Mission Implausible is now something you can watch.

Just go to YouTube and search Mission Implausible podcasts or click on the link to our channel in our show notes, This episode of Mission Implausible dealing with the Jeffrey Epstein scandal was recorded several weeks ago, so like a lot has happened since then.

I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'Shea.

We have over sixty years of experience as clandestine officers in the CIA, serving in high risk areas all around the world.

And part of our job was creating conspiracies to deceive our adversaries.

Now we're going to use that experience to investigate the conspiracy theories everyone's talking about, as well as some you may not have heard.

Could they be true or are we being manipulated?

We'll find out now on Mission Implausible.

Today's guest is Tara Palmyrie.

She's an American journalist.

She's worked in a variety of news organizations.

She has a great sort of YouTube podcast show that she does now very focused on on Epsteen and the Maxwells.

So, Tara, thank you very.

Much for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, So, my show, The Terra pal Mary Show, is a political podcast because I've long covered power and politics, but I've also covered the Jeffrey Epstein story for a long time as well since his death, and I did some investigative podcasts and magazine story and another number of other things, and I stay in touch with the survivors, and I've just kept digging when a lot of people kind of gave up on the story.

So that's where we are right now.

But I do think it's the perfect story that intertwines power and politics, which has always been my focal point, my north star in my career, even when I was based in Brussels covering the EU and brexitst and the populist movements over there, and then when I was a White House correspondent covering Trump for ABC News.

No, I like to tangle with power.

I try to figure out what's going on there, and I'm always fascinated by the personalities behind it and how it really works well.

And since this podcast, we try to talk about conspiracies and conspiracy series thing plays on a variety of levels with that thing.

But one of the things I've become interested in lately is if you look at the Epstein history and what in the investigations and then he talks about quote unquote files and that type of thing.

This isn't just a US story, really, this is an international story.

It involves Maxwell's, it involves a lot of other governments and probably to include Russia and Israel and a number of other places.

But it's become like a really core US political story, and that we almost think that the Justice Department has all the answers on this, and that it's up to Trump to let it go or not let it come out.

But don't a lot of foreign governments have pieces of this and understand what's going on.

So if there's bad things in there about powerful people, it's not just in the Justice Department.

It's held by others as well.

It's probably very much held by mi I six, who is tracking and xandrew around and his cavorting with various dignitaries.

I mean, if you have a royal who's out there trying to do business deals with foreign dignitary, I would think you'd want to keep track on that.

He obviously has access to information his mother, who saw who who loved him the most really of all of them.

You know the fact that she's getting a briefing from the Prime minister every week.

He has a certain status, and I can't imagine that they weren't keeping track of him.

And we know that Jeffrey Epstein liked to brag about spending time with African dictators Vladimir Putin.

He liked to show off the fact that he was friends with random princes from countries that don't even have monarchies anymore, but still have a certain status that gives them access to the upper echelon of wealth and finance in society.

And so those were the circles that he swam in, and I think that gave him access to more valuable secrets.

I mean, who holds who hold you know this being spies, former spies, there you go, who holds all the information that you need most the time?

So Epstein, for some people means, oh, you know the list that was the client list, supposedly that was on Pambondi's desk.

That's what it is, or it's something else.

And looking into this, the roots of this go back.

To the Lenmarxwell, yeah, but it goes back to her father.

People don't maybe not realize Americans may not realize who he is.

He was sort of the rupert Murdoch this day, but it actually goes back to like the nineteen fifties even late forties, when he was in Berlin where apparently he signed an agreement to work with the Russians, with the Soviets, and this thing balloons out.

There's elements that are in France.

There's elements of espionage, there's elements of money.

There are mysteries involved, like where did Epstein get his money?

How did he I mean, he wasn't qualified for any of these positions that he got into, including his first teaching positions.

So there's all these mysteries.

How would you describe the entire Epstein drama.

I think he's an international con man that various agencies across the country found across the world, excuse me, found to be useful because he offered them information on people that he blackmailed or spent time with, and he used sexual embarrassment at a way to get information or became involved with them in ways that were criminal.

But he was the one who was willing to go to the authorities first, like for example, in the Financial Towers Ponzi scheme, it was a three hundred million dollar scheme.

This was early on in his the largest Ponzi scheme in the world at the time with Stephen Hoffenberg.

It's been reported that he spoke to prosecutors at least three times.

Now his partner in that scheme, Stephen Hoffenberg, spent the rest of his life in prison, but Jeffrey Epstein did not.

You know, he was involved as an informant on a Bear I believe it was Bear Stearn's case, but there was another financial case that he was involved in.

But this was his network, and he's useful to all of these people.

Also, I thought something that was interesting that came up in the Glenn Maxwell tapes when she was interviewed by Todd Blanche Not that I take everything she says at face value, but for a very long time she denied the connection between her father.

Excuse me, sorry, Robert Baxel, who I did an entire podcat away called Power the Maxwells.

You will enjoy it because it is very succession S.

It's very Rupert Murdoch.

That's going to help you understand how influential of a figure he was at the time, like she was the equivalent of Elizabeth Murdoch, or or even more so, because she was a socialite, hanging out with the royals, and she was written about in the newspapers as being this beautiful young socialite.

So and he was going to buy the New York Daily News.

He owned the Mirror in the UK.

He would fight for newspapers against Rupert Murdoch.

He had MTV Europe, he had Peregrine, so he'd even the McMillan and some of the other top scientific publishing houses.

So he had a lot of influence through publishing.

But it was interesting because she admitted in this tape that actually her father vouched for Jeffstein for a job in finance, when clearly he was a college dropout known for being a sex pest out of high school that he taught at a Dalton And here's Robert Maxwell vouching for him.

And I'm like, well, how do they know each other?

And that's always been the question.

There's always been a theory that he introduced Glenn to Jeffrey and then funneled money to him offshore, laundered money, knowing that either Masad was going to get him because he was too compromised, or he was going to have to kill himself because he squandered all the pensioners' money.

He dies off the side of his Yeah, Robert Maxwell, the Lady Glen by the way, everyone around these people die mysteriously, So he dies off the side of his yacht.

I suddenly think, and you guys can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think he was probably too compromised because he had stolen all this money from the pensioners, and Masad wanted to get rid of him, and that's why he was he died.

These people, these men, they are not the suicidal type.

I was actually talking to Mark Epstein last week, and Mark Epstein is Jeffrey Epstein's brother, and we were saying, I said, do you think that Jeffrey Epstein would kill himself?

Like you know him, he's your brother, And obviously he wants he doesn't want it to be marked as a suicide because he won't get the insurance money, right, and he can prove foul play, can sue the government.

Yeah, yeah, there's more money in it for him if his son, if his brother was killed.

But I do think there is something the level of ego to like ego maniacs, narcissism, that do not make them the type that killed themselves.

They think they can get out of everything.

They treat people terribly.

You don't steal from pensioners and not think you can't.

Get out of it.

So I think he was killed.

He funneled the money to Epstein, who got it to Glenn Maxwell.

Now we don't have any bank transfers, we don't have anything to prove that.

But how did Glenn Maxwell live in New York City and when she got there only have a hundred thousand dollars to her name.

He's bankrupt and suddenly she's living, you know, in a She's living in a multimillion dollar apartment next to Jeffrey Epstein's, which is the biggest townhouse on Upper Eastside.

It just seems like, why would he just take care of this woman who didn't even want to have sex with according to his tapes.

I would tell us a little bit more about Robert Maxwell, because I remember Maxwell his paper in Britain was people believed it was actually funded by in Russian interests.

Is that I think that there was certainly a feeling that Robert Maxwell was not what he seemed.

You know, I didn't know that at the time that people thought it was funded by Russia, and I didn't.

We didn't hear that, but there was certainly a feeling that he was not working for the UK government.

Although he ends up being an MP at one point a member of Parliament.

It's not amazing.

And Robert Maxwell, that's not his real name.

He was Coslamakia, right.

He was a check to who just was able to get out in nineteen thirty nine before the Nazis marched in.

He did end up in British intelligence in the OSS during the war, and then after the war was posted in Berlin, where he maintained a close relationship supposedly, it said, with the Soviets.

But then later he rose up and I'm not sure how, but he became a great power inside of the UK, a publisher and a newspaper baron.

And then in the end it turns out he stole basically all his pincherders' money, had gone bankrupt, and died mysteriously on his falling off his yacht.

Now you mentioned Mosad.

And I'm not really not clear on if there's what or if the relationship is between Maxwell and Mosad was during the fifties, sixties, seventies.

He was buried in the Mount of Olives in Israel, which is reserved.

You're rich, she could do that, but it you know, but do you think so, oh yeah, if you're rich enough.

Here's the thing I don't understand.

It seems to me like all of these men are sort of playing off a bunch of different intelligence agencies.

Did you ever see that often when you were working in the region.

I mean, it just seems like these these men kind of are They're not your everyday asset.

They're powerful men, and they seem to be being able to sort of work for all different agencies, and they probably give them preferable like business terms, because you know, it's almost like it's valuable.

It's valuable for your business.

It's valuable to the Russians that have people in other countries that are sort of compromised with the Russians because they can do even lots of stuff to benefit benefit the Russians.

And I remember I think there was a art clause reading recently where it said that one of the British Foreign Office reports, like in the late fifties said that his program on press could be a front for Soviet scientific espionage.

But when you say intelligence agency and stuff, it's hard for us because CIA was a foreign intelligence organization, So like going after just rich people who were sort of I don't know, had newspapers and stuff, wasn't part of the game, right, I mean, maybe the Israelis for some purpose, certainly the Russians.

Right.

I think if if Robert Maxwell, who he was an incredibly powerful individual in the sixties and seventies in the UK, if he wants to talk to Mosat to pass on some information, I'm sure they'll listen.

But there's a difference between that and him being controlled by that sort of gets into conspiracy theory.

I think oftentimes rich people will try to manipulate intelligence agencies with information, right, and then try to get governments to do what they want.

We've certainly seen that, you know, in the run up to the In the run up to the Iraq War, there were a number of dissident Iraqis who work into members of the Republican Party and to you know, elements of the US intelligence community, mostly the military, who were you trying to get them to invade?

But so Maxwell dies, his daughter gets together with Jeffrey, and money starts to flow.

Now back to Jeffrey Epstein, He's a college dropout and yet he still gets a job teaching at this high school, right.

This elite high school Dalton.

He doesn't have any teaching certificates, he doesn't have college education.

So how does he get this job.

Well, he's working for Bill Barr's father, as in the former attorney general.

The web of powerful people around him is so it's so amazing.

He owned a modeling agency called mc squared and his partner, Jean lup Brenell, mysteriously dies in a French prison hanging himself.

This is this is epstinc not Bar's father.

Yeah, exactly, And so it's just like everything around him is just so mysterious.

How are these people so interconnected?

He's got meetings with Bill Burns, who you guys know, he was a former deputy Secretary of State.

He met with Jeffrey Epstein, he goes on to be CIA direct.

I mean, he had really high level contacts and they were willing to meet with him.

Yeah, I mean yeah, rich people are all around each other.

And when you go back to like he had these connections with agencies.

You know, frankly, if you have that kind of money and that kind of clout, it's relationships with politicians that are much more valuable for you.

So if you go over the heads of agencies, if you're friends with the with the Prime Minister and your friends with the president, and you're friends with people around, then you can get things done because they tell agencies what to do, and they actually the ones can move money and move things around.

So you know, if you're in with the royal family in England and you're in with the Prime Minister, and you're in with the you know, Prime Minister of Israel and stuff, you can you can move around as you wish.

Yeah, I agree, But also sometimes it's like you need the bureaucrats from time to time, and Secretary of State is a pretty powerful politician.

I would say, but.

What's he going to do for I mean, he met him once.

My guests would be Bill Burns has met like one hundred and fifty thousand senior people.

But I don't know what.

I don't know what, what does he want?

Yeah, so this guy's a registered sex offender who procured a mind of a prostitution.

He's getting a seat with the Deputary Secretary of State, who goes on to BCIA director.

And here's the one thing I noticed from the emails and all the reporting on his relationship with Jess Staley.

So when he was at JP Morgan, he was Epstein's banker even after this defender sex offense.

And the thing that was so interesting to me is that when things weren't going well with Jess Staley and and he had, you know, set Jess Saley up with women snow white and beauty and the beasts, and just Daley admitted to having an affair with a woman who we met through Jeffrey Epstein, and they had maintained this relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, and that relationship with JP Morgan really sort of allowed him to get back into re ingratiate himself into these upper classes.

So this was very valuable for him, and Jes vouched for him, and so did a number of others at the highest levels.

But the point is that when Jess Staley started to be started to see that he was getting pushed out of the bank, Jeffrey Epstein helped him land a job as CEO of Barclays Bank.

Certainly connecting and doing things for all these wealthy and powerful men.

They weren't just around him for just like, oh yeah, Jeffrey Epstein's a laugh.

What a great time that creepo is.

There was something in it for them.

And it's and it's partly him providing women at parties and things, or what's the.

What's the I think it was partially providing women.

Money laundering.

I think it was trafficking.

I think putting money offshore.

I do think a big part of it, though, is like once he knew that you did something that would cause social embarrassment, he didn't have to say it to you, but there was a known Yeah, It's like just like an implied knowing, and when he asked you to invest, you did it.

I mean we saw Mark Rowan, who led it Apollo Hedge Fund, give Epstein hundreds of million dollars.

It's crazy for state planning and tax purposes, Jeffrey Epstein wasn't some like master estate planner.

The reason I keep going back to the banking industry is because at least you can follow the money there, you know what I'm saying.

Where it's a little bit more difficult when it comes to influence, because I think that's what we're talking about right now, is influence and information.

Right so is former agency officers, you know, we would meet hundreds of people.

If you're on a diplomatic tour, you've meet hundreds of people and playoff at oh I know so, and so when you call somebody new, it's like, oh, we have someone in common and name them like okay, have lunch.

But then there's a weaning process.

So the fact that some Jeffrey Epstein or a CIA officer meets somebody doesn't mean much if it's one or two meetings.

But we're also trying to figure out is how their vulnerabilities here are there is this person useful to me?

And there's a sort of a weaning, weeding out process.

And so for for Jeffrey Epstein, I my sense is there's a large funnel on one end where he's trying to meet everybody, and he's also trying to figure out who is of use to him, who's black mail bull, who was looking for women, who's looking for you know, things that only he can provide.

And I don't think every person who met him is, but I think, you know, those are the people he focused on.

So just for starters though, So he's fired from this job, you know, at the high school, and he ends up running that the finances for this guy who owns Victoria's Secret, Well, I was.

Less Wester his first job.

I don't think it was.

I think he did the Ponzi scheme first and then he worked at bear Stearns, then less Wesner.

It's unclear how far back the relationship was all and what he did for Less Wesner, who was the founder of Victoria's Secret, he wasn't actually working for the company.

He was managing his personal wealth, that's right.

Managing as wealth.

And the same for ever Acrabt infants.

Yeah, they owned Yeah, it's called l Brands, and they own bath and body works.

Basically, they own malls everything you see in the mall.

Okay.

One of the most trees I'd like to dine into, though, is how is his human trafficking?

And one of the mysteries for me is in the US, if there were hundreds of women who were abused this way taken to the island, it seems to me, at least now a lot of them would be willing to come forward.

But my understanding is a lot of these women were pulled out of like Eastern Europe and the Soviet former Soviet Union in Russia, which means that there would be money involved, which means that there would be room for Russian you know, Russian intelligence services in mafioso to get involved in this.

It would also be one reason why one none of these women would come forward because they're like, hey, we you know, we've got Natasha and Moscow and if you like fuck with us, you know will have her talk.

Right.

That gives them the Russians control as well.

So what is your sense of now of like, what do we understand about the human trafficking network that Jeffrey Epstein was I think clearly involved in, because that would also involve money, transfers, travel, there would be digital dust, right, you've got to write back it, there'd be somehow emails back and forth, communication.

Involved, all these things.

Sometimes can't you do this without without all these trails?

Okay, So there were a number of girls that he found from Eastern Europe, Asia, et cetera.

We don't know these girls like, they haven't come forward.

In fact, it's mostly the American girls.

And if you notice it, and by girls, I mean they're women now, they're my age, they're older.

There probably only about two dozen of them that have come forward.

I think and the FBI estimated a thousand, which probably means there's even more victoms.

So a big part of that is fear.

Fear because of the men involved in these circles, fear.

Some of them just received NDA payouts.

Some of them are just afraid because they know what could happen to them, or they don't want to deal with the stress, or they don't want people to know, or they have that shame.

There's so many different reasons why.

But in particular when it comes to the girls that were foreign, I think they use that modeling agency to traffic girls.

That was certainly a way to do that.

They would find them and recruit them to beat models, and they and some of the girl these girls thought, oh wow, well you mean your friends with the owner of Victoria's Secret.

It's my big break.

And then here they are, and they are they have their passports taken from them.

They are his sex slaves.

They live in his house, and some of them stayed with him for a long time, maybe Stockholm syndromes trauma.

I can only imagine what that's like.

Now.

Also know from Virginia Juphrey that she would be sent out to other countries like Thailand, and she would said, and he said, go find me twins in Thailand, so she would go to Thailand.

She went to Thailand and that's actually when she escaped him, and she met her husband, married him instantly, just to get away from him.

Then moved to Australia to be as far away from Epstein as she could possibly be after years and years of sexual abuse from very high ranking people in government.

You know, she accused Ehud Barak of raping her.

She accused George Mitchell, a senator from Maine.

She accused Bill Richardson, she accused a number of others, and you know, this is this This was the kind of set that she was around, and so she felt that the safest place for her to be would be in Australia.

She finally comes forward about her story about Prince Andrew in twenty ten, and then about a decade later, the Crown actually two decades later, to be Frank, they come forward and they pay her a historic settlement.

But that's all to say.

It was an international scheme.

You can see from the flight logs they're constantly moving around.

But then they also had their their micro i'd call it micro, but pyramid scheme that they ran through this Palm Beach High School where they told the girls, if you bring another girl, you get three hundred dollars.

And I don't think that they I think they were actually pretty smart about it, and they very rarely brought to many of the high school girls over to And by smart, I mean they tried to minimize some risk and they used more of the foreign girls when they were moving them abroad.

Although Virginia, you can see the flight logs, was traveling all over the world with them.

You were saying about foreigners, I think born women, and I think that was through the modeling promises, because that's the kind of for that was a common thing and seemed plausible, and especially for some of these women that are coming from Eastern.

Europe and Russia or some.

Of these desperate circumstances.

Yeah.

Yeah, But why does Glaine, why does Glene Maxwell.

Get so involved?

Little I've looked at it looks like she actually did some of this stuff before she even met Epstein, like for related to her father and some of his activities.

And may really I never heard that.

Tell me about that.

Actually, I will send you an article that I've just read about that.

It doesn't mean it's true, but.

Like, yeah, there were reports of her bringing posh but not particularly smart women over to the house and people were commenting on this, and of course her father is all really fabulously wealthy and he can make your.

Career or not.

I did not know this, that she was trafficking.

For her father.

There's an allegations of it.

Yes, you know, that might make sense.

I always thought they had a twisted relationship based on my reporting and how he would.

He was actually pretty abusive to her the way that he speak to her, But he also had this weird relationship with her where they were meow at each other and I know it's very weird.

And he praised her for her beauty, but he said, you know, she's my favorite.

She looks the most like me.

And we've been doing this for twenty minutes and we still haven't mentioned Trump yet, right, we're still story.

Yeah, well I'm about to mention him and you go and then Adam M.

Yeah, you guys know that Tyre and I are dear friends and worked very closely together.

She's been talking shit about you.

Oh really, yeah.

I said that.

I was like I was brought into this story.

This wild story through Adam Davidson, and we will live.

I hope to get down to the bottom of it, but I don't know if we ever will.

But yeah, Robert Maxwell did Glenn much like Trump treats Avanka, where he sees her as an accessory, you like to bring her parties.

He felt like she would take the place of the wife.

And actually, you know, Glenn met Trump through her father.

He tried.

She tried to sell Donald Trump gifts, these gifts and they would go to parties on the Hudson and their relationship goes back because he was the owner of the Daily News and they all go way way back.

Well, we have our colleague Adam Davidson here with us.

So Adam, as we talk about Epstein stuff, this is really hard for us because we talk about conspiracy theories.

This thing is so crazy and there's so many people.

You could just list all of the people and the places and the names, and it sounds like you're trying to create a conspiracy because it's like this person knows that person, this person worked here, and this has money, and the money came here and the girl.

But like a lot of that's true, so like and a lot of it is out there now, So why is this not actually all pulled together so that for people who want to know?

So, Hi, Tara.

Tara and I worked together on this story for a very intense year or more, and and I think we both went through a lot.

It's a dark one.

I first heard about Jeffrey Epstein on the set of The Big Short, just to name drop, like I was advising Adam McKay, the writer director, and like in between takes he had just somehow learned.

I was on set as like the journalist expert to talk about finance, and I like condescendingly said, no, none of what you're saying is possible, because if that were true, everyone would know about it and it would be like all those people would be in jail.

It can't be sure enough.

It was the rare case where it completely batshit conspiracy theory turned out to be completely true.

I mean, this is Tara, you and I.

This is what is so difficult for us emotionally, is like there are things we feel like we know that we can't even say because of legal reasons or because we were told it by people who you know, victims who asked us to keep it secret.

It is even worse, worse, it is even more people.

And what's amazing is it really implicates It's not just it in place many of the most respected people or most powerful people in the world, institutions Harvard.

It made me think, like, if you're gonna do a conspiracy, you should make it as big as possible and touch as many people as possible because it's harder.

You know, if it was like fifteen bank managers in Joplin, Missouri, like maybe you could bring it down.

Could you take us through a bite sized piece of this alex Acosta, right, he gives a sweetheart deal to Epstein, you know, maybe getting Trump off the hook and other people, and then later maybe he's named secretary of late you know, how does this he ends up on the cannet.

Yeah, I mean I have to agree with Adam on that it does feel like everybody it's like this secret that's just tying them all together.

It's the kind of consensual secret.

And if they let the House of Domino's fall or the House of Cards fall, then they all go down together, so they have to stick keep it up.

I don't know if there is a direct line between alex Acosta and this deal and becoming the Secretary of Labor.

But I have to say that, you know, he dealt with a lot of very prominent Republicans at the time to deal with it.

Ken Starr who at who has a lot of influence in the party.

J.

Lefkowitz now Alan Derschwitz, who has a lot of prominence in the Republican Party.

Bill Barr at the time was I think a deputy Attorney General under Bush.

This this case went all the way up to Gonzalez, who was AG at the time Bush.

So I, you know, to deal with the kind of sensitive type of case he's getting, this type of exposure probably puts him on like federalist lists that maybe he wasn't at at the time.

Maybe it helps him with his buddies in Washington and Ty.

One thing that I find like, so head Messing is like on this show most Conspiracies, it's like you just dismissed, like come on, Like it's not like alex Acosta signed a secret deal.

But with this the things we know happened and are the same kinds of things as alex Acosta became Labor secretary because he protected bad people.

We don't know if that's true.

Right, we don't have evidence that that's true, and.

That might be know what was in the files, he would know like who was indicated, and it's like oh yeah, And so later it's like, I want to keep him, you know, keep him sweet.

So I'm not claiming that there was a like a written conspiracy.

You're being a little bit of a conspiracy animate But that's.

Mill bargaining back in a big way.

Maybe he was like, hey, I know it's going in the Epstein files.

Make me your age.

So if you have a big conspiracy, it's very easy to know hang conspiracies off of it.

And so the one that seems to be the one that's we're focused on now is Trump.

Trump tied to it.

They were best friends, he introduced his wife.

From your experience, Adam and Tara, do you think Trump is a central player in the ugliness of this or he's just another one of these big shots that made his way through the process.

I think it's central to all that.

I think it's partially why this story has come back in such a way because in someone's like make it go away, you're wondering.

Why, why, why, why why?

And the more evidence comes out, it's like whoa.

These guys were as close as we believed they were.

They were very good friends.

They liked The thing that bonded them was their love of women.

Hmmm.

He's on the jet a bunch of times, he's in the book a bazillion times, he's writing cards about their secret trysts.

What more is there?

They have a common friend in Pallo's on Polli, who allegedly introduced Trump to Milania.

It's just like.

There, you and I had a very weird and fun afternoon with if you remember Tara, just an interview.

So on the list of things that are upsetting about this story, so what one thing is.

Like?

I think Epstein stood out as unusually voracious, unusually calculating, but I think I think a lot.

I mean, we talked to models who said, like that was that whole scene of like sixteen year old girls rich guys.

There was a bunch of locations in Europe, in the Caribbean, in New York and Palm Beach and older rich men having sex with teenage girls was I don't know how to say it other than it was widely accepted as not a weird thing.

I mean, we heard so many stories.

I think you see it getting more unusual, and certainly by the early two thousands, there's no question.

I mean, he himself says it.

Trump was central to that party scene, certainly in the New York part of it and in the Florida part of it.

I think that if you were around those parties in the early nineties the mid nineties and someone said, hey, who's like central to this, I do think you would have said Donald Trump, like you, He was a key figure.

It's not just he's the president now, so we're picking him out.

Although the way I look at it for all the people who spent time with Epstein more than just a really casual moment is if they didn't have sex with the young girls, it wasn't because they it was available to them, and they knew it was available to them.

So the best you can say for anybody who spent serious time with him is they were in a setting where other men were clearly having sex with young girls and they didn't do anything about it.

But also Jeffrey kind of pushed them on.

He pushed the girls on the Yeah, he wanted you to do it because he knew that they may be underage or it might be illegal, and that was the bacchanal kind of environment that you got.

And I think that in some ways he groomed the elites around him, and so did Glenn Maxwell why she was so central to all of this into thinking like this is totally normal and nothing's going to happen.

It's a great time.

Just come by Jeffrey Epstein's We're a good time.

It's like the frat house.

It's fun.

You know.

Then there's a twist that he would try to use this, and that's you know, because obviously, if you're doing this, you know, you're either just a sexual psychopath or you're trying to do it for a reason.

And if I recalled, it wasn't Bill Gates along one time, and then he tried and Bill Gates was cheating on his wife, and Epstein then tried to use that is extortion against Ogates.

Then Bill Gates came out publicly and then got divorced.

All well, his wife says that it was a relationship and it was what he was doing with Epstein that led to the divorce.

I had two things I wanted to ask, So one is, just have you talked about intelligence?

Because I feel like when I was working with Tara, I didn't know any spooks, and now I know to CIA former case officers, and I feel like one thing you have convinced me of is the idea that Jeffrey Epstein is an intelligence, that he is himself an officer of either the Massade or the CIA is very unlikely.

It's unlikely he's a run asset where everything he did was driven, right.

Can you talk about that, because that is a very persistent rumor.

I mean, he might be a guy who talks to intelligence people, right, I mean there's lots of those people.

I mean I might be one of those people.

Right.

If he's running in these circles, it wouldn't be unusual for him to, like, you know, be someone who talks to intelligence from China, passes on tips or things like that.

But when people think of like an asset, they think of like control, like we control him, he does what we say.

And someone who's you know, if you're a billionaire and you're running in those circles, you know there's there's not going to be control over you.

I don't see what the motivation would be, what the hold would be.

This was a sociopath who was out for himself.

So Jerry's right.

In our parlance, there's different levels of people who are and you could say, are in touch with an intelligent sagancy.

So if someone's important and his friends with Clinton and Bush and Trump and talks to prime ministers, and as he goes to Israel and Russia and he talks to a senior politician and one of the senior politicians says, you know, you should talk to CIA, or CIA tells the CIA guys, you talked to him, He's got all this stuff.

Yeah, there will be someone will meet him, probably more likely an analyst.

Then you know, someone in the Client Estine Service.

Listen to what he has, just you know, a contact.

It's completely there's no control.

There's no effort to try to suborn that person or ask them to sign secrecy agreements or anything like that.

That's very separate from the kind of people Jerry and I try to meet as we're looking for access to secrets, is we're trying to find people who have access to government can't get any other way.

And then, like Jerry says, control, that's our term for they understand that they're actually operating secretly working for US in the CIA, and they're keeping that secret from their government or other and they have to and to do that, they have to keep themselves safe, and they have to follow our rules.

And so that's a controlled asset.

This person doesn't fit that.

In the slightest.

It's certainly possible that Epstein, who's in all these circles, talk to somebody in the CIA, but that doesn't mean that the CIA would then do to go over there and talk to that person and tell me what he said, we're not doing all.

So, Russia has a wider spectrum of what they consider use of people.

So if there's people who are useful to them just because they say things are in benefit to Russia, they will maintain contact with them and try to subtly given information into them so that they'll use it.

You've heard people talk about that term useful idiots and all, and so their view is different from ours.

So the way Jerry and I move up through the system and get promoted is by recruiting controlled sources who provide us unique information.

If I meet someone and think interesting, but it's just a you know, the person walked in.

It came into the CIA, got a badge to come in as a visitor, tell us something and left as an American like that doesn't of no value to me professionally, Like there's a piece of information that gets into our system, great, but that doesn't mean we say that we give that any extra weight over anything else that's in there.

The dog whistle there is that CIA or mostly most side of the conspiracy theories.

I heard it's the you know, it's the great Jewish conspiracy that exactly, Yeah, it's the most sad and the Jews are running this international sex ring.

I mean, that's what they're implying, as opposed to he talked to a MOSAT officer and gave tips or did them a favor.

I think there's a huge.

Difference between that and what's being implied when they say he's you know, he works for MOSART as if that like explains it.

So I just want to go back to alex a Cost again because I wasn't quite.

Satisfied with yeah with you, Adam, So maybe I got the facts wrong.

But when I look at this.

Epstein was up on dozens of charges with with like dozens of high level people, likely including Donald Trump as they're looking into this right who they were good friends at the time, and what the charges they were looking at was basically raping a fourteen year old girl.

Right, this is the charges he was looking at.

And for reasons that have never been explained that I don't understand, alex Acosta cut him a deal where it was basically soliciting a prostitute.

And then he got to like still able to fly around on his jet, He could live at home, he only had to show up to jail on weekends.

He didn't even do that.

But what he did have is he had reams of people who were involved in his network.

Right, it wasn't just Jeffrey Epstein, it was Epstein and lots of other people who were around him, influential people.

Yeah, three administrations later, alex Acosta still knows what the charges are.

He knows what's in the files.

He's read them, he collected them, right.

And so it seems to me not that he would like write Donald Trump and say I'm going to talk unless you give you a cabinet.

But he doesn't even need to say that, right, and not just Donald Trump, because right now he's a big wig in like Newsmax.

Right, he's been given the sinecure where he basically does nothing, and they pay him a lot of money.

You know, there's there's normal like just how America works kind of scuzziness.

And I do think the two thousand and six to two thousand and eight like miscarriage of justice where this guy the cops felt like they knew that he had dozens hundreds of you know what I would call rapes.

I mean, I think they are rapes.

Yeah, yeah, And this was ongoing.

There was crossing state lines, there was airplanes, like, there was all the things that either a local or federal prosecution should work.

What he ended up getting convicted of is one count of prostitution, which several people have told me, can you even call like a fourteen year old prostitute?

Like is that?

What does that mean?

Like that is child rape?

Whatever?

Like whether you pay for it or not.

And he didn't.

But not only did he get this really short sentence, he was allowed to leave during the day on a work study thing, and he created this office for himself.

And we have pretty good reason to think he was having sex with underage girls while he was serving his sentence.

But he kept his mouth shut.

He didn't talk, he didn't roll on any of the people in his network who were all big donors who were senior people, arguably Donald Trump, right, the other people of that, because it wasn't we're describing this as though that back then, as though it was just Jeffrey Epstein.

No, it was, it was.

Yes, it seems to me Jeffreys at that time he had two choices.

He could roll on all the other guys and try to get a lighter sentence, or he could go to the other guys and say put pressure on the prosecutor.

What I'm trying to get at is was this normal crappy behavior, Like was this just the normal, like you know, sadly just unsurprising that really rich people live in a different legal system than poor people, and or was this something it is explained by just a rich guy hiring big lawyers and throwing their weight around.

I do think that explains a lot of it.

But the situation is different now about legal stuff.

But is this something that could be reopened because is this something that could be dug into I think people.

But I don't know if the legal system has a method of I mean, I guess I'm genuinely asking, does it of like if someone's dead there's no active case, Like what I mean Congress could theoretically and you know, like on the list of like maddening things about the alex Acosta deal is Glaine Maxwell and then two other major co conspirators were given this like we promised never to prosecute you agreement.

And that's actually what one of the ways Glaine's trying to get the Supreme Court to throw out her conviction.

That really, I mean, legal scholars told is that's weird.

Like nobody like they didn't give any information.

This wasn't immunity in exchange for you know, normally you go to the bottom people to get the top people.

You don't give you don't just give the top people and their cronies blanket immunity.

So that that is very very weird, I would say, looking into Alexicosta, this wasn't a man with a lot of backbone.

He wasn't like a highly experienced at turn.

You know, if you remember this is after all those it almost seems sweet at this point, but when Bush fired or Albert Gonzalez fired all those prosecutors for not being sufficiently loyal to George W.

Bush and brought in a bunch of more mediocre you know, sycophantic lawyers, and alex Acosta was one of them.

So we never do that again.

We'll never do that.

Obviously, we learned our lessons.

But part of what's mattening is what we do know.

Like I'm still nervous to say all the names that I feel fairly confident we're complicit, but you know the names, like you know what the names are, a lot of them start with B and the name Bill and and like we can go to the edge cases or the like cases we don't know for sure, and that's worth doing.

But there's lots of cases we basically know and and those people are not facing anything.

But it's right because we worked in a secret verization and our job was to protect sources and secrets forever.

Like so to Jerry and I, we could still be prosecuted if on this podcast we say something that's.

Class give me something, if we were to out you as our asset, Adam, you know you could see no, no, yeah, we don't.

But the President, I says, can say those things now are are unclassified, and they did that with all the Kennedy's right, So there's there was real secrets that are still being held.

But the JF.

Kennedy assassination, not tied to who killed them and stuff.

But President said, nope, that's all free game.

Anybody can have it.

Now can can a president or anybody in the legal system say, now that's all free to be seen?

Because well, I think a president can declassify anything, right, they but this isn't classifyed information for those parts getting held by the justice the Justice Department.

I mean, you could redact the victims' names and release it all, right, I think so, Well, there would be a lot of suing.

So let's say, you know, mister X meets Epstein once, or somebody says to a prosecutor early in the case, oh so and so was it Epstein's you know, John Cipher was at Epstein's party.

Well, you know, twenty years later that comes out, that's in the Epstein file.

So that somebody said you were at a party, you know, as part of the investigation.

You know, you don't want your name even if you didn't do anything wrong.

And then and then there's what's right and wrong is right and wrong in legal and illegal.

So if someone let's just pretend a good what of Epstein's best friends, What if there's photographs of him in a three way with Jeffrey Epstein with a nineteen year old girl.

That's not illegal, but that's like pretty fucking disgusting.

So so you know, the Justice Department can't prosecute you for that.

It's just that gets into politics and around, right, do you release it or don't you?

Yeah?

I mean I would, like, you know, I'm a journalist.

I would like it all released.

I think we as a nation need This case really broke me in a lot of ways as a journalist, like it.

I think I had a really naive belief that the truth gets out eventually, that powerful people can try and prevent the truth from coming out, but once it comes out, they're screwed.

And I think we now live in a world where like it's just kind of known, right, like we basically if you want to pay attention, I mean, it's enough is out there and it doesn't have much of an impact, and everyone seems like, you know, I see people on like fari Zakaria or whatever, who, in my view shouldn't be part of at a minimum, shouldn't be part of polite society, Like we shouldn't be engaging them or you know, I sort of thought, like courts should have a presumption of innocence, but I don't know that society needs a presumption of innocence.

Like in my view, if you spent like there are people, big names who we have on the flight records, they were on a plane which every epstein and underage women.

So if you went to a friend's house or rode on a friend's plane and they were hanging out with a fifteen year old and it wasn't their daughter, and there wasn't their niece, and let's say that's all that happened, nothing else happened, that's still really gross.

Like if you've been say a president or a head of a university or a Nobel prize winning scientist, Like that's not cool and that's not like some theory that we know that.

So I don't know.

It's I find.

The death of shade.

But let me ask you another mystery that I flee will solve and will it make a difference.

So Todd blanche was Trump's personal lawyer, poof you know, a little dustotomy.

He's now number two with DOJ, number two with DOJ, Like I really imagine a really friggin busy guy has nothing better to do but get at an airplane and see Glene Maxwell for two days, right, and to sit with her and her lawyer who he's personal friends with.

And then all of a sudden she goes to Club fed.

She goes on to which is which is my understanding from reading the media, is not legal.

Somebody had to sign a waiver or an exemption.

Somebody signed something.

There had to be paperwork to get her to put her into this, into this camp.

I'd like to know who that was, Yeah, and why they Why is it you know that she she gets it.

You know, somebody's protecting a child sex trafficker.

Gallanne Maxwell.

She's been put into a nice the nicest prison possible.

But you know what it's like that we've who signed that thing.

The prisons keep put them out shut and that's what's fascinating that we like there.

I used to I remember an economist talking about, like in the West, generally corruption as an aberration and people hide it.

In most former Soviet Union nations in the Middle East, et cetera, corruption is it's not even hidden like you you know, like an Azerbie Sean you can you know, you can go to the houses of the ministers who've only ever worked in government office and they have these massive mansions and and it's it almost like, can it be called corruption because corruption seems to imply there's a non corrupt system that is then you know, corrupted.

But if that is the system and this one and we've had, you know, like, let's not pretend America has never had corruption.

I just read the Ulysses S.

Grant biography, and even though it makes a strong case that Grant himself was not corrupt, his administration was wildly corrupt.

But this is just such a crystal clear case of Okay, we're not like nobody's it's just out in the open, like we know what's going on.

We know in the fact that.

Trump won't say definitively, I will not pardon her, right, He's like, yeah, let me think about it, which is but for all.

Now, John, my understanding is the way you use compromont is you don't call up and say, hey, John, you did these things.

Here's a video.

You say, hey, you had a really fun time in that weekend in Miami that was really wild.

Hey, by the way, I got this friend of mine who's trying to do some business.

I'd love it if you would talk to him.

What you're doing is you're fishing for a compliment on your article in the New York Yes, which which I've said is an excellent, I think description of how the Russians use compromise.

That if Trump is part of that process, this would be the way that it's done.

And that means like Epstein or whomever is not calling someone and saying, hey, if you don't do this, it'll be this right, it's.

Right, and it's more like, yeah, organized criminals befriend and talking to So like, once you know that you bring someone into complicity in some way or another, then you know there's everybody sort of dirty, and everybody then doesn't know what they have on you.

You don't know what he has on me, but you know there's dirt out there, and so it's better to let the system play out than to ever attack anyone because you don't know what they have on you that could be used against you and can be incredibly subtle.

So like, once you've done things that essentially you know are wrong, you don't want to come out.

You're now part of that system and you want to maintain the system stability.

You don't want to almost lead a decent life and.

Not it would be an easier way to do things, but the desire for money and fame and girls and those kind of things.

It's easy.

But you can see Donald Trump does it almost instinctually.

I remember his head of DHS in his first term.

He contacted her and said that she had to go publicly in front of to public, give a speech and say something that he knew was a lie, she knew was a lie and was wrong, or she was going to be fired.

And she did so.

Now that you've got a powerful person doing something illegal or at least unethical for you, they're not the Yeah, they're corrupt, they're part of the complicit, and you know you sort of have them somewhat so you don't need to really threaten them.

And it's straight that has the US population become part of this.

So I wasn't paying attention to the Epstein files, right, Epstein scandal, conspiracy theories.

I didn't really pay attention.

We were overseas, right well, but the right was where this was.

This was the Republicans.

We're going to get Bill Clinton, you know, let it all out, and then you.

Know, people like you know, Charlie, some guy named Charlie right is like, no, no, the Epstein files got to come out.

And then suddenly, like a few telephone calls are made, it's like, yeah, no, the Epstein stuff's over.

It's gone, it's over with.

And yet this is where I wonder about the cult status of American political parties.

It's like, yes, Epstein is incredibly important, we need to get to the bottom of it.

And then within days, Epstein's over.

We were never interested, right, Not everybody's gone with that, but but millions of people have been, and whole media outlets have just basically overnight switched gears and people have buy and large gone with it.

I think this is one of those ones that still has public traction.

Well, I really want it out because I think that you should suffer for being part of a terrible sex traffic ring of underage carls.

That's a view I have.

And shame should be enough in our society.

You don't need to be legally charged and thrown in jail if you do something that's wrong, unethical, and illegal, even if you haven't been charged.

And I want to say a good word for Tom Holman here, I do the fact that he accepted fifty thousand dollars according to the press, a US takes pair of money in a peg.

That doesn't mean he's corrupt because he wasn't convinced.

He wasn't go confected exactly.

Yeah, it means I'm totally clean.

You're either clean or dirty.

There's no I want to say your Adam.

Your article is called a theory of Trump compromont and it was July twenty eighteen in New Yorker, So it's worth reading to give a sense for this idea.

And if I remember correctly, that was the article that got everybody to be like, oh my goodness, we've been heading down a bad path.

And ever since then, America's been it's been totally fine like that, you know, I will say a lot of that reporting I did, and then the Jeffrey Epstein thing.

It I'm still wrestling with how I feel about the limits of journalism.

Like it's it really is a life altering experience, all right, fun talk.

Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'sha, John Cipher, and Jonathan Stern.

The associate producer is Rachel Harner.

Mission Implausible is a production of honorable mention and abominable pictures for iHeart Podcasts.