TRIGGERnometry - JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz

00:00:00.000 If it turned out that our own intelligence services were involved in or allowed purposefully the assassination of our own president, that would have, I think, implications diplomatically for U.S. standing abroad.

00:00:14.320 So this is really one of the first litmus tests about how serious the Trump administration is about cleaning up the agencies.

00:00:23.760 So what's the real story of Jeffrey Epstein?

00:00:26.440 Where I am on it currently is it does seem like Epstein was an access agent.

00:00:32.260 There's a question of how much smoke do you need to have before you just come out and say, there's a dang fire.

00:00:39.420 Mike, welcome to Trigonometry.

00:00:41.160 Thanks for having me.

00:00:41.940 It's good to have you on.

00:00:42.880 We are sitting here on the day that allegedly the JFK files are going to be released.

00:00:48.500 Do we know what's in them?

00:00:50.420 We don't.

00:00:51.160 It could be, there could be bombshells.

00:00:54.280 There could be, it could be a nothing burger.

00:00:56.440 There could be bombshells that are redacted.

00:00:59.460 I know that the president has come out and said that he's going to try to prevent any redactions from, this was when Pam Bondi declared that they were going to come out a while ago.

00:01:11.040 She said subject to, you know, redactions about national security concerns around the, I guess this was around the Epstein disclosures.

00:01:19.060 And that prompted this sort of public backlash.

00:01:22.580 What does, what could undermine U.S. national security about what's in the Epstein documents?

00:01:27.640 And I think there's a similar perception about the JFK assassination that there are implications for national security and for American standing if it does turn out that there was malfeasance or foreknowledge coming from the national security state.

00:01:43.200 So there's a lot of very strange evidence around the role of our own intelligence services in the death of JFK.

00:01:50.980 There's a great book called JFK and the Unspeakable, which documents much of this.

00:01:56.360 You know, the CIA was opening the mail, for example, Lee Harvey Oswald for months before the assassination, suspecting formally that he was a counter, it was a counterintelligence probe, basically, that he might be working for Russia.

00:02:09.980 And so basically monitoring his communications and mail beforehand, you have a number of other strange circumstances around the events that happened that day.

00:02:20.880 And if it did turn out, for example, that there was a role of our own intelligence services in that assassination, you can imagine the diplomatic backlash that would have for our own State Department.

00:02:33.660 When we go around and we accuse the FSB or something in Russia or, you know, Chinese intelligence services or Iranian intelligence services of malfeasance or human rights violations.

00:02:46.040 If it turned out that our own intelligence services were involved in or allowed purposefully the assassination of our own president, especially one whose name lives on in, you know, the Kennedy family is still a significant part of the Democrat Party.

00:03:03.700 You have Bobby Kennedy, who is the current head of HHS.

00:03:06.820 He says, this is not ancient history that this is a family name that lives on that would have, I think, implications diplomatically for for U.S. standing abroad.

00:03:17.400 And I could see there being a knife fight within the national security community about trying to redact.

00:03:24.600 The most damning evidence.

00:03:27.240 And so this is really one of the first litmus tests about how serious the Trump administration is about cleaning up the agencies.

00:03:37.060 In terms of transparency for past past malfeasance, when it's easy to go after things like crossfire hurricane or times when Trump himself was personally attacked.

00:03:46.520 But they've been serious about cleaning up the personnel side.

00:03:52.040 You know, they are they're in the process of firing or offering golden handcuffs to CIA.

00:03:58.920 They've decimated the staff at USAID.

00:04:02.080 So I think they mean business, but it's a question about whether or not they can get done.

00:04:07.000 Well, one of the guests we've had on the show before is Michael Francis, who's a former New York mobster, basically.

00:04:12.980 And he told us, I think it was in the sub stack section, the paywall section, that the mafia were involved somehow.

00:04:21.500 A lot of time people were attracted to us politically also.

00:04:26.360 Hey, listen, when, you know, the CIA came to us.

00:04:30.220 Fact.

00:04:31.100 OK, to help them assassinate Castro.

00:04:33.700 The CIA came to us 100 percent with JFK's assassination.

00:04:39.320 I heard that my entire life from people that were in the know.

00:04:44.160 And normally in that life, if you had something to do with murder, you don't want to talk about it.

00:04:48.560 OK.

00:04:49.540 But I heard enough about the Kennedy thing to know what went on there.

00:04:54.000 Wait, are you saying the mob murdered JFK?

00:04:56.360 I'm saying they were complicit in it.

00:04:57.940 Yes.

00:04:59.020 And I'm telling you this.

00:05:00.400 I've heard that all my life from the right people.

00:05:02.520 And I'm telling you this, there are classified documents that the United States is holding that every 25 years is supposed to release them.

00:05:10.060 Trump was going to release them.

00:05:11.400 Then they put the brakes on it, because I believe those classified documents are going to show that the mob was complicit in that.

00:05:17.840 And the U.S. government does not want the world to know that a sitting president was assassinated with the help of the mob.

00:05:24.800 Are you expecting that to be part of this conversation?

00:05:27.420 Yeah.

00:05:27.940 I mean, there's always an overworld, underworld connection to these things, whether that's in assassinations or whether that's in smuggling narcotics or smuggling goods or arms.

00:05:40.960 This actually gets to the Epstein network as well.

00:05:44.520 I mean, you have these, you know, Jeffrey Epstein was, I mean, it's sort of, it's interesting how these things line up and how they're both coming to a head simultaneously with these attempted disclosures.

00:05:55.140 Because, you know, the Kennedy assassination was in 63.

00:05:58.900 The Epstein story really goes back to the 1980s, not too long after, you know, the JFK assassination and aftermath.

00:06:09.960 And they both involved this overworld, underworld connection.

00:06:14.520 You know, you had the Teamsters that were alleged to have had a role in it.

00:06:19.940 You had, you know, the fight with the unions.

00:06:22.220 The unions play a really interesting role in statecraft because they service rent-a-riot muscle when we're trying to destabilize a country.

00:06:32.300 When we're doing color revolution work to try to mobilize a wellspring within a country to unseat its government, the first thing we do is we go to the trade labor groups, the unions,

00:06:43.040 the workers' movements in the country, and then we try to destabilize the industry from within.

00:06:49.300 We cause mass walkouts.

00:06:51.380 We, you know, have people, instead of making sure the trains run on time, they're walking out of the hospitals.

00:06:58.540 They're walking out of the, you know, the state-run media organizations.

00:07:02.760 They're walking out of, you know, daycare.

00:07:04.900 They're blocking the highways, and that brings the instruments of a dictator to a halt, as we sort of put it.

00:07:12.700 They can't weaponize their own power arm because there's nobody, you know, there's nobody to basically man those stations of power.

00:07:21.220 And oftentimes these are rough-and-tumble types who will take to the streets, especially if they're getting money on the side from a USAID

00:07:28.640 or a National Endowment for Democracy or a State Department.

00:07:32.360 So why we have the National Endowment for Democracy has a specific center called the Solidarity Center,

00:07:37.640 which the NED is effectively a CIA front.

00:07:42.760 It was conceived in the office of the Central Intelligence Agency director, William Casey, in 1983.

00:07:49.220 It was sort of replacing the old CIA function after the CIA got in trouble in the 1970s during the Church Committee hearings.

00:07:56.800 And they have an arm called the Solidarity Center, which goes out around the world and works with the unions.

00:08:02.660 And the unions are very close to the organized crime nexus.

00:08:06.380 I mean, this is something that is not just a sort of Hollywood theme or like a Sopranos-style theme where you have, you know, the unions and the mafia.

00:08:16.080 But this goes back a very long time because you have these rough-and-tumble types who will, you know, do dirty deeds, done dirt cheap.

00:08:24.800 They are often at the exact nexus of the logistics chain for intelligence work.

00:08:30.300 So, for example, if we are running arms to rebels in Nicaragua, as we were doing during the Iran-Contra scandal,

00:08:40.060 you're going to need those arms shipped from ports in Miami or Tampa or New Orleans.

00:08:45.900 You're going to need the dock workers who are on board.

00:08:47.980 The dock workers, the shipping magnets, the whole logistics chain is going to have to run through the people at the docks who are putting the cargo in

00:08:56.460 and who are not looking or not reporting, you know, what's inside them.

00:08:59.960 And that's simultaneously an organized crime type activity when you're talking about the sale or movement of narcotics or illegal arms.

00:09:11.900 This is something that Epstein himself was involved with to sort of connect this Epstein-JFK world

00:09:18.120 in the sense that Jeffrey Epstein, his whole network was involved in Iran-Contra in the early 1980s.

00:09:26.160 It was Jeffrey Epstein who helped move Southern Air Transport, which was a CIA proprietary airline from Miami to Columbus, Ohio,

00:09:35.180 which is where Les Wexner was.

00:09:37.020 That was his, you know, his main backer.

00:09:40.480 So he basically had a CIA airline that was implicated in illegal drugs and gun running in the 1980s,

00:09:47.160 moved directly to Columbus, Ohio, exactly where Epstein had bought property

00:09:55.940 and Les Wexner, his principal sponsor, who he had power of attorney over his whole financial empire.

00:10:01.140 To me, you have this, what's most interesting about it is when the organized crime activity is actually sanctioned by the intelligence state.

00:10:16.580 And that's where I think you get into the dirty laundry that the Trump administration is going to have to think long and hard

00:10:24.100 about the degree to which you want to expose, because it's not just us in the U.S. who see these disclosures.

00:10:31.440 It's everybody else.

00:10:32.860 And then suddenly these things get held up at the United Nations.

00:10:35.860 These things are persuasive to neutrals like in India or, you know, a European country who might be, you know, caught between worlds.

00:10:47.180 Like you could you can very easily see neutrals being persuaded to think, OK, well, if they were backing the organized crime networks here and in this case, 0.96

00:11:00.060 and we know that there are these unions who are getting these USAID grants or who are meeting with the U.S. embassy here and they're causing us a hard time.

00:11:08.780 And it could cause a crackdown on a lot of the soft power influence nodes that we still have in existence today.

00:11:14.420 Well, you mentioned Epstein, and that's something that I really want to talk with you about, because I haven't looked into it deeply at all.

00:11:22.580 I don't really know much about it.

00:11:24.920 The Joe Public perception of this, I would say, is there was some rich guy who hobnobbed with all these famous people,

00:11:33.880 some of them powerful people, and he was into young girls and some of these people were into young girls.

00:11:40.160 So he brought them to his island and they all had a good time, basically.

00:11:43.220 Right. So what's what's the real story of Jeffrey Epstein?

00:11:47.900 Well, no one really knows. It's a it's a black box.

00:11:50.740 There's there's so many potentials for what it could be.

00:11:56.100 Who was he, first of all? Just tell us his like story.

00:11:58.480 Yeah. Well, you know, he's a guy who was linked at a young age to our own former head of the Justice Department when he suicided himself effectively.

00:12:09.220 I mean, I don't know. I don't know how many people to this day believe it was genuinely a suicide.

00:12:13.940 But the fact is, is, you know, he he came up through through he was the official story is he was working in finance at Bear Stearns.

00:12:26.360 He develops a close relationship with Leslie Wexner, who was the head of limited brands, which was the largest retailer in the country in the 1980s.

00:12:35.680 He was given power of attorney over Les Wexner's entire financial empire, was basically given, you know, penthouses for for a dollar and was completely hooked up to this, you know, powerful retail magnet and was involved in bundling money for the Clinton administration during the 1990s.

00:12:59.620 As I mentioned, you know, he was involved in basically personally negotiating the transfer of a CIA proprietary airline directly to his his sponsors, Home City, that that airliner then would carry the goods of of limited brands to and from Hong Kong.

00:13:15.760 And then you had Wexner, I'm sorry, then you had Epstein get in trouble with these, you know, criminal indictment charges around underage girls in the in the late 90s.

00:13:29.620 Then you had Alex Acosta, who was the federal prosecutor that was in charge of the Epstein case being questioned in 2017 about why he didn't we and why he gave basically a wrist slap to to Epstein after his second indictment then.

00:13:44.740 And he really ignited this in a big way when he said the reason that he did not pursue various charges or try to throw the book at Epstein was because he was, quote, told to back off because Epstein belongs to intelligence.

00:14:00.260 And that produced, you know, a huge curiosity because Epstein going back decades had been accused variously of working for the CIA, of working for Israeli intelligence, of having connections to British intelligence.

00:14:15.320 And, you know, I think there's a great quote that was in, I think, the New Yorker magazine in the mid 1990s, and it went something like no one no one knows if Jeffrey Epstein is in an insurance broker, a concert pianist, a CIA agent, a like a, you know, like a retail, you know, magnet associate or a or a Mossad agent.

00:14:40.480 And there is something, John Kiriakou, who is a former CIA agent, I think, put it the most, where I am on it currently is it does seem like Epstein was an access agent.

00:14:59.200 And it's unclear whether it's.

00:15:01.260 So can I just stop you there?

00:15:02.180 What does an access agent mean?

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00:16:08.320 I don't know why they asked me to say that.

00:16:10.340 What does an access agent mean?

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00:16:44.800 Someone who gets access to high-level political figures, cultural figures who can swing hearts and minds, business figures.

00:16:55.580 You know, if I came to you and I said, I'm Mike Benz, I work for the CIA, tell me all your secrets.

00:17:01.780 You know, you're not going to do that.

00:17:04.280 But if you think that I'm, you know, a fun-loving guy who's got access to beautiful women and I throw great parties and I can take you and your friends on a great vacation and we've got common business interests.

00:17:16.460 You know, I will learn things in the process of those conversations that I can then relay to, you know, folks in the intelligence world who simply want to know what the next move is of these political figures or of these billionaire, you know, billionaire investors or funders.

00:17:38.460 It's also a way to broker deals in a way where you effectively have a back channel.

00:17:46.340 Oftentimes these high-level business deals between nation states and also between nation states and corporations need a little bit of massaging from back channels, from interlocutors, from go-betweens who don't formally represent that foreign government or that government.

00:18:07.420 Like the State Department, like the State Department, a great example of this is Bill Burns who was the CIA director for Joe Biden, for President Biden for all four years.

00:18:16.800 He was picked to be the head of the Central Intelligence Agency having never worked for the CIA.

00:18:23.320 He had spent 35 years in the State Department.

00:18:26.900 He negotiated the Iran deal for President Obama and then he went to work at a think tank for seven years.

00:18:34.300 And then he, you know, how does someone like Bill Burns know how all the gadgets work?

00:18:39.460 How does he know how to work the cockpit of the CIA having never worked there?

00:18:43.340 And the answer is because when he worked for the Carnegie Endowment for a National Peace, which he was the president of for seven years before he got the CIA job,

00:18:53.900 that's one of those think tanks that's at the center of this back channel statecraft.

00:18:59.320 In fact, his own autobiography is called The Back Channel and basically details, you know, the role of his role and the role of his network in being able to massage deals in the background, like the Iran deal.

00:19:12.220 If you're going to line up something like the Iran deal, which was this early 2015, you know, pivotal moment that created this big rift between Israel and NATO,

00:19:21.980 it created this big rift between the Obama foreign policy world and much of the bipartisan buy-in that existed between the certain factions within the GOP.

00:19:37.880 I think that really cleared the way for Trump. But to line that up, you're going to need all the different stakeholders aligned.

00:19:44.880 And sometimes you can't send in a formal U.S. State Department person to do that.

00:19:51.060 You might want to convey a more heavy handed message that you don't want to be on the record conveying.

00:19:55.080 But if a back channel conveys it, then you can deny it later.

00:19:59.740 Same thing. So whether that's brokering deals, whether that's setting up informal networks, this is a big part of how statecraft operates.

00:20:08.800 You have these formal bureaus and these formal divisions and formal W-2 employees at state or CIA.

00:20:16.440 But most of the work happens at the informal layer where someone from state or someone from the intelligence world who is running,

00:20:27.360 who's basically a symphony orchestra conductor of these outside groups that are informal and that can massage it,

00:20:35.220 can get a general sort of set of terms lined up, who can convey sanctions are going to be forthcoming or whatever the message is.

00:20:43.780 And also who can gather intelligence that can be used that you can't necessarily get if you are in the intel world and you don't know who's all going to be there.

00:20:55.300 You can't necessarily tap all their phones or maybe they just bought a burner phone.

00:20:59.240 You can't get you need a fly on the wall. You need someone in the room.

00:21:02.700 And I think that is probably the closest to the Epstein story.

00:21:09.180 And I don't know which government it is.

00:21:12.720 It could be there's obviously a U.S. government connection in the sense that an American prosecutor was told not to go through with prosecution because he belonged to intelligence.

00:21:22.640 So you obviously have at least the U.S. government involved in that.

00:21:26.800 And again, when you date it back to this whole Iran-Contra network, that was a U.S. government activity.

00:21:32.900 And, you know, this was this whole Adnan Khashoggi network that Wexner and Epstein ran through, that they were involved in the illegal arms sales to Iran, you know, to evade sanctions by back-channeling the whole thing.

00:21:46.740 And then the guy goes on to negotiate the sale of a CIA proprietary airline.

00:21:50.660 There's obviously U.S. statecraft.

00:21:52.540 There could also be British statecraft involved.

00:21:54.700 There could also be Israeli statecraft involved.

00:21:57.020 These things often move together and have for a century.

00:22:00.880 And so I hear a lot about the blackmail story, though, with Epstein.

00:22:07.620 And that's where I'd like to see more evidence.

00:22:11.540 You know, this is sort of the—

00:22:12.440 Well, the reason people say that is it's kind of the obvious thing.

00:22:15.220 Like if you get a pedophile to bring other people to his pedophile island, that's the perfect place for blackmail material to be generated, isn't it?

00:22:24.200 You would think.

00:22:25.140 But there's also, you know, there's weird examples of this happening without blackmail.

00:22:30.360 There was a case in the early 2000s with a private military contractor called DynCorp.

00:22:37.620 And DynCorp was implicated, and they were actually banned from being able to get government contracts for a certain time after that,

00:22:46.300 because they were supplying young girls to these Arab sheikhs and to these sort of paramilitary leaders in Central Asia and Middle East, North Africa.

00:23:00.920 And, you know, this was like human trafficking.

00:23:03.740 These are young girls that were basically given, you know, as a way of juicing deals and as a way of, you know, sort of making their clients happy.

00:23:14.400 But that didn't necessarily involve—there wasn't a blackmail, you know, situation going on.

00:23:18.660 It was a service provided, basically.

00:23:20.260 Right, and so what I—I feel like it's presupposed that it's a blackmail ring.

00:23:29.520 And I would think with the thousands of people that Epstein had as clients or was constantly interfacing with,

00:23:40.400 that one person, one person would come out and say,

00:23:46.000 yes, Epstein or an Epstein associate directly tried to blackmail me with, you know, potentially incriminating, you know, evidence from a video camera.

00:23:57.840 I mean, someone could—with the thousands of people who were implicated in these Lolita Express, you know, Little St. James Island trips,

00:24:09.200 you would think that one—now, you might say, okay, well, no one wants to come forward

00:24:13.040 because they don't want to reveal that they had been blackmailed.

00:24:16.060 But, you know, people can be down on their luck and have little to lose and much to gain.

00:24:24.580 I mean, frankly, you don't even need to say what was necessarily on it.

00:24:27.520 You can imagine the multimillion-dollar book deal you get by being—by claiming that you are the victim of this, you know, of this extortion.

00:24:37.400 And the fact that not a single person, to my knowledge, has come out and said that is—it doesn't sit well with me that it should just be presupposed in that way.

00:24:50.940 If you look at, for example, Epstein's relationship with people like Ehud Barak, who was, you know, the former prime minister of Israel,

00:25:00.760 what was constantly Jeffrey Epstein's penthouse, Ehud Barak was working closely with the West Exec,

00:25:11.340 which was the main sort of foreign policy national security intelligence incubator hub for the Biden White House.

00:25:19.040 That was where Jake Sullivan and all of these other national security experts were.

00:25:23.840 And they were consulting with Ehud Barak, and Ehud Barak was tightly aligned with them on foreign policy against Trump world things.

00:25:31.320 I suspect that Epstein was sort of synthesizing in the network.

00:25:36.760 Same thing with Reid Hoffman.

00:25:38.260 I know that there's—Elon currently has a feud with Reid Hoffman, who's sponsored a number of these anti-Trump, anti-Elon groups.

00:25:48.500 Billionaire, you know, highly influential in Democrat politics.

00:25:52.420 I'm not convinced that Hoffman was being blackmailed by Epstein so much as you're trying to gather intelligence on them.

00:26:03.700 And the other thing is, is if somebody in the network squeals to a friend because they're being pressured or extorted,

00:26:12.460 hey, Epstein's trying to blackmail me.

00:26:15.040 Well, that makes Epstein useless because that word gets around there.

00:26:18.860 You know, if I'm being blackmailed, I might tell my mom and dad, I might tell my best friend, they're trying to blackmail me.

00:26:26.020 I don't even need to say what I'm being blackmailed for.

00:26:29.360 That immediately creates a pressure valve on the person, and that word gets around.

00:26:35.240 And then they say, okay, I don't want to hang around with this guy because there are rumors that he's blackmailing this other person.

00:26:40.420 And then there goes all the access.

00:26:43.500 There goes, you know, your access to Bill Gates and Reid Hoffman and heads of state all over the world.

00:26:51.140 So I think there's layers to it, if that makes sense.

00:26:56.380 No, of course there's layers to it. 0.87

00:26:58.500 The thing that I can't believe is that you have a man who is a convicted pedophile,

00:27:02.420 and the U.S. still wants to have involvement with him,

00:27:08.180 surely wouldn't they look at that and go, this guy is a complete liability?

00:27:12.340 And then also the people who spent time with him.

00:27:16.340 I mean, if I was a public figure of that repute and of that notoriety,

00:27:22.500 the last thing I'd want to do is hang around with a convicted pedophile.

00:27:27.880 That's just a surefire way to torpedo your reputation, isn't it?

00:27:31.020 It's tough.

00:27:32.280 I mean, on the first question about why the U.S. would continue to have dealings with Epstein

00:27:38.160 after the first indictments came down, these networks are always very, very messy.

00:27:45.100 When you're talking about this sort of back-channel intelligence work,

00:27:49.460 when you're talking about moving illegal arms or narcotics or working in shady conflict zones

00:27:58.720 and things like this, it tends to attract a cowboy type who is singularly capable of doing things

00:28:08.480 that a more straight-laced person with a clean record can't really pull off.

00:28:13.780 I mean, a great example of this is Hunter Biden.

00:28:16.420 Hunter Biden has gotten in a lot of trouble throughout his life.

00:28:20.040 You know, he was kicked out of the Navy for cocaine.

00:28:23.060 He, I don't know what possessed him to do this particular part,

00:28:27.280 but he was recording on his own laptop him snorting lines of cocaine while, you know, 0.93

00:28:33.360 sleeping with Russian prostitutes and, you know, negotiating what girls to bring over and pay for, 0.95

00:28:41.120 carrying around unlicensed firearms. 0.95

00:28:43.840 I mean, the litany of, he didn't pay his taxes for five whole years in a row.

00:28:49.680 And yet he was on the chairman's advisory board of the NDI.

00:28:54.300 The NDI is the National Democratic Institute.

00:28:56.100 It's the DNC branch of the National Dome for Democracy, which is a literal CIA cutout.

00:29:01.920 Again, it was conceived by the CIA in 1983 because they were sad that they had lost their powers

00:29:08.560 after the church committee hearings in the late 1970s.

00:29:10.960 The founder of the National Endowment for Democracy said it was terrible in the 1960s and 70s

00:29:16.940 when the CIA was seen as subsidizing political dissident groups.

00:29:20.620 That's why the endowment was created, so that we could provide the funding

00:29:24.160 and it wouldn't look like the CIA was going to do it.

00:29:27.340 The CIA gets a copy of every grant that the National Endowment for Democracy makes.

00:29:31.140 They have two political branches, the IRI, the International Republican Institute for Republicans,

00:29:35.440 and the NDI, the National Democratic Institute for Democrats.

00:29:38.960 And Hunter Biden was on the chairman's advisory board after that stuff.

00:29:45.720 And also the NDI was run by Madeleine Albright, who was the secretary of state under Bill Clinton.

00:29:51.480 But Hunter Biden is also being tasked with effectively conducting a form of covert corporate espionage

00:30:00.620 and statecraft while he's at Burisma.

00:30:03.080 They were pitching Burisma to the State Department as being a way to hedge Europe off of Russian gas

00:30:09.000 by building up Ukraine's endogenous gas supply and working directly with the State Department in a number of regions.

00:30:16.220 They petitioned the government of Italy to, you know, to get them deals.

00:30:20.960 They petitioned the State Department in Foggy Bottom to, you know, to juice the skids in Ukraine.

00:30:29.700 You had Joe Biden personally go to Ukraine and threaten a billion, you know, withholding a billion dollar USAID loan guarantee

00:30:36.980 to remove the prosecutor who was investigating this.

00:30:39.820 But the question is, well, why would you task Hunter Biden to do that?

00:30:44.300 There's a bunch of Bidens.

00:30:45.580 You know, you had James Biden, you know, you had the nieces, the nephews, or you could just have a friend.

00:30:52.180 But, you know, why was it Hunter?

00:30:55.040 And, you know, part of this is these personality types, first of all, you're also dealing in a lot of these cases

00:31:03.400 with organized crime networks where crime is not a disqualifier to, you know, to daily life,

00:31:12.620 especially if you're in a place where you control the prosecutors and you know you're not going to get arrested

00:31:17.420 for various things, whether that's drugs or prostitution or guns or deals that evade sanctions.

00:31:27.360 And so it is dirty work.

00:31:29.820 And so often that requires dirty people to do it. 1.00

00:31:33.440 And someone walking in with a totally clean record and no rap sheet is often a stick in the mud

00:31:40.440 or can't speak the lingo or can't hang.

00:31:43.280 And you accrue that over years and they have no, so they have no access.

00:31:46.860 They have no credibility.

00:31:48.940 So, you know, it's just like in the role of organized crime when it comes to the JFK story

00:31:57.940 and with the Epstein story, with the Hunter Biden story.

00:32:00.560 And that same thing with Iran country.

00:32:02.840 Barry Seale was the guy who was the, you know, the cocaine cowboy who was flying the drugs in and out of Nicaragua

00:32:09.740 when we were using those drugs as to convert to cash, to buy the guns, to get around the congressional blockade

00:32:19.080 on using U.S. taxpayer funds to do it.

00:32:21.100 But why did you pick this cocaine cowboy to be the one, you know, flying? 0.60

00:32:27.120 Well, because he was an ace pilot.

00:32:29.620 He could speak the lingo with the locals.

00:32:32.340 He knew the people on the ground.

00:32:34.240 They trusted him.

00:32:35.560 And so he's the way you get access.

00:32:38.420 I mean, you see this story not infrequently in movies.

00:32:42.280 And I think not for the wrong reason.

00:32:46.840 It's interesting that you say that.

00:32:48.200 And I love the fact that you brought up the idea of a movie because sometimes when talking about Jeffrey Epstein

00:32:54.580 and people who have met him, they say that he's almost not a real person.

00:32:59.440 He was like a construct.

00:33:01.020 Yeah.

00:33:01.340 Which I find really interesting.

00:33:03.420 So what do people mean by that?

00:33:05.140 Well, I think it gets back to the fact that no one could quite make out who he really was.

00:33:11.680 You know, I come back to that quote from like The New Yorker or whatever it was,

00:33:15.420 where they said no one can tell if he's a real estate broker, you know, a CIA agent, a concert pianist, you know, or a Mossad.

00:33:23.840 It's you have a guy who's got a very, very strange backstory getting into this ridiculous position of power and privilege.

00:33:32.100 Someone who, you know, was only on Wall Street for a couple of years before he basically inherits this massive portfolio

00:33:40.880 and is able to, you know, get access to like I come back to the how do you how if I tried to negotiate the sale of a CIA proprietary airline,

00:33:52.640 you know, as a regular civilian would make no sense.

00:33:56.920 How do you even get the access?

00:33:58.440 How would you even get in position to do that?

00:34:00.280 But, you know, there was a very strange backstory even to that because you had this, you know, this Iran-Contra situation in the early 80s.

00:34:11.660 And then you had this network in Columbus, Ohio that was under investigation.

00:34:17.320 And then the the main attorney representing that Columbus network, this guy, Arthur, Arthur Shapiro.

00:34:26.060 Everyone can look up this mysterious 1985 assassination of Arthur Shapiro, which was in the middle of this Iran-Contra scandal.

00:34:34.540 He was the guy who was handling the he represented the law firm that was handling the accounts for this Ohio network.

00:34:43.020 He had not filed taxes for something like seven years.

00:34:48.740 It's another one of these Hunter Biden type situations.

00:34:51.200 So he was under the gun of an IRS investigation.

00:34:55.540 He he he was murdered the day before he was set to testify to the grand jury in the IRS case.

00:35:03.320 And it was it was it was a very strange situation, because when you when you look at that network's role in Iran-Contra and in the sort of illegal organized crime networks, you could see how somebody might be assassinated because.

00:35:22.580 Especially because the tax records provide this, you know, hard forensic evidence of what you did with the money.

00:35:30.920 And if that could have if his testimony to clear his own name required implicating the people in that network, you can see why he may have been killed for the same reason that someone like Jeffrey Epstein may have been killed.

00:35:47.260 30 years later.

00:35:48.440 And what's very interesting about that is Epstein met Wexner that that very same year in 1985.

00:35:55.660 And there's a lot of speculation that Epstein effectively took the place of that law firm or in terms of handling handling that Columbus, Ohio network account and taking care of the financial transactions and having it not be formally, you know, accountable to to that network.

00:36:20.160 And in fact, that that that would explain the power of attorney that would explain, you know, these huge assets that were given over given over to Epstein for apparently nothing in return.

00:36:33.060 And the fact that that network is involved in U.S. statecraft, not just in the Western Hemisphere, but also in the Middle East, both, you know, in terms of Iran, Israel, the strange sort of, you know, Arab shake, you know, relationships with all that.

00:36:48.000 I also find it very strange that Jeffrey Epstein was able to lease an apartment in New York City directly from the U.S. State Department.

00:36:55.120 It was a very curious episode.

00:36:57.880 I believe this was in the 1990s.

00:37:00.480 But Jeffrey Epstein was able to get a lease directly from the U.S. State Department for for one of his properties.

00:37:06.220 I don't know how I would go about having the State Department as my personal landlord.

00:37:10.640 Yeah. And, you know, when we talk about this, Mike, because we all have a conspiratorial element to us.

00:37:16.420 And I'll be honest with you, you Americans, you love a conspiracy theory.

00:37:20.440 It is. It's your national sport.

00:37:22.380 You do. You chat about a few things and then you go, right, who's really in charge?

00:37:26.780 Well, when you have a First Amendment, it makes it a lot easier.

00:37:29.940 Touche. He fired back at you right there.

00:37:32.540 Yeah. No, but I think culturally we just had Andrew Schultz on.

00:37:35.400 We were talking about this as well. This may go out before that one.

00:37:37.840 But I think part of the amazing thing that makes America so wonderful is the sense that it's like filled with people who think anything is possible.

00:37:45.840 And that's why you can achieve great things and do amazing things.

00:37:48.920 But if anything is possible, anything is possible.

00:37:52.500 And I think just culturally we spend a lot of time here, but we're not from here.

00:37:56.580 We notice that it's a very popular thing in America in a way that it isn't in other places.

00:38:01.900 Well, it's interesting. I would think that people in the UK would be, I mean, given, you know, that perfidious Albion moniker for British statecraft and, you know, the role of covert British intelligence work in so many world events and for so many centuries now, 0.96

00:38:23.860 I would think that people would be a bit more curious in the UK to try to get answers to various things.

00:38:30.920 In fact, our own intelligence states.

00:38:32.160 Yeah, but we're the good guys.

00:38:33.440 Right. Well, but this is what's funny is I think that a lot of what's happened in the past 10 years has been because of the perception,

00:38:41.700 which I think is the correct perception, that these intelligence agencies and covert action powers have been weaponized against our own people.

00:38:50.820 And that has, you know, it was Republicans who were leading the charge about the Iraq war, about the war on terror,

00:38:57.920 about, you know, the use of the CIA to do drone strikes, to it was John McCain who, you know, led many of these regime change operations,

00:39:07.180 you know, who ran for president in 2008.

00:39:09.900 The Bush family was basically born of the CIA from Prescott Bush to George H.W. Bush, who was the CIA director.

00:39:18.160 To this day, the the main CIA headquarters in Langley is called the George George Bush National Intelligence Center.

00:39:25.800 But when it was weaponized against our own people and so transparently, I mean, the CIA coming out with that memo saying that the 2016 election was basically illegitimate because of Russian bots and trolls.

00:39:40.700 And then we saw our own FBI counterintelligence, you know, take up the mantle of this.

00:39:45.840 And I think that has created the perception of urgency in getting answers to things that we had long taken for granted.

00:39:55.100 But the other thing I'll say is this.

00:39:56.840 If you don't want conspiracy theories, then you can't have conspiracy agencies.

00:40:00.620 The fact is, is everything that the CIA does is under cloaked under something called NSC 10-2.

00:40:07.760 It's a National Security Council memo 10-2 in 1948 that made gave them the cloak of plausible deniability.

00:40:17.340 That basically they could deny what they're doing.

00:40:19.720 And as long as they didn't, as long as they didn't, as long as the U.S. government, the U.S. State Department could, could plausibly deny what, you know, what had been done, then it was sanctioned.

00:40:32.260 Everything was sanctioned.

00:40:33.660 Espionage, arson, black propaganda, economic sabotage.

00:40:39.860 Up until the 1960s and 70s, even assassination was, was allowed to be done if it, if it was covert.

00:40:46.600 And so you have this, you have this situation where it's one thing if that's just the dirty work being done in a conflict zone when you're dealing with terrorists or a, or a bona fide dictator and it's all outside the house.

00:41:03.420 But because these things have power, they have tentacles into everything.

00:41:09.280 And it makes a lot of sense as to why that is.

00:41:11.320 To me, I don't even talk about this, I don't even think I really come into it with a very conspiratorial tone.

00:41:17.960 This is just business.

00:41:18.900 This is just how it's done.

00:41:20.640 If you, the, the, the intelligence world is not the final boss of this by any stretch.

00:41:27.260 The CIA director makes about $220,000 a year.

00:41:33.860 That is less than like a second year associate at a New York law firm.

00:41:40.480 You know, you could be correcting typos, you know, as a, as a glorified paralegal, your second year.

00:41:46.200 And you're making more than the head of the Central Intelligence Agency.

00:41:49.920 Well, there's kids on YouTube unboxing toys that make 10 times that.

00:41:53.300 Right.

00:41:53.580 Yeah.

00:41:53.960 At 14.

00:41:54.600 And so, and not only that, the CIA occupies a very junior position within the whole national security state structure.

00:42:03.140 It's well below the National Security Council level.

00:42:05.660 It's well below the State Department level.

00:42:07.840 This is why it's always a promotion to go from CIA director to secretary of state, like Mike Pompeo was promoted from CIA director to state.

00:42:15.100 Or Leon Panetta for, for, you know, the Democrat CIA director under Bill Clinton was, got promoted to the head of the Defense Department.

00:42:24.780 Because the intelligence only plays a junior role to state craft work or to military work.

00:42:30.700 It's, it's, it's just an assistant that you task things to when it's too dirty to do yourself.

00:42:36.720 And they themselves then work through the whole society network to affect that state craft aim.

00:42:43.260 If you want to influence hearts and minds in a country, that means you work with the media.

00:42:47.160 That means you work with the universities.

00:42:48.600 That means you work with the local think tanks.

00:42:50.420 That means you set up local NGOs.

00:42:52.440 If there's a prosecutor who's giving you trouble, it means you work with the local judges, the local prosecutors associations, the local mayors and governors and, and presidents.

00:43:01.900 And, but that requires you having an entanglement at every layer of society.

00:43:07.420 The youth groups, the ethnic minority groups, the women and gender identity groups, the religious denominations.

00:43:14.700 I mean, this is, you can, everyone right now can go to CIA World Factbook at CIA.gov.

00:43:19.240 Every country has the current updated CIA entry, whether they go to Bangladesh or Burma or Kenya or the UK.

00:43:31.460 And you will see a meticulously documented demographic breakdown, the, you know, the religious minorities, the, you know, percent of the population at varying age levels.

00:43:45.280 You know, what percentage of its workforce is unionized, what national resources it has.

00:43:50.560 And all of these things are modes of soft power to accomplish a statecraft aim to advance U.S. national interest.

00:43:59.840 And the thing that makes this all, I think, tough for a lot of people, and they take an attitude that comes across as conspiratorial,

00:44:10.120 is because they have been under the presupposition that the world did not exist this way and has not existed this way,

00:44:19.400 this way for a full century now, almost here in the U.S.

00:44:23.360 They think that their universities are just, you know, professors teaching, you know, teaching students about a particular topic.

00:44:33.280 They don't understand that, for example, that the Harvard Endowment has made a huge amount of its $50 billion by working with the U.S. State Department in foreign regime change operations.

00:44:47.200 I mean, this came out in the 1990s when Jeffrey Sachs was the head of the Harvard Endowment for International Development,

00:44:53.540 was personally petitioning USAID for something like half a billion dollars to administer the economic privatization of Russia during that shock therapy period.

00:45:03.280 The Harvard Endowment and George Soros' Quantum Fund were given basically a no-competitor closed auction bid on the sale of those formerly Soviet government-held assets.

00:45:21.400 And Harvard is getting billions of dollars in grants in total from the U.S. government while they're doing favors for them.

00:45:26.880 The same thing with Columbia University.

00:45:28.480 The same thing with Stanford University.

00:45:30.420 They think they're, Americans think that the universities are something that they are, I don't want to say that they're not, but that they're only partially.

00:45:40.220 It's the same thing with businesses and the business side of this.

00:45:45.000 You know, there was a famous case in the 1970s where we overthrew the government of Chile, and it came out 30 years later, 35 years later.

00:45:54.300 This was printed in the Guardian that, you know, part of the reason behind that coup was because the Pepsi, you know, Pepsi Cola company, its bottling operations were being threatened by Allende.

00:46:06.920 And Pepsi reached out to Henry Kissinger, the Secretary of State, to see what could be done to get rid of Allende. 0.98

00:46:14.080 Kissinger then hooked up Don Kendall or Kendall Johnson, the head of, the chairman of Pepsi with the CIA director.

00:46:27.380 The CIA director and the head of the Pepsi Cola company had a personal meeting about how to mobilize a coup in Chile.

00:46:36.100 They then had an additional meeting with the largest newspaper mogul in the country to assist in the CIA operation.

00:46:43.920 And you drink Pepsi and you don't, you don't know how the, the bottling is made.

00:46:49.720 You know, you, you go to, you go to the gas station, you pump your gas and you think that the gas just comes out of the ground or it comes on a tree.

00:46:57.900 You don't understand that a lot of Exxon Mobil and Chevron only have the, you know, the market dominance they have because the Pentagon has cleared the way for them to secure territory in Middle East, in Kuwait, in, you know, the, the, the Persian Gulf, in parts of Mexico.

00:47:18.380 You don't understand that there's CIA activity and state department diplomacy that's done as part of that, that statecraft.

00:47:26.100 And so I think a lot of people are only now beginning to see the layers of that.

00:47:32.920 And it causes a lot of shock mentally when, when they see that.

00:47:37.860 Sometimes in life, you just need a secret weapon.

00:47:41.420 Maybe it's that one joke that always lands at the pub or a dish you can whip up that makes you look like a Michelin starred chef.

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00:49:00.220 Do you think as well that we have been focusing in on America and talking about the way it's been conducting its operations and the corruption within, which of course exists, but at the same time, we kind of ignore, you know, what the Iranians are doing as well, what the Russians are doing. 0.51

00:49:20.020 Everybody is playing this game.

00:49:22.200 So if the Americans weren't playing it, then the Russians would be. 0.98

00:49:26.640 And it's just a game, isn't it?

00:49:28.540 It's an interconnected game.

00:49:29.980 It is.

00:49:30.520 And in fact, that was actually one of the reasons it was set up in the first place.

00:49:33.860 If you go back and you read the inauguration of organized political warfare by George Kennan, who was the head of policy planning staff for the State Department in the 40s and 50s, he was the guy who would, weeks after he wrote this memo, would actually create this NSC 10-2 plausible deniability thing.

00:49:50.520 And he wrote this memo a couple weeks before that cloak of plausible deniability was granted to the CIA, and he laid out that we need to do this dirty work of the inauguration of organized political warfare, that we need a formal political warfare capacity that is going to have to work with the criminal underworld, is going to have to work with all the media outlets, is going to have to work with the unions, is going to have to set up all these front entities, and is going to have to create informal channels for all this.

00:50:19.220 And what he says is, if we don't do this, then the Bolsheviks will. 0.83

00:50:24.200 And so we're going to, and he gives another example where he says the Brits have been doing this for over a century.

00:50:33.280 So basically, the Brits or the Bolsheviks are going to dominate the 20th century with their organized political warfare apparatus if the State Department doesn't have this, and if we don't create an intelligence capacity to execute that.

00:50:47.200 And so I think that is true, and that's why I think what's happening right now to me is inspiring because it's getting national consciousness to a level that's, I think, smarter than it was. 0.94

00:51:01.000 And sometimes that veers you in stupid directions as you're trying to figure out how it all works.

00:51:05.260 You know, you see one thing, and then you fixate on it, and you think, okay, everything's this. 0.99

00:51:10.140 You see another thing, you go, okay, no, no, actually, that was wrong, it's this.

00:51:13.780 You see another, okay, it's this.

00:51:15.020 And then you go out in these directions, and you sort of, but over time, it's just a network, and it's just how the world works.

00:51:21.820 And that's not to excuse the immorality of organized crime or of intelligence gone wrong.

00:51:33.820 There is the potential need for that dirty work to be done, if for no other reason than to combat the dirty work being done by other countries. 1.00

00:51:43.680 But it can still, it can go rogue.

00:51:46.380 It can go too wrong.

00:51:47.320 It can go unaccounted for for too long.

00:51:49.120 And I think that is where we are, and that is why I think that it is so important that these disclosures come out to the maximum extent possible.

00:51:59.840 And we went through this before and we lived.

00:52:02.360 In 1975, during the Church Committee hearing, when the Democrats held a series of investigations and hearings into the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, and the IRS, you had a moment where the head of the CIA counterintelligence was holding up a heart attack gun.

00:52:25.480 About how we assassinate people with a gun that shoots a dart that makes it look like the person died of a heart attack.

00:52:33.500 If we could survive that level of transparency, where we're literally showing our own assassination technique to how to kill someone and get away with it by making it look like they died of a heart attack, I think that you can do that today.

00:52:51.400 And frankly, I think the disclosures that came out then is part of how the CIA survived at a time when it was under huge pressure from Democrats because of their work against the Democrat Party when it was against the Vietnam War and it was being, that political warfare is being done domestically.

00:53:09.680 So I think this is a healthy process.

00:53:11.660 It's noisy and chaotic and can, you know, can result in some turbulence.

00:53:18.320 But it's, I think it's part of the cleaning house process.

00:53:21.040 It's gone on too far, too long.

00:53:22.400 Well, you made the point, and I think it's a really valid point, which is that we might tolerate it, you know, if you're an American citizen, you might tolerate it when it's against the Taliban or whoever.

00:53:33.760 But the JFK and the Epstein things as just two examples, those are things that involve U.S. citizens.

00:53:40.380 Right.

00:53:40.900 You've got an American president being assassinated.

00:53:43.860 Yeah.

00:53:44.400 And you've got this guy who was, you know, up to God knows what.

00:53:48.700 And the question with Epstein as well is, interestingly, is what do we, everyone thinks Jeffrey Epstein didn't kill himself.

00:53:58.500 Do we know enough to actually say that categorically?

00:54:02.080 I don't think there's a question of how much smoke do you need to have before you just come out and say there's a dang fire.

00:54:14.720 I mean, you had the confluence of strange facts on the ground that are indisputable is something you seldom have in a case like this.

00:54:30.120 You have both of the security cameras malfunctioning with none of the footage, you know, retainable.

00:54:39.000 You have the pages in the visitor's log ripped out, you know, an unrecoverable from who actually, you know, visited the prison.

00:54:46.080 You have both of the security guards falling asleep or walking off the job.

00:54:50.140 You have the head of the Justice Department who's in charge of the FBI.

00:54:55.520 The FBI is the intelligence arm of the Justice Department.

00:54:58.460 And the person who's, you know, would be prosecuting whoever, you know, killed Epstein if he if he died by homicide happened to be Bill Barr.

00:55:10.420 Bill Barr's father, Donald Barr, was personally the math teacher, was the high school teacher of Jeffrey Epstein.

00:55:20.120 You have the direct family connection between the head of the Justice Department and Epstein.

00:55:25.060 Then you have the fact that Bill Barr started his career in the CIA.

00:55:29.860 He told his high school guidance counselor he wanted to be the head of the CIA.

00:55:33.400 He then worked immediately for the CIA for seven years to start his career.

00:55:38.120 He only became disenchanted with the CIA when when the reforms were made in the late 1970s to fire 30 percent of the workforce after the church committee hearings.

00:55:48.120 He went to Knight Law School while he was working for the CIA.

00:55:52.480 He then got his first legal job effectively while he was serving as the the CIA's liaison to the to the Congressional Committee investigating Iran-Contra.

00:56:06.560 If you you can read this in The Washington Post and The New York Times, they described Bill Barr in the early 1980s as the CIA's mop up man,

00:56:13.480 because he was the one who was the blocker and tackler to prevent CIA disclosures about the illegal activities of the Republican Reagan-Bush administration during Iran-Contra.

00:56:26.980 The exact origin story for how Epstein even came into this world in the first place.

00:56:33.840 And so the secrets of the Epstein universe, I think, are are the secrets of the Bill Barr universe.

00:56:42.600 And the fact that Bill Barr was the head of the Justice Department while all this happened and there was it didn't even look like there was an attempt, frankly.

00:56:56.060 I mean, if you if you go back to those news cycles, oh, the security cameras are gone, oh, the visitors logs are gone, oh, the security guards fell asleep.

00:57:05.220 And it was almost like jumping on the grenade immediately as it happened.

00:57:12.100 And and it's not the first time you have these strange things.

00:57:16.360 I mean, Ghislaine Maxwell's father, Robert Maxwell, fell off a yacht in 1991.

00:57:21.900 Just just oh, well, I guess that's a suicide, too.

00:57:25.440 And then it comes out later that he was working, you know, for Israeli intelligence at the time and potentially British intelligence.

00:57:31.600 And, you know, it had been known as this publisher.

00:57:34.180 But then in death, we find out that there's this big intelligence network and that happens to be a close partner of U.S. intelligence on on many foreign policy issues.

00:57:43.660 So. So the other thing is, is, you know, when when you when you read CIA assassination guides, as I've as I've done on my own streams, there's so much attention paid to trying to minimize and ensure that there's only a casual investigation afterwards that you create the appearance of an accident.

00:58:04.180 But, you know, you know, you can't you can't to me, I that level of evidence shifts the burden to where I think you need to presume that it is.

00:58:19.700 But if there if there is, you know, evidence that absolves the the Bill Barr Justice Department of that, I would be open to it.

00:58:31.340 But I think that the burden has flipped where you need to presume suicide.

00:58:35.980 Mike, what I mean, here's a question.

00:58:38.580 I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Yeah. I'm sorry. Yeah.

00:58:40.360 I'm going to this is a very easy question. Why do you think that the Epstein Epstein files haven't been released?

00:58:47.320 I think for the same national security reason that that that we've been talking about, which is that whether it's U.S. intelligence, British intelligence, Israeli intelligence, whether it's implicating specific things about those networks or about the modalities through which those networks operate.

00:59:11.020 So, for example, if those files show that Epstein belonged to intelligence and was reporting directly his conversations about the Iran deal, about, you know, his conversations with the hood Barack to, you know, to Bill Burns.

00:59:30.300 I guess that was after it. But to the, you know, to the CIA director or to the Justice Department or to the FBI, you can imagine that straining relations between U.S. and Israel.

00:59:40.060 If it comes out that this that there's a CIA memo that says, you know, we know this about Epstein.

00:59:48.800 He's doing this work for us, but he's also doing this work for the Brits or for the Israelis.

00:59:53.000 You could see a situation where you might have delegations from those governments pushing on the State Department, pushing on the CIA, pushing on FBI, pushing on the Justice Department to not do that because it implicates their own national security.

01:00:07.960 And this gets back to this sort of strange entanglement within the intelligence world where you have these intelligence coalitions.

01:00:14.640 You have them in the five eyes.

01:00:16.060 And so in theory, I mean, you can imagine a situation where let's just say there's some joint intelligence work we're doing.

01:00:23.020 The U.S. is doing with New Zealand and there's some common network that we're surveying.

01:00:29.660 We have assets on the ground there.

01:00:31.780 We're we're let's just say we're doing something in like Burma or Vietnam.

01:00:39.640 Let's just say there's some network we're trying to pry the Chinese influence off of Vietnam. 0.96

01:00:44.500 And you've got these New Zealand contacts and we're sharing intelligence and, you know, in these intelligence, you know, analyst memos or or embassy cables, they talk openly about national secrets shared from the United States to the five eyes coalition.

01:01:02.980 And then there's a movement within New Zealand to, you know, some political party in New Zealand says the national security state has been oppressing us and we think that they've been, you know, politicized and are impacting domestic politics.

01:01:21.040 We want all these files about, you know, their work within these regions to be public.

01:01:29.140 You can imagine a State Department delegation saying you better redact these documents.

01:01:34.100 We told you these secrets and confidence.

01:01:36.840 And so you could imagine diplomatic blowback.

01:01:40.000 You could imagine, you know, threats to the coalition.

01:01:44.280 And so it's that layer of it, especially when you look at how deep the relationships go, I mean, almost always U.S., U.K., Israel and potentially some other partner countries have moved together as a coalition bloc.

01:02:04.860 I mean, for, you know, 80 years now and it's almost always even when it's not immediately a joint coalition, there's there's synchronization that's done to ensure that there's some compromise position that's happening on foreign policy that's happening on Iran.

01:02:23.940 That's, you know, now some of this fell apart with the under the Obama administration, with the schism that opened up with Obama going through with the the Iran deal against the against the protestations of Israel and against the protestations of Saudi Arabia, who's another close partner in this.

01:02:39.500 And it's also I should really add Saudi Arabia to this list because the Khashoggi network was working directly with the Epstein network. 0.58

01:02:47.640 And, you know, Saudi Arabia is another one of these Middle Eastern countries who's closely aligned with U.S. foreign policy.

01:02:54.440 You know, both Israel and Saudi Arabia, they really came together after decades of, you know, of disputes and not recognizing each other diplomatically and things because they were both commonly threatened by the Obama Iran deal.

01:03:09.760 Trump gets an office and, you know, eliminates that as his first week.

01:03:15.120 And then, you know, Kushner and the White House end up, you know, going through the Abraham Accords and sort of trying to tie them together by economic development.

01:03:23.600 But then they ran these operations against Trump, who was, you know, and so you have this you have this almost ancient relationship.

01:03:33.820 That only a decade ago start to develop its fissures and then those fissures have been, you know, widening and narrowing over the past eight years through, you know, the Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump thing.

01:03:50.500 And I could see there being certain aspects that might be embarrassing that would be allowed because they embarrass one side of that of that aisle.

01:03:59.720 It is. It is. It is. But I don't know how that how that'll play out because of the the likely perception for the need to maintain the enthusiastic support of allies.

01:04:16.380 You know, during the Trump administration or whether or not the Trump administration, Trump doesn't, you know.

01:04:21.740 If you're going to throw caution to the wind and say, I don't need to get reelected, we're also reorganizing everything with USAID being reshuffled and, you know, with with what we're doing at the NGO layer.

01:04:33.820 Maybe it's time to renegotiate all these relationships.

01:04:36.680 And there's a chance that that's that could happen with the UK.

01:04:41.580 I know Trump has reiterated, you know, the special relationship, but there's also a lot of conflict over what the Labour Party is doing on human rights grounds with free speech and the tension around Ukraine that is, you know, could potentially lead to a rift there.

01:04:57.860 But whatever happens with the files, it I think is is an interesting litmus test for how those relationships are going to go.

01:05:05.460 Well, Mike, it's been great having you on before we head to Substack, where our fans get to ask you their questions.

01:05:11.640 The one we always end with is what's the one thing we're not talking about that we should be.

01:05:16.000 Before Mike answers a final question at the end of the interview, make sure to head over to our Substack.

01:05:21.360 The link is in the description where you'll be able to see this.

01:05:25.740 Does Mike believe U.S. State Department employees and employees in other federal agencies actively undermined Trump when he was running for president?

01:05:34.480 If you're in charge, what is the first best bang for your buck thing that you would go after?

01:05:39.620 He's thinking about Doge in this case.

01:05:42.060 What is the most outstanding action that each of the five eyes country is taking that stifles or limits free speech or freedom of expression?

01:05:52.940 I think the role of unions in organized crime and statecraft, as we were discussing earlier, is something that has to be much more robustly explored.

01:06:02.920 One of the main things that I think is likely to destabilize the U.S. in the next few years, as it was during Trump's first term, were these rent-a-riot pop-up protests that can completely destabilize a country when all the workers are walking out.

01:06:21.300 They're blocking the highways, they're provoking the police, so you're left with either a sort of authoritarian crackdown or your police precinct burns to the ground, as what happened in Minneapolis.

01:06:33.740 But a lot of this is intermediary, but a lot of this is intermediated by the unions and these groups like AFL-CIO and SEIU and whatnot.

01:06:42.080 And while there's been much attention by Doge on USAID and on the NGOs, I think there's this very unexplored layer which needs to be renegotiated, which is U.S. financial assistance to unions and worker groups internationally with that money boomeranging back home to spill into paid protests.

01:07:06.920 And so I think that's something that the Justice Department, the Department of Labor and the State Department need to seriously reevaluate, reevaluate.

01:07:15.280 All right. Head on over to Substack where we ask, Mike, your questions.

01:07:18.220 What countries around the world seem to have the purest form of government or at least minimal influence from the blob, it's what we call the deep state in the U.K., or similar style of corruption?

01:07:29.520 Do any exist? Do any countries exist that don't have this?

01:07:32.160 Do any countries exist that don't have this?

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TRIGGERnometry - March 23, 2025

JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz

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