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Ghislaine Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in prison for conspiring with Jeffrey Epstein to sexually abuse minors on Tuesday. Her lawyers have stated they will appeal the sentence.

Pulitzer-prize winning reporter Chris Hedges wrote during Maxwell’s trial that it will “not hold to account the powerful and wealthy men who are also complicit in the sexual assaults of girls as young as twelve Maxwell allegedly procured for billionaire Jeffrey Epstein.

“Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, hedge-fund billionaire Glenn Dubin, former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, former Secretary of the Treasury and former president of Harvard Larry Summers, Stephen Pinker, Prince Andrew, Alan Dershowitz, billionaire Victoria’s Secret CEO Les Wexner, the J.P. Morgan banker Jes Staley, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barack, real estate mogul Mort Zuckerman, former Maine senator George Mitchell, Harvey Weinstein and many others who were at least present and most likely participated in Epstein’s perpetual Bacchanalia, are not in court. … Epstein’s death in a New York jail cell, while officially ruled a suicide, is in the eyes of many credible investigators a murder.”

In February, the British Independent reported “Prince Andrew and Virginia Giuffre reach ‘£10m’ settlement over sexual abuse claim.” Giuffre was one of the girls targeted by Maxwell.New York magazine just published the piece: “How Leslie Wexner Helped Create Jeffrey Epstein” about how the billionaire Wexner, whose company at one point owned Victoria’s Secret, Abercrombie & Fitch, Express, and Bath & Body Works, funded Esptein. “Epstein’s money, Upper East Side mansion, and even the Lolita Express — originally a Boeing 727 owned by L Brands — would all come from Wexner.”

See past accuracy.org news releases citing the work of investigative reporter Whitney Webb. In 2020, she noted: “The fact the FBI won’t even touch or question Les Wexner (‘head of the snake’ of the whole op) tells you that any effort to go after Ghislaine is superficial.”

In her piece, “Hidden in Plain Sight: The Shocking Origins of the Jeffrey Epstein Case,” Webb reports that “Alex Acosta — who arranged Epstein’s ‘sweetheart’ deal in 2008 and resigned as Donald Trump’s labor secretary following Epstein’s arrest — claimed that the mysterious billionaire had worked for ‘intelligence.’”

Webb also wrote about Maxwell’s father, Robert, who worked with the Mossad “according to several books including Seymour Hersh’s The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy.” She adds: “In exchange for his services, the Mossad helped Maxwell satisfy his sexual appetite during his visits to Israel, providing him with prostitutes, [whom] ‘the service maintained for blackmail purposes.’” [Quoting the book Gideon’s Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad by Gordon Thomas.] Webb’s book One Nation Under Blackmail: The Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Crime that Gave Rise to Jeffrey Epstein is scheduled to be released later this year.

MARLON ETTINGER, marlonjettinger@gmail.com, @MarlonEttinger
Ettinger covered the Maxwell trial and wrote several pieces for his Substack including “Prince Andrew Settles.”

Pulitzer-prize winning reporter Chris Hedges writes: “The trial of Ghislaine Maxwell … will not hold to account the powerful and wealthy men who are also complicit in the sexual assaults of girls as young as twelve Maxwell allegedly procured for billionaire Jeffrey Epstein.

“Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, hedge-fund billionaire Glenn Dubin, former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, former Secretary of the Treasury and former president of Harvard Larry Summers, Stephen Pinker, Prince Andrew, Alan Dershowitz, billionaire Victoria’s Secret CEO Les Wexner, the, J.P Morgan banker Jes Staley, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barack, real estate mogul Mort Zuckerman, former Maine senator George Mitchell, Harvey Weinstein and many others who were at least present and most likely participated in Epstein’s perpetual Bacchanalia, are not in court. … Epstein’s death in a New York jail cell, while officially ruled a suicide, is in the eyes of many credible investigators a murder.” (See below.)

Available for interviews:

LEE LAKEMAN, leelakeman@shaw.ca
    Lakeman is a writer, feminist, activist and works with the Vancouver Rape Relief & Women’s Shelter. She said today: “It’s not an accident that a woman is getting charged while all of these men are not. Part of the dynamic here is how prostitution has become normalized in our society. This case also reveals a tremendous level of corruption and anti-democratic functioning at work.” She notes the lack of serious investigation of Epstein’s death. See BBC report from 2020: “Jeffrey Epstein: Jail CCTV erased by ‘technical errors.'”

MARLON ETTINGER, marlonjettinger@gmail.com, @MarlonEttinger
    Ettinger is covering the Maxwell trial. See his Substack.

CATHERINE WATTERS, catspaws44@protonmail.com, @CatW44
    Watters is covering the Maxwell trial. Her writings are here.

The Miami Herald is reporting: “Key accuser of Ghislaine Maxwell not expected to testify in her trial.” “Virginia Roberts Giuffre — who has previously cast Maxwell as a central player in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation — apparently isn’t going to testify, even though she has been mentioned by witnesses and prosecutors almost daily during the trial: as a minor who visited Epstein’s homes multiple times; as a girl who had sex with Epstein; as a victim who was allegedly recruited by Maxwell; and as a teenager who flew on Epstein’s private plane, often with Maxwell — 32 times.”

“Her absence in the room is striking, considering that there is physical evidence that appears to support her story of sexual abuse: photographs of her with Maxwell and Prince Andrew and of her at Epstein’s ranch in New Mexico, pictures of her with Epstein and Maxwell at a birthday party aboard a yacht where she looks barely out of childhood.”

See past accuracy.org news releases including “Epstein and Maxwell: ‘One Nation Under Blackmail’ citing the work of investigative reporter Whitney Webb. In 2020, she noted: “The fact the FBI won’t even touch or question Les Wexner (‘head of the snake’ of the whole op) tells you that any effort to go after Ghislaine is superficial.”

In her piece, “Hidden in Plain Sight: The Shocking Origins of the Jeffrey Epstein Case,” Webb reports that “Alex Acosta — who arranged Epstein’s ‘sweetheart’ deal in 2008 and resigned as Donald Trump’s labor secretary following Epstein’s arrest — claimed that the mysterious billionaire had worked for ‘intelligence.’”

Webb also wrote about Maxwell’s father, Robert, who worked with the Mossad “according to several books including Seymour Hersh’s The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy.” She adds: “In exchange for his services, the Mossad helped Maxwell satisfy his sexual appetite during his visits to Israel, providing him with prostitutes, [whom] ‘the service maintained for blackmail purposes.’” [See Gideon’s Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad by Gordon Thomas.

WHITNEY WEBB, wwebbmpn at protonmail.com, @_whitneywebb
Webb is author of the forthcoming book One Nation Under Blackmail about the Jeffrey Epstein scandals.

She stressed that the indictment released today against Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s longtime associate, is “for only three victims — [from] 1994 to 1997 — and the indictment states that Maxwell was involved in their sexual abuse directly (in terms of the sex acts themselves) but NOT charged for that.”

Webb tweeted: “They waited until after Bill Barr fired [United States attorney for the Southern District of New York Geoffrey] Berman” and “They reportedly arrested her in [New Hampshire], they’ve known where she is this whole time, waited till now. Why now?”

She also notes on Twitter: “The fact the FBI won’t even touch or question Les Wexner (‘head of the snake’ of the whole op) tells you that any effort to go after Ghislaine is superficial.”

Webb was featured on an acccuracy.org news release last year that drew on a series of her reports including “Mega Group, Maxwells and Mossad: The Spy Story at the Heart of the Jeffrey Epstein Scandal,” in which Webb examines the role of Epstein’s main financial patron for decades, billionaire Leslie Wexner.

She highlights that a main goal of the Epstein-Maxwell operation was to blackmail prominent individuals and “it’s important to mention that it was state-sponsored and involved compromising politicians [and] individuals so they would be supportive of policies pursued by that state. Sexual blackmail by intelligence has a long history, in the U.S. and elsewhere, and Epstein and Maxwell were merely using that same playbook (on a grand scale) for the benefit of their sponsors.”

Webb also wrote about Maxwell’s father, Robert, who worked with the Mossad “according to several books including Seymour Hersh’s The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy.” She adds: “In exchange for his services, the Mossad helped Maxwell satisfy his sexual appetite during his visits to Israel, providing him with prostitutes, [whom] ‘the service maintained for blackmail purposes.’” [Gideon’s Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad by Gordon Thomas]

See Webb’s interview last year with The Real News: “Epstein May Be Just One Part of an Intricate Network of Sex and Power.”

Webb wrote her series on Epstein for MintPress. She is now with The Last American Vagabond. Her reporting there has included the pieces “Techno-Tyranny: How the U.S. National Security State Is Using Coronavirus To Fulfill An Orwellian Vision” and “All Roads Lead to Dark Winter.”

On Friday, just following the release of key documents, Vanity Fair reported: “Unsealed Epstein Documents Reveal Powerful Men and Disturbing New Details.” The magazine noted: “Glenn Dubin, Bill Richardson, George Mitchell, and others are mentioned. ‘A lot of important people are going to have a really bad weekend,’ said a source.”

The New York Times is reporting: “Soon after Mr. Epstein was found dead of an apparent suicide in a federal jail on Saturday, Geoffrey S. Berman, the chief federal prosecutor in Manhattan, said his office’s investigation would continue, and pointedly mentioned that the government’s indictment against Mr. Epstein included a conspiracy charge.”

Carol Leonnig of the Washington Post tweeted Saturday: “People close to Epstein fear he was murdered … as Epstein told authorities someone tried to kill him in a previous incident weeks earlier. He was described as being in good spirits in recent days.”

Bruce Barket, the lawyer for Nicholas Tartaglione, Epstein’s former cell mate, said that several weeks ago, Epstein “tried to hang himself, and our client was able to alert the authorities and prevent it.” Tartaglione was then removed from the cell and not immediately replaced, one of several apparent breaches of protocol that seem to have made Epstein’s alleged suicide possible.

See accuracy.org news release of a month ago on some of Epstein’s connections to clandestine agencies, via Donald Barr, Attorney General William Barr’s father, who was in the OSS; and the younger Barr (who was with the CIA, the successor of the OSS), who helped cover up the Iran Contra scandal.

WHITNEY WEBB, wwebb at mintpressnews.com, @_whitneywebb
Webb is a reporter for MintPress News based in Chile. She also co-hosts the MintCast podcast with Alan MacLeod.

While Trump and other Republicans have put out theories that the Clintons were involved in the death of Epstein and some Democrats are alleging that Trump was behind it, Webb stresses the need to look at the deeper forces, known facts and histories around Epstein’s network. She has written a series of pieces including “Hidden in Plain Sight: The Shocking Origins of the Jeffrey Epstein Case,” which states that “Alex Acosta — who arranged Epstein’s ‘sweetheart’ deal in 2008 and who recently resigned as Donald Trump’s Labor Secretary following Epstein’s arrest — claimed that the mysterious billionaire had worked for ‘intelligence.’

“Other investigations have made it increasingly clear that Epstein was running a blackmail operation, as he had bugged the venues — whether at his New York mansion or Caribbean island getaway — with microphones and cameras to record the salacious interactions that transpired between his guests and the underage girls that Epstein exploited. Epstein appeared to have stored much of that blackmail in a safe on his private island.”

In “Government by Blackmail: Jeffrey Epstein, Trump’s Mentor and the Dark Secrets of the Reagan Era,” Webb describes a “young William Barr” helping in “stonewalling the congressional Pike Committee and Church Committee, which investigated the CIA beginning in 1975. Among the things that they were tasked with investigating were the CIA’s ‘love traps,’ or sexual blackmail operations used to lure foreign diplomats to bugged apartments, complete with recording equipment and two-way mirrors.”

In “Mega Group, Maxwells and Mossad: The Spy Story at the Heart of the Jeffrey Epstein Scandal,” Webb examines the role of Epstein’s main financial patron for decades, billionaire Leslie Wexner. She also writes: “The Maxwell family has become a source of renewed media interest following Jeffrey Epstein’s arrest, as Ghislaine Maxwell, long described in the media as a British ‘socialite,’ was publicly cited as Epstein’s long-time ‘on and off’ girlfriend, and Epstein’s victims, as well as former wives of Epstein’s friends, have claimed that she … procured underage girls for his sexual blackmail operation. Ghislaine Maxwell is also alleged to have engaged in the rape of the girls she procured for Epstein and to have used them to produce child pornography.”

Vicky Ward, who tried to report on Jeffrey Epstein’s criminality as early as 2003, recently wrote that Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta “cut the non-prosecution deal with one of Epstein’s attorneys because he had ‘been told’ to back off, that Epstein was above his pay grade. ‘I was told Epstein “belonged to intelligence” and to leave it alone,’ he told his interviewers in the Trump transition, who evidently thought that was a sufficient answer and went ahead and hired Acosta. (The Labor Department had no comment when asked about this.)” See Ward’s recent pieces for The Daily Beast: “Jeffrey Epstein’s Sick Story Played Out for Years in Plain Sight” and “I Tried to Warn You About Sleazy Billionaire Jeffrey Epstein in 2003.”

The Observer notes that Acosta was asked if Epstein had ties to intelligence agencies at his news conference Wednesday and gave a “a non-denial denial of an epic kind”: “I would [be] hesitant to take this reporting as fact” said Acosta. See “It Sure Looks Like Jeffrey Epstein Was a Spy — But Whose?”

Ward charged on “Democracy Now” on Monday: “This is a man who definitely trades in the knowledge he has over the rich and famous, and uses it for leverage. He also introduces rich and famous people, like Bill Clinton, like Donald Trump, to girls.”

Epstein’s associate who allegedly helped connect him with his girl victims is Ghislaine Maxwell. She is the daughter of Robert Maxwell, the media mogul who died under mysterious circumstances in 1991. Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh alleged in his book The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy that Maxwell was tied to the Israeli Mossad. Hersh was sued for the allegation, but then received an apology.

Attorney General William Barr, who spent years at the CIA, stated he would recuse himself on the Epstein matter on Monday and then reversed himself on Tuesday. Barr helped cover up the Iran-Contra scandal by approving the pardons of Elliott Abrams and other officials who were caught in illegal activity. In 1973, Epstein got his start as a math teacher thanks to Barr’s father, Donald Barr, who was headmaster of the elite Dalton School despite Epstein not having a college degree. His New York Times obituary notes that Donald Barr belonged to the Office of Strategic Services (better known as the OSS, the precursor to the CIA).

Julie K. Brown of the Miami Herald has named two women — Virginia Roberts Giuffre and Sarah Ransome — who say that Epstein, when they were very young, directed them to have sex with Alan Dershowitz. Yet, the New York Times and other media continue to reference and even quote Dershowitz about the case without noting that he has been thus accused. Dershowitz was also one of Esptein’s lawyers when Acosta agreed to the non-prosecution agreement. The Times has recently noted that Dershowitz attacked the Herald‘s reporting in an attempt to deprive them of a Pulitzer. A piece by Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman quoted him saying that if you didn’t know Epstein and Trump in the 80s, “you were a nobody” — again, without noting that Dershowitz has so far been accused by two of Epstein’s victims.

Liaquat Ali Khan, the founder of Legal Scholar Academy, and a professor emeritus at the Washburn Law School interviewed Alan Dershowitz in 2004 and wrote that Dershowitz participated in the “Israeli assassination committee that reviews evidence before terrorists are targeted and killed.” Said Dershowitz: “I actually sat in on one of the committee meetings.”