Is It Possible That This Whole Epstein Story Will Be Revealed By.....

[Kid Berwyn]

34. Semion Mogilevich

Russia Thing is not a hoax.

Excerpt…

00:20:29] Jeff Schechtman: Talk about Jeffrey Epstein and how he enters this equation with Trump and the Russian mafia and Putin. Where does Epstein fit into this puzzle?

[00:20:38] Craig Unger: Well, that’s one thing I’m trying to find out more about right now, because I think, you know, we haven’t really looked at Epstein’s financial affairs in great, great depth. I mean, there’s been some reporting on Leon Black’s relationship to Epstein. Leon Black, of course, is a multi-multi-billionaire, and he paid Epstein, I believe it was $178 million, [for] what turned out to be tax advice and advice for estate planning. Well, I don’t know about you, but that’s a lot more than I pay my accountant. And you figure something else had to be going on there. Was that blackmail? Was it kompromat?

I also interviewed at great length a guy named John Mark Dugan, who was once a deputy sheriff in the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Department. And when I talked to him, Dugan was kind of a bad actor. He’d been fired from the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Department. A lot of people disliked him and said he was doing very, you know, dubious things. And he told me that he had gotten 478 videos from the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Department that Jeffrey Epstein had taken, presumably, of all of [the] sexual activities [he had] going on, whether it was in his Palm Beach house or his other houses was unclear. He actually showed me one of these sex tapes. And to be honest, I was not convinced that it was what he was claiming it to be. But John Mark Dugan ended up in Moscow. He showed me photos and I printed one of them in my book, American Kompromat. It shows him in Moscow with a guy named Borodin, who was one of Putin’s top aides. And this was just a couple of days after he had arrived in Moscow. And you had to wonder, this guy John Mark Dugan was really a nobody. How did he get appointments with the staff of these figures, with top Putin officials? And I mean, it looks like he’s selling kompromat. Whether that’s the case or not, I still don’t know. But he’s definitely an actor on behalf of Russia. He is putting out disinformation. And, you know, I think the whole Epstein operation in a way may have been used to get kompromat. That’s certainly possible. Again, whether it’s sex tapes or financial machinations, we don’t really know.

[00:23:43] Jeff Schechtman: Why has this been so difficult to pin down? Ten years there’s been talk about Trump and Russia and Putin, all of the things that we’ve been talking about, Craig. And yet 10 years later, there are still, at least within the polite company of the mainstream media, a sense of, well, there’s really no proof. It’s all a conspiracy. Probably didn’t really happen.

[00:24:08] Craig Unger: Right. Well, there are a lot of reasons. You know, I think one is, you know, I’ve written six books on the Republican Party’s assault on democracy. And [in] each one, you see the erosion of our checks and balances again and again and again. And when it comes to Trump and Epstein, one thing you see is that our regulations concerning the sale of real estate are pathetic. I mean, they are so weak that it’s a joke. That is, it is completely above board to buy real estate through anonymous limited liability corporations in which the name of the beneficial owner is obscured, so that you can buy real estate anonymously and you can do it in all-cash purchases. So if a mobster comes to your house and puts down six million dollars, by the way, that was 40 years ago and it’s the equivalent of $30 million today, that’s all good and well. And there’s suddenly no record of who owns the property thanks to the new transaction. And that is perfectly legal today. And it’s very hard to get beneath that. You know, you have a lot of countries, you know, I’m thinking of the Cayman Islands, the Bahamas, the Channel Islands, Panama, that seem to be devoted to allowing money laundering and other financial crimes. Well, the United States is becoming just like the rest of them in a way. And Trump and his allies and the Russian gangsters have taken full advantage of that. So all of that is one reason. I mean, and I could go on and on about the weakness of our regulations.

You know, I also think the media has failed in so many different ways. And I was looking back to when I started out in journalism, and, you know, I’m an old guy, as you may know, I’m 76 years old. And when I was in college and starting out in journalism, the stories that really animated me were the My Lai massacre, the Pentagon Papers, Watergate. And in each case, it was one or two or a handful of reporters who could do one story or more, maybe a series, but in so doing, they caused the entire national conversation to change. This was also a time when Americans, by and large, shared the same factual reality. That is not at all the case today. And over those last 50 years, I’ve watched that change again and again and again. I mean, I think it started to change back. You know, I just did a book on the October surprise of 1980. My most recent book was called Den of Spies. And when I started reporting that in 1991, for the first time I ran into my reporting was sort of erased by a battle for control of the narrative. That is, there were administration people close to the Bush administration that was then in power, people close to Henry Kissinger, who was also writing for Newsweek when I was there. And obviously, he had a hell of a lot more clout than I did. And those were the people who triumphed and they squashed a really, really important story that I think is a really significant part of American history concerning the 1980 presidential election.

Continues…

https://whowhatwhy.org/podcast/trump-putin-epstein-its-not-a-hoax/