Chris Hedges

The release of the Epstein Files has shocked the public with unimaginable stories of the pedophilia, exploitation of women and brash depravity of the ruling class. While these stories have been the major source of public outrage, a deeper dive into the Epstein Files reveals the inside world of how the billionaire class operates to control information and collude with each other – hide their crimes and gain massive wealth at the expense of the working class.

In this episode, Chris Hedges speaks with Maureen Tkacik, an investigative journalist who has studied and written about the Epstein Files for The American Prospect and The Nation. Tkacik exposes the players behind the looting of the Soviet Union after its collapse, the truth about Larry Summers’ abrupt resignation from Harvard, the controversy around the death of the media magnate Robert Maxwell and more.

In addition to providing women for wealthy men, Epstein became their trusted finance manager, funneling money to Israel and other members of the elite class. Epstein was also talented at building friendships with their wives, such as Noam Chomsky’s wife Valeria Wasserman and Woody Allen’s wife Soon-Yi Previn, for example. Tkacik describes Epstein as “a magnet for these sort of ‘much older man with money and younger wife’ combinations,” exploiting these connections to divert the finances of these aging men to his, and the class he represents, preferred causes.

Tkacik concludes the interview with a discussion of the liberal media’s complicity in hiding the crimes of the ruling class and federal law enforcement’s disinterest in holding the powerful to account. “Ponzi schemes, money laundering, intelligence, you see that triumvirate over and over again,” Tkacik explains. Tkacik refers to the current times as “bleak” but also “very illuminating.” In summary, Hedges states, “It’s the depravity, the greed, the hedonism, the lack of empathy, the callousness, the cruelty that has defined all oligarchic classes throughout history.”

Chris Hedges

Executive Producer:

Max Jones

Intro:

Margaret Flowers

Transcript:

Margaret Flowers

Crew:

Diego Ramos and Sofia Menemenlis

Transcript

Chris Hedges: Jeffrey Epstein’s financial network is often overlooked in the released Epstein files. He was not only a trafficker, an abuser of girls and women, but at the epicenter of the ruling billionaire class, which is global, a class that controls not only our economies and politics, but also our systems of information and education. The investigative journalist, Maureen Tkacik, has examined the files to knit together the intimate connections between Epstein and our global financial elite.

Joining me to discuss this Epstein class is Maureen Tkacik, the investigations editor at the American Prospect. So, Maureen, there’s two articles I want to discuss with you, which focus on how Epstein got his money. The first was in The Nation, it’s called “Larry, We Knew You Too Well”. The second is in The Prospect, “Newspapers Did Not Kill Themselves”. But let’s start with your article in The Nation, because it goes back to the breakup of the Soviet Union, the seizure of state assets that created the Russian oligarchic cabal that Putin comes out of, and Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard, and Jeffrey Epstein, they’re all involved. So, I’ll let you go from there.

Moe Tkacik: Sure, yeah. It’s funny, it always comes back to 1991. This is the year that Jeffrey gets Les Wexner to sign over Power of Attorney. This is the year that…

Chris Hedges: Can I just interrupt you? Do you have a theory as to why Wexner did that? This is the head of Victoria’s Secret and huge, huge amounts of money from Wexner are transferred and property and everything else.

Moe Tkacik: It was roughly the same month, maybe even the same week that a secret Columbus Police Department memo started to circulate about Wexner’s organized crime connections and his connection to the really violent assassination-style hit on his accountant, who had been scheduled to testify in exchange for leniency on some pretty bad tax evasion charges. Apparently, he hadn’t filed his tax returns for seven years. So, this guy, who is sort known as something of a mob accountant, was going to testify, going to talk to the FBI. He shows up dead. It’s really ugly. I forget the sordid details. But the Columbus Police Department started mapping all of Wexner’s relationships and those of his biggest retailer landlord, the Taubman families, and also a guy who used to own the San Francisco 49ers, but then had to sell it because he was pushed out by the NFL, very mobster type. I’m forgetting his name, but Joe something Italian, I think. And his accountant was Shapiro. So, he was under and I’m sure that Wexner, being who he was, had a lot of connections in the Columbus Police Department. It is said that he was molesting young boys, who were scouted through a modeling agency in the 80s. That is something that has been a persistent rumor. I read about it in a book. So, something was closing in. There was some folks closing in on Wexner. And I sense, just because of the timeline, that that might have been one of the reasons that he signed it over to Jeffrey to keep it from the feds, right? You know, that makes a lot of sense to me.

But a lot of other things were happening in 1991. The collapse of the Soviet Union being a big one. And Robert Maxwell, the textbook publisher, newspaper publisher, lifetime Mossad asset, big jolly fellow, buys the New York Daily News, which has just come out of a really, really horrible strike. Its owners, the Chicago Tribune, had spent a lot of money, something like $250 million trying to break the union. And they almost broke it. But then Maxwell swoops in and says,” I will buy the New York Daily News if you give me $60 million to do it.” And the Tribune said, “Well, $60 million is cheaper than the $150 million that we think that it will cost to actually pay out all of the union contracts that we’re going to owe. So sure, it’s yours.” Everybody is elated at the New York Daily News. And then eight months later, seven months later, Maxwell falls off his yacht and dies, although not necessarily in that order or almost certainly not in that order. And it turns out very quickly after that that Maxwell’s Maxwell Communications, his communications empire, is missing $1.4 billion in cash that it was supposed to have. Where is this money? It is a big mystery. The bank accounts of the family are frozen internationally and Kevin Maxwell is sort of put under house arrest to a certain extent. I mean, he’s the, I think, the eldest son, but he was the son who was really taking the reins at the business. And, Ghislaine at this time is in New York complaining to everybody that she’s completely broke, that she has not a cent to her name. And how do they emerge from this situation? Because Ghislaine has been spotted by none other than a Mirror reporter actually telling all of the servants on the yacht to shred everything they find and throw documents overboard, that kind of thing. She’s under a cloud of suspicion. She’s been living in New York. She decides to live in New York. And there’s a document in the Epstein files that I found that actually sheds a lot of light on what happened.

But simultaneously to all this, of course, the Soviet Union is collapsing. And Larry Summers, not sure if he is friends with Epstein yet. I’m not sure when Larry Summers becomes best friends with Jeffrey Epstein, like it seems he was right before his death. But Larry Summers is the president of the World Bank, and he sends a protege of his named Andre Shleifer, a Harvard economist who is very young and he was born in Russia, but he came over and he graduated college at 16, something along those lines. You know, he’s an up and coming, hot shit in the economics world. Larry puts him in charge of this project to privatize Russia, essentially oversee the privatization of 225,000 state-owned enterprises under this kind of team of Chicago type boys, but they’re Harvard boys, inside Yeltsin‘s administration. And this all ends in these guys get unbelievably rich and no one sort of really pays attention while Russia completely collapses. The economy collapses. The Ruble loses all of its value. A lot of the IMF loans that Russia is supposed to be getting in order to stabilize its currency are going missing. The wire transfer suddenly, like a billion dollars will be transferred from the IMF to Russia and they won’t be able to find where it went. This is really, really shady stuff happening.

And in 1997, after a whistleblower comes forward, somebody who gets screwed out of the action, USAID, which has been funding this whole operation, suspends all of its funding to the project, kind of kicks these guys out of Russia. They start investigating what actually happened. And as it turns out, they had made a lot of money investing in these privatized Russian assets. A lot of that money, that money was actually supposed to go and be distributed among the Russian population as vouchers. And that program is a universal laughing stock. People are selling their vouchers for a loaf of bread, while Andre Shleifer’s wife, who’s a hedge fund manager working for Tom Steyer, gets extremely wealthy. And so does their co-investor, a guy named Len Blavatnik, who helps them out later by backdating a bunch of documents. Len Blavatnik, now also a good friend of all the Epstein’s, now worth $30 billion. At one point, the richest man in the UK, so kind of put a pin in that guy. So, this episode and a lot of what happened in Russia, a lot of the really horrific plunder that happened in the 90s set the stage for Putin to emerge as their savior.

Chris Hedges: Let me just stop you there because I want to just look at the details. So, they’re buying up state industries for ridiculously low prices, which creates this oligarchic class. How did Shleifer and these figures, what was their involvement? So, we know how the oligarchs were buying state factories for nothing and creating, in terms of assets, immense wealth for themselves. How did these Harvard economists and others in AID, how were they actually also making money?

Moe Tkacik: Well, I think that Len Blavatnik was a big key to this. So, Blavatnik is sort of a shadowy figure. There’s never any mention of him in any newspaper. I couldn’t find anything until 1997. Chrystia Freeland – former finance minister of Canada, maybe current, I don’t know – but she writes this glowing profile about how this ‘Exemplar of the American dream’ has gotten unspeakably wealthy in Russia and isn’t that lovely? Before that, it’s not clear what he was doing. He shows up as the CEO of some Jersey City-based outfit and in 1990, but he was supposedly involved in leveraged buyouts of a distribution company He had gone to Harvard MBA. But it’s not clear. His record before 1997 when he turns up as one of the first oligarchs is – and he also sues people who call him an oligarch. I don’t think that he’s actually been successful in any of those lawsuits, but just an alleged oligarch. His track record from before that is sort of unknown.

And this is the case for a lot of these folks. I’m not the best at being able to read Russian newspapers on the internet. I’ve been scouring for a lot of these guys. But one pattern that emerges when you start to study this stuff is that for the most part, these are guys who got out of the Soviet Union in the 70s and 80s, generally through Israel. But there’s also Armenians who got out during this time and maybe some Austrians and Hungarians. But it’s primarily Jewish Soviets who were refuseniks, who were anti-communist and sort of went to New York or showed up in Texas by way of Israel and then came back as soon as the government started to collapse. And so, I’m not exactly sure. Some of these guys were supposedly driving taxis all of these years. Blavatnik was getting an MBA, but there are also a lot of connections that a lot of these folks have and Blavatnik, I have no idea. But in the case of some of these guys, like a guy who will come up, Greg Luchansky, they have documented organized crime ties. And so, they’re kind of part of this sort of Russian-Zionist mafia. And I think that’s the reason that Russiagate was able, or that people like Rachel Maddow are able to say, “Well, the Epstein files really implicates Epstein is a Russian intelligence officer.” Well, yeah, Russia plays very prominently in all of these stories. And mostly because there was so much money to be made there in the 90s while everybody starved.

Chris Hedges: Let me just throw in, which some people don’t know, Sy Hersh exposed this. Jonathan Pollard, who was the CIA agent who was arrested for espionage for providing information to Israel and now was freed and lives in Israel, he had exposed to Israel the entire network of American intelligence in Russia and Israel traded that information for the release of Soviet Jews.

Moe Tkacik: [laughing] Well this is in what? The mid-80s? So, a lot of the folks that I focused on are people who came before that in the 1970s. That is something that I’ve actually read in a lot of places is a thread that they share. But surely, those who were there in the 80s are even much more useful. And that’s when, because obviously 1991 wasn’t the beginning of this. There was a lot of theft happening and just wholesale kind of mafia takeovers of a lot of these enterprises. And that was what they had to contend with, right? There were these guys, they called them ‘roofs’, who ran the extortion rings around state-owned enterprises. So, you had to pay off these guys and their whole operations in order to privatize any of these entities. So, this is a very exotic operation happening, reliant on a lot of people who know bad guys throughout the former USSR and going as quickly as possible and doing it all as quickly as possible under the kind of rubric of free market shock treatment, Milton Friedmanomics. And Larry Summers, I don’t know how intimately involved he was in Shleifer’s actual self-enrichment, but he sure as heck did what he could to cover it up.

Chris Hedges: So, where is Shleifer now?

Moe Tkacik: Shleifer’s still at Harvard. He’s still a Harvard professor. His wife was, after enriching them the first time with investments in Gazprom and various aluminum smelters owned by Blavatnik, she shows up again with Paul Singer in the default of Argentina, so one of the holdout bondholders, so would have made 1,000 % returns on that.

So, Shleifer’s still okay. Larry Summers, however, he leaves the Clinton administration. He leaves the World Bank, becomes a Treasury Secretary, probably some jobs in between that I’m missing. Then he gets the presidency of Harvard in 2001 and immediately commences pissing people off. Like you said, he wants to shut down the classics department, which…

Chris Hedges: Well, yes, I was involved in all that. He didn’t believe in the humanities. He shut down the Sanskrit department. He made war on the humanities. And he was just a Philistine. But let’s get to Epstein and Summers and Shleifer.

Moe Tkacik: So, what I saw in the files – The Nation wanted me to write a sort of elegy to Larry Summers on the event of his second resignation from Harvard a week before last – and, I found in the Epstein files this fascinating exchange or series of exchanges between Epstein and his very close friend Peter Mandelson, who is now under indictment, I think, in the UK for…

Chris Hedges: He is the former Labour Party leader and former UK ambassador to the US…

Moe Tkacik: And really sort of the behind-the-scenes architect of Tony Blair’s new Labour, Clintonian neoliberal program. So, Mandelson and Epstein are talking about various Dodd-Frank reforms and their counterparts in the UK dealing with clamping down on the financial sector’s abuses and Banker’s bonuses and the like and they’re talking a lot about this stuff and this is a period when Jeffrey Epstein is not emailing Larry Summers himself that much. Understandably, Larry Summers is running the National Economic Council. He probably shouldn’t be emailing Jeffrey too much at this time, although they’re having meetings. But Mandelson and Epstein keep emailing back and forth about how they can constrain some of these reforms. They’re trying to get rid of the Banker Bonus Tax in the UK. They really hate the Volcker rule, which is part of the sort of rehash of Glass-Steagall. And while they’re discussing this, Mandelson’s like, “Okay, I’m going to go to Davos. What should I say to Larry? Does he know that we are friends?” And Epstein says, “You must bring up Andre Shleifer. Back when Larry was at Harvard, he had this terrible time with Andre Shleifer with the scandal and you gotta bring that name up. That’s how he’ll know how to trust you.” And Mandelson is like, “Okay.” But he’s kind of like not getting it and he’s like “No no, no, you must bring up Andre Shleifer. That’s how he’ll know he can open up.”

And then months later, he’s about to see Larry again and he says to Mandelson, “Listen, you got to bring up Shleifer. Remember don’t forget to bring up Shleifer.” And Mandelson’s like, “Yeah. Remember we talked about this? I brought him up at Davos and he was very embarrassed. I don’t know if I’ll be able to see him alone.” But one thing that Epstein says is, “I helped him through that. I saw him through that. I was behind him a thousand percent through this Shleifer scandal.” He doesn’t discuss the specifics at all what this is. But the way that he keeps telling Mandelson to bring it up to Summers, despite it being completely irrelevant to any of the substance that they’re talking about, really has this like very clear blackmail light, sort of sheen to it. And I have no idea how – you’d have to speculate as to how Epstein would have been of assistance to Summers back when he was going through this Shleifer scandal because it was a huge investigation. It cost Harvard at least $10 million in legal expenses, probably actually a lot more than that. It was an episode where the University is literally accused of defrauding the US government, which is pretty unreal. In a case like that, luckily it was Harvard, was a think tank, a corporate think tank that wasn’t actually Harvard University. But when you are actually found guilty of defrauding the US government, you’re not actually allowed to take any more money from the US government. Now, everybody has ways of getting around this. I’ve never seen the US government actually blacklist anybody who’s accused of defrauding it because of course that’s you know who pays for your campaign commercials. But it’s a very unusual case, especially back then in 2000, that a university, especially Harvard, would be charged with defrauding the government.

This was a real sordid chapter. Larry managed to sort of keep it out of the headlines. But there was a 22,000-word institutional investor piece about the whole thing. And it goes into great detail. It’s quite crazy about how just utterly out of control this crew was. This story comes out at the very beginning of 2006. Somebody anonymously mails the story in manila envelopes to all of these people on the faculty senate. It makes the rounds. All of these emeritus professors are up in arms and they’re like, “This has gotten so out of control.” A lot of these professors are like accounting professors and math professors, not the humanities, softies that Summers doesn’t take seriously. And he announces his resignation within weeks of this happening in February, basically, like I said, 20 years ago last week. So, it was a big deal and yet, I am told that if anyone would ever bring it up again with Larry, he would shoot it down. So now when we talk about Larry being president of Harvard and why he resigned, everybody brings up “Women can’t do math”, which is something that he had said over a year earlier. And then his constant belittling of Cornel West, supposedly for recording a rap album, probably for standing for everything that Larry Summers is not.

Chris Hedges: Also, the Harvard Corporation because the Harvard Corporation lost almost a third of its endowment because they were bad investments. That’s another issue. Let’s go back to Epstein. So, with this looting by an America- type mafia or in alliance with the Russian oligarchs, where was Epstein and does it appear that some of Epstein’s money and wealth came through that process or not?

Moe Tkacik: So, I have not yet examined the relationship between Epstein and Blavatnik, who’s a really kind of fascinating but also very shadowy character. But this unbelievable document that I came across in the files really starts to shed a lot of light on how central the collapse of the Soviet Union was to the Epstein class and to his network and to potentially a lot of his sort of mysterious money.

So, in 1991, like I was saying, Robert Maxwell, newspaper baron, publishing magnate, falls off his yacht and dies. And there are a lot of different reports. There are medical examiners that say, “No, he was hit by a blow to the head. Obviously, he was hit.” But within weeks of his death, it is discovered that there is a 1.4 billion dollars missing from Maxwell Communications, his publishing empire, and most of it is missing from the pensions of Daily Mirror workers. Everything is frozen for the Maxwell family. His heir, a guy named Kevin Maxwell, Ghislaine’s much older brother, she’s the baby of the family, he is immediately under a cloud of suspicion. But so is she, because she is spotted when they go to get the body to fly it to Israel – because of course he must be buried in Israel even though they’re not acknowledging that he was a lifetime Mossad asset – she is seen by a Daily Mirror reporter, who she has brought along, ordering all of the servants to get rid of, shred everything that they find, find all of the documents on the yacht, find anything and get rid of it. And so, isn’t that interesting?

They are all under this cloud of suspicion and very broke and she’s complaining to everybody in her elite circles in New York, “My god, I don’t have any money. I’m a complete pauper. I’m terrible.” And at this point, this is when, and this is something that Kevin does, she gets hooked up with Epstein. And apparently Epstein did not know, according to this gentleman who’s being interviewed by a completely clueless Assistant U.S. Attorney in 2020. This is a guy named James Hatt. He was a telecom executive, but really he was working for the intelligence service. And so, he was sort of posing as a telecom executive. He was posted most of the time to the Soviet Union, largely Latvia, to try and privatize telecoms. And he encounters all of these folks, and he comes forward in 2020 to the FBI and says, “Listen, I have all this information. I used to hang out with these people all the time. I can tell you what they were doing, how it all fits together.” These are the things, the connective tissue, how are they fitting together? He says, number one, basically that, under the advice of his father, Kevin had appointed Jeffrey Epstein to sort of take care of the family’s money in the event of an emergency, right? And so, they never found the money that was missing from the Daily Mirror. What they did have was hundreds of shell companies, most based in Liechtenstein, that they were sort of cycling through. There were bankruptcy examinations, but maybe half the money was found, but a lot of it just sort of went missing.

And what this guy says is that they had sort of put the money into the coffers of a Vienna-based mobster named Grigory Luchansky. Luchansky was born in Georgia, spent a lot of his time in Latvia. There was a ton of money laundering going on in Latvia at the time, a very critical port for illicit oil sales. So, a lot of money is funneling through Latvia and this guy Luchansky is sort of like the boss, the main mob boss of Latvia. He becomes very good friends with this telecom executive because he’s trying to privatize telecoms in Latvia. So, he has to pay him off. He refers to him as something called a ‘roof’, which is like the network of kind of the extortion ring that surrounded any of the Russian state-owned enterprises. You’d have to pay these guys off in order to successfully privatize it. So, Luchansky is this kind of mobster, he’s based in Vienna, spends a lot of time in Latvia, and Epstein is laundering money for him and bringing back some of it to Ghislaine Maxwell. And Epstein is getting a lot of his money to kind of keep the Maxwell family afloat. Apparently, according to this document, he’s getting it out of the New York Daily News, which is, of course, the newspaper that Maxwell owned, had just purchased when he died.

He had just purchased it in early 1991 after this horrible strike. And in bankruptcy court, the newspaper is sold to Mort Zuckerman, who is a Montreal-born man about town, a recent ex-boyfriend at that point of Gloria Steinem, and he owns US News and World Report, and at that point the Atlantic Monthly. He buys the New York Daily News after months and months in which Conrad Black is supposed to be buying it, everything is set for Conrad black. The ink is almost dry, but he’s having trouble with the unions and that’s another interesting wrinkle here because the union – and I talked to some reporters from the New York Daily News – the union that is kind of holding everything up and that decides whether or not somebody’s going to get to buy the Daily News is the Newspaper Deliverers Union, which is basically a wholly-owned subsidiary of organized crime. It’s under investigation. Its president just got out of prison on 124 counts of racketeering. He’s about to go back to prison when this whole deal is going down because he tests positive for cocaine. When Maxwell was buying the newspaper, these union’s representatives literally threatened to kill him right then and there. And apparently that seals the deal for him.

But somehow Mort Zuckerman takes this newspaper out of the hands of Conrad Black, another interesting fellow, at the last minute, even though they don’t have any of the details sorted out. And for some reason, apparently, according to this gentleman, and I’d have to go through the bankruptcy filings to see whether there were avenues that they established for this legally, they were extracting large sums of money. And he just says so much money was coming out of the Daily News and distributing it to Ghislaine and the rest of the nine, I think…

Chris Hedges: Through Epstein, was it?

Moe Tkacik: Epstein was the one who was doing that. Now, Epstein was also extremely good friends with Mort Zuckerman.

Chris Hedges: Well, aren’t there email exchanges where he’s sending Zuckerman women?

Moe Tkacik: Yes, so Zuckerman is an interesting fellow. Granted he says, “Is 31 too young?” to the then 72-year-old Mort Zuckerman. So, Mort Zuckerman again and this is another thing that gets really sort of not recognized within the Epstein network, he set plenty of rich guys up with over 18 women. With wives, with mistresses, Leon Black’s mistress. She was fully of age. And he has to have set up Les Wexner with his wife Abigail, who was, I think that her father was the CEO of El Al at the time. But because he is very close with a lot of these women. He’s extremely close with Sunni Previn. He’s extremely close with Wendy Murdoch, Wendy Dunn…

Chris Hedges: With Valery Chomsky and I want you to talk about that but there’s also the biographer of the former Prince Andrew. After 60,000 copies of his book came out, he had to remove claims or argues that Epstein provided Melania to Trump.

Moe Tkacik: It’s funny that you should mention that because there’s a guy named Paolo Zampolli. He is the gentleman who supposedly introduced Melania to Trump. They’re still very good friends. He was there the other day when Melania was presiding over the Security Council. Paolo is in the Trump Administration. He works for the State Department as something like a senior advisor over special world projects or something along those lines. He’s in this network during the time. He runs a modeling agency. And I’ve spoken to a lot of folks close to Zampolli about whether he did actually introduce Trump to Melania or whether it was Epstein. It’s really hard to know.

Zampolli is nowhere near as sort of formidable as Epstein. In terms of being savoriness, I would say that he is no more savory. But Melania has sued, and won in a lot of cases, but she has sued pretty much anyone who has wondered about the official story of her and Trump. There is a Slovenian journalist who wrote a long investigation into this that basically said, “No, it was Zampolli but she was a high-class call girl. She was modeling in all of these clubs in Milan that are known brothels. And that’s how she met Trump.” And she has sued anyone who has republished that. He put out another book.

But one thing that the Slovenians will always say is that she supposedly met Trump in 1998, but it was in 1996 that in Slovenia, they started hearing about this up-and-coming model who was supposed to be dating Donald Trump. She was not a successful model at all. One thing that is really amazing is how casting directors, because the Slovenians have really gone over a lot of this territory, they’ll say, “She’s so beautiful and she has such great skin and hair and she takes such good care of herself, but she has like zero charisma and she was just like a terrible model.” So, she didn’t have a lot of work. But somehow she got a three-year H1B visa in 1996 and supposedly met Trump two years later. And I think that what a lot of the sort of Melania Truthers believe was that she met Trump much earlier, that she got the visa as a result of Trump wanting her to have a visa, and that they have to sweep this under the rug because at the time, Trump was still married and not even separated from Marla Maples and God knows whatever else.

But yes, Jeffrey Epstein was at the epicenter of this whole network. He was friends. Zampolli is very close with Jean-Luc Brunel. All of these models, Zampolli’s models, tended to live in this building that was owned by Jeffrey Epstein’s brother. So, all of these enterprises were interconnected.

Chris Hedges: Let me ask, because it’s an interesting point that you make in your article in The Prospect, about Epstein’s relationship with the much younger wives of people like Chomsky, Woody Allen. You raised that point. Explain.

Moe Tkacik: I think that he’s extremely close to Soon-Yi Previn.

Chris Hedges: This is Woody Allen’s wife and former stepdaughter.

Moe Tkacik: So, one of the reasons that I started thinking about this was that Mort Zuckerman has pretty advanced dementia, has for a very long time. He was diagnosed, it looks like around 2013, and after his diagnosis, he goes to Epstein and basically says, “What should I do?” He has two daughters, the first with an ex-wife, a woman that he married for like four years. And the second with no one knows. Possibly it’s egg donor-surrogate combination, but she has no known mother. So unusual situation there. He doesn’t seem inclined to sort of leave them with his fortune. He has these nephews. But he’s kind of going to Epstein with like, “What do I do with all this money that I have?” It’s $2.8 billion at this point. And Epstein’s like, “Well, send it over to me. I’m going to figure it out.” You know, how you avoid taxes or whatever. And so, he sends over all of this financial information and Epstein, number one, he says, “This is all a complete mess You got to give it to me. I can straighten this out for you, but all of your trusts need to be rewritten.” Not exactly sure why, but the folks at JP Morgan, to whom he referred Zuckerman, are apparently falling down on the job. And then he keeps saying, “What if you just get married. If you just get married, we don’t have deal with any of this problem. Just get married and then we don’t have to deal with step-up basis, these the estate tax issues. This would just be so much easier if you got married.” And what that made me think was that Epstein really, he was sort of a magnet for these sort of a much older man with money and younger wife combinations. He was a little cooler than the geezers, you know? I mean, I think that like a little younger than Woody and a little bit more kind of ‘Of the world’. He and Soon-Yi are just extremely close.

But I think, and this is one of the things about this Wexner relationship that I started to think after reading so many of the exchanges between him and Mort Zuckerman, is that for these guys, you get the sense that their wealth isn’t even theirs. There is some element that they are owned by these, because Zuckerman at one point he’s like, “Where do I have to give my money away to? Who do you have to give your money away to?” And Epstein’s like, “I don’t know, what do you want? Jewish? Alzheimer’s?” And Zuckerman just says, “Well, Jewish Alzheimer’s.” So that’s one of the expectations is that there’s going to be an enormous amount of money flowing back to the various Zionist organizations. And Zuckerman was at the very top of that collection. He ran something called the Council of Presidents of Jewish Organizations for a while, which is a title they call ‘King of the Jews’ supposedly, according to the forward I think, and there is also this sense that you get that at the very top these oligarchs, you can’t take it with you and so they get very sort of paranoid when they start to get older about what’s going to become of their money and how sort of to protect themselves. And Epstein is the guy who kind of soothes their sort of sense of existential dilemmas about that, but then also encourages them to just, “Hey, leave it to your wife.” Because Zuckerman is very resistant to a lot of Epstein’s suggestions. He seems extremely stingy. Epstein’s like, “Why don’t you just agree to pay for camp for your kids’ cousins? What’s the big deal?” But there is this sense that Epstein has is like as soon as this sort of transfers over to the lady, then the money is even more sort of controllable by me and my networks. I have even more clout in terms of deciding where to target it – what universities, what galleries that we’re going to annex. So, I think that this is something that sort of needs to be explored.

A thing that I do worry about with Chomsky is just like his papers, that was something that I’ve thought about while reading the Valeria and Chomsky stuff. Clearly, Chomsky was, like you’ve observed, sort of drawn to Epstein’s financial acumen about how to deal with his estate. But in his case, especially given that we know that he was such a prolific answerer of emails and correspondence, I fear what happens to all of his papers when he dies. Who’s going to get first crack at them? Is Mossad going to be there? Because I’ve heard about that stuff happening in the past. And so I think that there’s probably good reasons that he had for wanting to cultivate Chomsky but the reason that they get drawn to him, I think, is because he is very good. He’s very good at ingratiating himself to women.

Chris Hedges: Let me ask about the focus has obviously been on the pedophilia rings and the sexual abuse of girls and women, but I think you argue that they’ve missed this other important aspect in the Epstein files, which is this financial cabal that Epstein was at the center of.

Moe Tkacik: Yeah, so one thing that was really striking about, again, going back to that British intelligence officer, telecom guy, was that this gentleman that he mentions, Gregory Luchansky, was like an obsession of the CIA. William Saphire wrote a column about him in 1995. In the 90s, there was a lot of fear about what was going to happen to Russia. I remember the fear of Zhirinovsky, what all of this chaos that we had done so much to unleash and to worsen was going to wreak. So, the big thing on Luchansky was that he was suspected and he showed up at a bunch of DNC – he gets a meeting with Clinton that supposedly Ghislaine organizes. And Ghislaine goes to work as his pimp essentially.

Chris Hedges: You don’t mean Chomsky, you mean Epstein.

Moe Tkacik: As this guy Luchansky’s pimp. She was working for Luchansky. But in the in the real hawkish stories about this guy, and he was one of a large parade of very shady foreign donors to the DNC and to Clinton during the mid-90s. He belonged to that sort of parade, the Charlie Tree, you know, those guys. But they were saying that he was suspected of trafficking nuclear materials to Iran. But this is one of the things that was just so striking to read and to understand because that’s the other thing is that he was a business partner of Mark Rich, who was famously pardoned by Clinton on his last day in office and Mark Rich was another one of these guys who sold Iranian oil. He didn’t care who he was taking money from. He was completely unideological, a Zionist, right? But he did lots of deals with Iran and that was one of the reasons that he actually was originally indicted.

That’s the other thing is that it is all about getting rich and punishing your enemies. And at the end of the day, they don’t have loyalty to any country, right? They don’t have loyalty to anyone. And that’s the other thing that’s so depressing about reading some of Epstein’s emails is that he’s such a bad guy, but he’s more human than a lot of the folks that he was dealing with. Certainly, Zuckerman, and it’s hard to kind of wrap your mind around that. Or maybe he has more of like a patina of humanity. Because he was a really bad guy, but he could play a human being.

And I feel like that is sort of what has happened. He and Mort Zuckerman… Ehud Barak, it’s important to put that into context, right? Like Ehud Barak is Bibi’s longtime rival. He supposedly was as woke as it got in the 90s in Israel. Certainly, he was also a racist Jewish supremacist, but also an Ashkenazi supremacist. He looked down on the Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews. There’s a point at which he says to Epstein, “We don’t have to import these low rent Jews anymore, like the Mizrahi Jews from Yemen and Morocco and Egypt. We can really have our choice of Jews, and we should try to get better stock to immigrate.” Right? Because they’re crazy eugenicists. But at the same time, that was a calculation because, as you know, Likud, Netanyahu’s party, their base is Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews and Soviet Jews. And these are people who suffered a lot of discrimination and bigotry – incredible, scandalous feats. Their babies being stolen in the hospital and auctioned off to Ashkenazi parents in the 50s. That literally happened. And it’s one of the motives for the guy who killed Rabin. But these are folks who had some sympathy for the Arabs back in the 50s. That was snuffed out and they became the hardest core, Likudnik, Kahanist, Jewish supremacist people in Israel, that faction, and that’s what we’re living with now. And now, the old Labor Zionists, the Ashkenazis, the woke Ashkenazis, they’re all moving to Berlin and not allowed to vote anymore. And so you see kind of how as bad as things were when Epstein was writing all of these emails. They’ve definitely gotten worse.

Chris Hedges: It’s a window into the into the ruling class. I mean, that’s what it is and it’s not just that they treat everyone as objects, including girls and women, but I think that what you have investigated and written on, it also just shows the criminality, and of course it’s a network where they all watch out for each other, as you pointed out, on the way to getting fabulously rich.

Moe Tkacik: Yeah, another thing that’s like sort of a meta story that I came across because initially I started looking at this because of the New York Daily News. I was interested in that newspaper, which was the highest circulating newspaper in America in the 70s, had a circulation close to like 1.5 million in the 80s. It was always a friend of Israel, but it was the working class, kind of the epitome of the populist newspaper. They’re down to 20 reporters, four on the national desk and 16 on state and local. I don’t know how you run a newspaper with that kind of crew, a daily newspaper, but they’re owned by Alden Global Capital, the Duke La Crosse Bro-run newspaper plunderer that’s kind of gotten all of the newspapers, Chicago Tribune, Denver Post, Times, you name it. But when Zuckerman finally sold the paper, and that was the other thing, that Epstein wanted Zuckerman to get the paper off his hands in 2013. It was sitting on Zuckerman’s books at a value of like 550 million dollars. He ends up selling it for one dollar to the sort of precursor of Alden, called Tronc. It immediately gives this contract to this guy for like 10 million dollars. He’s like flying around in private jets. I mean, it’s completely, disgusting.

But you realize that because in the context of Jeff Bezos just sort of having the Washington Post staff and Epstein at one point he writes to Peter Thiel, “Hey man, you know, like I’ll upfront half of your expenses on that Gawker lawsuit. I hate them too.” For these guys, at one point, owning a newspaper was a path to influence and they sort of subsidized these things and they took money out of these things and the journalists never really paid attention to the depressing finances of their operations because it’s a source of existential dread. I mean, being in this industry for my whole life, it’s been in crippling recession and nobody pays attention. When they sold it, they sold not just the newspaper, but this 25-acre plot of land in New Jersey where they had a printing press and it’s waterfront land overlooking the Hudson. It was a 50 % interest in that land, but they sold this thing for a dollar.

And, who knows what other side deals were involved in that transaction? Probably quite a few. But there’s so much that we don’t know. There’s so much that you don’t have to disclose as an oligarch these days. We’re sort of at the mercy of these people and journalists are very much loathed. Real journalism is loathed by these guys. And it occurred to me that the New York Daily News would have been the ideal newspaper to sort of be sifting through the Epstein files because so many of these characters are in New York. They’re sort of New York personalities.

And the New York Times tried to cover this scandal, but they keep running against up against – I mean, one of my favorite things was a story that they ran about how Epstein was just a con man, and there’s all this talk about how he was in intelligence but he was just a con man. And like, no, you don’t get to do Ponzi scheme after Ponzi scheme and get away with it if you don’t have some connections. And where are those connections, right? Those things go together. Ponzi schemes, money laundering, intelligence, you see that triumvirate over and over again, right? And there’s one point where they say that he has this connection to the White House and it’s what’s her face. But it’s a Rothschild. They just leave out the Rothschild part of her name, right? There’s so much that the New York Times just won’t touch.

And the FBI didn’t want to investigate. The other story is how the files show complete disinterest on the part of the US attorney and on the part of our federal investigators in understanding what was going on. So, it’s a bleak story, but it’s also, in light of the absolute insanity of this particular moment, very illuminating.

Chris Hedges: Well, it’s the depravity, the greed, the hedonism, the lack of empathy, the callousness, the cruelty that has defined all oligarchic classes throughout history. And I think that your work has been important because it’s that pedophilia, human trafficking, that exploitation of girls and women is just one piece of that vast puzzle. And we need to highlight that. We need that complete picture, which I think that your work has been very important in terms of providing. Thanks, Maureen, and I want to thank Sophia, Diego, Victor, Thomas, and Max who produce the show. You can find me at chrisedges.substack.com.