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Two Epstein stories landed in the same news cycle.

Wednesday afternoon, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick sat for four hours in front of the House Oversight Committee — not under oath, no cameras — and admitted he had been lying about Jeffrey Epstein for twenty years. Wednesday evening, a federal judge in White Plains released a yellow legal-pad note that has been sitting in a courthouse since 2021, that the Justice Department admits it never had, that a federal prisoner has been carrying around in his belongings for nearly six years.

Ellie Leonard came on the show today to walk through what both stories actually mean. She has been on the Epstein file for six years. She has read the emails, the chats, and the things the DOJ has not handed over. The conversation does what an interview is supposed to do — names the things the headlines are leaving on the table.

The note doesn’t read like Epstein

Ellie made one observation about the note that should not be possible to unsee.

The triple exclamation points. The Bugsy-Moogs cadence. FOUND NOTHING!!! NOT WORTH IT!! The dramatic flourish. None of it matches the Epstein who emailed his Brooklyn childhood friends, none of it matches the Epstein who corresponded with James Watson and Noam Chomsky, and none of it matches the Epstein who wrote about academia in long, dense paragraphs.

It is, Ellie said, the writing of a 1930s movie gangster impression. And then she put the actual point on the table: “this style is what we see coming from Donald Trump.” She is not claiming Trump wrote the note. She is flagging that the cadence — triple punctuation, all caps, dramatic compressions — is the cadence of Trump and Steve Bannon, not the cadence of Jeffrey Epstein.

Either Epstein wrote this in extreme duress, in a register he otherwise never used. Or somebody else wrote it. There is no third option that lets the document carry the weight the DOJ would need it to carry.

The cellmate, the bomber, and the man running the prison

Epstein’s cellmate Nicholas Tartaglione is a former NYPD cop convicted of murdering four people. After the July 2019 incident, the Bureau of Prisons next wanted to put Cesar Sayoc into the cell — the MAGA pipe-bomber who mailed incendiary devices to thirteen Democratic leaders.

Ellie made the chain explicit. Bill Barr was the Attorney General. Bill Barr was the head of the Bureau of Prisons. Every cell-assignment decision for the highest-profile federal prisoner in the country either crossed his desk or someone close to it. The choice of Tartaglione and the choice of Sayoc were not accidents. They were a message.

Epstein, multiple sources told Ellie at the time, was terrified. He was not suicidal. He had started talking to prosecutors in part to get out of the cell. The “suicide watch” was lifted after twenty-four hours, his roommate was rotated, and his psychologist cleared him for general housing. None of that is what happens around a real suicide attempt.

The note never reached the DOJ

The note was found, Tartaglione says, in a graphic novel after the July 2019 incident. He kept it. He kept it through his trial and his conviction. He kept it through the entire Trump-Barr DOJ, the Garland DOJ, and into the second Trump term. The Justice Department’s three-million-page Epstein Files Transparency Act release does not contain it. The DOJ has confirmed to The New York Times that it has never seen the document.

It came out on Wednesday because The New York Times petitioned Judge Kenneth Karas to unseal it. Without that petition, it would still be in a court file in White Plains.

The “complete” Epstein record is not complete. A document the U.S. government should have collected six years ago was sitting in a federal courthouse the entire time, and nobody in the Justice Department asked for it.

The 15-minute call that has no record

Epstein’s last phone call was to his girlfriend Karina Shuliak the night before he died. Fifteen minutes. We have always been told there is no recording, no transcript, because the call was made off-system.

Ellie has been through the documents. The call was made on a prison phone. A guard helped Epstein log in because Epstein did not have his own PIN. The call was logged under the guard’s correctional-officer ID. There is, by the prison’s own paperwork, a record. We have been told for six years that there is not.

That call would tell us what Epstein was saying the night before he died. It would tell us whether he sounded suicidal. It would tell us whether he sounded like a man preparing for something else entirely. The Justice Department has the means to find it. The Justice Department has not.

Lutnick’s not-oath afternoon

Howard Lutnick did not testify Wednesday. He gave a transcribed interview, off-camera, not under oath, in front of the House Oversight Committee.

Ellie laid the through-line out. Lutnick bought 11 East 71st Street in 1998. He shared a wall with Jeffrey Epstein until 2019. Twenty-one years. The first version of his story was that he visited his neighbor once, saw the massage table, found it gross, and never spoke to him again. We now know that version was false.

He did Adfin with Epstein in 2012. His firm Cantor Fitzgerald’s venture arm corresponded on the deal through 2014. He brought his wife, four children, and a full deployment of nannies to Little St. James in December 2012. He took a $50,000 contribution from Epstein for a 2017 dinner honoring Lutnick. He emailed Epstein about a museum expansion through 2018. The email chain between Lutnick’s wife and Lesley Groff — Epstein’s longtime assistant — laid out the arrival times, the dock arrangements, and the lunch logistics like it was any other family vacation.

And now: an email surfaced through Lord Peter Mandelson’s traffic in which one of Epstein’s lawyers forwards Lutnick’s nanny’s resume to Epstein himself. Epstein had no children. Why does Epstein need a nanny’s resume?

Ellie said Wednesday’s testimony also produced a contradiction Lutnick will not be able to clean up easily. He told a podcast that Epstein was one of the greatest blackmailers of all time. Wednesday, behind closed doors, he denied saying it. The podcast exists. The audio exists.

Mar-a-Lago

Marjorie Taylor Greene has now publicly described Trump telling Pam Bondi that the Epstein files would hurt his Mar-a-Lago friends. Ellie put that line where it belongs in the context — the reason none of the men in this network can break is that breaking takes the network with them.

It is not the moral cost. It is the financial cost, the social cost, the protection cost. Lutnick will not flip on Trump. Trump will not flip on Lutnick. Wolff will not flip on either of them. Mandelson is gone from his ambassadorship and is still not breaking. The men in this story keep each other’s secrets because keeping the secrets is the only thing that keeps them in the room.

The piles outside the DOJ

Ellie has spent six months going through Michael Wolff’s email and chat record with Epstein. Wolff, she said, is sitting on what is likely the second-largest private archive of Epstein material outside the DOJ — the rest is held by the Epstein estate. He is dripping it out into books and articles. He is also, in Ellie’s read of the chats, in a much closer long-term relationship with Epstein than the public record has acknowledged.

The point lands in two directions. There is real evidence outside the DOJ. The DOJ is not the only institution that needs to be pressed.

The Citadel stays standing

Ellie’s frame for what New York actually is: a small town. Everyone goes to the same five parties a night. Everyone keeps each other’s secrets. The mainstream press does not break these stories because the mainstream press is in the room at the same parties. The Met Gala this week — the ten-million-dollar Bezos-Sanchez endorsement — is the picture of it.

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The stories that have moved this case in the last twelve months have come from independent reporters working from documents and timestamps. Ellie’s reporting on Wolff is one of those. Narativ’s six years on the espionage angle is another. The DOJ’s three-million-page release is a fourth.

The Justice Department under Bill Barr and the Justice Department under his successors have not closed this case. The Oversight Committee will not close it either. It will be closed, if it is closed, by the people willing to read the documents and name what is in them.

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The recording — believed made by Jeffrey Epstein, likely at his 71st Street townhome, in February 2013 — has Israel’s then-Defense Minister Ehud Barak and former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers at the table. Three-and-a-half hours of audio, edited into three short acts. Thirteen years on, the conversation echoes through today’s headlines.

Anne found the audio. We digitally enhanced it. The one realization about Epstein that lands: the sex was the side hustle. The real business was politics, power, and finance.

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On July 2, 2008 — two days after Jeffrey Epstein began his Florida prison sentence — a Delaware entity called Zorro Trust won the Oklahoma state Powerball. Eighty-five million dollars. Two days after Epstein went to prison, and not one reporter in the United States asked a single question.

That is the scale of what Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez has spent this year opening up. A thirty-seven-year veteran journalist and novelist who lives in New Mexico, Valdes-Rodriguez joined Narativ Live tonight for the first in a five-night prime-time event, 5 Nights, 5 Epstein Secrets, that launches Monday at 5 PM ET. Her document-driven Substack series is the reason New Mexico’s state attorney general opened a criminal investigation into Zorro Ranch, and the reason cadaver dogs finally searched the 7,500-acre property on March 9, 2026 — six years after Epstein died.

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When French financial prosecutors raided the Paris offices of Edmond de Rothschild bank on March 24, they weren’t just investigating a former employee. They were pulling on a thread connecting Jeffrey Epstein’s intelligence operation to the United Nations Security Council, the Oslo peace process, and one of Europe’s most powerful banking dynasties.

The thread begins with a former French diplomat, Fabrice Aidan, whose connections through the Rothschild family banks link Jeffrey Epstein to Israeli and Russian intelligence, the UN Security Council, and the Oslo Accords.

What those connections reveal is an arm’s-length intelligence operation connected to Israel’s IDF and run by the world’s preeminent banking family, the Rothschilds, as well as the KGB and its successor agency, the FSB.

This is the same family that funded the first Jewish settlements in Ottoman Palestine, whose patriarch is known in Israel as “the Father of the Settlement,” and to whom the Balfour Declaration—the 1917 document that launched the Zionist project—was addressed. The family that built Israel appears to have built Epstein, too.

What French police must try to learn from the files they seized is whether there is evidence of an espionage ring, who was calling the shots, and what the mission was. The answer may reside in Aidan’s résumé before he joined the bank.

EPSTEIN’S INSIDE MAN

Fabrice Aidan was a French civil servant who served at the French Embassy in Israel from 1998 to 2000, then spent nearly a decade at the United Nations as the special assistant and political adviser to Terje Rød-Larsen—theNorwegian diplomat who engineered the Oslo Accords and later led the International Peace Institute (IPI) in New York.

That’s the same IPI that accepted approximately $650,000 from Epstein and entities tied to him between 2011 and 2019. The same Rød-Larsen who resigned in 2020 over his undisclosed Epstein ties. According to reports, Rød-Larsen wrote official letters to U.S. authorities to secure visas for young Russian women in Epstein’s orbit, falsely claiming they possessed “extraordinary abilities” for research roles.

As Rød-Larsen’s special assistant, Aidan was the operational node and Epstein’s direct entry into UN-linked diplomatic events—a pipeline for Epstein’s receipt of over 200 pieces of sensitive material normally reserved for diplomats.

WHAT HE SENT EPSTEIN

Aidan appears in more than 200 documents released by the U.S. Department of Justice. The emails, sent between 2010 and 2016, show Aidan using his official UN title, office, and email account to transmit sensitive materials to Epstein, including:

• UN Security Council briefings—restricted documents normally limited to a narrow circle within UN headquarters.

• Confidential diplomatic readouts — including a readout of Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s private telephone conversation with Turkey’s Foreign Minister

• Geopolitical intelligence—on January 25, 2011, Aidan sent Epstein an “Urgent” email coordinating a dinner involving Sheikh Abdullah and Bill Gates, treating Epstein as a key operational link.

The Narativ Epstein Archive contains direct evidence of the pipeline in action.

In July 2013, Aidan forwarded Epstein an Atlantic Council analysis on Syria policy by Frederic C. Hof, a former State Department Special Adviser. The email was marked “Importance: High.” Aidan’s note read simply: “You’ll find it interesting. Warm regards. Envoyé de mon iPhone.”

The email originated from Dentons international law firm’s Global Business Intelligence Unit—specifically from the GBIU-MideastNews distribution list at GBIU-MideastNews@dentons.com. Recipients included Melissa Mahle (a former CIA operations officer and security consultant), Stephen A. Seche (former U.S. Ambassador to Yemen), and Timothy Dixon—a distribution channel of former intelligence and State Department officials. Aidan was on this list and forwarded its contents directly to Jeffrey Epstein.

Thirty-eight minutes later, Epstein forwarded Aidan’s intelligence to his own network.

Aidan co-edited an Oxford University Press book with Rød-Larsen—The Search for Peace in the Arab-Israeli Conflict(2014). The foreword, written by Rød-Larsen from Paris in September 2013—five months after Aidan left the UN—describes Aidan as “a French diplomat, who served for ten years as my special assistant and political adviser in my different United Nations capacities” who “played an instrumental role” and “made essential substantive inputs.” Rød-Larsen dedicates the book to “my beloved wife, Ambassador Mona Juul, my companion in war and peace.” Both would be under investigation within three years.

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THE FIRST PART OF TONIGHT’S SHOW ABOUT MICHAEL WOLFF WITH CAN BE SEEN HERE.

PART 2 IS ABOUT THE CRYPTO CAPTURE AND THE GREATER NORTH AMERICA STRATEGY WITH .

In 2013, Jeffrey Epstein wrote to Norwegian diplomat Thorbjorn Jagland with a pitch for Vladimir Putin. The idea: Russia could do to global finance what Sputnik did to the space race. Instead of competing with Silicon Valley, copying startups, playing catch-up to Microsoft and Google, Russia could leapfrog the entire Western financial system by reinventing money itself. Epstein claimed he had helped craft the derivative markets in the 1970s and told Jagland that a new form of currency — cryptocurrency — could hand Russia dominance over the global economy. Jagland negotiated the approach, telling Epstein he would pitch Putin by saying he had a friend who could help attract the foreign investment Russia had failed to secure on its own. The day after the exchange, Epstein’s Google Calendar contained a single entry: “Prepare Putin Paper.” He demanded any meeting with Putin last two to three hours, away from the crowds of St. Petersburg. We don’t know if the meeting happened, but Epstein visited Russia multiple times, held Russian visas, and met with deputy economic ministers on several occasions.

Now look at the map. Brock Pierce, a former child actor turned crypto billionaire who co-founded Tether, was Epstein’s personal advisor on all things crypto. Pierce told Epstein he “had a great time with the girls” and Epstein instructed him to “find him a present.” Pierce’s creation, Tether, is now a $133 billion stablecoin backed by U.S. Treasury bills held in custody by Cantor Fitzgerald — the firm owned by Howard Lutnick, now Trump’s Commerce Secretary. When Lutnick had to divest from Cantor Fitzgerald, Tether financed his family’s purchase of the company, creating a closed loop where the same entity that sells the cryptocurrency also secures it. Lutnick, whose name appears more than 250 times in the Epstein files, who brought his children and nannies to a bespoke lunch on Epstein’s island in 2012, now sits in a position where he could authorize a bailout of his own company if the Tether bubble pops. That bubble — $133 billion in Treasury bills that would flood the market in a panic redemption — could spike interest rates and crash the U.S. economy overnight.

The Gulf money pipeline completes the picture. Trump’s World Liberty Financial sold 49 percent to Sheikh Tahnoun of the UAE for $500 million. MBS and Qatar are also backers, with Qatar providing $2 billion to establish a stablecoin competitor to Tether. Epstein was directly connected to all three — he visited the Louvre with MBS during a private closed viewing, maintained direct ties to Sheikh Tahnoun, and cultivated Qatari contacts throughout the Gulf blockade. The network is running the same play it ran before 2008: pump a bubble they control, sell at the top, crash it, and buy American assets for pennies on the dollar. Except this time the derivative is crypto, the Commerce Secretary is a member of the network, and the wealth is flowing directly from the American treasury into the hands of Gulf monarchies, Russia, and their partners. The blueprint Epstein pitched to Putin thirteen years ago is playing out in real time.

The broadcast closed with former Danish intelligence senior analyst responding to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s announcement of “Greater North America” — a Pentagon strategy declaring every nation from Greenland to Ecuador a U.S. security perimeter. Kaarsbo called it an elaboration of the December national security strategy, warning that Denmark has already deployed combat-ready troops to Greenland and that nine European nations have signed nuclear deterrence agreements with France. He noted that if the Iran operation deteriorates, the administration could pivot to a full-throttle Arctic approach. The scenario — two NATO allies facing off with live weapons over Greenland — would have been unimaginable a few years ago. Denmark’s prime minister has drawn the line. Most of Europe, with the possible exception of Orban’s Hungary, stands behind her. Kaarsbo, joining from the French Alps within kilometers of the main French Arctic forces base, observed that when countries are already discussing nuclear sharing, you know the alarm is at the pinnacle. Everything else trickles down from there.

THE FIRST PART OF TONIGHT’S SHOW ABOUT MICHAEL WOLFF WITH CAN BE SEEN HERE:

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Narativ Live streams on YouTube, Substack, and narativ.org. The full crypto investigation is available at narativ.org in The Greatest Heist Book 2.

The Commerce Secretary’s family fortune depends on a crypto company that washes Russian money and holds $133 billion in U.S. Treasury bills. Here’s what we found — and how we got here.

1. LUTNICK LIED ABOUT EPSTEIN

Howard Lutnick swore under oath he barely knew Jeffrey Epstein. We published the evidence — 250 emails, island visits with his wife and four children, a business partnership through 2018. He admitted the island visit only after we broke the story. narativ.org/lutnick-lied-about-epstein

2. HIS FIRM IS A RUSSIAN MONEY PIPELINE

An FBI whistleblower said Lutnick “instructed all the fraud” — Russian mafia money through Deutsche Bank via an invisible entity called Parabridge. His co-CEO ran a Panama Papers shell linked to banned Russian entities. Manafort’s middlemen. Deripaska’s network. All through Cantor Fitzgerald.

3. THE FBI HAD EVERYTHING — AND HID IT FROM CONGRESS

34 database hits. 3 suspicious activity reports. Two whistleblowers. An accidentally un-redacted log reading: “Alleged Money Laundering by Howard Lutnick.” The Bureau briefed no senator before confirmation. Fifty-one voted yes.

4. TETHER OWNS THE LUTNICK EMPIRE

Tether loaned Lutnick’s children the money to buy Cantor Fitzgerald — the firm that custodies Tether’s $133 billion in reserves. The collateral is Cantor’s own stake in Tether. If the family defaults, Tether seizes everything. The Commerce Secretary’s fortune is inside a closed loop controlled by a crypto company.

5. TETHER IS A RUSSIAN MONEY LAUNDERING FRONT

$8 billion in documented Russian sanctions evasion. Russian oil revenue converted to USDT. Drone parts for Kalashnikov. Hamas. North Korea. Mexican cartels. Never audited. Controlled by four foreign billionaires — none American. Italian media describe the largest shareholder as offering Russia “a financial infrastructure useful for circumventing sanctions.” narativ.org/tether-russian-front

THE BOMB IS STRAPPED TO THE U.S. TREASURY, AND THE COMMERCE SECRETARY IS COMPROMISED

$133 billion in dirty money now suppresses yields, inflates the stock market, and funds government borrowing. Trump’s lawyer killed the investigation. Trump signed the law. If Tether collapses, those Treasuries hit the open market overnight. It is worse than 2008 — and the President is protecting it.

This is what happens when you allow the foxes to guard henhouses.

When Howard Lutnick became Commerce Secretary in February 2025, he was required to divest from Cantor Fitzgerald, the Wall Street firm he had led for three decades. He sold his stake to a trust for his four children — who did not have the funds to purchase it outright. To facilitate the deal, Tether — the company whose $133 billion in reserves Cantor holds — loaned the children the money to buy their father’s firm.

According to Bloomberg (March 18, 2026), “Dynasty Trust A” — benefiting all four Lutnick children — borrowed an undisclosed sum from Tether in October 2024. New York credit filings show the loan is secured by all of the trust’s assets, including a $600 million convertible bond that entitles Cantor to a 5% stake in Tether itself.

To recap: Tether loaned the funds to the Lutnick family trust. The loan’s collateral is a convertible bond that gives Cantor an ownership stake in Tether. In effect, Tether financed the purchase of the firm that safeguards Tether’s own reserves — using that firm’s stake in Tether as security.

If the trust defaults, Tether would seize the collateral and become the senior creditor for the Commerce Secretary’s family business. The Lutnick family’s fortune — and the Wall Street firm responsible for safeguarding $133 billion in stablecoin reserves — would be at the mercy of a single crypto company.

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Howard Lutnick was confirmed as the 41st Secretary of Commerce on February 18, 2025, by a vote of 51 to 45. Nobody in the Senate chamber mentioned what the FBI already kn…

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Minutes before President Trump posted on Truth Social Monday morning that he was halting strikes on Iran’s energy infrastructure — citing “very good and productive conversations” that Iran immediately denied ever happened — someone made a fortune.

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She didn’t know the man’s last name. She wasn’t a news follower. She had buried what happened to her for decades. It was a friend who saw Jeffrey Epstein’s face on television and said: I think t…

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Today I joined Wajahat Ali and investigative researcher Ellie on The Left Hook to break down the latest revelations from the Epstein files. Here’s the stack — what you need to know and why it matters.

The DOJ Cover-Up Is Now Undeniable

The biggest story isn’t what’s in the Epstein files. It’s what was taken out.

The Trump DOJ deployed FBI agents on 24-to-48-hour shifts — locked in rooms, unable to leave — with one job: find every reference to Donald Trump in the Epstein files and scrub it. They weren’t investigating crimes against girls. They were protecting the president. That is a scandal of mammoth proportions. A sitting president’s Department of Justice systematically deleted his name from files documenting one of the largest sex trafficking operations in history. That’s not politics. That’s obstruction. And it violates the Epstein Transparency Act that Congress enacted specifically to prevent this.

You don’t hide something unless you’re guilty of something.

The Hilton Head Case: A 13-Year-Old Girl and Three Missing FBI Interviews

The Post and Courier corroborated a bombshell story the DOJ tried to bury: a woman who, as a 13-year-old on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, in 1984, answered a babysitting ad placed by a man named “Jeff.” There was no baby. There were no kids. He gave her alcohol, gave her drugs, and assaulted her.

She later identified the man as Jeffrey Epstein. She described him as looking like Lurch from the Addams Family. She remembered specific details — the cologne that triggered her years later, the crinkly Tyvek “cardboard shirt” that was an 80s fabric. The FBI took her seriously enough to conduct at least four, possibly five interviews and create a 21-page slideshow. But when the Epstein files were released, three of those interview summaries were simply missing. And 37 pages remain unaccounted for.

There are legitimate questions about this case — the timeline of when Trump and Epstein knew each other, details about a Rick James concert that doesn’t line up with performance records, the mother’s criminal history. These need investigation, not dismissal. But here’s what’s beyond dispute: the FBI investigated it, the DOJ buried it, and the cover-up itself is a crime.

The woman was represented by Eric Fudali from the Bloom Group — the same firm that represented Katie Johnson. And here’s the chilling detail: the FBI logged her interview into the database one day after Jeffrey Epstein was found dead. Her second interview was three days before he died.

The Subpoena and the Streisand Effect

The House subpoenaed Attorney General Pam Bondi. She has to appear. The day after that subpoena, the DOJ suddenly “found” three missing executive summaries and published them. As Waj put it — the Streisand effect. They tried to hide something, got caught, and made it infinitely worse.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Pam Bondi told Trump he was all over the Epstein files. Trump then lied publicly about it. We know the DOJ had FBI agents working around the clock to scrub his name. We know Trump wrote a lewd message in Epstein’s 50th birthday book — the Wall Street Journal stood behind its reporting, Trump threatened them, and weeks later the actual book surfaced.

The questions for Bondi are simple: Where are the other 37 pages? What did the president know, and when did he know it? Who ordered the cover-up?

Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself — The Evidence Is Mounting

Guard Tova Noel Googled “latest on Epstein jail” at 5:42 AM and again at 5:52 AM — less than 40 minutes before her colleague, Correctional Officer Michael Thomas, found Epstein dead at 6:30 AM. She had time to do Google searches but somehow couldn’t perform the required 30-minute check-ins because she’d “fallen asleep.”

Ten days before Epstein’s death, Noel made a $5,000 cash deposit that was flagged by Chase Bank in a suspicious activity report to the FBI. She’s a prison guard. This is not normal.

FBI 302s reveal that an inmate overheard guards in a commotion. One said: “You killed him.” Others were saying: “Breathe.” The inmates described it as a cover-up.

The independent autopsy commissioned by Mark Epstein found three bone breaks in the neck — inconsistent with suicide. The cell was designed to be suicide-proof. There is no photograph of Epstein dead in his cell. The only image is of him on a gurney being wheeled into a hospital — and his color was too good for someone who’d been dead for any significant time. No blood pooling. No bruising. Either he had just died moments before, or something else happened entirely.

The noose wasn’t even around him when they found him.

CBS News reported that multiple experts found indications the released prison camera footage may not be raw footage. Julie Brown confirmed the camera didn’t even show Epstein’s cell — it was pointed across the unit entirely. Every mistake that could have been made in the forensic investigation was made. Evidence was mishandled. Footprints everywhere. The guards weren’t interviewed for two years.

Two days before his death, Epstein updated his will. His last cellmate, Ethan Reyes, has since died. His previous cellmate was Nicholas Tartaglione — a former NYPD cop convicted of killing multiple people. And the Bureau of Prisons had considered making Cesar Sayoc — the MAGA bomber who sent pipe bombs to Trump’s critics — Epstein’s cellmate. Why would you assign a man who tried to kill people for Donald Trump as the cellmate of a man who had information that could destroy Donald Trump?

Mark Epstein called the FBI and said he believed Donald Trump killed his brother. Steven Hoffenberg, who knew Epstein’s world intimately, told me the same thing the morning Epstein died. When I called Hoffenberg at 7:30 that morning, he panicked. He made doctors remove all needles. He wouldn’t let me off the phone. He said: “They killed Jeffrey, they’re going to kill me.” Who? “Donald Trump.”

Bill Barr — whose father Donald Barr gave an unqualified Jeffrey Epstein his teaching job at Dalton — visited Epstein in jail shortly before his death. As Attorney General, Barr oversaw the Bureau of Prisons. The same organization that was supposed to keep Epstein alive.

Michael Wolff’s 100 Hours

Author Michael Wolff has 100 hours of recorded interviews with Jeffrey Epstein that he refuses to release. His excuse — “nobody wants them” — is absurd. He was offered free transcription services. He declined. Now the Epstein files reveal Wolff was far closer to Epstein than he let on, functioning not as the heroic journalist he presented himself as on Substack, but as someone who had critical information he chose to withhold. Given Wolff’s unprecedented access to Donald Trump, the question becomes: was he doing the same double agentry with Trump that he did with Epstein?

The Pattern

Every thread leads to the same place. The DOJ scrubs Trump’s name from Epstein files. The FBI investigates a case involving Trump and Epstein and a 13-year-old girl, and the interviews are buried. Pam Bondi is warned Trump is in the files. Todd Blanche — Trump’s personal attorney — flies to visit Ghislaine Maxwell after the lead prosecutor, Maureen Comey, is fired. Maxwell gets a once-in-a-lifetime transfer to minimum security and offers to say Trump did nothing wrong in exchange for commutation.

And the man who could have testified about all of it died under circumstances that defy every protocol, every standard, and every reasonable explanation.

This is the biggest cover-up in modern American history. And it’s unraveling.

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Watch the full conversation on The Left Hook with Wajahat Ali. Find Ellie at The Panicked Writer on Substack and Red Pencil Script on social media. Follow Narativ at narativ.org.

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There is an image that stays with you.

September 13, 1993. The South Lawn of the White House. Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin standing in the sun, the two men whose peoples had been trying to kill each other for decades, and between them Bill Clinton — arms spread wide, ushering them together like a man who believed he was about to change the world. When their hands met, Rabin’s famously reluctant, Arafat’s famously eager, Clinton’s face broke into something that looked like genuine joy.

It was the defining image of his presidency. It was the moment that said: maybe this ends. Maybe a war that had seemed permanent could be stopped. The Oslo Accords had been negotiated in secret in Norway, and now they were being ratified on live television in front of a crowd that included most of the American foreign policy establishment and a watching world. For one afternoon in September, the impossible felt close.

We have been told the story of why it failed. Arafat walked away from Camp David in 2000. The Palestinians, the story goes, could not bring themselves to accept the final terms. No partner for peace. Clinton himself spent years defending that version of history, defending Ehud Barak’s offer, explaining why the Palestinian Authority simply would not close.

But now something is emerging from the sworn testimony of Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, and from the Epstein files, that asks a different question about those years between 1993 and 2000 — and specifically about the years between 1993 and 1995, when the Oslo framework was being built.

What if there was another thing happening there?

What if, even as Clinton stretched his arms wide on that South Lawn, an influence operation was already underway — working through Jeffrey Epstein, through access to the White House, through a network of money and compromise and carefully placed relationships — to ensure that the peace process Clinton was trying to build would never arrive at its destination?

That is the question this investigation asks. Not to relitigate Clinton. Not to provide ammunition for a right wing that has spent years weaponizing the Epstein file while protecting the very network it pretends to expose. But because understanding the architecture of what happened then is essential to understanding what we are living through now — a war in Gaza, an American president who arrived pre-aligned with the interests that sabotaged Oslo, and a geopolitical order built over forty years by the same union of forces.

A NOTE ON SOURCING:

On August 29, 2019 — nineteen days after Jeffrey Epstein died in federal custody — I recorded an interview with Ari Ben-Menashe, the former Israeli military intelligence operative who was present when Robert Maxwell introduced Epstein to that apparatus in the early 1980s. Ben-Menashe told me on tape that Epstein was deployed against Bill Clinton. That the operation worked. That Clinton was moved away from the Palestinian position the Israeli military intelligence right feared, and toward a posture more favorable to Israel.

Before his death in September 2022, Steven Hoffenberg — Epstein’s partner in the Towers Ponzi scheme — told me on the record the same thing: Clinton was the target of an intelligence operation through Jeffrey Epstein. The relationship had a purpose from the beginning.

Those comments laid buried in our extensive interview transcript archive until watching the Clinton depositions in front of the House Oversight Committee made me dig them up. Their sworn testimony did not break this analysis. It supports it, six and a half years after Ben-Menashe spoke on tape.

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The most explosive exchange came when Rep. Nancy Mace pressed Clinton on whether the State Department received any intelligence cables mentioning Epstein’s foreign travel or trafficking network during her tenure as Secretary. Clinton said she was not aware of any. Mace fired back asking how the nation’s top diplomat could have missed one of the most prolific sex traffickers in the world. Clinton deflected, saying it was a Justice Department matter — then turned the question around, asking why Secretary Rubio and Attorney General Bondi haven’t been called to explain why the Trump administration gutted the State Department’s trafficking office, cutting more than 70 percent of its staff.

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For fifteen years, Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein were best friends. They partied together in Palm Beach and Manhattan. They were photographed together, quoted praising each other, and linked in the tabloids. That friendship — and what it may have involved — has dominated the Epstein story since the files began dropping in January.

But the millions of pages released by the Department of Justice this year, combined with Leslie Wexner’s explosive testimony under oath on February 18, reveal something more significant than a friendship. They reveal that Trump and Epstein were not two men who happened to know each other. They were two men built by the same financial dynasty — a dynasty with a two-hundred-year history of building exactly this kind of network.

The Dynasty

To understand what the Epstein files have exposed, you have to understand the Rothschilds — not as an antisemitic trope, but as a specific, documented, two-century-old banking operation with a specific business model.

The Rothschild family built its fortune through a pattern that has repeated across every major financial crisis since the Napoleonic Wars. In 1825, when the Bank of England faced a liquidity crisis, it was the Rothschilds who supplied the gold to avert collapse — making the family indispensable to British finance. In the crash of 1873, while every other major bank in Vienna was destroyed, the Rothschild-founded Creditanstalt was the only institution left standing. It absorbed the market. By 1913, Creditanstalt’s assets equaled the entire Austrian state budget. In 1890, when Barings — then the most powerful bank in London — faced ruin, the Rothschilds organized the rescue on terms that permanently subordinated their rival.

The pattern is always the same. Finance the boom. Survive the crash. Consolidate during the wreckage. The family doesn’t just weather crises. It emerges from them stronger, having absorbed the clients, the assets, and the influence of everyone who didn’t survive.

N.M. Rothschild & Sons set the daily gold price in London for nearly a century. Rothschild & Co is consistently ranked among the top ten global investment banks for mergers and acquisitions. Sir Evelyn de Rothschild served as the personal financial advisor to Queen Elizabeth II. The family’s advisory business, restructuring practice, and wealth management operation span over forty countries.

This is not conspiracy. This is the documented history of a financial institution that has operated continuously since 1798. And in the 1980s, two branches of this dynasty made two decisions that would converge, decades later, in the same White House.

Their Man: Epstein

On February 18, 2026, Leslie Wexner — the richest man in Ohio, the founder of Victoria’s Secret — testified under oath before the House Oversight Committee. The FBI had named him an unindicted co-conspirator. At eighty-eight, he decided to talk.

In his prepared statement, Wexner named every person who endorsed Jeffrey Epstein before Wexner hired him. There were three. Two were from Bear Stearns — chairman Ace Greenberg and future CEO Jimmy Cayne, who “endorsed Epstein without hesitation.” The third was from the Rothschild dynasty.

“Epstein also offered a reference, Élie de Rothschild,” Wexner said. “When I spoke with Élie, he highly recommended Epstein based upon work Epstein had done for his family.”

Élie de Rothschild — Baron de Rothschild, head of the French branch of the banking dynasty — personally vouched for a man who had been pushed out of Bear Stearns, had no financial license, and had spent the previous six years doing undocumented work in Europe alongside arms dealers and intelligence-connected figures. Epstein carried an Austrian passport listing a Saudi residence. He had no visible clients, no public track record, and no credentials.

And yet one of the most powerful bankers in the world picked up the phone and told the richest man in Ohio to trust him.

That endorsement opened everything. Within four years, Epstein held Wexner’s power of attorney — total control over a billion-dollar fortune. He embedded himself in the Ohio business network that would eventually feed into JPMorgan Chase. He became a director of the Wexner Foundation. He ran the real estate development of New Albany. He even relocated a CIA-linked cargo airline — Southern Air Transport, the Iran-Contra airline — to Columbus to ship clothes for Wexner’s retail empire. Customs agents found cocaine on one of its planes in 1996.

The Rothschild relationship didn’t end in 1987. It deepened across decades and branches of the family. By 2015, Epstein had signed a $25 million contract with Ariane de Rothschild’s Edmond de Rothschild Holding. He exchanged over five thousand emails with Ariane. He brokered introductions between the Rothschilds and Wall Street’s largest private equity firms. He told Peter Thiel in 2016: “As you probably know, I represent the Rothschilds.” He told Ariane herself that “the Epsteins were the Vienna bankers” — a reference to Gustav Ritter von Epstein, who built the Palais Epstein on Vienna’s Ringstraße in the 1870s, right next to Parliament. The same crash of 1873 that destroyed Gustav’s bank made the Rothschild-founded Creditanstalt the last institution standing.

His relationship with the Rothschild dynasty was real, deep, and sustained from 1987 until the year before his death. And newly released files show he didn’t just work with banking aristocracy — he operated as part of it.

But newly released documents from the Epstein files — never before reported — reveal something remarkable. Whether Jeffrey Epstein was truly descended from the Viennese Epstein banking dynasty has not been proven. But the documents show it doesn't matter. He was accepted by European banking aristocracy — by diplomats, professors, royalty, and the Rothschilds themselves — as one of their own.

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On Wednesday, February 18, Leslie Wexner sat before a House Oversight Committee deposition camera and did something no one in Jeffrey Epstein’s orbit has ever done. He talked. Not in the guarded, monosyllabic way his attorney Michael Levy wanted — five-word answers, nothing more. Wexner talked the way a man talks when he’s been hung out to dry by every other player in the network and has decided, at 88, that if he’s going down, he’s taking the names with him.

For nearly five hours, the billionaire founder of The Limited and Victoria’s Secret volunteered names, connections, and details that his own lawyer tried desperately to shut down. At one point, after Wexner had spent an extended stretch naming Rothschild, the Queen of England, the founders of Google, Jeff Bezos, the King of Saudi Arabia, and Abigail Johnson of Fidelity — his attorney Levy leaned in and whispered what he didn’t know was being picked up by a hot mic: “I’ll fucking kill you if you answer another question with more than five words, okay?”

Wexner laughed.

He kept talking.

What Wexner was doing wasn’t senility. He was alert, following every question precisely, and deliberately steering his answers into territory that his lawyer — and whoever texted that lawyer mid-testimony — did not want him to enter. A minute before the “kill you” moment, Levy received a message on his device. His whole demeanor changed. He stopped smiling. He looked concerned. Someone was watching in real time, and what they were watching was Wexner putting elite names on a congressional record under oath.

This investigation follows those names where they lead.

“I Spoke to Élie de Rothschild”

Of all the names Wexner dropped, one unlocks the rest.

When asked how he came to hire Jeffrey Epstein, Wexner testified that in 1987, he called Élie de Rothschild for a reference. “I spoke to Élie de Rothschild,” Wexner said under oath. “He represented their whole family.”

Élie de Rothschild — Baron de Rothschild, head of the French branch of the banking dynasty — vouched for a man who had been fired from Bear Stearns, had no financial license, and had spent the previous six years in Europe doing work that remains largely undocumented.

Those six years — 1981 to 1987 — are the black hole at the center of the Epstein story. Before he arrived in Wexner’s orbit, Epstein was operating in Europe alongside Douglas Leese, a British arms dealer who architected the Al-Yamamah deal, the largest arms sale in British history — a £43 billion pipeline of weapons to Saudi Arabia. Leese worked with Adnan Khashoggi, the Saudi arms broker, and Robert Maxwell, the media baron and alleged Israeli intelligence asset. Epstein carried an Austrian passport listing a Saudi residence.

When Epstein returned to America with a Rothschild endorsement, he wasn’t a financial advisor. He was an operative with connections to the arms trade, intelligence services, and European banking — and one of the world’s most powerful families had just given him the keys to American wealth.

The Rothschilds are not a single entity but a dynasty with branches across Europe, each surfacing differently in the Epstein story. The French branch produced Élie, who vouched for Epstein in 1987, and the Edmond de Rothschild Group, chaired by Ariane de Rothschild, who signed Epstein’s $25 million contract. The British branch produced Sir Evelyn de Rothschild, Queen Elizabeth II’s personal financial advisor, and his wife Lynn Forester de Rothschild, who introduced Prince Andrew to Epstein. The same branch produced Nathaniel Rothschild, who introduced Oleg Deripaska to British politicians — connecting the family directly to Russian oligarch money and Putin’s inner circle.

Epstein understood this architecture intimately. In a December 2018 email to Ariane, he described a Harvard class on Hitler’s years of destitution, during which the future dictator lived in a shelter funded by three wealthy Viennese families: “The Gutmanns, the Epsteins, and the Rothschilds.” Epstein added: “the Epsteins were the Vienna bankers. Bought their bank on the ring, hence still Palais Epstein.”

The Palais Epstein is real — an ornate building on Vienna’s Ringstraße, built by the banker Gustav Ritter von Epstein in the 1870s. Whether Jeffrey Epstein was actually descended from that family is unverified. But he made this claim directly to the chair of the Rothschild bank he represented — positioning his own family alongside hers as Viennese banking aristocracy. Ariane didn’t dispute it. She responded that she “regularly used to say that Rothschilds planned and supported Hitler in mass destruction to gain more power.” The day before, Epstein had forwarded the same story to Steve Bannon with the self-aware quip: “Not only billionaire pedophile friend of Trump but helped Hitler. Just what I need.”

Whether the bloodline claim was true or performance, it reveals how Epstein positioned himself within the network: not as an outsider who conned his way in, but as someone who belonged.

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In February 2021, two FBI agents sat down for a phone interview with a man who had spent 32 years in the securities industry. He had worked inside Howard Lutnick’s companies. He held a Series 30 license — the most senior regulatory position in his unit — and supervised 50 people at Cantor Fitzgerald’s New York office.

He told them Lutnick instructed all of the fraud. He told them the firm laundered money for the Russian Mafia. He connected Lutnick to Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and the offshore financial architecture that brought down Bear Stearns.

The FBI wrote it all down. Three pages. Then did nothing.

Howard Lutnick is now the United States Commerce Secretary.

The $10 Mansion

The whistleblower told the agents that Lutnick “was a neighbor of JEFFREY EPSTEIN in the adjoining property at 11 E 71st Street.” Lutnick “bought the property for $10 through a trust.” “LES WEXNER and EPSTEIN owned the building.” Lutnick “bought it in a very roundabout way from EPSTEIN.”

Property records confirm it all.

In 1988, SAM Conversion Corp. bought the townhouse. The company used Leslie Wexner’s Columbus, Ohio address. Epstein was vice president. In 1992, SAM Conversion sold it to the 11 East 71st Street Trust. Price: ten dollars. Epstein was the trustee. In 1996, the trust sold it to the Comet Trust. Ten dollars. In 1998, the Comet Trust sold it to Howard Lutnick. Ten dollars. Transfer taxes show the real price was $7.6 million. Lutnick took out a $4 million mortgage the same day.

The house shares a wall with 9 East 71st Street — Epstein’s mansion. Same portfolio. Same trusts. Same people.

The Greatest Heist Confirmed

Then the whistleblower revealed what we’ve been exposing in the Greatest Heist Book 2.

He told the agents “there was a relationship between LIQUID FUNDING and executives at BEAR STERNS.” When Bear collapsed, those executives moved to Lutnick’s companies — or “they went to a Russian hedge fund.”

Liquid Funding Ltd. was the $6.7 billion offshore vehicle at the center of Bear Stearns managed by Jeffrey Epstein. Leveraged 180-to-1. Holding toxic securities that included repackaged Trump casino debt. As I’ve been reported in The Greatest Heist, Liquid Funding was the vault — the mechanism through which insiders extracted billions before Bear Stearns collapsed in March 2008, paid for by taxpayers - while America slumped into the Great Depression.

A veteran securities insider, sitting inside Cantor Fitzgerald, told the FBI there was a direct relationship between Liquid Funding and Bear Stearns executives — and that those executives landed at Lutnick’s firm or a Russian hedge fund.

That places the Commerce Secretary inside Epstein’s network as the 2008 crash was triggered by Epstein - and a likely beneficiary of a $6.7 BN taxpayer bailout.

The Money Came From The Russian Mafia

The whistleblower described a criminal enterprise.

Cantor Fitzgerald and its affiliates were “well known for money laundering,” he told the FBI. The firm “had a history of crime.” “LUTNICK ran everything and he maintained a very small circle. LUTNICK instructed all of the fraud being committed. He used philanthropy as a smokescreen for illegal activity.”

The money moved through Parabridge International Services — an affiliate that handled payroll and charity funds. The whistleblower said PIS was connected to Deutsche Bank accounts in Singapore and Hong Kong. Cantor paid brokers from foreign foundations through PIS. A former Deutsche Bank CEO served as its Global President. The Panama Papers connected Cantor Fitzgerald to shell companies.

The money being laundered, the whistleblower said, came “from the Russian Mafia. That was what senior people in the trading market thought.”

He mapped a network that stretched far beyond Cantor. BGC Partners created subsidiaries in Delaware, Cyprus, and Malta. BGC International used the same intermediaries as Inter Jura — the entity associated with Paul Manafort. Aubin Securities was linked to banned Russian entities.

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