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Kibbe on Liberty
Ep 373 | Government Corruption Runs Even Deeper Than We Thought | Guest: Mike Benz
01:13:03
Matt Kibbe is joined by Mike Benz, executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, to take a deep dive into the links between the military, wealthy individuals like Bill Gates, and the public health apparatus that gave us the COVID-19 pandemic.
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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to Kibbe on Liberty. I'm talking to Mike Benz about the latest Epstein drop, specifically the institutional implications of the collusion between banks and the military and Epstein and specifically about the implications for our understanding of what really happened during the pandemic. Check it out. Welcome to kibby on liberty. Mike, how's it going?
- [00:56]
B
Great to see you.
- [00:57]
A
It's good to physically meet you. I've been a huge fan of your work now for couple years. I'm not sure when exactly I discovered you and I've been looking forward to this conversation as it happens. When you were doing, around the time you were doing your last episode with Rogan, a couple days later, I had Thomas Massie on this show to talk about the revelations of the Epstein files and you. Actually, I went through this whole life cycle of depression and then hope when I hear you talk because you convinced me that we're going to unleash the Kraken on, I guess I'll call it the Deep State, but it's more complicated than that. So I wanted to pick up there. I just finished your Rogan episode today. What to you is the big news that comes out of the Epstein files and, and what didn't we get that we should have gotten?
- [02:00]
B
Well, the biggest thing is confirmation, 100% confirmation of many elements about the Epstein network and chronology that were speculated happening behind the scenes, but always were a conspiracy theory because you couldn't hold up the physical email or FBI file. So, for example, the closeness of the relationship between Epstein and Hud Barak is completely manifest in these. Not just from the thousands of emails, many of which we knew before these files because Ehud Barak, who is the Israeli Prime Minister, but also head of Israeli military intelligence before that, and then the head of the Israeli Ministry of Defense after that. There's Epstein, ironically enough. We only have this because Epstein secretly recorded basically the head of the Israeli Pentagon, their equivalent of it. But it's while he's leaving office. He hasn't left yet. This is February 2013. I'm giving this as an example to show because prior to this year, before Ehud Barak's emails were hacked, there was long speculation about Epstein's ties, for example, to the Israel side of this equation. And there's obviously many countries and we, we can get into that, but the fact that they were always sort of at the same events. They had this business partnership in something called Carvine911, which was operating in America as this emergency services company. And what you saw was that while the head of the Israeli military was in office February 2013, but had not, was looking to transition to the private sector. Jeffrey Epstein, under the table, records this conversation, evidently on his phone, but it's in the FBI files, this three hour conversation where he is coaching Ehud Barak on how to make millions in the private sector by cashing in the IOUs that accrued to him while he was effectively the top dog, kind of the apex predator of the Israeli military industrial complex over 40 years, and that he could basically cash in, create a favor bank, a list of people who owe him favors, that he got them a job, he did them, something useful for them, and now that he's entering the private sector, he's calling in the favor bank. That's one of those things where the very next month, who Barak would leave office, Epstein arranges this $3 million board seat. This is the sort of thing that we see in the United States all the time. The famous case of Nikki Haley going to get a board seat on Boeing, or Lloyd Austin, the head of our Pentagon, going and getting a board seat on Raytheon and the like. And it really shows you how this apparatus works. I felt that constantly at the State Department when I was there, which is this overhang of outside organizations and fixers at events who basically try to seduce you into serving some outside interest rather than serving your own country. And the fact is, Bill Burns, who would go on to be our CIA director in 2021, he was. Before that he was this undersecretary for Political affairs at the State Department and then the Deputy Secretary of State. He met with Epstein three times his final year in that role and then got, you know, a huge, huge salary running the Carnegie Endowment, which is funded by both the US and British governments, closely tied to this kind of intelligence network that connects US and UK interests and has for 80 years. The Carnegie Endowment's the oldest think tank in the United States. And you have to wonder, did Epstein. We don't have his secretly recorded calls with the guy who would be CIA director just a few years later, but did Epstein hook the CIA director up with Ryan? The Carnegie Endowment? It's the same thing with Kathy Rummler. We knew there was this relationship between Epstein and Goldman Sachs. It had long been speculated there was a deep connection between Epstein and the Rothschild Bank. But then you have a hard receipt that, you know, he's talking. I forget if it was to Peter Thiel. I think it was where he says, I represent the Rothschild Bank, I represent the Rothschild interest. And you look at that, you go, okay, well, everyone who was Paying attention, knew that this house was on fire, so to speak. When you look at all the commercial co investments and all these other tangential details, but you see it right there on paper, you go, okay, this is now a solid block that we can build the next level on top of, rather than always having to question is there a 1% chance it could have been structured some different way? But then time and again he just comes out and says it. In that case, you had Kathy Ruemmler, who had just been the White House counsel, the top personal lawyer for the Obama administration from 2011 to 2014ish. She immediately, while she was there, the Justice Department passed this bank secrecy law, this Swiss bank program, to basically allow Swiss banks to repatriate money back to the United States and settle for a very cheap amount to avoid criminal indictment on money laundering charges. And Kathy Ruemmler, the White House counsel who surely was coordinating with the Justice Department on that law immediately when she leaves the government, she is hired by the Rothschild bank through Jeffrey Epstein, earns something like a $10 million commission to negotiate with the Justice Department to give a sweetheart settlement using the law that she may have played a role in spearheading while she was there to get Jeffrey Epstein's client off the hook and gets a $10 million fee for it. I mean, think about that. Relative to a government salary as White House counsel, you're making like 200k. The next year you're making 10 million exploiting a loophole that you just helped put in while you were in government. So it begs the question, was this program ever something good for the American people? Was it always something the Rothschild bank had been interested in that since 2008 in some sort of regulation to give them a safe harbor. So every aspect of our foreign policy, whether it's statecraft, intelligence, declarations of war, we saw this with Epstein wanting to loot the $80 billion worth of sovereign wealth held by the Libyan government, where he explicitly says, you know, this was a US led war effort. And he says, I'm going to get my MI6 and Mossad guys to help out on this. So it's like you can't do that without having someone at the dod, at the Department of War who is operationalizing that so that you can overthrow the government of Libya. And then you've got this web of intelligence financier folks who are then exploiting and jackaling it. So, you know, the reason that I said there's a million Epstein's is because it's everywhere. If you're at state aid, CIA, Department of War, there is this fixer class, and that's really the saturation of our political finance world. Basically makes it almost impossible to have a government that serves our people.
- [10:06]
A
Yeah. So some of this we've always known the revolving door and basic public choice economics tells us that people don't lose their self interest when they go into government. But there's something, it feels more sinister about this ecosystem because it almost seems like a second secret economy where the movers and shakers and the fixers and the financiers and the government officials and the members of the military industrial complex are puppeteers orchestrating something other than the people voted for. And that's the black pill part of your story. Like this is really bad, right? Right.
- [10:46]
B
Well, it converts public service into puppets of private enterprise. And so it gets to this kind of sticky crony capitalist layer. I think you and I both agree the solution is not some sort of socialist communist thing. That's not even an escape hatch from that system, even if you idealize it to be. But the fact is there have been many times in American history where laws have been passed to try to like even Epstein's client, Adnan Khashoggi. His corruption around arms trafficking and influence peddling in the United States got a whole law basically the Foreign Corrupt Practices act basically grew out of having to do anti money laundering and know your customer regulations because of the way this single arms dealer revealed the face of this system of exploiting the military industrial complex in the United States for his and his network's profits. And I think one of the reasons that this Epstein story has so much staying power is because we're getting a look behind the funhouse mirror where every time we American citizens have seen a shadow of this, there's been a question, is that real? Am I projecting this onto some system that I'm, you know, how deep does it go? You know, I don't, I don't have time to get a PhD in this, but I just feel something's off. And then you see this and you see basically every major celebrity you've seen in your dab the tablet. Every elected president, that person, either directly or their immediate network, is wrapped up in it. And it's a way to pry open many long held secrets of our country and of governments around the world.
- [12:49]
A
Thank you for joining me today on Kibbe on Liberty and for being part of our fiercely independent audience. Every week, my organization, Free the People, partners with BlazeTV to bring you this show. My guests bring smart perspectives on everything from current events to timeless philosophical debates. If you like what you hear, go to freethepeople.org kol and support Kibbe on Liberty so we can continue to produce these honest conversations with interesting people. Now, let's get back to it. Yeah. This is not a new thing, and you're seeing that. I want to ask a technical question. I think you're the one that somehow dug up this recording in the files of Ehud Barak and Epstein talking. How did you find that?
- [13:37]
B
Well, I found it from Ryan Grim, who is at Dropsite News. He had played a different clip on his timeline, and I used GROK to reverse search the file for the Justice Department file number. And then I just listened to the audio from there. But I was so captivated by it because Epstein put into words something that I've only heard Tom Wolf mention in that 1987 bonfire of the Vandies. He's describing the New York City criminal justice system. He's basically describes the prosecutor's office as they're looking for their. What was it, the great white defendant, I think they were calling it, and the politics of bringing the charges in that Bonfire, the Vandy's case. And Tom Wolf is explaining that the New York City District Attorney's office doesn't work on the basis of who committed a crime or not, whether you're innocent or not. It's prosecutions are pursued on the basis of whether they put a favor in the favor bank to somebody above them at the mayor's office or outside interest or whether it doesn't, in which case you don't bring the case or you bring a case. That's BS I've thought about that chapter of Bonfire of the Vanities for so many years, because when I got to the State Department, I saw just this huge apparatus of people who are mostly decent people. And you can imagine they're good to their mothers, they've got families, but they're systematically, seemingly obliviously, doing the wrong thing at every layer of it. And you go, well, what's motivating them to do this? And you find out, okay, well, this person is sort of protected by this person in Congress. And this person, while they may be a Republican like me and serving the same administration as me, this person was actually a Liz Cheney pick. And so the reason they're pursuing this policy on disinformation in Europe and trying to get Europe to pass a censorship law to censor Trump supporters is because Liz Cheney had more pull over this than there. And so this person is putting a Favor in the favor bank to Liz Cheney by pursuing this policy in the Europe desk while I'm trying to do what I think is best for the national interest, but there's no money to be made in that. The common route in my position would have been to go on to be a lobbyist for Google and Facebook and Microsoft and Apple. I got a call, I've told this story a couple times. It was one of the most fascinating things that happened to me there. While I was running basically the big tech bureau in the economic affairs division, Google basically circumvented the line to get on my calendar. And there were nine Google lobbyists who called me. I looked up all their backgrounds beforehand. They had all represented all these various Middle Eastern or European governments as lobbyists or been like big oil, like represented like Exxon and then they represented Google. And so it's like big oil, big government to big tech lobbying. And they managed to get on my calendar without me even approving it. And they basically said, listen, you're about to go into negotiations with Europe about this new digital markets acting. They're proposing this is the number one most existential threat to our business model over the next five years. You have to take this as your diplomatic posture. You have to propose these reforms to the model legislation that they just rolled out. If you do that, it'll create all these American jobs. If you do that, this will protect US interests in Europe. And if you don't do this, you know, we'll get replaced by. It's all these things that you're hearing this. And while they're, they're not formally saying, listen, if you do this, you're going to get a board seat at Google. If you do this, you're going to get, you know, our trade association will hire you for a million dollar a year salary as a lobbyist after this. But they are asking you in very nice terms to do favors for them regardless of your opinion, you know, what you think is best for the country. And you saw this revolving door. I mean that was a path I turned down because first of all, at the time they were censoring an in process election, this was the 2020 election. Basically three quarters of the Trump base was either throttled, banned, shadow banned. Entire critical narratives to the election were just completely, you lost your livelihood if you lost your wedding photos and baby photos that you posted on Facebook, if you talked about it or on YouTube. And so. I can see the sort of visage of Epstein in every corner of the highest level of our government. And this is just a really cool chance to be able to root it out.
- [19:08]
A
Yeah. So when Massie and I were talking, we're actually talking about you. And you've, I think, certainly me, I don't want to speak for the Congressman, but you've informed my understanding of the Epstein scandal to be about systemic corruption. It's not just about underage child trafficking, not to minimize that, but it's about the entire system being captured by that incentive, that negative incentive process that you're describing. I worked on the Hill and it was the same thing. No one ever came to my office and said, I'd love for you to spend less on the National Endowment for Democracy. It was always someone there. And I have a former libertarian friend who describes his conversion as finding a better compensating point of view. I won't name names, but that's how the system works. And Massie himself is sort of proving the disincentive. Like if you step out of line, if you challenge the system, if you actually do your job as a congressman, which is what I think he's doing. Yes. They will try to destroy you.
- [20:28]
B
Yeah. It's incredibly unfortunate, the strategy that whoever in the admin is driving it between the White House and DOJ that they've carved out on this issue. Because if, for example, these files had been unilaterally compelled through some sort of executive order rather than having to be pried open by Representative Massie, and it was done a year ago, this entire MAGA civil war could have been averted. Nobody blames Donald Trump or the Trump administration 1.0 for what happened under Bill Barr and Chris Wray when they were running the Justice Department and FBI. Every, there was a. There was a total pass given for the events of late 2019 and 2020 when there were demands for disclosures then, because everyone saw that that same Justice Department and FBI were screwing Trump and that he effectively didn't have control over that at that time, in the heat of Russiagate and then COVID 19 and then the election craziness with the mail in voting and all that. But this was something that pretty much every high level Trump administration, administration, incoming figure from the Justice Department to the FBI to the White House itself was echoing and holding up is a kind of easy one. I mean, there's a lot more potentially devastating, embarrassing national security secrets that we've all asked for. We now know, thanks to Senator Rand Paul, for example, that, that the CIA and ODNI were personally soliciting Ralph Baric for, you know, to do Basically gain of function experiments on coronavirus, you know, leading up to the darpa, you know, RFP on inserting a fern cleavage site insertion into, you know, into Covid. The fact that Avril Haynes, the deputy CIA director was a participant in event 201 and then becomes head of ODNI. And we can get to that, but the fact is that's the sort of thing everybody wants to know. If it was a lab leak and it was a biosecurity thing, that obviously has international implications. If we were to reveal all CIA Department of War ODNI files about this biosecurity event, that that would potentially, if it came from the United States and it was farmed out to China, that would obviously have diplomatic impact amidst calls from members of Congress and the White House itself to sort of say it was 100% China. Other countries could sue us for damages for negligently allowing a lab leak of this sort of thing. We all want the answers to that. That is, but, but that we could see being kind of a tough thing. Maybe you wait 60 years way beyond some sort of, you know, when most of the world has forgotten it. I obviously don't want that. But the idea is like Jeffrey Epstein, we've been told, was just one guy who died seven years ago. And you know, we were told that the, you know, the Justice Department pursued all leads and ran it down and there was no cover up about what happened to him. So there should be no issue with these disclosures at all. The fundamental question in my view has been what protected Jeffrey Epstein his whole life when he seemed to have been in and out of, if not outright criminal activity, then criminal adjacent activity for 40 years before his death in the 1970s. He left Bear Stearns under, under the cloud of an SEC investigation of him selling hot stock for Edgar Bronfman. He was involved in the Towers Financial Ponzi scheme, which was the largest Ponzi scheme in American history before Bernie Madoff. You know, he had, he had a fake passport since 1982 that he traveled on four separate occasions to different countries using. He was tied up in these intelligence webs around Iran Contra and CIA proprietary airliners and the Clinton foundation. And to say nothing of the influence peddling and apparent money laundering, the US Virgin Islands bank fraud, where he magically managed to skate away from any criminal liability. And the question is like, well, what was he useful? Was he protected because he didn't do anything? And this was all a big misunderstanding, other than the single charge that he pled to for Soliciting, which is obviously a horrible thing. Thing. What I'm saying is it was like something like 53 charges and it's knocked down to like a single plea, less than a year in minimum security and then House, House release sort of thing. There are many examples in American history where the Central Intelligence Agency or the State Department will lean on the Justice Department to not go after someone because the process of putting them on trial would be devastating in terms of public disclosures about highly sensitive events. And given that Epstein seems to have played a direct financing role in a dozen of these high level geopolitical events dating back to, appears to be financing the Mujahideen in the late 1970s through the Iran Contra affair, you know, through all the various activities of the Les Wexner philanthropy network in the 1990s into the Clinton foundation work. If there's a CIA memo to the Justice Department that says, hey, massive damage would accrue if you bring this, if you pursue this case, we Recommend, if the 2006 case is to be pursued, that it's highly limited in scope that there, that a plea deal prevents this from spilling out into open court. I mean, we know that Jeffrey Epstein used to say he worked for the CIA and then sometime before 2001, according to the Evening Standard, he, he later denied it. We know in 1999 he foided the CIA for any open and acknowledged agency links. We only know that because of these files. I keep stressing this point point which is that there was the same frustration at an intelligence community cover up around the JFK assassination. Really in the 1960s, a huge left wing, very robust and academic literature field was created around JFK conspiracy literature that really used the JFK assassination as a inroads to understanding many other contemporaneous covert activities and malevolent acts of the intelligence community well beyond the JFK assassination. So for example, there was Operation Mongoose and Operation Condor and all these different interlinking financial networks of various donors in Houston or hedge fund folks in New York. But by looking at the links between the intelligence community and their interests and JFK's activities, it became clear that if you were to actually be able to declassify these documents, we would not just have a record of what really happened to jfk, but you'd have an entire historiography of this chronology of American history in a deep forensic ability to actually understand how our own country works that couldn't have been available before. And in 1992, Congress under the Democrats passed a bill that compelled the CIA to set up this independent auditing and review board. And starting in 1997, it began to make very serious disclosures. Are you familiar with Operation Northwoods?
- [28:56]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [28:57]
B
That only came about because that was, I think 1998, I believe is when that came out.
- [29:02]
A
Exposing it.
- [29:02]
B
Right?
- [29:03]
A
Yeah.
- [29:03]
B
That only came out because it was an appendix at the back of a record deemed to be satisfactory to the JFK Records Collection Act.
- [29:14]
A
Explain it quickly because I think it's stranger than fiction. It doesn't seem possible that that happened.
- [29:20]
B
It's probably the single most insane government document ever declassified. And that's not for lack of competition. For example, before I talk about that, I'll just give it like a reference. The JFK files that were declassified in March 2025 under Director Gabbard, they were unredacted, hundreds of thousands of pages. Some of them include a willful, deliberate plan between the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of War to release basically ticks and fleas that were man made but would appear to be of biological origin, to drop on agricultural crop workers in Cuba to economically destabilize them to enhance the embargo that was in place amidst failed assassination attempts on Castro. Now, contemporaneous with that, we know, for example, that. Well, Chris Newby published this great book called Bitten, which goes through what happened at the Rocky Mountain Laboratory, which was the main Department of War funded gain of function bioweapons program effectively. And it was said it was biodefense. But they were juice. They were collecting ticks and fleas in the Rocky Mountains, basically running these gain of function experiments to infuse them with all sorts of debilitating diseases.
- [30:52]
A
Sounds familiar, right?
- [30:53]
B
Well, that very lab would end up being funded by DARPA and getting the. Basically the biological imprints of. They would get these COVID 19, these coronavirus samples in 2018 at the same time it was under Fauci's control. This is one year before, before the outbreak. So before all the EcoHealth alliance and Wuhan lab stuff, the samples started in the Rocky Mountain lab. That very same one that Chris Newby in her book Details was used to juice up these ticks. We now because of these files last year have confirmation with a memo with CI letterhead saying we're going to take these ticks and fleas, we're going to drop them out of like a C130 or whatever, flying low over Cuba in its agriculture region. We just need the sign off of Fort Detrick or something, they said. And so now that we can close the loop on that this was a horrible thing. But that very same lab ends up being a key player in what appears to be the origin story of COVID 19 in 50 years later, 55 years later. And so knowing these data points is very helpful to be able to issue spot and for oversight in Congress the next time they see something happening. If you're sitting on the armed Services committee and you see a funding grant to the Rocky Mountain Laboratory, you don't have to say, oh, you know, some anonymous egg account on Twitter said something weird about it. You can, you can have the confidence of knowing, oh, okay, we know from these JFK files that this was used previously to have a fake biodefense operation to create offensive, sub lethal but debilitating bioweapons as part of a sanctions, you know, enhancement, effectively. Which also begs the question of, well, there's something similar happening with the biolabs in Ukraine, with the outbreaks of various other things like Zika and SARS and mers. But what happened in operation Northwoods? Coming back to that, I'm just giving a comparison. Operation Northwoods was a document, it was an appendix at the back of another document released in the late 1990s that called the title of it was called Pretext for war with Cuba. And it made the argument that the United States needed to create a pretext, a lie to justify going to war with Cuba. So it needed to do some sort of false flag that was of such high profile military media whirlwind significance that it would create a justifiable predicate for the United States to use the military to invade Cuba at a time when Congress did not want to do it. So there was not an organic groundswell sufficient to commit troops or kinetic military force. So they need to create that somehow by ginning up some sort of false flag. And then so the Northwoods plan was about two dozen different proposals of false flags and some of these. So it started by proposing starting a rent a riot in Miami or Washington D.C. to have US military folks riot on the streets of Miami or D.C. but tell the media or have them dress up like they are Cuban communists in order to have basically these riots and destabilizations be blamed on Cuban intelligence rather than the US military or military intelligence, and that they included burning down, that these folks would burn down U.S. military barracks, that they would set buildings on fire. It then went on to say that we could sink our own boats outside of the Miami harbor. We could blow up our own airplanes and make it look like our commercial airplanes were shot down by Cubans and that the US military could actually use Mig Russian Mig jets and dress them up to. To make them look like they were Cuban planes bought from Russians. Because this is another thing they were trying to tie it to the Russians and that they basically plant a false news story that dozens of Americans had been murdered by Cuba. It even included a plan to have mock funerals for the non existent victims and that they could assist this by actually blowing up a US military plane and then having their own military emergency services be first at the scene to show the debris, to show pictures to the media for that. Probably the most famous thing that the Northwoods document is known for today is the curious parallels around the 911 events. Because I believe it was 1997 or 1998 when this was declassified and in 2001 obviously 911 happened and it involved planes flying into buildings. And this was a very curious part of the Northwoods plan which involved hijacking our own airplanes. And basically using the kind of remote curious is this was, I believe this was 1961 that this document was and it showed how you could hijack the buildings. And this very detailed technical section where it described how it would make it look. You'd have real passengers board an airplane, but you would have a drone capability to fly it, to fly it manually. You would have a second plane that would tail behind it being flown by the drone. The plane that's said to be hijacked would actually descend to Eglin Air Force Base or some Air force base in Florida, but the drone airplane would keep going and it was. There are many questions about 9 11, frankly that are still unanswered and I think are becoming increasingly less controversial to talk about publicly. But the fact is there are questions, for example, about whether or not the planes themselves that flew into the towers could have operated at that velocity. There are many theories that pose that only a military aircraft could fly at that airspeed or with that precision or do that kind of corkscrew into the Pentagon itself. Well, here you have a. You have a document that from 1961 declassified in the late 1990s that shows a plan that was unanimously approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. So that would be the Mark Milley equivalent, you know, under the Trump and Biden administration, this is basically the most powerful figure in the US military who personally proposes this. It's unanimously approved. All of these different false flags are unanimously approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And then when that plan is rejected by jfk, the chairman of The Joint Chiefs, Lyman Lemnitzer was not ordered arrested or perp walked for preparing a plan to murder hundreds of Americans, to blow up buildings, to sink our own ships, to set our own military aircraft on fire. He was promoted to General Secretary of NATO. So you see something like that, and you go, well, damn, what are they talking about? What was Mark Milley doing ahead of January 6th when he was coordinating with.
- [39:27]
A
How many times have they done it since?
- [39:29]
B
Right. But this is an opportunity to come clean. I think the frustration right now with the White House is, guys, we have so much going on in the world. Why are you fixated on Epstein? And they're not seeing that from the base. It's, guys, what are you doing? There's so much going on in the world. This is a layup. This costs you nothing. This is. Just do it and get it over with. This is. We're not asking you to expend tens of millions of dollars or put military boots on the ground in Syria. You're literally just opening up the files that we elected you to get in and show us. And frankly, you can't trust these institutions until these transparency efforts are, if not concluded, so substantially advanced that we go, okay, they've shown us the dirty underwear. Now we can trust the new ones they put on are clean until that we can all smell the stink. You know, we know there's dirty underwear in the room. The question is, are you still wearing it? And if not, show us where it is. Because you're the one sitting on the files.
- [40:42]
A
At Kibbe on liberty. Freedom is a lifestyle24.7, something you live and breathe and wear, wear every day. If that describes you, you need the very best liberty swag in the market today, just like this shirt I happen to be wearing. Go to freethepeople.org kol and check out our exciting merch. You, too can love liberty and look cool. So I want to. I want to get into something specific that I don't think enough people have focused on. And I'm just starting to dig into myself. And you. You hopefully know a lot more than I do. But the exchanges between Bill Gates and Epstein. Regarding pandemic planning specifically, and later, Epstein's bizarre obsession with funding science and scientists. And I think it was you that shared that VH1 sizzle reel. Like, it's kind of insane and funny and disgusting at the same time. To see this 2003 puff piece on VH1 talking about this baller, Jeffrey Epstein, and all of his apartments and yachts and planes and mansions And I'm watching this saying this is surreal but about 2/3 of the way through it talks about his science lab in his massive New York apartment and how he. The video, I don't know if this number is real, but the video says he's spending $20 million a year funding science experiments. Well, at the same time he's talking to Jess Staley who was at J.P. morgan at the time, and Gates and Gates staffers about coming up with some sort of donor advised fund, some sort of exotic financial structure which is Epstein's. That's why you go to Epstein to come up with some sort of vaccine based financing plan where they could make millions and maybe billions of dollars.
- [42:49]
B
Yeah, yeah. Well to me that's a natural evolution out of his military work. He started his career at Bear Stearns. Bear Stearns was I think the broker on about $13 billion worth of BCCI trades where BCCI was the CIA bank for moving guns to the Mujahideen who would become ISIS and Al Qaeda. And then he was living in the early 1980s with Stanley Pottinger, who was not only the White House lawyer, the Justice Department lawyer who covered for the CIA Plumbers affair, but who also himself was busted running guns to that same CIA backed network in the early 1980s. Incidentally, the FBI had been surveying him but then the tapes malfunctioned and so he was able to skate free on the charges of it. In 1982 Epstein began flying, flying back and forth to meet with Sir Douglas Leese, who was one of the most prolific arms dealers in British history. By the mid-1980s, Epstein had Adnan Khashoggi as his client. Adnan Khashoggi was the most prolific arms dealer probably in human history. He earned more commissions from Raytheon, Boeing and Lockheed Martin than every other sales commission agent in the world combined. Also worked close closely with the Central Intelligence Agency. He was the middleman in Iran Contra between the US and Israel through the Saudi Khashoggi network. Epstein's fake passport listed his residence as Saudi Arabia. And this was basically this arms network that appeared to persist all the way up into the 90s. I find it very curious for example, that when Jeffrey Epstein negotiated the transfer of the circumstances CIA's gun running airline, Southern Air Transport, a CIA proprietary used to illegally move guns into Nicaragua during iran contra. In 1994 he negotiated the move of that CIA airline from Miami to Columbus, Ohio where the Limited was to serve the Limited out of an Air Force base, Rickenbacker Air Force Base that same year. In 1994, the Limited acquired a series of gun stores and then sold off its interest in the gun stores. In 1998, when Southern Air Transport filed for bankruptcy and closed down after confessing that that very week, I believe that was what it did. What it was accused of doing in the Kerry report on the CIA gun running. So it begs the question, was Jeffrey Epstein running guns out of a CIA? Technically, shortly before it moved to Columbus, Ohio, it transferred ownership from being owned and operated by the CIA to being owned and operated by the CIA employee who had run it. But it was sold to him in his individual capacity. And that guy just retired from the CIA. Right. So it's the world's thinnest layer. But the fact is that begs the question if there's a way to get your hands on the charters of those flights, the flight logs of Southern Air Transport while it was serving it, I would not be surprised to find that it may have been moving guns or drugs or other things to support our at the time CIA backed fighters in Central Asia. It was flying back and forth to Central Asia. I guess what I'm getting at is you have this multi decade history in the weapons space. Also, even after he got out of his sort of luxury resort prison for a year in 2008, he was quickly doing basically arms commissions work in Cote d', Ivoire, in Mongolia, even the carbine911 with a Houdini Barack appeared to have been this kind of, you know, emergency services kind of DHS DoD type thing. And it. And so there's this overlap in my view between the military and medicine where you know, when I first started not being able to shut up about this, I have a family member who's a doctor who said to me, you know, when you get in there, can you tell me why is it that so much of the medical profession is funded by darpa? This is a family member who's been a doctor for 40 years and very accomplished medical professional the whole career. Could not answer the question about why DARPA is the source of funds for so much, you know, so much of medical research. But I mean think about Donald Rumsfeld for example. Donald Rumsfeld, I believe he was, before he was the made the Defense Secretary, he was the head of Gilead, I believe. And then Gilead goes and plays a significant role in. I mean basically I believe Ram Desebir came out of that. That which was. I mean that's the run. Death is near. I think there's some pretty persuasive arguments that Remdesivir is actually what was killing people. And the reason that the US had the highest death toll rate, which that it basically was this kind of. It was causing the perception of a pandemic that was mass killing people. But because as soon as people got the flu, they were prescribed this thing that was killing them and forcing them to be put on incubators and the like and just kidney failure. That I believe that the clinical trials showed that there were basically mass death by people who took this. And yet it was immediately prescribed and gave the impression that Covid was killing people at 100 times the rate. Meanwhile, it's now well established, established by Bill Gates himself, citing CDC data, that it was no more fatal than the flu. But so it begs the question, you know, was given that Moderna, for example, is basically a adjunct of the Department of War, you know, given that by its very nature, the whole field of, you know, biological, you know, biodefense is a defense run thing. 65% of the warp speed funds were given to the Department of War, not to HHS. Was this a military operation? And given Epstein's role in the military industrial complex through the financial, the brokering his entire network web, I think it's a very easy transition into the big money future field of big medicine having all those big military touch points. And I think that's probably what's happening around the Gates. Epstein.
- [50:10]
A
Yeah. So from coming up with exotic financing for weapons deals to exotic financing for bioweapons, let's call it research. Maybe they're not creating bioweapons, but they, they're certainly creating bioweapons in the name of stopping bio weapons.
- [50:29]
B
Even if it's biodefense, you still need dod You've got all sorts of regulatory things to make sure that you're not kicking off a world war or a global pandemic about it. And so putting it, the difference between a veterinary medicine program and a weapon of mass destruction is whether you say it's military or whether it's for military or medical purposes. If you're souping up an animal with freak diseases and trying to make it more and more potent, the only difference between whether that's a military offensive weapon or a medical vaccine development program is whether you park it at, you know, a military desk or you park it at a pharma company.
- [51:21]
A
That was the big reveal. Two quick things. Debbie Lehrman, who's a researcher who has done stuff for the Brownstone Institute, is the one that convinced me that the response to Covid, everything about it felt like a military operation. It wasn't a public health response. And that in part helps explain why this hitherto rejected idea of locking people in their homes was suddenly embraced, because that's what you would do in a military occupation. The email I'm quoting goes back to 2011. This conversation pretty much goes on through 2017, where they're talking about all of. Of these ways to finance all of this research and what a great investment opportunity is. So it's kind of the. It is precisely what you're saying. It's just instead of talking about guns, we're talking about vaccines. And that's the other guy I want to get to before. And I'm doing this in part in hopes that the crowd starts digging into these emails.
- [52:30]
B
Can I make one more question, which is that the terrifying thing to me above and beyond all of that, was it wasn't just that the military and intelligence community was so involved in what appears to be the development or at least the gain of function research to create something like this. If not this literally was that the censorship industrial complex entities themselves were funded by the military and intelligence community. And that, at the time, was something that I think I was in a weird position to be able to compile the evidence around because I had already seen the military so involved in the censorship of other political narratives and was very fixated on the Civil affairs branch of The Pentagon and NATO's StratCom strategic communications censorship license they granted themselves in the mid, you know, basically after the Crimea affair, but then especially when Trump won. So what you saw is that the very first organizations that were flagging trending narratives about COVID before it was even called Covid, all of these were military contractors. Every single one of the first movers in the censorship of censorship space around Covid were funded directly by the US Military. Grafka, for example, which is a CIA and military contractor, got millions of dollars in Pentagon contracts initially to help do social media analytics so that the military and the CIA could figure out what were ISIS people saying on Twitter. And then it pivoted into what were Russian bots and trolls saying on Twitter to influence elections. It was actually incubated within the Pentagon's Minerva Initiative, which is the psychological Operations Research center of the Pentagon, within. Within days of now they contest this. I publish about this. They said, actually we did it a month after the COVID outbreak, and we backdated the data. So even though our report says that we started doing this narrative network mapping on December 16, 2019, we actually did on January even though the documents that you found, which sucks that you found those documents, but actually we kind of misspoken it. We actually started in January 2020. Either way, even if you accept that in January 2020, before it even got the name COVID 19, it was still just a phantom coronavirus or pneumonia like symptoms they created in tandem with NATO stratum. So again back to NATO and this whole Lyman Lemnitzer weird network of false flag stuff to justify these huge things. Grafica, a military contractor specializing in psychological operations did this giant report mapping every country in NATO segmenting by ra, right wing, left wing, all these different communities breaking out basically their buy in to the story and having separate sections for conspiracy theories around man made Origins lab leak, the inefficacy of hypothetical future vaccines. They had a whole section about conspiracy theories about Bill Gates and conspiracy theories about George Soros. They had a topographical network map mapping basically every significant influencer and social media account on every social media platform in the United States, the uk, France, Spain, Italy, Greece. They had this whole thing that they compiled under a military contract to censor every single hypothetical challenge to the COVID origin story, to the vaccine drive. A vaccine wouldn't even come out until a year and a half after that about the role of big players like Bill Gates in the affair to even mandates and various kind of policies. It preempted it and that was done by the military. I mean a lot of people don't even know the military is even legally allowed to do that, that it has this get out of, you know, civilian control of government free card through its civil affairs branch that argues, well, you know, the military is supposed to do the emergency response to pandemics and this would undermine our emergency response. But that means you can't even choose what the policies are.
- [57:17]
A
Yeah, yeah. So I have this theory and I've earned this the hard way over many years of obsessing about the government response to the pandemic. But we talk about the pandemic industrial complex and the military industrial complex and the censorship industrial complex. And I'll put big finance as a new circle in my circles. If those are concentric circles, the Venn diagram kind of looks like like one circle kind of the same thing.
- [57:45]
B
Well, I would put the big finance one in the middle because it's companies are not owned by some random one off like Rothschild or Ford or Carnegie type. They're owned by hedge funds, they're owned by giant or private equity funds, they're owned by these giant New York and London Financial firms. And so when you are drafting off of war, those financiers, I mean who is the single biggest donor to the Democrat Party? George Soros. George Soros. What is he? He's a hedge fund guy. He makes short term bets on special opportunities by taking aggressive speculative positions. But they're not really speculative because they're all based on special opportunities that are opened up by government action. While he's funding the politicians to do that action, he will invest in a clean stove technology web of networks in Africa while he's funding the DNC to staff the State Department to pressure all the African countries to buy only clean stoves. He will invest in the Oyo Tolgoi mine in Mongolia, the biggest copper mine in the world. But he's doing that while his Open Society Institute is working with the State Department to pressure Mongolia to give it to the contract rights to Rio Tinto while he's in. And that's why he's invested in Rio Tinto. It's insider trading on national security secrets. And that's what you see with the Epstein story time and again.
- [59:37]
A
So the final can of worms I want to open has to do. We were talking earlier about how Epstein had collected all of these scientists and scientific projects and he had his lab. God knows what else he was up to. There's a Stanford project, former Stanford professor Nathan Wolf who appears in the Epstein files, the Neutranche 589 times. And he was one of Epstein's favorite scientists to the point where Epstein actually was acknowledged in Wolf's book the Viral Storm where he calls Epstein a loyal and generous friend who could kindly contributed his valuable time and unique skills. Unique skills is an interesting way to acknowledge and it's maybe not just one degree of separation, maybe two. But Wolff was intimately involved in EcoHealth alliance and virus harvesting. His entire career was surely financed by these governments agencies that were doing this bioweapons research. And Epstein's. I don't know if he's in the middle of it, but he's adjacent to it in a way that can't just be a coincidence.
- [60:58]
B
Yeah, well, it's worth noting that Robert Maxwell himself, Ghislaine Maxwell's father, famously alleged to be kind of British Israeli spy type guy, ran this giant publishing empire. But you know, the, the foundation of it was the kind of monopoly that Maxwell got over scientific research publications. And then that you know, was ultimately sold and you know, 1991 it was, you know, that became kind of a de facto model. But I think he really pioneered that kind of, you know, domination of the field of kind of publisher control over scientific research. And there's lots of reasons that you might want to do that above and beyond, you know, the pandemic in 2019. The fact is you get basically advanced knowledge pre publication of various, you know, patentable research. I mean, when you're a hedge, I mean, imagine running a giant fund. Like for example, coming back to how we started this, talking about the conversation that Jeffrey Epstein had with Ehud Barak in his final month as the Defense Minister in Israel. In that talk, Epstein proposed, proposes that Ehud Barak get connected with Peter Thiel. And at that point, Ehud Barak had never heard of Palantir, didn't know how to spell Peter Thiel's name. And Epstein is telling him about the incredible technology that Palantir has and the unique advantage that it might have in the kind of military VC type space and the surveillance vc, you know, the AI is basically how he pitches it. Type space. Well, I mean, imagine if you have hundreds of scientists at your beck and call that you're funding because you're funding Columbia University, you're funding mit, you're funding Harvard. I think Les Wexner was the single biggest donor to the Harvard Kennedy School, for example. But you're funding research at the Arizona State University and the like another weird one, that was the biggest university by mentions in the Epstein files, its president is the founder and still president of In Q Tel, the CIA's venture capital arm, Michael Crowe. But the fact is, is you get all sorts of financial. I mean, you get early access, you get insider trading. Basically. If you know that this scientist is working on this thing, then you can bring them into other. You can run that back to the network, you can make market trades off of that. You could connect this person to something your fund is currently doing. You can basically promise potentially to these academics that rather than drawing a $150,000 professor salary, they could be making millions of dollars by jumping over and using this thing they're developing in the sciences or in the medical field to attach to some Bill Gates funded medical science company or to some military contractor. And then beyond that, you also obviously have the kind of military and intelligence side of that as well, which is that military technology doesn't create itself. I mean, it's not like you had a bunch of 6 foot 8, 300 pound linebacker military grunts who created the atom bomb. It was a bunch of nerdy scientists working nominally out of university research programs who then came together for the Los Alamos project. And that gives whether it's regardless of what military technology it is, at the end of the day, it's a field of scientific research study in the same way that bioweapons are on the medical side of it. It's just again, whether you call it a military program or a physics program, it's the same thing. You just can create a civilian front for it and say that you're doing academic research rather than, I mean, this is the thing this administration said it was calling BS on when Iran did it, right. They said, oh, well, you know, we have these research programs for nuclear energy. And they say that's not, you're not just researching nuclear energy. You are. This is a front for a military operation to create a bomb. Well, that's what all of this that we do is. And that's why we, that's why we structure it this way. And so, so Epstein sits at that middle layer, that dividing line between the military and the civilian, and is the ultimate connector to folks on both sides of it.
- [66:03]
A
So I want to wrap up with something positive because you've just red pilled us and we're even. Me as a cynical, grumpy old libertarian that worked in Washington a long time, I thought I knew how the system works. But the level of institutional corruption can make people feel that not only doesn't voting matter, but democracy doesn't matter. Citizen participation in anything that happens doesn't seem to matter. But you think opening the door to this kind of information is liberating by actually telling people what to do. And you think there's an opportunity to expose more of this talk specifically about that. But because Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna stumbled across this legislative window that I don't think anybody anticipated, yes, I am hard.
- [67:01]
B
I can see the impulse to be disheartened when you see the divide between the higher levels of the White House and the base at present. I do think that there was a miscalculation about this and the staying power of the Epstein story is going to eventually force more concessions as it already has through this bill. I think about this. Nobody wanted to be the one. Nobody wanted to be the Thomas Massie who has their whole career thrown up in the air getting primaried and hit pieces and disavowed. And then Marjorie Taylor Greene feeling like she had to drop out of Congress altogether over this. Nobody wanted to be the one to sponsor the bill, but nobody wanted to be the one to go against it once it was already sponsored. So you had this situation where everybody feared the higher power centers of the party to not sponsor that bill. But once the bill was sponsored and live to be voted on, everybody feared the base that if they voted against it, they'd be voted out and it'd be held over their heads forever. And so the mere act of sponsoring the bill put the establishment in a bind. They would normally obey donors or obey top down directives, but once the bill was live and they had to answer forever how they voted on that bill, they were put to a point in 4271 it passed in the House and 99. 0 in the Senate. So nobody was willing to bring it. But then once it was brought, nobody was willing to oppose it. The same thing can be done with all of this. I think that this is one of these moments where if you can use that same strategy, you could do that in theory, not just for the CIA and State Department files around Epstein, who's going to say, who's going to vote against CIA declassification around COVID 19 all records responsive to bioweapons research. The CIA, ODNI, DIA, you know, NSA, all of this. That do. Do it with Fast and Furious. Do it with Seth Rich laptop. I'm inspired by what Thomas Massie has done and given that, you know, they've already pulled, right. It's easy from the crowd to say this. I know this. I'm sure that when Thomas Massie walks back to his car at night or something, you know, he, he wonders, you know, okay, like, did I, did I say too much today? But the fact is, I mean, he's just opened the door to a very revealing phenomenon, which is that our elected representatives at the end of the day feared the base more than they feared the top of the pyramid on this. And by the way, I should say I happen to think that Donald Trump is a fantastic president on many, many, many, many things. And I am extremely happy that he won and 90% of things. But on this thing, I think it's pretty apparent that the gap is justified. I think he probably just doesn't have eyes on exactly, maybe just doesn't use Twitter as much and so just doesn't really see just how deep the divides have grown around this. But the fact is, is I don't think anyone's gonna want to be on the other side of voting that. So, you know, he's well passed in for a penny, but you're in for like, you know, 6 or 700 pennies. Go for the full pound. You know, I think, I think there's an opportunity to be hero and the bigger the coalition that can gather around Thomas Massie and come out and vocally support him and support his efforts on this, he could really go down as a figure of history.
- [71:19]
A
Yeah. And this idea should be brought to Rand Paul, who's now the chairman of the Senate Committee of Jurisdiction and has expressed open frustration that his criminal referrals of Anthony Fauci have satisfied dormant at the Justice Department. So maybe this is a different way to skin that cat.
- [71:38]
B
Yeah.
- [71:39]
A
Yep. So where do people find your stuff? You're. You're all over the place and you're not that hard to find. But if someone's living under a rock and they don't know Mike Benz, how do they find you?
- [71:47]
B
You can find me on xikebencyber. Also rumble, YouTube, Instagram, basically every. Every social media platform. It's Mike Benciber. I'm pretty prolific. And you can see receipts for pretty much everything we talked about here today that I mentioned somewhere on my timeline.
- [72:06]
A
All right. And at some point in the future, people will see the second conversation. We're about to have more digging more deeply into the pandemic industrial complex and the military origins of the response to Covid and can look forward to that, too. I really appreciate you taking time.
- [72:25]
B
Likewise. Thanks.
- [72:27]
A
Thanks for watching. If you liked the conversation, make sure to like the video, subscribe and also ring the bell for notifications. And if you want to know more about free the people, go to freethepeople.org.