Every writer who has ever published in the New York Times understands one thing: editors take seriously the paper’s role as the nation’s “paper of record.” It is a hoary and venerable title dating to 1913 when the Times became the first U.S. newspaper to publish a continuous searchable index of its subjects. What this means in practice is that IF a sweet turn of phrase or an exquisitely curated verb potentially shades a fact a hair away from what stringent potential inspection by its most fastidious potential reader - amateur ornithologist in Mongolia, autodidact geographer familiar with the precise GPS coordinates of Point Nemo, historian of the widget - might insist upon, editors will flag, query and invariably opt for a less specific or blander word or phrase.

Given that, we were shocked to see the weird oversights in a recent reported essay about lawyer Kathy Ruemmler, who Jeffrey Epstein had designated his ‘arch-feminist … great defender” and whose long and hearty relationship with the sex-offender has tanked a once-soaring career, from Obama’s White House Counsel to top lawyer at Goldman Sachs.

The writer Ankush Khardori is identified in the op ed byline as “a legal analyst and former federal prosecutor who specialized in white-collar crime.” Khardori wrote that he had spent three hours interviewing Ruemmler, listening to her side of the story.

Khardori set up his piece with a kind of disclaimer about “big law” - and how its practitioners work incredibly long hours under enormous pressure to bring in colossal sums of money from titans. “Outside of the media spotlight (and off the record), most white-collar lawyers I know have been unwilling to condemn” Ruemmler, Khardori wrote. “That is not because they are sympathetic to Mr. Epstein or friendly with Ms. Ruemmler, but because doing business with Mr. Epstein, and people like him, was business as usual for the top ranks of the legal profession. It most likely remains so to this day.”

To put that plainly, they serve Rich criminals all day long. Butthat disclaimer doesn’t absolve the fact checkers of what would seem a duty to clarify some of the statements Khardori and Ruemmler make.

A few examples:

The article implies that Ruemmler was just like other members of the Biglaw clan who must shake a dirty hand now and then to make their bonuses. “They reciprocated not necessarily because they liked [Epstein], but because it was their business to know people like him.” That line would leave readers thinking Ruemmler might not have liked Epstein but remained in contact with him for business purposes.

The emails tell a different story. Beginning in fall 2014, the two were in near constant contact, with a clear rapport.

The article leaves out that fact. The whoppers go unchallenged. For instance, she states: “If I had seen or heard anything to suggest that Epstein was harming women or girls, I would have taken action to stop it.”

That quote is presented without comment, despite the fact that elsewhere in the story she makes clear she knew about his Palm Beach conviction for exactly that harm. Furthermore there is evidence in her communications with Epstein that she knew he was a registered Level 3 (the highest level) sex offender, having been forced to agree to that as part of his Palm Beach non prosecution agreement.

The timeline is also verifiably off. Khardori writes that Ruemmler first interacted with Epstein after she left the White House in summer 2014, and just before she returned to private practice when she “received a phone message from a man she had never met” who “wanted to set her up with Bill Gates to oversee legal work for a new investment fund.” No Biglaw attorney would turn that down. So far so good. She told Khardori that Larry Summers had sent Epstein to her.

A simple word search of her name in the DOJ dump of emails and scheduling messages in the DOJ’s Epstein files indicates otherwise.

Epstein told Summers that Leon Black’s attorney Brad Karp (coincidentally the first Biglaw leader to obsequiously bend the knee to Trump’s illegal federal courthouse ban threats and pro bono demands) connected him with Ruemmler.

And half a year before she left the Obama White House, in December 2013, emails indicate Epstein had tentative meetings set up with Ruemmler and his own attorney Reid Weingarten in Washington.

The relationship did ramp up in the summer of 2014, with at least five scheduled lunches at Epstein’s New York mansion, with the likes of Bill Gates and lawyers for the Rothschild family. Epstein bragged that she would meet the following people at his house: Peter Thiel, Ariane de Rothschild, Ehud Barak, Norwegian politician Thorbjørn Jagland, Dr. Eva Dubin. Ruemmler replied to that with a joke: “you are such a good matchmaker. Are you going to find me a husband next?”

Perhaps most embarrassing is that Ruemmler told Khardori she was assured of the propriety of her relationship with Epstein by the fact that two of the most odiously partisan and morally egregious attorneys in America worked for him as well. Khardori explained: That Alan Dershowitz and Kenneth Starr were part of his 2008 legal team only seemed like further proof of his relative innocence — surely, they wouldn’t have chosen to work for someone they knew had committed the crimes Mr. Epstein was accused of.

Seriously?

It is understandable that Khardori, doing reputation rehab, left out some unsavory elements to Ruemmler’s public service career also evident in the Epstein files: receiving a CIA medal apparently for work running interference with the Senate Judiciary Committee Abu Ghraib torture investigation; her involvement, via Epstein, with the Saudi government’s efforts to crush or avoid a U.S. law allowing 9/11 survivors to sue the desert monarchy; and feeding intelligence about the Mueller investigation to Steve Bannon and Epstein, while representing convicted sex offender George Nader.

That said, we are not interested in crucifying Kathy. In fact we feel sorry for her. A Gen X female super-lawyer, she worked hard and rose in the ranks of powerful men - only to be brought low. Many of the men she sat across from in boardrooms or lunches or dinners in Washington, New York, Paris, London and Riyadh we now know to be Epstein class predators or enablers, men who consider women fit to be traded like farm animals. But she is also not a victim. And the extent of the misleading omissions in the piece deserve attention because as it stands it serves as a passive assist to the larger Epstein coverup.

Bekah just published an exhaustive record of Mr. Zampolli’s long strange career at the UN, Skeletons in the Diplomatic Closet. Minutes before it went online she was kicked off TikTok, where she has 1.4 million followers - an event that Mr. Zampolli celebrated on his Instagram account. Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with and ! .

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Your Freakshow guide is just back from a weekend in San Antonio, soaking up the sights and sounds at Turning Point USA’s Women’s Leadership Summit – and yes, coincidentally watching the Knicks kick the Spurs.

The word “leadership” was perhaps an oxymoron among the thousands of young women who sat through speech after speech about submitting to God, husband and female biology. The lineup featured high profile conservative women including Erica Kirk, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Kayleigh McEnany, and even Texas State Sen. Angela Paxton (Ken Paxton’s estranged and cheated-on wife), alongside a bouquet of hip and pretty right-wing Gen Z influencers all advocating early marriage and pregnancy and putting husband and hearth ahead of worldly pursuits.

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The TPUSA Women’s Leadership Summit is an annual, expensively produced and carefully packaged political propaganda product. This year, the organization occupied three floors of the San Antonio Marriott, plastering the hotel’s walls, doors, escalators and elevators with slick signage. The main co-sponsor was the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (IFCJ), whose founder said she flew in from Israel to encourage the gathered to repeat a Hebrew word offering themselves to God.

To the naked eye, the event was more tent revival than political conference. The most reliable applause lines invoked the dangers of Muslims and “transgenders.” No one needed a Trump button here. The politics of the participants was presumed. “It’s Not Political It’s Biblical” read one button on a table devoted to recruiting GOTV door-knockers, where a digital electoral map ranked the states according to how “tyrannical” – aka progressive – their policies are.

TPUSA’s project of selling Gen Z women on a submissive posture aligns with the Heritage Foundation’s latest manifesto. The overt push for submission – a concept that occupied white-nationalist fringe swamps merely a few years ago – has now become one of the ideological pillars enabling the predators’ ball assembled at the White House, headed by a convicted sex abuser and oft-accused serial sex pest.

The supposed personal misery and baby-hating of feminists is bedrock to the ideology (See: JD Vance and childless cat ladies). Twenty-something influencer Isabel Brown declared that the Handmaid’s Tale-dressed protesters outside the building “will say the baby growing inside you is a lethal parasite.”

“Charlie would often say that feminism was about wanting women to become men and eventually not needing men,” Erica Kirk said. “He watched feminism rear its head on college campuses in a way that was openly hostile to conservative women who were told to reject the very things that make womanhood unique. Things like motherhood is a burden, marriage is a trap, or motherhood is something that should be stalled or not even experienced at all…”

“Feminism is the biggest lie we have ever been sold as women,” said podcaster Savanna Stone, whose merch includes a Good Wife hat and a sweatshirt that reads Normalize Liking Husbands Again. “While the textbook definition of feminism is about equality between the sexes and women having agency over their own lives, what feminism actually is, is a movement funded by the wealthiest evil people with the goal to destroy marriage and family.”

Several of the speakers cited polls from the early 2000s showing women reporting lower levels of happiness relative to men than women did in the 1970s. No one mentioned the other polls that consistently find single women happier than married women.

If the unhappy women poll is in fact accurate, though, is it fair to blame feminists?

The best guesses for why women might be unhappy involve some version of the Second Shift problem that Arlie Hochschild identified: women don’t enjoy going to jobs and returning home to still do all the work traditionally assigned to women.

All such polls prove is that women changed while many male partners did not.

Every one of the esteemed speakers at the San Antonio Marriott holds bank accounts and credit cards in her name, and every one of them has taken advantage of the right to pursue good-paying jobs – all rights earned by our feminist grandmothers. They’re cynically – and cleverly – leveraging the American birthright assumption that all people, women included, have a right to happiness, conveniently forgetting, as usual, the “pursuit of” part of that phrase.

They prey on the fact that no one bothered to drill into the next generation that the fight for women’s equality as human beings was never going to be easy, nor was it going to end anytime soon.

My 48-hour bath in submissive-wife propaganda ended at the San Antonio airport just as Heidi Blake’s devastating report on the choke-rapist Tate brothers landed in my news feed. The article details years of violent abuse inflicted on dozens of digitally trafficked women, both in the United States and abroad, with a sickening degree of legal impunity. The porn entrepreneurs made millions from pay-per-view sex and a pyramid scheme of social media rape propaganda advising young men how to violently and psychologically force women to submit.

The Tates and their minions are, of course, the post-millennial inheritors of the Epstein class. They share their ideological forefathers’ profound contempt for women, their refusal – or incapacity – to view women as human, the same assumption of impunity, same obsession with manipulation and total control over women that we see in every one of Epstein’s interactions with his “girls.”

(If you do not have access to Blake’s article, message Freakshow for a PDF – it is essential reading.)

All you have to do is behold the worldwide influence and social and legal impunity of the rape-Tates to understand that women are in a war. A real war with real violence.

What TPUSA’s well-financed and slick influencers are selling to young women is the idea that they would be a lot happier if they had never had to fight at all. And the price of that attrition is abandoning efforts to earn one’s own living, choose when and with whom to have children, maintain financial independence, vote, or fully participate in the world outside the kitchen and bedroom.

They preach – literally, in speeches threaded with Biblical passages – that submission is the path to both happiness and spiritual salvation. They present feminism as rebellion against “God’s purpose” and the fountainhead of virtually every challenge women face today.

They do see a war, but their strategy involves a Christian soldier, fighting a very different kind of battle: an internal one devoted to molding herself to husband, childbirth and motherhood, and to crushing her own secret dreams because – although they never say this explicitly – it is simply too hard under current conditions to chase them.

It is certainly unfortunate, but hardly a coincidence, that the misogynistic and corrupt Trump administration propped up by TPUSA helped spring the Tate monsters and bring them back to America. The submissive wife movement is the performative, cross-wearing, milkmaid-dressed light side of the Epstein-class coin.

The young women in prairie mufti, chiffon baby doll dresses and cowboy boots do not hear a peep of objection from TPUSA. What they will hear are Bronze Age admonitions to endure, like this from Book of Genesis: “To the woman [God] said, “I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you.”

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Join me, COURIER Newsroom’s Camaron Stevenson, and Amb. Norm Eisen this Thursday, June 11 at 7 PM ET for a deep dive into what’s been uncovered since the launch of COURIER’s “The Cover-Up” investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s network and alleged conspirators.

But this isn’t just another panel. 🕵️‍♀️💻 In a special live civic sleuth session, you’ll get an inside look at the investigative database powering the reporting—and learn how YOU can help uncover the truth.

⚠️ Fair warning: this interactive event will run longer than our usual one-hour program because there’s a lot to unpack.

Register now and bring your curiosity!

Join COURIER and MeidasTouch on Wednesday, June 10 at 7:00 PM ET for the NY-12 Primary Debate, featuring George Conway, Alex Bores, Laura Dunn, Nina Schwalbe, and Micah Lasher.

In one of the country’s most closely watched congressional races, candidates will debate the future of the Democratic Party at a moment of growing frustration, generational change, and political upheaval.

Candidates will debate the issues shaping the 2026 midterms, including affordability and housing, immigration, corruption and money in politics, democracy reform, climate, AI regulation, and American leadership in a second Trump era.

Register now to watch live.

On March 2, 2018, the spy movie Red Sparrow was released. Jennifer Lawrence played a sidelined Russian prima ballerina recruited to Sparrow School, a secret intelligence service that trains young women to use their minds and bodies as weapons against Russia’s enemies.

The day the movie was released, four tickets were purchased on Jeffrey Epstein’s American Express card for a 7 pm showing. The next day, Epstein was emailing about a design for jackets and sweaters featuring “red pigeons” with American flag colors and the words “RED GOLBYS.” Golby is a transliteration of the Russian word for pigeon or dove.

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Later that summer, Epstein emailed his pal, hotel heir Tom Pritzker, asking if he had seen Red Sparrow, to which Tom replied, “3 times.” Epstein then boasted about his “Red Pigeons” design, explaining that “each girl has a tee shirt and a hoodie with the badge and her initials.”

He described the badges as “merit badges.”

By the summer of 2018, Epstein had been running his transcontinental sex trafficking operation for nearly a decade, with an increased focus on recruiting “girls” from Eastern European and Eurasian cities and villages. It would be another six months before Julie Brown’s exposé of Epstein’s Palm Beach trafficking operation and sweetheart deal was published.

But his male friends – especially guys who were in on the game, like Pritzker – would have been well aware of his pimping. Anyone who visited his mansion or island would have noticed the presence of barely legal (if that) sylphs with Slavic accents.

The question of Epstein’s intelligence connections hangs over the entire story. Was he or wasn’t he? And if he was, who was he working for? CIA? Mossad? KGB? All of the above?

It is the plutonium pit of the case, the box no one in authority has seemingly been able – or wanting – to crack open.

So was he joking with the red sparrow “badges” and jackets for “the girls”? Was he burnishing his reputation as Coney Island’s Bondstein? Or was he brazenly celebrating the success of a honeypot and kompromat operation?

By 2018, at the very least, Epstein and his coterie were aware of his reputation as an international man of mystery, and he and his johns were secure in their impunity.

Our discovery of Epstein’s red sparrow badges and clothing prompted us to take another, closer look at two Russian women in his orbit. They arrived not from the backwoods of Eurasian impoverishment – his preferred hunting grounds – but from the highest levels of post-Soviet Russian politics and power. One of them, Masha Drokova, was close enough to Putin to have worked with his top strategist. The other, Svetlana Pozhidaeva, is the daughter of a reputed Russian KGB officer and a brilliant, multilingual graduate of Russia’s top foreign service school.

Both women sailed through Epstein-world during the height of his international trafficking operation. Both went on to successful careers in Silicon Valley. And both have denied being spies, despite numerous allegations.

Based on these new discoveries in the files, Pozhidaeva appears to have been more deeply enmeshed in the sex trafficking op than Drokova, who worked openly for Epstein as a PR agent, after arriving in the U.S. having trained under Putin’s brilliantly diabolical strategist Vladislav Surkov.

Pozhidaeva used a variety of pseudonyms while dating wealthy and powerful men and secretly reporting back to Epstein about them, sometimes referencing what seemed to be specific objectives, such as “the two year project” or “getting the ring.” One Middle Eastern billionaire she dated knew her as “Selana.” She sometimes emailed Epstein under the name “Mégane Lemiel” (“le miel” means honey in French, a possible nod to a honeypot operation).

In dozens of emails and texts with Epstein, Pozhidaeva checks in from private jets and various points around the globe, hunting “girls” or “pussy” for him. She also seems to have been one of his primary recruiters post-2010, not only bringing them in but grooming them, traveling with Jean-Luc Brunel on recruiting trips and reporting back to Epstein on the men. For example:

The emails often show her asking Epstein how to handle requests for sex, including when to submit and how long to remain involved. In one exchange, he literally scripts how she should speak to tech investor Josh Fink, one of the men she was dating, lying to, and reporting back to Epstein about. She forwards Epstein a dozen text messages from Fink, including discussions on Elon Musk, for comment.

In a 2013 exchange below, she talks about needing “to do Elon and the Russian first” and discusses her relations with Fink, Saudi billionaire Mohammed Jameel (referred to as MJ), and Todd Meister, the son of the accountant who first introduced Epstein to his great benefactor, the gnomic billionaire Lex Wexner.

Five months after Epstein’s death, Pozhidaeva went to Russia and meticulously erased her real name from all the registries there. She is now living in the United States under a new name and has proclaimed herself an Epstein victim. She filed for compensation from the fund and has recently announced that she is receiving mental health assistance through the Epstein victims’ program.

In a 2012 exchange with Musk, Epstein invited him to hang with Svetlana and have “fun” in Paris. Elon sounded interested.

Epstein also seemed to be using her as bait when inviting Musk to St. Bart for News Years Eve 2012. “I will leave svetlana and jenn on st bart , for ny eve. enjpy [sic],” he wrote. Musk replied, perhaps with more caution than Epstein had hoped: “Ok, we could perhaps get together for lunch on the 31st.”

Now that we know all of her pseudonyms, Pozhidaeva turns out to have been the mystery girl Epstein persuaded to dress in a Snow White costume and have “fun” with former Barclays CEO Jes Staley. In the first email below, Epstein tells her that Brett Ratner is “going to film a big movie, Snow White” and urges her to get a costume. The odious Ratner was one of the producers on the 2012 film Mirror Mirror, a live-action fairy tale comedy based on the Grimm Brothers story. (Ratner went on to be accused of a range of sexual misconduct, fled Hollywood, and was rehabilitated by Melania, who had him direct her recent “documentary.”)

The next day, Pozhidaeva reports on the encounter, and within minutes, Epstein receives a satisfied report from Staley before asking him which character he would like next.

Drokova immigrated to the U.S. in 2014 and ran publicity campaigns for clients including Gett, Houzz, HotelTonight, and Masquerade. In 2019, she was named to the Forbes 30 under 30 list.

In one 2017 email with Epstein, they discuss Jeff Bezos. Drokova remarks that Bezos seems nice but not as “special” as Epstein as it “was very, very clear from the first moment I saw you that you are special. and I won’t say if it totally feels like he is special.”

Last month, Mother Jones published a profile of Drokova, who is now operating in Silicon Valley as a financier under the name Maria Bucher. She is an investor in Valar Atomics, a nuclear power startup launched by a young entrepreneur with ties to Idaho Christian nationalist Doug Wilson and funded in part by Peter Thiel.

Before becoming a Valley “founder,” Drokova was such a Putin superfan that she was once featured in a documentary called Putin’s Kiss and remained involved in pro-Putin events as recently as 2019. She has since publicly denounced (on Twitter) her Russian affiliations. “I gave up my Russian passport years ago, can’t return without risking my freedom, and have publicly opposed the Putin regime,” she wrote. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, she also denied engaging in espionage: “It’s been a long time since I divided people into us versus them,” she said. “I’m not a spy, even though that sounds romantic.”

Six months before his death, Epstein remained deeply connected to both women, who also clearly interacted with one another. In January 2019, he emailed with Drokova about Pozhidaeva at Davos.

In March, Pozhidaeva told him that she and Masha were collaborating on ways to rehabilitate his reputation in the wake of renewed attention on his Palm Beach conviction.

Investigative journalist Craig Unger has been writing about Epstein’s Russian girls for years. In his book “American Kompromat,” he pegs Donald Trump as a “Russian asset” and discusses the potential red sparrows in his and Epstein’s orbit.

In a recent Substack piece, one of Unger’s sources, Yuri Shvets, a former major in the KGB, talked about the mystery of Pozhidaeva:

She was in one of the best, most prestigious academic institutions in Russia … She could make a breathtaking career in the Foreign Office or in any foreign company working in the Moscow office. She would make a great career. But instead she goes into the so‑­ called modeling business? … Of course, we know what Epstein was doing with the ladies. But in this particular case, Epstein takes her and introduces her to renowned American and international scientists. How could someone as intelligent and well educated as Pozhidaeva become an activist for women while possibly seeking patronage from­ Jean‑ Luc Brunel and Jeffrey Epstein, who directed and participated in human trafficking and the rape of underage girls for more than two decades?

According to Shvets, Putin was obsessed with American tech and would have flooded the zone with spies to get access to it. For Putin, getting into Silicon Valley “would have been the equivalent of penetrating the Manhattan Project in World War II.”

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The Future of the Democratic Party is on the Ballot

Join COURIER and MeidasTouch on Wednesday, June 10 at 6:30 PM ET for the NY-12 Primary Debate, featuring George Conway, Alex Bores, Laura Dunn, Nina Schwalbe, and Micah Lasher.

In one of the country’s most closely watched congressional races, candidates will debate the future of the Democratic Party at a moment of growing frustration, generational change, and political upheaval.

Candidates will debate the issues shaping the 2026 midterms, including affordability and housing, immigration, corruption and money in politics, democracy reform, climate, AI regulation, and American leadership in a second Trump era.

Register now to watch live.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To add insult to injury, this week, Pam, the defenestrated private citizen recently diagnosed with thyroid cancer, will have to endure a day of questioning about her role in the Epstein cover-up. While her former DOJ deputy – Trump’s personal attorney Todd “Whiteout” Blanche – wins the Old Man’s heart by erasing J6 criminals from the DOJ website and rewarding violent coup plotters like Stewart Rhodes with taxpayer money, Pam will, at least for a day and maybe longer, become the public face of the Justice Department’s Epstein files cover-up.

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

January 2025

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

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

February 4, 2025

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

February 11, 2025

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

February 21, 2025

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

February 27, 2025

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

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

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

February 28, 2025

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

March 2025

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

May 2025

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

June 5, 2025

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

July 4, 2025

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

July 7, 2025

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

July 15, 2025

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

July 16, 2025

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

July 17, 2025

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

July 22, 2025

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

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

August 1, 2025

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

October 7, 2025

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

November 14, 2025

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

December 21, 2025

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

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

February 11, 2026

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

As The Daily Beast’s Joanna Coles put it:

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

February 17, 2026

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

April 2, 2026

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

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

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

Hear directly from:

• Senator John Hickenlooper, Former Governor of Colorado

• Dr. Vin Gupta, Physician + Medical Analyst

• Representative Emily Gregory, Florida House of Representatives (HD-87)

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

• Shaughnessy Naughton, 314 Action President

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zampolli accepted the compliment:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hear directly from:

• Senator John Hickenlooper, Former Governor of Colorado

• Dr. Vin Gupta, Physician + Medical Analyst

• Representative Emily Gregory, Florida House of Representatives (HD-87)

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

• Shaughnessy Naughton, 314 Action President

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

Over the weekend, Acting Attorney General Todd “Whiteout” Blanche appeared on Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo proclaiming – without, as usual on this topic, any evidence – that there is “a ton of evidence” of fraud in the 2020 election and confirmed that active DOJ investigations into the matter are ongoing in Arizona and Georgia.

Trump’s personal attorney is running hard to make his temp job as the nation’s top law enforcement official permanent. He knows well that chief among the job qualifications will be his willingness to accuse – and perhaps even prosecute – Democrats who win House and Senate seats in the midterms for allegedly stealing their elections. This has been the standard Trump playbook since the near-coup of 2020, but the spectacle of a once-respected federal prosecutor debasing himself to carry it out is particularly revolting.

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If he gets the job, Blanche (about whom the Freakshow has more here) will take over the next phase of a massive lawfare and political influence operation at the highest levels of American law enforcement. Pam Bondi had previously been overseeing that project, though apparently not with enough brazen savvy for The Big Man. Blanche’s announcement today of a $1.776 billion slush fund to pay out to J6 criminals and other Trump cronies who got on the wrong side of the law is a big step toward proving he’s not Pam.

The nonprofit watchdog group Not Above the Law has assembled a damning amount of evidence showing just how much the Trump administration has not only weaponized, but utterly gutted the Department of Justice in the 18 months since the 2025 inauguration.

More than 11,000 responsible, constitutionally-inclined attorneys and employees, unwilling to politicize the law by going after progressive organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center or prosecuting Trump’s enemies – like currently, James Comey – have left the agency in droves. Efforts to replace them are falling far short. The administration has been laying the groundwork for a fully lawless, weaponized and politicized federal law enforcement apparatus. Among the most alarming developments:

Ignoring crimes: Trump’s DOJ dropped more than 23,000 criminal investigations and cases in the first six months of his second term. In February 2025 alone, the DOJ declined nearly 11,000 matters – the highest monthly total in DOJ records dating back to 2004.

Putting criminals back on the streets: Trump has pardoned thousands of insurrectionists, health care fraudsters, and anti-choice extremists while the DOJ drops related cases. Among the J6 pardonees were violent criminals from the fascist Proud Boys and nine members of the white nationalist Oath Keepers. And a growing number of them have since been rearrested, many for sexual or violent crimes.

Driving out qualified lawyers: The DOJ is down at least 3,300 attorneys and 11,200 employees overall, leaving entire divisions and regional prosecutors’ offices hollowed out and unable to meet caseload demands.

Releasing fraudsters and losing taxpayer money: Trump has pardoned 80 white-collar criminals who stole more than $2 billion from taxpayers. Many of them operated in the health care industry, meaning they were defrauding programs intended to care for sick and vulnerable people. Meanwhile, the DOJ has closed more than 100 health care fraud investigations.

Letting polluters pollute: The Trump DOJ has declined environmental crime cases at three times the rate seen during Biden’s first six months – and at 1.5 times the rate of Trump’s own first term.

Letting extremists harass women: Trump pardoned two dozen people convicted under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, which protects patients seeking reproductive health services from threats, force, and physical obstruction. The DOJ has since sharply pulled back on enforcing the provisions of the Act.

Turned the Civil Rights Division into a sick joke: Instead of protecting Americans’ civil rights, Trump’s fanatically MAGA Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon has gutted the department. About three-fourths of the department’s attorneys have left over the last year.

Leaving America vulnerable to foreign adversaries: The DOJ’s National Security Division has lost more than a third of its staff, making it harder to handle caseloads involving espionage, cybersecurity threats and foreign interference.

This is the DOJ that Todd Blanche will inherit. And if his Fox News appearance over the weekend is any indication, it is a department he would further weaponize and dedicate to cheating the hell out of American voters this fall.

Eyes open.

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

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

Hear directly from:

• Senator John Hickenlooper, Former Governor of Colorado

• Dr. Vin Gupta, Physician + Medical Analyst

• Representative Emily Gregory, Florida House of Representatives (HD-87)

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

• Shaughnessy Naughton, 314 Action President

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which brings us to Epstein.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Before Tim Parlatore picked him up, Indyke had reportedly been laying low in South Florida, banking multimillion dollar profits from Epstein’s trust and working as a real estate agent. Parlatore says he felt sorry for him, and that Indyke assured him the FBI had already interviewed him and found him blameless. Unsurprisingly, that doesn’t really hold up. In fact, several years prior, a 2020 settlement with Deutsche Bank noted that Indyke withdrew $800,000 between 2013 and 2017 in $7,500 increments – an amount clearly chosen to deliberately skirt the reporting triggers that would attract attention. He has since said the money was for “meals, gifts, and gratuities,” though DOJ files suggest Epstein’s global trafficking business was peaking during those same years. Any presumption of Indyke’s ignorance further eroded as the Files revealed him running numerous shell companies for Epstein. And COURIER recently discovered that Indyke lied to the House Oversight Committee about a $3 million house he received as a gift.

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

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

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

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

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

Hear directly from:

• Senator John Hickenlooper, Former Governor of Colorado

• Dr. Vin Gupta, Physician + Medical Analyst

• Representative Emily Gregory, Florida House of Representatives (HD-87)

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

• Shaughnessy Naughton, 314 Action President

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

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

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

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

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

The Times added that the note has not been authenticated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This post is part of COURIER’s The Cover-Up, an effort to expand our coverage to follow the money and investigate the Epstein Class power players in and outside the government.

With a new database by Thorian AI, we have unprecedented ability to navigate more than 1.2M of the Epstein files and we’re sharing access with you. Join the investigation by exploring the files like the ones referenced in this story and sending us a tip. Together, we can turn information into justice.

This week, we at the Freakshow interviewed journalist Sacha Biazzo of RAI, Italy’s national public broadcasting network, about his investigation into Italian bon vivant and Trumpworld “envoy” Paolo Zampolli. A few weeks ago, Biazzo conducted a revealing – and ultimately contentious – sit-down interview in Italian with Zampolli. He also spoke with Zampolli’s ex, Amanda Ungaro, along with dozens of acquaintances, friends, colleagues, and at least one relative.

Biazzo has produced, in Italian, a three-part series on Zampolli, packed with eye-popping information. Zampolli’s maternal aunt told Biazzo that Paolo – born in 1970, a scion of business dynasties on both sides – was a troubled, drug-using only child who never graduated from high school, dropping out at age 13. Other sources described how he left his hometown of Milan, drifted into the wealthy Eurotrash dens of Ibiza, and learned the modeling trade from Elite Model Agency impresario and serial abuser John Casablancas, then later from trafficker and MC2 Model Management owner Jean-Luc Brunel.

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After encountering Casablancas and Brunel, Zampolli started his own New York agency, ID Model Management, later used by Epstein for access to girls. Epstein’s only known comment about him, however, appears in a 2011 email: “Be careful, zampoli is trouble. Lots” [sic]. In one DOJ file, an interview with an Epstein associate/victim, marked “under protective order,” mentions “Zempoli” since Epstein found her during an ID model casting.

Zampolli’s business network included the Polish-born Michel Adam Lisowski, who lived in the same Paris apartment building as Epstein, created FashionTV, and was later convicted of sexual assault in France and Israel, along with other men. All of Zampolli’s sketchy associations are laid out in American Prospect’s deep dive into the global underworld of predatory sleazeballs.

Zampolli, as is well known, takes credit for having “scouted” the 20-something Melania Knauss in Milan, bringing her to the U.S.A., and introducing her to Trump. Various people, including Amanda Ungaro and Michael Wolff, have disputed this story.

Milan in the early 1990s was teeming with young beautiful women from the former Soviet Union – often inexperienced and vulnerable to exploitation. In Melania’s official history, there is almost no trace of her modeling career anywhere in Europe prior to meeting Trump in New York.

Amanda Ungaro told Biazzo (and reiterated to us last month) that she believes Melania and Trump have some kind of “pact” with Zampolli related to his knowledge of the modeling underworld.

Biazzo backed this up with an audio recording of Zampolli speaking to a friend in Italy over the phone, bragging that the Trumps promised him their full support after he helped Melania win a 2016 libel suit against the Daily Mail and a Slovenian journalist who claimed she had been an escort. In the recording aired by RAI, Zampolli – claiming to quote Melania – says in Italian: “Paolo don’t worry, you have our back, everything that happened we will protect... we protect you.”

But there’s more.

Biazzo also reported on less salacious, though equally troubling matters that have received attention in Italy, but not yet in the U.S. Barely a month after his second inauguration, Trump named Zampolli his special envoy to Italy – a non-official, non-diplomatic post with no State Department oversight, invented for his old pal. Envoys are typically appointed for war negotiations, humanitarian crises or other sensitive diplomatic missions.

By February 2025, Zampolli was bouncing around Italy – much to the confusion of local officials – proclaiming his new title and meeting with far-right leader Matteo Salvini. In March, the party boy with the mystery portfolio was courting major Italian arms manufacturers, trying to entice them to invest in the United States while pushing for U.S. entry into the Euro-Japanese GCAP fighter plane program – a move that would have benefitted sixth-generation military jet supplier Lockheed.

No Italian institution had been officially informed by the United States of his appointment. “Zampolli? Zampolli who?” Italy’s Foreign Minister, Antonio Tajani, reportedly said when asked by journalists.

That confusion did little to disrupt Zampolli’s special relationship with the one man who mattered. He was soon given a promotion to another Trump-manufactured title: U.S. Special Representative for Global Partnerships. His “projects” have included making a $20 billion deal with Uzbekistan for Boeing jets, which he shorthanded publicly as “$20 billion in twenty minutes.” He boasted to the Italian press: “I am available for anything the President wishes in the area. As the President says, ‘Just call me.’”

In Italy, Zampolli is seen as a caricature from the fleshpots of the upper class, a creature at home in the felonious “Bunga Bunga” era of Silvio Berlusconi – who he sold his family business to back in the 90s. One of his best friends is Giuseppe Cipriani, restaurateur and grandson of the founder of the famous Harry’s Bar in Venice. The younger Cipriani’s partner, Nicole Minetti, is a former Ibiza DJ who served prison time for her role in trafficking young women in the scandal that brought down Berlusconi.

Minetti and Cipriani are currently all over the Italian media for a scandal involving suspected trafficking at a ranch Cipriani owns in Punta del Este, Uruguay, called “The Gin Tonic.”

Throughout 2024, before Trump’s re-election, Zampolli fed his Instagram with snaps of himself at Cipriani restaurants around the world, the lone male at tables surrounded by beautifully dressed young women.

Biazzo struck a nerve when he asked Zampolli about Victoria Drake, an American woman who has publicly accused him of drugging and raping her in New York. On camera, Zampolli flies into a rage, stumbles over his words and calls her a “whore” in Italian. Drake has said she filed a complaint with the NYPD, but that Zampolli’s diplomatic immunity appeared to shield him.

Zampolli got in on the diplomatic immunity game starting in 2011, when he presented himself as a diplomat in a luxury magazine, despite his UN title being completely honorific and not connected to any tangible position. He later persuaded the leaders of the island of Dominica that he was enough of a player that he could successfully represent their interests, and they granted him an actual UN ambassadorship. That affiliation opened up a whole new revenue stream: the island’s passport-selling program. In one case that ended up in court, Zampolli allegedly demanded a $7 million commission from a Dubai-based company for helping finance a luxury hotel in which 800 “family passports” were sold for a casual $195 million.

Now, with Trump’s imprimatur, Zampolli is jetting around on the American taxpayer’s dime, shilling for U.S. weapons manufacturers. One could argue there is no better mascot for the moral and legal cesspool that is the military industrial complex than a habitue of the Epstein demimonde in which young women are prey and referred to as “whores” should they complain.

Zampolli is now brokering multi-billion-dollar “deals” with no oversight and no official State nor Commerce Department portfolio.

We have questions.

Who is paying him and how much? Are U.S. taxpayers financing his jaunts? Has he been vetted and security-cleared? Is his position subject to the 2021 law putting envoys under certain restrictions and requiring Congressional consent? Is he receiving commissions similar to the one he extracted from the Dominica hotel deal?

House Oversight, please subpoena him.

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

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

Hear directly from:

• Senator John Hickenlooper, Former Governor of Colorado

• Dr. Vin Gupta, Physician + Medical Analyst

• Representative Emily Gregory, Florida House of Representatives (HD-87)

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

• Shaughnessy Naughton, 314 Action President

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

Now that Rep. James Comer has indicated that some Republicans are ready to PARDON Maxwell (cue: political ploy to shift blame from Trump alone) independent journalist Scott Carney at Magnetic North and I decided to record ourselves reading the entire two day transcript of Attorney General Todd Blanche in conversation with Ghislaine Maxwell last year. We…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So many secrets!

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

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

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

Epstein sent Thiel this message a few weeks later:

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

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

Hear directly from:

• Dr. Vin Gupta, Physician + Medical Analyst

• Representative Emily Gregory, Member of Congress

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

• Shaughnessy Naughton, 314 Action President

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

Dear Reader:

I know you want me to Make it Make Sense.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s never the guns.

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

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

To wit, this remarkable exchange on CNN today:

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

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

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

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

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

That’s the spirit to match the times.

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

It sounds better in the Italian but it means:

Get your act together, United States of America.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Substack Live this Thursday 4/23

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

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COURIER’s newly-launched Epstein investigation project

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When and under what circumstances did you meet Zampolli?

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

When and under what circumstances did you meet Melania?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can you characterize Melania’s relationship with Zampolli?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Would you testify before the House Oversight Committee?

Absolutely.

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COURIER’s newly-launched Epstein investigation project

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

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

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

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

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

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

I love you sir.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. Whiteout is on the case.

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COURIER’s newly-launched Epstein investigation project

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her official duties included:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suspicious!

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

They leave.

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

No rush!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A cover-up?

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

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

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COURIER’s newly-launched Epstein investigation project

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

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

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

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

Subscribe Now