This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election…We will win this, and as far as I’m concerned, we already have won it.
—President Donald Trump, speech at White House, 2.21am, November 4, 2020
~
[F]or many years, Americans were blatantly lied to about the security of our election infrastructure, including electronic voting machines and ballot counting systems dishonest almost all. They’re vulnerable, and they’re easily compromised and people within our government knew that.
—President Donald Trump, speech at White House, July 17, 2026
~
What kind of fuckery is this?
—Amy Winehouse, “Me & Mr Jones,” 2006
I’ve been reading PREVAIL since you launched in 2019, and I don’t think you’ve even once written about election fuckery.
Election fuckery? You mean what Donald says happened to him in 2020? Because he won’t shut up about that, even though he keeps losing in court, and his claims are complete and utter bullshit.
No. I mean like how Trump cheated to “win” the 2024 election.
Come on, man. You really want to do this?
Haven’t you been following the Ashley St. Clair story?
Ever since she was nasty to my friend Sandi Bachom on the train back to New York after J6, I’ve tried to limit my consumption of Ashley St. Clair content. She doesn’t strike me as a good judge of character. Witness her decision to have a baby with a Nazi sociopath with the physique, and the sense of humor, of a blood-bloated deer tick.
Did you hear what she said, though? About Elon Musk and the “space lasers” and the “anomaly in the matrix?”
I did. I actually watched the whole video.
Here’s a sample:
And in October [2024], Elon tells me that he is ready to release his, in his words, “anomaly in the matrix.” And I am like, “Like, who’s that?” And he says that he has 10,000 lasers in space, referring to his satellites.
I say—because I am, like, rather uncomfortable, and I know the gravity of what he’s trying to tell me right now—I say, “Wow, finally a focus on the Jewish vote.”
He keeps going, and he says, “You know, this is not something on—this is not a piece that they’ll see on the chessboard.”
And I straight-up tell him, I say, “I would ask more, but I really don’t want to be deposed.” To which he says, “Very wise.”
Ngl, I found her quite compelling. Unlike with, say, Tim Pool, I understand why people like her.
But I don’t necessarily trust it.
Why not?
Do you even know who Ashley St. Clair is?
She’s a MAGA influencer who helps me choose the very best cosmetics and skincare products.
Exactly. Ashley St. Clair is only famous because she fed at the MAGA trough—and because she is, as she put it, “one of Elon’s baby mamas.”
That doesn’t mean she’s not telling the truth.
Oh, I believe she’s telling the truth. I have no doubt about that.
So why haven’t you written about it?
It just seems…convenient. Like, we want so badly for there to be proof of some nefarious 2024 election fuckery that we’ll stoop to believing a paid propagandist because it seems like maybe she’s come to Jesus? I’ve seen this movie before, kwim?
Wait—do you not think the 2024 election was stolen?
Look, just because Donald’s campaign was visibly sputtering, with fewer and fewer fascists attending his rallies, as Kamala was packing stadiums…
…just because he was last seen in a yellow vest being driven around in a garbage truck, like an overgrown child at a county fair…
…just because he told his followers it was okay not to vote, that it didn’t matter…
…just because his fortunes changed once Elon showed up in Pennsylvania to help the cause…
…just because Elon knew what the results would be four hours before the AP…
…just because Elon boasted that Trump would not have won without him…
…just because Ashley explained how that worked…
…just because Donald was widely despised and running against the most exciting candidate since Obama, who had all the intellectuals and artists and pop-cultural icons out campaigning for her…
…just because he won six of the seven swing states by less than 3.2 percent, which is close to the margin of error…
None of that means the fix was in. Stop being conspiratorial.
You’re joking, right?
Am I? Because I sure ain’t laughing.
Look, I was 100 percent sure Kamala would win. Like, not a doubt in my mind. I was so excited that I allowed myself to feel the joy I knew I’d feel when it happened. I wrote pieces about it and everything. I even wrote a poem—in iambic pentameter, no less.
And then, she lost.
The takeaway, for me, is that I am not good at forecasting election results. I’m too biased towards intelligence, human decency, and good judgment. Because I am not racist, sexist, stupid, easily fooled by Fox News, or a member of some inscrutable Evangelical denomination conditioned since birth to do whatever my pedophile sex-pest MAGA pastor tells me, I am always shocked at how many of my fellow Americas are racist, sexist, stupid, easily fooled by Fox News, or a member of some inscrutable Evangelical denomination conditioned since birth to do whatever their pedophile sex-pest MAGA pastor tells them.
The rise of the United States as a hegemonic power was fueled by racism. Brutal, nasty, overt, unapologetic racism. And misogyny transcends the racial divide. Throw in the hate-churches and the military-grade psy-ops disguised as cable news and social media, and our self-destruction was probably inevitable.
The main reason I was so depressed after the election wasn’t because Trump won, but because so many Americans voted for him, despite it all. A lot of Americans still think he’s the cat’s pajamas.
Dude, you’re bringing me down.
You’re the one who wanted me to write about this.
But wouldn’t it restore your faith in America—in humanity—if we proved that the ‘24 election was stolen?
In theory, yes. Especially if they marched everyone involved into a military tribunal, found them guilty, and hurled them into an oubliette, where they’d have to listen to Mötley Crüe’s “Shout at the Devil” for all eternity. I would even be fine with a live volcano instead of an oubliette. But there’s just no way that would ever happen.
How do you mean?
First of all, they will never admit the election was stolen. Ever. Because to do so, the thinking goes, would be to undermine our faith in our election process. You know, because we have such unshakable faith in it now.
The closest we’d ever get is what we are seeing now:
People like Ashley St. Clair—that is, minor public figures who have made their fame and fortune through lies, and whom we know better than to fully trust; unreliable sources, in other words—explaining how the fuckery all works…
…no one in the legacy media, and certainly not in positions of power, taking them seriously…
…and anyone who does the hard work of investigating it, tarred as a conspiracy theorist.
It’d be just like the Butler assassination attempt: everyone knows that it’s fishy as all get-out, that human ears don’t grow back like blades of grass, that the Secret Service would never let Trump behave that way if there was a real threat to his life—but no one will risk his or her reputation to come out and say so.
And even if they did admit the ‘24 election was fucked, what would be done about it? We think, what, Todd Blanche is going to open a DOJ investigation? That Trump will be given 24 hours to vacate the White House, and then, after a good sage-ing of the grounds and a thorough de-Romanov-ing of the Oval Office, Kamala and her team would ride in on white horses to clean up the mess?
Wait—who are “they?” What do you mean by “they?” Now who’s being conspiratorial?
The powers that be. Literally anyone in a position of authority that could actually do something about it. Senators, House members, U.S. Attorneys, FBI officers, state Attorneys General—even local sheriffs. Anyone with the authority to open investigations, subpoena witnesses, and make arrests.
To date, the only individual courageous enough to go after Trump on election-related stuff was Fani Willis—the district attorney of Fulton County—and we all saw what happened to her.
Yeah, but she brought that on herself.
Miss me with the Fani Willis slander.
If a white man did what she did—hire his highly qualified significant other to do a job no one else would take—you think he’d be pilloried like that? Give me a fucking break.
Other than Jack Smith, who was hired for that express purpose, the only two people in positions of authority in the entire United States with the guts to indict Trump were a Black man and a Black woman—and they are district attorneys of a city and a county, respectively.
Also: Willis was forced out, but the case she built against Donald was still active. The State of Georgia v. Donald J. Trump, et al. A RICO case. The kind of thing that could not only make a prosecutor’s career, but put his or her name in the history books as one of the all-time good guys—a hero for the ages. But the white guy that took over as prosecutor of the case practically tripped over himself asking the judge to dismiss it. Unpinned grenades have been held longer than he kept that case active for. He said the indictment was “without precedent”—duh—and wrote a 22-page memo rationalizing his chicken-shit decision, whining about how hard it would be to try a sitting president. Which was hard to hear over all the violins playing just for him.
Fucking coward. Fucking poltroon. I bet you don’t remember his name.
Who’s name?
The white guy who took over the case from Fani Willis. The executive director of the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia.
I do not.
Pete Skandalakis.
Skandalakis?
Scandal Ass-kiss. You can’t make this shit up.
The point is, Fani Willis built a case, persuaded a grand jury, indicted the bastard, arraigned him—even got his fucking mugshot! And we all allowed “them” to destroy her. The court of public opinion convicted her instead of the actual criminal. So forgive me if I’m not optimistic about anyone ever discovering, prosecuting, indicting, and convicting Donald Trump and his minions—including Elon Musk, who is both a vindictive Nazi prick and the richest man alive, which is never a good combination—for election fuckery.
But if the truth came out, people will take to the streets!
People take to the streets when the Knicks win the NBA championship. They don’t take to the streets for this kind of thing. That shit only happens in the movies. There’s no Hollywood ending to this. At some point, Trump will kick the bucket, and then we get Peter Thiel’s loathsome, obnoxious, couchfucking muppet. Roll credits.
So, not like Disclosure Day?
The most unrealistic part of Disclosure Day isn’t the aliens, or the “device” that they use, or the enhanced mental powers of the two leads. It’s that at the end, when Emily Blunt gives her TV news broadcast, everyone stops and pays attention. Come on, dude. Nothing commands everyone’s attention. Jesus Christ could come down from on high to judge the living and the dead, and there’d be people like my son, who would be listening to a Spotify playlist while playing Mario Kart on his Switch 2, completely oblivious.
We’re getting off topic.
That’s the danger with the Q&A format.
We were talking about elections being stolen.
We were. Because you wanted to.
The 2000 election was stolen. Can we agree on that?
Every rightwing douchebag with a law degree was in Florida at the end of 2000 trying to figure out ways to hand that election to George W. Bush; a lot of those rightwing douchebags are now prominent government attorneys, or on the Supreme Court.
The thing is, Bush did end up winning in Florida.
Bush “won” by 537 votes—out of 5.96 million cast in the Sunshine State.
So he came from behind and won, like the Knicks in Game Four. Only in Florida, the OG Anunoby tip-in came in the form of an assist by the Supreme Court.
Dubya won by a single Electoral Vote. Deal with it.
But his brother was the governor of Florida! The State A.G. was corrupt!
In that case, let’s just jump into the time machine and make Al Gore president. And then we can use the same time machine to send Jeb Bush back to Linz in the 1890s, so he could kill baby Hitler, like he promised. While we’re at it, let’s vaporize John Wilkes Booth after the first act of “Our American Cousin.”
Facts is facts. Al Gore lost Tennessee, his home state. Whether we’re talking about the Democratic candidates or the San Antonio Spurs: if you can’t hold home court, you don’t deserve to win.
Then there was the 2004 election.
The day after Election Day 2004 was the single bleakest and most depressing day of the entire ten years that I lived in New York City. Nothing came close—and I was there on 9/11.
That election was stolen, too! There were shenanigans in Ohio! Karl Rove worked some serious dark magic to hand Bush the victory! Kerry was the rightful winner!
Huh. Well, I found an op-ed supporting your claim that ran in Rolling Stone on June 1, 2006:
The reports were especially disturbing in Ohio, the critical battleground state that clinched Bush’s victory in the electoral college. Officials there purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent. In Warren County, GOP election officials even invented a nonexistent terrorist threat to bar the media from monitoring the official vote count…..
Across the country, Republican election officials and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election. A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004—more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes. In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots. And that doesn’t even take into account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes—enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.
See? I told you!
You want to guess who wrote that?
Seymour Hersh?
Nope.
Greg Palast?
Uh-uh.
Howard Zinn?
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.—the raccoon-penis-collecting, toilet-seat-coke-snorting, whale-beheading antivaxer now in Trump’s Cabinet, last seen spreading dangerous disinformation about Dr. Fauci.
So: consider the source.
That doesn’t mean he’s wrong! RFK Jr. wrote that 20 years ago! Before he lost the plot!
He beheaded the whale 30 years ago.
[speechless]
Although, to be fair, a Kennedy would know about election fuckery.
Hey now. There’s no hard evidence that Jack Kennedy struck a deal with the Chicago Outfit to get JFK elected. That’s hearsay.
Right. It’s a hoax, fake news, the greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history! Got it.
Wait, isn’t that what Trump said about the Russia stuff?
Indeed. I ran it on the first page of Dirty Rubles.
Let’s talk about that, then. Trump/Russia. That’s your wheelhouse, after all. Did Trump really collude with the Kremlin?
People get hung up on that word: collusion. In the court of law, collusion has a very specific meaning that mostly relates to price-fixing. Trump and Putin were obviously not doing that. In legal terms, collusion has more to do with Andre Dawson signing with the Cubs in 1987 than Trump canoodling with the Russians in 2016.
That’s why Trump kept repeating that phrase, “No collusion.” Legally, he is correct. But colloquially? There 100 percent was collusion.
In Volume 5 of its report on Russian active measures campaigns and interference in the 2016 election, the bipartisan Senate Select Committee on Intelligence “found that the Russian government engaged in an aggressive, multifaceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence, the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.”
That was signed off on by the committee chair, Richard Burr, as well as Senators Risch, Blunt, Cotton, Cornyn, Sasse, and Marco Rubio—every one a Republican. All but Burr—who was immediately exiled for his crisis of conscience—felt the need to add this addendum (italics and boldface in the original): “Volume 5 exhaustively reviews the counterintelligence threats and vulnerabilities to the 2016 election, but never explicitly states the critical fact: the Committee found no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government in its efforts to meddle in the election.”
Got that? So the Trump campaign and the Kremlin did not “agree to fix or control the prices they will charge for their respective goods or services,” which is the legal definition of collusion. And which no thinking human was accusing them of doing.
So what’s the correct term?
Cooperation is the word the Democrats on the Committee—Senators Heinrich, Feinstein, Wyden, Bennet, and, oh yes, Kamala Harris—employed:
The Committee’s bipartisan Report unambiguously shows that members of the Trump Campaign cooperated with Russian efforts to get Trump elected. It recounts efforts by Trump and his team to obtain dirt on their opponent from operatives acting on behalf of the Russian government. It reveals the extraordinary lengths by which Trump and his associates actively sought to enable the Russian interference operation by amplifying its electoral impact and rewarding its perpetrators—even after being warned of its Russian origins. And it presents, for the first time, concerning evidence that the head of the Trump Campaign was directly connected to the Russian meddling through his communications with an individual found to be a Russian intelligence officer.
These are stubborn facts that cannot be ignored. They build on the Committee’s bipartisan findings in Volume 2 and Volume 4 that show an extensive Kremlin-directed effort to covertly help candidate Trump in 2016, and they speak to a willingness by a major party candidate and his associates, in the face of a foreign adversary’s assault on the political integrity of the United States, to welcome that foreign threat in exchange for advancing their own self-interest.
That still seems pretty vague.
The Democrats continue (italics in the original text):
The Committee’s bipartisan Report found that Paul Manafort, while he was Chairman of the Trump Campaign, was secretly communicating with a Russian intelligence officer with whom he discussed Campaign strategy and repeatedly shared internal Campaign polling data. This took place while the Russian intelligence operation to assist Trump was ongoing. Further, Manafort took steps to hide these communications and repeatedly lied to federal investigators, and his deputy on the Campaign destroyed evidence of communications with the Russian intelligence officer. The Committee obtained some information suggesting that the Russian intelligence officer, with whom Manafort had a longstanding relationship, may have been connected to the GRU’s hack-and-leak operation targeting the 2016 U.S. election. This is what collusion looks like.
This is what collusion looks like! Why wasn’t THAT the headline in the New York Times?
I don’t know. Liberal media bias?
Wait, remind me again about Paul Manafort. I get these soulless Trump cronies mixed up.
He’s the one who looks the most like an actual mobster:
Manafort spent most of his adult life as a Washington-based lobbyist—initially teaming up with his buddy and fellow traveler Roger Stone—for unsavory foreign leaders like Mobutu Sese Seko, Jonas Savimbi, Ferdinand Marcos, and Viktor Yanukovych, as well as various Russian oligarchs and Pakistan’s ISI. He raked in a boatload of money from his misadventures in Ukraine—and then blew it on oriental rugs and ostrich coats. “Blood money,” as one wag put it.
Who said that?
The same person who later called him and Donald “power-hungry egomaniacs:” his daughter Andrea.
Wait a second—did you say Roger Stone?
Yes.
Longtime Trump crony Roger Stone?
Yes.
Roy Cohn disciple Roger Stone? The Batman villain with the tattoo of Richard Nixon on his back? That Roger Stone?
Yes. He and Manafort had a consulting company with a third man, Charles Black.
Charles…Black…? Come on. That’s not a real person.
He is. I swear. He’s a proud member of the American Association of Political Consultants Hall of Fame.
The what?
The American Association of Political Consultants Hall of Fame.
That can’t be a real thing.
It is. I swear. Other AAPC Hall of Famers include Lee Atwater, the author of the GOP’s “Southern Strategy;” Karl Rove, alleged Ohio vote tinkerer and J6 scumbag Ali Alexander’s shall-we-say mentor; and Our Dark Lord Satan, aka Arthur Finkelstein.
No Henry Kissinger?
He’s not on the website. I guess he’s sort of the Pete Rose of the American Association of Political Consultants Hall of Fame.
All joking aside: Manafort seems like he was a key cog in the 2016 fuckery.
That he was. Indeed, if one takes the time to read the parts of Volume 5 that concern Paul Manafort, one sees that the summary provided by the Democrats on the Committee is, in the immortal words of Marisa Tomei in My Cousin Vinny, dead-on-balls accurate. The document goes into great detail about the seditious shit Manafort pulled and how he pulled it.
The GOP Senators hid behind the word colluded, just as Bill Clinton once hid behind the term sexual relations, but there is zero ambiguity here. Manafort as campaign chair worked in concert with an enemy intelligence officer to sabotage the election—and then, just in case there was any doubt whose side he was on, he lied about it to federal prosecutors. Per Volume 5:
On numerous occasions over the course of his time on the Trump Campaign, Manafort sought to secretly share internal Campaign information with Kilimnik. Gates, who served as Manafort’s deputy on the Campaign, aided Manafort in this effort. Manafort communicated electronically with Kilimnik and met Kilimnik in person twice while serving on the Trump Campaign. Manafort briefed Kilimnik on sensitive Campaign polling data and the Campaign’s strategy for beating Hillary Clinton. At Manafort’s direction, Gates used an encrypted messaging application [suggested by Kilimnik] to send additional Campaign polling data to Kilimnik.
The Committee was unable to reliably determine why Manafort shared sensitive internal polling data or Campaign strategy with Kilimnik. Manafort and Gates both claimed that it was part of an effort to resolve past business disputes and obtain new work with their past Russian and Ukrainian clients by showcasing Manafort’s success.
TL;DR: Paul Manafort is a stinking traitor.
I sure think so. Mueller agreed. That’s why he indicted Manafort on the charge of—wait for it—Conspiracy Against the United States. That sounds dramatic, like something from a Tom Clancy novel, or a spec script of Scandal. But it is real—one of the actual charges on which the former Trump campaign chairman was indicted.
Come again?
Paul Manafort, who ran the Trump campaign from May through August 2016—an interval that included the hiring of Cambridge Analytica, the changing of the party platform at the Republican National Convention to soften its stance on Russian incursion in Ukraine, and Junior’s notorious Trump Tower meeting; peak treason season—was accused of conspiring against his country.
That wasn’t some Pizzagate-style conspiracy theory. That wasn’t uninformed speculation. That wasn’t something posted anonymously on Reddit. That was an actual charge, filed by the Special Counsel of the U.S. Department of Justice investigating Trump/Russia.
And the individual accused of this heinous crime was the chairman of the Trump campaign.
Not an intern. Not a coffee boy.
The guy in charge.
Was he found guilty?
Manafort was found guilty on eight counts, involving false tax returns, bank fraud, and failing to disclose a foreign bank account.
And Conspiracy Against the United States?
Manafort plea-bargained his way out of that one. Likely because he knew he’d lose. Even so, he was convicted of the other charges, and he spent time in federal prison.
Isn’t he still in prison?
Not anymore.
Why on earth not?
Why d’ya think? Trump pardoned his ass.
Didn’t the press know, when he was hired in May of 2016, that Manafort was a Russia’d up piece of shit?
Although Manafort had not worked on a U.S. race in 20 years, the consensus in the media was that this was a smart hire. He was a charming guy. Nicknamed “The Count,” the 67-year-old Manafort was well-educated, worldly, independently wealthy, and smart—in stark contrast to the provincial mouthbreathers comprising most of Trump’s team, especially loutish then-campaign manager and Hope Hicks sidepiece Corey Lewandowski.
Here was a seasoned pro who would bring establishment bona fides to the upstart campaign. That was the general impression of him in the media at the time.
Yet another catastrophic failure by the media.
The Fourth Estate shits the bed yet again.
But let’s put it in context. By March 2016, Trump had sewn up enough delegates that the Republican nomination looked like a sure thing. Then reports trickled out about unhappy delegates, a disgruntled GOP establishment, and the unthinkable prospect of a contested convention that July. Could Ted Cruz or John Kasich somehow pull the chair right out from under Trump’s prodigious derrière?
The last time the GOP dealt with a contested convention was back in 1976, when President Ford managed to stave off a challenge by California governor Ronald Reagan. The man in charge of Ford’s effort back in ‘76 was a young Republican strategist and lawyer named—you guessed it—Paul Manafort. He would later broker conventions for George H.W. Bush in ‘88 and Bob Dole in ‘96. Not only did Manafort have truck with the GOP establishment, but given his experience with brokering conventions, he seemed uniquely qualified to lead Trump to the nomination.
Given the Roger Stone connection, Trump must have known Manafort pretty well, before he hired him to run the campaign.
See, that’s the bit of context Volume 5 does not provide. The Report doesn’t describe how tight Paul Manafort and Donald Trump were—and had been, for decades. As you say, Manafort was business partners with Roger Stone, Trump’s long-time friend and political adviser. He had an apartment in Trump Tower. Before he was brought into the campaign, Ivanka Trump referred to him simply as “Paul.” He was also close with the shady businessman Tom Barrack, the mutual friend who reportedly suggested to Trump that he take Manafort on. This wasn’t some stranger, Walter Kurtz’s errand boy sent by grocery clerks. This was a mover and shaker with deep ties to Russian organized crime, living in Trump Tower, where lots of other mobbed-up folks lived, and who was chummy with that building’s developer, who was himself a fully owned asset of the Russian mob.
Whoa. My head is spinning.
Bet.
It seems important, all of the Russian connections. Why did nobody talk about this at the time?
Lots of people were talking about it, at least on Twitter. The FBI was investigating it. But the legacy media largely ignored it.
Why would the legacy media ignore such an obvious and dangerous national security risk?
I’m tempted to say, “Because their corporate overlords and in-house attorneys wanted them to steer clear, and they knew if they didn’t, they’d get pink-slipped—and at the end of the day, they care about money and fame more than the country or the truth.”
But let’s give them the benefit of the doubt. On Valentine’s Day 2017, Jeet Heer of The New Republic explained the Fourth Estate’s collective reticence in a since-deleted tweet: “Part of the reason I (and others, I think) resisted the Russia theory is that it seemed too stupid to be real. But sometimes life is stupid.”
What we’ve learned this last decade—pace Heer—is that life is often stupid.
So when did Manafort join the campaign?
He joined as convention strategist in late March 2016, when it looked like there might be a contested convention. Right before Cambridge Analytica and the Mayflower Hotel foreign policy speech, attended by the Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak and organized by Dimitri Simes, the Russian expat who ran the Center for the National Interest. Simes, who was introduced to Jared Kushner by non-AAPC Hall of Famer Henry Kissinger.
Dimitri Simes. Why does that name sound familiar?
Because there’s a whole chapter in the Mueller Report about him.
So Simes is a bad guy?
I don’t want to make sweeping subjective claims. But I will point out that, after the Mueller interview, Simes fled to Russia, where he started hosting a pro-Putin gameshow. Also he was close with Richard Nixon, post-presidency. Oh, and the FBI raided his house in Virginia in August of 2024, and subsequently indicted him and his (much younger) wife for sanctions violations relating to Moscow:
As alleged in the first indictment, Dimitri and Anastasia Simes participated in a scheme to violate U.S. sanctions for the benefit of sanctioned Russian broadcaster Channel One Russia and to launder funds obtained from that scheme. Channel One Russia, a state-owned Russian television station, was sanctioned by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) on May 8, 2022, for being owned or controlled by, or for having acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, the Government of the Russian Federation.
From at least in or around June 2022 through the present, Dimitri Simes, Anastasia Simes and others allegedly participated in a scheme to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), by providing services to Channel One Russia, including by serving as a presenter and producer of programming, and by receiving over $1 million, a personal car and driver, a stipend for an apartment in Moscow, Russia, and a team of 10 employees from Channel One Russia following its designation by OFAC. The indictment alleges that Dimitri and Anastasia Simes also engaged in a scheme to commit money laundering, knowing the transactions were intended to conceal the proceeds of IEEPA violations.
Dimitri and Anastasia Simes maintain a home in Huntly, Virginia. They remain at large and are believed to be in Russia. They are each charged with one count of conspiracy to violate the IEEPA, one count of violating the IEEPA, and one count of conspiracy to commit international money laundering. If convicted, they face a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison for each count.
As alleged in the second indictment, Anastasia Simes further participated in a scheme to violate U.S. sanctions for the benefit of, and to receive funds from, sanctioned oligarch Aleksandr Yevgenyevich Udodov. Udodov was sanctioned by OFAC on Feb. 23, 2023 for operating or having operated in the management consulting sector of the Russian Federation economy. From at least in or around February 2023 through the present, Anastasia Simes and others allegedly participated in a scheme to violate IEEPA by purchasing art and antiques for the benefit of Udovov from galleries and auction houses in the United States and Europe, and having the items shipped to her residence in Huntly, Virginia, where they were stored for onward shipment to Russia. In return, Anastasia Simes was reimbursed and received a service fee. The indictment alleges that Anastasia Simes also engaged in a scheme to commit money laundering, knowing the transactions were intended to conceal the proceeds of IEEPA violations.
It’s too bad. I kind of dig Anastasia’s artwork.
Did the DOJ ever apprehend the Simeses?
No, although we can all rest assured it’s high on Todd Blanche’s list of priorities. (нет!)
Okay, so Manafort joined the campaign in March 2016. When did he become campaign manager?
In June of 2016.
Who was in charge before then?
See, this is where it gets interesting.
In name, Corey Lewandowski was in charge. In actuality, however, Jared Kushner pretty much ran the show.
How do you know that?
It was reported in Forbes, when the magazine did that infamous blowjob of Mr. Ivanka.
Blowjob?
That’s media industry slang for a particularly obsequious puff piece. The Forbes profile was egregious in that regard. The first page of the profile contains this sentence:
Trump’s son-in-law, dressed in an impeccably tailored gray suit, sitting on a brown leather couch in his impeccably neat office, displays the impeccably polite manners that won the 35-year-old a dizzying number of influential friends even before he had gained the ear, and trust, of the new leader of the free world.
That makes me want to impeccably vomit into my impeccably wide-open mouth, but I guess landing an exclusive interview with such an Important Person means that impeccable ass must be impeccably kissed.
Anyway, that profile features this telling quote about what exactly Kushner did for the 2016 campaign: “It’s hard to overstate and hard to summarize Jared’s role in the campaign. If Trump was the CEO, Jared was effectively the chief operating officer.”
Wow. I didn’t realize Jared was the mastermind.
That’s because he didn’t necessarily want the hoi polloi to know how involved he was. Like all vampires, Jared likes to operate in the shadows.
But the man who gave that quote certainly knew the score. Forbes describes him as “the only significant Silicon Valley figure to publicly back Trump.” Which means that he, like Kushner, was intimately involved with the campaign—much more involved than people realize.
Don’t leave me hanging. Who gave the quote?
Peter Thiel.
What?!?! The German-born South African-raised radical Catholic Dark Enlightenment sweaty Antichrist-obsessed weirdo who pwns JD Vance? That Peter Thiel?
Ein und dasselbe. Een en dieselfde. Unum idemque.
This is especially relevant in the Year of Our Lord 2026, when we now know that Thiel is all over the Epstein files—and was having meetings with Jeffrey Epstein ten years ago, while all this was going on.
Wait…what the fuck?!?
What indeed.
But it gets worse. Check out this find from the ace investigative journalist (and Mike Flynn/Kash Patel antagonist) Jim Stewartson:
Oh my God! Say it ain’t so! Epstein went to see Beyoncé on the Lemonade tour!
Y’all haters corny with that Illuminati mess.
But seriously: that’s not what Jim found. As he explains:
On Oct 7, 2016, an emergency lunch meeting was set in New York City by Jeffrey Epstein with Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, and Russian Ambassador to the UN, Vitaly Churkin.
Several hours later that day, the infamous Access Hollywood video came out—a shocking bit of backstage banter that, although it barely hinted at Trump’s true misogyny and narcissism, nevertheless threatened Trump’s flailing campaign.
But this blockbuster video got little breathing room because it was followed immediately by the release of Clinton aide John Podesta’s Russian-hacked emails on Wikileaks—just 30-60 minutes later.
Almost like they were waiting for it.
Why would they be “waiting for” the Access Hollywood tape to drop?
To release an “October Surprise” of their own. As Stewartson explains:
Podesta’s emails, despite being pretty boring by and large, were systematically reengineered by alt-right online trolls to mean that Hillary Clinton was involved in child sex trafficking—by alleging “pizza” was “code,” for example. Many of those trolls were paid by Peter Thiel’s PAC MAGA3X which was organized with the specific purpose of running covert influence operations for Trump.
Mike Flynn and Erik Prince both worked to amplify these false, deliberately traumatic narratives about Podesta and a cabal of Satanic pedophiles run by Hillary. This was done in large part through Breitbart, which was run by Epstein’s close friend Steve Bannon, and funded by Thiel bankroll Rebekah Mercer.
Additional firepower for these psychological operations was provided by Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Internet Research Agency (IRA)—later charged by Robert Mueller with election interference.
Up to 600 Russians were dedicated to delivering online propaganda in the 2016 election on Twitter and Facebook. All of it was devoted to smearing Hillary Clinton and electing Donald Trump.
The systematic propaganda attack on Hillary, which mirrored Epstein and Trump’s own documented child rape, was later branded as Pizzagate—and extended by QAnon. It was all large-scale projection designed to swing a presidential election through psychological warfare.
And Peter Thiel…?
If Stewartson is right, as he usually is, then the sweaty Dark Enlightenment billionaire weirdo was the connective tissue between Epstein, the Kremlin, and the online stormtroopers, both American and Russian, who did the 2016 dirty work:
Peter Thiel was the only major donor who supported Trump in the wake of Trump’s comments about grabbing women by the genitals on video—by publicly donating $1.25 million dollars in the immediate aftermath, despite numerous Trump defections.
Palantir had previously been caught planning to run a covert influence operation on Wikileaks and Glenn Greenwald for Bank of America.
A month after Trump’s inauguration, Vitaly Churkin suddenly died—cause of death “unclear.” While no windows were involved, it is widely understood this was not a natural death.
It turns out we were all looking for “Russian collusion” in the wrong place the whole time. The PayPal Mafia and Russian intelligence were just part of Epstein’s plan—not the other way around.
Slow down, Charlie. I’m a little confused. What is Jim really saying?
That Trump/Russia is really Epstein/Trump/Russia.
Dude.
I know, right?
Hang on. Thiel was quoted in that “blowjob” article, sure. And he publicly supported Trump. But was he actually involved in the campaign?
Not officially. But he was involved enough to understand Jared Kushner’s importance. And for the sycophantic Forbes reporter to talk to him about it.
What about Epstein? Was he in touch with Jared Kushner?
See, now you’re asking the right questions.
Was Jeffrey in touch with Jared, you want to know? The answer is no.
Not at all?
Not at all. At least, not in the documents we have access to.
Jeffrey was clearly monitoring Jared—he even bought Vicky Ward’s Kushner book when it came out. But if you search the Epstein emails for “Kushner,” most of the mentions concern new Los Angeles Lakers owner Joshua, not his brother Jared.
That’s strange.
That two intimate associates of Donald Trump—both with deep ties to Israeli intelligence, both having regular meetings in 2016 with important Kremlin officials, both chummy with Peter Thiel, both invested in Trump winning the election, and both legendary networkers—never once so much as exchanged notes?
It’s not just strange. It’s unlikely.
Remember, like Jeffrey, Jared wanted to be in contact with everybody who was anybody. This is the same stunod who blundered into the meeting with Ambassador Kislyak, floating the idea of setting up a “backchannel” via the Russian embassy.
He was inexperienced and rash, back then. He hadn’t yet figured out how to cover his tracks.
And yet: no emails between him and Epstein. Not a one.
Did you find anything about Kushner in the Files?
The one document I found where Epstein says anything about Jared is this email to Michael Wolff from two days before the 2016 election:
Who is SB?
Steve Bannon, most likely. At the time, still a key player in the Trump inner circle.
Epstein seems to be mocking Kushner there.
Yes. The “whoops” is like he’s laughing at his younger counterpart. He’s also pointing out a very obvious financial connection between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign that the legacy media pretty much ignored—but that’s a whole other story.
But look at the whole exchange. Most of it is Wolff and Epstein talking about Signal, the messaging app that is supposedly super secure. Here, Epstein is warning Wolff that it’s not.
So what?
At the time, Kushner was in the news for using Signal, defying conventional government practice and, maybe, the law:
Meanwhile, Epstein is saying Signal can be intercepted—that its reputation for being secure is NSA propaganda.
I don’t follow.
Then let’s break it down.
With regard to Epstein and Kushner potentially being in touch in 2016, there are three possibilities:
They were not in touch. Given all of the overlap previously discussed—Israeli intelligence, Russian government, Trump campaign, Donald personally—as well as the Gulf State contacts and the potential Ivanka connection, it beggars belief that Epstein and Kushner did not communicate at all in 2016. But it’s certainly possible that they were not in contact. Indeed, Occam’s Razor tells us this is the right answer.
The communications have not yet been released. If true, then the Epstein-Kushner emails are what Trump, Bondi, Patel, and now Blanche are really hiding. That’s possible—especially if those messages have espionage and/or national security implications, and could be more justifiably redacted—but unlikely.
They used a secure messaging app to communicate. If true, that’s why there’s no trace of their exchanges. The messages self-destructed. This is also unlikely—but it’s the one I’d open up a Polymarket account just to bet on.
But Epstein didn’t use Signal.
No. He didn’t. And in the summer of 2016, Jared did. But in time, curiously, Kushner’s messaging app of choice changed:
Are you saying Epstein and Kushner were communicating on WhatsApp in 2016?
Please don’t put words in my mouth. I’m not reporting that. Not at all. For all we know, they didn’t communicate because Epstein couldn’t stand the little twerp and wanted nothing to do with him; that would be my response to Jared, certainly. All I’m saying is, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that, if they were communicating at all—and I’m not saying they were, just that it was unlikely they weren’t—it was via a disappearing-messages app.
Because in 2016, remember, you had a confluence of very bad actors—Kremlin intelligence officers, Russian mobsters, Silicon Valley Nazis, Opus Dei weirdos, Nixonian dirty tricksters, alt-right propagandists and influencers, shadowy “men in the middle” with deep connections to Israeli intelligence, sleazy journalists, disgraced former NYC mayors, child sex traffickers, and whatever the fuck Steve Bannon is—all moving heaven and earth to beat Hillary and install Donald in the White House. Do we really believe Epstein and Kushner, two of the most important figures in the sweeping operation, didn’t communicate ever—not even once?
For me, the tell is that there are zero emails in the Files. It’s counterintuitive, but I’d be less suspicious if there were some innocuous back-and-forths between Epstein and Kushner. But: nothing at all? Really? Like, it’s part of both of their jobs to communicate with each other, no?
But hey, Epstein also managed to run the financial side of his child sex trafficking operation through JP Morgan Chase for 15 years, and be close pals with the No. 2 in that corporation, Jes Staley, without CEO Jamie Dimon ever even hearing his name, pretty much. Maybe he was just really good at avoiding people.
Did Epstein ever meet with Kushner in person?
Excellent question!
As the investigative journalist Ellie Leonard painstaking argued, Epstein almost certainly attended a meeting with Donald Trump at Trump Tower on Sunday, November 13, 2016. At the time, the Trump Transition Team was figuring out who would do what in the Cabinet. That very day, it was decided that Reince Priebus would be White House Chief of Staff. As the New York Times reported:
The simultaneous announcement and competing lines of authority are consistent with Mr. Trump’s management style in his businesses and in his campaign: creating rival power structures beneath him and encouraging them to battle it out.
It is also a reflection of who has the ear of the president-elect: his children, and especially his eldest daughter, Ivanka Trump, and her husband, Jared Kushner. Both had argued that the chief of staff job should not be held by someone too controversial, according to several people familiar with the decision-making inside the transition effort.
We know Kushner was in NYC at the time. We have images of him leaving Trump Tower the following day. Do we really think he wasn’t on the premises on November 13, 2016, when all these high-level discussions were going on? And if he was there, and Epstein was also there meeting with Trump—do we really believe Kushner would have not attended? I mean, Jared went to the fucking June 9 Trump Tower meeting with Junior and Natalia Veselnitskaya, ffs. He would ghost Epstein?
Let me again stress: this is pure speculation on my part. I’m not reporting this. But the Epstein-Kushner relationship—two NYC-based Americans in Trump’s inner circle, both also very close with two different but simpatico Israeli prime ministers, one of them a former intelligence chief—demands further investigation, if you ask me.
And you asking me is, of course, the purpose of this exercise.
Dude. I don’t even know what to do with this information.
Me neither. Fortunately, there’s time to let it marinate. We’re pushing 8,000 words, so we’ll have to wait for the next installment…
Incredible investigative piece. Only you could pull this together. So much to think about and remember. Thanks as always Greg
It’s TUESDAY🎉And this piece deserves an AWARD🏆🏆🏆