Jeffrey Epstein was working with Russia to Help them Evade Sanctions for Invading Ukraine. In Alaska, Putin and Trump Have Some Explaining to Do.
Trump's Cabinet is Lousy With Deep Ties to Epstein, Crypto, and Russia, Russia, Russia
Trump's every move now appears desperate attempt, not just to change the channel away from Epstein, but to put himself out of reach of its consequences.
Later this week, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are going to meet in Alaska for some kind of bizarre summit over the fate of Ukraine. The Journalist and author Michael Wolff, who spent hundreds of hours interviewing Epstein, has been sharing lots of extremely grim and believable stories about Trump, Epstein, and how things are playing out in the White House right now.
The Epstein story is the first thing to put Trump on the defensive, and he hasn’t been able to escape it. His entire presidency is predicated on the idea that we are all forced to endure a political horror-suspense reality TV show that cannot be escaped. Trump wanted to be the top story every day, but that has now been displaced by Epstein, and rightly so.
Wolff recently suggested that Trump would use some major stance on Ukraine as a means of pushing Epstein off the front page. It won’t work.
The rest of NATO and and the EU are rejecting it. The split between the US and the rest of its NATO allies on Ukraine is a huge win for Russia, and for the stability of all developed countries, all of whom are having their economies rocked by the unexpected declaration of economic warfare from an ally.
A staunch ally, no less, in shared conflicts for more than a century, with whom we have had peaceful and mutually beneficial political and economic relationships. And the onslaught of threats of everything from annexation and military invasion, to - in the case of Canada - using tariffs to collapse the Canadian economy.
While the focus in Canada keeps focusing on China, the blatant operations of Russian agents keep being ignored.
There are allegations of Trump having questionable ties to Russia dating back to the 1980s, including the idea that the KGB was interested in him. Surely, if the KGB were on him as far back as that, that the FBI might not be the only Federal police and surveillance agency in the world to have copies of incriminating evidence from Epstein - perhaps even copies of the hundreds of gigabytes of videos that were on hard drives at Epstein’s house.
I thought this was a possibility, when I came across an incredible piece from an incredible, must-read blog about Cryptocurrency that was jaw-dropping.
I stumbled on the details1 of some communications between Epstein and a “former”2 member of Russia’s FSB3 that stopped me dead in my tracks.
Apparently Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s Dossier Center had obtained copies of a conversation in which Epstein had proposed the creation of a BRICS4 cryptocurrency as a means by which Russians could evade the international sanctions imposed in the aftermath of Putin’s first and far more successful Ukrainian adventure5.
Devoted readers of The Cryptocalypse Chronicles will have heard me describe the ideal user base for cryptocurrency as “a cabal of organized crime groups, kleptocratic regimes, and rogue nuclear states”6. That’s because criminals, kleptocrats, and rogue nuclear states are all dealing with the one problem crypto can actually solve that traditional finance cannot: they want to move money around the world and they don’t want anyone to be able to stop them. And now I was reading that Jeffrey Epstein had pitched cryptocurrency to exactly that user base as a way to solve exactly that problem more than ten years ago.
Epstein’s understanding of cryptocurrency, it turned out, was far more sophisticated than I had assumed. Not only did he have a clear grasp of crypto’s core use case, he had even proposed a relatively sophisticated blockchain based solution to Russia’s thorny sanctions problems. All of this made me suspect that Epstein might have been far more involved in the crypto economy than anyone has yet proven.
Ukraine was invaded in 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea. Epstein was discussing working with Russia to help them evade sanctions.
Epstein’s death rocked Crypto markets, and a few days after there was a transfer of a quarter of a trillion dollars on a single day.
Epstein was arrested on July 6th, 2019 as he stepped out onto the tarmac at New Jersey’s Teterboro Airport at the end of a private jet flight from France. He ended his own life7 in a New York City jail cell roughly a month later. A few days afterwards, in what I’m sure is Totally Just A Coincidence, more bitcoins moved “on chain” than all but one other day in modern bitcoin history8.
As the author notes, cryptocurrency scams were being used to finance Russian troops in the war against Ukraine.
everyone assumes that Trump is covering up the Epstein files because those files reveal him to be some kind of pedophile. But what if the files instead reveal that Trump and Epstein were working together to launder Russian money? It’s hardly a secret that Trump’s real estate projects from the 1980s to early 2000s wre rife with Russian oligarch money - oligarchs buying apartments in Trump Tower, oligarchs lending the Trump Organization money to build hotels, and so on. Senator Ron Wyden has recently been talking about Epstein’s bank transfers, many of which involved Russian banks. If Epstein and Trump were friends who liked doing real estate deals with Russian money, it seems reasonably likely to me that they might have done some deals together.
In a separate piece, The Cryptocalypse Chronicles lists some of the other prominent people tied to cryptocurrency who were also connected to Epstein:
Howard Lutnick - “Trump’s current Secretary of Commerce, was quite literally Jeffrey Epstein’s neighbor. - Howard Lutnick manages2 somewhere north of $100 billion - roughly one fifth3 of the military budget of the United States - for Tether, the central bank of the cryptocurrency economy and the favoured financial services provider of criminals, terrorists, and rogue nuclear states4 the world over.”
Brock Pierce - “I wrote (a lot) about Brock Pierce’s incredibly sordid history and deep connections to things like cryptocurrency, Tether7, and the Israeli government last year in my catalogue of New York City mayor Eric Adams’s crypto grifting. I mentioned Pierce’s connections to Epstein in passing in that post but there’s a bit more to it…,” including connections to Ghislaine Maxwell’s sister.
Peter Thiel - Epstein was an investor in Valar Ventures, one of the firms associated with Thiel’s adventures in Tolkienized late stage capitalism and one that has done some investing in the cryptocurrency space.
It’s worth mentioning that Thiel is a major backer of Rumble, the video platform created as a right wing alternative to YouTube. Other Rumble backers include luminaries like Vivek Ramaswamy, JD Vance, Howard Lutnick.”
Rumble’s founder, Chris Pavlovski, is Canadian.
Larry Summers - Economist and advisor to Barack Obama. “Summers served (serves?) on the boards of some of the largest and most exploitative cryptocurrency companies. Epstein’s connections to Summers in particular and Harvard more generally are fairly well documented.”
Ehud Barak - Retired Israeli General and former Prime Minister of Israel. “according to the sources collected by NFTEthics Jeffrey Epstein, Ehud Barak, and Peter Thiel were co-investors in an Israeli company called Reporty Homeland Security that was later renamed to Carbyne.”
Steve Bannon - Michael Wolff recounted that he was present when Bannon met Epstein, just after Trump had won the 2016 election. Bannon told Epstein that Epstein had been the only person they had been afraid of during the campaign. Cryptadamus mentions that there are 15 hours of video of Bannon coaching Epstein on what to say in a 60-minutes style interview. That’s not the only connection - the other being to the Brock Pierce.
“Bannon was one of Brock Pierce’s early business partners. Their collaboration began in the pre-bitcoin era, a few years after Mr. Pierce was arrested in a house in Marbella filled with guns and child pornography but a few years before he anointed himself “the hippie king of crypto”. The two men’s partnership has at this point spanned decades. In 2022 Bannon even advised Mr. Pierce’s rather quixotic senatorial campaign (as did Steven Cheung, the Trump spokesman)
The allegations of Russia being involved in the 2016 election, and helping Donald Trump, were widely investigated and found to be accurate. Russia obtained Democratic e-mails and they were released through Wikileaks. The details of Russia working with Cambridge Analytica and Facebook were spelled out by a Canadian whistleblower, Christopher Wylie.
Author Craig Unger wrote a book that alleged that Trump’s casino and real estate businesses were used to launder money for the Russian mafia.
What’s more Unger specifically names Semion Mogilevich - ethnically Russian, born in Ukraine, who has been described as "the most powerful and dangerous gangster in the world." He controls RosUkrEnergo, which of course is involved in the Russian-Ukrainian dispute.
In an Interview with Newsweek from 2018, Unger explained:
Who is Semion Mogilevich?
He is the brains behind the Russian mafia. He is worth $10 billion. He is the king of money launderers, and he is the financial genius behind many of their scams. Russia has no Wall Street, no Goldman Sachs. If you have financial acumen, you work for the Russian mafia. If he had been born here, he might be head of Goldman Sachs. The Russian mafia fetishizes brutality. Mogilevich helped elevate it from this thuggish world of extortion to sophisticated financial scams. He lives in Moscow. He has been on the FBI Ten Most Wanted list, and one of the people on the Budapest task force investigating him was Lisa Page, who was part of Mueller's investigation. [Page resigned from the FBI in May.]You call this the greatest intelligence operation of our time. What do you mean by that?
It started out as a simple money-laundering operation at Trump Tower in 1984, when a Russian mobster came to Trump Tower with $6 million in cash and bought five condos. This is the template for what begins to unfold. At least 1,300 of Trump condos in the United States have been sold similarly. All cash purchases through anonymous sources. Those numbers reflect only domestic property. After the demise of the Soviet Union, the KGB decided to create multibillion-dollar companies to survive. The use of the term mafia state is not just a metaphor. It really explains how Russia works. The mafia essentially reports to Putin.Do you think Trump knew he was being targeted, or did he just think the Russians were being nice and helpful?
I have no idea what's going on in his mind. But it's hard to believe someone can do 1,300 transactions and not know what is going on.
When the FBI and the Department of Justice had to turn tail and start pretending there was nothing releasable, they deployed the argument that there would be images of underage persons, and they couldn’t be released for that reason.
That ignores all of the financial records of Epstein’s transactions - thousands of them, sending more than $1-billion worth.
Democratic Senator Ron Wyden told NOTUS:
“I handed the Trump administration a ready-made Epstein file involving a billionaire financier and Wall Street banks, and they have done nothing with it.. Second, I know for a fact that the Trump administration is sitting on an Epstein file that contains new actionable information, and they’ve done nothing with that either.”
The Huffington Post Reported that:
“Wyden alleges that he has also laid eyes on other documents — now in possession of the Trump Treasury Department — that “contain extensive information on the extent to which high-profile individuals paid Epstein staggering sums of money, which was then used to move women around the world or engage in dubious transactions indicative of money laundering.
As the senator wrote in a June letter to Bondi and others: “These documents also shed light on how major U.S. financial institutions turned a blind eye to the financing of Epstein’s criminal network, simply waiving the payments through without properly reporting them to U.S. authorities in a timely fashion, as required by law. All of the individuals, financial institutions, attorneys and agents who participated in financing Epstein’s illegal activities must be held accountable.””
A reporter could just ask Putin whether Russia knows anything about Epstein - which given his connections to Russian Intelligence is certainly worth asking.
One of the panicked spin lines being pushed by Tim Pool - a podcaster and influencer who is alleged to have been paid six-figure sums by Russia for the anti-Ukrainian, pro-Russian propaganda he was pushing - is that the Epstein files can’t be released because of the lurid sexual content, while ignoring all the files about Epstein’s financial transactions.
The current mad market economic conditions are a mix of panic and planning, as the BRICS nations are seeking to do more than just set up a competing global reserve currency and trading scheme. For India, China and Russia, the goal is not to outcompete, but to actively work to ensure that the United States and the West collapse as the Soviet Union did.
That’s essentially Trump’s role in all of this: to accelerate this process, which is avoidable. There are absolutely similarities between the US and the Soviet Union that, under Trump, are absolutely uncanny. A lot of that is the incredible rigidity of the thinking across the board, which focuses on cultural divisions and not on the shared financial pressures that are collapsing the system that can be averted and mitigated through the right policy actions.
The comparison to the Soviet Union is incredibly important, because it is far more relevant. While everyone keeps comparing Trump to Hitler, no one has recognized the obvious, which is that Hitler was a loser. You know who won a revolution that lasted? No, not the United States. Lenin and the Russian Communists. It fell apart, but it lasted a few decades.
Steve Bannon called himself a Leninist. “Lenin, wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”
And what that is isn’t really like any of the other forms of government we’re used to talking about. All these classifications about contradictions, left, right, capitalist, it’s just government run by gangsters and people who want to get even, even if their anger is completely misdirected.
Trump could not be doing a better job of doing exactly what Putin would want him to do, if his aim were to cripple the U.S. economically. Project 2025 might as well have been written by the Kremlin as a means of destroying America. The destruction of USAID by DOGE; the destruction of health, research and R & D by RFK Jr. destructive cuts, tariffs and deportations that are driving U.S. business and farm bankruptcies; dismantling of oversight and regulation of securities and finance, which means that financial crimes and scams will keep stripping vulnerable people of money and wealth.
The Economic risks are colossal, since Trump is jeopardizing the single greatest contributor to American prosperity, which is the US dollar’s dominance as the global reserve currency - which is what BRICS seeks to destroy.
The U.S. went off the gold standard in the early 1970s. Paul Volcker explained the remarkable financial trick at work: the U.S. could continue to run deficits, which would be financed by other countries buying U.S. Treasuries. What would those countries do with their US dollars? They would have no choice but to recycle them through Wall Street. The advantage for the U.S. of this exorbitant privilege is that while every other country has to pay for their American dollars, the U.S. can create them for free. This is what Trump is putting at risk - and in so doing is playing directly into the hands of every country that is actively working to see the U.S. fail.
The role of maniacal tech broligarchs like Peter Thiel or Marc Andreesen is that if the U.S. dollar and global financial system collapse, they can just use crypto instead, so they can rule instead.
Trump’s appointing people to positions of incredibly authority when they are dangerously unqualified is also massively destabilizing. Trump’s effort to nominate Matt Gaetz as Attorney General was an early indicator of the degree to which Republicans would be expected to surrender their integrity to Trump.
While Gaetz’ appointment proved to be too much for Republicans to swallow, they have nevertheless supported a string of incompetent, dangerously unqualified, deluded and compromised individuals to key positions in the administration, while systematically removing individuals with the kind of skill and judgment that is essential, not to just to executing plans effectively, but who have the judgment and experience to prevent outright disasters.
There’s a saying that first rate leaders have first rate advisors, and second rate leaders have fifth rate advisors. In popular culture, from film to comic books, supervillains and gangsters are often surrounded by stooges, morons and sycophants. The fictional portrayals of brazen stupidity seemed heavy-handed and over the top, but the behaviour of the Trump administration suddenly makes them seem like documentaries where, if anything, the fictional characters are models of restraint and quiet intellect in comparison.
There is a depressing logic to all of this, and it’s important to understand why the incompetence is such an important part of corruption and the illegitimate use of power.
By appointing people who are grossly unqualified to positions of power, the people who are appointed have by far the best job they will ever have in their life - a job that they have no idea whatsoever how to perform. That makes them the perfect loyalist: they will obediently do whatever they are told to do, because they don’t know what they are doing.
There is an incredibly important relationship between incompetence and overreach that isn’t often recognized, but having spent time in politics, people who don’t know what they are doing will overcompensate by trying to control everything and everyone. Because they don’t know how things work, and because they are in charge, they are fundamentally insecure in their position, their fear and anxiety drives them to try to exert total control, with paranoid purges, surveillance, and brute force.
It’s also a deliberate way of breaking the morale of the competent.
There’s a fantastic textbook about the philosophy of law, Bad Acts and Guilty Minds, by Leo Katz, which explores “conundrums of the criminal law,” both legal cases and historical instances that raise questions about “mens rea” - the guilty mind - when people have been subjected to extraordinary measures to rob them of their agency.
One such historical incident that Katz discusses is the brainwashing of American Prisoners of War in Korea by Chinese intelligence, who methodically turned certain American soldiers into anti-American propagandists who would deliver condemnations of their own country. Katz takes manipulation, brainwashing and duress seriously.
One of the Chinese techniques to destroy existing structures of authority was to “appoint the youngest and most inept member of a squad its leader.”
“The Chinese running the Korean POW camps were apparently adept at all of these techniques. In fact, interviews with returning POWs showed them to have been true masters. Keenly appreciating the force of authority, they made sure that all sources of authority but their own were eliminated.
Noncommissioned officers, for instance, who could have contended with the Chinese for the minds of their prisoners, were segregated from the rest of the men. To emphasize to everyone the irrelevance of old lines of authority, the Chinese often appointed the youngest and most inept member of a squad its leader.”
Examples of this gross ineptitude and lack of qualifications include Trump’s cabinet, many of whom are former critics who have surrendered every shred of moral authority they once had and have submitted to Trump.
That includes JD Vance, and Marco Rubio, who were once sharply critical of Trump, as well as the utterly unqualified Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Attorney Generaly Tulsi Gabbard, Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, Dan Bongino, RFK Jr, Kristi Noem, Linda McMahon, Sean Duffy, Scott Bessent and Linda McMahon and Dr. Oz.
They are all implementing policies that are truly ruinous for the United States, and for all that there are claims they are trying to “Make America Great Again” when the policies they are bringing in run counter to the founding principles of the nation, as well as to the laws and constitutional amendments that ratcheted the country towards justice over the centuries.
All the debates about ideology or identity or 5d analysis of Trump should not obscure the reality that Putin and Trump are both gangsters. All the two-dollar words trying to define what “ideology” drives them misses the point.
They dismantle the courts and take over the police because they are, themselves criminals. They dismantle democracy to consolidate their power and prevent others from being able to hold them account for their actions, and they reject the fundamental necessity of the rule of law, which is that it applies to everyone.
They reject the rule of law because they want to be the law, and that they will be able to do whatever they want. A U.S. Politician recently described “Citizens United” which equated money with speech and allows for unlimited donations in American elections as the worst Supreme Court decision in history.
The current Supreme Court’s string of decisions have been absolutely shameful in their corruption. Roberts, Alito and Thomas have all heard cases from wealthy benefactors, but the worst decision so far must be that they ruled that the President can commit crimes in his official duties.
The reaction from commenters was that this was clearly a violation of the Founding Fathers’ clearly stated intent to have a system of government where the President was not a King who was above the law. The situation is much worse: America has a President who is a convicted felon who the Supreme Court has given a greenlight to commit crimes, and can pardon anyone who commits one.
Trump is taking over the police in Washington DC after a DOGE staffer had his nose bloodied by two 15-year-olds in a carjacking, decrying violence in the streets of the US Capitol, when Trump himself was responsible for one of the worst criminal attacks in Washington in decades, the January 6 assault on the Capitol in an attempt to hold on to the presidency. Trump pardoned over 1,000 criminals, including all the J6 rioters, some of whom were re-arrested on some truly appalling charges of crimes against children.
What the Supreme Court did with their decision to give the President of the United States the ability to commit crimes in office was to end the rule of law, which is the cornerstone of individual freedom, accountability and justice in a democratic society. By putting the President beyond the reach of the law, it entrenches corruption and makes it part of the office.
The problem is corruption and lawlessness. Fighting corruption and crimes by the most powerful people in the world is daunting, because a functioning justice system relies on trust and confidence which in the U.S. has been replaced, quite deliberately, by the idea of personal enforcement through gun ownership.
Economic deprivation and social abandonment - which is the story of the US government for decades - means there are multiple constituencies who are now distrustful, resentful or skeptical of police and the justice system. There are constituencies who feel they are harrassed, unfairly targeted or harmed by police (Black Lives Matter, for example) ; there are constituencies who resent that powerful people get away with crimes (MAGA Epstein obsessives); and there are criminals who want to commit crimes for their personal benefit, and who will go to extraordinary criminal lengths to maintain their position.
For Americans who want to see a genuine return to American values, people should be clear about the corruption and the need to return to the rule of law. Making the President subject to the same laws as everyone else should be a clear priority.
For the rest of the world, one of the most effective ways to deal with this international corruption would be to criminalize cryptocurrency - offering regional amnesties for individual investors whose activities were legal. The vast majority of cryptocurrency is used for criminal purposes by bad actors. No government can seriously justify it, and it a ban would immediately have the impact of reducing corruption, money laundering and funding for organized crime, terrorism, and foreign interference.
People, through their governments still have the capacity to make change for the better, and whether it is the U.S. or any other nation, an appeal to the angels of our better nature still has the power to prevail.
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This is Poillievres favourite currency too.
Russiagate was a hoax bro.
Have you never heard of McCarthyite tactics?
I say this as an Economic Populist.
Trump is privatizing the state left and right, but it does you a disservice to still be relying on this Russia bs.
Killary Klinton basically had her staff make all this stuff up.