The great Epstein unravelling

[mister_coffee]

The problem with the whole "dropping a dime" thing is that both of them were up to their necks in major criminality and I find it implausible that either of them (no matter how stupid) would go to law enforcement. Because they would know they had no way of controlling whether any investigations they triggered would start looking at them.

Given the murky history of Epstein's finances and Trump's public history I feel pretty confident that both of them were involved in seriously dirty finance.

On the other side of it I find it implausible that not only did Trump not only know about what Epstein was doing to little girls, I also find it implausible given his known proclivities and public statements that he wasn't hip-deep in the same stuff. Yuck.

The other interesting question is who else distanced themselves from Epstein in 2004 and 2005?

[Rideback]

Jim: Shane Almgren used to work for Trump at Mar a Lago. He's stuck pretty close to the public facts and certainly Wolff's interviews are pretty juicy tidbits after all these years. This third storyline lines up better with the chronology and is more in line with Trump's persona.

[just-jim]

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A friend sent this. I dont follow this author…or even vouch for him. But - interesting theory…

https://substack.com/@shanealmgren
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The Trump team has always alleged that Trump and Epstein’s “falling out” in 2004 was either due to Epstein being a “creep” around Mar A Lago, or Trump “discovering” his BFF was a sexual predator and pedophile.

Both versions allow Trump to come off sounding like he took the moral high ground.
The first explanation sounds believable, the second does not. It’s pretty clear to everyone at this point (who isn’t MAGA) that Trump was well aware of EXACTLY what his buddy was up to.

Then Trump trotted out a brand new explanation this week: that Epstein had “stolen” young women who worked at his spa, which was a rather bizarre way of describing Epstein hiring away Trump’s workers. After repeated unheeded warnings not to poach his ladies, Trump decided that was it and revoked his membership at the club.

But there’s a third explanation that jives perfectly with the 2004 timeline…and sounds way more Trumpian than these semi-chivalrous explanations - a real estate feud. According to Trump biographer Michael Wolff, this is what ACTUALLY happened…(Wolff intervied Epstein over 30 times, totaling 100 hours of recorded conversations, for his trilogy on Trump.)

In 2004, a Palm Beach mansion known as Maison de l’Amitié belonging to a bankrupt nursing home magnate was being auctioned off in a bankruptcy sale. Epstein bid $36 million on the house, and then apparently asked Trump for advice on moving the swimming pool on the property.
Trump then went behind Epstein’s back and bid $41 million, winning the property and closing the deal in 2005. Epstein was furious. He said he knew Trump’s finances well enough to know he didn’t have $40 million - so someone else was probably fronting him the money. Epstein accused him of money laundering for a Russian oligarch.

Thus began the epic feud between 2 filthy rich dudes with no morals having a pissing match over some real estate.

Trump never lived in the new house. He fixed it up and flipped it in 2008 for $95 million to…a Russian oligarch named Dmitry Rybolovlev.
Epstein was so irate at Trump for scoring the massive windfall that he started threatening lawsuits to rat Trump out for what he was sure was a money-laundering scheme.

This next tidbit is not verified, and fact-checking it produced no conclusive results:

According to Epstein, Trump retaliated to the lawsuit threats by going to the police and “dropping the dime” on his pal’s extracurricular hobbies.
If that version of events is accurate, it sounds like the most Trump thing ever.

It was never about Jeffrey being a creepy pedophile. It was about Jeffrey threatening to blow the lid off his questionable business dealings with the Russians.
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[pasayten]

https://www.facebook.com/share/r/19irbV1f8w/

[pasayten]

[pasayten]

https://youtube.com/shorts/kHGTjJqTji4? ... ez5sEqLS0y

[PAL]

Yep, Ghislaine will have some kind of accident.
Here comes the leak!

[mister_coffee]

I think the through line is that he is willing to protect wealthy and powerful men at the expense of anyone and everything else. Well anyone except him.

A couple of observations.

The "1000 FBI agents" who went through all of the material to look for anything Trump-related basically looks like a machine guaranteed to produce a leak to me. If they try to clumsily sweep it under the rug I think it almost inevitable that some whistleblower at DOJ will release it all. This is where the omerta culture at the FBI will slam hard against the passionate hatred of child molesters. All it takes is one.

They used Microsoft's Sharefile for the 1000 FBI agents collaboration. So any one of them could have grabbed all of it. Worse, Sharefile has well-known security flaws that would let a malicious third party grab all of the data. So I think it is a safe bet that multiple foreign intelligence organizations and hacker groups have everything.

Reading between the lines in the 2016 Katie Johnson court filings implies that there were witnesses to a lot of these incidents. I imagine that when the Epstein thing blew up and the Maxwell prosecution happened they ran down a lot of those loose ends. So it is at least possible that there is corroborating testimony that put Donald Trump in a room with a naked and tied up 13-year-old.

I think the trajectory for Ghislaine Maxwell is that she is going to testify that Donald Trump had nothing at all to do with Epstein's pedophilia. Then she is going to have an unfortunate accident.

[Rideback]

And of course Trump is now considering a pardon for 'Diddy'. Birds of a feather.

[Rideback]

More than one thing can be right at the same time.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jeffrey-ep ... stigation/
In depth investigation into the jail video by CBS points towards a coverup back to Barr.

[mister_coffee]

The Katie Johnson case is a good example of what is being distracted from. In her court filing she claimed that she was sexually assaulted by Donald Trump multiple times when she was 13. Furthermore she witnessed Donald Trump sexually assault another 13-year-old and a 12-year-old. In the court filings they also had identified at least one witness who worked for Epstein at the time.

The case was dropped after the 2016 election.

[mister_coffee]

I am doubtful that anything happened there except that Epstein killed himself. For a lot of reasons. That whole chapter in the story is a distraction.

[Rideback]

Fresh reporting from CBS that DoJ and FBI both have clean copies of the prison video that are not missing the minutes that Bondi said was the result of a prison glitch. And now CBS is reporting more https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jeffrey-ep ... stigation/

[mister_coffee]

Epstein and Maxwell had to have other employees who either helped them or were in a position to know what is going on. I'm surprised we aren't hearing from those employees yet.

Two people don't traffic hundreds or thousands of girls by themselves.

Some girls were "recruited" from local high schools in Palm Beach. Knowing how high schools are you have to believe that a lot of people heard about this.

[pasayten]

Link added...

[mister_coffee]

That sounds like material from Michael Wolff.

[Rideback]

Where is your article from Ray?

[pasayten]

https://www.alternet.org/epstein-trump/
Written by Joe Conason July 13, 2025 | 06:39AM ET

Years after his apparent suicide in a Manhattan federal lockup, the notorious sex offender and financial manipulator Jeffrey Epstein has returned from the dead to haunt Donald Trump and instigate a massive rupture in Trump's government and MAGA movement.

Having long encouraged the proliferation of conspiracy theories on the right -- from the racist birther myth about Barack Obama to the QAnon mania over alleged pedophilia among Democratic politicians and Hollywood figures -- Trump now stands accused of concealing proof of his own perfidy in the "Epstein files." Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed to have those files on her desk, promised to release them, and yet now tells the MAGA faithful that they will not be released.

The reaction has been volcanic.

The most sedulous and servile Trump supporters in the right-wing media complex, from Jack Posobiec and Laura Loomer to Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson, are castigating not just Bondi but the Trump administration. The far-right provocateur Mike Cernovich posted a direct blast at the president on X: "No one is believing the Epstein coverup, @realDonaldTrump. This will be part of your legacy. There's still time to change it!" On Bannon's livestream show, he taunted Posobiec as a "sap" for ever believing that Trump would release the Epstein files.

Amusing as it is to observe the MAGA weirdos chewing on each other, and to mock them as paranoia overwhelms their usual sycophancy, their suspicions are not ill founded. It was very strange indeed when Bondi -- as well as Trump's FBI director, Kash Patel, and deputy director, Dan Bongino, both professional conspiracy-mongers -- so abruptly decided to bury the Epstein evidence after all their vows of "transparency."

Most Americans interested in Epstein and Trump have seen the old video of them together at a party, whispering and leering at young women. Most have seen quotes from Trump in magazine profiles praising his pal Epstein, who "likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side." But if you listen to Michael Wolff, the bestselling Trump biographer and National Magazine Award-winning writer, there is far more to their relationship than a few words and images.

Wolff knows Trump well and knew Epstein very well -- and what he has to say about them points in a very troubling direction. Last month he discussed both subjects and their connections on "The Court of History," a MeidasTouch podcast hosted by journalist Sidney Blumenthal and historian Sean Wilentz.

While Trump has repeatedly tried to minimize his ties to Epstein, whom he now calls a "creep," Wolff said "Epstein and Trump had been the best of friends for almost 15 years. ... They were instrumental in each other's rise." The pair "hunted women together," according to Wolff, but fell out, as very rich men do, over real estate. Trump went behind Epstein's back to outbid him on a Palm Beach property that both coveted. Epstein believed that Trump was actually laundering money for a Russian oligarch and threatened to expose him. And then, according to Wolff's recollection of what Epstein told him, Trump "dropped a dime" on his friend's trafficking of young girls to the Palm Beach Police Department. (Which, as Wolff notes, indicates that Trump had long known of the crimes perpetrated at Epstein's house.)


By the time of Trump's ascent to the presidency, Epstein was ready to "drop a dime" of his own. Wolff told Blumenthal and Wilentz how, after Trump's election in 2016, "I was sitting talking to Epstein and he said, 'Wait a minute, I've gotta show you something.'" According to Wolff, Epstein "went into his safe, and he came out with photographs. They were Polaroids, I think, and he kind of spread them out like playing cards. ... It was Trump with girls of an uncertain age, at Epstein's Palm Beach house, where all of the things that (Epstein) would ultimately be accused of took place." He places the date of those pictures around 1999 or 2000.

"And I remember very vividly three of them," Wolff continued. "There are two in which the girls, topless girls, are sitting on Trump's lap. And then a third in which he has a stain on the front of his pants, and the girls are kind of pointing at it, sort of bent over, laughing ... three or four girls." Wolff also said he assumes those photographs were in Epstein's safe when the FBI raided his house and seized every item of potential evidence.

The crimes and coverup demand a Congressional investigation -- and perhaps this time, Democrats and a few courageous Republicans will dare to demand the truth from Trump.

[mister_coffee]

Oh he was surely getting paid. But then there is this:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/08/nyre ... owitz.html

[PAL]

Follow the money. He must be getting paid by Fox and/or OAN.

[mister_coffee]

In another thing about this that makes no sense: Alan Dershowitz.

Given that he has well-known personal connections to the whole mess one would think that a Smart Person (and he is a Smart Person) would wisely keep his mouth shut about the Epstein files and the whole situation. But he is on Fox News and OAN talking about it. But he is actually being very cagey about what he does and does not say.

So it is (again) just plain weird.

Just asking questions here.

Why would a well-respected lawyer and law professor bend legal ethics into a pretzel representing a friend in a case where has has some involvement and might arguably be a witness?

Given his involvement, however indirectly, why aren't Fox News and OAN mentioning that when he is on their shows?

Does the Dershowitz-Epstein connection explain why Mr. Dershowitz defended Donald Trump in his first impeachment trial in 2020?

[just-jim]

More on Epstein’s finances. From NPR, Saturday:

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

We have the basics on Jeffrey Epstein. The sex offender who died six years ago is in the news because President Trump's administration promised revelations then enraged his supporters by failing to deliver. Many people listening right now were not even adults when Epstein was a friend of Trump, or when he served time in jail, or when he was arrested again and killed himself. So we've called journalist Vicky Ward who has covered Epstein most of that time. She profiled him in 2003. Our conversation will last about 4 1/2 minutes and will include details of sexual assault. Welcome to the program.

VICKY WARD: Thanks for having me, Steve.

INSKEEP: OK. So in 2003, Epstein was an apparently very rich man who was connected with many rich and powerful people. How did he make his money?

WARD: Great question. He claimed that he was a financial adviser for billionaires, and yet there was no footprint of him trading in the markets. We know that he invested money through hedge funds from a very wealthy billionaire whose name was Leslie Wexner. But even that didn't really explain why suddenly, out of nowhere, a guy who hadn't even graduated from college suddenly possessed the largest town house in Manhattan, a private island in the Caribbean, a ranch in New Mexico, an apartment in Paris and the famous Lolita Express, his private airplane. The math has never added up, and there's been a lot of mystery and secrecy, frankly, around his money. He was also - he had to leave Bear Stearns in the early 1980s under slightly strange circumstances.

INSKEEP: Wow. OK. Was it apparent to people who wanted to know how much interest he had in sex with minors?

WARD: So that is one of the great, great - another great mystery. We do know that there were a lot of bold-faced names, politicians, very rich men who were on his planes, who may have visited the island, who came to dinner at his houses. And he was, at the same time, surrounded by beautiful women, many of whom were underage minors, almost in plain sight. I mean, even last week, you had reporting in The Wall Street Journal that for his 50th birthday, which happened exactly around the time I did my first Vanity Fair piece on him - early 2003 - you know, people, again, big names were sending him messages almost referencing his obsession with sex with underage minors.

INSKEEP: Now, we'll just review that in 2007, he was charged with recruiting dozens of girls, some as young as 13. He reached a plea deal with Alex Acosta - who was a U.S. attorney in the Bush administration, went on to serve as labor secretary in Trump's first term - was arrested again in 2019. Here, however, is something that I think is important. You've mentioned how many questions there still are about this man. Do you think the Justice Department files, if released in full, would answer some of these questions for you?

WARD: I think there's got to be something in there. You know, we know that they took a huge amount of material out of his house in Palm Beach back in the - sort of the 2000s. They also had access to a huge amount of stuff out of his New York mansion when they rearrested him in 2019. There are still a lot of questions about that plea deal, how he escaped federal charges back in 2008, '09 and did that sweetheart deal with Alex Acosta. Who else was involved in this scheme? Who propped him up financially? Because without his money, there's no evidence that when he didn't have money, he was trafficking minors. So I think that there's got to be something. But the person who really, really knows a lot of the answers to these questions is Ghislaine Maxwell.

INSKEEP: ...Ah, who is now being questioned once again by the Trump administration. Investigative journalist Vicky Ward, thanks so much for the basics on Jeffrey Epstein - really appreciate it.

WARD: Thanks for having me.

[mister_coffee]

Whatever Mr. Thiel's other flaws might be, we can be certain he wasn't diddling little girls.

[just-jim]

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[mister_coffee]

There is no indication from Epstein's well-publicized job history that he had any particular expertise in either tax or estate planning. People who actually do that work for wealthy people don't charge $153 million for their services either.

The math doesn't math here.

Whatever Epstein did for Black didn't involve taxes or estates.

More on the modeling to trafficking pipeline:

https://thegoodage.medium.com/modeling- ... 5f37e1e49f