Files Showed Jeffrey Epstein Was a Guest at Conrad Black's Lavish 60th Birthday Party for Barbara Amiel. The DOJ Just Deleted It.
Trump pardoned convicted corporate criminal Conrad Black, who has been protecting Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell for decades. Who else is protecting Conrad Black?
On February 6, 2025, I sent out an article (LINK HERE) about the National Post’s Tristin Hopper writing an article, “First Read: Canadians in the Epstein Files” which included Mark Carney’s mentions, which were all in news articles, but not National Post founder Conrad Black’s 81 mentions.
Included in that story was a link to a files that has since been deleted by the Department of Justice. I realized this after a commenter disagreed with my claims, saying that there were not 81 files, but 79. Two files have been deleted.
If you click on the link in the excerpt below, it previously led to a pdf, EFTA01682184.pdf, which was a 50 megabyte file with scanned in documents. It now delivers a “link not found.”
This is the quote:
“the news story about the birthday party in 2000 that Conrad Black threw for his wife, Barbara Amiel, for which he billed the company $42,869.57, where guests included Henry Kravis, Estee Lauder heir Ronald Lauder, Mort Zuckerman, A Alfred Taubman, Anna Wintour, Barry Humphries, Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein.
“Like Lord Black, some guests have since suffered a taste of scandal - Jeffrey Epstein, a mobile phones millionaire on table three, was charged last year with soliciting prostitutes for sex in Florida and, according to lurid newspaper reports from police investigation documents, has highly unusual tastes in massage.”
However, thanks to canny internet sleuths who have recognized the Trump administration for erasing and rewriting history, the file has been preserved and is available at https://jmail.world, and you can read it here:
While no one in Canadian media is willing to mention it, Conrad Black has been named many times as an associate of Jeffrey Epstein on the basis of the fact that their contacts took up nearly half a page of Epstein’s “secret” black book. New York Magazine from February 10, 2026 pointed it out, again.
The connections are not subtle: Black, Amiel, Epstein and Maxwell were in the same orbit and shared the same friends and business partners.
Conrad Black has been covering for Epstein and Maxwell for over 20 years:
In 2003, when journalist Vicky Ward was writing the first big story about Epstein, she said Black - her then-husband’s uncle - was part of a pressure campaign to interfere with the story.
Black had close connections to many of Epstein’s alleged, and actual, co-conspirators:
Ghislaine Maxwell, whom Black says is a friend, was “Sentenced To 20 Years In Prison For Conspiring With Jeffrey Epstein To Sexually Abuse Minors.”
Les Wexner, the billionaire owner of Victoria’s Secret, has been named in the files as a co-conspirator with Epstein. He sat on the board of Conrad Black’s company, Hollinger, from 1996-2002.
Donald Trump was in business with Black for years. Trump was a shareholder in Hollinger.
The National Post and Postmedia were sold to an American company, Chatham Asset Management, which also owns AMI, where National Enquirer publisher David J Pecker agreed to be the “eyes and ears” of the Trump campaign. Pecker and fellow AMI exec Daniel Rotman were appointed to the board of Postmedia at the time they were arranging the hush-money payments for which Trump was convicted.
Why would the DOJ delete it? Well, because it exposes Black’s criminality, as well showing the extraordinary proximity to elites that Maxwell and Epstein enjoyed, thanks to Black’s hospitality.
Not only is the entire file intact, the contents of the article relating are available for free online anyway.
Titled “Happy Birthday Barbara” from May 2007, from Chicago, by Andrew Clark.
The details of the dinner came to public attention at trial.
The issue of whether a 60th birthday party where “An opera singer gave a recital from Carmen and Samson & Delilah,” was a legitimate business expense, or whether Black was running a “corporate kleptocracy” as alleged in the report on Hollinger by Richard Breeden, a former Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Black only personally covered $20,000 of the $62,869.57 cost of dining at “Le Grenouille.”
There were only 80 guests - including Barry Humphries of Dame Edna fame.
Ghislaine Maxwell, was seated at Table 1. Jeffrey Epstein, described as a “mobile phones millionaire” and financier) was seated at Table 3.
The Host’s Table (Conrad Black):
Anna Wintour (Vogue Editor-in-Chief)
Barry Humphries (Actor, known as Dame Edna Everage)
Ahmet Ertegun (Founder of Atlantic Records)
Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild: The company manages investments in The Economist Group, owner of The Economist magazine,
Kate Ford (Widow of Henry Ford II)
Arianna von Hohenlohe - A 24-year old princess who the next year married Dixon Boardman, the inspiration for a character in Tom Wolfe’s the Bonfire of the Vanities
The Birthday Girl’s Table (Barbara Amiel):
Henry Kissinger (Former U.S. Secretary of State & War Crime Enthusiast)
Donald Trump (then real estate mogul; he later testified that he viewed the party as a business event, now convicted felon, adjudicated rapist.
Tina Brown (Former editor of The New Yorker and Vanity Fair)
Peter Jennings (ABC News anchor)
Vernon Jordan (Advisor to Bill Clinton)
Table One (Near the Opera Singer):
Oscar de la Renta (Fashion designer)
Ghislaine Maxwell (Socialite & convicted sex criminal)
Charlie Rose (Talk show host,
As a consequence, some of the guests at the party were required to testify as to their opinion about whether they thought the party was business, or pleasure.
“To tickle guests’ appetites, there were amuse bouches of Beluga caviar, lobster and cucumber salad, beef carpaccio and cheese puffs washed down with $320-a-bottle 1993 Dom Perignon champagne.
The well-heeled revellers tucked into lobster ravioli or veal with herbes and gnocchi, followed by a chocolate “coppelia” and truffles.
In total, the party got through $13,000 of wine including 26 bottles of 1998 Chassagne Montrachet Prosper Maufoux (a snip at $130 each) and 23 bottles of Clos Vougeot Prosper Maufoux, priced at $205 each.”
One of guests-turned-witnesses at trial who vouched for Conrad Black was John O’Sullivan, a former speechwriter for Margaret Thatcher,
“The party didn’t seem to me very different from [another] Hollinger party I attended, which was not a birthday party but a party for Hollinger directors,” John O’Sullivan, a journalist who also wrote speeches for former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, told the court in Chicago.
O’Sullivan, who has known the Black family for more than 20 years, said he attended the dinner and considered it a “business event masquerading as a social occasion.”
“In 1998 [O’Sullivan] he was a leading member of the journalistic team that found the National Post, Canada’s first national newspaper.”
Lead prosecutor Eric Sussman tried to portray O’Sullivan as a biased witness, suggesting he owed Black “a debt of gratitude” after the mogul helped him secure a position as editor-in-chief of the National Interest journal.
O’Sullivan disagreed with Sussman’s suggestion that he was only appointed after Black invested thousands of dollars into the magazine through Hollinger, saying their relationship was more of a “two-way street.”
Taki Theodoracopulos, a columnist for The Spectator UK, which Black owned at one point wrote that “The party, as far as I was concerned, was a flop. No loose women around. It was full of businessmen, people Conrad did business with, like Leonard Lauder, who was a big advertiser in the Black papers, Donald Trump, the ghastly Richard Perle and others prominent in Wall Street and D.C.”
In 2023, Taki was convicted of a 2009 charge of attempted rape.
However, John O’Sullivan, who defended Trump, is much more than a journalist.
O’Sullivan served from 2008-2012 as vice president and executive editor of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. He is currently president of the Danube Institute and editor of the Australian monthly magazine Quadrant.
He is a former editor (1988-1997) and current editor-at-large of the opinion magazine the National Review and a former senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. He had previously been the editor-in-chief of United Press International, editor-in-chief of the international affairs magazine, The National Interest, and a special adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. He was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire(CBE) in the 1991 New Year's Honours List.
O’Sullivan has been working for far-right causes around the world for decades:
Since his stint at the US right-wing think tank The Heritage Foundation (1979–1983) he has become an important interface between American and British reactionaries…
According to a leaked member list of the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS), O’Sullivan was a member of the organization as of 1971… and a staff member of the Bruges Group, a EU-skeptical UK think tank founded in 1989 which played a key part in the 2016 Brexit referendum.28
John O’Sullivan joined the board of directors of the Center for Family and Human Rights (C-FAM), an arch-reactionary anti-abortion and anti-LGBTIQ hate group, presided over by its co-founder Austin Ruse.
In Canada, O’Sullivan is part of the “Canada Strong and Free Network” which was formerly known as the Manning Centre, named after founding leader of the Reform Party, Preston Manning. It has been actively working with US right groups tied to Trump and the far-right.
O’Sullivan might seem like the living embodiment of a conspiracy theory of how shadowy organizations have been pulling the strings behind the scenes for decades, except they actually happened.
The Mont Pelerin Society that fought to overturn Keynesian economics and crush social democracy in the 1970s; the Heritage Foundation, which has been selecting a string of corrupt Supreme Court justices in the U.S.; Brexit, and now he is working promoting Viktor Orban.
However, the Epstein files show that in many of these, O’Sullivan’s work overlaps directly with Trump, Epstein, Bannon and UK conservatives. In their conversations, Bannon and Epstein talk about Brexit, Nigel Farage is mentioned as “...part of Steve Bannon's international network of right-wing populist leaders." Farage is “referenced in multiple reports analyzing Steve Bannon’s efforts to build a global network of nationalist and populist movements, appearing alongside figures like Viktor Orbán, Marine Le Pen, and Donald Trump.”
The global rise of right-wing authoritarianism is not an accident: it has been nurtured.
Conrad Black bought Canada’s newspapers in the 1990s with the stated intention of making them, and the country, more right wing. That was Stephen Harper’s stated goal.
Black’s Ostentatious Self-Dealing at Hollinger: a “Corporate Kleptocracy”.
Black claimed that all the charges against him were cooked up. In fact, during his trial, he benefited from a Supreme Court ruling that helped get the CEO of Enron off the hook.
Black’s cosiness with Trump is unsurprising: they are two peas in the same pod. Both are egomaniacs born into wealth who are still celebrated despite having left an astonishing trail of wreckage, failure and criminal convictions in their wake, all while pissing away their inheritance.
The Breeden report details nearly 500 pages of Black’s self-serving business practices at Hollinger.
Hollinger’s proxy statement for 2000 falsely stated that Black had exercised an option to purchase the apartment at “then fair market values.” In reality, Black acquired the Hollinger apartment in 2000 at what its market value had been in 1994 when Hollinger bought it. The deal was a real estate time machine for Black.
Apartments weren’t the only deal the Blacks cut for themselves in living expenses. Food, cell phones, perfume, and other routine living expenses, including tips by Mrs. Black while on shopping trips, were expensed to Hollinger. Black’s corporate expense reports charge the company for items such as “handbags for Mrs. BB” ($2,463), “jogging attire for Mrs. BB” ($140), exercise equipment ($2,083), “T. Anthony Ltd. Leather Briefcase” ($2,057), opera tickets for “C&BB” ($2,785), stereo equipment for the New York apartment ($828), “silverware for Blacks’ corporate jet” ($3,530) “Summer Drinks” ($24,950), a “Happy Birthday, Barbara” dinner party at New York’s La Grenouille Restaurant ($42,870),1and $90,000 to refurbish a Rolls Royce owned by Ravelston for Black’s personal transportation.
Another finding of this Report is that Black and his Ravelston associates, particularly Boultbee, frequently coupled their maneuvering to avoid accountability with aggressive schemes to avoid personal taxation. Not satisfied with receiving $20 to $40 million a year in excessive management fees, Black and the Ravelston insiders then directed significant portions of those fees to Moffat Management and Black-Amiel Management, which were empty shell companies registered in Barbados. Even though these entities did nothing to earn fees, and did not have either employees or real operations, paying management fees to them on the pretense that they performed services allowed the recipients the prospect of transforming a portion of the enormous management fees that would otherwise most likely have been taxable in Canada (where the payments were received), or possibly the U.S. (where services were largely performed), into dividends received in Barbados (where nothing occurred). Similarly, not content with receiving more than $5 million in “incentive” payments for losing $68 million on Hollinger Digital investments, Black and other recipients members of the “Senior Executive Group” (but not Perle) had most of their Hollinger Digital payments wired to a different shell entity in Barbados.
One of the reasons Black argued there was nothing wrong with any of this is because the board, oozing with cronies, signed off on it.
Slate Magazine ran an entertaining piece about Hollinger’s “Board from hell”.
Over his career, Black, aka Lord Black of Crossharbour, brilliantly cobbled together an empire of newspapers that included London’s Daily Telegraph, the Chicago Sun-Times, and the Jerusalem Post. But his greatest feat may have been putting together a board of directors singularly unequipped to oversee a newspaper operation, to deliver justice to shareholders, and to grasp the concept of conflicts of interest. For the past several years, in fact, Hollinger International’s board has been the corporate governance equivalent of the Star Wars cantina scene.
To give you an indication of how bad the board members were, Epstein’s benefactor and co-conspirator Les Wexner was singled out as being the best of a bad bunch.
“there are few cases in which the board of directors of a publicly held company is almost entirely stocked with insiders, cronies, and clunkers, with the odd convict thrown in for good measure…
As of the spring [2003], Hollinger International’s board included five individuals who met the Securities and Exchange Commission’s definition of corporate insiders: Black; his wife, columnist Barbara Amiel Black; and three other Hollinger International executives.”
… Indeed, the roster of independent directors reads like the politically plugged-in guest list at an American Enterprise Institute dinner—not the managerial crowd you’d find at a Business Roundtable function.”
Those independent directors included:
“A. Alfred Taubman - remained on Hollinger’s board even after he had been convicted of violating antitrust laws”
“Dwayne Andreas, the paterfamilias of Archer Daniels Midland, the agri-business giant that in 1996 pleaded guilty to price-fixing, was also a longtime board director.”
Henry Kissinger, who may have attended one or no meetings in exchange for his $35,000 fee.
“The Honorable Richard Burt, the former arms negotiator and Reagan-era ambassador to Germany; the Honorable James Thompson, the former Republican governor of Illinois; and the Honorable Richard Perle. The Honorable Robert Strauss, the ambi-partisan fixer and former ambassador to the Soviet Union, served on the board for six years but left in 2002. Marie Josee Kravis, a respected conservative economist and the wife of financier Henry Kravis, was also a board member as of this spring. With the exception of Kravis, these directors were far more equipped to discuss regime change in Iraq than they were to discuss regime management in Conrad Black’s empire.”
This is literally true.
One of Hollinger’s slackest board members was Richard Perle, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense who was one of the actual architects of the Iraq War. Ostensibly on the audit committee, Perle just ok’d everything.
Perle and another Hollinger board member, Gerald Hillman, a former McKinsey consultant, were working together on a company called Trireme Partners, which had received an investment from Hollinger that was singled out in the Steeden report:
“HOLLINGER’S INVESTMENT IN TRIREME PARTNERS
In late 2002, Perle purported to commit Hollinger to invest $25 million in Trireme, a venture capital fund in which he had a significant financial interest. At the time, he was a Hollinger director and a director and officer of Digital. Thus, the Trireme investment was a related-party transaction that required independent director or Audit Committee approval. No such approval was ever sought or obtained.
According to Perle, the Trireme opportunity arose in connection with Black’s attempt to outsource Hollinger’s investment activities. Following the collapse of the internet boom, Perle suggested to Black that they raise a separate investment fund together so that Hollinger could continue investing but also obtain money from other investors. E-mails and other documents suggest, however, a different sequence of events: that Gerald Hillman, a longtime friend and associate of Perle, and Perle started Trireme and then actively courted Hollinger’s participation in it.”
Perle was on the The Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee under George W Bush - he was the Chairman.
Perle ended up having to resign due to a scandal involving Trireme - after allegations in a New Yorker article that he was meeting Adnan Khashoggi, the Saudi arms dealer at the centre of the 1980s Iran-Contra Scandal.
In January 2003, The New Yorker ran an article by Seymour Hersh, reporting that Perle had had a meeting with Khashoggi in Marseilles, and had offered him U.S. intelligence in exchange for a Saudi investment in Trireme - the company whose principals were all on the board of Hollinger, which had made a $25-million investment in the company without disclosing it. Boeing had put in $20-million, bringing the total to $45-million.
Perle had a long track record of self-dealing: “In 1983, he was the subject of a New York Times investigation into an allegation that he recommended that the Army buy weapons from an Israeli company from whose owners he had, two years earlier, accepted a fifty-thousand-dollar fee. Perle later acknowledged that he had accepted the fee, but vigorously denied any wrongdoing.”
According to the Hersh article:
Khashoggi and Zuhair told me that they understood that one of Trireme's objectives was to seek the help of influential Saudis to win homeland-security contracts with the Saudi royal family for the businesses it financed.
“As Khashoggi saw it, Trireme’s business potential depended on a war in Iraq taking place. ‘If there is no war,’ he told me, ‘why is there a need for security? If there is a war, of course, billions of dollars will have to be spent.”
Perle was one of the loudest and most influential voices driving for the Iraq War, a war that cost hundreds of thousands of lives, cost trillions of dollars, for a lie, all while he was setting up a private company with Hollinger board members and Hollinger money so he could profit from it.
At the time, the National Post in Canada, as well as Conservative Opposition Leader Stephen Harper, were demanding that Canada, led by Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chretien, should join the UK and the US in invading Iraq. Chretien refused, which may have been one of the best decisions he ever made.
David Frum, Conrad Black and the Iraq War
When talking about the Iraq War and Conrad Black, it’s important to remember someone else close to Black who worked in the W Bush White House: David Frum. Frum coined the fraudulent term, “the axis of evil” and the messaging he helped craft to beat the drums of wary was used to justify the “pre-emptive” Iraq War. It was most shameful and blatant cons in history - blatant lies that Saddam Hussein had to be stopped because of a lie that he had weapons of mass destruction. The lies were extensive, planned and deliberate - that cynically leveraged the trauma of 9/11 to convince people that Saddam Hussein had something to do with it. The result was an utter catastrophe. Nothing good whatsoever, and incredible harm came from that lie.
Frum has shown incredible - some, like me, might say grovelling - subervience to Black over the years. The same gaslighting minimizing of Black’s corporate shenanigans. In the National Review, of Black’s “Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full”
Frum pens sentences so desperate to ingratiate it’s hard not to turn your head away in disgust:
“Black is a writer of severe restraint and martini-dry wit. Still, he allows himself one personal editorial comment on the meaning and legacy of Watergate, one that expresses his deep—and well-founded—anger at the way in which he was put to trial on the self-serving testimony of his former business partner”
Are we to understand Black feels for Nixon because they both knew what it was like to be ratted on by a pal? This is mafia logic.
There’s another piece here from 2010 by Frum, originally in the National Post, bemoaning Black’s cruel fate, stranded in a Florida prison, far from family. Treating him as if he is a political prisoner, even applying that Black may have been wrongly convicted, kicking it off with “If Black did wrong….”
Every syllable of this pathetic sob story paints Conrad black, a grown man who chose to do these things, with agency, of being a victim who is being picked on.
He is facing the consequences of his actions.
Black was in jail because he is a corporate criminal, convicted after due process. The reason he couldn’t come back to Canada was because he had renounced his citizenship in a fit of pique, after being informed by Prime Minister Jean Chretien that Canadians aren’t allowed to be Barons - which Frum also frames as government persecution.
Imagine considering yourself persecuted because you couldn’t be a Baron.
Frum and Black are tied together in many ways: both were and are deeply involved in conservative politics in both the US and Canada, working a revolving door between media, organizing and blatant propaganda. Frum worked at the Wall Street Journal, Weekly Standard, and at the National Post, and played a role in trying to unite Canada’s two conservative parties - the “Winds of Change Conference”.
The same Hollinger documents from the trial showed Black was paying Frum $16,667 a month, as reported by Ken Silverstein in Harper’s in 2007.
In 2001, Frum wrote an profile for Slate so unctuous it makes Monty Burns’ Waylon Smithers sound like Don Rickles: “Black is the rarest of breeds: A mogul more interesting for himself than his businesses.” Frum also defended Black during the Hollinger trial, and while mentioning Black’s pardon, rambled about the pardon system and not any of the above: he argued that it was right to pardon Black, even if Trump was still bad.
For over two decades, since he interfered in the 2003 Vanity Fair story by Vicky Ward, Black has been protecting his friend Ghislaine Maxwell and keeping the crimes of her partner, Jeffrey Epstein from being reported accurately . Les Wexner was on the board of Hollinger. Black and Epstein shared a lawyer in Alan Dershowitz. Trump pardoned Black. Are all named Epstein associates.
Please consider sending this to an editor or reporter and ask them to look into it.
Just don’t ask Atlantic writer David Frum about it.
On second thought, maybe you should.
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For years we have been calling David "Frum the Scum". Thanks for tieing these two birds of a feather together. Many people have forgotten and now read Frum regularly. Definitely not "fit to print".
Always thought Conrad Black was a pompous windbag who thought nothing of bending the law to suit himself, but this says he absolutely has no moral floor. Doubly thankful now that Jean Chretien forced him to renounce his Canadian citizenship — one less creep for us to deal with.