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Narativ with Zev Shalev (Audio)
Hosted by Zev Shalev · EN
Uncover the hidden forces shaping our world.
Zev applies his skills gained as a journalist and news executive for 30 years to give viewers and listeners an unparalleled view of events changing our world.
Narativ is Where Truth Lives.
www.narativ.org
www.narativ.org
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BREAKING NEWS: TRUMP JUST PARDONED HIS FAMILY — FOREVER
2d ago00:31:29Tap to summarizeToday’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche quietly signed and posted to the Justice Department’s website Tuesday a one-page document giving Donald Trump, his family, his businesses, his trusts, and every Trump-affiliated entity perpetual immunity from any IRS audit. The one page memo was signed today and was only made public by the New York Times after Blanche testified before a senate committee. The document was made public after Monday’s surprise resignation of Brian Morrissey — The Treasury department’s Senate-confirmed general counsel of seven months — who walked out of the building Monday night, hours after the slush fund was announced, but before the tax audit immunity was made public today. We now know why.Section C of Blanche’s document “releases, waives, acquits, and forever discharges” Trump and “related or affiliated individuals … family or others filing jointly … trusts, parents, sister or related companies, affiliates and subsidiaries” from any future IRS pursuit. Section D adds that the United States cannot be held liable for any action flowing from the related $1.776 billion fund, including fraud. Attorney Anne P. Mitchell, on Narativ: “He is foreshadowing there’s going to be fraud, and there’s going to be tax fraud, more of it. And now he has this piece of paper that says he is immune from that.”Trump sued his own IRS for ten billion dollars. Ninety House Democrats warned the presiding judge any settlement would be “a specter of corruption unparalleled in American history.” Before the judge could rule, Trump’s Justice Department dropped the lawsuit. DOJ released a nine-page settlement Monday creating the $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization fund” that pays January 6 rioters and other claimed “victims of lawfare” out of the Treasury. The audit pardon was the second document, posted Tuesday — not in the public settlement. No court reviewed it. No judge approved it.What Blanche signed is the forward-looking presidential pardon Trump cannot give himself, applied to his family instead. The Supreme Court’s 2024 immunity ruling protected Trump for official acts during his presidency. It does not extend to his children, his trusts, or his joint filings. The audit pardon does.Anne P. Mitchell, Esq. — attorney, law professor, Army veteran — walked through the legal vulnerability live on the broadcast. The lawsuit was dropped before any judge could approve a settlement. The document Blanche signed is a contract that refers to a “settlement agreement” no court has ever seen. “Todd Blanche doesn’t even have the authority to say that about the United States,” she said. “He is not the United States. It’s a contract. Contracts break.” State attorneys general are already being briefed.The timing is visible. The U.S. Office of Government Ethics disclosed last week that Trump personally executed 3,700 stock transactions in the first quarter of 2026 — $220 million worth — with matched-day purchases of Apple shares the day he praised Apple, Thermo Fisher shares the day he toured the plant. CNBC’s Jim Cramer was handed the news on air Monday and went silent for ten seconds. The audit pardon was signed Tuesday.Denver Riggleman — the former Republican congressman who served on the January 6 Select Committee — joined the Narativ broadcast and said it on the record. “Anybody who signs off on this money going downrange, including Todd Blanche, I think is an enemy of the United States. I’ll state it directly.” The first piece pays the rioters. The second piece protects the family. The third piece is whichever state attorney general files first.Today’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.Tonight’s Narativ Breaking News special was brought to you by Ground News. Forty percent off the Vantage Plan at groundnews.com/fivestack. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe
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61% Say The War In Iran Is A Mistake Plus New Video of Cole Tomas Allen Seconds Before Saturday's Gunfire
3w ago00:35:21Tap to summarizeScott MacFarlane joins us from Washington with an insider’s view of the week that was. This week, every guardrail in Washington got stress-tested at once. From the seven seconds of gunfire on the Hilton ballroom floor, to a Supreme Court ruling that quietly redrew the American South, to a war that just hit Day 60 with no off-ramp. Watch the show and support Scott MacFarlane’s Substack - you’ll get plugged into the daily events before they happen. Thank you Rick Kohut, LeftieProf, Lalisa, PJ Schuster, Assemblywoman Debra Mazzarelli, and many others for tuning into my live video with Scott MacFarlane! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe
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BREAKING NEWS: DISBARMENT COMPLAINT FILED AGAINST CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS FOR CORRUPTION
3w ago00:29:30Tap to summarizeLike most of the content on Narativ, this video and post is free for everyone. Sign up below to get more posts like this for free, or become a paid subscriber to support our independent investigations.Yesterday the Supreme Court came down 6-3 in Louisiana v. Callais and gutted what was left of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The ACLU is calling it Jim Crow 2.0. Barack Obama said the Court has abandoned its role in our democracy. The opinion was written by Chief Justice John Roberts. Today, on a special early edition of Narativ Live, Christopher Armitage came on to explain why he has filed a complaint with the DC Bar to have Roberts disbarred — and why anybody watching can do the same thing in ten minutes.The Callais ruling rewrote what it takes to challenge a discriminatory map. The plaintiff now has to prove that the people who drew the lines intended to discriminate, not just that the map does. Roberts has been working to dismantle the Voting Rights Act since the Reagan administration. He wrote the 1981 memo calling the effects test a quota system. He wrote the 2013 Shelby County opinion that took the teeth out of Section 5. Yesterday he finished the job on Section 2. Forty years. Same hand. Same project.For sixteen years, Roberts has been calling something on his federal disclosure forms a salary that is not a salary. His wife, Jane Sullivan Roberts, is a legal headhunter. She places senior lawyers — the kind leaving government, the kind firms pay top dollar for — at law firms that argue cases at the Supreme Court. WilmerHale. Hogan Lovells. Davis Polk. When one of those firms hires her candidate, the firm pays her a commission. Sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars per placement. A 2022 whistleblower complaint from inside her former firm walked the spreadsheets to Congress: more than ten million dollars in commissions over seven years. Add the years that followed at her next firm, where the public numbers go dark, and the floor estimate runs past twenty million dollars. From the firms that argue in front of her husband.Roberts called it salary. “Commission is influenced by outcome in a way that salary isn’t as directly,” Armitage said. The Chief Justice picked the word that hides the conflict. The whistleblower was a clerk and an attorney. She knew what she was looking at. Congress held a hearing. The story quietly disappeared. About a third of the cases Roberts has weighed in on have involved firms his wife recruited for. He has not recused from a single one.Like most of the content on Narativ, this video and post is free for everyone. Sign up below to get more posts like this for free, or become a paid subscriber to support our independent investigations.There is also an equity stake. Jane Roberts holds equity in one of the firms. A company with business in front of the Court appeared before her husband. The stake went undisclosed for three years. Bloomberg got hold of it. Roberts then filed an amended form and called the omission an error in judgment. “People have gone to jail for that with the same excuse,” Armitage said. George W. Bush’s White House ethics lawyer — when that was still a job — said Roberts fudged the paperwork in a way that is misleading. Misleading on a federal form is a crime. The Chief Justice of the United States knows that. He counted on nobody reading the forms.The pattern holds across the conservative bloc. Ginni Thomas took money for years from conservative groups with business at the Court, then texted Mark Meadows trying to overturn the 2020 election. Clarence Thomas did not recuse from the January 6 cases. ProPublica then walked the country through more than twenty years of undisclosed gifts to Thomas from the billionaire Harlan Crow — yachts, private jets, real estate. Sam Alito took a private-jet fishing trip to Alaska with the hedge-fund billionaire Paul Singer, did not disclose it, did not recuse when Singer’s fund had a $2.4 billion case at the Court, and voted with Singer. Three of the nine. Three sets of millions. Three sets of forms with the truth missing. “The Republican Party is a criminal organization primarily,” Armitage said. “What they sell is influence.”Disbarment will not remove Roberts from the Supreme Court. The Constitution requires only nomination and confirmation. But the DC Bar holds federal judges to the same standard as everyone else who carries its license, and Armitage’s complaint argues that on its face, sixteen years of false household-income disclosures and a hidden equity stake are a textbook violation of the recusal statutes. The DC Bar has disbarred federal judges for less. Attorneys across the country are now filing their own complaints. Retired judges are filing them. The ACLU picked up the story today. “If we get him disbarred, he will forever live in infamy as the Chief Justice whose corruption got him disbarred,” Armitage said.History rhymes. Six years ago Narativ reported on the Federalist Society money pipeline that bought the bench Roberts sits on. Yesterday’s Callais opinion is what you get when the man at the top of that bench has spent four decades waiting to write it — and sixteen years quietly collecting on the side. The mechanism doesn’t change. The names do.Armitage publishes The Existentialist Republic on Substack. His complaint is posted in full there at no cost. The DC Bar accepts public complaints by email and at 515 Fifth Street NW, Washington DC. Ten minutes. Your own words. Armitage was deliberate about waiting a week before posting his own filing — he wants people to write their own letter, not copy his.Roberts has spent sixteen years counting on the certainty that nobody would read the forms.Today, somebody read the forms. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe
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NEW PHOTOS OF MBS AND EPSTEIN SURFACE ALONG WITH DETAILS OF EPSTEIN'S MOSQUE ON LITTLE ST. JAMES
3w ago00:19:07Tap to summarizeThis is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.narativ.orgTwo new photographs of Jeffrey Epstein joking with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman landed in Ellie Leonard’s signal threads this morning, hours before The New York Times published a long account of the same network. Both pictures show the two men close, intimate, at ease. The Times piece tracks the rest of it — tapestries from the Kaaba in Mecca shipped to Epstein’s island, tiles from Uzbek mosques, a golden dome modeled on ancient Syrian temples, and a 2014 photo of Epstein with the Emirati executive Sultan Bin Sulayem, who was later fired from his job at DP World over his Epstein ties. The point, Leonard noted on the show, is that Epstein “didn’t really know how to design a mosque” — he bought what cost the most because the price was the relationship. The mosque on St. James Island is not a mosque. It is a meeting room with a Mecca tapestry on the wall, built to impress the Saudis who came to dinner.The Saudi connection runs back to the eighties. Adnan Khashoggi, the uncle of the murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi, trained Epstein in what I called “the finer arts of criminal money laundering.” Decades later, Epstein discussed Jamal Khashoggi’s 2018 murder with Steve Bannon over email in language Leonard described as “crass.” Mohammed bin Salman, Bannon’s Saudi counterpart, is the man American intelligence holds responsible for the killing. The same Mohammed bin Salman who took meetings with Epstein and kept a photograph of the two of them together on a side table in his office.PAID SUBSCRIBERS CAN ACCESS A DEEPER DIVE BELOW THE PAYWALL
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7 Reasons Why Trump Was Not Under Any Threat on Saturday Night — And He Knew It
3w ago01:03:22Tap to summarizeAttorney Anne P. Mitchell, Esq. and I break down the affidavit and come to an alarming conclusion. The FBI affidavit is supposed to read as the chronicle of a near-assassination of the President. Read with discipline, it reads as the chronicle of a man Trump knew could not reach him. This post is free for everyone. Sign up today to get more posts like this or become a paid subscriber and help us grow our platform for independent journalism1. Allen chose the only door he could not get through.The Washington Hilton has at least four other paths into the International Ballroom. Only one had a secret service-manned magnetometer screener. According to Aaron Parnas, a Hilton guest reported that the elevator key card system was disabled the evening of the dinner — any guest could ride to any floor unscreened. Despite these other options, Allen took the staff stairs down from his tenth-floor room and walked past every unguarded route to the only entrance with armed Secret Service agents standing in front of it. A Caltech-trained engineer who built drone targeting systems for the Pentagon does not pick that door if he intended to kill the president.2. Allen Wasn’t even on the same floor as Trump The dinner was on the Concourse Level. Allen ran at the magnetometer line on the Terrace Level — at least one floor up. Between him and the President: a bank of escalators, a thousand people, and several feet of concrete. There was no line of sight. There was never going to be a line of sight.3. He exempted nearly everyone in the building.Allen’s Rules of Engagement: hotel security, not targets unless they shoot at him. Capitol Police, same. National Guard, same. Hotel employees, not targets at all. Hotel guests, not targets at all. Buckshot, not slugs — in his own words, “to minimize casualties. There’s less penetration through walls.” Real assassins do not exempt the room.4. He carved out law enforcement explicitly.The email names FBI Director Kash Patel as the one administration official written out of the target list. As internet-law attorney Anne P. Mitchell put it on Narativ Live this afternoon, Allen “obviously thinks law enforcement is to be respected.” A man trying to assassinate the President does not write a respect-for-law-enforcement clause into his own document.5. Trump used a secure route Allen never came near.Since the Reagan attempt outside the Hilton in 1981, presidential visits to the venue go through a hardened entrance — drive into the garage, then directly up to the ballroom through an internal corridor sealed off from the public. Trump entered that way Saturday night. Allen approached a public stairwell on a different floor. The two routes never crossed.6. Trump told the agents to wait.He told Norah O’Donnell on Sunday’s captured 60 Minutes that he asked Secret Service to “wait a minute” so he could “see what was going on.” Vice President JD Vance was escorted out before him. Trump stayed seated for roughly eight seconds. Real Secret Service does not ask permission to move a protectee. A real protectee does not refuse to move. The detail behaved like a detail that knew the situation was contained.7. He has demanded no investigation.Survivors of assassination attempts demand accountability. They demand firings. They demand Senate inquiries. They demand audits of the security plan. Trump has demanded none of that. He has called the people asking these questions “conspiracy theorists.” He has demanded one thing: that taxpayers pay to build his stalled White House ballroom. Senator Lindsey Graham introduced the bill today.A man who has just survived an attempt on his life — and on his wife’s — would ask “how did this happen?”. He isn’t pushing a doomed ballroom build. The Conclusion He was not in the same room. He was not even on the same floor. He had four other paths into the ballroom and chose the hardest. He fired one round, hit a ballistic vest, and fell to the ground. He was nowhere near Donald Trump.The Trump regime continues to frame him as an assassin. He was not. At best, Cole Tomas Allen was a politically frustrated American who chose a public act as his expression of that frustration — a statement made at the potential cost of his own life, not the president’s.The federal government’s charging document does not survive that read. Allen’s assassination charges will not hold up, and neither will the regime's use of Allen’s words to brand its political opponents as accomplices to an assassination that was never going to happen.Thank you "Sushi"(Jen) of MIND HAVEN, Dr. Mary M. Marshall, Eric Lullove, Noble Blend, Sarah, and many others for tuning into my live video with Anne P. Mitchell, Esq.! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe
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BREAKING: TRUMP RUSHED OFF-STAGE AT WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENTS DINNER AFTER SHOTS FIRED
4w ago01:12:04Tap to summarizeBreaking News is always free at Narativ. Sign up to get more coverage like this for free or become a paid subscriber for our investigations and analysis.Just after 8:30 Saturday night, Secret Service officers pulled Donald Trump and Melania Trump off the stage at the Washington Hilton. Five shots rang out at the magnetometer line outside the ballroom of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. A 31-year-old man from Torrance, California — identified in reports tonight as Cole Tomas Allen — charged the security checkpoint with a shotgun, a handgun, and multiple knives. He had assembled a long gun in an unsecured back room of the hotel. He fired. A round struck a Secret Service officer in his bullet-resistant vest. The officer is alive and, in Trump’s words, “in great spirits.” Allen is in custody. He is alive too.Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Education Secretary Linda McMahon were in the ballroom. None were injured. The Hilton went on lockdown. The dinner was canceled. Trump said it will reschedule within thirty days. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said charges will follow shortly. FBI Director Kash Patel said the Bureau is examining ballistics, the long gun, and shell casings, and is interviewing witnesses. Trump described Allen as a “lone wolf” and “a sick person.” This is the third time in under two years that Donald Trump has been the target of a confirmed attempt — Butler, Pennsylvania, July 2024; the Palm Beach golf course, September 2024; and the Hilton tonight.Three things from the night sit uneasily next to those facts. Hours before the dinner, on Fox News, White House Press Secretary Karoline Levitt previewed the evening with these words: “It’ll be entertaining. There will be some shots fired tonight in the room. So everyone should tune in. It’s going to be really great.” Ninety minutes after Secret Service pulled him from the stage, Trump returned to the White House and framed the night as a unification — “I saw a room that was just totally unified,” “a tremendous amount of love and coming together” — and pivoted to his East Wing ballroom project, calling the Hilton “not a particularly secure building” and saying Secret Service and the military “are demanding” the new ballroom. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer told viewers on air he watched a gunman fire a “very serious weapon” at least six times from a few feet away. Blitzer was inside the ballroom. The shooting was at the magnetometer line outside.The facts are not in dispute. The officer was hit. The suspect was real. The weapons were real. The President was rushed off a stage by Secret Service for the third time in twenty-one months. The unease is in the speed and the polish of the framing around the facts. Butler is still unresolved for many. The same questions follow this president time and time again. Real events do not unfold this swiftly and coherently. Narativ will follow the investigation. History Rhymes. That’s how we know sooner.Thank you Mike Godwin, Sharon Dymond, Lisa 🌿🔍🔎🌿, Suzanne Sky, Jai C. Porter🇨🇦, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe
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WORLDWIDE EXCLUSIVE: THE WOLFF-EPSTEIN FILES WITH ELLIE LEONARD AND SPECIAL GUEST LEV PARNAS
4w ago01:04:49Tap to summarizeEllie Leonard finished reading every page. Eighteen hundred of them. Five hundred and thirty-three documented email exchanges between Michael Wolff and Jeffrey Epstein across nine years and six months, ending forty-four days before the FBI arrested Epstein at Teterboro. The picture she came back with is not a writer and a subject. It is a service agreement hiding in plain sight.Like most of Narativ’s content, this special report is available to everyone for free. If you’d like to get more content like this sign up below, or become a paid subscriber and support our independent journalism.Leonard and Lev Parnas joined Narativ Live tonight for a special report on what the emails actually show. The friendship did not begin in 2009 with a casual note to Epstein’s assistant Leslie Groff. Wolff flew on Epstein’s plane to a TED conference as early as 2001. In 2003 Wolff tried to facilitate the sale of New York Magazine to a consortium that included Epstein, Harvey Weinstein and Donnie Deutsch. The paper record picks up in 2009, goes silent for a year, then comes roaring back in February 2011 with Wolff writing, “Have been defending you to the world’s press.” That email is the moment the relationship becomes commercial. “He is now being paid by Jeffrey Epstein for a PR operation, a reputation cleanup of Jeffrey Epstein,” Shalev said. “Their friendship is not really a ‘friendship’. It’s a service agreement between a client and a PR guy that was masquerading in front of everybody else as a friendship and as an author-subject relationship.”Leonard catalogued the mechanics. Wolff worked with British PR operative Ian Osborne and five other publicists over the course of the correspondence. An Osborne and Partners memo recovered in the files lays it out in bullet points: “clean up Google,” retain search engine optimization firms, hire “Israeli experts” to scrub the internet, target a specific list of journalists — Gerald Baker, Lionel Barber, Andrew Sorkin, John Micklethwaite, Josh Tyrangiel — who between them ran the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the New York Times DealBook, and Bloomberg Businessweek. The Gates Foundation relationship was the planned vehicle for rehabilitation. When Virginia Giuffre named Prince Andrew in January 2015, Wolff drafted a seven-thousand-word New York Magazine feature built around the Gates angle. Epstein’s lawyers killed it. Wolff kept working. He did not believe Giuffre. He defended Prince Andrew. He treated the #MeToo movement, in Leonard’s words, as “absolute bunk” while simultaneously finding graduate-student assistants for Epstein to hire.On October 22, 2017, Wolff brokered the first meeting between Epstein and Steve Bannon at the Gramercy Park Hotel. By January 2018 Fire and Fury was the number one book in America and Epstein was hosting a theatrical “Fire and Fury birthday party” for himself with Bannon, Tom Barrack, Woody Allen and Obama’s former White House counsel Kathy Ruemmler in the room. By February 2019, Wolff was forwarding early drafts of Siege to Epstein for editing. “Epstein was editing, helping him write and edit his books too,” Leonard said. “The Trump books, they were editing Trump’s book together.” The hundred hours of recorded interviews Wolff has been selling on Substack as his insider archive are not journalism. They are the raw material of a nine-year fixer operation. Wolff himself told Epstein in writing that he used the existence of the tapes as leverage — if a source refused to cooperate, “remind them that I have these tapes and I have these interviews.”Parnas flagged the part that does not sit right. Donald Trump has not sued Michael Wolff. He does not treat Wolff the way he treats other reporters who claim to have evidence against him. “The relationship, there’s something about it that doesn’t smell right,” Parnas said. “Wolff talks about Donald Trump. I have the goods on Trump. Trump is everything, but he never produces it.” If Wolff sold Epstein a liberal-media-guy-who-understands-you reputation fix, the question is whether he sold Trump the same package. The pattern in the emails — saying one thing to Epstein and the opposite to Bannon, saying one thing publicly and the reverse behind closed doors — does not rule it out.History rhymes. Narativ wrote on March 30 that Wolff was Epstein’s fixer (narativ.substack.com/p/michael-wolff-was-epsteins-fixer), working from the first pass through the files and Leonard’s early transcription. Tonight’s show is the full receipt. The cross-reference map of all 533 exchanges, the eight chapters of the friendship, the peak months that line up exactly with Epstein’s legal crises — it all sits in a single fact sheet now. What looked like a prolific journalist covering the powerful was a paid reputation manager working inside Epstein’s defense for the entire decade Wolff was also writing America’s definitive books about Donald Trump.Thank you to Ellie Leonard and Lev Parnas. Leonard writes The Panicked Writer on Substack and is continuing the Hilton Head investigation. Parnas is a Narativ regular and a congressional candidate who lived inside Trump’s orbit during the years Fire and Fury and Siege were being written. The Wolfpack — the viewers crowdsourcing this investigation in real time — earned their name tonight.History Rhymes. That’s how we know sooner.Narativ Live is a production of narativ.org. Subscribe for breaking news alerts, the weekly video podcast in HD, and email notifications of live broadcasts.Thank you Amy Gabrielle, Rolf Kvalvik, Robin Payes, Elaine Cimino, Yvonne Evans, and many others for tuning into my live video with Lev Parnas and Ellie Leonard! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe
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NARATIV LIVE: IRAN LATEST & JARED KUSHNER UNDER INVESTIGATION
4w ago00:36:36Tap to summarizeThis is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.narativ.orgDonald Trump told CNBC’s Squawk Box this morning that an extension of the Iran ceasefire was “highly unlikely.” By three this afternoon he had posted to Truth Social that he was extending it after all, citing a “seriously fractured” Iranian government. Between those two statements, Iranian negotiators refused to meet with the American peace envoy in Pakistan. Their reason, repeatedly reported and acknowledged on tonight’s broadcast, was direct: the peace envoy represents Israel, not the United States.The peace envoy is Jared Kushner.Kait Justice, writing at Downwind of Truth, has been tracing the Kushner thread for over a month. Tonight she laid the pieces out together. In 2021, at the close of Donald Trump’s first administration, the Saudi sovereign wealth fund put two billion dollars into Kushner’s newly formed Affinity Partners. The fund’s own board advised Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman against the investment — Kushner, the board said, had neither the experience nor the track record for the money. The Crown Prince overrode the board. Affinity Partners now reports six billion dollars under management, up from four-point-eight billion in 2024. The mission of the firm, Justice said on air, is to create an investment channel between Saudi Arabia and Israel.That mission has a paper trail that runs through Jeffrey Epstein. In emails surfaced in Justice’s reporting, Epstein wrote to a Qatari royal that “if the people would allow your country to recognize Israel, it could be interesting to discuss.” The email predates the Abraham Accords — Kushner’s signature first-term diplomatic achievement — by two years. In a parallel thread, Epstein pitched the Saudi royal court on an oil-backed currency and a compliant cryptocurrency, claiming on the page that he had already spoken to the founders of Bitcoin. Kushner’s network picked up the pieces Epstein left behind, and built the firm Riyadh now writes the checks to.PAID SUBSCRIBERS CAN ACCESS A DEEPER DIVE BELOW THE PAYWALL
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5 Nights 5 Secrets: What Was Going On At Epstein's Zorro Ranch?
Apr 2100:42:13Tap to summarizeThis is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.narativ.orgOn the opening night of Narativ’s five-part investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, independent journalist Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez — whose document reporting at The Pugilist is the proximate cause of the 2026 New Mexico Department of Justice criminal investigation into Zorro Ranch — sat down with Zev Shalev to walk through the archive she has been building around the 7,500-acre property halfway between Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories where Jeffrey Epstein ran his New Mexico operation for nearly three decades.Valdes-Rodriguez led with the microwave link. Zorro Development Corporation, the Epstein entity that held the ranch, filed five FCC microwave licenses; the estate maintained them after Epstein’s 2019 death, and when Texas millionaires Donald and Mary Catherine Huffines purchased the property in 2023 they cancelled three of the five and kept two. “It’s a bidirectional system,” Valdes-Rodriguez told Shalev. “One of them transmits from the ranch to the top of Sandia Crest.” She has pulled DOJ emails in which the general contractor who installed the system described it, in his own words, as “a military-industrial grade system, and very expensive.” The ranch next door, which shares more than two miles of fence line with Zorro, is owned by the estate of Henry Singleton — founder of the defense contractor Teledyne and, as Valdes-Rodriguez noted on air, a trustee of Ronald Reagan’s blind trust. Teledyne was later fined for knowingly selling non-functional components to Sandia. The two microwave licenses expire on July 12, 2026.Shalev walked the audience through the Robert Maxwell FBI file — 105-25063, opened by J. Edgar Hoover on December 9, 1953 under the classification “Internal Security — R & GE” — and the parallels between Maxwell’s October 1954 attempt to recruit the directors of Oak Ridge, Brookhaven and Argonne National Laboratories through a journal he owned and Epstein’s later endowment of a chair at the Santa Fe Institute in Robert Maxwell’s name. “The simplest explanation for all of these things,” Shalev told viewers, “is these guys were spies, and they were trying to get nuclear secrets to their countries that they could sell them.” Valdes-Rodriguez reminded viewers that Ghislaine Maxwell, Robert Maxwell’s daughter, is on record saying she was the one who first brought Epstein to New Mexico.Then came John J. Kelly. Kelly, Valdes-Rodriguez explained, was a private Albuquerque attorney and the chair of the New Mexico Democratic Party, introduced to Epstein by the sitting governor, Bruce King. Kelly signed as Epstein’s Power of Attorney on the 1993 Zorro purchase and on the state-land leases that expanded the property by thousands of acres. Eight months later, Kelly was confirmed as United States Attorney for the District of New Mexico. He served through the end of the Clinton administration. Maria and Annie Farmer began reporting Epstein to the FBI in 1996. “He never, in his entire tenure as U.S. Attorney for this district of New Mexico, ever opened any kind of investigation into Jeffrey Epstein,” Valdes-Rodriguez said. When a local TV reporter years later asked Kelly why his name appeared in Epstein’s files, Kelly replied: “You’ll have to ask Mr. Epstein.”PAID SUBSCRIBERS CAN ACCESS A DEEPER DIVE BELOW THE PAYWALL
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BREAKING NEWS: President Trump's Labor Secretary — Lori Chavez-DeRemer — has resigned.
Apr 2000:02:47Tap to summarizeThis is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe
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