Transcript: Journalist Whitney Webb on Peter McCormack Show

Now it’s. He says it’s all a Democrat hoax.

PETER MCCORMACK: Very strange.

WHITNEY WEBB: Strange is one word for it. Yeah.

Political Calculations and Partisan Interests

PETER MCCORMACK: Did you watch Kash Patel’s interview with Rogan?

WHITNEY WEBB: I saw clips from it, but I didn’t feel like watching Kash Patel for three hours.

PETER MCCORMACK: Well, so I thought, I thought Rogan did a great job. He was pushing cash, but that was the point. I started to think, this is getting a bit weird. And I started to think, I started to question, well, there was an opportunity for the Biden administration to use this against the Trump administration. And there’s a chance. There’s been a chance for the Trump administration to use against the Biden administration. And both administrations love dirt.

WHITNEY WEBB: Yeah.

PETER MCCORMACK: Both want to attack the other one.

WHITNEY WEBB: Sure.

PETER MCCORMACK: And now both are just kind of like.

WHITNEY WEBB: Well, kind of. So with this recent reversal that we just talked about, a lot of Democrat congressmen are, you know, kind of smell blood in the water, and we’re calling to release the files and all of this. But I think neither party wants things to go too deep.

So a lot of the benefit to partisan politics of the Epstein scandal, it only really is beneficial to either side if it’s kept very superficial, you know. And so I think, you know, releasing a tranche of documents about everything would end up implicating. It would go too deep. Probably. Probably. That’s my assumption of why they don’t. They kind of want to memory hole it now and sort of rebrand it as a hoax, which is kind of challenging because a lot of Trump’s base has been very interested in the Epstein case, arguably more than the Democrats voter base for years.

PETER MCCORMACK: Well, it feels like it’s dented the MAGA movement, maybe temporarily, maybe.

WHITNEY WEBB: We’ll see.

The Missing Evidence

PETER MCCORMACK: So is it your belief that there is a treasure trove of information that we would all be interested in?

WHITNEY WEBB: Well, there’s definitely information that they should put out there, I think so. For example, the FBI raided Epstein’s New York townhouse. They were reportedly binders, CDs full of multimedia content, all sorts of stuff. We don’t really know what was on those.

You know, we had Pam Bondi, the Attorney General, say, “oh, it’s on my desk,” and then is saying, you know, “oh, well, we can’t release it because it’s all C.P. you know, it’s child porn,” after saying like, “oh, no, it’s release,” implying it was releasable.

But there’s also a lot of strange things that would be interesting to know, like why did the FBI, even though they raided Epstein’s residence in New York, why did they not raid Zorro Ranch in New Mexico, another property within the continental US? Why did it take them up to a month to get to his island in the U.S. virgin Islands? As far as I’m aware, those delays are unexplained.

What about the France case? Jean Luc Brunel, one of the main, or believe, you know, alleged co conspirators of the Epstein case, died in a French prison awaiting trial, much like Epstein in 2022. And we don’t really have a lot of information from French authorities about what they found as part of that investigation because obviously with Brunel not going to trial because he died, it’s not going to come out in the court. Right.

Suspicious Deaths and Cover-ups

PETER MCCORMACK: Also died by hanging. And no surveillance footage as well.

WHITNEY WEBB: Well, I’m not sure about the circumstances of the death, but it was, it was pretty much. I mean, it’s kind of shady.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah.

WHITNEY WEBB: I mean, there were. There was another death related to Epstein in 2022. Mark Middleton.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yes.

WHITNEY WEBB: That was completely bonkers.

PETER MCCORMACK: Hanging and shotgun.

WHITNEY WEBB: Yeah, Hanging by. Well, police say that he hung himself with an extension cord and also shot himself in the chest. Said there was no weapon at the scene. Later came back and said there was a weapon 30ft from his body. And then the judge sealed all evidence from ever being made public to stop the spread of harmful conspiracy theories. So Brunel dying in prison. I’m not really aware of the circumstances, but, you know, do you want to.

PETER MCCORMACK: Explain the connection of Brunel and Middleton to Epstein?

The Brunel Connection: Modeling and Trafficking

WHITNEY WEBB: Well, they’re separate connections, so Brunel is a lot more connected to Epstein in the sense of the sex trafficking case. So he and Epstein work together on this modeling agency called MC2, where under the guise of modeling contracts, Brunel would coax a lot of women from places like Brazil, from Eastern Europe and in Russia, among other places to come. Model in the U.S.

Epstein would pay for their visas, among other expenses for this agency. And they would come to the US and be housed at these apartment complexes that are multiple. There’s multiple attestations to that being a key part of the sex trafficking operation. Allegedly women’s passports were taken, so they were, you know, very controllable under those circumstances.

And yeah, so, I mean, Brunel was a key part in that sense. And he also operated stuff out of Miami and Palm Beach. He had modeling agencies there and he was known as far back as the 1980s to be an alleged sex trafficker and sexual predator. There was a 60 minute sex about him. And then an author, I think his name is Michael Gross, wrote a whole piece about. A whole book about the dark side of the modeling industry. And a key focus of his work was Jean Luc Brunel. So he’s, you know, pretty well known as being an accomplice of Epstein and court documents and beyond.

The Middleton Connection: White House Access

PETER MCCORMACK: And Middleton was.

WHITNEY WEBB: Middleton was the main person that Epstein was meeting with when he was going to the Clinton White house in the 1990s.

PETER MCCORMACK: And he went a lot.

WHITNEY WEBB: Well, he went 17 times between 93 in January 95 and Middleton left in February 95. So basically, you know, there’s a more or less a coinciding between the end of Epstein going to the Clinton White House and Middleton’s ouster from there. Yeah.

And Middleton’s suicide happened shortly after the extent of those meetings was revealed. So it was known that Epstein had been to the White House a few times, but they didn’t the full extent. The 17 meetings, most of them were with Middleton. That information came out in 2022, and a few months later, this incident with Middleton takes place.

The Clinton Body Count and Commerce Department Scandal

PETER MCCORMACK: There appears to be a lot of. A lot of people connected to the Clintons who’ve died. I think you said in an interview I heard there was like another 34 that haven’t been listed.

WHITNEY WEBB: Oh, yeah. Well, that has to do with the Commerce Department. So this is part of this broader scandal and it’s very complicated, but I try and delineate it in my book. But basically there was this whole airliner or this whole airplane that was carrying people from the Commerce Department, including the Secretary of Commerce, Ron Brown, and their plane, you know, crashed in Croatia under kind of dubious circumstances.

And yeah, I would argue that those were kind of. I don’t really think that plane crash was an accident. And I explain why in my book, but there’s lots of. Ron Brown had just agreed to testify as part of this broader case involving corruption involving the Clinton families and the scandal that Middleton and I argue. My book Epstein was a part of, called China Gate. It’s remembered as Chinagate, but it was definitely something much bigger than that. We can get into that later. It’s very insane.

The Elite Network: Coordination or Opportunism?

PETER MCCORMACK: See, what. What I can’t figure out is, so listen to your book, reading your most recent article, there seems to be a large network of elites which can be anything from business. You know, successful business people, billionaires, finance people, politicians, presidents, NGOs.

WHITNEY WEBB: Sure.

PETER MCCORMACK: Secret Services. There’s like this huge Network of people. And I can’t work out, is there a big coordinated network of elites who work together, or is it just once you get into the elites, maybe you think you can get away with a few things, you can maybe do some corrupt deals, and if you’ve got the right connections, you can get away with it. If you step too far out of line that you. You might go to jail or be killed. I can’t quite get my head around it, but it does come across that all governments are basically mafias.

Operation Underworld: The Birth of the Crime-Intelligence Alliance

WHITNEY WEBB: Yeah, I mean, that’s kind of my view. So basically what I argue in my book is that the network behind Epstein and the reason why there’s so many powerful people in this group is because it’s born out of this union that occurred during World War II between organized crime and the nascent U.S. intelligence apparatus, which, of course, there was a lot of British involvement with that when in the creation of the CIA and the OSS and all of that in World War II.

But that alliance officially happened. It’s known as Operation Underworld. Even though the US Intelligence community denied it for several decades, they now admit it. But that alliance was justified at a wartime necessity. “We have to team up with the mob to win the war.” But after the war, the alliance provably continued.

So ultimately, what that. Essentially what happened then is that a lot of these rackets that were previously of organized crime, you know, arms trafficking, drugs trafficking, sex trafficking, prostitution, whatever became, you know, rackets of intelligence services.

PETER MCCORMACK: In what way?

WHITNEY WEBB: Well, I mean, there’s a litany of evidence of the CIA being involved in drug trafficking and arms trafficking via illegal means for many decades. And a lot of those networks at the CIA used go back to the same nexus. I mean, that’s basically what volume one of my of my book is about.

The Business of Intelligence

PETER MCCORMACK: But why would they be in bed with these criminals?

WHITNEY WEBB: It’s great business. The CIA in the OSS were really mostly Wall street people, Wall street lawyers and bankers. And it was great business for them to team up with these people. So basically, it’s a new market. It’s a legal market with state protection. And so the CIA more often than not, has gone over the competition for those markets.

And that’s why you have all these scandals, but no accountability for the CIA being involved in drug trafficking, arms trafficking, and all sorts of scandals over the years. But there’s never been any accountability since. You know, there was an effort with it at the, you know, during the church committee in the late 70s. But since then, the CIA investigates itself and exonerates itself Every time.

Redefining US Interests

PETER MCCORMACK: Okay, sorry, I’m just trying to get my head around this. So whilst the CIA, Central Intelligence Agency is meant to be protecting US interests.

WHITNEY WEBB: Abroad, they define US interests, I think as something than what the American public is. So if you look at the CIA’s earliest coups, their earliest regime change operations, they were done on behalf of very powerful multinational corporations like Anglo American Oil in Iran and the United Fruit Company in Guatemala, some of the earliest examples.

So to them, protecting US interests is protecting the interests not necessarily of the American people, but of massive American based multinational corporations.

PETER MCCORMACK: So it’s all economic defense in a sense, arguably economic defense. Because wasn’t the Guatemala. Didn’t they, didn’t, didn’t they remove a kind of socialist leader who wanted to return land to the Guatemalan?

The Cold War Justification and Its Consequences

WHITNEY WEBB: Yeah, well, that historically has happened, been the justification for a lot of it. And a lot of the justification was sort of Cold War era stuff. We don’t want this leader to become close to the Soviets, ergo we must remove him from power.

But you know, the means of that had been pretty scandalous, especially if you look at what came downstream of some of those governments in Latin America. For example, Chile being a notable example, where Henry Kissinger in the CIA in 1973 orchestrated a coup against Salvador Allende and then Augusto Pinochet takes over.

And it’s obviously a still very sore spot in Chilean politics, but objectively, there’s a lot of things Pinochet did that are really indefensible. He teamed up with a German pedophile guy who ran this place called Colonia Dignidad with his government’s approval. A lot of people tied to the Pinochet government were involved in basically trafficking babies that were stolen from their mothers and then sent to adoption agencies at the US. People made money off of this and nothing was done.

And he had a lot of really shady bank accounts, did shady arms deals. So, okay, the socialist guy is gone, but was it really any, did it really justify all this other stuff? I mean, I’m probably going to get in trouble for getting into Chilean stuff just because people will accuse me of defending one side or the other. But I think obviously Pinochet engaged in behavior that was really, really bad.

PETER MCCORMACK: Interfering with the democratic process.

WHITNEY WEBB: Well, yeah, of course. I mean, people elect a leader and then the CIA comes in and deposes them and puts in a dictator. It’s, I mean, they’ve done this around the world over and over, over and over again. And I mean it’s not even. They’ve also interfered in elections throughout Europe.

They engaged in things like Operation Gladio where that was basically teaming up with the Italian mafia interests of the Vatican, and the CIA backed terror groups in Europe that those terrorist activities were blamed on left leaning people in order to get people to vote with right leaning parties to prevent European countries from affiliating themselves with the Soviet Union.

But would they have even have done that? I don’t know. I mean it was a preemptive thing. And so I mean eventually, but I mean again, this is how the CIA justifies the stuff to itself. I would argue that a lot of it was about economic interests. And at the same time, a lot of these actors were involved in sort of backrooms deals with either Soviet intelligence or Chinese intelligence or the Chinese military. That’s sort of what the China Gate thing ultimately circles back to.

PETER MCCORMACK: Tell me about that.

The Trans-Ideological Corporation

WHITNEY WEBB: Well, really quick, I want to bring up this point. So Samuel Psar, very close friend of Robert Maxwell, who I’m sure we’ll get into later, he was a lawyer. Among other things, he testified to Congress in the early 70s about what he saw happening.

And he talked about the rise of the trans ideological corporation where US multinational corporations were basically entering into all these joint ventures and becoming extremely entangled with state owned companies of the communist east in Russia and China. And he said that this was creating a new economic system of governance that was making the nation state irrelevant. And this is in the early 70s.

And a congressman was like, “Well, do you think this is a bad thing?” And he was like “not necessarily.” And he was actually at the forefront of making that happen. And a lot of these people, including people like Robert Maxwell, did try and further that kind of vision.

So ultimately if that was happening at the early 70s and they admitted it, a lot of these actors that justified things out of cold the necessity of the Cold War, just like they justified it with the necessity of World War II, it really doesn’t add up with what the public justification is.

PETER MCCORMACK: Is it even possible to understand what the mandate of the CIA is? Because it seems very well it’s supposed.

The CIA’s Expanding Definition of National Security

WHITNEY WEBB: To be to protect American national security, but national security for a long time has been this huge catch all, right? The U.S. has justified all sorts of things under the guise of security and presumably continued to do so. So I don’t really give that a lot of weight.

I mean, so as an example, the Reagan administration when Iran Contra was being investigated, there was a line of questioning brought up about how the group that was responsible for that in the Reagan administration had developed something called the Continuity of Government protocols whereby under a vaguely defined national emergency, basically the entire American Constitution could suspended. Pretty scandalous stuff.

And one of the examples of this vaguely defined national emergency was a widespread non violent opposition to US military intervention abroad. And when a congressman tried to ask Oliver North about this at the Iran Contra trial, they basically shut down the hearing under the guise of national security. That’s crazy.

PETER MCCORMACK: Well, if you think the economic strength of the US is national security, you can, that’s a catch all for protecting.

WHITNEY WEBB: The American multinational corporations that openly admitted, if you believe Psar intermingling with the state owned companies of China and Russia are ostensible adversaries.

PETER MCCORMACK: But you could, you can justify the protection of a multinational in another country by changing the administration. You could.

WHITNEY WEBB: Or redomiciling them. Sure, yeah.

PETER MCCORMACK: Or allowing or turning a blind eye to banks, banking, money, drug trafficking.

WHITNEY WEBB: Yeah, of course.

PETER MCCORMACK: And so it then creates a different set of rules for those within the elite gang of what they can and can’t do from what you and I as mere plebs.

Beyond Sex Trafficking: The Broader Epstein Network

WHITNEY WEBB: So taking this back to the Epstein scandal, I think that’s why they only want to keep the discussion at sex trafficking.

PETER MCCORMACK: Because it’s wider than that.

WHITNEY WEBB: Epstein was absolutely doing a lot of really shady arms trafficking stuff and financial criminality and they have no interest in getting deep in the weeds there because.

PETER MCCORMACK: That exposes other people.

WHITNEY WEBB: Sure, absolutely. And basically this illusion that our world operates the way we’re told it operates.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah, I think we know it doesn’t anymore. The veil has been lifted. I think the only worry is we move on so quickly. We just forget about this Epstein thing. And it’s just this thing in the past years.

WHITNEY WEBB: Well, it’s been pretty persistent in not being forgotten about, which I think now in the case of the Trump administration, they really wish people would move along and forget about it.

PETER MCCORMACK: But it does feel like ever since Trump came out the last few weeks, it feels like it has been going cold. People have been talking about it a bit less.

WHITNEY WEBB: Yeah, maybe. Well, I mean so much is going on in the US with US policy that it’s stuff that’s huge news. It gets end up buried a few days later and a decade ago it would have been a huge multi month long story. Now it’s just a blip. I mean the news cycle is just so fast.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah.

WHITNEY WEBB: So I mean, there’s a lot of reasons why that could be. But I mean, I think also just because the Epstein case was particularly popular with Trump’s base, less so with the Democratic base. Now a lot of the influencers in that media circuit are either being like, “yes, it was a hoax” or have moved on to other things.

The Limited Hangout Strategy

PETER MCCORMACK: Because the trail’s gone dead. What else can, I mean, we can keep asking questions.

WHITNEY WEBB: Well, I don’t know what you mean by trail going dead. I mean, I think it’s pretty clear that the administration does not plan to release further documents and they’ve said that. And I guess there’s this planned congressional hearing where they’ve subpoenaed the Clintons and some other things, some other people.

But I anticipate that will be a pretty controlled hearing. I don’t think you’re going to hear any questions about Mark Middleton or Chinagate there or what Epstein was doing the 17 times he went to the White House. It’s all going to be about everything that happened after Clinton was no longer president, which is if you look at how the Epstein case has been treated with respect to Bill Clinton for years now, it only focuses on Clinton after he left office. It’s the same for Bill Gates too. They only focus on the Gates Epstein relationship after Gates was no longer chairman of Microsoft.

PETER MCCORMACK: So it’s plan controlled a trickle of information feeding scraps to us.

WHITNEY WEBB: Yeah, I mean it’s a limited hangout. So it’s like they find some tidbits that are interesting within a spectrum and people are so entranced by what’s in that spectrum, they don’t look for anything beyond that. They just assume that’s all there is.

PETER MCCORMACK: Because if we know everything, it opens up everything. It’s Pandora’s box.

WHITNEY WEBB: Well, it is a Pandora’s box in a way, yeah, sure. Because basically if you go as deep as I went in writing those two books, and you could certainly go deeper. It basically shows that, yeah, we’re the world is basically run by a meta cartel.

PETER MCCORMACK: Explain that.

The Meta Cartel: A System of Impunity

WHITNEY WEBB: Well, I would argue, yeah, it is a cartel. It basically operates with an impunity and they have no accountability for all of their crimes. Even when they’re exposed here and there, some people just are protected and above the law almost inexplicably.

And as I point out in my book, it’s a lot of the same actors over and over again, the same institutions. And you can see when one institution crumbles, another one pops up in its place.

So as an example in the book, I talk a lot about the bank of Credit and Commerce International, BCCI that implodes in 1991. It’s covered up by William Barr when he was Attorney General, who covered up Iran Contra, the Promise software scandal and BCCI all as being Attorney General and later would return to kind of do that and for Trump when he was attorney general again.

But after BCCI implodes, a lot of their portfolio of organized crime and shady interest goes to the banks that are sort of related to this guy named Edmund Safra. And Edmund Safra dies in his home. Supposedly from the story is very bizarre, but from arson allegedly set by his American nurse because she wanted to set a fire and then save him from it, but then didn’t save him from it. Yeah, it’s fine.

Anyway, he was very good friends with Robert Maxwell and a lot of these figures that pop up all over the place in the Epstein case. And then who absorbs his banks? HSBC. They basically take those over and then HSBC gets exposed. I forget, I think that one of the. It wasn’t the Panama Papers, but it was one of those consortium of journalists that published these leaks basically revealed a lot of prominent people that were part of these HSBC Swiss accounts that had been inherited from Safra.

Epstein was one of them. Some associates of Epstein like Flavio Briatore are there, but also HSBC was laundering money for drug cartels. And who didn’t go after them when they were in charge of the bank of England? Mark Carney, who is now Prime Minister of Canada and everyone’s leaving and why he was head of the bank of England. There’s pictures of him hanging out with Ghislaine. So who’s Father Robert Maxwell was banked by Safra, among other things.

Robert Maxwell and the Crime Syndicate Connection

PETER MCCORMACK: Well, I remember him from my childhood because he was a prominent figure in the UK owning a mirror group and waking up one day in his. His body’s found in the ocean. Another suspicious death.

WHITNEY WEBB: Yeah. Ghislaine thinks it was rogue Mossad agents and Sicilian Mafia hitmen that killed him. Together, working together. It’s kind of funny, because that’s kind of the thesis of my book. It’s the national crime syndicate, which was the Italian Mafia, their New York branch, and later their head got deported to Italy and sort of set up shop there, and then the Jewish mob that was headed by Meyer Lansky.

And basically this crime syndicate is the crime syndicate that teamed up with intelligence agencies. Because this operation, Underworld, all of that, the formation of this nexus predates the founding of the state of Israel. And so a lot of these actors, and I note this in my book, too, were involved with the arming of the Haganah and these paramilitary groups that later create Israel in 1948 and then help them set up their intelligence agencies.

So that’s sort of how you get all this overlap between Mossad, Britain, CIA. It goes back to the beginning of Israel’s national security complex, really.

The Complexity of Tracking Networks

PETER MCCORMACK: I have this picture in my head of like, a huge wall of pinballs with bits of string tying things together. But I think it all exists in your head. How do you…

WHITNEY WEBB: It doesn’t all exist in my head. I mean, I have to put it on paper and plan it out, too. I don’t do the stereotypical conspiratorial pin board thing that’s like Always Sunny in Philadelphia meme. Like, I don’t do that.

But some of it does require mapping out, because think about how these people operate. These people could not have gotten away with all of this, as it wasn’t for mazes of holding companies, shell companies, Byzantine offshore banks, and all the other things that enable financial criminality in today’s world. So, obviously, the connections are similarly going to be labyrinthian and Byzantine, but they are there.

PETER MCCORMACK: Okay, but how do you make sense of it all? Because it is a large, complex network of people, institutions, politicians, billionaires. How do so many get away with it?

Generational Baton Passing

WHITNEY WEBB: I feel like I pretty convincingly show in my book that there’s a lot of baton passing going on between the generations. So my book starts in the 40s, and I follow a lot of these institutions and people through the years.

I talk a lot about how a figure named Roy Cohn, who was Donald Trump’s mentor, and how he passed a lot of things on to Trump. How a lot of people that were in Cohn’s network got involved with Robert Maxwell. Robert Maxwell hired them when he came to the U.S., including figures like Robert Keith Gray that were PR executives on their face, but also tied to the CIA involved in sex blackmail, close friends with William Casey, who was CIA director under Reagan, among other things.

And how they got involved with Maxwell’s entry into New York City, which is how mainly how Ghislaine got so enmeshed in New York society and also teamed up with Epstein in that same period of time. So all of this matters and these connections are significant because this baton passing shows that this is a generational thing.

And in the case of Maxwell, Robert Maxwell’s children, at least the ones that were close to him, because you have two that sort of splintered off from the larger Maxwell clan, but are very open that after he died, they were trying to figure out how to rebuild his empire and using his Rolodex of contacts to rebuild that. And they did it.

In doing so, you have Ian and Kevin doing all this interesting financial stuff after their father’s death. And then the twins, Isabelle and Christine, make this search engine company and get involved with Microsoft and Bill Gates and all this stuff back in the 90s. And Ghislaine Maxwell was reportedly involved in that too, and then also very involved with Epstein and all sorts of other things, and eventually becomes one of the main people at the UN developing sustainable development policy for the world’s oceans.

Getting Into “The Club”

PETER MCCORMACK: How do you get in this gang? Like, how does that happen? And how do people know they can start acting with impunity?

WHITNEY WEBB: So the best analogy I’ve heard for that is actually from the journalist Nick Bryant, who’s the guy that published Epstein’s black book with Gawker in the flight logs, among other things. And he also wrote an amazing book on the Franklin scandal, which is about this extremely insane sexual blackmail and sex trafficking pedophilia network that was active in D.C. in the 1980s during the Reagan era.

And he basically had someone explain it to him. I forget who his source was, but it was basically, imagine it like you’re on a yacht and you’re invited on this yacht and then you can do whatever you want while you’re on the yacht. But you try and get off and you’ll drown, or they won’t let you get off, you’ll be popped off if you try and leave. So as long as you’re in the club, operating within the club’s rules, you can act with impunity, but there’s certain things you can’t do in order to enjoy that impunity.

PETER MCCORMACK: So is it like a set of unsaid rules? You with us?

WHITNEY WEBB: I would not know.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah, but what’s your suspicion? Because I’m trying to understand how once you’re in this thing, you start to feel like, okay, I can start trafficking weapons. I can start trafficking women, young kids. I can start doing financial deals. Like, how do you know you’re in that club and you can get away with it?

The Epstein Model

WHITNEY WEBB: I’m not really sure. But let’s take the case of Epstein, for example. So it seems like Epstein’s mentors in this world were a British arms dealer named Douglas Leese and a friend of Leese’s named Adnan Khashoggi, who is a very infamous weapons dealer with ties to the Saudis, the UK, American intelligence, Israeli intelligence.

PETER MCCORMACK: That’s Jamal Khashoggi’s…

WHITNEY WEBB: That’s his nephew, I believe. Yeah. And Adnan Khashoggi as an example, he was known for a lot of financial crime. He had an interesting appearance in the savings and loans crisis of the 1980s, for example. He banked with BCCI. He was a major arms dealer.

And also he would basically have… he had a yacht. He would bring powerful clients, which of course include politicians, they include diplomats, they include businessmen, powerful people in general onto his yacht. And there would be young women there to entice them. And people have alleged, including a head of a call girl ring active in Europe during the time that she said she was part of it, a sexual blackmail operation to get business.

And ultimately, if you’re someone like Jeffrey Epstein operating in that and you see that Adnan Khashoggi can do that, and it’s business for him, and you have no moral scruples, why wouldn’t you? Especially if you’re operating with intelligence services which benefit you, some sort of state protection.

John Kiriakou, who’s a former CIA analyst, has talked about how in the CIA in particular, you want to cultivate a source because you need their intelligence, you need their information. It’s essentially agency policy to give them anything they ask for in order to secure access to that information and that intelligence, even if it’s kids.

PETER MCCORMACK: It’s fucking wild.

Intelligence Agencies and Criminal Activity

WHITNEY WEBB: And it’s even beyond just the agency. So BCCI, this bank, the US Senate report on it basically says… I mean, not basically, it absolutely says that they also engaged in sex trafficking of minors to elite members of the bank.

PETER MCCORMACK: So intelligence agencies are trafficking children?

WHITNEY WEBB: Well, what’s intelligence? It’s information.

PETER MCCORMACK: Sure.

WHITNEY WEBB: Yeah. So any sort of access to information that you can use to your benefit, they want to secure that, to get an edge over their competing intelligence agencies. And they will justify anything in the name of securing that intelligence. That’s what Operation Underworld was about. “We need intelligence from the mob, so we have to team up with the mob, even though it’s bad to team up with organized crime.” But then they become organized crime.

PETER MCCORMACK: Right, but it’s all organized crime.

WHITNEY WEBB: That’s what I’m saying.

PETER MCCORMACK: It’s all organized crime.

WHITNEY WEBB: From that point, it became organized crime. Well, even before Operation Underworld, this same national crime syndicate, like in New York, had taken over the Democratic Party because they took over the unions. And so after they threatened a few people’s lives, hit a key people here and there, and then they controlled New York’s Democratic Party and then expand and basically take it over in other metropolises in the US and bam, it’s done. And then they do the same thing with the Republicans.

The Rebranding of Organized Crime

PETER MCCORMACK: So organized crime hasn’t gone away, it’s just rebranded.

WHITNEY WEBB: Yeah, and the shapes are rebranded. They’re philanthropists now. Well, like, look at Leslie Wexner. Yeah, of course, Leslie Wexner is a great example of that.

PETER MCCORMACK: He’s a weird guy.

WHITNEY WEBB: That’s one way to put it. Yeah. So in the interest of just keeping this on the organized crime thing, Leslie Wexner, his tax attorney, got shot in the face in broad daylight a few days before he was supposed to testify to the IRS.

And Columbus, Ohio, police obviously investigated this murder and produced this document that talks extensively about Leslie Wexner and his ties to organized crime interests. And that was destroyed by the police, supposedly destroyed by the Columbus chief of police, but this local journalist and attorney named Bob Fitrakis obtained it accidentally through a Freedom of Information Act request.

And then when confronted with it, that police chief was like, “Oh, I thought I destroyed it. How’d you get it?” Openly admitted to try and cover it up, but Wexner, for his estates, hires people from Columbus PD or at least has did during that time to be his private security at his developments, like New Albany and places like that.

And he’s the most powerful man in Ohio. Richest man in Ohio by far. So if you want to be somebody in Ohio politics, you have to go through Wexner. I mean, even J.D. Vance had a fundraiser at his house.

PETER MCCORMACK: I didn’t know that.

WHITNEY WEBB: Well, it was in the beginning of his career and before the team up with Peter Thiel.

PETER MCCORMACK: You’re not a fan of Peter Thiel?

WHITNEY WEBB: No, I’m not one of the few in independent media that does not like him. We can get into that later.

PETER MCCORMACK: Can we get into that now?

WHITNEY WEBB: Sure, if you want, yeah.

PETER MCCORMACK: Why? I mean, look, I can probably guess.

The Palantir Connection and Surveillance State

WHITNEY WEBB: Yeah, well, there’s a lot of reasons, but I guess let’s start off here. So I would argue that neoconservatives have very successfully rebranded, and I think Peter Thiel is a very important example of that. So Peter Thiel as an example, Palantir has been in the news. Right. He’s a co-founder of that.

So how was Palantir created? Well, there was this company that was being run. Not company, sorry. It was a government program after 9/11 called Total Information Awareness. It was housed within the Pentagon’s DARPA office. And the man they chose to put in charge of that was John Poindexter, who was the highest ranking member of the Reagan administration to be indicted for his role in Iran Contra, which again, the continuity of government stuff is relevant here.

So eventually, you know, it launches and whatever, but people are outraged by it because as they rightly point out, as they rightly pointed out, it would eliminate constitutional protections of Americans’ rights, specifically the right to privacy, among other things. It was a huge surveillance dragnet. And its goal wasn’t just to, you know, surveil everything. It was to predict crime before it happens, predict terror attacks before it happens. I mean, it’s like Minority Report was basically the end goal of it.

And so after all the pushback, they changed the name to Terrorist Information Awareness and try and rebrand. “Oh, it’s not total. We’re not going to. We are still going to surveil innocent Americans, but we’re focusing on the terrorists.” You know, they did all this stuff to try and rebrand it, but Congress defunded it. But hidden in that bill, Congress allowed aspects of it to continue.

And essentially, I argue in my work on Palantir that an effort was made to privatize large aspects of TIA as Palantir, because when Alex Karp and Peter Thiel were setting it up. They went to John Poindexter through this guy named Richard Perle who was a long standing neocon actor with very extensive ties also to the state of Israel. He was caught in the 70s giving classified information to Israel’s embassy and should have gone to jail and somehow did not and had a lot of ties also to Netanyahu’s first government.

And he, Richard Perle is the guy that connected Thiel and Karp to Poindexter. And they basically wanted to talk to Poindexter because they wanted to recreate Total Information Awareness and saw him as the godfather of modern mass surveillance. And in doing so they basically, you know, Peter Thiel teams up with In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital firm. Alex Karp has said on record that the intended clients of Palantir from the beginning was the CIA. And you know, the CIA was their first client.

For their first six years as a company, their top developers went to Langley, Virginia which is CIA headquarters, every two weeks to show the CIA their product and have them tweak it to their liking. And during that period of time, one of the top people at the CIA that would have been involved in that is this guy named Alan Wade who was also intimately involved with Total Information Awareness. And if you look at how Total Information Awareness was described, its privacy protections, it’s exactly the same as the way Palantir sold their stuff later on. So there’s an insane amount of overlap.

And what’s crazy here is that Allen Wade a few years prior had created a homeland security software program that was also pre-crime-esque and similar to what Palantir ended up doing. It was called Killead and he teamed up with Christine Maxwell to do that.

PETER MCCORMACK: I wonder what the Whitney Webb file in Palantir is like.

WHITNEY WEBB: I’m sure it’s long, it’s got a nerd. They probably know I have a mold allergy and all sorts of stuff.

PETER MCCORMACK: That I’m visiting you having a conversation.

WHITNEY WEBB: Well, I mean that’s their job, right?

PETER MCCORMACK: Well it’s funny, so let me tell you.

WHITNEY WEBB: But it’s about pre-crime, it’s about predicting stuff before it happens. And that’s what I think a lot of people miss about Palantir because a lot of people say about mass surveillance, you know, “Well I have nothing to hide,” you know, but it’s not about if you’re doing something wrong now or not. It’s about an algorithm thinking if you will do something wrong in the future.

PETER MCCORMACK: I think I would definitely be on that algorithm. I think you would be as well.

The Carbyne Connection and Emergency Services

WHITNEY WEBB: Well, the problem is that pre-crime has been inching along and actually a lot of people in Epstein world, I mean obviously Peter Thiel and Epstein had a relationship. More came out about this earlier this year after, you know, Thiel kind of tried to minimize his ties a few months earlier. But Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund co-invested in this company with Epstein and Wexner and Ehud Barak called Carbyne that basically had a pre-crime component to it.

And Carbyne has now colonized an insane amount of 911 emergency call services systems throughout the US and are the main company at the forefront. If this legislation in the US has passed, that’s called Next Generation or NG911 where they’re going to basically federalize and centralize all 911 emergency call systems. And then when you centralize it, you can just put one company in charge.

They have changed the board a lot since the Epstein scandal because Ehud Barak was the chair and there were people on the board that were tied to Epstein, including a woman that he allegedly took to the UK to sort of soften up some US Senators whose identity is still unknown before the Iraq war vote. But it’s a story for another time. And you know, some other figures tied to Epstein were on the board and it would formerly been created by veterans of Israeli intelligence, but now they only have one of the Israeli intelligence co-founders on the board.

The others have left to do other things. One of them now works for Erik Prince I believe. And you know, they’ve kind of gone their separate ways and they’ve tried to rebrand as a more American looking company. I guess they added Trump’s former head of DHS, Kirstjen Nielsen I think is her name to the board and they have Michael Chertoff, the former first head, one of the early heads of DHS under Bush.

PETER MCCORMACK: So it’s like, so everything and everyone is captured and everything is corrupt.

Technology and the Evolution of Control

WHITNEY WEBB: I think that’s kind of a simplification. I think not everything has always been like that. I think this particular group, once they got their hands on power, it’s a faction, you know, they’ve been consolidating control for a long time and I think the advent of technology, big tech sort of taking over our lives has really facilitated that.

Because as I the whole conclusion to my book is that why would you take someone like Epstein down? You don’t need people like him anymore to compromise people because all of our lives are increasingly online. So if they want something on you, they can just harvest it off through, you know, whether it’s, you know, Palantir. It ends up in your Palantir database. Basically, it’s sucked up by the NSA or GCHQ or any of these other agencies. And you’re profiled based on it, or if there isn’t incriminating stuff, they can plant incriminating stuff on your devices.

PETER MCCORMACK: So you’re screwed either way.

WHITNEY WEBB: If they want to screw you, I mean. Sure. Yeah. And so it’s much easier to consolidate power under those circumstances.

PETER MCCORMACK: Do you think they’re.

WHITNEY WEBB: And they elevate people who are compromised to positions of power. How did a guy like Dennis Hastert become Speaker of the House of the United States when it was known that he was a pedophile years before getting to that position? Because they can hold it over his head the whole time.

The Network of Sexual Blackmail Operations

PETER MCCORMACK: Do you think there are a lot of Epsteins operated?

WHITNEY WEBB: Well, yeah. My whole book is about how Epstein was not an anomaly. You know, I mentioned the example of Adnan Khashoggi, but, you know, I mentioned Robert Keith Gray, who Robert Maxwell hired when he came to the US and made his big entry into New York City. He was also involved in sex blackmail stuff.

There was a page boy scandal he was related to in the 1980s where. Oh, I forget the guy’s name. I think Larry Craig was the name of the main congressman or senator involved. And Craig denied all the charges, but then got caught in the early 2000s for soliciting sex in a bathroom in an airport or something like that. But there’s been a ton of these scandals over the years. And then you have figures like Roy Cohn, who I mentioned earlier, involved in sex blackmail activities as well. There’s a lot of these figures.

PETER MCCORMACK: Sex blackmail seems to become very useful.

WHITNEY WEBB: Well, it is, because, I mean, this is one of those things that’s a holdover from the mob that later gets absorbed by intelligence agencies because they see its utility.

PETER MCCORMACK: You know, so if we see someone.

WHITNEY WEBB: Rich, famous, knowing who, you know, knowing information, the sexual blackmail information, it intel, the CIA, that’s intelligence to them. We want to gather intelligence on these people and then use it to our benefit for national security interests, which is all economic. Well, more often than not. But it’s, you know, it’s obviously other things too. Just. I think it depends on the circumstance, really.

PETER MCCORMACK: It’s so hard to get your head around it, Whitney.

WHITNEY WEBB: Well, you know, I’ve thought about. I understand that my books are like a lot of information, but the thing is we’re never going to get an affidavit from the CIA being like, “Yes, we did bad things.” Like we’ve known they’ve done bad things in various decades. It’s been very documented and they won’t admit to bad things there in almost every one of those cases. So it’s like you’re not going to get that about Epstein or about anybody else, you know.

Epstein as the Central Figure

PETER MCCORMACK: So why do you think Epstein became almost like the, I don’t know, the central figure for all of this corrupt global elite network?

WHITNEY WEBB: Well, he’s just a microcosm of it really, but I think.

PETER MCCORMACK: Is it his own?

WHITNEY WEBB: He became too exposed, I think especially after his first arrest and as he described that he became radioactive. But he had, you know, before been able to move through all these different circles, you know, with impunity, and was a well respected guy in these elite circles. Right. He was useful to a lot of people, mainly for money things, but also for, you know, other more illegal things from, you know, what we know about the case as it’s developed.

So I think since then, I don’t know if he tried to rebrand as like a tech entrepreneur and all this stuff, but he was allegedly still cultivating important relationships. He was reportedly advising Tesla on how to take Tesla private. He claimed to be advising Treasury on their, the Department of Treasury on cryptocurrency and anti-hacking efforts, all sorts of. He was still doing a lot of stuff between those arrests. It’s just, you know, the public association was, you know, no longer beneficial for a lot of powerful people.

Epstein’s Financial Acumen

PETER MCCORMACK: But he was considered financially illiterate.

WHITNEY WEBB: By who?

PETER MCCORMACK: Well, I think Eric Weinstein came out and said he’s a moron.

WHITNEY WEBB: Yeah, that’s interesting. Doesn’t he work for Thiel Capital? Well, Eric, you know, I’m not super familiar with Eric Weinstein’s Epstein story, but as I understand it, he talks a lot more about his impressions of Epstein at the meeting as opposed to why he was going there. And I believe he ran a hedge fund at the time. So why would you be going to Epstein as a hedge fund guy? I don’t know.

PETER MCCORMACK: Well, it seems like everybody met with Epstein at one time.

WHITNEY WEBB: Yeah, for financial stuff. But I do not believe that he was financially illiterate. He was very successful. He would not have been tapped in the 80s by people like Adnan Khashoggi and Douglas Leese if he was not savvy. He helped orchestrate one of the largest Ponzi schemes in US history at Towers Financial. But his name got dropped from the case like three months in. So, I mean, how do you do that by being financially illiterate?

PETER MCCORMACK: Well, didn’t.

WHITNEY WEBB: Why would Leslie Wexner give you power of attorney over all of his affairs?

PETER MCCORMACK: Well, that is also very weird, though.

WHITNEY WEBB: But would he do that for someone who’s financially illiterate? Because Epstein had several years between 1987 or 1985, depending on who you believe when the introduction was made.

PETER MCCORMACK: But why give it to him anyway?

WHITNEY WEBB: Well, obviously Wexner liked Epstein very much. I think there’s now questions there. So there’s this murder of Wexner’s tax attorney.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah.

The Epstein Financial Network

WHITNEY WEBB: And then not long after that, Epstein comes into Wexner’s world and untangles his tangled finances, whatever that means. And Epstein during that time, you know, before then, between 1981 and 1985, described himself as a “financial bounty hunter.” He was hired to find money that had been stolen. And he hid away stolen money for powerful people. He played both sides.

And someone who can effectively do that – he was hired by like, very fancy, aristocratic people for those purposes, admittedly, like a very aristocratic Spanish family being one of them. They would not just hire some financially illiterate idiot to do that kind of stuff for them. And Adnan Khashoggi was one of his clients, too. He’s not going to hire a financially illiterate guy to do that. I think that is bull. And it’s part of this narrative that’s been woven about Epstein, about how he was just charismatic and him being good at anything else was just a facade.

Well, yeah, because by that narrative inherently means don’t look any deeper into what Epstein was doing, you know, in his early history, for example.

PETER MCCORMACK: Well, let’s talk about that.

WHITNEY WEBB: Sure.

PETER MCCORMACK: Is this the arms trafficking?

WHITNEY WEBB: Yeah, among other things.

PETER MCCORMACK: So, okay, can we go back further just for people who don’t understand, how did he become a thing? Because wasn’t he…

The European Connection

WHITNEY WEBB: No one really knows. But it all seems to have started with this backpacking trip to Europe in 1971. And this was when he was a college dropout. I think he went to Cooper Union, I think for a few years, didn’t finish. And then started at NYU in 1971 through 74, but didn’t get a degree. Something like that.

And somewhere in 1971, he went backpacking to Europe. And he was in the UK and so in the UK, he became close friends with this famous cellist, Jacqueline Dupree, and reportedly he claimed through her got sort of an in with the Royal family. At that point, I don’t really know if that’s true, but he comes back from that backpacking trip and he’s hanging out at Jimmy Goldsmith’s house.

And Jimmy Goldsmith is an interesting figure. If you are a fan of Adam Curtis documentaries, you may remember him from “The Mayfair Set.” He is a currency speculator or was. He was very close to Robert Maxwell, among other figures. He was a member of this very interesting nexus in Mayfair called the Claremont Club, which was sort of this elite gambling club that a lot of interesting figures were tied to, including figures with intelligence links, organized crime links and sexual blackmail links.

So for example, if you’re familiar with the Profumo affair in UK politics, the nexus responsible for that which brought down the government of Harold Macmillan has its nexus at the Claremont Club. And Jimmy Goldsmith was a member of that along with people that were also very close to Robert Maxwell, like Roland or Tiny Roland as he’s remembered. And another well known member is David Sterling, who basically started a lot of this movement that the private mercenary phenomena in Britain, among other things.

So definitely a network of powerful people. And a lot of his early – Epstein’s early high society New York contacts, his earliest ones, a lot of them met him at Jimmy Goldsmith’s mansion in New York.

PETER MCCORMACK: So he’s originally networking.

WHITNEY WEBB: Yeah. But he’s a college dropout. Something happens when he goes to Britain, we don’t really know, but he gets connected with this crowd.

PETER MCCORMACK: Do you have a suspicion it may…

WHITNEY WEBB: Have been through his daughter, Isabel Goldsmith? She’s in the Black book. But I mean, it’s hard to know. Also, Jacqueline Dupree reportedly cultivated ties with sort of the New York Jewish community because she converted to Judaism in 1967. She was married, I think to an Israeli musician, but she became close to – she was close also to Itzhak Perlman, who’s a famous New York musician. I think he’s a violinist. I can’t remember exactly what instruments he plays. But he and Epstein had a pretty significant relationship also.

But it’s important to point out when I say Epstein had a relationship with people, I’m not saying they had a sex blackmail relationship necessarily. What we’re trying to untangle here is the truth of who Epstein was and why was he taken down? Because I don’t think he was taken down because in 2019, all of a sudden, the US government became outraged about the sweetheart deal of 2007, you know, 12 years after the fact, and then wanted to rectify some wrong. I think it was about something else. He pissed off somebody or, you know, something similar that befell Robert Maxwell, for example.

PETER MCCORMACK: But anyway, stop becoming useful. Too much heat, something.

WHITNEY WEBB: I have some theories. We can get to those later.

The Dalton School Connection

But going back to early Epstein. Yeah, so he’s in this network with Jimmy Goldsmith, and he gets hired in 1974, which is the year he stops – also the year he stops going to university for any reason, and gets hired at the Dalton School, which is this elite New York private school. And he’s hired by Donald Barr, who’s William Barr’s father.

Donald Barr had worked at the OSS, which is the precursor to the CIA, and then after that, had been involved in all of these programs to identify gifted children when they were, you know, high schoolers and things like that. And Epstein would have fallen in that category. We don’t know if there was a connection there. But Epstein graduated high school two years early. He was a math whiz and also got a scholarship to go to Interlaken, where he would later return to offend, actually, which is this kind of elite music school for really talented kids.

And I think he went there because he was good at the bassoon or something, but he was apparently really good at math and could play a lot of different instruments and was, you know, reportedly very talented. And he obviously caught people’s attention for some reason.

PETER MCCORMACK: Was it Bear Stearns from there?

The Bear Stearns Years

WHITNEY WEBB: It was Bear Stearns from there. So it depends on who you believe about who hired him. But it was Ace Greenberg, at the end of the day, who became CEO or the head of Bear Stearns, I think, in 1978. But, you know, there’s a lot of people. There’s a lot of baton passing here for responsibility. And I think that’s kind of common now that Epstein is kind of an infamous character, right?

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah.

WHITNEY WEBB: So the sister, or sorry, allegedly it was the daughter of Ace Greenberg. She denies – she says it was some kid at school. One of her friends or – no, another kid at school. Their dad was friendly with Greenberg and recommended Epstein to Greenberg. I don’t know. There’s all these different stories, but there’s an agreement that it was Greenberg that brought him to Bear Stearns.

PETER MCCORMACK: Okay.

WHITNEY WEBB: Well, it’s kind of complicated. But basically, you know, he joins – Epstein joins Bear Stearns in 76. And by 1980 he’s a limited partner. He has a very meteoric rise at the firm. Oh yeah, he was basically Greenberg’s protege. And then he leaves in 1981.

There’s a lot of, again, a lot of different stories there, but it seems like the most likely explanation is that there was this SEC investigation because the trade at the center of that investigation happens the day before Epstein resigns Bear Stearns. And the official story that he had been fined for not reporting something in the expense account appropriately, it doesn’t really make sense with why he would leave a job as a limited partner netting him a lot of money for a fine that was relatively small.

And then you have other Bear Stearns executives and Epstein himself say, “Oh, I wanted to strike out on my own and make my own business at that point.” Again, a lot of conflicting information.

The SEC Investigation and Financial Networks

But the SEC case revolves around the Bronfman family insider trading involving Seagrams and a lot of other people that are sort of in this network. One of the guys involved in that insider trading scandal later becomes a big part of Jimmy Goldsmith’s corporate raiding in the US and his acquisition of this company called Crown Zellerbach, which is part of this – well, I don’t want to throw out too many names that confuses people.

But Drexel Burnham Lambert, they’re the heart of a lot of the savings and loans and junk bond scandal financial funny business going on in the 80s. And Epstein has a lot of ties to that crowd. And so Epstein appears to have been advised to leave Bear Stearns because of that investigation. I argue in the book it was probably to take heat off of Ace Greenberg, who would become CEO at that point. Epstein was his protege and having him sort of go and take the fall for it made it a lot easier for them.

But what’s interesting about this too is that the lawyer for Bear Stearns up until a few weeks prior had been Bill Casey, who had just been tapped as Reagan’s CIA director. So whoever Bill Casey left his whole legal portfolio to, of all his longtime legal clients would have been the person to make that call.

And then after he leaves, he, you know, becomes involved in this financial bounty hunting where he’s hiding and finding money for powerful people in offshore shadow bank world. In 1981 is also where Casey brings in Khashoggi for Iran Contra related purposes and all of that. And Khashoggi becomes Epstein’s client. All sorts of things start to kick off.

PETER MCCORMACK: The same names keep coming up over and over again. Sometimes not even just the family.

WHITNEY WEBB: Well, as I was saying earlier, we’re not going to get a signed affidavit from the CIA or, you know, any intelligence agency talking about Epstein, including Israel’s. So what are we left with? Well, we have to look at what is ultimately, you know, I guess circumstantial evidence. But you stack enough of it over the decades, you know, you can show that something shady is definitely going on.

And that’s the reason my books are long and so detail oriented, is because that’s all we really have in terms of open source intelligence to put all of this together. Right. And so that’s, you know, that’s what I tried to do.

PETER MCCORMACK: Okay, so after Bear Stearns, he goes out on his own. At what point does he become connected to Mossad?

The Intelligence Connection

WHITNEY WEBB: So it’s allegedly somewhere in the span of 1983 and 1985.

PETER MCCORMACK: So it’s not long after.

WHITNEY WEBB: Not long after, no. But remember, you know, his mentors in the shady world of arms trafficking and all of that are Douglas Lee Spirit and Adnan Khashoggi. And they team up around this time. And Khashoggi in particular has relationships with Israeli intelligence, but it was actually a person who was known to have been working with Robert Maxwell on Israeli intelligence stuff. Ari Ben Menashe, that said that he, Epstein, was brought before him by Maxwell, and Maxwell wanted him included in the stuff that they were doing for Israel. That stuff being, you know, arms transfers.

The other guy in the group was Nick Davies, who was the foreign editor for one of the publications that Maxwell owned at the time.

PETER MCCORMACK: What year did Maxwell die? Was it 86?

WHITNEY WEBB: 91.

PETER MCCORMACK: Was it 91. Okay. Because he feels like a successor to…

Maxwell’s Legacy

WHITNEY WEBB: Maxwell in a lot of ways. Yeah. So Maxwell was – I think he’s misunderstood because a lot of people think of him as just a fraud and a grifter, and obviously he was those things. He engaged in a lot of illegal financial stuff. And the reason it wasn’t – well, the reason it wasn’t exposed sooner is because he was very adept at keeping things afloat when they were insolvent. Right.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah.

WHITNEY WEBB: Moving money from here to there, around. And I don’t think his kids, you know, Evan and Keenan – Evan could keep up with that or do it the way he could do it. But Epstein definitely was capable, I think.

But Robert Maxwell was one of a series of deaths in 1991 that are tied to these intermix scandals with Iran Contra, one being Promise, in which Maxwell was also involved, and the other one being BCCI that we’ve brought up a few times. Yeah, I’m not sure where you want to go from here.

PETER MCCORMACK: So I kind of want to understand what Epstein was doing in that period and in the late 80s, early 90s, because obviously most of us aren’t aware of him until there’s a lot of other things.

The Iran-Contra Connection and Arms Trafficking

WHITNEY WEBB: He’s involved in a lot of pies. So his earliest stuff with arms trafficking was with Leese, and apparently Khashoggi and Leese had gone into this joint venture with Chinese weapons manufacturers, mainly the company Norinco, and they were sending a lot of weapons to Iran. So it was a parallel arms trafficking operation to Iran that was separate but related to Iran Contra. And so that seems to be sort of his foray into it.

And then obviously, you know, Khashoggi is doing Iran Contra. He’s doing stuff in savings and loans and other sorts of arms deals all over the world. And Epstein gets involved with Wexner in this period. He gets involved with Steve Hoffenberg and the Tower Financial Ponzi in this period. And he’s doing this financial bounty hunting stuff.

And a lot of the characters that he gets involved with and other characters that’s not really talked about a lot is Evangeline Goulettas. He ends up sharing an office with her for several years. And their attorney, the Golettis family attorney, Alan Tesler, becomes involved with Leslie Wexner in this period. And he also is involved with the architect of the aforementioned Promise software scandal, or, sorry, Earl Bryan during this time. And so it all. All these people start to sort of meld into these same scandals in the 80s. And Epstein was absolutely sort of enmeshed in this, in this crowd.

PETER MCCORMACK: What do you think drives is driving him at that time? Is it power and money? Is it just money? What drives all these things?

WHITNEY WEBB: I think it depends on what kind of person you are. And I think it’s pretty clear that Epstein was pervy and when you’re very powerful, you can get away with all sorts of stuff. And he was obviously sought after for his financial acumen. But I would say, you know, again, it’s offshore banking stuff, it’s shady banking stuff that he was really good at. That was actually what he was sort of tapped at. At Bear Stearns for. He initially started being, like, an assistant to someone on the floor of the stock exchange and by the end of it was advising their wealthiest clients on matters relating to esoteric markets in the tax code.

PETER MCCORMACK: So I do money.

WHITNEY WEBB: Yeah. So I think, you know, it’s pretty clear he was. He was sought after, at least by these shady characters for those purposes. Yeah.

The Mossad Connection

PETER MCCORMACK: When does. So when does the tap on the shoulder from Mossad come? What’s the point where.

WHITNEY WEBB: I mean, it seems like it’s Robert Maxwell being sort of the earliest, but again, if you have, you know, Leese and Khashoggi in the mix, it’s possible it could have come a little sooner. But again, it’s. It’s hard to know. Hard to know. But, I mean, he had ties. Oh. It’s important to point out that the head of aman, which is the military Intelligence directorate of Israel at the time that Maxwell sort of pushes out Epstein was Ehud Barak.

And according to Ari Bin Manashe, Ehud Barak was one of the higher ups that Robert Maxwell referenced as having approved Epstein before he introduced him to Epstein. Huh. But supposedly Ehud Barak says that he didn’t meet Epstein until, like, the late 90s. But there’s a lot of these cases where people say, “No, I met him way later.” And all of this that have turned out to, like, not be true. Like Bill Gates, for example, saying it was like 2011 was their first meeting.

PETER MCCORMACK: That was bullshit.

WHITNEY WEBB: Yeah.

PETER MCCORMACK: Okay. Because we go from him being a guy involved in financial things to maybe some arms deal to a guy who owns an island and a planet.

Robert Maxwell’s Entry into New York

WHITNEY WEBB: It’s hard to know how that happened, but I think it’s somewhere in the late 80s, because Robert Maxwell in the late 80s sort of plans his entry into the. Into New York from the UK. He decides he’s, like, not liked very much in the UK at that point. And he talks about how when he goes to New York, people love him and how he thought that was great. But that isn’t, like, the only reason.

Another one of the main motivators here is that he was picked by this Wall street bank, Rothschild Inc. It was created by the Rothschild family because they felt like they had neglected Wall Street.

PETER MCCORMACK: Okay.

WHITNEY WEBB: And wanted to sort of reestablish their dominance in New York finance. That’s how they described it to the New York Times. And so they focused on mergers and acquisitions initially to get their foothold. And so they picked Jimmy Goldsmith and Robert Maxwell to be sort of their corporate raiders. From their UK banking interest that made the entry for Rothschild Inc. In mergers and acquisitions into the US and so you have Jimmy Goldsmith do the Crown Zellerbach play that I mentioned earlier. And you have Maxwell take over Macmillan, among other things, as part of this push into the U.S. you know, financial system, basically.

So in the same period of time that that’s happening, Robert Maxwell has developed a very close relationship with this mobster named Semyon Mogilevich. And he’s helped him gain access not only to the US financial system, but also the Israeli financial system by getting him a dual citizen passport, basically through Israel, where Maxwell had a lot of connections.

And it’s known now, thanks to the work of Gordon Thomas, that it was very. And also Seymour Hersh that, you know, it was a very close relationship between Maxwell and Israeli intelligence. So he used that to facilitate the entry of this, of this mobster into these different financial systems. And Maxwell actually built an alliance between people like Mogilevich and organized crime groups all over the planet. As far as the Japanese Yakuza, basically.

So Maxwell should be known for a lot more than just stealing the pensions, Stealing pension funds. Yes. He should, of course be known for that too, because that’s terrible, but he should be infamous for a lot more.

The Mega Group and Organized Crime Connections

And so he’s making his entry into the US for these reasons, among other things. And he is sort of. Well, when he gets there, he’s tapped on the shoulder by these people that are all close to Leslie Wexner. They are members of this group that was established the same year, 91, that’s called today the Mega Group. It’s Wexner, Bronfman in the sky named Lawrence Tisch, the Crowns, Lester Crown. A lot of them have organized crime ties historically that arguably persists to the present.

And Bronfman’s important here too, because after BCCI collapse, I mentioned earlier Admin. Edmund Safra sort of seemingly taking over a lot. So one of those Safra banks was bank of New York. And Edgar Bronfman was intimately involved in that at the time that it sort of became affiliated with Mogilevich financial interests, among other things.

And Robert Maxwell starts having a lot of famous New Yorkers on his yacht on the Lady Ghislaine, a lot of whom are tied to organized crime in some capacity, like Steve Ross, the former head of Time Warner, who built out the company that would eventually become Time Warner out of an organized crime front company, among other things.

You have, you know, there’s a picture of him also with that guy Ross and Trump, that’s pretty famous now. And also in that picture is John Tower, who was on the Maxwell and also Israeli intelligence payroll to facilitate their role in the Promise scandal in that picture. And Trump, of course, had ties to, you know, through Roy Cohn, to, you know, Roy Cohn was a guy that straddled political power in Washington with organized crime. He was a mob lawyer. But he was also very close to, like, the Nixon administration and then later the Reagan administration, very close to Bill Casey and all sorts of other actors of relevance here.

So this is an incredible swamp that Maxwell is swimming in in this time. But he’s basically sent there for this very powerful banking dynasty, but is also sort of fronting for a lot of these, you know, criminal interests. And one of the people he hires to help guide his entry into the US because he wanted to gain influence with all sorts of powerful politicians and powerful people, is Robert Keith Gray, who, as I mentioned earlier, not only had close ties to Bill Casey, Roy Cohn, and all of these guys, but was also a known blackmailer. So that might be where it started. How do you really want to influence politics and powerful figures in New York?

PETER MCCORMACK: Intelligence.

WHITNEY WEBB: You need intelligence. Yeah.

PETER MCCORMACK: You need someone as a front to help gather that intelligence.

WHITNEY WEBB: Yeah. And Epstein was already well connected to all sorts of networks, you know, kind of like Roy Cohn, straddling both worlds to an extent.

Intelligence Recruitment and Operations

PETER MCCORMACK: When you become a Mossad agent, how does that work? What do we know? Like, you become an agent, you become. Well, you’re compromised yourself.

WHITNEY WEBB: Well, there’s agents, there’s assets, there’s all sorts of things you can do for the agency that taps you on the shoulder, as it were.

PETER MCCORMACK: But are you tapped on the shoulder with incentives or with threats? Or can it be both?

WHITNEY WEBB: I’m sure it can be both.

PETER MCCORMACK: And at that time, Epstein was probably incentives.

WHITNEY WEBB: Well, I think he was already enmeshed in the Maxwell world. And Maxwell, again, is one of these figures that straddles organized crime. And he’s one of powerful business, powerful banking, and had already been working for Israeli intelligence for some time.

PETER MCCORMACK: And so he maybe introduced Epstein, said, “He’s one of us. We can trust him.”

WHITNEY WEBB: Well, that’s what he did. That’s what, you know. Yeah. In the mid-80s, that was already a done deal. But Epstein was also involved with U.S. intelligence. Absolutely. But again, the Iran Contra nexus, which is basically kind of what this is, is a melding of US And Israeli intelligence and also figures that are assets for either both agencies or more.

You know, I mean, like, Robert Maxwell wasn’t Just involved with Israeli intelligence. He had involvement. Involvement with British intelligence, Russian intelligence. I mean, he was kind of, you know, across. He had his hand in a lot of pies, we’ll put it that way. And Epstein absolutely was the person with their hand and a lot of pies, especially in 1980s the.

US-Israeli Intelligence Cooperation

PETER MCCORMACK: Is the Israeli intelligence and the US intelligence pretty much one of the same. Is it a very good.

WHITNEY WEBB: Yeah. So I’ll give you an example. James Jesus Angleton was one of the first CIA counterintelligence chiefs. There’s a huge statue to him in Tel Aviv thanking him for all he did. And there’s been documents that have come forth since basically showing that he was elevating Israeli interests over American interests, which has happened time and again in US politics. That’s what the neocons are known for. Right.

And you have someone like Bill Casey, too, who was very close to figures intimately enmeshed with Israeli intelligence, like Bruce Rapaport, for example, one of his best friends. And. And just, you know, you have all these people having rather insidious business relationships even. Why, you know, Casey’s CIA director.

And then you have this, what I mentioned earlier about sort of organized crime being an element here, because organized crime is transnational, right. And so this, this national crime syndicate that I’ve mentioned a few times is also a transnational thing. So Bruce Rapoport, who, you know is an Israeli nominally, he’d come to visit Bill Casey when he was CIA director, they go golfing together. His chauffeur would be a mob guy, an American mob guy, you know, and there’s a lot of examples of, you know, this, the organized crime being all over the place.

The P2 Lodge and Italian Connections

So some of my more recent work on the broader FC network focuses on Italy and some of the people there, and they seem to really all come from this nexus that was exposed in the 80s. This P2 Lodge, or Propaganda D it was called, was a huge, huge scandal in Italy. A lot of people, it involved a lot of politicians, bankers, very powerful people that were basically meeting in secret. It was labeled a subversive organization by the government. It was operating as a Freemason lodge.

And, you know, it was connected to the collapse of several prominent banks. One of the main guy that was going to. to go to trial for all of this, Michelle sendona, was under 24, seven police watch to make sure he wasn’t popped off. They were inspecting his food, everything, and someone slipped cyanide in his coffee and he died. So, okay.

But anyway, the biggest, the guy that came out of P2 that ended up becoming very powerful and famous after the scandal is Silvio Berlusconi. Yeah, yeah. And even the current government of Italy is very affiliated with Berlusconi.

PETER MCCORMACK: He liked his bunga bunga parties.

WHITNEY WEBB: Yeah, well, so when he was prime minister, he. Yeah, had these bunga bunga parties, as they were called in one of the main. While she was a teenager. At the time 17, she was a focal point of it. I think her nickname in the press was Ruby or something. It’s remembered as Ruby Gate. She got caught stealing something. Why all of this was going on, like theft from a mall or something like that.

And then when she was being held, Berlusconi, whose prime minister at the time calls and lies and said it was the prime minister of Egypt’s daughter and to let her go or it would create a diplomatic crisis. It, like, wasn’t true.

PETER MCCORMACK: Isn’t it wild?

The Berlusconi Connection

WHITNEY WEBB: And that’s how it all starts to kind of unravel for him. But he has historic ties, I mean, to mafiosos and all sorts of really shady stuff. And I mean, he’s a real character, to say the least.

PETER MCCORMACK: But it’s wild that he is a prime minister of Italy would be involved in such shame.

WHITNEY WEBB: No one remembers that. Yeah, this is this. Yeah.

PETER MCCORMACK: But it’s the idea that you, you know, you’re the prime minister, you are exposing yourself to one of the hugest scandals that you could go through as a prime minister, but you do it because you must feel like you can operate with impunity.

WHITNEY WEBB: Well, yeah, absolutely. Because by that point, I mean, he’d been in politics for ages. He controlled Italian media. He was the father of Italian broadcasting. I mean, he’s an extremely powerful dude. And he did get away. I mean, he basically got away with that, too.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah, but he’s really operated like a mob boss.

WHITNEY WEBB: Yeah, I would argue that. Well, you know, P2, which Berlusconi was a member of, and, you know, it was on paper instrumental to his rise to become a super billionaire and later politician. You know, it was part of this nexus I referenced earlier as it relates to Operation Gladio.

The Italian side of the national crime syndicate comes to Italy, Charles Luciano, and helps set up that operation. And this nexus that involved, you know, American intelligence, the Mafia, the Vatican, and very powerful Italian businessmen and politicians and diplomats.

The Recurring Layers of Power

PETER MCCORMACK: There’s this layer through everything. There’s multiple layers. There is a layer.

WHITNEY WEBB: Well, there’s multiple scandals that have all been memory hold, and there’s been no accountability. So, like, I bring up a scandal like that, and people are like, “whoa, what?” But, you know, in a world where things make sense, that would be known about and accountability would have happened and we’ll. And would have been like, “we’re never doing that again,” you know?

PETER MCCORMACK: Well, I remember the whole when the Bunga Bunga stuff came out and like, oh, well, this.

WHITNEY WEBB: Oh, I’m talking about P2.

PETER MCCORMACK: Oh, P2. Okay. But what I’m saying is on these layers, there’s through all of this, there is a layer of organized crime, a layer of intelligence agencies, a layer of big business and rich people, and then this other layer of young girls.

WHITNEY WEBB: Yeah, they like teens.

PETER MCCORMACK: They do like teens. They do like teens. But it’s a layer. All these layers exist.

WHITNEY WEBB: Mm, yes. They pop up over and over again. I mean, I don’t know. Again, this is what I tried to show. The redundancy of how this keeps happening. The same names, the same people, and also the same cycles of impunity and no accountability.

PETER MCCORMACK: Can you make sense of it?

WHITNEY WEBB: Well, I tried to in the books.

PETER MCCORMACK: Not sense, as in piecing the piece together. The logic of how we exist in a world where this is just happening.

WHITNEY WEBB: Oh, yeah. Okay. So perception management is how we exist in this. And don’t really. Yeah, and don’t really know. Sure. Well, the same guy that made PR is the same guy that made propaganda. It was Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew, who basically weaponized psychology against the whole world because PR is propaganda for corporations. Right. So he developed both jointly.

Epstein’s Rise to Political Circles

PETER MCCORMACK: Okay, okay, so back to Epstein. How do we get, from a tap on the shoulder, friends with Maxwell to this point where he’s now in with Clintons and Trumps.

WHITNEY WEBB: Yeah.

PETER MCCORMACK: All these, like, high society of you.

WHITNEY WEBB: Maxwell dies in 91, and that’s the first year that Ghislaine and Epstein are, you know, seen out publicly dating. But Epstein had several girlfriends in this period, and he took many of them on his Clinton White House visits, which began in 1993.

The first one was not Mark Middleton. It was Robert Rubin that was inviting him and Robert Rubin. No, but his deputy was Larry Summers, who, as we all know now, had a very cozy Epstein relationship. And, you know, Robert Rubin and the repeal of Glass Steagall. Ruben had left to go work for Sandy Weil. And that’s the reason why Glass Steagall had to go away so that city group could merge.

PETER MCCORMACK: That was a Clinton policy. Right.

WHITNEY WEBB: Well, the repeal of it, yeah. Larry Summers was also a Treasury secretary under Clinton, but at the time Rubin affected that Epstein visit. He wasn’t Treasury Secretary yet, because I believe Clinton had three treasury secretaries, Rubin and Summers being the latter two. The first one was Lloyd Benson.

And so at that time, Reuben was head of the National Economic Council, but he had previously been head of one of the top people at Goldman Sachs. And Goldman Sachs was one of the main banks involved in Robert Maxwell’s funny money stuff involving the pension funds, by the way. So I wonder how Robert Ruman and Epstein could have possibly met, but it might be somewhere in there because Goldman Sachs was Maxwell’s banker.

The Israeli Connection and Political Blackmail

PETER MCCORMACK: All right, so the Clintons, the connection. Would this be the Israeli connection saying, “we want you to get closer to the Clintons?” Is this himself just wanting to get closer, just elevating his place in society?

WHITNEY WEBB: Well, Ari Bin Manasha, who I mentioned earlier, said that he, under his understanding, was that the sexual blackmail stuff of Epstein was done for Israel with the purpose of blackmailing Bill Clinton and a lot of the other politicians that are, you know, accused by Epstein, prominent Epstein accusers or otherwise named in documents, things like that, are people like Bill Richardson or George Mitchell. They’re both Democrats.

So if you’re Israel and you’re trying to influence American policy, it would actually probably behoove you to largely blackmail Democrats, because Democrats are the ones that at least they posture anyway, of being more sympathetic to Palestinians than Republicans. So you don’t really need to blackmail Republicans to take your side when it comes to negotiations related to the Israel Palestine conflict.

And what’s interesting is, you know, there’s a couple other figures that ended up having unusual relationships with Epstein that were related to some of those big agreements on between Israel and Palestine during the Clinton era. So one of them was later on head of the International Peace Institute, which Epstein donated a lot of money too, but he also gave personal loans and other things to this guy who had to step down. His name, I think, was. Oh, I don’t know how to pronounce it, but his last name was Rod Larson and he was one of the lead negotiators on the Oslo Peace Accords in the early 90s, as an example. And George Mitchell was known as a negotiator involved in this kind of stuff, too. So it seems like a lot of targeting was kind of done there.

And also, allegedly there’s been a lot of work done. I forget the journalist’s name. David Harbour, I think it is. Anyway, he went over tons of documents and other things that basically showed that the Monica Lewinsky thing, Israel knew about it first and that there was a lot of pressing of Clinton on that point by Netanyahu to get something more favorable for Israel during negotiations then.

And also you have figures like Ehud Barak and another member of the aforementioned mega group, Michael Steinhardt, being instrumental in pressuring Clinton to pardon Mark Rich in the final days of his time as president. It was one of those very last minute pardons that are usually pretty controversial. And Clinton’s not the only one to do that. You know, Trump has done some of them. And pretty much every recent president has controversial pardons made at the last moment, like Biden’s, you know, we’re Fauci and his own family and things like that. So it’s become unfortunately a pretty common practice.

But Ehud Barak was, you know, is reported to have screamed at Clinton about pardoning Mark Rich. So, you know, former Prime Minister and Defense Minister of Israel screaming at the US President, telling him what to do, and then he does it. Interesting.

PETER MCCORMACK: It’s a useful tool for a president on the final days.

WHITNEY WEBB: Yeah. So it’s important to point out, though, that Mark Rich, you know, he was a commodities guy and he was a fugitive from the US for a long time because he was. He disobeyed US Sanctions and was selling, you know, oil or engaged in commodity sales to basically benefit Israel, but was engaging in transactions with Iran and other companies that were, you know, on the naughty list of the US Government at the time.

But he was a very well known and it’s very well documented asset of Mossad and Israeli intelligence and had a lot of overlap with that. A lot of people that worked for him were on Israeli intelligence payroll and he also had a lot of, you know, his company Glencore, I believe now is Nathaniel Rothschild is one of the main people there and has been for some time. So he was, you know, the new head of the British Rothschild branch.

Clinton’s White House Visits and Post-Presidency Connections

PETER MCCORMACK: So he went to the White House quite a few times. And Bill Clinton was listed on his plane a lot.

WHITNEY WEBB: Well, so the plane rides that we really know about with Clinton and Epstein happened after Clinton left office. But Epstein was meeting at the White House while Clinton was in office. He was bringing women with him. And maybe he met Bill Clinton, we don’t really know because there hasn’t been a lot of transparency.

We just know the people who were signing off, the people in the White House that signed off on the meeting from the visitor logs. So like Jeffrey Epstein is coming, someone writes it down and then they say, you know, who was the person that authorized them to come. Right. So some of those meetings could have involved Clinton? We don’t really know, but it’s very possible. But what’s interesting, you know, all we can really look at are the people that we know he was meeting with who signed off on it. So, like I mentioned, the first one was Reuben. And then after that, almost all of.

PETER MCCORMACK: Them are Mark Middleton, who later ended up.

WHITNEY WEBB: Yes. Dead under very unusual circumstances, to say the least.

PETER MCCORMACK: So what was Clinton’s connection after he left office? Why was he spending.

WHITNEY WEBB: Oh, because Epstein was basically helping him set up the Clinton philanthropies. That’s the Clinton foundation, the Clinton Global Initiative, the Clinton Health Access Initiative, which is what a lot of those flights to Africa were about. And that’s a lot of the people that were in Clinton’s network, like Doug Band and a woman, I forget her name, but she was the lady that basically created on paper the Clinton Health Access Initiative and what a lot of the Africa trip was about that included people like Chris Tucker and Kevin Spacey and some of the more infamous flights that are known about.

PETER MCCORMACK: Hold on. So was he taking the Lolita? The Lolita Express. It’s like they’re laughing at us. Were they taking.

WHITNEY WEBB: That’s the nickname for it? Yeah.

PETER MCCORMACK: Would they. Oh, it wasn’t. Sorry, I assumed that was.

WHITNEY WEBB: No, that’s not the official name. Oh, I thought it was.

PETER MCCORMACK: I was, like, laughing.

WHITNEY WEBB: Yeah, I don’t think it had.

PETER MCCORMACK: So he was taking that plane to Africa.

WHITNEY WEBB: Yeah. And he also went to Asia with Epstein.

PETER MCCORMACK: But it’s like a. It wasn’t a great plane, but it was a crappy 727.

WHITNEY WEBB: I don’t remember the. I think it’s 777 model.

PETER MCCORMACK: But, yeah, I’m a bit of a plane geek. You can get better.

WHITNEY WEBB: Okay, well, then you know better than me. I’m.

PETER MCCORMACK: I think it’s a 727.

WHITNEY WEBB: The planes, as it relates to Epstein, I’m most aware of her Southern Air Transport, which we should definitely talk about.

PETER MCCORMACK: Well, tell me about that.

The Middleton Connection and Chinagate

WHITNEY WEBB: Well, because it relates to the Middleton stuff. Okay, so Middleton, at the time Epstein is meeting with him, is involved in this scandal that sort of revolves around Clinton’s reelection campaign in ’96, I guess. But it is much more than that.

It’s remembered today as a Clinton campaign finance scandal where basically people that were not citizens of the US were funneling a ton of money to the DNC, the Democratic National Committee, illegally. And that was absolutely happening. But a lot more was going on.

A lot of these businessmen, they were Chinese and they were all trying to get access, most of them, to Ron Brown. Brown, the Commerce Secretary, he’s the one that we brought up earlier because he died in the suspicious plane crash along with the department, the sub department and the Department of Commerce that was most targeted with this group, which is the ITA. I think that’s International Trade Administration.

Pretty much the top staff of that department was taken out with Ron Brown in one go and the guy at the airport that was allegedly responsible, the navigator, was found dead of an alleged self-inflicted shotgun wound to the chest like two days after. And Ron Brown had a wound in his head when he was found in the plane crash. That is, if you look at it objectively, it’s a bullet hole and that was not inflicted by the crash. No survivors.

WHITNEY WEBB: Okay, so why were they trying to get after Ron Brown? Chinagate is very complicated. Congress tried to investigate it. They were stonewalled by every agency. It was crazy. Mark Middleton pleaded the fifth when he was brought in. I think almost 30 times. No one wanted to say anything about this and it’s been extremely memory-holed.

So why was Epstein meeting with Middleton while Middleton was a central figure in all of this? So really one of the main nexuses of China Gate aren’t Chinese or Indonesian. They’re the Riadi family. And the Riadi family had a lot of business interests also in the United States. And they were very close to a financier based in Arkansas named Jackson Stevens, who is very important to the rise of the Clintons as a political dynasty. So that’s important there.

On the other side of it, the Riadis also were very close to BCCI Hong Kong. And when BCCI was imploding, they tried to rescue specifically that Hong Kong branch and had a lot of connections to sort of those networks there. They try and rope in Chinese government-linked firms to help them rescue it and that they don’t rescue it, but they continue. They basically make joint ventures with the Chinese government.

And so the Riadis and a lot of people who worked for them that were Chinese nationals end up being the people that are the Chinese figures in China Gate, but they’re really working for this Indonesian guy that’s in bed with the Chinese government. So it’s a little broader than just China Gate.

The Weapons-Technology Exchange

And essentially what I would argue is going on is that sensitive US military technology was being given to the Chinese military in exchange for Chinese weapons flooding being smuggled really into the United States. So why would they do that?

Well, the US was the Chinese the number one spot for Chinese weapons purchases up until they were banned by Clinton. And part of that was an exchange to get Congress to grant China most favorable nation status for trade, because they didn’t have that before and they wanted that. And it was a major impediment to the US-Chinese economic relationship that exists today.

Because if you aren’t an MFN or Most Favored Nation, it’s much harder for you to establish that kind of economic dependency, really, which is what it’s developed into. Everything is made in China. It wouldn’t have been as easy to sort of establish that. But anyway, they still wanted to sell the weapons to somebody. The Chinese weapons market lost its number one customer.

Southern Air Transport and the Columbus Connection

So how were the weapons getting in? Around the same time, Jeffrey Epstein, who has power of attorney over all of Leslie Wexner’s affairs from ’93 on and Wexner’s business interest, start basically negotiating the relocation of this airline called Southern Air Transport from Miami, where it had been located, to Columbus, Ohio, where the Limited and Wexner’s business interests are based on.

And prior to this, Southern Air Transport was known for being a CIA-owned airline that later became a CIA de facto owned airline that was the main airline in Iran Contra that was moving weapons and drugs between the US and Latin America, with a major node in their trajectory in that scandal being Mena, Arkansas at the time Bill Clinton was governor. And there’s a lot of talking about the Clinton kill list, as it’s called. A lot of those earlier names on that are related to MENA specifically.

But anyway, it relocated to Columbus. Instead of going from North America to South America or Central America, it starts going to Hong Kong. And people in Ohio’s government at the time basically start calling it organized crime links one, I think the Ohio inspector general reportedly called it “the Meyer Lansky run.” People there knew that there was some shady crime stuff going on. And as I mentioned earlier, there’s this document of Columbus PD linking Wexner to organized crime before this happens.

Chinese Arms Companies and Operation Dragon Fire

So the main Chinese companies, arms companies involved, we have one called Poly Technologies that’s tied directly to the Chinese military. And then Norinco, who I mentioned earlier, because they had been in this joint venture with Douglas Lees from 1983 on, which is when their profits start to skyrocket, they start selling, becoming the main weapons supplier to Iran and all sorts of governments around the world, mostly the third world, but like I mentioned earlier, they had become a major supplier to the US until this move was made in the early Clinton administration.

And this is really, I would argue, part of a much larger scandal here, or appears to be, because if you’re familiar with Gary Webb and the dark alliance about crack cocaine exploding and all of that involving CIA and the Iran Contra network, if you look… So one of the CIA director at the time came to one of those communities to talk and basically be like, “nothing to see here.” And there’s a lady that stands up and is like, “enough about the drugs. Where are all the guns coming from?”

Because guns were being flooded into the Pacific and these same networks were caught by the FBI trafficking weapons into California during the same period of time. They busted it. It’s called Operation Dragon Fire. But the higher-ups were tipped off ahead of time and escaped. And so only like really low-lying people in the hierarchy of that operation ended up going to prison for it. And it’s never been properly investigated at all.

The Prison-Industrial Complex Connection

And a lot of really strange stuff is going on, sort of, if you look at that as a broader scandal. So you have weapons flooding these areas, you have drugs flooding these areas. And allegedly, you have hip hop gangster rap being orchestrated by record companies for the benefit of private prisons.

And why is that significant? Well, the Promise software scandal, I mentioned earlier, is very complex again, but one of the main players in that is Wackenhut. And another one of the main players in that is MCA, the Music Corporation of America, which later, basically its subsequent iterations come to dominate hip hop in that period.

And Wackenhut, which is now Geo Group, is one of the… was then and still is now one of the main private prison companies in the US and then Clinton passes the crime bill that in 1994, that basically makes all of these things offenses and makes it much easier to fill the prisons.

And what are some of the companies that end up using prison labor around this time? Well, Leslie Wexner’s Victoria’s Secret is one.

PETER MCCORMACK: Are they really?

WHITNEY WEBB: Yep. Well, not anymore, because it got found out, but in this period of time.

PETER MCCORMACK: It was where they paid like 17 cents an hour.

WHITNEY WEBB: I mean, it’s free slave labor. Yeah, yeah. And then another company that I believe still uses it is General Dynamics, which is Lester Crown’s company. Lester Crown being one of the mega group guys. And then some of the biggest corporations in the world. One of them is Walmart, which has long-standing ties to the Clinton family, the Waltons and all of that.

So it’s very messed up and should be investigated. It has not been investigated. I mean, Gary Webb has essentially been vindicated since then, but he was smeared and attacked and ended up dying, some people say suspiciously. His family denies that. And I’m not going to be the one to say definitively what happened, but obviously something…

It’s not like the network that engaged in all of the illegal activity and Iran Contra just, they got caught and then all pardoned by Bill Barr and then just stopped doing what they were doing. That’s not how this stuff works. It’s just like BCCI. BCCI implodes and gets found out. The people using it and the people running it didn’t just stop, at least the people pulling the strings, they need something else to service their interests in those ways, so they make something else.

Mark Middleton’s Suspicious Death

PETER MCCORMACK: At what point did Mark Middleton decide to hang himself and shoot himself in the chest at the same time?

WHITNEY WEBB: It was 2022. And so it was well after the Chinagate stuff had presumably been forgotten about, but it was shortly after the Daily Mail actually was the outlet that did it, of all outlets, revealed the full extent of the… of Epstein’s visit to the White House and showed that most of his meetings were with Middleton.

Because before that it was thought to be only like, I think three or four meetings, mostly about a White House fundraiser that Hillary Clinton was running that was also very suspect. I talk about that in my book. It was supposedly to redecorate the White House. It probably was not.

Trump’s Connection to the Network

PETER MCCORMACK: But where’s the overlap with Trump? Because he was hanging out with Trump.

WHITNEY WEBB: Sure. But Trump, back in the ’90s and ’80s, he was like a Democrat. He was friends with the Clintons. Right.

PETER MCCORMACK: Just part of that crowd.

WHITNEY WEBB: Yeah, sure. But I mean, the Epstein Trump thing, there’s kind of different angles there, because when Clinton was president, it’s not like Trump was in and around the White House then. I mean, obviously, Trump is a politician comes later.

Trump was bailed out in the early 1990s by Rothschild banking interests, the same banking interests that had brought Robert Maxwell to New York. They’re on the same yacht. Roy Cohn is part of that network that are enmeshed with the people that Maxwell is hiring to advise him on how to best influence New York high society and D.C. politics.

PETER MCCORMACK: Hmm.

WHITNEY WEBB: And before that, Trump had, I think ’87, taken de facto control of this company that was created as a CIA front and had years of being tied to the mob called Resorts International. And he used that to kind of try and establish himself in Atlantic, New Jersey. At the time. They were trying to make Atlantic City the new Vegas. Right.

PETER MCCORMACK: He did, as I understand it, kick Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago. Right. For being a bit weird and creepy.

The Trump-Epstein Relationship and Real Estate Connections

WHITNEY WEBB: Yeah, that’s so there’s conflicting stories again, about why they parted ways. So Trump has now said it’s because Epstein was poaching employees. The most famous poached employee is Virginia Giuffre when she was, like, 15 or something like that.

But there’s also it seems like their relationship soured because they were both trying to compete for the purchase of this Palm Beach property, this mansion. And then, I believe Trump won. Epstein wanted it, and there was acrimony between them, and Trump sold it to some Russian or Ukrainian billionaire guy that then bulldozed it. Kind of a whole very suspect thing there.

But a lot of Trump’s real estate interests, the Russiagate stuff, a lot of it was looking at some of these shady Russian figures that had done real estate deals with Trump in the past, because Trump is a real estate guy before he was a politician. But a lot of those were used to say, “oh, he’s owned by Putin.” And if you look at those individuals, they go back to Simeon Mogilevich. They go back to the mobster guy that was close to Maxwell and all these other people and banked by Safra’s and the Bank of New York and in all of this stuff.

So it seems to be this particular crowd that they became very enmeshed with. And again, Trump was bailed out by Wilbur Ross and N.M. Rothschild when his Atlantic City stuff, all of those efforts went haywire for him. And to paraphrase one of the bankers on that deal, they didn’t rescue Trump because it made economic sense. They rescued him because his brand was valuable, and it obviously has been very valuable.

But I think if you want to talk about the Epstein Trump relationship, a lot of people are like, “oh, well, did Epstein have dirt on Trump?” I mean, maybe, but ultimately it doesn’t really matter because the same people. The same people are kind of behind both of them. The power structure that has enabled Trump from that point on is very, very similar to the Epstein Maxwell network. There’s an extreme amount of overlap there.

Timeline of the Trafficking Operation

PETER MCCORMACK: So when did all the weird stuff started with the young girls being shipped around start? Because I feel like most of us understanding of the Epstein story starts really from the philanthropy where he was trying to support Bill Gates philanthropy.

WHITNEY WEBB: Most people are familiar with the early 2000s on.

PETER MCCORMACK: We all know the backstory since, but it’s kind of like we start to hear about him having meetings on the island.

WHITNEY WEBB: Accusers from the 90s.

PETER MCCORMACK: Sure.

WHITNEY WEBB: I think the earliest is like 91 or 92 maybe. I don’t know. I mean, I’m not an expert on every accuser of Epstein ever. I focus more on who was Epstein and what was he really up to besides sex trafficking, in addition to trying to line who were, what was the power structure that enabled Epstein to operate with impunity with respect to the sex trafficking as well? That’s more my interest and focus.

PETER MCCORMACK: Because the Bill Gates divorce feels very fishy.

WHITNEY WEBB: Well, yeah, I mean. Well, Melinda was like, say that some of it was related to Epstein, but, I mean, it’s hard to know if that was really why or that was just a convenient excuse to cut the cord. Well, it’s not like billionaires are the most truthful people on the planet.

The Sweetheart Deal and Legal Immunity

PETER MCCORMACK: Okay, so let’s get, let’s go therefore to his sweetheart deal. His first. If he’s being protected, if he’s an asset of intelligence agencies, why does he face an initial prosecution?

WHITNEY WEBB: Well, obviously the sentence he got, I think in total was like 18 months and it was like minimum security. He was allowed to leave the prison during the day to work.

PETER MCCORMACK: He had like a private office.

WHITNEY WEBB: Yeah, but I think the most important part of it, in terms of what we’re talking about is that it was supposed to grant immunity to a lot of co-conspirators. Right. Which included was supposed to include Ghislaine Maxwell.

And actually there may be a Supreme Court case heard about this because Maxwell’s attorney is, and Maxwell herself obviously is arguing that because of that agreement which was with the government or at least the government of Florida. But I think it’s the federal government, they should honor that and shouldn’t have prosecuted her for the case that she was convicted for more recently.

Yes, and I don’t know, we’ll see what happens there. It’s complicated stuff, but a lot of the stuff Ghislaine is in prison for right now, I believe is stuff that’s alleged to have occurred earlier than the period most people think of. It’s related to the 90s, as I understand it.

PETER MCCORMACK: So she was trafficking young girls around the whole.

WHITNEY WEBB: I think it was, it seems like it began, the operation seems to have begun in the early 90s, around the time Maxwell died, and Epstein and Ghislaine are publicly seen together.

Prince Andrew and the Royal Connection

PETER MCCORMACK: I mean, this all became a story in the UK, obviously because of Prince Andrew. That’s where our interest comes in.

WHITNEY WEBB: Oh, and what’s crazy about that relationship is that there were so many articles from like 2000, 2001 and 2002 about that that basically say things like Ghislaine “appears to be blackmailing Andrew for Epstein” back then. It’s nuts. And talks about Prince Andrew bringing his own massage table to be massaged by Epstein’s entourage and stuff. And that Ghislaine is charismatic and can wrap men around her little finger and all sorts of. I mean, some of the quotes are just bonkers.

PETER MCCORMACK: Did you ever see his interview with the BBC?

WHITNEY WEBB: Just clips from it, where he claims he’s unable to sweat.

PETER MCCORMACK: Unable to sweat? Yeah, because trauma from the Falklands, the whole. I mean, I watched the whole thing. It’s one of the wildest interviews you’ll ever see. I mean, fuck knows why he chose to do it because he’s a terrible liar.

WHITNEY WEBB: Yeah. He probably thought it would work.

PETER MCCORMACK: I mean, it totally backfired.

WHITNEY WEBB: Well, I’m sure powerful people like him are surrounded by yes men.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah.

WHITNEY WEBB: So that probably didn’t help.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah. I mean, he’s kind of been ostracized by the royal family now in some ways. Yeah, but he got away with it.

WHITNEY WEBB: Yeah.

PETER MCCORMACK: And the weirdest part of him was after. I mean, you’re.

WHITNEY WEBB: Yeah, but I mean, wasn’t Prince Charles or King Charles at one point very close to Jimmy Savile and some of these other figures, Lord Mountbatten?

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah, I don’t know the detail. Yeah, I don’t. I don’t know. But I always thought it was wild that Prince Andrew, as a royal and essentially an heir to the throne of some sort, would go and visit Epstein and go for a walk in Central Park with him after a prosecution.

WHITNEY WEBB: Well, some people say that Epstein and Andrew met in as early as 91.

PETER MCCORMACK: Wow.

WHITNEY WEBB: That’s alleged by Steve Hoffenberg, his former business partner, who did the Ponzi scheme with him at Tower Financial. And you can take that with a grain of salt if you want. I mean, obviously Andrew himself says it occurred much later. I think he says 99.

PETER MCCORMACK: Well, everyone has their own window, right?

WHITNEY WEBB: Yeah, everyone. I mean, again, there’s so many issues of conflicting stories about when who met who in the Epstein story, but it’s because people want to absolve themselves of responsibility as much as possible.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah.

WHITNEY WEBB: So, again, it’s kind of complicated there, but there’s allegations of it going back earlier. But what’s interesting is that when Andrew was publicly known to be with Epstein and Ghislaine, and it was the subject of much media speculation in the UK, which is 2000 to 2002, roughly. Andrew, in that window, is appointed to this role where he’s the UK representative for International Trade and Investment, and in doing so has a major role in arms deals.

Yes. Specifically lobbying on behalf of BAE Systems, which is a major UK defense contractor that previously worked very closely with Douglas Lease in the Thatcher era. Lease was responsible for getting the Al Yamaha deal signed to benefit BAE. And that is one of the reasons for the extreme closeness to this day of British and Saudi interests.

The Black Book and Circled Names

PETER MCCORMACK: We haven’t talked about Leon Black yet. No, we can. So I think a lot of people want to see a black book of who the pedophiles are, who the people who were sleeping with children or sleeping with teenagers.

WHITNEY WEBB: Well, really quick, the black book already exists. But one thing we haven’t brought up is how the person who stole it from Epstein’s house was his former butler named Alfredo Rodriguez. And Alfredo Rodriguez offered it. He was trying to get money for it. But he circled names in it, trying to give it to the victims lawyers saying “this is the holy grail of who was responsible or who were major accessories to Epstein’s sex trafficking crimes.” Right.

And so Ghislaine is circled. Leslie Wexner, circled. Jean Luc Brunel is circled, but so is Donald Trump. So is this guy named Flavio Briatore, who is known. I did an article about him recently. He introduced Naomi Campbell to Epstein.

PETER MCCORMACK: Hold on.

WHITNEY WEBB: But he’s very close to Berlusconi, who we talked about earlier.

PETER MCCORMACK: But is this why Musk came out and said the reason Trump’s not releasing the files is because he’s in them?

WHITNEY WEBB: I mean, it possibly could be related because that’s what the butler was saying. But no one can ask him why he circled the name. Because he’s dead. He died in 2014.

PETER MCCORMACK: Suspicious.

WHITNEY WEBB: I mean, he allegedly took the book saying that he needed insurance because Epstein wanted him to disappear. So he seemed to view it that way. But then the victim lawyer that he was offering it to, Brad Edwards, tipped off the FBI and the FBI set up a sting operation, and then sent him to prison for obstructing justice. And he got the same sentence Epstein got, 18 months, I believe.

PETER MCCORMACK: How did he die?

WHITNEY WEBB: I think his wife said that it was some type of fast acting cancer.

PETER MCCORMACK: Okay, okay.

WHITNEY WEBB: But either way, he can’t be asked about it. But that does seem significant because some people have said, “oh, well, he wanted money, so he was just circling names of billionaires.” But there’s people in the black book that were much richer than some of the people circled there. Certainly much richer than Maxwell or Jean Luc Brunel. Obviously, Leslie Wexner and Trump are very rich. And some of the other. But some of the other names aren’t nearly as rich as other people that are in this book, like Tom Pritzker, who runs Hyatt Hotels. He was fabulously wealthy, for example.

There’s definitely if you just wanted to pick billionaires to shake down, you would have just picked the highest net worth individuals. Right. And that’s not what is the case here. And also a lot of the names that are circled, it’s panned out that they were co-conspirators. Right. Like Wexner, Maxwell Brunel. For example, they’re the most well known associated names with the case besides Epstein himself.

Leon Black and Financial Connections

PETER MCCORMACK: All right, so Leon Black gave Epstein 158 million.

WHITNEY WEBB: Yeah. A lot of money. I’m not an expert on exact. I mean I haven’t written extensively about those dealings beyond what’s been reported in the press. But I can talk about Leon Black going farther back because it’s kind of interesting.

He started off as a major guy at Drexel Burnham Lambert, which is this banking nexus that was important to the S&L crisis and also the junk bond explosion. Michael Milken was the architect of that. He was pardoned by Trump in his first term for. So he’s no longer a felon. He’s one of those guys that’s rebranded as a philanthropist in recent years, actually very successfully.

PETER MCCORMACK: They all done this.

WHITNEY WEBB: Yeah, but he, I mean major financial crimes went on and the junk bonds were used to fuel a lot of these corporate raiders that ended up taking over major swaths of the American corporate landscape and really centralizing them within this group. That is the subject of my book.

And so Leon Black was a part of that. And what’s interesting also as an aside is that his father, Eli Black died rather suspiciously falling out of a high rise window when he was the head of United Fruit Company. That’s the same fruit company that CIA did coups for. Yeah. And then it was taken over by Leslie Wexner’s business mentors, Max Fisher.

The Yacht Metaphor and Leon Black’s Connections

PETER MCCORMACK: Going back to your yacht explanation, there’s a lot of people who seem to have got off the yacht.

WHITNEY WEBB: Yeah. Or they just threaten deals, or they make mistakes and expose themselves too much. I mean, there’s a lot of reasons. You can slip and fall off the yacht, or you can deliberately decide to try and hop off. And I think some of these things are related to that.

But anyway, Leon Black obviously operates in these networks and has for a long time. Apollo Global Management is his firm that he funded with other Drexel people and what he’s known for now. And his crimes with Epstein were investigated by an internal group at Apollo that exonerated him. But one of the lead authors on that is the guy named Alvin “Buzzy” Krongard, who used to be executive director of the CIA and is one of the main suspects in 9/11 insider trading.

PETER MCCORMACK: It’s a meta cartel.

Epstein’s Role in Modern Philanthropy

WHITNEY WEBB: I mean it looks that way to me. But Leon Black, it was supposedly for philanthropic purposes. And so this is one of those examples where Epstein is one of these types of figures that was important in the world of philanthropy from the post-2000s on.

Things like the Clinton Foundation, the Gates Foundation, they were reported about by outlets like the Huffington Post, as ushering in this new era of philanthropy through impact investing and things like that. And Epstein was intimately involved in setting up both of those.

And Isabel Maxwell has very unusual ties to Bill Gates too that go back to like the late 90s, early 2000s that are very strange. So something weird was going on at Microsoft with Microsoft’s top people.

Microsoft Connections and Trans-Ideological Corporations

And then what a lot of people don’t talk about either when they talk about the Gates relationship is that Epstein was also very close to the chief technical officer of Microsoft, Nathan Myhrvold, and actually went on a Microsoft business trip to Russia in the late 90s that Myhrvold was present for that they apparently can’t explain.

But I would argue that’s one of those trans-ideological corporations things because that Sam Pisar guy I mentioned earlier, the Maxwell confidant that talked about all this to Congress and was like, “It’s actually not a bad thing.” He was a lawyer for Apple and Steve Jobs referring to him was like, “I don’t know if he worked for the CIA or the KGB, but really he probably worked for both.”

But he was Pisar and other people were about getting Silicon Valley established in some of these other countries and furthering this trans-ideological corporation model where corporations run the world and the nation state and nation state sovereignty is irrelevant or doesn’t exist.

PETER MCCORMACK: Where’s Leon Black now?

WHITNEY WEBB: I believe he’s still at Apollo, isn’t he? I mean, I haven’t followed him really ever that closely because I found other parts of the case more interesting. But I think he’s one of those obvious signposts that show that people came to Epstein to manage money when they wanted to evade taxes or engage in money laundering or some other sort of financial funny business.

PETER MCCORMACK: Well, maybe wanted a certain type of entertainment.

WHITNEY WEBB: Well, that’s been alleged too. Black denies it, of course.

PETER MCCORMACK: Of course. It’s not like, “Hey, I’m a pedo.” Okay, so if we move to 2019, Epstein was re-arrested or re-prosecuted the second time.

The 2019 Re-Arrest: A Cover Story?

WHITNEY WEBB: Yeah, it was SDNY going after him because the other cases, remember, were all took place in Florida.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yes.

WHITNEY WEBB: And so this is a totally different district going after him.

PETER MCCORMACK: But you believe at this point he’s being discarded.

WHITNEY WEBB: So I can’t say with any certainty. I know why it was. But here’s the thing. I don’t think the US government, specifically a district as known to be as corrupt as the Southern District of New York SDNY would be outraged on behalf of the victims that Epstein had been let off so leniently 12 years before. And it was all because of Julie Brown at the Miami Herald, they decided to go after him.

I mean, that just seems like a cover story to me. Not to imply that Julie Brown was involved in that, but I think her reporting gave them an opening to go after this guy. At least some faction for something. I think Epstein probably pissed off someone.

PETER MCCORMACK: I want to talk to you about one of my sponsors, Incogni.

A Theory About Epstein’s Downfall

WHITNEY WEBB: I do have a theory, but I mean it. Again, it’s hard to know and this is inherently speculative. So I really want to preface that.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah, okay.

WHITNEY WEBB: Well, a lot of people because I talk about controversial things and I’m very critical of billionaires like to twist my words. So trying to be careful.

PETER MCCORMACK: This will end up a five second AI thing.

WHITNEY WEBB: Yeah, I have a major AI slop impersonation problem that we can talk about later because it’s insane. But sorry, we were talking about…

PETER MCCORMACK: So you have a…

John Brennan and the Saudi Connection

WHITNEY WEBB: My theory about… So John Brennan is the CIA, was CIA director under Obama and there’s a lot of weird things around him. So for example, Michael Hastings, a lot of people have forgotten about him. He died suspiciously just as he was about to publish an exposé on John Brennan. He had previously published something on Stanley McChrystal. He was a major general at that time who had to resign because of the reporting.

So there’s been speculation about that, about what happened to Hastings. And then there was a WikiLeaks release after about how the CIA had the ability to take control of someone’s car and cause something like what happened to Michael Hastings, who died in a weird explosion in his car. Anyway, so John Brennan has that to his record.

But I think if not him, someone in his network, but probably him got very mad at Epstein because I think Epstein was likely involved with the rise of the current crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, who had a very uncharacteristic rise to power, I believe in 2017 or so.

And Epstein was very involved in Saudi Arabia going back to his relationship with Khashoggi. He had this Austrian passport that showed Epstein’s face, but a fake name and all of the stuff. And it was frequently traveling. He was using it to frequently travel back to and from Saudi Arabia and all these other places. And I think his address on it was listed as being Saudi or something like that.

And obviously Khashoggi was a very important player in Saudi world and Epstein and him had a pretty important relationship. And as it relates to John Brennan, John Brennan had been CIA station chief in the capital of Saudi Arabia for a long time. And the crown prince that was deposed by Mohammed bin Salman, we’ll call him MBS for now, that MBS took out of power, had been the guy that Brennan had basically groomed to be the new crown prince that was like the CIA’s golden boy, you could say.

PETER MCCORMACK: So Epstein interfered.

Epstein’s Role in MBS’s Rise to Power

WHITNEY WEBB: Well, I think Epstein was part of the group that put MBS into power. Pictures of them figured prominently together, figured prominently in his townhouse. I think Epstein was an architect of MBS’s Vision 2030, which was his policies for a post-oil Saudi Arabia.

And Epstein appears to have been managing Saudi wealth funds, at least one sovereign wealth fund of theirs. And I say that about Vision 2030 because one of the first things MBS did as part of that was to promote Sophia the robot. He gave her citizenship to be the first robot to be granted citizenship. But the people that made that robot, Ben Goertzel and Hanson Robotics, heavily funded by Epstein. So I think it’s very likely he was the one that connected him. And he was very interested in AI and robotics, transhumanism, and a lot of the stuff that’s sort of within Vision 2030.

PETER MCCORMACK: But ultimately what he was doing was working against US interests at that point.

WHITNEY WEBB: Well, I mean, again, this is a transnational thing, and so you have transnational factions, too, but basically, I think it’s pretty clear that the Obama faction is different than the Trump faction. And so you’re having someone like John Brennan getting pissed off at whoever took out his favored leader of Saudi Arabia and put in MBS because MBS was too young to be crown prince.

It’s about seniority in Saudi Arabia. It doesn’t go father-son like that, because when you’re king of Saudi Arabia, you have an insane number of kids. And so it tends to be passed through uncles and it’s seniority. And he came to power in his early 30s, and then he did. He put all these other Saudi royals and prominent aristocrats in the Ritz Carlton. I don’t know if you remember this. They were hung upside down.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah.

The Saudi Connection and Power Structure Shakeup

WHITNEY WEBB: All of that stuff happened. Yeah. So there was obviously a big shakeup of the power structure of Saudi Arabia, which has always been very close to US interests when he comes to power. And MBS not only had close ties to Epstein, he also had really close ties to Jared Kushner.

Apparently Kushner and Adam Newman of WeWork, the Israeli guy, were texting each other all the time, and they were going to solve. They bring peace to the Middle East and help and develop what would, you know, part of what would become the Abraham Accords together. Okay, so obviously, MBS is tight with the Trump crowd.

And so even if Epstein and Trump didn’t like each other personally at this point, that doesn’t mean that the power structure that has enabled them both to do their thing, I mean, they still operate in that arguably. I mean that’s what it looks like to me.

So I think, yeah, Epstein pissed off interests related to John Brennan. And John Brennan was also an architect of Russiagate, right, which was also aimed at Trump. And then the whole Jamal Khashoggi thing happens and MBS’s charm offensive, where he’s like, “I am a reformer. I’m here in Saudi Arabia, I’m going to change everything up and open movie theaters and let women have some rights,” you know, and all of that.

Yeah, he paid a ton of money for that. And then the Jamal Khashoggi thing just evaporated it like that, you know. And so I think there was stuff that went on to kind of get at Trump and MBS. And I think also of course, Epstein not long after all of that.

But again, Epstein, you know, had his hand in too many pies for it to be like fleshed out to the full extent, you know, so it had to be kind of a controlled demolition. And what’s interesting, so I brought up William Barr a few times. He’s basically the Republican CIA mop up man. But one of the main lawyers for Epstein victim Stanley Pottinger is basically that for the Democrats.

And his law partner, Brad Edwards is the one that tipped the FBI off about the guy with the black book and got him sent to prison. I mean, there’s kind of some weird stuff there. So anyway, if you want to do a controlled demolition, so to speak of Epstein, you need to have at least some control of both sides.

And it’s interesting that one of the, you know, main prosecutors for I think Maxwell’s case and then later the Diddy case is James Comey’s daughter, Maureen Comey. I mean, you have like a lot of powerful connections here and I think a part of it is aimed at controlling both sides because you can’t have too much come out, you know.

Epstein’s Death and Official Narrative

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah. And so at that point, yeah, they’ve come in, they’ve got compromise on Epstein himself, anyway. Well, sure, yeah. And so he’s done, he’s cooked facing prosecution. Do you think he killed himself?

WHITNEY WEBB: Yeah. So I don’t buy the official narrative about how he killed himself. But I also don’t want to say I know what happened authoritatively because I don’t think anyone does, right, because even now with attempts to release footage and whatever. It’s inconclusive and doesn’t show anything.

PETER MCCORMACK: And there’s like a bit of footage missing and it flickers, right? Yeah, it’s like they’re not very good.

WHITNEY WEBB: No, but I think they were just hoping that, you know, it would be enough to keep people quiet and memory hole it and make people.

PETER MCCORMACK: It’s done the opposite.

WHITNEY WEBB: Yeah. Yeah, but I mean, a lot of poor calculations, I think, were made, you know.

PETER MCCORMACK: Do you think this is just going to fade away now?

Financial Criminality and the 2008 Crisis

WHITNEY WEBB: I mean, I hope not, obviously, because I think it’s a huge miscarriage of justice. Because, I mean, even beyond the sex trafficking stuff, you know, this is a network involved in extreme financial criminality. There’s a lot of weird stuff with Epstein, for example, in the 2008 financial crisis that hasn’t been appropriately investigated, which was, you know, in essence, a huge wealth transfer from the bottom 99% to the top 1%. And of course, Epstein was a major banker for the top 1%.

PETER MCCORMACK: Nobody went to jail.

WHITNEY WEBB: No, but he basically popped was the pin that popped Bear Stearns. And then Bear Stearns is absorbed by Epstein’s new bank, J.P. Morgan. And do you know who picked Jamie Dimon to lead J.P. Morgan? Well, a little farther back than that. J.P. Morgan, it was Bank One merged with J.P. Morgan and then he became the new CEO. John Dimon did.

But how did Dimon become head of Bank One? Well, it was the Crowns and Leslie Wexner’s right hand man, besides Epstein, Jack Kessler, I guess you could say left hand man. He has two hands. One’s Epstein, one is the Kessler guy because Bank One was like a Ohio based bank. The guy that built it up was one of the mentors to Wexner. Very close network there, so. And also had weird Iran Contra banking links, so. And Dimon was Sandy Weill’s protege, who, you know, was involved with the Glass Steagall stuff for Citigroup and all of that. Yeah.

Trump’s Promise of Transparency

PETER MCCORMACK: So it is still, it is still weird that Trump came in and said, “We’re going to release all the files, we’re going to release everything.”

WHITNEY WEBB: Well, I think they wanted to make people think that this was going to be a new era of transparency, but it obviously has not been that. So some documents have been made that are notable. They’ve been released about things like the MLK assassination, the JFK assassination. But those were a long time ago. All the criminals that orchestrated those conspiracies are dead.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yes.

WHITNEY WEBB: Or at least almost dead. You know, I mean, Ruth Payne is still alive as it relates to JFK stuff. They could bring her before Congress, I guess, but we’ll never talk to her. But that’s besides the point. So in the case with Epstein, it’s too recent. Too many people are alive, some of them are in power.

PETER MCCORMACK: Well, that’s what I’m getting at because I’m. Look, if Trump’s going to come out and say, “Look, I’m going to release the files,” I’m assuming he knows himself, he’s fairly clean in his relationship with Epstein team. Fairly. But when he gets fully exposed to the files, who within his network is exposed?

First Friends Investigation

WHITNEY WEBB: Sure. Well, that’s the whole thesis of this recent investigative series I’ve been doing called “First Friends,” which is about people who are close to Trump that likely have something to lose if some of this stuff were to be fleshed out more.

PETER MCCORMACK: Such as?

WHITNEY WEBB: Well, one of them is Flavio Briatore, who I brought up earlier, who is, again, like we already discussed, very close to Berlusconi. And he basically Michelle Sindona, who I mentioned. The guy who died from the cyanide laced coffee. Yeah. His successor at a lot of his shady companies. Briatore became a mentor, or not a mentor. The Apprentice, the underling of that guy, whose name was Attilio Dudo, I believe.

And he died in a car bomb that was never solved. And then Briatore left town, got tied to. I think he went to Milan and got tied with. Tied up with all sorts of sort of underworld characters. And there were wiretaps of him talking to crime guys. And he eventually had to become a fugitive from Italy and establish himself in the US.

He became the representative for the Benettons of United Colors, of Benetton fame, and later became best known as a Formula One guy because he was coaching the Benetton team and Michael Schumacher was his main guy. But then he got caught doing race fixing scandals while banking with the HSBC Swiss accounts that were all very suspect. The timing of that overlaps.

So anyway, Briatore is one of these circled names, as I mentioned earlier. So Epstein’s butler thought they were instrumental, or thought he was instrumental to what was going on there. And at the event where Naomi Campbell says Briatore introduced her to Epstein, you can see a teenage Virginia Giuffre being taken, following Maxwell around like her shadow. I think it was on Briatore’s yacht, the party.

And Briatore also was close to another Victoria’s Secret angel, Heidi Klum, fathering one of her children. And I think his most recent wife after that was a former employee of Berlusconi, who was a model that marketed the Wonder bra, something like that. But he has a lot of connections to the world of modeling that are, you know, like Epstein, rather suspect.

The Modeling Industry Connection

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah. I mean, just all through this, like I say, there’s this big network of. I talked about these layers. One of the layers seems to be modeling.

WHITNEY WEBB: Yeah.

PETER MCCORMACK: Like it’s ultimately, it’s rich guys and their perversion.

WHITNEY WEBB: Yeah. So my most recent article on this is about another modeling guy named Paolo Zampolli, who is best known now, I guess, because, you know, people have accused Melania and Trump of first being introduced by Epstein. I think Epstein claimed that he first introduced them at some New York fashion event. And the first couple say, “No, it was at the Kit Kat Club. It was Paolo Zampolli that introduced us.”

PETER MCCORMACK: Okay.

Elite Model Management and John Casablancas

WHITNEY WEBB: But Paolo Zampolli is a protege of this guy named John Casablancas. I don’t know if you’re familiar with him. He is, you know, the face of Elite Model Management. But he. That was a merger between his agency and the agency of this guy named Gerard Marie, who then became head of Elite’s European branch.

And Marie has been accused of trafficking women, just like Jean Luc Brunel. The accusations are very similar. One woman accused him of trafficking her to Adnan Khashoggi, actually in the 1980s, that Khashoggi paid 50 grand just to meet her. And then she was pressured into having a relationship with him.

And basically, you know, a lot of these women, they are taken to these countries with all these promises and then, you know, they are penniless and, you know, to make have success in the industry. Predatory relationships develop because these modeling executives like Marie demand things if they want to have success.

And, you know, it’s very. It seems like a very dark industry if you’re looking at a lot of these people at Elite, I mean, including Casablancas, who was accused of exploiting his younger models as well. And Casablancas admitted that his sexual preference was for what he called “child women.” And his third wife, he met when she was 17. Seventeen. And he married her that same year. So she was technically a minor in Brazil.

The Network of Victims

PETER MCCORMACK: There’s a huge network of victims here then.

WHITNEY WEBB: Yeah, well, a lot of, you know, it’s strange because some of it seems like Epstein in terms of his trafficking. I mean, he wasn’t. There’s the well known scandal, but it seems like. Also so, like Epstein would lure women with promises of paying their scholarships and offering them modeling jobs. And he didn’t for most of the known victims. He just used that as a lure and then abused them and discarded them.

But there were some women that he did do that for, and then they get married off to very powerful people. And some of them are the women he took to the White House. One of them he basically handed off to Trump. That was his girlfriend before Melania. Her name’s Celina Midelfart. She’s a Norwegian heiress.

Another one was Frances Hardeen that he passed off to John Doerr, who is a very. A commodity trader, very tied up in the network. I talk about, in my book, an oil trader guy who’s very, very sus.

And then you have someone like Nicole Junkermann, she’s seen on the arm of people like Paul Allen. She’s reportedly, you know, used to blackmail US Senators on Wexner’s UK property with Epstein. And she was Elite Models previously.

And then another model, Melanie Walker, she basically is now dating a top guy or married to a guy that Andreessen Horowitz. But she was Epstein science advisor and then Bill Gates science advisor, but during a time when Bill Gates said he didn’t even know who Epstein was. Strange.

But it seems like, you know, Elite Models, there’s something weird that was going on there. And that’s not to say that every woman that modeled for them had this experience, but there are some that stand out, and it seems to have happened often enough.

PETER MCCORMACK: Well, it’s like rich, powerful guys want hot women.

WHITNEY WEBB: Yeah. And I should also say that Gerard Marie was involved with the MC2 agency that was Brunel and Epstein, and a focus of the sex trafficking case, but he’s never been charged.

PETER MCCORMACK: If.

WHITNEY WEBB: It feels like if the French case is. Is dead in the water, they don’t want to go there for some reason. But if Gerard Marie was. Was pimping out, you know, young models to people like Khashoggi, that would be why, you know, it feels like if.

The Potential Collapse of the Elite

PETER MCCORMACK: If all of. All of this was released, all the files were released, this would be a complete collapse of the political and financial elite.

WHITNEY WEBB: Well, okay, if the political and financial elite are, you know, part of this corrupt cartel that is born out of organized crime and intelligence, like, maybe they should collapse.

PETER MCCORMACK: Oh, no. And we wanted. Because.

The Transnational Problem of Compromised Leadership

WHITNEY WEBB: Do we want to be ruled over them? No, I don’t. Yeah, but the problem is they’re both parties in the U.S. And arguably they’re both parties in the UK too. You know, the core of Keir Starmer’s political network is a man named Peter Mandelson, a long time Labor Party operator and the two people that Epstein was closest to in the UK were Mandelson and Prince Andrew.

So it’s a transnational problem. And so, you know, the reason Keir Starmer’s in is because the last government was so terrible. And so, you know, the next cycle people will be like, “I want nothing to do with labor.” And they’ll just go back and it’s ping pong from one side to the other, but nothing. Well, we want mental changes.

And so the same is true for the US but what they need to control is perception. And so I think in the US they’ve done a much better job of that than in the UK where the Trump campaign created the perception they were going to be so radically different not just from Biden, but from Trump’s first term in terms of transparency and all these major changes.

And so they picked a lot of people who Trump’s base trusted from the years prior, like Dan Bongino, a podcaster, who was like, “release the files” being put in as a deputy FBI guy in Kash Patel, “release the files” being put in as head of the FBI. But then they turn around once they’re in power and are like, “trust us, there’s nothing to see here.” And I think they thought because those guys had cultivated so much trust with Trump’s base, they would believe them and that would be that.

PETER MCCORMACK: You know, it does feel like it’ll be, it will be washed over.

The Era of Unprecedented Perception Management

WHITNEY WEBB: I just get this feeling it depends on people and if they are willing to let something like this go. But again, we’re in a very unprecedented era of perception management, right, where there are tons of we produced by interacting with the digital world, the Internet. We have produced tons of data on ourselves that have been sucked up by companies that use AI to analyze all of that and profile on us.

And they know how to socially engineer things in ways now that they, I’m sure they wish they had had decades before. And you know, where do people go to get their news? Well, it’s on all these platforms that big tech, you know, controls and big tech, whether it’s Google, whether it’s Palantir, whether it’s Microsoft or LinkedIn. I mean, Epstein was friends with all those executives, Amazon, Jeff Bezos and Ghislaine Maxwell were reportedly very, very cozy. I mean.

PETER MCCORMACK: Is there anyone not implicated?

WHITNEY WEBB: Yeah, sure. I mean, I’m not trying to say. I mean, a lot of people try and discredit me by saying, I say absolutely everyone’s associated with Epstein. But I mean, this stuff that’s been reported on.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah.

WHITNEY WEBB: Right. So you know Sergey Brin of Google, his money was being managed by Epstein at JP Morgan. It came up as part of the JP Morgan USVI case. I mean, he was subpoenaed as part of it. That case was settled out of court to make those types of problems go away.

Another person that came up in that case in discovery, Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. So it’s not just Ehud Barak, because Netanyahu used to use this against Ehud Barak in the political campaign, being like, “oh, he has an Epstein tie. And I don’t.” Well, it turns out that’s not as true as we had thought. Right.

The Capture of Independent Media

PETER MCCORMACK: Okay. So we rely on the independent media sometimes to do some of the investigation or ask the question.

WHITNEY WEBB: Sure.

PETER MCCORMACK: Does that feel like that’s been captured as well?

WHITNEY WEBB: Well, Rumble is the competitor to YouTube and it’s funded by Peter Thiel and.

PETER MCCORMACK: JD Vance and people like that just taking tether money.

WHITNEY WEBB: Tether money.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah. You know, tether have invested. I know you’ve invested in them. Okay.

WHITNEY WEBB: So the Brock Pierce co founded.

PETER MCCORMACK: Brock Pierce is a weird motherfucker.

WHITNEY WEBB: Yeah, he was Epstein, one of Epstein’s cryptocurrency guru dies, came to the island to talk to him about crypto. Yes. After being involved with the Digital Entertainment network pedophile scandal. Yeah.

PETER MCCORMACK: I always wonder on that one, was Brock Pierce an abuser or abused himself?

The Cycle of Abuse

WHITNEY WEBB: I think he was probably both. But I think as a Disney child star, the abuse probably started long before he got in the Mark Collins Record network.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah.

WHITNEY WEBB: But I think it’s fair to say that Ghislaine was probably abused by either her father or people around him.

PETER MCCORMACK: Right.

WHITNEY WEBB: Because that relationship, I feel bad for the way she was raised. It seems like a very traumatic rearing. And I think that’s probably true of all the Maxwell children. But it seemed like his control, the way he controlled Ghislaine was different.

PETER MCCORMACK: And his boat was the Lady Ghislaine.

WHITNEY WEBB: Yeah. And he had like a sexualized portrait of her up in it. I mean, it was very weird. So, you know, I think those things happen. I mean, people have alleged too that, you know, a lot of times people who were offenders return to the place or where they were, you know, attacked, abused, and then try and repeat it there.

And so since Epstein was at interlocking when he was a teen and then went back to offend there, you know, some people have speculated maybe he was first, you know, something happened to him when he was a teen. Again, we don’t really know, but it’s very common. Yeah.

Ghislaine Maxwell’s Current Situation

PETER MCCORMACK: Ghislaine’s situation is quite weird right now.

WHITNEY WEBB: Well, she obviously wants a pardon.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah, clearly wants a pardon and could be a useful person for a pardon.

WHITNEY WEBB: Yeah. But I mean, again, she also doesn’t want to implicate herself in anything. So, you know, every time she’s had a deposition, she’s been like, “absolutely everyone powerful is innocent of all charges.” I mean, she doesn’t want to die. She thinks her father was murdered. She thinks Epstein was murdered.

PETER MCCORMACK: She doesn’t want to get. She doesn’t want to suicide.

WHITNEY WEBB: She doesn’t want to get murdered, and she wants to get out of jail. I mean, it should be obvious. I don’t know. I think. I mean, there were headlines during, you know, before Trump came back in office, that she was trying to talk to the Biden administration to give them dirt on Trump. I mean, she’s just someone trying to wiggle her way out of a big problem.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah. God, this whole thing’s mental.

WHITNEY WEBB: It’s just. But again, they’re just trying to control perception. So they’re going to have a congressional hearing. They’re going to walk out. The Clintons, they’re going to probably ask them softball questions. They’re not going to ask them about the 1990s, because the China Gate thing involved people close to Democrats and Republicans. And you think that they would be all over it. It’s Clinton, it’s China, it’s illegal activity. Crickets.

The Interconnected Criminal Network

PETER MCCORMACK: When you were doing your various bits of investigative journalism, other often overlaps. Are you just starting to see the whole thing now is just one big thing?

WHITNEY WEBB: I mean, there’s always overlaps. Yeah. It’s crazy. Yeah. It feels like you’re writing about the same story.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah.

WHITNEY WEBB: It’s just one beat over and over again. Yeah, well, because it’s a criminal network that has operated without impunity, and they’ve been able to pop off their competition. And so they consolidate control, they centralized control. And so, you know, they’re just going to keep doing that.

I mean, Peter Thiel frames himself as a libertarian, but he’s not. He says stuff like, “free market competition is for losers. If you want to get rich, build a monopoly.” That’s what these people have done. I mean, they’ve done it very successfully. And Thiel in particular, when he builds monopolies like Palantir, he does it with state involvement. PayPal, when they were making PayPal, they went. They say they went to every three letter agency to talk to them as they were setting up their company.

The Double Standard of Justice

PETER MCCORMACK: The thing is, it becomes very hard to not look at the world through the lens of conspiracy because, yeah, even where I am in the UK at the moment, we’ve got people going to jail for writing tweets. Right. We got minor, you know, we as normal people are held to such high standards in terms of crime and the law, but these people have committed some of the most heinous, horrific crimes and get away with it.

It is just a, it’s, it’s this weird kind of, I don’t know, it’s like this global bourgeoiserie that gets to run the world with just this global network.

WHITNEY WEBB: Yeah. I mean they are unaccountable because they’ve captured the institutions that would make them accountable.

PETER MCCORMACK: Theoretically captured everything.

Corporate Control Over Government Policy

WHITNEY WEBB: Yeah. By this point. But I mean, this is something that’s been going on for decades. If you have Samuel P. Sar go before Congress, he’s practically bragging and he’s like, “yeah, the nation states are relevant because all of the companies that fund our US Politicians are going into business with our extensible adversaries. And now that’s who run the businesses run the world. What’s the nation state? The governments don’t. It’s businesses.”

Now governments are the enabling environment for policies written by the richest people in the world via groups like the World Economic Forum. That’s where all the billionaires go. You know, those think tanks, those entities, they make the policy and they filter them out to the governments and the governments are the enabling environment for policies written by billionaires.

PETER MCCORMACK: You can kind of understand the socialist argument against the billionaires based on that lens. Not economically.

The Path to Economic Independence

WHITNEY WEBB: I’m not here to say I know the solutions to these problems and so I’m not going to be like, it’s socialism, it’s that. But at the end of the day, regardless of what you think the solution is, organized crime should not be running the world. But they are. And what is the best way to extricate ourselves from it? It’s becoming economically independent.

So as an example, why has Israel done so much to try and destroy the Boycott, Divest and sanctions movement or BDS to the point that they’re having people. They funded basically legislation in various states and in Congress of the US that make it, you know, you can’t boycott Israel. You have to like sign an oath. You’re not going to boycott Israel for various things. Why? Because it’s powerful when people do not economically engage because money is they need it. A lot of the grift and terrible things they’ve done are for profit. Right?

So if we stop being economically dependent on them and create a parallel system which has to be done at the local level, then they stop having power over us. If we continue to be economically dependent on them, we are being herded into a technocratic hellscape where they will have complete control over our lives because it’s already there.

Well, they’ll have complete control over our finances, but there’s still time. Once they eliminate cash and they have us all on surveillable programmable money, whether it’s public sector, this public sector version of that in CBDCs, or the private sector version of that, which is, you know, in the US Dollar stablecoins, which are openly partnered with the US Government.

Like Tether, it’s a public private partnership. Tether has the FBI and Secret Service on its platform. They openly say “we’re a partner for US dollar hegemony.” You know, it’s a public private partnership. Those are the two models we’re dealing with here. And that’s not freedom money. It may be marketed as such to, you know, people in economies where they. Their local currency has a lot of problems, but is, you know, it’s complicated in the sense that, you know, the US had oversaw the dollarization of various countries in the world that lost control over their own finances.

You know, Ecuador is one, El Salvador is another one. And then, you know, they are dependent on what the Fed decides.

PETER MCCORMACK: We need everyone on Bitcoin.

WHITNEY WEBB: So if you globally dollarize and you, you get everyone on the dollar, well, you have a new world currency and who gets, you know, fiscal policy to a large extent, again, the nation state has become irrelevant. It’s an empire and it’s an empire run by organized crime and that, you know.

PETER MCCORMACK: Okay, well, is it. If. Sorry, final question.

WHITNEY WEBB: Economic dependence.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah.

WHITNEY WEBB: Is not a good idea. If you don’t want to be somebody’s slave. You have to stop using the slavery money.

PETER MCCORMACK: Use Bitcoin. Okay, final question. What it. What is for you? There might be multiple answers to this, but the biggest unanswered question that you have.

WHITNEY WEBB: Oh, about the Epstein case.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah. But you can go wider if you want, but.

The Unanswered Questions

WHITNEY WEBB: Oh, man. Well, not really sure how to answer that because I mean, things I don’t know the answer to. I’ve formed theories about why they decided to go after Epstein in 2019.

PETER MCCORMACK: But is there anything that you’re always like, “Fuck, I wish I knew this”?

WHITNEY WEBB: Well, you know, we tried to get documents on Mark Middleton from the Clinton Presidential Library and they just will not respond. They have folders of Middleton stuff. I’m just like, “Please give it to me.” Because I think that’s a huge scandal.

I think what Gary Webb stumbled upon was massive. I mean, obviously it happened a long time ago, but it still has very real effects today and would make people in the US very mad. Something really nasty was going on there.

And I wonder if that was the second iteration of the Iran Contra people, the enterprise, as they called themselves. What have they been doing since? It seems like they were doing it in 2008. They, in my opinion, had a hand in 9/11 in the US. What have they been doing since?

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah, it feels like we should all be very angry.

WHITNEY WEBB: But I think we’ve also been engineered to not be angry. We’re all just like, “Meh, well, I don’t know.”

PETER MCCORMACK: I feel like the Epstein is the…

WHITNEY WEBB: One where the hyper normalization thing, it’s…

PETER MCCORMACK: We have to keep this Epstein. We have to keep it live. We have to keep people talking about it. Because it feels like the door that opens Pandora’s box to say, “Look, here it all is.”

WHITNEY WEBB: I think at this point you’re right. Yeah. Because it is well known enough, everyone cares about it, that if you pull on it, it helps expose how corrupt things are.

Keeping the Epstein Case Alive

PETER MCCORMACK: And everybody knows about the case. Everybody was waiting for them to release the files. We were all disappointed. We just got to keep it front of mind. And people got to keep saying, “No, this is not acceptable. Give us the fucking files, tell us what’s going on.” Yeah, and let it all fucking burn down. Thanks, Whitney.

WHITNEY WEBB: Well, it’s not just about burning it down. It’s about putting something better in its place.

PETER MCCORMACK: Of course.

WHITNEY WEBB: And so I think the solutions there, you know, some people are like, “Oh, Whitney, your work is so demoralizing.” Well, I’m like, “Yeah, it sucks to find out that the mob runs the world,” you know, but the question is, do you just want to let them keep running it because it bums you out? Or do you want to say, “Screw you guys, we’re going to build something else and get off your slave plantation?” Basically, yeah, fuck you guys.

And I am in the group of, I would like to build something else. I have three kids. I do not want them living in a world run by the mob.

PETER MCCORMACK: I agree.

Building Something Better

WHITNEY WEBB: So what are you going to do about it? I mean, it starts locally. It starts with your community, because that’s where we can actually affect change. Voting for left or right, blue or red. I mean, it’s just this ping pong thing where nothing fundamental is changing. And so to effect that change, we have to do it ourselves.

And you think this would be a core American value. Individualism, individual responsibility. But a lot of people just don’t care. And so, you know, that sucks. But I think those of us that do care need to take steps to be as independent from the system as possible.

Because every so often, this predator class, they do wealth transfers or they orchestrate and manufacture events and they make a big grab, not just for our money, but for our rights.

PETER MCCORMACK: Rights, I think.

WHITNEY WEBB: And we’re at the point where we can’t really keep losing money and rights without somebody left so deep in a hole that we can’t climb out. So what should we do before that happens? There is an important window of time to do something about it in our local community and for our families and our friends and our neighbors.

And we have to do something, because if we don’t and that thing happens. “Oh, well, I watched all these podcasts and learned about how corrupt everything is.” But, you know, and I think they spend a lot of time trying to keep us distracted on all sorts of things and sucked into culture wars. Yeah. And things that don’t matter so that we just don’t give them the finger, basically. And that’s what we really need to do.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah. Fuck you guys, right? Should we go get pizza? Sounds good, Whitney. Thank you. It’s long. It’s complicated. Your work’s amazing. I’m glad you…

About the Books

WHITNEY WEBB: I would refer people to my books, “One Nation Under Blackmail,” volumes one and two. There’s lots of footnotes for what I’ve said, and they’re reputable sources. So if you think I’m too conspiratorial or not a reputable source, please check my sourcing and decide for yourself.

I’m not trying to tell people what to believe. I’ve just done research about this because I found the case to be insane and also interesting.

PETER MCCORMACK: Am I right? Volume one’s first?

WHITNEY WEBB: No, but you can read my books for free online on archive.org.

PETER MCCORMACK: No, no, no, don’t do that. Go buy the fucking book.

WHITNEY WEBB: Well, you can buy my book. Yeah, but I care more about the information coming out. Honestly, I would like people to engage with this stuff and understand the power structure. So, I mean, it is available there and archive.org is fighting legal battle after legal battle to take it offline. And they’re a very important resource. So if you want to donate money, donate money to them.

PETER MCCORMACK: I must have bought volume one a long time ago though, because when we were prepping for this, I went to buy them both. And volume one it just said download. And then I bought volume two. So I must have already bought volume one a long time ago.

Understanding the Context

WHITNEY WEBB: Well, some people get lost in the sauce in volume one because it’s really the context for volume two. So volume two is the book about Epstein. And when I’m talking about Epstein, just in the first chapter, I’m bringing up BCCI, I’m bringing up Iran Contra and figures like Khashoggi. I bring up Maxwell.

Volume one needed to be created because a lot of people don’t understand the extent of what BCCI really was, what Iran Contra really was. The stuff Khashoggi was doing, the savings and loans crisis. I mean, you have to understand all the stuff these people were orchestrating during this period of time to understand where Epstein fits in.

Because Iran Contra, for example, it’s remembered as an arms for hostages scandal. It was much more than that. There were drugs, there was a whole Latin American theater that was just crazy. I mean, all sorts of things are folded into that.

PETER MCCORMACK: But you have to be dialed in when you’re listening. So when I was driving and listening to the first book, I was following it, I was fine. When I was sat at home trying to listen to it, there was distractions on the kids around. I was like, I couldn’t. You’ve got to get proper dialed in.

WHITNEY WEBB: Because it’s dense and the details are necessary because we’re left with crumbs. But you have enough crumbs and you put them together, you can sort of map out what’s going on. Yeah, there’s some gaps here and there, but the picture I think, and a lot of people that have read my book think is clear enough that you can more or less figure out that something very bad was going on.

And at the very least there needs to be an investigation. But again, these hearings, a lot of these stuff going on, I think it’s for show because a lot of this deeper stuff they’re not interested in touching with a ten foot pole.

PETER MCCORMACK: Please don’t release it. We’ll share on the show notes. Thanks, Whitney. And people, listen, buy the books. You can get them for free, but buy them. Support Whitney. Let’s go get pizza. Thank you.

WHITNEY WEBB: Sounds good.

PETER MCCORMACK: Thank you, everyone.

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