The Epstein Files Aren't Just About You-Know-Who

 

     It is now a virtual certainty that Pam Bondi’s corrupt DOJ will slow-walk the release of the Epstein files as long as it can, forever if possible. We have no way of knowing how that will play out.

But the excavation of Jeffrey Epstein’s entire life has become a mini-industry, and we now know a whole lot more than we did, even a few weeks ago. No, we don’t have a smoking gun — video of Trump, say, in bed with an underaged girl or two — and it’s possible there won’t be. But that doesn’t mean there hasn’t been some pretty juicy stuff jumping out of the files that have, despite Bondi’s best efforts, already been released.

It will take a while for the pieces to fall into place, but there are plenty of storylines for ambitious reporters to follow. I am expecting astonishing revelations, though they won’t necessarily involve Trump. The Trump evidence will mostly remain unavailable until something, or someone, pries it loose.

But in the meantime, we can savor, for example, the transcripts of three lawsuits filed in 2023, which taken together paint an extremely squalid picture of Epstein’s sex-trafficking business, and the role of a major bank in facilitating it.

The lawsuits were brought by several of Epstein’s victims, who named the bank, JP Morgan Chase —and its president at the time, Jes Staley — as defendants. They alleged that Staley, and by extension JP Morgan, played a shockingly complicit role in Epstein’s illegal operations. They treated Epstein as a privileged client, providing banking services that let him seamlessly buy, sell, transport, house and, when necessary, buy the silence of young women all over the world.

There is abundant evidence that Staley knew exactly what was going on in the Epstein organization, and may even have partaken of the product. Other executives at JP Morgan are alleged to have known of Epstein’s activities, especially after his first Florida conviction in 2008.

The suits were settled quietly, with JP Morgan agreeing to pay $395 million — lunch money, essentially — to settle with the victims.

Many thanks to Greg Olear for his exhaustive parsing of the transcripts from those lawsuits, and while I highly recommend his account of what was contained in them, it’s not so much the lawsuits themselves that interest me, as what Olear’s analysis may imply.

What follows is speculation, and should be taken as such.

I’m speculating that “Q,” as in “QAnon,” was onto something, sort of. There actually is, or at least seems to be, an international ring of elite pedophiles, whose wealth and connections shield them from the law. There was a market for Epstein’s services, and that market won’t have gone away.

The problem for Q — and for his brain-dead followers — is that the ring has nothing to do with Democrats in general, or the Clintons in particular. As I’ve written before, the real pedophiles are all on the right, and so far there’s nothing in the Epstein files to suggest otherwise. No doubt there are a few degenerate Democrats in amongst Epstein’s customers, but nobody is trying to shield them from the law.

For roughly the first half of his career, Epstein was a wildly successful financial swindler, and we know how he somehow milked a rather large fortune from Les Wexner, the Victoria’s Secret founder. In that time, Epstein may have had a taste for both underaged girls and blackmail, but it wasn’t until he hooked up with Ghislaine Maxwell that he would turn his personal kinks into a business model.

Ghislaine was the right person for the job. Her father was the late Robert Maxwell — media mogul, member of Parliament, notorious fraudster — who drowned, in curious circumstances that I won’t get into, in 1991.

Ghislaine’s daddy had long enjoyed sketchy ties to Russian intelligence, Israeli intelligence, and organized crime bosses all over the world. He was once partners with Semion Mogilievich, “Boss of Bosses” of the Russian Mafia, whom the FBI once labelled “the most dangerous man in the world.” Fun fact: He was an early investor and apartment owner in Trump Tower.

Mogilievich was known for his business and financial acumen. He understood the practical benefits of international banking, and saw no reason why organized crime should be excluded from enjoying them. In a kleptocracy like Russia’s, it was a relatively simple matter for a sophisticated criminal overlord to take over a private bank, Inkombank, and gain access to the entire global financial system.

The world was now his laundry. Through Inkombank and related acquisitions, he was able to take dirty money from dozens of international criminal enterprises — drugs, weapons, extortion, contract murder, and, yes, sex-trafficking — and have it come out squeaky clean.

At 79, Mogilievich is — against all odds for someone with his resume — still alive. He reportedly enjoys a comfortable retirement in Moscow, out of reach of Western law enforcement. He is thought to be protected personally by Putin, who is himself a sort of Mogilievich protégé.

While the Mogilievich-Maxwell connection is well known, it’s not clear whether their connection involved sex-trafficking. Even so, we can make the educated guess that Ghislaine learned the trade somewhere, and Daddy’s knee comes to mind. We can further guess that Epstein — who met the Maxwells just before Daddy died — was eager to pick her brains.

History will record that the enterprise they created together was vast in scope, lavishly financed, and — as with everything that’s Trump-adjacent — steeped in organized crime. There are clear connections to the Russian mafia, which means there are clear connections to Putin.

Knowing what we know now about the extent of Russian meddling over the last decade, the role of Russian banks in Trump’s first election begs to be further explored. Remember the Alfa Bank server that was talking to the Trump organization in 2016? We still don’t know what that was about. There are hundreds of Trump-Russia questions that remain unanswered, and hundreds of dots still waiting to be connected.

Which is why, for some time now, Sen. Ron Wyden (D) of Oregon has been demanding that Congress follow the money in all matters involving Epstein. He has called for investigations into $1.5 billion in Epstein-related transactions that passed through four banks:  the aforementioned JP Morgan Chase, as well as Bank of America, Bank of New York Mellon, and — no surprise here — Deutsche Bank. I’m guessing he’ll find abundant connections to Russia and organized crime.

Meanwhile, the files will continue to dribble out. Wyden’s staff and reporters galore will continue to scrutinize them. The money trail will get easier to follow, and the full scope of Epstein’s international connections will eventually come into focus. Or not.

Either way, I’m guessing Sen. Wyden will be providing much entertainment this year.