Deconstructing the Epstein Myth: What MAGA Got Right About the Stakes

The dark ecosystem that created both Donald and Jeffrey: A conversation with Stephanie Koff about the world beneath.

I spoke yesterday with my friend and Five 8 co-host Stephanie Koff—AKA Lincoln’s Bible, or LB—about the history of Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump. Here is the discussion:

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And here is a transcript, edited for clarity:

GREG OLEAR (GO)

Hello everyone, we are here with Stephanie Koff, AKA LB, who you might recognize as my co-host on The Five 8 and longtime friend. But we wanted to do a slightly different format today to talk about this Epstein business and kind of lay out everything that we know about it. And by “we,” I mean you, Stephanie. So that’s the purpose here.

Now for people who don’t know and might not be aware, you have a terrific podcast out called The World Beneath, which you put out four years ago, in which you did a lot of research on both organized crime and the intelligence community, and, specifically, people within that. Everybody should go listen to that podcast if they haven’t done so, but you’ve done a lot of research in both of these areas. It’s sort of your beat, if you will.

And it’s how we met back on Twitter—when it was still Twitter and we were all much more naïve about things—or I was. So, ten years ago. Okay, now you started looking into Trump’s history of money laundering. Back then was before the 2016 election—ten years ago.

STEPHANIE KOFF (SK)

Ten years ago. Ten years ago. Yeah.

GO

And that is how you found Jeffrey Epstein. You came across Jeffrey Epstein that way, okay, which is a very different way than most people come across “Jeffrey Epstein, sex trafficker.” So we’re going to talk not about that, we’re going to talk about how you found him, which was: you followed the money.

SK

I was following the money.

GO

And what did you discover?

SK

Well, was looking at all of the criminals around Donald, and I had a head start with a piece of information that I had gotten in 2005—before there was even an imagination that this man would run for president. I think to the layman’s understanding, if you knew who Trump was, which people did, that he was political in any way, just maybe he had been and we learned that he had been.

In 2005, Trump had this new reality show with Mark Burnett. And so I had a circle of people that I knew. I’m a writer, screenwriter. So I knew folks in that circle with that man.

GO

Okay. Meaning Burnett.

SK

Yes, Burnett. And I had learned that Donald was in a tremendous amount of debt to some Russians. And it was threatening this new thing—this idea of him as this self-made, you know, billionaire, whatever, whatever the thing was, a successful businessman, because it was all about to crumble. And there’s been a tremendous amount of reporting since I learned that. Verifying all of that. So I had that information at the time, back in the day.

And so when he came down that escalator, I knew, I was like, “Oh no, that’s the guy that’s in debt to a bunch of Russian gangsters!” And so I started trying to figure out who those Russians may be. And then in doing that, I came across Jeffrey Epstein.

GO

Okay, interesting. So Trump to the Russians to Epstein.

SK

Yeah, well, organized crime—specifically Russian organized crime. And then trying to understand Donald and Fred, Fred’s empire, his father’s empire, which was built with the Genovese crime family. And then the building of Trump Tower in Manhattan that moved in—they had different territory as Fred would call it, as Donald has said on the record—that Manhattan wasn’t. According to his father, “That’s not our territory,” because it wasn’t, it was Gambino territory. For Donald Trump specifically to be able to build in Manhattan, develop in Manhattan, Fred arranged for, and Roy Cohn arranged for, the two crime families, the Gambinos and the Genovese to form what became known as a concrete cartel—all the five families were in there. And this was the bid-rigging over concrete contacts to develop in Manhattan. And it was called “the Donald Trump deal.” And so that was in the middle of it, for those U.S. crime families and the racket they were running, which is this very racket that Giuliani used to prosecute the five families. So…

GO

Four of the five families.

SK

Four of the five families. Castellanos was a holdout and then was killed, shot dead in the street. So that’s the history.

There’s way more than that. During that time, before the Russian mafia had really taken over New York—which it did; it rolled in in the late 80s, some of it even back to the 70s, but very specifically in the 80s and the 90s and just sort of rolled up a lot of the territories as their own. And they did it by laundering money through Donald’s casinos. There was a lot of ways that they did all of that. There was a very prominent Russian gangster named Ivankov, who had actually an office in Trump Tower in Manhattan, but he was ultimately caught, tipped off and caught by Andy McCabe’s team.

Like when you start learning about these characters, of what they were doing back in the day, both on the law enforcement side pursuing Russian organized crime and from the Russian organized crime side—the bosses and the key figures there were all in business in some fashion with Donald Trump.

Then in the mid early 2000s to like 2005, 2006, right around when I was hearing this stuff about him, what was happening was the Russians were wanting to keep using Trump to go internationally. So the properties: Trump Panama developing and Trump Toronto developing and Trump Georgia developing and all of these foreign developments, which we were watching. If you watch “The Apprentice,” it unfolds on “The Apprentice” as well. This sort of expansion of the Trump thing where he was just licensing his name to be put on these things, because he was really over-leveraged.

Like the one in Georgia, the country Georgia—the Trump Tower there, all they did was just stick a shovel in the ground, and a whole bunch of money was laundered. There’s Trump Baku, which, you know, there was quite a bit of reporting how that was probably a front for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Again, Iran and their corruption very closely tied in with Russian organized crime as well.

GO

Right. Adam Davidson in the New Yorker.

SK

So that’s the background. That’s why the Trump/Russia thing is not a hoax. Donald is the hoax. You know, he did. And there’s so much reporting and Trump, the company, Allen Weisselberg, all those people, they affirm this, they said, “Yeah, yeah, we took that money.” The problem with it is some of it was illegal, but a lot of it’s not illegal, right?

He couldn’t get a casino license in Australia, infamously. They would not give him a casino license because of his ties to organized crime, both U.S. organized crime and Russian organized crime.

GO

So a major Five Eyes power decided that Trump couldn’t have a casino license because of his ties to organized crime—and specifically Russian organized crime. Let’s just underline that because it seems important. Australia is, as they say, a real country, you know—that is one of our strongest allies.

SK

Right. Right.

So how you get to Jeffrey is, there was a time in the 80s where Donald was really having issues, and he was sort of over-leveraging himself. He was building in Atlantic City. He was doing these things and couldn’t get them funded. He always had a problem getting the money because legitimate banks would stop lending to him, which was the crisis he was facing in the early 2000s, mid-2000s. There was Deutsche Bank, but even Deutsche Bank was turning him down, so he had to go for this Russian money. You could get Russian money, you could get Chinese money, and the Chinese money hadn’t quite showed up yet. But the gangsters will invest in you. So the banks were difficult.

Now part of the stuff that made it hard to get finding from U.S. banks is because of what happened with him in the 80s with Bear Stearns. So there’s a guy that ran Bear Stearns.

(This is all the reporting done by Wayne Barrett. And I recommend everybody go read Wayne Barrett’s work on Donald and Fred Trump and that sort of “Trump Inc.” He did extraordinary work on that. He also did great work on Giuliani and showing what sort of a criminal and a fraud Giuliani was. And it still is, I guess.)

So Ace Greenberg ran Bear Stearns. Bear Stearns is the company that infamously went down in 2008 with all the credit-default swaps, all that kind of stuff that just crashed—you know, the Big Short type of thing.

But before that, they were a real player—Bear and Lehman and these other entities. Goldman Sachs. And so Donald had a very close relationship with Ace Greenberg. Ace Greenberg is the man whose daughter was Jeffrey Epstein’s student when Jeffrey Epstein was at the Dalton School. And Epstein did whatever he did at the Dalton School to leverage his just being a math teacher and tutor at this private school into working directly for Ace Greenberg.

So he went into the financial industry at Bear Stearns. And he didn’t come in as a low-level person and work his way up. He came in at a very senior level, and it caused a great sort of upset at Bear Stearns. Who is this guy? Where is he coming from? And why is Ace giving him this plum spot?

And he was handling private wealth management. And his big client that he had, that Ace gave him, was Edgar Bronfman, who’s Sam Bronfman’s son. Sam Bronfman, he established Seagrams, and he was Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano’s business partner during the bootlegging days. And Edgar Bronfman has a lot of ties to Russia as well, quite frankly. And it’s his daughters that were part of that NXIVM thing. That’s how people recognize that name, Bronfman.

GO

He’s Canadian though, right? Sam Bronfman?

SK

Yes, he was Canadian. So that was part of the bootlegging thing. Yeah.

But that was Jeffrey’s client, and he got into difficulties and troubles there at Bear Stearns with that particular client managing, you know, and he basically had to be fired. And Ace really resisted firing Jeffrey. And what I uncovered and discovered was that he didn’t fire him. He just moved him into Offshores. Jeffrey went into establishing offshore accounts and offshore money, sort of tax havens for Bear Stearns clients.

If you go into the Offshore Leaks database—which is where I found Jeffrey’s offshore accounts, some of them—you can see there are old Bear Stearns officers. In fact, Ace Greenberg’s partner at Bear Stearns is still connected and linked into those offshore accounts. So Epstein was very much doing that business, and he was doing that business for Bear Stearns right at the time that Bear Stearns was doing these wild, risky, money-backing things for Donald, for Donald developing his casino.

So that is where I found him. And I’m like, “Who’s this Jeffrey Epstein, and what is this?” And then I started looking into Jeffrey Epstein, and I’m like, “My God, everybody’s some kind of sex-trafficking criminal.” He’s not the only one that was tied in with Donald’s business or his financial backing in some way that also was convicted for sex trafficking. There’s another guy named Tevfik Arif, who was a big partner with Donald, who had that yacht with all the underage prostitutes and the trafficking that went on there. There’s a yacht, I think off of Turkey where they were finally caught, he was finally caught. So there’s the folks in Panama: his business partners in Panama were nailed for sex trafficking, international sex trafficking. And the people in Canada: there’s ties in there for his business partners in Trump Toronto and Canada, who were also Russian. The main partner there was the son-in-law of Semion Mogilevich’s business partner and consigliere—Semion Mogilevich being a great big Russian gangster.

And then there’s all the Craig Unger reporting on Mogilevich, that Donald was in fact laundering Mogilevich’s money himself. And that’s the man who originally compromised him. So that’s the money. It’s full of sex traffickers and it’s full of Russian gangsters.

GO

So let’s underline again Semion Mogilevich. That’s an important connection because Semion Mogilevich, if I remember correctly, was at one point directly working with Robert Maxwell. That was in one of those books, right?

SK

Correct. In Maxwell’s biography, Mogilevich is named several times. I believe the source for that was Ari Ben-Manashe, a former Israeli intelligence officer who also worked for the Kremlin. But that Robert Maxwell biography—this is Ghislaine Maxwell’s father—outlines Robert Maxwell as a Mossad and a KGB spy. That means that he was an intelligence officer. It looks like he also did—there’s quite an FBI file on him. He probably worked with U.S. intelligence at times, and it looks like he definitely worked for the Queen. He was very close with, very close with the Queen. He touched the Queen. There’s video of him, footage of him touching her, like walking alongside her and touching her like.

GO

He was friends with the Queen. Yeah.

SK

That’s very rare and weird and very strange.

GO

It’s very strange. Robert Maxwell also, when he died in 1991, in November of 1991, by falling off a yacht off the coast of the Canary Islands—as happens, I guess, all the time, so no foul play at all, none suspected; it’s weird how that thread keeps going up—but remember, he had defrauded the pensions of the company, the publishing company that he bought. So he was about to collapse before he died, like his entire...

SK

That’s right.

GO

…financial empire was a house of cards, and it was all bullshit. So that’s an important thing to keep in mind.

SK

That’s right. And he knew Donald. Donald knew him directly. There’s a lot of images and photographs. They were on the yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, that he named after his daughter. So yeah.

GO

They were on the yacht, in Page Six. With Ivana, which is interesting because Robert Maxwell is born Jan Hoch and is from Czechia. And Ivana Trump is also Czech. So I envision a scenario where the two of them are on the yacht talking in Czech, and Trump is just standing there like an idiot.

SK

I’m sure, yeah. Junior, I believe, is fluent in Czech. People underestimate Don Jr.

GO

Yeah, and Baron is fluent in Slovenian, yes.

SK

But you know, another character that was in that world with them, with Robert Maxwell—and it’s important because his money shows up in Jeffrey Epstein’s next big financial scam after the Bear Stearns moving him—is a man named Adnan Khashoggi, who is Jamal Khashoggi’s uncle. And there’s not a lot of Khashoggis, actually, by the way.

Donald knew the Khashoggis very, very, very well. Ivana called Adnan her best friend quite often. When Donald bought the one and only yacht he’s ever bought, he bought Khashoggi’s yacht. So he bought Khashoggi’s, yeah.

And Khashoggi was a known intelligence officer for Saudi Arabia, but he was at one point the wealthiest man in the world.

GO

He was an arms dealer, right? Wasn’t he an arms dealer?

SK

He was a big arms dealer. Yeah.

GO

I remember that, even in the moment, people knew who he was. Like, he wasn’t some hidden figure. I remember reading about him in the 80s. I didn’t know what these people were at the time. But I knew their names.

SK

Paul Manafort was also in this mix, Tom Barrack was in this mix. There were a lot of folks that we saw show up in Trump 1.0 as President, helping with his campaign, that were swirling around in this—what I call the underworld. But it’s where crime syndicates and intelligence services are just, you know, intertwined.

And that’s what MAGA is aware of when it comes to Jeffrey Epstein. They can kind of feel that there’s something odd there. There are intelligence services there.

Now, it’s important to point out that before Robert Maxwell died—there are several people who are credible witnesses and know what they’re talking about that have identified that Robert Maxwell was taking Jeffrey Epstein around and sort of introducing him as his protégé. So this myth—this lie—that Ghislaine and Jeffrey told that he showed up after Ghislaine’s dad died, that she moved to New York and that’s where she met Jeffrey? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. They knew each other before her father died or was killed or whatever happened off the side of that yacht. So that’s kind of key.

And then Jeffrey went from there to creating one of the biggest Ponzi schemes, the biggest Ponzi scheme ever before Bernie Madoff. He almost kind of invented it. That was called Towers Financial. And I talked a lot with Steve Hoffenberg; you talked with him as well. He was a tricky character. He’s passed away now, but he went to prison for quite a long time, and he got out of prison right at the beginning of Trump’s first term. The first person to call him when he was out of prison actually was Roger Stone, he told me.

But Hoffenberg was mortified with what Jeffrey had done with the victims. That reporting had kind of just come out when he was just out of prison. And he did contact the victims, and he did want to kind of make good. Because the money from Towers Financial was never fully recovered, Hoffenberg didn’t understand why he went to prison and Jeffrey got off.

I talked to Hoffenberg a bit. I’m like, “Well, what are some of the ways that someone gets out of being prosecuted for a big crime financial crime like this?” And it looks like Jeffrey very much cooperated with prosecutors. Now, there were a lot of criminals that were part of Towers; that was a big money laundering vehicle. Quite a lot of the money from Iran-Contra, Steve Hoffenberg suspected, was pushed—that Jeffrey got his hands on—it was pushed through Towers.

That is money that Robert Maxwell was in charge of that also disappeared around the time of his pension scandal. And so there was a lot of pressure on Robert Maxwell right before his death. It wasn’t just that his empire was crumbling. There was a lot about to be exposed of the kind of places he’d had his hands in, money that disappeared that he should never have been anywhere near it. And it exposed nation-states, intelligence services, doing what maybe they shouldn’t have been doing.

So that’s the world. It’s like a private intelligence rogue operatives. Private arms dealers like Adnan Khashoggi or the guy that Nicolas Cage played in that movie, Lord of War—like those guys, that world.

There’s also: you don’t have to just deal in arms or traffic in arms. You can traffic in kompromat, right? You can traffic in other things that would have value to intelligence services of both our nation and other nations. And it does very much look like that Robert Maxwell was in that business. It looks like Ghislaine took the mantle, and Jeffrey took the mantle from him and developed their own little operation. So all of the pieces are there for Epstein to have that connection.

And Towers Financial, I think, is also a great big piece that doesn’t get talked about enough, in terms of, What kind of deal did this guy cut with those prosecutors, that he got out of facing prison? And his business partner went in for 20 years, 18 years or whatever.

And knowing the kind of money, the kind of players that Epstein ran with, just with that one fraud and scheme alone—those are very valuable names, and a lot of money that he could have turned over to prosecutors to cut himself a deal. That could very well be the key to Alex Acosta’s phrase about Jeffrey, when he says he was told Epstein “belonged to Intelligence.” Because he would have some really big names in Towers, and really powerful players that maybe were on a sanction list, quite frankly.

GO

So just to review quickly, Towers Financial ran from 1988-1993. He’s now worked, Jeffrey has, as a math teacher at Dalton (where he got fired), at Bear Stearns in some weird capacity (where he got sort of fired). And then he went to work, if I remember correctly, Hoffenberg said Epstein went to work for Douglas Leese, who was another person in that world.

SK

Leese, yes—who was an arms dealer for the Queen. Right.

GO

And he, Leese, according to Hoffenberg, recommended Epstein to Hoffenberg by saying, “He’s smart and he has no moral compass.” So Hoffenberg knew he was going to do this Ponzi scheme, and he needed like a guy to help him with it. And that’s why he hired him. Like, specifically.

SK

And that would have been while Robert Maxwell was still alive or just sort of on his way out to the next world. Yeah. Right. All right around that time.

GO

Right. Again; so now, we’re all the way into the early 90s, and so far it’s money and offshores and arms deals and Russian mobsters and shady characters, but we haven’t even—we haven’t gotten to the sex trafficking part yet, right?

SK

Yeah, as far as we know, it wasn’t happening then. And that’s just—we only know what’s in those court documents, with what the prosecutors brought to light. And a lot of it’s still redacted. But yeah, then he’s setting up, and he’s got Les Wexner, you know, somehow come folding him in.

GO

Les Wexner being the guy that owns Victoria’s Secret and these other big retail chains. And that was the time when Jeffrey was walking around saying he was a model scout for Victoria’s Secret, you know, as a pickup line that he was using.

SK

That’s correct. There is a journalist in the Ohio area, Bob Fitrakis, who’s really good, a great muckraker, and he did a lot of work on Wexner and Wexner’s ties to organized crime. And Wexner as a potential…what’s called a non-official cover, a NOC, for our own intelligence services. Wexner has an airfield there in Ohio, a private airstrip, and there were planes coming in and out of there that Fitrakis believed and tracked to our own intelligence services.

GO

Right, and Wexner’s the guy that owns the lovely, huge mansion on the Upper East Side of New York, on East 73rd, where he’s like, “Why don’t you just live in my mansion? You know? Why don’t you Kato Kaelin this? And you just move in. I don’t need it, it’s fine, it’s good.”

SK

Right. Yeah. To Epstein, yeah, Wexner handed over the most valuable piece of property, the most valuable private residence in Manhattan to Jeffrey—just gave it to him.

GO

Which is, I think, I would say odd, unusual, strange, whatever word you want to use. Weird.

SK

It’s odd.

The other odd thing, and we talked about this this past week a lot, but we kept talking about it at the time, too. We do know that that all of these homes, New York, down in Palm Beach, out in New Mexico, the island and the plane, that these properties that either Jeffrey owned or had access to or were his in some way or form, all had surveillance technology wired throughout them. That’s in the underlying evidence in the court cases against him. So we’re not just speculating about this. It’s in the evidence. And you have to understand that we’re talking about properties that he was using for the—you know, for the abuse, while he abusing these minors and raping the minors.

This was at a time where it was kind of pre, almost pre-internet even. Certainly back when the internet was—we’re talking about early nineties, right? Call it Radio Shack, but that’s really all there was. Like, what’s he, how does this guy, do this? He would have had to have a closed network, somehow, some way of recording and storing and wiring up in the walls. It’s not what it is today. And I just don’t see Jeffrey Epstein being the Radio Shack guy who’s doing all this on his own, for his own perversion. So somebody wired up his shit for him. Now, he could have paid somebody privately to do that, certainly, but considering we’re watching people like Ehud Barak wander in and out of the properties, I would put money down on, you know, that he had a little help from some very sophisticated signal intelligence groups.

GO

I referenced it on the show—there was that movie Sliver, with Billy Baldwin, where he has the whole building wired up, and they show him in this little room with all the screens, and Sharon Stone is on the screens. That sort of setup is what Epstein had, effectively. It was where he had all these cameras and there was a master control room, presumably, where you could look at everything and record it and all that kind of stuff. And presumably the people that were staying there had no idea that this was a thing.

SK

Yeah. And we know it was recorded because the recordings made their way into evidence. And Pam Bondi just recently said that this is child porn and that’s why she can’t show anybody. And my question is, Well, are the girls alone? You know? I mean, who’s in there? Who’s in there with them?

GO

Mm-hmm. Yeah, we just need to know who. We don’t need to see it. We actually don’t want to.

Now, there’s a lot of myths about this guy, Epstein. He’s almost like this mythical figure now. And I think that adds to the mystique and the kind of misinformation and disinformation that’s out there around him. So what are some myths that are not true? Because I think that we’ve helped here so far in explaining all the financial stuff. I think that’s an important piece that nobody really talks about that much. But is there anything else myth-wise that people should know?

SK

Well, first of all, I think the myth of his intelligence—that he was some kind of wizard, some financial genius. And there were people, I can’t remember the man’s name, but there was a man who was like, it actually was a financial wizard, who said like, “Yeah, Epstein was kind of a street guy. He wasn’t this sort of magical, sophisticated investor, and he didn’t seem like one. He seemed like he just wanted to party. He just partied all the time.”

So I don’t know how much money managing he was doing. I think that’s sort of a big myth around him: to cast him as some kind of genius is probably what he wanted. He wore that Harvard sweatshirt around Alan Dershowitz in all those photos, right? He’s always wearing that. But he didn’t go to Harvard.

I think there is some discrepancy of whether Bill Barr’s dad actually hired him.

GO

I think Donald Barr, yeah, Bill Barr’s dad left the semester before Jeffrey arrived, so he could have made the hire, but the person who took over wasn’t sure, apparently, or wouldn’t say.

SK

He could have hired him. Right. So that’s why I kind of just stay away from all of that. Now, Bill Barr’s law firm did represent the law firm that Bill Barr worked at—it did represent Jeffrey Epstein in his criminal cases. I believe that’s true. But that’s a great big law firm.

GO

I feel that way about photos. Like, I feel like Ghislaine Maxwell tried to have her picture taken with every single human on earth that would ever be anybody. So just because somebody has their picture taken with Ghislaine doesn’t really mean anything. Like, as much as I love the picture of her with Elon Musk, it’s just—who knows what that is.

SK

Who knows? I mean, she was a proper British socialite, right? So she wanted to be at every party and that was her job. That was her job.

GO

Yeah. She was good at her job. That was her job. And she’s really good at her job. She’s really good at her job.

SK

But I think, you know, being picked specifically by Ace Greenberg, and being given that hand, it’s like—God, I’m a screenwriter. So it’d be like, I don’t know, it’s almost like Jeff Bezos saying, “Here’s a great big thing. Anything you want to write for Amazon, you can write. Amazon will underwrite, it will fund it. You can do whatever you want. Here’s a budget. Here’s your staff.” Like, beyond an overall deal. That’s what Epstein got.

So again, it’s not that he was some genius. He really—I don’t know. Was he blackmailing Ace Greenberg? Why did Ace Greenberg go to the mattresses for this guy? I mean, he literally was risking Bear Stearns at one point, with the SEC saying, “This guy’s running a scam, you gotta fire him.” And he was like, “I can’t fire him.” Why can’t you fire him? And then he just moved him offshore. So that kind of stuff is important.

And the other myth, which we already talked about, the lie that he didn’t know Robert Maxwell. It’s just a flat-out lie. Robert Maxwell shepherded this guy to Israeli intelligence officers and introduced him to high level people—introduced Jeffrey as his protégé.

GO

Yeah, seems important. Yeah, 1991, Robert Maxwell dies. Later in ‘91, Ghislaine comes to New York, starts up with Epstein, and off to the races they are.

Okay, moving on. Now, you’ve talked about this a lot of times too, where MAGA and QAnon, the Epstein files and this Epstein thing, this child sex ring story is such a huge part of their mythology. They have this idea, because they’ve been told, and it’s been pounded into their heads, that there’s a secret cabal of pedophiles that’s secretly in league with each other and is running the country. And it involves the Clintons and the Clinton Foundation and Hillary Clinton and the basement at the pizza place and all this other crazy stuff. Which, you know, like all good pieces of disinformation, parts of it are true, you know?

But they’re ignoring the big orange elephant in the room here, and I think that’s the problem. But before we get to that, what does MAGA have right about this? Because there’s stuff in their conception of things that isn’t completely batshit.

SK

Yeah. Well, I think the first thing they have right, and the big thing that they have right—that is continually dismissed whenever this gets talked about in legacy media, even now; it’s sort of crumbling, their worlds are crashing around them because Donald is so clearly compromised—is that it is really, really, really bad if our leaders are owned by a foreign power. That’s a bad thing. It’s a bad thing to have somebody in a position of power, of political power, let alone the presidency or the Supreme Court or…

GO

…or the mayor of New York.

SK

…or the mayor of New York, or in Congress. It’s really bad, then, if not just is that individual compromised or owned by a foreign power, but if what compromised them was that they were raping children.

This is unacceptable, and they are absolutely right to be outraged about it. And I am not going to put my toe in and say because I can’t wrap my own soul around the fact that MAGA is not morally outraged at all of these other things, and that Donald himself is an adjudicated rapist, the Access Hollywood tape—if it’s about the sex stuff, he was in there with a Miss Teen America, that pageant, or Miss Universe, whatever—that teen pageant that he owned, walking in on 15 year old girls. He’s talked about his daughters, both of his daughters, sexually—one when she was a one-year-old baby, so he’s…

GO

And he let Ivanka model while she was 15 for somebody who was a known creeper.

SK

He handed Ivanka over to John Casablancas, who was already was a known rapist of 14 year old, 15 year old, 16 year old girls. Okay.

GO

Casablancas was quote unquote “dating” Stephanie Seymour when she was 14 and he was 42, which is—I’m putting “dating” in quotes because that ain’t dating.

SK

Yes. That predates Ivanka, and this is known, and Donald not only knew that, but like with Jeffrey, wanted to be this man’s friend and was a running buddy of John Casablancas. He was much closer with Jeffrey Epstein, but it’s not that he didn’t see these things. These men were openly dating—statutory raping—young girls, and grooming them and walking around with them in their arms, and the girls would be half-dressed around other men.

This is that. So yes, why did MAGA not look at this and see this? There’s a reason for some of it that we can get into, but where MAGA is right—and I just want them to know I get it; I think you’re right about this—is it is absolutely unacceptable that an industrial-scale child sex trafficker and rapist controlled, had kompromat on, our political and business leaders. That, we need to know. The citizenry needs to know that. We can’t have that. Just like you can’t have somebody who’s got real financial problems like Bob Menendez, or is open to being purchased, being bought off by a foreign government. Just like that.

That we can’t have those people, because then we’re not…and then to have the phrase “Make America Great Again,” when everything’s being owned by, you know, a foreign intelligence service—and understanding also that Jeffrey was in that world of what looks like selling things to foreign intelligence, but is certainly connected to them. You’re never going to have proof of the things that you can’t have proof of, but you have to look at it and say, “This man was in this sort of underworld of dealing with nation-state intelligence services at the same time that he’s recording child rapes.”

GO

Yeah. And creating, or cultivating, the environment in which those rapes could easily take place.

SK

And the mythology of Jeffrey was so important to him because if you have the mythology of being a financial wizard who can do more with your money than anything. My God. He’s got planes and islands, and that whole part of the gig was about being part and parcel and a critical element of the most rarefied of rarefied heirs socially.

So that that’s it. You’re going to fly with Bill Clinton and go over and do something. You’re going to, know, you’ve got Donald Trump as a best friend. You’re in this sliver of the world that everyone aspires and can’t reach. It’s mystical and magical. How do you get up there?

And anybody with even a modicum of wealth, if not, you know, very wealthy people are like, “My God, will he manage my money? How do I get close to Jeffrey?” Because if he’s magical with the money, even people are very smart in business in other ways still think that it’s magic. They still want their magical person to manage their money. And so that whole thing was a trust-wash right?

But you have to now go—and this is where also MAGA gets it right—you just have to put your feet in the in the boots of the Kremlin. You know, the KGB at one point and then FSB and SVR and all the other services now, after the Soviet Union fell and it became the Russian Federation. You are that level of human intelligence. They were the best in the world, and quite possibly still could be; I don’t know, they seem to have gotten really bad. But the skill set during Jeffrey’s era—Jeffrey Epstein would be Person Number One that you’d want to get to know and use in some way. And to think that foreign intelligence officers wouldn’t be targeting, within that room of rarefied air, a man who was walking around with 14-year-old girls, many of them. And had a best friend in Donald Trump, who was going on Howard Stern saying, “He likes them young.” And he’s flying on planes with Bill Clinton. You better believe, you better believe every foreign intelligence service agency worth its merit is trying to get in there. What an opportunity.

GO

We’re now at the 42 and a half minute mark, and we haven’t mentioned Prince Andrew yet, but you can add him to that list because—yeah.

You said something before about trust-washing and myth creation and it’s these guys, these con men—and I’m thinking of Epstein, I’m thinking of Trump, and I’m thinking of Keith Raniere from NXIVM—one thing that they have in common is they take one little thing at the beginning that they get lucky to get, some favorable press coverage or something, and they use that, and talk about it, talk it up, talk it up, talk it up, and then get more people to believe it. And they can use it as a springboard to go everywhere.

With Keith Raniere, it was that he was in Mega, a group where you have to be smarter than Mensa. And somebody ran an article about it in the Albany Times Union. And they ran it, and he never let that go. And then people were like, “Oh, he must be very smart.”

And Donald Trump, I forget if it was Forbes or Fortune that first added him to that list of the wealthiest people. That was bullshit. They even said later that it was, but he took that and ran with it, and he ran with it, and ran with it, and ran with it to the point where nobody thought to not believe it.

And Epstein did the same thing with trust-washing. So after a point, if you’re a normal person, let’s say you’re a professor at MIT—and I’m not excusing anybody for anything, but you’re like, “There’s this guy. He’s inviting me to his house in Manhattan and Bill Clinton and, you know, Prince Andrew and Bill Gates are going to be there.” You would probably think to yourself, “Wow, that’s cool.” You wouldn’t think, “I don’t know, I better not go. Might be a sex trafficking operation.” Like, Epstein presented himself as legitimate by surrounding himself with these people. Anyone below that level looks at it and thinks, “Well, this must be great. I mean, Bill Gates, Prince Andrew. Yeah. I’m so excited to be part of this, to be involved with this.” And it just snowballs from there. And that’s how these con men operate.

SK

Listen, that’s how they operate. And Jeffrey got a taste of that world, of what that world must be like, by being a teacher of kids at the Dalton School whose parents were all part of rarefied air. But it’s Ghislaine—it’s Ghislaine who understood how to craft and create not just the myth, but the op. It was a hell of an op. That was a hell of an op.

GO

She, from what I’ve heard, from my own sources, was like that too, always talking about how her dad, who her dad was, and my dad, da-da-da-da-da, kind of like Meghan McCain, like the same kind of thing.

SK

She played at Buckingham Palace on the grounds with the princes.

GO

She also went to college with Boris Johnson. I think they were in the same year. I don’t think they hung out, but they knew each other a little bit from what I read.

SK

That makes sense. That tracks. Again, it’s a rarefied world.

There’s a thing that’s important to say about what MAGA gets right. But there’s a word that they need to stop using: the word blackmail. Here’s what they’re right about. They’re right about Pam Bondi. Pam Bondi is to blame. Pam Bondi is to blame. Not that Donald isn’t, you know, isn’t part of this whole thing, but Pam Bondi right now is continuing the con. And MAGA knows it and it doesn’t have anything to do with anything other than the protection racket that Donald insured by weaponizing the Department of Justice, by putting his cronies in there.

So here’s why I can say this. anybody can challenge me on this. I don’t care. She is to blame. The list—the list, right? Let’s start with that term—as if Jeffrey kept a list of all the men. “Let me have my Excel spreadsheet,” you know, since we’re going to the 90s, “my Excel spreadsheet…”

GO

Lotus123.

SK

“…Lotus123 of all of the powerful men that I’ve compromised. I’m gonna keep that in a list format,” as if he didn’t know, as if he wasn’t running around with these people, as if you don’t remember that you’ve recorded Prince Andrew, right? Whatever it is.

The list is Pam Bondi’s to make. It’s not that there’s a list that exists and we want her to pull it out of the files and show it to us. That gives her an out and she knows this. That’s a bullshit out, of her saying, “Look, there’s no list.” Okay, I believe you. But you’re the one who’s supposed to make the list, Pam Bondi. You have all of the underlying evidence. You have men on those tapes—and I refuse to believe that the FBI did not identify them when they brought their case finally against Epstein or the Florida prosecutors, right?

GO

Plus, because they’re famous.

SK

Plus if they’re famous, you know, if you know who they are, you can write that name down and make the list. That’s what MAGA is asking for. And how dare Pam Bondi play this word game. It reminds me of Bill Clinton going, “Depends on what the meaning of the word is is.” It’s that level of garbage.

Make the list, Pam! That’s what you said you were going to do. Write down the names of the men that are on those video files. Write down the names that are redacted in all of the court documents that came out of the affidavits from the victims. The victims named names. Give them to us.

GO

Yeah, yeah, give them to us.

SK

Okay, I understand there were other people trying to call in, I understand that they got tips, and I understand that there were names of people who were investigated and they were found not to have, you know, maybe they were even out of the country or whatever. But there are plenty of people we know from this case, there are plenty of names, and she is the one that is supposed to compile that list of names. It doesn’t exist out there that somehow magically it’s either there or it disappears. And I want that confusion to stop. So Pam Bondi? Yes, hold her to the fire.

The other thing that that MAGA has got right, but it’s the wrong way to talk about it, is using the word blackmail.

GO

Yeah, I was gonna say. And that word in the letter that they released does some heavy lifting. The whole letter hinges on the word blackmail, which is a very specific thing. Anyway, as you were saying…

SK

Right. Right. That’s right. And so yet again, Pam Bondi grabbed that word, put it to the specific definition of what that crime would be as the Department of Justice would prosecute it, and then looked at it only narrowly in the way of, “Do we have evidence that Jeffrey Epstein himself was blackmailing any of the men that are on a list that she can’t seem to compile that the girls were being trafficked to.” And/or the evidence shows kompromat. So I can believe that Jeffrey Epstein never directly blackmailed anybody.

GO

Why would you? You’re gonna go to Bill Clinton—or you can go to a nation state? Who has more money, right?

SK

You could go to Bill Clinton, or you can go to—even our allies, to their intelligence services. We know he was swimming in that world with them. And you can say, “Hey, you know, I got all these goods. Are you gonna pay me?”

So stop using blackmail. Use kompromat. Kompromat. This is what we call kompromat. Jeffrey ran an operation that collected kompromat, sexual kompromat, sex with minors, rapes, child rapes, kompromat on powerful men in politics, U.S. and possibly others, definitely princes, in business, politics, finance, possibly academia, and other things besides.

GO

So, you know how people describe themselves as content creators? Jeffrey Epstein was a kompromat creator. That was his job. Okay. And you know, again, the blackmail, there’s no point in blackmailing.

You said something else interesting before, which is that if you own somebody with this, it’s better than just paying them off, because kompromat can be sold, it can be transferred, it can be distributed. That makes it even more valuable, right? It’s not just that Jeffrey has a tape of whoever. It’s that now country X has that tape, or country Y has that tape. And then they’re in a position to blackmail if they so choose. But he’s just the broker. Just the middle man. He’s the ultimate middle man.

SK

And by the way, his bodyguard, I believe it was, his house man ran off, I believe it was to Russia or a former Soviet Union nation and disappeared. And he supposedly had access to all this stuff too. So it could also have been people that were working for Jeffrey Epstein that took off with this stuff and tried to secure their own safety, and certainly some wealth for themselves. That’s a possibility. It’s on the table.

I’m not trying to weave conspiracy. I’m just saying that it doesn’t serve anybody for everyone from legacy media to the Justice Department to deny the world as it exists. In the event that Jeffrey was selling this stuff or he was collecting it from the get-go on behalf of a foreign intelligence service—in that event, everyone needs to assume, and I believe Donald does, that this shit is in the wild.

GO

Mm-hmm.

SK

It’s not that there’s just one copy of everything, and the Justice Department has it and they can delete it all and then it goes away. I mean, these were court cases also that involved victims. Victims’ attorneys would have access to the information. The prosecutors involved had to have access to the information. The court itself had access to the information. Oh boy.

GO

Pam Bondi was the Attorney General of Florida, by the way, where the crimes took place. Before she was the U.S. A.G.

SK

For eight years she was attorney, yes, of Florida—for the eight years while Jeffrey was raping these girls. So that seems important too.

GO

Seems important.

There’s something else we should say, because we haven’t said it yet: the Bill Clinton piece. There’s a lot of…you know, MAGA will say, “Well, the Democrats just want to protect Bill Clinton.” And I think I can speak for pretty much everyone. If Bill Clinton did something like this, to hell with him. No one’s going to come to his defense. If he committed crimes of this magnitude, then he deserves whatever’s coming to him. Period. Full stop.

SK

Yeah, full stop. I’m one of those few centrist liberals who gave up on Bill Clinton when he looked in the camera and he lied to my face. I just don’t like people who are smarmy with vocabulary because they are brilliant. I think he’s an intellectual bully. And I think getting in front of the camera while being president and saying, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman”—I don’t care if you did, but don’t stand in front of the camera and lie your ass off at to me about something like this. And I understand Ken Starr and all those people out to get you and they’re horrible, but…

GO

Brett Kavanaugh.

SK

Brett Kavanaugh, but like, ew. So I don’t trust you, you know, and that’s where I’m at. Sorry.

GO

Yeah. No, no, that’s it. I agree.

SK

Let alone this. Dear God. And I love his wife. It has nothing to do with it. They’re not the same person.

GO

Right. No, they’re not the same person. I hate, I hate when they’re conflated, it drives me nuts. They’re two different people. They’re married, but they’re two completely different individuals with individual agency. And that’s just, that’s just how it is.

So do you think we’re going to get to a point where the scales fall off the eyes of MAGA? How can we get to the point? I mean, what do you think we should do here?

SK

I think this is the moment. I think we’re in a moment right now, which is why we’re doing this. Otherwise, I wouldn’t bother. I didn’t think I would ever have a moment where I would bother. I had so written off reaching people in his cult. It’s just, you know, I did a tremendous amount of work at a moment where I believed that people could be reached with focusing on the money, focusing on his frauds, focusing on his crimes, focusing on all the—my God, I compiled this list years ago on Twitter at the time, which then became X, and X, when Elon took over, was one of the big things that, know, lot of powerful threads that had a lot of real information. I know this is social media, but it’s where we were getting our news. And they got broken up and dismembered and buried. And that’s why I left that platform for a long long time and doing a little bit now, but I don’t know. I was keeping track of all of the pedophiles around Donald—not just rapists and sexual assaulters as well, but where it was crimes and specifically pedophilia. There’s Putin. I mean, it’s just a huge list.

GO

Wait…

SK

Okay, I’m just saying that I could, if you couldn’t reach MAGA people then with that, I think they had to be betrayed by him in some way. And this is a real betrayal. And I think it’s a real moment. I would like to think that he’s not going to present some narrative that they can go, “Okay, okay, great. We’ve got this narrative now and we’ll run with this and we can all go back to daddy, right?” I’d like to think that enough of them have sort of had that shock value of realizing that they are marks, and they were conned—really conned.

And I want to say to those folks, it’s a horrible thing to be conned. But cons work. It’s not your fault that you were conned. You can look later at what it was about you, that you needed to believe in this guy, you know, and examine that. But this is a real professional con man. Look at what he’s achieved through lies and fraud and conning! He’s achieved the presidency of the United States—at this point in history, where we’re this huge power, and we’re a free people.

GO

Twice.

SK

Twice. I think he’s going to go down as the greatest con man that ever lived. I will give him those flowers. As I’ve said with you, you know, I gave him those flowers. I don’t know of any other person who is this accomplished of a con man. This is a pro of pros. He’s a pro.

So you’re MAGA. You’re just his mark. He zeroed in on you. You were very vulnerable in ways that you had no idea. You’re handing out your every thought, every emotion, every political leaning, your address, your farts, on Facebook. You were posting all your shit. And all Trump had to do was work with Facebook, create an algorithm, scoop you up and put ad tech software directing right at you. And you thought, “My God, he thinks like I think.” No, he just read your posts, guys. But I understand how you couldn’t see that and why falling for this.

And if only those folks had found the work that I did, that you did, all the work we did that predated Julie K. Brown, quite frankly. And she did incredible work, not taking anything away from her. She’s an amazing journalist. But by the time she put her stuff out there, I think because we had surfaced so much and had done so much work that wasn’t penetrating and wasn’t getting into the bubble that Trump was creating and his team was creating around his base, they could—QAnon could—slide in there and they could grab on. Come to know Jeffrey Epstein late to the game and run with a totally different narrative.

So maybe Donald can create another narrative like that to run in another direction, but I’m hoping, I’m hoping that with this, enough of them have seen the light now and can really take in who he really is and how dangerous this is.

Because they were right about that. It’s dangerous. Dangerous.

GO

Very dangerous. It’s very dangerous. No, I think that he is one of the greatest con men of all time. I think, as we talked about on the Twitter spaces the other day, you have to go back to like some medieval pope to get to the level of mass—you know, creating a situation based on lies to get a whole lot of people to behave in a certain way. And he was able to do it.

I can’t remember what I was gonna say. It doesn’t matter.

SK

The con man. Good luck. But you were saying the scales falling. this, is this, is this the moment? Do we think the scales?

GO

Oh, I know what I was gonna say. I think he’s waiting until the AI is good enough that he can blame deepfakes. I think that’s what he’s going to start blaming everything on. The videos are going to come out, and he’s going to be like, “Deepfakes, you know, Elon can do that,” or whatever it’s gonna be. So prepare for that and know that it’s a lie and bullshit, okay? Let’s just prepare for it.

Okay, so to close, all do know this game Categories? You know how to play Categories?

SK

Yeah, like Scatagories.

GO

Well, I don’t know Scategories is, but Categories is, you pick a thing that has a finite amount of, you know, like colors, and then you say a color, I say a color until we run out. Okay. So we’re going to play categories and the category is “Pedophiles in Donald Trump’s orbit.”

SK

God. All right. Can we include the rapists as well, like sexual assaulters and rapists?

GO

I think we can, yeah, sure. Okay. You wanna go first?

SK

Okay, we’ll start with the pedophiles. All right. Am I going first? Yeah, Putin.

GO

Sure. Okay. Jeffrey Epstein.

SK

George Nader.

GO

Ghislaine Maxwell.

SK

Matt Gaetz.

GO

Casablancas, the guy from Elite, who we mentioned.

SK

Yep, Jean-Luc Bruñel. My God, I had such a long list.

GO

Yep, he’s on my list. Tevfik Arif, the guy you mentioned with the yacht off Turkey.

SK

My God, I had such a long list. Well, I mean, Jim Jordan, but that’s an enabler.

GO

Still, he counts. That counts. I mean, what was Diddy accused of? I’m not sure. But they were—they knew each other.

SK

I think he said he looked, he knew and he would sometimes look in the showers. There was one young man who is an adult now, but yeah, for the Ohio State rapes. Yeah, enabler, enabler.

GO

No, Diddy, like Puff Daddy, like Sean Combs. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know what the, I haven’t really followed that case. I don’t know if the accusations involve underage people or not. I assume that they do, but I don’t know. So yeah, he’s definitely not a good guy.

SK

I don’t know, but definitely rape.

There’s more. It was this huge long list. It was crazy. That party—listen, I understand that Jeffrey was active during an era that a Democrat was president. Okay. So it was the 90s and Bill Clinton was president. And that’s where the power was, it was in the Democratic Party. But to think that the people behind Jeffrey, or that Jeffrey swam around with in terms of foreign intelligence services, haven’t continued to—

Roy Cohn, by the way, Roy Cohn. He said he had the biggest trove of sexual kompromat of anybody. I mean, I guess it would rival Larry Flynt’s, because Larry Flynt had a bunch of it—according to Larry Flynt.

GO

Roy Cohn, of course.

SK

We’re with the Republican Party now that does things like go on the 4th of July to the Kremlin, right?

We could do the same Categories game with the Russians in Donald’s orbit, and the gangsters and mobsters. I could do that forever. I put a little video together of that and it just went forever and it still wasn’t complete. You know, this is the world that he’s in.

GO

Right, he doesn’t have that many friends, is the point. And all of these people swirling around in his inner circle are all...

SK

He doesn’t. Yeah. And Donald Trump himself—Donald Trump himself, who his own wife said, “He raped me.”

GO

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Which now, they’re parsing that, they’re like threatening AOC because she called him a rapist and, I mean, did you watch The Apprentice, the movie? Because I recall seeing a scene in there in which Trump rapes Ivana. That’s just—I don’t recall any lawsuit there that stopped that from coming out, so I don’t know.

SK

Yeah. I don’t know. I mean, go ahead and sue her.

GO

AOC’ll have to get those Epstein files released, won’t she?

SK

A jury found that he was, or he wouldn’t have had to pay E. Jean Carroll because the defamation was “I never raped her.” That was the alleged defamation. And he did. The jury found that he did. There was evidence that he did enough to rule in her favor.

GO

Yeah, so we say “adjudicated.”

SK

So that’s why when we say “adjudicated rapist,” that’s what that means.

GO

Right, but there’s so many other accusers. I mean, I did a thread a long time ago, I think after Access Hollywood came out. There are a lot of accusers, like four dozen, I think, that we know of. And those are just the ones we know about. And that’s a lot. I mean, two is too many, but 48 or something or whatever it is, that’s what we might call a pattern. If you were like one of those FBI profiler guys, you might say that this guy has a has a problem with this.

Not to make light of it, because it’s horrifying. And as you said before, MAGA is right. Somebody like that should not be in a position of authority. Someone like that should be on a list. If they’re not in prison, should be on a list of sex offenders and be living in the Econo-Lodge down the street, which is the only place they’re allowed to live in this town. So that’s where he should be based on all of these accusations.

SK

Yeah.

GO

Unless you believe that all 48 women were full of it and they just wanted something from this guy. Which I do not.

SK

Yeah. Yeah. So again, this sort of part of it is hard to. It’s hard to empathize with his followers who just ignored all of this and believe the bullshit or aren’t having a problem with what he and Stephen Miller are doing right now, and aren’t having a problem with Kristi Noem, how wretched it is, that can look at what Elon Musk did, and can look at all of those lost souls in the Texas floods and not connect the dots that that’s because they couldn’t get the warnings because those those services were done away with, so that we could have this gross transfer of wealth to billionaires, multi-billionaires. And that when that those actual facts are brought up by journalists saying, know, “We know that these people didn’t get these warnings because of how you dismembered the emergency services and the weather services and then reorganized it. So everything has to go through Kristi Noem,” like this whole thing that they did coming in and fucking around with the government under this sort of bullshit ruse—you know, this con of saying, “This is how we’re going to save us some money. So therefore, you know, we can strip Medicaid.” You know, all this stuff.

The government is culpable. The government under him is culpable for leaving these people stranded without warning. Trump calls that evil just to have the actual facts at your disposal and need to question those in power about how what they did, whatever their intentions may have been when they did it, maybe they had good intentions and they were trying to fix things, but they fucked it up. And people are dead because of that. That’s not an evil question. Call that question evil.

GO

Which is what he said. He said that the journalist was evil for asking the question, right? Is that what he said? Yeah.

SK

Horrible. What a horrible thing to say.

GO

I want to say one more thing before we close. To your point about MAGA and being okay with all the Stephen Miller stuff, i.e. the rounding up of immigrants because there’s a wave of immigrants that are coming and they’re having babies here and all this. Right?

SK

U.S. residents and U.S. citizens.

GO

Donald Trump, two of his three wives are immigrants, and four of his five kids are born of the immigrants—all but Tiffany. So until ICE comes and gets rid of all of them, I don’t wanna hear another word. That’s where I’m at. Like, if we’re going to get rid of birthright citizenship, Ivanka gotta get out. Goodbye, out.

And I don’t think that’s going to happen. So what’s good for the goose has to be good for the gander. That’s how things are, you know? And if it’s not, then we have two Americas and we can’t have that. That’s not acceptable and should never be acceptable.

SK

Yeah.

GO

So, anything we didn’t cover that you want to get in before we close?

SK

I just want to say the reason we’re coming back to this and creating this content, this extra content. You know, we do a Friday night show that is fun. And I invite everybody to watch us on Friday night on YouTube. It’s called The Five 8, if you’re seeing this or reading about this and you didn’t know that. And that’s sort of been enough for you and me in terms of feeling like, okay, we’ve built these platforms. We’re responsible citizens. We want to contribute to the discourse. We have a specific skillset.

And we enjoy one another, and we enjoy the community that we’ve built. And Friday nights have been kind of enough for us. We added a show with two other, wonderful hosts on Wednesday. So there’s a show on Wednesday night as well with Lisa Graves and Nadine Smith.

But this moment, we knew we got to do more. And so we’ve done more. And but I don’t know how much more we can do other than this. I’ve brought it back to attention that what I would like to say about it is now if we spoke into MAGA, I want to speak to legacy media and anyone in legacy media and the punditry who would be watching this, listening to this or reading this transcript of this:

You’re not doing your job. By dismissing Jeffrey Epstein’s very real, very documented, proven history, swimming around with foreign intelligence services and our own, quite possibly, and his criminal record financial crimes that he committed that are very real, from the Ponzi scheme, to the SEC violations at Bear Stearns, to the offshore accounts, to the shady money and the lies around his wealth, where it came from, where did it go. We don’t have answers for any of that. It’s not normal. None of it is normal. To deny this or say it’s all just MAGA conspiracy because they think there’s a cabal of sex traffickers and child sex rapists that control the world, and to throw the baby out with the bathwater on that and not actually do your job of detailing the provable demonstrable facts of this man’s very real history is a real betrayal.

Stop taking the easy, lazy way out on this. Stop it. I’m begging you. I’m begging you. Do the work. It doesn’t take much. There are still living witnesses, credible witnesses who can verify, that I spoke to, that you can go speak to that can verify everything. There’s actual offshore accounts that you can see in the Offshore Leaks database. There’s the Ponzi scheme and the crimes, and there are prosecutors still alive that will talk to you about that Ponzi scheme and who was involved, from Tom Barrick to Paul Manafort to Rudy Giuliani, who was the lawyer for Towers Financial.

You can dissect it, you can talk about it and that gives the fulsome context of who this guy was and what kind of operation he was running. To just accept what Pam Bondi’s saying now, and Kash Patel, that we look for the conspiracy, but there’s just no conspiracy there—to buy that garbage and just sort of say, “Yes, MAGA, God, maybe they’ll, you know, they were all lied to,” and yeah, you need to start parsing out the garbage from the reality and report on this correctly, and report on Jeffrey Epstein correctly: who he was and who he was partnered with and what kind of operation he was running and what and who he was connected to.

Because I’m going to tell you what’s going to happen if you keep being lazy about this—and I’m being generous by saying you’re being lazy and just saying, “Yeah, they think it’s all this Pizzagate stuff.” People like me and other journalists, solid journalists, the journalists who’ve done the work on all of this, we’re going to include your name in there, because there’s no reason that you should be that lazy.

There’s no reason for it unless you’re being threatened. Or you’re just garbage at your job.

GO

Yeah. Don Lemon had Jeffrey Epstein’s brother on, and Jeffrey Epstein’s brother said, “Yeah, Donald was in there.” So that’s—he’s a witness. That seems like good journalistic work to me. I can think of another person who’s sitting in federal prison right now who might know a thing or two and has no incentive to not talk really.

SK

Right. Now, she’s tricky. Well, no one’s gonna talk, but she’s tricky. Ghislaine’s tricky. She wants a pardon.

GO

I don’t think she can get one now. I don’t think that pardon’s coming.

SK

Well, think if she comes forward and she wants to testify, I don’t know if she’s doing it while we’re doing this. Her case was coming for the court. So apparently there’s reporting out there now about her that she wants to clear Donald’s name. Yeah. So she’s tricky. She’s suspect.

But again, we need legacy media to finally get on the beat of actually reporting on who she is, what she was up to, where she lied—about her relationship with Jeffrey and who he was, how they wove a myth together. It would go a long way. It would go a long way. There’s no denying her father was a spy.

GO

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

SK

There’s no denying it. And it’s not just some fanciful book that was written. Again, there are still former intelligence officers who worked with him, but also prime ministers were on the record at the time saying, “Yeah, he’s one of ours. He works for our intelligence services.” So I don’t think those folks were lying.

GO

Yeah.

People seem to enjoy these, “Is it a murder or a suicide slash accident?” stories. So that’s a good one, Robert Maxwell’s. It’s fun. He’s buried in state in Jerusalem, so they’re never allowed to dig up his body for an autopsy, by the way. Just putting that out there.

So this has been fun, or as fun as it can be to talk about something so absolutely horrible. Thank you for joining me and sharing your knowledge with everybody, which is vast, and I appreciate you and that’s it. That’s all I’ve got to say.

SK

Thanks, Greg.

GO

Bye everybody.

SK

Bye everyone.