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New Documents Renew Scrutiny Of Billionaire Leon Black And Epstein's Recruiters

New Documents Renew Scrutiny Of Billionaire Leon Black And Epstein's Recruiters

The Indy 500 is zipping around our capital, but the wheels of American justice are slow. Attorney General Todd “Boy Cohn” Blanche – with the help of FBI agents flagging documents with the acronym POTUS for special review – has thrown enough roadblocks into the Epstein Files Transparency Act to defend his boss for now.

Maybe not for long, since a judge is threatening him with contempt of court.

And at least one other powerful man is feeling the heat.

That man is Epstein’s biggest “tax client,” master of the universe and Wall Street billionaire Leon Black, whose lawyers and fortune have managed to shield him from accusations, responsibility and questions for years. His imperial impunity may finally be reaching its limit, at least at the congressional level, where the House Oversight Committee is threatening to hold him in contempt of Congress if he continues to refuse to turn over nondisclosure agreements.

Earlier this summer, when the NDA issue came up, Black stalked out of the Oversight Committee with his phalanx of lawyers. The Committee has been hashing out next steps with them ever since and has apparently ran out of patience: Black is now threatened with a contempt citation next week.

“If Mr. Black refuses to provide the Committee with responsive documents or refuses to appear for his scheduled deposition on September 3, 2026, the Committee will use all tools at its disposal, including contempt,” Comer said in a letter to Black’s lawyers.

Black was Epstein’s biggest known client, having paid him about $170 million, according to Senate Finance Committee ranking member Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR). Black has said the money was for “tax and estate planning,” and documents in the files indicate that Epstein was indeed involved in his financial life.

But there are also plenty of communications between the two men – or between Epstein and his recruiters referencing Black – to suggest that their relationship edged in the direction of Epstein’s side business trafficking women, and is worth further investigation.

We covered Black’s involvement with two of Epstein’s Russian recruiters in a Freakshow last month. And now, in newly discovered communications, we see Victoria Housez telling Epstein that an office space she was looking at for her “scouting” business with trafficker and spy Daniel Siad would be a place where “Leon” “can feel comfortable.”

Black has specifically denied to the Oversight Committee that he knew anything about the sex trafficking operation until Epstein was arrested at Teterboro stepping off his private jet: “With the benefit of hindsight, I now know -- as does the world -- that Epstein was engaged in horrific, sordid activities. I feel terrible for Epstein’s victims. I want to state clearly that I did not know about this nefarious activity until Epstein was charged with trafficking in July 2019.”

But we have discovered previously unreported messages between Black and the global sex trafficker that suggest otherwise. Their communications are filled with Epstein’s innuendo about his real business.

In August 2017, Black and Epstein had the following exchange:

Leon: “You OK? Hopefully not overexerting …”

Jeff: “Home tonight. Did you see mickey mouse as the sorcerers apprentice. Fantasia . Overwhelmed bu what he wished for [sic]”

Leon: ???

Jeff: You used to be able to understand when you were younger! Soooo many new

A year later, in August 2018, they shared another exchange, this one with casually racist undertones.

A few hours later, Black replied, prompting Epstein to explicitly mention “photos.”

And then there are the photos themselves.

We have uncovered previously unpublished photos of girls that Epstein sent to Black without explanation. One thing we know from Epstein’s communications with recruiters is that he was avidly collecting – often demanding – pictures of potential marketable women and children.

A reasonable person might assume that the recipient of the images Epstein sent without comment was at least dimly aware of the sender’s habit of (at the very least) collecting photos of young women to share with his friends.

Below are some examples of photos Epstein shot into Black’s phone or inbox.

He sent this one in August 2011, four days after the first exchange between Epstein and recruiter Victoria Housez mentioning Leon Black:

In July 2016, on Black’s 65th birthday (for which Black’s wife Debra had solicited a story for a birthday book), Epstein sent the below photo, unlabeled, off to Leon personally:

Epstein sent the following image to Black in November 2016, apparently taken while Epstein was in Saudi Arabia visiting MBS on the eve of the 2016 election. An hour earlier, Jeff had texted Norwegian diplomat Terje Rød-Larsen: “I’m in Riyadh,” and later sent Terje a photo of himself laughing with MBS. (Michael Wolff has said that Epstein told him he smuggled “girls” disguised as flight attendants into Saudi Arabia – a serious crime there.)

The above photo appears in the same thread in the DOJ files as two screenshots related to Jared Kushner and a photo of Leon Black at the US Open with Jared and Ivanka.

Black, who claims his relationship was entirely businesslike, also appears in the files making milkshakes with Epstein’s redacted “assistants.”

Just good clean fun.

Throughout these newly unearthed communications, Black not only seems to be a friend of Epstein’s – he explicitly calls him “friend” and even “dear friend.”

“Happy New Year my friend!!!” he wrote Epstein during the Jewish holidays in 2018.

Black told the committee he decided to give Epstein a “second chance” but now regrets it: “I did know that Epstein pleaded guilty in June 2008 to State charges relating to prostitution involving a minor. Epstein had told me that it was an isolated incident resulting from a fake ID. Five years after his conviction, I gave Epstein a second chance, as did many others. I wish I had not.”

In fact, he was giving Epstein a second chance quite a bit sooner than that. As we reported last month, an Epstein recruiter named Irina Chernova – who ultimately became a recipient of Black’s largesse – planned to accompany Black in 2009 to visit Epstein while Epstein was still under house arrest for his Palm Beach conviction.

In the email arranging the visit, Chernova said she would also bring at least one [redacted] girl; Epstein replied that he would “talk to Leon” about the visit and says [redacted] “can bring her sister or friend” (apparently some new girls Epstein had not yet met).

Like Trump, Black is in the infamous 50th birthday book, with a sexually insinuating note. He called Epstein “dear friend,” and signed it “love and kisses, Leon.”

When the committee pressed him on those effusions, he said, “Friendship is an amorphous term … We were never best friends. Was I friendly with him from the point of view of enjoying his Rolodex? Yes. Did I think he was very smart as a professional adviser? Yes.”

Black was also dismissive about the significance of his family foundation, which he appointed Epstein to run. “I don’t think that entity did a whole lot,” he said.

Depends on your definition of “whole lot,” apparently.

In just the five years between 2000 and 2005, IRS 990 forms filed by the Leon Black Family Foundation show that it donated over $19 million to at least 41 different organizations. During that period, the forms list Epstein as the foundation’s only director other than Leon Black and his wife.

Time will tell whether Black’s lawyers can keep running interference between the Wall Street whale and Republican-led Congressional committee. Team Black, picking up the refrain from Epstein’s other non-friend friend, Donald, calls it a “witch hunt.”

But whatever happens, there are ominous signals here for Epstein’s old buddy, the Predator-in-Chief.

In his letter to Black’s lawyers threatening contempt, Comer described the investigative “scope and intent” in terms that should put both Todd Blanche and Donald Trump on notice.

The scope includes:

(i) the alleged mismanagement of the federal government’s investigation into Mr. Jeffrey Epstein and Ms. Ghislaine Maxwell, (ii) the circumstances and subsequent investigations of Mr. Epstein’s death, (iii) the operation of sex-trafficking rings and ways for the federal government to effectively combat them, (iv) ways in which Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell sought to curry favor and exercise influence to protect their illegal activities, and (v) potential violations of ethics rules related to elected officials.

The Oversight Committee chairman (a Tennessee Republican, remember) also made clear that NDAs, documents Trump relied on to shut people down throughout his career, are not ironclad against the eyes of the law. At long last, the legally binding, lip-zipping bribes that wealthy predators use to silence victims and witnesses might be subject to some legislative oversight or restriction.

Comer wrote:

Mr. Epstein, and his associates, used a variety of tools to control his victims and other individuals in his orbit. The Committee is aware that Mr. Epstein used non-disclosure agreements to silence his associates, some of whom have since come forward as victims and survivors of his abuse … The Committee is also aware of the existence of at least one non-disclosure agreement between your client and a woman who was connected to Mr. Epstein. The pursuit of this investigative pathway––and relevant facts surrounding it––is necessary to determine the nature and extent to which Mr. Epstein and his associates used these confidential agreements, which in turn will help determine whether legislation is necessary and if so, how to craft such legislation to prevent such activity from reoccurring.

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.

Katie Chenoweth is associate professor of French at Princeton University and an investigative researcher

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow

barron trump

How Trumpworld Turned Tates' Rape Propaganda Into A Business Model

Now that the Brits have charged Andrew and Tristan Tate and their long criminal history is out in the open and undeniable, Trumpworld wants to slither away from its old pals. But it can’t hide those long-standing ties to the pimp-pornographer rape cheerleaders for very long. The brothers are integral to the larger Trump Predators’ Ball: No White House in American history has been so packed with, or allied with, men accused of domestic violence, roofie rape, infidelity and pedophile protection.

For years, the Trump team has cynically nurtured and profited from its connection to the Tates – to the detriment of American women’s health and safety, and with quantifiable political and economic gain.

As we wrote last week, Barron Trump could and should be subpoenaed by the House Oversight Committee. He is widely credited as the link that brought the Tates and their blinkered, insecure younger male followers into Trump’s orbit. Men under 30 swung toward Trump by 15 to 20 percentage points in 2024.

But Barron is hardly the only Trumpworld character with Tate ties who should be hauled in. And the family’s relationship with them isn’t just political. Don Jr. – back in his weak-chinned, pre-beard days – first invited Andrew Tate to Mar-a-Lago in 2017.

As Tate has described it, the bromance started online and ended up with him inside Trump Tower for four hours, meeting Big Daddy himself.

“I followed [Don Jr.]. He followed me back. I DM’d him and said, ‘You guys are literally the heroes of the West.’”

Tate soon began tweeting support for Trump, with his signature brand of enthusiastic profanity (the n-word).

Now remember, at that point, Andrew Tate was already promoting sex trafficking online and teaching young men how to do it. He appeared on livestreams bragging about emotionally manipulating vulnerable women into sex work (much like his predecessor Epstein) and beating them to keep them in line. He was running a super creepy subscription-only “War Room” that would be exposed as a cultish sex-trafficking op.

But “creator” Andrew Tate was going to be useful for far more than just fluffing the bros. He would soon be making the Trump family and its allies money.

The Tate-Trumpworld connection lives inside a parallel economy that builds an audience and enriches itself – literally – off a sewer of misogynistic propaganda and trafficked women.

Why would Don Jr. and the self-described “patriotic capitalists” behind 1789 Capital (including Chris Buskirk and billionaire spawn Rebekah Mercer) want rape-promoting dirtbags like the Tates in their investment portfolios?

One reason, of course, is political. The Trump 2024 strategy was to juice and inflame male resentment over MeToo and DEI, redirecting their grievances (that should have been aimed at the financialized titans laughing at them all the way to the bank) toward women.

In an interview with Vanity Fair last week, Tate lawyer Joseph McBride – whose ignominious client list includes NXIVM cult leader Keith Raniere, Alex Bruesewitz, and a pigpen of J6 rioters – warned that “if Trump doesn’t support him, and if the next people who are going to be running for office potentially are just like, ‘Yeah, down the river he goes,’ that young cohort of people will break with the Republican Party in the next election.”

But the other reason – perhaps the more important one in the long run – is cash.

By 2022, Meta had banned Tate, YouTube had removed him, and TikTok was suppressing him and related content. That left millions of Tate followers with nowhere to go. Trumpworld didn’t simply hand him a microphone. It built an economy around the audience he brought with him.

Junior was an early investor in the right wing media platform Rumble (like Peter Thiel and JD Vance, who had invested in 2021). He soon banked himself a $7 million multi-year contract to platform his “Triggered” podcast. In late summer 2022 (right before now-Commerce Secretary and Trump pal Howard Lutnick took it public), Rumble reportedly gave the Tates a $6 million contract (Andrew claims it was $9 million) to produce five days a week of programming after they had been deplatformed almost everywhere else.

What influencer could possibly be worth that kind of money? Even Tucker Carlson, freshly booted out of Fox in 2023, couldn’t resist flying to Romania for a two-and-a-half hour interview (in a previous shorter interview on Fox, he had allowed Tate to get away with lying that he had not been criminally charged). The show was Carlson’s first post-Fox interview and has reportedly been viewed 110 million times.

To put that in venture-capital terms: Tate isn’t just content – he is a customer acquisition channel.

The Tates delivered millions of highly engaged viewers to Rumble after being banned or restricted on mainstream platforms. Rumble monetizes through ads, branded campaigns, “premium” subscriptions and livestream revenue, all areas where the Tates generated value. Even just a small percentage of Tate followers creating Rumble accounts and subscribing to Premium would have been lucrative.

Former Bank of America banker Omeed Malik invested alongside Don Jr. in Rumble before forming 1789 Capital, a fund explicitly created to support businesses in the “anti-woke economy.” Its founders – people from the Trump political donor network – see strategic value in platforms like Rumble, Truth Social and PublicSquare as distribution networks for politically useful dirtballs like the Tates.

Malik – surprise! – has had his own problems with women. An allegation of workplace harassment (which he denied) is probably the defining point of both his financial and political career.

Of course, 1789 Capital has also invested big money in Tate ecosystem allies, including, a few months after his big Tate interview, Carlson’s digital media company, Last Country, Inc. The financiers also invested in Happy Dad hard seltzer, the principal consumer brand of Tate ecosystem node and Nelk Boys founder Kyle Forgeard. Forgeard is another social media meathead with ultrawhite veneers and a key cross-promoter of the Tates. He and other performative Neanderthals endlessly fluff one another through livestreams, podcasts, and exclusive clubbing at places like Executive Branch in Georgetown.

Besides the Tates, the crew includes people such as Alex Bruesewitz (the media strategist behind Trump’s most racist and offensive Truth Social memes), the Full Send Podcast, and Justin Waller, a Deep South version of the Tates sometimes called their “third brother,” who is also credited with connecting Andrew to Barron Trump.

Beyond Junior’s investment, Trump Media purchases cloud, video, advertising and infrastructure services from Rumble in a “wide-ranging” technology partnership.

The Trump family benefits in other ways too. Andrew Tate has promoted and traded their World Liberty Financial token. He steered millions of his gullible crypto-obsessed followers toward the Trump crypto business, even though he himself lost around $67,500 while shilling for it. Later reporting calculated that his overall crypto losses were close to $1 million, much of it tied to the WLFI token.

But whether Tate made or lost money is beside the point. He repeatedly directed his millions of followers toward a Trump-family financial product.

Another point of affinity between Trumpists and the Tates is a sense of victimhood and shared scorn for legal norms. Trump’s own felonious history needs no recounting here, but even Chris Buskirk, aforementioned 1789 founder, has a sketchy record. According to Reuters, court records show that “between 2011 and 2015, Buskirk and his wife were sued at least 11 times over unpaid debts – by business partners, debt collection companies, their dry cleaner, and others.”

Do the real victims in this sick game – American women – have any recourse? A functioning civil society would offer some route to legal retribution. Impunity for a similar large-scale propaganda movement like the Tates’ promoting violence against Black people or Jews in this country would be unthinkable.

Alas, any lawsuit would be unlikely to survive a motion to dismiss, thanks largely to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the so far ironclad shield protecting everyone from Nazi-promoting Musk to rape-promoting bros from liability for content posted by “third-party users.” When Andrew Tate uploads misogynistic or violent content, Rumble can simply claim to be the platform not the speaker.

But Rumble doesn’t merely host the Tates. It employs them. Investors like Don Jr. profit from that relationship. Rumble recruited Tate, negotiated a multimillion-dollar contract, paid him to produce specified amounts of content, and promoted him as a featured creator. A plaintiff could reasonably argue that Rumble wasn’t merely carrying Tate’s speech; it was financing, commissioning, marketing and amplifying it as part of its business strategy.

Bottom line, although this is hardly news: There is no point too low on the anti-social behavior scale for the Trumps or their Trumpworld strategists and donors.

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.

Katie Chenoweth is associate professor of French at Princeton University and an investigative researcher

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow

Tate Brothers

All Choked Up: Enabled By Trump, Tate Brothers Strangle Women And The Law

“Slap, slap, grab, choke. Shut up, bitch. Sex.” – Andrew Tate

For more than a decade, Andrew Tate has publicly advocated for and bragged about personally choking, slapping, and violently dominating women into submission across dozens of podcasts, interviews and online broadcasts. Rumble, the video hosting service backed by investments from the likes of Peter Thiel and JD Vance, paid Tate at least $6 million a year to spread his brand of propagandized violence against women.

During that same period, at least eight women have publicly alleged that Andrew or his brother Tristan Tate strangled them during sex, several saying they lost consciousness. They include Lauren Southern, Brianna Stern, three women pseudonymously quoted in the New Yorker, and four anonymous women in a UK civil case. The brothers deny the allegations, but given their long public history of bragging about doing exactly that to unnamed women, their denials ring hollow.

The Tate brothers are Sons of Epstein. There is an ideological and criminal lineage between the Boomer global sex trafficker and these Millennial monsters: shared misogyny, assumption of impunity, underage victims, and of course, the pimping business model. Only the style has been updated. Every video of the brothers oozes psychopathy. Their brand of caricatured manhood is derangement on steroids.

To our shame, the American government has treated these stranglers like international heroes instead of global pariahs and a significant threat to women and girls worldwide.

One of the Trump administration’s first acts was helping the brothers escape rape and trafficking charges in Romania by flying them to Miami. Ric Grenell, a “diplomat” with the extra special title of Special Envoy for Special Missions of the United States, pressured Romanian officials to lay off the Tates, who had been released from prison but ordered to remain in the country. A month after Trump’s 2025 inauguration, they were out and delivered to Miami by private jet. No announcement, no explanation – unless you count this deleted Roger Stone tweet crediting Grenell:

Just another pair of freaks for the Predators Ball assembling in Washington.

A year and a half after getting his mojo back, Andrew was interviewed at the Milken Conference by Melania’s former “agent” and Trump Special Envoy for Global Partnerships Paolo Zampolli – who had just distinguished himself by having ICE deport the mother of his child. The Tates’ Trump-granted impunity and connections opened doors for them in Dubai, Russia and Kazakhstan.

Meanwhile, the brothers never stopped upselling their PHD (Pimping Hos Degree) to millions of men and boys. Their followers are a new class of young men who insult their female teachers and classmates, creating such a negative impact at schools that educators have held conferences about it.

The unofficial official administration position on this pair of stranglers came from occasional Laura Loomer walker, tiny incel Paul Ingrassia, who has called Andrew Tate the “embodiment of the ancient ideal of excellence” for his “sheer physical prowess,” “sharp as a tack” and full of “willpower and spirit.” Ingrassia has since been demoted from his personnel office perch near the White House inner circle to the GSA – not due to his support of the Tates, but because his Nazi-adjacent views came to light.

It turns out Ingrassia was not the Tates’ real White House connection. Don Jr. has called their prison time in Romania “absolute insanity.”

But according to reports in Forbes and the New York Times, the real Tate link is the Boo Radley of the Trump family: Barron Trump. During the 2024 campaign, Barron reportedly became such a fan of the Tates that he turned his father onto the notion that they could help him with young men.

Barron has largely escaped scrutiny. First, because he arrived on the national scene as a preteen. And second, just by virtue of the parental combination of an icy mother and a depraved father. Now a young adult, this towering spectral figure, publicly silent, still gets a pass, despite reportedly being tied not only to the Tates but also to the family crypto business and rumors that he cashes in on prediction markets via insider knowledge of his father’s antics.

Rep. Yassamin Ansari (D-AZ) has formally asked the House Oversight Committee to investigate the Tates’ access to the administration, including subpoenaing Barron Trump to determine whether he used his position to interfere in any of the brothers’ legal proceedings.

Her request is completely reasonable: investigating why and how the Trump administration aided two men credibly accused by at least eight women of strangling them – some to the point of unconsciousness – is at least as urgent as the Epstein investigation.

Naturally, her office has been deluged with hate mail for daring to suggest Barron answer for himself.

Beyond exposing the Trump incels and misogynists who welcomed the stranglers back onto American soil, the Rumble platform should be investigated for giving the brothers a $6 million contract (that Andrew Tate claims was actually $9 million) and platform from which to spew their violent misogyny.

In a functioning civil society, women and girls would have some avenue to sue the Tates, along with the companies that have disseminated their messaging. This isn’t just hate speech. It has quantifiable effects. Researchers are finding that the increasingly common teen habit of strangling women during sex has become so widespread that young women are suffering brain damage. That research briefly made headlines and disappeared while Andrew Tate continued proselytizing to millions of boys in junior high (and maybe, younger, who knows) that nearly murdering a woman can be sexually gratifying.

Tate stans blame women instead. John Mac Ghlionn wrote in the Hill last year:

Schools, particularly in Western countries, have become increasingly hostile to traditional expressions of masculinity. Boys are expected to behave like girls — to sit still, be passive and suppress their natural instincts ... A toxic society, not toxic masculinity, made Andrew Tate famous.

This combination of whining – hostile to traditional expressions of masculinity – and sweeping framing – Western countries – rather than just, say, Oberlin, is standard rhetorical fare among the MAGA literati.

Cheering on men who publicly celebrate – and are credibly accused by multiple women of – choking women to unconsciousness are laundered into soldiers in Project 2025’s greater campaign against feminism.

That narrative began to crack on July 19, when the Brits decided to not only reopen their investigation but to add dozens of new charges. They may have been shamed into action after journalist Heidi Blake published her exhaustively reported New Yorker article in early June, documenting harrowing stories from women in England, Romania, and elsewhere. (If Blake doesn’t win a Pulitzer, the oversight will rank up there with the egregious long delay in Julie K. Brown’s recognition for her 2018 Epstein series in the Miami Herald.)

After the arrests, there was a burp of MAGA support online. But as the deeply distracted, disaster-ravaged White House hasn’t signaled it will get involved, the usual suspects have not been stepping up. That includes women like Trump lawyer Alina Habba, who once told Andrew Tate on his podcast, “I’ve got your back.”

The Tates’ own lawyer (a meathead named Joe McBride who posts pictures of himself packed into suits like warm, rancid sausage in a casing) warns that comparing his client to Epstein will get him murdered in jail.

Desperate to get some traction with Big Daddy, McBride is using Twitter to try to gin up conspiracy theories, curry favor with Trump, play the commie card, and threaten Rep. Ansari – sometimes all in a single post:

If Andrew Tate were free, he would be dismantling this communist psychopath in real time and raising an army to unseat her for going after Barron Trump.
The Tate Bros are one of the most powerful weapons the conservative movement has.Their absence is the point.

The thing is, Tate is no Epstein. And Barron Trump, Ric Grenell, Paul Ingrassia, and Joe McBride are definitely not an assemblage of white shoe lawyers waiting to save his sorry ass.

Soon, one hopes, Andrew Tate will be pulling kitchen duty in prison, where inmates can line up and bark one of his favorite misogynistic slogans – the same one his legion of preteen fanboys have been scrawling on papers they turn in to their female teachers: “Make me a sandwich.”

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.

Katie Chenoweth is associate professor of French at Princeton University and an investigative researcher

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow



How Daniel Siad, Suddenly Deceased 'Model Recruiter,' Fit Into Epstein's World

How Daniel Siad, Suddenly Deceased 'Model Recruiter,' Fit Into Epstein's World

This week, another Epsteinworld recruiter, Daniel Siad, was found dead in his home outside Paris. He was 69 years old and under investigation in France over allegations of rape and trafficking. Siad joins Epstein and fellow French sex trafficker Jean-Luc Brunel in Hades, although there’s no indication he took his own life like the other two. Initial reports point to a cardiac arrest, but an autopsy is planned to determine the exact cause.

As usual, the sudden death of a man who appears in the Epstein files more than 2,000 times immediately sparked conspiracy theories. Epstein was already acquainted with the Swedish-French-Algerian Siad during his Palm Beach years and by 2009, Siad was in regular communication with him about “scouting” women. According to DOJ records, Epstein routinely wired money to Siad’s accounts in Sweden and Dubai, sometimes as much as $25,000 at a time.

Although French, Siad, like many in Epsteinworld, seems to have had an unusual number of connections in Russian circles. He apparently hung out with Russophilic French nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen. He showed up at Fidel Castro’s funeral in 2016 and later told Epstein that Castro’s son wanted to meet him. He also introduced Epstein to a Russian spy’s daughter, Svetlana Pozhdaeva, who went on to recruit for – and report on various prominent men to – Epstein.

What makes Siad significant at this point in the ongoing Epstein cover-up and congressional inquiry is that, for at least a few years in the 2010s, he partnered with another Epstein associate and recruiter, a Russian woman named Victoria Housez. And, as we reported in a recent Freakshow, The Billionaire and the Recruiters, Housez had a financial – and maybe personal – relationship with billionaire Leon Black. Housez’s emails and other DOJ records indicate that Black repeatedly sent her money in 2011 and 2012, perhaps more than $50,000, while she was actively recruiting for Epstein and seeking to establish some kind of larger-scale “scouting” operation.

Within weeks of agreeing to scout for Epstein in May 2011, Housez had connected with Siad. “i go now with Daniel to see the boats outside of paris to book it for Russian receptions [sic],” Housez wrote in June 2011.1

“HAVE YOU HEARD FROM DANIEL?” Epstein emailed Housez in August 2011. “yes, he call me all the time [sic],” she replied.

Two weeks later, Housez told Epstein, “With Daniel we will do scouting together, he is waiting when i come back [sic].” In that same email, she asked about September travel plans and mentioned Leon Black: “please tell me when exactly i need to fly to NY? 5th? or better discuss it directly with Leon [sic]?”

Siad and Housez were both based in Paris – a crucial hub for the movement of Eastern European women into Epstein’s operation, as detailed in the Freakshow’s French Connection report. Multiple emails from Housez to Epstein discuss Black alongside updates on her scouting activities with Siad.

“Leon just left from Paris,” Housez emailed Epstein in October 2011. “we decided i ll fly to NY in a few weeks. are you coming here? i saw Daniel, we were talking about the system of scouting. [sic]

“I want to send you money,” Epstein emailed Siad in February 2012.

Around that time, Housez told Epstein that she was flying to Moscow to discuss opening a Paris office for World Fashion Channel, a cheesy network that served as a lure for aspiring models, and where Daniel Siad served as “Development Manager.” The network is owned by Russian billionaire Igor Kesaev, who has reported ties to the Russian government and security services, including the FSB. A few months after reporting her Moscow visit to Epstein, Housez became the “official representative” for World Fashion Channel in France.

Housez then emailed Epstein to inquire about Black sending her money to start a company that she claimed “he wanted me to do.” She wrote: “whats going on with Leon? … i saw him last time in december and received his little help at the beggining of January. its march soon, i really need a money to develop company (thats what he wanted me to do) .he wants to see me? it could be better every month, then to wait 2-3 month without money. [sic]”

A month later, Siad wrote Epstein: “In Paris ,helping Victoria ,very excited to start the TV project that will help us more for Scouting [sic].” DOJ records indicate Black sent $20,000 to a redacted recipient that same day. While the identity of this recipient is uncertain, other payments from Black to the same person closely align with dates Housez says she met with him.

The emails also suggest Housez and Siad were looking for a Paris office space from which to run their joint business. “Did you and vic find offices.?” Epstein asked Siad in April 2012. “me and Victoria are visiting different location we are waiting for answers,” Siad replied. “I have already a lots of models because. I have a new name cards from World Fashion Chanel it’s easy to stop a models [sic].”

In mid-June 2012, Housez was still updating Epstein on the office hunt and checking in about Black (“Leon plan is still actual?” she asked. Five days later, Black was in St. Petersburg for an advisory board meeting of the Russian Direct Investment Fund and was scheduled to meet Vladimir Putin the following day.) She invited Epstein to visit a space she liked, and Epstein let Siad know “victoria found great offices.”

“Great let’s move then ,I found a great girls too [sic],” Siad replied. Epstein advised him to coordinate with Housez.

The Siad-Epstein-Housez-Black nexus appears to have still been going strong in the fall of 2012. On September 18, Housez wrote Epstein, using parentheses as her signature shorthand for the smiley face emoticon: “i checked and spoke today with Daniel , he found a lot for you )))) we are waiting for you.” She followed up the next day, happy again: “Leon wrote me sms he wants to see me in Paris beg. of November ))).”

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.

Katie Chenoweth is associate professor of French at Princeton University and an investigative researcher

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow

Epstein and Ruemmler

What Today's Epstein Testimony May Reveal About Foreign Election Interference

Today, regretful Jeffrey Epstein pal and former superlawyer Kathy Ruemmler appears before the House Oversight Committee as the members look into the powerful network the international sex trafficker cultivated. Tomorrow, President Donald Trump will address the nation to warn about “foreign interference” coming for America’s elections - an obvious ploy to pave the way for grabbing ballots, posting troops at polling places and whatever other anti-democratic plots he and his henchman - like Steve Bannon - have planned for our midterms.

The two events don’t look connected on the surface. But, actually, they are.

The Epstein files reveal that Ruemmler, Epstein and Bannon were mutually obsessed with the Mueller investigation into foreign interference into Trump’s 2016 election win and one of its shadiest actors.

Among Ruemmler’s clients after her stint as President Obama’s chief legal counsel was a man named George Nader. Ruemmler represented him as he became a cooperating witness in the Mueller investigation into Russian efforts to help the Trump 2016 campaign.

Nader, a Lebanese-American businessman, was a kind of free agent in the foreign influence campaign that boosted the TV reality show star into his first presidency. His name appears more than a hundred times in the final Mueller report in connection with both Russian and Middle Eastern efforts to influence the Trump campaign.

Nader is also now a convicted pedophile serving a ten year prison sentence, but a decade ago he was a key actor in multiple foreign influence ops aimed at helping Trump, involving Gulf oil monarchies, Israeli social media manipulators and, yes, Russians.

Nader’s exploits were once newsworthy and well-covered; but, the avalanche of absurdity and menace that is the Trump Two-era has buried him in the memory hole. Ruemmler’s client, though, was of intense interest to Epstein and Bannon. And the DOJ Epstein files reveal that Ruemmler was feeding both of them information about Nader and the Mueller investigation, as this text indicates.

Nader’s role in Trump-Russia actually came around the inauguration in January 2017, when Nader helped arrange and attended a meeting in the Seychelles between mercenary and Trump supporter Erik Prince and Kirill Dmitriev, a Russian sovereign wealth fund executive with close ties to Putin. Mueller’s team would later regard the meeting as a potential attempt to establish a secret back-channel between the incoming Trump administration and the Kremlin.

During the Mueller investigation, newly minted best buds (more on their affairs here and here) Bannon and Epstein were laser focused on Nader. They call him “George” or, when Epstein mentioned him to Bannon, “your boy George.” At the time, Epstein was connecting Bannon with the Gulf monarchs he had spent several years cultivating.

And Kathy Ruemmler - who Epstein bragged was his feminist “arch-defender” - was the insider who kept them up to speed on how “George” was faring with the Mueller investigators. The following string of their relevant communications could open a worthy line of inquiry at the Oversight Committee today — if for nothing else than to remind Americans of the depth and breadth of the foreign influence operations that helped Trump get elected in 2016.

In April 2018 Epstein first mentioned Ruemmler’s Nader connection to Bannon writing, “as you know Kathy is Nader s counsel. She s very busy [sic]”.
Four days later, he texted Bannon: “Kathy coming now to download” followed a few hours later he updated with “Im sittin here with Kathy rummer. If you have any questions [sic]”.
A few weeks later, Bannon texted Epstein: “Just got summoned to Abu Dhabi for meeting with mbz for Monday night.” A few days later, Bannon was making plans to meet with Dubai billionaire Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem — then chairman and CEO of global logistics giant DP World, now a disgraced Epstein john. Epstein texted Bannon: “you are going to have FUN”; to which Bannon replied: “I’m here @ least thru Sunday —- need to close this” [sic].

Around the same time, May 2018, The New York Times exposed a secret Trump Tower meeting Nader had with Donald Trump Jr. in the summer of 2016, where Nader pitched him on the UAE and Saudi princes wanting to help Trump win. According to the Times investigation, mercenary contractor Erik Prince put Nader together with the squirrelly scion to tell him of the princes’ aim. Nader also brought along Joel Zamel, whose Israeli company employed former intelligence officers who specialized in “collecting information and shaping opinion through social media” according to the Times. Zamel reportedly provided an “elaborate multi-million dollar proposal” for a social media “manipulation effort” to get Trump elected. (After Trump was elected, Nader paid Zamel $2 million – for reasons never made clear)

Two days after the article, Epstein wrote to Bannon: “Going to get more complex , - Susan Rice is one of the ‘when did she know? She is represented by the same lawyer as your boy, Nader - Kathy Ruemmler.”

Epstein often joked about Ruemmler and Bannon getting romantically involved, calling Bannon “your boyfriend Steve” in messages with Ruemmler and referring to Ruemmler as “your girlfriend” in texts with Bannon. The three of them met together on several occasions in 2018, during the Mueller investigation, based on the communications.

In an October 2018 text to Ruemmler, Epstein wrote “i think your boy [i.e., Bannon] is going to see george” to which she replied, “Hopefully they stay out of trouble”.

In January 2019, Ruemmler emailed Epstein a Reuters story on NSA cyberspies thwarting enemies of the UAE. In March, Mueller submitted his final report to Attorney General Bill Barr. Six days later, Epstein reported to Bannon: “Girl going to see George on sat in germany.”

Ruemmler’s appearance today on Capitol Hill is, among other matters, an opportunity to remember that Trump’s 2016 campaign was so rife with foreign interference that it kicked off a series of massive, years-long investigations that revealed the real - not the cocked-up Big Lie-connected - threats to American elections. When Trump speaks to the nation Thursday night, he will be flanked by leaders of a gutted and craven national security community looking for proof that the 2020 election was “stolen.” Meanwhile, Americans have all the proof we need that the 2016 election was contaminated with foreign influence. And if the President wants to warn Americans of the ongoing threat, he could start with a confession.

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.

Katie Chenoweth is associate professor of French at Princeton University and an investigative researcher

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow

How 'Epstein Class Supervillain' Bannon Still Prospers As A Fake Populist

How 'Epstein Class Supervillain' Bannon Still Prospers As A Fake Populist

No Epstein class supervillain has paid any meaningful public or legal price for his crimes, other than throwing around cash settlements in exchange for silence. Evading justice is, of course, one element of supervillainy.

But there are gradations of evasion – from shamed hiding to gleeful skating.

This week, we want to take another look at one Epstein fanboy still smirking under the radar. The self-described “Leninist” strategist Steve Bannon masterminded one of the greatest political tricks in years: convincing poor whites that the Republican party – the party of the moneyed, the corporations and the borderless oligarchy, led by a nepo-baby fake businessman – is the faction that really cares about the welfare of “low propensity” voters.

But the guy who made “elites versus working people” and “smash the administrative state” into right-wing rallying cries was also one of Epstein’s coziest pals in Trumpworld. In fact, DOJ records suggest that Epstein was the pivotal man in Bannon’s transformation from right-wing American douchebag with a string of failed marriages and a simmering resentment at Hollywood libs into an international man of mystery with a Bernard-Henri Lévy hairdo (maintained, on Epstein’s recommendation, with “simply silver” shampoo), cutting deals across Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia.

Bannon has so far not only avoided Epstein-related subpoenas or testimony of any kind, he has also managed to escape scrutiny from the very audience he spent years ginning up with Deep State pedo theories – an audience that Trump won over, in part, by promising to expose Epstein’s pals. He remains such an influential figure in MAGA world that he is poised to play a major role in Trump’s plan to cheat the midterms.

Besides Trump, Bannon is almost alone among exposed members of the Epstein class in remaining in good odor with the MAGAs who, a mere year ago, were demanding public shaming and legal action against all of Epstein’s pals.

The DOJ files reveal Bannon to be not just a pal of Epstein, but someone single-mindedly keyed into Epstein’s access to the global elite. Within weeks of their first meeting, Epstein connected him with influential UN diplomat Terje Rød-Larsen, who helped ease Bannon’s entry into geopolitical and financial hunting grounds like the Gulf monarchies and Mongolia, of which Bannon told Epstein, “we can make that place a crypto capital.”

Epstein seems to have advised Bannon as he broke away from Trump and set out to build his own “grassroots army.” He conferred with Bannon on launching his own dark money organization, “Citizens of the American Republic,” with $100 million in bitcoin, discussed with MIT’s Joi Ito the idea of helping Bannon finance his movement with a crypto “deplorable coin,” and encouraged Bannon to create a new “world bank of the people” for his “workers party.” Before long, Steve was hooked up with the director of Davos and moving and shaking with the sheiks.

Epstein called him “lambchop.”

The Epstein-Bannon bromance began around the fall of 2017, a few months after Bannon bottomed out of the White House. At the time, he claimed he had been liberated: “I feel jacked,” he told The Weekly Standard, “I’ve got my hands back on my [media] weapons.”

He fell even further out of favor with Trump by early 2018, when Michael Wolff quoted him calling Donald Trump Jr. “treasonous” for meeting with Russians at Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign. Bannon soon lost not just Trump but also the critical, lavish support of his eccentric billionaire patroness, Rebekah Mercer.

Enter Jeff.

The first mentions of Bannon and Epstein getting together appear in October 2017, when Wolff tells Epstein that Bannon “wants a secret meet.” Epstein was, of course, fine with secrets. He instructed Wolff to “suggest to SB that my meeting with him is just he and me. better to have total privacy on certain issues [sic].” A few days later, he cast another lure, advising Wolff, “you can tell SB , I have some ideas for him [sic]”.

The beautiful friendship kicked off with this February 2018 exchange:

Soon, Wolff was reporting that Bannon was “all hepped up on Saudi stuff.” “I told him you were the man,” Wolff wrote Epstein. “He seemed to know that.”

Within a few months, Epstein was jetting Bannon over to the Middle East to meet some of his other special friends among the Gulf oil monarchies. “All the boys are celebrating ramadan but will see you if you want,” Epstein wrote in a May 2018 text exchange. “Only there for 2 days and going out in desert with mbz [sic],” replied Bannon, referring to the leader of the United Arab Emirates.

Epstein also played sideline cheerleader as Bannon got dragged into the various 2018 congressional probes into Trump’s sleaze, urging him to “stay mentally tough” in the face of subpoenas from the House Intelligence Committee and the Mueller investigation. He even offered Bannon the surveillance-resistant safety of his mansion, which, he bragged in one email, “is similar to a SCIF.”

Bannon ultimately agreed to cooperate with Mueller, just days before his first in-person meeting with Epstein in early 2018.

Epstein’s lawyer and pal Reid Weingarten (who we covered last week) was excited about bringing Bannon into the Epstein claque. “Try to make the bannon [sic] meet happen with me there,” he wrote Epstein in early 2018. “There is play here…”

Epstein was also consulting his feminist “arch defender,” superlawyer Kathy Ruemmler, about Bannon, while looping him in on the activities of her client, Lebanese businessman George Nader. Coincidentally – or not – Ruemmler was representing Nader, a convicted pedophile, who, like Bannon, was cooperating with the Mueller investigation.

Bannon’s communications with Epstein reveal more about the behind-the-scenes geopolitical activities that involved national security, great game rivalry with China over tech, and, presumably, money.

In one lengthy May 2019 exchange – as Bannon was planning a trip to Kazakhstan arranged by Epstein – they discuss Saudi Arabia using China’s Huawei for 5G, which the U.S. felt would give China a surveillance edge in the Middle East. “You saw where they begged us to give 90 day reprieve on huawai [sic],” Bannon writes. “Yes of course,” Epstein responds. “The real game is in the shadows … as usual.” Their “game” somehow involved the Kazakh government: “kazakh daughter the key,” Epstein advised before telling him, “Im asking for a meeting with the pres and intelligence chief [sic].”

Bannon was no stranger to the dark side. He actually got his new friend Jeff quite worried about his relationship with Chinese fraudster Guo Wengui, on whose private jet Bannon flew around the country stumping for Republicans in summer 2018, possibly violating campaign finance laws. Two years later, Bannon was lolling aboard Guo’s $28 million yacht when he was arrested for defrauding small “big beautiful wall” donors. (Trump later pardoned him.)

Last week, Guo was sentenced to 30 years in prison for massively defrauding investors. But for several years, Bannon had a million-dollar consulting contract with him.

In their emails, Bannon and Epstein refer to Guo as “Kwok” – “Miles Kwok” being another name Guo used. Epstein seems to have become wise to the real Kwok/Guo before Bannon did, and he warned him repeatedly.

“Do u know my man miles kwok [sic],” Bannon texts in one thread.

Epstein cautioned that the Chinese businessman was going to get them both in trouble. “Careful,” he warned Bannon.

In the same thread, they joke about the movie Chinatown and the famous scene in which Roman Polanski slices Jack Nicholson’s nose. Jeff writes: “my very close friends as a favor , also would like you safe … if either one of us , in different investigations will need to testify publicly, it would be preferred to do it with two nostrils instead of one [sic].”

It’s not clear which of Epstein’s “very close friends” wanted Bannon “safe” – or what exactly they thought Guo could do to them.

Later in the same exchange, Epstein writes, “re kwok , honybear ok. icarus not [sic]”. “Will explain kwok later-- like trump an instrument,” Bannon responds, to which Epstein replies, “I am very well informed there. , didn’t know it was him [sic]”. (Epstein’s “honeybear” remark is a reference to Bannon’s favorite nickname for himself: “Honey Badger.”)

By December 2018, six months before Epstein’s arrest, the two men were such close buds they were yukking it up about the #MeToo movement – “so many guys caught in the me too . reaching out to me [sic],” Epstein wrote – and joking about organizing a “million man march” on Washington where everyone would wear “pink dick hats.” Another favorite target was their mutual acquaintance Donald Trump. “If you Google the word idiot, a picture of Donald Trump comes up …” Epstein texted. “Pop-up picture ---signed,” Bannon quipped back.

Bannon has recovered from his fall after Trump 1.0. His pardon in the fraud case and his stint in jail for blowing off a congressional subpoena only burnished his legend as a rebel against the Deep State. He remains extremely influential through his War Room media platform, the same platform he used for years to juice the Epstein Deep State conspiracy.

This Epstein class insider has remained a leader of the “deplorables” – perhaps not so shockingly, given that a million of them recently let Trump fleece them with his crypto coin for a reported $3.8 billion.

Bannon’s War Room doesn’t have the reach of Fox. But it is available across a wide range of platforms, including Real America’s Voice, Apple Podcasts, Rumble, Spotify, as well as X and email lists. It now functions as a powerful political organizing tool. Bannon always gives his listeners something to do: show up at school boards, pressure members of Congress, flood phone lines, organize local conventions, challenge elections, and support specific candidates.

He has kept the pedal to the metal on the 2020 election lies.

If anything, his influence is greater in the second Trump administration than it was in the first. War Room is now a key stop on the right-wing DC media circuit. And it is gearing up to serve as a critical node in the alliance between influencers, right-wing media and the White House as they prepare the vote suppression and election fraud plot to subvert the midterms.

There is one reliably incendiary topic, though, that Bannon has jettisoned along the way to his current position as the King of Fake Populists.

It begins with the letter E.

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.

Katie Chenoweth is associate professor of French at Princeton University and an investigative researcher.

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow

Enabling Decades Of Epstein Coverup Was A Sprawling Legal Power Network

Enabling Decades Of Epstein Coverup Was A Sprawling Legal Power Network

One of the unprecedented benefits of the Epstein Files Transparency Act is that the records expose how power actually works – especially among lawyers. A whale like Epstein, a locus of money and influence, attracted elite lawyers no matter how dirty a client he was. The legal circle around him was filled with insiders who began their careers wearing the white hats of federal prosecutors before switching sides to defend immense fortunes and powerful men like Leon Black, Donald Trump, and Epstein himself.

Some of Epstein’s lawyers – Alan Dershowitz, Ken Starr, Jay Lefkowitz, Roy Black – are practically household names now thanks to the infamous Palm Beach plea deal they helped craft, cutting their client loose to traffic a thousand more women and girls before his death.

Others are more private. But their names come up again and again in the Epstein files – not always actively representing him, but also chatting with, socializing with, and hanging around the sex trafficker and his johns. Some dished more passive assists to the cover-up, such as producing exonerating reports or leading Trump administration efforts to tie prominent Democrats to Epstein.

Together, these lawyers possess decades of confidential info on colossal financial (and other) crimes, matters that extend far beyond Jeff. They represent the institutional knowledge of the power networks they have served from well before the 2008 crash, through the second Epstein investigation, and into Trump 2.0’s orgy of corruption. Of course, they are masters of the fine art of the confidential settlement and NDA – the silence-for-money mechanism that the House Oversight Committee has only recently tried to peel back in its Epstein investigation.

Here we take a closer look at four lawyers who matter not just to Epstein, but to the Epstein class: DC-based white collar criminal lawyer Reid Weingarten (2285 mentions in the Epstein files); Brad Karp, former chairman of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison (1801 mentions in the Epstein files); Dechert LLP partner Andrew Levander, who oversaw the “independent investigation” that exonerated Leon Black; and Manhattan’s current chief federal prosecutor Jay Clayton, who never represented Epstein, but was tasked with the only Epstein-related investigation of Trump’s second term and whose office oversaw most of the Epstein file review for the Department of Justice (Clayton is also Trump’s nominee for Director of National Intelligence).

Brad Karp famously became the first Big Law leader to bend the knee to Trump’s outrageous – and ultimately illegal – threat to bar Democratic-supporting lawyers from federal court buildings. Karp lost his chairmanship of the firm as a result of his exchanges with Epstein, made public in the files.

Their communications are chummy and indeed embarrassing. Among the emails, Epstein calms Karp’s fears about some unspecified public embarrassment and recommends doctors for the attorney’s unnamed maladies.

Karp often strategized with Epstein on how to protect his client, Leon Black. “I genuinely believe that the two of us are the two people on the planet who he most trusts and who he understands try to protect him at all times,” Karp wrote to Epstein in a 2018 email.

The two also discussed whether Black was using cocaine. Epstein wondered if the drug was behind what he called Black’s “aggressiveness” and “high risk taking.” According to Epstein, Black admitted to using it in his younger days, but said he no longer did.

In a 2015 email, while brainstorming with Karp about how Black should handle a woman threatening to go public about their affair, Epstein suggested hiring either his own longtime lawyer and buddy, Reid Weingarten, or another attorney, Andrew Levander, to help.

Reid Weingarten is a former federal anti-corruption prosecutor turned white collar defense lawyer. His clients have included an Enron miscreant, two of Bill Clinton’s Cabinet Secretaries, former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein post-2008 financial crash, and countless other high profile (accused) corporate fraudsters. He also represented Roman Polanski, who remains wanted in the U.S. for a decades-old charge of having sex with a 13-year-old.

A consummate Washington player, Weingarten has been involved in numerous politically sensitive cases.

In 1992, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hired him to belatedly investigate the “October surprise” allegations, that Reagan’s henchmen had secretly cut a deal with Iran to delay the release of American hostages until after the 1980 election in exchange for weapons traded through Israel. Weingarten concluded that the prime sources for the story were “wholly unreliable” and that there was nothing to see, when in fact, as author Craig Unger has written, House investigators had already found actual receipts from the Iranian payments.

One of the key players in the nothing-to-see-here report was former federal attorney Stan Pottinger, who was himself investigated for selling arms to Iran, and a man with whom a young Epstein happened to share an office. (The Freakshow has previously uncovered evidence of Epstein’s travels to Israel timed to the Iran–Contra deal.)

Weingarten was not part of Epstein’s Palm Beach defense team, but he appears to have advised him on the wave of post-2008 civil suits brought against him by the victims. The two remained in close contact. Weingarten appears throughout the DOJ Epstein library, including in a photo sitting behind a desk surrounded by young women whose faces have been redacted. For years, Weingarten served as a sounding board for Epstein and was a frequent visitor to the New York mansion for breakfasts, lunches, and dinners. In a 2011 email, Epstein offered the frazzled attorney some signature advice: “time to relax. go get a massage.” Weingarten replied: “I wish.”

Weingarten led the defense team after Epstein’s arrest in 2019 and has indicated he believes Epstein was murdered in jail.

Andrew Levander is a straight-out-of-central-casting Manhattan white-shoe lawyer. Bowtied and bespectacled, he looks like he has an apt quote from Horace for every occasion.

But Levander has long been comfortable operating in darker company. He once served as personal attorney to legendary arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi and his relationship with Epstein was almost longer than Donald Trump’s. Epstein even once recommended Levander to Leon Black as a possible lawyer to handle a mistress who was demanding money.

As a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York (SDNY) during the 1980s, Levander reportedly enlisted the ambitious Coney Island thug morphing into Jeff Bondstein to help track down money related to the collapse of Drysdale Securities, according to James Patterson’s Filthy Rich. This early Epstein adventure – as a government tool of sorts – deserves further attention, which we will someday give it. It also occurred around the same time he was working for British arms kingpin Douglas Leese.

Years later, Levander was just the man for the job to produce the so-called Dechert Report, the findings of an “independent investigation” commissioned by Apollo’s Board in 2020 that ultimately exonerated Leon Black in the Epstein matter. After interviewing Black and twenty people and reviewing some financial records, Levander concluded that Black neither knew about nor participated in Epstein’s crimes against women.

Apollo and Black have leaned heavily on that report ever since – including before the Oversight Committee last week, shortly before Black walked out of the hearing.

Here are some of the risible and easily disproven statements in the Dechert Report:

Black stated that he was repulsed by the details of Epstein’s crimes … witnesses agreed that Black was shocked when the allegations became public … witnesses noted specifically that they did not believe Black would have allowed Epstein to be introduced to Black’s wife and children if Black had had any suspicion that Epstein had done anything inappropriate or illegal with girls or young women.
Dechert has seen no evidence that Black or any employee of the Family Office or Apollo was involved in any way with Epstein’s criminal activities at any time. There is no evidence that Epstein ever introduced Black, or offered to introduce Black, to any underage woman.
[See last week’s Freakshow on Black’s payments to recruiters here.]
Black viewed Epstein as a confirmed bachelor with eclectic tastes, who often employed attractive women. However, Black did not believe that any of the women in Epstein’s employ were underage. Black has no recollection of ever seeing Epstein with an underage woman at any time.
[The use of the word “underage” here hedges the fact that Epstein provided Black with a so-far unknown number of women, alluded to in this November 2016 email below.]

The word “underage” does a lot of heavy lifting for Epstein’s pals, like Black. The DOJ files are rife with evidence that Epstein introduced Black to numerous young women whose exact ages remain unknown, but who often seem to have been in their early 20s. As we’ve discussed before, the “pedo” designation for Epstein and his johns was useful for ginning up the baby-eating liberals MAGA conspiracy theories that juiced Trump’s campaigns, but it also obscures the harm done to an untold number of vulnerable young women. And it has also allowed the men Epstein was supplying with trafficked young women to skate or at least buy time.

Finally, we come to Jay Clayton.

Clayton worked for the venerable Manhattan law firm Sullivan & Cromwell until 2017, specializing in mergers and capital market offerings. During the 2008 financial crisis, he was one of the lead attorneys advising Bear Stearns and handled JPMorgan’s acquisition of the collapsing investment bank.

Clayton, a reliable friend to Wall Street and corporate America, easily sailed through his years as Trump’s first term SEC chief. “Over time, Clayton pushed through more than two dozen measures that eased regulations for corporate America,” Reuters reported.

Then, suddenly, in the fraught summer of 2020, in the midst of COVID and mere months before the presidential election, something curious happened. Just as New York federal prosecutors were preparing to take a second bite out of the rotten Epstein apple by indicting still-at-large Ghislaine Maxwell, Trump’s Attorney General Bill Barr tried to sack Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. Attorney for SDNY, and replace him with Jay Clayton.

The excuse for this odd shuffle? Barr claimed Clayton really wanted to live in New York, even as COVID was still circulating and most sentient beings with money were parked outside the city.

The timing of the switch, however, is almost comically precise as it relates to the Maxwell indictment. Between June 11-18, 2020, a draft of an indictment circulated inside the SDNY office. On June 19, AG Barr told Berman he wanted to replace him with Clayton, but Berman refused to step down. Barr then informed him that Trump would be sacking him and Berman resigned on June 20.

Democrats immediately cried foul, albeit without identifying the reason for the scheme.“Jay Clayton can allow himself to be used in the brazen Trump-Barr scheme to interfere in investigations by the U.S. Attorney for SDNY, or he can stand up to this corruption, withdraw his name from consideration, and save his own reputation from overnight ruin,” Sen. Chuck Schumer said on Twitter.

Clayton stayed in Washington. SDNY Deputy U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss replaced Berman, and became the public face of the Maxwell case. A few days after she announced the indictment, the FBI apprehended Maxwell in her coastal mansion hideout in Maine, where she’d wrapped her phone in tinfoil in an effort to evade surveillance.

Jay Clayton remained at the SEC until the end of Trump’s first term. Soon after Biden entered the White House, Leon Black’s company hired him. A few days after Biden was inaugurated, Apollo released Andrew Levander’s “independent investigation,” which concluded that Black had no knowledge of Epstein’s crimes. Nevertheless, the now publicly known gargantuan sum he paid to Epstein for “tax and estate planning” was hurting the firm’s reputation.

In February 2021, Apollo named Jay Clayton its “lead independent director.” One month later, Black announced he would step aside as chairman and that Jay Clayton would become the “non-Executive Chairman of the Board.”

Clayton sat out the Biden years at Apollo.

Then Trump returned.

Within months of taking office, Trump appointed Clayton – Leon Black’s handpicked “non-executive” and a man who’d spent four years in the HQ of a major Epstein cover-up – as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. He took office just as Trump administration elves were poking through the SDNY’s Epstein files and finding – whoops! – Trump’s name often enough to raise panic in the White House. Clayton held onto millions of dollars in Apollo stock while overseeing the final review and redaction of the DOJ files before they were released to the public.

As Congress began digging into the case, Rep. Ro Khanna observed that the first name survivors often mention is Leon Black.

The Epstein cover-up legal revolving door has come full circle.

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.

Katie Chenoweth is associate professor of French at Princeton University and an investigative researcher

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow

Linked To Epstein's Trafficking In Emails, Billionaire Black Will Soon Testify

Linked To Epstein's Trafficking In Emails, Billionaire Black Will Soon Testify

Leon Black paid an international sex trafficker with no known accounting skills $170 million between 2012 and 2017. Why – and for what – may never be definitively answered. Black’s billionaire pockets have afforded him enough top-shelf lawyers to protect his privacy as long as he lives. But the public dump of millions of pages of Epstein files has opened a window into at least some of the answers.

In a March 2026 letter sent to Black, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, said: “According to federal government records reviewed by my investigators, you have made at least $8 million in payments between 2015 and 2018 to women of Eastern European origin that were potentially involved in prostitution and possible victims of Epstein’s trafficking scheme.” Wyden also suggested that Black may have used “gifts” as a way to evade taxes and that he was “surveilling and paying off” women.

We looked into some of the women who discussed Black with Epstein, who seem to have been significantly familiar with the billionaire, and who appear to have had financial dealings with and/or received gifts from him. As Black is due to testify before the House Oversight Committee later this week, we offer up the following discoveries for potential lines of questioning.

Two of the women openly emailed Epstein about recruiting for him. Both were young Russians and both received significant sums of money from – and spent considerable time with – Leon Black between 2009 and 2019, when Epstein was arrested. The women often refer to “Leon” or “L,” a designation that Sen. Wyden believes refers to Black, as do we.

The first woman we identify as Irina Chernova. She is in the DOJ files, and Wyden has stated that Black made payments directly to her between 2009-12. That allowed us to confirm that emails to Epstein during this period referencing “Leon” from “Irina” were sent by Chernova.

Chernova was born in 1984 in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, and worked in television journalism. Based on the files, she appears to have recruited dozens of women for Epstein, and in 2011, introduced him to Karyna Shuliak, the Russian model and eventual dental student to whom Epstein later bequeathed his estate.

In one January 2011 email exchange, he pressures Chernova to bring him new girls.

Chernova was also one of the largest recipients of Leon Black’s money. According to Sen. Wyden, she received “hundreds of thousands of dollars” directly from Black’s Bank of America accounts between 2009 and 2012.

It seems Chernova was already close enough with Black in 2009 to accompany him to visit Epstein while Epstein was still under house arrest for his Palm Beach conviction. In the email arranging the trip, Irina says she plans to bring at least one [redacted] girl; Epstein replies that he will talk to Leon about the visit and says [redacted] “can bring her sister or friend” (apparently some new girls Epstein had not yet met).

In January 2010, Chernova emailed Epstein about a trip she planned to Paris and London, writing,” Leon is going to China on Feb 1 for a week.”

Two months later, she reported to Epstein that she was going to Paris, London, and then Russia for Easter, adding “It’s between us, I didn’t tell Leon about Paris, only about Russia.”

That August, after losing her phone, she asked Epstein for Leon’s number. Epstein in return asked for the number of a redacted woman. Two days later, she followed up to say he had given her Leon’s number in the Hamptons, but she wanted his cell phone number as well. In that same email, she also confirmed two appointments for Epstein with individuals whose names are redacted.

The following month, Epstein sent Chernova birthday greetings, to which she responded, “Leon just left, can you please call when you have a minute.”

In February 2012, Chernova asked Epstein to intervene and secure her “a good-bye present” from Black. Epstein assured her it would be “generous.”

Apparently, however, it was not much of a goodbye.

Five years later, Chernova wrote to Epstein that “thanks to L’s good bye gift I’ve enjoyed being a full time mom for most of this time. [We’ve been exchanging texts and planning to meet for lunch with L since I left, but we haven’t met. Yet :) Hope he’s doing good.]”

A month after that email, Epstein’s calendar showed back-to-back meetings with both Black and Chernova. Shortly afterward, Chernova emailed that she and Black were “back together” and later asked about a $100,000 payment Black had promised her. Epstein indicated that he himself had already sent her $28,000.

Another Russian recruiter appears to have also benefitted from Black’s largesse over the years that she “scouted” and introduced Epstein to women.

The second woman, Victoria Housez (now Victoria Ginzburg), hailed from the Russian hinterlands and attended South Ural State University before popping up in Paris on the fringes of the fashion world. Records in the DOJ files suggest Black may have gifted Housez more than $50,000 in 2011 and 2012, while she appears to have been actively recruiting girls for Epstein and looking to potentially establish some kind of larger-scale trafficking operation. After personally reading 1200 emails in the files from that time period and studying the email signatures as well as the instances in which Housez’s name is left unredacted, our analysis suggests the following exchanges can be connected to her.

Housez frequently discussed Black in emails with Epstein. At one point, she asked if Leon’s secretary could wire money to her account because she “does transfer all the time.” In the same email, she asked Epstein to share her Russian bank account information with Black because “french ask too many questions.” Epstein replied: “cannot”.

She also wrote that Black wanted to give her money to start a company – one that, based on the surrounding context, seemed to mean a modeling agency or another similar entity that could operate as a trafficking front. Epstein spent a considerable amount of time coaching her on how to deal with Black and present her case.

“Do not bother with business plans for agency,,, concentrate on deomstrating [sic] that you have an eye and can get the job done . we will have fun” Epstein wrote in one email. Housez replied: “As we agreed model business does not bring money. i can do scouting for something else … Lets have some Fun ;) as you say”.

While she tried to talk money, Epstein focused on rating the women in photos she sent him, chiding her for providing him with girls he rated at about a five out of ten, and berating her for not providing enough new girls.

A typical interaction between them involved questions of money and female flesh like this one from 2011:

VH: all the girls i just sent you till 21YO and much much more ))
JE: try to get real mnumbers 2.5 million is not realistic
VH: do you mean the number of users in 1,5 year?
JE: no dollars wanted for start up
VH: for scouting big network we need almost nothing,its already working, we could control all Russian model network and place models need numbers? but if you dont like the whole idea i will think about another one ;))) how are you today?
JE: send photos of you

These exchanges occurred while Black was publicly expanding his involvement with Russia during a period of relative economic détente, as Vladimir Putin sought greater investment from the West.

Epstein paid close attention.

In July 2011, he emailed his scheduler, Lesley Groff, with the dates of the Russian Direct Investment Fund board meeting with Putin in Sochi that Leon Black planned to attend. Epstein apparently intended to go himself.

In September 2011, Black was announced as a founding member of the Advisory Board of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, a $10 billion state fund set up to attract foreign investment in Russia. That month, Reuters reported that he attended its launch event at the International Investment Forum in Sochi and had a private, one-on-one meeting with Putin.

In July 2011, Epstein told Ghislaine Maxwell he was thinking of making Housez his “Europe asst.” In August, Housez emailed Epstein about firming up her September plans: “You said better if i contact him [Black] directly about it. will you give him my number and to me his?” As Black was being named RDIF advisor, Housez wrote to Epstein: “I wanted to ask you, its normal that L. asked me bank account and nothing?”

Throughout the fall of 2011, Housez and Epstein frequently discussed Black, his whereabouts, her need for his money, and her hopes that he would set her up in a Paris apartment. She planned to ask Black “where he thinks i have to work.”

Some emails suggest a more intimate relationship between Housez and Black. For example: “I am at home all the time, Leon is very happy that i am not going out (like you said).” And then a few months later: “ready to go to ny next weekend, he is not answering, hope he still likes me :)” She also reported that she’d been going to the gym to be “in perfect shape for beginning [sic] of November,” when Black was due to be in Paris. She wondered at one point why he hadn’t been in touch: “still strange…that he doesn’t want to see me, i was good.”

It is not clear exactly what kind of work Housez thought she was doing for Black.

One March 2013 exchange is especially revealing. Housez thanked Epstein for Black (“for leon thank you, but i worked for it as well”) and defended her work record, while Epstein excoriated her, “after two years and thousands of euros. you can do better than thsi (sic).”

The files also contain multiple FBI raw interviews with redacted victims, called 302s, in which women (not minors) said Epstein introduced them to Black after telling them they would be asked to give massages. According to those interviews, Black instead became sexual.

One woman who met Black was later introduced to former Barclays CEO Jes Staley, another Epstein pal. She told investigators Staley “forcefully put her hands on his crotch area,” and the encounter ended in “rough sex” that she told Staley she did not want. (Staley has previously denied, as reported by The Guardian, any wrongdoing in connection with Epstein.) There is also a second-hand account of a woman giving Black a blowjob she didn’t want to give and being “grossed out” by it.

What does appear clear, however, is that Housez understood the work she was doing for Epstein.

On April 4, 2012, Epstein berated her in another familiar exchange: “you have produced photo s after photos. , nothing more” to which she replied, “not just photos:)) but its true didnt have conditions for this.. help me in real to have conditions and budget and i can produce more not worse then [redacted];).”

By September of that year, things were looking up. “i found super scout for you ) .. the guy serbian 25yo, doing just this, placed in ny, london,paris ),” Housez wrote to Epstein, “you will love what he has, i spoke with him for possible collaboration.” Epstein responded: “give me your bank details.”

Housez replied, “here is my bank acc !!!! THANK YOU !!! “

Asked about the relationships with Chernova and Housez, Susan Estrich, an attorney for Black, responded with this statement:

As we have said repeatedly, Mr. Black called for an independent investigation of his relationship with Epstein. The Dechert Report reviewed more than 60,000 documents and interviewed more than 20 people —including Mr. Black— without any restrictions on business and personal matters. The investigation, which was led by a former prosecutor for the Southern District of New York, found that Mr. Black paid Epstein for tax and estate planning advice for his family office and found no evidence that those payments were for anything other than those services. The investigation further found that Epstein’s work had been vetted and approved by best-in-class law and accounting firms. It also found that he had no awareness of the criminal activities that led to Epstein’s arrest in 2019.

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow



Behind TPUSA's 'Christian' Education Program, A Conviction For Child Porn

Behind TPUSA's 'Christian' Education Program, A Conviction For Child Porn

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic of American Gothic literature, The Scarlet Letter, set in Puritan New England, centers on the punishment meted out to a woman who has a passionate affair with her pastor, becomes pregnant and then is sentenced to wear a red letter A for Adultery around her neck for the rest of her life. The novel is a piercing 19th Century critique of the effects of a repressive, sin-obsessed society on the health and happiness of its people.

Erica Kirk’s TPUSA, as I wrote last week, is one of the more insidious organizations wielding regressive influence in an America where women are already bodily and legally under siege by the Trump administration’s predators’ ball. TPUSA joins Christian nationalist churches in the broader MAGA effort to promote female submission to men, early marriage and wifely obedience to husbands in both private and public matters – including one vote per household, with the man of the house filling out the ballot.

It’s brazen, it’s lunatic, and it’s effective, as TPUSA’s women leaders serve as an auxiliary to the broader Epstein class cover-up protecting abusive men.

Besides the antediluvian ideology, though, there’s another element to the TPUSA scene that reminded us of the Hawthorne novel. Instead of their conspicuous crosses, many could be wearing a red H for Hypocrisy, for passing righteous judgment on a supposedly sin-infested culture, while living with – and in some cases hiding – sexual abuse among their own.

One of the talks at the TPUSA Women’s Leadership Summit was “Why Christ-Centered Classical Education Changes Everything,” delivered by the organization’s education consultant, Heather Lloyd. Lloyd is sometimes listed in TPUSA materials as a member of the leadership team. She is currently with Erica Kirk in a Chicago suburb promoting “classical Christian education” to educators and parents. Her day job is as executive director of Concordis Education Partners, affiliated with white nationalist Idaho pastor Doug Wilson.

To the conference audience, Lloyd delivered a denunciation of “government education,” accusing public schools of being rife with “crazy sin.” For example: “One percent of our population right now identifies as transgender. That’s actually a large number. Now the problem is that we tend to think that that’s the issue. But I’d like to argue today that this is the symptom, not the issue … True public education is the church providing education for biblical fluency for the community,” she declared. “The Puritans wanted every child to be able to read God’s word.”

The goal is lofty and unapologetically atavistic: eradicate secular education and get kids fearing God and reading Bibles again. In her talk, Lloyd also cheered an audience member’s claim that the Texas school voucher program – in which taxpayer education money is diverted to parents opting into private schools – had caused 14 fund-starved school districts to shut down. (The declining number of public school students is partly due to those private school vouchers and partly to the falling birth rate – another obsession of the right.)

But for someone aiming to Make Puritans Great Again, Lloyd has a peculiar challenge: Her husband, Alex Lloyd, recently spent two years in prison for possession and distribution of child pornography. Court records indicate the materials consisted of 10 videos and 3 images, including at least one involving a prepubescent minor, obtained through the Kik messaging platform. He initially pleaded not guilty, then later entered a guilty plea to a federal offense involving possession of child pornography as before facing a jury trial. He spent two years in prison and was released in 2024 as a registered sex offender. A condition of his release includes a ban on unsupervised time with children, including his own grandchildren.

Alex Lloyd was a deacon at Doug Wilson’s Moscow, Idaho-based Christ Church. Wilson is a controversial white Christian nationalist whose influence has exploded under the Epstein-class-protecting Trump administration. He is a favorite pastor of Pete Hegseth and has addressed – sermonized, actually, in flagrant violation of the separation of church and state – service members called to mandatory gatherings inside the Pentagon.

As a consultant, Heather Lloyd helps sell hundreds of Christian schools on the programs and curriculum of the Association of Classical Christian Schools (ACCS), an accreditation network of hundreds of private schools and colleges in the United States, founded in 1993 by Wilson. His abhorrent ideology when it comes to women is not overtly stated in the material, but according to some parents I’ve spoken to and who shared their experiences publicly it permeates the schools.

Wilson has suggested marital rape is not possible, although he has walked that back. Earlier this year he tweeted “Husbands are prohibited from bluster, bossing about, selfish grasping, and all the rest of it, but the Bible nevertheless requires wives to obey their husbands. This obedience is to be cheerful, complete, reverent, all the way down, and across the board. … Now I am fully aware that in our current cultural climate this is a perfectly outrageous thing to say and teach. It may even be illegal in some states. “

He also co-wrote a textbook used in the curriculum Lloyd promotes with a fellow church affiliated educator who openly groomed a high school student he was teaching. The church never charged him because the girl was 18 by the time they had sex, but Wilson did take the man’s name off the textbook.

The church has a history of leniency toward abuses like that (and worse). Marital rape is not uncommon, detailed in harrowing firsthand accounts, and claims about pedophiles within the church’s ranks are diminished or said to be overlooked. The father of one victim said that when he reported the abuse, church officials threatened to bring him – the father – under church discipline for failing to protect his daughter. “It would be like me getting robbed and the police coming over and arresting me because I didn’t have five locks on the door, only one,” he told reporters for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which published an article about the saga. “It was just bizarre.”

Alex Lloyd’s family called Doug Wilson to pick him up from the Moscow, Idaho, police station after his 2022 arrest. The church soon dismissed Lloyd from the deaconage, but in its public statement, did not mention the child pornography charges, instead claiming he confessed right away to a porn addiction, and blamed his problem on “the pornification of the culture.”

What her husband’s sex offender status means in practical terms for TPUSA education missionary Heather Lloyd – who has personally taught Wilson’s Christian classical methods to children at schools in Arizona and Idaho over the past two decades – is that she cannot drive onto school grounds with her husband in the car and would likely be required to disclose that she lives with a registered sex offender if applying for new jobs involving children. As of 2019, according to one church member’s post praising her “faithful obedience,” she was running a summer camp for teenage girls.

It’s not clear that she is teaching anymore and TPUSA did not return a comment confirming (we will update if and when they do). But Heather Lloyd goes in and out of schools with administrators across the nation. When parents at one school discovered her husband’s conviction and Sex Offender status and attended a meeting, she batted away concerns claiming Alex “accidentally” opened child porn - “about 19 seconds worth” - and quickly deleted it. She told parents there were “no issues, he can see his grandchildren.”

A parent present for that discussion said “Heather is insane to be in this business with such a skeleton in the closet, but she is just one piece in a larger organization, where people are in cahoots pushing Doug Wilson’s system. And she would not pass a school background check! if you live with a registered sex offender you can’t take a kid on a field trip yet somehow she is an education consultant at TPUSA.”

The fact that Erica Kirk’s TPUSA would front the wife of a registered child porn sex offender as an education consultant and advisor suggests that, like other well-financed Trump-supporting PACs and organizations, this leviathan of Christian right extremist influence shares with the Epstein class a sense of impunity rarely seen in modern American political history.

They will say they’re just trusting in the Lord.

With this clan, perhaps one and the same.

[Turning Point USA and Heather Lloyd, contacted together — as Heather Lloyd is a consultant — did not respond to a request for comment.]

.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.

Katie Chenoweth is associate professor of French at Princeton University and an investigative researcher

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow




Pam Bondi

Pam Bondi's Swan Song: Ex-Attorney General Scheduled For Oversight Testimony

In 2013, then-Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi personally solicited a $25,000 political donation from the Donald J. Trump Foundation for her re-election PAC – and soon received it. Days later, Bondi’s office abandoned plans to join a New York lawsuit investigating fraud allegations against Trump University.

It is against the law for charitable foundations to make political contributions. But in the universe of Trump corruption, $25,000 was laughable chump change. It just proved to him how cheaply Pam Bondi could be had.

Fast forward a few years. Bondi, no longer in elected office, got serious about money as a $115,000-a-month lobbyist with the DC-based influence giant Ballard Partners. Her client list included deep-pocketed private prison corporations and the government of Qatar (for whom she was specifically registered under the Foreign Agent Registration Act for “dealing with matters pertaining to combating human trafficking”). When Trump nominated her to be his attorney general in early 2025, she didn’t bother mentioning those clients in her statement of potential conflicts of interest.

So far so good: lies and omissions are standard operating practice in Trumpworld.

His initial pick for attorney general was Matt Gaetz, who might have been a more fitting choice to oversee the Epstein cover-up, having himself been investigated for child sex trafficking and found to have violated Florida’s statutory rape laws according to the House Ethics Committee. Gaetz had skated on all of it, but was ultimately too tainted even for the slavish Senate Republican majority that would have to approve the nomination.

Still, Bondi was something of an unusual choice for a Trump casting. His preferred front-of-house women tend to be more colorful and histrionic – Pirro, Loomer, Omarosa, Noem. Bondi, though from Florida herself, for some reason never went full Mar-a-Lago face, though it’s not clear self-mutilation would have saved her.

Managing the fake release of a fake politically-motivated conspiracy while simultaneously curating the cover-up of real files tied to a real conspiracy was always going to be a tall order. One day she was riding in the presidential limo with Trump to the Statue of the Union address. The next, she was out in the cold.

To add insult to injury, this week, Pam, the defenestrated private citizen recently diagnosed with thyroid cancer, will have to endure a day of questioning about her role in the Epstein cover-up. While her former DOJ deputy – Trump’s personal attorney Todd “Whiteout” Blanche – wins the Old Man’s heart by erasing January 6 criminals from the DOJ website and rewarding violent coup plotters like Stewart Rhodes with taxpayer money, Pam will, at least for a day and maybe longer, become the public face of the Justice Department’s Epstein files cover-up.

In advance of her star turn on the Hill, here is a Freakshow timeline of Bondi’s ignominious reign as the nation’s top law enforcement official, and how she became Trump’s Brer Rabbit in the tar pit.

January 2025

Shortly after Trump’s inauguration, the Justice Department orders the Southern District of New York, which has an active investigation still underway, to send all Epstein-related evidence to Washington. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD.) would later state that “neither the survivors nor the SDNY prosecutors knew that the purpose of this transfer was to terminate the case.”

Despite the fact that Trump won the 2024 election in part by juicing the Epstein conspiracy and promising to reveal the sordid details, the Senate Judiciary Committee advances Bondi’s nomination without asking anything about the files.

February 4, 2025

The Senate confirms Bondi, by a vote of 54 to 46, with all Republicans and one Democrat – John Fetterman of Pennsylvania – voting in favor.

February 11, 2025

Republican Reps. Jim Comer (R-KY) and Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), as chairs of House Oversight and the Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets respectively, send a letter to Bondi requesting an ASAP briefing on documents related to the Jeffrey Epstein case.

February 21, 2025

Bondi goes on Fox and famously announces that the Epstein “client list” is “sitting on my desk right now to review” as part of a directive from President Trump himself.

February 27, 2025

Bondi incites an influencer revolt by inviting a pack of MAGA fake journalists, including Laura Loomer, to the White House and passing out binders labeled “The Epstein Files: Phase 1.” They pose for a photo op, thinking they are holding “declassified” material, only to realize that none of it was ever classified and much of it was already public (Epstein flight logs had been available since 2021).

Worse, the redactions are so badly mishandled that dozens of victims’ names – but not the names of their abusers – enter the public record.

With the stunt having failed, Bondi hops on with Fox News’ Mark Levin and shifts the blame to the New York federal prosecutor’s office, claiming they are “sitting on thousands of pages of documents regarding Epstein.” She promises that America will soon see “the full Epstein files” and then writes a letter to Kash Patel demanding delivery of the “full and complete Epstein files” to her office by 8 AM the next morning, while also demanding an “immediate investigation” into why her orders to the FBI were not followed.

February 28, 2025

James Dennehy, head of the FBI’s New York field office, is fired.

March 2025

Bondi tells Sean Hannity that the DOJ has received “a truckload of evidence” and department staff begin processing 100,000 pages of the Epstein files in Winchester, Virginia. The job takes too long, so two weeks later, Bondi reportedly pressures the FBI to increase staffing and intensify efforts. A whistleblower later reports that she and Patel put crime-fighters on 24-hour document redaction shifts, with instructions to look out for Trump’s name. Sen. Dick Durbin’s letter about this episode contains many questions Bondi has not yet been asked publicly.

May 2025

Bondi reportedly tells Trump during a briefing that his name appears in the Epstein files.

June 5, 2025

Elon Musk claims that the Epstein files have not been released because Trump is in them. “Time to drop the really big bomb: [Trump] is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public.” House Democrats immediately fire off a letter asking Bondi and Patel whether Musk’s claim is true.

July 4, 2025

A weekend of mysterious, panicked scrambling unfolds between Main Justice in Washington and the FBI’s New York office to get additional copies of Epstein file photos to Todd Blanche’s office.

July 7, 2025

The DOJ and FBI release an unsigned joint memo stating their “exhaustive review” found no co-conspirators, “did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties,” and that no further disclosure of documents was warranted. At the end of the letter, officials link to video footage of the MCC Epstein cell area. Bondi never releases any materials related to the “exhaustive review.”

July 15, 2025

Reps. Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna introduce the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

July 16, 2025

Trump posts that the Epstein files are a “Democrat hoax” on Truth Social, then repeats that claim in person from the Oval Office. That same day, Maureen Comey, lead prosecutor in the New York Epstein investigation, is fired.

July 17, 2025

The Wall Street Journal publishes the first of its “birthday book” stories, revealing that Trump gave his old friend Jeff a lewd drawing as a gift. Trump denies that it’s real and eventually files a $10 billion lawsuit that is later tossed by a judge. As another distraction, Trump instructs DOJ to seek release of Epstein grand jury materials. A day later, Bondi and Blanche ask the federal court to release the transcripts.

July 22, 2025

Pam Bondi posts a statement from Todd Blanche announcing that she directed him to communicate with Ghislaine Maxwell’s attorneys.. “If Ghislane [sic] Maxwell has information about anyone who has committed crimes against victims, the FBI and the DOJ will hear what she has to say.”

Two days later, Blanche meets with Maxwell in Tallahassee. Meanwhile, House Speaker Mike Johnson, trying to head off a vote on the Epstein Transparency Act, shuts down House business for the rest of the summer.

August 1, 2025

The Bureau of Prisons, a DOJ agency, transfers Maxwell to a low-security prison despite BOP guidelines for convicted sex offenders.

October 7, 2025

Pam Bondi appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee. She seems flummoxed by questions about photos of Trump in Epstein’s safe, as described by Michael Wolff, and deflects questions about DOJ failures to investigate Epstein’s finances by blaming Democratic administrations.

November 14, 2025

At Trump’s behest, Bondi asks New York U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton (a lawyer previously brought into Epstein associate Leon Black’s hedge fund for reputation rehab) to “take the lead” on investigating Epstein’s involvement specifically with Democrats, including Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, Reid Hoffman, and other institutions.

December 21, 2025

Bondi tweets that the Justice Department will bring charges against “anyone involved in the trafficking and exploitation of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims.” She claims the DOJ has already met with “many victims” and urges others to reach out to her, Blanche, or the FBI “and we will investigate immediately.”

(NOTE: Victims have repeatedly said that Bondi never talked to any of them and the DOJ has so far not prosecuted anyone other than Ghislaine Maxwell.)

February 11, 2026

Bondi testifies before the House Oversight Committee – prickly, cornered and occasionally unhinged – while refusing to acknowledge a group of Epstein victims in the audience. The spectacle likely ended her run in the Trump cabinet reality show.

As The Daily Beast’s Joanna Coles put it:

These hearings, like so much political theater now, are staged for an audience of one: the great and powerful Donald Trump. So while Bondi thought she was playing the role of loyal defender, her sneering responses and burn book takedowns turned her into something else: the Angry Woman. And that is not something her boss would order from Central Casting.

February 17, 2026

American Freakshow reports the existence of three missing FBI interviews related to a sexual assault allegation against Trump by a woman whose redacted name is marked with the unusual label “protect source.” The story gets picked up by NPR, and after two weeks of denials, the DOJ finally acknowledges the three interviews. But questions remain about what other materials might be similarly withheld.

April 2, 2026

Trump fires Bondi over her handling of the Epstein files. There’s a difference between suave, brazen disregard for the law in quiet practice and full-frontal rudeness to the legislative branch. It’s a difference her replacement, Acting AG Blanche, having auditioned as Trump’s Roy Cohn for the last several years and grown increasingly willing to put his client’s kingly immunity into practice, understands.

He immediately announces that there will be no more Epstein file releases.

.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.

Katie Chenoweth is associate professor of French at Princeton University and an investigative researcher
Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow

Epstein Class Act: MAGA Misogynists Link Up At Big Beverly Hills Finance Confab

Epstein Class Act: MAGA Misogynists Link Up At Big Beverly Hills Finance Confab

Two accused rapists loll in giant black pleather chairs against a backdrop of mint green book shelves and a cold hearth: the Beverly Hills version of a cozy YouTube fireside chat.

Earlier this month, proud sex trafficker Andrew Tate and “modeling agent” Paolo Zampolli linked up at, or in the vicinity of, the annual Milken Institute Global Conference, where business leaders and wannabes congregate to discuss “Leading in a New Era.”

The annual confab is sometimes described as the American business version of Davos. The 2026 conference announcement invited attendees to the Beverly Hilton to “reflect on the disruptions and innovations of the recent past and translate lessons learned into building meaningful, healthy, and prosperous lives for all.”

Milken Global is named after one of the great Wall Street fraudsters of all time – a man who, as they say, did the crime and did the time, then came roaring back into polite society.

Kind of like, come to think of it, a guy named Jeff.

This annual networking conference, tailored for C-suite executives, investors, and policymakers is of course open to both men and women… at least for now (let’s see how America looks after Scott Yenor’s vision becomes the law of the land).

But the fact that roofie-rape-accused Zampolli – the guy who pulled strings to have ICE deport his baby mama when she became inconvenient – AND a multiple rape and battery-accused global sex-crime-cheerleader scumbag like Andrew Tate were both present is proof positive that the Epstein Class is still in control of American business echelons in 2026.

Then again, perhaps we should not be shocked that an Andrew Tate would be skulking around with a Paolo Zampolli at a major American confab named after a Wall Street felon.

Michael Milken was originally sentenced in 1990 to 10 years in federal prison after pleading guilty to six felony counts related to securities and reporting violations tied to the Drexel Burnham Lambert scandals. Of course he did not serve the full sentence – he did less than two years due to good behavior and cooperation with prosecutors. Though permanently barred from the securities industry, Milken retained massive informal influence through his relationships, family offices, philanthropy, advisory networks, and the Milken Institute ecosystem.

The annual Milken Institute Global Conference became central to his rehabilitation, evolving into a sought-after gathering of CEOs, politicians, billionaires, celebrities, intelligence figures, tech founders, and global investors. Over the decades, attendance by these establishment figures effectively normalized Milken, and in 2020, Trump pardoned him, erasing his federal conviction.

And last fall, the historic federal-style Riggs Bank building a short walk from the White House and U.S. Treasury got a new name: the Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream. It’s billed as a kind of museum with “interactive exhibits” focused on education, health, finance and entrepreneurship.

What better way to signal that the founding principles of the American commons – thrift, honesty, hard work, respect for law and order – have morphed into something rather more …barbaric… during the Epstein years. And not just in his mansion or Mar-a-Lago.

The word “Milken” appears 723 times in the Epstein files released so far – most often in connection with his institute, which invited Jeff to its events. But the men were certainly friendly. In one 2012 scheduling email, Epstein was to have breakfast with Leon Black, and the sender (an Apollo company employee) suggested Mike Milken might join them. In another email, Epstein described Milken as “leons [sic] closest friend.”

Epstein did attend at least one of the Milken conferences, in 2013, though he dismissed it afterward as having “wasted my time.”

But the Milken reputation-rehab method was always an option for Jeff. In fact, Valerie Post – the Council on Foreign Relations’ director of events at the time – suggested it to him in a 2010 email.

Of course Paolo Zampolli, currently a Trump-invented “special envoy” would grace the Milken Institute Global Conference with his presence. But hanging with Andrew Tate, whose malignant effect on teen boys worldwide has prompted whole seminars of concerned educators, adds insult to Trumpian injury.

Making this spectacle infinitely more odious is that the conference took place not far from the Beverly Hills Hotel, where Tate – in a 2025 incident reported to police – “violently beat and choked” a woman named Brianna Stern, who later filed a lawsuit against him in Los Angeles. The details are harrowing: Stern claims they were having consensual sex when Tate began to choke her, and she “began crying and begging for him to stop. He would not.” Days later, she was diagnosed with a concussion after seeking medical attention, according to the complaint. She told NBC, “I was terrified that I might die.”

(Tate has denied the allegations and filed a $50 million countersuit against her, though a judge tossed parts of his case in December. Stern’s suit is scheduled to go to trial next year.)

Numerous other women have lodged rape and choking allegations against Tate, including conservative political influencer Lauren Southern, who detailed a choking rape in her memoir last year. A UK civil case brought by four women is inching through the London court system over alleged incidents between 2013 and 2015. One woman says Tate pointed a gun at her face and raped her. Another claims he frequently strangled her, while a third says he continued having sex with her after she lost consciousness from choking. One filing also states that he said he was “debating whether to rape” her.

In 2023, Tate was indicted in Romania, along with his brother Tristan and two Romanian women, on charges of human trafficking, rape, and forming an organized criminal group to sexually exploit women. He has bragged on record about trafficking women and treating them “like slaves.” Romania charged him with imprisoning women tattooed with “Tate Girl” and forcing them to perform webcam sex acts for hours at a time.

None of that disqualified him from our national Predators’ Ball. When Trump won the 2024 election, Tate tweeted that his Romanian rape case would be “dismissed” and added, “Watch this space ;-)”. That case remains open, but pro-Tate freaks in the Trump administration – likely including his former lawyer and current administration tool, Paul Ingrassia, who once called Tate a paragon of western masculinity – managed to spring him and his brother from Romania and fly them to Miami. There, they have resumed their rape-cheerleading influencer enterprise.

Zampolli, meanwhile, has gone on a misogynistic rampage of his own since his ex, Amanda Ungaro, accused him of cutting a deal with Melania to keep himself in Trump’s good graces. He has been raging in the Italian media against “whores” who accuse him of roofie rape or support his ex-wife in Brazil.

Zampolli clearly finds in Tate a kindred spirit and the rape-bro’s content creation den a safe space. There, he bragged to Tate about selling Boeing jets to Uzbekistan during one of his “envoy” jaunts for Trump: “$20 billion in 20 minutes, by the way. This is the art of the deal, the art of impossible.”

Tate replied, “I only did $19 billion in 20 minutes, so you’ve beaten my record.”

Zampolli accepted the compliment:

Well, if you also would be selling Boeing like me, we have to compete. Like I told Jeff [presumably Jeff Shockey, Boeing’s EVP of Government Operations, Global Public Policy & Corporate Strategy] for the head of buying that as I’m the second best served person after the president of the United States of America, which he beat me a lot, and they told me, ‘Would he be upset?’ I said, ‘No, absolutely not. This is called fair competition.’ More Boeing we sell, more job we give to America [sic].

Trying to imagine a Boeing executive forced to pretend to respect this depraved Epstein demimonde apparatchik almost makes me feel sorry for him.

A spokeswoman for the Milken Institute emailed the Freakshow that “Andrew Tate was not registered for and did not attend the Milken Institute Global Conference. He also did not attend any Milken Institute-hosted events alongside the conference.” She added that Zampolli had been invited by a sponsor. “There are many events held on the sidelines of the Milken Institute Global Conference with which we do not have any connection or oversight. I believe this is where Zampolli and Tate spoke.”

Well, Tate was undoubtedly slinking around and proud of it. In a video tweeted from what appears to be a private jet, he boasted about not having to pay for his Milken ticket and said he was invited “because I’m a rich n---, I’m there doing rich n--- shit.”

In the video with Zampolli, he was less profane: “We met earlier at the Milken conference. I’m taking this so seriously. I’ve even got some written down questions because I know you’re a serious businessman who’s done some very serious things… Are you enjoying the Milken conference? What do you think? This is my first one, but there’s some interesting people here.”

Zampolli replied with the signature obsequy that has made him the perfect Trump tool. “Oh, well, I want to thank Mr. Milken to have invite me here for sport diplomacy. There is big panels of sport. We have a lots of sport people… And it’s an honor to be – thank you, Mr. Milken for inviting me” [sic].

It’s 2026. Jeff’s been dead eight years. The mansion is shuttered, the island swept clean of predators.

But there is still always a cozy conclave in America where the Epstein class can schmooze

.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.

Katie Chenoweth is associate professor of French at Princeton University and an investigative researcher
Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow
Top Hegseth Aide Is Former Mob Lawyer Linked To Epstein And Trump Coverups

Top Hegseth Aide Is Former Mob Lawyer Linked To Epstein And Trump Coverups

Steve Bannon is our favorite felonious Epstein supervillain. He’s actually fun to talk to and has brilliant media instincts (flooding the zone with shit – his great insight – most certainly works). As the information sewer overflows, it becomes impossible to keep track of rampant abuses of power, open-air corruption and the networks that keep the sordid operation going. The shit-flood and the scoop-obsessed news cycle work together like a bomb going off and burying the witnesses.

Sometimes it pays to stop and dig around. In the age of the Epstein cover-up, it behooves us not to forget the unanswered questions.

Today we will revisit the career of Pete Hegseth’s top aide, former New York mob attorney Tim Parlatore.

Parlatore – born Timothy Payne – attended Brooklyn Law, like Trump’s better-known guard dog and personal lawyer, Acting Attorney General Todd “Whiteout” Blanche. Not Yale. Not Harvard. These guys might not be Roy Cohn, but they came up cold and hard through the same Gotham legal networks that enabled Donald Trump’s game for decades.

Parlatore got his start in criminal defense law at the knee of Bruce Cutler, mobster John Gotti’s famously combative lawyer. His first case that garnered media attention was in defense of a Marine Corps reservist and Iraq War veteran charged with animal cruelty for kicking his girlfriend’s dog. It’s not clear why he changed his last name from Payne, but a guy named “Parlatore” probably jived better with the likes of Gambino family “made man” Joseph Sclafani and Bonanno family soldier Anthony “Skinny” Santoro. (For more on Parlatore’s curious path, read national security writer Seth Hettena here.)

At the Pentagon, Parlatore has distinguished himself by drafting unconstitutional restrictions on the press while simultaneously propping up his flop-sweating former client, Pete Hegseth. He got to know the philandering, boozing Fox News host while helping settle a roofie rape accusation against him. Before that, Parlatore had won virility-obsessed Hegseth’s loyalty by successfully defending a truly psycho Navy Seal charged with war crimes in Iraq (fellow SEALs alleged that the man bragged about killing women and children and boasted of a “kill rate” of 10 to 20 people a day).

But Parlatore is not just a Pentagon macher. He is one of the top guardians Donald Trump has relied on to protect his dirtiest secrets.

Which brings us to Epstein.

Parlatore is in the Epstein files, representing the MCC guard who accompanied Epstein’s body from his jail cell to the hospital where he was pronounced dead – one of the first people to communicate with the duty guards responsible for watching over the incarcerated international trafficker.

But Parlatore also has another much deeper Epstein connection. He boarded the Trump train when post-presidential Donald needed “killer lawyers” to defend him against federal charges tied to the theft of classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago. A month after taking that case, Parlatore brought Darren Indyke into his law firm – yes, the same Darren Indyke who spent decades serving as Jeffrey Epstein’s personal lawyer.

This is the sequence of events: In September 2022, Parlatore publicly defended Trump on TV after the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago; in October 2022, he hired Indyke; by November 2022, Parlatore was formally part of Trump’s legal team handling the classified documents investigation.

Parlatore later stated that he personally oversaw and organized searches for classified documents at other Trump residences. He has scoffed at reporters who find the timing and fact of his hiring Epstein’s lawyer odd. After all, he was just giving the poor guy a break.

We still don’t know what Trump took or why. The indictment charged him with 37 federal counts – later increased to 40 – for willfully retaining classified documents, conspiring to obstruct justice, and making false statements after leaving office. The details are sketchy, but alarming. Trump made off with material related to nuclear information, U.S. and foreign military capabilities, contingency attack plans, intelligence sources and methods and other highly compartmentalized national security details.

We may never find out more because a Trump-appointed Florida tool, AKA Judge Aileen Cannon, tossed the case, sealed the record, and muzzled everyone under the threat of criminal charges.

Congressional Democrats who attended a closed briefing with special prosecutor Jack Smith could only sputter hints as to what they’d seen afterward. The Trump-retained materials were among “the most protected materials held by the federal government,” including a document so sensitive that access had reportedly been limited to “only six people” in the U.S. government.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said a public hearing would have been “absolutely devastating to the president.” One box of documents had allegedly been scanned onto a Trump aide’s laptop and uploaded to the cloud, which he argued created an entirely separate set of security concerns.

Raskin also said investigators found documents “pertinent to [Trump’s] business interests,” which he pointed out, raised questions about why the records were retained in the first place.

None of this should surprise anyone. Donald Trump has never been known to leave easy money on the table – from the post-Great Recession Trump University scam to the small vendors in Atlantic City he bankrupted by stiffing them for pianos and carpets at his doomed casinos, and now the latest, “Trump phones.”

Fleecing the government is also a family tradition. Daddy Fred Trump profiteered off of World War II GI Bill construction money, the Trump Organization was found guilty of tax fraud, Donald Trump evaded federal taxes for at least a decade, and now his conflicted son is making billion dollar deals with the Pentagon.

Back to Mr. Parlatore. Now that the depth and breadth of Epstein’s international networking and backchannel connections to U.S. government agencies are becoming known, the presence of an Epsteinworld insider like Indyke in the vicinity of the stolen documents case becomes even more interesting.

Before Tim Parlatore picked him up, Indyke had reportedly been laying low in South Florida, banking multimillion dollar profits from Epstein’s trust and working as a real estate agent. Parlatore says he felt sorry for him, and that Indyke assured his benefactor that the FBI had already interviewed him and found him blameless. Unsurprisingly, that doesn’t really hold up. In fact, several years prior, a 2020 settlement with Deutsche Bank noted that Indyke withdrew $800,000 between 2013 and 2017 in $7,500 increments – an amount clearly chosen to deliberately skirt the reporting triggers that would attract attention.

Indyke has since said the money was for “meals, gifts, and gratuities,” though DOJ files suggest Epstein’s global trafficking business was peaking during those same years. Any presumption of Indyke’s ignorance further eroded as the Files revealed him running numerous shell companies for Epstein. And COURIER recently discovered that Indyke lied to the House Oversight Committee about a $3 million house he received as a gift.

Darren Indyke’s sole qualification as a lawyer for the Parlatore Law Group is a career spent managing the legal and financial affairs of a global sex trafficker with deep ties to American and foreign power networks. Indyke possesses the kind of unique “skills” and knowledge that would undeniably come in handy if and when the Epstein cover-up gets too close to Trump.

The cover-up is vast – a vault of secrets going back decades and involving some of the most powerful men in the world. Epstein knew what those secrets were worth. Trump certainly does too.

The Parlatore Law Group, with attorneys playing both sides, should be on the House Oversight Committee’s radar.

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.

Katie Chenoweth is associate professor of French at Princeton University and an investigative researcher.

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow

Possible Epstein Suicide Note Looks Real -- And May Prove He Killed Himself

Possible Epstein Suicide Note Looks Real -- And May Prove He Killed Himself

A federal judge has released a scrawled “suicide note” Jeffrey Epstein’s quadruple-murder-convicted cellmate says he found in a graphic novel left behind after the sex trafficker was moved out of his cell several weeks before he died. The note has been sealed for years in a case involving that inmate and a feud between lawyers. The New York Times recently petitioned to have it released and last night the paper of record published it.

“They investigated me for months — FOUND NOTHING!!!” the note begins. “It is a treat to be able to choose one’s time to say goodbye,” the note continues.

“Watcha want me to do — Bust out cryin!!

“NO FUN,” it concludes, with those words underlined. “NOT WORTH IT!!”

Unauthenticated note allegedly found in Jeffrey Epstein's cell after his alleged suicide in the Metropolitan Correctional Centr

The Times added that the note has not been authenticated.

The “bustin out cryin’” phrase doesn’t sound at all like Epstein, and already online armchair sleuths and Epstein-ologists are declaring it fake for that reason.

But it appears to have been a pet phrase of his. We’ve found three emails in the DOJ library over the years in which Epstein talked - with a friend and with his brother - about “bustin’ out cryin.”

In a New Year’s Eve 2016 email to childhood friend Terry Kafka, in a discussion about missing their friend Warren Eistenstin, who died in 2014, Epstein wrote “Whatcha want me todo / bust out cryin” adding “I get very nostalgic and truly miss warren. On nites like tonite.”

Earlier that year in an email to his brother Mark Epstein, who informed him that their cousin had become a grandfather, he had written “whtchoo want me todo -- bust out cryin” .

Three years later in a March 2019 email to his brother, (subject line: “tits”), just a few months before his arrest, he wrote “what would you like me to say , do ? bust out cryin”

The similarity of the language and the oddness of the phrase certainly suggest that note is authentic. And in fact, Epstein was deemed suicidal by the Bureau of Prisons, had been found unresponsive in his cell and taken to the prison hospital several weeks before he was found dead in his cell.

The question of whether he was murdered or killed himself has been hanging over the saga since practically the day he was found dead, with a broken hyoid bone. The New York medical examiner officially ruled a suicide.

But Epstein’s brother Mark - among many including Epstein’s lawyers - who believed he was murdered - hired the highly regarded independent pathologist Dr. Michael Baden, who served as New York’s chief medical examiner in the 1970s and who has weighed in on high profile murders over the years.

Baden concluded that Epstein’s injuries, including fractures to his larynx and hyoid bone, were “extremely unusual in suicidal hangings” and more consistent with “homicidal strangulation.” He urged authorities to look further: “There’s evidence here of homicide that should be investigated, to see if it is or isn’t homicide,” he said.

But he admitted his observations were not conclusive. And New York Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Barbara Sampson said she stood “firmly” behind findings in her autopsy report, which ruled Epstein hanged himself and temporarily quelled much of the speculation surrounding the financier’s death.

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.

Katie Chenoweth is associate professor of French at Princeton University and an investigative researcher.

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow


The Accountant's Suitcases: What Really Happened To Contents Of Epstein Safe?

The Accountant's Suitcases: What Really Happened To Contents Of Epstein Safe?

Let’s say you’re a middle-aged accountant who has spent your career working for one very rich, globally connected man. It’s high summer and you’re in the Hamptons when you get word that Number One Client – your only client – has been arrested by the feds. You may or may not have an idea why. You know a lot about Number One Client. You know where his money is, how his hundreds of millions are structured. He pays you handsomely for it. You also pay his bills, including wires totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years to girls. You might even know, as the President of the United States has said, that Number One Client likes girls “on the young side.”

He’s been in trouble before, and authorities never bothered with you. But now, not only is he in jail, federal agents have broken down the baronial door of his Upper East Side mansion and are pawing through everything – the sex toys, the massage tables, the taxidermied dogs… and the safe.

Cutting through it with a diamond-tipped saw took the good part of a night. Inside: 48 loose diamonds, envelopes of cash totaling $70,000, multiple hard drives, binders of CDs, and various passports (Israeli, Austrian, and American – all with Epstein’s photo, but not his name).

Suspicious!

But their warrant – narrowly focused on sex crimes from 2002-2005 – doesn’t allow the feds to seize that stuff on the spot. They could cart off CDs found elsewhere labeled in ways related to their quest, like, for example, “Misc. Girls Nude/Dinner—Scientists.” But they need another warrant for the passports, cash, and unlabeled CDs.

They leave.

You have a choice: Stay at the beach? Go back to the city?

No rush!

With the boss in jail as of July 2019, Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime accountant Richard Kahn really was in no hurry to get back to the city. He says he left it to the house manager to decide how to handle the feds and their quest.

Incredibly, in the two official federal investigations into Epstein, no one seems to have bothered to interrogate Kahn about anything – let alone this episode – until the House Oversight Committee called him in last month.

Kahn told them that “I received a call from Merwin [Dela Cruz, the house manager] … telling me that ‘I packed up two bags of Epstein’s belongings or things that were safe, and I left them with your doorman in New York City. I just wanted to let you know.’ I said to him, ‘I’m not home. I’ll be home in three or four days. And, you know, at that time, I’ll bring it up to my apartment.’” Kahn says he moseyed back to Manhattan, found the suitcases with his doorman, and brought them up. “I never touched them. I never opened them. I left them in my dining room.”

Well, the house manager told a very different story. When the FBI returned to the mansion with a warrant for the safe’s contents, they found it empty. According to the FBI’s handwritten notes, Dela Cruz said that Kahn, who he described as “the money guy,” had instructed him to pack the contents of the safe into two suitcases and deliver them directly to his – Kahn’s – apartment dining room on Sunday, his day off.

The FBI called Kahn to get the suitcases out of his apartment and into their hands. Kahn added his lawyer to the call. He claims he was back in his office that day and had returned the “never touched” suitcases to the mansion within 20 or 30 minutes of hearing that the FBI wanted them.

The New York FBI did eventually get their hands on some of the materials from the safe. But even then, the logging of them was weirdly delayed, by at least a month in some cases, according to the records. Released DOJ records indicate that the FBI’s logged contents included unlabeled hard drives and approximately eight binders containing CDs of photos, in addition to the cash, diamonds, and passports.

But a property receipt from the initial FBI search indicates that the only items seized from the safe at the time were two black binders of CDs and 13 loose CDs. Special Agent Kelly Maguire, the leader of the team that searched the house, testified at Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial that agents did not have the legal authority to seize other CDs at that time.

So where did they go? What else of interest might have been on disks stored in a safe alongside loose diamonds and fake passports?

Former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Geoffrey Berman, wrote in his book Holding the Line that the FBI also discovered an Israeli passport inside the safe. We have not found any trace of that passport in the files released by the DOJ.

Michael Wolff has claimed that Epstein kept “a dozen or so” compromising photos of Trump in his safe, and would occasionally take them out to show Wolff and other friends. There is no record of those photos in the DOJ files released so far.

Special Agent Maguire did speak with Richard Kahn on the phone before the suitcases were returned. According to the call’s FD-302 interview form, Kahn was careful to add his attorney, who advised that Kahn had not opened or tampered with the contents of the suitcases and would return them to Epstein’s house in 20-30 minutes, which he reportedly did.

The FBI took the suitcases, gave Kahn a property receipt, and moved them to a secure location at the FBI New York Operations Center.

After Kahn handed over the suitcases, the record reveals more errors, inconsistencies, delays, and general weirdness in the FBI’s handling of the evidence from the safe and their reporting of these events. A “book of CDs” appeared in one inventory of the suitcases on July 11, only to be flagged as an erroneous entry in an “amended inventory” 20 days later.

FBI photographs of the suitcases taken on July 11, 2019 include two black images that are not redactions. Documentation pertaining to Kahn appears to have been entered with significant delays compared to other similar reports. A 302 report and inventory of the suitcases from Kahn were drafted on July 17, 2019, but not entered until over a month later on August 20 – ten days after Epstein’s death.

Kahn’s sworn testimony regarding the safe’s contents and the suitcases directly contradicts an FBI Task Force Officer’s sworn affidavit filed by SDNY in applications for subsequent search warrants (which only include the house manager’s version of events).

A cover-up?

Much like COURIER national correspondent Camaron Stevenson’s reporting on Kahn’s partner in Epstein-world, lawyer Darren Indyke, we find Kahn’s testimony to the Oversight Committee to be seriously undermined by the DOJ’s own files.

At the very least, we know the FBI’s handling of the safe materials and Richard Kahn’s interim possession of them destroyed a clean chain of evidence from the get-go.

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.

Katie Chenoweth is associate professor of French at Princeton University and an investigative researcher.

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow

Continuing Under Bondi And Patel, The Epstein Coverup Is The Crime

Continuing Under Bondi And Patel, The Epstein Coverup Is The Crime

Last week, independent journalist Jacqueline Sweet penned an “exclusive” report in the New York Post on the 37 missing pages tied to a woman making serious allegations against Donald Trump. Sweet is a solid reporter, with works published in Rolling Stone and The Guardian, and has consistently expressed skepticism – both online and personally to us – about the validity of the woman’s claims.

She has been getting access to material that is not public. In an earlier piece for the Guardian, based on information leaked to her, she revealed that the accuser had a criminal record – which the Department of Justice (DOJ) eventually confirmed by releasing the pages.

Now, someone with access to the full Epstein files has leaked again… but only Sweet and the Murdoch tabloid have gotten a look at the pages. As she wrote: “The 37 pages, which aren’t public but have been reviewed by The Post, include sickening claims that Epstein began abusing the woman during a visit to Hilton Head Island when the accuser was just 13 and forced her to perform oral sex on Trump.”

In her Guardian article, Sweet called the claims “outlandish.” Clearly she finds the witness not at all credible. And that’s fine.

But the decision to share “documents that are not public” with a Murdoch tabloid is curious. Maybe other editors weren’t interested? Or maybe the source doesn’t want them widely read quite yet?

We reported on some of these missing pages early – first, in fact – in a post titled “Protect Source,” the tag attached to the unnamed woman’s claims in the available files. We noticed gaps in the DOJ’s numbering system that indicated they were covering up some missing interviews. We reported the lurid allegations with caveats because the Epstein files contain many unproven claims and we resist the Pizzagate, Satanic-panic theorizing that has been re-emerging amidst the online DIY investigation frenzy.

This particular accusation, however, seemed to warrant closer scrutiny from members of Congress, primarily, we thought, because of the unusual “Protect Source” designation. The story of the missing pages drew mainstream attention from NPR to the New York Times. More than a month later, professional Never Trumpers and Epstein-ologists are still devoting tens of thousands of written and spoken words to the topic.

The impetus for this obsession is the belief that the files hold a silver bullet against Donald Trump: Somewhere, a grown woman who, as a teenager, was preyed upon by a younger Trump, will emerge and finally take him down.

I have some doubts about the woman’s Trump story myself, but the behavior of the DOJ is even more suspicious. First they withheld pages. Then they claimed they were duplicative – which they are not. Then someone leaked a few to Sweet and right-wing news site Breitbart.

The DOJ continues to withhold additional pages. Now they appear to be selectively dropping them to a single journalist and two Trump-friendly outlets.

The accuser’s description of Epstein’s MO certainly sounds familiar: lured to a vacation home, plied with booze, talked into bringing other 13-year-olds around. Plus she described Jeff’s snaggletooth, which he hides in most photographs. Sweet has insisted that there is no evidence Epstein was ever in South Carolina in the ‘80s, but of course the absence of a travel record means nothing. We have already uncovered evidence that he was in unexpected places in the ‘80s, like Kuala Lumpur.

He was still just a Coney Island thug then, on his way to becoming James Bondstein.

But let’s be real about our expectations.

First: Trump’s predatory inclinations are baked into his appeal. He survived E. Jean Carroll’s lawsuit as well as dozens of women alleging that he was, at best, a sex pest and at worst, a sexual assaulter. Will a woman now in her late 50s or 60s with decades-old memories be the person who finally takes down the nearly 80-year-old Leader of the Free World? To paraphrase his infamous 2015 boast: he could probably live down an alleged rape on Fifth Avenue.

Second: Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director "K$H" Patel had their hands deep in the Epstein files early on. In March 2025, FBI agents were pulled away from crime-fighting to scour the files, ostensibly for the mythical “client list” that so obsessed the MAGAs (which in fact already existed publicly in Epstein’s black book), but additionally to “flag” mentions of Donald Trump. An FBI whistleblower told Sen. Dick Durbin, Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, that agents were working 48-hour shifts and given spreadsheets to fill out.

But the coverup started long before that – in Palm Beach, where prosecutors allowed Epstein’s white shoe powerhouse attorneys to send their own investigators into his mansion to remove evidence, including computers, never to be seen again.

It continued in 2019, when FBI agents inside Epstein’s New York mansion – apparently without the proper warrants – let longtime accountant Richard Kahn remove items from a safe, only to return later with a curated selection of whatever had been in it. FBI records of this are murky and deserve congressional attention. This episode is so suspicious and strange that we will devote an entire newsletter to it next week so stay tuned.

The coverup continues to this minute, with the Bondi DOJ still redacting the names of Epstein’s rich and powerful johns.

So: Eyes on the prize. The Epstein coverup IS the crime. And the closest thing we have to a silver bullet.

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.

Katie Chenoweth is associate professor of French at Princeton University and an investigative researcher.

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow

'Protect Source': Where Are Missing FBI Interviews With Trump Accuser?

'Protect Source': Where Are Missing FBI Interviews With Trump Accuser?

Here at the Freakshow, like everyone else, we sift through the millions of pages in the Epstein files with an eye for the elusive Trump connection, some proof behind the long-circulating rumors about his participation in the frolics Epstein arranged for himself and his coterie of wealthy ogres.

Earlier this week, journalist Roger Sollenberger published a piece examining evidence the FBI appears to have concealed involving Trump. It centers on a July 2019 interview with a woman who claimed to the FBI that she met Epstein in South Carolina in 1983 or 1984, when she was 13 years old. According to her account, Epstein tricked her into showing up at his vacation rental by claiming to need a babysitter. There were, in fact, no children. Instead, she says, he drugged her, took nude pictures, and raped her.

So far, another revolting Epstein story.

But this one scales up.

The redacted victim in that interview has biographical details that closely match those of another redacted-name woman. In separate documents within the Epstein files and in a court filing, that woman alleged that Epstein took her to New York and exposed her to “wealthy older men” as “fresh meat.” She further claimed that he introduced her to a man – Trump – who sexually assaulted and “punched her in the head.”

The Epstein files are full of outrageous allegations that can be dismissed for lack of corroboration: the FBI fielded and recorded wild claims of murder, child sacrifice, and even stories of Trump on a yacht in Lake Michigan tossing a baby overboard. The existence of large victim compensation funds from the Epstein estate to accusers and their attorneys naturally attracts con artists and grifters. It is a magnet for the fantasies and lies of untold numbers of celebrity-seekers and other lunatics. We can see the Satanic panic conspiracy of the Pizzagate era rising again in some of the Epstein DIY research and commentary.

This particular accusation, however, invites a closer look from members of Congress who have access to the unredacted Epstein material.

Here’s why:

  1. It appears that the FBI interviewed this woman four times over a period of a few weeks in the summer of 2019. But only one of the four interviews is in the released files.
  2. The agents clearly believed the woman had something to fear. Her name is always redacted but followed by the words in all caps: PROTECT SOURCE. This designation is nowhere else in the Epstein files. An FBI source we spoke with told us it is typically used for high-risk informants such as mafia rats.
  3. In the single interview included in the release, the woman showed FBI agents a photo of Epstein and Trump on her phone. She then asked if she could crop out the second person. When agents asked about the second man, her lawyer intervened, stating that “[REDACTED] was concerned about implicating additional individuals, and specifically any that were well known, due to fear of retaliation.”


  1. In an October 2019 call between the FBI and her attorney, also logged by the FBI, the attorney referenced “information regarding any investigation into a recent suspicious incident that occurred at [redacted] place of employment.” (Mentions of “suspicious incidents” confronting Trump accusers at work remind us of Stormy Daniels’ account of the creepy thug who threatened her and her baby daughter in a Vegas parking lot when she was preparing to go public about her tryst with Donald).
  2. The DOJ appears to have gone to great lengths to hide the fact that they removed pages of interaction with the woman. The released Epstein files use a secondary numbering system that appears sequential, but in this case conceals significant gaps in the primary record. The woman’s first interview with the FBI, labeled “Interview One,” begins at serial -001. In the released files, the documents then jump to -008, -009, and -010 for a series of photos that include one of Epstein and Trump, with Trump cropped out, followed by images of the accuser as a teenager with friends. Three numbered records then appear relating to her initial FBI phone interview and two contacts with the Bloom firm. The six missing items of evidence could be images or text. If they are text, they could amount to many more pages in total, as the first interview runs nine pages long.
  3. In one undated document that appears to be what the FBI calls a case index, there are four PROTECT SOURCE interviews listed, clearly with the same woman. We only have one of them. Where are serials 252, 264 and 312 – corresponding to Interviews 2,3, and 4?

  1. There is another tell. The one interview we have is titled “Interview One.” The standard FBI practice throughout the Epstein files is to title interviews “Interview of [person]” — unless there are multiple interviews, in which case they are numbered.
  1. We know this woman’s report concerned the DOJ because in July 2025, as the Department was facing calls to release the files, an internal email placed Trump at the top of a list of accused individuals on a PowerPoint presentation. His name was highlighted in yellow for “salacious” accusations, alongside Leon Black, Les Wexner, and others.
  2. Because of that email and an FBI powerpoint also in the files, we know that a search for Donald Trump’s name in July 2025 returned “a positive case hit” in FBI lingo. This email implies it was documented in an attached spreadsheet which is not in the files now.

The details in the internal FBI email and PowerPoint closely align with the allegations made by a South Carolina woman represented as Jane Doe 4 by attorney Arick Fudali of the Lisa Bloom firm, which currently represents 11 Epstein accusers.

From the FBI Power Point:

[Redacted] stated Epstein introduced her to Trump who subsequently forced her head down to his exposed penis which is subsequently bite [sic]. In response, Trump punched her in the head and kicked her out.

From the Bloom firm lawsuit:

Epstein’s sexual abuse of Jane Doe 4 continued across state lines. On information and belief, Epstein flew Jane Doe 4 to New York, New York on approximately three of four occasions. During these trips, Epstein brought Jane Doe 4 to intimate gatherings with other prominent, wealthy men. It was later made clear to Jane Doe 4 that Epstein brought her to these parties to essentially offer her up as “fresh meat” to these other men. Jane Doe 4 was brutally and forcibly battered, assaulted, and raped by these other men she met through Epstein. On one occasion, one of these prominent men forcibly slapped Jane Doe 4 in the face after she was forced to perform oral sex on him. This same man forcibly raped her, penetrating her both vaginally and anally.

Jane Doe 4 settled with the Epstein estate and was paid, according to her attorney, though the Victims Compensation Fund reportedly rejected her claim. Lisa Bloom, in an email to us Sunday night, declined to comment. Bloom also briefly involved herself in the media rollout of the pre-2016 Trump “rape” accusation by the pseudonymous Katie Johnson, which fell apart before the press conference and was never been corroborated nor litigated.

Experienced Epstein researchers, including Thomas Volscho, have stated good reasons why this allegation should be treated with caution.

At the Freakshow, we assume the DOJ aggressively sanitized the Epstein files of anything Trump during the frenzied order from Kash Patel (K$H) and Pam Bondi last March, which put a legion of FBI officers on 24-hour shifts to find mentions of Don. Victims have stated that some of their FBI interviews and naming of names are not in the released files. We also know the release itself has been chaotic, the whole operation carried out in a state of panic, and that mistakes have been made.

To recap: we have an FBI email and an FBI powerpoint both referencing the Trump allegation, but we do not have the records or interviews to which the email and powerpoint refer. We have a victim who asked that Trump be cropped out of a photo with Epstein on her phone. We have missing and renumbered documents.

This could be nothing more than a coincidence due to sloppy panicked document dumping.

Or it could be something else.

The woman stopped cooperating with the FBI, never filed a civil case, and never publicly mentioned Trump. This chilling note suggests one reason FBI thought PROTECT SOURCE was needed:


We respectfully suggest that our elected officials in DC take a closer look, especially the Congresswoman from South Carolina, Rep. Nancy Mace.

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 Freakshow