The Cabal is in Control
QAnon was right, just not in the way they thought.
Hey everyone. My paternity leave is officially over, which is sad. But it does mean we will return to a more consistent schedule going forward.
Holy moly do we have a lot to talk about.
Epstein.
A week ago the Department of Justice released a whole new batch of Epstein Files and these were - by far - the craziest of the bunch. If you want a quick summary:
Despite his claims to the contrary, Elon Musk communicated with Epstein, and even requested to go to his island, multiple times. He even tried to organize a trip there (ON CHRISTMAS MORNING) because his kids were driving him crazy. Musk worked in the Trump Administration.
Alex Acosta, who infamously gave Epstein his sweetheart deal after his first arrest is very much in the files. Acosta worked in the first Trump Administration.
Alan Dershowitz and his assistant Mitch Webber are both in the files. Dershowitz defended Trump in his first impeachment trial and Webber worked in the Trump Administration.
Steve Bannon had extensive communications with Epstein, and seemed to be very close to him. They texted frequently, often about Trump. Bannon worked in the first Trump Administration.
Howard Lutnick, who conceded that he had met Epstein but cut off all ties to him in 2005, is seen asking to go to his island in 2014. Lutnick works in the Trump Administration.
Epstein had frequent communications with Peter Thiel, who is a Republican mega donor and close friend of J.D. Vance. Vance works in the Trump Administration.
Brett Ratner, the Hollywood director/producer, also hung out with Epstein. Ratner directed the Melania Trump “documentary.”
Epstein communicated frequently with Woody Allen, who hasn’t made a good movie since Blue Jasmine. Allen no longer plays jazz concerts at the Carlyle on Monday nights. (?)1
Do you see where I’m going with this? IT LOOKS BAD. And it gets a lot worse.
Is Trump in the files again?
Obviously he is, because Trump and Epstein were close friends for many years. In this batch, we see more evidence that Trump flew on Epstein’s plane and that they spent a lot of time together. Overall, Trump is mentioned more often in the files than Harry Potter is mentioned in all seven Harry Potter books.
I want to speak to a lot of the evidence in the files, specifically the stuff that talks about the things Trump and Epstein did with women. Like I said last time around, there are a lot of FBI “tips” in the files that mention Trump, and I think it’s fair to treat them with a healthy dose of skepticism. One of the tips is from a person who alleges that he saw Epstein engage in cannibalism, something that 100% of his victims failed to mention over the years.
Obviously, a lot of the stuff that gets called into the FBI tip line is not true, but there was still something about Trump in the more reliable parts of the files. We now have access to an FBI interview with one of Epstein’s victims, and how she was “presented” to Trump and Epstein by Ghislaine Maxwell. Ultimately, nothing happened between Trump and the woman (or more likely the girl, since Epstein was not interested in anyone who was over 18), but the fact that she was presented to Trump as a potential “mate” is disgusting. She was taken around Mar-A-Lago and spent time with Trump and Epstein.
The most important part of this is that it’s not from the FBI tip line. This was a person being interviewed by two FBI agents and it was related to a crime. If you are a frequent reader of the Jackal, you know that lying to the FBI is a crime in and of itself (which is why you should never talk to them without a lawyer), and one that does get prosecuted regularly. There is no evidence anywhere that a woman who was potentially abused by Epstein was ever indicted for lying to the FBI, and there is no evidence the agents in this case ever pursued a charge against her, meaning there is a good chance they thought her story was true.
Is it hard evidence that Trump was involved with underage girls? No, but we continue to take steps in that direction with every drop of files.
“Epstein was everything.”
I want to get into a few quotes from Marjorie Tayler Greene, the former Congresswoman from Georgia. In her big interview with the New York Times, Greene quoted Trump, who went after her for trying to release the files: “Epstein was everything.”
After the latest batch of files were released, Greene said something else: “MAGA was all a lie.” When you go through the files and read Epstein’s exchanges with everyone, from Peter Thiel to Steve Bannon, a clear story begins to unfold: Epstein was a major player in global politics, and he was completely in sync with Trump’s line of thinking.
In an exchange with Thiel from 2016, Epstein celebrated Brexit and the “return to tribalism,” as it represented new opportunities for people like Thiel and himself. Epstein wanted negative interest rates, the end of globalization, and “amazing new alliances.” Epstein said, “finding things on their way to collapse, was much easier than finding the next bargain.” If you’ve watched Game of Thrones, this is essentially Littlefinger’s speech: “Chaos is a ladder.”
The files similarly show that Epstein was close to the first Trump Administration. We’ll get into Epstein’s relationship with Bannon later, but there are emails from Epstein to Larry Summers (a previous member of Barack Obama’s Administration), in which it’s suggested that Epstein is headed to Mar-A-Lago and someone in the Administration was asking him for names to replace Steve Mnuchin, Trump’s Secretary of the Treasury:
You also see Epstein communicating with - get this - the Russians. He talks about meetings with Vladimir Putin, and has direct communications with others from Putin’s inner circle. Whenever Epstein gets into any trouble, he runs immediately to the Russians, and to Putin directly.
There is a thread here, and it suggests that the Russians2 were potentially using Epstein as a “honeytrap” for wealthy men in the West. There is a good video on this below, and a good read on it here:3
An interesting tidbit from many, many years ago: In the Mueller Report, where they were tasked with finding out about the infamous “pee tape,” it was noted that after Trump heard about a potential tape, he sent Michael Cohen looking for it.
Cohen got in touch with a Russian businessman and asked about the tape. This is what the report says happened:
On October 30, 2016, Michael Cohen received a text from Russian businessman Giorgi Rtskhiladze that said, “Stopped flow of tapes from Russia but not sure if there’s anything else. Just so you know . . . .” Rtskhiladze said “tapes” referred to compromising tapes of Trump rumored to be held by persons associated with the Russian real estate conglomerate Crocus Group, which had helped host the 2013 Miss Universe Pageant in Russia. Cohen said he spoke to Trump about the issue after receiving the texts from Rtskhiladze. Rtskhiladze said he was told the tapes were fake, but he did not communicate that to Cohen.
Note the date of Cohen’s text: It came after the Access Hollywood tape was released. Just something to note! What is obvious from the Epstein Files is that he kept photos, videos, and other materials of the men who either visited his island or spent time with him. And there are photos of men with girls as well. Was the pee tape facilitated by Epstein and given to the Russians? Crazier things have happened.4
Epstein was extremely online.
To me, the most interesting thing in the files is Epstein’s relationship with Bannon and a man named Christopher Poole. This part of the Jackal is a deep dive into Internet culture, but bear with me.
Poole is the founder of 4Chan, a hyper-online Internet forum that features lots of memes, off-color jokes, and Neo-Nazi stuff. If there is a gross rumor about a politician or other public figure, there is a good chance it came from 4Chan. So, why was Epstein chatting with Chris Poole?
4Chan has always run into problems with Internet regulators, and that was always a headache for Poole. He previously shut down 4Chan’s politics board because it was overwhelmed with overtly pro-Nazi propaganda, but then curiously relaunched it only a year later. In a must-read piece, Ryan Broderick details what happened:
Poole shutdown /new/ in January 2011, telling users at the time, “As for /new/, anybody who used it knows exactly why it was removed. When I re-added the board last year, I made a note that if it devolved into /stormfront/, I’d remove it.” (Stormfront is one of the oldest Neo-Nazi communities on the web.)
So it has never made much sense as to why Poole would ban /new/ for being a racist hell hole and then, barely a year later, launch /pol/, a board specifically designed to be a racist hell hole. But buried inside the newest batch of files related to the Epstein investigation is a possible hint as to what made Poole change his mind. He met with Epstein the day before /pol/ was created (my emphasis).
In Epstein’s emails with Bannon, you can see how the two of them were plotting to gin up support for far-right autocrats across the world. Bannon and Epstein bragged about supporting:
Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil.
Viktor Orban in Hungary.
Matteo Salvini in Italy.
Marine La Pen in France.
Nigel Farage in the U.K.
Shinzo Abe in Japan.
The most important part of Epstein’s association with 4Chan is that it is the birthplace of QAnon, before it was hijacked by Ron Watkins and brought over to 8Chan (a site that is somehow worse than 4Chan).
So, you have Epstein and Bannon plotting together on how to convert disaffected young men who are stuck in extremely online Internet forums, and it comes after Epstein’s meeting with Poole years earlier.
But the biggest part of this to me is when Epstein and Bannon start talking.5 Michael Wolff (remember him?) gets them together in October 2017, shortly after Bannon left the White House in Trump 1.0. They begin coming up with ways to “stave off” the (at the time) nascent #MeToo/Time’sUp movement:
Do you know what else started in October 2017, right after Epstein and Bannon got connected, and only a few years after Epstein had met the head of 4Chan? QAnon. Funny coincidence.
Overall, you see Epstein and Bannon orchestrating the major rightward shift towards global populism from 2015ish to the present. My guess is that Greene read all of these emails and concluded that MAGA is a lie fomented and manipulated by Jeffrey Freaking Epstein or, at the very least, aligned with him. If that’s true, then Trump was right when he said Epstein was everything.
This is not going away.
The Trump Administration has repeatedly said that they are not releasing any other files, and that the Epstein investigation is over. There will be no arrests, and apparently no names will be made public. The thing is, Democrats will eventually be back in power after November and will have the ability to compel the release of these records, without redactions (never mind the fact that Trump officials are currently breaking the law, which may be relevant to a judge).
The releases done by the government also show something else conclusively, even leaving aside Epstein’s weird conversations with Bannon, Musk, and Thiel: Trump and Epstein were very, very close friends. I think in one of my other Jackals on the Epstein Files, I poured cold water on a long-standing rumor that Melania was introduced to Trump by Epstein. I basically reasoned that because Melania threatened to sue anyone who printed that, it couldn’t be true since she wouldn’t expose herself to discovery for no reason.
But the latest batch of files seems to confirm it:
That is one of Epstein’s assistants giving testimony under oath. Maybe they’re lying, but it sure would be interesting if someone who Melania threatened to sue asked her to prove it in court.
MAGA will not care.
This is the regular part of each Epstein Jackal where I tell you that MAGA is not going to abandon Trump over Epstein. A thing I have said to some friends in private is that even if we eventually see evidence that Trump was after underage girls, MAGA will then shift and say, “Liking a 16 year-old girl doesn’t make you a pedophile, it makes you a hebephile.” And that is already happening:
When I see “takes” like that, I generally only have one response:
Like I said above, the Administration now says the Epstein Files are #over, and I would bet that Trump’s supporters fall in line.
When Trump was asked about the survivors during a press conference by Kaitlin Collins, he said this in response:
You are the worst reporter. CNN has no ratings because of people like you. You know she’s a young woman — I don’t think I’ve ever seen you smile. I’ve known you for 10 years. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a smile on your face. You know why you’re not smiling? Because you know you’re not telling the truth.
Classy. But the most shocking comment to me was from Trump’s assistant Todd Blanche. After all of these releases and documents detailing truly lurid behavior from Epstein (and others) Blanche said that partying with Epstein is “not a crime.”6 OK:
If I voted for Trump, I would hide my head in a bag.
See you on schedule one week from now.
It goes without saying that Bill Clinton is also mentioned in the Epstein Files and he is bad.
Just a little side note, but elsewhere in the files you have Epstein giving Bannon very real advice about how people should deal with Trump. At one point, he tells Bannon - regarding Trump negotiating with the Russians - that Trump has to see himself getting something out of any deal. Truly amazing that the billionaire pedophile knows exactly how to manipulate the sitting President of the United States.
Worth noting that both of these are British sources, where the Epstein Files are having huge, political ramifications and have forced at least one resignation in government. Quite a contrast from America.
I have long been a skeptic of the “pee tape,” but I am no longer ruling anything out, given what is in these files.
Another fun thing that they apparently confirm in their chats: Trump was having an affair with one of his aides, Madeline Westerholt, throughout his first term.
Worth noting that if there are minors being trafficked at one of Epstein’s parties and you are there with full knowledge of what’s happening…that is a crime.