Fast forward to 2022; I’m living in Spain & have become friends with a Nigerian musician named Akinsola Onasanya. He’s the founder of a band called Ogun Afrobeat Orchestra. As a teenager, Akin found his way into Fela’s community of musicians at The Shrine, their temple of Afrobeat. Members of Fela’s band, the Egypt 80, helped Akin learn to hold down Afrobeat rhythms on the drums. Eventually he joined a band that made its way to Greece. Over two decades, Akin’s journey took him from Greece to Italy & then finally Madrid. Almost as soon as we became friends I start telling him we were going to travel to his native land.

In November 2022, we finally made it happen. That trip was like a journey to another world. In my mind I’d imagined seeing live music in various venues from one night to the next. What I experienced instead was the most extreme poverty of anywhere I’ve ever been. It’s hard to host concerts when the country lacks electricity (or running water). We made it to the Shrine (Nigerian police burned the original Shrine after Fela had become too popular in the 1970s), but rather than seeing Afrobeat being performed live, instead saw homeless people sleeping everywhere. The good news was that Akin knew some of the musicians living there, so we were at least treated well.

My full story from Nigeria will have to wait for another day, but the main point for our current purposes is that soon after arriving, Akin’s brother, Kayode, blessed me with a Nigerian name, Tomiwa. From that day on everyone called me Tomiwa. We did finally see some music, incidentally. After a chaotic week around Lagos & the Ogun State, we arrived at an old British fort called Freedom Park, ostensibly to see a Nigerian juju band. However the music itself was basically impossible to hear, due to ancient speakers that broadcast hissing sounds rather than the musicians’ instruments. This night was also the first time I’d seen a fellow white person since landing in Nigeria. And even though it’s not relevant to the story, I can’t emphasize enough how brutally hot it was everywhere we went.

Our last night went better. Fela’s oldest son, Femi Kuti, performed on Victoria Beach. The scene was looking pretty good — there were enough upper-class Nigerians to actually fill out a well-dressed audience. Yet on the way back, due to Nigeria lacking working infrastructure, street lights, road signs, or reliable GPS, we ended up in one of the worst slums probably anywhere in the world, & had a very harrowing journey trying to make it out. Just when I was starting to have hope for Nigeria I was quickly reminded of what a failed country it is. But again I digress.

Soon after returning safely to Spain, my girlfriend & I attended a concert of Akin’s band. There, she evidently had the idea of Ogun recording a song called Tomiwa. Fast forward to a week before Christmas, & Carolina is telling me we need to go out to pick up my gift. She has me do weird things like wear warm socks — I presumed we were going to a farm so I could adopt some hens (something I’d been eager to do). Instead we arrived at a music studio & immediately ran into Akin. Carolina explains they’re recording a song, for me. Flabbergasted, the first thing I can think to say is: “Under no circumstances am I singing.”

Turns out, Akin had already composed the whole arrangement. He wrote some backup vocals for me & Carolina. Despite my protestations, we ended up singing the part — goosed on by several hours of beers — which mercifully was limited to just one word. Soon the song was mastered & Carolina — amazing person that she is — had it pressed to vinyl. Last year we finally got it on Spotify. These days Ogun performs it regularly around Europe. It’s a proper dance floor banger.

The last step before starting to share this story with the world was a music video that helped tell the whole story. My talented friend Josh Wright has just completed that video, which I’m extremely excited to share with you now. As you can see, this has been a labor of love. And it’s taken a long time because the song is incredible & I wanted to ensure each step was completed to my usual standard of excellence.

Anyway, I’m eternally grateful to my amazing girlfriend Carolina Pérez Rioja for blessing me with this incredible gift (which keeps on giving every time I listen to it). Definitely not many people can say they have their own theme song!

I hope you all love it as much as we do.

Your money wasn’t stolen, nor was any law broken. But that doesn’t mean you haven’t been improperly exploited. The reality is, every time you use a U.S. dollar in ordinary commerce, you’re unwittingly transferring purchasing power you’ve earned to banks and the government — and I’m not talking about bank fees and direct taxation. I’m talking about a backdoor wealth transfer very few Americans are even aware exists.

Here is how it works.

Imagine you’re a farmer a few hundred years ago in a rural area with one grain warehouse.

After a productive harvest, you — like the other farmers — store your grain at the warehouse, because grain left in a barn rots, burns, or walks off in the night, and the warehouseman has a stone building and a good lock. For a small storage fee he issues you a paper receipt: one bushel, redeemable on demand, no questions asked.

Before long these receipts start circulating on their own. A farmer who wants a plow doesn’t cart 40 bushels into town; he hands over a slip of paper, and the blacksmith takes it, because the blacksmith knows the grain is there. Everyone knows the grain is there. These grain receipts have become a medium of exchange — money, effectively — and the whole arrangement rests on one simple fact: The warehouse is full.

This is an honest business. A valuable one. Nobody in our story is doing anything wrong.

Then the warehouseman notices something. On any given day, only a handful of farmers come to redeem bushels. Most of the grain just sits. And grain that sits is capital he could be lending to a nearby mill at interest.

The first betrayal

Notice how the warehouseman’s opportunity does not come from the reckless farmer who sells his whole harvest and drinks the proceeds. That man has nothing on deposit and is of no use whatsoever. The opportunity comes from the prudent farmer — the one who saves, who plans ahead, who leaves a cushion for a bad year. His restraint is the raw material. The more carefully he behaves, the more the warehouseman has to work with.

Now you can start to see how the system extracts most from whoever behaves best. Hold onto that thought.

So, the warehouseman lends out your grain. He does not ask, because asking means you might say no. He keeps the interest, because he’s the one making the loan. You believe you’re paying a small fee to have your property guarded, when in fact you’re supplying the working capital of a lending business you have no stake in and never agreed to join.

If this strikes you as a breach of trust, you’re hardly alone — for around 400 years, so did the law.

Then, in 1848, the House of Lords changed everything.

Foley v. Hill

Edward Foley sued his bankers, arguing what any reasonable person would argue: that money handed to a banker for safekeeping is still the depositor’s money, and the banker holds it as a trustee holds anything else.

The Lords disagreed. Lord Chancellor Cottenham held that money paid into a bank ceases altogether to belong to the customer. It becomes the banker’s own money. He may lend it, speculate with it, put it in jeopardy, and he commits no breach of trust in doing so, because there is no trust. The depositor is not a beneficiary. He is a creditor — an unsecured one — with nothing but a claim in debt against a private institution.

The stakes were historic, and the court understood them exactly. Had Foley won, banks would have been barred from lending deposits at all, because a trustee may not profit from trust property. The entire architecture of modern banking rested on that one ruling going the other way.

And so it did.

That is the moment the moral inversion was written into law, and nearly two centuries later it remains the operative paradigm. Every person who has ever said “the bank is holding my money” has been mistaken, in the strict legal sense, since before the Civil War. The bank is not holding it. The bank owns it, and owes you.

The second betrayal

Back to the warehouse, because the warehouseman now has another idea.

He has been lending grain. But why lend grain at all, when what circulates is receipts? He can simply write new receipts, hand them to the mill, and collect interest on paper he manufactured with a pen.

Now there are more claims on the warehouse than there is grain in it. Every farmer still believes his receipt is good, and every farmer is right, right up until the moment you all want your grain on the same afternoon.

So, the warehouses are now using your hard work to make themselves wealthier using a technique that has the additional unfortunate effect of devaluing the fruits of your labor.

Think this is inapplicable to modern banking? In truth the current system is worse.

In 2014, the Bank of England said banks do not act as intermediaries lending out the savings placed with them, nor do they multiply up central bank money. Lending creates the deposit. The loan comes first; the money is conjured to match it, each as a new credit on the balance sheet. In his 1975 book, Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went, J.K. Galbraith — no radical, a Harvard economist and Kennedy adviser — couldn’t help but observe that the process by which banks create money is “so simple that the mind is repelled.”

So the warehouseman is not even lending your grain. He is writing receipts against grain that was never grown, and collecting interest on them, and your saved bushels serve mainly to lend credibility to the entire scheme.

Meanwhile, what happened to the requirement that he keep at least some grain on deposit?

On March 15, 2020, the Federal Reserve announced that reserve requirement ratios would drop from (on net) 10 percent to … zero percent. More accurately, under the excuse of countering Covid lockdown’s deleterious effects on the economy, the feds eliminated the reserve ratio entirely. For banks, this meant a fresh $200 billion released from reserve. To this day, most Americans either do not know this occurred or cannot believe it can be true.

Stated the other way, the legal minimum quantity of grain your warehouse must now keep on hand is: none.

What happens when everybody shows up

Federal Reserve economists will object that grain warehouses that lend out the grain are a parable from a simpler time. Our modern banking system is regulated, insured, sophisticated.

Then came Thursday, March 9, 2023.

Silicon Valley Bank was the 16th largest bank in the country. Ninety-four percent of its deposits were uninsured, which is to say that 94 percent of the money sitting in that bank belonged, in the strict legal sense established in 1848, to the bank. Depositors discovered this over the course of a single afternoon.

By the close of business that Thursday, $42 billion had left the bank, with roughly $100 billion more staged to go out the following morning — the FDIC’s own account of the day. The bank ended Thursday with a negative cash balance of $958 million. When the Federal Reserve sent its routine cash letter, the bank could not meet it. It had run out of grain. On Friday morning, regulators closed it.

What happened next tells us everything about who this system is built for.

That weekend, the Treasury, the Federal Reserve, and the FDIC jointly invoked the systemic risk exception, a provision that lets them override the ordinary requirement to resolve a failure at least cost. All deposits were guaranteed, insured and uninsured alike, with access restored Monday. The FDIC estimates it absorbed $16.7 billion in losses that would otherwise have fallen on uninsured depositors.

Note carefully who was and was not made whole. Depositors: covered. Shareholders and unsecured debt holders: wiped out. The people who had voluntarily accepted risk in exchange for potential return bore their losses, exactly as they should. The people who had merely put money in a bank were rescued by a discretionary emergency power, because the alternative was a nationwide run that would have revealed how little grain there is in any of these buildings.

The episode laid bare that clients’ deposits are not safe, and great effort would be expended to prevent consumers from realizing the risk is not an isolated one.

The third betrayal

The final insult is the one that makes the rest permanent.

The warehouseman stops keeping grain altogether.

He doesn’t need it. The receipts circulate on their own; nobody redeems; the building itself is now beside the point. His paper is no longer a claim on anything; it is simply paper that everyone accepts, and he prints them as his needs require.

Nixon made this official on August 15, 1971, when he closed the gold window, meaning dollars no longer had any claim to intrinsic value beyond their ability to satisfy tax collectors. Which is even worse than the warehouseman creating credits out of thin air.

A warehouse running this scheme can never survive long, as their receipts would quickly fall out of demand on the open market. People can walk away from a bad business. But a warehouse you are legally required to use is something else entirely. Your wages are paid in the receipts. Your taxes must be settled in the receipts. Every debt in the country is denominated in them, and every creditor must accept them. There is no competing warehouse, and choosing not to participate can carry criminal penalties.

The compulsion is what turns a lousy product into an extraction. You cannot opt out. The system is designed for subservience.

The bill

The tab, for anyone still gamely holding receipts:

Since the Federal Reserve opened its doors in 1913, the dollar has lost roughly 97 percent of its purchasing power. It now takes about $33 to buy what a single dollar bought when Woodrow Wilson signed the Act. Put the other way around, today’s dollar buys about three cents’ worth of 1913 goods.

That figure, note, comes from the government’s own price index — the one it compiles, revises, and periodically redefines. (Readers may recall my work at Reality Index, which focuses on providing a more accurate measurement of rising prices.) Try a measure the government does not control. In 1913 an ounce of gold was fixed at $20.67. Today it runs north of $4,000, having hit $5,597 in January of this year. Measured in gold, the dollar has lost not 97 percent of its value but something closer to 99.5 percent.

The pace is not linear, either. M2 grew about 41 percent in the two years after early 2020 — the sharpest monetary expansion since World War II. Prices caught up starting in 2021, which surprised only the experts who had assured the non-experts that they wouldn’t.

And here is the part that matters morally, which almost nobody explains. New money does not arrive everywhere at once. It enters at specific points and radiates outward, and the people standing nearest the spigot spend it before prices have adjusted. Irish-French economist and banker Richard Cantillon worked this out 300 years ago and it has been ignored ever since, because the implication is unflattering.

Watch it happen in real time. Between 2020 and 2022, the newly created trillions reached financial markets and asset holders first. Stocks rose. Home prices rose. Anyone who already owned things got richer, on paper and in fact. Wage earners came last in the queue, and by the time raises arrived, the groceries had already been repriced. The people who owned assets were made whole and then some. The people who owned only their labor paid for it.

This is why inflation is the most regressive tax ever devised, and the only one that requires no vote. It transfers wealth from those who hold currency to those who hold assets, from the young to the old, from the saver to the debtor, silently and continuously, and this Robin Hood-in-reverse contrivance is presented to the public as natural as the weather.

Now, the split of who gets what, right now, in a period widely described as one of high interest rates:

The FDIC’s national average rate on a savings account is 0.38 percent. Chase, Bank of America, and U.S. Bank pay many of their customers 0.01 percent. The average credit card rate is 19.57 percent, down slightly from the record 20.79 percent set in 2024.

Marinate on that for a minute: The institution funds itself with your balance at nearly nothing, lends money into existence against it, and charges you north of 19 percent to borrow it back. The spread is modern banking. Your prudence is their input. The gap between those two numbers is not a market outcome — it is a transfer, and it flows in one direction, from the people who work and save to the people who are licensed to print.

Roughly 90 percent of the dollars in existence were never issued by any government. There are about $2.3 trillion in physical U.S. currency against an M2 of roughly $22 trillion. The rest are ledger entries at private companies, created when those companies made loans, and the government’s own printing merely supplies the base of the pyramid the rest is built on top of.

Assume you’ve got $1,000 deposited in a savings account for a year.

You earn $3.80 on interest. Meanwhile, inflation, running at 3.5 percent over the 12 months through June, quietly removes about $34 of purchasing power. You end the year with $1,003.80 that buys what $970 bought when you deposited it. That’s $30 gone, with no line item and no notification.

Meanwhile the industry’s net interest margin — the spread between what banks earn on assets and what they pay to fund them — sits at 3.31 percent. On your thousand dollars, that is $33.10.

Roughly $30 leaves you. Roughly $33 arrives on the other side of the counter. The correspondence is not exact and the mechanisms are not identical, but the direction is always the same. Multiply by every deposit account in the country and you arrive at the reported figure: $80.5 billion in industry net income in the first quarter of 2026 alone.

So, beyond direct taxation, what is the actual cost of simply using dollars? There are two main categories.

The inflation tax. Inflation applied to the money stock is the textbook measure of what money holders lose by holding money. 3.5 percent over the twelve months through June × roughly $22 trillion in M2 ≈ $780 billion per year.

The banking spread. $80.5 billion in industry net income in Q1 2026 annualizes to roughly $322 billion.

Combined, call it north of $1 trillion a year against a $32.4 trillion economy — roughly 3 percent of everything the country produces, before a dollar of income tax, sales tax, or overdraft fee. Spread across about 132 million households, on the order of $8,000 a year each, though that overstates the per-household figure since businesses hold money too.

To repeat, because it is the whole point: that is a rough approximation of how much purchasing power you are unwittingly transferring to the banks and the government simply by participating in the economy. Were we instead living in an era without fiat currency and without fractional reserve banking, what would you have done with that lost wealth?

And the government’s cut is the biggest and the least visible. Federal debt now exceeds 124 percent of GDP — roughly $39 trillion. Inflation at 3.5 percent erodes the real burden of that debt by well over $1 trillion a year. Every point of inflation is a transfer from savers and wage earners to the largest debtor in human history, which happens to be the entity that appoints the people who set the inflation rate.

A government that can dilute you does not need to tax you, and does not need to ask.

Credit isn’t the problem

Credit itself is not inherently problematic. Big, expensive projects could rarely be funded via savings alone. The problem is compulsion.

If today’s monetary system is as beneficial as its defenders say, it should be able to survive competition and disclosure. Let banks offer full-reserve accounts alongside fractional ones and let customers choose, with the terms stated plainly rather than buried in an 1848 precedent nobody has read. Let people hold and transact in whatever they trust without a tax event on every exchange. Let institutions that gamble and lose bear the loss.

Consider how thoroughly the exits are sealed. Under Section 408(m), the IRS classifies gold, silver, platinum, and palladium bullion as “collectibles,” taxed on long-term gains at a maximum federal rate of 28 percent — against 0, 15, or 20 percent for stocks. Gold mining shares get the ordinary rate; the metal itself does not. Which once again reveals the priorities: The government levies a penalty rate on the one asset that has historically protected people from the government’s own currency. You are free to opt out, so long as you accept a tax rate the government otherwise reserves for baseball cards and antique furniture.

But when the banks help fund politicians’ grandiose projects, and politicians help ensure banks receive their cut, it’s not surprising ordinary consumers are left holding the bag. Our Founders understood this risk, because they had been robbed personally. Congress issued roughly $241 million in Continental dollars to finance the Revolution, and in March 1780 called them in at forty to one — an official repudiation of about 97.5 percent of what the public still held. By 1781 the notes had stopped circulating altogether, and “not worth a Continental” entered the language as a synonym for worthless.

Madison, writing in Federalist 44, described what that had done in explicitly moral terms: the pestilent effects of paper money on “the necessary confidence between man and man,” constituting an accumulation of guilt that could be expiated only by “a voluntary sacrifice on the altar of justice.” Jefferson, writing to John Taylor in 1816, was blunter — banking establishments were “more dangerous than standing armies,” and financing government on debt owed by the next generation was “but swindling futurity on a large scale.” He called the banking system a “blot left in all our constitutions.”

Accordingly, Article I, Section 10 of the Constitution forbids states from making anything but gold and silver coin legal tender.

Yet over time, as bulwarks against centralized power and the debasement of money were gradually eroded away, what was once a scenario meant to be prevented has become the scenario in which our participation is mandatory.

Think of it this way: A service you cannot decline, whose price you cannot see, sold by parties who set that price and are rescued when they make bad bets, has somewhere along the way altogether stopped being a service.

The scheme, laid bare

Strip away the academic jargon — liquidity, accommodation, the ample reserves regime — and describe the arrangement in the terms you’d use for any other transaction:

You are required by law to hold your savings in an instrument that is guaranteed to lose value. That instrument is issued by third parties who profit from issuing it. The institutions holding your balance own it outright, lend against it, keep the proceeds, and pay you a fraction of one percent. When the losses come, as in 2008 and again in 2023, the public covers them. When the gains come, the public gets nothing. Phrased differently: It’s nearly impossible to use dollars and not somehow enrich bankers.

Ultimately the most perverse aspect here is that the more value someone adds to society, the more the system exploits them. Debt is rewarded, savings punished. To try front-running the inevitable loss of your own purchasing power, you’re incentivized to spend now. Traditional American values of hard work and thrift are tossed by the wayside. When virtuous behavior is disincentivized and imprudent behavior incentivized, it’s no surprise the modern world can feel like the slow motion collapse of civilization. Every hour you spend working your farm, punching the clock at the factory, providing professional services — you are not only enriching both parties to the transaction, but also the operators of the dollar system itself: the federal government, and their banking industry colleagues.

If a private company proposed this in a prospectus, it would be prosecuted. Because it is the modern monetary system, it is taught in schools as the natural order of things.

If people were presented with these terms, they’d be rejected outright. But as we’re born into the system, we barely think to question it. The other reason for popular apathy is that the extraction is invisible by design — it arrives as slightly higher prices every year, rather than as a line item on a statement, and a loss you never saw is a loss you will not resent.

But the loss is real, and it’s ever-present. Go find your bank balance and multiply it by three percent. That is roughly this year’s charge. You will not find it on any statement, and nobody will ever send you a receipt.

To create something better, the first task is simply to start seeing the system as it actually is. Exploitive by design.

The next follows on its own. If the official money is a mechanism for transferring your purchasing power to people who did nothing to earn it, then arranging your affairs to depend on it a little less is not tax evasion, it is not crankery, and it is not a fringe political act. Trading directly with people you know, holding things instead of receipts, keeping wealth in forms nobody can dilute by decree — these are the ordinary responses of a person who has read the contract and noticed what it says.

Because ultimately you owe no loyalty to the warehouse that emptied itself.

Here’s how Anthony Fauci memorialized the occasion:

“Had dinner at my home with Jake and Jennifer Tapper. Relaxed, good time. Jake clearly believes that Trump is totally nuts. Hit 83,000 new cases today. The single day record since the beginning of the outbreak.“ (p. 420)

His first focus is the fun night he had with fellow D.C. A-listers; Covid cases hitting a new record are noted almost as a parenthetical.

What he was telling the rest of us

As the Faucis were hosting dinner parties, Fauci was on the weekly governors’ call telling them to close bars and cap restaurant occupancy. “Close the bars, open the schools” was his line all autumn on the Sunday shows. When Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker called in November, frustrated that bar and restaurant owners were pushing back on him, Fauci agreed to back him and told him to quote him directly (p. 502). He was working the phones for tighter rules on other people’s dinners while hosting his own.

Fauci’s pre-vaccine social schedule

Early July — dinner at Jake and Jennifer Tapper’s home in Washington. “Terrific couple. Friendship building” (p. 232). Same month he told the governors to shut the bars.

Mid-September — “Had great dinner over my house with Peter Staley (and his dog Stella) with Chris, Janet Tobias and John…” (p. 343)

September 21 — a private outdoor concert at a home on 30th Street NW, performed by the National Pops Orchestra. The ambassadors of Iraq, Mexico, Colombia and the United Kingdom attended. The conductor stopped the program to dedicate a song to Fauci. The song was “Climb Every Mountain” (p. 355).

October 23 — the Tappers, again.

Thanksgiving

Fauci spent the week before the holiday warning Americans about large family gatherings. He worried in the diary that “travel over Thanksgiving will exacerbate the current surge” (p. 489). Ron Klain texted him past midnight with a video of Joe and Jill Biden urging people to be careful. He did Meet the Press and This Week that weekend hammering the point.

So what did he do on the day itself? The diary doesn’t say.

The November 26 entry — headed “(Thanksgiving)” — logs the case count, complains that Trump is pardoning Gen. Flynn, notes the Georgia Senate runoff, then says:

“Went on walk with Will and Joli to Mall and was ‘mobbed’ by well-wishers who wanted photos with me. Went to the steps of Lincoln Memorial and read the speech of Lincoln on the opposite wall of the Gettysburg Address.”

For some reason Fauci doesn’t treat Thanksgiving dinner with the same radical transparency as he does his calendar of daily media hits, but he is at least careful to note being “mobbed” by groupies on the National Mall.

Post-Vax, Fauci Went Full Social Butterfly

Once the vaccines were being rolled out in early 2021, Fauci was baiting the public with carrots of normal social gatherings. The policy change adapted well to Fauci’s increasingly busy social calendar.

April 2021, a “Spring celebration” at NIAID’s Bob Seder’s for the cherry blossoms, where he notes he was “a little nervous since people were hugging and not wearing masks” (p. 681). May, dinner at Jeff Zients’s house with the White House chief of staff — Fauci logs the address, and adds that the home “is absolutely magnificent” (p. 722). Later that month, the Kennedy Center Honors as Joan Baez’s escort, champagne on the outdoor deck after (p. 746). June, dinner at Sally Quinn’s with Bob Woodward (p. 795). September, Baez and her son over for pasta (p. 885).

October 1 he did two in one night: a pizza-and-beer party at Zients’s house with the White House Covid team, where “Jeff was extremely kind in calling attention to my presence” and “everyone gave me a round of applause,” then dinner a block and a half away (p. 892).

Three weeks later, brunch for Christine Lagarde at Adrienne Arsht’s home, where “the typical Washington a list was there.” Fauci’s own gloss:

“I tend to shy away from these functions since everyone gathers around me wanting to take photos and telling me what a wonderful job I’m doing.”

I am not a psychiatrist, but this reads like someone with narcissistic personality disorder reassuring himself that actually he’s very humble indeed.

Readers will also note his habit of jotting the address of any new D.C. bigwig into whose graces he enters: 2221 30th Street NW., 4500 Garfield Street NW, 3303 Highland Place NW, 9 Chevy Chase Circle, 2330 S Street NW. Fauci seems to love cataloguing his access, house by house.

2022 & Beyond

By 2022 the restrictions were loosening in much of the United States, though states of emergency weren’t lifted in New York until late September, and in California, not until 2023. D.C. was still being restricted up through early 2022. With that context, we return to Fauci’s social calendar:

August: dinner at Adrienne Arsht’s place in Chevy Chase (p. 1021).

September: Zeke Emanuel’s surprise 65th birthday, catered by Pineapples and Pearls, Rahm and Ari Emanuel in attendance (p. 1057).

Two days later, a Library of Congress dinner where he was seated beside Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, who “now collaborates with Scarlet on making albums of her recited poems” (p. 1060).

Then a long weekend in Aspen at a private gathering hosted by Mukesh Ambani, John Doerr, Ari Emanuel, Robert Kraft, Yuri Milner and Eric Schmidt, where Fauci reports that Alex Rodriguez “proved to be a very intelligent thoughtful person” (p. 1070).

November: a gala at Jeff Bezos’s mansion on S Street, which Fauci describes as “an enormous mansion that goes on and on,” followed by a second gala at Café Milano the same evening.

José Andrés wanted to cook him a private dinner (p. 1112). Then the National Portrait Gallery, 750 guests, red carpet.

December: the Kennedy Center Honors as the Health Secretary’s guest, alongside George Clooney, U2, Julia Roberts, Sean Penn and Matt Damon (p. 1132).

Three years earlier this man was telling Americans not to visit their parents.

Self-awareness is not Fauci’s forte

Recall where we once were: Graduations cancelled. Funerals capped at ten, then banned. A school year gone, then most of another. Weddings postponed twice and held in backyards. Parents who died alone because the guidance said no visitors to nursing homes — guidance Fauci recorded, on March 16, 2020, as having “reflected my pushing.”

Read the diary for the equivalent cost on his side and you find a cancelled birthday trip in February 2020 (which invariably had more to do with his insatiability for media than any self-imposed restrictions).

What you find instead is dinner at the Tappers’. A private concert with four ambassadors. Friday night dinner parties. Unimpeded travel. Champagne on the Kennedy Center deck. Applause when he walked into a pizza party. Bezos’s mansion, Aspen, José Andrés offering to cook for him privately.

The man most upstream of every restriction in American life spent the pandemic almost entirely unburdened by any one of them.

All citations refer to Anthony Fauci’s personal diary, 1,141 pages, released by Sen. Rand Paul on July 24, 2026, and available at paul.senate.gov.

Offit is one of the vaccine industry’s biggest cheerleaders. He co-invented the rotavirus vaccine. He sits on the FDA advisory committee that votes on these products. Offit telling Fauci he’s moving too fast is like Mike Tyson having warned Tupac he needed to dial it back.

Here’s Fauci’s diary entry, in full, on the substance of that warning:

“The boosters are safe and to put it in plain terms it can help, and it certainly cannot hurt.“ (p. 856)

It certainly cannot hurt. Not “the benefits outweigh the risks.” Not “we’re monitoring.” A flat declaration that a medical intervention has no downside — written privately, to himself, by the government’s chief infectious disease official, in the same entry recording that one of the most respected vaccine scientists in America had just told him to wait for more data.

The three moves

Read all 1,141 pages and a pattern emerges: Whenever a safety concern reaches Fauci, he does one of three things.

He impugns the motive. April 2021: Oxford researchers publish a large database analysis finding more thrombosis with the mRNA shots than with AstraZeneca’s. Fauci’s entry, same day:

“Obviously, bullshit. They did not look for thrombocytopenia and so the observation is invalid. Also, not surprising fr the Oxford group sine their vaccine is in trouble and I would not be surprised if they were trying to disparage the other vaccines.“ (p. 692)

As he often does, Fauci appears more focused on the business of vaccines than the science.

He asserts privileged data. September 2021, on the outside physicians raising questions:

“The talking head docs on the outside all have their own opinion, many of whom have not seen the data that we have seen.“ (p. 874)

And he reframes the concern as an obstacle. This one is even more revealing. Briefing Biden and Harris on the booster rollout, Fauci writes:

“we needed to do this and make sure that we don’t have a stumbling block with the FDA and acip. The one issue that could arise is that the risk benefit ratio of boosting young kids 18 years old and there abouts may not be favorable in the context of the risk of myocarditis balanced against the risk of their winding up in the hospital.” (p. 852)

For Fauci, a federal safety review is not a group of experts whose opinion to respect, if an obstacle to be overcome. He freely admits an unfavorable risk-benefit ratio for teenagers is the thing that “could arise.”

Early warnings

The dismissals started before there was a vaccine to defend. In April 2020, at a task force meeting on the government’s vaccine strategy, Deborah Birx — the White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator, a physician with 30 years in vaccine research — tore the plan apart. Part of her objection was about the technology itself. Fauci’s diary: “She does not like ‘newer technology’ such as mRNA, DNA, and even some viral vectors. She likes antigens, whole killed, etc.” Then his verdict, in five words: “A bit overdetermined in her prejudice” (p. 68). That was April 29, 2020. Again, a seasoned scientist on his side of the vaccine debate is being swept aside, seemingly for having different views than Fauci.

September 2020, before any vaccine was authorized: A volunteer in the Oxford-AstraZeneca trial developed transverse myelitis — inflammation of the spinal cord, a serious neurological injury. The trial was halted worldwide. Fauci’s entry: “Lot of discussion about the transverse myelitis in a volunteer in the UK Chimp Ad Oxford trial. May have had a prior case, but was designated as multiple sclerosis” (p. 352). Within a sentence of recording the injury, he had somehow managed to internally diagnose the patient he’d never examined with a pre-existing condition. The trial resumed in Britain that month. It stayed paused in the United States for another six weeks, because American regulators wanted to see more.

On December 17, 2020 — five days after the first American shots went into arms — Fauci had a call with Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance, Britain’s chief medical officer and chief scientific adviser. They had a warning: “the UK is seeing more than just the two instances of anaphylactic reactions to the mRNA vaccine of Pfizer” (p. 539). Their country had started vaccinating a week ahead of ours, which made them the world’s early-warning system, and they were sending him a a warning. Fauci recorded it as a bullet point between a note on case surges and a note on the Moderna authorization. He never came back to it.

What he was told, and by whom

The warnings weren’t fringe, either. They came from inside the building.

The FDA’s two top vaccine regulators quit over it. Marion Gruber and Phil Krause, director and deputy director of the office that reviews these products, resigned in August 2021. Fauci recorded the reason accurately — “they are upset that decisions have been made by acip and by the White House that should have been made first at the level of the FDA” (p. 864). He called it “a big blow to the FDA.” He never once seemed to seriously consider whether they were right.

Then they published in The Lancet, with WHO scientists, concluding the evidence didn’t support boosting the general population. Fauci’s verdict: “This is clearly sour grapes on the part of the FDA who feel that they are being pressured to approve boosters“ (p. 872). Elsewhere he wrote they “were actually shooting from the hip without knowing anything about the Israeli data.”

The Israeli waning data became Fauci’s trump card in the booster fight. In July 2021, comparing notes with British counterparts, he wrote that they were “skeptical about the Israeli vaccine efficacy data for asymptomatic and mildly symptomatic disease as we are here in the United States” (p. 817). As we are here in the United States. Two months later the same data was solid enough to override the CDC’s advisory committee at 5:40 in the morning. In Fauci World, the same study was contested when it argued against boosters, he decisive when it argued for them.

Gruber and Krause weren’t the first to quit in protest. In May 2020, Peter Marks — the director of the FDA center that reviews every vaccine in America, and the man who named Operation Warp Speed — quit the program. Fauci gave it eleven words: “Turmoil in OWS – Peter Marks drops out. Upset with how he is being treated with the arrival of Moncef” (p. 187). The next sentence of that entry is about Trump’s re-election prospects. Three of the most senior vaccine regulators in the federal government left their posts over how these products were being handled. Fauci logged all three departures, but never once whether they might have had a point.

The CDC’s own staff flagged the safety gap. From his September 2021 entry: there is “a lack of a lot of data for safety among young individuals particularly in the context of myocarditis,” and CDC’s Amanda Fine “was very concerned that the ACIP would balk at recommending for younger individuals the third dose because there was not enough safety data“ (p. 873).

His next line in that same passage: “As we all know Jeff is very much intense on getting this approval through.”

And when the CDC’s advisory committee voted 9–6 against, on exactly those grounds, Fauci started working the phones. He texted Rochelle Walensky and — his word — “literally begged her to override“ the vote (p. 883). She called back at 11:25 that night. He missed it. They spoke at 5:40 the next morning. She reversed her own experts. Fauci congratulated her on finally showing “clear leadership,” and noted she’d acted “based on very intensive persuasion that I made to her late at night“ (p. 887).

By that November, he had a name for the committee’s caution: “an overly concerned attitude about myocarditis in the younger male age group“ (p. 917).

In the same passage, he mentions the ally who kept texting him foreign booster data — and observes, without a flicker of discomfort, that the man “has very close ties with Pfizer.”

Six deaths, then the Daily Mail

April 12, 2021. Walensky calls at 10 p.m. about the Johnson & Johnson pause. Fauci records the details: six cases of cerebral venous sinus thrombosis. All women, 18 to 48. One dead. Three hospitalized, two in intensive care. Onset six to 13 days after the shot. (Thrombosis is the same warning he dismissed from Oxford.)

The next line of the entry is about a Daily Mail article concerning his old high school (p. 689).

No reflection, follow-up — nowhere in 1,141 pages does he attempt to look into the issue further

Zero

Here is the count across the entire diary of the man who ran America’s vaccine messaging.

Times he writes “VAERS” — the federal adverse event reporting system: zero.

Times he writes “safety signal”: zero.

Times he writes “adverse event” about a vaccine: zero.

“Risk-benefit,” as a phrase he uses to think with rather than a hurdle to clear: zero.

He wrote 641 separate entries logging his own press appearances.

He used to know better

None of this is because Fauci didn’t understand the risks. He understood them perfectly, and the diary proves it — because in March 2020 he was the one applying the brake.

When Trump’s people wanted remdesivir rushed to the public, Fauci put his objection in writing to the White House. He had “more concern about the potential toxicities of this unapproved, investigational drug in the context of COVID-19 as well as the need to prove that it works before we widely distribute it“ (p. 726).

That’s the correct instinct, expressed clearly.

Yet 18 months later the same man was calling an advisory committee’s safety caution “overly concerned,” disposing of a thrombosis paper in a single day, taking pre-announcement phone calls from Pfizer’s CEO, and telling his diary that a booster “certainly cannot hurt.”

Had only he attempted to verify that’s true.

All citations refer to Anthony Fauci’s personal diary, 1,141 pages, released by Sen. Rand Paul on July 24, 2026, and available at paul.senate.gov. Word counts are raw string searches of the extracted text.

“I am certain that there will be some deficiencies that the IG will find as is always the case with IG audits. Certainly, whatever they find it will be misconstrued by those who want to make a case for our involvement in the outbreak. I am starting to feel that it is important for me to write an editorial or an opinion piece giving our side of the story.” (p. 753)

Our involvement in the outbreak. Followed closely by a plan to get out in front of it.

That instinct — get ahead of it, control the story, decide what the public needs to believe and then saturate every channel with it — is the organizing principle of these documents. It shows up in the origins fight. It shows up in masks, transmissibility, and boosters. It shows up in how he handled the people who disagreed with him. And it shows up, most revealingly, in what he chose to write down.

What was released

On July 24, Senator Rand Paul’s committee published two documents that have not been reported in any depth.

The first is Fauci’s personal diary, 1,141 pages, running from late 2019 through his retirement in December 2022. It is partly a journal and overwhelmingly a scrapbook: he pasted hundreds of articles about himself into it, frequently in full.

The second is 136 pages of internal email about his awards — nominations, ethics clearances, and the disposition of prize money.

Fauci does not date the composition of his entries, so we cannot always distinguish what was typed the same evening from what was assembled later. Page numbers refer to the released PDFs.

I. What they thought at the start

Page 13 of the diary covers two important events from January 31, 2020.

The first is that Fauci is handed the mic to serve as Covid’s point person. He writes:

“White House is now fully convinced that I be the science/health spokesperson for the USG. Bob Redfield just does not come across very weel. He takes forever to say something and it is usually wondering. This drives the WH and HHS comms people crazy and so they are putting me out on all the requests.”

The director of the CDC was not sidelined for being wrong, but for being slow on camera. The selection criterion was not who’s the most credible scientist, but who performs best on TV.

Redfield’s own account of that period, given under oath in 2023, is worth recalling. Asked why he had been excluded from the origins discussions, he pointed to ideological differences: “Because it was told to me that they wanted a single narrative, and that I obviously had a different point of view.”

The second thing happens after he gets back to his office. Jeremy Farrar of the Wellcome Trust calls, sounding “very concerned,” with Kristian Andersen of Scripps conferenced in and Eddie Holmes in the background from Sydney. Fauci writes down what they told him:

“The people on the phone felt that the mutations around the furine cleavage site of the spike protein could not have occurred naturally since it would require an evolutionary ‘jump’ that they found nowhere in bat isolates.”

Deliberate insertion, they said, followed by release — accidental release being the most likely.

The next day Fauci convened a larger call of twelve experts in epidemiology. His entry characterizing it (p. 14) is the probably the single most consequential paragraph in the whole diary. There was “not total agreement about the likelihood of deliberate insertion,” he writes. Ron Fouchier was certain it could have arisen naturally and said they shouldn’t waste time. Christian Drosten agreed with Fouchier. And then, in Fauci’s own words:

“the rest felt that deliberate insertion was possible.”

Ten of 12 thought it must be manmade. And he admits the person driving the zoonotic theory perspective, Ron Fouchier, was "expected of him since he was the original GOF [gain of function] person with Yoshi Kawaoka."

II. What happened next

Three days later, four of the scientists from that call were circulating a draft arguing the opposite. “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” appeared in Nature Medicine on March 17, concluding that the virus was not a laboratory construct. Andersen told the journal in his cover note that the paper had been prompted by Fauci and Francis Collins. Drafts went to both men before publication. Fauci’s reply to Andersen: “Nice job on the paper.”

Two months after Proximal Origin published — Fauci's institute approves an $8.9 million grant for Andersen.

On April 16, Collins wrote to Fauci asking whether NIH could help “put down this very destructive conspiracy.” The following day, Fauci cited Proximal Origin from the White House briefing room podium — the most watched platform on earth at that moment.

Three weeks after that, on May 4, 2020, he told National Geographic that the evidence was “very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated,” citing “a number of very qualified evolutionary biologists.”

The doubt referenced in his diary never reached the public.

And his account of that February call has never stopped changing.

A June 7, 2021 diary entry (p. 767), recounting the same meeting: "About half of the people felt that this was possibly a constructed virus and the other half were convinced that this was a natural occurrence."

In a June 3, 2024 sworn opening statement to the House Select Subcommittee, Fauci said he joined a call with about a dozen international virologists, that the discussion was "lively, with arguments for both possibilities," and that after further examination several who had been concerned about lab manipulation became convinced the virus was not deliberately manipulated. So we’ve gone from one or two in support of zoonotic origin, to 50-50, to an apparent majority. The facts of the meeting never changed; Fauci just became increasingly bold with each recounting.

The June 2021 account of that meeting contains another problem: he says “a few weeks later” Andersen and colleagues re-examined the data and concluded natural origin. The draft was circulating on February 4 — three days after the call. The June 2021 entry shows how he’s trying to mould history into something different for posterity.

III. Intel community

On June 4, three CIA officers briefed Fauci in a secure compartmented information (SCIF) facility at NIH. He found the whole thing “extremely strange and unexpected,” and the lead briefer “almost pathetic in her naivety” (pp. 764–765). They showed him intercepted communications out of Wuhan as well as intel on the transfer of pangolin viruses from a Beijing group to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, believed to have been used in a transgenic mouse study. A source reported “unknown experiments” had been “conducted by the military in Wuhan.”

Fauci dismissed each item in turn. It would be “perfectly natural,” he wrote, for a laboratory that studies coronaviruses to work on pangolins. Then the questioning turned, and, in his telling, “almost made me believe she was grilling me” — at which point he asked, half in jest, whether he ought to have a lawyer present. He closed the entry: “There is something very fishy about all of this.”

This briefing, Fauci wrote, was “very similar to some of the very disappointing briefings that I had previously received in prior years from the CIA.” He was not a stranger to the agency. He had been dismissing its work for some time.

Seven weeks later Fauci was in a different SCIF — in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building — at a counter-briefing that Beth Cameron of the National Security Council had arranged, in his own words, “because of the catastrophic briefing that the amateurs from the CIA gave me several weeks ago” (pp. 804–805). Across the table sat Maher Bitar, the NSC’s senior director for intelligence programs — the official who sits between the intelligence community and White House policy.

Fauci used the meeting to grade the agencies. The FBI, which favored a laboratory origin, “has no idea what they’re talking about.” The NSA, which leaned the other way, was treated more kindly. He then explained to Bitar why natural emergence was “almost certain.”

And then he told the National Security Council whom to believe:

“I urged the NSC folks to work closely with qualified card-carrying evolutionary virologists such as Kristian Andersen, Eddie Holmes, Bob Garry, Andy Rambaut, among others.”

Those are three of the four authors of Proximal Origin — the scientists he had convened 18 months earlier, who had told him on February 1 that deliberate insertion was possible, and who had published the opposite within the month. The intel community, Fauci insisted, should trust his experts, not their own analysts.

He judged the meeting a success. “I believe that they understood where I was coming from,” he wrote, “and it turned out to be a very good meeting.”

Six weeks after that, when the Office of the Director of National Intelligence published its 90-day origins review, Fauci disposed of the dissent in a clause: the FBI’s lab-leak assessment was “based on no data at all” (p. 863).

In January 2025, the CIA publicly assessed that a research-related origin was more likely than a natural one — a low-confidence judgment, but a reversal. It was reached, as CBS reported, without new intelligence. The same body of evidence its officers had carried into that NIH conference room in June 2021, when the man they were briefing decided the problem was them.

IV. Habit becomes routine

Origins is where this pattern is most consequential, but it is not where it started or where it stopped. The diary shows the same strategy applied to every contested question of the pandemic: decide what the public needs to believe, then flood the zone.

Consider masks. Fauci’s public reversal in the spring of 2020 is well known, and he has explained it as a response to shortages and to emerging evidence on asymptomatic spread (p. 375). But watch what happens when the question comes back around in February 2021, when he begins pushing double-masking (p. 619):

“CDC starting to do practical things that I have actually been pushing for some time. For example: Wearing 2 masks could be better than just one. They did a dummy study and showed that a cloth mask over a surgical mask actually gives a more complete fit and keeps out aerosols.”

Note the order of operations: He had been pushing it “for some time,” the evidence arrives afterward, and the evidence is a mannequin. That is the entire evidentiary basis for double-masking in a 1,141-page diary kept by the government’s chief spokesman on the subject during the month he was urging 330 million people to adopt it. In another email he recommends masks because “people are wearing them anyway.”

We see every time Fauci is turned to for guidance, he makes bold proclamations without feeling burdened to verify any scientific basis. We also see it in the numbers.

Across 1,141 pages by the nation’s senior infectious disease official during the largest public health event in a century, here is how often certain terms appear.

Never once: “peer review.” “Meta-analysis.” “Risk-benefit.” “Learning loss.” “Mental health.”

Once: “N95.” “Seroprevalence.” “Cost-benefit.”

Twice: “Cloth mask.” “School closure.” “Natural immunity.”

Against which:

• “Award” — 80

• “Hero” — 49

• “Instagram” — 36

• “Bobblehead” — 23

• “Selfie” — 19

• Entries headed “PRESS:” — 641

The question of whether prior infection conferred meaningful protection — the question underpinning the vaccine mandates that cost people their jobs — is never worked through anywhere in these pages. It appears twice, both times as an attack to be repelled.

V. The flex

What the diary contains instead of evidentiary reasoning is an extraordinarily detailed record of influence.

March 15, 2020: Fauci records calling Bill de Blasio and convincing him to close New York City’s schools, then telling him he should close the bars and restaurants, too — de Blasio “said that he would base this on my recommendation.” He records a parallel call with Ann O’Leary, Gavin Newsom’s chief of staff, who tells him that based on his television appearances, California will close its schools, bars, and restaurants. He records walking out of the White House to drivers honking their thanks. The next morning, federal guidelines emerge “that reflected my pushing for a more aggressive mitigation 15 day strategy.”

So here we have Fauci humble bragging about shutting down the largest city and state in the country, via leverage that was entirely a function of being the guy Gov. Newsom & Mayor de Blasio watched on TV.

His impact extended beyond the continental United States. Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett requested a Zoom to secure Fauci’s “opinion and ultimate support” for Israel’s booster program, recorded it for his own Instagram, and asked for Fauci’s cell number so he could “intermittently call me for advice”; with State Department approval, Fauci gave it (p. 830). The presidents of Ecuador and Chile called. So did health ministers in Brazil, Gabon, Israel, and Quebec.

The MLB commissioner wanted guidance on spring training; the NHL players’ union wanted projections (p. 507). Bill Gates had a standing biweekly slot. Coach K, on a podcast, called him “the point guard for the world,” and Fauci wrote it down (p. 83).

Then there is the CDC, which he seemed to be furtively running through his cellphone.

May 13, 2021: Rochelle Walensky calls to say she is changing the mask guidance for vaccinated Americans. Fauci: “She will take my advice ... I’m very pleased that she listened to me.” Then the tell: “The radical right-wing maniacs who blamed me for the rigidity of the CDC recommendations will probably not realize at all that it was me that triggered this change” (p. 736).

September 2021: the CDC’s independent vaccine advisory committee votes 9–6 against the booster recommendation the White House wants. Fauci, the White House’s Jeff Zients, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and Leslie Dach — a Democratic operative who founded the advocacy group Protect Our Care — work the phones. Fauci texts Walensky and, in his own words, “begged her to override” the vote. She calls back at 11:25 p.m.; he misses it; they speak at 5:40 a.m. His entry: “Alas! Rochelle listened to me. She overruled the recommendation of the ACIP.” He congratulates her on finally showing “clear leadership” (pp. 883–884, 887).

So, Zients had been calling him “multiple times per day asking me to continue to mentor Rochelle such that the CDC/ACIP does not veer too far off the FDA recommendations and our ultimate intent” (p. 880).

We can only guess what their “ultimate intent” is, but recall the context is loosening rules for those who’ve agreed to be vaccinated.

In January 2021, Zients called Fauci at dinner “asking for a favor” — a Politico reporter was preparing a story that Biden was unhappy with his Covid team, and Zients wanted Fauci to go on background and say otherwise. “I told Jeff that I would of course be happy to do this,” Fauci wrote (p. 580). The next day: “I convinced them that the Biden team is a good team.” In March, Zients wanted him “comfortable with” the CDC’s forthcoming guidance for vaccinated people; Fauci reviewed it, decided the agency had loaded it with qualifiers, and “edited their document some what.” Without a hint of irony, Fauci then adds: “Jeff was very sensitive in not having the White House interfere” (p. 642).

Here we have three nominally independent agencies, a White House coordination office, and a party-aligned outside operative, converging by telephone on predetermined outcomes, with the advisory committee that voted the other way treated as an obstacle to be routed around. This is the structure that enabled them to steamroll actual, data-driven scientists.

VI. Threats to the structure

Real science requires dissent. But to Fauci, who once infamously likened himself to science itself, dissent was a danger to his entire enterprise.

Scott Atlas, the Stanford radiologist Trump brought onto the task force, generated an October 2020 email in which Fauci formally demanded his removal “from the Task Force and quite frankly from the White House itself” (p. 388). Days earlier, Fauci had recorded a meeting between Alex Azar and “Atlas and his 3 stooges” — Drs. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, Sunetra Gupta of Oxford, and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard (p. 390) — a week before those three published the Great Barrington Declaration. After a Good Morning America appearance that month, Fauci, trying to squelch these burgeoning critiques, congratulates himself: “I blew away the Great Barrington Declaration” (p. 406).

Richard Ebright, the Rutgers microbiologist who has been the most persistent scientific critic of NIAID’s gain-of-function portfolio, is “truly an asshole” (p. 834); then a man pushing lab-leak because he “wants to be somebody” (p. 888); then “this complete idiot” whom Fauci resolves to handle in his memoir “since he really is a horrible person” (p. 906). In the same passage he writes that he is “terribly disappointed” in virologists Jesse Bloom and David Relman and believes they are “pushing for and even hoping that this was a lab leak.”

Then April 2021 (p. 695), David Morens has told Fauci that people are trying to “bring me down.” Fauci takes umbrage that these critics have received funds from the agency he was running: “It is my suspicion that some of these so-called NIAID grantees are Imperiale and Rich Ebright.”

He notes that both have publicly claimed he would cut their funding for criticizing him, calls that preposterous — then closes the entry: “Let us see if in fact these are the villains.”

You can only imagine him as Dr. Claw gently stroking his cat as he typed those words.

VII. Fauci’s colleagues, the press

The most revealing aspect of these pages are how Fauci worked with compliant “journalists” to shape media narratives. On July 26, 2020, while watching Brett Giroir — the assistant secretary for health and a fellow member of the White House task force — be interviewed on CNN’s State of the Union, Fauci writes that Giroir was “talking bullshit about testing with Jake pressing him.” Then (p. 263): “I gave Jake some questions to ask him.”

So, a senior federal official is trying to undermine a rival federal official, using a CNN anchor as his conduit.

The diary records CBS’s chief medical correspondent, Jon LaPook, emailing Fauci over a weekend “to prep him for his interview” before going on air, then cited Fauci repeatedly during it (p. 2). LaPook later produced the admiring 60 Minutes profile Fauci credits with driving Trump “over the edge.”

Fauci even got stories killed, at least according to his telling: In January 2020, the Washington Post’s Lena Sun called to check a tip that Beijing had leaned on the WHO’s director-general to delay declaring an emergency; Fauci told her it was nonsense and wrote, “I probably stopped her from writing the story” — noting that Sun had come to him because he is “in all the important meetings” (p. 7).

Members of the corporate media make many embarrassing cameos in these pages: Jake Tapper sends Fauci a text making fun Laura Ingraham’s intelligence (p. 113) and twice hosts Fauci for dinner at their family home (p. 420); George Stephanopoulos texts after an interview, “Thank you, Tony. So impressive” (p. 264); Andrea Mitchell calls his cell, apologetic, having assumed he had declined her show rather than been blocked from it (p. 235); Jimmy Kimmel writes his TIME 100 citation in the year he was ranked first among “Leaders,” another puff piece he saves for his scrapbook (p. 357).

The pattern becomes easy enough to understand: He supplied access and the guise of expertise, they supplied a platform and a halo, and the arrangement was load-bearing enough that when a reporter got a genuinely hard tip about the WHO and China, she brought it to him before she wrote it.

VIII. The scrapbook

Which brings us to what the diary mostly is: 641 entries in these pages are labeled “PRESS:” — lists of the day’s media appearances, often a dozen at a time, frequently followed by the articles themselves transcribed in full. A senior scientist’s pandemic journal turns out to be, by volume, a clipping service devoted to his favorite subject: himself.

The tone of what he preserved is worth registering. He kept the Washington Post column comparing a Rand Paul cross-examination of him to “watching Albert Einstein being disputed by his dry cleaner.” He kept the Joan Baez portrait and her calling him an American hero (p. 292). He kept the cookies from Joe and Jill Biden with the note “You are our hero” (p. 175), and Julia Roberts gasping on an Instagram livestream that he was her personal hero, and Marian Wright Edelman calling him “a true national treasure” (p. 1113), and Beth Cameron of the NSC texting that he was her hero for what he did with Rand Paul (p. 815).

By my count he records someone calling him a hero at least 10 times across three years.

He also recorded receiving many standing ovations, including one he could not see because he was attending by Zoom, noting in the same passage that it would be his 58th honorary doctorate and that Holy Cross was naming a science complex after him (p. 951). He recorded a Seattle Mariners crowd’s ovation three separate times in one entry — claiming his opening pitch was “perfect” — alongside a complaint that the Washington Examiner had reported some fans booing (p. 1,020). He recorded being “totally mobbed by my colleagues wanting selfies. I must have done at least 100 (no exaggerating!)” (p. 1084). When the Infectious Diseases Society of America established a perpetual Anthony S. Fauci Prize, he transcribed the entire citation (p. 1086).

And then there is the second document Sen. Paul’s office released, which shows that a good deal of this was not happening to him. Our tax dollars were helping arrange it.

In October 2018 — 14 months before any of this — Barton Haynes of Duke nominated Fauci for the Shaw Prize. Fauci wrote back the same day (Awards, p. 2):

“Thanks, Bart. There is another one that looks possible for me if you are willing to do it. As usual, I will supply all of the material. It is the Dan David Prize.”

As usual? Four days later he pitched a third and wrote the strategy himself (p. 4): the Heinz Award, category “The Human Condition,” using the PEPFAR record — “We obviously will take care of all of that on my end.” He coached Haynes through qualifying as a nominator, noting the “minor glitch” that the Heinz people require a CV first “because they do not want just anyone nominating anyone.” He tracked prize calendars like a portfolio, telling Haynes to stand down on the Dan David until “medicine/science returns as a theme” (p. 5). He collected it two years later.

The Dan David Prize — $1 million, headquartered at Tel Aviv University — announced Fauci as its 2021 public health laureate on February 15, citing his “courageously defending science in the face of uninformed opposition.” None of the coverage mentioned that the nomination pipeline had been running since 2018 with the laureate supplying the materials.

Every message in the awards file copies NIAID staff, who assembled packages, chased clearances, and eventually arranged a wire transfer. NIH’s ethics counsel was described by her own superior as playing “the seminal role in assembling of the award packages” (p. 19). (Which to me sounds like the opposite thing an ethics counsel should be doing.) That superior was Lawrence Tabak, then NIH’s principal deputy director, who personally wrote to HHS General Counsel arguing across several pages that Fauci should be allowed to keep the $40,000 attached to a National Academy of Medicine award — invoking the Academy’s 1863 charter, a 1997 amendment to the Federal Advisory Committee Act, and a Congressional Research Service report (p. 30). Days earlier Tabak had written to Fauci about the delays: “my goal is to support you in the strongest possible way” (p. 18).

When the Dan David Prize cleared on April 9, 2021, the internal traffic was preserved (pp. 120–121). Arthur Bennett: “At last!!!!!!!” Patricia Conrad, forwarding to Fauci: “Congratulations....you’re rich!” Greg Folkers: “I want my 15%.”

We know the sum to the penny because Fauci corrected his own financial disclosure the following spring (p. 135): “The Dan David prize that was deposited in my bank account was $899,960.00, not $901,400.”

Technically soliciting one’s own nomination is not illegal, and in elite science it is not even unusual — most major prizes require a qualified nominator. But here we have some pretty well-scaled machinery: a federal agency’s staff and the NIH’s chief ethics counsel running a standing campaign, a legal argument built at the deputy-director level so a cash prize could be retained, and roughly $900,000 landing in the personal account of a sitting official who had arranged the nomination that produced it.

The final verdict

These two document dumps go a long way helping us understand how the sausage is made, and it’s not pretty.

The White House needed a face that performed well under lights; governors needed cover for decisions they had half-made and took it from a man whose authority came from TV hits rather than peer-reviewed studies; a press corps needed access and a protagonist and traded a halo for both; a White House coordination office needed a scientist willing to serve as an anonymous source, edit another agency’s guidance, and lean on another agency’s director when her experts voted wrong. Foreign leaders needed the imprimatur of Official Science on a phone call. NIH’s own leadership needed the world’s most famous scientist happy, and built him the legal argument to keep his bank account flush.

And Anthony Fauci got the largest edifice of public esteem ever assembled around an American civil servant — much of which, it turns out, he had personally arranged the scaffolding for, starting 14 months before the first case of Covid.

Fauci’s blast zone was wide: On a public told that guidance was science when the diary records it as message discipline and mannequin studies; on three highly credentialed academic epidemiologists who found themselves recorded as “stooges”; on a CDC director cut out of briefings on her own agency’s guidelines; on an advisory committee whose 9–6 vote was reversed by telephone before dawn; on international agencies leaning on U.S. officials for guidance, on everyone who lost a job over a mandate …

The story began with Fauci acknowledging his own panel of experts virtually unanimously agreed Covid was manmade, before shifting to the elaborate effort put into convincing the world otherwise. Throughout it all, we see little discussion or concern about the humanitarian impact of anything they’re doing. Instead we see a craven egomaniac milking it for all it’s worth.

**********

Both documents are public at paul.senate.gov: the diary at 1,141 pages, the awards correspondence at 136. Page citations refer to the PDFs as released; word counts are raw string searches of the extracted text and include pasted press. Quotations preserve original spelling. Dr. Fauci’s representatives were contacted for comment.

Yet despite these intel connections, Vance conceded there are no documents directly linking Epstein to any intelligence agency — and if such a document existed, “it wouldn’t exist in 2026.”

Whether Epstein was a formally recruited, badge-carrying Mossad agent cannot be proven or disproven from the record, and a competent intel agency would never leave the proof lying around. What we can try to determine is whether Epstein functioned as an intelligence-adjacent operator — a private citizen who invested in surveillance technology, brokered access between heads of state, worked hand-in-hand with the former head of Israel’s defense establishment. On that, the roughly 3.5 million pages the Justice Department released in early 2026 have much to say.

Ehud Barak

The most solid evidence in these files is Epstein’s close relationship with Ehud Barak — former Israeli prime minister, defense minister, and IDF chief of staff.

In September 2010, Epstein hosted Barak, then Israel’s sitting defense minister, at his Manhattan townhouse for what he billed as a small, private dinner, and worked the guest list personally: Larry Summers; an invitation routed through Bill Gates’s science adviser Boris Nikolic; Tom Pritzker, among others. It would be, Epstein wrote, “the epicenter of intellectual interest” (EFTA00896172; EFTA00298515; EFTA02421326). The pattern repeats in 2011 (EFTA00915122), and within a few years, new businesses emerge from this social nexus.

Epstein’s career in surveillance technology

After Epstein’s 2008 conviction, his professional focus gravitated toward technologies for identifying, locating, and monitoring people.

In September 2012, Epstein applied to the U.S. Virgin Islands Economic Development Commission for tax benefits for Southern Trust Company, a firm he wholly owned. In the application, Epstein’s stated objective was to build “an extensive DNA database and develop a data-mining platform for the database to be available through the Internet” — a system referencing “over 200 million profiled US Internet users and up to 2 billion worldwide,” whose pitch was to let individuals “know your DNA” (EFTA01105214). The Virgin Islands government later concluded Southern Trust performed no real services and operated as a tax shield, ultimately recovering tens of millions in back taxes and penalties (Government of the U.S. Virgin Islands v. JPMorgan Chase, S.D.N.Y., Doc. 290-7). Its brokerage records show it functioning as a trading vehicle, moving sums like a $10 million transfer and buying public equities through Epstein’s associate Richard Kahn (EFTA00832858; EFTA02625611).

Southern Trust was not only, purportedly, a biomedical data-mining company, but also the vehicle through which Epstein made his signature technology investment. Through ST, and through another entity called Sum (E.B.) 2015 — the limited partnership Barak formed to hold his own stake — Epstein invested in Reporty Homeland Security, later renamed Carbyne, an Israeli “next-generation 911” firm whose platform pinpoints a caller’s location and can access the caller’s device during an emergency call. In January 2015, Barak forwarded the term sheet to Epstein and Epstein’s lawyer Darren Indyke, urging approval because it “cover[ed] our needs for control of it in future developments” (EFTA00866069). A year later, Barak confirmed to Epstein and co-investor Nicole Junkermann that he had wired a further half-million after a signed progress report (EFTA00834100). Israeli reporting established that Epstein put money in as early as 2015, and roughly $1 million via Southern Trust in 2016.

The richest picture of Epstein’s surveillance dealings comes not from the Justice Department’s files but from Ehud Barak’s own inbox. In May 2025, a hacker group called Handala — which security researchers link to Iran — obtained hundreds of thousands of Barak’s emails, and the transparency collective Distributed Denial of Secrets posted them for verified journalists. Reason, which first reported on them in August 2025, cautioned that the emails carry no cryptographic signatures to independently verify them; they should be treated as leaked material, weighed accordingly, and kept distinct from the DOJ-released record. That said, several of the same 2013 exchanges also appear in the DOJ files, which corroborates the cache at least in part.

The leaked emails show Epstein working to pull Peter Thiel, PayPal co-founder and backer of the surveillance contractor Palantir, into Barak’s orbit. In May 2014, while he and Barak were structuring the Reporty investment, Epstein urged Barak to “spend real time with peter thiel [sic]” and offered to arrange a dinner. Barak, describing the planned meeting to another associate without naming Epstein’s hand in it, expected to “probably spend it talking just geopolitics.” In February 2016, Epstein pitched Reporty directly to Valar Ventures, a fund Thiel co-founded; general partner Andrew McCormack took the meeting but passed, calling the company premature while adding that the firm remained “fans of what you are building.” Two years later, a different Thiel firm, Founders Fund, joined a $15 million funding round for the company, by then renamed Carbyne. Thiel later told The Wall Street Journal he had met Epstein more than once in 2014 for networking and conceded, “I didn’t think enough about what Epstein’s agenda might have been.”

Carbyne’s board of directors included Pinhas Buchris, a former commander of Unit 8200, Israel’s signals-intelligence corps, and former director-general of its Defense Ministry. Buchris told Haaretz, the paper that broke the Epstein-Barak partnership in 2019, that the investment was arranged so that Epstein’s involvement was hidden: “Barak brought the money… I don’t know Epstein and haven’t met him.” Yet the leaked emails show Barak scheduling a December 2014 virtual meeting with Epstein and Buchris together, and instructing his lawyer to alter the investment terms based on Buchris’s input.

Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund also invested in Carbyne, and in September 2017 Andrew Intrater, whose Columbus Nova was the U.S. affiliate historically tied to Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, bought roughly a quarter of Carbyne’s Series A-1 preferred stock. As Reason Magazine summarized earlier this year: “Epstein tried to get into a new line of work: surveillance,” using Barak to seek out surveillance-industry opportunities and to connect with Thiel, ex–signals-intelligence figures, and people in Putin’s circle.

Epstein used Barak to chase a “four pronged security, cyber” venture — a pitch to Tom Pritzker that drew the wary reply, “doing biz with Israelis is perilous. Is eb in Aspen?” (EFTA01964547) — and dangled a menu of heads of state to bankers, offering JPMorgan’s Jes Staley a single week’s access to “president of ivory coast, president of senegal… ehud barak, bill richardson, george mitchell” (EFTA00919472). Drop Site News has tied that African access to a real pitch: mass communications surveillance for Côte d’Ivoire. To Elon Musk in 2013, Epstein sold Barak by his résumé, describing him as the “former defense minister of israel… and head of the munich team” (EFTA01964604) — invoking Barak’s command of Israel’s post-Munich retaliation operations as a credential.

In January 2015 he emailed MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito about facial “deception recognition” and “eye signaling” (EFTA02513624), and his files include pitch materials for AHURA AI, a firm built around webcam-based facial-expression and emotion tracking (EFTA00797486).

Carbyne was not the only Israeli security-tech venture Barak steered toward Epstein. In April 2016, Barak asked Epstein to invest in Levitection, an electromagnetic-imaging startup staffed by veterans of the Israeli weapons maker Rafael, describing "sci-fi like achievements in military products." Barak proposed using "the same construct we used in Reporty," and, per the emails, Epstein agreed to have Barak's lawyer negotiate terms. Levitection later won part of a $1.5 million U.S. Department of Homeland Security contract in 2020 for using "electromagnetic imaging and artificial intelligence to detect threats and concealed items in wide-open areas," before going out of business in 2022. The company's founder, Gideon Levita, disputes the emails' implication: he told Reason that Barak “has never been an investor in Levitection” and that “Jeffrey Epstein was never mentioned in any context related to the company.”

The Epstein files document Epstein regularly sending Barak articles on cyber warfare, emergency-response technology, Russian nanotechnology, and Unit 8200 itself. In one April 2015 note he described being “AMAZED by the rate of which technology has moved into the private sector,” and observed that “many corporations are looking for a new military like perspective on mgmt.” The same period of his life, as The New York Times reported, included stranger ventures in the business of data and bodies — a scheme to seed women with his DNA, and funding for research into a particle that might trigger “the feeling that someone is watching you.”

The Kremlin

In the spring of 2013, Epstein is coaching Barak through a negotiation he’s having with Russian counterparts. On April 27 he writes: “I think you should propose all up front. no need for a written agreement. until later. do not go to number 1 too quickly, I understand more now so we should speak” (EFTA01976710; EFTA00959507). Barak, mid-thread, is trying to reach him and asks for “the present no[?].” Drop Site News reads “number 1” as the longstanding nickname for the head of the Mossad, although that’s an inference not possible to confirm one way or another.

On May 9, Epstein tells Barak to “let Putin know you will be in Moscow. See if he wants private time,” and Barak replies: “jeff pl don’t share the info with any of our friends” (EFTA01975333). The same day, Epstein reports that then secretary-general of the Council of Europe, Thorbjørn Jagland, had asked him to explain “how russia can structure deals” to attract Western investment (EFTA01974597). By May 21, Epstein claims access at the very top: “Putin asked that i meet him in st petersburg the same time as his economic conference. I told him no,” pending “real time and privacy” (EFTA00961759; EFTA01970982).

Barak's messages to Epstein repeatedly surface the aforementioned Viktor Vekselberg, the Putin-allied Russian oligarch. At one point Barak asked Epstein whether there was time to grab coffee with a man he called "VV" and "Viktor." In April 2015, Barak also asked Epstein's opinion of Fifth Dimension, an AI intelligence company Vekselberg backed. Its pitch deck, which Barak forwarded to Epstein, promised to turn "massive scale data from multiple feeds into actionable intelligence" in "an automated real-time manner," illustrated with mockups of surveillance screens and maps tracking individual people. Epstein told Barak to call him; per Reason, the two did not take the project further. Fifth Dimension shut down in 2018 after Vekselberg was hit with U.S. sanctions.

Epstein & the CIA

The American-intelligence thread is thinner than the Israeli one but harder to wave away, and it begins with the reason Epstein escaped serious prosecution in the first place. The investigative journalist Vicky Ward reported that Alexander Acosta, the U.S. attorney who signed Epstein’s 2008 non-prosecution deal, was told by superiors that Epstein “belonged to intelligence” and to leave the matter alone — an account Acosta has since disputed. Whatever its truth, the documented contacts are real. Epstein’s private calendar, reported by The Wall Street Journal, shows three 2014 meetings with William Burns — then deputy secretary of state, later Biden’s CIA director — first in Washington and then at Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse, after which Epstein apparently arranged a car to the airport. The CIA, unsurprisingly, insists Burns knew Epstein only as a “financial services” expert offering advice on leaving government, that “they had no relationship,” and that Burns recalls one brief encounter and denies the rest.

More telling than any single meeting is how Epstein behaved toward the agency. In 2011 his lawyer filed a Freedom of Information Act request asking the CIA for records that would establish his “affiliation” with it, reaching back to 1999; the agency replied that it found no acknowledged records but could “neither confirm nor deny” a classified relationship — the standard Glomar non-answer that, years later, prompted Rep. Nancy Mace to demand the CIA’s Epstein files. None of this is proof, of course: a Glomar response is boilerplate the CIA gives about almost anyone, the calendar meetings are unverified and partly denied, and the popular reading of a man FOIA-ing his own file as an operative signaling his availability is ultimately still just speculation.

Reaching back to the Reagan years, we have claims of Epstein playing a role in the Iran-Contra arms smuggling scandal. Here are the basic contours: After Bear Stearns, Epstein styled himself a money-recovering “bounty hunter,” was “mentored” (per The New York Times) by the British arms dealer Douglas Leese, briefly partnered with a former Justice Department official scrutinized over arms sales to Iran, and moved in the orbit of Adnan Khashoggi and the CIA-linked bank BCCI — all fixtures of Iran-Contra. Independent journalist Whitney Webb says the CIA used Epstein to run the money laundering side of the operation, a claim supported by the controversial Ben-Menashe, who says Epstein was also trafficking weapons. Webb’s reporting originates largely with Steven Hoffenberg, a convicted Ponzi fraudster who later sued Epstein, and hasn’t been objectively confirmed.

A former NSA counterintelligence officer, John Schindler, has written that he believes Epstein “was definitely a spy,” while conceding he cannot say whose.

The Maxwells

Behind all of this is Epstein’s partner-in-crime, Ghislaine Maxwell, whose father, Robert, is widely reported to have worked as a long-time Mossad agent. Epstein’s ex-partner Steven Hoffenberg says Robert Maxwell personally introduced Ghislaine to Epstein in the late 1980s, although the New York Times recently reported Ghislaine didn’t meet Epstein until the early 90s. The popular speculation is that Maxwell was running a Mossad-linked intel operation that he passed along to Epstein.

An FBI FD-302 quotes a source describing Robert Maxwell as “a very wealthy Israeli Intelligence (Mossad) Agent” who died falling off a yacht, adding it’s “widely suspected he was assassinated.” According to another report, “at least six serving and former heads of Israeli intelligence" attended Maxwell’s funeral. A House Oversight release notes Maxwell “was working for the Israeli government and the Mossad,” that “Maxwell’s ties to the Mossad are well-documented,” but “Epstein’s connections are less well known.”

In the 1980s the Department of Justice contracted for a data-integration platform called PROMIS, built by the firm Inslaw. A 1992 House Judiciary Committee report established that a copy was handed to an Israeli government representative recorded as "Dr Ben Orr" in May 1983, and cited sworn testimony that the stolen software was "distributed internationally… to further intelligence and foreign policy objectives" — though the committee could not confirm what happened to it afterward. The claim that Robert Maxwell personally brokered a backdoored version for Israeli intelligence comes not from the report but from the former Israeli agent Ari Ben-Menashe and from journalists Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon; the DOJ's own 1994 review found no credible evidence for the broadest allegations.

Maxwell’s daugther Christine, Ghislaine’s sister, co-founded Chiliad, whose federated-search software ran the FBI’s post-9/11 counterterrorism data warehouse. Included in the Epstein files [EFTA00277076] is a report from a tipster who said the Maxwell sisters ran “a company for USDOJ software” with “a backdoor,” and that “Robert, Ghislaine, and Jeffery were all Mossad agents.” Reports of a Mossad-linked “backdoor” with PROMIS and Chiliad are, of course, not easily confirmed, and officially denied.

Epstein’s friend, the disgraced and deceased French modeling scout and alleged sex trafficker, Jean-Luc Brunel, “told [his acquaintances] that Ghislaine’s father, Robert Maxwell, was one of the reasons why Jeffrey Epstein had money. He said that Maxwell had been one of Epstein’s first investor clients,” one such close Brunel acquaintance told The Sun in 2020.

It is widely believed that Epstein’s honeypot/kompromat operations were an extension of the clandestine intelligence-gathering methods honed by Robert Maxwell.

The blackmail model

Accuser pleadings released through the House Oversight Committee describe surveillance cameras at Epstein’s Florida and New York homes that recorded activity in private spaces (HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023060; 030590). That recording capability is independently well-established and is the physical backbone of any kompromat operation. A September 2020 internal DoJ email relays a reporter’s tip that Ghislaine Maxwell claimed to hold Epstein-captured videos of high-profile figures (EFTA00087773).

Epstein: Of course I’m an asset

In October 2018, Epstein provided an apartment to Yoni Koren, Barak’s longtime bureau chief (described in some reporting as a Mossad veteran). According to Al Jazeera, Epstein helped Koren pay for his cancer treatments, and when Koren’s cancer returned, Barak wrote to Epstein directly: “Deeply thankful to you, of course. Thanks from me as well” (EFTA02620572; EFTA02620453).

Two months later, as intelligence rumors were swirling, Epstein emailed Barak: “you should make clear that i dont work for mossad. :)” (EFTA02609943; EFTA02612116). Was he joking? Serious? Who knows.

An unclassified FD-1023 confidential-source report records a source who “believed both Maxwell and Epstein were Israeli spies,” describing the tradecraft of photographing oneself with powerful people to hand to a handler (EFTA01245118). An April 2020 FD-302 interview records a source calling Epstein a “construct” running an “Israeli state-sponsored technology” operation (EFTA01683612). The caveat is that these capture what informants believed, not what the feds confirmed.

Media outlets have reported on Epstein’s habit of boasting to associates that he was “an intelligence agent,” with the Daily Beast reporting he told an ex girlfriend he was a Mossad agent. And there’s circumstantial evidence to support his claims. While searching his house in New York City, for example, FBI agents discovered a 1980s Austrian passport bearing his photo under a false name with a listed Saudi residence.

Arguing for the negative

Mossad brass, perhaps unsurprisingly, deny any connection to Epstein. Former Mossad director Yossi Cohen has said Epstein had “absolutely nothing” to do with the agency. Former prime minister Naftali Bennett, who oversaw the Mossad, called the claim “categorically and totally false.” And Benjamin Netanyahu argued Epstein’s close relationship with Barak, “proves the opposite,” since Barak is his bitter domestic rival.

There is also a simpler theory that accommodates all of the evidence: Epstein operated as an on-call “access agent” whose primary skills — accumulating kompromat, laundering money, arranging access to the world’s movers & shakers — dovetail neatly with the needs of intelligence agencies.

What the evidence supports

The Epstein files cannot conclusively prove Epstein worked on behalf of any intel agency. There is no signed contract stating his terms of employment at Mossad. The CIA hasn’t released his “Asset of the Month” award. There are no smoking guns here. But that doesn’t mean there’s no story. The available evidence is bad enough: a convicted sex offender operated for years as a private node in an international security-and-intelligence network. He co-invested in Israeli surveillance technology with a former Israeli prime minister; he registered his own company as a mass DNA-and-data-mining platform; he brokered that partner’s access to Vladimir Putin and to African heads of state; he sequenced when — by one outlet's reading — the Mossad chief got looped in; he quietly cared for a former Israeli intelligence aide — and he did all of it while at least one FBI source and, reportedly, one U.S. attorney came away believing he “belonged to intelligence.” No badge is required for any of that.

Vance was right that the document proving the rest would not survive to 2026. But the documents that did survive describe a man who did not need to be on a payroll to do the work. Whether you call that an asset, an operator, or simply the most useful private citizen two intelligence cultures ever declined to claim is, in the end, a question of vocabulary. The function is on the page.

What follows is an inventory of that record: what the state entered into evidence, what its witnesses said under oath, and what remains unresolved. The exhibit numbers are the court’s. The full hearing — exhibits, rulings, and cleaned transcripts, day by day — is archived in Grabien’s Robinson tracker, and every claim below can be checked against it.

A preliminary hearing asks only for probable cause, a low bar by design, and this case will almost certainly clear it. The point here isn’t to predict that. It’s to lay the evidence out plainly and see what it amounts to.

Identification

Start with the roof. The state’s theory places the shooter at a perch on the Losee Center, and the shot came from there. But the surveillance shows no distinguishing features. Under cross-examination on the first day, the officer who reached the roof was asked what the video actually showed:

Q: On the video of the person on the roof — could you identify the face, clothing markings, weight, shoes, or what was on the head?

A: I could tell height, and that he wasn’t heavy — a skinny person. Not the face, shoes, or headwear.

Q: Did you see a gun?

A: I saw a long black object in the left hand as he moved across the roof.

Q: In your report, do you mention seeing a gun — or even that object?

A: I did not mention it.

Q: When you left at 9 p.m. and returned the next morning — did you, or anyone on that campus to your knowledge, know who the shooter was?

A: Not that I knew of.

Robinson’s name did not come from identifying the figure. It came from the surrender. Asked how the shooter was identified, the lead investigator testified that on the evening of the 11th, Washington County relayed that a man in the area wanted to turn himself in; his name then went to an analysis group for a driver’s-license and DMV workup that produced a photo, an address, and vehicles.

The clearer clip the state later relied on, Ex. 11.1, is not independent footage: it is the same surveillance as the unaltered Ex. 11.4, enhanced with zooms, blurs, and red circles added by the County Attorney’s office, and the defense objected that it had been altered by a non-testifying person.

That leaves one identification tying the roof figure to Robinson by name — his roommate, Lance Twiggs. Shown the FBI’s released suspect images during his recorded statement (Ex. 16), Twiggs qualified it:

Investigator: “I’ll show you a couple of those images — the FBI release. Two rows, three images. Do you recognize the person?”

Twiggs: “I wouldn’t say with a 100 percent certainty, just because of the camera quality — but that looks like him. The shoes he’s wearing, the sunglasses… I hadn’t specifically seen him in that hat, but people usually wear a hat. And the jeans. So — especially the bottom two — those definitely do look like him.”

And the one set of prints from the shooter’s path excludes Robinson. The parties stipulated to it (Day 4):

Investigators observed latent fingerprints and a palm print on a glass window near where the individual landed after jumping from the Losee Center roof. [The] FBI examiner found only three latents — 11B, 11C, 11D — of comparable value and excluded Tyler Robinson as the source of all three.

The unrecorded scene

The same officer’s body camera did not capture the roof he secured (Day 1):

Q: Your body cam — about 27 minutes 35 seconds — starts at the Hall of Flags and ends while you’re still on the roof, before you taped it. That’s the only body cam you have that day?

A: Yes — I believe the battery died. It was too chaotic to go back for it.

For the interval between the figure leaving the roof and the scene being secured, the location the state’s theory is built on has no continuous record, and the officer did not go back to review other footage covering it.

The forensic evidence

The DNA is the strongest single exhibit the state entered. Its laboratory reported Robinson a major contributor on the rifle and cartridges at “at least one trillion times” more likely than not (Ex. 3; Ex. 30.3). The firearm reports are also affirmative: the recovered rifle was test-fired and operable, the fired cartridge case was identified as having been fired in it, and a toolmark examiner tied the engraving on the cartridges to a rotary cutting tool from Robinson’s home (Ex. 30; Ex. 30.4).

The DNA reports carry their own qualifiers, which the state’s own DNA chief laid out on cross (Day 5):

Q: And “major contributor” speaks only to the quantity of DNA — not to any activity, or how or when it was deposited?

Oliver: Correct. None of my testing can speak to the activity that led to the deposition of the DNA. A profile can even be developed where the contributor never touched the item — secondary transfer.

She was equally plain about the headline figure:

Oliver: Yes, it’s a reporting cap. It could be quintillions or octillions; we chose a trillion because it has meaning to people.

The swabs were mixtures of as many as four or five contributors. The elimination samples placed Robinson’s father’s DNA on the rifle and Twiggs’s DNA on the engraving tool; the FBI’s report separately listed Twiggs as a contributor on the towel and the screwdriver, at figures in the quintillions and octillions (Ex. 30.1). Shared-residence DNA on shared objects is expected.

No gunshot-residue evidence, and no evidence that the rifle had been recently fired, was entered.

The fatal round, the autopsy, and who testified about them

The one piece of physical evidence tying the recovered rifle to the shot that killed Kirk is a bullet-jacket fragment produced during the autopsy; its exact provenance, and who discovered it, were not disclosed. The fragment was submitted to the ATF, whose examiner compared it to Robinson’s rifle and reported the result inconclusive — neither identified nor excluded (Ex. 30.2). That examiner testified for the defense; her own proficiency test in bullet comparison carried an item error rate near 18–20 percent, and the underlying AFTE method is subjective by its own description, the basis for the PCAST reports of 2016 and 2017.

Everything the public heard about the lack of an exit wound came from outside the courtroom. The “man of steel” account — that the bullet failed to exit because of the victim’s bone density, attributed to the treating surgeon — came from a Turning Point USA spokesman on social media. No surgeon testified. The medical examiner who performed the autopsy did not testify either; the autopsy report was admitted (Ex. 11), but its headline conclusion came secondhand via the case agent. The report is confidential under Utah law and has not been released, and the medical examiner’s office previously told reporters no details would be confirmed. The physical account of the fatal round, in other words, runs through the ATF and a secondhand report, not through a physician on the stand.

The confession material

This is the crux of the state’s case. The text thread (Ex. 16.1), conformed to the charging Information, has Robinson confessing outright:

Robinson: I am still ok my love, but am stuck in Orem for a little while longer yet… I gotta grab my rifle still. To be honest I had hoped to keep this secret till I died of old age. I am sorry to involve you.

Twiggs: you weren’t the one who did it right????

Robinson: I am, I’m sorry

Twiggs: Why?

Robinson: Why did I do it?… I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.

A handwritten note found under Robinson’s keyboard (Ex. 16.3) reads, “I had the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk and I’m going to take it.” And Twiggs testified Robinson admitted the killing to him in person the following day.

Its provenance is worth recording. The text messages were entered not as a forensic phone extraction but as photographs of Twiggs’s phone, taken by an FBI agent during his first interview; a Cellebrite extraction was referenced but was not the vehicle by which the thread came in. The keyboard note came in the same way: Twiggs testified that after the 11 p.m. text telling him to look under the keyboard, he found the note, read it, photographed it, and put it back. A second, burnt note was separately recovered from the kitchen trash during the search of Robinson’s home (Ex. 20.4) and displayed alongside the photographed one. The texts, in-person confession, and written note all arrive through Lance Twiggs.

The state's third confession exhibit — a Discord thread (Ex. 16.2) — was admitted but published only to the gallery, so its contents never entered the record; it came in as photographs of Twiggs's phone, who was himself in the thread, and separately by subpoena to Discord. The first message attributed to Robinson is timestamped 7:57 p.m. on September 11 — the evening after the killing, around the time of his surrender — and no testimony established the device it was sent from.

The note also produced the hearing’s one procedural rupture. Ex. 16.3 had been admitted but ordered not broadcast; on Day 4 it appeared on the courtroom’s public feed for several seconds while displayed beside the broadcastable burnt-note photo. On Day 5 the judge found his order violated and sanctioned the media, barring broadcast of any exhibit for the remainder of the day (Day 5).

In the press, it’s been reported Robinson’s family turned him in and said he confessed. A search-warrant affidavit unsealed in March says more: that Robinson confessed to his father that he was the shooter. But there’s several levels of separation between Robinson’s reported confession and the final affidavit. The affidavit doesn't carry the father's account; it carries a former sheriff's deputy's account of the father's account, relayed up through two sheriffs — Robinson to his father, the father to Mike Mitchell, Mitchell to Sheriff Brooksby, Brooksby to Sheriff Smith, and only then into a sworn statement. Fourth-hand information, which at no point documents what Robinson actually said, when, or where. The father who supposedly heard it firsthand gave no direct statement in the record. And Robinson, hours later at the jail, confessed nothing — he asked for a lawyer and went silent. This evidence amounts to an admission no one can quote, attested by no one who heard it, which perhaps explains why it was never entered into the public record during the preliminary hearing.

On motive, the state offered the texts and the engraved cartridges and little else. No broader digital trail or path to radicalization was placed in evidence. Twiggs, who had known Robinson only a few months, testified that politics did come up between them — but not Kirk:

On politics, he talked more than I did; he’d mention things he heard on the radio driving to work. I’d never heard him talk about Charlie Kirk specifically. On gender-identity or LGBTQ issues, not really — usually it was about Trump or current policies.

Robinson was politically engaged, in other words, but Kirk never surfaced in their conversations, and the state placed nothing between that daily silence and the engraved rounds.

The vehicle after midnight

After midnight the night following the shooting, a neighbor’s doorbell camera recorded a vehicle the state attributes to Robinson. On cross, the lead investigator agreed the camera’s owner had described a bald driver and three other people in the car, that the detail was in the report, and that he had not raised it on direct — where the same footage was described as Robinson’s car with a single person getting out (Day 2). Robinson is not bald. The three others were not identified.

Two more claims against the record

Robinson was said — by the governor and by FBI leadership — to have refused to cooperate. The arrest-interview transcript, quoted in a defense filing, records otherwise:

Investigator: Before we begin, I’m just gonna read you your rights… you have the right to remain silent… Are you good to proceed? I’d love to talk to you.

Robinson: I would like to speak with my, uh, legal counsel. I’m hoping for a fellow in Utah named Doug Terry… until I’ve had the opportunity to speak with someone, I would like to remain silent.

The discovery summary itself notes he “declined to be interviewed without having an attorney present.” Invoking the 5th and 6th Amendments is a right, not a refusal to cooperate in the sense advertised.

The family was said to have called Robinson guilty. The record supports that they recognized him from released images and helped bring him in.

Open questions

How was Twiggs ruled out as a participant, and what were the terms of the immunity — federal and state — extended to the state’s only cooperating witness? Why did the state’s only cooperating witness need immunity? Why was it provided? Who were the bald driver and three others driving in a car the state says is Robinson’s on September 11th? And what accounts for the live, unfired round of a different caliber recovered from a second building’s roof (Day 3), which the state attributed to an officer clearing a weapon?

Where it stands

A preliminary hearing renders no verdict. The state’s evidence is likely sufficient for probable cause, and the case will probably be bound over on September 1. Prosecutors also commonly hold back their strongest material for trial, and may have here. What the five days established, and what they left open, is set out above. The distance between the two — between evidence sufficient to proceed and evidence sufficient to convict — is what the trial is for.

Editor's note (July 13, 2026): This piece has been revised since publication. The original version said only that Robinson's family "recognized him from released images and helped bring him in." After publishing, I went through sixteen search-warrant affidavits in the case — unsealed in March and located by attorney Andrea Burkhart — one of which states that Robinson confessed to his father that he was the shooter. I've rewritten that passage to account for it. Note that this reported confession reaches the court fourth-hand — father to a family friend, to two sheriffs, to the affidavit, with no words, time, or place of the confession recorded — and it never entered this week's hearing at all. That the state left its "he confessed to his father" in a search-warrant affidavit rather than put it on the stand is, itself, worth noticing.

The Tyler Robinson case tracker is now online: a free, searchable, day-by-day archive of the proceedings. Every session is transcribed and cleaned by hand, wrapped in the apparatus that makes a transcript usable — a witness index, an exhibit log tracking what was offered, admitted, and shown to the cameras, and a rulings log for how Judge Graf resolved each fight. Above it sits a “State of the Evidence” tracker laying out the pillars of the prosecution’s case — identification, DNA, the weapon, the alleged confession, the autopsy, the surrender, the death-penalty enhancement — with what the State has actually put on and where the open questions remain. A filings docket, anchored by the charging document itself, rounds it out.

Why bother with the complete record? Take the DNA. The wire copy will tell you it’s devastating, and in one direction it is: the FBI tied Robinson to the towel and screwdriver with numbers on the order of octillions to one, which the analyst may describe only as “very strong support for inclusion.” What the wire copy leaves out is that the same analyst, under cross, conceded her software returned a likelihood ratio of exactly one — the value the field calls “uninformative” — for the roommate she still wrote up as a contributor, and that the towel supposedly tying the evidence to Robinson’s home had been fished out of a bush on campus. That exonerates no one. It is the difference between a case that looks airtight in a headline and one you can actually evaluate, and you only get it by reading the whole exchange.

That is the point, and the standard cuts the same way for everyone. The archive takes no position on Robinson’s guilt, which a preliminary hearing does not decide in any event; the bar is only probable cause, and the State is widely expected to clear it. The record is the record, and it belongs to the public.

One caveat, offered plainly: these transcripts come from Grabien’s audio transcription, cleaned by hand — not the court’s certified reporter. They are the fullest working record available right now, not a citation-grade replacement for the official transcript, and anything genuinely ambiguous is flagged as such.

The hearing runs through Friday, with each day added as it wraps. If you’ve only ever seen the headline, read the exchange.

Read the archive: https://news.grabien.com/robinson-prelim-archive

1. Central Park

2. Slaughterhouse-Five

3. Soul music

4. Monster car rallies

5. Potato chips

6. Airplanes

7. Dolly Parton

8. George Washington

9. Elvis

10. March Madness

11. Food trucks

12. Homecoming & prom

13. Langston Hughes

14. Chess Records

15. Benjamin Franklin

16. Donald Byrd

17. The World Series

18. Phish concerts

19. Baywatch

20. Disco

21. Tom Sawyer

22. Frank Sinatra

23. In Cold Blood

24. Disney World

25. Flora-Bama

26. Koreatown

27. The Declaration of Independence

28. SNL in its prime

29. The Empire State Building

30. Waffle fries

31. Video games

32. The Beach Boys

33. John Wayne

34. Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade

35. Jackie Robinson

36. Andrew Jackson

37. Hunter S. Thompson

38. Davy Crockett

39. The Marlboro Man

40. Skateboards

41. George Gershwin

42. Ellis Island

43. The New Yorker

44. Clothes hangers

45. David Lynch

46. Evel Knievel

47. Action Park (RIP)

48. Flash-frozen food

49. Stetson cowboy hats & boots

50. Microprocessors

51. Billie Holiday

52. Popsicles

53. Booker T. Washington

54. Roller skates

55. Nolan Ryan

56. American Spirit cigarettes

57. "Bad," Michael Jackson

58. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

59. Philly cheesesteaks (Pat's)

60. Ethernet

61. County fairs

62. Varsity Blues

63. Groundhog Day

64. Jazz Fest

65. Milkshakes

66. Assembly lines

67. Snowboarding

68. Top Gun

69. 3D printing

70. Chuck Berry

71. The SEC

72. The Waldorf-Astoria

73. Cheeseburgers

74. Toilet paper

75. Broadway

76. Ziploc bags

77. Caddyshack

78. Jesse Owens

79. The Little League World Series

80. GPS

81. Ronald Reagan

82. Monticello

83. Nylon

84. Walking the National Mall on warm summer nights

85. The Indianapolis 500

86. Beat poets

87. Joey "Jaws" Chestnut

88. Scrabble

89. Route 66

90. In-N-Out Burger

91. Light bulbs

92. Coney Island

93. The 4th Amendment

94. Jimi Hendrix

95. SEAL Team Six

96. Rollercoasters

97. Sam Cooke

98. Jackass

99. William F. Buckley

100. Yosemite

101. Blind Boys of Alabama

102. Catch-22

103. Aretha Franklin

104. The Farmer's Almanac

105. Trading Places

106. Charlotte's Web

107. The X Games

108. Motels

109. Amelia Earhart

110. Speakeasies

111. The Slinky

112. Patrick Henry

113. Little Italy

114. Air conditioning

115. Preservation Hall (New Orleans)

116. The New York Post

117. The 7th-inning stretch

118. Johnny Cash

119. Clothespins

120. The Catcher in the Rye

121. The Super Bowl

122. Bill Withers

123. Super Glue

124. Barbie 125. Professional wrestling

126. Rock 'n' roll

127. Chick-fil-A

128. The Washington Capitals

129. Smartphones

130. The 1st Amendment

131. Quentin Tarantino

132. The jukebox

133. Dr. Seuss

134. East Coast boom-bap rap

135. Harriet Tubman

136. Alarm clocks

137. Chia Pets

138. Hulk Hogan

139. Stevie Wonder

140. Drive-in movies

141. Otis Redding

142. William "The Refrigerator" Perry

143. Murray Rothbard

144. The record player

145. Mini golf

146. Comic books

147. Basketball

148. The Alamo

149. Frisbees

150. Nina Simone

151. Pacemakers

152. Tailgating

153. Charles Lindbergh

154. Huckleberry Finn

155. "Bitches Brew" Miles Davis

156. Microbrews (Long Trail = #1)

157. The Washington Redskins

158. The Old Man and the Sea

159. Animal House

160. The U.S. Constitution

161. Stubb's

162. Lady Liberty

163. Where the Wild Things Are

164. The Blues Brothers

165. Death of a Salesman

166. Beastie Boys

167. Po'boys

168. The Twin Towers

169. LED

170. Monopoly

171. Kelly Slater

172. The 10th Amendment

173. Diana Ross & the Supremes

174. The Kentucky Derby

175. Gumbo

176. Thomas Jefferson

177. On the Road

178. Rodeos

179. Thelonious Monk

180. Tony Hawk

181. Blue jeans

182. The Wizard of Oz

183. Deodorant

184. The Boston Tea Party

185. Moby-Dick

186. Morse code

187. James Dean

188. George Foreman

189. Cape May, NJ

190. Plastic

191. The Wall Street Journal

192. Mason jars

193. Run-DMC

194. Rocky

195. Buffalo wings

196. Email

197. Mardi Gras

198. Edgar Allan Poe

199. Las Vegas

200. Fahrenheit 451

201. Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest

202. The NYPD

203. Breakdancing

204. The 2nd Amendment

205. OutKast

206. Lasers

207. Eminem

208. Clam chowder

209. Grant Green

210. Ice cream cones

211. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

212. Straws (plastic)

213. George Clinton & Parliament-Funkadelic

214. Prospect Park

215. James Madison

216. Duct tape

217. Motown

218. Vulcanized rubber

219. Lenny Dykstra (& the '93 Phillies)

220. Funkmaster Flex DJing all of NYC Saturday nights on Hot 97

221. Tupperware

222. Ray Charles

223. A Confederacy of Dunces

224. The electric guitar

225. Telephones

226. The Great Gatsby

227. Grits

228. Thanksgiving

229. Marvin Gaye

230. San Francisco pre-2000s

231. Louis Armstrong

232. Clarence Thomas

233. The Ford F-150

234. Go-go music around Howard University

235. Cars

236. Rockefeller Center (though not the family)

237. The Allman Brothers Band

238. Cal Ripken

239. "The Score," The Fugees

240. Ferris Bueller's Day Off

241. The steel plow

242. Lemonade stands

243. Typewriters

244. Ella Fitzgerald

245. Gone with the Wind

246. Can openers

247. T.S. Eliot

248. Apple (Steve Jobs era)

249. Bunk beds

250. Wu-Tang Clan

America has given us much to be grateful for. Happy Independence Day!

Mamdani’s own emergency release calls air conditioning “the best protection against extreme heat.” So the city has correctly identified the technology standing between you and the morgue, and its official guidance is to use less. And that gets at what this is really about; the one thing the city admits you need, it cannot reliably supply, so the shortfall gets quietly repackaged as your patriotic duty to perspire.

78 is not a temperature, it’s a worldview. It treats one of humanity’s finest inventions as a vice to be rationed, apologized for, and ratcheted a degree warmer every July until we’ve all sportingly agreed to be miserable. And misery, as it happens, is not free of charge. Anything less than air conditioning is a choice to regress, and the data on that is not even close.

Start with the least controversial fact: Air conditioning keeps people from dying. A cohort study that tracked 72,740 Americans through the early 1980s found that those with central air had a death rate 42 percent lower than those without, once you controlled for the usual confounders. When the power failed during U.S. heat waves and people died at home, 91 percent of them either had no working A/C or had switched it off. France, 2003: a heat wave killed roughly 15,000 people, on a continent that long regarded air conditioning as faintly barbaric — the sort of thing Americans do, like putting ice in wine. Maybe the barbarians were onto something.

Heat doesn’t just kill; it makes everyone insufferable. A large literature, gathered by the psychologist Craig Anderson under the tidy banner of “the heat hypothesis,” confirms what anyone stranded on a sweltering subway platform already suspects: people get meaner as the mercury climbs. Road rage, assaults, murders — all of it tracks the temperature. Air conditioning is, among its other services, the most under-appreciated anti-crime program in American history, and no mayor has ever cut a ribbon for it.

It also makes us smarter and richer, which you’d think would earn it some grace. Drop a testing room from 77 to 68 degrees and performance on math and language tasks measurably improves. A century ago, Ellsworth Huntington clocked piece-rate workers and found their output peaked around 60 to 65 degrees — decidedly not in a puddle of their own sweat. Montesquieu got there first, back in 1748, grumbling that heat smothers “bold enterprise.” Every cooled classroom, every cooled office, every refrigerated server farm humming along so you can doomscroll in comfort, is air conditioning compounding quietly into national wealth.

And here is what the 78 crowd always breezes past: air conditioning is one of the most democratic technologies ever built. In 1620, staying cool meant being King James I, who had a Dutch inventor personally chill Westminster Abbey for his royal comfort. In 1948, it meant being a Washington hostess flush enough to charter a Potomac cruise ship to flee the swamp. American engineer Willis Carrier ended all that. Like Ford with the car and Edison with the bulb, his real genius wasn’t the invention but making the thing cheap enough for the masses. American homes with A/C went from about 10 percent in 1960 to roughly 70 percent by 1999. Schumpeter said it best: capitalism’s glory isn’t more silk stockings for the queen, but stockings the factory girl can afford. A 78-degree mandate is that miracle, played in reverse.

Which is the real heresy on offer. Air conditioning is the rare climate technology that bosses no one around. It doesn’t decree one temperature for all; it hands each person a dial. Milton Friedman and the survey researcher Ronald Inglehart — two men who agreed on approximately nothing — both landed on the same finding: human beings, in every culture measured, want to choose for themselves. A citywide 78 is the precise opposite. One number, for 8 million people, chosen by a guy who is not currently in your apartment.

In fairness, I’ll concede the one genuine cost of air conditioning the research turned up. Before it existed, the swampy horror of a Washington summer reliably drove Congress out of town for months at a stretch. A/C let them stay — and pass more laws. So the critics may have a point. Just not the one they think.

The Italian writer Beppe Severgnini once observed that the American refusal to endure the “sweaty indignity” of heat is “the antithesis of passive resignation.” He meant it as a compliment. A 78-degree directive is passive resignation with a comms strategy — Europe’s sweat-and-cope ethos, imported and dressed up as solidarity. As my left-wing friends like to say, we don’t want to turn back the clock. The future cannot be warmer homes for the sake of camaraderie. The future is a working grid, expanded capacity, and a comfortable home climate for every working American family.

On its face the case is about the clause, but it is really about the Court itself. The question the Justices are answering this morning is not only what the 14th Amendment means — it is whether they still consider themselves bound by what it was written to mean, or whether they have quietly become a 9th-and-a-half branch of policymakers, free to bend a ratified text to whatever the current majority happens to want. Those are two fundamentally different jobs, and only one of them belongs to the Court.

And the test is not which side wins. A Court doing its job reads the amendment as the men who wrote it meant it and follows that meaning wherever it leads, including to results that poll badly. A Court that instead reaches for the outcome the moment demands, and reverse-engineers a reading of the text to get there, has stopped interpreting and started legislating. When it does that to relieve political pressure, it does not buy peace. It spends the only asset it actually has, which is the public’s belief that it is applying law rather than preference. That credibility, once spent, does not come back on command.

So set the politics aside and look at the standard the Court is being measured against — because a ruling settles a case, and it does not settle a meaning. The meaning was settled in the Senate on the last day of May 1866, by the men who drafted the words and put them to a vote. Their debate is in the public record. I have read the whole of it_. What it shows is that the people who wrote “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” did not think those words were decorative, and did not think birth on the soil was enough.

Start with the man who wrote it. Senator Jacob Howard of Michigan introduced the clause and told the Senate exactly what it did and did not reach. Birthright citizenship, he said, “will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers.” The clause was a definition built around a qualifier, and the qualifier was doing real work.

What did that qualifier actually require of a person? Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, supplied the definition that the modern reading simply pretends does not exist. “Subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” he explained, “means subject to the complete jurisdiction thereof.” And then, in case anyone missed it: “Not owing allegiance to anybody else. That is what it means.”

That standard meant something more than mere physical presence within the borders. It meant something more than being protected by the laws while a person happens to be here. Subject to the complete jurisdiction, owing allegiance to no one else. Sen. George Williams of Oregon said the same thing in the same debate — the words meant “fully and completely subject to the jurisdiction of the United States,” and he used the child of an ambassador to illustrate the difference between being answerable to American law in some respects and being wholly within American allegiance.

If you want proof that the framers themselves understood birth on the soil to be insufficient, you do not have to infer it — they handed it to you directly. The entire back half of the debate is about American Indians — people indisputably born within the geographic limits of the United States — and the senators agreed, across the aisle and at length, that Indians who maintained tribal relations were not citizens by birth. Howard called these tribes “quasi foreign nations.” Trumbull asked whether anyone seriously believed a tribal Indian was “subject to the complete jurisdiction” of the United States, and answered his own question: “By no means.” These men were born on the soil, and still they were not citizens. The reason given, every single time, was allegiance.

That, in the end, is the whole ballgame. The dividing line the authors drew was allegiance, not geography. The clause they wrote was the codification of a principle Congress had already enacted a few weeks earlier in the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which declared citizens of “all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power.” The drafters defined the jurisdiction requirement by naming its precise opposite.

So how did we arrive at a regime in which the clause is treated as a pure accident of geography — born here, citizen, full stop? It did not happen through the amendment — it happened through the courts. A series of decisions, beginning with United States v. Wong Kim Ark in 1898, layered a broader rule on top of the text until the words came to mean something close to their opposite, and then later courts built on those, and later ones on those. I am not interested in re-litigating whether Wong Kim Ark was rightly decided. I think it was not, and I am not bound to respect a mistake simply because it is old. The point is narrower and harder to dodge: a meaning was assigned to this amendment by judges that the men who wrote it explicitly disclaimed on the floor of the Senate.

Here is what I would say to anyone who wants the broader rule — who genuinely believes the children of people who owe their allegiance to another country should be American citizens at birth. That is an entirely coherent position to hold. You may even be right that it is the better policy. But it is not what was ratified, and the honest way to make it the law is the one the Constitution already provides. Amend the Constitution, because Article V exists for exactly this purpose. Win the argument, assemble the supermajority, and write the rule you want into the text in plain words, the way Howard and Trumbull wrote theirs.

What you do not get to do is rewrite a ratified amendment by accretion — one expansive ruling stacked on the last — and then call the result the original bargain. That was never the bargain anyone actually struck, and the men who struck the real one said so out loud — in a transcript that does not change no matter what is announced from the bench today.

Which is exactly why this morning is a test. The record is fixed, and it is fully public. If the Court reads the amendment as its authors wrote it, it has done its job, whatever the headlines say. If it reaches past that record for the answer the moment prefers, it will have told us something — not about birthright citizenship, but about itself.

***Below, please find a transcript of the ratification debate, which I’ve compiled via The Congressional Globe***

The Senate Debate on Birthright Citizenship — May 30, 1866

Congressional Globe, 39th Congress, 1st Session, pp. 2890–2895. The Senate’s consideration of the citizenship clause of what became the 14th Amendment, then pending as House Joint Resolution No. 127. Reproduced from the original record. Speaker labels and paragraphing have been standardized for readability; the wording is unchanged. Two short passages were cut off in the page images used to transcribe this and are marked in brackets below.

Original scan: babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=osu.32437011560386&seq=129

Mr. HOWARD. I now move to take up House joint resolution No. 127.

The motion was agreed to; and the Senate, as in Committee of the Whole, resumed the consideration of the joint resolution (H. R. No. 127) proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

The PRESIDENT pro tempore. The question is on the amendments proposed by the Senator from Michigan, [Mr. Howard.]

Mr. HOWARD. The first amendment is to section one, declaring that “all persons born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the States wherein they reside.” I do not propose to say anything on that subject except that the question of citizenship has been so fully discussed in this body as not to need any further elucidation, in my opinion.

This amendment which I have offered is simply declaratory of what I regard as the law of the land already, that every person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction, is by virtue of natural law and national law a citizen of the United States. This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the Government of the United States, but will include every other class of persons. It settles the great question of citizenship and removes all doubt as to what persons are or are not citizens of the United States. This has long been a great desideratum in the jurisprudence and legislation of this country.

The PRESIDENT pro tempore. The first amendment proposed by the Senator from Michigan will be read.

The Secretary read the amendment, which was in line nine, after the words “section one,” to insert:

All persons born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the States wherein they reside.

So that the section will read:

Sec. 1. All persons born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the States wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States, nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Mr. DOOLITTLE. I presume the honorable Senator from Michigan does not intend by this amendment to include the Indians. I move, therefore, to amend the amendment — I presume he will have no objection to it — by inserting after the word “thereof” the words “excluding Indians not taxed.” The amendment would then read:

All persons born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, excluding Indians not taxed, are citizens of the United States and of the States wherein they reside.

Mr. HOWARD. I hope that amendment to the amendment will not be adopted. Indians born within the limits of the United States, and who maintain their tribal relations, are not, in the sense of this amendment, born subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. They are regarded, and always have been in our legislation and jurisprudence, as being quasi foreign nations.

Mr. COWAN. The honorable Senator from Michigan has given this subject, I have no doubt, a good deal of his attention, and I am really desirous to have a legal definition of “citizenship of the United States.” What does it mean? What is its length and breadth? I would be glad if the honorable Senator in good earnest would favor us with some such definition. Is the child of the Chinese immigrant in California a citizen? Is the child of a Gypsy born in Pennsylvania a citizen? If so, what rights have they? Have they any more rights than a sojourner in the United States? If a traveler comes here from Ethiopia, from Australia, or from Great Britain, he is entitled, to a certain extent, to the protection of the laws. You cannot murder him with impunity. It is murder to kill him, the same as it is to kill another man. You cannot commit an assault and battery on him, I apprehend. He has a right to the protection of the laws; but he is not a citizen in the ordinary acceptation of the word.

It is perfectly clear that the mere fact that a man is born in the country has not heretofore entitled him to the right to exercise political power. He is not entitled, by virtue of that, to be an elector. An elector is one who is chosen by the people to perform that function, just the same as an officer is one chosen by the people to exercise the franchises of an office.

Now, I should like to know, because really I have been puzzled for a long while and have been unable to determine exactly, either from conversation with those who ought to know, who have given this subject their attention, or from the decisions of the Supreme Court, the lines and boundaries which circumscribe that phrase, “citizen of the United States.” What is it?

So far as the courts and the administration of the laws are concerned, I have supposed that every human being within their jurisdiction was in one sense of the word a citizen, that is, a person entitled to protection; but in so far as the right to hold property, particularly the right to acquire title to real estate, was concerned, that was a subject entirely within the control of the States. It has been so considered in the State of Pennsylvania; and aliens and others who acknowledge no allegiance, either to the State or to the General Government, may be limited and circumscribed in that particular.

I have supposed, further, that it was essential to the existence of society itself, and particularly essential to the existence of a free State, that it should have the power, not only of declaring who should exercise political power within its boundaries, but that if it were overrun by another and a different race, it would have the right to absolutely expel them.

I do not know that there is any danger to many of the States in this Union; but is it proposed that the people of California are to remain quiescent while they are overrun by a flood of immigration of the Mongol race? Are they to be immigrated out of house and home by Chinese? I should think not. It is not supposed that the people of California, in a broad and general sense, have any higher rights than the people of China; but they are in possession of the country of California, and if another people of a different race, of different religion, of different manners, of different traditions, different tastes and sympathies are to come there and have the free right to locate there and settle among them, and if they have an opportunity of pouring in such an immigration as in a short time will double or treble the population of California, I ask, are the people of California powerless to protect themselves?

As I understand the rights of the States under the Constitution at present, California has the right, if she deems it proper, to forbid the entrance into her territory of any person she chooses who is not a citizen of some one of the United States. She cannot forbid his entrance; but unquestionably, if she was likely to be invaded by a flood of Australians or people from Borneo, man-eaters or cannibals if you please, she would have the right to say that those people should not come there. It depends upon the inherent character of the men. Why, sir, there are nations of people with whom theft is a virtue and falsehood a merit. There are people to whom polygamy is as natural as monogamy is with us. It is utterly impossible that these people can meet together and enjoy their several rights and privileges which they suppose to be natural in the same society; and it is necessary, a part of the nature of things, that society shall be more or less exclusive.

It must be evident to every man intrusted with the power and duty of legislation, and qualified to exercise it in a wise and temperate manner, that these things cannot be; and in my judgment there should be some limitation, some definition to this term “citizen of the United States.” What is it? Is it simply to put a man in a condition that he may be an elector in one of the States? Is it to put him in a condition to have the right to enter the United States courts and sue? Or is it only that he is entitled as a sojourner to the protection of the laws while he is within and under the jurisdiction of the courts? Or is it to set him upon some pedestal, some position, to put him out of the reach of State legislation and State power?

Sir, I trust I am as liberal as anybody toward the rights of all people, but I am unwilling, on the part of my State, to give up the right that she claims, and that she may exercise, and exercise before very long, of expelling a certain number of people who invade her borders; who owe to her no allegiance; who pretend to owe none; who recognize no authority in her government; who have a distinct, independent government of their own — an imperium in imperio; who pay no taxes; who never perform military service; who do nothing, in fact, which becomes the citizen, and perform none of the duties which devolve upon him, but, on the other hand, have no homes, pretend to own no land, live nowhere, settle as trespassers wherever they go, and whose sole merit is a universal swindle. I mean the Gypsies. They wander in gangs in my State. They follow no ostensible pursuit for a livelihood.

These people live in the country and are born in the country. They infest society. Are those people, by a constitutional amendment, to be put out of the reach of the State in which they live? I mean as a class. If the mere fact of being born in the country confers that right, then they will have it; and I think it will be mischievous.

I think the honorable Senator from Michigan would not admit the right that the Indians of his neighborhood would have to come in upon Michigan and settle in the midst of that society and obtain the political power of the State, and wield it, perhaps, to his exclusion. I do not know that anybody would agree to that. Therefore I think, before we assert broadly that everybody who shall be born in the United States shall be taken to be a citizen of the United States, we ought to exclude others besides Indians not taxed, because I look upon Indians not taxed as being much less dangerous and much less pestiferous to society than I look upon Gypsies.

I do not know how my honorable friend from California looks upon Chinese, but I do know how some of his fellow-citizens regard them. I have no doubt that now they are useful, and I have no doubt that within proper restraints, allowing that State and the other Pacific States to manage them as they may see fit, they may be useful; but I would not tie their hands by the Constitution of the United States so as to prevent them hereafter from dealing with them as in their wisdom they see fit.

Mr. CONNESS. Mr. President, I have failed to learn, from what the Senator has said, what relation what he has said has to the first section of the constitutional amendment before us; but that part of the question I propose leaving to the honorable gentleman who has charge of this resolution. As, however, the State of California has been so carefully guarded from time to time by the Senator from Pennsylvania and others, and the passage, not only of this amendment, but of the so-called civil rights bill, has been deprecated because of its pernicious influence upon society in California, owing to the contiguity of the Chinese and Mongolians to that favored land, I may be excused for saying a few words on the subject.

If my friend from Pennsylvania, who professes to know all about Gypsies and little about Chinese, knew as much of the Chinese and their habits as he professes to do of the Gypsies, he would not be alarmed in our behalf because of the operation of the proposition before the Senate, or even the proposition contained in the civil rights bill, so far as it involves the Chinese and us.

The proposition before us, I will say, Mr. President, relates simply in that respect to the children begotten of Chinese parents in California, and it is proposed to declare that they shall be citizens. We have declared that by law; now it is proposed to incorporate the same provision in the fundamental instrument of the nation. I am in favor of doing so. I voted for the proposition to declare that the children of all parentage whatever, born in California, should be regarded and treated as citizens of the United States, entitled to equal civil rights with other citizens of the United States.

Now, I will say, for the benefit of my friend, that he may know something about the Chinese in future, that this portion of our population, namely, the children of Mongolian parentage, born in California, is very small indeed, and never promises to be large, notwithstanding our near neighborhood to the Celestial land. The habits of those people, and their religion, appear to demand that they all return to their own country at some time or other, either alive or dead. There are, perhaps, in California today about forty thousand Chinese — from forty to forty-five thousand. Those persons return invariably, while others take their places.

Another feature connected with them is, that they do not bring their females to our country but in very limited numbers, and rarely ever in connection with families; so that their progeny in California is very small indeed. From the description we have had from the honorable Senator from Pennsylvania of the Gypsies, the progeny of all Mongolians in California is not so formidable in numbers as that of the Gypsies in Pennsylvania. We are not troubled with them at all. Indeed, it is only in exceptional cases that they have children in our State; and therefore the alarming aspect of the application of this provision to California, or any other land to which the Chinese may come as immigrants, is simply a fiction in the brain of persons who deprecate it, and that alone.

I wish now to address a few words to what the Senator from Pennsylvania has said as to the rights that California may claim as against the incursion of objectionable population from other States and countries. The State of California at various times has passed laws restrictive of Chinese immigration. It will be remembered that the Chinese came to our State, as others did from all parts of the world, to gather gold in large quantities, it being found there. The interference with our own people in the mines by them was deprecated by and generally objectionable to the miners in California. [Senator Conness’s remarks continued in the original record but were not captured in the source transcription.]

Mr. DOOLITTLE. I moved this amendment because it seems to me very clear that there is a large mass of the Indian population who are clearly subject to the jurisdiction of the United States who ought not to be included as citizens of the United States. All the Indians upon reservations within the several States are most clearly subject to our jurisdiction, both civil and military. We appoint civil agents who have control over them in behalf of the Government. We have our military commanders in the neighborhood of the reservations, who have complete control. For instance, there are seven or eight thousand Navajoes at this moment under the control of General Carlton, in New Mexico, upon the Indian reservations, managed, controlled, fed at the expense of the United States, and fed by the War Department, and at a cost to this Government of almost a million and a half dollars every year.

Are these six or seven thousand Navajoes to be made citizens of the United States? Go into the State of Kansas, and you find there any number of reservations, Indians in all stages, from the wild Indian of the plains, who lives on nothing but the meat of the buffalo, to those Indians who are partially civilized and have partially adopted the habits of civilized life. So it is in other States. In my own State there are the Chippewas, the remnants of the Winnebagos, and the Pottawatomies. There are tribes in the State of Minnesota and other States of the Union. Are these persons to be regarded as citizens of the United States, and by a constitutional amendment declared to be such, because they are born within the United States and subject to our jurisdiction?

Mr. President, the word “citizen,” if applied to them, would bring in all the Digger Indians of California. Perhaps they have mostly disappeared; but there are the Indians of Oregon and the Indians of the Territories. Take Colorado; there are more Indian citizens of Colorado than there are white citizens this moment if you admit it as a State. And yet by a constitutional amendment you propose to declare the Utes, the Tabahuaches, and all those wild Indians to be citizens of the United States, the great Republic of the world, whose citizenship should be a title as proud as that of king, and whose danger is that you may degrade that citizenship.

Mr. President, citizenship, if conferred, carries with it, of course, the rights, the responsibilities, the duties, the immunities, the privileges of citizenship, for that is the very object of this constitutional amendment — to extend. I do not intend to address the Senate at length on this question tonight. I have simply raised the question. I think that it would be exceedingly unwise now to adopt this amendment and to put in the Constitution of the United States the broad language proposed. Our fathers certainly did not act in this way; for in the Constitution as they adopted it they excluded the Indians who are not taxed; did not enumerate them, indeed, as a part of the population upon which they based representation. Our ancestors said that until they took the first step toward civilization, until they broke off the tribal character of the Indians and subjected them to the laws of the United States, they were not citizens.

Mr. TRUMBULL. Of course my opinion is not any better than that of any other member of the Senate; but it is very clear to me that there is nothing whatever in the suggestions of the Senator from Wisconsin. The provision is, that “all persons born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens.” That means “subject to the complete jurisdiction thereof.” Now, does the Senator from Wisconsin pretend to say that the Navajoe Indians are subject to the complete jurisdiction of the United States? What do we mean by “subject to the jurisdiction of the United States”? Not owing allegiance to anybody else. That is what it means.

Can you sue a Navajoe Indian in court? Are they in any sense subject to the complete jurisdiction of the United States? By no means. We make treaties with them, and therefore they are not subject to our jurisdiction. If they were, we would not make treaties with them. If we want to control the Navajoes, or any other Indians of which the Senator from Wisconsin has spoken, how do we do it? Do we pass a law to control them? Are they subject to our jurisdiction in that sense? Is it not understood that if we want to make arrangements with the Indians to whom he refers we do it by means of a treaty? The Senator himself has brought before us a great many treaties this session in order to get control of those people.

If you introduce the words “not taxed,” that is a very indefinite expression. What does “excluding Indians not taxed” mean? You will have just as much difficulty in regard to those Indians that you say are in Colorado, where there are more Indians than there are whites. Suppose they have property there, and it is taxed: then they are citizens.

Mr. WADE. And ought to be.

Mr. TRUMBULL. The Senator from Ohio says they ought to be. If they are there and within the jurisdiction of Colorado, and subject to the laws of Colorado, they ought to be citizens; and that is all that is proposed.

It cannot be said of any Indian who owes allegiance, partial allegiance if you please, to some other Government that he is “subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.” Would the Senator from Wisconsin think for a moment of bringing a bill into Congress to subject these wild Indians with whom we have no treaty to the laws and regulations of civilized life? Would he think of punishing them for instituting among themselves their own tribal regulations? Does the Government of the United States pretend to take jurisdiction of murders and robberies and other crimes committed by one Indian upon another? Are they subject to our jurisdiction in any just sense? They are not subject to our jurisdiction. We do not exercise jurisdiction over them. It is only those persons who come completely within our jurisdiction, who are subject to our laws, that we think of making citizens; and there can be no objection to the proposition that such persons should be citizens.

It seems to me, sir, that to introduce the words suggested by the Senator from Wisconsin would not make the proposition any clearer than it is, and that it by no means embraces, or by any fair construction — by any construction, I may say — could embrace the wild Indians of the plains or any with whom we have treaty relations, for the very fact that we have treaty relations with them shows that they are not subject to our jurisdiction. We cannot make a treaty with ourselves; it would be absurd. I think that the proposition is clear and safe as it is.

Mr. JOHNSON. Mr. President, the particular question before the Senate is whether the amendment proposed by the Senator from Wisconsin shall be adopted. But while I am up, and before I proceed to consider the necessity for that amendment, I will say a word or two upon the proposition itself; I mean that part of section one which is recommended as an amendment to the old proposition as it originally stood.

The Senate are not to be informed that very serious questions have arisen, and some of them have given rise to embarrassments, as to who are citizens of the United States, and what are the rights which belong to them as such; and the object of this amendment is to settle that question. I think, therefore, with the committee to whom the matter was referred, that it is very advisable in some form or other to define what citizenship is; and I know no better way of accomplishing that than the way adopted by the committee.

The Constitution as it now stands recognizes a citizenship of the United States. It provides that no person shall be eligible to the Presidency of the United States except a natural-born citizen, or one who was in the United States at the time of the adoption of the Constitution; it provides that no person shall be eligible to the office of Senator who has not been a citizen of the United States for nine years; but there is no definition in the Constitution as it now stands as to citizenship. Who is a citizen of the United States is an open question. The decision of the courts and the doctrine of the commentators is, that every man who is a citizen of a State becomes ipso facto a citizen of the United States; but there is no definition as to how citizenship can exist in the United States except through the medium of a citizenship in a State.

Now, all that this amendment provides is, that all persons born in the United States and not subject to some foreign Power — for that, no doubt, is the meaning of the committee who have brought the matter before us — shall be considered as citizens of the United States. That would seem to be not only a wise but a necessary provision. If there are to be citizens of the United States entitled everywhere to the character of citizens of the United States, there should be some certain definition of what citizenship is, what has created the character of citizen as between himself and the United States, and the amendment says that citizenship may depend upon birth, and I know of no better way to give rise to citizenship than the fact of birth within the territory of the United States, born of parents who at the time were subject to the authority of the United States.

I am, however, by no means prepared to say, as I think I have intimated before, that being born within the United States, independent of any new constitutional provision on the subject, creates the relation of citizen to the United States.

The amendment proposed by my friend from Wisconsin I think, and I submit it to the Senate, should be adopted. The honorable member from Illinois seems to think it unnecessary, because, according to his interpretation of the amendment as it stands, it excludes those who are proposed to be excluded by the amendment of the Senator from Wisconsin, and he thinks that that is done by saying that those only who are born in the United States are to become citizens thereof, who at the time of birth are “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” and he supposes and states very positively that the Indians are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.

With due deference to my friend from Illinois, I think he is in error. They are within the territorial limits of the United States. If they were not, the provision would be altogether inapplicable to them. In one sense, therefore, they are a part of the people of the United States, and independent of the manner in which we have been dealing with them it would seem to follow necessarily that they are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, as is anybody else who may be born within the limits of the United States.

But when the United States took possession — England for us in the beginning, and our limits have been extended since — of the territory which was originally peopled exclusively by the Indians, we found it necessary to recognize some kind of a national existence on the part of the aboriginal settlers of the United States; but we were under no obligation to do so, and we are under no constitutional obligation to do so now, for although we have been in the habit of making treaties with these several tribes, we have also, from time to time, legislated in relation to the Indian tribes. We punish murder committed within the territorial limits in which the tribes are to be found. I think we punish the crime of murder committed by one Indian upon another Indian. I think my friend from Illinois is wrong in supposing that that is not done.

Mr. TRUMBULL. Not except where it is done under special provision — not with the wild Indians of the plains.

Mr. JOHNSON. By special provision of legislation. That I understand. I am referring to that.

Mr. TRUMBULL. We propose to make citizens of those brought under our jurisdiction in that way. Nobody objects to that, I reckon.

Mr. JOHNSON. Yes, I do. I am not objecting at all to their being citizens now; what I mean to say is, that over all the Indian tribes within the limits of the United States, the United States may — that is the test — exercise jurisdiction. Whether they exercise it in point of fact is another question; whether they propose to govern them under the treaty-making power is quite another question; but the question as to the authority to legislate is one, I think, about which, if we were to exercise it, the courts would have no doubt; and when, therefore, the courts come to consider the meaning of this provision, that all persons born within the limits of the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens, and are called upon to decide whether Indians born within the United States, with whom we are now making treaties, are citizens, I think they will decide that they have become citizens by virtue of this amendment.

But at any rate, without expressing any decided opinion to that effect, when the honorable member from Wisconsin, to say nothing of myself, entertains a reasonable doubt that Indians would be embraced within the provision, what possible harm can there be in guarding against it? It does not affect the constitutional amendment in any way.

The honorable member from Illinois says that the terms which the member from Wisconsin proposes to insert would leave it very uncertain. I suppose that my friend from Illinois agreed to the second section of this constitutional amendment, and these terms are used in that section. In apportioning the representation, as you propose to do by virtue of the second section, you exclude from the basis “Indians not taxed.” What does that mean? The honorable member from Illinois says that is very uncertain. What does it mean? It means, or would mean if inserted in the first section, nothing, according to the honorable member from Illinois. Well, if it means nothing inserted in the first section it means nothing where it is proposed to insert it in the second section.

But I think my friend from Illinois will find that these words are clearly understood and have always been understood; they are now almost technical terms. They are found, I think, in nearly all the statutes upon the subject; and if I am not mistaken, the particular statute upon which my friend from Illinois so much relied as one necessary to the peace of the country, the civil rights bill, has the same provision in it, and that bill I believe was prepared altogether, or certainly principally, by my friend from Illinois. I read now from the civil rights bill as it passed:

That all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign Power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens.

What did these words mean? They meant something; and their meaning as they are inserted in that act is the same meaning which will be given to them if they are inserted in the first section of this constitutional amendment.

But I conclude by saying that when we are trying to settle this, among other questions, for all time, it is advisable — and if my friend will permit me to say so, our clear duty — to put every provision which we adopt in such plain language as not to be capable of two interpretations, if we can. When Senators upon the floor maintain the opinion that as it now stands it is capable of an interpretation different from that which the committee mean, and the amendment proposed gets clear of that interpretation which the committee do not mean, why should we not adopt it? I hope, therefore, that the friends of this constitutional amendment will accept the suggestion of the honorable member from Wisconsin.

Mr. TRUMBULL. The Senator from Maryland certainly perceives a distinction between the use of the words “excluding Indians not taxed” in the second section and in the first. The second section is confined to the States; it does not embrace the Indians of the plains at all. That is a provision in regard to the apportionment of representation among the several States.

Mr. JOHNSON. The honorable member did not understand me. I did not say it meant the same thing.

Mr. TRUMBULL. I understood the Senator, I think. I know he did not say that the clause in the second section was extended all over the country, but he did say that the words “excluding Indians not taxed” were in the second section, and inasmuch as I had said that those words were of uncertain meaning, therefore, having gone for the words in the second section I was guilty of a great inconsistency. Now, I merely wish to show the Senator from Maryland that the words in the second section may have a very clear and definite meaning, when in the first section they would have a very uncertain meaning, because they are applied under very different circumstances.

The second section refers to persons except those in the States of the Union; but the first section refers to persons everywhere, whether in the States or in the Territories or in the District of Columbia. Therefore the criticism upon the language that I had used, it seems to me, is not a just one.

But the Senator wants to insert the words, “excluding Indians not taxed.” I am not willing to make citizenship in this country de—— [a few words were not captured in the source transcription] I am not willing, if the Senator from Wisconsin is, that the rich Indian residing in the State of New York shall be a citizen and the poor Indian residing in the State of New York shall not be a citizen. If you put in those words in regard to citizenship, what do you do? You make a distinction in that respect, if you put it on the ground of taxation.

We had a discussion on the civil rights bill as to the meaning of these words, “excluding Indians not taxed.” The Senator from Maryland, [Mr. Johnson,] I think, on that occasion gave this definition to the phrase “excluding Indians not taxed,” that it did not allude to the fact of taxation simply but it meant to describe a class of persons; that is, civilized Indians. I was inclined to fall into that view. I was inclined to adopt the suggestion of the Senator from Maryland, that the words “excluding Indians not taxed” did not mean literally excluding those upon whom a tax was not assessed and collected, but rather meant to define a class of persons, meaning civilized Indians; and I think I gave that answer to the Senator from Indiana, [Mr. Hendricks,] who was disposed to give it the technical meaning that “Indians not taxed” meant simply those upon whom no tax was laid. If it does mean that, then it would be very objectionable to insert those words here, because it would make of a wealthy Indian a citizen and would not make a citizen of one not possessed of wealth under the same circumstances. This is the uncertainty in regard to the meaning of these words.

The Senator from Maryland and myself, perhaps, would understand them alike as embracing all Indians who were not civilized; and yet, if you insert that language, “Indians not taxed,” other persons may not understand them that way; and I remember that the Senator from Indiana was disposed to understand them differently when we had the discussion upon the civil rights bill. Therefore I think it better to avoid these words and that the language proposed in this constitutional amendment is better than the language in the civil rights bill. The object to be arrived at is the same.

I have already replied to the suggestion as to the Indians being subject to our jurisdiction. They are not subject to our jurisdiction in the sense of owing allegiance solely to the United States; and the Senator from Maryland, if he will look into our statutes, will search in vain for any means of trying these wild Indians. A person can only be tried for a criminal offense in pursuance of laws, and he must be tried in a district which must have been fixed by law before the crime was committed. We have had in this country, and have today, a large region of country within the territorial limits of the United States, unorganized, over which we do not pretend to exercise any civil or criminal jurisdiction, where wild tribes of Indians roam at pleasure, subject to their own laws and regulations, and we do not pretend to interfere with them. They would not be embraced by this provision. For these reasons I think this language is better than the language employed by the civil rights bill.

Mr. HENDRICKS. Will the Senator from Illinois allow me to ask him a question before he sits down?

Mr. TRUMBULL. Certainly.

Mr. HENDRICKS. I wish to know if, in his opinion, it is not a matter of pleasure on the part of the Government of the United States, and especially of Congress, whether the laws of the United States be extended over the Indians or not; if it is not a matter to be decided by Congress alone whether we treat with the Indians by treaty or govern them by direct law; in other words, whether Congress has not the power at its pleasure to extend the laws of the United States over the Indians and to govern them.

Mr. TRUMBULL. I suppose it would have the same power that it has to extend the laws of the United States over Mexico and govern her if in our discretion we thought proper to extend the laws of the United States over the republic of Mexico, or the empire of Mexico, if you please so to call it, and had sufficient physical power to enforce it. I suppose you may say in this case we have the power to do it, but it would be a violation of the faith of this nation to extend our laws over these Indian tribes with whom we have made treaties saying we would not do it.

Mr. FESSENDEN. We could extend it over Mexico in the same way.

Mr. TRUMBULL. I say we could extend it over Mexico just as well; that is, if we have the power to do it. Congress might declare war, or, without declaring war, might extend its laws, or profess to extend them, over Mexico, and if we had the power we could enforce that declaration; but I think it would be a breach of good faith on our part to extend the laws of the United States over the Indian tribes with whom we have these treaty stipulations, and in which treaties we have agreed that we would not make them subject to the laws of the United States. There are numerous treaties of that kind.

Mr. VAN WINKLE. If the Senator will permit me, I wish to remind him of a citation from a decision of the Supreme Court that he himself made here, I think, when the veto of the civil rights bill was under discussion; and if I correctly understood it, as he read it, the Supreme Court decided that these untaxed Indians were subjects, and distinguished between subjects and citizens.

Mr. TRUMBULL. I think there are decisions that treat them as subjects in some respects. In some sense they are regarded as within the territorial boundaries of the United States, but I do not think they are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States in any legitimate sense; certainly not in the sense that the language is used here. The language seems to me to be better chosen than it was in the other bill. There is a difficulty about the words, “Indians not taxed.” Perhaps one of the reasons why I think so is because of the persistency with which the Senator from Indiana himself insisted that the phrase “excluding Indians not taxed,” the very words which the Senator from Wisconsin wishes to insert here, would exclude everybody that did not pay a tax; that that was the meaning of it; we must take it literally. The Senator from Maryland did not agree to that, nor did I; but if the Senator from Indiana was right, it would receive a construction which I am sure the Senator from Wisconsin would not be for; for if these Indians come within our limits and within our jurisdiction and are civilized, he would just as soon make a citizen of a poor Indian as of the rich Indian.

Mr. HENDRICKS. I expected the Senator from Illinois, being a very able lawyer, at the head of the Judiciary Committee, to meet the question that I asked him and to answer it as a question of law, and not as a question of military power. I did not ask him the question whether the Government of the United States had the military power to go into the Indian territory and subjugate the Indians to the political power of the country; nor had he a right to understand the question in that sense. I asked him the question whether, under the Constitution, under the powers of this Government, we may extend our laws over the Indians and compel obedience, as a matter of legal right, from the Indians. If the Indian is bound to obey the law he is subject to the jurisdiction of the country; and that is the question I desired the Senator to meet as a legal question, whether the Indian would be bound to obey the law which Congress in express terms extended over him in regard to questions within the jurisdiction of Congress.

Now, sir, this question has once or twice been decided by the Attorney General, so far as he could decide it. In 1856 he inquired whether the laws of the United States regulating the intercourse with the Indian tribes, by the general legislation in regard to Oregon, had been extended to Oregon; and he gave it as his opinion that the laws had been extended to Oregon, and regulated the intercourse between the white people and the Indians there. Subsequently, the Attorney General was asked whether Indians were citizens of the United States in such sense as that they could become the owners of the public lands where the right to acquire them was limited to citizens; and in the course of that opinion he says that the Indian is not a citizen of the United States by virtue of his birth, but that he is a subject. He says:

The simple truth is plain that the Indians are the subjects of the United States, and therefore are not, in virtue of home-birth, citizens of the United States. The two conditions are incompatible. The moment it comes to be seen that the Indians are domestic subjects of this Government, that moment it is clear to the perception that they are not the sovereign constituent ingredients of the Government. This distinction between citizens proper, that is, the constituent members of the political sovereignty, and subjects of that sovereignty, who are not therefore citizens, is recognized in the best authorities of public law.

He then cites some authorities. Again, he says:

Not being citizens of the United States by mere birth, can they become so by naturalization? Undoubtedly. But they cannot become citizens by naturalization under existing general acts of Congress.

Mr. JOHNSON. Whose opinion is that?

Mr. HENDRICKS. That is the opinion of Mr. Cushing, given on the 6th of July, 1856. I did not intend to discuss this question, but I will make one further reply to the Senator from Illinois. When the civil rights bill was under consideration I was of the opinion that the term “not taxed” meant not taxed; and when words are plain in the law I take them in their natural sense. When there is no ambiguity the law says there shall be no construction; and when you say a man is not taxed I presume it means that he is not taxed. I do not know any words that express the meaning more clearly than the words themselves, and therefore I cannot express the meaning in any more apt words than the words used by the Senator from Wisconsin, “Indians not taxed.”

If it is the pleasure of Congress to make the wild Indians of the desert citizens, and then if three fourths of the States agree to it, I presume we will get along the best way we can; and what shall then be the relations between these people and the United States will be for us and for our descendants to work out. They are not now citizens; they are subjects. For safety, as a matter of policy we regulate our intercourse with them to a large extent by treaties, so as that they shall assent to the regulations that govern them. That is a matter of policy, but we need not treat with an Indian. We can make him obey our laws, and being liable to such obedience he is subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. I did not intend to discuss this question, but I got into it by the inquiry I made of the Senator from Illinois.

Mr. HOWARD. I hope, sir, that this amendment will not be adopted. I regard the language of the section as sufficiently certain and definite. If amended according to the suggestion of the honorable Senator from Wisconsin it will read as follows:

All persons born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, excluding Indians not taxed, are citizens of the United States, and of the State wherein they reside.

Suppose we adopt the amendment as suggested by the honorable Senator from Wisconsin, in what condition will it leave us as to the Indian tribes wherever they are found? According to the ideas of the honorable Senator, as I understand them, this consequence would follow: all that would remain to be done on the part of any State would be to impose a tax upon the Indians, whether in their tribal condition or otherwise, in order to make them citizens of the United States. Does the honorable Senator from Wisconsin contemplate that? Does he propose to leave this amendment in such a condition that the State of Wisconsin will have the right to impose taxes upon the Indian tribes within her limits, and thus make of these Indians constituting the tribes, no matter how numerous, citizens of the United States and of the State of Wisconsin? That would be the direct effect of his amendment if it should be adopted. It would, in short, be a naturalization, whenever the States saw fit to impose a tax upon the Indians, of the whole Indian race within the limits of the States.

Mr. CLARK. The Senator will permit me to suggest a case. Suppose the State of Kansas, for instance, should tax her Indians for five years, they would be citizens.

Mr. HOWARD. Undoubtedly.

Mr. CLARK. But if she refuse to tax them for the next ten years how would they be then? Would they be citizens or not?

Mr. HOWARD. I take it for granted that when a man becomes a citizen of the United States under the Constitution he cannot cease to be a citizen, except by expatriation or the commission of some crime by which his citizenship shall be forfeited.

Mr. CLARK. If it depends upon taxation—

Mr. HOWARD. The continuance of the quality of citizenship would not, I think, depend upon the continuance of taxation.

Mr. CLARK. But still he would be an “Indian not taxed.”

Mr. HOWARD. He has been taxed once.

Mr. CLARK. The point I wish to bring the Senator to is this: would not the admission of a provision of that kind make a sort of shifting use of the Indians?

Mr. HOWARD. It might, depending upon the construction which would happen to be given by the courts to the language of the Constitution. The great objection, therefore, to the amendment is, that it is an actual naturalization, whenever the State sees fit to enact a naturalization law in reference to the Indians in the shape of the imposition of a tax, of the whole Indian population within their limits. There is no evading this consequence, but still I cannot impute to the honorable Senator from Wisconsin a purpose like that. I think he has misapprehended the effect of the language which he suggests. I think the language as it stands is sufficiently certain and exact. It is that “all persons born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

I concur entirely with the honorable Senator from Illinois, in holding that the word “jurisdiction,” as here employed, ought to be construed so as to imply a full and complete jurisdiction on the part of the United States, coextensive in all respects with the constitutional power of the United States, whether exercised by Congress, by the executive, or by the judicial department; that is to say, the same jurisdiction in extent and quality as applies to every citizen of the United States now. Certainly, gentlemen cannot contend that an Indian belonging to a tribe, although born within the limits of a State, is subject to this full and complete jurisdiction. That question has long since been adjudicated, so far as the usage of the Government is concerned. The Government of the United States have always regarded and treated the Indian tribes within our limits as foreign Powers, so far as the treaty-making power is concerned, and also — especially as the commercial power is concerned — for in the very Constitution itself there is a provision that Congress shall have power to regulate commerce, not only with foreign nations and among the States, but also with the Indian tribes. That clause, in my judgment, presents a full and complete recognition of the national character of the Indian tribes, the same character in which they have been recognized ever since the discovery of the continent and its occupation by civilized men.

They have always been regarded, even in our ante-revolutionary history, as being independent nations, with whom the other nations of the earth have held treaties, and in no case, I believe, has either the Government of Great Britain or of the United States recognized the right of an individual Indian to transfer or convey lands. Why? If he was a citizen, in other words, if he was not a subject of a foreign Power, if he did not belong to a tribe whose common law is that land as well as almost every other description of property shall be held in common among the members of the tribe, subject to a chief, why is it that the reservation has been imposed and always observed upon the act of conveyance on the part of the Indian?

The opinion of Attorney General Cushing, one of the ablest men who has ever occupied the position of Attorney General, has been read here, in which he states clearly that the Indians, though born upon our soil, owing us allegiance, are not citizens; they are our subjects; and that is the very word which is used in this amendment proposed to the Constitution of the United States, declaring that if they be “subject” to our jurisdiction, born on our soil, they are, ipso facto, citizens of the United States.

Mr. President, the celebrated civil rights bill which has been passed during the present Congress, which was the forerunner of this constitutional amendment, and to give validity to which this constitutional amendment is brought forward, uses the following language:

That all persons born in the United States, and not subject to any foreign Power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States.

Why should this language be criticized any more now, when it is brought forward here in this constitutional amendment, than when it was in the civil rights bill? Why should the language be more criticized here than it is in the second section of this constitutional amendment, where the same words are used? The second section, in apportioning representation, proposes to count the whole number of persons in each State, “excluding Indians not taxed.” Why not insert those words in the first section as well as in the second? But, sir, the committee of fifteen, fearing that this declaration by Congress was without validity unless a constitutional amendment should be brought forward to enforce it, have thought proper to report this amendment.

Mr. FESSENDEN. I want to say to the honorable Senator, who has a great regard for truth, that he is drawing entirely upon his imagination. There is not one word of correctness in all that he is saying, not a particle, not a scintilla, not the beginning of truth.

Mr. DOOLITTLE. I take a little issue with my friend from Maine on that point as a question of fact.

Mr. FESSENDEN. In the first place, this was not brought forward by the committee of fifteen at all.

Mr. DOOLITTLE. This proposition was first introduced into the House by a gentleman from Ohio by the name of Bingham.

Mr. FESSENDEN. I thought the Senator was speaking of this first part of the section, the amendment, not the whole.

Mr. DOOLITTLE. No, sir; that is proposed by the Senator from Michigan. As I understand, a member from Ohio, Mr. Bingham, who in a very able speech in the House maintained that the civil rights bill was without any authority in the Constitution, brought forward a proposition in the House of Representatives to amend the Constitution so as to enable Congress to declare the civil rights of all persons, and that constitutional amendment, Mr. Bingham being himself one of the committee of fifteen, was referred by the House to that committee, and from the committee it has been reported. I say I have a right to infer that it was because Mr. Bingham and others of the House of Representatives and other persons upon the committee had doubts, at least, as to the constitutionality of the civil rights bill that this proposition to amend the Constitution now appears to give it validity and force. It is not an imputation upon any one.

Mr. GRIMES. It is an imputation upon every member who voted for the bill, the inference being legitimate and logical that they violated their oaths and knew they did so when they voted for the civil rights bill.

Mr. DOOLITTLE. The Senator goes too far. What I say is that they had doubts.

Mr. FESSENDEN. I will say to the Senator one thing: whatever may have been Mr. Bingham’s motives in bringing it forward, he brought it forward some time before the civil rights bill was considered at all and had it referred to the committee, and it was discussed in the committee long before the civil rights bill was passed. Then I will say to him further, that during all the discussion in the committee that I heard nothing was ever said about the civil rights bill in connection with that. It was placed on entirely different grounds.

Mr. DOOLITTLE. I will ask the Senator from Maine this question: if Congress, under the Constitution, now has the power to declare that “all persons born in the United States, and not subject to any foreign Power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States,” what is the necessity of amending the Constitution at all on this subject?

Mr. FESSENDEN. I do not choose that the Senator shall get off from the issue he presented. I meet him right there on the first issue. If he wants my opinion upon other questions, he can ask it afterward. He was saying that the committee of fifteen brought this proposition forward for a specific object.

Mr. DOOLITTLE. I said the committee of fifteen brought it forward because they had doubts as to the constitutional power of Congress to pass the civil rights bill.

Mr. FESSENDEN. Exactly; and I say, in reply, that if they had doubts, no such doubts were stated in the committee of fifteen, and the matter was not put on that ground at all. There was no question raised about the civil rights bill.

Mr. DOOLITTLE. Then I put the question to the Senator: if there are no doubts, why amend the Constitution on that subject?

Mr. FESSENDEN. That question the Senator may answer to suit himself. It has no reference to the civil rights bill.

Mr. DOOLITTLE. That does not meet the case at all. If my friend maintains that at this moment the Constitution of the United States, without amendment, gives all the power you ask, why do you put this new amendment into it on that subject?

Mr. HOWARD. If the Senator from Wisconsin wishes an answer, I will give him one such as I am able to give.

Mr. DOOLITTLE. I was asking the Senator from Maine.

Mr. HOWARD. I was a member of the same committee, and the Senator’s observations apply to me equally with the Senator from Maine. We desired to put this question of citizenship and the rights of citizens and freedmen under the civil rights bill beyond the legislative power of such gentlemen as the Senator from Wisconsin, who would pull the whole system up by the roots and destroy it, and expose the freedmen again to the oppressions of their old masters.

Mr. DOOLITTLE. The Senator has made his answer, I suppose.

Mr. HOWARD. Yes, sir.

Mr. DOOLITTLE. Mr. President, when the Senator undertakes to say that I have any disposition to subject the freedmen to the despotism of their old masters, he says that which there is not a particle of foundation or excuse for saying. I say to that Senator—

Mr. HOWARD. I beg the Senator to allow me one word. I made no personal imputation against the Senator from Wisconsin.

Mr. DOOLITTLE. I desire to finish my sentence before being interrupted.

Mr. HOWARD. I will not be forced by the Senator into a false position.

Mr. DOOLITTLE. I do not desire to be interrupted until I finish one sentence. I say to that Senator that so far as the rights of the freedmen are concerned, I am willing to compare my course of action in this body or elsewhere with his. I say to that Senator that I labored as hard as he has labored to secure the rights and liberties of the freedmen, to emancipate the slaves of the South, and to put an end forever not only to slavery, but to the aristocracy that was founded upon it.

Mr. WILLIAMS. I would not agree to this proposed constitutional amendment if I supposed it made Indians not taxed citizens of the United States. But I am satisfied that, giving to the amendment a fair and reasonable construction, it does not include Indians not taxed. The first and second sections of this proposed amendment are to be taken together, are to be construed together, and the meaning of the word “citizens,” as employed in both sections, is to be determined from the manner in which that word is used in both of those sections. Section one provides that:

All persons born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

If there be any doubt about the meaning of that paragraph, I think that doubt is entirely removed by the second section, for by the second section of this constitutional amendment Indians not taxed are not counted at all in the basis of representation. The words in the second section are as follows:

Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within the Union, according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed.

They are not to be regarded as persons to be counted under any circumstances. Indians not taxed are not even entitled to be counted as persons in the basis of representation under any circumstances; and then the section provides:

But whenever, in any State, the elective franchise shall be denied to any portion of its male inhabitants, being citizens of the United States...

Now, can any reasonable man conclude that the word “citizens” there applies to Indians not taxed, or includes Indians not taxed, when they are expressly excluded from the basis of representation and cannot even be taken into the enumeration of persons upon whom representation is to be based? I think it is perfectly clear, when you put the first and second sections together, that Indians not taxed are excluded from the term “citizens”; because it cannot be supposed for one moment that the term “citizens,” as employed in these two sections, is intended to apply to Indians who are not even counted under any circumstances as a part of the basis of representation. I therefore think that the amendment of the Senator from Wisconsin is clearly unnecessary. I do not believe that “Indians not taxed” are included, and I understand that to be a description of Indians who maintain their tribal relations and who are not in all respects subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.

In one sense, all persons born within the geographical limits of the United States are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, but they are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States in every sense. Take the child of an ambassador. In one sense, that child born in the United States is subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, because if that child commits the crime of murder, or commits any other crime against the laws of the country, to a certain extent he is subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, but not in every respect; and so with these Indians. All persons living within a judicial district may be said, in one sense, to be subject to the jurisdiction of the court in that district, but they are not in every sense subject to the jurisdiction of the court until they are brought, by proper process, within the reach of the power of the court. I understand the words here, “subject to the jurisdiction of the United States,” to mean fully and completely subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. If there was any doubt as to the meaning of those words, I think that doubt is entirely removed and explained by the words in the subsequent section; and believing that, in any court or by any intelligent person, these two sections would be construed not to include Indians not taxed, I do not think the amendment is necessary.

Mr. SAULSBURY. I do not presume that any one will pretend to disguise the fact that the object of this first section is simply to declare that negroes shall be citizens of the United States. There can be no other object in it, I presume, than a further extension of the legislative kindness and beneficence of Congress toward that class of people.

The poor Indian, whose untutored mind, Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind,

was not thought of. I say this not meaning it to be any reflection upon the honorable committee who reported the amendment, because for all the gentlemen composing it I have a high respect personally; but that is evidently the object. I have no doubt myself of the correctness of the position, as a question of law, taken by the honorable Senator from Wisconsin; but, sir, I feel disposed to vote against his amendment, because if these negroes are to be made citizens of the United States, I can see no reason in justice or in right why the Indians should not be made citizens. If our citizens are to be increased in this wholesale manner, I cannot turn my back upon that persecuted race, among whom are many intelligent, educated men, and embrace as fellow-citizens the negro race. I therefore, as at present advised, for the reasons I have given, shall vote against the proposition of my friend from Wisconsin, although I believe, as a matter of law, that his statements are correct.

The PRESIDENT pro tempore. The question is on the amendment of the Senator from Wisconsin to the amendment proposed by the Senator from Michigan.

Mr. DOOLITTLE. I ask for the yeas and nays on that question.

The yeas and nays were ordered.

The release came with the now-routine arithmetic of FOIA processing: 250 pages reviewed, 38 pages released, 51 pages withheld entirely. An additional seven pages had been previously sent to “other government agencies” for consultation; six of those were returned and released. The total visible footprint of this tranche, after redactions, is 44 pages — roughly 17 percent of what was processed.

That ratio, for a case file on the most consequential domestic political shooting in a generation, is its own data point. What is left after the redactions raises a series of questions the documents do not answer — and several of them are questions the press did not press the first time around.

What the Bureau is actually withholding

The release is governed, on its face, by the standard FOIA exemptions: b6 and b7C for personal privacy, b7A for ongoing law enforcement proceedings, b7E for law enforcement techniques and procedures, and b5 for the deliberative-process privilege. These are the same exemptions that appear in routine FOIA releases on traffic-camera footage and pension audits.

What is unusual here is the sealing order. The deletion sheets attached to the release show, in this single tranche, that pages 68–69, 85–180, and a long subsequent run are withheld in their entirety under the notation “OTHER — Sealed Pursuant to Court Order.”

That is roughly 150 pages, in a single release, withheld not under any FOIA exemption — but under a court order whose origin, scope, and duration the Department of Justice has not publicly identified. The cover letter does not name the court. It does not name the proceeding. It does not name the underlying parties whose interest the seal protects. It simply states that the pages are sealed, and that, as a matter of FOIA processing, the Bureau has nothing further to release.

A court order can attach to many things. It can attach to a grand jury proceeding (Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6(e)). It can attach to materials obtained under the Stored Communications Act. It can attach to sealed search warrants and their returns. It can attach to a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order. The release does not tell us which.

In a case where the shooter is dead and no co-conspirator has been publicly named or charged, the existence of a sealing order covering roughly two-thirds of the processed pages is, on its own, a fact worth noting. The Bureau is not invoking national security. It is not invoking an ongoing prosecution against a named defendant. It is invoking a seal whose justification is not described.

The Counterterrorism Division pivots within four days

Among the documents that are released — at least in skeletal form — is an electronic communication from the Counterterrorism Division, dated July 17, 2024, four days after the shooting.

The EC’s subject line is redacted. Its enclosed “search terms” are redacted. Its operational parameters are redacted. Its assessment of what the FBI “assesses” about the post-Butler threat environment is redacted. What survives the redactions is the framing: the document authorizes a monitoring tool — the tool’s name is itself blacked out — to “identify potential threats in violation of federal law posted in the days following the attempted assassination of former President Donald J. Trump.” It explicitly notes “the likelihood of this event impacting the domestic violent extremist (DVE) threat.”

The EC closes with the standard disclaimer: “No investigative activity may be conducted for the sole purpose of monitoring the exercise of First Amendment rights.”

That disclaimer is boilerplate, which the FBI attaches to documents that authorize precisely the kind of activity the disclaimer is designed to deny was happening. Its presence is not evidence of impropriety. Its presence is, however, a tell about the category of activity being authorized.

The Bureau pivoted, within four days of the shooting, from investigating the shooter to monitoring the online reaction to the shooter, under the DVE framing. That is not, on its own, scandalous. It is, however, the kind of operational detail that did not appear in the public account of the post-Butler investigation and that the public has a legitimate interest in understanding.

Two interviews at the Cranberry Marriott, redacted “per ICE”

On July 14, 2024 — the day after the shooting — FBI agents conducted at least two interviews at the Marriott Hotel in Cranberry Township, Pennsylvania, located at 100 Cranberry Woods Drive, about 22 miles south of the Butler fairgrounds.

The first interview began at approximately 1830 hours. The second began at approximately 1900 hours. Both are documented in standard FD-302 interview reports. Both subjects’ names, dates of birth, addresses, and telephone numbers are redacted. Both subjects’ entire substantive responses — running for a full page each — are redacted under a combination of b6, b7C, and b7E, with the unusual notation “per ICE” appearing in the exemption column.

The “per ICE” annotation is the operative detail. FBI FOIA productions sometimes carry the marking when responsive material has been routed through another agency for consultation, and the consulting agency has asserted exemptions independently of the Bureau’s own analysis. Immigration and Customs Enforcement asserting b6, b7C, and b7E over the entirety of two interviews conducted the day after the Butler shooting tells us two things.

First, at least one — and probably both — of these interviewees fell within ICE’s jurisdictional interest. ICE’s authorities cover, in the main, individuals with immigration status questions, individuals tied to transnational criminal organizations, individuals subject to deportation or removal proceedings, and individuals connected to Homeland Security investigations. It does not assert FOIA exemptions over routine domestic witnesses. Two interviews conducted in the same hotel on the same evening, the day after the shooting, with the entire substantive body redacted at ICE’s insistence, points toward foreign-national witnesses, witnesses with visa-status issues, or witnesses connected to an ongoing HSI matter.

Second, the Bureau itself has not described who these interviewees were, in any of the public-facing materials issued in the 18 months since the shooting. The Crooks investigation has been characterized, repeatedly, by senior FBI and DOJ officials as a lone-shooter matter with no co-conspirators and no nexus to any foreign actor. The Cranberry Marriott interviews do not refute that characterization. They do not, on the visible record, do anything. But the redaction pattern indicates the Bureau spoke, the day after the shooting, with witnesses important enough that another federal agency intervened to maintain their identities and substantive accounts under seal.

The press has not, to the best of public reporting, accounted for who was interviewed at the Cranberry Marriott on the evening of July 14, 2024. Judicial Watch’s litigation may eventually establish that. The visible documents do not.

The two unidentified subjects on Meridian Drive

A separate FD-302, dated July 17, 2024, summarizes the telephone interview of a witness who was present at the Trump rally and who describes, in detail, two unidentified subjects on the perimeter of the AGR property in the hour before the shooting — neither of whom is Crooks.

The witness — name, contact information, and home address redacted — describes:

UNSUB1: a Caucasian male, approximately five-foot-nine to five-foot-ten, broad build, brown hair, driving a “later model (2000’s) red Chevrolet pick-up truck.” The witness reports that UNSUB1 pulled into the parking lot near the water tower between 4:30 and 5:00 PM, exited his vehicle, began screaming at spectators, demanding everyone get off the property, then left the scene — and returned twice to observe the spectators from his vehicle.

UNSUB2: a Caucasian male, approximately five-foot-ten to six feet, broad build, short hair, wearing a “grey shirt with fatigue patterned pants” and carrying what the witness described as “a black camera bag.” UNSUB2 was observed walking on Meridian Drive toward the AGR building and entered the AGR building. He was not seen again before the shooting.

The 302 ends without indicating that either UNSUB was identified, interviewed, or excluded. The witness’s separate description of the shooter himself — “brown, long and straight” hair, “large forehead” — is consistent with Crooks’s photo identification. UNSUB1 and UNSUB2 are described as separate from the shooter.

This may be nothing. Rallies attract a large number of unaffiliated and excitable people; an angry pickup driver shouting at spectators is consistent with a property owner, a hostile neighbor, or any number of mundane categories. A man with a “camera bag” entering an event-adjacent building during preparations for a major political rally may be press, security, vendor staff, or building personnel. The witness’s account is uncorroborated and recorded in a single 302.

What the document does not show is any indication that the Bureau identified, located, or interviewed either UNSUB. That absence may reflect a successful identification recorded elsewhere in the file — perhaps in the 150 pages currently under seal. It may reflect that the Bureau looked and could not find them. Or it may reflect that the witness’s account, having been recorded, was filed and not pursued.

The public has not been told which.

The cooperator with the protected institutional context

The first 302 in the release, from July 17, 2024, summarizes an email exchange with a witness whose institutional relationship to Crooks is wholly redacted but who recalls him as an unremarkable young man.

The quoted line is in keeping with the broader public narrative: quiet kid, no red flags, modest ambitions. What is interesting is not the line. It is what is being protected around it.

The witness writes that her preference is email “so I can fit responding in during my working time at [redacted] (typically only on Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons this summer).” She describes “components” of “[redacted] [redacted].” She refers to “interactions” with Crooks “related to [redacted].” She mentions “[redacted]” attended by Crooks in particular “[redacted]” contexts.

What is being concealed is not the witness’s name. The name is protected by b6 and b7C, which is unremarkable. What is being concealed, behind heavier b7E stacking, is the institutional context in which a person who anticipated Crooks “would go on to be an engineer” interacted with him. The b7E exemption protects “techniques and procedures for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions.” That is an unusual exemption to apply to a witness’s workplace — unless the workplace itself, or the witness’s role in it, falls within a category the Bureau treats as a sensitive technique or procedure.

That is the kind of detail that, in any normal mass-casualty investigation, is part of the public timeline within the first week — the high school teacher, the after-school program coordinator, the community college instructor. Here, 18 months later, it remains redacted under an exemption designed to protect operational tradecraft.

The document does not tell us what kind of institution this was. It tells us only that the Bureau treats the question as one that b7E protects.

The pattern this release fits into

A few caveats are in order before the larger point.

This is one tranche in an ongoing FOIA production. Judicial Watch is litigating; further releases will follow; some of what is currently sealed may eventually be unsealed. The Bureau is operating under court supervision in this matter, and the seal — whatever it is — was presumably entered by a federal judge after some adversarial or quasi-adversarial process. The redactions are not, by themselves, evidence of misconduct.

This release also does not contain anything that disproves the FBI’s prevailing narrative that Thomas Crooks was a lone wolf attempting to assassinate Donald Trump. There is no smoking gun here. The DMV returns are clean, the NCIC checks are negative, Pennsylvania does not maintain a firearms registry, and the witness accounts of the shooting itself describe what the public footage describes: a young man on a rooftop, fired upon by Secret Service counter-snipers, dead at 1825 hours, body bagged, and removed.

What the release does support is a narrower claim, and that claim is best read against an 18-month pattern.

The Bureau’s public account of the Crooks investigation has been, from the beginning, that this was a simple case: a lone gunman with no co-conspirators, no foreign nexus, and no further threads worth chasing. If that account is accurate, the volume and architecture of the redactions in this release are difficult to explain. The Bureau is not asserting that the sealed material would compromise an ongoing prosecution; there is no living defendant. It is not asserting that the sealed material would compromise national security; the b1 classification exemption is not checked on the cover letter. It is asserting only that approximately 150 pages — in this tranche alone — are sealed under a court order whose origin and scope the Department of Justice has not described.

This sits inside a broader pattern that has accumulated over the last 18 months and that I have written about previously. Within 10 days of the shooting, the Bureau submitted an emergency disclosure request to Gab seeking information on an account it described as “possibly” associated with Crooks. The FBI testified before Congress that Crooks used Gab during 2019-2020 to post “anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic” content. Gab CEO Andrew Torba called that untrue:

Crooks’s body was cremated within 10 days of the shooting, before any congressional oversight body had the opportunity to examine it. The would-be second assassin, Ryan Routh, apprehended at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach in September 2024, was subjected to a prosecution timeline that the Biden Justice Department repeatedly extended.

None of these data points, taken individually, proves the existence of a federal nexus to the Butler shooting. Taken together, they describe an investigation whose public characterization — simple, settled, lone gunman, nothing further to see here! — sits in increasing tension with the volume of material the Bureau continues to redact, seal, withhold, and route through interagency consultation.

A genuinely simple case does not require 150 pages of court-sealed material in a single FOIA tranche. A genuinely simple case does not require ICE to assert b6/b7C/b7E exemptions over the entirety of two witness interviews conducted the day after the shooting. A genuinely simple case does not require b7E “techniques and procedures” exemptions to be stacked over a cooperator’s workplace. A genuinely simple case does not, four days in, require the Counterterrorism Division to spin up redacted monitoring tools under the domestic-violent-extremist framework.

The release of May 29, 2026 does not, on its own, resolve any of this. It does, however, give the public — and Judicial Watch, and the federal judge supervising the underlying litigation — one more increment of evidence about which questions the Department of Justice continues to treat as ones the public should not be allowed to answer.

The Bureau will release another tranche. The seal will be lifted, extended, or modified. And somewhere in the unreleased portion of this file is the answer to the question the visible record forces: what happened at the Cranberry Marriott on the night of July 14, 2024? And who was on Meridian Drive on the afternoon of July 13?

Source: Judicial Watch, Inc. v. United States Department of Justice, Civil Action No. 25-cv-2216 (D.D.C.). Fifth interim FBI release, FOIPA Request No. 1642040-000, dated May 29, 2026. Bates-stamped pages FBI(25-cv-2216)-1012 through FBI(25-cv-2216)-1261, with 51 deleted pages identified on the FOI/PA deletion sheet.

Most of the international coverage has focused on the optics: Ivanka Trump describing Sazan as a “private island” the family had “discovered,” the Aman Resorts branding, the flamingos and Mediterranean monk seals in the adjacent Vjosa-Narta wetlands, the “Trump Island” jokes on The Daily Show. The optics are bad, but they’re also a distraction.

The interesting questions are these: Why, of all the post-government opportunities available to a former White House adviser, did Jared Kushner choose a strategically located former military island honeycombed with Cold War tunnels? Who introduced him to it? Where is the money coming from? And — given who his introducer is, and who his introducer’s social circle is — should anyone be entirely comfortable taking the “luxury eco-resort” pitch at face value?

The answers, as far as they go, are documented. Kushner told the All-In Podcast that he discovered the island while on vacation aboard the yacht of his friend Nathaniel Rothschild, and that he later met privately with Edi Rama aboard the same yacht to begin discussions. Affinity Partners’ principal known investor is the Saudi Public Investment Fund, which wired Kushner $2 billion in 2021 over the objections of its own screening committee. And Nat Rothschild’s documented social network — the people he has worked with, sued, sailed with, and been photographed with for the last two decades — overlaps in non-trivial ways with the social network that ran Jeffrey Epstein’s last decade.

This is not a piece arguing that Kushner is building Epstein’s island. It is a piece arguing that the network around Kushner is harder to dismiss than the press has so far been willing to dismiss it.

The Bunker Island

Sazan is unlike any other piece of land currently being marketed to tourists in the Mediterranean. France 24 reported in 2015 that beneath the pine and fig trees lie roughly 3,600 one-man nuclear bunkers and “kilometres of tunnels and underground facilities including a cinema, a school and a hospital.” Smithsonian magazine, covering the island’s first opening to tourism that same year, described an intact network of bunkers and tunnels used by Cold War soldiers. The Soviet Union maintained a Whiskey-class submarine base there in the late 1950s, and Western open-source reporting has long alleged a chemical weapons facility, though no party has officially confirmed it.

For most of the 20th century the island was strictly off-limits to civilians. It opened to limited tourism in 2015. In December 2024, the Albanian government declassified the island for civilian development. Atlantic Incubation Partners — Kushner’s vehicle — was named a “Strategic Investor,” a designation that allows expedited permits, fast-tracked environmental review, and a bundle of incentives unavailable to ordinary applicants. The development scope, as reported by Albanian and international press, is enormous: as many as ten thousand hotel rooms and villas spread across the island and adjacent coastal areas, restoration and “adaptive reuse” of the Cold War-era military structures, a marina, an Aman Resorts-managed flagship hotel, and a perimeter that will include parts of the Vjosa-Narta lagoon, an ecologically protected wetland that serves as a stopover for migrating flamingos and a habitat for monk seals and sea turtles.

Calling this an “eco-resort” requires a generous definition of both terms. Calling it a “private island” — as Ivanka Trump did in the comments that finally sparked the public backlash — requires a generous definition of private. Sazan remains, in a strict legal sense, Albanian sovereign territory. What is being negotiated is not ownership but a long-term concession with extraordinary privileges, on land that was previously classified as both protected and strategic.

SPAK’s investigation, opened in late May 2026, is examining how the protected status was changed and whether the regulatory changes were lawful. Rama has defended the project as central to Albania’s tourism ambitions and has described the project as backed by Qatari capital. Government officials have rejected allegations of favoritism. The protests, by the second day, had drawn several thousand demonstrators per night in Tirana, with smaller actions in Vlorë. Footage of a protester being dragged from the resort site by private security has circulated widely. The Albanian press has begun to ask, openly, whether the island is being prepared as a “billionaire bolt-hole.”

That phrase has been used. Including by major outlets. None of them have asked the question the bunkers force one to ask, which is: a bolt-hole from what?

The Yacht

Here is what Kushner has said, on the record, about how he came to be building this thing.

On the All-In Podcast, hosted by venture capitalists Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks, and David Friedberg, Kushner explained the origin of the deal. “We were on a friend’s boat,” he told the hosts, “Nat Rothschild’s, on vacation.” From the deck of that yacht — Kushner described it as a casual sighting from the water — he saw the Albanian coastline and began making inquiries about investment opportunities in the country. He later met Edi Rama on the same yacht. According to Albanian coverage of the interview, Kushner spent roughly a year afterward “studying the market” with a “partner on the ground” before formalizing the project. Those onboard meetings, by Kushner’s own telling, helped seed the conversations that became the Sazan development.

That is the chain of custody the project has, in the man’s own words: yacht, Rothschild, Rama, billion-dollar concession.

So who is the friend whose boat Kushner was on?

Nathaniel Philip Victor James Rothschild, the 5th Baron Rothschild, is a British-born Canadian financier and hereditary peer. He sits within the Rothschild banking family but operates independently from its principal financial institutions. He is now a naturalized citizen of Montenegro, where he reportedly maintains substantial holdings. He has spent his career, by his own description and by the accounts of those who have worked with him, as a connector between Western capital markets and resource-rich, governance-poor jurisdictions.

His public record is colorful. In 2008, Rothschild hosted then-EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson and then-Shadow Chancellor George Osborne, separately, aboard the megayacht of Russian aluminum oligarch Oleg Deripaska off Corfu — a scandal that produced a parliamentary inquiry in London, a public quarrel between Rothschild and Osborne in the press, and, eventually, a libel suit by Rothschild against the Daily Mail’s parent company over its coverage of the Mandelson visit. Rothschild lost the suit in 2012. The presiding judge found that the underlying reporting — including that Mandelson had flown with Deripaska, Rothschild, and others on Deripaska’s private plane to Siberia for what the judge characterized as “the business of the possible joint venture between them in mining” — was substantially accurate.

Deripaska, for the record, is sanctioned by the United States, United Kingdom, and European Union, and is widely described in open-source reporting as “Putin’s oligarch.” He is the same Deripaska who employed Paul Manafort as a political consultant in the 2000s and who features prominently in the Mueller report as the recipient of Manafort’s offer of “private briefings” during the 2016 campaign.

Rothschild’s commercial career has been similarly Russia-adjacent. His investment vehicle Vallar Plc, listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2010, eventually became Bumi Plc in a reverse merger with the Indonesian Bakrie family’s coal interests — a transaction that collapsed in acrimony, litigation, and a near-total wipeout of public shareholders. He has been an investor in EN+ Group, Deripaska’s hydroelectric and aluminum holding company. He has also spent the last decade quietly building holdings in Montenegro, Albania’s coastal neighbor, where he holds citizenship.

The pattern, across two decades of public reporting, is consistent: Rothschild as the man whose yacht the politicians are on, whose plane they are on, whose Adriatic compound they are on. He is the broker, as well as the host. The pattern is so well-established that the Albanian press, in covering the Sazan deal, has not had to invent any framing for it. They have simply restated what Kushner told the All-In Podcast.

The Epstein Adjacency

Here is where the new DOJ Epstein file release intersects with the Sazan story.

Nat Rothschild does not appear in Jeffrey Epstein’s flight logs. He does not appear in the so-called “black book” by first name. What he does appear in, repeatedly, is the email correspondence of Peter Mandelson — Rothschild’s close friend, one of Kushner’s indirect predecessors in the role of “the politician on the Deripaska yacht,” and one of Jeffrey Epstein’s documented intimates from 2002 through at least 2011.

The Mandelson-Epstein emails, released by the House Oversight Committee in November 2025 and reinforced by the DoJ release in December, are now a matter of public record. They span a decade. They show Mandelson seeking Epstein’s advice on his post-government career, gossiping with Epstein about mutual acquaintances, accepting Epstein’s hospitality, and — most relevantly here — using Epstein as a backchannel to help Nat Rothschild.

In April 2010, Mandelson forwarded Epstein an email he had written to Jes Staley, then a senior executive at JPMorgan (later CEO of Barclays, and himself now a figure of significant Epstein-related embarrassment). The forwarded message read in part: “I’ve been following my friend Nat Rothschild’s plans to list a vehicle on the LSE and I’m very happy that JPM are now planning to get involved as book runners alongside Credit Suisse.” Mandelson was, by his own admission to Epstein, using their relationship to help promote Rothschild’s London listing — the Vallar vehicle that would later become Bumi.

Epstein’s reply, captured in the released files, was characteristic: “You are soooooooooooooooo devious.” Epstein understood exactly what he was reading: Mandelson laundering a favor for Rothschild through an Epstein-adjacent banker.

Other items from the released correspondence:

In August 2009, Mandelson described to Epstein a stay at a Rothschild family country house in Buckinghamshire, sending dispatches about the property and noting that “Rothschilds seem to own large part of Bucks.” Epstein expressed concern about the privacy of the house’s glass walls; Mandelson reassured him there is plenty of seclusion. The familiarity in the exchange is the point. This was not a one-off social pleasantry. Mandelson was reporting in to Epstein from a Rothschild residence as a matter of course.

In May 2010, Epstein wrote, of a planned dinner involving former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak: “nat’s sister doesn’t know about me, does she?” The exchange suggests, at minimum, that Epstein believed Nat Rothschild’s sister might possess information that could embarrass him. That is not the worry of a man who has never been in proximity to the family. It is the worry of a man whose proximity has produced something he would prefer to keep buried.

In September 2010, planning the same Barak dinner, an Epstein associate suggested: “Tim has ‘moved’ to London but I think good to invite (friend of Jes) and Nat (who won’t come but will be impressed).” Epstein replied that he would invite both; the associate’s parenthetical — Nat would not come but would be impressed — captures the relationship as the file shows it. Epstein was actively cultivating Rothschild from a distance, knowing direct contact would not be welcome, and using their mutual associates (Mandelson, Staley, Barak) as the human plumbing.

This is, by itself, less than a smoking gun. It is also more than nothing. And it sits inside a broader Rothschild-Epstein nexus that the DoJ files have only now made fully legible.

The most direct of those connections runs through Ariane de Rothschild, the Swiss-French banker who serves as chair of the Edmond de Rothschild Group, and is a distant cousin of Nat Rothschild. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2023, based on Epstein’s leaked appointment calendars, that Ariane de Rothschild had met with Epstein more than a dozen times between 2013 and 2019. The released correspondence shows Epstein and Ariane de Rothschild addressing each other as “Jeff” and “Ariane,” with Epstein arranging meetings between her and Bill Gates, Boris Nikolic, and Kissinger associate Joshua Cooper Ramo. They discussed internal Rothschild family politics — including a 2015 dispute over renaming the Paris-Orléans holding company “Rothschild & Co” — at a level of detail that suggests something well past arm’s length. The bank has acknowledged the meetings as routine business contact. The volume of the correspondence does not support that characterization.

A separate thread involves Lynn Forester de Rothschild — known socially as Lady Rothschild — and her former husband Andrew Stein, the former New York City Council President who was indicted for fraud in 2010. Epstein, the released emails show, was actively shopping the story of the Stein indictment and Lady Rothschild’s tangential involvement (through Firstmark Holdings, a venture that listed Henry Kissinger and Conrad Black as directors) to British tabloids. Whether Epstein had inside information or was running a smear is not yet clear from the released material. What is clear is that he had detailed information about the financial affairs of yet another branch of the family and was attempting to weaponize it.

Witness testimony in the Maxwell trial confirmed that “Rothschild” — first name unspecified — was an entry in Epstein’s leather-bound contact directory recovered from his Palm Beach home, alongside Mandelson, Trump, Black, and Kissinger.

The minimum honest summary: Nat Rothschild personally appears in the Epstein files only at one degree of separation, through Mandelson’s correspondence. The broader Rothschild family appears at zero degrees of separation, through Ariane de Rothschild’s documented relationship and Epstein’s active interest in Lynn Forester de Rothschild’s affairs. The minimum honest characterization is that the family Kushner’s introducer belongs to was, during the same years in which the introducer was working with Deripaska, also working with Epstein.

The Apollo Vector, Revisited

Lest the Rothschild thread make the rest of the network seem incidental, it is worth restating where the new development sits in relation to the rest of Kushner’s post-government infrastructure.

Affinity Partners — the firm that will hold whatever Sazan ultimately becomes — was launched in early 2021 with a $2 billion anchor investment from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. The Saudi screening panel that reviewed the proposal recommended against it, citing Kushner’s inexperience, the firm’s excessive management fees, and the public-relations risk. Mohammed bin Salman overruled the panel. As of the most recent disclosures in the Senate Finance Committee’s investigation, Affinity has collected more than one hundred and fifty-seven million dollars in management fees from foreign sovereigns, the majority from the Saudis, against essentially no realized investment returns. The firm’s assets under management spiked from roughly $3 billion at the start of 2024 to $4.8 billion by year-end, in apparent anticipation of a second Trump term.

The Affinity infrastructure is the financial vehicle. The infrastructure that brought Kushner into the Gulf in the first place — and that converted him from political naïf to Saudi confidant — was the late-2010s network operated by Tom Barrack, Trump’s inauguration committee chairman. Barrack’s documented relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, captured across years of DoJ-released emails, includes the 2012 “How is my role model?” salutation, the 2016 line to Tom Pritzker about “barrack and the boys in pb, wild wild,” and the May 2016 introduction Barrack made to Emirati ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba on Kushner’s behalf: “You will love him and he agrees with our agenda!” The man marketing the candidate’s son-in-law to the Gulf in 2016 was the same man who, in his off hours, was telling Epstein and Michael Wolff that “we both love you and want to be your butler’s [sic].” The same man who, by the time the Russia investigation closed in around the White House in 2021, would be indicted by the Justice Department on charges of acting as an unregistered foreign agent of the United Arab Emirates. He was acquitted at trial in 2022.

And there is, finally, the older financial vector: Apollo Global Management and Leon Black. Black paid Epstein $158 million between 2012 and 2017 for what the Dechert report characterized as tax and estate planning advice — payments the Senate Finance Committee under Ron Wyden eventually concluded had helped Black avoid more than $1 billion in federal taxes. In the same window, Apollo’s real estate lending arm extended a $184 million loan to Kushner Companies; the Securities and Exchange Commission quietly closed an Apollo inquiry shortly after Apollo co-founder Josh Harris had been making regular White House visits to Kushner; and Apollo provided more than $300 million in mezzanine financing for the Brookfield rescue of 666 Fifth Avenue, the Kushner family’s signature troubled asset, in a transaction in which the Qatar Investment Authority held an undisclosed $1.8 billion preferred position. Apollo’s current CEO Marc Rowan, per Financial Times reporting in February 2026, had at least five scheduled meetings with Epstein, including one at Apollo’s offices, despite Apollo’s previous insistence that no one other than Black had any relationship with Epstein.

The point is not that any of these threads, individually, proves anything. The point is that there is one network, and Kushner now sits at the center of it. Apollo financed his father’s company and his troubled tower. Saudi money launched his firm. Tom Barrack introduced him to the Gulf royals who fund it. And Nat Rothschild, the man whose social circle overlapped substantially with Epstein’s during Epstein’s most active decade, introduced him to the Albanian prime minister who is now expediting his $1.4 billion development on a former Soviet submarine base.

These are not seven degrees of separation. They are one or two.

The Whistleblower Who Saw It First

There is a document in the DoJ release worth pausing on, because it makes a point about both the substance and the curatorial choices of the file dump itself.

The document bears the Bates number EFTA00010777. Its subject line, in full, reads: Fw: Apollo/Epstein/Kushner connection. The author, identifiable from the surviving body text and from a long trail of related emails throughout the release, is Christopher Dilorio, a financial-industry whistleblower who has been writing to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Department of Justice, the IRS, and others since at least 2017 alleging that an Apollo–Epstein–Kushner triangle has operated a money-laundering and stock-fraud network through small-cap public shell companies.

The top of the document — sender field, date, recipient list, and what would normally be header metadata — is fully blacked out under a redaction. The lower portion is not. The surviving text addresses “grossly corrupt SEC et al scumbags,” asserts that “ALL of my allegations: beyond a shadow of a doubt, 100% accurate,” and links to a publicly available SEC enforcement complaint, SEC v. Environmental Solutions Worldwide, Inc. — Complaint 17673, filed in 2002, alleging a $15 million pump-and-dump scheme. The email then states, by name: “ESWW was a money laundering shell. The SEC knows it. The degenerate Epstein knows it. The Degenerate Leon Black/Kushner BFF/Milken proteges/Marc Rowan/Apollo knows it. The DOJ/IRS knows it.”

Two things about this document deserve attention.

The first is the shape of the redaction. The Epstein Files Transparency Act Standard restricts redactions to victims and “and materials that would jeopardize an active federal investigation.” The accusations Dilorio levels — against Leon Black, Jared Kushner, Marc Rowan, Apollo, and Epstein, all public figures, none of them in any sense private — appear on the page untouched. What is gone is the part that would let a reader assess to whom Dilorio was writing, when, with what kind of distribution, and to which federal officials he was copying. Whether that redaction is procedurally proper is, at minimum, a question that journalists and FOIA litigants with standing should be putting to the Department of Justice. The DoJ release was signed off on by Attorney General Pam Bondi.

The second is the substance. Dilorio’s allegations remain his allegations. He is, by his own framing, a man with years of grievance against the SEC. His language is intemperate. His interpretive conclusions, in several places, outrun his evidence. The SEC has never acted on his theory. None of that means he is wrong. It means his correspondence is what it is: a contemporaneous record of a financial-industry insider attempting, for the better part of a decade, to get federal regulators to investigate exactly the Apollo–Epstein–Kushner triangle that the DoJ Epstein file release has now, by the simple act of publishing the underlying documents, made publicly legible. The triangle Dilorio described in his 2017 emails is the triangle the files now describe in 2026. Whether the SEC’s failure to investigate reflects regulatory incompetence, regulatory capture, or something else is a question for another piece.

What is worth noting here is only this: the email exists, the email names the connection, the email is partially blacked out, and the blacked-out portion is the part that would reveal who was being told.

So What Is Being Built?

The official pitch is straightforward. Aman Resorts. Luxury villas. Marina. Eco-tourism. Restoration of military structures. Job creation for Albania. A “destination to be envied,” in Rama’s phrase.

The actual project is murkier. Ten thousand rooms is not a boutique resort. It is, in scale, closer to a mid-sized European city. “Restoration and adaptive reuse of Cold War-era military structures” is not, on the face of it, an obvious luxury-hotel marketing point — and yet it is featured prominently in the development plan as released. A “private island” framing, in the words of one of the principals, applied to sovereign Albanian territory under a long-term concession, raises questions about what “private” is meant to mean. Strategic Investor status, expedited permits, environmental review fast-tracked through a protected wetland — these are not the regulatory hallmarks of a transparent commercial development. They are the hallmarks of a sovereign giveaway.

The legal and financial architecture matters less than the social architecture. The people who put this deal together are the same people who, in earlier configurations, put together other deals that turned out to be something other than what they were marketed as. The 2008 Vallar-Bumi listing was marketed as a clean play on Indonesian coal. It ended as a public-shareholder wipeout and a multi-year recrimination tour among Rothschild, the Bakries, and their bankers. The Trump-era 666 Fifth Avenue rescue was marketed as a routine commercial transaction. It involved sovereign money from a country whose blockade the United States had been backing months earlier. Affinity Partners was marketed, when it received its $2 billion Saudi anchor in 2021, as a serious investment firm. Three years on, it had invested perhaps a third of its capital, was charging fees on the unused balance, and was facing congressional scrutiny over whether the entire structure was a fee-extraction vehicle dressed up as a fund.

None of which proves Sazan is sinister. But Sazan does not need to be sinister to be a legitimate subject of inquiry. It needs only to be opaque, expensive, strategically located, brokered by people with a documented track record of opacity-friendly transactions, and underwritten by a sovereign whose payments to the developer have already been the subject of a Senate investigation. By those criteria, the project does not have to clear a high bar to deserve scrutiny. It clears the bar simply by existing.

The Albanians have begun to ask, in their own language and in their own streets, the questions that the international press has been reluctant to ask. Whose island is this, really? Who is going to be allowed on it? What is going to happen inside the tunnels and bunkers — three thousand six hundred of them, plus an underground hospital, an underground school, and a Cold War cinema — that the development plan describes only as material for “adaptive reuse”? Who will the eventual occupants be? What documentation, if any, will exist of who comes and goes?

These are not paranoid questions. They are, given the documented social network of the developer and his introducer, the questions any competent journalist or prosecutor would be expected to ask. Whether anyone in a position to demand answers will do so is a separate question — and one whose answer, given the family connection of the developer to the current administration in Washington, is not encouraging.

Jeffrey Epstein owned a private island. He used it for what he used it for in part because it offered the architecture of privacy: water as a moat, distance from law enforcement, no curious neighbors, no records of who came or went. Sazan is materially larger than Little Saint James. It already possesses, by way of its Soviet military past, an underground infrastructure that any privacy-seeking developer would otherwise have to build from scratch and at great expense. And it is being developed by a firm whose principal investor is a sovereign with a documented history of using its money to purchase silence — about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, about the funding of extremism, and about a long list of other matters.

Maybe none of this means anything. Maybe Sazan ends up exactly as advertised: an Aman-branded luxury complex catering to wealthy Mediterranean tourists, with the bunkers as quirky historical accent and the wetlands preserved per environmental commitments yet to be made.

Or maybe it doesn’t.

The Albanians, for now, are right to be in the streets. The rest of us are right to be asking what, exactly, is being built — and on whose behalf, and using which network, and under what terms.

The story of the last decade is not, finally, that Jared Kushner was Jeffrey Epstein’s friend. It is that Kushner now operates, with the explicit backing of the same Gulf sovereigns and through the same brokers and on the same financial scaffolding, the kind of private-jurisdiction infrastructure that Epstein himself spent his last fifteen years assembling on a much smaller budget. The infrastructure outlived its previous owner. The network found a successor. The successor’s father-in-law is back in the White House. And the next island is bigger.

Sources

On Sazan Island and the resort project

• Miami New Times — Kushner’s All-In Podcast remarks on the Rothschild yacht meeting

• Al Jazeera — Albanian protest coverage

• Newsweek — SPAK investigation and protest escalation

• International Business Times UK — Kushner’s admission on Rothschild’s role

• Wanted in Rome — Project scope and Albanian government approval

• Sazan Island Resort overview — Atlantic Incubation Partners, Strategic Investor status, development plans

• Vox News Albania — Kushner’s full account of meeting Rama on Rothschild’s yacht

• The Kenya Times — Rama on Qatari backing

• The Daily Beast — Daily Show coverage and Ivanka quotes

On Sazan’s Cold War infrastructure

• France 24 — 3,600 nuclear bunkers, tunnels, underground hospital

• Smithsonian Magazine — Island’s reopening to tourism

On Nat Rothschild

• Rothschild v. Associated Newspapers Ltd., UK High Court judgment (2012) — The Corfu yacht affair and Mandelson-Deripaska-Rothschild Siberia trip

On the Rothschild-Epstein network

• City AM — Mandelson-Epstein-Rothschild email correspondence on the LSE mining vehicle

• Nordic Times — Ariane de Rothschild’s documented relationship with Epstein

On the Barrack-Kushner-Epstein Gulf pipeline

• WhoWhatWhy, “The Epstein Accords” investigation by Nina Burleigh and Katie Chenoweth

On the Dilorio email and SEC complaint referenced

• SEC v. Environmental Solutions Worldwide, Inc. (Complaint 17673, 2002)

• DOJ Epstein file release, document bearing Bates number EFTA00010777, subject line “Fw: Apollo/Epstein/Kushner connection”

Additional reporting threads

• New York Times reporting by Jesse Drucker, Kate Kelly, and Ben Protess on the Apollo and Citigroup loans to Kushner Companies (February 2018)

• Senate Finance Committee under Sen. Ron Wyden, on Leon Black’s payments to Epstein and on Affinity Partners’ foreign-sovereign investments

• Financial Times reporting (February 2026) on Apollo CEO Marc Rowan’s meetings with Epstein and Apollo’s letter to clients

• House Oversight Committee release of Mandelson-Epstein correspondence (November 2025)

• Wall Street Journal (2023) on Ariane de Rothschild’s appointment-calendar entries with Epstein

• Department of Justice Epstein file release (December 2025)

The headline finding is straightforward. A basket of goods and services that cost $100 in 2000 costs $246 today by the Reality Index. The official CPI says $187. Over twenty-five years, real-world prices for the things American families cannot avoid buying have risen roughly 32% faster than the official statistic captures. Extended back to 1980, the same gap compounds further: $516 versus $391, the same 32% gap stretched over 45 years.

That number is not a surprise to anyone who has been paying for their own groceries, rent, or family health insurance. It is the gap between the morning inflation headline and the receipt at the register. What is genuinely interesting, when you look at how the Consumer Price Index is constructed, is not that the gap exists. It is that the official statistic understates the gap as little as it does.

Why a parallel measurement is necessary

CPI is a sophisticated index built by serious economists. It is also, by any honest read of its methodology, an index that systematically understates the price growth of things American families cannot avoid buying. The reasons are technical, but the arithmetic effect of each one is not.

CPI does not measure home prices. It uses Owner’s Equivalent Rent — what homeowners would theoretically pay if they were renting their own homes — instead. OER is roughly 24% of CPI by weight, the single largest line in the index, and it has lagged actual home prices by approximately three percentage points per year since 1995.

CPI does not measure family health insurance premiums. It uses a medical care subindex tracking provider list prices for hospital stays and doctor visits. According to Kaiser Family Foundation, the average family premium has grown 4.66 times since 1999. The CPI medical subindex has grown 2.32 times over the same period — exactly half as fast.

CPI does not aggregate prices using the arithmetic mean. It uses a geometric mean formula, adopted in 1999, which mathematically produces a lower number than the arithmetic mean. The Bureau’s stated rationale is that families substitute toward cheaper goods when prices rise. The arithmetic effect is to reduce reported inflation.

CPI treats faster computers and better smartphones as deflation through hedonic adjustment, even when the dollar price on the receipt is higher than last year’s. The methodological argument is that you are getting more product for your money. The arithmetic effect is to reduce reported inflation.

Each of these choices has a stated rationale. Each is defended in the academic literature. And each, since the 1980s, has had the arithmetic effect of producing a lower reported inflation rate than the methodology that preceded it. None has moved the number in the other direction. That asymmetric pattern is the thing worth examining honestly.

The Reality Index is not a claim that CPI is a conspiracy. It is a parallel measurement built to make that pattern visible — using BLS’s own household-spending weights, so the basket cannot be cherry-picked, and substituting independent retail dollar data wherever that data exists.

Why we could not build this earlier

The idea for the Reality Index has been waiting on tooling for years. Building a defensible parallel inflation measurement requires pulling and reconciling roughly two dozen retail data series across 45 years of historical records, normalizing them against BLS subindexes, and resolving the countless small inconsistencies that come from chaining different methodologies together over time. In the pre-AI era, that was a multi-year, six-figure research project — closer to a doctoral thesis than a media product. AI changed the math. What used to require a team of research assistants and a year of grant funding now requires careful editorial judgment and a methodology that holds up to scrutiny. The data work is no longer the bottleneck. The interpretive work is.

The result is the Reality Index v1. The methodology paper is roughly the length of a long magazine feature. Every component series, every weight, every data source is documented in full at realityindex.co/methodology_paper. The point is to be cited and challenged, not to be sold.

What is on the site today

The Reality Index publishes every component, every weight, and every methodology choice openly. Among the resources we are launching with:

• The headline rate — the cumulative 1970–2025 chart, with a year-by-year breakdown of where the gap came from.

• Five category landing pages — housing (6.11× since 1980, the largest divergence from CPI), health care (15.60×, the most extreme), transportation (3.92×, essentially in line with CPI), food at home (3.03×, slower than CPI — an honest finding), and energy (3.09×, also slower than CPI).

• Sensitivity analysis — what the headline number looks like under five different defensible weighting methodologies, including the Federal Reserve’s own preferred basis. The gap exists under every methodology, ranging from 29% to 61%.

• A plain-language timeline of CPI methodology changes since 1983, with the official rationale and the critique presented side by side.

• “What Reality Index Doesn’t Measure” — an essay on the inflation vectors we know exist but cannot yet quantify rigorously, including reverse hedonics on industrial food, time costs, hidden fees, and healthcare access versus price.

Alongside Reality Index: the American Dream Index

We are also launching a sister project called the American Dream Index. The Reality Index asks how much prices have risen for an evolving basket of goods. The American Dream Index asks a different question: how much it costs, every year from 1980 to today, to live the same middle-class life that 1980 promised — a four-bedroom home, three children, two cars, employer-sponsored health insurance, modest discretionary spending — priced against median household income.

The headline finding is uncomfortable. The dollar cost of that lifestyle grew 5.16 times since 1980. Median household income grew 4.89 times. The aggregate ratio is roughly unchanged, but the composition shifted hard: health care grew 7.5 times, housing carrying costs 4.2 times, groceries 3.3 times. Families have less room to cut and more cost coming from things they cannot escape. The 1980 lifestyle cost 159% of median household income in 1980. It costs 145% today. The middle-class American life of 1980 has remained out of reach for the median family for 45 years, and that gap has not closed.

What comes next

Reality Index v1 is the start, not the end. Three things are on the immediate roadmap:

First, regular updates. New BLS data releases monthly. New annual data — KFF family premiums, FHFA home prices, NCES tuition, AAA driving costs — releases on staggered schedules across the year. The Reality Index is built to ingest each of these as it releases, with the headline number updating accordingly. We are not freezing a snapshot.

Second, user customization. A future version of the site will allow visitors to build their own version of the index — different weights, different baskets, different anchor years. The methodological choices that go into CPI are not the only defensible ones. The point of the Reality Index is to make the construction transparent and the choices examinable. The next step is to make them adjustable.

Third, a series. The Reality Index is the first in a series of accountability-data projects Grabien plans to publish. The instinct is the same one that built our transcript indexing service: take a public-interest dataset, make it transparent, and put it where anyone can use it.

What I am asking for

Two things, in order of how much they would help.

First, read the methodology. If you read the methodology paper, you will know more about how CPI is constructed than 99% of journalists who report inflation numbers. You will also be in a position to evaluate whether the Reality Index is a serious measurement or a polemic. We have built it to be the former.

Second, challenge us. The standing commitment of the project is to revise the methodology when revision is warranted. If you find a more rigorous data source for a category, a methodology improvement, or a measurement error, send it to info@realityindex.co. The site will publish corrections with timestamped methodology notes.

The gap between the official inflation statistic and the personal reality of American families has been a credibility crisis for federal economic measurement for at least the last decade. It is time to have the conversation honestly. This project is our contribution to that.

Tom Elliott is the founder & CEO of Grabien Inc. The full Reality Index methodology, data sources, and complete chart history are at realityindex.co. Methodology suggestions and data corrections from any reader are welcome at info@realityindex.co.

Between the April 21 confirmation hearing and the floor vote now coming into view, one set of questions has gone entirely unasked. They concern the nominee’s documented adjacency to Jeffrey Epstein’s social network, and his wife’s family’s far deeper documented entanglement with it — adjacency and entanglement that surface, repeatedly, across the more than 50,000 pages of Epstein-related records the House Oversight Committee released in September and November 2025, and the further January 2026 Department of Justice production that the Epstein Files Transparency Act compelled.

Nothing in those documents accuses Kevin Warsh of any crime. Nothing places him on a flight, at a property, or in an email exchange with Epstein. But what the documents do show — about Warsh himself, about his wife’s family, and about the post-2008 relationship Epstein cultivated with the family business he was rising through — is enough that no senator should cast a confirmation vote without asking him about it on the record.

The Warsh adjacency: St. Barth’s, December 2010

On December 21, 2010, a roster of high-profile visitors to St. Barth’s for the Christmas holiday was emailed directly to Epstein’s personal vacation account, jeevacation@gmail.com. The list catalogues guests by accommodation and travel arrangement. Entry #21 is Kevin Warsh and his wife Jane Lauder, listed as a couple, staying at a “house near Isle de France.” Entry #24, three lines down, is Ghislaine Maxwell — at the time Epstein’s longtime associate, now a federally convicted sex trafficker — staying on “Billy Kotick’s boat.” The same names appear together in three separate document copies in the files. The list reads as a who’s-who of that holiday’s St. Barth’s set, including Roman Abramovich, David Geffen, Martha Stewart, and Harvey Weinstein.

A separate document in the files functions as an Epstein-associated personal contact directory. It contains an entry for Jane Lauder cross-referenced to her husband:

Ms. Jane Lauder ( Kevin Warsh ) / LI / FASHION / 300 / BUSINESS / DC /

The shorthand is its own form of evidence. “FASHION” reflects Jane Lauder’s senior executive role inside the Estée Lauder cosmetics empire — she was at the time rising into Global President roles at Origins and later Clinique. “DC” almost certainly references Kevin Warsh’s Washington connections from his 2006–2011 tenure on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. “BUSINESS” classifies the relationship type. “300” appears to be a tier or priority code within Epstein’s contact system. Whatever the precise meaning of the numeric code, the entry is not casual. It is a formally catalogued, cross-referenced node in Epstein’s personal contact infrastructure — and it was logged a year and a half after Epstein’s 2008 plea deal, inside the window when his pattern of conduct was a matter of public record.

The Lauder entanglement: a documented post-2008 relationship

What was not in the Warsh hearing — and what every senator voting this week should be asked to reckon with — is how deeply the post-2008 Epstein-Lauder relationship is now documented in mainstream reporting.

Ronald Lauder is Jane Lauder’s uncle. He is the longtime chairman of Clinique Laboratories, the Estée Lauder subsidiary where Jane Lauder served as Global President. He is, in short, the senior family figure overseeing the corporate empire that the Fed chair nominee’s wife helps run. He is also one of the largest individual donors to Pres. Donald Trump. And his relationship with Epstein is now confirmed not by a single document or social-list adjacency, but by multiple converging strands of reporting from Bloomberg, ARTnews, Artnet News, and The Daily Pennsylvanian, all in February 2026.

Friends Ventures LLC: the $25 million art vehicle Epstein personally set up

Bloomberg reported on February 6, 2026 that Jeffrey Epstein “coordinated the creation of a legal vehicle in 2014” — Friends Ventures LLC — “that allowed billionaire financiers Ronald Lauder and Leon Black to share ownership of a $25 million painting.” The work is Kurt Schwitters’ 1920 mixed-media piece Ja-Was?-Bild, acquired at Christie’s London for £13.9 million. Per the Epstein files, Epstein himself drafted the structure: Lauder and Black would alternate possession in two-year cycles “until death,” per Epstein’s own description in the documents.

Three additional works — a Max Beckmann self-portrait and two Kirchners, including the iconic Berliner Strassenszene — were jointly held 50/50 between Black and Lauder’s Neue Galerie. Black paid $31.6 million for his stakes; the three works were appraised at $93.5 million in 2016. In a 2016 presentation Epstein prepared on Black’s trust, Epstein laid out a succession plan in which Ronald Lauder would purchase Black’s 50% Friends Ventures stake for $12.5 million on Black’s death, and the Neue Galerie would purchase Black’s stakes in the other three works for $46.75 million.

This is not adjacency. This is Epstein operating as a structuring agent for a multi-tens-of-millions art partnership between Ronald Lauder and a man — Leon Black — who paid Epstein $158 million for advisory services between 2012 and 2017. It is documented in court-released emails and in mainstream art-market reporting.

Scheduled meetings, the pool club, the tax returns

Per the Daily Pennsylvanian’s February 11, 2026 analysis of the DOJ files, the Ronald Lauder–Epstein relationship continued in scheduled, in-person form well into 2017 — nearly a decade after Epstein’s plea deal and amid full public knowledge of his pattern of conduct:

• On February 11, 2017, Epstein emailed German entrepreneur Nicole Junkerman that “the nicole fan club” — consisting of Epstein, Ronald Lauder, and “Leon” (Black) — had convened by Epstein’s pool.

• On February 18, 2017, Epstein emailed Bill Gates recommending Gates “seek out” Lauder for health-program funding: “tell him we are buddies. he is very smart.”

• On February 24, 2017, Ronald Lauder was scheduled to visit Epstein’s home, in an event Epstein noted his recipient “should be well dressed” for. He was to be accompanied by James Watson, the Nobel laureate.

• In August 2017, Epstein asked through assistants to review Ronald Lauder’s past two years of tax returns and his will, offering “best guidance” via his accountant.

• In April 2017, Epstein planned to bring Ronald Lauder as a guest to a party hosted by former Norwegian diplomat Terje Rød-Larsen, alongside Woody Allen, Leon Black, and Lawrence Summers.

Ronald Lauder’s name appears more than 900 times across the DOJ files released in January 2026. He has not been accused of any crime. He has not commented publicly through his offices at the Estée Lauder Company or the World Jewish Congress.

The Austrian passport overlap

One additional element belongs in the public record, though it remains an inference rather than a documented fact: Ronald Lauder served as U.S. Ambassador to Austria from 1986 to 1987, the exact period during which Epstein obtained the fraudulent Austrian passport later recovered from his New York safe. Independent investigative writers have raised Lauder as a plausible facilitator. No official document confirms this, and Lauder has not been formally investigated for it. But it is a question that has been asked publicly, and it is on the record.

What this means for the Warsh nomination

The documents do not allege that Kevin Warsh participated in any of this. They do not allege he knew about the Friends Ventures LLC, the pool meetings, the tax-return requests, the scheduled home visits, or the succession planning Epstein drafted for Ronald Lauder’s eventual purchase of Leon Black’s art stakes. They do not allege he had financial dealings with Epstein.

What they do establish is a set of facts that, taken together, raise straightforward disclosure questions for any nominee, much less a nominee for the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve:

• Kevin Warsh and Jane Lauder were on a December 21, 2010 St. Barth’s guest list emailed directly to Jeffrey Epstein’s personal account, listed three lines above Ghislaine Maxwell.

• Jane Lauder is a formally catalogued, cross-referenced entry in an Epstein-associated personal contact directory, with a “BUSINESS” classification.

• Jane Lauder’s uncle Ronald — the senior figure overseeing the family business empire Jane has spent her career inside — was in a documented, multi-year, post-2008 personal and business relationship with Epstein, including a $25 million art LLC Epstein personally structured, scheduled home visits, and Epstein-prepared trust-and-succession documents.

• All of this is documented in mainstream reporting from Bloomberg, ARTnews, Artnet News, and The Daily Pennsylvanian, sourced to the DOJ and House Oversight Committee document releases of 2025 and January 2026.

The Federal Reserve chair is one of a handful of jobs in American public life where institutional credibility is the entire job. The Fed does not command armies or pass laws. Its power rests on whether markets, foreign central banks, and the American public believe its chair is making decisions on the merits. That credibility is fragile. It is more fragile now, after a confirmation cycle that included an open DOJ investigation of the sitting chair, a senator who initially pledged to block any Trump Fed nominee until that investigation was dropped, and the first fully partisan committee vote on a Fed chair nominee in the institution’s history.

The Banking Committee did not raise the Epstein file material at the April 21 hearing. There is no public record of Warsh being asked, under oath, basic questions any nominee in his documented proximity to these files should be prepared to answer:

1. When did you last have contact, in any form, with Jeffrey Epstein? When did you last have contact with Ghislaine Maxwell?

2. Did you or your wife ever visit any property owned or controlled by Epstein, including the St. Barth’s house near Isle de France referenced in the December 2010 list emailed to Epstein’s personal account?

3. Were you aware, at the time or since, that you and your wife were listed on a guest roster emailed to Epstein’s personal account in December 2010, two and a half years after his Florida plea?

4. When did you first become aware of your wife’s uncle Ronald Lauder’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein? What did you know, and when, about Friends Ventures LLC, the in-person meetings at Epstein’s properties, and Epstein’s involvement in Ronald Lauder’s art transactions and trust documents?

5. Were any matters related to Estée Lauder Companies, its subsidiaries, or any Lauder family entity discussed in any conversation in which Jeffrey Epstein was a participant, recipient, or subject?

6. Did Epstein ever solicit your views, in your capacity as a Federal Reserve Governor between 2006 and 2011, on any matter of monetary policy, financial regulation, or banking supervision — directly or through any intermediary, including any member of the Lauder family?

These are not gotcha questions. They are the questions any senator should want answered on the record before confirming a nominee whose wife’s family business is now documented to have been an active, post-2008 node in Epstein’s network. The answers may be entirely exculpatory. They may be a Christmas in St. Barth’s, an uncle-in-law’s bad judgment, and nothing more. If so, Warsh should say so under oath, and the record should be made before the vote, not after.

The standard, applied evenly

This question would matter the same way if Joe Biden had nominated someone whose name appeared in the Epstein address book with a “BUSINESS” classification, and whose spouse’s uncle had a documented multi-year post-2008 relationship with Epstein including a $25 million art LLC Epstein personally structured. It would matter the same way if the nominee were a Democrat with a Wall Street pedigree and a billionaire spouse. The standard is the standard.

The Senate has a few days. The committee has already voted. The floor vote is what remains. There is no reason — none — that senators of either party cannot demand answers to a handful of direct questions before they put their names beside a confirmation that, once cast, cannot be uncast. The Federal Reserve is too important. The Epstein record is too documented. And the questions are too obvious to leave unasked.

A note on sources

All document citations in this piece are drawn from the Epstein records released by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform — the approximately 33,000 pages produced by the Department of Justice in September 2025, the records produced by the Epstein estate in September and November 2025 (the latter tranche exceeding 20,000 pages), and the further January 2026 DOJ production compelled by the Epstein Files Transparency Act, signed into law November 19, 2025. The Ronald Lauder–Epstein relationship reporting is sourced to Bloomberg (”Epstein Set Up LLC for Ronald Lauder, Leon Black to Hold $25 Million Artwork,” February 6, 2026), ARTnews (”Collector Ronald Lauder Repeatedly Named in Newly Released Jeffrey Epstein Files,” February 4, 2026), Artnet News (”Leon Black and Ronald Lauder Joined Forces to Buy Masterpieces, Epstein Files Show,” February 10, 2026), and The Daily Pennsylvanian (”Files show years of communication between former Penn donor Ronald Lauder and Jeffrey Epstein,” February 11, 2026). The address book entry, the December 21, 2010 St. Barth’s guest list, and the related contact records described above are part of the House Oversight releases.

Same president, same Congress, same Republican trifecta: One was constitutional, The other, not even close.

The TCJA cut taxes by $1.5 trillion over ten years. Whether you loved the policy or hated it, the constitutional question is settled. Article I, Section 8 grants Congress the power “to lay and collect Taxes.” Setting rates is the textbook example of an enumerated power. Hamilton spent most of Federalist 30 arguing for exactly this kind of broad federal taxing authority. The TCJA is, by any originalist reading, squarely within the government’s job description.

The Farm Bill spent $867 billion over ten years. Roughly three-quarters of that money funded SNAP — what people still call food stamps. The rest went to crop insurance subsidies, commodity supports, rural development grants, conservation payments, and dozens of other programs. There is no enumerated power to feed Americans. There is no enumerated power to subsidize farms. The General Welfare Clause, which Congress invokes for nearly everything it does, was never meant to be a freestanding grant of authority. James Madison was emphatic on this point in Federalist 41: “For what purpose could the enumeration of particular powers be inserted, if these and all others were meant to be included in the preceding general power?”

Two bills. Twelve months apart. Same signatures. The constitutional gap between them is the gap between the federal government the founders designed and the one Americans actually live under.

That’s the question this project tries to answer at scale.

The Constitutionality Index is a public scorecard of every federal public law enacted since 2017. Every one. Not a sample, not a curated list of greatest hits. All 1,507 of them, scored against the Constitution as ratified, using a strict originalist test: Does the law rest on an enumerated power? Does it intrude on authority reserved to the states by the Tenth Amendment? Does it violate the Bill of Rights?

Three verdicts: Constitutional. Contested. Unconstitutional.

Three ways of counting: by number of laws, by pages of new statutory text, and by dollars provisioned.

The reason for the three metrics is simple. Counting laws lets you tell yourself a flattering story. Most years, somewhere between 60 and 75 percent of public laws are constitutional — naming post offices, honoring veterans, transferring federal property, exercising the actual enumerated powers. That figure is not a lie, but it is misleading, because it counts a one-page bill renaming a courthouse the same as an 878-page omnibus that funds half the executive branch.

Switch to pages of statutory text and the picture inverts. Across the decade, fewer than 15 percent of pages of federal law are constitutional. Switch to dollars and it gets worse. In a typical year, less than one percent of the money Congress directly provisions has a clean enumerated-power foundation. Some years it’s less than a tenth of one percent.

These are not small differences. They are the difference between a federal government that does a few important things and stays out of the way, and a federal government that does almost everything and asks Article I to come along for the ride.

The data, year by year, tells a remarkably consistent story.

2017 looks unusually good — 43 percent of dollars constitutional — and that is almost entirely because the TCJA was so large that it dragged the average up by itself. Strip out the tax cut and 2017 looks like every other year.

2020 was the Covid year. Congress provisioned $6.6 trillion in emergency spending. By the index’s accounting, $11 billion of it — about one-sixth of one percent — rested on an enumerated power. Trump signed every major Covid package. Biden inherited and extended the framework. There was no partisan disagreement about whether the federal government had the authority to do any of it.

2022 stands out for a different reason. The PACT Act — toxic-exposure benefits for veterans of the burn pits — clears $797 billion under the war powers, the cleanest enumerated foundation in the Constitution. Veterans benefits are exactly the sort of obligation Hamilton defended in Federalist 23 as inseparable from the power to raise armies. That single bill makes 2022 the highest-scoring Biden year by dollars.

The pattern across both administrations and both parties is the same. When Congress acts inside its enumerated powers — taxes, tariffs, defense, veterans, federal courts, federal property, foreign affairs, the post office, copyright, coinage — it tends to produce constitutional law. When it ventures outside, into health care and education and disaster relief and farm subsidies and local law enforcement, almost everything it produces fails the test. The volume of activity outside the enumerated powers dwarfs the volume inside.

This is not a Republican problem or a Democratic problem. It is a Washington problem, and it has been one for more than a century.

Why does any of this matter to ordinary Americans?

Because the founders had a specific theory of why federalism matters, and it was not abstract. Madison argued in Federalist 45 that the powers reserved to the states would concern “the lives, liberties, and properties of the people; and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.” The whole point of decentralizing those questions was that they are the questions that touch daily life — schools, public health, local crime, family policy, business regulation, the price of housing, the quality of the roads. The closer the decision-maker, the more responsive the system.

What happened over the twentieth century, accelerating after the New Deal and again after the Great Society, was a transfer of those decisions from state capitals to Washington. Education policy is now largely federal. Health care policy is now largely federal. Disaster preparedness, family welfare, drug policy, urban policy, agricultural policy, infrastructure, energy — all increasingly federal. The Tenth Amendment is essentially dead letter.

The cost is not just constitutional. The cost is that Americans have lost the ability to influence the decisions that shape their lives. State and local elections, where one vote actually moves outcomes, decide less and less. National elections, where the median voter has roughly zero influence on anything, decide more and more. Government feels distant because it is distant. Solutions feel impossible because they are coming from the wrong level of the system.

The Constitutionality Index does not propose to fix any of this. It proposes to measure it — clearly, transparently, law by law, with the citations and the founders’ own reasoning attached to each verdict. Every score can be challenged. Every entry shows the work.

The full database is live at ConstitutionalityIndex.com. Updated as new laws are enacted.

The federal government Americans actually have is not the one the Constitution describes. The first step toward fixing that is admitting how far the gap has grown.

Looking ahead, we’ll be rating the Obama years. Stay tuned.

Band’s testimony won’t be the splashy event Bill Clinton’s was in February. The interview is closed-door. The transcript will trickle out later, redacted, after both sides finish negotiating which parts the public gets to see.

But it may matter more than the Clinton deposition that preceded it. Because Bill Clinton, when asked under oath whether he had ever discussed Epstein and Maxwell with Doug Band, did not deny it. He hedged.

“He worked for me… I know that he knew both Epstein and Maxwell. I do not know to what extent he was in contact with them… I knew some of what he was doing, and I didn’t know some of what he was doing.”

That’s not a denial. That’s a former president pre-positioning distance from his own gatekeeper.

To understand why Band matters — and why Tuesday’s questions could reach further than anyone outside the committee currently appreciates — you have to understand what he built. Not just the Clinton Global Initiative. The broader machinery: an interlocking philanthropic apparatus that, by the mid-2000s, had become the most powerful private foreign-policy instrument in the world. And then you have to look at who else was inside it. And what they were actually doing there.

The Architect

Band started as an unpaid intern in the White House counsel’s office in 1995. By the time Bill Clinton left office in 2001, Band was the body man — the aide who carried the bags, managed the schedule, decided who got the meeting. He has himself described traveling with Clinton to nearly 125 countries and over 2,000 cities. When Clinton’s spokesman wanted to deny that the former president had ever set foot on Jeffrey Epstein’s private island, the spokesman didn’t have to call Clinton. He called Band.

That gatekeeper role is well-documented. The architectural one is less appreciated. Band was, in Clinton’s own telling, the originator of the Clinton Global Initiative. “Doug had the idea to do this,” Clinton has said. CGI launched in 2005. By the time it shut down a decade later, it had convened heads of state, billionaires, NGO directors, and corporate CEOs around what it called “Commitments to Action” — pledges that, by the foundation’s own count, raised $69 billion for some 2,100 projects.

Band also co-founded Teneo, the strategic-advisory firm that eventually counted Bill Clinton himself as a paid adviser at $2.5 million. Teneo was later investigated by the FBI as a possible “pass-through” for Clinton compensation in connection with the bureau’s probe of Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe. The bureau ultimately did not bring charges. But Band’s CFO at Teneo confirmed to investigators the structural arrangement — that the firm had been used to channel money to the former president.

Two structures. Both built around Bill Clinton. Both bearing Doug Band’s fingerprints. Both, in different ways, scrutinized for the same kind of question: were they actually about what they said they were about?

The Super-NGO

By 2006, the Clinton Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation had begun working together so closely that the late diplomat Richard Holbrooke described what he was watching as “the beginning of what you might call the first super-NGO… with overlapping interests and a great deal of resources.”

Holbrooke was not exaggerating. The numbers are extraordinary, and they are public.

The Gates Foundation has given the Clinton Health Access Initiative — the Clinton Foundation’s largest arm — roughly $634 million across nearly 200 grants. CHAI accounts for the majority of total Clinton Foundation program spending in any given year. The Gates Foundation has separately donated more than $25 million directly to the Clinton Foundation and is among its six largest individual donors.

The first publicly announced collaboration came in 2006: a $750,000 Gates grant to the Clinton Foundation for HIV/AIDS work in Lesotho. Bill Gates and Bill Clinton appeared together that year at Microsoft’s Government Leadership Forum in Cape Town and at the XVI International AIDS Conference in Toronto.

In 2011, Tachi Yamada — former president of the Gates Foundation’s Global Health Program — joined the CHAI board, formalizing the personnel overlap.

In 2013, Hillary Clinton, fresh off her tenure as Secretary of State, launched the No Ceilings Project — a flagship CGI initiative on women’s empowerment, run as a direct partnership with the Gates Foundation. Hillary and Melinda Gates announced it together at NYU. Chelsea Clinton moderated.

The two foundations were not set up to be twinned, and their work wasn’t redundant. But the same playbook applied to both: convene the right billionaires, broker the right access, attach the brand of either Bill Gates or Bill Clinton (or both) to the deliverable, and let the philanthropic veneer carry the legitimacy of what was, at the operational level, an influence-trading apparatus.

That apparatus is the part that needs to come out from under the word charity. Convening heads of state on behalf of “global health” is not the same activity as actually treating malaria patients. CGI’s actual function — the thing that distinguished it from the hundred other AIDS charities operating in 2005 — was the staging of the convening. It was a power exchange in tuxedos. The money raised was real, and some of the work it funded saved lives. None of what follows takes that away. But the architecture itself was not a hospital. It was a marketplace.

Epstein in Both Architectures

This is where the public story breaks. Because Jeffrey Epstein was not a passing donor or a peripheral name on a guest list at either foundation. The documentary record places him inside the founding of both — and inside the operations, repeatedly, for over a decade.

On July 6, 2007, Epstein’s defense attorneys Alan Dershowitz and Gerald Lefcourt sent the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida a 23-page mitigation letter as part of plea negotiations. Epstein was at that moment under criminal investigation for trafficking underage girls. The letter argued he was too valuable a citizen to prosecute. Among its claims:

“Mr. Epstein was part of the original group that conceived the Clinton Global Initiative.”

Lefcourt confirmed the claim’s authenticity to ABC News in 2016, telling the network he would not have made the representation to federal prosecutors had he not believed it to be true.

In her July 2025 interview with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, Ghislaine Maxwell was asked about her own role in CGI’s startup. “I was. I would say very central to that, yes,” she answered. She had helped convene people. She had participated in budget discussions. Released emails show Maxwell wiring $1 million to Publicis Groupe — the firm contracted to produce CGI’s inaugural event — described as “for the Clinton project.”

Bill Clinton himself, under oath in February, was forced to acknowledge that Maxwell “was also interested in early Clinton Global Initiative efforts.” He could not deny it. The trail had become too thick.

So in 2007, while under federal investigation for trafficking children, Jeffrey Epstein was using a claimed founding role in the Clinton Global Initiative as character evidence to avoid prosecution. And the claim was credible enough that his lawyer was willing to put it in writing to federal prosecutors.

Epstein was not, by any account anyone has ever offered, a humanitarian. He had no record of meaningful charitable giving before 2005. He did not personally treat malaria patients or build schools. What he had was a long-running interest in proximity — to power, to wealth, to influence — and CGI was, at its founding, the most efficient proximity-generating machine ever built in private American philanthropy. That is what he wanted to be at the founding of. Not the cause. The room.

The same pattern played out, years later, on the Gates side of the alliance.

Beginning in late 2011 and accelerating through 2014, Epstein worked with Bill Gates on a “donor-advised fund” — a charitable vehicle through which Gates would manage the wealth of newly-minted billionaires. Epstein described it as “cloud computing for the giving world” and projected it would attract twenty to fifty billion dollars “quickly.”

He pulled in Boris Nikolic, Gates’s chief science adviser. Larry Cohen, head of Gates Ventures. Connie Collingsworth, the Gates Foundation’s general counsel, who at one point described the project to Epstein as “our work.” Dick Henriques, the Gates Foundation’s CFO, called Epstein directly to discuss it. JPMorgan executives Jes Staley and Mary Erdoes were copied on planning emails. By September 2014, Bill Gates was actively promoting the fund, emailing Epstein an offer to pitch it at a dinner with Ray Dalio and Paul Tudor Jones.

Side emails laid out the personal compensation structure. One Epstein note specified: “Bill uses a 10-15 million dollar advance to buy his interest in the fund. Boris gets all the downside and fifty percent of the upside.” Another instructed: “upside 100% FM, 50% RG, 2.5 million advance jan 1 finish… no reference to last day in public email.” Epstein warned the parties against “memorizing preliminary ideas in writing.”

The fund stalled when Melinda Gates objected. A 2017 message from one of Gates’s intermediaries told Epstein that Bill “feels bad about the DAF btw. He thought great idea but wife wouldn’t allow.”

Two foundations. Two founding-era footholds for the same convicted sex trafficker. Both involved Gates Foundation and Clinton Foundation senior personnel. Neither had anything to do with charity, in the sense ordinary people use the word. They had to do with structure. And Epstein wanted to be inside the structure.

The Connective Tissue

The thing to notice about the people who appear in both ecosystems is how few of them there are.

Larry Summers introduced Bill Clinton to Jeffrey Epstein in 2002, on the recommendation that led to the Africa trip. Summers attended the May 2011 meeting at Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse with Gates, Nikolic, and JPMorgan’s Jes Staley. Released emails show Summers flew to the U.S. Virgin Islands on Epstein’s jet ten days after his own wedding, with Ghislaine Maxwell aboard. In 2013, Epstein was emailing Summers updates on resource deals in Russia, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan.

Boris Nikolic was Bill Gates’s chief science adviser, described by colleagues as Gates’s “right arm.” He was also named as a backup executor of Jeffrey Epstein’s will — a fact Nikolic has said publicly shocked him. Nikolic was the conduit through which Epstein reached Gates for over a decade.

Doug Band was on nearly every Clinton flight on Epstein’s plane, by Maxwell’s account “probably” the person who invited her on the Africa trip, and the recipient of casual personal emails from Maxwell signed off “Miss you.” He was the gatekeeper through whom Epstein’s $25,000 donation to the Clinton Foundation in 2006 — made through a shell entity called “C.O.U.Q.” that listed Epstein as its president — would presumably have flowed.

Melanie Walker, a Gates Foundation senior adviser, was a longtime Epstein contact. Tachi Yamada crossed from Gates to CHAI in 2011, the same year Epstein opened his Gates pipeline. Connie Collingsworth, Gates Foundation general counsel, was actively working with Epstein on DAF legal structure.

This is not six degrees of separation. It is one or two. And the same operators kept moving between the two largest private foreign-policy instruments in the world, and Jeffrey Epstein was inside the calls.

Where the Charity Veneer Meets the Documentary Record

The public story of CGI and the Gates Foundation is that they exist to alleviate human suffering. They have, in many cases, done exactly that. CHAI’s negotiated drug-pricing has saved lives at scale. Gates’ Foundation has done useful work improving sanitation in 3rd world countries. None of that is in dispute.

But the documentary record describes another layer — and it is consistent enough across decades and continents that it can no longer be waved off as right-wing innuendo.

Rwanda, 2002-2003. Bill Clinton flew to Rwanda on Jeffrey Epstein’s Boeing 727 as part of what he later described as Clinton Foundation work. Doug Band was on the trip. So was Ghislaine Maxwell. The flight logs are on the public record; ABC News has reported them. Whatever Clinton’s foundation business in Rwanda actually was, it was conducted on the private aircraft of a man who, three years later, would be under federal investigation for trafficking children. While in Rwanda, Epstein organized a program to send young Rwandans to the United States, apparently for study.

Haiti, 2010. In the weeks after the earthquake, Bill Clinton was named UN special envoy for the Haitian relief effort. Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State. The Clinton Foundation became a central conduit for the multi-billion-dollar reconstruction money pouring into the country. On January 29, 2010, Haitian authorities arrested ten American Baptist missionaries from an Idaho-based outfit called New Life Children’s Refuge, attempting to take 33 Haitian children across the border into the Dominican Republic without documentation. The group’s leader, Laura Silsby, a friend of the Clintons, had a track record: civil judgments for unpaid wages, a foreclosed house, and according to CNN, a prior attempt to remove 40 children from Haiti that had been intercepted by Haitian police acting on a tip. Silsby’s legal adviser, Jorge Puello, was later arrested in connection with an international human-trafficking ring linked to Haitian and Central American children. It just so happens that as the Clintons were getting setup in Haiti, Epstein was emailing his private jet managers about a getting a flight to Haiti.

Bill Clinton personally intervened to broker the release of nine of the ten missionaries. Silsby’s charges were ultimately reduced; she served minimal time. Wikileaks emails later revealed that Hillary Clinton’s office had been corresponding with Silsby’s New Life NGO since at least 2001. The Haitian government’s investigation of Silsby’s network was effectively shut down.

The Clinton Foundation’s broader Haiti record after 2010 generated its own scandals — multi-billion-dollar reconstruction commitments delivered as a fraction of what was promised, opaque contracting, accusations from the Haitian people themselves that the foundation had used the disaster to advance its own networks rather than the country’s recovery. The phrase “Hillary stole our money” became a standard chant at protests in Port-au-Prince through 2016.

This is the part that deserves to be said directly. The same NGO architecture that brought Bill Clinton to Rwanda on Epstein’s plane in 2003, that pulled in the Gates Foundation’s senior counsel to work with Epstein on a $20-50 billion donor-advised fund in 2014, that took $25,000 from a shell entity called C.O.U.Q. in 2006 — that architecture, in 2010, also intervened on behalf of an American woman caught at the Haitian border with 33 children she had no legal basis to remove, whose own legal adviser turned out to be wanted for human trafficking.

These cases do not, individually, prove a single coordinated criminal enterprise. They do, taken together, describe an apparatus whose actual operating logic was something other than what its press releases said it was. The veneer was charity. The substance was access, leverage, and the discreet protection of friends. Does anyone believe Epstein took an interest in structuring these NGOs because he has a big heart?

What to Watch For Tuesday

Doug Band testifies tomorrow. The interview will be closed-door. The transcript may take weeks to surface. But the value of the testimony will lie almost entirely in whether the committee asks the right questions — and whether Band’s answers, when finally released, line up with what other witnesses have already said under oath.

Things investigators should press on:

• Did Bill Clinton visit Little St. James? Band told Vanity Fair in 2020 that Clinton went to the island in January 2003 and that Band declined to go. Clinton swore in February that he never went. Either he or Clinton has been wrong about this for years.

• Was Epstein ever in CGI planning meetings? Maxwell says she was “very central.” Lefcourt put Epstein in the “original group.” Where did those conversations physically happen?

• Did Band know about Epstein’s claim, in writing, to federal prosecutors in 2007 that he had helped conceive CGI? Was anyone at CGI consulted? Did anyone push back?

• Did Teneo, or any of its clients, have any financial relationship with Epstein or Epstein-linked entities?

• What did Band know about the Silsby case? As Bill Clinton’s right hand during the Haiti relief effort — when Clinton personally intervened to free Silsby’s missionaries — was Band part of that decision?

• Why did Bill Clinton stop flying with Jeffrey Epstein?

• Was Jeffrey Epstein in Haiti with the Clintons in 2010, or any year thereafter?

Band has spent twenty years as the Clinton family’s pre-emptive denier — the man reporters call when they want a quote saying Bill wasn’t on the island, the aide who DM’d Vanity Fair to set the record straight, the gatekeeper whose job was to make the documentary record line up with the public story. Tomorrow, for the first time, he doesn’t get to be the messenger. He has to be the witness.

If his account matches what Bill Clinton said in February — if he hews to the Clinton hedge, the “limited interactions” framing, the “I had no idea what was going on” line — then we’ll know the cleanup is holding. If it doesn’t, the story isn’t Doug Band’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. The story is the architecture they built together, and what that architecture was actually for.

The world’s most powerful philanthropy alliance has a Doug Band problem. Tuesday we’ll see whether the committee wants to talk about it.

Republican leaders in Congress have imperiled both our economy and our party’s future by shirking their constitutional duties regarding President Trump’s war in Iran. The first and highest duty of Congress is to uphold the Constitution, not to rubber stamp the president. Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution grants Congress exclusive power to declare or not to declare war. And what has commenced and continued in Iran is a war!

Our founders, led by James Madison, envisioned precisely what is happening today, and did their best to help us prevent it. Madison argued the need for checks and balances among the three branches of government to prevent any of the three from becoming too powerful. He maintained war is the “true nurse of executive aggrandizement” and insisted that war-making power be entrusted to the legislature. There, military actions would be debated and, if approved, funded. Article 1, Section 8 became a key pillar of the proposed Constitution which was then ratified by the states.

Congress has evaded its constitutional responsibility by permitting the President to mislabel as a mere “military operation,” rather than a war, the presence near Iran of some 20 ships and submarines, including three carrier strike groups, various attack aircraft, and the arrival of thousands of marines, as well as special forces.

The imperative to respect the supremacy of the Constitution over any one leader should be vividly clear today. President Trump repeatedly campaigned on a platform of “America First” that promised no new wars in the Middle East. Yet, once again, just like his predecessors did in Afghanistan and in Iraq, he is sending America’s finest to risk life and limb in what could easily become another quagmire. As of late March, 13 U.S. service members have died and over 300 have been injured.

I served President Reagan. He was very patriotic and loyal to fellow Republicans. However, I strongly doubt he would have ignored the Constitution and taken the United States to war in Iran. It was not by chance that former Prime British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, credited President Reagan for winning the Cold War without firing a shot!

Depending on President Trump’s continually changing statements, the war in Iran could end in two or three weeks or, maybe not. While the president crows, “We have won this… militarily they are dead,” the Straits of Hormuz are still closed, and Iranian drones and missiles still rain down across the Middle East. Moreover, the war’s costs – higher inflation led by skyrocketing gas prices, increasing shortages, and ever mounting debt – will hurt the American people and dramatically weaken what the president touts as his great economic success story.

Sensing economic and political disaster, President Trump may backpedal, call progress on negotiations when there is little or none, label no deal a deal, and/or call retreat a victory. Unfortunately, the damage is done. The challenge for Republican Congressional leaders – and one you can and must still meet – is to do the job you were elected to do.

Support President Trump when he is right, and, yes, he has many sound and welcome policies, but when he is reckless, rein him in. Do so by staying true to the Constitution. That sacred document was written for We the People and for eternity. Its wisdom remains as strong and able to protect our freedoms today as when our founders handed it down over two centuries ago.

Bently Thomas Elliott was the Director of White House Speechwriting for President Ronald Reagan. This article originally appeared in The Daily Caller.

The “Suicide”

The DoJ’s Inspector General released a report that officially concluded there was no reason to doubt the suicide story, but actually contains many disturbing details if you read the included evidence. As summarized by JustFacts:

• Federal prison officials placed Epstein in a cell with a murderous, hulking ex-cop — a death trap for any child molester.

• Less than two weeks later, prison guards found Epstein in the middle of the night in a semiconscious state with a rope and “friction marks” around his neck.

• Despite a court order requiring the prison to preserve video surveillance footage near Epstein’s cell during the strangulation, federal prison officials failed to do so and also lost the backup due to “technical errors.”

• Federal prison officials took Epstein off “suicide watch” just one day after the strangulation without determining whether Epstein was attacked by his cellmate or tried to commit suicide.

• One day before Epstein’s death, federal prison officials removed his new cellmate and didn’t replace him. They did this even though a prison psychologist sent an email to over 70 prison staffers stating that Epstein “needs” a cellmate — a common suicide prevention measure.

• One day before Epstein’s death, a federal court unsealed more than 2,000 pages of lawsuit records that named and implicated wealthy and powerful people in Epstein’s sex crimes, as well as federal officials in covering up the crimes.

• One day before Epstein’s death, federal prison officials permitted Epstein to make a completely unmonitored phone call in direct violation of prison policy and under patently false pretenses.

• Federal officers placed a hoard of linens in Epstein’s cell, which is commonly prohibited because they can be used to create nooses.

• Federal officers left Epstein alone in his cell for nearly eight hours on the night he died — despite the fact that they were required to check on all inmates in his unit “at least twice per hour” and were only 15 feet from Epstein’s cell.

• Federal officers falsified records to show that they had checked on Epstein, a violation of federal law punishable by up to five years in prison.

• Federal prosecutors “dismissed all charges pending against” the two officers who falsified the records and “declined” to prosecute others who “falsely certified inmate countslips and round sheets on the day before and the day of Epstein’s death.”

• Federal prison officials failed to record footage from 9 of the 11 surveillance cameras around Epstein’s cell on the night of his death, including one that showed Epstein’s cell tier and cell door.

• The FBI agents who searched Epstein’s New York mansion found and then abandoned a sexually explicit trove of photos and CDs labeled with the names of “young” females alongside people other than Epstein. This allowed one of Epstein’s most notorious accomplices to take the evidence and potentially scrub it before giving it to the feds.

• To this day, the federal government hasn’t revealed the names of the people that were written beside the “young” females on Epstein’s CDs.

Hours before Epstein’s reported suicide, he made an unmonitored call to his girlfriend, Karyna Shuliak. She told friends Epstein gave no indication he was thinking of harming himself. The New York Times asked the Bureau of Prisons for his full call logs; “those logs show only one social call during his stay, more than a week earlier, to Shuliak.” In other words, the logs omitted this critical call. To date there is no knowledge of its contents, beyond Shuliak saying Epstein appeared to be in good spirits.

The Cameras

Due to a known issue with the prison’s DVR system — an issue jail officials were already aware of — only one security camera in the SHU unit was functioning. The feds said there exists no camera list correctly naming camera locations in the jail. The corrupted DVR drives were shipped to Quantico, where the FBI reportedly planned to attempt data recovery. However, according to an FBI letter, “they discontinue[d] those efforts once we told them dates prior to July 29th weren’t of interest.” This is itself strange, as pre-July 29th would have covered Epstein’s original reported strangulation.

According to the Inspector General’s report, both guards tasked with monitoring Epstein that night fell asleep during key hours, missing six of the six mandatory visual checks on Epstein. At other points during the night, as newly surfaced surveillance footage shows, the guards were actively walking around mere “steps away” from Epstein’s cell as he was reportedly preparing sheets to hang himself.

Many online researchers have noted that by using a technique to search Epstein files displaying the text “no images produced,” you’ll find files with a .pdf extension that, when renamed to .mp4, reveal video files. One interesting video is surveillance footage from the Manhattan Correctional Center from the night prior to Epstein’s “suicide.” It shows a large screen blocking the camera from the stairwell.

The Body Swap Theory

Why might blocking the stairwell camera be necessary? One possibility is to facilitate what a worker at the jail posted about on 4Chan: that the night before the “suicide,” the feds swapped Epstein out.

“Last night after 0415 count they took him medical in a wheelchair front cufed but not 1 triage nurse says they spoke to him. Next thing we know a trip van shows up? We do not release weekends unless a judge orders it. Next thing we know, he’s put in a single man cell and hangs himself? Here’s the thing, the trip van did NOT sign in and we did not record the plate number and a guy in a green military outfit was in the back of the van according to the tower guy who let him thru the gate. You guys I am shaking right now but I think they switched him out.”

Within 24 hours, the feds subpoenaed Apple, AT&T, CitiBank, and 4Chan to investigate this poster’s identity and determined it was indeed a staffer at the jail. Consider the priorities this reveals: subpoenas issued within hours of an anonymous post, while the investigation into the most high-profile prisoner death in modern history was left to two guards who falsified records.

Multiple sources in the Epstein files note that at 10:39 PM on August 9, investigators reviewing jail surveillance footage flagged an orange-colored figure moving up a staircase toward the locked tier housing Epstein’s cell. The Inspector General said it could be someone carrying bedding; CBS reported independent analysts said it looked more like an inmate. Officials have repeatedly stated no one entered Epstein’s housing tier that night.

The Guards

The NY Post reported that one of the jail guards, Tova Noel, was googling “Latest Epstein jail” in the hours before his reputed death. Noel also “made a mysterious $5,000 cash deposit 10 days before the predator’s jail-cell suicide, new Department of Justice documents reveal.” Noel drove a $62,000 Range Rover — an extravagant luxury for a jail guard.

Noel was one of the two jail workers accused of faking records to say they checked on Epstein throughout the night of his “suicide.” She was fired, but the feds later dropped criminal charges.

Per the NY Post, “Noel googled ‘latest on Epstein in jail’ at 5:42 a.m. and then again at 5:52 a.m. — less than 40 minutes before her colleague, correctional officer Michael Thomas, found the disgraced financier dead in his jail cell.” Noel later denied to the feds that she had googled Epstein — a claim her internet history would disprove. Despite the DoJ knowing she was actively checking for updates on Epstein throughout that night, the IG report downplays this, merely stating she read an article about Epstein:

“OIG analysis of the activity on the SHU computers revealed that Noel used the computer periodically throughout the night, including to search the Internet for furniture sales and benefit websites and to read a news article about Epstein. Thomas used the computer briefly around 1 a.m. and 6 a.m. to search for motorcycle sales and sports news.”

Noel reported that faking records at the Manhattan Correctional Center was just the way things operated there.

The files only contain Noel’s bank records beginning in December 2018. They show seven cash deposits totaling $11,880. Noel started working at the Special Housing Unit — where Epstein had been held — beginning on July 7, 2019, just weeks before his death.

Noel, who drove a $62,000 2019 Land Rover Range Rover, wasn’t asked about the cash during her DOJ interview, records showed.

The Miami Herald reports that an inmate during Epstein’s incarceration overheard a commotion the morning Epstein was reportedly found dead:

The federal government’s online Epstein library contains a five-page handwritten report of an FBI interview with an inmate who awoke the morning of Aug. 10, 2019 to the loud commotion in the Special Housing Unit, or SHU, where he and Epstein were jailed.

“Breathe! Breathe!” he recalled officers shouting about 6:30 a.m. Then he said he heard an officer say “Dudes, you killed that dude.” A female guard replied “If he is dead, we’re going to cover it up and he’s going to have an alibi — my officers,” the FBI notes said. The inmate claimed the whole wing overheard the exchange.

Later, after learning Epstein had died, he said inmates said “Miss Noel killed Jeffrey.”

He identified the female guard as Tova Noel, one of two correctional officers who were later charged with falsifying reports so that it appeared from their records that they had made their rounds that night — when they had not. The charges against her and the other officer, Michael Thomas, were later dropped, but both were fired.

And another curiosity. In an interview with an unnamed jail worker, the redacted interviewee says they used a fake body to confuse the press:

“[REDACTED] remained with COs [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] until personnel from the Office of Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) arrived to transport EPSTEIN to their facility. Due to the large news media presence outside the MCC, a male OCHE official called and said he would be arriving at the loading dock with a black vehicle. In order to thwart the media, [REDACTED], [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] used boxes and sheets to create what appeared to be a human body, which was put into the white OCME vehicle which the press followed, allowing the black vehicle to depart unnoticed with EPSTEIN's body.”

The Body Doesn’t Match: The Prostate

It seems clear enough someone died of hanging or strangulation that morning. The question is whether it was Epstein’s body, or someone else’s.

Perhaps the most damning evidence that it was not Epstein’s body comes from his prostate — or rather, his lack of one.

In an exchange with Dr. Richard Axel, Epstein said that despite taking testosterone, he also takes Viagra due to not having a prostate. This is Epstein, in his own words, telling a doctor that his prostate had been removed.

His medical records corroborate this. A LabCorp patient report for Epstein references his “radical prostatectomy” — boilerplate language triggered by a prostatectomy flag in his patient history. This language appears in reports from both 2010 and 2018.

In two of the Epstein files, we have Epstein texting himself about needing a prostate cancer specialist. In April 2019 — just months before his death — NY-Presbyterian Hospital told Epstein the doctor he sought was no longer practicing and included several alternative recommendations. Of a proposed doctor they wrote: “He has been listed as an expert in nerve-sparing radical prostatectomy techniques as well as male infertility by Castle Connolly’s ‘Best Doctors’ Guide since 1999 as well as other national ‘Best Doctor’ lists.” (“Nerve-sparing” translates to Epstein being able to continue his favorite pastime.)

And yet: despite all of these records indicating Epstein’s prostate had been removed, the NYC coroner report describes the deceased as having a prostate that is “slightly and diffusely enlarged, with marked enlargement of the verumontanum.” The verumontanum is an anatomical structure that exists within the prostate. You cannot have one without the other.

To date, there is no publicly known way to regrow a prostate.

The Body Doesn’t Match: The Lipoma

Jeffrey Epstein suffered from a roughly 6 cm lipoma (fatty tumor) in his left supraclavicular fossa — the area above his left collarbone — documented in 2016, 2017, and again in 2018. The 2016 report also references a similar exam from 2014. In 2016 there were communications about surgical removal. In 2017, Epstein’s assistant confirms he hasn’t had it removed. In 2018, it’s being MRI’d all over again.

2016:

2017:

2018:

Both MRIs document a mass large enough to displace the brachial plexus — a critical nerve bundle serving the arm. The autopsy makes no mention of it whatsoever, despite a detailed neck dissection necessitated by the hanging injuries. The 2016 MRI also documented multilevel cervical spondylosis (C3-C7) with cord compression at C5-C6. The autopsy doesn’t mention this either. Its musculoskeletal section notes only a healed rib fracture and general musculature — no soft tissue masses anywhere.

Despite Epstein’s voluminous communications with his doctors in the years and months before his reported death, there is no record anywhere of Epstein having the lipoma removed. As late as September 2018, he was texting his doctor about it. And even if he had somehow undergone an undocumented surgery and recovery in the months before his arrest, that level of operation should have left scarring or other evidence the autopsy would have noted.

The lipoma’s location also creates a cardiovascular problem for the official narrative. “Evaluation of the left supraclavicular fossa once again demonstrates a lesion identified, inferior to the subclavian vein, and displacing the roots of the brachial plexus inferiorly,” the radiologist, Dr. Douglas DeCorato, observed in the 2018 MRI. In 2016, in an exchange with one of his doctors, the surgeon says he’s bringing his brother, a vascular surgeon, because “the tumor is directly adjacent to the subclavian vessels.”

Here is what the official autopsy says of the deceased’s cardiovascular system (a section redacted in some versions of the document):

During autopsy, the cardiovascular system examination involves tracing major vessels including the subclavian. A 6 cm mass resting on those vessels should have been encountered during that dissection — yet the autopsy reports the pulmonary vessels and venae cavae as simply “free of thrombus and embolus” with no mention of any adjacent mass.

The 2018 MRI explicitly states there is “no evidence of adenopathy.” The autopsy, roughly 14 months later, documents multiple enlarged cervical lymph nodes up to 1.5 cm. That could be a new development, but combined with the missing lipoma and the impossible prostate, it deepens the question of whether these records describe the same person.

The Body Doesn’t Match: Physical Appearance

The Epstein in the post-mortem photos has ears and a nose that look markedly different from Epstein’s known features. Morticians have also noted that images of the deceased with his mouth closed do not align with how faces typically present after death by hanging — muscles relax and gravity takes over, meaning mouths and eyes usually fall open.

The Medical Examiner

The original death certificate, from the day after his reported suicide, lists his immediate cause of death as “Pending Further Study.” New York City’s medical examiner, Dr. Kristin Roman, told federal investigators that due to the high-profile nature of the case, she wanted to be “thorough” and speak with the guard who found him. However, she was not permitted to do so. She changed the ruling to suicide after reviewing “additional evidence” — which sources say was his alleged prior suicide attempt.

Jeffrey Epstein’s brother hired famed pathologist Michael Baden to observe the autopsy. “Baden served for decades as a member of the New York State Correction Medical Review Board, an entity responsible for reviewing deaths of inmates in custody,” the Miami Herald reports. “Baden has conducted more than 20,000 autopsies including reviewing those of former President John F. Kennedy, and civil rights leaders the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Medgar Evers.”

Baden found three separate fractures: two on the left and right sides of the thyroid cartilage (the Adam’s apple), plus one on the left hyoid bone. He described the injuries as requiring a “huge amount of pressure” and specifically noted they were “more consistent with ligature homicidal strangulation” than suicide. “I have never seen three fractures like this in a suicidal hanging,” Baden later told 60 Minutes. “Going over a thousand jail hangings, suicides in the New York City state prisons over the past 40-50 years, no one had three fractures.” Others have noted that hyoid fractures can occur in hangings, particularly among older individuals — but three fractures remains highly unusual.

Attorneys for Jeffrey Epstein told the Southern District of New York: “We also had been in receipt of a tremendous amount of medical and scientific evidence volunteered to us opining that the injuries suffered, as reported, were far more consistent with assault than with suicide, and we are happy to supply the court with all the information we have.” These attorneys also noted how the prison guards had moved the body, complicating investigation efforts: “Instead of having the cell in the condition it was found, if he had been dead for 45 minutes or two hours or four hours, there were efforts to move him and, therefore, make it more difficult to reconstruct whether or not he died of suicide or some other cause.”

It would helpful if the body could be reexamined. Unfortunately that’s impossible as it was almost immediately claimed by “an unidentified [Epstein] associate.”

The Pre-Dated Death Announcement

The feds’ statement on Epstein’s death appears to have been drafted a day before he died. As many as 23 documents in the disclosure are labeled as statements from the Southern District of New York’s US Attorney’s Office. In one version, the date reads August 9, 2019 — a day before Epstein was reportedly found dead. It states: “Earlier this morning, the Manhattan Correctional Centre confirmed that Jeffrey Epstein, who faced charges brought by this Office of engaging in the sex trafficking of minors, had been found unresponsive in his cell and pronounced dead shortly thereafter.”

The DOJ has called it “merely an unfortunate typo that was later updated to reflect the correct date before being publicized.” Theoretically possible, sure. But it’s another incident in an impossibly long string of coincidences where you must extend the feds the benefit of the doubt.

Destruction of Evidence

Then there are the jail’s surveillance hard drives. The Epstein Files contain an FBI memorandum admitting that an FBI agent removed the hard drive from the jail’s camera system, wiping all of the data from the night Epstein died. The agent did this, they acknowledge, even as he knew doing so would result in the content’s corruption. This comes on top of two other surveillance systems that independently failed that night.

And it gets worse. Just yesterday, the Daily Beast reported that six days after Epstein’s death, the Department of Justice shredded a massive volume of documents from the jail:

A Bureau of Prisons “After-Actions team” went through the jail and shredded the files, according to a report drafted by an FBI official whose name has been redacted. The document is part of the tranche of files released by the Department of Justice earlier this year.

“[Redacted] has never seen this amount of bags of shredded documents coming out to be put in the dumpster at the rear gate of the MCC,” the report said.

“Last week Epstein hung [sic] himself, and there is an ongoing investigation. There was a BOP After-Actions team that come, and they are supposed to review what happened,” the report continued.

… “Caller found it suspicious that an after-action team charged with investigating would be shredding huge amounts of paperwork with all of the officials from the AIG, FBI and BO[P] in the building in the middle of an investigation. Those giving instructions to [redacted] said, ‘Make sure you get that box too,’” the document said, referring to the assistant inspector general.

That this was no normal cleanup operation is underscored by the fact that at least one inmate was recruited to help dispose of the shredded material: “[Redacted] was bringing back bags of shredded papers, around 4 or 5 bags, and caller brought them into the gate to throw into the dumpster. [Redacted] told caller that the after-action team is shredding huge amounts of paperwork.”

Even more damning: a federal prosecutor later wrote that “all institutional count slips prior to August 10, 2019, which we requested on August 12, 2019, are apparently ‘missing.’”

The Miami Herald notes there were two separate corruption probes associated with Epstein’s death — “one, an obstruction-of-justice case involving the shredding of documents and possible charges of dereliction of duty and other misconduct by correctional officers; and second, a blackmail-for-sex scheme involving a correctional officer that the DOJ labeled a ‘Color of Law’ probe” — and both were transferred from being an FBI criminal case to being a matter for the DoJ’s Office of Inspector General (OIG), which lacks prosecuting power.

From the outset, on the day Epstein’s body was found, then-Attorney General William Barr immediately announced that Epstein died of an “apparent suicide.” And then, six days later, on Aug. 16, Sampson confirmed the suicide ruling.

With the cause and manner of death already determined, and no foul play suspected, the only aspects of the case left unresolved – at least in the eyes of the Justice Department – was whether the actions of any of the officers contributed to Epstein’s suicide.

This seemed to color the investigation almost from the beginning, since Epstein’s death was never treated as suspicious. As a result, his cell was never considered a possible crime scene that would, under normal circumstances, be examined by experienced criminal and forensic experts who would take fingerprints, blood samples and other evidence. One thing that got lost as a result of the cell not being examined was that the piece of fabric that Epstein allegedly used to hang himself was never identified.

Before moving on, it’s worth recalling that Epstein significantly revised and signed his will two days before his reported death. Normally, dramatic changes to your estate hours before a death arouse suspicion, but it’s also not inconsistent with suicide.

The Tattoo Question

Many have called into question an apparent discrepancy between Epstein having at least one tattoo and the autopsy body having none. The files contain an undated image of Epstein with a barbed wire tattoo on his left arm:

However, this situation isn’t straightforward. In 2009, Epstein references his tattoo in an email. In 2010, his assistant emailed him about tattoo removal options. There are also several redacted emails about a tattoo. Some have pointed to a 2017 DoJ deposition referencing a “barbed wire” tattoo on the left arm, but this deposition is actually from one of the victims, not a contemporaneous observation of Epstein.

Due to Epstein’s 2010 interest in tattoo removal and the lack of dated photos confirming the tattoo’s presence at the time of his arrest, there’s not enough to establish this discrepancy definitively. It’s also possible someone has inserted a fake image of Epstein with a barbed wire tattoo specifically to plant a debunkable conspiracy theory — a known disinformation technique.

Post-Mortem Activity

Meanwhile, accounts connected with Epstein have remained active after his reported death.

The Irish media outlet The Ditch “gained access to the convicted paedophile’s FedEx account after the US Department of Justice published an unredacted password. The department later removed it from the Epstein files.”

The account was used as recently as summer 2024 — despite Epstein’s death in 2019.

The Ditch still has access to the FedEx account and address book, which contains almost 100 names and addresses, including an ex-Israeli Air Force Lieutenant Colonel who now advises Alan Dershowitz.

A package collected from Gulfstream’s product support centre in Savannah, Georgia, was shipped to Plan D LLC in Kennesaw, Georgia, on 20 May, 2024.

Plan D is the now-dissolved firm that Epstein incorporated to own and operate his private jet, which Donald Trump used during the 2024 US presidential election campaign.

Another package was shipped from the same Gulfstream address in Georgia to Empire Aviation in West Palm Beach, Florida, on 12 March, 2024, according to invoices.

FedEx deleted both invoices from the child sex offender’s account in the past few days.

Then there’s Fortnite.

One of the early public discoveries from the Epstein files drop is that Epstein had a Fortnite account under the username littlestjeff1.

This username matches an email listed in the Epstein files, littlestjeff@yahoo.com (Littlest = Little St. James). It also appears as the username of his YouTube account.

After people looked up the account’s status, it appeared to be actively used from Tel Aviv. Fortnite removed the account from online tracking, then issued a statement saying it was a “ruse” — actually another player “who changed their username” to match Epstein’s.

However, Fortnite’s player community noted a problem with this explanation: when people change their username on the platform, you can see the previous usernames. This account showed no prior name. (That community note was later removed from X.)

Other details that Epic Games’ statement didn’t address: the account showed a gap in activity that coincided with Epstein’s stay in the Manhattan Correctional Center, and records of its use were scrubbed from the Wayback Machine.

Could anyone in Epstein’s orbit exert influence over Epic Games? One pathway: Epstein’s estimated $5 million equity stake in Tencent, the Chinese technology conglomerate that purchased a 48.4 percent outstanding stake — equating to 40 percent of total capital — in Epic Games in 2012. Tencent’s acquisition triggered a number of high-profile departures from Epic, reputedly over the company’s shifting philosophy. A financial whistleblower also alerted the feds to suspicious Epstein activities related to Tencent’s ownership.

Epstein’s “secret” bank in the U.S. Virgin Islands, Southern Country International, also saw significant post-mortem activity. The New York Times reported that Southern Country had $693,157 in assets when Epstein died. Then, in mid-December 2019, the estate transferred $15.5 million to the bank. Two weeks later, its assets were back down to $499,759. The estate offered no explanation. A magistrate judge reviewing the transactions said, “There’s no explanation for it.”

The Epstein files dump also includes emails between DoJ and HHS officials from July 6, 2021 — two years after Epstein’s death — discussing “Epstein’s” availability for a call in Colorado. Snopes investigated and found evidence indicating these emails refer to Richard Epstein, a cooperating witness in a Medicare fraud investigation. Despite my general skepticism of Snopes, I believe they’re correct here: the evidence strongly suggests this email chain referred to a different Epstein.

There are also the supposed sightings. Someone thought he might have seen Ghislaine (and someone who looks like Alan Dershowitz) in Quebec. Someone else brought a drone to Little St. James and caught a glimpse of someone who resembles Epstein (and his most recent girlfriend) in the weeks after his reported suicide. Another sighting had him in a random port in Greece.

Why the Feds Might Help Him Disappear

Why would the federal government help Epstein flee? There are actually many reasons.

He provided them a skill they find valuable: money laundering. CBS News recently revealed a previously undisclosed DEA investigation — a five-year-plus probe targeting Epstein and 14 other individuals for approximately $50 million in suspicious wire transfers linked to illicit narcotics and prostitution activity in the U.S. Virgin Islands and New York City.

He was an international power broker, coordinating operations among banking families, intelligence agencies, universities, and governments. He’d been a key cog in the apparatus that seems to run our power structure for at least 40 years. And he provided the U.S. intelligence:

• Epstein “told colleagues and friends that he was an intelligence asset”

• The FBI closed a forfeiture proceeding against Epstein, noting “Epstein… has provided information to the FBI as agreed upon”

• There’s speculation that Epstein was a “confidential informant”

• The U.S. State Department rented Epstein a luxurious townhouse in New York City that had been seized from the Iranian government in 1992. They didn’t even complain when he failed to pay his bills.

• Researcher Mike Benz has detailed reporting all but conclusively showing Epstein helped launder money for the CIA during, at least, Iran-Contra.

And yes, most likely he was leveraging sexual blackmail — as everyone now largely agrees. Were they really going to let Epstein go to trial where he starts spilling secrets? A guy like Epstein would have sooner torched the whole cathedral than quietly accept a life sentence. That was never going to happen.

My working theory is that the feds initially hoped Epstein would be killed in jail — the most convenient outcome for Trump, Barr, and others. Which may explain why they kept housing him with violent inmates. When that failed, they went to Plan B.

Suppression Over Investigation

Of course I cannot prove any of this definitively — although the prostate issue seems as close to proof as it gets. But one thing I can say: even if the feds didn’t help Epstein abscond, why are they acting like they did? If you start with this theory — that they orchestrated a conclusion to the Epstein chapter they hoped would tie up countless loose ends — everything else starts making sense. Including Trump and Bondi’s absolute resistance to dig deeper into the files.

One of the most notable aspects of the feds’ post-Epstein behavior is how focused they are on suppressing incriminating information rather than investigating it.

Case in point: Zorro Ranch. Many Americans have wondered why the feds never raided Epstein’s 7,500-acre New Mexico compound despite multiple victims testifying of abuse there. But it’s worse than neglect — the feds actively prevented others from investigating, reports the Albuquerque Journal.

The request by federal prosecutors essentially “gutted” New Mexico’s investigation into sex trafficking at Epstein’s 7,500-acre Zorro Ranch located 30 miles south of Santa Fe, Balderas said.

“We provided information to them to strengthen their prosecution,” he said. Prosecutors made assurances they would provide findings to New Mexico investigators. “They were making the representation that they were going to prosecute with a multijurisdictional, multistate focus.”

Balderas’ office also sent a letter in 2020 urging federal prosecutors to seize control of Zorro Ranch to preserve evidence, records show. Balderas said he also offered to assist serving search warrants at the ranch but never received a response and has no reason to believe prosecutors acted on the requests …

None of the investigative records provided by New Mexico appear to be among the more than 3 million pages of documents released last month by the U.S. Department of Justice.

The FBI/DoJ’s redactions — technically illegal under the Massie/Khanna disclosure bill — are also telling. The day before Epstein was reported dead, the federal jail transferred out Epstein’s cellmate despite a prison psychologist expressly forbidding this. The records reporting the transfer are blacked out:

This is one of thousands of similar examples. The Massie/Khanna bill specifies redactions are only “permitted to withhold certain information such as the personal information of victims and materials that would jeopardize an active federal investigation.” The law also requires the DoJ to list all redactions and categories of redactions. The DoJ refuses to comply with either requirement.

Should we wonder if the FBI has a conflict of interest considering its post-9/11 data-mining was in large part assisted by Chiliad, a Big Data company run by Ghislaine Maxwell’s sister, Christine? One whistleblower told the FBI “a backdoor to the software is suspected … I suspect Robert, Ghislaine, and Jeffrey were all Mossad agents trying to blackmail leaders in the political and financial world.”

The Impossible Coincidences

I can’t help but acknowledge that putting all of this in writing will be controversial. But this is the actual presumption of a very large swath of the American public — and for good reason. We already know the feds lied about Epstein’s “sweetheart deal.” They lied about his intelligence connections. They lied about the lack of incriminating evidence in the Epstein Files. They refuse to comply with the law requiring the release of unredacted records. And all of that is before the chain of impossibly improbable events surrounding his supposed suicide.

To continue believing the official narrative, you must believe:

It’s just bad luck the body autopsied had an enlarged prostate, despite Epstein telling his own doctor he’d had his removed.

It’s just bad luck a 6 cm tumor documented in Epstein’s neck through 2018 vanished from the 2019 autopsy — with no surgical record explaining its absence.

It’s just bad luck the jail’s known-to-be-broken DVR system wasn’t repaired before the most notorious inmate in the country was found dead.

It’s just bad luck 11 of 12 cameras were either offline or not recording that night.

It’s just bad luck an FBI agent corrupted the data on one of the surveillance drives still in existence.

It’s just bad luck the FBI was unable to recover that footage.

It’s just bad luck the Bureau of Prisons shredded “huge amounts of paperwork” from the jail six days after Epstein’s death, during an active investigation, and that the institutional count slips from the night he died went “missing.”

It’s just a coincidence someone working at the jail posted that he believed they swapped the body out — and the feds subpoenaed his records within hours.

It’s just bad luck that not one but both guards assigned to Epstein’s unit that night fell asleep, failed to make their rounds, and lied about it.

It’s just a coincidence one of those guards was receiving unexplained cash deposits and driving a $62,000 Range Rover, and spent part of the night googling for updates on Epstein in jail.

It’s just bad luck the DoJ dropped charges against both guards.

It’s just bad luck the medical examiner initially needed more time, was denied access to the guard who found the body, and then changed her ruling.

It’s just bad luck a competing pathologist found three neck fractures — more consistent with strangulation than hanging — something he’d never seen in thousands of jail suicides.

It’s just bad luck the feds’ announcement of Epstein’s death was dated the day before he died.

It’s just bad luck Epstein’s FedEx account was shipping packages five years after his death, and his Fortnite account showed activity from Tel Aviv.

It’s just bad luck the feds shut down New Mexico’s investigation into Zorro Ranch and then failed to include any of New Mexico’s records in the 3 million pages they released.

It’s just bad luck so many of the feds’ documents regarding Epstein’s reported final days are still being illegally redacted.

All of this only scratches the surface. Further examples of the feds’ withholding of evidence, as well as conflicts of interest between Epstein-affiliated enterprises and federal officials, are too numerous to document here. One rabbit hole: the Epstein-backed surveillance company Reporty (later renamed Carbyne, also known as Smart911), whose financial backers — including former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak — overlap with the president’s, and whose technology appears to be used at the Pentagon. (There is more on this in the book “Epstein: Dead Men Tell No Tales.” And I can’t help but quickly add: The authors of that book interviewed Epstein’s attorney, victims’ attorneys, among others, and the only person willing to go on record stating he believed Epstein killed himself was Alan Dershowitz. )

Speaking for myself, I can only weather so many insults to my intelligence before accepting I’m being had. We’ll likely never know exactly what happened on August 10, 2019. But one thing I can say with confidence: the feds have absolutely earned their distrust.