A

Jeffrey Epstein's financial network is often overlooked in the released Epstein files. He was not only a trafficker and abuser of girls and women, but at the epicenter of the ruling billionaire class, which is global, a class that controls not only our economies and politics, but also our systems of information and education. The investigative journalist Maureen Tasek has examined the files to knit together the intimate connections between Epstein and our global financial elite. Joining me to discuss this Epstein class is Maureen Tasak, the investigative editor at the American Prospect. So, Maureen, there's two articles I want to discuss with you which focus on how Epstein got his money. The first was in the Nation. It's called Larry, we knew you too well. The second is in the Prospect. Newspapers did not kill themselves. But let's start with your article in the Nation because it goes back to the breakup of the Soviet Union, the seizure of state assets that created the Russian oligarchic, you know, cabal that Putin comes out of. And Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard, and Jeffrey Epstein, they're all involved. So I'll let you go from there.

B

Sure. Yeah. So in 1990, and it's funny, it always comes back to 1991. This is the year that, you know, Jeffrey gets Les Wexner to sign over a power of attorney. This is the year that.

A

Can I just interrupt you? Do you have a theory as to why Wexler did that?

B

Well, it was.

A

This is the head of Victoria's Secret,

B

and it was huge.

A

Huge amounts of money from Wechster is trans are transferred and property and everything else.

B

It was roughly the same month, maybe even the same week, that a. A secret Columbia's Columbus Police Department memoir was started to circulate about Wexner's organized crime connections and his connection to the really violent assassination style hit on his accountant, who had been scheduled to testify, you know, in exchange for leniency on some pretty bad tax evasion charges. Apparently he hadn't filed his tax returns for seven years. And so this guy who is sort of known as something of a mob accountant, was going to testify, you know, going to talk to the FBI. He shows up dead. It's, it's, it's really ugly. I forget the sort of details, but the Columbus Police Department started mapping all of Wexner's relationships and those of his landlord, his biggest retailer landlord that the Taubman families. And also a guy who used to own the San Francisco 49ers, but then was had to sell it because he was pushed out by the NFL. Very mobster type I'm. I'm forgetting his name, but Joe something Italian, I think. And, And. And his accountant was Shapiro. So it was. He was under. And. And I'm sure that Wexner, being who he was, had a lot of connections in the Columbus. The police. Police department. It is said that he was molesting young boys who were, you know, scouted through a modeling agency in the 80s. That is something that has been a persistent rumor. I read about it in a book, so I have. So. So something was closing in. There was some folks closing in on Wexner. And I sense, just because of the timing, because the timeline, that. That might have been one of the reasons that he signed it over to. To Jeffrey, to keep it from the feds. Right. You know, that. That makes sense. That. That makes a lot of sense to me. But a lot of other things were happening in 1991, the collapse of the Soviet Union being a big one. And Robert Maxwell, the textbook publisher, newspaper publisher, massage, lifetime Mossad asset, you know, big jolly fellow is. Is buys the New York Daily News, which has just come out of a really, really horrible strike. The. Its owners, the Chicago Tribune, had, you know, spent a lot of money. It's been something like $250 million trying to break the union. And they pretty much, you know, they. They almost broke it. But then Maxwell swoops in and says, I will buy the New York Daily News if you give me $60 million to do it. And the Tribune said, well, $60 million is cheaper than the $150 million that we think that it will cost to actually pay out all of the union contracts that we're going to owe. So, sure, it's yours. Everybody is elated at the New York Daily News. And then a few months later, you know, eight months later, seven months later, Maxwell falls off his yacht and dies. Although not necessarily in that order or almost certainly not in that order. And it turns out very quickly after that that Maxwell's Maxwell Communications, his. His communications empire has know. Is missing $1.4 billion in cash that it was supposed to have. Where is this money? It is a big mystery. You know, the. The bank accounts of the family are frozen internationally, and Kevin Maxwell is put, you know, sort of put under house arrest to. To a certain extent. I mean, he is. He's his. He's the. The. I think the eldest son, but he was the son who was really taking the reins at the. At the business. And, you know, Ghislaine at this time is in New York complaining to everybody that she's Completely broke that she has not ascent to her name. And you know, how do they emerge from this situation? Because Ghislaine has been spotted by none other than a mirror reporter actually, you know, telling the all of the servants on the yacht to shred everything they find and you know, throw documents overboard, that kind of thing. So she, you know, she's under a cloud of suspicion. She decides she's been living in New York. She decides to live in New York. And there's a document in the Epstein files that I found that actually, you know, sheds a lot of light on what happened. But simultaneously to, you know, to all this, of course, the Soviet Union is collapsing. And Larry Summers, not sure if he is, is friends with Epstein yet, not sure when Larry Summers becomes, you know, best friends with Jeffrey Epstein. Like it seems he was, you know, right before his, his death. But Larry Summers is the President of the World bank. And he sends a protege of his named Andre Schleifer, a Harvard economist who you know, is very young and he was born in Russia, but he came over and he, you know, graduated college at 16, something along those lines. And you know, he's an up and coming hot shit in the economics world. Larry puts him in charge of this project to privatize Russia. Essentially oversee the private privatization of 225, 000 state owned enterprises under, you know, this kind of team of, of you know, Chicago type boys. But they're harbor boys inside Yeltsin's administration. And this all ends in, you know, they, these guys get unbelievably rich and no one sort of really pays attention while Russia, you know, completely collapses. The economy collapses. The ruble loses all of its value. You know, a lot of the, the IMF loans that, that Russia is supposed to be getting in order to stabilize its currency are going missing. The wire transfer suddenly like, you know, a billion dollars will be transferred from the IMF to Russia and they won't be able to find where it went. You know, this is really, really shady stuff happening. And after, you know, sort of a whistleblower comes forward, somebody who gets sort of screwed out of the action. Usaid, which has been funding this whole operation, suspends all of its funding to the project, kind of kicks these guys out of Russia and it turns in and they start investigating what actually happened. And as it turns out, the, you know, they had made a lot of money investing in these privatized Russian assets. A lot of that money. That money was actually supposed to go and be distributed among the Russian population as vouchers. And that program is a, you know, universal laughingstock. People are, you know, selling their, their vouchers for a loaf of bread while Andre Schleifer's wife, who's a hedge fund manager working for Tom Steyer, gets extremely wealthy and so does their co investor, a guy named Len Blavatnik, who helps them out later by backdating a bunch of, you know, documents. Len Blavatnik, now, you know, also a good friend of all the Epstein's, now worth $30 billion at one point the richest man in the UK so kind of put a pin in that guy. So this, this episode and a lot of what happened in Russia, a lot of the really, you know, horrific plunder that happened in the 90s that you know, set the stage for Putin to emerge as their savior.

A

Let me just stop you there because I want to just look at the details. So they're buying up state industries at, for ridiculously low prices which creates this oligarchic class. How did Schleifer and these figures, how did they, what was their involvement? So we know how the, the oligarchs were buying state factories for nothing and creating, you know, in terms of assets, immense wealth for themselves. How did these, these Harvard economists and others in aid. How were they actually also making money?

B

Well, I think that Len Blavatnik was a big key to this. So Blavatnik is a sort of shadowy figure. He like there's never any mention of him in any, you know, newspaper. I couldn't find anything until 1997. Christopher Friedland Former Finance Minister of Canada maybe current, I don't know or. But she writes this glowing profile about how this exemplar of the American dream has, you know, gotten unspeakably wealthy in Russia. And isn't that lovely? Before that it's not clear what he was doing. He shows up as the CEO of some Jersey City based outfit and in, in 1990. But it's, it's very. He was supposedly involved in leverage buyouts of a distribution company. He had gotten a Harvard mba. But it's not clear he is just is his record before 1997 when he turns, you know, he turns up as one of the first oligarchs is. And he also sues people who him an oligarch. I'm not sure if I don't think that he's actually been successful at any of those lawsuits but just alleged oligarch is, you know his, his track record from before that is, is sort of unknown. And this is the case for a lot of these folks, I'm not the best at figuring out, you know, being able to read, you know, Russian newspapers on the, the Internet. I've been scouring for a lot of these guys. But, you know, one pattern that emerges when you start to study this stuff is that for the, for the most part, these are guys who got out of the Soviet union in the 70s and 80s, generally through Israel. But there's also Armenians who got out during this time, and maybe some Austrians, some Hungarians, but, but it's primarily, you know, Jewish Soviets who, you know, were refusing, who, who were, you know, anti communist and sort of went to New York or showed up in Texas by way of Israel and then came back as soon as the, as soon as the, the government started to collapse. And so, you know, I, I'm not exactly sure, you know, some of these guys were supposedly driving taxis all of these years. Blavatnik was getting an mba. But, but, you know, there are also a lot of connections that a lot of these folks have. And, and Blavatnik, I have no idea. But in the case of some of these guys, like a guy who will come up, Greg Lucansky, they have, you know, documented organized crime ties. And, and so they're kind of, kind of part of this sort of Russian Zionist mafia. And I think that's the reason that, you know, russiagate was able. Or that, you know, that, that people like Rachel Maddow are able to say, oh, well, this scene of the Epstein files really implicates. Epstein is a Russian intelligence officer. Well, yeah, they're, you know, Russia plays very prominently in all of these stories. And the, and mostly because there was so much money to be made there in the 90s, while everybody.

A

Let me just throw in, which some people don't know. Cy H. Exposed this Jonathan Pollard, who was the CIA agent who was arrested for espionage for providing information to Israel and now was freed and lives in Israel. He had exposed to Israel the entire network of American intelligence in Russia, and Israel traded that information for the release of Soviet Jews.

B

Well, that, you know, a lot of these, this is in what, really 1980, the, the mid-80s. I, I, yes, I think that. So a lot of the, the folks that I have focused on are, are people who came before that in the, in the 1970s. That is something that I've actually read in a lot of places, um, is a thread that they share. But surely, you know, those who were there in the 80s or even much more useful. And that's when a lot of the, you know, the. Because obviously in 1991 wasn't the beginning of this. There was a lot of theft happening and just, you know, wholesale kind of mafia takeovers of a lot of these, a lot of these enterprises. And that was what they had to contend with, right? Like there were, there were these, these guys, they call them roofs, who were sort of who, who ran the extortion rings around state owned enterprises. So you had to pay off these guys and their whole operations in order to privatize any of these entities. So this is a, you know, very exotic operation happening, you know, reliant on a lot of people who kind of know bad guys throughout the former USSR and going as quickly as possible and doing it all as quickly as possible under the kind of rubric of free market, you know, shock treatment. Milton Friedmanomics and Larry Summers. You know, I don't know how intimately involved he was in Schleifer's actual and self enrichment, but he sure as heck did what he could to cover it up.

A

He told the deans, yeah, where is Schleifer now?

B

Schleifer's still at Harvard. He's still a Harvard professor. His wife was, after enriching them the first time with investments in Gazprom and various oil aluminum smelters owned by Blavatnik. She shows up again with Paul Singer in the. The default of argent of one of the holdout bondholders. So would have made, you know, thousand percent returns on that. So Schlaver's still okay. Larry Summers, however, because he, he leaves the Clinton administration, he leaves the World bank, becomes a Treasury secretary, probably some jobs in between that I'm missing. Then he gets the presidency of Harvard in 2001, immediately commences pissing people off, like you said. He wants to shut down the Classics

A

department, which, well, yes, I was involved in all that. He didn't believe in humanities. The humanities. He shut down the Sanskrit department. He made war on the humanities. And he was just philistine. But let's get to Epstein and Summers and Schleifer.

B

So what I saw in the files, and this was just the Nation wanted me to write a sort of elegy to Larry Summers on the event of his, you know, second resignation from Harvard a week before, a week before last. And I found in the Epstein files this fascinating exchange or series of exchanges between Epstein and his very close friend Peter Mandelson, who is now under indictment, I think, in, in the UK for,

A

you know, the former former Labour Party leader and former US or UK ambassador

B

to the US and really sort of the behind the scenes Architect of. Of Tony Blair's New Labor. Yes, you know, Clintonian neoliberal program. So Mandelson and Epstein are talking about various Dodd Frank reforms and their counterparts in the UK dealing with, you know, clamping down on the financial sector's abuses and Baker bonuses and the like. And they're talking a lot about this stuff. And this is a period when Jeffrey Epstein is not emailing Larry Summers himself that much, understandably. Larry Summers is running the National Economic Council. He probably shouldn't be emailing Jeffrey too much at this time, although they're having meetings. But Mandelson and Epstein keep emailing back and forth about how they can constrain some of these reforms. They're trying to get rid of, you know, the. The banker bonus tax in the uk they really hate the Volcker Rule, which is part of the sort of, you know, rehash of. Of Glass Steagall. And while they're discussing this, Mandelson's like, okay, I'm going to go to Davos. What should I say to Larry? You know, does he know that we are friends? And Epstein says, you must bring up Andre Schleifer. You know, in back when, you know, Larry was at Harvard, he had this terrible time with Andre Schleifer with the scandal. And you got to bring that name up. That's how he'll know how to trust you. And Mandelson is like, okay, you know, but it's. It's, you know, he's kind of like not getting it. And he's like, no, no, no, you must bring up Andre Schleifer. That's how he'll know, you know, he can open up. And then months later, they're, you know, he's about to see Larry again, and he says to Mandelson, listen, you got to bring up Schleifer. Remember, don't forget to bring up Schleifer. And Mandelson's like, yeah, remember we talked about this. I brought him up at Davos, and he was very embarrassed. I don't know if I'll be able to see him alone. So. But. But one thing that Epstein says is, you know, I helped him through that. I saw him through that. I was behind him a thousand percent through this Schleifer scandal. He doesn't discuss the. The specifics at all, what this is, but the way that he keeps telling Mandelson to bring it up to Summers, despite it being completely irrelevant to any of the substance that they're talking about, really has this, like, very clear blackmail light, you know, sort of sheen to it. And, you know, I have no idea how you'd have to speculate as to how Epstein would have been assistants to Summers back when he was going through this lifer scandal, because it was a, you know, it was a huge investigation. It cost Harvard at least $10 million in legal expenses, probably actually a lot more than that. It, you know, it was an episode where the, the university is literally accused of defrauding the US Government, which is pretty unreal in, in a case like that. Luckily, it was Harvard, you know, was a, was a think tank, a corporate think tank that wasn't actually Harvard University. But when you are actually found guilty of defrauding the US Government, you're not actually allowed to take any more money from the US Government. Now, everybody has ways of getting around this. I've never seen the US Government actually blacklist anybody who's accused of defrauding it because, of course, that's, you know, who, who pays for you for your campaign commercials. But it's, it's very, it's a very unusual case, especially back then in 2000, that, that, the, that the, that a university, especially of Harvard, would be charged with defrauding the government. So this was a real sordid chapter. Larry managed to sort of keep it out of the headlines, but there was a 22,000 word institutional investor piece about the whole thing. And it goes into great detail. It's, it's, it's quite crazy about how just utterly out of control this crew was. And, and this story comes out at the very beginning of, of 2006. Somebody anonymously mails the story in manila envelopes to, you know, all of these people on the faculty senate. It makes the rounds. All of these emeritus professors are, you know, up in arms and they're like, this is, you know, this has gotten so out of control. A lot of these professors are like accounting professors and math professors, you know, not, not the humanities, you know, softies that, that Summers doesn't take seriously. And he announces his resignation within weeks of this happening in, in February, basically, like I said 20 years ago last week, so was a big deal. And, and yet I am told that whenever anyone would ever bring it up again with Larry, you know, he would shoot it down. So now when we talk about Larry being president of Harvard and why he resigned, everybody brings up women are, are, are, you know, can't do math, which is, you know, some, something that he had said like over a year earlier. And then his, his constant belittling of Cornel west, supposedly for Recording a rap album, you know, probably for having, you know, standing for everything. That, that Larry Summers is not

A

also the Harvard Corporation, because. Oh, yes, and the Harvard Corporation lost almost a third of its endowment.

B

Of the endowment. Right.

A

And that was because they were bad investments, which. That's another issue. Let's, let's go back to Epstein. So with this looting by, you know, an American type mafia or, you know, in alliance with the Russian oligarchs, where was Epstein? And does it appear that some of Epstein's money and wealth came through that process or not?

B

So we shall. Because I have not, I have not yet examined the relationship with, between Epstein and Blavatnik, who's a really, you know, kind of fascinating, but also very shadowy character. But this unbelievable document that I came across in the files really starts to shed a lot of light on how central, you know, how, how central the collapse of the Soviet Union was to the Epstein class and to his network and to a lot of, you know, potentially a lot of his sort of, you know, mysterious money. And in. So in 1991, like I was saying, Robert Maxwell, newspaper baron, publishing, you know, magnet, falls off his yacht and dies. And, you know, there are a lot of different reports, but there, you know, there's, there's autopsies that, there's, there's medical examiners that say, no, he was hit by a blow to the head. You know, obviously he, he was hit. But, you know, within weeks of his death, it is discovered that There is a 1.6, $1.4 billion missing from the Maxwell Communications, his publishing empire. And most of it is missing from the pensions of Daily Mirror workers. And everything is frozen for the Maxwell family. So the, the, the, you know, his sort of heir, a guy named Kevin Maxwell, Ghislaine's much older brother, she's the baby of the family. He is immediately under a cloud of suspicion, but so is she, because she's spotted, you know, when they go to get the body to, to fly it to Israel, because of course, he must be buried in Israel, even though they're not acknowledging that he was a lifetime Mossad asset. He. She is seen by a Daily Mail reporter who she has brought along ordering all of the servants to get rid of, shred everything that they find, find all of the documents on the yacht, find anything, you know, and, and get rid of it. And so isn't that interesting? They are all under this cloud of suspicion and very broke. And she's, you know, complaining to everybody in her elite circles in New York. Oh, my God, I Don't have any money. I'm completely, completely, you know, I'm a complete pauper. How terrible. And at this point, this is when, and this is some, something that Kevin does. She gets hooked up with Epstein. And apparently Epstein did not know. According to this, this, this gentleman who's being interviewed by a completely clueless assistant U.S. attorney in 2020. This is a guy named James Hattie. He was a telecom executive, but really he was working for the intelligence service. And so he was sort of posing as a telecom executive. He was posted most of the time to the Soviet Union, largely Latvia, to try and privatize telecoms. And he encounters all of these folks and he comes forward in 2020 to the FBI and says, Listen, I have all this information. I used to hang out with these people all the time. I can tell you what they were doing, how it all fits together. These are the things, the connective tissue. How are they fitting together? And he says that, number one, he says that basically that Kevin, under the advice of his father, Kevin, had appointed Jeffrey Epstein to sort of take care of the family's money while, you know, in event of an emergency. Right. And so they never found the money that was missing from the Daily Mirror. What they did have was, you know, you know, hundreds of shell companies, most based in Liechtenstein that they were sort of, you know, cycling through. There were bankruptcy examinations, but nothing ever, you know, maybe half the money was found, but a lot of it just sort of went missing. And what this guy says is that they had sort of put the money under the, you know, into the, the, the coffers of this mobster in Vienna. A Vienna based mobster named Gregory Lucansky. Lucansky was born in Georgia, spent a lot of his time in Latvia. There was a ton of money laundering going on in Latvia at the time. A very critical port for illicit oil sales. So a lot of money is funneling through Latvia. And this guy Lucansky is sort of like the, the, the boss, the main mob boss of Latvia. He becomes very good friends with this, this telecom executive because he's trying to privatize telecoms in Latvia. So he has to pay him off. He refers to him as something called a roof, which is like the, the network of, of kind of the extortion ring that surrounded any of the, the, the Russian state owned enterprises. You'd have to pay these guys off in order to successfully privatize it. And so Lucansky is this kind of mobster. He's based in Vienna, spends a lot of time in Latvia and Epstein is getting money you know, is laundering money for him and bringing back some of it to Ghislaine Maxwell. And Epstein is getting a lot of his money to kind of keep the, the Maxwell family afloat. Apparently, according to this document, he's getting it out of the New York Daily News, which is of course the newspaper that Maxwell owned, had just purchased when he died. He had just purchased it in, you know, early 1991 after this horrible strike. And in bankruptcy court, the newspaper is sold to Mort Zuckerman, who is a, you know, Montreal born, sort of, you know, man about town, a recent ex boyfriend at that point, of Gloria Steinem and, and he owns U.S. news World Report and at that point the, the Atlantic Monthly. He buys the New York Daily News after months and months in which Conrad Black is supposed to be buying it. You know, everything is set. Conrad Black, the ink is almost dry, but he's having trouble with the unions. And that's another interesting wrinkle here because the union and I talked to some, you know, reporters from the New York Daily News, the union that is kind of holding everything up and, and, and that decides whether or not, you know, somebody's going to get to buy the Daily News is, is the Newspaper Deliverers union, which is basically a wholly owned subsidiary of organized crime. It's, you know, under investigation. Its president just got out of prison on, you know, 124 counts of racketeering. He's gonna about to go back to prison when this whole deal is going down because he tests positive for cocaine. They literally threatened, when Maxwell was buying the newspaper, this union, these unions representatives literally threatened to, to kill him right then and there. And apparently, you know, that seals the deal for him. But, but somehow, you know, Mort Zuckerman takes this newspaper out of the hands of, of Conrad Black, another interesting fellow, at the last minute, even though they don't have any of the details sorted out, and for some reason, apparently, according to this, this gentleman and I'd have to go through the bankruptcy filings to see whether there were, you know, whether there were avenues that they established for this legally. They were extracting large sums of money. And you know, he just says so much money was coming out of the Daily News and, and giving it, you know, distributing it to Ghislaine and the rest of the, you know, nine I

A

think, but through Epstein. Through Epstein.

B

Epstein was the one who was doing that. Now Epstein was also extremely good friends with Mort Zuckerman.

A

They have, there aren't their email exchanges where he's like sending them, sending Zuckerman women.

B

Yes, yes, he. So in, you know, he, he Zuckerman is an interesting fellow, but yeah, he's. He. No now granted, you know, he says his 32 is 31 too young to the. Then a 72 year old Mort Zuckerman. So Mort Zuckerman again. And this is another thing that gets really, that gets really sort of not recognized within the Epstein network. He said plenty of, of rich guys up with, you know, over 18 women with wives, with mistresses. Leon Black's mistress, you know, she was, you know, fully of age. And that was an almost. I think that him. And I'm, you know, he must, he has to have set up Leslie Wexner with his wife Abigail, who was a. I think that her father like was the CEO of El Al at the time, but she, you know, because he is very close with, with a lot of these women. He's extremely close with SUNY Previn. He was extremely close with Wendy Murdoch,

A

Valerie Chomsky and yes, and it's a disaster. I want you to talk about that. But there's also the biographer of the former Prince Andrew before, after 60,000 copies of his book came out, he had to remove it. Claims or argues that Epstein provided Melania to Trump.

B

Funny that you should mention that because the guy who did, I mean the, the. There's a guy named Paolo Zampoli is the gentleman who supposedly introduced Melania to Trump. They're still very good friends. He was there the other day when Melania was presiding over the Security Council. Paolo is, is in the Trump administration. He is the, he. He works for the State Department as something like a senior advisor over special world projects or something along those lines. He's, he's in this network during the time he, he runs a modeling agency. And I've spoken to a lot of folks close to Zamboli about whether he did actually introduce Trump to Melania or whether it was Epstein. There are, you know, it's, it's, it's. It's really hard to know. Zempoli is not necessarily. He's not as. He's nowhere near as sort of formidable as Epstein. But in terms of being savoriness, I would say that he is no more savory. But, um, but Melania has sued, um, and one. Um, in, in, in a lot of cases. But, but she sued pretty much anyone who has wondered about the official story of her and Trump. There is a Slovenian journalist who wrote a long investigation into this that basically said, no, it was Empoli, but she was, she was a high class Call girl. You know, she was modeling in all of these, these clubs in Milan that were our known brothels. And that's how she met Trump. And that is why, you know, this is. And, and she has, she has sued anyone who has republished that he put out another book. But one thing that, that the Slovenians will always say is that she supposedly met Trump in 1998. But it was in 1996 that in Slovenia they started hearing about this up and coming model who was supposed to be dating Donald Trump. She was not a successful model at all. One thing that is really amazing is how casting directors, because the Slovenians have, have really gone over a lot of this territories. You know, she's, they'll say, oh, she's such a, she's so beautiful and she has such great skin and hair and she, she takes such good care of herself, but she has like zero charisma and she is just like a terrible model. So she didn't have a lot of work, but somehow she got a three year H1B visa in 1996 and supposedly met Trump two years later. And I think that what a lot of the, the sort of Melania truthers believe was that she met Trump much earlier, that, that she got the visa as a result of Trump wanting her to have a visa. And, and that, you know, they can't, you know, they have to sweep this under the rug because at the time Trump was still married and not even separated from Marla Maples and you know, God knows whatever else. But yes, Jeffrey Epstein was at the epicenter of that, this whole network. He was friends. Zampoli is very close with Jean Luc Brunel. They were all kind of, they all, all of them, these models, Zampoli's models tended to live in this building that was owned by Jeffrey Epstein's brother. So all of these enterprises were interconnected.

A

Let me ask, because it's an interesting point that you make in your article in the prospect about Epstein's relationship with the much younger wives of people like Chomsky. Woody Allen, you raised that point, explain.

B

I think that he's extremely close to SUNY Previn.

A

This is Woody Allen's wife and former stepdaughter.

B

He. So one of the things that it seems like, because one of the reasons that I thought I started thinking about this was that Mort Zuckerman has pretty advanced dementia. Has for a very long time. He was diagnosed, it looks like around 2013. And after his diagnosis, he goes to Epstein and basically says, you know, what, what should I do? You know, he doesn't have. He has two daughters, one of whom, the first with his. With an ex wife, a woman that he married for like four years. And the second with no one knows. Possibly it's egg donor surrogate combination, but she has no known mother. So unusual situation there. He doesn't seem inclined to, like, sort of le them with his fortune. He has these nephews who he does, but he's kind of going to Epstein with like, you know, what do I do with all this money that I have? And it's, you know, $2.8 billion at this point. And Epstein's like, well, send it over to me. I'm gonna figure it out. And, you know, how you avoid taxes or whatever. And so he sends over all of this financial information, and Epstein is just like, you know, number one, he says, you know, this is all a complete mess. You got to send it, you know, you got to give it to me. I can straighten this out for you, but all of your trusts need to be rewritten. Not exactly sure why, but the folks at JP Morgan to whom he, you know, referred Zuckerman, are apparently, you know, falling down on the job. And then he keeps saying, what if you just get married? If you just get married, we don't have to deal with any of this problem, you know, just get married, and then we don't have to deal with, you know, step up basis or whatever. You know, these. The. The estate tax issues. You know, this would just be so much easier if you got married. And what. What made me think, you know, what that made me think was that Epstein really, you know, he was sort of a magnet for these sort of, you know, a much older man with money and younger wife combinations. He, you know, was very, like, he was a little cooler than the geezers. You know, I mean, I think that, like, you know, a little younger than. Than Woody and a little bit more kind of of the world. He and Soon Yi were just extremely close. But I think that. That, you know, and this is one of the things about, you know, this Wexner relationship that I started to think after reading so many of the exchanges between him and Mort Zuckerman is that for these guys, you get the sense that their wealth, like, isn't. Is it isn't even theirs. Like, there is some element that they are owned by these, you know, because. Because Zuckerman at one point, he's like, you know, he's like, okay, where do I have to give my money away to? Who do you have to give your money away to? And. And Epstein's like, I don't know, you know, what do you want? Like, you know, Jewish Alzheimer's and, And, you know, Zuckerman just says, well, Jewish Alzheimer's. So that's, that's one of the expectations is that, you know, there's a. Going to be an enormous amount of money flowing back to the various Zionist organizations. And Zuckerman was at the very top of that, of that collection. He ran something called the Council of Presidents of Jewish Organizations for a while, which is a title they call King of the Jews, supposedly, according to the foreword, I think. And there is also this, like, there's just this sense that you get that, like these. That at the very top, these oligarchs, you know, again, you can't take it with you. And so they get very sort of, you know, paranoid when they, when they start to get older about what's going to become of their money and, you know, how sort of to protect themselves. And Epstein is the guy who kind of soothes their sort of sense of. Of, you know, existential dilemmas about that, but then also encourages them to just, hey, leave it to your wife, because the wife is going to be even more, you know, Zuckerman is very resistant to a lot of Epstein's suggestions. And it's. He's. He seems extremely stingy. Like, he doesn't, you know, Epstein's like, why don't, you know, like, why don't you just agree to pay for camp for your, you know, for. For your kids, cousins? Like, that doesn't, you know, what. What's the big deal? And then he's kind of like. And, but. But there is this sense, I think, that Epstein has, is like, you know, as soon as this sort of transfers over to the, the lady, then, you know, the, the money is even, even more sort of controllable by, you know, me and my networks. And I can, you know, I have even more clout in terms of deciding what. Where to target it, you know, what. What universities, what, you know, galleries that we're gonna, you know, sort of annex. So I think that, you know, this is something that, you know, sort of needs to be explored. A thing that I do worry about with Chomsky is, is just like his papers. I, you know, that was something that I've thought about while reading the, you know, Valeria Chomsky stuff. Clearly, you know, Chomsky was like, you've observed sort of drawn to Epstein's financial acumen about, you know, how to kind of deal with his. His estate. But in, in. In his case, especially given that we know that he was such a. A prolific answer of emails and, you know, correspondence. I fear what happens to all of his papers when he dies? Who's going to get first crack at them? You know, is. Is. Is, you know, Mossad going to be there? Because I've, I've. I've heard about that. That stuff happening in the past. And so I, you know, I, I think that there's probably good reasons that he had for wanting to cultivate Chomsky, but the reason that they get drawn to him, I think, is because he is very good. He's very good at ingratiating himself to women.

A

Let me ask about the. The focus has obviously been on the pedophilia rings and the sexual abuse of girls and women, but I think you argue that they missed this other important aspect in the Epstein files, which is this financial cabal that Epstein was at the center of.

B

Yeah, I mean, so one thing that, that was really striking about, again, going back to that British intelligence officer who, you know, telecom guy, was that this. This gentleman that he mentions, Gregory Lucansky, was like an obsession of the CIA. William Sapphire wrote a column about him in 1995. In the 90s, this guy was. There was a lot of fear about what was going to happen to Russia. Is it. You know, I remember the fear of Jaronovsky. You know, what all of this chaos that we had done so much to unleash and to worsen was. Was going to wreak. And so the big thing on Luchonsky was that, you know, he was suspected and he showed up at a bunch of dnc. He. He gets a meeting with Clinton that supposedly Ghislaine, you know, organizes, and Ghislaine goes to work as his. As his pimp, essentially.

A

You don't mean Chomsky, you mean Epstein?

B

No, no, no. I mean, as this guy, Lucansky's pimp. She was working for Luchanski. But in the, in the real hawkish stories about this guy, and he was one of a large parade of very shady foreign donors to the DNC and to Clinton during the mid-90s. Like, he was. He belonged to that sort of parade, the Charlie Tree. Sure, you know, those guys. But. But they were saying that he was suspected of trafficking, you know, nuclear materials to Iran. And, you know, that was, you know, if only, I guess. But. But, you know, this is one of the, the things that we. That was just so striking to read was. And, and to understand, because the. The other. That's the other thing is that he was a business partner of Mark Rich, who was famously, you know, pardoned by Clinton on his last day in office. And Mark Rich was another one of these guys who, you know, he, he sold Iranian oil. He didn't care who he was taking money from. He was completely unidelogical, a Zionist. Right. But like he, you know, he, he did lots of deals with Iran and that was one of the reasons that he actually was originally indicted. And, and, and you know, that's the other thing is that like these, none of these guys are, it is all about, you know, getting, getting rich and you know, punishing your enemies. And at the end of the day, they don't have loyalty to any country. Right? That, that's not like they, they don't have loyalty to anyone. And that's the other thing that's so depressing about reading some of Epstein's emails is that like, he is, he's such a bad guy. He's, he's, but he is, he's more human than a lot of the, the folks that he was dealing with. Certainly Zuckerman, you know, and, and, and that's like, it's hard to kind of wrap your mind around that. Or he's, he's more, or he maybe has more of like a patina of humanity because like, you know, at the, he was a, like I said, a really bad guy. But he could play a human being. And you know, I feel like that is sort of what has happened. He and Mark, Mort Zuckerman, these guys were an Ehud Barak. It's important to, you know, put that into context, right? Like Ehud Barak is Bibi's, you know, longtime rival. Supposedly. He was, you know, he was as woke as it got in the 90s in Israel. Certainly. He was also, you know, a racist Jewish supremacist, but also Ashkenazi supremacist. He looked down on the Mizrahi and Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews. But you know, he, there's a point at which he, he says to Epstein, you know, we have to, you know, we don't have to import, you know, these like, sort of low rent Jews anymore, like the, the Mizrahi Jews from, from Yemen and, and Morocco and e, you know, we can, we can really, you know, have our choice of Jews and we should try to, you know, get better stock to immigrate. Right, because they're crazy eugenicists. But at the same time, that was a calculation because the, you know, as, you know, Likud Netanyahu's party, their base is Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews and Soviet Jews. It is not. And these are people who suffered a lot of discrimination and bigotry at the like, incredible, like scandalous feats, you know, their babies being stolen at the, you know, in the hospital and, and auctioned off to Ashkenazi parents in the, in the 50s that like, literally happened. And it's one of the motives for the guy who killed Rabin. But, but, you know, these are, these are folks who had some, you know, sympathy for the Arabs back in the 50s, you know, that was snuffed out and they became the hardest core Likudnik, you know, Kahanist, Jewish supremacists, people in, in, in Israel, that faction. And um, that's what we're living with now. And now, you know, the, the old Labor Zionists, the Ashkenazis, the woke Ashkenazis, like have, you know, they're, they're all, you know, moving to Berlin and not allowed to vote anymore. And, and, and so you see kind of how, as bad as things were when, when Epstein was writing all of these emails, they've definitely gotten worse.

A

It's a window into the, into the ruling class. I mean, that's what it is. And it's not just that they, they treat everyone as objects, including girls and women, but I think that what you have investigated and written on it also just shows how the criminality the in, you know, and of course, it's a network where they all watch out for each other, as you pointed out, on the way to getting fabulously rich.

B

Yeah. And you know, another thing that's like sort of a meta story that I came across because initially I started looking at this because of the New York Daily News. I was interested. That newspaper, which was the highest circulating newspaper in America in the 70s, had a circulation close to like 1.5 million in the 80s. You know, it was always a friend of Israel, but it was a, you know, working class. It was kind of the, the epitome of the populist newspaper. They're down to 20 reporters, four on the national desk and you know, 16 on state and local. I don't know how you run a newspaper with that kind of crew, a daily newspaper, but they have, they're owned by Alden Global Capital D, the Duke Lacrosse bro run, I think, you know, newspaper plunderer that's kind of gotten all of the newspapers. Chicago Tribune, Denver Post, you know, Times, you name it. And. But when they were sold, when Zuckerman finally sold the paper, and that was the other thing is that Epstein wanted Zuckerman to get the paper off his hands. 2013, it was sitting on, on Zuckerman's books at a value of like $550 million. He ends up selling it for $1 to the sort of precursor of Alden called Trunk. And these guys are like, they, you know, it immediately, you know that like gives this contract to this guy for like $10 million. He's like flying around in private jets. I mean it's of kind completely disgusting. But you know, you realize that, you know, because the, a lot of the, in the context of Jeff Bezos, you know, just sort of having the, the Washington Post staff and Epstein at one point he writes to Peter Thiel, hey man, you know, like I'll up front half of your expenses on that Gawker lawsuit. I hate them too. For these guys, at one point, owning a newspaper was a path to influence and they sort of subsidized these things and they took money out of these things. And the journalists never really paid attention to the depressing finances of their operations because it's a source of existential dread. I mean, being in this industry, you know, for my whole life it's been in, you know, crippling recession and, and nobody sort of pays attention. But they're, you know, when they sold it, they sold it, not just the newspaper, but this 25 acre plot of land in New Jersey where they had a printing press and it's, it's, you know, waterfront land, you know, overlooking the Hudson. Man. They, and you know, it was a 50% interest in that land, but they sold this thing for a dollar. And you know, who knows, you know, where like what other side deals were involved in, in that transaction? Probably quite a few, but it is sort of this, like this. There's, you know, there's so much that we don't know. There's so much that you're not allowed that, that you don't have to disclose as an oligarch these days, we're sort of at the, the mercy of these people. And. Yeah, and, and, and if, if we unturn it, you know, over if the, the more journalists are not really, you know, they're, they're very much loathed. Real journalism is, is loathed by these guys. And that's why there's not, you know, it occurred to me that the New York Daily News would have been the ideal newspaper to sort of be sifting through the Epstein files because, you know, so many of these characters are, you know, in New York, they're sort of New York personalities. And, you know, the New York Times can't, you know, they've tried to cover the scandal, but they keep running against, up against. I mean, one of my favorite things was a story that they ran about, you know, how Epstein was just a con man, and there's all this talk about how he was in intelligence, but he was just a con man. And it doesn't, you know, it's like, no, like, you don't get to. To do, like, Ponzi scheme after Ponzi scheme and get away with it if you don't have some connections, you know, and where are those connections? Right? Those things go together. Ponzi schemes, money laundering, intelligence, they're all. You see these. That, you know, that triumvirate over and over again. Right? And, and they, you know, there's one point where they say that he gets this, you know, he, he has this connection to the White House, and it's. What's her face, but it's a Rothschild. They, they just leave out the Rothschild part of her name. Right. You know, there's so much that the, the, the New York Times just won't touch. And, and it's, and, and the, The FBI didn't want to investigate. I mean, the, you know, the, the other story is how the files show complete disinterest on the part of the U.S. attorney and on the part of our, you know, federal investigators in understanding what was going on. And, and so, you know, it's. It's. It's not. It's a bleak story, but it's. It's also in light of the absolute insanity of this particular moment. Well, you know, very illuminating.

A

It's the depravity, the greed, the hedonism, the lack of empathy, the callousness, the cruelty that is defined all oligarchic classes throughout history. And I think that your work has been important because that pedophilia, that human trafficking, that exploitation of girls and women is just one piece of that vast puzzle. And we need to highlight that. You know, we need that complete picture, which I think that you. Your work has been very important in terms of providing. Thanks, Maureen. And I want to thank Sophia and Diego, Victor Thomas and Max, who produced the show. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com.

B

Sam.