During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act. ~ George Orwell
None of the Above should be a valid choice on Voter BallotsDonald Trump & Jeffrey Epstein together:
Part 1: A Timeline of Epstein, Trump, Sex Trafficking, and the Intelligence Community
via pijinglish
On 07/10/19, Observer published an article with the following headline: It Sure Looks Like Jeffrey Epstein Was a Spy—But Whose? I passed it around to a few people as idle speculation, and one of them replied,
"Pretty weak factual premise for this article. I think the journalist is stretching. The intelligence methodology alleged doesn’t ring true to me either: — I can’t see US intelligence letting this guy run a sex-trafficking ring in the hope of pulling in a few high level targets; if it’s a hostile intelligence operation, I can’t see US intelligence not intervening early on. I’d say wishful thinking by the journalist. Broader issues of how Epstein got off so easy are more interesting."
Perhaps they're right. The article itself is pretty light on details and doesn't offer much in the way of evidence. So, what are the chances that Epstein or Trump have been involved in some sort of sex trafficking ring with possible ties to the intelligence community? Is that as batshit crazy as it seems? Is any of this remotely plausible?
While even a few years ago a post like this would have been relegated to the tin foil hat sections of the internet, we live in strange times indeed. I've assembled the following from primary sources as much as possible, but I'm also recycling some of my old Reddit posts, as well as some more recent posts by others (if I fail to properly attribute any of my sources, please call me out. Much of this remains speculative, and some of it still clearly falls in the "conspiracy theory" category, but maybe in light of new information we'll re-examine older rumors.
Our story takes place roughly between the mid-1970's and the present day. Join me, won't you?
Because the premise of this post relies on the idea that the CIA would condone or even oversee a sex-trafficking ring, we first have to answer the question if that is even possible. It would appear that it is:
(1954 - 1966) Operation Midnight Climax:
In the 1950s, visitors to a brothel atop San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill got more than just a tryst and a view of the bay. Clients were secretly dosed with LSD as CIA agents watched from behind a one-way mirror. Although it sounds like a bad late-night spy movie, Operation Midnight Climax, as it was called, was a very real part of a larger covert project called MKULTRA."
(Don't worry. I'm leaving mind control out of this.)
When the CIA ran a LSD sex-house in San Francisco:
In 1943, a Swiss chemist named Albert Hofmann developed an unbelievably powerful drug called LSD. When the technical branch of the CIA learned about this drug, the gung-ho head of its chemical division, a young chemist named Sidney Gottlieb, persuaded CIA official Richard Helms that the agency should investigate it as a spy tool. On April 13, 1953, CIA director Allen Dulles approved a program for “covert use of biological and chemical materials” with an initial budget of $300,000. Its name: MKULTRA.
The CIA began to fund LSD projects at many institutions, including Columbia University and Mount Sinai Hospital. Informed consent and other moral niceties were dispensed with. One researcher kept seven subjects, junkies enticed by promises of hard drugs, on LSD for 77 straight days. No follow-up on them was ever done.
The CIA was playing an extremely dangerous game. In 1953, Gottlieb dosed a CIA colleague, Frank Olson, causing Olson to undergo a mental crisis that ended with him falling to his death from a 10th-floor window. But this horrific incident only put MKULTRA temporarily on hold.Gottlieb soon hired [New York mobster George White, a tough-guy OSS captain who had been an agent in the Federal Bureau of Narcotics] to run two “safe houses” for LSD testing in Greenwich Village. White administered LSD, knockout drops and marijuana to his unwitting “guests” using food, drinks and cigarettes, then tried to get them to talk.
In 1955, White was transferred to San Francisco, where he had worked as a journalist, and rented out the apartment on Telegraph Hill. To give his pad the desired French-whorehouse look, White furnished it with Toulouse-Lautrec posters, a picture of a French can-can dancer and kinky photos of women in bondage and domination poses.
“It was supposed to look rich,” a narcotics agent who regularly visited told Marks, “but it was furnished like crap.”
White installed bugging equipment and a two-way mirror behind which he would sit on a portable toilet, quaffing a martini from the pitcher he kept in the refrigerator, and observe the proceedings. The prostitutes who staffed the operation were paid in part with chits they could use for favors such as getting out of jail....Operation Midnight Climax soon expanded beyond the Telegraph Hill pad. CIA operatives began dosing people with acid in restaurants, bars and beaches. They also used other, more exotic drugs: “If we were scared enough of a drug not to try it out on ourselves, we sent it to San Francisco,” a CIA source told Marks. And the agency began using the prostitutes to lure men of all sorts, not just marginal figures, back to the safe house.
In 1974, NYT journalist Seymour Hersh wrote an expose on the CIA's domestic spying program:
(12/22/74) HUGE C.I.A. OPERATION REPORTED IN U.S. AGAINST ANTIWAR FORCES, OTHER DISSIDENTS IN NIXON YEARS
An extensive investigation by The New York Times has established that intelligence files on at least 10,000 American citizens were maintained by a special unit of the C.I.A. that was reporting directly to Richard Helms, then the Director of Central Intelligence and now the Ambassador to Iran.
In addition, the sources said, a check of the C.I.A.'s domestic files ordered last year by Mr. Helms's successor, James R. Schlesinger, produced evidence of dozens of other illegal activities by members of the C.I.A. inside the United States, beginning in the nineteen‐fifties, including break‐ins, wiretapping and the surreptitious inspection of mail.
...“Counterintelligence!” one high‐level Justice Department official exclaimed upon being given some details of the C.I.A.'s alleged domestic operations. “They're not supposed to have any counterintelligence in this country.”
“Oh, my God,” he said, “oh my God.”
A former high‐level F.B.I. official who operated in domestic counterintelligence areas since World War I, expressed astonishment and then anger upon being told of the C.I.A.'s alleged domestic activities.
“We had an agreement with them that they weren't to do anything unless they checked with us,” he said. “They double‐crossed me all along.”
He said he had never been told by his C.I.A. counterintelligence colleagues of any of the alleged domestic operations that took place.
Due to the Watergate scandal and other investigations, the Church Committee was formed in 1975:
was a U.S. Senate select committee in 1975 that investigated abuses by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), National Security Agency (NSA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS)....R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., editor of the conservative magazine The American Spectator, wrote that the committee "betrayed CIA agents and operations." The committee had not received names, so had none to release, as confirmed by later CIA director George H. W. Bush.
Bush would be CIA Director between 1976-1977, until Carter was elected and replaced him with Stansfield Turner. To put it mildly, Turner was not liked by the CIA's good old boy network who felt they'd been left out in the cold after the Church Committee. The San Francisco Chronicle interviewed Turner several months after his appointment:
(08/05/77) CIA Chief Deplores CIA Brothels:
"inexplicable...abhorrent..."
Once Reagan was inaugurated in 1981, Turner would be replaced by William Casey, George HW Bush was VP, and the good old boy network was up and running again. Bob Woodward had this to say about Casey, whose career began in the OSS during WWII:
60 Minutes, An Interview With Bob Woodward:
He broke the rules. He used POWS, prisoners of war, Nazi prisoners of war...as spies for the United States. He used prostitutes. He had one team of prostitutes that were spies. He knew that you don't get the job done of winning by playing by the rules.
So we've established that the CIA was perfectly willing to use prostitutes as part of its intelligence gathering and that by the early 1980's, the Director of the CIA had himself used these methods. But what does any of this have to do with Trump and Epstein? Let's examine their weird careers.
Trump and Epstein both grew up in New York. Trump, born in 1946, grew up in Queens with a wealthy father. Epstein, born in 1953, grew up on Coney Island in a middle class family. I don't know that their paths ever crossed at this stage, but Epstein was possibly familiar with the Trump name even then because in 1966, when Epstein was 13, Fred Trump purchased and demolished one of Coney Island's landmark amusement parks, Steeplechase Park, and wanted to turn it into residential properties. For more info on the effect this would have had on Epstein's neighborhood, see: How the Trumps Brought Death and Destruction to Coney Island. But for Trump, who was 20, this episode and others like it, would be a model for the kind of business man he'd become.
(1973) The Untold Story of Trump Model Management (Part 1):
[John] Casablancas... started Elite Model Management in 1972, by contrast, offered something different. First, he offered money-much more than models were making under Ford and similar agencies. He also offered the prospect of a more exiting lifestyle unhindered by curfews or morality clauses, where late night partying, drug use and hedonistic pleasures were encouraged. While Ford and her compatriots provided the security of labor protection-such as standardized pay and working hours- Casablancas embraced the increasingly popular principals of unbridled capitalism and neoliberalism. In exchange for employment security he gave them an opportunity to earn money commensurate with their commercial success, and the possibilities were endless.
...Around this time Donald Trump was working tirelessly to ingratiate himself into the Manhattan social scene with little success. That changed when he met the man who would become his mentor and closest adviser, Roy Cohn - the infamous lawyer who first gained notoriety as a red baiter during the McCarthy Hearings. Trump met Cohn in 1973 at Le Club, a members-only East Side hangout.
Trump was 27, and had just moved to Manhattan but was still working in Brooklyn at one of his father’s company offices. He was a nobody at the time, but he was able to strong arm the owners of Le Club into a membership-something he did as a way to get to know older, connected and powerful men like Roy Cohn. At the time, Trump and his father had been slapped with a lawsuit by the Department of Justice for racial discrimination, for refusing to rent out their real estate properties to black families. Trump knew his best shot at getting the feds to back down was to get a political “fixer” like Roy Cohn on his side. Cohn would eventually represent the Trumps in a counter suit against the DOJ, and ultimately a settlement would be reached. But that was just the beginning of Trump and Cohn’s relationship-“Though Cohn had ostensibly been retained by Donald to handle a single piece of litigation,” Wayne Barrett, an investigative journalist for New York’s Village Voice, would write in his 1992 book about the Trump family “he began in the mid-‘70s to assume a role in Donald’s life far transcending that of a lawyer. He became Donald’s mentor, his constant adviser on every significant aspect of his business and personal life.”
Through Cohn, Trump gained access to Manhattan’s drug-fueled disco scene, of which Cohn was a fixture. Cohn would become the legal advisor to Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, the owners of Studio 54 where Trump would spend much of the 1970’s. During this period, Trump engaged in such excess of promiscuity that he deemed it “my second business” according to author Michael Gross. During an interview with Gross for his Pop Culture anthology My Generation - Trump reminisced on this time of his life:
“You had drugs, women and booze all over the fuckin’ place”, he boasted. “If I hadn’t got married, who knows what would have happened?” in case anyone missed his point, he would later clarify - “I don’t think anybody had more sex than I did. Sex was all over the fucking place”. He would also describe the typical night at Studio 54 - “I would watch supermodels getting screwed, well-known supermodels getting screwed, on a bench in the middle of the room. There were seven of them and each one was getting screwed by a different guy.”
Later he would tell Howard Stern that his sexual exploits-and their inherent risk of deadly disease-were what he considered his “personal Vietnam”, opining that there was perhaps no more deadly weapon than the vagina.
And such was the life that Donald Trump saw in the late 70’s. In a way, it was a life not all that dissimilar to Casablancas’, yet with 2 considerable differences. One, Casablancas was a self-made man who was naturally charming, attractive, and navigated the celebrity and social scene with ease. Donald Trump was not. In fact Trump had a personality that most people in the elite circles he wanted to belong to found off putting. But perhaps the greatest difference between the two men was John Casablancas was famous, and Trump was not.
Nonetheless, Trump and Casablancas would cross paths at some point during the 70’s-most likely through Roy Cohn, who was involved in the suit between Elite and Ford-and they would form a decades long friendship and later a formal partnership that would end up influencing many of his future career choices and inform his style of interacting with the media. Casablancas’ influence on Trump becomes obvious when reading about both men, and it portends quite a bit, but has been largely forgotten by history.
...Donald Trump met, and started dating, Czech model Ivana Zelníčková - a woman who, despite his later claims that she was a supermodel, was in reality barely making a living posing in her bikini at trade shows at the time they met. Ivana and Trump would marry in 1978 and their first child, Donald Jr., would be born 8 months later.
Until Trump's presidential campaign, Roy Cohn was largely a forgotten figure as far as popular culture was concerned. But he played an extremely important role in Trump's development:
Cohn played a major role in McCarthy's crusade against Communism. [21] During the Lavender Scare, Cohn and McCarthy attempted to enhance anti-Communist fervor in the country by claiming that Communists overseas had convinced several closeted homosexuals employed by the US federal government to pass on important government secrets in exchange for keeping their sexuality secret. [21] Convinced that the employment of homosexuals was now a threat to national security, President Dwight Eisenhower signed an executive order on April 29, 1953, to ban homosexuals from working in the federal government. [21] (Note: Cohn himself was gay. It is reported that his friendship with Trump only soured in the early 80's because Trump learned Cohn had HIV. Cohn would die in 1986 from complications related to AIDS.)
...After leaving McCarthy, Cohn had a 30-year career as an attorney in New York City. His clients included Donald Trump [25]; New York Yankees baseball club and New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner [26] [27]; Aristotle Onassis [28]; Mafia figures Tony Salerno, Carmine Galante, and John Gotti; Studio 54 owners Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager; the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, and Texas financier and philanthropist Shearn Moody, Jr. [29] and Richard Dupont.
...In the early 1960s he became a member of the John Birch Society and a principal figure in the Western Goals Foundation. Although he was registered as a Democrat), Cohn supported most of the Republican) presidents of his time and Republicans in major offices across New York. [3] He maintained close ties in conservative political circles, serving as an informal advisor to Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. [3] Cohn's other clients included retired Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz who has referenced Cohn as "the quintessential fixer)". [31]
...Rupert Murdoch was a client, and Cohn repeatedly pressured President Ronald Reagan to further Murdoch's interests. He is credited with introducing Trump and Murdoch, in the mid-1970s, marking the beginning of what was to be a long, pivotal association between the two. [41]
Another figure comes into play around this point:
In 1976, Stone joined Reagan’s first failed presidential bid, working as his “youth director.” The following year, at 24 years old, Stone was elected chairman of the Young Republicans, a political organization for conservatives ages 18 to 40. The chairmanship had clout in conservative circles; the Young Republicans’ support was crucial to Barry Goldwater’s presidential nomination in 1964. Stone’s friend from the College Republicans, Paul Manafort, managed his campaign. Decades later, Manafort would become chairman of Trump’s 2016 presidential bid, and would also be indicted by the special counsel. Both men were from Connecticut, and as our colleague Franklin Foer wrote last March, they shared “an affection for finely tailored power suits, and a deeper love of power itself.”
By 1980, Stone had made crucial contacts in Reaganworld, and coordinated the Reagan campaign’s efforts in the Northeast that year, during the California governor’s second run at the White House. He worked closely with the Reagan adviser Roy Cohn.
Cohn introduced Stone to his friend and protégé Donald Trump, then a private businessman. At Stone’s urging, Trump, who was in his 30s, became a major donor to Reagan’s second presidential campaign. The two men hit it off—the start of a tumultuous relationship that spanned both business and politics over the next three decades.
After Reagan won the White House, Stone founded one of Washington’s first major lobbying firms with friends from his Young Republicans and campaign days: Charles Black and Manafort. As Foer has written, Black, Manafort, and Stone pioneered a new type of influence peddling that was hardball and morally dubious. One of their first clients: Trump and the Trump Organization, his family business.
With that in mind, let's examine one of the older conspiracy theories about Cohn:
(1984) Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat, and the CIA by Jim Hougan:
"According to fugitive ex-CIA officer Frank Terpil, CIA-directed sexual blackmailing operations were intensive in Washington at about the time of the Watergate scandal. One of those operations, Terpil claims, was run by his former partner, Ed Wilson. Wilson's base of operations for arranging trysts for the politically powerful was, Terpil says, Korean agent Ton Sun Park's George Town Club. In a letter to the author, Terpil explained that historically, one of Wilson's Agency jobs was to subvert members of both houses [of Congress] by any means necessary... Certain people could be easily coerced by living out their sexual fantasies in the flesh... A remembrance of these occasions [was] permanently recorded via selected cameras... The technicians in charge of filming. . .[were] TSD [Technical Services Division of the CIA]... The unwitting porno stars advanced in their political careers, some of [whom] may still be in office."
...Ton Sun Park, the owner of the George Town Club where Wilson ran his sexual blackmail scheme, was an associate of radical cult leader Sun Myung Moon. October 31, 1978, a report printed for the use of the Committee on International Relations, 'Investigation of Korean-American Relations': "During 1976, the subcommittee also received information about an apparent attempt by Moon and his followers--along with Tong-sun Park--to buy a controlling interest in the Diplomat National Bank (DNB), which opened in Washington D.C., in December 1975. Neil Salonen, president of the UC of America, was called to testify concerning this and other allegations. Salonen said he had bought DNB stock at the suggestion of Pak Bo Hi, but denied the UC was in any way involved in financing the DNB stock purchases." Moon has been a major anti-communist activist and is connected to all the reactionary elements within this movement, most notably those involved with the World Anti-Communist League. These include Cercle members Count Hans Huyn and Otto von Habsburg in Bavaria, Germany, Paul Vanden Boeynants in Belgium, and Arnaud de Borchgrave, Rev. Jerry Falwell, George Bush, John Singlaub, and many others in the United States. Moon has also been tied to sexual blackmail rings. December 20, 2002 issue of Executive Intelligence Review (EIR), 'The 'No Soul' Gang Behind Reverend Moon's Gnostic Sex Cult': "The sex is a specialty of Moon's own Gnostic "family" cult. Remember the Congressional Madam scandals of the 1970s, featuring Tong Sun Park and Suzy Park Thomson? That was just the tip of the iceberg of "The Reverend" Moon's sexual-favors operation. Military intelligence officers who investigated Unification Church operations in Washington in the 1970s and '80s, report that the recruitment device used on ranking, conservative political and military officials was to hold weekly orgies, arranged by Col. Bo Hi Pak, the Unification Church official who was a top officer of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA). The special treat at these affairs were the "Little Angels", Korean schoolgirls brought over by Moon as a singing group. The photo files from these sessions are reported to be a powerful influence in certain circles to this very day." DeCamp again, p. 179-180: "Gray's associate Wilson was apparently continuing the work of a reported collaborator of Gray from the 1950's McCarthy committee counsel Roy Cohn [of Permindex, according to EIR; and connections to Fascist International in Europe since the early 1950s], now dead of AIDS. According to the former head of the vice squad for one of America's biggest cities, Cohn's job was to run the little boys. Say you had an admiral, a general, a congressman, who did not want to go along with the program. Cohn's job was to set them up, then they would go along. Cohn told me that himself."
(Because I'm lazy, I used the above quote from this crazily formatted site. Feel free to discount it if you like, but considering the topic, I felt it relevant.)
So, to recap, in the 1970's while Trump was just starting out he befriended both John Casablancas, a modeling agent with a predilection for young girls, Roger Stone, a Republican dirty trickster involved in Watergate, and Roy Cohn, a hardline anticommunist and closeted homosexual, who introduced Trump to Rupert Murdoch and took him to sex parties at Studio 54 while Cohn was allegedly also involved in sexual blackmail operations for people affiliated with the CIA. Both Stone and Manafort would later be revealed to be active swingers with a taste for sex clubs and cuckoldry.
More in Part 2.
Part 2: A Timeline of Epstein, Trump, Sex Trafficking, and the Intelligence Community
via pijinglish
I don't think John DeCamp gets everything right, especially his claims about satanic groups, but in 1988 we learn about the Franklin Coverup, which Wikipedia describes as:
"The Franklin child prostitution ring allegations began in June 1988 in Omaha, Nebraska and attracted significant public and political interest until late 1990, when separate state and federal grand juries concluded that the allegations were unfounded and the ring was a "carefully crafted hoax." [1][2].
From the NYT:
(12/18/88) A Lurid, Mysterious Scandal Begins Taking Shape in Omaha
In the Executive Board's public session Monday, Mr. Chambers said the activities of Lawrence E. King Jr., the credit union's manager for the last 18 years and the central figure in its collapse, were ''just the tip of an iceberg, and he's not in it by himself.'' But Mr. Chambers added nothing that would shed light on his cryptic assertion....Mr. King is a 44-year-old Omaha resident who wholly or partly owns several small businesses here and lives with his wife and school-age son in a large house in one of the city's better neighborhoods. He is a tall, expansive figure well known for his costly style of dressing, lavish celebrations and extensive travel, sometimes in chartered jets and often with an entourage of young men.In 1972 he headed a national political organization, Black Democrats for George McGovern. But he gained greater prominence after he had switched parties a while later, serving for a time as vice chairman of the National Black Republican Council, an official affiliate of the Republican Party, and becoming a familiar figure on the Republican social scene.Mr. King has maintained a $5,000-a-month residence off Embassy Row in Washington and has also entertained generously at Republican National Conventions. At the 1984 gathering, in Dallas, where he sang the national anthem on the convention floor, he rented the ranch where the television series ''Dallas'' is filmed and organized a party there for black Republicans....Mr. King's trouble with the authorities came to the surface early last month when officials of the Government's National Credit Union Administration, acting on information from the F.B.I. and the Internal Revenue Service, arrived at the offices of the Franklin Community Federal Credit Union and shut it down. Then, on Nov. 14, the agency, which oversees the nation's federally chartered credit unions and insures their deposits, filed the Government suit against Mr. King, whose salary as Franklin Community's manager had been less than $17,000 a year.
(1989) Washington Call Boy Scandal
Craig J. Spence (1941 – November 10, 1989) was a Republican) lobbyist who was found dead in a Ritz-Carlton hotel room in 1989. [1] [2] ...Spence was implicated in a gay call-boy ring scandal, that arranged after-hours visits to the White House, the Washington Times and other papers reported in June 1989. Afterward, Spence committed suicide in a Boston hotel....Spence's name came to national prominence in the aftermath of a June 28, 1989 article in the Washington Times identifying Spence as a customer of a homosexual escort service being investigated by the Secret Service, the District of Columbia Police and the United States Attorney's Office for suspected credit card fraud. The newspaper said he spent as much as $20,000 a month on the service. He had also been linked to a White House guard who has said he accepted an expensive watch from Mr. Spence and allowed him and friends to take late-night White House tours. [4] Spence entered a downward spiral in the wake of the Washington Times exposé, increasingly involving himself with call boys and crack, [5] and culminating in his July 31, 1989 arrest at the Barbizon Hotel on East 63rd St in Manhattan for criminal possession of a firearm and criminal possession of cocaine. [6] Months after the scandal had died down, and a few weeks before Spence was found in a room of the Boston Ritz-Carlton Hotel, he was asked who had given him the "key" to the White House. Michael Hedges and Jerry Seper of The Washington Times reported that "Mr. Spence hinted the tours were arranged by 'top level' persons", including Donald Gregg, national security adviser to Vice President George H. W. Bush at the time the tours were given. [5] When pressed to identify who it was who got him inside the White House, Spence asked "Who was it who got [long-term CIA operative] Félix Rodríguez) in to see Bush?", agreeing that he was alluding to Mr. Gregg. [5] Gregg himself dismissed the allegation as "absolute bull", according to Hedges and Seper. "It disturbs me that he can reach a slimy hand out of the sewer to grab me by the ankle like this," he told the reporters. "The allegations are totally false." [5]
I'll let you decide how credible you find any of this so far. It should be noted that many of the people implicated in these affairs -- Wilson, Singlaub, Moon, Casey, Rodriguez, Bush, Stone, and Gregg -- were also involved to varying degrees in the Iran Contra Affair, which illegally raised money for anti-communist terrorists in Central America through the use of death squads, rape, and drug sales. One does not necessarily equal the other, but sexual blackmail and human trafficking don't seem like much of a stretch.
An article by The Guardian notes:
Czechoslovakia ramped up spying on Trump in late 1980s, seeking US intel:
In summer 1987, Donald and Ivana Trump visited Moscow and Leningrad, following a personal invitation from the Soviet ambassador in Washington, Yuri Dubinin. The trip was arranged by Intourist, a travel agency that was also an undercover KGB outfit. Soon after returning from Moscow, Trump announced he was thinking of running for president. That presidential bid failed to materialise.In October 1988, on the eve of the US election, Ivana Trump visited her parents in Zlín, known at the time as Gottwaldov. According to the files she “confidently” predicted Bush’s victory to her father, who in turn passed the tip to local StB officers.“The outcome of the election confirmed the veracity of this information,” StB field agent Lt Peter Surý wrote, in a document dated 23 January 1989 and marked “secret”.The prediction came “from the highest echelons of power in the US”. Ivana was “not only a well-heeled US citizen” but moved in “very top political circles”, Surý stated....It is unclear when the KGB began a file on the future president. In Prague about 60,000 StB documents were declassified in the mid-1990s, after the collapse of communism. The StB destroyed most records.However, secret memos written by the KGB chief, Vladimir Kryuchkov, in the mid-1980s reveal that he berated his officers for their failure to cultivate top-level Americans. Kryuchkov circulated a confidential personality questionnaire to KGB heads of station abroad, setting out the qualities wanted from a potential asset.According to instructions leaked to British intelligence by the KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky, they included corruption, vanity, narcissism, marital infidelity and poor analytical skills. The KGB should focus on personalities who were upwardly mobile in business and politics, especially Americans, the document said.
Another article in the Chicago Tribune notes:
Czechoslovakia secret police file: Trump sure of presidential win — in 1996:
A year before the 1989 collapse of communism in many parts of Europe, details about Ivana Trump's 1988 visit back to her homeland were recorded in a classified police report. The Oct. 22, 1988 report claimed that Trump refused to run for president in 1988 — despite alleged pressure to do so — because he felt, at 42, he was too young. But the secret report said he intended to run in the 1996 U.S. presidential race as an independent, when he would be 50."Even though it looks like a utopia, D. TRUMP is confident he will succeed," the police report said, based on information from an unspecified source who talked to Ivana Trump's father, Milos Zelnicek, about her visit.It was unclear where the alleged "pressure" was coming from. [Note: In "Get Me Roger Stone", Stone claims he was the one who convinced Trump to run.]...Trump's first wife was born Ivana Zelnickova in 1949 in the Czechoslovak city of Gottwaldov, the former city of Zlin that just had been renamed by the Communists, who took over the country in 1948. She married Trump, her second husband, in 1977. As she kept traveling home across the Iron Curtain on a regular basis, Ivana became a tempting target for the powerful, deeply feared Czechoslovak secret police agency known as the StB.
And by at least 1989, Trump himself was in the social circle of both Iran Contra figures and the father of Epstein's alleged "madame", Ghislaine Maxwell:
(This is from a previous post I made, seen here. Some of the links are subscription only, but are provided for accuracy)
“Everybody, but everybody at the party aboard British media mogul Robert Maxwell’s yacht Wednesday night had to doff their shoes before boarding the plush-carpeted “Lady Ghislaine.” Maxwell insisted, and his guests cooperated, including Donald Trump (minus Ivana), who has a much bigger yacht and was happy to compare notes with Maxwell. [Note: This is in reference to the Kingdom 5KR, originally owned by Adnan Khashoggi, international arms dealer and uncle of slain journalist Jamal Khashoggi.] There were John Tower [Republican Senator in charge of the Tower Commission, which investigated Iran Contra]; ex-Navy secretary John Lehman [Reagan appointee 1981-1987], now with Paine Webber; lawyer Tom Bolan [law partner of Roy Cohn]; literary agent Mort Janklow [clients include both Nancy and Ronald Reagan for their memoirs]; UN envoy Thomas Pickering [currently a board member at the world’s biggest pipe company, OAO TMK, in Moscow and Chairman of the Rostropovich-Vishnevskaya Foundation, “a non-profit organization based in Washington, DC that supports programs to improve the health of children worldwide”]; and Peter Kalikow, owner of the New York Post [awarded the Israel Peace Medal in 1982; created a super PAC for Herman Cain that was later revealed to be entirely financed by his donations]; Maxwell’s daughter, Ghislaine, and his niece, Helene Atkin of Macmillan, the publishing house Maxwell recently took over."[Note: This sentence wasn't in the Daily News article but shows up in a St Louis Dispatch piece a week later]: “Maxwell, who weighs about 300 pounds, went over the guest list personally.""No one could tell who didn’t make the final list, but we do know that Martha Smilgis of Time was disinvited by David Adler, public relations chief at Macmillan. She wrote the profile of Maxwell which he apparently did not like.”
Who was Ghislaine’s father?
Ian Robert Maxwell "MC (10 June 1923 – 5 November 1991), born Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch, was a British media proprietor and Member of Parliament (MP). Originally from Czechoslovakia, Maxwell rose from poverty to build an extensive publishing empire….Maxwell had a flamboyant lifestyle, living in Headington Hill Hall in Oxford, from which he often flew in his helicopter, and sailing in his luxury yacht, the Lady Ghislaine. He was notably litigious and often embroiled in controversy, including about his support for Israel at the time of the 1948 Palestine war. In 1989, he had to sell successful businesses, including Pergamon Press, to cover some of his debts. In 1991, his body was discovered floating in the Atlantic Ocean, having fallen overboard from his yacht. He was buried in Jerusalem. Maxwell's death triggered the collapse of his publishing empire as banks called in loans. His sons briefly attempted to keep the business together, but failed as the news emerged that the elder Maxwell had stolen hundreds of millions of pounds from his own companies' pension funds. The Maxwell companies applied for bankruptcy protection in 1992....Shortly before Maxwell's death, a former employee of Israel's Military Intelligence Directorate, Ari Ben-Menashe, approached a number of news organisations in Britain and the U.S. with the allegation that Maxwell and the Daily Mirror's foreign editor, Nicholas Davies, were both long-time agents for Mossad. Ben-Menashe also claimed that in 1986, Maxwell had told the Israeli Embassy in London that Mordechai Vanunu had given information about Israel's nuclear capability to The Sunday Times, then to the Daily Mirror. Vanunu was subsequently kidnapped by Mossad and smuggled to Israel, convicted of treason and imprisoned for eighteen years.Ben-Menashe's story was ignored at first, but eventually The New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh repeated some of the allegations during a press conference in London held to publicise The Samson Option, Hersh's book about Israel's nuclear weapons. On 21 October 1991, two MPs, Labour's George Galloway and the Conservative's Rupert Allason (also known as espionage author Nigel West), agreed to raise the issue in the House of Commons under Parliamentary Privilege protection, which in turn allowed British newspapers to report events without fear of libel suits. Maxwell called the claims "ludicrous, a total invention" and sacked Davies.[44] A year later, in Galloway's libel settlement against Mirror Group Newspapers (in which he received "substantial" damages), Galloway's counsel announced that the MP accepted that the group's staff had not been involved in Vanunu's abduction. Galloway himself, however, referred to Maxwell as "one of the worst criminals of the century....The Maxwell companies filed for bankruptcy protection in 1992. Kevin Maxwell was declared bankrupt with debts of £400 million. In 1995, Kevin and Ian and two other former directors went on trial for conspiracy to defraud, but were unanimously acquitted by a twelve-man jury in 1996.”
Epstein's own weird history has been spoken of to some degree, and I'm not sure I have much to add at this point, but perhaps it's important in context.
Financier in sex abuse case went from math whiz to titan
He taught calculus and physics at the prestigious Dalton School, a prep school in Manhattan, from 1973 to 1975, despite not having a college degree. Attorney General William Barr's father, Donald Barr, was headmaster at the time...Epstein left Dalton in the mid-1970s for a job at Bear Stearns at the urging of a student's father who arranged a meeting with the chairman of the investment bank, according to published reports. He later began his own money-management business, J. Epstein & Co....Epstein has long obscured the source of his wealth. Even after his arrest, he refused to provide authorities with even basic information about his income and assets. His attorney said Epstein's lawyers intend to provide the information but want to make sure it is correct first.This much is clear: "He is a man of nearly infinite means," federal prosecutor Alex Rossmiller said in court....Epstein also forged a relationship with Leslie Wexner, the retail titan behind Victoria's Secret, The Limited and other store chains. He started managing Wexner's money in the late 1980s and helped straighten out the finances for a real estate development Wexner was backing in a wealthy Columbus, Ohio, suburb.It was through Wexner that [in1996] Epstein acquired his Manhattan mansion, a seven-story, 21,000-square-foot former prep school less than a block from Central Park. It has been valued at about $77 million.
Around the same time, Trump started dating Marla Maples, who was working at his Atlantic City Taj Mahal Casino:
(1988) The Untold Story of Trump Model Management (Part 1):
Donald Trump, for his part, was becoming increasingly restless, and reckless. Despite fathering 3 children and having a devoted wife, by all accounts he didn’t spend much time with any of them, preferring work and play to the routines of domestic life. In the 80’s he made at least two life changing decisions-to step out on his wife publicly, and to expand his negligible empire into Atlantic City casinos. He built Harrah’s at Trump Plaza in 1984, and a partially completed building that became Trump Castle in 1985-a property that would be managed by his first wife, Ivana. He also scooped up the Taj Mahal in 1988, which at a cost of $1.1 billion made it the most expensive casino ever built at the time.
Some weirdness starts to pop up here, at least allegedly. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer:
(10/27/83) GROUND BROKEN FOR RESORTS' 2D N.J. CASINO-HOTEL
Resorts International, which opened the city's first gambling hall 5 1/2 years ago, broke ground yesterday for a second casino-hotel that will cost $250 million to build and will contain 1,000 hotel rooms and the world's second-largest casino.
According to Wikipedia:
Resorts International was a hotel and casino company. From its origins as a paint company, it moved into the resort business in the 1960s with the development of Paradise Island in the Bahamas, and then expanded to Atlantic City, New Jersey with the opening of Resorts Casino Hotel in 1978.
So how did a paint company morph into a multimillion dollar casino company? We're going to have to go to conspiracy theorists again. Make of it what you will:
Goodfellas: The Hidden History of Resorts International:
Resorts International was largely a family affair that grew out of a company called the Mary Carter Paint Company."Mary Carter (she never existed) was pretty much a family affair controlled by Jim Crosby, two of his brothers, and his in-laws. Based in Tampa, Florida, the firm included in its directorate James Crosby, John Crosby (a plastic surgeon in Mobile, Alabama), William Crosby (a Tampa realtor), and the Murphy brothers, Henry and Tom, who'd married the Crosby daughters. Henry owned a funeral home in Trenton, New Jersey, while Tom was board chairman of Capital Cities Communications, a successful broadcasting business founded by explorer Lowell Thomas. The explorer too was an early shareholder in Mary Carter Paint, as was Republican Thomas Dewey." (Spooks, Jim Hougan, pg. 381)Acclaimed researchers Sally Denton and Roger Morris note: "... the Mary Carter Paint Company, which was widely considered to be a CIA front that laundered payments to the Cuban exile army in the early sixties..." (The Money and the Power, pg. 284).This is certainly quite plausible considering Mary Carter was then based out of Tampa, a hub for joint CIA-Syndicate efforts to assassinate Castro. As was noted before here, Tampa don Santo Trafficante, Jr. was one of the gangsters initially tapped by the CIA's notorious Office of Security to arrange for Castro's untimely demise. Trafficante, a close associate of Meyer Lansky (whom we shall return to again), had been deeply involved in Cuba's gambling operations prior to the revolution and would later become even more deeply immersed in the world heroin trade. As was noted before here, he was very close to the emerging Cuban Mafia, which provided ample recruits to the CIA during the early 1960s despite much suspicion that Trafficante was a double agent for Castro.Certainly the Mary Carter Paint Company would have been well positioned to assist Trafficante in these endeavors in Tampa. And such a connection would also explain why the corporation, in the mid-1960s (as CIA Cuban operations were winding down), abruptly sold off its paint business and boldly delved into gambling. By the end of the decade it was managing one of the most profitable casinos in the world on the Bahama's Paradise Island. What it amounts to is that by the late period James Crosby emerged as not only the CEO of Mary Carter/Resorts International, but as an extremely well connected figure within the GOP and beyond."... Crosby was himself uniquely situated in Republican circles: a sometime guest at the White House, he'd donated $100,000 to Nixon's 1968 campaign. He was also a friend of, and frequent host two, Bebe Rebozo (with whom he banked). Moreover, Crosby's private intelligence agency, Intertel, was even then working with White House aides and ITT executives to discredit Jack Anderson's revelations anent ITT and Chile. At the same time, Intertel was the de factocustodian of the demented billionaire Howard Hughes (his own $100,000 donation would later result in two volumes of Senate testimony in the Watergate affair). Indeed, the ties between Paradise Island and Richard Nixon's administration were of the sort that bind: Allan Butler, owner of the failing bank that was his namesake, claims the Nixon was a silent partner of Crosby's in his Bahamian ventures, sharing a healthy chunk of Paradise Island bridge revenues with yet another secret partner, Bebe Rebozo. And by by no means finally, James O. Golden, Resorts' vice-president and one of Intertel's founding spooks, had formerly served as Nixon's Secret Service shield, later taking charge of security for the Nixon forces at the GOP's 1968 convention in Miami Beach. That Paradise Island is a special place, and had a special place in the heart (or what passed for a heart) of the Nixon regime, is abundantly clear... (Spooks, Jim Hougan, pg. 180) ...And that brings us to possibly the most curious aspects of Resorts, namely its ownership of its own vast private intelligence network.It was known as Intertel, short for International Intelligence, Inc. Intertel was incorporated in 1970 as an almost wholly-owned subsidiary of Resorts International and hit the ground running. During its heyday, Intertel had an impressive roster and an international reach. It would turn up in host of intrigues throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Curiously, it had its origins with Robert Kennedy's "Get Hoffa" squad."... Intertel, known especially and remarkably for its composition of former organized crime strike force attorneys from Robert Kennedy's Justice Department... The IRS considered Intertel... 'an organized crime enterprise of some type aimed at the Bahamas,' as one account summed up the agency's view. Roberts Peloquin and William Hundley, Kennedy's top crime fighters, had joined the firm and recruited operatives from the CIA, FBI, IRS, Secret Service, and other intelligence agencies. Staffed exclusively by what one author called 'Get Hoffa agents,' it was likened into a corporate CIA.' (The Money and the Power, Sally Denton & Roger Morris, pg. 284)...Intertel's other ventures include spying of muckraker Jack Anderson) for ITT, investigating the Chicago Tylenol murders and the Bhopal disaster. Even more ominous, however, were its dealings with a shady Belgium-based private detective agency known as Agence de Recherche et d'Information (ARI). As was noted before here, ARI was linked to members of the neo-fascist terror organization known as the Westland New Post, a few of whom had also been implicated in drug trafficking and pedophile rings. Intertel reportedly hired ARI to do some work for them during the 1980s....What is of great interest to us here is Trump's third Atlantic City casino: the Taj Mahal. While now widely associated with Trump, thanks in no small part to it leading to his first bankruptcy, it was not in fact Trump who started the casino. That dubious distinction lies with Resorts International.The company had begun construction on the Taj Mahal in 1983, but had run into persistent difficulties in finishing construction in the following years. Then, in April 1986, James Crosby died suddenly. This left Resorts in turmoil (allegedly) and Trump stepped in. Trump bought a controlling stake in the company in 1987 and was promptly named its chairman of the board.Let that sink in for a moment: Donald J. Trump, the current President of the United States, was briefly the chairman of a corporation long suspected of being a CIA front, that had decades-spanning involvement with the Syndicate, numerous "rogue" financiers, various drug and arms traffickers and which owned a vast private intelligence network...."
According to the Philadelphia Inquirer:
(07/22/87) TRUMP COMPLETES THE DEAL FOR RESORTS INTERNATIONAL
Developer Donald Trump took control of Resorts International Inc. yesterday in a $79 million deal that gives him his third Atlantic City casino, including what will be the largest gaming hall in the city.Trump sealed the deal in New York with those connected to the estate of the late founder of Resorts International, James M. Crosby.Trump paid a cash price of $135 a share for 585,068 shares of Class B stock, which has 100 times the voting power of Class A stock.He is expected to make a formal tender offer for the remaining 167,230 shares of Class B stock within the next several weeks at the same $135-a-share price. Owning all the Class B stock would give him 93 percent of the company's voting power.At a board meeting immediately after the transaction with the Crosby estate, Trump was elected chairman of the board of Resorts International, replacing Henry B. Murphy, Crosby's brother-in-law, who resigned.
And his relationship with Ivana was falling apart:
(1989) Ex-Wife: Donald Trump Made Me Feel ‘Violated’ During Sex
After a painful scalp reduction surgery to remove a bald spot, Donald Trump confronted his then-wife, who had previously used the same plastic surgeon.“Your fucking doctor has ruined me!” Trump cried.What followed was a “violent assault,” according to Lost Tycoon. Donald held back Ivana’s arms and began to pull out fistfuls of hair from her scalp, as if to mirror the pain he felt from his own operation. He tore off her clothes and unzipped his pants.“Then he jams his penis inside her for the first time in more than sixteen months. Ivana is terrified… It is a violent assault,” Hurt writes. “According to versions she repeats to some of her closest confidantes, ‘he raped me.’”Following the incident, Ivana ran upstairs, hid behind a locked door, and remained there “crying for the rest of night.” When she returned to the master bedroom in the morning, he was there.“As she looks in horror at the ripped-out hair scattered all over the bed, he glares at her and asks with menacing casualness: ‘Does it hurt?’” Hurt writes.
In 1992, Trump would divorce Ivana. It's this same year that we find him arranging a party of 30 for himself, Jeffrey Epstein, and 28 young aspiring calendar girls:
(1992) Trump Was Alone at a 1992 Party with 28 Girls and Accused Sex Trafficker Jeffrey Epstein
Part of a “calendar girl” competition organized at Trump’s request, the party was put together by a businessman named George Houraney, who spoke with the New York Times for a story published Tuesday.Houraney was also one of many to accuse Trump of sexual harassment, this time toward his former girlfriend and business partner, Jill Harth, who described an incident in 1997 as an attempted rape by Trump.“I arranged to have some contestants fly in,” Houraney told the Times. “At the very first party, I said, ‘Who’s coming tonight? I have 28 girls coming.’ It was him and Epstein.”...Before the “calendar girl” event, Houraney warned Trump about Epstein once again.“Look, Donald, I know Jeff really well, I can’t have him going after younger girls,” Houraney recalled telling Trump in the Times interview. “He said: ‘Look I’m putting my name on this. I wouldn’t put my name on it and have a scandal.’”
[EDIT: MSNBC reports on 07/17/2019 on newly discovered footage of Trump and Epstein discussing women at a party in November of 1992.]
The Boston Globe reported:
(1992) The pageant of Donald Trump’s dreams
It was a snowy night in Manhattan, December 1992, and the festive group was embarking on a circuit of exclusive clubs after a sumptuous dinner at the Plaza Hotel’s Oak Room.As the limo wove through the city, Trump discussed his views on dating, according to one of the women riding along. The billionaire casino mogul declared that “all women are bimbos” and said most were “gold diggers” who would be smart to go after men with money. Like him.Rhonda Noggle, the model who relayed the story to the Globe in an interview, said that, at that point, she had had enough. Speaking sharply to Trump, she said, she asked him to stop the limo. The car grew silent.
(1989-1995) The Untold Story of Trump Model Management (Part 1):
1989-1995 just so happens to be the same time period in which Donald Trumps world and empire was falling apart at the seams. In the beginning of the decade he was facing the end of his first marriage and a looming court battle. Despite his purportedly active dating life, by many accounts Trump was being rejected by many, if not most, of the women he pursued-including Carla Bruni and Jill Hearth. Marla Maples, after years of being the secret mistress and repeated rounds of being dumped and publicly humiliated by Trump, was starting to lose her patience. And the big gamble he took in Atlantic City was, by all accounts, failing miserably-a direct result of his jaw droppingly awful business practices and general incompetence. In 1991, his Taj Mahal Casino filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy. In 1992, he again filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy again, this time on his Trump Plaza Hotel (also in Atlantic City), at the time owing $550 million dollars. Recall that he would report an almost 1 billion dollar loss on his 1995 tax returns, according to the copies obtained by the New York Times. Indeed, the early 90’s were not a very good era for Donald Trump. In light of this fact, it’s worth noting that the sexual assault allegations against him are all clustered within this very time frame. [Note: This article was written in 2016, prior to more allegations]...By the time “New York Magazine” did a front page profile of him in 1988, Casablancas reputation for bedding young models was established and begrudgingly accepted (a price to pay in exchange for his “genius”) within the New York social scene, but the expose came as a shock to many outside the bubble. John Casablancas would soon find out that he was not as untouchable as he thought he was. In the article-which ran under the title “Girl Crazy”-Casablancas was portrayed as a champagne guzzling pervert, singularly dedicated to the “new look” department of Elite where he spent his days ogling the scantily clad, sometimes naked bodies of teenage girls. In light of Donald Trump’s more alarming comments and decisions around his daughter Ivanka, this quote stands out:"Casablancas talked about his seventeen year old daughter, Cecile. He said Cecile had been solicited by a photographer last summer on a beach in Ibiza. The photographer asked her to pose in a bikini, and Casablancas raced over to try to get a $2,000 fee for the shot. “She’s got a great little body” he told his models."Another quote that brings a chuckle and a nod of recognition in this story is Casablancas’s bizarre pride over never having changed a diaper. Donald Trump would make similar boasts in a Howard Stern interview a few years later. Compelling proof this is not, but I do believe it’s a hint at the kind of Don Juan persona that Don, far from a Juan, actually a dejected, balding husband with a crumbling empire....But the scandal did not end there, nor did it begin. Less than a month earlier 60 minutes aired a prime-time special on the abuses of underage girls in the modeling industry. Investigative reporter Craig Pyes portrayed the modeling industry as infested with agents who were notorious hustlers and playboys. His report revealed that both Claude Haddad- the head of European scouting for Ford- and Ford’s Paris-based agent Jean-Luc Brunel had been accused of horrific sexual misconduct by many models. [Note: Brunel's name appears multiple times on Epstein's flight manifests.] The special aired the interviews of dozens of women who accused both Brunel and Haddad of a litany of crimes, ranging from racist invective towards black models to violent rape. And in fact the hidden camera footage captured in filming the special caught it all- from Xavier lamenting about n**er models, to Haddad chuckling about drugging and raping 13 year old girls. According to Model At a retreat soon after the one-two punch delivered by the coverage, Haddad, Jean Luc Brunel and Casablancas were once again overheard (albeit not taped this time around) laughing about their crimes. Alternatively they were angry when confronted by interim scouting manager Trudi Tapscott - ”I’m a man and I have needs, I will not apologize for that!” Casablancas is said to have declared....Over time Donald Trump would emerge from the ruins of his empire with a new approach to business, and a new source of income-in 1996 he bought the rights to the Miss Universe franchise, and became the central figure in the running of these pageants. And in 1999 he started a modeling agency - T models, later changed to Trump Model Management. The correlation of interests is quite clear-for a man awkward around women but dependent on his public image saying otherwise, a stable of women under his employ was a way to boost his image-and even better, he was able to lock all of these women into non disclosure agreements, ensuring that his behavior with them had little chance of becoming public knowledge. It also appeared to have served as a useful tool regarding his business transactions-which, in the aftermath of his bankruptcy, were increasingly dependent on some less than savory characters. How he did this, and the breadth of this activity, will be explored in the next installment. But for the time being, there is one final aspect of this story that is breathtaking, and speaks more to the character of Donald Trump than anything else.
More in Part 3.
Part 3: A Timeline of Epstein, Trump, Sex Trafficking, and the Intelligence Community
via pijinglish
NY Daily News - February 28, 1993: The first newspaper article to note Ghislaine’s acquaintance with Jeffrey Epstein, at the opening of MercBar.
I'm going to borrow heavily from Cadet-Bone-Spurs' post made earlier today:
“Jane Doe” alleges Donald Trump sexually assaulted her on four separate occasions, culminating in a rape when she was just 13 at Jeffrey Epstein’s mansion.Her evidence? Three sworn declarations – from her, a friend she confided in at the time, AND one of Epstein’s recruiters.This case was filed in New York federal court in 2016. You can read her pleading here The case was NOT dismissed. Jane withdrew her complaint on November 4, 2016, saying she was “afraid to show her face” due to “numerous threats” against her.Jane came to New York in June 1994 “in the hope of starting a modeling career.” She soon met "Tiffany," who offered to bring her to parties where she could meet folks in the business - hosted by Epstein.This is eerily similar to tales of recruiters in MiamiHerald's reporting.Jane claims Trump had “sexual contact" with her at four parties she attended that summer. She understood both Trump and Epstein "knew that [she] was 13 years old.”The fourth time, she says "Trump tied me to a bed, exposed himself to me, and then proceeded to forcibly rape me."Jane claims a 12-year-old named Maria was forced to be involved in the third encounter. She never saw Maria again after that.Following the rape, Jane says Trump threatened to hurt her and her family if she ever told anyone. He suggested he could make her “disappear like Maria.”Jane is not the only witness offered in this filing. A woman using the pseudonym “Joan Doe” attests that she is willing to testify that Jane told her about the sexual encounters with Trump and Epstein “in the 1994-95 school year.”Here is her sworn declaration Jane also filed a sworn declaration from Tiffany, who says Epstein employed her starting in 1991 “to get attractive adolescent women to attend these parties.” Tiffany corroborates Jane’s story and claims to have “personally witnessed” the four encounters between Jane and Trump.Tiffany also claims she personally witnessed the “one occasion where Mr. Trump forced [Jane] and a 12-year-old female named Maria [to] perform oral sex” on him. She also claims to have witnessed Trump’s later threats against Jane. Tiffany says she worked for Epstein until 2000....Here is more on Epstein that matches details in the MiamiHerald reports: being forced to give him massages, Epstein forcing digital penetration, his irritation at her protests, etc.Listen to her voice. Listen to her story. Here she recounts her first encounter with Trump when she was 13. Her description matches his known idiosyncrasies and germophobia: He required her to touch him with a glove."He seemed to take a liking to me because I was so young...he kind of liked things to be his first."**"Donald Trump specifically asked about me because I remind him of his daughter, and she said, 'Well, she's 13 as well.'"**I know we avoid seriously discussing this because it is disturbing beyond comprehension. But we all know what Trump has said about Ivanka. This. Adds. Up.
(1995) The Untold Story of Trump Model Management (Part 1):
7 years had passed since John Casablancas had appeared on the cover of New York magazine, declaring his love for underage girls, and Donald and Ivana had made a decision-their daughter, Ivanka, would become a model. Despite a widespread belief that she was too young, too naive, and wasn’t quite aesthetically suited for the industry-Ivanka Trump was nonetheless able to get signed to a major agency, At the tender age of 13, she signed on with the new look department of Elite Model Management- under the tutelage of none other than John Casablancas:"It seems that Monica Pillard, the president of Elite, had been eyeing Ivanka since she spotted her on her father's lap four years ago, when Mr. Trump was a judge of a new-talent contest for the agency.Mr. Trump and Elite have a longstanding, informal relationship. Ms. Pillard served as a judge in the Miss Universe pageant, which is jointly owned by Mr. Trump and CBS, as is the Miss Teen USA pageant. John Casablancas, Elite's founder, is a friend of Mr. Trump's, and Elite has held events at Trump Tower in Manhattan."Yes, Donald Trump decided to entrust his daughter to this man. Yes, Casablancas still had his job. He would weather charges of tax evasion, and class action lawsuit-but eventually his past caught up with him. In 2002 he was sued by a former model who alleged that Casablancas had raped her when she was 15, and then forced her to get an abortion. The lawsuit was settled for an undisclosed amount, and in 2003 Elite model management officially declared bankruptcy.Despite the fact that Ivanka largely flopped as a model, Donald Trump would continue to brag about her physical beauty, physique, and ostensibly prolific modeling career.
Personally, I think this is one of the most damning pieces of evidence. Trump knew the allegations against Casablancas, but he let Ivanka work for him anyway.
[EDIT: For the sake of fairness, here's some additional info about the Jane Doe case sent to me by another Redditor. I've been meaning to make a Clinton post because I have my own theories about what's happening there, but it should be noted that the Jane Doe case is still very much up in the air: The Guardian
A publicist using the pseudonym “Al Taylor” is acting as a representative for Johnson, and has been shopping around to media outlets a video of a woman who wears a disguise while recounting the allegations against Trump. “Taylor” said in telephone calls last month that he was seeking $1m for the tape.[H]e then became threatening when asked more about his motivations in seeking the money for the video and about his true identity. “Just be warned: we’ll sue you if we don’t like what you write,” he said. “We’ll sue your ass, own your ass and own your newspaper’s ass as well, punk.”
But even given Trump’s moderately disgusting track record with women, the fact is that a cadre of men have been shopping this Katie Johnson story around for nearly a year, while repeatedly refusing requests to interview the supposed victim. The facts speak less to a scandal and more, perhaps, to an attempt at a smear—one that finally, after months of clumsy maneuvering, is gaining speed.
Massive anti-Trumper Harvey Weinstein fixer lawyer Lisa Bloom was hired for 24 hours for her media connections to organize a press conference. She later admits that she never met or spoke with the woman.
In the article that contains the now infamous Trump quote about Epstein dating younger woman there are 16 quotes from Clinton and even Democrat icon Bill Richardson even calls Epstein a close friend.
Epstein: International Money Man of Mystery
In that same NY Magazine profile on Epstein they talk in depth about his closet and most trusted relationship with one woman in particular, Ghislaine Maxwell, she is said to have one on one dinners with the Clintons at and is so close to the Clintons that she was even at Chelsea Clintons "close family" wedding.
Ghislaine Maxwell is named in the Epstein case as his "madam" and the person whose job was to procure underage girls for him. She paid a multimillion settlement in 2015 to a victim and in another new court filing in April she is accused of helping rape a pair of teen sisters, one of them only 15.]
(1996) The Secret History of Jeffrey Epstein's New York Townhouse
For reasons that have never been explained, Wexner appears to have made a gift of the house to Epstein, transferring title for the cost of $0 around 1996. The New York Times reports the property was formally transferred in 2011 from a trust controlled by Wexner and Epstein to a Virgin Islands-based entity controlled by Epstein; Wexner, meanwhile, told the Times through a spokeswoman that he "severed ties" with Epstein a decade ago.
After Robert Maxwell’s death, Trump apparently kept in touch with Ghislaine, and was spotted chatting with her at Ford Model’s 50th Anniversary Party, which the article insinuates Trump crashed:
NY Daily News - October 31, 1997:
Pictured together are Donald Trump and Ghislaine Maxwell, as she “tries to get Donald Trump to focus on the conversation as models saunter by.” “Trump was able to feast his eyes on the likes of Ione Skye, Amanda de Cadet, Christie Brinkley, Elaine Irwin Mellencamp, VH1 model-of-the-year Karen Elson, and Dutch treat Daniela Van Graas. But rest easy, model mothers: The developer walked out with only a Travel & Leisure goodie bag.”
(1998) Jeffrey Epstein boasted that he played matchmaker for Donald and Melania Trump, report says
Donald and Melania Trump often have told the story about how they met at a Manhattan nightclub during New York Fashion Week in 1998.Jeffrey Epstein has never figured into this origin story — but the financier and former Trump friend has tried to take credit for this historical encounter between the future president and first lady.The New York Times, reporting on Trump’s long and difficult friendship with the newly jailed accused sex trafficker, said that Epstein was very eager to play up his connections to Trump after the 2016 election. One way Epstein did this was by “claiming that he was the one who introduced Trump to his third wife,” the Times reported....In Donald and Melania Trump’s version of how they met, they give credit to another person for their introduction: modeling agent Paolo Zampolli. The agent threw the party at the Kit Cat Club, where the then-celebrity real estate mogul spotted a beautiful 28-year-old model from Slovenia named Melania Knauss. At the time, Trump was still married, though separated from his second wife, Marla Maples. He also was on a date with another woman....Melania called, they went on a date, Donald soon got his divorce from Maples, and the two eventually married in 2005.If Epstein made claims that he somehow brought Donald and Melania Trump together, he could argue that the timing made sense.From the 1980s through the early 2000s, Trump and Epstein were Palm Beach neighbors and Manhattan high-flyers who shared an an appreciation for wealth and for being seen together at fabulous parties, especially if beautiful women were present, according to the New York Times and other publications.“I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy,” Trump famously told New York magazine in 2002. [Note: If true, this means they'd been friends since at least 1987.] “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
Trump would divorce Marla Maples in 1999:
(1999) The Untold Story of Trump Model Management (Part 1):
[Trump] would also go on to unceremoniously dump Marla Maples, his long suffering mistress having become his reluctant second bride, and shut her down with legal arrangements that both forbade her from saying a negative word about him in public for all time, and ensured she got next to nothing in spousal/child support. Maples agreed to this despite the fact that she had already raised their daughter Tiffany almost entirely on her own. In fact until his presidential run Trump had not shown a modicum of fatherly interest in her life aside from the bizarre speculation-when she was merely a baby-about her future breast size and compliments of her 1 year old legs on Lifestyles of the RIch and Famous. Over a decade later, in one of his few public acknowledgements of her existence, he would smirk as he admitted to Howard Stern that he had urged Marla to abort her.
Palm Beach Daily News - June 13, 1999 : Reports that Avenue Magazine lists both Jeffrey Epstein (“rich guy”) and “Mar-A-Lago’s own” Donald Trump as among the 157 most eligible bachelors.
According to Mother Jones:
Founded in 1999, Trump Model Management “has risen to the top of the fashion market,” boasts the Trump Organization’s website, and has a name “that symbolizes success.” According to a financial disclosure filed by his campaign in May, Donald Trump earned nearly $2 million from the company, in which he holds an 85 percent stake. Meanwhile, some former Trump models say they barely made any money working for the agency because of the high fees for rent and other expenses that were charged by the company. ...Each of the three former Trump models said she arrived in New York with dreams of making it big in one of the world’s most competitive fashion markets. But without work visas, they lived in constant fear of getting caught. “I was pretty on edge most of the time I was there,” Anna said of the three months in 2009 she spent in New York working for Trump’s agency.“I was there illegally,” she said. “A sitting duck.”According to three immigration lawyers consulted by Mother Jones, even unpaid employment is against the law for foreign nationals who do not have a work visa. “If the US company is benefiting from that person, that’s work,” explained Anastasia Tonello, global head of the US immigration team at Laura Devine Attorneys in New York. These rules for immigrants are in place to “protect them from being exploited,” she said. “That US company shouldn’t be making money off you.”Two of the former Trump models said Trump’s agency encouraged them to deceive customs officials about why they were visiting the United States and told them to lie on customs forms about where they intended to live. Anna said she received a specific instruction from a Trump agency representative: “If they ask you any questions, you’re just here for meetings.”...Kate, who worked for Trump Model Management in 2004, marveled at how her former boss has recently branded himself as an anti-illegal-immigration crusader on the campaign trail. “He doesn’t want to let anyone into the US anymore,” she said. “Meanwhile, behind everyone’s back, he’s bringing in all of these girls from all over the world and they’re working illegally.”...We’re herded into these small spaces,” Kate said. “The apartment was like a sweatshop.”Trump Model Management recruited models as young as 14. “I was by far the oldest in the house at the ripe old age of 18,” Anna said. “The bathroom always smelled like burned hair. I will never forget the place!” She added, “I taught myself how to write, ‘Please clean up after yourself’ in Russian.”
In the late ’90s, the media documented that Trump attended dinner parties at Epstein’s 71st Street mansion. In April 1999, UK tabloid The Mail reported that Donald Trump was among the guests at a dinner Epstein threw in honor of Prince Andrew:
Palm Beach Post - February 20, 2000: Donald Trump, now dating Melania Knauss, hosts a pro-am tennis tournament at Mar-A-Lago, which Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell attend. “One celebrity, however, was not so obvious. Even when Trump announced England’s Prince Andrew, many in the crowd doubted his presence. For one, he stayed in the background, introducing himself as Andrew York, and for two, he’s recently shed 20 pounds, making him a possible double for actor Rupert Everett.” Trump is pictured with Melania and Prince Andrew, while Epstein and Maxwell are photographed with Michael Bolton.
Palm Beach Post - November 16, 2004: Trump bids $41.35M to best two other bidders, one of whom was Jeffrey Epstein, for Abe Grosman’s estate.
[Note: Palm Beach Daily News - May 2, 2018: "Trump’s former estate: The story behind the $95-million mansion tear-down” — "The buyer in July 2008 was Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev, who reportedly has never lived there and last year saw the end of a contentious, and stratospherically expensive, divorce from his ex-wife Elena, the terms of which were undisclosed. Property records give no clue as to whether there was an internal ownership change as a result of the divorce or any other factor.”]
In 2005, Trump married Melania Knauss:
(2005) Melania Trump's Life Before Marrying Donald Was Mysterious
She was born Melanija Knavs, (later westernized as "Melania Knauss," and ultimately, she took the last name of her husband after they wed in 2005), on April 26, 1970, in Novo Mesto, Slovenia — then part of Communist Yugoslavia. Her father, Viktor Knavs, now 73, was a car dealer, and her mother, Amalija, now 71, was a children's clothing designer, to according Biography.com. She grew up at home with her younger sister, and later learned that her father had a son from a previous relationship — her half-brother....After she signed with a modeling agency at 18, she dropped out of the university, according to Biography.com....Trump worked as a model in Milan and Paris before moving to New York in 1996. She worked with well-known photographers like Patrick Demarchelier and Helmut Newton, according to Biography.com, and graced the covers of magazines like Harper's Bazaar in Bulgaria and Vanity Fair in Italy. She also posed nude in GQ magazine in 2000.Not much is known about her modeling career between 1992 and 1996, when she moved to New York, per reporter Lauren Collins for The New Yorker. She went on to have reasonable success, and worked mostly in print....Melania Trump reportedly speaks Slovene, English, French, Serbian, and German. She is the first first lady to be born in a Communist nation and only the second to be born abroad......In a 2005 interview with The New York Post, Paolo Zampolli, the president of ID Models recalled: "It was unusual for her to go out; she never went to clubs or bars ... She never dated anyone in New York before Donald. She only went to movies by herself and to the gym."
(2002 - 2005) According to the Indictment [1] unsealed in Manhattan federal court:
From at least 2002 through at least 2005, JEFFREY EPSTEIN enticed and recruited, and caused to be enticed and recruited, dozens of minor girls to visit his mansion in New York, New York (the “New York Residence”), and his estate in Palm Beach, Florida (the “Palm Beach Residence”), to engage in sex acts with him, after which he would give the victims hundreds of dollars in cash. In order to maintain and increase his supply of victims, EPSTEIN also paid certain victims to recruit additional underage girls whom he could similarly abuse. In this way, EPSTEIN created a vast network of underage victims for him to sexually exploit, often on a daily basis, in locations including New York and Palm Beach.EPSTEIN’s victims were as young as 14 at the time he abused them, and were, for various reasons, often particularly vulnerable to exploitation. Moreover, EPSTEIN knew that many of his victims were under 18, including because, in some instances, victims expressly told him they were underage.In creating and maintaining this network of minor victims in multiple states to abuse and exploit sexually, EPSTEIN worked with others, including employees and associates who facilitated his conduct by, among other things, contacting victims and scheduling their sexual encounters with EPSTEIN at the New York Residence and at the Palm Beach Residence.In both New York and Florida, EPSTEIN perpetuated this abuse in similar ways. Victims were initially recruited to provide “massages” to EPSTEIN, which became increasingly sexual in nature and would typically include one or more sex acts. EPSTEIN paid his victims hundreds of dollars in cash for each encounter.In particular, during encounters at the New York Residence, victims would be taken to a room where they would perform a massage on EPSTEIN, during which EPSTEIN would frequently escalate the nature and scope of physical contact with his victims to include, among other things, sex acts such as groping and direct and indirect contact with the victims’ genitals. In connection with the encounters, EPSTEIN, or one of his employees or associates, typically paid each victim hundreds of dollars in cash. Once minor victims were recruited, EPSTEIN or his employees or associates would contact victims to schedule appointments for “massages.” As a result, many victims were abused by EPSTEIN on multiple subsequent occasions.To further enable him to abuse underage girls, EPSTEIN asked and enticed certain of his victims to recruit additional minor girls to perform “massages” and similarly engage in sex acts with EPSTEIN. When a victim would recruit another underage girl for EPSTEIN, he paid both the victim-recruiter and the new victim hundreds of dollars in cash. Through these victim-recruiters, EPSTEIN maintained a steady supply of new victims to exploit, and gained access to dozens of additional underage girls to abuse.
Jeffrey Epstein's Accusers Speak Out: "I Was Young, I Was Scared"
"I was young, I was scared, I knew these people were powerful," Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who was 16 when Epstein's ex-girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell allegedly recruited and groomed her for sexual slavery, told the Miami Herald in 2018 as part of the newspaper's massive investigation of Epstein's misconduct. "I didn't know what would happen if I said ‘no.’ I didn't know what would happen if I reported them. That 16-year-old girl just let it happen."Giuffre had been working at Mar-a-Lago when Maxwell recruited her to be a masseuse for Epstein, and claims she was forced to have sex with his prominent associates, including attorney Alan Dershowitz and Prince Andrew, Duke of York. (Dershowitz and Prince Andrew have both denied Giuffre’s allegations.) She said she was sent to Little Saint James, Epstein’s private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where she alleges she participated in orgies with older men while underage....Courtney Wild, another survivor, said she met Epstein in 2002 when she was 14 and reportedly still had braces on her teeth. Like he did with many of the accusers, he first asked her to give him a massage in exchange for cash. Wild, who later helped recruit other girls for Epstein, said he liked girls who looked like her — white, very young, slender, and easy to manipulate."He told me he wanted them as young as I could find them," Wild told the Miami Herald in 2018. "If I had a girl to bring him at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, then that’s how many times I would go a day. He wanted as many girls as I could get him. It was never enough."...Sarah Ransome claims Epstein sex-trafficked her in 2006 and 2007 and that, like Giuffre, she was also forced to have sex with Epstein’s lawyer, Alan Dershowitz (which he has denied). "The news of my abuser's arrest today is a step in the right direction to finally hold Epstein accountable for his crimes and restore my faith that power and money can't triumph over justice," Ransome told CBS News. Wild and Michelle Licata, another accuser of Epstein, were in the courtroom on Monday during Epstein's arraignment hearing. Licata told Good Morning America that she cried when she saw the financier appear in court."I don't think anyone has been told the truth about what Jeffrey Epstein did," Licata told the Miami Herald in 2018. "He ruined my life and a lot of girls' lives. People need to know what he did and why he wasn't prosecuted, so it never happens again."
Palm Beach Post - July 24, 2006: Jeffrey Epstein arrested on solicitation charges and charged with a third degree misdemeanor.
Palm Beach Post - August 14, 2006: “Powerful Legal Team Stymies Detectives” — One of the first articles to go into charges against Epstein. Names his political contributions to Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer, among others. Also includes Trump’s 2002 quote: “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it, Jeffrey enjoys his social life.” Alan Dershowitz uses the MySpace profiles of the alleged victims to discredit them.
(2007) It Sure Looks Like Jeffrey Epstein Was a Spy—But Whose?
In a report for the Daily Beast, Ward shed light on the Justice Department’s 2007 non-prosecution agreement with Epstein, that sweetest of sweet deals, since it got Epstein a laughably lenient sentence—for crimes which any normal person would have gone away for decades after admitting to.Alexander Acosta, the current U.S. Labor Secretary, is in the hot seat, since a dozen years ago he was the U.S. Attorney for South Florida who cut that deal with Epstein. Ward explained the background of that deal, which is now a noose for Acosta. Specifically, she elaborated that the Epstein issue came up when Acosta was appointed to the cabinet by President Donald Trump. Ward writes:*He’d cut the non-prosecution deal with one of Epstein’s attorneys because he had “been told” to back off, that Epstein was above his pay grade. “I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone,” he told his interviewers in the Trump transition, who evidently thought that was a sufficient answer and went ahead and hired Acosta. (The Labor Department had no comment when asked about this.)*Wait, what?So, Acosta, according to himself, backed off on prosecuting Epstein back in 2007, despite the possession of ample evidence proving his guilt, because he “belonged to intelligence.” Whose intelligence, exactly? is the first of many questions that arise here.This claim was met with an appropriate degree of skepticism, and Acosta had a chance to explain what he meant in a press conference this afternoon. On camera, Acosta maintained that he did the best he could with that case, while admitting that it hardly looks like a fair punishment now.The intelligence issue came up, and Acosta’s response was bizarre. He punted on setting the record straight, instead proffering this strange word salad when asked about Ward’s reporting:So there has been reporting to that effect and let me say, there’s been reporting to a lot of effects in this case, not just now but over the years and, again, I would hesitant to take this reporting as fact. This was a case that was brought by our office, it was brought based on the facts and I look at the reporting and others, I can’t address it directly because of our guidelines, but I can tell you that a lot of reporting is going down rabbit holes.To anyone acquainted with our nation’s capital, that’s a non-denial denial of an epic kind. Given the chance to refute Ward’s report, specifically that the Epstein case involved intelligence matters, Acosta did nothing of the sort. Indeed, he functionally admitted that it’s true.What then can we conclude at this point? It appears that Jeffrey Epstein was involved in intelligence work, of some kind, for someone—and it probably wasn’t American intelligence either. The U.S. Intelligence Community is lenient about the private habits of high-value agents or informants, but they won’t countenance running sex trafficking rings for minors on American soil, for years. While it’s plausible that Epstein was sharing some information with the FBI—many criminals do so to buy themselves some insurance—it’s implausible that he was mainly working for the Americans.
(2019) The Secret History of Jeffrey Epstein's New York Townhouse
In addition to “hundreds—and perhaps thousands—of sexually suggestive photographs of fully- or partially-nude females,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Alex Rossmiller revealed in a filing this week that the house also contained a massage table with sex toys and lubricant.
(07/08/19) Jeffrey Epstein had ‘vast trove of lewd’ photos of girls: Prosecutors
Federal agents who searched Epstein’s $77 million Upper East Side townhouse in Manhattan also found “in a locked safe ... compact discs with hand-written labels including the following: ‘Young [Name] + [Name],’ ‘Misc nudes 1,’ and ‘Girl pics nudes,’ ” according to a new court filing in Epstein’s case.Prosecutors said Epstein, a 66-year-old former friend of both President Donald Trump and ex-President Bill Clinton, represented both an “extreme flight risk,” and an “acute danger” to the public if he is freed on bail.“The defendant, a registered sex offender, is not reformed, he is not chastened, he is not repentant; rather, he is a continuing danger to the community and an individual who faces devastating evidence supporting deeply serious charges,” prosecutors from the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York wrote in their filing.Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to procuring a person under 18 for prostitution and felony solicitation of prostitution, according to his plea agreement on charges brought in Florida.He is accused in a new indictment unsealed Monday of trafficking “dozens” of minor girls, some of them as young as 14 years old, from 2002 to 2005. The indictment accuses him of having the girls brought to him to sexually abuse in his New York and Florida mansions, and then paying each of the girls hundreds of dollars.
I hope this insanely long post gives more detail into what might possibly be going on. While a few of the more conspiracy minded links might ring untrue to most of you, I wanted to include them in part because of how strange this story might be. Trump and Epstein have known each other for a very long time. The sources of their money still aren't clear, and they both have numerous links to more than a few shady characters. To wrap up with the quote from the original article:
Who are the suspects then? It seems awfully coincidental that Epstein’s best pal and business partner for decades has been Ghislaine Maxwell, the British socialite and daughter of the late Robert Maxwell, the media mogul who died under mysterious circumstances in 1991. Something of a Bond villain turned real life, Maxwell loved the limelight, despite being a swindler and a spy. British counterintelligence assessed that Maxwell was working for the KGB, while pervasive allegations that he was working for Mossad too are equally plausible.Since the lines between Russian intelligence, Israeli intelligence and organized crime can get remarkably blurry in practice, as I’ve explained previously, assessing whom Epstein’s been working for may prove difficult to answer with any precision. But we have a suspect list to start asking questions.What’s not in doubt is that a sex trafficking ring centered on minors, which involved numerous global VIPs in compromising situations, would be of high interest to quite a few intelligence services. The Epstein saga seems certain to get even more unpleasant and interesting.
End. [I'm actually working on a Part 4 to follow this up with a little more current info]
Part 4: A Timeline of Epstein, Trump, Sex Trafficking, and the Intelligence Community
via pijinglish
EDIT: This was originally posted over at Keep_Track, but they decided it was still too conspiracy minded. Anyway, enjoy.
I'm posting this as a follow up to my posts last week, which have since been removed by the mods. While I might not agree with their decision, this post isn't intended to be an angry rebuttal. This is their sub, and I can understand why they felt my posts might not be appropriate for a sub that wishes to be taken seriously. I tried to acknowledge the links which I knew might be problematic, but that doesn't change the fact that, as sources, they remain problematic. That said, all three posts seemed to be generally well received, and I'd like to think they held some value even if they were admittedly highly speculative at times.
If you don't know what I'm talking about, I've reposted last week's posts on a different sub, and I'll link to them here if the mods don't mind. [Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 -- I'll wait for approval before linking.] This post, then, is my attempt to explain why I think an examination of this kind is necessary at the moment, and why I don't believe it to be a liberal version of Pizzagate. I promise I'm not trying to skirt the rules or to somehow make this about me, but I don't think I really clarified a few important points that I should have.
First off, I followed Pizzagate right from the start. (Searching through Reddit comments is a nightmare, but here's one quick thread I was involved in around the time the story broke. Here's another.) I'm originally from DC myself, and I actually know several people who helped open Comet Pizza back in 2006. They were bartenders, kitchen staff, and servers, and I spent a fair amount of time there after hours while my friends closed up. My friends' bands played there, we had birthday parties there, even my grad school graduation party was held there. So when I first heard the allegations I was pretty shocked, but then it became pretty clear pretty quickly that it all looked like bullshit. The story has been pretty roundly debunked by this point, so I don't think I need to get into that. How, then, is this different? The most important difference, in my mind, is the origin of the story.
In the case of Pizzagate, there wasn't really a coherent starting point. It likely originated on 4chan and was then amplified based on wishful thinking and intentional propaganda, despite the fact that there were no known victims. I'll get into that a bit more in a few. My posts last week were, I admit, highly speculative. The idea that Trump and Epstein have been involved in a sex trafficking ring with links to the intelligence community seems absurd. But I wasn't speculating based on something I pulled from thin air. I was speculating based on comments made by the Secretary of Labor, regarding his time as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida. Whatever our opinions are of Acosta, he's not some random neckbeard on 4chan, and these are his words about why he decided to cut a deal with Epstein:
“I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone."
That's a really, really strange claim. I think it deserves to be examined, but I'm not sure how we go about doing that when both the subject matter and circumstances of the claim are so utterly bizarre that they defy belief. Whether they ultimately have any merit is still completely up in the air, but given their source, and given the fact that there are dozens of actual victims who have given testimony implicating both Epstein and Trump, individually and together, of committing sexual assault and rape on both adults and adolescents, we might give Acosta's claims a closer look. But in order to do so we have to wrap our minds around some really unbelievable ideas. That was what my posts last week were trying, albeit clumsily, to accomplish.
In Part 1, I wanted to establish that yes, the CIA had dabbled in prostitution and sexual blackmail. (I should have probably also mentioned Russia's reliance on kompromat, but for the most part I think that's more widely agreed upon by the people who frequent this sub.) I also wanted to establish that many of the people in Trump's circle in the mid-1970's and 80's were allegedly involved in various forms of sexual blackmail and child exploitation through modeling agencies. The rumors about Roy Cohn existed long before Trump ever entered the picture as a political figure.
And while I mentioned Roger Stone as a "dirty trickster", I failed to mention that, according to Business Insider:
New York's notorious "Manhattan Madam" has come back into the limelight.
Kristin Davis, who was known for running a high-end prostitution ring in the 2000s, is a close associate to Roger Stone, who was arrested in the Russia investigation on Friday on charges that he lied to Congress and obstructed the probe.
Davis, who shared a New York duplex with Stone, told CNN that the FBI called her at 6 a.m. on Friday and told her they had a search warrant for the residence.
...Kristin Davis started her career working at a hedge fund. She claimed that by the end of her stint, she was senior vice president of operations for a $2 billion fund....In her time working in finance, she said she was asked to book escorts for her bosses. It was from here that she decided to set up her own agency.
According to the Washington Post: (08/10/2018) How an ex-madam, a political trickster and a toddler got tangled up in the Russia investigation
Davis and Stone have been friends since 2008. She says she met him when they appeared together on a radio show following her release from New York’s Rikers Island jail, where she’d served several months on a charge of promoting prostitution. Stone called her, she says, and declared: “You’re brilliant. Can we talk about what you’re going to do with your life?”
Davis, a poised and articulate speaker who has touted her business acumen, had a compelling backstory, one with natural appeal to Stone, a bon vivant with a long-established reputation for taking delight in all things salacious who sometimes quips that he is “tri-sexual. I’ve tried everything.”
...In her late teens, she says, she was already working in the finance industry, eventually becoming a vice president at an East Coast hedge fund in her early 20s. She noticed how highflying finance types celebrated by hiring prostitutes. Sensing a business opportunity, she opened a high-end prostitution service in New York.
...Davis has claimed repeatedly that Eliot Spitzer, the former New York governor, was one of her frequent clients, using the code name “James” while he was serving as the state’s attorney general. She dedicated a full chapter in her book to those allegations. Spitzer has vigorously denied the claims. He declined to comment.
Davis was arrested and sent to Rikers in 2008, the same year that Spitzer, who was never charged with a crime, resigned as governor after the New York Times reported that he’d patronized the Emperors Club VIP, another high-priced prostitution service.
That's all salacious enough, but even more pertinent to the point of this series of posts: back in 2010, The Atlantic reported: (10/13/2010) Meet the Leader of Eliot Spitzer's Smear Campaign
On Fox TV and at the New York Post, a peculiar detail is the subject of endless fascination: Did Eliot Spitzer, ex-governor of New York and newly minted CNN show host, really insist on wearing knee-high black socks during his encounters with high-priced escorts? A far more important question is this: Where did the story come from and why?
The answer to that question is important because it reveals much about political bloodsport in this country and how the media are routinely manipulated by clever political operatives who are paid to attack their enemies by "leaking" damaging rumors in ways that quickly enter the mainstream media as fact.
The tale of the Luv Gov's black socks was originally penned by Roger Stone, the amanuensis of the dark side and perhaps the Republican Party's best-dressed and most ruthless dirty trickster. He first introduced the hosiery motif in a letter he claims his lawyer -- Paul Rolf Jensen -- sent to the FBI, as a story heard, second-hand, from an off-work call girl at an "adult-themed club." (Don't you just love the detail?)
Problem #1: The FBI never received the letter from Stone. Problem #2: Stone's letter -- dated prior to Spitzer's downfall -- only surfaced after Spitzer's downfall, leading some to wonder (because of problem #1 and because the address and the name of the agent/addressee were blacked out) if his letter had been back-dated to make it look as though he had sent it before the scandal. Problem #3: Mainstream media outlets all over the world -- including the NY Times and the Miami Herald -- give credence to the black socks story, even though it was based on a rumor or hallucination originated by Stone.
Stone had a motive to plant the story because he had been paid to embarrass the governor. First, former NY State Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno hired Stone for $20,000/month to take on Spitzer. With Stone's help, Bruno turned everyone's attention away from his own corruption -- using state aircraft and vehicles to go on personal fund-raising trips -- and toward an attack on Spitzer for "spying" on Bruno. (The "spying" consisted of releasing public records of Bruno's state-paid travel.)
In his enthusiasm to take on the Sheriff of Wall Street, Stone left an obscene message, which is included in my new film, Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer, on the voicemail of Spitzer's father. "The voice does sound eerily like me," a smiling Stone told me in an on-camera interview.But, even though the call originated from his phone number, Stone denies it actually was him, claiming a "rogue unit" of the NY State Police "under Spitzer's control" had pasted together recordings of his voice. (I recall wondering what tapes might have been used to put together phrases like "your phony, psycho, piece-of-shit son.")
When Bruno was forced to fire Stone over the incident, Stone found other sponsors to pay him to stay on the Spitzer attack detail. According to Stone, his paymasters were "wealthy Republicans." Fortune's Peter Elkind, who contributed critical reporting to the film and is the author of the book Client 9, found evidence that Stone had bragged to a South Florida blogger that the "wealthy Republicans" -- called "The Group" -- were organized around a coordinating operative, Republican lobbyist Wayne Berman, and financiers including former AIG Chairman Hank Greenberg and Home Depot financier Ken Langone -- all major-league Spitzer haters. (Stone denies this.)Mysteriously, before anyone could even imagine Spitzer's spectacular fall, Stone was predicting it in cryptic emails and telegrams. "Eliot's going down," he told Rich Baum, the secretary to then Gov. Spitzer, in an email. While there is no doubt that Spitzer provided the weapon and the ammunition for his own political demise, did Stone play the role of the hit man?
...[T]he sexual hypocrisy of "family-values Republicans," as evidenced by Newt Gingrich, David Vitter (who ordered prostitutes during congressional roll call votes), John Ensign, Mark Sanford, Bob Livingston, etc., doesn't interest Stone for a simple reason: He is a paid political assassin who targets Democrats.
...So let's sum up: Stone helped take down Spitzer, contrived the black socks story to keep him in disgrace, hired an ex-madam to corroborate the story and then convinced newspapers and TV shows -- seduced by the fun of it all -- to act as confirming sources. And who is Roger Stone advising now? Carl Paladino, the Republican candidate for NY Governor, the would-be replacement for the man Stone takes credit for taking out. Kaching!
And despite all this, it might still be beside the point had Stone not been a constant and important presence in Trump's life right up to and through the 2016 presidential campaign. And once Stone was ousted, he was simply replaced by Stone's old business partner, Paul Manafort, who had an apartment in Trump Tower and would be accused by his own daughters of forcing their mother into non-consensual gangbangs. Unlike Pizzagate, which was baseless, we can see that highly influential people in Trump's sphere were repeatedly accused of the kinds of behavior that give plausibility to the claims of sex trafficking and blackmail.
In Part 2, I detailed a couple of conspiracy theory-like scandals in the 1980's that alleged links between the GOP and child sex trafficking. I won't reiterate them here, but my point wasn't to try to connect either Trump or Epstein to those particular conspiracies, rather to point out that at the time they were both coming up in the world, many of the people they were or would be surrounded by were implicated in these accusations. I also detailed early rape allegations against Trump, and his decision to focus on modeling agencies with less than sterling reputations. (The Guardian published "The Full List" on 6/24/2019) Trump has now famously said in 2002 that he'd known Epstein for "15 years", which places their friendship as starting around 1987. This means that Epstein's career skyrocketed from math teacher to partying with Donald Trump in about a decade. By 1992, Trump seems to have understood Epstein's tastes well enough that he knew what kinds of parties to throw for him: two guys who don't drink, and 28 very young women.
Just a few days ago, New York Magazine published this:
(07/11/19) Real Hedge-Fund Managers Have Some Thoughts on What Epstein Was Actually Doing
Epstein’s spotty professional history has also drawn a lot of attention in recent days, and Kass says it was one of the first things that raised his suspicions years ago. Now 66, Epstein didn’t come from money and never graduated from college, yet he landed a teaching job at a fancy private school (“unheard of,” says Kass) and rose through the ranks in the early 1980s at investment bank Bear Stearns. Within no time, Kass notes, Epstein was made a partner of the firm — and then was promptly and unceremoniously ousted. (Epstein reportedly left the firm following a minor securities violation.) Despite this “squishy work experience,” as Kass puts it, at some point after his quick exit, Epstein launched his own hedge fund, J. Epstein & Co., later renamed Financial Trust Co. Along the way, he began peddling the improbable narrative that he was so selective he would only work with billionaires.
Oddly, Epstein also claimed to do all the investing by himself while his 150 employees all worked in the back office — which Kass says reminds him of Madoff’s cover story. Though it now appears that Epstein had many fewer employees than he claimed, according to the New York Times:
Thomas Volscho, a sociology professor at the College of Staten Island who has been researching for a book on Mr. Epstein, recently obtained [a 2002 disclosure] form, which shows [Epstein’s] Financial Trust had $88 million in contributions from shareholders. In a court filing that year, Mr. Epstein said his firm had about 20 employees, far fewer than the 150 reported at the time by New York magazine.
Given this puzzling set of data points, the hedge-fund managers we spoke to leaned toward the theory that Epstein was running a blackmail scheme under the cover of a hedge fund.
How such a scheme could hypothetically work has been laid out in detail in a thread on the anonymous Twitter feed of @quantian1. It’s worth reading in its entirety, but in summary it is a rough blueprint for how a devious aspiring hedge-fund manager could blackmail rich people into investing with him without raising too many flags.
Kass and former hedge-fund manager Whitney Tilson both emailed the thread around in investing circles and both quickly discovered that their colleagues found it quite convincing. “This actually sounds very plausible,” Tilson wrote in an email forwarding the thread to others.
“He somehow cajoled these guys to invest,” says Kass, speaking of hypothetical blackmailed investors who gave Epstein their money to invest, but managed to keep their names private.
The fact that Epstein’s fund is offshore in a tax haven — it is based in the U.S. Virgin Islands — and has a secret client list both add credence to the blackmail theory.
So what did Epstein do with the money he did have under his management, setting aside the questions of how he got it and how much he had? One hedge-fund manager speculates that Epstein could have just put the client money in an S&P 500 index fund, perhaps with a tax dodge thrown in. “I put in $100 million, I get the S&P 500 minus some fees,” he says, speaking of a theoretical client’s experience. Over the past few decades, the client would have “made a shitload” — as would Epstein. A structure like that wouldn’t have required trading desks or analysts or complex regulatory disclosures.Kass has kicked around a similar idea: Maybe Epstein just put all the client money in U.S. treasuries — the simplest and safest investment there is, and the kind of thing one guy actually can do by himself.
If the blackmail theory sounds far-fetched, it’s worth keeping in mind that it was also floated by one of Epstein’s victims, Virginia Roberts Giuffre. “Epstein … also got girls for Epstein’s friends and acquaintances. Epstein specifically told me that the reason for him doing this was so that they would ‘owe him,’ they would ‘be in his pocket,’ and he would ‘have something on them,’” she said in a court affidavit, according to the investigative series in the Miami Herald that brought the case back to the public’s attention late last year.
In the 2015 filing, Giuffre claimed that Epstein “debriefed her” after she was forced into sexual encounters so that he could possess “intimate and potentially embarrassing information” to blackmail friends into parking their money with him. She also said photographic and video evidence existed — an assertion that looms especially large now that federal investigators have found a trove of images in Epstein’s home safe.
And The Miami Herald recently published this:
(07/14/2019) Epstein scandal explodes in Israel as ties to former prime minister under scrutiny
Jeffrey Epstein’s arrest is reverberating in Israel, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing Likud party are calling for a criminal probe into former prime minister Ehud Barak’s personal and business ties with the accused sex trafficker, Israeli media is reporting.
Barak, 77, served as prime minister from 1999 to 2001. This month he formed a new party to run for prime minister against Netanyahu, who called for new elections in September. Once political allies, Barak and Netanyahu have been sparring on social media, with Netanyahu producing a video raising Barak’s relationship to the multimillionaire New York financier, and Ohio billionaire Les Wexner, who has given money to Barak, the Times of Israel reported.
In Part 3, I listed the numerous allegations against Trump and Epstein, many of which are well known by now but some of the lesser known ones -- like Trump's decision to put 13 year old Ivanka under the control of a modeling agency whose owner, John Casablancas, was known to rape his underage models -- may have been new to some people. Given Trump's long and uncomfortable track record of sexualizing Ivanka, and Casablancas' own record of sexualizing his underage daughter, the decision is deeply unsettling. That, plus the fact that Trump likely met Casablancas through Roy Cohn, and had known Epstein's madam, who had her own potential ties to various intelligence agencies, and you've got a weird web worth looking at. Conclusive? No, but hard to ignore.
The timing of the Wikileaks drop that released the Podesta emails which would be mangled to come up with fake codewords that formed the basis of the Pizzagate rumors is well known: the same day Trump's "grab 'em by the pussy" tape was made public. Among the many pieces of "evidence" used to discredit the Podestas was their weird art collections -- a strange detail that proved little, yet was repeated often, even while not one victim had made any kind of accusation. Additionally, the artist Marina Abramovic, would also be dragged into it, allegedly as a depraved cannibal. Nothing came of any of it, even while the right claimed it #confirmed the conspiracy. Meanwhile:
(07/11/2019) The Décor in Jeffrey Epstein’s NYC Townhouse Is the Stuff of Nightmares
The Times cites a lot of design nonsense in a recent piece about the townhouse, but the single piece of information that will go down in infamy is that Epstein possesses a mural depicting “a photorealistic prison scene that included barbed wire, corrections officers and a guard station, with Mr. Epstein portrayed in the middle.” He reportedly commissioned it a few years ago, and now it’s displayed somewhere on the second floor.
R. Couri Hay, a public-relations specialist who visited Epstein’s home three months ago, told the Times he was invited for the express purpose of viewing the mural. “[Epstein] said, ‘That’s me, and I had this painted because there is always the possibility that could be me again,’” said Hay.
This is likely a reference to the 18-month jail sentence Epstein served (but only 13 months of it) as part of a 2008 plea deal that allowed him to avoid federal charges and, potentially, a lifetime of imprisonment. Though Epstein was accused of molesting dozens of underage girls at his Palm Beach property, he was allowed to plead guilty to a mere two counts of soliciting prostitution from a minor.
...The home featured a “life-size female doll hanging from a chandelier.”
...A 2003 Vanity Fair piece on the townhouse described the entrance hall as decorated with “row upon row of individually framed eyeballs … imported from England.”
...According to one visitor who spoke to the Times, there’s a chessboard at the bottom of the staircase that is hair-raising in its commitment to creeping people the fuck out. Each of its customized figurines is modeled after one of his staffers and “dressed suggestively.”
...Vanity Fair’s 2003 report also contains a detail about a stuffed black poodle in Epstein’s study. It’s situated atop a grand piano and Epstein has reportedly pointed it out to visitors, telling them “No decorator would ever tell you to do that … But I want people to think what it means to stuff a dog.”
Among the latest accusations are those made by 49-year-old Maria Farmer, who, in an affidavit filed in April, claims that Epstein leveraged her dreams of becoming an artist to lure her into his web. She says that Epstein went on to sexually assault both her and her younger sister, who was 15 at the time.
I could go on, but my point is that, unlike Pizzagate (which, if Im going to make any accusations myself, looks convincingly to me like an attempt to get ahead of the real story through disinfo), there are real victims here. The claims of Epstein's involvement with intelligence agencies doesn't come from the back corners of the internet, but from the prosecutor of the case itself.
(07/10/2019) THE EPSTEIN SCANDAL IS GIVING QANON EVERYTHING PIZZAGATE COULDN’T
“The broadest grievances of the QAnon community revolve around corrupt elites who are untouched by the justice system, covered-up child abuse, and sex trafficking,” said Travis View, a researcher who hosts a podcast about QAnon. “Part of the promise of the QAnon is that these injustices will be corrected soon. You can see how the credible allegations and arrest of Jeffrey Epstein ticks all these boxes.”
...“The problem, which is typical of QAnon, is that they make outlandish claims that unnecessarily go beyond the evidence,” said View. “In the case of Epstein, they absurdly claim that Epstein Island contains secret underground tunnels in which children were abused and sacrificed. This is an echo of the satanic panic of the 80s, in which preschools were baselessly accused of containing tunnels used for hiding child abuse.” [Note: In Part 2 I mentioned The Franklin Coverup, which in my opinion managed to garble instances of actual child abuse with nonsense about satanic cults. QAnon also manages to make Epstein's actual child abuse seem outlandish and implausible.]
...In addition to the child sex trafficking conspiracy, QAnon posits that the Russia investigation was actually a front — and Trump and special counsel Robert Mueller are in cahoots to bring down the sex ring. Any day now, they believe, Mueller will unseal thousands of pending federal indictments against celebrities and high-ranking officials.
QAnon began in October 2017 when “Q” (in reference to the highest government security clearance available) posted a cryptic message on 4chan, referencing equally cryptic remarks by Trump at a photo op with military personnel. At the appearance, the president warned about an impending “calm before the storm” — which has since become a slogan associated with Q.
It’s often been described as a spinoff from the Pizzagate conspiracy, which posited that then-candidate Hillary Clinton and Democrat officials were running a child trafficking ring below the Comet Ping Pong pizza restaurant in D.C. The Pizzagate theory, which spread quickly via social media, inspired a man to drive six hours from North Carolina, armed with an AR-15, which he fired upon arrival. Nobody was hurt, but the incident was a tangible reminder that fake news and conspiracy theories can inspire real-world violence.
As my previous posts were blowing up, I mentioned that I intended at some point to make a post like this about Clinton's connection to all this. I have my own theories, but I think it's worth examining and I certainly hope that people smarter and more qualified than myself are looking into it. (I have included an edit in my repost of Part 3 that includes info on questions around Jane Doe's testimony as well as Ghislaine Maxwell's presence at Chelsea Clinton's wedding.) But there are so, so many connections between Trump and Epstein and various people accused of sexual blackmail going back decades that it's hard to ignore.
Additionally, Courthouse News reports:
(07/16/2019) Prosecution of Child-Sex Traffickers Plummeted Under Trump
For many victims, last week’s incarceration of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein represents belated justice after more than a decade of impunity and governmental complicity.
Beneath that gloomy surface, however, an even darker picture emerges: federal prosecutions of those who trafficked children for sex dropped 26.7% over the last year.
The startling numbers appeared Tuesday in a report from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.
“If the present pace of such prosecutions continues, the fiscal 2019 total will be 162, compared to 221 last year,” TRAC’s report states.
The Obama administration dramatically ramped up such prosecutions, climbing threefold from 85 cases in 2009, the year the 44th president took office, to more than 260 during his final year in the White House.
While those prosecutions held steady in the first year under President Donald Trump, TRAC’s analysis of Justice Department data says they have taken a dramatic plunge every year since.
“Compared to five years ago, the estimate of FY 2019 prosecutions of this type is down 32.2 percent, from 239,” the study says. “However, prosecutions over the past year are still much higher than they were ten years ago, up 90.6 percent from the 85 reported in 2009.”
Meanwhile, the right is relying on stuff like this:
(07/09/19) Conspiracy Theorists Seem Perplexed by a Photo of Obama and Clooney. Here’s What It Shows
A common tactic among purveyors of misinformation is to hint at lurid or explosive claims by “just asking questions” about otherwise mundane pieces of evidence. Twitter user @WinstonConvefe employed this strategy in July 2019 in posting a photograph of President Obama and actor George Clooney on a boat with a purported child, along with a series of questions suggesting that something nefarious had just occurred
[Can you imagine Q's response if R Kelly had been arrested in a building owned by Clinton or Obama? EDIT: Or if Obama had moved dozens of migrant teenage girls near his private resort?]
EDIT 2: (07/16/2019) WAPO: Trump’s tweets are a distraction for something else he doesn't want us to see
While Trump was doubling down on his controversial tweets, Epstein was attending his bail hearing. At the hearing, prosecutors revealed that the contents of a locked safe in Epstein’s Manhattan mansion allegedly included diamonds, cash — and a bogus and outdated passport with Epstein’s photograph, a different name and an address in Saudi Arabia.
Coincidence? Maybe. But, really? What’s clear is that Trump wants to distance himself from Epstein, whom he knew socially, as photos have captured . In one instance, they were reportedly the only two male guests at a party attended by a bevy of young women. That’s a pretty intimate bromance.
It’s also clear that the very private Epstein has received very special treatment despite his illegal activities, including the 2007 non-prosecution agreement negotiated by outgoing labor secretary Alexander Acosta, who on Friday agreed to step down after reports detailed his role in the sweetheart deal when he was a U.S. attorney in Miami.
The bogus passport opens a Pandora’s box of questions. Who knows what Epstein was up to? Who else might be implicated? All those diamonds and cash suggest that Epstein was prepared to leave suddenly.
Who knows? Somebody. Maybe several somebodies. But 2020 is a long way off — and anyone who was ever connected to Epstein must be sweating grenades about now.
Right now I don't think we have a clear idea of who exactly is blackmailing who or why or for how long it may or may not have been going on, but we might have to re-evaluate what we think we know in order to actually make sense of it all.
I hope the links provided in this post meet the standards of this sub. [EDIT: <Ron Howard voice> It didn't.]
I don't know how we're supposed to proceed. We live in interesting times.
A Timeline of Trump's association with Epstein madam, Ghislaine Maxwell
via pijinglish
Given the recent news that Trump and both of his sons have been photographed with the (Trump campaign contributor) one time owner of the massage parlor where Trump friend Robert Kraft was arrested for soliciting victims of sex trafficking, I thought it was interesting that this makes at least two more associates involved in sex crimes. I won't get into convicted pedophile George Nader, but I wanted to see if Trump had any relationship with Epstein's alleged madam, Ghislaine Maxwell, so I checked through old newspapers to see if they might have known each other outside of Epstein. It appears they did:
(Some of the links are subscription only, but are provided for accuracy)
NY Daily News - May 5, 1989: “Everybody, but everybody at the party aboard British media mogul Robert Maxwell’s yacht Wednesday night had to doff their shoes before boarding the plush-carpeted “Lady Ghislaine.” Maxwell insisted, and his guests cooperated, including Donald Trump (minus Ivana), who has a much bigger yacht and was happy to compare notes with Maxwell. [Note: This is in reference to the Kingdom 5KR, originally owned by Adnan Khashoggi, international arms dealer and uncle of slain journalist Jamal Khashoggi.] There were John Tower [Republican Senator in charge of the Tower Commission, which investigated Iran Contra]; ex-Navy secretary John Lehman [Reagan appointee 1981-1987], now with Paine Webber; lawyer Tom Bolan [law partner of Roy Cohn]; literary agent Mort Janklow [clients include both Nancy and Ronald Reagan for their memoirs]; UN envoy Thomas Pickering [currently a board member at the world’s biggest pipe company, OAO TMK, in Moscow, and Chairman of the Rostropovich-Vishnevskaya Foundation, “a non-profit organization based in Washington, DC that supports programs to improve the health of children worldwide”]; and Peter Kalikow, owner of the New York Post [awarded the Israel Peace Medal in 1982; created a super PAC for Herman Cain that was later revealed to be entirely financed by his donations]; Maxwell’s daughter, Ghislaine, and his niece, Helene Atkin of Macmillan, the publishing house Maxwell recently took over."
Note: This sentence wasn't in the Daily News article but shows up in a St Louis Dispatch piece a week later: “Maxwell, who weighs about 300 pounds, went over the guest list personally."
"No one could tell who didn’t make the final list, but we do know that Martha Smilgis of Time was disinvited by David Adler, public relations chief at Macmillan. She wrote the profile of Maxwell which he apparently did not like.”
Who was Ghislaine’s father?
Ian Robert Maxwell "MC (10 June 1923 – 5 November 1991), born Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch, was a British media proprietor and Member of Parliament (MP). Originally from Czechoslovakia, Maxwell rose from poverty to build an extensive publishing empire….Maxwell had a flamboyant lifestyle, living in Headington Hill Hall in Oxford, from which he often flew in his helicopter, and sailing in his luxury yacht, the Lady Ghislaine. He was notably litigious and often embroiled in controversy, including about his support for Israel at the time of the 1948 Palestine war. In 1989, he had to sell successful businesses, including Pergamon Press, to cover some of his debts. In 1991, his body was discovered floating in the Atlantic Ocean, having fallen overboard from his yacht. He was buried in Jerusalem. Maxwell's death triggered the collapse of his publishing empire as banks called in loans. His sons briefly attempted to keep the business together, but failed as the news emerged that the elder Maxwell had stolen hundreds of millions of pounds from his own companies' pension funds. The Maxwell companies applied for bankruptcy protection in 1992.
...Shortly before Maxwell's death, a former employee of Israel's Military Intelligence Directorate, Ari Ben-Menashe, approached a number of news organisations in Britain and the U.S. with the allegation that Maxwell and the Daily Mirror's foreign editor, Nicholas Davies, were both long-time agents for Mossad. Ben-Menashe also claimed that in 1986, Maxwell had told the Israeli Embassy in London that Mordechai Vanunu had given information about Israel's nuclear capability to The Sunday Times, then to the Daily Mirror. Vanunu was subsequently kidnapped by Mossad and smuggled to Israel, convicted of treason and imprisoned for eighteen years.
Ben-Menashe's story was ignored at first, but eventually The New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh repeated some of the allegations during a press conference in London held to publicise The Samson Option, Hersh's book about Israel's nuclear weapons. On 21 October 1991, two MPs, Labour's George Galloway and the Conservative's Rupert Allason (also known as espionage author Nigel West), agreed to raise the issue in the House of Commons under Parliamentary Privilege protection, which in turn allowed British newspapers to report events without fear of libel suits. Maxwell called the claims "ludicrous, a total invention" and sacked Davies.[44] A year later, in Galloway's libel settlement against Mirror Group Newspapers (in which he received "substantial" damages), Galloway's counsel announced that the MP accepted that the group's staff had not been involved in Vanunu's abduction. Galloway himself, however, referred to Maxwell as "one of the worst criminals of the century.
...The Maxwell companies filed for bankruptcy protection in 1992. Kevin Maxwell was declared bankrupt with debts of £400 million. In 1995, Kevin and Ian and two other former directors went on trial for conspiracy to defraud, but were unanimously acquitted by a twelve-man jury in 1996.”
NY Daily News - February 28, 1993: The first newspaper article to note Ghislaine’s acquaintance with Jeffrey Epstein, at the opening of MercBar.
After Robert Maxwell’s death, Trump apparently kept in touch with Ghislaine, and was spotted chatting with her at Ford Model’s 50th Anniversary Party, which the article insinuates Trump crashed:
NY Daily News - October 31, 1997: Pictured together are Donald Trump and Ghislaine Maxwell, as she “tries to get Donald Trump to focus on the conversation as models saunter by.” “Trump was able to feast his eyes on the likes of Ione Skye, Amanda de Cadet, Christie Brinkley, Elaine Irwin Mellencamp, VH1 model-of-the-year Karen Elson, and Dutch treat Daniela Van Graas. But rest easy, model mothers: The developer walked out with only a Travel & Leisure goodie bag.”
Palm Beach Daily News - June 13, 1999 : Reports that Avenue Magazine lists both Jeffrey Epstein (“rich guy”) and “Mar-A-Lago’s own” Donald Trump as among the 157 most eligible bachelors.
Palm Beach Post - February 20, 2000: Donald Trump, now dating Melania Knauss, hosts a pro-am tennis tournament at Mar-A-Lago, which Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell attend. “One celebrity, however, was not so obvious. Even when Trump announced England’s Prince Andrew, many in the crowd doubted his presence. For one, he stayed in the background, introducing himself as Andrew York, and for two, he’s recently shed 20 pounds, making him a possible double for actor Rupert Everett.” Trump is pictured with Melania and Prince Andrew, while Epstein and Maxwell are photographed with Michael Bolton.
Note: Miami Herald - November 28, 2018: "For years, Jeffrey Epstein abused teen girls, police say. A timeline of his case” — January 2012: "Virginia Roberts files court papers in Florida claiming that she was forced by Epstein to have sex with Prince Andrew and lawyer Alan Dershowitz when she was underage. In a sworn affidavit, she provides photographs of her with the prince and with Epstein’s close associate, British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell. She claims Maxwell worked as Epstein’s madam, which she denies. Dershowitz and the prince deny her claims as well, setting off a series of legal actions between Dershowitz and Roberts’ attorneys that are later resolved in an out-of-court settlement."
Palm Beach Post - November 16, 2004: Trump bids $41.35M to best two other bidders, one of whom was Jeffrey Epstein, for Abe Grosman’s estate.
Note: Palm Beach Daily News - May 2, 2018: "Trump’s former estate: The story behind the $95-million mansion tear-down” — "The buyer in July 2008 was Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev, who reportedly has never lived there and last year saw the end of a contentious, and stratospherically expensive, divorce from his ex-wife Elena, the terms of which were undisclosed. Property records give no clue as to whether there was an internal ownership change as a result of the divorce or any other factor.”
Palm Beach Post - July 24, 2006: Jeffrey Epstein arrested on solicitation charges and charged with a third degree misdemeanor.
Palm Beach Post - August 14, 2006: “Powerful Legal Team Stymies Detectives” — One of the first articles to go into charges against Epstein. Names his political contributions to Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer, among others. Also includes Trump’s 2002 quote: “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it, Jeffrey enjoys his social life.” Alan Dershowitz uses the MySpace profiles of the alleged victims to discredit them.
TL;DR: In addition to Epstein, Trump has been an associate of Epstein’s alleged madam, Ghislaine Maxwell, since at least 1989, and Trump was clearly in the social circle of Epstein, Maxwell, and Prince Andrew when the alleged abuse occurred.
Affidavits regarding brutal rape of minor:
https://www.scribd.com/doc/316341058/Donald-Trump-Jeffrey-Epstein-Rape-Lawsuit-and-Affidavits
Review of these documents:
https://www.snopes.com/news/2016/06/23/donald-trump-rape-lawsuit/
Video of testimony:
https://vimeo.com/176181706 ~ apparently removed
Corruption is Legal in America via Doku Mentor
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