Transcript of Joe Rogan Podcast #2447 w/ Mike Benz

There are certain things that get blocked in that. There were a lot of FOIA fights about COVID. Fauci famously, there’s this exchange where one of the folks in Fauci world says that they learned cool tricks from the FOIA lady about how to get around requests.

But the fact is you can FOIA the CIA for records because that FOIA forces the CIA to give you declassified or unclassified records. And if it’s classified, it’ll issue a Glomar—we cannot confirm or deny the existence or non-existence of classified information—before we get any further.

JOE ROGAN: The JFK stuff, I never heard anything about it. I mean, I know the files came out, but there was no big revelations. There was no—was there anything that came out of that that was significant?

What the JFK Files Really Revealed

MIKE BENZ: I thought it was huge. I learned—I guess people are looking at the JFK files, most people are looking at it for clues as to who killed JFK. And I know that there are many researchers who specialize in the JFK assassination that have sharpened their theories, I suppose, on the basis of it in a useful way.

For whatever it’s worth, for me, I was never expecting to see a CIA document saying, “I, James Jesus Angleton, authorized the assassination of the President of the United States.”

But the fact is, what it revealed were all of these tangential and ancillary documents that showed the structure of intelligence work at a very fine and detailed level. The kind of revelations that really only come around once in a generation.

There’s a video online by Michael Parenti, who’s a CIA whistleblower around the time of the Iran-Contra hearings in the 1980s. And he says, “Pay attention to these hearings. This may be the last time for another 20, 30, 40 years that you ever get an inside look at the detailed minutiae of a covert operation.”

Because all this was being blasted on a Congressional Jumbotron with hearings and formal congressional investigations and public testimony. And there’s—I sort of look at the JFK files release like that. We got a very detailed look at everything that was happening around effectively Operation Mongoose.

JOE ROGAN: Can you refresh my memory? What was Mongoose again?

Operation Mongoose and Operation Condor

MIKE BENZ: Yeah, so we had Operation Mongoose and Operation Condor, which were related to the—nominally, what you’ll read is that they were related to the attempts by the CIA for Mongoose, for example, to destabilize the government of Cuba in order to induce a regime change.

But because those efforts proved unsuccessful, they regionalized the conflict to do counter-communism work effectively throughout all of Latin America, the Caribbean, South America. And Operation Condor was effectively a kind of counterinsurgency strategy to stop the rise of left-wing Marxist groups who were trying to throw off the yoke of American imperialism, so to speak, as they put it.

And so you had a massive CIA operation to try to tilt the internal politics of basically every country south of the border. And we got incredibly just detailed—I’ll give you an example of one declassified document that’s really wild.

There’s one document that is a CIA file with instructions to delete all physical copies of the document at the end that describes how the agency had internally authorized an attempt to assassinate Castro by working through the Meyer Lansky syndicate and hiring two hitmen that were in Miami, but had contacts with the Cuban exile community liaisons within Cuba.

This was a formal agency file that described how a CIA case officer made contact with people from the mob, organized crime, with offers of payoffs, with very detailed logistics. You can find this. I did a whole video on it on my, the like X subscriber thing. I’ll put it on the top of my social media.

Sexual Blackmail Operations

But it also describes a really interesting Jeffrey Epstein-like figure. Robert Mayhew was a CIA asset. The JFK files, they describe how they got—they sponsored a movie to simulate, I believe it was the president of Indonesia having an affair with a blonde woman. They filmed a basically like a porno that would—to create a tape.

And they had very—they describe how they set up the room to make it look like it was, I think in the presidential palace or some hotel room that would have been in that country in order to create what’s effectively a sexual blackmail tape that could then be leaked to the press in order to discredit the President.

And you look at these in formal agency files and on the one hand you go, “Okay, that was the 1960s, that was the early 1960s. That was before there was any oversight on the CIA at all.” It wasn’t until the Church Committee hearings in 1975, 1976 that we even had congressional oversight of the CIA. There was no Senate Intelligence Committee, there was no House Intelligence Committee at the time.

And at that point assassinations had not been outlawed. I mean the CIA was allowed to assassinate people. There’s since been a ban on that. So you go, “Okay, that’s 60 years ago.” But the fact is they did it. The fact is that is within the array of options that folks in covert operations saw as on the table.

JOE ROGAN: Working with the mob.

The CIA, the Vatican, and the Mob: A Historical Alliance

MIKE BENZ: Working with the mob now. But that goes back a long time. I found it totally unsurprising. It’s one of these things. It’s just kind of the general theme. It’s shocked but not surprised. It’s like, holy crap, they put this in writing. What are we doing here, guys? But you’re like, but I’m not surprised they did it because I know they were doing all these other things.

The fact is, the CIA was working with the mob before there was a CIA. Before it was done by the CIA, work with, for example, the Italian mob was done through the Department of War, really, starting in the 1940s because they were the Central Intelligence Agency. Well, at the time, it was the OSS in the 1940s, but it would become the CIA, one of their main logistical points of contact and allies for the resistance against Mussolini in Italy.

Mussolini was cracking down both on the Vatican Church and on the Italian Mafia. And so the strange bedfellows. There’s a great book on this by Paul Williams. I think it was published in 2017. It’s called “Operation Gladio: The CIA, the Vatican and the Mob.” And I recommend this book to everyone because it’s a really, really detailed academic deep dive on this nexus between a religious institution, an intelligence agency, an illegal organized crime syndicate that does all manner of black ops. And it especially focuses on the funding relationship.

The Larry Summers-Jeffrey Epstein Email and Vatican Bank Politics

In fact, this just came out and this sort of gets the utility of these documents. There’s an incredible document that just was released this week where Larry Summers, who was the head of the US Treasury, so not only was he the head of Harvard University and the head of the American money system, but he says he’s trying to explain to Jeffrey Epstein kind of the politics of what’s happening in the Vatican.

And what he says to him is that what’s actually most important going on right now is what’s happening with the Vatican bank, which is kind of the deep politics of the Vatican. And I saw this email and I just laughed and did a little twirly thing in my chair because it’s totally unsurprising, if you read that book “Operation Gladio” that I mentioned, it traces 80 years of this because the Vatican bank was the first offshore bank before offshore banking even existed.

There was an alliance with the Vatican bank during World War II itself, with our Department of War and with organized crime outfits, at least according to the evidence that I find persuasive in this book and that appears to be validated by Italian court documents in the 1990s, when all of this was litigated. Incidentally, that was when the mob was really prosecuted for the first time.

Strange Bedfellows: The Alliance Against Mussolini

But effectively what happened was, you had strange bedfellows. You had the United States who wanted to get rid of Mussolini, you had the Vatican who wanted to get rid of Mussolini, and you had organized crime who wanted to get rid of Mussolini. And because organized crime is very deep in the logistics and unions, they control the ports, they control the streets, they control safe houses.

And if they have allies in a bank, they are able to launder money effectively in order to do black market type trade. And if you have, for example, the support of the US Government to facilitate that and there’s protection offered to those organized crime groups, what you end up having is effectively a state-sponsored mafia with an untouchable bank.

And at the time, because Larry Summers explains this to Jeffrey Epstein in very simple terms, which is, yeah, here you go. “The most important change in the Vatican may not be Pope Benedict’s retirement, but change in leadership of the Institute for Works of Religion, the Vatican’s bank. Because of the Vatican’s status as a sovereign country, it’s exempt from transparency rules of not only Italy, but of the European Union. This status allows its elite clients to evade any scrutiny in their money transfers. Last May, Vatican bank president was fired after Italian authorities opened an investigation into a far-flung bribery scheme.”

And he goes through this. But what’s important here is the British. When we think of offshore banking now, it’s usually associated with Cayman Islands, Jersey, Isle of Man, Panama. Well, Panama is sort of a different story. But it’s usually associated with these kind of small island countries that are formerly their own territory, their own sort of sovereign territory.

You also see this within the United States in Native American reservations with these kind of autonomous zones that can be shielded from certain kinds of public disclosures that a typical finance institution that’s going—

JOE ROGAN: On with Native American banks.

MIKE BENZ: Well, yeah, this was actually part of—

JOE ROGAN: Is that connected to the casinos? Because they have a lot of money from the casinos.

MIKE BENZ: Yeah.

The Octopus Murders and Financial Networks

MIKE BENZ: Yeah, wow. Yeah. In fact, if you watch “The Octopus Murders,” which I think was HBO or Netflix or one of those, great—

JOE ROGAN: I haven’t seen it, but it’s awesome.

The Vatican Bank and CIA Money Laundering Operations

MIKE BENZ: It’s fantastic. And you know, it goes through how this was used effectively by the NSA during the Promise Software scandal and the Iran Contra scandal of the 1980s, where you had basically the NSA and then the US government running money laundering effectively through casinos on Native American sovereign territory.

But the fact is, in the 1940s, the Vatican bank was really the only game in town. This traces back at the CIA level to a lawyer named Paul Helliwell, who was kind of the architect of money laundering for the CIA. And it didn’t even start in really started with the attempt to try to stop Mao in the 1930s and 1940s.

There were the Opium wars in the 1830s, where effectively the British Empire and the East India Trading Company were making ungodly amounts of money by selling opium to China. They would grow the opium on the Golden Crescent or India, and then they would sell it to China with a huge customer base which would bring in huge amounts of revenues to the British Crown.

And then there were two Opium wars that were fought in the 1830s and 50s, I believe, around then. And the Opium wars were China’s attempt to stop the import of opium into China because it had a huge, by that point, opium addiction problem. Opium dens in China were a massive issue within the country. They tried to ban it. And the British Crown pried open the narcotics market through a military conquest of parts of China.

That’s how Britain got control of Hong Kong, which remains a major narco trafficking site connected to Jeffrey Epstein in very weird ways. I’ll just sidebar that. But Mao rose to power in the name of his public campaign was about rejecting the century of humiliation between the 1830s and the 1930s to support Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang, the Chinese nationalists against the Chinese Communists.

The War Department couldn’t get enough congressional allocations, taxpayer money to support that. So they had to find some way to finance the forces that are now effectively Taiwan. Because when they ultimately lost, they fled to the island of Formosa, which is now Taiwan. But they financed that initially, the War Department, the Chinese nationalists, through the narcotics trade, through the basically the narcotics cultivated in the Golden Triangle.

And these operations continued in Cambodia and Laos and were a big part of the JFK expansion of covert operations to this day. In Fort Bragg, the Special Operations Training center is called the JFK. This was a massive expansion of small wars, covert action instead of big military action. So it was mostly spearheaded by CIA rather than DOD or Department of War.

Paul Helliwell and CIA Banking Structures

But what happened was, is Paul Helliwell, in order to be able to traffic illegal narcotics, created a bunch of these CIA banking structures. One’s called Castle Bank and Trust in the Cayman Islands, another one, Nugent Hand in Australia. And when you have that friendly bank that’s protected, then you can move drugs.

This is this overworld underworld alliance between intelligence and organized crime. Because basically every intelligence operation is—I don’t want to say every, but at the operational level, it’s a crime, it’s an act of sabotage, it’s an act of subversion, it’s an act of obstruction, it’s an act of illegal surveillance.

So in order to do an illegal crime, you don’t want to do it yourself because then your fingerprints are on the gun. But if you know people who do illegal crimes for a living in an organized way and have experience in doing it, that allows you to be a very useful extension. And it gets justified in the name of national security.

The illegal narcotics trade set up by Paul Helliwell, who would go on to be the main lawyer for Disney and set up Disney World in Orlando—you can look all this up, you can pull up Paul Helliwell’s Wikipedia, or you can look at the history of Disney, or you can pull up Castle Bank and Trust. You can put any one of these up on screen. This is all fully declassified.

Operation Condor and Iran-Contra

And so they then took that model to South America and Latin America and the Caribbean during Operation Condor, Operation Mongoose. And this is part of what gave rise to the Iran Contra that spawned Jeffrey Epstein, which was the CIA got busted running the same thing it did in 1940s China, which was a drugs for cash for guns operation.

You cultivate—you can’t get enough money in USAID. In the 1940s, USAID didn’t even exist. You can’t get enough money from US taxpayer dollars. You can’t get enough money from private donors who will draft off of the regime change for their own profit. So how do you get your resistance rebels enough money?

That usually comes down to black market trade, whether that’s diamonds in Africa, whether that’s illegal mining activities in South America, or whether that’s narcotics. And the best things to use for this kind of covert financing are small fungible physical materials that can be converted into large sums of cash. For example, a truck full of cocaine can fund an army, a truck full of copper can’t.

And so you had this state sanctioned drug trade, this state sanctioned illegal weapons logistics apparatus, and the state sanctioned money laundering apparatus that started in the 1940s and was utilized throughout the entirety of the Cold War.

Operation Gladio and NATO Networks

On the Mafia side, Operation Gladio was this stay behind network is what they said. Basically these were right wing groups, many or some of which were kind of Nazi adjacent who hated communism. And so even though we fought against the Nazis in Mussolini and Hitler in World War II, there was a utility to preserving a certain homegrown domestic network that really hated communism to assist us on the ground in the war against communism.

And what you saw was in Operation Gladio, this was a NATO wide covert network, alliance of networks, a network of networks that in basically every one of the NATO countries there was a cell or a number of cluster cells that were set up in order to covertly influence the domestic politics of the country.

And if you look at the members of these cluster cells, there’s some of the—you know, Silvio Berlusconi was a part of the so called P2 Lodge that was, that came up in the Operation Gladio files when the Italian government basically put all this on trial in the 1990s and that structure is still used by intelligence today.

If you go to my X feed and you look up, for example, Anne Applebaum and the thread that I did on the Integrity Initiative, if you just put Integrity Initiative and I can show you what these cluster cells look like and it’s fascinating to look at the organizational structure of it.

The British Financial Empire

But I guess what I’m getting to here is with the Mafia and the Vatican at that time, that was the only game in town for offshore banking. If you wanted to have a bank that had no oversight whatsoever. When the British lost the Suez Canal in 1957 and basically had to give up their empire, this is during decolonialization, the British Empire transitioned from a physical empire to a financial empire and moved heavily into offshore banking.

That’s how you got these kind of British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Jersey, Man, all these kind of British offshore banking hubs. And with London as the capital of international finance, the British Empire was effectively able to maintain a comparable level of imperial vassal state control without having physical troops or physical territorial control.

The Vatican bank has lost a lot of its rank, I would say, in the international finance system since the 1940s because the market’s so saturated now with offshore banking hubs. But that explains what’s happening in this Larry Summers, Jeffrey Epstein exchange.

Disinformation and the Files

JOE ROGAN: One of the weirder things about these files is there’s some stuff in there that you go, okay, one thing that we know happens is when something is true, a bunch of stuff gets attached to it that’s both not true and also preposterous that allows you to sort of dismiss all of it together. There’s a lot of people thought about that with Pizzagate, and there’s some stuff that I saw online that was like, George W. Bush was involved in ritual sacrifice or things along those lines, like killing babies and eating people and wild s*.

MIKE BENZ: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: What do you think that stuff is?

MIKE BENZ: I don’t know. I don’t.

JOE ROGAN: Do you think it really occurs?

MIKE BENZ: What I’ll say is, this is a bad week to be a total Pizzagate denialist. You would feel a lot more comfortable about it a week ago than you would this week. I don’t particularly focus or I don’t want to say care. My knowledge set on it is a lot more limited on it because I don’t think it’s a central crux of political influence.

I don’t know if it’s kind of almost an inside joke in a certain way. Jeffrey Epstein himself in these emails is unbelievably trolly. You know, he’ll say things that are the kind of shitposts you say to a buddy or your brother or something that you don’t mean. You know, it’s f*ing cheek. But if you were a cynical out to get you person who somehow obtained that text message, you’d say, oh, look, he said it.

And so there’s a lot of that going on. But the fact is I’ve seen a lot of images shared around the time period of when Pizzagate was popping off in 2016 that all I’ll say is it doesn’t look good or easily explainable. At the same time, a lot of those screenshots I have not, you know, for most of these, for the things I’ve posted about or that I’m talking about here, I’ve gone to the Justice Department file, I’ve looked up the file number. I’ve confirmed whether or not the screenshot is actually what it is.

For those, I have not yet, but I would not—I wouldn’t feel totally confident saying there’s no there there. But that’s about as far as I can go on that.

JOE ROGAN: When you say images, what are you talking about?

MIKE BENZ: Well, there’s a lot of, you know, if you look up pizza, for example, it’s just as a keyword search. You’ll see. Or cheese or something. It looks like in the DOJ database for these new files, you’ll see a lot of things of people talking about pizza in a way that it seems like a code, kind of impossible to imagine to do to a pizza what’s about. You know what I mean?

But I don’t—to me, there’s so much real world provable things in there and also so many kind of more real world implications of allegations that are made in the files that kind of should be explained.

Context and Misinterpretation

A common mistake that I see going around social media this week is people—it kind of gets the reason that the FBI and the President was arguing that these files shouldn’t be released in the first place, which is that people would take things out of context and wildly think things are true that are not because they’re baseless allegations made by some anonymous tipster, but because it’s in an FBI file, people will think it’s true.

Now, I don’t think that’s a reason not to release these. I’m extremely glad these were released. What I’m saying is I’ve seen that phenomenon run away. And some of this I know is kind of baseless in terms of the factual evidence because some of the people, one of the confidential human sources, for example, that is cited the first day of the drop, there was this kind of bombshell claim in the—this is probably the most viral post, the first day of the DOJ release which was a confidential human source. CHS means FBI informant.

JOE ROGAN: Who—

The FBI Files and Confidential Sources

MIKE BENZ: The FBI internal memo describes how this confidential human source reported that Alan Dershowitz was a Mossad agent. And after every meeting he goes back and tells his Mossad handlers what they talked about. And you go, oh my God, it’s an FBI confidential human source. The FBI wouldn’t pay an informant unless they found them credible for this sort of thing.

On the very next page of the files it says President Trump—I’m paraphrasing, you can pull this up if you want—President Trump is controlled by the government of Israel and they have, I forget if he says they have blackmail or something to this effect. Now I don’t know whether either of those things are true or not. I don’t know any more than anybody else who’s done research on this.

Certainly there’s a lot of overlap between Dershowitz and the Israeli government and high level Israeli officials. So in that sense, if that were to be reported, I don’t know that it would be the—who knows about whether that’s true or not. But it plays into a kind of confirmation bias that a lot of people have. And so when you see that in an FBI file, the first thing your instinct is, if that’s your journalism beat, is to write all about it and get millions of views.

And same thing. There’s a MAGA civil war right now that’s happening over issues around Israel. You know, you say, oh my God, it’s been proven. The FBI knows that. Well, Ken Silva, who’s a journalist, shortly after that published a tweet containing a file that had much less engagement where he said, actually, I actually have a copy of this document. Again I’m paraphrasing here, where it matches that document file number, it’s got the same text and it looks like that confidential human source is Chuck Johnson.

Now I saw that and I went, oh my God. Because one morning I woke up to a text from that very person saying, this is about two years ago. I’d never met him, never talked to him, don’t have his number. Somehow he got mine and messaged me on signal to turn myself in because I’m going to prison.

He then proceeded to look up my ex-wife and make allegations that I was a Mossad agent because she was a prostitute from a foreign country and involved in all these, you know, Mossad, black ops type things. Now he didn’t get the name right. He found a different person with a similar spelling that was, I guess busted for prostitution or something, and then makes these giant claims on social media that I have been married to a foreign spy prostitute or something.

And then he goes on to message someone he thinks is my donor and threaten them to cut off funds, because if he doesn’t, then I’ve made the intelligence community very angry, and they have deputized him to tell the person he thought was my donor that the intelligence services of the United States of America will crush the businesses of someone he thought was my donor if he doesn’t cut off the funds he thought that person was giving to me.

Okay, this is that confidential human source, or at least according to the reporting of Ken Silva, the level of things that are untrue about that, combined with the fact that this very person is going around saying that he’s not just an FBI informant, but that he actually can direct the intelligence agencies of the United States to crush someone’s private practice if they don’t change their discretionary donations to someone. Like, that’s the person you’re saying. That person’s comments to an FBI officer or task force prove these claims about Dershowitz and Trump. I mean, that’s ridiculous.

I know firsthand that there’s zero credibility to those claims. Now, they may be true or not, but the fact is, there’s a lot of context to all of these. Just because it’s said in an FBI file does not make it true. We learned that lesson in Russiagate. We learned that lesson with the Steele dossier. But I think that same sort of caution and prudence should be applied with these. And I think ultimately the truth wins out on these things. It just takes longer than you might want to.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, it’s so tangled. You know, the whole thing is just—I think everybody who looks at it realizes this is a rabbit hole that just goes to the center of the earth. And there’s so many people involved in that. What do—here’s the big question that people ask. If there was a Jeffrey Epstein, and it seems like all these things he was involved in. Is there a Jeffrey Epstein right now that we don’t know about?

Professional Fixers and Intelligence Operations

MIKE BENZ: There’s a million of them. A million of them. I mean, this is why I find this—this is not the core of what I focus on, but I find it a really interesting field of study because it helps understand so many other US Government institutions and the relationship between government and private business.

Jeffrey Epstein is part of a class of what are effectively professional fixers. And this is a kind of class of professional who sits not really within a particular government or private sector institution, but in the kind of sticky layer between them that connects them all. And I would say that, for example, people like Mark Rich, Bruce Rapoport, and I can go through all these figures and who they are. Robert Mayhew and these types are just good case studies in how the intelligence world, the business community uses.

Let’s take an example of Bruce Rapoport and you can pull up on screen if you want. There’s a great article I think it’s called, I think it’s from 1988 or 1991. It’s called “Intrigue in High Places. Oil Pipeline, Iraq” and then just Bruce Rapoport. It’s R-A-P-P. Yeah, here you go. “Pipeline, Deal, Intrigue in High Places.” And I’ll describe what happens here in a second.

In fact, there’s a great YouTube video on this as well. If you look up Bruce just on YouTube. Bruce Rapoport, 1988. There’s a great kind of couple minute summary of all this. But effectively what happened was, and let me start this by just—Jeffrey Epstein got to Bear Stearns in 1966, sorry, 1976. And then worked there until 1980. Sorry, just because you have it on screen, maybe I’ll go through this first and then I’ll do the Jeff, because the Jeffrey Epstein connections.

The Iran-Iraq War and the Pipeline Deal

So what happened here was you had the Iran-Iraq War from 1980 to 1988. And Henry Kissinger had a really great quote about this because he asked what is the US Government strategy on this? Because it’s very convoluted and why are we giving weapons to Iran when the Iranian revolution just happened in 1979 that overthrew what was a US government friendly government that was partially installed by the CIA in 1953. We’ve now declared an international arms embargo on them. You know, we’re basically at war with the ayatollahs. Why are we giving them weapons and helping them defeat Iraq?

And the issue was we were also in a kind of war over regional hegemony and oil with Iraq. And so Henry Kissinger’s quote was, “My only wish is that both sides would lose, could lose.” And so what happened was because we didn’t want Iraq to take over Iran and become effectively bigger than Saudi Arabia in the region, we were funding and giving weapons to Iran to try to fend off the much bigger Iraqi army. And then at a certain point in this, we began to back Iraq. We went back and forth supporting Iran-Iraq.

And so Iraq, because of the embargoes on it wanted to build a pipeline to get its oil out. And it was going to pass through Jordan and it was going to abut against the border of Israel. And a major CIA contractor and CIA connected private business called Bechtel, highly, highly influential company. There’s been many, many, many books written on Bechtel and Bechtel is alive and well today.

If there was a saga, for example, around the Stanford Internet Observatory, around the censorship industrial complex, when I visited the Stanford Internet Observatory and I went to the courtyard, Courtyard is sponsored by Bechtel. I think it’s called the Bechtel Courtyard.

But what happened was, is Bechtel was promised by Iraq a billion dollar contract in 1980s money for constructing this pipeline. And the Central Intelligence Agency and the White House National Security Council, both for geostrategic reasons, wanted this pipeline built. The problem was, is they were afraid the Israeli government was going to sabotage the pipeline because Iraq was very hostile to Israel. And there was a lot of tension between the Iraqi government and the Israeli government.

And they were afraid that if Bechtel got this contract and built this pipeline that Israel would—you know, these pipelines are very fragile and all it is because it passes close to it. It’s very possible that that would happen. It would destroy both the CIA’s goal and the private profiteer Bechtel’s goal.

So how do you solve that problem? Well, what the CIA did is what the National Security Council, which is the interagency that the CIA reports to, did is they engaged a private fixer named Bruce Rapoport, who was a Swiss billionaire with close ties to the Israeli government to back channel with the Israeli government some sort of secret agreement that would guarantee that they would not sabotage the pipeline.

And because the Attorney General of the United States—now again, think about this as well as I’m saying this, think about Jeffrey Epstein and think about the character of Bill Barr, for example, who started his career for seven years at the CIA, was highly involved in the CIA’s Iran-Contra and then was Attorney General both in the 1990s during the Epstein connected BCCI scandal and the, you know, when Jeffrey Epstein killed himself or whatever happened to him.

So what happens is, is Bruce Rapoport does indeed use his contacts with the Israeli government to strike an agreement that then would allow the project to be greenlit. But it triggers a special prosecutor’s investigation of the Attorney General himself, Ed Meese, because one of his friends was alleged to be in on the deal. So they argued that effectively that through Bruce Rapoport, the Attorney General was striking a secret agreement with Israel to profit himself. A massive conflict of interest.

And what ended up happening is Bruce Rapoport stepped forward and said, no, no, no, it wasn’t to profit. The terms weren’t to profit the friend, it was the terms we secretly reached with Israel is that they were going to get like a 30% cut on the revenue of the pipeline and that’s what secured the buy in. But the fact is, is Bruce Rapoport was not—now the other part of this is that the National Security Council told basically the overseas development arm of the US Government, formal US Government agency to put American taxpayer funds to help subsidize the pipeline, the Bechtel pipeline.

And that government agency did not want to put up something like $400 million of taxpayer funds on it because they thought Bruce Rapoport was a very shady Epstein-like figure who had all sorts of sordid details about his own past. So that government agency queried the CIA for all records about Bruce Rapoport and the CIA gave them a limited hangout. They said, oh, you know, we only have a few documents that are responsive to it and no red flags.

As it turned out, what the special prosecutor compelled from the CIA is that they had a whole dirty dossier on Bruce Rapoport. And if they had given that to the US Government agency, there couldn’t have been support for the pipeline. Now after all this scandal, the pipeline ended up not being built.

But the point is here you have the same type of person as Jeffrey Epstein, the same regions and countries that are involved in a significant part of the Epstein saga. You have the same structure of the intelligence community, private businesses and back channel deals with government officials. But because there was no 201 file on Bruce Rapoport, he was not formally a CIA asset. He was what’s called a liaison, a contact, a facilitator, a friend of the station doesn’t work for the CIA.

He’s got his own hedge fund, he’s got his own basically finance. He’ll invest in commodities or foreign exchange or private portfolio companies. But sometimes he’ll work with the CIA, sometimes he won’t. Depends on whether it’s good for him. And in this case he thought it was good for him to take this. Who knows what cut he himself got on it.

But the fact is here you have the same type of—you have every layer of this from the Justice Department to the CIA to the private financiers to the private companies to real world geopolitical action. And this appears in my view of it to be exactly the model that Jeffrey Epstein himself replicated and was on parallel track with for his whole career. And I can get into that, but does that make sense in terms of—this type of figure exists basically in every country, in every industry. And they’re not all as prominent as Epstein, but I would argue people like Mark Rich and at the time, Bruce Rapoport kind of were. They don’t all have these child sex trafficking type things.

JOE ROGAN: This is the thing is what he was connected with. It makes me wonder if he didn’t have that sick thing where he liked underage girls, like if he’d never gotten arrested, which was what, 2008 or something. When did he initially get arrested?

MIKE BENZ: 2006. But he was—the plea deal was 2008.

JOE ROGAN: So if that hadn’t happened, like if you just got a guy who’s getting of age prostitutes, we probably never hear about this.

MIKE BENZ: Yeah.

The Censorship-Industrial Complex and Government Surveillance

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The BCCI Connection and Epstein’s Financial Operations

MIKE BENZ: And you can imagine very easily why. Because Epstein was involved in fraudulent financial activities his entire career. He was under SEC investigation at Bear Stearns in 1980 when he was involved in a deal. I think it was St. Joe’s Mineral Company, which is owned by Seagrams, which is owned by the Bronfman family. He got in trouble with the SEC at that time.

As soon as he got in trouble, he left Bear Stearns and went out on his own, but then worked effectively at Bear Stearns off the book for the next decade. According to his own testimony, he had a continuous relationship with Bear Stearns for, I think he said, 31 years. It was basically from the moment from the 1970s, 1976 until 2007, 2008, when Bear Stearns collapsed while Jeffrey Epstein was in jail.

But then Jeffrey Epstein. It appears to me almost impossible that Jeffrey Epstein was not working on BCCI pipeline deals while he was at Bear Stearns. Bear Stearns was one of the three biggest clearinghouses for BCCI transactions. BCCI is the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. Sometimes people call it the Bank of Crooks and Criminals International.

It’s an incredible saga of CIA banking gone wrong. It’s a bank that was started in Pakistan in 1972 and then grew to be the CIA’s main way to covertly back the Mujahideen against the Russians during the Cold War. So we backed Osama Bin Laden, the CIA, we backed the Islamic Mujahideen, the radicals who became al Qaeda and ISIS with billions of dollars of CIA and MI6 and Israeli and Saudi facilitated co-support and financial funds in order to do a Cold War operation just like we talked about with strange bedfellows backing right wing organized crime to stop left wing communism.

We did the same thing in Afghanistan through the Pakistan Afghanistan border to covertly run guns to the Mujahideen. In fact, there’s a great YouTube video that I always like to play so that you can see it for yourself. It’s really short. You can look up 1979, Zbigniew Brzezinski dropping out of a helicopter to tell the Mujahideen that both God and the United States government is on their side.

And the reason this clip I always think is so fun to play is because this was the very moment in 1979 that Jeffrey Epstein appears to have been involved in the BCCI financing of this very operation. So if you turn the volume up and you start at the beginning.

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

NARRATOR: U.S. National Security Adviser Brzezinski flew to Pakistan to set about rallying resistance. He wanted to arm the Mujahideen without revealing America’s role on the Afghan border near the Khyber Pass. He urged the soldiers of God to redouble their efforts.

ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: We know of their deep belief in God. We are confident that their struggle will succeed. That land over there is yours. You’ll go back to it one day because your fight will prevail and you’ll have your homes and your mosques back again. Because your cause is right and God is on your side.

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

The Role of the National Security Advisor

MIKE BENZ: Now that is the National Security Advisor of the United States of America. The National Security Advisor is the highest post in the Cabinet. It is the person the President talks to every day. All intelligence, military and statecraft goes through the National Security Advisor. That is the numero uno.

And he personally, in 1979, this didn’t come out until years later, but we were covertly doing this. So to do a covert operation and this is why I focus on the money side of Epstein from the 1970s to present. Because the money in any covert operation is the most essential part. It’s the only thing that is irreplaceable.

And that if you don’t have it, everything goes away. You lose one person, find another one, you lose one logistics hub can create another one with money. You lose money, you lose everything. You lose your ability to pay your informants, you lose your ability to bribe government officials. You lose your ability to win the support of local institutions.

We lost Vietnam not really so much because we lost at the kinetic war level, but because we lost the ability to fund it, because it got defunded. So we literally couldn’t do it anymore.

CIA Money Laundering Operations

And there’s another great clip just to show how sophisticated CIA money laundering was even by the 1960s. Sorry, I’ll stop doing this after running around clip to clip after this or I’ll chill on it. But if you go to my X account, you can also find this on YouTube. There’s a great, I believe it was CBS in the 1960s. It’s called “In the Pay of the CIA,” I think. But if you type in CIA money laundering, you’ll see this great clip about how sophisticated CIA money laundering was already by the 1950s and 60s.

And the that because everything the CIA does has to be laundered. It’s a spy agency. If it writes a check, if it doesn’t conceal the origins of the money, gig’s up. So everything that is CIA has to move through some sort of money laundering mechanism.

Well, you know, to kind of, I guess borrow a phrase from the President. Somebody’s doing the money laundering. You need outside contacts who do not work at the agency or necessarily for the agency to facilitate that money laundering. And that was done through, for example, the Pakistanis with BCCI as well as contacts in London.

That is what I believe Jeffrey Epstein was doing his entire career after that. From Towers Financial to his tenure with Leslie Wexner to kind of the way I think that he helped model the Clinton Foundation itself with the Clintons in the early 2000s. And his expertise in that I think is what made him useful. Really not. Well, it’s more the connections of, I guess, donors and billionaires around him that made him the most useful.

Epstein’s Early Career and Connections

But the fact is he specialized when he went out on his own formally. He leaves Bear Stearns in 1981 and starts a one man group called Intercontinental Assets Group out of his New York City apartment. He’s not even 30 years old. Right away he gets big level clients like Adnan Khashoggi, who at the time was alleged to be the world’s richest man. He was the Saudi arms dealer.

And to give an impression of how significant this figure was in the weapons trade, he earned more in commissions from Lockheed Martin, Boeing and I think one of the other big military contractors than every other commissions agent in the entire world combined. That’s why there were rumors that he was the world’s richest man.

In fact, we actually had legislation passed because of how influential he was. He was the one who in 1983 flew to the National Security Council, to the White House to orchestrate the Iran Contra affair. He was the Saudi middleman that was part of this operation where the United States used the Saudi middleman Adnan Khashoggi to run guns to Israeli contacts to smuggle into Iran to fight off the Iraqis.

I know it’s a bit of a long sequence, but effectively you can think of it as the United States and Israel with Saudi Arabia in the middle. Now, Adnan Khashoggi was one of the major clients of the CIA’s BCCI bank and he was the host of the CIA’s offshore operation that was created in 1976 called the Safari Club.

The Safari Club and CIA Restructuring

In 1975, 1976, when the CIA started getting handcuffs put on it with the Church Committee hearings. Jeffrey Epstein starts his career at Bear Stearns in 1976, the very moment of the biggest shakeup of the CIA in CIA history. At that moment, the Church Committee hearings were ongoing and the public was seeing, you know, Colby and Angleton holding up a heart attack gun. You know, how the CIA can kill someone and make it look like they died organically of a heart attack.

Operation Chaos had just broke about the CIA funding student groups on American college campuses. COINTELPRO broke, MKUltra broke. It was one house of horrors after another on everybody’s TV that only had three news stations. And so Democrats were completely fired up about getting rid of the CIA or putting massive handcuffs on it, which is what they did.

They created effectively what’s now the Senate and House Intelligence Committee. So there’s oversight of the CIA by the people’s representatives. The first year Carter was in office in 1977, went through what was called the Halloween Massacre, fired 30% of all CIA operations personnel. They massively cut funding.

And so in response to this, you had a set of stakeholders who wanted that CIA dirty work to still be doable, but they didn’t have the legal authorization to run it out of the CIA. So what they did is they took the same group of international partners that the CIA had been working with, that includes Saudi Arabia, Israel, the UK, France at the time, Iran, because this was before the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

They were all part of this thing called the Safari Club, which got its name from the Mount Safari. It was basically a resort club in Kenya, which was the main hub. Just like Colombia, for example, is kind of the main. Was the main US government hub for logistics. It was kind of a foothold for our ability to do work. And Venezuela or Guatemala or Nicaragua or Brazil in Africa, Kenya was our main stronghold.

But Adnan Khashoggi ran that. This was basically a seven, eight country joint covert operations intelligence network. And it was informal, it wasn’t technically the CIA. And it was set up. You can pull the Wikipedia for this, actually, just so you don’t need to take my word for it. The sanitized Wikipedia will tell you everything that I’m saying here.

And it ended up. That network ended up becoming one of the main. Yeah, so if you start at the top, you’ll see that there it is on the right, the Safari Club. It was a covert alliance of intelligence services formed in 1976 that ran clandestine operations in Africa. Now what they’re leaving out here is that it was also Asia played a huge role in Pakistan and Afghanistan and the like.

But these were all these different countries’ attempt to offset the restrictions that the Democrats had put on the CIA. When Reagan gets back to power in 1981, you still have these handcuffs on the CIA. You still have the Democrats controlling the House of Representatives. The Democrats did, you know. So there was an international arms embargo.

The Iranian Revolution and Its Aftermath

First of all, in 1979, the Iranian Revolution happens and it’s blamed on the CIA being cut back. The CIA helped install the Shah in 1953. They argued that if Jimmy Carter hadn’t destroyed the CIA, we would still have Iran as a friendly country. We could have stopped this. We could have nipped it in the bud. We could have had people on the ground.

It’s Jimmy Carter’s fault that he cut the CIA, that we’re in this disaster with the world’s third largest reserve of oil and gas and this hugely geostrategic country now being an enemy of America rather than a friend. So an international arms embargo was put on Iran.

But then Iraq threatened to invade it and we didn’t want Iraq to take it over, so we had to do something illegal if we wanted to help Iran. And it was against international law to give them weapons. But if we didn’t give them weapons it was perceived massive geostrategic geopolitical earthquake that we’d lived with for centuries. So you had to do one illegal action with the gun running.

The Nicaragua Conflict and the Boland Amendment

And then there was an inter-party dispute. The Democrats at that time, the majority, did not want to do intervention in Nicaragua. There was an in-party power called the Sandinista government and there was a rebel faction called the Contras. And Republican donors and stakeholders had interests in Nicaragua and wanted to help the Contras overthrow the Sandinista government.

But there was a party dispute. Democrat donors didn’t profit from that and they at the time had a fairly robust anti-imperialism kind of mindset and were sick of CIA regime change by the early 1980s after everything that was disclosed in just the previous years.

So Republicans wanted to overthrow the Nicaraguan government, Democrats didn’t. Democrats had a House majority and they passed something called the Boland Amendment which forbade any US government funds from going to support the Contras. So this put the Republicans in a pickle.

By the way, this is what’s happening kind of today around Ukraine. If you flip the parties, 100% of Democrats vote for Ukraine funding. The Republican Party is split about it. This is the inverse of what was happening in the early 1980s. 100% of Republicans wanted to fund the Contras against what they called the Soviet aligned Sandinistas. And the Democrats were split but they successfully passed this Boland Amendment.

The Birth of “The Enterprise”

So the CIA was in a pickle. How do you run guns to Iran when it’s against international law? And how do you fund the Contras when it’s illegal to spend US government money to fund them? And so what they came up with is effectively the structure. I think it’s the most useful structure for understanding American statecraft and intelligence activity to this day.

What they came up with is what they called a structure called “The Enterprise,” which the CIA Director Bill Casey referred to as a private, self-sustained, off the shelf, standalone entity that did not exist within the US government but was instead it comprised the money came from outside fixers who would then effectively channel donor money and black market trade to fund the Contras.

So the money didn’t come from US taxpayers, it didn’t come from USAID, it didn’t come from an allocation from the US Department of War or foreign assistance from the Department of State. As it turned out, the money came from cocaine and a couple of other things. But this was the famous Freeway—

JOE ROGAN: Ricky Ross.

The Iran-Contra Connection and Southern Air Transport

MIKE BENZ: Yeah. Gary Webb, John Kerry, and this was the soup that Jeffrey Epstein was coming up in. And a funny story related to this is that the main airline used to transport the drugs and guns in the Drugs for Cash for Guns operation was a CIA proprietary airline called Southern Air Transportation.

Southern Air Transport was the proprietary CIA airline, meaning it was owned and operated exclusively by the Central Intelligence Agency. And it was the airliner that all these aircraft moved through. Iran Contra was basically the early 1980s, up until the mid late 1980s, it was based in Miami.

In 1994, Southern Air Transport, the CIA proprietary airline, which in the intervening time was spun out to not be owned by the CIA, but rather to be owned by someone who had worked for the CIA at the time it was owned by the CIA. So, you know, pretty thin layer there. But it moved from Miami to Columbus, Ohio, primarily to service the Limited. Oh, I know all about this, Joe. I have a video on this.

JOE ROGAN: Look over at Jamie, because he’s obsessed.

MIKE BENZ: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And in fact obsessed with Epstein.

MIKE BENZ: Yeah. Probably told you about this five years ago.

JOE ROGAN: Okay.

MIKE BENZ: Well, there’s a great article, I think, Spook Air and you know, on this.

JOE ROGAN: But how many roads lead back to Ohio?

MIKE BENZ: Most.

JOE ROGAN: Most, if not all. What is this connection with Ohio?

Ohio’s Role in Organized Crime Networks

MIKE BENZ: Well, Ohio was, you know, if you remember, kind of the origins of organized crime in the United States really goes back to the Prohibition era when you had this Midwestern mafia syndicate around Cincinnati and then it moved into Dayton and Columbus and adjacent to Chicago and this whole sort of hub around Prohibition.

And then prohibition was 1920 to 1933. When prohibition ended, all these networks went from black market alcohol to black market drugs because it was no longer black market. They no longer had a business smuggling alcohol. So they moved into the narcotics space.

JOE ROGAN: Which ones? Which narcotics?

MIKE BENZ: Well, it was primarily opium in the 1930s. This was part of opium, really? Well, yeah, because in the 1930s was when you had, as we discussed, the Department of War’s alliance with Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang, the Chinese Nationalists.

The supply for, you know, the supply for heroin for example, or you know, opium. It comes from Asia. It comes from the Golden Crescent, the Golden Triangle. And the way this logistics chain moved was our CIA War Department backed rebel groups in Asia. They sat territorially on the Golden Triangle. They would cultivate the opium. They would basically fly it out on military aircraft.

It went to Europe for processing in France. Was one of the main, this kind of French Connection saga, which again, Jeffrey Epstein is weirdly connected to. And I can tell you about that if you’re interested and then it would go to the basically Italian Mafia folks for the transshipment.

And you had Italian Mafia controlled docks and ports in the United States and New York and New Jersey. And you had CIA protected Italian Mafia groups in Southern Italy, which at the time were national security protected because they were our allies against the communists.

And so you had this drug trade to support foreign policy imperatives. And you can do that. You can run that exercise with pretty much every drug on planet Earth at this point. And it makes it very difficult to stop the drug trade, because by stopping the drug trade, you’re running up against something that your own government considers perhaps unfortunate but necessary logistics hub.

JOE ROGAN: Do you think that’s happening right now with Mexico?

MIKE BENZ: Yeah. Whoa. Well, I mean, think about this. Fast and Furious. Yeah. Wasn’t that long ago.

The Fast and Furious Scandal

JOE ROGAN: The Fast and Furious story is fing bananas. Tell it to people that don’t know, because just the idea that they proposed this and implemented it is so fing crazy.

MIKE BENZ: Yeah, well, so this was a scandal during the Obama administration. Eric Holder was the Attorney General of the United States. He had to step down because he was held in contempt of Congress for jumping on the grenade and not turning over the Fast and Furious files.

Earth to Congress. Note to Congress, who wants to be a hero. By the way, you can do the same thing with the Epstein bill, with the Fast and Furious files. I think everybody in this war on drugs that, you know, we’re so gung ho about, we just captured the President of Venezuela over drugs. It would be awfully nice if you compelled the Justice Department and FBI to turn over the Justice Department and FBI run Fast and Furious files.

But what happened was, is, and I believe this had interagency approval, meaning the White House signed off on it, the Central Intelligence Agency signed off on it. The Department of Defense signed off on it. The State Department signed off on it. The FBI and ATF signed off on it.

This was a gun running operation to send guns to the Sinaloa cartel to have them be able to successfully win a narco drug war against the Los Zetas cartel. The Los Zetas cartel was pilfering oil pipelines. Remember Mexico, the oil wealth of the United States is vastly, disproportionately concentrated in Texas, in west Texas and southern Texas, where it shares oil fields with Mexico.

Effectively, those oil fields go into Mexico is replete with oil. And there are many partnerships between United States oil companies and the Mexican government, Pemex and all the different kind of private, private lines. And this is a big point of geopolitical contention.

But the fact is, is one of the things that organized crime groups do in order to get money for their own syndicate because they’ve got effectively military control of a territory, is if a pipeline runs through that territory, they can simply cut open the pipeline and steal the oil.

This is for example what was happening with our CIA backed rebel groups in Syria. We’re taking the oil. I mean we would literally, you know, our spunky moderate rebels would, you know, literally cut open Syrian pipelines and take the oil. And this was one of the ways to support, you know, you can support it with drugs, you can support it with black market oil.

And by the way, while I’m on the topic, if you pull up and I have this on my X if you type in Institute for Peace or just type in Institute Peace Drugs. The US Government, the US Institute for Peace told the Taliban not to shut down the drug trade after they took power in 2022. They said it would have a devastating negative impact on the local economy if they didn’t keep growing. What was then, you know, 90, 95% of the. Well, yeah, if you, Well I think click the next image. Wait, next image. Yeah, here you go.

So this is, this is a, you know, we give the US Institute of Peace at the time we gave them $55 million a year. The US Institute Peace was created by act of Congress in 1990.

The Taliban’s Opium Ban

JOE ROGAN: This headline is wild. “The Taliban’s successful opium ban is bad for Afghans and the world.”

MIKE BENZ: Yes, right, right. So now remember, just about, you know, the Taliban had just taken back power that happened in the, you know, in the early Biden administration. The Taliban, if folks recall, cut. So we, the CIA was help and the US military as well as their allies and regional allies were cultivating the opium on the Golden Crescent for a noble cause to win the Cold War against the evil Soviets.

This was a big part of the funding for the Mujahideen and this was one of the big scandals that ended up enveloping BCCI, the CIA’s bank because it was the way, because it was non compliant with any banking regulations, it all moved offshore. The drug money, the drug logistics chain that the CIA built for the Mujahideen then moved through the drugs money laundering chain at the CIA bank.

And this apparatus had scaled for 20 years by the late 1990s when the Taliban like the Chinese wanted to shut it down. When the Taliban took power in the 1990s and they did that, they cut the opium down to effectively zero in 1999. And this is all open source.

And then we invade Afghanistan in 2001, 2003, it becomes a US military occupied zone. And it goes from 0% of the world’s heroin to 95% of the world’s heroin, all under US military occupation. In fact, we installed their dictator whose brother was the main drug kingpin of the whole country.

And some of this moved through, some of this moved through the Cold War CIA backed Turkish Gray Wolves outfit. And there’s a funny quote, I think in the Michael Hastings article on Stanley McChrystal where Stanley McChrystal’s team refers to Hamid Karzai’s funny little hat that he wore. Hamid Karzai was the CIA installed, you know, strongman after we took over Afghanistan.

He referred to his hat as “the Gray Wolf’s vagina.” I mean, basically saying like this is the, you know, the drug logistics orifice. But leaving that aside, what I’m getting to is you have this banking network, you have all these logistics chains.

Jeffrey Epstein’s Connection to Bear Stearns and BCCI

Jeffrey Epstein, his first 10 when his come up is made through this whole network. It turns out that Bear Stearns opened a trading desk to clear BCCI transactions in 1978. Jeffrey Epstein’s mentor, the person who actually recruited him to apply to Bear Stearns was a guy named Ace Greenberg.

Ace Greenberg then was a senior executive at the time. And then I think in 1978 or 1979 he becomes CEO. So the head of Bear Stearns and he sets Jeffrey Epstein up with his daughter. So Jeffrey Epstein is a young kid. People wonder how did Jeffrey Epstein make partner at Bear Stearns so fast?

Well, there’s a couple explanations. One is the guy who brought him into the firm quickly became CEO thereafter. And Jeffrey Epstein was dating his daughter. The New York Times actually reported this about a month and a half ago by getting the insider testimony of a dozen people who worked at Bear Stearns at the time. So he’s dating the boss’s daughter.

But also Ace Greenberg as the CEO would have to approve all of these transactions and it looks like was involved in these clearinghouse activities. What happened was Bear Stearns cleared about $13 billion worth of BCCI transactions.

And it looks like these transactions were involved in the very same Adnan Khashoggi, Sasodi and Doug Leese, who was a British arms dealer that Jeffrey Epstein was flying to London to meet with and working with all those years.

And Bear Stearns was doing it through this entity called Capcom, which was what the Senate report on the BCCI scandal referred to as “the bank within the bank” of BCCI. So kind of the inner Sanctum of now that Capcom was owned by Kamal Adham, who was the head of. He was the chief spy for Saudi Arabia.

So Bear Stearns, the New York Times reports, based on a dozen of these, you know, insider testimonies, they got like three of Epstein’s bosses on the record to talk about what he was doing there. Amazingly, the New York Times does not mention a single deal name in the entire 20,000 word report.

JOE ROGAN: Why do you think that is?

The Epstein Files and Government Protection

MIKE BENZ: It might not be news fit to print. Also, I can be charitable and say they just might not know. They might think that. I don’t think that the New York Times has a pinky of the specialization in Jeffrey Epstein cinematic universe knowledge that your random anonymous egg account on X has. So they might not know about Bear Stearns doing BCCI transactions. They might not know what you know. If you don’t know the material, you don’t necessarily know what to ask. That’s me being charitable.

Also, you know, some of the witnesses may have said that they don’t want to talk about specific deal names because that would tarnish, you know, the folks involved in that deal for association with Jeffrey Epstein. There could be a lot of reasons. I’m trying to be charitable here.

But the fact is they all said Jeffrey Epstein moved up so fast because he was dating the boss’s daughter. And he was put on the biggest and most lucrative deals very quickly within the firm given the incredible volume that Bear Stearns appears to have been moving through. BCCI, and BCCI being the hottest ticket in town then in the late 1970s, it was literally the main vehicle for the US government to covertly launder funds.

Capcom, according to the Senate intelligence report and the Justice Department investigations, was the main vehicle for funding the mujahideen. 50% of those trades. And they laundered it illegally, which requires a brokerage, you know, a clearinghouse to prove it. You know, the way this is set up is you have a bank, you’ve got a money launderer and you’ve got a clearinghouse.

The bank was the CIA Bank BCCI. The money launderer was the CIA’s literal direct partner in this. The Saudis. CAPCOM was run by the chief Saudi spymaster. And then in 1982, Jeffrey Epstein obtained a fake Saudi passport. Sorry, it was a fake Austrian passport because that was a big loophole passport during the Cold War for spies, but said his residence was Saudi Arabia. We didn’t find this out until 2019 when his safe was raided.

But at that exact time, Jeffrey Epstein has this fake Saudi passport. And it’s being done to support the CIA backed rebel group, the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. But that requires a clearinghouse to clear those money laundering trades. They were using these mirrored commodities trades, which is this technique of basically selling to yourself to make money look clean so that it looks like profit, it looks like you won or lost it in a market trade rather than through drug money. And then they were then sending that on to the Mujahideen.

But the fact is, at the same time that that was happening, Adnan Khashoggi, who had become Jeffrey Epstein’s client in the 1980s when he went on his own, was the one facilitating the weapons. You have this drugs for cash, for guns. The person, so the bank that’s turning the drugs into clean cash, that the head of the Saudi spymaster is running that part of the banking side. And then you’ve got the Saudi arms dealer who is moving it illegally into Iran, working hand in glove with the CIA and the National Security Council.

The whole time you have an illegal financial enterprise protected at the highest level by the United States government, the US Intelligence Services, and by proxy, the Justice Department itself. Can you imagine the Justice Department prosecuting it while that operation was ongoing?

The Rolando Masferrer Case: A Blueprint for Protection

Any defendant, you know, here’s. You asked what are the great reveals in the JFK files? And I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring up the case of Rolando Masferrer. There’s an incredible document in the JFK files that Tulsi Gabbard released last year, which is a CIA document that describes, I think the quote is, “massive damage” if the Justice Department pursues a criminal case against a guy named Rolando Masferrer.

If you just type in Rolando Masferrer, JFK files 2025 release or like massive damage or something like that, you’ll see this. It’s an unbelievably incredible document. What it documents is that there was a dispute between the CIA and the State Department. The State Department sets foreign policy. The CIA is supposed to serve covertly the State Department. The CIA is the junior seat at the table.

Nobody ever goes from being head of the State Department to head of the CIA. That’s a demotion. The CIA is supposed to be kind of the, I use like the Sopranos reference. Silvio comes in and shakes down the hairdresser shop or whatever for the money it owes the family. If you are that hairdresser, it’s easy to think that Silvio runs the Mafia because he’s the one who shows up at your house, breaks your windows, breaks your knuckles and takes your money. But Silvio’s not doing that because he runs it. He’s doing it because the person setting the policy of the enterprise, Tony, is the boss of it.

The way it’s supposed to work is the State Department sets policy and the CIA does or organizes the plausibly deniable dirty work to achieve it, if that is necessary to achieve that foreign policy. This is why there was a lot of debate in 1948 about whether the CIA should even take on this role. This is this great 1948 George Kennan memo that says maybe we should have an office within the State Department called the Bureau of Organized Political Warfare. And then two months later they decided the CIA would take that.

But the fact is it’s basically a State Department function. But CIA is supposed to defer to State. But what happened was is there was a factional dispute between State and CIA over Cuba policy. The State Department thought that the CIA backed rebel groups in Miami were being too aggressive and too provocative, too hot headed doing acts of terrorism and sorts of things that looked bad to the international community. JFK was trying to rein them in.

But the CIA, the careers and folks there wanted to take a more aggressive posture. And so one of the CIA’s key assets and ringleaders had a logistics hub with a massive CIA backed Cuban exile community network at that time in the early 1960s in Miami thought that JFK was being too impatient, too cautious. They wanted to invade basically a section of Haiti departing from Miami to use that as a base to then do kinetic attacks against Cuba.

The State Department learned that this CIA backed network led by Orlando Masferrer was going to do this and stopped it. They had a customs and border agent basically who was like manning the docks and caught them as like 300 of them were departing to try to take over a part of Haiti to do this. And then the State Department directed the Justice Department to pursue criminal charges against Rolando Masferrer. In steps the CIA. And you know if you can find this memo, you know it’s M-A-S-F-E-R-R-E-R.

JOE ROGAN: His name’s on it.

MIKE BENZ: If you, if the, the title of it is like “Massive Damage” that would. That would accrue. You can probably also just find it on or just. Yes, yeah, Massive damage. There you go. “Estimate of damage which could accrue to CI Miami through prosecution of the Orlando Masferrer Haitian invasion group.”

Again we just learned the existence of this document last year. This is from the 1960s. Now it says the decision by the Justice Department to seek a grand jury indictment against Rolando Masferrer and certain of his associates is a potentially explosive matter which could result in extensive damage to CIA activities in Miami. Recent adverse publicity on the national scene and in the Miami area have added substantially to the already sizable embarrassment potential.

Can you imagine what these memos looked like for Jeffrey Epstein? Some of the main sectors of danger to CIA equities are described below. Basic national publicity regarding student and foundation topics have already attracted attention of the local press to the CIA in general. Usually any reference to CIA covert activities leads press to check files for references of any such activities locally. However, before this action can be taken, the story regarding. And then he goes over the Pan Am foundation, the University of Miami, which hosted JM Wave.

The University of Miami, then the CIA’s largest station house in the world, it was called JM Wave, was hosted in a facility off of the University of Miami campus. Again, the biggest CIA station house in the entire world, the CI. So it goes on to say that, okay, there have been all these. The top paragraph is saying we’re under a lot of pressure. Justice Department, the public is already losing support for the CIA because of all these other disclosures. And it will be disastrous if you pursue the prosecution of him because Rolando Masferrer is going to squeal.

So I think if you go down to the next page, he says, as has been the case for the past six years, and he says, basically the CIA has been working with the head of the president and treasurer of the University of Miami. They’re extending the cooperation and all of this. So basically all these touch points that Rolando Masferrer’s network connects to will be exposed. And they go over all these, what were previously redacted CIA cutouts in the area.

And then it goes on. The memo says, even if the above circumstances did not exist, we would remain concerned regarding the possible effects of the prosecution of the Masferrer group. Although no station agents or persons with whom the Miami station has contractual arrangements are among the persons arrested or those who will be prosecuted, it will be very easy for the defense to drag CIA Miami into the case.

The defense has only to obtain testimony, true or perjured, they conceivably true, from one of the defendants or summon as defense witnesses one or more disaffected former agents of the CIA station in order to begin a chain reaction surfacing such detail and rumor concerning CIA operations against the Cuban target. Given the sizable reduction of infiltration and redaction, a general feeling of frustration, lack of support for Cuban freedom attributed to passive US Policy, basically saying it would undermine our entire operation against Cuba and the American people support for it.

If the Justice Department indicts these people who just committed this crime because they can very. The whole network is CIA and they can just call to the stand that their friends and associates had been talking with the CIA about this well before they had done it and that would be a massive scandal.

Now that’s just one example here. And what goes on to happen is there’s a negotiation between the State Department and CIA about whether to bring the case, how to bring the case, how to shape. There’s a follow up memo on this which is totally incredible. That I think is more the logistics on this.

The agreement they reach is that the State Department wins. Nominally they do bring the prosecution, but they bring it in a highly limited and tepid way. And they agree to the CIA’s demands to limit lines of inquiry, to file motions against entering anything into discovery that might basically reveal the CIA networks in this. And they agree to have CIA general counsel person on the prosecution team in order to personally make sure that the Justice Department stays in line.

And if something looks like, if the judge grants discovery for something that might reveal the CIA’s role in it, drop that line of prosecution so that it can’t be entered into evidence. And this is what you see time and again is how these networks get protected, whether it’s drug cases or whether it’s foreign policy scandal cases, whether it’s money laundering cases.

I believe in the Marc Rich case, part of, I think his lawyer cited at one point, or maybe it was in his pardon application, the work that he had done for US Intelligence services as part of the reason that he should be granted leniency.

Epstein’s Decades of Protection

But the point I’m getting to here is given Jeffrey Epstein’s involvement in the BCCI network, given Jeffrey’s involvement in the 1990s, with all the foreign policy activities happening in the Middle East at that time, given Jeffrey Epstein’s involvement through the early 2000s Clinton era and everything, given his involvement in everything from Israeli to Saudi to British to French high level government officials, can you.

Jeffrey Epstein was investigated by the SEC in the 1980s. He was one of the two people who ran the biggest Ponzi scheme in history at the time in the United States, the Towers financial collapse. Epstein’s business partner goes to jail for like 30 years or 20 years or whatever. But Epstein skates completely free.

Epstein gets involved in this huge fraud in the US Virgin Islands with this you know, like billion dollar fraud case in the US Virgin Islands. Never prosecuted for any of it. Why is that? Well, one is, you know, he may have. We know in the US Virgin Islands case he was sponsoring the campaigns basically of the politicians there. The prosecutor’s answer to the politicians could be that.

But I would be shocked if there in 40 years of this Where’s Waldo Forrest Gump. He’s always in the room. In 40 years of American foreign policy and intelligence activity, you know, money sourcing for that. For all the crimes that Epstein committed, the concern was the same one they had with Orlando Masferrer. Don’t bring the case. And if you do, bring it in a highly limited way.

And that’s exactly what happened in 2006, the first time he was indicted. Everybody was up in arms that it was a sweetheart plea deal. It limited. It gave protection to all co-conspirators known and unknown. And it was swooped in quickly before there was a trial in full so that lines of evidence couldn’t be opened about the network.

JOE ROGAN: It’s just crazy that statutory rape is what took it all down. Right. Because it’s underaged hand jobs. Right? That’s what took it all down.

MIKE BENZ: Yeah. I mean, well, it seems to be what took Jeffrey Epstein down.

JOE ROGAN: Kind of crazy.

The DynCorp Scandal and the Currency of Influence

MIKE BENZ: Even that has a really interesting geopolitical history. There was a similar scandal in the early 2000s with a private military contractor called DynCorp, which again runs through this Adnan Khashoggi kind of Middle Eastern network. DynCorp got in trouble for trafficking, facilitating the traffic. Major US military and CIA contractor for logistics and institutional support and military assistance on the ground for the US military all over the world.

They got in trouble moving, basically trafficking underage kids to Middle Eastern sheikhs. And I believe in the early 2000s, and I believe the reason that was alleged by Congress that they did that was to juice the deals with them. Basically these people who were critical, if you’re operating on the ground in Kuwait or pick your Middle Eastern country in order to serve your purpose for the US government to be this outside plausibly deniable but extensively infrastructured professional support outfit on the ground, you need the support of the local government. You need the support of the local high level officials. They need to be happy.

And there’s several currencies for that. There’s financial payoffs and there’s other things they might like, like parties and young women, especially in places where being with the very young female is not illegal. And so what DynCorp I believe got busted doing, and you can look up the DynCorp scandal here, was doing this. And I believe their argument was, well, you wanted us to do this thing on the ground. You wanted us to help the US Military and kind of cover support nodes that were happening here. We had to do it somehow. This is part of what helped us do that.

I would not be surprised if the Epstein trafficking apparatus started with similar motivations. It’s not necessarily for blackmail, but because it makes clients or customers or VIP people happy. It makes them owe you something. It makes them want to get involved in a deal you do, even if the deal is not one they would ordinarily do because they just want to stay close to you because you’re their supplier of their vice, of the thing that they want but can’t get.

You know, if you’re a 70 year old billionaire, you can’t walk into a bar and leave aside the underage thing. You can’t walk into a bar and meet an 18 year old who’s, I presume these things are facilitated at private parties. And it needs to, you know, for a lot of these guys, it has to be discreet. You know, they’ve got wives, they’ve got reputations.

The Currency of Access in Professional Networks

And there’s an aspect of this that plays out at every institution. I worked at a New York law firm and there’s ways that you can make partner. At least this was the vibe that I felt. Some people make partner because they’re really good technically at what they do. They’re just amazing. They’re just technical whizzes on the minutiae of how to structure a merger or acquisition. They’re just really great at structuring an offshore banking transaction. Or they’re really, they just know absolutely everything about tax law.

There’s some people who move up because of nepotism. You know, they’re the brother and they’re the son in law of a major partner. There are some people who make partner because they know one, they brought in one client who’s just a really big rainmaker. And there’s some people who move up because they open doors to partners while they’re associates. They introduce them to someone, they host events, they’ve got tickets to exclusive things. And the partners just like being around that person because they get access to that person in a currency that they can’t get on their own.

And that includes hosting cool exotic parties, having attractive women. I’ve never been convinced that the central role of the Epstein young girl, in my view, sidebar of the Epstein money laundering story is that it was for blackmail. Part of this is because the moment Jeffrey Epstein formally, officially threaten somebody with blackmail and that person tells his wife, and that wife tells her friends, and that gets out to somebody else that knows Jeffrey Epstein, Jeffrey Epstein’s access goes away overnight. That’s the sort of thing that even a rumor of that spreading and nobody else is going to want to do business with them.

JOE ROGAN: So you think people just assume it’s blackmail because that is how you would blackmail someone, especially underage girls?

MIKE BENZ: I think it is very possible that there could have been indirect blackmail, meaning Epstein passes it on to an intelligence service to, you know, to a corporate espionage client or something. And they use that for their own purposes. But even then, I mean, imagine for example, if, you know, like on the Bill Gates thing, like there was an, you know, Bill Gates gets an email, “I have a video of you sleeping with this person.” And you know, or somebody much lower level, the moment they send that to the press, if, you know, in order to, they figure they have nothing to lose.

I mean, there’s not been anybody in the seven years that’s transpired who said I was personally blackmailed by Jeffrey Epstein. I think because the moment you do that, nobody comes to your parties anymore. You lose all the access, you lose all the deal flow, you lose all the goodwill that you’ve generated. Because this rumor, people are very risk averse, especially at that level.

JOE ROGAN: Right, but just to have it over their head and never use it though, right?

MIKE BENZ: Well, I think that what you could have is because he does his own nefarious stuff, he could compile it so that if they ever go out, if they ever threaten him with something, he’s now got something on them. And I’ve seen some correspondence that, you know, in the files that that looks like that might not be an impossible scenario.

JOE ROGAN: Do you think that’s how Jeffrey Epstein got in that position in the first place, that they knew he had this kink?

Learning from the Khashoggi Network

MIKE BENZ: No, not at all. I mean, Adnan Khashoggi had the same thing. Adnan Khashoggi was running around with dozens of young and apparently underage girls the whole time. I think that Jeffrey Epstein probably learned how powerful that can be through that network. Seeing that that’s what powerful people do. That gives them something that gets them a lot of local influence and wins them a lot of favor.

JOE ROGAN: That’s a very specific illicit desire to want underage people. How do you even find out that someone’s into that?

MIKE BENZ: Well, I don’t think that the majority or anything close to it of the women were technically, I think it was largely very young, you know, barely legal, so to speak. But, and I know that there were cases of underage, but I, you know, I…

JOE ROGAN: Think most of it, it was just…

MIKE BENZ: Most of it was just very, very young. But not, not like, like 20 year old, not like 13 year old type thing. And then, yeah, remember, because this is an international enterprise and many of the clients are in countries that don’t necessarily have the same norms about that that we do, you can very easily see someone getting involved in that just because girls juice deals.

And so I don’t think that Epstein, I have not seen evidence, and in my view, you don’t need any of that to understand the core part of the Epstein story that has relevance to your life today in terms of your own government and the workings of power and corporate finance and the like. But I do think that girls juice deals and the fact that he had the coolest parties on a private island with the hottest girls is something that…

JOE ROGAN: Brought in a lot of intellectuals, stimulating conversations, scientists, all these very interesting people. So that was part of the thing, right? That was the draw.

The Power of Social Currency

MIKE BENZ: Try hosting a cool party as a guy with a bad ratio, so to speak, with a sausage party. And when you develop a reputation for having attractive women at the parties you host, you become, you become an important person to know in the network because basically every male has, that has a desire for attractive women. Not saying underage, obviously, but that is a universal biological desire for men to want to be around attractive women.

JOE ROGAN: And what did they do for gay guys?

MIKE BENZ: I have no idea.

JOE ROGAN: Is that a part of the file or the lore?

MIKE BENZ: I’ve not seen evidence of it, or if I have, I can’t recall it offhand. But again, the whole point is he’s…

JOE ROGAN: Throwing these very attractive cool parties to get all these people together.

How Social Capital Facilitates Deals

MIKE BENZ: But that’s what juices deals. Take this scenario. Epstein’s running a fund, a donor, a colleague, someone that he’d like to do a favor for, or an intelligence service says, “Hey, we’re trying to get a pipeline built in the Middle East. We need a facilitator to help arrange private outside funding for it. So this thing can be constructed. And it doesn’t look like it’s coming from the US government, but the US government will provide some sort of loan guarantee or something on it. But we can’t raise enough money to do this. It needs to come from the outside. But it would really help American national security. And there’s probably something in it for you if you can get this done.”

Epstein then goes out and says to, then puts out, basically tries to make contact with people in his network who might be interested in that deal, and then goes and goes out to five people. Two of them are in the space locally. The deal terms look good. They want to do it 100%, no hesitation. Then two people say, “Well, listen, it’s a good idea in concept, but I don’t know, the risk profile on it looks a little high. This normally would not be something that my team would clear. We, you know, it’s interesting, but, you know, I, it’s just, it’s a little rich for my blood in terms of the risk profile.”

But Jeffrey Epstein asked them to do it. And Jeffrey Epstein, you know, for the past three years of their lives, has been the best weekend they’ve ever had, has, you know, has made them feel alive again in their, you know, mid-50s or 60s, has opened all sorts of other deals for them, and this deal might work out. So I’m afraid that if I say no to Jeffrey Epstein on this deal, I’m not going to get an invite to the next party. I’m not going to be able to get laid again with women I find attractive or that yada, yada. And Epstein hooks those up.

I will do, I’ll get in on this deal just because I want to be in the good graces of Jeffrey Epstein. Not because the deal is a standalone thing. It’s because it’s juiced by the girls, the parties, the lifestyle that Epstein allows you to have access to.

JOE ROGAN: But in the public eye, the narrative is underage girls. And this is the thing that makes it so disgusting when people talk about it. Everyone says, “F* kids on the island.” This is the big conspiracy about it. And this is the reason why people are so outraged about it.

The Epstein Files and CIA Connections

MIKE BENZ: My concern with the runaway train on that is that it’s a massive manhunt for something that it may be true. To me, it’s a needle in the haystack. It might be true. Good luck looking for it.

And when I think about it logically, with the role that Epstein played between BCCI, Iran Contra, Latin American politics, African politics, Asian politics, major world foundations, you don’t need… It would seem ludicrous to me that Epstein doesn’t… I mean, it’s not impossible. But logistically, if Epstein ever directly threatens someone proactively, that is, if the person tries to blackmail Epstein, Epstein could reactively say, “Well, I’ve got sh*t on you too.”

But proactively, and really, really do someone in like that, and word gets around that that happens, everything, everything he built goes. The whole Rolodex finds out. And then even if the rumor’s not… even if he didn’t… if that rumor existed, people aren’t going to want to go to the parties because now that’s not an unfettered good time. That is like, “Oh, he did this to this guy. I know.”

And so, and the fact that these sorts of things, they have a value way beyond blackmail. They have a value in terms of bringing people in network and keeping clients and customers happy and providing access. And I think that the focus on that… listen, if there were any sort of receipts whatsoever on that after all these years, if there was something really good to chew on on that thread, I’m open minded about it.

But my concern is the fixation on this. You think about the sort of pie chart of what the Epstein cinematic universe can tell you about the world. Even if it’s true, it’s a very, very, very small fraction of that.

Epstein’s FOIA Requests to the CIA

And this gets back to… in 1999, I mentioned Jeffrey Epstein FOIAed the Central Intelligence Agency in 1999 for all records about himself. And then he did it again in 2011.

Now, Jeffrey Epstein was not a public figure at all in 1999. He didn’t come into public awareness, public attention until 2001, 2002, when he started flying… when he flew Bill Clinton around post-presidency, Bill Clinton around on his Africa tour around the time of the start of the Clinton Foundation. And everyone was wondering, “Whoa, who’s this eccentric billionaire who is personally flying around on his private jet the President of the United States for the past eight years?” And that’s when the Jeffrey Epstein celebrity story started.

But he was a private figure in 1999 when he FOIAed the Central Intelligence Agency for records. And we just learned this in the files this week. The response… we don’t actually have the underlying… what’s in the files is a 2011 FOIA response to Jeffrey Epstein’s lawyer. Jeffrey Epstein did this through his lawyer using the Privacy Act. This is a way to basically kind of anonymously FOIA the CIA to basically keep communications between the CIA and your lawyer for information you’re entitled to under the Privacy Act about yourself.

And we don’t have the underlying letter in the files, tragically and for whatever reason. But what we do have, because I would expect that to be an enclosure to the CIA response… but the fact is, is anybody who wants to be a hero right now? And I have it up on my X account. I have in the thread that I did on this, the reference, the file reference numbers. These are not classified documents. FOIA responses are not classified.

So anybody right now can FOIA the Central Intelligence Agency for all records and communications related to the CIA’s written communications with Jeffrey Epstein via his lawyer, both in 1999, 2011. But the 2011… what it says is, “We have received your request for your client Jeffrey Epstein’s records search under the Freedom of Information Act. We’ve granted the request to search for all open and acknowledged agency affiliations between Jeffrey Epstein and the CIA. We have run that search and the answer is no documents are responsive to the request.”

And then it says in the next paragraph, “With respect to your request that touches on classified documents, we can neither confirm nor deny the existence or non-existence of any such documents. So you can consider this a partial denial of your FOIA request.”

Now what’s so interesting about that is you may think if you read that, that Jeffrey Epstein just requested any public facing links between him and the CIA, or just a general “what do you have on me that the public can search?” just to see. First of all, the fact that he did that alone twice in 1999, 2011 says something.

But you might think, “Okay, well he just wants to know if other people might think that he’s CIA.” He’s moving up in the world in 1999. He’s about to be a massive public figure. He wants to know if other people FOIA the CIA for records on him, what they will see.

But it turns out that response to a FOIA, partial granting of the FOIA to look for open and acknowledged agency links and partial glomar “neither confirmed nor deny existence, non-existence” is a stock CIA FOIA response whenever you FOIA the CIA for someone’s personnel files.

The Classified Connection

Which leads to the question, because the fact that the CIA says “we consider this a denial of your request for classified… for things that touch on classified matters” means that he asked… he didn’t just ask for all open and acknowledged links between the CIA and himself. He asked for something, and whatever that thing was, it touched on something classified.

There would have been no glomar if… there would have been nothing to deny about the request if it had only been limited to open and acknowledged links. To me this is a bombshell and should prompt Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie and the 427 members of the House of Representatives and 100% of the U.S. Senate to pass the same bill that the United States Congress did in 1992 for the JFK Records Collection Act, when the CIA was forced by law to stand up an independent auditing body to review all classified records relating to the JFK assassination for the first time ever and then declassify them over months and years through the work of that independent board.

The existence of this correspondence we just learned about this week alone should prompt a 427 to 1 and 100% Senate to do the same thing they just did with DOJ files for CIA originated files. That’s actionable immediately. Who’s going to want to be on the other side of that in Congress?

“No, the CIA’s records about Jeffrey Epstein, prolific child sex trap…” However you want… whatever you see in the Rorschach inkblot test of the Epstein universe, I think it would be very hard to be… if that bill gets introduced for a sitting member of Congress to be on the other side of it. I think it would pass and it would legally compel the CIA to turn over what I think are quite possibly, arguably very likely, 40 years of CIA documents referencing Epstein.

Why the CIA Must Have Records

The CIA would not be doing its job if it didn’t have records about Jeffrey Epstein. Jeffrey Epstein was a counterintelligence threat with all the foreign countries that he was dealing with. If he had been a double agent sort of thing, the CIA would not be doing its job if it was not keeping tabs.

Epstein’s network was a key financial and logistics hub in highly geopolitical, sensitive areas of operation of the CIA. The economics division of the CIA, let alone the operations division, is going to have to keep analysts informed about money flows in those countries. And when you add in the fact that he represented Adnan Khashoggi’s money, who was the CIA’s main point person for 10 years, the literal central linchpin, and his money is being handled… there’s no way.

And you would now have a legal mechanism to enforce CIA declassification if Congress forces it. Now, the other part of it is, okay, why hasn’t the CIA turned this over before? You could argue it’s a Rolando Masferrer case. It would embarrass the Agency. It would mean in Congress their funding is going to get decimated because they’re toxic. You can argue it’s foreign governments that don’t want the…

But part of it is the CIA is not allowed to do this unless Congress forces them. These are classified documents. I mean, it could charitably volunteer to ODNI by conducting an internal task force that voluntarily asks Tulsi Gabbard to declassify these. I wouldn’t hold your breath on that.

But this is immediately actionable and it would solve the mystery. All we need is one brave member of Congress to get the ball rolling and stand up that bill. And you can just copy paste the 1992 JFK Records Collection Act and just substitute JFK for Jeffrey Epstein.

The Circumstances of Epstein’s Death

JOE ROGAN: What’s your take on the circumstances around his death?

MIKE BENZ: I don’t know, I…

JOE ROGAN: It’s weird that they took a guy who is one of the most high profile defendants ever and you put him in jail with a mass murderer.

MIKE BENZ: Yeah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Kind of crazy. You put him in jail with a cop who had killed drug dealers. A juiced up gigantic cop.

MIKE BENZ: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Who was obviously a psychopath. And then 18 days before he died, he complained that that guy tried to kill him.

MIKE BENZ: Yeah, I mean, it doesn’t look good.

JOE ROGAN: It’s just crazy that this guy wasn’t in protective custody. It’s crazy that the cameras go down. It’s crazy that the footage that they’ve released is weird because it’s missing. It’s missing time.

Bill Barr’s Connections

MIKE BENZ: And it’s crazy that it happened under the watch of an Attorney General who himself was so deeply embedded in the Epstein network his whole life. I mean, from the weird kind of coincidence of Bill Barr’s father, Donald Barr and Jeffrey Epstein’s Dalton School, to the fact that Bill Barr started his career in the CIA during the Iran Contra operation that Jeffrey Epstein appears to have been doing the covert money laundering for.

I mean Bill Barr was… he went to law school, trained to be a lawyer while he was at the CIA. And then his main job was being the CIA’s blocker and tackler to obstruct. He was the CIA’s point of contact to Congress during the Iran Contra scandal that Jeffrey Epstein was so deeply involved in and was blamed in the press at the time for being the person at CIA blocking Congress from seeing the CIA documents that were so central to the scandal.

Then he becomes the Attorney General of the United States and he writes the pardons of the BCCI officials who… Robert Mueller was co-leading that investigation at the time. This is in the early 1990s, the first time Bill Barr. So you have the BCCI Bear Stearns multibillion dollar operation that appears to me that Jeffrey Epstein was working on and then took the clients from that deal as his own personal clients when he went private on his own.

And Bill Barr is who lets the people from the crooked CIA bank off the hook. And then he becomes Attorney General again. And in 2019 he’s the one in charge of the FBI. The FBI answers to the Justice Department. The FBI is the same relationship with justice that the CIA has with State. They’re the investigative army of the Justice Department.

So I think it’s hard to trust anyone on this. And I don’t know what kind of file set the Trump FBI inherited after all this time. It’s hard to make heads or tails of it.

To me, I think getting answers on the things that are immediately actionable, getting the CIA’s direct correspondence with Jeffrey Epstein that I mentioned, a congressional bill that forces that… because if it comes out that there are effectively an entire avalanche of classified Epstein files dating back 40 years and then you’ve got the CIA Attorney General, it puts these things in a very different light depending on whether…

The Foundation of Truth

The thing that has generated so much smoke this whole time, the allegation of protection by U.S. Government intelligence and however many others, to know that on physical paper… we know that the CIA interfered in the Rolando Masferrer trial. We know that the CIA contracted out to mafia hitman in an attempt to kill a foreign president. We know that MKULTRA actually was real.

These things you can’t scale. Think of things like a Jenga tower. If a foundational piece is not solid, you can scale a whole architecture of BS on top of it. And if that assumption falls away, this majestic looking tapestry of just years and years of effort collapses because the thing you assumed to be true because it looked like there was so much smoke, to know it to be true, that that is a solid piece that you can put the next piece on top of.

There’s that quote, “99% is a b*tch, 100% is a breeze.”

JOE ROGAN: What does that mean?

The Power of Document Verification

MIKE BENZ: It means when you’re only 99% sure of something, you always have to agonize. Well, if it’s not true, and I think it is, and I build all this stuff on top of it, the 1% chance that that’s not true means it would be a real bitch for me to spend years of effort on this thing, for me to spend millions of dollars on this thing when it’s based on assumption that was only 99% likely to be true, but 1% it may have been structured some way different, there might be something I missed in this.

Whereas 100% is a breeze, okay? It’s automatic. You can. And things like this is why document drops like this are so vital. Not even necessarily because they have some single smoking gun that tells you who killed JFK or what client Jeffrey Epstein trafficked women to, but because it allows you to put down real Jenga pieces about what actually happened. And that process itself allows you to ask the questions that might get you to those answers.

JOE ROGAN: It makes a lot of sense. Is there anything else you want to add to this? I mean, we could kind of go on for days.

MIKE BENZ: Yeah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, you spend so much time on this stuff. How do you have that kind of an attention span? It’s kind of nuts. I mean, I follow some of your live streams. I’m like, first of all, your recall is insane.

The Theory of Mind Approach to Research

MIKE BENZ: I heard something once, which I think is really helpful. I don’t think I’m special in any way like this. I think literally anyone can do this if you just kind of apply this kind of trick. I heard this once, which is that if you read a history book, don’t just read it agnostically. Have a theory in mind about what you think this is and how it worked.

Even if you are wrong about that theory, what you will find is that names, dates, locations, your brain will remember them forever because they’re not, if I’m thinking about something that happened in, I don’t know, like November 11, 1983. Okay, if I see like that date on a driver’s license card or something, and I have no theory of mind, when I see that I’m not going to remember that five minutes from then, it’s going to be like remembering, trying to remember an 11 string number or like someone’s cell phone or something when you don’t really know the person or you haven’t dialed it a million times.

But if you have a theory of mind that you are indexing those things in relation to what you find is that your brain keeps those in that index. So I’ve joked, because we’ve talked about this Iran Contra affair, which was really the creation of this apparatus that we live under today where because the CIA got handcuffs put on it, everything had to become CIA to get around those handcuffs. The universities had to be the foundations, the private philanthropic donors. And this is what happened in the censorship industrial complex. It was all wrapped around this.

But what you find is those dates mean something to you because they’re placed in relation to something else that happens. I joke that I index things by Iran Contra often. For example, when I was studying about BCCI and I learned, okay, this happened in 1984. I don’t just think about 1984 as an abstract thing. I think, okay, well that means it happened after the meeting between Robert McFarlane and Anand Khashoggi but before the oil pipeline scandal of Edmees.

And then, so I remember that this thing happened on this date because I place it in that index and anyone, I think it’s something that anyone, I think people organically do it when they’re really passionate about something. And this is an easy thing to be passionate about because it gets to the heart of networks that are the determining power structures of your life.

When you look up and then you look up at the thing that you’re looking up at and you look up at the thing above that, this is the network you see. Whether it’s in intelligence, military, statecraft, high finance, private philanthropies, universities, labor unions, scientific research, doesn’t mean it’s the Epstein network, so to speak, but it’s this layer of interconnected human networks and I think it’s an important history for the American people to have access to so that they can make informed decisions about how they want to change that world.

They can make informed decisions about what to vote for, they can make informed decisions about what kind of industries that they’re participating in that they might want to see reformed. And it’s so it makes it easy to be passionate about because if we can, if we can get a win here, it’ll really change the world.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I think you do a great service and I think your abilities are exceptional. I think you’re selling yourself short a little bit. You’re being a little self deprecating because it’s very unusual what you’re able to do. And I think just the sheer amount of time that you’ve invested in this stuff is kind of mind boggling.

MIKE BENZ: Well, what would you like to see in this? Like if you had a wish list, what are the things that are open threads or.

The Fear of an Unfixable System

JOE ROGAN: Well, the real concern with me is that it’s unfixable and that this is just a standard way that our government has operated since the 1950s or whenever and it can’t be fixed and that they’ll just gloss over it. A new person will get into office and promise that they’re going to implement some reform and it never happens and that we just accept that over and over and over again. That’s the real fear.

The real fear is that there’s a slow capture of our democracy to the point where it’s just a mere illusion. That’s the real fear. And I think a lot of people think that we’ve already passed the point of no return on that. That’s what scares the s* out of a lot of people.

And then when you see things that are happening in other countries, like particularly England, which is just rampant crackdown on free speech and with the arrests from people that are posting things on social media sites and the implementations of. There’s a new thing that they tried to do, or I think they are doing this concept of having a limited amount of time so you can drive outside of a zone and after that you have to pay for it. That’s a new thing, right?

MIKE BENZ: Yeah. Smart cities type concept.

JOE ROGAN: I can send this to you, Jamie, because I just sent it to Constantin because it appears to be real and.

MIKE BENZ: It’s terrifying your carbon budget.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. That’s nuts. Well, look at what California’s doing right now. What California is doing is they are taking or they’re moving forward with this. The idea that you have a tax on the amount of miles that you drive now. So instead of just taxing gas like they’ve always done, now they’re taxing you on the amount of miles that you drive.

Well, you’re already getting tax on that. If you’re driving more miles, you’re spending more money on gas, so you’re getting, you’re spending more money on tax. But now they’re taxing on top of that, which is essentially they’re stealing money.

MIKE BENZ: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Why can’t I find it forward. Here goes. Jamie, you’re on, you’re on signal, right?

MIKE BENZ: I can get it to myself. It is really interesting how that whole thing I sent.

JOE ROGAN: But it’s crazy that the California thing is bananas. It just says, wow, that’s it. Oh, it doesn’t have the link. Okay, hold on. Huh? Oh, maybe this is it.

The Geopolitical Origins of Climate Policy

MIKE BENZ: Hold on a second. I think there’s a really interesting underdeveloped history around the origins of the climate. The 2006, 2005, 2006, 2007, really global warming climate kind of policy push from the US government that became a runaway train as investor money rushed in.

It’s my opinion, and I’m open minded about it, but it appears to be the case in my view, after a study of this, that the US government, together with foreign allies, pursued this kind of demonization of carbon at a real policy level, or hydrocarbon based fuels as a kind of geopolitical battering ram against newly resurgent Russia.

In the mid 2000s, as Putin was getting power back over a bunch of post Soviet eastern satellite countries through basically pipeline exploiting his leverage around pipelines. And the fact that this is like the John McCain type quote that Russia is “a gas station with a military.” You hear that a lot.

Gazprom, the state sponsored oil company, was effectively the biggest oil company. Well, gas problem was for gas. But Rosneft Russia had at one point the largest oil exports in the world. It was the motor engine of their economy, oil and gas. And the relationship between Russian oligarchs and businessmen and Eastern European Russian oligarchs and businessmen allowed that hydrocarbon based dependency and financial opportunity to let Putin reassert Russian control over Central and Eastern European countries that NATO was trying to turn into Western vassal states essentially.

So you had this in the 1990s, this wasn’t an issue because Boris Yeltsin was the president and he was effectively an adjunct of the US government incidentally through Larry Summers and the Jeffrey Epstein Harvard network. So there became this push after Russia’s interventions in Georgia and the like, and a big attack on a lot of high level Republican basically.

I think this push to try to create a shift in the types of energy the world uses was a way to kneecap Russia’s main source of revenue to ensure that the plan to seize political or vassal state control over Eurasia would continue against Putin’s new nationalist and global resurgence. And this includes a bunch of crap that happened in 2003, 2004.

But effectively then you started to see the US government champion these hydrocarbon policies and you started to see all of these international forums, journals, regulators, openly talking in this mid aughts period as Russia was starting to reclaim political influence, that these climate policies would be a way to stop Russian power and influence because it would cripple them economically.

There’d be no business between oligarchs in the different countries for them to even leverage. It would effectively allow us to continue the golden age of the uniparty 1990s moment. And then you saw all these government subsidies to it, tax benefits, like, free money basically. And then it became a runaway as the market saw that this was a highly protected, incentivized space by the US government. They all flooded into.

Now they’ve got a sunk cost if those policies change. You’ve got trillions of dollars in climate finance globally. And then these start becoming part of like IMF loan requirements and. But now it’s like even if the science is completely wrong, what started arguably is a kind of national security based way to force energy diversification.

This is what we put Europe through the United States with the sanctions against Russia. We forced them to divest of oil and gas and invest in a basket of alternative energy, cleaner energy supplies. But now it’s. And that could be justified at the national security level with the science of this actually being the case. So you could sell it to the whole world.

Even if you prove that false at this point, there’s so much infrastructure built up that you have this network, you have hedge funds. I mean Bill Gates has a climate fund. Al Gore is a billionaire from this one. Tom Steyer, one of the biggest investors in DNC, the Climate Impact Fund. Michael Bills, who funded the CIA Governor of Virginia, Abigail Spanbergler.

JOE ROGAN: And then the momentum of the. It’s sort of an unstoppable social narrative now.

The CIA and Private Finance: A Dangerous Alliance

MIKE BENZ: Right. Well, and the thing that’s terrifying about it is that it has conjoined the diplomatic muscle of the American government and whatever allies abroad with private finance.

For example, we overthrew the government of Bangladesh in 2024. The Biden administration did. They ran this whole coup. They did it through the National Endowment for Democracy, CIA cut out and a million other orgs on the ground. It was a color revolution street protest. I think we may have talked about this last time where literally the CIA sock puppet National Endowment for Democracy sponsored rap music videos and produced them and put them on YouTube and then worked with the unions, set up transgender dance festivals to try to get the LGBT community on board against the government.

And then giant riots, they install. It’s effectively. But part of the thing that they leaned on in the post-transition government is to agree to these basically climate finance reforms.

And you can just like the CIA and the oil industry became completely inseparable. Completely inseparable. I mean George Bush, for example, Zapata Energy Offshore and the whole Texas oil thing to then becoming the Central Intelligence Agency direct. I mean Trump’s first Secretary of State was Rex Tillerson. Rex Tillerson never worked in government. The Secretary of State oversees the CIA. He’s got the whole CIA portfolio. How’s he not? Well, he was the chairman and CEO of ExxonMobil.

You can’t. The CIA and the US military creates the market for oil companies. You can’t get access to the oil unless you either overthrow a government or support against an insurgency political movement. One that will guarantee you favorable terms, access, yada yada, the whole market. And then the CIA and DoD people will rotate into board seats on those oil companies. And so it becomes inseparable.

And my fear about this is that over the past 10 years the same thing has started to happen with the client, the sort of clean energy side of big energy companies like big oil and CIA for a century. Now you have like big climate and CIA because there’s so much money. It’s energy, it’s the master resource.

CIA Intervention in Brazil and Climate Finance

And so now you’ve got, you know, what appears to me CIA intervention in part like some of these things. You have to wonder why did the Biden CIA try to overthrow the Bolsonaro government in Brazil? This was a pro-US political party. The person Lula was tied at the hip with China, divested from all these US contracts, massively reduced the footprint of US-aligned policies in the second biggest country in our hemisphere.

And well, Brazil just announced this $1.3 trillion climate finance initiative. And you know, all of these people are all these New York hedge funds and London banks who’ve skated towards this are in on that.

You have, I mean this is a crazy case. One of the biggest beneficiaries of the post-coup Lula’s government in Brazil were all of the clean ethanol. George Soros’ longest standing equity investment at that point was a company called Atticoagra which did clean ethanol fuel alternatives. The problem is it’s part of its business, part of it is it’s not competitive on price with diesel-based fuels.

So the only way to compete and win that market and make millions of dollars is if the government imposes a mandate, a quota that forces people to buy your product. Well, George Soros co-sponsored those CIA-adjacent National Endowment for Democracy operations all over Brazil while he’s holding an equity interest in the thing that day one. There’s an imposed mandate to use those climate products.

It’s the same thing in Africa. You have CIA regime change to force clean energy companies so that the people who sponsor the donors who sponsor the politicians who pick the staff of the CIA enacts policies that makes money for those hedge funds invested in climate finance.

JOE ROGAN: So f*ed up.

MIKE BENZ: I think that’s what’s happening in California without the regime change element. I think at the kind of, you know, I think you have investors who profit from this. And the only way those investments can be profitable is if government imposes mandates, quotas and bans on alternatives to that product. I mean that’s kind of the way the vaccine market works.

JOE ROGAN: Do you have that link?

MIKE BENZ: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Should we play it?

MIKE BENZ: Yeah, just play it.

15-Minute Cities and Digital Surveillance

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: They just set up their little 15-minute city and they are now charging people for leaving the city. You get 100 free days. They call it a “free day.” You get a free pass to leave the 15-Minute City. And if you exceed your 100 free days, you have to pay the US dollar equivalent of $93 per day.

And if you live outside of the 15-Minute City and you want to travel into the 15-Minute City, you get 25 free passes. Free move. Oh, there the government’s giving you free movement capability. You get 25 free passes and if you exceed those 25 days, it’s $93 a day.

And how are they tracking all this? Oh, there’s not a man at the gate. They’re not writing up tickets or having police officers that are. Oh no, they are monitoring you with digital AI surveillance and cameras and then they’re automatically finding you.

This is why we have to be against the flock cameras in the United States. They’re not just speed trap cameras. This is why we have to be against the Palantir whole of government database. This is why we have to stand up and raise awareness and bring attention to these matters instead of arguing with each other and NPCs on the Internet over left versus right issues or my side, your side.

They are keeping us artificially divided because they are setting up this infrastructure in the United States right now. Divide and conquer. We are in the division part of the divide and conquer agenda. Conquer is next. You think it’s bad now, wait till you have to pay $100 a day to leave your 15-minute city conspiracy. Right. So only rich people are going to be able to afford that. It’s just like the meat thing, right? It’s like, you know, the irony of, you know, Australia being a prison colony and now you’ve got, now it’s like the homeland in the UK.

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

The UK’s Role in American Censorship

MIKE BENZ: But I mean look, the UK just got rid of jury trials for a lot of cases and yeah, you know, has 12,000 speech arrests a year and some people arrested for what seems like even holding up their own country’s flag at an opportune moment or silently praying and you know, we need to liberate the British people.

I mean it’s unbelievable that, I mean they call it perfidious Albion. Right. British statecraft has been so pernicious to the American people in the past decade. It was Russiagate. The entire three-year special prosecutor saga was because of a British spy Christopher Steele and an Iran-Contra veteran, Stefan Halper, residing abroad at Cambridge to kick that off.

And then the British government conspired with the Biden administration to create, to conjoin the US-UK censorship industrial complex. America First Legal, Stephen Miller and Gene Hamilton’s nonprofit law firm they started, obtained these incredible documents that showed a planning meeting between the British government and the Biden administration attended by the CIA, the National Security Council, USAID, hosted at the White House.

And it was the British, the UK Digital Commission. They brought a huge slide deck of all the ways that their new censorship law, what’s today called the Online Safety Act, the OSA, would effectively help throttle misinformation in the United States. Like basically it was like you scratch your back, our back, we’ll scratch yours. And it was this US Democrat Party, UK Labour Party alliance.

Meanwhile, the Biden government was paying British censors, the Global Disinformation Index, which killed the ad revenue for. They went after Daily Wire, Federalist, a million conservative news sites and social media accounts, went after the social media platforms in the United States. They’re British black ops by their own language. Well, CCDH, but they were funded by our government to censor our voices but laundered out to the UK.

And I think we need to fundamentally restructure that special relationship. We’ve had that relationship for a long time, totally unquestioned. We can’t farm that out. And if that’s not, if that’s not addressed and we don’t fix that relationship, I think you can’t really fix our own system unless we, you know, cut out some of the poison that we inject from the outside.

Closing Thoughts: A Historic Moment of Transparency

JOE ROGAN: Mike, we gave people a lot to go over, almost too much. But you, if anybody wants more, your X account is amazing. You’re tireless. I don’t know how you do it, but thank you for doing it. I really appreciate you and appreciate you coming on here.

MIKE BENZ: Oh, thanks so much for having me. Nothing but fun from here. I mean look, it’s fun. I mean guys, or the world is opening up and we are seeing behind a looking glass where there has been a veil of secrecy for 60 years about some of these things. For 10 years about some of these things.

So don’t get too black-pilled. This is something has happened that has never happened before and you are alive to experience it. So you know, try to enjoy the ride. All right, thanks.

JOE ROGAN: Bye everybody.

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