The Epstein Documents: What Still Doesn’t Make Sense ft. Mike Benz
On Wednesday's show Jay Beecher offered a skeptical attitude toward the entire Epstein Files saga. Now, Mike Benz joins to give the opposite take, examining the many interesting facts and connections of Epstein's life story and explaining why he believes they constitute proof of Epstein's activities in the world of international intelligence. Benz explores Epstein's ties to Israeli PM Ehud Barak, arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, and others, and says what still remains unexplained. Watch every episode ad-free on members.charliekirk.com! Get new merch at charliekirkstore.com!Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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All right, welcome back.
Hour two of the Charlie Kirk Show is underway, and I am very excited about this conversation with the great Mike Benz.
Mike Benz has been, he just had a tour de force on Joe Rogan, three hours with the great Joe Rogan, all about Epstein.
So much to get into.
We, of course, had Jay Beecher on the show yesterday.
I loved that interview.
I actually think it was a sobering kind of analysis of six years of investigative journalism.
But Mike Benz has different insights.
He's seen different things.
And I want to make sure that we approximate the truth here by getting Mike Benz's insights in the mix.
So without further ado, Mike, welcome back to the show.
It's great to have you.
Thanks.
Thanks for having me, guys.
Yeah.
Well, I was talking to you a bit offline.
The reason I wanted to have you on is because there is so much to the Epstein dump.
There's 3 million documents.
It's impossible for one.
It's the most recent one.
Yeah, to get the whole scope of what's happening here.
And you've been making headlines here.
We've got clips from your Rogan interview that we're going to play.
You made a lot of news.
In general, just let's start at the beginning.
What do you think that we learned from this?
Has it added contours to your understanding?
The floor is yours.
Oh, an unbelievable amount has been turned up in this.
It's, I guess, the way I describe it is it's shocking, but not surprising.
I don't think there's anything in here that has surprised me, but it still is very shocking to see the details laid out.
And it also confirms, in my view, essentially, from almost every angle, the way that I've tried to proscribe people or prescribe people to view Epstein in context to sort of understand the Epstein cinematic universe beyond a lot of the kind of simple,
easy to grasp onto things or the things that he was arrested for, in my view, understanding the character of Epstein helps understand the world around you and the role that he played because there's a little visage of Epstein in almost every industry, every government, every intelligence service, every private investment fund.
And so, you know, what we're getting are to know something for a fact versus to have a constellation of circumstantial evidence is a very different thing.
You know, many of the allegations around Epstein until this point involved highly compelling circumstantial evidence.
But so much that has turned up in these files has just been, you know, what you'd call in an evidentiary proceeding a direct evidence.
That is, it's not, oh, we think that he was talking to X or Y because he talked to 13 of his associates and there's a rumor going around and someone said that he did.
Now, you have a direct email or you have a direct, you know, a direct audio file that says X or Y.
We can get all the specifics of what all those things are because there's frankly 3 million of them.
But, you know, I can either turn to that or you guys want to go in a different direction.
I'll leave it to you.
So, so I'll be honest.
One of the things that I was challenging Jay Beecher, a phenomenal interview.
I encourage everybody to go watch it and listen to it.
But one of the things that I just couldn't shake was this sense that I've had that he was an Intel asset or he was working with CIA, with Mossad, whatever.
And he seemed to be thinking that, you know, those claims had been overblown.
Yeah, why would he work with Mossad if he could just call Ehud Barak?
Or why, you know, he, yes, yes, he was involved, but it was, it was softer.
It was more kind of veiled in business transactions or whatever.
I just couldn't shake it.
And I kept pushing him on that.
And I've seen that you've kind of been going into this.
You know, there's this email, Robert Maxwell, Ghelanes Maxwell, apparently threatened Mossad.
And you've kind of gone into some of this, but there's so much there.
And I just want to let you make those connections if they're there, if it's true, because I just, I feel that there's got to be a there.
Well, I was laughing because when you said I couldn't help shake the feeling, I thought, well, you don't say.
I mean, this is a bad week to be an Epstein intelligence denialist.
I'll give you some.
We'll start with the U.S. side of it.
One of the things that turned up in these documents that I, again, shocked but not surprised is Epstein FOIA the central intelligence agency twice for records about himself first in 1999 and then again in 2011.
Now, Andrew Blake, have you guys, have you ever foyed the CIA to see what any CIA records about yourself it has?
That wouldn't even occur to me to contemplate that as an option.
You know, I guess, but I'm also not a billionaire either or a centimillionaire.
Centimillionaire.
Okay.
Well, would you request for any, quote, open or acknowledged agency affiliations?
So that was, okay, just so I'm understanding, Mike, he, this is in 1990.
Did you say 1991 or 2001?
1999.
1999.
This is two years before he became a public figure.
Right, okay.
At that point, he was still a private citizen, not publicly known, not written about in the mainstream news.
It wasn't until 2001 and 2002 when he began flying the most recent president of the United States, Bill Clinton, around in Africa on his private jet that the media started to take interest in him.
So he was still basically a private operative who basically two years before he became a public figure, first asked the CIA if there were any open or acknowledged links, agency affiliations.
What's also interesting is the CIA, we actually don't have exactly what he asked the CIA, even though I think we should, and I know that we are entitled to it.
And now I'm happy to report that after I made a bit of a crusade about this, multiple people have now filed FOIAs to the CIA to get Jeffrey Epstein's correspondence with the CIA, which is not classified because FOIA requests at the CIA are not.
Now, the CIA is obviously not allowed to tell you, by virtue of it being a spy agency, any classified records that it has.
But for example, it can send you declassified records, or if the CIA has acknowledged any links to a particular individual, it can send you the records on those.
But what's interesting about that CIA letter is it says, with respect to your request about open or acknowledged links, we have conducted that we grant the request for documents.
We have searched for documents.
No documents are responsive to that.
With respect to the portion of your FOIA request that touched on classified matters, we can neither confirm nor deny the existence or non-existence of such documents, which means that Jeffrey Epstein not only asked for open and acknowledged agency links, but also asked something about himself that was classified.
Now, for what it's worth, that is the same stock response you get when you ask the CIA for CIA personnel files.
So he's not yet a public person, and he FOIAs the CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency, asking for what it has on him, basically.
Yes.
And we don't know exactly how he stated his question or what he included in that, but we do know that it touched on classified documents because the CIA's response was, you know, regarding that specific line of questioning, we cannot confirm nor deny.
That is really shocking, actually.
That's a bombshock.
And what's very exciting is unless the law is not followed and the Justice Department does not come down on the agency for not following the law, if it doesn't follow it, we are legally entitled to actually see the correspondence between the C because they left a in the Epstein files.
Again, none of this was known until last week that, again, in 1999 and then again in 2011, sent an identical request.
And now this is before, again, the 2019 rearrest, but there's a case reference number.
So we know they have the files.
All right, Mike Benz, I have a co-host here, Blake.
Blake was, I could see his mind thinking.
He went to Dartmouth.
He's a very smart guy.
I know Mike.
I know Mike.
I think I go back.
So, Mike, Mike, we've spotted over his theories on a lot of things.
Yeah, Blake.
Blake was not.
Blake had an incredulous look on his face.
I'm going to throw it to Blake.
What were you thinking, Blake?
Well, I guess I'm just thinking, I just, it strikes me as innately implausible that the reveal that Jeffrey Epstein is an intelligence asset is that he FOIA himself at the CIA.
I guess I would ask.
Why would he do that?
Like, why would he do that if the CIA needed to hide anything?
Why would they get outed by their legalistic response to a FOIA request?
I think there's like a lot of ways they could get around that.
I just find it highly unlikely.
Okay, it's done through the, Blake, it was done through the Privacy Act, meaning there was no public alert.
We only know about this because it's in the FBI file.
This is a way, if you go through the Privacy Act, you can see what records that are publicly searchable about you without it being revealed to the public so that you can see what other people would get if they were to do that same FOIA.
In theory, anyone could do a FOIA about Jeffrey Epstein.
But if you do it through the Privacy Act, you get it and you get it alone, and it's kept as a private correspondence between you and your lawyer.
That's smart, Mike.
That's how it's done.
So, you know, I learned this yesterday.
I know this is public information, but it's one of those pieces of the Epstein saga that people forget that he was arrested either in the late 80s or early 90s.
And his partner went to prison for it.
Anyway, I'm just saying like he skated free.
You're talking about the Tower's financial collapse.
Yes.
Yes.
Which at the time was the biggest Ponzi scheme effectively in U.S. history at that time.
But Epstein is a Where's Waldo figure.
I make the argument that Epstein's intelligence adjacency started in 1978, 1979.
There's kind of a Forrest Gump story around this.
When he worked at Bear Stearns, Bear Stearns was one of the top three largest clearinghouses of the BCCI bank.
That was the CIA's bank.
It went down in flames in 1990 when Bill Barr effectively covered it up.
He wrote the pardons for the six BCCI officials.
That's the Bank of Credit and Commerce International.
That was the CIA's bank for laundering basically gun and drug money to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan.
And you have to understand in 1979, the Iranian revolution happened at the very moment that the CIA was at its weakest because of the church committee hearings and the Halloween massacre.
And the CIA was setting up a complex offshore intelligence web through a network that's called the Safari Club, the Mount Kenya Safari Club, that was run by Adnan Khashoggi, the largest arms dealer in the world, who was the Saudi middleman between the U.S. and Israel during the Iran-Contra affair.
Adnan Khashoggi was Jeffrey Epstein's client when he started Intercontinental Assets Group in 1981 after the SEC investigation of him at Bear Stearns for handling Edgar Bronfman's money on a deal involving St. Joe's Mineral Company.
And Edgar Bronfman was, you know, played a very senior role in policy.
He was the head of the, oh my gosh, I don't know why I'm blank on the name, but he was the head of a major international Jewish advocacy group that played an effective kind of shadow State Department role in many aspects of the Iran war.
The Reagan administration had this Iran-Contra operation that involved effectively the U.S. and Brits getting guns to Iran to fend off Iraq and doing it through Israel with Saudi Arabia as the middleman.
And it's at this time while Bear Stearns is laundering money effectively in a CIA gun running operation.
This is, you have to keep in mind also, there was an international arms embargo on Iran at the time.
Jeffrey Epstein's 10% Cut00:02:14
So that was illegal to do.
And I find the Nicaragua side of that, the gun running to the Nicaraguans with the skim interesting because Jeffrey Epstein had a very lurid history in South American affairs.
For example, when Ghelaine Maxwell was asked by Todd Blanche in her DOJ interview last year to give an example of Jeffrey Epstein's business transactions, she could only think of one example to illustrate it.
And that was imagine if the Sinaloa cartel was owed money by the Los Zetas cartel or a rival cartel and They needed a way to trace the assets of the other cartel to get the money back.
They would hire some, they would hire Jeffrey and Jeffrey would take a 10% cut, a 5% to 10% cut of the money.
I just find that interesting because we're only 13 years removed, 14 years removed or so from the Fast and Furious operation when the Obama White House green lit an operation to run guns to the Sinaloa cartel so that they could win a gang war against the Los Adas who were cutting into effectively U.S. pipeline interests in Mexico.
But the fact is, is you need to find, you need to explain how Jeffrey Epstein, before the age of 30, had so many high-profile clients stretching from the Middle East to France to the UK to these high-level contacts in Israel that make sense given the fundamental constraints on someone who's 29, 30 years old from handling, being competent enough to handle billionaires' money.
And the fact is, is the fact that he worked on those deals, the fact that he was flying back and forth cross-country to visit Doug Leese at that time, who was the main British arms dealer involved in Iran-Contra, the fact that he was living at the time with Stanley Pottinger, who was the CIA's mop-up man, who literally also got investigated by the FBI for running those same guns to Iran,
Jeffrey Epstein's Secret Recordings00:17:16
but then the case was magically dropped when the FBI said the audio recordings that they had on him malfunctioned.
It's his whole career.
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All right.
So, Mike, summing up, I mean, your mind is like, you just like have this incredible ability to capture all of these connections.
It's truly, truly amazing.
And so, if I'm going to sum up what you were getting at, and I was, I was taking notes, I was trying to track each piece.
You only FOIA yourself at the CIA if you've got a lot of reason to believe that they've either got stuff on you, they've got personnel files on you, whatever.
When you've got all these, the smoke, there's got to be fire with all these connections.
All these connections are Iran, Nicaragua, whatever, all these relationships.
It has to mean something.
This can't just be pure coincidence.
He wasn't just like a good party boy that liked to hang out with Prince Andrew.
Like, there's more going on here.
So, you're touching on the American side.
Are there connections that you would draw with Mossad or Israeli intelligence?
What about Russia, Russian intelligence?
Well, absolutely.
And these are all linked.
So as I mentioned, Jeffrey Epstein was handling the money for the CIA's point person between the U.S. and Israel in 1983 when Adnan Khashoggi, Epstein's client, flies to Washington, D.C. to meet with Robert McFarlane, the National Security Advisor, to plan this operation.
And that itself would be something I would think the crucial middleman, who's also rumored at the time to be the world's richest person and who learned more in Adnan Khashoggi.
Oh, okay.
Of course.
But the point is, at that point, that was a coordination between American intelligence and Israeli intelligence.
Who was running Israeli military intelligence at that time from 1983 to 1985?
It was Ahud Barak.
Ahud Barak, even before this week's drop, had been documented something like 47 times at Jeffrey Epstein's house and were business partners on Carbine 911 and did business deals together everywhere from Mongolia to Cote d'Ivoire to Ahud Barak seeking Jeffrey Epstein's counsel for how to evade sanctions on Russia.
Ahud Barak, even before this week's drop, had been documented something like that.
after the 2014 Crimea affair.
But the fact is, is what these new revelations show is a much, much deeper and complete overlap for many years between Epstein and Barak in a way that is really interesting.
I'll give you an example.
One of the things that surfaced here and that I blew up, I think it's sitting at about six and a half million views right now, is Jeffrey Epstein secretly recording Ahud Barak during a three-hour conversation they had while Ahud Barak was the sitting minister of defense.
Now understand, Ahud Barak went from running Israel's most elite covert commando unit to running Israeli military intelligence to becoming the prime minister of Israel, who Mossad reports directly to.
Mossad is structured to sit in the prime minister's office effectively, answers directly to.
And so it's not structured quite the same way as our CIA.
And then Ahud Barak became effectively the equivalent of the head of our Pentagon, which means constant coordination with Mossad, but it's also more, you know, he's more closely affiliated with Amman, which is Israeli military intelligence.
And the fact that he was the head of it, while that, and this is also how you see Epstein so involved in the arms trade, both in the U.S., Israel, Saudi Arabia, the U.K., and always working with these arms dealers.
But what I'm getting at is in this conversation, Ahud Barak is one month before he leaves office as the head of Israel's military, and he's looking to make it big in the private sector.
So Epstein records under the table, I guess, the FBI has a three-hour recording of this, a three-hour coaching session where Jeffrey Epstein instructs Ahud Barak on how to convert his lifetime of accumulated government power into getting rich on the outside with in private business.
And what he tells Ahud Barak is stop focusing on your skills, your military background and the things you've accomplished.
That's not going to get you money.
That's not why people are going to pay you.
What you need to do is compile a list of people who owe you something, IOUs.
Think people who owe you favors.
Now is the time to call in those favors.
And what I find so fascinating about this is, one, on the one hand, someone who's worked in these kind of Israeli military and intelligence adjacent networks for 40 years is now literally helping that person cash in on the outside.
But it also shows a kind of the mercenary aspect of Epstein's operation.
He was secretly recording the head of the Israeli military, not the other way around, which I just think is kind of an interesting through the liberal.
Isn't that a point kind of against some of this?
I guess it just seems like so much of the argument that he's running this masterful blackmail ring or is part of all this Intel stuff is presumably that stuff would be well hidden.
And yet so much of this is actually quite public, somewhat glaring.
And then once we also start digging out stuff that was originally hidden, it doesn't seem to produce that much of a smoking gun.
I mean, Ehud Barak, well, he's, I mean, he gets attacked by the first person to basically bring this to public light as a big deal is Benjamin Netanyahu.
He attacks him about it in Israeli politics.
In fact, I think they're attacking him about it right now because they say, I guess, some of the conversations, they say Epstein was kind of a liberal and he wanted to make Israel more liberal and all of that.
Right.
But, I mean, every country has got heterodox political factionalism.
The U.S., as well as, I mean, a change in leadership or a change in what faction of our CIA is dominant can determine whether or not a foreign country's government lives or dies.
I mean, the fact is, is what, you know, when Biden is in control of the CIA, you get things like the government of Brazil turns over.
You know, when Trump becomes head of the government, suddenly the CIA USAID operations in Hungary stop.
And so there is a similar thing in Israel in terms of whether or not you have an Ahud Barak or a Benjamin Netanyahu government.
What's interesting in these files is it describes how hard it was for them to even get a meeting with Netanyahu.
And you see Ahud Barak actually playing a not as significant role in the Biden world.
He was closely affiliated with the WestExec faction.
If you guys remember that in-between period when the Hillary Clinton folks were out of power, but before Biden got in, basically every major person in the cabinet was a part of a private consulting group called WestExec.
It had Avril Haynes, Anthony Blinken, pretty much all of the people who would populate the cabinet.
And they worked very closely with Ahud Barak.
I believe he even funded them or hired them for private consulting type things.
But what you see is it is true that a foreign country's spy apparatus or covert influence apparatus does have an effect on American politics.
I don't think it's wrong in any sense to call that out.
I think that it has been silly to try to deny any links between Epstein and Israel.
It's all over the place for his whole career.
But the fact is, is this class of person, a outside financial fixer, is while they are affiliated with governments, there is also a on again, off again, only if it's good for me type relationship that happens.
Like I don't think Epstein, I would not be surprised if Epstein sent those FOIAs, not because he worked at or for CIA, but that he occasionally worked with CIA when it was profitable for himself and his partner network.
And he wanted to know if that adjacency might turn up in a public record search.
Same thing with his connections with Israel.
He certainly worked with high-level Israeli intelligence and military figures.
That doesn't mean he gets a paycheck from it necessarily.
There are these affinity networks where you yourself can get rich by doing a favor for people in government.
I believe that's likely the case with Epstein, both in the U.S. and in Israel.
And likely, you know, when you look at the UK and French and Saudi webs, it looks like at a much less involved level, there's a there there too.
Well, it makes it makes perfect sense to me that he was worried that it would be public information, especially as he became more famous, and he kind of probably had an inkling that he was getting more and more high profile, that he wanted to check to see what was publicly available.
If somebody else could find this out about him, about what the CIA had scooped up on him.
I mean, if he's an Intel operative, why would he have to make the application himself?
Well, because he's probably understood.
So you do it.
You do it.
Well, let me just correct that.
He did it through his lawyer using the Privacy Act, which is the way you do that if you want to effectively anonymously see what other people would see if they had filed that FOIA.
Okay, but he's also, apparently he's like an Intel asset.
I just, I feel like this is a distance code stuff.
No, careful.
You got to be precise with your language.
Okay.
There is a difference between an asset and a contact.
And this is very important.
I've done lectures on 20 different figures in recent American history who were CIA contacts, facilitators, logistical support nodes, but that do not rise to the level of asset.
Asset is a technical term that requires the compilation of a 201 personality file.
That is, if you are a formal asset, but Epstein could have done all of this with intelligence, appears to have done it with U.S. intelligence, but only on an off and on basis, not as a, okay, the CI told me to do it, therefore I have to do it.
This is a really important one because a lot of people don't understand the sticky gooey layer, the mortar between the bricks when it comes to intelligence work and non-intelligence work.
There is a vast web of kind of peri-intelligence, intelligence adjacencies that is the way in which intelligence work is done.
By its very nature, anything that is a covert action cannot be actualized by a overt.
I admit I'm a CIA.
The hard and fast distinction is literally impossible.
What you have is a layer of contacts that facilitate that action.
And sometimes those are formal assets.
Often, in their most significant form, they're actually not.
And I can give you a bunch of examples.
But Mike, you exposed a lot of this with the censorship industrial complex, how the government basically figured out that they could outsource certain actions that would be deemed illegal if it was done directly by the government, right?
And so it follows that this is the exact same formula that they were using somebody like Jeffrey Epstein for.
There's so much explosive stuff.
You've said on Joe Rogan that you didn't think that he was actually his main motive was blackmailing people necessarily.
I wanted to give you a chance.
I think that it's, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
So, you know, this is something that, you know, is because people have gotten so invested in it.
I think, you know, you're sort of trying to stop a runaway train when you say it, but it's just a simple fact.
First of all, Epstein wouldn't have enough time in the day to run some sort of, you know, global, you know, pedo ring in an organized and structured fashion.
I mean, the guy is, you know, 12 funds and all the business and meetings, influence nodes.
He's in science, technology, military, gun running, you know, all these different, to be a full-time pimp like that, I don't even know is technically possible.
The main thing is, is I do think it is possible that there could be a blackmail element in the sense that if you compile certain things on, if you have something on, you could sell that to a corporate espionage client or to an intelligence client.
And there could be some sort of indirect blackmail capacity that other people have.
None of that has ever been proven or there's no even open leads to follow.
But the second is, is your entire network would everything you've built would crash down in an instant the moment that rumor is even around.
That rumor didn't arise about an Epstein blackmailer until after he was already arrested and dead in a jail cell somehow.
If you blackmail one person offensively, people tell their wives that they go through a major crisis of PR in terms of they may tell their publicist and their wife and no other soul, but wives talk to wives.
And the moment one person that's friends with Jeffrey Epstein tells another person, hey, don't mess around with that guy.
That guy threatened you with stuff, then all the parties stop.
All the access stops.
All the confidant relationships stop.
Now, I do think it's possible that he could defensively blackmail someone, if you will, which is that if somebody says, hey, I know the dirt you were involved with, I'm going to tell NBC News this happened at your party.
And he goes, ah, not so fast.
You were at that party and look what I have you on tape doing.
That's very possible.
I mean, you saw, you saw, for example, I remember seeing a clip from a long time ago and not throwing any shade at Milo Yiannopoulos when I say this, but I remember him holding up like a, you know, like a recording or something of just saying, listen, when I talk to people, I try to have it on tape.
Now, I don't think Milo's ever offensively blackmailed someone with that, but I can see when you are a high net worth or highly influential public figure and like, you know, you, in case anyone comes after you, you have something on them.
But that doesn't mean it's like some highly organized, like, I mean, he did that, for example, with the head of Israeli, the Israeli military.
Do you think that, I mean, he was under the table recording him for three hours.
Well, that's the same thing.
Do you think that he was?
Yeah, exactly.
So the question is, if he wasn't motivated by blackmailing or honeypots or whatever, what was he motivated by?
Yrefi's Allegations Debunked00:11:25
We have three minutes left.
Mike, I could talk to you for hours and hours.
There's a million reasons.
He could have been, he's gotten in trouble his whole life.
I mean, when he was 27 years old, he got in trouble at Bear Stearns, you know, both on the SEC thing and another intra-office thing.
He may have had a bad experience where someone tried to blackmail him and he goes, I wish I had recorded that thing because they were doing dirty stuff too and then made a practice of it.
And then when he, the more property he owned, he just had everything hooked up.
We don't, that's a hard thing to substantiate given that this guy who's got 100,000 high-level people on his Rolodex, not a single one after his death, after he couldn't even drop the blackmail, has even made an allegation that Epstein tried to blackmail.
So there's no open leads on it, and there's an entire cinematic universe that is very useful for understanding the modern day.
As you pointed out, the censorship industrial complex is structured the same way the Epstein network is, the same way intelligence work is.
The data points to mine here in terms of what we can understand about our own government, what we can understand about our relationship with foreign governments, how to understand New York hedge funds and the role that they exert or high finance or London banks exert.
There's a whole world to see in the Epstein looking glass.
And I think that should be, that's primarily my focus.
People are free to search for whatever.
I'm super right.
I think you're super right.
I mean, I'm convinced there's just too much smoke there to not be a little bit of fire, even if it's not as sensational as some would make it.
I was pushing back with Jay because I felt like there was something.
I would close out with my closing thought here would be, I feel like for years, I mean, Epstein died almost seven years ago at this point.
It's crazy how long it's been.
But it seems like I know you've pushed back on this, but the widespread assumption is, oh, this had to all be explained as part of a big blackmail ring.
And that would justify the intelligence connections.
But as you point out, nobody has made a blackmail allegation.
Nobody talked about it being blackmail.
It turns out there kind of is no blackmail because if no one's alleging it and there's no evidence of it, it seems to have not happened.
And at that point, like you pull on the thread and so many, there's so many interlocking assumptions.
Oh, well, he was doing blackmail.
What would he do blackmail with?
Oh, well, it was these underage girls.
So he would get compromised on people.
But we don't have examples of that being used.
I just, I feel like there's so many interlocking assumptions.
Yeah, we can go over the very questionable.
Go ahead.
People latched on to that, what Blake just said, because they didn't understand all of this.
And there was no other way for most normie civilians to even understand the Epstein operation.
And that's my concern, is that all of that, that momentum was all built up because nobody was saying all of this with a large platform.
And so that became the only explanation, even though in my view, there's not much of a there.
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I think that's a really interesting point because you guys actually do sort of agree on this because I've talked to you about it off air.
How because there isn't sort of a rational explanation for stuff, it creates a vacuum.
And the most sensationalized version of events fills that because that's what flies on the internet or whatever.
Sensational versions and also things that aren't proven become fact.
The thing I mentioned, if you want to comment on this, Mike, but a thing I mentioned with our guests yesterday that stood out to me was how I heard over and over, it was kind of taken as an article of truth.
I saw it repeated in many articles that the prosecutor in Epstein's Florida case had told the Trump administration, oh, well, Epstein belonged to, I was told he belonged to intelligence, so I didn't pursue it.
And I heard that over and over again.
And then it turned out, I was reminded that was an unnamed source providing hearsay that they said someone told, I think the Washington Post that they'd heard this originally.
Not even publicly.
He denied it in a statement to the Trump administration that we then surfaced with these files.
And that just got me thinking, that was such a core part of what people used to argue for this.
And it was a kind of runaway hearsay statement that, if anything, has direct evidence against it.
Right, right.
And I saw that.
That was in the OPR report during the Justice Department investigation.
But I have my own questions about that.
I don't know how to feel about that allegation.
I agree with you that it is not the core receipt, so to speak, to base any of this on because it's contested.
And I do think that the way the question was phrased in terms of the OPR, this is the Office of Professional Responsibility and the Justice Department.
I think the way it was phrased and the lack of any follow-up questions beyond just, you know, did you have knowledge that he was an asset sort of thing leaves the door open.
But I think that there's so many other layers of it that speak to it.
And again, I'm very curious to see now that the FOIAs have been fired, what the CIA comes back and says, because they are legally required to give us that correspondence.
One of the things that I pointed out earlier today on X was, because we have the file reference numbers for the whole back and forth of the FOIAs.
Now, while through the Privacy Act, it's not publicly searchable that you sent that, it is not inherently classified communication between the CIA and Epstein's lawyer for Epstein records, which means if you have the reference number, they're required to send it to you unless they classified that correspondence after the fact.
And if the CIA drags its feet on this FOIA, if it obstructs, if it says you can't have it for one of two reasons, one, we classified it.
That says something pretty damning.
Or two, we lost it.
Our record somehow deleted it between 2011 and 2019.
I would demand a Justice Department investigation into that in terms of who at CIA may have deleted it or how it may have, when exactly the files were no longer retained.
If it turns out that the CIA says we don't have it, and then an FBI investigation into the forensics of why they don't have it says, well, it got deleted in our system in a fluke malfunction on July 10th, 2019.
I think that tells you something as well.
But the fact is, is from the CIA's work through BCCI, while Bear Stearns was handling the clearing of those CIA transactions through the Adnan Khashoggi Iran-Contra affair.
Here's another one.
The CIA's proprietary airline, Southern Air Transport, used an Iran-Contra that Jeffrey Epstein was handling.
The CIA main point man's main operatives transactions for that very gun-running CIA proprietary airline, Southern Air Transport.
Epstein negotiated its move to Columbus, Ohio, where Jeffrey Epstein was running the limited out of when he got durable power of attorney.
I mean, Blake Andrew, can you guys negotiate the move of a CI proprietary airline to serve your business?
Now, at that time, Southern Air Transport, just two years earlier, had divested, so it was no longer owned by the CIA and operated by the CIA.
It was owned to a CIA, a retired CIA agent who had been part of its management team while it was CIA.
So it was technically a private business, but then it goes to serve Jeffrey Epstein's company.
By the way, just two years after that, the State Department leased one of the largest residential buildings in New York City to Jeffrey Epstein right after it seized it from the government of Iran.
So Jeffrey Epstein had his, the State Department as his personal landlord after seizing.
I mean, can you go on Zillow or Airbnb?
Has the State Department ever been your personal landlord?
And by the way, the only reason that Jeff that that arrangement ended up expiring was because Jeffrey Epstein violated the terms of his agreement with the State Department by subleasing it out to two of the lawyers for both the French Connection and Pizza Connection scandals, which were both CIA drug-running scandals from the prior decade.
The French Connection was the CIA's role in facilitating illegal narcotics from Lebanon to France.
And the Pizza Connection scandal was when there was a basically a CIA-protected transshipment of drugs to Italian mafia organizations in New York and New Jersey that was laundered through pizza shops.
So, I mean, the whole thing up and down, you can trace it to the kind of CIA earthquake of the Carter administration, giving way to this kind of U.S.-Israel, Iran, Iran, Saudi, Iran-centric foreign policy web.
And then it just metastasized from there as all these things require money.
Hedge funds and private equity funds get in on the action.
Epstein makes his way from the finance world to the kind of fixer world, financial bounty hunter world into the high finance world.
And you can trace U.S., Israeli, British, and to some degree, you know, French and Saudi foreign policy for decades through the figure of Jeffrey Epstein.
Mike, I had to ask you about this.
And I know we're going long here, so thank you for your time.
There was like now all of a sudden there's like a, there's like George W. Bush is in the, in these emails, and so is Macron from France.
George H.W. Bush's Complex Role00:02:58
Like, yeah, go ahead.
George H.W. Bush was the CIA director in 1975, and the Safari Club grew out of his network.
The whole Khashoggi family.
You have to understand, I mean, George H.W. Bush was the CIA director and then played this very interesting role in the October surprise around Iran, and then was the vice president of the Reagan administration during Iran-Contra and was effectively the blocker to protect Reagan on it.
A lot of people think he was kind of the main progenitor of the whole Iran-Contra affair.
When he became president, his attorney general was Bill Barr, who not only was the cover-up, who started his career in the CIA for the first seven years of his career.
He only became a lawyer and then the attorney general because he went to law school at night while he was in the CIA.
The Democrat media in the early 1980s blamed him for the CIA blocking the congressional investigations into Iran-Contra.
And then while he picked Bill Barr as his AG, Bill Barr wrote the pardons for the six BCCI officials who were cleared of any wrongdoing in the CIA bank's disaster.
There's a lot of.
I'm just getting started.
I know, man.
There's so much smoke.
There has to be fire.
That's where I'm at.
Listen, I think I just want to kind of synthesize this for our audience that's listened to day one with Jay Beecher and day two with Mike Bence.
I think so much of this has been sensationalized, especially a lot of the sex stuff.
Apparently you find out he was deformed and he had erectile dysfunction and he wasn't even able to perform.
I hate to, you know, I'm trying to be sensitive for our 11-year-olds that might be listening.
But the point is, some of that stuff I think has been really sensationalized.
The underage girl things, I think Jay had a lot of really interesting intel on.
Virginia Guffery was apparently recruiting them and they were presenting themselves as over 18, whether he knew or not, I don't know.
That's a big question mark.
He liked them young.
There's no doubt.
18 to 25 was his presumption.
The point I'm making is there's been a lot of sensationalism around that, a lot of sensationalism around the blackmail.
But one of the questions that I go back to is what JD Vance said.
Why was this man able to make so much money when basically everybody with a brain, a finance brain, says that he was like subpar, mediocre at finance at best?
Some say he was good at avoiding taxes.
Okay.
But some of the video that we have of him talking finance, people are not impressed.
People that should be impressed are not impressed.
So the question is, how did he make all his money?
What you present is a theory or connections that seem to make me believe that there's smoke, there could be fire.
Seems like a lot of fire in this area.
And so it's kind of like both of these angles feel like they have truth in them.
Fire In The Void00:03:17
And then in the void of where there's details, the internet runs in and sensationalizes to the max.
Is that a fair summation, kind of?
Yeah, I think so.
I think one of the reasons that I think people's intuition about the immensity of what's hidden about the Epstein story is completely true.
But the rush to fill the vacuum of that is filled with things they can understand.
And the fact is, when I'm talking about all these networks, America does not yet have the language to put these things into words because they don't, these things are hidden from them in part because we have a national security state.
We have all of our statecraft is classified under as a foreign policy and sensitive.
And the fact is, is this is something that makes our politics Coke and Pepsi, the fact that these networks are not talked about on network news.
The fact is, is they can only really be shared through social media networks and the like, which is why I think that the collective understanding on this, particularly on the right, because the right, you know, there's kind of a universal thump goes around moment here.
Insofar as the left was actually quite wise to this in the 1960s and 70s after they were run through the mill by the national security state during the Cold War when there was a war on communism.
And so a lot of socialists or socialist light folks were targeted and they had to, they went through this same sort of collective, wow, this is the CIA's relationship with private business and this is how the military connection comes into this.
And there was a very robust scholarship for about 20 years in the Democrat Party around that.
And there has really never been on the Republican Party until now because the Republican Party's base of support in American politics for the past century has come from basically three places.
The military-industrial complex itself, which was largely set up by Eisenhower.
The big oil industry, which is tightly connected with the military-industrial complex, and the Chamber of Commerce for just general big business who like low-tax, free enterprise policies.
And there was never like they were always on the giving end rather than on the receiving end.
So Republicans, by and large, were kept dumb unless you were in the business that this entire cinematic universe exists.
And now that Republicans or half of the Republican Party has been systematically targeted by this apparatus, I mean, this was part of my frustration for many years in trying to explain the censorship industrial complex is that to even know that people saw the CIA on the board of Facebook.
I'm sorry, on the trust and safety team on Facebook and the trust and safety team of Twitter and the trust and safety team of YouTube and couldn't understand how this could be possible or USAID's role in this or the State Department's role in this or their funded grantees.
The Other Side of Epstein00:01:50
And so you need to explain essentially how U.S. foreign policy works, how domestic sentiment is a, they call this the driver, the domestic drivers of foreign policy is critical to our international business, our multinational business and private equity and U.S. foreign policy focused things depend on what people vote for here.
Because if you vote for the wrong president, those businesses that make money abroad go kaput or the foreign policy initiatives can radically change.
And so they targeted the Trump movement, regardless of what you voted for him for.
If you are a Trump supporter and Trump wanted to go a different way on Ukraine, a different way on Russia, a different way on China, a different way on Syria, a different way on Iraq, well, then you have to target the whole movement to make sure that guy doesn't get elected.
And you target it through this peri-intelligence layer.
Yeah, that's well said.
I think that's a, Blake, I mean, you and me are probably just a little bit on different wavelengths.
You see Normie here.
No, I mean, listen, I think, Mike, that was a really good summation.
I think there's just too much smoke.
There's got to be some fire there.
But I think some of the sex stuff maybe has been sensationalized.
Some of the blackmail stuff, I'm with you on that.
Mike, you've made a lot of time for us at the drop of a hat.
Thank you so much for giving us as much of these connections.
You've given us a lot to think about.
And I think a really important other side of this, Epstein saga.
Mike Benz, the executive director for the Foundation for Freedom Online and so much else, former State Department.