Let Sleeping Dogs Lie

Why We Won't Get to the Bottom of the Epstein Case

Jeffrey Epstein died August 10, 2019, in a prison in New York City. Or maybe he didn’t, some people say he was spirited away in a sort of criminal-protection program and he’s out there somewhere living large after having used plastic surgery to disguise his appearance. Or else he committed suicide, unless of course, he didn’t, and everything has been investigated but all of the evidence has been tampered. Suicide is both proven and impossible. Two days before he died (if he did die), he wrote a trust for his estate and it’s secret. The list of things we don’t know about Epstein is long.

If we can’t even figure out what happened to the presumably late Mr. Epstein, it’s no wonder that his “list” or “file” or whatever is also missing in action. Why can’t we see the Epstein files? To paraphrase the fiery Col. Jessup (Jack Nicholson) from A Few Good Men, “We can’t handle the list.”

To be sure, lots of Epstein lists, address books, flight logs, and stuff have already been released and we’re no more confused than we were before. If we don’t even know if this guy is dead or how he died (and he died in government custody!) how are we going to know what he was up to when he was alive?

In 2022, independent journalist Whitney Webb published a book on Jeffrey Epstein. Well, she meant to do that. Her opus became One Nation Under Blackmail and the book became a two-volume set of over a thousand pages and only a small amount of it was about Epstein. The reason is that Epstein has to be viewed in context and that context is vast.

Think of Jeffrey Epstein as a spider. Now imagine Jeff-the-Spider is sitting in a spider web as big as the earth. And imagine several hundred other spiders inhabiting this web, just at different places. Sometimes the other spiders are very lively and interact with each other. That’s what we’re dealing with. You can’t understand Jeffrey Epstein until you understand the spider web, at which point you’ve forgotten about Jeffrey Epstein. He may have created the perfect cover story for a man of his profession: human trafficker.

So Who Is Jeffrey Epstein?

Jeffrey Epstein is most frequently described as a human trafficker, which he certainly seems to have been. He also seems to have aberrant sexual practices. He was an evil man, guilty of unspeakable crimes. But those crimes are just the tip of the iceberg.

But that’s not why Epstein evidence is under wraps. As Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber if you’re on X) said on a recent Julian Dorey podcast, to understand the Epstein case you have to first understand Iran Contra.

That’s right.

Iran Contra

In case you’re under 80 years old, you don’t remember when the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) ran free and could do whatever it wanted, whenever it wanted, and to whomever it wanted, up to and including the assassination of foreign officials. Back before around 1975, the CIA did not need any sort of Presidential approval or Congressional oversight to run around trying to kill pesky international people. They invented the “heart attack gun.” They tried to bump off Castro. They slipped LSD into the drinks of unsuspecting citizens. They ran torture sites offshore.

Then along came the Church Committee which looked into the CIA and found they were out of control. A period of reforms set in and by the 1980s, the government thought it had put at least some guide rails in at the CIA.

But the Church Committee was to the CIA was drug rehab is to a drug addict. It only works if they want it to work.

In the aftermath of the Church Committee findings, the CIA launched a clever workaround that we’re still untangling today. You could call this the “CIA proprietaries.” That’s a real intelligence term for an organization that is completely separate from the CIA except that it is funded by them and works for them. It is set up as independent organization, so it can give the CIA “plausible deniability.”

The CIA started to fund nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and other organizations (sometimes universities, other institutions, or they created new groups), gave them buckets of money, and asked them to carry out the work that the CIA could no longer do itself. These proprietaries often had noble-sounding names and hired a few liberal arts majors to be the gentle face of the organization.

A lot of this work was bought and paid for by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID, may they rest in peace). USAID diverted taxpayer money away from the CIA and gave it to independent groups controlled by the CIA. The CIA calls this kind of stuff “soft power.” The unspoken idea is that you don’t have to go to war if you can pay bribes.

For instance, let’s say a bunch of people are trying to overthrow the current government of some foreign country. That used to fall under the category of “none of our business,” except globalization has quite literally made everything our business. The United States has vested interests everywhere (as do many other major nations) so the political elites in D.C. look at the situation and take sides. We don’t always pick the morally superior side or the democratically elected side, we pick the side that can do us the most good. And by “us” I mean the politicos making the choices. Let’s say in this example, we want the winner to be the rebels trying to overthrow the existing government.

The United States won’t go to war over this. We won’t even send military support. Politicians won’t give speeches on this, it won’t be the subject of an editorial in some mainstream newspaper. We like to sound virtuous and above board, so we have to be sneaky. Instead, we’ll find a nice nongovernmental agency with a neutral sounding name such as the Agency for Peace and Happiness with ties to the country of interest. If such an organization does not exist, we’ll create one. Next, we’ll bankroll them with millions, and then we will start offering grants to that country. The grant will go to people with (indirect) ties to the rebels trying to overthrow the government. Only we won’t call it “aid to overthrow the government.” Instead the Agency for Peace and Happiness will offer millions in grants to that nation (to go into the hands of the guy who’s going to give it to the rebels) but it will be earmarked for “training young girls and women in entrepreneurial and cyber skills for the 21st century” or “music appreciation for transsexual youth” in that country. It doesn’t matter how ludicrous the grant is, because nobody checks how the money was spent. It can all go in the pockets of the guy in charge of the rebel army, we don’t care. As Bruno Mars once said in a different context, “Don’t believe me, just watch.” Watch here.

That’s what the CIA calls “soft power.” The CIA has plausible deniability, some foreign crackpot got a fat bribe, and the fighters in the war got some guns. Oh, and the CIA proprietary got their skim.

Soft power got totally out of control in the 1980s. The CIA couldn’t work openly, so they set up NGOs and other groups to do their work and yield their influence for them. Now let’s bring this to a real political crisis: Iran Contra.

During Iran Contra, the United States had a couple of seemingly unconnected interests. First, we were terribly concerned with what was going on in Iran. The Shah of Iran had been deposed, a more religiously fundamentalist government took over and took American hostages, the hostages were eventually released, but we remained fearful about what might happen next. If the crazy Iranian government in power at that time got deposed, the United States had legitimate concerns that it could be replaced by an even crazier one. There never seems to be an end to extremism, and we were afraid Iran would go even more extreme. The CIA and the State Department very much wanted to keep the current nutty regime in power in Iran, but Congress had put in place a total embargo on arms sales to Iran. The main goal was that if we helped the current Iranian regime stay in power now, they might favor us sometime in the future. But how could we get money or weapons to send to Iran since our elected officials would not allow it? Congress made it unlawful to send arms to Iran.

Meanwhile, we had another seemingly unrelated issue. There was a guerilla war going on in Nicaragua. The sandanistas were a communist group trying to overthrow the Nicaraguan government; the Contras were opposing the sandanistas but they lacked weapons and supplies. We wanted to help the Contras, but the arms, money, and aid could not flow through normal channels since Congress would not allow it. The voters didn’t want that. Nobody wanted more war, except, of course, the CIA and the State Department.

A scheme was cooked up, which I will oversimplify to get the point across quickly.

• Using a network of sketchy “outside brokers” who were mostly Saudis and Israelis, this network would get arms into Iran. Was this illegal? Absolutely

• The brokerage angle is important since these Saudi and Israeli brokers would buy arms and then sell them at a profit

• The rest of the profits would then be used to buy arms and other tools of warfare to give to the Contras

• At each juncture of the business, the various players would skim off the profits they considered appropriate

• This set up a nice cycle, but they had to keep pumping money in, so they arranged to get cocaine from South America to fly into the United States

• The money from the drug sales would be laundered and then used to buy more arms to feed the cycle

CIA ran its own airline at the time (Southern Air Transport, now defunct) and they used a little airport in the middle of nowhere to run cocaine and cash. The airport was in Mena, Arkansas, and the cooperative governor of Arkansas at the time was a guy named Bill Clinton. Maybe you’ve heard of him.

And here’s a little tidbit to see just how weird the spider web of Jeffrey Epstein is. Jeffrey Epstein had ties to a billionaire named Les Wexner who ran The Limited and other apparel lines. At one point, Southern Air Transport moved its base of operations to somewhere in Ohio so they could service Les Wexner’s various businesses. The more you dig into Jeffrey Epstein the more you see that everybody connects to everybody else.

So now we have this bizarre network of drug smuggling, gun running, and money laundering going on so we could sell

• Weapons to Iran (that Congress prohibited)

• Weapons to Nicaragua (that Congress prohibited)

• Cocaine to the American people (that’s illegal, too)

And there was a lot of money laundering through a complex network of “CIA proprietary” banks and financial institutions in the Caribbean, Switzerland, and Panama. The Church Committee may have thought they defanged the CIA, but it only made the CIA worse.

So what does all this have to do with Jeffrey Epstein? It’s the world in which he operated. In fact, he was part of Iran Contra.

Epstein is Not Who You Think

Jeffrey Epstein was first and foremost the finance guy. He is the person who helped the Clintons set up the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative. He had a genius-level understanding of how to move money (even dark money) internationally, how to launder money efficiently while covering tracks, and how to conceal assets. He also knew the players in terms of finding cooperative bankers who would look the other way or helpful arms dealers. He knew how to set up complex international structures of shell corporations so that well-meaning forensic accountants would age out of their government jobs before they could trace the money conclusively.

One of Jeffrey Epstein’s first official appearances at the White House came after he delivered then-First Lady Hillary Clinton a check for $10,000 to “redecorate the White House.” I can’t prove it but I suspect the Clintons already knew Epstein, but this is Epstein’s first official White House visit dates to November 29, 1993. Somehow, when Jeffrey Epstein and Hillary Clinton met together, I don’t think they talked about the china patterns.

Bill Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein may have been pigs, but I am quite certain that at least some of their meetings and foreign travels were about moving money, setting up corporations, building opaque networks of shell companies, setting up trusts, and find cooperative people to bend banking laws.

Back when Iran Contra was going on, there was involved in this morass an international man of mystery named Jamal Kashoggi. Kashoggi had a wild biography. Born in Saudi Arabia, he moved confidently in international circles, and he spoke English so well he worked for a stint as a reporter for The Washington Post. He was rich, powerful, knew everybody, but had no obvious means of support since he lived at a level far above that of most Washington Post reporters. As a matter of fact, before he died, Kashoggi sold his yacht to the Sultan of Brunei, and in late 2024, the sultan sold it to Donald Trump for $28M. It was renamed it The Trump Princess.

Coming back to Iran Contra, Kashoggi was the guy who was going to handle the portion of Iran Contra that got weapons into Iran.

Back in 1983, it was Kashoggi who handled one leg of the Iran Contra logistics: he would obtain weapons from the United States, deliver them to Israel, and Israel would handle the sales to Iran. According to Mike Benz (he’s on Rumble and X), after Epstein’s demise a search of his personal effects turned up a very credible fake Saudi passport. It has Jeffrey Epstein’s photo but a fake identity and from the stamps in the passport, it was used at least four times to travel from the United States into Saudi Arabia during the Iran Contra years. What was Epstein doing? Who knows?

Before Epstein, there was Kashoggi. Kashoggi was rich and very well connected. Kashoggi’s address book would have made interesting reading: he knew Osama bin Laden. He knew Donald Trump. He knew Jeffrey Epstein. He had 2M followers on Twitter (now X). This is not to say all of these guys were working with Kashoggi—Trump once described Kashoggi as a jihadist—but just to say that the networks of people keep looping in the same people. When Kashoggi died under mysterious circumstances in 2018, Time Magazine’s named him Man of the Year.

As we start to dig up the truth about Epstein, what’s going to come out about the human trafficking is less worrisome to the elitist world order than the fact that it would expose how these “CIA proprietaries” and other organizations carry out nefarious missions that our government prohibits. Congress wouldn’t let the United States sell weapons to Iran in the 1980s, but Kashoggi made it happen with help from his friends and some American taxpayer dollars slipped to him on the down low.

If we look into Epstein too much, we might find out that in 2024, the CIA’s budget was substantially less than the budget of USAID. We might find out that our intelligence communities run drugs to fund secret projects. That means that some of the people who are making sure school kids have ready access to dangerous drugs are our very own friends in government, and they’re using our tax dollars to do it.

Truth is coming out but it is a dribble, not a flow. And a lot of this information is so laden with excruciating details that it gets boring before it gets interesting.

But if we dig too much into Epstein, we’re going to find out more than we ever wanted to know about USAID, narco networks, CIA proprietaries, and soft power. For instance, look what we might find if we look into Afghanistan.

• Around 2000, the Taliban in Afghanistan had stopped the production of poppy plants to make opium used in heroin production

• On September 11, 2001, the Twin Towers fell in New York City

• The United States immediately starts attacking Afghanistan; this is a bit inexplicable since the alleged terrorists were Saudi Arabians

• By 2002, Afghanistan is responsible for 90% of the global supply of heroin

• America for years controlled Afghanistan in what became a slow-motion war against the Taliban (whom the United States once supported)

• American pulls out of Afghanistan in a debacle of a retreat under Joe Biden

• The Taliban enforces the opium ban again and production goes down by about 95%

This seems to be another example of a narco network, drugs for guns or maybe it’s just drugs for money. But in Afghanistan, the United States’ presence correlates pretty closely to opium production.

Of course, drugs and war go together like snakes and the heebie-jeebies. The blending of war and drugs has been going on since the 19th century, back to the days of Britain’s Opium Wars that crippled China. The Afghanistan opium trade may have been needed by covert groups of “proprietaries” to fund the war against the Asad regime in Syria. Or maybe some other war—wherever you find two or three Democrats gathered together, you’ll find somebody itching to start some new foreign war.

Looking into the life and activities of Jeffrey Epstein is sort of like moving the refrigerator in your kitchen. You just don’t know what you’re going to find, but you can be pretty sure it’s disgusting.

Was Epstein an Intelligence Asset?

People always ask if Epstein was CIA or Mossad or some other sort of foreign agent. Was this guy from Coney Island the real life embodiment of James Bond?

I don’t know, of course, but I don’t think he was an intelligence asset.

Asset is the term used by the CIA to describe people who either work for or with the agency in some official capacity. They may or may not get a salary or have a title, but they have a 201 document on record. A 201 means that there is a documented written relationship established between the person and the agency. Typically, such a relationship would involve a supervisor for that person (sometimes it’s a “handler”) and some specific tasks, which would not be spelled out too clearly in the 201. It is highly unlikely Epstein would have allowed himself to get ensnared with a 201, which would leave a very obvious paper trail. Plus, guys like Epstein and Kashoggi don’t really work for intelligence. They worked with intelligence on specific projects when they felt like it and when their interests aligned with intelligence interests.

In spy language, Epstein would more likely be called a “contact.” A contact is not recorded on the 201 forms or any other paperwork. They’re who you mean when you say, “I know a guy.” Contacts have no legal relationship with the agency. They’re exactly who you need when something has to be done “off the books.”

I don’t think we’ll ever find any sort of official records that tie Epstein to the CIA or Mossad or other intelligence agencies. It’s why we all think Epstein was some kind of spook but nobody knows who he worked for.

What did a guy like Jeffrey Epstein bring to the table for intelligence services? Why would an agency like the CIA want to work with Epstein?

Money.

Outside money men were of great value to the United States. They are independent agents (“contacts” not “assets”) but they can set up, run, and even oversee complex and possibly sketchy financial networks. Then can set them up, wipe off the fingerprints, and sneak off into the night. They can shut down financial networks, too. I don’t know this for a fact, but I think this was who Epstein was. Epstein may have been a pervert but that’s the cover story. He was really a money man. His cover story is so shameful and disturbing that it distracted us from who he really was. Here’s why I think he was the money man.

• Epstein worked on Wall Street as a young man and quickly rose through the ranks; he had a natural talent for big money management

• A guy named Stephen Hoffenberg hired Epstein to work at a Wall Street outfit called Tower Financial and served as Epstein’s mentor. Remember, Epstein is just 34 years old at the time

• Tower Financial is implicated in one of the largest Ponzi schemes in American history of about $500M (Sam Bankman Fried would top that later on). Stephen Hoffenberg took the fall and went to prison for 18 years

• Epstein got off with no charges at all

• Later on, Hoffenberg said Epstein was involved in the Ponzi scheme. Nothing ever happened to Epstein

• Hoffenberg served his time, and was found dead in his apartment in 2022

• Epstein had lots of other financial interests in various companies and banks; he held the money of Les Wexner, fonder and owner of The Limited line of clothing stores

• Epstein helped the Clinton Global Initiative and Clinton Foundation set up their pay-for-play organization that so far has been robust enough to withsand scrutiny. The organization is as sketchy as Hunter Biden’s Burisma contract, but nobody seems to be able to take it down

• Epstein never seemed to get in trouble, he always had people to get him out of tight spots

This explains why Epstein could so easily hobnob with world political figures like Ehud Barak of Israel and tech giants like Bill Gates and scientific luminaries like Stephen Hawking. He had close ties to many universities, particularly Harvard. Epstein was the guy who could either get the money or set up the organizations that could protect illicit money. It also explains why he got along so well with Ghislaine Maxwell, an international socialite who knew everybody. She was so “in” that she is the only person I ever heard of who could enter or exit the private residences in Buckingham Palace without going through a security check

Epstein was the money man, and his job was networking. Unfortunately for us, these networks were vast and complicated. As we try to pick apart Epstein’s spider web of nefarious activities, we run into a lot of big name people.

As a matter of fact, most big-name universities are more involved in soft power and doing intelligence work than academics. Why else did Columbia University just hire Hillary Clinton to join their School of International Public Affairs (SIPA). Already at SIPA are Mike Pompeo and everybody’s favorite villain with a bad haircut, Victoria Nuland. These aren’t high-powered academics who bring intellectual rigor to SIPA, they’re deep state power brokers. They don’t teach classes, they don’t write books or articles. They deal in soft power. It’s why the United States funnels billions of taxpayer dollars to the big universities.

But back to Jeffrey Epstein. He was a money man with extraordinary skills and a long list of very wealthy and powerful connections. Epstein was able to broker deals, set up money-laundering organizations, and move in and out of soft power enterprises.

Everybody sees Epstein as a pervert and I’m sure that’s true. But he was so much worse than a pervert.

If we start to dig into Epstein, we’re going to find out that a lot of his contacts were not interested in sex parties or human trafficking or occultic ceremonies. Some were just running drugs or running guns or trying to overthrow governments. Some were brokering wars. Others wanted to do off-the-books scientific experiments. I have heard stories that Epstein was very interested in cloning humans.

Should Epstein be Forgotten?

For all the uproar about whether or not the “Epstein files” should be released, there is a lot of trepidation. Biden never released the files, and no Democrat asked him to. Trump promised to release the files, but recently dismissed such an action as not of key interest. And considering the once-open border, the economy, wars and rumors of wars around the world, election integrity, and rampant crime in America, we have bigger fish to fry.

Or is Trump hiding something? I personally think that Trump’s life has been examined under a microscope several times over, so it’s unlikely there is anything there that could hurt Trump personally or politically. I don’t think Trump is flinching because he’s afraid he’ll look bad.

More likely, Trump wants to close the Pandora’s box of the Epstein case because it will dredge up things we aren’t quite ready to sort out. Sometimes there is an order of things, and maybe we are not at the point yet where we can fully unravel the Epstein lists. It’s kind of like first the public has to be told that John F. Kennedy was not killed by a lone nut assassin before we can open up the Epstein files. (Notice how Trump is declassifying the Kennedy and Martin Luther King files. Maybe that’s the prelude.)

Or maybe it’s just too complicated. Most of us don’t understand Iran Contra, let alone how Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Clinton and various government officials fit into this mess.

I don’t think we’ll see the end of the Epstein chronicles anytime soon. The Epstein story is so sprawling and so huge and involves so many different people and weird seemingly unconnected events, that Epstein has become a minor character in his own saga.