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All right, my friends. What a day to have you in here, buddy.
Kid in a candy shop. We hack the government. We hack the government's files, evident. We have three and a half million files that it feels like we should not have. It would have been great to have had seven years ago in 2019 when this was being litigated. But it's an incredible moment of transparency for how the world works, how governments interact with the private sector and funds, and it's just really cool to be a part of it.
What was the holdup What was the... Because it seemed like there was a lot of people that did not want these files released.
Yeah, I thought about this a lot. What we have access to now are internal documents from the Justice Department and the FBI that are normally, even though they're not classified, they are part of a criminal investigation, and so they're not normally disclosable to the public. It could be the case that it required a congressional bill to force this out. If there's an internal investigation and it's not a part of a court document that's entered into evidence, you can't just foya the Justice Department to dirt on your political enemies because you think that they might be involved in something. Now, I don't know if it could have been done through an executive order around Epstein transparency, around the time of the first binders. Certainly, it looked like there was friction between the President and Thomas Massey over this issue. But I don't know the details of what went down there. But the fact is the bill passed 427 to one in the house. Who's the My recollection is that it was Randy Fine, but I might be wrong on that, so I don't want to smear or imply anything on dueling.
There was one person that didn't want it released because they thought it would compromise the victims, right? At one point in time, at least.
Yeah. I don't know what the rationale is, and because I don't recall offhand who the one is, I don't want to lean on that too much. But the fact is, is nobody wanted to be on the other side of this. I can't think of anything that both Republicans and Democrats voted on 427 to one and... Oh, I'm sorry, Clay Higgins. Sorry. Apologies to Randy Fine. Yeah. There was obviously friction because this implicates everybody, Republicans and Democrats, Americans and a dozen different foreign countries, heads of major hedge funds and multinational corporations, donors to all political parties, major university and science institutions. I mean, almost every major player in world affairs was in some way either involved in or adjacent to this network, or the network or the network have tried to reach out to them because they were influential. There was a mutually assured destruction around the Epstein Hot potato for a decade now, which is that out of power, the Republicans said, Oh, the Democrats don't want to disclose this because of the Clintons. Then the Trump administration gets into power, and there's a very slow reaction to the disclosures that culminated in what happened this week.
You had the Democrats saying, Oh, they're not disclosing it because of Trump world and his associates. Meanwhile, they controlled the Justice Department and the FBI for four years and didn't release any. It took a moment like this. What's really interesting about it is this bill only compelled the disclosure, this law that passed in Congress, only compelled the disclosure of Justice Department originated files. Justice Department, by extension, FBI is the investigative arm of the Justice Department. It does not compel CIA originated files. One of the coolest moments of transparency we had last year in 2025 was when Tulsi Gabbard as the ODNI, as the head of Director of National Intelligence in charge of the whole intelligence community, Speer headed the JFK files release, and we got basically fully unredacted documents. Now, I know there's a contest over how complete they are, but the fact is, it was hundreds of thousands of files that had never been seen before or unredacted versions of documents that had been fully or partially redacted for decades. The only reason that we have JFK files at all is because in 1992, Congress passed a bill to force the CIA to start turning over documents.
The law, I believe, was called the JFK Records Collection Act. It forced, by law, the CIA to establish this independent presidential assassination review board that would review documents for declassification and compel on the basis of that independent body. Given all of the intelligence intrigue around Epstein, and the fact that it is, in my view, physically impossible over Epstein's 40-year career in intelligence-adjacent work, that there's not Epstein files that are CIA-originated. We actually... I saw this in the files that were just released. Jeffrey Epstein himself, twice fouillied, that's the Freedom of Information Act, which is a law that, I think, came around in 1966, which allows any US citizen to ask any government agency for all public records that it has about anything. There are certain things that get blocked in that. There were a lot of foia fights about COVID. Fauci, famously, there's this exchange where one of the folks in Fauci world says that they learned cool tricks from the foia lady about how to get around request. But the fact is you can foia the CIA for records because that foia forces the CIA to give you declassified or unclassified records. If it's classified, it'll issue a Glomar.
We cannot confirm or deny the existence or nonexistence of classified information.
Before we get any further, the JFK stuff, I never heard anything about I mean, I know the files came out, but there was no big revelations. Was there anything that came out of that that was significant?
I thought it was huge. I learned... I guess people are looking at the JFK files. Most people are looking at it for clues as to who killed JFK. I know that there are many researchers who specialize in the JFK assassination that have sharpened their theories, I suppose, on the basis of it in a useful way for whatever it's worth. For me, I was never expecting to see a CIA document saying, I why James Jesus Angleton authorized the assassination of President of the United States. But the fact is, what it revealed were all of these tangential and ancillary documents that showed the structure of intelligence work at a very fine and detailed level, the revelations that really only come around once in a generation. There's a video online by Michael Perente, who was a CIA IA whistleblower around the time of the Iran Contra hearings in the 1980s. He says, Pay attention to these hearings. This may be the last time for another 20, 30, 40 years that you ever get an inside look at the detailed minutiae of a covert operation, because all this was being blasted on a congressional jumbotron with hearings and formal congressional investigations and public testimony.
I look at the JFK files release like that. We got a very detailed look at everything that was happening around, effectively, Operation Mongoose. Because- Can you refresh my memory?
What was Mongoose again?
Yeah. There was Operation Mongoose and Operation Condor, which were related to the... Nominally, what you'll read is that they were related to the attempts by the CIA, for Mongoose, for example, to destabilize the government of Cuba in order to induce a regime change. But because those efforts proved unsuccessful, they regionalized the conflict to do counter communism work effectively throughout all of Latin America, the Caribbean, South America. Operation Condor was effectively a counterinsurgency strategy to stop the rise of left-wing Marxist groups who are trying to throw off the yoke of American imperialism, so to speak, as they put it. You had a massive CIA operation to try to tilt the internal politics of basically every country south of the border. We got incredibly just detailed. I'll give you an example of one declassified document that's really wild. There's one document that is a CIA file with instructions to delete all physical copies of the document at the end that describes how the agency had internally authorized an attempt to assassinate Castro by working through the Meyer Lansky syndicate and hiring two hitmen that were in Miami but had contacts with the Cuban exile community liaisons within Cuba.
This was a formal agency file that described how a CIA case officer made contact with people from the mob, organized crime, with offers of payoff, with very detailed logistics. You can find this. I did a whole video on it on my, the ex-subscriber thing. I'll put it on the top of my social media. But it also describes a really interesting Jeffrey Epstein-like figure. Robert Mayhu was a CIA asset. The JFK files, they describe how they got... They sponsored a movie to simulate, I believe it was the President of Indonesia, having an affair with a blonde woman. They filmed was basically like a porno to create a tape, and they had very... They describe how they set up the room to make it look like it was, I think, in the presidential palace or some hotel room that would have been in that country in order to create what's effectively a sexual blackmail tape that could then be leaked to the press in order to discredit the president. You look at these in formal agency files, and on the one hand, you go, Okay, that was the 1960s. That was the early 1960s. That was before there was any oversight on the CIA at all.
It wasn't until the church committee hearings in 1975, 1976 that we even had congressional oversight of the CIA. There was no Senate Intelligence Committee. There was no House Intelligence Committee at the time. At that point, assassinations had not been outlawed. I mean, the CIA was allowed to assassinate people. There's since been a ban on that. You go, Okay, that's 60 years ago. But the fact is, they did it. The fact is, that is within the array of options that folks in covert operations saw as on the table. Working with the mob. Working with the mob. But that goes back a long time. I found it totally unsurprising It's one of these things. It's just the general theme. It's shocked but not surprised. It's like, holy crap, they put this in writing? What are we doing here, guys? But you're like, I'm not surprised they did it because I know they were doing all these other things. The fact is, the CIA was working with the mob before there was CIA. Before it was done by the CIA, work with, for example, the The Italian mob was done through the Department of War, really starting in the 1930s, and then especially in the 1940s, because they were the Central Intelligence Agency.
At the time, it was the OSS in the 1940s, but it would become the CIA. They're one of their main logistical points of contact and allies for the resistance against Mussolini in Italy. Mussolini was cracking down on the Vatican Church and on the Italian Mafia. There were strange bedfellas. There's a great book on this by Paul Williams. I think it was published in 2017. It's called Operation Gladio, the CIA, the Vatican, and the Mob. I recommend this book to everyone because it's a really, really detailed academic deep dive on this nexus between a an intelligence institution, an intelligence agency, an illegal, organized crime syndicate that does all manner of black ops, and it especially focuses on the funding relationship. In fact, this just came out, and this gets the utility of these documents. There's an incredible document that just was released this week where Larry Somers, who was the head of the US Treasury. So not only was he the head of Harvard University and the head of the American money system, but he's trying to explain to Jeffrey Epstein the politics of what's happening in the Vatican. What he says to him is that what's actually most important going on right now is what's happening with the Vatican Bank, which is the deep politics of the Vatican.
I I saw this email and I just laughed and did a little twirly thing in my chair because it's totally unsurprising if you read that book, Operation Gladio, that I mentioned, it It traces 80 years of this because the Vatican Bank was the first offshore bank before offshore banking even existed. There was an alliance with the Vatican Bank during World War II itself with our Department of War and with organized crime outfits, at least according to the evidence that I find persuasive in this book and that appears to be validated by Italian court documents in the 1990s when all of this was litigated. Incidentally, that was when the mob was really prosecuted for the first time. But effectively, what happened was you had strange bedfellows. You had the United States who wanted to get rid of Mussolini, you had the Vatican who wanted to get rid of Mussolini, and you had organized crime who wanted to get rid of Mussolini community. Because organized crime is very deep in the logistics and unions, they control the ports, they control the streets, they control safe houses. If they have allies in a bank, they are able to launder money effectively in order to do black market type trade.
If you have, for example, the support of the US government to facilitate that, and there's protection offered to those organized crime groups, what you end up having is effectively a state-sponsored mafia with an untouchable bank. At the time, the Vatican... Because, and Larry Summers explains this to Jeffrey Epstein in very simple terms, which is… Yeah, here you go. The most important change in the Vatican may not be Pope Benedict's son retirement, but change in leadership of the Institute for Works of Religion, the Vatican's Bank. Because the Vatican's status is a sovereign country, it's exempt from transparency rules of not only Italy, but of the European Union. This status allows its elite clients to evade any scrutiny in their money transfers. Last May, Vatican Bank President was fired after Italian authorities opened an investigation into a far-flung bribery scheme. He goes through this, but what's important here is the British, when we think of offshore banking now, it's Usually associated with- Cayman Islands. Cayman Islands, Jersey, Man, Panama. Panama is a different story, but it's usually associated with these small island countries that are formerly their own territory, their own sovereign territory. You also see this within the United States in Native American reservations with these autonomous zones that can be shielded from certain kinds of public disclosures, a typical finance institution.
That's going on with Native American banks?
Well, yeah, this was actually part of- Is that connected to the casinos because they have a lot of money from the casinos? Yeah.
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Gambling problem? Call 1-800 Gambler in New York Call 877-8openY or text openY-467-369. In Connecticut, call 888-789-7777 or visit ccpg. Org. On behalf of Boot Hill Casino and Resort in Kansas, pass-through of per-wager tax may apply in Illinois. 21 and over. Age and eligibility It varies by jurisdiction. Void in Ontario. Restrictions apply. Bet must win to receive bonus bets which expire in seven days. Minimum odds required. For additional terms and responsible gaming resources, see dkng. Co/audio. Limited time offer. Yeah. In fact, if you watch the Octopus Murders, which I think was HBO or Netflix or one of those. That is great. I haven't seen it, but it's awesome. It's fantastic. It goes through how this was used effectively by the NESA during the promise software scandal and the Iran Contra scandal of the 1980s, where you had basically the NESA and then the US government running money laundering effectively through casinos on Native American sovereign territory. But the fact is, in the 1940s, the Vatican Bank was really the only game in town. This traces back at the CIA level to a lawyer named Paul Helawell, who was the of money laundering for the CIA. It didn't even start.
It really started with the attempt to try to stop Mao in the 1930s and 1940s. There were the Opium Wars in the 1830s, where effectively, the British Empire and the East India Trading Company were making ungodly amounts money by selling opium to China. They would grow the opium on the Golden Crescent or India, and then they would sell it to China with a huge customer base, which would bring in huge amounts of revenues to the British Crown. Then there were two opium wars that were fought in the 1830s and '50s, I believe, around that. The opium wars were China's attempt to stop the import of opium into China because it had a huge, by that point, opium addiction problem. Opium dens in China were a massive issue within the country. They tried to ban it, and the British Crown pried open the narcotics market through a military conquest of parts of China. That's how Britain got control of Hong Kong, which remains a major narco-trafficking site connected to Jeffrey Epstein in very weird ways. I'll just sidebar that. But Mao rose to power in the name of... His public campaign was about rejecting the century of humiliation between the 1830s and the 1930s.
To support Shanghai Shek and the Kuomintang, the Chinese nationalists against the Chinese communists, the War Department couldn't get enough congressional allocations, taxpayer money to support that, so they had to find some way to finance the forces that are now effectively Taiwan, because when they ultimately lost, they fled to the island of Formosa, which is now Taiwan. But they financed that initially, the War Department, the Chinese Nationalist, through the narcotics trade, through basically the narcotics cultivated in the Golden Triangle. These operations continued in Cambodia and Laos, and were a big part of the JFK expansion of covert operations. To this day, in Fort Bragg, the Special Operations Training Center is called the JFK. Today, this was a massive expansion of small wars, covert action instead of big military action. It was mostly spearheaded by CIA rather than DOD or Department of War. But what happened was is Paul Hillewel, in order to be able to traffic illegal narcotics, created a bunch of these CIA banking structures. One's called Castle Bank & Trust in the Cayman Islands, another one is Nugent Hand in Australia. When you have that friendly bank that's protected, then you can move drugs.
This is this overworld, underworld alliance between intelligence and organized crime, because basically every intelligence operation is, I don't want to say every, but at the operational level, it's a crime. It's an act of sabotage. It's an act of subversion, it's It's an act of obstruction. It's an act of illegal surveillance. In order to do an illegal crime, you don't want to do it yourself because then your fingerprints are on the gun. But if you know people who do illegal crimes for a living in an organized way and have experience in doing it, that allows you to be a very useful extension, and it gets justified in the name of national security. The illegal narcotics trade set up by Paul Hallowell, who would go on to be the main lawyer for Disney and set up Disney World in Orlando. You can look all this up. You can pull up Paul Hallowell's Wikipedia, or you can look at the history of Disney, or you can pull up Castle Bank and Trust. You can put I'll send one of these up on screen. This is all fully declassified. They then took that model to South America and Latin America and the Caribbean during Operation Condor, Operation Mongoose.
This is part of what gave rise to the Iran Contra that spawned Jeffrey Epstein, which was the CIA got busted running the same thing it did in 1940s China, which was a drugs for cash for guns operation. You can't get enough money in USAID. In the 1940s, USAID didn't even exist. You can't get enough money from US taxpayer dollars. You can't get enough money from private donors who will draft off of the regime change for their own profit. How do you get your resistance rebels enough money? That usually comes down to black market trade, whether that's diamonds in Africa, whether that's illegal mining activities in South America, or whether that's narcotics. The best things to use for this covert financing are small fungible physical materials that can be converted into large sums of cash. For example, a truck full of cocaine can fund an army. A truck full of copper can't. You had this state-sanctioned drug trade, this state-sanctioned illegal weapons, logistics apparatus, and the state-sanctioned money laundering apparatus that started in the 1940s and was utilized throughout the entirety of the Cold War. On the Mafia side, Operation Gladia was this stay behind network is what they said.
Basically, these were right-wing groups, many or some of which were Nazi-adjacent who hated communism. Even though we fought against the Nazis in Mussolini and Hitler in World War II, there was a utility to preserving a certain homegrown domestic network that really hated communism to assist us on the ground in the war against communism. What you saw was in Operation Gladio, this was a NATO-wide, covert network, alliance of networks, a network of networks, that in basically every one of the NATO countries, there was a cell or a number of cluster cells that were set up in order to covertly influence the domestic politics of the country. If you look at the members of these cluster cells, there's some of them. Silvio Berlusconi was a part of the so-called P2 Lounge that came up in the Operation Gladio files when the Italian government basically put all this on trial in the 1990s. That structure is still used by intelligence today. If you go to my X feed and you look up, for example, Anne Applebaum and the thread that I did on the Integrity Initiative, if you just put Integrity Initiative in, I can show you what these cluster cells look like.
It's fascinating to look at the organizational structure of it. But I guess what I'm getting to here is with the mob and the Vatican, at that time, that was the only game town for offshore banking. If you wanted to have a bank that had no oversight whatsoever. When the British lost the Suez Canal in 1957 and basically had to give up their empire, this is during decolonization, the British Empire transitioned from a physical empire to a financial empire and moved heavily into offshore banking. That's how you got these BVI, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Jersey, all these British offshore banking hubs, and with London as the capital of international finance, the British Empire was effectively able to maintain a comparable level of imperial vassal state control without having physical troops or physical territorial control. The Vatican Bank has lost a lot of its rank, I would say, in the international finance system since since the 1940s because the market's so saturated now with offshore banking hubs. But that explains what's happening in this Larry Summer's Jeffrey Epstein exchange.
One of the weirder things about these files is there's some stuff in there that you go, Okay, one thing that we know happens is when something is true, a bunch of stuff gets attached to it that's both not true and also preposterous that allows you to to dismiss all of it together. There's a lot of people thought about that with Pizzagate, and there's some stuff that I saw online that was like George W. Bush was involved in ritual sacrifice or things along those lines, like killing babies and eating people and wild shit. What do you think that stuff is?
I don't know. Do you think it really occurs? What I'll say is This is a bad week to be a total pizza gate denialist. You would feel a lot more comfortable about it a week ago than you would this week. I don't particularly focus or, I don't want to say care. My knowledge set on it is a lot more limited on it because I don't think it's a central crux of political influence. I don't know if it's almost an inside joke in a certain way. Jeffrey Epstein himself in these emails is unbelievably trolley. He'll say things that are the shit posts you say to a buddy or your brother or something that you don't mean. You're fucking around. You're trying to get a cheek, but you If you were a cynical, out to get you person who somehow obtained that text message, you'd say, Oh, look, he said it. And so there's a lot of that going on. But the fact is, I have seen I've seen a lot of images shared around the time period of when Pizzagate was popping off in 2016 that all I say is it doesn't look good or easily explainable at At the same time, a lot of those screenshots, I have not...
For most of these, for the things I've posted about or that I'm talking about here, I've gone to the Justice Department file, I've looked at the file number, I've confirmed whether or not the screenshot is actually what it is. For those, I have not yet, but I would not... I wouldn't feel totally confident saying there's no there, there, but that's about as far as I can go on that.
When you say image What are you talking about?
Well, there's a lot of... If you look up pizza, for example, it's just as a keyword search, you'll see, or cheese or something. It looks in the DOJ database for these new files, you'll see a lot of things of people talking about pizza in a way that- It seems like a code. Is impossible to- To imagine it's actually just pizza. To do to a pizza. That's about why. Oh, okay. You know what I mean? But to me, there's so much real-world, provable things in there, and also so many more real-world implications of allegations that are made in the files that should be explained. A common mistake that I see going around social media this week is people... It gets to the reason that the FBI and the President was arguing that these files shouldn't be released in the first place, which is that people would take things out of context and wildly and think things are true that are not because they're baseless allegations made by some anonymous tipster. But because it's in an FBI file, people will think it's true. Now, I don't think that's a reason not to release these. I'm extremely glad these were released.
What I'm saying is, I've seen that phenomenon run away. Some of this I know is baseless in terms of the factual evidence, because some of the people, one of the confidential human sources, for example, that is cited, the first day of the drop, there was this bombshell claim in the... I think this is probably the most viral post, the first day of the DOJ release, which was a confidential human source, a CHS, means of FBI informant, who the FBI internal memo describes how this confidential human source reported that Alan Dershevitz was a Mossad agent, and after every meeting, he goes back and tells his Mossad handlers what they talked about. You go, Oh, my God, it's an FBI confidential human source. The FBI wouldn't pay an informant unless they found them credible for this thing. On the very next page of the files, it says, President Trump, I'm paraphrasing. You can pull this up if you want. President Trump is controlled by the government of Israel, and they have, I forget if he says they have blackmailing, or something to this effect. Now, I don't know whether either those things are true or not. I don't know what any more than anybody else who's done research on this.
Certainly, there's a lot of overlap between Dershevitz and the Israeli government and high-level Israeli officials. In that sense, if that were to be reported, I don't know that it would be the... Who knows about whether that's true or not? But it plays into a confirmation bias that a lot of people have. When you see that in an FBI file, the first thing your instinct is, if that's your journalism beat, is to write all about it and get millions of views. Same thing, there's a mega civil war right now that's happening over issues around It's real. You say, Oh, my God, it's been proven the FBI knows that... Well, Ken Silva, who's a journalist, shortly after that, published a tweet containing a file that had much less engagement, where he said, Actually, I actually have a copy of this document. Again, I'm paraphrasing here, where it matches that document file number. It's got the text, and it looks like that confidential human source is Chuck Johnson. Now, I saw that and I went, Oh, my God. Because one morning, I woke up to a text from that very person saying, this is about two years ago, I never met him, never talked to him, don't have his number.
Somehow he got mine and messaged me on signal to turn myself in because I'm going to prison. He then proceeded to look up my ex-wife and make allegations that I was a Mossad agent because she was a prostitute from a foreign country and involved in all these Mossad, Black Ops type things. Now, he didn't even get the name right. He found a different person with a similar spelling that was, I guess, busted for prostitution or something, and then makes these giant claims on social media that I have been married to a foreign spy prostitute or something. Then he goes on to message someone he thinks is my donor and threaten them to cut off funds because if he doesn't, then I've made the intelligence community very angry, and they have deputized him to tell the person he thought was my donor that the intelligence services of the United States of America will crush the businesses of someone he thought was my donor if he doesn't cut off the funds he thought that person was giving to me. This is that confidential human source, or at least according to the reporting of Ken Silva. The level of things that are untrue about that, combined with the fact that this very person is going around saying that he's not just an FBI informant, but that he actually can direct the intelligence agencies of the United States to crush someone's private practice if they don't change their discretionary donations to someone.
That's the person you're saying That person's comments to a FBI officer or task force prove these claims about Dershowitz and Trump? I mean, that's ridiculous. I know firsthand that there's zero credibility to those claims. Now, they may be true or not, but the fact is, there's a lot of context to all of these. What is just because it's said in an FBI file does not make it true. We learned that lesson in Russiagate. We learned that lesson with the Steele dossier. But I think that same caution and prudence should be applied with these. I think ultimately the truth wins out on these things. It just takes longer than you might want to.
It's so tangled. The whole thing is just, I think everybody who looks at it realizes this is a rabbit hole that just goes to the center of the earth. And there's so many people involved in that. Here's the big question that people ask. If There was a Jeffrey Epstein, and it seems like all these things he was involved in. Is there a Jeffrey Epstein right now that we don't know about?
There's a million of them. A million of them. I mean, this is why I find this. This is not at the core of what I focus on, but I find it a really interesting field of study because it helps understand so many other US government institutions and the relationship between government and private business. Jeffrey Epstein is part of a class of what are effectively professional fixers. This is a class of professionals who sits not really within a particular government or private sector institution, but in the sticky layer between them that connects them all. I would say that for example, people like Mark Rich, Bruce Rappaport, and I can go through all these figures and who they are, Robert Mayhue and these types, are just good case studies in how the intelligence world, the business community, take an example of Bruce Rappaport. You can pull up on screen if you want. There's a great article. I think it's called I think it's from 1988 or 1991. It's called Intrigue in High Places, Oil Pipeline, Iraq, and then just Bruce Rappaport. It's R-A-P-P. Yeah, here you Pipeline Deal, Intrigue in High Places. I'll describe what happens here in a second.
In fact, there's a great YouTube video on this as well. If you look up Bruce, just on YouTube, Bruce Rappaport, 1988. There's a great a couple of minutes summary of all this. But effectively, what happened was, and let me start this by just Jeffrey Epstein got to Bear Stearns in 1976, I'm sorry, 1976, and then work there until 1980. Sorry, just because you have it on screen, maybe I'll go through this first and then I'll do the Jeff, because the Jeffrey Epstein connection is there. What happened here was you had the Iranian Iraq War from 1980 to 1988. Henry Kissinger had a really great quote about this because he asked, What is the US government strategy on this? Because it's very convoluted. Why are we giving weapons to Iran when the Iranian Revolution just happened in 1979 that, over through what was a US government friendly government that was partially installed by the CIA in 1953. We've now declared an international arms embargo on them. We're basically at war with the Iatollus. Why are we giving them weapons and helping them defeat Iraq? The The issue was we were also in a war over regional hegemony and oil with Iraq.
Henry Kissinger's quote was, My only wish is that both sides could lose. What happened was, is because we didn't want Iraq to take over Iran and become effectively bigger than Saudi Arabia in the region, we were funding and giving weapons to Iran to try to fend off the much bigger Iraqi army. Then at a certain point in this, we began to back Iraq. We went back and forth supporting Iran, Iraq. Iraq, because of the embargoes on it, wanted to build a pipeline to get its oil out, and it was going to pass through Jordan, and it was going to abut against the border of Israel. And a major CIA contractor and CIA-connected private business called Bechtel, highly, highly influential company. There's been many, many, many books written on Bechtel, and Bechtel is alive and well today. If there was a saga, for example, around the Stanford Airnet Observatory, around the censorship industrial complex, when I visited the Stanford Airnet Observatory and I went to the courtyard, the courtyard is sponsored by Bechtel. I think it's called the Bechtel Courtyard. But what happened was is the Bechtel was promised by Iraq a billion contract in 1980's money for constructing this pipeline.
The Central Intelligence Agency and the White House National Security Council, both for geostrategic reasons, wanted this pipeline built. The problem was, is they were afraid the Israeli government was going to sabotage the pipeline because Iraq was very hostile to Israel, and there was a lot of tension between the Iraqi government and the Israeli government. They were afraid that if Bechtal got this contract and built this pipeline, that Israel would... These pipelines are very fragile, and all it... Because it passes close to it, it's very possible that that would happen. It would destroy both the CIA's goal and the private profiteer Bechtel's goal. How do you solve that problem? Well, what the CIA did is... What the national security Security Council, which is the inter-agency that the CIA reports did, is they engaged a private fixer named Bruce Rappaport, who was a Swiss billionaire with close ties to the Israeli government, to backchannel with the Israeli government some secret agreement that would guarantee that they would not sabotage the pipeline. Because the attorney general of the United States, now, again, think about this as well. As I'm saying this, think about Jeffrey Epstein and think about the character of Bill Barr, for example, who started his career for seven years at the CIA, was highly involved in the CIA's Iran Contra, and then was attorney general, both in the 1990s, during the Epstein connected BCCI scandal and the when Jeffrey Epstein killed himself or whatever happened to him.
What happens is, is Bruce Rappaport does indeed use his contacts with the Israeli government to strike an agreement that then allows the... Would allow the project to be green-lit. But it triggers a special prosecutor's investigation of the attorney general himself, Ed Meis, because one of his friends was alleged to be in on the deal. They argued that effectively, that through Bruce Rappaport, the attorney general was striking a secret agreement with Israel to profit himself, a massive conflict of interest. What ended up happening is Bruce Rappaport Rappaport stepped forward and said, No, it wasn't to profit. The terms weren't to profit the friend. It was the terms we secretly reached with Israel is that they were going to get a 30% cut on the revenue of the pipeline, and that's what secured the buy-in. But the fact is, Bruce Rappaport was not... Now, the other part of this is that the National Security Council told basically the overseas development arm of of the US Government, a former US Government Agency, to put American taxpayer funds to help subsidize the pipeline, the Bechtel pipeline. That government agency did not want to put up something like $400 million of taxpayer funds on it because they thought Bruce Rappaport was a very shady Epstein-like figure who had all sorts of sorted details about his own past.
That government agency queried the CIA for all records about Bruce Rappaport, and the CIA gave them a limited hangout. They said, Oh, we only have a few documents that are responsive to it and no red flags. As it turned out, what the special prosecutor compelled from the CIA is that they had a whole dirty dossier on Bruce Rappaport. If they had given that to the US government agency, there couldn't have been support for the pipeline. Now, after all this scandal, the pipeline ended up not being built. But the point is, here you have the same type of person as Jeffrey Epstein, the same regions and countries that are involved in a significant part of the Epstein saga. You have the same structure of the intelligence community, private businesses, and back channel deals with government officials. But because there was no 201 file on Bruce Rappaport, he was not formerly a CIA asset. He was what's called a liaison, a contact, a facilitator, a friend of the station. Doesn't work for the CIA. He's got his own hedge fund. He's got his own basically finance. He'll invest in commodities or foreign exchange or private portfolio companies.
But sometimes he'll work with the CIA. Sometimes he won't. It depends on whether it's good for him. In this case, he thought it was good for him to take this. Who knows what cut he himself got on it. But the fact is, hearing Here you have the same type of… You have every layer of this, from the Justice Department to the CIA, to the private financiers, to the private companies, to real-world geopolitical action. This appears, in my view of it, to be exactly the model that Jeffrey Epstein himself replicated and was on parallel track with for his whole career. I can get into that, but does that make sense in terms of… This type of figure exists basically in every country, in every industry, and they're not all as prominent as Epstein, but I would argue people like Rich, and at the time, Bruce Rappaport, were. They don't all have these child sex trafficking type things.
This is the thing. This is the thing is like, what he was connected with. It makes me wonder, if he didn't have that sick thing where he liked underage girls. If he'd never gotten arrested, which was what, 2008 or something? When did he initially get arrested?
2006. But he was The plea deal was 2008.
If that hadn't happened, if you just got a guy who's getting of-age prostitutes, we probably never hear about this. Yeah. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. To level up your business, you got to level up your website. Squarespace does the heavy lifting for you. Even I use it to power my website. Joerogen. Com is powered by Squarespace. Squarespace gives you every Everything you need to claim your domain, professionally showcase your offerings, grow your brand, and get paid all in one place. Head to squarespace. Com/rogan for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use the offer code, Rogan, to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.
That's crazy. You can imagine very easily why. Because Epstein was involved in fraudulent financial activities his entire career. He was under SEC investigation at Bear Stearns in 1980. When he was involved in a deal, I think it was St. Joe's Mineral Company, which is owned by Seagrums, which was owned by the Bronfman family. He got in trouble with the SEC at that time. As soon as he got in trouble, he left Bear Stearns and went on on his own, but then worked effectively at Bear Stearns off the book for the next decade. According to his own testimony, he had a continuous relationship with Bear Stearns for, I think he said 31 years. It was basically from the moment, from the 1970s, 1976 until 2007, 2008, when Bear Stearns collapsed while Jeffrey Epstein was in jail. But then Jeffrey Epstein, it appears to me almost It's possible that Jeffrey Epstein was not working on BCCI pipeline deals while he was at Bear Stearns. Bear Stearns was one of the three biggest clearinghouses for BCCI transactions. Bcci is the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. Sometimes people call it the Bank of Crooks and Criminals International. It's an incredible saga of CIA banking gone wrong.
It's a bank that was started in Pakistan in 1972 and then grew to be the CIA's main way to covertly back the Mujdat Hadin against the Russians during the Cold War. We backed Osama bin Laden, the CIA. We backed the Islamic Mujdatideen, the radicals who became Al Qaeda and ISIS, with billions of dollars of CIA and MI6 and Israeli and Saudi-facilitated co-support and financial funds in order to do a Cold War operation, just like we talked about with Strange bedfellows backing right-wing organized crime to stop left-wing communism. We did the same thing in Afghanistan through the Pakistan-Afghanistan border to run, covertly run guns to the Mujdat Hadin. In fact, there's a great YouTube video that I always like to play so that you can see it for yourself. It's really short. You can look up 1979's A Big New Brzezinski dropping out of a helicopter to tell the Mujdat Hadin that both God and the United States government is on their side. The reason this clip, I always think, is so fun to play is because this was the very moment in 1979 that Jeffrey Epstein appears to have been involved in the BCCI financing of this very operation.
If you turn the volume up and you start at the beginning. America's road US National Security Advisor, Brejinsky, flew to Pakistan to set about rallying resistance. He wanted to arm the Mujdatideen without revealing America's role. On the Afghan When he was on board in near the Khaiba Pass, he urge the soldiers of God to redouble their efforts. We know of their deep belief in God, and we are confident that their struggle will succeed. That land over there is yours. You'll go back to it one day because your fight will prevail and you'll have your homes and your mosques back again because your cause is right and God is on your side. Now, that is the National Security Advisor of the United States of America. The National Security Advisor is the highest post in the cabinet. It is the person the President talks to every day. All intelligence, military, and statecraft goes through the National Security Advisor. That is the numero uno. He personally, in 1979, this It didn't come out until years later, but we were covertly doing this. To do a covert operation, and this is why I focus on the money side of Epstein from the 1970s to present, because the money in any covert operation is the most essential part.
It's the only thing that is irreplaceable and that if you don't have it, everything goes away. You lose one person, find another one. You lose one The Logistics Hub can create another one with money. You lose money, you lose everything. You lose your ability to pay your informants. You lose your ability to bribe government officials. You lose your ability to win the support of local institutions. We lost Vietnam not really so much because we lost at the kinetic war level, but because we lost the ability to fund it because it got defunded. We literally couldn't do it anymore. There's another great clip just to show how sophisticated CIA money laundering was even by the 1960s. Sorry, I'll stop doing this after running around clip to clip after this, or I'll chill on it. But if you go to my X account, you can also find this on YouTube. There's a great, I believe it was CBS in the 1960s. It's called In the Pay. I think it's called In the Pay of the CIA. But if you type in CIA money laundering, you'll You see this great clip about how sophisticated CIA money laundering was already by the 1950s and '50s.
Because everything the CIA does has to be laundered. It's a spy agency. If it writes a check, if it doesn't conceal the origins of the money, gigs up. Everything that is CIA has to move through some money laundering mechanism. Well, to, I guess, borrow a phrase from the President, somebody's doing the money laundering. You need outside contacts who do not work at the agency or necessarily for the agency to facilitate that money laundering. That was done through, for example, the Pakistanis with the BCCI as well as contacts in London. That is what I believe Jeffrey Epstein was doing his entire career after that, from Towers Financial to his tenure with Leslie Wexner to the way I think that he helped model the Clinton Foundation itself with the Clintons in the early 2000s. And his expertise in that, I think, is what made him useful. Well, it's more the connections of I guess, donors and billionaires around him that made him the most useful. But the fact is, he specialized. When he went out on his own, formerly, he leaves Bear Stearns in 1981 and starts a one-man group called Intercontinental Assets Group out of his New York City apartment.
He's not even 30 years old. Right away, he gets big-level clients like Adnan Khashoggi, who is the, at the time, was alleged to be the world's richest man. He was the Saudi arms dealer. To give an impression of how significant this figure was in the weapons trade. He earned more in commissions from Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and I think one of the other big military contractors than every other commissions agent in the entire world combined. That's why there were rumors that he was the world's richest man. In fact, we actually had legislation passed because of how influential he was. He was the one who, in 1983, flew to the National Security Council, to the White House, to orchestrate the Iran Contra affair. He was the Saudi middleman that was part of this operation where the United States used the Saudi middleman, Adnan Khashoggi, to run guns to Israeli contacts to smuggle into Iran to fight off the Iraqis. I know it's a bit of a long sequence, but effectively, you can think of it as the United States and Israel with Saudi Arabia in the middle. Now, Adnan Khashoggi was one of the major clients of the CIA's BCCI Bank, and he was the host of the CIA's offshore operation that was created in 1976 called the Safari Club.
In 1975, 1976, when the CIA started getting handcuffs put on it with the church committee hearings, Jeffrey Epstein starts his career at Bear Stearns in 1976, the very moment of the biggest shakeup of the CIA and CIA history. At that moment, the church committee hearings were ongoing, and the public was seeing Kolby and Angleton holding up a heart attack gun, how the CIA can kill someone and make it look like they died organically of a heart attack. Operation Chaos had just broke about the CIA funding student groups on American college campuses. Cointel broke. Mk Ultra broke. It was one house of horrors after another on everybody's TV that only had three news stations. Democrats were completely fired up about getting rid of the CIA or putting massive handcuffs on it, which which is what they did. They created effectively what's now the Senate and House Intelligence Committee. So there's oversight of the CIA by the people's representatives. The first year, Carter was in office in 1977, went through what was called the Halloween Massacre, fired 30% of all CIA operations personnel. They massively cut funding. In response to this, you had set of stakeholders who wanted that CIA dirty work to still be doable, but they didn't have the legal authorisation to run it out of the CIA.
What they did is they took the same group of international partners that the CIA had been working with, that includes Saudi Arabia, Israel, the UK, France, at the time, Iran, because this was before the 1979 Iranian Revolution. They were all part of this thing called the Safari Club, which got its name from the Mount Safari It was basically a resort club in Kenya, which was the main hub. Just like Colombia, for example, was the main US government hub for logistics. It was a foothold for our ability to do work in Venezuela or Guatemala or Nicaragua or Brazil. In Africa, Kenya was our main stronghold. But Adnan Khashoggi ran that. This was basically a seven, eight country joint Covert Operations Intelligence Network. It was informal. It wasn't technically the CIA. It was set up in... You can pull the Wikipedia for this, actually, just so you don't need to take my word for it. Like, literally, the sanitized Wikipedia will tell you everything that I'm saying here. It ended up, that network ended up becoming one of the main... If you start at the top, You'll see that there it is on the right, the Fire Club.
It was a Covert Alliance of Intelligence Services formed in 1976 that ran clandestine operations in Africa. Now, what they're leaving out here is that it was also Asia, played a huge role in Pakistan and Afghanistan and the like. But these were all these different countries attempt to offset the restrictions that the Democrats had put on the CIA. When Reagan gets back to power in 1981, you still have these handcuffs on the CIA. You still have the Democrats controlling the House of Representatives. The Democrats did... There was an international arms embargo. First of all, in 1979, the Iranian Revolution happens, and it's blamed on the CIA being cut back. The CIA helped install the Shah in 1953. They argued that if Jimmy Carter hadn't destroyed the CIA, we would still have Iran as a friendly country. We could have stopped this. We could have nipped it in the bud. We could have had people on the ground. It's Jimmy Carter's fault that he cut the CIA that we're in this disaster with the world's third largest reserve of oil and gas and this hugely geostrategic country now being an enemy of America rather than a friend.
An international arms embargo was put on Iran, but then Iraq threatened to invade it, and we didn't want Iraq to take it over. We had to do something illegal if we wanted to help Iran. It was against international law to give them weapons, but if we didn't give them weapons, it was perceived massive geostrategic, geo-political earthquake that we'd lived with for centuries. You had to do one illegal action with the gun running. Then there was an inner party dispute. The Democrats at that time, the majority, did not want to do intervention in Nicaragua. There was an in-party power called the Sandinista government, and there was a rebel faction called the Contras. And Republican donors and stakeholders had interests in Nicaragua and wanted to help the Contras overthrow the Sandinista government. But there was a party dispute. Democrat donors didn't profit from that, and they at the time, had a fairly robust anti-imperialism mindset and were sick of CIA regime change by the early 1980s, after everything that was disclosed in just the previous years. Republicans wanted to overthrow the Nicaraguan governments. Democrats didn't. Democrats had a House majority, and they passed something called the Bolin Amendment, which forbade any US government funds from going to support the contras.
So this put the Republicans in a pickle. By the way, this is what's happening today around Ukraine, if you flip the parties, 100% of Democrats vote for Ukraine funding. The Republican Party is split about it. The inverse of that was happening in the early 1980s. 100% of Republicans wanted to fund the Contras, against what they called the Soviet-aligned Sandinistas, and the Democrats were split. But they successfully passed this Bolan Amendment, so the CIA was in a pickle. How do you How do you run guns to Iran when it's against international law? And how do you fund the Contras when it's illegal to spend US government money to fund them? What they came up with is effectively the structure, I think it's the most useful structure for understanding American statecraft and intelligence activity to this day. What they came up with is what they a structure called the enterprise, which the CIA director Bill Casey referred to as a private, self-sustained, off-the-shelf, stand-alone entity that did not exist within the US government, but was instead it comprised the money came from outside fixers who would then effectively channel donor money and black market trade to fund the Contras.
So the money didn't come from US taxpayers. It didn't come from USAID. It didn't come from an allocation from the US Department of War or foreign assistance from the Department of State. As it turned out, the money came from cocaine and a couple of other things. But this was the famous-Fuhr-Rickey Ross. Yeah, Gary Webb, John Kerry. This was the soup that Jeffrey Epstein was coming up in. A funny story related to this is that the main airline used to transport the drugs and guns in the Drugs for Cash for Guns operation was a CIA proprietary airline called Southern Air Transport. Southern Air Transport was was the proprietary CIA airline, meaning it was owned and operated exclusively by the Central Intelligence Agency. It was the the airline that all these aircraft moved through. Iran Contra was basically the early 1980s up until the mid-late 1980s. It was based in Miami. In 1994, Southern Air Transport, the CIA proprietary airline, which in the intervening time was spun out to not be owned by the CIA, but rather to be owned by someone who had worked for the CIA. At the time, it was owned by the CIA, It's a pretty thin layer there.
But it moved from Miami to Columbus, Ohio, primarily to service the Limited. Oh, I don't know all about this, Joe. I have a video on this. I got to look over at Jay because he's obsessed.
He's obsessed with Patel.
Yeah, I probably told you about this five years ago.
Yeah.
Yeah. Okay. Well, there's a great article, I think, Spook Air on this.
How many roads lead back to Ohio?
Most.
Most, if not all. What is this connection with Ohio?
Well, Ohio was, if you remember, the origins of organized crime in the United States really goes back to the Prohibition era when you had this Midwestern Mafia syndicate around Cincinnati, and then it moved into Dayton and Columbus, and adjacent to Chicago, and this whole hub around Prohibition. Then Prohibition was 1920 to 1933. When Prohibition ended, all these networks went from black market alcohol to black market drugs. Because it was no longer black market, they no longer had a business smuggling alcohol. So they moved into the narcotic space.
Which ones? Which narcotics?
Well, it was primarily opium in the 1930s. This was part of-Opium? Really? Well, yeah, because in the 1930s was when you had, as we discussed, the Department of Wars Alliance with the Shanghai Chek and the Koumentang, the Chinese Nationalists. The supply for, the supply for heroine, for example, for example, It comes from Asia. It comes from the Golden Crescent, the Golden Triangle. The way this logistics chain moved was our CIA war department-backed rebel groups in Asia, they sat territorially on the Golden Triangle. They would cultivate the opium. They would basically fly it out on military aircraft. It went to Europe for processing in France. That was one of the main... This French connection saga, which, again, Jeffrey Epstein is weirdly connected to, and I can tell you about that if you're interested. Then it would go the basically Italian Mafia folks for the transhipment. You had Italian Mafia-controlled docks and ports in the United States, in New York, in New Jersey. You had CIA protected Italian Mafia groups in Southern Italy, which at the time were national security protected because they were our allies against the communists. You had this drug trade to support foreign policy imperatives.
You can run that exercise with pretty much every drug on planet Earth at this point. It makes it very difficult to stop the drug trade because by stopping the drug trade, you're running up against something that your own government considers perhaps unfortunate but necessary logistics hub.
Do you think that's happening right now with Mexico?
Yeah. Whoa. Well, I mean, think about this. Fast and Furious. Yeah. Wasn't that long ago.
The Fast and Furious story is fucking bananas. Tell it to people that don't know, because just the idea that they proposed this and implemented it is so fucking crazy.
Yeah. Well, so this was a scandal during the Obama administration. Eric Holder was the attorney general of the United States. He had to step down because he was held in contempt of Congress for jumping on the grenade and not turning over the Fast and Furious files. Earth to Congress, note to Congress, who wants to be a hero, by the way? You can do the same thing with the Epstein bill with the Fast and Furious files. I think everybody in this war on drugs that we're so gung-ho about, we just captured the President of Venezuela over drugs. It would be awfully nice if you compelled the Justice Department and FBI to turn over the Justice Department and FBI run Fast and Furious files But what happened was, and I believe this had inter-agency approval, meaning the White House signed off on it, the Central Intelligence Agency signed off on it, the Department of Defense signed off on it, the State Department signed off on it, the FBI and ATF signed off on it. This was a gun running operation to send guns to the Sinaloa cartel to have them be able to successfully win a The narco drug war against the Los Zetas cartel.
The Los Zetas cartel was pilfering oil pipelines. Remember, Mexico, the oil wealth of the United States is vastly, disproportionately concentrated in Texas. In West Texas and Southern Texas, where it shares oil fields with Mexico effectively. Those oil fields go in... Mexico is replete with oil. There are many partnerships between United States oil companies and the Mexican government, Pemex and all the different private lines. This is a big point of geopolitical contention. But the fact is, one of the things that organized crime groups do in order to get money for their own syndicate, because They've got effectively military control of a territory is if a pipeline runs through that territory, they can simply cut open the pipeline and steal the oil. This is, for example, what was happening with our CIA IA-backed rebel groups in Syria. We're taking the oil. We would literally... Our spunky moderate rebels would literally cut open Syrian pipelines and take the oil. This was one of the ways to support You can support it with drugs, you can support it with black market oil. And by the way, while I'm on the topic, if you pull up, and I have this on my X, if you type in institute Institute for Peace, or just type an Institute Peace Drugs.
The US government, the US Institute for Peace, told the Taliban not to shut down the drug trade after they took power in 2022. They said it would have a devastating negative impact on the local economy if they didn't keep growing what was then 90, 95% of the... Well, I think, click the next image. Wait, next image. Yeah, here you go. We give the US Institute of Peace. At the time, we gave them $55 million a year. The US Institute of Peace was created by active Congress in 1984.
This is the headline is wild. The Taliban's successful opium ban is bad for Afghans and the world.
Yes, right. Now, remember, just about... The Taliban had just taken back power. That happened in the early Biden administration. The Taliban, if folks recall, cut... The CIA and the US military, as well as their allies, with regional allies, were cultivating the opium on the golden crest for a noble cause to win the Cold War against the evil Soviets. This was a big part of the funding for the Mujdat Hadin. This was one of the big scandals that ended up enveloping BCCI, the CIA's bank, because it was the way... Because it was non-compliant with any banking regulations. It all moved offshore. The drug money, the drug logistics chain that the CIA built for the Mujdatideen, then moved through the drugs money laundering chain at the CIA bank. And this apparatus had scaled for 20 years by the late 1990s, when the Taliban, like the Chinese, wanted to shut it down when the Taliban took power in the 1990s. And they did that. They cut the opium down to effectively zero in 1999. And this is all open source. In Then we invade Afghanistan in 2001, 2003. It becomes a US military occupied zone, and it goes from zero % of the world's heroin to 95% of the world's heroin, all under US military occupation.
In fact, we installed their dictator, whose brother was the main drug kingpin of the whole country. Some of this moved through the Cold War CIA-backed Turkish Gray Wolves outfit. There's a funny quote, I think, in the Michael Hastings article on Stanley McChristol, where Stanley McChristol's team refers to Hamed Karzai's funny little hat that he wore. Hamed Karzai was the CIA installed. Strong man, after we took over Afghanistan, he referred to his hat as the gray wolves vagina. I mean, basically saying this is the drug logistics orifice. But leaving that aside, what I'm getting to is, you have this banking network, you have all these logistics chains. Jeffrey Epstein, when his come up is made through this whole network. It turns out that Bear Stearns opened a trading desk to clear BCCI transactions in 1978. Jeffrey Epstein's mentor, the person who actually recruited him to apply to Bear Stearns, was a guy named Ace Greenberg. Ace Greenberg then was a senior executive at the time, and then, I think in 1978 or In 1979, he becomes CEO, so the head of Bear Stearns. He sets Jeffrey Epstein up with his daughter. Jeffrey Epstein is a young kid.
People wonder, how did Jeffrey Epstein make partner at Bear Stearns so fast? Well, there's a couple of explanations. One is the guy who brought him into the firm quickly became CEO thereafter, and Jeffrey Epstein was dating his daughter. The New York Times actually reported this about a month and a half ago by getting the insider testimony of a dozen people who worked at Bear Stearns at the time. He's dating the boss's daughter, but also Ace Greenberg as the CEO would have to approve all of these transactions, and it looks like was involved in these clearing house activities. What happened was is Bear Stearns cleared about $13 billion worth of BCCI transactions, and it looks like these of Actions were involved in the very same Adnan Kashoggi Society and Doug Lees, who was a British arms dealer that Jeffrey Epstein was flying to London to meet with and working with all those years. Bear Stearns was doing it through this entity called Capcom, which was what the Senate report on the BCCI scandal referred to as the bank within the bank of BCCI. So the inner sanctum of... Now, Capcom was owned by Kamal Adam, who was the head of...
He was the chief spy for Saudi Arabia. So Bear Stearns The New York Times reports, based on a dozen of these insider testimonies, they got three of Epstein's bosses on the record to talk about what he was doing there. Amazingly, the New York Times does not mention a single deal name in the entire 20,000-word report.
Why do you think that is?
It might not be news fit to print. Also, I can be charitable and say they just might not know. They might think that... I don't think that the New York Times has a pinkie of the specialization in Jeffrey Epstein Cinematic Universe knowledge that your random anonymous egg account on X has. So they might not know about Bear Stearns doing BCCI transactions. They might not know what If you don't know the material, you don't necessarily know what to ask. That's me being charitable. Also, some of the witnesses may have said that they don't want to talk about specific deal names because that would tarnish the folks involved in that deal for association with Jeffrey Epstein. There could be a lot of reasons. I'm trying to be charitable here. But the fact is, they all said Jeffrey Epstein moved up so fast because he was dating the boss's daughter, and he was put on the biggest and most lucrative deals very quickly within the firm. And given the incredible volume that Bear Stearns appears to have been moving through BCCI, and The BCCI being the hottest ticket in town then in the late 1970s, it was literally the main vehicle for the US government to covertly launder funds.
Capcom, according to the Senate intelligence report and the Justice Department investigations was the main vehicle for funding the Mujdat Hadin, 50% of those trades, and they laundered it illegally, which requires a brokerage, a clearinghouse to prove it. The way this is set up is you have a bank, you've got a money launder, and you've got a clearinghouse. The bank was the CIA Bank, BCCI. The money launder was the CIA's literal direct partner in this, the Saudis, Capcom was run by the Chief Saudi Spy Master. And then in 1982, Jeffrey Epstein obtained a fake Saudi passport of I'm sorry, it was a fake Austrian passport because that was a big loophole passport during the Cold War for spies, but said his residence was Saudi Arabia. We didn't find this out until 2019 when his safe was raided. But that exact time, Jeffrey Epstein has this fake Saudi passport It's being done to support the CIA-backed rebel group, the Mujdatideen in Afghanistan. But that requires a clearinghouse to clear those money laundering trades. They were using these mirrored commodities trades, which is this technique of basically selling to yourself to make money look clean so that it looks like profit.
It looks like you won or lost it in a market trade rather than through drug money. Then they were then sending that on to the Louis Jadine. But the fact is, at the same time that that was happening, Anand Khashoggi, who had become Jeffrey Epstein's client in the 1980s when he went on his own, was the one facilitating the weapons. You have this drugs for cash for guns, the The person, so the bank that's moving, that's turning the drugs into clean cash, that the head of the Saudi spy master is running that part of the banking side. Then you've got the Saudi arms dealer who is moving it illegally into Iran, working hand in glove with the CIA and the National Security Council the whole time. You have a You have a illegal financial enterprise protected at the highest level by the United States government, the US intelligence services, and by proxy, the Justice Department itself. Can you imagine the Justice Department prosecuting it while that operation was ongoing? Any defendant... You asked what are the great reveals in the JFK files, and I'd be remiss if I didn't bring up the case of Rolando Masfer.
There's an incredible document in the JFK files that Tulsi Gabbard released last year, which is a CIA document that describes, I think the quote, as massive damage if the Justice Department pursues a criminal case against a guy named Rolando Masfer. If you just type in Rolando Masfer, JFK files 2025 release, or massive damage or something like that, you'll see this. It's an unbelievably incredible document. What it documents is that there was a dispute between the CIA and the State Department. The State Department sets foreign policy. The CIA is supposed to serve covertly the State Department. The CIA is the junior seat at the table. Nobody ever goes from being head of the State Department to head of the CIA. That's a demotion. The CIA is supposed to be the, I use like the Sopranos reference. Silvio comes in and shakes down the hairdresser shop or whatever for the money it owes the family. If you are that hairdresser, it's easy to think that Silvio runs the Mafia because he's the one who shows up at your house, breaks your windows, breaks your knuckles, and takes your money. But Silvio is not doing that because he runs it.
He's doing it because the person setting the policy of the enterprise Tony, is the boss of it. The way it's supposed to work is the State Department sets policy, and the CIA organizes the plausibly deniable dirty work to achieve it, if that is necessary to achieve that foreign policy. This is why there was a lot of debate in 1948 about whether the CIA should even take on this role. This is this great 1948 George Kennen memo that says maybe we should have a office within the State Department called the Bureau of Organized Political Warfare. Then two months later, they decided the CIA would take that. But the fact is, it's basically a State Department function, but CIA is supposed to defer to state. But what happened was there was a factual dispute between and CIA, over Cuba policy. The State Department thought that the CIA-backed rebel groups in Miami were being too aggressive and too provocative, too hot-headed, doing acts of terrorism and sorts of things that looked bad to the international community. Jfk was trying to rein them in. But the CIA, the careers and folks there, wanted to take a more aggressive posture.
One of the CIA's key assets and ring leaders, head of a logistics hub with a massive CIA-back Cuban exiled community network, at that time in the early 1960s in Miami, thought that JFK was being too impatient, too cautious. They wanted to invade basically a section of Haiti departing from Miami to use that as a base to then do Connecticut tax against Cuba. The State Department learned that this CIA-backed network, led by Rolando Masfer, was going to do this and stopped it. They had a customs and Border agent, basically, who was like manning the docks and caught them as 300 of them were departing to try to take over a part of Haiti to do this. Then the State Department directed the Justice Department to pursue criminal charges against Rolando Masfer. In steps, the CIA. If you can find this memo, it's M-A-S-F-R. I think it's F-E-R-R-U-R, Rolando Masfer. It's His name is on it. The title of it is massive damage that would accrue. You can probably also just find it on... Yeah, massive damage. There we go. Estimate of damage which could accrue to CIA Miami through prosecution of the Rolando Masfer, Haitian invasion Group.
Again, we just learned the existence of this document last year. This is from the 1960s. Now, it says, The decision by the Justice Department to seek a grand jury indictment against Rolando Masfer and certain of his associates is a potentially explosive matter which could result in extensive damage to CIA activities in Miami. Recent adverse publicity on the national scene and in the Miami area have added substantially to the already sizable embarrassment potential. Can you imagine what these memos look like for Jeffrey Epstein? Some of the main sectors of danger to CIA equities are described below. Basic national publicity regarding student and foundation topics have already attracted attention of the local press to the CIA in general. Usually, any reference to CIA covert activities leads press to check files for references of any such activities locally. However, before this action can be taken, the The story regarding, and then he goes over the Pan Am Foundation, the University of Miami, which was what hosted J. M. Wave, the University of Miami. Then the CIA's largest station house in the world, it was called J. M. Wave, was hosted in a facility off of the University of Miami campus.
Again, the biggest CIA station house in the entire world. It goes on to say that, okay, there have been all these... The top paragraph is saying, We're under a lot of pressure, Justice Department. The public is already losing support for the CIA because of all these other disclosures, and it will be disastrous if you pursue the prosecution of him because Rolando Masfer is going to squel. I think if you go down to the next page, he says, as has been the case for the past six years, and he says basically, the CIA has been working with the President and Treasurer of the University of Miami. They're extending the Cooperation and all this. Basically, all these touch points that Rolando Masfer's network connects to will be exposed, and they go over all these what were previously redacted CIA cutouts in the area. Then the memo says, Even if the above circumstances do not exist, we would remain concerned regarding the possible effects of the prosecution of the Masfer Group. Although no station agents or persons with whom the Miami station has contractual arrangements are among the persons arrested or those who will be prosecuted, it It will be very easy for the defense to drag CIA Miami into the case.
The defense has only to obtain testimony, true or perjured, they can see it would be true, from one of the defendants or someone as defense witnesses one or more disaffected former agents of the CIA station in order to begin a chain reaction surfacing such detail and rumor concerning CIA operations against the Cuban target. Given the sizable reduction of infiltration and general feeling of frustration and lack of support for Cuban freedom, attributed to passive US policy, basically saying it would undermine our entire operation against Cuba and the American people's support for it. If the Justice Department It bites these people who just committed this crime because the whole network is CIA, and they can just call to the stand that their friends and associates had been talking with the CIA about this well before they had done That would be a massive scandal. Now, that's just one example here. What goes on to happen is there's a negotiation between the State Department and CIA about whether to bring the case, how to bring the case, how to shape. There's a follow-up memo on this, which is totally That would be incredible. That, I think, is more the logistics on this.
The agreement they reach is that the State Department wins nominally. They do bring the prosecution, but they bring it in a highly limited and tepid way, and they agree to the CIS demands to limit lines of inquiry, to file motions against entering anything into discovery that might basically reveal the CIA networks in this. They agreed to have a CIA general counsel person on the prosecution team in order to personally make sure that the justice department stays in line. If something looks If the judge grants discovery for something that might reveal the CIA's role in it, drop that line of prosecution so that it can't be entered into evidence. This is what you see time and again is how these networks get protected, whether it's drug cases, whether it's foreign policy scandal cases, whether it's money laundering cases. I believe in the Mark Rich case, I think his lawyer cited at one point, or maybe it was in his pardon application, the work that he had done for US intelligence services is part of the reason that he should be granted leniency. But the point I'm getting to here is, given Jeffrey Epstein's involvement in the BCCI Network, given Jeffrey's involvement in the 1990s with all the foreign policy activities happening in the Middle East at that time, given Jeffrey Epstein's involvement through the early 2000s Clinton era and everything, given his involvement in everything from Israeli to Saudi to British to French high-level government officials.
Jeffrey Epstein was investigated by the SEC in the 1980s. He was one of the two people who ran the biggest Ponzi scheme in history at the time in the United States, the Towers financial collapse. Epstein's business partner goes to jail for 30 years or 20 years or whatever. But Epstein skates completely free. Epstein gets involved in this huge fraud in the US Virgin Islands with this billion-dollar fraud case in the US Virgin Islands. Never prosecuted for any of it. Why is that? Well, one is he may have... We know in the US Virgin Islands case, he was sponsoring the campaigns, basically, the politicians there. The prosecutor's answer to the politicians could be that. But I would be shocked if there In 40 years of this Where's Waldo, Forest Gump, he's always in the room in 40 years of American foreign policy and intelligence activity money sourcing for that for all the crimes that Epstein committed, the concern was the same one they had with Rolando Masfer. Don't bring the case, and if you do, bring it in a highly limited way. That's exactly what happened in 2006, the first time he was indicted. Everybody was in arms that it was a sweetheart plea deal.
It limited, it gave protection to all co-conspirators, known and unknown. It was swooped in quickly before there was a trial in full so that lines of evidence couldn't be opened about the network.
It's just crazy that statutory rape is what took it all down, right? Because it's underage hand jobs, right? That's what took it all down.
Yeah, I mean, it seems to be what took Jeffrey Epstein down.
Kind of crazy.
Even that has a really interesting geopolitical history. There was a similar scandal in the early 2000s with a private military contractor called Dyn Corp, which again runs through this Adnan Kashoggi Middle Eastern network. Dyn Corp got in trouble for were trafficking, facilitating the traffic. It was a major US military and CIA contractor for logistics and institutional support and military assistance on the ground for the US military all over the world. They got in trouble basically trafficking underage kids to Middle Eastern shakes. I I believe in the early 2000s, and I believe the reason that was alleged by Congress that they did that was to juice the deals with them, that basically these people who were critical. If you're operating on the ground in Kuwait or... Pick your Middle Eastern country. In order to serve If your purpose for the US government to be this outside, plausibly deniable, but extensively infrastructured professional support outfit on the ground, you need the support of the local government. You need the support of the local high-level officials. They need to be happy. There's several currencies for that. There's financial payoff, and there's other things they might like, like parties and young women, especially in places where being with the very young female is not It's legal.
What Dyncorp, I believe, got busted doing, and you can look up the Dyncorp scandal here, was doing this, and I believe their argument was, Well, you wanted us to do this thing on the ground. You wanted us to help the US military and covert support nodes that were happening here. We had to do it somehow. This is part of what helped us do that. I would not be surprised the Epstein trafficking apparatus started with similar motivations. It's not necessarily for blackmail, but because it makes clients or customers or VIP people happy. It makes them owe you something. It makes them want to get involved in a deal you do, even if the deal is not one they would ordinarily do because they just want to stay close to you because you're their supplier of their vice, of the thing that they want but can't get. If you're a 70-year-old billionaire, you walk into a bar, and leave aside the underage thing, you can't walk into a bar and... Leave aside the underage thing. You can't walk into a bar and meet an 18-year-old who's, I presume. These things are facilitated at private parties. For a lot of these guys, it has to be discrete.
They've got wives, they've got reputations. There's an aspect of this that plays out at every institution. I worked at a New York law firm, and there's ways that you can make partner. At least this was the vibe that I felt. Some people make partner because they're really good technically what they do. They're just amazing. They're just technical whizzes on the minutiae of how to structure a merger or acquisition. They're just really great at structuring an offshore banking transaction, or they just know absolutely everything about tax law. There's some people who move up because of nepotism. They're the brother and the son-in-law of a major partner. There are some people who make partner because they know one... They brought in one client who's just a really big rainmaker. There are some people who move up because they open doors to partners while they're associates. They introduce them to someone. They host events. They've got tickets to exclusive things. The partners just like being around that person because they get access to that person in a currency that they can't get on their own. That includes hosting cool, exotic parties, having attractive women. I've never been convinced that the central role of the Epstein young girl, in my view, sidebar of the Epstein money laundering story is that it was for blackmail.
Part of this is because the moment Jeffrey Epstein officially threatened somebody with blackmail, and that person tells his wife, and that wife tells her friends, and that gets out to somebody else that knows Jeffrey Epstein. Jeffrey Epstein's access goes away overnight. That's the thing that even a rumor of that spreading, and nobody else is going to want to do business with them.
So you think people just assume it's blackmail because that is how you would blackmail someone, especially underage girls?
I think it is very possible that there could have been indirect blackmail, meaning Epstein passes it on to an intelligence service, to a corporate espionage client or something, and they use that for their own purposes. But even then, I mean, imagine, for example, if on the Bill Gates thing, Bill Gates gets an email, I have video of you sleeping with this person or somebody much lower level. The moment they send that to the press, they figure they have nothing to lose. There's not been anybody in the seven years that's transpired who said, I was personally blackmailed by Jeffrey Ips. I think because the moment you do that, nobody comes to your parties anymore. You lose all the access, you lose all the deal flow, you lose all the goodwill that you've generated because this rumor People are very risk averse, especially at that level. Right.
But just to have it over their head and never use it, though.
Right. Well, I think that what you could have is because he does his own nefarious stuff, he could compile it so that if they ever threaten him with something, he's now got something on them. I've seen some correspondence in the files that looks like that might not be an impossible scenario.
Do you think that's how Jeffrey Epstein got in that position in the first place, that they knew he had this kink?
No, not at all. I mean, Adnan Khashoggi had the same thing. Adnan Khashoggi was running around with dozens of young and apparently underage girls the whole time. I think that Jeffrey Epstein probably learned how powerful that can be through that network, seeing that that's what powerful people do that gives them something that gets them a lot of local influence and wins them a lot of favor.
That's a very specific illicit desire to want underage people. How do you even find out that someone's into that?
Well, I don't think that the majority or anything close to it of the women were technically. I think it was largely very young, barely so to speak. I know that there were cases of underage, but I think- Most of it was just girls. Most of it was just very, very young, but not like- Like 20-year-old girls, 18-year-old girls. Not like 13-year-old type thing. Then, yeah, remember, Because this is an international enterprise, and many of the clients are in countries that don't necessarily have the same norms about that that we do, you can very easily see someone getting involved in that just because girls juice deals. I don't think that Epstein... I've not seen evidence, and in my view, you don't need any of that to understand the core part of the Epstein story that is relevant to your life today in terms of your own government and the workings of power and corporate finance and the like. But I do think that girls juice deals and the fact that he had the coolest parties on a private island with the hottest girls is something that makes- Also brought in a lot of intellectuals, stimulating conversations, scientists, all these very interesting people.
So that was part of the thing, right? That was the draw.
Try hosting a cool party as a guy with a bad ratio, so to speak. Sausage party. With a sausage party. When you develop a reputation for having attractive women at the parties you host, you become You become an important person to know in the network, because basically every male has a desire for attractive women, not saying underage, obviously, but that is like a universal biological desire for men to want to be around attractive women.
What did they do for gay guys?
I have no idea.
Is that a part of the file or the The lure?
I've not seen evidence of it, or if I have, I can't recall it offhand.
But the whole point is he's throwing these very attractive, cool parties to get all these people together.
But that's what chooses deals.
Right.
If you take this scenario. Epstein's running a fund. A donor, a colleague, someone that he'd like to do a favor for or an intelligence service says, Hey, we're trying to get a pipeline built in the Middle East. We need a facilitator to help arrange private outside funding for it so this thing can be constructed, and it doesn't look like it's coming from the US government, but the US government will provide some loan guarantee or something on it, but we can't raise enough money to do this. It needs to come from the outside, but it would really help American national security, and there's probably something in it for you if you can get this done. Epstein then goes out and then puts out basically, tries to make contact with people in his network who might be interested in that deal, and then goes and see, it goes out to five people. Two of them are in the space locally. The deal terms look good. They want to do it 100%, no hesitation. Then two people say, Well, listen, it's a good idea and concept, but I don't know, the risk profile on it looks a little high.
This normally would not be something that my team would clear. It's It's interesting, but it's a little rich for my blood in terms of the risk profile. But Jeffrey Epstein asked them to do it. Jeffrey Epstein, for the past three years of their lives, has been the best weekend they've ever had, has made them feel alive again in their mid-fifties or '60s, has opened all sorts of other deals for them. This deal might work out. I'm afraid that if I say no to Jeffrey Epstein on this deal, I'm not going to get an invite to the next party. I'm not going to be able to get laid again with a girl, with women I find attractive or that yada, yada. And Epstein hooks those up. I'll get in on this deal just because I want to be in the good graces of Jeffrey Epstein, not because the deal is a stand-alone thing. It's because it's juiced by the girls, the parties, the lifestyle that Epstein allows you to have access to.
But in the public eye, the narrative is underage girls, and this is the thing that makes it so disgusting. When people talk about it, everyone says, Fuck kids on the island. This is the big conspiracy about it, and this is the reason why people are so outraged about it.
My concern with the runaway train on that is that it's a massive manhunt for something that it may be true. To me, it's a needle in the haystack. It might be true Good luck looking for it. When I think about it, logically, with the role that Epstein played between BCCI, Iran Contra, Latin American politics, African politics, Asian politics, major world foundation, you don't need... It would seem ludicrous to me that Epstein It doesn't mean it's impossible. But logistically, if Epstein ever directly threatened someone proactively, that is, if the person tries to blackmail Epstein, Epstein could reactively say, Well, I've got shit on you, too. But proactively and really do someone in like that, and word gets around that that happens, everything he built goes that the whole Rolodex finds out. Then even if the rumor is not... Even if that rumor... Even if he didn't, if that rumor existed, people aren't going to want to go to the parties because now that's not an unfettered good time. That is like, Oh, he did this to this guy I know. In the fact that these things, they have a value way beyond blackmail. They have a value in terms of bringing people in network and keeping clients and customers happy and providing access.
I think I think that the focus on that... Listen, if there were any receipts whatsoever on that after all these years, if there was something really good to chew on on that thread, I'm open-minded about it. But my concern is the fixation on this. You think about the pie chart of what the Epstein Cinematic universe can tell you about the world. Even if it's true, it's a very, very, very small fraction of that. And this gets back to in 1999, I mentioned Jeffrey Epstein foyed the Central Intelligence Agency in 1999 for all records about himself. And then he did it again in 2011. Now, Jeffrey Epstein was not a public figure at all in 1999. He didn't come into public awareness, public attention until 2001, 2002, when he flew Bill Clinton around, post-Presidentcy Bill Clinton around, on his Africa tour around the time of the start of the Clinton Foundation. Everyone was wondering, whoa, who's this eccentric billionaire who is personally flying around on his private jet the President of the United States for the past eight years? That's when the Jeffrey Epstein celebrity story started. But he was a private figure in 1999 when he foyed the Central Intelligence Agency for records.
We just learned this in the files this week. The response, we don't actually have the underlying... What's in the files is a 2011 foya response to Jeffrey Epstein's lawyer. Jeffrey Epstein did this through his lawyer using the Privacy Act. This is a way to basically give anonymously for you the CIA, to basically keep communications between the CIA and your lawyer for information you're entitled to under the Privacy Act about yourself. We don't have the underlying letter in the files, tragically, and for whatever reason. But what we do have, because I would expect that to be an enclosure to the CIA response. But the fact is, Anybody who wants to be a hero right now, and I have it up on my X account, I have in the thread that I did on this, the file reference numbers. These are not classified documents. Foyer responses are not classified. So anybody right now can foya the Central Intelligence Agency for all records and communications related to the CIA's written communications with Jeffrey Epstein via his lawyer, both in 1999, 2011. But the 2011, what it says is, We have received your request for your client Jeffrey Epstein's records search under the Freedom of Information Act.
We We granted the request to search for all open and acknowledged agency affiliations between Jeffrey Epstein and the CIA. We have run that search, and the answer is no documents are responsive to the request. And then it says in the next paragraph, With respect to your request that touches on classified documents, we can neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence of any such documents. So you can consider this a partial denial of your Voya request. Now, what's so interesting about that is you may think if you read that, that Jeffrey Epstein just requested Any public-facing links between him and the CIA? Or just a general, what do you have on me that the public can search just to see? First of all, the fact they did that alone twice in 1999, 2011 says something. But you might think, okay, well, he just wants to know if other people might think that he's CIA. He's moving up in the world in 1999. He's about to be a massive public figure. He wants know if other people, foia the CIA for records on him, what they will see. But it turns out that response to a Foya, partial granting of the Foya to look for open and acknowledged agency links, and partial Glomar, neither confirm nor deny existence/nonexistence, is a stock CIA foia response whenever you foia the CIA for someone's personnel files, which leads to the question...
Because the fact that the CIA says, We consider this a denial of your request for classified, for things that touch on classified matters means that he didn't just ask for all open and acknowledged links between the CIA and himself. He asked for something, and whatever that thing was, it touched on something classified. There would have been no Glomar. There would have been nothing to deny about the request if it had only been limited to open and acknowledged links. To me, this is a bombshell and should prompt O'Kana and Thomas Massey and the 427 members of the House of Representatives and 100% of the US Senate to pass the same bill that the United States Congress did in 1992 for the JFK Records Collection Act, when the CIA was forced by law to stand up an independent auditing body to review all classified records relating to the JFK assassination for the first time ever and then declassify them over months and years through the work of that independent board. The existence of this correspondence we just learned about this week alone should prompt a 427 to one and 100% Senate to do the same thing they just did with DOJ files for CIA-originated files.
That's actionable immediately. Who's going to want to be on the other side of that in Congress? No, the CIA's records about Jeffrey Epstein, prolific child sex trap, however you want, whatever you see in the Rorschach inkblot test of the Epstein universe. I think it would be very hard to be if that bill gets introduced for a sitting member of Congress to be on the other side of it? I think it would pass, and it would legally compel the CIA to turn over what I think are quite possibly, arguably very likely, 40 years of CIA documents referencing Epstein. The CIA would not be doing its job if it didn't have records about Jeffrey Epstein. Jeffrey Epstein was a counterintelligence threat with all the foreign countries that he was dealing with if he had been a double agent thing. The CIA would not be doing its job if it was not keeping that. Epstein's network was a key financial logistics hubs in highly geopolitical sensitive areas of operation of the CIA. The economics division of the CIA, let alone the operations division, is going to have to keep analysts informed about money flows in those countries. When you add, and then You add in the fact that he represented Anand Khashoggi's money, who was the CIA's main point person for 10 years, the literal central linchpin in his money is being handled.
There's no way. You would now have a legal mechanism to enforce CIA declassification if Congress forces it. Now, the other part of it is, okay, why hasn't the CIA turned this over before? You could argue it's a Rolando Masfer case. It would embarrass the agency. It It would mean in Congress, their funding is going to get decimated because they're toxic. You can argue it's foreign governments that don't want that. But part of it is the CIA is not allowed to do this unless the Congress forces them. These are classified documents. I mean, it could charitably volunteer to OD&I by conducting an internal task force that voluntarily asked Tulsi Gabbard to de to classify these. I wouldn't hold your breath on that. But this is immediately actionable, and it would solve the mystery. All we need is one brave member of Congress to get the ball rolling and stand up that bill. You can just copy Caste, the 1992 JFK Records Collection Act, and just substitute JFK for Jeffrey Epstein.
What's your take on the circumstances around his death?
I don't know.
It It's weird that they took a guy who is one of those high-profile defendants ever, and you put him in jail with a mass murder. Yeah. Kind of crazy. You put him in jail with a cop who had killed drug dealers. A juiced up, gigantic cop who was obviously a psychopath. And then 18 days before he died, he complained that that guy tried to kill him.
Yeah. I mean, it It doesn't look good.
It's just crazy that this guy wasn't in protective custody. It's crazy that the cameras go down. It's crazy that the footage that they've released is weird because it's missing time.
And it's crazy that it happened under the watch of an attorney general who himself was so deeply embedded in the Epstein Network his whole life. I mean, from the weird coincidence of Bill Barr's father, Donald Barr, and Jeffrey Epstein's Dalton to the fact that Bill Barr started his career in the CIA during the Iran Contra operation that Jeffrey Epstein appears to have been doing the covert money laundering for. I mean, Bill Barr was seven years. He went to a night law school, trained to be a lawyer while he was at the CIA. Then his main job was being the CIA's blocker and tackler to obstruct. He was the CIA's point of contact to Congress during the Iran Contra scandal that Jeffrey Epstein was so deeply involved in and was blamed in the press at the time for being the person at CIA, blocking Congress from seeing the CIA documents that were so central to the scandal. Then he becomes the attorney general of the United States, and he writes the pardons of the BCCI officials, who was co-leading that investigation, Robert Mueller at the time. This is in the early 1990s, the first time, Bill Barr.
So You have the BCCI Bear Stearn's multibillion-dollar operation that appears to me that Jeffrey Epstein was working on and then took the clients from that deal as his own personal clients when he went private on his own. Bill Barr is who lets the people from the Crooked CIA Bank off the hook. Then he becomes attorney general again. In 2019, he's the one in charge of the FBI. The FBI answers to the Justice Department. The FBI is the same relationship with justice that the CIA has with state. They're the investigative arm of the Justice Department. I think it's hard to trust anyone on this. I don't know what file set the Trump FBI inherited after all this time. It's hard to make heads or tails of it. To me, I think getting answers on things that are immediately actionable, getting the CIA's direct correspondence with Jeffrey Epstein that I mentioned, a congressional bill that forces that, because if it comes out that there are effectively an entire avalanche of classified Epstein files dating back 40 years. And then you've got the CIA attorney general. It puts these things in a very different light, depending on whether The thing that has generated so much smoke this whole time, the allegation of protection by US government intelligence and however many others, to know that on physical paper, like we know that the CIA interfered in the Rolando Mass for a trial, like we know that the CIA contracted out to Mafia Hitman in attempt to kill a foreign president, like we We know that MK Ultra actually was real.
These things you can't scale. I think of things like a Jenga tower. If a foundational piece is not solid, you can scale a whole architecture of BS on top of it. And if that assumption falls away, this majestic-looking tapestry of just years and years of effort it collapses because the thing you assumed to be true because it looked like there was so much smoke, to know it to be true, that that is a solid piece that you can put the next piece on top of, it There's that quote, 99% is a bitch, 100% is a breeze.
What does that mean?
It means when you're only 99% sure of something, you always have to agonize. Well, if it's not true, and I think it is, and I build all this stuff on top of it, the 1% chance that that's not true means it would be a real bitch for me to spend years of effort on this thing, for me to spend millions of dollars on this thing when it's based on an assumption that was only 99% likely to be true. But 1%, it may have been structured some way different. There might be something I missed in this. Whereas 100% is a breeze. Okay, it's automatic. Things like this is why document drops like this are so vital. Not even necessarily because they have some single smoking gun that tells you who killed JFK or what client Jeffrey Epstein trafficked women to, but because it allows you to put down real Jenga pieces about what actually happened. And that process itself allows you to ask the questions that might get you to those answers.
It makes a lot of sense. Is there anything else you want to add to this? I mean, we could go on for days.
Yeah.
You spend so much time on this stuff. How do you have that an attention span? It's nuts. I I follow some of your live streams. I'm like, first of all, your recall is insane.
I heard something once, which I think is really helpful. I don't think I'm special in any way like this. I think literally anyone can do this if you just apply this trick. I heard this once, which is that if you read a history book, don't just read it agnostically. Have a theory in mind about what you think this is and how it worked. Even if you are wrong about that theory, what you will find is that names, dates, locations, your brain will remember them forever because they're not... If I'm thinking about something that happened in, I don't know, like November 11th, 1983. If I see that date on a driver's license card or something, and I have no theory of mind when I see that, I'm not going to remember that five minutes from then. It's going to be like trying to remember your eleven string number or like someone's cell phone or something when you don't really know the person or you haven't dialed it a million times. But if you have a theory of mind that you are indexing those things in relation to What you find is that your brain keeps those in that index.
I've joked, because we've talked about this Iran Contra affair, which was really the creation of this apparatus that we live under today, where because the CIA got handcuffs put on it, everything had to become CIA to get around those handcuffs. The universities had to be, the foundations, the private philanthropic donors. This is what happened in the industrial complex. It was all wrapped around this. But what you find is those dates mean something to you because they're placed in relation to something else that happens. I joke that I index things by Iran Contra often, For example, when I was studying about BCCI and I learned, okay, this happened in 1984, I don't just think about 1984 as an abstract thing. I think, Okay, well, that means it happened after the meeting between Robert McFarlon and Anand Khashoggi, but before the oil pipeline scandal of Ed Meese. I remember that this thing happened on this date because I place it in the index. I think it's something that anyone... I think people organically do it when they're really passionate about something. This is an easy thing to be passionate about because It gets to the heart of networks that are the determining power structures of your life.
When you look up and then you look up at the thing that you're looking up at and you look up at the thing above that, this is the network you see, whether it's an intelligence, military, statecraft, high finance, private philanthropies, universities, labor unions, scientific research. It doesn't mean it's the Epstein network, so to speak, but it's this layer of interconnected human networks. I think it's an important history for the American people to have access to so that they can make informed decisions about how they want to change that world, how they can make informed decisions about what to vote for, they can make informed decisions about what industries that they're participating in that they might want to see reformed. It makes it easy to be passionate about because if we can get a win here, it'll really change the world.
Well, I think you do a great service, and I think your abilities are exceptional. I think you're selling yourself short a little bit. You're being a little self replicating because it's very unusual what you're able to do. I think just the sheer amount of time that you've invested in this stuff is mind boggling.
Well, what would you like to see in this? If you had a wishlist, what are the things that are open threads?
Well, the real concern with me is that it's unfixable and that this is just a standard way that our government has operated since the 1950s or whenever, and it can't be fixed, and that they'll just gloss over it. A new person will get into office and promise that they're going to implement some reform, and it never happens, and that we just accept over and over and over again. That's the real fear. The real fear is that there's a slow capture of our democracy to the point where it's just a mere illusion. That's the real fear. And I think a lot of people think that we've already passed the point of no return on that. That's what scares the shit out of a lot of people. And then when you see things that are happening in other countries, like particularly England, which is just rampant crackdown on free speech and what the the arrests from people that are posting things on social media sites and the implementations of there's a new thing that they tried to do, or I think they are doing this concept of having a limited amount of time so you can drive outside of a zone, and after that, you have to pay for it.
That's a new thing, right?
Yeah. I can send Jamie that. Smart cities type concept.
I can send this to you, Jamie, because I just sent it to Konstantin because it appears to be real, and it's terrifying.
Your carbon budget.
Yeah, that's nuts. Well, look at what California is doing right now. What California is doing is they are taking or they're moving forward with this, the idea Yeah. That you have a tax on the amount of miles that you drive now. So instead of just taxing gas like they've always done, now they're taxing you on the amount of miles that you drive. You're already getting tax on that. If you're driving more miles, you're spending more money on gas. So you're spending more money on tax. But now they're taxing on top of that, which is essentially they're stealing money. Where can I find it? Forward here. Here we go. Hold on a second. Jamie, you're on Signal, right? I can get it to myself.
It is really interesting how that whole thing started.
I sent it to Jamie on Signal.
But it's crazy that the California thing is bananas. It just says, wow. That's it? It doesn't have the link?
Okay, hold on. Sorry. Maybe this is it. Hold on a second.
I think there's a really interesting underdeveloped history around the origins of the climate climate, the 2005, 2006, 2007, really global warming climate policy push from the US government that became a runaway train as investor money rushed in. It's my opinion, and I'm open-minded about it, but it appears to be the case, in my view, after a study of this, that the US government, together with foreign allies, pursued this demonization of carbon at a real policy level or hydrocarbon-based fuels as a geo-political battering ram against newly resurgent Russia in the mid-2000s, as Putin was getting power back over a bunch of post-Soviet Eastern satellite countries through basically pipeline, exploiting his leverage around pipelines and the fact that this is like the John McCain type quote, that Russia is a gas station with the military. You hear that a lot. Gazprom, the state-sponsored oil company, was effectively the biggest oil company. Gazprom was for gas, but Ross Naftin. Russia had at one point, the largest oil exports in the world. It was the motor engine of their economy, oil and gas. The relationship between Russian oligarchs and businessmen and Eastern European Russian oligarchs and businessmen allowed that hydrocarbon-based dependency and financial opportunity to let Putin reassert Russian control over Central and Eastern European countries that NATO was trying to turn into Western vassal states, essentially.
In the 1990s, this wasn't an issue because Boris Yeltsin was the President, and he was effectively an adjunct of the US government, incidentally, through Larry Somers and the Jeffrey Epstein Harvard Network. There became this push after Russia's interventions in Georgia and the like, and a big attack on a lot of high-level Republican. Basically, I think this push to try to create a shift in the types of energy the world uses was a way to kneecap Russia's main source of revenue to ensure that the The Eurasia, the plan to seize political or vassal state control over Eurasia would continue against Putin's new Nationalist and global resurgence. This includes a bunch of crap that in 2003, 2004. But effectively, then you start to see the US government champion these hydrocarbon policies, and you started to see all of these international forums, journals, regulators, openly talking in this mid-auts period as Russia was starting to reclaim political influence, that these climate policies would be a way to stop Russian power and influence because it would cripple them economically. There'd be nothing There'd be no business between oligarchs in the different countries for them to even leverage. It would effectively allow us to continue the golden age of the Uniparty 1990s moment.
Then you saw all these government subsidies to it, tax benefits, free money, basically. Then it became a runaway. As the market saw that this was a highly protected, incentivized space by the US government, they all flooded in. Now, they've got a sunk cost. If those policies change, you've got trillions of dollars in climate finance globally. Then these start becoming part of IMF loan requirements. But now it's like, even if the science is completely wrong, what started, arguably, as a national security-based way to force energy diversification. This is what we put Europe through the United States with the sanctions against Russia. We forced them to divest of oil and gas and invest in a basket of alternative energy, cleaner energy supplies. But now it's... And that could be justified at the national security level with the science of this actually being the case. So you could sell it to the whole world. Even if you prove that false, at this point, there's so much infrastructure built up that you have this network. You have hedge funds. Bill Gates has a climate fund. Al Gore is a billionaire from this one. Tom Stier, one of the biggest investors in the D&C, the Climate Impact Fund.
Michael Bill, who funded the CIA governor of Virginia, Abigail Spanbergler.
Then the momentum of the... It's an unstoppable social narrative now.
The thing that's terrifying about it is that it has conjoined the diplomatic muscle of the American government and whatever allies abroad with private finance. For example, we overthrew the government of Bangladesh in 2024. The Biden administration did. They ran this whole coup. They did it through the National Endowment for Democracy, CIA cut out, and a million other orgs on the ground. It was a Color Revolution street protest. I think we may have talked about this last time where literally the CIA Sock Puppet, National Endowment for Democracy sponsored rap music videos and produced them and put them on YouTube and then worked with the unions, set up like transgender dance festivals to try to get the LGBT community on board against the government. Then, giant riots they install, it's effectively a... But part of the thing that they leaned on in the post-transition government is to agree to these Basically, climate finance reforms. You can, just like the CIA and the oil industry, became completely inseparable. I mean, George Bush, for example, Zipata Energy Offshore, in the whole Texas oil thing to then becoming the Central Intelligence Agency Director. I mean, Trump's first Secretary of State was Rex Tillerson.
Rex Tillerson never worked in government. The Secretary of State oversees the CIA. He's got the whole CIA portfolio. How does he know? Well, he was the chairman and CEO of ExxonMobil. The CIA and the US military creates the market for oil companies. You can't get access to the oil unless you either overthrow a government or support against an insurgency political movement, one that will guarantee you favorable terms, access, yada, yada, the whole market. Then the CIA and DOD people will rotate into board seats on those oil companies, and so it becomes inseparable. My fear about this is that over the past 10 years, the same thing has started to happen with the clean energy side of big energy companies. Big oil in CIA for a century. Now you have big climate in CIA because there's so much money. It's energy. It's the master resource. Now you've got what appears to me, CIA intervention in part. Some of these things you have to wonder, why did the Biden CIA try to overthrow the Bolsonaro government in Brazil? This was a pro-US political party. It was a The person Lula was tied at the hip with China, divested from all these US contracts, massively reduced the footprint of US-aligned policies in the second biggest country in our hemisphere.
Well, Brazil just announced this $1. 3 trillion climate finance initiative. You know all of these people are... All these New York hedge funds and London banks who've skated towards this are in on that. You have, I mean, this is a crazy case. One of the biggest beneficiaries of the post-coup, Lula's government in Brazil, were all of the clean ethanol. George Soros' longest-standing equity investment, at that point, was a company called Atecoagra, which did clean ethanol fuel alternatives. The problem is it's It's part of its business. Part of it is it's not competitive on price with diesel-based fuels. The only way to compete and win that market and make millions of dollars is if the government imposes a mandate, a quota that forces people to buy your product. Well, George Soros co-sponsored those CIA-adjacent National Down for Democracy operations all over Brazil. Well, he's holding an equity interest in the thing that day one, there's an imposed mandate to use those climate products. It's the same thing in Africa. You have CIA regime change to force clean energy companies so that the people who sponsor the donors who sponsor the politicians who pick the staff of the CIA enacts policies that makes money for those hedge funds invested in climate finance.
So fucked up. I think that's what's happening in California without the regime change element. I think it's the I think you have investors who profit from this, and the only way those investments can be profitable is if government imposes mandates, quotas, and bans on the alternatives to that product. I mean, that's the way the vaccine market works.
Do you get that link? Yeah.
Should we play it?
Yeah, just play it. Sound, hold on.
The UK, they just set up their little 15-minute city, and they are now charging people for leaving the city. You get 100 free days. They call it a free day. You get a free pass to leave the 15-minute city. And if you exceed your 100 free days, you have to pay the US dollar equivalent of $93 per day. If you live outside of the 15-minute city, you want to travel into the 15-minute city, you get 25 free passes, free move. The government's giving you free movement capability. You get 25 free passes, and if you exceed those 25 days, it's $93 a day. How are they tracking all this? Oh, there's not a man at the gate. They're not writing up tickets or having police officers set up. Oh, no, they are monitoring you with digital AI surveillance and cameras, and then they're automatically finding you. This is why we have to be against the flock cameras in the United States. They're not just speed trap cameras. This is why we have to be against the Palantier whole of government database. This is why we have to stand up and raise awareness and bring attention to these matters instead of arguing with each other and NPCs on the internet over left versus right issues or my side, your side.
They are keeping us artificially divided because they are setting up this infrastructure in the United States right now. Divide and conquer. We are in the division part of the divide and conquer agenda. Conquer is next. You think it's bad now? Wait till you have to pay $100 a day to leave your 15-minute city. Conspiracy. Right. So only rich people are going to be able to afford that. It's just like the meat thing, right? It's like the irony of Australia being a prison colony, and now it's like the homeland in the UK. But look, the UK just got rid of jury trials for a lot of cases. Yes. And has 12,000 speech arrests a year, and some people arrested for what seems like even holding up their own country's flag at an opportune moment or silently We need to liberate the British people. I mean, it's unbelievable. I mean, they call it Perfidius Albion, right? British Statecraft has been so pernicious to the American people in the past decade. It was Russiagate. The entire three-year Special Prosecutor saga was because of a British spy, Christopher Steele, and an Iran contra-veteran, Stephen Halper, residing abroad at Cambridge, to kick that off.
And then the British government conspired with the Biden administration to join the US-UK censorship industrial complex. America First Legal, Steven Miller and Jean Hamilton's nonprofit law firm they started, obtained these incredible incredible documents that showed a planning meeting between the British government and the Biden administration, attended by the CIA, the National Security Council, USAID, hosted at the White House, and it was the UK Digital Commission. They brought a huge slide deck of all the ways that their new censorship law, what's today called the Online Safety Act, the OSA, would effectively help throttle misinformation in the United States. Basically, it was like, you scratch your back, our back, we'll scratch yours. It was this US Democrat Party, UK Labor Party Alliance. Meanwhile, the Biden government was paying British sensors. The Global Disinformation Index, which killed the ad revenue for... They went after Daily Wire, Federalist, a Million Conservatives news sites and social media accounts, went after the social media platforms in the United States. They're British, black ops by their own language. Well, C-C-D-A, it's who it was. But they were funded by our government to censor our voices, but laundered out to the UK. I think we need to fundamentally restructure that special relationship.
We've had that relationship for a long time, totally unquestioned. We can't farm that out. We If that's not addressed and we don't fix that relationship, I think you can't really fix our own system unless we cut out some of the poison that we inject from the outside.
Mike, we gave people a lot to go or almost too much. But if anybody wants more, your ex-account is amazing. You're tireless. I don't know how you do it, but thank you for doing it. I really appreciate you, and I appreciate you coming on here.
Thanks so much for having me. Nothing but fun from here. I mean, look, it's fun. I mean, guys, the world is opening up, and we are seeing behind a looking glass where there has been a veil of secrecy for 60 years about some of these things, for 10 years about some of these things. So don't get too blackpilled. Something has happened that has never happened before, and you are alive to experience it. So try to enjoy the ride. All right. Thank you, man.
Bye, everybody.
Mike Benz is the Executive Director of the Foundation for Freedom Online and a former official with the U.S. Department of State.www.youtube.com/@MikeBenzCyberOfficialwww.foundationforfreedomonline.com
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