CIA Analysts Lawyer Up As Brennan, Clapper Ensnared In Expanding Russiagate Probe

By Tyler Durden – Zero Hedge – 10/19/2019
CIA analysts involved in the intelligence assessment of Russia’s activities during the 2016 US election have begun to hire attorneys, as Attorney General William Barr expands his investigation into the origins of the Russia probe, led by US Attorney John Durham.
The prosecutor conducting the review, Connecticut U.S. Attorney John Durham, has expressed his intent to interview a number of current and former intelligence officials involved in examining Russia’s effort to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, including former CIA Director John Brennan and former director of national intelligence James Clapper, Brennan told NBC News. –NBC
NBC learned of the ‘lawyering up’ from three former CIA officials “familiar with the matter,” while two more anonymous leakers claim there’s tension between the Justice Department and the CIA over what classified documents Durham has access to.
With Barr’s approval, Durham has expanded his staff and the timeframe under scrutiny, according to a law enforcement official directly familiar with the matter. And he is now looking into conduct past Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, a Trump administration official said.
One Western intelligence official familiar with Durham’s investigation leaked that Durham has been asking foreign officials questions related to former Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos, who was fed the rumor that Russia had ‘dirt’ on Hillary Clinton by a Maltese professor, Joseph Mifsud. While US media has sought to portray Mifsud as a Russian asset, the self-described member of the Clinton foundation has far stronger ties to the West.
According to congressional testimony given by Papadopoulos last October as well as statements he’s made over Twitter, the whole thing was an FBI setup – as a ‘woman in London, who was the FBI’s legal attache in the UK’ and “had a personal relationship to Bob Mueller after 9/11” was the one who recommended that he meet with Mifsud in Rome.
As the theory goes; Mifsud, a US intelligence asset, feeds Papadopoulos the rumor that Russia has Hillary Clinton’s emails shortly after he announces he’s going to join the Trump campaign. Papadopoulos repeats the email rumor to Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, who alerts Australia’s intelligence community, which notifies the FBI, which then launches operation “Crossfire Hurricane” during which the FBI sent multiple spies (including a ‘honeypot’) to infiltrate the Trump campaign. Notably, former FBI employee Peter Strzok flew to London to meet with Downer the day after Crossfire Hurricane was launched – while Strzok’s boss, Bill Priestap was in London the day before the Downer-Papadopoulos encounter.
And if this is all true, Durham has a lot to untangle – including the Clinton / DNC-funded Steele Dossier.
‘Queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption’: Tulsi Gabbard DRAGS Hillary Clinton after ‘Russian asset’ claim

Image by Gage Skidmore
RT | October 18, 2019
Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) has accused Hillary Clinton of being behind a ‘concerted campaign’ to destroy her reputation and challenged her to stop hiding and enter the 2020 presidential race.
“Great! Thank you Hillary Clinton,” Gabbard tweeted on Friday afternoon. “You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain.”
“From the day I announced my candidacy, there has been a concerted campaign to destroy my reputation. We wondered who was behind it and why. Now we know — it was always you, through your proxies and powerful allies in the corporate media and war machine,” Gabbard added.
Clinton, who has blamed everyone from the FBI to Russia for her 2016 loss to Donald Trump, said in an interview on Thursday that “Russians” were “grooming” someone in the Democrat primary field to run as a third-party candidate. While not calling out Gabbard by name, her spokesperson later told CNN, “if the nesting doll fits,” leaving no room for doubt.
Of all the candidates in the crowded Democrat primary field, Gabbard has been under the heaviest fire from journalists who previously boosted Clinton, accused of being an “Assad apologist” over a fact-finding trip she took to Syria years ago.
“Don’t cowardly hide behind your proxies. Join the race directly,” Gabbard called out Clinton, who has dropped hints that she might run again in 2020 as a rematch for her 2016 humiliation.
During the 2016 campaign, Gabbard resigned as vice-chair of the Democratic National Committee after endorsing Bernie Sanders for the party’s presidential nomination. Clinton beat Sanders out for the nomination largely due to support from the unaccountable “superdelegates,” and it emerged later that her campaign had taken over the DNC entirely – which might help explain Gabbard’s line about “the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long.”
Hillary Clinton Pitches Conspiracy Theory That Tulsi Gabbard, Jill Stein Are Russian Assets
By Tyler Durden – Zero Hedge – 10/18/2019
Hillary Clinton is still peddling election-related conspiracy theories, this time hinting that 2020 Democratic contender Tulsi Gabbard is being ‘groomed’ to split the Democratic vote as a third party candidate, thus handing the election to President Trump.
Speaking with former Obama 2008 campaign manager David Plouffe on his podcast, “Campaign HQ with David Plouffe,” Clinton said – without mentioning Gabbard by name: “I’m not making any predictions but I think they’ve got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate. She’s the favorite of the Russians.”
Of course, that’s “assuming Jill Stein will give it up – because she’s also a Russian asset,” Clinton continued.
Earlier in the interview, Clinton hinted that the Trump 2020 campaign is still in “contact with the Russians,” and that “we have to assume that since it worked for them, why would they quit?”
“Donald Trump is Vladimir Putin’s dream,” Clinton added. “I don’t know what Putin has on him – whether its both personal and financial, I assume it is. But more than that, there’s this bizarre adulation Trump has for dictators.”
Clinton also insisted that Russia “did affect the outcome of the election” in 2016, despite the DOJ concluding otherwise.
Incredible!
The Deep State Goes Shallow: A Reality-TV Coup d’état in Prime Time
By Edward Curtin | February 21, 2019
This article was first published on February 21, 2017, one month after Donald Trump was sworn in as president, more than two-and-a half years ago. What was true then is even truer now, and so I am reprinting it with this brief introduction since I think it describes what is happening in plain sight today. Now that years of Russia-gate accusations have finally fallen apart, those forces intent on driving Trump from office have had to find another pretext. Now it is Ukraine-gate, an issue similar in many ways to Russia-gate in that both were set into motion by the same forces aligned with the Democratic Party and the CIA-led Obama administration. It was the Obama administration who engineered the 2014 right-wing, Neo-Nazi coup in Ukraine as part of its agenda to undermine Russia. A neo-liberal/neo-conservative agenda. This is, or should be, common knowledge. Obama put it in his typically slick way in a 2015 interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakiria, saying that the United States “had brokered a deal to transition power in Ukraine.” This is Orwellian language at its finest, from a warmonger who received the Nobel Prize for Peace while declaring he was in support of war. That the forces that have initiated a new and highly dangerous Cold War, a nuclear confrontation with Russia, demonized Vladimir Putin, and have overthrown the elected leader of a country allied with Russia on its western border, dares from the day he was elected in 2016 to remove its own president in the most obvious ways imaginable seems like bad fiction. But it is fact, and the fact that so many Americans approve of it is even more fantastic. Over the past few years the public has heard even more about the so-called “deep state,” only to see its methods of propaganda become even more perversely cynical in their shallowness. No one needs to support the vile Trump to understand that the United States is undergoing a fundamental shift wherein tens of millions of Americans who say they believe in democracy support the activities of gangsters who operate out in the open with their efforts to oust an elected president. We have crossed the Rubicon and there will be no going back.
“In irony a man annihilates what he posits within one and the same act; he leads us to believe in order not to be believed; he affirms to deny and denies to affirm; he creates a positive object but it has no being other than its nothingness.” – Jean-Paul Sartre
It is well known that the United States is infamous for engineering coups against democratically elected governments worldwide. Voters’ preferences are considered beside the point. Iran and Mosaddegh in 1953, Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, Indonesia and Sukarno in 1965-7, Allende in Chile in 1973, to name a few from the relatively distant past. Recently the Obama administration worked their handiwork in Honduras and Ukraine. It would not be hyperbolic to say that overthrowing democratic governments is as American as apple pie. It’s our “democratic” tradition – like waging war.
What is less well known is that elements within the U.S. ruling power elites have also overthrown democratically elected governments in the United States. One U.S. president, John F. Kennedy, was assassinated because he had turned toward peace and opposed the forces of war within his own government. He is the lone example of a president who therefore was opposed by all the forces of imperial conquest within the ruling elites.
Others, despite their backing for the elite deep state’s imperial wars, were taken out for various reasons by competing factions within the shadow government. Nixon waged the war against Vietnam for so long on behalf of the military-industrial complex, but he was still taken down by the CIA, contrary to popular mythology about Watergate. Jimmy Carter was front man for the Tri-Lateral Commission’s deep-state faction, but was removed by the group represented by George H. Bush, William Casey, and Reagan through their traitorous actions involving the Iran hostages. The emcee for the neo-liberal agenda, Bill Clinton, was rendered politically impotent via the Lewinsky affair, a matter never fully investigated by any media.
Obama, CIA groomed, was smoothly moved into power by the faction that felt Bush needed to be succeeded by a slick smiling assassin who symbolized “diversity,” could speak well, and played hoops. Hit them with the right hand; hit them with the left. Same coin: Take your pick – heads or tails. Hillary Clinton was expected to complete the trinity.
But surprises happen, and now we have Trump, who is suffering the same fate – albeit at an exponentially faster rate – as his predecessors that failed to follow the complete script. The day after his surprise election, the interlocking circles of power that run the show in sun and shadows – what C. Wright Mills long ago termed the Power Elite – met to overthrow him, or at least to render him more controllable. These efforts, run out of interconnected power centers, including the liberal corporate legal boardrooms that were the backers of Obama and Hillary Clinton, had no compunction in planning the overthrow of a legally elected president. Soon they were joined by their conservative conspirators in doing the necessary work of “democracy” – making certain that only one of their hand-picked and anointed henchmen was at the helm of state. Of course, the intelligence agencies coordinated their efforts and their media scribes wrote the cover stories. The pink Pussyhats took to the streets. The deep state was working overtime.
Trump, probably never having expected to win and as shocked as most people when he did, made some crucial mistakes before the election and before taking office. Some of those mistakes have continued since his inauguration. Not his derogatory remarks about minorities, immigrants, or women. Not his promise to cut corporate taxes, support energy companies, oppose strict environmental standards. Not his slogan to “make America great again.” Not his promise to build a “wall” along the Mexican border and make Mexico pay for it. Not his vow to deport immigrants. Not his anti-Muslim pledges. Not his insistence that NATO countries contribute more to NATO’s “defense” of their own countries. Not even his crude rantings and Tweets and his hypersensitive defensiveness. Not his reality-TV celebrity status, his eponymous golden tower and palatial hotels and sundry real estate holdings. Not his orange hair and often comical and disturbing demeanor, accentuated by his off the cuff speaking style. Surely not his massive wealth.
While much of this was viewed with dismay, it was generally acceptable to the power elites who transcend party lines and run the country. Offensive to hysterical liberal Democrats and traditional Republicans, all this about Trump could be tolerated, if only he would cooperate on the key issue.
Trump’s fatal mistake was saying that he wanted to get along with Russia, that Putin was a good leader, and that he wanted to end the war against Syria and pull the U.S. back from foreign wars. This was verboten. And when he said nuclear war was absurd and would only result in nuclear conflagration, he had crossed the Rubicon. That sealed his fate. Misogyny, racism, support for Republican conservative positions on a host of issues – all fine. Opposing foreign wars, especially with Russia – not fine.
Now we have a reality-TV president and a reality-TV coup d’etat in prime time. Hidden in plain sight, the deep-state has gone shallow. What was once covert is now overt. Once it was necessary to blame a coup on a secretive “crazy lone assassin,” Lee Harvey Oswald. But in this “post-modern” society of the spectacle, the manifest is latent; the obvious, non-obvious; what you see you don’t see. Everyone knows those reality-TV shows aren’t real, right? It may seem like it is a coup against Trump in plain sight, but these shows are tricky, aren’t they? He’s the TV guy. He runs the show. He’s the sorcerer’s apprentice. He wants you to believe in the illusion of the obvious. He’s the master media manipulator. You see it but don’t believe it because you are so astute, while he is so blatant. He’s brought it upon himself. He’s bringing himself down. Everyone who knows, knows that.
I am reminded of being in a movie theatre in 1998, watching The Truman Show, about a guy who slowly “discovers” that he has been living in the bubble of a television show his whole life. At the end of the film he makes his “escape” through a door in the constructed dome that is the studio set. The liberal audience in a very liberal town stood up and applauded Truman’s dash to freedom. I was startled since I had never before heard an audience applaud in a movie theatre – and a standing ovation at that. I wondered what they were applauding. I quickly realized they were applauding themselves, their knowingness, their insider astuteness that Truman had finally caught on to what they already thought they knew. Now he would be free like they were. They couldn’t be taken in; now he couldn’t. Except, of course, they were applauding an illusion, a film about being trapped in a reality-TV world, a world in which they stood in that theatre – their world, their frame. Frames within frames. Truman escapes from one fake frame into another – the movie. The joke was on them. The film had done its magic as its obvious content concealed its deeper truth: the spectator and the spectacle were wed. McLuhan was here right: the medium was the message.
This is what George Trow in 1980 called “the context of no context.” Candor as concealment, truth as lies, knowingness as stupidity. Making reality unreal in the service of an agenda that is so obvious it isn’t, even as the cognoscenti applaud themselves for being so smart and in the know.
The more we hear about “the deep state” and begin to grasp its definition, the more we will have descended down the rabbit hole. Soon this “deep state” will be offering courses on what it is, how it operates, and why it must stay hidden while it “exposes” itself.
Right-wing pundit Bill Krystal tweets: “Obviously [I] prefer normal democratic and constitutional politics. But if it comes to it, [I] prefer the deep state to Trump state.”
Liberal CIA critic and JFK assassination researcher, Jefferson Morley, after defining the deep state, writes, “With a docile Republican majority in Congress and a demoralized Democratic Party in opposition, the leaders of the Deep State are the most – perhaps the only – credible check in Washington on what Senator Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) calls Trump’s “wrecking ball presidency.”
These are men who ostensibly share different ideologies, yet agree, and state it publically, that the “deep state” should take out Trump. Both believe, without evidence, that the Russians intervened to try to get Trump elected. Therefore, both no doubt feel justified in openly espousing a coup d’etat. They match Trump’s blatancy with their own. Nothing deep about this.
Liberals and conservatives are now publically allied in demonizing Putin and Russia, and supporting a very dangerous military confrontation initiated by Obama and championed by the defeated Hillary Clinton. In the past these opposed political factions accepted that they would rotate their titular leaders into and out of the White House, and whenever the need arose to depose one or the other, that business would be left to deep state forces to effect in secret and everyone would play dumb.
Now the game has changed. It’s all “obvious.” The deep state has seemingly gone shallow. Its supporters say so. All the smart people can see what’s happening. Even when what’s happening isn’t really happening.
“Only the shallow know themselves,” said Oscar Wilde.
Trump-Zelensky-Ukraine: What is really going on here?
By Tony Kevin | OffGuardian | October 2, 2019
I have over several days reflected on the official White House record of the Trump-Zelensky conversation on Ukraine-US relations on 25 July 2019, a conversation held soon after Zelensky’s confirmed election victory, and declassified by Trump’s presidential order of 24 September 2019.
I have also been reflecting on the more recent Democratic Party decision to explore possibilities for impeachment of Trump, a decision fortified by the so-called ‘CIA whistleblower’ and his/her rather unimpressive revelations.
Here is my hypothesis of what may be going on here. As always, it is a complex mixture of domestic US politics, and Trump’s and Zelensky’s foreign policy goals. And a footnote follows on Downer.
Let’s start with the foreign policy goals. Both Trump and Zelensky are operating in highly constrained and threatening foreign policy environments at home. At the time of their phone call, Trump still had the warmonger Bolton to deal with inside the house: and even now he is still under the watchful scrutiny of the Russophobe imperial state figure of his Secretary of State Pompeo, closely though undeclaredly linked to the Washington imperial party on Ukraine-Russia as on other East-West issues.
Zelensky is similarly constrained and threatened in Kiev by the anti-Russian fanaticism that has been indoctrinated in large sections of the Ukrainian population by decades of nationalist, often neo-Nazi, Russophobe propaganda.
It is a tribute to the instinctive good sense of the Ukrainian electorate that Zelensky was able to defeat in the polls the discredited NATO stooge Poroshenko so comprehensively and decisively. The maturity of this vote gives me renewed hope for Ukraine. But there is a long way to go still towards political normalisation and economic recovery there.
Zelensky is smart enough to see that his country must achieve a normalisation of relations with Russia, but knows that he cannot yet say this openly. Putin wants this also, very much. But both men know it will take a very long time after the accumulated bitter grievances on both sides over recent decades, and especially since the lethal and destructive civil war on Eastern Ukraine that was begun by Poroshenko in April 2014 – no doubt on American advice.
This war has had terrible human consequences: loss of life, wounded and disabled casualties, destroyed communities, massive forced refugee outflows. Neither side can get over this easily or quickly.
The reciprocal prisoner release on 7 September was an essential symbolic action. Putin’s release of the navy crews who took part in the provocative and foolish Ukrainian raid on the Kerch Strait bridge a year ago was a key part of building Ukrainian confidence and trust in Zelensky’s leadership.
Russophobes in the West are in consternation at new green shoots of possible hope for progress towards Kiev-Moscow normalisation under the Normandy diplomacy format.
They are desperate to derail this hope, by proposing impossible conditions for normalisation: in particular that any self-determination elections for Donbass (while remaining within sovereign Ukraine) could only be held under an ‘internationally supervised’ election and with ‘international peacekeepers’ in charge.
See for example this recent piece by a European analyst, Gustav Gressel. East Ukrainians rightly see such a formula as a sure recipe for US infiltration and black regime change operations in Donbass. So it will not happen.
As I interpret the Trump-Zelensky conversation, both leaders were cautiously but in a friendly way exploring the boundaries of what might be possible for each of them as presidents to revisit the troubled history of the past few years. I see nothing dishonourable or intimidating in this conversation. Trump critics are reading into it only what they want to read.
Here I turn to the US domestic politics aspect.
Trump is still bitterly opposed by the US imperial state represented by people like Biden, Clinton, Bolton and McFaul (and increasingly, I suspect, by Obama), but also the FBI-CIA national security dissident faction represented by people like Brennan, Comey and Clapper. These people have learned nothing from the embarrassing failure of the Mueller investigation to prove the false Russiagate allegations.
They are keen still to bring Trump down by whatever possible means.
They see the threat to the credibility of their cause if Trump and Zelensky should together succeed in finding evidence of Ukrainian underpinnings of the 2016-17 Russiagate conspiracy against Trump. They are desperate to have a last bash at Trump before he might finally expose any such improprieties, through evidence from Ukraine (or, for that matter, Australia – see below).
They were powerful enough in the Democratic Party to finally overcome the experienced Nancy Pelosi’s prudent and well-founded resistance to their plans. She knows that this impeachment process could destroy any Democratic Party hopes for power next year.
But these fanatics are ready to go for broke, in their rage and despair against Trump. The ‘CIA whistleblower’, whoever he or she may be, is their last desperate throw.
The pathetic, compromised figure of Joe Biden, with his damning Ukrainian nationalist connections, is their unlikely standard-bearer. Elizabeth Warren is a possible backstop.
For these folk, either Sanders or Gabbard would be a disaster as a candidate – because neither shares the imperial agenda, and both are morally strong enough to resist it.
Nancy Pelosi and Tulsi Gabbard know the realities. I suspect Bernie Sanders does too, but is awaiting his moment to speak out on this.
The US liberal print media led by the New York Times and Washington Post, and more sympathetic networks like MSNBC and CNN, are trying to keep the impeachment fire alive. Other networks like FoxNews are standing back from it more sceptically.
I predict – analytically – that Trump will survive this latest impeachment wave and come out even stronger for the 2020 election as a result. His indignant base will be energised to vote in strategically important numbers sufficient to regain for him the US presidency for four more years.
This is good news for prospects for peace between Ukraine and Russia, however problematical it may be in other areas of the world diplomatic arena (and I am no supporter of Trump).
But I do not expect early miracles in Ukraine, rather a slow normalisation and contact-building process between these two closely related nations.
* * *
And a late footnote on Trump, Morrison and Downer: with exquisite timing, Trump has now put the acid on Morrison to give his Attorney-General Barr access to Australian intelligence files on Downer’s alleged attempt to collect intelligence from, and possibly incriminate, George Papadopoulos in their alleged wine rooms encounter in London, while Downer was still Australian High Commissioner.
It would seem, according to the allegations, that Downer was trying to collect intelligence to support the Russiagate allegations against Trump.
Morrison is now between a rock and a hard place. He cannot reject Trump’s request outright. (As Australian Labor figures are thoughtlessly urging him to do). But nor can he pursue Trump’s request enthusiastically enough to expose any alleged anti-Trump secret activities of Australian intelligence agencies, who were under pressure at the time from visiting figures in the US FBI and intelligence world – Comey, Clapper and Brennan – to help them build the Russiagate case against Trump in the first year of his presidency.
A Five-Eyes operational dilemma indeed, that will test Morrison’s loyalties.
The Biden Affair in the Ukraine

By Israel Shamir • Unz Review • September 30, 2019
The Borderlands of the Ukraine have been a decisive battlefield for centuries. Here Stockholm, Berlin and Moscow vied for dominance. Karl XII had lost here to Peter the Great; Stalin defeated Hitler; now the Clintonites are likely to suffer in the Ukraine their ultimate defeat. The Democrats had made their biggest political mistake of the century in attacking Trump for the Biden affair — that is, if the Americans retain any common sense.
Vice-President Biden extorted millions of dollars in personal bribes from the vulnerable Ukrainian client state. When this sordid affair came under investigation, he blackmailed Ukrainians, using his position and American taxpayer money to force the sovereign state to fire its Attorney General for investigating the bribes.
Instead of covering their face in shame and dismissing Biden as a potential party candidate in the 2020 race, the Dems led by the superannuated Mrs Pelosi decided to impeach the President for uncovering this rogue. In the well-remembered flick Dirty Harry the lawyers tried to save a criminal by attacking the policeman who didn’t observe the niceties of a Miranda warning. This was the model for the Dems in their impeachment attempt.
Biden’s criminal extortion wasn’t a secret. He boasted of this racket at a public occasion. He famously admitted that:
I said, I’m telling you [the Ukrainian leaders], you’re not getting the billion dollars. I said, you’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. (Laughter.) He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.
The Ukrainians put in place someone who was solid at the time, so solid that he terminated the investigation of Burisma oil company. This company was the vessel to transfer bribes to VP Biden, via his son Hunter Biden. John Solomon of The Hill wrote:
“U.S. banking records show Hunter Biden’s American-based firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC, received regular transfers into one of its accounts — usually more than $166,000 a month — from Burisma from spring 2014 through fall 2015, during a period when Vice President Biden was the main U.S. official dealing with Ukraine and its tense relations with Russia.”
The fired prosecutor Mr Viktor Shokin said that Biden fils had been under investigation. After he was dismissed due to Biden père interference, the money continued to pour out of poor Ukrainian pockets to well-stuffed Biden coffers. My Kiev acquaintances had a memory of a good-for-nothing young man, keen on coke and broads, who by himself would never get such a salary.
You would ask, why Biden admitted to the crime? He considered himself untouchable like Mrs Clinton and other people of her circle. Mischievous President Trump decided to prosecute Biden for bribery and extortion, as if he were an ordinary mortal. This was a direct threat to the Clintonites (let us use this nickname for the power variously described as Democrats, Liberals, Internationals, financiers, Masters of Discourse or Deep State). This challenge caused them to abandon caution and to start a furious pre-emptive campaign against cocky Trump.
Their accusation is outright ridiculous: they claim Trump’s intention to bring Corrupt Joe to justice was criminal per se, as Biden was a likely contender for the Dem nomination. As it happens, the US Constitution didn’t find it fit to provide likely contenders with full immunity for past and future crime prosecutions. It’s just the Clintonites were used to be above the law. Indeed, for three years President Trump avoided to touch them. Crimes of Mrs Clinton were well known, from the simple affair of the email server to the Libya murders.
It was expected victorious Trump would unleash the law against the defeated dowager for Mrs. Clinton’s role in the Obama administration’s decision to allow the Russian nuclear agency to buy a uranium mining company. Conservatives have long pointed to donations to the Clinton family foundation by people associated with the company, Uranium One, as proof of corruption, reported the New York Times. The Clintonites saved the old lady’s skin by starting the Russiagate hoax. In 2016 election debate Trump told Clinton that, if he was in charge of the nation’s laws, “you’d be in jail”. But a year later he was in charge, and she wasn’t in jail, not even charged. The ruse of Russiagate worked wonders: the President accused of collusion with Russia did not dare to charge his adversary with this very offence.
Now the Clintonites decided to repeat their feat and began impeachment procedure hoping it will keep Trump busy and away from uncovering the Ukrainian Hell’s Kitchen.
What actually had happened in the Ukraine? In 2014, Clintonites had managed the regime change in this former Soviet republic. They removed the legitimate president by using the full spectre of illegal operations. The Ukraine became a Clintonite colony, and Joe Biden their viceroy in the Ukraine. Biden’s involvement in the coup d’état was his biggest crime, but nobody speaks of that, noticed Joe Lauria. They had turned Ukraine against Russia and instigated the civil war in the East of the poor country, despite strong efforts of president Putin to keep Russia out of Ukrainian turmoil. But they also gave a thought to personal profiteering, like they did in Russia in 1990.
Joe Biden had been treated royally in Kiev. He was asked to chair government meetings and proudly sat on the Presidential seat. The Ukrainians are not famous for their subtlety. Nice people, but rather simple ones, even by East European measure. They became involved in 2016 election campaign on the Clintonite side. There is no doubt VP Biden was the man who directed this “foreign involvement in the US elections”. The obliging Ukrainians delivered to him the dirt on Paul Manafort, and Manafort went to jail.
The Ukraine is the second home for CrowdStrike, the cyber-security company that was instrumental in accusing Russia of meddling. Its founder and head, a Russian Jew and American citizen Dmitry Alperovich is a pathological Russia hater on the model of Masha Gessen and Max Boot. People in Kiev say he had built the case against Russia on the strength of a single server allegedly used for hacking the DNC. The server is located in the Ukraine, not in Russia. President Trump asked for its whereabouts in his conversation with the Ukrainian President Mr Zelensky.
The subject of the server makes many people in the Clintonite camp extremely nervous. They already marked it with “conspiracy” marker, meaning you may not touch it. In another “conspiracy debunking” item they created a straw man, saying “the notion that there is some missing “server,” and that the server might exist somewhere—like in Ukraine—has no basis in reality. The DNC’s network consisted of many servers and computers”. However, the server Trump asked about is not the DNC server, but the server allegedly used to hack DNC server. It had left some Russian-language traces, and it was presented as a proof of Russian involvement. But Alperovich’s hackers in the Ukraine also use Russian as their working language, and this allowed the Russia-hating Jew an opportunity to create the whole chain of “proofs” of Russian hackers’ activity with fancy names. Recovery of the server would put paid to the whole myth of Russian hacking, and would make the Clintonite case untenable.
Alperovich, obsessed with his hatred, could cook the case of Russian meddling, but it had to be ordered and utilized by somebody up the feeding chain, most probably Joe Biden. And now Joe Biden, the real criminal, who took bribes and blackmailed the friendly state officials, who orchestrated foreign involvement in the US elections, went on to become the leading contender for Dem party.
The Dems claimed Trump threatened to withdraw funds from the Ukraine if they won’t cooperate with the US enquiry. This claim had been debunked after the full transcript of two Presidents’ chat had been published. But even if it were sterling truth, it would be business as usual for the US. You probably remember the threats of cutting aid that were issued by the US representative in the UN in order to force sovereign states to vote for Israel. The execrable Nicky Haley said, ‘The US will be taking names’, and Donald Trump added his own threats to cut aid.
How could they find fault in Trump allegedly threatening to cut aid to Ukraine if they think Biden was perfectly all right for doing exactly that? But these guys aren’t playing cricket.
The forthcoming Presidential race is becoming a global affair, it seems. In so many countries the US influence had been delivered by agents of Clintonite clan, and all of them are tempted to do what the Clintonites ask, that is to help them to undermine President Trump. In the Ukraine, the struggle of Clintonites and Trumpers is far from over. President Zelensky promised President Trump to help him; but the oligarchs of the Ukraine are in Clintonite camp.
All but one: Igor (Benny) Kolomoysky, a maverick Jewish oligarch and a friend of the President, is an enemy of Clintonites. He also stands against IMF, International Monetary Fund, the powerful bankers’ body that issued many loans to the Ukraine. Just this year, Kiev has to pay six billion dollars to the IMF to remain solvent, and IMF refused to refinance it. The loans were mainly stolen by the gang of the former President, Mr Poroshenko. People in Kiev say that about 1.7 billion dollars of the latest loan had been pocketed by the American supporters of Poroshenko, meaning Joe Biden and his ilk. Now Mr Kolomoysky suggests the new Ukrainian president may default on IMF loans.
Kolomoysky is also the only oligarch who is not in bed with the liberals. The balance of power in the Ukraine is not in favour of Trumpers. The Ukrainians like to back winners; once they made a mistake supporting Mrs Clinton, as they were sure she would win. Perhaps they will make this mistake again. It would depend on the actual Dem contender. Joe Biden had cooked his goose by taking too many bribes in the Ukraine, but another contender may have a better chance, the Ukrainians think. Mrs Warren, perhaps?
They even fiddle with the idea of Mrs Hillary Clinton running again and winning this time. The Ukrainian oligarchs, and first of all Mr Victor Pinchuk, a Jewish billionaire from Dnepro city, No. 1 among the rich Ukrainians, would do anything for her. He contributed many millions to her fund; he finances the Atlantic Council, the Clintonite think-tank, fighting against Russia and Euro-sceptics. He is ‘the wealthy businessman’ Trump referred to in his talk with Mr Zelensky. Judging by Trump’s interest in the Ukrainian server, the President is aware that the old lady is still able to do some mischief, and his promise to take her to jail is still unfulfilled.
It is possible in the presidential race 2020, the Dems will use drafting technique, as the long-distance runners (or bikers, or cross-country skiers) do. The first leading contender (in our case, Biden) would get the flak, get exhausted, and in the last moment he would withdraw from the race yielding the nomination to his well-rested comrade, be it Warren or Clinton or whoever. Bearing that in mind, Trumpers could keep some of the ammo they have on Biden (and there is a lot to find in the Ukraine) until (or rather if) he gets the nomination.
Israel Shamir can be reached at adam@israelshamir.net
Who Killed Jeffrey Epstein?
By Helen Buyniski | Helen of desTroy | August 14, 2019
Infamous pedophile and likely intelligence asset Jeffrey Epstein was reportedly found dead in his jail cell this past weekend. An autopsy has allegedly been done, but its results are “pending,” leaving the curious with only the initial reports claiming he hanged himself and was pronounced dead of cardiac arrest in the hospital shortly thereafter. The 72 hours following his death have done little to clear up the matter of what actually occurred in Epstein’s cell on Saturday morning, though law enforcement sources on Monday told the New York Post he had hung himself with a bedsheet from the bunkbed frame in his cell – no mean feat for a six-foot, 200-pound man supposedly being checked on by guards twice an hour, and a physical impossibility owing to the paper-thin sheets, according to a former inmate of that prison.
What we do know is that he was officially alone in his cell when he died, having been taken off suicide watch at his lawyers’ urging less than a week after he was found unconscious with marks on his neck last month. Epstein reportedly claimed someone tried to kill him during that incident, though others speculated he had “choked” himself in order to convince a judge to allow him bail or secure a transfer to a nicer facility. Did “someone” come back to finish the job, merely paying the guards to look the other way? An assassin would have had to spread his money around handsomely – like most areas of Manhattan, the Metropolitan Correctional Center where Epstein was confined is heavily surveilled – but that’s not difficult for the caliber of person who had reasons to want Epstein dead. So who killed him?

The convicted sex offender had blackmail material on dozens if not hundreds of powerful people. Epstein’s homes and aircraft were monitored with cameras and microphones, and his private island was completely wired for video, according to a friend of his alleged procuress, Ghislaine Maxwell. Safes found on his property contained piles of video discs marked young (name of girl) + (name of VIP) – alongside the diamonds, piles of cash and Saudi passport. Virginia Roberts Giuffre, one of his victims, says she was “debriefed” after sex sessions with Epstein’s famous friends, supplying him with the intimate details of their encounters in order to potentially weaponize the information. Even New York Times columnist James Stewart reports Epstein boasted to him about the trove of “potentially damaging or embarrassing” information he had on the “supposed sexual proclivities and recreational drug use” of the rich and famous. Epstein had mountains of dirt on presidents, princes, prime minsters, and lesser politicians. Any one of these (and probably more than one of these) could have taken out a contract on him, concerned that he might give away their little secret. If Epstein was not an intelligence asset, with connections high up in the Israeli and US governments, he would have been disposed of long ago, but it’s possible that one of the reasons he was not “suicided” earlier is because those who did want him dead had clashed with another faction concerned he had a “dead man’s switch” that would release even more incriminating material to the press.

Comparisons to the JFK assassination are apt. While Epstein was even more loathed by the American public than Kennedy was beloved, he had as many powerful enemies, and those speculating about his murder are already being smeared as irresponsible conspiracy theorists for demanding answers on the year’s most unlikely “suicide.” When the forces of the media establishment are so quickly marshaled against any attempts at investigating a full-of-holes “official story,” even declaring that such malignant conspiracy-mongering “hurts kids” (Epstein’s own child-trafficking apparently pales in comparison), it’s safe to assume that official story is a pack of lies. So without further ado, let the (responsible, well-sourced) speculation begin. Coincidence theorists need not apply.
SUSPECTS
As soon as Epstein’s death was announced, the hashtag #ClintonBodyCount started trending on Twitter along with #Arkancide and other names for the phenomenon that has seen dozens of Clinton enemies, witnesses, and other liabilities die under mysterious circumstances since the early days of the former president’s political career. As a frequent flyer on the Lolita Express (26 times, according to flight logs, at least five of those without his Secret Service retinue), Bill Clinton had good reason to be concerned about Epstein’s continued existence. Certainly, the couple were an early favorite for Epstein’s killer – even Donald Trump retweeted a Clinton Body Count meme.
However, Epstein is currently under investigation for sex trafficking. In court documents unsealed earlier this week from Giuffre’s lawsuit against alleged madam Ghislaine Maxwell, Giuffre testifies that Clinton was not involved in the actual trafficking of girls – though there seems to be little doubt he enjoyed the fruits of Epstein’s evil deeds. Epstein even had a hand in the founding of the Clinton Global Initiative, according to his lawyers. That Clinton has been accused of rape by too many women to count and is known for being unable to keep it in his pants is not exactly a secret, in Washington or anywhere else, but he is unlikely to be placed at legal risk by the current Epstein probe. Unless Epstein had dirt on Hillary as well – who is rumored to be plotting a move to insinuate herself back into national politics, most likely through her daughter – the family accomplishes little by icing Epstein except calling more attention to the #ClintonBodyCount. One guerrilla commentator even chalked “XOXO Hillary + Bill” on the sidewalk outside Epstein’s New York home.

The FBI immediately declared a probe into the suspicious circumstances surrounding Epstein’s death. Regardless of whether this makes them dangerous domestic extremists by their own reasoning – since any foul play would have had to be accomplished through conspiring with the guards to sneak into the jail and do away with the pedophile, and the FBI has unilaterally declared ‘conspiracy theorists’ to be dangerous extremists in need of heavy surveillance – the FBI’s interest does not rule out a US intelligence role in his murder. As 9/11 proved, the government’s right hand rarely knows what the left is doing even within a single agency, let alone where rival agencies are concerned. And Attorney General William Barr, the former CIA general counsel who specialized in helping intelligence assets caught with their hands in the cookie jar get off scot-free, has already made it clear he is treating the death as a terrible miscarriage of justice by the prison, one which might even prove financially remunerative for Epstein’s relatives (he has a brother).
When former Florida prosecutor Alex Acosta was asked why he OK’d the appalling 2007 non-prosecution agreement with Epstein’s lawyers which saw the wealthy sex fiend spend just 13 months on work-release in a Palm Beach jail after pleading guilty to a lesser charge of soliciting underage prostitutes despite a 53-page federal indictment including 36 alleged victims hanging over his head, Acosta told the Trump transition team he was ordered to leave Epstein alone because “he belonged to intelligence.” That was sufficient reason for the Trump team to give him the green light for appointment as Secretary of Labor. While Epstein provided information to the FBI in 2008, according to their own documentation, individuals involved with the case who spoke to the Palm Beach Post don’t recall any cooperation.
“The Palm Beach State Attorney’s Office was willing to let Epstein walk free. No jail time. Nothing,” Acosta claimed by way of explanation during a press conference last month after he was forced to resign as Labor Secretary for his (mis)handling of the 2007 case. He insisted the sweetheart deal the wealthy pedophile’s lawyers crafted was the lesser of two evils – that a slap on the wrist was better than nothing. And Palm Beach police told the Miami Herald they were hounded, harassed, and otherwise pressured in the service of getting Epstein’s case downgraded to a misdemeanor during the original 2007 investigation, with State Attorney Barry Krischer ultimately ignoring their recommendation to prosecute Epstein on high level child sex charges.
In the days preceding Epstein’s death, Florida governor Ron DeSantis ordered the state to take over a probe into Epstein’s non-prosecution deal and the terms of his work release, an investigation that would presumably lead to the Palm Beach State Attorney’s office, which was conspicuously handed to Fort Pierce State Attorney Bruce Colton. While Krischer is no longer in that position – in a nauseating irony, he trains law enforcement in prosecuting crimes of sexual violence and oversees placement of children in foster care – his apparent collusion with Epstein’s attorneys will likely come to light, as well as the forces higher up that dictated the terms of the plea deal. Whatever US “intelligence” shared Epstein with the Mossad could have been motivated to take him out to prevent him from talking. While DeSantis – who has promised to be the most pro-Israel governor in the country – would likely pull the plug on that investigation before it got out of hand, the Justice Department opened its own investigation in February into whether prosecutors committed professional misconduct during the 2007 case. If Trump were to lose the 2020 election, Barr – the man who arguably saved the CIA from much-deserved extinction and an expert memory-holer of inconvenient inquiries – would be powerless to fix any federal probe, replaced by a Democratic appointee.
And what of Trump himself? For every three “ClintonBodyCount” hashtags, there was a “TrumpBodyCount” hashtag (which isn’t a thing, but don’t tell the #Resistance), insisting Trump was up to his neck in trafficked children and had good reason to ice the molest-happy millionaire. This is as doubtful as the Clinton hypothesis. If Epstein is being wielded as a weapon by Netanyahu against Barak, Netanyahu would not kill the golden goose that is Trump, who has obeyed his foreign policy dictates magnificently. And the documents unsealed from Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s lawsuit suggest that Trump did not physically engage with Epstein’s retinue of underage sex slaves. The president’s reported germ phobia is somewhat incompatible with girls who were being passed around from blackmail target to blackmail target like party favors, and he allegedly had Epstein booted from Mar-a-Lago for sexually assaulting a girl, suggesting that despite the chummy pictures of Epstein and Trump that surface on googling “Jeffrey Epstein Bill Clinton” (!), the real estate magnate realized early on that Epstein was a honeypot and kept his distance. Trump was mentored by Roy Cohn, whose own record as a blackmailer is legendary; if he wasn’t involved in the Epstein ring himself, he certainly would have recognized its nature early on.

Epstein is extremely well-connected to the Israeli intelligence apparatus, and these are people with both means and motive to remove him from the chessboard. Former Israeli PM Ehud Barak has been photographed entering and exiting Epstein’s East 71st St residence in Manhattan, hiding under a jumble of hats and scarves, and has admitted to visiting the pedophile’s private island, though insists he never went to parties or met girls with Epstein despite photographic evidence to the contrary. Barak and Epstein have been friends for over a decade, the Israeli having been introduced to the wealthy sex offender by his fellow former PM Shimon Peres. Barak has thrown his hat into the ring to challenge Bibi Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving leader, who has made it clear he considers the PM post to be his by divine right and won’t give it up easily. Speculation has swirled that the reopening of the Epstein case is tied to the battle of the Israeli titans – that Netanyahu is sacrificing a Mossad asset to destroy his rival.
Barak, then, has plenty of reasons to want Epstein out of the way. Having formed a company with the mysterious financier as a vehicle to invest in Carbyne911, a company founded by high-level veterans of Israeli intelligence that allows a remote operator to surveil a person not only through the target’s own phone but also through all the internet-connected devices around them, Barak has put other dubious financial dealings at risk of coming under the Epstein probe’s microscope. Worse, Carbyne911 – which its opportunistic owners have marketed as the solution to mass shootings – has been exposed as a horrifying surveillance tool. Similar software has already been weaponized by the Chinese government to spy on its citizens, and Carbyne’s advisory board includes former Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, the Patriot Act co-author who reliably surfaces on the boards of every Orwellian initiative from the Atlantic Council to CyberDome to NewsGuard, ready to leverage his unique blend of experience and sociopathy to strip Americans of their privacy and civil liberties. Peter Thiel, the PayPal co-founder whose company Palantir openly “uses war on terror tools to track American citizens” on behalf of anyone with the funds to pay for their own private intelligence agency, is also an investor in Carbyne911. The idea that a company run by Israeli intelligence, advised and funded by a who’s-who of police-state cheerleaders, that sells a powerful surveillance tool isn’t using it to spy on Americans is too absurd to seriously consider, and such a program is too valuable to be sacrificed merely because Epstein’s stink suffuses it (and it does suffuse it – he and Barak are the company’s largest investors, and most of Barak’s stake was in fact put up by Epstein).
The electoral face-off between Barak and Netanyahu is scheduled for next month, by which time the frenzy over the Epstein case will have ebbed significantly, especially with no defendant as the focus of click-driving salacious speculation. While Netanyahu has demanded an investigation of his rival, it’s not clear that Barak did anything financially illegal in accepting millions of dollars of Epstein’s money. Investigators may still pursue other loose ends – that Maxwell has remained unindicted for so long beggars belief, for example, and victims’ lawyers have promised to go after Epstein’s “enablers” – but the sensationalistic coverage from mainstream news will peter out absent a body in the courtroom. Barak can thus get back to the business of attacking Netanyahu, who is currently facing indictment in multiple corruption probes, and potentially wresting Israel from his grasp. He has much to gain from snuffing Epstein and little to lose – unless Epstein’s dead man’s switch would unleash enough compromising material to end his political career for good. Certainly, Barak has a bad track record of associating with sexual predators – his president, Moshe Katsav, spent five years in prison on rape charges, and the vice-consul to Brazil during his tenure, Arie Scher, fled to Israel to avoid prosecution on child pornography charges.

WHAT DIDN’T HAPPEN
The only certainty is that Epstein did not “commit suicide” without significant outside help. He had been taken off suicide watch less than a week after the previous month’s “suicide attempt,” contrary to standard procedure, which would require authorization (and documentation thereof). One source told the New York Post the suspicious marks discovered on his neck after he was found unconscious curled up in his cell last month appeared more like evidence he had been choked than evidence that he had attempted to hang himself, but his beefy ex-cop cellmate, an accused quadruple-murderer charged with shooting and then burying four men in his backyard after a coke deal gone wrong, insisted he had not only not harmed his notorious roommate and not heard anything, but that he had saved Epstein’s life by discovering him unconscious and alerting a guard. How this happened if they shared a cell is unclear, and Tartaglione’s lawyer has only said they shared the unit – two other sources told NBC they shared the same cell. Epstein spent just six days on suicide watch, receiving daily psychiatric examinations, according to a law enforcement source who spoke to the New York Times. Thanks in part to the strenuous lobbying of his defense attorneys, whom he met with for up to 12 hours a day while under suicide watch, Epstein was soon moved back to his protective housing unit with a new cellmate where he was supposed to be checked every 30 minutes by guards instead – a procedure which was not followed the night of his alleged death – and that cellmate was mysteriously transferred just hours before the “suicide,” according to a source who spoke to Fox News.
Despite rumors of a “camera malfunction” that surfaced immediately following the announcement of Epstein’s death – traced back to a “social media entrepreneur” specializing in “information warfare” whose clients include American politicians – a corrections union representative has confirmed there were no cameras inside the individual cells in Epstein’s unit, creating perfect conditions for whatever happened the morning of August 10th. A former Brooklyn jail warden has confirmed that for Epstein to “commit suicide,” a cascade of errors would have been necessary – starting with removing him from suicide watch. While the officers staffing MCC are supposedly the cream of the crop, at least one of the officers tasked with watching Epstein was not “a regular guard,” according to corrections union head Serene Gregg. Epstein’s ‘guards,’ both working overtime, falsified records of the half-hour checks they had failed to conduct, an anonymous source told the AP – because they were asleep, the New York Times added. Those two at the very least would have to be paid off for any operation to go smoothly, and any investigation interested in finding out – as opposed to covering up – what really happened to Epstein should interview and monitor all of those working on the unit for financial changes, especially the guards who would normally have been working that night but opted not to, allowing the drowsy duo to step in and claim their overtime. Those two have reportedly been placed on administrative leave as of Tuesday, while the presiding warden has been reassigned to Philadelphia.
Epstein’s suspicious demise has several parallels with the “suicide” of Maxwell’s father, British newspaper baron (and Israeli spy) Robert Maxwell. Despite years of valuable service to the Mossad, Maxwell died after falling off his boat, allegedly committing suicide, as his newspaper empire was collapsing, and after attempting to pressure his Mossad connections to bail him out of the financial hole he’d dug himself into. Two of Maxwell’s biographers claim he was killed, three months after demanding the bailout and threatening to expose certain Mossad operations if he didn’t get it, because he simply became too much trouble; ex-Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky has explained how this was accomplished. The dead man was then feted with a star-studded funeral in Israel, attended by six Israeli intelligence chiefs and complete with eulogies by then-PM Yitzhak Shamir boasting he had “done more for Israel than can today be said,” and future PMs Ehud Olmert and Shimon Peres, who also praised his “services” for Israel. Those “services” included peddling an Israeli-backdoored version of the software program Promis to government agencies, a Trojan horse purporting to improve government efficiency which instead funneled information on government activities back to Tel Aviv – a 1980s equivalent of Carbyne911.
EPSTEIN IS DEAD; LONG LIVE EPSTEIN?
The possibility exists that Epstein isn’t actually dead. A 4chan post purporting to be from an MCC employee, posted before news of Epstein’s alleged demise was made public, claims the disgraced financier was taken to the jail’s medical unit just hours before his alleged suicide and points to a suspicious van coming and going, undocumented per the prison’s usual procedures, at the same time as his potential route of escape. Comparisons of “Epstein”’s corpse to images of the living Epstein appear to show completely different ears, a unique and difficult-to-fake body part. Others have questioned why there was a photographer on hand to snap photos of the body leaving the prison in the first place and pointed out the article accompanying the photo referred to a “body believed to be Epstein’s.” Epstein’s brother allegedly identified his body, but if there was a plot, he’d be in on it, ready to milk the jail for millions in a wrongful death suit – a possibility Barr seems to be setting in motion by attacking MCC for “failing to adequately secure” their famous charge. The “celebrity pathologist” who observed the autopsy on behalf of Epstein’s lawyers also “helped investigate” the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King, Jr. There is no smoking gun, but there is an Epstein-sized plausible-deniability gap to slip through.

What would be the purpose of keeping Epstein alive? He’s too high-profile to use as an asset any further, and could be a liability if he becomes resentful for having lost his privileged position as the Mega Group’s #1 Honeypot and being left to rot in jail – a particularly nasty jail, at that (“Guantanamo was nicer,” said an inmate who’d stayed in both). But any good blackmailer worth his salt has a dead-man’s switch with reams of sensitive material ready to go in event of death or accident. Epstein hasn’t actually betrayed his intelligence backers, at least not publicly – though he has been disavowed by everyone from Trump to Clinton to Barak, even to his one-time mentor, Les Wexner, who after setting Epstein up with his Manhattan den of iniquity now claims the disgraced “money manager” for whom he has been the sole client since 1987 ripped him off. Even Alan “I kept my underwear on” Dershowitz has backed away from the radioactive pedophile. Epstein, on the surface, has no friends left. Yet he appears to have had advance knowledge of his own arrest, selling the evidence-laden “Lolita Express” jet just a few weeks before he was apprehended at Teterboro Airport. Why did he conveniently fly home to do the time the public so desperately wanted him to do – a situation that could have been avoided if he wasn’t certain of having an escape route? Epstein was said to be in unusually good spirits before he “suicided.”
But according to Ostrovsky, Robert Maxwell went to his death believing he’d get what he wanted, as well. And if Epstein was the raging sex addict his victims say – one girl claimed he told her he required three orgasms a day, that it was biological “like eating,” while another confirmed that even if she brought him new girls “at breakfast, lunch, and dinner… it was never enough” – keeping him alive, even with a new face in a new country, would be highly risky. Meanwhile, Ghislaine Maxwell has reportedly vanished, suggesting she’s either worried about her “loose end” status making her a target for whoever killed Epstein or she’s concerned Epstein’s victims will finally have their revenge on her in the courtroom. Certainly, the media are turning against her, and with prosecutors vowing to go after Epstein’s “enablers,” she’s number one on the list. Will justice prevail? Has it ever?
Assange Must Not Also Die in Jail
By Craig Murray | August 13, 2019
The highly dubious death of Jeffrey Epstein in a US maximum security prison is another strong reason not to extradite Julian Assange into one – particularly as many of the same people who are relieved by Epstein’s death would like to see Assange dead too.
But there is every reason to fear Assange is already in danger, in Belmarsh maximum security prison, where he is currently incarcerated. As the great journalist John Pilger tweeted six days ago:
Do not forget Julian #Assange. Or you will lose him.
I saw him in Belmarsh prison and his health has deteriorated. Treated worse than a murderer, he is isolated, medicated and denied the tools to fight the bogus charges of US extradition. I now fear for him. Do not forget him.
There is no official explanation as to why Julian’s health has continued to deteriorate so alarmingly in Belmarsh. Nobody genuinely believes him to be a violent danger, so there is absolutely no call for him to be imprisoned in the facility which houses the hardcore terrorist cases.
Assange is fighting major legal cases in the UK, Sweden and the United States, yet is permitted visitors for only two hours per fortnight, inclusive of time spent with his three sets of lawyers. All of his visitors have been alarmed by his state of physical health and many have been alarmed by his apparent disorientation and confusion.
It is because of Assange’s draconian one year sentence for “bail-jumping” on claiming political asylum that he can be kept in such harsh conditions and with so little access to his lawyers. That is why his sentence was so unprecedentedly stiff for missing police bail. Otherwise, as a remand prisoner awaiting extradition hearing his conditions would ordinarily be less harsh and his access to lawyers much better. The Establishment has conspired to reduce his ability to defend himself in court. I am not convinced it is not conspiring to destroy him.
Epstein’s Death Must Be the Start, not the End, of the Investigation
By Craig Murray | August 11, 2019
There are a number of royal palaces and grand residences of former Presidents and Prime Ministers where the inhabitants have a little bit more spring in their step following the death of Jeffrey Epstein. The media is rushing to attach the label “conspiracy theory” to any thought that his death might not have been suicide. In my view, given that so many very powerful people will be relieved he is no longer in a position to sing, and given that he was in a maximum security jail following another alleged “suicide attempt” a week ago, it would be a very credulous person who did not view the question of who killed him an open one.
There has been a huge amount of obfuscation and misdirection on the activities of Epstein and his set. To my mind, the article which remains the best starting point for those new to the scandal is this one from Gawker.
Two days ago a federal court unsealed 2000 pages of documents related to the allegations against Epstein. Of these the most important appears to be a witness statement from Virginia Giuffre alleging that while a minor she had sex at Epstein’s direction with Senate Majority leader George Mitchell and former New Mexico Governor Bill Mitchell, plus a variety of senior foreign politicians.
Epstein’s sexual activities and partying with young girls were carried out in full view of key friends, his domestic and office staff, his pilots and of course the participants. There is no shortage of potential witnesses. Several of these really ought to be taking great care – though if I were them I would certainly eschew any protection involving US security services or law enforcement. Ghislaine Maxwell might take heed of her father’s fate and avoid swimming for a few years.
(I am probably not the only one old enough to compare the many similarities between Robert Maxwell’s asset stripping career and that of Philip Green. The progress of society after thirty years of Thatcher, New Labour and returned Tories meaning that Green by contrast got no criminal charges and much bigger yachts.)
In the UK, Ms Giuffre’s alleged relationship with Prince Andrew has been mentioned in the media. In fact the evidence that she had a relationship with Prince Andrew of some sort is overwhelming. Here is some of the actual evidence from the court documents.


The age of heterosexual consent in England is 16 and there is no indication that Prince Andrew is doing anything illegal in this photograph in which Ms Giuffre is 17. Nor is the photo in itself evidence of sex, though it certainly is intimate. The notion however that Ms Giuffre was “lent out” to Andrew may have legal implications as she was flown into the country, allegedly for the purpose.
No satisfactory alternative explanation has been offered as to what might have been happening here, as Ms Guffre’s lawyers noted.

No further details appear in the documents to amplify Ms Giuffre’s claim that she was forced to have sex with a “well known Prime Minister”, other than to repeat the claim. But what is plain is that her tale is not entirely invention. Just how much more did Epstein know, and who might he have taken down with him?
The truth is that sexual abuse by the rich and famous transcends all political boundaries. Bill Clinton was very frequently on Epstein’s plane and Epstein joins the very long list of those connected to the Clintons who died in dubious circumstances.
Two coincidences – the first being the bruise marks on the neck sustained in Epstein’s first “suicide attempt” in jail – remind me of the case of John Ashe, the senior official very close to the Clintons who died with bruise marks on his neck, when he accidentally dropped his barbell on his throat while bench-pressing alone at home.

Ashe was charged and awaiting trial for receiving corrupt funds from businessman Ng Lap Seng while Ashe was serving in the USA’s turn as President of the UN General Assembly. Ng Lap Seng, a six time visitor to the Clinton White House, had previously been accused of making very large illegal donations to Clinton campaign funds, and was subsequently arrested while entering the USA with over US $4 million in cash. Unlike the Clintons, Ashe was charged with taking Seng’s money and rather like Epstein may have had an interesting song to sing while going down, had he not conveniently dropped the barbell on his throat.
I said that the first thing that jogged me to link the Epstein/Clinton and the Ashe/Clinton cases was the bruise marks on the throat. The second is that both stories have been debunked by self proclaimed “conspiracy-busting” website Snopes – in a manner which shows that Snopes has no regard for the truth whatsoever.
In the case of John Ashe, Snopes wrote an utterly tendentious piece of “myth-busting” which stated that it was a myth that Ashe’s death occurred shortly before his trial and that he was not due to testify against the Clintons. Snopes failed to mention that Ashe, a very senior Clinton appointee, was charged with taking corrupt money from precisely the same man who had been very widely accused of giving corrupt money to the Clintons. And while it was true his trial was not imminent, his pre-trial deposition was.
In the Epstein/Clinton case Snopes wrote a piece debunking the notion that this is a photograph of Bill Clinton on Epstein’s private jet.

Snopes sets out to prove that this is not Epstein’s private jet but that of another billionaire, and that the girl is not Rachel Chandler. For the sake of argument I am prepared to accept what they say on both counts. But is the sensible reaction to that photo to say “Oh that’s OK it’s another billionaire’s jet” or to say “Why is Bill Clinton on a billionaire’s private jet in an intimate pose with a worryingly young female”? As with the Prince Andrew photo, although it has been circulating for years no alternative innocent explanation is on offer.
And the fact that this is another billionaire’s plane should open again the much wider question of networks of the rich and the powerful indulging each other’s passion for sexual exploitation of the young. It is a great shame that in the UK, the Establishment has been able to characterise the falsifications of Carl Beech as discrediting the entire notion of historical child sexual abuse. It is as though one person making up stories about a Bishop would mean there was never child exploitation in the Catholic Church.
The deeper question is why such a significant proportion of the rich and powerful have a propensity to want to assuage their sexual desires on the most vulnerable and powerless in society, as opposed to forming relationships among their peers. I suspect it is connected to the kind of sociopathy that leads somebody to seek or hoard power or wealth in the first place.
It is not necessary to develop that idea further, to understand that the Epstein case had given us a glimpse of criminal sexual behaviour which beyond doubt involves many powerful people. It is essential that the threads that can be grasped are now worked on assiduously to uncover the entire network.
I am afraid to say I suspect the chances of that actually happening are very slim indeed.


