Dahud Ortiz is a post-traumatic Marine Corps veteran who traveled to Madrid to kill an attorney who’d been chatting with his wife and ended up killing an associate and two clients instead, setting fire to the office to cover his tracks. Vladimir Antonio Arevalo Chavez is a high-ranking MS-13 official who allegedly forged alliances with major Mexican drug organizations that ultimately cartelized the theretofore fragmented “coyote” business of migrating to the United States, putting poor border-crossers in debt to organized crime figures. Jose Hernandez Reyes is a low-level human smuggler and habitual drunk driver who until recently was scheduled to be deported a sixth time, after getting wasted and opening fire in a residential Texas neighborhood, then passing out in his car when he ran out of ammunition. Eric Adams allegedly took millions of dollars in direct bribes and illegal campaign contributions and is accused by a former police chief of transforming the New York Police Department into a “criminal enterprise” for enriching allies and illegally arresting and launching tabloid smear campaigns against political enemies. Imaad Zuberi was sentenced to 12 years’ imprisonment for illegally laundering millions of dollars from the Qatari royal family and other Gulf state oligarchs into American political campaigns.
Trump’s Justice Department commuted Zuberi’s 12-year prison sentence in May, in possible gratitude for the Qatari plane, though a long-ago $900,000 donation to Trump’s first inaugural committee was cited by the press for his reasoning. The agency dropped the Adams prosecution in February, in an explicit quid pro quo for agreeing to cooperate with extralegal immigration roundups. DOJ dismissed charges against MS-13 official Chavez in April as a favor to El Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele, whose secret back-channel alliances and negotiations with MS-13 had gotten him elected. It released Hernandez Reyes to a halfway house in June as a favor for agreeing to testify against Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom the administration accidentally sent to the El Salvadoran gulag. And it negotiated Ortiz’s release from a Venezuelan prison as part of the deal that released 252 Venezuelan nationals from said El Salvadoran gulag.
What is the common thread in the Trump regime springing all these people from prisons or indictments? Perhaps it can be found in a WhatsApp text written by Zuberi in 2017. “The joke going around in Washington establishment … is the bigger the scumbag the sooner you will be invited to the White House.” Zuberi himself had a wide array of clients, and during the Obama administration he would be contacted for meetings “from all scumbag [sic] of the world, warlords, kings, queens, presidents for life, military dictators, clan chiefs, tribal chiefs and etc.”
The writer Whitney Webb, whose 2022 two-part book series One Nation Under Blackmail analyzes the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking enterprise in the context of earlier deep state–sanctioned organized crime networks like Iran-Contra and the Bank of Commerce and Credit International, observed on a recent podcast that Trump has long subscribed to his mentor and mafia lawyer Roy Cohn’s notion that every powerful man is the custodian of a “favor bank,” in which quid pro quos are brokered like loans and deposits. But banks (in theory anyway) have to lend out their reserves at a better rate of return than they pay on their deposits, and the bargains being made at this point lack any sense of reason or proportion.
Trump has long subscribed to his mentor and mafia lawyer Roy Cohn’s notion that every powerful man is the custodian of a “favor bank.”
It now looks increasingly likely that the Trump DOJ will apply similar tortured illogic used to drop charges against Adams in exchange for immigration cooperation to its dealings with convicted child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, who is currently serving a 20-year sentence for recruiting girls as young as 14 into sex slavery with Epstein. There is a notion that Trump will pardon Maxwell in exchange for “information” that incriminates MAGA enemies like the Clinton family and somehow absolves Trump himself, neglecting that Maxwell’s current lawyer David Markus recently represented Hillary Clinton in Trump’s racketeering lawsuit against her. At the same time, Democrats have displayed an illogical, giddy certainty that any and all new Epstein revelations will surely and chiefly embarrass Trump—assuming they can run the whole Russiagate playbook again but for real this time, and get better results.
For better or (mostly) worse, of course, the Epstein scandal is real, its “Russia” is Israel, and though many of his conspirators were Republicans, Epstein at the height of his power displayed considerably more interest in infiltrating liberal circles than schmoozing with Republican revolutionaries. On the other hand, the most relevant living Democrat to have taken campaign funds from Epstein is Chuck Schumer, whose approval ratings are barely higher among Democratic voters than the 8 percent who support Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
At the same time, the mainstream liberal establishment has perhaps never been so amenable to a “clean break” with the Israel lobby in which the Epstein enterprise played such an intriguing role. Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin—who during the Biden administration was such a relentlessly dutiful shill that she voted to ban the State Department from citing Gaza Health Ministry death statistics and wrote an angry letter to the Facebook Oversight Board complaining about its determination that “From the river to the sea” does not, in itself, constitute “hate speech”—recently said in an interview she would consider forcing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to register as a foreign lobby.
Given that the genocide is now on its 665th day and Al Jazeera’s traumatizing documentary on the epidemic of children dying from starvation will turn one next month, I am not sure what changed, but surely Zohran Mamdani has played a role. Wall Street oligarchs including Epstein friend, business partner, and alleged sex abuse conspirator Glenn Dubin spent tens of millions of dollars on attack ads smearing the 33-year-old socialist as a vicious antisemite and a threat to Jewish safety, and yet current polls show him winning Jewish voters in the city by 17 points. Perhaps Democrats are starting to grasp the difference between Jewish voters and the confederation of Zionist billionaires whose absolutist clampdown on criticism of the Israeli government effectively chilled political class resistance to even its most sadistic acts throughout the 2024 campaign cycle.
That billionaire cabal is of course inextricably intertwined with the Epstein story: In fact, it was launched by two longtime Epstein benefactor-conspirators who once co-founded a secret Israel lobby that promoted the Iraq War and laid the groundwork for the proliferation of Zionist groups on college campuses.
I PERSONALLY RECALL A PANG OF TERROR on October 17, when Les Wexner emerged from self-imposed exile to announce he was cutting off all donations to Harvard University and Harvard-affiliated think tanks and institutes, to which he had donated tens of millions of dollars over the years, in retaliation for the school’s supposed failure to adequately condemn an open letter issued by student groups that blamed Israel for the terror attacks of October 7th. Wexner was such a central figure in the Epstein enterprise that I was almost surprised institutions as elite as Harvard were still allowing him to use their sterling brands to launder his reputation, and vaguely wondered if this wasn’t simply Wexner’s attempt to get ahead of a Sackler-style cancellation.
It wasn’t. The billionaire boycott of elite universities perceived as going “soft” on anti-Israel sentiment had actually started more than a month earlier, when Wexner’s good friend, cosmetics heir and longtime Netanyahu benefactor Ron Lauder, had begun lobbying his own alma mater UPenn to cancel a Palestinian literature festival. Dozens of billionaires, from the ubiquitous Bill Ackman to the elusive Len Blavatnik, would join thousands of merely rich people in a multipronged effort to ostracize and punish both critics of Israel and institutions that did not punish them sufficiently. This clampdown would become the defining dynamic of the 2024 election cycle and the concurrent near-frictionless enablement of genocide in Gaza. But how did it come to this? And what could the bizarre secrecy around the Epstein enterprise teach us about that?
Lauder and Wexner go way back, with both each other and Epstein. In the 1980s, Epstein traveled with an Austrian passport with a fake name during Lauder’s stint as ambassador to that country; many have speculated the contacts begin there. In 1991, Wexner, Lauder, Charles Bronfman, Michael Steinhardt, Steven Spielberg, and 15 other oligarchs founded the Mega Group to finance Zionist youth organizations like Birthright and Hillel that could work to discourage intermarriage and “assimilation,” burnish Israel’s public image, and in Bronfman’s characterization, “make it cool to be Jewish.” That same year, the Columbus Police Department had circulated an eight-page memo detailing Wexner’s organized-crime associations and fingering him as a possible suspect in the 1985 Mafia-style murder of his former tax attorney; the month the memo was drafted, Wexner had signed over full power of attorney over his multibillion-dollar fortune, estimated at the time to be the third-largest in America, to Epstein. Also that year, the British tabloid mogul and documented Mossad asset Robert Maxwell died mysteriously in a fall from his yacht in an accident/assassination that left his daughter Ghislaine inconsolable, broke, and increasingly inseparable from Epstein, who for reasons that remain a mystery was now an overnight billionaire.
Epstein himself made 17 visits to the White House between 1993 and 1995, and mixed with countless administration officials at Democratic fundraisers and Democrat-adjacent charity events. He met with everyone from Bob Rubin to then-Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell to Lynn Forester de Rothschild, but he met most frequently with a fundraising guru named Mark Middleton, who died in 2022 in a bizarre combination shooting/hanging that was ruled a suicide, the details of which were sealed by a judge at the request of his family. In the 1990s, Middleton was enmeshed in a straw donor scandal involving Indonesian and Chinese arms dealers that came under congressional scrutiny, only to be vanished from headlines by the Monica Lewinsky scandal. In early 1997, newly elected Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose campaign Lauder had largely bankrolled, disclosed to Bill Clinton that Israeli intelligence officials had intercepted 30 hours of phone calls that included sessions during which the president and Monica Lewinsky engaged in phone sex. (Bibi was an ideal emissary for this information, having accused rivals of using his own affairs to blackmail him during the early ’90s.)
In 2019, the former Israeli spy and convicted arms trafficker Ari Ben-Menashe told Webb he believed Epstein was originally dispatched to “catch up with Mr. Clinton” because “the Israelis feared that Clinton, when he was campaigning for president, will be a repeat of Mr. Carter … [who] wanted to press them for peace with the Palestinians and all that stuff.” The Israelis concluded early on, Ben-Menashe said, that Clinton was not like Carter in that respect—perhaps because one of his first big Middle Eastern policy appointments was Dennis Ross, a neocon who a former Palestinian foreign minister lamented was “more pro-Israel than the Israelis.”
While Wexner, Lauder, and the Mega clique generally sided with right-wing Israelis, bankrolled Netanyahu’s campaigns, and looked skeptically at the peace process, Epstein was known for associating most closely with doves like Ehud Barak, who unabashedly warned Israelis that the status quo in occupied territories constituted “apartheid,” and Sen. Mitchell, an Irish-Lebanese from Maine whom Clinton dispatched on a “fact finding mission” in 2000, after Barak’s “peace talks” with Arafat devolved into what Israelis were calling the “Second Intifada.” Mitchell’s committee ultimately concluded that the intifada was a mostly nonviolent and organic uprising triggered largely by Barak’s right-wing rival Ariel Sharon; historians would later conclude that Ross had sabotaged the negotiations as a favor to his friends in Likud. The late Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who was “stolen” from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago to work for Epstein as a masseuse and “sex slave” at the age of 17 and was famously photographed with Prince Andrew, claimed in a lawsuit that Epstein had forced her to have sex with both Mitchell and Barak, in addition to Wexner, during this time; all have denied it, and Giuffre died from an apparent suicide earlier this year.
Meanwhile, Epstein used his status as a “model scout” for Wexner’s Victoria’s Secret to lure scores of underage models into his burgeoning sex trafficking enterprise and a parallel enterprise run by Jean-Luc Brunel, a conspirator who died in prison in 2022. Former Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Mike Jeffries and Bruce Weber, the retail guru and fashion photographer Wexner hired to overhaul Wexner’s preppy youth retailer, did the same thing, luring dozens and dozens of young men into abusive sexual relationships with the promise of getting a jump-start on their dreams of modeling and acting fame.
What one class action lawsuit termed “oversexualization” seemed to imbue everything the Wexner enterprise touched: In 2018, Jewish Currents published an exposé in which some 50 participants on Birthright trips to Israel described the trip’s organizers fostering an intensely sexual atmosphere in their efforts to discourage intermarriage. And in 2020, five former members of the Ohio State wrestling team who were victimized by the longtime pedophile team doctor wrote to the state district attorney demanding an investigation into the Wexners’ influence on their administration’s lackadaisical approach to abuse investigations. Leslie Wexner has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to his alma mater, and his wife sits on the board of trustees.
When Epstein was first indicted in Palm Beach in 2007, he flew to Israel to negotiate his plea bargain and a friend told New York magazine, “He thinks there’s an anti-Semitic conspiracy against him in Palm Beach. He’s convinced of that.” Harvey Weinstein, a close friend of Epstein’s before the two had a falling-out, went on a public rant about the need for Jews to organize “like the Mafia” to combat antisemitism in March 2015, just two weeks before Manhattan prosecutors officially declined to prosecute a sexual assault he had committed earlier that year despite the victim’s successful obtainment of a recorded confession from the movie mogul. Epstein had reportedly cut off ties with Weinstein after he had gotten “rough” with one of his “favorite girls,” but this did not stop his friend Ehud Barak from giving Weinstein an introduction with Black Cube, the Mossad-linked private intelligence firm he retained to dig up dirt on his accusers.
Last week, the scholar Mouin Rabbani published an essay detailing a long list of occasions on which the Jewish state had somewhat inexplicably offered citizenship and protection from extradition to accused and indicted American criminals, including numerous pedophiles, who happened to be Jewish. But it is difficult to visualize the government extending this courtesy to a delinquent on the membership rolls of Jewish Voice for Peace, and easy to imagine it granting emergency citizenship to Ted Cruz or even an ethnic Palestinian along the lines of Nayib Bukele. (Israel has spent dearly offering military protection and public relations help to the illiterate drug lord Yasser Abu Shabab, who escaped from a Hamas prison in 2023 to operate a lucrative aid-looting enterprise in Gaza.) And the Jewish state has repeatedly refused to extradite Mexico’s former chief of criminal investigations, who is suspected of helping orchestrate a massive cover-up in the mysterious 2014 disappearance and apparent murder of 42 college student protesters that allegedly involved torturing witnesses into making false confessions; the official, Tomás Zerón, is not Jewish, and Mexico’s president is, but Israel refuses to relinquish Zerón, who is full of praise for all the “amazing” people he has met in Tel Aviv, because Mexico recognizes Palestine. (As did, it stands to reason, the murdered college student protesters.)
It is easy to imagine that, if by some miracle any member of the Trump administration got indicted, Israel would rally their government to protect him at all costs. As it stands today, Trump seems to be happily emulating Israel’s business model right here for all colors and creeds of millionaire and billionaire sickos and scam artists, while filling the prisons with college protesters and day laborers. And that might be just the favor bank Trump will need in a pinch. Building a safe space for corruption in America could make it easier to have a soft landing in exile.
This isn’t a terribly new phenomenon of course; the same justice system that allowed Epstein to leave his jail cell each morning to go to “work” in his massage room spent five years torturing Julian Assange for alleged crimes his alleged victims never wanted to prosecute. But that fundamental unfairness is probably the most widely reviled trait of this country. In the Epstein saga, Democrats have an unusual opportunity to implicate Trump with spearheading a “uniparty” plot to trade our admittedly decayed democratic institutions with an ethically bankrupt “favor bank” for rich predators and genocidaires. And as hard as this may be for the conventional wisdom class to grasp, that’s even worse than getting photographed with half naked girls.