At the Freakshow we don’t spend a lot of time on conspiracy theories – but we make an exception when it comes to Jeffrey Epstein, a career criminal burrowed deep into the American national security and foreign affairs establishment for reasons that are unclear and with effects that are not fully understood. Was he a spy? Alex Acosta, the Miami federal prosecutor who cut Epstein’s infamous sweetheart deal, supposedly said he was told to “back off” because Epstein “belonged to intelligence.”
So many of Epstein’s connections are well-known and hashed over. Rich men have lost wives and jobs and paid massive settlements for their involvement, while others squirm and deny or issue carefully worded apologies. We know their names. But there’s more to uncover. Epstein was a predator and pimp, yes, but it was never just about the girls.
House and Senate committees might wait forever for full disclosure from the Justice Department, but there are hoards of archives in the public realm that they could start looking into. A good place to start? The records of those old bogeymen, the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations. These organizations preceded Davos, serving something of the same purpose – hosting self-important gasbag speakers for audiences of men with even greater self-regard. They primarily serve as closed-door clubs where private interests can be quietly advanced into public policy.
Epstein showed up inside these lofty clubs in the early 1990s – the launch years of his utterly mysterious rise in the American establishment. As we reported in a previous Freakshow, the doors to global power opened wide for Epstein in 1991 after the gnomelike Ohio billionaire Les Wexner very questionably gave him power of attorney over his billions. That same year, Jeff got his first jet and Ghislaine Maxwell appeared on the scene as his enabler and sometimes girlfriend.
He put the Wexner pile to work on power-networking right away. By 1992, Epstein was loaning $100,000 to Bill Clinton’s inaugural committee. Between 1991 and 1995, he made 17 White House visits. The visits abruptly stopped in January 1995, the same year he joined both the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission.
In the June 12, 1995, roster of the Trilateral Commission, he is identified as Jeffrey E. Epstein, President, New Albany Property Inc. (New Albany was the planned village near Columbus that Wexner was developing and living in). He soon forked over $350,000 to the Council on Foreign Relations, which has since publicly disavowed him. The CFR has also claimed he only showed up for two meetings as a member, but club records suggest otherwise.
In October 1995, Les Gelb – an international affairs éminence grise and New York Times columnist who appeared in Epstein’s black book and traveled with him on his plane – arranged with Clinton’s CIA director John Deutch for a “private tour and briefing” at the CIA. The daylong agenda included briefings on “info. warfare,” “global humanitarian emergencies,” “proliferation” and “economic intelligence,” and even included a $12 lunch with Deutch (that the CFR told the members they would have to cover themselves).
Epstein was among a small number of Gelb’s invitees to that CIA event, along with some white shoe lawyers, oil and weapons industry reps, and consultants from Kissinger Associates and the Carlyle International Group. (MAGA conspiracists will be sorry to see that in one of the records related to this lunch, Gelb hand-wrote “George Soros unable to attend CIA Day anytime Oct-Nov.”)
The CIA director who hosted the event, John M. Deutch, also served as Clinton’s Deputy Secretary of Defense, and was later accused of spectacular breaches of national security protocol. Official reports on his habits make Trump’s Mar-a-Lago classified documents bathroom pile look like Fort Knox in comparison.
He kept a running journal of his work at the agency on a computer disk that he carried home with him every night and subsequently accessed on computers designated for “unclassified” use that were connected to the internet. He refused home security that most DCIs get, attempted to reformat and delete files when the CIA asked him to turn them over, and had a computer expert visit him weekly to discuss encryption and other issues, according to one inspector general’s report..
“Dr. Deutch failed to follow even the most basic security precautions” read a Pentagon report on the matter. A CIA investigation concluded that he “intentionally processed... highly classified information” on his home computers in Massachusetts and Maryland.
Deutch refused to cooperate and was never charged; Clinton pardoned him two hours before he handed the White House over to W in January 2001.
One could chalk up this behavior to being a bureaucratic tech Luddite – except that Deutch had been at MIT for decades by then, had served in the Pentagon and the Energy department and was regarded by a computer expert he worked with as a “fairly advanced” user.
After his government years, Deutch returned to MIT – another node of American national security and scientific power that Epstein was burrowing into with money and personal charm. He gave MIT $850,000 and struck up a friendship with, among others, Deutsch’s friend Noam Chomsky. Deutch was head of the Department of Chemistry, Dean of Science and Provost, and eventually served on the board of a company started by Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, who had close ties to Epstein. Epstein connected Vekselberg with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak in 2013, and the men went into business together. Deutch also helped Vekselberg create the Skolkovo Institute, a Russian-MIT collaboration that by 2014, Boston FBI warned could be a vehicle for Russia to steal US technology, and in 2022, the U.S. sanctioned it for its “close relationship with Russia’s defense sector.”
By 2003, Epstein had embedded himself all the way into the establishment. It had taken just over ten years. His birthday book is a record of the respect, love and affection of numerous extremely powerful men. At the Trilateral Commission and the CFR, he smirked and slunk and rubbed shoulders with U.S. Senators current and former, Secretaries of State current and former, chairmen of banks and financial firms and aerospace and international conglomerates – men who would go on to make decisions affecting the course of world affairs and millions of people’s lives, from Moscow to Tel Aviv, from Berlin to Abu Dhabi, from the status of Palestine to a nuclear-armed Iran.
These are all just breadcrumbs: facts over time that might suggest connections to larger events. Mostly they raise questions without answers. The Epstein motherlode is hoarded up in a DOJ vault, currently guarded by K$H Patel and Pam Bondi. The Trump regime has gone to great lengths to divert attention from what had been their followers’ greatest conspiracy obsession. Besides provoking unrest in American cities, they are hiding the files, flagging (and presumably erasing) King Don’s presence in said files, slow walking or flat out ignoring Congressional subpoenas, and giving the royal prison treatment to Epstein’s depraved procuress Ghislaine Maxwell.
Even Bible Mike, our God-lovin’ House Speaker, is in on the coverup, refusing to swear in a duly elected member of Congress, apparently to delay or block a full House vote that would open the Epstein matter for discussion. To quote a song from one of Epstein’s Boomer era bands: “There’s something happening here… What it is ain’t exactly clear.”
Brilliant work, proving the old adage, follow the money and the value of the available public documents in tracking government wrongdoing.
Excellent resource on the Epstein matter.