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00:02:22.000Joining us now is Mike Benz, the Foundation for Freedom Online.
00:02:26.000You can find him on X at MikeBenz Cyber.
00:02:29.000Mike, we're going to try to get through as much as we can with you.
00:02:31.000Mike, let's just start with the facts for those people that were enjoying a Sunday evening.
00:02:35.000You see, this is how perverse this all is.
00:02:37.000Here I am on this beautiful Sunday evening, and the sun is setting, and the Cubs are up 11-0 at Wrigley Field on Sunday night baseball against the wretched St. Louis Cardinals.
00:02:46.000My phone is lighting up like a Christmas tree all about Epstein.
00:02:48.000I said, whoever is responsible for this will be forever scorned in my life.
00:02:52.000I said, I had a beautiful Sunday evening.
00:02:54.000The Cubs are finally good for the first time in a decade, and my daughter's watching the Cubs, and I have to worry about Epstein.
00:02:58.000So what is it that got me so distracted away from the Cubs up 11-0 against the St. Louis Cardinals?
00:03:05.000Well, we don't fully know yet because this is all happening both quickly and then kind of no official word.
00:03:15.000This is basically an Axios exclusive that published what they said was the official results of the Justice Department investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, with the Justice Department concluding that Epstein killed himself,
00:03:33.000that Epstein had no client list, and that effectively there was no further investigations pending into the Epstein affair, at least related to many of these key issues that so many people have been concerned about for the past several decades now, but especially since 2019.
00:04:00.000Particularly, I think, the new information on there after what the FBI has been saying is the idea that there's no client list, that effectively the reference that Pam Bondi made earlier this year that the Jeffrey Epstein client list was sitting on her desk for review, that it actually did not exist at all is what that document suggests.
00:04:28.000Now, what's interesting is we don't know how official that is from Axios.
00:04:34.000They post a DOJ document on their news article write-up, and then within hours of uploading it, they removed the document from the article.
00:04:46.000Now, I don't know if that's because of a potential legal action from the Justice Department against them.
00:04:52.000It does not appear that the Justice Department gave them this exclusive, I should say, because there's no quotes from senior DOJ officials around it.
00:05:02.000There's not, to my knowledge, been official acknowledgement by the Justice Department of this Axios report.
00:05:08.000But effectively, the Internet pulled the document before Axios deleted it.
00:05:46.000Well, this now gives a Justice Department ratification, assuming that this is all true.
00:05:53.000This gives a Justice Department ratification to what we've heard from the FBI for the past several months, that Epstein killed himself.
00:06:01.000And this coming from the Justice Department is much, much bigger than it coming from the FBI.
00:06:07.000The FBI is the investigative arm of the Justice Department, but the Justice Department is really the keeper of all information.
00:06:15.000The elephant in the room around the Epstein story has always been the Justice Department's 2008 sweetheart deal with Jeffrey Epstein, where the senior DOJ official, Alex Acosta, reportedly said that he was, Quote, told to back off Epstein because he belonged to intelligence.
00:06:34.000That was then effectively left a giant neutron bomb in Washington about how all of the potential child sex trafficking and Wall Street deal making and sort of covert arms dealing and everything that else that Epstein was involved in went much bigger than one kind of perverted megalomaniac figure,
00:07:01.000but was rather tied to the highest levels of power in Washington, D.C. Now, at the time, the head of the Justice Department, Bill Barr, when Epstein died, was not only personally connected to the Epstein affair through Donald Barr, Bill Barr's father, who, of course, was with Jeffrey Epstein at the Dalton School.
00:07:22.000Donald Barr was a part of the founding of the Central Intelligence Agency, and Bill Barr himself began his career, his first seven years at the CIA.
00:07:32.000So there's been lingering questions for this Justice Department being more independent from those networks to be able to get answers.
00:07:41.000Now, effectively, there really has been none on that side of it.
00:07:45.000There's no supporting evidence that's provided in this Axios leak about the contents of what was reviewed.
00:07:53.000For example, we don't know what conversations Pam Bondi may have had or not had with John Ratcliffe, the CIA director.
00:08:00.000We don't know what search queries were put into CIA files or cables with reference to Epstein or the network.
00:08:08.000Alex Acosta, the prosecutor who was reportedly made that statement about Epstein belonging to intelligence, and then when he was questioned about it, when he became a cabinet secretary official as the head of the Department of Labor for the Trump administration, publicly when he was questioned about it, he said he could neither confirm nor deny, which I think everyone thought was about as shady as it gets.
00:08:34.000And then a very strange Justice Department Office of Professional Responsibility investigation only relegated the intelligence question to a single footnote where they reportedly asked Acosta a kind of tangential leading question saying, did you have knowledge that Epstein was an intelligence asset?
00:08:59.000Acosta said, no, but that's a very easy no if you don't have firsthand knowledge.
00:09:04.000Any lawyer would tell you answer only the question that you're asked, not any color on it.
00:11:22.000But do you trust what we're being told here, Mike?
00:11:24.000Well, the issue is, is I don't operate on trust.
00:11:29.000I think that Cash and Dan are phenomenal.
00:11:31.000And I don't think that this is an FBI thing, frankly.
00:11:34.000I think that when you're talking about the foreign intelligence networks that Epstein was involved in since 1981, this is his whole story once again.
00:11:45.000So but do you mean Israeli intelligence, Saudi intelligence?
00:11:54.000I think you have a global network here that spans the Central Intelligence Agency in the U.S., that spans British intelligence, Israeli intelligence, Saudi intelligence.
00:12:03.000How does Jeffrey Epstein go to be the primary financial embezzler, but the embezzler for Adnan Khashoggi, the guy who personally negotiated and fronted the money for the arms for hostages when we were running missiles to Iran during the Iran contrast.
00:12:25.000And look, an even better argument, that's a good one, is that this guy goes from a math teacher to living a multiple billionaire type lifestyle with some of the most incredible real estate ever.
00:12:36.000And no one has any records of trades from this guy ever.
00:12:39.000So Mike, I think that you and I both believe that he had some sort of relationship with foreign intelligence and maybe domestic intelligence.
00:12:47.000There's just no way he was able to get that magnitude of wealth that quickly.
00:12:51.000Being a vastly unimpressive person when you met him in person, I never met him, but a lot of people met him that I know that, of course, were not involved in his whole scheme.
00:13:00.000And they just said, this guy's underwhelming.
00:13:02.000this guy was not some sort of brainiac.
00:13:04.000He was kind of just very crass and very obviously into women.
00:13:21.000Or do you think it suggests something else?
00:13:24.000Well, it is very possible that Pam Bondi was referring to the so-called little black book, which was partially admitted into evidence during the Glaine Maxwell trial, and that referred to contacts and addresses rather than a formal client list.
00:13:42.000But to me, the great unanswered question here is, why are we asking about the FBI when we should be talking about the CIA and getting answers on that question?
00:13:51.000Because the CIA question will get you to the foreign intelligence aspects.
00:13:56.000There's simply no way on planet Earth that the Central Intelligence Agency does not have documents at least referencing Jeffrey Epstein, given that his whole life story for the 30 years preceding his death was a CIA story.
00:14:12.000Jeffrey Epstein was in the middle of Iran-Contra, the CIA operation to run guns to the Nicaraguan Contras and to funnel arms to Iran in illicit covert arms dealings with Adnan Khashoggi as the middleman.
00:14:31.000And Jeffrey Epstein was the financial fixer for that.
00:14:35.000It was Jeffrey Epstein who personally negotiated the transfer of the CIA's proprietary airline, Air America, which became Southern Air Transport.
00:14:43.000After it was busted doing covert CIA drug and gun trafficking, it moved from Miami, where Epstein had one home, to Columbus, Ohio, where Epstein had the other, while he was working for Les Wexner.
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00:17:10.000This was, you're talking about mass child sex trafficking with a, with a little St. James Island in broad daylight that everyone you know and love and see on TV is going there.
00:17:22.000And if even that person is given a sweetheart deal by the Justice Department, is family friends with two attorney generals, Bill Barr and John Mitchell.
00:17:34.000John Mitchell was the head of the Justice Department for Richard Nixon, who personally introduced Jeffrey Epstein to Adnan Khashoggi to do the CIA gun running during Iran-Contra.
00:17:46.000If at the end of that, you don't get a single CIA file on this guy, despite having reported testimony from the head of the Justice Department, where now 11 months of his emails go missing, his DOJ.gov emails go missing as soon as the DOJ starts investigating.
00:18:05.000And to have no transparent, I mean, this is supposed to be the most transparent administration ever.
00:18:11.000It looked like when Tulsi was doing the JFK files, it looked like that was supposed to be a kind of prelude to the disclosures we were going to get on Epstein.
00:18:20.000And it may be the case that Epstein killed himself.
00:18:23.000It may be the case that there's no client list, so to speak.
00:18:36.000What I am most interested in is the cover-up.
00:18:39.000And look, are there a bunch of rich slobs in Palm Beach?
00:18:43.000Not Donald Trump, obviously, because if Donald Trump would have been on here, they would have leaked it.
00:18:46.000Are there a bunch of rich slobs in Palm Beach that were probably involved in some really sultry, beneath the table, disgusting sex stuff with Epstein?
00:19:28.000You know, I grew up, parents were missionaries in Africa, and we ended up in California right after in 89.
00:19:34.000And we lived from the Pete Wilson era following Ronald Reagan as governor to Pete Wilson to seeing that state go from the glory that it was to our country to a dismal piece of crap state.
00:19:47.000I mean, to you know, to use articulate language, it's garbage now, and in large part because of mass amnesty, you're 100% right.
00:19:56.000You know who was one of the biggest proponents or opponents of mass amnesty?
00:21:49.000I was actually on my way home for the 4th of July.
00:21:51.000It was the first 4th of July I was going to be able to spend with my family in four years.
00:21:54.000I was driving, almost got to Texarkana, and then I got message that this was happening, turned around, came back down here.
00:22:03.000And all I can think is, you know, I miss my family for 4th of July, but at least I get to go home and see them.
00:22:08.000Most up-to-date numbers we just got this morning from the sheriff and city administrators.
00:22:14.00082 dead with 55 adults, 27 children, 10 of these children from the Mystic camp, this Christian summer camp, that are still unaccounted for.
00:22:24.000And I asked the question, what are we talking?
00:24:24.000But right now, the entire focus is on finding those 10 missing girls and the rest of the missing now presumed, you know, moving from that rescue to recovery.
00:25:34.000I watched North Carolina and Tennessee, the dismal failures of the last administration when they were blowing, wasting all of our money, trillions of our dollars on things, on garbage.
00:25:44.000What President Trump is, is he is a businessman.
00:25:47.000Everything he does, the decisions he makes, are strategic to making decisions that help our country.
00:25:52.000Everyone from the top down has said all of that is absolute nonsense.
00:25:57.000The reaction, the response we're seeing here is the best response I've ever seen.
00:26:01.000Again, having covered all those other disasters from the local, the state, and the federal level, this is by far the best response I've ever seen.