Media: 'Is Ghislaine wearing suffragette white today?'
The rest of the world: 'Is anyone going to ask why Ghislaine was trained to fly multimillion-dollar, private, unregulated aircraft and licensed to operate submersible (underwater) vehicles across international borders?'
Media: 'Jeffrey Epstein was an American financier.'
The rest of the world: 'Please name one American financier who needs a 53-lb shredder, a tile-and-carpet extractor, a 30,000-lb Carmix self-loading concrete mixer and a 40,000-lb, portable jaw crusher.':theintercept.com/2019/07/09/jef…
Media: 'Epstein was an international man of mystery. Who knows what was going on? He had big houses and planes and islands and helicopters and boats.'
Everyone else: 'Could we please close the loopholes on wealthy people sex-trafficking children on boats and private aircraft?'
1/2 Media: 'Epstein was friends with Bill Gates, Les Wexner, Leon Black, Jes Staley, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Prince Andrew and Kevin Spacey, many of whom he flew on his private aircraft. His flight manifests are incomplete / redacted. We still don't know what was going on.'
2/2 The rest of the world: 'Epstein's ties to world leaders, Wall Street billionaires & celebrities -- many of whom have been accused of being sexual predators and/or have sought to mislead the public about the nature of their relationships with Epstein -- must be investigated.'
This cannot rest on just the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell. Or the fate of Prince Andrew (though that is sure to be unimpressive). There are far too many other threads to this story & they are global. With his two remote islands and vast resources, what was Jeffrey Epstein doing?
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While he was alive, Jeffrey Epstein repeatedly dodged exactly when he met Ghislaine Maxwell and flat-out denied to @VickyPJWard he ever knew Robert Maxwell. The below nugget paints a very different picture.
Epstein also denied meeting the high-ranking British defense contractor Sir Douglas Leese, who brokered major arms deals in Middle East. Leese's son, Julian, appeared surprised at Epstein's denial, telling @VickyPJWard, his father was a mentor of sorts to Epstein in the 1980s.
Sir Douglas Leese reportedly introduced Epstein to a range of people in his global intel, defense and security circles, including Robert Maxwell, who, according to an article by @VickyPJWard, sought Epstein for help with solving Maxwell’s “debt” issues: rollingstone.com/culture/cultur…
“Jersey is one of the most significant tax shelters in the world…If you speak up about corruption, you will have a very hard life. It’s made easy for you to do the wrong thing and your life is made very hard if you do the right things.” – Jersey Senator Stuart Syvret #UK
This note looks like a joke, but it is real. It was left in the letterbox of two brave Jersey politicians, Trevor Pitman (find him @bald_from) and his wife, Shona Pitman. Shona is not on Twitter, but you can follow or ask questions of Trevor on here.
Both Trevor and Shona, as politicians with the States of Jersey parliament, were fighting to address decades of child abuse issues on the island and other miscarriages of justice. For their efforts, they received horrific and anonymous threats like this one.
The Queen's PR firm, Farrer & Co, do not like journalists asking about possible money-laundering on one of the Queen's tax shelters. They also object to journalists checking the facts with additional sources and, generally, doing journalism. One such example -- and my response.
I see lots of coverage of the Chris Cuomo statement, but few members of the media weighing in directly, which is unfortunate. We in the media need to do a better job of explaining ourselves when we write or broadcast stories — & if there is a conflict, we must not sugarcoat it.
Received lots of calls this week from non-journalist friends asking about this situation. In journalism school, we are taught to be nonpartisan, to be objective, to not even participate in a political march or social demonstration in our free time. To be publicly neutral.
Of course, journalists have opinions. Spouses. Family members. And many of us vote, so we also have political leanings. But we’re not to bring that into our jobs. And we are vetted before we are even hired to ensure that does not happen.
Just a reminder: Ghislaine Maxwell, accused of recruiting teenage girls for Jeffrey Epstein from 1994 to 2004, was slated to go to trial this week. The trial was moved to Nov to allow her more time to assemble a defense against sex-trafficking charges: apnews.com/article/nh-sta…
Ghislaine Maxwell, who is now 59 -- and is likely to turn 60 while on trial for sex-trafficking -- has been denied bail three times now. Maxwell is also under investigation by the U.S. Virgin Islands’ Justice Department in connection with Epstein's private island.
Throughout this spring and into summer, billionaires tied to Jeffrey Epstein, such as Leslie Wexner, Bill Gates and Leon Black have taken professional and reputational hits due to their associations with him (Bill Clinton is not a billionaire).
U.S. OFFICE OF THE WHISTLEBLOWER: How do you confront a billionaire who's stealing your money? What's it really like to be a Wall Street whistleblower? Inside the SEC's top-secret arm exposing the biggest financial violations in the world. My story @iimag: bit.ly/3qi5ec3
I went into this piece with so many questions, and the research process was quite challenging, because the SEC's Office of the Whistleblower is cloaked in secrecy. It does not give out whistleblower names or describe the cases it's working on -- so how to write about it?
To reach whistleblowers, I had to dig deep and reverse-engineer details from documents (many of them court cases, or corporate & government releases that let info slip out). I also had some excellent help from @kkcwhistleblower @LabatonSucharow and whistleblower @EdwardSiedle.