Six-point-seven billion dollars. Paid in full. April 2008. While Bear Stearns collapsed, while Lehman Brothers died, while nine million Americans lost their homes—someone made sure Jeffrey Epstein’s offshore vault walked away clean. This is what everyone is missing about the Epstein files: the financial crimes that made the sex trafficking possible.
Tonight’s Narativ Live brought together three investigators tracking different pieces of the same network. Ellie Leonard discovered a letter that proves Epstein impersonated his own lawyer while negotiating his 2008 plea deal. Kait Justice exposed how current Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s business ties to Epstein run through an Israeli intelligence network. And Lev Parnas, who once helped build this network, is now working to dismantle it piece by piece.
The conversation revealed something extraordinary: the same eighty-four day window in 2008 when Liquid Funding extracted six-point-seven billion dollars is the same window when Epstein’s legal team was negotiating the plea deal that buried everything. Not a coincidence. Coordination.
Ellie Leonard walked through her forensic analysis of the letter Epstein wrote to prosecutor Alex Acosta. The punctuation gave him away—two commas in a row, periods with random spacing, no apostrophes, chaotic syntax. All matching Epstein’s documented email patterns. The letter attacked lead prosecutor Marie Villafaña, claimed her evidence was wildly exaggerated, and asked Acosta to reconsider the plea proposal. It worked. What started as an eighty-two page memo with sixty indictments became two counts: procuring a minor for prostitution and solicitation.
Kait Justice explained how Scott Bessent worked with Ehud Barak’s private intelligence firm Ergo while serving as Chief Investment Officer at Soros Fund Management during the 2008 crisis. Barak then formed his own Israeli company called Ergo, followed by a trio of entities based on “Cogito, ergo, sum.” One of those entities—Sum—brought in Epstein’s U.S. Virgin Islands Southern Trust Company as a fifty percent partner in January 2016. Senator Ron Wyden says Bessent is now refusing to provide Congress with financial records relating to Southern Trust. The question is obvious: what’s in those records that’s worth protecting seventeen years later?
Lev Parnas connected the dots between the financial extraction and the political protection that followed. He explained how networks coordinate when they’re threatened, how delay tactics protect financial interests, and how having people in key positions—like Mark Filip at DOJ, a former colleague of Epstein’s attorney Ken Starr—makes the protection possible. The same pattern that protected Epstein in 2008 is the same pattern protecting the twenty-nine unnamed individuals Ghislaine Maxwell just revealed in her proffer agreement.
The timeline exposes the coordination. April seventh through eighth, Liquid Funding’s liabilities paid off at par. June twenty-third, Deputy Attorney General Mark Filip tells Epstein’s lawyers the DOJ won’t intervene. June thirtieth, Epstein signs the plea deal. Eighty-four days from extraction to burial.
Bear Stearns owned forty percent of Liquid Funding—worth two-point-six-eight billion dollars—which went to JPMorgan after the rescue. The remaining sixty percent—over four billion dollars—went to unnamed noteholders whose identities have never been revealed. No bankruptcy. No creditor list. No forensic audit. No discovery.
Donald Trump went from nine hundred million in debt to a net worth of one-point-five billion through a decade that included the 2008 crash. In December 2007, weeks before Bear Stearns started to collapse, Trump sealed a senior-secured loan worth nearly half a billion from Andy Beal. The casinos cratered, creditors took the hit, Trump walked away richer. Was Trump one of those unnamed noteholders? Nobody’s been forced to answer.
That’s what the plea deal protected. Not just Epstein’s sex crimes—the financial crimes the sex crimes were designed to enable. The vault that survived while America burned. The network that extracted billions while families lost everything. The protection structure that’s still operating today.
This investigation matters because it reveals how Donald Trump got to power. The same network that built Liquid Funding, that extracted six-point-seven billion dollars, that negotiated the plea deal—that’s the network that put Trump in the White House. Understanding who controls that network is how we stop what’s happening now.
BELOW THE PAYWALL: TWO DOCUMENTS FROM TONIGHT’S SHOW
Narativ Live is available as an audio podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. This is a Narativ production.
Thank you Cat, John Liccione, Lyudmila Piker, Richard Hogan, MD, PhD(2), DBA, Andy Collen, and many others for tuning into my live video with Lev Parnas, Ellie Leonard, and Kait Justice! Join me for my next live video in the app.
