“I was told Epstein belonged to intelligence.”

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari)  

For many years, decades, even, the question swirled around like a barely-detected sewer gas leak: How could even the concept of a Jeffrey Epstein exist?

     He was a college dropout, Ponzi scheme stooge and a failed math teacher, seemingly someone who possessed no brilliant financial insight. And yet, before anyone knew it, he was a billionaire with hundreds of millions in liquid capital, owned posh properties all over the world (He was flying in from his property in France when he was arrested in July 2019), including an island two miles off the coast of St. Thomas, expensive cars and private jets. So, how did he do it?

     Well, blackmailing hundreds of the most powerful men in the worlds of politics, royalty, industry and science certainly played a part in all that. But there's much more to the story.

     Epstein was protected by an unimaginably powerful system already in place, and was handed gratis hyper-expensive assets, such as the $77 million Manhattan townhouse in which Epstein and Trump took turns raping poor 13 year-old Katie Johnson and countless other children.

 

     Jeffrey Epstein was no accidental billionaire or someone who earned his way to the top or stumbled into it. Ironically, Epstein was groomed for the role for which he'd later become notorious just as he groomed his countless underaged victims. When Alex Acosta, the former US Attorney who'd crafted that infamous sweetheart deal for Epstein in 2007, why he'd done so, Acosta repeatedly said, “I was told Epstein belonged to intelligence.”

     Yes. Jeffrey Epstein was groomed, cultivated and protected like a human corpse flower. But the blackmail, extortion, coercion and business dealings? That was a glorified side hustle.

     When Epstein was given that laughable sentence while his victims and their lawyers remained unaware, it was eight years before Trump even came down that escalator. But by that time, Trump and Epstein had been joined at the hip for at least a decade and a half. He was steeped in Epstein's and his own crimes. While the two were infamously friends with similar sick interests, deep down Epstein never looked at Trump as anything other than one of his many marks.

     And when he made his move on Trump, it was the thing that broke them up. It wasn't over a real estate deal.

     Narativ's Zev Shalev, a journalist who's been writing about Epstein and the Maxwells for years, has been making crucial connections between Epstein, Robert Maxwell, Israeli military intelligence and Russia's FSB (former KGB). Thanks to Shalev and Ari Ben-Menashe, a former Israeli military intelligence officer and arms dealer and Maxwell’s former handler, confirms they met in the early ‘80s, not in 1991 but a decade earlier when she was still a teenager (and Epstein was already 28). Then Epstein suddenly came into a huge windfall of hundreds of millions of dollars at the exact moment Maxwell's bloated, naked corpse was found floating in the water near his yacht.

     But, a decade before that, Ghislaine Maxwell's flying from London to New York to meet this bright, rising star named Jeffrey Epstein on a Concorde even though she was living on an $80,000 annual allowance during her father's bankruptcy. Did Epstein have anything directly to do with Maxwell's murder? It's risky to speculate but he certainly benefited handsomely from his death. At least that's how a homicide detective would look at it.

 

 When Does the Death Watch Begin?

To get back to Acosta's comment about Epstein belonging to Intelligence, there's more than enough evidence to merely speculate that both Maxwells and Jeffrey Epstein worked for Israeli military intelligence and at the very least had ties to Russian intelligence, as well. Working for Israeli intelligence would certainly explain why Israel buried Maxwell at the Mount of Olives with honors even though everyone knew he was a pension thief and a criminal who was fighting off bankruptcy at the time of his abrupt and suspicious demise.

     Powerful people were coddling and protecting Epstein going back to when he was in his 20s. And Epstein's rise to prominence was too sudden for the timing to be ignored. I refer you again to the Manhattan townhouse valued at $77,000,000 that was just handed to him free of charge by Victoria's Secret's CEO Lex Wexner (where Katie Johnson was raped by both Epstein and Trump on the same night). Russian money launderer Deutsche Bank opened its private wealth division's vaults to him and Trump on the same day.

     Epstein protected powerful people just as he'd blackmailed them for levrage. Up to a point, Epstein helped shape US foreign policy, especially as regards Israel and Palestine. And, for many years, they protected Epstein, mainly if not exclusively because of his intelligence ties. Then he got arrested on Trump's watch in July 2019. Less than a month later, certain people then decided it wasn't worth keeping Epstein around any more.

      The bodies are starting to stack up like cord wood. It began with Robert Maxwell 34 years ago. It continued with Epstein's "suicide" in a jail cell in Manhattan in 2019. Then, three and a half years ago, Jean-Luc Brunel, a modeling agency executive, suspected pedophile and a friend of Epstein's was, surprise, surprise, found hanged in his own jail cell.

      Then  the most tragic death of all: Virginia Giuffre, a prominent Epstein accuser and who had been trafficked to Prince Andrew and others when she was a minor, on April 25 was found dead of an apparent suicide, even though she had no reason to kill herself. Just days before, she'd famously said she "had just days to live", which could mean all sorts of things.

     So, the question remains, when will it be Ghislaine Maxwell's turn to repeat her father's and lover's fates?  People are highly suspicious of Maxwell being very quietly transferred to a minimum security facility in Texas just days after being interviewed by Donald Trump's "former" lawyer, Todd Blanche. The suspicion across MAGA World and beyond is that it's the next step just before a full pardon or at least a commutation for Maxwell. It's an article of faith that, whatever Epstein knew about some of the most powerful men in the world, Ghislaine Maxwell knew at least part of it.

      Watch this space.