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- [00:02]
Host 1
We're really not very conspiratorially minded people. But then the other day I woke up and I started reading about it and I was like, oh, oh, there's actually like there there with this Epstein stuff. Particularly, you know, this letter that was reported.
- [00:16]
Host 2
The entire trajectory so far of Epstein's career. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I'm going, surely, like, this is CIA, isn't it?
- [00:26]
Mike Benz
He was told to back off Epstein because Epstein belonged to intelligence and to leave it alone because it was above his pay grade. People are going to invent their own Epstein story unless there's an official one. And the only people who can provide the official one are the people we just elected in this past election who ran on giving us the official story.
- [00:53]
Host 1
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- [01:52]
Mike Benz
Thanks for having me.
- [01:53]
Host 1
Oh, it's good to have you on. Listen, I'll be honest with you. You know, Francis and I, we're really not very conspiratorially minded people. It's not something we pay a lot of attention to. There's been a lot of this Epstein stuff lying around for a long time. And to be honest with you, I've tuned most of it out. I see that, you know, the people who hate Israel are talking about Epstein and Israel. The people who are about this talk about Epstein and this. Everyone's got their own hobby horse, right? But then the other day I woke up and I started, for some reason, something came up in my newsfeed and I started reading about it and I was like, oh, oh, there's actually like there there with this Epstein stuff. But particularly, you know, this letter that was reported. I Think it was in the Wall Street Journal about Donald Trump supposedly sending some kind of note with a picture of a woman and all of this. And when I started reading it, I was actually starting to go away. There's actually stuff in this that sounds kind of legit. So we thought we'd have you back on the show and to break it down for us and also explain how it ties in to a lot of the intelligence community and institutional stuff that you're always talking about that we discussed last time you were on the show. But first of all, I thought it'd be really helpful to, for people who are like me, not particularly into this stuff, not particularly aware of it, to have heard the name Jeffrey Epstein, who kind of go, oh, he had this island that he was a pedophile, etc. For you to just tell us who the man was, what is his biography, how did he get to his positions and who actually was. In what role did he play in a lot of this stuff that we are now talking about?
- [03:31]
Mike Benz
Well, Jeffrey Epstein is this kind of international man of mystery figure who, who has sort of done a forest gump tour through strange areas of US politics for about four decades. So he's a guy who was recruited as versus a math and physics teacher to the Dalton School, a prestigious New York City private school in the mid-1970s by Donald Barr, who was the former. He's the father of William Barr, the Attorney General the head of the US criminal justice system during the the second Trump administration, then also was also Attorney general in the 1990s. Donald Bar started his career in the CIA. It was the OSS, it's the predecessor to the CIA before he went on to Columbia and then the Dalton School. His son Bill, Bill Barr was also started his career in the CIA, then was a lawyer for the CIA. Told his high school guidance counselor his dream job was to be the head of the CIA. This is in his own autobiography. Um, and then you have this kid Jeffrey Epstein, who by all accounts was, you know, did not come from, from much before the Dalton School. He got this job teaching math and physics without a college degree, which is somewhat unusual. But he was very charming and charismatic and had the opportunity to tutor the son of Ace Greenberg. Ace Greenberg was the head of Bear Stearns. Bear Stearns folks may remember from the 80s through the early 2000s was one of the marquee investment security brokerage firms and investment houses on Wall Street. It went down in flames in 2008 in the mortgage backed securities crisis. That was also the year that Jeffrey Epstein was, was first. First arrested, first the plea deal for his first indictment. But essentially, as the, as the legend goes, what's been publicly reported in terms of how Epstein got into the finance business was he met Ace Greenberg through, through Greenberg's son that he was tutoring. And when, when Epstein got fired from the Dalton School, Ace Greenberg gave him a chance at Bear Stearns. And Ace Greenberg at the time had this corporate philosophy that he called the psd. Poor, smart, driven to make money, and he liked the hustler types. So he brought Jeffrey Epstein on. And Jeffrey Epstein started kind of as a junior floor trader and then quickly made his way up to a partner status at Bear Stearns, primarily running family, family in the state, accounts for tax, handling taxes and, you know, creatively using the offshore banking system in order to maximize, you know, minimize the tax liability for big family accounts. Reportedly these included big accounts like the Bronfman family and others. And it was through. And you have to remember, so this is 1976 to 1981 is this first phase of Epstein's launch of his career. And something, something very important happened in that period for, for US Geopolitics, for British, for, Israeli, for. Because this is what's happening right now. And I'll just back up to say that right now, many of these. There's a little bit of a revolution in the MAGA base under Trump as people feel like there are insufficient answers. And one of the lingering questions has been Epstein's intelligence ties. And so I'm going to sort of tell this story to sort of connect where the intelligence touch points come into this as, as, as well as his adjacent financier story. And so 1979, there were in the middle of Epstein's Bear Stearns tenure, a couple of big things happen in the world of intelligence and geopolitics. The Jimmy Carter years smashed the CIA's traditional covert action capabilities. Jimmy Carter rode to power on the back of the Church committee hearings, which was the first time that the CIA ever had congressional oversight. Frank Church famously held up the heart attack gun about how the CIA kills people with, effectively, a dart gun that makes it look like a heart attack. Everything came out from Operation Mockingbird in terms of control over the media, to Operation Chaos in terms of infiltration of student groups, to MK Ultra in terms of, you know, messing around with ways to psychologically influence people. And chains were put on the CIA in terms of its traditional covert action. Jimmy Carter fired 30% of the CIA's operation division in a single day. He. He then crippled its budget. And it was also during this time that the US suffered numerous setbacks in its foreign policy vision, most notably the loss of Iran. Iran had been a obviously massively geostrategic pivot point for pretty much most of the 20th century. It's, you know, obviously it's the second largest reserve of oil, third largest reserve of natural gas. And in 1979, there was a Islamic revolution in the country. And a lot of people in the national security space felt that that would not have happened if the CIA had had its traditional powers back. And in the background of that, there were. There were joint intelligence networks that were being formed to try to offset the cuts to the CIA. Very famously, folks can look up a group called the Safari Club, which, which was led by French intelligence, actually. But it, it swept up the Egyptians, the Moroccans, the Portuguese, and also the US And Israeli intelligence functions were junior partners on that network as well. But you essentially had the outside financiers and outside weapons dealers who were being tapped to. To informally coordinate what the CIA itself was, was banned from doing directly. So these networks were already lurking when Epstein went out on his own in 1998.
- [09:57]
Host 1
Mike, I'm just going to interrupt you very briefly just to crystallize this. So one of the things that I've learned from watching some of your stuff is essentially what you're saying is, as you're talking about now, the CIA had its wings clipped. There were certain things that it could no longer do legitimately. And so it started using the various kinds of agents, assets, contacts, etcetera, to effectively do the same things, but outside of its formal structure so that it could never be pinned on CIA itself. Is that. That's basically what you're saying, right?
- [10:29]
Mike Benz
That's exactly it. And this structure would come to a head in the biggest scandal of the Ronald Reagan White house in the 1980s. So Ronald Reagan was the US president from 1980 to 1988. And he came, he came to power essentially on the heels of the Iran hostage situation and people feeling like America was weak under Jimmy Carter. And President Reagan wanted to get the CIA's old powers back, but felt, but was hamstrung by the Democrats in Congress, who were still stinging from the revelations of the CIA targeting the Democrat party during the 1970s. And so the depth, there was a. There was a difference in foreign policy between the Republicans and Democrats in the 1980s that's quite similar to what's happening with the Democrats and Republicans having a difference over Ukraine today. And that was notably around the issue of Nicaragua, which is, you know, in Latin America. The Republicans wanted to do a regime change against Nicaragua to take out the, the Sandinista government and back a group of rebels called the Contras. But the Democrats did not want to do that. They called that, they said that that was sort of imperialist, colonialist and also the CIA should not be doing this sort of thing. And so the Democrats passed a congressional amendment that banned any U.S. government money going for the overthrow of Nicaragua. It was called the Boland Amendment. So this meant no State Department money, no pentagon money, no U.S. aid money. But the, the Ronald Reagan White House still wanted to do it. And so they, they found a very creative mechanism to do this, which is really part, this is where the Epstein story, where he's first getting his legs. So just to back up for a second, Jeffrey Epstein leaves Bear Stearns in 1980, late late 1980, early, early 1981, under circumstances that are disputed. But effectively he either left or was fired after the, after he got in trouble with alleged violations of a private securities offering. It's called Regulation D. But regardless of the circumstances of how he left Bear Stearns, he remained very close with Bear Stearns. He remained in close contact with Ace Greenberg. He was reportedly still a client of Bear Stearns Services, but he went out on his own at that point. He's 28 years old and he starts a one person consultancy from his New York apartment called Intercontinental Assets Group. And he has that company for the next 12 years, but particularly throughout the 1990s, this is his primary financial vehicle. And what he says that he does through iag, Intercontinental Assets Group is provide two adjacent services to the same function. He's his clients are high net worth individuals and governments who either want to shelter money from creditors and other governments or who want to find hidden assets of debtors who owe money to those high net worth individuals or governments. So it's basically taking advantage of the offshore banking system, the Cayman Islands, US Virgin Islands, the, you know, Jersey, the like, in order to do the same sorts of work that he would have been adjacent to when he was running family estate accounts in terms of, you know, the Bron family and the like. But he's doing this at a time when the US gets intimately involved in the Iran Contra affair. The Iran Contra affair was from effectively 1983 to 1988 and it gets its name Iran Contra, because the US did, did tried to hit two birds with one stone. The Republicans in the Ronald Reagan White House, they. The Iran Iraq war had popped off between 1980 and 1988. And the US was at, on the one hand sort of in a, in a cold war with Iran because of the 1979 revolution, but did not want Iraq to just steamroll over Iran because they had twice as many forces and there were concerns about Saddam Hussein and, and him having regional hegemony. So one way to get in with the Iranian government in order to get them to be more amenable to US foreign policy was to sell them arms against the Iraqis. But the problem was is that was illegal under international law because of an arms embargo against Iran. So what happened was in 1983, Adnan Khashoggi, who was at the time the, the largest arms dealer in the world by a large, large margin. He was at one point rumored to be the richest man in the world. He just for one weapons company alone, for example, for Lockheed Martin, he made three times more in commissions as an arms dealer for Lockheed Martin than every other commissions agent of Lockheed Martin combined. Three times more than every other arms broker on earth. And he was, he was a Saudi high net worth individual connected to the royal family. In 1983, Adnan Khashoggi travels to the US and he and the Ronald Reagan national security adviser Robert McFarland work out this creative structure in which Adnan Khashoggi would serve as a middleman between the US and Israel for US weapons to be effectively smuggled to Israel and sold to Iran. And then they skimmed the profits of the arms deal to fund the Nicaraguan Contras. So the Reagan White House thought that this would basically knock out two birds with one stone. This would advance their foreign policy in the Middle east through the weapon sales to Iran. And it would also satisfy the Bolan Amendment restrictions. It would not be US money that was, that was funding the Contras. It wouldn't be USAID money or, or official DOD money. This would just be skimmed money from a private transaction that had nothing to do with the US officially because this was all coordinated through the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency under its plausible deniability doctrine. Now at that time, Jeffrey Epstein was claiming that Adnan Khashoggi was one of his marquee clients at IAG. In 1987, Jeffrey Epstein gave an interview where he reiterated that Adnan Khashoggi was one of his main clients for his, for his IAG business. And in fact when Jeffrey Epstein's safe was raided in January 2019 by the FBI, they found they drilled a hole in his personal safe at his residence and found a series of fake Passports that Jeffrey Epstein had had throughout his life. And one of them was a passport that was, it was a fake passport. So it had his ID but it had a fake name and it was issued in 1982, expired in 1987 and it listed the residence as Saudi Arabia and it had and this p. Fake passport in the early 1980s. So again Jeffrey Epine is just now 30 years old. It was so good that he was able. There were four stamps on the passport including to Saudi Arabia, to France, to the UK and I believe to Spain. So this, this passport was so good that he got in and out of four different countries under a fake, under a fake name. But again listed the residents of Saudi Arabia where Adnan Khashoggi was and showed visits to Saudi Arabia on the stamp passport. So but at this time you have this multi intelligence agency operation that's running this. You had the US and UK interest in Iran at the time. You had the Israeli interests in Iran at the time. You had the Saudi interests in Iran at the time. So right there you've got four different sort of pools of joint intelligence work that's happening before Jeffrey Epstein's 30th birthday. Now he continues that relationship throughout the 1980s. And it's noteworthy here just to note that the primary CIA vehicle for running transportation of guns and at the time illegal narcotics. Because this was another way that US intelligence was funding the war in Nicaragua was because they couldn't get U.S. aid money. They had to work through the black market goods economy in order to fund the Contras. The Contras sat on the supply chain for illegal narcotics, especially cocaine. This gave rise to a series of scandals about alleged CIA drug running to support that war. This was, this was covered by Senator then Senator John Kerry who would in something called the Kerry Report on CIA drug running at that time. The John Kerry would then go on to be the Secretary of State and he would also run for president against George W. Bush in 2004. But as well as these were also the Gary Webb allegations. In fact the head of the CIA in 1996, John Deutch had to travel to Compton, Los Angeles to do a mea culpa to explain how it was just an isolated incident. This is not a systematic thing the CIA does. But, but the, the main transport mechanism for that was a CIA proprietary airline named Southern Air Transport, formerly Air America. This is all declassified. Everyone can look up Southern Air Transport. And it was primarily, it was, it was a CIA proprietary. This was something that was done by the CIA in the 1950s and 70s in. You don't see this very much anymore because of the reforms in the 1970s. This type of. Of subsidies, these type of subsidies will usually now come from USAID or the U.S. development Finance Corporation. You don't really see large companies being originated or birthed by the CIA anymore after the Carter reforms. But what's important about the story is that Southern Air Transport was. Was the. The bag airline for. For deposits of weapons, drugs and cash for Iran Contra for the Republicans during the 1980s. One of its. One of its bases of operations, one of its main touch points was the US Virgin Islands. It was St Thomas that it had a exemption to charter large freight to. Now the US Virgin Islands, of course, would be where Jeffrey Epstein would famously purchase his Lolita island, the famous little St. James, just two miles from St. Thomas. It's actually right across the water from it. If you want to get to Little St. James, you fly to St. Thomas, just like Southern Air Transport, and then you take a ferry across the water and you're right there. The US Virgin Islands is important because it is the money laundering. It was the money laundering front end for the CIA money laundering that was done at that time, before US Funds went to Swiss bank accounts or Panamanian offshore bank accounts. They would be run through the US Virgin Islands, which was still continental United States, but had much more lax anti money laundering and know your customer rules. And so this was a place that cash would be deposited and then, you know, into local branches in the U.S. virgin Islands and out from there. But what's very interesting is that after the Iran Contra chapter of Jeffrey Epstein's life concludes, he links up with Les Wexner, who is one of the wealthiest business.
- [22:17]
Host 1
Mike, I'm sorry to interrupt. Before you move on from that section, I just had a couple of questions about what he was actually doing. So he was he Khashoggi, who's this arms dealer, is a client of his. But what is his level of involvement in all of this? Is he actually doing things that are illicit? Is he just managing money for this guy? Is he helping these weapons shipments? What do we actually know about Epstein's involvement in this intelligence operation at this point?
- [22:43]
Host 2
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- [24:49]
Mike Benz
Hi, I'm here to pick up my son, Milo. There's no Milo here. Who picked up my son from school. Streaming only on Pico.
- [24:59]
Host 2
I'm gonna need the name of everyone.
- [25:00]
Mike Benz
That could have a connection.
- [25:01]
Host 2
You don't understand.
- [25:02]
Mike Benz
It was just the five of us. So this was all planned. What are you gonna do? I will do whatever it takes to.
- [25:09]
Host 1
Get my son back.
- [25:10]
Host 2
I honestly didn't see this coming.
- [25:11]
Mike Benz
These nice people killing each other. All her fault. A new series streaming now only on Peacock. Well, the record is unclear other than that he was moving money for them. We don't even know, for example, with Khashoggi, whether or not the the funds that he was managing for Khashoggi were related to Iran Contra or to Khashoggi's other business dealings. So in this also included he was moving money around for people in European royal families. But the Khashoggi. The Khashoggi part of the story, I think is interesting because Khashoggi was the linchpin of the Iran. He was the middleman between the US and Israel for, for the whole operation and therefore all of us, British, Saudi and Israeli security. And you know, the success of their operation depended on Kashogi. And you had, you know, Khashoggi is one of Epstein's marquee clients. But what happens at that point is 1988, the Iran Contra affair concludes. Jeffrey Epstein gets involved in the Towers Financial scandal, which was the largest Ponzi scheme that went down in flames in the US before the, the Bernie Madoff affair. This is 1989 to 1990, that Towers Financial, he gets hooked up to them through a, a British arms dealer. Doug, Doug, Doug Lees. He gets connected into that network through John Mitchell, who was the, the former Attorney General of the United States under Richard Nixon. John Mitchell went to prison during the Watergate affair. He was the, again the head of the Justice Department. So you have the Jeffrey Epstein story sort of sandwiched by Attorney Generals of the United States, the highest levels of U.S. criminal justice. John Mitchell was, from 1969 to 1972, he was the Attorney General and then he stepped down to run the Reelect Nixon campaign and then was busted as the guy who was running the political intelligence fund that funded Watergate, which was, you know, Watergate itself was a bunch of ex CIA plumbers that went in and, you know, bugged and raided the DNC headquarters. John Mitchell's was. John Mitchell was arrested for that. And then when he came out, he became a kind of wheeler dealer in this kind of underground, overground underground network. And he was who connected Epstein to Doug Lease. After Towers Financial goes down in flames, the, the CEO of Towers Financial ended up spending something like 20 years in prison. But Jeffrey Epstein skated out of that. Jeffrey Epstein then linked up with Les Wexner in Ohio. And this is sort of the period that is more, that is, that is more robustly I think discussed in, in present discourse because Les Wexner was the, was the head of the Limited, which was at the time, in the early 1990s, the largest retail chain in the United States. It was Victoria's Secret. It was, I believe, Bed Bath and Beyond. It was all of these different sort of mall retail chains, Abercrombie and Fitch. And so it was of, you know, a huge public, you know, these are all giant retail companies with, with vast logistical train chains in terms of transport and logistics. In 1991, Jeffrey Epstein gets durable power of attorney over Les Wexner's financial affairs. And this is.
- [28:59]
Host 1
Sorry again, let me pause you here for a second. I'm just trying to fill in a few blanks and obvious questions that people will have on their minds. Who is this guy? How is he jumping from one thing to another and getting all these crazy jobs and before, you know, he has power of attorney over a guy who owns the largest retail chain in America. How does this, what is he, is he, is he some kind of genius? Is he charismatic? Is he as some people are saying, like using blackmail over these people? Like what's going on? This is quite an extraordinary career.
- [29:30]
Mike Benz
Well, I think what's important to keep in mind is that he maintained close ties with the Bear Stearns network when he went out on his own at 28 years old. You wouldn't be capable of, of singularly, you know, running the, the tax affairs for some of the most high net worth, you know, individuals and, and family offices. Or why would Adnan Khashoggi, for example, you know, trust, you know, trust a 20, 29, 30 year old kid to run these affairs. The fact is, is he maintained client services at Bear Stearns. Bear Stearns was still one of the most aggressive but marquee names on Wall Street. What he, you, you enter the realm of speculation is what I'm trying to say in terms of how he was able to, you know, like Les Wexner for example, was not, was never deposed by the, by the Justice Department or, or ever really publicly answered how it was that he, or why it was that he gave power of attorney to Jeff, to Jeffrey Epstein. I can, I can speculate as you know as to the reasons. But, but, and I can either do that now or I can do that after I lay out all the facts. It might be a little bit give.
- [30:41]
Host 1
Us, and I give us a sense because I think at this point a lot of people will be going how is this guy bouncing from one like insane opportunity to the next at these young ages with right without an education, etc.
- [30:53]
Mike Benz
Well, what's noteworthy is in 1991, this is the reported, you know, time that Jeffrey Epstein links up with Ghislaine Maxwell, whose father, Robert Maxwell had, you know, just, just died. Robert Maxwell was a, a towering figure really in, in British statecraft and also quite seriously involved in the early Zionist movement in Israel and was, you know, given a very famous funeral in, in Israel with heads of state saying that, you know, that Maxwell has done more, you know, for the, for the state of Israel than can, than the story can presently be. Be told Maxwell ran a big publishing house and was a billionaire, was highly influential in British statecraft affairs as well as with many touch points to the Israeli.
- [31:46]
Host 2
Sorry, Mike, there's something that I want to ask you here and then we'll get back to it, but this is a point on Robert Maxwell. There's a lot of people and I'm told a lot of credible evidence that says that Maxwell was heavily involved with Mossad. Is this true?
- [32:01]
Mike Benz
Well, there's, there's so much smoke there that it's again like when you look at the state funeral held for Robert Maxwell where you have all the senior heads of state. I mean essentially Robert Maxwell was a guy who, you know, helped in the founding of Israel itself. He started off in I think Czechoslovakia under the Iron Curtain and then fled, fled to the UK and then helped run guns to the, the, the Stern Gang and the early Zionist movement, as you know, during the period of the creation of Israel itself. And what's, what's considered, what's interesting about that is just how, how fascinating that dovetails with Jeffrey Epstein's own work himself. Again, Iran Contra was a situation of gun running to two different countries in a cover was weapon sales to Iran and gun smuggling to the Contras in Nicaragua. And then you would see this, this repeated in, in the dealings with Doug Lesie again how he or Doug Leas, how he was actually, you know, he himself was a major British arms dealer. So you have this kind of COVID military logistics pipeline. And this also is, are some of Epstein's closest relationships with the government of Israel that have these adjacencies to Robert Maxwell's. Like for example, 43 times it was reported that, that Ehud Barak the met with Jeffrey Epstein and stayed at Jeffrey Epstein's home. These are 43 reported times that this happened. Ahud Barak was the, the Prime Minister of Israel, but he was also the Defense Minister of Israel. So he was the head of the Israeli military before he was Prime Minister and Defense Minister. Ehud Barak was the head of the Amman. That's Israeli military intelligence. That's actually the, the largest of the Israeli military, of the intelligence agencies. You have the Amman, which is the military intelligence. You have the Mossad and then you have Shin Beth. This is sort of the equivalent of the nsa, the CIA and the FBI. And so in Ehud Barak before that had been the, the commander of Israel's most elite covert military special operations force. And so this is the guy that, that is tightly connected to Epstein. You know, again, over 40 reported meetings HUD Barak is staying at Jeffrey Epstein's house. But this is again connected to the military establishment just as Iran Contra was a military affair, just as what Robert Maxwell was doing between British and Israeli intelligence was military. And so, you know, this is, this is another part of this, this story is that as, so as Epstein links up with the Maxwell family in the early 1990s, you have this period of turmoil in the 1990s. Bill Clinton was became president in January 1993 and 17 times on the White House visitor logs Jeffrey Epstein visits the Bill Clinton White House. So and this is also in the late 1990s, it should be noted, is when Ehud Barak was the prime minister of Israel. So you have this go. This guy who's got high level dealings with the highest level of the US Government and the highest levels of the Israeli government. Now we don't know what they talked about in these meetings. We don't know, you know, if, if Epstein was, you know, just bringing coffee to the White House to talk with, with Bill Clinton and his National Security Council. But, but the fact is is this was also a period of considerable turmoil in, in Middle east affairs. You have you know, the, the Camp David and, and Oslok, you have the, many of these U. S. Israeli economic integration zones that are set up by Bill Clinton in order to try to bring security as well as economic development to both partner countries as they try to try to solve many of the flare ups that were happening in the Middle East. But it's, but at this time, the main asset that Epstein appears to be able to bring to the table is that he's very close with the. What's reported to be the highest net worth individual in the state of Ohio. Leslie Wexner, who was the head of this giant retail conglomerate, the Limited. Now it's a, it's very curious as to how someone gets durable power of, of attorney over such a far flung international business empire. There's. Now this is where we enter again the realm of, of speculation in one reason to assign durable power of, of attorney to somebody other than yourself. Durable power of attorney means you have a, a static ability to sign documents on somebody else's behalf and they are then legally obligated. This is something that's often assigned, for example, when somebody is 80, 90 years old or they're on their deathbed but their transactions. You're not transferring equity to them to somebody else, but they are effectively running your affairs. Now. You know, Wexner was, you know, healthy and, and there's, there's no reason to do this, other than the. I should say there are very few reasons to do this other than the kind of legal protection that you get by being able to maintain plausible deniability that if somebody else signed something under durable power of attorney that, that you did not agree to that. And so because you're not the authorized signatory at that point, when that happens, you can claim, for example, if someone was involved in an illegal, illegal weapons purchase or some sort of business fraud, that it would be your, the person who executed the contract who would be legally liable for that. So many speculate that the reason for this is that Jeffrey Epstein was in very deep with these international high net worth figures as a financier and a go, but a middleman between different governments and that Wexner, and he sort of came to Wexner vetted and Wexner then assigned durable power of attorney to him for, for Wexner's international business affairs. Now what's very interesting about this.
- [38:28]
Host 2
Can I just pause you there, Mike. So what you've just explained and the entire trajectory so far of Epstein's career, that to me seems like something out of a movie, neither plausible nor realistic. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I'm going surely like this is CIA, isn't it? Isn't it? I mean, how else has this man been able to do all of these things?
- [38:55]
Mike Benz
Well, it's really not that crazy. I mean, so, so first of all, I do agree with that assessment that, that Epstein. Now the. Can I just make one more sort of factual thing about this because.
- [39:08]
Host 2
And then come back to my question.
- [39:09]
Mike Benz
The CIA story I think is a, is a very important one. And it's one of these things that they're very actionable things that the Attorney General Pam Bondi can do to get answers to that. And the failure to pursue those has made this question I think linger in MAGA world. And one of the things that I've been trying to advocate for is, you know, transparency measures. So we can put this to bed to sort of quiet. I think a lot of the satisfy. I think a lot of the concerns that have popped up on, in domestic US politics on this. But what happens in 1994 is Southern Air Transport, if you remember the exact CI proprietary airline, proprietary meaning it belongs to. It was created by, it was run directly by the Central Intelligence agency. When the CIA used to do that sort of thing in the 1950s to the 1970s. Today that money would come from USAID or the Delta and Finance Corporation or these other sources. But when, when Southern Air Transport got in trouble over Iran Contra. It moved its base of operations from Miami because Miami was the major transit point because it touched the U. S. Virgin Islands, it touched Colombia, Nicaragua, Guatemala. It was, you know, the nearest flight path. When Southern Air Transport's business essentially ran out after Iran Contra, it moved in 1994 to Columbus, Ohio, which was exactly where Jeffrey Epstein was domiciled with his, with, with his residence there. It's exactly where the Limited was headquartered. It's exactly where Les Wexner, you know, owned the largest residence in the, in the state of Ohio. It was in Columbus, Ohio. The head of the Ohio Development Development Office for, for Franklin county where Frank where Columbus resides, gave juiced this big tax incentive deal for Southern Air Transport to. To move to Columbus, Ohio again Epstein and Wexner's hometown. And it was specifically to service the Limited. And this again is. These are statements on the record from the head of the development office of Franklin county that Southern Air Transport moved from Miami where it was transiting guns and drugs and cash for the Central Intelligence Agency. It moved while directly to Columbus, Ohio specifically to service the exact business conglomerate that Jeffrey Epstein had durable power of attorney over running. And so, you know, there is this curious kind of, you know, anecdote here where I don't think you and I could just negotiate the transfer of a CIA proprietary airline, you know, to service our lemonade stand if we, if we set it up now. Now the, the argument was because the Limited was the world. Was the country's largest retail chain at the time. It had very serious charter flight and logistics needs in order to, you know, do the logistics from Columbus, Ohio where the flagship was, to all the supply chains around the world. What's notable is it was around this time that, that the Limited started buying up sporting goods stores which sell guns and hunting equipment. It actually, in 1994, the Limited bought one of the. One of the largest. Bought six branches in Ohio of one of the largest gun stores. Now of course this is not unusual in intelligence work. This is what happened in Operation Fast and Furious for example, which took down the Attorney General Eric Holder under the Obama administration. If folks remember 2012 to 2014, there was a, a famous CIA gun running operation. Well, it was technically run by the FBI and atf, but it was approved at the interagency level, meaning approved by the White House interagency, the CIA, State Department, the National Security Council. And these were a ser. A ring of gun stores in Arizona and parts of Texas that were running guns to the Sinaloa Cartel. A narco trafficking cartel in Mexico ostensibly for that cartel to do battle with another cartel called the Zetas who were stealing oil from pipelines that ExxonMobil and Chevron had partnerships with. Pemex, the, the main state oil company in Mexico at the time. The US couldn't just go in and bomb Mexico to take out a narco cartel there. The only way to stop the problem of US companies being robbed by one narco gang was to build up another gang in the country to take them out themselves. And so that of course had blowback on, on the US intelligence state when one of those guns was used to kill a US border agent. And then those guns were traced to those very gun stores. And then Eric Holder famously was held in contempt of Congress for failing to, for stonewalling Congress about the, the, effectively the intelligence ties and how deep they went in that operation. So Eric Holder was then ejected from, from the Attorney General's office. I mean you see these same types of things I guess is what I'm trying to communicate here with John Mitchell and Bill Barr around jumping on the grenade. But so, so at the same time the Limited is buying up these gun stores in Ohio. They get the CIA's gun running airline to go directly to Columbus Ohio. It should be noted that five years earlier Jeffrey Epstein when he was at Towers Financial, the Ponzi scheme I mentioned, one of the companies they made a play at to purchase was Pan Am Pan American Airlines who was not a CI proprietary but was one of the commercial branches that the CIA frequently used for commercial cover in during the Vietnam War era and earlier. So this is not a CIA proprietary, but Jeffrey Epstein seemed to have a thing for purchasing airlines that were logistics for intelligence hubs. And then in 1998 Southern Air Transport folds up in October 1998 on the very day that the CIA comes clean on the Iran Contra scandal. That again, the CIA in the late 1990s was under a lot of pressure, particularly from the black community in America because of the disclosures from Gary Webb around, around CIA narco trafficking with Southern Air Transport. This was the same time that John Deutsch, the CIA director traveled to Los Angeles to speak to the black community about apologizing effectively for those operations that put crack cocaine on the streets of of Miami and la. But on the very day that the CIA concedes Southern Air Transport's role in weapons and guns dealing is the very day that Southern Air Transport declares bankruptcy and cuts off operations in, in Columbus, Ohio. At this point Epstein appears to move into his third Phase So you can think of it as phase one is he's sort of a, a scrappy kid who's willing to take chances are on fin on murky financial dealings and is sort of the long arm of the Bear Stearns network for, for work that touches high net worth individuals, family offices and governments around sensitive geopolitical operations. And then you have sort of the Les Wexner period where he is running, you know, this kind of vast retail chain and running the money and finances for that. And then he sort of enters this statecraft and philanthropy period around Bill Clinton and the, the Clinton Foundation. So in, so after Bill Clinton leaves office in the late 1990s, Jeffrey Epstein flies Bill Clinton around to Africa in these various African development initiatives that were done in 2002. For example, Bill Clinton flies on Jeffrey Epstein's jet and flies around publicly with Jeffrey Epstein for an HIV AIDS humanitarian relief tour. On that, on that as well was Bono and I think Chris Tucker. And that very year Bill Clinton starts the Clinton foundation which would then spawn the Clinton Global Initiative which would boomerang back on US Politics in a big way with its various scandals during the 2016 election cycle. But Jeffrey Epstein's attorney testified in, in court that Bill Clinton was a co founder of the Clinton Global Initiative and pitched the idea of it to Bill Clinton. Now the Clintons have not either confirmed or denied that, but the fact is is the Epstein, you know, estate felt that that was such a, such a noteworthy thing to, to mention that they, you know, that, that you know, there's testimony under penalty of perjury that, that Epstein helped set up the Clinton Global Initiative. And of course this would be a international philanthropy. Pools of tens of millions of dollars that connected world leaders for joint philanthropic efforts that also dovetailed with statecraft initiatives happening at that time. This is a, this was, this was a frequent cover, for example for, for intelligence work. After the 19, the reforms of the 1970s, much of this work moved into USAID and private philanthropies. And it's around this time also that Epstein is deepening his ties with high level figures in, in his Israeli statecraft as well as in, in with the British royal family. It's Jeffrey Epstein goes in on a deal, for example with Ehud Barak to purchase shares in in Carbine, a major, you know, technology and surveillance firm. But you, you have. And then of course, but a lot of this came to a halt in 2006 when Jeffrey Epstein was indicted the first time. I, I should note a few other notables before I talk about this 2006 event, which is really what we're living in the aftermath of. Jeffrey Epstein was was also many of these networks, the Les Wexner networks as well as the Leon Black Networks. Leon Black was the the CEO of Apollo. Apollo is one of the largest investment firms in New York. It's got tens of billions of dollars of assets under management. I think about $500 billion of assets under management. Leon Black, the head of it personally paid Jeffrey Epstein $170 million for you have so called tax advice and restructuring.
- [49:49]
Host 2
Hang on a second. Sorry.
- [49:51]
Host 1
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Mike Benz
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- [51:52]
Host 2
There are times when you're telling this story, Mike, that I'M going, okay, that sounds plausible. That sounds plausible. And then he goes $170 million for tax. I mean, if that's the case, shouldn't we all become tax advisors?
- [52:08]
Mike Benz
Well, of course the, you know, being the tax advisor in that way is about creative structuring. If there were things that Apollo Management was doing as a, as a kind of liquid middleman for various, various deals that could have been brokered, you know, internationally. Because a lot of what hedge funds or a lot of what private equity funds and alternative asset managers do is, you know, they are, they're moving in these illiquid assets that then become very easy fronts for, for money laundering through the debt schemes that, that they do. Like a lot of ways that the, that for example, the CIA structures these money laundering operations as, as, as debt instruments, as these complex loans, back to back loans between different banks or different portfolio companies in, in a common, in a common fund. And then you simply never pay back the money. And so it's effectively the bank ends up going bankrupt or the asset ends up going under. This is what happened with bcci, the big CIA bank that Adnan Khashoggi was heavily involved in that got in a lot of trouble in, in the 1980s during the Iran Contra affair because it was the CIA's sort of primary banking house for the Iran Contra operation. But just to just to I guess bring, bring this back a little bit the, in in 2006 because the Leon Black Jeffrey Epstein affair is noteworthy particularly because it happened after the first indictment and the first indictment of Jeffrey Epstein, which is being re litigated right now in the United States is happened started in 2006 and at this time Epstein's dealings with a lot of these networks ended up getting fractured because people don't want to really do business with them anymore. After the allegations in 2006, for example, this is around when Donald Trump sort of severed ties with Epstein when these allegations.
- [54:09]
Host 1
Mike, can you give us some details on that indictment? What is he indicted for? What are the accusations? What is it that's being revealed to the public at this time point?
- [54:17]
Mike Benz
Right, so in 2006 after, after dozens of reports from local families in Florida, Jeffrey Epstein ends up getting indicted by the state, the Florida state prosecutor for effectively prostitution and, and trafficking of women for, for sexual acts. And the, the state, the state prosecutors end up watering down the charges brought against Epstein after some sort of mercurial moves are reportedly made by Epstein's defense lawyers. And at that point the FBI and and federal Justice Department moves in on Epstein and says, okay, well we're going to actually make this a much more substantial case. And so that's when the underage, you know, child sex trafficking charges start to come in. And in May 2007, the, the lead prosecutor at, at the Justice Department, Maria Villanueva as well as the FBI are prepared. They prepare a 60 count federal indictment, 82 pages worth of charges and they alert the head of the Justice Department in Miami at the time, a guy named Alex Acosta, that they are going to the the FBI is going to arrest Jeffrey Epstein the following week in May 2007 while he was in the US Virgin Islands judging a beauty pageant at the time. This is May 2007, the FBI is ready to go. They've got the, you know, this massive indictment and they're ready to make the formal arrest when Alex Acosta, according to the Justice Department's own investigation of this in 2020 stops, stops the, the arrest and says, no, you're going to observe the chain of command here. You're not going to arrest Jeffrey Epstein until I say you can. I'm going to meet with Epstein's defense counsel first. And at this point Alex Acosta effectively takes over the Epstein investigation and then cuts a sweetheart deal for Jeffrey Epstein in which Jeffrey Epstein they effectively drop the criminal charges at the federal level in for Epstein to agree to the state level charges and plead guilty to them and get a year and a half in prison where effectively for the, the last six months of that, Epstein can walk in and out of the prison to do his own kind of business dealings. So basically gets a sweetheart deal where they, he, the, the whole federal charges end up getting dropped for Epstein to plead guilty to the state level ones and he's completely, you know, free and clear within two years despite this massive, I mean it's been reported in the Glenn Maxwell trial, for example, it was about a thousand women who were, who were trafficked in this and so to only and many of them underage. So to have effectively under two years of prison for that and then be back out on the streets was seen as the sweetheart deal of the century. And it was very unusual the way it was cut because Acosta cut the process, the lead prosecutors out of, out of the plea negotiations and he also cut the victims. So the victims, this is highly unusual in a plea deal of this kind. The victims had no say in the, the Justice Department didn't even ask whether or not the victims were okay with that, you know, as. But the details of this plea deal were never known until 2018, when the Miami Herald, one of the big mainstream news outlets in Miami, reported the details of this plea deal. And the Miami Herald began, became, began investigating this because it was in 2017, 2018, when Alex Acosta would go to be a Cabinet member. He was this, he was the Secretary of Labor for the Trump administration, which is a cabinet level position. It's the, the head of the Department of Labor, which, which is, which is effectively the touch point between the federal government and unions. Unions, as we noted, are, are one of the ways that logistics are done for intelligence work and also have many touch points with organized crime. But the fact is, Alex Acosta went from running this, you know, Miami Justice Department office to being elevated to sitting in the Cabinet meetings and being, you know, the highest person for all things labor in the US Federal government. So Miami Herald begins digging into this and gets a hold of this secret plea deal and publishes its contents as. And so Alex Acosta is having to deal with the scandal for the Trump administration. In February 2019, the Justice Department launches an internal investigation into the contents of the plea deal and whether or not it was on the up and up. And then five months later, in July 2019, Jeffrey Epstein is indicted for a second time with much more extensive charges. He's indicted on July 6, 2019, and then on July 9. So just three days later, July 9, 2019, a bombshell was published which we are living in, the aftermath of, which is Vicki Ward, who is, you know, a prolific investigative journalist at the time for the Daily Beast, publishes a piece saying that Trump transition officials spoke with her and told her that when Alex Acosta was being interviewed by the Trump administration for the Department of Labor job, he was asked by the Trump transition team if the Epstein plea deal was going to cause embarrassment to the Trump administration. And why did you cut this plea deal? And what the Trump transition officials told Vicki Ward is that when Acosta was asked that question, he replied at that time in that interview that he was told to back off Intelligence, back off Epstein, because Epstein belonged to Intelligence and to leave it alone because it was above his pay grade. And that was the reason he cut the sweetheart deal.
- [60:18]
Host 1
Told by whom?
- [60:20]
Mike Benz
This, we don't know. This, we don't know. And this is one of the lingering questions for the, for, for the Justice Department today to answer, because that was July 9, 2019. The very next day, Alex Acosta is under the gun. Now he is being attacked by the, by the, by the media. He's eventually going to resign over this, over this affair and stepped down as Secretary of Labor. But the very next day, Jeffrey Alex Acosta gives a one hour media press briefing to answer questions from the media about the Epstein plea deal. And the very last question, you can look this up on YouTube. It's Alex Acosta's July 10, 2019 press conference. He's asked by a reporter, I believe, from Reuters, whether or not there was any truth to what was published the very day before by the Daily Beast that he cut the plea deal to Alex Acosta because he cut the plea deal to Jeffrey Epstein because Epstein belonged to intelligence. And Alex Acosta kind of shuffles nervously and says, I am not allowed to answer that question because of ethics rules by the Justice Department. So don't believe everything that you read in the media. But I can neither confirm nor deny. Richard Lardner from The Associated Press. Mr. Secretary, were you ever made aware.
- [61:38]
Host 2
At any point your handling of this.
- [61:40]
Mike Benz
Case if Mr. Epstein was an intelligence asset of some sort?
- [61:47]
Host 2
So there has been reporting to that effect. And let me say there's been reporting to a lot of effects in this case, not just now, but over the years. And again, I would, you know, I would hesitate to take this reporting as fact. This was a case that was brought by our office. It was brought based on the facts. And I look at that reporting and others, I can't address it directly because of our guidelines, but I can tell you that a lot of reporting is.
- [62:23]
Mike Benz
Just going down rabbit holes. So this sort of set US Media in a tizzy. What possible reason could Alex Acosta have to not answer whether or not this whole affair can be attributed to something much bigger than just child sex trafficking or prostitution, but that this was actually sanctioned by U.S. intelligence agencies or potentially international intelligence agencies. We don't know what intelligence branch that was. And the fact that Alex Acosta, when asked publicly by mainstream media reporters, didn't even deny that that's what he said, you know. But now, arguably you could argue that because of the Justice Department Office of Professional Responsibility investigation that specifically about the plea deal, that Alex Acosta was bound by some ethics guidelines related that, that to not jeopardize the, the ongoing investigation of the Justice Department. But this had been a cold case for 11 years at that point. That case was already over in 2008. And in previous questions in that same press conference, Alex Acosta would cite, and everyone could go back and look this up on YouTube. He would, he would preface things by saying, well, I can't answer that question directly because of, because of the ongoing Justice Department investigation, but let me Try to answer your question from a different angle. He would use phrases like that to try to give more information about other things. But on this he was totally mum. And so, so there's been no public statement from Acosta on this million dollar question. All we have is what came out in the OPR report, the Office of Professional Responsibility report, when in November 2020, which was, which happened two weeks after Trump lost the election. So this report took 21 months for the Justice Department to write. It was a review of the plea deal that Alex Acosta struck in order to decide whether or not discipline disciplinary action should be meted out on Alex Acosta and his and his associates for violating Justice Department protocol. You know, what they ultimately found is that it was unseemly and it did not perfectly observe Justice Department protocol, but they would not be pursuing disciplinary charges. That was what came out of that. Now it was a 348 page report, a 21 month investigation. And the only reference to asking Acosta about the intelligence question was a single footnote on page 169. It's, it's footnote 244 where OPR writes, we asked Alex Acosta if he had any knowledge about Epstein being an intelligence asset. Direct, quote, and Epstein and Acosta said, quote, the answer is no. Now, now there's a lot of problems with, with this. First of all, the way they teed up the idea of an intelligence asset in the report is that there were rumors that Acosta was an FBI informant be and was providing informant testimony to the FBI covertly as the FBI was investigating the collapse of Bear Stearns because Bear Stearns and Jeffrey Epstein were Acosta or Epstein. Mike, you said Acost that, that, that Epstein was, was an FBI informant. And so, so in the 348 page report they say there were rumors that that lenience was cut by Alex Acosta because Epstein, there were media reports that Epstein was an FBI informant in the FBI's Bear Stearns probe. And this is very common. One of the ways to get your sentencing cut down or to get a, a plea deal on favorable terms is to become an informant for the FBI, who's the investigative arm of the Justice Department. And so what, you know, even within what Acosta was seen as denying, it did not appear to be CIA or international intelligence. The other part of it is they use the word asset, which is a very limited term in this sense. Most, most figures who act as fiduciary go betweens financial middlemen for the CIA in covert action are not given, you know, 201 human intelligence asset files. They are not considered assets in a classical or technical sense. They are not recruited by, by the CIA. They are, they are not beholden to, they are not salaried by it. So, for example, if you look at figures like Bruce Rapaport or Mark Rich or I, there's. I did a study of it.
- [67:15]
Host 1
What you're saying, Mike, just to save people, all the details, is essentially he, Alex Acosta can deny that he's a CIA asset, but at the same time, he could be somebody that the CIA works with. Right, right. And that denial is a technical use of the term asset. And if he's just somebody that they used as a go between, he might be somebody that they use, but he wouldn't be labeled an asset. And that's, that's what you're trying to explain.
- [67:40]
Mike Benz
Right. And they never published the transcript. Again, this is in, in a single footnote on one page. You know, this is completely buried. Now. The media reported this as being, okay, Acosta walked back the statements that, that Epstein was, you know, belonged to Intelligence. But, but what's very curious about this is even in the footnote of this report, it doesn't say what question they even asked Acosta. Like, there's. They quote Acosta as saying the answer is no, but they don't even quote their own question. And so, you know, and this is another thing. If somebody asked me a question and the answer is no to something, I'll typically say no. If I, if I say the answer is no, you've usually worked me up to it. Like I might say, well, I don't know, it might be yes, it might be no. I heard that he belonged to Intelligence, but I didn't know for sure. So how do you want me to answer that question? Well, only answer this question if you have firsthand knowledge that you were shown, you know, a document or. Okay, well, in that case, the answer is no. You could see it going like that and then it being dangled out as only reporting the, you know, the 44 line quote. But the fact is, is at that time, OPR reports directly, the Office of Professional Responsibility conducting this investigation reports directly to the, to the Attorney General of the United States. It's an independent branch of the Justice Department that doesn't have all these bureaucratic layers. It reports directly to the Attorney General. The Attorney General was Bill Barr, who, again, father was CIA, who recruited Jeffrey Epstein, who he, who Bill Barr himself started his career in the CIA, was a CIA lawyer. He was referred to by the New York Times as the COVID up general of Iran Contra itself. When, when, when Bill Barr was the CIA lawyer during Iran Contra and then pardoned everyone involved while he was the Attorney General the first time. This is the last person that you would expect. I mean, Bill Barr should have been conflicted out of that until that entire investigation because of his own history in that exact network. But that was who was shaping the OPR report. And what I'm saying is Pam Bondi could answer this question for us right now because she's the Attorney General and OPR reports to her that report was only, was less than five years ago. She can go directly to the OPR office. She can pull the transcript of what OPR investigators asked Alex Acosta about Epstein's ties. She can publish that for the public and we can see exactly what was asked about the intelligence ties. We can see that transcript and see did, did they ask about, you know, did it go the way. For example. I just posited that it might have that I, it's impossible for me to believe that they asked a single question about that, given that it was what Alex Acosta resigned over and given that this media reporting dominated the, an entire year's worth of election cycle dialogue in 2020 about Epstein's intelligence ties. In that question itself, you would have had traffic from the Central Intelligence Agency's Office of General Counsel who would have coordinated with, with the Office of Professional Responsibility in order to run that question down. What came out in the CIA name trace? All this information can be made public if the Justice Department wants to provide an answer. And, and Pam Bondi was asked this question at a White House press briefing just two weeks ago where Pam Bondi was asked, did you, Was Epstein an intelligence asset? And then it was again, that's the wrong question. As I see it, you're going to want to run a broader sweep because most, most of the time these sort of financial middlemen are not formal assets. But Pam Bondi was stopped by President Trump when she got asked that question. Trump then leapt in and said, pam, you don't need to answer that. Why are we talking about Epstein? And then he said, well, listen, if you want to answer it, you can, but you don't have to. And Pam Bondi then turns back to the questioner and says, I don't know the answer to that. We're going to try to run it down. I'll revert to you. But, but look, a CIA name trace only takes two weeks to get the results of. This is something.
- [71:58]
Host 1
Okay, Mike, so what's going on. Why? What is, why would President Trump interfere in this information coming to light?
- [72:06]
Mike Benz
Well, there's lots of reasons that, and I've been a very vocal Trump supporter. You know, I think that it's been a phenomenal presidency in terms of so many different policies that the admin has been able to get through. But you know, the Epstein one is a very sensitive one for, for pretty obvious reasons. The fact is, is Jeffrey Epstein so, so Trump's concern that he stated is that if you publish the list and we still don't know exactly what that is, there's a little black book that was that the Justice Department held up during the Ghislaine Maxwell trial, but that is under seal. You, the Justice Department has said there's no other client list. But the fact is there's many of these documents that would implicate Epstein's business dealings with many other people. It doesn't necessarily mean they were involved in a child sex trafficking ring, but it's still embarrassing to be seen as doing business with someone who is indicted that way. The fact is, is there are many, many people around Trump world who were doing business with Epstein for many, many years. And I'll run through a short list of this now before I do. It's worth noting that, that Trump himself in February 2015. Everyone can look this up in YouTube, in CPAC, the, you know, Republican, you know, conservative action network that's highly influential in US Republican politics. In February 2015, when Trump was first considering running for office, he said to Sean Hannity at cpac, he was asked his opinion of Bill Clinton. And Trump says, Bill Clinton, nice guy, but I think he's gonna have a little problem with a little guy named Jeffrey Epstein and his famous island. Bill Clinton, nice guy. Got a lot of problems coming up, in my opinion, with the famous island with Jeffrey Epstein, a lot of problems.
- [73:59]
Host 2
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- [75:36]
Mike Benz
And so Trump back in 2015 was sort of using the Epstein connections to Bill Clinton as a kind of sword against the Democrat nexus. And of course you know, Trump was running against Hillary Clinton for president. But Trump world itself is deeply interlaced in this. As I mentioned this, the Epstein story goes back to much of the the Republican nexus around Iranian foreign policy from the 1980s. Many of these senior figures from Iran Contra, like Ellie, like Elliot Abrams and many others were involved. They went from the Reagan White house in the 1980s to the Trump White House, you know, running high level policy in, in 2016. Many of Trump's donors come from that world. You have I, I mentioned Leon Black, a Trump donor who was the head of Apollo Management, one of the biggest, most powerful, you know, funds on Wall street, was a Trump donor, was a Trump VIP at the inauguration, a kind of gadfly figure at Mar? A Lago. Leon Black as I mentioned gave $170 million to Jeffrey Epstein I believe it was in 2013-2015. This was, this was after Epstein had been indicted and was a, you know, was a chat, was a sexual predator, you know, formally with a predator alert. Whatever neighborhood he moved to, he was a formerly indicted sexual predator at the time that Leon Black was doing, you know, giving him $170 million. Leon Black's son Ben Black is now in charge of the Development Finance Corporation, which is the exact place that was involved in many of these scandals from the 1980s. It was in the the so called Iraq Gate, the Iraq oil pipeline scandal of the Reagan administration when once again the Reagan administration used an Israeli middleman for an, for a U.S. statecraft initiative. This was the case where the U.S. iraq and Jordan wanted to have Bechtel, a major U.S. engineering firm, construct a billion doll pipeline from, from Iraq through Jordan so that U.S. u.S. Business interests would take advantage of Iraqi oil rather than it going to the, the Soviets. But they were afraid that Israel might bomb the pipeline because it was right in their face and Israel wasn't getting any cut of it. And so the, the Central Intelligence Agency by way of the national security council in 1988 hired a, a Swiss financier with deep ties to the government of Israel named, named Bruce Rapaport. And again these Swiss bank accounts is also how Jeffrey Epstein was, was, was running his, his affairs. But Bruce Rapaport was engaged because of his connections to the Israeli defense sector and his closeness with Shimon Perez, the Israeli President and the head of the Labor Party. Just like Jeffrey Epstein was close with Ahud Barak, the head of the Israeli Labor Party and Prime Minister at the time. 90s. But Bruce Rapaport was the, you know, the formal conduit in order to secure a guarantee from the Israeli government not to bomb the pipeline. And he secretly negotiated a 30% cut for the Israeli government, you know, in that. And but Bruce Rapaport by the way it should be noted when all this came to light and a special prosecutor was, was stood up to investigate the, the US Justice Department head Ed Misa over this. Bruce Rapaport did not have a 201 file there. There, there was a CIA dossier on him. There was a CIA goet that were setting up the financing. But they said Bruce Rapaport is a contact but he's not an asset. So we don't. So initially they stonewalled the investigation and refused to turn over files to the Development Finance Corporation because at the time what happened was the National Security Council wanted the Development Finance Corporation which again today is run by the son of Leon Black Epstein's biggest client. They wanted the Development Finance Corporation to put up $400 million to, to finance this pipeline, to subsidize it. But the Development Finance Corporation said we don't want to do that. This money could go to nothing. Israel is, this is right in Israel's face. It's going to, they're going to, they're going to sabotage this pipeline. Why would they allow this to run right over their border? And the National Security Council said put up the money and shut up. They said well why are we doing business with this guy Bruce Rapaport? This guy's got an extremely checkered past his allegations of fraud. The Development Finance Corporation queries the CIA for a name trace on Bruce Rapaport. The CIA spits back nothing but public news clippings but the. So the CIA hides from, from the Development Finance Corporation that actually they were doing business with Bruce Rapaport and that they had a whole dossier about Bruce Rapoport's ties to the Israeli government. And this all came out because of a special prosecutor probe. But what I'm saying is, is in that case, you once again have four different governments, the U.S. israel, Iraq, Jordan, and you have. And at the time, they didn't want to make public the US Government support for this deal because it cut Turkey out of the money. So they didn't. They wanted Bechtel to construct this pipeline. They wanted the consent of the Iraqis, the Jordanians and the Israelis, but they didn't want the State Department to acknowledge it. So they couldn't tell the Development Finance Corporation, which is U.S. government agency, that they were supporting this deal. They just wanted it financed. They wanted it to happen on its own, but then to covertly push it in the background. And so again, but that was the Development Finance Corporation today that's being run by the head that the son of Leon Black, Howard Lutnick also, you know, has reported connections to this as well, because, you know, his residence, you know, he was basically Epstein's neighbor and there were some strange financings around that. But again, that doesn't mean that, you know. No. Lutnick, of course, was the head of.
- [81:55]
Host 2
You know, can I just stop you there? Because you, what you painted is a very, very detailed picture of all these people who stand to lose significant status, reputation, possibly criminal charges of all of this thing. These things come out. If we look at Elon's tweet, how much of that do you think is accurate? Where Elon basically said Trump's mentioned on the Epstein files, that's the reason it's not going to be released. Sayonara and goodbye.
- [82:31]
Mike Benz
Well, I, I don't think that Trump was involved in, you know, any, any underage prostitution or even prostitution or, or anything illegal about, about the Epstein network. But, but you, you do have these ties. I mean, I'll give you, give you just some, the historical record of this. So I, I mentioned that 1987, Jeffrey Epstein bragged to the, you know, one of his top clients was Adnan khashoggi, the, the CIA's middleman for, for Iran Contra. Adnan Khashoggi at the time was one of the richest men in the world. Adnan khashoggi owned an $86 million yacht. Trump purchased that yacht in 1989. It's. He's, he's been connected to this network. I'll give you another one is if you look at the flight logs from the 1990s, I had a birthday party about, about a month ago where one of the guests at my birthday party brought the, the famous binder for influencers that was handed out by Pam Bondi which contained the flight log records. And I skimmed through the flight logs of this, this is a pub. This was shot handed out this only a couple months ago that this, this thing was. Well you can, in those flight logs Donald Trump's name is mentioned probably two or three times. So he flew on Jeffrey Epstein's planes in the 1990s. Now that, now again this doesn't mean that you know, Donald Trump was involved in some sort of child prostitution ring, but Jeffrey Epstein was the money guy at the time. Jeffrey Epstein was had power of attorney over Les Wexner's entire estate. Les Wexner is a, is a giant benefactor in Republican politics. You know, very influential in the whole Ohio politics region. Jim Jordan, the, you know, highly influential head of the House Judiciary Committee is an Ohio guy. Vivek Ramaswamy is, you know, apparently running for, for office in Ohio. These, these are networks that go to the, the highest levels of Republican power. They also go to the highest levels of Republican foreign policy, especially vis a vision Iran and you know, the, the U.S. you know, the Iran foreign policy issue is one of the major pivot points that distinguished Trump world from Obama world. If you look at so, so you have this, this complicated relationship where on the one hand Epstein is, is intimately involved in the Clintons and the anti Trump side of the Israeli government who Barak for example was very close with with West Exec, which was the essentially the government in waiting for the Biden foreign policy team. This is where Avril Haines and Samantha Power and, and Tony Blinken were all you know, kind of parked in this consultancy firm that effectively did in the private sector what they were doing for the Obama State Department and ODNI and White House and then they all got senior placements in the Biden administration and UHUD Barak was a, was a consultant for them while he was meeting constantly with Epstein. You also have the fact that Ahud Barack is, is one of Netanyahu's chief opponents in Israeli politics. You have Netanyahu in the Likud Party. You have this kind of war going on between the, the labor side and the Likud side in Israel. And so in, in the present day incarnation of Epstein world, it seems to be Trump's enemies. And I think that's probably what Trump was alluding to in 2015 when he used that Epstein connection as a sword against Clinton. But historically speaking, Epstein really started off much more on the Republican side and with these GOP networks. And so it looks like basically around the Clinton era, In the late 90s, early 2000s, Epstein really started teaming up more with the Democrats. But you still have these connections throughout, you know, about 20 different high level members of Trump world. And I think Trump's point on this is that he was initially leaning into the disclosures and then I think he got startled. And I don't know whether someone in, you know, Trump donors or personal friends leaned on him to do this, whether or not part of that concern came from the national security community. But effectively, I think his, his stated answer for not wanting to do maximal disclosures is he said if you put these names out, it's going to go out without context and the media never reports context and so it'll all be out of context. And I don't think he's wrong about that. I mean, you take the Leon Black situation, for example. I've mentioned that a couple times here because Leon Black is a, a powerful figure in, in conservative politics and, and you know, has a, you know, is like I said, a family placement at a high level, you know, Trump world thing. That doesn't mean Leon Black was, you know, involved in anything illegal. He's, you know, his stated, you know, reason was that he, he thought that Epstein told him it was a one off thing and that he was a, a new man now and he'd never do it again. But the fact is, is like if, if publications come out, for example, about Howard Lutnick and, and the like, doesn't mean Lutnick is involved in that. Trump himself flew on Epstein's jet and you know, reportedly had Epstein at Mar A Lago several times before he kicked him out of the club. It doesn't mean that he's involved in that. But you get tainted by association. And so I think that the levels of association are deeper than what the Trump White House wants to let on. But there's so much that's come out publicly that it's hard to make this go away.
- [88:23]
Host 2
Well, it's not just hard to make it go away, Mike. I posit to you that it's impossible to make it go away. And this is the biggest challenge that Trump has faced so far in his presidency. This is bigger than Elon, this is bigger than the war in Iran. This is bigger than the fallout with the tech. Right. And Vivek and all of that. I mean, this is really serious. You're looking at the Wall Street Journal running that story. You're looking at, you know, some of the things that Trump has said.
- [88:52]
Host 1
And look, Francis, maybe just let's pause on that story, shall we? Because it's one thing we haven't fully addressed, but the story alleges, and it's kind of interestingly written because on the one hand it sounds kind of plausible, on the other hand, it is secondhand information. They say that according to a person with knowledge. So they themselves have not seen this for one of the Jeffrey Epstein's, I think it was his 50th, maybe one of his birthdays. Ghislaine Maxwell arranged for a bunch of powerful influential people to send in various notes for him. And according to this report, somebody with knowledge of this said that Donald Trump sent in a letter which had a kind of suggestive image of a woman with rather a strange kind of message about, you know, we have a shared secret and all of this sort of stuff. And immediately a bunch of people came out, very high level, which to me was quite significant. Right. Because if the story is just bs, you often don't, you don't even acknowledge it. JD Vance, President Trump himself, I think. And they all said, well, I've never drawn a picture. Someone immediately showed a picture that he drew of something. Right. I've never used the word enigma. Again, this video of him using that word. Right? All of these things and you're kind of going, what's going on here? Is this, is this real? Because if it is, that message is kind of weird, Mike.
- [90:16]
Host 2
All right, bit of an unexpected one for you, but this actually got my attention the other day. I was scrolling online and came across this video from none other than Chuck Norris. Yes, that Chuck Norris. He's in his 80s now, and according to him, he still feels like he's in his 50s. And honestly, watching it, I could believe it. The video goes through three specific foods he says you should avoid, like the plague, and a few other things he's doing to keep in shape and stay sharp. I was skeptical at first, but the stuff he suggests is genuinely simple and actually makes a lot of sense. If you're interested in health, energy or just curious what Chuck Norris swears by at 80 plus, this is worth your time. Watch the video now@chuckdefense.com trigger that's chuck defense.com/trigger. And we put the link in the description below to make it easy.
- [91:13]
Mike Benz
Right. And it Was, I mean, Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against his formerly close ally Rupert Murdoch, you know, over this. It's just a huge amount of, of money. Immediately. Now, now, you know, reportedly this was entered the way the Wall Street Journal got a hold of this was because of a Justice Department exhibit, I believe in the Glenn Maxwell trial that was, that was leaked. And so the, so the Wall Street Journal said, well listen, we're just publishing what the Justice Department itself did. And I don't know that the truth or falsity of it, but you can certainly, I think the speed at which the, the Trump train moved legally on this speaks to the, you know, perceived vulnerability around it. And you know, that's, this is an issue that is tearing the base apart. Not in a way that I think will make people who are pro Trump anti Trump, because I think that there's so much goodwill there. But there are all these unanswered questions and I think everyone can see because of the proximity of the Epstein network to the, to the highest levels of power on both sides of, of the US Political aisle, be they the Reagan administration, the Clinton administration, the Trump administration, as well as other, you know, international governments, you, I think everyone has been excited about these disclosures and that it would kind of give a blueprint about many of the shadow elements of the administration of power that ordinary laypeople are just not privy to. They're not a member of the billionaire hedge fund class, they're not a member of high level governments. But that by getting the disclosures around Epstein, you would be able to sort of peer through the veil. And this was something that was teased and ran on by Trump in 2015, by J.D. vance on the campaign trail in 2024, by Pam Bondi, Cash Patel, Dan Bongino, and I think to when, when the big man himself, Trump echoes. Why are we still talking about Epstein? I'm not going to do a special prosecutor, which he's come out and said now he has signaled that he supports on unsealing grand jury indictment evidence. And to, to their credit, Pam Bondi did file that motion. But the problem is, is there's enough smoke. There's not enough smoke to say exactly what the fire is, but there is so much smoke that you can't ignore the possibility, you can't ignore that there is some sort of fire there. Whether that is from the Trump donor world network, whether that's from the intelligence community thing. And this gets back to, you know, so when you talk about the intelligence side of this, you know, in my view, I mean, I see what people obviously see about Epstein from all the different, different linkages. And in my view, I actually think it would be better to put that to bed by simply publishing it because I think that the conspiracy theories that will abound about it will be worse than what it actually is. And, and the fact is, is like you see all these touch points, for example, there is a, there's a big part of the Trump base that is just, that is they're in bed together, but they are sort of bound in bed together because of political necessity. You have these kind of domestic focused America first folks who want to America to invest in its own infrastructure and its own education and wants out of kind of financial and geopolitical entanglements in foreign wars and the like. And you also have a kind of international foreign policy class who likes Trump for his foreign policy dealings, who likes Trump, for example, for his policies on maximalists against Iran. Both the Obama and Biden administrations were seen as, you know, brokering, you know, the, a pro Iran network from the Iran deal that was struck by, by Barack Obama. This is what bound Israel and Saudi Arabia together because by, by allowing Iran to have sanctions relief and export oil and gas, it could then pump up the, you know, Hezbollah and the Houthis and Hamas with tens of billions of dollars worth of, of exports. And then you also had the Saudi network which was, which was, which is vehemently against the Iran deal together with Israel because Iran being able to export all this oil and gas would undermine the Saud, you know, the Saudi hegemony in the, in the region over oil and gas. And so this is what gave rise to the Abraham Accords. And this is also what put both Saudi and Israeli government interests behind Trump against Obama, Clinton and Biden. And so you have this kind of foreign policy focus and this domestic policy focus in the MAGA camp where the, the foreign policy side of Trump world needs the MAGA base for the votes and the MAGA base needs the Trump foreign policy world for the money and the institutional clout. And I don't think either of them can win an election without the other. If you don't have the base that turns out for the votes, then you're going to end up with an Iran deal. You're going to end up, you know, with the foreign policy that isolates Israel from, you know, from the Biden, Biden administration and Obama administration. And if you don't have the, if you push it too far the other direction and you don't account for the sentiment of the MAGA base, you're not gonna have the votes, so you're going to end up with Democrats and you know, the sort of Iran based foreign policy. So, so both of them need each other and they're both, I think at loggerheads over this because they're lingering issues about the intelligence side of what Epstein appeared to be involved in. The fact is, when you look at the Ace Greenberg networks, the Edgar Bronfin networks, the Adnan Khashoggi networks, the Leslie Wexner networks, the Ahud Barack networks, the Robert Maxwell networks, every single step in the link of this chain from the, from the time Epstein was 25 years old till the day that he died, ran straight through this nexus of US, Israeli, Saudi, as well as, you know, sort of Western European intelligence agencies. And it's, and it's, or at least government affairs that connected them to, you know, to, to the money side of that. And so I think people are looking at this moment and there, there's, I think that they are kind of presuming like, like a lot of what you'll hear is like, you know, Epstein was this high level, you know, Mossad agent and that he, he was effectively blackmailing, you know, high level US politicians on behalf of Israel and this sort of thing. And I think that, that people look at that because they see what appears to be, you know, the, the guts, if you will, of a potential blackmail scheme given the, you know, the underage girls and the video equipment and the like, and the fact that the Justice Department has kind of satisfied on a lot of that or said that they won't be publishing it to protect the victims. And so none of the names have come out. And as I see it, you know, what you have here, something which is still a monumental scandal if indeed the plea deal was cut to protect Epstein because he was a, a node in this network. But something that is much more ordinary course, insofar as how the intelligence angle relates to this, which is that, you know, this is, this is how business is done even in these situations. You don't know whether or not it was an asset or an agent. I would not expect it to be an agent. You don't know who was the junior or senior partner in any of these. It's very. So one of the things that happens in these kind of statecraft operations is you have junior and senior partners, for example, in the, in the Safari club network that ran through Bear Stearns and ran through this 1970s Iran and you know, foreign policy network that was primarily led by French intelligence. And then you had junior partners from the US and Israel. Now of course, Epstein would go on to have a residence in France. One of the women who supplied, one of the high level guys who supplied women to him was Jean Luc Brunel, who himself died mysteriously in prison while he was under investigation. You have these, you know, French connections around the Epstein network. You also have, for example, the, with Iran itself. You know, Iran was, you know, obviously the 1953. The US participated in a regime change operation through Kermit Roosevelt to install the Shah. But this was also largely a British led in, you know, operation where it was Anglo British Petroleum that was being nationalized at the time that, you know, led to that series of events. And so you have, you know, you, to the extent that you have, you know, US and Israeli participation in that affair, you could argue that it was a senior British role in it. For example, if you look at things like Iran Contra, that was primarily a US intelligence operation where the Israelis played a junior partner in the deal. You have, you know, the case of, you know, the Iraqi oil pipeline that I mentioned 1988. Once again, that's primarily US intelligence and you do have an Israeli intelligence touchpoint. But again it's in a junior role. It was initially a US intelligence idea. They needed a broker to the highest levels of the Israeli defense and statecraft sphere in order to negotiate that. You don't know in any particular Epstein dealing who's senior and who's junior on these things. And, and I would prefer that the records simply come out. And I see this as being one of these things where losses loom larger than gains. There's more market instability when you don't, when there's uncertainty than then when there's certainty and things are simply priced in. And so I think that what's been done to date has been an attempt to kind of blame other governments in power for not disclosing this and using that as campaign talking point. But then once you're in power simply sitting on everything and the fact is, is they're just very easy answers that we can get without having to do a whole, you know, we don't need to spend four years on this issue. There's, there's a number of disclosures that can be made immediately, as I mentioned, the results of a CIA name trace. You don't, you're not able to subpoena the British government or the Saudi government or the Israeli government, but you can publish what's in the CIA files or, or you know, to the extent that you have a special prosecutor who, or, or some sort of Justice Department investigation that makes this public. You know, through a Justice Department investigation, you can get the Alex Acosta transcript so that we know at least what the Justice Department asked the, the guy who cut the sweetheart deal about the intelligence question. But I think right now people are assuming the worst about the Epstein story that are like, that the US Government is totally controlled through this blackmail nexus that's got, you know, foreign. And the fact is, is at this point, it's so far gone that I think you're going to have depressed voter turnout in 2026 from a lot of people who are going to hear all these things and not really know how, you know, the, the statecraft works. And there are easy things the Justice Department can do that it isn't. And people are going to see, say, well, hey, this was easy to get. You didn't do it, because there's something in there you don't want us to see. And so I think that you can. There's a way to do this that kind of would be best for the administration and best for the American public. That, that, that for whatever reason is not being pursued right now.
- [103:35]
Host 2
I think, you know, sometimes, Mike, there happens to be an issue which covers and triggers your fam, your, Your base, and it covers every single point. And I think Epstein for the MAGA base is that issue, which is why it's so toxic for Trump. Trump talked about draining the swamp. I mean, you can't get any more fucking swamp than this, can you? Number one. Number two, there's the abuse of underage girls, particularly when a lot of MAGA sort of the earth working Christian people, they quite rightly find that abhorrent. When Trump came to power, he was, you know, he spoke about this, he used it as a sword against other people. The dismissive way that he is in on social media, attacked the base. And also lastly as well, I mean it, just by refusing to deal with it, you're refusing to deal with a cancer.
- [104:42]
Mike Benz
Yeah.
- [104:43]
Host 2
And it's only going to grow. So you either deal with the cancer or you let it engulf your party and your reputation. Is that an unfair assessment of what Trump is dealing with now?
- [104:55]
Mike Benz
I think that's spot on. And Trump is in an unusual place because there's so much love for Trump from the base. I mean, we watched this guy get A. Get 91 felonies, you know, on totally BS grounds. The first president to ever be arrested, indicted, have a mug shot. We were all there through that, you know, we were there when he got shot in the face. You know, it was, we were there when he got spied on by the Central Intelligence Agency and who placed spies in his campaign in 2016. We were there through the FBI special. There's so much love for Trump and we're so used to seeing him be attacked on pernicious, illegal or immoral or unjustified grounds. And I think Trump is used to having the base be dogmatic and persistent in defending him against alleged scandals that are non scandals. And this is one of the first times that Trump is kind of on the receiving end of that same kind of persistence and aggression that it feels like has been trained into the MAGA movement. And it's, it's very, it's very. You can see how Trump is between a rock and a hard place here because depending on what exactly is motivating the, I mean, it could be coming from the donor world, it could be coming from his personal friends, it could be coming from foreign governments who don't, whose own operations are wrapped up in this and don't want disclosures. You know, it could be coming from the high finance world, from current business partners. But Trump has been just kind of screaming about this and even using some pretty strong language like saying that he doesn't want the, that there's a portion of the base who support. He doesn't even want this. This was embedded into one of his, his truth last week. I don't think he really means that. But, but I, I think you're exactly right on, on that. But Trump has, has a weird way of being able to surf these things. And you know, they, that saying, you know, post through the scandal, just keep posting through it. You know, Trump, remember Trump in 2016 had one of these major scandals that no one thought would, would go away. When you know, this was the famous grab them by the blank thing with the, the, the CBS tape. And everyone thought, oh, this is going to dog him the rest of his life. I mean, when's the last time you heard that thing? So it is possible that Trump can simply post his way through this.
- [107:25]
Host 2
Surely this is, look, that was a cross lewd off the cuff comment made, which, you know, sometimes men say those types of things. Fine, not, not ideal as we would say in Britain with our casual, with our sense of understatement. But this is something very, very different.
- [107:44]
Host 1
And the big difference is that was all the people that already hated Trump attack Trump attacking him. This is his own side now going after him really well.
- [107:53]
Mike Benz
Because when you don't have an investigation, even though you are the only. Because Trump, Trump and the, and Trump's Attorney general, these are, these are the only people that we, the people can petition for answers on this. Otherwise, we have to come up with our own. And if you had the Internet come up with its own answers, they're going to come up with something as, you know, extremely wild. And, and the issue is, is if it was less wild than what the Internet thinks up, then you would think that the Justice Department would give those answers. And their failure to do so leaves the base with either, you know, trusting what they read on the Internet, which is. Which given everything Epstein was involved in, you know, a billionaire financier, connected the highest levels of Wall street, multiple, you know, multiple powerful world governments, both sides of the political aisle, presidents on both sides, attorney generals spanning back 50 years. You have. Your people are going to invent their own Epstein's story unless there's an official one. And the only people who can provide the official one are the people we just elected in this past election who ran on giving us the official story by having the Justice Department do an investigation and unseal everything, make available all the, everything that was behind the curtain of the Justice Department of the Central Intelligence Agency, of the FBI, of, of, you know, international intrigues. The only, of the only official biographer of the Epstein story who can tell this with any completion is the Trump government that we elected who told us they were going to do this. So in the absence of an official biography, the Internet has to invent one. And that is going to. As years and years go by, that story is not going to get any less fantastical. And it does not. That story that's being written by the Internet does not look good for Trump world. The best thing they can do is come clean and rip the band aid off, tell us exactly who Jeffrey Epstein was.
- [110:08]
Host 1
Mike, it's been a pleasure. We could talk for hours. In fact, we have talked for hours. We've got some questions from our audience that we'll put to you from them on our substack. Before we do that, what's the one thing about this entire thing that no one is talking about and should be?
- [110:25]
Mike Benz
I think it's the Alex Acosta transcript at opr. The fact is, is it when you look at something like CIA stonewalling the files, which is a very, very common thing, I've, I've even had, you know, meetings around this with, with folks in government about just how, how difficult it is to get files from the Central Intelligence Agency when they don't want to show you something. There's lots of bureaucratic tricks. I mentioned this in the Bruce Rapaport case where they stonewalled, you know, even, even official requests until it was yanked out of them under threat of criminal punishment by the Justice Department. In this case, Pam Bondi could walk down the hallway to the Office of Professional Responsibility. There was a 21 month investigation about Epstein's intelligence ties that was already done by the Justice Department. And the fact that all of the files around that investigation are still under seal at the Justice Department is, Is not right. That is something we have a right to know. And it's so easy to do. It's not going to require sifting through four decades of CIA, you know, financial transactions. It's not something that you can blame anybody else for. It reports directly to the Justice Department. I think that everybody needs to demand this. And Pam Bondi, the next time there's a microphone, you know, interface, you know, at a podium, needs to be asked, did you retrieve the Alex ACOSTA transcript from November 2020 that specifically asked Alex Acosta about Jeffrey Epstein's intelligence ties? And if you haven't asked for it, why not? It? It's the office that reports directly to you. And if you have asked for it, when are you going to make that document public?
- [112:14]
Host 2
Mike, it's been an absolute pleasure. Make sure to head over to our substack where we carry on this very interesting conversation.
- [112:23]
Host 1
Early in Trump's current term, the Kremlin sanctioned media inexplicably released naked pictures of Melania Trump. Do you believe that this photo release and the recent Epson Ferrari are connected.