Although it had been a feature of elections in some parts of the United States for years, the phenomenon of mail-ballot voting exploded in the 2020 election. In the midst of the COVID pandemic, jurisdictions around the country expanded use of mail voting, sometimes sending ballots to every registered voter. Steps were taken to facilitate ease of mail voting, such as establishing drop boxes for returned ballots, relaxing rules regarding signature verification, and easing restrictions on “ballot harvesting,” the practice whereby paid political activists collect a large number of completed ballots and return them for counting. As a result, by some estimates, the proportion of ballots cast by mail nearly doubled from 2016 to 2020.
There is, of course, an ongoing debate over whether the turn to mail-ballot voting was necessary, given the pandemic circumstances, or a partisan maneuver to advance the prospects of Democrats, who seemed to reap most of the benefits electorally. Whether or not it was necessary, the development clearly contributed in two important ways to undermining confidence in the results – and is likely to continue doing so unless legislators and election officials take corrective measures.
First, mail-ballot voting is intrinsically less secure than in-person voting. Things might go awry at multiple points. The ballot might never be delivered, or it might be delivered to the wrong address, or to the right address but wrong person. Even if delivered into the right hands, it might ultimately be filled out by someone else or by the intended recipient under pressure; under these conditions, there is no guarantee that the secret ballot is preserved, a problem exacerbated by the activity of ballot harvesters. Once the ballot is completed, it can get lost in the mail, removed from a drop box, or otherwise compromised.
And this is without accounting for the potential for large-scale fraud. In 2020, an unnamed political operative in New Jersey described to the New York Post how he had developed and been using for years a system for replicating ballots and submitting them on behalf of his candidates. Despite the assurances of some that voter fraud is not an issue in the United States, a number of high-profile cases in the last quarter-century prove otherwise. Since 1997, mayoral elections in Miami and Paterson, New Jersey, as well as a congressional election in the Ninth District of North Carolina, have been vacated due to proven fraud. As John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky document in their 2021 book “Our Broken Elections,” these three cases are the tip of the iceberg. Indeed, Fund and von Spakovsky note, most cases of large-scale fraud in recent years have involved mail ballots.
There is a reason France no longer uses mail-in ballots in its elections, and why the 2005 commission led by Republican James Baker and Democrat Jimmy Carter identified mail ballots as the least secure mode of voting (though in 2020 Carter rather weakly tried to walk back that conclusion).
Nearly a year and a half after the 2020 elections, a special counsel has charged that substantial voter fraud took place in more than 90 of Wisconsin’s nursing homes, where it appears that nursing home staff or administrators requested ballots for invalid patients, then filled out and returned those ballots, possibly forging the patients’ signatures. A private study (separate from the controversial Arizona “audit”) alleges that 200,000 mail ballots in Maricopa County were counted despite mismatched signatures.
Overall, one does not need to accept former President Trump’s expansive claims of national voter fraud – indeed, one should not, without a great deal more evidence than he has yet offered – in order to recognize that mail-ballot voting is vulnerable to a number of problems that make it chronically less reliable than in-person voting. Moreover, perhaps as importantly, many voters recognize this fact, and as a result will consistently question the validity of close results in elections using large-scale mail balloting, at least if their candidate loses.
Second, because of significant disparities in the political makeup of the mail-ballot electorate and the Election Day in-person electorate (in states that are not 100% mail ballot), the reporting of election results can become distorted. In the 2020 general election, we witnessed both a much-expected “red mirage” and a lesser-noted “blue mirage.” In a few states such as Texas and Ohio, mail-ballot votes were counted and reported first, leading to initial Democratic leads that were gradually wiped out through the night as Election Day votes were added to the tallies. In most major states, the reverse happened. Election Day votes were counted first, followed by mail-ballot votes. The predicted “red mirage” came to pass as President Trump took early leads in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin before surrendering them over the next few days as the mail ballots rolled in.
No one paid much attention to Texas and Ohio, which had their totals in relatively early, and in any case went the way they were expected to go. On the other hand, the “red mirage” states drew enormous scrutiny. They were already understood to be swing states that could go either way and would determine the election. Moreover, all had voted for Trump in 2016. Many Trump supporters went to bed on November 3 with their man seemingly headed to another surprise win, and found out on November 4 that it was slipping away in a process that was not completed for several days. That sensation, of having an election victory subsequently overridden, undoubtedly contributed to the willingness of many to embrace Trump’s “stolen election” narrative. That is an outcome we should hope to avoid in the future.
It is possible that the partisan makeup of mail-ballot versus Election Day voters depends on circumstances. In 2020, Democratic voters may have been more afraid of COVID and hence more likely to avoid voting lines, while Republican voters were urged by their president not to trust mail voting. Perhaps other circumstances will produce different tendencies. Unless both modes of voting are utilized equally by supporters of both candidates, the potential will exist that those who lose based on late-reporting mail results will wonder whether something nefarious happened.
The optimal solution would be to increase in-person early voting opportunities and the number of Election Day polling places, while strictly limiting mail voting to traditional absentee voting for reasons of illness, disability, or absence. However, many jurisdictions continue to be committed to widespread mail voting. It is a practice that is not going away anytime soon, so a key question is what can be done to reduce the damage that mail-ballot voting can do to confidence in electoral legitimacy.
The two problems outlined above – inadequate ballot security and delayed vote totals – require distinct measures.
The chief way to mitigate concerns around delayed vote totals is to enforce a strict Election Day deadline for the return of mail ballots and to require election officials to begin counting received mail ballots prior to Election Day. The other confidence-building measure would be to adopt Georgia’s new requirement that election officials must announce on Election Night the total number of votes received. This will prevent the perception that large batches of incoming votes are materializing out of thin air.
As for ballot security, some states have already taken steps that should be adopted more broadly. These include banning ballot harvesting and improving verification techniques (possibly using the last four digits of Social Security numbers instead of signatures). Not least, state and county election offices should take more seriously their obligation to keep their voter-registration rolls updated. If election officials want voters to be confident in the legitimacy of mail-ballot elections, they need to make sure that no household is getting five extra ballots for residents who haven’t lived there in years. Unfortunately, Democrats have widely condemned such measures as “voter suppression.”
None of these steps would prevent a nominally responsible eligible voter from casting a vote by mail, but they can help bolster confidence in our elections. If we have to learn to live with mail-ballot voting, we should be able – no, eager – to answer legitimate concerns rather than pretend that they don’t exist.
Andrew E. Busch is Crown professor of government and George R. Roberts fellow at Claremont McKenna College. He is co-author of “Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics” (Rowman & Littlefield).
The past few weeks have been tough for Hunter Biden and, by extension, the rest of the Biden family. On March 1, news broke that Hunter Biden’s longtime business partner and friend Devon Archer was sentenced to a year in federal prison for defrauding a Native American tribe. Then just yesterday, the New York Timespublished an investigation revealing that although the younger Biden had paid his outstanding tax liability – which was reportedly greater than $1 million, and which required him to take out a loan to pay it off – a federal investigation into his failure to pay taxes on his earnings from overseas has continued.
Much lower in the NYT story, America’s “paper of record” mentioned the laptop belonging to Hunter Biden that was reportedly abandoned at a computer repair shop, and subsequently became the heart of a NY Post story published shortly before the 2020 election (which was subsequently ignored by the MSM because of unfounded rumors that the materials had been stolen by Russian hackers, or that the laptop itself was some kind of plant). It didn’t only mention the laptop, but also confirmed that it was authentic. We previously reported on how the NYT sued to obtain copies of emails mentioning Biden and his exploits allegedly gleaned from Romanian embassy officials.
And in the latest blow to the reputation of the president’s perennially troubled son, a lawyer for the mother of Hunter Biden’s 3-year-old daughter (who was born out of wedlock to a woman who allegedly slept with the younger Biden while working as an exotic dancer) said during an interview with CNBC that he expects the younger Biden “to be indicted” for tax fraud.
Attorney Clint Lancaster told CNBC that his client, Lunden Roberts, had recently testified in Delaware before a federal grand jury in the criminal investigation into the 52-year-old presidential scion. The lawyer based his commentary on “what I saw” in Biden’s financial records.
Lancaster said he and Roberts were interviewed by an assistant U.S. attorney, an FBI agent and an IRS agent — “one that carries a badge and gun” — more than a year ago about Biden in Little Rock, Ark., where Lancaster practices law.
“I expect him to be indicted,” the lawyer said about Biden. “Just based on what I saw in his financial records, I would be surprised if he’s not indicted.”
Lancaster later added that neither he nor his client want Hunter Biden to go to jail.
“It’s not my goal, much to the unhappiness of many people in the Republican Party,” said Lancaster, a supporter of former President Donald Trump who in late 2020 worked on a legal challenge to results that showed Biden had won the state of Wisconsin that year.
He also confirmed that the younger Biden hadn’t visited his 3-year-old daughter with Roberts, “which is sad because the baby looks like him, with blonde hair.” He also explained that he had come into possession of a vast trove of the younger Biden’s financial records as part of his work on Roberts’ child-support suit. When asked about the number of records, Lancaster said it was around “10 gigs of data”.
“Oh, hell, it was a bunch,” said Lancaster when asked how many records there were related to Hunter Biden’s finances. The documents were part of the case file for an Arkansas court child-support lawsuit that Roberts filed against Biden in 2019 in connection with their daughter.
“They’re all in electronic form,” Lancaster said. “I would estimate it was anywhere from 10 gigs of data.”
“I saw a lot of information” that is “problematic” for Biden, he said.
Finally, Lancaster told CNBC that his client hadn’t received immunity before testifying because she hadn’t committed any crimes. The NYT on Thursday reported that Roberts had been questioned about the provenance of the child support payments she had received from Biden. Prosecutors were apparently investigating whether the same corporate entity from which she received the payments was also used by Biden to receive payments from Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company from which he received a salary of $50K per month just for sitting on its board.
Given all the information on the investigation that’s just come to light, we wouldn’t be surprised if the grand jury hearing the evidence is soon asked to vote on whether federal charges should be brought against the younger Biden. His father, the president, has already recused himself from the case as his DoJ has continued with the investigation. If charges are brought and Hunter Biden is convicted (or pleads guilty), his father would then have the option of pardoning him. From this vantage point, it’s not too difficult to imagine a scenario where Biden pardons his son after deciding not to seek another term in office.
Despite being found guilty late last year for her role in sex crimes against minors, Ghislaine Maxwell, the “madam” and chief accomplice of the intelligence-linked pedophile and sex trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein, may soon walk free. A juror in the case, Scotty David, subsequently took credit for the jury’s decision to find Ghislaine Maxwell guilty and “inadvertently” revealed that he had incorrectly answered a pre-trial questionnaire. As a result, the possibility of a mistrial, and Ghislaine walking free, now looms large.
David has some interesting connections, as he currently works for the Carlyle Group – the global investment firm whose ties to the bin Laden family during the early 2000s have come under scrutiny. Carlyle’s executives often have ties to intelligence, with one example being its former chairman and then chairman emeritus, Frank Carlucci, who had been deputy director of the CIA and, later, Reagan’s Secretary of Defense. Carlyle’s current co-founder and co-chairman David Rubenstein, as noted in this article from Free Press Report, served on the board of the influential Trilateral Commission during the same time as Jeffrey Epstein, while his ex-wife Alice Rogoff (divorced in 2017) had a very close working relationship with Ghislaine Maxwell, including with her now defunct “charity” the TerraMar Project. Given the fact that there are known ties between David’s employer and Ghislaine Maxwell, why has this potential conflict of interest gone unmentioned by mainstream media?
Not only that, but – according to a family member of one of the women who testified against Maxwell during her trial – David was connected with the journalist who would publish the now infamous, post-verdict report via Vicky Ward. Ward has been denounced by Epstein victims and others close to the case for having had a past “chummy” relationship with Ghislaine Maxwell she declined to disclose for years and for subsequently telling Ghislaine that Epstein victim Maria Farmer had been the person who had first reported Maxwell and Epstein to the FBI back in 1996. Farmer later claims that Ward’s lack of journalistic integrity, after promising to keep Farmer’s identity secret, had put her life in danger and forced her into hiding.
It seems that there is, yet again, a major cover-up in the works, one which involves major centers of financial and political power in New York City and beyond. In order to fully understand the sexual trafficking and blackmail operation that Maxwell and Epstein oversaw, and why powerful forces apparently continue to intervene in the case, one must first understand its genesis, particularly how and why Ghislaine Maxwell arrived in New York City. In this second installment of “Meet Ghislaine” (read Part 1 here), the beginnings of Ghislaine’s career – closely controlled by her father, Robert Maxwell, until his 1991 death – are followed in detail.
The Young Ghislaine
Early on in life, Ghislaine Maxwell was surrounded by the rich and powerful figures who frequented her father’s offices as his publishing empire and political connections grew both in the UK and abroad. Her father, Robert Maxwell, was a dominant force in her life as he was for her siblings as well, though Ghislaine gained a reputation as his favorite child, despite having been neglected in the earliest years of her life.
However, Ghislaine did not escape the abuse that was known to befall Robert Maxwell’s other children. While brothers Kevin and Ian were well known to regularly receive tongue lashings from their father in full view of friends and business associates, Ghislaine received “prearranged hidings [beatings]” from her father, with a nine-year-old Ghislaine telling author Eleanor Berry, a friend and confidant of her father’s, that “Daddy has a series of things lined up in a row. There’s a riding crop with a swish to it, another straight riding crop and a few shoehorns. He always asks me to choose which one I want.”
By all accounts, Robert Maxwell had firm control over Ghislaine’s young life. This was particularly true when it came to her love life through her teens and into her time at university, when he reportedly would ban her boyfriends from the family home and try to keep her from being seen with them publicly. It appears that Robert Maxwell applied this rule uniquely to Ghislaine and not to his three older daughters. Though such behavior could be attributed merely to his being a protective father, he later went to great lengths—even involving his publishing empire—to promote Ghislaine’s affairs with certain individuals, particularly those who inhabited elite circles (explored in more depth later in this article). This behavior suggests that Robert Maxwell may have seen Ghislaine’s sexuality as a useful tool in growing his influence empire, beginning when she was quite young. It also may have contributed to Ghislaine’s willingness, years later, to sexually exploit and abuse the young women targeted by herself and Jeffrey Epstein.
In much the same way as Ghislaine’s young personal life was controlled by her father, her entry into the working world after her graduation from Oxford was directly facilitated and managed by her father, with Robert Maxwell setting her up “with a string of jobs across his business empire.” By 1984, at age twenty-two, she was serving as a director of the British football club Oxford United alongside her brother Kevin. At the time, Robert Maxwell held shares in the club through a company created explicitly for that purpose. He served as the club’s chairman beginning in 1982.
Ghislaine and her father at an Oxford United football match
Prior to and during this same period, Ghislaine worked in various roles at her father’s companies Pergamon Press and the Mirror Group, with British media later describing her early career as “entirely dependent on her father’s patronage.” She was working for the Mirror Group by 1984 and possibly earlier. During this period, Robert often used Ghislaine to market and generally represent his newspapers publicly.
In 1985, and with Robert Maxwell’s full approval, The People — the Sunday edition of the Daily Mirror— ran a story claiming that efforts were being made to blackmail the paper’s publisher, Robert Maxwell himself. The blackmailer had reportedly threatened Maxwell with information regarding Ghislaine’s alleged relationship with David Manners, then-Marquis of Granby and the future Duke of Rutland. The article sought to paint Robert Maxwell as bravely resisting the “blackmailer,” but there is more to the story.
This astonishing article claimed that people connected with the British MP Harvey Proctor had tried to blackmail Maxwell via The People. The article claimed that a “sinister phonecaller” had warned that, if the newspaper continued its campaign to expose Harvey Proctor, they would “produce a story about Ghislaine and Lord Granby at Belvoir Castle with incriminating pictures of them in compromising positions.” Manners denied the claim, stating that he and Ghislaine were merely friends.
The bizarre decision to publish a front-page story exploiting his own daughter’s alleged sexual relationship because of an anonymous phone call was especially odd given that Robert Maxwell was known for his tight control over his youngest daughter’s love life. As previously mentioned, he had banned her boyfriends from visiting the family house and had gone to great lengths to prevent her from being seen in public with them. Yet, for whatever reason, Robert Maxwell clearly wanted information linking Ghislaine to the future duke put out into the public sphere. Though it is difficult to know exactly what was behind this odd episode in Ghislaine’s past, the situation suggests that Robert Maxwell saw Ghislaine’s young sexuality as a useful tool in building his influence empire.
The story is also odd for other reasons. The motive of the blackmailer was ostensibly to prevent Maxwell-owned papers from covering the Harvey Proctor scandal. But Manners (Lord Granby in the article), who was allegedly involved with Ghislaine, was also a close friend and later the employer of Harvey Proctor. Why would someone close to Proctor seek to blackmail Maxwell by putting the reputation of his own friend on the line?
In addition, the appearance of Harvey Proctor, a Conservative member of Parliament, in this tabloid spectacle is interesting for a few reasons. In 1987, Proctor pleaded guilty to sexual indecency with two young men, who were sixteen and nineteen at the time, and several witnesses interviewed in that investigation described him as having a sexual interest in “young boys.” Later, a controversial court case saw Proctor accused of having been involved with well-connected British pedophile and procurer of children Jimmy Savile; he was alleged to have been part of a child sex-abuse ring that was said to include former UK prime minister Ted Heath.
Of course, the Maxwell-owned newspapers, in covering the alleged effort to blackmail Robert Maxwell, did not mention the “young boys” angle at all, instead focusing on claims that distracted from the then-credible accusations of pedophilia by claiming that Proctor was merely into “spanking” and was “whacky,” among other things.
As was mentioned in Part 1 of this series, Ghislaine had also become involved with “philanthropy” tied to her father’s media empire during this period, which included hosting a “Disney day out for kids” and benefit dinner on behalf of the Mirror Group for the Save the Children NGO. Part of the event took place at the home of the Marquess and Lady of Bath, with the former known being for his strange obsession with Adolf Hitler. The gala was attended by members of the British royal family. The same evening that the Ghislaine-hosted bash concluded, the Marquess of Bath’s son was found hanging from a bedspread tied to an oak beam at the Bath Arms bar in what was labeled a suicide.
The attendance of royals at this Ghislaine-hosted gala was not some lucky break for Ghislaine or her “philanthropic” efforts, given that Ghislaine had been close to the royals for years, as some of her later employees and victims attested to having personally seen pictures of her “growing up” with the royals, a relationship allegedly facilitated by the Maxwell family’s ties to the Rothschild banking family. Ghislaine was heard on more than one occasion describing the wealthy and influential Rothschilds as her family’s “greatest protectors,” and they were also among Robert Maxwell’s most important bankers, who helped him finance the construction of his vast media empire and web of companies and untraceable trusts.
While Ghislaine was working in these capacities for her father’s business empire, there are indications that she had also, to some extent, begun to become involved in his espionage-related activities. According to former Israeli intelligence operative and associate of Maxwell in his dealings with Mossad, Ari Ben-Menashe, Ghislaine accompanied her father to events frequently, including the now-infamous 1989 party on Maxwell’s yacht where several key figures in the intelligence-related PROMIS software scandal were in attendance.
Ben-Menashe has also claimed that Jeffrey Epstein was brought into the group of Israeli spies that included himself and Robert Maxwell during this period in the mid-1980s and that Epstein had been introduced to Robert Maxwell after having been romantically involved with Ghislaine.
In 2019, Ben-Menashe told former CBS News producer Zev Shalev that “he [Maxwell] wanted us to accept him [Epstein] as part of our group. . . . I’m not denying that we were at the time a group that it was Nick Davies [foreign editor of the Maxwell-owned Daily Mirror], it was Maxwell, it was myself and our team from Israel, we were doing what we were doing.” He then added that Maxwell had stated during the introduction that “your Israeli bosses have already approved” of Epstein. Shalev later corroborated Epstein’s affiliation with Israeli military intelligence during this period with another former Israeli intelligence official. Epstein’s former business associate Steve Hoffenberg, who worked with Epstein from the late 1980s until 1993, has also stated that Epstein had boasted of his work for Israeli intelligence during that period and “rumors” of Epstein’s affiliation with both Israeli and US intelligence appeared in media reports as early as 1992.
Ari Ben Menashe in his office. He now runs a consultancy firm.
Past reporting by Seymour Hersh and others revealed that Maxwell, Davies, and Ben-Menashe were involved in the transfer and sale of military equipment and weapons from Israel to Iran on behalf of Israeli intelligence during this period. Epstein is also known to have been involved with arms dealers at this time, including with UK’s Douglas Leese and the Iran-Contra–linked Adnan Khashoggi. Ben-Menashe went on to tell Shalev that he had “met him [Epstein] a few times in Maxwell’s office, that was it.” He also said he was not aware of Epstein being involved in arms deals for anyone else he knew at the time but that Maxwell wanted to involve Epstein in the arms transfer in which he, Davies, and Ben-Menashe were engaged on Israel’s behalf. He later clarified that he had seen Epstein on several occasions after his initial recruitment, as Epstein “used to be in [Robert Maxwell’s] office [in London] quite often” and would arrive there between trips to and from Israel.
Moving On Up
Beginning roughly during this same period, in 1986, Ghislaine began dating an Italian aristocrat named Count Gianfranco Cicogna, whose grandfather was Mussolini’s finance minister and the last doge of Venice. Cicogna also had ties to both covert and overt power structures in Italy, particularly to the Vatican, to the CIA in Italy, and to the Italian side of the National Crime Syndicate. The other half of that syndicate, of course, was the Jewish American mob with its modern-day ties to the informal Mega Group, which itself was deeply connected to the Epstein scandal and whose members included business partners of Robert Maxwell.
Gianfranco Cicogna in an undated photo
Cicogna’s relationship with Ghislaine lasted throughout the 1990s, though numerous media outlets have misreported their relationship as having taken place only during the early 1990s. It was reported in the British media in 1992 that Cicogna had been Ghislaine’s “great love” and that he had “moulded the Ghislaine we now see. He told her where to get her hair cut, and what to wear.” It’s worth noting that Gianfranco Cicogna met a grisly end in 2012 when the plane he was flying exploded in a giant fireball during an air show, a morbid spectacle that can surprisingly still be viewed on YouTube.
Toward the end of her relationship with Cicogna, Ghislaine is said to have founded the Kit Kat Club, which she depicted as a feminist endeavor. Why Ghislaine chose the name “Kit Kat Club” is something of a mystery. The original Kit Kat Club was set up by a renowned pie maker named Christopher Catling in London during the eighteenth century to promote the freedoms obtained during the 1688 Glorious Revolution. Until the late 1800s, Catling’s organization was the only entity to use the name. Then, in the 1900s, various wealthy private clubs, music venues, and public houses adopted the name for establishments all around the UK. The original name of the club created by Catling was also the inspiration behind the naming of the famous KitKat chocolate bar produced by Nestlé. The name caught on, with independent music venues bearing the name in Wales, Northern Ireland, and the North of England; there was even a Kit Kat Club band in Scotland. Then came the 1966 musical Cabaret, which was set in the Kit Kat Club in Berlin. Cabaret had been turned into a movie around the time Ghislaine Maxwell supposedly founded and named her own Kit Kat organization, but her true reasons for choosing this name may never be known.
An article in the Sydney Morning Herald later described Maxwell’s Kit Kat Club as “a salon held in a variety of locations, designed to bring together women from the arts, politics and society.” The article goes on to quote an attendee of the events, author Anna Pasternak, who stated, “It was bright, wealthy and society women. Nowadays, it seems quite normal to be going to a meeting just for women, but 30 years ago it seemed exciting.” Of Ghislaine, Pasternak stated that she was “very mindful of who you were, your status, your importance. I think it was more a way of advancing herself, making contacts that could be useful to her.”
The Kit Kat Club, despite being described by other outlets as “an all-female debating society” and group meant to “help women in commerce and industry,” held functions that were hosted by Maxwell that often had many men in attendance. One apparently frequent attendee of the Kit Kat Club was Jeffrey Archer. Archer is a former Tory MP turned novelist who has been the recipient of various accusations of financial fraud over the years and who has served time in prison for perjury. He was another close colleague of Harvey Proctor and helped finance his business ventures following the latter’s conviction for acts of “gross indecency” with two teenage boys. In a 1996 article published by the Daily News, Archer said of his experience at the Kit Kat Club: “I had the time of my life, surrounded by women under 40. I had orgasm after orgasm just talking to them!”
Archer can also be seen in images taken at a Kit Kat Club event in 2004. Pictures from that same event show other attendees, including Stanley and Rachel Johnson, the father and sister of current UK prime minister Boris Johnson. Also seen at this 2004 Kit Kat function was former Tory MPJonathan Aitken, who went to jail for perjury and is known for his close ties to Saudi royalty; former key figure in the Rupert Murdoch media empire, Andrew Neil; and Anton Mosimann, who has been called the “chef to royalty.”
There has since been speculation that Ghislaine’s Kit Kat Club is where Donald Trump met his future wife Melania. Although the New York Times and other outlets reported that, at Fashion Week 1998, Donald Trump first met Melania at the Kit Kat Club in New York, this locale was not related to Maxwell’s Kit Kat Club and is instead a famous club in New York that also got its name from Catling’s original Kit Kat Club. However, these same outlets also reported that Epstein and Maxwell claimed to have been the ones who introduced the Trumps to each other.
Soon after her “painful” split from Gianfranco Cicogna, Ghislaine was seen skiing in Aspen, Colorado—“where the rich and famous mix” during the winter season—with American actor George Hamilton, who was also seen escorting Ghislaine to the Epsom races in 1991. Hamilton, twenty-two years Ghislaine’s senior, is apparently much more than just an actor, as he allegedly played a major role in aiding Ferdinand Marcos, the former dictator of the Philippines, and his wife Imelda move billions of public funds out of the country and convert them into private wealth for themselves and their accomplices abroad. Marcos originally rose to power with the help of the CIA.
George Hamilton and Ghislaine Maxwell attend the Epsom races in 1991
A NY prosecutor referred to Hamilton as a “front” for Marcos, and media reports at the time claimed he had also acted as Imelda Marcos’s financial adviser. The Associated Press reported that Hamilton had been an unindicted co-conspirator in the fraud and racketeering cases brought against Imelda Marcos after she and her husband fled their country in 1986. The congressional committee tasked with investigating the flight of billions from the Philippines just prior to Marcos’s ouster declined to investigate the financial transactions surrounding Hamilton, which were alleged to have been connected to that very crime. Notably, at the same time, the CIA refused to disclose what it knew about the capital flight. As mentioned later in this article, the private investigator hired by this congressional committee to track down the Marcos’s money was Jules Kroll.
In 1990, Ghislaine was added to the payroll of another of her father’s newspapers, the European, which had launched that same year. It’s not exactly clear, however, at what point she joined the company or in what role(s) she served. A website recently set up by Ghislaine’s siblings following her July 2020 arrest for sexual crimes related to minors states that she developed and created “advertising opportunities” in the newspaper’s supplement during her time there. This same year, she moved to the United States, first to Los Angeles after being “offered a small part in a movie” that was being filmed there.
Coming to America
During the late 1980s, Robert Maxwell’s media empire began to falter as he had overextended his finances by making massive purchases, including Macmillan publishing among many others. Part of the reason behind his rapid, and arguably hasty, expansion was related to his rivalry with fellow media baron Rupert Murdoch. Another factor was his desire to become ever more wealthy and powerful. Former British ambassador to the US Peter Jay, who had also served as Maxwell’s chief of staff, later said that these purchases were partially motivated by Maxwell being “offended and upset that he was seen as merely a printer. . . . He was determined to go and demonstrate to the world that he was a publisher as well.”
Given Robert Maxwell’s ties to intelligence and the role some of his media assets played in espionage-related affairs, such as the arrest of Israeli nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu, it is possible if not likely that some of these acquisitions during this period were motivated by more than just his ego. Indeed, some of the companies Maxwell purchased or created during this period played a role in his sale of the bugged PROMIS software, acting as fronts for Israeli intelligence in the process.
In the lead-up to the 1990s, some of Maxwell’s companies became increasingly linked to organized criminal activities, such as those of Russian mobster Semion Mogilevich, and to the effort of Bulgarian intelligence to plunder Western technology known as Neva. Some of the companies Maxwell created to operate the Neva program were also used as cover for Israeli intelligence. The ties between this Maxwell-operated web of companies to the interconnected worlds of intelligence and organized crime grew under the umbrella corporation known as Multi-Group. The FBI later referred to Multi-Group, cofounded by Maxwell, as giving rise to a global criminal syndicate that came to control a large percentage of the profits from major industries, including oil, telecommunications, and natural gas. The Maxwell model for moving and laundering money between a web of Eastern and Western banks was at the core of the criminal enterprise that lurked within the Multi-Group web of companies.
Years later, the FBI’s foremost counterintelligence expert, John Patrick O’Neill, described Robert Maxwell as being “at the heart of the global criminal network” and that his lasting contribution to the world was having been “the man who set in motion a true coalition of global criminals” through the creation of Multi-Group. O’Neill died in the attacks of September 11, 2001. His death was not only convenient for those constructing the official narrative of the attacks, as he had been the top expert in the FBI on Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, but it was also convenient for those who took the reins of Maxwell’s criminal enterprises in New York after Maxwell’s 1991 demise. Indeed, in the late 1990s, O’Neill had told author Gordon Thomas that he “had staff still trying to unravel the links from Maxwell’s legacy,” particularly his organized crime links and their operation in New York.
John P. O’Neill, the FBI counterintelligence expert, was the Bureau’s top expert on Osama bin Laden and was also attempting to track down the vestiges Robert Maxwell’s crime-linked enterprises in New York City before his death on September 11, 2001.
Robert Maxwell’s foothold in New York, which led to his establishing links to the city’s criminal underworld, appear to have gotten underway when he purchased Macmillan. He had little trouble raising money for a grander entry into New York business and society, despite his well-known past financial chicanery that had earned him the nickname “the bouncing Czech.” Investment banks such as Lehman Brothers, Rothschild Inc., Salomon Brothers, and Goldman Sachs lined up to represent and help finance Maxwell and his ever-growing web of businesses and corporate entities. Some speculated at the time that some of the funds Maxwell raised during this period and for this purpose had originated in the Soviet Union, where he had considerable connections, including to the KGB. There is also the possibility that some of the funds included proceeds from Maxwell’s sale of bugged PROMIS software to governments around the world.
Despite having opened a considerable new stream of revenue through Multi-Group and its legitimate and illegitimate businesses, years of financial fraud and stock-buying schemes caught up with Robert Maxwell’s empire, which began rapidly imploding in early 1991. In what is often considered a bizarre move by observers, given Maxwell’s dire financial situation and the poor state of the newspaper, Maxwell decided to expand his presence in New York by buying the New York Daily News in March 1991. However, Gordon Thomas later reported that the paper’s previous owners, the Chicago Tribune Group, had offered Maxwell $60 million to take over the floundering paper. Regardless of the true story behind his acquisition of the paper, he chose to put his daughter Ghislaine in charge of “special projects” shortly after becoming its owner. That position, per London’sSunday Times, “provided her with her entree to the power base of the city.”
In addition to her new role in charge of “special projects” for the paper, Ghislaine was also made managing director of a “ready-made” company based in New York and created by her father, Maxwell Corporate Gifts. The New York Post later described the company as Ghislaine’s “own fiefdom.” Little is otherwise known about Maxwell Corporate Gifts, with the Maxwell family subsequently describing the company as “a business that supplied long-term service awards for companies.” In 2021, Ghislaine’s siblings published a short biography of their sister that asserted that Ghislaine had founded Maxwell Corporate Gifts in the mid-1980s after her graduation from Oxford and before her move to the US. Their claim is at odds with past media reports that predate Ghislaine’s infamy by several years and even decades. It is also possible, however, that the entity’s creation preceded by several years its use by Ghislaine and her father in New York.
Because few or no public records remain accessible regarding the company’s activities, we can only speculate about its activities. Given that the creation of the company coincided with the Maxwells’ entry into New York as well as the fact that Robert Maxwell’s ambition to expand his influence throughout the city was quite clear at the time, it was most likely a part of the growing Maxwell influence network in the city. New York media outlets subsequently claimed that Robert Maxwell saw himself as “the patriarch of a dynasty that would wield financial and political power on a global scale” and that he additionally saw New York as where they would truly make their mark.
After buying the New York Daily News, and despite his mounting financial problems, Maxwell received such positive attention in New York City that it surprised even him. According to an anecdote from Robert Pirie, investment banker and the then-president of Rothschild Inc.:
After he bought the Daily News, I picked him up at his boat. He liked Chinese food, so I decided to take him to Fu’s, which is the best Chinese restaurant in the city. As we drove up First Avenue, people would recognize him, and open their car doors and come out and shake his hand. At Fu’s, the entire restaurant got up on its feet and started clapping. He was overwhelmed. He told me, “In my whole life in London, no one’s ever acted like this. I’m here a month and look what’s happening.”
This type of reception throughout the city led Maxwell to become even more determined to expand his presence there. He hired a “group of prominent consultants and lawyers to help him make his way in America.” These included former senator Howard Baker and former senator John Tower as well as Republican Party consultant and high-profile public relations executive Robert Keith Gray. The inclusion of these three men in advising Maxwell on his entry into the United States is highly significant, but each is important for a different reason.
Senator Howard Baker (R-TN)
Tennessee senator Howard Baker, best known for being the vice-chairman of the Senate Watergate Committee and subsequently Reagan’s chief of staff after the Iran-Contra scandal, had become Robert Maxwell’s business partner in 1991 in a venture called Newstar. Newstar focused on expanding investment opportunities for Americans in the former Soviet Union and was described by Richard Jacobs, who cofounded the company with Baker, as “an international merchant banking, investment and advisory company.” Jacobs also stated that Robert Maxwell was one of the major shareholders in the company. Newstar was just one of several companies that Maxwell used to enrich himself through privatizing assets of the former Soviet Union. Baker also attempted to recruit other respected public figures into Maxwell’s empire.
Senator John Tower (R-TX)
It appears that Maxwell first encountered Baker through his years-long relationship with Senator Tower, with whom Baker had had a decades-long partnership in the Senate. Maxwell had first gotten close to Tower years earlier, at Henry Kissinger’s behest, with the intention of advancing the Mossad goal of installing PROMIS software on the computers of top-secret US laboratories tied to the nuclear weapons program. It was Maxwell who placed Tower on the Mossad payroll, prompted his involvement in the Iran-Contra deal, and later added him to his own payroll via the company Pergamon-Brassey, which appears to have been strongly related to both the PROMIS scandal and the Bulgarian-led Neva program. Tower died just months before Maxwell, in early 1991, as the result of a suspicious plane crash, which at the time reportedly made Robert Maxwell fear for his own life.
Robert Keith Gray
Robert Keith Gray is perhaps the key to unlocking the truth about Robert Maxwell’s plans and ambitions for his future in New York City. Gray was a smooth operator, having worked on major presidential campaigns and as the top executive at the public relations firm Hill and Knowlton. Less known is the fact that Gray had extensive ties to US intelligence and also to a handful of call girl and sexual-blackmail rings that encircled the Watergate scandal of the Nixon presidency and the more obscure Koreagate scandal of the same era. He was also tied, through connections in his home state of Nebraska, to figures involved in the Franklin Scandal. One common thread throughout the sexual blackmail scandals that were linked in some way to Gray was the Georgetown Club, owned by South Korean intelligence asset Tongsun Park and whose president was Robert Keith Gray at the time when it was used by CIA and other intelligence-linked figures to acquire sexual blackmail. John Tower was a member of the Georgetown Club during this period, as were many other prominent politicians and power brokers in Washington, DC.
During the period where he sought these men’s advice about how to grow his influence in New York, Robert Maxwell was also eager to get closer to George H. W. Bush—then the US president—with whom he had cultivated a relationship decades earlier. The Bush White House later became embroiled in the pedophile, blackmail, and sex-trafficking scandal that enveloped former Washington lobbyist Craig Spence, a network later shown by journalist Nick Bryant to have been at the core of the Franklin Scandal network. The alleged contact Spence had at the Bush White House was former National Security Advisor Donald Gregg. Gregg denied these reports, and the story was quickly memory holed. In 1989 Spence was found dead in a Boston hotel room and his death was quickly ruled a “suicide.”
Soon after Robert Maxwell’s effort to expand his footprint in New York, which author Gordon Thomas alleges involved Maxwell’s desire to become “king” of the city, he was being “courted” by Edgar Bronfman, Laurence Tisch, and other “luminaries of the New York Jewish community.” Bronfman and Tisch were among the founding members of the informal Mega Group, founded that same year by Leslie Wexner and Edgar Bronfman’s brother Charles. Charles Bronfman had previously teamed up with Maxwell in 1989 in an ill-fated attempt to purchase the Jerusalem Post. In a previous report that I wrote for MintPress News, I noted how many Mega Group members, including Wexner and the Bronfmans, had clear ties to organized crime networks and/or intelligence (as was the case for Tisch). Maxwell himself, as explored in this article and Part 1 of this series, checked these boxes as well.
The Mega Group’s existence was not revealed to the public until seven years later, in 1998. At that time, it underwent a very public reveal in the Wall Street Journal, and the names of its most prominent members were disclosed. Given that Robert Maxwell was cozy with this network and was being “courted” by them the year of its founding and that he had died long before the publication of the Wall Street Journal article, it is worth considering the possibility that Maxwell himself was a Mega Group member and that the only reason his name was not included in the WSJ’s disclosure of the group is because he was no longer alive. Support for this thesis can be adduced in the subsequent team-up of sexual-blackmail influence operator Jeffrey Epstein, who had been a financial adviser to Wexner since 1987 and his money manager since 1990, and Ghislaine Maxwell, Robert Maxwell’s favorite daughter.
While Wexner is often considered to be an Ohio business mogul, he had become increasingly active in New York in the 1980s, particularly its real estate market, especially following his involvement with Epstein. For over a decade and up until the early 2000s, Epstein was frequently referred to in the press as a real estate mogul or “property developer,” and some of these early articles, including one that named Ghislaine as the “mysterious business queen” of social circles that spanned New York and London, also discussed allegations that Epstein was involved with both the CIA and Israel’s Mossad.
Rising from the Ashes
At the end of October 1991, Robert Maxwell contacted private investigator Jules Kroll and arranged a meeting to see if he could hire Kroll to investigate a “conspiracy” to ruin him financially and destroy his empire. Kroll told Maxwell he would take the case.
Jules Kroll
Jules Kroll’s involvement in this matter is significant for several reasons but chiefly because of the ties of his firms to US and Israeli intelligence. Kroll Associates, founded by Jules Kroll in 1972, became known as “the CIA of Wall Street” and was later alleged by French intelligence to have been used as an actual front for the CIA. The reasoning behind this nickname and such claims is partially related to the company’s penchant for hiring former CIA and FBI officers as well as former operatives of Britain’s MI6 and Israel’s Mossad. The successor company to Kroll Associates, K2 Intelligence, has similar hiring practices. In 2020, former Kroll Associates employee Roy Den Hollander was accused of murdering the son of New York judge Esther Salas at their family home just as Salas was due to preside over a case involving ties between Jeffrey Epstein and Deutsche Bank.
At the time that Robert Maxwell hired Kroll, the brother of then US president and former CIA director George H. W. Bush—Johnathan Bush—was on its corporate advisory board. Soon afterward, Kroll became employed by Bill Clinton in his first presidential campaign and later was hired to manage security for the World Trade Center in New York after the 1993 bombing. In addition, Kroll had been hired to investigate how money had been spirited out of the Philippines by the Marcos family. As previously mentioned, Ghislaine’s friend George Hamilton had played a significant role in that affair.
Furthermore, just weeks before 9/11, Kroll hired John P. O’Neill, with the involvement of Jerome Hauer—also a Kroll employee at the time, who would be one of the few, and possibly the only, high-ranking Kroll employee to die in the attacks. As previously noted, O’Neill was seeking to unravel “Maxwell’s legacy” in New York criminal networks at the time of his death on September 11, 2001. A report from January of that year noted that federal investigators were still trying to determine “how much of her [Ghislaine’s] father’s fortune is buried in the offshore trusts he used so freely for the benefit of his family.”
Kroll was unable to give Robert Maxwell the information he had wanted before Maxwell died under suspicious circumstances on his yacht in November 1991. Though media reports often say that his death was most likely a suicide, many biographers, investigators, and even Maxwell’s own family assert that he was murdered, having hit the end of the line in terms of his usefulness to those who had empowered his legal and illegal activities over the years. Ghislaine herself claims it was a group of “Mossad renegades” who took her father’s life.
Soon after news of Robert Maxwell’s death spread, his wife Betty Maxwell, accompanied by Ghislaine, headed to his place of death—his yacht, then located near the Canary Islands. As mentioned in Part 1, journalist John Jackson, who was present when Ghislaine and Betty boarded the yacht shortly after Robert’s death, claims that it was Ghislaine who “coolly walked into her late father’s office and shredded all incriminating documents on board.” Ghislaine denies the incident, though Jackson has never retracted his claim, which was reported in a 2007 article published in the Daily Mail. If Jackson is to believed, it was Ghislaine—out of all of Robert Maxwell’s children—who was most intimately aware of the incriminating secrets of her father’s financial empire and espionage activities. Betty Maxwell subsequently claimed that Ghislaine had been the child she chose to accompany her because she spoke Spanish and could help more than her other children in communicating with local authorities.
Ghislaine aboard the Lady Ghislaine shortly after her father’s death
Following her father’s death, Ghislaine publicly claimed to know next to nothing of his affairs and to have no money herself, despite it being well known that her father had created numerous trusts in the Lichtenstein tax haven that were meant to fund the Maxwell family for “generations.” A New York detective who interviewed Ghislaine in Manhattan while trying to trace her father’s assets later stated:
She came in dressed in sackcloth and ashes. It was pathetic. She said she had no money. Yet here was this expensive lawyer arguing with us in a room so air conditioned we couldn’t hear what he said. In between claiming she had no money, you couldn’t but help warming to her, she was so solicitous. We hadn’t had any lunch and she was recommending restaurants here and there and where to stay and go shopping, and slipping in from time to time how she never had anything to do with her father’s affairs.
Another investigator said that “It is entirely possible, and we didn’t have the resources to check, that Maxwell could have siphoned off money from some of his 400 companies in America to her. She was living on something.”
In 1992, Ghislaine repeated the claims that she was destitute but promised her family would soon make a comeback. That year, she told Vanity Fair, “I’m surviving—just. But I can’t just die quietly in a corner. . . . I would say we’ll be back. Watch this space.” As I previously reported, it was during this same period that the Maxwell siblings were openly attempting to rebuild their father’s empire and legacy, which potentially included his intelligence activities.
It later emerged that during this period and the years that followed, Ghislaine had shifted from being dependent on her father to being “entirely dependent” on Jeffrey Epstein for her “lavish lifestyle.” Some acquaintances of Ghislaine have since claimed that “she started working for him [Epstein] immediately after her father died.”
Ghislaine and Jeffrey Epstein at a 1991 memorial event for her father at the Plaza Hotel
Ghislaine and Jeffrey Epstein’s public relationship began in 1991 during a tribute dinner at the Plaza Hotel held in Robert Maxwell’s honor, where Epstein sat at the same table with Ghislaine and Betty. According to media reports, this was Ghislaine’s “first step in publicly announcing her deep affection for him [Epstein].” The choice of the Plaza would prove to be ironic given that Ghislaine and Epstein were launching an extensive sexual-blackmail operation that would go on for well over a decade. The hotel had previously been the site of a sexual-blackmail operation involving the infamous lawyer Roy Cohn and his mentor, the liquor magnate Lewis Rosenstiel.
The Plaza Hotel was purchased in 1988, not long after Cohn’s death, by Cohn’s protégé, Donald Trump, who had become close to Jeffrey Epstein beginning in 1987, when the two men, along with Tom Barrack, used to frequent New York nightlife hotspots together. The Plaza subsequently became the site of numerous parties attended by underage girls hoping to become “models.” Both Epstein and Trump, during this period and beyond, were known for their efforts to purchase, control, or have significant access to a variety of modeling agencies. Epstein was known to use the promise of modeling opportunities to either recruit or lure in young victims to his and Maxwell’s sexual-trafficking enterprise. Regarding Epstein, Trump stated in 2002: “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” Years later, Trump claimed to have had a falling out with Epstein over the latter’s behavior at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
In the year that followed his first public appearance with Ghislaine, Epstein was treated by both the press and those close to Ghislaine as her father reincorporated, with various media reports stating and/or quoting their associates comparing Epstein directly to Robert Maxwell. Some of these reports, as early as 1992, also openly discussed the possibility that Epstein, like Robert Maxwell, was working for Israeli intelligence as well as the CIA.
Reports throughout the 1990s would say that Ghislaine’s role in Epstein’s businesses was “nebulous” yet central, and she would later be described as having the role of “consultant.” Her own web of businesses was described “as opaque as her father’s,” and one described her as an “internet operator.” When asked about her work by reporters, she would refuse to confirm the nature of her businesses or even their names. The “internet operator” claim seems to be related to the “substantial interest” she possessed in the tech company founded in the 1990s by her twin sisters, Christine and Isabel, which produced the Magellan search engine. During this same period, Ghislaine and Epstein courted Microsoft executives, including Bill Gates, which led to a close relationship between Microsoft and Magellan and Isabel Maxwell’s subsequent business, CommTouch, which had deep ties to Israel’s national-security and intelligence apparatus.
Ghislaine and Epstein, as most now know, were also operating a sexual-trafficking and sexual-blackmail operation that involved the sexual abuse of minors, who were used to seduce and entrap powerful individuals, particularly Democratic politicians. Furthermore, the pair’s ties to intelligence have subsequently emerged and are alleged, including by eyewitnesses, to have begun in the 1980s with the direct involvement of Robert Maxwell. As noted in this article, Robert Maxwell at the time of his death was attempting to become “king” of New York high society.
Given the context surrounding the circumstances during which the Ghislaine-Epstein sexual-blackmail operation developed and launched, as detailed here, it appears more than plausible that this operation not only benefited certain intelligence agencies but also the organized crime–linked Mega Group and the Maxwell family itself. Ultimately, the activities that Ghislaine undertook alongside Epstein, as well as those of her siblings, fulfilled Robert Maxwell’s reported desire to become “the patriarch of a dynasty that would wield financial and political power on a global scale.” However, like the rise and fall of her father, Ghislaine’s power and influence was not meant to last.
In this light, it appears that the sexual-blackmail activities of these two individuals was an operation seeking to not only influence US policy on behalf of a foreign entity (as well as domestic entities such as the CIA) but to influence powerful individuals for the benefit of the Maxwell family itself as well as the organized crime web in which Robert Maxwell enmeshed his business interests in the latter years of his life.
To continue to claim that Ghislaine Maxwell’s activities were only performed to please Jeffrey Epstein who only sought to financially extort certain individuals for his personal gain is dishonest when faced with the facts of the matter and the context in which their operations took place. It also belittles the experiences of those who survived sexual abuse at the hands of both Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein, as the continued cover-up of their complex dealings means that justice will never be served for their enablers, while the names of those they unduly influenced will never become public. It is a revelation that those in power must prevent the public from understanding at all costs, lest Americans realize that the United States has long been a country ruled by backdoor dealings, illicit intelligence operations, and blackmail.
Whitney Webb has been a professional writer, researcher and journalist since 2016. She has written for several websites and, from 2017 to 2020, was a staff writer and senior investigative reporter for Mint Press News. She currently writes for The Last American Vagabond.
As is often the case with AP’s coverage of news having to do with Israel, there’s a serious omission in its reporting on the Russia-Israel connection even when it involves oil and the United States.
The day after the State of the Union Address, two Interpol fugitives attended the “National Prayer Breakfast” held in Washington DC. The day before that, these fugitives from the law were the guests of honor at an hour-long meeting of the International Relations Committee on Capitol Hill, invited by ranking Democrat Tom Lantos (Calif.)
You would think it would be hot news when wanted men being hunted by European police suddenly pop up in the US particularly on Capitol Hill and at events attended by the US president.
Yet, there was not a single AP story in the US on any of this. 1 Not a single national network television or radio news program even mentioned these facts. In fact, Google and LexisNexis searches four days after these events took place turned up only three newspaper articles on them anywhere in the entire country. 2
Who are these fugitives from the law, wanted by Interpol, who are meeting at the highest levels of the US government? And why didn’t we learn of them?
Therein lies the story. These two men, it turns out, are just the tips of a colossal iceberg. And this iceberg doesn’t just have 90 percent of its mass hidden under water; this iceberg is almost entirely submerged.
They are Mikhail Brudno and Vladimir Dubov, Israeli-Russian partners in the giant Russian oil company Yukos. They, along with a number of their cronies, are wanted by Interpol for allegedly bilking Russian citizens out of billions of dollars. To elude Russian prosecution, these men have taken up residence in Israel. 3
As the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz explains: “In recent years Russian authorities began investigating [Yukos], its managers and major stockholders, many of whom are of Jewish origin. The probes caused several of the managers to flee to Israel, and resulted in Khodorkovski’s [Yukos CEO] arrest and a Kremlin attack on Yukos.”
The fact is that Israel is an important factor in the ongoing, nation-shaking power struggle now going on in Russia. Yet AP virtually never reports this connection. For example, a few months ago in a typical AP story on this power struggle, “Report: Russia again charges Berezovsky,” 4 Moscow AP Bureau Chief Judith Ingram makes no mention anywhere that Berezovsky is an Israeli citizen, or of his many connections to Israel.
Such omissions by AP and large swaths of the American media leave Americans seriously disadvantaged in deciphering what is going on in Russia, and its profound significance for the world.
In order to make sense of this Russian power struggle, and to understand its importance to the rest of us, it is necessary to understand the usually omitted Israeli subtext. When this is understood, the friendship of such pro-Israel Congressional leaders as Rep. Lantos to fugitive Russian oil tycoons begins to make sense.
To explore this background it is often useful to turn to the Israeli press. In July a major Israeli publication, the Jerusalem Post, carried an article headlined: “Boris Berezovsky: Putin’s Russia dangerous for Israel.” Before describing what this contained, let us first go into a little of the background.
The Oligarchs
Boris Berezovsky is one of seven “oligarchs,” as they are known both inside and outside Russia: massively rich, powerful manipulators who through violence, theft and corruption acquired a mammoth percentage (reports range from 70 to 85 percent) of Russia’s resources, from its oil to the auto industry to mass media outlets.
At the same time, the group steadily gained control over much of the country’s political apparatus. Using extraordinary financial resources and insider dealing, the oligarchs handpicked prime ministers and governmental leaders and barely even bothered to do this behind the scenes.
In 1997 Yukos founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky, one of the group and Russia’s sometimes richest man (several of the oligarchs trade the top spot back and forth) told an interviewer before he was arrested and imprisoned by Putin last year:
“If we rank all the fields of man’s activity by profitability, politics will be the most lucrative business. When we see a critical situation in the government, we draw lots in order to pick out a person from our milieu for work in power.” 5
Almost all of these oligarchs, it turns out, have significant ties to Israel. In fact, Berezovsky himself has Israeli citizenship a fact that caused a scandal of Watergate proportions in Russia in 1996 when it was exposed by a Russian newspaper. 6
Do Berezovsky’s dual loyalties really matter? Yes. In the realm of global dominance, Israel’s interests and Russia’s are considerably divergent. It is in Israel’s interests to bring to power a regime in Russia friendly to Israel, rather than the current one under Putin, which Israeli leaders feel is supportive of its enemies. Not long ago, for example, Putin met with Syrian leaders an action highly disturbing to Israel.
Having an Israeli citizen at the highest levels of the Russian government is ideal, from Israel’s point of view. In Berezovsky they had such a man. The Jerusalem Post article mentioned above is revealing. It describes Berezovsky as “the Godfather of the Oligarchs’ and Kingmaker of Russia’s Politics’” and reports Berezovsky’s statement that “Putin’s Russia is dangerous for Israel.” Berezovsky goes on to assert that Putin “supports terror” in the Middle East through Russia’s previous relations with Iraq and current relations with Iran. 7
While Israelis may have been delighted at Berezovsky’s position in Russia, It is not surprising that Russian citizens were somewhat less so. Finding that a powerful leader and member of the Russian Security Council was an Israeli citizen was disconcerting, at best.
As a result of the media uproar over Berezovsky’s Israeli citizenship and other events, the Oligarchs’ connections to Israel are widely known in Russia and elsewhere. In Israel they are covered frequently, often with adulation, including a recent hit Israeli TV series called “The Oligarchs.”
“Some of its episodes,” according to Israeli writer Uri Avnery, “are simply unbelievable or would have been, if they had not come straight from the horses’ mouths: the heroes of the story, who gleefully boast about their despicable exploits. The series was produced by Israeli immigrants from Russia.”
Avnery writes that the oligarchs used “cheating, bribery and murder,” as they “exploited the disintegration of the Soviet system to loot the treasures of the state and to amass plunder amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars. In order to safeguard the perpetuation of their business, they took control of the state. Six out of the seven are Jews.” 8
According to a Washington Post story by David Hoffman, the group bought and controlled Russian governmental officials at the highest levels. After financing Yeltsin’s election in 1996, Hoffman writes: “The tycoons met and decided to insert one of their own into government. They debated who and chose [Vladimir] Potanin, who became deputy prime minister. One reason they chose Potanin was that he is not Jewish, and most of the rest of them are, and feared a backlash against the Jewish bankers.” 9
In Russia, the oligarchs are deeply loathed, considered villains who worked to bleed the country dry; during their reign many Russian citizens saw their life savings disappear overnight. A new term was coined for their dominance, “semibankirshchina” (the rule of the seven bankers), and they were widely known to have wielded small, murderous armies. There are rumors that Berezovsky, subject of the respectful AP article, was even responsible for the gunning down of an American journalist, Forbes Moscow editor Paul Klebnikov.
While no one has been charged with the murder of Klebnikov, who had written a book on Berezovsky, many suspect a Berezovsky connection. As a friend of Klebnikov wrote: “Experienced expatriates in Russia shared an essential rule: Don’t cross these brutal billionaires, ever, or you’re likely to go home in a box.” 10
The Chechnya Connection
There is evidence that Berezovsky’s responsibility for death and tragedy may be vastly greater.
“Berezovsky boasts that he caused the war in Chechnya,” Avnery reports, “in which tens of thousands have been killed and a whole country devastated. He was interested in the mineral resources and a prospective pipeline there. In order to achieve this he put an end to the peace agreement that gave the country some kind of independence. The oligarchs dismissed and destroyed Alexander Lebed, the popular general who engineered the agreement, and the war has been going on since then.
“In the end,” Avnery writes, “there was a reaction: Vladimir Putin, the taciturn and tough ex-KGB operative, assumed power, took control of the media, put one of the oligarchs (Mikhail Khodorkovsky) in prison, caused the others to flee (Berezovsky is in England, Vladimir Gusinsky is in Israel, another, Mikhail Chernoy, is assumed to be hiding here.)”
Yet, apart from the Washington Post, American media report on almost none of this. Instead, US coverage largely portrays Berezovsky and his crowd as American-style entrepreneurs who are being hounded by a Russian government whose actions are, to repeat the media’s commonly used phrase, “politically motivated.”
US news stories, even when they occasionally do hint at questionable practices, tend to use such phrases as “brash young capitalists” to describe the oligarchs. 11 For example, a long series co-produced by FRONTLINE and the New York Times referred to these men as “shrewd businessmen,” and asked “what it’s like to be young, Russian and newly affluent?” 12 Massive violence, dual loyalties, and control of resources are rarely, if ever, part of the picture.
When AP Moscow bureau chief Ingram was asked for this article about Berezovsky’s Israeli citizenship, she claimed to know nothing about it, a curious contention for someone who has been an AP news editor in Moscow since 1999. When Ingram was queried further, she hung up the phone.
An examination of Ingram’s reporting on the Berezovsky story cited above raises serious questions. Though she is located in Moscow, Ingram interviewed only two people for her news story: Berezovsky, who is in London, and Berezovsky associate Alex Goldfarb, in New York. One wonders why she interviewed none of the Russians residing around her.
Similarly, one wonders why not a single AP story has identified Berezovsky’s considerable connection to Israel.
Further, nowhere does Ingram’s article convey the ruthlessness of the oligarchs’ actions, or the significance of their holdings, including control of its media. Unnoted in Ingram’s report is the fact that her subject and fellow oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky have been two of Russia’s most powerful media tycoons.
Before Putin’s crackdown, according to the Washington Post, oligarchs had succeeded in seizing “the reins of Russia’s print and broadcast media, vital to the evolution of the country’s fledgling democracy and growth of its nascent civil society.” Berezovsky crony Gusinsky, who is close friends with Rupert Murdoch and was about the launch a satellite network, fled to Israel when it appeared he would be arrested.“ 13
Somehow, AP’s bureau chief seems to have missed all this.
Does this matter to Americans?
AP is the major news source for the thousands of news outlets around the country who cannot afford to have their own foreign correspondents. When AP chooses not to cover something, its omission is felt throughout the nation. When national news networks and others leave out the same facts, the cover-up is almost total.
Russia, despite its current turmoil, contains enormous power. Its natural resources are gargantuan: it possesses the world’s largest natural gas reserves, the second largest coal reserves, and the eighth largest oil reserves. It is the world’s largest exporter of natural gas, the second largest oil exporter, and the third largest energy consumer.14 Russia’s significance on the world stage now, as in the past, is immense.
Similarly, the United States is currently the most powerful nation on earth. It is therefore essential that its citizens be accurately informed on issues of significance. Israeli citizens, Russian citizens, and citizens of nations throughout the world know the information detailed above. It is critical that American citizens be no less well informed.
For years, the neocons’ push for war against Iraq was largely not covered by the US media. For even longer, the neocons’ close connections to Israel have gone largely unmentioned in mainstream American news reports. As a result, very few Americans know to what degree many of those responsible for the tragic US invasion and occupation of Iraq have been motivated by Israeli concerns.
The omission in coverage of Iraq has been profoundly disastrous, both for the Middle East and for Americans. In fact, it is quite likely that only history will show the true extent of this disaster. It is deeply troubling to see the same kind of omission occurring on Russia.
End Notes
Interestingly, an AP report sent out only on its Worldstream wire (i.e. to Europe; Britain; Scandinavia; Middle East; Africa; India; Asia; England, but not to US papers) contained information on this at the end of the report.
Washington Post: “Prayer Breakfast Includes Russian Fugitives” (overall, the Post has been an exception to the general blackout on this subject); the Seattle Times, which ran the Post story, and the New York Times, in a short story on page 12 on Sunday, three days after the event. Interestingly, the NY Times story was filed from Moscow (not Washington) and quotes a “spokesman” for the two men, Charles Krause, who has worked as a correspondent in Israel for the News Hour with Jim Lehrer. In the Times story Russian attempts to prosecute these men are described as “politically motivated.”
This is a wise move, since Israel is known for often failing to Jewish extradite citizens, no matter what their crime. Even requests for such cooperation by the US, which gives Israel over $10 million per day, sometimes go unheeded by the Israeli government. Private citizens wanted for committing murder in the US, for example, have sometimes not returned for trial.
Associated Press, Sept. 22, 2004
“Tycoons Take the Reins in Russia,” By David Hoffman, Washington Post Foreign Service, Friday, August 28, 1998; Page A01
“Media and Politics in Transition: Three Models,” Post-Soviet Media Law & Policy Newsletter, Issue 35, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Feb. 27, 1997
“Boris Berezovsky: Putin’s Russia dangerous for Israel.’, Bret Stephens, The Jerusalem Post, July 5, 2005
“The Oligarchs”, Uri Avnery, CounterPunch, Aug. 3, 2004
“Tycoons Take the Reins in Russia,” By David Hoffman, Washington Post Foreign Service, Friday, August 28, 1998; Page A01,
“Same Old Ruthless Russia,” by Michael R. Caputo, Washingtonpost.com
Washington Post, Aug 28, 1998
October 2003, Sabrina Tavernise,
“Powerful Few Rule Russian Mass Media,” David Hoffman, Washington Post, March 31, 1997; Page A01
The huge $1.5 trillion US federal spending bill, that’s expected to be signed into law by President Joe Biden today, allocates over $2.6 billion to “Democracy Programs” and requires these programs to combat “the misuse of social media to spread disinformation or incite hate.”
This requirement is buried deep into the 2,741 page bill on page 1,408 and is part of the “Title VII General Provisions” of the “Department of State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Appropriations Act, 2022.”
The bill states: “Democracy programs supported with funds appropriated by this Act… should, as appropriate… include… efforts to combat weaponized technology, including the misuse of social media to spread disinformation or incite hate.”
While this is the main requirement in the bill related to disinformation, there’s also another reference to disinformation on page 1,848 that states:
“Funds appropriated by this title under the heading “Economic Support Fund” may be transferred to, and merged with, funds available under the heading “Diplomatic Programs” for activities related to public engagement, messaging, and countering disinformation.”
The “Economic Support Fund” heading makes $6.47 million available until September 30, 2024 while the “Diplomatic Programs” heading makes $125 million available until September 30, 2024 with the provisions that up to $15 million “may be transferred to, and merged with, funds available under the heading “‘Capital Investment Fund”’ for cybersecurity and related information technology investments” and that the funds “shall be made available, as appropriate, to enhance the capacity of the Department of State to identify the assets of Russian and other oligarchs related to the situation in Ukraine, and to coordinate with the Department of the Treasury in seizing or freezing such assets.”
The way the final text of this massive spending bill was released in the middle of the night, hours before a final vote, has been criticized by numerous US politicians.
The final text of the bill was published just before 3 am Eastern Standard Time (EST) on Wednesday morning and the final vote for the bill in the US House of Representatives was set for 1:30 pm EST on Wednesday, giving representatives less than 11 hours to read the final text before voting.
A day later, the final vote for the bill in the US Senate was held, giving Senators around 24 hours to read the nearly 3,000 pages in the bill.
“Literally in the DARK OF NIGHT, the Democrat controlled Rules Committee met at 1:30 am – 2:30 am and passed the HORRENDOUS $1.5 TRILLION Omnibus bill,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted. “They did NOT tell anyone or announce this debate on the bill until after midnight! We woke up to 2,741 pages and we vote today!”
Senator Rand Paul added: “Do you think there is a single person in the U.S. who believes that Congress is filled with speed readers capable of digesting thousands of pages in a matter of hours? The 2741-page omnibus with a $1.5 trillion price tag that was released in the middle of the night is a perfect example of why Congress needs time to read the bills.”
This isn’t the first time a huge spending bill has been used to push new online rules. In December 2020, a controversial copyright reform that proposed up to 10 years in prison for “unauthorized streaming” was buried 2,540 pages deep in the 5,593 page “Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021.” Despite its huge length, this bill passed both houses of Congress and was signed into law by then-President Donald Trump within six days.
The addition of requirements to fight online disinformation in this federal spending bill is the latest of many examples of the federal government targeting online speech. The Biden White House has admitted that it flags content for Facebook to censor and proposed that If you’re banned for “misinformation” on one platform, you should be banned from ALL platforms. Members of Congress have also threatened to hold Big Tech companies “accountable” if they don’t censor misinformation.
Europe has been shaken by galloping gas prices in recent months, leading to financial and socio-political instability in the Old World.
There are several reasons for this, one of them being the politics of domestic European speculators, who wanted to get rich quick when, as a result of their blatant Russophobic policies, European officials managed to keep Gazprom and its cheap gas out of the EU internal market. As a result, these speculators sell at a markup of 300, 400 or 500 per cent the cheap gas that Gazprom pumped into their storages back in the summer. In doing so, they squeeze their super-profits out of the European consumer. And until they sell these reserves, they will not let Russian gas into Europe.
In addition to European speculators on Russian gas, the United States has become enormously rich in recent months, profiting from the extraordinarily high prices. Meanwhile, in order to distract public opinion from the true situation on the issue, Joe Biden’s administration officials are trying to falsely accuse Moscow of increasing gas prices, while doing nothing to lower those prices themselves, as their fall is absolutely unprofitable for Washington.
And this is confirmed by data from the Russian Federal Customs Service and the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, which clearly show reports on gas exports to Europe by the US and prove that it is the US that has been making more money than Russia on the super-high gas prices in recent months. Thus, the value of natural gas and LNG exported by Russia in January-August 2021 was $33.197 billion, compared with $42.9 billion worth of LNG exported by the US during the same period!
Most US gas supplies to Europe come under spot contracts (at exchange prices, quick purchase and payment and delivery by a certain date) concluded in December and January, when quotations in Europe were hitting record highs. As a result, traders now supplying American gas to Europe are making super profits. In January, they not only benefited from supplying Europe with gas produced in the US, but they also diverted volumes from the Middle Eastern and even Asian routes as a result of lower gas prices in the Asia-Pacific region (APAC).
As for Gazprom, it delivers, fulfilling its contractual obligations mainly under long-term contracts, i.e. at prices significantly lower than those on the stock exchange.
If LNG supplies result in lower gas prices in Europe, that market will automatically become uninteresting to US exporters, and Europeans themselves will have to go back to buying gas from the traditional suppliers. The panic mood in Europe is therefore now being artificially maintained by allegtions that Russia could cut off gas supplies because of the escalating situation around Ukraine. It is remarkable, however, that all the LNG supplies from the US have never managed to seriously depress gas exchange quotations in Europe, while any news of successful negotiations between Russia and the US or European leaders knocks prices down by $100-150.
As we know, the European gas market is the backyard of the global LNG market, dependent on the conditions in the APAC countries, where the market is physically larger. As soon as prices begin to fall in Asia, they also fall in Europe, and vice versa. In 2021, half of US gas exports went to Asia-Pacific and only a quarter to Europe. However, the diversion of LNG flows from the US to Europe could soon result in higher gas prices in the APAC, with US gas carriers heading back to Asia and European prices again breaking records for the benefit of the same European speculators and US traders, and to the misfortune of Europeans who will pay the price for Washington’s gangster gas policy.
Europe, with its substantial gas consumption and dozens of underutilized LNG import terminals, has long been of great interest to US companies, which have spent a total of $60bn on export infrastructure. There has been a real boom in the construction of LNG terminals in Europe too, under the influence of Washington, and they have even been built in Lithuania and Poland. However, no one can deny that LNG is expensive compared to pipeline gas from Russia. This is why, until recently, Europe was very enthusiastic about buying pipeline gas cheaply from Russia and why 75-80% of Europe’s LNG terminal capacity stood empty. In any case, the main criterion for assessing the prospects of US LNG as a competitor to Gazprom in Europe is price.
However, there have been some significant deteriorations in the gas market in recent weeks. Above all, they followed Russia’s receipt in late February of written confirmation of NATO’s and the United States’ refusal to engage in a dialogue with Moscow on security guarantees. This came against a backdrop where the West had previously blatantly refused to reassure Kiev’s rampant neo-Nazi authorities, who came to power in 2014 through a Washington-inspired coup. But for 8 years, at the instigation of Washington and with the tacit support of the West, the Kiev authorities have consistently pursued a policy of genocide in Donbas, where, according to incomplete information, they have killed more than 13,000 Russian-speaking civilians and pursued a policy of Russophobia. In addition, the Kiev authorities have recently intensified their neo-Nazi activities in the country and have made increasing threats of a potential nuclear weapon capability in Ukraine, in the hope of using which Kiev has already begun to develop far-reaching plans to attack Russia.
Under these conditions and in the absence of a proper Western response to the activities of the Kiev authorities, in late February Moscow was forced to launch a special operation in Ukraine to demilitarize and denazify it for reasons of self-preservation. In response, Washington and its Western allies unleashed an information war against Russia and slapped severe sanctions. Brussels, in a bid to please the Russophobic US political establishment, has refused to certify the already built Nord Stream 2, which could have significantly eased the situation on the European gas market. However, other Russian pipelines continue to operate and pump gas to Europe. Moreover, despite the misleading anti-Russian information warfare unleashed by Washington, Russian gas continues to flow through the Ukrainian gas transmission system without interruption, as reported by the Ukrainian transmission system operator itself. Gas supplies to Europe are not just flowing through the Ukrainian pipeline, they have also increased. The Europeans have increased their requests for supply and Gazprom has begun to pump through the Ukrainian pipe all of 109 million cubic meters of gas per day instead of 50 million cubic meters per day, as it was before the Russian special operation in Ukraine began, which is a doubling of supplies.
However, due to the depletion of European underground storage facilities due to winter weather, there is almost no gas left, forcing the EU to switch to current imports, which are “obligingly” offered by the US, which itself unleashed the crisis in Ukraine to, among other things, raise the price of gas in Europe. As for the Europeans, they are so far trying to move Russia’s hydrocarbon supplies out of the sanctions bracket, although individual European politicians, such as Borel, who openly “eat from Washington’s table”, have started talking about imposing additional sanctions against Russia in the gas sector as well, to please White House policy. At the same time, such European officials know full well that Russia is not going to use its gas as a tool against Europe. The EU has no substitute for that, by the way, and many of the world’s gas exporters have already spoken out about it. And the situation in Europe will only get worse for the population if the anti-Russian policy of the current European officials continues, threatening not only the impoverishment of the population, but also the bankruptcy of many European companies and even entire sectors of the economy.
At the same time, as Europe’s anti-Russian sanctions policy continues to escalate, it cannot be ruled out that Russia may eventually, in order to ensure its own security, use hydrocarbon supplies as a retaliatory measure if it considers Western sanctions to be disastrous for the Russian economy. But such actions will only lead to a clear victory for the United States over Europe, a further increase in its dependence on Washington, including on gas, and an even greater enrichment of the United States through its previously planned increase of gas prices in Europe by exacerbating relations with Russia.
The Biden administration made direct payments to nearly all major corporate media outlets to deploy a $1 billion taxpayer-funded outreach campaign designed to push only positive coverage about COVID-19 vaccines and to censor any negative coverage.
Media outlets across the nation failed to disclose the federal government as the source of ads in news reports promoting the shots to their audiences.
According to a Freedom of Information Request filed by The Blaze, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) purchased advertising from major news outlets including ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox News, CNN and MSNBC.
HHS also ran media blitzes in major media publications including The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, New York Post, BuzzFeed News, Newsmax and hundreds of local TV stations and newspapers across the nation.
In addition to paying news outlets to push the vaccines, the federal government bought ads on TV, radio, in print and on social media as part of a “comprehensive media campaign,” HHS documents show.
In March 2021, Facebook announced a social media plan to “help get people vaccinated,” and worked with the Biden administration and U.S. health agencies to suppress what it called “COVID misinformation.”
BuzzFeed News advised everyone age 65 or older, people with health conditions that put them at high risk of severe illness from COVID, healthcare workers and those at high risk of exposure to the virus to get vaccine boosters, in accordance with guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Other publications, including the Los Angeles Times, featured advice from experts on how readers could convince “vaccine-hesitant people” to change their minds.
The Washington Postpresented “the pro-vaccine messages people want to hear.”
Newsmax said COVID vaccines have “been demonstrated to be safe and effective” and “encouraged citizens, especially those at risk, to get immunized.”
Yet, the latest data from the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System shows 1,151,450 reports of adverse events from all age groups following COVID vaccines, including 24,827 deaths since Dec. 14, 2020.
The media rarely covered negative news stories about COVID vaccines, and some have labeled anyone who questions the shots “science denialists” or “conspiracy theorists.”
“These outlets were collectively responsible for publishing countless articles and video segments regarding the vaccine that were nearly uniformly positive about the vaccine in terms of both its efficacy and safety,” The Blaze reported.
Congress appropriates $1 billion tax dollars to ‘strengthen vaccine confidence’
In March 2021, Congress appropriated $1 billion U.S. tax dollars for the Secretary of Health and Human Services to spend on activities to “strengthen vaccine confidence in the United States,” with $3 billion set aside for the CDC to fund “support and outreach efforts” in states through community-based organizations and trusted leaders.
Federal law allows HHS, acting through the CDC and other agencies, to award contracts to public and private entities to “carry out a national, evidence-based campaign to increase awareness and knowledge of the safety and effectiveness of vaccines for the prevention and control of diseases, combat misinformation about vaccines and disseminate scientific and evidence-based vaccine-related information, with the goal of increasing rates of vaccination across all ages … to reduce and eliminate vaccine-preventable diseases.”
HHS did not immediately respond to The Blazewhen asked if the agency used taxpayer dollars to pay for people to be interviewed, or for a PR firm to place experts and celebrities in interviews with news outlets.
The Blaze also reached out to several news organizations whose editorial boards claimed “firewall policies” preventing advertisers from influencing news coverage, but which nevertheless took money from HHS for targeted ads.
“Advertisers pay for space to share their messages, as was the case here, and those ads are clearly labeled as such,” Shani George, vice president of communications for The Washington Post, said in a statement. “The newsroom is completely independent from the advertising department.”
Although The Washington Post may have several departments, they’re all under the authority of the same CEO and key executive team.
A spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Times said their “newsroom operates independently from advertising.”
Former Newsmax anchor confirms network paid to promote only positive coverage
According to Desert News, Emerald Robinson, an independent journalist who previously served as the chief White House correspondent for Newsmax and One America News, said she was contacted by a whistleblower inside Newsmax who confirmed the news organization’s executives agreed to take money from HHS under the Biden administration to push only positive coverage of COVID vaccines.
Robinson was also contacted by top Newsmax executives in 2021, and told to stop any negative coverage of the COVID shots as “it was problematic.”
Robinson said she was warned multiple times by executives and was told by PR experts who worked with Newsmax that medical experts or doctors likely to say negative things about COVID vaccines would not be booked as guests.
Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy in an op-ed applauded Biden for his vaccine efforts.
Ruddy wrote:
“At Newsmax, we have strongly advocated for the public to be vaccinated. The many medical experts who have appeared on our network have been near-unanimous in support of the vaccine. I myself have gotten the Pfizer vaccine. There’s no question in my mind, countless lives would have been saved if the vaccine was available earlier.”
In other examples cited by The Blaze, “fear-based vaccine ads” from HHS featuring “survivor” stories from COVID patients who were hospitalized in intensive care units were covered by CNN and discussed on ABC’s “The View” last October.
HHS ads on YouTube featuring celebrities like Sir Michael Caine and Sir Elton John garnered millions of views.
As The Defender reported in September, a group of people injured by COVID vaccines reached out to the media to tell their stories, only to be told by news agencies they could not cover COVID vaccine injuries.
Kristi Dobbs, 40, was injured by Pfizer’s COVID vaccine. Dobbs spent months pleading with U.S. health agencies to research the neurological injuries she and others are experiencing in hopes of finding a treatment.
Dobbs said she and others who developed neurological injuries after getting a COVID vaccine shared their experiences with a reporter, in hope of raising awareness about their experiences.
Dobbs said she and others knew they needed to tell their stories, without causing “vaccine hesitancy,” to protect others from the same fate — so members of the group started writing and calling anyone who would listen, including reporters, news agencies and members of Congress.
Dobbs said they tried the best they could as simple Americans to reach out to those who would hear their stories. Finally, a reporter from a small media company was willing to do a story. Dobbs and others from the group participated in a 2-hour and 40-minute interview.
“The story never went anywhere,” Dobbs said. She said the reporter told them a “higher up” at Pfizer made a call to the station and pressured staff there into not covering any other stories about vaccine adverse reactions.
As previously reported by The Defender, the same investment firms with financial interests in Pfizer also hold large ownership stakes of corporate media outlets.
In addition, Pfizer has contracts with the federal government, which has spent billions of American tax dollars both buying COVID vaccines and promoting only positive coverage to the public.
Liberty Counsel founder and Chairman Mat Staver told Desert News, “People have been injured and died as a result of the most extensive propaganda campaign in U.S. history and it was paid for with our taxpayer dollars.”
COVID vaccines are not safe or effective, but the American public has been given propaganda by the Biden administration instead of truth from the news media, Staver said.
“The consequence is that many people have needlessly suffered as a result of the censorship and propaganda.”
Megan Redshaw is a freelance reporter for The Defender. She has a background in political science, a law degree and extensive training in natural health.
Del sits down for a one-on-one with the former W.H.O. consultant & research scientist, Tess Lawrie MD, PhD, who was a critical part of the Ivermectin trials over a year ago with overwhelmingly positive conclusions. See data and recorded personal zoom calls that reveal how a key review was attacked from within, keeping the safe, life-saving drug out of the hands of millions of dying Covid patients for more than a year.
There are a lot of words that could characterize “Public Health” in 2022.
Some that come to mind:
-Not credible
-Misleading
-Wrong-focused
-Myopic
The one word that sums up “Public Health” in 2022?
“Untrustworthy”
“Public Health” has suffered from increasing and now severe vaccine myopia since the “prevention” program rose to power in the CDC.
Their one-sided thinking was fairly restricted to pediatrics but now has infected allopathic medicine.
Why are they untrustworthy?
For me, it’s because they willfully ignore evidence that challenges their policy positions. Worse, they work to destroy it (targeting papers for retraction, and peoples’ reputations).
They lie to themselves.
Their disdain for evidence that runs counter to their narrative places them outside of the demarcation zone of Science.
Here’s an example:
In the UK, the triple vaccinated now account for the majority of Covid-19 cases, hospitalizations & deaths (See DailyExpose.uk ).
And they want us to accept school mandates in places like Washington State.
The public trusted public health with their lives and their livelihoods. There are still people in “Public Health” defending lock-downs.
And they want us to trust them and support them in their quest for a “Universal COVID Vaccine” – one that targets “all variants” – an impossible task given the rate of evolution of RNA and how widespread SARS-CoV-2 is across the globe (See: Washington Post).
They are untrustworthy because have turned a blind eye to the full balance of the data.
Here are some synonymous that might help you in your communications today
Dishonest, deceitful, not to be trusted, double-dealing, treacherous, traitorous, two-faced, janus-faced, unfaithful, duplicitous, dishonorable, unprincipled, unscrupulous, corrupt, shady, shifty, underhanded.
See how many of the following characteristics apply to “Public Health” from an article on five characteristics of untrustworthy people from Inc.com(5 Ways to Tell if Someone Is Untrustworthy):
1. They lie to themselves
2. They project behaviors on you that are clearly not ones you are exhibiting
3. They breach confidentiality
4. They show a lack of empathy
5. Their emotional state is volatile, and they have a pattern of inconsistency and fickleness in their decisions
The byline of the Inc.com article reads “Trust is the superglue of relationships, but if you spot these behaviors, it’s time to find a new partner to do business with.”
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in December 2021 granted Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) to two COVID-19 early treatment oral drugs: Pfizer’s Paxlovid and Merck’s molnupiravir.
This was a major milestone, as until then, there were no FDA-endorsed pharmaceutical pill options for people diagnosed with COVID-19.
The standard medical therapy for a newly diagnosed person was: Go home, rest, drink water and go to the hospital if things get dire.
Now, after almost two years, people diagnosed with early stages of COVID-19 can be prescribed a pill!
As background, there are three stipulations a drug must meet in order to obtain EUA from the FDA:
There must be an emergency.
The treatment in consideration must be safe and offer 50% efficacy.
There must not be an alternative available treatment that is safe and effective.
Pfizer and Merck oversaw clinical trials that attempted to prove their products were safe and effective. In the letters of authorization issued to Pfizer and Merck, the FDA outlined what tests were done, what the results were, what some of the limitations and concerns are, etc.
The FDA then generated more detailed advisories to healthcare providers (doctors) for Paxlovid and molnupiravir. These documents give more specifics about use restrictions (e.g., not to children), potentially adverse effects of each drug (e.g., not to be used by pregnant women, etc.), potential conflicts with other drugs (quite a few), etc.
Here are four key points to consider regarding the Paxlovid and molnupiravir data:
The tests were conducted by the pharmaceutical companies themselves (not an unbiased entity).
No long-term testing was done on either of these drugs (the trials lasted a few months).
The effects on patients with many other diseases (e.g., Parkinson’s) were not evaluated and remain unknown.
The reported effectiveness of each drug (hospitalization or death: 88% and 30%) are relative not absolute. (See this explanation about this important point.)
OK, kudos to the FDA for giving consumers some early treatment options for dealing with COVID-19. It’s especially good that they are non-hospital, take-at-home therapies.
However, the question remains: How do these FDA-endorsed drugs compare to other over-the-counter (OTC) and non-patented drugs — especially ivermectin (IVM) and hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) — that are reported to have some early treatment effectiveness against COVID-19?
As a scientist (physicist) I try to be careful in analyzing data, to not only be accurate but to present it objectively and understandably.
In that light, see this table where I juxtapose Paxlovid and molnupiravir to IVM, HCQ and three OTC drugs: curcumin, Vitamin D and zinc. The comparisons made are based on about 20 COVID-19 factors (effectiveness, safety, cost, etc.).
Comparison of Major COVID-19 Early Treatment Oral Pharmaceuticals
Click here to increase the size of the chart and access the hyperlinks.
6 takeaways from comparison of Paxlovid and molnupiravir to IVM, HCQ, and OTCs
Pfizer’s Paxlovid is reported to have very high effectiveness.
HCQ and the curcumin have effectiveness comparable to Paxlovid.
Merck’s molnupiravir has very low effectiveness.
IVM, Vitamin D and Zinc have effectiveness far superior to molnupiravir.
Paxlovid and molnupiravir have more serious side effects than the others.
Paxlovid and molnupiravir cost considerably more than the non-patented options.
Are Pfizer and Merck oral treatment EUAs legal?
Remember, federal law stipulates that an EUA can not be granted unless: “There is no adequate, approved, and available alternative to the product for diagnosing, preventing, or treating the disease or condition.”
The data in this analysis indicate there are “adequate and available alternatives for treating” COVID-19. If the data are accurate, then these EUAs have questionable legality.
Adequate and available alternatives for treating COVID-19 do, in fact, exist — the FDA has no scientific justification for ignoring IVM, HCQ, Vitamin D and zinc.
Further, if these FDA-issued EUAs for Paxlovid and molnupiravir violate federal statutes, a closer examination of the FDA’s COVID-19 vaccine EUAs seems warranted.
If the Pfizer and Merck EUAs are legal, then why haven’t HCQ and IVM also been given EUAs?
Considering the six takeaways listed above — plus the fact, as noted in the above table, that there have been successful HCQ and IVM studies much larger (~10x) than those done for Paxlovid and molnupiravir — exactly why has the FDA not issued EUAs for IVM and HCQ?
The comparative in Table 1 adequately demonstrates there is no justification for the FDA’s refusal to grant EUAs to IVM and HCQ.
If the FDA had granted EUAs for HCQ and IVM a year ago, hundreds of thousands of COVID-19 deaths would have been prevented.
What FDA policy, procedure or precedent took priority over preventing hundreds of thousands of American deaths?
What about monoclonal antibody therapies?
Let us now expand our comparisons to include current monoclonal antibody therapies:
Comparison of Major COVID-19 Early Treatment Pharmaceuticals
Click here to increase the size of the chart and access the hyperlinks.
Note that the four key points identified above, regarding the Paxlovid and molnupiravir data, all apply here.
Some of the main takeaways from this comparison are:
Sotrovimab has the highest effectiveness — but the least amount of data.
HCQ and curcumin have effectiveness comparable to the bamlanivimab+ and casirivimab+ combinations.
The first FDA EUA given to bamlanivimab turned out to be a mistake (as health issues were discovered).
All the monoclonals have more serious side effects than the non-EUA options.
All the monoclonals cost considerably more than the non-EUA options.
All the monoclonals have much less safety data than the non-EUA options.
Again, this comparison shows that IVM, HCQ, curcumin, vitamin D and zinc compare very favorably to all of the early treatments that received EUA from the FDA.
John Droz, Jr. is an independent North Carolina physicist.
This is amazing. BMJ Editor Fiona Godlee knew in August 2020, when the phase 3 vaccine trials were just getting started, that the vaccines:
a) would not be very effective
b) would likely just decrease severity of illness and not prevent infection
c) might become a suboptimal, chronic treatment, and
d) might change the definition of what we consider a vaccine to be
How did she know this? I imagine she knew it from a whistleblower or two or ten. The public certainly didn’t know it. If she knew it Fauci knew it, along with his Corona Task Force of useful idiots.
By Fiona Godlee, editor in chief, BMJ | August 20, 2020
“Few can doubt that we need a vaccine for covid-19 as soon as possible, and great strides are being made, including in our understanding of the immunology of SARS-CoV-2.1 But what damage may result from the race to create one? The World Health Organization has produced guidance on minimum characteristics for a vaccine, including 50% efficacy, temperature stability, potential for rapid scale-up, and proper evaluation against comparators. But, writes Els Torreele, these basic requirements are being rapidly eroded by the prevailing view that anything is better than nothing.2 So instead we are heading for vaccines that reduce severity of illness rather than protect against infection, provide only short lived immunity, and will at best have been trialled by the manufacturer against placebo. As well as damaging public confidence and wasting global resources by distributing a poorly effective vaccine, this could change what we understand a vaccine to be. Instead of long term, effective disease prevention it could become a suboptimal chronic treatment. This would be good for business but bad for global public health.”
Of course, some academics were notably vocal during COVID19, taking the thesis position– lockdown, school closure, masking, temperature checks– or the antithesis– that these interventions don’t work or did more harm than good. But notably most academics were silent.
I understand why laboratory scientists might have stayed out of it, but two groups puzzle me: global health advocates and early life course/ disparities researchers who were quiet.
Lockdowns might ultimately be the single most destabilizing event in the last 25 years globally. Leading to famine and extreme poverty like we have never seen in modern times. Oxfam warned last summer that 11 people die each minute from hunger, outpacing covid.
A generation of kids have lost their future. UNICEF reported in March 2021 that 168 million kids lost a year of school, and many lost more.
India faced some of the longest closures, mortgaging the future of tens of millions of kids, leading to catastrophic educational losses.
School closures in the USA were disproportionately in liberal strongholds and attitudes were temporaly linked to Trump’s advocacy. Closing school for more than a year is the greatest domestic policy failure of the last 25 years. As a lifelong Democrat/ progressive, I know with confidence that my team is responsible for this.
Yet, throughout this pandemic, notice how many global health scholars were totally silent on lockdowns. How many global health researchers said nothing as India sacrificed the future of a generation with school closures? How many US based disparity researchers or early childhood advocates were silent on school closure? I believe most were quiet!
Why?
The answer is simple: they are more committed to their career than they are to the cause. It is a professional liability to take a strong stand on a controversial issue. It can lead to professional repercussions. Being silent is safe. At the same time, the single most consequential decision of one’s lifetime was taking place on topics these people supposedly care about, but they were silent. Instead, they continued their, by perspective, trivial work.
This criticism is particularly relevant for global health reseachers. For years, I have felt that some spend their lives flying to Europe to attend cocktail parties and lavish conferences, praising themselves for their virtue, while the globe stagnates in economic hegemony, and the average person’s health in a low or middle income nation is unchanged. It feels like empty rhetoric, and this was on full display with COVID. Most were totally silent on lockdowns.
Part of the barrier is the Academy, which is meant to promote vibrant thought, has become a monoculture of groupthink. Everyone cares about diversity, but on school closures– a form of structural racism– they were all silent. Everyone cares about the poor, but is happy to put their own child in a school pod, while poor kids get a zoom education. Perhaps some of these people lacked professional support or protection to speak against the (perceived) mob, but others may have merely lacked courage, or as is human nature, chosen selfishness.
At the end of the day, covid policy was dominated by idiots, people lacking a self preservation instinct, and a few courageous souls. Sometimes, however, it was hard to tell who was who. But most of all we missed the voices that should have been active. They were silent. They let me down, but also a few hundred million children. I hope they enjoy their promotions.
In honour of Michael Parenti (1933–2026), who passed away on 24 January 2026 at the age of 92. He spent his life naming what power prefers to leave unnamed.
In 1837, Abraham Lincoln remarked: “These capitalists generally act harmoniously, and in concert, to fleece the people.”
Today, he would be dismissed as a conspiracy theorist.
That dismissal—reflexive, automatic, requiring no engagement with evidence—is not a mark of sophistication. It is a tell. The question worth asking is not whether conspiracies exist (they are a matter of public record and a recognised concept in law) but why acknowledging their existence provokes such reliable hostility. What work does the label “conspiracy theorist” actually do?
The late political scientist Michael Parenti spent decades answering that question. His conclusion was blunt: “’Conspiracy’ refers to something more than just illegal acts. It serves as a dismissive label applied to any acknowledgment of ruling-class power, both its legal and illegal operations.” The term functions not as a descriptor but as a weapon—a thought-terminating cliché that protects the powerful from scrutiny by pathologising those who scrutinise them.
Conspiracy denial, in Parenti’s analysis, is not skepticism. It is the opposite of skepticism. It is credulity toward power dressed up as critical thinking. As he wrote in Dirty Truths: “Just because some people have fantasies of conspiracies does not mean all conspiracies are imaginary.” … continue
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The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
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The bizarre decision to publish a front-page story exploiting his own daughter’s alleged sexual relationship because of an anonymous phone call was especially odd given that Robert Maxwell was known for his tight control over his youngest daughter’s love life. As previously mentioned, he had banned her boyfriends from visiting the family house and had gone to great lengths to prevent her from being seen in public with them. Yet, for whatever reason, Robert Maxwell clearly wanted information linking Ghislaine to the future duke put out into the public sphere. Though it is difficult to know exactly what was behind this odd episode in Ghislaine’s past, the situation suggests that Robert Maxwell saw Ghislaine’s young sexuality as a useful tool in building his influence empire.
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