Last July, Trump’s personal attorney Todd “Whiteout” Blanche, in his capacity as Deputy Attorney General of the United States of America, conducted a two day interview in a Tallahassee office with convicted Epstein sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell. He shared the interview table with his old friend David Markus, Ghislaine’s defense attorney.

Everything about the spectacle was outrageous and beyond all legal norms. The White House was in the early stages of a political panic over Epstein that has proven lasting. Blanche had hightailed it to Florida after the Wall Street Journal published the now infamous “birthday book” bawdy message Donald Trump drew for his friend’s 50th birthday. At the time Trump was claiming the image was fake and was about to sue the Journal for $10 Billion (a judge just tossed that out.) And Trump, who had ginned up Epstein Deep State Democrats baby eating pedophiles Q-Anon theorizing for his own political benefit, was now calling the whole Epstein story a “hoax” and its avid MAGA followers “stupid.”

The interview was framed as a “proffer” - that is an offer from a defendant or convict to tell the truth about crimes, and maybe spill the beans on uncharged conspirators. But - as reporters familiar with Maxwell’s criminal and civil cases and lawyers who know how to conduct proffers all observed at the time - the meeting was more like a very long, somewhat awkward get to know you first date where both sides have very specific and very ardent desires, than any criminal case proffer.

On her side, Maxwell repeatedly lied, or claimed to have forgotten things easily found in previous civil and criminal testimony and records. She even - insidiously - blamed Virginia Giuffre for Epstein’s predatory sex habits.

Blanche, who spent years prosecuting violent federal crimes, had to have read at least some of the record on Maxwell’s crimes. But he never contradicted her, and besides eliciting her money quote “Trump was a perfect gentleman,” he confined his questions about men to Democratic and progressive Epstein pals. Son-of-a-preacher-man Blanche squirmed through questions about sex toys and naked underage masseuses, and Ghislaine’s and Jeff’s sexual difficulties, and called for breaks when the topic got too close to his boss and /or his pals.

As we all know, a few weeks later, Maxwell was sprung from a high security women’s prison and moved to a camp fed where she can play with puppies and meet her family and friends in a room where prison staff serves snacks.

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Now that Rep. James Comer has indicated that some Republicans are ready to PARDON Maxwell (cue: political ploy to spread blame from Trump alone) independent journalist at Magnetic North and I decided to record ourselves reading the entire two day transcript. We worked hard to stay in character (I snagged an orange t shirt and was sick that day, so rocking an authentic inmate look, Scott did the Trump tool in white shirt and red tie). It was arduous — but we often found ourselves having to stop, laugh and discuss the insanity of our conversation.

I’ll be uploading the first day’s conversation soon, paywalled for now. Eventually we will post it everywhere as a public service.

PayPal mafioso Peter Andreas Thiel was the hidden hand behind the lawsuit that took down Gawker, the greatest satirical and investigative site of late 20th-century American media. He spent approximately $10 million in legal fees to fund multiple lawsuits against Gawker – most notably, an invasion of privacy case which won MAGA ape-man Hulk Hogan a pile of money after his ill-advised sex tape was released into the wild.

The site had outed Thiel as a gay man. It wasn’t exactly news. The entire LA gay community was aware of his wild rentboy parties.

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But his warped hyper-Christian, Nazi-adjacent, German-South African upbringing had him policing the closet perimeter. The outing seems to have done him some good though: A year and a half after he vanquished Gawker, he married a man at a ceremony in Vienna.

He also stepped up and got behind Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign, even taking the stage at the RNC in Cleveland for a victory lap. Big breath, off the diving board: “I am proud to be gay. I’m proud to be a Republican.”

The line fell a little flat in Quicken Loans Arena, packed to the rafters with early-onset Trump cult homophobes in “Hillary Sucks But Not Like Monica” t-shirts.

Maybe it was that lukewarm reception – or the subsequent unwanted scrutiny as he packed the first Trump White House with his tech cronies – but Thiel soon retreated back into his lair. In one 2016 email exchange, Jeffrey Epstein asked, “are you enjoying raising your public profile?” and Thiel replied, “Not really… need to stop this!”

But he didn’t stop. He stayed involved in American politics, operating behind-the-scenes as a Republican megadonor, bankrolling his friend Blake Masters’ failed Arizona senate campaign, pouring money into JD Vance’s Ohio senate campaign, and ultimately connecting Vance with Trump. He has also spent millions fighting taxes on the ultrawealthy.

This stealthy litigation terrorist now sits at the helm of one of the most powerful surveillance machines ever built.

He really loves secrets. Secrets for me, but not for thee.

Thiel even titled a chapter in his book Zero to One “Secrets,” musing on the great secrets of history and how they were protected. “Every one of today’s most famous and familiar ideas was once unknown and unsuspected. The mathematical relationship between a triangle’s sides, for example, was secret for millennia. Pythagoras had to think hard to discover it. If you wanted in on Pythagoras’ new discovery, joining his strange vegetarian cult was the best way to learn about it.”

Your Freakshow Guide is unable to confirm this as historical fact, but he is clearly referring to the so-called “Pythagorean brotherhood,” which treated the theorem at the heart of Euclidean geometry as mystical and divine.

A secretive brotherhood? Where have we run across this arrangement before?

Thiel flies under the radar as an Epstein class supervillain. He appears in the Epstein files close to 3,000 times, including in hundreds of emails exchanged with Epstein. Jacobin recently published an exhaustive article covering many more of the Thiel-Epstein interactions than we have room for here at the Freakshow.

Thiel is central to the machinery hoovering up people’s secrets. He has been enriched by Palantir’s sinister surveillance technology, which compiles massive amounts of data – bank records, tax filings, health information, and potentially location and communications – on Americans through Trump administration contracts with ICE and the IRS. He maintains a huge network of defense contracts worldwide and a deep well of political money, most recently deployed against Democrats’ redistricting efforts in Virginia.

Grossly rich, paranoid and eccentric (he has compared Greta Thunberg and Pope Leo to the antichrist), he owns getaways in New Zealand and Buenos Aires, holds three passports and, for good measure, has been seeking Maltese citizenship, all of which enables him to GTFO of the USA whenever doom looms on the horizon.

Epstein’s interest in Thiel started shortly after he got out of jail in 2009. In those early Bitcoin days, Epstein was trying to get Thiel involved in a new or “alternative” financial system.

They appear to have finally met in person in 2014, through Silicon Valley macher Reid Hoffman, after Epstein tried other channels, including literary agent John Brockman and British tech investor Ian Osborne.

In March 2014, Epstein met with Thiel for two and a half hours at his San Francisco home. Emails from that summer show Epstein discussing the creation of an alternative currency using Facebook. In August, he sent Thiel an update: “Im going to have a meeting with Fed treasury, irs occ, and finsec . to discuss digital and virtual currencies. . questions? why dont you try to fly to ranch this weekend, take a few hours [sic].”

That June, Thiel acolyte Blake Masters sent Epstein a copy of Zero to One with the note: “Jeffrey, Peter asked me to send you a copy-I know he’d love to hear what you think..It’d be great to meet you sometime in NYC. Warm Regards, Blake”.

By November, Thiel was talking to Epstein about investing in his company, Valar Ventures. Epstein ultimately put in $40 million. Valar, which provides start-up capital to financial services tech companies, is the largest asset in Epstein’s portfolio;a year ago, it was valued at $170 million, enriching his estate long after his death.

Throughout the following years, prior to his arrest, Epstein was forwarding Thiel material about CoinDesk (one with subject: “no need to say anyting [sic] more”) and various market opportunities and CFTC actions related to Bitcoin and other alternative currency schemes.

It’s not clear from the files how often the two met in person. Epstein repeatedly tried to entice Thiel to his island, dangling his usual lures of market tips and high grade networking – including with former Harvard president and Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and former Deputy Secretary of State and CIA director Bill Burns.

“Visit me Caribbean [sic],” Epstein wrote in 2018. Thiel replied to another island invitation, asking when Epstein would be there, but Thiel’s representatives denied to the New York Times that he ever went. (Of course, Elon Musk issued similar denials, even though texts show him avidly interested in the scene.)

So many secrets!

Peter Thiel is so deeply enmeshed in Epsteinworld that an Oversight Committee subpoena should be in order. But he’s a billionaire – and possibly even an FBI informant – so we won’t hold our breath. According to Thiel acolyte and right-wing troll Charles C. Johnson, Thiel was recruited by the FBI in 2021 to supposedly pass along intel on foreign actors and “Silicon Valley intrigue.” Johnson claims he advised him to “join up or be crushed” because of his income tax avoidance and relationship with Epstein.

In 2016, Epstein sent this mysterious message to MIT professor Joi Ito: “peter thiel LOVED the secret socieity [sic] idea. . he has done alot of work on the concept. all failed so far”.

Freakshow has reached out to Ito and Thiel for clarification. But it doesn’t take much imagination to picture what that “society” might look like.

Epstein sent Thiel this message a few weeks later:

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Join COURIER and 3.14 Action on June 11 for Facts vs. Fiction: The Fight for Science in American Democracy.

Misinformation isn’t just noise. It’s shaping policy decisions that impact healthcare costs, public health, and everyone’s lives. This live conversation will examine what’s at stake when facts are ignored and what changes when experts lead with evidence. From lowering costs to protecting access to care, we will break down how science-driven leadership delivers real results and why scientific integrity is essential to democracy.

Hear directly from:

• Dr. Vin Gupta, Physician + Medical Analyst

• Representative Emily Gregory, Member of Congress

• Dr. Paul A. Offit, Director, Vaccine Education Center, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia

• Shaughnessy Naughton, 314 Action President

Stay tuned for more speaker announcements, and don’t miss this conversation. RSVP today!

Dear Reader:

I know you want me to Make it Make Sense.

Welcome to another lesson in the political applications of public trauma. Like some insidious machine, last night MAGA influencers and shills and bots went off simultaneously, on cue using the mayhem to advance Dear Leader’s obsession with his wasteful ballroom. If you doubt this, you can watch Elon’s estranged baby mamma Ashley St. Clair streaming herself spilling the beans: “All of MAGA is paid and they coordinate their messaging in lockstep via groupchats,” she says. “All of these people came to the conclusion that after what they saw at the WHCD, their first thought was ‘Trump needs his ballroom.’”

Next, cue the conspiracy theories: A troubled Caltech grad takes his spot next to the other shooters who must have been Democratic plants Crooks and Robinson. These Manchurian candidates join the chemtrails, UFO murders, vaccines with tracking microchips, and all the rest of the paranoid schizophrenic babble that one can hear on the street outside the Port Authority.

Oh and did pregnant Karoline Leavitt actually tell a red carpet reporter an hour or so before the evacuation that “shots will be fired”? Why yes!

Unlike the other two incellular maniacs, if Cole Tomas Allen actually pulled a trigger, and we don’t know now and may never er know, no one, thankfully, was killed. It’s not clear yet whether a Secret Service agent’s bulletproof vest sustained a friendly fire bullet or from the would-be assassin.

But in the telling of course the young man who traveled across the country on a train will have been motivated not by his own demons, not by maniacal but righteous rage at live broadcast state-sponsored murders, or Trump’s open-air racism.

He will have acted because, as Trump has announced, he “hated Christianity.” His “writings” will show this.

Hysterical early reports from MAGA influencers were that DC Hilton security was lax - dum-da-dum - cue Deep State enemies lurking. This turned out not to be the case - the shooter simply loped through a magnetic arc and got tackled on the fly - nowhere near the dais.

The real lax security of course started - as always - at the gun store, then on the cross country Amtrak train where he transported his weapons, then out on the street in DC where he toted them illegally, and then at the Hilton check-in a few days before the event.

But when CBS’ Margaret Brennan asked Trump’s personal attorney and Acting Attorney General Todd “Whiteout” Blanche about the guns, he swatted her down: “Look, this isn’t about, in my mind, changing the law or making the laws more restrictive around possession of firearms. …. “And I don’t think that that’s something we should be focused on right now in any way, shape or form.”

It’s never the guns.

To begin to be able to name what is going on, I recommend some reading about what our brothers and sisters in Russia have endured since the turn of the 21st Century. First, The Wizard of the Kremlin by Giuliano de Empoli, a fictionalized account of the schemes of Putin’s political stage manager, a former theater producer and reality show impresario-turned-strategist Vladislav Surkov. The Russian regime has mastered the art of using horrifying public trauma to manipulate the public. Then, to understand the dazed and confused MAGA faithful who fall for the manufactured narrative every fucking time, read Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia, by Peter Pomerantsev, who reveals the stew of cults, regime lies, mass disinformation, and salvation narratives that have rendered much of the public incapable of critical thinking.

So many American journalists who should know better by now are still utterly flummoxed. Their training never prepared them for this moment, still reaching for fairness and norms, careers anchored in a lost era when one could assume that national leaders acted with some semblance of respect for civic discourse, and were still susceptible to shame.

To wit, this remarkable exchange on CNN today:

DANA BASH: You and your fellow Democrats have used some heated rhetoric against the president. Do you think twice about that when something like that happens?

Rep. JAMIE RASKIN: What rhetoric do you have in mind?

DANA BASH: That he’s terrible for this country and so on and so forth .. .

Oh America: Richest country on earth with a government ditching science, defying the Constitution, embracing religious and medical quackery for power. A stupid reality show with real menace, real guns, real war, real nukes, and real state terror. And now, cherry on top for history, grotesque images of Cabinet members, celebrities and DC swells in black tie, fleeing the sound of gunfire - broadcast around the world, to the sound of bleating MAGA minions calling for a new ballroom.

Kudos to the CAA agent photographed calmly forking up his spring pea and burrata salad while the room was evacuated. Huzzahs also to the table of celebrants who had the forethought to snatch bottles of wine and champagne for the road during evacuation - and selfie’d themselves! - while a photojournalist captured the scene.

That’s the spirit to match the times.

The photo made the morning edition of Italy’s newspaper La Repubblica. As one Italian commenter on Instagram put it: “Stati Uniti d’America ripiggliaventi!”

It sounds better in the Italian but it means:

Get your act together, United States of America.

AUTHOR NOTE: The second novel in my Road Sign trilogy of dystopian satires is published. A while ago, I decided that some truths are more effectively communicated in fiction. The trilogy is about the effects of political uses of public trauma, pending climate catastrophe and mass media dissemination of real time violence on our souls.

Here’s a link to more information about the book on Amazon. If you, like me, are boycotting Bezos as much as possible, you can contact me directly right here on substack by replying to this newsletter email, and I’ll mail you copy, plus shipping. Still costs less than a pizza!

Have a listen and check out her book, RFK Jr, The Fall and Rise. And thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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Last week, we interviewed Amanda Ungaro, the deported former model haunting Melania Trump. RAI, the Italian broadcast network, has since broadcast a lengthy interview in which Ungaro shares more harrowing details of her longtime partnership with Melania’s former modeling agent – Trump’s current “Special Envoy for Global Partnerships” – Paolo Zampolli.

Ungaro’s is a voice from the Trumpworld demimonde: a familiar saga of youthful beauty defiled by early grooming, followed by an adult life lived in semi-servitude and physical fear, the glossy veneer of high fashion masking the dark truth.

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Domestic violence was already on my mind when I watched Ungaro’s interview on Sunday. The Washington Post had, that morning, published a police bodycam image of Texas Rep. Cory Mills, a MAGA Republican, taken after his visibly bruised girlfriend called DC police. Mills is seen casually lounging, blaming the woman’s “easily bruised” skin and a fall for her injuries. The spectacle of relaxed posture, entitled impunity and a cop standing by listening without intervening is the quintessential image of the domestic abuser, re-enacted daily all over the country and probably the world.

In the RAI interview, Ungaro accuses Zampolli of drug use – specifically cocaine – and domestic violence.

He would beat me constantly, and if I didn’t want to have sex with him, he’d punch me. Once he smashed my laptop over my head. The last physical assault was between 2017 and 2018, when we separated. Paolo came home completely out of his mind, and I said to him: ‘Paolo, you’re wasted — go to sleep, I have to go to work tomorrow.’ But he kept coming at me. So I pushed him off and tried to lock myself in the bathroom. I tried to close the door, but he came in and started hitting me everywhere. Here, here — I have all the photos. My arms, my face, down here too. For a second I couldn’t feel anything at all...

When shown images of her bruises, Zampolli denied, and speaking his native Italian to the broadcaster, was dismissive, suggesting they were the result of her sportiness. “On her legs – she did kickboxing … She had a bruise here – this one did kickboxing every day.”

When the interviewer corrected him – “She did CrossFit, not kickboxing” – Zampolli changed course and went on the attack. “So these abuses – she made them up. I’ve never laid a finger on a woman.”

His attacks then devolved into a stream of racist and misogynist remarks, blaming Brazilians, Latin soap opera upbringing, Amanda’s background, and even her friends.

“It’s the Brazilian woman” – someone named Lidia – who he said tried to “cause trouble … this Brazilian whore. This one’s crazy. Brazilian bastard [breeds], they’re all the same. Oh, that one’s a nice piece of ass, we were together, we were getting to know each other. What a nut job she is. These models–”

These models. Fun to frolic with but mamma-mia, what a pain in the ass!

Zampolli once almost bought a modeling agency with Jeffrey Epstein, but the deal fell through. Like his buddy Donald, Zampolli says he was never pals with the Coney Island conman. “I knew he had the girls,” Zampolli told RAI. “I knew. But they weren’t mine, because they weren’t even models. They were young girls, minors, masseuses. The models were a cover-up for this Epstein.”

But like Jeff and Donald, Paolo really likes pretty girls and he too likes them young – if not illegal. His Instagram feed is a skein of selfies with dozens of gorgeous young women at Cipriani restaurants all over the world (He is pals with Giuseppe Cipriani).

The images of this haggard Lothario surrounded by sylphs brings to mind a scene in Loro, Paolo Sorrentino’s film about Silvio Berlusconi. A flabby old man with dyed black hair and immense worldly power is surrounded by dozens of young beauties on the lawn of a Sardinian palazzo. In a concupiscent tableau straight out of Nero’s court, they preen and dance for him. But when he finally lures the youngest of the beauties to his bedroom and tries to kiss her, she recoils, saying, “Your breath smells like my grandpa’s.”

I met Zampolli when I was writing my book on the Trump women, at his townhouse on 17th Street, which he had managed to designate a “diplomatic residence.” He had persuaded officials of the small Caribbean nation of Dominica that he was enough of a New York macher to prove useful as their UN “Ambassador.” He used that connection to, among other things, engage in the island’s Citizen by Investment industry, in which people with shady pasts, or from countries on no-fly lists, pay six figures to get a passport with easy entry to the Schengen Area or the USA. Zampolli participated in a passport-sale-financed deal with Dubai-based developers, and later went to court to extract a $7 million finders fee commission from them.

His sketchy business history includes founding an ocean conservation project “We Are The Oceans” (WATO) that in timing, topic and method almost exactly matched Ghislaine Maxwell’s “Terra Mar” – the latter literally a do-nothing front cooked up by crisis PR experts to try to salvage her reputation as things were going south for her former boyfriend Jeffrey Epstein.

Zampolli is reportedly in the process of eluding a 2023 roofie rape charge reported to the NYPD by a woman named Victoria Clarke, who says she was 23 when he lured her to his townhouse after a UN party. The sordid details appear in a disturbing report by Bekah Day, titled “Someone Was Always Watching.” Apparently, Zampolli shares the Epstein habit of wiring his residences with cameras. A rape kit confirmed rape and drugging, but the NYPD never carried the case forward reportedly because of his “diplomatic” status. Day claims she has heard from other women with similar stories. (Zampolli has called it extortion.)

Zampolli has since left little Dominica behind, now adding Trumpian impunity to the perk of diplomatic immunity.

Trump always kept the man who “discovered” his lovely wife close, but in Trump 2.0, he is locked in a bear hug. Cameras caught his perma-tanned mug next to Vice President JD Vance, striding across a tarmac in Hungary to a meeting with the soon-to-be electorally defenestrated Viktor Orbán a few weeks ago.

Last week, the Financial Times published a story about Zampolli’s work as Trump’s envoy. His catchy personal pitch these days is “$20 billion in 20 minutes,” referring to a “deal” he brokered with the government of Uzbekistan to buy Boeing jets. He also tried to sell nuclear energy in Hungary and talked the Romanians into opening a Donald J. Trump Park.

Yesterday, he posted a photo of himself in the backseat of a car, dashing through Belgrade, pointing to the flashing lights in his motorcade. The FT described him as an example of Trump’s “transactional” governing style. “Zampolli’s evolution from New York socialite and former modeling agent to globetrotting Trump envoy offers a window into how … loyalists are deployed as intermediaries in a system where access, relationships and deals often blur into one.”

But there is another darker way of looking at it. Ungaro told RAI:

I started asking myself: how is it that before, you weren’t that close to Trump, and now you’re best friends? Behind all of this, there’s a deal he made with Melania. Because he isn’t close to Trump – he’s close to Melania. Plain and simple. His relationship with Trump goes through Melania. [He says to Melania:] ‘Melania, I want to be the ambassador to Italy. Melania, you have to give me a position, a title.’ But I ask – how can Trump appoint as US ambassador someone who does drugs, someone who isn’t even American, but an immigrant? So it’s Melania who’s supporting him; it’s Melania who’s pushing him.

The FT is a proper British paper. It would never describe what Trump is doing with Zampolli in the language and with references to the social structure Mario Puzo understood, but we will: Keep your friends close and your mysterious wife’s old friends even closer.

Substack Live this Thursday 4/23

On Thursday at 11 AM ET, I will be LIVE with Isabel Vincent, author of the bombshell new book RFK Jr.: The Fall and Rise. Tune in to understand what’s going on behind-the-scenes with the man helping engineer the Trump administration’s assault on science.

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COURIER’s newly-launched Epstein investigation project

For too long, the Epstein Class has dealt in wealth, power, and politics to avoid accountability and deny victims & survivors their due justice. The public deserves the truth, but the Trump Administration is failing its legal obligation to deliver it.

That’s why we’re expanding our coverage to follow the money and investigate the power players in and outside the government. With a new database by Thorian AI, we have unprecedented access and ability to navigate more than 1.2M files and we’re sharing access—and what we’re finding—with you.

Subscribe to The Cover-Up and get one concise, easy-to-read email a week that cuts through the noise with the headlines you need and the breakdowns you want.

By staying plugged in and leveraging our reporting to make your own calls-to-action louder, together, we can turn information into justice.

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Last week, Melania Trump issued a mysterious six-minute statement from the White House podium in language couched in legalese, denying that she was friends with Jeffrey Epstein and threatening “those who would tell lies about me.” Like everyone else in the world, we wondered what provoked it. Thanks to an independent journalist named Bekah Day, we all soon understood what Melania was responding to: recent statements by Amanda Ungaro, a former model and friend.

We reached out to Ungaro, who sent us answers to our questions over a messaging platform.

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Ungaro was deported to Brazil earlier this year, after her ex, Paolo Zampolli—the man who brought her into the U.S. decades ago, was Trump’s former business partner, and now serves as Trump 2.0’s “Special Envoy for Global Partnerships”—made a call that apparently resulted in ICE detaining and then deporting her. Zampolli and Ungaro have been engaged in an ongoing child custody battle. The child is currently staying in New York with Zampolli.

This display of abusive power was first reported by Day and eventually by the New York Times. Zampolli told the Times he didn’t direct the deportation, but contacted the agency because he was “curious.”

Amanda has known the Trumps for years. She and Zampolli were guests at the President’s table at both Trump inaugurations. In our exchange with Ungaro, she contradicts some reported elements of the Melania-Donald story, including how they met, and says that Melania “knows that I witnessed highly compromising interactions over the course of 20 years.” She says she would be willing to testify before the House Oversight Committee if asked.

The interview has been translated from her written responses in Portuguese and edited for clarity.

The First Lady’s office and Zampolli, contacted separately, did not respond to requests for comment. Where there exists public record of either First Lady Melania Trump or Paolo Zampolli denying wrong doing, those comments have been included.

When and under what circumstances did you meet Zampolli?

The first time I had contact with Paolo Zampolli was when I was 15 years old. I can state that, starting from this first meeting, Paolo Zampolli began harassing me in an attempt to pursue an intimate relationship.

When and under what circumstances did you meet Melania?

I was introduced to Melania by Paolo Zampolli; at that time, we were already dating, and that is when I was introduced to her.

What was Melania’s immigration status, and who handled her case? The same lawyers who handled yours?

I cannot answer that specific detail; however, she was already in a relationship with Trump, and I was already aware that Paolo Zampolli was the person responsible for negotiating visas to legalize his models’ status in the United States. Everyone knew that this was a task he performed. Like everyone else, I know that she worked and earned money for a long time while undocumented—and that, too, fell under Paolo Zampolli’s purview. He circumvented the law, enabling the models to work and earn money illegally. He did the same with me when I joined the agency.

Did you speak with Melania about your deportation and Zampolli’s involvement? When, and what was her reaction?

I tried to reach her through contacts who had direct access to her; and, based on what those contacts told me, she was aware of the situation but did nothing.

Her reaction was one of indifference regarding what was happening to me. It seems to me that Melania, together with her husband, has a pact with Paolo Zampolli. Paolo constructed a false narrative claiming that he was the one who introduced Melania to her husband—and not only do I know this isn’t true, but everyone knows it isn’t true [Author’s Note: Melania and Zampolli have both denied this]. I don’t know what the specific agreement was behind the creation of this narrative, but Paolo was an associate of Epstein, and they did business together.

You became close enough to get to know Melania’s Slovenian immigrant family. Tell us about your relationship with them, as well as with her.

Yes, I became very close to her family. Holiday parties, Christmas, the White House, Mar-a-Lago—we were always invited, and for Paolo, our attendance was non-negotiable. This was the core of Paolo’s power strategy: the greater the intimacy, the more assurance he would have that he could be exactly where he wanted to be at any given moment. If you search on X, you can find a video that Paolo had my son, Giovanni, make for Melania—specifically with the aim of further entrenching us within the family circle [A/N: This is the video Amanda is referring to]. It wasn’t enough to involve just me; he had to involve my son as well. He constantly sought to heighten the level of intimacy, as if doing so would guarantee the execution of his ambitious, corrupt schemes—the very kind of schemes he was already engaging in back when he was involved with the United Nations.

What do you know about Melania’s relationship with Epstein?

I was younger than Melania. Everything [regarding that situation] had already taken place by the time I came along; yet, the whole thing felt strange and made no sense. It was as if their relationship had been pre-programmed—like a specific project that Paolo had meticulously architected, solely to claim the power and credit for having orchestrated their meeting. Everything that is unfolding now was, in fact, part of that original plan. Paolo Zampolli had business dealings with Epstein; he was a recruiter of girls for Epstein. It was all always a plan [A/N: Zampolli has denied being involved with Epstein socially or in business].

Can you characterize Melania’s relationship with Zampolli?

Paolo Zampolli always portrayed himself as the one who initiated the relationship. It always seemed to me that Paolo held some hidden leverage over Melania’s life—something that kept her in his thrall. It was a business arrangement, it seems to me—an agreement from which both parties stood to benefit. Just look at how things have turned out today.

What can you tell us about Zampolli’s personal life? The cameras, his treatment of women, and his sex life?

Paolo Zampolli is a sick individual. He stole from his mother, kicked her out of her home, and placed her in a nursing home. Paolo Zampolli hates women.

My life with him was something that is difficult, even now, to describe. I was only 17 years old—easily manipulated—and I had come from the interior of Brazil. He seduced me in every conceivable way; given the absence of my family, doing so was all too easy for him. I longed for a family life—the kind I had always known.

Even before I turned 17, Paolo had already begun harassing me; he was aggressive, constantly sending gifts and flowers—no matter where I happened to be, those presents would always find their way to me.

Paolo persisted in his advances, and I eventually decided to give him a chance at a relationship—even though he was never the kind of man I had idealized.

At first, everything felt new and exciting, but as time went on, things took a turn for the worse. He was a man with absolutely no personal hygiene; he would rummage through trash cans to retrieve discarded plastic containers, and he was incapable of even washing his own drinking glass. These were the habits of someone who had always had everything handed to him on a silver platter.

During a trip to Italy, acquaintances of his told me that Paolo’s youth was already marked by crimes committed against car insurance companies.

Our family life was another disaster. Lacking any sense of family dynamics, we had no normal family routine. Our home was more like a club—a venue for meetings and business dealings. There was no true family atmosphere, no dialogue between husband and wife. He was the sole conductor of everything, and this came at the cost of my modeling career.

One night—just before an audition for a fashion show that Paolo didn’t want me to do—I was punched in the face; the blow left me bruised and marked, making it impossible for me to attend.

I endured every conceivable form of violence. I was treated like a disposable object—used and then cast aside.

I was subjected to psychological abuse, sexual harassment, false imprisonment, domestic violence, and non-consensual sex.

After Giovanni was born, things became even worse. People often ask me: “Why didn’t you leave Paolo Zampolli?” Paolo confiscated our passports and became even more violent. When I finally ended our relationship in 2018, he wiretapped my phone; I was followed through the streets and had no peace. It was one abuse after another.

Our home felt like a reality TV show. Everything was filmed and controlled by him—hidden listening devices were planted throughout the house, and people would trail me whenever I went out.

For six years, we didn’t even sleep together anymore, as his lack of respect—and his persistent habit of associating and having sexual relations with prostitutes—had become chronic. Whenever we hosted a party at our home, I would retreat to my bedroom; meanwhile—showing a complete lack of respect for both me and my son—Paolo would use other rooms in the house to have sex with the people he had invited over. They were not my guests. Paolo’s sexual partners were exclusively prostitutes.

In Washington, he would host parties attended by underage girls who were accompanied by older men.

Where is your son, and what is the status of your efforts to reunite with him?

Giovanni was supposed to be here in Brazil, per a judicial ruling [a court order]. He did come, but his father influenced and funded him to return to New York, as he wanted him to spend Christmas with Trump.

Currently, there is a legal case pending with the Brazilian government regarding the abduction of a vulnerable person [for Giovanni]. As I have been deported, I am currently unable to see my son; furthermore, Prosecutor Stacy Cleveland [with the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office] has designated me a fugitive, and there is an active arrest warrant against me issued by Florida authorities. She engaged in email correspondence with Paolo Zampolli, and in my view, she is compromised by Paolo—the very man who attempted to have me serve a six-year prison sentence in a Florida state prison without ever presenting a single piece of evidence against me.

Did Melania personally threaten you? If so, in what way and when?

Melania felt threatened, and while she did not threaten me directly, she knows that I witnessed highly compromising interactions over the course of 20 years. She does not know the full extent of what I know—for I lived with Paolo for 20 years.

Would you testify before the House Oversight Committee?

Absolutely.

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COURIER’s newly-launched Epstein investigation project

For too long, the Epstein Class has dealt in wealth, power, and politics to avoid accountability and deny victims & survivors their due justice. The public deserves the truth, but the Trump Administration is failing its legal obligation to deliver it.

That’s why we’re expanding our coverage to follow the money and investigate the power players in and outside the government. With a new database by Thorian AI, we have unprecedented access and ability to navigate more than 1.2M files and we’re sharing access—and what we’re finding—with you.

Subscribe to The Cover-Up and get one concise, easy-to-read email a week that cuts through the noise with the headlines you need and the breakdowns you want.

By staying plugged in and leveraging our reporting to make your own calls-to-action louder, together, we can turn information into justice.

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Trump White House cabinet meetings are always opportunities for his appointees to humiliate and prostrate themselves before Dear Leader, but they usually keep the spectacle inside the West Wing. Last week, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche brought the full Theater of Servility to the Justice Department, at a press conference that was supposed to be about fighting fraud (conveniently timed as the number of allies, donors and others convicted of fraud that President Trump has pardoned approached 70 and taxpayer repayment losses neared $2 billion).

Discussing his role as temporary – or quite possibly permanent – replacement for Pam Bondi, the aptly named Mr. Blanche (blanch is, fittingly, another word for whiten) used the occasion to publicly declare his devotion.

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“As to whether or not I want this job, I did not ask for this job. I love working for President Trump,” he said. “If he chooses to nominate somebody else and asks me to go do something else, I will say, ‘Thank you very much. I love you, sir.’”

I love you sir.

I am something of a student of Mr. Blanche, having pored over some 500 pages of the insane softball interview he did with sex monster Ghislaine Maxwell before rewarding her with a transfer from a high-security penitentiary to a puppy and cupcakes Camp Fed.

The heartfelt “I love you” struck me as worthy of further research.

What, exactly, would provoke a smart man with a law degree and a decent reputation to this level of public self-abasement?

A little digging turned up what looks like Todd’s Rosebud.

Blanche was born in 1974, a solid Gen X guy, son of a preacher man. When he was about ten years old, his father, Rev. Richard Blanche of Faith Bible Fellowship International, lost his church building and started hosting his flock at the family’s split-level ranch on a suburban cul-de-sac in Colorado Springs.

Three or four times a week, Rev. Blanche would set up folding chairs for 60 to 70 people in his living room and preach. Faith Bible International is a Pentecostal church, a “charismatic” sect, where speaking in tongues and other emotional noise-making is encouraged.

Soon enough, neighbors complained. Since the area was not zoned for such gatherings, the City of Colorado Springs ordered him to stop.

The order is somewhat surprising, given that Colorado Springs is a locus of hyper-Christianity – home to NORAD and the US Air Force Academy (about seven miles away from the Blanche home), totally proselytized by evangelical Christians to this day.

The presence of so many religious wackos around the tip of the fearsome nuclear spear is one of the great symbols of the American superpower.

Todd’s dad did not take the city’s orders lying down. He resisted, got a six-month prison sentence and multiple fines. Rev. Blanche’s case was no minor pro se zoning defense — it escalated into organized constitutional litigation with lawyers from the nascent (now powerful) national religious-liberty legal groups.

Eventually, he became something of a minor cause célèbre. The conservative Rutherford Institute was the first to step in, followed by the Christian Legal Association, which used the case to mount a deliberate constitutional confrontation over religious land use.

For context: In the 1980s, religious proselytizers warned that American secularism was on the verge of using state power to crush believers and drive them into secret meetings in basements, as had supposedly happened in Soviet Russia. The paranoia of the American Christianity with which we are so familiar today – the persistent claim of being “under assault” – was just ginning up.

In 1986, Liberty University’s The Fundamentalist Journal published a lengthy article on Rev. Blanche’s travails. In it, he claimed the stakes were extremely high: “A prayer before a meal or devotions among family members could constitute religious activity,” he warned – and could be banned.

We can surmise a few things about the effect this might have had on Todd in his formative years, growing up in a fervent white Protestant Pentecostal family with in-home churching.

Psychologists and sociologists have long documented a persistent link between sectarian Protestantism and authoritarian parenting ideologies. In its more rigid expressions, Christian nationalist parenting produces a certain type of adult in whom obedience to authority, including submission to – if not a deep need for – a powerful daddy figure, is thoroughly embedded.

As a boy, Todd witnessed the spectacle of state power crushing his dad’s freedom to worship in their home. Despite the Christian legal community’s best efforts, eventually the liberals won.

The Blanche family eventually moved to Florida. Todd went off to a four-year military high school in New Mexico, then bounced through LSU, Beloit and American University (he was a stellar athlete). Unsurprisingly, given his youthful exposure to the legal system, he chose to go into law. No Ivy League for this preacher’s son… he took classes at Brooklyn College of Law at night, while grinding as a paralegal during the day.

Blanche eventually worked his way into Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, one of Manhattan’s whitest white-shoe law firms. He was reportedly in the running for a federal judgeship, but those hopes were dashed when Sen. Chuck Schumer announced that he would not be appointing white males for a while – a DEI affront Blanche has never forgotten.

During Trump 1.0, he defended some Trumpworld denizens, including Paul Manafort, who was serving a 47-month federal sentence for bank fraud, tax fraud, and failure to disclose foreign bank accounts. Blanche managed to prevent New York prosecutors from bringing state charges (brought specifically to fend off an expected Trump pardon) and Manafort soon walked.

From there, he moved up the food chain: Trump lawyer Boris Epshteyn, Rudy Giuliani pal Igor Fruman, and other figures from the extended underworld. All that success caught Trump’s attention and Blanche left the firm to become the Big Man’s personal lawyer. That decision, he has said, was made in part out of disgust with the New York legal community’s supposed unwillingness to defend Trump (though Trump’s litigation probably kept plenty of lawyers well-fed for years).

Blanche now plays Tom Hagen to Trump’s Godfather – the indispensable chill consigliere, the one non-blood-related member of the trusted circle. He ran defense in the Stormy Daniels hush money case, the Georgia election scheme, and Mar-a-Lago classified documents mess.

As Deputy Attorney General, Blanche has continued to prioritize defending Client Number One over the American people. He sat by while his boss pardoned more than a thousand J6 criminals and dozens of fraudsters. After the DOJ pulled a thousand FBI agents off of crime-fighting duties to scour the Epstein files for mentions of Trump before the releases began, Blanche spent two days in a Tallahassee women’s prison gently and obsequiously interviewing Ghislaine Maxwell before she was transferred to a low-security facility with puppies and a comfy room for family visits where prison staff provide snacks.

And last summer, as DOJ panic over the Epstein files release demands reached a fever pitch, Blanche ordered the FBI to place images from the sealed trafficking cases – including material related to Epstein’s jail death – on a thumb drive, then somehow “lost” it, provoking a frenzy of concern. The end result? Nothing was released.

Blanche appears to have found his life’s calling – using state power to defend an autocrat who provides him and the rest of the MAGAs with a Big Daddy to cower to, venerate and obey.

During the Stormy Daniels trial, Blanche subjected himself to withering abuse. According to Jonathan Karl’s book, Tired of Winning, Trump at one point accused Blanche of making decisions that would destroy his chances of a second term (blaming a lawyer rather than the entitled decisionmaking that created the crisis in the first place… of course).

“You little fucker!” Trump shouted in Blanche’s face, according to Karl’s source. “You are going to cost me the presidency!” He went on to lash out against other lawyers on his team, saying: “They want me to be indicted! That’s in the middle of the primaries! If I lose the presidency, you are going to be the reason!”

One of the first things Blanche did after replacing Bondi was to declare the Epstein case over and done with, with no more releases planned – despite three million pages of documents still secreted in the vault. Tomorrow, Todd Blanche is scheduled to be questioned by the House Oversight Committee in a closed-door session.

Fear not, oh Donald, my liege; the Epstein cover-up is in good hands.

Mr. Whiteout is on the case.

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COURIER’s newly-launched Epstein investigation project

For too long, the Epstein Class has dealt in wealth, power, and politics to avoid accountability and deny victims & survivors their due justice. The public deserves the truth, but the Trump Administration is failing its legal obligation to deliver it.

That’s why we’re expanding our coverage to follow the money and investigate the power players in and outside the government. With a new database by Thorian AI, we have unprecedented access and ability to navigate more than 1.2M files and we’re sharing access—and what we’re finding—with you.

Subscribe to The Cover-Up and get one concise, easy-to-read email a week that cuts through the noise with the headlines you need and the breakdowns you want.

By staying plugged in and leveraging our reporting to make your own calls-to-action louder, together, we can turn information into justice.

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As the Epstein files revealed the scale of Epstein’s Eastern European trafficking operation, I sometimes wondered whether the vulnerable Trump is not Donald but the former Melania Knavs of Slovenia.

Last week’s “statement” from the First Lady would seem to confirm that guess.

For months, the resistance has been burning the midnight oil studying emails and FBI memos in the files for THE silver bullet: a woman who can somehow verifiably prove that Trump raped her when she was underage.

Hope springs eternal that such a find could bring him down, despite the fact that since 2016 more than two dozen adult women - including some who were teens at the time - have openly and sometimes in court accused Trump of sex harassment, abuse and assault. One of them even won a $5 million judgement for the abuse, and when he continued to lie about E. Jean Carroll, a jury charged him another $80 million.

From the minute he was first elected, mere weeks after the “grab em by the pussy “ hot mic , we knew or should have known that Trump’s predatory behavior with women was not a political liability.

But there is a chink in the coverup dike. It’s always been there, repaired and shored up with SLAPP suits, actual lawsuits, threats of lawsuit and other forms of menace. Jeffrey Epstein even joked about it in an email with Michael Wolff.

It’s what Epstein called “the Melania story.”

Melania, unlike Don, is not Teflon. She is and always has been deeply vulnerable. An introvert, clearly uncomfortable speaking English, a beauty raised in Cold War Slavic peasantry, she entered America via one of the sleaziest operators in Trumpworld. Her arrival coincided with a period of time when Russian mobsters and American dirtballs including Coney Island thug Jeffrey Epstein, were commodifying young Slavic women for the New York and world market.

Earlier this week, her office issued a cryptic notice that the First Lady would be making a “statement”. At the appointed time, mystified reporters gathered in the White House and the world watched her deliver a six minute speech singling out unnamed people “telling lies” about her and her supposedly non-existent relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.

The statement put Epstein back in the news. The focus of Melania’s slit-eyed rage soon became clear: a former pal in the 2000s Manhattan modeling demimonde named Amanda Ungaro. Brazilian born, willowy beauty Amanda was brought to the US from Brazil at the age of 17 by the odious late pedo Jean Luc Brunel, trafficked, abused and eventually hooked up with a Brunel, Epstein and Trump associate named Paolo Zampolli (whose eye she had caught when she was just a 15 year old in Brazil.)

Zampolli, heir to an Italian toy fortune, longtime holder of diplomatic immunity via a gig he got as UN Ambassador for the Caribbean island of Dominica, ran his own model agency, ID Models. For years he and Ungaro lived together in a Chelsea townhouse, where I interviewed him in 2018 for my book about Trump and his women. Fun fact: I noticed his houseman had a record involving money laundering.

The couple had a child together before splitting up a few years ago. Ungaro says a child custody battle ended with Zampolli - now Trump’s current “Special Envoy for Global Partnerships” - siccing an ICE agent on her, and having her deported to Brazil. Zampolli has said he only called the ICE agent because he was “curious.”

Ungaro recently sat for an interview with Spanish newspaper El Pais, and that interview will be released Sunday morning (will update with link). It isn’t clear yet whether El Pais contacted the First Lady’s office or whether Melania was responding to Ungaro’s Tweets claiming Melania knew about the deportation and did nothing to help her - despite a long relationship that included Amanda’s friendship with Melania’s family. (After Melania’s “statement,” Ungaro went on a Tweet rampage. Xitter deleted them all. See some below.)

What would someone like Ungaro know that could provoke the wife of the Leader of the Free world to hold a press conference? Ungaro is breaking the omertà around Melania’s life story, a story that includes a lacuna between her late teens and mid-twenties. As I discovered reporting on her in Slovenia, people who knew about her and her father’s legal problems were personally threatened into silence. Washington Post reporter Mary Jordan wrote in her 2020 biography of Melania that she had an easier time writing about royals and drug cartel kingpins than the president’s soigné third wife.

With that intensely guarded biography it was always going to be a risky thing to trot her out as a political wife. In their early years together Trump would say she was Austrian and she let that stand uncorrected. Later the campaign would claim she spoke five languages. Yet French and Italians who worked with her in the fashion world never heard her speak either, and she certainly never deployed any of it on her official trips to Europe with the President.

She reportedly cried on election night in 2016. Her discomfort was increasingly palpable. She disappeared from view for long periods. But she showed up when it counted, gracing rally stages, stunning lumpen crowds in swing states with her balayage, stilletos and posture.

Her official duties included:

One: Brand enhancement. Bellowing from rally platforms “where’s my supermodel!”

Two: Impress the manosphere: Trump has worn “hot compliant wife (™) since Melania was just his girlfriend, heavy- breathing supposedly from bed into the phone on live Howard Stern broadcasts

Three: Con the rubes. Trump’s “faith leaders” even got white nationalist Christians to label Melania a “Proverbs 31 wife” - that is, a woman who posed in S and M gear and nude on a fake Air Force One is actually a bread-baking, baby-popping role model for women and girls.

That was her entire portfolio until quite recently, when suddenly the White House tried out a new role: Serious Melania (™).

Serious Melania (tm) emerged earlier this year to preside over the UN Security Council, reading a clearly AI-generated word salad of a script about children and peace while America bombed a school and Israel bombed hospitals, medics and civilians in Iran and Lebanon.

Serious Melania (™) then hosted a “Fostering the Future summit” on AI and education at the White House, reading another AI-scripted word salad about children and learning but this time before “representatives of 45 nations” and a robot.

A senior advisor warned that Serious Melania (™) plans “serious” implications for those who defy her version of history - including “a team of lawyers.” It’s worth noting that Trump, litigator in chief, has yet to file a threatened billion dollar lawsuit against Michael Wolff, for allegedly conspiring with Epstein to ruin him politically, including a reference to “the Melania story” coming out and driving him “over the edge.”.

Serious Melania (tm) concluded her “statement” with a cynical bit of tradesmanship, advocating that Epstein survivors be allowed to testify in Congress. The survivors replied in a letter that asking them to testify was shifting the burden of accountability onto them instead of where it rightly belongs - the U.S. Justice Department.

There are three million MORE documents in the Epstein files. There is evidence of crimes all over the already released documents but no indictments or investigations ahead. Trump’s acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has announced that there will be no more releases.

Among the currently available Epstein files is a chummy email exchange between Epstein’s madam Ghislaine Maxwell and Melania in which Maxwell called Melania “sweet pea.”

What could it possibly mean? Serious Melania (™) took no questions.

NOTE: We will be interviewing Amanda Ungaro for Courier’s Coverup soon. .Watch this space for more.

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

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

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

Suspicious!

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

They leave.

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

No rush!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A cover-up?

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

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

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COURIER’s newly-launched Epstein investigation project

For too long, the Epstein Class has dealt in wealth, power, and politics to avoid accountability and deny victims & survivors their due justice. The public deserves the truth, but the Trump Administration is failing its legal obligation to deliver it.

That’s why we’re expanding our coverage to follow the money and investigate the power players in and outside the government. With a new database by Thorian AI, we have unprecedented access and ability to navigate more than 1.2M files and we’re sharing access—and what we’re finding—with you.

Subscribe to The Cover-Up and get one concise, easy-to-read email a week that cuts through the noise with the headlines you need and the breakdowns you want.

By staying plugged in and leveraging our reporting to make your own calls-to-action louder, together, we can turn information into justice.

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Have you ever wondered what is going on in the psyche of a person whose net worth is $850 Billion but whose negligible lifetime charitable contributions are engineered entirely to benefit his own family? Are you baffled about the moral core of a man who professes to believe billionaires who do peel off a few B-notes for the less advantaged are evil or at least deeply misguided? Do you scratch your head about men who made their fortunes thanks to government-funded labs, but who so resent the idea of paying taxes that they will literally leave the states that financed those labs? Have you pondered why a very rich man would decide that a climate activist is the Antichrist?

I’m talking about Musk Thiel and Bezos but countless less famous Richie Riches with yachts and multiple homes and private jets would rather see a predatory failed businessman wrecking the country for the sole reason that he’s promised to safeguard their piles from taxation.

Tomorrow, Thursday April 2 at 11 a.m. ET, I’ll be talking to author, researcher, and campaigner Chuck Collins. Collinss is co-editor of Inequality.org and heir to the Oscar Meyer meat fortune and by definition, a class traitor for opposing the methods and mentality of the one percent - the class into which he was born - and revealing the Wealth Defense Industry that sustains their “river of wealth.” His books include The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions and Burned by Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power Are Ruining Our Lives and Planet.

Mark your calendar. Send in your questions for Chuck in advance or tune in at 11 am Eastern tomorrow and post in the stream. I will try to get to them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But let’s be real about our expectations.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Big Conversations Coming Up This Week

Tomorrow, Tuesday 3/31 at 1:15 PM ET

Tune in to my Substack Live with COURIER CEO Tara McGowan as we dissect the Epstein coverup.

Thursday 4/2 at 11 AM ET

I will be LIVE with author, researcher, and campaigner Chuck Collins. Collins, co-editor of Inequality.org and heir to the Oscar Meyer meat fortune, is, by definition, a class traitor for writing terrific books on the mentality of the one percent and the systems that sustain their “river of wealth.” His books include The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions and Burned by Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power Are Ruining Our Lives and Planet.

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Trump’s White House staffing system has always been one part reality show casting and one part mob hierarchy. Do they look the part? Are they blood relatives?

In his first term, he made his daughter Ivanka a senior advisor to handle “the woman stuff.” Naturally, his Orthodox Jewish son-in-law would make a great Middle East envoy. And Jared has been waist deep in the region ever since, up to and including the moment he walked away from negotiations with Iran.

The Kushner model of Middle East diplomacy – do business with oil tyrants and support Israel – has precedent in the activities of an older, more experienced man (not a role model, but a model nonetheless). As we outlined in Part One, Jeffrey Epstein spent his post-prison years cozying up to Arab royals whose sovereign wealth funds contained trillions, and who might be persuaded to support – or at least not actively oppose – Tel Aviv.

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In October 2017, Epstein tried for a third time to market himself to MBS, in a letter lathered with cringeworthy obsequy: “I begin my letter with the greetings of peace as instructed by the Noble Prophet Mohammed. November 7 will mark one year since you and I met and laughed . Many things have changed since, and many, have not. You became crown prince and I remained a friend” [sic].

He then proposed a series of financial options from his “sophisticated toolbox,” including selling billions of dollars of shares to China and creating a Saudi cryptocurrency – “the first to be wholly shariar [sic] compliant. The muslim world will rejoice and its uses will be for the future.” He concluded with the promise that his services would be entirely free. “I do not want any money from you or the kingdom. I believe in what you are trying to do … your time is precious , i realize but the economy is the blood of your vision.”

A few months later, Norwegian diplomat Terje Rød-Larsen asked Epstein to prep World Economic Forum director Børge Brende ahead of a meeting with the Saudi prince: “Borge is seeing MBS on Wednesday. Inputs?”

Epstein’s play was simple: the sheiks and princes didn’t just want money, they wanted social cred; he was ready to help them with that through sportswashing (let’s have the stars of world soccer compete at a match in the UAE!) and techwashing (via another cringeworthy pitch to the son of the ruler of Dubai, whose father famously orchestrated the abduction of his own adult daughters).

When Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in the Saudi consulate in Turkey in October 2018, Epstein and his pals worried about their robed friend. Rød-Larsen met with MBS’ aide Raafat in London and reported back: “Dark Cloud over his head, and it won’t go away. Will keep you updated on R.” The CIA concluded that MBS ordered the killing of Khashoggi. He denied it. A year later, a Saudi court convicted eight men and sentenced five to death.

The sordid saga didn’t damage Epstein’s – or Kushner’s – friendship with the prince. From Davos in January 2019, Rød-Larsen sent Epstein a photo of himself walking beside Saudi King Salman, captioned “the king and I,” adding “I will get in touch with Ehud.”

Beyond the Norwegian, Epstein worked another pipeline into the Gulf: New York businessman and Trump’s inauguration committee chairman, Tom Barrack. Epstein’s relationship with Barrack, whose parents were Lebanese immigrants to California, dated back to at least 2012, when Barrack emailed Epstein, “How is my role model?”

A few weeks after the 2016 election, Epstein wrote to Tom Pritzker: “barrack and the boys in pb, wild wild” [sic].

In another email exchange, Barrack wrote to Epstein about himself and Michael Wolff: “We decided last night that we both love you and want to be your butler’s” [sic].

Epstein replied: “When do we see you? Are you meting Raafat” [sic].

Throughout 2016, Epstein schmoozed Barrack, hard. In August, he set up a lunch between Barrack, Ehud Barak, and soon-to-be-dead Russian ambassador Vitaly Churkin. Apparently the meeting was a success. Epstein emailed Tom Pritzker: “lunch was AMAZING. tom barrack was floored.” The following month, probably during UNGA week in New York, he introduced Barrack to Rød-Larsen.

Meanwhile, Barrack – the man who wanted to be Epstein’s “butler” and was having “wild wild” times with Jeff and “the boys” – was busy connecting Jared Kushner with Gulf royals.

At first, the Arabs snickered about Jared. He seemed naive and was extremely tight with Israeli hardliners (as a teen, Bibi Netanyahu had even slept in his bed at the Kushner family home in New Jersey). But Jared was poised to replace Epstein as the Saudis’ Trump whisperer and eventually became MBS’s best friend at the White House.

“You will love him and he agrees with our agenda!” Mr. Barrack wrote in May 2016 to Emirati ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba.

For a while, Barrack kept Epstein in the loop. DOJ files show Epstein emailing Barrack about Saudi 9/11 survivor lawsuits, and name-dropping him with the Emiratis. In one email to Dubai businessman (and Epstein john) Sultan Bin Sulayem, he wrote “barrack said to give you a hug for him”.

But in spring 2017, Barrack went dark. Epstein worried that Barrack had perhaps been “sidelined” due to the growing investigation into foreign influence in the Trump campaign. In communications with New York Times reporter Landon Thomas Jr., Epstein predicted that Barrack was out of the inner circle and that National Economic Council director Gary Cohn and Jared were “likely to take over”. Landon replied: “How does Jared takeover now with FBI circling?”

Eventually Barrack reconnected with Epstein, after requesting a switch to encrypted communication methods, including Signal and WhatsApp.

Meanwhile, Jared was ascending. He had convinced the president, aka his father-in-law, to make his first visit to Saudi Arabia, where he and his delegation were lavishly received. In October, Jared traveled to Riyadh for a secret meeting with MBS. According to the Intercept, they discussed names of Saudis disloyal to MBS; days later, a purge was underway. One source claimed that MBS bragged to fellow royals that Kushner was “in his pocket.” According to the Washington Post, Kushner later told aides he and the prince met alone to “brainstorm” strategies.

The “adults in the room” in the first Trump administration were troubled by this mode of foreign policy. National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster warned that Kushner was freelancing and “might make naive mistakes.” Trump’s first Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was frustrated that Jared was effectively setting up a parallel state department.

In February 2019, Jared was stripped of his top-level security clearance – but by then, it hardly mattered. He was already communicating directly with Saudi and Emirati crown princes via WhatsApp. That same month, Epstein emailed Bannon to let him know “MBS coming to wash 19th” [sic]. Bannon replied: “To have breakfast with Jared.”

Epstein now watched from the sidelines as the younger man, born rich, ignorant of the wiles it took to scrabble up from Coney Island, got richer and grew more acclaimed.

One exchange between Epstein and Bannon:

Epstein: “He thinks Jared and he can run it”

Bannon: “???”

Epstein: “Donald”

Bannon: “Can run the investigations ?”

Epstein: “Govt”

Bannon: “I think Jared has done the ‘fade’ recently as heat has been turned up”

Epstein: “Heard how smart , he is and he doesn’t need anyone else . Chat tonite. Not from here”

Bannon: “K”

In another exchange that month, the two men discussed a Maggie Haberman article contradicting Trump. Epstein observed that Bannon was Trump’s “only hope,” and added, “Im pushing, jared needs squashed” [sic]. Bannon replied, “He is killing Trump.”

Six months later, Epstein was dead and Jared would soon collect $2 billion in investment money from MBS. He was also the celebrated hero of the Abraham Accords. Today, he has plans to turn flattened Gaza into a shiny beach resort. And as a private citizen with deep ties to Netanyahu and MBS – who are both interested in blowing Iran into the Stone Age – he has played a pivotal role in igniting a regional war.

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We’ll also cover Melania’s latest moves off the chaise longue at Mar a Lago and into her occasional role providing feminine cover and cognitive dissonance for Trump regime cruelty and bullying.

TUNE IN at 8, link to come.

Americans have been so addled by Trump 2.0’s shit-flooded media zone that we barely noticed when Trump dispatched his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to conduct Middle East “negotiations” while simultaneously soliciting billions from Gulf monarchs for his investment fund. Open air corruption is, of course, on brand. In the first Trump term, this unelected family member – with close personal ties to Israeli leader Bibi Netanyahu – got credit for crafting the so-called Abraham Accords.

That series of agreements, finalized in late 2020, officially normalized relations between Israel and four Arab nations. The optics were such a success that Trump gave Kushner another go at playing diplomat, this time with Iran. As before, Kushner used the time to double-dip as a businessman soliciting investments, but threw in the towel on peace and helped kick off Trump’s first war.

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It is all beyond the pale, but a close reading of the DOJ’s Epstein Files suggests that Jeffrey Epstein may actually deserve as much – or even more – credit than nepo-baby Kushner for the Abraham Accords.

The warming of contacts between Sunni monarchs and Israel emerged during the 2010s, a period when Epstein was avidly engaged in an influence game aimed especially at the Gulf royals.

Through a combination of his signature lures – the possibility of vast riches, sex, and powerful connections – the convicted sex criminal worked the Middle East for almost a decade. And hardcore misogynist Wahhabis, whose archaic systems and trillion dollar fossil fuel wealth funds are an anti-democratic cancer on the entire region, were an easy target.

Like meets like.

Today, we arguably have the Epstein Accords to thank for the unholy alliance between the Israeli right and the Arab kings and princes who stood by while the IDF bombed Gaza, leaving vast human devastation in its wake. Now, the Epstein Accords have reached their hideous dénouement: a regional war with America’s military striking Iran in what appears to be a national disaster – for the United States.

Epstein began laying the groundwork while still serving time in Palm Beach. He was months out of house arrest when he personally met with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, and soon he was buddy-buddy with Gulf royals from the UAE to Saudi Arabia.

The road to the Epstein Accords begins on May 4, 2010, when Epstein, at the time still under house arrest, texted a redacted someone (WHY DOJ?): “lets call that guy from the un theja„ ask when we can speak tomorrow and try -- to set up a meeting at 71 st on 13 or 14.. remind him ehud barak meeting”.

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak had, at some point, introduced his friend Jeff to a Norwegian politician who would prove pivotal in the process: Terje Rød-Larsen, an eminently corruptible, hard-drinking man who had been lionized for his role in the 1993 Oslo Accords.

Epstein had been communicating with Barak during his time in prison. In an exchange on April 8, 2009, Barak’s wife emailed a redacted someone (WHY DOJ?), asking to be connected to “Geoffrey.” Just over 12 hours later, someone sent an email back saying Epstein wished them a Happy Passover and that “he also wanted me to let you know that Senator Mitchell is one of Jeffrey’s oldest and closest friends...and if you needed Jeffrey’s help, to just let him know!” George J. Mitchell was, at the time, U.S. Special Envoy for Middle East Peace.

By October 2010, Rød-Larsen got Epstein invited to the inaugural Sir Bani Yas forum in the UAE, hosted by Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan (known as AbZ). AbZ would eventually become one of the signatories of the Abraham Accords in 2020. After the event Epstein wrote to Rød-Larsen: “Terje that was great fun… you and I are going to have a very good time”.

Epstein soon stepped into the role he would play until his arrest at Teterboro nine years later: a connector between Israeli officials, Arab monarchies, and Western business and political figures who needed access to piles of sovereign oil wealth. With the UAE invitation in hand, Epstein emailed Ehud Barak’s aforementioned wife, Nili Priel: “nilli, if ehud has a chance to speak, lets set up a call.. Im am going to abu dhabi next week. abbas, will be spending time witih me” [sic].

He told an assistant to reach out to George Mitchell to let him know he was meeting with Abbas. He also forwarded information about the event to Jes Staley, Ghislaine Maxwell, Peter Mandelson, Prince Andrew’s right-hand man David Stern, Bill Gates’ aide-de-camp Boris Nikolić, and Tom Pritzker – the usual suspects. By November, Epstein was passing messages to AbZ via Prince Andrew.

For the next eight years, hundreds of texts and emails show Epstein feverishly expanding his network among Gulf elites in the Middle East.

At the same time, he was coddling his Norwegian buddy Rød-Larsen, who, by 2014, was calling Epstein his “best friend.” Epstein was distributing books that glorified the Oslo Accords while Rød-Larsen was in the hospital with a heart problem – the first in a series of medical issues in which Epstein would involve himself. Over time, Epstein provided financial support to Rød-Larsen, including paying for his prostate cancer care, funding a loan for a villa on a Greek island, and leaving $10 million in his will for Rød-Larsen’s two children.

All in exchange, quite clearly, for access to the Norwegian’s rolodex of Arab potentates.

In 2016, as his old running buddy Donald Trump arrived on the scene, Epstein added a new role to his emerging portfolio with the sheiks: Donald whisperer. With that powerful connection and Rød-Larsen’s network, he sought and developed a personal relationship with Saudi heavy hitters, eventually including Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud (MBS).

Earlier that year, Rød-Larsen had connected him to MBS advisor Raafat Al-Sabbagh. Within months, Al-Sabbagh was hanging at Jeff’s mansion, dining with figures like Larry Summers and Tom Pritzker, enjoying the mansion’s “GYM” and joking about learning “Russian math.”

Soon, the Saudi was so comfortable with Jeff that he was sending him texts about his favorite subjects: one about a Russian girl who “sold her virginity in Dubai” and another regarding Jeff in Palm Beach, ”I am sure you are opening so many legs there.”

Like Kushner, Epstein combined his Middle East schmoozing with financial opportunism and spent much of 2016 proposing schemes for the Saudi sovereign wealth fund. In May, he emailed Al-Sabbagh, cc’ing Rød-Larsen, “a more radical idea for you boss. would be instead of creating new securities from aramco. form a new currency based on oil, different regulations and more more 21 century”[sic]. A few weeks later, he was blathering in seminar-speak about “knowledge” as the “most valuable asset for the future.”

By the end of hot Trumpy summer 2016, Epstein – who had helped bankroll a Broadway play about the Oslo Accords that made Rød-Larsen and his wife Mona Juul look like heroes – decided to rent out all of Lincoln Center and host 1000 of his friends, including Israeli President Shimon Peres, for a private performance.

That August, Trump’s buddy Tom Barrack texted Epstein: “Met ur Saudi friend! He loves u!!” Jeff replied curtly, telling the businessman to download Signal. Later in August, Epstein arranged a lunch with Barrack, Ehud Barak, Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin and unnamed “Saudis.”

After a sustained effort by Rød-Larsen, Epstein finally got himself invited to Riyadh. Raafat’s staff instructed Epstein’s staff that they should inform the consulate his visa was personally authorized by MBS (Epstein’s sex offender status, clearly stated in his passport, never hindered his travel).

On Election Day 2016, he sent Rød-Larsen buddy pictures of himself with MBS. That night, Raafat Al-Sabbagh asked Epstein whether the king should call to congratulate Trump. He said yes and told him to call Tom Barrack.

Epstein wasted no time. The day after the election, he wrote MBS a letter proposing that he be hired as the prince’s “financial confidant” – gratis. “I am happy and privleged to act as his “financial bodyguard.” He boasted of his bonafides: “I know how wall street will try to play” [sic].

A few weeks later, he sent another letter, suggesting he could help shield Saudi assets from JASTA, the US law Congress had passed on September 11 of that year allowing 9/11 survivors to sue Saudi Arabia.

Incredibly, Epstein also networked MBS’s people with top U.S. lawyers Ken Starr and Kathy Ruemmler. The pair, one a Republican and one a Democrat, were apparently enlisted to help the Kingdom stave off JASTA litigation (and possibly challenge the constitutionality of JASTA entirely).

Starr, who has since died, did meet with Raafat at least once, and emails indicate Ruemmler also met with the Saudis. In one, she told Epstein, “they want me to come to Saudi with you.”

As the activities of Epstein and Rød-Larsen come to light, Al Jazeera reports that Palestinian leaders “are now questioning whether Oslo’s foundational agreements of the two-state solution were brokered by a mediator – Rød-Larsen – vulnerable to elite blackmail and foreign intelligence.” Mustafa Barghouti, General Secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative, said he was “not surprised at all” by the corruption allegations. “We never felt comfortable with this person from the very first moment. Oslo was a trap … and I have no doubt that Terje Rød-Larsen was being effectively influenced by the Israeli side all along.”

Meanwhile, in Norway, investigators seized documents related to the Oslo Accords that Rød-Larsen reportedly stashed in his basement. Some have reportedly also turned up in Israel. Yesterday, the Norwegian Parliament voted to open an investigation into links between Epstein and the Norwegian Foreign Office.

Paranoia about non-secure comms pervades Epstein’s texts with Rød-Larsen. The men are forever trying to get off text and get each other on the phone. Their exchanges are filled with references to some meeting or person, followed by “call me” and repeated “tried you”s as the men juggled different time zones.

But as the Trump Era commenced, Epstein’s sense of security was just lax enough that after Christmas 2016, he fielded – and never erased – a Michael Wolff message lauding him on his new Saudi advisory role:

“I have been thinking about this Saudi thing. It is really the ultimate change-the-narrative gift. It instantly redefines you-- in kind of a mind-boggling way. When its underway take me with you on one trip and l’ll do the story. Good for the Saudis, because story gets out in a sy=pathetic fashion, and for you because it turns you into the Jew with the M=ddle East in the palm of his hand” [sic].

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Next Week – The Epstein Accords: The Trump Years

The Oversight Committee might ask Kathy Ruemmler about the following interactions with Epstein regarding the Saudis:

• Epstein introducing Ruemmler and Raafat via email

• Epstein writing to the Saudis and Rød-Larsen: “kathy will see you both in new york on the weekend”

• Ruemmler writing to Epstein in October 2016: “They want me to come to Saudi with you”

• Epstein telling Ruemmler a week after Trump’s election that MBS aide Raafat was moving to NY for 2 weeks to “begin work seriously”

• Epstein telling Ruemmler around the same time that various Saudi documents remain “privileged” to him

• Epstein telling Raafat that Ruemmler needed to do a “conflict check” with her firm, followed by “conflict ok.”

ICYMI: MAHA & the Midterms

Last week, COURIER’s virtual event in partnership with 3.14 Action drew 22K+ live viewers across platforms. The event featured Hank Green, Dr. Mary Trump, Representative Lauren Underwood, Shaughnessy Naughton, and Dr. Vin Gupta discussing how misinformation and policy decisions affect healthcare access and costs in the U.S. Missed it? Watch the full replay on YouTube.

This event is part of a broader series on science, health, and public policy in American democracy. Our next conversation, Facts vs. Fiction: The Fight for Science in American Democracy, is happening Thursday, June 11. RSVP today!

Six years ago, in the final days of Jeffrey Epstein’s life, a federal judge released documents from Virginia Giuffre’s defamation case against Ghislaine Maxwell. The documents included a bit of testimony that stayed in my head for a long time and I doubt I am alone.

Rinaldo Rizzo, “house manager” for New York hedge fund titan Glenn Dubin and his wife Eva Andersson-Dubin – Jeffrey Epstein’s ex-fiancée and a former Miss Sweden – described an incident in the family kitchen that still so upset him he was crying when he told it to lawyers years later.

In around 2004, Rizzo encountered a “very attractive, beautiful young girl. Makeup, very put together, casual dress. But she seemed to be upset, maybe distraught, and she was shaking… Shaking, I mean literally quivering … She proceeds to tell my wife and I that, and this is not – this is blurting out, not a conversation like I’m having a casual conversation. That quickly, I was on an island, I was on the island and there was Ghislaine, there was Sarah [presumably Epstein aide Sarah Kellen], she said they asked me for sex, I said no. And she is just rambling.”

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The girl also appeared to be drugged or disoriented, and didn’t know how she had gotten from the island back to New York. She claimed Maxwell had taken her passport, another aide had seized her phone, and that she had “been threatened.”

“Was she in fear?” the lawyer asked.

“Yes.”

“You could tell?”

“Yes. She was shaking uncontrollably.”

For years, that image has haunted me and probably anyone else who read through those pages.

Who was this girl? How did she get home? Is she okay now?

At the time, the Dubins issued a statement through their lawyer denying the account. They’ve never been subpoenaed over it. The question didn’t even come up at Maxwell’s 2021 trial where Eva Andersson-Dubin appeared as a character witness. She testified that she didn’t remember meeting a witness who had described group massage orgies. On cross-examination, a prosecutor asked if she had any memory problems. “It’s very hard for me to remember anything far back and sometimes I can’t remember things from last month,” she said. “My family notices it. I notice it. It’s been an issue.”

Yesterday, the Swedish newspaper Expressen published a bombshell investigation that might jog her memory about some of her nannies.

The tabloid tracked down what it claimed were classified ads placed by the Dubins in the Göteborgs-Posten, “repeatedly in the early 2000s” seeking nannies or au pairs to come to New York. The paper contacted some of the women who, as teens, answered those ads. Two spoke, but identified themselves only by their first names: Hanna and Susanne. Both said the Dubins introduced them to Epstein, both were housed in the Manhattan building where Epstein kept his trafficked girls and where his lawyer and accountant had offices.

Hanna told the paper that Epstein visited frequently during her time with the Andersson-Dubin family, often with a few 20-year-old, tall, slim, attractive (and mostly silent) women in tow. “I remember that he always had different young girls with him as company,” she said. “And I understood from the staff that it was always like that.”

Susanne recalled that Epstein “gave a very mysterious impression.” She said he spoke enough Swedish to say, “Hey, how are you?” and seemed friendlier than Glenn Dubin, who called her “Swedish Girl” and never learned her name. “I thought, God, what a nice man. He lives here in this luxurious house, why isn’t Eva with him?” But then she visited Epstein’s mansion with the Dubin children and followed them into a room filled with pictures of naked girls. After that, she said, “I thought he was creepy.”

Both girls said they were brought to New York as tourists without au pair visas and their salaries were paid in cash. At the Epstein building where they were housed, Hanna said she met girls her age – good-looking girls he “helped,” she said, using air quotes. “There were many girls my age who in various ways might have earned money by performing various services. They got a slap on the backside. It was like no big deal.”

“Everything came to an abrupt end when another Swedish girl came to the family,” Expressen reported. According to Hanna, the girl – who was younger than the others – had answered the classified ad and was flown to New York, but then sent to Jeffrey Epstein’s island. The girl “thought she would be some kind of assistant and it turned out that the assistant job was not at all what she had thought,” Hanna told Expressen, adding that the girl seemed traumatized. “I’ve thought about it a lot because I didn’t ask more about what was happening.”

After that, things changed. Eva turfed Hanna out.

“Eva then told me one day, ‘We don’t need you anymore. You can’t keep working.’ Then they more or less threw me out on the street. Back then, it was convenient that there was no au pair organization or visa. So, you can’t keep on hiring people legally.”

The Dubins have denied knowledge of Epstein’s crimes, and speaking to Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter through a PR agent, denied that they ever employed a 15-year-old Swedish girl or transported such a person from Sweden. Expressen reported it has “been in contact with more nannies than those quoted in the text. They do not want or dare not tell about their experiences.”

Whatever the deal was with the Dubins and the nannies, one thing is certain: Epstein had a thing for blondes. He joked with his pals about “shiksas,” the Yiddish pejorative for non-Jewish women. There are 923 hits on the word “blonde” in the Epstein files. The emails and texts reflect hours of scheduling and discussion with hairdressers about getting his girls the “right shade,” as well as slobbering talk of blondes between Epstein and his johns and suppliers. One memo recorded a call from Jean Luc Brunel advising Epstein that he had a girl “age 8x2” ready to come over and teach him Russian – albeit “not blonde.”

Epstein especially prized Swedish girls. He might never have gotten over losing former Miss Sweden to Glenn Dubin after 10 years of dating. In an email to Bill Gates’ lieutenant Boris Nikolic he expressed his regrets: “we were together for ten years. she wanted marriage , AGGHHH. she married glenn dubin. Untrustwaorthy prick. howver he allowed me to enjoy raising my goddaughter. [sic]” .

Epstein also told friends that he wanted to marry the Dubins’ 19-year-old daughter, Celina, who had been taught as a girl to call him “Uncle Jeff.”

Besides the Dubin nannies, Epstein had another supply chain for hot Svear babes: a whole organization devoted to training young female Swedish economists.

DOJ files contain dozens of emails with, and mentions of, Barbro C. Ehnbom, a Swedish economist who in 2001 created Barbro’s Best and Brightest (BBB) with the aim “to promote future women leaders through mentorship and interdisciplinary idea-exchange” at the Stockholm School of Economics. Apparently Epstein put money into her projects, including her Swedish American Life Science Summit (SALSS), and had persuaded her that he was just the man to get her best and brightest young women networked into New York finance.

Epstein clearly had other aims. In many of the emails, he asks Barbro to send photos of individuals in her latest class, and frequently inquires about her finding him a wife or at least a new assistant. Their relationship dated back to at least 2003. In a 2009 email sent to a redacted woman while he was serving time in jail, Epstein wrote: “barbro just sent me a photo you look great”.

In 2017, Barbro wrote him: “if you send me a cell phone number, I can start sending you photos from BBB, much easier than e-mail”.

Epstein repeatedly asked her for possible wives.

Barbro’s first reply on 8/20/12: “How about this year’s SALSS Project Manager [redacted] - brainy and sen=sual! Picture attached!”

The next morning, Barbro followed up with a jpg: “She is the one!”

“Here are the girls you selected,” Barbro emailed Epstein in April 2014, adding that one of them might soon land a job at Spotify.

A 2012 BBB Christmas card in the Epstein files contains a group photo of young women with redacted faces and another of a smaller group, posed in silvery showgirl outfits.

The organization has a 300-person closed BBB Facebook group. One can only imagine the conversations underway there as the Epstein files spill out.

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Join COURIER and 3.14 Action on March 12 for MAHA & the Midterms: How Trump and RFK Jr.’s Agenda Costs Americans.

This live conversation will examine how political choices are reshaping healthcare access ahead of the midterms. We’ll break down how Trump, RFK Jr., and the broader MAHA agenda are impacting public health, who benefits, and what’s at stake for families across the country.

Featured Speakers include:

• Hank Green, Author + Creator

• Dr. Mary Trump, Psychologist + Author

• U.S. Representative Lauren Underwood, Member of Congress + Registered Nurse

• Shaughnessy Naughton, 314 Action President

• Dr. Vin Gupta, Physician + Medical Analyst

Stay tuned for more speaker announcements.

Don’t miss this conversation. RSVP today!

As the Trump-provoked regional war expanded disastrously by the hour, the White House dispatched Melania to preside over the U.N. Security Council today. The Council is the U.N.’s principal organization responsible for safeguarding international peace and security. The chairmanship rotates monthly by nation and March is America’s turn.

“In a historic move, First Lady Melania Trump addressed the U.N. Security Council as the United States assumed its Presidency,” her office announced as she delivered a nugatory word salad of a speech titled “Peace Through Education.” Without the digital watermark, it’s impossible to be sure, but it had the emotionally vacant pablum flavor of AI writing throughout. For example: “Intellect blossoms humanity’s fundamental needs: shelter, food security, clean water, and health care. And predictably, almost all communities will have access to knowledge within our lifetimes.”

As children were being shredded under an American-Israeli carpet bombing of Tehran –Secretary Kegseth promised there were “no rules of engagement” in this war –Melania’s soigné presence was a middle finger from our warmongering nation to the international community. In its sheer grotesquery, it recalled Imelda Marcos collecting thousands of pairs of shoes while her husband’s secret police left tortured corpses in the gutters of Manila.

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Melania at the Security Council is a wink-wink from the administration’s Groypers and Bronze Age Pervert fans to the MAGA sector that prefers the Taliban model when it comes to women and politics. Having a resume that starts and ends with being a mute human accessory makes her the Trump movement’s ideal woman.

I’m guessing the producers of this cynical spectacle are members of the Tate Brothers A-Team. This claque of Trump Administration incels and misogynists brought notorious rape-propagandists to the U.S., platformed pastors and other wackos who believe women should “submit” and should not vote, draped the Department of Education with a giant banner of a 19th-century anti-suffragist, removed women from leadership roles in the Pentagon and elsewhere, and erased government websites and plaques celebrating American women’s contributions to government, culture, and the sciences.

The Trump movement, from the day he rode down the elevator in 2015 with his silent “supermodel,” has always been about promoting the transactional femme as the ideal model for women. Melania wielding the gavel at the U.N. Security Council models to girls and women that if you do exactly what the patriarchy wants you to do – speak little, moisturize, provide sexual titillation, and learn to balance on hobbling fuck-me shoes – you too might reach high places, at least for that killer photo shoot.

There is a certain feminine strength in this work, don’t underestimate it. It is not easy to pick your way down jetway steps in stilettos without looking down. It is even harder to suppress your gag reflex at the breath of disgusting old men.

Melania comes from the same school of hard knocks that produced those tough, hustling Epstein-affiliated Russian women who endured revulsion and humiliation and carried on regardless – some of whom are now CEOs of their own Silicon Valley companies.

Melania’s path required less of her intellectually, but no less in humiliation.

What would you do for a free Trump Tower apartment for yourself and your family of chain immigrants? Dahhling, would you pose naked in a chain-mail bra and S&M blinders in a fake Air Force One cockpit? Pose again, naked and in handcuffs?* Coo to Howard Stern on live radio about your tubby, insecure, but rich boyfriend’s sexual prowess?

No. It is NOT a walk in the park to be a Melania. But if you can make it look easy, and better yet, look as though you like it (she has some challenges with that), there are rewards.

The Trump era opened with the slap-in-the-face 2016 election of a self-described “pussy grabber.” This second regime is an out and proud Predator’s Ball, from the convicted felon president himself down to our roofie-rape-accused “Secretary of War,” to sex-assault and stalking-accused DHS shadow boss Corey Lewandowski, to Nazi-loving manosphere minion Paul Ingrassia, the Tate bro fanboy lawyer who has written that the rape-cheerleading brothers represent “hope for the survival of manhood.” Kegseth recently befouled the halls of the Pentagon by bringing in for a prayer session his “pastor,” Doug Wilson, who believes marital rape is impossible because when a woman says “I do,” she consents for life.

Last week, video circulated of lunatic Christian nationalist pastor Dale Partridge instructing the women of his congregation to model “joyful submission” to their husbands as an example to “insubordinate feminist women” everywhere: “Our duty as the church is to tell the world what is normal.”

That is normal?

For millions of real American girls and women, the role model is Taylor Swift: a sexy self-made billionaire about to marry a hot football star whose dick works so well she has written songs about it. That combination enrages Trumpy predators and their fanboys.

One of martyred Charlie Kirk’s last Twitter chatrooms convened a gang of millennial assholes to debate: “Should Taylor Swift submit to Travis Kelce?” I tuned in for a minute. The last words I think I heard the living Kirk say were: “I don’t want a wife who tells me what to do with my money.” Ironically, said wife now controls his tens of millions of dollars. Oh.

In Trumpworld, normal is Epsteinism: a philosophy and way of life in which women are not human but mannequins to decorate the boys club – sex toys for entertainment. Despite the second wave, despite Me Too, despite women outpacing men in school and professional life, Epsteinism never really died out.

But oh, the rewards of trading your autonomy, dignity and self-respect in Trumpworld! Pose nearly nude and purr sexily to Howard Stern about how Donald beds you several times a day...

I really don’t care, do u?

The sum total of what Melania has done for the world so far: accessorized her oafish mate, tore up the White House Rose Garden, hated on her Christmas duties, and rehabilitated junior Harvey Weinstein (Brett Ratner).

She didn’t sign up with Donald to become First Lady of America. She has submitted to stumble-reading speeches written by Trump hacks with more crypto interests than brains. At least at the UN – the Tower of Babel – she could have finally spoken in Slovenian, her native language, the one she actually knows, thereby giving a little paid work to one of the translators who, along with much U.N. staff, will soon be out of work, if not already unemployed thanks to AI and the international organization’s declining budget.

Melania’s great legacy will be that she modeled submission to America’s insubordinate women.

In her willingness to serve as a silent prop for photo shoots and participate in the occasional trolling stunt like today’s at the U.N., Melania serves another political purpose. As Steve Bannon understood from Gamergate, misogyny is a powerful organizing force for the MAGA brotherhood of unhappy American men – men brutalized by forces that women have nothing to do with, starting with war.

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The largest buildup of American firepower in one place since 2003, 40 to 50 percent of the nation’s deployable air power, is clustered around Iran right now. Yesterday the State Department started evacuating the embassy in Beirut. And the Washington Post reports the Pentagon can’t figure out what to do with an additional half a trillion dollars Secretary Kegseth has acquired from American taxpayers.

What is going on? While the media is riveted on credible evidence that the DOJ is hiding FBI interviews with a Trump accuser (reported by the Freakshow last week) will Trump use the State of Union to announce some diversionary Hellfire on the Middle East?

I never was a Tucker Carlson fan. Frat boy smirk, platforming a Hitler stan, Neanderthal views on women and men - although I am neutral on ball-tanning. But since Fox turfed him out he seems to have hit his stride with courageous hardball interviews of performative Christian warmongers. He exposed Ted Cruz’s ignorance about Iran, whose destruction the Texas Senator has been cheerleading for a decade.

Last week, Carlson sat down with Trump’s Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, and for two hours challenged our man in Jerusalem’s Bible Belt pseudo-history of the Middle East. To his credit Huckabee did not flee, even though occasionally in visible panic as he explained American policy with fifth century B.C.E. legends.

The entire interview is worth watching for anyone who wants a deeper understanding of the End-Times mythology and bloodthirsty Biblical lunacy undergirding American policy as we verge on an attack on Iran for no other reason than that it is Israel’s last regional foe.

Among the gaffes: to the horror of our allies in the Middle East - who have officially objected - Huckabee proclaimed that although the Bible says God promised the Jews an Israel from the Euphrates to the Nile (“It would be fine if they took it,” he said), he believes Israel would settle for the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River.

“River to the Sea” is of course what some pro Palestinian protesters have been heard to chant - to great criticism and college speech clampdowns. But anyone who has been to Israel knows river to sea is also a phrase religious nationalists and Christian Zionists do expect to define the borders of Israel.

Carlson also got Huckabee, nominal follower of lamb-protecting Jesus, to repeatedly excuse murder and maiming of children in Gaza with, either they were armed by Hamas, or just, “that’s war.” At least he didn’t look Tucker dead in the eye as Sen. Lindsay Graham did last week when asked about Gaza, and say, “Flatten It”.

Will the most powerful military in the history of the planet once again be applied to back policy rooted in an American Sunday school teacher’s history of the Middle East? Seems possible.

Watching Huckabee fish around in his head for Bible verses, I was reminded of an incident while researching my 2006 book about archaeological forgery Unholy Business: A True Tale of Faith Greed and Forgery in the Holy Land. To report the book I spent months in Israel, drove to archaeological sites from the Galilee to the Negev, and interviewed secular and religious experts in archaeology, epigraphy and related fields.

I also spent time with a few busloads of Christian tourists delivered by preachers to Biblical sites. One afternoon I tagged along with a group visiting Tel Megiddo, better known to eschatologists as the site of the final battle, Armageddon. Armageddon of course is the end of the world, predicted in Revelation, which evangelical Christians believe will happen when all the Jews have returned to Israel. For that reason, Megiddo is a standard stop on the religious tours that traverse the Holy Land, hourly, daily, weekly, year-round.

I tagged along with a group of white South African pilgrims whose tour had already taken them through the Galilee, into Nazareth, dipped into the River Jordan and was headed to Jerusalem later that afternoon.

I already knew there was a political/archaeological dispute about the meaning of some of the finds at Megiddo. The first archaeologists to excavate Megiddo from the University of Chicago in the 1920s focused on the pre-biblical societies whose remains were at the bottom of the tel. Israeli diggers in the 1980s worked a bit higher on the mound, and were more interested in Biblical history, specifically the story that King Solomon built Megiddo and that the city became the center of the so-called United Monarchy that officially brought the people of ancient Israel together as one nation.

The Israeli archaeologists dated newly excavated ruins to the time of King Solomon, and soon they were being used to support the claim that Solomon had created a united Jewish nation as described in the Bible. But in the 1990s, a prominent Israeli archaeologist named Israel Finkelstein challenged the Biblical interpretation of Megiddo. Finkelstein, head of the archaeology department at Tel Aviv University, then co-wrote a book, in English, re-casting the dates of the ruins at Megiddo to a hundred years later. He challenged the notion that palatial ruins at Megiddo were the Biblical Solomon’s palaces. In doing so, Finkelstein brought down upon himself the wrath of both religiously-inclined archaeologists who pegged him as having an atheist agenda, and the resentment of Israeli nationalists, who questioned his patriotism.

This little conflict was on my mind as I followed the tour guide up the tel. And while the Christian guide seemed knowledgeable on archaeological terminology, he either didn’t know about or didn’t care to share the competing theories with his band of pilgrims. Instead, as we ascended the tel, he described its history in terms of the Bible’s stories.

He reminded us that in the New Testament, Jesus stopped at Megiddo while he was walking south on the road from Nazareth, and met a Samaritan lady by the well near Megiddo (the crowd softly mm-hmmm-ed). “The Samaritan – a pagan – doesn’t like Jesus and she might have poisoned him but he assumes she won’t and she doesn’t.” The guide then launched into the Biblical history of Megiddo, starting with “the time of Solomon, when Megiddo was built up as a large royal city.” As we walked, one of the pilgrims pointed to an incline and said, “That’s Solomon’s ramp.” A sign near some ruins suggested that the style of palace remains were similar to Solomon’s palace in Jerusalem.

Eventually, the guide led his group to the peak of the tel, and a covered viewing deck. From this vantage point, the view was immense. The Jezreel Valley, Israel’s breadbasket, spread out gloriously almost to the horizon, divided into neat squares of agricultural bounty. The Upper Galilee hills of northern Israel – bordering Hezbollah territory - were visible far beyond the plains. To the east, in the haze, hundreds of miles away in the haze, was the edge of ancient Persia – modern Iran.

The guide pointed out the direction of Iran and then shifted into a cinematic tone of voice, befitting the majesty of the view. “Friends, it happened here!” he announced. “The great fight. Would it be the land of the Philistines [sea people] or the land of Israel? Lucky for us David did battle and it became the land of Israel. Will Armageddon be physical or virtual? Who knows, it’s up to the believers. But standing here, in your visionary eyes, you can see the two superpowers, on this great plain.”

A member of the group opened a Bible. After prayer, one of the tourists opined to the group, while pointing in the general direction of Iran, “There is no question they are developing into the sons of darkness and the Judeo-Christians are the sons of light.”

The Megiddo tour guide I had followed was nowhere near as colorful as some who lead the other tens of thousands of Christians pouring out of the buses in the parking lot daily, year-round. “Can you imagine this entire valley filled with blood?” the tour leader of Texas-based Discovery Ministries, Inc. said to his traveling flock while a reporter for Vanity Fair was along. American Gary Frazier was riffing off a passage in Revelation predicting that Christ will wreak bloody havoc on his enemies in the end times, so that blood flows out of “the winepress, even unto the horse bridles, by the space of a thousand and six hundred furlongs.”

With the reporter watching, Frazier, a colleague of the bonkers Rapture novelist Tim LaHaye, gestured to the Jezreel valley below and calculated: “That would be a 200-mile-long river of blood, four and a half feet deep. We’ve done the math. That’s the blood of as many as two and a half billion people.”

For further context on the political and financial uses of Biblical archaeology, read my book, Unholy Business: A True Tale of Faith, Greed and Forgery in the Holy Land.

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

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

So far, another revolting Epstein story.

But this one scales up.

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

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

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

Here’s why:

1. It appears that the FBI interviewed this woman four times over a period of a few weeks in the summer of 2019. But only one of the four interviews is in the released files.

2. The agents clearly believed the woman had something to fear. Her name is always redacted but followed by the words in all caps: PROTECT SOURCE. This designation is nowhere else in the Epstein files. An FBI source we spoke with told us it is typically used for high-risk informants such as mafia rats.

3. In the single interview included in the release, the woman showed FBI agents a photo of Epstein and Trump on her phone. She then asked if she could crop out the second person. When agents asked about the second man, her lawyer intervened, stating that “[REDACTED] was concerned about implicating additional individuals, and specifically any that were well known, due to fear of retaliation.”

4. In an October 2019 call between the FBI and her attorney, also logged by the FBI, the attorney referenced “information regarding any investigation into a recent suspicious incident that occurred at [redacted] place of employment.” (Mentions of “suspicious incidents” confronting Trump accusers at work remind us of Stormy Daniels’ account of the creepy thug who threatened her and her baby daughter in a Vegas parking lot when she was preparing to go public about her tryst with Donald).

5. The DOJ appears to have gone to great lengths to hide the fact that they removed pages of interaction with the woman. The released Epstein files use a secondary numbering system that appears sequential, but in this case conceals significant gaps in the primary record. The woman’s first interview with the FBI, labeled “Interview One,” begins at serial -001. In the released files, the documents then jump to -008, -009, and -010 for a series of photos that include one of Epstein and Trump, with Trump cropped out, followed by images of the accuser as a teenager with friends. Three numbered records then appear relating to her initial FBI phone interview and two contacts with the Bloom firm. The six missing items of evidence could be images or text. If they are text, they could amount to many more pages in total, as the first interview runs nine pages long.

6. In one undated document that appears to be what the FBI calls a case index, there are four PROTECT SOURCE interviews listed, clearly with the same woman. We only have one of them. Where are serials 252, 264 and 312 – corresponding to Interviews 2,3, and 4?

7. There is another tell. The one interview we have is titled “Interview One.” The standard FBI practice throughout the Epstein files is to title interviews “Interview of [person]” — unless there are multiple interviews, in which case they are numbered.

8. We know this woman’s report concerned the DOJ because in July 2025, as the Department was facing calls to release the files, an internal email placed Trump at the top of a list of accused individuals on a PowerPoint presentation. His name was highlighted in yellow for “salacious” accusations, alongside Leon Black, Les Wexner, and others.

9. Because of that email and an FBI powerpoint also in the files, we know that a search for Donald Trump’s name in July 2025 returned “a positive case hit” in FBI lingo. This email implies it was documented in an attached spreadsheet which is not in the files now.

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

From the FBI Power Point:

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

From the Bloom firm lawsuit:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or it could be something else.

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

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

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Join BigTentUSA on Thursday, February 19 at 7pm ET for a timely virtual conversation with me and Camaron Stevenson, moderated by Kimberly Atkins Stohr of The Boston Globe, as we break down the latest twists in the Epstein case following the release of three million newly unsealed documents. Drawing on COURIER’s investigative reporting, we will examine newly revealed details involving figures such as Howard Lutnick, Brad Karp, and other key names and institutions emerging from the latest tranche.

We’ll unpack what these records tell us about elite networks, legal maneuvering, and accountability—what we’ve learned so far, what remains obscured, and why this moment matters both domestically and globally. From media and political power to the failures of our institutions, this conversation will connect the dots—and outline what Americans should be watching next.

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