
Hosted by Zev Shalev · EN

Thank you Hal Gill, Patris, Nick G, A Dude On The Couch, Ms. H, Pamela, and many others for tuning into my live video with 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

Christopher Armitage came on Narativ Live tonight to argue, in plain language, what most of the legal-political world has been too cautious to say aloud — that Justice Clarence Thomas could be indicted next Monday, in a Fairfax County courthouse, on charges already supported by the public record. The case does not require Congress, the Department of Justice, or the Supreme Court itself to do anything. It requires three Virginia officials who already have the authority to act, and the will to use it.Armitage’s argument rests on a doctrine the Supreme Court has affirmed as recently as the 2019 Snyder decision — dual sovereignty: states are allowed to enforce their own laws, even on federal officials. The Roberts Court has narrowed federal fraud, bribery, and corruption statutes to the point that the federal-level case against Thomas may no longer be winnable, but Virginia’s laws are not bound by John Roberts’s reading. Thomas lives in Fairfax County. He files a Virginia resident income tax return. The twenty years of private jets, superyachts, summer compounds at Harlan Crow’s Adirondacks property, tuition payments for a child he was raising, and a quarter-million-dollar motorhome from a separate benefactor — totaling, by Armitage’s accounting, more than twenty million dollars in gifts, of which roughly ten million are documented and unreported and another eleven million are estimated from gaps in the record — are income under federal tax law unless they meet the Supreme Court’s own 1960 “detached and disinterested generosity” test in Duberstein. A politically active billionaire whose business and ideological interests appear before the Court does not meet that test. Leaving that income off a Virginia return, with intent to defraud, is a felony under Virginia Code § 58.1-348.The intent question — usually the hardest piece of a tax-fraud prosecution to prove — is the easiest one to read in Thomas’s record. He disclosed his first Harlan Crow flight in 1997, then stopped disclosing them for the next twenty years while continuing to take them, and amended his forms only for the specific trips reporters had already proven. He used to report large gifts as taxable income. He stopped. He knows.The deeper contribution Armitage brought to the conversation tonight is the four-tier taxonomy of state resistance his soft-secession academic work has built — Tier 0 cooperative federalism, Tier 1 uncooperative federalism (Heather Gerken’s 2009 contribution, we don’t have to help you), Tier 2 soft secession (we don’t need you — Washington State’s economy alone exceeds plenty of European countries that maintain full safety nets), Tier 3 oppositional federalism (state criminal law turned on federal officials), and Tier 4 constitutional noncompliance (active intervention against federal action, such as state National Guards refusing to participate in mass deportations). The Thomas case is Tier 3. So is the fifty-thousand-dollar bribe Tom Homan took on Texas soil and could be charged for in a Texas courtroom if Texas had Democratic leadership. So is every federal corruption case the Roberts Court has narrowed out of federal reach and left lying in state jurisdiction. Armitage’s frame names what the right wing has been doing for fifty years — building state-level pressure that the Supreme Court eventually has to ratify — and asks why Democrats are not running the same play, applied for good.On Pam Bondi’s testimony before the House Oversight Committee tomorrow on the Epstein files, Armitage’s instruction was direct. Every Democratic member with questioning time should open by stating, on the record and to her face, that they will pursue criminal perjury charges if she lies under oath. Then they should follow Ted Lieu’s example — start their questions by saying the president is a pedophile who is named in the Epstein files. Refuse to grant Bondi the lawyerly courtesy that has, until now, allowed every Trump-regime official to stonewall a hearing without consequence. “Call her a liar,” Armitage said. “Do it.”On the November midterms, Armitage offered a deliberately bleak prediction: no veto-proof majority for the Democrats, a rigging campaign the existing checks cannot fully stop, and a Democratic Party whose own approval rating sits below Donald Trump’s because it has no counter-incentive plan for its voters. The fight, he said, is not about the outcome — it is about the daily practice. The right wing waged a fifty-year campaign to overturn Roe v. Wade because they took the long-shot cases and refused to be told the cases could not be won. The same tactic, applied for good, can charge Clarence Thomas in Virginia on Monday, indict Tom Homan in Texas, and unwind the federal capture from below — one county, one statehouse, one indictment at a time.The action items Armitage handed our viewers were not federal. Pressure your state attorney general. Pressure your county prosecutor. Pressure your statehouse representative. Pressure your city council member if that is what you have access to. Treat the prosecution movement the way the right wing treated Roe — a multi-decade campaign of state-level pressure that culminates in courthouse doors opening, not closing. Steve Descano, the Fairfax Commonwealth’s Attorney, spent six years in the Justice Department’s Criminal Tax Division and knows how to read this case. Governor Abigail Spanberger has the authority under Virginia Code § 2.2-511 to ask Attorney General Jay Jones to take it up. None of them has moved. All three of them can.What came through most clearly tonight is that nothing about this requires permission from the institutions that are failing. It requires a county prosecutor in Virginia who is willing to do his job, and enough constituents writing, calling, and showing up to make doing that job the safer political bet. Charge him on Monday. Then charge the next one.Christopher Armitage publishes The Existentialist Republic and is the architect of the soft-secession framework — academic working paper, free booklets, and tools at the link.Thank you Dr. Eric Lullove, Lalisa, Truthsayer, Dannys, Richard, 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

Andrew Lownie sat across from me in shorts on Monday afternoon. The paperback of The Rise and Fall of the House of York drops Thursday in the States — the book Simon & Schuster pulled to delete a single line was published as a paperback in Britain and is tracking for number one. Next, American readers get the book on Thursday.Lownie referenced an FBI intelligence document dated January 2026, headed RIS and the People’s Republic of China. The subject is Andrew Mountbatten Windsor. The links being mapped: Russian criminal gangs, Russian intelligence services, Chinese state intelligence. Andrew served at the Ministry of Defence. He was a trade envoy. He collected secrets in both roles. Lownie writes about that document in the new paperback.“In some ways Epstein was a player in a bigger story,” he said. He thinks Epstein was a Russian asset recruited much earlier than people realized. That, he said, explains where the money came from.I pushed him on the timeline. I told him what Stephen Hoffenberg told me before he died — that Epstein and Maxwell knew each other in the 1980s, that Epstein was working with Maxwell on his financial issues in the dying days of Maxwell’s life. I told him what Ari Ben-Menashe told me on the record — that he met Epstein in Robert Maxwell’s London offices during Iran-Contra. That Maxwell wanted to bring Epstein onto the operations team. That Tel Aviv — the Military Intelligence Directorate — had already approved. That Ghislaine and Epstein were an item at a very young age. That Robert Maxwell thought Epstein was going to marry his daughter.Lownie did not flinch. He said it lines up with what he is hearing from a source on the periphery in the mid-1980s — Epstein, Ghislaine, and Andrew running around London, doing the same things they would do later.If that’s true, the official story is wrong. The Concorde story — Ghislaine penniless, flying to New York after her father’s death, falling into Epstein’s arms — is a cover. They had already planned to take over Robert Maxwell’s business.The Rothschilds keep showing up. Evelyn de Rothschild was close to the Queen. Lynn Forester de Rothschild was close to Epstein and close to Andrew. The witnesses at her wedding to Evelyn were Peter Mandelson and Prince Andrew. Lownie said the mainstream press will not touch her — she is rich and litigious. Australian television spiked his interviews on this subject.I asked him about the Queen. Did she know.“The Queen knew everything,” he said. Intelligence officers worked inside the palace. Letters were written to her for fifteen years. Intelligence officers came to her and were turned away by her private secretaries. The 2010 Ferguson access-selling story. The 2022 High Court case where the Yorks could not explain £1.3 million in their account. Nothing was done. The cover-up ran from the Queen to the King. It would still be running if the Epstein files had not dropped at Christmas.I asked the question every Narativ reader wants answered. Does Andrew face real justice.Lownie does not think so. He thinks Charles will not let his brother stand trial because Andrew might call the King as a witness. He thinks Mandelson is different. Mandelson, he said, goes to prison.We ran out of time. The notes match from two angles. The story begins earlier. The network is bigger. The cover-up has been running for fifteen years and is breaking now because Substack reporters keep digging.Andrew Lownie’s The Rise and Fall of the House of York is out Thursday. Buy it. Subscribe to his Substack. He has paid for every page.Watch the full conversation on Narativ Live. Subscribe at narativ.org.Thank you Amy Gabrielle, PJ Schuster, Catherine Mommsen, Gretchen Theodorakis, Dominique, 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

House Republicans didn’t lose the Iran war powers vote tonight.They pulled it — because they were about to lose.For three roll calls they defended Trump’s war on the floor. Tonight, with Golden flipped and their own members gone home, they wouldn’t let the floor be counted at all.Asked point-blank what happened to the vote, the chair said only: “that was a women’s history museum.” Then moved on.A pulled vote keeps the loss off the books. It’s barely better than losing — and they know it. 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

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.narativ.orgEddy Aragon broadcasts from Albuquerque on KIVA — “The Rock of Talk.”When Jeffrey Epstein died in August 2019, the FBI searched his Manhattan townhouse, his Palm Beach mansion, and his Caribbean island. One Epstein property was left alone: Zorro Ranch, in the high desert south of Santa Fe. The local ABC, NBC, and CBS affiliates would not touch the story. The people who had worked on the ranch called Aragon’s station instead. His AM signal carries to the small towns around the property — Edgewood, Moriarty, Stanley — and for seven years the leads came to him because there was nowhere else for them to go.In November 2019, three months after Epstein’s death, one of those leads arrived as an email. The sender said he was former Zorro staff — “a person that has been there and seen it all.” He said he had taken material from Epstein’s home “as my insurance.” And he wrote one sentence: two foreign girls had been buried in the hills outside the ranch, on the orders of Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.Aragon did what a citizen is supposed to do. He took the email to the FBI in person, sat for a formal intake — name, Social Security number, a background check — and handed it over.The Bureau did nothing with it. For six years.That was not the only door Aragon tried. In 2019 and 2020 he helped convene a citizens’ grand jury on behalf of Chauntae Davies, an Epstein survivor who has said she was raped at Zorro Ranch. The filing was stamped and delivered to the Santa Fe courthouse. It was never examined — not by the county sheriff, not by the state Attorney General.The work cost him. Aragon says his FM tower on the Sandia ridge was taken down, and his videos were stripped from every social platform he was on. The more he said about Zorro Ranch, the more the pressure came.He was also right to keep going. The New Mexico Truth Commission now investigating Zorro Ranch — the first official inquiry into the property in its history — exists, Aragon says, because of the email he forwarded in 2019. Congresswoman Melanie Stansbury found that email in the public Epstein files and carried it to the state Attorney General. The tip the FBI buried for six years became the document that reopened the case.Aragon’s instincts run further than the documents, and on Narativ Live we drew that line plainly: the speculation about ritual and the occult is not something our reporting rests on, and Narativ’s investigation of the Epstein files has found no evidence for it. What Aragon has earned is narrower and harder. He received a credible insider’s allegation of bodies buried at Zorro. He handed it to the federal government. And he watched the government do nothing for six years.What is actually beneath Zorro Ranch — who built the house, why the wells were drilled far past anything a ranch could use, who owns the land that rings it, and what one survivor says was done to her in a room below ground — is the subject of our investigation. THE GREATEST HEIST, Book 3, Part 2: ZORRO, publishes this week.Aragon has one wish for the property, he told Narativ Live. If he could walk it, he would go straight to the mechanical rooms. “I know,” he said, “that everything is in those mechanical rooms.”Thanks to everyone who came here in good faith — you’re the reason this space exists. The conversation on this post has run its course, so I’m closing the comments here. The rest of Narativ stays open, and I’ll see you in the next one.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.narativ.org`Thomas Massie is out.The Republican congressman from Kentucky’s 4th — the only Republican to vote against Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, the man who filed the discharge petition with Ro Khanna to force release of the Epstein files, the libertarian who called the war on Iran illegal — lost his primary tonight to a Trump-endorsed retired Navy SEAL named Ed Gallrein. Decision Desk HQ called it. NBC called it. CBS called it. Massie walked on stage and conceded. He said the race “went on longer than Vietnam.”The bill came to $35 million. The most expensive House primary in American history. $19 million spent against Massie. $16 million for him. The Republican Jewish Coalition put up $4 million. AIPAC’s United Democracy Project added $2.6 million. Israeli-American billionaire Miriam Adelson — the woman who paid for Trump’s 2024 campaign — moved millions through aligned channels. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth flew to Kentucky on Monday to campaign for Gallrein in his “personal capacity” — a phrase that means the Pentagon would rather not own it on paper.PAID SUBSCRIBERS CAN ACCESS A DEEPER DIVE BELOW THE PAYWALL

Today’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

Scott 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

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.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

This 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