Transcript: Tucker Carlson and Darryl Cooper LIVE on the Epstein Cover-Up

And the main character, he gets assigned or given to the one female oligarch on the planet. And at first, you know, he’s sort of one of her slaves and victims, but then she takes a liking to him and he joins her and participates in what’s going on.

And there are scenes in there right near the beginning, there’s a scene of these grotesque aliens that kidnapped the guy that they make – one of them makes the prisoners watch while he rapes a 15-year-old virginal redhead. And so these are the books that Donald Barr, former OSS agent, father of Bill Barr, the Attorney General who had Jeffrey Epstein arrested and oversaw his death. These are the kind of books that he was writing at the time that he hired the most notorious pedophile in American history.

So whatever the odds of the first part were, you can probably add a few zeros to that. And we can keep adding zeros if you want.

TUCKER CARLSON: I do. I mean, it’s hard to believe that this is – but it is real. What you’re describing is real.

Bill Barr’s Intelligence Connections

DARRYL COOPER: Yeah, totally real, totally verifiable. This is not stuff you’re going to find on fringe websites. You can find it in any mainstream story about it, Wikipedia even, whatever.

So Bill Barr himself, he was an intelligence connected guy very deeply. His first job out of college was as an intern for the CIA in the mid-70s. And that doesn’t sound like much until you learn that he was a legal intern with the CIA whose job was to be the liaison to Congress during the Church Pike Committee hearings that were really like the first and up to this point, probably only time that the CIA has faced a real threat of oversight and clamping down on its activities.

And so this was a very, very critical time when a lot of the agency secrets were coming out and they were facing the possibility of – well, they didn’t know. I mean, the agency might have gotten shut down, you know, if this had gone badly for them. And so Bill Barr is the legal intern who was the liaison. And what that meant was, you know, he was the guy that when Congress requested some documents, he’s like, okay, goes back to the agency, here’s what they want, okay, well, here’s what we can give them. And he goes back and convinces them that this is all there is, or that they don’t need the rest or anything like that. He was that guy, you know, to smooth that over and make it work.

And he apparently did a very good job because the boss of the CIA at the time was George H.W. Bush. When George H.W. Bush took over as – was elected president in 1988, took over in 89, he brought in Bill Barr to be his Attorney General, who spent most of his time, at least the big story – I’m sure an Attorney General does a lot of things and wears a lot of hats, but the major story that was going on at the time was cleaning up what was left of the Iran Contra affair.

And so you have the guy who was the legal intern for the CIA during the Church and Pike Committee hearings, brought in by the director of the CIA at the time to be the Attorney General who is cleaning up the Iran Contra affair that took place, obviously, while Bush was the vice president. He goes into the private sector for a while, reemerges. When Donald Trump needs an Attorney General of his own, not for any particular reason, I guess, except, you know, then this happens.

He just happens to arrest the guy that his father gave his first job to, job that he was totally unqualified for, and a guy who had proclivities that most of us find very strange and unacceptable and are very, very rare, but coincidentally happened to be the very topic that Donald Barr, Bill Barr’s father, liked to write books about. So, very strange, it could all be a coincidence, but the odds are against that.

Epstein’s Time at Dalton School

TUCKER CARLSON: So Donald Barr hires – that’s a remarkable story. And I believe, and I said it to him, that Bill Barr as Attorney General helped cover up Epstein’s death, the details of his death. Again, here are the facts. The facts are that he declared it a suicide before they’d finished the investigation or even really began the investigation. So that alone suggests dishonesty, I think, anyway, or lack of rigor or something. What happened to Jeffrey Epstein at Dalton? How long was he there?

DARRYL COOPER: He’s there for about a year and a half, two years only. And then he was fired for poor performance is how it got written up. And maybe it was that, again, he had no teaching experience and no college degree. So it may have just been he was a bad math teacher. But there are people who had children as students at the time who actually say he was a good math teacher. So maybe, maybe it had to do with something else.

Maybe it had to do with the fact that there were already allegations against Jeffrey Epstein by the girls he was teaching at this high school of inappropriate behavior. He would even show up to high school parties sometimes where kids are drinking and partying, and he would show up as the teacher, the adult, and kind of just try to join in. So there were those complaints that were going on.

But while he was at Dalton School before he got run out, one of the students he was teaching – the father of one of the students he was teaching was the CEO of the investment bank Bear Stearns at the time. Ace Greenberg, he’s known as. And he approached, I’ve heard it was Barr himself. I don’t know if that’s the case, but he approached somebody who was one of his bosses or one of the people who had brought him into the school and asked if he would make the introduction to Ace Greenberg and put in a good word for him. And so he meets Greenberg and Greenberg when he gets run out of Dalton, brings him on at Bear Stearns and they put him to work.

Transition to Wall Street

TUCKER CARLSON: So by this point, Jeffrey Epstein’s like 22, 21, thereabouts.

DARRYL COOPER: This is 1976, I think he was born in 53. So yeah, 23 years old maybe with no college degree.

TUCKER CARLSON: Two years of college at Cooper Union and he’s been a high school math teacher. And he got basically fired from that job. And he gets hired at Bear Stearns.

DARRYL COOPER: He gets hired at Bear Stearns.

TUCKER CARLSON: Is that normal?

DARRYL COOPER: I couldn’t tell you, especially back then. I’m not really sure.

TUCKER CARLSON: Does it sound normal? I doubt it doesn’t sound normal, but whatever.

The Bear Stearns Years and Early Connections

DARRYL COOPER: So he gets brought in and the story goes that they put him on the options desk at first, but he was not very good at it or not very engaged or interested in it. And so they put him in their Special Products division where Jimmy Cayne, who took over as CEO Bear Stearns from Ace Greenberg, described what Epstein did there in Special Products division.

And he basically, in so many words, in sort of the Wall Street financial speak, said that his job was to help wealthy clients hide their money to create tax advantageous transactions. But it was to help wealthy clients hide their money. And while he was doing that, he met and came into contact with a lot of well known people who became very important for the rest of his career with wealthy clients.

And so like, one of them, for example, was Edgar Bronfman, who will come up later in our story. He’s one of the heirs to the Seagram’s liquor fortune. Very connected guy. We’ll probably get to that in a while. But that only lasts four years. He’s there at Bear Stearns from 76 to 1980 and then he gets run out of Bear Stearns for a regulatory violation.

And the story kind of goes there. The official story from the people who were all involved in it at the time are that he was breaking the rules and they were very upset about it. But apparently he stayed friends, close friends with Ace Greenberg and Jimmy Cayne for a long time after that. And he banked with Bear Stearns all the way up until the time the investment bank collapsed in 2008. So there weren’t that many hard feelings or that intense of hard feelings, apparently.

But he left. And I think the reason for it is probably pretty obvious. He just got a little too aggressive and flew a little too close to the sun doing the job that they had hired him to do. And so he had to leave because there was a violation. They didn’t want the attention and everything. But he landed on his feet. He stayed friends with the people who hired him, all those kind of things.

The Pentagon Connection That Makes No Sense

This is where it gets really interesting. So again, to go over his resume, he does two years of college, drops out, gets hired as a high school math teacher, is run out of that job ignominiously, either for poor performance or for harassing his female students. Then he goes to work for Bear Stearns, does that for just a few years and gets run out of there for a regulatory violation. And that is his resume at this point. There’s nothing else I’m leaving out.

The very next year. This would make him, I guess, 28 years old. It’s 1981. He’s 28 years old. We have him on a private airplane with a big time British arms broker named Douglas Leese, very big player back in the 1980s, on a private plane to go to a meeting at the Pentagon with this guy.

TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, not for the first time, I’m going to stop. You say it doesn’t make any sense at all.

DARRYL COOPER: Not if. Yeah, so if you’re looking at it in a conventional way, it doesn’t make sense.

TUCKER CARLSON: Not if you assume the world works in the ways that we’re told it works. That doesn’t make any sense.

The Arms Dealer Connection

DARRYL COOPER: Right. And so you have to ask, what is it a guy like Douglas Leese would be? What interest would he have in a guy like Jeffrey Epstein even if he was a money man of some kind? Presumably a guy like that can have any money man he wants. Why does he need a guy like Jeffrey Epstein?

And I think the answer is, and this is an answer to a lot of researchers have come to over the years, and I think it’s the most obvious one at least the simplest is that when you look at the kind of things that somebody like Leese would do, it’s not as if Leese owned a weapons manufacturer. That’s not what he did. He was a fixer. He was a guy who made the deals happen. He made sure the right people got paid off and that everything was kind of smoothed over so that these things would go through.

He was mentioned, for example, in the UK Parliament in the 1980s in reference to the Al-Yamamah weapons deal with Saudi Arabia, which is the biggest weapons deal in UK history. I think to this day. BAE Systems alone has made $46 billion off this deal over the years. Over the years. And I think that was up through 2010 or something. So it’s probably higher now.

But there have been allegations from politicians, from lawyers, journalists, other weapons companies who were upset about their competition getting a leg up this way, that there was bribery, there was all kinds of shady stuff going on behind the scenes to make sure that the deal went the way that they wanted it to go.

And you think that a guy who is whose job is to go around and make sure that people are being paid off with illicit funds that cannot be traced, because then you end up like Lockheed Martin did when they got caught bribing officials in Japan to sign off on a weapons deal there. Nobody wants that. You got to hide your money better. You got to figure out how to do that in a way that nobody’s going to track it. And that’s why you need a guy like Jeffrey Epstein.

You’re not going to be able to walk in the front door of Goldman Sachs and say, I need to talk to one of your money managers. Hey, can you launder this money for me? You need a guy who’s morally compromised, who is willing to get down in the dirt and do this kind of work. And that is what Jeffrey Epstein had just spent the last four years at Bear Stearns doing.

I don’t know how. I don’t know. This may be out there, but I can’t remember ever coming across how it is he met Leese, but it was probably through the wealthy clients that he was working for there at Bear Stearns. So that when he did get run out, they made sure he landed on his feet and he was doing something that he could actually succeed at.

The Maxwell Connection

And so you go through the 1980s, and Leese is the guy who introduces him to Robert Maxwell. He introduces him to a lot of big players and figures in European politics and in the economy and introduces him to Maxwell, and Maxwell introduces him to his daughter Ghislaine, who became his partner in crime, I guess you’d say, over the years.

And Robert Maxwell’s a super interesting character because this is the reason that I brought up near the beginning. And we should probably say, like, the thing that people are really interested in this story about. I mean, there’s the tabloid aspect of it. There’s a lot of people out there who just. There’s always talk about the Epstein list. They want there to be a safe that the FBI opens up or drills a hole and cracks into, and then there’s just a ledger of signed in blood. I, Jeffrey Epstein, compromised these famous movie stars and politicians on these days, that’s what people want. They’re not going to get that. That kind of thing doesn’t exist.

The Intelligence Connection

The really interesting aspect of it is encapsulated in just one incident which happened in. I guess this came out after Epstein was arrested during the first Trump administration, that Alexander Acosta, who was Trump’s Labor Secretary at the time, he had been the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of Florida in charge of prosecuting Epstein’s first sex crimes case back in the mid 2000s.

And we’ll get to all this later, but Epstein was given a very, very. To call it a light sentence is being very generous in how we describe it. I’ll get into the details of how it all came together and what the actual sentence was later. But he was asked in his vetting process, Alexander Acosta, hey, if this comes up, this is a potential scandal. You gave this pedophile with all these victims against, they had like 40 witnesses in that 2007, 2008 case. I mean, on the record, corroborating each other’s stories independently. I mean, this was the most open and shut case you can imagine. We’ll get into the case here in a bit.

But he was asked, how could you, what’s your excuse for giving this guy the deal that you gave him? Because it’s kind of crazy. And he said, well, I was told that Epstein belonged to Intelligence and to leave it alone. Now, this is from. To be fair, this is from an unnamed source in the administration who was involved in that vetting process, as told to the journalist Vicky Ward. I don’t think Ward would make that up, and I don’t think she would embellish.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I have something to. I have something to add to this, which is true. And I would be delighted to talk to Mr. Acosta anytime, by the way. So I say this with the caveat that it hasn’t been. He’s not said this to me, but I believe that he’s been asked about this and that has not denied it, and that his response was, that’s true, but I don’t remember who said it to me.

DARRYL COOPER: Well, I mean, how many people can tell the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida to drop a case against a pedophile with 40 on the record witnesses corroborating each other’s stories? There’s not very many people who can tell him to do that.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, there’s not many people who can murder an inmate in federal lockup in Manhattan either.

DARRYL COOPER: I mean, who’s he going to take that order from? And who is it going to have enough juice from that he’s going to say, yes, boss, and actually go do that? The Deputy Attorney General and the Attorney General, maybe, I guess. I mean, there’s just not that many people who can do that. And the whole case. And we’ll get into this later.

TUCKER CARLSON: Was.

DARRYL COOPER: Yeah, it’s a. It was just incredibly shady how it was handled from day one. I mean. But, yeah. Anyway, I’ll put that aside, because the interesting thing there is you have the most famous and prolific mass pedophile in the history of the United States, certainly the most famous one who the Labor Secretary under. I don’t know if they put people under oath when they do these vettings. Probably not. But he told somebody in a setting where it mattered and where he wasn’t being watched. This wasn’t for publicity or anything like that. Behind closed doors. He said that Epstein belonged to intelligence, which could mean a lot of things.

A lot of people want to hear that he worked for the CIA or the Mossad or something like that. But there’s a lot of wiggle room there. When you say, I think Naftali Bennett, the former Israeli Prime Minister, just came out recently and said, I can say categorically that Jeffrey Epstein did not work for the Mossad. It’s like, okay, so he wasn’t an employee of the Mossad. Was he an asset of Israeli military intelligence? Which is something different now. Bennett’s not lying, but kind of not telling the whole truth either. And so you got to be careful with the wiggle room in the words that people use.

The Media Silence

But when you have that and when you. I mean, to me, I don’t know, this is just. Maybe I’m missing something here. I’m not a journalist or anything, but I would think that when you have a story like the Jeffrey Epstein story, that every time any little piece of information has dropped about the Epstein story ever since he was arrested, doesn’t matter what it is, any little drib and drab, it goes viral. It is the number one story that night. It is the highest ratings of any show or anything. Whoever talks about it, whatever it is, everybody wants more information on this story. It’s just too good to be true. From like a network or newspaper perspective, right?

You talk about like billionaire playboy who has connections just around world governments and US government, including just wealthy famous people, business owners, people that everybody has heard of and sees on TV all the time, that that guy was running a mass pedophile ring. And the Labor Secretary under Donald Trump, who was the guy in charge of prosecuting him in 2007, said that he belonged to Intelligence.

I would think that every newspaper in the country and every cable news channel in the country would have a team of reporters camped out on that dude’s lawn to stick a microphone in his face every time he left his house and say, what did you mean by that? Can we get some kind of clarity on whether this pedophile was belonging to. But we don’t get that. And when you don’t get things like that, you get a lot of room for speculation and it’s kind of justified speculation.

TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, what is that? And instead you get a lot of emphasis on the sex part, which deserves attention. Of course these are sex crimes apparently in some cases against minors. Horrible, not acceptable. But the other parts are completely ignored. Like what was this guy doing, this Cooper Union non graduate who with bare dirt and then he’s with an arms dealer flying private to meeting at the Pentagon, like take three steps back. What is that?

The Intelligence Network Connection

DARRYL COOPER: Hired by a guy at that first job who had connections to intelligence through the OSS, whose son was a CIA connected guy. I mean, so all of these intelligence connections that aren’t – you know, this is all circumstantial stuff that doesn’t attach necessarily. The fact that Donald Barr worked for the OSS back during the war, or that his son Bill Barr worked for the CIA, that doesn’t by itself mean anything about Epstein.

TUCKER CARLSON: I think his son Bill Barr spent like what? Six years.

DARRYL COOPER: I think six. Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: So he wasn’t just an intern and by the way, he stayed right. Was an employee. But it’s not just circumstantial because you have apparently the former Labor Secretary saying, former U.S. attorney, federal prosecutor saying he belonged to Intelligence. So I, anyway, I’m not trying to justify my interest in this. I don’t think it needs justifying. But I think the people who haven’t covered the story and the material parts of the stuff that actually really matters, they need to justify their lack of interest in it. Like what is that? New York Times.

DARRYL COOPER: It’s natural to start asking questions when a question that would occur to anybody, somebody who just heard a five minute synopsis of the story and they’re from Mars and they have never heard any of it before. You tell them the short little story, a five minute version of it that I just told you and the first thing they’re going to ask is, well, what did he mean when he said that Epstein belonged to Intelligence? What’s going on there? And you can’t get a journalist to ask that question.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right.

DARRYL COOPER: And so it’s natural for us to start wondering why that is.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, because the question that all this bears on the purpose of this interview, the purpose of all questions that I’ve ever raised about Epstein, go back to one central question, which is who runs the world? Who’s making the decisions and on whose behalf? This idea that, you know, there are all these 100 and whatever nation states, each acting in its own. That’s not true. And so what is true? This may point us in that direction.

The 1980s Intelligence Transformation

DARRYL COOPER: Yeah. You know, one of the things that we go back to the 1980s, I mean, it’s just such a fascinating time because in the Iran Contra deal, Mike Benz likes to point this out, and he’s great on all of the Epstein stuff in the 80s and just a lot of the intelligence shenanigans in general going on back then is that, you know, it really provides a window into the question you’re asking right now. Who runs the world? Who’s actually in charge of everything that’s going on? How is power structured and how does it operate really, you know, in the world?

And if you go back to those, the Church and Pike Committee hearings and then you roll into the Carter administration where he brings Admiral Stansfield Turner in to run the CIA and basically gives him a directive to pare down the agency’s operational commitments and the things that it does in the field, start focusing more on, you know, what Truman thought he was getting himself into, which was, you know, a batch of analysts to help keep the President informed as he made decisions. And by all accounts, as far as I know, Admiral Turner tried to do that job with some enthusiasm.

You get to the point where by the 1980s, the CIA’s ability to operate is under a lot of scrutiny and limited in ways that it never had been before. I mean, you go back to 50, 60 and 70, and I mean, they were just cowboys.

TUCKER CARLSON: They’re dosing elephants with LSD, right?

DARRYL COOPER: Exactly.

TUCKER CARLSON: Whatever you want. They’re visiting Jack Ruby in prison and turning them crazy.

DARRYL COOPER: Right. And so it’s right at that time when their activities are being curtailed and under a lot of scrutiny that you start to see the emergence of the system that we have now that pops up again and again whenever we end up in a place like Ukraine or just anywhere where you have institutions like the National Endowment for Democracy or USAID, a lot of these other organizations that, you know, they’re not the CIA. You have one of the former heads of the National Endowment for Democracy on the record in an interview, almost bragging in his tone, saying, we do all the jobs that the CIA used to do, of course. And so it was outsourced.

TUCKER CARLSON: In coordination with CIA and other.

The Freelance Intelligence Network

DARRYL COOPER: And so that’s when you get guys like Epstein who are, you know, they’re not economists that are, or finance guys that are hired by the agency and given an office in a CIA, you know, GS rank or something. They’re freelancers, they’re mercenaries. They work for the CIA today, they might work for MI6 tomorrow, they might work for the Mossad or Israeli Defense Intelligence the next day.

And so that’s one of the things a lot of people want to hear, that he was an agent of this organization and sort of have it nice and pat and tight like that. And it may be that he did more work for one than the other. He had more loyalty to one than the other. Things like that. When you look at his various connections that we’ll get into, maybe there’s, you know, conclusions to draw there.

But he was one of these guys who was kind of a freelance fixer that would be used by the intelligence communities of countries that, you know, I assume he wouldn’t go run off and do it for Russian intelligence back in the 1980s. But as you said, you know, the idea that there’s 100 something independent nation states all acting in their own interest, that’s a fiction today. It was a fiction yesterday. It was a fiction in the 1980s, you know, so to say. Where exactly is the line? And it shifts from decade to decade depending on what’s going on. But where exactly is the line between The CIA and MI6? They’re different. They, you know, they compete with each other in various ways and so forth. But I mean to say that they’re two just totally separate independent agencies that are acting alone. And I mean, that’s obviously just not true.

And so Epstein was an asset of this network of intelligence agencies that would do these things together. And you know, the Iran – he was deeply involved with the money side of the Iran Contra scandal. One of the people that Douglas Leese introduced him to besides Robert Maxwell was Adnan Khashoggi, who, the last name probably sounds familiar to people from the news recently. He was the Washington Post columnist or editorialist who was chopped up into little pieces in the Turkish embassy by Saudi embassy or the Saudi embassy in Istanbul by, you know, the Saudis who had taken him. And Adnan Khashoggi was his uncle. And he’s, he was kind of, you know, he’s the real Khashoggi.

TUCKER CARLSON: There are only like four families that control the world so far. We have the Bushes, the Barrs, the Khashoggis. It’s like everything, everybody’s reoccurring in this.

The Khashoggi Connection

DARRYL COOPER: Well, even the Khashoggis are kind of an example of what I’m talking about here where, you know, it’s useful. We’d be talking about somebody other than Adnan Khashoggi if it was, if his name was Adnan Al Saud, the fact that he’s not a part of the royal family, he’s a cutout. These people are cutouts because that’s what you need. You need when it gets to a point where, you know, they get a little bit too loose, too public, they start doing things that are drawing too much attention that you can cut them loose without it being your cousin or brother. That’s going to cause real internal strife, you know, and that’s what happened. Adnan Khashoggi eventually went to jail, but.

So Adnan Khashoggi was like the comic book version of your, you know, your Arab billionaire, just sort of very decadent everything. Gold, crazy giant yacht that was later bought by Donald Trump, actually. But Adnan Khashoggi was, and again, this is mainstream news. You don’t have – he had a harem, the whole thing. Whatever you think that somebody like that would be like, that’s what he was, that’s who he was. Although apparently a very devout Muslim, which is, you know, seems like a contradiction, but I don’t pretend to.

TUCKER CARLSON: Also, in the words of people I know who knew him, good guy.

DARRYL COOPER: Isn’t that funny? Good guy. But he was one of these fixers. He was in fact probably in the 1980s for a long time, probably the most prominent fixer when it came to weapons brokering, things like that.

The Soviet Arsenal Sale

You got to remember in the 1980s this really kicked into super high gear in the 90s, but it’s already going on in the 80s as the Soviet Union was starting to fall apart. I mean, they had a first world empire’s military arsenal that was just going on sale by every colonel who had control of an armory or something, putting this stuff on the market because everybody can look around and realize that the ship’s sinking and they want to go pull the nice brass doorknobs and sink fixtures off so they can escape. And that was happening even in the 1980s.

And that’s why, you know, you look around the world back then and everywhere you look you’ve got civil wars, you’ve got militias kicking off revolutions and they’ve all got AKs, they’ve got all the Russian made gear because it’s all being sold off by, you know, whoever can get their hands on it in the Soviet Union. I mean, talking billions, tens hundreds of billions of dollars of weapons that are hitting the world black market, right?

And Adnan Khashoggi at this really critical time in, you know, in the history of, I guess the post war order, but also just the history of the intelligence communities in the west and other places, he’s kind of one of the main guys who is, you know, he doesn’t just like Douglas Leese, he doesn’t own a weapons manufacturing company. He’s the guy who makes the deals happen. He’s a fixer. He’s a guy who goes between different parties who maybe don’t speak the same language or whatever. And he makes sure the right people get paid. He knows who has to get paid all these things.

And so for example, you go back in the 1980s when he was working on the books for companies like Lockheed Martin and I’ll get the exact number wrong right now, but it’s like this. I mean, there was one year they pay him $180 million. And this is the 1980s – was probably half a billion dollars today, another year $210 million they pay him in one year. You know, I mean, this is the.

TUCKER CARLSON: You know, and he’s not manufacturing anything.

DARRYL COOPER: Correct.

TUCKER CARLSON: And he’s not actually buying anything. He’s merely the middleman.

DARRYL COOPER: He is the middleman and the deal maker.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s a lot. That’s a big vig, I think.

DARRYL COOPER: Yeah. And so a lot of that money, obviously, is not being kept by him. It’s being paid out to the people.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s right.

DARRYL COOPER: You need, in order to make all this happen. But a huge amount of it’s going to him, you know, and so if you are a guy who. Oh, you know, let me get to this part.

Epstein’s One Client

So after Jeffrey Epstein leaves Bear Stearns, and around the same time that he ends up on that private plane with Douglas Leese on his way to the Pentagon, he starts his own company. And as far as anybody’s ever been able to find out, as far as I’ve ever been able to find, I have looked. He had one client, and that client was Adnan Khashoggi. And so, you know, that’s just another connection where you have.

TUCKER CARLSON: How in the world. So I was alive and reading the newspaper then. Adnan Khashoggi was one of the most famous people in the world. I mean, he was in, you know, the New York Times and the National Enquirer and the New York Post. Everyone knew who he was. How does this guy with two failed jobs and two years at Cooper Union end up starting a company where his only client is Adnan Khashoggi? No, I’m serious.

DARRYL COOPER: Well, I think probably the answer is that the company was set up so that he could do a job.

TUCKER CARLSON: For a more direct way to put it was how does he get connected with Adnan Khashoggi?

DARRYL COOPER: Through Douglas Leese.

TUCKER CARLSON: How’s he connected to Douglas Leese?

DARRYL COOPER: Well, I assume through his wealthy clientele when he was laundering money at Bear Stearns, you know, that’s how he met again, a lot of the people that would later become important to him. And so you got to admire his pluck. He was a hustler, man. You know, that’s definitely true. It’s sort of a. I think when people get up to that level of power or just, you know, when they reach those heights, even if it’s a lot of times, if it’s athletes, but if it’s political figures or anything like that, you know, there’s often an obsessive impulse that drives them to be very successful, but often disorders the personality in.

The Epstein-Maxwell Connection

TUCKER CARLSON: Ways that he was disordered, according to. But it’s just interesting. It’s amazing how many people he intersected with.

DARRYL COOPER: Yeah, well, I remember when Anthony Blinken became Secretary of State. And, you know, I’ve been following the Epstein story and just all the little connections with it for a long time by then. And so I knew that Anthony Blinken’s stepfather was Robert Maxwell’s closest confidant, his lawyer, and the last person to speak to him before he died.

TUCKER CARLSON: Before he was murdered.

DARRYL COOPER: Yeah, probably. Yeah. And we’ll get to that, too. But it’s like, I’ve learned over the years not to place too many demands on our ruling class. You know, I don’t want to get all crazy. I’m not going to tell you guys to stop taking bribes. I’m not going to ask. That’s all fine. Just keep the bribes. Whatever.

Can we have one major public official that is not a single degree separated from Jeffrey Epstein? Is that possible? Because apparently it’s not possible. You got Donald Trump talking about the issue the other day on camera, and the guy standing next to him is Howard Lutnick, who was Epstein’s neighbor for years, you know, in New York. I forgot.

It’s like we just. Can we just get one important person who’s not one degree or less separated from what? The most prolific mass pedophile in US History? Is that possible? Because apparently it’s not.

TUCKER CARLSON: You may be answering the question, why is the press not as interested in this story as they would under other circumstances be? I have a feeling if you were accused of being a mass pedophile, there would be more media interest.

DARRYL COOPER: They would love that. Yeah. When you’re somebody like me or probably somebody like you, it’s good that we don’t drink and we lead pretty boring lives.

From Bear Stearns to Arms Dealing

TUCKER CARLSON: So that’s okay. So Douglas Lee, he winds up on this plane, then he starts to a meeting at the Pentagon, presumably about arms sales. We’re not exactly sure how he got into the company of Douglas Lees, but we assume it’s because he was set up by one of his clients at Bear Stearns, from which he was fired in a job that he was apparently set up by Donald Barr to get. Okay, then he sets up this company to work with or for Adan Khashoggi. What happens next?

DARRYL COOPER: Well, so there’s not a lot of detail on Epstein specifically during this period, but there is a lot of detail on guys like Adnan Khashoggi. And so you can kind of read between the lines as he progresses through.

Adnan Khashoggi was the chief guy really that we used in the Middle East to broker and fix the Iran side of the Iran Contra deal. And so, you know, people have heard the term, maybe younger people aren’t that familiar with what Iran Contra was. I mean, I know probably a lot of people watching this are fans of Reagan, the Reagan administration and all that, and that’s fine. But I mean, the Iran Contra deal was like, if it wasn’t high treason, especially on the Iran side. I mean, it was an inch away from it, you know, I mean, this is a declared enemy of the United States.

We have a law, you know, a past embargo forbidding the United States government or any company that is in the United States from selling weapons to the Iranians. And that’s what we were doing.

The Iran Contra Connection

So the brief summary of the Iran Contra scandal was we had two things that our intelligence agencies wanted to do or our security establishment, let’s say wanted to do, but that they were not allowed to do.

One was the Iran Iraq war’s going on. And our interest in that war at the time at least was just to keep it going as long as possible. Something really evil, I think, about funding and providing support to both sides of a war for the express purpose of just making it go on longer. But from a cold hearted strategic perspective, you can understand, you know, what people were thinking at least. But that’s what we want to do.

Saddam Hussein at the time was having success on the battlefield. We wanted to make sure that the Iranians stuck around a little bit longer and Saddam didn’t get too powerful because that’s what we were worried about at the time, Saddam getting too powerful.

And so the other thing we wanted to do is we wanted to provide support for the Nicaraguan Contras who were fighting the Sandinista government down there. In the early 1980s, an amendment to a budget was passed in the House called the Boland Amendment. It was passed 477 to 0, which, you know, if you’re a president, we’ve learned you can kind of defy Congress to a degree. If they voted 477 to 0, you’re probably playing with a little bit of fire if you want to do that.

And so, but we really, really, really wanted to support the Contras against the communist government in Nicaragua. And the Boland amendment, what it said was you can’t use any of the money in this budget, any US Government funds that cannot go to the Contras in any way, shape or form, it can’t go to them. You know, as weapons, it can’t go to them. As cookies, you can’t. It just cannot go to them.

And so you got these two things that sort of security establishment really wants to do that they’re forbidden by law from doing. And they bring both of those things together and figure out how to make one hand kind of wash the other.

The idea was we’re going to sell weapons to Iran, which we’re not allowed to do, but we are allowed to sell weapons to Israel. And Israel has a lot of the same weapons systems that we want to send to Iran. So we’re going to sell them to Israel. Israel, working through guys like Adnan Khashoggi, are going to get their weapons to Iran, get these weapons to Iran. And we’re not selling anything to Iran, we’re selling to Israel. Iran’s going to pay a premium for these weapons, and that premium is off the books. And that is going to be used to support the Contras. And so that was basically the scheme.

The Money Laundering Operation

Now you have when you’re doing something like that. I mean, all you have to do is look at any big mafia court case or something, you know, watch a mob movie where they go to court. It’s always the money. The money is how you get caught doing stuff like that.

People think of money laundering as this boring sideshow when it comes to organized crime or their cousins in the intelligence community. It’s not a sideshow. It’s right at the center of the thing. The whole operation relies on money laundering because you have to be able to hide that. It’s the easiest way to trace out your networks and what they’re doing and who’s a part of them. You can figure out everything from it. Who’s the most significant player in this network, all these things just by looking at their money.

And so you have to have guys like Jeffrey Epstein, who spent four years at Bear Stearns and a few years since then, by the time he starts doing work for Khashoggi, figuring out how to move money offshore, move it around through different countries over time, changing jurisdictions.

You gotta remember, too, this was back before the Internet or anything like that. It was not exactly an easy process to just hop on your computer and look at where these transactions are being passed to the global financial system. You know, it’s a different world today for that reason, but it’s tougher. Back then, you had to send investigators probably to that country to go to that bank and look at their records kind of thing, you know, and so.

But still, you needed a guy like Epstein who was skilled at moving money around in ways and hiding it in ways that at least would be hard to trace. They would pass at a first glance. You know, you get a really skilled forensic accounting team at the Department of Justice who really dedicates themselves to it. They can figure it out, but it needs to just pass at a glance so that some congressman is not taking a look at it, you know, and so Epstein is one of the guys, presumably one of multiple guys who was working the financial side. I’m not sure I 100% about that, but I presume they weren’t only relying on this one guy for, you know, these things that were going on. Who was handling the money and making sure that in Iran Contra.

TUCKER CARLSON: And sure that in Iran Contra.

DARRYL COOPER: Well, he was working for Adnan Khashoggi, doing that. When Adnan Khashoggi was involved with Iran Contra. I don’t have any document or anything that says Jeffrey Epstein specifically was working with the intelligence agency on Iran, anything like that. We know he was doing work for Khashoggi that involved this kind of thing because that’s what the company did.

TUCKER CARLSON: And he’s an American. Yes, right. Who, at least for Donald Barr, anyway, he has some intel. He’s rubbed up against people who are familiar with the intel world. So.

DARRYL COOPER: Well, when you’re also. Real quick, if you’re working for people and with people like Douglas Lees, Adnan Khashoggi, Robert Maxwell, you’re rubbing against these.

TUCKER CARLSON: They’re right in the middle of it.

DARRYL COOPER: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: And so. And that was the thing they work on. It just blows my mind that there’s a connection between Jeffrey Epstein and Iran Contra that just really. Yeah, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

DARRYL COOPER: I mean, Iran Contra, it is sort of the patient zero for understanding the power structure in the modern world. In a lot of ways, it really, really is. It’s so fascinating.

Reflecting on Iran Contra

TUCKER CARLSON: Remember it well, and the fun, I mean, very well. And knew people who were involved in it very well. And I just, I thought it was all fake. It was years. It was years before I realized that that was a meaningful thing. And I think many conservatives and Republicans. I’m still a conservative Republican, however, I try to be more honest and thoughtful than I once was. And that is a big. That’s a big thing that they did. And no one was ever really punished for it.

DARRYL COOPER: And the people that were kind of celebrities now, some of whom I really.

TUCKER CARLSON: I just want to say for the record, I think a lot of those people were patriots, man, but you get caught up, especially during the Cold War. You know, I tell people sometimes that, look, I don’t like a lot of the stuff that went on in the Cold War. There are a lot of things that the US did that I wish weren’t in our history books. And, you know, that historians, 500 years from now weren’t going to have to read about us, you know, in their history books. But for the people at the time, I mean.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, I knew them. Yeah. No, I agree. And, you know, there are a couple, but Ollie North is the famous one. And, you know, what a nice man, what a good man. So I just want to say that. But he’s not the. Ollie North is not the one who designed the scheme.

DARRYL COOPER: He was a colonel at the time.

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly. In the Marine Corps. And he was doing what he was asked to do, whatever. Not to get so far afield to that. But that’s just amazing that Epstein was involved in that. So what does he do after that?

Enter Robert Maxwell

DARRYL COOPER: Well, let me actually, just. So let’s pause here for a minute because this whole period, still, there’s a lot to unpack here. So Robert Maxwell was also one of the main money conduits for Iran Contra as well. Let’s talk about Robert Maxwell. Fascinating guy, really a fascinating. Another guy. I’ve seen that. You look at him, you’re like, man, he’s kind of an amoral, you know, beast in a lot of ways. But at the same time, he’s a force of nature and a figure out.

TUCKER CARLSON: Of history who figured in history.

Robert Maxwell’s Early Life and War Service

DARRYL COOPER: So he was born in Czechoslovakia and he was, I want to say he was 18 or 19 years old. He was very, very young when the Germans invaded and he managed to escape. He wasn’t called Robert Maxwell at the time. He changed his name eight or nine times over the course of the years. But he managed to escape to France in May 1940, which, if you know the story of World War II is not the best time to escape to France.

And so he hooks up with what’s left of the Czechoslovak resistance there in France and follows the British retreat and manages somehow to talk his way onto a boat and gets over to Britain and gets hooked up with the Czech government in exile there in London, becomes disenchanted with the government in exile pretty quickly and starts well, yeah, so we’ll get to that next part in a minute, actually.

So then he’s working at first for the Czech government in exile, gets a little disenchanted with them and so joins the British army. And he’s part of the Normandy invasion. And he fought. He was in heavy combat all the way to Berlin. You know, he won the second highest medal that the British army gives out, not just to foreign volunteers, but to anybody. So it’s the Distinguished Service Cross or the Navy Cross here in the US and, you know, you don’t get those just for showing up on time every day like he got it for storming a machine gun nest and saving a bunch of people’s lives, you know, so physically courageous guy, obviously, very resourceful, ballsy guy, you know, to make it across Europe at such a young age and do all these things.

Post-War Intelligence Work

After the war is over and we occupy Germany, he goes to work for British Intelligence, first as a translator. I don’t know how many languages he spoke back then, but later on, he allegedly was fluent in 9. Maybe that’s an exaggeration, but he was fluent in 5 and functional in 4. That’s pretty damn impressive, you know. And so he was a guy who had connections behind the Iron Curtain that was emerging. He’s from that side of the line. He was a soldier who had fought valiantly for the British, and so now he’s working for British Intelligence. And he’s actually pretty valuable to him.

And he gets involved in, you know, some dirty work. I mean, he was involved in interrogating captured SS soldiers, for example, which I imagine those were not always pleasant experiences actually, later on in life. This didn’t come out till quite a bit later when he was an older guy, like, soon before his death, he was actually fingered an investigation for murdering a bunch of German, unarmed German civilians while he was there. It never went to the point of, you know, having to be proven in court or anything. So it was just something that was out there. But he was named in the investigation.

And so he’s working for British Intelligence for a while there in Berlin, which is a pretty hot assignment, obviously, especially as the Iron Curtain’s starting to come down. And when the war ends, he goes back to Britain. He’s changed his name to Robert Maxwell by this point, gets British citizenship.

Arms Smuggling Operations

And one of the first things we have him doing in the late 1940s, after the war, when he gets back to Britain, is you have this guy who, again, is from the other side of the line. He’s got connections with people across Europe, he’s involved with British intelligence, and he hooks up with the British Zionist movement and in contravention of British law at the time, is helping to smuggle weapons, specifically aircraft parts were kind of his main bag through Czechoslovakia down to the Zionist movement in Israel to fight the Arabs. And again, this is still. I think he’s probably 25 or something like that at this point. Maybe 27, 28. Young guy.

TUCKER CARLSON: And not just the Arabs, the British also.

DARRYL COOPER: Well, right, yeah, fighting the British.

TUCKER CARLSON: And he’s now a British citizen. Just saying.

DARRYL COOPER: There is that. Yeah. You know, that whole thing is a little bit of a tangent, but I mean, all that stuff is so interesting because when you think about something like that, right. Like if you have a situation like the Zionists in Palestine in the late 1940s who were facing down the possibility of war with several countries around them, and you’re just a movement that kind of just drove the British out of the country, and now you got to figure out how to hold on to it. And the British were the main people who have any foreign presence, you know, European foreign presence in the region, have a weapons embargo against. You need to get weapons and supplies. How are you going to do it?

Well, you need guys like Robert Maxwell, you know, because not everybody knows how to do it. If they called me on the phone and said, hey, Darrell, we need to get, you know, we need you to get us 800 RPGs at this port, and blah, blah, blah. Okay, so call Robert Maxwell. Don’t look at me. You know, because, you know, who knows? But he knew, and that was something he was able to do.

Lyndon Johnson’s Involvement

Lyndon Johnson did that. Actually, there was a really interesting. Several articles written about it, but one in the Times of Israel where they. This is a laudatory article. You know, they’re writing it in a way that is very grateful to Lyndon Johnson. But this is back when he was still in the US Congress, back in the 30s and 40s, he was working with a Zionist friend of his there in Texas to illegally, in contravention of American law as a U.S. congressman to ship weapons and other supplies to the Zionists in Palestine in crates marked Texas Grapefruit.

And the main guy who did the research on this is a Jewish scholar named Louis Gamalek. And you can’t find the paper online. It’s only in the reading room at the Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C. and fortunately, before I came on your show last time, I visited the place and went and read it, and they might have somebody tackle me at the Door if I tried to go there and do it now. But I read it, and it’s fascinating because he really lays out in detail that you really can’t deny that Lyndon Johnson was involved with this. And so then.

TUCKER CARLSON: And there’s some evidence that Jack Ruby, too, was involved in that also, which.

DARRYL COOPER: I think, well, so that’s where I was going to go next. Then you ask, well, Lyndon Johnson doesn’t know how to smuggle the weapons to Palestine. Who knows how to do that kind of thing? Organized crime knows how to do that kind of thing. And so, you know, when you get into any of these kind of things, this is why I say, you know, the intelligence community and their cousins in the organized crime world, they’ve always been directly next to each other. They intersect.

TUCKER CARLSON: There has to be.

Building the Maxwell Empire

DARRYL COOPER: And so Maxwell does this, and as that, you know, as Israel’s founded, and he kind of starts to just move on as a British citizen, starts to make his way in the world. He starts out, he creates a small publishing company that specializes. Basically, he basically had a monopoly in getting scientific papers from behind the Iron Curtain and translating and editing the journals that they would have and the papers they would have and distributing them in the West.

And so he starts making a lot of money doing that. He starts expanding out into what became the Maxwell empire, where he owned the New York Daily News, the Daily Mirror. I mean, it was a. He was the Rupert Murdoch at the time, right as the tabloid king. And he became a billionaire back when billion really, really meant something. You know, he actually became a member of parliament in the 1960s. And so it was there in the 1960s.

TUCKER CARLSON: So just 20 years after he got there.

DARRYL COOPER: Yeah, yep. Yeah, yeah. That’s extraordinary. Amazing, honestly.

Recruitment by Israeli Intelligence

And it was there in the 1960s that the Mossad representative in Great Britain, like the assigned guy at the time was Yitzhak Shamir, who later became the prime minister of Israel in 1980s, but started his career as the leader of the State Stern Gang, very infamous terrorist group that killed a lot of people back in the 1940s, carried out the King David Hotel bombing along with the Irgun. I mean, killed 91 people, including 15 Jews, which, you know, if I was Yitzhak, I’d probably be pretty upset about that part at least, but killed many people.

Killed Lord Moyne, a British diplomat in Egypt in 1946, sent mail bombs to several British government officials in Whitehall, in London there. And actually, we have two accounts on this that may be drawing from the same source. And so I don’t want to say it with the same level of certainty, but sent mail bombs to Harry Truman’s White House addressed to him. And we got that from a book that was written by a guy, a fellow who ran the White House mailroom over the course of like six presidents. And he wrote a memoir about just all the different things that he had seen and everything. And one of the things he mentioned is these mail bombs coming from the Zionists in Palestine addressed to Harry Truman. That story was repeated in Harry Truman’s daughter’s memoir. I don’t know if that’s coming from, if that’s independent or if she’s just getting that from the other guy’s book. So I don’t know. But that’s two sources that say that. So that’s what Yitzhak Shamir was up to.

And he goes to Robert Maxwell and he talks to him about his obligations as a Jewish billionaire and an important guy with intelligence community connections in foreign countries, the obligations that he has to the Jewish state of Israel. And you know, that can be a look, it can be, that can be very, very compelling to, especially to people who are, who are kind of mercenary types like Maxwell and kind of always had been, have been from a very young age, you know, feeling like they’re living in a foreign country, because they are. And then, you know, you start to get this appeal of like, obligation to something really meaningful.

Patterns of Ethnic Loyalty in Intelligence

You see this a lot. For example, when I work for the Department of Defense, obviously everybody who’s watching this knows that I have a little bit of a troll in me, but usually my trolling has a purpose. In this case, it did. We were doing a stand down, like a big training thing in an auditorium on what to look for regarding insider threats. Right? So this is like DOD employees who might possibly be looking to spy or pull classified information out for nefarious purposes or, or something, and they’re going through, as part of the training, all of these actual cases that happened over the years.

And out of the nine or 10 that they showed us, you know, there’s one or two where the guy just had a gambling addiction and he needed money and he just didn’t care and he was going to do it. But literally, like the other 8 or 9, 90% of all the ones they showed us were Chinese guys, Chinese Americans spying for China, Russian Americans spying for Russia, Jewish Americans spying for Israel. And all of them, pretty much this was just a pattern. And nobody was talking about it. The trainers weren’t talking about it. They were just pretending like it didn’t exist.

And so leave it to me. I raised my hand at the end when they took questions and I brought that fact up. I was like, what are we supposed to exactly do with that information? And to the guy’s credit, he was honest. He didn’t try to blow smoke up me or anything. He just said, you’re not to look at that at all. Like, that’s not something we consider. And I said, okay. Everybody kind of, you know, looked around like, all right, that’s just how it is.

But, you know, the reason that that pattern existed in the first place is that just, it can be very powerful. Not everybody’s going to respond to it. Most people of any ethnicity are loyal to the country they live in, but you can find people with buttons to push, you know, and Robert Maxwell was one of those people.

Maxwell as a Freelance Intelligence Asset

And so Yitzhak Shamir recruited him and he became from that point on a very committed Zionist and asset to Israeli intelligence. Now, again with Maxwell, just like we talk about a lot of these other people, when I say he was an asset of Israeli intelligence, that doesn’t mean he was on the payroll of Mossad. You know, he didn’t have a rank in the Israeli intelligence community or something. He was a freelancer. He was a guy who was almost. And he looked at himself this way. He was almost like a, like a sovereign himself. You know, he was not really like kind of a member of any country. Exactly. He was like this free floating sovereign entity that would work between the nation states in the world. And that’s very often what he did.

So, for example, you know, this actually is an actual example when the Israeli government wanted to meet with the heads of the KGB in the 1980s, you can’t exactly, I mean, without raising a ruckus or having it be a thing, you can’t put the head of the Mossad on a plane and send them to Moscow to go meet the head of the KGB. And so they would talk to Robert Maxwell, Robert Maxwell would go talk to them and he’d be, you know, the kind of go between and the deal maker and fixer.

TUCKER CARLSON: Very common.

The Maxwell-Epstein Connection

DARRYL COOPER: Right. And you know, I imagine you probably need those people if you’re going to do these kind of things. And so that’s the kind of thing that he would do. You know, there are allegations that are pretty well substantiated at this point that one of the things he would do was act as essentially like a slush fund for Israeli intelligence, black ops.

And the way that it would work is, you know, he would reach into his company’s pension funds, for example, pull some money out that they could then go use to pull off an operation. And then, you know, six months here, a year there down the line, they figure out ways to get the money back to him and they kind of replenish it.

A former Israeli intelligence officer named Ari Ben Menashe is a very controversial but interesting figure. We’ll talk about him more in a little bit because he comes a lot into the Epstein story, too. He and Viktor Ostrovsky, who’s another Mossad, former Mossad official who wrote a book about his experiences after he got kind of jammed up by them and blamed for some things. They both say that Maxwell, what happened you talk about him being murdered is that, you know, once you start reaching into your company’s pension fund to help out Israeli intelligence, like, well, I can do it for this personal reason too, you know, I’ll pay it back. Always pay it back, of course.

And he starts doing that and he gets himself into a lot of trouble. And by the end of his life, he was going to be. I mean, his empire was going to be brought down. He was going to be bankrupt and probably going to prison. I mean, he had robbed his company’s pension fund blind for years at this point. And it was all getting to the point where it was just no longer solvent. It couldn’t be hidden anymore.

And what Ben Menashe says is that he went to his friends in the Mossad and he told them, look, I’ve done all this for you over the years. I have done so much for you. You are going to get me out of this somehow, one way or another, whether you give me the money, whether you deal with the issue in Britain, you’re going to get me out of this. And he got a little too aggressive about it. Ben Menashe says. And, you know, shortly after that, they found him floating off of his yacht near the Canary Islands.

TUCKER CARLSON: And there was a satellite photo. I don’t know if it was ever introduced in court, but I believe this is true. A satellite photo taken that showed a boat with, you know, the belief is that the boat was boarded by some group that threw him off. He had injuries.

DARRYL COOPER: Three different doctors couldn’t agree on the cause of death, not a drowning.

TUCKER CARLSON: And he had injuries consistent to his shoulder, consistent with his struggle.

DARRYL COOPER: He was a big guy. He would have fought. Yeah, but there’s actually another thing happened right before that too, is for years people had speculated and presented little evidence here and there that he was associated with Israeli intelligence, but just right before he died, I think he was in 88. Right before he died, Seymour Hersh went on the record with three, I think, four independent sources that all fingered Maxwell and his number one in his media empire as agents of Israeli intelligence, as active agents of Israeli intelligence. And two weeks later is when he was found dead. And then it was after that that a lot of the financial stuff, the problems that he had kind of came out.

TUCKER CARLSON: There was a five year lawsuit, five year case against his two sons.

DARRYL COOPER: Yeah. And they actually brought a lawsuit against Seymour Hersh for defamation and lost. And not only did they lose, they had to pay all of Hersh’s legal fees and pay him out for suing him. So, you know, the idea of Robert Maxwell being an Israeli intelligence agent is as well substantiated as anything gets in that world.

TUCKER CARLSON: I think he received a state funeral in Israel. He certainly buried there.

DARRYL COOPER: Well, that’s. No, actually, this is the fun part too. So you have this British citizen who has no connection to Israeli intelligence at all. No, nothing. He just is a British guy who’s never lived in Israel. He gets a state funeral that’s attended by every living Israeli prime minister, intelligence agency head, and the President. The President and the Prime Minister. Yitzhak Shamir actually gave his eulogies. And Yitzhak Shamir said that this man has done more for the state of Israel than can now be told.

And he was given a burial plot on the Mount of Olives facing the Western Wall, which is reserved for. It’s the highest honor, you know, that you can bestow when it comes to that kind of thing. And so clearly this was a guy who was very important to a lot of people over there. And he was. It was because he was a very important intelligence.

How Epstein Entered Maxwell’s Orbit

TUCKER CARLSON: What was his. Yeah, I don’t think that’s conscious. It’s funny, as time goes by, people start claiming that certain substantiated facts are not facts. And no one kind of remembers that. No, actually, that’s been proven anyway. What was his connection to Jeffrey Epstein? How does Jeffrey Epstein wind up in an orbit of a guy like that?

DARRYL COOPER: Douglas Leese introduced him. And so. And according to multiple sources from Israeli and US intelligence circles that have gone on the record to journalists like Vicki Ward, both of them were involved in the weapons deals and things that we’re talking about in the 1980s. You know, Maxwell would be the guy who, like his pension fund would be used as a slush fund, for example, the conduit to move money through. Epstein would be a guy who made sure that it moved around in ways that couldn’t easily be traced. And so they worked together with intelligence on these operations.

And so Robert is the one who introduced him to his daughter. It’s not something a father really wants to do, introduce your daughter to a guy like Jeffrey Epstein. But maybe she had problems of her own. I don’t know. He introduces her and so just add that to add another zero to the odds of all of these connections kind of piling up, right? Known 100%, locked in Israeli intelligence agent for decades. Robert Maxwell, his daughter just happens to be, you know, Jeffrey Epstein’s partner in crime.

And, you know, have you seen that famous picture of Prince Andrew with Virginia Roberts? She’s a teenager. Stand there with her. That’s in Robert Maxwell’s house in England, that that picture was taken. So, you know, they were. They were close, obviously, you know, and here’s the funny thing, actually. When Vicky Ward interviewed, when she interviewed Jeffrey Epstein in 2002, we’ll get to her whole interview in 2002, which is really interesting because it was in 2002, nobody knew who Jeffrey Epstein was. None of these conspiracy theories were out there, anything like that. And she’s got all kinds of stuff we’ll talk about here in a second.

But he said total ignorance. Robert Maxwell doesn’t ring a bell. Don’t know him at all. And they were incredibly close. She didn’t really. It wasn’t the point of her story, so she didn’t really pursue it too much. He also was asked by her about his relationship to Douglas Leese, and he claimed not to know Douglas Leese. When Douglas Leese’s own son, Julian, he said that his father was essentially, for many years, he used the word a mentor to Jeffrey Epstein of sorts. And he expressed disbelief that Epstein would have claimed not to know him.

I mean, so you have these connections that Epstein denies, which again, if they were innocent connections, he probably wouldn’t have a reason to do that. All of these intelligence connections that. With people who were, you know, again, like you take the Donald Barr one, for example, okay, he worked for the OSS in World War II. Great. I don’t know, maybe he, you know, maybe it’s a once intelligence guy, always an intelligence guy, and he was still. But I don’t know, all I have is that he worked for the OSS. And so maybe that’s all in the past, has nothing to do with it.

But all these other guys, these are people who were not only active but absolutely central to the most high profile operations that were going on in the 1980s. And Jeffrey Epstein is right there in the middle of all of them. And they all seem to think that he’s pretty damn important. You know, Robert Maxwell pimps out his daughter to him. You know, I don’t maybe want to put it too harshly. When you give your daughter to a guy like Epstein, what do you say about it? You know, guys like Khashoggi and Douglas Leese, who was his mentor, I mean, these are guys who are right in the middle of the most high profile operations going on at the time.

The Source of Epstein’s Wealth

TUCKER CARLSON: So how does Epstein, does he get rich from doing this stuff? Because at the center of the story or the enduring mystery, from my perspective, there are a couple, but one is, where did all the money come from?

DARRYL COOPER: How did he get rich? So one of the people that Vicky Ward interviewed in 2002, none of which made it into her story, Vicki Ward.

TUCKER CARLSON: Was a Vanity Fair reporter at the time.

DARRYL COOPER: She was writing for Vanity Fair. Yeah, she wrote for Rolling Stone later. And the whole story of the publication of Restoring Vanity Fair is a lot of fun. So we’ll talk about that. One of the people that she interviewed was a guy that Jeffrey Epstein had helped send to jail, a guy named Steven Hoffenberg, who ran a company called Towers Financial that was engaged in a Ponzi scheme. I think it was a $450 million Ponzi scheme, robbed a lot of people of a lot of money. Hoffenberg doesn’t deny it. He took responsibility for it at the time, pled guilty, did his time, and he’s open about all of it now. Calls himself greedy and just all these things.

Well, he gets a call from Douglas Leese and says, hey, I got a guy who can help you out. Because he knew Leese. And he puts him in touch with Jeffrey Epstein. And Epstein, he said, is just the kind of guy that a business like a quote, unquote business, like the one I’m running this Ponzi scheme is looking for. It’s a guy who’s very intelligent, who knows a lot about the offshore accounting and things that we need to know about, and he has no moral compass whatsoever, Hoffenberg said. And this is what he told Ward at the time.

And so some of the other things that he said is he said that what Epstein would do, and he did this to Hoffenberg himself eventually, is the people that they would be moving money around for, they would take some of that for themselves. And Epstein had a scheme that he called Playing the Box, which I don’t know where the name exactly comes from, but what it entailed is stealing money from people and making sure that you have compromising information on them so that even if they catch you doing, they’re going to be too embarrassed or too afraid to actually come out and go after you.

And so, given what we know about Epstein’s proclivities and his later activities, you can probably guess what some of those activities were. Right? And this is what Hoffenberg said he would do. He said that Jeffrey Epstein, you know, well, so he confirms the story of Epstein being attached to Douglas Leese, first of all, because he knew Leese and that’s how they met. And he says that Epstein used to talk quite openly about his connections and dealings with the intelligence community, not just in the US but in Israel as well.

And again, none of this made it into the story, because this is 2002. Vicki Ward’s just like Douglas, who. What doesn’t really. She didn’t know who these people were, and she was trying to invest. I mean, she had on the record witnesses accusing Jeffrey Epstein of sexual assault. Like, underage girls. That’s responsible. She was interested in. So all this other stuff, she doesn’t even know what he’s talking about at the time. She kept all her notes and everything, and once it kind of came out later, she brought all that out into the public.

The Vanity Fair Story That Never Was

So, yeah, the story of. Here’s a fun one. So. And Vicky Ward tells this story. But, I mean, there was even an NPR report, radio report about this several years ago when the Epstein thing was coming out where they have people who are working at Vanity Fair, one of the senior editors in an audio interview telling the story. She’s working. She’s running down this story. And she’s got three on the record witnesses, two sisters, but then one totally independent, telling the same story about Jeffrey Epstein. He sexually assaulted them.

And she’s writing up this story, but it started out as like, a profile piece, like, that’s all. And then this stuff came out through the course of her reporting, and she is pursuing this story, and all of a sudden, one day she gets her interview with Jeffrey Epstein, and she asks him about the girls, and he gets really, really upset, threatens or personally threatens her, like, says, I’m not coming after the magazine. If you print this, I’m coming after you, because my relationship here is with you. Don’t do this to yourself. Don’t do this to your family. It’s not worth it.

TUCKER CARLSON: Whoa.

The Vanity Fair Story Gets Killed

DARRYL COOPER: And so she says, well, you know, does what a reporter’s supposed to do, I suppose. You know, you’re not going to push me around like that. And you don’t know who this guy is. And so he’s just some rich guy who’s trying to threaten you or something. And so she writes up the story, and it goes through legal, and legal looks at it. You got three on the record witnesses corroborating each other’s stories, gets through legal, and then right before it goes to press, Graydon Carter, who was running Vanity Fair at the time, he puts the kibosh on that part of the story. He just takes it out without even telling Vicky Ward has all of that stuff removed. And it’s just a profile piece about Jeffrey Epstein.

TUCKER CARLSON: This international, minus the sexual assault allegations.

DARRYL COOPER: Correct. And so the story, though, where it gets really interesting. And again, this is told by not just Ward, but by a bunch of people who worked there at the time. As they talk of the office at the time, they said he comes into his office one day, he’s the first person in the office. Graydon Carter’s office within the larger complex is blocked, but Jeffrey Epstein’s already in there. He’s the first person in, and he’s waiting for him, and he berates him and threatens him and tells him, you know, he better not print this.

And a short time later, Graydon Carter leaves his house in New York City and he finds a bullet on his stoop. And then a little while later, at his country house upstate, he finds a severed cat’s head on the porch there. And according to the senior editor and a lot of people at Vanity Fair, Graydon Carter and everybody in the office knew exactly what this was. These were threats from Jeffrey Epstein, and Graydon Carter axed the story because of that.

And so, you know, you have to think like Vanity Fair. They’ve probably been threatened legally by people before who they’re writing exposes on every month. And so to intimidate somebody like that and a magazine like that into doing that with such direct and overt threats, you know, you look at, you’re like, man, what kind of confidence and hubris did this guy have that he felt confident?

TUCKER CARLSON: You know, the biggest magazine publisher in the country at the time, most important, published the New Yorker. Like, big, big deal place.

DARRYL COOPER: But it worked and it got axed. And probably because of that, a lot more girls got sexually assaulted over the next several years.

How Epstein Got Rich

TUCKER CARLSON: You know, so how did. So by the time Vicky Ward is interviewing Epstein in 2002. You know, Vanity Fair at the time was like, basically the in house publication for the ruling class. Like, you know, the emerging ruling class. Anyway, he’s a rich guy. How did he get rich? I’m confused.

DARRYL COOPER: Yeah, I mean, so to go back to Hoffenberg and Towers Financial, for example, Hoffenberg was running this Ponzi scheme with Epstein. Vicki Ward has a source in the Justice Department who worked the case at the time who told her about Epstein cooperating with the government against Hoffenberg and said that if it had gone to trial for Epstein, it would have gone worse for him than it did for Hoffenberg. Like, he had more fingerprints and was more deeply involved with the scheme than even Hoffenberg was.

But what he had done was he had taken $100 million from Hoffenberg, from the company and hidden it offshore, and then went to the authorities and cooperated with them to get Hoffenberg thrown in jail. And since Hoffenberg had pled guilty, there was no discovery or anything like that. And he just went away for 18 years.

TUCKER CARLSON: And Jeffrey Epstein, he did 18 years.

DARRYL COOPER: Eighteen years, yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

DARRYL COOPER: Jeffrey Epstein, for with 40 on the record witnesses accusing him of sexual assault in 2008, got.

TUCKER CARLSON: 13 months and not even full time detention.

DARRYL COOPER: Yeah, yeah, let’s talk about that. I mean, this.

The Les Wexner Connection

TUCKER CARLSON: I just want to linger for a second on the money. So it’s been reported repeatedly that there’s a guy called Les Leslie, Les Wexner, biggest owner of the biggest house in Ohio. Who is Wexner, and what is his relationship to Epstein? And before you begin, because I want people to keep this in mind as they’re listening, as far as I know, and I think this is correct, Wexner, who I believe is still alive, has never been interviewed by the Department of Justice, so just want to throw that out there.

DARRYL COOPER: Yeah, that’s correct. As far as I know. So Les Wexner, he owns Limited Brands, L Brands, so Victoria’s Secret, he owns Abercrombie and Fitch, a lot of the places that you see when you go into the mall. I don’t think it’s the case anymore. But for a long time, he was the largest clothing manufacturer and distributor in the United States. Billionaire, incredibly wealthy guy, as you said, owns the largest and most expensive house in the state of Ohio, where he lives in Columbus. And the second largest and most expensive house in the state of Ohio was owned by Jeffrey Epstein and was directly behind Wexner’s house.

TUCKER CARLSON: What?

DARRYL COOPER: Yeah. So Wexner, he was introduced to Wexner, through this network of people, and very, very quickly becomes. I mean, the nature of their relationship is still kind of a mystery because it’s so hard to explain in any terms that you can really draw a plausible story for within a very short period of time. He known this guy. He known this Epstein guy, like, two years. Right. And not because he had. He had worked at his company for those two years and was so squared away, anything like that. We don’t exactly know what he was doing during those two years, but he knew him two years when he signed full power of attorney over his entire estate. Les Wexner, talking billions of dollars, the largest clothing manufacturing corporation in the country, or company in the country, to the point where this was not a limited power of attorney. Jeffrey Epstein could sign.

TUCKER CARLSON: Wait, he gives Jeffrey Epstein power of attorney over everything?

DARRYL COOPER: Jeffrey Epstein could take out loans in his name. He could sign his tax returns. He had full power of attorney over the Wexner estate. Soon after that, Wexner’s mother gets sick, and her spot on the Wexner foundation board, which is how Wexner disposed of most of his money, opens up. He puts Jeffrey Epstein on there, and he basically runs the board of the foundation for about 15 years, controlling a lot of where that money went and. What?

TUCKER CARLSON: 15 years?

DARRYL COOPER: Yeah. And Wexner alleged this was way later on, after everything had kind of come out. So who kind of knows? You know, everybody’s kind of trying to distance themselves from Epstein at this point, but he says that Epstein stole a lot of money from him through his, you know, control over the foundation. Everything. Probably did, for all I know, but, you know, we can.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, just. I just. I’m shocked to learn, and I am learning this, that Jeffrey. You’re positive Jeffrey Epstein had power of attorney.

DARRYL COOPER: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: Over.

DARRYL COOPER: You can. Yeah. You can read that. Read that anywhere. Yeah. For 16 years, by the way. 16 years. And so what?

TUCKER CARLSON: Has Wexner ever been asked, why would you give.

DARRYL COOPER: I don’t even think he’s. Forget the Department of Justice. I don’t think he’s given any interviews to journalists about it. Maybe he’ll come on here and sit in my seat and talk to you. I kind of doubt I would be polite.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’m genuinely fascinated by that detail because that is, you know, a man who builds like, all of these characters. You know, they’re unusual people. They’re not average people. They’re extraordinary people. By definition, you build a billion dollar company, good or bad. You’re not like everybody else. And you’re good. You’re good in business, and you’re careful and judicious, and you don’t hand power of attorney over to some guy you’ve never worked with.

Epstein’s Power Over Wexner

DARRYL COOPER: Especially he had his own executives, people who worked for him for decades, coming to him, being like, boss, who is this guy? What are you. What are you doing? Why are you giving him so much authority and power? There was a guy that Wexner had known for decades. They go to Ohio State football games together. They do dinners together. They were good friends. And he tells this story about how Jeffrey Epstein comes into the picture, and he’s going to meet him for the first time. Epstein goes over to his office, and Epstein shows up, like, an hour late for the meeting, and he gets there, and the first thing he does when he sits down in his chair. And I mean, this is just one of those things that. This isn’t a faux pas. This is a message. He sits down in the chair at this important businessman. It’s a good friend of his boss or whatever he was, Les Wexner. He sits down in the chair, and he kicks his feet up on the guy’s desk. The guy was like, okay, that’s interesting. You know, this guy’s not Wexner’s secretary, apparently.

TUCKER CARLSON: Quite a power move.

DARRYL COOPER: Yeah. And so Wexner, there, in that meeting, gets on the phone with both of the guys, and he tells his friend, you know, Jeffrey’s family treat him like family, you know? And so eventually, a little later down the line, that guy has a disagreement with Epstein, and they get into an argument about something. And from that moment on, he says he couldn’t reach Wexner by phone. He got cut off immediately, completely, with no explanation. This guy had known him for decades because he had a tiff with Jeffrey Epstein. And so this guy clearly had either some kind of a powerful hold over Wexner for one reason or another, by.

TUCKER CARLSON: Definition, we can say that.

DARRYL COOPER: Or they were working together in some other way. So Wexner’s another one of these interesting cats, right? Like where his mentor was a real estate guy, mainly, but he did a lot of things named Max Fisher. And I think he was originally from Indiana, Max Fisher, but lived in Ohio, I believe. But anyway, either way, he was Wexner’s mentor for a while. Not his mentor like when he was just getting started. Wexner’s already rich by this point. It’s not about that.

TUCKER CARLSON: Fisher’s.

DARRYL COOPER: His big main thing was philanthropic contributions in management for Jewish and Zionist and state of Israel related causes. Right. And so when you look at, like, what the Wexner foundation did, for example, they would give a little bit of money to Ohio State University here and there and, like, a few other things locally there in Columbus and around the state of Ohio. But the vast, vast, vast majority of it went to Zionist organizations, Jewish organizations, things like that, which, you know, fine, Fisher’s the guy that sort of. That sort of did what Yitzhak Shamir did with Robert Maxwell. But for Les Wexner, you know, you go to him and you say, you’ve got an obligation here to the Jewish state. You’re a Jewish billionaire. You know, you’re a big, important person in the most powerful country in the world. Like, you have an obligation to your people. And again, it’s a powerful call. And so it really came to, in a lot of ways, define Wexner’s life after that. And so in the 1990s, this was in the newspapers and stuff during the Clinton administration. Really, really interesting. Les Wexner and Edgar Bronfman, which, if that name sounds familiar, it’s because I mentioned.

Breaking News: Trump Calls for Epstein Grand Jury Testimony

TUCKER CARLSON: Sorry, I want to just pause. I was just handed this breaking news to some extent. This is from the President of the United States, released on Truth Social just now. Based on the ridiculous amount of publicity I’m quoting given to Jeffrey Epstein, I have asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to produce any and all pertinent grand jury testimony subject to court approval. This scam, all caps perpetrated by Democrats, comma, should end, comma, right now, exclamation point.

DARRYL COOPER: All right, shut the cameras off, guys. We’re done here.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I still think. Okay, that’s pretty good. I have no idea where this leads, if anywhere. I certainly hope it leads to greater disclosure. That’s good for everyone, including the President, and it’s good for everyone. Disclosure is good, but it doesn’t change, in my opinion, the need for anyone who’s interested in the story to know what the story actually is. So I hope you will continue.

The Mega Group and Epstein’s Connections

DARRYL COOPER: Yeah. So in the 1990s, Wexner and Edgar Bronfman, who I mentioned earlier, one of the heirs to the Seagram’s liquor fortune, who was one of Jeffrey Epstein’s clients when he was working at Bear Stearns. Those two guys founded a group called the Study Group, but it’s more commonly known as the Mega Group. That came out in the papers a little bit in the late 1990s. Not a lot was written, but it was a group of, at first about 20, but then later it expanded. Jewish billionaires in the United States and Canada, who would meet at least twice a year to get together and just coordinate how they were distributing their philanthropic money, what their focuses were for that year. Just making sure they were all acting in concert to help serve the interests of Israel in their respective countries.

They would finance scholars and other professionals to write up papers and studies and analyses for the Israeli government, for Israeli intelligence, for example. And they were very plugged into that and very, very, very connected to the Israeli government and specifically, specifically Israeli intelligence through the work that they would do for the Israelis. And it. So, you know, again, just one more sort of connection there to the intelligence world among people who are very, very, very close to Jeffrey Epstein.

Now, you know, you watch the Netflix documentary or anything about Jeffrey Epstein, one of the things that really does stick out to you is this guy, okay, there’s rich and then there’s rich, and Jeffrey Epstein’s rich. I mean, apparently, right? This is a guy who.

TUCKER CARLSON: He certainly lived like it.

DARRYL COOPER: He had the second largest. I mean, when you see the pictures of this place he lived in in Ohio, the pictures of this ranch he lived on in New Mexico, he had a $70 million house in the largest private residence, I believe, in New York’s area.

TUCKER CARLSON: How did he buy that house?

DARRYL COOPER: Les Wexner gave it to him.

TUCKER CARLSON: Les Wexner gave him a $70 million house?

DARRYL COOPER: Yeah, I don’t think it was worth 70 million at the time, but when he got arrested, it was. Yeah, yeah, gave it to him.

TUCKER CARLSON: Worth more now, probably.

DARRYL COOPER: Can I. I mean, and no one’s.

TUCKER CARLSON: Ever asked Les Wexner, why did you sign over power of attorney over your whole life and give, among other things, a $70 million property, the biggest private residence in Manhattan to Jeffrey Epstein? Owen.

Epstein’s Lavish Lifestyle

DARRYL COOPER: I mean, I don’t think. I don’t think he’s given anybody the opportunity. You know, he had that. He had that big. You know, everybody’s seen the picture of the temple on the island, but that’s just one little part of it. I mean, it’s a much. I think it was 60, 80 acre island, something like that. Big, beautiful mansion, several outbuildings, that crazy temple. He had a fleet of airplanes and not just a Learjet or something like that. He had a customized 727. So basically his own Air Force One he was flying around in. You know, he had a mansion in Paris. He actually owned a second US Virgin island down there as well. I mean, so this is a dude who is Elon Musk, doesn’t live this way he probably could, but he doesn’t even close.

TUCKER CARLSON: No. Elon sleeps on people’s couches.

DARRYL COOPER: Right. And so if you take the official story, which is that he was a money manager of some kind, the only client that we know of was Les Wexner. But what he exactly even did for Wexner nobody’s really able to describe.

The Money Manager Story Falls Apart

TUCKER CARLSON: So the official story is he’s a money manager.

DARRYL COOPER: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: Is there any. So it’s hard to manage money in a country’s financial systems are as regulated as ours are anonymously. So if you’re actually managing money, certainly if you’re conducting trades, there’s a record, and in some capacities, you have to register.

DARRYL COOPER: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Is there any documentary evidence that Jeffrey Epstein was in any recognizable sense, a money manager?

DARRYL COOPER: Not only is there no documentary evidence, you know, people have to understand how, you know, the regulatory environment is one reason that it’s really hard to do any of this kind of thing on that scale under the radar, but also just on a personal network level, like in Wall street and places like that, like, if you’re a guy. So Jeffrey Epstein, back in the 1980s, he claims. The claim was at the time, even not just now. It’s not something he came up with later, that he was a money manager who only took accounts of a billion dollars or more. So you didn’t just have to be a billionaire, you had to have a billion dollars to invest with him. Right.

And a guy who knew him back then thought he would do Epstein a solid, and he brought him a client who had $600 million he wanted to invest with Epstein. This is 1980s money. It’s like $2 billion today, like inflation adjusted. Right. You show up with that kind of money to Goldman Sachs, and the CEO is going to meet you at the front door and take you up a private elevator. And the company’s vice president, presidents, are going to give you a presentation about all the people that are going to be dedicated. Like the big, biggest investment banks in the world are going to audition for you. You don’t audition for them. You know what I mean? Like, if you have that kind of money, Epstein blew the guy off. He said, oh, no, it’s too small. I don’t deal with that kind of pocket change, you know, 600 million today, $2 billion.

And so you say, well, that’s obviously ridiculous. Obviously there is no fund manager in the world that would do that. And so why would he do that? And I think when you look at the whole record, the answer is obvious. He wasn’t a money Manager. You know, people.

TUCKER CARLSON: He didn’t actually invest people’s money.

DARRYL COOPER: Yeah, people think like a. You know, a hedge fund is like a dude sitting at his desktop computer, like on E Trade or something. Hedge funds have teams of analysts and mathematicians and all. It’s a whole big business, you know, and, like, people need to understand that. So nobody’s ever. Nobody knows anybody who’s ever worked for Epstein in this capacity. Nobody’s ever. I mean, look, when you’re operating at that level, if he was who he says he was, moving that kind of money around, you know, you don’t go buy shares in Microsoft. You know, you take a position in the company. You know, these are things that are done through large institutions.

And, you know, you have to have institutional support so that they can gather up enough shares for you to purchase and then structure the purchases in a way that it doesn’t just suck all the liquidity out of the market and, you know, drive the market crazy on the stock price for a little while. This is a complex operation. There’s a lot of people. Nobody has even. Nobody has heard of anybody who’s heard of anybody who’s ever done any kind of.

TUCKER CARLSON: And there’s no record of anything?

DARRYL COOPER: No, nothing.

TUCKER CARLSON: Him investing money, trading stocks, Nothing.

DARRYL COOPER: Which is just impossible. I mean, it’s just. It’s flat out impossible that he was doing what the official story says he was doing, and there’s just no trace of it. It’s not possible.

The Wexner Connection Mystery

TUCKER CARLSON: So once again, where’d the money come from? Well, clearly, some of it came from Les Wexner. We don’t. I’m summarizing what I think you’ve said. We have no idea why Wexner gave him all this power and money. We have no idea.

DARRYL COOPER: Not any. We don’t have hard evidence on it. You know, some people suggested blackmail because of things that have come out about Epstein, but we don’t have anything like that. There are people who were in the Wexner circle back in those days when Epstein was around, and they’ve claimed that Epstein was known kind of around the office as the boyfriend. But that’s just an allegation. Nobody has any hard information on that. And both of the guys. Epstein was asked about it under oath, and Wexner, they all obviously deny that. So I don’t. You know, it’s not an accusation or anything, but it’s just trying to understand something that otherwise is, like, really inexplicable. Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: So what were there other. Because Epstein’s annual operating budget had to be, like, it’s hard to calculate, but, like, not that hard. Just maintaining aircraft like that is just.

DARRYL COOPER: Beyond big yacht he had.

TUCKER CARLSON: Beyond. Who are the other rich people he got money from? Do we know?

DARRYL COOPER: Well, so there, you know, there was a story that actually just came out in the last few days that I have not had an opportunity to really dig down deep in. I should go check Mike Benz’s Twitter feed. He’s probably done this, or he will soon. But where There are records apparently of a billion and a half dollars that were transferred to and from Epstein, apparently involving people whose names, you know, we’ve all. We’ve all heard before. It’s not public. And so I, you know, again, I haven’t dug deeply into that and exactly what’s going on with it. So maybe there’s. Maybe there’s one document there that we can, you know, that’s going to tell us something. But even that, that’s. That. That doesn’t explain how. I mean, he’s living the lifestyle of a guy who personally has billions and billions of dollars.

TUCKER CARLSON: But it doesn’t explain motive. It doesn’t explain why Wexner would give him all of this at the very, very young age, with no relevant experience as. As a tax advisor, as an investor.

The Victoria’s Secret Scandal

DARRYL COOPER: Just, I mean, think about this, Tucker. There was a. There was a point in the 1980s when it might have been the early 90s, actually. Wexner, again, owned Victoria’s Secret. For a guy like Jeffrey Epstein, that’s kind of a gold mine you’re sitting on, right? Because he would go out and he would pose as a talent scout. He would tell people that he was that, and he would present credentials that made it plausible. And he would get girls who wanted to be models, who wanted to be in Victoria’s Secret to pose for him, and then he would sexually assault them at times.

And so two of the. This kind of got word got around that he was doing this, and two of the top executives at Victoria’s Secret together, guys who worked there for years, knew Wexner well. They went to him together and presented the evidence and told him that this is what this guy’s doing. And they never heard anything more about it. Nothing happened. And so you ask, like, got this young, I guess, run of the mill money manager dude who, at Wexner at this point, is only known for a few years. It’s not like they have a decades long relationship or anything. And two of your top executives come and say he’s using your name, basically, to sexually assault women who want to work for our company, and it gets blown off. And you say, who could get away with something like that? You know, and. And the answer is the kind of guy that Wexner would give full power of attorney over his estate to, I suppose, you know, wild.

Leon Black and Other Wealthy Connections

TUCKER CARLSON: So there was a couple people who’ve been revealed in the popular press as having had relationships with Epstein and giving him money, and one of them is a guy called Leon Black. What is that story? So we know that Black gave him over $100 million. I think he said he. I think he’s admitted that he did. Right?

DARRYL COOPER: Yeah. They all kind of have the same story that, like, we trusted this guy as an investment manager, basically, and, you know, we were suckers. It’s like, there’s not a lot of billionaire suckers out there, you know, when it comes. When it comes to the money side of their life, you know, all the details of he and Black’s relationship, I’m. I’m not completely firm on, honestly, but he gives. In general, he gives the same story that, like, Wexner gave. Oh, I trusted him. I was just too naive and too trusting and scammed me like he scammed everybody. I mean. But, you know, they don’t even describe.

TUCKER CARLSON: What the scam was. What’s the scam?

The Epstein Financial Scheme

DARRYL COOPER: Well, so you look, for example, at what happened with Hoffenberg before Epstein turned on him. He took $100 million out of the company and Hoffenberg’s accounts, moved it offshore, and then turned state’s evidence on the guy and sent him off to prison. And so, you know, what Hoffenberg said Epstein would do to other people, what eventually got done to him is he would take their money into Towers Financial at the time, but he would set up other companies to do this as well, and he would get investors to come in, and then he would take their money and he would hide it away, and he would do it after he had procured blackmail on people to control them afterwards so that they didn’t come after him.

And this is, again, something that I wouldn’t probably put so much stock into if Hoffenberg had been interviewed about it in 2019 and told that story. When people are already talking about all of this stuff, it’s out there. This is 2002. Nobody knows who Jeffrey Epstein is in 2002. I mean, this is before he maybe was in the society pages or something in New York City, but nobody. He was not a celebrity and so Hoffenberg is making these very specific allegations about people that Epstein was connected with in the 80s and 90s, from Lisa to Khashoggi and others to the specific. I mean, he gets down to exactly what he called the scheme that he was running, playing the box.

And he describes the whole thing, and essentially it’s scamming wealthy people out of their money and using blackmail to make sure that they’re afraid to come after him. Now, how much of his wealth that represented, you know, it’s kind of hard to say because when he got sent off to jail in 2008, 2009, he moved all of his money offshore to Israel, actually, and also sent 46 and a half million dollars to the Wexner foundation, which Wexner says was him paying back what he had stolen from Wexner. I haven’t heard him ask the question, why didn’t you press charges? Why, you know, anything like that? So who knows? But, yeah, so, I mean, let’s talk a little bit about what happened in that first case of his.

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly. So Epstein is unknown to most people. Then he becomes sort of famous in 2006, 2007.

DARRYL COOPER: Yeah. And in society circles, he was pretty famous. Of course, it was a big deal. I mean, you know, West Palm Beach is a small community down there of very connected people.

TUCKER CARLSON: How did he get busted? What was he accused of? What was he convicted of?

The Recruitment Operation

DARRYL COOPER: So Epstein’s thing that he would do usually is starting with Ghislaine Maxwell as his initial recruiter. He would find girls that were vulnerable in one way or another. Young girls, usually at high schools. He wasn’t, by all accounts, I think, the youngest girl that he’s accused of messing with was 12 years old at the time. So, you know, execute him or bury him under the prison. But, you know, a little bit different proclivity than the prepubescent pedophile. It is probably a different psychology.

But through Maxwell, story goes, she would go out and she would identify a girl who very often was from broken family or from, you know, no father in the picture, which was very important because fathers tend to beat the hell out of 40 year old guys who sexually assault their daughters. And so you find these girls who kind of already have some problems, and you bring them in to give them a massage. Say, look, he’s this wealthy guy. He’s very interesting. He just likes to get massages. He’ll pay you $200 to give him a massage. Don’t you want to just make $200? Back in the 80s, 90s, you know, early 2000s, a lot of money for high school girls, especially from the wrong side of the tracks.

And so some of them would, I presume, say no, but others would go do it. And once they found ones that they liked who kind of fit the profile, then they would outsource the recruitment to those girls. And it was actually one instance, in fact, where the girl, when they tried to assault her, because, you know, they’d start out with a massage and then they would go from there. And the girls. At this point, you’re in this billionaire’s house, isolated behind a gate, and what are you going to do? You know, they don’t. It’s a scary situation for a high school girl. Obviously, you know, a lot of the people who look at the situation and I tend to find very. I guess it’s not strange when you really think about it, but when I talk to men about this, they’re like, kill that guy. Just get rid of that guy. When you talk to women about it, I find that they’re a little bit more punitive in their view. And maybe that’s just because what was she doing there? Yeah, they remember being 15, and they’re like, I wasn’t just some purely innocent dove.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, men are protective, as they should be.

DARRYL COOPER: And so there was one girl who, she did react that way. She refused to do anything. And they said, well, okay, that’s all right, it’s all right. You know, we still think you’re awesome. You know, we want to get massages and everything. I’ll tell you what, you don’t have to do anything, but we’ll give you $200 for every one of your friends that you bring. If you find others, you bring them in to do this and, you know, we’ll give them $200. You’ll get $200 every time you do it. And she did it.

And those girls, you know, really kind of sickeningly, I think, they were kind of portrayed in the presses like prostitution solicitors. These are minors. These are high school girls being manipulated by adults who very skillfully manipulated billionaires. You know what I mean? So that’s just a ridiculous idea to place a responsibility on them. Kind of a sick thing to write in a newspaper, honestly.

How Epstein Got Caught

But they would do that, and, you know, that sort of ensured. I mean, the girl who is from a broken family and has some problems from the wrong side of the tracks. She might know a girl who is from an intact middle class family with two concerned parents, but very often her friends are kind of from the same mold that she’s from every once in a while. They weren’t though. And this is part of how he got caught is one of the girls that they brought in. They had a father, they had a mother who cared, and they had a pretty regular family who after everything was over, she ran back to them and told them all about it and they went to the police.

And so the West Palm Beach, this is down in Florida, the West Palm Beach Police Department starts looking into the guy, starts gathering more information, starts talking to more witnesses. And very quickly this thing starts expanding out so that two witnesses becomes four and four becomes eight and eight becomes 16. It’s expanding a lot. And they’re realizing they have a big, big, big issue on their hands.

And as they’re going through the Netflix documentary, it leaves out a lot of really important information, but it’s really good on this stuff. You know, they interview the chief of police in West Palm Beach there at the time. And you can see he is just flabbergasted, outraged, just to the point where he says at one point that it cost him his faith in the US Criminal justice system because he was getting stonewalled like crazy at the local level.

People in his department or somewhere in the local government were leaking the information of the investigation to Jeffrey Epstein. So, for example, when they raided his house, finally went in there and all the computers had been taken away, was totally ready for the raid and prepared for it. Everything was removed. And he was 100% tipped off, they say.

Federal Involvement and Obstruction

So he’s facing this kind of resistance at the local level and the state prosecutor level. And so he does something that you don’t do as a chief of police. He just went completely around his chain of command and went directly to the feds himself and said, I’m going to bring the feds in. Clearly the state and the local officials are too corrupted, apparently. Maybe it’s just because he’s an important guy and they don’t want to rock the boat and bring bad publicity, whatever it is. I need to bring the heavy artillery in here because the feds aren’t going to care. You know, they’re not. He’s not big enough for them, supposedly.

And so he gives it over to the feds and that’s when it ends up in the lap of Alex Acosta, who is the Southern District of Florida U.S. attorney at the time. And so they start looking into this guy, and they start building out a case. You have this woman, Villanueva, I think her name was, who was the lead Prosecutor for the U.S. attorney’s office on the Epstein case. And she, from all appearances at least, was very enthusiastic and earnest about trying to pursue this case and was very upset about how the whole thing was handled by her superiors.

But they’re building out a case, and they get to the point where. I mean, this was actually even before the West Palm Beach Police Department did this. The feds got handed a case with 40 something on the record. Underage witnesses accusing this guy, corroborating each other’s stories, telling the exact same story of how they were recruited, what happened when they got there, what they were asked and made to do, everything down the line, right?

This is when West Palm Beach first went to the prosecutor after they started building their case. They said the guy sort of chuckled and laughed. He was like, this is going to be the easiest case I’ve ever done. You know, this is open, and we’re going to put this guy away for 100 years. This is the easiest case we’re ever going to do. And he can’t do it at the state level. So he hands it over to the feds and open and shut. I mean, how do you get away from 40 on the record, corroborating independent witnesses? Right? You can discredit one or two or ten. You still got 30 left, you know.

The Acosta Deal

And goes to the feds, and they build out the case more. They bring in more witnesses, they gather more evidence. And all of a sudden, the prosecutor, she starts running into obstacles of her own. One of the things, for example, they found out was that the computers that had been taken out of his house in West Palm Beach were in the possession of somebody connected to Epstein’s lawyer. And so she put out a Department of Justice subpoena demanding those computers from the lawyers and the people. And the lawyers kind of delay and have meetings and put things off and so forth. And these are some of them people we’ve heard of, Alan Dershowitz, people like that, who they delay.

And so one day, she goes to her bosses, and she kind of grills him a little bit. She wrote this in an email, actually. She was very aggressive about it though. She’s like, I don’t know what’s happening here. I don’t know what the deal is. But we have a child predator on our hands with an open and shut case to put this guy away for the rest of our life. What is the problem here? And she gets reprimanded and told in no uncertain terms, your attitude is not appreciated and you need to back off by her superior.

And so then one day, and this is while the subpoenas out for those computers, Alex Acosta personally goes and cuts a deal with Epstein’s lawyers without telling the lead prosecutor who’s looking into the case without telling the victims, which is in contravention of victims rights law. You know, if you’re going to cut a deal with a sex offender, you got to tell the victims, hey, by the way, this is what’s happening, here’s why we’re doing it. And just so you know, he’s going to be out of jail in a year or something. You have to tell them.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s a law. This guy wind up as Labor Secretary.

DARRYL COOPER: That is a story worth looking into. I don’t know, but a lot of.

TUCKER CARLSON: Candidates for the gig.

DARRYL COOPER: So he.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why that guy?

DARRYL COOPER: Yeah, he comes in and he cuts a deal with the lawyers that says that the federal government agrees not to prosecute Epstein for any of the crimes that are being alleged, any related crimes that have yet to be alleged, nor will they prosecute any of his accomplices, known or unknown. So crimes that come out in the future, committed by people who aren’t known about yet, those are covered under this immunity as well. Right. It’s the most blanket you can possibly imagine. And as a condition of the deal, the subpoena for his computers was dropped.

TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, so it sounds like they intentionally didn’t gather a lot of evidence.

DARRYL COOPER: 100%.

The DOJ’s Limited Information

TUCKER CARLSON: So this is relevant. The reason I’m bringing it up is there’s this. I said I wouldn’t talk about contemporary politics, but there’s this huge controversy over why isn’t the DOJ releasing all this information. And my informed understanding is, at least to some extent, because they don’t have it. And they don’t have it because we’ve never gathered. And I don’t know why nobody has said that publicly. I’m not making excuses for anybody, by the way, but I. It’s just really interesting. So the cover up began immediately, 100%.

DARRYL COOPER: And went all the way up to the federal level. And then just to remind everybody where this conversation started, that U.S. attorney, future labor Secretary under Donald Trump, was apparently on the record telling the people who were vetting him for the Labor Secretary job that he, the reason he cut that deal was because he was told Epstein belonged to intelligence and to leave it alone.

TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, so, okay, let’s just set this in time and place. The feds basically protecting Jeffrey Epstein in 2007. Ish. That’s the Bush administration. And it clearly. This is a very high profile thing. It was in the papers. DOJ, this is their. You know, Acosta is a U.S. attorney. He’s the federal prosecutor in Southern District of Florida. Correct.

DARRYL COOPER: Mm.

TUCKER CARLSON: So what does DOJ think of this? Like, why are they involved in it?

The High-Level Cover-Up

DARRYL COOPER: I mean, involved in, like the cover up? I think, you know, that’s, that’s the interesting question. I go back to the question I asked earlier. Like, a U.S. attorney is pretty high up. You know, he’s running the Southern District of Florida’s U.S. attorney’s office. That guy, there’s not that many people above his head. You can tell him to drop a case like that.

I mean, you got to think about it like this too. I mean, this is a career case for a prosecutor like Acosta. I mean, you’re going to be Attorney General behind this case someday. You know, you talk billionaire playboy putting him away for his entire life because he’s sexually abusing underage girls for years and years. I mean, you’re going to. This makes your whole career. And so to drop that, there’s only a couple people and a couple reasons that somebody like him would agree, would agree to do that.

You know, and there are people whose names we’ve all heard probably, you know, I think Alberto, was it Gonzalez, who was Attorney General at the time. And I mean, it’s only a few people who could do that.

You know, one of the things might have something to do with it is in when, before Jeffrey Epstein was sentenced, for whatever reason, you have this billionaire who’s just the definition of a flight risk. They don’t take his passport away. And before he’s sentenced, he, he flees. He flees the country, goes to Israel, stays there for several months, moved all his money offshore by this point, and while he’s in Israel, he’s telling people there that he’s thinking about staying, because you can actually do that.

They don’t extradite Jewish criminals, at least who flee to Israel. There’s an organization called Jewish Community Watch, which is a Jewish organization that tracks pedophiles who fled the United States to go to Israel where there’s no extradition of Jewish criminals there between just the years. I think it was 2010 when they started, when they opened up in 2016, 2017, when this story was written. So a period of six years, there were already 60 pedophiles from the United States that had fled to Israel and were living freely there. Some of them had reoffended there and got thrown in Israeli jails. But so this is a thing, you know, and Jeffrey Epstein was, why isn’t.

TUCKER CARLSON: The US Government demand the government of Israel send them back?

DARRYL COOPER: I mean, you’ve been self employed for a while, but when you weren’t, was it your habit to go to your boss and make demands of them on a regular basis? I don’t know. I mean, since when do we ever make demands on Israel? It’s been a long time.

The Two-Tier Justice System

TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t know. But I, you know, that’s obviously distressing. So, okay, so there’s clearly a cover up at the very beginning. And I just want to say again, I think that’s one not the totality of, but one of the reasons we don’t have this information now is because DOJ doesn’t have the information.

DARRYL COOPER: Can I tie up that last point real quick, just a second. So him being in Israel and at least having the threat of staying there, you know, that may have played a role in him cutting his deal because that’s when his deal, he’s already been charged at this point, he’s awaiting sentencing, he’s been convicted and they don’t take his passport and he’s been convicted and.

TUCKER CARLSON: He leaves the country.

DARRYL COOPER: Correct. And his plea deal or. Well, so. No, no, let me back that up. His plea deal was negotiated while he was out of the country because he didn’t fight the, he didn’t fight the charges. It wasn’t, it didn’t go to, you know, go to trial, to a jury trial or anything. He was out of the country and his lawyers could credibly go to the deal.

TUCKER CARLSON: Say that is special treatment. Did any of the J6 defendants get treatment like that?

DARRYL COOPER: No, I don’t think so.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s what’s infuriating about all this. Leaving aside, you know, a lot of other elements that are upsetting, but the most infuriating is just the two tiers or multi tier system of justice.

DARRYL COOPER: This is something that people, I think have not, maybe even at the highest levels, when I read President Trump’s true socials about it, things like that, that people are just, they don’t seem to be understanding if this isn’t about some guy that sexually assaulted a bunch of girls like Jeffrey Epstein, for better or for worse, has become a proxy for other things. You know.

Clarifying Acosta’s Statements

TUCKER CARLSON: Can I interrupt you to say, our faithful and gifted researcher has just held up a note saying Acosta, apparently Alex Acosta has said, and this is different from what I described, that he never said that Epstein was connected to intelligence.

DARRYL COOPER: So that is not my understanding. So he was asked about it at a press conference and he essentially refused to answer. He said, you know, that’s, he said I wouldn’t take those media reports at face value. And beyond that, Department of Justice policy, you know, kind of forbids me from going any further into that.

And then there was another, it was an ABC News report and this is kind of an example of how this stuff gets out into the public mind. There was an ABC. Yeah, it was. ABC News report was talking about his DOJ deal back then. And they said that in the story, they said that the DOJ had stated that he had no connections to intelligence. But when you actually go read the documents, that’s not what was asked at all. The question was not whether he had any connections to intelligence. The question was whether he was given leniency because of cooperation that he was giving to the FBI and DOJ on cases related to Bear Stearns. And they said no to that. And it got written up in the news as him saying he had no connection to the intelligence community, which is not true.

TUCKER CARLSON: The lying is like overwhelming.

Epstein’s Unprecedented Deal

DARRYL COOPER: Yeah. And so just so everybody understands here, I mean this is a guy who again, over 40 on the record witnesses, most of them underage, corroborating each other’s stories independently of this guy sexually assaulting underage girls for years. He gets this non prosecution agreement with the federal government in perpetuity. Him and all of his accomplices, known and unknown for crimes, known and unknown.

And it gets sent down to the state level and he agrees to a two year term down there in southern Florida. Not at, not in a federal prison, not in a state prison, at the county jail where he has. It sounds like I’m making this up. I’m not. He has his own wing of the jail to himself. His cell door remains open. He gets out on work release for 12 hours a day, six days a week, accompanied only by security that he pays the salary of. He only has to stay the night there six days a week and then spend one day a week there in the jail.

TUCKER CARLSON: So, you know, so it’s like the National Guard.

DARRYL COOPER: Yeah. And again, you’re not talking about a guy who got busted embezzling funds. You know, you’re talking about a guy who got busted doing the thing that if you were to poll every American, I believe, and ask them, what’s the worst thing, what is the worst thing that anybody can do that you would, you know, you’re against the death penalty that you might make an exception for? It’s molesting little children.

You know, everybody kind of agrees that that is the red line. Everybody feels that way, that I know that you know, that everybody listening to this knows. And so you ask, like, what are the possible reasons that could be big enough and important enough that they would let a guy like this have a. I mean, it’s insulting to the investigators, to the police, to the prosecutors to give a guy a deal like that, you know.

The Elite’s Contempt for Regular Americans

TUCKER CARLSON: Can I say one thing that has always struck me about this case and why I think it’s like revealing of the entire power structure in the United States. Epstein. And there was testimony from public testimony from women who lived with Epstein to this effect. His contempt for Americans, sort of normal middle class, working class Americans, he did not see them as fully human. He didn’t at all.

So it’s like molesting a high school girl from housing development or a trailer park in South Florida doesn’t really count as molesting because she’s a pro. Who cares? And that attitude suffuses our leadership class. That is their answer.

DARRYL COOPER: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: 100,000 people die of fentanyl OD’s. Yeah, but I mean, people, you know what I mean? Like, it’s sad, but it’s not an emergency because. Because they’re like people you would never meet and you don’t really care about. Just build another dollar store in their town and like nobody cares about them. He really had that attitude. But that’s the attitude they all have.

The Lolita Express and Elite Complicity

DARRYL COOPER: He had justification for having that attitude in terms of his. The impunity with which he operated. And this is actually something I was hoping we would get to because all this stuff is super intelligent, interesting and important. All the intelligent stuff and everything. If you want like all the deep, deep, deep detail on that stuff. I did a six hour long podcast series on it.

Guys like Mike Benz, Ryan Dawson’s one of the chief researchers who’s really done a lot of the work that people who write books about the nation being under blackmail and so forth. Like crib this guy’s research without crediting him, you know, but. And I’m going to, I’m actually going to interview him next week just to go really deep on a lot of the, a lot of the stuff that we’re not able to get here to here tonight.

But you know, the thing I want to, I really want to kind of maybe the question that I want to leave people with as we get into the last part of this conversation. You say that like, so when Epstein was, was convicted in 2000, the 2000s case, this was in the newspapers. This was not something, you know, you might, if you were watching the football game, you might not have ever heard about it. But if you were a wealthy person in Washington D.C. or New York City or West Palm Beach, Florida, you knew who Jeffrey Epstein was and you knew what had happened to him, and you knew what he had done.

His private plane was nicknamed the Lolita Express. Lolita is a novel written by Nabokov about a guy, based on a true story, actually about a guy who takes a 12 year old girl, kidnaps her and takes her on a kind of odyssey across the country, raping her over the course of those two years.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s a novel about child molestation.

DARRYL COOPER: It’s a novel about child molestation. And his airplane was nicknamed the Lolita Express. It was not given that nickname by him, it was given that nickname by other people. Other people knew who this guy was. They knew what he was doing.

And so the question then that I really had to wrestle with for a long time, and I have an answer that satisfies me now and it relates to what you were. The point you were just making about our ruling class. You know, if Tucker, if I. If literally any one of my male friends or family members, any of them, if we got invited to go somewhere on some dude’s plane and you walk onto that plane and as soon as you get in the air, five or six underage girls who are not related to him come out in their underwear and start offering massages.

My responses to that are going to vary between, like, which level of criminal action am I going to take against this guy? Am I going to beat him senseless? Am I going to throw him out of his flying plane? You know, those are basically the range of outcomes in that situation. And that’s true for almost everybody. That almost everybody watching this knows. And so regular people hear about this and they’re like, they almost have trouble believing that it’s possible because they don’t know anybody who would have such a cavalier reaction. They don’t know anybody who.

The Podesta Connection and Spirit Cooking

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, I know a lot of people.

DARRYL COOPER: So yeah, that’s why I think it’s important to go over. And I don’t want to get into like the conspiracy theory side of this stuff that. That’s not as important to me, honestly. But you need to.

TUCKER CARLSON: I think we’ve progressed. We’ve been here an hour and 57 minutes. And I think that from what I can tell, I’m sort of familiar, not with a lot of what you said, but the framework I get. I don’t think you’ve said anything that’s speculative, have you?

DARRYL COOPER: I’ve tried not to.

TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, so the story just based on available facts, which are a minority of all facts about it, but just what we have is like, it’s a true indictment.

DARRYL COOPER: You remember back when the Podesta emails came out and the whole Pizzagate thing took over the Internet for a while, you know, every dark corner, the Reddit and everything else was all this, this satanic pedophile conspiracy, you know, et cetera, called Pizzagate? Yeah. Again, I’m not going to get into the conspiracy theory itself. I’m just going to use it to raise a larger point about what we’re talking about here.

The interesting thing to me about that whole saga was not the idea that there’s some big crazy conspiracy involving just any of that stuff. That’s just whatever. That’s what the Internet does with information like that. The interesting thing to me was the things that were just 100% fact, the bits and pieces of the story that they were using to construct that narrative, the pieces themselves are really interesting.

One of the first things that came up as people started digging into those on Reddit and everywhere else and really going into it, one of the things is everybody remembers hearing about spirit cooking. You know, the performance artist Marina Abramovic did this event that the Podestas were invited to and apparently enjoyed very much called spirit cooking. And what, pray tell, is spirit cooking, Tucker?

It was a performance art piece, a dinner event where the attendees would go and sit in rooms with white walls and eat meals off of mock corpses in tubs of blood with weird creepy messages about cutting the finger on your left hand and eating the pain and drinking fresh breast milk with fresh sperm milk on earthquake nights. All these crazy edgelord art school, you know, things that are kind of just embarrassing, but, you know, these weird cryptic sayings written in goats and blood on the walls. In one room, there’s an effigy of an infant with a bucket of goat’s blood thrown all over it. There’s another room where there’s a bunch of shells with little figures put in positions of various positions of copulation. You know, there’s photos from these events that Abramovich would put on. You know, Lady Gaga’s there eating off of one of these mock corpses. Gwen Stefani’s at one of them. And, you know, they’re there at these.

TUCKER CARLSON: Places where.

DARRYL COOPER: You know, forget about. You know, people want to say, oh, this is a satanic ritual. Forget about all that. Forget about all that. Just think about, like, if this was your friend or your brother or your sister and they went to this thing or they brought you to this thing, you’d be like, what are we doing here? What is this? Exactly. Right. And so the next thing that came out.

TUCKER CARLSON: Wouldn’t you run immediately again?

DARRYL COOPER: You would. I would. Everybody we know would. Everybody.

TUCKER CARLSON: And Tony and Heather Podesta went to this.

DARRYL COOPER: Well, I don’t know if Heather did or not, but he and John did. And Tony’s a big art collector.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, I’m aware. Yeah. I knew his wife.

Tony Podesta’s Art Collection

DARRYL COOPER: Yeah. And his. His art collection became a big part of the whole Pizza Gate.

TUCKER CARLSON: This is right in my neighborhood, by the way, where I live.

DARRYL COOPER: So.

TUCKER CARLSON: So weird.

DARRYL COOPER: You know, Tony Podesta’s taste in art became a big part of that whole Pizzagate story. And it’s one of those things that, again, when you. When you have gaps to fill in a story and just pieces of information, you’re not getting any explanations from anybody that make any sense, explaining it to you in a way that’s plausible. That’s how conspiracy theories grow like mold. Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: If something like that is going on in your city, if, like, some of those powerful people in your city are participating in something like that, I don’t need to know anymore. Yeah, I literally don’t need to know anymore. Like, that’s just there.

DARRYL COOPER: I told you earlier that I made the point of going and buying a copy of Architectural Digest in Washington, Life magazine that profiled his apartment and his art collection. And on the walls in the photographs in these magazines, there’s a lot of different art there. But, like, the most prominent ones that are. One’s a mural size centerpiece of a room. The others are poster size. Like, big, important, prominent pieces that he’s got out for everybody to see are by a Serbian artist named Biljana Djurdjevic.

And they’re part of a series of paintings that, according to the artist’s own interviews, are based on explorations of child molestation, sexual assault, and just childhood trauma and abuse in general. And it is. You know, there are a lot of paintings in the series, but the ones that show up in the magazine piece, for example, one, the great big mural one is a bunch of young girls, they look like maybe teenagers, 12 year olds or something, who are lying in a circle. It’s called Synchronized Swimming is the name of the painting lying in a circle at the bottom of like a. Like a tiled room or something. And they all have this spaced out, kind of dead, drugged out look in their eyes. And some of them have black eyes and they’re just playing there. And so I don’t want to be.

TUCKER CARLSON: Ruled by people like this.

DARRYL COOPER: Well, so let me just keep. Because this gets so much worse.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, you’re upsetting me. And I lived in this world for so long and I intentionally ignored this and I. But now that you are describing it, I’m like, I can’t even believe I was in the same county as people like that.

DARRYL COOPER: I would look if I was into art that featured tied up, pubescent, prepubescent children in their underwear by an artist that says this is all about child sexual assaults. What this series of paintings is about. If I was into that, I would at least take it all down before company came over. These were rooms that he threw his parties in, he invited people over to. I would definitely take them down before architectural digestion.

TUCKER CARLSON: But if you were into them, like being. Let me just be clear. Being into something like that means that you are on an evil path. That’s. That’s evil. I don’t know what to say. Like an image like that, it’s. It’s also obvious now that I have distance from it. There’s. That’s bad.

The Disturbing Art Collection Continues

DARRYL COOPER: He was asked in an interview about some of his favorite artists. One of them that he listed was a woman named Patricia Piccinini. Who does, I guess, sculptures, you would say, I don’t know if they’re clay sculptures or whatever, but. And they’re really grotesque images of, you know, a small girl standing up on her bed, maybe five years old with this demon thing with its claws around her, kind of leering at her. There’s one with this sort of weird pig monster spooning this little boy in his bed with pustules on its back. There’s a lot of mouths that look like sphincters and vaginas and the kids are playing with them. It’s all very suggestive with weird surrealist horror movie kind of sexually tint slanted stuff. Listed her as one of his favorite artists. Another one that he listed was a woman named Kim Noble. And I’ll stop grossing you out with the accurate.

TUCKER CARLSON: You’re upsetting me because you’re describing Tony Podesta, who is the brother of the former White House Chief of staff, two time chief of staff John Podesta. But Tony Podesta is the most powerful Democratic lobbyist in Washington. This is not some fringe character. It’s not a homeless guy, not even some like eccentric rich guy. This is a person who’s at the center of the Democratic establishment for my whole life there.

DARRYL COOPER: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: And his wife is, you know, they’ve since divorced, but she’s like, look, pull up a picture of those two on Google and just look at it and ask yourself, is that like how brainwashed would you have to be not to see there’s something really wrong there? Really wrong. Like deeply wrong, spiritually wrong. I’m not trying to be judgmental or cruel. I’m just, I don’t understand how that could exist at the very center of power in Washington D.C. that’s like a, I just feel it so deeply.

DARRYL COOPER: Since that gets to the, to the question that we’re trying to answer here, like, so another artist that he named is one of his favorites was a British woman named Kim Noble. And I don’t think I could pull it up on my phone and show that to the audience right now without getting this video banned. Kim Noble was a woman who was violently sexually assaulted countless times between the ages of 1 and 3. It shattered her mind. She has dissociative identity disorder, what we used to call multiple personality disorder. And several of these personalities are artists.

And they, the art is something that like a four or five year old would do. It’s scribbled stick figures and everything, but it is the most grotesque depictions of adults sexually abusing children that you can think of. However bad you think it is, it’s worse. And so, and this was another woman that was named, that he was a fan of. And so I just think to myself, this millionaire lobbyist in D.C. and his friends, the biggest Democratic lobbyist, saying, you know, what do you think about the artist Kim Noble? It’s like, oh, I think the image with the demon having the little girl fellating her while another demon urinates on her is just fascinating in its use of color. I mean it’s what you just who are these people?

The Culture of Corruption

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, so that’s what I didn’t understand. So I at the time, living near the, in the middle of all this. I lived right down the road from Comet Pizza. I knew David Brock and James Alefantis and I’m not well, but like they’re in the. I disapproved they’re liberals, they’re Democrats, whatever. I’m not going to have dinner with them. But I assumed the art stuff, and I knew the Podestas. I assumed that was just, like, douchey, pretentious. They’re like townies. They don’t, you know, they made all this money. They’re pretending to be sophisticated. They have terrible taste. Of course, this is, like, my thinking. I’ll just admit it. Kind of snobbish view of it.

Like, I didn’t or couldn’t or refused to or whatever. Face the obvious reality that’s just hitting me right now right in the face, hard. That’s evil. That’s evil. And what I thought was gauche is satanic in a. Strictly speaking. I mean, whether they’re like, you know, part of some organized Church of Satan or whatever, I don’t even know if that exists in real life. But certainly obedience to Satan exists.

DARRYL COOPER: And that’s what that is, period. And maybe just as interesting, because that’s just one person. There’s a lot of people who have strange proclivities and weird interests. Right?

TUCKER CARLSON: Fine, he’s at the center of the city.

DARRYL COOPER: A, he’s at the center of power. But B, again, what is the culture of this place that he would feel comfortable inviting magazine photographers over to take pictures, to take photographs of the paintings he puts in his rooms of. There’s one of the paintings that he has by Biljana Djurdjevic, that is just unmistakably two dead little girls lying on their backs in, like, a pond or a lake or something. Just no question that that’s what it is. It’s in the magazine. And so people are.

TUCKER CARLSON: They. I think I may be misremembering this. And don’t. Don’t sue me, Heather Podesta, if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure Heather Podesta told me to my face that they had another house just for the art.

DARRYL COOPER: I think he supposedly owns 5,000 pieces of art. Something.

TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, so. But that means, like, okay, so why do you have a house? So you can invite people over. So that’s like, my neighbors. I never went, but I was never invited. But that means, like, a lot of people I know went over to the Podesta’s house and saw paintings of demons having sex with dead children or whatever. I can’t even let that into my head. And they’re like, yeah, kind of. Kind of far out, kind of funky, you know, they’re sort of edgy, the Podestas. It’s like, yeah, check yourself.

DARRYL COOPER: Right, right.

TUCKER CARLSON: This is hell.

Historical Patterns of Ruling Class Corruption

DARRYL COOPER: When you ask the question of how is it? And this is something that ordinary people really need to understand because this is not the first ruling class that this has happened to. No, no, it’s happened to ruling classes throughout the world, throughout history.

TUCKER CARLSON: This is Weimar, Caligula.

The Elite’s Different Moral Code

DARRYL COOPER: Yes. It’s the British gentry in the late 18, early 1900s when they’re all into Alice Crowley and all that kind of stuff.

TUCKER CARLSON: 100%, it’s white mischief in Nairobi in 1925. This is late Empire school.

DARRYL COOPER: You know, the fact that we asked the question, how is it that every single person I know that you know, that everybody listening to this knows and allows into their life would run screaming off of that airplane when six underage girls in their underwear come out, the answer is, well, if you just came from a spirit cooking dinner and then followed up by a party at Tony Podesta’s house where there’s pictures of tied up dead 8 year olds all over the wall and then you go onto that plane, you know.

TUCKER CARLSON: I can vouch for that. I’ve never went on the plane, I never went to the Podesta’s house. But boy, did I live in a world of people who did. And not one time in 35 years in D.C. did anybody say, holy, I was at Tony’s house last night. You should see what’s in there. They were like, oh, it’s douchey.

DARRYL COOPER: I mean, look, you would get kicked off of a local school board for having pictures of tied up dead 8 year olds on your wall. And so if you were going to.

TUCKER CARLSON: Also, what’s happening to your society, this.

DARRYL COOPER: Is the seat of power.

TUCKER CARLSON: Like its values flow downward.

DARRYL COOPER: It’s like the top of the pyramid. There’s some freak down the block who’s just into weird stuff. Whatever. You might tell your kids to avoid that house and everything. But fine, this is America. We interpret. At least until Israel attacked Gaza. We interpreted the First Amendment pretty broadly. Things like that, most people still do. Fine. I’m maybe not calling for that guy’s arrest or anything. You can go be a freak in his own house, but you’re not participating in the conversation or in the decision making process of whether we do gender reassignment surgeries on 8 year olds. When you have pictures of dead tied up 8 year olds on your wall. And I think most ordinary people, and I think people who are in the Washington world in a lot of these elite circles, they just don’t get how this looks to the rest of the north.

The Acceptance of Violence

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, it’s not just how it looks, it’s how it is. And you know, that kind of thinking allows you to kill a lot of people, which they do. And so they have these conversations about we need to do this or do that. What you really mean is drop bombs on kids, which they do continuously.

DARRYL COOPER: No one even mentions it.

TUCKER CARLSON: So the acceptance of violence against civilians. I’ve only started to realize this since I left. It’s been five years. And I’m like, that is, I mean, maybe there’s a circumstance where you need to go full Dresden on somebody. Let’s talk about it. But they don’t talk about it. It’s just like, well, we’re going to bomb the Houthis and like open the shipping lines. What does that mean? Nobody cares. Yeah, because they have a total acceptance of killing people.

Personal Experience with Moral Compromise

DARRYL COOPER: One of the reasons I left the Department of Defense, you know, I used to work on air and ballistic missile defense systems for a long time with the DOD and I would go all over the world, work with our allies, work with, on American base, and I go onto American ships on deployment with them sometimes when they were in hot spots so that they had like a real expert on in case something bad happened with one of their air defense systems.

And a lot of times I’d be on a little destroyer and I don’t think I’m divulging any classified information here or anything. And honestly, with something like this, I just don’t particularly care, I guess nobody ever told me not to talk about it. But when the Saudi war and UAE war on Yemen was going on, and every day you’re reading in the paper of kids literally starving to death, of kids dying of very preventable, very treatable diseases by the tens of thousands on a regular basis.

And we would be interdicting smugglers coming from Baluchistan and other places trying to come in and out of Yemen. And we’d stop their dhows in small boats and we’d board them and search them and so forth. And when this was going on, I wasn’t a part of the crew. I was a civilian Department of Defense employee. But I go out on deck and I kind of watch these things go down.

And I can’t tell you how many times, eventually it was one too many times, I would read one of those stories about what was going on in Yemen. And then we’re 100 miles off Yemen, stopping a boat that’s coming into that country that has nothing on it but medicine, and watching everybody dump it into the ocean, and then everybody kind of celebrating like we just won another big victory. And it got to the point where, again, it was just one too many times I couldn’t sleep at night. It was a big factor of why I left the job.

And I want to be very clear, I don’t indict the sailors who were carrying out the mission. When you’re in the culture, I mean, you’re part of the military. It’s hard to describe to outsiders, but these are guys who thought they were fulfilling their patriotic duty 100%.

TUCKER CARLSON: I get it. But there’s not a strong Christian vibe in that environment.

The Elite’s Moral Distinction

DARRYL COOPER: Not exactly. Yeah. It’s not too welcome when you’re asking people to throw medicine in the water that’s on its way to a country where kids are dying of diarrhea.

That moral compromise, you know, the idea, the answer to that question of how could Jeffrey Epstein, when everybody knew, everybody in elite circles knew what he had done, why is anybody accepting an invitation to go hang out with this guy? Why is anybody flying on the Lolita Express like any of these things?

And the answer, I think, again, is you’re talking about a moral environment that is very different from the one. There was a article in the New York Times several years ago about this French author named Gabriel Matzneff. This really, there was one line in it that really shed a lot of light on this for me.

Gabriel Matzneff was a French author, very famous, had a column in Le Monde, I think, famous novelist. And all of his books, all of them were novels about pedophilia and painted in a very positive way. You know, the book that kind of broken through was called under 16 years old, and they’re all graphic depictions of pedophiles. Yeah.

And eventually he gets busted, and he doesn’t deny anything that he did when he’s going through the criminal justice process and everything. But he is really, really angry because he’s like, who do you. I could name names right now that would bring this whole place down. Are you kidding me? You’re going to put this on just me.

And one of the things that they said in that New York Times story is they said in France, but I would say this is, again, common. This isn’t unique to France. The ruling class or the elite classes have for a long time distinguished themselves from ordinary people by their adherence to a different code of morality.

TUCKER CARLSON: The Marquis de Sade.

DARRYL COOPER: Yes. And that becoming a mark of distinction, because, look, I am one of the most powerful. I’m the most powerful Democrat politician in the country. I can invite other people who in their worlds are powerful. I can invite them over to my house and have them walk by my paintings of dead little girls, and they’re going to go home smiling. That’s what I can do. And then you think of a guy like Jeffrey Epstein who takes it one step further and says, I wonder what else I could get away with.

The Spiritual Nature of Evil

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. I had one of the most interesting conversations I’ve ever had. I had with a very spiritually attuned, very smart friend of mine. And I was saying, you know, I’m a man, and I hate lying, and I just want to be honest about it. There are people do bad sexual stuff, and I don’t.

DARRYL COOPER: But you could.

TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t judge that much because you’re like, yeah, you know, we’re all in the wrong circumstance, capable of anything. But I said to this person, I don’t get the underage girl thing. That’s like, they’re not into it. They’re kids. Maybe I have too many kids or something. I’m just. I’m not being selfish. I’m just being honest.

DARRYL COOPER: I don’t get that.

TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t see any appeal at all.

DARRYL COOPER: It’s a pathological obsession. I mean, Epstein was into girls with braces specifically.

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly. So what is that? And the conventional explanation is maybe I’m being too honest. But I think it’s. I think this is really revealing because it’s not about sex. It’s a spiritual thing. And I said, what is that? And this friend of mine said, it’s the thrill of destroying innocence. That’s what it is. And that is the definition of evil. That is Satan right there, taking something pure.

I guess this is. Maybe I’m the only person ever thought of this. Maybe you have already have. I had not thought of that. I was like, it’s not just a sexual attraction. Like, oh, I think underage girls with braces are hot. They’re not. No normal person thinks that. That’s bizarre. No, the idea is that I’m destroying something that’s pure.

DARRYL COOPER: Yeah. And throughout history.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, that’s just. That’s Satan acting. Sorry.

DARRYL COOPER: Throughout history, people have looked at that as something that confers power. That’s what. Child sacrifice.

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly.

DARRYL COOPER: You know, and where people get that idea, I don’t know, but it’s apparently deeply ingrained enough.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s not an idea. It’s a spiritual reality.

DARRYL COOPER: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s like the core of the Christian message where, you know, Satan says during. At the end of the 40 days of temptation to Christ, you know, bow down before me and I’ll give you all this power. And that’s clearly the arrangement which is explicit or not, but it’s real nonetheless between leaders when they. When they kill in a wanton way, which most of them do. And when they destroy beauty and innocence, you’re doing that in exchange for power. And it is a real trade. Like, that’s all real. It’s totally wrong. You become more powerful.

The Complicit System

DARRYL COOPER: And in a way, the Epstein’s of the world, the people who are just really pathological, you know, everybody kind of knows and accepts that there are Jeffrey Dahmers out there. They’re just people who have broken minds, who do things that none of us can understand. I think for me, and for a lot of people, the more important question is how does Alex Acosta not resign in protest when he’s told to drop this case? How is.

TUCKER CARLSON: And how does wind up Labor Secretary?

DARRYL COOPER: How does every. I mean, what every person. DC is the most cutthroat town in the country. Any. They will take anything out of context if they have to, to destroy you. And you got this guy who’s literally displaying pictures of dead kids on his wall. Never even comes up. Like, it’s all just normal. It’s all good. You say, the people that are more interesting to me are the quote, unquote, ordinary, ish people who were going to that party and thinking what they’re. What they’re looking at is normal.

Epstein’s Post-Conviction Freedom

TUCKER CARLSON: So let’s get into some of the specifics subsequent. After Epstein gets out of his fake jail sentence in the county jail. Is that what it was?

DARRYL COOPER: Yeah, county jail. Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, county jail. He’s just spending the night. Yeah, six days a week.

DARRYL COOPER: Oh, and by the way, the West Palm rather was a private investigator that was hired by the victim’s lawyers who was watching him during that period of time. He would go all sorts of places, you know, and even after his jail, it was supposed to be two years, he served 13 months. After that, he was on probation. And he was on probation. You’re supposed to report all your travels. He would leave the country. He would go to Paris, he would go to the Virgin Islands, he would leave the state. They documented him doing this. They would go to the authorities, these private investigators and lawyers and say, look, we got pictures. We got this, we got that. They don’t care. It was fine.

The Accountability Problem

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s unbelievable. I mean, ask anybody. I happen to know a lot of people who have been on parole or probation, and boy, they’re very afraid of violating it because you wind up back in a halfway house or in prison. But he wasn’t afraid at all.

So has anyone ever been punished for that? That seems even… it seems on par with the sex stuff. Like, as a crime, if you’re a public official entrusted with upholding our system of law and you ignore it for whatever reason on Epstein’s behalf, like, you should be punished for that. Has anyone ever been punished?

DARRYL COOPER: You know, the excuse that “I was just following orders” only stops working when you lose the war. You know, as long as that doesn’t happen, then that excuse holds up. Everybody passes it to the person upstairs, and eventually it gets to a level that that person has enough juice to just shut the question down altogether.

TUCKER CARLSON: Say that again. The excuse… I’ll say it for you. The excuse that “I was just following orders” only stops working when you lose the war.

DARRYL COOPER: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: So as long as your party or culture, organization or whatever it is, the structure, the power structure, as long as you’re still in power, you never have to answer these questions because, like, who’s going to make you?

DARRYL COOPER: Yeah. And don’t underestimate the kind of…

TUCKER CARLSON: What we’re facing right now.

The Psychology of Complicity

DARRYL COOPER: Don’t underestimate the ability of the human mind to… if you are an ordinary person who joined the Department of Justice and you’re a prosecutor, and you’re being told to drop this case against this guy who is a major predator who’s harming girls on the regular. You’re being told to drop this case. But you’re a normal person. You’re a person who joined the Department of Justice to go fight crime, gosh darn it. But you got a family, you got tuition to pay. You got to put food on your kid’s table, and you got to balance all that out against whether or not you’re going to be able to sleep at night.

And in order for you to be able to sleep at night, the human mind is very, very adaptable. Even like minor things. I mean, for you to be able… not you personally, the royal “we”… we drive to church on Sundays and we pass under an overpass, and there’s a bunch of just completely destitute homeless people laying on the ground. I think the right answer is like, “Oh, there’s my church today. I’m going to go deal with this and do what I can here. That’s church today.” But we have to tell ourselves a lot of stories to be able to just drive past that and drive home and go to breakfast and still think of ourselves as human beings. And the mind’s very, very, very good at coming up with stories like that for ourselves.

The Afghanistan Parallel

So if you remember, for example, this was during the Afghanistan war. There was an army captain. His name slips my mind at this point, but he’s a hero in my book. But he actually got kicked out of the army. They eventually reinstated him, I think, but initially with discipline. Kicked out of the army because he came upon an Afghan army commander or police official… I can’t remember which one it was… raping a little boy, and he beat the hell out of him. And he got in trouble for that. He got kicked out of the army for doing that.

And then the rest of the soldiers that went to Afghanistan were given stand downs and told that, like, “Look, this practice called bacha bazi, it’s horrible. It’s awful. We are not here to reform these people’s culture. We’ve got an enemy we’re trying to fight here, a counterinsurgency. If we start stepping in every time something like this happens, it’s going to undermine the effort. And so you guys are just going to have to look the other way when you come across a grown man raping a little boy.”

TUCKER CARLSON: How about no?

DARRYL COOPER: And so, you know, it’s like, especially when… if you think back, like, there were instances where we sent troops to remote Afghan villages to go violently put down uprisings that had happened because we told them they have to have a certain number of women on their village council, and that’s not their culture. And so we’re willing to alienate the local population to impose feminism on a remote village. But child rape, that’s…

TUCKER CARLSON: Just kind of a cultural thing.

DARRYL COOPER: You know, the Taliban had banned that and actually had death squads roaming the country, killing people who did it. And imagine the propaganda the Taliban were able to put out. Like, “We had destroyed all the poppy fields, and we banned this practice of bacha bazi, like systematic child rape. The Americans come in, both of those things come back in force.”

It was a New York Times article. Hilarious the way it was framed, because it was an article about “look at what the evil Taliban are doing,” where they were “manipulating” these boys who were being kept as sex slaves at police checkpoints and things and manipulating them into shooting their commanders and their guards and then coming out and fighting for the Taliban. “Manipulating.” Like I read it, and I was like, “It sounds to me like they’re liberating these boys.” But okay.

And one of the things that it said in there is it was so widespread that they looked at like three or four hundred police checkpoints. Every single one of them. Every one of them had a stable of little boys that when people would get hired to become an officer and get assigned to a place, they would often demand bacha bazi boys at their checkpoints or the stations that they were assigned to as, like, a perk of the job. And we went along with that.

And it’s like, you know, and so that’s how somebody at the Department of Justice or in the intelligence community can say, “Yeah, you know, this guy in his free time, he does this, he does that. But look, whatever, we’re trying to fight a war, use our money laundering,” and that’s how they explain it to themselves.

Post-Conviction Activities

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s a really rotten, decadent culture, I would say, at the top. And as evidence of that, Epstein gets out of jail in 2008-ish, 2009. And then between then and 2019, so 10 or 11 years, he’s like roaming around. We have records of like a lot of famous people hanging with him on his plane, on the island during those years, correct?

DARRYL COOPER: Yes. Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Post conviction. Post public humiliation.

DARRYL COOPER: Riding the Lolita Express.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, but that was after.

DARRYL COOPER: Yeah, everybody knew.

TUCKER CARLSON: And so who are those people? Can you name some?

The Clinton Connection and Jean-Luc Brunel

DARRYL COOPER: A lot of the ones that have been in the news. You know, Bill Clinton obviously. I think he’s on record riding Epstein’s plane 26 times. And just for reference on that, one of Epstein’s buddies and partners in crime was a French guy named Jean-Luc Brunel, who ran a modeling and talent scouting agency and used it the way that Jeffrey Epstein would use Victoria’s Secret, and they would also use it together. In fact, Jeffrey Epstein provided the seed money for the agency, and they would bring girls in and use that environment to sexually abuse them and take advantage of them.

And he was… when Jeffrey Epstein was in jail for those 13 months, in 13 months, Jean-Luc Brunel visited him 70 times. Okay. He didn’t ride on his plane as often as Bill Clinton did. Right. So that’s just a reference point.

And Jean-Luc Brunel, by the way, after Epstein got arrested, immediately went into hiding, and then got caught trying to cross the border to flee France, got put in jail. And I will give you one guess and one guess only. What happened to him? Everybody watching got it right. He hanged himself in his cell.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, he didn’t.

DARRYL COOPER: Yes, he did. How did all the people watching get that right on the first try?

TUCKER CARLSON: I’m not making that up.

DARRYL COOPER: I’m not making it up. I’m not making it up.

TUCKER CARLSON: Just like Robert Maxwell killed himself, just…

DARRYL COOPER: Like Jeffrey Epstein did, just like the DC Madam.

Epstein’s Death

TUCKER CARLSON: So let’s get to the sort of terminus of the story of his life, which is his death. And what do we know about that and what don’t we know about it?

The Epstein Story in the 2010s

DARRYL COOPER: Yeah. So one of the interesting things about the Epstein story, you see a lot of all the story we’ve been telling tonight about money laundering, intelligence agency connections in the 80s and 90s, like a lot of that stuff is, again, it’s a pile of circumstantial evidence, but it’s a big enough pile that you can really draw a pretty firm narrative with it.

When you get to the, say, 2010s, we don’t have nearly as much sort of solid information on crimes being committed or high level things going on. Now, one of the things we do have is he was very, very close with Ehud Barak, former Israeli Prime Minister. And he was the head of military intelligence for quite a long time. In fact, he was head of military intelligence back when Jeffrey Epstein, Adnan Khashoggi, these people would have been operating back in their heyday.

He was very close with him. He was photographed going into Jeffrey Epstein’s house one time in a disguise. He stayed over for, not overnight, but for longer stretches. For a long time. Jeffrey Epstein provided the seed money for a tech company that Ehud Barak started up with a bunch of guys who were veterans of unit 8200, which is like the Israeli NSA, basically a tech company.

And when Epstein was in control of the Wexner foundation, he gave Ehud Barak $2.3 million to write two papers, one of which apparently got written, but the other never even got written. They never asked for their money back, so just gave them $2.3 million. So very, very tight, close. Big money changing hands, you know, no allegations of sexual abuse or assault. There is, there are victims who say that they were forced to have sex with Ehud Barak. But, you know, I haven’t vetted those claims or anything, and I don’t want to make that claim.

But so you know that that’s one of the things we do have. But beyond that, you have a lot of celebrities, a lot of sort of political figures like Bill Clinton. And a lot of it is sort of framed and does look like it’s sort of a rehab tour. You know, he’s giving a lot of money away to primarily scientific causes, things like that, trying to build rebuild public goodwill, essentially.

The Victims’ Lawyers Fight Back

And it was. The reason he was arrested again is because the lawyers, God bless them, of a bunch of the victims from the first case, you know, they were really, really, really upset about what happened, especially the fact that, you know, it took a lot of courage for these girls to come out. These people were terrifying. Ghislaine Maxwell would tell them when they tried to get away that you know, how easy it is to get rid of a girl like you. These are the stories that the victims tell. They would threaten their lives, they would threaten their families.

And, you know, they’re watching this guy get protected at the highest levels. They’re watching him get just a nothing sentence when, you know, they all know what they did and the number and the case against him. And so they think he’s an incredibly powerful guy. They’re terrified. Took a lot of courage to come out.

And so when they went and cut a deal behind the backs of not only the lead prosecutor, but the victims and the victim’s lawyers, the thing was signed, done deal before anybody below, like Alex Acosta’s level even knew about it again, including the Department of Justice League prosecutor. They were really angry, you know, because they had been telling these girls, look, I know it’s scary, but you got to do this. And don’t worry, we got this guy. He is going away for the rest of his life. You don’t have anything to worry about. And then to have that happen behind their backs, they were really angry.

And so they kept on the case. And they said, look, there is something out there called the Victims Rights Act. You are legally bound to inform victims when you do something like this. You did not do that. This deal you made is not valid. And eventually a federal judge found that indeed the government had engaged, these are the words, the federal judge had engaged in a consistent conspiracy with Jeffrey Epstein to make this deal, this illegitimate, illegal deal. And so it got stricken, and that allowed him to be rearrested.

The 2019 Arrest and Suspicious Circumstances

And so that’s why he was arrested in 2019 after, I guess it was by the feds. By the feds. As he was coming back from Paris, his plane landed and Bill Barr’s Department of Justice. Bill Barr had just taken over the Department of Justice in, I think it was February 2019 or so right after the midterms, and he has him arrested, and then everybody kind of knows the rough outline story after that, he’s in jail.

There was the story of him being assaulted, apparently, in his cell by this gorilla that they put him in there. Well, you see the picture of the dude that they put him in with. He was a corrupt NYPD police officer who was in for a double murder of two drug dealers that he was offing for another drug deal. Something like, he’s like giant bodybuilder dude, just a monster of a guy. And, you know, they put little Jeffrey Epstein, a guy who’s, you know, for all of his evils, not a violent criminal, in a cell with that guy. That guy assaults him, and then he ends up. He ends up dead under circumstances that, you know, have gone. They’ve been gone over again and again, and they’re as insane and ridiculous and implausible as everybody says.

I mean, for years, we were always told, this is just until very recently when they released that footage of the hallway outside his cell, that there was no footage, that all three of the cameras that were relevant to that area of the jail somehow had malfunctioned or gone out of service at the same time. And the guards who were on duty that night, you know, they had fallen asleep, and the pages of their logbook for the pertinent time period somehow had gone missing. And so all of these things, you’re like, come on, man.

And a lot of times people say, like, you know, because they have this James Bond idea of, you know, these kind of things, and they’re like, if these were really. If this was really some kind of a murder or a, you know, just maybe not a murder, but Jeffrey Epstein was told, you know, the best course of action for you is if you go ahead and commit suicide now. You know, the other options we’re giving you are way, way worse. The guards are going to be off, you know, sleeping for a little while, so take care of yourself. Whatever it was, you know, like, you have. You have this set of circumstances. It’s entirely implausible.

And you have pretty much everybody who knew him, including his lawyers, you know, his lawyers immediately and still to this day, as far as I know, make the point. They’re like, look, this was a guy who. Whose hubris was off the charts. He had already gotten away with this once. He was now under arrest with a president that, you know, I think personally, we’ll see what happens. You know, I don’t. I just don’t personally buy into the accusations of Trump having to do with Epstein just doesn’t, doesn’t strike me as the personality type that would do that, that kind of thing. But, you know, there are pictures of him out there. There was a relationship out there that maybe could kind of be leveraged, doesn’t want embarrassment.

There were, in other words, there were strings to pull. Like, it wasn’t as if his appeals were exhausted and he’s going off to prison tomorrow where, you know, you’re going to have a bunch of crackers waiting for this new Jewish pedophile that just showed up and he’s just going to kill himself. He had so many cards to play and he had gotten away with it before. And nobody who was close to him during that time, even including his lawyers, believes that he committed suicide.

Bill Barr’s Role in the Cover-Up

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, one lawyer, I spoke to his lawyers about it, and one said to me, well, he thought he was going to get out on appeal in days. So it’s interesting that the Bureau of Prisons, Department of Justice, has never released the names of the inmates who were in the lockup with him. He was supposedly in the cell by himself, but there were 11, I think, in that range, other inmates in the cell block, which was the maximum security cell block within the Federal Detention center, the MCC, we don’t know who they are, and we know that a bunch were transferred out shortly after. Several were anyway, and somehow we can’t know their names because HIPAA or something. I mean, it doesn’t make any sense.

The guards who fell asleep were not really punished. They lied about the tape. And most damning of all, Bill Barr participated in the cover up, flat out. You could read his memoir and in it he says, as soon as this happened, my first concern was people would think he was murdered. Really? You’re the chief law enforcement officer. You should hold open every possibility, including the most obvious, which was he was murdered. So if your goal from the very first moment was to convince people of something you didn’t know was true, you’re not pursuing the truth. You are in fact, by definition, participating in a cover up. That’s my view. I’d love to know the other side of it. Bill Barr won’t talk to me about it, though. He’s attacked me for saying it. But Bill Barr is participating in the cover up. So what the hell is that?

DARRYL COOPER: Yeah, and again, to go back to what we covered earlier, I mean, with Bill Barr’s history of covering things up for the intelligence community, both the Iran Contra thing, as Attorney General in the early 90s and as the CIA liaison, legal liaison to Congress during the Church and Pike Committee hearings. There’s a history there, you know, of covering things up that have embarrassing ties to the intelligence community. And, you know, one of the ways that, like, I don’t think Bill Barr, if he was your neighbor, I think he’s probably a good neighbor. If you, you know, if he was never.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I know him. I’ve always thought he was a super nice guy, friendly guy.

DARRYL COOPER: Everybody who knows him thinks he’s a good man. And, you know, there, what matters is.

TUCKER CARLSON: How you use your power. That’s how you’re judged.

DARRYL COOPER: And again, they go back to how people justify things to themselves. You know, a lot of people, most people are not comfortable thinking of themselves as evil human beings or as people who are participating, doing evil. And so they tell themselves stories to make it not that way. And, you know, again, to me, a pervert like Jeffrey Epstein is like one small part of this story to me.

TUCKER CARLSON: The whole.

The Bigger Picture: Accountability and Democratic Control

DARRYL COOPER: The whole constellation of forces around him that kind of coalesce to protect him and confuse the issue. And to this day is still. I mean, when I said Jeffrey Epstein has become a proxy for other things that are important, this is something. There’s one message I would like, if there’s anybody at the White House or. Or anywhere close to those people watching right now that they need to understand is the reason this is important to the base is not because they think there’s this Jewish pedophile who worked for the Israeli Mossad and they want him held up. It has nothing to do with that.

It’s a proxy for, can we hold these people accountable? Like Donald Trump’s presidency in general. You know, people might have favored the trade policy. Certainly they were. The immigration thing was important, all that kind of stuff. But really what it was is, man, these people have gotten so out of control and so out of touch with the rest of us and so unconcerned with what’s going on with the rest of us. We just got to bring in a wrecking ball from the outside who’s going to go in there and shake things up and tear this thing down.

TUCKER CARLSON: People are not listening to us because we’re irrelevant. We don’t have any say in our government. There is no democratic control in the United States. The population’s views really matter. That’s the feeling that people have. And this whole story that you’ve told for 2 hours and 37 minutes confirms that they are right to be concerned. Because what you’re describing is a pretty organized, informally organized, anyway, force or series of Forces that operate outside and above the US Government and every other global government, or most of them anyway. And by definition.

So the U.S. attorney, the federal prosecutor, the chief federal prosecutor in one of our biggest states has told back off and does, and everybody beneath him does also. So, like, what is that? It’s a force bigger than the US Government. And I just think that can’t continue. That can’t continue. You can’t have that.

The Sacred Nature of Justice

DARRYL COOPER: And the nature of the crime, again, being that one crime that if you polled Americans said, what’s the worst crime? I think it would make the top of every list of every poll that you could run, however you worded it. The fact that that’s the crime, you know, it makes it so that when they tell you we bombed a car in Kabul and killed this family of 10 during the Afghanistan withdrawal, we can’t really get into all of the details because of sources and methods and this and that and so forth, people will be like, okay, I don’t really like that, but fine.

But a child’s innocence, if anything is sacred, a child’s innocence is sacred. And sacred means there is no compromise with regard to that. If you have to, if exposing the information about somebody like Jeffrey Epstein means that a Dr. Strangelove style nuclear device goes off and destroys the planet, too bad, let justice be done, even if the heavens fall on something like that, because the crime is just beyond the pale. It’s something that for all normal people, they say, whatever your excuse is, national security. First of all, what does this guy who’s a pedophile have to do with national security?

TUCKER CARLSON: But whatever your excuse is, I’ve wondered since day one, what does that do with national security?

DARRYL COOPER: Yeah, whatever it is, the answer is no. We have a journalist who has a source, and this has not been refuted by the people involved saying that he belonged to intelligence. We have all these ties over the years that provide more circumstantial evidence to back that. If the U.S. government had anything to do with this guy, if foreign governments operating on our soil had anything to do with this guy, we don’t care what your excuse is.

We’re talking about a man who was raping children. And if our government, the people who pass laws that we have to follow or else have men with guns show up to our house and drag us off to a cage somewhere, the men and women who make those rules, they don’t. This is something that we have to draw a line in the sand and say, this is too far. You are going to dump all of this and we don’t care what happens. We want an explanation of what was going on here. And there’s just, we’re not going to take no for an answer on it. This is too far. It’s just too emblematic, and it’s too severe of a crime. And I hope that people, I really hope that people will keep that mentality and not let this die until we get a good, satisfactory answer on what was going on.

The Human Approach to History

TUCKER CARLSON: Amen to that. And everything that you have said, I think in a really measured, restrained way. I also notice about you, as I’ve noticed before, your total determination to see things through the eyes of the people you’re talking about, whether you agree or disagree with them. You add humanity to history, which is why I value your historical analysis. I think it’s the right way, it’s the humane way.

My last question, I just can’t help this because I’m not as good a person as you are. But why? So Mark Levin described you as a propagandist, a demagogue, saying you shouldn’t have a platform, you should be silenced. I’ve listened to you now for 2 hours and 40 minutes. I wonder what about what you just said would make Mark Levin call for you to be silenced and call you a criminal. I mean, here you are arguing against child molestation. You’re not attacking anybody, certainly on the basis of religion or ethnicity or anything like that. You’re not even attacking any governments. That’s my read on what you’re saying. Why would that, your 2 hour and 40 minute description of this news story, why would that make someone like Mark Levin so angry?

The Fear of Truth

DARRYL COOPER: I mean, I think when you see the constellation of commentators and personalities that have immediately jumped to the side of, there’s nothing to see here, it’s all over with, let’s drop the case. It’s all the same people who were telling us we were traitors if we didn’t want to bomb Iran just a few weeks ago. And so I think, and here’s the funny thing about it is I think that people like Mark, people like Ben Shapiro, a lot of these folks are actually, they’re afraid.

They have something like the pop understanding of what Jeffrey Epstein was about in their heads and they’re afraid that exposing the case will show his ties to Israeli intelligence. I actually have a much more conservative view on the whole thing than they probably have. I don’t think they have as much to be afraid of in that sense. I think he did work for Israeli intelligence, but I think he was a freelancer. He did work for the CIA, did work for a lot of intelligence agencies, probably independent criminals.

TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, this is not just about, I agree with you. It’s clearly not just about Israel. It’s about a lot. It is in part about Israel, but it’s not only about Israel. It’s about our government. They’re the ones who covered up the crimes in 2007. Yes, but that’s not a problem. Like we can say that that’s totally cool. It says a lot about Levin and his priorities, his reaction to this. I would say, and I would say anyone who doesn’t want to get to the bottom of this, like, why?

Drawing the Line

DARRYL COOPER: I mean, there is no answer that’s going to make sense to anybody that has sat through three hours of this conversation already. Because there is no good answer to that question. We should not compromise on this. We will get a satisfactory answer or we will burn this place down. Figuratively. Don’t come knock on my door, FBI.

But we’re not going to let this go, that this is a line in the sand. You will be honest with us about this because if you can’t, the nature of this crime, if you can’t, then it means that this thing cannot be fixed, that you cannot be honest with us about anything. We can’t trust anything you say if you’re willing to lie to us to our faces when there is so much implausible, ridiculous information out there. Lie to us to our faces in such a brazen way about a guy who was raping children. Like, if you’ll do that, then there’s just nothing more to talk about with the ruling class.

TUCKER CARLSON: I can’t improve on that. Darryl Cooper, thank you. I’m always grateful when you come. This is the second time. I hope it won’t be the last. Thank you very much.

DARRYL COOPER: Always a pleasure.

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