MAGA Outrage Over Trump's Plan for More H-1B Visas: With Prof. Ron Hira; Latest Epstein/Israel Revelations and Newly Released Emails: With Drop Site's Murtaza Hussain
Trump's plan for more H-1B visas sparks outrage among MAGA supporters. Prof. Ron Hira discusses the controversy and explains how the H-1B visa system ultimately serves corporations and hurts workers. Then: Drop Site News journalist Murtaza Hussain breaks down the latest revelations about Jeffrey Epstein. ----------------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern on the dot every night, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, President Trump once again sparked concern and this time even outrage among his most faithful MAGA base by arguing last night that the U.S. must increase the number of H-1B visas.
Those are what enable foreign workers to work American jobs in the United States because he argued American workers lack the necessary talents to do these highly skilled jobs and only foreigners can do them.
That was followed up by a Fox News interview given by his Homeland Security Secretary, Christy Noam, in which she proudly boasted that the administration is both increasing and accelerating the issuance not only of H-1B visas, but also naturalizations, the process by which foreign nationals become American citizens.
To say that all of this contradicts the core precepts of the America First movement is to radically understate the case.
To help us understand all of the implications of these policies for the American worker and the American economy, we'll speak with an expert in exactly this area.
He's Howard University professor Ron Hira.
He's the author and editor of the book Outsourcing America and a very prolific writer on H-1B visas and other types of outsourcing of American jobs.
Then, both House Democrats and House Republicans today released numerous emails that they subpoenaed from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein, including some that explicitly mention President Trump in ways that could at least be politically embarrassing for the president, even if not incriminating.
All of this comes as Trump himself personally is acting very aggressively to try and induce or even cajole and bully House Republicans to withdraw their support for a petition that would require the Justice Department to release most of the Epstein files.
In other words, for the Trump administration to fulfill its campaign promise to do so.
We'll talk about all this with Murtaza Hussein of Dropsite News, who in addition to all of that has been reporting from a series of other previously undisclosed Epstein emails that prove how closely the convicted sex worker worked with Israeli intelligence and other high-level officials inside the Israeli government.
Reporting that has notably, yet unsurprisingly, been ignored by most of the corporate media.
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Last night, President Trump surprised many of his most faithful followers in the MAGA movement by telling Fox News' Laura Ingraham that the United States had to increase significantly the number of H-1B visas.
the visas that allow foreign nationals to come to the United States to work in jobs here on American soil, because he said when she challenged him, there's simply not enough talent among American workers in order to fulfill and perform these highly skilled jobs requiring the importation of huge numbers of foreign workers.
That was followed up by an interview given by Christy Noam, the Secretary of Homeland Security, this morning on Fox News, in which she boasted that the Trump administration is not just accelerating, but also increasing the issuance of H-1B visas and the process of naturalization, the process by which foreign nationals become American citizens.
This has been at the core of the MAGA movement and the MAGA agenda for some time prior to Trump's inauguration.
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy both argued that it was urgent that the United States government increase H-1B visas and most MAGA influencers and people with a large platform became enraged, arguing that the whole point of the MAGA movement is to provide jobs for American citizens to reindustrialize, to make sure they have livable wages, not to import foreigners onto American soil in order to do jobs that Americans are fully capable of doing.
And Trump seems to have resolved that war many months later by siding with Elon Musk, siding with Vivek Ramaswamy, siding with Silicon Valley, many of his other corporate and oligarchical donors who have very much an interest in having these foreign workers come to the United States, not because they're the only ones who can do the job, but in many cases because they do the job for far less, for lower wages.
They become dependent on the company.
They're basically like indentured servants.
There's no danger of them demanding things or unionizing.
It's very much in the interest of these large corporations, but very much not in the interest of the American worker on whom Trump built all three of his presidential campaigns, which is obviously causing a lot of consternation within the conservative movement.
And I think more broadly among people who are interested in helping the American worker.
Dr. Ron Hira is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at Howard University.
He is also a research associate with the Economic Policy Institute in Washington.
He has written very widely on exactly these topics, offshoring, high-skilled immigration, innovation, employment relations, and the decline of the middle class.
He's the author of the 2005 book, Outsourcing America, which even at 20 years old, sort of like the Israel lobby, as I always say, retains crucial insights for our current debates over H-1B visas and other types of immigration issues.
And he joins us tonight to help us work through these issues and to understand them better.
Dr. Herritz, great to see you.
Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us tonight.
Thanks for having me on, Glenn.
Absolutely.
I'm so glad to be here.
Let me just lay out, you know, one of the reasons why I always want to make sure I have experts on the topics where I feel like I have no expertise is because I understand the arguments and I don't have really enough, you know, study and enough expertise to try and help my audience resolve them.
And that's what you're here for.
So in order to do that, I just want to lay out briefly the arguments, which is on the one side, you have big corporations, big tech companies, Silicon Valley in the lead, but lots of other American corporations as well who say, look, for whatever reasons, may not be the fault of Americans, could be a failure of the educational system, training, whatever.
The fact is that there aren't enough American workers skilled and capable of performing high-level jobs.
And one of the examples Donald Trump gave was we can't take somebody off an unemployment line and put them in a factory and ask them to build missiles or batteries or other types of highly complex tasks that only highly trained people can perform.
And in the United States, the simple fact of the matter is that we don't have enough workers and we therefore have to import workers who are skilled.
On the other side, you have huge numbers of people from pretty much all walks of political life.
It really cuts across left and right who say, no, there clearly are enough American workers to do these jobs.
The problem is you have to pay them more.
They're a lot more trouble.
It's much easier for corporations to bring a bunch of people in whose whole life then depends upon that job with the corporation.
You can work them forever.
You pay them lower wages.
I presume there's a little bit of truth at least to each of those sides, but where does most of the truth reside in your view?
Well, most of the truth resides in the latter.
Most of the people who are coming in, and we have abundant facts on this, not just facts, but we know what the rules are for the program.
Most of the people who are coming in on H-1B visas have ordinary skills, skills that are abundantly available from American workers here.
And employers prefer the H-1B workers because they're both they can legally be paid less than American workers.
And secondly, they're controllable.
They're indentured to the employer.
So it's kind of a no-brainer for the employers to prefer the H-1Bs.
Having said that, the other side is correct too, that there are some very highly skilled people who do come on H-1Bs.
And so the real issue here is how do you fix the program so that most of the people coming in are actually filling genuine skills gaps, not coming in with because they're preferred, because they're cheaper and controllable.
And the larger issue too here is that it gets muddled with immigration.
The H-1B program is a guest worker program.
This is really labor policy.
It's not immigration policy, right?
You're intervening into the labor market, injecting workers here.
And you should really have a high bar to inject workers who have fewer rights, who are sort of second class in a lot of ways.
And there, the worker protections are just very weak.
Any guest worker program needs very strong worker protections.
The H-1B program has very weak worker protections.
That's why employers love it.
That's why Silicon Valley loves it.
And that's why most workers don't like it.
Yeah, I think it's an important point.
It's a little bit nuanced just in the sense that there is a need for H-1B visas where there's a very high-level or highly skilled type of position that only a certain number of people can do.
And if they happen to be to some extent in foreign countries, that's what H-1B visas were designed to facilitate.
They were supposed to be kind of the rarity or the exception.
And in a lot of ways, they become so easy to obtain fraudulently.
And it's become the rule.
I want to get into that in a second.
But before we do, I want to ask you, I think one of the reasons why people have such a hard time believing that this is really a problem, that American workers lack skills, lack the talent, as Trump called it, lack the training in order to perform jobs that we need to instead grab people from other countries, whether it be India or China or wherever, is because the United States, you know, for my whole lifetime has been renowned around the world as having the greatest educational system.
Our universities and colleges are the envy of the world.
You know, I've lived in Brazil for 20 years.
You mentioned Harvard or Yale.
And, you know, people speak with great reverence.
And obviously, as one of the richest countries in the world, we've always had a very high performing educational system as well.
And so now to suddenly hear claims by people at the highest levels of the U.S. government, including the president, he's by far not the only person who's saying this.
This has been something claimed for a long time, that for whatever reasons, we're not producing highly skilled workers, people who have the ability to compete in the modern industrial era of high-tech and other fields.
It's very difficult to understand why that would be.
Why is that?
Why is there even any non-trivial need to import foreign workers given that Americans just don't have these capabilities?
Why don't they?
Well, American workers do have those capabilities.
And I hope it's not just Harvard and Yale, but also Howard, where I am.
They're extraordinarily good American students who are graduating, and they're graduating into a terrible labor market.
So it's pretty simple to measure shortages.
Just like if you have a shortage of eggs or a shortage of gas, what happens?
Prices go up.
Same thing happens in the labor market.
And so if there were really a shortage of American workers in these even STEM fields, tech fields and whatnot, you'd see wages going through the roof.
Instead, we see wages flat or declining.
And, you know, most of the H-1B workers who are being imported are not being imported at very high wages and at very high skill levels.
They're mostly being imported at entry-level wages or junior level positions.
We're graduating record numbers of STEM workers, STEM graduates, American graduates in computer science and engineering, and they're graduating into a horrible labor market.
You can look at the unemployment rates and the like.
So this is a big myth within Washington circles and within elite circles that what the elites perceive to be the truth is not really the truth.
That the ground truth and ground reality of what most people are experiencing is very different than what's discussed in these sort of chattering class discussions.
I think it's really interesting, again, when it comes to Trump, just because the whole movement, you know, if it means anything, was supposed to mean that we're going to enact policies to serve not these large multinational corporations that don't in any way value an American worker more than a non-American worker, even though they're on American soil, they're American companies.
In fact, to some extent, for the reasons you said, they value foreign workers more than the American worker.
The whole point of the American First Movement was we're going to reverse that.
We're going to enact policies to benefit the American worker, not everyone else, at the expense of the American worker.
And Donald Trump in 2016 seemed to understand very well how the H-1B visa policy fit into that America First ideology because I think we have a, I don't want to show the one from today first, I want to show the 2016 one where he spoke out in opposition to H-1B visas.
I just want you to listen to this.
It is from March of 2016 from a GOP primary debate.
Well, first of all, I think, and I know the H-1B very well, and it's something that I frankly use, and I shouldn't be allowed to use.
We shouldn't have it.
Very, very bad for workers.
And second of all, I think it's very important to say, well, I'm a businessman and I have to do what I have to do.
And it's sitting there waiting for you, but it's very bad.
It's very bad for business in terms of, it's very bad for our workers, and it's unfair for our workers, and we should end it.
Very importantly, the Disney workers endorsed me, as you probably read.
And I got a full endorsement because they're the ones that said, and they had a news conference, and they said he's the only one that's going to be able to fix it because it is a mess.
All right.
So that's the 2016 version of Trump, who's basically, other than the boasting at the end about how he's the only one who can fix it, you know, is very much in alignment with your view.
I mean, it was a pure expression of the America First argument about H-1B visas, American workers.
He's saying, I use them, but it's abuse.
Would we hire people who we could easily hire American workers for because it's good for our business, but not good for them?
Fast forward nine years, here he is last night on Fox News being interviewed by Laura Ingram, who asks him about exactly this issue, and you get the exact opposite answer.
Let's listen to that.
There's never going to be a country like what we have right now.
The Republicans have to talk about it later.
And does that mean the H-1B visa thing will not be a big priority for your administration?
Because if you want to raise wages for American workers, you can't flood the country with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of foreign workers.
We also do have to bring in talent.
We have plenty of talented people.
No, you don't.
No, you don't.
We don't have talented people.
No, you don't have certain talents, and people have to learn.
You can't take people off an unemployment, like an unemployment line and say, I'm going to put you into a factory where we're going to make missiles or I'm going to put you in the middle.
How did we ever do it before?
Well, let me tell you, I'll give you an example.
In Georgia, they raided because they wanted illegal immigrants.
They had people from South Korea that made batteries all their lives.
You know, making batteries are very complicated.
It's not an easy thing.
It's very dangerous, a lot of explosions, a lot of problems.
They had like 500 or 600 people, early stages, to make batteries and to teach people how to do it.
Well, they wanted them to get out of the country.
You're going to need that, Laura.
I mean, I know you and I disagree on this.
You can't just say a country's coming in, going to invest $10 billion to build a plant and going to take people off an unemployment line who haven't worked in five years, and they're going to start making missiles.
It doesn't work that way.
No, no, one of the bizarre things about that is he's talking about that ICE raid in Georgia that ended up deporting huge numbers of South Korean workers.
We're actually here at the invitation of the U.S. government.
He's sort of saying like they wanted them out of there, but they made a mistake, even though it's his own, you know, ICE and immigration officials who did that.
But I'm more interested in this trajectory of Trump as this America First candidate in 2016 with his view on H-1B visas now doing this absolute turnaround.
I'm not asking you to psychoanalyze Trump.
No one can really do that.
But what do you think explains the kind of obvious radical difference in his position on this issue?
It's hard to figure out what they're talking about or what he's talking about here because as he said in the first clip, he actually campaigned with some of the Disney workers.
And that's a very famous case where in Orlando, Disney, which had record profits, forced 250 of its tech workers to train their H-1B replacements.
And he knew that the reason was because Disney could get a 40% discount on the H-1B workers.
And the Disney work, the American workers are the ones who had greater skills.
They're the ones who are training the H-1B workers.
So his claim that we're bringing in these foreign workers, in this case from South Korea, because Americans aren't capable, it's just the opposite of what he experienced with Disney, right?
Where the American workers had the skills and were training the H-1B replacements.
Now, in terms of what his administration has done, if you read, he issued an executive proclamation back in September on the H-1B program, raising the fee to $100,000 and some other things.
But if you read the preamble to that proclamation, he diagnoses, his administration diagnoses the problems, which is that the H-1B program is used for cheaper labor.
It's not used for specialized workers.
So they're kind of all over the map with this.
Now, whether he's really changed his position or not, I don't know.
What really matters is what the government does with policy.
Do they fix this program so that employers, so corporations can exploit the program and bring in guest workers not because they have specialized skills, but because they're 40% cheaper?
You can fix that.
And whether it was Trump or Biden or Obama, they all should have fixed this.
That was the whole point of the program.
And nobody in any power is willing to do that.
And the politics of this is strange because, you know, there's a lot of Democrats and a lot of Democrats should be supporting this, should be pro-worker.
This is an anti-worker program that you've got with the H-1B program.
So I don't know if Trump himself is misinformed, but his administration is actually taking good action so far, at least baby steps towards trying to fix the program.
One of the arguments that is often made for why H-1B visas are necessary is that, and again, this is presuming this conceit, this fiction that we don't have enough trained workers here, is that, oh, don't worry, they're just coming here.
And when they get here, we're going to pay them.
They're going to stay temporarily.
And what they're going to do is they're going to train American workers so that to the extent we don't have American workers who are sufficiently skilled in these jobs, these people who are skilled who are going to allow to come here temporarily to work, a major part of their job is going to be to train these American workers so that they are then ready to fill these jobs and they go back home.
Is there any validity to that claim for why H-1B visas actually benefit American workers?
There's zero validity to that.
Almost no H-1B workers are brought in to train U.S. workers.
H-1B workers, some H-1B workers are very highly skilled, super skilled, but the typical H-1B worker has really ordinary skills and they're being brought in because they're cheaper, not because they're bringing in special skills that aren't available from the American labor supply.
And we know this because about 50% of the program is used specifically for wage arbitrage, specifically by companies to undercut the workforce.
So they're taking advantage of really bad worker protections, bad government rules, and it's super profitable because I can bring in an H-1B worker cheaper, undercut the American worker, and make a huge profit doing it.
That's great for those corporations that are buying that cheaper labor, that foreign worker, but it's not because they're bringing in skills.
It's not because the H-1B worker, the foreign worker is training the American worker.
That's just the opposite that usually the American worker is training the H-1B worker.
So that's a complete fiction.
Yeah, there are stories, and I wanted to ask you about this to just the extent of how serious this is, that exactly as you say, it's actually the opposite, that a lot of times these companies force American workers to train their H-1B foreign replacements.
upon threatening them if they don't with the loss of their severance package.
And so you have these American workers who are losing their jobs, but on the way out are kind of forced to endure the humiliation of training the people who have been brought in ostensibly on the ground that they're the only ones who are qualified, yet the American worker is forced to train the H-1B import.
Is that actually something that is reasonably common?
Yeah, so I can give you examples that have been reported in the press, and there's dozens more that have never been reported by the press.
So Disney is probably the best known one where you had 250 U.S. workers who were forced to train their H-1B replacements.
You had 400 workers at Southern California, Edison, out in LA who were forced to train their H-1B replacements.
This was reported by the LA Times.
You had the University of California, which trains, which gets federal subsidies to train U.S. workers in STEM.
They forced 80 of their own IT workers, their own tech workers who were employed by the University of California.
They forced them to train their H-1B replacements.
Abbott Labs, Northeast Utilities, I could go on and on dozens and dozens that have been reported in the press.
This is well known and well understood.
Trump himself traveled around and campaigned with Leo Perero, who testified before Congress, before the Senate, about training his replacement and how humiliating that was.
He was one of the Disney workers.
So it's not a question of what we know and what we don't know.
We know this is what goes on.
The point is that this is worth tens of billions of dollars to corporations, and they're basically just screwing workers.
And both parties are complicit here.
Yeah, I want to get into politics in just a second about H-1B specifically and immigration more broadly because I think it's so interesting.
But you have this, you said something in the last week or so that caught my attention.
It's obviously central to the whole debate, which you said, quote, firms hunt for ways to misclassify H-1Bs in order to pay less.
In other words, they have jobs that could easily be filled by Americans, but they kind of manipulate what the job is to make it seem as though only a foreign worker can do this.
I have to say, you know, I didn't realize it at the time, but looking back retrospectively, I think the first time I really encountered H-1Bs is when I was in law school.
And there's a big part of law school programs back then, but even more so now, where foreign nationals come and they get an LLM degree or they have some specialized degree that they come to the United States to law school to get.
And a lot of them end up wanting to stay and working in American law firms.
And they compete just like every other American law school graduate for these jobs.
And I remember these big firms treated it like it was just run-of-the-mill business, where if they wanted to hire a foreign national for one of their lawyer jobs that any American graduate could have done, they just kind of tweak the qualifications.
You have to, I think, advertise and prove that no American with the skills applies.
They make it very, very idiosyncratic and specific.
So you want to hire an Austrian law student.
I remember that being one example.
You know, you just make it so that the job somehow requires a knowledge of Austrian law.
And it's extremely easy to manipulate.
I mean, I remember just how, you know, they had a whole kind of process and a set of lawyers who just specialized in getting H-1B visa and no one ever got rejected.
It was the easiest thing in the world to get.
How much of a problem is that?
You talked about the one example I saw you use is Deloitte as one of the leaders of H-1B visas.
But talk about how that kind of, it's almost like a fraud or an abuse at least of the law.
How does that work?
Yeah, so you're actually mixing a few things up.
And it's not surprising because most of the mainstream media gets this wrong.
Most politicians get it wrong.
I said at the beginning I didn't have the expertise, which is why you're here to correct me on anything I say wrong.
So this is your job tonight.
So they don't have to tweak anything.
There's no shortage required.
An employer can hire an H-1B without ever looking for an American worker.
They can replace American workers with H-1Bs.
There's no tweaking that's necessary to hire the H-1B.
It's just plussing up their labor supply.
What I posted about was how they manipulate the really weak worker protections that are in there.
What they do is they hunt for certain obscure kinds of occupations and they down skill the job so that they can pay lower wages.
So there are some protections around minimum wages that need to be paid, but the Department of Labor has been really negligent in the way that it's approached the minimum wage is something called the prevailing wage.
And so employers can manipulate the process.
Basically, employers are in the catbird seat.
They can pretty much do what they want, but there's no shortage necessary.
They don't have to advertise the job at all.
This is a big myth, misunderstanding.
Was that ever the case?
Is that ever the case?
Maybe, you know, I'm talking about law school, unfortunately, that was a long time ago, that it was never the case that you had to advertise and prove no American worker applied for the job who was qualified.
You would think that would be so basic.
That would be the core of the idea.
That's the whole point of bringing a guest worker in is because you're trying to fill a labor shortage, but there's no requirement for a labor shortage.
Plus, the employer gets a 40% discount.
They don't ever have to look for a worker.
No, it's never been a requirement of the H-1B program.
It is a requirement for a green card, which is permanent residence.
And this is the bigger issue.
Again, the H-1B program is not immigration.
It's a guest worker program.
It's labor policy, and it's terrible labor policy.
It's labor policy that's designed to steal wages from the H-1B worker and to undercut American workers, their job opportunities, their wages, and their working conditions.
It's all about trying to transfer wealth from workers to corporations.
It has nothing to do with labor shortages.
There's zero connection at all.
And there's not even the pretense of advertising the jobs.
They don't have any requirement at all to do that.
Yeah, that's amazing.
Just a couple more questions.
It's often the case that this phrase is used to describe H-1B workers, which is why corporations like them so much, which is basically they're in a form of indentured servitude.
And obviously, if you're an employer, the more leverage your employee has, the more concessions you have to make, the more you have to pay, the more you have to accommodate the employee's desires, because if it's a competitive job market, they can always go somewhere else and they're going to get a better offer.
But if the employee is dependent upon you, like indentured servants were, and basically required the employer to be pleased with them, to let them keep working, then they lose all leverage.
The employee has no leverage, which means the employer has it all.
Why do people who come on H-1B visas to the United States find themselves in a situation analogous to indentured servitude?
Yeah, so the system is set up so that the visa, the employer applies for the visa for the worker and then holds that visa, holds that work permit.
So those guest workers are guests in the country at the discretion of and at the pleasure of the employer.
If the employer lays you off, you're out of status.
You've got 60 days to try to find somebody else to sponsor you for an H-1B visa, or you have to leave the country.
And so that gives enormous bargaining power to the employer.
It's a complete imbalance in the labor market.
And you've got to understand that a lot of these H-1B workers want to stay in the U.S.
And so they're willing to put up with substandard wages.
They're willing to put up with poor working conditions in order to stay in the U.S.
And then on top of it, the government says the employer gets to decide whether they sponsor them for permanent residence or not.
So they can dangle that green card in front of the worker and even exert more leverage over those workers.
So it's a really crazy system that's stacked totally against the worker and in favor of the employer.
And it's just no surprise that employers, the Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, the tech industry, all are in favor of expanding H-1B visas because it's enormously profitable to exploit workers.
Well, as kind of the last question or maybe two questions, that's what I want to focus on is the politics, because I'm somebody who came to journalism and really focusing on politics as my primary work in 2004, 2005.
And this was in the first, this was in the Bush administration, the Bush-Cheney administration.
And at the time, it was Bush and Cheney who were very much pushing aggressively for what was called immigration reform, making it easier for people from other countries to come to the United States, for foreign workers to be able to get employed in the United States.
And at the time, that was a chamber of commerce, you know, kind of what the liberals used to call a chamber of commerce plot or a chamber of commerce policy agenda.
It was very much considered a corporatist agenda.
It served the interest of large corporations and corporate profit at the expense of the American worker.
And it was an agenda associated with the kind of pro-business establishment Republican Party of the type that George Bush and Dick Cheney both represented.
And then on the other hand, you had this very strong left-wing opposition to this kind of immigration.
I realize technically it's not an immigration issue, but it's mixed in politically and colloquially as that.
And you've had famous union workers like Cesar Chavez who are very concerned about immigration.
You had black civil rights leaders concerned about immigration who would take away jobs or drive down wages.
Bernie Sanders to this day has that in his DNA, you know, as kind of an old school leftist.
You ask him about immigration, he immediately talks about wages and it being a Koch brothers proposal to try and get as, you know, to flood the United States in the labor market.
And so that was a division, as I remembered it, just, you know, 20 years ago.
And then it kind of got put through this identity politics prism where opposition to immigration took on this sort of allegation of white nationalism or racism, that people were no longer concerned about immigration for wages, but because of the cultural effects that it would have on the country from bringing in certain kind of people.
That kind of changed the dynamic.
But then you had Trump in 2016, you know, sounding this economic populist message that was very much aligned with the kind of former left-wing views.
It's a very muddled politics.
But at the end of the day, the politics really haven't changed in the sense that either you're serving the interest of these major transnational corporations that don't care at all about the American worker, or you're creating policies that ensure that American workers can kind of re-emerge as a middle class, as an industrialized base, as having a, you know, guaranteed decent life if you have an honest job with a corporation.
So how do you think the politics are playing off on this?
Because it is odd that this America First movement seems to be now once again more influenced by, you know, Silicon Valley billionaires and Wall Street tycoons who played a major role in getting behind Trump's campaign and who are in his ear more so than his own worker base.
How do you assess the politics of all that?
Yeah, so I think this is the classic sort of populist elite divide, right?
And so I would point in terms of the politics to two people that have been most steadfast in trying to push for what I think is positive reform are Chuck Grassley, who's a pretty conservative Republican from Iowa, and Dick Durbin, who's a pretty liberal Democrat from Illinois, and reforming and fixing the H-1B program so that it actually serves its purpose of filling skills gaps instead of undercutting workers.
This is about the only immigration issue that they agree on.
Now, stepping back, I think we have to look at a larger sort of story about neoliberalism and how the Democratic Party has embraced that and this notion that, you know, if we just plus up labor supply, you know, supply creates its own demand and we shouldn't worry about that.
But the reality is that this isn't just plussing up labor supply.
This is actually guest workers rather than people with employment rights.
And if you put it in that frame, I think Democrats would look at it quite differently.
As I said before, this is labor policy, not immigration policy.
And just to give you a figure here, in terms of skilled immigration, so by skilled, I mean people with college degrees, at least, at least a bachelor's degree.
We have one and a half million skilled guest workers chasing 60,000 immigration slots.
So there's 25 guest workers for every one actual permanent residence green card.
So our high-skilled immigration policy isn't really immigration.
It has almost no immigration.
It's almost entirely guest worker programs.
And those things are complicated to manage and administer.
And that's why all of the lawyers on K-Street love it.
That's why all of the lobbyists for the companies try to expand it.
And Americans aren't paying attention to that.
So they want to put a cap on immigration, but they allow these guest worker programs to sort of proliferate and expand.
Why the Democrats are for that?
I can't really explain.
It doesn't make sense to me.
Maybe just they don't understand what's happening there.
But these are anti-worker programs.
Yeah, or that the Democratic Party, you know, at the end of the day, is still very much aligned with and dependent upon the corporate donors who have the same interests as the corporate donors who are reshaping Republican policy on this issue as well.
That's a cynical explanation, but I think also a very realistic one.
All right.
Professor, thank you so much.
It's been really illuminating to talk to you.
We'd love to have you back on.
This controversy is definitely not going away.
It's only going to expand.
You've done some great work in it, and I think you do a great job of helping people understand it in simple terms.
So thanks so much for taking the time.
It was great to talk to you.
Thanks for having me on.
Absolutely.
Have a good evening.
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Grove of emails released by both House Republicans and House Democrats today regarding Jeffrey Epstein.
Subpoena documents that they obtained by getting them from the Jeffrey Epstein estate.
Democrats released rather selectively, including several that were designed to be politically embarrassing for Donald Trump, places where Jeffrey Epstein seems to say that Donald Trump knew about the girls, meaning the activities in which Jeffrey Epstein was engaged that led to his conviction.
There's reasons to suspect the context of these emails.
I would not describe them as smoking guns.
I think a lot more interesting in these emails, though, is two things.
One, the fact that Jeffrey Epstein continued to maintain extremely close personal relationships with just the widest array of global elites you can possibly think of.
It seemed like everybody was just waiting around for Jeffrey Epstein to call and to meet with him well after everyone knew that he had been convicted on charges of soliciting minors, a minor in particular for prostitution.
It just seemed to have no effect whatsoever on his standing in the elite class, kind of feeding all the perceptions about how decadent and hypocritical and craven our global elite class is.
It's hard to think of a better example than that.
You can leave all the conspiracy theories aside.
That is just true.
All these emails show him having very intimate, friendly, trusting relationships with these people who swung open every door for him, even after those convictions were known.
And then the second aspect that I think is remarkable that we'll cover certainly more in depth is that many of the leading Trump officials, Pam Bondi and Dad Bongino, and Kash Patel and many others, spent four years in the Biden administration pounding the table, saying the release of the Epstein files, there was no greater priority than that, and that their concealment was among the greatest moral evils.
That the Biden administration, by concealing these files, was essentially helping to conceal the worst pedophile ring and predatory ring that the world has ever known.
And now you fast forward to Donald Trump's administration, and he very infamously announced that there would be no more disclosures of the Epstein files.
In fact, there have been basically no disclosures of previously unknown documents by the Trump administration.
He worked at Pam Bonte to do that.
And then it's not just that he said, we're not going to voluntarily disclose it.
There's currently a petition that is co-sponsored by Thomas Massey, the Republican of Kentucky, whom Trump, I don't think coincidentally, is doing everything possible to remove from Congress with Roe Conna, the Democrat from California.
And it now has enough votes, 218, to have that petition passed that would require the release of just about all of the Epstein files from the Justice Department.
And Trump, I don't mean Trump officials or Trump aides.
I mean, Donald Trump himself is working the phones, calling many members of Congress, Lauren Boebert, Nancy Mason, and others, to try and convince them to withdraw their name so that this petition no longer has a majority that would compel release of these documents.
So you've gone from four years of the Trump world, MAGA world, and not just random people, JD Vance and Donald Trump Jr., saying that there's no more important issue than the release of the Epstein files to Donald Trump now in office doing everything possible, not just to malign the reliability of these files, but to personally do everything possible to block release of these files.
And of course, they're still kind of trickling out.
And as they trickle out, the Democrats are going to make sure that the ones that get seen are the ones that involve him.
And if there's emails involving him and Jeffrey Epstein at the same time, he's trying to block it, whether they're incriminating or not.
And we can talk about that some other time politically, obviously that's going to look like Trump has something to hide.
And he seems to have something to hide.
What that is is, I think, up for debate.
But he certainly is very eager to make sure these Epstein documents never see the light of day.
To help us work through all of that, as well as some extremely interesting reporting on what I've always thought was the most important issue, or at least one of the most important issues, with respect to the Jeffrey Epstein case, which is whether or not Jeffrey Epstein had a close and serious working relationship with foreign intelligence agencies, specifically the Mossad and other Israeli intelligence.
Our guest tonight, who is my longtime friend and former colleague, Murtaza Hussein, has been doing some important reporting, along with Ryan Grimm, analyzing a whole trove of emails about the Epstein case that he's published, four stories so far that very much prove how close this relationship in fact was between Jeffrey Epstein and Israeli intelligence.
Notably, you'd be forgiven if you haven't heard about it since barely any media outlets have covered it, which in one way is bizarre, but another way is completely surprising.
So without further ado, here is my friend and colleague and a great investigative reporter, Murtaza Hussein.
Moz, great to see you.
Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us.
I can't hear Moz, although I know him well enough that I can just read his lips and know what he's saying, so it's not even important, the audio.
I think it's his fault.
I'm supposed to go back to, okay, I'm gonna talk to you and we're gonna pretend that Maz is not yet here even though you clearly have seen him here.
We're just going to kind of work out his audio issues.
While we're doing that, let me just show you a couple of the stories that we want to talk to Moz about that he's published in Dropside News.
Here's one from November 11th, the title of which is Israeli Spy Stayed for Weeks at a Time with Jeffrey Epstein in Manhattan.
Let's put that on the screen, please.
That's from Dropsite News, co-authored by Murtaza Hussain and Ryan Grimm.
These are leaked emails, which, according to Dropsite News, quote, show Epstein working on a wire transfer, working on a wire transfer to Ahab Baruch's top aide, Yanni Coren, who regularly stayed at his apartment.
We've known for a while that Jeffrey Epstein had a very long time, deep, and close personal friendship with the former Israeli prime minister and Israeli defense minister, Ahab Baruch.
But what we didn't know until this reporting was that a member of Israeli intelligence, a spy for Israeli intelligence, stayed for weeks at a time at Jeffrey Epstein's house where a lot of these activities were taking place.
Obviously, this was all after his conviction for soliciting a minor for prostitution.
Here's another article with great reporting just from four days before that, November 7th on DropSight.
Jeffrey Epstein helped Israel sell a surveillance deal to COTOV, which is a country in Africa.
Leaked emails show the details behind talks between that country and Israel that were shepherded by Eh Barak and Jeffrey Epstein.
So Epstein was carrying out official diplomatic activities on behalf of the Israeli government at the highest levels of the Israeli government.
From the week before, this is the same two reporters.
October 30th, Jeffrey Epstein and the Mossad, how the sex trafficker helped Israel build a back channel to Russia amid Syrian civil war.
Quote, hacked emails show how Jeffrey Epstein and former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak tried to engineer a Russian-led solution to remove Bashr al-Assad.
So in between converting with global elites and having all of his sexual activities that proved to be criminal, he was spending a great deal of time working on very high-level, crucial agenda goals of Israeli foreign intelligence using his bizarrely well-connected Rolodex to help the Israeli government and Israeli intelligence fulfill the goals of their government.
That has always been one of the questions is Jeffrey Epstein had all kinds of powerful global elites on his plane, on the island, at his homes.
That's very valuable information what those people were doing.
And the question was, was he working with any foreign government?
It's long been suspected he had ties to Israel.
But this reporting provides definitive proof that the involvement that he had with Israeli intelligence could not have been overstated.
He was definitely an agent of the Israeli government, of Israeli intelligence, working on its behalf to fulfill some of its most important foreign policy goals.
It is bizarre, but also kind of unsurprising that this has been essentially ignored.
All right, I think we are ready for Maz.
First, it was great seeing you.
Now I think I get to see you and hear you.
So why don't we just test that?
There you are.
Okay.
Can you hear me?
Yes, I can.
All right, Maz, congratulations on this reporting.
Before we get into the details of this reporting and the implications of it, I want to ask you instead first about some of the releases today, because I'll give you my impression.
You tell me yours.
Obviously, there's some salacious stuff in there that can be politically embarrassing to Trump.
You have Jeffrey Epstein saying that Virginia Guffrey, who's one of the main Epstein victims, spent a lot of time at Jeffrey Epstein's house along with Donald Trump.
The Democrats redacted her name, even though it was very obvious who they were talking about, in part because she is proven to be, and you can ask Michael Tracy and he'll tell you for eight hours the proof of this.
Kind of a stereofabula.
She made allegations against Alan Jershow that she had to withdraw.
A lot of what she said ended up being disproven.
So I think they were kind of eager to separate her from these allegations.
So you have that.
You have Jeffrey Epstein telling other people that Trump did have knowledge of what Jeffrey Epstein was doing.
You have Michael Wolfe, the kind of discredited journalist who was talking to Jeffrey Epstein in some of these emails about how he could blackmail Trump, basically, how he could use this information that he has about what Trump knew to gain influence with Donald Trump.
But to me, the much more interesting and proven component of these emails is what I said earlier, you may have heard, which is that, I mean, it's hard to even list the people, Peter Thiel and Larry Summers, and world leaders and leaders of every major bank who Jeffrey Epstein was just constantly talking to after his conviction for soliciting a minor for prostitution.
And they just didn't seem to care in the slightest that that was the case.
He lost no standing whatsoever in this world of the highest level of political and financial power.
What do you make of today's releases?
Well, first of all, Ben, thank you for having me on because it's been sort of interesting to see the lack of response to these very consequential revelations contained in these communications from Epstein.
It's almost as though it's being consciously ignored.
And it's fascinating seeing the emails come out today because I kind of agree with what you said.
There's a bit of a red herring in these emails.
Now, this is not to downplay the very grave nature of the crimes, the sexual crimes that Jeffrey Epstein was involved in that he committed and he ultimately went to prison for.
That is a very important issue when the victims and the people involved should all be publicly known.
But in the intense focus on the salacious details and the attempt to, I guess, embarrass certain political figures who are currently in power at the moment, like Trump, there's a huge other part of the story, which is being ignored, which is not being talked about at all, which kind of hints at what you're talking about.
How did Jeffrey Epstein have this enormous Rolodex of people?
You know, you named very well-known American figures.
He was well connected in Africa, in Central Asia, in the Middle East, in Russia, in Europe.
He knew people all over the world at the topmost levels in business, finance, and technology fields, government, and military.
He was an extremely well-connected individual, and he was using these connections to accomplish specific geopolitical goals for certain countries, as well as economic goals, making money for other people, accomplishing specific political objectives.
And we've written about a few of these stories in the past week.
You touched on some of them in your introduction there.
We're going to do more of that reporting.
But in all the focus on the salacious details, and I'm not saying it should not be focused on at all, it is important.
There's been pretty much a blackout on this other part of the Epstein story, which, in my view, is the more consequential part of the story, the more revealing part, and the part which I think there's a conscious effort presently to suppress, or, you know, to use a term of art, do a limited hangout.
We'll talk about certain parts of the Epstein story and ignore others and then deem the story having been, you know, addressed and covered.
Really, I think we're only at the tip of the iceberg on this.
And really, his intelligence and political ties is far, far more important, even than the grave crimes he committed for which he was convicted.
You know, I remember it was so conspicuous to me when you had that bizarre announcement by Pam Bondi.
It was really Pam Bondi Incapital, though they issued it in the name of the Justice Department.
It was unsigned.
They gave it to Politico, where they essentially said, okay, look, we investigated.
No evidence there was any blackmail.
There's no client list.
None of these things we've been telling you for four years.
Not only do we know is there, but the government is covering up.
Turns out we looked and none of it's there.
By the way, he also committed suicide.
There's no doubt about that.
You know, just sort of like brushing aside every single one of these things that particularly people on the American right had been fed as certain for so long.
And the one notable omission in those denials was that Jeffrey Epstein had any relationship or worked with or for foreign or domestic intelligence.
It was like it wasn't even on their radar.
And then a week or so later, a reporter went at the Oval Office, when at the White House where Trump was meeting with his cabinet, directly asked Trump and said, Is there any evidence that Jeffrey Epstein in these files?
Is there any evidence that he was working with foreign intelligence agencies?
And that was when Trump exploded with rage and said, You people are idiots for focusing on something so trivial, which his own son and vice president a year before had said was the most important story.
And then he said, Pam Bondi can answer.
And she said, You know what?
Not that I know of.
I'll look and I'll get back to you.
As they're like, this idea had never occurred to anybody.
Like, hey, maybe we should check to see if he's working with foreign intelligence.
And when you think about how costly politically it is for Trump to just so aggressively conceal these files and argue for their concealment in light of everything that's happened, there has to be things in there he doesn't want to come out.
And obviously one possibility is there's a bunch of his friends who are mentioned in there or even himself.
And he may think we're mentioned in there.
It may harm our reputation, even though it's not really evidence or proof we've done anything wrong.
But the other aspect of it, and this is generally when the government covers things up, it's because of connections to and activities by intelligence agencies that they don't want the world to see.
And the silence that your reporting has provoked really is feeding this suspicion for me that a lot of these releases are kind of designed to be tantalizing as a way of saying, oh, look, don't worry, you're getting transparency.
When in reality, on the most important issues, there is transparency.
You're providing it, but no one is really paying attention.
They're purposely kind of suppressing it.
I think that's absolutely correct.
You know, it's interesting when you look at these releases, a lot of our reporting, you know, it's based partly on the email leaks that took place and are hosted on a website called Distributed Denial of Secrets, which is like a successor to WikiLeaks.
And the emails were hacked by this pro-Palestinian hacking group some years ago.
one knows the exact identity of them uh but they were released there but you know those emails are only part of the story a lot of our stories are based Describe for people, because I've looked through these, like, what are those linked emails?
Like, who did they hack and where do these emails originate?
So there were several archives of leaked emails.
One of them, which comprised the bulk of our reporting, came from former Israeli Prime Minister Egou Barak.
And a lot of our stories are actually based on Barack and Epstein's interactions.
This is the period in 2013, 2016, just when Barak was leaving the defense ministry in Israel.
He's head of the Ministry of Defense.
He was talking to Epstein while he was there, and then also even more so after he left.
They're working together on these projects to promote Israeli tech surveillance tech firms in different countries around the world to create this do back channel diplomacy that Epstein would help set up for Barak on behalf of Israel.
They're doing all this and there's a lot of detail in those emails and there are a few other people who were hacked.
The strong suspicion is this part of an ongoing hacking war that was taking place between Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Israeli intelligence where they're hacking each other and dumping the information and so forth.
That's a realm of speculation.
We don't really know.
But you know, the emails actually don't tell the whole story.
As much as they tell, they tell quite a bit.
But really the story is filled in when you look at the emails and the government disclosures together.
Because the government disclosures, what we've seen so far, they contain Epstein's personal calendars, other emails, who he's talking to, what he was doing, and so forth.
And you can look at both of them together and the pieces start to fit together that way.
But what I noticed is that in these email disclosures, the ones so far, the government, for one thing, they release the documents in a way which makes them deliberately difficult to sort of parse through.
So they're creating all these artificial sort of barriers to an ordinary person, for instance, perusing them in a normal way.
The main major news outlets, which have resources and staff and money to devote to just going through it and systematizing it, they maybe are politically averse to covering some of these issues.
And then there's a small Venn diagram of people who have like the resources and the time and the skill set who can parse through it and are professionally doing that, of which I think Dropside is in that small Venn diagram.
So we're reporting on it, but they're making it difficult.
They're making it very difficult to do that.
And they're highlighting, again, these very salacious emails, which I guess they pass off to a few friendly journalists.
That becomes a story.
And it's important, like to reiterate, it's important, the issues with Trump and sexual abuse and so forth.
But then the real actual story is being occluded by these tactics, which are very canny in some way.
We're focusing in on reporting on these stories based on the emails, based on the government disclosures, specifically looking at the issue of his intelligence contexts.
And there's a tremendous wealth of information about this.
We've done four stories.
I believe we'll do many, many more stories about this.
And I'm surprised that other news outlets are not looking at it.
Maybe they will now after we've done a couple of reports, reports about it, to gain traction.
But, you know, it's just the tip of the iceberg.
There's a tremendous amount there because Epstein was like I said, he was an unbelievably active individual.
Looking at his email and his schedule, I wonder how he had the time to get into sex trafficking because he was so busy engaging in diplomacy and business deals all over the world that, you know, one could not imagine how an individual lives this way.
And that also points to the sort of inorganic nature, in my view, of these contexts.
And, you know, very quickly, people have asked, do I think, or other people look at the emails, think that Jeffrey Epstein worked for Mossad?
I actually think, interestingly, the relationship seems to be inverted.
Like it would almost maybe be more logical or accurate to say that the Mossad worked for Jeffrey Epstein, because in his relationship with Barack, for instance, who at that time was one of the most influential people in the Israeli security establishment, the power dynamic clearly seems to favor Epstein in the relationship.
Barack is looking to him for help, trying to get his attention, trying to get his help making money.
And they were jointly deploying these Israeli intelligence-linked commercial firms, surveillance firms, and tech firms, and also military firms around the world to do their bidding for things that they had in mind.
They can make money from them and they could also further Israel's strategic interests.
That seemed like it was more like that.
So Epstein, in my view, he seems like a very, very powerful individual on whose behalf he worked and whom he was answerable to.
I think it's not exactly clear.
But I don't think he was an employee of any state.
He was someone who was above all these states and he coordinated among what it seems like a transnational criminal organization of elites.
That's the only blunt way that I could put it.
He was a made man in that world.
Well, let me just play devil's advocate for a second on this distinction between the salacious parts of the story and then the parts on which you're focused, which is his obviously deep connection to not just the Israeli government, but the policies of the Israeli government and advancing Israeli interests.
You have, you know, there are a lot of, let's say, Jewish billionaires.
And I say Jewish billionaires because, you know, these are people who come from a Jewish culture where you're taught from birth to, you know, have a love for and affection for Israel.
You're taught that one of your duties as a Jew is to do everything you can to protect Israel.
And there are a lot of extremely wealthy Jews who have as their primary philanthropic activity working on behalf of Israel.
Larry Ellison, who's the richest or second richest person in the world, who now controls TikTok and Paramount and CBS through his son, is the largest single donor to the IDF.
He does all sorts of things with Israel.
When Benjamin Nature was out of power, he was going to give Netanyahu a very lucrative seat on the Oracle board.
Then you have the two largest financial patrons of Jeffrey Epstein, Leon Black and Lex Wexner, both of whom are Jewish billionaires who also had almost their exclusive philanthropic focus.
By philanthropic, I just mean activities that weren't about profiting from their main companies, serving the Zionist cause, building up Israel in all sorts of ways.
And so if you just sort of put Jeffrey Epstein in that category as somebody who's a Jewish billionaire with a lot of influence, there's nothing really notable or unusual, I guess, about the fact that he was really involved with Israel, had a lot of connections in Israel, worked to help Israel as Israel perceived it.
It only becomes, you know, kind of notable and significant and exceptional if, in fact, Jeffrey Epstein was doing things other than just procuring girls for himself.
And if you just look at the kind of legal, narrow legal charges that he and then Anglosaine Maxwell faced, you know, she was convicted on procuring girls, not for a huge sex trafficking ring, but only for Jeffrey Epstein.
So if we don't have the salacious parts, which we're calling it, namely that he was providing, you know, gold leech with a bunch of young girls, putting them in compromising positions, potentially blackmailing them.
If we don't have that, and all we have is the stuff you're reporting, which is that Jeffrey Epstein was a big supporter of Israel and did a lot to help Israel and use his connections around the world.
What is significant about that?
Well, you know, to be clear, I don't think that the other part is unimportant.
I think the two should be viewed in combination with one another because it does raise these other questions of were people being blackmailed and what was the that adds to the criminality of the entire behavior, the fact that he was doing this.
So the two things, it's not that one is important, the other isn't, and they should be treated equal resources should be devoted to covering both aspects of it.
So then we can all have the full picture.
But you know, to your point, it's very interesting because there is this sort of network or community of pro-Israel billionaires who are very well known.
A lot of them are pretty public figures and so forth.
But I think Epstein's a bit different because he actually wasn't one of those.
He wasn't straightforward.
He was pro-Israel, but he wasn't like a devoted, only caring about Israel type of guy.
He had deep connections in Africa, in the Middle East and Arab countries, in Russia, obviously in Europe, in Central Asia, even in, of course, in the United States.
He had his hand in many, many different pies.
So he was a bit more cosmopolitan than some of those people may have been.
And he was using these connections to accomplish all sorts of goals.
He wasn't only, he wasn't a purely Israel-focused individual.
And I would actually say it's kind of interesting that in a way, like ordinary Israelis were also victims of this whole situation because their country was being used by Barack and Epstein and others as kind of like a sovereign base for them to carry out their activities to deploy Israeli resources or state companies and so forth, individuals for their own interests, of which Israelis didn't really share per se.
People were getting rich.
I think Barack was getting rich.
Epstein seemed to already be very rich.
He didn't seem to at this point need money that much.
But, you know, this was a very private enterprise from a handful of people.
And, you know, it wasn't even all necessarily for the benefit of Israelis per se.
It was the benefit for some sort of network of people who actually span many different backgrounds.
There were Arabs there, there were Europeans, there were, as mentioned, Africans, Mongolians even.
That was all, this is all it was about.
So it's kind of, we don't really have a paradigm to discuss what this is.
And a very, very clear one.
But one last point.
I haven't seen any evidence per se that Epstein was blackmailing people.
I do think it's very plausible.
And he did have ties with these Russian oligarchs who were known to do that kind of thing in Russia.
But, you know, another interesting thing is that I almost think that a lot of the people who he connected with, they would have almost done things for him even out of the willingness, you know, of their own volition, the majority of them at least, because what Epstein offered people was the chance to make them rich.
He wanted Barack wanted to become rich.
He knew he had to come to Epstein and Epstein could open doors for him.
They wanted to have, you know, fun, quote unquote.
They want to be part of the bustling social scene of which he was a very important member.
So I guess, you know, he would facilitate that.
So, you know, he may have been blackmailing people, but almost, you know, that would have been, in some cases, superfluous in many cases, at least, to get what he wanted politically, as we see in these communications.
There's no question that blackmail, especially about private sexual matters, which is what tends to generate the most attention, maybe the most embarrassment, reputational harm, is a very common part of high-level geopolitics.
Certainly the Israelis use it.
The Americans have used it.
Countless examples that you can cite that is not a conspiracy theory.
And so, and there is an email that is very interesting where the so-called journalist Michael Wolfe, who has a lot of ethical problems of his own, was actually coaching Jeffrey Epstein on how he could use the leverage that he has over Trump and the knowledge he has about Trump's activities with Jeffrey Epstein to kind of get what he wants from Trump or force Trump to do things or help Jeffrey Epstein in some way.
So, I mean, it's not like these materials, even the limited ones that we've seen, because remember, the Justice Department has most of them and still hasn't released them, are getting drips and drabs.
There's already some blackmail talk around Jeffrey Epstein and his activities.
But one of the things that really strikes me, Maz, I just want to delve into this a little bit more and get your view on it, is, you know, I think one of the reasons that the Jeffrey Epstein case has been so captivating for so many people is because there is this perception that we're basically living under the rule of a global elite.
You know, you were kind of talking about it's not just Israel and the United States.
There was an email today.
I'm pretty sure I didn't confirm it, so I don't want to say definitively, but I think Mohammed bin Salman gave Jeffrey Epstein a gift of some sort of carpet or rug or something.
Maybe it's a little too on the nose, but I'm pretty sure that that was one of the emails.
But also, you know, when Jeff Bezos' marriage broke up, it was because his WhatsApp was hacked.
And that was when his wife discovered he was having an affair and there's a lot of blame that has been assigned to Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi prince.
So you have, you know, Jeff Bezos and the Saudi prince and the Emir of Qadr and the whole Persian Gulf region and these like warlords in Africa and then these bankers in Europe and the entire kind of major elite system in the United States that transcends party and national interest.
And I think there's a perception that people have and there's a lot to it that we're no longer run by kind of a national elite but this global international transnational elite and that it seems so removed from the people over whom they're ruling and so drowning in unprecedented levels of wealth and power.
You know, you're talking about people worth $350 billion who can just buy up media outlets on a dime and the amount of money floating around in a lot of these developing countries, you go to these developing countries and you see they look way more advanced than the United States.
You're talking about massive amounts of money on this global scale and that there's something deeply depraved and deeply amoral and maybe even worse.
And even independent of evidence that we may or may not have or get that this was some ring where huge numbers of very influential people were participating with Jeffrey Epstein and having sex with underage girls, the fact that they were on his plane and that they were at his island and that there were all kinds of references to their knowledge that this is what he was doing.
The conviction itself was a public record.
What type of global elite or any kind of culture doesn't hold against somebody the fact that they were convicted of soliciting a minor for prostitution and knowing, you know, some of that rich and with that level of access to the best lawyers, that's a plea bargain that obviously entails a lot greater wrongdoing than the conviction itself ultimately reflected.
And it's like they viewed him as not just a friend, but someone of the highest standing within this extreme mega elite world.
What do you think this says about the kinds of people who really are running the world and governing our lives?
Well, separate from and above democratic elections.
Well, they're immersed in depravity.
That's the obvious conclusion.
And, you know, one thing I'll say is that, you know, in a lot of the reporting we do with Dropside and these global corruption and so forth, even separate from the Epstein stories specifically, the same names keep coming up.
I'm working on a story, me and Ryan are working on a story about another African country, which we're going to publish soon.
And a name came up that came up in the context of the story we did about Pakistan a few months ago.
Just names keep, there's a very small little community of people, relatively small community of people who seem to all know each other.
They're very wealthy.
They travel.
They are connected to one another in this manner.
It's a very relatively small social circle.
And, you know, people will say, well, this is conspiratorial or you shouldn't be saying this.
But it's the fact is, and this is literally the observable data in front of our eyes.
This is what is happening.
These are how people are connected with one another.
And they seem to view themselves as having impunity.
They have impunity to engage in very egregious activities.
I would even venture that the Epstein conviction and the Epstein arrest and everything that happened is an aberration.
It's probably more likely we never hear about these things or we're not aware of everything that's happening per se, things, you know, egregious acts like he was committing.
And, you know, to your point, the use of these sexual blackmail as a tool of political control, you know, there is, it's very strong.
I'm very conservative in my statements, but there is very strong circumstantial evidence of what's happening in this case.
And again, it's not an issue that anyone in the media really wants to discover.
And part of the reason for that is we've also covered in our reporting, the media itself is very implicated.
The elite media is extremely very much part of this transnational global elite, which we're discussing.
And they have close relationships with many of these individuals as well, too.
And there's communications between Epstein and certain high-profile media figures, even in these emails.
We've seen other ones as well, too.
We've written about them.
So, you know, that is something which is part and parcel of this.
And I think it points to a broader issue that's taking place right now, that there's a collapsing trust in elites worldwide and very clearly playing out in the U.S. as well too.
And Epstein is a very important figure because what he did and what he signifies and what's not been said about him and how his story ended, it's very, it's a great, it's kind of a key which opens the lock on a lot of different things.
It strikes at the legitimacy of what you can call the regime, quote unquote, because, you know, he was so plugged in at the highest levels in the American elite and the global elite.
He was so depraved.
And as you said, people were so unbothered by his depravity.
Everything we've written about was many, many years after his first sex conviction.
And it seemed to have no impact on his business and personal relationships at that level.
It's very, it indicts them a lot because the hypocrisy and the, you know, the behavior, which is so at odds with the public perception, is just so glaring.
And the inability to come clean about everything that took place with Epstein and what he did, who he was, and how his life ended, that is only furthering this collapse in trust in elites.
And, you know, we're doing these stories.
I thought I was pretty dated and cynical, to be honest.
So I'm doing these stories and seeing all these details.
And, you know, I think that people who just check out or they just have no faith in the system, like, I don't really blame them because on one hand, there's so much deceit and there's so much falsity in our public understanding of these issues.
And the corruption is so broad, unfortunately, that, you know, a lot of things which people would deem irresponsible to believe, they may be true.
So I think we should look at this very conservatively and be very indulgent of people because Epstein's story is just an indictment of so, so much.
And the more I hope you learn, the more we may come to understand how much needs to be reformed.
Last question, Maz, but it's not a very quick or simple one.
But I just, I think, what I want to, I think it's very important to understand why these things capture attention.
And, you know, there's so much kind of sermonizing among media elites about the propensity for people to engage in conspiracy theories or to believe conspiracy theories.
And they never look in the mirror and realize the reason that has happened is because they've lied so much and they've covered up so much and they are so self-interested that people have completely lost faith and trust in them.
And when you see this global elite class or this elite class that is so corrupt, you are more inclined to start believing that there are all sorts of kind of sinister things taking place that may not be immediately visible to the eye.
And I think one of the big factors of this is one of the things people hate most for very good reason.
And it's a common theme that is for a long time is when elites and powerful people impose rules on everybody else and sermonize with great sanctimony about the moral imperative of obeying these rules and then just freely violate the rules for themselves.
This is something that we saw in COVID where people go outside to get some fresh air, want to attend the funeral outdoors of a funeral member and they're told they're deeply irresponsible citizens who are killing old people and are reckless and sociopathic.
And then, you know, you have Gavin Newsom going to a closed restaurant with a bunch of lobbyists or Nancy Pelosi going, you know, all kinds of leaders all over the world who got caught, you know, just living their lives freely while imposing these very onerous restrictions on how everybody else had to live.
And there's this sense of outrage.
Like you're lecturing to us about, you know, the evils of us violating the rules that you yourself don't even consider yourself subject to.
And I think that, you know, I'll just tell you this quick story.
The first time I ever went to Dubai, it was maybe like, I don't know, 13, 14 years ago.
You know, when you hear all these things about the Emirates where, you know, it's very anti-gay, gay people are, it's criminalized.
If you get caught being gay, you go to prison for life or you can even be, you know, sentenced to death.
It's just like aggressive.
And then, you know, I went and I happened to know, you know, some people in the highest elite circles, people who are chics, connected to the royal family, kind of on the outer perimeter.
And, you know, I remember I went with my husband David and we went to visit their homes and like half of them were just gay, like openly gay.
And these are the powerful people in society, you know, living these lives that were the exact antithesis of the regime of morality that they're imposing on everybody else.
And I think there's a lot going on with that in the Epstein story in the sense that we have a culture that has made it such that anything having to do with sex with minors is probably the single worst crime you can commit.
You know, you go to prison, that's the crime that endangers your life if you're in prison for abusing minors.
Every state legislature has increased the punishment for people who do that.
There are vigilante groups online that have become very popular who lure people in who get caught talking to an imaginary 15 or 16 year old and want to, I mean, this is this like moral indignation over this issue is extreme.
You know, rightly or wrongly, it is.
But then you have, you know, somebody who's extremely rich and powerful in Jeffrey Epstein who gets convicted of crimes like this, who everybody knows has a major ring that is geared toward underage girls.
And you have American presidents and world leaders and, you know, Bill Gates and the most powerful people in the world who seem to have no concern whatsoever about this moral code that they demand be imposed on everybody else.
They just exempt themselves even from a crime of this gravity.
And like at some point, that becomes completely unsustainable the more that becomes visible.
And I think that's a big reason why there's such an interest in burying the Epstein case.
I totally agree with you.
And you look at the impunity that people at this level seem to enjoy.
It seems to engender ever greater levels of depravity and extremism.
If you look at Epstein's case, not only did he do all this, there are stories of like the very extreme sorts of fantasies that he entertained of immortality through his study, building that temple on his island and so forth.
One can only imagine for what purpose.
This, as shocking as it is, it's not almost in a way surprising because these are people at that level of wealth and power who feel themselves unencumbered by any moral sort of code that's imposed on the rest of us.
Your example from the UAE is very interesting.
If you look at other countries like Pakistan, other Islamic countries, it's very similar.
The elites often are extremely have libertine lifestyles and the harsh social codes are imposed only on the working and middle class people as it means the social control, one can surmise.
So, you know, that is just a common aspect of human nature that when one feels, I guess, super empowered, you start to push the envelope.
I think PDD also was like this, just completely losing any sense of self-control and not feeling that you're bound by these moral rules, which are for, you know, the mere commoners.
So I think that's also, you know, this is something which enrages people so much.
The average person is enraged by this.
And if you look at the populist sentiment in the U.S., both on the left and the right, the young non-establishment political voices, they're very angry.
They're very angry at the hypocrisy of their elites.
They're very angry about things like Epstein, which are symbolic of that hypocrisy and symbolic of that corruption in such a gratuitous manner.
And the thing that is, I think, very dangerous is that they seem to have no way of knowing how to address this.
They can't reform.
They can't really come clean because it's so damning and so many are implicated that their only real strategy is to try to hush it up in these sophisticated ways by trying to stifle it entirely, by doing these limited hangouts of partial information, by trying to deflect from the main core issue.
So that strategy, you know, it's very sophisticated.
Give them credit.
It's worked in the past.
But, you know, it becomes less and less sustainable when you have this cacophony of voices who are like able to publish things on Dropsite or System Update and other places and talk about these things.
The social control and the information control is a bit more difficult in that environment.
So I think they're worried about Epstein for these reasons because they could ignite greater populist discontent in the United States or elsewhere.
And I won't say that one thing, that Epstein was very plugged in in a lot of countries.
There's a lot of countries in the world where Jeffrey Epstein was a part of their national story, and they simply don't know that yet.
And the more that eventually the stuff like that comes to light, the more you're going to see this draining away of trust in authorities, and not just in the U.S., but far beyond that as well.
Yeah, and it doesn't have this partisan angle where he was only aligned with one party or the other.
Quite the contrary, that had no interest for him, no limiting principle at all.
You know, whoever, whatever elites on left and right and center, he could get his hands on, and there were quite a number of them.
He was more than happy to do so.
His tentacles were in so many different power centers around the world that ultimately linked together.
I think, you know, there's so many interesting aspects of the story, but I think that above all is the one that is most compelling.
And the more Trump and people in power try and conceal these files, I think the more interest they're automatically generating, the more suspicions they're provoking and inflaming for reasons that make a lot of sense.
All right, Mazwell.
Congratulations on the great reporting.
I think it's imperative that people read it.
You can read all those articles at DropSite, where you can also subscribe, do amazing journalism on so many areas.
And we will continue to have you on, even if nobody else will, to talk about the reporting you're doing on these Israel connections, because to me, that has been always the tower in question or one of them at the heart of the story.
