Epstein's Cryptic Touch

Jeffrey Epstein touched cryptocurrency in a lot of inappropriate places.

   “The minotaur more than justifies the existence of the labyrinth.”

          - Jorge Luis Borges

This post owes a heavy debt to some incredible research on the touchpoints between Jeffrey Epstein and various figures in the cryptoverse done by NFTEthics, one of the (literally) less than ten participants in the cryptocurrency markets whom I don’t regard as a fundamentally evil human being. It seemed worth revisiting and slightly updating that information now that Jeffrey Epstein has become such a hot topic again (eternal recurrence is a motherfucker) but you can (and should) view the original thread’s abundance of source references here (or here if you don’t have an account on The Privatized Public Square¹).

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HOWARD LUTNICK

“Best I can do is help Iranian terrorists access the American capital markets.”

It has been widely reported that Howard Lutnick, Trump’s current Secretary of Commerce, was quite literally Jeffrey Epstein’s neighbor. It has been less widely reported that Lutnick bought a house from Epstein in a transaction some sources have described as “bizarre” and it seems to have been pretty much missed entirely by the American media establishment (with the notable exception of a few intrepid reporters at The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg who have done some great reporting on the subject) that Howard Lutnick manages² somewhere north of $100 billion - roughly one fifth³ of the military budget of the United States - for Tether, the central bank of the cryptocurrency economy and the favoured financial services provider of criminals, terrorists, and rogue nuclear states⁴ the world over.

I wrote a long and detailed post about Tether and Lutnick that you can (and should) read here. Truth be told I have always found the “Lutnick was Epstein’s neighbor” connection to be a bit tenuous but it’s still worth flagging because in a very real sense Howard Lutnick is probably the single most important person to ever grace the cryptoverse. Without Lutnick’s willingness to look the other way about incredible amounts of financial degeneracy - everything from facilitating garden variety investment scams right on up to providing financial services to sanctioned terrorist groups - it would be much, much harder for capital to flow back and forth between the “real” financial sector and the brisk trade in monkey JPGs and fraud that some call the cryptocurrency markets.

It’s worth pointing out that when Tether did the rounds of Wall St. financial firms begging for someone - anyone - to hold their cash after their previous banking partner received a corporate death sentence for being the Mexican cartels’ favourite bank, pretty much everyone not named “Howard Lutnick” said something along the lines of “oh hell no, I ain’t touchin’ that shit”. This chorus of hell nos almost certainly included many of the banks and hedge funds that routinely launder billions of dollars for drug cartels and/or were more than happy to look the other way about the fact that Jeffrey Epstein was convicted of sexually abusing children in 2009.

Put another way, it takes a special kind of person to agree to be Tether’s banker. A person like Jeffrey Epstein’s next door neighbor Howard Lutnick.

The fact that Lutnick is an ardent supporter of Israel will also become relevant later, especially after you read the next post on this blog⁵. That post will concern the ways in which the war between Iran and Israel is still playing out “on the blockchain”⁶ . It will also feature some alarming recent statements by the former head of Mossad’s financial intelligence service about the Netanyahu family’s deep involvement in the cryptocurrency industry.

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BROCK PIERCE

Brock Pierce seen here in his starring role in Disney’s The Mighty Ducks, several years before founding a company that became possibly the most infamous fully confirmed pedophile ring in Hollywood history. And just because I know what you’re wondering, no, nothing I just said is a joke.

I wrote (a lot) about Brock Pierce’s incredibly sordid history and deep connections to things like cryptocurrency, Tether⁷, and the Israeli government last year in my catalogue of New York City mayor Eric Adams’s crypto grifting. I mentioned Pierce’s connections to Epstein in passing in that post but there’s a bit more to it than the fact that Epstein invited Pierce to speak at the “Mindshift” conference Epstein organized in an attempt to rehabilitate his image after his first round of convictions for what we will delicately refer to as “inappropriate touching of minors”.

Apparently Pierce’s invitation to speak at Epstein’s conference was delivered by none other than Al Seckel, the long term partner of a woman named Isabel Maxwell. Isabel Maxwell just so happens to be the sister of a woman named (wait for it) Ghislaine Maxwell. Isabel and Ghislaine’s father was a man named Robert Maxwell, a notorious UK fraudster who, to quote Wikipedia, “had known links to the British Secret Intelligence Service MI6, to the Soviet KGB, and to the Israeli intelligence service Mossad”. I’m not going to comment on this further other than to say I at times wonder if people are overindexing on the third and underindexing on the second, especially considering that according to The Dossier Center Epstein had proposed a BRICS⁸ cryptocurrency to a member of the FSB⁹ as early as 2015.

Actually I take that back. I would also like to point out that in my piece on Brock Pierce and Eric Adams I called out Jerusalem Post writer/editor Zvika Klein for engaging in what to me appeared to be blatant reputation laundering for Brock Pierce well before this kind of thing started coming out as the Qatargate scandal started to rock the Netanyahu regime:

Why, it’s almost as though there were some kind of coordination between Netanyahu and elements of the Israeli press to launder the reputations of people who help the regime launder massive amounts of money.

And while I’m here why don’t I just mention that plenty of people I’ve talked to refer to Brock Pierce as “the gay Epstein”.

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PETER THIEL

Pay no attention to the prematurely balding young man on the right.

Peter Thiel has discussed his relationship with Epstein publicly on numerous occasions. For a long time I was more or less ready to believe what was the pretty obvious subtext of Thiel’s stuttering attempts at explaining himself: Epstein was world class at helping rich people avoid taxes¹⁰ and Peter Thiel really hates paying taxes¹¹. I did, however, take note of the fact that Thiel allegedly started making large investments in the cryptocurrency space the same year that he allegedly first met Jeffrey Epstein.

However new information was uncovered by The New York Times a few weeks ago about Thiel and Epstein’s financial entanglements. It turns out Epstein was an investor in Valar Ventures, one of the firms associated with Thiel’s adventures in Tolkienized late stage capitalism and one that has done some investing in the cryptocurrency space.

One wonders why the original 2015 investment didn’t get the kind of triumphant press release that usually accompanies these kinds of deals.

It’s worth mentioning that Thiel is a major backer of Rumble, the video platform created as a right wing alternative to YouTube. Other Rumble backers include luminaries like Vivek Ramaswamy, JD Vance, Howard Lutnick (whose firm Cantor Fitzgerald has been at times the largest holder and/or custodian of Rumble’s shares), and (wait for it) Tether, which made an enormous $775 million investment in Rumble relatively recently.

It should therefore surprise no one that Rumble recently announced it will allow its users to send money to each other with (wait for it) Tether’s USDT tokens. I’m sure all those Rumble USDT transactions will be vetted to prevent abuses by Russian oligarchs and Chinese organized crime groups just as carefully as the rest of Tether’s USDT transactions¹².

Other Rumble shareholders have included people like America’s FBI director Kash Patel (who needed somewhere to park all the money he got paid for hosting a podcast for The Epoch Times prior to that company being revealed as a massive crypto money laundering operation for a Chinese cult called Falun Gong) and Tulsi Gabbard, America’s Director of National Intelligence (who has also invested in incredibly sketchy cryptocurrencies that I don’t have time to discuss here).

I will also note that Tulsi managed to acquire her shares in Rumble shortly before Tether’s $775 million investment in the platform pushed up the price, which I’m sure is just another one of those funny coincidences.

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REID HOFFMAN

“The sky is such a vibe right now.”

See the previous section about Peter Thiel, except wherever you think “Trump supporting libertarian billionaire co-founder of Paypal and Palantir who wants to destroy the government”, think “Kamala supporting billionaire co-founder of Paypal and LinkedIn who wants to co-opt the government” instead. Much like his libertarian doppelganger, Hoffman began investing in cryptocurrency ventures around the time he met Jeffrey Epstein.

And while there’s never any reason to think anything Elon Musk says is true, it’s worth noting that for a long time whenever Elon talked about Epstein’s island during an episode of the The Conspiracy Theories ‘R' Us Podcast The Joe Rogan Experience¹³, he would name Reid Hoffman as someone who was going to be in a lot of trouble when the Epstein files finally came out.

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LAWRENCE SUMMERS

A lot of people know Larry Summers as the former president of Harvard University who served as an economist in the Obama adminsitration and was an architect of 2008’s infamous bank bailouts. Most people don’t know that Summers served (serves?) on the boards of some of the largest and most exploitative cryptocurrency companies.

Epstein’s connections to Summers in particular and Harvard more generally are fairly well documented. The fact that some of the companies Summers oversaw via his position on their boards of directors¹⁴ have been indicted by the SEC for engaging in various forms of financial degeneracy is one of those things the American media kind of missed.

Digital Currency Group (DCG) is an investor in hundreds of American cryptocurrency companies, many of which turned out to be engaging in various degrees of fraud. DCG isn’t a consumer facing company so few have heard of it but in a very real way it was the dark force behind the entire American crypto industry prior to the FTXplosion and it is still a major player today.

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EHUD BARAK

“The rain in Spain falls always in the plains.”

Ehud Barak is a former Israeli Defense Force general who was the prime minister of Israel from 1999 to 2001. A photo of the man entering Epstein’s Manhattan residence has been an extremely hot topic on the parts of The Social Media Wastes where garden variety conspiracy theorizing starts to slide into straight up anti-semitism¹⁵. I’m not sure what to make of that photo or of the fact that Ehud Barak met with Epstein “dozens” of times according to The Times of Israel; I’m just here to mention that according to the sources collected by NFTEthics Jeffrey Epstein, Ehud Barak, and Peter Thiel were co-investors in an Israeli company called Reporty Homeland Security that was later renamed to Carbyne.

Ehud Barak was also apparently some kind of mentor to one of the more infamous grifters in crypto history, a man named Mike Novogratz who is the CEO of Galaxy Investment Partners, one of the largest (and for a long time one of the only) publicly traded crypto companies. Among his other achievements Novogratz managed to pull something like a billion dollars out of the Terra / Luna ponzi scheme before it collapsed and ruined thousands of people’s lives all around the world (but particularly in South Korea, where there were suicides).

Better to be lucky than smart, as they say.

Novogratz was such a believer in the Terra/Luna ponzi scheme¹⁶ that he got a huge tattoo and declared himself to be a LUNAtic. I’m sure that was because Novogratz, a graduate of Princeton University with a long career at Goldman Sachs, was a true believer in an obvious ponzi scheme and definitely not because he was making sure he could credibly raise the “sorry I’m just a really dumb guy who doesn’t understand money - just look at this huge stupid tattoo!” defense in court when it came out that he had extracted a billion dollars from an obvious ponzi scheme.

Terra/Luna was just one of Novogratz’s many crypto plays. Much more consequentially he and his college roommate were deeply involved in the launch of Ethereum, the first blockchain to seriously compete with the bitcoin blockchain and also the blockchain where a little less than half of Tether’s 160 billion USDT tokens live (in addition to pretty much all the cryptocurrencies you were hearing about ca. 2016).

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STEVE BANNON

Epstein hired Steve Bannon to do media coaching a few months before his second arrest in 2019, resulting in some fairly bizarre video clips of what looks like Bannon asking Epstein some Really Tough Questions that are actually just clips of Bannon play acting as a hostile reporter at the press conference Epstein would never get around to calling. The clips are part of what Bannon has claimed are 15 hours of uninterrupted footage of Epstein’s final interview, recorded several months before his final exit.

And remember Brock Pierce, from the first section of this article? Bannon was one of Brock Pierce’s early business partners. Their collaboration began in the pre-bitcoin era, a few years after Mr. Pierce was arrested in a house in Marbella filled with guns and child pornography but a few years before he anointed himself “the hippie king of crypto”. The two men’s partnership has at this point spanned decades. In 2022 Bannon even advised Mr. Pierce’s rather quixotic senatorial campaign (as did Steven Cheung, the Trump spokesman who’s corporeal form resembles nothing so much as an experiment with an ogre and a donut gone horribly wrong).

Steven Cheung on his way to breakfast.

Never one to let hippie kings have all the fun (or any fun, ideally), Bannon has also run a few of his own crypto grifts over the years. The most famous of these was probably the FJB (“Fuck Joe Biden”) memecoin he launched way before memecoins were even cool¹⁷. The more sinister of these was probably Bannon’s deep ties to Miles Guo AKA Miles Kwok, a Chinese billionaire crypto grifter cum intelligence operative currently serving time in an American federal penitentiary for defrauding investors in at least one massive crypto grift¹⁸ called HimalayaCoin. There’s a whole section on Guo in my article on Eric Adams concerning connections to China; read it if you want. There’s also a great New Yorker piece on the man.

Remember when Bannon was arrested? He was arrested on Miles Guo’s yacht, a year or two before Guo himself was arrested after firebombing his own Park Ave. penthouse.

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JOI ITO

Joi Ito is the former director of the incredibly prestigious MIT Media Lab. In 2015, concurrent with millions of dollars in donations arranged by and/or originating from Jeffrey Epstein, he created MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative to “provide a stable and sustainable funding for long-term Bitcoin Core developers”. I have not seen any evidence that Epstein’s donations were related to the Digital Currency Initiative but the timing is… interesting.

In 2019 Ito resigned from his position at MIT - probably one of the most desirable jobs in the entirety of modern technology - after getting caught trying to hide Epstein’s involvement in those donations.

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…AND FRIENDS

The infamous “Epstein Files: Phase 1” binders full of women already public information distributed to the most gullible people on the planet MAGA influencers and Pizzagate enthusiasts with names like “DC Draino” by Attorney General Pam Bondi that triggered the latest incarnation of the Epstein fiasco. The footer on the cover of the binders reads “The Most Transparent Administration In History” (And no, that’s not a joke. Zoom in if you don’t believe me.)

There’s more in the NFTEthics thread - a lot more. Some of the more salacious details include some admittedly pretty tenuous connections to terrifying Russian organized crime bosses like Semion Mogilevich (who is, of course, a big fan of cryptocurrency). You should read their posts about it.

While it’s admittedly the case that I haven’t seen any direct smoking gun style evidence linking Epstein to crypto investments¹⁹ and no one has ever identified any blockchain addresses attributable to the man, it’s also the case that the timing, nature, and frequency of Epstein’s touchpoints to an industry that more or less exists solely to facilitate money laundering²⁰ on the scale of a medium sized nation state coupled with his vast and unexplained wealth and numerous relationships with intelligence agencies that sometimes need to do a little incidental money laundering is what the kids today commonly describe as “sus”²¹.

I’ll leave you to mull all that over. In the meantime here’s a subscribe button you can hit if you want to learn about things like the “on chain” war between Israel and Iran way before any of America’s journalistic class catches onto the fact that it’s even happening.

[UPDATE August 2nd] Since originally publishing this I ended up doing some deep digging into what was going on in the blockchain data around the time of Epstein’s arrest and death, and to be honest the results were a lot more suggestive than I ever expected them to be. Watch this space.

[UPDATE August 5th] The second part of this article is now available here.

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POSTUM SCRIPTUM

Facts.

I’m just going to throw out a few observations about the Epstein situation that have nothing to do with crypto:

1. Epstein is on tape saying he was Donald Trump’s “closest friend” for most of a decade. Obviously Epstein isn’t the most trustworthy source but thankfully Epstein and Trump’s close relationship was recently corroborated by the chief operating officer of Trump of the Trump Plaza Casino and Hotel who observed Epstein and Trump frequently showing up to the establishment late at night, at least one time in the company of an underage (meaning under 21 here, not under 18) woman, which got Trump in trouble with New Jersey’s gaming regulators.

2. Jeffrey Epstein being allowed to kill himself is almost as big a scandal as someone coming in and killing him. While not actually on suicide watch at the time of his death, Epstein had made at least one suicide attempt in the days before he managed to complete the act. Seems like a lot of sturm und drang could have been prevented by one of those suicide proof smocks they use in America’s medieval correctional system.

3. Epstein and Trump are reported to have fallen out over a real estate deal. Despite the fact that Trump either sued or was sued by someone almost twice a week, every week, for 43 years prior to being elected president in 2016, he neither sued nor was sued by Epstein, which is kind of “sus”.

4. The photos of Trump with the 19 year old he publicly dated when he was in his 40s roughly concomitant with his relationship with Epstein are what I might call “questionable” but the videos of Epstein and Trump ogling very young women combined with recent statements from Epstein’s victims and ex-girlfriends regarding their interactions with Donald Trump back in “the day” are what we might call “alarming” (and I’m not sure what we would call Epstein pleading the 5th²² when asked if he had ever socialized with Donald Trump in the presence of females under the age of 18).

5. A kind of surprising number of the people who oversaw the administration of justice in Florida when Epstein was doing all the inappropriate touching have ended up in Trump administrations past and present. Pam Bondi failed to do anything about Epstein for her entire eight year reign as the Attorney General of Florida, the state where a lot of the inappropriate touching occurred… and now she’s the Attorney General of the United States. Alex Acosta, who personally arranged for Epstein to get off with a slap on the wrist for soliciting prostitution instead of a decades long felony sentence for abusing children, was appointed by Trump to be the Labor Secretary. If your tinfoil hat is tuned to the right frequency you can almost imagine some kind of quid pro quo here. Oh, and while I’m here, let’s not get into the fact that the man who gave Jeffrey Epstein his big break in life was Donald Barr, AKA “the father of Bill Barr, the Attorney General of the United States in Trump 1.0”.

6. Most people discussing the Epstein case in public have no idea what they are talking about. The best people to follow for the real deal information are the investigative reporter Julie Brown (who broke the story about the slap on the wrist deal that led directly to Epstein’s rearrest and death) and TrueAnon (possibly the greatest podcast in the world). And while I don’t always agree with their inferences, I would be remiss to not at least mention Whitney Webb and Unlimited Hangout’s borderline autistic²³ attention to detail when it comes to compiling information about the life and times of Jeffrey Epstein.

7. I currently believe it is unknowable whether Epstein worked directly for some kind of intelligence agency but I think it is getting hard to dispute the idea that Epstein was what those kinds of agencies refer to as an “asset”. One can be an “asset” without knowing one is an asset (*cough* Tulsi Gabbard *cough*). That said, I want to reiterate what I said before about how it seems to me that a lot of the current discourse seems to be overindexing on Maxwell and Epstein’s connections to Mossad and underindexing on their connections to similar but much larger agencies that are headquartered a few hundred kilometres west of the Ural Mountains²⁴.

8. The correct conclusion upon seeing Trump's pivot from "Crooked Hillary is in the Epstein files" to "the fake Epstein files were made up by Crooked Hillary and anyways if you still care about this at all you’re a bad person who can go fuck themselves" was that Trump thought something that incriminates him and/or his inner circle is in the those files.

9. This conclusion would have turned out to be correct when the Wall Street Journal published the details of Trump’s alleged “bawdy” birthday letter to Epstein a few days ago.

10. Trump’s alleged “bawdy” birthday letter to Epstein was sent several years before Epstein was arrested. Put another way, the “bawdy” birthday letter was sent at a time when we know Epstein was at or near the height of his first round of abusing young girls and women (“three massages a day keep the doctor away”).

11. The Wall Street Journal’s incredibly expensive and Harvard educated lawyers would not let them publish that “bawdy” birthday letter if there were any chance they would lose Trump’s inevitable defamation lawsuit.

12. Apropos of nothing I will note that Alan Dershowitz, king of the Trump loving “Democrats” and man who got sanctioned for filing a bunch of bullshit in court related to an election in Arizona, does not dispute contributing his own “bawdy” letter to the bound volume of bawdiness compiled by Ghislaine Maxwell that also contains Trump’s “bawdy” letter. That means Dershowitz was apparently a friend of Epstein well before Epstein retained Dershowitz’s legal services to fight his first arrest for “inappropriate touching”.

13. While I don’t doubt there are names of powerful and/or wealthy people in what is now colloquially known as “The Epstein Files”, it’s worth noting that all the women who testified at Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial testified that they were trafficked only to Jeffrey Epstein. Other than Prince Andrew there has been precious little evidence of any other men behaving badly²⁵.

14. In retrospect, it shouldn’t really be surprising that the self described “first crypto president” is a notorious sex pest who fucked over an incredible percentage of his contractors and business partners in between chasing poontang with Jeffrey Epstein.

And here’s a prediction: Trump will drop his $10 billion²⁶ lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal a few days before he is set to be deposed and/or is about to be forced to comply with WSJ’s many and varied discovery demands.

Bookmark it (and hit those “Restack” and “Like” buttons at the top if you enjoyed reading this; it really helps).

[UPDATE] A few hours after I published this piece The Wall Street Journal dropped another, bigger bomb on Donald Trump.

1. FKA “X”, FKA “Twitter”.

2. “Managed”, technically, because now all that money is being stewarded by parties with whom Howard Lutnick has an arms length relationship. The fact that many of them just happen to have the last name “Lutnick” (because they are his children) is just a coincidence and totally above board.

3. Or one sixth, if we’re using the new military budget in the new “Big Beautiful Bill”.

4. And, one suspects, at least a few national intelligence / military agencies other than the only one that’s been actually confirmed as a user of Tether (the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps).

5. Which doesn’t exist yet.

6. You can get the preview of that upcoming post in my thread on The Privatized Public Square here.

7. Pierce is the “doulah for creation” (don’t even ask) of the aforementioned Tether - the central bank of crypto whose money is/was managed by Howard Lutnick - as well as a ton of other infamous crypto grifts including (but not limited to) EOS, one of the the largest crypto grifts in crypto grifting history.

8. BRICS is an acronym for what were once the hottest up and coming economies: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. Now that China is the world’s second largest economy it’s kind of a stupid/obsolete expression but people still use it because it’s fun to say.

9. FKA “the KGB”.

10. At least in part via something called a Grantor Retained Annuity Trust (“GRAT”). I’m not going to get into that here but there’s an explanation of Epstein’s usage of GRATs from University of Chicago’s law school you can read here and here’s a weird thing on the Reuters site specifically about GRATs and crypto from the height of the 2022 crypto bubble, mere weeks before The Terraclysm. Note that I’ve never seen any evidence Epstein used crypto in any GRATs he arranged, but then again I’m not sure the public has ever seen much of anything about the man’s GRATs.

11. “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” - Grover Norquist

12. Which is to say more or less “not at all”.

13. Real talk I kind of think Joe Rogan is going to save the world from Trump… eventually. But for now it’s depressing watching him go from the only man making physicists and vaccinologists world famous to what he is now, which is an insane conspiracy nuttered anti-vaxxer.

14. If you’re unfamiliar with corporate governance, the board of directors of a corporation is in charge of things like hiring and firing the CEO and making the sure the company isn’t engaging in massive amounts of fraud.

15. Anti-semitism admittedly the end stage of pretty much all unhinged conspiracy theories.

16. Terra/Luna was technically a stablecoin, except unlike Tether, which is backed by “trust me bro, the money is in the bank”, Terra/Luna was backed by pure distilled “trust me bro”.

17. As a Leninist, Bannon is pretty good at seeing over time’s horizon.

18. I also have strong reason to believe Guo and (maybe) Bannon were involved in the FTX debacle in some way, though I have refrained from publishing those opinions on the advice of other journalists who’ve lived through the consequences of talking about Miles Guo in print.

19. Yet.

20. The kinder term for this business model is “regulatory arbitrage”.

21. For the olds in the audience “sus” is Gen Z for "suspicious”.

22. In the U.S. the 5th Amendment forbids anyone from being forced to give evidence against themself.

23. “Autistic” is frequently used as a term of admiration in the cryptocurrency world and for better or worse that usage has kind of made its way into my vocabulary.

24. Moscow. I’m talking about Moscow.

25. So far.

26. Lol.