Saagar Enjeti and Akaash Singh dissect the argument that Jeffrey Epstein was an intelligence asset rather than merely a pedophile, citing his 1974 hiring by Donald Barr and alleged ties to MI6 via Douglas Leese. They detail how Epstein amassed wealth through Leslie Wexner's $70 million transfer and suppressed Vicki Ward's 2002 investigation into trafficking and spy connections involving Donald Trump and Shimon Peres. The hosts contend that the 2007 non-prosecution agreement, negotiated by Alex Acosta while Epstein fled to Israel, protected a blackmail ring spanning Mossad, the CIA, and Saudi Arabia. Ultimately, they assert that releasing the full Epstein files is essential to expose this global network of elite corruption and challenge narratives shielding intelligence agencies from accountability. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Offshore Banking and Blackmail00:14:27
What's up everybody?
Welcome to Flagrants.
You know, there was a vote by the House committee to see if we could get the whole Epstein file released.
And shockingly, some of these politicians, I believe, I don't know many of them, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven of them said that it's probably not a good idea that we release the full detailed Epstein file.
And, you know, what we could do is just decide to move on to something else.
I'm sure there'll be other news stories.
Or maybe we could bring somebody who has become quite the expert at the Epstein Story, phenomenal podcast.
Our good, good friends, Sager and Jeff.
Yeah, I saw your episode with Tucker.
It was absolutely amazing.
And like, I didn't realize how detailed and in-depth your knowledge is.
He's got a kid now.
So now, yeah, yeah, that's true.
You got to protect him.
And I have a baby girl.
Yeah, so I did do the research, but I asked you a lot of questions.
That's what all good men do.
So maybe it's a good idea that we just kind of like start with the case for Epstein being intelligence because what I've seen quite recently is a lot of people kind of wiping the record and acting like this is pure conspiracy that he did have any ties or connections.
And I think there's a lot of like, we have a lot of tidbits of information that we've all kind of collected.
And there's collective conscience that he absolutely is.
So like, what is the argument for it?
Maybe give us some backstory.
I know you put together something amazing.
So just break it down.
Who is this Epstein character that we all think we know so well?
I'll start off from the top.
I totally understand people who are saying it's a conspiracy theory.
And in large part, I think it's because it's been wildly overstated by some people, which is natural in the open environment, right?
They're like, he's obviously Mossad.
He's obviously CIA.
This is part of a blackmail ring.
And in my opinion, the American people actually have it right.
They just don't have the language, the facts, and they need to pull it together.
And I want them to have the information that they have to be able to make that case, especially whenever we have the Israeli prime, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, just yesterday, who said unequivocally, Epstein did not work for Mossad.
Now, remember, you know, there are key terms here that matter.
Work is not the same as asset or worked with or worked with at some time.
And this is the master game that these people play, the non-denial denial.
It's one of the most classic things in the history of Washington.
So let's start at the very, very, very beginning.
And I've put together some stuff.
That's why I have my laptop here with me.
So the first time that we can see any link between Jeffrey Epstein and somebody who become eventually very important to a story in the intelligence world is in 1974.
So in 1974, right here in New York City, where we are today, Jeffrey Epstein, despite having no college degree and being a dropout from New York University, is hired by Donald Barr.
Now, why does that last name sound familiar?
Donald Barr is the father of William Barr, who was the U.S. Attorney General under Donald Trump in 2019, who actually presides over the investigation into the Jeffrey Epstein suicide.
I'll just call it a death here for now.
So Donald Barr in 1974 hires Jeffrey Epstein at the Dalton School.
Does Donald Barr have intelligence connections in the school?
Yes, he certainly does, as would be a surprise to all of you, as do all of the storied families or the people who are connected to the most elite private schools here in New York City.
So here we have a New York Times report from 2019.
Jeffrey Epstein taught at Dalton.
His behavior was noticed.
And what they talk about specifically is that Epstein, even here in his early 20s, is already exhibiting the pedophile behavior that it becomes known for.
He starts harassing a lot of young girls.
And in the span of just one year, finds himself basically under investigation and departs under weird circumstances after teaching math here at the Dalton School.
So the question is, why did Donald Barr hire Jeffrey Epstein, a person at the Dalton School, to teach math despite having no credentials, no college degree?
I mean, you can't even get a job at a public school without a college degree and a teacher certification.
Let me ask you.
And this is the first time we see you.
Okay, so let me ask you this question.
And I think it's important to just give pushback so we kind of understand.
I don't even want to call it pushback.
You know, my dad had a college degree.
He walks in and he asks if he can be a work in the news station.
Sure.
And so this is back in like the 70s.
He's able to get a job working in the news station.
Eventually was on air.
So there was a different time.
Could teachers just teach at an elite private school?
No, but that's the thing.
So no, they could not be not common.
The Donald Barr, by the way, actually departed the school at the very same time as Jeffrey Epstein.
The Coke from Donald Barr and others, the explanation is that he very often had an unconventional hiring strategy.
But, you know, people who attended Dalton and others basically said it was a very weird hire at the time, and nobody still to this day really has an explanation for why.
That's the very first known link.
And it's weird.
Okay, let's just be honest.
It's weird.
So from 1974, 1975, we have the departure.
So somewhere around 1976, Jeffrey Epstein meets a guy named Ace Greenberg, Ace Greenberg of Bear Stearns.
And of course, you guys know for the younger audience out there, Bear Stearns is one of the most storied investment banks in Wall Street history.
Went down in 2008.
So Ace Greenberg, whose child goes to Bear Stearns, meets Jeffrey Epstein ostensibly at some sort of like parent event.
So here we have Jeffrey Epstein's deep ties to Top Wall Street.
So it talks here about Greenberg.
Just so I can understand.
Yeah.
So Jeffrey Epstein was teaching at Dalton.
Ace Greenberg's kid at Dalton.
Correct.
Builds a relationship with this Ace Greenberg guy who is one of the, what, the heads of the bank?
Yes.
He's the head of the bank, one of the most powerful men on all of Wall Street in the 1970s and 1980s.
God.
So Jeff.
So Ace Greenberg hires Jeffrey Epstein initially on the options desk.
What ends up happening is Epstein's actually not very good at that.
So they're like, what's this guy any good at?
So they transfer him to basically the high net worth money management desk.
And effectively, for the next five years, Jeffrey Epstein learns the art and really the art of money laundering.
He manages high net worth individuals' money.
What he does with that money is he specializes in offshore accounting.
And then specifically, what he does is he gets deep in with all of these shadowy figures who are experts in the Cayman Islands and moving money offshores.
Now, this is the first known time that he begins to develop the portfolio that will make him very useful for intelligence agencies in the future.
Now, sorry, real quick, are they moving money offshores to avoid taxes or it's initially it's to avoid taxes.
Now, but what we eventually learn is from the formation of something called IAG.
So after five years at Bear Stearns, Jeffrey Epstein is fired for a regulatory D violation.
Basically, he broke internal banking rules and insider trading.
So there's two things that we learn here.
Number one, he's involved in sketchy behavior from the very beginning.
Two, he's not prosecuted.
He's basically fired, let go, and everybody keeps it hush-hush.
I'll come back to that in the future because he develops a strategy there called playing the box.
Playing the box is a strategy he admitted to where he said you can break the law and you can always get away with it because people will be too embarrassed to be able to call you out for it, which will enable you to continue your money laundering.
Why would they be embarrassed?
Because Bear Stearns would be embarrassed by the fact that they have somebody who is managing so much money inside of their bank.
Is he internally called?
He was internally caught.
And that's why he was.
SEC doesn't find out.
Bear Stearns finding out.
Bear Stearns compliance and they're like, look, we need to make this go away.
We just, we don't want to deal with this anymore.
He just needs to go.
So from that point forward, 1981, Epstein forms a company called IAG, the Intercontinental Assets Group.
And I'm going to read directly here from the description.
He is a quote, high-level bounty hunter who helps clients recover assets.
This is the first entree into what will eventually sprawl as a global intelligence network because a high-level bounty hunter who helps you recover money is not involved in quote legitimate business.
What does that mean?
Recover money?
Yeah, exactly.
So it's in many cases, he eventually gets involved with people who are running Ponzi schemes and basically keeping and hiding money offshore.
He sells himself, and it's very unclear because none of the records of this have ever really been released.
But the description of high-level bounty hunter indicates to us that his specialization in offshore banking is one that becomes very important to intelligence networks.
So, this is where people might ask, like, hey, why do we even care about this?
Why would an intelligence network even want offshore banking?
And the reason why is in the 1980s, there were all of these very sketchy arms deals that were happening.
Here we have in the United States the Iran-Contra affair.
This is the Cold War.
And everybody actually has a very distorted attitude as to how the CIA front companies work.
Nobody at the CIA has a bank at JPMorgan Chase that says CIA, that goes and buys a front company building.
Did you guys?
Perfect example.
Do you ever watch Argo?
Do you guys watch the movie?
So remember how Ben Affleck's character flies to Hollywood and gets a front man to open a company and the money is laundered through the front man?
That man would be known as a CIA asset because he's able to open that front company.
So that's why it's very important to the CIA.
They'll work for the CIA.
Of course, they have their own job.
Exactly.
They have their own money.
And actually they put up their own money.
Exactly.
But eventually get reimbursed somewhere in shady offshore banking thing on the back end.
So these are vital parts of any intelligence network, Israeli, U.S., Saudi, everybody.
Because this is something that everybody does.
Of course, it works as espionage.
Exactly.
Because Iran would be like, because you have to be in a movie here.
And then you get a wrong contra and blowing up.
That's exactly what we're doing.
This is literally necessarily in and of itself bad.
No.
It's a necessary.
It's just the way that you do business.
There's no value judgment here.
So the point is, is that at this time, this is when he begins to develop a relationship somewhere around between 1976 and 1981 with a man named Douglas Leese.
Now, Lease is a very important character.
Douglas Leese was a UK national.
He's a verified in UK government documents as having been involved in multiple arms deals and is thought to have been at least somewhat of a CIA, MI6, some sort of intelligence asset.
Douglas Leese is an expert, again, in offshore banking and international money laundering.
At the age of 20, I think it's 28, and somebody can check my work on this, is that at the age of 28, Douglas Leese brings a young Jeffrey Epstein on a private plane to the Pentagon for purposes that we still do not know.
This is long before Epstein is a billionaire.
This is when he's involved specifically in offshore banking.
Lease is basically the conduit through which he is then introduced to all of these very important people.
Yes, Adnan Khashoggi, who's a very important person in this story.
Stephen Hoffenberg, who is basically the source of a lot of this information.
Keep in mind, Stephen Hoffenberg, and he went on the record to Vicki Ward, who's the journalist who did the original expose on Epstein in 2002.
He was convicted of one of the largest Ponzi schemes in U.S. history.
What ended up happening is he was trying to con Epstein, but Epstein actually conned him out of $100 million.
But he, Stephen Hoffenberg, basically showed the relationship between Douglas Leese and Epstein, which Epstein got very testy about whenever he was asked, basically pretended, I hardly know the guy.
Leese is the person who introduces Epstein to Hoffenberg, to Robert Maxwell, and to this Adnan Khashoggi.
Now, the reason why all three of those names matter is that Hoffenberg shows the conduit of the way that Epstein was already working with illegal enterprises and offshore banking.
The way that he alleges Epstein stole his money was specifically through one of these offshore transactions.
The other two names I was running a Ponzi scheme.
And then he caught caught and then wrote a hater article about it.
And actually, Epstein, actually, Epstein cooperated with U.S. authorities against Hoffenberg and basically got him locked up in prison.
This was only acknowledged years and years later.
I mean, he was a master networker.
We have to give it to him.
But again, here's another link between the community, the U.S. government, Jeffrey Epstein.
Here's a link to offshore banking.
And then specifically, Adnan Khashoggi and Robert Maxwell.
So who are these two individuals?
Here he has Adnan Khashoggi.
Adnan Khashoggi is the uncle of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist who was butchered in the Turkish embassy in the Turkish embassy.
But for our purposes, what can we look at here?
Saudi arms merchant, world-class playboy, dies.
This is from his obituary in the Washington Post.
So why do we care about Adnan Khashoggi and his association with Epstein?
And these are verified ties between the two.
Adnan Khashoggi is somebody who worked on all kinds of sketchy arms deals throughout his life.
These people are very useful to the Saudi kingdom, to the Israelis, because they are cutouts.
They're not officially part of the royal family.
Their money is used to finance various severe arms deals.
He has a verified connection to Mossad and to funneling arms between Israel and Iran in the past.
All of this is out in the public record.
It's effectively been acknowledged.
And I don't even think it's really disputable.
I know that you've spoken about this already, but I just want to make this.
Yeah, I want to make this incredibly clear, right?
Where it's like governments and countries cannot be actively involved in these Cold War tactics.
They need to find these proxies to do it.
And those proxies might not necessarily be bad.
Matter of fact, they offer incredible utility.
So a Khashoggi, for example, for Saudi Arabia might be one of the most important figures executing the plans of Saudi Arabia without getting the people in charge of Saudi Arabia dirty.
And at this point in time, it's looking like as we go through the story, Epstein might be an asset to the United States of America, or maybe when we get into Maxwell, or at least it doesn't look like there's anything incriminating on him so far.
No, no, well, I mean, to be fair, his pedophilia and his proclivities were kind of secondary to his money.
Now, the reason why I think he eventually gets away with the stuff that he does in the future is because of all the work he did in the 1980s and the 1990s for these various governments.
I don't want to connect us to like a movie, but there's this movie, Art of War, that Nicholas Cage is in.
And there's this.
I love that movie.
It's a great movie.
And it's based on, I think, like a relatively, I think that guy we just released from Victor Victor Bout or something.
You got a six woman for the Lord of War.
Yeah.
And so basically, he goes, there's this moment where he's arrested and this guy from the FBI has been holding it down.
He eventually goes, hey, listen, somebody's going to come in that door and let you know that it's time for me to go.
And he's like, I don't know what you're talking about, blah, blah, blah.
And to me, that's kind of what it's feeling like so far, where there could be these connections.
And we might get it misconstrued where it's like the government is involved in this, like illicit child fucking blackmail scheme, when in reality the government's looking like no, actually we're just running guns and we're running all the dirty money and we're funneling stuff between Israel and Iran.
This is why you know, the Saudi government can't facilitate an Israel-Iran arms deal.
Right, these are all allegedly mortal enemies, but a Khashoggi oh, he can do it, he can finance that deal and we can make him whole on the back end.
Spying on Israel's Enemies00:07:37
Now a similar yeah, go ahead.
And last thing I would say is I was talking to a friend of mine.
I think that I think Morgan Stanley or JP Morgan banked him, I forget which one.
Was it JP at that time, just is later on?
Well, Deutsche BANK and JP Morgan both banked Jeffrey Epstein and like a friend of mine was working over there and he basically I was asking about it he was like he's like yeah, like he just operated with dirty money yeah, and I think that's why you know the government had an eyeball on him, because it was advantageous for them to know who's sending him 30 million dollars from El Salvador.
He was the banker and a lot of these banks will just take dirty money?
Of course they will.
If you're getting tens of millions from a third world country, please believe it's not because they're selling slushies on the street.
You know like there's some fucked up shit going on.
So i'm just trying to position at this point, right now, the government might think that they have an asset working in their best interest at this point.
This is a rational case for them.
This we're not yet involved with eventually becomes the pedophilia ring.
Also guys, tour dates.
I'm gonna be in Kansas City august 1st and 2nd.
August 8th and 9th.
I'm gonna be in Toledo Oio, at the Funny Bone, august 22nd and 23rd.
It's a lot of fucking.
Ohio huh, Liberty Township, september.
Uh, september 11th through 13th let's hope it on bombing those shows.
Dania Beach, Florida.
Bunch of other dates on my website at Akersing.com.
What's up, guys?
Mark Yagnon here, I got some tour dates for you.
If you want to skip forward dude, i'm not going to stop you.
You know what I mean.
I completely understand it.
Happen, all right.
Suck his dick, is That's not bad, honestly.
It's not bad.
It's not bad.
I bet it actually is bad.
Don't do it, okay?
Because this Saturday in New York City on July 19th, I'm going to be doing Alex's show at the Hard Rock.
Come on out.
Absolutely.
Suck his dick, guys.
And then I'm going to be in Stanford, Connecticut, Hoboken, New Jersey, Levantown, New York, Chandler, Arizona, San Diego, Burlington.
I'm also going to Canada, Toronto, Montreal, a bunch of other days.
Detroit is in there, and we're adding some.
Suck his dick into the new year.
I'll see you guys at the show.
God bless you all, and peace be with you.
And like Mark said, this Saturday, July 19th, New York City, Times Square.
Suck his dick at Hard Rock Casino, Times Square.
We have a happy hour.
We have comedy.
We have an after party.
I have to come have a good time.
Wait.
Cancel Comedy X on Instagram, Lincoln Bio.
Let's move now to Robert Maxwell.
Now, Robert Wack Maxwell is probably one of the most central important figures in this story.
Robert Maxwell is the father of Ghelain Maxwell.
And Robert Maxwell is basically an intelligence operative from day one.
So Robert Maxwell is a very interesting early life story.
He's a Czechoslovakian Orthodox Jew.
He flees the Nazis, finds a way to escape from mainland Europe, fighting with the resistance to the UK, fights the Nazis in World War II.
He gets the second highest medal from the British government during World War II for his exemplary service, and he becomes a British national, changes his name multiple times.
What eventually happens, though, is that Robert Maxwell begins to roll up the tabloid news empire.
He's a Rupert Murdoch of his time by rolling up tabloid news in the UK and effectively becoming like a sovereign wealth fund in and of itself with his billions.
Maxwell is a very committed Zionist and somebody who's very important to the state of Israel.
He's been openly acknowledged at this point as a Mossad asset.
I have his code name here.
Let me find it.
He's known as Mega.
Quote, the bountiful source.
This is from a former Mossad operative who described it.
No, I actually didn't see it.
Yeah, okay.
He's a character in the Tetris.
Oh, okay.
All right.
Like he's personified as himself.
That's part of the story, which is one of the assets that they owned.
I guess might have been the Maxwell is again just like Khashoggi.
He's financing international arms deals.
He's very important to Mossad.
He's very important to MI6.
He's very important to the U.S. intelligence community.
But the thing that really puts him apart is that Maxwell is a committed Zionist and he works specifically on behalf of the state of Israel to advance its interests.
And the most extreme example of that, can we put that wired one up there?
It talks about the Inslaw octopus.
This is a very important article from the 1990s and it describes basically a piece of software that Robert Maxwell was integral in both financing and selling to the Department of Justice.
And it was Israeli spyware that was installed on vast numbers of U.S. government computers that was used specifically to spy on the United States by Mossad and the U.S. and the Israeli intelligence community.
This was in the early 90s.
This is whenever it was exposed.
But in the 1980s, this is something that Maxwell was directly accumulated measures taken for this act.
Actually, I'm not actually sure about this.
I mean, as usual, whenever it comes to Israeli operations on U.S. soil, we're all like, hey, you should cut it out.
And then we don't really do anything about it.
There's a great document.
Jonathan Pollard is a very good example of this.
There's a talk on Netflix about this, the octopus murders and this guy, Danny Castellero, that basically tried to expose us to the family.
Oh, that's right.
I forgot.
I had never watched it, but I know it's fantastic.
And he gets murdered in his attempt to try to expose the Inslaw software.
All right.
So there we go.
That's Robert Maxwell.
He's involved in things like this.
But I could actually go on forever.
Is that a Pollard?
Jonathan Pollard?
Do you know who that is?
No.
Jonathan Pollard is one of the greatest spies in U.S. history.
He was an NSA employee in the 1980s.
He was spying on behalf of the state of Israel, selling them secrets.
You can, yeah, there's a picture of him.
Yeah, I did.
So he served 30 years in a U.S. prison.
While he was here, he became a cause celeb in Israel, saying that he was unjustly persecuted, even though he was a United States citizen, selling secrets to Israel.
Bib Netanyahu visited the family.
He sold the secrets to Russia, not no, no, no.
Israel sold the secrets to Russia.
He sold the secrets to Israel.
No, no, no, no.
He sold the secrets to Israel.
Let's be clear.
Israel sold them to the Soviet Union.
Jonathan Pollard was actually granted Israeli citizenship, I think, in abstentia.
Bibi Netanyahu visited him in prison here in the United States of America, basically saying, Well, are we always going to stand with you?
The moment his federal probation is up after he's released from prison, after his sentence, he moved to Israel and he's never coming back.
So that's a perfect example here: you have a United States citizen spying on behalf of the Israeli government, open caught.
It's all admitted out in the open.
The Israeli government says, hey, we're friends.
Like, just forgive us, you know, forgive him.
He was just a Jewish patriot doing what he wanted for his country, even though he was not an Israeli citizen there at the time, granted him citizenship and openly campaigned for all of our presidents of the United States, Bill Clinton onward, to pardon Jonathan Pollard.
And they came pretty damn close, let me be clear.
So that's another example of how we really treat Israeli espionage very differently than all other espionage on the United States.
If you guys remember in the Ted Cruz interview where Tucker was like, you know, it doesn't concern you that Mossad is spying on American.
He's like, well, all countries do it.
All friendly countries spy on each other.
There's an exception that we seem to make here for this country.
Spying on Israel?
You know, I don't know if we've ever been caught in a high-profile operation.
I mean, I'm sure that we do.
And in fact, we probably should, considering what's going on.
Actually, you know what?
We definitely have been because I remember there's been documents, leaks from the Israeli cabinet meetings.
You remember the Signal Gate, the Signal leaks?
I published some of those documents.
And in one of those was actually minutes from the cabinet meeting from Bibi.
So yes, we are spying on Israelis as well.
To be fair, we're spying on everybody.
So it's like if we're doing it, we're like, although the Israelis did get kind of upset about that.
So, you know, it's a little ironic because they got upset whenever we were doing it, but not in 10 years.
I saw Dershowitz saying that.
Like, yeah, we do that or they do that.
Like, he was trying to make it this seem like since everybody does it, it's okay.
Yeah, but it's not okay.
It's not okay.
It's like we should all punish, you know, if we.
It's not okay when we do it.
It's not okay when you guys were supposed to be Alice.
The Butterfly Trust Scheme00:15:47
That's right.
Okay.
So let's continue.
Well, we should do it.
Yeah, we should do it.
Let's continue with it.
Let's get away with it.
Robert Maxwell over there.
We're coming back.
Robert Maxwell.
All right.
Robert Maxwell, the father of Ghelane Maxwell.
So this is how Jeffrey Epstein meets Ghelane Maxwell, his eventual co-conspirator in the child trafficking network.
And Robert Maxwell, of course, is a very shady death.
Nobody's still really sure how he died.
He allegedly either jumped or fell off of his yacht, which, of course, happens to everybody.
I mean, it's somewhat believable, but I mean, it's just one of those things where, you know, he is killed in various or he dies in very suspicious circumstances.
He has all kinds of luminaries at his funerals, and whatever he knew, you know, kind of goes to the grave with him.
So after that, in this period, we have 1988.
This is probably one of the most important years in the history of Jeffrey Epstein.
Move away from Maxwell.
Well, can I just tell you a fun little tidbit?
Of course.
I want to get this right, and I have to check spelling and everything on this, but I wish I had.
Okay, ready?
Right now, I think one of the issues with releasing the Epstein files is because if you release a report that implicates people without them being investigated, that's a concern.
And I think in Britain, there's called the FCA.
That's their version of the SEC.
I'm sure something like that.
So basically, they have a process that you give that person that is named a chance to respond or submit evidence before the report is released so that they can address concerns which might end up altering the report's conclusions about that person.
That process is called Maxwellization.
And it's named after Robert Maxwell.
That's amazing because it fits with his character and the way that he operates.
But that's what I mean.
And look, actually, let's take a second.
Why do these tabloids matter?
Everybody remembers the whole David Pecker scandal here in America with Donald Trump.
It's that they basically are like private intelligence services.
They coover up all of these stories.
They often buy people's silence through non-disclosure agreements, and then they use that as pedigree with the richest people in the world.
I'm like, hey, Donald, we held this story on Karen McDougal, who accused you.
So we, you know, we'll sell them a little bit alternative.
If we own five different tabloids, you can print the same story that's allegedly on all of them.
But then the other newspaper articles and TV shows, they start picking it up.
So before an algorithm, you have to create the trip.
I mean, you're literally describing the New York Post to Fox News Pipeline, right?
Which are all you're talking about.
It's so crazy to make an allegation like that.
That is.
I mean, they're owned by Rupert Murdoch.
It's out in the open.
Many people who work there will tell you that's literally how it works.
It doesn't take a genius to figure this stuff out.
Oh, let's turn return to the money.
So 1988, very important year in the life of Jeffrey Epstein.
He leaves or basically reforms IAG.
At this point, it's been seven years.
He's very important to many of the world's most influential arms dealers and other people.
Almost certainly at this point is embroiled in some of these deals.
This point is a very sketchy point because now he creates the Jay Epstein Company.
The Jay Epstein Company, self-described, accepts only clients with $1 billion.
This is a year where there are only 140 billionaires in all of his existence in 1988.
There's not very many people who are billionaires.
And to have $1 billion in cash, liquid, to be able to invest is effectively unheard of.
So who are the people that this is ostensibly for?
He pitched specifically as, quote, an economic advisor to the super rich.
No other services have ever been advertised.
And this is the source eventually of all of his wealth.
And so it's somewhere around this time in the 1980s and the Jay Epstein company that he signs a client named Leslie Wexner.
Wexner, one of the most important figures, again, in this story, really the source of much of his money and his power to the way that it eventually becomes.
Leslie Wexner is one of the richest men in America, one of the richest men in Ohio.
Leslie Wexner is a committed Zionist.
He's donated and worked with the Israeli government.
And we'll talk about that in a little bit.
But Leslie Wexner, eventually, in this time period, effectively signs over his entire portfolio and eventually leads to power of attorney being signed over to Jeffrey Epstein.
You guys had a great exchange where you were like, hey, we have a decade of friendship here, and I would not sign power of attorney over to any of you.
There's only one person I'm signing power of attorney to, my wife.
There's nobody else who's ever going to get it.
We're supposed to do that.
If we wanted to, you know what I'm saying?
That's the only person who conceivably has ever been able to do it.
What about business managers?
Do they have power of attorney?
No, or they have a limited power of attorney.
And that's very different than his entire control of his estate.
So somewhere in this time, in the 88 to 91 period, in just three years, he is able to convince this man, Leslie Wexner, multi-billionaire, the founder of Victoria's Secret, to basically sign over all of his power of attorney and control of his assets.
Even more importantly, over the next five years, he effectively begins transferring many assets from the Wexner, from the Wexner fortune to his own personal portfolio.
Multiple properties in the state of Ohio, which are actually referenced in the Ghelain Maxwell trial for the sex trafficking purposes.
Those are Wexner properties.
And then the infamous, you know, massive townhouse in Manhattan, at that time, the largest private residence, you know, basically valued at some $70 million.
I mean, again, who in this world is transferring a $70 million townhouse, largest private residence at the time, the city of New York, over to this man.
For what purpose?
Go ahead.
Is there a purpose?
For example, is he trying to avoid taxes?
Yeah.
Give me the argument outside of corruption.
Sure.
Leslie Wexner has talked to his people and has talked to people about this.
And his explanation is that Epstein was a money wizard, that he simply had ideas called.
They said he's a wizard with money.
He's the smartest man with money I've ever seen.
The steel man case for how this has nothing to do with blackmail is exactly what you just said.
And this is eventually what's hinted at by the richest and most powerful people in the world: guys, we were doing money laundering.
It wasn't about blackmail or any of this other stuff.
It was a way for us to launder our money internationally.
I'll come back to it, but that's basically the excuse that Leon Black gave.
Leon Black is genuinely one of the richest men in New York.
He was a $9 billion net worth, founder of the Apollo Group, one of the largest private equity firms in the world.
From 1997 onward, he has a relationship with Jeffrey Epstein to the point where he puts him on the board of the Black Family Foundation.
And it eventually comes out between 2012 and 2017, he transferred $170 million to Jeffrey Epstein and to Epstein-related accounts.
His argument is tax advice.
Now, his argument is that over that five-year period, he gave him $170 million and saved to the tune of $1 billion.
That's what he claims.
What he claims.
Now, if that is the case, all of us would hire Epstein immediately.
Right, that's right.
But there's no way to do that legitimately.
And also, if you look at all of the paper trail for this, Epstein was not a licensed financial advisor.
He was not a licensed tax advice person.
He was not somebody who was ever well known in the hedge fund industry.
I mean, this is the question about why are these super rich people transferring all of this money to this individual?
I'm willing to believe money laundering, but with the Wexner case, I just simply can't get there.
Vicki Ward and James Stewart, biographers and others have looked into the story.
They really believe that blackmail is somehow at the center of the story of Wexner.
I think that this is purely speculation on my behalf.
I think that makes a lot of sense, especially for economically ignorant folks like myself, which are like, I'm not giving a fucking townhouse to anybody for any purpose.
Exactly.
But there are these certain situations where people set up these trusts.
They set up these LLCs.
They set up these S-scores so they can put certain to avoid taxes.
They create these loopholes.
So there is a version where he had found a way to do this.
I don't understand why passing it directly to Epstein avoids taxes because Epstein would then have to pay those.
Exactly right.
Exactly right.
Like, why not put it into a joint trust that Epstein has access to?
Why is it specifically passed to Epstein unless for his personal use?
Let's be clear.
He needed it under his name to validate him to do certain things.
Which is what eventually we began to see with the story.
And also, look, let's be honest here about Wexner.
Wexner is the founder of Victoria's Secret.
Like, would it be crazy to say the founder of Victoria's Secret is kind of perverted?
And Leslie Wexner has been photographed with all these young women.
It's like literally, yeah, making laundry for teenagers.
Yo, I'm choked to be told that this person is involved with some weird stuff.
Again, look, because he's still alive and he would sue me, that is purely speculation on my part based upon publicly available information.
I am not claiming anything otherwise.
But don't they have to go find fairly legal secret models around the world?
I mean, that's their business model, to be clear.
So, like, let's just say that when do you turn 18 so I could put you on the same play with wings?
This happens, right?
So, that's the person and the individual who's at the nexus of a lot of this stuff.
Now, let's say then what we move from there because that Wexner transfer sets Epstein as the king of New York, as the king of New York society.
Can I ask one more question before that?
Um, are there any people in finance that look at that transfer and they go, wow, this was a smart financial decision for Wexner?
I have not yet found a single person.
Got it.
In fact, every rich person who I have ever talked with about the Epstein thing has told me I have no idea what the fuck was going on.
And has anybody explained, Wexner or his people explained why it was advantageous to him to no, he just said it was a terrible mistake and that he trusted Epstein entirely with his money.
He literally called his relationship and the transfer, quote, a terrible mistake.
That's the only public apology that he's ever given on the case.
It is Wexner's never gone into it.
By the way, he's still alive and he should answer questions.
It is interesting that we haven't seen him in an interview.
Like, we've seen shut himself down.
But we've seen Prince Andrew in an interview.
That's right.
Like, he's maybe the only person that we haven't heard speak publicly about this.
A little bit, but you know, a little bit.
It's been years.
I think in 2020 is when he gave his apology.
But same with Leon Black, by the way, who resigned from his public company and has basically disappeared from New York society.
Jess Staley, the former CEO of Barclays, Epstein's private banker, I'll return to him in a little bit with the Israel connection because he's a very important part of that story.
But he's also resigned and now, you know, he has no, he's not CEO of a publicly traded company, doesn't need to testify, doesn't even give any interviews.
He's filthy rich, and you know how these people operate.
You can hire bodyguards and live behind a wall for the rest of your life.
So that's basically where we are.
With Maxwell Sr. and when Epstein and him meet, did they do any business together that we know of?
So this is the problem.
We don't have the full records.
And this is part of why the release of the files is very important.
And I will also return where I think defining the files as a list is very important because that's not how it works.
People seem to have it in their head that there's a ledger, that there's a black book that's like paid or have kitty tape supports Israel.
This is not how this works, guys.
Like as a journalist, like what we're doing here is we're compiling information.
We're looking at public stuff that cannot be explained otherwise.
We're steel manning the case.
We're reaching out to Leslie Wexter for comment.
The IRS today, as you guys all know, has all of our information.
All of the Butterfly Trust accounts connected to Jeffrey Epstein.
What's the Butterfly Trust?
That was an Epstein-linked account, which the New York Financial Services.
By the way, you guys should take this up.
Here in the state of New York, they have all access to Epstein's financial records 2013 onwards because they fined Deutsche Bank for their business with Epstein for violating the bank rules and for violating New York State regulations.
New York State has the books for his entire financial life, 2013 onwards.
JP and Deutsche Bank.
Well, Deutsche Bank paid like $75 million to the Epstein victims specifically for facilitating a lot of this trafficking.
But my point is, is that I want those documents.
I want the Butterfly Trust accounts.
Leon Black, the way that he even paid Epstein, and this was only available by subpoena power that we know of, was through some private jet holding company.
I mean, this stuff is all masked in a way that their names were never supposed to be on top of any of it.
The only way we can get it is from release and from subpoena from the United States government.
Part of why the Trump administration's decision is so very disappointing.
And so I know I keep cutting myself.
I just want to make sure that I understand this.
Like it seems so brazenly foolish for these people to even be tangentially connected to Epstein.
Well, not before this time.
I don't want to be giving them an out, but I want to be really understanding the situation.
If you are operating with somebody who uses, you know, nefarious techniques to hide money, which I do not put past any wealthy person.
No.
Anybody who's got tens of millions of dollars, I promise you, they are doing some shady shit to hide that money, to move that money.
Like, I know a guy who like would fly to the fucking Bahamas with tens of thousands of dollars strapped to his body.
It sounds like out of a movie, he would do it regularly.
Why are you snitching on me?
You guys all know him.
I just want to say that.
So it was a regular thing to just avoid taxation.
Setting up accounts back.
And I think this is probably like the 80s.
This is not as so.
So doing these things to avoid taxes is quite common amongst the people who makes tens, 20 or hundreds of millions of dollars.
But doing it so directly with Epstein is what I find peculiar.
And there's a part of me that goes, if they're doing it directly with him, do they not feel concern about his relationships and intentions?
Is there some sort of trust there?
Because like you said earlier, the CI knows they're on some fuck shit.
So they're like, we got to make sure that we're not associated with this.
Why would you not?
Well, that's a great question, especially if he's been operating for a decade now and he hasn't been caught, hasn't gotten in any trouble, it's like, oh, this guy's good.
That's the defense I would make is that pre-2005 before the investigation, it's actually somewhat, somewhat understandable for somebody who is not in Palm Beach or New York society.
I would say more in the 1980s.
From about 95 onward, it's an open secret.
Jeffrey Epstein likes kids.
Jeffrey Epstein likes him.
When does he first caught?
So that's 2005.
That's the very first investigation into Epstein.
The actual law enforcement.
So we could make the argument that before that, it's greed.
Well, yeah, again, though, because all of these people live, this is the, as you're saying, the super rich is the smallest world in, is the smallest group in the world.
They may live all over the world, but they're actually all in the same place, basically all at the same time.
Yeah, they're doing all their stuff.
They're always in St. Barnes.
They're always in London.
They're always in, you know, Tahoe, whatever.
Like Palm Beach.
This is why they all know each other.
So to a certain extent, I actually can't really forgive it because it's such an open secret in the 1990s that Jeffrey Epstein likes little kids, basically, and his trafficking young women.
Well, before the 90s, yeah, I guess we could give him somewhat of a pass, but it starts to become out in the audience.
I'm not trying to give a pass.
What I'm trying to do is like not be guilty of internet trims.
Yeah, sure.
Which is like applying something we learn about and is confirmed in 2005 and 2008 with a conviction to everyone prior to that.
I think after 2005 and definitely after 2008, like you're aware that you're dealing with a convicted pedophile.
So you're a registrar sex offender.
Yeah, yeah, like registered sex offender.
There's no excuse.
But before that, I do think that there are these people that just want money and they'll do anything for money.
And they are already operating in pseudo-illegal behaviors and activities.
And there's this incredible desire and thirst for power.
So they might be willing to rub shoulders with these nefarious characters.
And if there's some before 2005, there's some level of plausible denial.
There is some.
Yeah, exactly right.
And they're like, he's not.
And if he's like, I could save you a billion dollars, you might be tempted to take that plausible denial.
This is the thing.
You're taking it literally.
And I'm still not quite sure that I'm there yet.
Epstein Empire at Its Peak00:03:55
I'm not quite sure he actually was doing anything of the tax advice sort.
I still don't know.
I still am like not clear on what he was actually doing.
I don't think anybody's clear.
Nobody's doing that's part of the problem.
But I want to make sure that when we're pinning people to certain things, like if you're staying in his penthouse after he's a registered sex offender, you're pinned.
Like there's no idea.
Like the prime minister of Israel, sorry?
Multiple times.
Like Bill Gates.
Yeah, like Bill Gates.
Didn't he have an office in Harvard?
Yeah.
Was that after?
Well, I'm not sure about that.
I'd have to go back and double.
But yeah, those things, like, let's pin it right there.
There's no question you have stories.
Or Stephanopoulos who had dinner in his life.
Why are you hanging out?
Can't just Google him?
Exactly.
Yeah.
And you should be.
So, so, okay.
So there are these.
I get it.
I get it.
I just want to make sure that we're compartmentalizing a little bit.
Not to say that they don't know that they're engaging in illegal activity.
They just maybe aren't going, I'm with a kid fucker who's using this as potential blackbelt or as an intelligence actor.
Very right.
Very true.
And that's important.
So let's get into actually sex trafficking and actually that whole race.
Don't let me speed you up.
You know, you're calling your.
So 1991 to 2005, I call this the Epstein heyday.
So this is, I've gained control of the Wexner Empire.
I've transferred these assets and these properties into my name.
Ghillain is here.
And now it's on.
So if you look from that, the Ghillain Maxwell trial describes many of these Ohio properties being used specifically for sex trafficking purposes, right?
So these are just in late 1994, late 1995.
Basically, we move from that point forward.
The Palm Beach Virgin Islands connection begins to materialize.
We have the house in Palm Beach.
We have the compound in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
The Lolita is the Epstein Island.
We have the Virgin Island Island that's acquired under the Epstein basically estate.
Then we have the Lolita Express that's purchased, the private jet.
So all the pieces that are now famous, these all come into play between 91 and 2005.
This was the heyday of the Epstein Empire.
Is this where you see the images of him and Trump hanging out?
Exactly.
2002, that's when we have the first image.
Although, you know, I have it in my notes for the Trump-Epstein relationship.
Let me go ahead and form that.
Don't let me speed you up.
No, no, it's fine.
So 2002, Trump says, I've known Jeff for 15 years.
So basically putting the relationship back to the 1980s.
Terrific guy.
He's a lot of fun to be with.
It's even said he likes beautiful women as much as I do.
Many of them are on the younger side.
No doubt about it.
Jeffrey enjoys his social life.
So that's Donald Trump in 2020.
2002.
Just again, to show everybody here what we're dealing with.
Open the secret.
All right.
So, yeah, he likes him on the younger side.
He said it.
And if you want, there's video if you want to go ahead and play it.
I have the YouTube link from NBC News of them hanging out.
Let me find.
Yeah, Footage from 1992, actually.
Can you go ahead and click that one?
It's a YouTube link.
It's from a NBC News package in 2002.
It's some B-roll that actually shows them hanging out.
So this is the same thing.
Here we go.
This is the famous.
You know, they're all hanging out together.
And by the way, I haven't showed this yet, but there are photos of Trump and Robert Maxwell hanging out together as well in the past.
So he certainly knew a lot of these individuals.
We can see him dancing.
They're at a party.
Apparently in the mid-2000s, there was a party that was thrown involving Victoria's Secret models that was put on by Epstein and another associate of Donald Trump where they all hung out.
So just putting that out.
Who the other guy?
Yeah, I actually don't know.
I love his tie.
It's very 1990s.
So anyway, look, the footage, it all exists.
And I'm sparing nobody here.
I want to be real.
To your earlier point, the super rich, the super elite is kind of a small circle.
It's not kind of an incredibly small circle.
All know each other.
So if it's 15 years hanging out, you're going to hear some whispers about one of your friends.
It's not even a whisper.
He said it out loud on the record.
Yeah, Trump said it.
He just said it.
All right, guys, we got to take a break real quick because America is under attack.
Our freedom is under attack.
Epstein's list is being suppressed.
And there's only one company that could stop that from happening.
There's only one company that cares about freedom.
America Under Attack00:02:28
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Convenience stores ending with that also felt a little pointed.
So let's get back to this.
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Condé Nast Journalism Secrets00:09:46
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Now let's get back to the show.
2002.
Yes.
Very important year in the Epstein story.
2002 is when journalist Vicki Ward, she works here in New York City, Vanity Fair Magazine.
This is the Vanity Fair Magazine.
Vanity Fair.
This is the very first premier magazine to say, who is this guy?
Graydon Carter, the legendary Condé Nass editor, king of New York society.
It basically works with Vicki and says, hey, let's go write about this Epstein figure.
Vicki eventually uncovers evidence of the young women trafficking, of the intelligence community ties, and all of this in 2002.
How does she uncover this?
Because she goes, she does a great job.
She goes and interviews these people.
That guy, Stephen Hoffenberg, who's in prison.
She interviewed him in prison and she didn't print his quotes until 20 years later because it was shut down by Graydon Carter.
Now, Joey, can you please put up the story from New York Magazine?
Why Graydon Carter would be able to?
I understand the name Condé Nass, but maybe explains.
So what I'm having here in front of me is a very shit, crazy story is that according to Carter, somebody put a bullet outside of his house.
I think it was either outside of his house or wherever he was, and a dead cat to intimidate him while he is investigating the Epstein story.
So it eventually comes out.
What is Condé Nass?
Condé Nas.
I mean, they own Vogue.
They employ, you know, if anyone's ever seen The Devil Wears Prada, like that's based on Vogue magazine and Anna Winter.
That's part of the Condé Nass Empire.
Conde Nas Empire.
Imagine with Rupert Murdoch with News.
This is with magazines.
Dude, it's so hard because the audience here is going to be young.
So they don't even remember the Vanity Fair heyday.
Like this was a big fucking deal.
Before blogs, before like your favorite Instagram page, there were magazines.
This was the beating heart of American culture.
Vanity Fair Magazine, The New Yorker, Vogue magazine.
Newspapers were information.
Actually, magazines were more like op-ed.
Yeah, magazines were not just op-ed.
They were actually the places where this type of journalism, I mean, there's stories at Condé Nas about guys who are getting paid half a million dollars a year.
They would write three stories a year.
But they would spend six months like Vicki Ward.
Because it was really journalism.
It would change the face of the country.
Some of my favorite journalists, there's a guy named Dexter Filkins at the New York.
He spent like six months, one of my favorite war reporters.
They'll go out and report for some conspiracy theories about it.
He's like a 10,000-word article.
Theoretically.
Watergate, whatever the conspiracy.
Take conspiracy theories aside.
That's journalists breaking a story that caused your president to resign.
Change the trajectory of the entire world.
And now when it happens and you see like a 20-page article in the New Yorker or something like that, you're like, who the fuck reads this?
And nobody really reads it.
But at the time.
Oh, it was everything.
And that's why, like, our parents, and I think that we're probably a little bit even too young, us, maybe you, just because you're involved in journalism so much.
I have read about it so I can contextualize it, but I never experienced it.
But this was the heyday of like information and it created habitual reading, right?
Like just my parents had a subscription to New York Magazine and New Yorker.
And like every single, when is it coming?
It's weekly?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It used to be.
I don't know anybody.
But it's like, so they're reading it every single day.
And the pieces that are in there, the assumption was that these were like real investigative journalism pieces, and they're uncovering truths that take months and months to put together.
So they really gain like the support and trust, at least of maybe like, I don't want to say like more like coastal elites.
It's what you just described.
The global elite.
The global elite is very small.
It's like maybe 10,000 people who run the entire world.
And actually, that might even be a little bit generous.
And they're all subscribing to Vote.
I mean, look, Anna Winter is still an icon amongst the super rich.
So obviously, it really matters.
So Epstein basically uses the threat of legal action to shut down any mention of his intelligence ties, which he's confronted with directly.
Any mention of the sex trafficking and the pedophilia accusations.
And all of it is dropped from the Vanity Fair article that culminates in the 2002 story, Who is Jeffrey Epstein, the mysterious man of New York?
But it basically insinuates things about being with women and he knows everybody.
He's friends with Harvey Weinstein.
He's friends with all of New York society.
Everybody seems to know him.
You have the quotes by Donald Trump and others.
And so what we see there is 02 is a very important year because it shows his power, his power to shut down Graydon Carter, his power to bring the Condé Nass Empire to bear and say, no, you're not reporting any of this.
The power of using Harvey Weinstein and others to basically call all the journalists and other people around him and say, I'm going to sue the shit out of you if you report even one word of this.
Now, it's important to note that like shutting down stories is quite common.
If you have a PR agency or something like that, especially at that time.
At this time.
When access really matters.
I would even say now.
Like you have a PR agency or something's about to release on TMZ and you know somebody over there at TMZ, you're like, yo, can you just not put out this?
If you hold this, I'll give you an exclusive on this.
But there's a quid pro quo, which is like, if you don't release this, I'll give you the first dibs on this story coming out with this album release.
So that is, it is quite common practice, but to shut down a story that's making an allegation or multiple allegations this big, you need to have some serious weight and some serious quid pro quotes.
I think it's got to be more than just lawsuit because these people, I mean, they're lawyered up to the gills.
Like if you run Condé NASA, that's what I was trying to say.
To understand how extraordinary this is, this is Tende fucking nasty.
This is a massive, I mean, dude, even me and you and others, when people are like, I'm going to sue you, I'm like, yeah, good fucking luck.
I'm like, all right, I've got insurance.
I'm like, and I know how the First Amendment works.
And New York Times versus Sullivan, I'll be like, I'm going to eat your fucking legal fees for lunch and I'll see you in court.
All right.
Because of the legal standard, if you are a public figure, like Epstein was basically at that time, the possibility, you know, the bar for defamation and libel is so incredibly high.
I actually really support that.
It's one of my key differences with Trump: I think it's a good thing because it allows for journalism.
Well, not just that.
We can fucking go for it.
We want to be famous without security.
So let's not.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We'll get into that in another.
And then why does he agree to this article?
Is it just hubris?
Oh, Epstein?
No, no, he didn't agree to it.
Article Ward was assigned.
Epstein did not want this to happen.
Oh, really?
He never wanted it.
They changed the article to make it less salacious.
He can actually go and raise it.
I don't think we're understanding how crazy this is.
And he intimidated Graydon Carter basically to take out a lot of the salacious with a fucking bullet and a dead cat.
You've seen the Godfather.
It's the same thing.
It's literally mobile.
Instead of a horse in the head, it's a dead.
It's crazy.
And there's no way to prove that he was the one that did it, but having those.
He's not.
Listen, Graydon certainly believed it.
And Graydon works and has dinner with the most powerful people in all.
He's not spoken about this.
He has certainly not.
He has not actually answered a whole lot of questions about this.
So that's an important thing.
But does he give a comment to Vicki Ward here?
Huh?
You know, Epstein goes on the record in some places, but we don't learn the full extent of all of their exchange until 2021, after he's dead, when she begins to reveal a lot of the stuff that she was actually had on the record in this story.
So, this is the very first known time of a major expose, which would have really hurt Jeffrey Epstein if it had come out, that he's able to shut down.
Eventually, in the future, we see the same tactics with Good Morning America and with the Prince Andrew story, if you'll recall of that famous video, the leaked video from CBS or ABC News, where she's like, I had this story, I had everything, and the palace shut it down.
And Epstein and all of them basically came together and we wanted, didn't want to lose our coverage of the royal wedding.
And so we didn't publish any of this.
And she's like, I had the story from day one.
We didn't want to lose our coverage of the royal wedding.
Exactly.
So we shut this down.
The Prince Andrew story.
We would have access to the royal wedding.
Yes.
So again, that's the quid pro quo.
It's like, if you want to work with us, if you want access to this, this story that you know is going to probably sell way more ads than your prince.
Yeah, the royal wedding was fucking huge.
Exactly.
So they're.
Women in America got up at like 5 a.m. to watch it earlier.
Yeah, which is so important.
Which is wild.
Sorry.
Alex, go, go, go.
It's good to ask questions about this.
I think we feel guilty asking because it looks like we're trying to create it out.
I'm not trying to create a newspaper.
I'm trying to understand the totality of this and like where they would be coming from if they were going to defend it.
So that's your question.
You said that's 2002, which is right.
That story came out in 02.
Actually, it was published in March 03, but it was reported throughout 2000.
But then she doesn't release the other part of the story until 28 years later.
Yeah, basically after he's that means you knew he was fucking kids.
Well, and she sat on it.
But she didn't have evidence, man.
We're journalists.
We can't say these things.
No, no, no, no.
See, this is very important.
I can't just come out.
It's not important.
Yeah, I can't just come out and say these fucking aims without evidence.
You need to.
And look, I talked about that.
That's going to Mark many times.
But I talked about the barrier, you know, the defamation stuff.
Like, you need to have some stuff on the record.
And she did not have enough that they felt comfortable going forward with something like that.
I thought they felt comfortable.
I thought they just took it out of the camera.
They're claiming that it didn't meet the evidentiary standard.
Vicki Ward says otherwise.
Like, look, I could see the case either way, but the point is, is that what's come out afterwards is that Graydon Carter was terrified.
And so it's not really about the story.
It's that he was afraid to be able to publish this.
So that is the context of his social power.
Afraid for him.
He seemed to be a pair of, he was afraid for his life.
But okay, so because these are different things.
Afraid for your life is different than afraid for the success of your, what would you call that?
Like a his magazine.
Magazine.
Yeah, his social cachet, his cachet.
Yeah, because if you lose access, you essentially have no cachet.
False Passports for Pedophiles00:10:42
Right.
And which is ironically what Epstein is concerned about.
If Epstein becomes persona non grata because of this piece, he no longer can do the thing that he does, which is connect and liaison with super wealthy and influential people.
There you go.
Okay.
All right.
So that gets us to 05.
So 91 to 05 is the heyday.
2005 is the first time that we really know about a prolonged investigation into Epstein and eventually culminates in the sweetheart deal of 2008.
So in 2005, a 14-year-old girl who was lured by Epstein, Maxwell, associates, and all these people, her father complains to the Palm Beach Police Department about being sexually abused by Jeffrey Epstein.
This leads to an undercover investigation by Palm Beach PD, where they launch this investigation where they're able to connect multiple underage girls who are being lured by Epstein and Maxwell and other associates to the compound in the well-oiled system.
There's a documentary on Netflix.
This is the part they actually did quite well of just showing the way that that all worked.
Search warrant finds hidden cameras, sex toys, basically proof of underage communications with Epstein.
They have him nailed dead to rights, probably 20 years or whatever, under state law.
However, Epstein hires all of these extremely filthy rich lawyers who are able to go to the Palm Beach Police Department.
They claim that they were poking holes in their case.
Palm Beach PD basically throws up their hands and they're like, Look, I can't handle this shit.
They're like, This is a level of, you know, this is a machine I'm going up against that I don't know how to combat this machine.
They're only they only have a bulletproof charge on him of solicitation of prostitution.
But they go to the feds.
Now, the feds, of course, have the vast resources of the federal government, the Department of Justice.
The person who's in charge at that time is a guy named Alex Acosta.
Alex Acosta, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern Florida.
Now, U.S. Attorney for Florida, this comes under his purview.
This investigation is launched under him using FBI resources.
They are able to develop a large case against Jeffrey Epstein.
The operation is called Operation Leap Year that is launched by them.
Leap Year uncovers evidence that Epstein has an interstate sex trafficking operation involving girls as young as 13 years old.
Now, this is a very important point.
We have a secret federal indictment that was issued against Jeffrey Epstein, where they lay out all of this evidence for a sweeping indictment, which would have put him behind bars probably for, I mean, for probably for the rest of his life.
This is where everything starts to happen.
This is where the sweetheart deal comes into play.
And it's at this point after this secret federal indictment that they come to the Epstein team and they're like, this is what we have on you.
Let's begin a negotiation because they're looking for a plea deal ultimately.
Why are they looking for a plea deal?
Well, I think it's part of, I think it's kind of customary where you bring, you know, when the feds investigate you, they have to send you a target letter.
They're like, hey, you're under federal investigation.
You need to hire counsel, you know, just so we can get this whole ball rolling.
I mean, something like 95% of people charged by the federal system plead guilty.
So it's quite common.
Most people don't go to trial.
The feds don't want you to go to trial.
If they do, they're going to smack your, you know, they'll hit you with charge after charge.
You're going to spend the rest of your life in prison.
The vast, vast majority of people don't fail.
That's why they have a 95% conviction rate.
That's why they have their conviction rate.
Exactly.
So that's how they get to it.
And there's a variety of systemic issues.
So it was all generally par for the course up until this point.
That's when Epstein hires Alan Dershowitz.
That's when he hires all of these Bush-connected officials.
All of these other people.
Derswitz Bush connected.
Well, no, no, no, no, not Dershwitz.
There are other lawyers on the team who are connected to George W. Bush, the administration, to Republican politics in general, because George W. Bush is the president at this time.
And it's at this time that you have the sweetheart non-prosecution agreement that is agreed upon by Alex Acosta and the Epstein legal defense team.
Now, at this time, too, this is a very important point.
Joey, can you please put up my tweet?
Epstein flees to Israel while he negotiates his deal with Acosta.
So if you go to the first slide there, please.
Yes, this is from a Vicki Ward story.
Talk that Epstein had moved himself and his assets to Israel had reached the ears of such luminaries as Harvey Weinstein, Jeff Bukes, Alex Gibney, Taylor Hackford, Dustin Hoffman, Alec Baldwin, and filmmaker Michael Mailer.
Has anyone told Vicki Ward?
I heard someone say, ah, fame, ever since I wrote this article about Epstein in the March 2003 story.
I've had dubious honor of being considered the New York expert on the case.
Well, I've never been one to leave a riddle unsolved.
So I called Epstein's office to ask.
Around lunchtime, he phoned me laughing, assuming he'd been in Israel, but assuring me he'd been in Israel, but was now back in New York.
And he says, Would you want to live in Israel?
As he denigrates that.
So he goes to Israel while this sweetheart deal is being negotiated.
This is very important, okay?
Again, very important.
Is that he was safe in Israel for reasons that remain unknown to us to this day?
And he generally can't leave the country underneath.
Actually, yeah, Joey, can you go to the next slide?
So when he returns, when he goes, returns to America, as you can see right there, April 2008, Epstein returns from Israel before pleading guilty.
Some question why he was allowed to even keep his passport while his team is undergoing negotiation with the federal government.
Can you explain how normal that is?
That is not normal.
So that is extremely non-normal.
If you have money like that, you're a flight risk.
Yeah, exactly.
While you're being federally investigated, they will take your password because you were flavoring.
It's very similar to what happened, I think, at least in the beginning of the Diddy trial.
Remember, there were the words like Diddy was going to flee.
And I think that they told him that he had to stay in America, right?
So I don't have the so to be clear, I don't think it's while investigation.
There are other, I'm not a lawyer, but the way I'd read about it is it was very uncommon at that time, especially after he agreed to plead guilty.
Because remember, he pleased, he agrees to plead guilty under a non-prosecution agreement in September 2007.
This is April 2008.
During this period, he is in Israel, where he's effectively going to be a private sector.
2007 or 2008?
So 2007 to 2008 is while he is in his is in Israel.
Again, basically, the theory was the open talk in New York society that Vicki Ward heard is that Epstein had moved himself and all his assets to Israel.
This is apparently, by the way, a common thing, relatively common, for pedophiles who are Jewish in the United States who actually have fled to Israel to escape prosecution.
Really?
Yeah.
Actually, Joey, can you go down?
Glenn Greenwald.
That is a bad look for Israel, dude.
How Jewish American pedophiles hide from justice in Israel?
Why do they accept well?
Israel has the right to return for every Jew in the world.
It's called Aliyah.
So they're taking advantage of like a yeah, some of them are taking advantage and basically being able to go to Israel.
It's complicated as well in terms of extradition agreements, et cetera.
But Glenn Greenwald flagged that piece to me: how Jewish American pedophiles hide from justice.
But sorry, just to try to understand this, is that something that the United States just allows for anybody?
Again, I actually don't know.
I only learned of it yesterday.
I didn't realize that it wasn't just Epstein, that there's this is actually like a common enough phenomenon that people have written a story about it before.
I need to go look into it in general.
I would hope personally that we use our influence with all allies or any extradition agreement that anybody charged with a crime like this against children be immediately extradited to the United States.
Because I mean, my friends that are in trouble with the Indian government over the joke, they took their passports.
Yeah.
They just got them back.
But like, I don't even know if one of them got them back.
You're under arrest for freedom of speech potentially.
We're going to trial.
You have my passport.
This guy is on trial for pedophilia.
Not on trial.
He's in investigation.
I apologize.
Investigation and eventually a non-prosecution agreement, which is different because he admits to pleading.
So he hasn't been charged yet.
Well, he had not been charged yet.
He enters the non-prosecution agreement in September 2007.
While he's here or while he's away?
While he's in Israel.
So while he's in Israel, he enters.
His legal team enters for the first time.
So he had already left.
What I'm trying to understand, did he do anything illegal by leaving?
No, I don't think so.
Or anything that's not normal.
It's more about the question of why do you feel so safe in Israel?
You know, and it's like, why, you know, why are you going over there with all your assets?
Did you get some promises there from the government?
But are you normally allowed to leave intelligence connections?
Again, if you look at that Palm Beach story, that scroll up, Joey, and again, put that screenshot about returns from Israel to the next one.
It was noted at the time.
This is a report from the Palm Beach, Palm Beach local news, that it was uncommon and that there were questions at the time why he was allowed to steal.
Obviously, it looks incredibly fucked up.
But I am trying to steal men in terms of, let's say that there was somebody that had dual citizenship to Britain.
They're being investigated for something.
Could they go stay in Britain?
Yeah, they could.
So that would be okay and maybe not common, but it would be legal.
Although you just made an important point there, is that we have never yet been acknowledged that Epstein ever was an Israeli citizen.
So we have no idea whether at that time?
We have no idea.
To this day, we don't know.
We do know that he was found with false passports that were inside of his house in New York City.
So it's possible that he even found it.
Yeah, can you Google it, please, Joey?
Epstein passports that were found at his New York City residence.
This is an open and acknowledged fact, and I'll come back to this as part of the intelligence case.
Who the fuck has false passports?
It's not exactly an easy thing for multiple passports and travels to Africa and to the Middle East.
And they were found in his residence in his New York City.
Guys, did Jason Bornetto fuckers?
I've never understood false passports because everything's connected to yeah, that's right, which means that there's no really such thing as a false passport and there's a passport that's issued to you under false pretenses by foreign governments.
So it's just a possibly by your own government.
Like that.
Yeah.
Wow.
Yeah.
In the age of the barcode, there's no false passport.
Okay.
All right.
Wow.
When's the last time you guys flew into America?
Do you know how much biometric data and all that stuff?
Yeah.
This is not happening.
But like CIA can issue passports.
No, CIA can issue a passport under that that will clear State Department.
I mean, look, even though.
Which would confirm the connections to intelligence.
So look, go, go, go.
No, I was just saying, when you land in any country in the world, even the jankiest country in the world at this point, everybody's swiping the passport.
Yeah.
It's all.
So then the question would be, the logical thinking would be, he goes to Israel, and while this deal is being negotiated, if the deal is not advantageous to him, I'm staying in Israel.
Then he's staying.
Now, is there, is that, does he have enough leverage where staying in Israel is actually a threat to the U.S. intelligence apparatus?
This is unfortunately, we still don't know because this is all part of the unreleased, perhaps Epstein files.
And I would be happy to be wrong.
So in one circumstance, it could be as simple as, I'm not living in America as a pedophile.
I'd rather just live over here.
I'd rather live in Israel.
I'm going to stay.
And there is no intelligence involved.
There is another version where it's like, hey, I'm going to go over here.
Do you want me to tell all these guys everything I know?
Because I could easily just tell them everything I know and they'll accept that information.
Overturning Non-Prosecution Deals00:15:19
Let's actually really sit on this because this is what leads to the sketchy non-prosecution agreement.
So September 2007, Alex Acasa offers Epstein non-prosecution agreement despite massive evidence of a sex trafficking ring that crosses state lines, a textbook definition of a federal case.
He pleads only to the solicitation of prostitution involving a minor, and he must register as a sex offender.
The conditions of his non-prosecution agreement basically say he must spend 18 months in the Palm Beach County Jail.
He has weekend release.
He's allowed 12 hours a day, six days a week to basically do whatever he wants.
There is some evidence that he actually continued some of his trafficking while he was actually locked up in prison.
He had a black car that would pick him up for 12 hours a day.
It's the greatest deal in the entire world.
And all he has to do is serve 18 months under these sweetheart conditions.
And what he is able to do is that he is only has to register as a sex offender.
He does not spend decades in federal prison.
So he gets 12 hours a day.
Yes, wait, four, six days a week.
Yeah, it's called work release.
They actually call it work release.
That was the conditions.
Now, here's another very important thing about this plea deal.
Under this non-prosecution agreement, the federal government grants immunity for all crimes that were under investigation of that indictment to Jeffrey Epstein and to all unindicted co-conspirators, including Ghillane Maxwell.
So this non-prosecution agreement grants sweep him immunity of all crimes that were named in the secret indictment, both for Ghillene Maxwell and for Jeffrey Epstein.
And for Jeffrey Epstein.
Pause right here.
So in other words, he gets this slap on a wrist compared to what they're investigating him for.
That's right.
And he gets to wipe the slate clean for all the way worse shit.
Now he gets immunity.
That's different than wiping the slate clean.
Does he then acknowledge all the things that happened through his immunity?
I don't believe so.
I think it was just that these were the crimes that you were being investigated for, and we're going to basically agree that we'll never prosecute you for them in exchange for limited hangout.
What does that mean?
Basically, it's like the publishing of some of the bad things you did in order to hide all of the bad things.
So everything before 2008, he gets off with 18 months.
Well, everything in the secret indictment that was against.
Yes, exactly.
So to be a vision is, which, by the way, still exists and has never been released to the state.
So there is a virgin virgin.
A lot of them.
Is a version where we could, is there any version where we could learn about what was in that?
Yeah, they could release it if they wanted to.
I mean, these are part of the promises that have been made by the immunity agreement.
Well, actually, no.
So, hold on a second.
This is part of the reason.
Can you put that back up?
Because this is important.
An immunity than getting your reason why.
The reason why we ever learn anything about this is because of the victims and the courageous victims, who, according to the law on the books at the time, is that the victims themselves had a right, a federal right to be informed of this non-prosecution agreement.
This non-prosecution agreement was kept secret from the Epstein victims at the time, which violates federal law.
And once these people fight for justice, and it's in 2018 that a court rules that the Epstein non-prosecution agreement violates the federal rights of the Epstein victims.
It's under that ground that the non-prosecution agreement is overturned.
And it is under then that the Southern District of New York is able to arrest Jeffrey Epstein on new charges.
So this civil rights, this lawsuit is, yeah, the Crime Victims Rights Act.
That's exactly what it is.
They complain they were not informed of the government's deal and were very unhappy about it because they trusted the feds to basically work basically to give them justice on their behalf.
And they ruled, the district court ruled, that it violated their rights under the Crime Victim Rights Act and overturned the non-prosecution agreement, which opens the door to his rearrest in 2019.
Okay, so hold on right here.
Because it overturns that conviction.
I don't want to say conviction, but it overturns the non-prosecution agreement and the immunity.
We should now legally have access to the indictment and investigation.
We don't legally have access to it.
Why is that?
Why can you overturn something, but he still gets immunity through it?
Well, he didn't have immunity.
They indicted him on new charges, but there's still an open question as to whether all the new charges in the 2019 indictment against Epstein include the secret indictment and many of the charges that were made against him.
Bare minimum.
There would be nothing that would go against our system of justice that would simply expose all the charges and investigation in that initial crime or those initial crimes, right?
Because it was overthrown.
Well, it's complicated.
So I do know that the grand jury docs were actually released from 2006.
I have this in front of me because I don't have all of the details exactly on here, but it's not the full actual investigation.
I guess what I'm trying to get at is this doesn't necessarily prove a blackmail ring, which seems the narrative is incredibly popular online.
It's something that we've obviously talked about.
But it would at least acknowledge the accusations and the extent of the crimes that he was accused of.
Yeah.
Which we haven't really gotten to at all.
We've heard about them.
Yes.
But that information is not.
And I think what would be very interesting about that is that if we have access to that information, yes, it might not incriminate the co-conspirators.
No, actually, it would incriminate those co-conspirators now.
Yes.
But that would be okay because those people were being investigated and was going to go to trial anyway.
We don't fall into that same maximalization act or whatever I was talking about.
Yes, right.
Right.
Yeah.
This idea that, like, oh, you were around Epstein, so we don't want your name to be mentioned because your image could be tarnished when you weren't actually accused of anything.
No, no, this is, they were accusing you of it and they were ready to go to trial.
That's right.
They were willing to go.
Release that bare minimum.
But they have released some of that.
They've released the grand documents, but exactly.
So this gets to the whole point.
And then even then, whether we can really trust whether all those grand jury documents, which were only released about a year or so ago, and by the way, I'm not a lawyer, so if I misspeak on any of this stuff, like please forgive me.
I'm actually just trying to compile like all the evidence.
What we do know, at least according to the Justice Department, is that this was a deal that should never have happened.
But that doesn't happen until 2020 after Epstein kills himself.
After the Office of Professional Responsibility officially says Alex Acosta showed poor judgment whenever he entered this investigation.
But that's the whole ballgame here is why we did not, why we let him off on a sweetheart deal.
Go ahead.
Was Ghelan the only co-conspirator that got immune to the future?
I think she wasn't named in it.
It was like to any co-conspirator.
She wasn't specifically named, but it did cover her because she was one of the people who would have covered all co-conspirators.
But I think Alexis was covered.
I'd have to revisit that exact case, but I know there were like assistants and other people who were involved.
That's the thing.
I mean, look, this doesn't just, it's like, remember Harvey Weinstein and he had all of his assistants.
And it was like, yeah, it's like, hold on a second here.
There's a lot of people that need to know about this to make this all happen.
So here's a weird question, kind of.
Why would that judge in 2018 suddenly kind of buck everything else that's happened and say, no, these victims have a right to justice?
Because it's a clear-cut case.
It's literally the law that they had to be informed of the non-prosecution agreement.
Very ignorant question.
Why did it take 10 years?
Were the legal systems very slow?
That's just basically what it is.
Also, a lot of them were felt in silence.
A lot of them didn't even know about it.
They learned about it later.
And after they learned about it, they thought that this had all been a lot more penal.
He'd been penalized more after they learned, again, that documentary on Netflix that actually goes into all of these specifics.
But I'm more focused on the intelligence question.
That's like the case I want to really stick with because that's the whole ball is here.
Why did Acosta let him off?
And before you get to that, Mark, what were you going to do?
Do you know if the statute of limitations applies for these kinds of things if someone's sort of like collaboration with the crime is yeah, well, we'd have to go we'd have to do the math, but if you think about the statute of limitations, Ghelane goes on trial for crimes in the 1990s.
So presumably, you know, all of her convictions, if it's in, what, 2021, I think she was convicted, then let's go back some 20 years.
So there must be the statute of limitations.
There is for everything, I think, but murder, but it presumably does go back like decades enough that she was able to be prosecuted.
So at the very least.
Other co-conspirators.
The other co-conspirators could also be.
And wouldn't it wipe away the statute of limitations if there was proven that the case wasn't handled according to the legalities of the current situation?
I'm not a lawyer.
I don't know.
You get what I'm saying?
It's like, let's say they...
You would think so, but I could also see some bullshit way where they're like, no, it's the government's fault for entering into a bad thing.
So he can't prosecute it.
Well, they didn't enter into a bad thing.
They didn't tell the victims.
They didn't tell the victims of the agreement.
So I would imagine it's like a mistrial.
You're allowed to do it again.
I don't think that the statute of limitations should wipe that away.
I think the victims will just have right to see that agreement.
I don't think it would undo the agreement.
Yeah, exactly.
The thing is, is that they didn't have to do anything except tell them, hey, guys, this is what we did.
And they just didn't do it because it was a sweetheart deal.
It was a sweetheart deal.
And they didn't want to reveal why he's able to get away with this.
But this is kind of what Miles has one question.
I'll go really, really quick.
The Freedom of Information Act, would this apply at any point?
Is there like a time in which this will have to release?
That's a FOIA.
It's a big FOIA question.
So FOIA, I mean, it can take forever in the Department of Justice, and there are various like classification roles.
This leads, remember there was redactions in the Epstein files, and even then it has to go through review of the FOIA officer.
This is not really something that we'll ever find out via FOIA.
That's almost impossible.
Got it.
And then secondly, when people talk about the word, or like say Epstein files, are they generally referring to this secret indictment?
Is that the bulk of it?
Or are there so many other pieces of it?
I'm trying to find the secret indictment details here.
Yeah, so the sealed federal indictment prepared by the Southern District of New York that led to his eventual July 2019 arrest.
This was under seal in late or June.
So this basically goes back to the indictment that was previous, prior to the non-prosecution agreement.
That's what I'm talking about.
That is not what the Epstein supposed files are.
And this is the other problem.
Nobody really knows what the Epstein files are.
And there's been this bastardization, again, of this idea of the black book and the so-called client list.
I'm telling you, it doesn't work like that.
Like there are names in books.
Some of the names in the Epstein Black book actually turned out he never met them.
Right.
So what Epstein files to me is financial records is the entire like co-conspirators.
The indict the original investigation documents, the FBI 302s, and the, you know, the operation.
That's what we're going to learn about.
That's what we all want to know.
And then a bunch of tapes and the tapes that were allegedly lost about the cash and the artwork and the flight logs, which are still not, you know, entirely released.
Very been released in dips, drips and stats.
So let's focus here on the non-prosecution agreement and why this did not happen and the case for why.
It is very, in my opinion, likely he was an intelligence asset.
So in 2019, Joey, if you could please put this up from the Daily Beast, Vicki Ward, remember, this is Vicki Ward.
This is the person who reports from Vanity Fair 2002, probably the foremost authority on Epstein.
She reports that Alex Acosta, while he was being screened by the Trump transition team in 2017, when he was asked, why did you back off the Epstein case?
She says here, he was told, she was told he belonged to intelligence and to let it go.
Now, this, I want to be clear.
It's not been confirmed 100% that he said this.
This is reporting from Vicki Ward about the Trump transition team.
Now, though, if you can go to the next link that I sent, in 2019, when Alex Acosta holds a press conference about this entire issue and he is asked specifically about intelligence ties of Jeffrey Epstein and whether he would confirm this, he says, quote, I would hesitate to that reporting as fact, but he would not deny it.
Later on, he is asked on the record here by the Office of Professional Responsibility whether he had any information that Epstein was an intelligence asset.
He says, absolutely not.
I did not have information.
And he's informed that he is allowed to speak about this in a classified setting if he would like to, but he denies that he had information.
But it's important to actually release the exact transcript as to what and how he was asked.
Because you remember when I said earlier when Naftali Bennett said he never worked for Mossad?
That's very different than worked with Mossad.
That's very different than was aware of, had contact with, right?
Do you see what I'm saying?
There are multiple non-deniers.
They're very specific with their wording to evade the truth.
Correct.
As any lawyer and any former U.S. attorney would know when he's under question.
But nonetheless, Alex Acosta had an opportunity to address this and issued a non-denial denial in his public press conference in 2019.
Last time I was here, I told you guys my great regret is I sat next to him on a plane and I didn't ask him about it because it was midnight flight from Miami and nobody was talking.
And I'm just staring at this dude being like, bro, I gotta.
Like, I gotta ask.
He probably thought I was such a freak.
He's like, who is this guy?
Look at that.
Anyway, so Alex, if you're listening, I would still love to talk to you about this.
But he has never confirmed.
He's never confirmed.
He's never denied it.
Well, I guess he basically lives.
I mean, look, he lives a private life in Miami.
He can come out at any time.
I kind of deny.
Well, he said here.
He said here.
And didn't really deny it.
And again, this is why the exact transcript matters because he said, here, let's open it up.
Is that very specific?
Is that transcript available?
No, it's not available.
And actually, that's one of the Epstein files that people would like to release.
So, Acosta told OPR he did not have any information about cooperating in federal investigation or relating to media reports that Epstein had, quote, been an intelligence asset.
OPR says it did not find any reference to his purported cooperation or even a suggestion.
In the footnote, they say when OPR asked Acosta about his apparent equivocation in a 2019 press conference in answering the media question about Epstein being an intelligence asset, he said, The answer is no.
So, that's what he told them.
Okay, let's be clear about what he said, at least in one on-the-record setting, because there are various different reporting on this.
I am personally inclined to take the totality of evidence of everything I talked about about his connections with Hoffenberg, with Adnan Khashoggi, with Douglas Lease, to show all of his connections that we're about to get into with Israel and say, I think there's a pretty good case to be made.
And let's also get now to why the intelligence community would ever want to cover this stuff up.
FBI Informant Crimes Exposed00:12:08
All right, why?
So, can we go to the next link, please?
This is from BuzzFeed News 2021.
A great reporter, Jason Leopold, he's like the FOIA king.
And what he reported in 2021 is secret CIA files say that staffers committed sex crimes involving children.
Declassified CIA Inspector General report shows a pattern of abuse and repeated decisions by the federal prosecutors not to hold agency personnel accountable.
Now, why?
And by the way, some of these agents abuse children as young as two and six, which are named here in the documents.
All right.
And so, why would the feds not want to prosecute known pedophiles, people who are actually abusing children, not just child pornography?
Why?
They were concerned if they prosecuted them in open court that sources and methods would be revealed.
So, in sources and methods.
So, in 10 different known times here from the CIA Inspector General, they decided not to prosecute known pedophiles specifically to make sure that they could protect intelligence at the expense of justice and bringing people and putting these people in jail.
So, that shows you that there is a track record here from the United States government, from the CIA Inspector General report, in which, even in a much lower-level scenario, that they don't want this information to come to light.
Not because they necessarily care about the justice, they care at the end of the day about sources and methods, and about at all costs, they want to keep all of these people out of open court because those people might start talking a whole lot of shit while they're on the transcript on the record.
And they might say, Hey, you put me in federal prison, I'm going to tell the whole world what I know.
And in exchange, they're let off with probably the worst crime that you can commit, you know, literally, in my opinion, like the worst possible crime that you can commit.
We're talking about the sexual abuse here of children as young as two and as six.
Second one, and this shows you actually a more uh systematic one.
Shout out to my friend Daryl Cooper, uh, who uh flagged this case to me in his podcast.
I highly recommend it, The Martyr Maid Podcast on the Epstein files.
So, this is something he brought to my attention by his podcast: is that all throughout the 1970s and 1980s, there was this place called the Kencora Children's Home in Northern Ireland, where it was basically a hub and an orphanage for orphaned boys who were being systematically abused by intelligence assets known to MI6 and MI5 because,
and it was basically covered up and ignored because they were key conduits in helping MI5 manage the Northern Irish problem during the Troubles.
This is what a clear-cut example of basically how it works.
MI5, MI6 is a British intelligence.
And then, the Troubles is a time in which there was Irish resistance against the UK and Northern Ireland.
And it's complicated.
I'm not a full expert.
In order to manage that resistance, they had these intelligence assets who were sexually abusing children.
They knew they were sexually abused, and they let it happen.
Because it was advantageous to community intelligence.
So what I'm just showing you, though, this has all happened in the past.
But just so we can clarify, it doesn't mean MI5 and MI6 are orchestrating the molestation of these children.
It means that they're looking the other way, which is equally heinous.
It's honestly worse in my opinion.
Yeah, I actually think it's worse.
Okay, fair enough.
Because it is advantageous for what the current administration or what the country wanted at the time.
And so you are using this as evidence that intelligence communities have done this happening.
Have done this in the past.
These are verified incidents.
They show us this has happened.
And real quick, it would lend itself to this idea that intelligence communities were aware of what Epstein was doing and was able to look the other way because there was access to certain information and money that they wanted.
So it would thwart this idea that the government is actively using Epstein as a worker, if you will, to run a blackmail ring.
But it would confirm this idea that they were aware of this pedophile sex trafficking ring happening and they allowed it to happen.
So as long as they could use him, continue to use him as an asset.
That's exactly right.
Which I think is an important slice because I think the internet has taken Epstein and turned him into the Mossad CIA government blackmail ring that they use to incriminate the elites, which at this point in time, we don't know if there's any evidence of that.
But it seemed like there's overwhelming evidence to his access to these elites and his utility to intelligence services.
Correct.
That's exactly right.
And I wonder if it's advantageous for intelligence to have an asset or someone like this that has such a malignant proclivity.
Correct.
You're exactly.
And see, this is very important.
Can you go on?
Can you continue on that?
If basically you have someone that's able to have access to all this information and money, but also is a known pedophile, he's much easier to control and coerce.
So it's like in the hood, if you've got a crackhead or a heroin addict, that you need him to do some fucking that they always got to come back to you because they're addicted to the thing you got.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
I mean, the FBI looks the other way on criminals.
Actually, Joey, can you Google this?
It's like confidential informants commit crimes.
FBI, there was a report recently.
It came out a couple of years ago that named like the number of crimes that the FBI allowed its confidential informants to commit while it was working with them.
That's Whitey Bulger.
Yeah, but it's not Whitey.
It's like it's Whitey.
It goes way bigger than that.
Whitey would be like the biggest thing.
Yeah, the perfect example of that.
So the notorious Boston gangster, of course, always an FBI informant, but they allowed him to continue to run shit in Russia.
I mean, it's thousands of crimes.
It's shocking.
Professional dictator, and they can do whatever they want to do.
They can do whatever you want, as long as you keep certain things.
Oh, you can kill tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people as long as you're loyal.
You could say, like, I would Google something like confidential informants commit crimes, like FBI admits something like that.
Maybe we can find that.
I'm just citing it off the top of my head.
Sorry, in the meantime, but do we have since I've looked at it?
Go ahead.
Do we have any idea what he's providing that is worth the kids getting?
Yeah, there we go.
FBI allowed informants to commit 5,000 crimes or something like that.
It's like maybe 5,000 or 50,000.
I can't read that line.
Exactly.
Again, I'm trying to cite.
5,600.
I'm trying to show everybody that this is business as usual for the federal government.
And just to clarify, not all these crimes are kid fucking.
Some of these crimes are drug running.
Most of these crimes are drugs.
Exactly.
There are illegal activities that the FBI is aware of, and they allow these people to operate in these spaces.
They know that they're operating these spaces and being watched just as long as that information trickles back.
For example, if you're a gun runner in America, you want to send some guns to some third world country, the FBI or the CIA is going to be aware of that.
They can tap you for that information.
And they might actually want those guns to get over.
Totally.
And they might need somebody like you were describing before to ensure that those guns actually get there for their nefarious purposes.
But again, I just want to parcel this.
It's not like the only crimes being committed are having sex with children.
It is quite common that you are using these nefarious characters to carry out the horrible crimes that you cannot be associated.
As you pointed out earlier, it's business as usual.
It's just extended to the furthest possible line.
Yeah, this is pedophilia.
That is a great word.
I'm struggling.
Yeah, yeah.
And we all struggle with that because we're good people.
But when you're surrounded by this, look, it's all how do you commit major crimes, right?
It's all a buildup.
Like, nobody just starts out immediately going for a billion-dollar Ponzi scheme.
I mean, one of my favorite books is The History of the Madoff Scheme.
It starts small, man.
It starts with one, it's one doctored paper, and then it leads to this.
And then it's one lie.
It's one quarter.
It's just one.
That's all.
And then you take another, and next thing you know, you're in a $56 billion Ponzi scheme.
It takes 50 years to get there.
But it doesn't happen all overnight.
It happens in a permission structure in an environment of crime.
The information structure is huge.
Because it might be the most obvious answer in the world, or there is no answer, and that's obvious.
What intelligence is he providing?
Do we have any idea?
I don't know.
That it's like, oh, well, this is potentially a pedophilia ring involving the most powerful people in the world.
And instead of having any kind of justice, okay, so let's speculate at this because this is pure speculation and we have no idea.
And this is part of what it would be great to get from files or investigation or a church committee.
You know, the church committee actually would be the only answer here.
We need a congressional committee to come to.
I don't know about pedophilia.
Do you know what the church committee is?
No, it's in the 1970s.
It was Senator Frank Church, who was an American hero.
No church can help itself.
Why did he call it the church?
Senator Frank Church in the 1970s exposed COINTEL PRO, all of the out-of-control operations by the FBI and the CIA, and he brought the intelligence community to bear post-Watergate.
And basically, America didn't trust them anymore.
Senator Church basically seized on this.
He exposed a lot of the issues with the Black Panthers, with COINTELPRO, with the COINTELPRO to anybody.
COINTELPRO was a CIA.
Is that mind control?
What am I thinking of?
No, no, no.
Co-Intel Plan Pro is COINTELP.
Agent Provocators.
I'm getting all the agent provocators.
You put the FBI agents in peaceful people.
Like against the Black Panthers.
So there's that.
And then what was the mind control?
MK Ultra.
MK Ultra.
That's the MK Ultra.
He exposed all this, right?
So that's why what I'm saying is we need something like that to happen with this.
The intelligence community could be effectively using illegal measures to incriminate people that are not doing actual or acting against their own citizens.
Or acting against their own citizens entirely.
Like he was an arms dealer, money launderer.
That's a lot of evidence.
By the way, I'm speculating.
That's not confirmed.
What I'm trying to say is there is a lot of evidence that points in that direction.
I can't get further without the documents.
He was just like, he was what information.
Do a lot of arms dealers knew a lot of people who were doing.
So, you know, look, we can only speculate.
What is exactly happening?
Bare minimum, what we can confirm is that he was involved, obviously outside the child sex trafficking, that he was doing illegal money laundering.
He appears, in my opinion, to have been doing it.
Well, didn't he get caught at Bear Stearns?
Maybe not money laundering, but inside of Churchill.
Yeah, he was doing something that violated compliance rules in the 1980s.
So he's doing illegal stuff for the transfer of money, probably tax evasion, which is quite common when you're dealing with this type of money.
Yes.
But still willing to go to illegal measures to prop up the wealth of the opens up his own firm and only accepts billionaire.
Yeah, billionaire, right?
Again, like, what do I do?
That's what I'm going to do.
I'll open up a podcast dude.
Only billionaire.
Actually, today, it would be the equivalent of saying only 20 billion, right?
There's not that many people who are worth more than 20%.
What if there was one guy that was managing the money of all the richest people in the world?
It would be advantageous for the intelligence communities of any country to have access to that.
Yeah, you would actually be quite foolish if you didn't.
If you didn't, you have to have something.
Exactly.
So, this is where, again, like, we can only speculate.
What did they get out of this?
In my opinion, in the 1980s, he was obviously financing arms deals.
It's just like a clear-cut case for me.
That's the most useful.
Black money is the most useful thing in the world to a U.S. intelligence or Mossad intelligence, Saudi intelligence, any of these other people.
Then it gets to the question of the whole blackmail thing.
And look, I think there is at least some evidence here in the case of Wexner and others that it appears to look like blackmail was used by Epstein for his personal financial gain.
And then we combine the two to where we have hidden cameras that we know about in the Virgin Islands, that we know about in the New York residence, that we know about in Palm Beach.
Many of this footage and other things never has been released.
We know about the DVDs and all that.
On the cameras, I think it's important to note that it's not simply security cameras.
I have cameras in all my homes.
Exactly.
Like they were wired for audio as well and they were in the bathrooms.
Yeah.
I don't have, yes, but I actually think that's another interesting point because that doesn't necessarily mean it's only sexual blackmail.
Oh, I would imagine it's the more come over to my house.
Let's just talk about some.
You go to the bathroom and you're like, this fucking weirdo.
I got to get the hell out of here.
He's a piece of shit.
Blah, blah, blah.
And now you got that locked, and then the FBI gets access to it.
Which I think is an important delineation that you might have some head of state, and let's say they're in the Epstein files as, oh, there is audiovisual blackmail of Bill Clinton or Yehud Barak.
It might not necessarily be sexual.
Yeah, you're exactly right.
Front Companies and Leaks00:14:27
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Now let's get back to the show.
All right, guys, listen, I know I'm all about Bitcoin, and here's what I've learned: I should not invest in any other coins.
Kraken gave us some money to invest.
I lost $7,000 last time out of 10.
Wow.
So that's almost hard to get it.
So this time they gave me more money.
All I'm doing is Bitcoin.
That's it.
I'm not fucking around with Fartcoin anymore.
Everybody send me their meme coins.
Fuck yourselves.
It's Bitcoin only for me.
What about you guys?
I think I'm mostly Bitcoin too, and I think I've been doing okay.
Lil Ethel.
You're up the most.
I think I'm up the most.
Yeah.
I'll be honest, I didn't pick them.
Bitch, you had a Jewish person pick it up.
Yeah, you had your handler.
That's smart.
I'm not sure if I have my Jewish handler pick it.
That's smart.
And it's working out.
Yeah, you're winning.
Also, got gold.
A lot of gold.
A lot of diamonds.
I bought real estate.
No, I doubled on an Epstein coin and it's crushing right now.
I'm like, I'm through the roof, dude.
They shouldn't make that.
I don't even know what that's going to be.
You know, they don't ever show you the results of that.
Yeah.
Trump said there's actually no coin.
What the hell?
What did I put all my money in?
This is crazy.
And then now you're pretty much break-even, right?
Yeah, I broke even.
Yeah.
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Watching Bitcoin.
Oh, goddamn.
Excluding wolves in New York and Maine, Maine, yeah, thank God through Paywood Interactive Inc.
Let's get to Aid Barack.
This is important because now I want to start making the Israel case specifically.
So we already talked about how earlier Epstein present this factually.
I don't need people coming with the anti-Semitism accusations.
Let's live only in the world of fact.
Oh, absolutely.
Wait, that happens?
Today, right now, this entire thing is going to be branded anti-Semitic.
Listen, I don't care anymore, but even though they are going to say that no matter what, we should not be irresponsible and let's live in the world of fact.
So, go ahead, Joey, and scroll down the things that I have that says Epstein and Ayud Barack.
So, okay, let's go ahead and put this up here.
Here are the lists that I compiled just yesterday of every Israeli prime minister who we know who was linked to Jeffrey Epstein.
Number one is Shimon Perez.
Shimon Perez was the prime minister of Israel in the 1980s.
He, according to Eyud Barak himself in the open record, introduced Eyud Barak to Jeffrey Epstein.
So that's the first prime minister of Israel that we know who's linked to Jeffrey Epstein.
Number two is Eoud Omer, who was named as an Epstein associate by the U.S. Virgin Islands in their lawsuit against JP Morgan and Chase.
I will be honest, Ayud Omer, we have the least amount of information.
We only know he was named by the U.S. Virgin Islands as an Epstein associate.
Number three, Eyud Barack, as I list there.
Connections too vast to paraphrase.
All right.
And so let's spend some time now on Ayud Barak.
Let me return to Netanyahu in a bit.
In my document, you can scroll to the Epstein and Ayud Barak section.
Ayud Barak stayed for multiple times at Jeffrey Epstein's house.
This is confirmed.
He flew dozens of times on Jeffrey Epstein's private jet.
But he has no way to stay in New York City.
Yeah, right.
He's the former prime minister of Israel.
Where could you stay?
Actually, Joey, can you pull up the photo of Ayud Barak?
Ayud Barak Epstein mansion.
He had my time.
This is the biggest problem.
You're going to go say it's a four seasons.
I want you guys to see the photo.
There's a photo of Ayud Barak walking into the Epstein mansion with his face covered with a scarf up to his nose.
And this is pre-COVID times.
He says it was cold, but it was cold.
It was cold.
Yeah, there it is.
Look at that.
Look at that.
That's him walking into Jeffrey Epstein's house.
That's insane.
People don't walk around like that.
They don't walk around like that.
That's post-2000.
Sorry.
Yeah.
And that's post-2008.
So again, we're talking about post-conviction.
Yeah, post-conviction.
He's a registered sex offense.
That's right.
Still staying at his house.
He's saying his house.
Okay.
All right.
Also, 2015, I have a documented link here.
Epstein.
I'm not going to be able to cheap and not want to see it.
Epstein funded Aud Barack.
You don't know the Jews in real estate in New York City.
All right.
Let me continue.
Epstein funded Ayud Barak's defense intelligence startup to the tune of millions of dollars.
So that, in my opinion, is one of the real smoking guns.
Because what did I talk about earlier with Jeffrey with Robert Maxwell was the funding of software used by the Israeli government to do what?
To spy on the United States.
Now, this software would be used to spy everywhere, I imagine.
Right.
Yeah, of course, like Pegasus, right?
And all of these other things.
Right?
So it's not just the United States, but it's everybody.
All right.
But here in this case, Epstein entered partnership worth millions with Ayud Barak in 2015, post-conviction, registered sex offender.
Okay.
Let's continue.
Barack is who?
The former, not only prime minister, the former head of military intelligence inside of Israel.
Let's continue beyond that and let's say ask about Ayud Barak and what else he did.
I have this in the Wexner section.
If you want, it is, let me find it here.
I may not have actually put a citation.
You can Google it if you would like.
Epstein, who was also named by Leslie Wexner as a trustee of the Wexner Foundation, paid Ayud Barak $2.3 million to complete two consulting reports, one of which he never finished.
Okay, $2.3 million paid by the Wexner Foundation to Ayud Barak, the former prime minister of Israel, for one of which he never finished.
Okay, I'm just saying, good work if you can get it.
Right?
2.3 million.
Everybody out there if you're struggling with your bills and your mortgage, this is insane.
All right.
This is insane.
For purposes of what?
We don't know.
Now, let's return to the Wexner Foundation.
Why would you be paying him?
Yeah, exactly.
What's going on?
No, I guess I'm telling you, why is that advantageous?
Because it's like a jobs program for all of these former Israeli officials.
And it's basically a network where, and this actually fits what I was about to continue.
The Wexner Foundation funds a fellowship right now at Harvard University, which, by the way, of course, also had connections with Jeffrey Epstein.
And what did we see?
Is that the Wexner Foundation has for decades now sponsored programs where Israeli officials, including military officials and civil government officials, come to the United States to quote learn leadership.
And it's known as one of the largest networks of like highly influential Israeli government officials who come to the United States and basically link up with one another as a very, very powerful nexus.
So the Wexner Foundation is involved.
And why is that incriminating that they come here and learn leadership?
Well, it's not incriminating.
I'm just saying that the Wexner, this is an American.
He's a billionaire.
He's funding AIPAC and all of these various Zionist causes.
He's also paying weirdly $2.3 million to a former Israeli prime minister.
This is a foundation which Epstein has a lot of control over.
By the way, just to be fair to them, they have claimed that Epstein had no influence over that decision.
Okay.
I mean, he was, you know, basically running it.
And he had power of attorney by Leslie Wexner.
But, you know, to be fair to the Wexner Foundation, I mean, I just think it's crazy.
This is insane to pay $2.3 million to Ayud Barack.
So, what?
So, take me down that line of thinking.
If you pay him that money, what does that mean?
Yeah, for what?
It's like to what take me down?
I don't know.
Give me a hypothetical.
My hypothetical is that, you know, is that these are basically ways to create slush funds that perhaps he was using and others to fund other intelligence operations.
So this returns me to the black money point: you need legitimate ways to wash money.
Okay, nonprofits are great.
He's explaining the money to him, and then he's doing nefarious.
Who knows what he is doing with it?
I don't know what he's doing.
Is there a way of looking at it where you go, Jeffrey Epstein is working for U.S. intelligence, and in a way, this is how they're bribing Israeli.
You very may as well be honest.
Right.
And this is why I will never sit here and say he was solely a Mossad agent or a Mossad asset, solely a U.S. asset.
I think he was a high, he was a hired gun.
He would work for anybody.
For anybody.
And everybody would want to work with this person because he has access to all of these things.
He listens to the world's money, to the world's rich and the famous.
He can tell you the secrets.
I mean, this is the gold standard of an intelligence asset in the United States of America, the capital of the global empire, right?
New York City, the capital of global finance.
People, even private business people, would want to be friends with Epstein because, like, hey, what's going on with that deal?
Are they going to do a leverage buyout with this person?
And Epstein would be like, yeah, maybe I can find out for you, right?
And he, you know, calls up this person.
So there are a lot of reasons to want to have access to all of this.
Much of which is Rocket.
Why would he want access to why would he want access to Epstein?
Well, that is one of those things where I actually think the relationship was the other way because it might be just a pretty quote quid pro co situation.
Like you're Ayud Brock, you're the former prime minister of Israel, and Jeffrey Epstein is a guy who made his money somehow, and you need millions of dollars from him, not a legitimate, you know, venture capital firm.
I think that the reason that they want sketchy money is because it was probably, in my opinion, some sort of intelligence front, and that this is exactly fulfilling his purpose.
The financier uses the money, the dirty money, or the untraceable money to fund future spyware, intelligence companies.
This gets to the front company discourse.
It also shows us that he was involved in this in 2015.
It wasn't that long ago, okay?
It was only 10 years ago that he was still doing this.
So it shows that even post-conviction, he's continuing the behavior, which is very suspicious, in my opinion.
So that's where we are with Aide Brock.
Now let's return to Netanyahu because this is a fun story, actually.
So Netanyahu in 2011, I have that screenshot in my tweet if you want to go ahead and put that up there.
Netanyahu met with... the JP Morgan exec I mentioned earlier, Jess Staley.
All right.
So Jess Staley in 2011 emails Epstein and he said, I got to find the exact text.
I don't have it here in the document, but I tweeted it a couple of days ago.
Let me just go ahead and find it because the wording of it is genuinely remarkable where he sends him an email and he says something like, against all odds.
Yeah, here we go.
In 2011, J.P. Morgan executive forward and emailed Epstein.
Against all odds, we have been granted a meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu.
Epstein replies, surprise, surprise.
The U.S. Virgin Island notes that he was a key conduit in brokering meetings like this.
And so here's from the U.S. Virgin Islands lawsuit where they note some of the world's dignitaries, Prince Andrew, Eyud Barak, Netanyahu, David Gergen.
My point is around this is this JP Morgan CEO is able, you know, from the email discourse, he's like, against all odds, we were granted a meeting with Netanyahu.
And Epstein replies, surprise, surprise.
Why can't JP Morgan get a meeting with Netanyahu?
Exactly.
And first of all, it's super weird.
You know, why wouldn't you be able to get a meeting with Netanyahu?
JP Morgan, you're from the basement.
Why would you forward that to Epstein?
And Epstein's like, yeah, you're, you know, you're welcome for hooking it up.
I think it's weird.
Now, none of these point, perhaps, to like direct employee relationship.
It points to a vast network connectivity and network, which was useful, perhaps this time with the U.S. and Israeli intelligence.
But this looks like Epstein has influence over Israel, not the other way, right?
Well, it looks like the bi-directional.
Right, of course, of course.
I'm just saying in this certain circumstance, it's like, hey, we need to meet with this guy.
We can't happen.
And he's like, I'll tell him what to do.
Well, yeah, but it's not really influence.
It's more acting as an agent for major financial institutions to hook them up with the Israeli government.
Now, look, I mean, Netanyahu, by the way, has never answered any questions about this.
Eud Barak has, you know.
You're saying in his Nelk Boys interview, he didn't talk.
Is that how that?
By the way, do we know?
No.
What's up with signing them?
I don't understand.
Like, bro, I said this.
I was like, you have a newsy interview.
You got to release that shit.
You can't just hold a prime minister for a reading.
It's fucking crazy.
Your Nelk thing is still one of my favorite things ever.
How long could Kegstan get you?
How many happy dads do you think you can drink in 30 seconds?
I forget the one who is annoying with you, who's literally going to like be on his phone while BB is talking or something.
Well, the thing about Israel Palestine, who kind of watches that?
What a joke.
So, okay, to play devil's advocate for some of these people who would be on Epstein's list, and you brought this up earlier, but like theoretically, you got, if I'm a Bill Gates and this guy has access to all of these people and I'm concerned with wealth, I guess he's already been convicted of the pedophilia.
So even associated with him is crazy.
But theoretically, it's like, well, he could connect me with that billionaire and that billionaire.
Well, that's what happened in Bill Gates' case.
So Bill Gates, if you guys remember, well, it's complicated.
There's a lot of reporting about it, but allegedly, you know, he would use Epstein for marriage advice and things like that.
He's too old.
Yeah, that's better.
You know, I mean, actually, this is important on the Bill Gates story.
Melinda Gates divorced him over the Epstein thing.
And that's what she said.
Okay, well, that's the type of thing.
Reputation Laundering Tactics00:12:53
That's what she said.
Like, I would say that too.
But guys, yeah, of course they would say that.
Because here's the thing.
It had to be bad because Bill Gates was an obvious philanderer for over 20 years for their entire marriage.
So, what was worse than that to get you to divorce him?
Yeah.
There had to be something.
I think there was something sketchy that she found out.
Like, look, maybe she was just appalled by all the reporting, but she knew.
Look, everybody at Microsoft knew that Bill Gates was having affairs.
This is already documented.
It's out there, like, in terms of his conduct with women over the last 20 years.
So, it can't have been as bad as this income level where it's like they're multi-billionaire.
You know what I mean?
Come on.
They probably are not even in the same country, right?
They're like, they're both like vast estates that can just move around on private jets.
So, again, I did not like in the end.
This is Melinda Gates.
I did not like that meetings with Jeffrey Epstein.
No, I made that clear to him.
He was abhorrent.
He was evil personified.
My heart breaks for these women.
Yeah, I guess you got to say that.
Yeah, but it's one of those things where there might be something else.
I don't feel that way.
Do we know the first time?
What's the gap between the divorce and the first time this guy meets Epstein?
Because I think there's like 12 years where Melinda could have left.
Yeah, do you not like that it got out?
Well, that's part of it.
I mean, so if you don't like that it got out, she don't know.
I do not think she didn't know.
I don't know.
She could have left earlier if she was so bothered by it.
Right, but I think what Alex is saying, maybe she didn't know.
I think she should have known.
I think she didn't know because all of the stuff is about his care.
And I think actually she may know even more than we all do about what was going on in some of those rooms.
Wait, why?
Well, maybe it's like she asked him to come clean and he came clean.
Or maybe there's some stuff in court documents and lawsuits and others that have been alleged against him that, again, could have been cast or killed.
That'll tell you everything.
It was like billions.
I mean, we can look at it.
Yeah, it's going to be billions no matter what.
So it's, what was it, 40 billion, something like that?
Maybe 50?
And control of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Oh, yeah.
They agreed to continue those two things together.
There's something going on.
That's all I'm saying.
All right.
All right.
12.5 billion grand for her phonographic work.
Can you hear some more?
Maybe I'm thinking.
Mellie Mel.
Oh, no preno.
She's going to give it no matter what.
Right.
Yeah.
She was going to get it no matter what.
Yeah.
Okay.
Right.
So, anyway, my thing is like, why now?
I just think, again, she knew about his cheating.
Like, it had to be worse than that.
I don't really know what it was.
Or just public.
Or public.
It's possible.
But Bill Gates met with Epstein because he was trying to win a Nobel Peace Prize.
Bill Gates wanted the Nobel Peace Prize for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Epstein's like, oh, I can make that happen.
And why?
Like, that's the question.
It's like, why, even after being a registered sex offender?
Like, Andrew, you and I are in a weird position.
That's why Trump scored him.
He just wasn't.
All of us were.
All of us as public people, we get invited to dinners like all the time, right?
And I very rarely go because it's like annoying.
But I used to go.
But like, what I always do is just a cursory Google search, right?
And if somebody invited me to dinner, you know, and was a registered sex offender, which one of the very first things going to pop up, I'm not going.
But George Stephanopoulos went.
Bill Gates went.
Reed Hoffman.
One thing they went.
Peters.
I don't know.
I didn't hang out with my real friends.
Right.
Exactly.
It's like, what is going on here?
And not only are you guys doing dinners or whatever, you're all like wiring money to each other.
The Bill and Melinda Gates, like the Nobel Peace Prize.
And there's all kinds of people we don't even know about because there has not been yet a release of the files.
But isn't it like the rich people stuff that you were saying before?
It's like, oh, well, he's going over there.
I guess it's cool if we all go.
Yeah, but it's still.
Doesn't the sex offender thing register at any point?
Like, of course, at the point, does it register to be like, oh, we're not doing this?
I can understand that right now, to be honest with you.
I probably wouldn't Google.
But come on.
Once somebody's convicted, fuck that.
I don't know.
Your staff is going to Google.
Yeah, right, exactly.
Like, all these meetings are going through your staff.
And I'm not worth enough to have a staff.
If I was, they would have to be assistant.
You're not getting involved with everybody.
Think about how many people were terrified of just coming on a podcast.
I was terrified to come on a podcast, right?
You have some of the most powerful people in the world that are going to meet up with a convicted pedophile.
Right.
Yeah, you know what's going on.
You know.
But you said in the 90s, it was already common knowledge.
Like some youngsters.
Yeah, it's like that's that bad.
It's a big difference being a registered sex offender.
Yeah, there's a piece of deniability before that.
They all rationalize it.
I'm sure their staff says, yeah, look, he was given such a light sentence because it was kind of bullshit.
The charges were charged.
And so the whole thing was overblown.
And you're about to get $2 billion in a peace prize in your foundation.
And then you go, all right, for $2 billion, I got to have a lot of people.
I can help.
We're going to have a closed door meeting with the guy.
That's the weirdest thing.
It's the reputation laundering.
Like, again, we're talking about Bill Gates.
We're talking about MIT.
We're talking about the Ivy League universities.
We're talking about some of the world's most professional and smartest scientists who are going over to his house for dinner, who are, you know, accepting grants for his work at the MIT lab.
All of this is post-conviction.
Guys, you don't just give money to MIT.
They have enough money.
They don't just take it from anyone.
They do extensive backgrounds to make sure that you can put your name on something and they know what's happening.
I have a friend of mine who has a real estate fund or whatever.
And he got investment from these institutional places like MIT and that.
And the amount of background due diligence must be insane.
It's not insane.
And he often criticizes some of the developers who just like they raise money in the community.
And he's like, yeah, that's bullshit.
Because if you lose their money, it's no big deal.
There's nobody to answer to.
When you get money from an institution like the UC fund, like UC Pension Fund or whatever.
Pension fund.
Exactly.
The amount of due diligence, the SEC is on your phone.
It should be.
You know, getting looked at constantly.
So it's not like that's not going to come up.
It does come up and they look the other way, which is peculiar.
It's weird.
Okay.
Last thing.
I actually didn't put this in my notes.
And this really, I just, my goal here is to just emphasize all the connections and what could possibly still yet to be released.
So please Google the New York Financial Services report on Epstein, which regards Deutsche Bank.
Now, this report, I read it in 2020.
It's one of the craziest things I ever read because it is a description of financial behavior at this bank that any normal individual would never get away with.
Not only looking the other way, holding high-level meetings, being like, guys, we're not in compliance right now.
They're like, this is violating banking rules.
He is taking out like millions of dollars in cash, $9,900 at a time.
They're not reporting it to the feds, which are supposed to.
He's wiring money to Eastern European women, an obvious like sex trafficking wing, post-conviction, which by the way, post-conviction, they weren't even really going to supposed to be doing business with them for the reputation of the bank.
But they cite in the Deutsche Bank settlement and with the New York Financial Services internal emails where they're like, hey, he's really good for business because he connects us with a whole lot of people.
These are out there open, right?
And like inside, you literally watch as lower level compliance people who don't know what's up flag to their bosses and they're like, guys, what are we doing here?
Like, this is violating bank rules.
And they're like, hey, like, stop, right?
I mean, I'm talking all the way up to the highest level of the bank where internal conversations are had in multiple times.
This rep violates multiple bank policies.
It violates the law in this case, New York state law about the way that you're supposed to conduct yourself as a financial institution, looking the other ways, all these insane wire transfers for millions and millions of dollars.
So to me, that's like my final thing here.
These are the files I want.
I want the actual banking records.
I want the LLC formation documents.
I want the trust.
Yeah, from the wire.
My favorite quote, you know, from Lester Freeman.
If you start to follow the money, you don't know where the fuck it's going to take you.
And that's really what the whole story is about.
And yes, I understand the salacious details.
And I spent a lot of time on it here, you know, the pedophilia investigation and all of that, but it's secondary to the level of influence that he had.
And to the extent that it mattered, it mattered because he was so important in some respect that everyone was either able to look the other way or enable it or empower it and to make it happen in such a systematic way that involves all the world's most powerful elite.
So that's my final thing: release the Epstein files that actually matter and show us who he was.
It's not just about intelligence, it's about the financial network.
And the reason I think that it's being covered up here is because it does implicate everybody.
I think it implicates multiple governments, specifically the Israeli government.
I think it also implicates the United States government.
I think it's very uncomfortable for the world's richest and most powerful elite.
It shows the Bush administration.
It shows the Trump administration.
It shows the Biden administration who sat on some of these.
Some of the most powerful and influential people in the whole world.
It's not necessary that they're on tape, but perhaps they're financially entangled.
Perhaps the tapes were used at a time.
And that's, I think, the most disappointing thing about this.
So my goal here was to give people the language they can use into as to why it validates your feelings as to why something is being covered up.
And there's a reason they don't talk about this.
They call you a conspiracy theorist.
These are all facts, everything that I've laid out.
Can I say one thing?
That was awesome.
Thank you.
I don't know what the non-sexual version of being turned on is, but that was awesome.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Yeah, that's interesting.
It's almost like the blackmail ring, the sexual blackmail ring for the global elites is the conspiracy.
Simply following the money outside of the child sex trafficking might be what incriminates the most people.
Oh, it absolutely will.
Yes.
It's almost like it benefits them for there to be focused on the child sex ring because they might not be tied to it.
Or to talk or to talk in stupid terms of like client list.
And it's like, guys, they're on the island fucking the girls.
It's like, as long as the focus is on that, it will almost be a letdown to find out, oh, actually, they didn't have sex with any girls, but he was giving A.O. Brock $2.3 million or whatever.
And then the people go, it's only $2.3 million.
What's the big deal?
We thought they were having sex.
It's actually like to their benefit for the public to believe this blackmail, this sexual blackmail ring, and then be quote-unquote like let down by we should hope that there are less people having sex with children, by the way.
We all want that to not happen.
But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't continue to shine light on what's going over here and understanding his influence and why he was able to operate with impunity, despite being a registered sex offender.
That's the thing that seems so peculiar and lends itself to conspiracy.
Why was he able to behave in this manner?
Why was he able to?
Why were the higher-ups of this bank able to thwart their responsibility to the SEC, to their investors?
Two weeks, if I withdraw $9,900 in two weeks, the federal government's knocking on my door.
Like they, J.P. Morgan is going to flag my account.
I thought it was dumb.
They're not over 10 grand for them to do it.
No, but if it's $9,900, they have a mandatory reporting, but if they have, they have things in the bank to make sure that you're not, if it looks suspicious to do $9,900.
Two weeks and they're like, all right, he's trying to violate, trying to make sure that he doesn't come under reporting.
We're going to the feds.
We're notifying the IRS.
The IRS, by the way, again, has all of this documentation.
Yeah, the bank's not so stupid to be like, oh, it wasn't 10,000.
They're not dumb.
Exactly.
They have software.
Literally Palantir.
That's what they use Palantir for to automatically flag all of these suspicious activities.
My point is only that all of this exists.
And you, as Americans, you guys need the language to be able to know what to ask for.
I was telling Mark earlier, one of the reasons why it took so long to get COINTELPRO and MKUltra is that it took people breaking into a warehouse to learn about the specific code words so that they could then FOIA and ask to investigate.
Oh, wow.
Without knowing what to ask for, you don't know what to ask for.
It's an unknown unknown, in the words of Donald Rumsfeld.
Like, it's one of those things where you can't even begin to go down the rabbit hole if you don't even know where to start.
This is interesting.
Yeah.
And this is why.
And by the way, again, there are very, very powerful people right now today who are trying to make sure you don't look at this.
You have the Prime Minister of Israel, foreign prime minister of Israel, Nephtali Bennett.
He never worked for Mossad.
There's an entire influencer set right now.
Mark Levin, now it includes the President of the United States, all of these like kind of Zionist influencers who are calling you an anti-Semite because they say that there's no evidence.
And they define the terms to be like he worked for Mossad.
I'm not saying that he directly was an employee for Mossad.
He was run from the very beginning.
I'm saying that he shows all of the hallmarks, to use an infamous phrase, of being some sort of an asset, working with these various intelligence agencies.
Nuclear Threats and Hamas00:17:53
And I think that that stuff is so dirty that they just don't want to get into it.
And this is where Trump, I mean, we have to be honest.
We have to call it out.
He ran on this.
I have the evidence here that we can go through of like what they said in 2023.
It's what they say today.
There's 67 congressmen that voted against Rokana's amendment.
I know.
I know.
That's crazy.
All right, guys, let's take a break for a second.
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We were in this like this very interesting like media spin in the last few days where you know I was doing what I thought we're supposed to do, which is like hold our elected officials accountable for the promises that they say they will make.
I didn't realize that now I know better that you're not.
You're just supposed to let them do whatever the fuck they want, despite them promising as long as they're consistent.
Yeah, you just have to be consistent.
That's right.
But yeah, like to that, to that note, like I've thought about this a lot.
I actually think that like when the person you voted for is in power, that's when you have to be the loudest.
You're exactly right.
Thank you for saying that.
Because that's the only opportunity for you to get the things that they promised enacted.
Yes.
When someone that you did not vote for is in power, there's nothing you can do because they're not going to do the things you asked for anyway.
So you should be stomping the pavement.
You should be clamoring.
And when they're not doing the things, you should be going, hey, this is not what I voted for.
This is the thing you want.
This is the thing.
These are against everything that you said.
Not everything.
Otherwise, you're in a cult.
You're in a cult.
Because everybody's like, trust the plan.
No, I actually don't trust the plan.
Like, during the 40-chess shit, I hate to trust the process.
How about I trust what the fuck you said you were going to do and how about you do it?
Thank you.
I mean, again, this is important.
Everybody is always like, oh, there's a split in the MAGA base.
I actually think MAGA, by and large, will always kind of support Trump.
But I'm going to define the terms narrowly.
And this is kind of where we're all speaking to.
The people we're speaking to are not like MAGA, maybe some of them.
A lot of them are disaffected.
They're men.
They're people who are tangentially interested in politics.
And the reason why the Epstein story was important to them is it confirmed basically the way that they thought about the international elite.
And they saw Trump and Kash Patel and Dan Bongino as those who would work to like usurp that power.
It's a conduit to justice.
Exactly.
And for them to watch that betrayal now that's happening is one that only confirms the way that the system basically works.
And it causes very uncomfortable questions here.
I was saying this.
I was saying this yesterday, but it's like, if I wanted to vote for somebody that was going to keep the Epstein files under wrap, that was going to extend the foreign roads and there was wars that was going to increase the budget, I would have voted for Kamlov.
Yeah, that's right.
And by the way, by the way, probably would have done it more competently.
I'll say it.
I'll just say it.
Yeah, like way more.
It would have been very easy.
Yeah.
And we wouldn't have had to live through this last six months of like whatever bullshit is happening in the current day.
I mean, yeah, look, I mean, literally today, there is, Joey, you want to go ahead and pull this up?
You can go on my Twitter feed.
Donald Trump is sending $10 billion of new offensive weapons to Ukraine.
Not only that, by the way, it actually came out from the Financial Times that he reportedly told Zelensky the Ukrainians leaked this part of the phone call.
Who knows if they're telling the truth, but the Trump administration has not denied it.
Is Donald Trump asked Zelensky if Ukraine could hit Moscow and actually asked them, Hey, Zelensky, Vladimir, he said, Do you have what you need to be able to hit Moscow to hit St. Petersburg?
These are the World War III fears that I, you guys know, the last time I'm here, we were spending an hour on Ukraine.
So you can disagree with me if you'd like.
He said he wasn't going to do that.
So here's the thing.
And this is where I have like a little bit of, I give him a little bit of wiggle room.
And maybe it was just hubris.
I think Trump actually thought that he was going to walk in.
I think Trump actually thought that the only reason there are wars is because of lobbyists and lobbyists in government basically going, hey, we need to sell more military weapons.
Let's have some wars around.
So he's like, once I get in, I'll just call it Vlad.
I'll be like, yo, Vlad.
He was already president once, man.
So he knows the game.
Okay, fair enough.
And that's very fair.
And then that could be my naivete.
And I'll be held accountable for that.
Right.
And I guess I'm like hoping best case scenario because at the end of the day, I don't care what fucking side you're on.
You don't want to see hundreds of thousands of people get murdered.
Yeah, that's right.
You do for profit.
Yeah.
You do not want to see hundreds of thousands of people get murdered for private sector.
You can say, I told you so.
You can do all these other shit.
But at the end of the day, you just have to ask yourself, do you want to see hundreds of thousands of human beings get killed for profit?
And millions, actually, now millions of people.
I personally don't.
Yeah, I don't.
I personally don't.
So, what I'm going to do is: if there's somebody that says I aim to stop the foreign wars, and there's another person that says, Well, we got to do what's right to allies.
All I hear is less people dead, more people dead.
If you can sleep at night voting for the person that says more people dead over the person that says less people dead, that's fine.
I can't.
Yeah, that's not for me.
Same.
That's not for me.
I see what the fuck Gaza looks like, and I'm like, I want that to stop.
Yeah, I see what the fuck is happening in Ukraine and Russia, and I want that to stop.
So I don't feel that of all you regret whatever.
I don't regret a fucking second for voting for the guy who said that less people are going to die.
Also, all the things about he lied, he's a liar.
I don't know, man.
He promised he would overturn the Royal Versa Wade the first time.
So I don't know.
I thought he could get shit done in the January 6th.
The January 6th protesters?
He's like, I'll fart all them.
Yeah, he did it.
Yeah.
It's just important also to say what promises are being kept, what are not.
All right.
So immigration, I actually say he's kept a lot of his promises.
Unfortunately.
But we'll argue about this later whenever we record for my show.
But my point around here is: let's look specifically.
Epstein.
The Epstein memo is released when the day before Benjamin Netanyahu visits the United States of America for the third time in six months, July.
As resident of the United States, we have Benjamin Netanyahu, who by Trump's own account attacked Iran by the U.S. green light, where U.S. diplomacy was used as a ruse in order for the Israelis to conduct a military operation.
We have United States military assets that were used to bomb Iran, which is, I mean, gotta be one of the like, again, like you said, you had a presidential campaign where, yes, Trump would always say, we cannot let Iran have a nuclear bomb.
And I know this, and maybe I was too close to it.
I knew many of the people involved, like in the actual decision making, and I know that they have ridiculed people who have, quote, wanted to bomb Iran for years.
So then to watch that all just flip around, and now President Trump is the greatest deal maker and strength artist of all time when you would have ridiculed this level of logic long before.
And we have all of this reporting that actually it's like, actually, the nuclear program really wasn't destroyed.
And the reason that you could look at that is that the Israelis are leaking it, right?
You know, Joe, if you want to pull that up, Israel intelligence says Iran nuclear facility not destroyed.
This is from the New York Times a couple of days ago.
Oh my God.
And so look, like, so now there's a reason to continue.
Now we got to continue, right?
And it's like, oh, but I was told that the 12-day war was the only time it was ever going to happen.
Well, you guys, do you guys want to do some history?
All right.
So in 1981, Israel took out the Iraqi nuclear reactor.
They bombed it.
And they said, we have solved the Iraqi nuclear program question for all time.
What did we end up invading Iraq for?
Mark?
For WMDs, right?
And what actually happened as a result of that is that the nuclear program was driven underground.
And Saddam actually was more convinced than ever that he needed to acquire nuclear weapons to the point where he almost tried to create an image where he was having nukes, which caused the United States to invade him in 2003.
In 2007, Israel did what?
It struck the Syrian reactor and the nuclear program.
And the decision point beyond that was: listen, it's just about the nukes.
It's not about regime change.
Does anyone want to tell me what happened to the Syrian regime?
It was replaced by whom?
Al-Qaeda.
On behalf of whom?
Israel.
All right.
Israel literally supported the Syrian jihadist government.
And ironically, today, they're actually bombing them because now the al-Qaeda government is acting like al-Qaeda and persecuting and persecuting religious Druze minorities in the country.
And by the way, their justification, the Israelis, for bombing them, is that Syria has moved across the new border that Israel has declared for itself by seizing parts of Syria.
Now, we are supporting Ukraine for what?
Because Russia invaded them.
What is a seizure of territory as a result of a regime change operation in Syria?
Is that a violation of norms?
Rules of the rules-based international order and the way that a civilized nation would conduct itself for a Western nation?
I think the concern here is really like: if you are an autonomous nation, you got to handle your candle.
So, if you want to do all this stuff in the Middle East, that's on you.
Yeah, but you bear the consequences.
And exactly, it seems like you pay for it.
It seems like we bear the consequences.
I think that's like an important fracture right here.
If Israel's like, all right, we're going to go about it alone, and this is what we think is best for our safety.
It's like, okay, well, you can go do that.
The problem is every time they're about to go about it alone, they say we'll go about it alone.
I think we get a phone call a few hours later, and it seems like we go back it up.
And you can really do whatever you want in the world with impunity if America has your back no matter what.
And I think that's the kind of imbalance of power right there.
And it definitely feels like there's an imbalance in terms of the relationship in terms of what we're offering each other.
And now we're in a circumstance where, like, the war, you know, against Hamas has gone two years.
And you look at them, and Americans are starting to go, like, what?
It's really kind of destroyed.
I feel like you did it.
Kind of.
Like, yeah, it's destroyed.
And then there's all these people that, and I think Americans are starting to be like, okay, so we're paying for this.
I can't buy an apartment.
I can't buy a house.
I got $300,000 worth of school loans, but we're still selling billions of dollars over here.
And you can't begrudge Americans for starting to feel like there's an imbalance in this relationship.
Not even begrudge.
I mean, I mean, honestly, America, like, it's been this way for years.
But I think that's the thing.
But I think the important thing to understand is it's not saying that an independent country can't go do what it needs for its salvation.
You just have to bear the consequences for those actions.
And I think Americans are starting to feel like we bear the consequences, at least financially right now.
And if we end up in some sort of ground invasion in Iran, we will bear the consequences.
There's no question.
What?
A nation of what?
I forget the population of the US.
90 million or something like that.
They're going to be able to invade a country of 90%.
90 million.
By the way, yes, I do know the population of Iran.
We all know.
Yeah, Tucker.
Thank you, Dr. Carlson.
But, you know, look, let's really dwell on this.
Like, yes, what's happening in Gaza is being funded by the United States of America.
And, you know, there's a large constituency here in America that says that's necessary for Israel to take out terrorism, whatever the hell that means.
Apparently, it requires killing at the minimum of like 17,000 children.
I personally don't think civilized Western nations conduct themselves in that manner.
And everyone's like, well, what would you do?
And I was like, America has the template, guys.
Look, I will not defend the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Do you know how many thousands of American service members died and were wounded in missions to protect Iraqi civilians?
Ground.
That was on the ground.
Boots on the ground.
Boots on the ground.
American service members are maimed and were blown up to protect Iraqi civilians from an intra-civil war.
This is a really counter-terrorism operation.
I think the point that you're making is really important.
Yes.
Right.
Is that in an effort, I imagine, to save Israeli lives, which I do empathize with because I want to save American lives.
What they're doing is conducting war that would save the most Israeli lives, but unfortunately kills the most Palestinian lives.
Yeah, that's right.
And what you're innocent Palestinian life.
And then what you're making the argument is in Iraq, instead of us doing that, which we could have absolutely just easy.
We had the greatest bomb.
Who do you think sells all these bombs to Israel?
Where's it coming from?
We made a decision to do that boots on the ground, which cost American lives.
This was deeply regrettable.
I don't want a single American life.
Me neither.
But I think that is where we can put ourselves in a position of criticism for the way the war is being waged because we have been in that circumstance.
Twice.
And I think that's a good one, Danny said.
It's a really good argument.
That is what war is.
You have to sacrifice.
Well, okay, no, no.
But I think there's two types of war.
So this is the thing.
They said it's to get rid of Hamas.
And in that way, we are not at war with the Palestinian people.
We are at war with Hamas.
So how would you conduct that war?
We have an entire 20 years of experience, the United States military, where what we do is we want to separate the terrorists from the civilian population.
So we make sure that the civilians are protected.
Soldiers are put in harm's way in order to separate those two and to be able to kill them.
It requires a shitload of city combat.
It's brutal.
It's very difficult.
It's bloody.
Ask the Navy SEALs.
Ask the Marines, all the people who had to participate.
But it was semi-successful, at least in 2009 in the surge.
It reduced the amount of civilian casualties as a result of the Iraqi civil war.
But the other way to fight is when you're at war with the population and you want complete and total destruction.
Yeah.
That's when you fight like the United States on Japan in 1945.
And I agree with you.
And what's more analogous to what were happening?
So we can look at the intention.
No, no, no.
All I'm saying is, Akash, it's the intention and the words matter.
And the intention is obvious that they are actually at war with the population themselves, right?
Not just Hamas the terrorists.
Not just Hamas the Terrorism.
And I think that's a very important point for people to digest.
And I have to look at the conduct.
That's the piece that I agree with you that Americans feel like we're bearing the brunt and all that.
But also, when we invade, we are usually told, or when we aid a country in war, we are always told we are on the moral high ground.
Yeah, that's right.
With Ukraine, Russia is invading Ukraine, this country that cannot defend itself.
That's why we have to send it.
Now we're looking and we're seeing who we're supporting.
Right.
And we don't have a moral high ground.
They don't have a moral high ground.
And yet we keep supporting them.
So I agree with you that we feel like, why are we bearing the brunt of this and we don't have jobs?
But also, morally, we don't even have a high ground.
So why are we supporting Hamas has a high ground either?
No, of course not.
The way Israel is flattening Gaza, we don't have a moral high ground with the way they aren't doing it.
If there were boots on the ground and they're losing civilians, okay, maybe.
And Hamas is doing exercise.
This is why, as America, I actually think we should not talk about moral high ground.
I know this.
And we have no guys, every time.
Let's look at the history of U.S. moral interventions.
Serbia, disaster.
Oh, my God.
Kosovo, disaster.
2003 goes without saying.
Yeah.
I mean, I can go on forever.
Like Libya.
I don't think Afghanistan.
I don't think we do it with the moral high ground.
I think the perception we are sold is a moral high ground.
And now we're just seeing.
We're talking about the story.
Yeah.
I actually, that's why when I argue with liberals, I always tell them, I go, look, guys, I don't think you're doing anybody any good here using words like genocide or anything.
It's not because I don't disagree with you per se.
It's just that when you couch, for example, when, and I talked about this last year.
It's a debate that comes about the death.
It's humanitarianism and genocide.
And it's like, no, we're not talking about that.
We're talking about America's national interests.
Yeah, we're talking about it.
Is this good for us or not?
Mark and I were talking about that.
Where it's just like, now there's this debate on whether or not it's genocide.
It's like, whatever right below genocide is, it's really bad, too.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah.
Mass murder.
And Mark is like, it's like someone says, I'm not a pedophile.
I just like 16 year olds.
Yeah, that's right.
So it's like, isn't there a term for that?
It's like a gueliophile.
Yeah, it's a whole pedophile.
That's what it is.
There's one term.
It's just pedophilia.
Yeah, exactly.
But my point beyond that is like, look, let's define things in terms of America's national interests.
The Never Trump Grift00:15:30
What good are we getting from this?
We're bombing Iran.
We had a terror.
Do you guys remember the terror alerts in the mid-2000s?
Yeah.
Do you guys remember that?
Whenever the Iran thing happened, they literally sent out a terror alert across the whole country and they warned Americans living abroad to expect retaliatory attacks.
That's America, our country.
We are being felt the pain here.
It's just a Qatari asset, bro.
Yeah, of course.
But you know what's funny?
The Qatari government hates me because I lived in Qatar.
I went to high school there.
And I hated it so much that I've talked for years about the mistreatment.
Disclosing, just kind of invested.
Disclosure.
Okay.
No, but I just say it like because it's, you know, it's about being foreign, some form of foreign asset or whatever.
Why can't we all just be people talking in our own national interest?
And I think the reason that they throw out anti-Semite and race, whatever on all of this is specifically to shut down this conversation.
And the best thing that's ever happened is that we're all here.
But we can just talk honestly.
It's really unfortunate because I think that it's almost like a permission slip for anti-Semitism in a way.
Oh, you're a lot of real increased real anti-Semitism.
Yes, but not even whether it's increased or not.
There like are a lot of real anti-Semites out there.
That's true.
And then when you throw the term around when you're criticizing a sovereign nation, it gets lumped in with the people who actually do hate people because of their religion and ethnicity.
And that's the problem I have.
Like, I always say this all the time, like, everybody thinks I'm Jewish.
So I get all the anti-Semitism.
It exists.
Like, you guys might not hear it.
I get it.
I see it.
So it's like, you can't just throw that term around so flippantly because then nobody will take it.
It's a boy cracked wolf.
Nobody will take it seriously when it actually does happen.
And it does happen.
And it is a real fucking problem.
And I'm very concerned about like Jews in America who aren't dealing with it.
And they're concerned.
So it's, we got to be very specific.
Like the green black guys throwing it around.
He's calling the pod save American guys anti-Semites.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Right.
It's crazy, guys.
I think they also dismissed Elon's salute as well.
I think the ADL was like, yeah, they did.
Yeah, that's right.
They actually did.
The ADL, which, you know, look, I mean, we could argue about that all day long, but the ADL is basically an arm for Israel.
And this gets to the problem that I have with this whole like anti-Semitism industrial complex is they've conflated criticism of this foreign government with genuine anti-Semitism, which is the worst thing that you could possibly do for anti-Semitism itself because the term loses all meaning.
And look at the, look, Zoran, if we want to talk about, I mean, you know, they blasted this guy, anti-Semite.
We're in the most Jewish city in the world, except for Tel Aviv.
Right.
And he just won the Democratic primary and actually a lot of Jewish votes.
That should tell you something, guys.
That should show that these attacks don't work.
But the thing is, unfortunately, in Washington, they still work.
It's the worst possible thing that you could be called because of the way, look, it's ideology and it's money, and they're mutually reinforcing.
So for example, I, and I talked about this on Tucker, you were talking talking to me about it.
I don't get invited to all the things I used to get invited to.
And that sounds really silly, but that's the currency of the town.
It's fine.
I just don't care.
I get to come here, right?
They're always asking me to connect with you.
They're like, hey, man, I think Congressman so-and-so should go on Andrew Schulz.
I'm like, I guarantee you he doesn't give a fuck.
So I'm not getting his phone over.
That's my point, though, right?
It's like, there's a nice trade-off for me, and I've chosen this.
But my point is with them, the currency of the town is one that is entirely funded by AIPAC or pro-Zionist interests.
And the thing is, the way it's so nefarious is it bleeds into everything.
And people who are working at like a tax foundation to lobby for low taxes are being funded by people who are also very pro-Israel.
So if employees there were to like, let's say, make an Instagram post about Palestine, even though it has nothing to do with taxes, they would still be fired.
They would be drummed out of the organization.
And guys, like these people don't make a ton of money, like the lower level up-and-comers.
Like when I was in my early 20s, we actually made zero money.
So it's not worth risk for them.
Of course.
I mean, listen, you got to eat.
You want to advance.
You want to be connected to get a fellowship to do whatever.
You have to fall in line, even if you don't even work on Israel or Palestine, even if it's just a tangential thing and you're like, eh, it's kind of fucked up.
This is what happened in, this is what happened in Hollywood, not specifically with Israel-Palestine.
I actually don't think at all with that.
I think more with identity politics.
Oh, absolutely.
And I think that people are just really scared that if they had a serious opinion about anything, that they would be like, you're done.
Thrown out.
They'd be, you know.
And I think now that's, we're moving away from that.
Well, I think that's why what you do is so courageous, man.
I'm like somebody who's got actually like intertwined with like the, I mean, you can say it better than me, but everything I've read, like the studio system has got to be one of the biggest bottlenecks of pop culture in the world.
Like it's literally wrong.
Got to not care.
A couple of agencies and like you know what this is like movie distributors, and you're fucked if they're supposed to be.
They still think he's Jewish, he's good, yeah.
But this is why, like, it's it's always like annoying when like people say, like, oh, you're just doing this thing for Trump or Grift.
Grifting, it's like, you don't realize yeah, the real grift is the other way, yeah.
I'm in entertainment, I'm not in politics, like in a media company, I'm in entertainment.
So, like, the idea of even having Trump on the pod, and obviously, we asked to have Kamala and everybody else, and none of them came, but like that costs us.
Oh, yeah, there's not a financial doing a hostage video for Kamal, that's a you're a grifter.
That's grifting.
That's like 1,000%, right?
Like, I get it.
Doing those things for comma, you would absolutely, and I think that people don't realize that because I think they assume you know, it's you know, politics better than anybody, it's good versus evil.
So, as long as you're on the side of good, they don't see it as grift.
Oh, yeah, right.
So, that there, there's all these people that are grifting off Trump absolutely happens.
And then there's people grifting against Trump.
The Never Trump thing is a grift as well.
Look it up, but also look up the pedophilia stuff with the Lincoln Project.
I'm just throwing that out there.
People want to cut into that.
Now, I want to look into it.
But I guess what I'm saying is, like, the idea that, like, in order to, in order to grift, you have to be like financially satisfied, I imagine, by that thing.
And in the entertainment industry, the industry that we exist in, you're putting yourself in harm's way by doing wars.
So, I don't even like, for example, like, just, I mean, I had flat out the Netflix people saying, and who fucking knows, but like, you know, I'm up for consideration or whatever for an Emmy for life.
And I just had people tell me straight up.
They're like, listen, dude, like, you had Trump on the pod.
Like, there's no way that they're going to give you.
And it is the best hour comedy that was put out.
It should win.
It just is.
You know what I mean?
Like, no disrespect to anybody's there, but it's not as good.
Right.
And it's, but so, and if you want to judge it by any metric, you want to judge it by views, it has more views.
If you want to judge it by like impact, you want to judge it by kind of, in my personal opinion, obviously.
But like, that's the cost of it.
So I think that's the frustrating thing I would imagine for all of us when we're like, no, no, no, we're actually curious about talking to these people and having these conversations.
And we understand the cost of doing it.
And we're willing to take on that cost.
There is no risk when you're the anti-Trump grift and you just do all these things.
You virtue signal.
You say, I told you so to us for criticizing Trump.
It's like, if you actually cared, you would be worried about the midterms and worried about the elections and you would see people that were disillusioned by Trump not living up to his promises.
If you actually cared and you'd be like, hey, here's an opportunity to bring people into a coalition and in a democracy, gain more votes and potentially win.
Yeah, but you're presuming that they care about those.
And actually, that's my point.
They don't care.
They want clicks and views.
They are the exact thing that they're accusing us, but they are so caught up in their own hubris that they don't realize it.
And you sit back here and you rely and I watch it and I kind of just laugh at it.
But people take it serious.
They look at these people and I think it just makes them feel good in the moment.
And they can't disassociate that to like what might be better for the country.
Yeah, absolutely.
And look, I mean, something I've always appreciated about this pod is like, we just talk, right?
We can talk to anybody.
And I've known you long enough to know when you were a Bernie guy, right?
And I always felt like...
You're still a Bernie guy.
Yeah, I know that.
That's why people were so shocked to see you come around.
And I was like, guys, you just don't know Andrew, right?
But it's one of those things where because I've been able to get to know all of you and, you know, the whole comedy scene or whatever, when people ask about podcast bros and MAGA, I actually think it's you're very representative of the audience and you're turn against people who it seems were like fighting for the system and to the extent that there was an appeal of Trump.
And that's why it explains for somebody who could vote for Trump and also be like, yeah, Mamdani seems America first to me.
And it's because the horseshoe is in New York first by New York first by inflated in Newspaper.
But the horseshoe there is about talking about the country or the city that we're living in as opposed to these more establishment interests that you were elected to fight against in Trump's case.
But that's the appeal.
And somebody was like, oh, you speak to MAGA, right?
And I was like, no, I actually don't.
I was like, to the extent I have any authority, it's with 18 to 35 year olds who are interested in politics, the vast majority of whom are pretty bipartisan.
A lot voted for Trump.
Yeah, but like those common people are actually very independent.
They do go along with trends and other things.
And the most important thing is they both think for themselves.
Yeah, they're not in a cult.
And they are not in a cult.
Everybody's captured.
Not everybody.
There are very loud people that are captured by the cults.
And the cults are rewarded online with the algorithms.
Yes.
So there's the views and there's the clicks and there's the pats on the back and there's the yes queens in the comments.
But in reality, it's not representative of actual people.
So when the actual people see people having common sense conversations, which I hope that we have on this podcast, you know, I mean, today, right now, we had the pod save guys on the pod.
Nice.
Do you know what I mean?
And like, what's so interesting is like their criticism was the exact same thing that I was saying.
They immediately were like, this reaction that I told you so is like typical fucking liberal dumb shit where it's just like, we have an opportunity to use this frustration to win, but these people don't care about winning.
So they're acknowledging the grift as well.
And these are the most liberal guys you can imagine.
Well, we know why that they say that because they actually won an election.
They know how to win a fucking election.
They work for Barack Obama.
Barack Obama.
I mean, do you guys remember the state of Ohio?
He won that state.
He won Indiana.
That's insane.
And MAGA does it so well bringing people in.
Like, you've seen people go to the protests, like where they pretend to fake protests on the other side.
So like liberals will go to the MAGA side.
And then all the MAGA people are like, yeah, come over.
Yeah.
They're like, hey, come on in.
But my point actually is the way that that was sold.
But now that people like you are beginning to speak out, people like me and others, oh, it's like you are fake or, you know, you're not trusting the plan enough.
And it's like, I would argue that the least patriotic thing you could do is actually trust the government.
I would actually argue also in the case of when you support a political movement is that the least impactful thing you could do is trust the plan.
And because the people who don't trust the plan, they get shit done.
You think Israel trusted the plan?
No.
When we were trying to do diplomacy, they were like, no, we're fucking bombing Iran.
Okay.
And you're coming in with us.
Yeah, exactly.
They always win.
And that's the thing.
And I promise you, I don't promise you, but I would imagine in the next week or two, we will get some disclosure about the Epstein files that we were not going to get.
Right.
And the reason we got that is because there are people speaking out.
There's a reason why the White House responded to us.
Yeah, that's right.
The people are speaking out.
It's not just us, but it's a lot of people speaking out about our frustrations.
And whether you like this or not, the White House, the current administration is very transactional.
If they feel that people are becoming disillusioned, they acknowledge it immediately.
So if you do not voice these things, you do not get what the fuck you want.
It's like, and what do you actually want?
At the end of the day, what do you want?
Do you want to feel good in the moment?
Do you want to get your little clicks and views, make your little face-to-camera videos?
Or do you want to actually have some form of justice for a thousand girls that were victimized according to the government?
According to our U.S. Attorney General, a thousand that were victimized, right?
What do you actually want?
Because I'm glad you feel good with your pats on the back.
To me, it'd be pretty good to know if a thousand girls gets a little bit of justice.
That would make me feel pretty good.
Yeah, it should.
So before we leave, can I ask what is Trump's game with the Epstein files?
Why would he, while he's president, get, you know, Epstein is arrested, killed, slash dies, and then runs on releasing the files, does the fake sort of kangaroo release, and then now says that he was not working with any other conspirators.
There's only two possible theories, which I was not that open to this one, which was that Trump is implicated in until the more recent statements.
Why are my boys and gals like paying attention to all this?
You guys all need to move on.
Or on camera where he's like, are you really still asking about Jeffrey Epstein?
By the way, the day after he put out that true social, he was tweeting about revoking Rosie O'Donnell's citizenship.
That's funny.
So it's no, I mean, it's funny, but he's like, you guys are focused on Epstein when there's all this other stuff happening.
It's like, bro, you're literally tweeting about Rosie O'Donnell's getting denaturalized as a citizen.
But that's one theory is that, look, I mean, I read you guys the post.
He likes him young.
He said that in 2002.
He said it.
So maybe he knew something.
We're six months in.
Yeah.
How do you feel?
What's the job?
Wait, wait, sorry.
Oh, no, sorry.
I need to give the second.
Oh, yeah.
That was the first theory, which I did not give credence to.
Also, Tucker made a good point.
He's like, wouldn't have the Biden administration released it?
I was like, well, I thought that they would have, but listen, what if they want to prick Bill Clinton or all this other stuff?
So you can't release one.
Right.
And you have to release it.
Because what would the Biden administration do?
They'd release one person, Trump, and then nobody else.
That would make a lot of sense.
And then we'd be like, according to Trump, Obama created the files.
And Hillary made the files about Clinton.
The second is that it would be devastating to our relationship with Israel, or it was at a request of Israel, or it'd be devastating to our relationship.
If the CIA is that to be exposed, I mean, for example, everybody knows the CIA killed Kennedy.
Why has the CIA fought the release of these documents for 60 years?
Because they did.
I'm sorry.
Okay.
I did.
Okay.
Again, let me be more precise in my language.
I think that they were aware of and participated at least in some form in the plot that killed Kennedy.
I'll put more than that.
Not the kill, at the very least, involved in the plot.
And of course, in the cover-up.
That's like actually not a question.
So why did they do that?
Because they knew that it would break the American public's irrevocable trust in the way that they conduct business.
And that's why they fought for years to make sure that it didn't happen or to release the documents.
I think it's the same here in this case.
It's like, look, what we have is so bad to, you know, to the CIA, to the FBI, to Mossad, to Saudi, to all these governments, and to the Israeli prime ministers and others that it would just be so revelatory of the way that we conduct business.
It would make it impossible for us to continue business as usual.
And, sir, business as usual is so important that we just have to release all of this stuff.
And that's how the pressure comes down on Kash Patel, on Dan Bongino, on the Attorney General.
And yeah, I mean, it leads to them saying, Cash literally said in 2023, the Epstein files are under the direct control of the FBI director.
He became the FBI director.
And now he's like, it was all a conspiracy theory.
He literally said that.
The conspiracy theories were never true.
The conspiracy theories you invented, man.
So you were either lying then or you're lying now.
Bongino.
I mean, I have the clips that people can play if they want to of this stuff.
We can never let up on this story.
We can never let go.
Attorney General Pam Bondi from the White House lawn, which means to me used to mean something.
Chaos in Defense Policy00:07:20
I have the client list on my desk.
There are thousands of victims.
They're all the files.
We're ready to release them.
And then, you know, Akash, I think you said this.
You're like, either it was all a lie or you exploited the of thousands of children to get elected.
That's pretty fucked up.
So there's no good answer here.
Personally, I lean to the latter.
I think it's an intelligence thing.
And perhaps it has a crossover with Trump himself, which I did not believe until very recently.
When you say intelligence thing, and this seems more realistic to me, not that the intelligence has devised this blackmail scheme.
Yeah, exactly.
As I laid out for the multiple hours.
But he was potentially an asset to multiple intelligence agencies, and they looked the other way at his sexual deviant behavior.
And then started to cover it up with the non-prosecution agreement.
Exactly.
And that's the complicity.
That's the smoking gun.
And that's why it still remains.
I mean, look, even the Justice Department admitted that was a bad deal.
We never should have done it.
And you know what the irony is?
It's the Justice Department themselves, Maine Justice, the Washington, D.C. They're the ones who told Acosta to do the non-prosecution agreement.
But then they turn around and they blame Acosta.
And so he'd come.
Yeah, that's, I almost feel bad for the guy, you know, in a way, because he probably looks like he was just doing what he was told.
Yeah.
And he probably wanted to continue the investigation.
I mean, I don't know.
I mean, he still signed it.
Yeah, I agree.
He was complicit and he lived with it.
And he got rewarded for it.
He was the labor secretary for like a day.
No, for a while, 2017 to 2019.
Oh, he reigned for over two years.
And then they got the Patsy.
They were like, hey, you got to go.
Somebody got to go.
Somebody's got to go down for this.
And he resigned.
I think he's, you know, very rich and probably works in finance or whatever now.
But my point is just that it goes up high.
And unfortunately, like, we don't even really know how high.
And what's left to be released is still just an immense amount of documentation, which, no, we don't have a right to have it, like a theoretical right, but we almost have like a promise here from the campaign, from the president, that they would release everything.
They would declassify everything.
And they have immediately turned their back on that.
I got to use a bad word.
We're six months in.
Give me your grade on Trump.
The good, the bad.
What's his report, Gargret?
Well, you know, I'm actually not important in this.
Just like, let's look at the issues for things that I think he was elected on.
I think he was elected on two issues.
Three primarily.
Number one is the economy because inflation was high.
Inflation report came out today.
It's actually increased 2.7% since June.
A lot of that is, in my opinion, because of the incompetent way that they've rolled out the tariffs.
It actually makes me really upset.
I'm really pro-tariff, but the idea of tariff strategic tariffs.
I think the way that this has been done has been, frankly, a disaster.
The only reason that it didn't crash the economy is because he rolled them all back and said we're going to do a 90-day pause or whatever.
But creating chaos in people's lives and fucking with people's businesses is terrible.
Mark and I are new parents.
Do you remember the stroller problem about how over 90% of strollers and car seats come from China?
Well, you know, the UPA Baby stroller that like everyone in New York has that went up by hundreds of dollars as a result of the tariffs.
Sorry, I think that's wrong.
I think the car seats have become more expensive.
It's like you were elected to make life better for people.
That's a pretty material way.
Actually, the Trump directly impacted me and all other new parents here in the United States.
So that's where something I think creating that chaos economically has been a problem.
On the bill, it's the bill, philosophically to me, I just think really comes away from a lot of the Trump promise.
And I think I heard you talking about the bill.
I mean, let's just look at the math, right?
Like they are like, oh, well, we're going to cut spending.
And it's like, well, okay, but you increase the defense budget by $150 billion, right?
By the way, Doge never looked at the DOD.
What happened there?
You know, like, whoa, where, where are you, Doge?
Why did we fire like somebody in the National Weather Service and not someone in the Pentagon who can't pass an audit for five years in a row?
And so, you know, these are this is talk and it was cheap, in my opinion.
Like, they increased the defense budget and instead, you know, they put work requirements in Medicaid and in food stamps.
I'm not necessarily against work requirements per se, but really what bothered me was the way they were increasing the dollar shift to the states.
This is really wonky.
I apologize to everyone, but the end result is that more people could probably lose healthcare and/or food stamps.
Again, we can have a conversation about welfare and food stamps and all that, but it was the priority of increasing the defense budget, of extending the tax cuts, which are pretty overwhelmingly good for the top 20 people.
How many people overseas, it seems expensive.
Exactly.
So helping people overseas, and you got people who are at least precarious, you know, in terms of that.
So I think that the bill was a big miss in my opinion.
On the simple promise of making America great again, it seems life for most Americans is not as I think that the fundamentals still remain the same.
And that's the problem is I don't see a concrete way to fix that.
So yesterday, a report came out from the National Association of Realtors that the average first-time homebuyer in the United States is now 38 years old.
He used to be 27.
And look, Trump can't just wave a magic wand and fix that.
To the extent that he can do anything, it's to fire the Fed chair.
And I guess, you know, let's give him credit.
He's trying to drive.
But my point is just that the GOP as a whole and that bill did not seem laser focused, you know, on those problems.
So I would say I don't think it's gone very well.
Then, you know, on immigration, I mean, look, it's controversial.
I wait for Andrew.
I would say, of all the things that he quote promised to do, that's the one where he really has, you know, I think he's delivered.
The problem, in my opinion, is like the way the administration decides to conduct itself is kind of like an Iraq, like shock and awe approach where you come in with these big operations.
Now, I will explain the logic.
The logic is because there's 30 million people here, probably, who are illegal.
Deporting them all, even with billions of dollars, is like probably impossible.
So, you want to stage these like large-scale things to get people to self-deport.
And then, about a million people or so, according to the administration, has left.
We don't have a way of checking those numbers, which is why it's kind of difficult.
But I would put it all together and I would say that the story to me is just chaos.
It's like one that flips back and forth.
We have Doge, which is in power, Elon's the co-president, then he leaves, right?
And now he's talking about Epstein files and the America Party.
And then we bomb Iran very shortly afterwards.
We said we weren't going to do that.
And then we had the tariff brouhaha, like in between.
It doesn't feel as if there's like a steady hand on the wheel chaotically.
I mean, and I would apply that to immigration as well.
The biggest criticism Americans have right now about the immigration policy is not even necessarily deportation, it's the chaotic way that they feel it's being handled.
And if you think about it, it makes a lot of sense.
Like, why were people so mad at Biden over the border?
Because of the chaos at the border.
And let's give Trump credit.
He did fix that.
There's zero illegal crossings.
Fine.
But the point is now they look at the raids themselves and the way they're conducted and kind of like blown up by the White House as chaotic, right?
And I think that when you put that together with the way that the tariff policy, the immigration policy, and even the war policy, I mean, we were negotiating with Iran and then we weren't negotiating with Iran.
We berated Zelensky in the Oval Office and told him he didn't have the cards and we're giving him more weapons.
It doesn't make any fucking sense.
And then the Epstein thing is, well, you run on it, you say you have it, now you say you don't have it.
Republican Party Free Speech00:08:27
It screams like chaos and kind of incompetence.
And I can see why a lot of people are moving against it.
So that's like my wholesome tool.
What grade would you give up?
That's me all bet.
Me personally?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I would go issue by issue.
So like on foreign policy, I genuinely would give an F just in terms of Ukraine and Israel.
On immigration, considering what he ran on, I would probably give him like a B just because on the merits, I think he actually is doing almost every single thing that he said he would do.
If anything, I would say, my criticism, I mean, to be open about it, I'm very pro-mass deportation, but my criticism of it is that it seems like in many cases, they went more for the show as opposed to like the policy.
And I think that's the problem.
So that's like my personal target.
And also, the reason I will not give it an A is because a huge portion of the immigration machine was used to go after these like pro-Palestine students for speaking out against Israel.
I'm like, yo, fuck that.
Sorry.
Okay.
That's like a total, not only a free speech concern.
It's like, why are you using the resources of my government to deport critics of another country?
What?
People who are here legally?
This is the least of our problems.
All right.
But let's put that to the side.
So on the economy, yeah, I mean, look, this isn't me speaking.
Like, people know I'm like, I'm pretty out of step with like the trickle-down GOP, but like, I don't know.
I think the Big Beautiful bill was a, it was a disaster.
Like, only not only in terms of its unpopularity, but it didn't, you know, invest in all the things.
It didn't invest in making America better, like as a country.
There's no massive expansion of manufacturing tax credits.
There's no like ability to compete and deal with China.
It was really just kind of like a personal tax extension for the rich, more corporate tax extension for business as usual.
That just, I think, business as usual is what he was elected to like go against.
So, for me, it's like a C.
So, here's so you can average all that together.
I don't know what that is.
Here's my question: FA plus C.
Yeah, so where does the conservative party go from here?
We asked after the election, where does the liberal, where does the Democratic Party go?
The Conservative Party, what are y'all going to do now?
Well, what do you mean, Conservative Party?
Like the Republican Party, the Conservative, the Republican.
All right, the Republican Party, where do they go from here?
What's the difference?
Uh, conservative is an ideology, Republican is a party.
So, the conservative, so to be conservative is it's that's a big yeah, I thought that's more of a metacognitive.
So, where does it conservative or no?
In many cases, MAGA is not conservative, actually.
Most MAGA voters are on Medicaid and they don't want it to be cut, so they don't care about entitlement spending.
That's a non-conservative position, right?
But it's conservative to cut government spending.
So, those are kind of a direct tension.
You know, we could, I could talk forever about this.
It's a very intro-Washington kind of conversation, like what it means to be conservative and kind of what it means to be a Republican.
And Trump, in my opinion, the reason why he was able to succeed is because he wasn't conservative.
And he even said that.
He said, I'm not a conservative whenever he was running in the 2016 primary.
He is originally, at least to me, was more what I would call a rightist, like more somebody like the European right, a culture warrior who kind of accepts the legitimacy of the social welfare state and has more populist policies.
But that's not conservative, right?
That's it's very, very different.
I know this is semantics, but like it's important to like analyze like what we mean.
So, what happens to, I think, what you're trying to say is the Republican Party.
Yeah, the Republican Party, I mean, look, they still have a lot of choices.
You got three and a half more years to go.
Like, that's a long ass time.
Like, who knows?
All of this could be ancient news.
I don't think so.
I think, in general, if you look at the history of presidencies, you're basically baked by 100 days.
They wasted their whole hundred days on Doge, in my opinion, which was a disaster at this point.
I think we could fairly say.
And then they did the tax cut or the tax bill, which exploded the deficit, increased defense spending by 150 billion.
Yeah, the next hundred days better.
You know, then they did Israel, the Iran thing.
Now they're doing Ukraine.
Who knows what's going to happen with that?
I skipped over the tariffs, which I talked earlier, which were bad for the public and have not been handled competently, really, at all.
So, for them, I mean, their problem is that they're in a cult of personality.
Like, they're locked into Trump himself as an action.
And the biggest problem for them is when John McCain lost, he was like, Okay, it's your, you guys do what you want.
When Bush left, he was like, I'm out, right?
They fuck off.
And with Trump, like, do you guys ever see him not trying to guide the Republican Party?
He would never allow a post-mortem.
When Romney lost, right?
The entire Republican Party had to have a conversation: who are we?
What do we stand for?
And the conclusion was not that bullshit, not Romney, right?
That's not going to stand with the Trump Party, right?
So I think that they have a lot of issues like structurally for where they want to go.
In my opinion, they won the popular vote for the first time in 2004, since 2004 for Republican.
They flipped all kinds of crazy states because of the economy and really because of immigration.
And if they don't find a way to flip their numbers on both of those, and especially if the American way of life does not get materially better at a structural level, I think they're going to lose.
And I think they deserve to lose if that's what happens.
If that age for a first-time homebuyer goes from 38 from today to like 42, and if the home prices continue to go up and the supply continues to go down, if we don't, if we see wages stagnant, if we don't see like real material changes to the way people live, I just think, yeah, I think that the Republicans will lose.
And we always live in a change election.
I don't want to divert from this too much.
I know that we probably got to wrap up soon because we got to do something.
Yes.
So just real quick, obviously, you know, we're in New York City right now, greatest city in the world.
Yes, sir.
And there's an interesting Mayor election coming up.
What are your thoughts on the cultural circumstances that have happened that have propelled Momdani to superstardom and a primary victory?
Mamdani is a, is a, is, there's this phrase from back in the day, and it's a vindicating phrase to me.
It was all politics is local.
That was what they used to say back in the day.
In 2010, it actually flipped because there were all of these Democrats who lived in Republican areas and they just got blown out, even though they lived there for 20 years because they're like, you support Obama.
And Republicans are like, oh, I can't deal with that.
You know, he supports Obama.
Mamdani was a return, right?
Because what his opponents did is they made their entire campaign against him about Israel.
And he's like, no, guys, I'm talking about New York City.
I'm talking about the halal carts.
I'm talking about rent is too damn high.
And what I really love about that is it subverts all of this like national political rhetoric, DEI style language.
And it brings us back to what are you going to do about New York, dude?
Which is what people need when they're suffering.
That's what people need.
Exactly.
And that this city, you know, people have made a lot about like, oh, Mamdani won the rich people making 100 grand.
I'm like, bro, New York, 100 grand, you're like rent poor.
You know what I'm saying?
Like, damn.
You're like, you're poor as shit, actually.
Like, like on a bed, like you're legitimately eligible for the housing line.
No, like guys making 50K in Iowa are way richer than who are making 100, like 100.
Post-tax, post-state, local, federal.
100K in New York?
Like, I'm like, you're not.
Yeah.
It's like, bro, you got multiple roommates.
Okay.
You're like living in a three-bed if you're like 25 and I don't know, the East Alphabet City or something like that.
So let's recalibrate for New York expectations.
That's a good thing.
My favorite videos that he would do is like the halal cart video.
You know, hey guys, like halal is too expensive.
Let's make it eight bucks again.
I loved whenever he walked across Manhattan.
And the thing is, what he was able to do, he'd be like, no, you're obsessed about Israel.
Yeah.
You guys are the, I'm not spending all my time talking about this.
I would stay here in New York and hear all my policies to try and change that.
Fantastic.
And if you've lived under Bloomberg, I mean, my criticism of this city is that they unfortunately kind of turned it into a playground of the rich as opposed to a place that people lived.
You know, when the stuff I would read about the 1980s in New York, I'm not saying it didn't exist.
It always has been a playground for the rich.
It definitely has, but it has become the capital of the global financial elite for a certain, you know, I mean, when I walk around here, though.
Yeah, but I mean, I don't know.
I mean, when you walk around, there was 60% of the people.
You barely even hear English on the streets here in the summer, right?
Half these people, they're from fucking Saudi Arabia, Germany, like all over the world.
I don't know about that.
I think you're describing London.
Breaking Points of Debt00:07:29
But in terms of, I think that the difference now is that like everybody always came here for opportunity, right?
That doesn't matter.
If you're an immigrant, you came here for opportunity.
If you're from America and you moved here from like Wisconsin or Maine, you came here from opportunity.
You're thinking of work at a big fund.
You're thinking to be a graphic designer.
You're thinking to be a fashion designer, something.
It's always opportunity.
And I think that what's happening now is that kids or Gen Z feels like the only way to make it now is through TikTok.
And I don't begrudge them because when we were coming up, at least in entertainment, there was like Comedy Central and TV.
There are these things that you could get on that made it feel accessible.
And even if it wasn't accessible for you, there was this idea that like next year they're going to do an audition and maybe I'll get that, right?
This idea of like getting on SNL, all these different things were possible.
And one of the nice things about the, you know, decentralization of entertainment and making it go on the internet is that it gave freedom for people like us who wanted to go after it and make it ourselves.
The problem is not everybody wants to go after it and make it themselves.
They want institutions and structures that are established that they can hope to get accepted by and put on.
And now that those have fallen apart, and that's just in entertainment, now I think people are like, so I just got to go viral on TikTok.
And it's just like, I love that because I love the idea of like, I'm in control of my destiny.
Not everybody loves that.
And I think even the illusion of opportunity is better than luck.
Yeah, definitely.
And I think they're seeing that in not just entertainment, but you're probably seeing that in other spheres as well.
And to go back to what you're saying about like you make $100,000 a year, but you have $300,000 worth of debt.
I think that's why the rent freeze is so enticing to people.
Because if you're spending $1,700 a month, let's say on your student loans, and that's just the interest.
You're not even chipping away at them.
That's your savings.
So if you, again, take your rent from $5,000 a month and you take it down to $3,300, now you have your savings again.
And I think, in a way, the program is kind of like punishing landlords for universities charging exorbitant prices.
Yeah, that's right.
So you're just passing the buck to someone else.
And it's like landlord is a bad person, of course, because they own this property and there are shitty landlords.
I get it.
But like, I think the core of the issue is the fact that these kids are saddled with this debt with these degrees that offer them nothing in a city like New York.
And they're paralyzed with this fear that there is no opportunity for upper mobility.
That's very well said.
And what you're getting to, we'll wrap here, is like a structural issue, which is that America and our generation, I'm younger, millennial.
Like I'm 33.
And when I was coming up, it was you go to college and you will be rewarded.
And now I'm actually at the age where I get to look back at who made it and who didn't.
And I'm telling you guys, my friends with the most debt, they didn't make it.
It's fucked up.
And that, you watch the choices that people have to make.
We're going to delay having a kid.
That breaks my heart, man.
We're going to have to move wherever we, even though we want to live here, we have to go move somewhere else because we can't afford it.
Even though this is the best place to make money, right?
This is the best place for my career.
I can't have it all.
I have to make serious choices.
You can't take the risks necessary for success.
It's almost impossible to become successful without taking on immense risks.
Quite literally, when I started my business, I had $50,000 in credit card debt.
I would have been fucked if breaking points didn't work.
But, you know, I mean, I was like, you know, I'm young.
I called you before.
I was like, I was like, I think, I think it'll work.
I was like, I think so.
And, but, you know, we would have been actually hoped.
Imagine somebody with $300,000 in debt.
They're not doing that.
Exactly.
They have a job that actually pays for things and they go, I can't risk leaving wife and kids.
I mean, wife and kids is like, I think that's such a stratospheric in terms of people.
Yeah, exactly.
So, yeah, I think that that like contributes to the support from Mohamdani and specifically the demographic that seems to be really excited about what he's going to bring.
But to me, there's a little bit of this passing the buck.
It's like, okay, we have this thing we can't move, which are these loans.
So we got to move it to another area to free up some economic mobility for these people.
And I get, and if you're one of those people that's saddled with that debt, like you don't give a fuck who got to pay for it, like as long as it's not you.
So I get that.
They're offering a solution that maybe in the long term will hurt people.
And I want to talk to him about it because I want to see like how we grapple with that.
Like, you got to come on the show.
No, I've been talking.
No, I've been talking to them.
I've been talking to him.
So it looks like that's going to happen.
So, because I genuinely want to ask earnestly, like, what are the downstream effects of some of these policies and policies?
How does that work?
But there's no question that they are enticing.
And it's not to the poor.
People think that, oh, the poor love the socialists.
No, It's the middle class that are entitled in their brains to a better life that they're not having.
That this is so enticing.
They're like, wait, why am I the same economic bracket as my parents?
I was supposed to be richer lower than that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There is another.
In my opinion, you're materially much poorer than your parents.
You're way materially poorer.
Yeah.
And that's fucked up.
I think that's wrong.
And that's a systemic problem that gets to the like very structure of our economy.
I mean, one of the most important facts in the world from my friend Joe Wisenthal is that Shanghai Stock Exchange has barely grown since 2009.
But everyone in China, you are way more materially rich since 2009.
In America, the number has to go up.
Capital must return, specifically at 8% to 9%.
Our whole retirement's banked on that.
Our whole economy is banked on that.
And it doesn't matter if the shit that we own is nicer or not.
It must return.
It must have dividends.
It must have payoff.
And in Shanghai and in Beijing and all of that, they're like, oh, we don't give a fuck about that.
They're like, are we getting drone deliveries?
Are our houses nicer?
Are our electric cars the best vehicles in the world, hands down?
I'm telling you, if their ban was lifted, I would buy them tomorrow.
There is no competition.
I would throw the Tesla.
I'm getting in the Yang Wang.
Like, it's done.
BYD, let me in.
Huawei, any of these other people.
They have the best cars in the world.
It's genuinely not a question.
Not best electric, best cars in the world are in Shang or in Shanghai, Beijing.
Like the Chinese peasant is materially much better off than the United States than it was compared to 2009 than the average American from 2009 to 2025.
So let's all spend some time asking why.
And a lot of it is debt leverage projects, education being sold, badly structured debt.
I mean, the way that people are, even how do you get rich in America today?
For most people, it's like, or even really filthy rich, it's to work in hedge funds and finance and microtransactions for stuff that does not make this country better off.
If you, do you know how you get rich in China?
The government goes, you're allowed to get rich.
You can do it by building the best electric cars in the world.
Oh, the hedge fund, you're gone.
You're going to the gulag.
Actually, we don't do that here.
Right.
And I'm not advocating for that system, but in comparison to ours, it does work.
And that's a deep question that we all have to ask.
That's a strange question.
It's like, who is better off today?
I believe that the Chinese are better off as a result of their way of life, which is really fucked up because I think we have a much better, we had a path.
We didn't always used to be like this, and we could go in another direction.