On this episode of the podcast, Alex Blumbergbergberg joins me to talk about the Epstein scandal, and why the government should have made the documents public years ago. We talk about why it took so long for the government to declassify the documents, why it was so difficult to get them declassified, and what we should do now.
00:00:55.000What 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.
00:01:12.000It could be the case that it kind of required a congressional bill to force this out.
00:01:17.000Like when you, 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 FOIA the Justice Department to get dirt on your political enemies because you think that they might be involved in something.
00:01:35.000Now, I don't know if it could have been done through an executive order around Epstein transparency around the time of the first binders.
00:01:42.000Certainly, it looked like there was friction between the president and Thomas Massey over this issue.
00:01:51.000But I don't know the details of what went down there.
00:01:55.000But the fact is the bill passed 427 to 1 in the House.
00:02:18.000Yeah, 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.
00:02:34.000I can't think of anything that both Republicans and Democrats voted on 427 to 1.
00:02:46.000Yeah, so there was the I mean, 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.
00:03:14.000I mean, almost every major player in world affairs was in some way either involved in or adjacent to this network, or the network tried to reach out to them because they were influential.
00:03:33.000And so, you know, there was kind of 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.
00:03:51.000And then the Trump administration gets into power and there's a very slow reaction to the kind of disclosures that culminated in what happened this week.
00:04:02.000And so you had the Democrats saying, oh, they're not disclosing it because of Trump World and his associates.
00:04:09.000Meanwhile, they controlled the Justice Department and the FBI for four years and didn't release any.
00:04:20.000And what's really interesting about it is this bill only compelled the disclosure.
00:04:27.000This law that passed in Congress only compelled the disclosure of Justice Department-originated files.
00:04:34.000Justice Department, by extension, FBI is the investigative arm of the Justice Department.
00:04:39.000It does not compel CIA-originated files.
00:04:44.000And 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, spearheaded the JFK files release.
00:05:03.000And we got basically fully unredacted documents.
00:05:08.000Now, I know there's a contest over how complete they are, but the fact is, 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.
00:05:24.000The 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.
00:05:34.000The law, I believe, was called the JFK Records Collection Act.
00:05:38.000And 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.
00:05:56.000Given 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.
00:06:16.000And we actually, you know, I saw this in the files that were just released.
00:06:24.000Jeffrey Epstein himself twice FOIA, that's the Freedom of Information Act, which is a law that I think came around in 1966, which allows any U.S. citizen to ask any government agency for all public records that it has about anything.
00:06:44.000There are certain things that get blocked in that.
00:06:47.000There were a lot of FOIA fights about COVID.
00:06:51.000Fauci, 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 requests.
00:07:02.000But the fact is you can FOIA the CIA for records because that FOIA forces the CIA to give you declassified or unclassified records.
00:07:15.000And if it's classified, it'll issue a GLOMAR, we cannot confirm or deny and the existence or non-existence of classified information.
00:07:25.000Before we get any further, the JFK stuff, I never heard anything about it.
00:07:30.000I mean, I know the files came out, but there was no big revelations.
00:07:35.000Was there anything that came out of that that was significant?
00:07:41.000I guess people are looking at the JFK files.
00:07:46.000Most people are looking at it for clues as to who killed JFK.
00:07:51.000And 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.
00:08:06.000For me, I was never expecting to see a CIA document saying, I, James Jesus Angleton, authorized the assassination of the president of the United States.
00:08:22.000But 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 kind of revelations that really only come around once in a generation.
00:08:41.000There's a video online by Michael Parenti, who's a CIA whistleblower around the time of the Iran-Contra hearings in the 1980s.
00:08:49.000And he says, pay attention to these hearings.
00:08:52.000This may be the last time for another 20, 30, 40 years that you ever get an inside look at the detailed minutia of a covert operation, because all of this was being blasted on a congressional jumbotron with hearings and formal congressional investigations and public testimony.
00:09:15.000And I sort of look at the JFK files released like that.
00:09:20.000We got a very detailed look at everything that was happening around, effectively, Operation Mongoose.
00:09:34.000Yeah, so 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 to Mongoose, for example, to destabilize the government of Cuba in order to induce a regime change.
00:09:56.000But because those efforts proved unsuccessful, they regionalized the conflict to do counter-communism work effectively throughout all of Latin America, the Caribbean, South America.
00:10:10.000And Operation Condor was effectively a kind of counterinsurgency strategy to stop the rise of left-wing Marxist groups who were trying to throw off the yoke of American imperialism, so to speak, as they put it.
00:10:27.000And so you had a massive CIA operation to try to tilt the internal politics of basically every country south of the border.
00:10:40.000I'll give you an example of one declassified document that's really wild.
00:10:45.000There'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 hit men.
00:11:17.000that were in Miami but had contacts with the Cuban exile community liaisons within Cuba.
00:11:26.000And so 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 payoffs, with very detailed logistics.
00:12:11.000The 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.
00:12:29.000They filmed basically like a porno that would to create a tape.
00:12:38.000And 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.
00:13:04.000And you look at these in formal agency files, and on the one hand, you go, okay, that was the 1960s.
00:14:13.000But you're like, well, I'm not surprised they did it because I know they were doing all these other things.
00:14:17.000The fact is, is the CIA was working with the mob before there was a CIA.
00:14:25.000Before it was done by the CIA, work with, for example, 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.
00:14:45.000Well, at the time it was the OSS in the 1940s, but it would become the CIA.
00:14:49.000One of their main logistical points of contact and allies for the resistance against Mussolini in Italy.
00:14:58.000Mussolini was cracking down both on the Vatican church and on the Italian mafia.
00:15:05.000And so The Restrange Bedfellows, there's a great book on this by Paul Williams.
00:15:11.000It's called Operation Gladio, The CIA, the Vatican, and the Mob.
00:15:16.000And I recommend this book to everyone because it's a really, really detailed academic deep dive on this nexus between a religious institution, an intelligence agency, an illegal organized crime syndicate that does all manner of black ops, and it especially focuses on the funding relationship.
00:15:45.000In fact, this just came out, and this sort of gets to the utility of these documents.
00:15:49.000There's an incredible document that just was released this week where Larry Summers, who was the head of the U.S. Treasury, so not only was he the head of Harvard University and the head of the American money system, but he says to, he's trying to explain to Jeffrey Epstein kind of the politics of what's happening in the Vatican.
00:16:17.000And 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 kind of the deep politics of the Vatican.
00:16:29.000And 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.
00:16:45.000It traces 80 years of this because the Vatican Bank was the first offshore bank before offshore banking even existed.
00:16:56.000There 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.
00:17:14.000Incidentally, that was when the mob was really prosecuted for the first time.
00:17:20.000But effectively what happened was you had strange bedfellows.
00:17:23.000You had the United States who wanted to get rid of Mussolini.
00:17:25.000You had the Vatican who wanted to get rid of Mussolini.
00:17:27.000And you had organized crime who wanted to get rid of Mussolini.
00:17:30.000And because organized crime is very deep in the logistics and unions, they control the ports.
00:17:41.000And if they have allies in a bank, they are able to launder money effectively in order to do black market type trade.
00:17:55.000And if you have, for example, the support of the U.S. 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.
00:18:15.000And at the time, because, and Larry Summers explains this to Jeffrey Epstein in very simple terms, which is, yeah, here you go.
00:18:25.000The most important change in the Vatican may not be Pope Benedict's sudden retirement, but change in leadership of the Institute for Works of Religion, the Vatican's Bank.
00:18:34.000Because of the Vatican's status as a sovereign country, it's exempt from transparency rules of not only Italy, but of the European Union.
00:18:40.000This status allows its elite clients to evade any scrutiny in their money transfers.
00:18:45.000Last May, Vatican Bank president was fired after Italian authorities opened an investigation into a far-flung bribery scheme.
00:18:52.000And 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, Jersey, Mann, Panama.
00:19:09.000But Panama is sort of a different story.
00:19:11.000It's usually associated with these kind of small island countries that are formally, you know, kind of their own territory, their own sort of sovereign territory.
00:19:21.000You also see this within the United States in Native American reservations with these kind of autonomous zones that can be shielded from certain kinds of public disclosures that a typical finance institution does.
00:19:36.000That's going on with Native American banks.
00:19:38.000Well, yeah, this was actually part of.
00:21:21.000And, you know, it goes through how this was used effectively by the NSA during the promised software scandal and the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s, where you had basically the NSA and then the U.S. government running money laundering effectively through casinos on Native American sovereign territory.
00:21:48.000But the fact is, in the 1940s, the Vatican Bank was really the only game in town.
00:21:53.000This traces back at the CIA level to a lawyer named Paul Helliwell, who was kind of the architect of money laundering for the CIA.
00:22:03.000And it didn't even start in, well, really started with the attempt to try to stop Mao in the 1930s and 1940s.
00:22:16.000There were the opium wars in the 1830s, where effectively the British Empire and the East India Trading Company were making ungodly amounts of money by selling opium to China.
00:22:33.000They 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.
00:22:45.000And then there were two opium wars that were fought in the 1830s and 50s, I believe, around then?
00:22:52.000And 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.
00:23:04.000Opium dens in China were a massive issue within the country.
00:23:08.000They tried to ban it, and the British crown pried open the narcotics market through a military conquest of parts of China.
00:23:17.000That's how Britain got control of Hong Kong, which remains a major narco-trafficking site connected to Jeffrey Epstein in very weird ways.
00:23:28.000But 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 Chiang Hai-shek and the Kuomintang, the Chinese nationalists against the Chinese communists.
00:23:45.000The War Department couldn't get enough congressional allocations, taxpayer money to support that.
00:23:51.000So 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.
00:24:02.000But they financed that initially the War Department, the Chinese nationalists, through the narcotics trade, through the basically the narcotics cultivated in the Golden Triangle.
00:24:14.000And these operations continued in Cambodia and Laos and were a big part of the JFK expansion of covert operations.
00:24:24.000To this day, in Fort Bragg, the special operations training centers called the JFK.
00:24:31.000This was a massive expansion of small wars, covert action instead of big military action.
00:24:37.000So it was mostly spearheaded by CIA rather than DOD or Department of War.
00:24:41.000But what happened was Paul Helliwell, in order to be able to traffic illegal narcotics, created a bunch of these CIA banking structures.
00:24:52.000One's called Castle Bank and Trust in the Cayman Islands, another one, Newgan Hand in Australia.
00:25:00.000And when you have that friendly bank that's protected, then you can move drugs.
00:25:08.000This is this overworld, underworld alliance between intelligence and organized crime, because basically every intelligence operation is a, I want to say every, but at the operational level, it's a crime.
00:25:34.000So in order to do an illegal crime, you don't want to do it yourself because then your fingerprints are on the gun.
00:25:44.000But 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.
00:25:56.000And it gets justified in the name of national security.
00:25:59.000The illegal narcotics trade set up by Paul Helliwell, who would go on to be the main lawyer for Disney and set up Disney World in Orlando.
00:26:18.000And so they then took that model to South America and Latin America and the Caribbean during Operation Condor, Operation Mongoose.
00:26:30.000And 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.
00:26:49.000You cultivate, you can't get enough money in USAID.
00:26:52.000In the 1940s, USAID didn't even exist.
00:26:57.000You can't get enough money from U.S. taxpayer dollars.
00:26:59.000You can't get enough money from private donors who will draft off of the regime change for their own profit.
00:27:05.000So how do you get your resistance rebels enough money?
00:27:11.000That 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.
00:27:22.000And the best things to use for this kind of covert financing are small, fungible, physical materials that can be converted into large sums of cash.
00:27:36.000For example, like a truck full of cocaine can fund an army.
00:27:43.000And so 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.
00:28:06.000On the mafia side, Operation Gladio was this stay-behind network is what they said.
00:28:13.000Basically, these were right-wing groups, many or some of which were kind of Nazi adjacent who hated communism.
00:28:25.000And so 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.
00:28:46.000And 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.
00:29:10.000And if you look at the members of these cluster cells, there's some of them, you know, like 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.
00:29:27.000And that structure is still used by intelligence today.
00:29:31.000If you go to my X feed and you look up, for example, Ann 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.
00:29:45.000And it's fascinating to look at the organizational structure of it.
00:29:50.000But I guess what I'm getting to here is with the mob and the Vatican, at that time, that was the only game in town for offshore banking.
00:30:01.000If 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 decolonialization, the British Empire transitioned from a physical empire to a financial empire and moved heavily into offshore banking.
00:30:21.000That's how you got these kind of, you know, BVI, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, you know, Jersey, man, all these kind of British offshore banking hubs.
00:30:33.000And 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.
00:30:51.000And so the Vatican Bank has lost a lot of its rank, I would say, in the international finance system since the 1940s because the market's so saturated now with offshore banking hubs.
00:31:04.000But that explains what's happening in this Larry Summers Jeffrey Epstein exchange.
00:31:12.000One 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 sort of dismiss all of it together.
00:31:32.000There's a lot of people thought about that with Pizzagate.
00:31:34.000And there's some stuff that I saw online that was like George W. Bush was like involved in ritual sacrifice or things along those lines, like killing babies and eating people and wild shit.
00:31:57.000What I'll say is this is a bad week to be a total Pizzagate denialist.
00:32:08.000You would feel a lot more comfortable about it a week ago than you would this week.
00:32:12.000I don't particularly focus or I don't want to say care.
00:32:19.000My knowledge set on it is a lot more limited on it because I don't think it's a central crux of political influence.
00:32:32.000I don't know if it's kind of almost an inside joke in a certain way.
00:32:38.000Jeffrey Epstein himself in these emails is unbelievably trolly.
00:32:42.000He'll say things that are the kind of shit posts you say to a buddy or your brother or something that you don't mean cheek, but if you were a cynical, out-to-get you person who somehow obtained that text message, you'd say, oh, look, he said it.
00:33:11.000And so there's a lot of that going on.
00:33:13.000But the fact is, is I have seen some, I've seen a lot of images shared around the time period of when Pizzagate was popping off in 2016.
00:33:24.000All I'll say is it doesn't look good or easily explainable.
00:33:29.000At the same time, a lot of those screenshots I have not, you know, 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.
00:33:41.000I've confirmed whether or not the screenshot is actually what it is.
00:33:44.000For those, I have not yet, but I would not feel totally confident saying there's no there there, but that's about as far as I can go on that.
00:33:59.000When you say images, what are you talking about?
00:34:01.000Well, there's a lot of, you know, if you look up pizza, for example, it's just as a keyword search, you'll see, or cheese or something, it looks like, you know, in the DOJ database for these new files, you'll see a lot of things of people talking about pizza in a way that's kind of impossible to imagine to do to a pizza.
00:34:32.000But I don't, to me, there's so much real-world, provable things in there, and also so many kind of more real-world implications of allegations that are made in the files that kind of, you know, should be explained.
00:34:55.000Like a common mistake that I see going around social media this week is people kind of gets 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.
00:35:18.000But because it's in an FBI file, people will think it's true.
00:35:21.000Now, I don't think that's a reason not to release these.
00:35:23.000I'm extremely glad these were released.
00:35:27.000What I'm saying is, I've seen that phenomenon run away.
00:35:33.000And some of this I know is kind of 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 kind of bombshell claim in the, this is probably the most viral post, the first day of the DOJ release, which was a confidential human source, CHS, means of FBI informant,
00:36:04.000who the FBI internal memo describes how this confidential human source reported that Alan Dershowitz was a Mossad agent.
00:36:15.000And after every meeting, he goes back and tells his Mossad handlers what they talked about.
00:36:23.000And you go, oh my God, it's an FBI confidential human source.
00:36:28.000The FBI wouldn't pay an informant unless they found them credible for this sort of thing.
00:36:33.000On the very next page of the files, it says, President Trump, I'm paraphrasing.
00:36:42.000President Trump is controlled by the government of Israel and they have, I forget if he says they have blackmailing or something to this effect.
00:36:48.000Now, I don't know whether either of those things are true or not.
00:36:52.000I don't know what any more than anybody else who's done research on this.
00:36:57.000Certainly there's a lot of overlap between Dershowitz and the Israeli government and high-level Israeli officials.
00:37:03.000So 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.
00:37:11.000But it plays into a kind of confirmation bias that a lot of people have.
00:37:15.000And so 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.
00:37:25.000And same thing, there's a mega civil war right now that's happening over issues around Israel.
00:37:31.000It's, you know, you say, oh my God, it's been proven the FBI knows that.
00:37:37.000Well, 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.
00:37:54.000Again, I'm paraphrasing here, where it matches that document file number.
00:37:59.000It's got the same text, and it looks like that confidential human source is Chuck Johnson.
00:38:05.000Now, I saw that and I went, oh my God.
00:38:09.000Because one morning, I woke up to a text from that very person saying this is about two years ago.
00:38:19.000I never met him, never talked to him, don't have his number.
00:38:23.000Somehow he got mine and messaged me on signal to turn myself in because I'm going to prison.
00:38:29.000He 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.
00:38:50.000Now, he didn't even get the name right.
00:38:52.000He 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, you know, I had been married to a foreign spy prostitute or something.
00:39:12.000And 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.
00:39:27.000And 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.
00:39:45.000This is that confidential human source, or at least according to the reporting of Ken Silva.
00:39:54.000The 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,
00:40:09.000but 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.
00:40:25.000Like, 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.
00:41:30.000The 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.
00:41:38.000And there's so many people involved in that.
00:41:42.000Here's the big question that people ask.
00:41:44.000If 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?
00:41:54.000I mean, this is why I find this, you know, this is not the core of what I focus on, but I find it a really interesting field of study because it helps understand so many other U.S. government institutions and the relationship between government and private business.
00:42:15.000Jeffrey Epstein is part of a class of what are effectively professional fixers.
00:42:25.000And this is a kind of class of professional who sits not really within a particular government or private sector institution, but in the kind of sticky layer between them that connects them all.
00:42:42.000And 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 Mayhew and these types, are just good case studies in how the intelligence world, the business community, uses.
00:43:01.000Let's take an example of Bruce Rappaport.
00:43:04.000And this is a you can pull up on screen if you want.
00:43:30.000Pipeline deal, intrigue in high places.
00:43:32.000And I'll describe what happens here in a second.
00:43:34.000In fact, there's a great YouTube video on this as well.
00:43:37.000If you look up Bruce, just on YouTube, Bruce Rappaport, 1988, there's a great kind of couple-minute summary of all of this.
00:43:47.000But effectively, what happened was, and let me start this by just Jeffrey Epstein got to Bear Sterns in 1966, I'm sorry, 1976, and then worked there until 1980.
00:44:06.000Sorry, just because you have it on screen, maybe I'll go through this first and then I'll do the Jeffrey Epstein connections.
00:44:12.000So what happened here was you had the Iran-Iraq war from 1980 to 1988.
00:44:18.000And Henry Kissinger had a really great quote about this because he asked, what is the U.S. government strategy on this?
00:44:26.000And why are we giving weapons to Iran when the Iranian revolution just happened in 1979 that overthrew what was a U.S. government-friendly government that was partially installed by the CIA in 1953?
00:44:48.000We've now declared an international arms embargo on them.
00:44:52.000We're basically at war with the Ayatollahs.
00:44:54.000Why are we giving them weapons and helping them defeat Iraq?
00:44:59.000And the issue was we were also in a kind of war over regional hegemony and oil with Iraq.
00:45:12.000And so Henry Kissinger's quote was, my only wish is that both sides would lose, could lose.
00:45:17.000And so what happened was, 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.
00:45:36.000And then at a certain point in this, we began to back Iraq.
00:45:43.000We went back and forth supporting Iran-Iraq.
00:45:46.000And so Iraq, because of the embargoes on it, wanted to build a pipeline to get its oil out.
00:45:55.000And it was going to pass through Jordan and it was going to abut against the border of Israel.
00:46:01.000And a major CIA contractor and CIA-connected private business called Bechtel, highly, highly influential company.
00:46:13.000There's been many, many, many books written on Bechtel.
00:46:20.000There was a saga, for example, around the Stanford Airnet Observatory, around the censorship industrial complex when I visited the Stanford Internet Observatory and I went to the courtyard.
00:46:31.000The courtyard is sponsored by Bechtel.
00:46:33.000I think it's called the Bechtel Courtyard.
00:46:36.000But what happened was, is the Bechtel was promised by Iraq a billion-dollar contract in 1980s money for constructing this pipeline.
00:46:52.000And the Central Intelligence Agency and the White House National Security Council, both for geostrategic reasons, wanted this pipeline built.
00:47:00.000The problem was 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.
00:47:16.000And they were afraid that if Bechtel got this contract and built this pipeline, that Israel would, you know, these pipelines are very fragile.
00:47:25.000And because it passes close to it, it's very possible that that would happen.
00:47:30.000It would destroy both the CIA's goal and the private profiteer, Bechtel's goal.
00:47:39.000Well, what the CIA did is what the National Security Council, which is the interagency that the CIA reports to, did is they engaged a private fixer named Bruce Rappaport,
00:47:53.000who was a Swiss billionaire with close ties to the Israeli government, to back channel with the Israeli government some sort of secret agreement that would guarantee that they would not sabotage the pipeline.
00:48:10.000And because the Attorney General of the United States, now, again, think about this as well.
00:48:17.000As 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 when Jeffrey Epstein killed himself or whatever happened to him.
00:48:41.000So what happens is Bruce Rappaport does indeed use his contacts with the Israeli government to strike an agreement that then allows the prod would allow the project to be greenlit.
00:48:57.000But it triggers a special prosecutor's investigation of the Attorney General himself, Ed Meese, because one of his friends was alleged to be in on the deal.
00:49:09.000So 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.
00:49:26.000And what ended up happening is Bruce Rappaport stepped forward and said, no, no, no, it wasn't to profit, the terms weren't to profit the friend.
00:49:36.000It was the terms we secretly reached with Israel is that they were going to get like a 30% cut on the revenue of the pipeline.
00:49:45.000But the fact is, is Bruce Rappaport was not.
00:49:52.000Now, the other part of this is that the National Security Council told basically the overseas development arm of the U.S. government, a formal U.S. government agency, to put American taxpayer funds to help subsidize the pipeline, the Bechtel pipeline.
00:50:14.000And 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 sordid details about his own past.
00:50:32.000So that government agency queried the CIA for all records about Bruce Rappaport.
00:50:36.000And the CIA gave them a limited hangout.
00:50:40.000They said, oh, you know, we only have a few documents that are responsive to it and no red flags.
00:50:45.000As it turned out, what the special prosecutor compelled from the CIA is that they had a whole dirty dossier on Bruce Rappaport.
00:50:54.000And if they had given that to the U.S. government agency, there couldn't have been support for the pipeline.
00:51:01.000Now, after all the scandal, the pipeline ended up not being built.
00:51:03.000But the point is, 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.
00:51:18.000You have the same structure of the intelligence community, private businesses, and back-channel deals with government officials.
00:51:27.000But because there was no 201 file on Bruce Rappaport, he was not formerly a CIA asset.
00:51:37.000He was what's called a liaison, a contact, a facilitator, a friend of the station.
00:52:04.000And in this case, he thought it was good for him to take this.
00:52:08.000Who knows what cut he himself got on it.
00:52:11.000But the fact is, is here you have the same type of opera.
00:52:17.000You 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.
00:52:27.000And 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.
00:52:42.000And 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?
00:52:54.000And they're not all as prominent as Epstein, but I would argue people like Mark Rich and at the time Bruce Rappaport kind of were.
00:53:04.000They don't all have these child sex trafficking type things.
00:53:09.000It's like what he was connected with, it makes me wonder, like if he didn't have that sick thing where he liked underage girls, like if he'd never gotten arrested, which was what, 2008 or something?
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00:54:21.000And you can imagine very easily why because Epstein was involved in fraudulent financial activities his entire career.
00:54:32.000He was under SEC investigation at Bear Stearns in 1980 when he was involved in a deal.
00:54:41.000I think it was St. Joe's Mineral Company, which is owned by Seagrams, which is owned by the Bronfin family.
00:54:51.000He got in trouble with the SEC at that time.
00:54:53.000He then, as soon as he got in trouble, he left Bear Stearns and went out on his own, but then worked effectively at Bear Stearns off the book for the next decade, according to his own testimony.
00:55:05.000He had a continuous relationship with Bear Stearns for, you know, I think he said 31 years.
00:55:10.000It was basically from the moment, you know, from the 1970s, 1976 until 2007, 2008, when Bear Stearns collapsed while Jeffrey Epstein was in jail.
00:55:22.000But then Jeffrey Epstein, it appears to me almost impossible that Jeffrey Epstein was not working on BCCI pipeline deals while he was at Bear Stearns.
00:55:35.000Bear Stearns was one of the three biggest clearinghouses for BCCI transactions.
00:55:45.000BCCI is the Bank of Credit and Commerce International.
00:55:48.000Sometimes people call it the Bank of Crooks and Criminals International.
00:55:53.000It's an incredible saga of CIA banking gone wrong.
00:55:58.000It's a bank that was started in Pakistan in 1972 and then grew to be the CIA's main way to covertly back the Mujahideen against the Russians during the Cold War.
00:56:15.000So we backed Osama bin Laden, the CIA.
00:56:18.000We backed the Islamic Mujahideen, 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,
00:56:44.000just like we talked about with Strange Bedfellows, backing right-wing organized crime to stop left-wing communism.
00:56:55.000We did the same thing in Afghanistan through the Pakistan-Afghanistan border to run, covertly run guns to the Mujahideen.
00:57:07.000In fact, there's a great YouTube video that I always like to play so that you can see it for yourself.
00:57:15.000You can look up 1979, Zbignou Brzezinski dropping out of a helicopter to tell the Mujahideen that both God and the United States government is on their side.
00:57:28.000And 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.
00:57:41.000So if you turn the volume up and you start at the beginning, U.S. National Security Advisor Brzezinski flew to Pakistan to set about rallying resistance.
00:57:54.000He wanted to arm the Mujahideen without revealing America's role.
00:57:59.000On the Afghan border near the Khyber Pass, he urged the soldiers of God to redouble their efforts.
00:58:21.000You'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.
00:58:34.000Now that is the National Security Advisor of the United States of America.
00:58:40.000The National Security Advisor is the highest post in the cabinet.
00:58:44.000It is the person the president talks to every day.
00:58:47.000All intelligence, military, and statecraft goes through the National Security Advisor.
00:58:56.000And he personally, in 1979, this didn't come out until years later, but we were covertly doing this.
00:59:03.000So 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.
00:59:17.000It's the only thing that is irreplaceable and that if you don't have it, everything goes away.
00:59:22.000You lose one person, find another one.
00:59:27.000You lose one logistics hub can create another one with money.
00:59:34.000You lose your ability to pay your informants.
00:59:36.000You lose your ability to bribe government officials.
00:59:39.000You lose your ability to win the support of local institutions.
00:59:45.000We lost Vietnam, not really so much because we lost at the kinetic war level, but because we lost the ability to fund it because they got defunded.
00:59:58.000So we literally couldn't do it anymore.
01:00:00.000And there's another great clip just to show how sophisticated CIA money laundering was even by the 1960s.
01:00:07.000Sorry, I'll stop doing this after running around clip to clip after this or I'll chill on it.
01:00:13.000But if you go to my excount, you can also find this on YouTube.
01:00:18.000There's a great, I believe it was CBS in the 1960s.
01:00:25.000I think it's called In the Pay of the CIA or in the But if you type in CIA money laundering, you'll see this great clip about how sophisticated CIA money laundering was already by the 1950s and 60s.
01:00:37.000And the that, because everything the CIA does has to be laundered.
01:00:46.000If it writes a check, if it doesn't conceal the origins of the money, gigs up.
01:00:55.000So everything that is CIA has to move through some sort of money laundering mechanism.
01:01:04.000Well, you know, to kind of, I guess, borrow a phrase from the president, somebody's doing the money laundering.
01:01:17.000You need outside contacts who do not work at the agency or necessarily for the agency to facilitate that money laundering.
01:01:26.000And that was done through, for example, the Pakistanis with BCCI as well as contacts in London.
01:01:33.000That is what I believe Jeffrey Epstein was doing his entire career after that, from Towers Financial to his tenure with Leslie Wexner to kind of the way I think that he helped model the Clinton Foundation itself with the Clintons in the early 2000s.
01:01:49.000And his expertise in that, I think, is what made him useful.
01:01:57.000Well, it's more the connections of, I guess, donors and billionaires around him that made him the most useful.
01:02:03.000But the fact is, is he specialized when he went out on his own.
01:02:07.000Formally he leaves Bear Starns in 1981 and starts a one-man group called Intercontinental Assets Group out of his New York City apartment.
01:02:29.000And 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.
01:02:53.000That's why, you know, there were rumors that he was the world's richest man.
01:02:58.000In fact, we actually had legislation passed because of how influential he was.
01:03:01.000He was the one who in 1983 flew to the National Security Council, to the White House, to orchestrate the Iran-Contra affair.
01:03:13.000He 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.
01:03:35.000I 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.
01:03:42.000Now, 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.
01:04:02.000In 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 shake-up of the CIA in CIA history.
01:04:18.000At that moment, the church committee hearings were ongoing, and the public was seeing Colby 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.
01:04:35.000Operation Chaos had just broke about the CIA funding student groups on American college campuses.
01:04:45.000It was one house of horrors after another on everybody's TV that only had three news stations.
01:04:52.000And so Democrats were completely fired up about getting rid of the CIA or putting massive handcuffs on it, which is what they did.
01:05:01.000They created effectively what's now the Senate and House Intelligence Committee.
01:05:06.000So there's oversight of the CIA by the people's representatives.
01:05:12.000The first year Carter was in office in 1977, went through what was called the Halloween massacre, fired 30% of all CIA operations personnel.
01:05:26.000And so in response to this, you had a set of stakeholders who wanted that CIA dirty work to still be doable, but they didn't have the legal authorization to run it out of the CIA.
01:05:38.000So 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.
01:05:54.000They were all part of this thing called the Safari Club, which got its name from the Mount Safari.
01:06:00.000It was basically a resort club in Kenya, which was the main hub.
01:06:05.000Just like Colombia, for example, is kind of the main, was the main U.S. government hub for logistics.
01:06:10.000It was kind of a foothold for our ability to do work in Venezuela or Guatemala or Nicaragua or Brazil.
01:06:19.000In Africa, Kenya was our main stronghold.
01:08:03.000We could have had people on the ground.
01:08:05.000It'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.
01:08:21.000So an international arms embargo was put on Iran, but then Iraq threatened to invade it.
01:08:28.000And we didn't want Iraq to take it over.
01:08:30.000So we had to get, we had to do something illegal if we wanted to help Iran.
01:08:36.000And it was against international law to give them weapons.
01:08:39.000But if we didn't give them weapons, it was perceived massive geostrategic, geopolitical earthquake that we'd lived with for centuries.
01:08:49.000So you had to do one illegal action with the gun running.
01:08:53.000And then there was an inner-party dispute.
01:08:55.000The Democrats at that time, the majority, did not want to do intervention in Nicaragua.
01:09:06.000There was an in-party power called the Sandinista government, and there was a rebel faction called the Contras.
01:09:15.000And Republican donors and stakeholders had interests in Nicaragua and wanted to help the Contras overthrow the Sandinista government.
01:09:27.000Democrat donors didn't profit from that.
01:09:29.000And they, at the time, had a fairly robust anti-imperialism kind of mindset and were sick of CIA regime change by the early 1980s after everything that was disclosed in just the previous years.
01:09:42.000So Republicans wanted to overthrow the Nicaraguan governments.
01:09:46.000Democrats had a House majority, and they passed something called the Bolin Amendment, which forbade any U.S. government funds from going to support the Contras.
01:09:55.000So this put the Republicans in a pickle.
01:09:59.000By the way, this is what's happening kind of today around Ukraine if you flip the parties.
01:10:03.000100% of Democrats vote for Ukraine funding.
01:10:06.000The Republican Party is split about it.
01:10:09.000This is the inverse of that was happening in the early 1980s.
01:10:12.000100% of Republicans wanted to fund the Contras against what they called the Soviet-aligned Sandinistas.
01:10:24.000But they successfully passed this bullet amendment, so the CIA was in a pickle.
01:10:28.000How do you run guns to Iran when it's against international law?
01:10:35.000And how do you fund the Contras when it's illegal to spend U.S. government money to fund them?
01:10:43.000And so what they came up with is effectively the structure.
01:10:49.000I think it's the most useful structure for understanding American statecraft and intelligence activity to this day.
01:10:57.000What they came up with is what they called a structure called the Enterprise, which the CIA director Bill Casey referred to as a private, self-sustained, off-the-shelf,
01:11:11.000standalone entity that did not exist within the U.S. 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.
01:11:33.000So the money didn't come from U.S. taxpayers.
01:12:02.000And this was the soup that Jeffrey Epstein was coming up in.
01:12:08.000And 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.
01:12:26.000Southern Air Transport was the proprietary CIA airline, meaning it was owned and operated exclusively by the Central Intelligence Agency.
01:12:38.000And it was the airliner that all these aircraft moved through.
01:12:46.000Iran-Contra was basically the early 1980s up until the mid-late 1980s.
01:12:56.000In 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.
01:13:15.000So, you know, pretty thin layer there.
01:13:17.000But it moved from Miami to Columbus, Ohio, primarily to service the limited.
01:13:55.000Well, Ohio was, you know, if you remember kind of 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,
01:14:17.000and then it moved into Dayton and Columbus and adjacent to Chicago and this whole sort of hub around prohibition.
01:14:25.000And then Prohibition was 1920 to 1933.
01:14:28.000When Prohibition ended, all these networks went from black market alcohol to black market drugs because it was no longer black market.
01:14:37.000They no longer had a business smuggling alcohol.
01:14:40.000So they moved into the narcotics space.
01:14:54.000Well, yeah, if you, because in the 1930s was when you had, you know, as we discussed the Department of War's alliance with Chiang Hai-shek and the Kuomintang, the Chinese nationalists, the supply for the supply for heroin, for example, or opium, it comes from Asia.
01:15:16.000It comes from the Golden Crescent, the Golden Triangle.
01:15:19.000And the way this logistics chain moved was our CIA War Department-backed rebel groups in Asia, they sat territorially on the Golden Triangle.
01:15:37.000They would basically fly it out on military aircraft.
01:15:43.000It went to Europe for processing in France.
01:15:48.000That was one of the main, this is this kind of French connection saga, which again, Jeffrey Epstein is weirdly connected to.
01:15:55.000And I can tell you about that if you're interested.
01:15:58.000And then it would go to the basically Italian mafia folks for the transshipment.
01:16:05.000And you had Italian mafia-controlled docks and ports in the United States and New York and New Jersey.
01:16:12.000And 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.
01:16:25.000And so you had this drug trade to support foreign policy imperatives.
01:16:33.000You can run that exercise with pretty much every drug on planet Earth at this point.
01:16:38.000And 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.
01:16:52.000Do you think that's happening right now with Mexico?
01:17:16.000Well, so this was a scandal during the Obama administration.
01:17:20.000Eric Holder was the Attorney General of the United States.
01:17:23.000He 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.
01:17:32.000Earth to Congress, note to Congress, who wants to be a hero, by the way.
01:17:36.000You can do the same thing with the Epstein bill with the Fast and Furious files.
01:17:42.000I think everybody in this war on drugs that we're so gung-ho about, we just captured the president of Venezuela over drugs.
01:17:50.000It 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.
01:18:00.000But what happened was, is, and I believe this had interagency 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.
01:18:17.000This was a gun-running operation to send guns to the Sinaloa cartel to have them be able to successfully win a narco-drug war against the Los Zetas cartel.
01:18:34.000The Los Zetas cartel was pilfering oil pipelines.
01:18:37.000Remember, 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.
01:18:51.000Those oil fields go into Mexico is replete with oil.
01:18:54.000And there are many partnerships between United States oil companies and the Mexican government, Pemex, and all the different kind of private lines.
01:19:04.000And this is a big point of geopolitical contention.
01:19:06.000But the fact is, 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.
01:19:25.000This is, for example, what was happening with our CIA-backed rebel groups in Syria.
01:19:34.000I mean, we would literally, you know, our spunky, moderate rebels would, you know, literally cut open Syrian pipelines and take the oil.
01:19:43.000And this was one of the ways to support, you know, you can support it with drugs.
01:19:47.000You can support it with black market oil.
01:19:50.000And by the way, while I'm on the topic, if you pull up, and I have this on my ex, if you type in Institute for Peace, or just type in Institute, Peace, Drugs.
01:20:08.000the u.s government the u.s 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 uh you know negative impact on the you know the local economy if they didn't keep growing what was then you know 90 95 percent of the well yeah if you well i think click the next image uh
01:21:19.000So we, the CIA was help, and the U.S. military, as well as their allies and with regional allies, were cultivating the opium on the Golden Crescent for a noble cause, to win the Cold War against the evil Soviets.
01:21:37.000This was a big part of the funding for the Mujahideen.
01:21:42.000And 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.
01:21:56.000The drug money, the drug logistics chain that the CIA built for the Mujahideen then moved through the drugs money laundering chain at the CIA bank.
01:22:08.000And this apparatus had scaled for 20 years by the late 1990s.
01:22:12.000when the Taliban, like the Chinese, wanted to shut it down when the Taliban took power in the 1990s.
01:22:30.000And then, you know, we invade Afghanistan and 2001, 2003, it becomes a U.S. military-occupied zone, and it goes from 0% of the world's heroin to 95% of the world's heroin, all under U.S. military occupation.
01:22:49.000In fact, we installed their dictator, you know, whose brother was the main drug kingpin of the whole country.
01:23:03.000And some of this moved through, some of this moved through the Cold War CIA-backed Turkish Gray Wolves outfit.
01:23:14.000And there's a funny quote, I think, in the Michael Hastings article on Stanley McChrystal, where Stanley McChrystal's team refers to Hamid Karzai's funny little hat that he wore.
01:23:27.000Hamid Karzai was the CIA-installed strongman after we took over Afghanistan.
01:23:34.000He referred to his hat as the Grey Wolves vagina.
01:23:36.000I mean, basically saying, like, this is the drug logistics orifice.
01:23:43.000But leaving that aside, what I'm getting to is you have this banking network.
01:24:47.000One is the guy who brought him into the firm quickly became CEO thereafter, and Jeffrey Epstein was dating his daughter.
01:24:55.000The 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.
01:25:05.000And so 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 clearinghouse activities.
01:25:19.000What happened was Bear Stearns cleared about $13 billion worth of BCCI transactions.
01:25:28.000And it looks like these transactions were involved in the very same Adnan Khashoggi, so Saudi, and Doug Leese, who was a British arms dealer that Jeffrey Epstein was flying to London to meet with and working with all those years.
01:25:46.000And Bear Stearns was doing it through this entity called Capcom, which was what the the Senate report on the BCCI scandal referred to as the bank within the bank of BCCI.
01:26:00.000So kind of the inner sanctum of now that Capcom was was owned by Kamal Adam, who was the head of he was the chief spy for Saudi Arabia.
01:26:42.000Also, I can be charitable and say they just might not know.
01:26:49.000They might think that, you know, I don't think that the New York Times has a pinky of the specialization in Jeffrey Epstein cinematic universe knowledge that your random anonymous egg account on X has.
01:27:06.000So they might not know about Bear Stearns doing BCCI transactions.
01:27:12.000They might not know what, you know, if you don't know the material, you don't necessarily know what to ask.
01:27:21.000Also, 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.
01:27:38.000But the fact is, 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.
01:27:50.000And given the incredible volume that Bear Stearns appears to have been moving through BCCI and BCCI being the hottest ticket in town then in the late 1970s, it was literally the main vehicle for the U.S. government to covertly launder funds.
01:28:11.000Capcom, according to the Senate intelligence report and the Justice Department investigations, was the main vehicle for funding the Mujahideen.
01:28:21.00050% of those trades, and they laundered it illegally, which requires a brokerage, a clearinghouse to prove it.
01:28:33.000The way this is set up is you have a bank, you've got a money launder, and you've got a clearinghouse.
01:28:41.000The money launder was the CIA's literal direct partner in this, the Saudis.
01:28:49.000Capcom was run by the chief Saudi spy master.
01:28:54.000And then in 1982, Jeffrey Epstein obtained a fake Saudi passport.
01:29:00.000Sorry, it was a fake Austrian passport because that was a big loophole passport during the Cold War for spies.
01:29:05.000But said his residence was Saudi Arabia.
01:29:07.000We didn't find this out until 2019 when his safe was raided.
01:29:11.000But at that exact time, Jeffrey Epstein has this fake Saudi passport.
01:29:16.000And it's being done to support the CIA-backed rebel group, the Mujahideen, in Afghanistan.
01:29:26.000But that requires a clearinghouse to clear those money laundering trades.
01:29:30.000They 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.
01:29:44.000It looks like you won or lost it in a market trade rather than through drug money.
01:29:52.000And then they were then sending that on to the Mujahideen.
01:29:57.000But the fact is, 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.
01:30:11.000You have this drugs for cash for guns.
01:30:14.000The person, so the bank that's moving the, that's turning the drugs into clean cash, that the head of the Saudi spy master is running that part of the banking side.
01:30:30.000And 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.
01:30:45.000You have an illegal financial enterprise protected at the highest level by the United States government, the U.S. intelligence services, and by proxy, the Justice Department itself.
01:30:57.000Can you imagine the Justice Department prosecuting it while that operation was ongoing?
01:31:05.000You asked what are the great reveals in the JFK files.
01:31:10.000And I'd be remiss if I didn't bring up the case of Rolando Maspher.
01:31:16.000There'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 is massive damage if the Justice Department pursues a criminal case against a guy named Rolando Massfer.
01:31:35.000If you just type in Rolando Massfer, JFK files 2025 release, or like massive damage or something like that, you'll see this.
01:31:43.000It's an unbelievably incredible document.
01:31:45.000What it documents is that there was a dispute between the CIA and the State Department.
01:31:50.000The State Department sets foreign policy.
01:31:52.000The CIA is supposed to serve covertly the State Department.
01:31:59.000The CIA is the junior seat at the table.
01:32:00.000Nobody ever goes from being head of the State Department to head of the CIA.
01:32:08.000The CIA is supposed to be kind of the, I use like the Soprano's reference.
01:32:16.000Silvio comes in and shakes down the hairdresser shop or whatever for the money it owes the family.
01:32:24.000If 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.
01:32:34.000But Silvio is not doing that because he runs it.
01:32:39.000He's doing it because the person setting the policy of the enterprise, Tony, is the boss of it.
01:32:47.000The way it's supposed to work is the State Department sets policy and the CIA does or organizes the plausibly deniable, dirty work to achieve it, if that is necessary to achieve that foreign policy.
01:33:00.000This is why there was a lot of debate in 1948 about whether the CIA should even take on this role.
01:33:05.000This is this great 1948 George Kennan memo that says maybe we should have an office within the State Department called the Bureau of Organized Political Warfare.
01:33:16.000And then two months later, they decided the CIA would take that.
01:33:20.000But the fact is, is it's basically a State Department function, but CIA is supposed to defer to state.
01:33:26.000But what happened was, is there was a factional dispute between state and CIA over Cuba policy.
01:33:35.000The 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.
01:33:55.000But the CIA, the careers and folks there, wanted to take a more aggressive posture.
01:34:00.000And so one of the CIA's key assets and ringleaders had a logistics hub with a massive CIA-backed Cuban exile community network at that time in the early 1960s in Miami, wanted, thought that JFK was being too impatient, too cautious.
01:34:18.000They wanted to invade basically a section of Haiti departing from Miami to use that as a base to then do kinetic attacks against Cuba.
01:34:31.000The State Department learned that this CIA-backed network led by Orlando Massfer was going to do this and stopped it.
01:34:40.000They had a customs and border agent basically who was like manning the docks and caught them as like 300 of them were departing to try to take over a part of Haiti to do this.
01:34:50.000And then the State Department directed the Justice Department to pursue criminal charges against Orlando Massfer in steps the CIA.
01:34:59.000And if you can find this memo, it's M-A-S for, I think it's F-E-R-R-U-R, Rolando Massfer.
01:35:47.000Now, it says, the decision by the Justice Department to seek a grand jury indictment against Orlando Massfer and certain of his associates is a potentially explosive matter which could result in extensive damage to CIA activities in Miami.
01:35:59.000Recent adverse publicity on the national scene and in the Miami area have added substantially to the already sizable embarrassment potential.
01:36:07.000Can you imagine what these memos look like for Jeffrey Epstein?
01:36:10.000Some of the main sectors of danger to CIA equities are described below.
01:36:14.000Basic national publicity regarding student and foundation topics have already attracted attention of the local press to the CIA in general.
01:36:21.000Usually any reference to CI covert activities leads press to check files for references of any such activities locally.
01:36:28.000However, before this action can be taken, the story regarding, and then he goes over the Pan Am Foundation, the University of Miami, which was what hosted JM Wave, the University of Miami, then the CI's largest stationhouse in the world, it was called JM Wave, was hosted in a facility off of the University of Miami campus.
01:36:48.000again the biggest ci station house in the entire world uh the ci uh so it goes on to say that uh 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.
01:37:06.000And it will be disastrous if you pursue the prosecution of him because Rolando Massfer is going to squeal.
01:37:13.000I 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 head, the president and treasurer of the University of Miami.
01:37:27.000They're extending the cooperation and all of this.
01:37:31.000So basically, all these touch points that Orlando MassFer's network connects to will be exposed.
01:37:36.000And they go over all these, what were previously redacted, CIA cutouts in the area.
01:37:42.000And then it goes on, the memo says, even if the above circumstances do not exist, we would remain concerned regarding the possible effects of the prosecution of the MassFer group.
01:37:52.000Although 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 will be very easy for the defense to drag CIA Miami into the case.
01:38:04.000The defense has only to obtain testimony, true or perjured, conceivably true, from one of the defendants or summon 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.
01:38:26.000Given the sizable reduction of infiltration and a general feeling of frustration, lack of support for Cuban freedom attributed to passive U.S. Policy, basically saying it would undermine our entire operation against Cuba and the American people's support for it if the Justice Department indicts these people who just committed this crime because they can very.
01:38:49.000The 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 it and that would be a massive Scandal.
01:39:04.000And 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.
01:39:13.000There's a follow-up memo on this, which is totally incredible.
01:39:15.000That, I think, is more the logistics on this.
01:39:18.000The agreement they reach is that the State Department wins nominally.
01:39:23.000They do bring the prosecution, but they bring it in a highly limited and tepid way.
01:39:28.000And they agree to the CIA's demands to limit lines of inquiry, to file motions against entering anything into discovery that might basically reveal the CIA networks in this.
01:39:46.000And they agree to have a CIA general counsel person on the prosecution team in order to personally make sure that the Justice Department stays in line.
01:39:58.000And if something looks like, 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.
01:40:10.000And 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.
01:40:26.000I 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 U.S. intelligence services as part of the reason that he should be granted leniency.
01:40:41.000But 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, can you Jeffrey Epstein was investigated by the SEC in the 1980s?
01:41:13.000He was one of the two people who ran the biggest Ponzi scheme in history at the time in the United States, the Tower's financial collapse.
01:41:22.000Epstein's business partner goes to jail for like 30 years or 20 years or whatever.
01:41:45.000Well, one is, you know, he may have, we know in the U.S. Virgin Islands case, he was sponsoring the campaigns basically of the politicians there.
01:41:52.000The prosecutors answered to the politicians.
01:41:57.000But I would be shocked if they're 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, you know, money sourcing for that for all the crimes that Epstein committed, the concern was the same one they had with Orlando Masfer.
01:42:19.000Don't bring the case, and if you do, bring it in a highly limited way.
01:42:22.000And that's exactly what happened in 2006, the first time he was indicted.
01:42:28.000Everybody was up in arms that it was a sweetheart plea deal.
01:42:33.000It limited, it gave protection to all co-conspirators, known and unknown.
01:42:40.000And it was swooped in quickly before there was a trial in full so that lines of evidence couldn't be opened about the network.
01:42:51.000It's just crazy that statutory rape is what took it all down, right?
01:42:57.000Because it's underaged hand jobs, right?
01:43:10.000Even that has a really interesting geopolitical history.
01:43:13.000There was a similar scandal in the early 2000s with a private military contractor called Dein Corp, which again runs through this Adnan Khashoggi kind of Middle Eastern network.
01:43:23.000Deincorp got in trouble for trafficking, facilitating the traffic.
01:43:33.000It was a major U.S. military and CIA contractor for logistics and institutional support and military assistance on the ground for the U.S. military all over the world.
01:43:49.000They got in trouble moving, basically trafficking underage kids to Middle Eastern sheikhs.
01:43:59.000And 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.
01:44:11.000That basically, you know, these people who were critical, if you're operating on the ground in Kuwait or, you know, pick your Middle Eastern country in order to serve your purpose for the U.S. government to be this outside, plausibly deniable, but extensively infrastructured professional support outfit on the ground, you need the support of the local government.
01:44:41.000You need the support of the local high-level officials.
01:44:44.000And there's several currencies for that.
01:44:46.000There's financial payoffs 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 illegal.
01:45:00.000And so what Deincorp, I believe, got busted doing, and you can look up the Deincorp scandal here, was doing this.
01:45:09.000And I believe their argument was, well, you wanted us to do this thing on the ground.
01:45:15.000You wanted us to help the U.S. military and kind of covert support nodes that were happening here.
01:45:55.000It 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 the thing, of their vice, of the thing that they want but can't get.
01:46:11.000If you're a 70-year-old billionaire, you can't walk into a bar and leave aside the underage thing.
01:46:18.000You can't walk into a bar and meet an 18-year-old who's these things are facilitated at private parties.
01:46:30.000And it needs to, for a lot of these guys, it has to be discreet.
01:46:58.000They're just technical whizzes on the minutia of how to structure a merger or acquisition.
01:47:04.000They're just really great at structuring an offshore banking transaction or they're really, they just know absolutely everything about tax law.
01:47:11.000There's some people who move up because of nepotism.
01:47:14.000They're the brother and they're the son-in-law of a major partner.
01:47:18.000There's some people who make partner because they know one, they brought in one client who's just a really big rainmaker.
01:47:26.000And there's some people who move up because they open doors to partners while they're associates.
01:47:36.000They've got tickets to exclusive things.
01:47:39.000And 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.
01:47:47.000And that includes hosting cool exotic parties, having attractive women.
01:47:56.000I'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.
01:48:16.000And part of this is because the moment Jeffrey Epstein formally, officially threatens 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.
01:48:39.000That's the sort of thing that even a rumor of that spreading, and nobody else is going to want to do business with them.
01:48:46.000So you think people just assume it's blackmail because that is how you would blackmail someone, especially underage girls.
01:48:54.000I 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.
01:49:15.000But even then, I mean, imagine, for example, if, you know, like on the Bill Gates thing, like there was an, you know, Bill Gates gets an email, I have a video of you sleeping with this person, you know, or somebody much lower level.
01:49:36.000The moment they send that to the press, if, you know, in order to, they figure they have nothing to lose.
01:49:42.000I mean, there's not been anybody in the seven years that's transpired who said, I've been, I was personally blackmailed by Jeffrey Epstein.
01:49:48.000I think, because the moment you do that, nobody comes to your parties anymore.
01:50:08.000Well, I think that what you could have is because he does his own nefarious stuff, he could compile it so that if they ever go out, if they ever threaten him with something, he's now got something on them.
01:50:23.000And I've seen some correspondence that, you know, in the files that looks like that might not be an impossible situation.
01:50:32.000Do you think that's how Jeffrey Epstein got in that position in the first place, that they knew he had this kink?
01:50:38.000I mean, Adna Khashoggi had the same thing.
01:50:40.000Adna Khashoggi was running around with dozens of young and apparently underage girls the whole time.
01:50:47.000I 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.
01:51:07.000That's a very specific, illicit desire to want underage people.
01:51:14.000How do you even find out that someone's into that?
01:51:17.000Well, I don't think that the majority or anything close to it of the women were technically.
01:51:24.000I mean, I think it largely very young, barely legal, so to speak.
01:51:31.000And I know that there were cases of underage, but I think most of it was just very, very young, but not like 20 years old.
01:51:43.000And then, yeah, remember, because this is an international enterprise and many of the clients are like in countries that don't necessarily have the same norms about that that we do.
01:51:57.000You can very easily see someone getting involved in that just because girls juice deals.
01:52:02.000And so I don't think that Epstein, I've not seen evidence.
01:52:08.000And in my view, you don't need any of that to understand the core part of the Epstein story that has relevance to your life today in terms of your own government and the workings of power and corporate finance and the like.
01:52:23.000But I do think that girls juice deals and the fact that he had the coolest parties on a private island with the hottest girls.
01:52:33.000Also brought in a lot of intellectuals, stimulating conversations, scientists, all these very interesting people.
01:52:54.000And when you develop a reputation for having attractive women at the parties you host, 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 be want to be around attractive women.
01:53:58.000A 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.
01:54:16.000We need a facilitator to help arrange private outside funding for it so this thing can be constructed.
01:54:27.000And it doesn't look like it's coming from the U.S. government or just, but the U.S. government will provide some sort of loan guarantee or something on it, but we can't raise enough money to do this.
01:54:38.000It needs to come from the outside, but it would really help American national security.
01:54:42.000And there's probably something in it for you if you can get this done.
01:54:46.000Epstein then goes out and says to, then puts out basically, tries to make contact with people in his network who might be interested in that deal.
01:54:58.000And then goes and see goes out to five people.
01:55:16.000And then two people say, well, listen, it's a good idea and concept, but I don't know.
01:55:21.000The risk profile on it looks a little high.
01:55:24.000This normally would not be something that my team would clear.
01:55:29.000It's interesting, but it's a little rich for my blood in terms of the risk profile.
01:55:37.000But Jeffrey Epstein asked them to do it.
01:55:40.000And 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-50s or 60s, has opened all sorts of other deals for them.
01:56:18.000I will do, 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 standalone thing.
01:56:30.000It's because it's juiced by the girls, the parties, the lifestyle that Epstein allows you to have access to.
01:56:37.000But in the public eye, the narrative is underage girls.
01:56:41.000And this is the thing that makes it so disgusting.
01:56:43.000When people talk about it, everyone says, fuck kids on the island.
01:57:17.000And when I think about it logically, with the role that Epstein played between BCCI, Iran-Contra, Latin American politics, African politics, Asian politics,
01:57:32.000major world foundations, you don't need it would seem ludicrous to me that Epstein doesn't mean it's impossible,
01:57:48.000but 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.
01:58:04.000But proactively and really, really do someone in like that, and word gets around that that happens, everything he built goes, the whole Rolodex finds out.
01:58:18.000And then even if the rumor's not, even if that rumor isn't, 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 like an unfettered good time that is like, oh, he did this to this guy I know.
01:58:35.000And so, and the fact that these sorts of things, they have a value that went way beyond blackmail.
01:58:48.000They have a value in terms of bringing people in network and keeping clients and customers happy and providing access.
01:58:57.000And I think that the focus on that, listen, if there were any sort of 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.
01:59:18.000But my concern is the fixation on this, you think about the sort of 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.
01:59:36.000And this gets back to in 1999, I mentioned Jeffrey Epstein FOIAed the Central Intelligence Agency in 1999 for all records about himself.
01:59:55.000Now, Jeffrey Epstein was not a public figure at all in 1999.
01:59:58.000He didn't come into public awareness, public attention until 2001, 2002, when he started flying, when he flew Bill Clinton around, post-presidency Bill Clinton around on his Africa tour around the time of the start of the Clinton Foundation.
02:00:15.000And 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?
02:00:25.000And that's when the Jeffrey Epstein celebrity story started.
02:00:30.000But he was a private figure in 1999 when he FOIA the Central Intelligence Agency for records.
02:00:38.000And we just learned this in the files this week.
02:00:43.000The response, we don't actually have the underlying, what's in the files is a 2011 FOIA response to Jeffrey Epstein's lawyer.
02:00:53.000Jeffrey Epstein did this through his lawyer using the Privacy Act.
02:00:57.000This is a way to basically kind of anonymously FOIA the CIA to basically keep communications between the CIA and your lawyer for information you're entitled to under the Privacy Act about yourself.
02:01:15.000And we don't have the underlying letter in the files, tragically and for whatever reason.
02:01:23.000But what we do have, because I would expect that to be an enclosure to the CIA response.
02:01:28.000But the fact is, 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.
02:01:46.000So anybody right now can FOIA 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.
02:02:03.000But 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.
02:02:14.000We've granted the request to search for all open and acknowledged agency affiliations between Jeffrey Epstein and the CIA.
02:02:25.000We have run that search, and the answer is no documents are responsive to the request.
02:02:32.000And 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 non-existence of any such documents.
02:02:47.000So you can consider this a partial denial of your FOIA request.
02:02:51.000Now, 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?
02:03:12.000First of all, the fact that he did that alone twice in 1999, 2011 says something.
02:03:17.000But you might think, okay, well, he just wants to know if other people might think that he's CIA.
02:03:27.000He's about to be a massive public figure.
02:03:29.000He wants to know if other people FOIA the CIA for records on him, what they will see.
02:03:37.000But it turns out that response to a FOIA, partial granting of the FOIA to look for open and acknowledged agency links, and partial GLOMAR, neither confirm nor deny existence, non-existence, is a stock CIA FOIA response whenever you FOIA the CIA for someone's personnel files, which leads to the question,
02:04:05.000because 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 asked, he didn't just ask for all open and acknowledged links between the CIA and himself.
02:04:25.000And whatever that thing was, it touched on something classified.
02:04:29.000There would have been no GLOMAR if there would have been nothing to deny about the request if it had only been limited to open and acknowledged links.
02:04:41.000To me, this is a bombshell and should prompt Rocana and Thomas Massey and the 427 members of the House of Representatives and 100% of the U.S. Senate to pass the same bill that the United States Congress did in 1992 for the JFK Records Collection Act,
02:05:01.000when 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.
02:05:20.000The existence of this correspondence we just learned about this week alone should prompt a 427 to 1 and 100% Senate to do the same thing they just did with DOJ files for CIA-originated files.
02:05:43.000The CIA's records about Jeffrey Epstein, prolific child sex track, however you want, you know, whatever you see in the Rorschach inkblot test of the Epstein universe.
02:05:57.000I 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.
02:06:06.000And 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.
02:06:20.000The CIA would not be doing its job if it didn't have records about Jeffrey Epstein.
02:06:25.000Jeffrey Epstein was a counterintelligence threat with all the foreign countries that he was dealing with if he had been a double agent sort of thing.
02:06:34.000The CIA would not be doing its job if it was not keeping touch.
02:06:37.000Epstein's network was a key financial and logistics hub in highly geopolitical sensitive areas of operation of the CIA.
02:06:45.000The economics division of the CIA, let alone the operations division, is going to have to keep analysts informed about money flows in those countries.
02:06:58.000And when you add, and then you add in the fact that he represented Anand Khashoggi's money, who was the CI's main point person for 10 years, the literal central linchpin and his money is being handled.
02:07:42.000I mean, it could, you know, charitably volunteer to ODNI by conducting an internal task force that voluntarily asks Tulsi Gabbard to declassify these.
02:09:14.000And 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.
02:09:23.000I mean, from the weird kind of coincidence of Bill Barr's father, Donald Barr, and Jeffrey Epstein's Dalton School, 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.
02:09:40.000I mean, Bill Barr was like seven years.
02:09:44.000He went to night law school, trained to be a lawyer while he was at the CIA, and then his main job was being the CIA's blocker and tackler to obstruct.
02:09:56.000He 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.
02:10:14.000Then he becomes the Attorney General of the United States and he writes the pardons of the BCCI officials.
02:10:22.000Who was co-leading that investigation, Robert Mueller, at the time?
02:10:25.000This is in the early 1990s, the first time Bill Barr.
02:10:29.000So you have the BCCI Bear Stern's multi-billion 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.
02:10:45.000And Bill Barr is who lets the people from the crooked CIA bank off the hook.
02:10:51.000And then he becomes Attorney General again.
02:10:55.000And in 2019, he's the one in charge of the FBI.
02:10:59.000The FBI answers to the Justice Department.
02:11:00.000The FBI has the same relationship with justice that the CIA has with state.
02:11:04.000They're the investigative arm of the Justice Department.
02:11:09.000So I think it's hard to trust anyone on this.
02:11:14.000And I don't know what kind of file set the Trump FBI inherited after all this time.
02:11:25.000It's hard to make heads or tails of it.
02:11:27.000To me, I think getting answers on the things that are immediately actionable, getting the CIA's direct correspondence with Jeffrey Epstein that I mentioned, a congressional bill that forces that.
02:11:40.000Because 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.
02:11:55.000It 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 U.S. government intelligence and however many others, to know that on physical paper,
02:12:20.000like we know that the CIA interfered in the Orlando Massford trial, like we know that the CIA contracted out to mafia Hitman in an attempt to kill a foreign president, like we know that MKOTRO actually was real.
02:12:35.000These things, you can't scale, you know, think of things like a Jenga tower.
02:12:41.000If a foundational piece is not solid, you can scale a whole architecture of BS on top of it.
02:12:50.000And if that assumption falls away, this majestic looking, you know, tapestry of just years and years of effort collapses because the thing you assume 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.
02:13:14.000You know, it's, there's that quote, 99% is a bitch, 100% is a breeze.
02:13:23.000It 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 thousands, you know,
02:13:51.000millions 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.
02:14:00.000There might be something I missed in this.
02:14:07.000And things like, this is why document drops like this are so vital.
02:14:14.000Not even necessarily because they have some single smoking gun that tells you who killed JFK or, you know, what client Jeffrey Epstein trafficked women to, but because it allows you to put down real Jenga pieces about what actually happened.
02:14:37.000And that process itself allows you to ask the questions that might get you to those answers.
02:14:59.000I mean, I follow some of your live streams.
02:15:01.000I'm like, first of all, your recall is insane.
02:15:06.000You know, I heard something once, which I think is really helpful.
02:15:09.000I don't think I'm special in any way like this.
02:15:11.000I think literally anyone can do this if you just kind of apply this kind of trick.
02:15:16.000I heard this once, which is that if you read a history book, don't just read it agnostically.
02:15:25.000Have a theory in mind about what you think this is and how it worked.
02:15:34.000Even 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, you know, if I'm thinking about something that happened in, you know, I don't know, like November 11th, 1983.
02:16:02.000Okay, if, if I see like 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.
02:16:13.000It's going to be like remembering, trying to remember an 11-string, you know, number or like someone's cell phone or something when you don't really know the person or you've never, you know, you haven't dialed in a million times.
02:16:24.000But 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.
02:16:34.000So like I've joked, like 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.
02:16:53.000The universities had to be, the foundations, the private philanthropic donors, you know, and this is what happened in the censorship industrial complex.
02:17:02.000But what you find is like those dates mean something to you because they're placed in relation to something else that happens.
02:17:11.000I joke that I index things by Iran-Contra often.
02:17:14.000For 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.
02:17:24.000I think, okay, well, that means it happened after the meeting between Robert McFarlane and Anand Khashoggi, but before the oil pipeline scandal of Ed Mies.
02:17:36.000And then so I remember that this thing happened on this date because I place it into that index.
02:17:42.000And anyone, I think it's a I think it's something that anyone, you know, I think people organically do it when they're really passionate about something.
02:17:54.000And 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.
02:18:08.000When 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 in intelligence, military, statecraft, high finance, private philanthropies, universities, labor unions, scientific research.
02:18:26.000It doesn't mean it's the Epstein network, so to speak, but it's this layer of interconnected human networks.
02:18:35.000And 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.
02:18:47.000They can make informed decisions about what to vote for.
02:18:50.000They can make informed decisions about what kind of industries that they're participating in that they might want to see reformed.
02:18:58.000And so it makes it easy to be passionate about because if we can get a win here, it'll really change the world.
02:19:07.000Well, I think you do a great service, and I think your abilities are exceptional.
02:19:12.000I think you're selling yourself short a little bit.
02:19:14.000You're being a little self-deprecating because it's very unusual what you're able to do.
02:19:18.000And I think just the sheer amount of time that you've invested in this stuff is kind of mind-boggling.
02:19:26.000Well, what would you like to see in this?
02:19:29.000Like, if you had a wish list, what are the things that are open threads?
02:19:34.000Well, 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.
02:19:50.000A new person will get into office and promise that they're going to implement some reform and it never happens.
02:19:58.000And that we just accept that over and over and over again.
02:20:11.000And I think a lot of people think that we've already passed the point of no return on that.
02:20:15.000That's what scares the shit out of a lot of people.
02:20:17.000And then when you see things that are happening in other countries, like particularly England, which is just rampant crackdown on free speech and with 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.
02:20:42.000This 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.
02:21:04.000Well, look at what California is doing right now.
02:21:06.000What California is doing is they are taking or they're moving forward with this, the idea that you have a tax on the amount of miles that you drive now.
02:21:21.000So instead of just taxing gas like they've always done, now they're taxing you on the amount of miles that you drive.
02:21:29.000Well, you're already getting tax on that.
02:21:30.000If you're driving more miles, you're spending more money on gas.
02:22:22.000I think there's a really interesting underdeveloped history around the origins of the climate, the 2006, 2005, 2006, 2007, really global warming climate kind of policy push from the U.S. government that became a runaway train as investor money rushed in.
02:22:50.000It'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 U.S. government,
02:23:03.000Together with foreign allies, pursued this kind of, you know, demonization of carbon at a real policy level, or hydrocarbon based fuels, as a kind of geopolitical battering ram against newly resurgent Russia in the mid 2000s, as Putin was getting power back over a bunch of Post Post-Soviet.
02:23:34.000Eastern satellite countries through basically, pipeline, exploiting his leverage around pipelines and the fact that this is like the John McCain type quote, right?
02:23:44.000That Russia is a gas station with the military, right?
02:23:48.000GazProm, the state-sponsored oil company, was effectively the biggest oil company in GazProm was for gas, but Rosneft.
02:23:58.000Russia had at one point the largest oil exports in the world.
02:24:04.000It was the motor engine of their economy, oil and gas.
02:24:07.000And 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.
02:24:36.000In the 1990s, this wasn't an issue because Boris Yeltsin was the president and he was effectively an adjunct of the U.S. government, incidentally through Larry Summers and the Jeffrey Epstein Harvard Network.
02:24:53.000So there became this push after Russia's interventions in Georgia and the like and a big attack on a lot of high-level Republican.
02:25:06.000Basically, 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 Eurasia,
02:25:32.000the plan to seize political or vassal state control over Eurasia would continue against Putin's new nationalist and global resurgence.
02:25:42.000And this includes a bunch of crap that happened in 2003, 2004.
02:25:45.000But effectively, then you start to see the U.S. government champion these hydrocarbon policies, and you started to see all of these international forums, journals, regulators openly talking in this mid-aughts 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.
02:26:15.000There'd be no business between oligarchs in the different countries for them to even leverage.
02:26:20.000It would effectively allow us to continue the golden age of the Uniparty 1990s moment.
02:26:26.000And then you saw all these government subsidies to it, tax benefits, free money basically.
02:26:46.000If those policies change, you've got trillions of dollars in climate finance globally.
02:26:52.000And then these started becoming part of IMF loan requirements.
02:26:57.000But now it's like even if the science is completely wrong, what started arguably as a kind of national security-based way to force energy diversification.
02:27:11.000This is what we put Europe through, the United States, with the sanctions against Russia.
02:27:16.000We forced them to divest of oil and gas and invest in a basket of alternative energy, cleaner energy supplies.
02:27:24.000But now it's and they 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.
02:27:36.000Even if you prove that false, at this point, there's so much infrastructure built up that you have this network.
02:28:10.000Well, and it's and 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.
02:28:23.000Like, for example, like we overthrew the government of Bangladesh in 2024, the Biden administration did.
02:28:30.000They did it through the National Down for Democracy, CIA cutout, and a million other orgs on the ground.
02:28:36.000It was a color revolution street protest.
02:28:38.000I think we may have talked about this last time, where literally the CIA sock puppet National and Down for Democracy sponsored rap music videos and produced them and put them on YouTube and then worked with the unions, set up transgender dance festivals to try to get the LGBT community on board against the government.
02:29:02.000And then, you know, giant riots they install, you know, it's effectively a – but part of the thing that they leaned on in the post-transition government is to, you know, agree to these, you know, basically like climate finance reforms.
02:29:18.000And you can just like the CIA and the oil industry became completely inseparable, completely inseparable.
02:29:27.000I mean, George Bush, for example, Zapata Energy Offshore and the whole Texas oil thing and to then becoming the central intelligence agency directly.
02:29:36.000I mean, Trump's first Secretary of State was Rex Tillerson.
02:29:38.000Rex Tillerson never worked in government.
02:29:40.000The Secretary of State oversees the CIA.
02:29:45.000Well, he was the chairman and CEO of ExxonMobil.
02:29:49.000You can't, the CIA and the U.S. military creates the market for oil companies.
02:29:54.000You 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.
02:30:07.000And then the CIA and DOD people will rotate into board seats on those oil companies.
02:30:13.000And my fear about this is that over the past 10 years, the same thing has started to happen with the client, the sort of clean energy side of big energy companies.
02:30:59.000It was the person, Lula was tied at the hip with China, divested from all these U.S. contracts, massively reduced the footprint of U.S.-aligned policies in the second biggest country in our hemisphere.
02:31:20.000And, well, Brazil just announced this $1.3 trillion climate finance initiative.
02:31:26.000And 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.
02:31:34.000You have, I mean, this is a crazy case.
02:31:37.000You know, one of the biggest beneficiaries of the post-coup, Lula's government in Brazil were all of the clean ethanol.
02:31:47.000George Soros' longest standing equity investment at that point was a company called Atticoagra, which did clean ethanol fuel alternatives.
02:31:58.000The problem is, it's part of its business.
02:32:01.000Part of it is it's not competitive on price with diesel-based fuels.
02:32:07.000So 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.
02:32:19.000Well, George Soros co-sponsored those CIA-adjacent National Down for Democracy operations all over Brazil.
02:32:26.000Well, he's holding an equity interest in the thing that day one, there's an imposed mandate to use those climate products.
02:32:36.000You have like 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.
02:34:27.000This is why we have to be against the Palantir whole of government database.
02:34:30.000This 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.
02:34:40.000They are keeping us artificially divided because they are setting up this infrastructure in the United States right now.
02:35:04.000It's like, you know, the irony of Australia being a prison colony and now you've got, now it's like the homeland in the UK.
02:35:15.000But I mean, look, the UK just got rid of like jury trials for a lot of cases.
02:35:20.000And, you know, 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 praying.
02:35:31.000And, you know, we need to liberate the British people.
02:35:36.000I mean, it's unbelievable that, I mean, they call it perfidious Albion, right?
02:35:44.000British statecraft has been so pernicious to the American people in the past decade.
02:35:53.000The entire three-year special prosecutor saga was because of a British spy, Christopher Steele, and an Iran-Contra veteran, Stefan Halper, residing abroad at Cambridge to kick that off.
02:36:08.000And then the British government conspired with the Biden administration to create, to join the U.S.-UK censorship industrial complex.
02:36:22.000America First Legal, Stephen Miller and Gene Hamilton's nonprofit law firm they started obtained these 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 British, the UK Digital Commission.
02:36:49.000They 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.
02:37:02.000Like basically, it was like you scratch your back, our back, we'll scratch yours.
02:37:08.000And it was this U.S. Democrat Party, U.K. Labor Party alliance.
02:37:14.000Meanwhile, the Biden government was paying British censors.
02:37:18.000The Global Disinformation Index, which killed the ad revenue for like, they went after Daily Wire, Federalist, a million conservative news sites and social media accounts, went after the social media platforms of the United States.
02:37:34.000They're British black ops by their own language.
02:37:38.000Well, CCDH, who was, but they were funded by our government to censor our voices, but laundered out to the UK.
02:37:46.000And I think we need to fundamentally restructure that special relationship.
02:37:51.000We've had that relationship for a long time, totally unquestioned.
02:38:00.000And 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.
02:38:18.000Well, Mike, we gave people a lot to go over, almost too much.
02:38:22.000But if anybody wants more, your ex account is amazing.
02:38:40.000I 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.