Before we get to this week's episode, I wanted to mention two new podcasts that might interest listeners of On the Nose. JVP has a new podcast called JVP Radio, and if you enjoyed the “Mizrahi Therapy” conversation we had on this podcast, you might enjoy their two-parter on Mizrahi identity. I just listened to their fascinating conversation with Camille Lévy-Sarfati, a writer and curator who left Paris and returned to Tunis, where her family had left, in reclamation of her Tunisian heritage. I also wanted to let you know about the new PalFest Podcast. The latest episode is a really wonderful conversation between Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Palestinian writer and political analyst Tareq Baconi on the occasion of Baconi's new memoir, Fire in Every Direction. They are available wherever you get your podcasts. All right, enjoy this week's episode of On the Nose.

Hello and welcome back to On the Nose, the Jewish Currents podcast. I'm Arielle Angel, editor in chief of Jewish Currents, and I'll be your host for today. Today, we are going to be talking about the antisemitic conspiracy theory come to life known as Jeffrey Epstein. I put this together, as so many of these podcasts, just so that I could have smart people explain things to me, because this story is really one that is totally beyond me in so many different ways. So to talk about Jeffrey Epstein today, I have Ryan Grim, reporter at Drop Site News and cohost of Breaking Points. He's a longtime DC reporter leading the Washington bureaus for the Intercept and HuffPost, and notably, for this conversation, the author of a series of really in-depth, interesting articles about Epstein and his maneuvering in international affairs over the past—I don't know how many weeks or months. I mean, it seems like you guys never sleep. I don't know how you do it. Every time I look back at the site, there's something new. And Noah Kulwin, who's a writer and the cohost of the history podcast Blowback. He's written for New York Mag, the Baffler, Protean, and Jewish Currents—notably, also helped revive Jewish Currents with me eight years ago. He also wrote about Epstein for us at the time that this story was really coming into public view, so many years ago. So we'll talk about that, too.

So because this is kind of like an “Epstein for Dummies” podcast, I was wondering if you guys could give me a little bit of, like a collaborative biography here in terms of: Who is Jeffrey Epstein, and where did he make his money, and how does he climb the ranks of global elite when it doesn't really seem necessarily that he has any particular role or clear-cut reason to be involved in any of the things that he's involved in?

Noah, you want to start with that one?

Yeah. I think, just in the most 101 way, Jeffrey Epstein—he did not begin professional life in any prestigious, hyper-knowledgeable capacity that we're aware of. He was talent-spotted as a teacher at the Dalton School by Donald Barr, the father of William Barr, the Trump One attorney general and also Bush One attorney general. And he parlays his way into what I can only describe as financial advisor royalty. He appears in the 1980s; he takes on a number of very large clients. He becomes somebody who is a fixture of—I guess in the 1960s, the phrase might have been the jet set, the wealthy and well-traveled international class that, particularly in the 1980s, it's like the birth pangs of neoliberalism are really coming into view. In the 1980s, he also begins an association with Donald Trump. I don't know, and I know that it's been variously reported, how exactly they came into each other's orbit, but through the ’80s and ’90s, Epstein is reported to have a close relationship with Trump. This is partly because of Epstein's presence in Palm Beach, where Trump has set up Mar-a-Lago, which, in the course of the ’80s, he turns into this lux club.

But Epstein also develops associations with a lot of other infamous and powerful rich people. I think probably most notably by now, Leon Black, the head of the private equity giant Apollo Global Management, and Les Wexner being the other, the head of The Limited, which is the parent company of Victoria's Secret and Abercrombie & Fitch. Epstein is reported to do any number of things for these people. He's given power of attorney, which does not mean that he's literally the only person making financial decisions for these people, but it means that he is given the authority to move huge amounts of money and to make high-level business decisions on their behalf. He's reported to be a bit of a yenta. He introduced, I believe, the hedge funder Glenn Dubin to his wife, Eva Dubin. But what Epstein exactly does is not always clear, and what Ryan's and Maz Hussain's reporting at Drop Site has exposed is that Epstein was directly interacting and working with people in the intelligence world, most notably and visibly in Israel. But we also know that he, let's say, interfaced with leaders, and politicians, and intelligence agency chiefs from a number of governments. How all of these facts necessarily relate to the sex trafficking for which we know him is not exactly clear. There's a lot of circumstantial evidence and suggestive evidence of political blackmail scheming. But I will leave it there and let Ryan, I think, pick up where some of the facts may be.

Yeah, no, I think that's right. I think the jet set evolves, in the 2010s, into what we understand as the Davos set, as they really consolidate their power. Thinking about the Davos set helps to figure out what Epstein's role was here, because I think people are confused about it because they get stuck in this mold of: Was Jeffrey Epstein a Mossad agent? And then you're like: What would that even mean? There are such things as Mossad agents. You can be recruited, and you have a handler, and you're taking directives from Mossad. Does not appear by any stretch—as far as we can tell, maybe more things will come out—that that's the kind of relationship that we're talking about. What seems to be more accurate is that he is a kind of free, radical operator within this Davos set and is one of the most influential and connected members of that set. And so, if you are, let's say, Ehud Barak, who we're going to talk about, and you've just left your Israeli government job as minister of defense, and you need a connection in Russia, or you need a connection in West Africa, or you need a connection in the United States of America, he's a unique connector. Not many people can get you a meeting both with Bill Clinton and a West African dictator, and with Sarkozy, and with Macron, and with Putin. Very few people in the world have that range.

But how? How does that happen? Like, is it his winning personality? Noah talked about the blackmail stuff, like the possibility that it is connected to the Lolita Express and powerful men going on these sex trips and then having to account for them.

Partly—it's kind of a joke, but his winning personality. People will tell you, who interfaced with him, that he was over-the-top charming, and that matters in that world. And this comes from people that I've spoken to, but also, from reading a lot of his emails, he had an unusual habit of being very blunt and oftentimes even rude to these extremely powerful people. They're not used to that.

He negged them.

Yes, yeah, exactly. I think they found it actually refreshing. Famously, the New York Times published emails about him telling Leon Black: Your kids are complete morons. You're an idiot. You're such a jerk. Give me my $40 million immediately. There's nobody in Leon Black's life that's talking to him like that. So there's some of that. But then, also, he makes things happen. He gets Ehud Barak a meeting with Putin. And then, people say like: Oh, he actually had no tax experience. He wasn't even accredited or whatever. This is a fake cover for whatever intel thing he was running. In fact, I think the lack of training and the lack of certification made his advice almost more valuable to a lot of these people, because he was on the cutting edge of money laundering and other kinds of things that a normal tax person is not going to advise you to do. He is bending and breaking international tax rules at a pioneering rate. Developing, like: Hey, if you say you're setting up a biomedical company in the U.S. Virgin Islands, you can now funnel $50 billion through it here, and you can get this tax break doing that, and I've got this company in Israel that is actually doing biomedical stuff, and so we'll link it to that. Most tax people are like: I'm not coming anywhere near this. Because also, his clients are sanctioned people. They're drug runners or gun runners; they're operating mines in areas where they're abusing children.

Well, I mean, I guess in that regard too, it seems like there may also have been—because he's, in a certain sense, kind of a nobody—a willingness to walk straight into the darkness, where maybe there was a little bit more hesitancy among people with more of a profile.

Yeah, totally.

I want to draw a parallel to a different event in the news in the last couple of months. I am an NBA fan, and the Los Angeles Clippers are owned by Steve Ballmer, a co-founder of Microsoft, the wealthiest individual sports owner in the professional leagues. And it came out that the Clippers—allegedly, although it seems pretty clear that this is what they were doing—they were funneling money to their star player so that it did not count toward the league's salary cap. So they were illegally getting him money under the table by routing it through this company called Aspiration, that was basically in the business of—I mean, they did a bunch of things—but the main thing was: Oh, you are a carbon emitter? Well, we trade in carbon credits, so we offset your moral risk by buying these credits. If that does not sound like a compelling business to you, it wasn't. It was also fraudulent, according to the Justice Department. One of the things that immediately came out—there was a lot of, in the sycophantic NBA press, a lot of skepticism: Why would Ballmer pay money to these people? Why would he work with these crooks? He's so rich, he's so powerful. Why does he need these veritable hoodlums? It turns out that, well, Steve Ballmer may have been that rich, but Kawhi Leonard may really have wanted to have gotten paid in that way, and he wanted money that he couldn't otherwise get. And so, if Ballmer really wanted to do this shady kind of deal, he had to go to the kinds of people who are willing to do that shady kind of deal. To me, that illustrates a principle that applies quite broadly, which is that if you want to do shady stuff, then you need shady people to do it with, and Jeffrey Epstein is a shady guy par excellence. I mean, a lot of what we know and we now view rightfully as almost like this place of like, gothic horror, in terms of the island, the Upper East Side townhouse. Those were very effective marketing tools, no doubt, in his business of making people feel like he was exactly the kind of person they needed if they had to do something underhanded.

Yeah. I also think Epstein's ability to surround himself with other powerful people became a self-reinforcing phenomenon. So he's shady. If you need something done that's shady, like you need sanctioned money moved through a Swiss bank to an African mine, he can do it, but you're probably going to be okay because: Is that a picture of him with Bill Clinton, and Putin, and all of these other celebrities? Suggesting impunity. It's easy to find shady people. It's hard to find shady people where you're confident they're not going to go down with you.

Is it clear where the money comes from? I understand that he has power of attorney from Wexner and that he has his own financial business or whatever, but is that enough to do all of what he's doing? Is he in the echelon that he's playing in, or is there some kind of punching above his weight?

That part isn't entirely clear. JP Morgan looked very closely at the cash moving in and out related to the sex trafficking part. It’d be nice if they and the Swiss bank that he worked with would do a forensic analysis to try to figure out a lot more. But that's going to go to things that they don't want to talk about. They're okay outing the guy as a sex trafficker, but figuring out who he's getting his money from and where it's going is like, there's nobody in power who has an interest in that getting out. We can say he was tight with the Adnan Khashoggi circle. He's a known CIA asset, Saudi businessman, arms trafficker, one of the richest people in the world for a very long time, who was involved in Iran-Contra, who was involved in moving weapons in Africa for various different conflicts, moving gems, moving diamonds. The kind of guy that's like working in that element of the world, where you've got a combination of organized crime, and intelligence, and insurrections, and insurgencies. And so, Epstein is in that world, and I think when you're in that world, you can find yourself on the receiving end of significant amounts of money if you can cut the right deals. Whether that came from organized crime, something clean, from intelligence. It's usually a combination of all of it. But then, by the time he gets to Wexner, he's doing quite well, and from there, he's able to then leverage all his different relationships: I do Wexner, so Black, you should go with me too. I do Wexner and Black, you should now work with me. And so, it just grows from that point.

And there's also—and I really appreciate what you said earlier, Ryan—there's been a rush to paint Epstein as a cut-and-dry Mossad asset; as an asset of the Israeli government or of military intelligence in Israel. I do not believe that when you look at the emails that have come out and when you look at the good reporting, the picture is more complicated. It does not mean that he was not working in concert with these intelligence agencies or governments. It does not mean he wasn't being paid by them for some work. It also doesn't mean that he himself did not view himself as a patriot for one or more of these governments. I think the case of, for example, Arnon Milchan, the Hollywood producer who made wonderful movies such as Falling Down and LA Confidential—he was a legit Israeli spy, in the most straight-up, we have the proof. James Bamford's book Spyfail tells the story remarkably well. Milchin even was able to get, I think it was nuclear secrets, to Israel with the help of Sidney Pollack. It's a really wild story. I bring it up, again, not to say like: That's the real thing. The Epstein stuff is fake. It's just that's a good example of a very straightforward Israeli intelligence operation or espionage, let's say. In Epstein's case, we have a lot of evidence that he is able to get things done, in part because he represents himself as a kind of agent or freelance broker for governments. We also see him helping out very specific figures. I mean, Ehud Barak's an interesting figure because he is in the minority political camp in Israel, but he is very much an elite in terms of his personal wealth and the milieu that he inhabits. It's the tech and military industrial complex. I mean, your reporting has established this so astonishingly well—that an enormous part of how Epstein could do anything that he did is that he was able to really credibly represent himself as, again, a freelance deal maker. He met with an enormous and wide variety of people and was incredibly flexible in all of the different hats he would wear and tools and services he could provide toward that end.

Rather than saying like: He's an employee or an agent of Mossad, that he's working for Mossad, I think it's actually easier to understand as Mossad working for him. And not just Mossad. I’m using Mossad as a general term here, but the Israeli intelligence and national security apparatus. You see in the emails, Barak and Epstein both able to deploy that apparatus on behalf of their business operations that they're trying to do, whether it's in Cote d' Ivoire, or Nigeria, or Mongolia—we'll have future stories about where else they've been doing that—which then leads to security agreements between the states. So it's not just private enterprise, but it's in the service of producing this Israeli cybersurveillance industry around the world, which Barak is a major player in and which is of significant historical importance. The advent of that Israeli cyberweapons empire has changed what's possible for these tech companies to do and has become integrated into, I'd say, every big tech company on the planet, minus, probably, some Chinese ones. So, in some ways, it's like, yeah, he's not what Noah's describing as this typical agent who's stealing things and giving them to Israel. We don't have the evidence to prove that, and also the evidence, I think, suggests that's not what's happening. But what he was doing may be of much more significant consequence, globally.

I want to get deeper into your reporting, Ryan, with Murtaza. It's a mind-boggling amount of information that's come out in all of these emails, and you're doing us all a real service sifting through it. There's stuff about security agreements with Mongolia, there's stuff about selling spyware to Cote d'Ivoire that basically reinforces the authoritarian regime. There's stuff about brokering the relationship between Trump and Modi. There's stuff about working with the Rothschilds to finance the Israeli cyberweapons empire, which—I mean, we should take a look at these headlines, just on their face, because I want to talk after this about like the sense of conspiracy around this and how we make sense of the shape of it. But I was hoping you could tell us a little bit more about this reporting, both in the specifics but also in the zoomed-out sense. What do we take from this? What do we learn about the way that the world works from diving into these emails?

The key thing that I've taken away from it is the incredible overlap between the above-board Davos, Fortune 100 crowd with the intelligence world, with organized crime, and with, basically, resource extraction—the darker side of the global economy that they don't really want to talk about in Davos, and, in fact, all they talk about in Davos when it comes to the darker side of the economy is how they're going to clean it up: They're going to respect human rights in the mines; they're going to respect environmental rights when it comes to resource extraction; they're going to do carbon capture and they're going to focus on saving the world from climate change, when, in fact, all the people there, most of their wealth comes from resource extraction. And because of the role that conflict plays in that, that means you're going to have this portion of the economy happening in places that are quite unstable, which, then, is an invitation for intervention into the domestic politics there in order to win these resource concessions. And Epstein and Barak, that's a central part of what they're up to. Not just Barak; we have his inbox, so that helps a lot. But Epstein is clearly like—this is a major part of the world that he understands. And so, those people also, then—those countries and those factions within those countries—also want Israeli cybertechnology because they see that as a way of getting an advantage in their attempts to consolidate power. And involving all of his elite circles is interesting. Like, this is the real economy, and it's the real political economy. It's the real politics of the world. He's bouncing around from JP Morgan to Deutsche Bank, and then, in that one headline, he's working with Edmond de Rothschild Bank in Switzerland, and the head of it, Ariane de Rothschild, clearly grows fairly close with him because those are the banks that are more willing to abide by the kind of secrecy and envelope-pushing that you need if you're going to work in this violent resource extractive economy.

I mean, not to point out the most obvious naive point here, but a lot of the people who are being discussed, they're not elected officials. Even Ehud Barak, as you mentioned, is not serving an official role. This is an entire, alternate track in which power is moving. And we know this to be true—for those of us who understand capitalism—we know this to be true, and yet, to see it laid out, the way these relationships are being built, is pretty striking. I also wonder: There are some representations of this that make it seem as though Epstein is behind Barak. Like, Epstein is pushing Barak, and he needs Barak. And then, there are some that make it sound like Barak really needs Epstein and is using him. Who's using who, basically, in this equation? Do you have a sense of that?

The power dynamic between those two seems to actually be tilted toward Epstein. If you look at the bulk of their correspondence, it does seem—interestingly and confusingly, really, if you're coming to this fresh—to be Epstein that's calling the shots, that's coaching him, that understands that Barak is very good at opening doors around the world. And also, very importantly, he has all the connections to the Israeli cybertech stuff that flows out of the intel infrastructure there. So that's his role, but he's kind of Epstein's vehicle for this.

Noah, I want to go back to you. I want to talk about some of the Israel stuff, not just from the perspective of like, what is he doing with Israel, but also some of the motivation behind this. Your feeling is that he is pretty flexible, as you said, but I haven't seen anything where he's working necessarily against Israeli national interest. It seems like he's internalized Israeli national interest as it relates to Iran, as it relates to Syria. So first of all, how do you see that? How do you see his relationship to Israeli national interests? And is there anything more to say than this is kind of a Boomer, Jewish guy, Zionism?

I offer a couple possibilities because I don't want to make a definitive statement or ruling on this, because we're working with a keyhole view of this world. I think that Jeffrey Epstein and the kind of work he was doing with and for Israel, what is exceptional about it is the high level at which it was done, the secrecy with which it was carried out, and the seeming efficacy of his involvement. The idea, though, that there is an interest, apart from the American interest, as well, in seeing the proliferation of Israeli surveillance and spyware tech—you brought up, for example, Syria and Iran. Those are places, too, where essentially, the Israeli interest is not that far off from the American interest. I'm not saying they're identical, but I think part of what makes somebody able to so freely act as, essentially, a foreign agent for Israel as an American is because our government has, more or less, permitted some flavor of that for going on four or five decades. There are obviously moments where we crack down on that, but on the whole, it's tolerated, encouraged, et cetera. And so, I think that a lot of what Jeffrey Epstein, if we look at it—I don't think people wear IDF hoodies because they're just a fan of doing deals with Israel. He references his Jewishness, and he references a pretty familiar, Boomer-style sense of Jewishness and toughness in Israel, but again, to me, what it brings into relief is the ways in which that Israeli interest and American interest, although very divergent at lots of moments, are viewed by the elites of those countries and the people making decision and people like Epstein as actually being coterminous.

But isn't this a place, actually, where there was some daylight? I mean, with the Iran stuff, Obama's trying to make the deal. In your reporting, Ryan, this is happening during the Iran deal. Epstein and Barak are against it. They're trying to put out op-eds to influence the outcome there. So there was some daylight.

But to Noah's point, that was a rare moment where Obama broke with AIPAC and said: We're going to do this Iran deal. His Syria policy, there was some daylight between what Israel wanted and what Obama wanted there. But in the expanse of U.S.-Israeli policy, there usually isn't much. And also, make of this what you will, and I think it helped him in some ways, Epstein was—you can tell by his relationship with Ehud Barak—he's more of a labor Zionist. Like, he has influence with Netanyahu's circle and obviously does deals while Netanyahu is prime minister but personally is closer to the opposition to Netanyahu. And there are emails in there agreeing with Chomsky, in some ways, on the mistakes Israel is making and the way it's going to undermine the state going forward. Not all the way agreeing with Chomsky, but he's much more willing to be critical of the state, but from a place of friendship.

Very liberal zionist. Maybe this is a good time to talk about the shape of conspiracy and what it means. I'm just going to read the headlines, the Drop Site headlines, because I think it's instructive: “Jeffrey Epstein and the Mossad: How The Sex-Trafficker Helped Israel Build a Backchannel to Russia Amid Syrian Civil War”; “Jeffrey Epstein Pursued Swiss Rothschild Bank to Finance Israeli Cyberweapons Empire”; “Israeli Spy Stayed for Weeks at a Time With Jeffrey Epstein in Manhattan”; and the latest one—I mean, not on par in terms of the effect, but still interesting—“Jeffrey Epstein Aided Alan Dershowitz’s Attack on Mearsheimer and Walt’s ‘Israel Lobby’. Ryan, I saw you on Breaking Points, basically saying, when you talk about this stuff, it makes you look like a crazy person. What you didn't say is it makes you look like an antisemite, and I think that was probably an intentional swap there that you made. But still, the shape of this is very tough.

Yes. And that rose to particular prominence when it came to the Rothschild Bank. There's other Swiss banks he could have worked with. It’s like, come on, man. Really? When our Breaking Points segment went up, YouTube put a Wikipedia entry underneath it to the Rothschild family. So it's like, their AI is telling them: This might be some antisemitic conspiracy stuff going on in this YouTube clip here, so go read Wikipedia about the Rothschilds so that you can contextualize this video. But, yeah, when you're dealing in a world of global conspiracy, where people are operating behind the scenes, using their connections and their financial resources to leverage global politics in their direction, you're up against the edge right there.

Well, it's like what Naomi Klein says; The conspiracy is capitalism. Like, there is a conspiracy, and the conspiracy is capitalism.

Right.

A book that helped me indirectly with this stuff was The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills, a sociologist from the first half of the 20th century, primarily, who wrote a number of really fascinating studies about the structure of the upper rungs of the bourgeoisie in American life at the time that he wrote it—I think in the 1950s, early 1950s. One of the things that he describes is the world of elite, almost like social reproduction—the ways in which the high rungs of capitalism are, in fact, a various set of conspiracies. Part of what makes somebody an effective capitalist in the settings of, say, I don't know, private banking, is being able to draw upon a large network of people whom you trust and who trust you. Not just that you trust in the sense of your word is bond, although obviously that's part of it, but also trust in the sense that you are the right kind of person and that you can be trusted to understand and know what needs to be known and understood in the context of these very sensitive things involving other people who are part of this network. Which, to me, is an important piece of disentangling. Like, when you're looking at a conspiracy: Who are the participants in a plan to kill a president or something? And when you're looking at a conspiracy on the level of: So was Jeffrey Epstein planted by the Rothschild family? Trying to develop an ornate set of explanations for how something very disturbing and historically resonant is able to manifest.

There's an artist, Mark Lombardi, he was a conceptual artist in the 1990s, who became famous in that time because he made these diagrams of interlocks. And these interlocks were all essentially actual linkages between people caught up in very frothy conspiracies from the 1980s. It would connect the Bush family to the bin Ladens. Which meant, by the way, that the FBI went to the Whitney after 9/11 to ask about these drawings, and Lombardi had, by that time, committed suicide. But these drawings are, essentially, over time, when you look at them over the course of Lombardi's career, they took on this more global shape, like a globule literal kind of shape, as opposed to just these kinds of sprawling maps. But my reading of it is that it was an appreciation of how these very specific conspiracies connecting the bin Laden family to Bush owning energy companies and so forth reflected the structure of an increasingly globalized economy. And the way in which conspiracy manifests at this point in time is in, more or less, the execution of what we also consider to be the worst, most destructive, and also like the steering parts of our society right now—the plutocracy and all of the perversion and depravity that I guess that entails now.

Yeah. I think some of what you guys are both saying—and you've said it in various ways throughout this podcast—is that there is a real exhortation, on your part, not to just stack things, essentially, but to actually tease out more of the nuances of what's happening. When I look at Drop Site’s reporting, for me, the Putin-Syria stuff is crazy. But while it's newsworthy that Epstein is helping Dershowitz write his anti-Mearsheimer and Walt piece and disseminating it, that's not a conspiracy. That is a boomer Zionist helping a friend with an op ed on a topic he agrees with and disseminating it to influential people.

Except that the boomer is the money man for Wexner, who's a major donor to the school.

For sure, and yes, they are in a powerful circle, but at the same time, there's also a simple understanding of that. These are powerful people, and they exert influence, and their personal preferences and politics become part of that influence. I mean, when I see the subhead in the Rothschild piece that's like: “The realization of the Zionist vision.”—that's a subhead. What is that? That is a quote from the statement that the Israeli government makes about the Rothschild Foundation, about how they've been essential to building the Zionist vision. That's just history. They have invested in the building up of Palestine as an Israeli state, pre-state, and then continued, and this is just a kind of parve statement from their agreement to resolve this tax fraud issue, basically. Which, the tax fraud issue—again, capitalism is the conspiracy or whatever—but this phrase coming up for them. it's just par for the course. Maybe this is too insider baseball, but I'm just saying, if you're reading quickly or reading for headlines or whatever, it's like, all of this stuff stacks. You can draw inferences about the ways that this one Jewish pedophile is acting on behalf of the Zionist state for the interests of that state, and you can draw all kinds of inferences about motivation, but you can also see this as a person with his own politics, with access to a very powerful milieu inhabiting that role, on some level. And those may or may not be two different things. I don't know.

I mean, that's one reason I wish that more of the press was covering more of this. You have our stories, and we've got ones coming involving the Saudis, the UAE, but if the press generally were writing more about Epstein and his interactions with these global warlords, regardless of what country they come from or what their religion is, that would be helpful, but they're not. All they'll touch is the sex abuse part or anything salacious that they can find in the emails.

Yeah, I mean, Branko Marcetic says in Jacobin that we need to break the taboo of even asking questions about his links to the Israeli state. And I mean, is there that taboo? Like, do you think that that's the reason why they're not reporting on it?

Yeah. An editor at a major paper told me just recently that they were just cleared to start writing about it.

There was a literal moratorium.

You can infer it from its absence, too. I mean, it's kind of astonishing. There has been one very good strand of Epstein reporting in the New York Times that I follow by journalists like Matt Goldstein, who are on the business desk, who essentially have been very dogged on the question of the J.P. Morgan Suspicious Activity Reports or SARs. And what those journalists have focused on and successfully been able to get stories out about, they show beyond a shadow of a doubt that Epstein was a very controversial client at the highest levels of the banks over and over again, and that just on the measure of volume alone, the book of business that he brought in was really, really crazy. And so it's like, cool. That is the one major novel, revelatory string of reporting that has been teased out on this subject at that paper, which is literally the largest agglomeration of journalistic firepower anywhere in the world at this point.

Every other paper beats the Times on it at this point, with the exception maybe of the Post. Like the Wall Street Journal has had some pretty substantial reporting, even if it's regurgitating, in some cases, earlier reporting from Drop Site or from Julie Brown at the Miami Herald or something. The omerta, I think of it as, on the subject, is really, really strong, and a lot of it is perhaps like reputational stuff about the fear of being seen as indulging antisemitic stereotypes at this very sensitive time, and so on and so on. Like you can imagine that. And then, I can also imagine that there's a lot of people for whom the facts of the situation are themselves uncomfortable enough—about not wanting to yank particularly hard on this thread. And that's speculation, but it is knowing the people who report these kinds of stories and also just observing, again, a really astonishing lack relative to the size of the story and relative to the public interest in the story. This is the most sought-after story in the world, and it's not just the salaciousness. It's not.

No, and also, the left and the right have their own reasons for being interested in it.

I mean, Marjorie Taylor Greene, she's clearly resigning for a lot of different reasons, but one of the big ones is evidently that it's like the dog who bit the car. Folks on Chapo Trap House said this recently, too—she thought that she was going to be in the party getting rid of pedophiles, and then, it turns out that she's in the party that is literally protecting the most famous pedophile of all time at this point. Again, Drop Site and other sites have blazed a trail that the biggest, most powerful journalistic institutions in this country have not pursued nearly as vehemently.

Yeah. Maybe, if we could go back and do it again, I'd push to get some of the Saudi UAE stuff out faster because there's also an overlap there. One thing that Barak and also Epstein seem to appreciate about Israel, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia is like, they are states. So, within this Davos world, which is kind of stateless and above the states, to have a state capacity helps you inside that world. The UAE has really figured this out when it comes to money laundering. A lot of like African resources, both physical and also the value that's created by them flows through the UAE because the UAE—and I think, to some degree, you can say Saudi Arabia and Israel, also—figured out like: As states, we're recognized by the United Nations, we can write laws that would make what would otherwise be organized crime, make it legal. The UAE being the best example of that. So if you're a Nigerian mine owner, you're running your money through the UAE and washing it there. Understanding how those flows work becomes extremely valuable to oligarchs, who then go to somebody like Jeffrey Epstein, who then has the connections to make all that flow and make it legal enough.

Yeah, that's fascinating and terrifying. There's actually this great line, Noah, in the piece that you published with Ari Brostoff in 2019 that says: “Rather than endlessly tracing these webs of influence, we might do better to just listen for ideological echoes.” I love that line, in terms of how to understand some of this stuff. I've been thinking about Epstein almost a little bit as a cipher, as I've been reading these Drop Site pieces, in the sense that Epstein is the conduit for a lot of this stuff, and he is directing some of this stuff in certain kinds of ways, but he's almost just the mirror of the flow—the way that we see the flow of power in action. There's so many other different interests, obviously, being represented, and he's extremely interesting, just in terms of what he tells us about our world and how he reflects it back to us in all of its sordidness. Obviously, he's an individual who did really terrible things, but for me, in terms of the way that the story operates, you go through in the Drop Site pieces, whole sections without mentioning Epstein, because so much of what is set in motion by a meeting then takes on a life of its own and has its own impacts in the world. And so, it's just something that I'm sitting with.

One thing that I think is really helpful as well is to also consider that Epstein-like figures have existed before. It's almost an archetype to consider. The person who he most reminds me of is a guy named Sidney Korshak, who was the Chicago mob's big LA fixer. He was this really infamous figure. Everybody was connected to him. There's a great book about him called Supermob, and one of the things that it gets at is the idea that stuff like organized crime and figures like a Korshak, or, in today's age, an Epstein, these essential conduits—to use your word, Arielle—are a key part of explaining how the world works today, just as people like Korshak were a really important part of explaining how the world worked in its time. To that effect, it also means that stuff like the Chicago outfit was important to explaining how the world worked at that time. I mean, they owned General Dynamics, one of the largest military contractors in the early 1960s.

There is a way in which I think, today—again, in a more globalized society, in a society where ownership and assetization make this kind of influence a little bit different—you see this kind of power brokering, though, emerge in these similar kinds of underground criminal networks, however you want to call them. But rather than getting caught up trying to determine who's the real Jeffrey Epstein—what was he really doing, what's the real story with that guy—instead of trying to come up with some distinct singular truth in the Robert Caro sense, perhaps, to me, it's been helpful to think about, in the context of all of this reporting and all of the specific facts we're learning, that these are evidence of how these kinds of criminal, power broker, underworld, overlord-type figures operate. That this is evidence of how somebody like that does their business, and there's going to be a lot that we may never know—in fact, most that we won't ever know—but that it also doesn't make us cynical to see that people like this exist and operate free from democratic and public vision and control, but that it does sharpen our understanding of how it is that the ruling class and how the power elite are able to maintain that power and propagate it. Because people like Jeffrey Epstein would not exist were he not viewed as indispensable toward that end by the highest, most powerful people in our society. The person whom Epstein met with the most that I've seen the least reporting on (and whom I always wonder about) is Bill Burns, who was Biden's CIA director. Jeffrey Epstein met with Bill Burns before he was Biden's CIA director. Jeffrey Epstein was somebody who was seen as powerful, knowledgeable, and indispensable by these sorts of figures, and that should tell us a lot about the nature of our ruling class.

What I would say also, to anybody who is nervous about the way that this feeds into antisemitic conspiracy theories, it's more reason to root for it and hope for the rise of either left-wing populism or some type of left-wing analytical approach to global capitalism. The problem—among all their problems—with right-wing populism, because they refuse to identify the villain as the billionaire class and do a straight-up class analysis, they always need some type of lizard people to fit into that. And almost everywhere, it's going to be a global Jewish conspiracy that becomes the villain of right-wing populism, whereas the left wing doesn't need to do that because they have an analysis that is independent of your religion, your ethnicity, your background.

That is a great point, and I think Noah's point, too, is well taken. Like, this is a type. This is an archetype. They're not always Jewish. I wish we had had more time to talk a little bit about: Does Epstein work as a non-Jewish character? His ideological Zionism is in this, and we can't take it out, but it's not clear to me even that somebody who was positioned as he was in American finance, and like getting involved in weapons as a lucrative venture, that that ideology is necessary to have anyway. It's not clear to me, necessarily, that he would make different decisions in that regard, you know? So I think this is really helpful for me. Thank you, guys. I really, really appreciate you joining me on the show.

Thank you.

Yeah, good talking to you guys. Really enjoyed that.

This has been another episode of On the Nose. Thank you to our editor, Jesse Brenneman. If you like this episode, share it, and as always, subscribe to Jewish Currents, JewishCurrents.org. See you next time.