What do Conrad Black and Donald Trump have in Common? Jeffrey Epstein.
Conrad Black, who was pardoned for a federal crime committed in the U.S., accused Mark Carney of having poor values. Black embodies the moral bankruptcy of conservatism on both sides of the border.
“Liberating Canada: Tucker, Jordan Peterson & Conrad Black”
Above, a gathering of the Continental Conservative Cretinati.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.
Next, time maybe some background checks could avoid future embarrassment - because all of this stuff is readily available online:
Above is a screenshot of Conrad Black’s more recent emissions from the National Post, where he says that Mark Carney has poor values. In an era where each day we endure some harrowing new piece of news, I am surprised to say there are still new depths to which people will sink.
Black is a convicted criminal who spent years in US federal prison. Why does he think he has even the tiniest morsel of credibility on ethics?
There has also been an appalling conservative effort to link Mark Carney with Jeffrey Epstein, including creating AI images that are spreading online - when Conrad Black has been named as an associate of Jeffrey Epstein, and had over a dozen different phone numbers in Epstein’s Black Book.
Some Background: How Epstein Escaped Scrutiny
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.
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.
Conrad Black, Trump & Epstein
At the end of 2023, Trump supporters were salivating at the prospect of the lists of high-profile individuals who might be named with Epstein records coming out.
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 “Constipated 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.
That’s the same world that Conrad Black and his wife Barbara Amiel also wanted access to. Black was appointed to the House of Lords, and he and Amiel made a splash in Canada and in the UK. In the U.S. however, Black’s newspaper, the Chicago Sun-Times was in the Second City, not New York. Still, 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:
… 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 the same 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.
Perhaps Amiel was an early proponent of working from home. But I digress.
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. 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 [Epstein] 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 was 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 - 17 of them, not even counting emails. Epstein could also reach Black through Les Wexner, who was on the board of Hollinger. Ward says Wexner called her several times as well.
Black and Trump were 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, in 2004 Vanity Fair 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.
I wrote about it here:
That is the ethical context of the American owners of the National Post, as well as Conrad Black, Pierre Poilievre and in fact, what has become of the North American Conservative movement.
It is disgraceful. It’s a total abdication of moral responsibility. It’s more than brazenly corrupt - it’s flamboyantly corrupt.
Black and the National Post are making the statement that unrepentant and remorseless convicted criminals will be setting the moral tone here, but we’re not to mention their crimes. And that pressure to acquiesce in silence is how everyone else is corrupted too. We are being expected to ignore these colossal violations of moral and legal norms, stay silent, or cheer them on. Corruption is not just a quality. It is a process.
It is also a process than can be reversed, because we need to realize what this fight truly is. It’s about getting back to a society based on trust and confidence in each other
It is for the rule of law, or rule by criminals. And today’s conservatives are awfully soft on crime.
-30-
Thank you for this deep research! Thank you for tying in Pierre Poilievre and the Conservative movement. For more on (moron?) Epstein, read Craig Unger's book American Kompromat. It is disgusting what has happened to Canadian press and they will NOT divulge their neo-liberal and Fraser Institute embedded staff.
Conrad Black, isn't that the guy who had the high standards of marrying and divorcing several women, renounced his Canadian citizenship so he could become a Lord in Britain, was caught cheating in business and had to go to jail, bought up escapes in Canada so he could get only the kind of news he approved up and exemplified white privilege?
Just what kind of values are we talking about here?