Twenty-five years ago at 9 a.m. I was two hours from New York City preparing to take my almost two year old son to a play date. We were actually supposed to be in France on 9/11, where we were moving to live while I worked on a book. But at the last minute, I had panicked about unfinished stateside work and delayed the ticket by a month.

Norman Rockwell rural USA kind of day. Sparkling September morning. The rumble of a harvester across the road where a lone farmer was cutting his still green crop for winter silage. Eagles soaring over the river valley.

America the beautiful. God shed his grace on thee.

And a toddler on the floor.

We were in a ramshackle house we’d recently bought on our freelance photographer and writer incomes. Had not gotten too far with the fix-up. No radio, no TV nor wifi (actually the option was only dish or dialup and we had neither).

I strapped the child into his car seat and drove ten miles down river,stopping to gas up and that’s where I learned about the disaster. People were clustered around a TV, talking about the buildings, the Pentagon being hit, and maybe the White House!

“Are we at war?” I asked. A young man turned and hissed “If not we oughta be!”

Ten minutes later two riveted mothers stood watching towers fall on TV while babies gamboled nearby. After a while we went outside and they played on some swings. The sky was bright and utterly silent. We watched our baby boys and tried to imagine them in the future. Soldiers?

An editor called that afternoon asking for a column. What did it mean? Want to write about that? I thought: Whatever this means won’t be understood for years. I probably wrote exactly that.

We spent the next two and a half years in France, watching from afar the W regime and its inexorable Iraq war planning. Our country seemed crazier from the outside looking in. As the “shock and awe” came ever closer, the French held regular “manifs” - street protests against the war. Our son’s first memories probably include sitting on his father’s shoulders near the Place de la Republique and watching an effigy of W burning.

When we went back home, people had tied yellow ribbons on trees near our ramshackle house. Support our troops. Ask nothing but what you can do for your country.

If not we oughta be!

The leadup to the iraq war was long. They had to prepare the ground with lies about WMD, remember? Anyone who knew the region understood the difference between the secular dictator Saddam Hussein and the Wahhabi Muslim extremists influenced by Saudi Arabia. Saddam was locking up and torturing them.

Didn’t matter. To most Americans it was all the same. Ay-rabs. Eye-rack. Eye-ran.

Wolfowitz, Perle, Abrams, Feith, the neocon pro-Israel elves behind the scenes, took great advantage of the general ignorance.

Fact: Our warfighters chased the mastermind into a tunnel in the Afghan mountains. They had Osama bin Laden cornered. But just finishing off Al Qaeda would waste an opportunity and opportunities don’t knock every day. So they left him in there. If you still don’t believe this, read this account by CIA agent and former nuclear security agency official Bruce Held, who, among many others, has explained how the neocon elves around W wanted a war with Iraq so badly that they diverted the military from almost certainly capturing bin Laden in November 2001 to focus on war with Iraq.

They had a better idea about what to do with such an opportunity.

Cheney did too, with his Iraq oilfield map, meeting with the CEOs. Duty number one, how to keep it pumping, and second, divvy it up.

The word “terrorists’ was and still is a useful catchall label, a way to dehumanize whole swathes of oppressed people, as explained in this essay by the American lawyer John Whitbeck.

The label did a lot of lifting for the project. Among our American friends in Paris those years was a professor on sabbatical who I recall looking my husband in the eye when he suggested America was going after Iraq for Israel and saying. “That’s antisemitic.” The stakes were clear, the sides drawn. The professor later went on to write a novel channeling Arab women kidnapped by Isis.

Is it anti-Semitic, though, to see American wars in the Middle East as adjunct to support for Israel? A country into which we have poured record billions in defense dollars? And which has spent lavishly in return on lobbying and influence for decades?

A quarter century on, we’re in another war in the Middle East, and no one even bothers to pretend that it’s not for Netanyahu. That’s progress of a kind, I suppose.

Who else wanted those wars? The Saudis and their cousins in the royal families of the other Gulf monarchies didn’t mind it at all. No love lost between Wahhabis in charge of trillion dollar sovereign funds and the regional secular strongmen. Now the secular dictators are gone, the oilkings secure in their theocracies are allied with religious ethnostate Israel and lavishing the American president and his family with crypto cash, which the Trumps bank while spending tax dollars on more weapons for Israel.

Eye-rack. Eye-ran.

I think back on the editors’ request 25 years ago today. What did it mean? I didn’t know then.

But a quarter-century on, surely we know what 9/11 meant by now?

We try. A friend of mine argues that 9/11 differs from Pearl Harbor in that America has remained essentially about the same - or at least not as altered as it was after World War Two. That’s one way of looking at it. We haven’t entered a world war. Yet anyway.

But in all other ways, helplessly, we’ve changed utterly and with us, so has the planet. Our government blew through more than $5 trillion on Iraq and Afghanistan that could have been used on any number of actually needed things – education, health care, public works, climate change mitigation. Instead, those wars displaced 37 million people, most of them staggering north into Europe, upending the social order. If you don’t think that has anything to do with the rise in right wing parties in Europe, I suggest you visit any town along the south of France up against the Mediterranean where women in hijabs are pushing strollers, and men in skullcaps sit on the mairie steps.

It is in the rise of the European right feasting on the backlash to displaced millions pouring into Germany France the UK in the wake of the folly of the Iraq war and the wrecking of Syria and Libya and Afghanistan.

It’s here in the xenophobic contagion of that faraway migration, in the lie that terrorists are sneaking over our borders with other brown people, and in the normalization of masked secret police dispensing with due process.

It’s in our populist kleptocrat Trump, the people’s choice after a decade of wasted blood and treasure on the “war on terror” and lies about the grand project of remaking the Middle East.

It’s in the cynicism that bought us this lawless regime and its pharaonic corruption, a trickling down of soak the suckers Trump banditry that infects the entire economic system.

It’s in the malicious gleeful dismantling of systems and norms that once made Americans and, we thought, the world - believe in our exceptionalism.

It is in the chest beating reactionaries spawned by the unmanning effect of the event itself. The manosphere is all about burying a quarter-century of shame at the wave of fear that for a few hours infected - indelibly - the hearts of a certain kind of man.

Yesterday I watched a long video taken from a news chopper of the first tower burning while the announcer talked about getting a better view. The second tower is intact for most of the clip.

Watching it is almost unbearable, as minutes go by, and first one then another plane appears in the sky, but they fly away west - incredible that air traffic was still moving at that last minute, until finally, one darts in and the second great fireball erupts.

These days, we can see such murderous fireballs almost daily in our handheld devices, in real time video of high-tech savagery in Gaza. Yesterday the AP published a great shot of a missile hitting a refugee camp. The whizz-zip of the missile, the orange explosion, the rising belch of smoke.

The vague awareness that oh yeah, there are incinerated people in that cloud

The sound of gunfire, off in the distance … getting used to it now.

Tie a yellow ribbon.

In America, people in the strip malls and boarded up towns in flyoverland were lied to and fooled about this and they know it. Faith in media and government has chipped away. At least the Brits looked back, tried in the Chilcot report to place some accountability for great folly, finding the UK chose to join the U.S. “before peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted.” And based on dishonest and flawed “intelligence.”

AKA lies.

The farther away you were from ground zero the stronger the jingo-ism, that was another lesson learned. Islamophobia is still a guaranteed crowd-pleaser for Republicans with their low propensity voters and rural base. Witness the revolting spectacle of “America’s Mayor” Rudy Giuliani and others telling New York’s Muslim Mayor to stay away from today’s memorial downtown as Fox News’ wallpaper for these past days.

Are we at War?

If not we oughta be!

Perception is more important than reality. If someone perceives something to be true, it is more important than if it is in fact true. This doesn't mean you should be duplicitous or deceitful, but don't go out of your way to correct a false assumption if it plays to your advantage.

– Ivanka Trump recounting lessons she learned from her father in an excerpt from her book

Subscribe now

Trumpworld survivors know that good optics are the cardinal rule with the big guy – second only to successfully executing open-air corruption.

Thick-browed Pete Hegseth is nothing if not a Trumpworld survivor – for now anyway. We expect the day will come when this Fox Weekend chest-beater, currently running a real war involving the smoking ruin of U.S. bases, death and global havoc, is finally thrown under the bus.

Hegseth arrived as a Trump nominee plagued by alcohol abuse and roofie-rape allegations. Once confirmed, he delivered exactly the performance the White House reality show casting director wanted. He dubbed himself “War Secretary,” and, with a cartoonish strut, became a walking case study in steroid overuse.

A warrior caricature is as essential to the Trump show as Betty Boop femininity. But when Trump faced the greatest real challenge of his presidency – the forced release of the Epstein files in January 2026 – he needed extras as backup.

Enter Hegseth’s three social media influencers, riding to the rescue. Between them, these Three Musketeers have a combined one million X followers, more fans on podcasts and TV, and, as it turns out, Trump government positions too.

The Washington Post’s Dan Lamothe broke this delicious story (he also revealed the airport food cart caper and is one reason to maintain your Wapo subscription – despite Bezos, the place still has great, well-sourced journalists on staff).

Lamothe did not report on the substance of the trio’s social media activities in relation to the Epstein files, but the timeline speaks for itself. About a week after the files were released, Hegseth announced he was cutting Pentagon ties with Harvard and creating a task force to review military war colleges and other academic institutions. He staffed this woke-hunting task force with the aforementioned trio of former military men turned right-wing social media figures. They were given civil service acronyms – HQE (Highly Qualified Expert) or SGE (Special Government Employee) – and “.civ” government emails. The Pentagon refused to tell Lamothe whether, or how much, they were paid, or what their jobs were or how long they would be in them.

Retired Air Force colonel Kurt Schlichter, a popular right-wing flame-throwing trial lawyer, Townhall columnist, and former standup comic, is probably the best known of the three. He has 620,000 X followers whose favorite word – judging by their enthusiastic, if often grammatically incorrect, replies to his posts – is “retarded.”

Schlichter, a self-proclaimed “major influencer,” is a reliable source of MAGA snark on Fox, Newsmax, and beyond, having been around since Andrew Breitbart hired him years ago. Whether he’s still actively practicing law is anyone’s guess – his name is no longer on his firm’s website (he was still listed as recently as June).

In a crowd of surly manosphere influencers, though, Schlichter’s woman problem stands out as particularly… acute. He rarely misses a chance to trash females.

Responding to former U.S. Attorney Barb McQuade, he wrote: “Frigid wine women fear and loathe the things of men. This is why they should be patted on their empty heads and directed to the kitchen to prepare sandwiches” (you might recall that “make me a sandwich” is a rape-propaganda Tate Brothers meme spewed at female teachers by brainwashed preteen boys).

Schlichter has also called Democratic political women “fat, ugly and retarded” and liberal white women “an abomination.”

Given this penchant, it’s no surprise that he frequently dismisses Epstein’s victims as “hookers” or prostitutes and liars. From his very first comments on the files – in the form of a ranting YouTube video – he cited his experience as a trial lawyer, called the case “lies” and “nonsense,” and, apropos of nothing, mentioned that his mother is a judge. Unlike Hegseth’s mother, Kurt’s mommy has yet to weigh in on her son’s radical misogyny. He has repeatedly called those interested in the Epstein case “retarded.” He insists there is “no global sex trafficking ring.” and that he, along with Rep. Thomas Massie, “is laughing at how stupid” people are for believing there is.

The second Musketeer, is another former colonel and civilian lawyer named Thomas R. Anderson, who has racked up 320,000 followers on X under the nom de guerre Cynical Publius. As the files came out, Publius too shifted right on cue to slamming the Epstein case. There is no “there there,” he whined in one tweet. Some other greatest hits include: “We know everything there is to know;” There is “very little” in the files; Reps. Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna are “narcissistic charlatans bent on harming Donald Trump;” “Trump was the first person to report [Epstein] to the police” (despite not having a shred of evidence to back that up); and our personal favorite, “There is no ‘Epstein List.’”. Anderson/Publius also claimed that making any Trump and Epstein connection was defamatory and slanderous.

Mississippi-based podcaster Rob Maness, the third Musketeer with a Pentagon HQE title, spent months calling for the release of the Epstein files. But on the day the Wall Street Journal dropped its story on Trump’s contribution to Epstein’s 50th birthday book, Maness abruptly reversed course. After firing off two final tweets on July 17, 2025, he never mentioned Epstein again:

Predictably, Kegseth and his very online MAGA patriots ran for cover once the Post story broke. Publius squealed that he was only hired to serve on the task force and had nothing to hide. Maness accused the Post of defaming him, claiming the information about his Pentagon work was “illegally obtained personally identifiable information from government data sources.” Schlichter published an entire Town Hall column calling the Post “regime media” that “hits like a girl” – notably without ever denying that he had the government gig.

We all know it takes a social media village to make a sick bully named thousands of times in the Epstein files palatable. Lockstep messaging from Posobiec to Loomer to Schlichter to the Foxbots has been the name of the MAGA game for a decade. But War Sec. Hegseth now appears to be so freaked out by the exposure of his optics games and war disasters that he’s running polygraphs on dozens of officials, desperately hunting leakers while our Gulf bases go up in smoke – off camera.

Share

To preteen girls of my 1970s junior high, there was no other way to be. Hiphuggers, short skirts, aviators, long swingy hair. A lot of sass. And for many of us, the first post “Women’s Lib” generation, the expectation of an adventure-filled, self-reliant future with marriage and motherhood as options not imminent requirements.

To her peers in the adult public square at the time, she had threaded the needle of sexy and smart in a way that made male detractors look like idiots. The record of their blustering scorn and contumely and the open ridicule heaped on her, and the women she led, is part of history.

Feminazi. Furry Legged fanatic. C-word. B-word. And the perennial favorite: Man-hater.

They couldn’t take it. Her wit and panache drew out their scorn the way certain salves drain boils. The casual insolence and open diminishment toward her and her peers was part of the cultural wallpaper of the era. Among the men engaged in it, the psychological temperature ranged from lightly snide to psychotic.

Reporting on the creation of Ms. Magazine, ABC news anchor Harry Reasoner said on national television, “I give it six months before they run out of things to say.”

By the 1980s, the Viagran Centurions of the media had mobilized. The shock jocks - Limbaugh, Imus Stern - can’t you take a joke? - and their spiritual grandsons the fight club rape propagandist Tate bros and their herd of manosphere sheep. The disappointed entitled, the preternaturally insecure, the incels, and their insidious cousins, the fascist tiki-torch carrying “You Will Not Replace Us” troops.

Gay Talese, revered chronicler of the famously misogyinistic Italian Mafia, sharing a taxi with Steinem and another great 20th Century phallocrat the author Saul Bellow - once famously said: “You know how every year there’s a pretty girl who comes to New York and pretends to be a writer? Well, Gloria is this year’s pretty girl.”

To her face.

Can’t you take a joke?

Charles Manson, weighing in from prison in a 1970 interview uttered a phrase that decades later is close to an actual slogan dripped from the mouths of men from JD Vance to the Tate brothers: “Gloria Steinem and all those girls’ libbers, they’re taking the manliness out of the man. They want to be the men, but they don’t want to carry the weight.”

Replacement was always the underlying fear.

Millions of men now share the views of a psychotic mass murdering cult leader.: Taking the manliness out of the man.

Steinem saw this coming back in 1972: “Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.” In later speeches she would add to that: “But too few men are becoming the women they wanted to marry.”

She could name the core issues like no one else. Cut to the chase. “Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke. That’s their natural and first weapon.”

And: “She will need her sisterhood.”

Where is that sisterhood half a century later?

It boggles the mind that successful right wing American female leaders like Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Karoline Leavitt, Nancy Mace, Erika Kirk and the millionaire influencers and online trad wives and their followers do not revere this woman who demanded their equal humanity and enabled their rise from second class citizenship. Among other things they enjoy, they owe their professional status, credit cards and bank accounts and freedom to divorce to this woman’s leadership.

Instead of insisting that their men change to accommodate the new reality, they have decided to solve the problem of reactionary Tate-ish, manosphere incel-hate and preacherman misogyny disguised as the Lord’s word, by cheerleading for it, by promoting a retreat to primordial female roles. And taking that to the bank — from which they hire the nannies to watch the children they like to claim progressive women hate to care for.

Everything old is new again. For now.

Gloria has sailed into her rest. As Yeats wrote in his epitaph for Jonathan Swift, savage indignation there cannot lacerate her breast.

But in the era of state-regulated forced childbirth, wormy so-called Christian pastors calling for the return of god-given, man-only voting, and the resurgence of Trump style transactional sugar-daddy relationships between bloated, insecure Viagrans and surgically disfigured foot-bound younger women who have given up the fight, indignation is now ours to nurture and maintain.

“We did not redact images of any men unless it was impossible to redact the woman without also redacting the man. We did not protect President Trump. We didn’t protect or not protect anybody.”

That was Todd “Boy Cohn” Blanche earlier this year, explaining how the Department of Justice was handling redactions of sensitive information as it complied with the Epstein Files Transparency Act (EFTA).

At the same press conference, Blanche also promised DOJ was going to prosecute men involved in trafficking. “If we learn about information and evidence that allows us to prosecute them, you better believe we will.” But then he added this qualification: “I don’t think that the public or you all are going to uncover men within the Epstein files that abuse women.”

Regular readers of the Freakshow will know at a glance that that statement is not true. The files contain plenty of information and evidence suggesting that some men – both named and unnamed – appear to have participated in Epstein’s trafficking operation as scouts or johns, while many, many more appear to have been aware of the activities but done nothing about them.

Subscribe now

And over the past six months, we have uncovered the names of numerous men – and one non-victim woman, Kathy Ruemmler – whose identities are concealed in some or all versions of the files. Among the mysteriously redacted: the late sex traffickers Daniel Siad and Jean-Luc Brunel; Steve Bannon; former Prince Andrew’s top aide David Stern; Epstein’s brother Mark Epstein; Epstein’s great benefactor Les Wexner; Wall Street titans Leon Black and Glenn Dubin; former Colombian president Andrés Pastrana; former British ambassador to the U.S. Peter Mandelson; disgraced Dubai businessman Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem; Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman; former French minister Jack Lang; Kathy Ruemmler; and former Sen. George Mitchell.

How we uncovered these names varied from case to case. In many instances, there was another, unredacted copy of the same email, text message, or photo elsewhere in the files (suggesting a concerning lack of consistency in the redaction process). We also made some determinations based on an abundance of context clues.

Here is a sampling of some of the mystery-man redactions we have identified:

Daniel Siad is redacted in this conversation with Ghislaine Maxwell. The context of the email is that Epstein and Maxwell had just returned from Havana, where they had a five-hour lunch with Fidel Castro. Four days later, Siad sent Maxwell an email (“Hello from Havana”), which she forwarded to Epstein. For some reason, DOJ saw fit to redact Siad’s name.

Peter Mandelson can be identified as the redacted sender of this email reading: “Find me someone to be really nice to in Dubai.”

References to Leon Black are redacted multiple times in this email from Epstein recruiter Irina Chernova, discussing with Epstein a “good bye gift” she had received from Black (more on the relationship between Black and Epstein’s Russian recruiters in our The Billionaire and the Recruiters Freakshow series). Black is also redacted in this court filing from the U.S. Virgin Islands’ litigation against JPMorgan over the bank’s financing of Epstein’s trafficking there. Many other men are named in the document – but another Wall Street titan, hedge funder Glenn Dubin, is redacted. Dubin and his wife spent considerable time on Epstein’s island and they are also named in a deposition by an Epstein employee who alleged that one of their nannies was a terrified underage Swede who said Ghislaine Maxwell had taken away her passport in the Caribbean.

Les Wexner, the Ohio billionaire who was Epstein’s great benefactor, and Jean-Luc Brunel, the modeling agent accused of procuring girls for Epstein, are both mysteriously redacted in some copies of a 2024 internal FBI document summarizing the Epstein case and laying out the investigation timeline.

Former Colombian president Andrés Pastrana is the redacted sender of this email; the redacted recipient is Ghislaine Maxwell. Pastrana mentions Maxwell’s plans to “be in Arkansas with Clinton” and he is redacted again in an email from Maxwell mentioning Jeffrey’s “ideas for the conference.” Pastrana had flown to Cuba with Maxwell and Epstein a week earlier and afterwards sent Ghislaine a warm email in Spanish – his name again redacted – saying that el Comandante had a wonderful time.

Note: In an email the previous day, Daniel Siad mentioned that he was in Havana “taking care of” someone he calls “Andreas a great gentelement [sic],” a possible reference to Pastrana. The Freakshow has so far not determined what “taking care of” meant.

Some redactions look less like victim protection and more like protection from embarrassment.

The DOJ went to town with the blackout ink on former Prince Andrew’s aide David Stern. Stern can be identified as the redacted sender in numerous emails to Epstein on the topic of “lots of P” (P being Pussy), because in other messages, he is not redacted while discussing exactly the same thing.

Here is Stern wishing Epstein “lots of P” for his birthday in 2012, and again for the new year; making plans with Epstein to buy the Dukes Hotel in London with “room for lots of P”; on the lookout for new assistant P for Jeff in St. Moritz; and lamenting the hot weather and lack of good P in London.

Here, comedian Bobby Slayton is redacted while wishing Epstein a Happy New Year and, of course, a year with lots of pussy.

Some of the redactions do indeed look accidental. Tom Pritzker is all over the Epstein files, but is redacted in one entirely anodyne Maxwell email from 2001: “See you at 71st at 9.15pm Then I will feed you [sic].” It’s also possible that this single redaction is only one of others yet unmasked.

Other examples are harder to explain. Why would the late Wall Street tycoon and Epstein mentor Ace Greenberg’s name be redacted from Epstein’s Bear Stearns background check paperwork? Reputation protection? Brother Mark Epstein’s name and relationship to Jeff are redacted in the same file.

There are mysteriously redacted male faces in photographs, too. Redactions in two photos cover the face of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Two men flanking a woman or girl are concealed in this image. And in another redacted image, Sen. George Mitchell sits beside Jeffrey Epstein, holding a redacted small child (probably Mitchell’s child and not a victim).

Some redactions were contested early on. In February, Reps. Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna, who had seen both the original and redacted documents, grilled Blanche about the hidden identities. Massie pointed to a document containing 20 names, 18 of which had been redacted. Blanche claimed the document had “numerous victim names” and that DOJ had “unredacted all non-victim names.”

At the same hearing, Blanche also defended the redaction of Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem’s name in a notorious email in which Epstein tells the redacted Sultan that he “loved the torture video.” Blanche claimed it was initially redacted because the material contained an email address constituting personally identifiable information.

A February 2026 report to Congress, signed by Pam Bondi and Blanche, alphabetically listed the names of dozens of men and a few women – from Alexander Acosta to Paolo Zampolli – who were government officials or “politically exposed” and/or appeared in the files at least once. The letter stated that “No records were withheld or redacted on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure or foreign dignitary.”

Melania Trump is on the list, along with Donald Trump, but based on our review, that list is incomplete. The missing include Dubin, Stern, Pastrana, Greenberg and Mitchell. Mitchell’s omission can’t be explained simply by his being deceased since Kurt Cobain and Janis Joplin are both included.

If we take DOJ at its word that nobody was omitted or redacted to spare embarrassment or reputational harm, then there must be some other explanation for masking those men.

The only official excuse is in a footnote to the February report:

Any omissions from the list are unintentional and, as explained in the previous letters to Congress, a result of the volume and speed with which the Department complied with the Act. Individuals whose names were redacted for law-enforcement sensitive purposes are not included.

It’s entirely possible that some of the redactions (and un-redactions) are mistakes. But others are clearly deliberate. And Blanche has never defined what “law-enforcement sensitive purposes” actually means.

Blanche made his first public statement on the Epstein files on July 22, 2025 to announce that he would be interviewing Ghislaine Maxwell in person.

Six months later, announcing DOJ’s compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act, he cautioned that the public’s “hunger or a thirst for information” would probably not be satisfied by the documents because he “[didn’t] think that the public or you all are going to uncover men within the Epstein files that abuse women.” Now that he is Attorney General, Blanche has repeatedly doubled down on that position.

Meanwhile, his and DOJ’s explanations for what remains hidden continue to evolve. Tellingly, the excuse they’re using now for withholding handwritten FBI notes – that they are “duplicative” – was never mentioned in the early explanations.

Journalist Katie Phang’s lawsuit against Blanche prompted the DOJ to acknowledge that 200,000 pages in the files had been redacted or withheld based on various privileges. The judge in that case has so far appeared to side with Phang on the transparency issue and has threatened the DOJ with a contempt of court citation for failing to adequately explain various mystery redactions.

Protecting the men in the files from embarrassment or worse is apparently of higher importance than investigating any of them for knowledge of or involvement in Epstein’s crimes.

This is not the case in Europe. Norway is investigating two Epstein pals. At least two of the DOJ’s redacted men – Lang and Mandelson – are under investigation in France and the UK. Daniel Siad was also under investigation in France before he died.

So we have another sordid Trumpy milestone: his top law enforcement agency stands alone among the Western nations, not only turning a blind eye to a global trafficking and influence network with abused girls and women at its core, but actively hiding their names in file releases demanded by Congress.

Share

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

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

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

Subscribe now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leon: “You OK? Hopefully not overexerting …”

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

Leon: ???

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

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

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

And then there are the photos themselves.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just good clean fun.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The scope includes:

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

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

Comer wrote:

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

Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff is, for the moment anyway, the Democratic Party’s living legend in effective rhetoric. And he struck a hell of a nerve this week just by stating the obvious: Trump, he said, “doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.”

On its face, that statement is difficult for any sentient political observer, right or left, to disagree with. It has been obvious for months that Trump would much rather spend his days on his Bob the Builder projects, take a few public naps, and spend the wee hours exulting and giggling over racist memes and AI renderings of himself as Genghis Khan or Jesus – delivered by Natalie Harp, the woman his own staff calls his “Binky,” his security blanket.

Subscribe now

Even Forbes, The Capitalist Tool, noticed, publishing a story headlined, “Natalie Harp Seen Everywhere With Trump Lately.”

Meanwhile, his lawfully wedded spouse of two decades hasn’t been spotted anywhere, let alone anywhere near him, for almost a month.

Cat’s away, mice will play! Oops…

But the right has gone crazy. Scandalized pearl-clutching all around!

Trump himself feebly insulted Ossoff, calling him Pee-wee Herman. His allies, however, rushed to the defense of his chivalry and Harp’s honor in a ferocious eruption of performative hypocrisy.

Megyn “blood coming out of her wherever” Kelly went to the mat – figuratively, if not literally – for the disgusting cad.

Kelly was joined in moral outrage by the whole gang, playing the same tune in concert, like the Philharmonic, from Newt Gingrich – who famously discussed his divorce papers with his hospitalized wife – to Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, who, like Kelly, accused Ossoff of “sexism.””

Mentioning in political speech that the President is spending time with “Natalie” is apparently a level of offense above that of mainstream journalists quoting solid White House sources claiming Harp is so devoted to Trump that she:

• Slept in a Trump golf club locker room for a summer rather than be exiled from his glorious presence.

• Left him mash notes that alarmed even his devoted chief of staff, including, “You are all that matters to me,” “I don’t ever want to let you down,” and “I want to bring you joy.”

• Was one of the chosen ones invited aboard the sneaky Presidential food cart on the tarmac in Ankara, conveying him away from possible harm, leaving reporters and Cabinet members behind as live decoys for the Iranians Israel had promised were coming to get him.

• Apparently reads him to sleep at night with racist and sexist memes and conspiracy theories he can push out on “Trump Social.”

• Inspired the White House nickname “Binky,” because, as the Times’ Maggie Haberman said, “She is sort of his binky, for lack of a better way of putting it, a comfort blanket.”

Supercharge your program with Action Network Boost

Powerful features for the most advanced digital programs, including deliverability reporting, priority support, a new way to dig deeper into your data, simplified email customization, and much, much more. Sign up and get 10% off Boost here >

As we noted almost a year ago in The Body Horror of the Trump Years, after that tense weekend during which Trump disappeared, a brown something was seen tossed out of the White House residence window, and rumors were rife that he was dead or dying at Walter Reed:

The MAGA movement has undeniable aspects of body horror, a subgenre of horror that involves grotesque degeneration, mutation, or transformation of the human body … The doddering old man’s body is metaphor for the ghastly corrupting effect he has had on our country: a decade-long descent of our public discourse into profane spectacle, the jettisoning of common decency and empathy in favor of rudeness and cruelty, the daily rituals of public humiliation, open racism and sexism, and the craven terror of the disfigured Republican Party.

Natalie Harp’s arrival in Trumpworld is itself body-horror adjacent. She emerged, fully formed as a useful political prop, out of California around 2018, when she first tweeted support for Trump. The following year, she appeared on Fox and Friends, claiming she had a bone cancer that standard chemo was not helping. She credited Trump’s “Right to Try” law with giving her access to an experimental treatment that supposedly saved her life. (Her story has been convincingly challenged, but letting facts get in the way of a good political story is not the MAGA way.)

Trump, watching his favorite show, was enchanted by the Ivanka-Marla lookalike Liberty University graduate. He soon invited her onstage at one of his speeches. Before long, she was on national alt-right fake-news TV, spouting Bible verses and eventually Big Lie election trash as an anchor on OAN. She also landed a coveted speaking slot at the 2020 Republican convention.

By the summer of 2024, she was bunking in the locker room at the Trump National Golf Course Bedminster, so as to not let too much daylight get between her and The Donald. Melania was said to be irked and the staff alarmed, but nothing put a dent in her clutch behavior, least of all the object of her devotion.

Last week, Michael Wolff shared one of his best Inside Trump’s Brain reflections on Instagram, challenging one of the anti-Trump world’s most cherished certainties: the ubiquitous meme that Trump wears a diaper. Wolff is convinced it isn’t true, and there is little reason to doubt his access to Trumpworld insiders; the Epstein files made that crystal clear. He blames our universal attachment to the Trump diaper on a psychological syndrome that afflicts us all: the utter disbelief that obese, vituperative, rambling Trump “exists at all – an 80 year old man who lives on junk food and has never exercised a day in his life.”

As Wolff put it, we are riveted by the survival of this visibly decaying man: “How is that possible?”

The diaper, in other words, is less a medical claim than a tangible symptom of the Body Horror of Trump. And it is indeed horror. The kind that sticks.

Which is why Ossoff’s comment so unnerved the Red Team.

I am not alone in sharing this piece of feminine wisdom, dear Freakshow fans: There is no ladylike sensibility in the nation that doesn’t recoil at the thought of those giant, swollen, bruised paws coming anywhere near a young one’s flesh. And there is not a woman alive whose stomach doesn’t churn in unison with that of any young woman – even a devotee there by choice – confronting those flaccid turkey giblets (to steal a metaphor from the poet Anne Sexton), let alone interacting with that in any way.

Ossoff didn’t need to spell anything out. He didn’t need an allegation, a punchline, or even an adjective. He just said “Natalie” and everybody filled in the blanks of their own volition.

That is also what makes the ensuing Republican outrage so spectacularly funny. The party that has coalesced around a decaying, profane misogynist – who introduced America to the coarsest level of political discourse and misbehavior toward women in living memory – accusing a Democrat of gutter politics for simply mentioning the name of a woman constantly at the president’s side is one of the best laughs of Summer 2026.

Enjoy it while it lasts.

Share

Supercharge your program with Action Network Boost

Powerful features for the most advanced digital programs, including deliverability reporting, priority support, a new way to dig deeper into your data, simplified email customization, and much, much more. Sign up and get 10% off Boost here >

The moral cadavers in the crypt that is the U.S. Senate have now confirmed Donald Trump’s personal attorney Todd Blanche as our next Attorney General. Raising their pale, bony hands in unison last week, they gifted Donald the lawyer of his dreams, a man he expects to finally fill the shoes of his great mentor in mob-style lawlessness, Roy Cohn.

Blanche begins his new job as Chief Epstein Coverup Officer on an appropriately macabre anniversary. Seven years ago yesterday, Epstein was found hanging in his New York jail cell, leaving countless trafficked victims without justice, untold numbers of johns and habitual pedophiles shaken to the core and in danger of exposure, and a web of conspiracy theories that have powered whole political movements, including Donald Trump’s.

Subscribe now

Blanche has already proven his eagerness not merely to preside over the Epstein Files Coverup, but to personally engineer it – from executing an apparently illegal quid pro quo with sex monster Ghislaine Maxwell, to overseeing the redaction of names of rich predators in the files, to publicly promising to flout the Epstein Files Transparency Act entirely and withhold millions more pages of evidence that Congress has demanded be released.

His primary purpose appears to be to protect the men.

That is the main concern of a White House that has more mercy for men accused of domestic violence and roofie rape than for raped preteens with unwanted pregnancies. After stating that he was aware of three million more pages of documents, Blanche claimed, “There’s not some tranche of super-secret documents about Jeffrey Epstein that we’re withholding. We’re actually not withholding anything.” And he later told journalists: “This review is over.”

Lawyer and journalist Katie Phang, in her lawsuit against the DOJ over the Epstein coverup, is trying to force the department to explain who each redacted person actually is – victim, law-enforcement officer, etc. – and exactly how the statute permits their concealment. Congress authorized the protection of victims, not the protection of men from embarrassment or scrutiny. The judge in that case so far appears to be siding with her, making the Justice Department prove its case rather than simply taking Trump regime lawyers’ word for it.

Blanche is willing and able to play the role, but he is not really Trump’s Roy Cohn. He lacks the whiff of infernal sulphur that trailed his greatest predecessor in Trump’s long and sordid legal history.

Blanche is his “Boy Cohn.” And Boy Cohn has an origin story.

He is the son of a preacherman who – as we broke in a previous Freakshow – fought the law for years, trying to win the so-called “religious liberty” to host a twice weekly holy hoohaw in his suburban home. There, little Todd watched as his family split-level living room was transformed into a rave of dozens of falling-on-the floor, glossolalia-babbling, moaning and sobbing, God-orgasming Pentecostals.

The heavenly caterwauling bothered the neighbors. The city had an ordinance about such gatherings and told Todd’s father to stop. He called on “religious liberty” theoreticians in the nascent national Christian legal community. And off to court they went, for years.

This was in the 1980s, when the Christian right was just mustering its legal squadron for what has since become a full-on assault on American society. Little Todd was a preteen, watching it all from the corner of the living room. Or, who knows, maybe falling down in a Lord-struck stupor with the adults. More likely he was staring wide-eyed, absorbing the kookiness – and, behind closed doors, his father’s anguish at being denied what he considered to be his God-ordained right to host a revival in his suburban home whenever the lightning of the Lord pierced his head.

Decades later, Boy Cohn gets to avenge his actual daddy’s legal defeat by playing hero to an even Bigger Daddy who also considers himself a victim of the law.

It should come as no surprise that “Boy Cohn” Blanche, whose worldview was formed in a clash between religious fanaticism and secular law, plans to go well beyond advancing Trump’s Epstein coverup. He is now the preeminent legal defender of a Predatory Man’s White House: a regime that profited financially and politically off the pimp-pornographer Tates, is headed by a serial sex offender, and employs a roofie-rape accused “War Secretary.”

And Blanche has promised to go after the remaining rights of American women as well.

Just before his confirmation, Blanche was on a “White House Faith Office” call promising anti-abortionists “religious”liberty” for their cherished scheme to criminalize women from New York City to Baton Rouge and beyond. For Trump and his political strategists, the alliance with the god squad is just Politics 101. Trump couldn’t care less about the Bible or abortion. But for the regime’s White Christian nationalists like Russ Vought, the end goal is much bigger than denying Epstein survivors justice: it is putting 150 million women and girls on the back foot.

These religious liberty for me but not for thee fanatics now have a cool customer on their side: an experienced Manhattan federal prosecutor whose primary motivation is serving a Big Daddy who sees himself as a victim. On the Faith Office call, Blanche promised activists that DOJ, HHS, FDA and the White House were working on “permanent solutions” to prevent states and organizations from circumventing state abortion bans, and making Dobbs “permanent in every single state.”

What did women ever do to these men to deserve to be put on the back foot en masse like this? Maybe nothing, other than being a large and potentially powerful oppositional force to fascism. Maybe a lot more, having found autonomy and self-reliance preferable to the domination that Trumpism demands of men.

Historian of autocracy and friend of the Freakshow Ruth Ben Ghiat has written extensively about the link between controlling women and the rise of autocracy. “In an authoritarian state,” she has written, “women are as much the enemies of the strongman as the press, prosecutors, and the opposition.”

Your Freakshow Guide recently met the brilliant writer and Nazi era historian Rebecca Donner, author of a bestselling book about an American woman hero in the German resistance who stood up to Hitler. In an excellent Nation essay before the 2024 election, “Project 2025 in the Original Language,” Donner pointed out the parallels between the blueprint for Trump’s second term and the Nazi regime when it comes to women. Just four months after Hitler took power, women lost their reproductive rights and abortion was criminalized. And that was just the start. Women’s clinics were shuttered and 19,000 women who held positions in regional and local government offices were abruptly fired. Women lawyers were barred from serving as judges or public prosecutors, and female doctors were thrown off government-sponsored insurance plans.

Hitler shrieked: “We do not think it proper for woman to invade the world of man, to enter his territory; instead, we think it natural for these worlds to remain separate.” Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels echoed: “The first, best, and most suitable place for the woman is in the family, and her most glorious duty is to bear children.”

Third Reich comparisons aside, as 21st Century Americans, we can still maintain our faith that accountability is coming for this claque. Donald Trump’s approval ratings are lower than any president’s in polling history. His MAGAs are cracking up over the Epstein “hoax.” He might have SCOTUS-granted immunity for himself, but that immunity doesn’t extend to an appointee – even one sitting at the top of the justice system, who brazenly moved a sex monster to a friendly Camp Fed in exchange for lies and who is flouting a statute.

Boy Cohn is riding high now.

Every dog has its day.

Subscribe now

Share

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

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

Subscribe now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New features to Boost your digital program

Introducing Action Network Boost, a new add-on package built to take sophisticated digital programs to the next level. AI-informed reporting insights, new tools for cross-team collaboration, deliverability expertise, priority support, and much, much more. Learn more & get 10% off Boost here >

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*It has been pointed out by readers that the Neanderthals were far better men than the Tates and Trumps, and I thereby apologize and welcome suggestions for a better prehistoric analogy.

Share

New features to Boost your digital program

Introducing Action Network Boost, a new add-on package built to take sophisticated digital programs to the next level. AI-informed reporting insights, new tools for cross-team collaboration, deliverability expertise, priority support, and much, much more. Learn more & get 10% off Boost here >

President Donald Trump and his family could soon be confronted with “one of the biggest scandals” he’s ever faced, scholar and journalist Sidney Blumenthal suggested in our conversation on the legal commentary network “Legal AF.”

IN the current milieu of epochal corruption and pharaonic abuse of democracy it’s hard to imagine what “biggest scandal” could be . But the shocking impunity and more - respect - granted by Trump affiliates and White House insiders to these men multiply accused of rape and trafficking (see this week’s Freakshow) over a decade begs to be investigated by the House Oversight Committee.

The brothers raked in millions in Rumble podcast contract money and from their trafficking-connected private paid chat “War Room” and their “Hustler’s University” that fleeces preteens with promises of lessons to create a life of luxury cars and “hot” women. They have enjoyed global impunity in part thanks to a “bro media” network of right-wingers like Ticker Carlson and Candace Owen (now backing off) and Trump affiliates and members of the Trump family including Barron Trump.

The Tate-adjacent Trump underworld includes Barron Trump, Don, Jr., the family crypto bank World Liberty Financial and Zach Witkoff, “Special Envoy for Global Partnerships” Paolo Zampolli, various manosphere hustlers, many of whom have been getting very very rich off their links to each other and the Trumps.

As I told Blumenthal: “They’re the millennial version of Epstein; they have a type of network that is similar in that it relies on the trading of females and the abuse of women as the glue that connects them to each other. But it’s also a financial and political power node that they inhabit.”

WATCH: Trump’s Link to Tate Brothers Exposed by Inner Circle! by Legal AF

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

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

Subscribe now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Supercharge your program with Action Network Boost

Powerful features for the most advanced digital programs, including deliverability reporting, priority support, a new way to dig deeper into your data, simplified email customization, and much, much more. Sign up and get 10% off Boost here >

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If Andrew Tate were free, he would be dismantling this communist psychopath in real time and raising an army to unseat her for going after Barron Trump.

The Tate Bros are one of the most powerful weapons the conservative movement has.Their absence is the point.

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

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

Share

Supercharge your program with Action Network Boost

Powerful features for the most advanced digital programs, including deliverability reporting, priority support, a new way to dig deeper into your data, simplified email customization, and much, much more. Sign up and get 10% off Boost here >

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

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

Subscribe now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A month later, Siad wrote Epstein: “In Paris ,helping Victoria ,very excited to start the TV project that will help us more for Scouting [sic].” DOJ records indicate Black sent $20,000 to a redacted recipient that same day. While the identity of this recipient is uncertain, other payments from Black to the same person closely align with dates Housez says she met with him.2

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

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

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

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

Share

The President stands before the nation, using the bully pulpit of the White House, flanked by a pack of toady national security appointees, to deliver a warning about foreign interference in American elections. We don’t expect him to remind the nation of the foreign meddling in his own 2016 election — we have done some of that in this week’s column here.

The following is a response written and circulated by former government officials detailing the systemic manipulation of out of context selectively declassified documents aimed at juicing repeatedly debunked conspiracy theories to revitalize the Big Lie and give pretext for federalizing elections in our 50 states.

Read and share with the confused and gullible.

TRUMP ELECTIONS INTEL SPEECH BACKGROUNDER

Thursday, July 16, 2026

1. What to Expect Tonight (per press reporting, as of this morning)

• 9 PM EDT national address. Reported to be joined by Ratcliffe (CIA), Patel (FBI), Pulte (acting DNI), and Mullin (DHS) — the full stagecraft of an official government finding.

• Two subjects fused on purpose: alleged foreign influence/interference in 2020, and voting-machine “vulnerabilities.”

• A cover-up claim. Per CBS last night, one component will allege Beijing compromised U.S. voter data and that CIA knew and withheld it from Trump in his first term. Expect the intelligence dispute recast as an intelligence conspiracy — the target is not China; it is the IC.

• A mass document release — potentially thousands of raw records — curated by Pulte and John Solomon, brought on in June as a special government employee to choose what gets declassified. Kurt Olsen is working the Venezuela angle.

• Likely ingredients: Chinese acquisition of voter-registration data; the 2020–21 analytic dispute over China and the ombudsman report; Venezuelan machine capability; the Muskegon, Michigan registration case; a DHS noncitizen count. An adviser has denied claims that the Georgia Senate results will be declared “illegitimate”; another calls the speech a “potpourri” that may touch Iran. The text was not final last night.

2. Key Distinction

• Influence is not interference. Influence is propaganda — ads, trolls, state media. Interference is technical compromise of voting systems to change votes. The IC has used that distinction consistently since 2016.

• And there is a chain of four links, not one: acquisition → alteration → effect on votes → effect on the outcome. Evidence of influence is not evidence of access. Access is not alteration. Alteration would still have to be tied to the outcome.

• The IC never found links two, three, or four. The March 2021 assessment — NIC, CIA, DHS, FBI, State, NSA — found no indications any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process: registration, casting, tabulation, reporting. The companion DOJ/DHS/FBI/CISA report that month: no evidence any foreign-affiliated actor prevented voting, changed votes, or compromised registration integrity.

• On China specifically, the published assessment held with high confidence that China did not deploy interference efforts, and considered but did not deploy influence intended to change the outcome.

• The voter-data claim is already public, and it is thin. A declassified April 2020 NIO-Cyber report says Chinese intelligence “analyzed” states’ voter-registration data — for “public opinion analysis.” It does not say how China obtained the data; much registration data is public or commercially available. The unredacted portions do not accuse China of manipulating anything.

3. How Intel Gets Manipulated

• Aggregation. Stacking unrelated allegations — espionage, analytic disputes, Venezuela, Michigan, a noncitizen count — so the volume implies a conclusion none of them supports. Different actors, different systems, different evidence. Volume is not evidence. Make them defend each claim standing alone.

• Raw over finished. Dumping thousands of raw reports is not disclosure. Raw intelligence is uncorroborated by design, a source relaying a sub-source relaying an unnamed official. Finished analysis is what survived vetting. This burns sources and methods. Ask who vetted this. The NIC never saw it. And they just fired the NIC. Example: the September 2020 FBI Albany report — an alleged Chinese fake-license mail-ballot scheme the bureau’s own personnel called uncorroborated and possibly Chinese disinformation. If it resurfaces tonight as proof, that is the technique in action.

• Elevating dissent over judgment. The minority view is already in the published 2021 assessment — footnoted, not buried. That is the system working. And read what it says: the NIO for Cyber held with moderate confidence that China sought to undermine Trump through social media and official statements — and agreed China did not touch election processes. Promoting a dissent because it is politically useful is the Iraq WMD playbook: Office of Special Plans, Curveball, aluminum tubes all over again.

• Politicization Charge to Cover Politicization. The IC ombudsman’s January 2021 report found “influence” and “interference” used inconsistently, China analysts hesitant to characterize Chinese activity. Even the dissent didn’t claim China touched registration, ballots, counting, or reporting. Analysts also pressured the other way on Russia.

4. 2026 is not 2020: Guardrails Gone

• The people who would have caught this are gone. The NIC chair was walked out in 2025 for an assessment the White House disliked. Pulte arrived a day early and asked ODNI for a list of every employee to assess whom to fire. He fired the head of the Office of Mission Integration — which oversees the PDB and the NIC — and dismissed at least 21 career NIC staff, all but liquidating the IC’s senior-most analytic body. IC now intimidated, knows what happens when you contradict leadership.

• The acting title is the point. Trump told the Wall Street Journal an acting director is “less shackled,” with “more power…for a somewhat limited period of time,” and urged Pulte to start firing now, before a permanent successor arrives. The acting position is an opportunity for an unrestrained assault.

• Declassification is a political instrument. Gabbard rescinded finished assessments by memo on her way out the door. That pen passed to Pulte, who turned a sleepy mortgage regulator into criminal referrals against the President’s enemies — James, Schiff, Cook, Swalwell. He now curates tonight’s “evidence.”

• The outside referees are gone too — platform integrity teams, researcher data-sharing, and CISA’s election-security mission, all gutted.

5. What This is For: November 2026, not 2020

• Nothing released tonight can change 2020. Four months out from the midterms, the point is the predicate: casting 2020 as illegitimate builds the argument to contest 2026.

• An FBI assigning hundreds of agents to hunt for nonexistent fraud and a DNI willing to put the IC behind it will turn the same tools on the midterms. This follows the FBI seizure of more than 650 boxes of Fulton County records, with the sitting DNI along on the raid. Tonight is only the first step:

– Manufacture doubt about the integrity of the vote and the machines that count it. ← this is tonight

– Target officials who certify results the President dislikes.

– Selectively release intelligence to suggest a foreign power favors a Democratic candidate.

– Fabricate a pretext to seize ballots outright and halt the count in contested districts.

• Watch the demand, not the allegation. Expect it paired with the stalled SAVE Act and with the machines: the President just removed the remaining EAC commissioners, and the EAC sets voting-machine certification standards — he has previously tried to order it to decertify every machine in use. “The machines are vulnerable” is the argument for federal control of the machines. Gabbard’s own investigation examined Puerto Rico machines, found flaws but no evidence of hacking.

6. Key points

• Evidence of influence is not evidence of access. Access is not alteration. And alteration would still have to be tied to the outcome.

• Volume is not evidence. Six weak claims stacked together are still six weak claims.

• A raw report is a rumor with a classification stamp.

• They’re using a real dispute between analysts as a substitute for evidence about what China did.

• The question for a “cover-up”: covered up from whom? The dissent is footnoted in a published paper.

• Nothing in this speech can change 2020. It was never meant to. It is about November.

• ODNI fired the experts who could have vetted the charges — will likely to be replaced with political hacks.

^{Jeffrey Epstein, Kathy Ruemmler and Terje Rød Larsen Credit: Department of Justice}

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

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

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

Subscribe now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In April 2018 Epstein first mentioned Ruemmler’s Nader connection to Bannon writing, “as you know Kathy is Nader s counsel. She s very busy [sic]”.

Four days later, he texted Bannon: “Kathy coming now to download” followed a few hours later he updated with “Im sittin here with Kathy rummer. If you have any questions [sic]”.

A few weeks later, Bannon texted Epstein: “Just got summoned to Abu Dhabi for meeting with mbz for Monday night.” A few days later, Bannon was making plans to meet with Dubai billionaire Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem — then chairman and CEO of global logistics giant DP World, now a disgraced Epstein john. Epstein texted Bannon: “you are going to have FUN”; to which Bannon replied: “I’m here @ least thru Sunday —- need to close this” [sic].

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

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

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

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

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

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

Share

President Trump likes to complain about the “Russia Russia Russia Hoax,” but there is no question that he has an unusual affinity for Mother Russia. Wall Street whales, like former Apollo Group CEO Leon Black, understand it. Epstein did too. Post-Soviet Russia was a new frontier – lawless as the old Wild West, with capitalists and wannabe oligarchs racing to smash and grab resources and formerly state-run industries. Everything was for sale, including beautiful women; sexuality itself was commodified.

The activities of Trump and the Epstein class in that time and place are among the dirty secrets at the heart of the Epstein cover-up. This week, based on new discoveries in the files, we take a look at the Trump Tower Moscow, an unrealized dream, that links Trump with pieces we’ve run recently: Leon Black’s associations with Epstein’s Russian recruiters, Steve Bannon as the link between Epstein and the Mueller investigation, and Epstein’s red sparrows.

Evidence indicates that Leon Black agreed to finance Donald Trump’s early attempt to build a Trump Tower Moscow – something Black has since denied – at almost the same time Epstein started running the billionaire’s family foundation.

Subscribe now

The 90s were the heyday of the Epstein-Trump brotherhood, with countless photos of the two of them gallivanting around New York with Ghislaine Maxwell, flying on each other’s planes, and stealing – or sharing – each other’s girlfriends. The period also coincides with the greatest business catastrophe of Trump’s checkered career: the nearly billion-dollar bankruptcy that was resolved only because craven and embarrassed bankers forgave much of the debt in order to save their institutional reputations.

Great for Donald! Except that the IRS apparently regarded that debt forgiveness as income. So Trump suddenly owed $500 million in taxes. Enter Epstein, the sometime tax expert, who, according to Michael Wolff, advised Trump to simply ignore the IRS. Epstein later told Wolff (according to him) that this episode was the chief reason Trump became so obsessive about shielding his tax history from public view.

Trump was clawing his way back into the good graces of the money men, when in November 1996, he and financier Leon Black went to Moscow together to scout opportunities for a Trump-branded luxury residential tower or hotel.

Black’s connection to the project was both familial and financial. In the early 90s, not long after the Wall fell, Brooke Group Ltd. – whose vice chairman, Richard Ressler, is Black’s-brother-in-law – announced a joint venture with Russian entities to manufacture and distribute cigarettes in the former Soviet Union. The company acquired prime Moscow real estate at the site of the old state-owned cigarette factory, about a mile from the Kremlin, and by 1993, held a 50-year lease on 40,000 square feet of downtown office space.

According to the Moscow Times, Trump’s 1996 visit was arranged and managed by Brooke chairman Bennett LeBow, who also accompanied him. “Donald is the preeminent marketeer and developer in the world,” LeBow said. “We want the best for Moscow – and Donald’s it.”

“We’re looking at building a super-luxury residential tower,” Trump told the Times, explaining that he’d chosen Moscow because it was “a city with a great future, great potential.”

It was not Trump’s first trip to Russia. He and Ivana – a Russian-speaking, collectivist-educated Czech – had been wined and dined there in 1987. That trip was apparently so ego-gratifying that Trump announced he would run for president when he returned to New York.

In his 1997 book, The Art of the Comeback, Trump praised Leon Black and mentioned meeting with Apollo about “potential financing.” LeBow himself confirmed to the Moscow Times, “We are confident that we have the financing in place to begin one of these projects,” he said, naming four financial backers: his own Brooke Group; the investment banking firm Jeffries & Company, Inc., the Apollo Group and the Trump Organization.

On November 3, 1996, two days before Trump and Black’s arrival, American developer Paul Tatum – a Republican fundraiser trying to build his own Western-style luxury hotel – was gunned down in the Moscow subway. His corpse, with 11 rounds from a Kalishnikov, was shown on Russian television.

Tatum had accused his business partner, Umar Dzhabrailov, a shady cat with reputed mob ties, of blackmailing him to squeeze him out of the project. Dzhabrailov had been appointed to that role by the same city officials who then met with Trump. (Decades later, Dzhaibrailov called Ghislaine Maxwell his “soulmate,” before taking his own life after the Epstein files release last year.)

It was a gory prelude to the Trump-Black visit.

International affairs analyst and longtime Russia expert Gilbert Doctorow, who kept a diary during his years living in Moscow, had unusually close proximity to the visit because he was friendly with Trump’s then-publicist Norma Foerderer. He recalled city officials dismissing Tatum as “a trouble-maker, a squatter.” “They surely knew how to handle Donald,” he wrote, “because the very word squatter gets him going.”

“It is clear that Trump will go ahead with the project whatever is going on here,” he continued. “And so he should, because he won’t be putting one cent of his own money into it: on the contrary he is selling his name for the marketing objective and that is all.” The real investors were going to be Bennett LeBow and moneybags like Leon Black.

Years later, the Senate Intelligence Committee, investigating the 2016 Trump campaign’s Russia connections, took a closer look at the trip. Steve Bannon, who was interviewed by the committee, later reported to Epstein (as evidenced in emails in the files) that he and Black were numbers three and four on the list of names investigators were asking about. The committee’s final report, released in summer 2020, included details of the 1996 trip.

So what exactly did Black and Trump get up to in Russia?

Leon Black himself told the committee that a night in Moscow with Trump involved going to a concert, then a “discotheque” and then maybe… Black was a little foggy on this… a strip club. David Geovanis, another American businessman working with Apollo in Moscow, painted a considerably more colorful picture:

Whatever happened after dark, the business relationship continued.

Just months after the Moscow trip, on January 31, 1997, New Valley – another Apollo-connected company – announced a joint venture with the City of Moscow and Donald Trump to renovate the Moskva Hotel, across from the Kremlin. The $175 million project would include 600 guest rooms, 200 private condominiums, a convention center, banquet halls, retail shops and extensive public space.

A year later, Black’s Apollo engaged with his brother-in-law’s Brooke Group and New Valley Corporation to form Western Realty Development LLC, a new entity designed to develop real estate in Moscow. Apollo was to contribute up to $58 million.

The Trump Tower Moscow was never developed, and Black has since denied he was ever involved. The paper trail suggests otherwise.

And Trump had now entered a world where, as the Village Voice put it, “the lines between government, gangsters, and business are inextricably linked.” It was also the natural habitat for a Coney Island thug turned international sex trafficker.

Nearly a year after the Trump-Black trip, right around when Epstein was named a director of the Black family foundation, he joined a September 1997 Council of Foreign Relations trip to Russia and Kazakhstan. In an archival document of the trip, a section titled “Delegation” lists his name and biography, alongside David Rockefeller, Blackstone co-founder Pete Peterson and Republican donor and New York Jets owner Woody Johnson.

Six months later, Epstein was back in Russia, this time with Microsoft’s then-CTO Nathan Myhrvold and others, apparently scouting investment opportunities in Russia’s “nuclear cities.” Epstein was photographed in Sarov, one of Russia’s top nuclear weapons centers, a city guarded by the Russian military with very limited access for foreigners.

That part of Epstein’s Russia play did not involve his friend Donald.

But another part of it synced up nicely.

A year before traveling to Moscow with Leon Black, Trump had bought the Miss Universe pageant. He got into the pageant business after discovering that he enjoyed playing Pygmalion to pliant young women like Marla Maples (who ultimately proved not pliant enough – more on that in my book on the Trump Women).

The Miss Universe pageant has been described as a feeder for commercial sex trafficking. It draws aspirants from all over the globe, who often spend large sums on plastic surgery, new teeth, wardrobes, and elocution classes in order to compete. Many turn to financing by rich and powerful patrons.

It goes without saying that this system offered rich opportunities for the likes of Jeff and his johns, including Black and Trump.

Years later, Trump’s 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow provided the setting for salacious – and ultimately unsubstantiated – allegations about a Putin-recorded kompromat tape of Trump cavorting with prostitutes. But even as the reality show impresario rode the golden escalator toward the White House, a Trump Tower Moscow remained a gleam in his eye. The idea was revived in the 2010s by Trump enforcer Michael Cohen – who had himself pocketed nearly half a million dollars to connect the Russia-aligned leader of Ukraine with Trump – and by Felix Sater, a Moscow-born fraudster and longtime informant for the FBI.

That dynamic duo never got it off the ground either.

Subscribe now

Share

Substack Live this Thursday 7/16 at 2 PM ET

Join us this Thursday for a conversation with Media Matters for America senior fellow Matt Gertz. We’ll get into Steve Bannon’s years of living large with Epstein and his influence in the coming 2026 midterm election schemes.

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

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

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

Subscribe now

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

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

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

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

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

Epstein called him “lambchop.”

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

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

Enter Jeff.

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

The beautiful friendship kicked off with this February 2018 exchange:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It begins with the letter E.

Subscribe now

Share

This morning, the entire world is absorbing disgusting images of the most embarrassing national birthday bash in American - and perhaps any national - history.

If you thought Donald Trump’s White House lawn birthday UFC fight, with meathead Joe Rogan snickering and holding a mic under the drooling mouth of an oiled half-naked ape-man as he called Michelle Obama “a man,” was the low moment of the long White Rave you were wrong.

As nations go, 250 years is not that long at all. China has lasted for 4,000, the Indian subcontinent for 5,000 years, and the Egyptians and Mesopotamians go back 3,000 years. Their relics are in museums..

Here is what has now been recorded photographically for posterity of the United States of America on its 250th year of existence: Hundreds of self-anonymized white men in matching beige khakis, navy shirts, wearing white gaiters to hide their faces, marching with Confederate flags, in front of the U.S. Capitol, beating drums and chanting about reclaiming America. And surly MAGA civilians cursing at the very law enforcement they proclaim to revere while being evacuated off the National mall because of dangerous storms.

The funny thing about MAGA and its crypto-Nazis is that while the movement encourages and abets private armed fascists, some MAGAs are still embarrassed about the public display of what’s arguably the plutonium pit of their movement. They are fine with Donald’s dog whistles, they are cool with ICE dragging brown people out of homes, workplaces and children’s schools, but they’re still not quite ok with displays of unabashed racism and menace like Charlottesville and, now, the Patriot Front marching in DC on the 4th of July 2026.

Patriot Front was founded by a man named Thomas Ryan Rousseau after he and his followers split from another neo-Nazi gang, Vanguard America, after the deadly Unite the Right Charlottesville rally, in which a raving racist killed a white female anti-racist protester.

Hilariously, Fox mouthpiece Laura Ingraham kicked off what was apparently the MAGA message machine’s official statement on the spectacle: these men were actually leftist plants! In a Tweet posted over a video of some of the Patriots, she wrote: “I call fake. Looks more like Antifa in costume. No one should be allowed to cover their faces.”

MAGA Utah Sen. Mike Lee picked up the refrain, calling the march a “false flag” financed by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The Trump DOJ has charged the SPLC with funneling $3 million over decades to some of America’s violent racist organizations, apparently as its researchers were infiltrating those groups. The SPLC has filed to dismiss the suit and its lawyers say the moneys were for an informant program that ultimately saved lives.

Those lies didn’t get much traction since Patriot Front founder Thomas Rousseau appeared unmasked with the group at one Metro station and gave an interview before his men started marching around suburban Maryland and downtown Washington.

In the comments to Lee’s and Ingraham’s tweets, one can see the ongoing internecine argument erupting, between warm water Trumpers agreeing that no true MAGA would indulge in street Nazism, while the whole-hog fascists decried those critics as “cucks” and urged their fellow whites to come out of the closet and support the brave patriots, who, some said, only wore masks because “the left” would make their lives miserable if their identities were public.

The fact that so many MAGAs on social media will pretend overt fascist displays among white nationalism are “fake” is just further proof of the success of the Trump political movement in separating its followers from agreed upon reality. Among them, the January 6 rioters are now almost universally accepted to have been organized by undercover federal agents serving Deep State Democrats and RINOs.

With Trump having eradicated the Deep State, though, the mythological planters of false flags are now privately-financed communists paid for by George Soros.

The masked racists didn’t join the revelers at the National Mall - or if they did, they changed out of their uniforms. There, the intense heat delayed Trump’s scheduled appearance for hours. It broke late in the day as storms rolled into Washington. Authorities broadcast messages on large screens telling people who had waited to get seats to watch their beloved leader speak, to begin “immediate evacuation.” The crowd booed in response, yelling “USA, USA, USA.” Lightning flashed as staff urged people to head to the nearest exit. Eventually the surly mall-goers were herded to safety inside some of the Smithsonian buildings - including, ironically, including the Museum of Black History and Culture.

One observer, Charlotte Clymer, posted a picture and wrote that she had “never seen such a Lord of the Flies moment.”

Before midnight, the President, after publicly dozing, finally delivered a speech in which he lied about the Declaration of Independence. It does not say, as he said, that “we are all made in the image of one Almighty God.”

It actually states that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”

All are created equal. With rights.

Ever since Trump bewitched American racists and their cohorts - all suffering from Obama Derangement Syndrome, the enduring mental illness suffered by some whites in the wake of a successful, legally elected, Black president - we’ve been in a kind of social centrifuge, divided into separate elements. The Patriot Front’s Washington DC march and this iconic Reuters shot adds a fresh stain to the long and grotesque record of white nationalism in this country.

The image of the day from America’s 250th birthday is the one the world has seen before many times, to our bottomless shame. Sometimes the pictures include dogs and terror, sometimes the open mouths of shrieking women with carefully coiffed hair. Sometimes the images are uglier and involve torture and death.

The record of July 4, 2026, the one that live on in the great data centers of the impossible to predict future of our species will show that on the 250th birthday of the United States America, a nation founded on the notion that all are created equal, a lone Black girl sat in a DC Metro train car packed with white racists hiding their faces (for they too are - they must be - somewhere in their souls - deeply ashamed) preparing to hoist the Confederate flags and march.

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

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

Subscribe now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Black stated that he was repulsed by the details of Epstein’s crimes … witnesses agreed that Black was shocked when the allegations became public … witnesses noted specifically that they did not believe Black would have allowed Epstein to be introduced to Black’s wife and children if Black had had any suspicion that Epstein had done anything inappropriate or illegal with girls or young women.

Dechert has seen no evidence that Black or any employee of the Family Office or Apollo was involved in any way with Epstein’s criminal activities at any time. There is no evidence that Epstein ever introduced Black, or offered to introduce Black, to any underage woman.

[See last week’s Freakshow on Black’s payments to recruiters here.]

Black viewed Epstein as a confirmed bachelor with eclectic tastes, who often employed attractive women. However, Black did not believe that any of the women in Epstein’s employ were underage. Black has no recollection of ever seeing Epstein with an underage woman at any time.

[The use of the word “underage” here hedges the fact that Epstein provided Black with a so-far unknown number of women, alluded to in this November 2016 email below.]

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

Finally, we come to Jay Clayton.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clayton sat out the Biden years at Apollo.

Then Trump returned.

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

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

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

Subscribe now

Share

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

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

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

Subscribe now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VH: all the girls i just sent you till 21YO and much much more ))

JE: try to get real mnumbers 2.5 million is not realistic

VH: do you mean the number of users in 1,5 year?

JE: no dollars wanted for start up

VH: for scouting big network we need almost nothing,its already working, we could control all Russian model network and place models need numbers? but if you dont like the whole idea i will think about another one ;))) how are you today?

JE: send photos of you

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

Epstein paid close attention.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

Share

Public speculation about the state of the President’s physical and mental health erupts in regular bursts related to hand-bruises, weird sagging eye, weird rashes, cankles, public naps and unhinged rambles. But we pay less attention to his emotional health, even though he’s a lonely old man with millions of distant admirers and no real friends. His devoted wife is AWOL. When not in Florida, he lives alone in the White House residence except for the nightly apparition of Natalie Harp delivering a menu of obscene and racist social media memes, and the preternaturally discreet White House staff providing snacks and cleaning up after him. According to Swan and Haberman’s new book, the residence is an Augean stables of snack trash, with the old man tossing out White House silver along with the chip bags and empty ice cream containers.

The only physical contact the old man has with anyone beyond his official hand shaking duties is likely a glam room attendant straightening the red tie and wielding the spray tan, hair spray, suit-steamer, lint-brush to make him TV-ready.

Of all the memes circulated about the American President, the toddler in diapers or giant baby playing with toy bombers in the Iranian LEGO videos probably comes closest to the spectacle inside the gilded bunker. But Trump thinks of himself as a Builder not a warrior. He has spent his life trying to live up to the unmet expectations of Fred Trump, a man who knew foundations and concrete and actually had put hammer to nail. Donald grew up at that man’s side, costumed in hard hat but with hands destined to remain forever soft. He learned the profane patois of New York and New Jersey contractors but farmed out the rest of it.

Trump’s second term is remarkable for more aberrances than we can track. But chief among them are the mysterious, unnecessary projects to demolish East Wing, re-coat the Reflecting Pool, affix gold decorations to the Oval Office with super glue and until stopped, tear down and re-do the Kennedy Center. An arc-de-Trump waits on the drawing board.

The only reasonable explanation for this orgy of wasteful brick and mortar is that the handlers need toys and games to keep the old man from disrupting the serious business of making war, destroying the sciences, defunding humanitarians, filling concentration camps, and wrecking alliances - matters attended to with great devotion by Vought, Miller, Kegseth, Kennedy and Wiles - and nameless administration elves whose allegiances are most definitely not to the American people..

One sure sign that the Bob the Builder projects exist to placate and distract the Old Man is the near total lack of transparency around the contracting processes. Normally, federal agencies like the National Park Service would oversee the reflecting pool, and the National Capital Planning Commission would sign off on the East Wing project. Contracts normally overseen by the federal General Services Administration (GSA) were presented directly by the Executive Residence of the White House. There is no known evidence of GSA oversight.

These baffling, expensive boondoggles seem to serve two purposes. They keep the old man occupied and open the spigot on taxpayer funds for the claque in New York, Jersey and Florida who have either done business with the old man over the years or ponied up for a Mar a Lago membership.

The peeling algae-choked disaster of the $14 million Reflecting Pool improvement made news this weekend. The White House gave a no-bid $6.9 million contract to a company, Atlantic Industrial Coating. Trump has said he selected—or recommended—Atlantic because it had previously worked on one of his golf club pools, probably Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia. Trump called Atlantic’s owner “a guy who’s unbelievable at doing swimming pools.”

Atlantic then brought on a subcontractor from Oklahoma, Mid-America Industrial Coatings whose truck was seen at the pool. Reporter Gabe Sanchez tweeted in May that he called Atlantic to inquire about the subcontract. The owner “became evasive and shut down the conversation,” Sanchez reported, stating “That’s none of your business.” And it wouldn’t be the Epstein class-infested administration if a former chief operating officer of the Mid-America didn’t also have multiple felony convictions for child sex abuse.

There there’s the man hired to keep the reflecting pool clear and free of algae: John J. Cafaro, a Taftian cigar chomping dandy with a Hitler haircut and ‘stache, another in a long line of individuals and events that suggest America passed through a wormhole into a Marvel Comic alternative universe around 2016.

Cafaro owns the aptly named Green Water Solutions. He bagged the no-bid $1.6 million contract despite - or because of? - a record of pleading guilty to bribing public officials. There is now more algae on the pool than there was before the project.

The reflecting pool debacle is only the most recent Bob the Builder project. The totally unnecessary East Wing “ballroom” has been off the news cycle lately, buried by reports of war and flu outbreaks at Hegseth’s vaccine-free military installations. Like the others, there is no transparency on the contracts other than the name of the architect in charge and rumors about a large federal contractor, Clark Construction, since December 2025.

The cost of the heap of rubble and eternal Big Dig has careened so far over budget that taxpayers are now on the hook for at least half of the projected $600 million cost. Surprised? Cost overruns, padded contracts and wink-wink handshake deals are exactly how the reality show nepo-baby businessman learned the business.

Okay kids, that’s enough of a lesson for today. Grab your juice boxes and sing along with me:

Bob the Builder!

Can we fix it?

Yes we can!

Bob the Builder!

^{Photo by Sam Hodde for The Washington Post via Getty Images}

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

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

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

Share

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With this clan, perhaps one and the same.

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

^{Image from Idaho’s Sex Offender Registry, an official website of the Idaho State Police. COURIER redacted the address to prevent doxxing.}

Subscribe now