Spies, Frauds, and Hit Men: The Indispensable Epstein, the Compromised Hoffman, the Maniacal Mehlhorn
We do not need monopolists or their consiglieres in our technology stack or in our politics.
There are lots of weird stuff about Jeffrey Epstein and I’ve spent the better part of seventeen years thinking about him. I suspect I’ll spend the next seventeen thinking about him as well which is all the more fitting because I first met him when I was seventeen.
For those who are unaware I worked for Alan Dershowitz when he represented Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein didn’t think he should have had any jail time and I remember being surprised that he ended up being punished at all strange as it is to admit that now.
I distinctly remember sitting in Dershowitz’s office and hearing from one of the other interns that Epstein’s records were going to be “sealed — as if he were some kind of juvenile offender.” (They were not trying to be punny—insofar as I know but as the only gentile in the office, sometimes the humor eluded me.) That fellow went on to be very close with Leonard Leo — he had the right pedigree — and to serve in the Trump Department of Justice before going on to Big Law.
I actually have come to the view that Epstein was turned by U.S. intelligence and that he became a sort of traveling Jew between the various empires, private and nation state. Think of him as a kind of modern Kissinger or Rothschild — a kind of go-between, trying to insert himself into world events. His relationship — or was it partnership? — with Ghislaine Maxwell is similarly intriguing.
I know it’s a bit much to go there with the “Epstein as hero” narrative. I don’t think the world is as clean as heroes and villains, especially not when someone “belongs to intelligence” as former U.S. attorney Alexander Acosta once said of Epstein. (For what it’s worth the Sheldon Adelson crew around Trump wanted Acosta to be Attorney General rather incredibly.)
What was Epstein really? What if the people that Epstein was meeting with were, in fact, targets themselves? What if Epstein was part of an effort to recompromise people?
Consider that there’s been no serious biography of Epstein as yet. Nor has there been any really good, really serious documentary about Epstein. Indeed to the extent there’s been any public discussion about Epstein it has been in books written by compromised or Likud-affiliated propagandists affiliated with the very Israeli Washington Free Beacon. My friend and columnist Arthur Bloom does a very good send up of some of these people in his latest.
The Wall Street Journal gave us some sense of what Epstein was really up to when it recently published his social calendar.
Among the many people who hobnobbed with Epstein?
Let me quote, in part, The Journal:
The future director of CIA, Williams Burns.
Kathryn Ruemmler, White House counsel under Barack Obama.
Mr. Summers continued to meet with Epstein and seek his help years after Harvard decided it would no longer accept his donations.
Reid Hoffman, a billionaire venture capitalist and LinkedIn co-founder, visited Epstein’s private island in the Caribbean and was scheduled to stay over at his Manhattan townhouse in 2014.
Woody Allen, the Oscar-winning movie director, attended dozens of dinners with his wife, Soon-Yi Previn, at Epstein’s mansion and invited Epstein to film screenings.
Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister, visited Epstein dozens of times and accepted flights on Epstein’s private jet while visiting Epstein’s mansions in Florida and New York.
Leon Black, the billionaire co-founder of private-equity giant Apollo Global Management, scheduled more than 100 meetings with Epstein from 2013 to 2017.A friend of mine rightly argues that these contacts provide even more evidence for my thesis that Epstein was turned by U.S. intelligence.
Barnaby Marsh, cofounder of a philanthropy service which allows “helps the world’s most dedicated philanthropists channel their wealth, influence and desire for meaning towards social good.”
Why would Epstein want to meet with those government officials? Because he’s a spy, dummy. But whose?
It looks pretty likely that he was some sort of spy, operating in the margins between Anglo-American and Jewish and Israeli power.
Indeed when Epstein was arrested by the Trump DOJ, Netanyahu was tweeting and gloating about the arrest. Such an arrest could only have been allowed by Bill Barr whose ties to Israel and Chinese technology we have already discussed. Epstein’s friend and protector Ehud Barak had just entered the second Israeli elections of that year.
As a spy Epstein was clearly trying to raid Harvard and MIT for its intellectual talent and academic work. He was no doubt meeting with Chomsky because a linguist is exactly the sort of person you’d want to meet with if you were working on an AI or a large language model.
This project continues to this day with Israeli and Israeli-adjacent people.
Just this past week I was having a conversation with a founder who had an Israeli-adjacent investor who was looting the company — spun out of federally funded MIT research — and sending research back to Israel.
Epstein was seemingly a very important part of this project. His ferrying of money into MIT’s Joi Ito, with Reid Hoffman, should be understood in this way.
And we’d be remiss if we didn’t note the conviction of Jewish academic Charles Lieber who was smuggling key technology out of Harvard and into China.
Yes, MIT gave us the very Chisraeli Mr. Sam Bankman-Fried and yes, the fake AI work of spy turned podcaster Lex Fridman.
Eventually we are going to need to talk about the millions Elon Musk donated to the Future of Life Institute’s Max Tegmark — an MIT professor! — and how Tegmark vouched for Lex Fridman who pushed the discredited self-driving car nonsense which got people killed.
I guess effective altruism means never having to say you’re sorry.
Well, at least we stopped $5.7 billion going to Igor Kurganov, the Russian Jewish poker player backed by the Chinese mob.
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More intriguingly for our purposes is the role Epstein played as an angel investor and advisor to Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates and board member Reid Hoffman.
Did you know that Epstein (and Harvey Weinstein) were investors in 23&Me — the Chinese-backed personal genomics company founded by Google cofounder Sergey Brin’s then-wife?
Epstein was similarly trying to get Silicon Valley to acquire companies he had invested in and it appears he was quite successful at this undertaking.
In this, he was keeping to the monopolistic spirit of the age.
The Epstein story is therefore one totally linked to the large acquisitions which have been all too common and which center on the Big Tech companies — especially Microsoft and Google.
Google cofounder Sergey Brin was one four Jewish billionaires subpoenaed in a lawsuit by JPMorgan over Epstein and Brin has lost control of Alphabet now that the U.S. government has taken it over.
If you can’t figure out why an intelligence asset would be interested in such companies you’re not paying attention.
We have to return to the meetings of Bill Burns and Jeffrey Epstein. Supposedly Burns sought career advice from Epstein but it seems implausible that a lifelong diplomat like Burns would have been terribly interested in job advice from Jeffrey Epstein.
Could it have been the case that Burns was tasking Epstein? That would seem to be clear if you read Burns’s great memoir, The Back Channel: A Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for Its Renewal (2019).
But with what would Epstein be tasked with?
With recompromising the major tech companies’s leadership.
I believe he started with Reid Hoffman who sold his company LinkedIn — founded twenty years ago this week — to Microsoft. Hoffman is on the board of Microsoft.
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We’ve discussed before the Israeli ties to Microsoft and how these ties present real problems for the future of Microsoft. (The Microsoft cloud is increasingly losing contracts with the U.S. government because of that foreign penetration.)
Rather than help clean up Microsoft, Hoffman, who is always in a kind of rivalry with Peter Thiel, has been engaged in politicking.
One of the projects he’s undertaken?
Having his consigliere — Dmitri Melhhorn — fund a defamation lawsuit against former President Donald Trump.
"We had no prior knowledge that our funding would go to support her in particular. Yet, without philanthropic support to defray legal costs, Ms. Carroll might have become one of thousands of people who has been outgunned in court" by Trump, Mehlhorn explained.
Mehlhorn’s power comes from his role representing the interests of a monopolist who absolutely doesn’t want to have a conversation about wealth inequality in America.
As Mehlhorn doles out Reid Hoffman’s money you’d be right in wondering who the hell is this guy? And why is he allowed to set the national agenda? Oh it’s because he’s friends with a rich guy.
You can listen to Ryan Grim of the Intercept interview Mehlhorn who seemingly sees Donald Trump as a “fascist.” “I became quite alarmed” when Trump came into office. “I realized I could not do anything else other than get him to not win another election… I had so much fear about what a second Trump term would do.”
Yes, that’s quite neurotic. “We’ve been active in anti-fascist politics ever since,” says Mehlhorn. He’s not just “professionally anti-fascist” he’s also a “committed libertarian.” OK, whatever.
In Mehlhorn’s telling, Trump isn’t the “symptom” of larger macroeconomic policies but “the disease.”
Is Mehlhorn telling the truth? And how extreme was Trump in 2016? He supported national health care and breaking up the tech monopolies.
No, Mehlhorn is a handmaiden for foreign intelligence assets and protecting monopoly power.
Mehlhorn is of East German-Russian Jewish heritage and worked with Israeli intelligence cut outs like Democratic Majority for Israel to defeat progressive candidates in the 2022 primaries. The founder of DMFI is none other than Mark Mellan who has consulted on anti-Iran and anti-Palestinian messaging.
Mellman and Mehlhorn have worked quite closely together. Mellman is a strategic advisor to Yair Lapid. He even worked on naming Yair Lapid’s political party. I happen to support Yair Lapid’s efforts to overthrow Netanyahu but I do have grave concerns about working with people funded and backed by foreign governments.
This Jewish-East German alliance as evinced by Melhhorn’s parents isn’t as odd as Melhhorn might have you believe. Recall that East Germany spy master Markus Wolf — who was also half Jewish — once said he planned to go to Israel after the fall of East Germany.
Recall further that Melhorn (and Hoffman) worked to protect Henry Cuellar — one of the most pro-Israel members of Congress.
And that there were those weird financial ties between Epstein and Hoffman, especially as concerns LinkedIn/Microsoft.
Note that other Chisraeli-linked billionaires tried to insider trade over the Activision/Microsoft deal before they were stopped by the Biden Justice Department. The probe is ongoing.
Today Hoffman is pushing Open AI — he even wrote a book using it — while curiously leaving the board of the company. Hoffman claims it a conflict of interest but when has that really stopped Hoffman in the past?
A friend points out that the Open AI chief scientist is from Russia then Israel then Canada and now America. Yes, Open AI is crawling with foreign intelligence assets.
This won’t end well.
