Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 1/7/23: JFK Files with Jefferson Morley, Matt Taibbi Twitter Files Interview, Epstein Lawsuit, Billionaires Losing Money, Aging Millennials Less Conservative

Episode Date: January 7, 2023

In this Weekly Roundup we cover an interview with author Jefferson Morley on the JFK Files, a new interview with Matt Taibbi on State Dep Agency and Twitter, a Virgin Islands lawsuit directed at JPMorgan Chase over their involvement in Epstein's affairs, how Billionaires are losing a ton of money, and a surprising new study showing Millennials growing to be less conservative as they age.To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/AUSTIN LIVE SHOW FEB 3RDTicketshttps://tickets.austintheatre.org/9053/9054To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. I also want to address the Tonys. On a recent episode of Checking In with Michelle Williams, I open up about feeling snubbed by the Tony Awards. Do I? I was never mad. I was disappointed because I had high hopes. To hear this and more on disappointment and protecting your peace,

listen to Checking In with Michelle Williams from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I know a lot of cops. They get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes, But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. Listen to Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Lott.

And this is Season 2 of the War on Drugs podcast. Last year, a lot of the problems of the drug war. This year, a lot of the biggest names in music and sports. This kind of starts that a little bit, man. We met them at their homes. We met them at their recording studios. Stories matter, and it brings a face to them. It makes it real.

It really does. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey guys, Ready or Not 2024 is here and we here at Breaking Points are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it means the absolute world to have your support. What are you waiting for? Become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. So one thing I've been tracking very closely, I actually did a monologue here before the release, was the

government is mandated to release all of the records related to JFK's assassination. And president after president has been pushing off this deadline. It was once again, that deadline was upon Joe Biden, and he did do a limited release of documents. So very excited to be joined by an expert journalist and researcher on exactly what is revealed by these documents and also what is revealed by which documents are continuing to be withheld. We're joined by Jefferson Worley. He's a Washington journalist and author. He's co-founder and editor of the JFK Facts Substack, which I'm a subscriber to and you should be as well. He's also vice president of the Mary Farrell Foundation. Great to have you. Welcome.

Thanks for having me. A lot to talk about. Yeah, absolutely. So for people who are uninitiated, can you just give the backstory of where this release came from? What compelled action in the first place? So the assassination of President Kennedy 60 years ago has long been controversial, and Congress passed a law in 1992 in order to quell speculation and keep people fully informed that the government had to release all of its records related to the assassination and various investigations that were connected with it. In Congress, a lot was done. It was a good law. A lot of material was released, but Congress said

after 25 years, everything has to be released except in the rarest of cases. That was the law. A lot of material was released, but Congress said after 25 years, everything has to be released, except in the rarest of cases. That was the law. This is a law, by the way, that passed Congress unanimously. So the intent of Congress was very clear that after 25 years, and like you said, since then, since 2017, first President Trump and then President Biden have delayed enforcing the law to its full extent. And they've been giving a pass to various federal agencies, primarily the CIA, but also the FBI and other government agencies, which are still withholding portions of some files related to the assassination of President Kennedy. So last month, there was this big ballyhoo. The Biden White House released a memo, and the CIA did a big press offensive and tuned in their favorite reporters in Washington.

And they said, look, we're releasing all this stuff. There's really nothing left here. It's very it's all cut and dried. And we've complied with the law. And, you know, when we went in to look at that, we at the Mary Farrell Foundation, which is JFK researchers, it was a very partial release. It was, there's still 4,000 CIA documents that contain redactions that are related to the assassination. So it, you know, it was kind of a shell game. And so now we're trying to figure out what's going to happen next. And what, one striking thing that happened this time around was the press coverage, for once, was very skeptical. You know, I mean, even mainstream media organizations are now like wondering, like, the CIA must be hiding something if they're hiding

all this stuff, you know. And no, no, no, the CIA comes along and briefs their favorite reporters on background and says there's nothing to it. But you know, that's not really very convincing anymore. So as we go into 2023, as we head to the 60th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, the issue of, you know, will the CIA fully disclose is still a live one. Now they have till June 30th. So we'll see this spring whether there are going to be any more forthcoming or whether Biden can put his foot down and force them to fully disclose. That hasn't happened yet. And you and other researchers have identified certain documents that you're particularly interested in, which have not been released as of yet. What are some of the

pieces that, in your view, are missing and could help fill in some of the important blanks here? Well, there's sort of big picture things, and then there's very focused things. So let me start with a big picture one. One of the documents that we wanted to see the most, I think, was a document that JFK's advisor, Arthur Schlesinger, wrote to him in June 1961. This is two years before the assassination. It was in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs invasion, which was a total failure. That was the CIA's plan to overthrow Fidel Castro. It was very embarrassing to President Kennedy that it failed within the first hundred days of his presidency. And he was mighty pissed off at the CIA at that point. And the feelings were mutual.

You know, the CIA didn't like Kennedy because he hadn't backed their plan the way they thought he would. So in this period of confrontation between the CIA and the White House, Schlesinger writes a memo to JFK about CIA reorganization. And that's the title of the memo. And they're thinking about, well, maybe we should reorganize the CIA. So a very interesting memo, of which about a page and a half are still redacted by the CIA. And we were hoping that this would be like, we'd finally see what's under there. And first of all, like, there's no names of agents in there.

You know, this is two years before the assassination. It doesn't have anything to do with the assassination directly. So why not declassify? And you know what they did, Crystal? They declassified one sentence out of a page and a half. And the rest of it remains blank. So what do we draw from this? You know, the CIA doesn't want to talk about their conflict with President Kennedy 60 years ago. And somehow that's related to the assassination. That's kind of a common sense conclusion that you would draw from this. Right. And before you go into the micro piece, just to draw this out for people, you know, one of the primary hypotheses here is that the CIA was somehow implicated in the assassination of JFK. That's certainly something that I think a lot of research and a lot of the holes in

the story points to. And what people who say, no, no, no, that's not the case, will say is, well, JFK did a lot of the things that the CIA wanted him to do, so they really weren't at odds. Ultimately, he had sort of gone all on board with, you know, the Red Scare and kept a lot of the CIA heads in charge. So, you know, that's not really plausible because they didn't really have this conflict that other people see. And so that's why this memo is significant ultimately, right? Yeah, yeah.

I mean, because that's one view. I would say I've written three books about the CIA in the 1960s and particularly about three powerful men in the CIA. You know, the CIA and the White House were very alienated in 1963. The CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were very alienated in 1963. And that's not Morley's conclusion. That's the conclusion of the official history of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And it's also seen in dozens of books by CIA people. Kennedy's liberal policies, especially on Cuba, were very disturbing to people in the CIA. Yes, Kennedy went along with the CIA on other things. He went along in Vietnam. But, you know, if you know the story of the CIA, and especially Cuba operations, the sense of alienation after

the Bay of Pigs was very deep on both sides. So that continued through 1963. And it raises the question of if the president was killed by his enemies, as a lot of people think, you know, who would have the capacity to make the crime look like something else, right? And it would be people like the CIA. Now, I don't have a CIA done it theory. I don't know who killed Kennedy. That's what we're looking for. We're looking to try and, you know, resolve. And so one of the things that we do as researchers is I look at three categories of people, if you're talking about suspects in the assassination. And that's people, CIA people who were involved in assassination operations, other assassination operations, CIA people who implicated themselves in the crime

at one point or another, and Howard Hunt and David Morales seemed to do that at different times, and people who knew about Lee Harvey Oswald before the assassination. And so if you look at those people, and that's where we're drilling down now. First of all, one thing that people should know, and there's a lot of debates and disputes about the assassination. But one thing I think everybody, all researchers would agree is the CIA knew far, far more about Oswald than they ever told the Warren Commission or they ever told the American people. And that's what we're drilling down on now is the CIA was very interested in Oswald. Their denial is notwithstanding.

Why were they interested? And what were they doing with him? You know, what did they want to do with him? And so what we believe, a lot of research is, one very likely explanation is somebody was running an operation using Oswald. Now, was that an operation to kill the president? Don't know. Was it an operation that underestimated the threat that Oswald posed to the president? Possibly. We don't know. But that's where the story's going. The CIA's interest in Oswald before the assassination. And so talk to me then about the macro was the memo that laid out a potential restructuring of the CIA plan. What were the micro pieces that you were hoping would be in this release and were not?

So we're interested in the CIA the assassination, where Oswald has a series of encounters in New Orleans with a group called the Cuban Student Directory, which we now know was funded by the CIA. The CIA didn't disclose that to assassination investigators. And what this group did in that was they publicized Oswald's pro-Castro politics, and they made a big deal out of it. A totally obscure man. Nobody had ever heard of Leo R.B. Oswald's pro-Castro politics. And they made a big deal out of it. A totally obscure man, nobody had ever heard of Leo R.B. Oswald, but they were paying close attention to him. And they were on the radio, they were on TV, they were in the newspaper. Oswald was a pro-Castro activist. Well, when Oswald was arrested, that same group went to the press and said Kennedy

was killed by a communist. And so the whole first day coverage was very much shaped by the information from the Cuban student directorate, these people who had had some contact with Oswald, some fights over Cuban politics in New Orleans. That's what we want to know about. And these records are known to exist. They're known to concern CIA operations. This isn't a fishing expedition. It's a very precise request. You know, make these records public. And they didn't make them public. And in fact, they seem to deny that these were even JFK records. So they're digging their feet in because they really, really don't want to talk about this story.

But it is starting to see the light of day. Your latest Substack piece, let's go ahead and put this up on the screen, guys. It says, the CIA's new spin on Lee Harvey Oswald, the official story of the so-called lone gunman, recently changed. Why? So their original position that basically like, oh, we didn't know anything about this dude. He just kind of came out of nowhere, has become increasingly untenable. And so they've had to make some rhetorical shifts without really fully acknowledging the way that they lied in the past. And you break some of those down for us in the Substack piece. Just lay it down for us.

Yeah. So, I mean, look, they don't call it the Central Intelligence Agency for nothing. These people are smart, okay, and they're defending their interests in a smart way, you know, but their problem is, is they don't really have a ready cover story for the records that we're requesting. So they're trying to dodge what's going on. So like you said, it used to be when the Warren Commission came out, the CIA said, you know, we didn't know anything about this guy. I mean, he came out of nowhere. We just didn't know. With revelations of congressional investigations in the 1970s and declassification, which started in the 1990s, we finally saw that that just wasn't true at all. They knew a lot about Oswald.

They had opened a file on him and monitored his movements constantly for four years. And we're not talking about like some lowly clerk at the CIA who's paying attention to, you know, losers and lone nuts department. These were top people in the agency, in the counterintelligence staff run by James Angleton, and in the director of operations run by Dick Helms. So these were the people who had information about Oswald before the assassination. So they never said that. And in the 1990s, that became clear. And so now if they go to talk to reporters, they can't say, we didn't know anything about this guy. So now they've backed up and now they're just saying, we never engaged with him. So they're not denying that they knew all about it. They're not denying that they monitored him. They're just

saying they never engaged. Well, that's possible, so let's check it. Let's see the files, and if there's nothing there, there's nothing there, and they can exculpate him. They can exonerate him. That didn't happen either. On the face of it, that seems suspicious maybe. We didn't get a very good explanation except for these talking points that they distributed to their favorite reporters.

And in there, you know, they said that the records that were seeking the file of George Ioannidis, they denied that they had withheld that from investigators. And that's false. They did deny it from investigators. And Judge Tonheim, the head of the Assassination Records Review Board, said as much in a letter to Biden last month. So, you know, the judge put it on the table. These are JFK records. The CIA needs to put them out, review them and release them. And they didn't do that. So it's a very clear case.

And we now have another, you know, another deadline. Will they blow it again? You know, after you blow the deadline four times, you can probably count on blowing it five times, right? Yeah, fair enough. Washington bureaucracy would, you know, conclude that. So that's where we're at right now. Well, one thing that you do, as you pointed out, have on your side that you may not have had in the past is a more skeptical media. And what do you attribute that to? I mean, I think primarily that, you know,

the government story is not very credible. I mean, you can't say we're not hiding anything, but let us keep 4,000 documents secret. Now, you know, the counter argument that they say, and that their, you know, that their people in their public affairs office say is, you know, there's nothing related to the assassination in these records. Okay. You know, that's fine. The law says you have to release them all. So if you're right, release them. You know, their obstinance, their digging in tells you something. And that's all you can say. And we got to wait and see if we can, if we can actually get the records. Yeah. You have an agency that has a proven track record of lying, insisting they never engaged

with Lee Harvey Oswald, but the very documents that could prove them correct, they for some reason don't want to show the public. The last thing that I want to get for you is why should people still care about this story? Why should people still be interested in this? Well, I think that it shows, I mean, a couple of things. One, you know, the notion that President Kennedy was killed by his enemies is kind of commonsensical and a lot of people believed it. So it's not crazy to think that that's what happened. Jackie Kennedy thought that's what happened.

So, you know, we need to understand our history and what really happened. So, you know, we need to understand our history and what really happened. And, you know, we need to hold the government accountable, you know, and there's two ways to look at the JFK story. One is, you know, let's use that to tear down the government and, you know, and get rid of these people. But the other way to look at it is, you know, let's hold the government accountable and prove that the system can work and that we can admit our bad mistakes. And, you know, if something untoward happened with President Kennedy, you know, the American people are mature and we've seen a lot. You know, we know that extra constitutional conspiracies are normal in American history from Watergate to January 6th.

We see extra constitutional conspiracies. If something like that happened in 1963, I think people will say, yeah, you know, we need to know that. So that's where we're at. That's why people should care about it today, because it's not just, you know, it's not just a question of something that happened long ago, but it's a test of government, of self-government today. That's why it matters today. I think that's very well said.

Tell people where they can find you. And also, I know you have a really exciting podcast coming out today. So let people know about that as well. Yeah. So if you're interested in the JFK story, subscribe to JFK Facts, jfkfacts.substack.com. You'll get a daily dose of JFK news. You can sign up for free or you can be a premium subscriber for the modest cost of five dollars a month. So and you will learn all about the JFK story. And, you know, frankly, we're ahead of the media now where we have the credibility now. And so major news organizations are at least listening to our take on what's going on. So if you want that news first, go to JFfkfacts.substack.com. You can get in touch with me,

DM at Jefferson Morley on Twitter, and you can follow me there. I tweet about what's in the JFK news on a pretty regular basis. And one of the things that paying subscribers get with JFK Facts is access to the weekly podcast. And I have a terrific episode, which is going on tonight, with a man named Ernst Tidowitz. And Ernst Tidowitz was a friend of Lee Harvey Oswald in Russia.

He's still alive. He's a biochemist. He was a 20-year-old medical student. Oswald was a 20-year-old ex-Marine. And Tidowitz spoke English. And he got to know the man who has been accused of killing President Kennedy, and his view of the man of Oswald is quite interesting and quite different than anything you've probably ever heard before, certainly from mainstream news organizations. A very interesting man. So if you want to hear that, tune in at eight o'clock tonight, jfkfacts.substack.com. And I think you will learn something. I thought I knew a lot, and I learned something. Fantastic. That is a great season. I will definitely check it out. You guys all should as well. Jefferson Morley over at JFK Facts, journalist, researcher,

and really, really grateful for your time today. Thank you so much, sir. We're excited to be back now with none other than Matt Taibbi. You should check out taibbi.substack.com, TK News over there. Matt, welcome back to CounterPoints. Thanks for having me on. Of course, we're really excited. We talked earlier in the show about sort of the first dump of the two-part dump yesterday. Thanks for having me on. Matt, you had a thread on this on Twitter. You had a post on it up on TK, which was excellent. Can you start just by telling us, while people are looking at the lovely graphic, what the hell the FBI belly button is?

It's actually really interesting. I know that picture is gross and kind of off-putting. But in a way, it kind of should be. Because one of the things that we were focused on with these documents is trying to figure out the architecture of how information flowed to and from the government with Twitter. And what this thread is really about is how Twitter didn't really want to work with certain agencies for a variety of reasons.

They had political disagreements. They thought the State Department, for instance, was too Trumpy. And so they were putting up a front about how many different agencies they wanted to give away their chief moderator's phone number to. And ultimately, they settled on a system where everything went through the DHS and the FBI, and there's a passage where the FBI agent says, think of us as the belly button for the USG. So information essentially, and there's another passage where the agent says, the FBI will take care, you know, we'll handle the federal and the USIC,

and DHS will know what's going on in all the states. So that's how they did up the information. The moderation request came in on the federal and international side through FBI and domestically through the Homeland Security. And you also talked about this one back and forth around people who were retweeting or Zero Hedge articles or something. Zero Hedge had been banned, but then people are still sharing some of the information. And they said it led to, quote, another flurry of disinformation narratives around the time Zero Hedge had been speculating on the origins of COVID, whether or not it was a lab leak or natural origin. So what's going on with it? Are they zeroing in on zero hedge at this point and then trying to make sure that there's nothing emanating remotely from them? And what else did you find around this area? So I think this came from a report by the Global Engagement Center, which is like the fledgling Intel arm of the State Department that nobody's ever heard of. It was founded in the Obama years under Hillary Clinton.

I think they wanted to make basically like the State Department version of the NSA. And so it's kind of the weak sister of the intelligence community. And they issued a report in February of 2020 that basically identified a whole bunch of actors as potential cyber threats. And one of their criteria was sort of arguing that COVID might have come from a lab or retweeting news about zero hedge being banned from Twitter. And what this really offers you a window into is how government agencies decide that this or that account is suspicious. Like they have all these crazy criteria. Everybody thinks it's super sophisticated. It's not. It's really stupid. Like in another area of these reports, they're talking about anybody who retweets two or more Chinese diplomats is now suspect for spreading Chinese disinformation. And that included like the Canadian military, like a CNN account. So this just gives you a window into how they're making those decisions. I think it also gives us a window into how, and this was another thing your earlier thread yesterday reported on, how reporters promulgate and fuel so much of this cycle.

Your earlier thread, something like reporters now know this model works. That was an email from a Twitter reporter or a Twitter staffer. What did you find as it relates to this question in terms of reporters fueling and working with the government agencies basically in service of censorship? Yeah, so I find this part fascinating. Maybe only other reporters find it interesting. But, you know, you might remember back in the WMD episode, there was this famous thing involving Dick Cheney and this thing called stove piping, where Cheney would reach into one of the intelligence agencies and grab raw intel that hadn't been vetted, would feed it to a news agency or a newspaper like the New York Times and then would go on a show like Meet the Press and say, hey, did you hear about that New York Times article? And exactly the same process goes on here. Basically, you have either a government department like the Senate Intel Committee or some private researcher that's

connected to the government that goes through a reporter and says, here are a bunch of suspect accounts we think are Russia-linked. And then they will go to Twitter and say, we think these are Russia-linked. Will you take action on them? Do you have any comment? And Facebook, not wanting to take the political hit, might suspend a few accounts. And then instantly they have a headline like, you know, Facebook uncovers with our help, you know, Russian influence. And that's what the Twitter stuffer was talking about, that this is a model that works. As soon as you get somebody to sign off on the idea that this or that account is Russia linked, you already have an automatic news story. And they did that over and over again. And what's really interesting, I

thought, in these documents is you see the Twitter staff are saying, this is going to happen to us over and over again. And it did. I also want to ask you about this Yul Roth email that's number 17 in your thread, which I think actually kind of exposes the divide in such a profound way. And it's Roth referring to the DHS and FBI as apolitical. And he puts generally in parentheses to acknowledge that, okay, maybe there's a tiny bit of politics going on with DHS and FBI. But it's an internal email. I feel like when he's writing this, I think he means it. And the problem with this GEC, and you can talk a little about what GEC is, to them that was political. So what do you draw from the fact that, and let's assume that he means it, that when he thinks of the FBI and DHS that he sees them as apolitical. What does

that tell you about how Twitter was relating to those organizations, those government agencies? Well, clearly, I think they brought themselves into a place psychologically where they were able to comply with really this unbelievably incessant stream of demands from agencies like the FBI and the DHS to eliminate certain accounts. They justified that on the grounds that all of these things were legitimate threats. They were legitimately dangerous. We legitimately had to worry about what he called major risks, which included, I guess, Donald Trump getting reelected. So when they were presented with an agency that was politically not in the same place as they were, and it happened twice that year, actually,

I didn't mention this, but also that summer, they refused to go along with a Pentagon program that that involved the Army making fake accounts to cover up for drone attacks, they basically decided that a more Trump-leaning government agency was, quote, political, and the FBI, DHS, NSA, CIA, all those other agencies were not political. So that's how they justified dealing with all those moderation requests. But I think it's pretty transparent what they were doing. And I think people will see it that way too. Follow up on that real quick. How does that relate to what you found?

How does that relate to Lee Fong's story? Once Trump was in, what's the connection? Li Fang was on our show a couple of weeks ago talking about what he had found in which Twitter was kind of whitelisting a bunch of Pentagon bots and Pentagon accounts that were doing propaganda around the globe and around drone strikes. Did they at some point then you found pushback against some of this? Were they going too far? Yeah, and Lee even wrote about that.

The pushback came in June of 2020. It started with Facebook, actually. Facebook was the first company to say no, and then Twitter kind of followed their lead. But essentially, the Pentagon, and we can put Pentagon in parentheses because this really, we're talking about the NSA in some cases, they had been creating local foreign language accounts so that if, for instance, you did a drone strike in a foreign country where they speak Arabic and there were lots of local news reports saying, oh, they blew up a hospital, all these kids died, suddenly you would see a flurry of fake accounts that would say, oh, no, actually, it wasn't that bad. There were no serious casualties. And guess who that was? That was us doing that, right? So those were what we call information operations. And they had been doing,

they've been going along with that for years. But the Pentagon had not had a good relationship with Twitter dating back to 2017. I was told this explicitly by somebody in the defense community, that they had been basically ghosted by Twitter, dating back to the middle of 2017. Finally, in 2020, the companies banded together and decided not to do this anymore, and that story didn't come out until 2022. You might remember it from earlier last fall when it came out in the Washington Post that they had uncovered a U.S. information operation that was actually a Pentagon operation.

It's really interesting. One thing from all of these, all of the reporting that's happened during the Twitter file is to see how much business is conducted over email and Slack. I mean, one thing that's always plagued journalists like to time, like forever, basically is that nobody puts things in writing. You know, this is all phone calls or in writing, they say, we need to move this to a phone call. But so much of this was happening in writing and was etched in so-called like digital stone maybe. But Matt, is that, have you seen any effort? I'm sure there are a couple of emails where it's like, oh, let's chat over the phone. Or I think I've actually even seen any of that, but have you seen any

effort as you're going through these thousands, tens of thousands of emails to to move conversations to phone? Not that I'm in favor of less transparency, but did they really just think that this was kind of in a vault and was not a liability for them to be talking like this? They clearly thought that. They were extremely cavalier in what they were doing. There are moments where they say maybe this is more of a phone conversation. They also, and this is one of the things that came out in the second thread yesterday, the quote-unquote industry call, which has involved Twitter, Facebook, and a whole bunch of other companies.

And then the DHS, FBI, Director of National Intelligence. And then there were a bunch of other agencies that were sort of auditing. They were in listen mode only. All that was going on in Signal, which is an interesting question because some lawyers have raised to me the issue of, you know, can you really send things in encrypted fashion or can you send documents that are timed to disappear, which is what happens through the FBI's teleporter program. If you're a government agency, you're supposed to be recording everything, right? So that's interesting. They had, I would say, on the whole, really terrible OPSEC on all this stuff. But in some cases, they're using methods that I'm not sure were legal

if they're government agency endeavors. So it's interesting on both fronts. Yeah, that happened here in D.C. Government officials were communicating over signal, and they had to stop that because it's not appropriate. Right, well, that raises a lot of questions. I'm sorry to interrupt, but you had thousands and thousands of moderation requests coming in via signal and teleporter.

And I'm not sure how much of that is ever going to be retrieved. And, you know, is that okay? I'm not sure. Yeah, and so you and the other reporters working on the Twitter files have been accused of, quote-unquote, cherry-picking. And I saw you responded to that in one of your recent newsletters. Can you elaborate on your response to that particular line of attack? First of all, I don't even know what that means. As opposed to what? The absolutely perfect, even representative sample of humanity that you see on other news channels? Like, what are they talking about? And if you see an email, in a sea of emails where it says,

hey, we're the FBI, all the reports that come in from the U.S. intelligence community and from us will go through our channels and the Homeland Security is going to handle all the states. You're not going to pick that cherry? Like, you know, as a reporter, I don't really understand what they're arguing here. Yes, of course, we're taking the interesting stuff. But if you want to argue that there's some other email somewhere that says, oh, we're not doing this, I would feel ethically obligated to put that in there. I haven't seen that.

So that's why I'm feeling confident in publishing this stuff. But there isn't really like a contra argument that is not appearing in these emails. One thing that people have said, because I reported this initially, there were requests that came from the Trump administration and were honored. I was told that pretty solidly by former executives, and I felt obligated to report it. But I haven't seen it in the email record. So that's why people aren't seeing it. It's just that I don't have it in writing. That is really interesting. And I really recommend folks follow your subsect to TK News because it's been helpful in sort of

fleshing this out even more. Just great reads over there and hope you're able to get some sleep, Matt. Thank you both. So we have some very interesting and new information. I've always thought that this, the Virgin Islands could be one of the areas where their prosecutors and their team very much wanted to try and get to the bottom of this. And a new filing in the U.S. Attorney's Office is devastating for one of the major financial institutions in the country. Let's put this up there on the screen. Epstein's sex trafficking was aided by J.P. Morgan.

This is according to a new lawsuit from the U.S. Virgin Islands Attorney General's Office that was filed in the Southern District of Manhattan on Tuesday. activities and actually provided the financier with services reserved for high wealth clients, even after a 2008 conviction for soliciting a minor for prostitution in Palm Beach, Florida. They specifically say that they have information which has revealed that J.P. Morgan knowingly, negligently and unlawfully provided and pulled the levers through which recruiters and victims were paid and was indispensable to the operation and concealment of the Epstein trafficking enterprise. So why does all of this matter? We should go back and remember a New York financial services department fine of JP Morgan, of Deutsche Bank, and of other financial institutions, which showed specifically that the banks were involved in a collusion process to go after Epstein's business and specifically facilitated

his own transactions from the United States to Eastern Europe, presumably, and in many cases, towards women who are being used for sex trafficking purposes. Why does that matter? Because Epstein himself and his network and organization were pulling all sorts of financial chicanery that if you or I tried to pull, Crystal, we would be automatically reported to the FBI. And in fact, one of those, my personal favorite example from the financial services department complaint was when they would say, how much cash can we withdraw without triggering the feds? By the way, just asking that question, you're supposed to call the feds. And they engage in regular behavior where they would try and withdraw as much cash

as possible without triggering an automatic regulatory informing to federal authorities. This is just the tip of the iceberg. What the US Virgin Islands is doing here is revealing it at the major meta financial institutional level of which, remember, we have no transparency outside of that financial services fine that happened for Deutsche Bank in, I think it was in 2021. We have no more clarity because the Ghislaine Maxwell trial focused on crimes. And I'm not saying these weren't valid, but on things that happened in so far limited in scope and so long time ago, the actual architect of all of the power networks, the people like Leon Black, the billionaires, the Wall Street, the financial institutions, all of it remains outside of public record. So this is a very important case that's happening here. Yeah, I mean, the Ghislaine Maxwell trial, I think it's pretty clear, was engineered to protect as many powerful people as possible while still putting her in prison because the public was just not going to accept her ultimately going through, going free. institutions, keep in mind, like maybe before he was a convicted sex offender, maybe you could sort of turn a blind eye and make up some innocent reason for these strange transactions.

But they continued to do business with him and seek out business with him after he's a convicted sex offender. And these are sophisticated institutions. You don't think that they don't know what suspicious financial transactions look like, what they are supposed to report under the law in terms of suspicious financial transactions. So it really is disgusting. All they cared about ultimately was the money. And then the next twist in this story is this attorney general for the Virgin Islands, who's been seems to be pretty dogged in her pursuit of accountability and exposing the enablers of the Jeffrey Epstein sex crimes ring. She was fired from her job for filing this lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase. Go and put this piece up on the screen here.

She was fired days after suing JPMorgan Chase over the Jeffrey Epstein ties. And it says in the article, I mean, they out and out acknowledged that this was the reason for her dismissal. They didn't even try to make up like, oh, no, it had something to do with her other conduct. And it really had nothing to do with Epstein. No, they were like, no, this caught us off guard. And so we relieved her of her duty. So even from the grave, this man is still being protected. But more to the point, all of the powerful people who were caught up in this or who enabled this and chose to look the other way or were active participants, they continue to be protected at the highest levels. Yes. I want to underscore again that Denise George, the attorney general here who was fired, has been really courageous

on this investigation for years now. Let's go and put this up there on the screen. It's a news item from a couple of years ago, but it shows you that in an initial lawsuit that she actually filed, they allege that Epstein was trafficking girls as young as 12 years old to the U.S. Virgin Islands actually just came to with the Epstein estate to claw back, quote, more than $80 million in economic development tax benefits that Epstein and co-defendants had fraudulently obtained from U.S. Virgin Islands and other authorities to actually use to then fund his sex trafficking enterprise. I also want to read a quote from the lawsuit that she filed before she was fired. These decisions were advocated and approved at the senior levels of JP Morgan, who facilitated and concealed wire and cash transactions that raised suspicious of and weren't packed part of a criminal enterprise whose currency was a sexual servitude of dozens of women and girls in and beyond the U.S. Virgin Islands.

This lawsuit is, again, the tip of the iceberg. And if it actually was allowed to proceed, we would have gotten financial statements, subpoenas, possibly a senior J.P. Morgan executives, account managers, some of the other sophisticated financial chicanery that Epstein and all of his coterie were involved in. I mean, I still have so many questions. If we'll all remember Leon Black, who was the head of the Apollo Group, he was one of the richest men in the United States, one of the most powerful people on Wall Street. And he paid him some $100 million for, quote, tax advice.

And the way that he paid him that $100 million was through the Shell Corporation that owned his private jet to Jeffrey. I mean, this and then Bill Gates. Bill Gates' own divorce, as Melinda Gates has now come out and said, was because she was understanding the level of his involvement with Jeffrey Epstein, not just some one chance meeting. We're talking about behind closed doors, even allegedly in some cases complaining about his marriage. And, you know, he's known to have been

involved in affairs also while he was married. So some of the world's richest and most powerful men aren't snared in this and none of it yet has come to light. And he's been dead. I'll just say dead will say for the circumstances for later for several years now. I mean, it's just completely crazy. This was one of the only chances that we really had. And now she's been fired. And, you know, I'll let you surmise about why exactly that would happen. In 2022, we covered how inflation caused a lot of pain for a lot of people. But there was one group of people who not too sad about the fact that they also had a lot of financial pain. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen.

The world's billionaires lost $1.4 trillion in 2022. Leave this up on the screen. Let me read a few of the details here. The headline from Bloomberg says how Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and the world's 500 richest billionaires lost one point four trillion dollars in a year. Ultra wealthy tech founders led a wipeout in fortunes that span the globe. Those secretive families and pro sports owners emerged relatively unscathed. I want to read just a little bit of this article here. He says they say in Bloomberg, it's not just the money that was lost, though it was staggering,

almost 1.4 trillion wiped from those fortunes. Plenty of the pain, it turns out, was self-inflicted. The alleged fraud by one time crypto wonderkin, Sam Bankman-Fried, the devastating war waged by Russia on Ukraine that spurred crippling sanctions on its business titans.

And of course, the antics of Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, who's worth $138 billion less than he was just a year ago, combined with a backdrop of widespread inflation and aggressive central bank tightening. The year was a dramatic comedown for a group of billionaires whose fortunes fell to unfathomable heights in the COVID era of easy money. In most cases, the bigger the rise, the more dramatic the fall. Musk, Bezos, CZ, and Mark Zuckerberg alone saw some $392 billion erased from their cumulative net worth. And Sagar, this is kind of the flip side of the Fed tightening and hiking interest rates

dynamic, because it is true that in the era of zero interest rates, you've had this tremendous financialization of the economy. You've had money so cheap and easy that you had a lot of dramatic fortunes wildly inflated. And so that part, it's not bad that you have a coming down to earth of parts of the economy. It's just the pain of working class people and the fact that this has been sort of explicitly engineered to crush wages and spike unemployment. That's the part of the Fed policy that has been very objectionable. That's the hard part, right? Which is that there really is no way to do both when you're only using the Federal Reserve.

I also do want to underscore, I think it is interesting that China also was a huge part of this story. The Chinese economic lockdowns that happened have been devastating for the Chinese billionaire class. So this isn't just America, this is worldwide. The Russian oligarchs, of course, got nuked by US and Western sanctions, but the Chinese had a self-inflicted financial bomb that they set off on their economy with the COVID zero. On top of you have the central bank tightening. So it's global. This is a complete global meltdown, really, of what's happening. And look, I mean, all these people will sleep just fine at night. At a certain point, you know, is there any real difference in lifestyle between 350 billion and 100 billion? So I'm not going to get too upset for Jeff Bezos, for Elon Musk.

I do think it more represents, though, that there are millions of people who work for these individuals who are now suffering as a result. And it is more of a reflection on the aggregate of the pain that so many people have suffered. And look, I can't be the only one two years later where, you know, inflation may not be in the headlines anymore, but it's not like grocery prices have fallen. They basically just stayed the same. You actually hear where I am in Mexico. I was looking at gas, gas price here. It's like a buck 40 a liter. I mean, that's a lot of money. And when you consider what GDP per capita is, I'm like, wow, people, I guess they call

it petrol, but petrol is really gouging working people worldwide. So we should consider just how much of the pain, which is reflected in the top line figure of their net worth, is also dispersed on everybody else. So it's a tough one. It's one of those where given the playbook that central policymakers use at the banking level, this is really the only way to try and engineer it when really there should be a way to make sure that they don't do as well and then others actually get to do even better. Yeah, well, it's just like we've been saying for quite a while. I mean, the Fed policy

of zero interest rates or effectively negative interest rates for years and years, that created a lot of tremendous and basically fake wealth for the very, very tippy top. Meanwhile, it's not like working class people benefited from that era. But when you pop the balloon and you send the thing crashing back down, yeah, you're going to claw back some of those insane fortunes that were claimed by that fake easy money. But you're also going to hurt on the way down a lot of working class people. And that's, you know, that's exactly the story that we see playing out right now. So you have the accumulation of Fed sins over a number of years, which basically backstop the fortunes of the richest among us. And then you also have a total government failure to be able to pass economic policy independent of the Fed and use a toolkit

that would be better tailored and more suitable for these strange economic circumstances that we ultimately find us in. And that's sort of the story of the economy right now. But listen, I think it is in and of itself a fundamental good for the economy to have some of that easy money that was floating zombie companies and creating fake fortunes and all of this stuff. I think it's good to have that bubble ultimately pierced. It just is incredibly painful that the policy that's been pursued is one that is going to hurt working class people so much more than Elon Musk is not going to hurt because he lost $200 billion or whatever he ultimately lost. He's going to be just fine, even so. So it's a complicated landscape. I guess that's what I'll say. Some really interesting data put out by the

Financial Times about the political ideology of millennials. Let's go and put this up on the screen. So historically, demographic groups have gotten more conservative as they have aged, but millennials are, they say, shattering that oldest rule in politics. And you can see on the right side of the screen, these charts that track the political ideology of boomers, silent generation, and Gen X, they all follow that traditional pattern of becoming more conservative as they get older. Millennials, though, not only are they not following that pattern, they seem to be going in the opposite direction. This is data from both the US and the UK. So it's pretty fascinating. Obviously, we'll have huge implications for politics as silent generation passes on,

as boomers continue to age and millennials continue to come into power. There's some indications Gen Z may follow in millennials' footsteps with their political ideology as well. So huge ramifications in terms of political realignments and political power. And Sagar, you know, this is just sort of spitballing, but I have to think coming of age at a time of global financial total collapse, where you have, you know, clear malfeasance on the top of top financial institutions, you have no one going to jail for it. You have, you know, your entire career prospects impacted your whole life trajectory impacted by the series of events. It seems to me like that might shape your worldview for life. Oh, I think it's actually easy. It just tracks with wealth. Why do you think boomers became

more conservative as they got older? Because they had more money. They got more money. They had more money. And they're like, oh, actually, I want to pay less taxes. Yeah, mortgage interest deductions and all that sounds good. Why do you care about that if you don't have any of it? Actually, what you want is really what your parents had. So I don't think it's all that sounds good. Why do you care about that if you don't have any of it? Actually, what you want is really what your parents had. So I don't think it's all that complicated. And in fact, I mean, it just shows me that the definitions of conservative, liberal and all that, these things don't even really mean anything. What we're going to see is a great reordering in our lifetime. What the Republican Party looks like in 25, 30 years, I think it's just going to have to be completely different if it's going to survive, very akin to what happened in the 1940s or in the 1930s and 40s under Franklin D. Roosevelt,

when basically they had to abandon so much of what they stood for during the pre-Great Depression era. And you had Eisenhower come in and basically declare peace on the New Deal and usher in a completely new party. I think that's very likely to happen. I think on the Democratic side, much of the corporate, you know, kind of alliance and all that that stood for under the Bill Clinton era has really been thrown out, especially in the UK, where they basically thrown that out almost completely with the liberals. And in the Democratic Party for the US, it's still going to take some time. One of the things that I am taking some heart in with this Kevin McCarthy saga is that the parties are weaker now. And that's a really good thing. It's over the last 100 years, there has been no ability to cause chaos and revolt to try and take off the tops of these

parties. And something I've come around to is that no matter who gets this speakership, if Kevin McCarthy doesn't get it, that's actually good for American democracy because they should not have locks on the speakership votes. They should not have locks to be able to have top-down controls. This is something that really evolved more in the Gilded Age and onward. And instead, we need to see a return to some like raucous chaos and the ability to inject some new blood into the system. I think that's actually when it's working at its best, as opposed to the way it has been now for the last like

40 or 50 years, especially the last 100 years at the house level. Yeah, I agree with you. I mean, when things are stayed and ossified and controlled top down, it becomes very limited because when it's top down control, you know exactly ultimately who they are going to serve. But yeah, it is fascinating to me. I think you're right on the money. Like if you want young people to have more conservative politics, maybe cut them in on the deal, create some wealth, and then maybe they'll have a stake in the status quo.

Right now they have no stake in the status quo. They're like, fuck the status quo. This is not working for me whatsoever. And that's reflected ultimately in the data. So you see, we covered the Charlie Munger and Bernie Marcus and whatever, all these old guys lamenting these young people not being grateful for what they have, et cetera. But when you look at the numbers, millennials and Gen Z following in their footsteps, they're achieving every major life milestone later than previous generations. And so, yeah, of course, that's going to impact your politics. Of course, that's going to impact your sense of justice, of how the society should ultimately be ordered. And so no one should be surprised to see

that it is, in fact, having that impact on their political ideology. Yeah, I mean, Charlie Munger really should know better. You know, I think I was telling you I read that biography of Warren Buffett called Snowball, where Munger is a central character. Well, what's the lesson with Charlie Munger? Him and Warren Buffett got extraordinarily. I'm not saying they didn't work hard, but they also happened to invest during one of the greatest booms in modern American history during the 1960s. Were they responsible for that or was broader macro conditions, the world's superpower, cold war, all of that. See, it just shows you that major economic conditions shape the options that are even available to people. So if you came of, you know, came of age in the seventies, as opposed to the

sixties, it's a totally different world. And with millennials, we basically had the seventies, except they just never ended. There's no eighties that have come to save us. And so it's not a surprise when you have malaise and, you know, really just really, or lack of questioning and faith in institutions, which, you know, personally, I don't think you should have faith in those institutions. So I think it's a good thing that people are rejecting the status quo. It creates possibility. What happens with that possibility? Totally uncertain. Could be better, could be worse, who knows, but it at least creates possibility. I also want to address the Tonys. On a recent episode of Checking In with Michelle Williams,

I open up about feeling snubbed by the Tony Awards. Do I? I was never mad. I was disappointed because I had high hopes. To hear this and more on disappointment and protecting your peace, listen to Checking In with Michelle Williams from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I know a lot of cops. They get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. Listen to Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Lott. And this is Season 2 of the War on Drugs podcast. Yes, sir. Last year, a lot of the problems of the drug war. This year, a lot of the biggest names in music and sports. This kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We met them at their homes. We met them at their recording studios. Stories matter, and it brings a face to them.

It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart podcast.