Tucker Carlson and Darryl Cooper on the True History of Jeffrey Epstein and Ongoing Cover-Up

Hey, Olivia from Ollie here to help you ease into all things back to school.

Homework, meal prep, and pickup duty piling up?

Goodbye stress gummies help you keep your cool.

Start the day with kids multi- and probiotic for digestive and immune system health.

They'll love to take them.

And that makes mornings easier.

When back to school gets real, Ollie helps you do.

Find these and more at Ollie.com or retailers nationwide.

These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration.

This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

Daryl Cooper, ladies and gentlemen, it feels so naughty and forbidden to be sitting here with you.

It's like getting caught in a strip bar.

Just kidding.

I'm so grateful that you came.

Not everyone feels that way.

I just want to dispense with the political aspect of this by reading a verbate.

I don't have the tape for some reason, but this was my old friend Mark Levin on his show today.

And this is the transcript that I got.

Levin, and it actually says in parentheses, screaming like an old woman.

I don't know if that was actually on Fox or not, but I'm quoting, why are these insane, knuckle-headed know-nothings, these propagandists, these demagogues given platforms?

Someone gave us a platform.

Amazing.

By God, I'm going to take this crap on for as long as I live because it's destroying our youth and destroying their minds.

I'm glad he's standing up.

Somebody has to.

This guy sounds like a monster.

Who's he talking about?

You and me.

So, I think it'd be really fun to spend maybe three hours

being mean to Markle event.

I've already done that.

I want to create a documentary record.

You've already done this with your podcast, but for people who haven't seen it, I want to create a documentary record here

of everything that we know or think we know without too much speculation.

Just like stick to the facts about Jeffrey Epstein, the basic questions of Jeffrey Epstein.

I feel like I know a lot about this topic.

You know much more than I know.

So without further preamble and just being clear, I'm not here to make political points about this or comment on the unfolding drama around it, which is quite remarkable.

I don't really understand it.

So people tuning in to learn what is happening at the White House or in the Congress about this,

I can't really say at this point.

There'll be time for that.

But for right now,

I'd really just like to learn about Jeffrey Epstein.

So, with that, who was Jeffrey Epstein?

Well, Jeffrey Epstein just started out as a normal guy, born in Coney Island

in the 1950s.

First record we really have of him when he appears for us is in 1974 when he's hired to teach mathematics at the Dalton School, which is an elite private school in New York City.

Now,

I'm not familiar with the New York City K-12 education system, but I'm told it's a very elite place that

can have their pick of mathematics teachers from all over the world if they want it.

And so they hire a guy who's 20 years old, who dropped out of college after two years at Cooper Union with no teaching experience to teach math at this school.

At the age of 20?

At the age of 20, basically on the strength of a meeting with the headmaster of the school at the time, a guy by the name of Donald Barr.

Who was Donald Barr?

Yeah, so that name might sound familiar.

Donald Barr is a very interesting character, not least because his son, Bill Barr, was the attorney general who had Jeffrey Epstein arrested and oversaw his death in the federal jail that he was in.

Can I just ask you, I've already said I wouldn't interject, but I'm asking a pause already.

What are the statistical, the actual odds of that?

The Attorney General of the United States who arrested Jeffrey Epstein, oversaw his death, declared his death a suicide before the investigation ended, is the son of the guy who hired Jeffrey Epstein at age 20 with no teaching experience or college degree to teach at one of the most prestigious schools in Manhattan.

What are the, if you were like, hey, Grock, what are the odds?

What do you think the odds are?

Well, let's, whatever the odds are, let's add a few more zeros to that.

So, Donald Barr was also somebody who was, he used to work for the OSS, which was the precursor to the CIA back during World War II.

So, he has that connection.

Excuse me.

Donald Barr also dabbled in science fiction writing in his spare time.

One of the books that he wrote is called Space Relations.

And he wrote it right around this time that he hired Jeffrey Epstein.

And I've read the book, and you can go read about it on Wikipedia.

It's close enough to basically what the plot is if you want to get the idea of it.

The long and short is.

But you read the book.

Oh, yeah, I have a copy.

I make sure I get a copy of things like that.

I've got a copy of, you know, I went out and made sure I got a copy of the architectural digest in Washington Life magazines that

profiled Tony Podesta's house and art collection just in case, you know, just in case

it disappears.

And so, yeah, I got a copy of it.

I read it.

It's not a good book.

It's a pulpy kind of L.

Ron Hubbard style science fiction book, sort of.

But the basic plot of it involves the main character who is kidnapped and sold into slavery on this alien planet that's ruled by seven oligarchs who just...

have been corrupted by their power and their wealth to the point where they're basically insane and they spend most of their time breeding young slaves and kidnapping children from around the universe to bring them home and use them as sex slaves.

And the main character, he gets assigned or given to the one female oligarch on the planet.

And at first, you know, he's sort of one of her slaves and victims, but then she takes a liking to him and he joins her and

participates in what's going on.

And there are scenes in there right near the beginning.

There's a scene of these grotesque aliens that kidnap the guy that they make the, one of them makes the

prisoners watch while he

rapes a 15-year-old virginal redhead.

And so, this is, these are the books that Donald Barr, former OSS agent, father of Bill Barr, the attorney general who had Jeffrey Epstein arrested and oversaw his death.

These are the kind of books that he was writing at the time that he hired the most notorious pedophile in American history.

So, whatever the odds of the first part were, you can probably add a few zeros to that.

And we can keep adding zeros if you want.

I do.

I mean, it's hard to believe that this is real, but it is real.

What you're describing is real.

Yeah, totally real, totally verifiable.

This is not stuff you're going to find on fringe websites.

You can find it in any mainstream story about it, Wikipedia, even whatever.

So Bill Barr himself,

he was an intelligence-connected guy, very deeply.

His first job out of college was as an intern for the CIA in the mid-70s.

And that doesn't sound like much

until you learn that he was a legal intern with the CIA whose job was to be the liaison to Congress during the Church and Pike Committee hearings that were really like the first and up to this point probably only time that the CIA has faced a real threat of oversight and clamping down on its activities.

And so this was a very, very critical time when a lot of the agency's secrets were coming out and they were facing the possibility of,

well, they didn't know.

I mean, the agency might have gotten shut down, you know, if this had gone badly for them.

And so Bill Barr is the legal intern who is the liaison.

And what that meant was, you know, he was the guy that when Congress requested some documents, he's like, okay, goes back to the agency.

Here's what they want.

Okay, well, here's what we can give them.

And he goes back and convinces them that this is all there is or that they don't need the rest or anything like that.

He was that guy, you know, to smooth that over and make it work.

And he apparently did a very good job because the boss of the CIA at the time was George H.W.

Bush.

When George H.W.

Bush took over,

was elected president in 1988, took over in 89, he brought in Bill Barr to be his attorney general, who's really, who spent most of his time, like at least the big story, I'm sure an attorney general does a lot of things and wears a lot of hats, but the major story that was going on at the time was cleaning up what was left of the Iran-Contra affair.

And so you have the guy who was the legal intern for the CIA during the Church and Pike Committee hearings, brought in by the director of the CIA at the time to be the attorney general who is cleaning up the Iran-Contra affair that took place, obviously, while Bush was the vice president.

He goes into the private sector for a while, reemerges when Donald Trump needs an attorney general of his own.

Not for any particular reason, I guess, except, you know, then this happens.

He just happens to arrest the guy that his father gave his first job to, the job that he was totally unqualified for, and a guy who had proclivities that most of us find very strange and unacceptable and are very, very rare,

but coincidentally happened to be the very topic that Donald Barr, Bill Barr's father, liked to write books about.

So very strange.

It can all be a coincidence, but.

The odds are against that.

So Donald Barr hires, that's a remarkable story.

And I believe, and I've said it to him, that Bill Barr, as Attorney General, helped cover up Epstein's death, the details of his death.

Again, we hear the facts.

The facts are that he declared it a suicide before they'd finished the investigation or even really began the investigation.

So that alone

suggests dishonesty, I think.

Anyway, or lack of rigor or something.

What happened to Jeffrey Epstein at Dalton?

How long was he there?

He was there for about a year and a half, two years only.

And then he was fired for poor performance is how it got written up.

And maybe it was that.

Again, he had no teaching experience and no college degree.

So it may have just been he was a bad math teacher.

But there are people who had children as students at the time who actually say he was a good math teacher.

So maybe it had to do with something else.

Maybe it had to do with the fact that there were already allegations against Jeffrey Epstein by the girls he was teaching at this high school of inappropriate behavior.

He would even show up to

high school parties sometimes where kids are drinking and partying and he would show up as the teacher, the adult, and kind of just try to join in.

So there were those complaints that were going on.

But while he was at Dalton School, before he got run out,

one of the students he was teaching was

the father of one of the students he was teaching was the CEO of the investment bank Bear Stearns at the time, Ace Greenberg, he's known as.

And

he approached, I've heard it was Barr himself.

I don't know if that's the case, but he approached somebody who was one of his bosses or one of the people who had brought him into the school and asked if he would make the introduction to Ace Greenberg and put in a good word for him.

And so he meets Greenberg in Greenberg when he gets run out of adult and brings him on at Bear Stearns.

And

they put him to work at the end.

So by this point, Jeffrey Epstein's like 22, 21.

Thereabouts.

This is 1976.

I think he was born in 53.

So yeah, 23 years old, maybe.

Remember in 2020 when CNN told you the George Floyd riots were mostly peaceful?

Even as flames rose in the background?

It was ridiculous, but but it was also a metaphor for the way our leaders run this country.

They're constantly telling you, everything is fine.

Everything is fun.

Don't worry.

Everything's under control.

Nothing to see here.

Move along and obey.

No one believes that.

Crime is not going away.

Supply chains remain fragile.

It does feel like some kind of global conflict.

could break out at any time.

So the question is, if things went south tomorrow, would you be ready?

Well, if you're not certain that you'd be ready, you need ammo squared.

Ammo Squared is the only service that lets you build an ammunition stockpile automatically.

You literally set it on autopilot.

You pick the calibers you want, how much you want to save every month, then they'll ship it to you, or they'll store it for you and ship it when you say so.

You get 24-7 access to manage the whole thing.

So don't let the people in charge, don't let CNN lull you into a fake sense of safety.

Take control of your life, protect your family, be prepared.

Go to ammosquare.com to look at.

When you travel well, your KLM Royal Dutch Airlines ticket takes you to more than just your destination.

It takes you to winding streets, spontaneous detours, and the realization that neither of you is actually good with directions.

And when the final shortcut taken isn't exactly short, welcome aboard KLM Royal Airlines.

Our crew is here to give you a trip home that goes just as planned.

KLM Royal Dutch Airlines.

When you travel, travel well.

Learn more.

With no college degree, two years of college at Cooper Union,

and he's been a high school math teacher, and he got basically fired from that job.

And he gets hired at Bear Stearns?

He gets hired at Bear Stearns.

Is that normal?

I couldn't tell you, especially back then.

I'm not really sure.

I don't know.

I doubt it.

Doesn't sound normal, but whatever.

So he gets brought in, in, and the story goes that they put him on the options desk at first, but he was not very good at it or not very engaged or interested in it.

And so they put him in their special products division, where Jimmy Kane, who took over as CEO of Bear Stearns from Ace Greenberg, described what Epstein did there in the special products division.

And he basically,

in so many words, in sort of the Wall Street financial speak,

said that his job was to help wealthy clients hide their money,

to create, you know, tax advantageous transactions that kind of thing.

But it was to help wealthy clients hide their money.

And while he was doing that, he met and came into contact with a lot of

well-known people who became very important for the rest of his

career.

Wealthy clients.

Yeah.

And it's like one of them, for example, was Edgar Bronfman, who will come up later in our story.

He's one of the heirs to the Seagram's liquor fortune.

Very connected guy.

We'll probably get to that in a while.

But that only lasts four years.

He's there at Bear Stearns Stearns from 76 to 1980, and then he gets run out of Bear Stearns for a regulatory violation.

And,

you know, the story kind of goes there.

The official story from the people who were all involved in it at the time are that he was breaking the rules and they were very, very, very upset about it.

But apparently, he stayed friends, close friends with Ace Greenberg and Jimmy Kane for a long time after that.

And he banked with Bear Stearns all the way up until the time the investment bank collapsed in 2008.

So there weren't that many hard feelings or that intense of hard feelings, apparently.

But he left.

And

I think the reason for it is probably pretty obvious.

He just got a little too aggressive and flew a little too close to the sun doing the job that they had hired him to do.

And so he had to leave because there was a violation.

They didn't want the attention and everything, but he landed on his feet.

He stayed friends with the people who hired him, all those kind of things.

And this is where it gets like really interesting.

So again, to go over his resume,

he does two years of college, drops out, gets hired as a high school math teacher, is run out of that job ignominiously, either for poor performance or for harassing his female students.

Then he goes to work for Bear Stearns, does that for just a few years, and gets run out of there for a regulatory violation.

And that is his resume at this point.

There's nothing else I'm leaving out.

The very next year, and this would make him, I guess, 28 years old, it's 1981, he's 28 years old.

We have him on a private airplane with a big-time British arms broker named Douglas Leese, very big player back in the 1980s,

on a private plane to go to a meeting at the Pentagon with this guy.

Okay,

not for the first time I'm going to stop you and say, that doesn't make any sense at all.

Not if, yeah.

So if you're looking at it in a conventional way, it doesn't make sense.

Not if you assume the world works in the ways that we're told it works.

That doesn't make any sense.

Right.

And so you have to ask, what is it that a guy guy like Douglas Leese would be,

what interest would he have in a guy like Jeffrey Epstein?

Even if he was a moneyman of some kind, presumably a guy like that can have any moneyman he wants.

Why does he need a guy like Jeffrey Epstein?

And I think the answer is, and this is the answer that a lot of researchers have come to over the years, and I think it's the most...

the most obvious one, at least, the simplest, is that when you look at the kind of things that somebody like Lise would do, it's not as if Lise owned a weapons manufacturer.

That's not what he did.

He was a fixer.

He was a guy who made the deals happen.

He made sure the right people got paid off and that everything was kind of smoothed over so that these things would go through.

He was mentioned, for example, in the UK Parliament in the 1980s in reference to the Eliamama weapons deal with Saudi Arabia, which is the biggest weapons deal in UK history, I think, to this day.

BAE Systems alone has made $46 billion off this deal over the years.

And I think that was up through 2010 or something.

So it's probably probably higher now.

But

there have been allegations from politicians, from

lawyers, journalists,

other weapons companies who were upset about their competition getting a leg up this way, that

there was bribery, there was all kinds of shady stuff going on behind the scenes to make sure that the deal went the way that they wanted it to go.

And

you think

that

a guy who is,

you know, a guy like lease whose job is to go around and make sure that people are being paid off with illicit funds that cannot be traced because then you end up like Lockheed Martin did when they got caught bribing officials in Japan to sign off on a weapons deal there nobody wants that you got to hide your money better you got to figure out how to do that in a way that nobody's going to track it and that's why you need a guy like Jeffrey Epstein You're not going to be able to walk in the front door of Goldman Sachs and say, I need to talk to one of your money managers.

Hey, can you launder this money for me?

You need a guy who's morally compromised, who is is willing to get down in the dirt and do this kind of work.

And that is what Jeffrey Epstein had just spent the last four years at Bear Sterns doing.

I don't know how, I don't know,

this may be out there, but I can't remember ever coming across how it is he met Lise.

But

it was probably, you know,

through the wealthy clients that he was working for there at Bear Sterns so that when he did get run out, they made sure he landed on his feet and he was doing something that he could actually

succeed at.

And so you go through the 1980s and Lise is the guy who introduces him to Robert Maxwell.

He introduces him to a lot of big players and figures in European politics and in the economy and introduces him to Maxwell.

And Maxwell introduces him to his daughter, Ghelane, who became his partner in crime, I guess you'd say, over the years.

And

Robert Maxwell is a super interesting character because, you know, this is the reason that I brought up near the beginning.

And we should probably say, like,

the thing that people are really interested in this story about, I mean, there's the tabloid aspect of it.

You know, I think there's a lot of people out there who just,

there's all this talk about the Epstein list.

You know,

they want there to be a safe that the FBI opens up or drills a hole and cracks into.

And then there's just a ledger of, you know, signed in blood, I, Jeffrey Epstein, you know, compromise these famous movie stars and politicians on these days.

That's what people want.

They're not going to get that.

That kind of thing doesn't exist.

The really interesting aspect of it is encapsulated in just one incident, which happened in, I guess this came out after Epstein was arrested during the first Trump administration, that Alexander Acosta, who was Trump's labor secretary at the time, he had been

the U.S.

attorney in the Southern District of Florida in charge of prosecuting Epstein's first sex crimes case back in the mid-2000s.

And we'll get to all this later, but Epstein was given a very, very,

to call it a light sentence

is being very generous in how we describe it.

I'll get into the details of how it all came together and what the actual sentence was later.

But

he was asked in his vetting process, Alexander Acosta, hey, if this comes up, you know, this is a potential scandal.

You gave this pedophile with all these victims against, you know, they had like 40 witnesses in that 2007, 2008 case.

I mean, on the record, corroborating each other's stories independently i mean this was the most open and shut case you can imagine we'll get into the case here in a bit but uh he was asked how could you you know what's what's your excuse for giving this guy the deal that you gave him because it's kind of crazy um and he said well i was told that epstein belonged to intelligence and to leave it alone now

this is from

and to be fair, this is from an unnamed source in the administration who was involved in that vetting process, as told told to the journalist Vicki Ward.

I don't think Ward would make that up, and I don't think she would embellish it.

Well,

I have something to add to this, which is true, and I would be delighted to talk to Mr.

Acosta anytime, by the way.

So I say this with the caveat that it hasn't been, he's not said this to me.

But I believe that he's been asked about this

and that has not denied it.

And that his response was, that's true, but I don't remember who said it to me.

You may have noticed this is a great country with bad food.

Our food supply is rotten.

It didn't used to be this way.

Take chips, for example.

You may recall a time when crushing a bag of chips didn't make you feel hungover, like you couldn't get out of bed the next day.

And the change, of course, is chemicals.

There's all kinds of crap they're putting in this food that should not be in your body, seed oils, for example.

Now, even one serving of your standard American chip brand can make you feel bloated, fat,

totally passive and out of it.

But there is a better way.

It's called masa chips.

They're delicious.

Got a whole garage full of them.

They're healthy, they taste great, and they have three simple ingredients, corn, salt, and 100% grass-fed beef tallow.

No garbage, no seed oils.

What a relief.

And you feel the difference when you eat them as we often do.

Snacking on masa chips is not like eating the garbage that you buy at convenience stores.

You feel satisfied, light, energetic, not sluggish.

Tens of thousands of happy people eat masa chips.

It's endorsed by people who understand health.

It's well worth a try.

Go to masa m-as-achips.com slash tucker.

Use the code Tucker for 25% off your first order.

That's masachips.com

Tucker.

Code Tucker for 25% off your first order.

This episode is brought to you by Pacifico.

Here's a story you've probably never heard.

Legend has it, decades ago, a couple surfers went down to Mexico in search of epic swells, but they found something unexpected instead.

It was still crisp, lively, and smooth, but it had nothing to do with waves.

It was Pacifico, a delicious Mexican lager.

It's like it was brewed to be discovered.

Pacifico, find your own way.

21 Plus Discover responsibly, Pacifico Clara Beer, imported by Crown and Port, Chicago, Illinois.

Highly recommended.

Well,

I mean,

how many people can tell the U.S.

Attorney for the Southern District of Florida to drop a case against a pedophile with 40 on-the-record witnesses corroborating each other's stories?

There's not very many people who can tell him to do that.

There's not many people who can murder an inmate in federal lockup in Manhattan either.

I mean, who's he going to take that order from?

And who is it going to have enough juice from that he's going to say yes, boss, and actually go do that?

You know, the deputy attorney general and the attorney general, maybe.

I guess.

I mean, there's just not that many people who can do that.

You know, and the whole case, and we'll get into this later, was,

yeah,

it was just incredibly shady how it was handled from day one.

I mean, but yeah, anyway, I'll put that aside because the interesting thing there is you have the most famous and prolific mass pedophile in the history of the United States, certainly the most famous one,

who the labor secretary.

under, I don't know if they put people under oath when they do these vettings, probably not, but he told somebody in a setting where it mattered and where he wasn't being watched.

You know, this wasn't for publicity or anything like that.

It was behind closed doors.

He said that Epstein belonged to intelligence, which could mean a lot of things.

You know, a lot of people want to hear that he worked for the CIA or the Mossad or something like that.

But

there's a lot of...

There's a lot of wiggle room there when you say, I think Naftali Bennett, the former Israeli prime minister, just came out recently and said, I can say categorically that Jeffrey Epstein did not work for the Mossad.

It's like, yeah, okay, so he wasn't an employee of the Mossad.

Was he an asset of Israeli military intelligence, which is something different.

Now, you know, Bennett's not lying, but kind of not telling the whole truth either.

And so you got to be careful with the wiggle room in the words that people use.

But when you have that,

and when you,

I mean, to me, I don't know.

This is this.

Maybe I'm missing something here.

I'm not a journalist or anything, but I would think that when you have a story like the Jeffrey Epstein story, that every time any little piece of information has dropped about the Epstein story ever since he was arrested, it doesn't matter what it is, any little drib and drab, it goes viral.

It is the number one story that night.

It is the highest ratings of any show or anything, whoever talks about it, whatever it is.

Everybody wants more information on this story.

It's just too good to be true from like a network or newspaper perspective, right?

You're talking about like billionaire Playboy who has connections just around world governments and the U.S.

government,

including just wealthy, famous people, business owners, people that everybody has heard of and sees on TV all the time,

that that guy was running a mass pedophile ring.

And

the labor secretary under Donald Trump, who was the guy in charge of prosecuting him in 2007, said that he belonged to intelligence, I would think.

That every newspaper in the country and every cable news channel in the country would have a team of reporters camped out on that dude's lawn to stick a microphone in his face every time he left his house and say what did you mean by that can we get some kind of clarity on whether this pedophile was you know belonging to and but we don't get that and when you don't get things like that you get a lot of room for speculation and uh you know it's kind of justified speculation i mean what what is that and instead you get a lot of emphasis on the sex part yeah which deserves attention of course these are sex crimes apparently in some cases against minors horrible not acceptable

But the other parts are completely ignored.

Like, what was this guy doing?

This Cooper Union non-graduate who went to a pair of skirts and then he's with an arms dealer flying private to meeting at the Pentagon.

Like, take three steps back.

What is that?

Hired by a guy at that first job who had connections to intelligence through the OSS,

whose son was a CIA-connected guy.

I mean, so all of these, you know, the reason I threw out all of these kind of intelligence connections that aren't, you know,

this is all circumstantial stuff that doesn't attach necessarily.

The fact that Donald Barr worked for the OSS back during the war or that Donald or that his son Bill Barr worked for the CIA, that doesn't by itself mean anything about Epstein.

I think his son Bill Barr spent like, what, six years?

I think six, yeah.

So he wasn't just an intern, and by the way, he stayed, was an employee.

But it's not just circumstantial because you have, apparently, the former labor secretary saying, former years attorney, federal prosecutor saying he belonged to intelligence.

So I, anyway, I'm not trying to justify my interest in this.

I don't think it needs justifying, but I think

the people who haven't covered the story and the material parts of it, the stuff that actually really matters, they need to justify their lack of interest in it.

Like, what is that, New York Times?

Yeah, it's natural to start asking questions when

a question that would occur to anybody, somebody who just heard a five-minute synopsis of the story, and they're from Mars and they have never heard any of it it before.

You tell them the short little story, a five-minute version of it that I just told you, and the first thing they're going to ask is, well, what did he mean when he said that Epstein belonged to intelligence?

What's going on there?

And you can't get a journalist to ask that question.

Right.

And so it's natural for us to start wondering why that is.

Well, because the question that all this bears on, the purpose of this interview, the purpose of all questions that I've ever raised about Epstein, go back to one central question, which is who runs the world?

Who's making the decisions?

And on whose behalf?

This idea that, you know, there are all these 100 and whatever nation states each acting in its own, that's not true.

And so what is true?

This may point us in that direction.

Yeah.

You know, one of the things that we go back to the 1980s, I mean, it's just such a fascinating time because in the Iran-Contra deal, Mike Benz likes to point this out, and he's great on all of the Epstein stuff in the 80s and just the...

A lot of the intelligence shenanigans in general going on back then, is that, you know, it really provides a window into the question you're asking right now who runs the world like who's actually in charge of everything that's going on how do how is power structured and how does it operate really you know in the world and um

if you go back to uh those the church and pike committee hearings and then you roll into the carter administration where he brings admiral stansfield turner in to run the cia and basically gives him a directive to pare down the agency's operational commitments and the things that it does in the field, start focusing more more on

what Truman thought he was getting himself into, which was a batch of analysts to help keep the president informed as he made decisions.

And by all accounts, as far as I know, Admiral Turner tried to do that job with some enthusiasm.

You get to the point where by the 1980s,

the CIA's ability to operate is

under a lot of scrutiny and limited in ways that it never had been before.

I mean, you go back to the 50s, 60s, 60s, and 70s, and I mean, they were just cowboys.

Yeah, they're dosing elephants with LSD.

Right, exactly.

Whatever you want.

They're visiting, you know, Jack Ruby in prison and turning him crazy.

Right.

And so, and so it's right at that time when their activities are being curtailed and under a lot of scrutiny that you start to see the emergence of the system that we have now that

pops up again and again whenever we end up in a place like Ukraine or just anywhere where you have institutions like the National Endowment for Democracy or USAID, a lot of these other organizations that, you know,

they're not the CIA.

This is, I mean, you have like one of the former heads of the National Endowment for Democracy on the record in an interview, almost bragging in his tone, saying, we do all the jobs that the CIA used to do.

Of course.

And so it was outsourced.

You know, the CIA is understood.

In coordination with CIA and other organizations.

100%.

100%.

And so

that's when you get guys like Epstein who are, you know, they're not

economists that are, or finance guys that are hired by the agency and given an office and a CIA, you know, GS rank or something.

They're freelancers.

They're mercenaries.

They work for the CIA today.

They might work for MI6 tomorrow.

They might work for the Mossad or Israeli Defense Intelligence the next day.

And so that's one of the things.

A lot of people want to hear that he was an agent of this organization and like sort of have it nice and patent tight like that.

And it may be that he did more work for one than the other.

He had more loyalty to one than the other, things like that.

When you look at his various connections that we'll get into, maybe there's conclusions to draw there.

But he was one of these guys who was kind of a freelance fixer that would be used by the intelligence communities of...

countries that, you know,

I assume he wouldn't go run off and do it for Russian intelligence back in the 1980s.

But as you said, you know, the idea that there's a hundred-something independent nation states all acting in their own interest,

that's a fiction today.

It was a fiction yesterday.

It was a fiction in the 1980s, you know.

So to say, where exactly is the line, and it shifts from decade to decade depending on what's going on, but where exactly is the line between the CIA and MI6?

They're different.

They compete with each other in various ways and so forth.

But I mean,

to say that they're two just totally separate independent agencies that are acting alone, and I mean, that's obviously just not, that's just not true.

And so Epstein was an asset of this network of intelligence agencies

that would do these things together.

And, you know, the Iran,

he was deeply involved with the money side of the Iran-Contra scandal.

One of the people that Douglas Lees introduced him to, besides Robert Maxwell, was Adnan Khashoggi, who the last name probably sounds familiar to people from the news recently.

He was the Washington Post columnist or editorialist who was chopped up into little pieces in the Turkish embassy by

the Saudi embassy in Istanbul

by

the Saudis who had taken him.

And

Adnan Khashoggi was his uncle, and he was kind of the, you know, he's the real Khashoggi.

There are only like four families that control the world.

So far, we have the bushes, the bars, the Khashoggis.

It's like everything, but everybody's reoccurring in this.

Well, even the Khashoggis are kind of an example of what I'm talking about here, where

it's useful.

We'd be talking about somebody other than Adnan Khashoggi if his name was

Adnan al-Saud.

The fact that he's not a part of the royal family, he's a cutout.

These people are cutouts because that's what you need.

You need when it gets to a point where

they get a little bit too loose, too public, they start doing things that are drawing too much attention that you can cut them loose without it being your cousin or brother that's going to cause like real internal strife.

And that's what happened.

Adnan Khashoggi eventually went to jail.

So Adan Khashoggi was like the...

the comic book version of like your

Arab billionaire, just sort of very decadent, everything gold, crazy giant yacht that was later bought by Donald Trump, actually.

But Anan Khashoggi was, and again, this is mainstream news.

You don't have to.

He had a harem.

The whole thing.

Like, whatever you think that somebody like that would be like,

that's what he was like.

Although, apparently, a very devout Muslim, which seems like a contradiction, but I don't pretend to.

Also, in the words of people I know who knew him, good guy.

Isn't that funny?

Good guy.

So you walk into my garage, my actual garage, one of the first things you see is a Liberty safe.

We trust it.

All my family's guns are in there, the guns I inherited, the guns I actually hunt with.

I put the things I really care about in a Liberty safe.

They've got a new pricing program on its Centurion line.

It makes it easier than ever to afford real protection, which is made in the United States.

These safes are actually made here in Payson, Utah.

Skilled American workers make them, and they are clearly a quality product.

They're not that expensive.

Prices start below 600 bucks.

The Centurion Line is the perfect product for first-time buyers.

It's ideal for protecting your firearms, important family documents, anything you want to keep safe.

My guns are right there right now.

Every American deserves access to high-quality, secure storage without spending money overseas.

That's why Liberty is the best.

LibertySafe.com.

The whole Centurion line is there to keep you.

Discover Ralph's Club, New York, the new fragrance by Ralph Lauren.

With black currant, vanilla, and sandalwood, this scent embodies the sensuality and confidence of Usher.

Like the city that never sleeps, this masculine fragrance lasts for 12 hours.

Ralph's Club New York, Ralph Lauren.

Shop now at Macy's.com.

For Family Protected, you'll be glad you did.

We are.

But he was one of these fixers.

He was, in fact, probably in the 1980s for a long time, probably the most prominent fixer when it came to weapons brokering, things like that.

You got to remember, in the 1980s, this really kicked into super high gear in the 90s, but it's already going on in the 80s as the Soviet Union was starting to fall apart.

I mean, they had a first world empire's military arsenal that was just going on sale.

by every colonel who had control of an armory or something, you know, putting this stuff on the market because everybody can look around and realize that the ship's sinking and they want to go pull the nice brass doorknobs and

sink fixtures off so they can escape.

And that was happening even in the 1980s.

And that's why you look around the world back then, and everywhere you look, you've got civil wars, you've got militias kicking off revolutions, and they've all got AKs, they've got all the Russian-made gear because it's all being sold off by whoever can get their hands on it in the Soviet Union.

And we're talking billions, tens, hundreds of billions of dollars of weapons that are hitting the world black market, right?

And

Anon Khashoggi, at this really critical time

in the history of, I guess, the post-war order, but also just the history of the intelligence communities in the West and other places.

He's kind of one of the main guys who is,

just like Douglas Leese, he doesn't own a weapons manufacturing company.

He's the guy who makes the deals happen.

He's a fixer.

He's a guy who goes

between different parties who maybe don't speak the same language or whatever, and he makes sure the right people get paid.

He knows who has to get paid, all these things.

And so, for example, you go back in the 1980s when he was working on the books for companies like Lockheed Martin.

And I'll get the exact number wrong right now,

but it's like this.

I mean, there was like one year they pay him $180 million.

And this is like the 1980s.

So it's probably half a billion dollars today.

Another year, $210 million they pay him in one year.

And he's not.

manufacturing anything.

Correct.

And he's not actually buying anything.

He's merely the middleman.

He is the middleman and the deal maker.

That's a lot.

That's a big vig, I think.

Yeah, and so a lot of that money obviously is not being kept by him.

It's being paid out to the people that

you need in order to make all this happen.

But a huge amount of it's going to him, you know.

And so if you are a guy who,

oh, you know,

let me get to this part.

So after Jeffrey Epstein leaves Bear Stearns,

And around the same time that he ends up on that private plane with Douglas Leese on his way to the Pentagon, he starts his own company.

And as far as anybody's ever been able to find out, as far as I've ever been able to find, and I have looked,

he had one client, and that client was Adan Khashoggi.

And so, you know, that's just another connection where you have...

In the world.

So I was alive and reading the newspaper then.

Adan Khashoggi was one of the most famous people in the world.

I mean, he was in.

you know, the New York Times and the National Inquirer and the New York Post.

Like, everyone knew who he was.

How does this guy with two failed jobs and two years at Cooper Union end up starting a company where his only client is Adnan Khashoggi?

No, I'm serious.

Well, I think probably the answer is that the company was set up so that he could do a job for a while.

Of course, right?

So a more direct way to put it was how does he get connected with Adnan Khashoggi?

Through Douglas Leese.

How does he get connected to Douglas Leese?

Well, I assume through his wealthy clientele when he was laundering money at Bear Stearns.

You know, that's how he met, again, a lot of the people that would later become become important to him.

And so

you got to admire his pluck.

He was a hustler, man.

You know, that's definitely true.

It's sort of a,

I think when people get up to that level of power

or just, you know, when they reach those heights, even if it's a lot of times if it's athletes, but if it's political figures or anything like that, you know, there's often

an obsessive impulse that drives them to be very successful, but often disorders the personality in ways that behaviorally.

It was disordered, according to people who know.

But it's just interesting.

It's amazing how many people he intersected with in his life.

I remember when

Anthony Blinken became Secretary of State, and

I've been following the Epstein story and just

all the connections with it for a long time by then.

And so I knew that Anthony Blinken's stepfather was Robert Maxwell's closest confidant, his lawyer, and the last person to speak to him before he died.

Before he was murdered.

Yeah, probably, yeah.

And we'll get to that too.

But it's like

I've learned over the years not to place too many demands on our ruling class.

You know, I don't want to get all crazy.

I'm not going to tell you guys to stop taking bribes.

I'm not going to ask.

That's all fine.

Just keep the bribes.

Whatever.

Can we have...

One major public official that is not a single degree separated from Jeffrey Epstein.

Is that possible?

Because apparently it's not possible.

You got Donald Trump talking about the issue the other day on camera and the guy standing next to him is Howard Luttnick who was Epstein's neighbor for years, you know.

In New York, I'm for that.

It's like, we just can we just get like one important person who's not one degree or less separated from the most prolific mass pedophile in U.S.

history.

Is that possible?

You know, because apparently it's not.

You may be answering the question, why is the press not as interested in the story as they would under other circumstances be?

I have a feeling if you were accused of being a mass pedophile,

there would be more media interest in it.

They would love that.

Yeah, when you're somebody like me or probably somebody like you, it's good that we don't drink and we lead pretty boring lives.

So that's okay.

So Douglas Leese, he winds up on this plane.

Then he starts to a meeting at the Pentagon, presumably about arms sales.

We're not exactly sure how he got into the company of Douglas Leese, but we assume it's because he was set up by one of his clients at Bear Stearns, from which he was fired

in a job that he was apparently set up by Donald Barr to get.

Okay.

Then he sets up this company to work with or for Adant Khashoggi.

What happens next?

Well, so there's not a lot, there's not a whole lot of detail on Epstein specifically during this period, but there is a lot of detail on guys like Adnan Khashoggi.

And so you can kind of read between the lines as he progresses through.

Adnan Khashoggi was the chief guy, really, that we used in the Middle East to broker and fix the Iran side of the Iran-Contra deal.

And so, you know, people have heard the term.

Maybe younger people aren't that familiar with what Iran-Contra was.

I mean,

I mean, I know probably a lot of people watching this are fans of Reagan and the Reagan administration and all that, and that's fine.

But I mean, the Iran-Contra deal was like...

If it wasn't high treason, especially on the Iran side, I mean, it was an inch away from it.

You know, I mean, this is a declared enemy of the United States.

We have a law,

you know, a past embargo forbidding the United States government or any company that is in the United States from selling weapons to the Iranians.

And that's what we were doing.

And so, like, the brief summary of the Iran-Contra scandal was

We had two things that our intelligence agencies wanted to do, or our security establishment, let's say, wanted to do, but that they were not allowed to do.

One was the Iran-Iraq war is going on, and our interest in that war, at the time, at least, was just to keep it going as long as possible.

Something really evil, I think, about funding and providing support to both sides of a war for the express purpose of just making it go on longer.

But from a cold-hearted strategic perspective, you can understand, you know, what people were thinking at least.

But that's what we want to do.

Saddam Hussein at the time was, you know,

was...

having success on the battlefield.

We wanted to make sure that the Iranians stuck around a little bit longer and Saddam didn't get too powerful because that's what we were worried about at the time, Saddam getting too powerful.

And so the other thing we wanted to do is we wanted to provide support for the Nicaraguan Contras who were fighting the Sandinista government down there.

In the early 1980s,

an amendment to a budget was passed in the House called the Boland Amendment.

It was passed 477 to 0.

which, you know, if you're a president, we've learned you can kind of defy Congress to a degree.

If they voted 477 to 0, you're probably playing with a little bit of fire if you want to, if you want to do that.

And so, but we really, really, really wanted to support the Contras against the communist government in Nicaragua.

And the Bolin amendment, what it said was you can't use any of the money in this budget, any U.S.

government funds, that cannot go to the Contras in any way, shape, or form.

It can't go to them

as weapons.

It can't go to them as...

cookies.

You can't, it just cannot go to them.

And so you got these two things that the security establishment really wants to do that they're forbidden by law law from doing.

And they bring both of those things together and figure out how to make one hand kind of wash the other.

The idea was we're going to sell weapons to Iran, which we're not allowed to do, but we are allowed to sell weapons to Israel.

And Israel has a lot of the same weapons systems that we want to send to Iran.

So we're going to sell them to Israel.

Israel, working through guys like Adnan Khashoggi, are going to get those, get their weapons to Iran, get these weapons to Iran.

And we're not selling anything to Iran.

We're selling to Israel.

Iran's going to

pay a premium for these weapons, and that premium is off the books, and that is going to be used to support the Contras.

And so that was basically the scheme.

Now, you have, when you're doing something like that, I mean, all you have to do is look at any big mafia court case or something, you know, watch a mob movie where they go to court.

It's always the money.

Like the money is how you get caught doing stuff like this.

People think of money laundering as like this boring sideshow when it comes to organized crime or their cousins in the intelligence community.

It's not a sideshow.

It's right at the center of the thing.

The whole operation relies on money laundering because you have to be able to hide that.

It's the easiest way to trace out your networks and what they're doing and who's a part of them.

You can figure out everything from it.

Who's the most significant player in this network?

All these things just by looking at their money.

And so you have to have guys.

like Jeffrey Epstein, who spent four years at Bear Stearns and a few years since then, like by the time he starts doing work for Khashoggi,

figuring out how to move money offshore, move it around through different countries over time, changing jurisdictions.

Because you've got to remember, too, this was back before the internet or anything like that.

It was not exactly an easy process to just hop on your computer and look at where these transactions are being passed through the global financial system.

You know, it's a different world today for that reason, but it was tougher back then.

You had to send investigators probably to that country to go to that bank and look at their records kind of thing, you know?

And so, but still, you needed, you needed a guy like Epstein who was skilled at moving money around in ways and hiding it in ways that

it at least would be

hard to trace.

Like they would pass at a first glance, you know.

You get like a really skilled forensic accounting team at the Department of Justice who really dedicates themselves to it, they can figure it out, but it needs to just pass at a glance so that some congressman's not taking a look at it, you know?

You hear that clicking in the background?

That's the sound of seriousness.

That is the sound of the new Alp machined steel travel tin.

And it's made right here in Montana by our friends at Machinin USA.

It's milled from solid metal with the world's absolute best tactile feedback retention mechanism.

It's totally real.

It feels like closing the door on a well-built truck.

It comes in cream, gray, green, and black.

You could drive over this in your truck and it would be totally fine.

Drop in your bag, throw in the concrete, doesn't matter.

It'll still be there.

This holds your Alp and it's awesome.

I vouch for it.

Personally, it's in my pocket at all times.

Hey there, travelers.

Kaylee Cuoco here.

Sorry to interrupt your music, great artist BT Dubs, but wouldn't you rather be there to hear it live?

With Priceline, you can get out of your dreams and into your dream concert.

They've got millions of travel deals to get you to that festival, gig, rave, sound bath, or sonic experience you've been dreaming of.

Download the Priceline app today and you can save up to 60% off hotels and up to 50% off flights.

So don't just dream about that trip.

Book it with Priceline.

You can get yours at outpouch.com.

And so

Epstein is one of the guys,

presumably one of multiple guys who was working the financial side.

I'm not sure 100% about that, but I presume they weren't only relying on this one guy for

these things that were going on, who was handling the money and making sure that.

In Iran-Contra.

Well, he was working for Anand Khashoggi doing that when Anand Khashoggi was involved with an Iran-Contra.

I don't have any document or anything that says Jeffrey Epstein specifically was working with

the intelligence agency on Iran contra, anything like that.

We know he was doing work for Khashoggi that involved this kind of thing because that's what the company did.

And he's an American.

Yes.

Right.

um

who at least for Donald Barr anyway he has some intel he's rubbed up against people who are

familiar with the Intel world so well when you also real quick like if you're working for people and with people like Douglas Leese Aden Khashoggi Robert Maxwell you're rubbing against the intel right in the middle of it yeah and so and that was the thing they're working on it just blows my mind that there's a connection between Jeffrey Epstein and Iran Contra that just really yeah

I guess I shouldn't be surprised I mean Iran Contra is it is like sort of the patient zero for understanding the power structure in the modern world in a lot of ways.

It really, really is.

It's so fascinating.

I remember it well.

I mean,

very well and

knew people who were involved in it very well.

And

I just, I thought it was all fake.

It was years.

It was years before I realized that that was a meaningful thing.

And I think many conservatives and Republicans, I'm still a conservative Republican.

However, I try to be more honest and thoughtful than I once was.

And like, that is a big, that's a big thing that they did.

And

no one was ever really punished for it.

And the people that were kind of celebrities now, you know, doing some.

Some of whom I really like.

I mean, I just want to say for the record.

I think a lot of those people were patriots, man, but you get caught up, especially during the Cold War.

You know, I tell people sometimes that.

Look, I don't like a lot of the stuff that went on in the Cold War.

There are a lot of things that the U.S.

did that I wish weren't in our history books and,

that historians 500 years from now weren't going to have to read about us in their history books.

But for the people at the time, I mean...

Oh, I knew them.

I knew them.

Yeah.

No, I agree.

And

there are a couple, but Ollie North is the famous one.

And, you know, what a nice man.

What a good man.

So I just want to say that.

But he's not the Ollie North is not the one who designed the scheme.

He was a colonel at the time.

Exactly.

In the Marine Corps, and he was doing what he was asked to do.

Whatever, not to get so far afield.

But that's just amazing that Epstein was involved in that.

So, what does he do after that?

Well, let me actually just, so let's pause here for a minute because this whole period still, there's

a lot to unpack here.

So, Robert Maxwell was also one of the main money conduits for Iran-Contra as well.

Let's talk about Robert Maxwell.

Fascinating guy.

Really a fascinating guy.

Another guy like Epstein that you look at him and you're like, man, he's kind of an amoral

beast in a lot of ways.

But at the same time, he's a force of nature.

And a figure out of history, who figured in history.

So he was born in Czechoslovakia, and he was, I want to say he was 18 or 19 years old.

He was very, very young when the Germans invaded.

And he managed to escape.

He wasn't called Robert Maxwell at the time.

He changed his name eight or nine times over the course of the years, but he managed to escape to France.

in May 1940, which, if you know the story of World War II, is not the best time to escape to France.

And so he hooks up with what's left of the Czechoslovak resistance there in France and follows the British retreat and manages somehow to talk his way onto a boat and gets over to Britain and gets hooked up with

the Czech government in exile there in London, becomes disenchanted with the government in exile pretty quickly and

starts, well, yeah, so we'll get to that next part in a minute, actually.

So then

he's working at first for the Czech government in exile, gets a little disenchanted with them, and so joins the British Army.

And he's part of the Normandy invasion, and he fought.

He was in heavy combat all the way to Berlin.

You know, he won the second highest medal that the British Army gives out, not just to foreign volunteers, but to anybody.

So it's the Distinguished Service Cross or the Navy Cross here in the U.S.

And, you know, you don't.

You don't get those just for, right, yeah.

You don't get those just for, you know, showing up on time every day.

Like he got it for storming a machine gun nest and saving a bunch of people's lives, you know.

So physically courageous guy, obviously very resourceful, ballsy guy, you know, to make it across Europe at such a young age and do all these things.

After the war is over and we occupy Germany, he goes to work for British intelligence, first as a translator.

I don't know how many languages he spoke back then, but later on he allegedly was fluent in nine.

Maybe that's an exaggeration, but if he was fluent in five and functional in four, that's pretty damn impressive, you know?

And so he was a guy who

he had connections behind the Iron Curtain that was emerging.

He's from that side of the line.

He was a soldier who had fought valiantly for the British.

And so now he's working for British intelligence and he's actually pretty valuable to him.

And he gets involved in, you know.

some dirty work.

I mean, he was involved in interrogating captured SS soldiers, for example, which I imagine those were not always pleasant experiences.

Actually, later on in life, this didn't come out till quite a bit later when he was an older guy, like soon before his death, he was actually fingered in an investigation for murdering a bunch of German, unarmed German civilians while he was there.

It never went to the point of, you know, having to be proven in court or anything.

So it was just something that was out there.

But he was named in the investigation.

And so he's working for British intelligence for a while there in Berlin.

Which is a pretty hot assignment, obviously, especially as the Iron Curtain is starting to come down.

And when the war ends, he goes back to Britain.

He's changed his name to Robert Maxwell by this point, gets British citizenship.

And one of the first things we have him doing in the late 1940s after the war when he gets back to Britain is you have this guy who, again, is from the other side of the line.

He's got connections with people across Europe.

He's involved with British intelligence.

And he hooks up with some, like the British Zionist movement, and in contravention of British law at the time,

is helping to smuggle weapons, specifically aircraft parts, were kind of his main bag through Czechoslovakia down to the the Zionist movement in Israel to fight the Arabs.

And

again, this is still, I think he's probably 25 or something like that at this point, maybe 27, 28, young guy.

And not just the Arabs, the British also.

Well, right.

You're fighting the British, and he's now a British citizen.

There is that, yeah.

You know, that whole thing is a little bit of a tangent, but I mean, all that stuff is so interesting because when you think about something like that, right?

Like if you have a situation like the Zionists in Palestine in the late 1940s who were facing down the possibility of war with several countries around them.

And you're just a movement that kind of just drove the British out of the country.

Now you got to figure out how to hold on to it.

And the British, who are the main people who have any foreign presence, you know, European foreign presence in the region have a weapons embargo against you.

You need to get weapons and supplies.

How are you going to do it?

Well, you need guys like Robert Maxwell, you know, because not everybody knows how to do it.

If they called me on the phone and said, hey, Daryl, we need to get, you know, we need you to get us 800 RPGs at this port and blah, blah, blah.

I'd be like, uh okay so call robert maxwell don't look at me you know and um because just you know who knows and uh but he knew and that was something he was able to do um

lyndon johnson did that actually there was a there was a really interesting um several articles written about it but one in the times of israel where they uh they this is a laudatory article you know they're they're writing it in a way that um is very grateful to Lyndon Johnson, but this is back when he was still in the U.S.

Congress back in the 30s and 40s.

He was working with a Zionist friend of his there in Texas to illegally, in contravention of American law, as a U.S.

Congressman, to ship weapons and other supplies to the Zionists in Palestine

in Kratesmark, Texas grapefruit.

And the main guy who did the research on this is a Jewish scholar named Louis Gomalek.

And you can't find the paper online.

It's only in the reading room at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.

And fortunately, before I came on your show last time, I visited the place and went and it

and you know they might have somebody tackle me at the door if I tried to go there and do it now but

but I read it it's fascinating because he really lays out in detail that you really can't deny that Lyndon Johnson was was involved with this and so then you and there's some evidence that Jack Ruby too was involved in that also which I think well it's so that that's where I was going to go next is you then you ask well

Lyndon Johnson doesn't know how to smuggle the weapons to Palestine.

Who knows how to do that kind of thing?

Organized crime knows how to do that kind of thing.

And so, you know, when you get into any of these kind of things, this is why I say, you know, the intelligence community and their cousins in the organized crime world, they've always been directly next to each other.

They intersected with the current system.

Of course, there has to be.

And

so Maxwell does this.

And

as that, you know, as Israel's founded and he kind of starts to just move on as a British citizen, starts to make his way in the world.

He starts out,

he creates a small publishing company that specializes basically, he basically had a monopoly in getting scientific papers from behind the Iron Curtain and translating and editing the journals that they would have and the papers they would have and distributing them in the West.

And so he starts making a lot of money doing that.

He starts expanding out into what became the Maxwell Empire, where he owned the New York Daily News, the Daily Mirror.

I mean,

he was the Rupert Murdoch at the time, right?

Just the tabloid king, and he became a billionaire back when billion really, really meant something.

He actually became a member of parliament in the 1960s.

And so it was there in the 1960s.

So just 20 years after he got there.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's extraordinary.

Amazing, honestly.

And it was there in the 1960s that

the

Mossad representative in

Great Britain, like the assigned guy at the time, was Yitzhak Shamir, who

later became the prime minister of Israel in the 1980s, but started his career as the leader of the Stern Gang, a very infamous terrorist group that killed a lot of people back in the 1940s,

carried out the King David Hotel bombing along with the Irgun.

I mean, killed 91 people, including 15 Jews, which, you know, if I was Yitzhak, I'd probably be pretty upset about that part at least, but killed many people, killed Lord Moin, a British diplomat in

Egypt in 1946, sent mail bombs to several British government officials in Whitehall in London there.

And actually, we have two accounts on this that may be drawing from the same source.

And so I don't want to say it with the same level of certainty, but sent mail bombs to Harry Truman's White House addressed to him.

And we got that from a book that was written by

a guy, a fellow who ran the White House mailroom over the course of like six presidents.

And he wrote a memoir about just all the different things that he had seen and everything.

And one of the things he mentioned is these mail bombs coming from the Zionists in Palestine addressed to Harry Truman.

That story was repeated in Harry Truman's daughter's memoir.

I don't know if that's coming from, if that's independent or if she's just getting that from the other guy's book.

So I don't know, but that's two sources that say that.

So that's what Yitzhak Shamir was up to.

And he goes to Robert Maxwell and he talks to him about his obligations as a Jewish billionaire and

an important guy with intelligence community connections in foreign countries.

the obligations that he has to the Jewish state of Israel.

And,

you know, that can be a very, look, it can be, that can be very, very compelling to, especially to people who are, who are kind of mercenary types like Maxwell and kind of always had been, have been from a very young age, you know, feeling like they're living in a foreign country because they are.

And then, you know, you start to get this appeal of like obligation to something really meaningful.

You see this a lot.

And, for example, when I work for the Department of Defense,

obviously everybody who's watching this knows that I have a little bit of a troll in me, but usually my trolling has a purpose.

And in this case, it did.

We were doing a stand down, like a big training thing in an auditorium on what to look for regarding insider threats, right?

So this is like DOD employees who might possibly be looking to spy or pull classified information out for nefarious purposes or something.

And they're going through as part of the training all of these actual cases that happened over the years.

And out of the nine or ten that they showed us, you know, there's one or two where the guy just had a gambling addiction and he needed money and he just didn't care and he was going to do it.

But literally, like the other eight or nine, 90% of all the ones they showed us were

Chinese guys, Chinese Americans spying for China, Russian Americans spying for Russia,

Jewish Americans spying for Israel.

And all of them pretty much, this was just a pattern and nobody was talking about it.

The trainers weren't talking about it.

They were just pretending like it didn't exist.

And so leave it to me.

I raised my hand at the end when they took questions.

And I brought that fact up.

I was like, what are we supposed to exactly do with that information?

And to the guy's credit, he was honest.

He didn't try to blow smoke up me or anything.

He just said,

you're not to look at that at all.

Like, that's not something we consider.

And I said, okay.

Everybody kind of, you know, looked around like, all right, that's just how it is.

But, you know, the reason that that pattern existed in the first place is that just, it can be very powerful.

Not everybody's going to respond to it.

Most people of any ethnicity are loyal to the country they live in.

But you can find people with buttons to push, you know, and And Robert Maxwell was one of those people.

And so Yitzhak Shamir recruited him, and he became from that point on a very committed Zionist and asset to Israeli intelligence.

Now,

again with Maxwell, just like when we talk about a lot of these other people, when I say he was an asset of Israeli intelligence, that doesn't mean he was on the payroll of Mossad.

You know, he didn't have a rank in the Israeli intelligence

community or something.

He was a freelancer.

He was a guy who was almost,

and he looked at himself this way.

He was almost like a sovereign himself.

You know, he was

not really like kind of a member of any country exactly.

He was like this free-floating sovereign entity that would work between the nation states in the world.

And that's very often what he did.

So, for example,

and this actually

is an actual example.

The Israeli government wanted to meet with the

heads of the KGB in the 1980s.

You can't exactly, I mean, without raising a ruckus or having it be a thing, you can't put the head of the Mossad on a plane and send him to Moscow to go meet with the head of the KGB.

And so they would talk to Robert Maxwell.

Robert Maxwell would go talk to them, and he'd be, you know, the kind of go-between and the deal maker and fixer.

Very common.

Right.

And, you know, I imagine you probably need those people if you're going to do these kinds of things.

And so

that's the kind of thing that he would do.

You know, he

sometimes, you know, so there are,

I would say, allegations that are pretty well substantiated at this point that

one of the things he would do was act as essentially like a slush fund for Israeli intelligence black ops.

And the way that it would work is,

you know, he would reach into his company's pension funds, for example.

pull some money out that they could then go use to pull off an operation.

And then, you know, six months here, a year there down the line, they figure out ways to get the money back to him and they kind of replenish it.

A former Israeli intelligence officer named Ari Ben Menashe, he's a very controversial but interesting figure.

We'll talk about him more in a little bit because he comes a lot into the Epstein story too.

He and Viktor Ostrovsky was another Mossad,

former Mossad official who wrote a book about his experiences after he got kind of jammed up by them and blamed for some things.

They both say that Maxwell, what happened, you talk about him being murdered, is that, you know, once you start reaching into your company's pension fund to help out Israeli intelligence, like, well, I can do it for this personal reason too.

You know, I'll pay it back.

I'll always pay it back, of course.

And he starts doing that, and he gets himself into a lot of trouble.

And by the end of his life,

he was going to be, I mean, his empire was going to be brought down.

He was going to be bankrupt and probably going to prison.

I mean, he had robbed his company's pension fund blind for years at this point.

And it was all getting to the point where it was just no longer solvent.

It couldn't be hidden anymore.

And what Ben Menashe says is that he went to his friends in the Mossad and he told them, Look, I've done all this for you over the years.

I have done so much for you.

You are going to get me out of this somehow.

One way or another, whether you give me the money, whether you deal with the issue in Britain, you're going to get me out of this.

And he got a little too aggressive about it, Ben Menashe says.

And, you know, shortly after that, they found him floating off of his yacht near the Canary Islands.

And there was a satellite photo.

I don't know if it was ever introduced in court, but I believe this is true: a a satellite photo taken

that showed a boat with,

you know,

the belief is that the boat was boarded by

some group that threw him off.

He had injuries.

Three different doctors couldn't agree on the cause of death.

He was not a drowning.

And he had injuries consistent to his shoulder, consistent with his struggle.

He was a big guy.

He would have fought.

Yeah.

But see, there's actually, so another thing happened right before that, too, is

for years people had speculated and um and and presented you know little evidence here and there that he was associated with israeli intelligence but in uh just right before he died i think it was in 88 um

right before he died uh seymour hirsh went on the record with three i think four independent uh sources that all fingered maxwell and his number one in his media empire as agents of Israeli intelligence, as active agents of Israeli intelligence.

And two weeks later is when he was found dead.

And then it was after that that a lot of the financial stuff, the problems that he had kind of came out.

And there was a five-year lawsuit,

five-year case against his two sons.

Yeah, and they actually brought a lawsuit against Seymour Hears for defamation and lost.

And not only did they lose, they had to pay all of Hears's legal fees and pay him out for suing him.

So,

you know,

the idea of Robert Maxwell being an Israeli intelligence agent is...

as well substantiated as anything gets in that world, right?

Right.

Yeah, I think he received a state funeral in Israel.

He certainly buried there.

Well, that's no, actually, this is the fun part, too.

So you have this British citizen who has no connection to Israeli intelligence at all, no nothing.

He just is a British guy who's never lived in Israel.

He gets a state funeral that's attended by every living Israeli prime minister, intelligence agency head, and the president.

The president and the prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, actually,

gave his eulogies.

And Yitzhak Shamir said that this man has done more for the state of Israel than can now be told.

And he was given a burial plot on the Mount of Olives facing the Western Western Wall, which is reserved for

it's the highest honor, you know, that you can bestow when it comes to that kind of thing.

And so clearly, this was a guy who was very important to a lot of people over there.

And it was because he was a very important intelligence person.

What was his, yeah, I don't think that's kind of, it's funny as time goes by, people start claiming that certain substantiated facts are

not facts and no one kind of remembers that, no, actually, that's been proven.

Anyway, what was his connection to Jeffrey Epstein?

How does Jeffrey Epstein wind up in an orbit of a guy like that?

Douglas Leese introduced him.

And so, and

according to multiple sources from Israeli and U.S.

intelligence circles that have gone on the record to

journalists like Vicki Ward, both of them were involved in the weapons deals and things that we're talking about in the 1980s.

You know, Maxwell would be the guy who, like, his pension fund would be used as a slush fund, for example, the conduit to to move money through epstein would be a guy who made sure that it moved around in ways that couldn't easily be traced and so they work together with uh with intelligence on on these operations and so uh robert is the one who introduced him to his daughter that's uh you know Not something a father really wants to do.

Introduce your daughter to a guy like Jeffrey Epstein, but maybe she had problems of her own.

I don't know.

He introduces her.

And so just add that to, add another zero to the odds of all of these connections kind of piling up, right?

Known 100% locked-in Israeli intelligence agent for decades, Robert Maxwell.

His daughter just happens to be, you know, Jeffrey Epstein's partner in crime.

And, you know, have you seen that famous picture of Prince Andrew with Virginia Roberts?

She's a teenager.

You stand there with her.

That's in Robert Maxwell's house in England, that that picture was taken.

So,

you know, they were close, obviously, you know, and it's the funny thing.

Actually, when Vicki Ward interviewed,

when he interviewed, when she interviewed Jeffrey Epstein in 2002, we'll get to her whole interview in 2002, which is really interesting because it was in 2002.

Nobody knew who Jeffrey Epstein was.

None of these conspiracy theories were out there, anything like that.

And she's got all kinds of stuff we'll talk about here in a second.

But he said, Robert, he just total ignorance.

Yeah, Robert Maxwell,

doesn't ring a bell.

Don't know him at all.

And they were incredibly close.

She didn't really,

it wasn't the point of her story so she didn't really pursue it too much he also uh

um

was asked by her about his relationship to douglas lease and he claimed not to know douglas leese when douglas lees' own son julian he said that that his father was essentially for many years he used the word a mentor to jeffrey epstein of sorts and so um and he expressed disbelief that epstein would have claimed not to know him i mean so you know you have uh these connections that epstein denies which again if they were innocent connections, you know,

he probably wouldn't have a reason to do that.

All of these intelligence connections that with people who were,

you know, again, like you take the Donald Barr one, for example.

Okay, he worked for the OSS in World War II.

Great.

I don't know.

Maybe he, you know, maybe it's a once intelligence guy, always an intelligence guy, and he was still, but I don't know.

All I have is that he worked for the OSS.

And so maybe that's...

all in the past and has nothing to do with it.

But all these other guys, these are people who were not only active, but absolutely central to the most high-profile operations that were going on in the 1980s.

And Jeffrey Epstein is right there in the middle of all of them.

And they all seem to think that he's pretty damn important.

You know,

Robert Maxwell pimps out his daughter to him.

You know, I don't maybe want to put it too harshly, but when you give your daughter to a guy like Epstein, what do you say about it?

You know, guys like Hashogi and Douglas Leese, who is his mentor.

I mean, these are guys who were right in the middle of the most high-profile operations going on at the time.

So, how does Epstein, does he get rich from doing this stuff?

Because at the center of the story, or the enduring mystery from my perspective, there are a couple, but one is where did all the money come from?

How did he get rich?

So, one of the people that Vicki Ward interviewed in 2002, none of which made it into her story.

Vicki Ward was a Vanity Fair reporter.

At the time, she was writing for Vanity Fair.

Yeah, she wrote for Rolling Stone later.

And the whole story of the publication of her story in Vanity Fair is a lot of fun, so we'll talk about that.

One of the people that she interviewed was a guy that Jeffrey Epstein had helped send to jail, a guy named Stephen Hoffenberg, who ran a company called Towers Financial.

They was engaged in a Ponzi scheme.

They, I think, was a $450 million Ponzi scheme, robbed a lot of people of a lot of money.

Hoffenberg doesn't deny it.

He took responsibility for it at the time,

pled guilty, did his time, and he's open about all of it now, calls himself greedy and just all these things.

Well, he gets a call from Douglas Leese and says, Hey, I got a guy who can help you out, because he knew Leese.

And he puts him in touch with Jeffrey Epstein.

And Epstein, he said, is just the kind of guy that a business like a quote-unquote business, like the one I'm running, this Ponzi scheme, is looking for.

It's a guy who's very intelligent, who knows a lot about the offshore accounting and things that we need to know about.

And he has no moral compass whatsoever, Hoffenberg said.

And this is what he told Ward at the time.

And so,

some of the other things that he said is he said that

what Epstein would do, and he did this to Hoffenberg himself eventually,

is the people that they would be moving money around for, they would take some of that for themselves.

And Epstein had a scheme that he called playing the box, which I don't know where the name exactly comes from, but what it entailed is stealing money from people and making sure that you have compromising information on them so that even if they catch you doing it, they're going to be too embarrassed or too afraid to actually come out and go after you.

And so given what we know about Epstein's proclivities and his later activities, you can probably guess what some of those activities were, right?

And

this is what Hoffenberg said he would do.

He said that Jeffrey Epstein,

you know, well, so he confirms

the story of Epstein being attached to Douglas Leese, first of all, because he knew Lees and that's how they met.

And he says that Epstein used to talk quite openly about

his connections and dealings with the intelligence community, not just in the U.S., but in Israel as well.

And again, none of this made it into the story because this is 2002.

Vicki Ward's just like Douglas who?

It doesn't really, she didn't know who these people were.

And she was trying to invest.

I mean, she had on-the-record witnesses accusing Jeffrey Epstein of sexual assault, like underage girls.

That's what she was interested in.

So all this other stuff, she doesn't even know what he's talking about at the time.

But she kept all her notes and everything.

And once it kind of came out later, she brought all that out into the public.

So, yeah, the story of,

here's a fun one.

So, and Vicki Ward tells this story, but

there, I mean, there was even an NPR report, a radio report about this several years ago when the Epstein thing was coming out,

where they have people who are working at Vanity Fair.

One of the senior editors in an audio interview telling the story.

She's running down this story, and she's got three on-the-record witnesses, two sisters, but then one totally independent telling the same story about Jeffrey Epstein.

He sexually assaulted them.

And she's writing up this story.

But it started out as like a profile piece, like that's all.

And then this stuff came out through the course of her reporting.

And

she

is pursuing this story.

And all of a sudden, one day,

she gets her interview with Jeffrey Epstein.

And she asks him about the girls.

And he gets really, really upset, threatens her personally, threatens her, like says, I'm not coming after the magazine if you print this.

I'm coming after you because my relationship here is with you.

Don't do this to yourself.

Don't do this to your family.

It's not worth it.

Whoa.

And so she says, well, you know, does what a reporter is supposed to do, I suppose.

You know, you're not going to push me around like that.

And you don't know who this guy is.

And so he's just some rich guy who's trying to threaten you or something.

And so she writes up the story and it goes through legal.

And legal looks at it.

You got three on-the-record witnesses corroborating each other's stories.

Gets through legal.

And then right before it goes to press, Graydon Carter, who was running Vanity Fair at the time, he puts the kibosh on that part of the story.

He just takes it out without even telling Vicki Ward.

It has all of that stuff removed, and

it's just a profile piece about Jeffrey Epstein, this international minus the sexual assault allegation.

Correct.

And so the stories, though, where it gets really interesting, and again, this is told by not just Ward, but by a bunch of people who worked there at the time.

It was the talk of the office at the time, they said.

He comes into his office one day.

He's the first person in the office.

Graydon Carter's office within the larger complex is blocked.

But Jeffrey Epstein's already in there.

He's the first person in.

And he's waiting for him.

And he berates him and threatens him and tells him, you know, he better not print this.

And a short time later,

Graydon Carter leaves his house in New York City and he finds a bullet on his stoop.

And then a little while later at his country house upstate, he finds a severed cat's head on the porch there.

And according to the senior editor and a lot of people at Vanity Fair, Graydon Carter and everybody in the office knew exactly what this was.

These were threats from Jeffrey Epstein.

And Graydon Carter acts the story because of that.

And so, you know, you have to think like Vanity Fair, they've probably been threatened legally by people before who they're writing, you know, exposés on every month.

Yeah.

And so to intimidate somebody like that and a magazine like that into doing that with such direct and overt threats.

You know, you look at it and you're like, man, what kind of confidence and hubris did this guy have that he felt confident in?

Doing NASA, you know, the biggest magazine publisher in the country at the time, most important, published the New Yorker, like big, big deal place.

But it worked and it got axed.

And probably because of that, a lot more girls got sexually assaulted over the next several years.

You know, so how did, so by the time Vicki Ward is interviewing Epstein in 2002,

you know, Vanity Fair at the time was like basically the in-house publication for the ruling class, like, you know, the emerging ruling class anyway.

He's a rich guy.

How did he get rich?

I'm confused.

I mean, so to go back to Hoffenberg and Towers Financial, for example, Hoffenberg was running this Ponzi scheme with Epstein.

Vicki Ward has a source in the Justice Department who worked the case at the time who told her about Epstein cooperating with the government against Hoffenberg and said that if it had gone to trial for Epstein, it would have gone worse for him than it did for Hoffenberg.

Like he had more fingerprints and was more deeply involved with the scheme than even Hoffenberg was.

But what he had done was he had taken $100 million from Hoffenberg and from the company and hidden it offshore and then went to the authorities and cooperated with them to get Hoffenberg thrown in jail.

And since Hoffenberg had pled guilty, there was no discovery or anything like that.

And he just went away for 18 years and Jeffrey Epstein.

He did 18 years.

18 years, yeah.

Yeah.

Jeffrey Epstein

with 40 on-the-record witnesses accusing him of sexual assault in 2008 got 13 months.

And not even full-time detention.

Yeah.

Well,

yeah, let's talk about that.

I mean, this.

I just want to linger for a second on the money.

Yeah.

So it's been reported repeatedly that there's a guy called Leslie Les Wexner, biggest, owner of the biggest house in Ohio.

Who is Wexner and what is his relationship to Epstein?

And before you begin, because I want people to keep this in mind as they're listening, as far as I know, and I think this is correct, Wexner, who I believe is still alive, has never been interviewed by the Department of Justice.

So I just want to throw that out there.

Yeah, that's correct as far as I know.

So Les Wexner, he

owns limited brands, L-brands.

So Victoria's Secret he owns, Abercrabby and Fitch, a lot of the places that you see when you go into the mall.

I don't think it's the case anymore, but for a long time, he was the largest clothing manufacturer and distributor in the United States.

Billionaire, incredibly wealthy guy.

As you said, owns the largest and most expensive house in the state of Ohio, where he lives in Columbus.

And the second largest and most expensive house in the state of Ohio was owned by Jeffrey Epstein and was directly behind Wexner's house.

What?

Yeah.

So

Wexner, he was introduced to Wexner through this network of people and very, very quickly

becomes.

I mean, the nature of their relationship is still kind of a mystery because it's so hard to explain in any

terms that you can really draw a plausible story for.

Within a very short period of time, he known this guy, he'd known this Epstein guy like two years, right?

And

not because he had worked at his company for those two years and was so squared or anything like that.

We don't exactly know what he was doing during those two years, but he knew him two years when he signed full power of attorney over his entire estate, Les Wexner, talking billions of dollars, the largest clothing manufacturing corporation in the country,

or a company in the country,

to the point where this was not a limited power of attorney.

Jeffrey Epstein could sign

Jeffrey Epstein power of attorney over everything?

Jeffrey Epstein could take out loans in his name.

He could sign his tax returns.

He had full power of attorney over the Wexner estate.

Soon after that, Wexner's mother gets sick, and her spot on the Wexner Foundation board, which is how Wexner disposed of most of his money,

opens up.

He puts Jeffrey Epstein on there and he basically runs the board of the foundation for about 15 years, controlling a lot of where that money went and what happened.

15 years?

Yeah.

And Wexner alleged this was way later on after everything had kind of come out.

So who kind of knows?

You know,

everybody's kind of trying to distance themselves from Epstein at this point.

But he says that Epstein stole a lot of money from him through his, you know, control over the foundation and and everything.

He probably did for all I know, but

I'm shocked to learn, and I am learning this, that Jeffrey, you're positive Jeffrey Epstein had power of attorney

over

that anywhere, yeah.

For 16 years, by the way.

For 16 years.

And so.

Has Wexner ever been asked, why would you give...

I don't even think he's, forget the Department of Justice.

I don't think he's given any interviews to journalists about it.

Maybe he'll come on here and sit in my seat and talk to you.

I kind kind of doubt it.

I would be polite.

I'm genuinely fascinated by that detail because that is, you know, a man who builds, like all of these characters, you know, they're unusual people.

They're not average people.

They're extraordinary people by definition.

You build a billion-dollar company, good or bad, you're not like everybody else.

And you're good in business and you're careful and judicious.

And you don't hand power of attorney over to some guy you've never worked with.

Especially who two years ago he had his own executives, people who worked for him for decades coming to him, being like, boss, who is this guy?

Like, what are you doing?

Why are you giving him so much authority and power?

There was a guy that Wexner had known for decades.

They'd go to Ohio State football games together.

They'd do dinners together.

They were good friends.

And he tells this story about how Jeffrey Epstein comes into the picture, and he's going to meet him for the first time.

Epstein goes over to his office and

Epstein shows up like an hour late for the meeting.

And he gets there.

And the first thing he does when he sits down in his chair.

And I mean, this is just one of those things that this isn't a faux pas this is a message he sits down in the chair at this important businessman it's a good friend of his boss or whatever he was les wexner he sits down in the chair and he kicks his feet up on the on the guy's desk the guy was like okay that's interesting you know this guy's not uh wexner's secretary apparently quite a power move yeah and so um

wexner there in that meeting gets on the phone with both of the guys and he tells his friend, you know, Jeffrey's family,

treat him like family, you know.

And so eventually a little later down the line that guy has a disagreement with Epstein and they get into an argument about something and from that moment on he says he couldn't he couldn't reach Wexner by phone he got cut off immediately completely with no explanation this guy had known him for decades because he had a tiff with Jeffrey Epstein and so this guy clearly had either some kind of a powerful hold over Wexner for one reason or another.

By definition, we can say that.

Or they were working together in some other way.

So Wexner's another one of these interesting cats, right?

Like where his mentor was

a real estate guy mainly, but he did a lot of things named Max Fisher.

And I think he was originally from Indiana, Max Fisher, but lived in Ohio, I believe.

But anyway, either way, he was Wexner's mentor for a while.

Not his mentor, like when he was just getting started.

Wexner's already rich by this point.

It's not about that.

Fisher's

big main thing was philanthropic contributions and and management for Jewish and Zionist and state of Israel related causes, right?

And so when you look at like what the Wexner Foundation did, for example, they would give a little bit of money to Ohio State University here and there and like a few other things locally there in Columbus and around the state of Ohio, but the vast, vast, vast majority of it went to Zionist organizations, Jewish organizations, things like that, which, you know, fine.

Fisher's the guy that sort of that sort of did what Yitzhak Shamir did with Robert Maxwell, but for Les Wexner, you know, you go to him and you say, You've got an obligation here to the Jewish state.

You're a Jewish billionaire, you know, you're a big, important person in the most powerful country in the world.

Like you have an obligation to your people.

And again, it's a powerful call.

And so it really came to, in a lot of ways, define Wexner's life after that.

And so

in the 1990s,

this was in the newspapers and stuff during the Clinton administration.

Really,

really interesting.

Les Wexner and Edgar Bronfman, which if that name sounds familiar, it's because I mentioned.

Sorry, I want to just pause.

I was just handed this

to some extent.

This is from the President of the United States, released on True Social just now.

Based on the ridiculous amount of publicity I'm quoting given to Jeffrey Epstein, I have asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to produce any and all pertinent grand jury testimony subject to court approval.

The scam, all caps, perpetrated by Democrats, comma, should end, comma, right now, exclamation point.

All right, shut the cameras off, guys.

We're done here.

Well, I still think.

Okay, that's pretty good.

I have no idea where this leads, if anywhere.

I certainly hope it leads to greater disclosure.

That's good for everyone, including the president, and it's good for everyone.

Disclosure is good.

But it doesn't change, in my opinion, the need for anyone who's interested in the story to know what the story actually is.

So I hope you will continue.

Yeah, so in the 1990s, Wexner and Edgar Bromfman, who I mentioned earlier, one of the heirs to the Seagram's liquor fortune, who was one of Jeffrey Epstein's clients when he was working at Bear Stearns,

those two guys founded a group called the Study Group, but it's more commonly known as the Mega Group

that came out in the papers a little bit in the late 1990s.

Not a lot was written about it.

It's a group of at first about 20, but then later it expanded Jewish billionaires in the United States and Canada who would meet at least twice a year to to get together and just coordinate how they were distributing their philanthropic money, what their focuses were for that year,

just making sure they were all acting in concert to help serve the interests of Israel and their respective countries.

They would finance

scholars and other professionals to write up papers and studies and analyses for the Israeli government, for Israeli intelligence, for example.

And they were very plugged into that.

And

very, very, very connected to the Israeli government and specifically Israeli intelligence through the work that they would do for, you know, for the Israelis.

And

it, so, you know, again, just one more sort of connection there to the intelligence world among people who are very, very, very close to Jeffrey Epstein.

Now, you know, when you watch the Netflix documentary or anything about Jeffrey Epstein, one of the things that really does stick out to you is this guy, okay, there's rich, and then there's rich.

And Jeffrey Epstein was rich.

I mean, apparently, right?

This is a guy who.

He certainly lived like it.

He had the second largest.

I mean, when you see the pictures of this place he lived in in Ohio, the pictures of this ranch he lived on in New Mexico.

He had a $70 million

house in the largest private residence, I believe, in New York City or in Manhattan.

How did he buy that house?

Les Meisner gave it to him.

Lex Westner gave him a $70 million house?

Yeah, I don't think it was worth $70 million at the time, but when he got arrested, it was, yeah.

Yeah, gave it to him.

Worth more now?

Probably, yeah.

I mean, and no one's ever asked Les Wexner, why did you sign over power of attorney over your whole life and give, among other things, a $70 million property, the biggest private residence in Manhattan to Jeffrey Epsom?

No one.

I mean,

I don't think he's given anybody the opportunity.

You know,

he had that big island in, you know, everybody's seen the picture of the temple on the island, but that's just one little part of it.

I mean, it's a much, I think it was 60, 80 acre island, something like that.

Big, beautiful mansion, several outbuildings, that crazy temple.

He had a fleet of airplanes and not just a Learjet or something like that.

He had a customized 727.

So basically, his own Air Force One he was flying around in, you know.

He had a mansion in Paris.

He actually owned a second U.S.

Virgin Island down there as well.

I mean, so this is a dude who is

Elon Musk doesn't live this way.

He probably could, but he doesn't live.

Not even close.

No, Elon sleeps on people's couches.

Right.

And so if you take the official story, which is that he was a money manager of some kind, the only client that we know of was Les Wexner, but what he exactly even did for Wexner, nobody's really able to

describe.

So the official story is he's a money manager.

Right.

Is there any, so it's hard to manage money in a country whose financial systems are as regulated as ours are anonymously.

So if you're actually managing money, certainly if you're conducting trades, there's a record.

And in some capacities, you have to register.

Is there any documentary evidence that Jeffrey Epstein was in any recognizable sense a money manager?

Not only is there no documentary evidence,

you know, people have to understand how, you know, the regulatory environment is one reason that it's really hard to do any of this kind of thing on that scale under the radar, but also just on a personal network level, like in Wall Street and places like that.

Like if you're a guy.

So Jeffrey Epstein back in the 1980s, he claims the claim was, at the time, even, not just now, it's not something he came up with later, that he was a money manager who only took accounts of a billion dollars or more.

So you didn't just have to be a billionaire.

You had to have a billion dollars to invest with him, right?

And a guy who knew him back then thought he would do Epstein a solid, and he brought him a client.

who had $600 million he wanted to invest with Epstein.

This is 1980s money.

It's like $2 billion today, like inflation adjusted, right?

You show up with that kind of money to Goldman Sachs, and the CEO is going to meet you at the front door and take you up his private elevator.

And the company's vice presidents are going to give you a presentation about all the people that are going to be dedicated to your account.

Like the biggest investment banks in the world are going to audition for you.

You don't audition for them.

You know what I mean?

Like if you have that kind of money.

Epstein blew the guy off.

He said, oh, no, it's too small.

I don't deal with that kind of pocket chains.

You know, $600 million, today, $2 billion.

And so you say, well, that's obviously ridiculous.

Obviously, there is no fund manager in the world that would do that.

And so why would he do that?

And I think when you look at the whole record, the answer is obvious.

He wasn't a money manager.

He didn't actually invest people's money.

Yeah, people think like a

hedge fund is like a dude sitting at his...

at his desktop computer like on E-Trade or something.

Hedge funds have teams of analysts and mathematicians.

It's a whole big business, you know, and like people need to understand that.

So nobody's ever, nobody knows anybody who's ever worked for Epstein in this capacity.

Nobody's ever, I mean, look, when you're operating at that level, if he was who he says he was, moving that kind of money around, you know, you don't go buy shares in Microsoft, you know, you take a position in the company.

You know, this is, these are, these are things that are done through large institutions.

And, you know, you have to have institutional support so that they can gather up enough shares for you to purchase and then structure the purchases in a way that it doesn't just suck all the liquidity out of the market and

drive the market crazy on the stock price for a little while.

This is a complex operation.

There's a lot of people involved.

Nobody has even, nobody has heard of anybody who's heard of anybody who's ever done any kind of stuff.

And there's no record of anything.

No, nothing.

Him investing money, trading stocks, nothing.

Which is just impossible.

I mean, it's just, it's flat out impossible.

that he was doing what the official story says he was doing, and there's just no trace of it.

It's not possible.

So once again, where did the money come from?

Well, clearly some of it came from Les Wexner.

We don't, I'm summarizing what I think you've said.

We have no idea why Wexner gave him all this power and money.

We have no idea.

Not any, we don't have hard evidence on it.

You know, some people have suggested blackmail because of things that have come out about Epstein, but we don't have anything like that.

There are people who were in the Wexner circle back in those days when Epstein was around, and they've claimed that Epstein was known kind of around the office as the boyfriend, but that's just an allegation.

Nobody has any hard information on that.

And both of the guys, Epstein, was asked about it under oath and Wexner, they all obviously deny that.

So I don't, you know, it's not an accusation or anything, but it's just trying to understand something that otherwise is like really inexplicable, right?

So what were there other

because Epstein's annual operating budget had to be like, it's hard to calculate, but like not that hard.

Just maintaining aircraft like that is just beyond

big yacht he had.

Beyond.

Who are the other rich people he got money from?

Do we know?

Well, so there, you know, there was a story that actually just came out in the last few days that I have not had an opportunity to really dig down deep in.

I should go check Mike Benz's Twitter feed.

He's probably done this or he will soon, but

where there are records, apparently, of a billion and a half dollars that were...

transferred to and from Epstein, apparently involving people whose names, you know, we've all we've all heard before.

It's not public.

And so, again, I haven't dug deeply into that and exactly what's going on with it.

So

maybe there's one document there that we can

that's going to tell us something.

But even that,

that doesn't explain how, I mean, he's living the lifestyle of a guy who personally has billions and billions of dollars.

But it doesn't explain motive.

It doesn't explain why Wexner would give him all of this at the very young age with no relevant experience as

a tax advisor, as an investor.

It's just like...

I mean, think about this, Tucker.

There was a point in the 1980s when, it might have been the early 90s, actually, Wexner again owned Victoria's Secret.

For a guy like Jeffrey Epstein, that's kind of a gold mine you're sitting on, right?

Because he would go out and he would pose as a talent scout.

He would tell people that he was that and he would present credentials that made it plausible.

And he would get girls who wanted to be models, who wanted to be in Victoria's Secret

to pose for him.

And then he would sexually assault them at times.

And so two of the, this kind of got, word got around that he was doing this.

And two of the top executives at Victoria's Secret together, guys who had worked there for years, knew Wexner well, they went to him together and presented the evidence and told him that this is what this guy's doing.

And they never heard anything more about it.

Nothing happened.

And so you ask like, you got this young, I guess, run-of-the-mill money manager dude who

at Wexner at this point is only known for a few years.

It's not like they have a decades-long relationship or anything.

And two of your top executives come and say he's using your name, basically, to sexually assault women who want to work for our company.

And it gets blown off.

And you say, who could get away with something like that?

You know, and

the answer is the kind of guy that Wexner would give full power of attorney over his estate to, I suppose.

It's wild.

So there was

a couple people who've been revealed in the popular press as having had relationships with Epstein and giving him money.

And one of them is a guy called Leon Black.

What is that story?

So we know that Black gave him over $100 million.

I think he's admitted that he did, right?

Yeah, they all kind of have the same story that we trusted this guy as an investment manager, basically.

And we were suckers.

There's not a lot of billionaire suckers out there, you know, at least when it comes to the money side of their life.

You know, all the details of he and Black's relationship, I'm not completely firm on, honestly.

But he gives,

in general, he gives the same story that Wexner gives.

Oh, I trusted him.

I was just too naive and too trusting.

And he scammed me like he scammed everybody.

I mean, but, you know.

But they don't even describe what the scam was.

What's the scam?

Well, so you look, for example, at what happened with Hoffenberg before Epstein turned on him.

He took $100 million out of the company and Hoffenberg's accounts, moved it offshore, and then turned state's evidence on the guy and sent him off to prison.

And so, you know, and what Hoffenberg said Epstein would do to other people, what eventually got done to him,

is he would, you know, he would, they would take their money into Towers Financial at the time, but he would set up other companies to do this as well.

And he would get investors to come in, and then he would take their money and he would hide it away, and he would do it after he had procured blackmail on people to control, you know, to control them afterwards so that they didn't come after him.

And this is, again, something that I wouldn't probably put so much stock into that if Hoffenberg had been interviewed about it in 2019 and told that story when people are already talking about all of this stuff, kind of it's out there.

This is 2002.

Nobody knows who Jeffrey Epstein is in 2002.

I mean,

this is before,

you know, he maybe was in the society pages or something in New York City or something, but nobody, he was not a celebrity.

And so Hoffenberg is making these very specific allegations about people that Epstein was connected with in the 80s and 90s, from Leese to Khashoggi and others, to the specific, I mean, he gets down to exactly what he called the scheme that he was running, playing the box.

And he describes the whole thing.

And essentially, it's scamming wealthy people out of their money and using blackmail to make sure that they're afraid to come after him.

Now, how much of his wealth that represented, you know, it's kind of hard to say because

when he got sent off to jail in

2008, 2009,

he moved all of his money offshore to Israel, actually,

and

also sent $46.5 million to the Wexner Foundation, which Wexner says was him paying back what he had stolen from Wexner.

I haven't heard him ask the question, why didn't you press charges?

Why, you know, anything like that.

So who knows?

But

yeah, so, I mean, let's talk a little bit about what happened

in that first case of his.

Exactly.

So,

so Epstein is unknown to most people.

Then he becomes sort of famous in 2006, 2007.

Yeah, and in circle, you know, in like society circles, he was pretty famous.

Of course.

It was a big deal.

I mean, you know, West Palm Beach is a small community down there of very connected people who, you know,

what was he accused of?

What was he convicted of?

So Epstein's thing that he would do, usually,

is

starting with Delaine Maxwell as his initial recruiter, he would find girls that were vulnerable in one way or another.

Somebody, you know, young girls, usually at high schools.

He wasn't, by all accounts, I think the youngest girl that he's accused of messing with was 12 years old at the time.

So, you know, execute them or bury him under the prison, but a little bit different proclivity than

the prepubescent pedophile type.

Probably a different psychology, you know.

But through Maxwell, story goes, she would go out and she would identify a girl who, you know, very often was from a broken family family or from

no father in the picture, you know, was very important because fathers tend to beat the hell out of, you know, 40-year-old guys who sexually assault their daughters.

And so you find these girls who kind of already have like some problems and you would bring them in to give them a massage.

Say, look,

this wealthy guy is very interesting.

He just likes to get massages.

He'll pay you $200 to give him a massage.

Don't you want to just make $200?

Back in the 80s, 90s, you know, early 2000s, a lot of money for a high school girl, especially from the wrong side of the tracks.

And so some of them would, I presume, say no, but others would go do it.

And once they found ones that they liked who kind of fit the profile, then they would outsource the recruitment to those girls.

And it was actually one instance, in fact, where the girl, when they tried to assault her, because you know, they'd start out with the massage and then they would go from there.

And the girls, at this point, you're in this billionaire's house isolated behind a gate.

And

what are you going to do?

You know, they don't,

it's a scary situation for a high school girl, obviously.

You know, a lot of the people who look at the situation, and I tend to find very, I guess it's not strange when you really think about it, but when I talk to men about this, they're like, kill that guy, just get rid of that guy.

When you talk to women about it, I find that they're a little bit more punitive in their view.

And maybe that's just because...

What was she doing there?

Yeah, they remember being 15, and they're like, I wasn't just some purely innocent dove at 15.

Well, men are protective as they should be.

Yeah.

And so there was one girl who she did react that way.

She refused to do anything.

And they said, well, okay, that's all right.

It's all right.

You know,

we still think you're awesome.

You know, we want to get massages and everything.

I'll tell you what, you don't have to do anything, but we'll give you $200 for every one of your friends that you bring.

If you find others, you bring them in to do this.

And, you know, we'll give them $200.

You'll get $200 every time you do it.

And she did it.

And those girls, you know, really kind of sickeningly, and I think,

you know, they were kind of portrayed in the press as like...

prostitution solicitors and kind of these are minors these are high school girls being manipulated by uh by adults who very skillfully manipulated billionaires.

You know what I mean?

So that's just a ridiculous idea to like place a responsibility on them.

Kind of a sick thing to write in a newspaper, honestly.

But

and so they would do that.

And that sort of ensured, I mean, the girl who is from a broken family and has some problems from the wrong side of the tracks.

She might know a girl who is from an intact, you know, middle-class family with two concerned parents.

But very often her friends are kind of from the same mold that she's from.

Every once in a while they they weren't though, and this is part of how he got caught,

is one of the girls that they brought in, they had a father, they had a mother who cared, and they had a pretty regular family who, after everything was over, she ran back to them and told them all about it, and they went to the police.

And so the West Palm Beach, this was down in Florida.

The West Palm Beach Police Department starts looking into the guy, starts gathering more information, starts talking to more witnesses.

And very quickly, this thing starts expanding out so that two witnesses becomes four and four becomes eight and eight becomes 16.

It's like expanding a lot.

And they're realizing they have a big, big, big issue on their hands.

And as they're going through, the Netflix documentary leaves out a lot of really important information, but it's really good on this stuff.

You know, they interview like the chief of police in West Palm Beach there at the time.

And you can see he is just flabbergasted, outraged.

you know, to the point where, you know, he says at one point that it cost him his faith in the U.S.

criminal justice system you know because he was getting stonewalled like crazy at the local level people in his department or somewhere in the local government were leaking the information of the investigation to jeffrey epstein so that for example when they raided his house finally went in there and all the computers had been taken away was totally ready for the totally ready for the raid and prepared for it everything was removed um and he was 100 tipped off they say um And so he's facing this kind of resistance at the local level and the state prosecutor level.

And so he does something that you don't do as a chief of police.

He just went completely around his chain of command and went directly to the feds himself and said, I'm going to bring the feds in.

Like, clearly, the state and the local officials are just too corrupted, you know, apparently.

Maybe it's just because he's an important guy and they don't want to rock the boat and bring bad publicity.

Whatever it is, I need to bring the heavy artillery in here because the feds aren't going to care.

You know, they're not, he's not big enough for them, you know, supposedly.

And so he gives it over to the feds.

And that's when it ends ends up in the in the lap of Alex Acosta, who was the Southern District of Florida U.S.

Attorney at the time.

And so they start looking into this guy and they start building out a case.

You have this

woman, a Villan Aueva, I think her name was, who was the lead prosecutor for the U.S.

Attorney's Office on the Epstein case.

And she, from...

all appearances at least, was very enthusiastic and earnest about trying to pursue this case and was very upset about how the whole thing was handled by her superiors.

But they're building out a case and they get to the point where, I mean, this was actually even before the West Palm Beach Police Department did this.

The feds got handed a case

with 40 something on-the-record underage witnesses accusing this guy, corroborating each other's stories, telling the exact same story of how they were recruited, what happened when they got there, what they were asked and made to do, everything down the line.

This is

when they, when, when the West Palm Beach first went to the prosecutor after they started building their

their case,

they said the guy sort of chuckled and laughed.

He was like, this is going to be the easiest case I've ever done.

This is open, and we're going to put this guy away for 100 years.

This is the easiest case we're ever going to do.

And

he can't do it at the state level, so he hands it over to the feds.

And open and shut.

I mean, you just, how do you get away from 40 on the record corroborating independent witnesses, right?

You can discredit one or two or 10.

You still got 30 left, you know?

And

it goes to the feds and

they build out the case more.

They bring in more witnesses.

They gather more evidence.

And all of a sudden,

the prosecutor, she starts running into obstacles of her own.

One of the things, for example, they found out was that the computers that had been taken out of his house in West Palm Beach were in the possession of somebody connected to Epstein's lawyers.

And so

she put out a Department of Justice subpoena demanding those computers from the lawyers and the people.

And the lawyers kind of, you know, they delay and have meetings and put things off and so forth.

And these are some of them, people we've heard of, Alan Dershowitz, people like that,

who

they delay.

And so one day

she goes to her bosses

and she kind of grills them a little bit.

Like, what the hell is going on here?

You know, what, she wrote this in an email, actually.

She was very aggressive about it, though.

She's like, I don't know what's happening here.

I don't know what the deal is, but like we have, we have a child predator on our hands with an open and shut case to put this guy away for the rest of our life.

What is the problem here?

And she gets reprimanded and told in no uncertain terms, your attitude is not appreciated and you need to back off and all these kind of things by her superior.

And so then one day, and this is while the subpoena is out for those computers,

Alex Acosta personally,

goes and cuts a deal with Epstein's lawyers without telling the lead prosecutor who's looking into the case, without telling the victims, which is in contravention contravention of victims' rights law?

You know, if you're going to cut a deal with a sex offender, you got to tell the victims, hey, by the way, this is what's happening.

Here's why we're doing it.

And just so you know, he's going to be out of jail in a year or something.

You have to tell them.

It's the law.

Did this guy wind up as labor secretary?

That is a story worth looking into.

I don't know.

But a lot of candidates for the gig.

So he's

comes in.

That's right.

And he cuts a deal with the lawyers that says that the federal government agrees not to prosecute Epstein for any of the crimes that are being alleged, any related crimes that have yet to be alleged, nor will they prosecute any of his accomplices, known or unknown.

So, crimes that come out in the future committed by people who aren't known about yet, those are covered under this immunity as well, right?

It's the most blanket you can possibly imagine.

And as a condition of the deal, the subpoena for his computers was dropped.

Okay.

So it sounds like

they intentionally didn't gather a lot of evidence.

100%.

So this is relevant.

The reason I'm bringing it up is there's this, I said I wouldn't talk about contemporary politics, but there's this huge controversy over why isn't the DOJ releasing all this information?

And my informed understanding is, at least to some extent, because they don't have it.

And they don't have it because it was never gathered.

And I don't know why nobody has said that publicly.

I'm not making excuses for anybody, by the way, but I think it's really interesting.

So the cover-up began immediately.

100% and went all the way up to the federal level.

And then just to remind everybody where this conversation started, that U.S.

attorney, future labor secretary under Donald Trump, was apparently on the record telling the people who were vetting him for the labor secretary job that he, the reason he cut that deal was because he was told Epstein belonged to intelligence and to leave it alone.

Okay.

So,

okay, let's just set this in time and place.

The feds are basically protecting Jeffrey Epstein in 2007-ish.

That's the Bush administration.

And it clearly, this is a very high-profile thing.

It was in the papers.

DOJ, this is their, you know, Acosta is a U.S.

attorney.

He's the federal prosecutor in Southern District of Florida, correct?

So what does DOJ think of this?

Like, why are they involved in it?

I mean, involved in like the cover-up.

Cover-up.

I think, you know, that's the interesting question.

I go back to the question I asked earlier.

Like, a U.S.

attorney is pretty high up.

You know, he's running the Southern District of Florida's U.S.

Attorney's Office.

That guy, there's not that many people above his head who can tell him to drop a case like this.

I mean, you got to think about it like this, too.

I mean, this is a career case for a prosecutor like Acosta.

I mean, you're going to be attorney general behind this case someday.

You know, you're talking billionaire Playboy putting him away for his entire life because he's sexually abusing underage girls for years and years.

I mean, you're going to, this makes your whole career.

And so to drop that, there's only a couple people and a couple reasons that somebody like him would agree to, would agree to do that, you know, and

there are people whose names we've all heard probably, you know, I think Alberto was it Gonzalez who was attorney general at the time.

And I mean, it's only a few people who could do that.

You know, one of the things might add something to do with it is

before Jeffrey Epstein was sentenced, for whatever reason, you have this billionaire who's just the definition of a flight risk.

They don't take his passport away.

And before he's sentenced,

he flees.

He flees the country, goes to Israel, stays there for several months.

He moved all his money offshore by this point.

And while he's in Israel, he's telling people there that he's thinking about staying because

you can actually do that.

They don't extradite

Jewish criminals at least who who flee to israel there's a there's an organization called jewish community watch um which is a jewish organization uh that tracks uh pedophiles who have fled the united states to go to israel where there's no no extradition of jewish criminals there and um between just the years uh i think it was 2010 when they started when they opened up and 2016 2017 when this story was written so a period of six years there were already 60 pedophiles from the united states that had fled to israel and were living freely there some of them had reoffended there and got thrown in Israeli jails.

But so this is a thing, you know, and Jeffrey Epstein was a very good idea.

Why doesn't the U.S.

government demand the government of Israel send them back?

I mean,

you've been self-employed for a while, but when you weren't, was it your habit to go to your boss and make demands of them on a regular basis?

I don't know.

I mean, since when do we ever make demands on Israel?

It's been a long time.

I don't know, but

that's obviously distressing.

So,

okay, so there's clearly a cover-up at the very beginning, and I just want to say again, I think that's one, not the totality of, but one of the reasons we don't have this information now is because DOJ doesn't have the information.

Can I tie up that last point real quickly?

Just a second.

So

him being in Israel and at least having the threat of staying there, you know, that may have played a role in him cutting his deal because that's when his deal was.

He's already been charged at this point.

He's awaiting sentencing.

He's been convicted.

And they don't take his passport and he leaves.

He's been convicted and he leaves the country?

Correct.

And his plea deal,

or well, so no, no, let me back that up.

His plea deal was negotiated while he was out of the country.

Because

he didn't fight the charges.

It didn't go to

trial, to a jury trial or anything.

He was out of the country, and his lawyers could credibly go to the J6.

Say that is special treatment.

Did any of the J6 defendants get treatment like that?

No, I don't think so.

That's what's infuriating about all this, leaving aside a lot of other elements that are upsetting.

But the most infuriating is just the two-tiers or multi-tier system of justice.

This is something that people, I think, have not maybe even at the highest levels when I read President Trump's true socials about it, things like that, that people are just, they don't seem to be understanding, is this isn't about some guy that sexually assaulted a bunch of girls.

Like Jeffrey Epstein, for better or for worse, has become a proxy for other things.

Can I just interrupt you to say our

faithful and gifted researcher has just held up a note saying Acosta, apparently Alex Acosta, has said, and this is different from what I described,

that he never said that Epstein was connected to intelligence.

So that is not my understanding.

So he was asked about it at a press conference, and he essentially refused to answer.

He said, you know, that's, he said, I wouldn't take those media reports at face value.

And beyond that, Department of Justice policy, you know, kind of forbids me from going any further into that.

And then there was another, there was an an ABC News report.

And this is kind of an example of how this stuff gets out into the public mind.

There was an ABC, pretty, yeah, it was an ABC News report.

It was talking about his DOJ deal back then.

And

they said that

in the story, they said that the DOJ had stated that he had no connections to intelligence.

But when you actually go read the documents, that's not what was asked at all.

The question was not whether he had any connections to intelligence.

The question was whether he was given leniency because of cooperation that he was giving to the FBI and DOJ

on cases related to Bear Stearns.

And they said no to that.

And it got written up in the news as him saying he had no connection to the intelligence community, which is not true.

The lying is like overwhelming.

Yeah.

And so

just so everybody understands here, I mean, this is a guy who, again, over 40 on-the-record witnesses, most of them underage, corroborating each other's stories independently of this guy sexually assaulting underage girls for years.

He gets this non-prosecution agreement with the federal government in perpetuity, him and all of his accomplices, known and unknown for crimes known and unknown.

And it gets sent down to the state level and he agrees to a two-year term

in down there in southern Florida,

not in a federal prison.

Not in a state prison, at the county jail, where he has, it sounds like I'm making this up, I'm not.

He has his own wing of the jail to himself.

His cell door remains open.

He gets out on work release for 12 hours a day, six days a week, accompanied only by security that he pays the salary of.

He only has to stay the night there six days a week and then spend one day a week there in the jail.

So, you know.

So it's like the National Guard.

Yeah.

And again, you're not talking about a guy who got busted embezzling funds.

You know, you're talking about a guy who got busted doing the thing that if you were to poll every American, I believe, and ask them, what's the worst thing?

What is the worst thing that anybody can do that you would, you know, you're against the death penalty that you might make an exception for?

It's molesting little children.

You know, everybody kind of agrees that that is the red line.

Everybody feels that way that I know, that you know, that everybody listening to this knows.

And so you ask like,

What are the possible reasons that could be big enough and important enough that they would let a guy like this have a, I mean, it's insulting to the investigators, to the police, to the prosecutors to give a guy a deal like that.

You know?

Can I say one thing that has always struck me about this case and why I think it's like revealing of the entire power structure in the United States?

Epstein, and there was testimony from public testimony from women who lived with Epstein to this effect.

His contempt

for Americans, sort of normal middle-class, working class Americans, he did not see them as fully human.

He didn't and at all.

So it's like molesting, you know, a high school girl from

a housing development or a trailer park in South Florida doesn't really count as molesting because she's a pro.

Like, who cares?

Yeah.

And that attitude suffuses our leadership class.

Like, that is their attitude.

Yeah, 100,000 people die of fentanyls.

Yeah, but I mean, people.

You know what I mean?

Like, it's sad, but it's not an emergency because they're like people you would never meet meet and you don't really care about it just building their fucking dollar store in their town and like nobody cares about them.

He really had that attitude, but that's the attitude they all have.

He had justification for having that attitude in terms of the impunity with which he operated.

And this is actually something I was hoping we would get to because all this stuff is super

interesting and important, all the intelligence stuff and everything.

And if you want like...

All the deep, deep, deep detail on that stuff.

I did a six-hour long podcast series on it.

Guys like Mike Benz, Ryan Dawson's one of the chief researchers who's really done a lot of the work that people who write books about the nation being under blackmail and so forth like crib this guy's research without crediting him, you know.

But

and I'm gonna, I'm actually gonna interview him next week just to go really deep on a lot of the

stuff that we're not able to get here to here tonight.

But

you know, the thing I want to, I really want to kind of

maybe the question that I want to leave people with as we get into the last part of this conversation.

You say that like, so when Epstein was convicted in 2000,

the 2000s case, this was in the newspapers.

This was not something, you know, you might, if you were watching the football game, you might not have ever heard about it.

But if you were a wealthy person in Washington, D.C., or New York City or West Palm Beach, Florida, you knew who Jeffrey Epstein was and you knew what had happened to him and you knew what he had done.

His private plane was nicknamed the Lolita Express.

Lolita is a novel written by Nabokov about a guy, based on a true story, actually, about a guy who takes a 12-year-old girl, kidnaps her, and takes her on a kind of odyssey across the country, raping her over the course of those two years.

It's a novel about child molestation.

It's a novel about child molestation.

And his airplane was nicknamed the Lolita Express.

It was not given that nickname by him.

It was given that nickname by other people.

Other people knew who this guy was.

They knew what he was doing.

And so the question then that I really had to wrestle with for a long time, and I have an answer that satisfies me now,

and it relates to the point you were just making about our ruling class.

You know, if Tucker, if I, if literally any one of my male friends or family members, any of them,

if we got invited to go somewhere on some dude's plane, And you walk onto that plane, and as soon as you get in the air, five or six underage girls who are not related to him come out in their underwear and start offering massages.

My responses to that are going to vary between like, which level of criminal action am I going to take against this guy?

Am I going to beat him senseless?

Am I going to throw him out of this flying plane?

Those are basically the range of outcomes in that situation.

And that's true for almost everybody that almost everybody watching this knows.

And so regular people hear about this and they're like,

they almost have trouble believing that it's possible because they they don't know anybody who would have such a cavalier reaction they don't know anybody who would oh I know a lot of people

so uh yeah that's why I think it's important to go over um and I don't want to get into like the conspiracy theory side of this stuff that that that's not as important to me honestly um I'm not sure you need to I think we've progressed we've been here an hour and 57 minutes and I think that from what I can tell I'm sort of familiar not with a lot of what you said but the framework I get I don't think you've said anything that's speculative have you I've tried not to.

Okay, so

the story just based on available facts, which are a minority of all facts about it, but just what we have, it's like

it's a true indictment.

You remember back when the Podesta emails came out and the whole Pizzagate thing took over the internet for a while, you know, every dark corner, the Reddit and everything else was all this

satanic pedophile conspiracy, you know, et cetera, called Pizzagate.

Yeah.

Again, I'm not going to get into the conspiracy theory itself.

I'm just going to use it to raise a larger point point about what we're talking about here.

The interesting thing to me about that whole saga was not the idea that there's some big crazy conspiracy involving the, just any of that stuff.

That's just whatever.

That's what the internet does with information like that.

The interesting thing to me was the things that were just 100% fact, the bits and pieces of the story that they were using to construct that narrative, the pieces themselves are really interesting.

One of the first things that came up,

as people started digging into those on Reddit and everywhere else and really going into it, one of the things is everybody remembers hearing about spirit cooking.

You know, the performance artist Marina Abramovich

did this event that the Podestas were invited to and apparently enjoyed very much called Spirit Cooking.

And what pray tell is spirit cooking, Tucker?

It was a performance art piece, a dinner event,

where the attendees would go and sit in rooms with white walls and eat meals off of mock corpses in tubs of blood with weird creepy messages about cutting the finger on your left hand and eating the pain and drinking fresh breast milk with fresh sperm milk on earthquake nights.

All these crazy Edgelord art school

things that are kind of just embarrassing.

But these weird cryptic sayings written in goat's blood on the walls.

In one room, there's an effigy of an infant with a bucket of goat's blood thrown all over it.

There's another room where there's a bunch of shelves with little figures put in positions of various positions of copulation.

You know, there's photos from these events that Abramovich would put on.

You know, Lady Gaga's there eating off of one of these mock corpses.

Gwen Stefani's at one of them.

And, you know, they're there at these places where,

you know, forget about, you know, people want to say, oh, this is a satanic ritual.

Forget about all that.

Forget about all that.

Just think about like, if this was your friend or your brother or your sister and they went to this thing, or if they brought you to this thing, you'd be like,

what are we doing here?

What is this exactly?

Right.

And so the next thing that came out.

Wouldn't you run immediately?

Again, you would.

I would.

Everybody we know would.

Everybody.

And Tony and Heather Podesta went to this.

Well, I don't know if Heather did or not, but he and John did.

And so Tony's a big art collector.

Oh, I'm aware.

Yeah, I knew his wife.

Yeah.

And his art collection became a big part of the whole Pizzagate story.

This is like right in my neighborhood, by the way, where I live.

Which is so weird.

You know, Tony Podesta's taste in art became a big part of that whole Pizzagate story.

And it's one of those things that, again,

when you have gaps to fill in a story and just pieces of information, you're not getting any explanations from anybody that make any sense, explaining it to you in a way that's plausible.

That's how conspiracy theories grow like mold, right?

If something like that is going on in your city, if like some of the most powerful people in your city are participating in something like that.

I don't need to know anymore.

Yeah.

I literally don't need to know anymore.

Like that's just.

I told you earlier that I

made the point of going and buying the copy of Architectural Digest in Washington Life magazine that profiled his apartment and his art collection.

And on the walls, in the photographs, in these magazines, okay,

there's a lot of different art there, but like the most prominent ones that are, one's a mural-size centerpiece of a room, the others are poster-size, like big, important, prominent pieces that he's got out for everybody to see,

are by a Serbian artist named Biljana Djurjevic.

And they're part of a series of paintings that, according to the artist's own interviews, are based on explorations of child molestation,

sexual assault, and just childhood trauma and abuse in general.

And it is, you know,

there are a lot of paintings in the series, but the ones that show up in the magazine piece, for example, one, the great big mural one, is a bunch of young girls.

They look like maybe teenagers, 12-year-olds or something, who are lying in a circle.

It's called synchronized swimming is the name of the painting, lying in a circle at the bottom of like a tiled room or something?

And they all have this spaced-out, kind of dead, drugged-out look in their eyes.

And some of them have black eyes, and they're just sort of playing there.

And so, um, I don't want to be ruled by people like this.

Well, so let me just keep because this gets so much worse.

Oh, you're upsetting me because I lived in this world for so long, and I intentionally ignored this.

And I,

but now that you are describing it, I was like, I can't even believe I was in the same county as people like that.

I would look,

if I was, if I was into

art that featured tied up

pre-pubescent children in their underwear by an artist that says this is all about child sexual assaults, what this series of paintings is about.

If I was into that,

I would at least take it all down before company came over.

These were rooms that he threw his parties in.

He invited people over to.

I would definitely take them down before architectural digestion.

But if you were into them, like being, let me just be clear, being into something like that means that you are on an evil path.

That's evil.

I don't know what to say.

Like an image like that, it's also obvious now that I have distance from it.

That's bad.

He was asked in an interview about some of his favorite artists.

One of them that he listed was a woman named Patricia Piccinini, who does, I guess, sculptures, you would say.

I don't know if they're clay sculptures, whatever.

And they're...

really grotesque images of, you know, a small girl standing up on her bed, maybe five years old, with this demon thing with its claws around her, kind of leering at her.

There's one with this sort of weird pig monster spooning this little boy in his bed with pustules on its back.

There's a lot of mouths that look like sphincters and vaginas, and the kids are playing with them.

It's all very suggestive, weird, surrealist horror movie, kind of sexually tinted, slanted stuff.

Listed her as one of his favorite artists.

Another one that he listed was a woman named Kim Noble.

And I'll stop broke out with the afternoon.

You're upsetting me because you're describing Tony Podesta, who is the brother of the former White House Chief of Staff, two-time chief of staff John Podesta.

But Tony Podesta is the most powerful Democratic lobbyist in Washington.

This is not some fringe character son, a homeless guy, not even some eccentric rich guy.

This is a person who's at the center of the Democratic establishment of decades for my whole life there.

And his wife is,

you know, they've since divorced, but she's like,

I mean, look, pull up a picture of those two on Google and just look at it and ask yourself, is that

like, how brainwashed would you have to be not to see there's something really wrong there?

Really wrong, like deeply wrong, spiritually wrong.

I'm not trying to be judgmental or cruel.

I'm just, I don't understand how that could exist at the very center of power in Washington, D.C.

That's like a, I just feel it so deeply.

This gets to the question that we're trying to answer here.

Like, so another artist that he named is one of his favorites was a British woman named Kim Noble.

And I don't think I could pull it up on my phone and show that to the audience right now without getting this video banned.

Kim Noble was a woman who was violently sexually assaulted countless times between the ages of one and three.

Oh, come on.

It shattered her mind.

She has dissociative identity disorder, what we used to call multiple personality disorder.

And several of these personalities are artists.

And

the art is something that like a four or five-year-old would do.

It's scribbled, stick figures, and everything.

but it is the most

grotesque depictions of adults sexually abusing children that you can think of.

However bad you think it is, it's worse.

And so, and this was another woman that was named that he was a fan of.

And so I just think to myself of this millionaire lobbyist in D.C.

and his friends standing

saying, you know, what do you think about the artist Kim Noble?

I was like, oh, I think the, you know, the image with the demon having the little girl filleting her while another demon urinates on her is just fascinating in its use of color.

I mean,

it's what you just, who are these people?

Well, so that's what I didn't understand.

So I, at the time, living near the, in the middle of all this, I lived right down the road from Comet Pizza.

I knew David Brock and James Alephantis.

I'm not well, but like they're in the, I disapproved.

They're liberals, they're Democrats, whatever.

I'm not going to have dinner with them.

But I assumed the art stuff, and I knew the Podestas, I assumed that was just like douchey, pretentious.

They're like townies.

They don't, you know, they made all this money.

They're pretending to be sophisticated.

They have terrible taste, of course.

This is like my thinking, I'll just admit it, kind of snobbish view of it.

Like, ugh.

I didn't or couldn't or refuse to or whatever face the obvious reality that's just hitting me right now, right in the face, hard.

That's evil.

That's just evil.

And what I thought was gauche is satanic in a strictly speaking.

I mean, whether they're like, you know, part of some organized church of Satan or whatever, I don't even know if that exists in real life.

But certainly obedience to Satan exists.

And that's what that is.

And period.

And maybe just as interesting, because that's just one person.

There's a lot of people who have strange proclivities and weird interests, right?

Fine.

And he's at the center of the city.

A, he's at the center of power, but B, again.

What is the culture of this place?

He would feel comfortable inviting magazine photographers over to take pictures, to take photographs of the paintings he puts in his rooms of, there's one of the paintings that he has by Biljana Djurjevich that is just unmistakably two dead little girls lying on their backs in like a pond or a lake or something.

Just no question that that's what it is.

It's in the magazine.

And so anyway.

By the way, people are,

I may be misremembering this and

don't sue me, Heather Podesta, if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure Heather Podesta told me

to my face that they had another house just for the art.

I think I know.

He supposedly owns 5,000 pieces of art, something okay, so but that means like okay, so why do you have a house?

So you can invite people over.

So that's like my neighbors.

I never went, but I was never invited.

But that means like a lot of people I know went over to the Podestas house and saw paintings of demons having sex with dead children or whatever.

I can't even let that into my head.

And they're like, yeah, they're kind of far out, kind of funky.

You know, they're sort of edgy, the Podestas.

It's like,

check yourself, right?

This is hell.

When you ask the question of how is it, and this is something that ordinary people really need to understand, because this is not the first ruling class that this has happened to.

No, no, no.

It's happened to ruling classes throughout the world, throughout history.

This is Weimar Caligula.

Yes, it's the British gentry in the late 1800s, early 1900s when they're all into Aleister Crowley and all that kind of stuff.

100%.

It's white mischief at Nairobi in 1925.

This is late Empire story.

And so,

you know, the fact that, you know, we asked the question, how is it that every single person I know that you know, that everybody listening to this knows and allows into their life would run screaming off of that airplane when six underage girls in their underwear come out.

The answer is, well, if you just came from a spirit cooking dinner and followed up by a party at Tony Podesta's house where there's pictures of tied up, dead eight-year-olds all over the wall,

and then you go onto that plane.

I can vouch for that.

I just, I never went on the plane.

I never went to the Podesta's house, but boy, did I live in a world of people who did.

And not one time in 35 years in D.C.

did anybody say, holy shit, I was at Tony's house last night.

You should see what's in there.

They were like, oh, it's douchey artists.

I mean, look, you would get kicked off of a local school board for having pictures of tied up, dead eight-year-olds on your wall.

And so if you were going to.

Also, what's happening to your society?

This is the seat of power.

Its values flow downward.

It's like the top of the pyramid.

There's some freak down the block who's just into weird stuff, whatever.

You might tell your kids to avoid that house and everything, but fine.

This is America.

We interpret, at least until Israel attacked Gaza, we interpreted the First Amendment pretty broadly.

Things like that, most people still do fine.

I'm maybe not calling for that guy's arrest or anything.

He can go be a freak in his own house.

But you're not participating in the conversation or in the decision-making process of whether we do gender reassignment surgeries on eight-year-olds.

when you have pictures of dead, tied up eight-year-olds on your wall.

And I think most ordinary people, and I think people who are in the Washington world and in a lot of these elite circles, they just don't get how this looks to the rest of the North.

Well, it's not just how it looks, it's how it is.

And, you know,

that kind of thinking allows you to kill a lot of people, which they do.

And so they have these conversations about, oh, we need to do this or do that.

What you really mean is drop bombs on kids, which they do continuously.

And no one even mentions it.

So the acceptance of violence against civilians, I've only started to realize this since I left.

It's been five years.

And I'm like, that is, I mean, maybe there's a circumstance where you need to go Fool's Dresden on somebody.

Let's talk about it.

But they don't talk about it.

It's just like, well, we're going to, you know, we're going to bomb the Houthis and like open the shipping lanes.

What does that mean?

Nobody cares.

Yeah.

Because

they have a total acceptance of...

killing people.

One of the reasons I left the Department of Defense, you know, I used to work on air and ballistic missile defense systems for a long time with the DOD.

And I would go all over the world, work with our allies, work on American base, and I'd go onto American ships on deployment with them sometimes when they were in hot spots so that they had like a real expert on in case something bad happened with one of their air defense systems.

And a lot of times I'd be on a little destroyer.

And I don't think I'm divulging any classified information here or anything.

And honestly, like with something like this, like I just, I don't particularly care, I guess.

Nobody ever told me not to talk about it.

But when the Saudi war and UAE war on Yemen was going on, and every day you're reading in the paper of kids literally starving to death, of kids dying of very preventable, very treatable diseases by the tens of thousands on a regular basis.

And we would be interdicting smugglers coming from Balochistan and other places trying to come in and out of Yemen.

And we'd stop their DAOs in small boats and we'd, you know, board them and search them and so forth.

And when this was going on, I wasn't a part of the crew.

I was a civilian Department of Defense employee.

But I'd go out on deck and I'd kind of watch these things go down.

And I can't tell you how many times, eventually it was one too many times, I would read one of those stories about what was going on in Yemen.

And then we're, you know, 100 miles off Yemen, stopping a boat that's coming into that country that has nothing on it but medicine and watching everybody dump it into the ocean.

And

then everybody kind of celebrating like we just won another big victory, you know?

And it got to the point where, again, it was just one too many times.

I couldn't sleep at night.

And it was a big factor of why I left the job.

It's just,

and I want to be very very clear.

I don't indict the sailors who were carrying out the mission.

When you're in the culture, I mean, you're part of the military.

It's hard to describe to outsiders, but these are guys who thought they were fulfilling their patriotic duty.

100%.

I get it.

But there's not a strong Christian vibe in that environment.

Not exactly.

Yeah.

It's not too welcome when you're asking people to throw medicine in the water that's on its way to a country where kids are dying of diarrhea, you know.

And

so that moral compromise, you know, the idea, the answer to that question of how could Jeffrey Epstein, when everybody knew, everybody in elite circles knew what he had done,

why is anybody accepting an invitation to go hang out with this guy?

Why is anybody flying on the Lolita Express?

Like any of these things.

And the answer, I think, again, is you're talking about a moral environment that is very different from the one.

There was an article in the New York Times several years ago about this French author named Gabriel Matznev.

This really, like, there was one line in it that really shed a lot of light on this for me.

Gabriel Matsnev was a French author, very famous, had a column in Le Monde, I think, famous novelist.

And all of his books, all of them, were novels about pedophilia and painted in like a very positive way, you know.

The book that kind of broke him through was called Under 16 Years Old.

And they're all graphic depictions of pedophilia.

That's the name of the book.

Yeah.

And

eventually he gets busted

and

he doesn't deny anything that he did did when he's going through the criminal justice process and everything.

But he is really, really angry because he's like, who do you?

I could name names right now that would bring this whole place down.

Are you kidding me?

Like, you're going to put this on just me?

And one of the things that they said in that New York Times story is they said in France, but I would say this is, again, common.

This isn't, this isn't unique to France.

The ruling class or the elite classes have for a long time distinguished themselves from ordinary people by their adherence to a different code of morality.

Of course.

The marquee de Sade.

Yes.

And that becoming like a mark of distinction.

Because look, I am one of the most powerful people.

I am the most powerful Democrat politician in the country.

I can invite other people who in their worlds are powerful.

I can invite them over to my house and have them walk by my paintings of dead little girls.

And they're going to go home smiling.

That's what I can do.

And then you think of a guy like Jeffrey Epstein who takes it one step further and says, I wonder what else I could get away with.

Yeah, I had one of the most interesting conversations I've ever had, I had with a very spiritually attuned, very smart friend of mine.

And I was saying, you know, I'm a man and I hate lying and I just want to be honest about it.

Like there are people do, you know, bad sexual stuff and I don't, but you could, I don't judge that much because you're like, yeah, you know, we're all in the wrong circumstance capable of anything.

But I said to this person, I don't get the like underage girl thing.

That's like, they're not into it.

They're kids.

Maybe I have too many kids or something.

I'm just, I'm not being self-reached.

I'm just being honest.

I just don't get that.

I don't see any appeal at all.

It's a pathological obsession.

I mean, Epstein was into girls with braces specifically.

Exactly.

So what is that?

And the conventional explanation is, maybe I'm being too honest, but I think this is really revealing.

Because it's not about sex.

It's a spiritual thing.

And I said, what is that?

And this friend of mine said, it's the thrill of destroying innocence.

That's what it is.

Yeah.

And that is the definition of evil.

That is Satan right now.

Well, that was taking something pure.

I guess this is maybe, I'm the only person who never thought of this.

Maybe you have already have.

I had not thought of that.

I was like, it's not just a sexual attraction.

It's like, oh, I think, you know, underage girls with braces are hot.

They're not.

No normal person thinks that.

That's bizarre.

No.

The idea is that I'm destroying something that's pure.

Yeah.

And throughout history.

Well, that's just, that's Satan acting.

Sorry.

Throughout history, people have looked at that as something that confers power.

That's what child sacrifices.

Exactly.

You know?

And

where people get that idea, I don't know, but it's apparently deeply ingrained enough.

It's not an idea.

It's a spiritual reality.

And it's like the core of the Christian message where, you know, Satan says during the end of the 40 days of temptation to Christ, you know, we bow down before me, I'll give you all this power.

And that's clearly the arrangement, which is explicit or not, but it's real nonetheless, between leaders when when they kill in a wanton way, which most of them do, and when they destroy beauty and innocence, you're doing that in exchange for power.

And it is a real trade.

Like, that's all real.

It's totally real.

You do become more powerful.

And in a way, the Epsteins of the world, the people who are just really pathological, you know, everybody kind of knows and accepts that they're Jeffrey Dahmers out there.

They're just people who have broken minds, who do things that none of us can understand.

I think for me and for a lot of people, like the

more important question is how does Alex Acosta not resign in protest when he's told to drop this case?

How is

everybody

labor secretary?

How does everybody

person?

I mean, D.C.

is the most cutthroat town in the country.

They will take anything out of context if they have to to destroy you.

And you got this guy who's literally displaying pictures of dead kids on his wall, never even comes up.

Like it's all just normal.

It's all good.

And you say, like, the people that are more interesting to me are the quote-unquote ordinary-ish people who were going to that party and thinking that what they're, what they're looking at is normal.

So let's get into some of the specifics.

Subsequent after Epstein gets out of his fake jail sentence in the county jail.

Is that what it was?

Yeah, county jail.

Yeah.

Yeah, county jail where he's just spending the night

six days a week.

Oh, and by the way, the West Palm, rather, it was a private investigator that was hired by the victim's lawyers who was watching him during that period of time.

He would go all sorts of places.

You know, and even after his jail, it was supposed to be two years.

He served 13 months.

After that, he was on probation.

And he was on probation.

You're supposed to report all your travels.

He would leave the country.

He would go to Paris.

He would go to the Virgin Islands.

He would leave the state.

They documented him doing this.

They would go to the authorities, these private investigators and lawyers, and say, look, we got pictures.

We got this.

We got that.

They don't care.

It was fine.

That's unbelievable.

I mean, ask anybody.

I happen to know a lot of people who have been on parole or probation.

And boy, they're very afraid of violating it because you wind up back in a halfway house or in prison.

But he wasn't afraid at all.

So has anyone ever been punished for that?

That seems even, that seems on par with the sex stuff, like as a crime.

If you're a public official entrusted with upholding our system of law and you ignore it for whatever reason on Epstein's behalf, like you should be punished for that.

Has anyone ever been punished?

Yeah, you know,

the excuse that I was just following orders only stops working when you lose the war.

And as long as that doesn't happen, then that excuse holds up.

Everybody passes it to the person upside down.

And eventually gets to a level that that person has enough juice to just shut the question down altogether.

Say that again.

The excuse, I'll say it for you.

The excuse that I was just following orders only stops working when you lose the war.

Yeah.

So as long as your party or

culture or organization or whatever it is, the structure, the power structure, as long as you're still in power, you never have to answer these questions because like, who's going to make you?

Yeah, and don't underestimate the...

Kind of what we're facing right now.

Don't underestimate the ability of the human mind to

like if you are an ordinary person who joined the Department of Justice and you're a prosecutor and you're being told to drop this case against this guy who is a major predator, who's harming girls on the regular, you're being told to give him, to drop this case.

But

you're a normal person.

You're a person who joined the Department of Justice to go fight crime, gosh darn it, you know?

But you got a family, you got tuition to pay, you got to put food on your kids' table, and you got to balance all that out against whether or not you're going to be able to sleep at night.

And in order for you to be able to sleep at night, the human mind is very, very adaptable.

Even like minor things, I mean, for you to be able, not you personally, the Royal, we, you know, we drive to church on Sundays and we pass under an overpass and there's a bunch of just completely destitute, homeless people laying on the ground

when, you know, I think the right answer is like, oh, there's my church today.

You know, I'm going to go deal with this and do what I can here.

That's church today.

But we have to tell ourselves a lot of stories to be able to just drive past that and drive home and go to breakfast and still think of ourselves as human beings.

And the mind's very, very, very good at.

coming up with stories like that for ourselves.

So like if you remember, for example, this was during the Afghanistan war.

There was an army captain.

His name slips my mind at this point, but he's a hero in my book.

But he actually got kicked out of the army.

They eventually reinstated him, I think, but initially it was disciplined, kicked out of the army because he came upon an Afghan army commander or police official, I can't remember which one it was, raping a little boy, and he beat the hell out of him.

And he got in trouble for that.

He got kicked out of the army for doing that.

And then the rest of the soldiers that went to Afghanistan were given stand downs and told that, like, look, this practice is called bachabazi.

Yes, it's horrible.

It's awful.

We are not here to reform these people's culture.

We've got an enemy we're trying to fight here, a counterinsurgency.

If we start stepping in, every time something like this happens, it's going to undermine the effort.

And so you guys are just going to have to look the other way when you come across a grown man raping a little boy.

How about no?

And so, you know, it's like

on one, especially when, you know, if you think back, like there were instances where we sent troops to remote Afghan villages to go put down, violently put down uprisings that had happened because we told them they have to have a certain number of women on their village council and that's not their culture.

And so we're willing to alienate the local population to impose feminism on a remote village.

But, you know.

But child rape, that's just kind of a cultural thing.

You know, the Taliban had banned that and actually had death squads roaming the country,

killing people who did it.

And imagine the propaganda the Taliban were able to put out.

Like we had.

destroyed all the poppy fields and we banned this practice of bachabazi like systematic child rape the americans come in both of those things come back in force it was a new york times article hilarious the way it was framed because it was an article about look at what the evil taliban are doing where uh they were manipulating these boys who were being kept as sex slaves at police checkpoints and things and manipulating them into you know shooting their their commanders and their guards and then coming out and fighting for the taliban manipulate it's like i read it and i was like it sounds to me like they're liberating these boys but okay um

and one of the things that it said in there is it was so widespread that they looked at like three or four hundred police checkpoints.

Every single one of them, every one of them had a stable of little boys that when

people would get hired to become an officer

and get assigned to a place, they would often demand bachabazi boys at their checkpoints or the stations that they were assigned to as like a perk of the job.

And we went along with that.

And it's like, you know, and so that's how somebody at the Department of Justice or in the intelligence community can say, yeah, you know, this guy in his free time, he does this, he does that, but look, whatever.

We're trying to fight a war.

Get our money longer.

and that's how they explain it to themselves.

It's a really rotten, decadent culture, I would say, at the top.

And as evidence of that, Epstein gets out of jail in 2008-ish, nine.

And then between then and 2019, so 10 or 11 years, he's like roaming around.

We have records of like a lot of famous people hanging with him on his plane on the island during those years, correct?

Yes.

Yeah.

Post-conviction, public humiliation

riding the lolita express yeah yeah but that was after yeah everybody knew and so who are those people can you name some

a lot of the ones that have been in the news you know um bill clinton uh obviously wrote i think he's on record riding epstein's plane 26 times um and and just for reference on that um one of epstein's buddies and partners in crime was a french guy named jean-luc brunel who ran a modeling and talent scouting agency and used it the way that Jeffrey Epstein would use Victoria's Secret.

And they would also use it together.

In fact, Jeffrey Epstein provided the seed money for the agency.

And they would bring girls in and use that environment to sexually abuse them and take advantage of them.

And,

you know, he was, when Jeffrey Epstein was in jail for those 13 months, in 13 months, Jean-Luc Brunel visited him 70 times.

Okay.

He didn't ride on his plane.

as often as Bill Clinton did, right?

So that's just a reference point.

And Jean-Luc Brunel, by the way, after Epstein got arrested, immediately went into hiding and then got caught trying to cross the border to flee france got put in jail and i will give you one guess and one guess only what happened to him

everybody watching got it right he hanged himself in his cell no he didn't yes he did

wow how did all the people watching get that right on the first trip

i am not making it up i am not making it up just like robert maxwell killed himself just like jeffrey epstein did just like the dc madam so let's get to

the sort of terminus of the story of his life, which is his death.

And

what do we know about that and what don't we know about it?

Yeah, so one of the interesting things about the whole Epstein story is you see a lot of all the story we've been telling tonight about money laundering, intelligence agency connections.

In the 80s and 90s, like a lot of that stuff is, again, it's a pile of circumstantial evidence, but it's a big enough pile that you can really draw a pretty firm narrative with it.

When you get to the, say, 2010s, we don't have nearly as much sort of solid information on crimes being committed or high-level things going on.

Now, one of the things we do have is he was very, very close with Ehud Barak, former Israeli prime minister, and

he was the head of military intelligence for quite a long time.

In fact, he was head of military intelligence back when Jeffrey Epstein, Nankashogi, these people would have been operating, you know, back in their heyday.

He was very close with him.

He was photographed going into Jeffrey Epstein's house one time, like in a disguise.

He stayed over for not overnight, but for longer stretches for a long time.

Jeffrey Epstein provided the seed money for a tech company that Ehud Barak started up with

a bunch of guys who were veterans of Unit 8200, which is like the Israeli NSA, basically, a tech company.

And

when Epstein was in control of the Wexner Foundation, he gave Ehud Barak $2.3 million

to write two papers, one of which apparently got written, but the other never even got written.

They never asked for their money back.

So just gave him $2.3 million.

So very, very tight, close, big money changing hands.

You know, no allegations of sexual abuse or assault.

There are victims who say that they were forced to have sex with Ehud Barak, but

I haven't.

vetted those claims or anything, and I don't want to make that claim.

But

so, you know,

that's one of the things we do have.

But beyond that, you have a lot of celebrities, a lot of sort of political figures like Bill Clinton.

And a lot of it is sort of framed and does look like it's sort of a rehab tour.

You know, he's giving a lot of money away to primarily scientific causes, things like that, trying to rebuild public goodwill, essentially.

And it was

the reason he was arrested again is because the lawyers, God bless them, of a bunch of the victims from the first case, you know, they were really, really, really upset about what happened, especially the fact that, you know, it took a lot of courage for these girls to come out.

These people were terrifying.

Ghelain Maxwell would tell them when they tried to get away that, you know, how easy it is to get rid of a girl like you?

You know, these are the stories that the victims tell.

They would threaten their lives, they would threaten their families.

And, you know, they're watching this guy get protected at the highest levels.

They're watching him get just a nothing sentence

when

they all know what they did and the number and the case against him.

And so they think this is an incredibly powerful guy.

They're terrified.

It took a lot of courage to come out.

And so when they went and cut a deal behind the backs of not only the lead prosecutor, but the victims and the victims' lawyers, the thing was signed, done, deal before anybody below like Alex Acosta's level even knew about it.

Again, including the Department of Justice lead prosecutor,

they were really angry, you know, because they had been telling these girls, look, I know it's scary, but you got to do this and don't worry.

We got this guy.

He is going away for the rest of his life.

You don't have anything to worry about.

And then to have that happen behind their backs, they were really angry.

And so they kept on the case.

And they said, look, there is something out there called the Victims' Rights Act.

You are legally bound to inform victims when you do something like this.

You did not do that.

This deal you made is not valid.

And eventually, a federal judge found that indeed the government had engaged, these are the words of the federal judge, had engaged in a conspiracy with Jeffrey Epstein to make this deal, this illegitimate, illegal deal.

And so it got stricken.

And that allowed him to be rearrested.

And And so that's why he was arrested in 2019 after, I guess it was.

By the feds.

By the feds.

As he was coming back from Paris, his plane landed.

And Bill Barr's Department of Justice.

Bill Barr had just taken over the Department of Justice in, I think it was February 2019 or so, right after the midterms.

And he has him arrested.

And then everybody kind of knows the rough outlines of the story after that.

He's in jail.

There was the story of him being assaulted, apparently, in his cell by this guerrilla that they put him in there.

Well, you see the picture of the dude that they put him in with.

He was a corrupt NYPD police officer

who was in for a double murder of two drug dealers that he was offing for another drug dealer, something like he's like giant bodybuilder dude, just a monster of a guy.

And, you know, they put little Jeffrey Epstein, a guy who's, you know, for all of his evils, not a violent criminal, in a cell with that guy.

That guy assaults him.

And

then

he ends up dead under circumstances that have

been gone over again and again.

And they're as insane and ridiculous and implausible, as everybody says.

I mean, for years, we were always told, this is just until very recently when they released that footage of the hallway outside his cell, that there was no footage, that all three of the cameras that were relevant to that area of the jail somehow had malfunctioned or gone out of service at the same time.

And the guards who were on duty that night,

you know, they had fallen asleep.

And the pages of their logbook for the pertinent time period somehow had gone missing.

And just all of these things, you're like, come on, man.

And a lot of times people say,

because they have this James Bond idea of, you know, these kind of things.

And they're like,

if these were really, if this was really some kind of a murder or a, you know, just maybe not a murder, but Jeffrey Epstein was told, you know,

the best.

course of action for you is if you go ahead and commit suicide now.

You know, the other options we're giving you are way, way worse.

The guards are going to be off, you know, sleeping for a little while.

So take care of yourself.

Whatever it was,

you know, like

you have, you have this set of circumstances that's entirely implausible, and you have pretty much everybody who knew him, including his lawyers.

You know, his lawyers immediately, and still to this day, as far as I know, make the point.

They're like, look, this was a guy whose hubris was off the charts.

He had already gotten away with this once.

He was now under arrest with a president that, you know,

I think personally, we'll see what happens.

You know, I just don't personally buy into the accusations of Trump having to do with Epstein.

Just doesn't.

Doesn't strike me as the personality type that would do that, that kind of thing.

But, you know, there are pictures of him out there.

There was a relationship out there that maybe could kind of be leveraged, doesn't want embarrassment.

There were, in other words, there were strings to pull.

Like, it wasn't as if his appeals were exhausted and he's going off to prison tomorrow where, you know, you're going to have a bunch of boss crackers waiting for this new Jewish pedophile that just showed up and he's just going to kill himself.

He had so many cards to play and he had gotten away with it before.

And nobody who was close to him during that time, even including his lawyers, believes that he committed suicide.

Well, one lawyer, I spoke to his lawyers about it, and one said to me, Well, he thought he was going to get out on appeal in days.

So

it's interesting that the Bureau of Prisons, Department of Justice has never released the names of the inmates who were in the lockup with him.

He was supposedly in the cell by himself, but there were 11, I think, in that range, other inmates in the cell block, which was the maximum security cell block within the Federal Detention Center of the MCC.

We don't know who they are.

And we know that a bunch were transferred out shortly after.

Several were anyway.

And somehow we can't know their names because HIPAA or something.

I mean, it doesn't make any sense.

The guards who fell asleep were not really punished.

They lied about the tape.

And most damning of all, Bill Barr

participated in the cover-up.

I mean, flat out, you can read his memoir.

In and he says, as soon as this happened, my first concern was people would think he was murdered.

Really, you're the chief law enforcement officer.

You should hold open every possibility, including the most obvious, which was he was murdered.

So if your goal from the very first moment was to convince people of something you didn't know was true, you're not pursuing the truth.

You are, in fact, by definition, participating in a cover-up.

That's my view.

I'd love to know the other side of it.

Bill Barr won't talk to me about it, though.

He's attacked me for saying it.

But Bill Barr is participating in the cover-up.

So what the hell is that?

Yeah.

And again, to go back to what we covered earlier, I mean, with Bill Barr's history of covering things up for the intelligence community, both the Iran-Contra thing as Attorney General in the early 90s and as the CIA liaison, legal liaison to Congress during the Church and Pike Committee hearings, there's a history there, you know, of covering things up that have embarrassing ties to the intelligence community.

And, you know, one of the ways that, like, I don't think Bill Barr, like, if he was your neighbor, I think he's probably a good neighbor.

If you, you know, if he was never.

Well, I know him.

I've always thought he was a super nice guy, friendly guy.

I'm sure he's like, everybody who knows him thinks he's a good man.

And, you know, they're...

What matters is how you use your power.

That's how you're judged.

And again, to go back to how people justify things to themselves.

You know, a lot of people, most people are not comfortable thinking of themselves as evil human beings or as people who are participating in doing evil.

And so they tell themselves stories to make it not that way.

And,

you know, again, to me,

a pervert like Jeffrey Epstein is like one small part of this story.

To me,

the whole constellation of forces around him that kind of coalesce to protect him and confuse the issue.

And to this day, is still, I mean, when I said Jeffrey Epstein has become a proxy for other things that are important, I mean, this is something, if there's one message I I would like, if there's anybody at the White House or anywhere close to those people watching right now that they need to understand, is the reason this is important to the base is not because they think there's this Jewish pedophile worked for the Israeli Mossad and they want him held.

It has nothing to do with that.

It's a proxy for, can we hold these people accountable?

Like Donald Trump's presidency in general.

You know, people might have favored the trade policy.

Certainly they were, you know, the immigration thing was important, all that kind of stuff.

But really what it was is, man, these people have gotten so out of control and so out of touch with the rest of us and so unconcerned with what's going on with the rest of us.

We just got to bring in a wrecking ball from the outside who's going to go in there and shake things up and tear this thing down.

People are not listening to us because we're irrelevant.

We don't have any say in our government.

There is no democratic control in the United States.

The population's views don't really matter.

That's the feeling that people have.

And this whole story that you've told for two hours and 37 minutes confirms that they are right to be concerned because what you're describing is a pretty organized, informally organized anyway, force or series of forces that operate outside and above the U.S.

government and every other global government, or most of them anyway.

And by definition.

So the U.S.

attorney, the federal prosecutor, the chief federal prosecutor in one of our biggest states is told back off.

and does.

And everybody beneath him does also.

So like, what is that?

It's a force bigger than the U.S.

government.

And I just think that can't continue.

That can't continue.

You can't have that.

And the nature of the crime, again, being that one crime that if you polled Americans, said, what's the worst crime, I think it would make the top of every list of every poll that you could run, however you worded it.

The fact that that's the crime, you know, it makes it so that, you know, when they tell you we.

You know, we bombed a car in Kabul and killed this family of 10, you know, during the Afghanistan withdrawal.

We can't really get into all of the details because of sources and methods and this and that and so forth.

People will be like,

okay, you know, that I don't really like that, but fine.

But a child's innocence, if anything is sacred, a child's innocence is sacred.

And sacred means there is no compromise with regard to that.

If you have to...

If exposing the information about somebody like Jeffrey Epstein means that a Dr.

Strangelove-style nuclear device goes off and destroys the planet.

Too bad.

Let justice be done, even if the heavens fall on something like that.

Because the crime is just, it's beyond the pale.

It's something that for all normal people, they say, whatever your excuse is,

you know, national security, first of all, what does this guy who's a pedophile have to do with national security?

But whatever your excuse is.

I've wondered since day one, what does it have to do with national security?

Yeah, whatever it is, the answer is no.

Okay.

We have a journalist who has a source, and this has not been refuted by the people involved saying that he belonged to intelligence.

We have all these ties over the years that provide more circumstantial evidence to back that.

If the U.S.

government had anything to do with this guy, if foreign governments operating on our soil had anything to do with this guy,

we don't care what your excuse is.

We're talking about a man who was raping children.

And if our government, the people who pass laws that we have to follow or else have men men with guns show up to our house and drag us off to a cage somewhere, the men who make those rules, men and women who make those rules,

this is something that we have to draw a line in the sand and say, this is too far.

You are going to dump all of this and we don't care what happens.

We want an explanation of what was going on here.

And there's just, we're not going to take no for an answer on it.

This is too far.

It's just too emblematic, you know, and it's too severe of a crime.

And I hope that people, I really hope that people will keep that mentality and not let this die until we get a good satisfactory answer on what was going on.

Amen.

To that and everything that you have said, I think in a really measured, restrained way, I also notice about you, as I've noticed before, your total determination to see things through the eyes of the people you're talking about, whether you agree or disagree with them.

You add humanity to history, which is why I value your historical analysis.

I think it's the right way.

It's the humane way.

My last question, and I just can't help this because I'm not as good a person as you are, but why Sue Mark Levin described you as a propagandist, a demagogue,

you shouldn't have a platform, you should be silenced.

You know, I've listened to you now for two hours and 40 minutes.

I wonder what about what you just said

would make

Mark Levin call for you to be silenced and call you a criminal.

I mean, here you are arguing against child molestation.

You're not attacking anybody, certainly on the basis of like religion or ethnicity or anything like that.

You're not even attacking any governments.

That's my read on what you're saying.

Why would that,

your two-hour and 40-minute description of this news story, why would that make someone like Mark Levin so angry?

I mean, I think when you see the constellation of

commentators and personalities that have kind of immediately jumped to the side of there's nothing to see here.

It's all over with.

Let's drop the case.

You know, it's all the same people who were telling us we were traitors if we didn't want to bomb Iran just a few weeks ago.

And so I think, and here's the funny thing about it, is I think that people like Mark, people like Ben Shapiro, a lot of these folks are actually, they're afraid, they have something like the pop understanding of what Jeffrey Epstein was about in their heads, and they're afraid that exposing the case will show his ties to Israeli intelligence.

I actually have a much more conservative view on the whole thing than they probably do, you know, where I don't think they have as much to be afraid of in that sense.

I think he did work for Israeli intelligence, but I think he was a freelancer.

He did work for the CIA, did work for a lot of intelligence agencies, probably independent criminals.

Sounds like you're right.

I mean, this is not just about, I agree with you.

It's clearly not just about Israel.

It's about a lot.

It is in part about Israel, but it's not only about Israel.

It's about our government.

They're the ones who covered up the freaking crimes in 2007.

Yes.

But that's not a problem.

Like, we can say that.

That's totally cool.

It says a lot about

Levin and his priorities, his reaction to this, I would say.

And I would say, anyone who doesn't want to get to the bottom of this, like,

why?

I mean,

there is no answer that's going to make sense to anybody that has sat through three hours of this conversation, you know, already.

I agree.

Because I, you know, and to me, I don't think there is a good answer to that question.

We should not compromise on this.

You know, we will get a satisfactory answer or we will burn this place down.

Figuratively, don't come knock on my door, FBI.

But like, you know, that we're not going to let this go, that this is a line in the sand.

You will be honest with us about this.

Because if you can't, the nature of this crime, if you can't, then it means that this thing cannot be fixed, that you cannot be honest with us about anything.

We can't trust anything you say.

If you're willing to lie to us to our faces, when there is so much implausible, ridiculous information out there, lie to us to our faces in such a brazen way about a guy who is raping children.

Like if you'll do that, then there's just, there's nothing more to talk about with the ruling class, you know?

I can't improve on that.

Jerry Cooper, thank you.

I'm always grateful when you come.

This is the second time.

I hope it won't be the last.

Thank you very much.

Always a pleasure.

We want to thank you for watching us on Spotify, a company that we use every day.

We know the people who run it, good people.

While you're here, do us a favor, hit follow and tap the bell so you never miss an episode.

We have real conversations, news, things that actually matter.

Telling the truth always, you will not miss it if you follow us on Spotify and hit the bell.

We appreciate it.

Thanks for watching.