MTracey podcast - The "Epstein Files" meltdown continues!

Episode Date: July 13, 2025

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mtracey.netIt was time for yet another dive into the Epstein humiliation tonight, this time with Richard Hanania. Agree with him or not, Richard tends to be a fairly well-informed person, so it was interesting to discover how little he fundamentally knew about the Epstein saga, and how easy it was to dispel various myths he’d just kind of ambiently absorbed. We al…

Yeah, okay. So it looks like the substack glitch is working up again where I can't. Can you see the number of people in here? I can't see it. I can't, yeah. Oh, you can? And you could see the chats too? Uh, I see the chats, yeah. I see it now says 49 people. Okay. Well, anyways, I can't. Now it's 148. So, yeah. Okay, so, I mean, there's a, there's a problem here. Always problem on my end with substack. But whatever, whatever the, whatever the reason is, it doesn't matter as long as you can see it. as long as everyone can see us here. Okay, so you wrote this compact article. And I never looked into the Epstein thing because I almost figured like,

I mean, I always figured like, okay, who's promoting it? Like Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson and Jack Pesil. Like, okay, like, it's got to be wrong. Like, when are, what, Eric Weinstein, like, when do these people promote something? And it, like, turns out to be true, you know, other than like, the Earth is round or something. And, like, who knows if they even believe that? But it's even flimsier than I would have suspected. I thought there were, like, serious journalists who, like, kind of weren't to the conspiracy.

You know, I took the idea that, for example, the idea that Epstein was an agent. I thought this was like an accord document or something. People just say that. People do not check the sourcing of the claims that they make on the story. So, yeah, people will say that over and over, you know, Sager and Jetty, who I generally tend to like. And I've been on the show, I know them. But, you know, he did say on Tucker Carlson's podcast a few days ago that Acosta, who, okay, so there's so much context that we always have to unravel on the story. If people aren't aware, Alex Acosta was the Labor Secretary in Trump's first term.

He was previously a federal prosecutor in Southern Florida who presided over the agreement, the non-prosecution. agreement for federal prosecution that Epstein subsequently was thought to have gotten a sub-leignant sentence on the basis of he pleaded guilty to relatively minor state-level charges on the basis of that federal non-prosecution agreement. It's a very tangled web. People can read, you know, hundreds of pages of minute level, you know, granular documentation of how that all came about if they really want to, but people don't read the actual documentation. I mean, there's a literally, like, a 350-page Department of Justice, Office of Professional Standards, I think it is, or what's the exact title of that DOJ entity? Office of Professional Responsibility report that people can go read from 2020 if they really want to, but nobody reads.

And so, yeah, I mean, that quote, the Epstein quote, belonged to intelligence. as allegedly relays by Alex Acosta, it's essentially just pure hearsay and falls apart upon even mild scrutiny. It appeared in one 2019, Daily Beast article by this person, Vicky Ward, who attributed that quote

on the part of Acosta to some exchange he had two or three years prior with Trump transition officials and Acosta and Ward attributes her acquisition of that Acosta quote to an unnamed senior administration official who he had talked to two or three years prior. And I'm almost positive now. I don't know how this went over my head when I was first looking into it extensively. I'm almost positive that the senior administration official that he was talking to, or former senior administration official that she was talking to, can you guess?

Yeah. With Steve Bannon, because Vicki Ward at the time was working on a book trashing the Cushner's. And so Bannon had a huge feud with Jared Cushner, as you probably recall, in the first administration. And so she was talking to Bannon largely for that purpose. and people are asking in the comments, did Acosta ever deny it? Yeah, I should have put this in the compact article, but like, sometimes you're just overwhelmed with the flood of information on this stuff. Go read that OPR report. Acosta was interviewed about the Epstein non-prosecution agreement from 2007, 2008, and he was asked directly,

did he have any knowledge of Epstein being a, quote, intelligence asset? Acosta stated to investigators that, quote, the answer is known. So, yes, he did deny it. When he was actually on the record? Who did he deny this to? What was this? He could have faced professional repercussions. What is this?

Was this investigation or who was asking Acosta this? The Department of Justice office of professional responsibility. So basically like an internal watchdog. So he was under oath? Was he under oath? I don't know if he would he, if he had to swear an oath, but like if he lied to the DOJ. Yeah, it's a crime. Whatever.

Yeah. He's got to tell the truth. It's not like talking to a journalist. Not only would be a crime, it would be a crime, it would ruin his professional prospects. You know, so in the one situation where it actually was necessary for him to be maximally truthful, you would think, he did deny it. And yet you have all these influencers and even journalists and everybody just going around declaring willy-nilly that Epstein was an intelligence asset on the basis of one second or third hand hearsay quote that does not survive basics through. And there's so much else along those lines related to the story that we could get into. But it's why.

So if Bannon had just said it himself, nobody, I think, would take it that seriously. The fact that Bannon gave it to a journalist who decided it him, I think it makes it more, much more serious because people just know Bannon. And Bannon at the time was, had a close relationship with Epstein. Yeah. He did 15 hours of interviews that he still never released. How did they get close? What's the story between them? So they got close.

I don't know the exact story of how they met, but Epstein was very anigmatic and, you know, let's say interesting because he did make a point to congeny all manner of people for like salon style discussions at his various properties. So in New York, in Palm Beach, in New Mexico, at the Notorious Island, et cetera. He had an office at Harvard where because he gave money to Harvard,

they gave him some kind of office and he would host these academic symposiums where he would invite people from different fields and they would talk about things. And, you know, if you listen to Michael Wolf, the journalist describe it, who is also tied in with Bannon. I mean, Michael Wolf was invited by Epstein in 2014

to begin attending these salons or these suarez or whatever you want to call them. And as Michael Wolf tells it, they were genuinely fascinating. I mean, there would be very high-profile people who would just happen upon who would be at these events and they would have like freewheeling discussions. And I don't know, like, would you go to some event if there was a chance that there would be like a Nobel Prize winning scientist,

a current or former prime minister, maybe a famous actor and you know fill in the blank for other like notable guests yeah I probably would and yet if I had if I accepted an invitation in 2014

now I would be probably petrified because I could be claimed to be in some file by which association I would therefore be assumed to be a child predator yeah okay so yeah that's that that's that cool so that's all the Epstein intelligence. That seems like nothing. And then the other big thing is

I mean, it's possible that he consorted with different intelligence-related persons or for the years, because he consorted with like an astonishing array of prominent and powerful individuals. Yeah. Yeah, Epstein got around. And then this and this and this and so the only thing that we have that is actually of him having sex with, so the only thing that, Because that's that the intelligence claim. Now, the other claim, the salacious one, is that he is trafficking and having sex or setting up famous men with young girls to have sexes. And is that right? There's literally just one person named Virginia Guthrie who's accused him of this.

That's it? The only person in the world who's ever said this? Yeah, I bet you're glad that you read my article, aren't you, Richard? Actually, I also posted excerpts of it on it with some like supplemental stuff on substacks. so people should read Entrace.net as well. But yeah, okay, so here's what's so maddening about this whole issue. And again, if you do even the most basic scrutiny of any facet of this issue, you know what you're going to be accused of?

Somebody who needs to have their hard drive checked. You're accused of somebody who may have been on the list themselves or went to Epstein Island. I wish I was invited to Epstein Island. I wish in 2002 when I was 14 years old, I travel with Bill Clinton to the FD. That would have been a fascinating. Not of an awesome. Yeah.

But, you know, unfortunately, I wasn't. So I'm not personally invested in it in that way. But like you're accused of all kinds of depravities because nobody wants to touch anything that has any nexus with child sex trafficking, right? That's why all these people have settled these cases, including banks, J.P. Morgan, Deutsche Bank. And what do they get sued for? What do they even get sued for?

Deutsche Bank and the other, what was the other bank? They get sued. Why? Because they, because they handle Jeffrey Epstein's money? More or less, yes. So they're accused of being complicit in enabling his crimes. Did they know anything? How did they know?

How did they know? He was. I think one of the claims is that when Epstein withdrew cash, they ought to have done more due diligence to ensure that the cash he was withdrawing wasn't being used to further some child sex trafficking. It's absurd. But of course, does J.P. Borgant, do they just want to bite the bullet

rather than prolong litigation for years and years and years where they're going to be accused in the media of, and everywhere else, of obstinately refusing to compensate these alleged victims. Yeah. And by the way, the quote-unquote victims of which there are hundreds who come out the woodworks

are able to confidentially and non-adversarly have their claims adjudicated. So with the Epstein Compensation Fund, which was drawn from his own estate, and then it might be a slightly different with the banks, but essentially, if you wanted to talk

about the Epstein Victims Compensation Fund that was created after he died, it literally is expressly a non-adversarial and confidential formats so somebody can anonymously, anonymously make a claim, not be cross-examined at all, and then a privately appointed adjudicator

or mediator can assess whether they're entitled to millions of dollars. And people can't even like fathom that that could create a perverse incentive, and encourage people to want to hold themselves out as victims. And so this was the result, this was this fund, victims fund was created as a result of a lawsuit? Was it a settlement?

There are several funds. Yeah, yeah, because Epstein was being sued. Epstein's estate was being sued. So once he died, the executors of the estate essentially agreed to the creation of something called the Epstein Victims Compensation Fund. I might not have the exact wording correct, but it was more or less that. And then that became the model for the settlements

that were then reached with anybody else who could be claimed to have the most tangential association, essentially, with Epstein, including these major banks that simply had him as a client. I mean, it's amazing. The field day and the feeding frenzy that lawyers have had on this issue.

In New York, in Florida, in New Mexico, in the Virgin Islands, everywhere they can get their hands on anything, like, I think connected to Epstein, they've had an absolute bonanza. And, you know, and actually, you know, in fairness, so have the people who, so have the lawyers who continue to represent the Epstein estate. So that's just true. But yeah, on Virginia Juffrey, I mean, this is, it's mind-boggling that this is not reported on such that it doesn't penetrate the popular consciousness at all.

Okay. So what's the main assumption as to why the Epstein thing, quote-unquote, continues to be covered up? Now we've reached a new phase where Trump is apparently covering it up, right? And so are Cash Patel and Dan Bongino despite going around dangling these exciting little tidbits about how they were going to uncover the true story about Epstein. Okay, correct me if I'm wrong. What people assume is being covered up is a sprawling child sex trafficking ring that entailed Epstein supplying Myers to prominent individuals and then surreptitiously filming those individuals in illicit compromising encounters. and then using that as blackmail. That's basically it, right?

That's what people believe, right? And so the only basis for people to even have that belief is the accusations that have been unleashed by this person, Virginia Gufrey, who is essentially the initial most... Did she even, like, do we know if she even, like, knew Epstein? I mean, is there any even content with her and Epstein?

I mean, there's evidence, I think, that's been established that she was working at Mar-a-Lago. I mean, the, the, the, the, uh, yeah, the, I already in that. She was working at Mar-a-Lago, and she was, like, an aspiring masseuse. She was apparently reading, like, a masseuse instruction book or something. And the claim is that she met Gislein Maxwell, and one thing led to another, and then she ended up working, at Epstein's estate in... Did she work for Epstein? Do we know that?

For sure? I think there's some evidence that she worked to some degree at Epstein's estate, yeah. But here's what happened, okay? That then grew into this lavish story that she first debuted in 2011 when a journalist with the Daily Mail

or Mail on Sunday, the British tablight, got in touch with her. and she was paid like $140,000 or $160,000, something like that, simply to participate in an interview and to publish this photo that became notorious of her purportedly with Prince Andrew. The authenticity of that photo, I don't know if it's real or not, but it was real enough that Prince Andrew eventually settled because what's he going to do? Subject himself to like years of hysterical,

publicity and stand trial in the United States. Right. She seems to have had a photo of her with Prince Andrew and Jeffrey Epstein. Yeah, I think that's, I think, you know, it appears that she probably did have a photo for herself with Prince Andrew. That, that, that, uh, but in the first, in the first 2011 articles that came out that she was paid for, she conveyed to the journalist that there's no claim being made, that she ever had any sexual contact with Prince Andrew.

Wow. The stories get more and more grandiose over the years. She gets in touch with lawyers who by late 2014 have her signed on to another pending lawsuit. Okay, so there was a pending lawsuit in which she, her lawyers on her behalf added a filing that was stemmed from the Florida convictions in 2007, 8. being unlawful because other certain class of victims had not been properly notified that there was a settlement in place, okay? And that's when Joufrey makes her first blockbuster claims of having been sex trafficked to a host of prominent individuals.

So she claims she was sex trafficked to Alan Dershowitz, to the former majority leader of the United States Senate, George Mitchell, to the former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. and, you know, New Mexico governor, Bill Richardson. She claims that she saw Al Gore and Tipper Gore at the Epstein Island, but that was essentially disproven. She didn't make a specific sexual claim about them. But, yeah, she makes all these claims up about Bill Clinton. She says she also just makes a general claim that she was trafficked to a host of foreign princes and prime ministers and presidents. and so forth. Then it creates a huge media firestorm, okay? And as the claim gradually gets litigated,

central facets of what he's alleging fall apart, culminating in by 2022 Dershowitz, finally, being able to extract an admission from her that she had falsely accused him of child sex crimes for nearly a decade. Now, everything that Dershowitz has, if you go back and look at of what Dershowitz has said about this case from 2014 when Goufrey's filing first came out accusing Dershowitz through 2000

through to present everything has been vindicated and yet it just doesn't penetrate like the popular consciousness Dershowitz says she's a serial liar she doesn't know truth from from fiction you can't any allegation that

is predicated on what her on a claim of hers ought to be discounted because her credibility is so in tatters. And when there was finally a trial that was held that could most authoritatively adjudicate this main central claim that people are so wedded to, which is that there was this child sex trafficking ring that entrapped prominent people and was orchestrated by Epstein, and then he used blackmail to silence those prominent individuals for some unknown purpose. Virginia Cuffrey was not even called as a witness by prosecutors in the 2021 trial of Gisleine Maxwell.

The four women that were called as witnesses did not even allege that they were trafficked to any third-party individual. The sex trafficking conspiracy for which Maxwell was convicted basically as a proxy of Epstein because Epstein was dead. They poured tons of resources into potentially prosecuting him after there was a media uproar in 2000. 18 with the Miami Herald report. So they nailed Maxwell for sex trafficking conspiracies from like 25 years earlier. And the claim was that she was party to have sex trafficking conspiracy that consisted of a grand total of two people, her and Epstein. So like nothing to do with these grandiose sweeping claims that people want to believe are true and are the reason why. the Epstein files, quote, unquote, are

remotely substantiated by anything that's in the actual empirical record. Yeah. So one thing that we have, I'm looking at just Twitter right now, trending, release the Epstein. It's like still. It's like still. It's just so funny. But did you, so you saw this clip of Michael Wolfe, a journalist who was talking on some substack stream. It was Vicki Ward. She was the one who wrote.

Oh, that was Ricky Ward. Okay. And he says basically, he has personal. seen a photos of Trump. Epstein would show photos of Trump sitting by his pool with girls, topless girls, that this was taken from Epstein's safe box by the FBI. And also there's a picture with Trump has a stain on his pants. This is too, this is like a liberal wet dream. Like Trump has a state on his pants and girls are pointing at it and laughing. Well, I hadn't seen this before. I I don't know if this claims were made before. Like, what do you make of this?

So, Wolf did know Epstein. Wolf was invited to Epstein's salon functions. He has many hours of interviews with Epstein. Before the election last year, he released excerpts of some conversations that he had with Epstein relating to Trump. And in those conversations, Trump, Epstein claims that he and Trump were the best of friends. Yeah, I remember that. that. Okay, that was Michael. I didn't remember. That was him. Yeah. So I think it's pretty well established that Trump and Epstein were good friends. I mean, they were in the same Palm Beach and D. York social circles. They accused each other's jets, private jets to fly back and forth to places, I think. And so, and they're also kind of, you know, playboys. And so would it shock me? Would it be the crazy thing ever if like Donald Trump in the year 2000 or something was at Jeffrey Epstein's pool and was photographed, you know, with like some.

girls, you know, in bikinis or topless or, I guess not. I mean, but like, what is that, what is that supposed to vindicate that Donald Trump was a playboy who liked attractive young women? Well, he doesn't specify. He doesn't specify if they're under, if they look underage or whatever. Yeah, he says girls doesn't mean that they were, you know. Yeah. Doesn't mean that there was Aphelia. Yeah.

Yeah. The pointing and laughing. Do you think that's true? I mean, he, does he the kind of guy? I know that he's used sources. I know I've heard people question kind of his. his credibility. What would say your...

His methodology sometimes is a little suspect. But I don't know that he would just make that up. And so Bannon has claims to have 15 hours. Talk to us about Bannon. Yeah, so there was like a trailer that came out several years ago for... Came on 2021. For some documentary that Bannon claimed to be working on. and it included a one-on-one video interview with himself in Epstein,

which was significant because there's hardly any direct interviews anywhere with Epstein in that format. And I think there are none. I mean, he's done some like print interviews over the years, you know, going back decades. He had those kind of, you know, low-quality audio style recordings with Wolf. But this would be one of a kind. But there's only like the tiniest snippet of Epstein and Bannon in this interview. And apparently it had something to do with Bannon wanting to coach Epstein for a 60 Minutes interview. Like he had encouraged Epstein to do some 60 minutes interview.

And I don't know what exactly like dispel some of the claims that have been made against him. This was before he was arrested in 2019. And for all this time, this 15 hours. of interviews, almost 16, that Bannon confirmed existed, have just been, I don't know, sitting in Bannon's vault somewhere, are they in the Epstein files, wherever they are, they haven't been released. And so, like, all this, like, all this, like, right-wing internet clamor to release the Epstein files, and, like, how come there hasn't been clamored for Bannon to release this, like, priceless material with Epstein? Now, apparently I saw that he was asked about this today by

somebody at the TP USA conference. And now he's claiming that sometime next year, they're going to be released in like some multi-part series. What's stopping you from just releasing the raw interview footage now? So he's going to cut it all up and put it into some documentary? No, I mean, how about just release the raw footage, Steve? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, and he treats this like this is the most important issue in the world that he's

saying, yeah, they're high. Yeah, but give me like six or eight months and then maybe I'll release part of it.