JFK Files, Epstein and the Deep State - Mike Benz

If it turned out that our own intelligence services were involved in, or allowed purposely, the assassination of our own president, that would have, I think, implications diplomatically for our standing abroad. So this is really one of the first litmus tests about how serious the Trump Administration is about cleaning up the agencies.

So what's the real story of Jeffrey Epstein? Where I am on it currently is it does seem like Epstein was an access agent. There's a question of how much smoke do you need to have before you just come out and say there's a dang fire?

Mike, welcome to Trigonometry. Thanks for having me. It's good to have you on. We are sitting here on the day that, allegedly, the JFK files are going to be released. Do we know what's in them? We don't. It could be; there could be bombshells; there could be a nothing burger; there could be bombshells that are redacted. I know that the president has come out and said that he's going to try to prevent any redactions from—this was a when Pam Bondi declared that they were going to come out a while ago—she said, subject to, you know, redactions about National Security concerns around the EP—I guess this was around the Epstein disclosures—and that prompted this sort of public backlash. What does—what could undermine US National Security about what's in the Epstein documents? And I think there's a similar perception about the JFK assassination, that there are implications for National Security and for American standing if it does turn out that there was malfeasance or foreknowledge coming from the National Security State.

So there's a lot of very strange evidence around the role of our own intelligence services in the death of JFK. It's a great book called *JFK and the Unspeakable*, which documents much of this. You know, the CIA was opening the mail, for example, of Lee Harvey Oswald for months before the assassination, suspecting formally that he was counter—was a counter-intelligence probe, basically—that he might be working for Russia. And so they were basically monitoring his communications and mail beforehand. You have a number of other strange circumstances around the events that happened that day. And if it did turn out, for example, that there was a role of our own intelligence services in that assassination, you could imagine the diplomatic backlash that would have for our own State Department, right? When we go around and we accuse the FSB or something in Russia, or you know, Chinese intelligence services or Iranian intelligence services of malfeasance or human rights violations—if it turned out that our own intelligence services were involved in, or allowed purposely, the assassination of our own president, especially one whose name lives on—in you know, the Kennedy family is still a significant part of the Democrat Party. You have Bobby Kennedy who is the current head of HHS. This is not ancient history; that this is a family name that lives on—that would have, I think, implications diplomatically for our standing abroad. And I could see there being a knife fight within the National Security Community about trying to redact the most damning evidence. And so this is really one of the first litmus tests about how serious the Trump Administration is about cleaning up the agencies in terms of transparency for past—past malfeasance—when it's easy to go after things like Crossfire Hurricane, or times when Trump himself was personally attacked, but they've been serious about cleaning up the personnel side. You know, they're they're in the process of firing or offering golden handcuffs to the CIA; they've decimated the staff at USAID. So I think they mean business, but it's a question about whether or not they can get it done.

Well, one of the guests we've had on the show before is Michael Frances, who's a former New York mobster, basically. And he told us—I think it was in the Substack section, the paywall section—that the Mafia were involved somehow. A lot of time people were attracted to us politically also. Hey, listen, when you know the CIA came to us—fact, okay—to help them assassinate Castro. The CIA came to us 100% with JFK's assassination. I heard that my entire life from people that were in the know. And normally in that life, if you had something to do with murder, you don't want to talk about it, okay? But I heard enough about the Kennedy thing to know what went on there.

Um, wait, are you saying the mob murdered JFK? I'm saying they were complicit in it. Yes. And I'm telling you this; I've heard that all my life from the right people. And I'm telling you this: there are classified documents that the United States is holding that every 25 years they're supposed to release them. Trump was going to release them, then they put the brakes on it because I believe those classified documents are going to show that the mob was complicit in that, and the US government does not want the world to know that a sitting president was assassinated with the help of the mob. Are you expecting that to be part of this conversation?

Yeah, I mean there's always an overworld-underworld connection to these things, whether that's in assassinations, or whether that's in smuggling narcotics or smuggling goods or arms. This actually gets to the Epstein network as well. I mean, you have these—you know, Jeffrey Epstein was—I mean, it's sort of—it's interesting how these things line up and how they're both coming to a head simultaneously with these attempted disclosures, because you know, the Kennedy assassination was in '63; the Epstein story really goes back to the 1980s, not too long after after, you know, the JFK assassination and aftermath. And they both involved this overworld-underworld connection. You know, you had the Teamsters that were alleged to have had a role in it; you had, you know, the fight with the unions. The unions play a really interesting role in statecraft because they serve as rent-a-muscle when we're trying to destabilize a country; when we're doing color revolution work to try to mobilize a wellspring within a country to unseat its government, the first thing we do is we go to the trade labor groups, the unions, the workers' movements in the country, and then we try to destabilize the industry from within. We cause mass walkouts; we, you know, have people instead of taking—making sure the trains run on time—they're walking out of the hospitals; they're walking out of the, you know, the state-run media organizations; they're walking out of, you know, daycare; they're blocking the highways. And that brings the instruments of a dictator to a halt, as we sort of put it. They can't weaponize their own power arm because there's nobody—you know, there's nobody to basically man those stations of power. And oftentimes these are rough-and-tumble types who will take to the streets, especially if they're getting money on the side from a USAID or a National Endowment for Democracy or State Department.

So why—we have the National Endowment for Democracy has a specific center called the Solidarity Center, which the NED is—is effectively a CIA front. It was conceived in the office of the Central Intelligence Agency director, William Casey, in 1983. It was sort of replacing the old CIA function after the CIA got in trouble in the 1970s during the Church Committee hearings. And they have an arm called the Solidarity Center, which goes out around the world and works with the unions. And the unions are very close to the organized crime nexus. I mean, this is something that is not just a sort of Hollywood theme or like a *Sopranos*-style theme where you have, you know, the unions and the Mafia, but this—this goes back a very long time because you have these rough-and-tumble types who will—you know, do dirty deeds done dirt cheap. They are often at the exact nexus of the logistics chain for intelligence work. So, for example, if we are running arms to rebels in Nicaragua—in Nicaragua—as we were doing during the Iran-Contra Scandal, you're going to need those arms shipped from ports in Miami or Tampa or New Orleans. You're going to need the dockworkers who are on board, the dockworkers, the shipping magnates; the whole logistics chain is going to have to run through the people at the docks who are putting the cargo in and who are not looking or not reporting, you know, what's inside them. And that's—that's simultaneously an organized crime type activity when you're talking about the sale or movement of narcotics or illegal arms. This is something that Epstein himself was involved with.

To sort of connect this Epstein-JFK world in the sense that Jeffrey Epstein, his whole network was involved in Iran-Contra in the early 1980s. It was Jeffrey Epstein who helped move Southern Air Transport, which was a CIA proprietary airline, from Miami to Columbus, Ohio, which is where Les Wexner was—that was his, you know, his main backer. So he basically had a CIA airline that was implicated in illegal drugs and gun-running in the 1980s moved directly—directly to Columbus, Ohio, um, exactly where Les Epstein had bought property, and Les Wexner, his principal sponsor, who he had power of attorney over his whole financial empire, um, you know, was—that was—to me, you have this—what's most interesting about it is when the organized crime activity is actually sanctioned by the intelligence state. And that's where I think you get into the dirty laundry that the Trump Administration is going to have to think long and hard about the degree to which he wants to expose, because it's not just us—and the US—who see these disclosures; it's everybody else. And then suddenly these things get held up in the United Nations; these things are persuasive to neutrals like in India or, you know, a European country who might be, you know, caught between worlds—like a—you could—you could very easily see neutrals being persuaded to think, okay, well, if they were backing the organized crime networks here and in this case, and we know that there are these unions who are getting these USAID grants or who are meeting with the US Embassy here and they're causing us a hard time, it could cause a crackdown on a lot of the soft power influence nodes that we still have in existence today.

Well, you mentioned Epstein, and that's something that I really want to talk with you about because I haven't looked into it deeply at all. I don't really know much about it. I—the Joe Public perception of this, I would say, is there was some rich guy who hobnobbed with all these famous people, some of them powerful people, and he was into young girls, and some of these people were into young girls, so he brought them to his island, and they all had a good time, basically, right? So what's—what's the real story of Jeffrey Epstein?

Well, no one really knows. It's a black box. There's—there's so many potentials for what it could be. Who was he? First of all, just tell us his like story.

Yeah, well, you know, he's a guy who was linked at a young age to our own former head of the Justice Department when he, you know, suicided himself, effectively. I mean, I don't know—I don't know how many people to this day believe it was genuinely a suicide, but the fact is is, you know, he—he came up through—I—through—he was the official story is he was working in finance at Bear Stearns. Um, he develops a close relationship with Les—Les Wexner, who was the head of Limited Brands, which was the largest retailer in the country in the 1980s. Um, he was given power of attorney over Les Wexner's entire financial empire; was basically given, you know, penthouses for a dollar and was completely hooked up to this, you know, powerful retail magnet and was involved in bundling money for the Clinton Administration during the 1990s. As I mentioned, you know, he was involved in—you basically personally negotiating the transfer of a CIA proprietary airline directly to, you know, his—his sponsor's home city. That airline then would carry the goods of Limited Brands to and from Hong Kong. And uh, then you had Wexner—I'm sorry—then you had Epstein get in trouble with these, um, you know, criminal indictment charges around underage girls in the, you know, in the late '90s. Then you had Alex Acosta, who was the Federal prosecutor that was in charge of the Epstein case, being questioned in 2017 about why he didn't—why he gave basically a wrist slap to Epstein after his second indictment. Then and he really ignited this in a big way when he said the reason that he did not pursue various charges or or try to throw the book at Epstein was because he was, quote, "told to back off because EP belongs to intelligence." And that produced, you know, a huge curiosity because Epstein, going back decades, had been accused variously of working for the CIA, of working for Israeli intelligence, of having connections to British intelligence. And, you know, I think there's a great quote that was in, I think, the *New Yorker* magazine in the mid-1990s, and it—it went something like, "No one—no one knows if Jeffrey Epstein is an insurance broker, a concert pianist, a CIA agent, um, a like a, you know, like a retail, you know, magnet associate, or a—or a Mossad agent." And—and there is something—John Kiriakou, who's a former CIA agent—I—I think put it—the closest to where I am on it currently is it does seem like Epstein was an access agent. And it's unclear whether—so can I just stop you there? What does an access agent mean?

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What does an access agent mean? Someone who gets access to high-level political—political figures, um, cultural figures who can swing hearts and minds, business figures. You know, if I came to you and I said, "I'm Mike Benz, I work for the CIA, tell me all your secrets," you, you know, you're not going to do that. But if you think that I'm, you know, a fun-loving guy who's got access to beautiful women, and I throw great parties, and I can take you and your friends on a—on a great vacation, and we've got common business interests, and you know, I will learn things in the process of those conversations that I can then relay to, you know, folks in the intelligence world who simply want to know what the next move is of these—of these political figures or of these billionaire, you know, billionaire investors or—or funders. It's also a way to broker deals in a way where you—you effectively have a back channel. Often times these—these high-level business deals between nation-states and also between nation-states and corporations need a little bit of massaging from—from back channels, from interlocutors, from go-betweens who don't formally represent that foreign government or that government—like the State Department.

A great example of this is Bill Burns, who was the CIA director for Joe Biden—for President Biden—for all four years. He was picked to be the head of the Central Intelligence Agency having—having never worked for the CIA. Uh, he had spent 35 years in the State Department; he negotiated the Iran deal for President Obama. And then he went to work at a—at a think tank for seven years. And then he, you know—how does someone like Bill Burns know how all the gadgets work? How does he know how to work the cockpit of the CIA having never worked there? And the answer is because what you're—when he worked for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which he was the president of for seven years before he got the CIA job, that is—that's one of those think tanks that's—that's at the center of this back-channel statecraft. In fact, his own autobiography is called *The Back Channel* and basically details, you know, the role of his role and the role of his network in being able to massage deals in the background—like the Iran deal. If you're going to line up something like the Iran deal, which was this early 2015, you know, pivotal moment that created this big rift between Israel and NATO; it created this big rift between the—the Obama foreign policy world and—and much of the—the bipartisan buy-in that existed between—um, the certain factions within the GOP. I think that really cleared the way for Trump. But to line that up, you're going to need all the different stakeholders aligned. And sometimes you can't send in a formal US State Department person to do that. You might want to convey a more heavy-handed message that you don't want to be on the record conveying, but if a back channel conveys it, then you can deny it later. Uh, same thing. So—so whether that's brokering deals, whether that's setting up informal networks, this is a big part of how statecraft operates. You have these formal bureaus and these formal divisions and formal W-2 employees at State or CIA, but most of the work happens at the informal layer where someone from State or someone from the intelligence world who is running—who's basically a symphony orchestra conductor of these outside groups that are informal and that can massage—it can get a general sort of set of terms lined up—who can convey sanctions are going to be forthcoming or—or whatever the message is—and—and also who can gather intelligence that can be used that you can't necessarily get if you are in the Intel world and you don't know the—who's all going to be there. You can't necessarily tap all their phones, or maybe they just bought a burner phone. You can't get—you need a fly on the wall; you need someone in the room. And I—I think that is probably the closest to the Epstein story. And I don't know which government it is; it could be—there's obviously a US government connection in the sense that an American prosecutor was told not to go through with prosecution because he belonged to intelligence. So you obviously have at least the US government involved in that. And again, when you date it back to this whole Iran-Contra network, that was a US government activity. And you know, this was—this whole Adnan Khashoggi network that Wexner and Epstein ran through—that they were involved in the illegal arms sales to Iran, um, to—to evade sanctions by backchanneling the whole thing. And then the guy goes on to negotiate the sale of a CIA proprietary airline. There's obviously US statecraft there; there could also be British statecraft involved; there could also be Israeli statecraft involved. These things often move together and have for a century. And so—um, I—I hear a lot about the blackmail story, though, with Epstein, and that's—that's where I'd like to see more evidence. You know, this is sort of—well, the reason people say that is it's kind of the obvious thing: like, if you get a pedophile to bring other people to his pedophile island, that's the perfect place for blackmail material to be generated, isn't it? You would think. But there's also—you know, there's—there's weird examples of this happening without blackmail. There was a case in the early 2000s with a—with a private military contractor called DynCorp. And DynCorp uh was implicated, and they were actually banned from being able to get government contracts for—for a certain time after that because they were supplying young girls to these Arab sheikhs uh and—and to these sort of paramilitary leaders uh in the—in Central Asia and Middle East and North Africa. And you know, this was like human trafficking; this is—these are young girls that were basically given, you know, uh as—as a way of juicing deals and as a way of, you know, sort of making their clients happy, uh, but that didn't necessarily involve—there wasn't a blackmail, you know, situation provided, basically, right? And so—um, what—what I—I feel like it's presupposed that it's a blackmail ring, and I would think with the thousands of people that Epstein had as clients or was constantly interfacing with, um, that one person—one person would come out and say, "Yes, Epstein or an Epstein associate directly tried to blackmail me with," you know, potentially incriminating uh, you know, evidence from a video camera. I mean, someone could—with the thousands of people who were implicated in these Lolita Express, you know, Little St. James Island trips, you would think that one per—now you might say, okay, well, no one wants to come forward because they don't want to reveal that they had been blackmailed, but you know, people can be down on their luck uh and have little to lose and much to gain. I mean, frankly, you don't even need to say what was necessarily on it. You can imagine the multi-million-dollar book deal you get by being—by claiming that you are the victim of this, you know, uh of this extortion. Um, and the fact that not a single person, to my knowledge, has come out and said—and said that—it doesn't sit well with me that that it should just be presupposed in that way. If you look at, for example, um, Epstein's relationship with people like Ehud Barak, who is, you know, the, you know, the former prime minister of Israel, was constantly at Jeffrey Epstein's um penthouse. Ehud Barak was working closely with the—um—West Exec, which was the main sort of foreign policy, National Security, intelligence incubator hub for the Biden White House. That was where Jake Sullivan and all these other National Security experts were, and they were consulting with Ehud Barak, and Ehud Barak was tightly aligned with them on foreign policy against Trump world things. I—I suspect that Epstein was sort of synthesizing in the network. Same thing with Reid—Reid Hoffman. I know that uh there's Elon currently has a feud with Reid Hoffman, who sponsored a number of these anti-Trump, anti-Elon groups, billionaire uh, you know, highly influential in Democrat politics. Um, I'm not convinced that that Hoffman was being blackmailed by Epstein uh so much as—you're trying to gather intelligence on them. I—and the other thing is is if somebody in the network squeals to a friend because they're being pressured or extorted—"Hey, Epstein's trying to blackmail me"—well, that makes Epstein useless because that word gets around. There you know, if I'm being blackmailed, I might tell my mom and dad; I might tell my best friend—"They're trying to blackmail me." I don't even need to say what I'm being blackmailed for. That immediately creates a pressure valve on the person, and that—that word gets around. And then they say, "Okay, I don't want to hang around with this guy because there are rumors that he's blackmailing this other person." And then there goes all the access; there goes, you know, your access to Bill Gates and Reid Hoffman and uh heads of state all over the world. So I think there's—there's layers to it, if that makes sense.

No, of course there's layers to it. The thing that I can't believe is that you have a man who is a convicted pedophile, and the US still wants to have involvement with him. Surely wouldn't they look at that and go, "This guy is a complete liability," and then also the people who spent time with him? I mean, if I was a public figure of that repute and of that notoriety, the last thing I'd want to do is hang around with a convicted pedophile. That's just a surefire way to torpedo your reputation, isn't it?

It's tough. I mean, on—on the first question about why the US would continue to have dealings with Epstein after the—the first indictments came down—these networks are always very, very messy. When—when you're talking about this sort of backchannel intelligence work, when you're talking about moving illegal arms or narcotics or working in—in shady conflict zones and things like this, it tends to attract a cowboy type who is singularly capable of—of doing things that a more straight-laced person with a clean record can't really pull off. I mean, a great example of this is Hunter Biden. Hunter Biden has gotten in a lot of trouble throughout his life. You know, he was kicked out of the Navy for cocaine; he—I don't know what possessed him to do this particular part, but he was recording on his own laptop him snorting lines of cocaine while, you know, sleeping with Russian prostitutes and, you know, negotiating what girls to bring over and pay for; carrying around unlicensed firearms; I—the litany of—he didn't pay his taxes for five whole years in a row; I—and yet he was on the Chairman's Advisory Board of the NDI. The NDI is the National Democratic Institute; it's the DNC branch of the National Endowment for Democracy, which is a literal CIA cutout. Again, it was conceived by the CIA in 1983 because they were sad that they had lost their powers after the Church Committee hearings in the late 1970s. The founder of the National Endowment for Democracy said it was terrible in the 1960s and '70s when the CIA was seen as subsidizing political dissident groups; that's why the endowment was created so that we could provide the funding and it wouldn't look like the CIA was going to do it. The CIA gets a copy of every grant that the National Endowment for Democracy makes. They have two political branches: the IRI, the International Republican Institute, for Republicans, and the NDI, the National Democratic Institute, for—for Democrats. And Hunter Biden's on the—was on the Chairman's Advisory Board after that stuff. Uh, and also the NDI was run by Madeleine Albright, who was the Secretary of State under—under Bill Clinton. But Hunter Biden is also being tasked with, you know, effectively conducting a form of covert corporate espionage and statecraft while he's at Burisma. They were pitching Burisma to the State Department as being a way to hedge Europe off of Russian gas by building up Ukraine's endogenous gas supply and working directly with the State Department in a number of regions. They petitioned the—the government of Italy to, you know, to get them deals; they petitioned the State Department in Foggy Bottom to—um—you know, to juice the skids in Ukraine. You had Joe Biden personally go to Ukraine and threaten a billion—you know, withholding a billion-dollar USAID loan guarantee uh to remove the prosecutor who was investigating—but the question is, why would you task Hunter Biden to do that? There's a bunch of Bidens, you know, you had James Biden, you know, that you had the—the nieces, the nephews, um, or you could just have a friend, but why—why was it—why was it Hunter? And you—part of this is—these—these personality types—first of all, there—there's—you're also dealing in a lot of these cases with organized crime networks where crime is—is not a disqualifier to, you know, to daily life, especially if you're in a place where you control the prosecutors and you know you're not going to get arrested for various things, whether that's drugs or prostitution or guns um or deals that evade sanctions. And so it is dirty work, and so often that requires dirty people to do it. And someone walking in with a totally clean record and no rap sheet is often a—a stick in the mud or can't speak the lingo or can't hang with your crew—that over years and they have no—so they have no access; they have no credibility. So, you know, it's just like in—in the—in the role of organized crime, when it comes to the JFK story and with the Epstein story, with the Hunter Biden story, and that same thing with Iran-Contra. Barry Seal was the guy who was the, you know, Cocaine Cowboy who was—was flying the drugs uh in and out of Nicaragua when we were using those drugs as—to convert to cash to buy the guns to—to get around the Congressional blockade on using—

US taxpayer funds to do it, but why did you pick this Cocaine Cowboy to be the one? You know, flying well because he was an ace pilot; he could speak the lingo with the locals; he knew the people on the ground; they trusted him, and so he's the way you get access. And you see this story not infrequently in in movies, and I think not not for the not for a wrong reason; it's it's interesting that you say that. And I love the fact that you brought up the idea of a movie because sometimes when talking about Jeffrey Epstein and people who have met him, they say that he's almost not a real person; he was like a construct.

Yeah, which I find really interesting. So so what do people mean by that? Well, I think it gets back to the fact that no one could quite make out who he really was. You know, I come back to that quote from like the New Yorker or whatever it was where they said no one can tell if he's a real estate broker, uh, you know, a CIA agent, a concert pianist, uh, you know, or M—it's you have a guy who's got a very very strange backstory getting into this ridiculous position of power and privilege; someone who, you know, was only on on Wall Street for a couple years before he basically inherits this massive portfolio and is able to, you know, get access to like—I come back to the how do you how if I tried to negotiate the sale of a CIA proprietary Airline, uh, you know, as as a regular civilian, would make no sense. How do you even get the access? How would you even get in position to do that? But you know, there there was a very strange backstory even to that because you had this you know this Iran Contra Contra situation in the early 80s, and then um you had this network in Columbus, Ohio, that was uh under investigation, and then the the main attorney representing uh that Columbus Network, this guy Arthur Arthur Shapiro—everyone can look up this mysterious 1985 assassination of Arthur Shapiro, which was in the middle of this Iran Contra Scandal. He was the guy who was um handling the he he represented the law firm that was handling the the accounts for this Ohio network; he had not filed taxes for something like seven years—it's another one of these Hunter Biden type situations—so he was uh under the gun of an IRS investigation; he he was murdered the day before he was set to testify uh to the grand jury in the IRS case, um and it was it was a very strange situation because when you when you look at that Network's role in Iran Contra and in the these sort of illegal organized crime networks, you could see how somebody might be assassinated because uh especially because the tax records provide this you know hard forensic evidence of what you did with the money, and if that could have if his testimony to clear his own name uh required implicating the people in that Network, you can see why he may have been killed for the same reason that someone like Jeffrey Epstein may have been killed 30 years later.

And what's very interesting about that is Epstein met Wexner that that very same year in 1985, and there's a lot of speculation that Epstein effectively took the place of that law firm or in terms of handling uh handling that Columbus Ohio Network account and taking care of the financial transactions and having it not be formally you know accountable to uh to that Network. And and in fact, that that would explain the power of attorney; that would explain uh you know these huge assets that were given over given over over to Epstein for apparently nothing in return; uh and the fact that that network is involved in US statecraft, not just in the Western Hemisphere but also in the Middle East, both you know in terms of Iran Israel, the strange sort of you know Arab shake you know relationships with all that. I also find it very strange that Jeffrey Epstein was able to lease an apartment in New York City directly from the US State Department—was a very curious episode—uh I believe this was in the 1990s, but Jeffrey Epstein was able to get a lease directly from the US State Department for for one of his properties. I don't know how I would go about having the state department as my personal landlord.

Yeah. And you know, when we talk about this Mike, because we all have a conspiratorial element to us, and I'll be honest with you, you Americans, you love a conspiracy theory; it's your National spol—you do you chat about a few things and then you go right, who's really in charge? Well, when you have a First Amendment, it makes it a lot easier—touche, he fired back at you right there. No, but I think culturally we we just had Andrew Schultz on; we were talking about this as well—this may go out before that one—but I think part of the amazing thing that makes America so wonderful is the sense it's like filled with people who think anything's possible, and that's why you can achieve great things and do amazing things. But if anything's possible, anything is possible. And and I think just culturally we spend a lot of time here, but we're not from here; we notice that that it's a very popular thing in America in a way that it isn't in other places.

Well, it's interesting; I would think that people in in the UK would be, I mean, given you know that that uh perfidious albon moniker for for British statecraft and um you know the role of covert British intelligence work in so many world events and for so many centuries now, I would I would think that people would be a bit more Curious um in the UK to to try to get answers to to various things. In fact, our own intelligence—where're the good guys, right? Well, but this is what's funny is I think that a lot of what's happened in the past 10 years has been because of the perception—which I think is the correct perception—that these intelligence agencies and covert action Powers have been weaponized against our own people, and that has you know it was Republicans who were leading the charge about the Iraq War, about the war on terror, about you know the use of the CIA to do drone strikes—to was John McCain who you know LED you know many of these regime change operations um you know who ran for president in 2008, the the Bush family and was basically born of the CIA from Prescott Bush to George HW Bush who was the CIA director—to this day the the main CIA headquarters in Langley, it's called The George George Bush National Intelligence Center—um but when it was weaponized against our own people and so transparently—I mean the CIA coming out with that memo saying that the 2016 election was basically illegitimate because of Russian Bots and trolls—and then we saw our own FBI Counter Intelligence you know take up the mantle of this—and I think that has created the perception of urgency in getting answers to things that we long taken for granted. But the other thing I'll say is this: if you don't want iracy theories, then you can't have conspiracy agencies. The fact is is everything that the CIA does is under cloaked under something called NSE 10-2; it's the National Security Council uh memo 10-2 in 1948 that made gave them the cloak of plausible deniability that basically they could deny what they're doing, and as as long as they didn't as long as the US government the US state department could could plausibly deny what you know what had been done, then it was sanctioned—everything was sanctioned—Espionage, arson, uh black propaganda, uh economic sabotage—up until the 1960s and 70s, even assassination was uh was allowed to be done if it if it was covert. And so you have this you have this situation where it's one thing if that's just the dirty work being done in a conflict Zone when you're dealing with teror terorist—we a we're a Bonafide dictator—and it's all outside the house, but because these things have power, they have tentacles into everything, and it makes a lot of sense as to why that is to me. I don't even talk about this; I don't think I really come into it with a very conspiratorial tone; this is just business; this is just how it's done. If you this the intelligence world is not the final boss of this by any stretch; the the CIA director makes about $222,000 a year; that is less than like a second-year associate at a New York law firm; uh you know you could be correcting typos you know is a is a glorified paralal your second year and you're making more than the head of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Well, there kid kids on YouTube unboxing toys that make 10 times that, right? Yeah, at 14. And so not only that, the CI occupies a very Junior position within the whole National Security State structure; it's well below the National Security Council level; it's well below the state department level; this is why it's always a promotion to go from CIA director to Secretary of State, like Mike Pompeo was promoted from CI director to state, or leam Panetta for for you know the Democrat uh CI director under Bill Clinton was got promoted to the head of the defense department because the intelligence only plays a junior role to statecraft work or to military work; it's it's it's just an assistant that you task things to when it's too dirty to do yourself, and they themselves then work through the whole society Network to affect that statecraft aim. If you want to influence hearts and Minds in a country, that means you work with the media; that means you work with the universities; that means you work with the local think tanks; that means you set up local NGS; if there's a prosecutor who's given you trouble, it means you work with the local judges, the local prosecutors associations, the local Mayors and governors and and presidents and but that requires you having an entanglement at every layer of society—the youth groups, the ethnic minority groups, the women and gender identity groups, the religious denominations—I mean this is you can everyone right now can go to CIA World Factbook at cia.gov; every country has the current updated CIA entry whether that you go to Bangladesh or Burma or Kenya or the UK, and you will see a meticulously documented demographic breakdown, the uh you know the religious minorities, the you know percent of the population you at varying age levels, you know what percentage of its Workforce is unionized, what national resources it has, and all of these things are modes of soft power to accomplish a state craft craft aim to advance US national interest.

And the thing that makes this all I think tough for a lot of people, and they take an attitude that comes across as conspiratorial, is because they have been under the presupposition that the world did not exist this way and has not existed this way this way for a full Century now—almost here in the US—they think that their universities are just you know professors teaching uh you know teaching students about a particular topic; they don't understand that for example that the Harvard endowment has made a huge amount of its $50 billion dollar by working with the US state department in foreign regime change operations. I mean this came out in the 1990s when when Jeffrey Sachs was the head of the Harvard Endowment for International Development was personally petitioning USAID for something like half a billion to administer the economic privatization of Russia during that shock therapy period; the Harvard endowment and George Soros's Quantum fund were given basically a no no no competitor closed auction bid on the on the sale of those uh former former formerly Soviet government held assets, and Harvard is getting billions of dollars in Grants in total from the US government while they're doing favors of them; the same thing with Columbia University; the same thing with Stanford University; they think they Americans think that the universities are something that they are—I don't want to say that they're not—but that they're only partially—it's the same thing with businesses and the in the business side of this, you know there was a famous case in in the 1970s where we overthrew the Government of Chile, and it came out 30 years later, 35 years later—this was printed in the Guardian—that um you know part of the reason behind that coup was because the Pepsi you know Pepsi Cola Company uh its bottling operations were being threatened by Allende, and Pepsi reached out to Henry Kissinger, the Secretary of State, to see what could be done to get rid of Allende; Kissinger then hooked up um Don Kendall or Kendall Johnson uh the the head of the chairman of Pepsi with the CIA director; the CIA director and the head of the Pepsi Cola Company had a personal meeting about how to mobilize a coup in in Chile; they then had an additional meeting with the largest newspaper Mogul in the country to assist in the CIA operation. And you drink Pepsi, and you don't you don't know how the B the bottling is made; you know you you go to you go to the gas station, you pump your gas, and you think that the gas just comes out of the ground or comes on a tree; you don't understand that a lot of Exxon Mobile and Chevron only have the you know the market dominance they have because the Pentagon has cleared the way for them to secure territory in Middle East in Kuwait uh in you know the the the Persian Gulf in parts of Mexico; you don't understand that there's CIA activity and state department diplomacy that's done as part of that that statecraft. And so I think a lot of people are only now beginning to see the layers of that, and it causes a lot of shock mentally when when they see that.

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Do you think as well that we have been focusing in on America and talking about the way it's been conducting its operations and the corruption within—which of course exists—but at the same time we we kind of ignore you know what the Iranians are doing as well, what the Russians are doing—everybody is playing this game. So if if the Americans weren't playing it, then the Russians would be right, and it's just a game, isn't it? It's an interconnected game. It is, and that in fact that was actually one of the reasons it was set up in the first place. If you go back and you read the inauguration of organized political Warfare by George Kennan, who was the head of the policy planning staff for the state department in the 40s and 50s, he was the the guy who would weeks after he wrote this memo would actually create this NSEC 10-2 plausible deniability thing, and he wrote this memo a couple weeks before that cloak of plausible liability was granted to the CIA, and he laid out that we need to do this Dirty Work of inaugura you know the inauguration of organized political Warfare, that we need a formal political Warfare capacity that is going to have to work with the criminal underworld; it's going to have to work with all the media Outlets; it's going to have to work with the unions; it's going to have to set up all these front entities, and it's going to have to create informal channels for all this, and what he says is if we don't do this then the Bolshevik will, and and so we're going to and and he he gives another example where he says the Brits have been doing this for you know over a century. So basically you know the Brits or the Bolsheviks are going to dominate the 20th century um with their organized political Warfare apparatus if the state department doesn't have this, and if we don't create an intelligence capacity to execute that. And so I think I think that is true, and that's why I think what's happening right now to me is inspiring because it's it's getting National Consciousness to a level that's I think smarter than it was, and sometimes that veers you in stupid directions as you're trying to figure out how it all works; you know you see one thing and then you fixate on it; you think okay, everything's this; you see another thing; you go okay, no no, actually that was wrong; it's it's this; you see okay, it's this, and then you you go out in these directions and you sort of but over time it's just it's just a network, and it's just how the world works. And that's not to that's not to excuse the immorality of organized crime or of intelligence gone wrong; there is the potential need for that dirty work to be done if for no other reason than to combat the dirty work being done by other countries, um but it can still it can go Rogue; it can go too wrong; it can go unaccounted for for too long, and I think that is where we are, and that is why I think that it is so important that these disclosures come out to the maximum extent possible. And we went through this before, and we lived in the in 1975 during the the Church Committee hearing when the Democrats held a you know a series of Investigations and hearings uh into the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, and the IRS; you had a you had a moment where you know the the the head of the CIA Counter Intelligence was holding up a heart attack gun about how we ass Fascinate people with a with a gun that shoots a dart that makes it look like the person died of a heart attack—you if we could survive that level of transparency where we're literally showing our own assassination technique to how to how to kill someone and get away with it by making it look like they died of a heart attack, I think that you can do that today, and frankly I think the disclosures that came out then is is part of how the CIA survived at a time when it was under huge pressure from Democrats because of their work against the Democrat Party when it was against the Vietnam War and um and it was being the the political Warfare was being done domestically. So I think this is a healthy process; it's noisy and chaotic and can um you know can result in some turbulence, but it's I think it's part of the cleaning house process; it's gone on too far too long.

Well, you made the point, and I think it's a really valid point, uh which is that we might tolerate it, you know, if you're an American citizen, you might tolerate it when it's against the Taliban or or whoever, but the JFK on the Epstein things is just two examples—those are things that involve US citizens, right? Uh you've got an American president being assassinated, yeah, uh and you've got this guy who was you know up to God knows what—um and the question with Epstein as well is interestingly is what do we—everyone thinks Jeffrey didn't kill himself—do we know enough to to actually say that categorically? [Music] Um I don't think there's a question of how much smoke do you need to have before you just come out and say there's a dang fire. I mean you had the Confluence of strange facts on the ground that are IND disputable; is something you seldom have in a case like this; you have the both of the security cameras malfunctioning with none of the footage uh you know uh retainable; you have the pages in The Visitors log ripped out uh you know an unrecoverable from who actually you know visited the prison; you have both of the security guards falling asleep or walking off the job; you have the head of the justice department who's in charge of the FBI—the FBI is the intelligence arm of the justice department—and the person who's you know would be prosecuting whoever you know killed Epstein If he if he died by homicide happened to be Bill Barr; Bill Barr's father, Donald Barr, was you personally the the math teacher was the the high school teacher of Jeffrey Epstein; you have the direct family connection between the head of the justice department and Epstein; then you have the fact that Bill Barr started his career in the CIA; he told his high school guidance counselor he wanted to be the head of the CIA; he then worked immediately for the CIA for seven years to start his career; he only became disenchanted with the CIA when um when the reforms were made in the late 1970s to fire 30% of the workforce after the Church Committee hearings; uh he went to night law school while he was working for the CIA; he then got his you know first legal job of effectively well what he was serving as the the CIA's uh liaison to the to the Congressional committee investigating Iran Contra—if you you can read this in the Washington Post in the New York Times; They describ Bill Barr in the early 1980s as the CIA's mop-up man because he was the one who was the blocker and tackler to prevent CIA disclosures about the illegal activities of the Republican Reagan Bush Administration during Iran Contra—the exact you know origin story for how Epstein even came into this world in in the first place—and so the secrets of the Epstein Universe I think are are the secrets of the Bill Barr universe, and the fact that Bill Barr was the head of the justice department uh while all this happened and there was it didn't even look like there was an attempt frankly—I mean if if you go back you know to those news Cycles—oh the the security cameras are gone; oh the visitors logs are gone; oh the security guards fell asleep—and it it was almost like jumping on the grenade immediately as it happened—um and it's not the first time you have these strange things—I mean Ghislaine Maxwell's Father, Robert Maxwell, fell off a yacht in 1991—just just oh well I guess that's a suicide too—and then it comes out later that that he was working you know for Israeli intelligence at the time and potentially British intelligence and you know had been known as his publisher, but then in in death we find out that there's this big intelligence Network and that happens to be a close partner of US Intelligence on on many foreign policy issues. So the other thing is you know when you when you read CIA assassination guides as I've as I've done on on my own streams, there's so much attention paid to trying to minimize and ensure that there's only a casual investigation afterwards that you you know create the appearance of an accident, um but you know you can't you can't to me I that level of evidence shifts the burden uh to where I think you need to presume that it is, but if there if there is um you know evidence that absolves the pro you know the Bill Barr justice department of that I would be open to it, but I think that the burden has flipped where you need to presume suicide.

Mike, what I mean—here's a question—homde—I'm I'm gonna—this is a very easy question—uh why do you think that the Epstein epsteam files haven't been released? I think for the the same National Security reason that uh that we've been talking about, which is that whether it's US intelligence, British intelligence, Israeli intelligence, whether it's uh implicating specific things about those networks or about the modalities through which those networks operate—so for example—um if those files show that Epstein belonged to intelligence and was reporting directly his conversations about the Iran deal about uh you know his conversations with AUD Barack to uh you know to Bill Burns—I guess that was after it—but to you know to the CIA director or to the justice department or to the FBI, you can imagine that straining relations between US and Israel if it comes out that this that there's a CIA memo that says uh you know we know this about Epstein, he's doing this work for us, but he's also doing this work for the Brits or for the Israelis; you could see a situation where you might have delegations from those governments pushing on the state department, pushing on the CIA, pushing on FBI, pushing on the justice department to not do that because it implicates their own National Security. And this gets back to this sort of strange entanglement within the intelligence world where you have these intelligence coalitions; you have them in the Five Eyes, and so in theory I mean you can imagine a situation where let's just say there's some joint intelligence work we're doing—the US is doing with New Zealand—and um there's some common Network that that we're surveying; we have assets on the ground; they're we're let's just say we're doing something in like B Burma or uh Vietnam—let just say there's some Network we're trying to pry the Chinese influence off of Vietnam—and you've got these New Zealand contacts, and we're sharing intelligence, and you know in these intelligence you know analyst memos or or Embassy cables they talk openly about National Secrets shared from the United States to the Five Eyes Coalition, and then there's a a movement within New Zealand to you know some political party in New Zealand says the National Security state has been oppressing us, and we think that they've been you know politicized and are impacting domestic politics; we want all these files about uh you know their work within these regions to be public; you can imagine a state department delegation saying you better redact these documents; we told you these secrets and confidence uh and so you could imagine diplomatic blowback; you could imagine um you know threats to the Coalition. And so it's that layer of it, especially when you look at how deep the relationships go—I mean almost always US UK Israel and potentially some other partner countries have moved together as a coalition block—um I mean for you know 80 years now—and and it's almost always even when it's not immediately a joint Coalition, there's there's synchronization that's done to ensure that there's some compromise position that's happening on foreign policy that's happening on Iran that's you know now some of this fell apart with the under the Obama Administration with the Schism that opened up with Obama going through with the the Iran deal against the against the protestations of Israel and against the protestations of Saudi Arabia, who's another close partner in this—and that's also I should really add Saudi Arabia to this list because the Kogi network was working directly with the Epstein Network, and you know Saudi Arabia is another one of these Middle Eastern countries who's closely aligned with US foreign policy—you know both Israel and Saudi Arabia—they really came together after Decades of you know of disputes and not you know recognizing each other diplomatically and things because they were both commonly threatened by the Obama Iran deal; Trump gets in office and you know eliminates that his his first week, and then you know Kushner and and the White House end up you know going through with the Abraham Accords and sort of trying to tie them together by economic development, but then they ran these operations against Trump who was you know and and so you have this you have this almost ancient relationship that only a decade ago start to develop its fissures, and then those fissures have been you know widening and narrowing over the past eight years through you know the Obama Trump Biden Trump um thing, and I could see there being certain aspects that might be embarrassing that would be allowed um because they embarrass one side of that of that aisle—um it is it is—but I don't know how that how that'll play out because of the the likely perception for the need to maintain the enthusiastic support of allies—you

Know during the Trump Administration, or whether or not the Trump Administration—Trump doesn't—you know, if you're going to throw caution to the wind and say, "I don't need to get reelected." We're also reorganizing everything, with USAID being reshuffled, and you know, with uh, with what we're doing at the NGO layer, maybe it's time to renegotiate all of these relationships. And that, I—there's a chance that that's—that could happen with the UK. I know Trump has reiterated, you know, the special relationship, but there's also a lot of conflict over what the—the Labor Party is doing on human rights grounds, with free speech, and the tension around Ukraine that is, um, you know, could potentially lead to a rift there. But whatever happens with the files, it I think is is an interesting litmus test for how those relationships are going to go.

Well, Mike, it's been great having you on. Before we head to Substack, where our fans get to ask you their questions, the one we always end with is: What's the one thing we're not talking about that we should be? Before Mike answers a final question at the end of the interview, make sure to head over to our Substack; the link is in the description where you'll be able to see this. Does my—believe US State Department employees and employees in other federal agencies actively undermined Trump when he was running for president? If you're in charge, what is the first best bang for your buck thing that you would go after? He's thinking about Doge in this case. What is the most outstanding action that each of the Five Eyes countries is taking that stifles or limits free speech or freedom of expression? I think the role of unions in organized crime and statecraft, as we were discussing earlier, is something that has to be much more robustly explored.

One of the main things that I think is likely to destabilize the US, uh, in the next few years, as it was during Trump's first term, were these rental riot popup protests that can completely destabilize a country when all the workers are walking out; they're blocking the highways; they're provoking the police. So you're left with either a sort—sort of authoritarian crackdown, or you know, your—your police precinct burns to the ground, as what happened in Minneapolis. But a lot of this is intermediated by the unions and uh, these groups like AFL-CIO and and SEIU and whatnot. And while there's been much attention by Doge on USAID and on the NGOs, I think there's this very unexplored layer which needs to be renegotiated, which is US financial assistance to unions and worker groups internationally, uh, with that money boomeranging back home to—to spill into, you know, paid protests. And so I think that's something that the Justice Department, the Department of Labor, uh, and the State Department need to seriously reevaluate—reevaluate.

All right, head on over to Substack where we ask Mike your questions. What countries around the world seem to have the purest form of government, or at least minimal influence from The Blob—it's what we call the Deep State in the UK or similar style of corruption—do any exist? Do any countries exist that don't have this? [Music]