One of these five people is a convicted criminal who was in Jeffrey Epstein's little black book. Why don’t the other four have a problem with that?
One of these five people is a convicted criminal who was in Jeffrey Epstein's little black book. Why don’t the other four have a problem with that?
The selective outrage of far-right moralizers means never having to say you're sorry.
Jeffrey Epstein is one of those villains where his extensive and confirmed crimes are matched by lurid conspiracy theories. The fact that he died in prison and therefore took his secrets to his grave only deepens the mystery. If it were murder, who is behind it? The global A-list that Epstein managed to cross paths with means that gossip outlets and political parties can both delight in dropping names.
NPR writes:
Epstein was first convicted in a Florida state court of a sex crime involving a minor in 2008. After his release from prison, Epstein still held significant sway in New York City, hosting titans of finance, politics, media, academia and high society. He hosted parties at a townhouse that was reportedly the largest in Manhattan. Even so, the Times wrote about Epstein sparingly, and, when it did, even admiringly.
One financial reporter who kept tabs on Epstein for the Times wrote a gauzy profile of him that ran just before Epstein was set to enter prison in 2008. Reporter Landon Thomas Jr. mostly portrayed the offense as patronizing prostitutes rather than highlighting it as a crime involving a minor.
In the summer of 2018, Thomas refused an assignment to call Epstein on a story, citing a conflict. At his request, the financier had made a $30,000 donation to a Harlem cultural center. Enrich, Thomas' editor, ordered him not to write about Epstein again. Thomas was forced to leave the paper at the start of 2019. Enrich says the Times should have told readers about the episode, which the paper has never done.
The Miami Herald's Julie K. Brown broke the story open in November 2018 by chronicling accusations against Epstein and the failures of major institutions to hold him accountable. Brown says the press is among those institutions. Boies cites the press' failings too.
There are other billionaires who have been accused of crimes worse than Epstein’s - like Peter Nygard, who, like Epstein, is accused of serial assaults on women and girls, and also had a compound on a tropical Island. But Nygard’s didn’t have as many high-profile guests as Epstein.
To you give you an indication of the cultural significance of Epstein, Elon Musk just suggested that billionaires giving to Harris were doing so because they were on some supposed secret list of Jeffrey Epstein’s.
The question about Jeffrey Epstein is that people want to know how he got away with what he did for so long? Clearly, powerful people were able to exert their influence to protect him and keep his secrets.
We live in an era where we are all subject to the whims of narcissistic oligarchs and their courtiers.
In the 2016 election, Roger Stone made great hay linking Epstein to the Clintons, despite Trump’s long-standing connections to Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.
There’s a saying that “With a narcissist, every accusation is a confession,” and the strategic purpose of Stone’s accusations is that, with a criminal like Epstein, any connection at all is considered damning.
From Stone’s strategic and political point of view, the whole point is to rope other people into it. It’s a kind of political herd immunity: if he can infect enough people it inoculates everyone, because attacks on Trump’s connections to Epstein can be met with others.
On a muggy October morning in 2007, Miami’s top federal prosecutor, Alexander Acosta, had a breakfast appointment with a former colleague, Washington, D.C., attorney Jay Lefkowitz.
It was an unusual meeting for the then-38-year-old prosecutor, a rising Republican star who had served in several White House posts before being named U.S. attorney in Miami by President George W. Bush. Instead of meeting at the prosecutor’s Miami headquarters, the two men — both with professional roots in the prestigious Washington law firm of Kirkland & Ellis — convened at the Marriott in West Palm Beach, about 70 miles away. For Lefkowitz, 44, a U.S. special envoy to North Korea and corporate lawyer, the meeting was critical.
His client, Palm Beach multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein, 54, was accused of assembling a large, cult-like network of underage girls — with the help of young female recruiters — to coerce into having sex acts behind the walls of his opulent waterfront mansion as often as three times a day, the Town of Palm Beach police found.
On the morning of the breakfast meeting, a deal was struck — an extraordinary plea agreement that would conceal the full extent of Epstein’s crimes and the number of people involved.
Not only would Epstein serve just 13 months in the county jail, but the deal — called a non-prosecution agreement — essentially shut down an ongoing FBI probe into whether there were more victims and other powerful people who took part in Epstein’s sex crimes, according to a Miami Herald examination of thousands of emails, court documents and FBI records.
The pact required Epstein to plead guilty to two prostitution charges in state court. Epstein and four of his accomplices named in the agreement received immunity from all federal criminal charges. But even more unusual, the deal included wording that granted immunity to “any potential co-conspirators’’ who were also involved in Epstein’s crimes. These accomplices or participants were not identified in the agreement, leaving it open to interpretation whether it possibly referred to other influential people who were having sex with underage girls at Epstein’s various homes or on his plane.
As part of the arrangement, Acosta agreed, despite a federal law to the contrary, that the deal would be kept from the victims. As a result, the non-prosecution agreement was sealed until after it was approved by the judge, thereby averting any chance that the girls — or anyone else — might show up in court and try to derail it.”
On November 12, 2020 - when most of the focus of the U.S. was still on a pandemic and the chaotic U.S. Presidential election a U.S. Department of Justice review found that Acosta had “exercised poor judgment” when, “as a US attorney in Florida, he gave sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein a non-prosecution agreement. But the review did not find that Acosta or other prosecutors engaged in professional misconduct.”
Citing contemporaneous records, the report concluded that prosecutors’ “concerns about legal issues, witness credibility, and the impact of a trial on the victims led them to prefer a pre-charge resolution and that Acosta’s concerns about the proper role of the federal government in prosecuting solicitation crimes resulted in his preference for a state-based resolution.”
Here, the line “Acosta’s concern about the proper role of the federal government in prosecuting solicitation crimes” refers, obliquely, to the fact that Florida prosecutors portrayed the underaged victims, some of whom were 14, as prostitutes.
Yasmin Vafa, a human rights attorney and executive director of Rights4Girls, which is working to end the sexual exploitation of girls and young women. “There is no such thing as a child prostitute. Under federal law, it’s called child sex trafficking — whether Epstein pimped them out to others or not. It’s still a commercial sex act — and he could have been jailed for the rest of his life under federal law,” she said.
While Acosta as a Federal prosecutor in Florida
Acosta resigned as Labor secretary in July 2019, less than a week after federal prosecutors in Manhattan unsealed an indictment charging Epstein with running a sex trafficking operation in which he sexually abused dozens of underaged girls in New York and Florida from 2002 to 2005.
In 2019, Acosta wrote to the Daily Beast explaining the situation. The defense had been investigating and intimidating prosecutors. Epstein’s lawyers included Alan Dershowitz, Kenneth Starr, and Roy Black.
“Liberating Canada: Tucker, Jordan Peterson & Conrad Black”
That brings me to the group photo above. It’s from Keean Bexte’s Twitter profile photo, from an event in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Tucker Carlson was invited to an event with the Premier of Alberta, Danielle Smith, Jordan Peterson and Conrad Black were part of the discussion.
From Left to Right:
Conrad Black, Founder of the National Post, former owner of Postmedia, Member of the UK House of Lords and former owner of the Daily Telegraph.
Tucker Carlson, Former Fox News media personality
Keean Bexte, Former journalist at the Rebel, now has his own company the Countersignal
Dr. Jordan Peterson, Influencer & Litigant
Danielle Smith, Premier of Alberta
Now, as I mentioned one of these five people is a convicted criminal has been named as an Epstein Associate. However, he’s not the only member of that illustrious group whose made some poor life choices.
Some background on each of these characters.
Keean Bexte used to work for the Rebel and now runs the Countersignal. One of his correspondents interviewed Lauren Southern who, was implicated in the Department of Justice TENET Russian-funded propaganda charges.
If you’ve heard about Bexte lately, it’s because he accosted Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during a family vacation. Surprisingly, Trudeau did not have security remove him immediately.
Keean Bexte calls himself a journalist, which he really is not for reasons that are basically the same as his former employer, The Rebel, which was recently denied journalism tax breaks by Canada’s Federal Courts. An “advisory board had assessed that Rebel News does not produce original news content, “on the basis that the content was found to be largely opinion-based and focused on the promotion of one particular perspective.”
Bexts was a member of the Conservative Party of Canada and played a significant role in organizing for former Federal Conservative Cabinet Minister and Premier of Alberta, Jason Kenney.
According to Ricochet, Bexte was a recruiter for the Manning Centre for Democracy (now the “Canada Strong and Free Network”) and a staffer for a CPC Alberta MP.
He called for ending birthright citizenship in Canada at a CPC policy convention. Bexte ran “FireForce Ventures” a website that sold Rhodesian military paraphernalia from a time when Zimbabwe was ruled by a white supremacist government.
Bexte’s FireForce partners included Canadian Military & another CPC staffer, Adam Strashok. Strashok ran Jason Kenney’s call centre during his United Conservative Party (UCP) leadership run.
Bexte and the Rebel also promoted and drove with the 2019 Convoy protest to Ottawa, which was organized by many of the same individuals behind the 2022 convoy – Yellow Vests Canada whose Facebook page in 2019 had to be shut down for rampant death threats against politicians, especially Trudeau.
Danielle Smith, the Premier of Alberta. Aside from regularly repeating conspiracy theories that help validate some truly poisonous lies about the way the world works, Smith talked with Rebel News about offering amnesty to individuals who were arrested at Coutts, Alberta, for blocking the border during the Canadian Convoy Protest. While they were not found guilty of conspiracy to murder police, they were found guilty on other criminal charges, and the court heard that they talked about civil war and slitting politicians’ throats. Others were sentenced to jail, and the judge found they were ready to shoot police.
Dr. Jordan Peterson has faced his own legal troubles, because he does not understand the law. It shouldn’t take the Supreme Court of Canada to break it to you that screaming crazy stuff online about people who aren’t your patients isn’t considered best practice by your fellow psychologists.
Peterson is currently painting himself as a martyr for free speech because he is misreading the law. The professional psychological association wants him to dial back the froth and spittle, because being a psychologist is a privilege, not a right.
The Supreme Court of Canada has better things to do with its time than intervene in a case where the clear and only solution is to let the self-regulating profession self-regulate. That’s how the law works in Canada.
Peterson has previously shown that he does not understand how the law works in Canada is his disastrous foray of being an expert witness in Manitoba and in Ontario, and his testimony was rejected by both judges who found he was making basic errors in fact and reasoning. One judge said it was “the closest thing to junk science” they’d ever seen in their years on the bench.
Because Peterson is so busy doing his best Monty Python peasant “Help, Help, I’m being repressed” bit, anyone pointing out that he’s factually in the wrong is drowned out.
It’s important to make the point again: this is not about disagreeing with Peterson expressing his opinion. It’s about Peterson being wrong on the facts, where we can pull up or access independent information that shows he doesn’t have the first clue what he’s talking about.
That is why Peterson is not a martyr for free expression. (Peterson once suggested that AI be used to detect courses that had post-modernism in them and that faculty be fired. So much for free expression, or free inquiry. Great leap forward for automated censorship)
Peterson is wrong on the facts. Being wrong on evolution, the Bible, and biology, politics, history and the law does not make him a free speech martyr. He can aim to become St. Jordan, patron saint of people who would rather die than admit they were wrong, but that’s not going to change the court’s mind.
Tucker Carlson was fired from Fox because, he knowingly lied on the air, supporting Donald Trump’s false claim that he had won the 2020 election, because of tampering with voting machines. This wasn’t true, Fox and its hosts knew it, but they said it anyway. The company that made the machines risked being driven out of business by this blatant lie, so they sued and won.
The judgment against Fox was in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and there were texts that showed that Carlson clearly didn’t believe what he was saying.
Carlson loudly backed Putin’s invasion of Ukraine before it happened, and immediately after appearing at this event in Alberta, he jetted off Moscow to allow Putin to give his side of the story,
Carlson has also often raged about Jeffrey Epstein.
That brings us to Conrad Black
Conrad Black, Trump & Epstein
At the end of 2023, Trump supporters were salivating at the prospect there was a great deal of excitement at the lists of high-profile individuals who might be named.
New York Magazine mentioned Conrad Black.
Conrad Black was a major business figure in Canada, and had expanded his media empire around the world. He was known for being aggressive in his pursuit of libel and defamation claims, as well as his style of writing, which could be termed “Victorian blowhard”.
“In the early 1990s, Hollinger controlled 60 percent of Canadian newspapers in addition to hundreds of dailies worldwide, including the Chicago Sun-Times, the Montreal Gazette, Britain's Daily Telegraph and the Jerusalem Post.”
Black was named to the British House of Lords - and as a British Media Baron in the 1980s and 1990s, was in the same orbit as Ghislaine Maxwell - since her father, Robert Maxwell, owned The Mirror. Robert Maxwell famously was found floating in the Mediterranean having fallen off his yacht, his death revealing that he had plundered his company’s pension funds.
The role of Ghislaine Maxwell as a connector in all of this can’t be understated.
Epstein, it seems, made his fortune handling money for Les Wexner, a self-made billionaire from Cleveland, Ohio whose company, The Limited had made him a fortune. The brand stores he owned, like Victoria’s Secret spread with the explosion of 1980s malls, and his investments in information technology had made supply chain management and offshoring easier.
Wexner had money - but Ghislaine Maxwell could provide Epstein with an entrée into a different world of power, privilege, celebrity and royalty.
Conrad Black and his wife Barbara Amiel made a splash in Canada and in the UK, but in the U.S. Blacks newspaper, the Chicago Sun-Times was in the Second City, not New York. But Black and Amiel connections in the UK were extensive and there would have been plenty of overlap with Maxwell’s social circle.
From Vanity Fair:
But their home base is in London. In recent years, the Blacks' annual summer party at their four-story, 11-bedroom double-fronted spread, with its posh Kensington address and giant portrait of Napoleon in the stairwell, has become the highlight of the season, drawing a mix of politicians, royals, media heavies, playwrights, actors, and assorted beautiful young women. "It's like traveling on the tube at rush hour," says the English critic A. A. Gill. "You're pressing genitals with a Cabinet minister on one side and some lord you thought had died 10 years ago on the other."
"I don't think you can overestimate the enormous impact they've made in London," says a frequent guest at the Blacks' parties. "The dinners, the drinks parties, the general tycoonery. I hope that people in London don't forget what a fantastic time they've had because of Conrad."
Epstein’s “Black Book” has been copied and posted online, and the same page with Black and Amiel also features other public figures - Tony Blair, the Prime Minister of England, and Mike Bloomberg, the owner of Bloomberg news and former Mayor of New York.
The list of e-mails for Black and Amiel is comprehensive: 17 phone numbers for Amiel and Black - in Toronto, London, and at Hollinger in New York.
In 2007, CNN reported on Black being found guilty of fraud. The charge was later overturned on appeal, though a charge of obstruction of justice stuck, and he spent some years in prison in Florida.
Legal troubles for Hollinger International and Black began in mid-2004, when the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission published a report alleging "racketeering" and "corporate kleptocracy," which led to a $1.25 billion racketeering suit against Hollinger and Black.
That fall, after a U.S. federal judge threw out the racketeering suit, Black resigned as chairman and chief executive officer of Hollinger.
Months later, the SEC filed a civil fraud lawsuit against Black, Hollinger's former deputy chairman and chief operating officer, David Radler, and Hollinger.
"Black, Radler and other top executives didn't understand that investors had handed over their money in order to make more money, not to gain entree to a 'private gentleman's club,'" said Tombs, who added that the defendants "continued operating like they did in the '50s from the old Toronto days, wining, dining and schmoozing."
Federal prosecutors, under the guidance of Fitzgerald, said Black and the other three defendants defrauded shareholders of Hollinger International by collecting "non-compete" payments from the sales of media holdings.
If you were to read this Op-Ed by Rod McQueen, talking about how he’s forgiven Conrad Black in the Toronto Star, you might thing that Black was only convicted of obstruction of justice, when he was also convicted of fraud. In 2015, McQueen wrote “Why Canada still needs Conrad Black.”
This article from The Week explains in greater context:
The tycoon was sentenced to six-and-a-half years in federal prison and fined £125,000 (£98,000), and was ordered to repay the multimillion-dollar bonus to Hollinger.
However, appeals resulted in two of his three criminal fraud charges being dropped, with only the conviction for obstruction of justice upheld. Black’s sentence was reduced to 42 months, and he was released from prison in May 2012. He continues to deny all the charges brought against him.
Black was granted a full pardon by Donald Trump. Black wrote a book praising Trump, and has continued to write complimentary articles endorsing Trump in the National Post.
The move was met with some cynicism:
Commentators have noted that Black, 74, has been a vocal supporter of Trump and recently published a book praising the US president. NBC News and MSNBC legal analyst Glenn Kirschner said the issuing of the pardon was “as pathetic as it is transparent”.
From The Week:
The Times reports that Black is a “prominent supporter of Mr Trump’s presidency and has called him a friend”. In 2000, Trump “attended a $60,000 birthday party for Lord Black’s wife, Barbara Amiel-Black, and was reportedly prepared to testify in his defence at his trial”, the newspaper adds.
After Black was pardoned, he claimed that he should never have been charged, reflecting his lack of remorse that got him sentenced in the first place.
When he was facing sentencing, Black’s lawyer:
He added: “He seems to be fighting for his soul.”
But prosecutor Eric Sussman noted Black had previously said he was being “persecuted by Nazis” and “zealots”.
“He is disdainful and defiant” of the process and the verdict, heaped “scorn and contempt” on the court and “views prison in this case as a badge of honour”, Sussman told the judge.
The sentence Judge St Eve handed down was at the lighter end of the possible penalties, as prosecutors called yesterday for Black to be jailed for up to 24 years.
Black had been found guilty “of mail fraud and obstruction of justice for his role in defrauding shareholders of Hollinger International and skimming $60 million from the newspaper conglomerate”:
This 2003 article from Slate Magazine talks about the “Board from hell” that Black and Hollinger had assembled, which, as it noted, kept approving his decisions.
“The company—and its shareholders—lent money to an entity controlled by Black, paid massive management fees to entities controlled by Black, sold assets to companies controlled by Black, and maintained a condominium for Black in New York… As of the spring, 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.”
The amounts involved were considerable: over $100-million. A public shareholder in the company got fed up. As Vanity Fair reported:
“By January the board's investigation, led by investment banker Gordon Paris and advised by former S.E.C. chairman Richard Breeden, had entered the realm of the cliché, focusing on $3 million in payments to entities in the Cayman Islands and on Barbara Amiel's $276,000 salary from the Chicago Sun-Times, whose offices she reportedly hadn't set foot in for four and a half years.
The board has also been examining transactions with private entities controlled by Black and Radler, in an effort to ensure that Hollinger wasn't getting ripped off as Black and Radler effectively negotiated with themselves. In the summer of 2000, for example, Radler proposed to the board that Hollinger sell a group of New York and Pennsylvania newspapers to Bradford Publications, a company he and Black controlled, for $38 million. As part of the deal, Bradford paid Hollinger a non-compete of $6 million—which, in a peculiar arrangement, Hollinger itself lent to Bradford. In the words of one Chicago Tribune reporter, "Black and Radler borrowed money from Black and Radler to pay Black and Radler for not competing with Black and Radler."
.. $15.6 million in payments hadn't been authorized by the board—even though S.E.C. filings had suggested otherwise. Even worse, it found payments of $16.55 million to Hollinger Inc. that had never been disclosed.”
Black’s defense and possibly genuine belief that he is being unjustly persecuted is that he sees nothing legally or morally wrong, since the board signed off on it. He should get to do whatever he wants, as he always has done.
Now, I’m not a lawyer - but I sincerely hope that despite appearances, we do not live in a world where corporate boards of directors can make crime legal by signing off on it.
It goes on:
Over the years there have been a few real businesspeople on Hollinger International’s board, such as Shmuel Meitar, the head of an Israeli media company, and Leslie Wexner, the highly regarded founder of the Limited, whose six-year board tenure ended in 2002. But Black seemed to have a genius for recruiting CEOs with legal issues, as Steven Pearlstein noted in Wednesday’s Washington Post. A. Alfred Taubman, the former CEO of Sotheby’s, 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.
“Leslie Wexner, the highly regarded founder of the Limited, whose six-year board tenure ended in 2002” is the same Les Wexner who was the key to Epstein’s fortune, and he was on the board of Conrad Black’s media empire with both Black and his wife Barbara Amiel.
Vicky Ward is a journalist who first interviewed Epstein for Vanity Fair. She was married to Black’s nephew, Matthew Doull. There’s been an ongoing dispute about Ward, because she claimed that Vanity Fair’s editor Graydon Carter spiked part of her story involving allegations about Epstein and two young women, which Carter has forcefully denied.
Ward wrote in the Daily Beast:
“I spent many months on his trail in 2002 for Vanity Fair and discovered not only that he was not who he claimed to be professionally, but also that he had allegedly assaulted two young sisters, one of whom had been underage at the time. Very bravely, they were prepared to go on the record. They were afraid he’d use all his influence to discredit them—and their fear turned out to be legitimate.
As the article was being readied for publication, Epstein made a visit to the office of Vanity Fair’s then-editor, Graydon Carter, and suddenly the women and their allegations were removed from the article. “He’s sensitive about the young women,” Carter told me at the time. (Editor’s Note: Carter has previously denied this allegation.) He also mentioned he’d finagled a photograph of Epstein in a swimsuit out of the encounter. And there was also some feeble excuse about the article “being stronger as a business story.” (Epstein had also leaned heavily on my ex-husband’s uncle, Conrad Black, to try to exert his influence on me, which was particularly unwelcome, given that Black happened to be my ex-husband’s boss at the time.)” (Emphasis mine)
In the Daily Mail, Ward wrote:
“He wasn't remotely charming or funny. He was deeply misogynistic: from a terrible joke about his desire to see his female staff only wearing Prada bikinis in his New York house, even in winter, to telling me he enjoyed being surrounded by women because he liked 'elegant things'.
Mostly, though, he was a thug, who soon told me he had compiled a dossier on my then-husband and me. He claimed that he could get my husband fired from his job, and me from mine.”
Ward has mentioned this a number of times, and the focus has always been on disagreement over whether Vanity Fair succumbed to pressure from Epstein - and not the issue of whether Epstein applying pressure through Conrad Black, who owned newspapers.
Epstein’s threat was very credible. He and Ghislaine Maxwell both had a direct line to both Barbara Amiel and Conrad Black, and Epstein could also reach out to Les Wexner, who was on the board of Hollinger, to talk to Black. Wexner called Ward several times as well.
In fact, Black and Trump had been business partners:
When Black was at the helm, the Sun-Times in the early 2000s sold its building alongside the Chicago River to Mr. Trump, leading to the present-day Trump International Hotel & Tower Chicago. The two were partners in the undertaking until Mr. Trump bought out Black.
In fact, Vanity Fair in 2004 quoted Donald Trump prognosticating on Black’s future, as a shareholder of Hollinger.
Donald Trump, a current shareholder of Hollinger International who is developing the Trump Tower Chicago in a 50-50 venture with the company, thinks Black has comeback potential, both at Hollinger and in the social skirmish that is New York City. “In 1990 or 1991, when I owed billions of dollars, some people shied away from me,” he told me. “And now everyone is kissing my ass and begging me to sit at their righthand side at the table. Conrad is a tremendously strong man who will overcome these obstacles in the end. He will prevail.”
Even today, the ties between Trump and Black’s interests are closer than just a mutual admiration society. Trump gave Black a full pardon.
One of the hallmarks of Black’s career in newspapers is that he would buy them and turn them conservative.
Despite Black’s criminal conviction, he continues to write columns for Postmedia, which is Canada’s largest newspaper chain. It is no longer owned by a Canadian company. Two-thirds of Postmedia is owned by Chatham Asset Management, a New Jersey company whose media executives were responsible for covering up Donald Trump’s hush money trial, which resulted in his 34 felony convictions.
Chatham Asset Management is where Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen went to work after the 2016 election campaign. It also owned American Media Inc, or AMI - the the parent company of the National Enquirer, whose CEO, David Pecker was the first witness for the prosecution in Donald Trump’s hush-money criminal trial. The state alleged “Pecker helped Trump during the 2016 campaign by burying negative stories about him and attacking his rivals.”
The New York Times reported that “Pecker teed up falsified records charges.”:
In his third day of testimony, Mr. Pecker, the former publisher of The National Enquirer, described his involvement in the suppression of the stories of two women who claimed to have had sex with Mr. Trump: Karen McDougal, a Playboy model, and Stormy Daniels, the porn star whose 2016 hush-money payoff forms the basis of the prosecution’s case.
As part of a so-called catch-and-kill scheme, Mr. Pecker testified that his company, AMI, paid Ms. McDougal $150,000 to purchase her story, with no intention of publishing anything about an affair with Mr. Trump.
But Mr. Pecker expected repayment. He said he asked Michael D. Cohen, who was Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, who would handle the reimbursement, and Mr. Cohen responded, “The boss will take care of it.”
Because Mr. Pecker had such a hard time getting Mr. Trump to pay up, he was unwilling to buy a third story: Ms. Daniels’s account of sex with Mr. Trump.
“I am not a bank,” Mr. Pecker recalled saying.
Mr. Pecker suggested that Mr. Cohen buy Ms. Daniels's story instead, leading to the hush-money deal, repayments and records at issue in this trial.
This is relevant to both Conrad Black, the National Post, and Postmedia in Canada.
On October 19, 2016, the Toronto Star reported that David Pecker had been named to the board of Postmedia.
Pecker and the National Inquirer played an integral part in coordinating hush money payments to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal so they would remain silent about having had sex with Donald Trump. As a publisher of a tabloid that breaks news, he agreed to suppress stories that might have been damaging to a particular candidate, with the hope of swaying the outcome of the election.
That is an entire media outlet, the National Enquirer, was effectively acting as an arm of one political party’s campaign. Not only would the Enquirer only run articles critical of one party and presidential candidate, not only would it refuse to print critical articles of their chosen candidate, but they played an active role in paying money to silence women with the intention of keeping their stories from becoming public.
That’s not an allegation, or an accusation. It’s been confirmed to be true, beyond a reasonable doubt.
Pecker was appointed to the Board of Postmedia in October 2016, the same month that these hush-money payments were being made. It wasn’t a one-off: it was part of Pecker’s business model. He had made a practice of paying people to stay silent for years.
Mr. Pecker’s publications made deals with other celebrities as well, though not always for money. He traded away dirt about the golfer Tiger Woods in exchange for an exclusive interview in Men’s Fitness in 2007, according to people with knowledge of that episode.
AMI’s guilt is not in question:
This is the New York Times reporting on David Pecker’s testimony in court:
Mr. Pecker, who began his four days on the stand on Monday and said that he had come to an agreement with Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen in a meeting at Trump Tower in August 2015.
There, Mr. Pecker said, he agreed to run what amounted to a covert propaganda operation for Mr. Trump, trumpeting his candidacy while publishing negative stories about his Republican opponents. Most importantly, Mr. Pecker said, he had agreed to be the campaign’s “eyes and ears,” watching out for potentially damaging stories.
Pecker remained on the Postmedia Board for almost two years until he resigned when news broke of his implication in the hush-money scandal, in August 2018.
That is really a stupendous level of corruption. So we know for a fact that a board member of Postmedia confessed, in court, to running a covert propaganda operation for a particular campaign, that included suppressing and watching out for negative stories - in order to alter the outcome of the U.S. election.
It would certainly be fair for Canadians to ask just what kind of guidance and advice he brought to the table at Postmedia, given that Pecker’s business model of private surveillance and hush money wasn’t limited to the National Inquirer, but extended to muscle mags.
Pecker did the same for Harvey Weinstein, as Ronan Farrow reported in ‘Catch and Kill” - a term for catching the source of a story so you can “kill” it.
DAVE DAVIES: how did the reporting on Weinstein lead to this stuff about efforts to protect Trump?
FARROW: Well, it's very simple because Harvey Weinstein was also working with the National Enquirer and its parent company at the time, AMI, in much the same way that Donald Trump was. The difference was this wasn't election-related in Harvey Weinstein's case. And so, you know, it didn't ultimately emerge in court as something with, you know, actual legal ramifications. But it was a tremendously important story just from the standpoint of the media suppression that was happening. And many of us who broke those initial stories about Weinstein became aware in the course of that reporting that one of the levers that he had used to keep allegations of serial rape against him so quiet for so long, at least in terms of mainstream public discourse, was that he had relied on AMI to help go after his enemies and dig up dirt on people he wanted to get rid of and also to help identify negative information out there about him and catch and kill it.
So that happened, for instance, with respect to Ambra Gutierrez, a model that he was accused of groping, and the same Manhattan district attorney, actually, Cy Vance Jr., who initially started this investigation into Trump that in a roundabout way led to this verdict in the end. He had dropped efforts to pursue Weinstein in the wake of that. And part of Weinstein's strategy to ensure that there weren't criminal repercussions was to really go after accusers, like this model Gutierrez, where there were war room meetings between the Enquirer folks and him and his people saying, you know, how do we destroy her, essentially?
So this being a kind of Byzantine part of the modern architecture of power and media influence was fascinating to me, and it was very apparent early on from my conversations with sources there who were doing that sort of thing for Weinstein at the Enquirer, that maybe the most consequential example of what they were doing in this vein was for and with Donald Trump.
So you have David Pecker, Donald Trump, Conrad Black, and Jeffrey Epstein. Every one of them found by courts to have committed crimes.
In David Pecker, you have someone who has admitting to covering up crimes, including Harvey Weinstein’s with the National Inquirer and AIM, who also oversaw Postmedia, where Conrad Black and Jordan Peterson are regular columnists.
I know times have changed, but I’m old-fashioned, and I still consider criminal convictions a “red flag”. And the flag is redder and bigger when the prosecution actually manages to convict a defendant has wealth, power and connections and the most expensive and ruthless lawyers money can buy.
But everything in this article is something you can find on the Internet - and most of it is from big mainstream sources, which are supported by evidence - like emails, letters, testimony under oath in court.
Jordan Peterson and Tucker Carlson have been outspoken about Epstein, and Bexte and Danielle Smith are all about protecting the children.
You’d think one of them might be concerned about Black’s criminal conviction, being in Epstein’s Black Book, having Les Wexner on his board, business partnership with Donald Trump, and writing for a newspaper chain whose executive was the primary prosecution witness in Trump’s 34 felony convictions.
The links to the corrupt practices of British media is also important. The players are the same press barons who vied with each other in controlling the UK media - Conrad Black, Rupert Murdoch, Robert Maxwell - have moved, along with AMI, to controlling US and Canadian media outlets.
In the UK, the sleazy practises of the media were exposed in the Leveson inquiry. Newspapers paying people for sources, paying police for tips, and illegally hacking into phones to listen to people’s private recorded messages.
In one scandalous instance, that included hacking into the phone of a young woman who had disappeared and had been murdered.
In July 2011, the Guardian claimed that journalists on the News of the World had hacked into the phone messages of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler. Not only this, but messages were also removed to make room for more, giving her parents the impression she was still alive and picking up her messages.
“Catch and Kill” shows that these media outlets - rather than just gathering news for the purpose of sharing it - have been working as private intelligence gathering outfits for the purpose of gathering information which can then be used to control people with credible threats of exposure, reputational destruction, as well as silencing and suppressing stories in order to protect the powerful with the goal of influencing the outcomes of elections.
Right now, the basis of our moral and political discussions is dominated by transgressions related to the collective identity politics on the right and the left - whether a given statement or policy is racist, misogynist, offensive or oppressive, reckless, dangerous or deadly, which many certainly are.
The fundamental problem here is corruption. Corruption of the media, corruption of politics, corruption of our political system, corruption of the law. This corruption includes knowing about and turning a blind eye to criminal behaviour, which the criminals invariably claim was innocent or justified under the circumstances.
This is related to the madness of our age. Extreme inequality leads to extreme injustice and extreme corruption. The first step is to shine a light on it, and given the stakes for Canada, the United States, the UK and the world, exposing these connections and operations are essential to freedom, democracy, justice, and the rule of law.
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Jeffrey Epstein is one of those villains where his extensive and confirmed crimes are matched by lurid conspiracy theories.
Jeff was a sleaze bag, no doubt, and probably a blackmailer, but his 'crime' seems to be overpaying teenage prostitutes. Or have I missed something?