all major global events are connected to the sex-trafficking conspiracy that supposedly rules the world," Kang explains, adding that "in the past few months, I have been trying to gauge how much of the American public is now convinced that a cabal of pedophilesruns the world."
While polls have shown that most Americans do believe the government is hiding information about Epstein and his cohorts, Kang notes that "there is a difference between suspecting a coverup and going full Pizzagate-conspiracy mode, drawing connections among former U.S. Treasury Secretary and Harvard University president [Larry] Summers, Epstein, Trump, Bill Clinton, [Israeli national intelligence agency] Mossad, and the sudden rise of the A.I. industry, which now seems to be propping up a large part of the world economy — and then concluding that some shadowy group of oligarchs rules us all."
Following the votes to release the Epstein files and the defection of former Trump acolyte Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene(R-GA) from the House, Kang argues "we are in the middle of a quietly revolutionary moment in this country, which began with the pandemic and the protests stemming from the murder of George Floyd by a police officer."
"The subsequent unrest has taken on a variety of forms, including a continued and drastic decline in trust of the traditional news media and attacks on universities from both the left and the right," he adds.
That unrest, he writes, "was also channeled into Trump’s 2024 campaign, which was less about any one issue than it was about a renewed and utterly hollow promise to drain the swamp all over again."
The Epstein scandal has provided "a single theory of the world" that didn't rely on partisan leanings to feed that "insurrectionary energy," Kang writes.
"Epstein has provided that. Lest we forget, Epstein died more than six years ago now, and although the story certainly had not been forgotten by the public, it had at least been moved to a low-heat back burner when Greene; Thomas Massie, a U.S. representative from Kentucky; and a handful of other politicians began to talk about the Epstein files again," he says.
Kang says that a little over a month ago, he wrote that "on Planet Epstein, everything that happens — the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the war in Gaza, the suppression of speech by the Trump Administration — serves as proof that the country is run by blackmail, pedophilia and fealty to Israel."
"I do not think very many Americans buy into every part of that story, and I imagine that a great number would be rightfully appalled by the implicit and explicit antisemitism in this view of the world," he added.
Now, Kang says, "In hindsight, I fear that I might have undersold the number of Americans who do believe all those things."
Rising from the "Epstein mess," Kang writes, is Greene, whose "sudden resignation only adds another chapter to the conspiracy narrative on Planet Epstein."
"America loves righteous defectors, and her turn away from Trump — along with her newly measured tone when speaking in big-time media interviews or, last week, in front of the Capitol, flanked with Epstein survivors — turned someone who was an embarrassment into one of the more formidable members of the House of Representatives," Kang notes.
And while Kang doubts that "Greene, freed from Congress, and in spite of her past nuttiness and humiliations," will "become the magnet who pulls together the populist right and the populist," he does expect her to run for president with "someone from the insurrectionary left as her running mate."
"Such a campaign would certainly feature a lot of talk about Epstein and Israel, and would likely call for a new vision of the country that did away with what Greene called traitors who serve “foreign countries and themselves," Kang muses.
As for how such a ticket would fare against more mainstream politicians on either side, Kang says not very well, probably, because "political inertia and the two-party system are still powerful forces, despite the Epstein revolution that’s taking place on every smartphone in the country."
Whatever does ensue, Kang writes, he is certain that "political life after Trump will be defined by odd ideological pairings that do not follow the political lines of the past twenty years. An abrupt realignment now feels more probable than endless polarization."
"Some of the surprises that result from this realignment, such as [NYC mayor elect Zohran] Mamdani’s unlikely victory, will surely cause both hope and fear, as people grapple with the unexpected. But I do not think that we can fully predict the alliances to come, nor the new order they will bring," he concludes.
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AN 11 25
Will Sommer, author of “Trust the Plan: The Rise of QAnon and the Conspiracy That Unhinged America," writes in*The New York Times*that though the recent revelations around deceased Jeffrey Epsteinshould have been a "dream" for conspiracy theorists, their reactions have been "strangely muted" and "dismayed."
QAnon, a far-right American political conspiracy theory and movement that claims a cabal in the "deep state" is operating a global child sex trafficking ring and that President Donald Trump is secretly fighting them, has been placed, Sommer says, in a awkward position by Trump's relentless resistance to releasing the Epstein files.
"What was harder to explain, for many believers, was why Mr.Trump spent so long resisting the releaseof the key evidence that would confirm what they suspected was happening all along," Sommer says.
He says that, while there are some "celebrants" of the Epstein developments, "much of QAnon’s response to Washington’s Epstein excitement has been strangely muted, even dismayed."
And as Congress near unanimously voted to release the Epstein files last week, the conspiracy theorists in the group may have already moved on, Sommer notes.
"But with revelations about Mr. Trump’s relationship to Mr. Epstein mounting, the default QAnon position has become that Mr. Epstein just isn’t that interesting anymore," he writes. "That’s partly because QAnon believers no longer stand out so brightly in the conspiracy-minded Republican mainstream."
Sommer explains that the truth doesn't exactly match the QAnon "grand fantasies of elite exposure that QAnon dreamed up at its height. But for QAnon, the real problem with the Epstein revelations is that Mr. Trump sits uncomfortably close to the center of them."
QAnon members took to social media after the vote to release the files, including Jon Herold, who wrote, “All the awful things that people are saying, I hope it’s not true,” Mr. Herold said. “I don’t want to see any of it.”
"Given that the conspiracy theory doubles as a cult of personality built around Mr. Trump, this sort of reaction isn’t particularly surprising. But the new emails do suggest the conspiracy theorists were right about Mr. Epstein’s significance— albeit not in the ways they thought," Sommer says.
The Epstein scandal, Sommer writes, should matter deeply to QAnon, "because he was a rare example of the supposed sex-trafficking cabal’s machinations coming out in the open."
"While Mr. Epstein was mentioned relatively rarely in QAnon before his 2019 indictment, his mysterious death propelled QAnon recruitment and provided endless alleys for its amateur internet sleuths to explore," Sommer adds.
Trump's long and proven friendship with Epstein, however, has always been difficult for QAnon to explain, Sommers notes.
"The traditional QAnon explanation for the pair’s closeness has been that Mr. Trump was getting close to Mr. Epstein just to bring more publicity to his crimes," he writes.
But this explanation has begun to look "shaier" as more emails about Trump and Epstein have emerged.
"QAnon’s retreat from the Epstein story is striking because there remain real questions about Mr. Epstein that could make for a rich vein of new theorizing," Sommer writes.
"For most QAnon believers the priority is protecting Mr. Trump at all costs. Even if it means no longer asking questions. Even if it means letting the moment they finally got something right pass them by. Even if it means continuing to thirst for a storm that will never come," he explains.
And while one-time QAnon believer Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has moved away from Trump due in part to the Epstein scandal, Sommer says that "While Ms. Greene claimed she was no longer 'a victim' of 'media lies' that led her to QAnon, she still seems motivated by the hunt for information about sex trafficking that QAnon claimed to pursue."
QAnon, Sommer says, offered people "an understanding of the world in which Mr. Trump wasn’t letting his voters down, he was just fighting forces far more powerful and evil than they could imagine."
But things have changed, he writes.
"Now, Mr. Trump is once again bogged down in the first year of a presidential term, this time by the Epstein investigation. Prices are rising. Trump supporters are growing restless," Sommer says. "Do you think Q has one more clue left in him?"
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by the time Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting prostitution from an underage girl, he had established an enormous network of wealthy and influential friends. Emails made public this week show the crime did little to diminish the desire of that network to stay connected to the financier.
Thousands of documents released by the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday offer a new glimpse into what Epstein’s relationships with business executives, reporters, academics and political players looked like over a decade.
READ MORE:** Read Jeffrey Epstein’s newly released emails about Trump
They start with messages he sent and received around the time he finished serving his Florida sentence in 2009 and continue until the months before his arrest on federal sex trafficking charges in 2019.
During that time, Epstein’s network was eclectic, spanning the globe and political affiliations: from the liberal academic Noam Chomsky to Steve Bannon, the longtime ally of President Donald Trump.
Some reached out to support Epstein amid lawsuits and prosecutions, others sought introductions or advice on everything from dating to oil prices. One consulted him on how to respond to accusations of sexual harassment.
Epstein was charged with sex trafficking in 2019, and killed himself in jail a month later. Epstein’s crimes, high-profile connections and jailhouse suicide have made the case a magnet for conspiracy theorists and online sleuths seeking proof of a cover-up.
The emails do not implicate his contacts in those alleged crimes. They instead paint a picture of Epstein’s influence and connections over the years he was a registered sex offender.
Epstein kept a diverse political network
Epstein emailed current and former political figures on all sides, sending news clips and discussing strategy or gossip often in short, choppy emails laden with spelling and grammatical errors.
In several emails in 2018, Epstein advised Bannon on his political tour of Europe that year. Bannon first forwarded Epstein a news clip that described the German media as “underestimating” Bannon and that he was “As Dangerous as Ever.”
“luv it,” Epstein responded.
Epstein wrote that he’d just spoken to “one of the country leaders that we discussed” and that “we should lay out a strategy plan. . how much fun.”
Several months later, Epstein sent some advice: “If you are going to play here , you’ll have to spend time, europe by remote doesn’t work.”
“its doable but time consuming,” Epstein continued in a follow-up email, “there are many leaders of countries we can organize for you to have one on ones.”
Just a few months earlier, Epstein was insulting Trump — whose movement Bannon was a representative of — in emails to Kathryn Ruemmler, the former White House counsel under President Barack Obama.
Ruemmler sent a message to Epstein calling Trump “so gross.” A portion of that message was redacted, but Epstein replied, “worse in real life and upclose.”
In other emails with Ruemmler, Epstein detailed a whirlwind of well-known people he appears to have been meeting, hosting or speaking with that week, including an ambassador, a tech giant, foreign business people, academics and a film director.
“you are a welcome guest at any,” he wrote.
Jennifer Zuccarelli, a spokesperson for Goldman Sachs, where Ruemmler now works, declined to comment.
Epstein’s wealthy social circles
The financier emailed often with people in the upper echelons of wealth around the world, brokering introductions and chatting about politics and foreign affairs.
That included Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel, who Epstein sent an email to in 2014 saying “that was fun , see you in 3 weeks.”
Four years later, Epstein asked if Thiel was enjoying Los Angeles, and, after Thiel said he couldn’t complain, replied “Dec visit me Caribbean.” It’s unclear if Thiel ever responded.
In emails with Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, an Emirati businessman, Epstein complimented Bannon, saying in 2018 that “We have become friends you will like him.”
“Trump doesn’t like him,” responded Sulayem.
A year earlier, Sulayem asked Epstein about an event where it appeared Trump would be in attendance, asking, “Do you think it will be possible to shake hand with trump.”
“Call to discuss,” Epstein wrote back.
In January 2010, biotech venture capitalist Boris Nikolic was attending the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and Epstein emailed to ask, “any fun?”
Nikolic replied that he had met “your friend” Bill Clinton, as well as then-French President Nicholas Sarkozy and “your other friend,” Prince Andrew, “as he has some questions re microsoft.”
But then Nikolic said he was getting sick of meetings. Later, he wrote Epstein that “it would be blast that you are here.” He mentioned flirting with a 22-year-old woman.
“It turns out she is with her husand. Did not have chance to check him out. But as we concluded, anything good is rented ;)” Nikolic wrote.
Epstein kept in touch with academics
The theoretical physicist and cosmologist Laurence Krauss was among them. In 2017, Krauss reached out to Epstein via email for advice on responding to a reporter writing a story about allegations of sexual harassment against him.
“Is this a reasonable response? Should i even respond? Could use advice,” Krauss asked Epstein.
In an explicit exchange, Epstein asked Krauss if he’d had sex with the person in question and then suggested he should not reply to the journalist.
“No. We didn’t have sex. Decided it wasn’t a good idea,” replied Krauss.
Krauss said in an email to The Associated Press that he never hid the fact that he knew Epstein, and interacted with him several times.
“I sought out advice from essentially everyone I knew when false allegations about me were circulated in the press in 2018,” said Krauss. “I was as shocked as the rest of the world when he was arrested” in 2019.
In an August 2015 email exchange, Epstein told Chomsky, the famed linguist and social scientist, to only fly to Greece if he feels well, joking he previously had to send a plane for another “lefty friend” to see a doctor in New York.
In the same exchange, which dipped into academic arguments about warning signs on currency collapses, behavioral science models, and Big Data, Epstein offered his residences for Chomsky’s use.
“you are of course welcome to use apt in new york with your new leisure time, or visit new Mexico again,” Epstein wrote.
The emails also show that Epstein kept up a friendly relationship with Larry Summers, who was the treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton and former Harvard University president, and bantered about the 2016 presidential race and Trump.
Other emails showed a closer relationship. In 2019, Summers was discussing interactions he had with a woman, writing to Epstein that “I said what are you up to. She said ‘I’m busy’. I said awfully coy u are.”
Epstein replied, “you reacted well.. annoyed shows caring. , no whining showed strentgh.”
Summers issued a statement saying he has “great regrets in my life.”
“As I have said before, my association with Jeffrey Epstein was a major error of judgement,” the statement said.
Chomsky, Thiel, Bannon, and Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem did not immediately respond to requests for comment, which were sent through email addresses available on their own or their organizations’ websites.
*Associated Press reporters John Hanna in Topeka, Kansas, and Claudia Lauer in...
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an 11 25
In their thirst to speak of anything but damning emails further linking President Donald Trump to the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein, right-wing influencers were desperately grasping at everything.
New York Times reporter Ken Bensinger describes pundits’ ‘thunderous silence’ at one of the most exciting media explosions in weeks.
“For hours, Fox News made nary a mention of the tranche [of incriminating documents], whose contents suggested, among other things, that the president knew more about the abuses perpetrated by Mr. Epstein, a former friend, than he had admitted,” said Bensinger. “Prominent podcasters like Ben Shapiro and Megyn Kelly focused on H-1B visas, the government shutdown and a proposal for 50-year mortgages on their shows and social media.”
The online troll account known as “Catturd,” which posts “dozens of times every day to its nearly four million followers on X,” spent the aftermath of the email release attacking Michelle Obama, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California and former FBI Director James Comey.
“But as time wore on, right-wing media figures began coalescing around another approach: focusing on a single redacted name in the emails,” said Bensinger. “They argued that Democrats on the House Oversight Committee — who had released three emails early on Wednesday — had created a false narrative by hiding the name of one of Epstein’s victims in one of the messages. The redaction, the theory went, was meant to cover up that the victim, Virginia Giuffre, previously said she had never witnessed Mr. Trump involved in sexual abuse of minors.”
“This was done intentionally,” posted Newsmax anchor Rob Schmitt. He then followed that up with a selfie-style video in a gym. “This is how sick and twisted these people are,” Schmitt said. “They are vile creatures. This is what we’re up against.”
Right-wing media figures are in a difficult position, said Bensinger.
“The unified response to this week’s [email] disclosures shows how closely aligned right-wing media voices are with elected Republicans and the degree to which the two share story lines — and provide each other political cover,” said Bensinger. “Indeed, the core message that ended up emanating from conservative media this week originated [from Republicans] within the Oversight Committee itself, [who] jumped on the redaction question less than an hour after the three emails dropped.”
“Why did Democrats cover up the name?” Bensinger said committee Republicans posted on X. “Democrats are trying to create a fake narrative to slander President Trump.”
The White House seized that same line of thinking, pointing out that the redacted Epstein victim in the emails never claimed Trump had personally touched her.
Other MAGA influencers are now trying to ride that train as far as it can go, said Bensinger, with podcasters Benny Johnson and Tim Pool joining countless others in unified argument, all trying to raise suspicion over why Giuffre’s name was redacted.
Bensinger points out that it is the policy of the Oversight Committee to redact the names of victims in its revelations, and that Republicans committed an “apparent violation of the committee’s policy” when they released the unredacted version.
Read the New York Times report at this link.
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an 11 25
George Bush speechwriter and podcaster Tim Miller says MAGA Media “is in shambles as they're trying to circle the wagons around President Donald Trump following the … Epstein revelations.”
“You know, these folks are just grasping for anything to try to defend Trump when even in the most generous interpretation of events, he had wildly inappropriate relationship with the country's most notorious child sex trafficker, was around young women and girls — apparently, according to one of the emails — that [Epstein] was sexually abusing and trafficking, and that when he got a chance to reveal and publicize the other people who were complicit in this, he decided to cover it up,” said Miller.
Miller referenced a recent “News Nation” interview between Megyn Kelly and guest Batya Ungar-Sargon where she downplayed the allegations against Epstein.
“We have not seen some slew of young women come forward to say ‘me too’ on Donald Trump molesting them or having paid for sex with them when they were barely legal or otherwise. It just hasn't happened,” Kelly told Ungar-Sargon in replayed footage.
But Miller dismantled this argument, pointing out that he himself had interviewed Epstein victim Stacey Williams who claimed to have been groped by Trump.
“Being led into Donald's office to be groped by him was bad enough, and I probably was young enough and confused enough where maybe I was still questioning [what was happening],” Williams said. Miller included a link to that interview.
“Where have you been, Megyn Kelly? There were at least 28 women have accused Donald Trump of various acts of sexual misconduct, including rape, kissing and groping without consent. ‘You can do anything. Whatever you want. Grab ‘em by the p——,' looking under women's skirts, and yes, walking in on naked teenage pageant contestants,” Miller said.
Ungar-Sargon didn’t push back, on Kelly's claim, but instead pushed the argument that Epstein pushed his victims onto Trump and friend.
“[A] lawyer for a group of the women actually said Jeffrey Epstein would prey upon women when they were underage, … and then the lawyer said when they came of age and he was no longer interested in them, he would then pass them on,” Ungar-Sargon told Kelly.
“Sure,” said Miller. “… [W]hat was happening with these young girls was that Jeffrey Epstein was abusing them and molesting them. And then when they became 18, he would pass them off to his friends. And these sex-trafficked and groomed girls would give ... sexual massages to creepy old men who were friends with a sex trafficker. That's the spin now. That's where they're at. That's where MAGA world is. Here's our pretty picture that we'll paint on this.”
But Miller rolled out photos of Epstein victims Tila Davis and Jenna Lisa Jones, as well as Michelle Licata, (age 16) and Jennifer Araz.
“Araz was recruited at 14, assaulted at 15, and she looks like a baby,” said Miller, who then showed a photo of victim Courtney Wilde.
“If you're sitting across from them on this plane and then somebody looked over to you and was like, ‘he's … having sex with her,’ nobody would look at that and say, ‘well, it seems passably illegal.’ You would call the authorities immediately," Miller said.
“It's like looking at a Maxim magazine,” Miller said, referencing a photo collage of victims. “It's just sick. This is what Donald Trump has done to these people. He's made them sick in the brain. They can no longer have enough clarity … to be able to say, ‘you know what? I don't need to debase myself like this for this mushroom d——, f—— piece of s—— in the White House.’”
“We don't know exactly what Donald Trump's role was, but the fact that Donald Trump has been accused of sexual assault many, many times is on the public record,” said Miller. “The fact that he bragged about it is on the public record. The fact that he's trying to cover this up is something we all know. Who would want to cover up what happened to these girls?”
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an 11 25 badash
President Donald Trump is intensifying his efforts to thwart attempts to force the release of the Epstein files, even as the House moves toward a vote that could send disclosure legislation to his desk for his signature — or veto — further heightening scrutiny of his past ties to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
On Friday, the president announced he will ask the U.S. Department of Justice, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation “to investigate Jeffrey Epstein’s involvement and relationship with Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, Reid Hoffman, J.P. Morgan, Chase, and many other people and institutions, to determine what was going on with them, and him.”
The New York Times reported that the “inquiry appeared to be retribution for the renewed focus on his own ties to Mr. Epstein.”
After White House officials reportedly held a Situation Room meeting with Republican Congresswoman Lauren Boebert on Wednesday to convince her — unsuccessfully — to remove her name from the discharge petition, the president on Friday took a different tack, appearing both to try to wash his hands of the entire ordeal while refocusing attention on his political opponents and others.
“Epstein was a Democrat, and he is the Democrat’s problem, not the Republican’s problem!” Trump railed on his Truth Social website, while attacking Democrats.
“The Democrats are doing everything in their withering power to push the Epstein Hoax again, despite the DOJ releasing 50,000 pages of documents, in order to deflect from all of their bad policies and losses, especially the SHUTDOWN EMBARRASSMENT, where their party is in total disarray, and has no idea what to do,” Trump alleged.
“Some Weak Republicans have fallen into their clutches because they are soft and foolish,” the president continued. “Epstein was a Democrat, and he is the Democrat’s problem, not the Republican’s problem!”
“Ask Bill Clinton, Reid Hoffman, and Larry Summers about Epstein, they know all about him, don’t waste your time with Trump. I have a Country to run!”
Deadline on Friday noted that “Since the email release, Trump has avoided answering reporters’ questions about Epstein.”
Pointing to Trump’s Friday remarks, Politico’s Kyle Cheney remarked, “Trump again pleads with Republicans to stop talking about Epstein. The pressure hasn’t worked as well as it usually does. Also, the emails show Epstein was politically amorphous, deriding Ds just as much as Rs. And these latest emails were from the Epstein estate, not DOJ.”
Attorney Aaron Parnas added, “I guarantee you if Donald Trump truly believed Epstein was the ‘Democrat’s problem,’ he would have released all of the files by now.”
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new info on banks involvement w him?
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adelita
mtg in sit rm w doj?
Trump 'himself' calling Boebert and Mace to meet over 'concerns around the Epstein saga'
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mma
11/12/25 1:38 PM EST
11/12/25
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an 10 25
President Donald Trump's administration is now reportedly coming down hard on federal inmates for speaking out against the DOJ's apparent soft treatment of convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.
That's according to CNN, which
that Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) — the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee — is now demanding answers from the warden at Maxwell's minimum security prison about what he alleges is "VIP treatment" for deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein's chief accomplice. CNN host Jim Sciutto said Raskin is also questioning Maxwell getting "mysterious visitors, meal delivery and other special perks" and that the DOJ has "retaliated against inmates who dared to speak out about her fawning preferential treatment."
Elie Honig, a legal analyst for the network, told Scuitto that while he's less concerned with meal deliveries and meetings with visitors, the major red flag in Raskin's letter is the allegation that inmates have been punished for drawing attention to Maxwell's treatment.
"Apparently there are other inmates in this facility, other female inmates who have spoken out about preferential treatment to Ghislaine Maxwell and are now being punished," Honig said. "Representative Raskin points out one particular inmate who appears to have been kicked out of a training program and moved to a higher security prison. That is a major problem, if that's happening as retaliation."
Honig went on to remind viewers that Maxwell shouldn't even be at the Bryan, Texas prison — where she was moved earlier this year after a two-day meeting with Deputy Attorney General (and Trump's former personal attorney) Todd Blanche — due to Bureau of Prisons rules. Facilities like Bryan are typically only for white-collar offenses, whereas violent offenders like those convicted of sex crimes have to serve their sentences in more restrictive conditions.
"That takes a waiver. Somebody within the Justice Department ... has to specifically approve that, say, 'I waive the normal course of proceedings and I'm okay with Ghislaine Maxwell being moved to a lower security prison,'" Honig said. "To this day, we don't know who actually authorized that. And we've not gotten answers from DOJ about that."President Donald Trump's administration is now reportedly coming down hard on federal inmates for speaking out against the DOJ's apparent soft treatment of convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.
That's according to CNN, which
that Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) — the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee — is now demanding answers from the warden at Maxwell's minimum security prison about what he alleges is "VIP treatment" for deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein's chief accomplice. CNN host Jim Sciutto said Raskin is also questioning Maxwell getting "mysterious visitors, meal delivery and other special perks" and that the DOJ has "retaliated against inmates who dared to speak out about her fawning preferential treatment."
Elie Honig, a legal analyst for the network, told Scuitto that while he's less concerned with meal deliveries and meetings with visitors, the major red flag in Raskin's letter is the allegation that inmates have been punished for drawing attention to Maxwell's treatment.
"Apparently there are other inmates in this facility, other female inmates who have spoken out about preferential treatment to Ghislaine Maxwell and are now being punished," Honig said. "Representative Raskin points out one particular inmate who appears to have been kicked out of a training program and moved to a higher security prison. That is a major problem, if that's happening as retaliation."
Honig went on to remind viewers that Maxwell shouldn't even be at the Bryan, Texas prison — where she was moved earlier this year after a two-day meeting with Deputy Attorney General (and Trump's former personal attorney) Todd Blanche — due to Bureau of Prisons rules. Facilities like Bryan are typically only for white-collar offenses, whereas violent offenders like those convicted of sex crimes have to serve their sentences in more restrictive conditions.
"That takes a waiver. Somebody within the Justice Department ... has to specifically approve that, say, 'I waive the normal course of proceedings and I'm okay with Ghislaine Maxwell being moved to a lower security prison,'" Honig said. "To this day, we don't know who actually authorized that. And we've not gotten answers from DOJ about that."
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an 10 25
A slate of emails collected by the New York Times reveals a period of grinding stress between Jeffrey Epstein and his biggest financial supporter, billionaire Leon Black.
The chairman of the board of Apollo Global Management had been backing away from paying Epstein $40 million a year for various advisory work after Epstein’s first Florida indictment related to charges of underage sex.
“So Mr. Epstein threw a tantrum,” the Times reports. “ … The typo-strewn tirade was one of dozens of previously unreported emails … in which Mr. Epstein hectored Mr. Black, at times demanding tens of millions of dollars beyond the $150 million he had already been paid.”
And the pressure campaign appeared to work. Black continued to fork over tens of millions of dollars in fees and loans. After Epstein served jail time for soliciting prostitution from a minor, many of his contacts backed away. But not Black, who “kept Epstein afloat for years,” according to the Times. Eventually Black was pushed out of the private equity firm he co-founded over his ties to Epstein.
“The two men had been personally entwined for more than two decades. When a former girlfriend accused Mr. Black of sexual assault, he turned to Mr. Epstein for advice about paying her millions of dollars to keep it quiet,” said the Times, according to court records. “Another woman said in a lawsuit that Mr. Black had raped her at Mr. Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse. She eventually dropped the lawsuit.”
“And, for reasons that are unknown, Mr. Black wired hundreds of thousands of dollars to at least three women who were associated with Mr. Epstein,” the Times added, also according to court documents and notes taken by congressional investigators that were shared with The Times.
In one email, a frustrated Epstein boasted of his protective services to Black: "If you reflect on your financial life, you have been kept safe, had remarkable results and no disasters."
Their intimate tangle of machinations might explain how Epstein could berate Black so abusively in letters that sometimes referred to his children as “r-------” for supposedly making a mess of his estate.
“The emails … sent in 2015 and 2016 to Mr. Black through his personal assistant, as well as to a handful of his advisers, show another dimension of Mr. Epstein’s cruelty,” the Times reports. “While he was known for ingratiating himself with the rich and powerful, he could also veer into nastiness and was willing to turn the screws on his biggest client.”
Read the New York Times report at this link.
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an 10 25
'It's a conspiracy': Ann Coulter slams Trump’s 'Swamp'-like Epstein cover-up
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house discharge petition close 9 25 10th
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an 9 25
President Donald Trump is making it clear that he is sick of talking about Jeffrey Epstein and wants to move on, yet the scandal surrounding the U.S. Department of Justice's (DOJ) files on the billionaire financier and convicted sex offender isn't going away. And some Trump critics, according to HuffPost reporter Brandi Buchman, are using a satirical Trump/Epstein statue to troll the U.S. president.
"A 12-foot statue of President Donald Trump and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein holding hands and prancing together was erected on the National Mall early Tuesday, (September 23)," Buchman explains. "Three plaques appear alongside the satirical faux-bronze statues, courtesy of a mysterious group that goes by the name The Secret Handshake. The plaques note the statues are 'in Honor of Friendship Month' in September."
One of the plaques, according to Buchman, reads, "We celebrate the long-lasting bond between President Donald J. Trump and his 'closest friend' Jeffrey Epstein."
The statues, according to Buchman, come from a group calling itself The Secret Handshake.
The group's leader, quoted anonymously, told HuffPost, "No one else publicly that we know of partied with Donald Trump, traveled with Donald Trump and visited at Mar-a-Lago just as a friend, not just as an associate. Since this is Friendship Month, we wanted to celebrate what is presumably, at least publicly, Donald Trump's only true friend."
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hcr 9 25
An in-depth article in the New York Times Magazineyesterday by David Enrich, Matthew Goldstein, and Jessica Silver-Greenberg detailed how top bankers at JPMorgan Chase ignored the many red flags around Epstein’s financial activities to keep the wealthy and well-connected man as a treasured client. It was only after Epstein was arrested the second time, federal prosecutors charged him with sex trafficking, and he died in his jail cell that JPMorgan filed a report retroactively flagging 4,700 transactions totaling more than $1.1 billion as suspicious.
According to Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), that money included hundreds of millions of dollars of transactions involving women in Belarus, Russia, and Turkmenistan, and two Russian banks.
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mma
As the weird Trump birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein is released, MAGA media cling to their claims that it was a hoax
Written by Jason Campbell
Published 09/09/25 10:26 AM EDT
On Monday, lawyers for sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s estate provided Congress with a birthday letter allegedly written by President Donald Trump to Epstein in 2003.
Trump's letter to Epstein
From a September 8, 2025, article in the Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal first reported the letter’s existence in mid-July. At the time, Trump filed lawsuits against the paper, the reporters, and News Corp. for defamation, and his media allies rushed to his defense, calling the letter a “hoax.”
Podcaster Benny Johnson said the Wall Street Journal reporting is a “hoax.”
:{Video f
Citation
From the July 22, 2025, edition of The Benny Show, posted to YouTube
Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk said he didn’t believe the Wall Street Journal’s reporting.
:{Video f
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From the July 18, 2025, edition of The Charlie Kirk Show, posted to Rumble
Newsmax host Rob Schmitt said the Wall Street Journal reporters are “anti-Trump.”
:{Video
Citation
From the July 21, 2025, edition of Newsmax's Rob Schmitt Tonight
The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro: “I think the note is probably, at the very least, not written by him [Trump].”
:{Video
Citation
From the July 18, 2025, edition of The Daily Wire's The Ben Shapiro Show
The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles said Trump’s lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal is strong evidence that “it’s a fake letter.”
:{Video
Citation
From the July 21, 2025, edition of The Daily Wire's The Michael Knowles Show
Since the letter was provided to Congress, the White House has continued to deny its authenticity.
Trump’s media allies, including Kirk and Johnson, have also maintained that the letter is not real.
The New York Times examined Trump's signature that these MAGA figures are fixated on.
It’s all predictable.
After MAGA media figures lashed out at the Trump administration in July over its lackluster Epstein revelations, Trump successfully forced them to cave to his will and largely ignore the issue. Protecting the personal interests of Donald Trump continues to be the primary goal of right-wing media.
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AN 9 25
Amid escalating intra-party conflict, President Donald Trump and his allies are orchestrating a high-stakes primary challenge against Rep. Thomas Massie (R‑Ky.), who has frequently criticized the president over key policy issues.
CNN reported Sunday that Trump's super PAC, Kentucky MAGA, is revving up to flood Massie’s district with resources and attacks designed to topple the lawmaker, who is up for reelection next year.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) lambasted his Kentucky colleague for undermining party unity. “He is actively working against his team almost daily now and seems to enjoy that role. So he is, you know, deciding his own fate,” Johnson told CNN.
READ MORE:Arkansas farmers are facing catastrophe — and Trump is the reason why
"Speaker Mike Johnson and his leadership team are sending their clearest signals to date that their conservative colleague will have to fend for himself as Trump’s allies prepare to dump millions into Massie’s district to purge him from the Northeastern Kentucky district he’s represented for nearly 13 years. In interviews with CNN, five members of House GOP leadership declined to offer their backing for Massie’s reelection bid – and Johnson would not say if he’d support his colleague," the report said.
Massie is pushing fiercely to force the release of files related to convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, needing just two more GOP signatures for a discharge petition that would bypass leadership. Earlier, he bucked the party line on crucial votes, most recently ambushing a continuing resolution aimed at preventing a government shutdown, as well as lampooning Trump’s domestic priorities for ballooning the deficit.
Meanwhile, Trump’s apparatus is hard at work. His MAGA-aligned super PAC, launched in June, is staffed by veterans Tony Fabrizio and Chris LaCivita. They have pledged to spend “whatever it takes” to replace Massie in the May 2026 primary.
Trump has not yet found a challenger to take on the Kentucky Republican. According to the report, "Trump and his team are still searching for a candidate who can go toe-to-toe with the 54-year-old Massie, who has burnished a brand of a party maverick not afraid to break from his leadership and the president of his own party – namely on issues of government spending and budget deficits. But Trump views Massie as a deeply disloyal actor in a party where he demands unflinching support."
READ MORE:Irony oozes from Trump's latest self-made scandal
But Massie isn’t going down quietly. In mid‑July, his campaign announcedthat it had more than $1.7 million in its war chest for his reelection, including a solid $584,000 raised between April and June. He claims financial resilience and backing from high-profile backers, including tech billionaire and former Trump advisor, Elon Musk.
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mma
MICHAEL STEELE (CO-HOST): Breaking tonight, another new distraction from the Trump administration designed to pull focus from the Epstein scandal. Moments ago, Attorney General Pam Bondi directed federal prosecutors to launch a grand jury investigation into the origins of the Russia probe. Specifically, the investigation will look into criminal referrals from Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who made unsubstantiated allegations that President Obama and his aids in the intelligence community began the Russia probe to ruin Trump's chances of becoming president. Folks, there is no evidence that ever happened. Zippo, nada, none.
In fact, the idea that the Obama administration conspired against Trump was contradicted by a Senate Intelligence Committee review overseen by none other than Marco Rubio, who was the committee chairman at the time. Joining us now, Brendan Ballou, a former federal prosecutor with the Justice Department's National Security Division, and our friend Angelo Carusone, the president and CEO of Media Matters for America.
ALICIA MENENDEZ (CO-HOST): So, Brendan, how many times during your time at DOJ were you asked to secure a grand jury investigation and indictment where it was not clear who was being charged, what the charges were, or the timeline you were operating on?
BRENDAN BALLOU (GUEST): Zero times. So this announcement, as you said, said nothing about who's being investigated, what they're being investigated for, what the charging instrument would be, what the charges would be. The thing though that surprised me the most or that was most interesting to me about what wasn't announced was who was actually gonna do the investigation. They just said that it was going to be an attorney in the Department of Justice.
MENENDEZ: An unnamed federal prosecutor.
BALLOU: Exactly, which suggests to me that they have not yet found a credible US attorney to take this on.
SYMONE SANDERS TOWNSEND (CO-HOST): Why do you say that?
BALLOU: Well, you know, one thing that I always say when I come on here is that the Department of Justice depends entirely on its credibility. You know, there are some hack US attorneys that have gotten nominated and confirmed, unfortunately, that would be more than happy to take on an investigation like this. But if you actually want to secure an indictment in front of a grand jury, you know, 18 or more citizens, you need somebody that actually is going to be credible in front of them. And that they didn't announce this suggests that they haven't found that person yet.
MENENDEZ: Auditions are ongoing.
SANDERS TOWNSEND: I just think this is crazy because it's just a distraction. It is a huge distraction, and it just goes to show that they are spiraling. But this is the — the Russia probe is another conspiracy theory that Obama and all of these folks within the Obama administration trumped up these charges and these claims against Donald Trump because they didn't want him to win and that they were conspire — that they wiretapped his phone, right, during the -- these are all conspiracy theories.
STEELE: But wasn't there evidence that the Russians did try meddle in our election?
SANDERS TOWNSEND: Yes. Yes. But it's another conspiracy theory, and I think because Donald Trump has seen — I mean, I don't know. You tell me if the radio people have picked this one up.
But he's seen what the Epstein, you know, controversy around that conspiracy theory has done to him — it has not helped him. His wobbliness because it's like, well, why don't you wanna distance yourself from all the pedophilia, is not giving us more answers. It's providing more questions. On this, maybe his administration feels like, well, the people are with me on the Russia probe.
I'm on the up and up on that conspiracy theory. So let me just — let me just mix that thing up on the table, and perhaps that'll distract people to look over here and not over at this thing.
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS): Yeah. It's the safest possible thing that he could tap into as it relates to these conspiracies and these narratives. And it's also one of the promises that they've been making. And I — and, you know, when I heard this, I thought all the way back to November of 2017, because I remember a Rush Limbaugh segment where he basically laid out a story that sounded exactly like what was reported today, a fantasy, a fiction in which Trump's Department of Justice literally just has a non-named US attorney launch an investigation to get James Clapper and John Brennan for Russiagate. I mean, it's literally -- they plucked this from a from a Rush Limbaugh segment, and it wasn't just then.
And this gets to your point about it being safe. But that one, you know, he was such a potent storyteller that those things have legs. And when he sort of laid that architecture out back then, and I would say it existed, you know, around it, but he told it in such a concise way. If you then pull the thread in that — from that time period on, just a couple years, maybe, you know, a year and a half or so, eighteen months, Fox News did 2,000 segments alone on that very topic, a notion of this investigation being launched by the Department of Justice that would then expose and prosecute these people.
So to your point about it being safe, it is the safest possible play. And the two other corollaries to it are, one, this is part of his campaign promise. You know, he launched in Waco, promising to be revenge. This was one of the revenge items that he would go after these individuals and prosecute them. And the other is that and you, I think it's -- I'm so happy you started with the frame that it's about his base.
Because it's not about the rest of MAGA media or Trump aligned media. They're not — they don't care. See, they have not been percolating and swimming in this Russiagate stuff for the past eight years. Trump's base has the —
MENENDEZ: I'm sorry, what are we then defining as his base here?
CARUSONE: I would say it's the people who are listening to talk radio eight years ago and had cable that have now finally got Roku, but don't know that it's Roku and still think that they are flipping the channels on a cable box and are now, for the first time ever, maybe listening to YouTube or watching YouTube because Tucker Carlson is no longer on Fox. Right? That's his base. His base is the, you know, talk radio listener or the Fox News viewer, and the people around it, the ones that have been percolating in QAnon and this. It's not the Joe Rogan audiences or the Theo Von audiences or the bro-casts.
They were in it for the conspiracies against the abstract deep state, but they never cared about Russiagate. In fact, they love Obama. So, this doesn't actually do anything for them, and I think that's the last thing I'll say is that it's a little landmine there because it's going to make some of those people really mad. They love Obama. They're gonna think, what is this guy doing? I don't know anything about Russiagate. This feels like a distraction to stop us talking about your pedophilia defense.
STEELE: Well, I wanna stick with that for a little bit because you do open up a little bit of the other side of this in terms of how this is being fed by the administration in the first instance to that base. It's not and this, you know, we sort of touched on this last week, that you got to be careful about who the players are here. They're you know, the Joe Rogan types, the folks who are the influencers, the ones who are kind of playing him in the space at that level are not the base. They're not the rank-and-file moms and dads out there who put the MAGA hat on. In fact, the people burning MAGA hats probably you know, that's a whole another conversation. But it does beg the question of what does this grand jury process do that either legitimizes or delegitimizes the story?
BALLOU: Yeah. You know, the thing is I was thinking you're talking about all these conspiracy theories. It seems like the worst thing that could happen here is actually that they bring an indictment that gets to a verdict. You know?
If you're basing a case entirely on conspiracy theories and then you bring it to the public, eventually, that's going to have to get judged by a judge and by a jury. You know? And so I suspect what's going to happen here is you are going to see an endless series of leaks and innuendo talking about a sprawling investigation, but they will wait as long as they possibly can to actually indict someone.
STEELE: Does that I — I guess the question for the table then, is does that then feed sufficiently that beast that's out there hungering for the conspiracy, hungering for the day-to-day narrative to keep reeling them in closer and closer. And the linkage potentially to the Epstein ultimately because one conspiracy feeds into another. Right?
SANDERS TOWNSEND: Yeah, it does. I mean, I guess, I just feel like, you know, where I'm from, the streets say a prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich if they want to. Okay? So I find it very hard to — I mean, I just think about the fact that they indicted, this Justice Department, LaMonica McIver on what could be — what I believe are trumped up charges. So who's to say that they won't trump up charges and indict the ham sandwich version of this conspiracy theory, where you already have Obama on record in 2016 saying Russia didn't tamper with election machines, where you have Obama on record in 2016 talking about that Russia can only impact us if we abdicate our values. Like, these are all lies. But they are the Justice Department.
They can actually do a lot to be hurtful.
BALLOU: Oh, absolutely. But watch what happened in Congresswoman McIver's indictment. You know, the DOJ got ripped to shreds in its first court hearing there, and the lawyer that was actually assigned to the case was reassigned and I think has left the DOJ entirely. You know? You see the other indictment that happened next to that, the indictment of Ras Baraka, the newer mayor, that was dropped entirely. So, you know, they might get a quick headline by bringing an indictment, but in terms of securing convictions, you need more than conspiracy theories.
SANDERS TOWNSEND: Well, maybe this is gonna give me some hope today. Brendan Ballou, Angelo Carusone, thank you both very, very much.
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SEE COG DISSO FOR ANNO
Trump’s Fans Forgive Him Everything. Why Not Epstein?
July 14, 2025
By Michelle Goldberg
Opinion Columnist
Over the past squalid decade, many of us have let go of the hope that Donald Trump could do or say anything to shake the faith of his ardent supporters. They’ve been largely unfazed by boasts of sexual assault and porn star payoffs, an attempted coup and obscenely self-enriching crypto schemes. They cheered wildly at his promises to build a wall paid for by Mexico, then shrugged when it didn’t happen. The BBC reported on a 39-year-old Iranian immigrant whose devotion to Trump endured even after she was put in ICE detention. “I will support him until the day I die,” she said from lockup. “He’s making America great again.”
So it’s been fascinating to watch a vocal part of Trump’s movement revolt over his administration’s handling of files from the case of Jeffrey Epstein, the sex-trafficking financier who died in jail in 2019 in what was ruled a suicide. Running for president, Trump promised to release the Epstein files, which some thought would contain evidence of murder. “Yet another good reason to vote for Trump,” Senator Mike Lee of Utah, a Republican, wrote on social media. “Americans deserve to know why Epstein didn’t kill himself.”
Some of the influencers who now staff Trump’s administration built their followings by spinning wild stories about the case, promising revelations that would lay their enemies low. Epstein’s client list “is going to rock the political world,” Dan Bongino, now deputy director of the F.B.I., said in September. Appearing on Fox News in February, Attorney General Pam Bondi was asked whether her department would release “a list of Jeffrey Epstein’s clients.” She responded, “It’s sitting on my desk right now to review.”
Now she says there was no such client list. Last week the Justice Department and the F.B.I. released a memo saying that Epstein killed himself and no more information would be forthcoming: “It is the determination of the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation that no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted.” Trump has implored his followers to forget about Epstein, writing, in a petulant Truth Social post, that the files were “written by Obama, Crooked Hillary” and various other purported deep state foes. Let’s “not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about,” he wrote.
But he was wrong: Lots of people care. Trump’s followers responded to his attempt to wave Epstein away with uncharacteristic fury and disappointment. Bongino has reportedly threatened to resign over Bondi’s handling of the case. Epstein was a major subject at Turning Point USA’s Student Action Summit, a conservative conference that began on Friday in Tampa, Fla. Speaking from the stage, the comedian Dave Smith accused Trump of covering up “a giant child rapist ring.” The audience cheered and applauded.
Having nurtured conspiracy theories for his entire political career, Trump suddenly seems in danger of being consumed by one. In many ways it’s delicious to watch, but there’s also reason for anxiety, because for some in Trump’s movement, this setback is simply proof that they’re up against a conspiracy more powerful than they ever imagined. “What we just learned is that dealing with the Epstein Operation is above the President’s pay grade,” posted Bret Weinstein, an evolutionary biologist and podcaster. An important question, going forward, is who they decide is pulling the strings.
Epstein obsessives are right to be suspicious about the weird turns the case has taken. So much about it feels inexplicable, including the sweetheart plea deal Epstein got in 2008 and the fact that he was apparently able to kill himself despite being one of the most monitored inmates in the country. Even if it turns out that a review of the case doesn’t implicate anyone who hasn’t already been charged, it should be a scandal that Bondi misled the public about the existence of a client list.
But the administration lies all the time; that alone doesn’t explain why this issue has so tested the MAGA coalition. To understand why it’s such a crisis, you need to understand the crucial role that Epstein plays in the mythologies buttressing MAGA. The case is of equal interest to QAnon types, who see in Epstein’s crimes proof of their conviction that networks of elite pedophiles have hijacked America, and of right-wing critics of Israel, who are convinced that Epstein worked for the Mossad, the country’s spy service.
Trumpism has always been premised on the idea that he’s warring against dark, even satanic globalist forces, and within the movement there’s a fierce yearning for the cathartic moment when those forces will be exposed and vanquished. The Epstein files were supposed to show the world, once and for all, the scale of the evil system that Trump’s voters believe he is fighting. “Epstein is a key that picks the lock on so many things,” Steve Bannon said at the Turning Point conference.
The way Trumpists have made this case a cause célèbre can seem bizarre to outsiders. After all, Trump’s friendship with the sex-trafficking financier has been widely documented. Epstein’s best-known victim, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, said she was recruited at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club. And Trump has his own history of alleged creepiness around underage girls; several teenage contestants in one of his beauty pageants accused him of deliberately walking in on them when they were undressed. As Senator Jon Ossoff, Democrat of Georgia, said at a rally this weekend, “Did anyone really think the sexual predator president who used to party with Jeffrey Epstein was going to release the Epstein files?”
But I’ve always seen the fantasy of Trump as a warrior against sex trafficking as a way for his followers to manage their cognitive dissonance about his obvious personal degeneracy. To believe that they are on the side of light while championing a man of such low character, Trump’s acolytes have had to conjure an enemy of vast and titanic evil and invent a version of Trump that never existed.
Among those on the right who believe there’s an Epstein cover-up, few seem to be entertaining the idea that Trump is protecting himself. That, after all, would require a re-evaluation of his integrity and their judgment. But they still take for granted that Epstein was trafficking girls to powerful men and then blackmailing them and that he was killed so he couldn’t talk. Now they have to figure out why Trump won’t give them the information they long for. The most logical explanation, said Tucker Carlson on his podcast last week, is “that intel services are at the very center of this story, U.S. and Israeli, and they’re being protected.”
This notion has become so widespread that Israel’s government tried to address it. “There is no evidence — none — that Epstein was acting on behalf of the State of Israel,” wrote the Israeli minister Amichai Chikli in an open letter addressed to Turning Point’s head, Charlie Kirk. But Chikli couldn’t resist using the case against his more centrist political enemies, saying he wants to understand Epstein’s connection to “former Israeli prime ministers Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert, who both appear in previously published Epstein-related documents.”
This will not, I suspect, put theories about Epstein as a Zionist operative to bed. Without them, Trump’s followers would have to admit that they were duped, that MAGA has never been a Manichaean battle against sex criminals and that Trump glommed onto the Epstein story only to help him win an election.
The entanglement of the Epstein drama with American debates about the Jewish state portends some dark developments. I won’t pretend to know whether Epstein ever worked for the Israelis, though I can’t imagine Trump covering for them at any cost to himself. I’m worried, however, about people blaming Jews for the strange and unresolvable parts of his sordid story. Scroll through X, and you’ll see they already are.
It’s worth recalling the origin of the phrase “cognitive dissonance,” which was coined in the 1950s by Leon Festinger, an author of the book “When Prophecy Fails.” He and his co-authors studied an apocalyptic U.F.O. cult, with an eye to what happened when the spaceship didn’t appear as predicted. Some members, disillusioned, left the group. Most, however, maintained or redoubled their commitment. The problem for Trump is that some of his followers need to choose between their commitment to him and to the narrative that justified his rise.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment.
A version of this article appears in print on July 16, 2025, Section A, Page 22 of the New York edition with the headline: MAGA’s Cognitive Dissonance on Jeffrey Epstein.
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an sn 7 25
....
In 2008, he was put into the private wing of the Palm Beach County jail. He had his own television room. His personal driver arrived every morning to take him to his office.
Turns out the Palm Beach County state attorney, the FBI, prosecutors and the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida — a man named Alex Acosta, later appointed Secretary of Labor by Donald Trump — colluded to give Epstein the sweetest of sweet deals: a 20-month sentence.
He served about a year.
This is corrupt even by Florida standards.
When he got out in 2009, Epstein went back to living the lifestyle of the rich and infamous while the young women he assaulted and exploited were forgotten.
We might never have known all this were it not for the relentless and brilliant work of journalist Julie Brown, whose 2018 series in the Miami Heraldgave voice to his victims: She tracked down more than five dozen of them.
‘Pyramid scheme’
Brown’s reporting detailed how he’d prey on homeless girls or especially vulnerable kids, paying them to bring in other girls.
This sex-trafficking “pyramid scheme,” as Brown calls it, was run by Ghislaine Maxwell.
Maxwell would visit South Florida gyms and spas, telling petite blonde high schoolers — apparently Epstein’s “type” — they could make big money giving massages to “this old guy.”
She encountered 17-year old Virginia Giuffreworking at Mar-a-Lago’s spa and convinced her to “work” for Epstein.
Virginia Giuffre said Epstein passed her around to various men, including Prince Andrew and prominent lawyer Alan Dershowitz, instructing her to have sex with them. Prince Andrew denied the allegations but he wound up reaching a settlement with Giuffre. Dershowitz has also repeatedly denied allegations. Giuffre dropped her allegations against Dershowitz in 2022 and said she “may have made a mistake.”
Trump claims he had no idea what his good friend Jeffrey was up to back then, variously insisting he ditched Epstein for being “sleazy” (insert your own pot-and-kettle joke here) or they quarreled over Epstein’s “stealing” his pretty young Mar-a-Lago employees.
Brown’s attention to the shady nonprosecution deal in Palm Beach eventually led to his 2019 New York arrest on federal sex trafficking charges.
Epstein, of course, is now dead, most likely by suicide — though lots of MAGAs don’t believe that.
Virginia Giuffre is also dead, definitely by suicide.
Ghislaine Maxwell, however, is still here.
She wasn’t exactly living her best life in Tallahassee, spending her days giving yoga classes, teaching etiquette(even criminals want to be ladylike!) and, no doubt, explaining over and over that her name is not pronounced “Gizz-Lane.”
MAGA (and quite a few Democrats) want her to talk; she wants out of prison.
She may be about to get lucky.
Pardon
Thanks to Trumpists’ rich fantasy life, in which everything is a conspiracy of the Deep Swamp, she suddenly has some power.
She says she’ll testify in public as long as Congress agrees to a few little provisions as spelled out by her lawyer, chiefly immunity and a chance to see the committee’s questions in advance.
She also doesn’t want to appear before them until after the Supreme Court hears her appeal, in which she makes the thoroughly bizarre argument that the nonprosecution deal the Southern District of Florida cut with Epstein should apply to her, too.
Classic Florida move: The rules are different here.
Anyway, if they don’t comply, she’ll take the Fifth.
Trump keeps saying he’s “allowed” to pardon her, though he evades the question of whether he actually would.
That, no doubt, depends on what kind of dirt he thinks she has on him and whether that outweighs dirt she might have on his perceived enemies.
Here in Tallahassee, we’re feeling a little sore, a little mad at Texas for stealing our celebrity sex offender.
But once a Florida Woman, always a Florida Woman.
Texas will never take that away from us.
===--
ggl 7 25
[### 2 lawyers on Trump defense team shared Epstein as a client
AP News
https://apnews.com › 2-lawyers-on-trump-defense-team...](https://apnews.com/2-lawyers-on-trump-defense-team-shared-epstein-as-a-client-005baf1972164c49924f787c08f985ae)
Jan 24, 2020 — Alan Dershowitz and Ken Starr both helped the late hedge fund manager and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein win a lenient sentence for abusing underaged girls.
[### Alan Dershowitz and his role defending Jeffrey Epstein ... - Vox
vox.com
https://www.vox.com › identities › alan-dershowitz-jeff...](https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/7/30/20746983/alan-dershowitz-jeffrey-epstein-sarah-ransome-giuffre)
Jul 31, 2019 — Alan Dershowitz helped sex offender Jeffrey Epstein get a plea deal. Now he's tweeting about age of consent laws.
Missing: starr | Show results with: starr
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mma 7 25
NICOLLE WALLACE (HOST): I mean, Angelo Carusone, therein lies the entire rawness of the political predicament. The victims themselves had hope, along with Joe Rogan, along with Andrew Schulz, and along with millions of people who voted for Donald Trump, that what Donald Trump campaigned on is what Donald Trump was actually going to do on this story, that he was going to rat out the men who had been protected, I guess, in the telling -- in the government telling through sweetheart deals, the reporting bears that out. And we're at the opposite end of what was promised. What is your sense of where the story stands right now in the eyes of Trump's most ardent supporters?
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): Yeah, I think that's a good point, because, you know, at its core, you know, there's a lot of conspiracies and stories that get wrapped on top of it. But at its core, part of what Trump was tapping into when he even engaged on this issue as intensely as he did -- and we shouldn't discount the volume of intensity that he did engage on this very, very issue -- is that the people cared. It's hard to get mad at people for caring. Now, what they cared about, who they choose to blame, and the story that crept around was a lot of times really absurd. But they picked up on something very real and very intense, which was that people were hurt, children were hurt, young people were hurt, exploited, and powerful people got away with it, and that there was no accountability.
And those two, were there not the only ingredients then, but those are two key ingredients in the story that Trump tapped into when he was promoting QAnon, when all these conspiracy theorists were using it and exploiting that to then advance their own, you know, target their own enemies. But they all believe those two things, which is part of where the energy came from. And the third thing, which is that, as a part of his larger drain the swamp, you know, push back against the deep state, sort of get in there and hold all these people to account, that they would finally get some accountability for this.
And so it's not just that, you know, he's then going in there and not doing this thing. It's kind of at this point, like doing it -- and this is where it stands -- it's like kind of doing like arts and crafts with glitter. No matter how much you try to clean it up, it just keeps getting messier. And that's what's happening here, is that every time he tries to engage on this, do some kind of strategy, PR approach, something to distract, it only then takes what is already a very fractured landscape and makes these figures angry and talk to each other or talk about it more.
So, here's where it stands. Alex Jones, who is genuinely conspiratorial mindset and I think reflects one part of the wing, he does every day, he's mad at somebody different. Some days he's mad at Trump. You know, he'll blame Trump and say he's acting guilty, 18 days, this is too much, why is he acting like this? Today? He's not blaming Trump today. Trump is a victim of the DOJ and the DOJ is hurting Donald Trump. So that's one segment. And that's, you know, he's reflective of one core here. But at its end, they're still talking about it. They're still pushing it. They're still saying there's something there.
There's another segment, the newer people that Trump brought into the fold. These brocasts, these manosphere. They're mad at Trump and they're not tied into the political ecosystem, so the other part of the significance is that, not only are they basically saying, 'Trump didn't do what he did, you shouldn't trust him anymore,' but their other criticisms of Trump have all ramped up. So now they're criticizing him on the economy, criticizing him more on immigration. They're weaving in their own complaints. Asmongold, I think, is a good example of this. A video game streamer, he's even gone further. He, again, supported Trump last cycle, got pulled in, said, 'This is so important, because this could mean Trump is compromised,' right? So that's what he's telling his audience. So there's this segment that is increasing their attacks on Trump.
And then you sort of have the standard right-wing media, which is trying to hold the line and defend Trump by pushing his distractions. And then Trump himself, I think his behavior in the last 24 hours is significant. He has promoted QAnon accounts on his Truth Social account 14 times today alone. That's an old standby. And part of the reason he's doing that is because he knows that audience segment is really going to determine, at least steer where this is going. And what he's trying to get those QAnon people to believe is that somehow he's playing fifth dimensional chess and that there's something he's going to do. He's going to give them accountability soon. They just have to stick with him a little bit longer.
So it's still simmering, and every once in a while it will boil over. But the net effect of it is that it's not going to go away, and it's actually only going to increase and incentivize more criticisms and attacks on him.
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AN 7 25
EPSTEIN
What a fraud': QAnon shaman publicly trashes Trump in profanity-laden post
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- ### Fox News has mentioned Obama over 3 times more than Epstein since Tulsi Gabbard released her report
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- ### On MSNBC's The Beat with Ari Melber, Angelo Carusone explains the impact of Colbert's cancelation
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- ### Podcaster Russell Brand says “the same things are happening” under Trump as under prior presidents
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- ### Four systemic failures in the devastating Texas floods that national TV news coverage highlighted
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an 7 25
'Pathological liar': Trump deputy AG ripped for seeking meeting with Epstein co-conspirator
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mma
Trump’s latest attempt to defuse the Epstein revolt: Point supporters at common enemies
Written by Matt Gertz
Published 07/21/25
President Donald Trump is seeking to reunify allies enraged by his administration’s repudiation of MAGA claims about late convicted sex offender and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein by offering up spurious attacks on common and familiar enemies: the media — in this case Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal — and former President Barack Obama.
Trump brought together an ideologically diverse coalition and a fractured right-wing media ecosystem during his 2024 campaign based largely on their shared hatred for Democrats, liberal institutions like the press, and the left. His administration’s actions have at times sparked criticism from different factions over the handling of issues like the Russia-Ukraine war, tariffs, U.S. strikes on Iran,
, and, most of all, disclosures in the Epstein case.
The president spent last week failing to tamp down discussion of the Epstein story that seemed to be fracturing the MAGA movement. He tried claiming that his political enemies had “written” the “Epstein Files,” argued that the Epstein case is “pretty boring stuff,” and even lashed out at supporters who talk about it as “weaklings” and “stupid people.” But while the propagandists at Fox News were willing to play ball, Trump’s statements backfired elsewhere, leaving many right-wing media figures and the base alike in a state of revolt.
On Thursday, however, The Wall Street Journal reported that a “bawdy” letter bearing Trump’s signature had been included in an album created for Epstein’s 50th birthday (before allegations of his sexual abuse of girls became publicly known). The document, according to the Journal, had been reviewed by Justice Department officials who handled Epstein’s case.
The Journal report could have focused the right’s attention on Trump’s voluminous ties to Epstein. But Trump redirected them at a familiar target: journalists. responded that night by calling the letter “FAKE,” denouncing the paper, and claiming that he would sue. The following day, he followed through with a defamation lawsuit seeking $10 billion in damages from the two authors of the article; the Journal’s publisher, Dow Jones & Co.; parent company News Corp and that company’s CEO; and Murdoch himself.
Trump’s lawsuit is both unprecedented and consistent with Trump’s authoritarian treatment of a free press whose criticism he seeks to curtail through corrupt means. The message it sends is straightforward: If you publish reporting that displeases the president — even if, like Murdoch, your support was crucial to his political ascension — he may try to ruin you, so don’t try it.
While the Journal’s corporate cousins at Fox News mostly avoided the story on Friday, the network’s competitors throughout the fractured marketplace of right-wing media responded by sharpening their knives and attacking the paper. Laura Loomer deemed the Journal story “totally fake,” Charlie Kirk accused the Journal of a “terrible drive-by,” and Benny Johnson claimed that the real “scandal is in who wrote the story,” referencing a baroque conspiracy theory that was circulating on the right at the time.
The same day Trump’s lawyers filed their suit, former Fox contributor and current Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard offered even more grist for the right-wing media mill. In a story served up to Fox as an exclusive, Gabbard claimed to have uncovered documents proving “a treasonous conspiracy in 2016 committed by officials at the highest level of our government” which aimed “to subvert the will of the American people and enact what was essentially a years-long coup.” She suggested that figures including Obama “must be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” and said she was referring the documents to the Justice Department. Leaving nothing to subtext, Trump subsequently posted to Truth Social an AI video featuring Obama beng arrested and imprisoned.
Those documents, however, demonstrate nothing other than Gabbard’s own ignorance and/or malice. They show that Obama received an intelligence report that Russia had not hacked election systems to change vote totals in the 2016 election — which is consistent with what the Obama administration said publicly at the time — then asked for and subsequently received another intelligence report detailing other actions taken by the Russian government in an effort to influence the election. That effort, according to the intelligence community, the Justice Department, and a Senate committee helmed at the time by current Secretary of State Marco Rubio, included hacking and releasing Democratic emails.
Fox News contributor Andrew McCarthy, in a withering piece at National Review, described Gabbard’s argument as a “frivolous” attempt to further Trump’s “foolish stance” that Russia had not tried to influence the 2016 election via “overwrought and misleading” language and “thundering claptrap.”
But her attacks served to reignite years of conspiracy-mongering about the Russia “witch hunt,” and thus were credibly regurgitated elsewhere on the right, including by Fox’s stars, with some echoing Gabbard’s demagogic language about purported “treason.” Trump, meanwhile, repeatedly posted Fox clips and articles from right-wing media hyping the purported scandal.
Much of MAGA media seems eager to target the Journal and Obama on Trump’s behalf. But it remains to be seen whether those influencers — or their audience — will be willing to allow the Epstein story to fade away altogether.
That said, Trump’s best hope of keeping his supporters happy may very well be increasing the scale and tempo of his authoritarian attacks — and that means there will be more to come in the months ahead.
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AN 7 25
A newly uncovered web of more than 400 AI‑powered X accounts has begun rapidly contradicting itself in response to the controversy surrounding convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and the alleged cover‑up, despite its long‑standing promotion of MAGA figures, NBC News reported Sunday
Researchers from social analytics firm Alethea and Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub uncovered the automated “positive reply” network, which was originally designed to shower praise on members of President Donald Trump's administration like Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.
But in recent days, some of the bots have posted contradictory views about Attorney General Pam Bondi and others amid conservative backlash over withheld Epstein documents, according to the report.
READ MORE:'Like an open fire hose': Trump ripped as cracks show in MAGA media
Until earlier this month, the network consistently echoed MAGA talking points — denouncing Democrats in 2024, celebrating Trump’s return to power afterward. In rare cases, they even expressed admiration for liberal figures like Rachel Maddow.
However, when Bondi announced she would not release additional Epstein materials, the bots abruptly fractured: some defended her, telling users she “ought not be judged harshly,” while others demanded her resignation — or that of figures like FBI Director Kash Patel and Dan Bongino — within the same minute, per the report.
When Bondi announced she wouldn’t release further Epstein-related documents, one of the automated accounts immediately chimed in, asserting she “comes out clean as the [Department of Justice] DOJ confirms no Epstein client list found, while reaffirming his death by suicide.” But the tone flipped fast. According to the report, the same bot has since been advising X users to launch a full-scale uprising against Trump’s team.
On Friday, it urged followers: “Retweet if you believe that Trump & his cronies are lying to the public and treating us like we’re stupid. We won’t be fooled by their games.”
READ MORE:Why Republicans worship Trump as their sick and twisted role model
Although the precise inputs driving these accounts remain unknown, their behavior suggests they’ve been modeled after genuine MAGA social media profiles, C. Shawn Eib, Alethea’s head of investigations, told NBC.
“This split reaction mimics the organic reaction among supporters of Trump’s second administration,” Eib said.
He continued: “It’s possible that the behavior of these automated accounts is influenced by content posted from prominent influencers, and this shift is reflective of the general change in tenor among many of Trump’s supporters.”
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AN 7 25
Revealed: Trump admin pulls back on work combating human trafficking amid Epstein scandal
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AN 7 25 PROSECUTED HUMAN TRAFFIC AND EPSTEIN PAL gISANE
Firing of 'high-profile' prosecutor shows Trump 'is not thinking clearly': analysis
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https://gregolear.substack.com/p/deconstructing-the-epstein-myth-what
...SK
Well, was looking at all of the criminals around Donald, and I had a head start with a piece of information that I had gotten in 2005—before there was even an imagination that this man would run for president. I think to the layman’s understanding, if you knew who Trump was, which people did, that he was political in any way, just maybe he had been and we learned that he had been.
In 2005, Trump had this new reality show with Mark Burnett. And so I had a circle of people that I knew. I’m a writer, screenwriter. So I knew folks in that circle with that man.
GO
Okay. Meaning Burnett.
SK
Yes, Burnett. And I had learned that Donald was in a tremendous amount of debt to some Russians. And it was threatening this new thing—this idea of him as this self-made, you know, billionaire, whatever, whatever the thing was, a successful businessman, because it was all about to crumble. And there’s been a tremendous amount of reporting since I learned that. Verifying all of that. So I had that information at the time, back in the day.
And so when he came down that escalator, I knew, I was like, “Oh no, that’s the guy that’s in debt to a bunch of Russian gangsters!” And so I started trying to figure out who those Russians may be. And then in doing that, I came across Jeffrey Epstein.
GO
Okay, interesting. So Trump to the Russians to Epstein.
## Tinker, Tailor, Mobster, Trump
March 31, 2020
SK
Yeah, well, organized crime—specifically Russian organized crime. And then trying to understand Donald and Fred, Fred’s empire, his father’s empire, which was built with the Genovese crime family. And then the building of Trump Tower in Manhattan that moved in—they had different territory as Fred would call it, as Donald has said on the record—that Manhattan wasn’t. According to his father, “That’s not our territory,” because it wasn’t, it was Gambino territory. For Donald Trump specifically to be able to build in Manhattan, develop in Manhattan, Fred arranged for, and Roy Cohn arranged for, the two crime families, the Gambinos and the Genovese to form what became known as a concrete cartel—all the five families were in there. And this was the bid-rigging over concrete contacts to develop in Manhattan. And it was called “the Donald Trump deal.” And so that was in the middle of it, for those U.S. crime families and the racket they were running, which is this very racket that Giuliani used to prosecute the five families. So…
GO
Four of the five families.
SK
Four of the five families. Castellanos was a holdout and then was killed, shot dead in the street. So that’s the history.
There’s way more than that. During that time, before the Russian mafia had really taken over New York—which it did; it rolled in in the late 80s, some of it even back to the 70s, but very specifically in the 80s and the 90s and just sort of rolled up a lot of the territories as their own. And they did it by laundering money through Donald’s casinos. There was a lot of ways that they did all of that. There was a very prominent Russian gangster named Ivankov, who had actually an office in Trump Tower in Manhattan, but he was ultimately caught, tipped off and caught by Andy McCabe’s team.
Like when you start learning about these characters, of what they were doing back in the day, both on the law enforcement side pursuing Russian organized crime and from the Russian organized crime side—the bosses and the key figures there were all in business in some fashion with Donald Trump.
Then in the mid early 2000s to like 2005, 2006, right around when I was hearing this stuff about him, what was happening was the Russians were wanting to keep using Trump to go internationally. So the properties: Trump Panama developing and Trump Toronto developing and Trump Georgia developing and all of these foreign developments, which we were watching. If you watch “The Apprentice,” it unfolds on “The Apprentice” as well. This sort of expansion of the Trump thing where he was just licensing his name to be put on these things, because he was really over-leveraged.
Like the one in Georgia, the country Georgia—the Trump Tower there, all they did was just stick a shovel in the ground, and a whole bunch of money was laundered. There’s Trump Baku, which, you know, there was quite a bit of reporting how that was probably a front for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Again, Iran and their corruption very closely tied in with Russian organized crime as well.
GO
Right. Adam Davidson in the New Yorker.
SK
So that’s the background. That’s why the Trump/Russia thing is not a hoax. Donald is the hoax. You know, he did. And there’s so much reporting and Trump, the company, Allen Weisselberg, all those people, they affirm this, they said, “Yeah, yeah, we took that money.” The problem with it is some of it was illegal, but a lot of it’s not illegal, right?
He couldn’t get a casino license in Australia, infamously. They would not give him a casino license because of his ties to organized crime, both U.S. organized crime and Russian organized crime.
GO
So a major Five Eyes power decided that Trump couldn’t have a casino license because of his ties to organized crime—and specifically Russian organized crime. Let’s just underline that because it seems important. Australia is, as they say, a real country, you know—that is one of our strongest allies.
SK
Right. Right.
So how you get to Jeffrey is, there was a time in the 80s where Donald was really having issues, and he was sort of over-leveraging himself. He was building in Atlantic City. He was doing these things and couldn’t get them funded. He always had a problem getting the money because legitimate banks would stop lending to him, which was the crisis he was facing in the early 2000s, mid-2000s. There was Deutsche Bank, but even Deutsche Bank was turning him down, so he had to go for this Russian money. You could get Russian money, you could get Chinese money, and the Chinese money hadn’t quite showed up yet. But the gangsters will invest in you. So the banks were difficult.
Now part of the stuff that made it hard to get finding from U.S. banks is because of what happened with him in the 80s with Bear Stearns. So there’s a guy that ran Bear Stearns.
(This is all the reporting done by Wayne Barrett. And I recommend everybody go read Wayne Barrett’s work on Donald and Fred Trump and that sort of “Trump Inc.” He did extraordinary work on that. He also did great work on Giuliani and showing what sort of a criminal and a fraud Giuliani was. And it still is, I guess.)
So Ace Greenberg ran Bear Stearns. Bear Stearns is the company that infamously went down in 2008 with all the credit-default swaps, all that kind of stuff that just crashed—you know, the Big Shorttype of thing.
But before that, they were a real player—Bear and Lehman and these other entities. Goldman Sachs. And so Donald had a very close relationship with Ace Greenberg. Ace Greenberg is the man whose daughter was Jeffrey Epstein’s student when Jeffrey Epstein was at the Dalton School. And Epstein did whatever he did at the Dalton School to leverage his just being a math teacher and tutor at this private school into working directly for Ace Greenberg.
So he went into the financial industry at Bear Stearns. And he didn’t come in as a low-level person and work his way up. He came in at a very senior level, and it caused a great sort of upset at Bear Stearns. Who is this guy? Where is he coming from? And why is Ace giving him this plum spot?
And he was handling private wealth management. And his big client that he had, that Ace gave him, was Edgar Bronfman, who’s Sam Bronfman’s son. Sam Bronfman, he established Seagrams, and he was Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano’s business partner during the bootlegging days. And Edgar Bronfman has a lot of ties to Russia as well, quite frankly. And it’s his daughters that were part of that NXIVM thing. That’s how people recognize that name, Bronfman.
GO
He’s Canadian though, right? Sam Bronfman?
SK
Yes, he was Canadian. So that was part of the bootlegging thing. Yeah.
But that was Jeffrey’s client, and he got into difficulties and troubles there at Bear Stearns with that particular client managing, you know, and he basically had to be fired. And Ace really resisted firing Jeffrey. And what I uncovered and discovered was that he didn’t fire him. He just moved him into Offshores. Jeffrey went into establishing offshore accounts and offshore money, sort of tax havens for Bear Stearns clients.
If you go into the Offshore Leaks database—which is where I found Jeffrey’s offshore accounts, some of them—you can see there are old Bear Stearns officers. In fact, Ace Greenberg’s partner at Bear Stearns is still connected and linked into those offshore accounts. So Epstein was very much doing that business, and he was doing that business for Bear Stearns right at the time that Bear Stearns was doing these wild, risky, money-backing things for Donald, for Donald developing his casino.
:{:{So thatis where I found him. And I’m like, “Who’s this Jeffrey Epstein, and what is this?” And then I started looking into Jeffrey Epstein, and I’m like, “My God, everybody’s some kind of sex-trafficking criminal.” He’s not the only one that was tied in with Donald’s business or his financial backing in some way that also was convicted for sex trafficking.}:
There’s another guy named Tevfik Arif, who was a big partner with Donald, who had that yacht with all the underage prostitutes and the trafficking that went on there. There’s a yacht, I think off of Turkey where they were finally caught, he was finally caught. So there’s the folks in Panama: his business partners in Panama were nailed for sex trafficking, international sex trafficking. And the people in Canada: there’s ties in there for his business partners in Trump Toronto and Canada, who were also Russian. The main partner there was the son-in-law of Semion Mogilevich’s business partner and consigliere—Semion Mogilevich being a great big Russian gangster.}:
And then there’s all the Craig Unger reporting on Mogilevich, that Donald was in fact laundering Mogilevich’s money himself. And that’s the man who originally compromised him. So that’s the money. It’s full of sex traffickers and it’s full of Russian gangsters.
GO
So let’s underline again Semion Mogilevich. That’s an important connection because Semion Mogilevich, if I remember correctly, was at one point directly working with Robert Maxwell. That was in one of those books, right?
SK
Correct. In Maxwell’s biography, Mogilevich is named several times. I believe the source for that was Ari Ben-Manashe, a former Israeli intelligence officer who also worked for the Kremlin. But that Robert Maxwell biography—this is Ghislaine Maxwell’s father—outlines Robert Maxwell as a Mossad and a KGB spy. That means that he was an intelligence officer. It looks like he also did—there’s quite an FBI file on him. He probably worked with U.S. intelligence at times, and it looks like he definitely worked for the Queen. He was very close with, very close with the Queen. He touched the Queen. There’s video of him, footage of him touching her, like walking alongside her and touching her like.
GO
He was friends with the Queen. Yeah.
SK
That’s very rare and weird and very strange.
GO
It’s very strange. Robert Maxwell also, when he died in 1991, in November of 1991, by falling off a yacht off the coast of the Canary Islands—as happens, I guess, all the time, so no foul play at all, none suspected; it’s weird how that thread keeps going up—but remember, he had defrauded the pensions of the company, the publishing company that he bought. So he was about to collapse before he died, like his entire...
SK
That’s right.
GO
…financial empire was a house of cards, and it was all bullshit. So that’s an important thing to keep in mind.
SK
That’s right. And he knew Donald. Donald knew him directly. There’s a lot of images and photographs. They were on the yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, that he named after his daughter. So yeah.
GO
They were on the yacht, in Page Six. With Ivana, which is interesting because Robert Maxwell is born Jan Hoch and is from Czechia. And Ivana Trump is also Czech. So I envision a scenario where the two of them are on the yacht talking in Czech, and Trump is just standing there like an idiot.
SK
I’m sure, yeah. Junior, I believe, is fluent in Czech. People underestimate Don Jr.
GO
Yeah, and Baron is fluent in Slovenian, yes.
SK
But you know, another character that was in that world with them, with Robert Maxwell—and it’s important because his money shows up in Jeffrey Epstein’s next big financial scam after the Bear Stearns moving him—is a man named Adnan Khashoggi, who is Jamal Khashoggi’s uncle. And there’s not a lot of Khashoggis, actually, by the way.
Donald knew the Khashoggis very, very, very well. Ivana called Adnan her best friend quite often. When Donald bought the one and only yacht he’s ever bought, he bought Khashoggi’s yacht. So he bought Khashoggi’s, yeah.
And Khashoggi was a known intelligence officer for Saudi Arabia, but he was at one point the wealthiest man in the world.
GO
He was an arms dealer, right? Wasn’t he an arms dealer?
SK
He was a big arms dealer. Yeah.
GO
I remember that, even in the moment, people knew who he was. Like, he wasn’t some hidden figure. I remember reading about him in the 80s. I didn’t know what these people were at the time. But I knew their names.
SK
Paul Manafort was also in this mix, Tom Barrack was in this mix. There were a lot of folks that we saw show up in Trump 1.0 as President, helping with his campaign, that were swirling around in this—what I call the underworld. But it’s where crime syndicates and intelligence services are just, you know, intertwined.
And that’s what MAGA is aware of when it comes to Jeffrey Epstein. They can kind of feel that there’s something odd there. There are intelligence services there.
Now, it’s important to point out that before Robert Maxwell died—there are several people who are credible witnesses and know what they’re talking about that have identified that Robert Maxwell was taking Jeffrey Epstein around and sort of introducing him as his protégé. So this myth—this lie—that Ghislaine and Jeffrey told that he showed up after Ghislaine’s dad died, that she moved to New York and that’s where she met Jeffrey? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. They knew each other before her father died or was killed or whatever happened off the side of that yacht. So that’s kind of key.
And then Jeffrey went from there to creating one of the biggest Ponzi schemes, the biggest Ponzi scheme ever before Bernie Madoff. He almost kind of invented it. That was called Towers Financial. And I talked a lot with Steve Hoffenberg; you talked with him as well. He was a tricky character. He’s passed away now, but he went to prison for quite a long time, and he got out of prison right at the beginning of Trump’s first term. The first person to call him when he was out of prison actually was Roger Stone, he told me.
But Hoffenberg was mortified with what Jeffrey had done with the victims. That reporting had kind of just come out when he was just out of prison. And he did contact the victims, and he did want to kind of make good. Because the money from Towers Financial was never fully recovered, Hoffenberg didn’t understand why he went to prison and Jeffrey got off.
I talked to Hoffenberg a bit. I’m like, “Well, what are some of the ways that someone gets out of being prosecuted for a big crime financial crime like this?” And it looks like Jeffrey very much cooperated with prosecutors. Now, there were a lot of criminals that were part of Towers; that was a big money laundering vehicle. Quite a lot of the money from Iran-Contra, Steve Hoffenberg suspected, was pushed—that Jeffrey got his hands on—it was pushed through Towers.
That is money that Robert Maxwell was in charge of that also disappeared around the time of his pension scandal. And so there was a lot of pressure on Robert Maxwell right before his death. It wasn’t just that his empire was crumbling. There was a lot about to be exposed of the kind of places he’d had his hands in, money that disappeared that he should never have been anywhere near it. And it exposed nation-states, intelligence services, doing what maybe they shouldn’t have been doing.
So that’s the world. It’s like a private intelligence rogue operatives. Private arms dealers like Adnan Khashoggi or the guy that Nicolas Cage played in that movie, Lord of War—like those guys, that world.
There’s also: you don’t have to just deal in arms or traffic in arms. You can traffic in kompromat, right? You can traffic in other things that would have value to intelligence services of both our nation and other nations. And it does very much look like that Robert Maxwell was in that business. It looks like Ghislaine took the mantle, and Jeffrey took the mantle from him and developed their own little operation. So all of the pieces are there for Epstein to have that connection.
And Towers Financial, I think, is also a great big piece that doesn’t get talked about enough, in terms of, What kind of deal did this guy cut with those prosecutors, that he got out of facing prison? And his business partner went in for 20 years, 18 years or whatever.
And knowing the kind of money, the kind of players that Epstein ran with, just with that one fraud and scheme alone—those are very valuable names, and a lot of money that he could have turned over to prosecutors to cut himself a deal. That could very well be the key to Alex Acosta’s phrase about Jeffrey, when he says he was told Epstein “belonged to Intelligence.” Because he would have some really big names in Towers, and really powerful players that maybe were on a sanction list, quite frankly.
GO
So just to review quickly, Towers Financial ran from 1988-1993. He’s now worked, Jeffrey has, as a math teacher at Dalton (where he got fired), at Bear Stearns in some weird capacity (where he got sort of fired). And then he went to work, if I remember correctly, Hoffenberg said Epstein went to work for Douglas Leese, who was another person in that world.
SK
Leese, yes—who was an arms dealer for the Queen. Right.
GO
And he, Leese, according to Hoffenberg, recommended Epstein to Hoffenberg by saying, “He’s smart and he has no moral compass.” So Hoffenberg knew he was going to do this Ponzi scheme, and he needed like a guy to help him with it. And that’s why he hired him. Like, specifically.
SK
And that would have been while Robert Maxwell was still alive or just sort of on his way out to the next world. Yeah. Right. All right around that time.
GO
Right. Again; so now, we’re all the way into the early 90s, and so far it’s money and offshores and arms deals and Russian mobsters and shady characters, but we haven’t even—we haven’t gotten to the sex trafficking part yet, right?
SK
Yeah, as far as we know, it wasn’t happening then. And that’s just—we only know what’s in those court documents, with what the prosecutors brought to light. And a lot of it’s still redacted. But yeah, then he’s setting up, and he’s got Les Wexner, you know, somehow come folding him in.
GO
Les Wexner being the guy that owns Victoria’s Secret and these other big retail chains. And that was the time when Jeffrey was walking around saying he was a model scout for Victoria’s Secret, you know, as a pickup line that he was using.
SK
That’s correct. There is a journalist in the Ohio area, Bob Fitrakis, who’s really good, a great muckraker, and he did a lot of work on Wexner and Wexner’s ties to organized crime. And Wexner as a potential…what’s called a non-official cover, a NOC, for our own intelligence services. Wexner has an airfield there in Ohio, a private airstrip, and there were planes coming in and out of there that Fitrakis believed and tracked to our own intelligence services.
GO
Right, and Wexner’s the guy that owns the lovely, huge mansion on the Upper East Side of New York, on East 73rd, where he’s like, “Why don’t you just live in my mansion? You know? Why don’t you Kato Kaelin this? And you just move in. I don’t need it, it’s fine, it’s good.”
SK
Right. Yeah. To Epstein, yeah, Wexner handed over the most valuable piece of property, the most valuable private residence in Manhattan to Jeffrey—just gave it to him.
GO
Which is, I think, I would say odd, unusual, strange, whatever word you want to use. Weird.
SK
It’s odd.
The other odd thing, and we talked about this this past week a lot, but we kept talking about it at the time, too. We do know that that all of these homes, New York, down in Palm Beach, out in New Mexico, the island and the plane, that these properties that either Jeffrey owned or had access to or were his in some way or form, all had surveillance technology wired throughout them. That’s in the underlying evidence in the court cases against him. So we’re not just speculating about this. It’s in the evidence. And you have to understand that we’re talking about properties that he was using for the—you know, for the abuse, while he abusing these minors and raping the minors.
This was at a time where it was kind of pre, almost pre-internet even. Certainly back when the internet was—we’re talking about early nineties, right? Call it Radio Shack, but that’s really all there was. Like, what’s he, how does this guy, do this? He would have had to have a closed network, somehow, some way of recording and storing and wiring up in the walls. It’s not what it is today. And I just don’t see Jeffrey Epstein being the Radio Shack guy who’s doing all this on his own, for his own perversion. So somebody wired up his shit for him. Now, he could have paid somebody privately to do that, certainly, but considering we’re watching people like Ehud Barak wander in and out of the properties, I would put money down on, you know, that he had a little help from some very sophisticated signal intelligence groups.
GO
I referenced it on the show—there was that movie Sliver,with Billy Baldwin, where he has the whole building wired up, and they show him in this little room with all the screens, and Sharon Stone is on the screens. That sort of setup is what Epstein had, effectively. It was where he had all these cameras and there was a master control room, presumably, where you could look at everything and record it and all that kind of stuff. And presumably the people that were staying there had no idea that this was a thing.
SK
Yeah. And we know it was recorded because the recordings made their way into evidence. And Pam Bondi just recently said that this is child porn and that’s why she can’t show anybody. And my question is, Well, are the girls alone? You know? I mean, who’s in there? Who’s in there with them?
GO
Mm-hmm. Yeah, we just need to know who. We don’t need to see it. We actually don’t want to.
Now, there’s a lot of myths about this guy, Epstein. He’s almost like this mythical figure now. And I think that adds to the mystique and the kind of misinformation and disinformation that’s out there around him. So what are some myths that are not true? Because I think that we’ve helped here so far in explaining all the financial stuff. I think that’s an important piece that nobody really talks about that much. But is there anything else myth-wise that people should know?
SK
Well, first of all, I think the myth of his intelligence—that he was some kind of wizard, some financial genius. And there were people, I can’t remember the man’s name, but there was a man who was like, it actually was a financial wizard, who said like, “Yeah, Epstein was kind of a street guy. He wasn’t this sort of magical, sophisticated investor, and he didn’t seem like one. He seemed like he just wanted to party. He just partied all the time.”
So I don’t know how much money managing he was doing. I think that’s sort of a big myth around him: to cast him as some kind of genius is probably what he wanted. He wore that Harvard sweatshirt around Alan Dershowitz in all those photos, right? He’s always wearing that. But he didn’t go to Harvard.
I think there is some discrepancy of whether Bill Barr’s dad actually hired him.
GO
I think Donald Barr, yeah, Bill Barr’s dad left the semester before Jeffrey arrived, so he could have made the hire, but the person who took over wasn’t sure, apparently, or wouldn’t say.
SK
He could have hired him. Right. So that’s why I kind of just stay away from all of that. Now, Bill Barr’s law firm did represent the law firm that Bill Barr worked at—it did represent Jeffrey Epstein in his criminal cases. I believe that’s true. But that’s a great big law firm.
GO
I feel that way about photos. Like, I feel like Ghislaine Maxwell tried to have her picture taken with every single human on earth that would ever be anybody. So just because somebody has their picture taken with Ghislaine doesn’t really mean anything. Like, as much as I love the picture of her with Elon Musk, it’s just—who knows what that is.
SK
Who knows? I mean, she was a proper British socialite, right? So she wanted to be at every party and that was her job. That was her job.
GO
Yeah. She was good at her job. That was her job. And she’s really good at her job. She’s really good at her job.
SK
But I think, you know, being picked specifically by Ace Greenberg, and being given that hand, it’s like—God, I’m a screenwriter. So it’d be like, I don’t know, it’s almost like Jeff Bezos saying, “Here’s a great big thing. Anything you want to write for Amazon, you can write. Amazon will underwrite, it will fund it. You can do whatever you want. Here’s a budget. Here’s your staff.” Like, beyond an overall deal. That’s what Epstein got.
So again, it’s not that he was some genius. He really—I don’t know. Was he blackmailing Ace Greenberg? Why did Ace Greenberg go to the mattresses for this guy? I mean, he literally was risking Bear Stearns at one point, with the SEC saying, “This guy’s running a scam, you gotta fire him.” And he was like, “I can’t fire him.” Why can’t you fire him? And then he just moved him offshore. So that kind of stuff is important.
And the other myth, which we already talked about, the lie that he didn’t know Robert Maxwell. It’s just a flat-out lie. Robert Maxwell shepherded this guy to Israeli intelligence officers and introduced him to high level people—introduced Jeffrey as his protégé.
GO
Yeah, seems important. Yeah, 1991, Robert Maxwell dies. Later in ‘91, Ghislaine comes to New York, starts up with Epstein, and off to the races they are.
Okay, moving on. Now, you’ve talked about this a lot of times too, where MAGA and QAnon, the Epstein files and this Epstein thing, this child sex ring story is such a huge part of their mythology. They have this idea, because they’ve been told, and it’s been pounded into their heads, that there’s a secret cabal of pedophiles that’s secretly in league with each other and is running the country. And it involves the Clintons and the Clinton Foundation and Hillary Clinton and the basement at the pizza place and all this other crazy stuff. Which, you know, like all good pieces of disinformation, parts of it are true, you know?
But they’re ignoring the big orange elephant in the room here, and I think that’s the problem. But before we get to that, what does MAGA have right about this? Because there’s stuff in their conception of things that isn’t completely batshit.
SK
Yeah. Well, I think the first thing they have right, and the big thing that they have right—that is continually dismissed whenever this gets talked about in legacy media, even now; it’s sort of crumbling, their worlds are crashing around them because Donald is so clearly compromised—is that it is really, really, really bad if our leaders are owned by a foreign power. That’s a bad thing. It’s a bad thing to have somebody in a position of power, of political power, let alone the presidency or the Supreme Court or…
GO
…or the mayor of New York.
SK
…or the mayor of New York, or in Congress. It’s really bad, then, if not just is that individual compromised or owned by a foreign power, but if what compromised them was that they were raping children.
This is unacceptable, and they are absolutely right to be outraged about it. And I am not going to put my toe in and say because I can’t wrap my own soul around the fact that MAGA is not morally outraged at all of these other things, and that Donald himself is an adjudicated rapist, the Access Hollywood tape—if it’s about the sex stuff, he was in there with a Miss Teen America, that pageant, or Miss Universe, whatever—that teen pageant that he owned, walking in on 15 year old girls. He’s talked about his daughters, both of his daughters, sexually—one when she was a one-year-old baby, so he’s…
GO
And he let Ivanka model while she was 15 for somebody who was a known creeper.
SK
He handed Ivanka over to John Casablancas, who was already was a known rapist of 14 year old, 15 year old, 16 year old girls. Okay.
GO
Casablancas was quote unquote “dating” Stephanie Seymour when she was 14 and he was 42, which is—I’m putting “dating” in quotes because that ain’t dating.
SK
Yes. That predates Ivanka, and this is known, and Donald not only knew that, but like with Jeffrey, wanted to be this man’s friend and was a running buddy of John Casablancas. He was much closer with Jeffrey Epstein, but it’s not that he didn’t see these things. These men were openly dating—statutory raping—young girls, and grooming them and walking around with them in their arms, and the girls would be half-dressed around other men.
This is that. So yes, why did MAGA not look at this and see this? There’s a reason for some of it that we can get into, but where MAGA is right—and I just want them to know I get it; I think you’re right about this—is it is absolutely unacceptable that an industrial-scale child sex trafficker and rapist controlled, had kompromat on, our political and business leaders. That, we need to know. The citizenry needs to know that. We can’t have that. Just like you can’t have somebody who’s got real financial problems like Bob Menendez, or is open to being purchased, being bought off by a foreign government. Just like that.
That we can’t have those people, because then we’re not…and then to have the phrase “Make America Great Again,” when everything’s being owned by, you know, a foreign intelligence service—and understanding also that Jeffrey was in that world of what looks like selling things to foreign intelligence, but is certainly connected to them. You’re never going to have proof of the things that you can’t have proof of, but you have to look at it and say, “This man was in this sort of underworld of dealing with nation-state intelligence services at the same time that he’s recording child rapes.”
GO
Yeah. And creating, or cultivating, the environment in which those rapes could easily take place.
SK
And the mythology of Jeffrey was so important to him because if you have the mythology of being a financial wizard who can do more with your money than anything. My God. He’s got planes and islands, and that whole part of the gig was about being part and parcel and a critical element of the most rarefied of rarefied heirs socially.
So that that’s it. You’re going to fly with Bill Clinton and go over and do something. You’re going to, know, you’ve got Donald Trump as a best friend. You’re in this sliver of the world that everyone aspires and can’t reach. It’s mystical and magical. How do you get up there?
And anybody with even a modicum of wealth, if not, you know, very wealthy people are like, “My God, will he managemy money? How do I get close to Jeffrey?” Because if he’s magical with the money, even people are very smart in business in other ways still think that it’s magic. They still want their magical person to manage their money. And so that whole thing was a trust-wash right?
But you have to now go—and this is where also MAGA gets it right—you just have to put your feet in the in the boots of the Kremlin. You know, the KGB at one point and then FSB and SVR and all the other services now, after the Soviet Union fell and it became the Russian Federation. You are that level of human intelligence. They were the best in the world, and quite possibly still could be; I don’t know, they seem to have gotten really bad. But the skill set during Jeffrey’s era—Jeffrey Epstein would be Person Number One that you’d want to get to know and use in some way. And to think that foreign intelligence officers wouldn’t be targeting, within that room of rarefied air, a man who was walking around with 14-year-old girls, manyof them. And had a best friend in Donald Trump, who was going on Howard Stern saying, “He likes them young.” And he’s flying on planes with Bill Clinton. You better believe, you better believe every foreign intelligence service agency worth its merit is trying to get in there. What an opportunity.
GO
We’re now at the 42 and a half minute mark, and we haven’t mentioned Prince Andrew yet, but you can add him to that list because—yeah.
You said something before about trust-washing and myth creation and it’s these guys, these con men—and I’m thinking of Epstein, I’m thinking of Trump, and I’m thinking of Keith Raniere from NXIVM—one thing that they have in common is they take one little thing at the beginning that they get lucky to get, some favorable press coverage or something, and they use that, and talk about it, talk it up, talk it up, talk it up, and then get more people to believe it. And they can use it as a springboard to go everywhere.
With Keith Raniere, it was that he was in Mega, a group where you have to be smarter than Mensa. And somebody ran an article about it in the*Albany Times Union*. And they ran it, and he never let that go. And then people were like, “Oh, he must be very smart.”
And Donald Trump, I forget if it was Forbes or Fortune that first added him to that list of the wealthiest people. That was bullshit. They even said later that it was, but he took that and ran with it, and he ran with it, and ran with it, and ran with it to the point where nobody thought to not believe it.
And Epstein did the same thing with trust-washing. So after a point, if you’re a normal person, let’s say you’re a professor at MIT—and I’m not excusing anybody for anything, but you’re like, “There’s this guy. He’s inviting me to his house in Manhattan and Bill Clinton and, you know, Prince Andrew and Bill Gates are going to be there.” You would probably think to yourself, “Wow, that’s cool.” You wouldn’t think, “I don’t know, I better not go. Might be a sex trafficking operation.” Like, Epstein presented himself as legitimate by surrounding himself with these people. Anyone below that level looks at it and thinks, “Well, this must be great. I mean, Bill Gates, Prince Andrew. Yeah. I’m so excited to be part of this, to be involved with this.” And it just snowballs from there. And that’s how these con men operate.
SK
Listen, that’s how they operate. And Jeffrey got a taste of that world, of what that world must be like, by being a teacher of kids at the Dalton School whose parents were all part of rarefied air. But it’s Ghislaine—it’s Ghislaine who understood how to craft and create not just the myth, but the op. It was a hell of an op. That was a hell of an op.
GO
She, from what I’ve heard, from my own sources, was like that too, always talking about how her dad, who her dad was, and my dad, da-da-da-da-da, kind of like Meghan McCain, like the same kind of thing.
SK
She played at Buckingham Palace on the grounds with the princes.
GO
She also went to college with Boris Johnson. I think they were in the same year. I don’t think they hung out, but they knew each other a little bit from what I read.
SK
That makes sense. That tracks. Again, it’s a rarefied world.
There’s a thing that’s important to say about what MAGA gets right. But there’s a word that they need to stop using: the word blackmail. Here’s what they’re right about. They’re right about Pam Bondi. Pam Bondi is to blame. Pam Bondi is to blame. Not that Donald isn’t, you know, isn’t part of this whole thing, but Pam Bondi right now is continuing the con. And MAGA knows it and it doesn’t have anything to do with anything other than the protection racket that Donald insured by weaponizing the Department of Justice, by putting his cronies in there.
So here’s why I can say this. anybody can challenge me on this. I don’t care. She is to blame. The list—the list, right? Let’s start with that term—as if Jeffrey kept a list of all the men. “Let me have my Excel spreadsheet,” you know, since we’re going to the 90s, “my Excel spreadsheet…”
GO
Lotus123.
SK
“…Lotus123 of all of the powerful men that I’ve compromised. I’m gonna keep that in a list format,” as if he didn’t know, as if he wasn’t running around with these people, as if you don’t remember that you’ve recorded Prince Andrew, right? Whatever it is.
The list is Pam Bondi’s to make. It’s not that there’s a list that exists and we want her to pull it out of the files and show it to us. That gives her an out and she knows this. That’s a bullshit out, of her saying, “Look, there’s no list.” Okay, I believe you. But you’re the one who’s supposed to make the list, Pam Bondi. You have all of the underlying evidence. You have men on those tapes—and I refuse to believe that the FBI did not identify them when they brought their case finally against Epstein or the Florida prosecutors, right?
GO
Plus, because they’re famous.
SK
Plus if they’re famous, you know, if you know who they are, you can write that name down and make the list. That’s what MAGA is asking for. And how dare Pam Bondi play this word game. It reminds me of Bill Clinton going, “Depends on what the meaning of the word is is.” It’s that level of garbage.
Make the list, Pam! That’s what you said you were going to do. Write down the names of the men that are on those video files. Write down the names that are redacted in all of the court documents that came out of the affidavits from the victims. The victims named names. Give them to us.
GO
Yeah, yeah, give them to us.
SK
Okay, I understand there were other people trying to call in, I understand that they got tips, and I understand that there were names of people who were investigated and they were found not to have, you know, maybe they were even out of the country or whatever. But there are plenty of people we know from this case, there are plenty of names, and sheis the one that is supposed to compile that list of names. It doesn’t exist out there that somehow magically it’s either there or it disappears. And I want that confusion to stop. So Pam Bondi? Yes, hold her to the fire.
The other thing that that MAGA has got right, but it’s the wrong way to talk about it, is using the word blackmail.
GO
Yeah, I was gonna say. And that word in the letter that they released does some heavy lifting. The whole letter hinges on the word blackmail, which is a very specific thing. Anyway, as you were saying…
SK
Right. Right. That’s right. And so yet again, Pam Bondi grabbed that word, put it to the specific definition of what that crime would be as the Department of Justice would prosecute it, and then looked at it only narrowly in the way of, “Do we have evidence that Jeffrey Epstein himself was blackmailing any of the men that are on a list that she can’t seem to compile that the girls were being trafficked to.” And/or the evidence shows kompromat. So I can believe that Jeffrey Epstein never directly blackmailed anybody.
GO
Why would you? You’re gonna go to Bill Clinton—or you can go to a nation state? Who has more money, right?
SK
You could go to Bill Clinton, or you can go to—even our allies, to their intelligence services. We know he was swimming in that world with them. And you can say, “Hey, you know, I got all these goods. Are you gonna pay me?”
So stop using blackmail. Use kompromat. Kompromat. This is what we call kompromat. Jeffrey ran an operation that collected kompromat, sexual kompromat, sex with minors, rapes, child rapes, kompromat on powerful men in politics, U.S. and possibly others, definitely princes, in business, politics, finance, possibly academia, and other things besides.
GO
So, you know how people describe themselves as content creators? Jeffrey Epstein was a kompromat creator. Thatwas his job. Okay. And you know, again, the blackmail, there’s no point in blackmailing.
You said something else interesting before, which is that if you own somebody with this, it’s better than just paying them off, because kompromat can be sold, it can be transferred, it can be distributed. That makes it even more valuable, right? It’s not just that Jeffrey has a tape of whoever. It’s that now country X has that tape, or country Y has that tape. And then they’re in a position to blackmail if they so choose. But he’s just the broker. Just the middle man. He’s the ultimate middle man.
SK
And by the way, his bodyguard, I believe it was, his house man ran off, I believe it was to Russia or a former Soviet Union nation and disappeared. And he supposedly had access to all this stuff too. So it could also have been people that were working for Jeffrey Epstein that took off with this stuff and tried to secure their own safety, and certainly some wealth for themselves. That’s a possibility. It’s on the table.
I’m not trying to weave conspiracy. I’m just saying that it doesn’t serve anybody for everyone from legacy media to the Justice Department to deny the world as it exists. In the event that Jeffrey was selling this stuff or he was collecting it from the get-go on behalf of a foreign intelligence service—in that event, everyone needs to assume, and I believe Donald does, that this shit is in the wild.
GO
Mm-hmm.
SK
It’s not that there’s just one copy of everything, and the Justice Department has it and they can delete it all and then it goes away. I mean, these were court cases also that involved victims. Victims’ attorneys would have access to the information. The prosecutors involved had to have access to the information. The court itself had access to the information. Oh boy.
GO
Pam Bondi was the Attorney General of Florida, by the way, where the crimes took place. Before she was the U.S. A.G.
SK
For eight years she was attorney, yes, of Florida—for the eight years while Jeffrey was raping these girls. So that seems important too.
GO
Seems important.
There’s something else we should say, because we haven’t said it yet: the Bill Clinton piece. There’s a lot of…you know, MAGA will say, “Well, the Democrats just want to protect Bill Clinton.” And I think I can speak for pretty much everyone. If Bill Clinton did something like this, to hell with him. No one’s going to come to his defense. If he committed crimes of this magnitude, then he deserves whatever’s coming to him. Period. Full stop.
SK
Yeah, full stop. I’m one of those few centrist liberals who gave up on Bill Clinton when he looked in the camera and he lied to my face. I just don’t like people who are smarmy with vocabulary because they are brilliant. I think he’s an intellectual bully. And I think getting in front of the camera while being president and saying, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman”—I don’t care if you did, but don’t stand in front of the camera and lie your ass off at to me about something like this. And I understand Ken Starr and all those people out to get you and they’re horrible, but…
GO
Brett Kavanaugh.
SK
Brett Kavanaugh, but like, ew. So I don’t trust you, you know, and that’s where I’m at. Sorry.
GO
Yeah. No, no, that’s it. I agree.
SK
Let alone this. Dear God. And I love his wife. It has nothing to do with it. They’re not the same person.
GO
Right. No, they’re not the same person. I hate, I hate when they’re conflated, it drives me nuts. They’re two different people. They’re married, but they’re two completely different individuals with individual agency. And that’s just, that’s just how it is.
So do you think we’re going to get to a point where the scales fall off the eyes of MAGA? How can we get to the point? I mean, what do you think we should do here?
SK
I think this is the moment. I think we’re in a moment right now, which is why we’re doing this. Otherwise, I wouldn’t bother. I didn’t think I would ever have a moment where I would bother. I had so written off reaching people in his cult. It’s just, you know, I did a tremendous amount of work at a moment where I believed that people could be reached with focusing on the money, focusing on his frauds, focusing on his crimes, focusing on all the—my God, I compiled this list years ago on Twitter at the time, which then became X, and X, when Elon took over, was one of the big things that, know, lot of powerful threads that had a lot of real information. I know this is social media, but it’s where we were getting our news. And they got broken up and dismembered and buried. And that’s why I left that platform for a long long time and doing a little bit now, but I don’t know. I was keeping track of all of the pedophiles around Donald—not just rapists and sexual assaulters as well, but where it was crimes and specifically pedophilia. There’s Putin. I mean, it’s just a huge list.
GO
Wait…
SK
Okay, I’m just saying that I could, if you couldn’t reach MAGA people then with that, I think they had to be betrayed by him in some way. And this is a real betrayal. And I think it’s a real moment. I would like to think that he’s not going to present some narrative that they can go, “Okay, okay, great. We’ve got this narrative now and we’ll run with this and we can all go back to daddy, right?” I’d like to think that enough of them have sort of had that shock value of realizing that they are marks, and they were conned—really conned.
And I want to say to those folks, it’s a horrible thing to be conned. But cons work. It’s not your fault that you were conned. You can look later at what it was about you, that you needed to believe in this guy, you know, and examine that. But this is a real professional con man. Look at what he’s achieved through lies and fraud and conning! He’s achieved the presidency of the United States—at this point in history, where we’re this huge power, and we’re a free people.
GO
Twice.
SK
Twice. I think he’s going to go down as the greatest con man that ever lived. I will give him those flowers. As I’ve said with you, you know, I gave him those flowers. I don’t know of any other person who is this accomplished of a con man. This is a pro of pros. He’s a pro.
So you’re MAGA. You’re just his mark. He zeroed in on you. You were very vulnerable in ways that you had no idea. You’re handing out your every thought, every emotion, every political leaning, your address, your farts, on Facebook. You were posting all your shit. And all Trump had to do was work with Facebook, create an algorithm, scoop you up and put ad tech software directing right at you. And you thought, “My God, he thinks like I think.” No, he just read your posts, guys. But I understand how you couldn’t see that and why falling for this.
And if only those folks had found the work that I did, that you did, all the work we did that predated Julie K. Brown, quite frankly. And she did incredible work, not taking anything away from her. She’s an amazing journalist. But by the time she put her stuff out there, I think because we had surfaced so much and had done so much work that wasn’t penetrating and wasn’t getting into the bubble that Trump was creating and his team was creating around his base, they could—QAnon could—slide in there and they could grab on. Come to know Jeffrey Epstein late to the game and run with a totally different narrative.
So maybe Donald can create another narrative like that to run in another direction, but I’m hoping, I’m hoping that with this, enough of them have seen the light now and can really take in who he really is and how dangerous this is.
Because they were right about that. It’s dangerous. Dangerous.
GO
Very dangerous. It’s very dangerous. No, I think that he is one of the greatest con men of all time. I think, as we talked about on the Twitter spaces the other day, you have to go back to like some medieval pope to get to the level of mass—you know, creating a situation based on lies to get a whole lot of people to behave in a certain way. And he was able to do it.
I can’t remember what I was gonna say. It doesn’t matter.
SK
The con man. Good luck. But you were saying the scales falling. this, is this, is this the moment? Do we think the scales?
GO
Oh, I know what I was gonna say. I think he’s waiting until the AI is good enough that he can blame deepfakes. I think that’s what he’s going to start blaming everything on. The videos are going to come out, and he’s going to be like, “Deepfakes, you know, Elon can do that,” or whatever it’s gonna be. So prepare for that and know that it’s a lie and bullshit, okay? Let’s just prepare for it.
Okay, so to close, all do know this game Categories? You know how to play Categories?
SK
Yeah, like Scatagories.
GO
Well, I don’t know Scategories is, but Categories is, you pick a thing that has a finite amount of, you know, like colors, and then you say a color, I say a color until we run out. Okay. So we’re going to play categories and the category is “Pedophiles in Donald Trump’s orbit.”
SK
God. All right. Can we include the rapists as well, like sexual assaulters and rapists?
GO
I think we can, yeah, sure. Okay. You wanna go first?
SK
Okay, we’ll start with the pedophiles. All right. Am I going first? Yeah, Putin.
GO
Sure. Okay. Jeffrey Epstein.
SK
GO
Ghislaine Maxwell.
SK
GO
Casablancas, the guy from Elite, who we mentioned.
SK
Yep, Jean-Luc Bruñel. My God, I had such a long list.
GO
Yep, he’s on my list. Tevfik Arif, the guy you mentioned with the yacht off Turkey.
SK
My God, I had such a long list. Well, I mean, Jim Jordan, but that’s an enabler.
GO
Still, he counts. That counts. I mean, what was Diddy accused of? I’m not sure. But they were—they knew each other.
SK
I think he said he looked, he knew and he would sometimes look in the showers. There was one young man who is an adult now, but yeah, for the Ohio State rapes. Yeah, enabler, enabler.
GO
No, Diddy, like Puff Daddy, like Sean Combs. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know what the, I haven’t really followed that case. I don’t know if the accusations involve underage people or not. I assume that they do, but I don’t know. So yeah, he’s definitely not a good guy.
SK
I don’t know, but definitely rape.
There’s more. It was this huge long list. It was crazy. That party—listen, I understand that Jeffrey was active during an era that a Democrat was president. Okay. So it was the 90s and Bill Clinton was president. And that’s where the power was, it was in the Democratic Party. But to think that the people behind Jeffrey, or that Jeffrey swam around with in terms of foreign intelligence services, haven’t continued to—
Roy Cohn, by the way, Roy Cohn. He said he had the biggest trove of sexual kompromat of anybody. I mean, I guess it would rival Larry Flynt’s, because Larry Flynt had a bunch of it—according to Larry Flynt.
GO
Roy Cohn, of course.
SK
We’re with the Republican Party now that does things like go on the 4th of July to the Kremlin, right?
We could do the same Categories game with the Russians in Donald’s orbit, and the gangsters and mobsters. I could do that forever. I put a little video together of that and it just went forever and it still wasn’t complete. You know, this is the world that he’s in.
GO
Right, he doesn’t have that many friends, is the point. And all of these people swirling around in his inner circle are all...
SK
He doesn’t. Yeah. And Donald Trump himself—Donald Trump himself, who his own wife said, “He raped me.”
GO
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Which now, they’re parsing that, they’re like threatening AOC because she called him a rapist and, I mean, did you watch The Apprentice, the movie? Because I recall seeing a scene in there in which Trump rapes Ivana. That’s just—I don’t recall any lawsuit there that stopped that from coming out, so I don’t know.
SK
Yeah. I don’t know. I mean, go ahead and sue her.
GO
AOC’ll have to get those Epstein files released, won’t she?
SK
A jury found that he was, or he wouldn’t have had to pay E. Jean Carroll because the defamation was “I never raped her.” That was the alleged defamation. And he did. The jury found that he did. There was evidence that he did enough to rule in her favor.
GO
Yeah, so we say “adjudicated.”
SK
So that’s why when we say “adjudicated rapist,” that’s what that means.
GO
Right, but there’s so many other accusers. I mean, I did a thread a long time ago, I think after Access Hollywood came out. There are a lot of accusers, like four dozen, I think, that we know of. And those are just the ones we know about. And that’s a lot. I mean, two is too many, but 48 or something or whatever it is, that’s what we might call a pattern. If you were like one of those FBI profiler guys, you might say that this guy has a has a problem with this.
Not to make light of it, because it’s horrifying. And as you said before, MAGA is right. Somebody like that should not be in a position of authority. Someone like that should be on a list. If they’re not in prison, should be on a list of sex offenders and be living in the Econo-Lodge down the street, which is the only place they’re allowed to live in this town. So that’s where he should be based on all of these accusations.
SK
Yeah.
GO
Unless you believe that all 48 women were full of it and they just wanted something from this guy. Which I do not.
SK
Yeah. Yeah. So again, this sort of part of it is hard to. It’s hard to empathize with his followers who just ignored all of this and believe the bullshit or aren’t having a problem with what he and Stephen Miller are doing right now, and aren’t having a problem with Kristi Noem, how wretched it is, that can look at what Elon Musk did, and can look at all of those lost souls in the Texas floods and not connect the dots that that’s because they couldn’t get the warnings because those those services were done away with, so that we could have this gross transfer of wealth to billionaires, multi-billionaires. And that when that those actual facts are brought up by journalists saying, know, “We know that these people didn’t get these warnings because of how you dismembered the emergency services and the weather services and then reorganized it. So everything has to go through Kristi Noem,” like this whole thing that they did coming in and fucking around with the government under this sort of bullshit ruse—you know, this con of saying, “This is how we’re going to save us some money. So therefore, you know, we can strip Medicaid.” You know, all this stuff.
The government is culpable. The government under him is culpable for leaving these people stranded without warning. Trump calls that evil just to have the actual facts at your disposal and need to question those in power about how what they did, whatever their intentions may have been when they did it, maybe they had good intentions and they were trying to fix things, but they fucked it up. And people are dead because of that. That’s not an evil question. Call that question evil.
GO
Which is what he said. He said that the journalist was evil for asking the question, right? Is that what he said? Yeah.
SK
Horrible. What a horrible thing to say.
GO
I want to say one more thing before we close. To your point about MAGA and being okay with all the Stephen Miller stuff, i.e. the rounding up of immigrants because there’s a wave of immigrants that are coming and they’re having babies here and all this. Right?
SK
U.S. residents and U.S. citizens.
GO
Donald Trump, two of his three wives are immigrants, and four of his five kids are born of the immigrants—all but Tiffany. So until ICE comes and gets rid of all of them, I don’t wanna hear another word. That’s where I’m at. Like, if we’re going to get rid of birthright citizenship, Ivanka gotta get out. Goodbye, out.
And I don’t think that’s going to happen. So what’s good for the goose has to be good for the gander. That’s how things are, you know? And if it’s not, then we have two Americas and we can’t have that. That’s not acceptable and should never be acceptable.
SK
Yeah.
GO
So, anything we didn’t cover that you want to get in before we close?
SK
I just want to say the reason we’re coming back to this and creating this content, this extra content. You know, we do a Friday night show that is fun. And I invite everybody to watch us on Friday night on YouTube. It’s called The Five 8, if you’re seeing this or reading about this and you didn’t know that. And that’s sort of been enough for you and me in terms of feeling like, okay, we’ve built these platforms. We’re responsible citizens. We want to contribute to the discourse. We have a specific skillset.
And we enjoy one another, and we enjoy the community that we’ve built. And Friday nights have been kind of enough for us. We added a show with two other, wonderful hosts on Wednesday. So there’s a show on Wednesday night as well with Lisa Graves and Nadine Smith.
But this moment, we knew we got to do more. And so we’ve done more. And but I don’t know how much more we can do other than this. I’ve brought it back to attention that what I would like to say about it is now if we spoke into MAGA, I want to speak to legacy media and anyone in legacy media and the punditry who would be watching this, listening to this or reading this transcript of this:
You’re not doing your job. By dismissing Jeffrey Epstein’s very real, very documented, proven history, swimming around with foreign intelligence services and our own, quite possibly, and his criminal record financial crimes that he committed that are very real, from the Ponzi scheme, to the SEC violations at Bear Stearns, to the offshore accounts, to the shady money and the lies around his wealth, where it came from, where did it go. We don’t have answers for any of that. It’s not normal. None of it is normal. To deny this or say it’s all just MAGA conspiracy because they think there’s a cabal of sex traffickers and child sex rapists that control the world, and to throw the baby out with the bathwater on that and not actually do your job of detailing the provable demonstrable facts of this man’s very real history is a real betrayal.
Stop taking the easy, lazy way out on this. Stop it. I’m begging you. I’m begging you. Do the work. It doesn’t take much. There are still living witnesses, credible witnesses who can verify, that I spoke to, that you can go speak to that can verify everything. There’s actual offshore accounts that you can see in the Offshore Leaks database. There’s the Ponzi scheme and the crimes, and there are prosecutors still alive that will talk to you about that Ponzi scheme and who was involved, from Tom Barrick to Paul Manafort to Rudy Giuliani, who was the lawyer for Towers Financial.
You can dissect it, you can talk about it and that gives the fulsome context of who this guy was and what kind of operation he was running. To just accept what Pam Bondi’s saying now, and Kash Patel, that we look for the conspiracy, but there’s just no conspiracy there—to buy that garbage and just sort of say, “Yes, MAGA, God, maybe they’ll, you know, they were all lied to,” and yeah, you need to start parsing out the garbage from the reality and report on this correctly, and report on Jeffrey Epstein correctly: who he was and who he was partnered with and what kind of operation he was running and what and who he was connected to.
Because I’m going to tell you what’s going to happen if you keep being lazy about this—and I’m being generous by saying you’re being lazy and just saying, “Yeah, they think it’s all this Pizzagate stuff.” People like me and other journalists, solid journalists, the journalists who’ve done the work on all of this, we’re going to include your name in there, because there’s no reason that you should be that lazy.
There’s no reason for it unless you’re being threatened. Or you’re just garbage at your job.
GO
Yeah.
, and Jeffrey Epstein’s brother said, “Yeah, Donald was in there.” So that’s—he’s a witness. That seems like good journalistic work to me. I can think of another person who’s sitting in federal prison right now who might know a thing or two and has no incentive to not talk really.
SK
Right. Now, she’s tricky. Well, no one’s gonna talk, but she’s tricky. Ghislaine’s tricky. She wants a pardon.
GO
I don’t think she can get one now. I don’t think that pardon’s coming.
SK
Well, think if she comes forward and she wants to testify, I don’t know if she’s doing it while we’re doing this. Her case was coming for the court. So apparently there’s reporting out there now about her that she wants to clear Donald’s name. Yeah. So she’s tricky. She’s suspect.
But again, we need legacy media to finally get on the beat of actually reporting on who she is, what she was up to, where she lied—about her relationship with Jeffrey and who he was, how they wove a myth together. It would go a long way. It would go a long way. There’s no denying her father was a spy.
GO
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
SK
There’s no denying it. And it’s not just some fanciful book that was written. Again, there are still former intelligence officers who worked with him, but also prime ministers were on the record at the time saying, “Yeah, he’s one of ours. He works for our intelligence services.” So I don’t think those folks were lying.
GO
Yeah.
People seem to enjoy these, “Is it a murder or a suicide slash accident?” stories. So that’s a good one, Robert Maxwell’s. It’s fun. He’s buried in state in Jerusalem, so they’re never allowed to dig up his body for an autopsy, by the way. Just putting that out there.
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So this has been fun, or as fun as it can be to talk about something so absolutely horrible. Thank you for joining me and sharing your knowledge with everybody, which is vast, and I appreciate you and that’s it. That’s all I’ve got to say.
SK
Thanks, Greg.
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