Become Who You Are
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Saint Catherine of Siena said "Become who you are and you would set the world on fire".
Become Who You Are
#648 Inside the Jeffrey Epstein Web of Corruption: Dark Networks With No Moral Compass
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A dark web of money, power, and government complicity surrounds the Jeffrey Epstein case – arguably the largest child sex trafficking operation ever uncovered. Crime investigator Tom Hampson takes us beyond the headlines to expose how this predator operated with impunity for decades.
Epstein's journey from financial mastermind to sex trafficker reveals a troubling pattern. Initially valued for his ability to create shell corporations for arms dealers and billionaires, Epstein leveraged these connections to build an operation that processed $1.5 billion in transactions related to human trafficking – with major banks blocking suspicious activity reports from government review.
The podcast explores disturbing historical precedents like the CIA's "Operation Midnight Climax," where intelligence agencies hired prostitutes to drug and film unwitting men in sexual encounters. This context helps explain how government agencies became entangled with Epstein's network, with former Secret Service agent Dan Bongino stating after his investigation: "I'll never be the same after learning what I've learned."
Read Part 2: The Troubling Case of Jeffrey Epstein
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They got apartments in San Francisco and in New York City and they hired prostitutes to go out to cruise bars and the prostitutes would drug the drink, sometimes to the guys. They would entice them back to these apartments and they would seduce them and try to get information out of them before, during and after having sex with them.
Speaker 2:Dan Bongino says he goes after investigating this and looking into it. I'll never be the same after learning what I've learned. And his face was really like whoa, I had no idea, right. So he said on a social media post just last week that the agency is conducting multiple investigations relating to alleged public corruption and weaponization of government. He said the director and I are committed to stamping out public corruption and the political weaponization of both the law enforcement's and intelligence operations. But you realize what they're up against.
Speaker 2:I get back to Paul in Ephesians 6, you know we're not fighting against flesh and blood, but the powers and the principalities, the rulers of this world. He calls them and he's talking about the demonic all that money. Christ talks about it so often. He says what are you going to do with all that money and all those treasures? He said you know you can have all that. What good have you done if you got all these treasures and you've lost your eternal soul?
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Become who you Are podcast, a production of the John Paul II Renewal Center. I'm Jack Riggert, your host. I'm back with a good friend, crime investigator and crime journalist, tom Hampson. Tom, you wrote part two of your Jeffrey Epstein's articles, the Troubling Case of Jeffrey Epstein. I'm going to just read your opener here, if that's okay. Okay, and you know you're familiar with child porn, child sex trafficking, all these issues and the many other things, and so you have a pretty good idea of what's going on here. And this is not easy, right? It's a big, complex situation at the end of the day. So I want to just back up a little bit. You started out. This is part two.
Speaker 2:So why did our government turn a blind eye to Jeffrey Epstein's activities for so long and why are they now trying to claim there's nothing to see? Some argue that it's an effort to protect wealthy and prominent perpetrators, some of the people who show up on Epstein's Black Book, who flew on Epstein's plane that was nicknamed the Lolita Express, or visited Jeffrey Epstein's island, which is dubbed Orgy Island. While it's recognized that not everyone who shows up on these lists is guilty of sexually exploiting children, there's a sense that within these lists is a subset of people who are guilty of many crimes against children and our government is letting them go, or let them go scot-free, because of their supposedly importance and influence. But who's being protected and who's protecting them? The belief is that our government investigators know, and I have no doubt that that's true. The reason, though, at the end of the day, you say, is, quite simply, our government will claim it's not in the national security interest, and that's why this isn't coming out.
Speaker 2:You go into so many things here, but I just want to outline a couple of things. Jeffrey Epstein you make the point was a brilliant guy, huh, but he's a man with no moral compass. Amen to that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, one of the arms dealers actually characterized him that way was Douglas Lease, who was an arms dealer out of the UK that he worked with and he recommended Epstein to a guy named Stephen Hoffenberg who started Towers Financial. And when he recommended him he told Stephen he says the guy is a genius and he has no moral compass. So basically he was endorsing both the genius part and the no moral compass that in this group of people that operate there's many of them who really don't care about right and wrong, and that's the problem.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and one of his biggest clients and the ones you were just bringing up these arms traders for one, and Jeffrey Epstein goes in and helps them hide or facilitate their business transactions, and then it sets up sophisticated shelters to help them avoid paying taxes. And one example is Leon Black. I think he's passed away now, right.
Speaker 1:No, he's still alive. Is he still around?
Speaker 2:Apollo Global Management.
Speaker 1:Well, he's not with us anymore. He was replaced at Apollo after the Epstein deals.
Speaker 2:Epstein deals. Epstein saved them $500 million over six years and for that Epstein made $170 million. So we're talking about some big money here, tom, and that's just one of his clients. So when you're starting to talk about these things and arms dealers et cetera, these are big, big dollars going around.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, and one of the big problems that we've got is that there's so much secrecy in everything.
Speaker 1:If anybody who's ever looked into these networks of financial transactions and networks of corporate interests, you'll see what they call these shell corporations that exist offshore.
Speaker 1:They don't really exist for anything. They live in a desk drawer and they live in areas where they're mostly tax havens, but basically they're there to hide who owns what and where money is going and what it's being used for, and so there isn't any real I suppose you could say there is a legitimate purpose for it, but there isn't any good purpose for this secrecy in international finance. But one of the things that Epstein was very good at was setting up these networks of shell corporations so they could hide transactions, they could hide money, they could, you know, and basically you could make any amount of money you wanted, just disappear and make it almost impossible for people to track. So he's very good at that, and there were a lot of people that wanted that to happen, so they wouldn't have to pay taxes or so that they could hide what they're using the money for, and that includes governments, and so he was much in demand because he was so skilled at it.
Speaker 2:And this was kind of word of mouth in the beginning he's building up, and then he's building up these relationships among the ultra rich. These are billionaire types among the ultra-rich. You know, these are billionaire types and at least initially, he was not using underage girls. These were relationships they built up. These were, you know, I was going to say, legitimate businesses. Well, it's not that they're legitimate businesses, but he was setting up things that these people needed, you know, to avoid taxes, to actually, you know, arms dealers, and this gets us into the government, doesn't it? I mean these arms dealers from Iran-Contra and then up. You know, since then, you know, the intelligence agencies are working at some levels and sometimes with these arms dealers to supply the governments that we back around the world.
Speaker 1:Well, the Iran-Contra is a good example, because that was a completely blatantly illegal operation. It was engineered by the Reagan administration to get financial help to the Contras in Nicaragua in exchange for providing weapons to Iran, both of which were illegal, and so they had to do it all in secrecy, and they used people like Adnan Khashoggi, who was an arms trafficker, and Epstein was involved with Adnan Khashoggi in setting up the whole network of shell corporations that hid the operation from public view.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you could see where somebody with Epstein's skills, let's say, or talents, could really come in handy with these people. And then, of course, you end up getting, like you just said, the US government involved. And then they got the Israelis right, the Mossad involved, M-16, you know, the British intelligence agencies probably in on it. What is it M?
Speaker 1:M-I-6, not, like you know. Let's not get them confused with MS.
Speaker 2:Yeah, m-i-6. And then you have the Saudi Arabian intelligence agencies in there too later on. So so you know he gets to know all of these people at least at some level. Later on, though, tom, he gets introduced to Jelaine Maxwell, right, and it seems like his relationships and you know he's attending all these parties, building up relationships, kind of one, two at a time, right, but it seems like when she came in, she puts them on a different path. She starts hosting these big parties, selecting the guests, and then it seems like you know we're going to set up a way to compromise some of these guests. Do I have that right, right?
Speaker 1:You know, it's not just. It isn't just a compromising thing. It's creating an atmosphere that makes them more comfortable, more, you know, more prone to doing bad things it's. It goes from being a cocktail party to being some kind of a party at a fraternity house, I guess, I don't know.
Speaker 2:Well, sex is a big deal, you know. And if you can't, you know, you get these rich and powerful guys together with no moral compass and you start to introduce girls, and then somehow underage girls come into this picture too, and then you go. Well, if the government knows about this and they certainly seemed like it when he was sentenced the first time, right? I mean, he was sentenced for child sex trafficking, wasn't?
Speaker 1:he Well, no, he was sentenced to charge with prostitution and soliciting prostitution from an underage girl. He just had two counts in the original one.
Speaker 2:For himself or for clients. For himself and clients, okay. And so he got a very light sentence there and they knew something was going on right when, basically, he only had to stay overnight one day a week, got let out six days a week so he can go to work. He was out, wasn't he out 12 or 13, 14 hours a day.
Speaker 1:He was out 12 hours a day. I think. If they extended it a lot of times they weren't too strict on it. But he was six days a week. He was out hours a day and even the day that he had to be in the jail he had a really cozy kind of cushy cell. I don't know.
Speaker 2:When you start to talk about how these agencies like the CIA get involved with somebody like Epstein, and once they understand that he, through this arrest and more, that he's condoning the use of underage girls, let's say and why do they turn a blind eye to that? You know, share that story. You share the story of this egregious example of misconduct by the CIA that surfaces during the church committee investigations of the CIA in the mid-70s, right in the mid-1970s.
Speaker 1:Operation.
Speaker 2:Midnight Climax. Describe that a little bit, because you start to understand how far, when you don't have a moral compass and you have the power of these intelligence agencies and you're working for them, it's like a crime investigation.
Speaker 1:Right? Well, you can't, you know. The thing is that the people that thought up this Operation Midnight Climax are people who, likewise like Epstein, had no moral compass. Likewise, like Epstein had no moral compass. Governments have used what they call honey traps for as long as civilization has been around. I mean, they have tried to. They've used sex to entice people, to get information out of people, to get something on them in order to blackmail them. And so, I guess during the 60s, 50s and 60s, somebody in the CIA thought up this bright idea that hey, let's experiment with different ways, we can make the most out of using these honey traps. And so they got apartments in San Francisco and in New York City and they hired prostitutes to go out to cruise bars, and the prostitutes would drug the drinks sometimes of the guys. They would entice them back to these apartments and they would seduce them and try to get information out of them before, during and after having sex with them. And they used different kinds of drugs to facilitate even more information.
Speaker 2:And then sometimes they were experimenting with what kind of drugs would get the truth right? What's the truth serum here?
Speaker 1:huh, right, right, yeah, scopolamine, lsd, amphetamines which would be the best Cocaine. They did all these things and now all the people that were all the men that they were bringing back to the apartments, were completely unwitting. They had no idea what was going on and they would film these, the encounters that they had, because they had, they had, uh, you know, hidden cameras that they would film the encounter and they would film the girl, that the girl would try to ice information out of them and just uh, by, um, you know, by flattery, by, by, whatever they would do. They used a whole bunch of different things and this thing went on for I don't know 12 years.
Speaker 2:It was over 500 men, that they did 500 men. Look, I don't know how innocent each man was, but these were men that weren't committing, at least weren't there to kill who knows right. They're in a bar, they go back with a prostitute, but at the end of the day they weren't being investigated by the cia. They were just random guys, 500 of them being experimented on, like you just said, with between prostitutes and drugs to see which combination work best to get people to open up and talk well they would.
Speaker 1:They would get these guys to. You know they might be married. They might not be married. Whatever they would get them to you know they would entice them. And I have to say that you get somebody drunk and it is taking advantage of people who are vulnerable, even though, I mean, they're guys. You know, yeah, but you know when you inject drugs without them knowing.
Speaker 2:I mean this is overstepping the grounds, right? I mean, even if I had willpower, you put me on some kind of weird drug and that I'm not used to even and I don't know what's happening to me. I mean, look at these date drugs, right, these gang or these, these, uh rape, yeah, rape drugs that these guys in colleges put in their girls drinks. So we know it works, right.
Speaker 1:Well, and uh date rape, I guess who knows the the cia may have felt might have helped develop those things. Yeah and yeah, but so anyways.
Speaker 2:The point is that that you know we can do some some really corrupt things. The government level and let me just make this point, tom too, if you think that our corporations aren't involved. You got beer sterns, you've got JP Morgan Chase, all seeking these ultra rich clients who now get close to to Jeffrey Epstein so that he can introduce them to these ultra-rich clients, and to the point where they even blocked, with the SARs, suspicious activity reports that you're supposed to report to the government $1.5 billion that they suspected were for sex trafficking and they don't report it. I mean talk about greed and a lack of moral compass, tom. Yeah well, these are our banks.
Speaker 2:Who will investigate Jack over? You know $10,000? I take $10,000 out to put down on a car, say, and you know I got to tell the bank why I'm taking out $10,000. You know, and here you got $1.5 billion being blocked right from the government seeing that activity.
Speaker 1:But even without those suspicious activity reports, the government knew what was going on. They couldn't help but know what was going on. You have to wonder what is wrong with the people that we've got working in our government to be able to do this Now. Now you know there's, I understand that in order to catch criminals, sometimes you have to use not the finest techniques. I think I can't remember which justice the Supreme Court said it was it was. There was a challenge to undercover agents being used in investigations, because they were. They were tricking people into believing that they really were their friend, and so there was a challenge to a conviction based on an undercover agent being used. I don't remember exactly the language.
Speaker 2:I mean, you were an undercover. I mean we know this happens and you can't act like their enemy, you have to act like their friend.
Speaker 1:But the Supreme Court justice said that it's OK for federal agents and state agents, law enforcement people, to be duplicitous in their behavior, which and duplicity is not a nice thing, it's really not a good, it's not, it's not virtuous to be duplicitous. And so you start using non-virtuous means in order to catch the bad guys, and so then that is a slippery slope really. That's really the slippery slope that you start using unvirtuous means to accomplish and ends, and then you wind up becoming, you know, setting up an operation like Operation Climax. And how big a leap is that to saying, well, it's the girl's really 14, 15 years old, does it really? That's not that bad, you know, and look at, really 14, 15 years old, that's not that bad. And look at the information that we're getting so we can overlook this.
Speaker 2:And how many of those people you know. You asked, tom, how could our government be that corrupt? Well, the government is made up of people, right?
Speaker 1:That's exactly right.
Speaker 2:And you know what, and there's more and more and more people that don't have any moral compass either, or if they do, it doesn't take them long, right, the greed comes in. Look, if I'm undercover and even if I'm not undercover, but I'm privy to all of this money I mean, when you do drug busts, when you break down, bring people down and there's stacks of money there and you got guys that aren't, aren't morally upright, or other people in your squad you know in your group that you're working with. They put pressure on you, say jack, you know, if you're not going to take, you know, right, if you're not going to take anything here we all take something. Man, look at, we're just taking a little bit. Right, we don't get paid. I know guys like that. You know that, or they're undercover, tom, and they said well, how can I not snort a line of cocaine? The guy's looking right at me and it doesn't take much to start to fall for that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:One of the things that I've learned is that everybody has a price you know. You may think you don't, but I guarantee you do, and it just depends on what that price is, and so the challenge, I think, in what's happened in our government is that we have lost the ability to hold anybody accountable.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think we lowered the bar so much. Everything is secret.
Speaker 1:Everything is compartmentalized. Nobody knows what anybody else is doing. You know there was a—I'm going to bring it up in part three of the Epstein, my Epstein article. There was a. One of the depositions I looked at involved Jeffrey Epstein and it was after he left Bear Stearns. He was deposed by the SEC on case. And now here's this is a deposition. This is an official government deposition. When I'm reading the deposition, they've got all these names blacked out, but it's not the names of some innocent party. It's not the name. Epstein's name wasn't blacked out. It was the names of the government investigators asking the questions. Now, these are people that work for the government. Why are you blacking out their names? Why are you blacking out their contact information out of the deposition? This is a government agency. This is insane. This kind of why are they doing it?
Speaker 1:I don't know, it doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so, but basically it's just this idea that everything is secret. Everything needs to be, yeah, protecting the minor. Let's say you got somebody, a little girl or something you say Jane Doe, to protect their. But these people are all adults that are bringing these charges. We should know their names. They should not be anonymous. The files, the records in the grand jury should not be secret. These are once the cases come out. These things should be public.
Speaker 2:And if I am on the fence, you know if I'm working for a government agency or a corporation, or Beer Stearns, you know when they were still around, or Chase, you know, and I'm greedy, you know and I'm selfish and look and I'm on the fence and nobody's supervising. And look and I'm on the fence and nobody's supervising me. And I know nobody's really watching me or they're turning the other way. This really gives me the power to come in and do this. And if there's enough people, tom, that are willing to do this, the good guys realize that the you know that the people ahead of them, their bosses or their bosses' bosses, are in on the take or in on the action, or they don't know and they're afraid to expose this. You know it's not an easy system to break down. Once the deep state let's call it the deep state, you know I mean layers of corruption come in.
Speaker 2:It's not easy. You know who really made that clear. You mentioned it in the article when Dan Bongino, kash Patel, pam Bondi, when they started to him and Haw and turn the other way and you see, wow, something's really going on here. I just read something from Dan Bongino. He said this Tom, I'd like to get your take on this. He said you know he promises a dignified effort on the truth going forward. He said we can't run a republic like this. Dan Bongino says he goes after investigating this and looking into it, I'll never be the same after learning what I've learned. And his face was really like whoa, I had no idea, right. So he said on a social media post just last week that the agency is conducting multiple investigations relating to alleged public corruption and weaponization of government. He said the director and I are committed to stamping out public corruption and the political weaponization of both the law enforcement and intelligence operations. But you realize what they're up against, right? This is tough. This is tough stuff.
Speaker 1:You know, dan Bongino was a secret service. He was a New York City police officer and he was a secret service agent. He didn't get into all this stuff. I mean, this is you know, people, unless you've been inside the intelligence network, you just have no concept of the potential for corruption that exists in there and that everybody is going to be corrupt if they can live in darkness.
Speaker 2:Well, not everybody, but let's just say that.
Speaker 1:I don't know. I've seen some very—.
Speaker 2:Because if that's true, tom, well here, if the point being, if you've given in to darkness and you're living that way already and you have no—you don't bring light, let's just call it what it is If you don't have a faith in God and there's nothing but just this world for you, then you can go into it. You're going to go into, you know you're going to go into dark places. You're right, and you know, if there's no hope, no light. Again, I get back to Paul in Ephesians 6,. You know, we're not fighting against flesh and blood, but the powers and the principalities, the rulers of this world. He calls them and he's talking about the demonic Tom. So, from that standpoint, you know, if you don't have a power of good, if you don't have the power of a light within you, then, yeah, I think the default position for human beings is sin and death. Let's face it. You know this is biblical, you know.
Speaker 2:If you don't find a savior sin and death. You're looking at a six foot hole, tom, and you know people say, hey, let's take what we can, let's take what we can while we got the chance.
Speaker 1:But the other thing yeah, it's true that if you have your Savior and if you focus on being faithful, that maybe you might be able to overcome it. But really, Christians were built to be in community and unless you have somebody holding you accountable, you're going to fall. I don't care who you are, I don't care what your faith is, If you're out there alone and nobody knows.
Speaker 2:I get your point now. Okay, I see what you mean now, and so if you can, once you operate.
Speaker 1:Yeah, even Jesus sent them out two by two, you know right and and, uh, you know, billy graham was able to stay on the right path because he had people who held held him accountable. Yeah, no, no doubt about it. But what's happening in our government is nobody's holding them accountable. There there's no accountability and and it's and it's getting worse every year, and so that then these kind of cases look, the Epstein case is probably the? Um, the largest, longest child sex trafficking operation I've ever seen, and it was organized and people knew about it and nothing was done about it yeah, but you know, I think about even the church, you know even the Catholic church, when you investigated the crimes in there look at it, I mean even within the church itself.
Speaker 2:You know we have these dark places. So I just want to broaden this out because when people wonder what they can do, everybody the Bonginos, the Kash Patels, the Pam Bondys, trump, me, you, everybody has to do their part wherever that part is. And we got to do it. Like you said, in community, we got to. You know, that's why we call it the body. The body is the church. You know, we don't try to do these things by ourselves, but even that can be corrupted.
Speaker 2:Bongino said this Tom, the leadership of this administration and the work of the men and women of law enforcement have now, since the Trump administration came in, he said there's no doubt the country is safer.
Speaker 2:Now what that means exactly?
Speaker 2:He says this, he goes the FBI has carried out more than 12,000 violent crime arrests and seized more than 3,000 pounds of fentanyl, more than 136,000 pounds of cocaine, 11,000 pounds of meth and amphetamines, 27,000 pounds of marijuana, more than 21,900 immigration enforcement-related arrests, all since January. You know, the scope of this thing is amazing, tom, and unless everybody starts to stand up and say because I know people are on the sidelines, right and they and they're just armchair quarterbacking this, and I think your article, you know, makes it clear this is a big, big, big problem and, at the end of the day, how do you solve those problems? You know, every person has to take this on and decide that I am going to do good, and it's not easy. It's not easy because the powers are against you. You're not going to make as much money, you're not going to have as much control. You know, if somebody's dangling out sex, money, power in front of somebody, and I'm making, you know, $70,000 a year and I can make 10 times that it's pretty enticing for people.
Speaker 1:Well, let's put it this way the Iran-Contra affair that was a blatant violation of law. The people that were involved in it, in engineering it, in carrying it out, those people none of them faced any consequences whatsoever, and the people that wound up being convicted were pardoned. And even though it was a clear violation of the law. Now you can't allow that to happen. This is not the kind of thing that but it does.
Speaker 2:And it does happen and the solution to that. I know you're writing that in part three.
Speaker 2:But, as I start to really look at this. You know there'll be people saying, well, they need to go after this guy, and that's true, it's true. But here I was just talking to a—I was doing what they call an in-service in a school, a Catholic school for teachers, right, and it's all women teachers there. And how many we start to talk about, how many of the young girls guys too, of course, but young girls have no protection because they have no fathers in the house either through divorce, being born out of wedlock, et cetera, et cetera. The young boys, oh, that they don't have fathers. And so you know, if you have sex on your mind versus you know caring about and of course, all young guys have sex on their mind. They don't even understand what that is. But if you're going to use somebody as an object instead of just seeing the beauty of our sexuality, they go after those girls that don't have fathers. They know that they're easier, right?
Speaker 2:Then another teacher said to me she goes, jack, I saw this young guy caught him on his phone showing another boy pornography. So I caught him right in the act of having it on his phone. I came up right behind him, he puts it in his pocket and I go. You know you're going to have to go down to the principal with me and he goes. You know what? I don't care, my dad's into's into pornography. He watches pornography.
Speaker 2:So my point being, this time, either we don't have parents that that, in general, that are, uh, you know, instilling these morals and values down to each one of us, or they're implicit, you know, or you know they're in on the action already, right? Oh? So what kind of you know? Who are we to judge? Now, right, you know, all these people like cash, patel and bongino are trying, all these different people are trying, but they're up against a huge array of people that maybe have no idea and again I'm generalizing here, right, yeah of really how to stand up against all of the evil that they're facing. These are tough tasks.
Speaker 1:Well, first of all, you got to break it down into a very simple thing. You have to have some system of holding people accountable really, and the best way to hold people accountable is to shed light on what's going on. So there's got to be the least amount of secrecy that there is. You know, there's a murder of a Catholic what's his name? Frank Pellegrini. That happened and I think it was 1984, that I've been investigating.
Speaker 1:I can't remember the exact date of his murder, but he was kind of a key figure in some of the sex issues in the Catholic Church back in the 80s and several different agencies have investigated the murder. But when we try to get information about those cases, since the case is not solved, since the crime isn't solved, the police say well, it's an open case, so we can't give you any information. There's all kinds of cases like that. There's cases that haven't any case that hasn't been solved. They can say, well, you can't have it because it's under investigation, so it's all secret and it's not subject to review. Well, this allows agencies to be incompetent.
Speaker 2:Is there a solution to that, though? I mean, there are times, right, tom? I would suspect that Well if they feel like it?
Speaker 1:Yeah, if they feel like it, they'll give it to you.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, that's the problem.
Speaker 2:It's going to be very frustrating.
Speaker 1:Okay, when he was indicted, he was indicted for crimes that occurred between 2002 and 2005, which was the same period of time that he had been convicted back in 2007. When he was convicted in 2007, there was a non-prosecution agreement that was signed that he signed and then all these other people signed saying that nothing that happened before this time can you be charged, nobody that you've been involved with and nothing that you've done that happened before this time. You can be charged with anything again. And so now he was charged by and had to be approved approved by Bill Barr, who was the attorney general at the time. He was charged with these crimes that occurred between 2002 and 2005, which was the exact period. There were different crimes than what he was charged with in 2007, but it was the exact period of time that the non-prosecution agreement covered. Well, the Southern District of New York said well, that was a different district, so it doesn't apply to us.
Speaker 1:I contend that he could have fought that case and won because he had a non-prosecution agreement, because it was with the US government. Now, meanwhile, we know that there's all these other massive crimes that have occurred since 2007 that they should have been aware of and they didn't even bring any charges against them. So they charge them for all these earlier crimes and Bill Barr had to be approving of it. I contend that this was intentional, that this was intentionally. They were intentionally throwing the case. They were trying to make it look like they were intentionally throwing the case. They were trying to make it look like they were doing something and they said oh, look at this, Technicality gets off on it.
Speaker 2:So I mean, what's behind? Again, you know I don't want to get in the weeds here too much more, but I mean, all of these issues that we're talking about, does it just become too many people in the government will be exposed? Is that what they're covering up? Look, we know again. We talked about it already. This is a big network of corruption. But when they do that, are there specific when you say, okay, we've got intelligence secrets, we can't expose this stuff. Why can't we shed light on it now, tom, looking back, this is going back 20 years now.
Speaker 1:Well, because we have an illusion of transparency. We have an illusion of being in a country that respects the will of the people, and I think we have people in government that don't want to be held accountable to the people or to be held accountable for anything that they want to do, what they want to do, without any oversight.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So I think that's really what they're protecting is their own power.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Well, that's, I mean that's the theory of the deep state, right.
Speaker 1:You know we're going to stay in power.
Speaker 2:We saw this with Trump. They're investigating the Russian collusion. You can't make this stuff up. I mean, this is going right into everybody, from the president, you know, from Obama, the Clintons, you know, etc. And it's amazing, you know, when they're in power, what they'll do when we start to think about, you know, the rich versus the poor. There's a double-tiered justice system there, but it goes after the rich too. If you don't kowtow to what you just said, right, that's right.
Speaker 1:I don't really know all the. I don't have all the answers with this Epstein case, but it really is a case study that should be examined very thoroughly because we this is. Epstein was a fascinating guy, I mean, he was apparently. He was very likable because he had a lot of friends and he was very sociable. He got along with a lot of people. He had a lot of different interests, he went to many parties. I don't know what caused the change when he became romantically involved with Ghislaine Maxwell. I don't know why they shifted into using using girls in order to and you know, but it's basically arms deals and stuff.
Speaker 2:You make clear this was over already. Right, this kind of stuff was over already. So that's almost like part two of his his life, you know, when he gets involved in it, two of his life. You know, when he gets involved in it, you have somebody brilliant. You know, as we start to wind down here, tom, you have somebody brilliant, likable, interested in a lot of different things, and instead of again, instead of doing good, right, I'm going to use that just for my own greed. However, that works, and you're going to be caught down, tom. We get caught into these things. We know each person I know has been gone down some hole that they shouldn't have gone down in their life right Some sin.
Speaker 2:So we know from experience. I was just talking to somebody about the famous exorcist, father Gabriel Amorth from Rome. He's passed away now, but it was an amazing man and he talked about this experience. You know that experience of life. You have to remember those things because he said, each one of us can fall down into that. And, like John Paul said, what can I do? I'm going to get frustrated. No, don't get frustrated. You just have to know that these battles are taking place on the individual human heart. And my point with somebody like Jeffrey Epstein, he could have did so good.
Speaker 2:So much good with his life, tom, and still been a multimillionaire, you know, still been very rich and done good things, and it's so sad when you see this and now he's gone things and it's so sad when you see this and now he's gone.
Speaker 1:When you look at his early career, though, when he was doing the work with the British and their arms deal with Saudi Arabia and the Iran-Contra deal, he was working for the government. I mean, he was really doing that. He wasn't doing things that were particularly wrong. It certainly wasn't doing anything illegal. From the standpoint of his position, he didn't see it as being illegal because he's the government's involved in it. How could you consider it to be illegal? And he was making a lot of money. He worked with a lot of different people and then, when he went with Towers Financial and got involved in that whole deal, that's when he started really getting into questionable areas, because more money, you know you want more money. More money you got, you get more money you want, and so that's the kind of thing that he got into, and he started going downhill from there.
Speaker 1:But he was not involved in any kind of trafficking, of human trafficking certainly not involved with children and when he started with Ghislaine Maxwell it started as kind of a small thing. It was just local girls that they were dealing with and they were trying to bring into the operation, but then it grew into this. It met $1.5 billion in human trafficking. This is how can you, how can this happen? One person, one organization yeah.
Speaker 2:One organization is involved in this, and that wasn't like you make explicit in the article, that wasn't the profit from it. That's just what he was spending.
Speaker 1:That's what he was spending, that's what's he making off of this. And so this is a massive operation, doing regular business kind of things and making a lot of money, because he was good at it to becoming this really monstrously evil kind of person and trafficking in girls, and it's like so what happened? How did that happen?
Speaker 2:Well, you know, in general, without the specifics on this case, you know you look at the guys all over the world that have gotten into this. Take somebody like Stalin. When Stalin was a young guy, he was in the seminary to be a priest. When you start slowly, what happens to all of us? I have friends of mine that I've seen go down these holes where they get to my age now and they almost can't find themselves anymore. And it's small steps, tom, I take these small steps. I get involved in this, this, this, this, this, and pretty soon you know Satan is a smart dude man. You know, I mean, you know you think you're so smart you're setting up this big web of money.
Speaker 2:Well, there's another web that's got you wrapped up you know, and so many of these people in your article have died now.
Speaker 2:They met their maker. You know, in Catholic theology, tom, the last things, we call it the four key realities concerning the end of an individual's life and the end of the world, and that's death, judgment, heaven and hell Very well known, right, and we're all going to be there, my friend. And at the end of the day, all that money Christ talks about it so often. He says what are you going to do with all that money and all those treasures? He said, you know you can have all that. What good have you done if you've got all these treasures and you've lost your eternal soul? And that's what we do. And so it still becomes this battle between good and evil. And for all of our listeners, you know, just make sure that your heart's in the right spot.
Speaker 2:You know that you're passing these virtues and stuff down to our kids. Stay married, as hard as that could be with some people, you know, when you get divorced and these families break up. I see these kids, tom, because we have an apostle that we call it for young people, and young people even in high school. You see this brokenness in this culture today, when these young people don't have any moral truths anymore and they're getting blown around by the spirit of the age. Now just think if they are all going into government later on, or whatever, you know whatever. Are they going to bring good into the world? Even if they want to? They don't understand what that good is and, again, they don't have the power to do good, even if they want to right. They're going to be taken into these circumstances.
Speaker 1:Well, we really have to start bringing people up in a virtuous way again, and so we have to return to some of the classical education that we used to get, because I'll tell you that the people that are going into government right now are people that seem very willing to take shortcuts to get to where they want, and those shortcuts lead to some pretty terrible places?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and even the simple-minded ones, you know, not the brilliant ones the simple-minded ones.
Speaker 2:They get caught at their bureaucrats and they want their little power and they want to make sure they got their little jobs and that you know they're important. And so I know this in business, when I was just building small businesses up, some bureaucrat can you know, all I need is their signature in order to get a building done or in order to remodel something or whatever it was, and they could come in and they just him haul around and you know, tom, they want you to give them something. I lost whole contracts, good contracts for me, just because I wouldn't grease some guy's palm. And you look back at it and you go, man, my life could have been so much easier if I would have just paid this guy five grand or eight or whatever it was. You know, sometimes there weren't huge amounts of money and because I stood on some principle, you know you lose it. You lose it.
Speaker 1:I mean it's been. Chicago was praised years ago about having the best building code in the country or something. No, they had the building code like that so they could extract bribes out of people. It's just so ridiculous. It's happening all over and it's happening today at all levels, tom.
Speaker 2:So each one of us are fighting these battles. So the battle of the Bongino and Kash Patel. It's good to see good people and I just think you know and good leadership is going to help because other people will come up. But, man, this is a big battle.
Speaker 1:This is really a big battle. It's a huge problem. It's not something that they can't just say. Here are the files, we're opening them up. The government needs to do some serious investigation of this. We need another church committee is what we need.
Speaker 2:So yeah, who put that church committee together in the beginning? Do you know a little? We only got a minute left but.
Speaker 1:It was, I don't know, Senator Church or Representative Church or something, but it was a select committee.
Speaker 1:It had people from both the House and the Senate that looked into it, that investigated the intelligence community, and they got a lot of information. But I'm not sure that we have enough of a nonpartisan or a cooperative arrangement in Congress today to be able to pull that off. It's just they were so contentious. You got the Republicans versus the, the democrats. It's like you need. You need people that work together, um, toward finding out what happened and making things right, and I don't know that we've got people on both sides of the aisle willing to do that well, here, here's, here's how I want to add into it.
Speaker 2:I'll straighten them up tom, here's how I'm going to end this thing. This is matthew, chapter 7, verse 13 the narrow gate. Huh, if this doesn't sum this thing up, enter by the narrow gate, for the gate is wide and the way is easy. That leads to destruction, and those who enter it are many, for the gate is narrow and the way is hard. That leads to life, and those who find it are few. So this is Jesus going back, you know, over 2,000 years ago, and says hey, dude, go through the narrow gate. It's not going to be easy, and those who find it are few, and the gate is wide and the way is easy. That leads to your destruction, and those who enter that gate are many. And it's no different today than it was in Jesus' time.
Speaker 2:Tom, you know our job is to get ourselves and our families to heaven and then take it out in the world and do whatever good we can, and that's our job. And so I sum it up like that, because you shouldn't get depressed about this thing. You know, make sure that you're receiving the light and you're doing your part. And God, you know, let God be God, because you know we're facing something that's beyond just Trump can do it or Bongino can do it. Kash Patel, no, don't wait for them. I hope they do their job and I hope I do my job too.
Speaker 1:We have to have a revival of the church. We also need to have a revival of a sense of public service. Yes, yes, people need to look at working for government as a service and that they need to walk in there and go into that position, trying to do the best they can as a patriotic endeavor, rather than just making money.
Speaker 2:Well, and that's what gets back to that classic education that you're talking about, because these kids are not taught that, they're not taught to be patriots, they're not taught to be servants. Right, it's all about DEI and taking, taking, taking. So we're training these kids for that. So, hey, hey, brother, you're right, we got to get back to that too. So, god bless you. When's article three going to be ready?
Speaker 1:I don't know It'll be within two weeks. I don't think it'll be as long.
Speaker 2:There's a lot going on there, hey Tom, thank you so much. Thanks everyone. Thanks for joining us today. We'll talk to you again soon.
Speaker 1:Bye-bye.