The Charlie Kirk Show - February 06, 2026


The Epstein Documents: What Still Doesn’t Make Sense ft. Mike Benz


Episode Stats


Length

54 minutes

Words per minute

159.3831

Word count

8,612

Sentence count

541

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

5

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode of The Charlie Kirk Show, host Charlie Kirk sits down with journalist Mike Benz to discuss the Epstein scandal. Mike is a 6-year veteran of the New York Times and has spent the last 6 years covering Epstein and his associates. He has been on Joe Rogan's show "The Daily Show" and has been featured on The Daily Wire. In this episode, Mike shares his insights on Epstein and the massive documents uncovered by the Ron Perelman grand jury investigation.

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Charlie Kirk Show" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:03.000 My name is Charlie Kirk.
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00:01:09.000 All right, welcome back.
00:01:10.000 Hour two of the Charlie Kirk Show is underway, and I am very excited about this conversation with the great Mike Benz.
00:01:18.000 Mike Benz has been, he just had a tour de force on Joe Rogan, three hours with the great Joe Rogan, all about Epstein.
00:01:27.000 So much to get into.
00:01:28.000 We, of course, had Jay Beecher on the show yesterday.
00:01:31.000 I loved that interview.
00:01:32.000 I actually think it was a sobering kind of analysis of six years of investigative journalism.
00:01:39.000 But Mike Benz has different insights.
00:01:41.000 He's seen different things.
00:01:42.000 And I want to make sure that we approximate the truth here by getting Mike Benz's insights in the mix.
00:01:49.000 So without further ado, Mike, welcome back to the show.
00:01:52.000 It's great to have you.
00:01:53.000 Thanks for having me, guys.
00:01:53.000 Thanks.
00:01:54.000 Yeah.
00:01:55.000 Well, I was talking to you a bit offline.
00:01:57.000 The reason I wanted to have you on is because there is so much to the Epstein dump. 0.58
00:02:04.000 There's 3 million documents.
00:02:05.000 It's impossible for one.
00:02:06.000 It's the most recent one.
00:02:07.000 Yeah, to get the whole scope of what's happening here.
00:02:10.000 And you've been making headlines here.
00:02:14.000 We've got clips from your Rogan interview that we're going to play.
00:02:17.000 You made a lot of news.
00:02:19.000 In general, just let's start at the beginning.
00:02:22.000 What do you think that we learned from this?
00:02:24.000 Has it added contours to your understanding?
00:02:27.000 The floor is yours.
00:02:29.000 Oh, an unbelievable amount has been turned up in this.
00:02:32.000 It's, I guess, the way I describe it is it's shocking, but not surprising.
00:02:40.000 I don't think there's anything in here that has surprised me, but it still is very shocking to see the details laid out.
00:02:50.000 And it also confirms, in my view, essentially, from almost every angle, the way that I've tried to proscribe people or prescribe people to view Epstein in context to sort of understand the Epstein cinematic universe beyond a lot of the kind of simple,
00:03:14.000 easy to grasp onto things or the things that he was arrested for, in my view, understanding the character of Epstein helps understand the world around you and the role that he played because there's a little visage of Epstein in almost every industry, every government, every intelligence service, every private investment fund.
00:03:40.000 And so, you know, what we're getting are to know something for a fact versus to have a constellation of circumstantial evidence is a very different thing.
00:03:56.000 You know, many of the allegations around Epstein until this point involved highly compelling circumstantial evidence.
00:04:05.000 But so much that has turned up in these files has just been, you know, what you'd call in an evidentiary proceeding a direct evidence.
00:04:14.000 That is, it's not, oh, we think that he was talking to X or Y because he talked to 13 of his associates and there's a rumor going around and someone said that he did.
00:04:27.000 Now, you have a direct email or you have a direct, you know, a direct audio file that says X or Y.
00:04:36.000 We can get all the specifics of what all those things are because there's frankly 3 million of them.
00:04:43.000 But, you know, I can either turn to that or you guys want to go in a different direction.
00:04:48.000 I'll leave it to you.
00:04:49.000 So, so I'll be honest.
00:04:50.000 One of the things that I was challenging Jay Beecher, a phenomenal interview.
00:04:56.000 I encourage everybody to go watch it and listen to it.
00:04:59.000 But one of the things that I just couldn't shake was this sense that I've had that he was an Intel asset or he was working with CIA, with Mossad, whatever.
00:05:12.000 And he seemed to be thinking that, you know, those claims had been overblown.
00:05:15.000 Yeah, why would he work with Mossad if he could just call Ehud Barak?
00:05:19.000 Or why, you know, he, yes, yes, he was involved, but it was, it was softer.
00:05:23.000 It was more kind of veiled in business transactions or whatever.
00:05:27.000 I just couldn't shake it.
00:05:28.000 And I kept pushing him on that.
00:05:29.000 And I've seen that you've kind of been going into this.
00:05:32.000 You know, there's this email, Robert Maxwell, Ghelanes Maxwell, apparently threatened Mossad.
00:05:38.000 And you've kind of gone into some of this, but there's so much there.
00:05:41.000 And I just want to let you make those connections if they're there, if it's true, because I just, I feel that there's got to be a there.
00:05:51.000 Well, I was laughing because when you said I couldn't help shake the feeling, I thought, well, you don't say.
00:05:58.000 I mean, this is a bad week to be an Epstein intelligence denialist.
00:06:05.000 I'll give you some.
00:06:07.000 We'll start with the U.S. side of it.
00:06:09.000 One of the things that turned up in these documents that I, again, shocked but not surprised is Epstein FOIA the central intelligence agency twice for records about himself first in 1999 and then again in 2011.
00:06:29.000 Now, Andrew Blake, have you guys, have you ever foyed the CIA to see what any CIA records about yourself it has?
00:06:41.000 That wouldn't even occur to me to contemplate that as an option.
00:06:45.000 You know, I guess, but I'm also not a billionaire either or a centimillionaire.
00:06:50.000 Centimillionaire.
00:06:51.000 Okay.
00:06:52.000 Well, would you request for any, quote, open or acknowledged agency affiliations?
00:06:59.000 So that was, okay, just so I'm understanding, Mike, he, this is in 1990.
00:07:03.000 Did you say 1991 or 2001?
00:07:05.000 1999.
00:07:06.000 1999.
00:07:07.000 This is two years before he became a public figure.
00:07:09.000 Right, okay.
00:07:10.000 At that point, he was still a private citizen, not publicly known, not written about in the mainstream news.
00:07:16.000 It wasn't until 2001 and 2002 when he began flying the most recent president of the United States, Bill Clinton, around in Africa on his private jet that the media started to take interest in him.
00:07:32.000 So he was still basically a private operative who basically two years before he became a public figure, first asked the CIA if there were any open or acknowledged links, agency affiliations.
00:07:50.000 What's also interesting is the CIA, we actually don't have exactly what he asked the CIA, even though I think we should, and I know that we are entitled to it.
00:08:00.000 And now I'm happy to report that after I made a bit of a crusade about this, multiple people have now filed FOIAs to the CIA to get Jeffrey Epstein's correspondence with the CIA, which is not classified because FOIA requests at the CIA are not.
00:08:17.000 Now, the CIA is obviously not allowed to tell you, by virtue of it being a spy agency, any classified records that it has.
00:08:25.000 But for example, it can send you declassified records, or if the CIA has acknowledged any links to a particular individual, it can send you the records on those.
00:08:33.000 But what's interesting about that CIA letter is it says, with respect to your request about open or acknowledged links, we have conducted that we grant the request for documents.
00:08:46.000 We have searched for documents.
00:08:48.000 No documents are responsive to that.
00:08:51.000 With respect to the portion of your FOIA request that touched on classified matters, we can neither confirm nor deny the existence or non-existence of such documents, which means that Jeffrey Epstein not only asked for open and acknowledged agency links, but also asked something about himself that was classified.
00:09:11.000 Now, for what it's worth, that is the same stock response you get when you ask the CIA for CIA personnel files.
00:09:20.000 So he's not yet a public person, and he FOIAs the CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency, asking for what it has on him, basically.
00:09:30.000 Yes.
00:09:31.000 And we don't know exactly how he stated his question or what he included in that, but we do know that it touched on classified documents because the CIA's response was, you know, regarding that specific line of questioning, we cannot confirm nor deny.
00:09:48.000 That is really shocking, actually.
00:09:50.000 That's a bombshock.
00:09:51.000 And what's very exciting is unless the law is not followed and the Justice Department does not come down on the agency for not following the law, if it doesn't follow it, we are legally entitled to actually see the correspondence between the C because they left a in the Epstein files.
00:10:14.000 Again, none of this was known until last week that, again, in 1999 and then again in 2011, sent an identical request.
00:10:23.000 And now this is before, again, the 2019 rearrest, but there's a case reference number.
00:10:28.000 So we know they have the files.
00:10:30.000 All right, Mike Benz, I have a co-host here, Blake.
00:10:34.000 Blake was, I could see his mind thinking.
00:10:36.000 He went to Dartmouth.
00:10:37.000 He's a very smart guy.
00:10:38.000 I know Mike.
00:10:39.000 I know Mike.
00:10:40.000 So, Mike, Mike, we've spotted over his theories on a lot of things.
00:10:40.000 I think I go back.
00:10:45.000 Yeah, Blake.
00:10:46.000 Blake was not.
00:10:47.000 Blake had an incredulous look on his face.
00:10:49.000 I'm going to throw it to Blake.
00:10:51.000 What were you thinking, Blake?
00:10:52.000 Well, I guess I'm just thinking, I just, it strikes me as innately implausible that the reveal that Jeffrey Epstein is an intelligence asset is that he FOIA himself at the CIA.
00:11:06.000 I guess I would ask.
00:11:07.000 Why would he do that?
00:11:08.000 Like, why would he do that if the CIA needed to hide anything?
00:11:11.000 Why would they get outed by their legalistic response to a FOIA request?
00:11:16.000 I think there's like a lot of ways they could get around that.
00:11:19.000 I just find it highly unlikely.
00:11:21.000 Okay, it's done through the, Blake, it was done through the Privacy Act, meaning there was no public alert.
00:11:27.000 We only know about this because it's in the FBI file.
00:11:31.000 This is a way, if you go through the Privacy Act, you can see what records that are publicly searchable about you without it being revealed to the public so that you can see what other people would get if they were to do that same FOIA.
00:11:47.000 In theory, anyone could do a FOIA about Jeffrey Epstein.
00:11:51.000 But if you do it through the Privacy Act, you get it and you get it alone, and it's kept as a private correspondence between you and your lawyer.
00:11:58.000 That's smart, Mike.
00:11:59.000 That's how it's done.
00:12:00.000 So, you know, I learned this yesterday.
00:12:03.000 I know this is public information, but it's one of those pieces of the Epstein saga that people forget that he was arrested either in the late 80s or early 90s.
00:12:12.000 And his partner went to prison for it.
00:12:16.000 Anyway, I'm just saying like he skated free.
00:12:18.000 You're talking about the Tower's financial collapse.
00:12:20.000 Yes.
00:12:20.000 Yes.
00:12:21.000 Which at the time was the biggest Ponzi scheme effectively in U.S. history at that time.
00:12:28.000 But Epstein is a Where's Waldo figure.
00:12:31.000 I make the argument that Epstein's intelligence adjacency started in 1978, 1979.
00:12:39.000 There's kind of a Forrest Gump story around this.
00:12:43.000 When he worked at Bear Stearns, Bear Stearns was one of the top three largest clearinghouses of the BCCI bank.
00:12:50.000 That was the CIA's bank.
00:12:54.000 It went down in flames in 1990 when Bill Barr effectively covered it up.
00:12:59.000 He wrote the pardons for the six BCCI officials.
00:13:01.000 That's the Bank of Credit and Commerce International.
00:13:04.000 That was the CIA's bank for laundering basically gun and drug money to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan.
00:13:12.000 And you have to understand in 1979, the Iranian revolution happened at the very moment that the CIA was at its weakest because of the church committee hearings and the Halloween massacre.
00:13:24.000 And the CIA was setting up a complex offshore intelligence web through a network that's called the Safari Club, the Mount Kenya Safari Club, that was run by Adnan Khashoggi, the largest arms dealer in the world, who was the Saudi middleman between the U.S. and Israel during the Iran-Contra affair.
00:13:44.000 Adnan Khashoggi was Jeffrey Epstein's client when he started Intercontinental Assets Group in 1981 after the SEC investigation of him at Bear Stearns for handling Edgar Bronfman's money on a deal involving St. Joe's Mineral Company.
00:14:03.000 And Edgar Bronfman was, you know, played a very senior role in policy.
00:14:10.000 He was the head of the, oh my gosh, I don't know why I'm blank on the name, but he was the head of a major international Jewish advocacy group that played an effective kind of shadow State Department role in many aspects of the Iran war.
00:14:27.000 The Reagan administration had this Iran-Contra operation that involved effectively the U.S. and Brits getting guns to Iran to fend off Iraq and doing it through Israel with Saudi Arabia as the middleman.
00:14:46.000 And it's at this time while Bear Stearns is laundering money effectively in a CIA gun running operation.
00:14:54.000 This is, you have to keep in mind also, there was an international arms embargo on Iran at the time.
00:14:59.000 So that was illegal to do.
00:15:02.000 And I find the Nicaragua side of that, the gun running to the Nicaraguans with the skim interesting because Jeffrey Epstein had a very lurid history in South American affairs.
00:15:14.000 For example, when Ghelaine Maxwell was asked by Todd Blanche in her DOJ interview last year to give an example of Jeffrey Epstein's business transactions, she could only think of one example to illustrate it.
00:15:29.000 And that was imagine if the Sinaloa cartel was owed money by the Los Zetas cartel or a rival cartel and They needed a way to trace the assets of the other cartel to get the money back.
00:15:47.000 They would hire some, they would hire Jeffrey and Jeffrey would take a 10% cut, a 5% to 10% cut of the money.
00:15:54.000 I just find that interesting because we're only 13 years removed, 14 years removed or so from the Fast and Furious operation when the Obama White House green lit an operation to run guns to the Sinaloa cartel so that they could win a gang war against the Los Adas who were cutting into effectively U.S. pipeline interests in Mexico.
00:16:19.000 But the fact is, is you need to find, you need to explain how Jeffrey Epstein, before the age of 30, had so many high-profile clients stretching from the Middle East to France to the UK to these high-level contacts in Israel that make sense given the fundamental constraints on someone who's 29, 30 years old from handling, being competent enough to handle billionaires' money.
00:16:48.000 And the fact is, is the fact that he worked on those deals, the fact that he was flying back and forth cross-country to visit Doug Leese at that time, who was the main British arms dealer involved in Iran-Contra, the fact that he was living at the time with Stanley Pottinger, who was the CIA's mop-up man, who literally also got investigated by the FBI for running those same guns to Iran,
00:17:14.000 but then the case was magically dropped when the FBI said the audio recordings that they had on him malfunctioned.
00:17:22.000 It's his whole career.
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00:18:40.000 All right.
00:18:40.000 So, Mike, summing up, I mean, your mind is like, you just like have this incredible ability to capture all of these connections.
00:18:50.000 It's truly, truly amazing.
00:18:52.000 And so, if I'm going to sum up what you were getting at, and I was, I was taking notes, I was trying to track each piece.
00:18:58.000 You only FOIA yourself at the CIA if you've got a lot of reason to believe that they've either got stuff on you, they've got personnel files on you, whatever.
00:19:08.000 When you've got all these, the smoke, there's got to be fire with all these connections.
00:19:12.000 All these connections are Iran, Nicaragua, whatever, all these relationships.
00:19:17.000 It has to mean something.
00:19:20.000 This can't just be pure coincidence.
00:19:22.000 He wasn't just like a good party boy that liked to hang out with Prince Andrew.
00:19:27.000 Like, there's more going on here.
00:19:29.000 So, you're touching on the American side.
00:19:33.000 Are there connections that you would draw with Mossad or Israeli intelligence?
00:19:38.000 What about Russia, Russian intelligence?
00:19:40.000 Well, absolutely.
00:19:41.000 And these are all linked.
00:19:43.000 So as I mentioned, Jeffrey Epstein was handling the money for the CIA's point person between the U.S. and Israel in 1983 when Adnan Khashoggi, Epstein's client, flies to Washington, D.C. to meet with Robert McFarlane, the National Security Advisor, to plan this operation.
00:20:05.000 And that itself would be something I would think the crucial middleman, who's also rumored at the time to be the world's richest person and who learned more in Adnan Khashoggi.
00:20:15.000 Oh, okay.
00:20:17.000 Of course.
00:20:18.000 But the point is, at that point, that was a coordination between American intelligence and Israeli intelligence.
00:20:25.000 Who was running Israeli military intelligence at that time from 1983 to 1985?
00:20:30.000 It was Ahud Barak.
00:20:32.000 Ahud Barak, even before this week's drop, had been documented something like 47 times at Jeffrey Epstein's house and were business partners on Carbine 911 and did business deals together everywhere from Mongolia to Cote d'Ivoire to Ahud Barak seeking Jeffrey Epstein's counsel for how to evade sanctions on Russia.
00:21:02.000 Ahud Barak, even before this week's drop, had been documented something like that.
00:21:02.000 after the 2014 Crimea affair.
00:21:05.000 But the fact is, is what these new revelations show is a much, much deeper and complete overlap for many years between Epstein and Barak in a way that is really interesting.
00:21:21.000 I'll give you an example.
00:21:22.000 One of the things that surfaced here and that I blew up, I think it's sitting at about six and a half million views right now, is Jeffrey Epstein secretly recording Ahud Barak during a three-hour conversation they had while Ahud Barak was the sitting minister of defense.
00:21:38.000 Now understand, Ahud Barak went from running Israel's most elite covert commando unit to running Israeli military intelligence to becoming the prime minister of Israel, who Mossad reports directly to.
00:21:52.000 Mossad is structured to sit in the prime minister's office effectively, answers directly to.
00:22:00.000 And so it's not structured quite the same way as our CIA.
00:22:05.000 And then Ahud Barak became effectively the equivalent of the head of our Pentagon, which means constant coordination with Mossad, but it's also more, you know, he's more closely affiliated with Amman, which is Israeli military intelligence.
00:22:19.000 And the fact that he was the head of it, while that, and this is also how you see Epstein so involved in the arms trade, both in the U.S., Israel, Saudi Arabia, the U.K., and always working with these arms dealers.
00:22:29.000 But what I'm getting at is in this conversation, Ahud Barak is one month before he leaves office as the head of Israel's military, and he's looking to make it big in the private sector.
00:22:41.000 So Epstein records under the table, I guess, the FBI has a three-hour recording of this, a three-hour coaching session where Jeffrey Epstein instructs Ahud Barak on how to convert his lifetime of accumulated government power into getting rich on the outside with in private business.
00:23:02.000 And what he tells Ahud Barak is stop focusing on your skills, your military background and the things you've accomplished.
00:23:14.000 That's not going to get you money.
00:23:15.000 That's not why people are going to pay you.
00:23:17.000 What you need to do is compile a list of people who owe you something, IOUs.
00:23:24.000 Think people who owe you favors.
00:23:27.000 Now is the time to call in those favors.
00:23:30.000 And what I find so fascinating about this is, one, on the one hand, someone who's worked in these kind of Israeli military and intelligence adjacent networks for 40 years is now literally helping that person cash in on the outside.
00:23:49.000 But it also shows a kind of the mercenary aspect of Epstein's operation.
00:23:55.000 He was secretly recording the head of the Israeli military, not the other way around, which I just think is kind of an interesting through the liberal.
00:24:04.000 Isn't that a point kind of against some of this?
00:24:07.000 I guess it just seems like so much of the argument that he's running this masterful blackmail ring or is part of all this Intel stuff is presumably that stuff would be well hidden.
00:24:20.000 And yet so much of this is actually quite public, somewhat glaring.
00:24:24.000 And then once we also start digging out stuff that was originally hidden, it doesn't seem to produce that much of a smoking gun.
00:24:32.000 I mean, Ehud Barak, well, he's, I mean, he gets attacked by the first person to basically bring this to public light as a big deal is Benjamin Netanyahu.
00:24:40.000 He attacks him about it in Israeli politics.
00:24:43.000 In fact, I think they're attacking him about it right now because they say, I guess, some of the conversations, they say Epstein was kind of a liberal and he wanted to make Israel more liberal and all of that.
00:24:53.000 Right.
00:24:54.000 But, I mean, every country has got heterodox political factionalism.
00:25:01.000 The U.S., as well as, I mean, a change in leadership or a change in what faction of our CIA is dominant can determine whether or not a foreign country's government lives or dies.
00:25:13.000 I mean, the fact is, is what, you know, when Biden is in control of the CIA, you get things like the government of Brazil turns over.
00:25:20.000 You know, when Trump becomes head of the government, suddenly the CIA USAID operations in Hungary stop.
00:25:27.000 And so there is a similar thing in Israel in terms of whether or not you have an Ahud Barak or a Benjamin Netanyahu government.
00:25:35.000 What's interesting in these files is it describes how hard it was for them to even get a meeting with Netanyahu.
00:25:42.000 And you see Ahud Barak actually playing a not as significant role in the Biden world.
00:25:51.000 He was closely affiliated with the WestExec faction.
00:25:56.000 If you guys remember that in-between period when the Hillary Clinton folks were out of power, but before Biden got in, basically every major person in the cabinet was a part of a private consulting group called WestExec.
00:26:12.000 It had Avril Haynes, Anthony Blinken, pretty much all of the people who would populate the cabinet.
00:26:18.000 And they worked very closely with Ahud Barak.
00:26:20.000 I believe he even funded them or hired them for private consulting type things.
00:26:27.000 But what you see is it is true that a foreign country's spy apparatus or covert influence apparatus does have an effect on American politics.
00:26:40.000 I don't think it's wrong in any sense to call that out.
00:26:43.000 I think that it has been silly to try to deny any links between Epstein and Israel.
00:26:50.000 It's all over the place for his whole career.
00:26:54.000 But the fact is, is this class of person, a outside financial fixer, is while they are affiliated with governments, there is also a on again, off again, only if it's good for me type relationship that happens.
00:27:10.000 Like I don't think Epstein, I would not be surprised if Epstein sent those FOIAs, not because he worked at or for CIA, but that he occasionally worked with CIA when it was profitable for himself and his partner network.
00:27:25.000 And he wanted to know if that adjacency might turn up in a public record search.
00:27:31.000 Same thing with his connections with Israel.
00:27:33.000 He certainly worked with high-level Israeli intelligence and military figures.
00:27:39.000 That doesn't mean he gets a paycheck from it necessarily.
00:27:43.000 There are these affinity networks where you yourself can get rich by doing a favor for people in government.
00:27:49.000 I believe that's likely the case with Epstein, both in the U.S. and in Israel.
00:27:54.000 And likely, you know, when you look at the UK and French and Saudi webs, it looks like at a much less involved level, there's a there there too.
00:28:08.000 Well, it makes it makes perfect sense to me that he was worried that it would be public information, especially as he became more famous, and he kind of probably had an inkling that he was getting more and more high profile, that he wanted to check to see what was publicly available.
00:28:23.000 If somebody else could find this out about him, about what the CIA had scooped up on him.
00:28:27.000 I mean, if he's an Intel operative, why would he have to make the application himself?
00:28:31.000 Well, because he's probably understood.
00:28:32.000 So you do it.
00:28:33.000 You do it.
00:28:34.000 Well, let me just correct that.
00:28:35.000 He did it through his lawyer using the Privacy Act, which is the way you do that if you want to effectively anonymously see what other people would see if they had filed that FOIA.
00:28:47.000 Okay, but he's also, apparently he's like an Intel asset.
00:28:49.000 I just, I feel like this is a distance code stuff.
00:28:53.000 No, careful.
00:28:55.000 You got to be precise with your language.
00:28:57.000 Okay.
00:28:58.000 There is a difference between an asset and a contact.
00:29:02.000 And this is very important.
00:29:04.000 I've done lectures on 20 different figures in recent American history who were CIA contacts, facilitators, logistical support nodes, but that do not rise to the level of asset.
00:29:20.000 Asset is a technical term that requires the compilation of a 201 personality file.
00:29:28.000 That is, if you are a formal asset, but Epstein could have done all of this with intelligence, appears to have done it with U.S. intelligence, but only on an off and on basis, not as a, okay, the CI told me to do it, therefore I have to do it.
00:29:45.000 This is a really important one because a lot of people don't understand the sticky gooey layer, the mortar between the bricks when it comes to intelligence work and non-intelligence work.
00:29:57.000 There is a vast web of kind of peri-intelligence, intelligence adjacencies that is the way in which intelligence work is done.
00:30:08.000 By its very nature, anything that is a covert action cannot be actualized by a overt.
00:30:17.000 I admit I'm a CIA.
00:30:19.000 The hard and fast distinction is literally impossible.
00:30:23.000 What you have is a layer of contacts that facilitate that action.
00:30:28.000 And sometimes those are formal assets.
00:30:31.000 Often, in their most significant form, they're actually not.
00:30:34.000 And I can give you a bunch of examples.
00:30:35.000 But Mike, you exposed a lot of this with the censorship industrial complex, how the government basically figured out that they could outsource certain actions that would be deemed illegal if it was done directly by the government, right?
00:30:48.000 And so it follows that this is the exact same formula that they were using somebody like Jeffrey Epstein for.
00:30:56.000 There's so much explosive stuff.
00:31:00.000 You've said on Joe Rogan that you didn't think that he was actually his main motive was blackmailing people necessarily.
00:31:09.000 I wanted to give you a chance.
00:31:10.000 I think that it's, yeah.
00:31:11.000 Yeah, yeah.
00:31:12.000 So, you know, this is something that, you know, is because people have gotten so invested in it.
00:31:20.000 I think, you know, you're sort of trying to stop a runaway train when you say it, but it's just a simple fact.
00:31:26.000 First of all, Epstein wouldn't have enough time in the day to run some sort of, you know, global, you know, pedo ring in an organized and structured fashion.
00:31:38.000 I mean, the guy is, you know, 12 funds and all the business and meetings, influence nodes.
00:31:47.000 He's in science, technology, military, gun running, you know, all these different, to be a full-time pimp like that, I don't even know is technically possible.
00:31:59.000 The main thing is, is I do think it is possible that there could be a blackmail element in the sense that if you compile certain things on, if you have something on, you could sell that to a corporate espionage client or to an intelligence client.
00:32:13.000 And there could be some sort of indirect blackmail capacity that other people have.
00:32:19.000 None of that has ever been proven or there's no even open leads to follow.
00:32:24.000 But the second is, is your entire network would everything you've built would crash down in an instant the moment that rumor is even around.
00:32:32.000 That rumor didn't arise about an Epstein blackmailer until after he was already arrested and dead in a jail cell somehow.
00:32:41.000 If you blackmail one person offensively, people tell their wives that they go through a major crisis of PR in terms of they may tell their publicist and their wife and no other soul, but wives talk to wives. 0.61
00:32:57.000 And the moment one person that's friends with Jeffrey Epstein tells another person, hey, don't mess around with that guy.
00:33:04.000 That guy threatened you with stuff, then all the parties stop.
00:33:07.000 All the access stops.
00:33:09.000 All the confidant relationships stop.
00:33:11.000 Now, I do think it's possible that he could defensively blackmail someone, if you will, which is that if somebody says, hey, I know the dirt you were involved with, I'm going to tell NBC News this happened at your party.
00:33:25.000 And he goes, ah, not so fast.
00:33:27.000 You were at that party and look what I have you on tape doing.
00:33:31.000 That's very possible.
00:33:32.000 I mean, you saw, you saw, for example, I remember seeing a clip from a long time ago and not throwing any shade at Milo Yiannopoulos when I say this, but I remember him holding up like a, you know, like a recording or something of just saying, listen, when I talk to people, I try to have it on tape.
00:33:51.000 Now, I don't think Milo's ever offensively blackmailed someone with that, but I can see when you are a high net worth or highly influential public figure and like, you know, you, in case anyone comes after you, you have something on them.
00:34:06.000 But that doesn't mean it's like some highly organized, like, I mean, he did that, for example, with the head of Israeli, the Israeli military.
00:34:16.000 Do you think that, I mean, he was under the table recording him for three hours.
00:34:20.000 Well, that's the same thing.
00:34:21.000 Do you think that he was?
00:34:22.000 Yeah, exactly.
00:34:23.000 So the question is, if he wasn't motivated by blackmailing or honeypots or whatever, what was he motivated by?
00:34:30.000 We have three minutes left.
00:34:31.000 Mike, I could talk to you for hours and hours.
00:34:34.000 There's a million reasons.
00:34:34.000 He could have been, he's gotten in trouble his whole life.
00:34:37.000 I mean, when he was 27 years old, he got in trouble at Bear Stearns, you know, both on the SEC thing and another intra-office thing.
00:34:45.000 He may have had a bad experience where someone tried to blackmail him and he goes, I wish I had recorded that thing because they were doing dirty stuff too and then made a practice of it.
00:34:55.000 And then when he, the more property he owned, he just had everything hooked up.
00:34:59.000 We don't, that's a hard thing to substantiate given that this guy who's got 100,000 high-level people on his Rolodex, not a single one after his death, after he couldn't even drop the blackmail, has even made an allegation that Epstein tried to blackmail.
00:35:14.000 So there's no open leads on it, and there's an entire cinematic universe that is very useful for understanding the modern day.
00:35:20.000 As you pointed out, the censorship industrial complex is structured the same way the Epstein network is, the same way intelligence work is.
00:35:29.000 The data points to mine here in terms of what we can understand about our own government, what we can understand about our relationship with foreign governments, how to understand New York hedge funds and the role that they exert or high finance or London banks exert.
00:35:46.000 There's a whole world to see in the Epstein looking glass.
00:35:51.000 And I think that should be, that's primarily my focus.
00:35:54.000 People are free to search for whatever.
00:35:56.000 I'm super right.
00:35:56.000 I think you're super right.
00:35:58.000 I mean, I'm convinced there's just too much smoke there to not be a little bit of fire, even if it's not as sensational as some would make it.
00:36:06.000 I was pushing back with Jay because I felt like there was something.
00:36:10.000 I would close out with my closing thought here would be, I feel like for years, I mean, Epstein died almost seven years ago at this point.
00:36:17.000 It's crazy how long it's been.
00:36:19.000 But it seems like I know you've pushed back on this, but the widespread assumption is, oh, this had to all be explained as part of a big blackmail ring.
00:36:28.000 And that would justify the intelligence connections.
00:36:30.000 But as you point out, nobody has made a blackmail allegation.
00:36:34.000 Nobody talked about it being blackmail.
00:36:36.000 It turns out there kind of is no blackmail because if no one's alleging it and there's no evidence of it, it seems to have not happened.
00:36:44.000 And at that point, like you pull on the thread and so many, there's so many interlocking assumptions.
00:36:50.000 Oh, well, he was doing blackmail.
00:36:52.000 What would he do blackmail with?
00:36:53.000 Oh, well, it was these underage girls. 1.00
00:36:55.000 So he would get compromised on people.
00:36:56.000 But we don't have examples of that being used.
00:36:59.000 I just, I feel like there's so many interlocking assumptions.
00:37:02.000 Yeah, we can go over the very questionable.
00:37:04.000 Go ahead.
00:37:05.000 People latched on to that, what Blake just said, because they didn't understand all of this.
00:37:10.000 And there was no other way for most normie civilians to even understand the Epstein operation.
00:37:15.000 And that's my concern, is that all of that, that momentum was all built up because nobody was saying all of this with a large platform.
00:37:24.000 And so that became the only explanation, even though in my view, there's not much of a there.
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00:38:31.000 I think that's a really interesting point because you guys actually do sort of agree on this because I've talked to you about it off air.
00:38:38.000 How because there isn't sort of a rational explanation for stuff, it creates a vacuum.
00:38:44.000 And the most sensationalized version of events fills that because that's what flies on the internet or whatever.
00:38:51.000 Sensational versions and also things that aren't proven become fact.
00:38:55.000 The thing I mentioned, if you want to comment on this, Mike, but a thing I mentioned with our guests yesterday that stood out to me was how I heard over and over, it was kind of taken as an article of truth.
00:39:04.000 I saw it repeated in many articles that the prosecutor in Epstein's Florida case had told the Trump administration, oh, well, Epstein belonged to, I was told he belonged to intelligence, so I didn't pursue it.
00:39:17.000 And I heard that over and over again.
00:39:18.000 And then it turned out, I was reminded that was an unnamed source providing hearsay that they said someone told, I think the Washington Post that they'd heard this originally.
00:39:33.000 Not even publicly.
00:39:33.000 He denied it in a statement to the Trump administration that we then surfaced with these files.
00:39:39.000 And that just got me thinking, that was such a core part of what people used to argue for this.
00:39:45.000 And it was a kind of runaway hearsay statement that, if anything, has direct evidence against it.
00:39:51.000 Right, right.
00:39:52.000 And I saw that.
00:39:53.000 That was in the OPR report during the Justice Department investigation.
00:39:58.000 But I have my own questions about that.
00:40:00.000 I don't know how to feel about that allegation.
00:40:05.000 I agree with you that it is not the core receipt, so to speak, to base any of this on because it's contested.
00:40:15.000 And I do think that the way the question was phrased in terms of the OPR, this is the Office of Professional Responsibility and the Justice Department.
00:40:24.000 I think the way it was phrased and the lack of any follow-up questions beyond just, you know, did you have knowledge that he was an asset sort of thing leaves the door open.
00:40:37.000 But I think that there's so many other layers of it that speak to it.
00:40:45.000 And again, I'm very curious to see now that the FOIAs have been fired, what the CIA comes back and says, because they are legally required to give us that correspondence.
00:40:58.000 One of the things that I pointed out earlier today on X was, because we have the file reference numbers for the whole back and forth of the FOIAs.
00:41:07.000 Now, while through the Privacy Act, it's not publicly searchable that you sent that, it is not inherently classified communication between the CIA and Epstein's lawyer for Epstein records, which means if you have the reference number, they're required to send it to you unless they classified that correspondence after the fact.
00:41:32.000 And if the CIA drags its feet on this FOIA, if it obstructs, if it says you can't have it for one of two reasons, one, we classified it.
00:41:42.000 That says something pretty damning.
00:41:44.000 Or two, we lost it.
00:41:47.000 Our record somehow deleted it between 2011 and 2019.
00:41:52.000 I would demand a Justice Department investigation into that in terms of who at CIA may have deleted it or how it may have, when exactly the files were no longer retained.
00:42:05.000 If it turns out that the CIA says we don't have it, and then an FBI investigation into the forensics of why they don't have it says, well, it got deleted in our system in a fluke malfunction on July 10th, 2019.
00:42:21.000 I think that tells you something as well.
00:42:25.000 But the fact is, is from the CIA's work through BCCI, while Bear Stearns was handling the clearing of those CIA transactions through the Adnan Khashoggi Iran-Contra affair.
00:42:43.000 Here's another one.
00:42:45.000 The CIA's proprietary airline, Southern Air Transport, used an Iran-Contra that Jeffrey Epstein was handling.
00:42:50.000 The CIA main point man's main operatives transactions for that very gun-running CIA proprietary airline, Southern Air Transport.
00:43:01.000 Epstein negotiated its move to Columbus, Ohio, where Jeffrey Epstein was running the limited out of when he got durable power of attorney.
00:43:12.000 I mean, Blake Andrew, can you guys negotiate the move of a CI proprietary airline to serve your business?
00:43:21.000 Now, at that time, Southern Air Transport, just two years earlier, had divested, so it was no longer owned by the CIA and operated by the CIA.
00:43:29.000 It was owned to a CIA, a retired CIA agent who had been part of its management team while it was CIA.
00:43:38.000 So it was technically a private business, but then it goes to serve Jeffrey Epstein's company.
00:43:43.000 By the way, just two years after that, the State Department leased one of the largest residential buildings in New York City to Jeffrey Epstein right after it seized it from the government of Iran.
00:43:56.000 So Jeffrey Epstein had his, the State Department as his personal landlord after seizing.
00:44:02.000 I mean, can you go on Zillow or Airbnb?
00:44:09.000 Has the State Department ever been your personal landlord?
00:44:12.000 And by the way, the only reason that Jeff that that arrangement ended up expiring was because Jeffrey Epstein violated the terms of his agreement with the State Department by subleasing it out to two of the lawyers for both the French Connection and Pizza Connection scandals, which were both CIA drug-running scandals from the prior decade.
00:44:34.000 The French Connection was the CIA's role in facilitating illegal narcotics from Lebanon to France.
00:44:41.000 And the Pizza Connection scandal was when there was a basically a CIA-protected transshipment of drugs to Italian mafia organizations in New York and New Jersey that was laundered through pizza shops.
00:44:57.000 So, I mean, the whole thing up and down, you can trace it to the kind of CIA earthquake of the Carter administration, giving way to this kind of U.S.-Israel, Iran, Iran, Saudi, Iran-centric foreign policy web.
00:45:13.000 And then it just metastasized from there as all these things require money.
00:45:18.000 Hedge funds and private equity funds get in on the action.
00:45:21.000 Epstein makes his way from the finance world to the kind of fixer world, financial bounty hunter world into the high finance world.
00:45:32.000 And you can trace U.S., Israeli, British, and to some degree, you know, French and Saudi foreign policy for decades through the figure of Jeffrey Epstein.
00:45:42.000 Mike, I had to ask you about this.
00:45:44.000 And I know we're going long here, so thank you for your time.
00:45:48.000 There was like now all of a sudden there's like a, there's like George W. Bush is in the, in these emails, and so is Macron from France.
00:45:56.000 Like, yeah, go ahead.
00:46:00.000 George H.W. Bush was the CIA director in 1975, and the Safari Club grew out of his network.
00:46:09.000 The whole Khashoggi family. 1.00
00:46:11.000 You have to understand, I mean, George H.W. Bush was the CIA director and then played this very interesting role in the October surprise around Iran, and then was the vice president of the Reagan administration during Iran-Contra and was effectively the blocker to protect Reagan on it.
00:46:29.000 A lot of people think he was kind of the main progenitor of the whole Iran-Contra affair.
00:46:35.000 When he became president, his attorney general was Bill Barr, who not only was the cover-up, who started his career in the CIA for the first seven years of his career.
00:46:44.000 He only became a lawyer and then the attorney general because he went to law school at night while he was in the CIA.
00:46:50.000 The Democrat media in the early 1980s blamed him for the CIA blocking the congressional investigations into Iran-Contra.
00:46:59.000 And then while he picked Bill Barr as his AG, Bill Barr wrote the pardons for the six BCCI officials who were cleared of any wrongdoing in the CIA bank's disaster.
00:47:12.000 There's a lot of.
00:47:13.000 I'm just getting started.
00:47:14.000 I know, man.
00:47:15.000 There's so much smoke.
00:47:16.000 There has to be fire.
00:47:17.000 That's where I'm at.
00:47:19.000 Listen, I think I just want to kind of synthesize this for our audience that's listened to day one with Jay Beecher and day two with Mike Bence.
00:47:29.000 I think so much of this has been sensationalized, especially a lot of the sex stuff.
00:47:35.000 Apparently you find out he was deformed and he had erectile dysfunction and he wasn't even able to perform. 0.85
00:47:43.000 I hate to, you know, I'm trying to be sensitive for our 11-year-olds that might be listening.
00:47:47.000 But the point is, some of that stuff I think has been really sensationalized.
00:47:50.000 The underage girl things, I think Jay had a lot of really interesting intel on.
00:47:54.000 Virginia Guffery was apparently recruiting them and they were presenting themselves as over 18, whether he knew or not, I don't know.
00:48:02.000 That's a big question mark.
00:48:04.000 He liked them young.
00:48:05.000 There's no doubt.
00:48:06.000 18 to 25 was his presumption.
00:48:09.000 The point I'm making is there's been a lot of sensationalism around that, a lot of sensationalism around the blackmail.
00:48:15.000 But one of the questions that I go back to is what JD Vance said.
00:48:18.000 Why was this man able to make so much money when basically everybody with a brain, a finance brain, says that he was like subpar, mediocre at finance at best?
00:48:29.000 Some say he was good at avoiding taxes.
00:48:31.000 Okay.
00:48:32.000 But some of the video that we have of him talking finance, people are not impressed.
00:48:36.000 People that should be impressed are not impressed.
00:48:38.000 So the question is, how did he make all his money?
00:48:40.000 What you present is a theory or connections that seem to make me believe that there's smoke, there could be fire.
00:48:47.000 Seems like a lot of fire in this area.
00:48:49.000 And so it's kind of like both of these angles feel like they have truth in them.
00:48:54.000 And then in the void of where there's details, the internet runs in and sensationalizes to the max.
00:49:01.000 Is that a fair summation, kind of?
00:49:04.000 Yeah, I think so.
00:49:05.000 I think one of the reasons that I think people's intuition about the immensity of what's hidden about the Epstein story is completely true. 0.96
00:49:17.000 But the rush to fill the vacuum of that is filled with things they can understand.
00:49:25.000 And the fact is, when I'm talking about all these networks, America does not yet have the language to put these things into words because they don't, these things are hidden from them in part because we have a national security state.
00:49:40.000 We have all of our statecraft is classified under as a foreign policy and sensitive.
00:49:48.000 And the fact is, is this is something that makes our politics Coke and Pepsi, the fact that these networks are not talked about on network news.
00:49:58.000 The fact is, is they can only really be shared through social media networks and the like, which is why I think that the collective understanding on this, particularly on the right, because the right, you know, there's kind of a universal thump goes around moment here.
00:50:13.000 Insofar as the left was actually quite wise to this in the 1960s and 70s after they were run through the mill by the national security state during the Cold War when there was a war on communism.
00:50:27.000 And so a lot of socialists or socialist light folks were targeted and they had to, they went through this same sort of collective, wow, this is the CIA's relationship with private business and this is how the military connection comes into this.
00:50:44.000 And there was a very robust scholarship for about 20 years in the Democrat Party around that.
00:50:50.000 And there has really never been on the Republican Party until now because the Republican Party's base of support in American politics for the past century has come from basically three places.
00:51:03.000 The military-industrial complex itself, which was largely set up by Eisenhower.
00:51:10.000 The big oil industry, which is tightly connected with the military-industrial complex, and the Chamber of Commerce for just general big business who like low-tax, free enterprise policies.
00:51:23.000 And there was never like they were always on the giving end rather than on the receiving end.
00:51:28.000 So Republicans, by and large, were kept dumb unless you were in the business that this entire cinematic universe exists.
00:51:36.000 And now that Republicans or half of the Republican Party has been systematically targeted by this apparatus, I mean, this was part of my frustration for many years in trying to explain the censorship industrial complex is that to even know that people saw the CIA on the board of Facebook.
00:51:56.000 I'm sorry, on the trust and safety team on Facebook and the trust and safety team of Twitter and the trust and safety team of YouTube and couldn't understand how this could be possible or USAID's role in this or the State Department's role in this or their funded grantees.
00:52:11.000 And so you need to explain essentially how U.S. foreign policy works, how domestic sentiment is a, they call this the driver, the domestic drivers of foreign policy is critical to our international business, our multinational business and private equity and U.S. foreign policy focused things depend on what people vote for here.
00:52:34.000 Because if you vote for the wrong president, those businesses that make money abroad go kaput or the foreign policy initiatives can radically change.
00:52:45.000 And so they targeted the Trump movement, regardless of what you voted for him for.
00:52:51.000 If you are a Trump supporter and Trump wanted to go a different way on Ukraine, a different way on Russia, a different way on China, a different way on Syria, a different way on Iraq, well, then you have to target the whole movement to make sure that guy doesn't get elected.
00:53:06.000 And you target it through this peri-intelligence layer.
00:53:11.000 Yeah, that's well said.
00:53:14.000 I think that's a, Blake, I mean, you and me are probably just a little bit on different wavelengths.
00:53:21.000 You see Normie here.
00:53:22.000 No, I mean, listen, I think, Mike, that was a really good summation.
00:53:28.000 I think there's just too much smoke.
00:53:29.000 There's got to be some fire there.
00:53:30.000 But I think some of the sex stuff maybe has been sensationalized.
00:53:33.000 Some of the blackmail stuff, I'm with you on that.
00:53:36.000 Mike, you've made a lot of time for us at the drop of a hat.
00:53:40.000 Thank you so much for giving us as much of these connections.
00:53:44.000 You've given us a lot to think about.
00:53:45.000 And I think a really important other side of this, Epstein saga.
00:53:48.000 Mike Benz, the executive director for the Foundation for Freedom Online and so much else, former State Department.
00:53:56.000 You're crushing it out there.
00:53:57.000 Congratulations on all the success.
00:53:59.000 Thanks, you guys, too.
00:54:00.000 Be well.
00:54:00.000 All right.
00:54:01.000 Take care.