What REALLY Happens When You Investigate the Epstein Class Elites... | Nick Bryant

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So I think it's a little bit of both. Yeah. You've got a case, Chris Hedges was a superstar at the New York Times, won a Pulitzer Prize. Chris Hedges? Yeah. And he knew, he told me that, and I believe this, a number of people knew that when Bush came out with that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction, a lot of people knew it was bullshit. And I mean, it was being deconstructed. It was almost in real time on the internet. And he said the emperor has no clothes. And he got fired. He got fired for that. Chris Hedges, let's pull that up. Good for him. He stood on business. The New York Times fired him because he said, I think they're wrong. Well, yeah. I mean, it was very obvious to all of them. What did he tell you made it obvious at the time? I mean, it's very obvious now, but like when he saw it while it was happening. Well, he was, he was reporting in the Middle East. So he knew he was pretty plugged into that area. And then there, a friend of mine was an editor at a large magazine and he's a free thinker. And the people that worked at that magazine were on a reservation that they didn't even know they were on. Hmm. Their, their minds were, you know, so myopic that, and they didn't even know that. Imagine that being so in your own world that you don't even know that you're Truman. I mean, um, his boss didn't believe that there was blackmail going on with the Epstein case. I mean, that's how naive she was. Your friend. My friend's boss. Yeah. And then my friend would, would like submit an article by me like once a year or so. And I wrote a book about Watergate and at the heart of Watergate is a CIA honey trap. That's how I got turned on to the underside of the Watergate story. When did you write that book? Oh, it came out a couple of years ago. Okay. Two or three years ago. It's a, it's a good book. Yeah, I might check it out. So, um, I had a lot of evidence that Bob Woodward is a pathological liar or serial liar. I don't, I don't know the difference, but he, he lies a lot. And he, and I've nailed him in his Watergate reporting. He lies a lot. And can you get, can you explain like some of the things you would lie about? Well, he said that, that there was this omniscient source deep throat. Yeah. Deep throat that gave him all this information. And. Deep throat, uh, Mark Felt, who he said was deep throat, could have given him some information, but there's no way. And then Woodward said that, um, Woodward said that he would move the flower pot on his balcony and that would signal deep throat to that, to meet that night. And then they'd have this, they, Woodward would take all these cabs and things like that and they'd meet at a parking lot. And. Yeah. In Virginia. So Mark Felt during this period had been fired by the FBI. And so. And he wasn't, Mark Felt wasn't revealed until he died, I believe, right? Yeah. After he had Alzheimer's. And, um, and like I said, I'm sure he gave Woodward some information, but so we're supposed to believe that the dude drove into Washington DC every day and looked at Woodward's, uh, balcony. But here's the thing about Woodward. If you look at the balcony, it was in the back of the building. It was facing like a courtyard. So you would have to, you would, you would have to drive into the alley and get onto your car and walk probably about 60 feet and look directly up. Or he had a trap house. Yeah. And then, and then, um, if deep throat wanted to contact Woodward, he would put on, on a certain page of the New York times. He'd put, he'd put a clock there about at the time that they want to meet. Okay. So. So he would draw a clock and leave the times. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, but at that apartment building, everybody, all the New York times were put into a pile and everybody just got, so there's so much line and Alexander Haig was really the source that was the death knell. Who was Alexander Haig? He was, uh, Nixon's chief of staff. He didn't like Nixon. You know what's funny? We look at Watergate now and you look at, yeah, obviously it was like this thing where there was lies and coverups and they literally broke in and stole some shit, but you compare it to the shit we have now. Yeah. It's a Tuesday. I mean, Nick, a month and a half ago, the white house situation room tapes were leaked to the New York times. Nobody's talking about it. That would be like a biblical scandal in any other era, but we are so inundated with w there's, there's so much noise of such insane, no fucking way. That's actually true. But Oh my God, it's true stories. That's something like Watergate today. I don't even know if it would make the front page, Watergate wouldn't even be a, a blip right today. And Nixon actually listened to the court and surrendered the tapes. I don't think any president recently would actually have surrendered the tapes. So, um, would have listened to the court and surrendered the tapes. Yeah. And then they get, then their attorney general would go in front of the fucking Senate and be like, yeah, why are you breaking the law? Because we want to. Okay. No further questions. It's like, what the fuck man? Well, as I was saying earlier, when you've got a lot of compromised people in the government, you're going to end up with the government that we have, they're not. So you had. The weapons of mass destruction line. No heads rolled. You had the financial meltdown destroyed millions of Americans, millions of Americans, no heads rolled. That's right. Um. COVID. Well, you had Snowden's disclosures about how we're being illegally spied on. No heads rolled. And then you've got. Very strong evidence that that virus came out of the Wuhan lab. No heads rolled. And the USAID and the CDC were funding it. And chances are it was gain of function. No heads rolled. So Americans have to quit eating shit. Yes. I mean, as Americans, our government is destroying us. And we have to quit eating shit. We have to. We have to. And I think. And I think that there's two factors involved with this. I think that Americans have been conditioned to believe that they can't affect change. And Americans have been conditioned to hate the other side. The right thinks the left is mentally ill and the left thinks the right is mentally ill. Yes. At this point. I mean, that's where it's descended to. Yes. Because that's, that's an easy divide and conquer between Americans believing that they can affect change and then this divide and conquer. And as long as we have that, we're never going to be able to see democracy. One of, if not the most common DMs I get on Instagram are many of you asking me what my favorite books are. Well, today's your lucky day because if you use the link in my description below to join my newsletter, I'm going to give you my top 10 book recommendations. Right now. Also, if you'd like to join my clipping community for a chance to make money producing content from the show, you can do so via the discord link in my description below. And finally, you can join my Patreon for early uncensored releases of the full episodes via the Patreon link in my description below as always, please take one second to hit that subscribe button. If you haven't already. I really appreciate that. Also the like buttons a big help and you can join my newsletter via the link in the description below. Yeah, I get a little cynical about this. I have to admit it. And for a lot of the same reasons that you just laid out. the one place where i'm like maybe there's a light at the end of the tunnel is the recent trend i've seen this year when the late and we'll talk about it obviously in a little bit but when the latest tranche of epstein documents dropped in the end of january and then when we went to a war with iran at the end of february there are now two major issues that the farthest ends of the spectrum on the left and the right whether they like this or not agree on i mean my show it's really unique in the sense that we have a really balanced audience which i think is so fucking cool but i will see back-to-back dms from people who are clearly hardcore liberal and then clearly hardcore conservative saying that maybe they say it a little different but saying the same things and i can't think of a time in the last decade where that was really the thing that was really the case and i can't think of a time in the last decade where that was really the case and so i do wonder if you talk about we have to stop eating shit i completely agree it's a great point and the cynic in me says people are still going to complain and then go home and watch their netflix and you know get on with life but there are enough people that even now sitting here in end of july beginning of august that are still pissed about this stuff that is now you know five six months old which in today's society apparently is very old that it's like maybe this is like the ember they just can't quite put out maybe this is a moment where we could have that do you think that's possible what makes the epstein issue dangerous to our man our leaders is that the right and the left can agree yes that children shouldn't be molested with impurity that's right i mean the right and the left can't agree on much but they can agree on this yep and i started an our goal is to get an independent congressional commission to investigate epstein and we're going to need a lot of people we're going to need a lot of help but an independent congressional commission can decouple itself from the political system what we see now in the political system we know that the current administration isn't going to indict anyone because of their epstein involvement i mean it's demonstrated that time and time again i agree but then you've got the democrats having these quote-unquote shadow hearings where they're allowing these epstein co-conspirators to lie to them i mean i i'll give you an example uh les wexner said the last time he ever dealt with epstein was uh 2006 when they've got emails from 2008 and then epstein gave wexner 51 million dollars or 56 million dollars in 2011 now i don't care how rich you are you don't forget about 56 million dollars 56 million dollars yep so we know that the current administration isn't going to die but those democrats what they can do is put in referrals for indictments they could take that perjured testimony and put in referrals for indictments so it's at least on record so that individual is potentially can be prosecuted and they're not even doing that that's a dog and pony show and the only way and i believe this the only way we're going to get justice and i think we can do it i think enough americans can come together on this is an independent congressional commission that that decouples itself from the political system as long as this is hooked up to the political system we're never going to have justice can you explain how that would work because when i hear that and i'm sure when a lot of people out there are hearing that they still hear congressional so it's still in the middle of dc it's still in the middle of the belly of the beast what's going to make this particular setup you have in mind different with independent congressional commissions investigations and other issues are also are farmed out to people that aren't government personnel like who like investigators uh wherever people's expertise whatever whatever that independent congressional commission is about a lot of times they're farmed out to people who are experts in that so people might think of like the mueller invested investigation though and be like well that that worked well no that was not that was not an independent congressional commission but he was a special prosecutor brought in separately and then it was a shit show right yeah yeah independent congressional commissions are okay so they require a majority in the house and majority in the senate and i think that's kind of a good thing to do but i think that's kind of a good thing to do but i think that's kind of a good thing to do but i think that's kind of a good thing to do but i think that's kind of a good thing to do because with mueller he was still connected to the political system of course whereas what we're proposing and this is the only way we're going to get any kind of justice is an independent congressional all right so let me ask you this i hate i'm sorry i hate to be cynical on this issue though i often do a cynical people i have to admit i i am just because of what we've seen but like they do that whoever gets appointed to help with that process whether it's three people or five people or whatever it's going to be it's going to be a lot of people five people ten but whatever it is they're all humans they all got flaws and they all think they have constitutional rights until they start going to places that just aren't convenient for the people that decide who has constitutional rights and who doesn't and some of those people that get appointed to the commission that maybe someone like you successfully helps lobby to get you know gets put on it and then they get a call from someone with no pun intended a very deep-throated voice that says listen up motherfucker you ain't finding shit here's what you're going to get and then they get a call from someone with no pun intended a very deep-throated voice that says listen up motherfucker you ain't finding shit here's what you're going to do what stops that from happening well for example if i was on that commission i would make sure that it was to the letter of the law okay and there there are other people like me i hate to be this guy but that's that's awesome but let's say you get named to that commission okay and you've proven your whole career that you're willing to investigate things all the way down to the detail which is incredible and you should be commended for that but what's to say the first day that you're not that that you're named the head of that you know they don't say everything you ever love is going to die if you don't do x y or z i have had a death threat and i've had a lot of strange phone calls actually i'm in the episode files i when i got the black book in 2011 i started calling victims first but then i started calling epstein's inner circle and like who uh well the one that i got a hold of was sarah kellen i knew it and um and she wanted to commiserate with me how poorly the media had treated her and you know i wasn't really down with that so um our conversation wasn't very prolonged but it just so happens that someone sent an email their name is redacted to epstein's inner circle whose names aren't redacted there's this journalist nick bryant be aware of him this is what he looks like and they had a picture of me and that they uh dispensed so i thought that that and then actually there were three emails about me um one said alert and so obviously and can we pull that up deep on jmail.world but there are courageous people that will not back down from threats i mean there's a lot i've met a lot of them over the years yeah gary webb guys like that and then they end up dead well gary webb unfortunately i i have a tendency to believe that he killed himself um he was bipolar and he drank a lot but there are tom o'neill is a guy that just hung in there for i mean he spent 20 years of his life on on chaos and um but i've met a lot of courageous people over the years and it wouldn't be hard to get a number of courageous people together there you go october 11th 2011 12 24 p.m two unknown just a heads up there's a journalist calling around again his name is nick bryant this is what he looks like so you are all aware i guess they had your picture attached and then lvjet at aol.com responded yes thank you i told darren referring to darren indyke i assume yesterday he called me this is his cell number to look out for heads up i got the number off my caller id thanks then unknown responds again yep same number he called my cell go ahead down deep is there more there that's it do we have any others i wonder who the unknown is there are two others um do you know who the unknown is right there i don't know okay i don't know it's interesting that it's unknown and then this one is label is redacted which i assume is just they made it in the gmail format but that means it was actually blacked out on the actual file so it says when is the fbi going to come clean is the subject header although this is from this is from 2025 so So this is an email that went to Epstein's email for some reason long after the fact is that fair to say d if i can't really yeah there um but there's a couple other emails where uh one of epstein's henchwoman is telling epstein to call me okay leslie groff go out leslie groff right there call us okay so to jeffrey epstein from leslie groff on october 11th at 3 51 p.m so it's three hours later after those first emails i believe if i have the date right says bill shore saul woman mark packer chris knight barbro nick bryant and then i guess that's listing the the efta is the just the listing what document this was from in the files this episode is brought to you by universal pictures fucker and law spin this thanksgiving with the fuckers the beloved meet the parents franchise returns with a twist robert de niro and ben stiller are back joined by ariana grande as the newest member of the family get ready for laughs unexpected surprises and a hilarious new chapter of the family saga fucker and law rated pg-13 only in theaters this thanksgiving get tickets now carhartt's holiday gift guides were built in collaboration with the greatest gift giver of all time santa claus himself old saint nick counts on carhartt's durable gear to have his back through rain sleep and snow on the biggest night of the year because when everyone's counting on you to do your job what else would you wear to work better to grab a gift for every hard-working person on your holiday shopping list or head to carhartt.com is that like a little is it also creepy to you to see this that like this dude knew you were looking into him and was looking back at you um i've been at this a long time here's how i look at it a couple ice cream sandwiches well actually i had one yesterday um but i wasn't stressed i'm gonna do what i'm gonna do yeah and my adversaries are gonna do what they're gonna do that's what i that's how i play the game of life what made did you want to be a journalist when you were growing up no not at all i took one journalism class in college and i thought it was the most boring thing i've ever done and i'm like i'm gonna do what i'm gonna do i'm gonna do what i'm gonna do anything i'd ever i i i i studied philosophy in college yeah so what what happened how'd you end up here then well okay so i went to graduate school and i was recruited out of graduate school to write papers for lack of a better word that pertain to biomedical ethics biomedical ethics okay and there were academic papers and some of them were on fairly esoteric stuff like interstitial justice theory and which is a lot like game theory except it's uses words instead of numbers um and i also wrote a book when i was in academia and it pertained to lower socioeconomic children so that's something that i children is a topic that is near and dear to me i had a difficult childhood the first time i ran away i was 12 where you grew up in in minneapolis yeah i i i became kind of a street kid so what what what made you a street kid so young um i had a stepfather that uh didn't appreciate me and he could be violent so children's issues i'm not you know i i'd written a lot about children's issues before i ever started writing about this and um so i think it's funny when someone says well he's a conspiracy theorist well you know i've written all kinds of stuff about children's issues and i've never that have been published in very good journals and um i've never been accused of a conspiracy i've never been accused of being a conspiracy theorist um until you went to the things that they actually care about that's right until the franklin scam so did you that's really cool though because you took your own personal experiences that were really tough for you to write about and i think that's really cool because you took your own personal experiences that were really tough for you to write about and i think that's really cool because you took your own personal experiences that were really tough for you and went out to find other kids who through different lenses may have had really difficult experiences to see if you could shed light on that and help prevent it for more in the future well i i mean the first time i ran away i was 12 and i'm glad i didn't get very far because 12 year olds i was very susceptible to being preyed upon sure by the time i was 14 or 15 i was cynical and i was fairly big so i didn't really worry about where'd you run when you were 12 i made it to the highway and uh i was walking along the highway i didn't know about hitchhiking but i knew i had to get out of the house that night out of self-preservation what what what happened um my stepfather was beating me up in the living room and my mother said that he shouldn't hit me with a closed fist and then i i went whoa you know i'm not in the right place i'm not in the right i'm not safe here in this environment so that's when i took off but getting back to your question i so i i really i i took these journalism one journalism class i thought was really boring why'd you think it was boring it just was and um i i love philosophy i love philosophy and i'd take philosophy classes because i found them very very interesting what was interesting about them um to come across thinkers like plato or aristotle i'm i'm i'm not a kantian kant is uh i mean when you talk about great philosophers you've got you can start out with plato and aristotle and then i think that the next jump would probably be kant as far as the greatest philosophers what made him so great he emmanuel kant there there was a movement in philosophy called rationalists and rationalists said that we can discern the truth we we we have like the capacity to discern the truth and then there was the empiricist that said you can only discern the truth by measuring uh things that you you need empirical validation so what kant did is he combined the two and he said that we've got these innate mechanisms mental mechanisms but to to validate it we we also need empirical which gives us the ability to empirically and evaluate something so kant took the rationalists and the empiricists we're we're going to very different camps and was able to combine them and i and the book i wrote when i was in academia i used a lot of kantian um morality kant's morality is there's a utilitarian morality which is the most good for the most people and if you're a jew in germany utilitarian morality doesn't really work but if you're a jew in germany you can or ethics doesn't really work that well for you right now kant said he came out with a categorical imperative and he said if you make an action or a statement quantify that to the rest of the human race and see if there's a contradiction if you kill someone if everybody killed everybody then there would be nobody to kill so that would be contradictory so basically it's kant's formula for the golden rule and his philosophy just just blew me away i had lived with an indian guru when i was 19 and um a genuine indian guru and um he what what we learned there is that there's two realities there's uh the reality that we see and there's an which is an illusion and then there's reality um true reality now kant would say that there are two realities there's the phenomenological reality that what we see and actually a whole uh a whole philosophy has kind of predicated on phenomenology what kind i mean it kind of i mean a lot of the things that i've talked about in the book and i'll get back to kant one way or the other but what kant said is that what we see is the phenomena phenomenological reality but with inside is the numinal reality that we cannot perceive so that really rang true to me because i'd studied eastern philosophy when i lived with this guru when i was 19 and i really do believe that that's the case is really just a very small portion of what the reality is glass equals MC squared this glass has the mass that mass C equals MC squared is like 300,000 meters per second so squared is like 900,000 meters per second okay so this glass has the energy of 900,000 meters per second and it just looks like a glass to us but this this glass could power New York for for quite some time it has it has the energy to empower to power New York for quite some time so when you and that's that's that's Einstein's special relativity and so I'm a proponent of Einstein he wasn't a very good father and he wasn't a very good husband but hell of a physicist kind of like OJ Simpson I held a running back but not a very good father or or husband oh that's such a stray that's such a stray Einstein's catching right there so and and I'd always believe that and then I read Kant and he explained that to me why why we just see the phenomenological realm compared to the thing in itself the the new he called that the numeral realm so I was I yeah I just I was blown away by by a man who got his philosophy and you didn't particularly like the philosophy and you didn't particularly like the journalism class but then you start writing these biomedical ethics papers for someone I forget who he said I was actually employed by the University of Minnesota Medical School okay for those but here's the thing here's what happened um you know I was writing these esoteric papers and people in academia would read them they were good papers I had a bunch of papers published and Poison I had a book published um but they were very abstract I mean you you would need you know almost like a P.A. I mean you you would need you know almost like a P.A. to understand them. And then there was a woman who ran an organization in Minneapolis who said that there was a serial killer killing prostitutes in Minneapolis. And she was kind of crazy, so the media didn't listen to her and law enforcement didn't listen to her. But then I knew someone who knew someone that was a prostitute, and she had said that there was a serial killer killing prostitutes. And we were talking about this earlier. So I went to work. I got this long list of women that had been beaten, stabbed, or strangled. And it was the – it wasn't their name. It was when they were born. And how they died and on the date that they died. And then I went to the databases of the Star Tribune, Minneapolis Star Tribune, and St. Paul Pioneer Press, and I put that information in. And then I would – and then the article would come up about a woman. So I put together, I believe, 38 women that had been stabbed, strangled, or beaten to death in the previous, like, eight years. And I went to – I had the list, and I went to the Minneapolis police, and I said, are you sure you want to say that there's no serial killer? And they thought, well, you know, I don't know, maybe, I don't know. And then I went to the St. Paul police, head of homicide, and I said, are you sure you want to say there's no serial killer? And he said, well, you know, there could be. And then a task force was formed to catch that serial killer. How old are you when this is happening? I was about 32, 33. Yeah, 34. So I write this one article. I've been writing academic papers for five years, and nothing is getting done. And then I write this one article, and then a task force is formed. And that led me to journalism. It couldn't have been that long after that when you came into the Franklin scandal story, right? Well, I moved to New York City in 1994. I was 25 to pursue just a freelance journalism career. And then I stumbled across that finder's report and started digging into Franklin scandal when I was in 2002. And you were traveling a bunch to Omaha to cover that story and then coming back to New York and writing up your research and trying to put together what eventually became the book. Yes. Okay. So you get the book published eventually by a publisher out in Oregon because no one would take it. And you're still living in New York City. And you have, I mean, that's also crazy, too, because you were sacrificing yourself financially for so long, even to be able to still stay in New York City with all that. You said it was in 2011, though, when you got a hold of the black book. Is that right? Yeah. The Franklin scandal was actually published in 2009, 2010. There's, if you look at the first page, it says 2012 or something because we made some changes to it. But it was published 2009, 2010. And. And I was really in dire straits financially because I put all this money and time into writing this book. And we couldn't give them away because the fact that the government would cover up a child trafficking network was anathema to people. If you cover up a crime. You aid and abet that crime. So the fact that our government would aid and abet child sex trafficking, that was not a message people wanted to hear. And but what I saw happening in Florida was very similar to what was happening in Omaha, because there were a number of girls that came forward at that point. And a grand jury declared that not a single child had been abused. And I've since. And I've since acquired that grand jury testimony. And what Lana Bellalovic, she was a, which, which she, she was a special prosecutor, which she did was just malignant. She called two of the victims. The law enforcement was aware of multiple victims. They were aware of over 40. Well, at that point, the feds, yeah, when the feds got in. So, so she called two. One had been 14 when she was molested by Epstein. She was now 16. One had been, was 16. She had been molested multiple times by Epstein. She was now 18. And she just destroyed them. And really, really, you can go to Epsteinjustice.com. I do a takedown of that. How did she destroy them? She called in law enforcement people that just undermined their credibility. How'd they do that? Saying that they were on drugs and, you know. That, that type of thing. When, real quick, Nick, when did you, because obviously this was all going on in 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, Epstein's case. When did you first hear about it at all? Do you remember what year that was? I was still working on the Franklin scandal. Right. So maybe like 07, 08? Yeah, could have been 08, 09. And then I called up someone at the Palm Beach Post and I tried to talk to her about it. And actually, I made a few calls. And she just couldn't explain it. And I thought to myself, well, you know, I mean, the guy molested all these girls. And the grand jury said that he hadn't molested any girls. I mean, don't you think this requires a little more investigation? And she didn't seem to be willing to. She just said, well, this is kind of an anomaly. It's kind of weird. It's an anomaly. Yeah. I'm using. My terminology. Yeah, yeah. But basically she said, yeah, it's an anomaly. We just. So. So you start looking at it, though, in concert with what you were doing with the Franklin scandal. Yes. Because you're like, it's the same thing. Well, with the Franklin scandal, there were two cooked juries and two bullshit juries in Nebraska. And then with this, this is obviously a bullshit jury coming out of Florida. And then I was broke. But. I just couldn't let go. I knew that Epstein was like Franklin. I just, I just had this high powered intuition. And then I went down to Florida and 2011. And then I got the black book. And. Now, Epstein used euphemisms for victims. He said massage, under massage. There's, there's all kinds of girls. And. Yeah. We were looking through the black. Black book this morning. I hadn't, like I said, I hadn't looked at it in a little while, but like under the Florida one, I mean, yeah, there's all the different states. There's a bunch of them. Yeah. But there's like. Yeah. Just. Yeah. Yeah. Right there. And you're looking at this, and a lot of it's redacted, and you're like, statistically speaking, many of these numbers are girls 12 to 15. Well, I didn't have the redacted one. I had their phone numbers. I had everybody's phone numbers. So I started to call them first because you need, if there's a child trafficking network, you need victims. I mean, so I called the victims first. And the first call was very strange because I talked to a woman whose daughter had been molested by Epstein when she was 13, and she wanted to help me. I said, I'm a journalist. I'm looking into this. She wanted to help me, but she didn't want her kid to. So she asked her kid questions. She didn't want her kid to talk to you? Yes. Okay, got it. She wanted to make sure that everything was appropriate. That's right. So I asked the mother questions, and then the daughter answered them, and then the mother. So, and she was still very young. I mean, she was 13 at that, when she was molested by Epstein. Although there are younger people that, and we've seen that. But then I called a woman who said that she'd been flown around and flown to an island, and we weren't aware of an island at that point. So that wasn't in any, that wasn't discussed at any point during his initial case, like in the court records that didn't mention the fact that he owned an island? Not that I know of. Isn't that kind of crazy? You have a guy that you're bringing to trial for the worst kind of thing. And they're not listing off his various assets that include a eugenics ranch in Zorro, the fucking crazy mansion in Ohio that the farmer girls, Maria and her sister, were abused at. And then obviously something like the island. Like, I would think that's kind of like top of mind. That investigation, the only people that put together a valid investigation was the Palm Beach Police Department. This episode. This episode is brought to you by Universal Pictures' Fokker & Law. Robert De Niro and Ben Stiller are back. Joined by Ariana Grande as the newest member of the family. Fokker & Law, rated PG-13. Get tickets now. I'm Hannah. I've lost 75 pounds in 20 months with GLP-1s. Plus diet and exercise. On Rho, I've gone from struggling to run a mile to running farther every day. You can access FDA-approved GLP-1s online. Get the support you need to reach your weight loss goals. Go to Rho.co slash weight to see if you qualify. I'm a paid Rho partner. 20% average weight loss in one year in non-diabetics with obesity or overweight with a weight-related medical condition versus 3.1% in placebo arm. Rx only. To stay informed about serious side effects, go to Rho.co slash safety. When it got. When. Okay. What happened was. Well, the Palm Beach Police Department put together that investigation, and it had a bunch of. They knew of a bunch of girls. They had five underage girls, the statements, five. But they knew of many more. And when that grand jury came back and said that Jeffrey Epstein had molested a single minor, Michael Ryder, who is the unsung hero of this, the unsung hero, he was chief of the Palm Beach Police Department, he became very vociferous. And he went to the U.S. attorney, who was Alexander Acosta, and said, you've got to investigate this. And that's. And then the FBI went to work. And the FBI did, in fact. Well, there's a list of like 36 victims, but they knew of 40 or more. And the FBI worked very, very hard to really bring this. There was a. There was a. There was a draft that had, I think, 60 indictments by the feds. And one of those indictments was child trafficking, which is a heavy sentence in the federal system. It's 15 to life. So that's what Maxwell was nailed with. And so there was this draft. I think it was 60 indictments. And all of a sudden, Alexander Acosta says, oh, we're going to do this differently. We're not going to indict Jeffrey Epstein on any counts of child molestation. We're going to have the state do it. But then we're going to give immunity to all his co-conspirators. So that's how that worked. Which would include, like, Sarah Kellan. Sarah Kellan was actually named as one of the co-conspirators. But all of them. And what happened, and this is, I believe, what happened, Acosta was told that Epstein was intelligence and that he had to stand down. In the government, there's only two people that can tell a U.S. attorney to stand down. One is the attorney general. One is the president. And at that point, the attorney general was Alberto Gonzalez. And the president was George Bush, the cognitively challenged Bush. Yeah. Bush too. Bush too. So that was how it played out. Now, an attorney general isn't going to cover up a big pedophile network without his boss telling him. Attorney generals aren't going to go out on a limb like that. Which is also not how the job's supposed to work. But unfortunately, that's how it's worked for at least the last decade and a half. Or 25 years, sorry. Well, we could really get into history there, but I don't think we have the time. Oh, yeah. It goes back farther. I just think it's, I think the horse completely left the station when Bush was in office. So, Alexander Acosta stands down, and then the state of Florida indicts Jeffrey Epstein on one kind of adult solicitation and unlawful sexual activity with him. Which I think is potentially 15 years or 20 years, but he gets 18 months and he does 13. And he has like a little suite in that. Oh, yeah. We went through it. We went through the details a couple weeks ago on the show. So, yeah. Insane. Yeah. And he wasn't really confined there during the day that long. No. But when he was, and I've got a good source on this, they had a special room for him where he'd meet with his paralegals. Mm-hmm. And his paralegals were generally very young women in their 20s. Yep. And at least one of them came forward, Deef, I think, right? Yes. One of them did come forward. One of her, her name was released. She talked in that article we were referencing on the show. It's just like, you know, I look at a guy like Alexander Acosta, who, as you said, had the famous line of like, no, I was told he's intelligence, back off. And it's like, last I checked, I don't know. I looked at this and, well, I'm pretty sure he has at least a couple daughters. And. He's got two daughters. Okay. He's got two. And he not only stepped aside on this and said, whatever, but even despite knowing that and knowing the specifics of this case and what he had said all right to with that, he had the audacity to try to continue his political career successfully as well, eventually, obviously, becoming the labor secretary under Trump, one. And I just, you know, I'm really glad I can't relate to these people on these things. But the cognitive dissonance you have to have to continue your little climb up the political ladder after knowing you let something like that go, even if you were a little scared, okay, but you let it go. And then to have the audacity to accept a role as he was the labor secretary. Well, that's how it works. I mean, he. He was on the yacht. I think you're right. I mean, you can get on the yacht for selling your grandmother, too. Yeah. I mean, if you're willing to make. But in Acosta's defense, he did not. He was somewhat recalcitrant about that deal. And Ken Starr and a bunch of FBI people, it's in the files, came and put the heat on him, too. Ken Starr, who was the attorney on the Clinton impeachment trial. Yeah, who ostensibly prosecuted Bill Clinton. Yeah. That was a. I mean. Epstein had like a. Who were all his attorneys? It was Dershowitz. Who the hell else? Did he have Black on there? Black, Lefcourt, Ken Starr, Dershowitz. Yeah. That's another thing. It's like, oh, this guy just hired a better legal team than fucking OJ Simpson did for a pedophile case, and no one's talking about it. It's kind of interesting. Well, the mainstream media has been asleep at the wheel or negligent about this case. - Yeah. - I find it tragic. magic that the media is the way it is and i'm kind of a outsider to the media i mean i didn't take i did i only took one journalism class i've never been on a staff right of uh of a publication so i've always been able to approach things the way that i want to approach and think for yourself and yeah free thinking yeah goes in the mix but like i said earlier there are people at magazines and at newspapers and they're on a reservation that they don't even know they're on yeah yep and then you see people and and i don't know her personally but i i do find it interesting that someone like tara palmeri who was ostensibly in mainstream media for a long time and did these amazing podcasts back in 2020 on epstein and then on maxwell these two series she did you know there were there was another stop after political where she was at puck.news which was a newer kind of media platform but now she's on her own independent yeah banging this drum and like i don't know i'd love to ask her about that because i kind of wonder if that's related like she stepped off the reservation a little bit and they're like what the fuck are you doing and she went from someone who was like very much entrenched within the mainstream media and had developed all the right connections and was a rising star there to now she does well but you know she's on her own she's outside the system that's interesting i've been on her show once um she's been fairly impressive yeah in her investigation it really comes down to conscience you were talking about cognitive dissonance yes by by the time someone continually tramples their conscience there isn't any cognitive dissonance anymore i think i think uh alexander a concert reaching a point where there really wasn't any he accepted it yeah he accepted i want i always wonder what that's like because i have it's another example where you think of the movie scene of life when you see these scenes right someone walks into akasa's office and says you're not gonna you know they start talking about something normal and they say what are you doing what do you mean what am i doing you're not gonna do this what am i not gonna do you're not bringing charges this is way above you people like you swing from the neck if they start doing things like this and the difference is when you're watching that in the movie you know there's a little piano in the background and the scary music and then they get up and the camera's close on fucking him and and he's he's like breathing heavy and then he's like what the fuck and then it cuts to a new scene but in real life it's technically way less dramatic it certainly feels like something but it's just two people sitting there in silence like this no music no cameras no bullshit and one guy says you're not going to do this and he goes what you're not going to do this okay and then he lets it go well i'm sure that there was a call from the attorney general too and abertra gonzalez or maybe even the cognitively challenged george bush i could see that yeah but they had enough scandals at that point but we all need another so so akasta was in a difficult position and i think he felt that he had to make this deal who knows what kind of threats but then i'm sure that you know you might become labor secretary if you do this oh it's crazy well i got some questions on this i just gotta go to the bathroom real quick so okay we'll be right back all right we're back so you had mentioned you eventually went down to florida 0809 when you were hearing about this case went to florida in 2011 you went i'm sorry you went in 2011 you had first heard about the case in 2008 2009 but when you got to florida you were like oh my god i'm gonna go to florida when you went down to florida you started calling people included like with the massage victims as well who were little girls to to be clear but how did you we started to talk about this earlier how did you get your hands on the black book what was the full process there like from even finding out it exists to then actually having it in your hands there's an interesting story behind the blackboard even before i got it afraid of rodriguez was epstein's house manager that's right and he purloined the black book purloined stole the black book from epstein stole a copy of it and he called an attorney that was representing the victims or at least two victims i think at that point and he said i've got the holy grail i'll sell it to you for fifty thousand dollars that's it fifty thousand come on alfredo you know alfredo uh alfredo wasn't the brightest ball yeah so the attorney called up the fbi and the fbi did a sting yeah i remember that and then got the black book now the reason why remember i said the fbi found all those victims and then the case got quashed those fbi agents were angry really pissed that that epstein had gotten away because they had found all the victims so it obviously came from way above them so the fbi leaked it to the attorney and i met with the attorney um that wasn't brad edwards was it it was brad it was brad edwards okay and then i met with him a second time and he said well this this will help you in your investigation so he gave you the physical black book and then you uploaded a pdf version of it yeah well i try i came back to new york and i tried to sell it to a publisher a platform you had the physical book well a copy of it a copy of it okay and um no one wanted to touch it i mean and i think when i was pitching franklin i had there were a number of editors and publishers i could talk to and i had a pretty decent agent but talk about cognitive dissonance so i'd meet an editor and i would talk to them about franklin and then i'd show them a list of all the victims and and i could just see the cognitive dissonance going down in their eyes they would say to themselves this is a horrible story i really need to help nick bryant or i can just write nick bryant off as crazy and have a nice meal with my family tonight mm-hmm and all of them i i knew that most of them were going to go that route i didn't think that all of them were going to go that route so by the time i got the black book i didn't have all the connections that i had when i was pitching franklin but i still had a number of connections and no one would touch it no one would touch it no one would touch it and then i hooked up with john cook at gawker and and at that point i had the flight logs too and he said well we'll do it and who gave you the flight logs again uh another attorney and so it wasn't brad it was a different no a different attorney so it was another attorney for the victims though okay and did he give you that probably on the basis at that point that he knew you had been the black book guy so he's like no i don't think he knew that but if you google me and uh you can see that i've done a lot of i've written the franklin scandal i've i've done a lot of uh i've written a lot on children's issues um and that's what's troubling me is trouble i mean now i'm a conspiracy theorist and i had a friend of mine who was having dinner with someone who works at a at fox got a show and my friend said to him have you heard of nick bryant and he goes oh yeah he's a conspiracy theorist so they've heard of me but i'm a conspiracy theorist wow and that was because i'd become a conspiracy theorist and wikipedia completely trashed the book that i wrote that made it look nonsensical so they had their own page on the book as well um the franklin child abuse allegations and that's people would google franklin there you go boom right so i you know i tried to pitch it and pitch it and pitch it and finally gawker was going to publish it but the irony of it all is once it was published the flood yates opened on it and i think that there's been three quantum leaps in our understanding of epstein i think the black book is the first and i think uh the julia brown's uh series in the miami herald and then i think that the latest tranche of documents i think those have been our three quantum leaps i think you're right about that understand jeffrey epstein when you first had this though even before you get the flight logs when you get your hands on the black book and you're going through it and dave can you just i have it on my computer here but can you just google world world fast uh epstein black book pdf and hit the first link so we can have it up you know like i said i there's just been times where i'll go through this and scroll and i'll see a new name that i'd missed you know previously every time it's like it's like narnia you know in a fucked up narnia in 2011 getting that that's and then looking through it what does that feel like when you're first scrolling through this going holy shit and and also even before you answer that question when you see the number of contacts that some people that he had for some people meaning like i always use the example of rfk rfk and his ex-wife late life wife mary are in there he has like 10 contacts for the two of them at the time i went back to when i was a little kid my mom's old phone book that had you know before you had the iphone where you wrote down the contacts like this and there weren't even that many contacts for like my four at the time alive grandparents put together and they all had emails by the way they were all like with it on that and i'm like but he has 10 contacts for one guy and you know does that make you guilty of something no but does that look really suspect yeah i remember uh when i got the blackboard i did i hadn't slept a lot the night before and um when i'm on the road investigating stuff sometimes i you know i go through some so i hadn't had a lot of sleep the night before and then i got it and then i i've got a buddy named peter lavenda he's a writer oh yeah yeah and um i called up peter and i said man i got something to show you and um so we met at a dunkin donuts and i was showing peter the black book and dunkin donuts and um uh there you go we met and then i immediately made copies of it and then sent it to the four winds before the four what i dispersed a bunch of copies of it i like your phrases um because that's what i did with franklin whenever i'd come across like a document that was really incriminating i'd send it to everybody thank you guys for checking out this clip if you haven't already subscribed please subscribe and hit the like button on this video it is a huge huge help and if you'd like to check out this clips full podcast episode that link is in the description below or right here and finally you can follow me on instagram and x by using the links in my description below this episode is brought to you by universal pictures fucker and law spin this thanksgiving with the fuckers the beloved meet the parents franchise returns with a twist robert de niro 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