Jeffrey Epstein, Israel, and Elite Power, with Murtaza Hussain – #100

And that's why I think actually, you know, the real Epstein story is not to downplay the sexual crime he committed. I think we all know that now, though. But the real story is this, actually, that he was basically a freelance operative on behalf of...

the Israeli government, perhaps other governments. Right. So I want to drill down into the sort of new aspect of this that you guys covered in depth. I do want to say, from my perspective, the real story, the one that... I think the firewall is still protecting the dam is still, you know, hasn't broken yet on this is whether Epstein was blackmailing, you know, figures like Bill Gates or Bill Clinton, top US political figures.

And possibly on behalf of foreign interests. And I think that's the most radioactive story here. And the main reason why, you know, there's still such resistance to this command. If it was just... Some rich men preying on young women. I think that could have come out, right? The Speaker of the House would not have said, like, our whole political system could collapse if this came out, or there are huge national security implications if this came out.

Welcome to Manifold. My guest today is Murtaza Hussain, a journalist with DropSite News. Murtaza, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Steve. It's great to have you on. I was on your show, I think it was over the summer, maybe. Your beat is kind of national security, if I'm not mistaken. And on that podcast, we talked about U.S.-China competition.

Yeah, it was excellent. It was somewhere time flies. It was around the time of the... Well, it was actually late fall, maybe. It was around the time of the Chinese military parade. It was interesting. It was a good podcast, so I'm glad to have a talk to you again. Great. Yeah, sorry I got the dates wrong. The time just flies. I can't keep track of anything anymore. I totally, by coincidence, just happened to notice that you guys at DropSite broke some stories.

on Jeffrey Epstein and wanted to just touch base with you on that broad topic. But before we get into it, I would like maybe you to tell my audience a little bit about Dropside News because I'm a big supporter of alternative media. I think the...

corporate or establishment media really doesn't cover all kinds of things that you're really important to, should be important to American and international listeners. So tell us how DropSite was founded and what your sort of mission statement is.

Sure. And first of all, let me just say thank you for having me on because part of the warped media environment and the social control that they use to operate it is like selectively ignoring certain stories and not acknowledging them in the public record. regardless if they're true or not, just to maintain a set of political control. These kind of conversations in alternative media are super important to break out of the paradigm. But Dropside News, it was founded about a year ago.

It's an independent news organization, very small. There's only maybe about seven or eight of us, maybe seven or six, seven, something like that. But a very small number of us working here. It's funded on Substack. We have some donors to individuals. The vast majority of it's funded by... people paying a small sub-stack monthly fee. It's a publication focused on, broadly speaking, conflict and war and espionage and so forth.

And, you know, we travel for the job. I was in Syria early this year. We have colleagues who are in Palestine or all over the world, pretty much. We filed dispatches from... war zones ukraine and where you can pick up and the course of it so you know where it's a spin-off of a publication which i was also an original employee of called the intercept which is what was founded to do the edward snowden leaks and then literally evolved into more like a

conventional liberal left publication. Then we left to meet my colleagues and found a draft site, which is much more narrowly focused. on, you know, war and conflict and geopolitics per se. So yeah, that's the short story. We have about a hundred, half a million subscribers now. So it's going pretty rapidly, pretty healthily. And then, yeah, we've been covering the most recently Jeffrey Epstein.

saga yeah you know i i think that um a small group but of talented really committed people you can still move the needle in today's environment through the various startups i'm involved in i regularly communicate with establishment reporters at FT or Wall Street Journal or whatever that covers, say, genomics or AI or something. But honestly, I think establishment media is so both lazy and also distorted for...

kind of strategic reasons. And so I think guys like you, even though you're a small team, you can just have a huge impact. You could go out there and and really cover things in depth that need to be covered that way. That's actually the great thing about the current technological environment, where a lot of the overhead, institutional overhead that are required to do reporting has sort of been, you know...

eliminated like making video and broadcasting it does anyone can do that anyone's doing it publishing into a broad platform and we can do it so there's a lot of bad that goes along with it but you know there's a lot of good such that you don't need a gigantic building full of people to do what

only the New York Times, only FT or so forth could do some time ago. And now that's actually highlighting even more plainly the shortcomings of those institutions and how much they don't do with their resources oftentimes. Yeah. Look at me. I'm some professor who mainly does physics and AI stuff, but here I am. I get to have a podcast channel just by using the, in this case, we're on the Riverside platform.

By the way, I do know the founder of Substack, so I don't know how aware he is of you guys, but I think he would support what you guys are doing. So maybe that's something we could talk about offline.

Let's jump into our man, Jeffrey Epstein, who has gone in and out of the news. I think 10 years ago, I could mention the name Jeffrey Epstein, too. really even very politically aware people who are maybe even following the minutiae of what's going on in New York or in Washington, D.C., and they wouldn't even know who Jeffrey Epstein was that 10 plus years ago.

You guys broke a bunch of stories. And just to set it up, if I'm not mistaken, there are really two caches of emails that contributed a lot to these stories. One is the recent release. There's a whole saga about this Trump opposing it and then eventually it happening. But then there's another set of emails, which I think came from, was it an Iranian intelligence hack of, I don't know, was it Ehud Barak's email? Maybe you can set that.

the background up for us and then tell us what, what's the most interesting stuff you learned from this information. So there are actually three, so far, three separate sources of information you've been using for these stories. So one is the, are the House oversight, the committee disclosures of Jeffrey Epstein's documents from his estate.

His calendars, especially, and some private communications that he had taken in the last year of his life, those are in the public record. They were released as part of this ongoing litigation and ongoing... political inquiry into his activities. So that's one aspect. The other aspect is there is a cache of emails that Bloomberg News previously had exclusively, which Dropside also has now.

which were emails from his Yahoo mail account. He had many different email accounts, but he had a particular account on Yahoo, which, you know, there's about 18,000 messages in there. I don't really know what he used it for specifically, but the message, the broad diversity, I'll get into that. He kind of segmented his conversations, but we've been going through it for the past week, and it's...

Basically, a lot of messages from 2006 to 2019, but it wasn't the full scope of the activity at that time. There's some number of things he was doing using this address. And then finally, the inbox you referred to, which is the hacked. email inbox, not of Epstein, but of former Israeli Prime Minister, former Israeli Defense Minister, Ehud Barat. And in those emails, there are significant years of conversations between Barat.

And Epstein. And this was in the period that Barack was just leaving his defense minister role, 2013, and slightly before that as well, too, he was in touch with Epstein. And so a lot of our stories have drawn upon that Barack inbox. in conjunction with the house overset releases, especially the calendars, because they allow you to cross reference and understand what's going on in those emails. It's extremely revealing for reasons we'll talk about.

The origins of that Barak inbox is not totally clear. We have some speculation of what it is. It was claimed by a group. a pro-palestinian hacking group called handala and they had claimed at some time you know a few months ago i think it was actually a few years ago because then the inbox is all cut off in 2016.

So I think that actually happened a long time ago, but it was dumped on a website called Distributed Denial Secrets, which is like a predecessor, a successor organization to WikiLeaks. And they have all these hacks in different places. These have been sitting up there for a while. They've been sitting on there.

on Disagree Denial Secrets. People can go look at them. There's not just Barack. There was emails from a former Israeli ambassador at the UN, Ron Prosor, and a few other Israeli generals, a personal account for hack to put on a DbOS. But it was only Barack who had this very, very long correspondence with Epstein years long. And it was known that Barack knew Epstein. That had been reported.

in the context of their personal relationship and obligation to sexual exploitation, things like this. But what these emails show is something much more interesting, I think. We'll talk about it. But basically, it's the long arc of his ties with Epstein and what they were doing together for many, many years.

Just to clarify a couple of questions about specifically the email situation. So are there people who claim the Barack hacked emails are not real or has it more or less been established beyond reasonable doubt that those are real? So at this point, all the animals claiming they're not real because we went through, there's actually several things happened. First, they're actually first reported on by Reason Magazine. Someone did a story on them earlier this year about Epstein's ties.

to the spyware world generally. It was kind of a very high level story, but that was reported. And that reporter went through an independent process of verification. And then we went through an independent process of verification, talking to people in the emails. verifying non-public information that was privately in there. And then now another thing has happened in the past two weeks or so.

that the House Oversight Committee has released its cache of Epstein's communications, and they happen to overlap with the communications with Barack. So both emails, they're all in both things. So that was the kind of the third... you know, nail in the verification. So I think this point is pretty solid. Awesome. Now, I've read extensively in the most recent Gmail release. I don't think I've looked at the Yahoo stuff.

Is there a qualitative difference in terms of who he was communicating with through those different email accounts? So the Yahoo Mail, that has not been made public for everyone to see yet. Bloomberg has a copy, but they never share with anybody that ever published online. But now we have them through DDoS, receive them, and they give us access to them. We have a cache of them. So, you know, we're going to try to make them public so people can go through them themselves.

The issue is that, you know, obviously the one issue in his emails is that this is a period of his life when Epstein was very involved in sex trafficking. And he seemed like he was involved in this throughout his life. But he was using this email, at least for a certain period, extensively to engage in that behavior. So to just dump it online, I think maybe this is part of the reason Bloomberg hasn't done it. You know, you could imperil people's privacy.

you know, further victimize people inadvertently by doing so. So for us to do that, we'd have to vet them very thoroughly, which we're going to try to do and then see if it's safe that we can nap.

release it publicly thereafter but then you know i think people get a lot out of it because then other things went on there too but uh you know that's the big barrier and impediments to sharing the publicly at least today so i i think as we before we start taping i mentioned to you that uh It's a little bit of a joke, but I fancy myself an Epstein scholar because even 20 years ago, I knew people who knew Epstein.

And Epstein had a certain reputation in finance because he exhibited wealth as if he were one to 10 billionaire. But no one ever knew how he made his money. Nobody traded with him. All the trading. Big trading desks on Wall Street at the big banks and hedge funds never traded with him. So there was always a mystery. Like, how did this guy make his money? So there was a lot of fascination with him. And also...

Through the physics community, he had a genuine interest, actually, in frontier science and physics. And so there were a lot of people I knew who had gone to his island or knew him, and they were in the email, the Gmail. cash that became public. But I'm curious, in the parts of the emails that overlap chronologically,

Is he using sort of only the Gmail to communicate with one set of people and there's a completely disjoint set of people that are in the Yahoo messages or is he just got two email accounts that he's using all the time? Can you just say something about that? You know, I don't fully, I think we don't know the exact scope, but he had many email addresses. He had seen me, I've only seen a few of them. Yeah. But I, you know, we've discovered like, you know, more inboxes and so forth that he used.

What he specifically segmented them for, I'm not 100% clear. Some of them are a bit ambiguous. One of them is called JEE Vacation. One is called JEE Project. I think one was called JEE iTunes or something. Little Saints, Little JE, something like that. The Littlest Something. He had multiple different emails, which he would sometimes forward his own emails to a different box as well, too.

We used Gage in some sort of skullduggery with these emails. And I have seen there are differences in what he used them for. But the JEE vacation email, we don't really have that. through the lens of his communications there with Barack. So one could survive that based on what we see, what we've seen so far at least, and its provisional kind of inclusion, it seemed like the JEE vacation email may have been more used for his...

global espionage and back-channel diplomacy activities. That's the impression one gets from seeing his correspondence with Barack, whereas the JEE project emails may have dealt more with his dealings with academia. and his sex trafficking and his communications with his lawyer and so forth. But again, I can't know that for sure until and unless we get the full cache of the JEE vacation emails. But that is where it seems from the outside. Got it. Okay.

Maybe we should move on to Ehud Barak. So... I remember years ago seeing photos of Brock coming and going from Epstein's mansion, and sometimes he would wear, I forgot what these things are called, keffiyeh. He had something to disguise his face, but the paparazzi caught him coming in and out of there regularly, and even with a girl, I think, at one point.

So I think it was known that he and Epstein were close and that he stayed at the residence just off of Central Park. Also that they were involved in business. Maybe tell us what are the new things that you learned recently about this? So this is a profoundly interesting topic. Like everything you said, we've reported, but also what you said about the photos and the stories. Because I saw those stories years ago too.

Before I get into our stories, there's a very important domestic Israeli political context in the story, which is only going to become more salient, I think, and becoming salient in the last 24 hours, even so as well. But basically, Barak was somebody who... was kind of on the left of Israel, the center left of the Israeli political establishment. And he had deep alienation and rivalry with the people currently in power in Israel.

in Netanyahu and the Likud party and so forth. He was more of the labor bloc. So, you know, these stories about Barack, and this does not mean they're not true. It's just that it happens. Like, there's these very aggressive stories about him.

alleging his involvement in uh you know sex trafficking with epstein and uh you know sexual assault and so forth there was the story you mentioned the daily mail story which you know actually he was not and this is the psychological thing they did he was not actually with the women in those photos but they just put some women who were leaving the house

Maybe roughly the same time, maybe not in the same headline with him to make it seem that he just come out of an orgy or something at FC's house. But, you know, that was kind of like interesting because actually, you know, maybe it was doing that, but that was not exactly clear from that. And then.

Very recently, I think a month ago, Virginia Giuffre, her book came out because she was one of the victims of Epstein. And in the book, she alleges a prime minister, an unnamed prime minister, Richter, and very drastically and so forth.

But she doesn't actually name him. But, you know, it could be him. It seems like this is very strong superficial evidence. It could be him. But she never says that explicitly. But the New York Post, also a very right-wing newspaper, which is very pro-Israel only, they like put barack's photo in the in the story about this and like you know basically drew the conclusion that she never drew fearlessly without fear of defamation or whatever uh could be there

So, you know, these publications, The Mail and The Post and so forth, they're kind of more aligned with these really, right? Yeah. So they love this story because they love the idea of tearing it down. Even if it's true, they just would embrace it in a way they would not because they see him as a political rival. So this is kind of the subtext and the subtext is becoming more and more salient now as Israeli media starts taking note of the story.

But our stories are actually not really about Ehud Barak's putative involvement in sex trafficking. They're about something totally different, which the media has not covered at all, which I think is the real Epstein story. which is Epstein and Barack, including during the time that Barack was defense minister of Israel. And likely we only have the emails from 2012, 2016, most of the most part of their communications. And he was defense minister until 2013.

We did relationship to that start in 2012. It was clearly, you know, midstream. We caught it. They had a very close relationship. And Epstein was effectively working for Barack, working with Barack, I would say, actually. to further the goals of the Israeli security establishment, Israeli intelligence-linked tech and surveillance firms, and helping Barack conduct back-channel diplomacy on behalf of the Israeli government.

So he was somebody who I don't believe people asked me and they said even before writing about this, he was, was he a Mossad agent? I don't think he was a Mossad agent. He was something very different. He was somebody who... through his relationship with the israeli elite and at least in other countries in russia and u.s and europe and elsewhere africa and middle east uh he was somebody who

would act as independent actors supporting Israeli strategic goals. And Barat, in the correspondence, would rely on Epstein to help him accomplish his goals, but also help him make money. He would help him once he left defense ministry.

become a very wealthy private contractor, selling Israeli surveillance and security tools to foreign countries over many years. And that's really what our story is about. And that's why I think actually, you know, the real Epstein story is not to downplay the sexual...

crime he committed i think we all know that now though but the real story is this actually that he was basically a freelance because the operative on behalf of the israeli government perhaps other governments right so i want to drill down into the the the sort of new aspect of this that you guys covered in depth i do want to say from my perspective the real story the one that i think the firewall is still protecting the dam is still you know hasn't broken yet on this

is whether Epstein was blackmailing, you know, figures like Bill Gates or Bill Clinton, top US political figures, and possibly on behalf of foreign. And I think that's that's the most radioactive story here. And the main reason why, you know, there's still such resistance to this coming out. It was just some rich men preying on.

young women i think that could have come out right that speaker of the house would not have said like our whole political system could collapse if this came out or there are huge national security implications if this came out i don't think randy john sorry johnson would have said that uh

If it weren't something more akin to what I just mentioned. But we can get to that later because I know that wasn't the focus of your recent investigations. I think I can shed a little bit of light in on what you guys recently covered. For two reasons. So my first startup, which was founded back in 2000, so 25 years ago, was in encryption and information security. we had as one of our investors, the CIA Venture Fund. So we were in that world. And I know many Israelis who are in that world.

for a very specific reason. In Israel, if you're a high school student and you're one of the smartest kids in Israel, you test extremely high, you can, rather than serve in the ordinary military, you can get into two different programs, one called Talpiot and one called Unit 8200. Talpiot is a little more focused on sort of basic research. It's physics, math, computer science majors. 8200 is a little more focused on signals intelligence, so specifically like communications and spying and SIGINT.

Both of those programs allow you to go to university and get a very special set of degrees and training in practical... Defense related stuff, as well as highly theoretical advanced stuff. And these are the smartest kids in Israel that get into this program. The alumni from that program are very disproportionately.

the CEOs of tech companies coming out of Israel. And you meet them all the time in Silicon Valley, especially if you work in information security, you meet them all the time in more broadly in other technology areas as well. So that's a thing. It's very common, as you know, for someone who's had a whole life in politics, if they weren't super corrupt, they might come out of politics with really not a lot of money, a lot less money than people they would consider their peers.

You know, globally, people that regularly deal with at meetings and conferences and things, they have way less money than those people because they've been in public service. And often the moment they get out, they're in a hurry to rectify.

In this situation, like they're in a hurry to make those dollars shekels. And you can, I sort of interpret Ehud's communications with... epstein in that vein that look i'm out of politics now i want to make some money and i'm going to get into tech related defense related tech and spy related tech and

There's even an exchange where Jeffrey's like, yeah, I can help you with this. And he's saying, well, look, the way I interpret that sentence is a little ambiguous, but the way I interpret Ehud's sentence is that, hey, I know you're good with the ladies, but what do you know about?

tech and, you know, introducing me to the biggest pockets of money in the world, you know, that kind of thing. But they did get involved. And I think it's quite clear they worked together on a number of pretty big deals. And the world of money is, you know, there's pockets of money. And if you know people, oh, those Singaporean sovereign wealth fund, the UAE sovereign wealth fund, the Saudi sovereign wealth, you know, big pools of capital.

You need connections, you need introductions. Once you have those introductions, you can start working on deals. I think I have a very good sense of what that is about, that part of the relationship between Barack and Epstein. You're absolutely right, because Barack, when he left public office, as people in the U.S. do and in New York do and in Israel do, evidently.

uh they want to make a lot of money they want to make up for the last time of being a public servant and leveraging the connections ostensibly that they got uh in public life to start making money uh but you know it's interesting because

You know, one thing that's interesting in the emails is that there's clearly a power dynamic in the emails between Epstein and Barack. And one would think that Barack, he doesn't need introductions. He's a very powerful person, one of the most powerful influential people in the Israeli political industry.

security establishment at that time of his generation. But, you know, in the email, it's not like he, Epstein, was looking up to him or trying to get his help or trying to get his attention. It's quite inverted, actually. Barack is really eager for Epstein's help to make money. He needs help to make money. He needs help to make these introductions that you're talking about right now to private banks, to foreign governments. Specific individuals are well-placed there to make deals and so forth.

And what they were doing, the mechanism that they were trying to use to help them make money was, by and large, the promotion of these Israeli tech... and security firms and surveillance technology firms at the foreign government. So their relationship sort of accomplished a dual purpose. It did help make Barack lots of money as a consultant or like a...

finder of appropriate clients for these companies or for countries in some cases. But also in doing so, it would help spread this technology around the world. It would help embed the israeli firms which are linked or their origins are in you know either unit 81 or unit 81 in the tech infrastructure of other countries that would then later go on to sign formal security deals with Israel. And so far, we've done six stories in this archive. We have many more stories to come.

But the stories, they're very emblematic in many ways. There was one deal that the Israeli government signed with Cote d'Ivoire in 2014. That deal was very much engineered. The years leading up to it and final culmination between Epstein and Barack, both, including during a time when Barack was still defense minister. They were both meeting, quote, Ivarian officials, sometimes at Epstein's house in New York.

They were working to promote the surveillance technology to Cote d'Ivoire and they adopted it and it's still in place there. And they have a very good relationship stemming apart from these relationships that were built in. And a similar thing happened in Mongolia. Again, with Epstein's introduction, they created this NGO called the International Peace Institute to help set up a relationship between Barak and a few other people in the Mongolian government. Again, as a channel to create this.

sell this surveillance technology in 2017 to sign an official deal. And we have more stories like this in other countries, especially in Africa and other places that are doing this. Another thing they're doing is that A lot of diplomacy is done to these track two or track three sort of discussions between powerful people. Epstein was like a fixer in the sense, too. What story we did was he was helping Barack create a back channel.

between the israeli government when brahk was out of office but he's a powerful private citizen uh to create a back channel to express an offer to the russian government to afford resolution to the syrian civil war in 2013 to try to compel the removal of the syrian president at that time in replacement with a pro-Russian dictator where they would jointly select ostensibly. So he was doing that. And then he was also setting up meetings with the...

Steve Bannon and Modi in 2019 and doing all types of things. So his power and influence was far beyond what one would deem a private citizen, per se. He was somebody who was... more powerful than government officials, or as powerful in many cases, as powerful government officials, while ostensibly being, you know, just a financier, if one quote. So, you know, these are all very fascinating sort of activities you engage in.

which are in no way part of the mainstream public accounting of the story, which is that he was a creepy guy and he committed sex. It was a Me Too story. Basically, it's still the New York Times doesn't get this way. And not to downplay the nature of the ass he committed, the crime he committed, but this is really missing the forest for the trees here. And to your point very briefly about blackmail, a story, one of the stories he did was that in Epstein's house in Manhattan,

A senior Israeli military intelligence officer lived in the house for weeks at a time. According to not just the emails, the schedules, his personal schedule was released by the House Oversight Committee. Yoni Korem, who was Barack's chief of staff. including during the time that Barack was still defense minister. This gentleman was living in Epstein's house in his apartment in New York.

during also the place he was alleged to engage in sex trafficking. So, you know, one can imagine what he was doing there, and it's not really been accounted for anywhere. And at first of all, read the story and read all the details in the emails and so forth.

But it will be quite easy for someone to engage. It will create an environment that's conducive to that activity. And finally, at this point, you know, we don't have like, you know, it's a very extreme conclusion. We don't have like, I guess, a smoking gun per se right now. But I think that...

It's sort of already implied anyways, because if you are somebody who is very powerful and you know what other powerful people are doing, the criminal or moral activities they're engaged in, and you are even facilitating it for them. you kind of have leverage over them anyways. You have leverage over them for that reason. And if you have ties to foreign intelligence agencies where it's truly what they're saying in your house and so forth, you can use that information as a tool of...

Even without explicit coercion. So was he coercing people as well too? I think there is some reason to believe that. But even without that, I think that the story that he was, the blackmail aspect of it. is sort of built in it's baked into the cave already yeah i think i don't disagree with anything you said i think it's important to distinguish between what i might call early stage and late stage epstein okay

So I think the stories you've written and the recent emails that came out are kind of late stage Epstein where the guy already has an island. He has the largest single family residence. New York City, right, which was given to him purportedly for $1 by Les Wexner, who's one of the big mega group pro-Israel billionaires from Ohio, in this case from Ohio. So in the late stage Epstein, he knows everybody.

He's going to these events like Davos. He is a fun time. He's inviting you, Larry Summers and his wife to his island, Alan Dershowitz, you know, Bill Gates, et cetera, et cetera. He knows everyone. He can throw wild parties, great parties with fringe benefits. He's a man of mystery because he's purportedly a financier who might actually be able to help.

Leon Black or somebody like that save $100 million in taxes through some fancy legal maneuvers in Cayman Islands or something like this. So there's no reason why if I were a big hedge fund manager... or I were Minister of Defense of some European country, if I met Epstein in a party, I would get to know this guy. He's a very interesting guy, smart guy, has beautiful ladies hanging around with him, super rich, obviously has his own plane.

So that's late stage Epstein. And sure, he might have had more to offer Ehud Barak coming out of politics than vice versa in terms of making money. Right. So I think that's all. I think you're totally spot on with that stuff. But how did Epstein get there? You have a guy who was teaching, who didn't complete college, was teaching math and physics at Dalton.

Worked at a couple banks, maybe got fired, not sure what actually happened. Somehow he went from that to living a one to 10 billionaire lifestyle. And in that early phase, what... happened and you know that early phase does overlap somewhat with you know um early photographs taken with bill clinton and and

So already some big figures. Right. So so there there's a whole timeline here. We're really talking about, you know, I think when he was hanging out with Trump the most was in the 90s, probably. Right. So we're talking about a 30, 35 year arc for this guy. to the extent that he might have been running a kind of honeypot operation to accumulate black male leverage, whether for himself or for foreign powers.

That was more early Epstein, I think. But later on, I think he was just living it up and just doing whatever he wanted. and was already probably regarded as a resource. If I were the Russian secret police and I wanted some information, I might just send a guy to talk to Epstein, right? Because he knows everybody and he might be able to help. So I just want to distinguish between that. It's a 35-ish year arc for this guy.

And actually, this is something I'm really interested in your take, Steve, as well, too, as someone who followed Epstein and taken an interest in him for many years. Because this early part of his life, I've also been looking into it, and there is a degree. the intrigue is like putting it lightly but there's like a he was he was like he was involved in some way perhaps in Iran Contra and he had ties with Adnan Khashoggi and so forth during that time

And there is, like, you know, there's different working pieces. I think the pieces may be that he was, like, a very proficient money launderer. And money laundering is a tool that is useful for intelligence agencies. So we're one to, yeah, so if we want to... you know, be engaged in that, that can open a lot of doors. And there's also this organization, there's actually, I think, a Pakistani bank, it's called PCCI, which was also involved in a very institutional way in this sort of crime.

money laundering and all these divorce financial crimes but also sex trafficking uh it was involved in sex trafficking uh of women to gulf arabs and other people so you know there seems like a symmetry there between Epstein's rise and his tactics and the things these people are doing and others that may make sense. And also, let's do with Les Wexner because Les Wexner...

He became a billionaire. The Family Foundation or something like that was given over to Epstein. So basically, the fortune was given over to this guy. You know, who gives over their family the billion dollar fortune pound attorney to some, anyone other than maybe your son or something. You give it to him. it's all very strange and you know i'm really curious your take but there's something in here it was like the mafia or something as well too there's like a mafia-esque

The whole Paris state, the way that they operated and all this stuff, the worthy origins. I'm very curious of your analysis of it. Yeah, so I would love to... Okay, first of all, I'd like to... Maybe send you down a rabbit hole for your future research with a guy called Ari Ben Menashe, who's a very well-known figure in, I mean, he literally was held in federal prison, the same facility where Epstein was later.

killed or suicide. Ben Menashe spent a year in that federal prison under charges from the federal government, US federal government related to Iran-Contra. And he was an Israeli intelligence operative. I'll go into that in a second. And he's made public statements about what Epstein at the time was doing. I think that most people don't understand. Imagine that I'm just a hustler. I'm a grifter. And I'm just trying to make my money.

in manhattan and i get to know a bunch of rich people and maybe i i have access to girls and i get some of them in trouble with the girls and i blackmail them or something right It's a very risky position for me to be in to play that game because these are very rich people. They can hire private investigators to deal with me. They can hire ex-cops to come and rough me up. They can do whatever they want to me. What's my protection?

to be able to operate in that game. Okay, very tough game to play. But let's suppose I have an Intel connection. So in the way Russians would talk about is you have a roof. In the post-Soviet era, when things were really rough in Russia, all businessmen had to have a roof. That would be some mafia or intelligence or state organization that's protecting me. Otherwise, I'd get extorted by other people.

So if you're working with an Intel service, like let's say you're providing this compromise to an Intel service, the rough stuff they can handle, because if let's say I'm blackmailing. some hedge fund billionaire. And I'm just like, look, you slept with this girl at my house. What hate for your wife, Janet, who I love to find out about this. How would you like to invest in this new fund that I'm setting up? It came in islands, right?

And if the guy's like, hey, I know what you're up to. Don't you think you could fucking blackmail me? And I'm going to send some guys over to talk to you tomorrow. Former NYPD guys, right? If... I'm by myself. That's going to be a big threat to me. What can Epstein do against these guys? But if I actually work for an Intel service, they can help me with that rough stuff, right? They're used to that. They have people, former, I mean, what do Intel services do?

in foreign countries they have former special forces people that do wet work who you know i i just can just be protected much more than just a person standing by myself so my theory again i don't have any specific corroboration for this, is that if you want to play this game, you're best off pairing up, whether it's with the mafia or it's with state security or somebody who's willing to use violence or at least protect you with the threat of violence.

If some hedge fund guy says to me, I'm sending over some guys to rough you up. I'm like, hey, you know, I work with Mossad or I work with CIA. If you want to rough me up, I think you're going to get the worst end of this. I don't think your family wants to deal with that either. Right. So.

I think that's the missing piece that a lot of people don't realize. Like, it could just be the mafia. It could be, look, I have mafia connections. Don't mess with me. Either pay me off or I'm going to tell your wife. I'm going to release these photos to your wife, right? But if you think you can...

violence hey you can talk to my mafia friends about this right so i think that's a missing piece of this whole thing that people don't realize like most legitimate businesses are never going to flirt with violence

They're just not going to go there. But if you're an intel service or mafia like entity that does go there, different story, different story that no normal person like you or me ever wants to deal with. Right. Because if they threaten your family, what are you going to do? I'm just going to cave. Right.

So anyway, I think that's a part of it. Now, this Ari bin Menashe story. So Ari bin Menashe was charged. He was one of the people that was actually charged in Iran-Contrad. He was held in federal prison.

He was acquitted. Actually, if you go and look it up, he was actually acquitted because he claimed he was working for a U.S. allied government, Israel, the Israeli intelligence services. And that that was why he was acquitted. And this is all in the federal record. That guy who knew Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine Maxwell's father, who was known to also, you know, collaborate in some way with Wassad.

Arben Menashe just said openly, has said repeatedly that in that phase of his life, Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were involved in honeypot compromise operations for Israeli intelligence. He just flat out says it. So anyway, again, I don't know, just epistemically, I don't know what's true or false here. It's all, you know, it's very tough to figure out what's true or false when there are spies and things involved. But...

That's a particular direction, which it's not difficult to pick up that thread if you're investigating. And then, you know, it's never going to be mentioned by establishment media because it's very, very embarrassing. It's very embarrassing to think like Bill Clinton, somebody might have had compromise on Bill Clinton while he was president of the United States or something like this, right? So, yeah.

Yeah, you know, that very alarming quote you said on Mike Johnson that this could impure in the entire political system or destroy the entire political system. Imagine what that could be in reference to. Right. Nothing something like that. Right. Gravity. This guy, Mike Johnson, is a serious guy. He's like the third, in some sense, the third most powerful guy in the United States. Right. And he just says this to the press. What was he? What could he possibly mean by that?

Right. He had to say like, oh, you know, this P. Diddy thing, if it gets out, it's a threat to national security. What? You know, he did. He was doing the stuff with underage girls and rappers and whatever. What does that have to do with national security? What does that have to do with the collapse of our political system? For the third most powerful political figure in the United States, just a few days ago, right? To literally say that about the Epstein files to the...

the real media, the establishment media, but no one follows up on it. Right. No, like only you follow up on it. Right. It's just insane. Right. It's a, you know, that's crazy. Part of it is that these emails are sitting there. Like all this information is publicly available.

One could deduce it. We're doing it with very limited resources, but just a few people putting together. The New York Times and the whole building of people in Midtown Manhattan, Washington Post, All Financial Times, they are just not interested in... actively and i would say egregiously ignoring it in fact and a very funny thing happened the other day and it played out again today as well too it continued so the person who actually broke the matrix about this a little bit was benjamin netanyahu

Because 24 hours ago, on Friday night, roughly, Benjamin Netanyahu shared an article by the publication Jacobin. the left-wing publication of the United States, which referenced the Dropside News reporting about this Barack's ties to Epstein and what they were doing. And in doing that, you know, he kind of like gave the first official sort of acknowledgement that this exists and this is real. And I think he shared the article.

uh because you know he doesn't like barack and it's like some sort of like tying someone to jeffrey epstein and it could ask me it just doesn't look very good so he shared it for his own domestic political reasons but in doing so he gave a broader recognition to everybody in the world that this is something which you know unofficial public figure in Israel is acknowledging now. So now there's been all this fighting about it between Naftali Bennett and Netanyahu over the subject.

And recently at the Halifax Security Conference on Saturday, a journalist actually asked Barack about the subject. He asked him about, you know... There's this story, Netanyahu shared this, and they say all this stuff about you and Epstein and so forth. And, you know, Barack said was, you know, he didn't refer to Dropset, he referred to Jacobins. It's a very anti-Semitic publication, and it's all lies and things like this.

But it's like, you know, bringing this volcano, which everyone's trying to ignore, it's just sort of like erupting regardless. So I think their strategy, the people who are trying to engineer this into a limited hangout... the u.s political system by not acknowledging it suppressing whatever is in the files and the one refusing to acknowledge anything that comes out outside of that like i reporting the new york times will not acknowledge it because that doesn't exist

And then trying to keep it that way. But it's a little harder to control the narrative in this era. It's possible, but it's harder because you have to control many more points of access. So you can control, you can have a sufficient agreement in the New York Times, but you can't.

control every subset page or every person who may dig something up. And that's the dam that's sort of breaking right now, I think. And, you know, to your point, I don't know how deep it goes. If you go much deeper in that, I think that what you said about Ariba Menashe and the history of Epstein and so forth. I do think there's something there. And if it does come out...

It would be unbelievably humiliating for the current political elite. It would impugn the credibility. It would call everything into question if that would come to light. So I would imagine it would go to extraordinary lengths to stop that.

And there are going to be extraordinary lengths, but it's not really sufficient, actually, right now. It's still happening that the revelations are coming. And, you know, we're affording it, but others are going to report it too. It's a fact now. It's gone too far.

So, you know, we have to see how they continue to try to respond to it. I would just encourage you to keep pushing on the story because I feel like it's, you know, having been sort of like an amateur investigator into this particular story for. many years, decades, actually. I feel it's close to where it could break. Now, maybe it's not going to break because maybe I think Trump ginned up a Justice Department investigation.

of uh clinton epstein connections and so then like i think the justice department can probably like um block the release of a lot of documents by claiming that oh there's an active invest you know active investigation how sick are we of that that term but it's still possible i think some you know things could be blocked but uh i don't know i think we're very close to uh you know something interesting happening i agree i agree we are very close

I never do this on my podcast, but I'm going to show you a picture, which is one of my favorite pictures from the era. I'm older than you, so I really fully remember. iran contra and uh i was an adult when iran contra happened and bill clinton i voted twice for bill clinton he was my man can you guys see can you see this yeah uh yeah yeah it's a little amazing

Now, I don't know how many people have seen this photo, but isn't this one of the most amazing photos of all time? What year was this photo taken? I don't know, but judging from that monitor, I'm guessing it's a 90s photo. Crazy, huh? Amazing photo. Yeah. Unbelievable expression and everything. Maybe I should learn how to do, like, introduce more visual content into my podcast. Maybe I'll get more views, but... So, yeah, so...

To me, what could happen next, there are different possible branches we could end up on. One branch is that they managed to suppress it because now there's a DOJ investigation. And so even though this thing passed in Congress. They're still going to be able to withhold a bunch of stuff. And maybe that'll happen. On the other hand, maybe stuff will get out. And I think it could be... I think the real...

Again, I'm speculating here. I'm not saying I have this with high conviction. I know this with high conviction. It seems like the U.S.-Israel relationship is what's sort of hanging in the balance here. And if it is revealed that there, you know. israeli intelligence was using compromise against u.s politicians or something like that that would just be pretty devastating right if that came out and um so i think that to me is a possible

version of what happened in the early Epstein days and why this stuff is so tightly blocked today. That's my hypothesis. I agree. And, you know, it's funny because I think that they would take a story less preventive release of that information because so many people are invested in that relationship and just how damning that would be. I think that they would.

do whatever they could to stop that. Well, you know, a funny thing is that I think that whoever's doing the releases, they made some errors because not just like inconsistent reactions, but, you know, the thing with Yoni Corrin, like...

That is actually, you gave like a huge data point there. Unicorn, the military intelligence officer. That was in his calendars. So the government released information and they were done to other stuff, but they released information showing that A serving chief of staff to the Israeli defense minister was living in Epstein's apartment and military intelligence after living in his apartment on numerous occasions, including while Barack was the defense minister.

That is an astonishing detail to release. So I have to think that it was released maybe by accidents or, you know, I don't know. Maybe they just they were.

I don't know if it's redacted. Like, what's not redacted is real bad, but... Even if you put a crack team of aligned FBI, CIA people to go through all this and make sure nothing gets out that... you guys are gonna seize on mistakes are gonna be made i mean think of how much information is in all that stuff right and so it's quite plausible that it's just a mistake and they didn't they didn't really think about what the

consequences would be and you know plenty of people will just say oh you guys are you guys are anti-semitic you know even noticing that the chief of staff of the minister of defense of israel was living at epstein's place for weeks at a time like that that alone can't be discussed it's anti-semitic so who cares if it gets out right that's the emerging uh the emerging uh narrative about it and uh

Yeah, I think it's kind of a politicized use of a serious accusation, but that is what people are trying to say without engaging the substance of it, actually. So criticisms of it will be that this is just... conspiracy that's somatic and so forth but without actually talking about what was reported because the details cannot be engaged with because the details if you engage with the details and it's all over because you know

You didn't make it up. It's literally in the health oversight document. Sorry to interrupt you. Just to make a joke, actually. Let me state for the record, I am not anti-Semitic. My hero is Richard Feynman. And, you know, you actually look a little Semitic to me, actually. Just kidding. No more influential influences when I was growing up were Jewish. It's such a spurious acquisition. And, you know, the drops that are ever Jewish. It's like calling someone...

It's been politicized to the point where it's like in a communist regime, you would call someone a fascist. It's like that type of regime language is being used. Empty language. It's being during the meeting, which is very unfortunate.

But, you know, like, I think it's kind of like being less effective now. And, you know, one thing I always say is that when you look at the stories and activities, one of the victims of Jeffrey Epstein and this group of people who are operating his way... was actually ordinary Israeli people also, because their country was being used as like an operating base by this mafia to, you know, do things for their own benefit.

Which is not maybe benefited a certain class of people in Israel, but certainly if you're a working class and middle class person, you have no knowledge of this. You don't want your country to be used in this way. You were benefiting from it.

So, and now you're going to be blamed if something is like, this is, you're going to be blamed collectively despite having nothing to do with it. So, you know, I will say the Israelis are also victims of this too. So it's not something that's stigmatizing a certain group or certain nationality even.

It's something which, you know, it's a very class-based sort of thing. And, you know, many people have written themselves transnationally. So, you know, I don't think that that line of, you know, dismissing it will work because it's too well documented. You'd have to just, you know, nuke the articles from the internet. You can't do that anymore anyways. Wait for that now too. It was very voluminously detailed. And there's more. There's like a lot more to come. So...

You know, I think that they will try to ignore it. And then that may be the next best thing. But, you know, with friends like Netanyahu, you know, maybe you will continue giving us some sort of play in that thing. And I think that the dam is going to burst soon.

politicians will write about it so what's wild for me again like pointing out that i'm an older guy i grew up in the 80s um what's wild for me is that the groups that are legitimately interested in what's in this story and getting to the truth are so strongly both left and right so on one side you have like nick fuentes and the late charlie kirk who are like

at marjorie taylor green who were like far right people who want all this information to get out but then you have jacobin jacobin which is far left right it's and so it's like to me it's basically like old It's old boomers who don't want to think about this. And like young people who actually want the or old boomers who are just too influenced by establishment media. And then and then young people who actually.

just get their news from lots of sources like you said and so they they're they're going to learn about this one way or the other if it's a very good way it's a generational thing apart at least like not exclusively but definitely that's a part of it because the one thing those people shared common is that they were

Left and right, they were at odds with or excluded by or dissatisfied with the previous ruling compact and establishment. And they saw hypocrisies and things they don't think are not true or they don't get. And this is just such the most glaring and ostentatious example of potential corruption.

malfeasance and i think it's punctuated because of the you know unrest over the gaza war as well too which is happening at the same time as this because the questions about the u.s israeli relationship are becoming more pointed than ever especially from the other generation on both the lefts and the right so

You know, all these things are intersecting with one another to make this like a focal point. And, you know, actually, the first thing we said to me was interesting about this was Steve Bannon. And, you know, Steve Bannon is like his communication with Epstein, right?

uh they're basically one of our stories actually with the india related story but he actually said in a public event that epstein is the key to unlocking like everything or unlocking the whole story and that was very interesting to say because you know

I think there's a grain of truth in that or a strong grain of truth because he's emblematic of the corruption of a certain era and a certain consensus in American politics, which, you know, some people are interested in holding together and a lot of people are... kind of seeing through at this point and you know even my johnson's right if you do see through at that point it could be very injurious to the political system as a whole totally agree um let me throw out

another piece of history which is very relevant to this whole thing um which you might be interested in like another rabbit hole you can go down so but you know as a longtime epstein scholar i'm i'm steeped in this kind of stuff so a lot of people think the idea that people are blackmailed is just fanciful, it doesn't really happen, or that spying doesn't happen, that it's not really used in the way that people claim Epstein maybe was using it.

Even though they were willing, half the country was willing to believe that the Russians had compromised Donald Trump for years and years, some of the people still believe it, right? But when you bring it up in the Epstein context, they say it's just conspiracy theory. It's too fanciful to be true. But let me give you a real historical example, which is very famous. There's a huge Wikipedia entry on it. It's even made into movies. It's called Salon Kitty. Salon, S-A-L-O-N.

Kitty. Kitty is the name of a woman. Salon Kitty was a huge brothel operating in Berlin, and it was secretly operated by state security services of the Nazi party. So there was a huge brothel in Berlin. The Nazis used it not just to spy on foreign diplomats, rich people who passed through Berlin. They used it to spy on their own people.

So if a general came back from the Eastern Front and he was sleeping with some woman in the brothel, they would record every conversation. They had miles of tape. This is the 1930s and 40s. They had miles of tape, audio tape. of all the conversations that happened in this big building. If a general came back from the Eastern Front and they wanted to know if this guy was loyal to Hitler or thinking some thoughts that he wasn't supposed to be thinking, they were interested in that.

They were monitoring their own people. They were monitoring foreign diplomats, foreign dignitaries, businessmen, etc. It's an established fact that this thing ran for years and years and years. And it's a matter of history. So the idea that... No one's doing this anymore is just stupid. It's so much easier to do it now. Then that was very advanced technology for the 1940s to record every conversation happening in every room of this building. Now I can do a trivial. I can put a little tiny.

completely undetectable web camera in a room and you'll never know that you're being recorded, right? So, and Epstein could have done the same. In fact, I think the reporting, I'm curious what you think. I don't know how strong the reporting is, but it's reported many times.

that all the rooms in his New York residence were actually wired up. And there was a huge central control room in what used to be a bathroom on the ground floor. I've read that in many accounts. I just don't know how true it is. You know, so if that's true, then his residence was a giant salon kitty of Manhattan right next to Central Park.

I have seen that same information as well, too. And, you know, if you deduce the two things, intelligence agents living the extended time in your house, you know, the control room, the cameras, you know, it's a tremendous... I don't know what the word is. It's a tremendous Venn diagram of things which cross over to make it very plausible that that was exactly what it was doing. I seem to recall seeing a news story that...

Because of one of the civil suits, there were various victims groups that sued, I think, the estate of Epstein or whatever. In some of the civil suits, I think introduced as evidence was an inventory taken by the FBI. when they raided Epstein's residence in New York. And I've seen reporting on that. I don't remember if I've actually seen some item, like an item list. That supposedly lists many, many binders.

of information with disks. I mean, old technology, like, you know, disks, maybe photographs or audio or whatever, but in a binder format with different, you know, pockets. I mean, there was some... actual explicit reporting and that that only came out the fbi now claims it can't locate any of that stuff but that was reported and i think it it came to light because of a civil suit that somehow the court got access to this inventory

of fbi inventory when they raided the house if i had a team of journalists i would ask them to go look into that that's actually very interesting i will only go to that actually i mean they should If the FBI raids a residence of a prominent figure like Jeffrey Epstein and like apparently they drilled the safe. I've heard that said many times. They drilled a very big effectively kind of walk in safe, huge safe. They drilled it.

And surely there's an official document inventorying all this stuff they took out of the house. Like surely that's part of like FBI or police procedure. Right. So surely those documents exist. So they just want Mike John want them out. Right, right. We're so long inside the document. Yeah. So anyway, we've been on a long time and I've enjoyed this and I hope you guys will continue what you're doing. I think it's fantastic that at least somebody serious.

is still pushing on the store. Well, Steve, I really appreciate you having me because part of the whole problem with this story is the, you know, it's like a, you find the matrix or something because it's like a... institutional sort of consistency and position towards it, which is that it's not happening or if it's happening, this is a Me Too story that, you know, that's basically the story that happened and nothing else to see here.

But, you know, because of the fact we have the ability to broadcast and speak and report independently without the need for intermediaries any longer and to channel like this and drop site and whatever, it kind of makes it harder for them to, you know.

have these sort of... maintain a narrative which we all know is false or at least is fully incomplete so yeah thanks for having me and discussing it because it does help push back against that yeah it's been a pleasure let me just say one final thing which is i don't think either you or i are downplaying

the me too, that suffering of the women here that were exploited. Obviously that's super important. But again, back to my point about Pete Diddy, the power is protecting the information about what Epstein did. It's so vast. P. Diddy was also a Me Too sexploitation kind of situation. I think there were also underage people involved in that as well. But but the point is disparity between how what the forces at play.

to keep the Epstein information from coming to the public versus what happened with PDDI. It's such a disparity. And I just can't imagine the Speaker of the House saying what he said, I think it was less than a week ago, about the PDDI.

information, right? He only said it about the Epstein information that would shake the foundations of our political system and jeopardize national security. What could he possibly have meant? The third most powerful political figure in the United States, what could he have meant? with those comments. People should ask me. Absolutely. So, alright, well thanks a lot. Let's keep in touch on this. I hope you guys break some more stories and I can have you on again.

we'll have many more stories in the weeks in months to come. We have a whole, a lot to go through in there. Yeah. So keep seeing you soon. Awesome.