I went on Wajahat Ali’s show today to talk about Jeffrey Epstein, and I left thinking about a door. Not a jail door. The door back in.
Watch who is walking through it.
Michael Cohen went to prison for Donald Trump. He spent seven years calling him a con man. This week he reconciled with him — and now says the testimony that helped convict his old boss was “coerced.” Trump’s lawyers moved within days to throw out the New York cases. The fixer is back, and this time the fix is the record itself.
Leon Black walks through the same door Thursday. He paid Jeffrey Epstein more than $150 million — for “tax advice,” he says. He paid the U.S. Virgin Islands $62 million more — and bought himself what the rest of us cannot: immunity from further prosecution. Now he returns to the House Oversight Committee, under oath and on camera for the first time. A man who has sat two chairs from Vladimir Putin, answering to Congress about the financier he overpaid by nine figures.
Paolo Zampolli never left at all. He brought Melania to America and introduced her to Trump. He failed his security clearance, then took a government title anyway. He wrote to Russia’s UN ambassador on his private Gmail. He asked ICE to detain the mother of his child. Agents deported her to Brazil. He works inside the administration today.
Three men. One pattern. Each of them should be radioactive. Each of them walks back in. And each carries a thread that runs to Moscow — Cohen through the Russian-financed sale of a Palm Beach mansion he brokered, Black through Putin, Zampolli through the Russian ambassador Vitaly Churkin.
Here is the number that should end the argument. Zero. This Justice Department has opened not one investigation into any of it. The man who ran the Epstein cover-up is days from running the Department that buried it.
This is what people miss when they say nothing is happening. Something is happening. It just isn’t justice. The network is reassembling in daylight — reconciling, settling, testifying, getting hired — and calling it moving on.
I don’t think it’s moving on. I think it’s a reunion. Thursday, when Leon Black raises his right hand, we get to watch one more guest arrive.
Amanda Ungaro joins me tonight at 7. She kept the emails. She has more.
— Zev Shalev
Thank you Lev Parnas, Cat: Poli-Psych, LC - Silence is Complicity, Lyudmila and Daniel, ann schneider, and many others for tuning into my live video with THE LEFT HOOK with Wajahat Ali! Join me for my next live video in the app.
