Nick Bryant is the first reporter in the world to cover the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, and he s also written a book about the Franklin scandal, which is often distorted. In this episode of The Stone Zone, Nick tells the story of how he broke into the Epstein and Diddy sex trafficking ring.
00:00:02.960Joining me now is Nick Bryant, investigative journalist and author.
00:00:06.620Nick Bryant is literally the first reporter in the world to cover the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
00:00:14.920He's also written an extraordinary book on the Franklin scandal, which is often distorted.
00:00:21.900But the Franklin scandal took place in Washington, D.C., in which children were being supplied to high level government officials in the Bush administration.
00:00:33.860Nick Bryant took his initial story about Jeffrey Epstein's little black book, which he was able to obtain from a source to a number of media outlets.
00:00:44.900I guess he was freelancing and nobody was interested in this incredible story about a billionaire pedophile and his very important friends until ultimately Gawker published that book.
00:00:57.400I relied heavily on that book with attribution in my own book, The Clinton's War on Women.
00:01:04.260Nick Bryant, what a long, strange road it's been.
00:02:46.760I mean, Jeffrey Epstein was definitely trafficking these young girls to a wide range of people.
00:02:53.600And we know that from victim testimony.
00:02:57.080So it just wasn't Jeffrey Epstein acting alone.
00:03:00.200He was acting in concert with several other people.
00:03:02.860Last time I interviewed you, and I think it was because you have written a book, The Truth About Watergate, A Tale of Extraordinary Lies and Liars, which I must tell you, is the definitive book on Watergate.
00:03:17.360Nick Bryant managed to take a very complicated story.
00:03:21.580And by the way, Nick's not a conservative.
00:03:24.720Neither is he a Democrat or a liberal.
00:03:26.420He's just kind of a down the center investigative journalist.
00:03:29.360His politics do not bleed into his in his into his reporting, but he nails Watergate, which is why I had him on to talk about it.
00:03:39.740But when we spoke at that time, we spoke about the fact that there seems to be a commonality in all of these cases, whether it is the Epstein case, whether it is the Ghislaine's Maxwell case, whether it is the Diddy case.
00:03:55.680The perp, the perp, the main perp gets nailed.
00:04:00.680Epstein gets charged with conspiracy to engage in child sex trafficking, but none of his co-conspirators are ever identified.
00:04:09.700The same with Maxwell, the same with Diddy.
00:04:13.700And as you pointed out, one U.S. attorney presided over all those cases.
00:04:18.700Well, it was Damian Williams, who was the U.S. attorney that presided over the Maxwell trial, and he made sure that only victims that were molested by Epstein or Maxwell were called.
00:04:33.440There were four victims that were called, and they had no knowledge of the wider network.
00:04:39.160So he did his job there as far as containment.
00:04:42.040And then he went on to oversee the Diddy grand jury.
00:04:46.380And the Diddy grand jury was kind of a joke.
00:04:49.400I mean, I knew as soon as he announced it that it was going to be a joke.
00:04:55.240The thing about Diddy is that, and also we could say that about Epstein and the perpetrators for Franklin, for that matter,
00:05:02.560what brought all these guys down, at least as far as law enforcement, is they were getting too much media.
00:05:13.420I believe the Franklin network was certainly about blackmail, and the Epstein network was about blackmail.
00:05:18.820And then we find out that there are all these hidden cameras in Diddy's various homes, and that's been heavily corroborated.
00:05:27.520So I think that all three were involved in blackmail, but with Diddy, there were five civil cases pending against him when that grand jury was convened.
00:05:38.920And two of those cases had been – he had trafficked minors, and that was glossed over by Damian Williams.
00:05:50.240And Little Rod was the fifth case, and that's when it reached critical mass, where the government said, well, we have to do something about this.
00:05:59.400Little Rod – his name is Rodney Jones, and he's a hip-hop producer.
00:06:02.940And he was talking about Diddy trafficking underage girls and boys, and also about his hidden cameras.
00:06:10.820So with Epstein and also with Diddy, I believe that these are blackmailers, and blackmailers aren't going to be very successful when everybody knows that they've got hidden cameras.
00:06:24.280So I think that that kind of concludes their careers as blackmailers.
00:06:29.580As you know, there's been a lot of controversy about, quote-unquote, Epstein's list.
00:06:35.040And I don't think there ever was like a formal list.
00:06:39.060You were the first person to publish his little black book, which I believe you attribute to his butler, Alfredo Rodriguez, no longer with us.
00:06:48.360Although I believe it was you who noted that he circled the name of VIPs in the book who he thought were involved with sex with underage girls
00:06:57.320or might be material witnesses to pedophilia.
00:07:00.720I think there never was a list per se.
00:07:05.540It seems to me, given all the DVDs and the hard drives removed at the time of his 2019 arrest from Epstein's palatial home in New York,
00:07:14.800his island, Little St. James in the Virgin Islands, from his ranch in New Mexico, and I believe also from his apartment in Paris,
00:07:24.940that law enforcement should be able to piece together a list from watching those videos.
00:07:31.320But those videos and those hard drives seem incredibly to have completely disappeared.
00:07:38.380Well, the strange memo that was released by the Justice Department and the FBI last week
00:07:44.260actually said that there were 300 gigabytes of child abuse material, but there isn't anybody else in the child abuse material other than the children.
00:07:58.400And that's a little, I mean, that's ludicrous because there were definitely adults molesting these girls.
00:08:07.360And I have no doubts that a lot of that was blackmail footage because all of Epstein's homes had had hidden cameras.
00:08:16.920So for the Department of Justice and the FBI to say that the over, I do agree that there were over a thousand victims.
00:08:28.320But for them to say that it was only Epstein that molested these over a thousand victims.
00:09:07.180And as you said, I put the black book up on the internet in 2015.
00:09:13.320And then I saw, and with that book, we, for the adults, we redacted their numbers.
00:09:22.460And for, and there's over a hundred victims in that black book.
00:09:25.680And we redacted their last names and their numbers.
00:09:28.800The black book that I put up, that Bondi released 10 years later, everything was redacted.
00:09:35.440And so I think, I don't know what was going on with the Department of Justice thinking that they could give us something that we already knew and think that it was revelatory.
00:09:53.400That really, I think, really got the Trump administration into trouble.
00:09:59.300And then Bondi got further into trouble.
00:10:04.020She did say that there was a truckload of evidence.
00:10:08.920And only matters related to national security would be redacted from the documents.
00:10:14.140So now she has to tell us what a bunch of child molesters have to do with national security.
00:10:20.620And I think the crescendo of her mendacity was because, as you noted, Roger, there was a lot of disks and there were hard drives taken out of Epstein's home.
00:10:35.400Actually, the day after he was arrested, the FBI hid his home in New York almost immediately and opened up his safe.
00:10:43.560And his safe was not the dimensions of the safe that we think about.
00:10:47.600His safe was like the size of a closet.
00:10:51.420And Bondi led us to believe that all that material that was taken out of Epstein's safe was being reviewed by the Department of Justice at that time.
00:11:04.500When I have no doubt that the FBI and whatever dark malignant corner of intelligence deployed Epstein, they were looking at that, everything in Epstein's safe that day.
00:11:17.420And probably people did double shifts making sure what was on Epstein's disks and hard drives.
00:11:27.900So the Trump administration keeps digging itself deeper and deeper in a hole with these remarks about Jeffrey Epstein.
00:11:40.360Let me just ask you a direct question.
00:11:41.680In all of your research into Jeffrey Epstein, have you seen or heard any evidence whatsoever that Donald Trump himself engaged in any inappropriate behavior in or around, with anyone, in or around Jeffrey Epstein?
00:12:01.320With Trump, Alfredo Rodriguez circled people that he said were in cahoots with Jeffrey Epstein as far as his pedophilic pandering.
00:12:11.680And a number of those people that were circled were certainly in cahoots.
00:12:16.840There was Ghislaine Maxwell was circled, Ahud Barak, Les Wexner, Alan Dershowitz, Bill Richardson, and Jean-Luc Brunel, who was a fellow pimp of Epstein's.
00:12:29.220They formed a modeling agency together, MC Squared.
00:12:32.980And then we have victim testimony that corroborates that, these circled people in Epstein's black book.
00:12:40.920So, Rodriguez did circle Trump's name.
00:12:46.980And Trump said he'd never been to Epstein's home, but we know that he had.
00:12:53.000And then we also know that he flew on his plane.
00:12:56.020But I haven't come across any victims that said that they were molested by Trump.
00:13:03.300So, you can make with that what you will.
00:13:07.920Yeah, I mean, I interviewed Virginia Roberts Giffray for six hours, two, three-hour sessions.
00:13:15.800She said that she did meet Donald Trump.
00:13:18.800He went to a charity event at Epstein's home, which I report in my book, and that he was a perfect gentleman.
00:13:25.200Also, Roberts Giffray, who we were told recently committed suicide, I will come back to that, said both in her sworn testimony, but her lawyer.
00:13:36.740And she both said afterwards the only well-known public figure who would help her, who would support her in a lawsuit, and who would help her was Donald Trump.
00:13:44.840I've written about Trump being on Epstein's plane.
00:13:50.420The plane flew from New York, actually, Teterboro, New Jersey, to Palm Beach, leaving on a Friday, coming back on a Sunday.
00:13:58.120And Marla Maples, his wife at the time, and his daughter, Tiffany Trump, were on the flight.
00:14:03.520None of these flights, based on the FAA records that I examined, you reported extensively about this, show Trump going to the island.
00:14:11.660I don't believe there's any evidence he was ever on the island.
00:16:35.000Nick, you've set up a 501c3 nonprofit group, Epstein Justice, that's working to ensure that all the pedophiles who used Jeffrey Epstein to satisfy their sick, pedatory desires are put behind bars.
00:16:50.820Can you speak about your important work there and how people can get involved in that fight?
00:16:57.320Your audience, they just have to go to EpsteinJustice.com and they can sign up with us.
00:17:04.280Because Epstein has been in the news a lot lately, our organization is beginning to grow.
00:17:11.940And we want two relatively simple things.
00:17:16.040I mean, just that would be considered baseline morality.
00:17:20.280We want to know why the government covered up child trafficking.
00:17:24.740And when you cover up a crime, you're aiding and embedding that crime.
00:17:28.160So essentially, the government is aiding and embedding child trafficking in the Epstein case.
00:17:32.940And we want the perpetrators to be prosecuted.
00:17:37.800If our government had any kind of decency, that would happen.
00:17:45.140And we need a majority in the House and we need a majority in the Senate to make this, that we can do it.
00:17:54.480I think that people are really, really fed up over this story.
00:17:59.040And our government has lied to us before on a number of different things.
00:18:03.740But this is different because it involves American children getting molested with impunity.
00:18:11.200And I think that this is an issue that can bring the right and the left together because the right and the left have been divided and conquered.
00:18:21.420And the right and the right and the left need to come together on this issue so we can protect our children.
00:18:28.000In the short term, I have urged the president to direct the attorney general, to direct the interim U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York to move in court to unseal all of the grand jury testimony and evidence in Jeffrey Epstein's 2019 indictment by the Trump administration
00:18:48.900for child sex trafficking and conspiracy to commit child sex trafficking and on the basis of a whistleblower.
00:18:56.860Also very important to to unseal the search warrants for Epstein's home in New York and for the island, both issued out of the Southern District of New York.
00:19:17.780I want to thank my guest, Nick Bryant.
00:19:19.980Again, go to EpsteinJustice.com, EpsteinJustice.com to get in the fight to expose those who have done wrong in the name of justice for all of Jeffrey Epstein's victims.
00:19:34.000Also commend to you Nick Bryant's book on Watergate, The Truth About Watergate, A Tale of Extraordinary Liars and Liars.
00:19:40.400It is the definitive book on Watergate, why it happened, how it happened, who the good guys were, who the bad guys were, who the guys who were in the dark were.