Charlie Kirk’s assassination diverted attention from some of the most odious and embarrassing episodes of Trumpies engaged in the Epstein coverup. While Donald Trump orchestrated a national mourning spectacle for the TPUSA founder, his toadies were out in shifty-eyed overtime on Capitol Hill, parroting the brazen “nothing to see here” message.
We know that Trump judiciary officials deployed a thousand FBI agents – a veritable Roman legion – to flag the Trump name in the hundreds of thousands of pages of Epstein case files. And yet, at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, FBI Director Kash Patel embarrassed himself, dodging repeated direct questions about how many times Trump’s name is in the files, and whether he told Attorney General Pam Bondi that Trump’s name was in the Justice Department's Epstein files.
K$H, as Patel brands his Trumpy merch, insultingly claimed he had seen no “credible evidence” that any man other than Epstein had sex with his trafficked victims – despite the many public statements and courtroom testimony from those women.
He then stonewalled a House Committee hearing at which Republican Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie grilled him about the men believed to have been recipients of Epstein’s trafficked girls.
“According to victims, these documents in your possession, detail at least 20 men, including [Jes] Staley, CEO Barclays Bank, who Jeffrey Epstein trafficked victims to,” Massie said. “That list includes 19 over individuals, one Hollywood producer worth a few hundred million dollars. One very prominent banker, one high profile government official, one high profile former politician, one owner of a car company in Italy, one rock star, one magician, at least six billionaires including a billionaire from Canada. We know these people exist in the FBI files.”
K$H had nothing to add.
Also over at the House, former Trump Labor Secretary Alex Acosta, the Miami federal prosecutor who ignominiously signed off on the cushy Florida Epstein plea deal, claimed to a closed-door Oversight Committee hearing that je ne regrette pas any of it.
Perhaps he will someday revise that sentiment. It’s clear that Trump’s Manhattan running buddy and fellow “modelizer” was empowered to globalize his sick business after the Acosta slap on the wrist.
Here at the Freakshow, we’ve found a cache of previously unreported global Epstein travel records, with a curious pattern: In the years 2010 to 2014, right after his laughably brief jail stint, Epstein was jetting back and forth to Istanbul, then back to the US, frequently stopping at his tropical hideaway, which he’d made his official residence. Records from Customs and Border Protection show Epstein flying his private jet into and out of Istanbul 64 times during that four-year period, often landing at St. Thomas only to turn around and make another round trip to Istanbul the very next day.
The source for all this is in CBP records here.
Weirdly, these documents are in the public domain only because of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by Epstein’s own lawyer in July 2013, after Epstein had already been making regular trips in and out of Istanbul for two years. Was Jeff checking his tracks? (Epstein lawyer Darren Indyke has not replied to email or phone messages about this FOIA. If he does, we will update.)
More often than not, the records indicate female passengers were also on these flights. But their names are redacted. So many questions. Why Istanbul? Why always the private jet to Istanbul, when he flew commercial to Paris and London? Had the supply of underprivileged American girls run dry or had soliciting them gotten too risky after the plea deal?
Regrets-free Alex Acosta, in concert with Epstein’s A-Team of the best American defense lawyers money could buy, released Epstein into the wild in 2009. Instead of facing potential decades in prison, he spent 13 months of his 19-month sentence in the private wing of a Palm Beach jail, and was allowed to go home to his “office” by day. Once freed, he went on to fraternize with some of the most powerful men on the planet (we will have more on his relations with Vladimir Putin and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak in the next installment of The Trump-Epstein Files). And he would globalize his business, using multiple Russian banks to process payments related to sex trafficking.
The Trump-Epstein story isn’t going anywhere – as much as the administration would like to divert our attention with authoritarian threats to dissenters. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), has attached a request for thousands of Epstein-related documents at the Treasury to the National Defense Authorization bill, which Congress rarely if ever fails to pass. (More on this in a riveting new report by my COURIER colleague Camaron Stevenson.)
In a recent statement about these records, Wyden stated: “Treasury’s Epstein file details 4,725 wire transfers… adding up to nearly $1.1 billion flowing in and out of just ONE of Mr. Epstein’s bank accounts. If you ask me, that is more than 4,000 potential lines of investigation right there. Hundreds of millions more flowed through other accounts – that is even a lot more to investigate.”
Epstein’s private jet jaunts into and out of Istanbul coincide with a period when Turkey – Türkiye as it’s now more commonly spelled – and Istanbul specifically, was becoming a key transit point for trafficking in and out of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.
According to a State Department report published by the UNHCR in 2014:
Turkey is a source, destination, and transit country for women, men, and children subjected to sex trafficking and forced labor. Trafficking victims identified in Turkey are from Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Bangladesh, Belarus, Bulgaria, Moldova, Ukraine, Russia, Syria, and Morocco… Foreign victims are offered cleaning and childcare jobs in Turkey and, upon arrival, traffickers confiscate their passports and force them into prostitution in hotels, discos, and homes. Turkish women are subjected to sex trafficking within the country and in Western Europe, including Germany and Belgium. Traffickers increasingly use psychological coercion, threats, and debt bondage to compel victims into sex trafficking… Displaced Syrian, Afghan, and Iraqi nationals are increasingly vulnerable to trafficking in Turkey.
The dry language of that report just hints at a chain of pain and trauma, of course. Stateless people on the run, looking for a better life, tricked and trafficked, without passports or guides to lead them out of hell, and running into rich, sly predator Jeff. Their names will likely never be known to us. One hopes that someday their collective memory haunts Epstein’s surviving pals, including Trump, and all of the posthumous enablers working so hard to make everyone forget.
“A lot of the women and girls he targeted came from Russia, Belarus, Turkey and Turkmenistan,” Wyden stated. “You shudder to think about the kinds of people who must have been involved in trafficking these women and girls out of those countries and into Epstein’s web of abuse.”
Nina Burleigh is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.
Reprinted with permission from American Freak Show.
