Sending this out now because it’s timely (and to separate it from the usual finance-related post I’m working on.)
Looks like the Substack transition back to all-free went well. Refunds should be going out (they’d better - Stripe took a nice bite out of my account earlier). Apparently I have to manually switch old posts from “paid” to “everyone,” so please be patient as I do that.
Thank you so much to all the kind subscribers who said ‘don’t worry about a refund,’ but it’s all automated by Stripe, so buy yourself a bottle of wine or near-beer with them.
Sláinte!
Julie K. Brown’s Series on Epstein: Perversion of Justice
"Across the board, everyone in the administration who had ever discussed this [Epstein] matter within the last several weeks or months, people who had access to information, who publicly declared that there was something there, sometimes in exquisite detail...to then do a 180 on this completely, and act as though it's totally nothing - when have we ever seen anything like this?"
"Part of why Kamala is getting so much support is that, if Trump wins, that Epstein client list is going to become public. And some of those billionaires behind Kamala are terrified of that outcome."
— Elon Musk to Tucker Carlson in October 2024
“In 2007, you saw the Bush administration just completely quashed this, and then every administration after that has continued to cover it up."
- Nick Bryant on the Epstein case cover-up (over four Presidents)
Nick Bryant on Pam Bondi's "first lie."
On Les Wexner, Leon Black etc.
Epstein "was cleaning dirty money."
"They must think that Americans are really, really stupid."
Bryant on the Epstein "pimps" named by the New York Times.
"You charge them...they'd roll over on the perps in a heartbeat."
Epstein "had 12 phone numbers for Trump."
"For Clinton he had 25, so obviously Epstein and Clinton were in contact quite a bit."
"Think about the pilots, the limo drivers...we could indict them & they would roll over in a heartbeat. This would be one of the easiest RICO cases that’s ever been prosecuted by the Department of Justice. The Department of Justice just doesn’t have the will."
”So we've got these millions of Americans that have been molested and also trafficked. Millions. If we allow the Department of Justice to be apathetic and unresponsive to victims in a proven trafficking case, the Epstein trafficking case, that sends a message to millions of victims that they have no voice and no hope for justice.”
Another new interview, with William Ramsey: Epstein Justice Now! With Author Nick Bryant.
Darryl Cooper with Tucker Carlson
I've posted on 90% of what's discussed here, but it's well presented, and would be great for newbies.
I just wish Darryl Cooper hadn't made an out of the blue ad hominem slander of the outstanding Whitney Webb about 1:54:15 in.
“Can we have one major public official that is not a single-degree separated from Jeffrey Epstein? Is that possible? Because apparently it's not possible. You got Donald Trump talking about the issue the other day on camera, and the guy standing next to him is Howard Lutnick, who was Epstein's neighbor for years, you know, in New York.
Can we just get like one important person who's not one-degree or less separated from the most prolific mass pedophile in US history? Is that possible? You know, because apparently it's not.”
This is interesting: Apparently Youtube feels that you listening to this podcast and hearing how perverse and sick our leaders are might make you despondent...
Carlson: So it sounds like they intentionally didn't gather a lot of evidence?
Cooper: 100%.
In Epstein Case, Follow the Money
The single largest suspicious activity report reviewed by the congressional team was filed in late 2019 by JPMorgan for $1.1 billion. The report covered 4,700 transactions dating to 2003, including payments to women from Belarus, Russia and Turkmenistan. Many of Mr. Epstein’s victims included young women from Eastern European countries.
The next largest was by Deutsche Bank for about $400 million, followed by Bank of New York Mellon for $378 million and then Bank of America, which filed reports on Mr. Black’s payments to Mr. Epstein.
In 2023, JPMorgan paid $290 million to Mr. Epstein’s victims and Deutsche paid $75 million to settle lawsuits that claimed the banks ignored red flags about potential sex trafficking.
“…the goal of the story wasn't to prove or disprove a conspiracy. It was really to independently verify what the DOJ and FBI said about the footage, which is that it was a raw surveillance video. And based on the metadata, that's just not accurate. It was processed, reviewed, and assembled from multiple clips…”
How WIRED Analyzed the Epstein Video
fyi, Someone recently asked me about the Darryl Cooper/Tucker Carlson interview and other related matters, and I responded:
Cooper has a good grasp of the subject, and presents it well.
However, in his Carlson interview near the end, he pissed me off by making an ad hominem slap at the researcher I think is the best, and trust the most - Whitney Webb.
Webb has been hounded by a guy Cooper apparently likes named Ryan Dawson. Dawson claims Webb stole his stuff, which I think is total bullshit jealousy, having been on this case for a dozen years. I looked at Dawson's stuff long ago and was not impressed.
Nick Bryant and Julie K. Brown are also researchers I trust. I don't think of Darryl Cooper as a researcher as much as an explainer. Dawson I have no use for.
The authoritative source for the entire network is Webb's two-volume "One Nation Under Blackmail". It's a research tome, not breezy beach reading. You'll find plenty of references to Khashoggi and others there, plus a bunch of other stuff.
"...writing a 900-page book on this stuff, I can say Epstein is, first and foremost, a financial criminal, who later dabbled in sex-trafficking and also arms-trafficking. It's bad."
- Whitney Webb
On my substack, some of my main posts on the topic over the years include:
Also check out Whitney Webb's early 4-part series
Fascinating podcast: The Real Epstein Files The host makes some comments that may trigger some people.
"You're walking around wherever you live, and you see things are becoming more and more dilapidated. Things just seem to have gotten worse in the last decade, maybe even longer than that. And you're wondering, OK, so what's our government prioritizing? It seems to be, oh, we're prioritizing war in Israel, Ukraine, and we're investing and getting tied into all these tech oligarchs. It seems like we're doing a surveillance state. We're creating the conditions of I would say revolution."
“How could you be the party of protecting children if you're literally saying, hey, no, let's forget about this pedophile? Let's not put anybody in jail. Let's not prosecute anybody. Like, is Ghislaine Maxwell, you know, if she was in charge of a huge sex trafficking ring, I suppose she was sex trafficking for somebody, right?”
If Trump “would have just said, here's why it doesn't matter in the moment, he probably would have had enough support to keep that floated, but the fact that it became, didn't even exist. It's like, you know, that's banking on the majority of people being either blindly following sycophants, or too dumb to know that that doesn't make sense. But I don't agree with that. I think the vast majority of his base are good people that want good things. And they came to that and were like, but wait a minute, like I can't even find a way to make this make sense.”
The honey trap on E71 Street by Eric Margolis (published 3 weeks before Epstein was suicided)
I’VE had many strange experiences in my decades of covering intelligence affairs. These run from being invited to KGB HQ in Moscow, Chinese intelligence in Beijing, US intelligence in Virginia, Libyan intelligence in Tripoli, South African intelligence, and even Albanian intelligence in Tirana.
But none was odder than the day I was invited to lunch in New York City with the by now notorious figure Jeffrey Epstein. The golden boy of Manhattan and Palm Beach society now sits in a grim jail cell accused of having sex with underage girls. He’s been doing this in plain view since the early 1990’s but, until recently, he seemed bullet-proof.
Soon after I walked into the entrance of Epstein’s mansion on E 71st Street, said to be the city’s largest private home, a butler asked me, “Would you like an intimate massage, sir, by a pretty young girl?” This offer seemed so out of place and weird to me that I swiftly declined.
More important than indelicacy, as an old observer of intelligence affairs, to me this offer reeked of ye old honey trap, a tactic to ensnare and blackmail people that was old when Babylon was young. A discreet room with massage table, lubricants and, no doubt, cameras stood ready off the main lobby.
Did Pedophile Jeffrey Epstein Work for Mossad? by Philip Geraldi (published one month before Epstein was suicided)
The extent of Israeli spying directed against the United States is a huge story that is only rarely addressed in the mainstream media. The Jewish state regularly tops the list for ostensibly friendly countries that aggressively conduct espionage against the U.S. and Jewish American Jonathan Pollard, who was imprisoned in 1987 for spying for Israel, is now regarded as the most damaging spy in the history of the United States.
Last week I wrote about how Israeli spies operating more-or-less freely in the U.S. are rarely interfered with, much less arrested and prosecuted, because there is an unwillingness on the part of upper echelons of government to do so.
"When I think of the Mossad and the CIA, I think of the Genovese crime family & the Gambino crime family. They're always working together. And I think what we have with these intelligence services is very large crime families, although there are people in these intelligence services that know nothing about the darker side."
Thanks, Rudy. I can’t afford to subscribe to one damn thing right now. Love your work.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss... Welcome back Rudy!