jeffrey epstein
---
see two
SEE THREE
MERRI OK
:1ST FOR id {2ND ON BROUHAHA FAIL 7 25}:
see CRM 4 FREAKOUT
---
files: conspiracy globalist dem pedos
SEE CONSPIRACY CRM 4
aha-ish: losing track of gop dudes with underage girls, need skinny sex dolls vs strong grown woman?
gaetz did stunt in her district, stefanic apostate --> trumpista harvard
https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/sen-anthony-bouchard/
cheney GOP challenger says girl he impregnated at 18 when she was 14 was 'like the Romeo and Juliet story’
---
---
mma
Fox News host Jesse Watters, who once claimed to be “leading the charge to expose Jeffrey Epstein’s list of fixers, clients, and famous friends,” tied himself in knots on Thursday night as he attempted to explain to viewers why Democrats are in the wrong as they call for President Donald Trump’s administration to release Epstein-related documents.
Trump offered a campaign pledge, albeit a wishy-washy one, to “declassify the Epstein files,” which he has not lived up to in office. Now, House and Senate Republicans have stymied Democratic congressional initiatives aimed at forcing additional Epstein disclosures while Trump demands that his supporters move on from the story.
For Watters — who spent the last six years discussing Epstein across more than 100 episodes of his programs and denounced the “powerful people [who] want to keep you from knowing about Epstein’s world” — the real villains here are the Democrats, because they are allegedly late to the story and acting with impure motives.
Watters complained on his July 17 Fox prime-time show that “Epstein used to be a forbidden word for Democrats,” but “now they can't get it out of their mouth.” He went on to ask why the party is suddenly “so focused on the Epstein files, of all things.”
“The left doesn't care about Epstein, they never have, and they definitely don't care about the victims or the corruption or the cover-up,” Watters concluded. “They're just now doing the opposite of what Trump does.”
Video
Citation
From the July 17, 2025, edition of Fox News' Jesse Watters Primetime
Watters’ argument is indistinguishable from that of the White House, as indicated by the clip from press secretary Karoline Leavitt that he aired amid his gripes. It also raises more questions about Watters’ commitment to justice for Epstein’s victims than it does about the Democrats’.
It is certainly true that the left and right have modeled different versions of concern for Epstein’s “victims or the corruption or the cover-up” since the disgraced financier’s death in jail while awaiting trial for child sex-trafficking in 2019.
The left’s version involved conducting a meticulous, yearslong congressional investigation into the sources of Epstein’s money and successfully prosecuting his associate Ghislaine Maxwell, securing a 20-year prison sentence for her crimes on Epstein’s behalf.
The right’s version did involve MAGA propagandists like Watters doing a bunch of discourseabout how Trump was about to blow the case wide open by releasing the Epstein files. But at the same time, the movement’s decision-makers wished Maxwell well and then fired her prosecutor; hired the lawyers who secured the sweetheart federal nonprosecution agreement that allowed Epstein to get out of prison and allegedly sexually abuse more underage girls; and ultimately reneged on releasing more Epstein documents.
Your mileage may vary as to which of those fact sets demonstrates real “care about Epstein.”
I also think it’s true that Democrats and progressive commentators are talking more about the Epstein case after the last two weeks of revelations. Consider:
- The Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation released an unsigned statement about the Epstein case which contradicted past statements by the attorney general, FBI director, and FBI deputy director.
- The FBI deputy director reportedly skipped work in protest while contemplating resignation.
- The fracas triggered a MAGA revolt which featured calls from Trump allies for the attorney general’s removal.
- Trump responded by ordering his supporters to cease discussion of the “Epstein Files,” which he alleged had been “written by Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration.” Everyone seems to assume that this argument, which contradicted past MAGA theories and for which the president provided no evidence, is a bald-faced lie.
- The president subsequently claimed that he didn’t understand why his supporters were so interested in the Epstein saga because it is “pretty boring stuff”; described the Epstein controversy as a “Hoax,” a “SCAM,” and “bullshit”; and said that MAGA influencers who talk about it are “weaklings” and “stupid people” who are “wasting their time with a guy who obviously had some very serious problems, who died three, four years ago.”
- The Wall Street Journal published a story revealing that Justice Department officials who investigated Epstein and Maxwell reviewed an album Maxwell made for Epstein’s 50th birthday which includes a “bawdy” letter bearing Trump’s name which concludes: “Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.”
I don’t think it is surprising that that sequence has led to increased interest in the Epstein case.
The question, I think, is why those events have made Watters — someone who claims to be interested in exposing Epstein not due to political expediency but because of the victims, corruption, and cover-up — less interested in talking about it.
Why can’t Watters take the left’s “yes” for an answer? It seems quite obvious that the reason is that Trump wants him to say “no,” and Watters is a shill who does what he is told.
//
07/16/25 10:17 AM EDT
07/14/25 12:23 PM EDT
07/07/25
---
AN 7 25 COMEY DTR PROSECUTED HUMAN TRAFFIC AND EPSTEIN PAL gISANE
Firing of 'high-profile' prosecutor shows Trump 'is not thinking clearly': analysis
https://gregolear.substack.com/p/deconstructing-the-epstein-myth-what
---
---
AN 7 25 PROSECUTED HUMAN TRAFFIC AND EPSTEIN PAL gISANE
Firing of 'high-profile' prosecutor shows Trump 'is not thinking clearly': analysis
---
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.
---
---
an 7 25
President Donald Trump's handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case has resulted in a vast multitude of far-right media figures turning on the person they helped elect, according to a new analysis.
In a Thursday article in anti-Trump conservative outlet The Bulwark, author Will Sommer detailed how some of the biggest names in the MAGA media sphere have deemed Trump a heretic over the administration's insistence that the Epstein matter is closed and that the rumored "client list" purportedly including contact information for Epstein's criminal associates never existed. He listed multiple examples suggesting that Trump's biggest online advocates may not forgive him over the Epstein issue.
MAGA podcaster Tim Pool accused Trump of "trying to nuke his base." Anti-transgender activist Riley Gaines – who tied for fifth place against transgender swimmer Lia Thomas in a 2022 competition — wondered "[why on earth is [Trump] doing this?](https://x.com/Riley_Gaines_/status/1945536805685559701)" Another Pro-Trump influencer Matt Walsh, who describes himself on X as a "theocratic fascist," also piled on.
READ MORE:'Who in the world would be stupid enough to believe that?' Morning Joe torches Trump
"There is just no way for an honest person to look at this set of facts and come away with the conclusion that the administration is in the right on this issue," Walsh told his 3.7 million X followers.
According to Sommer, Trump has spent the last decade "playing pretend with his base" by teasing various policies and conspiracies. The Bulwark writer argued that Trump's tactics have now caught up with him, and that his response has only made the rift between himself and his base even wider.
"In the first term, they pretended Mexico would build the wall, and that Trump could bring all the manufacturing jobs back. Now they’re pretending that mass deportations will make everything from food to housing affordable, and even eliminate traffic jams," he wrote. "Then, with the Epstein memo, Trump abruptly stopped pretending. Instead, he offered a reaction akin to Whoa, you people are a bunch of dumb freaks, I don’t want to play this game anymore! And his fans—and, by extension, the people in right-wing media who built their careers playing this game—are mad about it."
Sommer also observed that Trump's circumstances are only likely to get "weirder" as the Epstein controversy drags on. He noted that right-wing journalist Jessica Reed Kraus is now pushing for Ghislaine Maxwell – who procured young girls for Epstein to prey on — to be pardoned due to her being a "scapegoat" for Epstein and the powerful men he associated with. Kraus lamented in an Instagram story that Trump was "only making this disaster worse by the day" in his responses.
READ MORE:'Didn't you vote to pass this?' GOP rep stumps CNN host after blasting bill he voted for
Click here to read Sommer's full article (subscription required).
---
AN 725
2016 wasn't Donald Trump's first presidential campaign. Trump first ran for president with the Reform Party in 2000, and longtime ally Roger Stone served as his campaign director. The campaign never really caught fire, however, and Trump dropped out of the race by February of that year.
It was in 2016, however, that Trump first attracted a huge audience as a presidential candidate, igniting the MAGA movement with his promise to "drain the swamp" and liberate the United States from "the deep state." That messaging really resonated with his hardcore MAGA base, and he revisited it during his 2020 and 2024 campaigns.
But GOP strategist Matt Wylie, in an op-ed published by The State on July 18, argues that with the Jeffrey Epstein controversy, President Trump has "become the swamp" he once condemned.
READ MORE: 'People are going to be shocked': Backlash predicted for GOP as disaster looms
"For years," Wylie writes, "J.D. Vance, Kash Patel, Dan Bongino and an army of MAGA influencers pounded a conspiracy drum about convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who died in jail awaiting trial.... They rallied MAGA's base around a foundational belief that America is ruled by a corrupt elite, and only Donald Trump could expose and destroy it. After all the hype, the Justice Department dropped a two-page memo on Sunday, July 6, claiming there's no Epstein 'client list' and no credible blackmail evidence, and officially ruled Epstein's death a suicide. This wasn't transparency. It was a calculated political maneuver."
Wylie continues, "There was no deadline forcing the release, and the Trump Administration knew it was sitting on political dynamite. You don't pick a Sunday evening on a holiday weekend, when the nation is focused on devastating flooding in Texas, unless you're deliberately trying to bury a story and blunt the fallout."
The Trump Administration, Wylie laments, "completely miscalculated" and "failed to grasp just how upset and unrelenting a betrayed MAGA base can be."
"What an absolute clown show," Wylie laments. "Now, Trump is visibly flailing. The president looks uncomfortable as he cycles through desperate, contradictory defenses: calling the Epstein files a hoax, blaming Democrats for the controversy, even calling his supporters stupid and telling those focused on Epstein he doesn't want their support…. But one thing is crystal clear: Trump isn't draining the swamp anymore. Trump has now become the swamp."
READ MORE:This jaw-dropping truth about the Supreme Court will make you furious
*Matt Wylie's full op-ed for The State is available at this link (subscription required).
---
an 7 25 robt r
Anyone wanting to understand the brouhaha over Pam Bondi’s refusal to turnover (or even acknowledge) the Epstein files need look no further than what the Supreme Court just did.
In McMahon v. New York the Supremes gave Trump a simple way to revoke federal spending authorized by Congress: just fire everyone responsible for implementing that spending.
The high court is allowing Trump and Education Secretary Linda McMahon to fire over half the people who work for the Department of Education until there’s a full hearing on the constitutionality of their action. But by then it will be too late to save much of the department.
Note that the Supreme Court made this astounding decision on its so-called “shadow docket” where it doesn’t even have to explain itself (the only record we have is Justice Sotomayor’s dissent).
No matter that Congress created the Department of Education; apparently, Trump can effectively end it. No matter that Congress in the 1974 Impoundment Control Act prohibits a president from unilaterally refusing to spend money that has been authorized by Congress; apparently, Trump can disregard the Act.
Trump now has unbridled power to repeal federal laws by the simple expedient of firing federal employees who implement them.
Why? How? On what basis? Who’s behind this? We don’t know. We may never know.
Which gets us to the brouhaha over Jeffrey Epstein.
For years, Trump has talked darkly of a “deep state” — a secret cabal intent on destroying America by harming the nation’s children.
Such as, perhaps, six justices who let him shut down the Education Department without even setting out their reasons?
Recall “Pizzagate,” the QAnon conspiracy theory that in 2016 allegedly linked Democrats to a ring of child sex-traffickers. It’s still around but has morphed into a less partisan conspiracy theory involving an alleged worldwide elite of child sex-traffickers.
Jeffrey Epstein and his death fit perfectly. Many right-wing media personalities have posited that the billionaire convict was murdered in prison as part of a cover-up of a sprawling sex-trafficking conspiracy.
Senior Trump administration officials built up great fanfare around the release of the supposed Epstein “client list.”
Even JD Vance accused the government of hiding the list. “If you’re a journalist and you’re not asking questions about this case,” Vance said, “you should be ashamed of yourself.”
But that was back in 2021, before Vance became part of the, um, conspiracy.
In February of this year, Attorney General Pam Bondi acknowledged the existence of Epstein’s client list. She said the client list is “sitting on my desk right now.”
Now the Trump-Vance administration says Epstein’s client list doesn’t exist.
The Epstein case illustrates Trump’s “deep state” no less than does an unsigned “shadow docket” Supreme Court decision allowing Trump to wipe out the Department of Education.
The phrase “Epstein didn’t kill himself” — a rebuttal to the official explanation of Epstein’s death — has taken on a cultural meaning way beyond the facts of the case. It means an unaccountable elite doing evil things in secret.
Trump built his political base on that premise. Once in office, he said time and again, he would expose that unaccountable, secret, evil elite.
No wonder 70 percent of voters believe “law enforcement is withholding information about powerful people connected to Epstein,” including 61 percent of Trump voters. And 58 percent of voters said Trump “maybe was or definitely was” involved in a cover-up.
Conspiracy theories thrive when elites act in secret. I have no idea whether Epstein killed himself or was murdered. But Wired Magazine’s metadata — showing that the FBI’s “raw” surveillance video from the night Epstein killed himself is seemingly missing 2 minutes and 53 seconds — got my attention.
As did the Supreme’s bonkers secret decision in McMahon.
And I’m no conspiracy theorist.
After hyping the promised release, a joint FBI and Department of Justice report last week said they had found no evidence of a list — or that Epstein, who died by suicide in his prison cell in 2019, had been murdered — prompting outcry from within MAGA circles.
As Bondi faces heightened scrutiny for her repeated attempts to dodge questions about the Epstein files, Loomer also teased that “there are people in the White House who agree with me that Pam [Bondi] spent too much time on Fox News and her statements were inconsistent and undermined what messaging is today about the Epstein files.”
Other prominent MAGA-aligned supporters of the president have also warned that Trump could see significant damage to his standing among his base if he does not change course.
Sixty-three percent of voters in a Quinnipiac University national poll released Wednesday said that they disapproved of Trump’s handling of the files. Republicans were also nearly split. Just 40 percent said they support how he’s handled the files, with 36 percent disapproving and another 20 percent not offering an opinion.
Mike Flynn — who briefly served as Trump’s national security adviser in his first term — wrote in a lengthy X post on Wednesday that Trump needed to “gather your team and figure out a way to move past this.”
“The roll out of this was terrible, no way around that,” Flynn wrote. “Americans want America to be successful, therefore, WE NEED YOU TO BE SUCCESSFUL.”
Elon Musk — with whom Trump had a blowup fight last month in which Musk accused Trump of being named in the Epstein files — criticized his former boss for trying to paint the whole situation as a hoax.
“He should just release the files and point out which part is the hoax,” Musk wrote on X Wednesday.
The MAGA meltdown over Epstein “could be his Afghanistan going into the fall,” Mark Mitchell, head of polling and operations at Rasmussen Reports, told Steve Bannon Tuesday on his “War Room” podcast.
“People are trying to say this isn’t a big deal,” Mitchell said. “People are trying to say nobody wants this Epstein information out. It’s an absolute misdirection. This is horrifying. And if it isn’t corrected, it threatens derailing Trump’s agenda, getting rid of his political capital.”
“This is not about a guy who died in 2019, this is about a representation of two-tier justice and about unaccountable government,” Mitchell told Bannon.
On Wednesday, conservative political commentator John Solomon told Bannon that he had interviewed the president, and that Trump supported the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate elements of the Epstein case as part of a broader look into a supposed deep state conspiracy to punish the Republican Party.
“I think he’s frustrated by all the social media chatter by people who don’t really know what’s in the Epstein files,” Solomon said. “He was very pointed about that, let’s stay focused on the things that matter to the American people. ‘I want the answers to Epstein like everyone’, he said, so let the prosecutor do that.”
The Epstein fiasco also prompted Speaker Mike Johnson to split with Trump on Tuesday, calling for the Department of Justice to release all the information it has on the sex offender in the name of “transparency.”
“It’s a very delicate subject, but you should put everything out there, let the people decide it,” Johnson told conservative commentator Benny Johnson, adding that Bondi should explain her previous claims of having the elusive Epstein “client list.”
Just a day prior, the Louisiana Republican had defended Bondi, choosing to defer to the Trump administration instead of criticizing the attorney general.
But Trump appears to remain unmoved despite growing rebellion within his MAGA cohort.
In the Oval Office on Wednesday, Trump repeated his claims that the whole ordeal was a “hoax” peddled by Democrats and once again defended Bondi’s handling of the case.
“She’s done very good. She says ‘I gave you all the credible information,’ and if she finds any more credible information, she’ll give that too. What more can she do than that?” Trump said, adding that he had “lost a lot of faith in certain people” over their outcry on the administration’s approach to the issue.
---
---
yt? msnbc? trump presented to be maga man on the INSIDE who would reveal the hidden secrets of evil elite, really pissed he will not deliver
---
MMA
07/16/25 4:32 PM EDT
07/16/25 3:32 PM EDT
07/16/25 3:17 PM EDT
07/16/25 3:02 PM EDT
07/16/25 2:28 PM EDT
07/16/25 2:18 PM EDT
07/16/25 1:47 PM EDT
07/16/25 1:46 PM EDT
07/16/25 1:36 PM EDT
07/16/25 1:18 PM EDT
07/16/25 10:17 AM EDT
07/16/25 8:03 AM EDT
07/15/25 8:30 PM EDT
07/15/25 5:57 PM EDT
07/15/25 3:33 PM EDT
07/15/25 2:52 PM EDT
07/15/25 2:19 PM EDT
- ### Ben Shapiro calls on Steve Bannon to release his Epstein tapes: “Release the Epstein tapes, Steve.”
07/15/25 12:53 PM EDT
07/15/25 12:49 PM EDT
07/15/25
---
rww [vid]
07/16/2025
by
The MAGA movement is in disarray as President Donald Trump continues to defend his administration's handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case while many of his right-wing supporters are growing increasingly outraged about what they see as cover up.
As Right Wing Watch reported last week:
When Axios reported earlier this week that a memo produced by President Donald Trump's Justice Department and FBI concluded that there is "no evidence that convicted sex offender and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein blackmailed powerful figures, kept a 'client list' or was murdered," the MAGA movement went into full meltdown.
For years, MAGA activists have been convinced that the Epstein files contained the key to finally taking down the "deep state" and that Trump was the only politician in America with the courage to release them; a belief that was eagerly fueled by members of Trump's own administration.
Since then, things have only gotten worse as Trump is now lashing out at his own supporters for having "bought into this ‘bullshit,’ hook, line, and sinker."
Religious-right broadcaster and full-blown Trump cultist Eric Metaxas waded into the maelstrom on his radio program the other day, lamenting that a demonic "spirit of division" is dividing the MAGA movement and urging everyone to trust Trump because his presidency has been "God's mercy to America."
"This is a great administration," Metaxas declared. "This is an administration so great we don't deserve it, and this is God's mercy to America to give us these heroes. From Kash Patel, Dan Bongino, Pete Hegseth, down the line; hero after hero after hero."
Metaxas was agog at "the idea that people would snipe in this way" about anything done by Trump and his administration.
"At some point, you have to really trust that Donald Trump does care about what we care about," Metaxas asserted. "I'll tell you right now folks, if you think Donald Trump would not do everything he possibly could to crush pedophile sex trafficking, I think you're crazy."
---
Charlie Kirk: “I'm done talking about Epstein for the time being. I'm gonna trust my friends in the administration.” 07/14/25
BUT JOINED THUGSWARM AT CONF
---
---
AN 7 25
During the 2024 presidential race, Donald Trump not only rallied his hardcore MAGA base — he also reached out to independents and Trump-curious members of the Manosphere. And that included interviews with Manosphere-friendly podcasters like Joe Rogan.
But according to Never Trump conservative Matt Lewis, the controversy over the Jeffrey Epstein investigation may hurt Trump's popularity with the Manosphere.
Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino is accusing U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi of an Epstein cover-up and is threatening to resign from his position if Bondi doesn't resign from hers. Trump, however, is sticking by Bondi and urging his supporters to move on from Epstein.
READ MORE: 'I'm done with this': Retiring GOP senator uses profanity in veiled threat to Trump
During a mid-July appearance on "The Jim Acosta Show," Lewis (a columnist for The Hill) told former CNN host Acosta, "Look, I think what's really dangerous for Donald Trump here are the last part of the coalition that kind of came together in 2024 — call them the Manosphere, right? You've got this guy, Andrew Schulz, you've got Joe Rogan, you got Theo Vonn; they were really important for bringing kind of apathetic, non-political people into the Trump fold. I don't think they're partisan hacks."
Acosta agreed with Acosta's analysis, saying, "They liked — they were attracted to Donald Trump by his frat boy antics and his locker room talk…. You're absolutely right. The Manosphere is like… Dude, dude, where's my conspiracy theory?"
Lewis laughed, joking, "I think you just got the title for this YouTube show." And he reiterated his point that Rogan and other Manosphere podcasters are not staunch partisans.
"Absolutely, I think there's a danger that they peel off because they were not, you know, dyed- in-the-wool Republicans," Lewis told Acosta. "And I think, you were talking about how they liked they liked Trump's demeanor. They were also just turned off by the left, you know — by kind of the woke left that told them you can't use this language. You can't call people the R-word. But they're not hacks, you know, and I think they're gonna push back on this one."
READ MORE:'Backfiring badly': A Trump 'ploy' is making things worse for far-right ally
*Watch the full video at this Mediaite link.
---
:{:{MMA}:
07/14/25 3:46 PM EDT
07/14/25 3:26 PM EDT
07/14/25 2:27 PM EDT
07/14/25 2:17 PM EDT
07/14/25 12:43 PM EDT
07/14/25 12:23 PM EDT
07/14/25 11:29 AM EDT
07/14/25 10:16 AM EDT
- ### MAGA media are seemingly flooding the internet with AI slop about Florida's new detention center
07/14/25 9:26 AM EDT
07/14/25 9:09 AM EDT
07/11/25 8:00 PM EDT
- ### Trump ally Laura Loomer: “We are witnessing a Fox News Cabinet. It's like a reality TV Cabinet.”
07/11/25 4:52 PM EDT
07/11/25 2:16 PM EDT
07/11/25 12:49 PM EDT
07/11/25 12:33 PM EDT
07/11/25 10:45 AM EDT
07/11/25 9:08 AM EDT
07/10/25 8:01 PM EDT
07/10/25 7:33 PM EDT
07/10/25 5:43 PM EDT
---
MMA
07/10/25 11:31 AM EDT
07/10/25 9:59 AM EDT
07/10/25 9:21 AM EDT
07/10/25 8:46 AM EDT
07/10/25 8:23 AM EDT
07/09/25 6:26 PM EDT
07/09/25
07/09/25
07/09/25 1:20 PM EDT
07/09/25 12:42 PM EDT
07/09/25 12:07 PM EDT
07/09/25 11:29 AM EDT
07/09/25 10:46 AM EDT
---
RWW
07/10/2025
by
When Axios reported earlier this week that a memo produced by President Donald Trump's Justice Department and FBI concluded that there is "no evidence that convicted sex offender and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein blackmailed powerful figures, kept a 'client list' or was murdered," the MAGA movement went into full meltdown.
For years, MAGA activists have been convinced that the Epstein files contained the key to finally taking down the "deep state" and that Trump was the only politician in America with the courage to release them; a belief that was eagerly fueled by members of Trump's own administration.
Now Trump and those same administration officials are being accused of covering up the truth about Epstein and his death, which is prompting some Trump cultists to twist themselves in knots defending the administration.
For instance, QAnon conspiracy theorist Liz Crokin, who has built an entire career on promising that Trump was working diligently to expose Epstein's secrets, was forced to scramble to explain why Trump himself angrily shut down questions about the Epstein investigation during a cabinet meeting earlier this week.
"This is brilliant," Crokin claimed during an appearance on "The Hannah Faulkner Show" on Tuesday, insisting that it was all a ruse by the president to trick the media into covering the Epstein issue.
"I kind of feel like we seeing a little classic President Trump Kabuki theater 5-D chess here," Crokin declared.
Video URL
MAGA pastor and unabashed Trump cultist Shane Vaughn took a different approach, telling those who believe that Trump and his administration are engaged in a cover up to "let it go" in a video he posted on Facebook.
"You trust [Trump], right?" Vaughn asked. "You trust Pam Bondi, you trust Dan Bongino, you trust Kash Patel. Let. It. Go! Get over it. Move on."
"Evil is evil. It's always there," Vaughn counseled. "Trust God. Trust Trump. Trust our Justice Department. We've got great people up there now."
Video URL
Todd Coconato, another right-wing pastor and Trump cultist, posted his own video on social media in which he passionately insisted that there must be "more to the story" because there is simply no way that Trump and his administration would "gaslight the whole MAGA movement" like this.
"I don't think that [Trump] wants his legacy to be that he allowed one of the biggest stories in our generation to just go away," Coconato insisted. "Either the man is a complete liar, which I just can't imagine that being the case. Dan Bongino, Kash Patel, Pam Bondi, we'll go down the list; would every one of them sell their soul? People say for money, they do it for money, they do it for power, they were just lying. All of them? All of them were doing that? So you're telling me that not one of them has a conscience? Not one of them would say, 'Hey you know what? I can't be involved in this, so I'm going to step down from this position' so they save their reputation and their integrity? You're telling me that none of this group—Karoline Leavitt, who is literally a strong believer—you're telling me that all these people, all of them are willing to sell their soul for power and none of them are going to step down? They're just going to be in lockstep with President Trump to just gaslight the whole MAGA movement?"
"I would say pause and pray and believe that there's more to the story, like I do," Coconato added. "I do think there's more to the story. I think we're going to hear more, I think we're going to see more, but I think it might take some time and I think everybody needs to have some patience."
"Don't just turn on this administration," Coconato begged. "Even if they did gaslight us on this, this is still far better than it would have ever been with a Kamala Harris administration."
---
MMA 7 25
President Donald Trump appointed conspiracy-obsessed MAGA media favorites to the highest levels of federal law enforcement, and now those figures are coming under fire from the right-wing fever swamp for failing to confirm their bullshit.
Axios reported on Sunday night that the Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation had concluded that there was no evidence convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein “blackmailed powerful figures, kept a ‘client list’ or was murdered.” Those findings repudiated claims that had for years permeated the MAGA influencer ecosystem and been promoted by the stars of Fox News and the broader right-wing media.
The Trump-appointed leaders of both the FBI and DOJ had previously stoked the same conspiracy theories their agencies rejected. “As social media influencers and activists, Kash Patel (now the FBI's director) and Dan Bongino (now deputy director) were among those in MAGA world who questioned the official version of how Epstein died,” Axios noted. Moreover, Attorney General Pam Bondi had claimed in a February interview on Fox News that the purported “client list” was “sitting on my desk right now to review.”
While the Epstein saga is a bit of a sideshow in the grand scheme of things, what it highlights about the underlying dynamics of the MAGA movement is deeply unsettling. It demonstrates that the Trump administration is in hock to some of the most deranged conspiracy theorists imaginable, treating them as among its closest allies and devoting substantial resources to their care and feeding.
The White House brought 15 MAGA influencers in to meet with Bondi in February, sending them home with glossy binders labeled “The Epstein Files: Phase 1.” When those binders did not satisfy the MAGA faithful, the attorney general reportedly tasked “hundreds of FBI employees” with reviewing Epstein investigation documents for release. In May, Patel and Bongino were sent to Fox to make the case, with the fervor of the converted, that Epstein had actually killed himself. And now the FBI and DOJ have produced a memo detailing their findings and released footage taken from outside Epstein’s cell in the hours surrounding his suicide.
The final result left Trump’s most zealous online allies with two options: They could finally acknowledge that they had been peddling nonsense for years — or they could insinuate that the Trump administration itself is part of the cover-up.
MAGA’s Epstein conspiracy theorists lash out at Bondi — and even Trump
In the hours after Axios’ story broke, several prominent MAGA influencers took the latter path, hammering the administration for failing to confirm their Epstein hypotheses.
“This new DOJ memo admits there are countless victims of Epstein on video but no client list or evidence of other rapists they can charge. Oh it claims Epstein wasn’t using videos as blackmail,” Robby Starbuck sneered on X. “NO ONE believes this for very good reason.”
Starbuck put the blame squarely on the attorney general.
“Bondi just made it all worse with this memo,” he wrote. “What a terrible, terrible idea it was to write this memo. It’s also incredibly insulting to our intelligence.”
Noting her prior claim on Fox that she was in possession of Epstein’s “client list,” he commented, “Was she lying then or is she lying now?”
Laura Loomer also blamed Bondi.
“Blondi lied,” she posted on X, using the nickname she typically utilizes for the attorney general. “She was always lying.”
Others were less specific about who was responsible for the cover-up.
“We were all told more was coming,” Jack Posobiec lamented. “That answers were out there and would be provided. Incredible how utterly mismanaged this Epstein mess has been. And it didn’t have to be.”
Tim Pool suggested that the administration was protecting “the adult child rapists who were blackmailed” and floated the possibility that they were protecting “shareholder value” from “the economic fallout if say, hypothetically, Bill Gates was revealed to have been flying around with Epstein and then we got videos of him abusing underage girls.”
And Mike Cernovich suggested that the buck stopped with the president.
“No one is believing the Epstein coverup, @realDonaldTrump,” he wrote. “This will be part of your legacy. There’s still time to change it!”
The right-wing media ecosystem is built to manufacture and distribute conspiracy theories to an audience trained to believe them. Under the incentive structure this ecosystem creates, it makes sense that the Trump campaign relied on conspiracy theorists to bolster its position, that Patel and Bongino boosted their standing within that ecosystem by echoing such claims, and that Bondi kept claiming an Epstein reckoning was imminent.
But eventually, the Trump administration trapped itself. Bondi, Patel, and Bongino were unable to produce the information that the MAGA faithful demanded, and they seem unable to convince them the information does not exist. It is the nature of conspiracy theorists to insist that anything which appears to rebut their claims actually confirms it. And now they’re turning on their erstwhile allies.
The truth about Epstein and Trump
One ironic aspect of the Epstein saga is that while MAGA influencers were apparently certain that the Trump administration was going to implicate a wave of prominent individuals in Epstein’s sex crimes and, perhaps, his death, there are few figures as prominent with ties as close to Epstein as Trump himself.
Consider:
- Trump was quoted in a 2002 profile describing Epstein as a longtime friend and “terrific guy” about whom “it is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
- Trump was among the politicians and celebrities who hitched rides on Epstein’s private plane in the 1990s.
- In 2019, shortly before Epstein’s arrest on sex charges, longtime Trump adviser Steve Bannon prepped Epstein for a potential interview.
- Trump chose for labor secretary in his first term Alex Acosta, who as a U.S. attorney oversaw a sweetheart plea deal for Epstein that a judge later ruled illegal.
- Alan Dershowitz, the Trump supporter who served on the president’s second Senate impeachment trial team, was one of the defense lawyers who helped Epstein secure that plea deal.
- After longtime Epstein associate Ghislane Maxwell was arrested on sex trafficking charges in 2020, Trump told reporters: “I’ve met her numerous times over the years, especially since I lived in Palm Beach, and I guess they lived in Palm Beach. But I wish her well, whatever it is.”
- Trump waffled about whether he would “declassify the Epstein files” during a Fox interview — but the network edited out that portion of his answer.
- Trump appointed as attorney general Bondi, who was “Florida's attorney general 2011-2109 -- a period of time when Jeffrey Epstein's plane records became public, victims' lawsuits were filed and a lot of new evidence against Epstein surfaced –” but she did not take action.
None of this is actually proof that Epstein was killed to cover up the fact that he had possessed evidence that he had sex-trafficked underage girls for Trump. He killed himself, and the idea of a “client list” was, as the reporter who exposed Epstein put it, “a figment of the internet's imagination -- and a means to just slander people.”
But if, say, a similar set of facts linked former President Joe Biden and his associates to Epstein, you can bet that MAGA’s conspiracy corps would treat them as clear evidence. And so it will be interesting to see, as they scrounge for an explanation for the Bondi/Patel/Bongino about-face, if any of them eventually land there.
Why the right’s conspiracy theory engine matters
The Epstein saga is ultimately a minor drama. It is embarrassing for the right that so many of its leading lights pushed the conspiracy theories for so long, and it’s unnerving that some of those conspiracy theorists now occupy the highest levels of government, but on its own terms, the stakes for the public are relatively low.
But this treatment of the Epstein saga is not an anomaly — the right responds in this same fashion to every news event. Its ecosystem is constantly pumping out new conspiracy theories intended to prove the perfidity of the left, its audience is trapped in a bubble in which it is constantly bombarded by such claims, and the consequences can be real and dire.
Following MAGA media’s fervid promotion in September 2024 of the racist, baseless lie that Haitians were stealing and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, local institutions received bomb threats and residents kept their children home from school out of fear for their safety.
Officials at all levels of government seeking to respond to a devastating hurricane in North Carolina the next month were forced to spend precious time debunking that ecosystem’s deranged lies because those were the sources some victims counted on for their information.
When the Epstein conspiracy theories are firmly in the rearview, everyone involved in propagating them will retain their influence over a Trump administration that is more concerned with placating them than in acting in the public interest. And that is truly dangerous.
---
---
RawStory
FBI silent as far-right podcaster demands Trump execution and Kash Patel torture
Jordan Green, Investigative Reporter
:{:{June 2, 2025}:
A far-right Pennsylvania activist and podcaster has suggested Donald Trump should be executed and FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino tortured, in both cases for failing to provide evidence in support of antisemitic conspiracy theories.
“Donald Trump, along with every other president since John F. Kennedy, is a traitor to their country,” Matthew Wakulik wrote on X last month. “This is just another example of why 95% of all federal government employees should be tried for treason and given the maximum penalty.”
Wakulik was angered by Trump’s failure to declassify government files on the Israeli military’s 1967 attack on a U.S. Navy ship, the USS Liberty, which was determined to have been a mistake.
In May, on The Berm Pit Podcast, which he co-hosts with Scott Siverts, a former U.S. Marine, Wakulik responded to a Fox Business interview in which Patel and Bongino discussed the case of Jeffrey Epstein, the financier and convicted sex trafficker who died by suicide in August 2019, in a New York jail.
Angered because Patel and Bongino failed to say Epstein was an agent of the Israeli intelligence services, Wakulik advocated “torture to get information, to extract information … whether it’s waterboarding or sleep deprivation.”
Wakulik has also advocated shooting Susie Wiles, Trump’s White House chief of staff.
The FBI and the Department of Justice declined to comment.
‘Show of force’
Since Trump entered politics in 2015, conspiracy theories wielded against political enemies have been a defining trait of his movement.
Wakulik, a Pittsburgh-area resident who regularly disgorges violent antisemitic rhetoric, recalled in the most recent episode of his podcast that in 2020, during Trump’s first term, he attended a rally in Richmond, Va. while armed with an AR-15 rifle that was meant as a “show of force,” to dissuade the then-Democratic controlled state legislature from passing gun control measures.
Days before the protest, Trump tweeted: “Your 2nd Amendment is under very serious attack in the Great Commonwealth of Virginia. That’s what happens when you vote for Democrats, they take your guns away.”
Wakulik recalled in a video posted to X on May 29 that he and his “militia” showed up at the rally “armed, full body armor, AR-15s and everything” at the rally. He attributed the legislators’ ultimate decision to vote down the gun-control measures to an “armed show of force.”
“There is nothing that works — and the government knows this — other than the threat of violence or violence itself,” Wakulik said.
While steeped in conspiracy theories familiar to the MAGA base, Wakulik appears to have become increasingly disdainful towards Trump.
Much of his ire appears to center on the Epstein case, which Trump aides have used to feed supporters’ appetite for conspiracy theories. For mainstream Trump followers, the case taps into suspicions about an ill-defined global elite, usually linked to Democrats. For hardliners inclined towards white nationalism and antisemitism, links to Israel or a mythical Jewish cabal are also common.
Before he became the FBI director, Patel promoted the idea that the U.S. government was engaged in a cover-up to protect powerful allies.
In December 2023, Patel told conservative media figure Glenn Beck that Epstein’s “black book” of contacts was “under the control of the director of the FBI.”
“And that’s the thing I think President Trump should run on,” Patel said. “On day one, roll out the black book.”
The same day, Patel told conservative influencer Benny Johnson the FBI was protecting Epstein “because of who’s on that list,” adding: “You don’t think [Microsoft founder] Bill Gates is lobbying Congress night and day to prevent the disclosure of that list?”
Patel added: “Put on your big-boy pants and let us know who the pedophiles are. We have an election coming up, and we need to adjudicate this matter at the polls.”
After Trump’s victory, Patel was nominated as FBI director but did not stop pushing Epstein conspiracy theories. Speaking to Johnson in November 2024, Patel predicted Trump would “come in here and maybe give [the American people] the Epstein list.”
The political establishment was “terrified” at the prospect, Patel claimed.
In February, with Trump in power, Attorney General Pam Bondi attempted to placate supporters’ hunger for revelations by inviting conservative influencers to the Department of Justice to receive binders of Epstein case files. However, the stunt was widely ridiculed by Trump supporters who noted that it brought little new information to light.
This month, in a joint interview with Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo, Patel and Bongino appeared to close the book on the Epstein case. As a lawyer with prosecutorial and defense experience who had visited detention facilities, Patel said, “you know a suicide when you see one, and that’s what that was.”
Bongino said: “He killed himself. I’ve seen the whole file. He killed himself.”
The next day, Wakulik and Siverts took stock.
Siverts said: “As a government, why can’t we just say, ‘Hey look, this guy, he was Mossad, and what he was doing here was this.’ Will we ever hear that from a government official here?”
Wakulik responded that the solution was for people to “demand by whatever means necessary that the truth comes out.”
“People are mad, but they don’t do anything about it,” he complained. “How would one pressure anyone into getting the truth out of them?”
“Through physical force,” Siverts said.
“Yes,” Wakulik said. “This is why they call [it] torture, right? Torture to get information, to extract information. This is why you apply physical violence or any type of, like, uncomfortability when it comes to torture techniques, whether it’s waterboarding or sleep deprivation.”
Raw Story reached out to the FBI National Press Operations unit in Washington, D.C. to request a comment from Patel. The FBI declined to comment on Patel’s behalf.
In fact, Wakulik soured on the Trump administration long before Patel and Bongino talked to Bartiromo.
Following the 2024 election, Wakulik suggested grading Trump’s appointees “on a scale of how many bullets I put in their heads,” according to video archived by a pseudonymous researcher tracking his statements and provided to Raw Story. Asked by his co-host to rate Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, Wakulik responded: “Five bullets.”
In posts to X, Wakulik has equated supposed Israeli influence over the U.S. government with British colonial rule in North America, while calling for “1776 style action” against “ZOG,” a white supremacist acronym that stands for “Zionist Occupied Government.”
Matt Wakulik (left) attended an armed pro-Second Amendment rally at the Virginia legislature in Richmond in January 2020.
Anthony Crider
The Trump administration, meanwhile, has made antisemitism its central rationale for deporting international students who support Palestine and defunding universities deemed improperly liberal. Such efforts include a Federal Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, which the administration pledges will “eradicate antisemitic harassment in schools and on college campuses.”
The Department of Justice did not respond to an inquiry from Raw Story about whether Wakulik’s statements deserved attention from the task force.
‘Go kinetic’
Wakulik has suggested he might be willing to act on his violent beliefs.
In a May 2 X post, Walkulik suggested “the militia” should go to Rochester, Minn. to hold a rally in support of a white woman widely condemned for calling a child the N-word in a public park. When another X user suggested the time wasn’t ripe for such a display, Wakulik replied: “I admit I am in a different position than most: I have no children and I really don’t have much to lose. In that aspect I’m more eager to go kinetic.”
In late April, the researcher tracking Wakulik’s statements submitted a report to police where Wakulik lives, in Washington County, southwest of Pittsburgh.
“We were previously unaware that Mr. Wakulik resided within our jurisdiction, and the information you have shared will be valuable in allowing us to maintain a vigilant watch,” Sgt. Gary Scherer of the North Strabane Township Police Department wrote in an email reviewed by Raw Story.
“As part of this, we will conduct a threat assessment, consult with our local FBI office, and likely speak to Mr. Wakulik.”
The following day, Wakulik posted a video reporting that his landlord told his wife a police officer visited their house to confirm that he lived there and that the officer “said it was for another agency.”
Wakulik said, “We are being surveilled currently, probably followed by either the FBI or [the Department of Homeland Security] or both.”
A spokesperson for the FBI’s Pittsburgh office told Raw Story the agency was unable to provide additional information.
Sgt. Scherer’s email said it appeared that Wakulik’s statements fell under First Amendment protections, but he would consult with the district attorney’s office to obtain a legal opinion. The Office of the Washington County District Attorney did not respond to a request for comment.
Wakulik could not be reached for comment.
In recent weeks, Wakulik and Siverts have discussed their plans to attend a reunion of USS Liberty veterans, scheduled to take place in Norfolk, Va. this weekend. Siverts said Wakulik was scheduled to speak at the event, and that both men had been issued press passes.
Moe Shafer, executive director of the Liberty Veterans Association, told a local news outlet that “any agenda for antisemitism or Jew hating… will not be allowed.”
Emails to the Liberty Veterans Association from Raw Story seeking clarification on Wakulik’s participation went unreturned.
Stew Peters, a podcaster with a history of antisemitic statements, has also said he plans to speak at the event. But last week an event organizer told WTKR News 3 that Marriott Bonvoy, the owner of the Sheraton Norfolk Waterside Hotel, where the event will take place, banned Peters from the premises.
Siverts expressed concern on the podcast last week that he and Wakulik's statements might put them in legal jeopardy, especially in light of the fatal attack on two Israeli embassy aides in Washington, D.C. on May 21. Siverts said he worried that “the FBI can come back from an incident that’s a violent incident where somebody was harmed or somebody was killed, and they go, ‘Well, he watched this podcast, and we need to hold this podcast accountable, too.”
Wakulik was unrepentant.
“They come and try to get me, I’m going to defend myself from violent criminals trying to commit an act of violence — a violent crime against me,” Wakulik said.
“But they’re police, Matt,” Siverts replied.
“If they break the law and use violent force to break the law against me, I’m going to defend myself from violent criminals,” Wakulik insisted.
Jordan Green is a North Carolina-based investigative reporter at Raw Story, covering domestic extremism, efforts to undermine U.S. elections and democracy, hate crimes and terrorism. Prior to joining the staff of Raw Story in March 2021, Green spent 16 years covering housing, policing, nonprofits and music as a reporter and editor at Triad City Beat in North Carolina and Yes Weekly. He can be reached at jordan@rawstory.com. More about Jordan Green.
---
===
an 2 25
Attorney General Pam Bondi allegesan FBI field office is withholding thousands of documents related to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, The Independent reports. Bondi released documents on the case Thursday, but they did not contain any major revelations — and right-wing Donald Trump supporters allege the “evil deep state” is responsible for purportedly concealing information.
The documents that were released included flight logs, which had been made available previously in court cases, and his book of contacts, which has been in circulation for years. Epstein died in prison in 2019 while awaiting trial for sex trafficking charges. He was previously convicted of soliciting prostitution from a minor.
“I repeatedly questioned whether this was the full set of documents responsive to my request and was repeatedly assured by the FBI that we had received the full set of documents," Bondi wrote in a letter to FBI director Kash Patel. "Late yesterday, I learned from a source that the FBI Field Office in New York was in possession of thousands of pages of documents related to the investigation and indictment of Epstein. Despite my repeated requests, the FBI never disclosed the existence of these files…There will be no withholdings or limitations to my or your access."
“If there are gaps, we will find them,” Patel said in a statement Thursday. “If records have been hidden, we will uncover them.”
“I nor the task force were given or reviewed the Epstein documents being released today” Representative Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), a member of the House Oversight Committee, posted on X. “A NY Post story just revealed that the documents will simply be Epstein's phonebook. THIS IS NOT WHAT WE OR THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ASKED FOR and a complete disappointment. GET US THE INFORMATION WE ASKED FOR!”
“We’re talking recordings, evidence, etc," conservative commentator Liz Wheeler posted on X. "The juicy stuff. Names. These swamp creatures at SDNY deceived Bondi, Kash, and YOU. Be outraged that the binder is boring. You should be. Because the evil deep state LIED TO YOUR FACE."
“Be very, very angry that deep state agents in the swamp at the [Southern District of New York] are at this very moment defying President Trump & AG Bondi & you who voted him into office, lying, and hiding the truth about Jeffrey Epstein because they don’t want their own corruption & weaponization of govt exposed,” she added.
Conservative commentator Glenn Beck called the files a joke. “Who is subverting POTUS?" he posted on X. "The#Epsteinfiles are a total joke. I know Kash, Pam B and The President. This is not the file. WH tells me that they believe the usual suspects FBI/SDNY has the actual#EpsteinClientList and are refusing to turn it over. THIS IS AN INTERNAL CIVIL WAR if true."
--==
---
https://www.alternet.org/jeffrey-epstein-set-up-meetings-with-trump-allies-before-2016-election/
no lnx
Revealed: Jeffrey Epstein set up meetings with Trump allies before 2016 election
Alex Henderson August 30, 2023
Four years have passed since wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein, facing federal sex trafficking charges involving minors, was found dead in a Manhattan jail cell. A medical examiner ruled that Epstein, on August 10, 2019, had died from suicide by hanging.
Epstein, who was 66 when he died, associated with a lot of famous people. According to the Wall Street Journal, Epstein set up meetings with some of Donald Trump's supporters before the 2016 presidential election.
Those supporters included Thomas Barrack and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel (a major donor to MAGA Republicans), WSJ journalists Khadeeja Safdar and David Benoit (not to be confused with the jazz musician) report.
Another was the late Vitaly Churkin, who was Russia's ambassador to the United Nations at the time.
Forbes reporter Sara Dorn, in a separate article on Epstein, notes, "The New York Times reported in May that e-mails from Epstein's assistant show he planned to meet with Thiel at least three times in 2014, but the paper did not confirm whether the meetings occurred and Thiel declined to comment at the time."
READ MORE: Ethics defenders cheer as Trump 'Big Lie' allies charged in Michigan
Find the Wall Street Journal's full report at this link (subscription required) and Forbes' article here.
---
https://www.mediamatters.org/diversity-discrimination/manosphere-influencers-are-teaming-anime-obsessed-content-creator-who
no lnx etc
violent misogynist and alleged human trafficker Andrew Tate is now promoting dangerous incel culture to his audience of millions.
Tate and his associates have teamed up with and are promoting an anime-obsessed content creator and misanthrope who glorifies school shooters, pushes Holocaust denial, and promotes the hyper-sexualization of underage girls.
Tate and his acolytes Justin Waller and “Sneako” have aligned themselves with “Waifu Watchers,” a viral content creator who appears to be obsessed with sexualizing underage cartoon anime girls. Waifu Watchers’ content promotes an incel-aligned and misogynistic ideology;the same kind of extremist rhetoric that has led to real-world violence, harassment, and is correlated with mass shootings.
This is an example of Tate and his adherents leaning into and helping to popularize violent incel culture while using Tate’s massively viral nature to push a new set of dangerous misogynistic ideas to his followers. This could be dangerous for Tate’s large fanbase, which includes susceptible kids and teens who idolize him.
In May 2022, Tate bestowed Waifu Watchers with the title of “G of the week” after he made a TikTok gloating about being legally allowed to be sexually attracted to underage anime girls because they aren’t real.
“I want you to follow this guy, Waifu Watchers. This is an official shoutout.” Tate’s co-host and brother Tristian said. “Can you follow this guy, everybody. He’s a fucking hero.”
“Hero. He ain’t taking shit,” Tate added.
Recently, Tate posted a photo of himself wearing a “Waifu Watchers” jacket standing alongside two female anime characters. Tate and the influencer have been pictured together numerous times. Waifu Watchers claimed that he stayed with Tate for a week, and that Tate gifted him cryptocurrency.
WW Tate
CitationScreenshot from Waifu Watchers' Instagram page
Tate and his adherents' decision to platform and promote an anime-obsessed misogynistic edgelord continues the pattern of far-right figures using anime and Japanese entertainment to push dubious narratives.
What is a waifu?
According to Dictionary.com, a “waifu” is “a term for a fictional character, usually in anime or related media, that someone has great, and sometimes romantic, affection for.” The term is taken from the English word for “wife.”
Some anime consumers have a “pseudo-intimate relationship” with waifus. This becomes insidious when anime watchers fixate on underage female characters as waifus, as some of these characters are drawn to be hyper-sexualized and fit coming of age stories.
Waifu Watchers promotes extremist and predatory views to his audience
Online, Waifu Watchers has promoted the sexualization of underage cartoon girls, Holocaust denial, and the glorification of school shooters.The influencer goes by “chaiinmail chase” in some of his videos.
Here’s a breakdown of the content creator’s history of pushing extremist views:
In a YouTube Shorts video, the influencer douses himself with what he pretends is the urine of an underage-looking anime girl.
In another YouTube Shorts video, the content creator celebrated the sound of a female anime character getting her finger broken and screaming.
On various occasions, Waifu Watchers has posted misogynistic content about women.
The content creator made a fake Joe Rogan interview with an anime character where she defends Hitler and promotes Holocaust denial.
During a vlog, the influencer said “I would never shoot up a school” unless it was a place that was “indoctrinating” kids into believing that three million Jews died during the Holocaust. He bleeped out the word Holocaust during the entirety of the vlog.
During the same vlog, he told his audience, “I hope you’re keeping those streets clean and those schools empty.”
The influencer sells t-shirts that glorify school shooters, rapper Ye’s (formerly Kanye West) “White Lives Matter” stunt, and convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
The content creator posted a photo of himself holding what appear to be firearms with the words “don’t log into twitter tomorrow,” appearing to refer to the phrase “don’t come to school tomorrow,” which was popularized as a meme following the Umpqua Community College shooting.
He admitted to making a fake, racist article that went viral on social media.
Some of the influencer’s YouTube content may violate the platform's terms of service against hate speech. Earlier this year, YouTube began monetizing YouTube Shorts for creators. Some of the short videos feature outright bigotry and misogyny. Tate’s own content is reportedly all over YouTube Shorts, despite being banned from the platform.
Online misogyny leads to real-world violence
Online misogyny has led to real-world violence and harassment. Incel culture and domestic violence have inspired mass shootings across the country.
Early manosphere influencers were a critical driver of Gamergate, a harassment campaign against women who worked in the video game industry that pushed violent misogyny and anti-feminism. Several women received death and rape threats for years from online harassers.
Viral influencers like Tate and Sneako promoting hateful or misogynistic content online have reminded some audiences online of the rhetoric that was used to attack women during Gamergate.
---
---
salon
921
Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon coached convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein for a "60 Minutes" interview months before he was arrested on child sex trafficking charges, according to a passage from a new book by Michael Wolff first reported by The New York Times' Ben Smith.
Bannon conducted more than a dozen hours of practice interviews with Epstein in 2019, aimed at making the latter appear less "creepy" ahead of the interview — which ultimately never happened — according to Wolff's forthcoming book "Too Famous." Wolff is best known for his recent trilogy of books on the Trump administration, "Fire and Fury," "Siege" and "Landslide."
Bannon, who led former President Donald Trump's first campaign and briefly served as his chief White House strategist before being fired, in part because of critical comments he made to Wolff, encouraged Epstein to speak to "60 Minutes" and recorded more than 15 hours of practice interviews with him at his Manhattan estate, according to Wolff.
Bannon interviewed Epstein while giving him tips, such as urging him to avoid looking at the camera so he doesn't come across as "stupid" and "advising him not to share his racist theories on how Black people learn," according to the report. Bannon reportedly also told Epstein to "stick to his message, which is that he is not a pedophile."
"You're engaging, you're not threatening, you're natural, you're friendly, you don't look at all creepy, you're a sympathetic figure," Bannon told Epstein toward the end of the session, according to interview transcripts obtained by Wolff.
Bannon confirmed to the Times that he had encouraged Epstein to talk to "60 Minutes" and had recorded more than 15 hours of interview footage with the deceased financier, but insisted he had "never trained anyone." Bannon told the Times he had recorded the interviews for an "previously unannounced eight- to 10-hour documentary" that was intended to show how Epstein's "perversions and depravity toward young women were part of a life that was systematically supported, encouraged and rewarded by a global establishment that dined off his money and his influence."
It's unclear how Wolff obtained the transcripts, though the author told the Times that Epstein wanted him to write a book about him.
"He wanted me to write something about him — a kind of a book — it wasn't clear why," Wolff said.
It's also unclear how Bannon and Epstein connected. Epstein, a millionaire financier who regularly socialized with wealthy businessmen, academics and even former presidents, was arrested months later on federal child sex trafficking charges. He had previously pleaded guilty to soliciting a person under 18 for prostitution in a controversial and remarkably lenient plea deal involving infamous attorneys Alan Dershowitz and Ken Starr and future Trump Labor Secretary Alex Acosta, who ultimately resigned after new details of the Epstein deal were reported. Epstein later died by suicide in a Manhattan jail cell while awaiting trial. His alleged accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, has pleaded not guilty to charges that she recruited and groomed underage girls for him to sexually abuse and sometimes participated in the abuse.
It's not the first time Bannon has been linked to Epstein, a longtime friend of Trump's that the former president touted as a "terrific guy" who enjoys women "on the younger side." Page Six reported in 2018 that Bannon was seen entering Epstein's Manhattan mansion, where Epstein and Maxwell are accused of repeatedly abusing underage girls.
"Bannon needs money to bankroll his political agenda," a source told Page Six at the time, just months after Bannon had left the White House. "Epstein has plenty of money, and craves power and access."
Epstein's former butler at his Paris estate also claimed in 2019 that Bannon had stayed at Epstein's apartment in the fall of 2018, which a spokesperson for Bannon denied at the time.
New York Times columnist James Stewart also wrote in 2019 that Epstein invited him, Bannon and Wolff to a dinner in 2018 but it's unclear whether the dinner ever happened and Bannon has denied that he attended.
Wolff, who regularly writes about disgraced powerful figures, has his own extensive ties to Epstein. In 2003, the Times reported that Wolff organized a bid to buy New York magazine with investors that included Epstein as well as disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein. Wolff later continued to see Epstein at his office, New York reported in 2007. Wolff told the outlet at the time that he had first met Epstein in the late '90s, recalling how the millionaire was followed around by "three teenage girls" who were "not his daughters." In fact, it appears that Wolff coached Epstein himself when the millionaire first faced charges before his 2005 guilty plea.
"He has never been secretive about the girls," Wolff told New York. "At one point, when his troubles began, he was talking to me and said, 'What can I say, I like young girls.' I said, 'Maybe you should say, 'I like young women.'"
Even after Epstein's 2005 conviction, Wolff continued to try to help Epstein.
"A few years ago the journalist Michael Wolff wrote a profile of him for New York magazine that was meant to 'rehabilitate' Epstein's image and would tell of all the billionaires who still, secretly, hung out with Epstein," The Daily Beast's Vicky Ward reported in 2019. "The piece had 'fact-checking' issues and never ran."
---
Epstein showed off 14-year-old victim to Trump at Mar-a-Lago: lawsuit
Brad Reed / Raw StoryAugust 17, 2020
A new lawsuit claims that late alleged child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein brought one of his victims to see President Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort when she was just 14 years…[el moz pref 12 yo]
==
7/20? trump wishes female enabler well
==
https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/heres-why-congress-wants-to-look-inside-the-bank-that-fronted-donald-trump-2-billion/}:
no lnx
Here’s why Congress wants to look inside the bank that fronted Donald Trump $2 billion
Written by Dana Kennedy / Raw Story, DC Report December 31, 2019
Just try phoning Trump’s private banker Rosemary T. Vrablic at Deutsche Bank’s U.S. headquarters in Manhattan. Back in 2017, before too many bankers involved with Deutsche Bank started turning up dead, Trump once dared reporters to call her, saying she was the “the head” of the bank and “the boss.”
The good news is that Vrablic, 58, is alive. That is not something to take for granted when you look at two dead Deutsche Bank executives with ties to Trump, Russia and possibly at dead pedophile money man Jeffrey Epstein. One banker was found hanged in 2014 and one in November.
Vrablic’s office picked up right away when this reporter called following the Supreme Court’s decision on Dec. 13 to take up Trump’s argument that he be allowed to shield disclosure of his financial information from Congress and the New York attorney general.
Not surprisingly, the woman who answered the phone in Vrablic’s office refused to identify herself. Nor would she put Vrablic on to answer questions about Trump.
She sounded flabbergasted that anyone from the public, much less the media, would be calling someone who is, for the most part, a mystery woman. And that is despite her role in approving about $300 million in allegedly suspect loans to Trump. That arrangement will be part of a quite likely historic oral argument by the Supreme Court in March with a planned June decision.
Refusing to transfer the call to a corporate spokesperson, the person who answered the phone tried to imply that Vrablic no longer worked there. Then she agreed to take a message that was never returned.
‘Global Laundromat’
Deutsche Bank lent Trump millions after he defaulted on loans they already gave him and after he once sued them in 2008. Known derisively as a “global laundromat,” the bank is facing U.S. and British legal actions over its role in a $20 billion Russian money-laundering scheme. Two Congressional committees want the bank to release 10-plus years of records involving Trump and his three oldest children as Congress probes Russian money laundering and possible foreign influence involving Trump. White House lawyers have fought the committees tenaciously.
It’s hoped that the Supreme Court’s verdict will end years-long efforts on the part of U.S. officials to glean the truth about Trump’s finances. Especially at issue is whether Russians interfered in the 2016 election and if that meddling was powered by Russian money funneled to Trump through the giant, scandal-ridden German bank.
Teller to Managing Director
Vrablic, a one-time bank teller turned Deutsche Bank private wealth managing director, was Trump’s liaison at the bank. She sat in a hoodie in the VIP section at the Trump inauguration.
Trump borrowed more than $2 billion in the past two decades. Many allege the loans could hold the key to Russian funding of Trump.
Hired in 2006 with celebratory ads in The New York Times and a sweet deal guaranteeing her $3 million a year, Vrablic’s work raised the bank’s public profile–at first in a good way. Now the opposite is true.
Trump burned through his relationships with bank investment and commercial real estate departments because of his constant defaults and failures. Then Vrablic stepped up in 2010.
The Kushner Network
Trump’s daughter Ivanka had just married Jared Kushner, who was a longtime client of Vrablic along with his mother Seryl. Ivanka steered Vrablic in the private bank sector of Deutsche Bank her father’s way. It turned out to be the financial lifeline crucial in helping him win the election.
People at Vrablic’s level in the banking world, even when they are swept up in such international scandals, are rarely household names unless they die suddenly… read suspiciously. Even then, they are familiar to only the most inside-baseball financial journalists. They are never part of the daily Trump-Schiff-Pelosi-Schumer-AOC-Nunes-McConnell etc. political narrative though their influence is often greater.
Their deaths often remain murky. Supposed details take on a life of their own on conspiracy websites but the actual truth remains frustratingly out of reach – a bit like Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged jail suicide.
A Pair of Suicides
Thomas Bowers, 55, Vrablic’s former boss, ran the private wealth division of Deutsche Bank and oversaw loans to Trump and reportedly to Epstein until he left the bank, reportedly in 2015. It is said he hanged himself at his Malibu home on Nov. 19.
His death was first reported in a tweet by David Enrich of The New York Times, one of the foremost experts on Deutsche Bank. “Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump and an Epic Trail of Destruction,” an upcoming book by Enrich, focuses in part on the sudden death of William Broeksmit, a senior Deutsche Bank executive.
Broeksmit, a man who “knew too much,” according to Enrich, was found hanging in his London home in 2014. Enrich calls it a “mysterious suicide.”
Enrich previewed the deeply weird story of the whistleblower in the Broeksmit case, who turns out to be the troubled but possibly believable stepson of Broeksmit, in a New York Times Magazine story in October. So far, though, he has done no more than tweet about Bowers, first to announce his death, then to deny “rumors” that Bowers had been Epstein’s banker.
The Epstein Connection
Enrich said on Twitter that Bowers left Deutsche Bank in 2013, prior to Epstein becoming a client. Deutsche Bank would not comment on Bowers and other reports say Bowers left Deutsche Bank in 2015 when Epstein was already a customer.
Epstein, of course, allegedly committed suicide while in jail in August. One of Estonia’s leading bankers, Aivar Rehe, apparently committed suicide in September in Tallinn. Rehe ran Danske Bank which was used by clients in Russia and Eastern Europe to launder billions of dirty dollars. At the time of the Rehe death, Frankfurt prosecutors were eyeballing Deutsche Bank for its part in doing business with suspicious American customers, The New York Times reported.
The Democratic-controlled House Financial Services and Intelligence Committees issued subpoenas to Deutsche Bank in April for the records. In turn, Trump sued the bank to prevent it from complying. It’s believed that the bank has documents that would show on how Trump made his money, who he partnered with and extensive details of what he borrowed and resulting transactions.
The subpoenas also included demands for information about suspicious activity in Trump’s Deutsche Bank accounts.
Trump’s Lender of Last Resort
Starting in the late 1990s, Trump had become such a bad credit risk, either repeatedly defaulting on loans or declaring bankruptcy, that no U.S. banks would do business with him.
Deutsche Bank, which badly wanted to expand internationally, especially into the United States, saw an opportunity with Trump and became his chief creditor, despite his rank financial past.
Anti-money-laundering investigators at Deutsche Bank flagged “multiple transactions” involving accounts controlled by Trump and Jared Kushner in 2016 and 2017 and alerted bank executives who apparently ignored the intel, The New York Times reported in May.
“You present them with everything, and you give them a recommendation, and nothing happens,” Tammy McFadden, a former Deutsche Bank anti-money laundering specialist who reviewed some of the transactions told The Times.
“It’s the D.B. way. They are prone to discounting everything.”
Additional reporting by Matthew Reagan and Anna Sasser, Occidental College, Los Angeles
==
==
Evidence in Jeffrey Epstein death points to homicide — not suicide: Former NYC medical examiner
David Badash / The New Civil Rights MovementOctober 30, 2019
A former New York City medical examiner and forensic pathologist says the evidence in the Jeffrey Epstein case points not to suicide – as has been officially declared – but homicide.
---
conspriacy theory? BC mena airport again iran contra?!
https://www.mintpressnews.com/genesis-jeffrey-epstein-bill-clinton-relationship/261455/
---
---
Jeffrey Epstein's efforts to silence press included a bullet on a reporter's doorstep, cat's severed head
==
https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/trump-retweets-conspiracy-theory-claiming-bill-clinton-killed-jeffrey-epstein
==
acosta resigns
Epstein was running a blackmail scheme under the cover of a hedge fund’: NY magazine reports on Wall St speculation
Bob Brigham / Raw Story July 12, 2019
Convicted sex offend Jeffrey Epstein claims to be a billionaire hedge fund manager. But his real business may have been a blackmail scheme that could end up implicating many of his powerful friends.
==
---
https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/reporter-behind-epstein-expose-describes-harassment-by-alan-dershowitz-followed-by-weird-computer-attacks
no lnx
Reporter behind Epstein exposé describes harassment by Alan Dershowitz — followed by ‘weird’ computer attacks
Written by Tom Boggioni / Raw Story July 25, 2019
In an interview with InStyle, Miami Herald reporter Julie K. Brown confessed that since her series of reports on Jeffrey Epstein broke — that led to the multi-millionaire being arrested in New York on child trafficking charge — she has been the recipient of “weird” computer and phone activity that she finds unsettling.
She also revealed that Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz has tried to discredit her reporting with her peers.
Asked by InStyle’s Sarah Cristobal about pursuing Epstein, (” Jeffrey Epstein has quite the reputation for intimidation. Julie, did you ever experience that?”) Davis said that so far nothing has happened that she is overly concerned about.
“Nothing has happened yet — not yet,” she admitted. “I will say that the one thing I’ve noticed is that there is definitely something weird going on with my phones and my computer.”
“I’ve been getting incessant FaceTime calls, one after another, from different numbers. I’m talking millions. I answered only one,” she continued. “I hope that means they didn’t hack in. I got so frustrated, and I thought, ‘Who are you? Why are you doing this?’”
Then she took a shot at Dershowitz who has been tangentially implicated in the Epstein case.
“When you go after powerful people, you know that they are going to try to find a way to mess with you,” she explained. “When [my story on Epstein] came out, [Harvard Law School professor and former Epstein attorney] Alan Dershowitz wrote an open letter to the Pulitzer Prize committee, trying to discredit my work and influence the board [not to award the Miami Herald a prize].”
“He must have said a million times, ‘I know that you’re not going to tell the truth because you’re just aiming for a Pulitzer,’” she recalled. “When I do this kind of work, it’s the farthest thing from my mind. I never thought that this Epstein story would be as big as it’s turned out to be. Never. The thing that drives me is finding justice and telling a story people can relate to, because there are tons of vulnerable women who have gone through something like this.”
You can read more here.
==
==
mSNBC’s Donny Deutsch presses reporter to name names in Esptein scandal — and drops some big hints
MSNBC’s Donny Deutsch pressed a reporter to name names after she reopened the Jeffrey Epstein sex abuse scandal with a series of bombshell reports.
==
https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/rachel-maddow-details-the-disturbing-new-ruling-against-trumps-labor-secretary-in-the-case-of-an-alleged-billionaire-child-molester/
On Thursday, a federal judge in Florida ruled that President Donald Trump’s Secretary of Labor, Alexander Acosta, broke the law when, as a U.S. attorney, he brokered a secret non-prosecution deal with Jeffrey Epstein, a highly-connected wealth manager accused of molesting and trafficking dozens of underage girls over a period of decades.
The ruling is explosive, for a number of reasons — and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow broke down its meaning and implications in a lengthy Twitter thread:
Rachel Maddow MSNBC
?
@maddow
Even if Alex Acosta were not a Trump cabinet official right now, this federal court ruling about his behavior in the Jeffrey Epstein case would/should put Acosta in headlines across the country.https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5745926-Epstein-Order.html …
19K
2:37 PM - Feb 21, 2019
Twitter Ads info and privacy
Epstein Order
Source document contributed to DocumentCloud by CJ Ciaramella (BuzzFeed).
documentcloud.org
9,782 people are talking about this
First, Maddow notes, “this is a breakthrough because for the first time, a court is confirming Epstein’s serial abuse of multiple minor girls (a federal crime) in Florida, elsewhere in the US, and abroad.” Getting any confirmation of this has proven devilishly elusive, because Acosta’s non-prosecution agreement, in addition to shutting down the FBI investigation, allowed Epstein to plead out on a charge of “prostitution.” A lawsuit last year that might have allowed some of Epstein’s victims to testify publicly for the first time was averted when Epstein brokered a settlement, thus continuing to keep the details of his alleged wrongdoing under wraps.
Second, the ruling confirms that Acosta’s deal with Epstein was a violation of federal laws that require crime victims to be informed of the details of an agreement that lessens the sentence of the alleged perpetrator:
View image on Twitter
View image on Twitter
Rachel Maddow MSNBC
?
@maddow
Replying to @maddow
The basis for the civil case that led to today's ruling was the Crime Victims' Rights Act, which should have *blocked* Acosta from doing this deal in secret with Epstein, without telling his potential victims.
Here, Julie Brown sums it up elegantly:
4,253
2:37 PM - Feb 21, 2019
1,871 people are talking about this
Twitter Ads info and privacy
Rachel Maddow MSNBC
?
@maddow
Replying to @maddow
Today, as Brown sums it up, the judge ruled that, "while prosecutors had the right to resolve the case in any way they saw fit, they violated the law by hiding the agreement from Epstein’s victims."
2,654
2:37 PM - Feb 21, 2019
Twitter Ads info and privacy
846 people are talking about this
This was not an accident, says Maddow. In fact, today’s ruling asserts specifically that Acosta himself worked hand in hand with Epstein’s attorney to keep the agreement concealed from the victims:
View image on Twitter
View image on Twitter
Rachel Maddow MSNBC
?
@maddow
Replying to @maddow
And which prosecutors did that specifically? Was it someone just working below Alex Acosta that he might not have known about? Someone he just didn't adequately supervise on this case?
Uh, not according to the judge. Read this:
2,493
2:37 PM - Feb 21, 2019
1,061 people are talking about this
Twitter Ads info and privacy
“So, a federal judge just ruled that the current Labor Secretary gave a secret non-prosecution agreement to a prolific, serial child sex offender — then broke the law by agreeing with the guy’s defense team that they’d all keep it secret from the victims,” Maddow concludes. “Did I mention that Alex Acosta is now a Trump cabinet official? Right now? Still?”
Acosta may have helped Epstein escape accountability for his alleged crimes. But now it is his turn to face legal scrutiny and public accountability.
---
Opinions
Is the GOP the law and order party? Not so much.
Jeffrey Epstein appears in custody in West Palm Beach, Fla., in 2008. (Uma Sanghvi/AP)
By Catherine Rampell
Columnist
December 10, 2018
For a party that claims to be “tough on crime,” Republicans seem pretty confused by what it means to hold criminals to account.
Particularly when it comes to white-collar crimes, or really any crimes committed by rich people.
:{:{}:
}:
On Friday, for instance, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) argued that President Trump should pardon his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who has been convicted of eight felonies and pleaded guilty to another two.
:{:{}:
}:
“If Manafort was going to be prosecuted as a consequence of his tax crimes or lobbying crimes, that would have happened more than a decade ago,” Gaetz said on Fox News, adding on Twitter, “The only reason he was prosecuted is because of politics.”
:{:{}:
}:
Joseph diGenova, a former Reagan-appointed federal prosecutor and now frequent Trump surrogate, likewise has suggested that Manafort should not have been prosecuted because he had “no criminal record.”
:{:{}:
}:
By this logic, absent an extant criminal record, no one — not even pre-prosecution Al Capone — should ever get charged with a crime. Never having been in jail becomes a Get Out of Jail Free card.
In reality, the reason Manafort wasn’t prosecuted ages ago — despite the many red flags over the years — has little to do with politics and more to do with the fact that the United States has basically stopped prosecuting white-collar crimes. Adjusted for population, there were half as many white-collar prosecutions in fiscal 2018 as there were 30 years earlier, according to data from Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.
Manafort is hardly the only wealthy white guy whom prominent Republicans — including GOP law enforcement officials — have sought to shield from the full weight of the law.
Consider the sweetheart plea deal given to Palm Beach billionaire Jeffrey Epstein,which the Miami Herald recently reported on in damning detail.
In a “cult-like sex pyramid scheme,” Epstein allegedly molested or sexually abused dozens of underage girls, some still in braces. One 15-year-old victim said she was recruited to be a “sex slave” out of the Mar-a-Lago locker room, where she worked as a towel girl.
The 53-page indictment prepared by law enforcement officials in 2007 could have landed Epstein in prison for life. Instead, Epstein, a longtime Democratic donor,hired a few well-connected Republican lawyers (including former independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr) and scored “one of the most lenient deals for a serial child sex offender in history,” according to the Herald.
The no-prosecution deal allowed him to serve just 13 months in the private wing of a local jail, from which he was granted “work release” 12 hours a day, six days a week. The agreement also effectively shut down an FBI investigation into others who might have been involved.
Which George W. Bush-appointed U.S. attorney decided to go so soft on sex crime? Why, Alexander Acosta, now Trump’s secretary of labor, a position with oversight over international child-labor laws and human trafficking.
Acosta effectively squelched an investigation into a real-life, Pizzagate-style child-sex ring. Yet law-and-order Republicans have remained mum on calls for his removal.
Other well-heeled, well-connected entities have also found the quality of Republican mercy unstrained.
Shortly after White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney took over as acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency dropped an investigation into an installment lender that had donated to his congressional campaign. A ProPublica investigation had found that the company was charging annual interest rates that could exceed 200 percent.
But the bureau’s leniency under Trump-chosen leadership has not been confined to that one company.
Even as consumer complaints have reached new highs, its publicly announced enforcement actions have dropped about 75 percent from their average over the previous five years, according to a Post analysis.
Of course, Republicans remain tough on some categories of lawbreakers.
Trump has advocated “rough[ing]” up some criminal suspects, and giving drug dealers the death penalty. Thirty years ago he urged the same fate for the Central Park Five, five young black men accused of rape who were exonerated by DNA evidence.
And while Trump and some Republican lawmakers have publicly supported a bill reforming prison sentencing rules, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) won’t give it a vote. Unlike with funding for his beloved wall, Trump has not exactly kicked up a fuss over this. But if Republicans truly want to give offenders a second chance — even when their pockets are shallow, and their ballots more likely to be Democratic — that is certainly a measure they could pursue.
Instead, Trump et al. seem to have adopted the adage attributed to various Latin American strongmen: For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law.
Read more:
Catherine Rampell: America is swarming with Paul Manaforts
Catherine Rampell: How America stopped prosecuting white-collar crime and public corruption, in charts
Kathleen Parker: How power and money colluded to let a sex-obsessed monster get away with abuse
David Von Drehle: It pays to be rich. Just look at the lurid case of Jeffrey Epstein.
Ivanka Trump: The Trump administration is taking bold action to combat the evil of human trafficking
Catherine Rampell
Catherine Rampell is an opinion columnist at The Washington Post. She frequently covers economics, public policy, politics and culture, with a special emphasis on data-driven journalism. Before joining The Post, she wrote about economics and theater for the New York Times.
==
The Billionaire Pedophile Who Could Bring Down Donald Trump and ...
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-billionaire-pedophile-who-could-bring-down-dona...
1.
Why Did Acosta Help Jeffrey Epstein Hide His Crimes?
nymag.com/.../epstein-plea-acosta-miami-herald-investigation-sex-crimes-trump-clinton....
Nov 28, 2018 - Trump's Labor Secretary Once Helped a Billionaire Child Rapist .... Although, be advised: Reading about Jeffrey Epstein for longer than 45 .... Tennessee Republican Governor Bill Lee, pictured right, apologizes ... A GOP challenger approaches New Hampshire .... This guy was crowd-funding his legal bills.
Missing: donor | Must include: donor
The GOP Donor Class Is a Pack of Ungrateful Brats
nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/.../the-gop-donor-class-is-a-pack-of-ungrateful-brats.htm...
Oct 5, 2017 - Can anyone blame Republican donors for closing their wallets to an enterprise ... And yet, the Trump-era Republicans have done their utmost to comport ..... PAC, is launching an early $100M presidential effort in FL, WI, MI, and PA, ... sordid role Alexander Acosta played in the Jeffrey Epstein child-sex case.
Is the GOP the law and order party? Not so much. - The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/...gop.../b646336e-fcc0-11e8-ad40-cdfd0e0dd65a_sto...
Dec 10, 2018 - Jeffrey Epstein appears in custody in West Palm Beach, Fla., in 2008. ... For a party that claims to be “tough on crime,” Republicans seem pretty ... Instead, Epstein, a longtime Democratic donor, hired a few well-connected Republican ... deals for a serial child sex offender in history,” according to the Herald.
Jeffrey Epstein: About the sex trafficking case & accusations | Miami ...
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/article220097825.html
Nov 28, 2018 - Jeffrey Epstein avoided a lifetime sentence for underage human and ... A decade before #MeToo, a multimillionaire sex offender from Florida got the ultimate break. ... for the then-38-year-old prosecutor, a rising Republican star who had .... Under federal law, it's called child sex trafficking — whether Epstein ...
Missing: funder donor gop
Top Individual Contributors: All Federal Contributions | OpenSecrets
https://www.opensecrets.org/overview/topindivs.php
2.
Super PAC donors - Florida Today
https://www.floridatoday.com/pages/interactives/2016-superpac-donors/
1.
The Salacious Ammo Even Donald Trump Won't Use in a Fight ...
https://news.vice.com/.../the-salacious-ammo-even-donald-trump-wont-use-in-a-fight-...
1.
Jeffrey Epstein, explained - Vox
https://www.vox.com/2018/12/3/.../jeffrey-epstein-trump-clinton-crimes-molestation
1.
POLITICO Playbook: The most reliable politics newsletter. - POLITICO
https://www.politico.com/playbook
1.