1164: Jacked-up Joe

Jeffrey Epstein met with Bill Gates years after financier served jail time Archived Version Thu, 15 Aug 2019 13:58 Bill Gates Chesnot/Getty Images Microsoft founder Bill Gates spoke more than once with Jeffrey Epstein, the late financier accused of child sex trafficking, to discuss ways to increase philanthropic spending, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter. Epstein's discussions with Gates included at least one meeting, which took place in New York in 2013, while Gates was still Microsoft's chairman, these people said. It was unclear whether the two also spoke on the phone. The discussions with Gates occurred years after Epstein served a 13-month sentence for a charge of soliciting an underage prostitute. Epstein was sentenced in 2008 in Palm Beach County. The revelation is another piece of the rapidly growing mosaic depicting Epstein's bizarre, confounding influence and ability to get into powerful circles. Gates' interaction with Epstein is puzzling because the former Microsoft CEO is one of the richest and most influential people in the world. Gates could get philanthropic advice from anyone, and yet he corresponded with Epstein, whose transgressions were well known at the time. Gates resigned as Microsoft's CEO in 2000, stepped away from a day-to-day role there in 2008, and served as the company's chairman until February 2014. He remains on the board. Epstein, a former friend of Presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, died at age 66 over the weekend in an apparent jailhouse suicide weeks after the wealthy financier was arrested on federal charges of child sex trafficking. The people with knowledge of the matter did not know the exact details of what was discussed at these meetings, except to say that they focused on "growing philanthropy" on a broader scale and that there were other philanthropic leaders in attendance. Gates never committed to helping Epstein with his own nonprofit organizations. Eventually, the Microsoft founder ceased communication with the disgraced financier. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, launched in 2000, has at least $32 billion in assets, according to the organization's 2017 tax filing. The foundation says it works to "ensure that all people '-- especially those with the fewest resources '-- can access the opportunities they need to succeed in school and life." Gates has a net worth of over $100 billion, according to Forbes. After the meeting in New York six years ago, Gates flew on one of Epstein's planes to meet with his family in Palm Beach, the people added. He did not, they noted, fly on the so-called "Lolita Express," which was allegedly used to transport underage girls to Epstein's home in the Virgin Islands. The Daily Mail first reported on Gates using the plane in March of that year, citing flight records. A spokeswoman for Gates did not deny that the former Microsoft CEO met with Epstein. But she said that Epstein did not perform official financial advisory work for Gates. "Epstein never provided tax, estate or services of any kind to Bill Gates," the representative said. A spokesperson for Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment. People who knew Epstein said he would tell associates that he did spend time with Gates '-- and that he acted as an informal advisor to him.

Mega Group, Maxwells and Mossad: The Spy Story at the Heart of the Jeffrey Epstein Scandal Archived Version Mon, 12 Aug 2019 11:21 A s billionaire pedophile and alleged sex-trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein sits in prison, reports have continued to surface about his reported links to intelligence, his financial ties to several companies and ''charitable'' foundations, and his friendships with the rich and powerful as well as top politicians. While Part I and Part II of this series, ''The Jeffrey Epstein Scandal: Too Big to Fail,'' have focused on the widespread nature of sexual blackmail operations in recent American history and their ties to the heights of American political power and the U.S. intelligence community, one key aspect of Epstein's own sex-trafficking and blackmail operation that warrants examination is Epstein's ties to Israeli intelligence and his ties to the ''informal'' pro-Israel philanthropist faction known as ''the Mega Group.'' The Mega Group's role in the Epstein case has garnered some attention, as Epstein's main financial patron for decades, billionaire Leslie Wexner, was a co-founder of the group that unites several well-known businessmen with a penchant for pro-Israel and ethno-philanthropy (i.e., philanthropy benefiting a single ethnic or ethno-religious group). However, as this report will show, another uniting factor among Mega Group members is deep ties to organized crime, specifically the organized crime network discussed in Part I of this series, which was largely led by notorious American mobster Meyer Lansky. By virtue of the role of many Mega Group members as major political donors in both the U.S. and Israel, several of its most notable members have close ties to the governments of both countries as well as their intelligence communities. As this report and a subsequent report will show, the Mega Group also had close ties to two businessmen who worked for Israel's Mossad '-- Robert Maxwell and Marc Rich '-- as well as to top Israeli politicians, including past and present prime ministers with deep ties to Israel's intelligence community. One of those businessmen working for the Mossad, Robert Maxwell, will be discussed at length in this report. Maxwell, who was a business partner of Mega Group co-founder Charles Bronfman, aided the successful Mossad plot to plant a trapdoor in U.S.-created software that was then sold to governments and companies throughout the world. That plot's success was largely due to the role of a close associate of then-President Ronald Reagan and an American politician close to Maxwell, who later helped aid Reagan in the cover-up of the Iran Contra scandal. Years later, Maxwell's daughter '-- Ghislaine Maxwell '-- would join Jeffrey Epstein's ''inner circle'' at the same time Epstein was bankrolling a similar software program now being marketed for critical electronic infrastructure in the U.S. and abroad. That company has deep and troubling connections to Israeli military intelligence, associates of the Trump administration, and the Mega Group. Epstein appears to have ties to Israeli intelligence and has well-documented ties to influential Israeli politicians and the Mega Group. Yet, those entities are not isolated in and of themselves, as many also connect to the organized crime network and powerful alleged pedophiles discussed in previous installments of this series. Perhaps the best illustration of how the connections between many of these players often meld together can be seen in Ronald Lauder: a Mega Group member, former member of the Reagan administration, long-time donor to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel's Likud Party, as well as a long-time friend of Donald Trump and Roy Cohn. From cosmetics heir to political player One often overlooked yet famous client and friend of Roy Cohn is the billionaire heir to the Estee Lauder cosmetics fortune, Ronald Lauder. Lauder is often described in the press as a ''leading Jewish philanthropist'' and is the president of the World Jewish Congress, yet his many media profiles tend to leave out his highly political past. In a statement given by Lauder to New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman in 2018, the cosmetics heir noted that he has known Trump for over 50 years, going back at least to the early 1970s. According to Lauder, his relationship with Trump began when Trump was a student at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, which Lauder also attended. President-elect Trump walks with Ronald Lauder after meeting at Mar-a-Lago, Dec. 28, 2016, in Palm Beach, Fla. Evan Vucci | AP Though the exact nature of their early friendship is unclear, it is evident that they shared many of the same connections, including to the man who would later count them both as his clients, Roy Cohn. While much has been said of the ties between Cohn and Trump, Cohn was particularly close to Lauder's mother, Estee Lauder (born Josephine Mentzer). Estee was even counted among Cohn's most high-profile friends in his New York Times obituary . A small window into the Lauder-Cohn relationship surfaced briefly in a 2016 article in Politico about a 1981 dinner party held at Cohn's weekend home in Greenwich, Connecticut. The party was attended by Ronald Lauder's parents, Estee and Joe, as well as Trump and his then-wife Ivana, who had a weekend home just two miles away. That party was held soon after Cohn had helped Reagan secure the presidency and had reached the height of his political influence. At the party, Cohn offered toasts to Reagan and to then-Senator for New York Alfonse D'Amato, who would later urge Ronald Lauder to run for political office. Two years later, in 1983, Ronald Lauder '-- whose only professional experience at that point was working for his parent's cosmetics company '-- was appointed to serve as United States Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for European and NATO Affairs. Soon after his appointment, he served on the Dinner Tribute Committee for a dinner hosted by the Jewish fraternal and strongly pro-Israel organization B'nai B'rith, the parent organization of the controversial Anti-Defamation League (ADL), in Roy Cohn's honor. Cohn's influential father, Albert Cohn, was the long-time president of B'nai B'rith's powerful New England-New York chapter and Roy Cohn himself was a member of B'nai B'rith's Banking and Finance Lodge. The dinner specifically sought to honor Cohn for his pro-Israel advocacy and his efforts to ''fortify'' Israel's economy, and its honorary chairmen included media mogul Rupert Murdoch, Donald Trump and then-head of Bear Stearns Alan Greenberg, all of whom are connected to Jeffrey Epstein. During his time as deputy assistant secretary of defense, Lauder was also very active in Israeli politics and had already become an ally of the then-Israeli representative to the United Nations and future prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu. Lauder would go on to be one of the most important individuals in Netanyahu's rise to power, particularly during his upset victory in 1996, and a major financier of Israel's right-wing Likud Party. In 1986, the year that Roy Cohn died, Lauder left his post at the Pentagon and became the U.S. ambassador to Austria, where his tenure was shaped by his confrontations with the then-Austrian president and former Nazi collaborator, Kurt Waldheim. Lauder's interest in Austrian politics has continued well into recent years, culminating in accusations that he sought to manipulate Austrian elections in 2012. After leaving his ambassadorship, Lauder founded the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation in 1987 and later went on to run for Mayor of New York against Rudy Giuliani in 1989. Lauder was encouraged to run by then-Senator Alfonse D'Amato, who had close ties to Roy Cohn and his long-time law partner Tom Bolan, who was D'Amato's adviser . At the aforementioned 1983 B'nai B'rith dinner honoring Cohn, D'Amato was the featured speaker. The likely reason was that Giuliani, though once an ally of the ''Roy Cohn machine,'' was at the time deeply disliked by the late Cohn's associates for prosecuting Cohn's former law partner, Stanley Friedman, for racketeering, conspiracy and other charges. Giuliani also had a history of bitter disagreements with D'Amato. Lauder's primary campaign, though unsuccessful, was noted for its viciousness and its cost, as it burned through more than $13 million. A few years later, in the early 1990s, Lauder would join a newly formed group that has long evaded scrutiny from the media but has recently become of interest in connection with the Jeffrey Epstein scandal: the Mega Group. Lauder, Epstein and the mysterious Austrian passport Before getting to the Mega Group, it is worth noting one particular act apparently undertaken by Lauder while he was U.S. ambassador to Austria that has recently come to light in relation to the arrest in early July of Jeffrey Epstein, a finding first reported by journalist Edward Szall. When police recently discovered an Austrian passport with Epstein's picture and a fake name after raiding his Manhattan residence, the source and purpose of the passport came under media scrutiny. According to the Associated Press , Epstein's defense lawyers specifically argued that ''a friend gave it to him [Epstein] in the 1980s after some Jewish-Americans were informally advised to carry identification bearing a non-Jewish name when traveling internationally during a period when hijackings were more common.'' This claim appears to be related to concerns that followed the hijacking of Air France Flight 139 in 1976 when Israeli and Jewish hostages were separated from other hostages based largely on the passports in their possession. Given that Epstein was unable to meet the conventional qualifications for an Austrian passport '-- including long-term residency in Austria (the passport lists him as a resident of Saudi Arabia) and fluency in German '-- it appears that the only way to have acquired an Austrian passport was by unconventional means, meaning assistance from a well-connected Austrian official or foreign diplomat with clout in Austria. Ronald Lauder, right, and Austrian Chancellor Viktor Klima pose with students from the Lauder Chabad School in Vienna, Austria in 1999. Martin Gnedt | AP Lauder, then-ambassador to Austria for the Reagan administration, would have been well-positioned to acquire such a passport, particularly for the reason cited by Epstein's attorneys that Jewish-Americans could be targeted during travel, and in light of Lauder's very public concerns over threats Jews face from certain terror groups. Furthermore, the passport had been issued in 1987, when Lauder was still serving as an ambassador. In addition, Lauder was well-connected to Epstein's former patron '-- former head of Bear Stearns Alan Greenberg, who had hired Epstein in the late 1970s immediately after the latter was fired from the Dalton School '-- and Donald Trump, another friend of Lauder and Greenberg who began his friendship with Epstein in 1987, the same year the fake Austrian passport was issued. In 1987, Epstein also began his relationship with his principal financier, Leslie Wexner, who is also closely associated with Lauder (though some sources claim that Epstein and Wexner first met in 1985 but that their strong business relationship was not established until 1987). Though Epstein's defense attorney declined to reveal the identity of the ''friend'' who provided him with the fake Austrian passport, Lauder was both well-positioned to acquire it in Austria and also deeply connected to the Mega Group, which was co-founded by Epstein's patron Leslie Wexner and to which Epstein has many connections. These connections to both the Austrian government and to Epstein's mentor make Lauder the most likely person to have acquired the document on Epstein's behalf. Furthermore, Epstein and the Mega Group's ties to the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, also suggest Lauder was involved in procuring the passport, in light of his close ties to the Israeli government and the fact that Mossad has a history of using ambassadors abroad to procure false, foreign passports for its operatives. Lauder himself has been alleged to have ties to Mossad, as he is a long-time funder of IDC Herzliya, an Israeli university closely associated with Mossad and their recruiters as well as Israeli military intelligence. Lauder even founded IDC Herzliya's Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy. Furthermore, Lauder co-founded the Eastern European broadcasting network CETV with Mark Palmer, a former U.S. diplomat, Kissinger aide and Reagan speechwriter. Palmer is better known for co-founding the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), an organization often described as an accessory to U.S. intelligence, and one whose first president confessed to the Washington Post that ''a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.'' A 2001 report in the Evening Standard noted that Epstein once claimed that during the 1980s he worked for the CIA, but Epstein later backed away from that assertion. The origins of the Mega Group Mafia The Mega Group '-- a secretive group of billionaires to which Lauder belongs '-- was formed in 1991 by Charles Bronfman and Leslie Wexner, the latter of whom has received considerable media scrutiny following the July arrest of his former protege Jeffrey Epstein. Media profiles of the group paint it as ''a loosely organized club of 20 of the nation's wealthiest and most influential Jewish businessmen'' focused on ''philanthropy and Jewishness,'' with membership dues upwards of $30,000 per year. Yet several of its most prominent members have ties to organized crime. Mega Group members founded and/or are closely associated with some of the most well-known pro-Israel organizations. For instance, members Charles Bronfman and Michael Steinhardt formed Birthright Taglit with the backing of then- and current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Steinhardt, an atheist, has stated that his motivation in helping to found the group was to advance his own belief that devotion to and faith in the state of Israel should serve as ''a substitute for [Jewish] theology.'' Other well-known groups associated with the Mega Group include the World Jewish Congress '-- whose past president, Edgar Bronfman, and current president, Ronald Lauder, are both Mega Group members '-- and B'nai B'rith, particularly its spin-off known as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). The Bronfman brothers were major donors to the ADL, with Edgar Bronfman serving as the ADL's honorary national vice-chair for several years. Former Israeli president Shimon Peres, second from left, listens to Edgar Bronfman during a 1995 lunch thrown in Peres' honor. From left are: Laurence Tisch, Chairman, President and Chief executive officer of CBS; Israeli Ambassador to the United States. Itamar Rabinowitz and Bronfman. David Karp | AP When Edgar Bronfman died in 2013, long-time ADL Director Abe Foxman said , ''Edgar was for many years Chair of our Liquor Industry Division, Chair of our New York Appeal, and one of our most significant benefactors.'' Other Mega Group members that are donors and major supporters of the ADL include Ronald Lauder , Michael Steinhardt and the late Max Fisher . As previously mentioned, Roy Cohn's father was a long-time leader of B'nai B'rith's influential New England-New York chapter and Cohn was later a celebrated member of its banking and finance lodge. In addition, Mega Group members have also been key players in the pro-Israel lobby in the United States. For instance, Max Fisher of the Mega Group founded the National Jewish Coalition, now known as the Republican Jewish Coalition '-- the main pro-Israel neoconservative political lobbying group , known for its support of hawkish policies, and whose current chief patrons, Sheldon Adelson and Bernard Marcus, are among Donald Trump's top donors. Though the Mega Group has officially existed only since 1991, the use of ''philanthropy'' to provide cover for more unscrupulous lobbying or business activities was pioneered decades earlier by Sam Bronfman, the father of Mega Group members Edgar and Charles Bronfman. While other North American elites like J.D. Rockefeller had previously used philanthropic giving as a means of laundering their reputations, Bronfman's approach to philanthropy was unique because it was focused on giving specifically to other members of his own ethno-religious background. Sam Bronfman, as was detailed in Part I of this series, had long-standing deep ties to organized crime, specifically Meyer Lanksy's organized crime syndicate. Yet, Bronfman's private ambition, according to those close to him, was to become a respected member of high society. As a consequence, Bronfman worked hard to remove the stain that his mob associations had left on his public reputation in Canada and abroad. He accomplished this by becoming a leader in Canada's Zionist movement and, by the end of the 1930s, he was head of the Canadian Jewish Congress and had begun to make a name for himself as a philanthropist for Jewish causes. Yet even some of Bronfman's activism and philanthropy had hints of the mobster-like reputation he tried so hard to shake. For instance, Bronfman was actively involved in the illegal shipping of arms to Zionist paramilitaries in Palestine prior to 1948, specifically as a co-founder of the National Conference for Israeli and Jewish Rehabilitation that smuggled weapons to the paramilitary group Haganah. At the same time Bronfman was abetting the illegal smuggling of weapons to the Haganah, his associates in the criminal underworld were doing the same. After World War II, close aides of David Ben-Gurion, who would later become the first prime minister of Israel and was instrumental in the founding of Mossad, forged tight-knit relationships with Meyer Lansky, Benjamin ''Bugsy'' Siegel, Mickey Cohen and other Jewish gangsters of the period. They used their clandestine networks to establish a vast arms smuggling network between the United States and Zionist settlements in Palestine, arming both the Haganah and the Irgun paramilitary groups. As noted in Part I of this report, at the same time these gangsters were aiding the illegal arming of ZIonsit paramilitaries, they were strengthening their ties to U.S. intelligence that had first been formally (though covertly) established in World War II. After Israel was founded, Sam Bronfman worked with future Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres to negotiate the sale of Canadian armaments at half-price to Israel and the bargain weapons purchase was paid for entirely by a fundraising dinner hosted by Bronfman and his wife. Many years later, Peres would go on to introduce another future prime minister of Israel, Ehud Barak, to Jeffrey Epstein. The rest of the Bronfman family's march on ''the road to respectability'' was undertaken by Bronfman's children, who married into aristocratic families such as the European Rothschilds and the Wall Street ''royalty'' of the Lehmans and the Loebs . The Bronfmans' newfound respectability did not mean that their association with the Lansky-led criminal empire had dissolved. Indeed, prominent members of the Seagrams dynasty came under fire in the 1960s and 1970s for their close association with Willie ''Obie'' Obront, a major figure in Canadian organized crime, whom Canadian professor Stephen Schneider has referred to as the Meyer Lansky of Canada. However, Edgar and Charles Bronfman were hardly the only members of the Mega Group with deep and long-standing ties to the Lansky-led National Crime Syndicate. Indeed, one of the group's prominent members, hedge fund manager Michael Steinhardt, opened up about his own family ties to Lansky in his autobiography No Bull: My Life in and out the Markets , where he noted that his father, Sol ''Red McGee'' Steinhardt, was Lansky's jewel fence of choice and a major player in New York's criminal underworld. Sol Steinhardt was also his son's first client on Wall Street and helped him jumpstart his career in finance. The ties between the Mega Group and the National Crime Syndicate don't stop there. Another prominent member of the Mega Group with ties to this same criminal network is Max Fisher, who has been described as Wexner's mentor and is also alleged to have worked with Detroit's ''Purple Gang'' during Prohibition and beyond. The Purple Gang were part of the network that smuggled Bronfman liquor from Canada into the United State during Prohibition, and one of its founders, Abe Bernstein, was a close associate of both Meyer Lansky and Moe Dalitz. Fisher was a key adviser to several U.S. presidents, beginning with Dwight D. Eisenhower, as well as to Henry Kissinger. Max Fisher, center, and Henry Kissinger, right, meet with leaders of Jewish organizations prior to Kissinger's 1975 Middle East trip. Henry Burroughs | AP In addition to Fisher, Mega Group member Ronald Lauder was connected to Roy Cohn and Tom Bolan, both of whom were closely associated with this same Lansky-led crime network (see Part I and Part II ) and who regularly represented top Mafia figures in court. Furthermore, another member of the Mega Group, director Steven Spielberg, is a well-known protege of Lew Wasserman, the mob-connected media mogul and long-time backer of Ronald Reagan's film and later political career, discussed in Part II of this series. One surprise connection to Cohn involves Mega Group member, and former president of U.S. weapons firm General Dynamics, Lester Crown, whose brother-in-law is David Schine, Cohn's confidant and alleged lover during the McCarthy hearings, whose relationship with Cohn helped bring about the downfall of McCarthyism. Another member of the Mega Group worth noting is Laurence Tisch, who owned CBS News for several years and founded Loews Corporation. Tisch is notable for his work for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the CIA, where Donald Barr, who hired Epstein at the Dalton School, also served and which forged ties with Lansky's criminal empire during World War II. Wexner's mansions and the Shapiro murder Leslie ''Les'' Wexner, the other Mega Group co-founder, also has ties to organized crime. Wexner's ties to Jeffrey Epstein have come under scrutiny following the latter's recent arrest, as Wexner was the only publicly acknowledged client of Epstein's suspicious hedge fund, the source of much of this wealth, and the previous owner of Epstein's $56 million Manhattan townhouse, which Wexner transferred to an Epstein-controlled entity for free. Before Epstein received the townhouse, Wexner appears to have used the residence for some unconventional purposes, noted in a 1996 New York Times article on the then-Wexner-owned residence, which included ''a bathroom reminiscent of James Bond movies: hidden beneath a stairway, lined with lead to provide shelter from attack and supplied with closed-circuit television screens and a telephone, both concealed in a cabinet beneath the sink.'' The Times article does not speculate as to the purpose of this equipment, though the allusion to famous fictional superspy James Bond suggests that it may have been used to snoop on guests or conduct electronic surveillance. The 1996 Times article also noted that, after Wexner bought the residence for $13.2 million in 1989, he spent millions more decorating and furnishing the home, including the addition of the electronic equipment in the ''James Bond'' bathroom, only to apparently never live in it. The Times , which interviewed Epstein for the piece, quoted him as saying that ''Les never spent more than two months there.'' Epstein told the Times , which identified Epstein as Wexner's ''protege and one of his financial advisers,'' that the house, by that time, already belonged to him. That same year, Epstein was commissioning artwork for Wexner's Ohio mansion. A recent article from the Times noted that: In the summer of 1996, Maria Farmer was working on an art project for Mr. Epstein in Mr. Wexner's Ohio mansion. While she was there, Mr. Epstein sexually assaulted her, according to an affidavit Ms. Farmer filed earlier this year in federal court in Manhattan. She said that she fled the room and called the police, but that Mr. Wexner's security staff refused to let her leave for 12 hours.'' Farmer's account strongly suggests that, given the behavior of his personal security staff at his mansion following Epstein's alleged assault on Farmer, Wexner was well aware of Epstein's predatory behavior towards young women. This is compounded by claims made by Alan Dershowitz '-- a former lawyer for and friend of Epstein's, who has also been accused of raping underage girls '-- that Wexner has also been accused of raping underage girls exploited by Epstein on at least seven occasions. The presence of the electronic equipment in his home's bathroom, other oddities related to the townhouse, and aspects of the links between Epstein and Wexner suggest there is more to Wexner, who has rather successfully developed a public image of a respectable businessman and philanthropist, much like other prominent members of the Mega Group. Leslie Wexner and his wife Abigail tour the ''Transfigurations'' exhibit at the Wexner Center for the Arts. Jay LaPrete | AP However, bits and pieces of Wexner's private secrets have occasionally bubbled up, only to be subjected to rapid cover-ups amidst concerns of ''libeling'' the powerful and well-connected billionaire ''philanthropist.'' In 1985, Columbus (Ohio) lawyer Arthur Shapiro was murdered in broad daylight at point-blank range in what was largely referred to as a ''mob style murder.'' The homicide still remains unsolved, likely due to the fact that then-Columbus Police Chief James Jackson ordered the destruction of key documents of his department's investigation into the murder. Jackson's ordering of the documents' destruction came to light years later in 1996, when he was under investigation for corruption. According to the Columbus Dispatch , Jackson justified the destruction of one '' viable and valuable '' report because he felt that it ''was so filled with wild speculation about prominent business leaders that it was potentially libelous.'' The nature of this ''wild speculation'' was that ''millionaire businessmen in Columbus and Youngstown were linked to the 'mob-style murder.''' Though Jackson's efforts were meant to keep this ''libelous'' report far from public view, it was eventually obtained by Bob Fitrakis '-- attorney, journalist, and executive director of the Columbus Institute for Contemporary Journalism '-- after he was ''accidentally'' sent a copy of the report in 1998 as part of a public records request. The report, titled '' Shapiro Homicide Investigation: Analysis and Hypothesis ,'' names Leslie Wexner as linked ''with associates reputed to be organized crime figures'' and also lists the names of businessman Jack Kessler, former Columbus City Council President and Wexner associate Jerry Hammond, and former Columbus City Council member Les Wright as also being involved in Shapiro's murder. The report also noted that Arthur Shapiro's law firm '-- Schwartz, Shapiro, Kelm & Warren '-- represented Wexner's company, The Limited, and states that ''prior to his death, Arthur Shapiro managed this account [The Limited] for the law firm.'' It also noted that, at the time of his death, Shapiro ''was the subject of an investigation by the Internal Revenue Service because he had failed to file income tax returns for some seven years prior to his death, and he had invested in some questionable tax shelters.'' It also stated that his death prevented Shapiro from his planned testimony at a grand jury hearing about these ''questionable tax shelters.'' As to Wexner's alleged links to organized crime, the report focuses on the close business relationship between Wexner's The Limited and Francis Walsh, whose trucking company ''[had] done an excess of 90 percent of the Limited's trucking business around the time of Shapiro's murder,'' according to the report. Walsh was named in a 1988 indictment as a ''co-conspirator'' of Genovese crime family boss Anthony ''Fat Tony'' Salerno, whose long-time lawyer was Roy Cohn; and the Shapiro murder report stated that Walsh was ''still considered associates of the Genovese/LaRocca crime family, and Walsh was still providing truck transportation for The Limited.'' Notably, the Genovese crime family has long formed a key part of the National Crime Syndicate, as its former head, Charles ''Lucky'' Luciano, co-created the criminal organization with his close friend Meyer Lansky. Upon Luciano's imprisonment and subsequent deportation from the United States, Lansky took over the syndicate's U.S. operations and his association with Luciano's successors continued until Lansky's death in 1983. The ''Mega'' Mystery and the Mossad In May 1997, the Washington Post broke an explosive story '-- long since forgotten '-- based on an intercepted phone call made between a Mossad official in the U.S. and his superior in Tel Aviv that discussed the Mossad's efforts to obtain a secret U.S. government document. According to the Post, the Mossad official stated during the phone call that ''Israeli Ambassador Eliahu Ben Elissar had asked him whether he could obtain a copy of the letter given to [Palestinian leader Yasser] Arafat by [then-Secretary of State Warren] Christopher on Jan. 16, the day after the Hebron accord was signed by Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.'' The Post article continued: According to a source who viewed a copy of the NSA transcript of the conversation, the intelligence officer, speaking in Hebrew, said, 'The ambassador wants me to go to Mega to get a copy of this letter.' The source said the supervisor in Tel Aviv rejected the request, saying, 'This is not something we use Mega for.''' The leaked communication led to an investigation that sought to identify an individual code-named ''Mega'' that the Post said ''may be someone in the U.S. government who has provided information to the Israelis in the past,'' a concern that subsequently spawned a fruitless FBI investigation. The Mossad later claimed that ''Mega'' was merely a codeword for the U.S.' CIA, but the FBI and NSA were unconvinced by that claim and believed that it was a senior U.S. government official that had potentially once been involved in working with Jonathan Pollard, the former U.S. naval intelligence analyst later convicted of spying for the Mossad. Almost one year to the day after the ''Mega'' spy scandal broke, the Wall Street Journal was the first outlet to report on the existence of a little-known organization of billionaires that was ''informally'' called the Mega Group and had been founded years prior in 1991. The report made no mention of the spy scandal that had spread concerns of Israeli espionage in the U.S. only a year prior. However, the group's distinctive ''informal'' name and the connections of its members to the Mossad and to high-ranking Israeli politicians, including prime ministers, raise the possibility that ''Mega'' was not an individual, as the FBI and NSA had believed, but a group. In 1997, when the ''Mega'' spy scandal broke, Netanyahu had recently become prime minister of Israel after an upset victory, a victory that was largely credited to one well-connected Netanyahu backer in particular, Ronald Lauder. Beyond being a major donor, Lauder had brought Arthur Finklestein on to work for Netanyahu's 1996 campaign, whose strategies were credited for Netanyahu's surprise win. Netanyahu was close enough to Lauder that he personally enlisted Lauder and George Nader to serve as his peace envoys to Syria. Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara with Ronald Lauder in 1997. Photo | Reuters Nader, who was connected to the Trump 2016 campaign and Trump ally and Blackwater founder Erik Prince, was recently hit with federal child sex trafficking charges last month, soon after Jeffrey Epstein had been arrested on similar charges. At the time Nader was picked to work with Lauder on Netanyahu's behalf, he had already been caught possessing large amounts of child pornography on two separate occasions, first in 1984 and later in 1990. This strong connection between Netanyahu and Lauder during the time of the 1997 ''Mega'' spy scandal is important considering Mossad answers directly to Israel's prime minister. Another possible connection between the Mega Group and the Mossad owes to the Mega Group's ties to Meyer Lansky's criminal network. As was detailed in Part I, Lansky had established deep ties to U.S. intelligence after World War II and was also connected to the Mossad through Mossad official Tibor Rosenbaum, whose bank was frequently used by Lansky to launder money. In addition, Lansky collaborated on at least one occasion with notorious Mossad ''superspy'' Rafi Eitan, who he helped acquire sensitive electronic equipment possessed only by the CIA but coveted by Israeli intelligence. Eitan is best known in the U.S. for being the Mossad handler of Jonathan Pollard. Notably, Eitan was the main source of claims that the code-word ''Mega'' used by the Mossad officials in 1997 referred to the CIA and not to a potential source in the U.S. government once linked to Pollard's spying activities, making his claims as to the true meaning of the term somewhat dubious. Given that the organized crime network tied to the Mega Group had ties to both U.S. and Israeli intelligence, the ''Mega'' codeword could plausibly have referred to this secretive group of billionaires. More supporting evidence for this theory comes from the fact that prominent members of the Mega Group were business partners of Mossad agents, including media mogul Robert Maxwell and commodities trader Marc Rich. The mysterious Maxwells The Maxwell family has become a source of renewed media interest following Jeffrey Epstein's arrest, as Ghislaine Maxwell, long described in the media as a British ''socialite,'' was publicly cited as Epstein's long-time ''on and off'' girlfriend, and Epstein's victims, as well as former wives of Epstein's friends, have claimed that she was Epstein's ''pimp'' and procured underage girls for his sexual blackmail operation. Ghislaine Maxwell is also alleged to have engaged in the rape of the girls she procured for Epstein and to have used them to produce child pornography. Ghislaine was the favorite and youngest daughter of media mogul Robert Maxwell. Maxwell, born Jan Ludvick Hoch, had joined the British Army in World War II. Afterwards, according to authors John Loftus and Mark Aarons , he greatly influenced the Czechoslovakian government's decision to arm Zionist paramilitaries during the 1948 war that resulted in Israel's creation as a state, and Maxwell himself was also involved in the smuggling of aircraft parts to Israel. Around this time, Maxwell was approached by British intelligence outfit MI6 and offered a position that Maxwell ultimately declined. MI6 then classified him as ''Zionist '-- loyal only to Israel'' and made him a person of interest. He later became an agent of the Mossad, according to several books including Seymour Hersh's The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy, and Robert Maxwell: Israel's Superspy by Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon. According to Victor Ostrovsky , a former Mossad case officer: Mossad was financing many of its operations in Europe from money stolen from Maxwell's newspaper pension fund. They got their hands on the funds almost as soon as Maxwell made the purchase of the Mirror Newspaper Group with money lent to him by Mossad.'' In exchange for his services, the Mossad helped Maxwell satisfy his sexual appetite during his visits to Israel, providing him with prostitutes, ''the service maintained for blackmail purposes.'' It was later revealed that the hotel in which he stayed in Israel was bugged with cameras, allowing the Mossad to acquire ''a small library of video footage of Maxwell in sexually compromising positions.'' As with the CIA, the Mossad's use of blackmail against both friend and foe is well-documented and known to be extensive . Maxwell was also a close associate and friend of Israeli ''superspy'' Rafi Eitan, who, as previously mentioned, was Jonathan Pollard's handler and who had previously worked directly with Meyer Lansky. Eitan had learned of a revolutionary new software being used by the U.S. government known as ''Promis'' from Earl Brian, a long-time associate and aide to Ronald Reagan. Promis is often considered the forerunner to the ''Prism'' software used by spy agencies today and was developed by William Hamilton, who leased the software to the U.S. government through his company, Inslaw, in 1982. Ariel Sharon (right)meets with Robert Maxwell in Jerusalem on Feb. 20, 1990. Photo | AP According to author and former BBC investigative journalist Gordon Thomas, Brian was angry that the U.S. Department of Justice was successfully using Promis to go after organized crime and money-laundering activities and Eitan felt that the program could aid Israel. At the time, Eitan was the director of the now defunct Israeli military intelligence agency Lekem, which gathered scientific and technical intelligence abroad from both public and covert sources, especially in relation to Israel's nuclear weapons program. A plan was hatched to install a ''trapdoor'' into the software and then market Promis throughout the world, providing the Mossad with invaluable intelligence on the operations of its enemies and allies while also providing Eitan and Brian with copious amounts of cash. According to the testimony of ex-Mossad official Ari Ben-Menashe, Brian provided a copy of Promis to Israel's military intelligence, which contacted an Israeli American programmer living in California who then planted the ''trapdoor'' in the software. The CIA was later said to have installed its own trapdoor in the software but it is unknown if they did so with a version of the already bugged software and how widely it was adopted relative to the version bugged by Israeli intelligence. After the trapdoor was inserted, the problem became selling the bugged version of the software to governments as well as private companies around the world, particularly in areas of interest. Brian first attempted to buy out Inslaw and Promis and then use that same company to sell the bugged version. Unsuccessful, Brian turned to his close friend, then-Attorney General Ed Meese whose Justice Department then abruptly refused to make the payments to Inslaw that were stipulated by the contract, essentially using the software for free, which Inslaw claimed to be theft. Some have speculated that Meese's role in that decision was shaped, not only by his friendship with Brian, but the fact that his wife was a major investor in Brian's business ventures. Meese would later become an adviser to Donald Trump when he was president-elect. Inslaw was forced to declare bankruptcy as a result of Meese's actions and sued the Justice Department. The court later found that the Meese-led department ''took, converted, stole'' the software through ''trickery, fraud and deceit.'' With Inslaw out of the way, Brian sold the software all over the world. Eitan later recruited Robert Maxwell to become another Promis salesman, which he did remarkably well, even succeeding in selling the software to Soviet intelligence and conspiring with Republican Texas Senator John Tower to have the software adopted by the U.S. government laboratory at Los Alamos. Dozens of countries used the software on their most carefully guarded computer systems, unaware that Mossad now had access to everything Promis touched. Whereas the Mossad's past reliance on gathering intelligence had relied on the same tactics used by its equivalents in the U.S. and elsewhere, the widespread adoption of the Promis software, largely through the actions of Earl Brian and Robert Maxwell, gave the Mossad a way to gather not just troves of counterintelligence data, but also blackmail on other intelligence agencies and powerful figures. Indeed, Promis' backdoor and adoption by intelligence agencies all over the world essentially provided the Mossad with access to troves of blackmail that the CIA and FBI had acquired on their friends and foes for over half a century. Strangely, in recent years, the FBI has sought to hide information related to Robert Maxwell's connection to the Promis scandal. According to journalist Robert Fisk , Maxwell was also involved in the Mossad abduction of Israeli nuclear weapons whistleblower Vanunu Mordechai. Mordechai had attempted to provide the media with information on the extent of Israel's nuclear weapons program, which was eventually published by the Sunday Times of London . Yet, Mordechai had also contacted the Daily Mirror with the information, the Mirror being an outlet that was owned by Maxwell and whose foreign editor was a close Maxwell associate and alleged Mossad asset, Nicholas Davies. Journalist Seymour Hersh alleged that Davies had also been involved in Israeli arms deals. Per Fisk, it was Maxwell who contacted the Israeli Embassy in London and told them of Mordechai's activities. This led to Mordechai's entrapment by a female Mossad agent who seduced him as part of a ''honey trap'' operation that led to his kidnapping and later imprisonment in Israel. Mordechai served an 18-year sentence, 12 years of which were in solitary confinement. Then, there is the issue of Maxwell's death, widely cited by mainstream and independent media alike as suspicious and a potential homicide . According to authors Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon, Maxwell had sealed his own fate when he attempted to threaten top Mossad officials with the exposure of certain operations if they did not help him rescue his media empire from crippling debt and financial difficulties. Many of Maxwell's creditors , who had grown increasingly displeased with the media mogul, were Israeli and several of them were alleged to be Mossad-connected themselves. Thomas and Dillon argue in their biography of Maxwell's life that the Mossad felt that Maxwell had become more of a liability than an asset and killed him on his yacht three months after he demanded the bailout. On the other extreme are theories that suggest Maxwell committed suicide because of the financial difficulties his empire faced. Ghislaine Maxwell, far right, Robert Maxwell's daughter, looks on his casket is unloaded from a plane in Jerusalem, Nov. 8, 1991. Heribert Proepper | AP Some have taken Maxwell's funeral held in Israel as the country's ''official'' confirmation of Maxwell's service to the Mossad, as it was likened to a state funeral and attended by no less than six serving and former heads of Israeli intelligence. During his funeral service in Jerusalem, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir eulogized him and stated : ''He has done more for Israel than can today be said.'' Other eulogies were given by future Prime Ministers Ehud Olmert (then Health Minister) and Shimon Peres, with the latter also praising Maxwell's ''services'' on behalf of Israel. Swimming in the same swamp As he built his business empire '-- and even became a member of Parliament, Maxwell was also doing work for Israeli intelligence, as several of the Israeli companies in which he invested became fronts for the Mossad. In addition, as he became a media mogul, he developed a bitter rivalry with Rupert Murdoch, a close friend of Roy Cohn and an influential figure in American and British media. Maxwell also partnered with the Bronfman brothers, Edgar and Charles '-- key figures in the Mega Group. In 1989 Maxwell and Charles Bronfman partnered up to bid on the Jerusalem Post newspaper and the Post described the two men as ''two of the world's leading Jewish financiers'' and their interest in the venture as ''developing The Jerusalem Post and expanding its influence among world Jewry.'' A year prior, Maxwell and Bronfman had become top shareholders in the Israeli pharmaceutical company Teva. Maxwell also worked with Charles Bronfman's brother Edgar in the late 1980s to convince the Soviet Union to allow Soviet Jews to immigrate to Israel. Edgar's efforts in this regard have received more attention , as it was a defining moment of his decades-long presidency of the World Jewish Congress, of which Ronald Lauder is currently president. Yet, Maxwell had also made considerable use of his contacts in the Soviet government in this effort. Maxwell also moved in the circles of the network previously described in Parts I and II in this series. A key example of this is the May 1989 party Maxwell hosted on his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine '-- named for his youngest daughter and Epstein's future ''girlfriend.'' Attendees of the party included Roy Cohn's protege Donald Trump and his long-time law partner Tom Bolan. A close friend of Nancy Reagan was also present, journalist Mike Wallace, as was literary agent Mort Janklow, who represented Ronald Reagan and two of Cohn's closest friends: journalists William Safire and Barbara Walters. The CEO of what would soon become Time Warner, Steve Ross, was also invited to the exclusive event. Ross' presence is notable, as he had built his business empire largely through his association with New York crime lords Manny Kimmel and Abner ''Longy'' Zwillman. Zwillman was a close friend of Meyer Lansky, Michael Steinhardt's father, and Sam Bronfman, father of Edgar and Charles Bronfman. Another attendee of the Maxwell yacht party was former Secretary of the Navy and former Henry Kissinger staffer Jon Lehman, who would go on to associate with the controversial neoconservative think tank, Project for a New American Century. Prior to being secretary of the Navy, Lehman had been president of the Abington Corporation, which hired arch-neocon Richard Perle to manage the portfolio of Israeli arms dealers Shlomo Zabludowicz and his son Chaim, who paid Ablington $10,000 month. A scandal arose when those payments continued after both Lehman and Perle joined the Reagan Department of Defense and while Perle was working to persuade the Pentagon to buy arms from companies linked to Zabludowicz. Perle had been part of the Reagan transition team along with Roy Cohn's long-time friend and law partner Tom Bolan (another Maxwell yacht guest). In addition to Lehman, another former Kissinger staffer, Thomas Pickering was present at Maxwell's yacht part. Pickering played a minor role in the Iran-Contra affair and, at the time of the Maxwell yacht party, he was U.S. ambassador to Israel. Senator John Tower (R-TX), who allegedly conspired with Maxwell in the Mossad-bugged Promis software at the Los Alamos laboratories, was also present. Tower died just months before Maxwell in a suspicious plane crash . Ghislaine Maxwell was also at this rather notable event. After her father's mysterious death and alleged murder on the same yacht that bears her name in 1991, she quickly packed her bags and moved to New York City. There, she soon made the acquaintance of Jeffrey Epstein and, a few years later, developed close ties to the Clinton family, which will be discussed in the next installment of this series. Jeffrey Epstein and the new ''Promis'' After it was revealed that Epstein had evaded stricter sentencing in 2008 due to his links to ''intelligence,'' it was the Mossad ties of Ghislaine Maxwell's father that have led many to speculate that Epstein's sexual blackmail operation was sharing incriminating information with the Mossad. Former CBS executive producer and current journalist for the media outlet Narativ , Zev Shalev, has since claimed that he independently confirmed that Epstein was tied directly to the Mossad. Donald and Melania Trump with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell at the Mar-a-Lago club, Palm Beach, Florida in 2000. Photo | Davidoff Studios Epstein was a long-time friend of former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who has long-standing and deep ties to Israel's intelligence community. Their decades-long friendship has been the source of recent political attacks targeting Barak, who is running in the Israeli elections against current Prime Minister Netanyahu later this year. Barak is also close to Epstein's chief patron and Mega Group member Leslie Wexner, whose Wexner Foundation gave Barak $2 million in 2004 for a still unspecified research program. According to Barak, he was first introduced to Epstein by former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who eulogized Robert Maxwell at his funeral and had decades-long ties with the Bronfman family going back to the early 1950s. Peres was also a frequent participant in programs funded by Leslie Wexner in Israel and worked closely with the Mossad for decades. In 2015, a few years after Epstein's release from prison following his conviction for soliciting sex from a minor in 2008, Barak formed a company with Epstein with the chief purpose of investing in an Israeli start-up then known as Reporty. That company, now called Carbyne, sells its signature software to 911 call centers and emergency service providers and is also available to consumers as an app that provides emergency services with access to a caller's camera and location and also runs any caller's identity through any linked government database. It has specifically been marketed by the company itself and the Israeli press as a solution to mass shootings in the United States and is already being used by at least two U.S. counties. Israeli media reported that Epstein and Barak were among the company's largest investors. Barak poured millions into the company and it was recently revealed by Haaretz that a significant amount of Barak's total investments in Carbyne was funded by Epstein, making him a '' de facto partner'' in the company. Barak is now Carbyne's chairman . The company's executive team are all former members of different branches of Israeli intelligence, including the elite military intelligence unit, Unit 8200, that is often likened to Israel's equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). Carbyne's current CEO, Amir Elichai, served in Unit 8200 and tapped former Unit 8200 commander Pinchas Buchris to serve as the company's director and on its board. In addition to Elichai, another Carbyne co-founder, Lital Leshem , also served in Unit 8200 and later worked for Israeli private spy company Black Cube. Leshem now works for a subsidiary of Erik Prince's company Frontier Services Group, according to the independent media outlet Narativ . The company also includes several tie-ins to the Trump administration, including Palantir founder and Trump ally Peter Thiel '-- an investor in Carbyne. In addition, Carbyne's board of advisers includes former Palantir employee Trae Stephens, who was a member of the Trump transition team, as well as former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff. Trump donor and New York real-estate developer Eliot Tawill is also on Carbyne's board , alongside Ehud Barak and Pinchas Buchris. Narativ , which wrote the first expose on Carbyne after Epstein's arrest, noted that the Chinese government uses a smartphone app very similar to Carbyne as part of its mass surveillance apparatus, even though the original purpose of the app was for improved emergency reporting. According to Narativ , the Chinese Carbyne-equivalent ''monitors every aspect of a user's life, including personal conversations, power usage, and tracks a user's movement.'' Given the history of Robert Maxwell '-- the father of Epstein's long-time ''girlfriend'' and young-girl-procuring madam, Ghislaine Maxwell '-- in promoting the sale of Carbyne's modified Promis software, which was also marketed as a tool to improve government efficacy but was actually a tool of mass surveillance for the benefit of Israeli intelligence, the overlap between Carbyne and Promis is troubling and warrants further investigation. It is also worth noting that Unit 8200-connected tech start-ups are being widely integrated into U.S. companies and have developed close ties to the U.S. military-industrial complex, with Carbyne being just one example of that trend. As MintPress previously reported , Unit 8200-linked outfits like Team8 have recently hired former National Security Agency (NSA) Director Mike Rogers as a senior advisor and gained prominent Silicon Valley figures, including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, as key investors. Many American technology companies, from Intel to Google to Microsoft, have merged with several Unit 8200-connected start-ups in recent years and have been moving many key jobs and operations to Israel with backing from key Republican donors like Paul Singer . Many of those same companies, particularly Google and Microsoft, are also major U.S. government contractors. Who was Epstein really working for? Even though Jeffrey Epstein appears to have had ties to the Mossad, this series has revealed that the networks to which Epstein was connected were not Mossad-exclusive, as many of the individuals close to Epstein '-- Lesie Wexner, for instance '-- were part of a mob-connected class of oligarchs with deep ties to both the U.S. and Israel. As was discussed in Part I of this series, the sharing of ''intelligence'' (i.e., blackmail) between intelligence agencies and the same organized crime network connected to the Mega Group goes back decades. With Leslie Wexner of the Mega Group as Epstein's chief patron, as opposed to a financier with direct ties to the Mossad, a similar relationship is more than likely in the case of the sexual blackmail operation that Epstein ran. Given that intelligence agencies in both the U.S. and elsewhere often conduct covert operations for the benefit of oligarchs and large corporations as opposed to ''national security interest,'' Epstein's ties to the Mega Group suggest that this group holds a unique status and influence in both the governments of the U.S. and of Israel, as well as in other countries (e.g., Russia) that were not explored in this report. This is by virtue of their role as key political donors in both countries, as well as the fact that several of them own powerful companies or financial institutions in both countries. Indeed, many members of the Mega Group have deep ties to Israel's political class, including to Netanyahu and Ehud Barak as well as to now-deceased figures like Shimon Peres, and to members of the American political class. Ultimately, the picture painted by the evidence is not a direct tie to a single intelligence agency but a web linking key members of the Mega Group, politicians, and officials in both the U.S. and Israel, and an organized-crime network with deep business and intelligence ties in both nations. Though this series has so far focused on the ties of this network to main Republican Party affiliates, the next and final installment will reveal the ties developed between this web and the Clintons. As will be revealed, despite the Clintons' willingness to embrace corrupt dealings during the span of their political careers, their mostly friendly relationship with this network still saw them use the power of sexual blackmail to obtain certain policy decisions that were favorable to their personal and financial interests but not to the Clintons' political reputation or agendas. Editor's note | The original version of this article incorrectly stated that Rafi Eitan was interested in repurposing the American-made Promise software to restore his standing in Israel's intelligence community caused by the fall-out from the Pollard Affair. The Pollard Affair occurred three years after Eitan had succeeded in repurposing the software and MintPress has removed that incorrect information from the article and regrets the error. This article also originally neglected to mention that Eitan, at the time of his collaboration with Earl Brian to repurpose the Promis software, was the director of the now-defunct Israeli military intelligence agency Lekem at the time of those events and that information has been added to the story. Feature photo | Graphic by Claudio Cabrera Whitney Webb is a MintPress News journalist based in Chile. She has contributed to several independent media outlets including Global Research, EcoWatch, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has made several radio and television appearances and is the 2019 winner of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in Journalism.

Did Jeffrey Epstein 'have portrait of Bill Clinton in blue dress and red heels in his NYC mansion?' | Daily Mail Online Archived Version Wed, 14 Aug 2019 19:57 Jeffrey Epstein had a bizarre portrait which appeared to be of Bill Clinton in a dress hanging in his Manhattan mansion, DailyMailTV can reveal. The picture depicting the former president apparently lounging on a chair in the Oval Office, wearing red heels and posing suggestively in a blue dress redolent of Monica Lewinsky was in a room off the stairway of the Upper East Side townhouse. The painting was secretly snapped inside the pedophile's lavish $56 million home in October 2012, four years after Epstein completed his sweetheart deal for prostitution of a minor and seven years before he was accused of running a sex trafficking ring of underage girls. The source, who asked to remain anonymous, was visiting Epstein to present a business proposal - an encounter with the pervert which included spotting a girl who seemed to be 14 waiting to see the financier. The woman said she was shocked to catch sight of the portrait through an open door as she walked through the ornate home with her business partner. She told DailyMailTV: 'It was absolutely Bill Clinton. It was shocking - it was definitely a painting of him. It was a very provocative, sexual picture. He was wearing heels, a blue dress and his hand was in a weird position.' Jeffrey Epstein had a bizarre portrait which appears to be of Bill Clinton hanging in his Manhattan mansion, depicting the former president lounging on a chair in the Oval Office wearing red heels and a telling blue dress, a source exclusively told DailyMailTV The color of the dress seemed to be a pointed reference to Clinton's former intern Monica Lewinsky who a blue dress during their infamous sexual encounter in the White House. The painting seemed to show Clinton in the Oval Office, with the presidential seal on display Epstein and Clinton were once friends, with the now 72-year-old flying on the now deceased financier's private plane, dubbed the Lolita Express, several times and on his own account vising the town house once - making it possible he could have seen the bizarre painting The color of the dress seemed to be a pointed reference to Clinton's former intern Monica Lewinsky, who a blue dress during their infamous sexual encounter in the White House. Epstein and Clinton were once friends, with the now 72-year-old flying on the now deceased financier's private plane, dubbed the Lolita Express, several times and on his own account vising the town house once - making it possible he could have seen the bizarre painting. Clinton has however denied being on Epstein's 'pedophile island,' Little St. James - a denial which Donald Trump sought to cast doubt on this week. The presence of the picture is a new twist in the relationship between Clinton, his family and Epstein. Last month the former president's office said he had not known anything of Epstein's crimes and had taken four trips with him in 2002 and 2003 - although flight logs showed that he had taken a total of at least 26 individual flights in the course of those. One of Epstein's former sex slaves, Virginia Roberts, claimed she saw Clinton on the island for a dinner held in his honor shortly after he left office, and stood by the claim when questioned under oath. After the financier's apparent suicide on Saturday morning, Trump retweeted a suggestion that the Clinton were somehow involved in the death and a link to court documents setting out Roberts' evidence. Epstein was found dead by suicide on Saturday after he was arrested in July Additionally, Epstein's alleged procurer, Ghislaine Maxwell, was a guest at Chelsea Clinton's wedding to Marc Meezvinsky, at least a year after the time when Bill Clinton says his relationship with Epstein ended. The origin of the painting is unknown. DailyMail.com has seen metadata which verifies where and when the picture was taken, which showed it hanging against a dark-colored wall in Epstein's stone fortress. 'Clinton' has his legs crossed over the arm of a chair, with blood red heels hovering over a rug that seems to bear the presidential seal. The shoulder of the blue dress hangs off to the side as 'Clinton' seems to raise a 'come hither' finger towards the viewer. The source who spotted the painting said she saw it while 'being led from the office to his personal quarters when we saw the portrait. 'It was through a door that had been left temporarily open by his housekeeper or butler. 'I thought, ''Why in the world would Epstein have that up?'' I didn't even know that they knew each other.' Although she was stunned by the painting, her business partner managed to take a snap of the painting. She said: 'He took a picture. I was mortified because there were cameras everywhere.' The source added that she was inside Epstein's home for around an hour and a half for the meeting, which had been arranged by the pedophile's then-assistant Lesley Groff. The glamorous blonde was named as a possible accomplice and granted immunity in Epstein's controversial plea deal in 2008. The source said: 'We had been in communication with Lesley Groff. She was the person who coordinated our meeting. 'We were met at the door of Epstein's penthouse by a butler. He had a real butler - an old gentleman who walked with a limp. He led us to Lesley's circular office. She was beautiful and fabulous and so nice and bubbly. 'Then she led us into Epstein's private quarters which is when we passed by the open door and the portrait. 'We went into his dining room and spoke to him about the proposal.' The source told DailyMailTV: 'It was absolutely Bill Clinton. It was shocking - it was definitely a painting of him. It was a very provocative, sexual picture. He was wearing heels, a blue dress and his hand was in a weird position'. Pictured: Clinton and Lewinsky in 1997 The source, who asked to remain anonymous, was visiting Epstein's home in New York (pictured) to present a business proposal in 2012 and said she was shocked to catch sight of the portrait through an open door as she walked through the ornate home with her business partner Ongoing relationship? Epstein's alleged procurer, Ghislaine Maxwell, was one of the guests at Chelsea Clinton's 2010 wedding to Marc Mezvinsky, at least a year after the former president says he last spoke to the pervert financier After the discussion, the source returned to the waiting area and said she noticed a young Hispanic girl was waiting to see Epstein. She added: 'We were wrapping things up with his private secretary and I noticed a young Hispanic girl there, all hunched up over her phone, waiting to see him next. 'I thought it was odd that she was in the same waiting room we were in. Showed around: Lesley Groff was involved in the meeting with Epstein at which the picture was taken. 'She was beautiful and fabulous and so nice and bubbly,' said the source 'She was really young - she looked about 14. I thought that maybe she was the housekeeper's daughter.' The source added that during her hour long discussion with Epstein, he struck her as a 'creepy' man. She said: 'He came out in pajamas. He wasn't messy but he had on a white t-shirt, pajama bottoms and bare feet. He was very grey and he looked creepy. 'He looked like a villain to me. I immediately knew we didn't want to do business with him, despite wanting the contract. 'I knew he would bury us if something went wrong.' The proposal fell through and she never worked with the billionaire. The macabre and excessive decor of Epstein's home has been well documented. While New York tax officials assessed the home at $55.93 million, government prosecutors assessed it to be worth $77 million. The sidewalk outside the home was heated so that any snow that settled on the pavement would melt immediately. The private Boeing 727 airliner (pictured) that carried prominent passengers also allegedly ferried underage girls In February 2002 Naomi Campbell was aboard the aircraft with Bill Clinton, according to flight logs It is complete with multiple bedrooms, five bathrooms, a two-floor reception room and three three-room suites that span the entire fourth floor. A Vanity Fair article noted that Epstein decorated his entrance hall with 'row upon row of individually framed eyeballs'... imported from England.' One visitor to the sinister townhouse told the New York Times that there was a chessboard at the bottom of the stairs with customized figurines modeled after one of Epstein's staffers and 'dressed suggestively'. Among the bizarre interior oddities is the mural on the second floor that Epstein commissioned that shows him in the middle of a prison scene and surrounded by barbed wire, guards and a guard station. R. Couri Hay, a public relations specialist who was invited to Epstein's home and viewed the mural just three months ago, recalled the billionaire saying: 'That's me, and I had this painted because there is always the possibility that could be me again'. Other people to have visited the home noted a life-size doll hanging from a chandelier and a dining room designed to resemble a beach. He has a table in his dining room covered with photos of famous faces, including a signed picture with former president Bill Clinton. There is also a wall in Epstein's study decorated with photos of director Woody Allen and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia. Other visitors to the home noted a large 20-seat dining table surrounded by computer screens and phones.

Ghislaine Maxwell, consort of Jeffrey Epstein, has been living in mansion outside of Boston Archived Version Wed, 14 Aug 2019 23:41 By Louise Boyle In New York For Dailymail.com 13:47 14 Aug 2019, updated 22:38 14 Aug 2019 Ghislaine Maxwell, 57, has been hiding out at a secluded $3M oceanfront property in Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts, DailyMail.com can exclusively reveal The property is owned by her tech CEO boyfriend Scott Borgerson, 43, who has been seen running errands in the area and walking Maxwell's dogThe British socialite was a long-time consort of Jeffrey Epstein and the alleged procurer of victims in his underage sex trafficking ringMaxwell hasn't been seen publicly in three years and hasn't left the home amid new focus on Epstein's alleged co-conspirators following his apparent suicide on Saturday'She's become a real homebody, rarely ventures out. She's the antithesis of the woman who traveled extensively and partied constantly with Epstein,' a source familiar with Maxwell's new life exclusively told DailyMail.comMaxwell is alleged to be one of the main players in a network of recruiters and enablers who provided Epstein with underage girls to sexually abuseIn July, Maxwell filed a request to stop the unsealing of 2,000 pages connected to a defamation lawsuit filed against her by Virginia Giuffre, who has accused Epstein of keeping her as a sex slave when she was a teenager Giuffre claimed Maxwell directed her to have sex with people including former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, former U.S. Senator George Mitchell, modeling agent Jean Luc Brunel and financier Glenn DubinMaxwell called the claims 'entirely false' and the case was settled out of courtGhislaine Maxwell, long-time consort of Jeffrey Epstein and the alleged procurer of victims in his underage sex trafficking ring, has been laying low in a New England beach town, DailyMail.com has learned exclusively. Maxwell, 57, is in a relationship with Scott Borgerson, 43, and has been living with him at his secluded oceanfront property at the end of a long private road in Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts. The British socialite has been loath to leave the $3 million mansion, a source told DailyMail.com amid heightened focus on Epstein's alleged co-conspirators following the convicted pedophile's apparent suicide on Saturday. 'She's become a real homebody, rarely ventures out. She's the antithesis of the woman who traveled extensively and partied constantly with Epstein,' said a source familiar with Maxwell's new life. Ghislaine Maxwell, 57, is hiding out at a secluded $3M oceanfront property in Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts, DailyMail.com can exclusively revealThe British socialite has been reluctant to leave the $3 million mansion (pictured), which is surrounded by trees and at the end of a long private road, a source told DailyMail.comThe property is owned by her tech CEO boyfriend Scott Borgerson, 43, who has been seen running errands in the area and walking Maxwell's dogBorgerson was seen walking Maxwell's dog on Boston Common near his apartment where he lives during the work weekMaxwell was a long-time consort of Jeffrey Epstein (pictured together in 2005) and an alleged procurer of victims in his underage sex trafficking ringLittle was known of Maxwell's whereabouts since she was last seen publicly three years ago as a multitude of reports claimed she had been living abroad, perhaps in London. Her former townhouse on the Upper East Side of Manhattan was sold for $15 million in 2016, by a company with the same address as Epstein's New York office. The spotlight has now swung to Maxwell, and other alleged co-conspirators of Epstein, following the convicted pedophile's apparent suicide in a Manhattan jail cell on Saturday. Attorney General Bill Barr issued a stark warning to Epstein's cronies on Monday and made clear that federal investigators were coming for them. 'Let me assure you that this case will continue on against anyone who was complicit with Epstein. Any co-conspirators should not rest easy,' Barr said. 'The victims deserve justice and they will get it.' Epstein, 66, was accused of arranging for girls, some as young as 14, to perform nude 'massages' and other sex acts, and of paying some of those girls to recruit others, between 2002 and 2005. Epstein had employees who helped bring him girls, prosecutors have said, though none have been criminally charged. Maxwell, 57, described as the 'madam of the house' by a former housekeeper at Epstein's mansion in Palm Beach, Florida, has strenuously denied any wrongdoing but reports now suggest she may be ready to co-operate with the authorities. However, following Epstein's death, legal sources have said that many of those deals could now be off the table. Former federal prosecutor, Jacob S. Frenkel, told the AP: 'Those who had leverage as potential cooperators in the case now find themselves as the primary targets. 'They no longer have anyone against whom to cooperate.' Maxwell's lawyer, Jeff Pagliuca, has not responded to requests for an interview with Maxwell by DailyMail.com. Borgerson was pictured last month running errands in the affluent community of Manchester-by-the-Sea, a half-hour drive from Boston. Borgerson declined to comment on his relationship with Maxwell when contacted by DailyMailTVBorgerson run his own company, Cargometrics, an investment management firm that specializes in analyzing data on global shippingBorgerson was seen walking Maxwell's dog on Boston Common near his apartment where he lives during the weekBorgerson lives at his apartment in Boston during the work week. Pictured is the stately apartment buildingThe socialite's New England hideaway is an imposing three-story colonial property with five-bedrooms, wraparound terraces and sweeping grounds which reach to the ocean'She's become a real homebody, rarely ventures out. She's the antithesis of the woman who traveled extensively and partied constantly with Epstein,' said a source familiar with Maxwell's new lifeMaxwell has not been seen publicly in around three years since she faded from the New York social scene she once reveled in with Epstein. In the wake of Epstein's apparent suicide on Saturday, the spotlight has now swung to Maxwell, and other alleged co-conspirators of Epstein'She's become a real homebody, rarely ventures out. She's the antithesis of the woman who traveled extensively and partied constantly with Epstein,' said a source familiar with Maxwell's new lifeThe socialite's New England hideaway is an imposing three-story colonial property with five-bedrooms, wraparound terraces and sweeping grounds which reach to the ocean. The property is owned by tech CEO and maritime academic Dr Scott Borgerson. Borgerson was seen by DailyMail.com in July running errands in the affluent community of Manchester-by-the-Sea, a half-hour drive from Boston. Later, he was seen walking Maxwell's dog on Boston Common near his apartment where he lives during the week while running his company, Cargometrics, an investment management firm that specializes in analyzing data on global shipping. The former Coast Guard officer, is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He was married and is believed to have two children. Borgenson did not respond to DailyMail.com's request for comment when first contacted, but following publication he claimed: 'I'm traveling abroad for business. Ghislaine Maxwell is not at my home and I don't know where she is.' Maxwell has not been seen publicly in around three years since she faded from the New York social scene she once reveled in with Epstein. The British aristocrat facilitated Epstein's entry to the rarefied worlds of royalty, politics and celebrity, cementing his friendships with Prince Andrew, Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Woody Allen, to name a few. Maxwell is the youngest child of the late newspaper magnate Robert Maxwell. She attended the boarding school Marlborough College in Wiltshire, England, a favorite of the British elite, and went on to study at Oxford University. In her twenties, she was a well-known face on London's social scene and founded the Kit Kat Club, an alternative to the old-school-tie network for high-powered women. She worked for her father's newspaper, The European, and as the director of Oxford United Football Club while her father was owner. Maxwell and Epstein partied with Donald Trump and Melania at Mar-A-Lago (pictured in 2000) and threw lavish dinners at Epstein's Upper East Side townhouse, attended by Woody Allen, Katie Couric, Chelsea Handler, David Blaine and Google co-founder Sergey Brin, among othersMaxwell operated as part-girlfriend, part-employee, orchestrating Epstein's social life. Epstein supported Maxwell and helped her remain in the social position she had grown accustom to from her upbringing. Pictured: Epstein and Maxwellwith actress Carol Mack in 1995 in NYCIn 1991, Robert Maxwell drowned in mysterious circumstances after falling off his yacht named the Lady Ghislaine. It emerged that his newspaper empire was built on the proceeds of epic criminality, which had seen him defraud its pension fund of almost half a billion pounds. Vilified in the UK, where Robert Maxwell's victims were angered by the lavish lifestyle his family had enjoyed at their expense, his youngest daughter relocated to New York, where she took up residence in a small apartment, and set about re-inventing herself. In the early Nineties, she took up with Epstein, a Gatsby-like financial whiz, who reportedly only managed the money of clients who could invest $1 billion. His sole publicly-named client is Les Wexner, the owner of L Brands which includes Victoria's Secret and Bath & Body Works. Maxwell operated as part-girlfriend, part-employee, orchestrating Epstein's social life. Epstein supported Maxwell and helped her remain in the social position she had grown accustom to from her upbringing. 'Ghislaine floated in and out of the house with the keys, and even though Jeffrey told me they didn't have a sexual relationship, she'd drop under her breath that she was sleeping in his bed from time to time' one Epstein ex-girlfriend told Vanity Fair this week. The pair partied with Donald Trump and Melania at Mar-A-Lago and threw lavish dinners at Epstein's Upper East Side townhouse, attended by Woody Allen, Katie Couric, Chelsea Handler, David Blaine and Google co-founder Sergey Brin, among others. The jet-setting financier also hobnobbed with Trump allies Wilbur Ross, Steve Mnuchin and Rudy Giuliani at a Hamptons film screening in 2010, just two months after his release from prison in Florida. It was revealed on Monday that Epstein bragged last year to a New York Times columnist about having 'dirt' on his rich and powerful associates. Virginia Roberts Giuffre, (pictured), claimed she was one of Jeffrey Epstein's sex slaves. She claims Maxwell instructed her to have sexual relations with several high-profile businessmenGiuffre says she was just 16 years old when she was recruited to work for EpsteinIn court documents, a former boyfriend alleges that she told him she took part in threesomes with Epstein and MaxwellGiuffre alleges that she was intimate with Prince Andrew on multiple occasions. She is pictured with Prince Andrew and Maxwell at Maxwell's London townhouse in 2001. Prince Andrew has denied these claims'The overriding impression I took away from our roughly 90-minute conversation was that Mr Epstein knew an astonishing number of rich, famous and powerful people, and had photos to prove it,' Times staffer James B. Stewart wrote. 'He also claimed to know a great deal about these people, some of it potentially damaging or embarrassing, including details about their supposed sexual proclivities and recreational drug use.' In 2008, Epstein was offered a secret deal to avoid federal prosecution and pleaded guilty to state charges of soliciting an underage girl for sex. As part of that deal, federal prosecutors agreed not to charge 'any potential co-conspirators of Epstein'. He served 13 months in county jail in Palm Beach, Florida and registered as a sex offender. During his sentence, he was allowed to work from his office most days. The deal was cut by Alex Acosta, then U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida. He resigned from his current role as Trump's Secretary of Labor in the fallout from the Epstein case. On July 6, FBI investigators broke down the doors of Epstein's $77 million New York home after he was arrested on his private jet at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey following a flight from Paris. A search of Epstein's home turned up hundreds of pictures of nude women, some of them minors, along with cash, diamonds, valuable art and an expired Austrian passport with Epstein's face but someone else's name, claiming Saudi Arabia as place of residence, according Geoffrey Berman, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. Maxwell is alleged to be one of the main players in a network of recruiters and enablers who provided Epstein with those underage girls to sexually abuse. In July, Maxwell filed a request with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit asking them to reconsider a decision made earlier in the month to unseal 2,000 pages connected to a civil defamation lawsuit filed against her by Virginia Giuffre, who has accused Epstein of keeping her as a sex slave when she was a teenager. One alleged victim of Esptein's, Sarah Ransome, filed a lawsuit in 2017, where she described Maxwell (pictured in New York City in 2015) as the 'highest-ranking employee' of Epstein's alleged sex-trafficking ringMaxwell allegedly trained recruiters, developed plans and concealed activity from law enforcement, according to court documentsEpstein hanged himself in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan on Saturday just 24 hours after the 2,000 pages were unsealed. He is pictured in New York in JanuaryOn July 6, FBI investigators broke down the doors of Epstein's $77 million New York home (pictured) after he was arrested on his private jet at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey following a flight from ParisAccording to the filing, Maxwell's justification for keeping the documents sealed was the media's 'furious feeding frenzy' over the Epstein case. Despite Maxwell's protests, the federal appeals court in Manhattan rejected her bid to keep them under seal and released some 2,000 pages of documents related to Giuffre's defamation suit on Friday. In the newly-released documents, Giuffre claimed in a May 3, 2016, deposition that Maxwell directed her to have sex with people including former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, former U.S. Senator George Mitchell, modeling agent Jean Luc Brunel and financier Glenn Dubin. It was not clear from the deposition transcript included in the court documents how old Giuffre was at the time of the alleged direction. The transcript does not indicate whether Giuffre actually engaged in sex with the four men. None of the four men has been criminally charged in connection with Epstein. Richardson, Mitchell and Dubin, or their respective representatives, all told Reuters that the various allegations against them were false. A lawyer for Brunel did not respond to a phone call and email seeking comment. The name of President Trump, who was once a friend of Epstein, appears in a November 14, 2016, deposition of Giuffre, in which she said Trump and Epstein had been good friends. In response to a question about how she knew whom Trump had sex with, Giuffre said she 'didn't physically see him have sex with any of the girls'. Giuffre, now 35, alleges she was recruited by Maxwell to have sex with rich and powerful men in 2000 while, aged 16, she was working as a towel girl at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort. Maxwell called the claims 'entirely false' and the case never went to trial. Epstein hanged himself in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan on Saturday just 24 hours after the 2,000 pages were unsealed. The nature and timing of Epstein's death has prompted widespread speculation and is now the subject of a federal investigation. A black bag believed to contain Epstein's body was pictured being taken out of New York Presbyterian-Lower Manhattan hospital on Saturday afternoonEpstein had been on 24-hour watch after he was hospitalized following an unsuccessful suicide attempt two weeks ago. The decision to remove Epstein from suicide watch is being investigatedIt has emerged that guards, who were supposed to be checking on Epstein every 30 minutes, had not looked in on him in hours. There are also questions as to why Epstein's cellmate had been moved, leaving him aloneIt has emerged that guards, who were supposed to be checking on Epstein every 30 minutes, had not looked in on him in hours. There are also questions as to why Epstein's cellmate had been moved, leaving him alone. Epstein had been on 24-hour watch after he was hospitalized following an unsuccessful suicide attempt two weeks ago. The decision to remove Epstein from suicide watch is also being investigated. Epstein had pleaded not guilty to federal charges of underage sex and sex trafficking of dozens of girls between 2002 and 2005. He faced 45 years in jail if convicted. The 66-year-old was denied bail due to his vast resources and being deemed a flight risk. Prosecutors told the court that Epstein had recently sent $350,000 to two people, including a former employee, and there were concerns he could attempt to influence witnesses in the case. Some of Epstein's other accusers say that they were groomed by Maxwell and ordered to have sex with other men. One alleged victim, Sarah Ransome, filed a lawsuit in 2017, where she described Maxwell as the 'highest-ranking employee' of Epstein's alleged sex-trafficking ring. Maxwell allegedly trained recruiters, developed plans and concealed activity from law enforcement, according to court documents. Jennifer Araoz came forward earlier this month and alleged that Epstein had raped her when she was 15. She claimed that in 2001, she was approached outside her Manhattan school by a friendly brunette woman in her twenties and told that Epstein wanted to meet her. She was 14 at the time. 'I feel like it was really well thought-out to really make me feel as comfortable as possible, to almost keep me coming back,' Araoz said in an interview on the Today show. Araoz is one of the first alleged victims to file a lawsuit against his estate today. In addition to Epstein's estate, Araoz is suing Maxwell and three female members of his household staff. Araoz officially filed the lawsuit on Wednesday when New York's new Child Victims Act came into effect, which opens a one-year window for people to file lawsuits over alleged sexual abuse regardless of how long ago it occurred. The 32-year-old's lawsuit is among the first of an expected wave of suits against Epstein following his apparent suicide.

All Eyes Are on Alleged Jeffrey Epstein Recruiter Ghislaine Maxwell '' Rolling Stone Archived Version Thu, 15 Aug 2019 14:56 Jeffrey Epstein is gone, and now everyone is looking for the heiress-apparent of his cache of secrets, the international woman of mystery, Ghislaine Maxwell. Authorities reportedly don't know where she is, but she appears to be in their sights. ''Let me assure you that case will continue on against anyone who was complicit with Epstein,'' and that ''any co-conspirators should not rest easy,'' Attorney General William Barr said Monday. The Department of Justice is now fully humiliated by, first, their lenient treatment of the convicted child sex trafficker, and then for letting him die in their custody. DOJ lawyers had cravenly agreed with Epstein's legal team in 2008 to keep the case quiet, but last year, dogged reporting from the Miami Herald's Julie Brown finally brought the trafficked women's stories to light. And last week, the day preceding Epstein's death, a New York court released over 2,000 pages of lurid details. The documents emerged from a defamation case against Maxwell, brought by one of Epstein's accusers: Virginia Giuffre, who in 2015 went public with allegations of being procured at age 15 by Maxwell, repeatedly assaulted by Epstein and forced to have sex with powerful men including Prince Andrew (who has denied it). Maxwell called the story ''obvious lies'' and for that, Giuffre sued her for defamation in 2016. Depositions in the case expose Ghislaine Maxwell's alleged crimes: Giuffre was fresh out of foster care and a rehab runaway when Maxwell allegedly started grooming her 20 years ago. Giuffre's lawyers also deposed other girls who accused Maxwell of procuring and grooming them for sex with Epstein and other men, backing up and expanding on Giuffre's trafficking story. Their depositions, and those of butlers, house managers and private pilots suggest an almost industrial-scale operation. The girls '-- now women '-- added more prominent names to the list of men alleged to have had sex with underage girls, including former Clinton Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, Sen. George Mitchell '-- who served as a fact finder for Clinton's Middle East peace process '-- and MIT artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky. (Mitchell and Richardson immediately denied the allegations; Minsky died in 2016.) In the latest documents, one Manhattan billionaire's butler recalled encountering an unnamed 15-year-old Swedish girl who told him Maxwell took her passport after she refused to have sex with Epstein while on Jeffrey's private island. The girl was ''shaking uncontrollably'' and couldn't remember how she had gotten off the island and back to the U.S, he said. Another witness-accuser, Johanna Sjoberg, recalled in a deposition how Maxwell appeared on the campus of Palm Beach Atlantic University, a small, private Christian school, in February or March of 2001. ''She approached and asked if I could tell her how to find someone to work at her house,'' Sjoberg testified. Sjoberg said she'd take the job herself. How was a Christian-college freshman to suspect a woman who spoke the Queen's English was out virgin hunting? According to Sjoberg, textbook grooming commenced. A shopping trip to posh Worth Avenue, a visit to the mansion. Then a week later, a call '-- would Johanna like to earn $100 dollars to perform some foot rubs at the mansion? She went and soon found herself asked to strip, and lying on the massage table herself, to learn the best massage moves. In a few months, she said in the deposition, she was being called in to participate in threesomes with Jeffrey and Ghislaine or other girls in Epstein's coterie. Maxwell, knowing Sjoberg was studying photography, eventually bought her a camera. But according to Sjoberg, there were strings attached. ''You cannot receive it yet because you didn't finish your job and I had to finish it for you,'' Sjoberg recalled her saying. ''She was implying that I did not get Jeffrey off and she had to do it.'' Eventually, she got the camera and was soon flying to Jeffrey's private island with other teen girls, to meet other men. ''She called us her children,'' Sjoberg recalled. ''At one point when we were in the islands we were all watching a movie and she called us her children.'' ''Did she ever refer to herself as a mother?'' the lawyer asked. ''Yes, like a mother hen.'' In the latest documents, as she always has, Maxwell denies everything. (Maxwell's legal team did not respond to requests for comment.) The lurid details '-- underage or barely of-age girls forced into threesomes, assaulted with sex toys, and according to one deposition account, getting to know Epstein's ''egg-shaped'' genitalia '-- transfixed social media for hours. Nasty Twitter plebes nicknamed the British socialite ''Ghiz'' making a public spectacle of a woman who, years after Epstein's Palm Beach imprisonment, was still maintaining a seemly front. ''I have been absolutely appalled by this story and appalled by the entire characterization of it and I apologize sincerely for my banging at the table,'' she says in one of the depositions, to lawyers who have already heard some two-dozen girls tell the same appalling story. Of course, it was all supposed to remain '-- as the word stamped on every page of her own deposition reminds us '-- ''Confidential.'' How does a proper upperclass Englishwoman end up accused again and again of cruising '-- with a chauffeur behind the wheel '-- South Florida strip-mall massage parlors, ''spas,'' and tiny Christian college campuses hunting for teen girls with bad families or just out of rehab or in foster care? Alliances between heiresses and serially sexually abusive men are not unheard of. Learjet heiress Pat Lear was a disciple of the guru known as Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh who ran a sex cult in Oregon. The Seagram's heiress Clare Bronfman poured millions into the NXVIM cult and then legal defense of sex slaver Keith Raniere. Patty Hearst took up arms with her Symbionese Liberation Army rapist. It's not clear what drew these other heiresses to the abusers, but to begin to understand Ghislaine Maxwell, the place to start might be her dad. Robert Maxwell's exploits in the underworld brought him in contact with some of the late Twentieth Century's most notorious global mobsters, and paid for the 53-room mansion on a 14-acre park overlooking Cambridge, where Ghislaine grew up. Born Jan Hoch to a peasant Czech family in in 1923, he grew up to be a member of British Parliament and owner of a major media company. But that was only the visible side of his. In their book Robert Maxwell: Superspy, British investigative journalists Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon claim that Maxwell was a conduit between the KGB, the Israeli intelligence service Mossad, and the emerging Russian kleptocrat oligarchy in the 1980s, creating some 400 companies that were used to launder the newly capitalist Slavs' dirty money. The authors alleged Maxwell was in business with Russian mob kingpin Semyon Mogilevich, a 300 pound financial mastermind who has been compared to the Wall Street bank Goldman Sachs for the scale of his criminal empire. Mogilevich is on the FBI's ten most wanted list for a variety of sophisticated financial schemes, besides the standard mob businesses of trafficking in humans and drugs. Maxwell was a prodigious patriarch '-- nine children by one wife '-- and baby Ghislaine was supposedly his favorite. He named his yacht the Lady Ghislaine, and was found dead near it, in 1990, under mysterious circumstances, after a series of criminal financial deals went bad. The cause of death remains murky, and Ghislaine Maxwell has said she doesn't believe he killed himself. Ghislaine Maxwell moved to New York in 1991, and was soon a society fixture, hanging with the likes of John F. Kennedy Jr. and Donald Trump. Her boyfriend was Jeffrey Epstein. According to the defamation lawsuit, by the mid-1990s, she was hunting for troubled girls and grooming them for him. The girls told lawyers they thought Maxwell was Epstein's part-time girlfriend, who wanted them around because she couldn't keep up with his insatiable sexual requirements. She was soon running his houses in New York, Palm Beach, and the Virgin Islands. As she cruised Florida strip malls, she was driven by Epstein's Palm Beach mansion manager, Juan Alessi. According to his deposition, he disliked her, and thought she was ''rotten spoiled.'' He also thought she and Epstein were ''like partners in business,'' he said. ''I don't know what kind of business but she was the one who organized I would say employment. So whatever I need, if I have some kind of problem, I contact her.'' Federal prosecutors have admitted in bail filings they don't know what Epstein actually did for money. But one clue lies in another lawsuit between Epstein and some of the accusers in Florida. An Epstein accountant testified that Epstein got his ''money start'' from Maxwell's father. What is known is that with his stash of mystery money he built a wired-up sybaritic paradise for horny powerful men, stocked with sexually groomed young girls and women. He then became a keeper of their secrets, as he bragged to author James B. Stewart last year. ''The overriding impression I took away from our roughly 90-minute conversation was that Mr. Epstein knew an astonishing number of rich, famous and powerful people, and had photos to prove it,'' Stewart wrote in the New York Times. ''He also claimed to know a great deal about these people, some of it potentially damaging or embarrassing, including details about their supposed sexual proclivities and recreational drug use.'' A lot of people knew what Epstein was into. Most have managed to keep hunkered down behind the hedge of lawyers. The legal documents dumped last week are just pieces of depositions, with many pages ending mid-sentence, presumably because those named in the missing pages are in Hail Mary legal mode, throwing last minute legal maneuvers at the judge to block their release. Dead men don't talk. Live women, in the Epstein case, have been talking '-- but until recently they might as well have been dead too for all the legal system cared. One Epstein associate could answer the questions that now, he never can. Her lawyers are both ''out of the country' and were unavailable for comment, according to the offices. But maybe soon, Ghislaine Maxwell will be forced out of the shadows to join her ''children'' in explaining who her late friend Jeffrey Epstein was and what he was doing.

Autopsy finds broken bones in Jeffrey Epstein's neck, deepening questions around his death - The Washington Post Archived Version Thu, 15 Aug 2019 15:01 Carol D. LeonnigNational investigative reporter focused on the White House and government accountability August 15 at 5:31 AMAn autopsy found that financier Jeffrey Epstein suffered multiple breaks in his neck bones, according to two people familiar with the findings, deepening the mystery about the circumstances around his death. Among the bones broken in Epstein's neck was the hyoid bone, which in men is near the Adam's apple. Such breaks can occur in those who hang themselves, particularly if they are older, according to forensics experts and studies on the subject. But they are more common in victims of homicide by strangulation, the experts said. The details are the first findings to emerge from the autopsy of Epstein, a convicted sex offender and multimillionaire in federal custody on charges of sex trafficking. He died early Saturday morning after guards found him hanging in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan and he could not be revived. Attorney General William P. Barr, whose department oversees the Bureau of Prisons facility where Epstein died, has described his death as an ''apparent suicide.'' Justice officials declined to comment on the new information from Epstein's autopsy. The office of New York City's chief medical examiner, Barbara Sampson, completed an autopsy of Epstein's body Sunday. But Sampson listed the cause of his death as pending. Asked about the neck injuries, Sampson said in a statement that no single factor in an autopsy can alone provide a conclusive answer about what happened. ''In all forensic investigations, all information must be synthesized to determine the cause and manner of death. Everything must be consistent; no single finding can be evaluated in a vacuum.'' The details add to the bizarre circumstances surrounding Epstein's death, which have launched a wave of questions and conspiracy theories about how he could have died in federal custody. Even President Trump has egged on speculation, without evidence, that Epstein '-- whose alleged victims say they were pushed to have sex with his powerful and celebrity friends '-- might have been killed to keep him from spilling the secrets of others. The revelation of Epstein's neck injuries follows reports that officers at the Metropolitan Correctional Center broke protocol and failed to properly monitor him. Corrections officers had not checked on Epstein for ''several'' hours before he was found hanging in his cell, a person familiar with the matter said, one of a series of missteps in the hours leading up to his death. Veteran prosecutors and law enforcement officials were shocked that one of the most high-profile inmates in the country wasn't more carefully watched. Barr said over the weekend he was ''appalled'' at serious ''irregularities'' in jail protocol, and he later transferred the warden to another facility. The Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan. (Mary Altaffer/AP)People familiar with the autopsy, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitive stage of the investigation, said Sampson's office is seeking additional information on Epstein's condition in the hours before his death. That could include video evidence of the jail hallways, which may establish whether anyone entered Epstein's cell during the night he died; results of a toxicology screening to determine if there was any unusual substance in his body; and interviews with guards and inmates who were near his cell. [Prince Andrew's connection to Jeffrey Epstein under new scrutiny following resurfaced allegations] Jonathan L. Arden, president of the National Association of Medical Examiners, said a hyoid can be broken in many circumstances but is more commonly associated with homicidal strangulation than suicidal hanging. Arden, who was not involved in the Epstein autopsy, said that in general, a finding of a broken hyoid requires pathologists to conduct more extensive investigation. That investigation can include analysis of the location of the noose, how narrow the noose is, and if the body experienced any substantial drop in the course of the hanging. The age of the deceased is also important, Arden said. The hyoid starts out as three small bones with jointlike connections but hardens during middle age into a U-shape that can break more easily. ''If, hypothetically, the hyoid bone is broken, that would generally raise questions about strangulation, but it is not definitive and does not exclude suicidal hanging,'' he said. A handful of studies conducted over the past decade have produced conflicting results about the likelihood of a hyoid break in a suicide. In a study of 20 suicidal hangings in Thailand, published in 2010, one-fourth of the men who hanged themselves had broken hyoids. In a larger study of suicidal hangings of young adults and middle-aged people in India, conducted from 2010 to 2013, hyoid damage was found in just 16 of 264 cases, or 6 percent. The study addressed the discrepancies in academic reviews, saying wide variations in findings of hyoid breaks are ''possibly due to factors like age of the victim, weight of the victim, type of suspension and height of suspension.'' Hyoid fractures have previously sparked controversy in jailhouse and other contentious deaths. In 2008, Ronnie L. White, a teenager accused of killing a police officer, died of an apparent suicide in a suburban Washington jail cell. But two days later, the cause of death was changed to homicide when a Maryland state medical examiner discovered the teen had a broken hyoid. The incident fanned racial tension and fueled conspiracy theories about the suspect's death in Prince George's County, Md. Medical examiners concluded White was probably strangled with a sheet, towel or ''crux of the elbow.'' The officer who moved his body pleaded guilty to obstruction. But no one was ever charged in White's death. A federal judge said in 2013 that it remained a mystery whether the inmate was slain or took his own life. The hyoid bone played a central role in a heated dispute last year over another high-profile death in New York, that of Eric Garner. A New York police officer was accused of using an improper chokehold while trying to arrest Garner and of causing his death. A police officers' association claimed that an autopsy from Sampson's office found there was no break of Garner's hyoid bone, and that this proved that the officer could not have strangled Garner and caused his death. This ''demonstrates conclusively that Mr. Garner did not die of strangulation of the neck from a chokehold,'' the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association said. But Sampson rejected that claim, saying she stood by her conclusion that Garner died of ''compression of neck (chokehold), compression of chest and prone positioning during physical restraint by police.'' Sampson's office said Garner's bronchial asthma, obesity and high blood pressure were contributing factors. In a widely circulated video of the 2014 incident, the officer was seen grabbing Garner around the neck, pushing him and his face into the pavement. Garner is overheard pleading several times: ''I can't breathe.'' Two weeks later, Sampson's office concluded the officer's actions were the primary cause of his death. Julie Tate contributed to this report.

FBI Records: The Vault '-- Jeffrey Epstein Archived Version Mon, 12 Aug 2019 14:20 Accessibility | eRulemaking | Freedom of Information Act | Legal Notices | Legal Policies and Disclaimers | Links | Privacy Policy | USA.gov | White HouseFBI.gov is an official site of the U.S. government, U.S. Department of Justice

Is Jeffrey Epstein's Zorro Ranch Insulated? | coreysdigs.com Archived Version Mon, 12 Aug 2019 19:01 There is a side to Zorro Ranch that is not being told. The fox is surrounded by the well-connected King family on all sides, a solar station to the west, and Hollywood to the north. Child sex trafficking is at the center of the Epstein investigation, but there may be much more going on than meets the eye, and Zorro ranch appears to be insulated. ' Jeffrey Epstein purchased the New Mexico ranch from Gov. Bruce King in 1993 '' the year Bill Clinton became President '' Jim Baca was brought on by Clinton and Bill Richardson worked with Clinton on the NAFTA passage '' both of which received thousands in campaign contributions from Epstein. ' Over 20,000 acres of Hollywood landscape sits just north of Epstein's land, purchased by fashion designer Tom Ford in 2001 '' another name in Epstein's black book. ' In addition to Epstein giving over $50,000 in campaign funds to former AG Gary King, the King family's land surrounds Zorro Ranch on all sides, and their political and defense connections go all the way up to ballistic missiles . Jeffrey Epstein was taken into custody on July 6, 2019 on charges of sex trafficking minors and conspiracy to engage in sex trafficking of minors. The indictment states he conspired with others to carry out these acts. In creating and maintaining this network of minor victims in multiple states to sexually abuse and exploit, Jeffrey Epstein, the defendant, worked and conspired with others, including employees and associates who facilitated his conduct by, among other things, contacting victims and scheduling their sexual encounters with Epstein at the New York Residence and at the Palm Beach Residence. Whereas they do not specify his New Mexico ranch in the indictment, Zorro Ranch is being investigated by New Mexico authorities who are assisting federal authorities in New York. They are currently interviewing people who allege they were abused by Epstein at the ranch. In a 2015 court filing in Florida, Epstein was accused of sexually abusing a 15-year-old girl in New Mexico and other locations. In 2008 Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty to soliciting a minor for prostitution in a plea deal that only required him to spend 13 months in jail, of which he served most of in his Palm Beach office on ''work release.'' There were dozens of victims, a 50-page indictment on sex trafficking charges that was shelved, and a secret plea deal that concealed the full extent of his crimes and granted immunity to any potential co-conspirators. It stunk, and is now in the spotlight again. A judge recently ruled for the unsealing of up to 2,000 pages of judicial documents to show evidence of whether Epstein and his partner Ghislaine Maxwell were recruiting underage girls in an international sex trafficking operation. Epstein's connections are vast,ranging from the Hollywood elite to billionaires, politicians, and presidents. Beforegetting into the political ''resumes'' which surround this ranch, take a look atthe overall landscape to get a visual sense of the lay of the land. The Lay of The Land Surrounding Zorro RanchEpstein purchased Zorro Ranch, consisting of nearly 8,000 acres, in 1993 from former Gov. Bruce King. It is assumed he purchased it under his real name at that time, but I was unable to trace the records from 1993. However, the Santa Fe County Assessor's records do reflect Jeffrey Epstein under Zorro Ranch Trust in 2011, which later switched to Cypress Inc. in 2013. Though his name is not indicated on the Cypress Inc. records, the New Mexico State Land office provided the state AG's office with documents indicating that Cypress Inc. is owned by Jeffrey Epstein. In fact, they are currently looking into 1,244 acres of state trust land that Cypress Inc. has leased since 1997. According to county records, he began constructing a stable, detached garages, and homes in 1994, and began building his 33,339 square foot mansion in 1999. What an interesting number to land on for square feet. Of course, by the time the multiple porches and patios were added, the overall square footage of this monstrosity came to 57,420. It has been reported that the Kings stillown land surrounding Epstein's property, but it wasn't stated as to just howmuch land, which Kings, and where those parcels are located. Nor do they seemto be reporting on the extensive land mass to the north, used by Hollywood forfilming over 30 movies, and purchased by Tom Ford in 2001, who just so happensto be included in Epstein's little black book. Below is a map detailing all of the parcels with their respective owners. To be clear, the Kings own land under many names. Also note that the State of New Mexico owns land adjacent in addition to a chunk of land right smack in the middle of Epstein's parcel. There are two smaller parcels also owned by Cypress/Epstein, indicated on the map that both fall within his overall large parcel. And, Alexander LLC is in fact a small representation of the bigger land just to the north that is also under the name Alexander LLC, which makes up the large parcel used for Hollywood movies. Why is this so significant that politicians, government, and Hollywood all insulate Epstein's property? Because there has been victim testimony alleging that they were taken to his ranch in Mexico and sexually abused, which is now under investigation. How is it that no one knew this was taking place? And the bigger question is, what else may have been happening at this ranch? Points of Interest:1) Wedged between Bill King's parcel and Epstein's is a parcel owned by New Mexico Solar Station LLC, which is interesting because it was purchased in 2006, yet the land remains vacant. The organizer listed on this parcel is Max Lee Kiehne, a longtime Santa Fe rancher and owner of Centerfire Property among other ventures. He was a 2010 campaign donor to Gary King, and serves on a committee for the NM Cattle Grower's Association along with Bill King. Kiehne graduated Harvard in 1968, and seems to have a fascination with space based on his twitter account. He only follows 33 individuals and organizations on twitter, and in addition to the astronauts, NASA, and space related pages, he also follows Bill Gates, Virgin, and Richard Branson. Michihiko Takahashi is listed as the agent on the New Mexico Solar Station LLC, and also works in real estate for Kiehn's Centerfire Property. He graduated the University of New Mexico and worked as a financial manager for Raycom Media Inc. and was the CFO for KASA, which is a local television broadcast station. What's not clear is what this solarstation is for and why the land has sat vacant since 2006. What's curious is,there would appear to be some form of broadcasting setup on Epstein's land justeast of this ''solar station'' parcel. In reviewing all of this, one can't help but flash back to last year's FBI lockdown of the solar observatory in Sunspot, in southern New Mexico, with a telescope that is overseen by the New Mexico State University. The alleged story being purported by the news is that a complete FBI lockdown, along with a Blackhawk helicopter, and closing of a post office was the result of a potential pedophile working there. Not much detail surfaced thereafter. 2) Here's where it gets interesting. Epstein has an airstrip and hanger at the south end of the property, yet there are two Cessnas stashed 2.85 miles north, just over the ridge at the far northwest end of his property. There is also a dirt road leading to that end where two homes sit. It's a short walk from the furthest home up over the ridge to the planes. Why are these two planes not located in the hanger right next to the airstrip? Notice their position in relation to the trees around them and the ridge itself. 2 Homes at base of ridge just south of planes(Update 7/27/19: After this article was published, it was suggested that these planes may very well have been flying over, were captured on satellite, and created an optical illusion that they are at ground level. This is entirely plausible.) 3) The State of New Mexico owns a section of land right smack in the middle of Epstein's parcel. The land is entirely vacant with exception of this structure built into the ground at the southern end. Being unable to determine exactly what this is, one would think a government employee might be required to visit this structure at times, which would take them straight through Epstein's property. 4) The ''ranch'' portion at the main entrance of Zorro Ranch is outfitted with a stable, paddocks, and other facilities, yet in this aerial view it wouldn't appear as though there are any animals on site. In fact, the entire ''ranch'' seems to be devoid of animals. Perhaps they are no longer on premise, or there are animals inside the stable? The mansion resides further up Zorro Ranch Road to the north. 5) Without being an expert on fracking, it would appear that these could be potential fracking areas throughout Epstein and the King's parcels. New Mexico is currently the third largest producer of oil in the US, though fracking seems to be in the hot seat right now. Perhaps they've had success and brought in a stream of revenue from this? 6) Whereas several reports reflect a photo of a labyrinth behind Epstein's mansion, based on aerial footage from January 8, 2018, it would not appear to be three-dimensional at all. In fact, it looks much like paint with a pile of rocks on top of the ''shrubs'' with dirt tracks rolling across it as well. Even if the grass and shrubs died off and they let it go, it seems strange that it would take on this appearance. Given the background of those surrounding this property, as documented further down, it gives one pause as to what might be underneath this section of land. This is curious, as the same thing was observed at the tennis courts on his Little St. James Island. This first photo was published by Reuters, and the labyrinth appears to be three-dimensional and legit, but there is no date on it, so it's hard to say how old this photo might be. Perhaps it was dressed up for when they hosted big functions and weddings at the property years back? The photos following Reuters photo represent what satellite images show from 2018. 7) Just north of Epstein's property is again bordered by land owned by the King family, as indicated in the map shown at the beginning. Just after that is the land listed as Alexander LLC, which represents several smaller parcels (some not highlighted in red below) along with a very large parcel, which encapsulates leased and deeded land, an airstrip and hanger, ranch, and the Silverado movie set. Over 30 movies have been filmed across this land. In 2001 fashion designer Tom Ford purchased this 20,000+ acres of the beautiful Cerro Pelon Ranch. Ford is listed in Epstein's black book. Is it any wonder as to how they know one another? Additional information and photos of this land can be viewed here, which hosts an interesting map overlay on Manhattan and Central Park, NYC. The King FamilyFormer Gov. Bruce King sold Jeffrey Epstein this nearly 8,000 acre family ranch for $12 million in 1993. Why let go of family property, while maintaining ownership of the land surrounding it? King passed away in 2009. King served in the U.S. Army during World War II, and spent a life in politics beginning in the early 1950's when he worked on Senator Dennis Chavez's campaign. He was elected to the Santa Fe County Commission in 1954 and served two terms. He went on to serve five terms in the New Mexico House of Representatives and three terms as Speaker of the House. In 1970 he was elected to his first term as Governor and proceeded to serve two additional terms in 1978 and 1990. He also served on several boards, was active in the Boy Scouts of America, and served as the Chair of the New Mexico Democratic Party and Vice-Chair of the National Governor's Association. Bruce married his wife Alice Marie Martin King in 1947. Alice passed away in 2008. Alice had an extensive background in advocating for the children of New Mexico. She served as Chair of the Juvenile Justice Council, worked with the Juvenile Justice Task Force to review the New Mexico children's code, and chaired the Governor's Task Force on Children and Families, as First Lady. The task force created the first-in-the-nation Children, Youth and Families Department. She also worked with educators and led several summits on the education system. She served on numerous boards of charitable foundations. She was a member of the board of directors for the New Mexico Boys Ranch and spearheaded the effort to establish the New Mexico Girls Ranch. She created the New Mexico Children's Foundation in 1992, which is a state-wide grant-making organization that has funded 165 small non-profit children's organizations throughout New Mexico. Gary King is the President of the Board. Bruce King had two brothers, Sam and Don,who also own a lot of land in New Mexico, some of which surrounds the Epsteinranch. Sam, Don, and Bruce's son Bill own King Butane Company since 2009 andBill is a licensed truck driver since 1991. Yolanda Jones King and former New Mexico AG Gary KingThe other son of Bruce King, Former AG of New Mexico Gary King, served from2007 to 2015. Prior to that he served as a democratic New Mexico StateLegislature for 12 years, from 1987-1998. ' Aside from Gary's background inpolitics, he has a law degree and previously maintained a private practice, andhas a PhD in organic chemistry. ' In 1990 King served as CorporateGeneral Counsel and Senior Environmental Scientist with Advanced Sciences, Inc.which is an environmental consulting firm that works with industrial andgovernment clients. It was acquired by Commodore Applied Technologies, Inc. in1996. ' In 1997 Gary and his wife purchasedseven timeshares at the Marriott Kauai Beach Club in Lihue, HI. ' In 1998 he became the Policy Advisor to the Assistant Secretary for Environmental Management at the U.S Department of Energy (DOE) in Washington D.C., then rose to the position of the Director of the Office of Worker and Community Transition just one year later. ' In 2006 he was elected as New Mexico Attorney General. ' AG Gary King initiated the New Mexico Human Trafficking Task Force which is headed by the Office of the Attorney General and has a dedicated human trafficking unit within its special investigations division. They work with Life Link, a service provider offering emergency assistance, housing, substance abuse, mental health treatment, employment and other supportive systems. They also work with state, local, tribal, and federal law enforcement agencies, and prosecutors. The office of the Attorney General was awarded a grant for this task force. ' He spearheaded legislation to make thepractice of human trafficking a felony crime, and was invited to Geneva,Switzerland by a United Nations committee to present this legislation as amodel for other nations. ' He has served as chair of the Manzano District of the Boy Scouts of America, and is president on the board for his mother's foundation '' the New Mexico Children's Foundation. ' King received $15,000 from Epstein in 2006 for his run at AG. According to some reports, in 2006, following Epstein's arrest, King gave back $15,000 that an Epstein company called The Zorro Trust had contributed to his campaign for attorney general. Yet, he went on to accept another $35,000 from firms linked to Epstein in his 2014 run for Governor. King had said they would look into it and stated, ''I don't think I've ever met him personally. He knows other members of my family better.'' Gary King is married to Yolanda Jones King, a woman with a very extensive and impressive background. ' Received her BS cum laude in chemistryand PhD in physical chemistry (chemical laser kinetics) from the University ofNew Mexico in 1981. ' In 1978 she worked on Bruce King'scampaign run. In 1987 Gary and Yolanda married. ' 32 Years in the U.S. Air Force workingin research, management of research, development of programs, resourcemanagement, and program planning. ' She holds a patent in beam sensingtechniques. ' She has numerous publications andpresentations on directed energy and space technologies. ' Served as the Director of Engineering& Technical Management at the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center at KirtlandAFB. ' Head of the space based sensing andsatellite protection technologies at the Space Vehicles Directorate of the U.S.Air Force Research Laboratory for three years, then moved to the AFNWC. ' Served as chair for the NATO RTOSensors ad Electronics Technology Panel. She traveled to meetings in Slovenia,Romania, Poland, France, Taiwan, Italy, the Netherlands and the Czech Republicwhile in that position, and Gary accompanied her. ' Was the Director of the InternationalOffice for the Air Force Office of Scientific Research in Washington, D.C. ' Was responsible for management of allBallistic Missile Defense Organization technology programs and oversight of allAir Force Science and Technology programs for the Phillips Laboratory Commanderand AFSTC Commander. ' 1999-2011 Served on the Board of Trustees for the University of New Mexico Foundation. Yolanda and Gary donated between $10,000 '' $24,999 between 2008-2009. Other donors include Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Lockheed Martin, big pharma companies and banks, Walmart, numerous foundations and estates, and the Navajo Nation donated over $1 million. ' 2019 '' New Mexico Senate Democrats confirmed Yolanda to the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology Board of Regents. ' Her campaign contributions are primarily to women, with the most recent to Tulsi Gabbard's presidential run, from Hawaii. A Few of Yolanda's Publishings and Symposiums: Negative deuterium ion thermal energy measurements in a volume ion source Co-chair at the NATO symposium on Advanced Sensor Payloads UAV 1989 Weapons Laboratory Air Force Systems Command '' Kirtland Air Force Base: Experimental Investigation of Relationship Between Nonlinear Field Energy and Emittance Growth. 2003 Air Force Research Laboratory Success Stories Epstein Campaign Money to Other New Mexico CandidatesIn 2006 Epstein donated $10,000 to Jim Baca's campaign for New Mexico stateland commissioner. It is being reported, that after Epstein's conviction, Bacaeither donated the money to charities or returned the money. That said, Bacawas twice elected New Mexico Commissioner of Public Lands, serving from 1983 to1986, and again from 1991 to 1993. In 1993 BillClinton began his presidency, Jeffrey Epstein purchased the New Mexicoranch from former Gov. Bruce King, and Baca was appointed Director of theBureau of Land Management by Clinton, and was fired the following year. Thereare two BLM parcels butted up to Epstein's property at the north end. Epstein also contributed $50,000 to each of former Gov. Bill Richardson's gubernatorial campaigns, who served as New Mexico's Governor from 2003 to 2011. According to reports, Richardson recalls visiting Epstein's New Mexico ranch only once during his run for governor in 2002. Richardson is also listed in Epstein's little black book. It is no coincidence that Richardson was also appointed the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and Energy Secretary by former President Bill Clinton. It's also no coincidence that him and Bill Clinton became friends after working closely on sealing NAFTA's passage in 1993. Is This A Bigger Operation?How is it political figures who arefighting for harsher laws for human trafficking, creating a human traffickingtask force, a community children's foundation, and have worked at the highestlevels of defense in our country, are completely blind to the actions of a manand his co-conspirators, who coincidentally owns their father's land rightsmack in the middle of all of theirs? And then, to go on and accept campaignfunds, long after he was a convicted sex offender, is rather astonishing. He funded the Governors, AGs, Land Commissioners, and likely others, for decades. To say that this tight-knit group of politicians, including former President Bill Clinton '' who traveled on Epstein's plane 26 times '' were not involved in some level of conspiracy, would be foolish at best. To suggest that deeply connected politicians, defense connections, and Hollywood all surrounding Epstein's ranch, is not suspect, would be even more foolish. Things aren't looking too bright for the Clintons, especially with their long list of connections to child sex traffickers and pedophiles. This also raises more questions as to what the Clintons, Richard Branson, Bill Gates, George Soros and numerous others are up to on the islands in the Caribbean, which is rife with child trafficking. The magic year was 1993. Bill Clintonbecame president, Gov. Bruce King setup Jeffrey Epstein in the center of hisother parcels in New Mexico, Jim Baca was appointed the director of the Bureauof Land Management by Clinton, and Bill Richardson was working hard on NAFTAalongside Bill. Epstein was lining everyone's pockets, and one by one, theywere added to his little black book. And this is just a glance into New Mexico'sZorro Ranch connections. Epstein's other connections and locations add layerafter layer of high-level government ties, making it undeniable that there aremuch bigger plays in action. The thought of blackmail, human trafficking, drugtrafficking, gun trafficking, experimentation, and other nefarious actions cometo mind when taking all factual reports and stacking them up to one another.Indeed, this is conspiracy at the highest levels '' and as the indictment suggests­'' co-conspirators are most definitely involved. Denied bail, Epstein remains in federal custody pending trial, and was recently found injured and in a fetal position in his cell, with reports swirling about a potential suicide or attempted murder by a former police officer who is serving time for running a drug ring, murdering four people, and burying them in his yard. Whatever proves to be true, one thing is for certain '' all the King's horses and all the King's men can't put Epstein together again. Read about Jeffrey Epstein's St. Thomas Network, Comms, And An Elite School

''They're Nothing, These Girls'': Unraveling the Mystery of Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein's Enabler | Vanity Fair Archived Version Tue, 13 Aug 2019 01:49 Is it possible prosecutors have lost track of Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein's alleged co-conspirator in his pedophile ring? For the past few weeks, rumors have circulated that she's 400 pounds and living in Florida, or that she's living the high life in London or the Continent, but according to the Washington Post, authorities are having a hard time locating her. Those who know her say that it's possible she is as much of a Houdini as Epstein. Both of them liked having secrets, and the way those secrets kept people off balance. ''Jeffrey always wanted to give the impression that he was an international man of mystery'--'I control everyone and everything, I collect people, I own people, I can damage people,''' says an ex-girlfriend. As part of Epstein's original plea deal, negotiated with Alexander Acosta, the others implicated were also given immunity from prosecution, which is partly why victims like Virginia Roberts Giuffre pursued her and others in civil courts. But Epstein's death has not stopped the current investigation. ''We remain committed to standing for you,'' Geoffrey Berman, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, wrote in a statement after Epstein's death, ''and our investigation of the conduct charged in the Indictment'--which included a conspiracy count'--remains ongoing.'' There were rumors on Monday afternoon that indictments of five people were imminent. The nature of the relationship between Epstein and Maxwell, the favorite daughter of embezzling press baron Robert Maxwell, who died when he fell or was pushed from his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, is not well known. Multiple victims claim she was both part of the sex trafficking ring, often bringing girls to Epstein, and a sexual participant. But Epstein told of-age women he courted that Maxwell was a former girlfriend fallen on hard times, and that he had taken it upon himself to maintain her position in society. ''Ghislaine floated in and out of the house with the keys, and even though Jeffrey told me they didn't have a sexual relationship, she'd drop under her breath that she was sleeping in his bed from time to time,'' says an ex-girlfriend. Another woman in Maxwell's orbit says she used to joke about keeping herself rail thin because Epstein liked thin girls. Maxwell, whose father was Jewish, liked to shock. ''She said, 'I do it the way Nazis did it with the Jews, the Auschwitz diet. I just don't eat.''' The sinister depravity of Epstein's sexual world, and Maxwell's role in enabling it, was mostly kept hidden. The two were fixtures on a certain rarefied Manhattan circuit. Epstein was as a practical joker who liked messing with people he regarded as lower on the food chain. A prominent 1990s Sports Illustrated model who dated Epstein describes meeting Donald Trump at one of Trump's parties in the penthouse of the Plaza Hotel back then, and Trump goading Epstein to get her number. ''Jeffrey said he wouldn't give it to him and he had to get it from me,'' she says. She finally gave it to him on another occasion, but he lost the number. ''Trump called Jeffrey trying to get it again, saying 'She gave it to me! You know she gave it to me! You can give it to me now!' but Jeffrey wouldn't do it.'' She laughs. ''Donald was such a joke to all of the models back then'--we all knew he was bankrupt and had no game. I remember Jeffrey once saying he was going to be late to pick me up because he had to drop off food for Donald'--he was at home crying under the covers.''

Jeffrey Epstein Autopsy 'Pending Further Information' '' Variety Archived Version Tue, 13 Aug 2019 03:46 August 11, 2019 5:19PM PTJeffrey Epstein's autopsy results are ''pending further information,'' according to a statement from the New York City Medical Examiner's office. ''Today, a medical examiner performed the autopsy of Jeffrey Epstein. The ME's determination is pending further information at this time,'' chief medical examiner Dr. Barbara Sampson said in the statement. Sampson also confirmed the presence of a private pathologist (Dr. Michael Baden) at the autopsy, per the request of Epstein's representatives '-- a ''routine practice,'' Sampson added. Epstein died Saturday of suspected suicide two weeks after he was found injured in his cell with marks on his neck. Previously, Manhattan federal prosecutors had charged Epstein in July with the sex trafficking of girls as young as 14 years old and the collection of child pornography. Epstein pled not guilty, but had he been convicted, he faced up to 45 years in prison. The suicide also came a day after court records were unsealed in which Virginia Giuffre alleges that Epstein kept her as a teenage sex slave and forced her to have sex and perform erotic massages on a number of powerful people, including Britain's Prince Andrew, former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and former U.S. Senator George Mitchell. All three of the accused of denied the accusations. Jeffrey Epstein's autopsy results are ''pending further information,'' according to a statement from the New York City Medical Examiner's office. ''Today, a medical examiner performed the autopsy of Jeffrey Epstein. The ME's determination is pending further information at this time,'' chief medical examiner Dr. Barbara Sampson said in the statement. Sampson also confirmed the presence [...] Just a few streets away from a protest in front of the Equinox in West Hollywood on Friday night, ''Pose'' star Billy Porter weighed in on the controversy. ''Leave,'' he told Variety in response to the uproar that came after Equinox and SoulCycle owner Stephen Ross hosted a fundraiser for President Trump at his Hamptons [...] A small protest erupted outside of Equinox Fitness in West Hollywood Friday afternoon following the outcry over a big-dollar fundraising event for President Trump organized by billionaire Stephen Ross, chairman of Equinox owner Related Companies. Approximately 20 people gathered at the Sunset Boulevard protest coordinated by Gonzalez Garcia and his friend Adam Bass. Garcia and [...] UPDATED: Donald Trump blasted Hollywood as ''racist'' outside the White House on Friday morning, adding that the industry is doing a ''disservice'' to the country. His remarks come amid controversy over ''The Hunt,'' the Blumhouse film about elite vacationers hunting down blue-collar whites for sport. The film has generated backlash on Fox News and other [...] President Trump took to Twitter Tuesday morning to attack Google, and allege without evidence that the search giant was looking to influence the 2020 election. ''We are watching Google very closely,'' he tweeted. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1158706058724040704 Trump's tweets were apparently prompted by a segment that aired Monday night on ''Lou Dobbs Tonight.'' In it, Dobbs interviewed former [...] After dominating the World Cup earlier this summer, Megan Rapinoe is striving towards a new goal. The soccer star has joined forces with her current and former US Women's soccer teammates Christen Press, Tobin Heath and Meghan Klingenberg to launch re-inc, a gender-inclusive fashion and lifestyle brand that defies convention and reimagines the status quo. [...] Kacey Musgraves was among those feeling she'd had more than enough following the massacres in El Paso and Dayton '-- and in a live performance at Lollapalooza and subsequent series of tweets, the native Texan let loose on the president for what she considered his feeble response to the tragedies. ''Don't you hear us, @realDonaldTrump?'' [...]

Crime Writer James Patterson Is Obsessed With Jeffrey Epstein's Penis Archived Version Tue, 13 Aug 2019 03:52 The story of Jeffrey Epstein'--a bizarre, self-described billionaire who bought his way out of trouble after police uncovered a sexual assault ring operating from his Florida mansion'--has fascinated the public for over a decade. So it makes sense that best-selling uber-rich crime writer James Patterson is, like the rest of us, obsessed with the mystery of his Palm Beach neighbor. And so, Patterson, the 69-year-old book mill owner and operator who holds the record for most No. 1 New York Times best sellers, has taken a rare swoop into nonfiction territory to give us Filthy Rich: The Shocking True Story of Jeffrey Epstein. As with most Patterson novels, Epstein's tale is co-written'--a generous characterization of the situation where Patterson employs dozens of ghostwriters and publishes their work under his brand'--with John Connolly, a former New York police detective, Vanity Fair editor, and current Florida private eye, who (it has been rumored) at one time allegedly worked for the Church of Scientology. Indeed, what is already known of Epstein, the massage-loving Icarus who flew too close to underage girls, is shocking. Dozens of profiles, hundreds of reported pieces, and thousands of pages of court documents have told the story of the man who worked for and socialized with New York's wealthiest and most famous while surrounding himself with loyalists who either actively aided in his sexual assaults of postpubescent girls or kept his secrets. Sadly, Filthy Rich has little to add to the canon. Patterson's 287-page book is organized into tiny'--sometimes just single-page'--chapters, bearing the subject's name and a date. These early, smaller chapters are meant to create scenes in the lives of the victims, but provide less detail than one might get by googling. These tableaux show girls between 14 and 18, getting ready to meet Epstein, dodging their parents' concerns, and conversations between them and the high-school classmate who acted as one of Epstein's madams, luring girls to the mansion's massage room. (Patterson writes in his author's note that scenes and dialogue have been ''recreated.'') As detailed in the book, citing news reports covering the constellation of court cases that have spawned from his crimes, Epstein between the years 1998 and 2007 ran a kind of depraved pyramid scheme, paying young girls $200 (or more if they would ''do more'') to give him sexual massages, and recruiting them to bring other young girls into the fold. These messages'--which would occur up to three times a day, with different girls each time'--were just a way to get high-school girls through the door, however. Once inside his room, a naked Epstein would grab them, masturbate, and sometimes penetrate them with his fingers, a vibrator, or his oddly-shaped penis, according to the girls. Strangely, Epstein's penis is the rare instance where the book is large on details. Lingering on his anatomy in several sections'--calling it ''egg-shaped,'' ''very tiny,'' ''some sort of birth defect,'' ''like a teardrop, like a drop of water ... really fat at the bottom and skinny at the top where it's attached. And it never gets fully hard, ever.'' When police got wind of Epstein's activities, they launched an investigation that led to a 53-page indictment. If convicted, Epstein was facing decades in prison, but he needn't worry: A team of powerful and talented attorneys that included Alan Dershowitz and former Clinton special prosecutor Kenneth Starr launched an aggressive'--and ultimately successful'--campaign to discredit the prosecutors as well as the young victims. (Epstein recruited vulnerable girls from the wrong side of the tracks who were less likely to tell anyone about the assaults in exchange for modest sums of money and perks like car rentals and movie tickets, the book notes.) U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta claimed the state didn't stand a chance against Epstein's legal dream team. ''Our judgment in this case, based on the evidence known at the time, was that it was better to have a billionaire serve time in jail, register as a sex offender, and pay his victims restitution than risk a trial with a reduced likelihood of success,'' he wrote in a 2011 letter, which Filthy Rich quotes in full. In the end, Epstein would strike a slap-on-the-wrist deal with prosecutors that enraged local police. He'd pay settlements to dozens of accusers, but plead guilty to only one count of soliciting a minor. He served 13 months of an 18-month sentence in a Palm Beach county jail'--16 hours of which every day but Sunday, he could spend at his home or in his office, due to a work release provision in the deal. The book's best chapters are its longer ones'--but these are often just printed depositions, letters, police interviews, and court documents. News stories are quoted from liberally. Vicky Ward's profile for Vanity Fair, as well as her explanation in The Daily Beast for why the most incriminating pieces were removed by her then-editor Graydon Carter, are among the published pieces examined at length. In Part II, ''The Man,'' Patterson examines Epstein before his fall. The 63-year-old was born to and raised by middle-class parents in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. A math whiz, Epstein was soon teaching at the Dalton School, a prestigious private prep school on New York's Upper East Side. Through a parent at the school, Epstein parlayed the position into another, better-paying one at Bears Stearns where he worked on tax issues for ultra-wealthy clients. But he didn't stay long; Epstein resigned during an insider trading investigation of Bear Stearns by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. From there, he collected rich clients, including the founder of The Limited Inc., Leslie Wexner, who some say gifted Epstein New York's largest private residence. Exactly what he did for them is unknown. Maybe he had ties to the government? Maybe he fashioned tax shelters for his clients? If Patterson knows, he's not telling. Through philanthropy, Epstein opened his circle to academics and political giants'--Nobel Prize winners, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Clinton are all counted as friends who visited Epstein's private island in the Virgin Islands. Patterson uncovers no evidence that any were involved with Epstein's criminal activity. And despite tabloid headlines, Filthy Rich, has nothing new on Epstein's ties to Donald Trump, or Bill Clinton. The original reporting is limited to brief interviews, including law enforcement officials; old Brooklyn friends who said Epstein always seemed like a nice Jewish boy to them; a former acquaintance who said Epstein used to lie about having money (he allegedly stole her friend's Concorde jacket and would tell people he flew on the aircraft, ''a total lie,''); and Todd Meister, Nicky Hilton's ex-husband who knows Epstein through his mega-rich dad and dishes in the book that Epstein (whom he calls a ''yutz'') once bragged that he ''liked to go into insane asylums because he liked to fuck crazy women.'' They also interviewed Anna Salter'--a clinical psychologist (and, it goes unsaid, mystery novelist)'--who has never met Epstein, but makes a few general statements about narcissism and psychopathy. In almost every section of Filthy Rich, Patterson asks the reader questions'--seemingly the same ones forming in his readers' minds. ''Who is Jeffrey Epstein?'' ''How Did Jeffrey Epstein make all his money?'' ''Is Epstein a born psychopath?'' ''What exactly was he guilty of?'' Filthy Rich, one could assume, was a failed attempt to answer these questions. ''I thought it was a really powerful story, and I thought it needed to be told,'' Patterson recently told The Wall Street Journal. If only somebody would.

New York coroner 'confident' Epstein's death was suicide: New York Times - Reuters Archived Version Tue, 13 Aug 2019 03:50 (Reuters) - New York City's chief medical examiner is confident Jeffrey Epstein died by hanging himself in the jail cell where he was being held without bail on sex-trafficking charges, but is awaiting more information before releasing her determination, the New York Times reported on Sunday, citing a city official. An exterior view of the Metropolitan Correctional Center jail where financier Jeffrey Epstein, who was found dead in the Manhattan borough of New York City, New York, U.S., August 10, 2019. REUTERS/Jeenah Moon An autopsy was performed earlier in the day on the disgraced financier found unresponsive on Saturday in a New York City jail, chief medical examiner Dr. Barbara Sampson said. A private pathologist observed the autopsy on behalf of Epstein's representatives, which she called ''routine practice.'' A determination on the cause of death ''is pending further information at this time,'' Sampson said in a statement. The suspicion in Epstein's death was hanging, said a city official not authorized to speak on the record. The Times did not say why it could not identify the source of information on the medical examiner's likely determination of the cause of death. Epstein, 66, was not on suicide watch at the time in his cell in the Special Housing Unit of the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC), a source said. Epstein, a well-connected money manager, was found hanging by his neck, according to the source, who was not authorized to speak on the record. The wealthy financier, who once counted Republican President Donald Trump and Democratic former President Bill Clinton as friends, was arrested on July 6 and pleaded not guilty to charges of sex trafficking involving dozens of underage girls as young as 14, from at least 2002 to 2005. The FBI and the Department of Justice's Inspector General opened investigations into his suicide while he was in federal custody. Last month, Epstein was found unconscious on the floor of his jail cell with marks on his neck, and officials were investigating that incident as a possible suicide or assault. Despite that incident, Epstein was not on suicide watch at the time of his death, and he was alone in a cell in the unit of the correctional center used to isolate vulnerable prisoners when his body was found. It was not immediately clear why Epstein was taken off suicide watch, a special set of procedures for inmates who are deemed to be at risk of taking their own lives. The Federal Bureau of Prisons, which operates the MCC, provided no explanation beyond its terse statement that Epstein was found dead in an apparent suicide. His death touched off outrage from Attorney General William Barr, politicians and many of Epstein's alleged victims, who fear that they may lose their day in court now that Epstein is dead. That investigation into conduct described in the indictment, including the conspiracy count, will continue despite Epstein's death, Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan, said on Saturday. The indictment - which accused Epstein of knowingly recruiting underage women to engage in sex acts, sometimes over a period of years - came more than a decade after he pleaded guilty in Florida to state charges of solicitation of prostitution from a minor in a deal with prosecutors that has been widely criticized as too lenient. Reporting by Letitia Stein in Tampa, Florida; Editing by Frank McGurty and Bill Rigby

4chan user posted about Jeffrey Epstein's death before it was public Archived Version Tue, 13 Aug 2019 23:00 Less than an hour before the first news reports surfaced that Jeffrey Epstein had been found unresponsive in his jail cell, a post about his death mysteriously appeared on a far-right message board. Authorities now want to know who was behind the post, which contained medically accurate details about the financier and accused sex trafficker. The New York City Fire Department, for its part, has determined that the information in the post did not come from its records, a department spokesperson told NBC News. Fire officials reviewed the post on 4chan, a forum popular with internet trolls and people in the so-called alt-right movement. BuzzFeed News was first to report on the post, which appeared on 4chan 38 minutes before the first tweet about Epstein's death from ABC News reporter Aaron Katersky at 8:54 a.m. ET. The flagship ABC News account tweeted an article about Epstein's death five minutes later. "[D]on't ask me how I know, but Epstein died an hour ago from hanging, cardiac arrest. Screencap this," the post reads. The text was accompanied by an image of Pepe the Frog, an internet meme that is popular among far-right internet trolls. Troll posts looking to capitalize on the initial post immediately began pushing elaborate conspiracy theories about body doubles, which were later refuted by the original poster. New York Presbyterian, the hospital to which Epstein was taken to, declined to comment. The New York City medical examiner's office said Sunday that it had completed an autopsy on Epstein but that it needed more information before determining the cause of death. Multiple people briefed on the investigation told NBC News that suicide remains the presumed cause of death and that no sign of foul play has yet emerged. Epstein was not on suicide watch at the time of his death, even though he was found in his cell two weeks ago with marks on his neck, multiple people familiar with the investigation said. Tom Winter Tom Winter is a New York-based correspondent covering crime, courts, terrorism, and financial fraud on the East Coast for the NBC News Investigative Unit. Ben Collins covers disinformation, extremism and the internet for NBC News. Daniel Arkin Daniel Arkin is a reporter for NBC News.

VIDEO - How And Why People Come Up With Conspiracy Theories : NPR Archived Version Thu, 15 Aug 2019 11:03 The unexplained suicide of Jeffrey Epstein has given rise to conspiracy theories. People sometimes seek simplistic answers when confronted by complex, coincidental or otherwise confusing phenomena. AILSA CHANG, HOST: President Trump says he does want a full investigation into the death of Jeffrey Epstein at a federal detention facility in New York. Over the weekend, Trump had retweeted an unsubstantiated suggestion that Epstein may not have taken his own life but was instead murdered. There is absolutely no evidence to support that allegation, but conspiracy thinkers don't necessarily need evidence, as NPR's Tom Gjelten reports. TOM GJELTEN, BYLINE: It can be hard to know what to make of an unfounded conspiracy theory. Terence Williams, who, on Twitter, calls himself an actor, comedian and commentator, got things rolling on Saturday with this little video rant on Jeffrey Epstein's death. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) TERRENCE WILLIAMS: And you know what? He had information on the Clintons, and the man ended up dead. Now, for some odd reason - for some odd reason - people that have information on the Clintons end up dead. GJELTEN: Since that tweet, Williams has followed with several more in the same vein. He may have been encouraged by Donald Trump retweeting his post. Being a comedian, Williams could simply have been out to get attention by saying something outrageous. Whether President Trump actually believes the conspiracies he highlights is also debatable. He's often employed conspiracy theories to denigrate his adversaries. Kurt Andersen, who wrote the book "Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire," says when a bad thing happens, it's easy to blame it on some secret cabal. KURT ANDERSEN: So if you're Donald Trump, my enemies the Clintons did this. If you are somebody who believes that Donald Trump is in league with the Russians, then, of course, you think, oh, no, the Russians did this. GJELTEN: But people don't need a partisan motivation to come up with a conspiracy theory. Consider such discredited claims as that vaccines cause autism, that 9/11 was an inside job, that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax. People genuinely believe these things, and that may trouble those who take logic or evidence seriously. Reverend Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, felt the need on his podcast to explain why conspiracy theories take hold. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) ALBERT MOHLER: We as human beings do not like unanswered moral questions. We want to know who did it. We want to know how it was done. GJELTEN: All the more so, Mohler said, when an event is associated with some strange coincidences. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) MOHLER: We're looking for a pattern. Our intelligence, given to us by God, is a pattern-seeking intelligence. GJELTEN: And a conspiracy theory can offer a pattern. Joe Uscinski at the University of Miami has studied conspiracy theories. He says people also see conspiracies even when there are no coincidences to explain. JOE USCINSKI: It doesn't matter because people can take whatever they want and turn it into whatever they want. GJELTEN: He cites the example of Supreme Court Justice Scalia dying in bed. Some conspiracy thinkers suggested he was smothered simply because there was a pillow by his head. USCINKSI: You know, everybody has a pillow near their head (laughter) when they're sleeping. That's not strong evidence of anything. But to them, that was very strong evidence. GJELTEN: Uscinski says his research suggests that people who ascribe to conspiracy theories are often those who feel they're under threat or out of power or somehow left on the outside. So connecting the dots may satisfy an emotional or intellectual need. Kurt Andersen says it can also be fun. ANDERSEN: Look at this. This person was here at this time. And look. It connects to this. That is part of the pleasure of puzzles, of detective fiction, of thrillers. It is a form of entertainment. GJELTEN: But a potentially dangerous form of entertainment if people take action based on a perceived conspiracy. Tom Gjelten, NPR News. (SOUNDBITE OF NILS FRAHM'S "SAYS") Copyright (C) 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio record.

VIDEO - Epstein Tapes Emerge: Dead Pedophile Describes His Lifestyle In Unearthed Recordings | Zero Hedge Archived Version Wed, 14 Aug 2019 21:11 In 2003, Jeffrey Epstein sat for five hours to give a rare interview with journalist David Bank, offering his thoughts on subjects ranging from mathematics, to exorbitant wealth, to the important of prenuptial agreements. After Epstein's arrest on July 6, Bank dug out the tapes and listened to them. The financier was, Bank recalled, friendly and gracious, eager to pontificate about many things but cagey about exactly what he did in his role as financial adviser to Leslie Wexner, the billionaire he met in Palm Beach in the 1980s and who opened doors for him in business and finance and beyond. -Bloomberg Having obtained copies of the interview, Bloomberg's Tom Metcalf offers select clips of the interview from a"sling-back chair on his private Carribean island." "But why speak here, in a gazebo steps from the crystal-blue sea, rather than up in the grand main house? "Too many girls," Epstein said. And with that, the tape began to roll." I realize what I am. I'm very comfortable in my own skin. I'm not a helicopter pilot. What I'm really free to do is I feel free to follow my own personality. As we discussed yesterday, I can't be totally wacko in what I do. It affects lots of other people who will get angry with what I do because then it affects me again. But on my own island or on my own ranch, I can think the thoughts I want to think. I can do the work I want to do and I'm free to explore as I see fit. Epstein also discussed his former clients and what he did for them, saying that he handled money for "Less than 10. More than four" individuals. He also went into some detail on how he counseled Victoria's Secret head honcho Les Wexner. "I don't tell him what sweaters to buy, he doesn't tell me when to buy or sell stock." People would always call me and say, could you come look at my problems? Could you come see my situation and tell me what you think. And I started J. Epstein & Co. I think in 1982 or 1983. And I said I would only take you if you had a billion dollars or more. Epstein says he want to "rough schools," and never earned a college degree. Still, the prestigious Dalton School on Manhattan's Upper East Side still hired him. "It attracted me because I thought it would be a different class of students I hadn't come across before," said Epstein, who said that "this was going to be the flip side" to his meager beginnings on blue-collar Coney Island. I saw lots of people doing lots of hard work and hard work didn't translate into success either. It wasn't what you knew or how hard you worked. In fact, the people who were doing construction on Telegraph Avenue at that time were, I remember seeing some people, you know, coming in at seven o'clock in the morning and spending 12 hours working and look they still were neither happy or successful. So it's not about what you know. And what I learned from Dalton later, lots of it in fact turns out to, not necessarily who you knew, but who you came in contact with. Epstein then goes into his time at Bear Stearns, whose CEO Alan "Ace" Greenberg he met through his job at Dalton. Greenberg summoned Epstein to his office and hired him on the spot. I started at Bear Stearns in 1976. Bear Stearns never had any training program. There was no course to begin. Alan Greenberg said he wanted me to learn each area of the business. So he thought the best place for me to start would be on the floor of the American Stock Exchange and then later move up to the trading desk and learn all the different areas of the firm including the margin department. He was amazing. Epstein said his ability to comprehend options pricing allowed him to quickly rise through the ranks at Bear Stearns - resulting in his temporary role as a limited partner. The way I saw it was physics, which was in fact based on a fixed number of rules and you did experiments in physics that couldn't violate those rules and if your experiment worked you hit the target. Finance seemed to be a different metaphor for the same processes but when you hit your target, you were able to fly first class to Paris. What the tapes don't reveal is how Epstein got so rich. "At the time of his arrest on federal charges that he molested and exploited dozens of teenage girls, he was worth more than $500 million, according to a financial disclosure his lawyers filed in an unsuccessful request for bail," reports Metcalf. Making money is my priority for how I think about things. Money itself and how people make money and how money is made in different ways. So takeovers were a way to make money. Commodity trading, was a way to make money. To me the new one is currencies. According to the report: At Dalton, he said, he earned less than $20,000 a year. He made a ''comfortable living,'' during his five years at Bear Stearns. He set up J Epstein & Co. in New York in the early 1980s, later changing the name to Financial Trust Co. and moving its headquarters to the U.S. Virgin Islands. He bought Little St. James for $7.95 million in 1998 and nearby Great St. James in 2016 for $22.5 million. Just the property taxes on his homes in New York, New Mexico and Florida came to more than $600,000 last year. As a money manager, Epstein earned fees for investment advice, tax services and estate planning. He bragged about how his decision to charge flat fees freed him from the pressure of incessant trading and differentiated him from stock brokers in an era when trading was commission based. -Bloomberg "Having personal staff is the first great luxury," said Epstein - however he also opined on wealth being a magnet for fraudsters. "My concern is that people can make spurious allegations all the time," said Epstein, adding "The idea is if nothing else he'll buy me off. I'll attack his reputation and he'll buy me off." One of the biggest issues is if you have too much money most likely you won't miss it if some is taken from you. That's very important, which is in fact security concerns'--and this is the reason I've always been private and wisely so'--is as you become known as a philanthropist or in giving away money then you become the perfect victim of frauds and identity theft. So what made Epstein tick? He said he loved music, and had played piano since the age of five. He also expounded on his love of mathematics and the sciences, describing the inner workings of the brain and evolutionary dynamics. Epstein: I was always very good at mathematics.Reporter: What made you interested in it?Epstein: It was solving puzzles. It's a strange feeling when you get the right answer to a puzzle. That leads to a later discussion about why people are so excited about puzzle solving and why is the brain itself both a predictor of things and an inherent puzzle solver. In fact, I hate to sort of jump again to more brain things but the idea of people receive pleasure when they get the right answer to a puzzle and the question is when you say pleasure, does that mean there's a bit of dopamine released in the brain? What are the real mechanics? What's going on in someone's head when they have what Duchamp referred to as the Aha! moment. According to Epstein, he'd sell any investment if it lost more than 10%. "If I lose $10 million of a $100 million I'm out. Under no circumstances am I going to lose more than 10% of my investments," he said, adding "I always want to have enough money to stay in the game." There was a book I read when I first started on Wall Street which was called ''Sell is a Four Letter Word,'' which meant that people get attached to things. They refuse to sell, or they refuse to resign, and they make up lots of reasons why that they're sticking around. Whether it be in relationships with other people, or with stocks. People have stocks that go down and they tell themselves I know I should have sold then, but I can't sell now. Lastly, Epstein talks about his relationship with JP Morgan Chase - a bank which severed ties with the millionaire pedophile as his downward spiral picked up speed. JPMorgan is probably the best private bankers in the world. The head of private banking you should talk to'--Jes Staley. They know they can call up and ask me, you know, there's an opportunity here and might take a very large sum of money, $100 million or more, whatever the number may be. And I can give them an answer by the end of the telephone call. Meanwhile - notwithstanding new recordings emerging, this appears to be the last we'll hear from Epstein, as dead pedophiles tell no tales.

VIDEO - The Last Refuge | Rag Tag Bunch of Conservative Misfits '' Contact Info: TheLastRefuge@reagan.com Archived Version Tue, 13 Aug 2019 04:01 Former AAG Matt Whitaker '' Epstein's Custodial Suicide is ''Fishy'''...Former Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker appears on Fox News with Lou Dobbs to discuss immigration judges and a unionization ruling. However, when the discussion turned to Jeffrey Epstein, even AAG Whitaker said common sense tells us something about this is ''fishy''. . Apparently the Bureau of prisons moved Epstein from suicide watch to a room with bunk beds and sheets. Then his cellmate was removed. Then the guards stopped watching him. Then he hung himself with the bed sheets'... Alone in the room with the bunk beds'... when no-one was watching, and no-one noticed. Oh yeah, and the FBI went to search his rapey island today. 35 days AFTER he was arrested. Three days AFTER the sealed records of his activity was unsealed; and two days AFTER his suicide. What were they waiting for?'... Yeah. ''Fishy''! Continue reading '†' Posted in Big Government, Big Stupid Government, Decepticons, Deep State, Dept Of Justice, FBI, media bias, President Trump, Professional Idiots, Sex Scandals, Uncategorized | Federal Judge Completely Rejects DOJ Argument '' Orders 'Archey Declarations' (Descriptions of Comey Memos)Released'...A U.S. District Judge has rejected the DOJ and FBI motion to block the release of the Archey Declarations (descriptions of Comey memos). [Background Here] In a strongly worded ruling (full pdf below) released moments ago, Federal Judge James Boasberg blasted the DOJ and FBI for attempting to change their filings, claim national security ''sources and methods'', and block his prior court ruling '' which instructed the DOJ to release the ''Archey Declarations''. The judge is obviously angry: It must strike readers as erroneous ''with the force of a five-week-old, unrefrigerated dead fish.'''... [Backstory for those unfamilar] In the background of what was The Mueller Investigation, there was a FOIA case where the FBI was fighting to stop the release of the Comey memos. Within that courtroom fight Mueller's lead FBI agent David Archey wrote a series of declarations to the court describing the content of the memos and arguing why they should be kept classified. The FOIA fight shifted; and the plaintiff, CNN, argued for public release of the content of the FBI agent's descriptions, now known as the ''Archey Declarations''. After a lengthy back-and-forth legal contest, on June 7th Judge James E Boasberg agreed to allow the FBI to keep the Comey memo content hidden, but instructed the DOJ/FBI to release the content of the Archey Declarations. On August 2nd the DOJ/FBI changed their position and claimed national security, ''sources and methods'' would be compromised by the release of the Archey Declarations. Today Judge Boasberg completely rejected their argument: Continue reading '†' Posted in 1st Amendment, AG Bill Barr, AG Jeff Sessions, Big Government, Big Stupid Government, Conspiracy ?, Deep State, Dem Hypocrisy, Dept Of Justice, Donald Trump, Donald Trump Transition, FBI, IG Report Comey, IG Report FISA Abuse, media bias, Notorious Liars, President Trump, Spygate, Spying, THE BIG UGLY, Uncategorized, White House Coverup | Quirky Angle '' Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne: 2016 FBI Activity Was ''Political Espionage'''...In a rather curious and quirky interview, Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne describes a related aspect to the DOJ/FBI operations against candidate Donald Trump in 2016. Byrne enters the story due to his romantic relationship with Maria Butina, a person charged by Robert Mueller as being a Russian intelligence operative. In/around 2015 Byrne met and started a relationship with Butina, and later was enlisted by the FBI for assistance in their investigation of her. [Sara Carter Backstory Here] Mr. Byrne now describes all of that FBI activity as somewhat of a political espionage operation to spy on several 2016 candidates, collect dirt, and seemingly gain operational leverage. WATCH : Continue reading '†' Posted in 1st Amendment, 4th Amendment, 6th Amendment, Abusive Cops, AG Bill Barr, Big Government, Big Stupid Government, Clinton(s), Conspiracy ?, Deep State, Dept Of Justice, Donald Trump, Donald Trump Transition, Election 2016, FBI, IG Report Comey, IG Report FISA Abuse, media bias, President Trump, Russia, Spygate, Spying, THE BIG UGLY, Uncategorized | Brexit Presents Unique Trade Opportunity for U.S. and U.K. Economic Alliance'....First rule in geopolitics, it's always about the economics. Second rule in geopolitics: refer to rule #1. Understanding this basic truism is the key to understand how President Trump is able to be so effective. There are trillions at stake, and infinite interests. ''Economic security is national security.'' ~President TrumpAll politics circles back to the underlying economics; whether it is an individual financial self-interest for a specific politician, or whether it is a larger financial interest for a group or even a nation. Everything is always about the money, and that essential truth is why Donald Trump is so uniquely qualified, influential and stunningly effective. Today: (VIA CBC) The United States would ''enthusiastically'' support a no-deal Brexit if that is what the British government decided to do, U.S. national security adviser John Bolton told reporters on Monday. ['...] As the United Kingdom prepares to leave the European Union on Oct. 31, its biggest geopolitical shift since the Second World War, many diplomats expect London to become increasingly reliant on the United States. ''If that's the decision of the British government we will support it enthusiastically, and that's what I'm trying to convey. We're with you, we're with you,'' said Bolton, in London for two days of talks with British officials. The U.S. administration is seeking an improved U.S.-British relationship with Prime Minister Boris Johnson after sometimes tense ties between Donald Trump and Johnson's predecessor, Theresa May. Continue reading '†' Posted in Auto Sector, Big Government, Brexit, Decepticons, Donald Trump, Economy, European Union, media bias, President Trump, Trade Deal, United Kingdom (UK) and Great Britain, US dept of agriculture, US Treasury, USA, USMCA | Trump Administration Enforces Immigration ''Public Charge'' Laws '' Green Cards Dependent on Self Sufficiency'...The White House has announced the Trump administration will enforce long-standing immigration laws that require entrants to be economically self-sufficient and limits public welfare benefits. An entry alien who is -or becomes- dependent on public welfare assistance, is known as a ''public charge''. Aliens will be barred from entering the United States if they are deemed likely to become public charges, or welfare dependent. These immigration rules have been in place for over 100 years, and generally were strictly enforced until the last 25 years. The Trump administration is re-enforcing the rules. . The enforcement action will have a direct bearing on the current immigration process as most border arrivals are economic migrants manipulating asylum claims. Immigration based on self-sufficiency has been U.S. law for generations. Continue reading '†' Posted in Big Government, Cold Anger, Death By Illegal Alien, DHS, Economy, Illegal Aliens, Legislation, media bias, NAFTA, President Trump, Taxes, Uncategorized, US Treasury, USA, USMCA | AG Bill Barr: ''Serious Irregularities'' Surround Custodial Death of Jeffrey Epstein'...United States Attorney General William Barr delivered remarks this morning to the Fraternal Order of Police's National Biennial Conference when he spoke about the custodial death of high-profile sex trafficking ringleader Jeffrey Epstein. ''We are now learning of serious irregularities at this facility that are deeply concerning''.. [Transcript] ['...] ''Before I begin, I would like to briefly address the news from the Manhattan Correctional Center over the weekend regarding Jeffrey Epstein. This case was very important to the Department. It was important to the dedicated prosecutors and agents who investigated the case and were preparing it for trial. Most importantly, this case was important to the victims who had the courage to come forward and deserved the opportunity to confront the accused in court. Continue reading '†' Posted in Abusive Cops, AG Bill Barr, Agitprop, Big Government, Big Stupid Government, Clinton(s), Conspiracy ?, Decepticons, Deep State, Dept Of Justice, FBI, media bias, Professional Idiots, propaganda, Sex Scandals, Uncategorized | August 12th '' 2019 Presidential Politics '' Trump Administration Day #935In an effort to keep the Daily Open Thread a little more open topic we are going to start a new daily thread for ''Presidential Politics''. Please use this thread to post anything relating to the Donald Trump Administration and Presidency. This thread will refresh daily and appear above the Open Discussion Thread. President Trump Twitter @POTUS / Vice President Pence Twitter @VP Stephanie Grisham Twitter @StephGrisham45