Narativ with Zev Shalev (Audio)

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.narativ.orgZev opened on a tell. Weeks ago, the First Lady of the United States walked before the press corps, unannounced, and denied a relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell that no one had accused her of having. She read a statement. She walked away. Zev Shalev played the clip and named the oddity: Melania Trump does not answer tweets, and she …

I went on Wajahat Ali’s show today to talk about Jeffrey Epstein, and I left thinking about a door. Not a jail door. The door back in.Watch who is walking through it.Michael Cohen went to prison for Donald Trump. He spent seven years calling him a con man. This week he reconciled with him — and now says the testimony that helped convict his old boss was “coerced.” Trump’s lawyers moved within days to throw out the New York cases. The fixer is back, and this time the fix is the record itself.Leon Black walks through the same door Thursday. He paid Jeffrey Epstein more than $150 million — for “tax advice,” he says. He paid the U.S. Virgin Islands $62 million more — and bought himself what the rest of us cannot: immunity from further prosecution. Now he returns to the House Oversight Committee, under oath and on camera for the first time. A man who has sat two chairs from Vladimir Putin, answering to Congress about the financier he overpaid by nine figures.Paolo Zampolli never left at all. He brought Melania to America and introduced her to Trump. He failed his security clearance, then took a government title anyway. He wrote to Russia’s UN ambassador on his private Gmail. He asked ICE to detain the mother of his child. Agents deported her to Brazil. He works inside the administration today.Three men. One pattern. Each of them should be radioactive. Each of them walks back in. And each carries a thread that runs to Moscow — Cohen through the Russian-financed sale of a Palm Beach mansion he brokered, Black through Putin, Zampolli through the Russian ambassador Vitaly Churkin.Here is the number that should end the argument. Zero. This Justice Department has opened not one investigation into any of it. The man who ran the Epstein cover-up is days from running the Department that buried it.This is what people miss when they say nothing is happening. Something is happening. It just isn’t justice. The network is reassembling in daylight — reconciling, settling, testifying, getting hired — and calling it moving on.I don’t think it’s moving on. I think it’s a reunion. Thursday, when Leon Black raises his right hand, we get to watch one more guest arrive.Amanda Ungaro joins me tonight at 7. She kept the emails. She has more.— Zev ShalevThank you Lev Parnas, Cat: Poli-Psych, LC - Silence is Complicity, Lyudmila and Daniel, ann schneider, and many others for tuning into my live video with THE LEFT HOOK with Wajahat Ali! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

Michael Cohen testified Donald Trump into thirty-four felony convictions — the only criminal record ever attached to an American president. This weekend, Trump megadonor John Catsimatidis handed Cohen a radio show on 77 WABC, after telling the New York Post he “checked with the White House and they had no objection.” On a special Narativ Live, Zev Shalev convened the two people who watched this deal assemble in real time — Lev Parnas and investigative writer Ellie Leonard of The Panicked Writer — to name what the hire actually buys.Parnas put the transaction in one breath. “Michael Cohen wants to get a pardon. Michael Cohen wants to get back into the good graces of Donald Trump. Michael Cohen wants to start making money, living the lifestyle, and wipe out the past,” he said. His sources told him months ago that Trump and Cohen were talking directly and that Cohen had been inside the White House — back when the media treated the reconciliation as unthinkable. Parnas keeps receipts. “He never deletes his text messages. I even have the last text message, last week, where he texted me: let’s be friends.”The mechanics matter. Trump cannot pardon a New York state conviction — his only road out runs through appeal, and an appeal needs the star witness recanting. Cohen supplied exactly that in January, claiming Alvin Bragg and Letitia James “pressured and coerced” his testimony. Shalev read the WABC arrangement against that timeline: a weekend slot now — Andrew Cuomo’s chair, while the disgraced ex-governor summers — with Catsimatidis dangling a five-day week “down the line.” Meaning, Shalev said, “if you come through with Donald Trump and you help him erase his criminal record, we will then let you have the five days a week.” Parnas didn’t treat it as a theory: “It’s not even a read. That’s exactly what’s going on.”Leonard traced the deal to its origin — a document. After Cohen told an interviewer he had never heard Jeffrey Epstein’s name, one of her Substack readers surfaced an email from Cohen’s own lawyers proposing a Rule 35 motion: Cohen, already in prison, offering to trade information for a sentence reduction. “The information he had was information about Epstein and Donald Trump,” Leonard said. The man claiming ignorance had brokered the Palm Beach mansion deal that ended the Trump-Epstein friendship and, by his own later account, dropped the Katie Johnson file on Trump’s desk — with Epstein’s name on it.Then the show played Cohen’s 2019 congressional testimony: asked how many times Trump directed him to threaten someone, Cohen answered, “probably 500 times over the ten years.” Shalev added his own entry to that ledger: “He threatened all of us. He threatened me with choking.” Parnas filled in the pedigree — a childhood around the El Caribe, the Brooklyn club run by Cohen’s uncle and frequented by five mafia families and Russian godfather Marat Balagula — and named the succession: Roy Cohn, then Michael Cohen, then Rudy Giuliani, and now Cohen again. Trump always replaces the fixer. The fixer always comes back.Where does it go? Parnas called WABC a test run. The endgame is bigger: Cohen berating Democrats on national television — Fox, if Trump gets his wish — building toward what Parnas described as the grand-reunion interview, a pay-per-view reconciliation. The station is already rehearsing the format. Giuliani held a WABC show until election denial got him fired. Anthony Weiner holds weekends. Roger Stone appears on the roster. Cohen inherits Cuomo’s chair. A rogues gallery, assembled by the one New York billionaire who phones the White House before making a hire.The panel closed on the cost of covering it. Leonard described a month of coordinated attacks — fabricated websites, invented recordings, an obsessive account working her name “day and night” — that drove her to file FBI and IC3 reports. Shalev, called a Nazi despite a grandmother who survived the Holocaust, named the pattern from experience: get over the target and the institutional pushback arrives, dressed as something else. Parnas reported the same disruption across Substack — accounts bleeding subscribers, billing failures, chaos — four months before an election. The people reading the Epstein files are under attack; the man who offered to sell what he knew about the files just got a microphone.Parnas promised the story doesn’t rest. He’s finishing an investigation into mega-donor money flowing through super PACs into democratic-socialist campaigns — foreign money included — and tracking special prosecutor Joe diGenova’s Southern District of Florida operation, which he warns will produce indictments aimed at Obama, Brennan, Comey and Clapper. And he opened a public campaign for a seat on Cohen’s new show. Equal time. On the record. With the texts.Cohen swore Trump directed the crimes. He now sells the story that prosecutors directed him. Shalev’s advice ran the other way from the hype: ratings rule New York radio, and a show nobody hears dies fast. Spend your attention on the people reading the files — not on the man who offered to sell them.Thank you Amy Gabrielle, LC - Silence is Complicity, Robin Payes, Soso's World, Noble Blend, and many others for tuning into my live video with Lev Parnas and Ellie Leonard! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.narativ.orgLesley Groff spent her deposition insisting she never knew what she was scheduling. Then she scheduled the one thing that matters. On Tuesday’s Narativ Live special, Zev Shalev walked the Gates and Groff transcripts with attorney Ann P. Mitchell of Notes from the Front and investigative writer Ellie Leonard of The Panicked Writer — each bringing a different toolkit: Mitchell the legal read, Leonard the deep work inside the files.The line that never went deadFor a decade, Donald Trump has sold a story: he and Jeffrey Epstein fell out years ago, he threw him out of Mar-a-Lago, they never spoke again. Groff, Epstein’s executive assistant of roughly twenty years, contradicted it under oath. Asked how often she connected the two men by phone, she answered “once a quarter, maybe, or twice” — regular calls the panel read as stretching across roughly ten years and, they believe, to the 2016 election. Groff couldn’t recall when they stopped. For Shalev, this was the night’s headline. “I’ve been trying to prove that for ten years,” he said, “and there she goes just saying they’re still friends all the way to 2016.”Mitchell supplied the legal mechanics of how Trump keeps his hands clean: he doesn’t put things in writing, so the contact runs assistant-to-assistant, with intermediaries — Steve Bannon among the names she cited — carrying messages between the two men. That structure, she argued, gives Trump the plausible deniability to claim he and Epstein never spoke directly while a communication conduit ran the whole time.PAID SUBSCRIBERS CAN ACCESS A DEEPER DIVE BELOW THE PAYWALL

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.narativ.orgFor years, the microwave dishes on the mesas above Jeffrey Epstein’s New Mexico ranch were a mystery that everyone filled with theory — a spy-grade rig, a military-grade encrypted relay, a CIA or Mossad line wired into the nuclear labs on either side of the property. The towers were real. The explanations were guesses. Nobody had the documents. On Tuesday’s Narativ Live, Zev Shalev laid out the ones Narativ found, and replaced the speculation with a paper trail — joined by New Mexico broadcaster Eddie Aragon, who knows the hardware and the high desert, for an expert read on what the findings mean.What Narativ foundThe anchor is a wire. On October 27, 2016, $41,131.61 left a Deutsche Bank account in St. Thomas and landed at a SunTrust account in Georgia belonging to Future Technologies Venture, LLC — a commercial network integrator, not a front. Its director of business development, Chris Cappiello, spent 2016 trading emails with Epstein’s money man, Richard Kahn, and the ranch manager, Brice Gordon, under a single subject line: “ZDC Microwave Link.”The job was connectivity, and the reason it was hard is geography. High-speed fiber could be landed at exactly one place near the ranch — the top of Sandia Crest, a 10,620-foot peak 26.8 miles from Epstein’s front door. Fiber to the ranch itself did not exist and was not coming. So Future Technologies strung a chain of commercial DragonWave radios down off the mountain — crest to ranch tower, ranch tower to main house, main house to lodge — and engineered the link to a full gigabit. Gordon confirmed it was finished on September 26, 2016. The Federal Communications Commission granted Zorro Development five licenses to run it.That detail collapses the spy-rig myth. The equipment was ordinary, off-the-shelf gear from a commercial vendor, carrying the ranch’s data because no carrier would run a line that far into the desert. The hardware was nothing exotic, but why go to these lengths to install high bandwidth internet to a sleepy horse farm occupied for 45 days a year.PAID SUBSCRIBERS CAN ACCESS A DEEPER DIVE BELOW THE PAYWALL

Today’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.Zev Shalev and Dean Blundell ran an abbreviated FiveStack on Tuesday, and the countdown kept arriving at the same place. A housing bill held hostage. A loyalist purging the spies. Two Epstein enablers pleading ignorance. A primary night soaked in foreign money. An eleven-day trillionaire. By the close, Shalev named the thread out loud: there wasn’t a single story on the board that wasn’t guided by the interests of a foreign government.TODAY’s Blindspot from GroundNews.comToday’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.5️⃣ The Eleven-Day TrillionaireEleven days after SpaceX went public and made him the first trillionaire in history, Elon Musk fell back under the line — a market selloff of roughly $363 billion, with SpaceX down again to about $156 the day of the show. Blundell relayed what a hedge-fund friend told him over dinner: they turned away clients who wanted in. The reason was the valuation — near $1.77 trillion against a single real customer, the United States government, and almost no runway to grow into the number. “Valuation is b******t,” Shalev said. The richer point underneath: the man whose net worth swings a third of a trillion dollars in a week, with Tesla, X, Grok and $1.8 billion in crypto all lashed to the same mast, still owns the country’s only ride to orbit.4️⃣ Mamdani’s Night, and AIPAC’sZohran Mamdani went three-for-three on his House endorsements, with Brad Lander burying Rep. Dan Goldman by thirty points. Shalev and Blundell read the result as a repudiation of AIPAC’s grip on who gets elected — and then refused the easy version of the story. Blundell drew the hard line: be as anti-Netanyahu, anti-Ben-Gvir, anti-Smotrich, anti-AIPAC as the facts demand, but the anti-Israel and antisemitic register running through some of the victory speeches visits the pain elsewhere, on a community that accounts for a fraction of the population and the majority of religious hate crimes. Shalev, born in Israel, separated anti-Zionism used as a proxy from legitimate criticism, and warned that candidates who win the primary on that register get crushed in the general — handing Republicans the seats.3️⃣ The Target and the SchedulerThe House Oversight Committee released the Gates and Groff transcripts. Bill Gates described being worked for blackmail over affairs with two Russian women — set-ups, in Narativ’s reading, that Epstein engineered — and staying in the circle anyway, claiming he’d “heard” Epstein was a sex offender but never looked it up. Shalev and Blundell didn’t buy it from the man who built a search engine. Lesley Groff, Epstein’s scheduler of nearly two decades, testified she never knew what she was scheduling — while confirming she booked calls with Donald Trump up to the election. Shalev’s verdict on the “I didn’t know” defense was flat: she knew.2️⃣ Who Benefits From Firing the CounterterroristsBill Pulte — the man who ran the FHFA machine that produced criminal referrals against Trump’s enemies — was sworn in as acting Director of National Intelligence on Friday and immediately began gutting the place: six intelligence officials fired, 45 detailees sent home, the counterterrorism and counterintelligence centers on the block for transfer or dismantling. Zev asked who benefits from firing counterterrorists. “Terrorists,” Dean answered. The show’s read: Pulte isn’t there to sharpen American intelligence. He’s there to manufacture confusion and cover into November — the same destination as the SAVE Act and the voter rolls.1️⃣ The Hostage StandoffThe bill that started the show is the one that may decide it. A bipartisan housing measure — 85–5 in the Senate, 358–32 in the House — sat ready for signature Tuesday morning. Trump canceled the signing until Congress passes the SAVE Act, the proof-of-citizenship and voter-ID bill that Narativ has reported could strip 100 to 150 million Americans of the ballot. Trump turned up at Thune’s lunch with Senate Republicans to force it. As the show aired, the outcome of that confrontation was still landing. The framing was not: a president sacrificing the country’s homes to secure the vote against its people.THE PATTERNPull the thread through all five and the same hand keeps surfacing — foreign, hidden, and closer to the center than any of these stories admit. “Everything is tied to foreign intelligence,” Shalev said in his close. “There’s just not a single story we can look at today that isn’t guided by the forces of a foreign government.” Not left, not right. Power protecting itself, and barely bothering to hide it.Today’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.Thank you LC - Silence is Complicity, Noble Blend, Lori Modafferi, 🇨🇦 Natalie Woodn’t 🇨🇦, Gretchen Theodorakis, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dean Blundell! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

Amanda Ungaro spent three and a half months in ICE custody before she asked a judge to deport her to Brazil — not because she’d done anything, she says, but because she wanted out of the facilities. On Narativ Live, in her first long on-camera interview, she laid out who she believes put her there: Paolo Zampolli, the man she calls the father of her child, the model scout credited with introducing Melania to Donald Trump, and the president’s longest-running friend.That is where a custody fight becomes a national-security story.The setup. Zampolli, by Ungaro’s account, kept her for two decades without easy access to her own passport. When she finally left him, she says, a custody battle over their son turned vicious — and charges followed, including an allegation she’d faked a medical license. She denies it. Zev’s read, laid out on the show: the charges were a pretext to mark her as a criminal so ICE could remove her. Ten officers came in the morning. She lost the custody fight, lost the country, and now sits in Brazil while Zampolli — appointed by Trump to an “ambassador for global partnerships” role — stays close to the First Lady. Ungaro calls him “Melania’s shadow.”The question Melania won’t answer. Ungaro says she appealed directly to the First Lady, who acted shocked and then did nothing. Zev’s point landed flat and hard: one phone call to Homeland Security from Melania Trump could have ended the detention in minutes. It never came. So either the First Lady let her self-described best friend be deported, or she had a reason to want her gone. Ungaro and Melania traveled the same road — models pulled out of Brazil and Slovakia through the same agency pipeline that Ellie Leonard describes as modeling at the front and something darker behind it.The Russians in the frame. Zev’s investigation, as he described it, found Zampolli’s orbit thick with Kremlin-linked figures — three people he ties to Russia’s FSB, a woman named Svetlana Pozhidaevawho also worked for Jeffrey Epstein, and Sergei Belyakov , a former Russian deputy economics minister Zev calls Epstein’s “Russian handler,” who signed off on one of their U.S. visas. A sports envoy and a Dominican Republic posting, Zev argued, are thin cover for an intelligence cell parked inside the United Nations, moving people on diplomatic passports. Parnas, who lived inside Trump’s world as the operator sent to “do the dirty work,” said he never heard Zampolli’s name in those rooms — but he remembers the era, the Miami–New York corridor, and the women being moved through it.The pipeline. Leonard walked through the machinery: Jean-Luc Brunel’s MC2 agency as a front to bring girls into the country, fake receipts to convince Epstein the agency earned its keep when it never turned a real dollar, and the O-1 “Einstein” visa used to import them — Epstein himself signing off, insisting everyone arrive “legally.” She cited the unredacted Maritza Vasquez deposition naming girls of 13, 14 and 15 out of Brazil, and the people who ran the visa program and, she notes, still work in it. She pointed to a model brought in at 14 though listed as 18, escaped, retrieved, groomed. And she pointed at the money: the JP Morgan litigation in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where investigators found 134 accounts opened for Eastern European girls — funded by Epstein, drained by no one but him. Parnas filled in the period detail that makes it all possible: pre-9/11, he says, a real U.S. passport went for $10,000.The survivors’ revolt. The night’s second break came from Parnas. Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s new book reportedly draws on audio from a secured room — transcripts of JD Vance and the FBI director weighing the Insurrection Act, Parnas says, around the question of how to bury the Epstein files and shield Trump, at the same stretch when Todd Blanche was set to meet Ghislaine Maxwell before her transfer. More than a dozen survivors, led by Lisa Phillips, signed a statement after learning the material had been held for a book rather than handed to investigators. Leonard’s timeline cuts to the bone: if the reporters had the tapes shortly after the meeting, that knowledge existed before Maxwell got her proffer and was moved. “Their trauma is not content,” the survivors wrote. “The truth must come out now.”Zev kept the frame steady all hour: this is what independent reporting catches that the legacy press sits on — and what it costs the people waiting for the truth. A part two is coming, on Ungaro, on Zampolli, and on the intimidation campaign the three of them say is now running against them on social media.Editor’s note: The claims about Zampolli, the Trumps, and the figures named above were made by Ungaro, Parnas, Leonard, and in Narativ’s reporting; Narativ has not independently corroborated every one. Melania Trump has publicly denied any relationship with Epstein. Those named have not responded.Subscribe to Narativ for the rest of this investigation — part two lands next week.Thank you Dana DuBois, Cat: Poli-Psych, Lyudmila and Daniel, Cheech Previti, Caro Henry, and many others for tuning into my live video with Lev Parnas and Ellie Leonard! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.narativ.orgAmanda Ungaro spent twenty years inside the world the Melania and Donald Trump. in her first live interview since the Trump administration deported her, she walked Zev through it — the plane, the agencies, the United Nations passport trade, and a First Lady she says watched it all happen - and did nothing to stop it. The AbandonmentFor nearly two decades, Ungaro and Zampolli were one of only two couples at Melania’s table — White House Easters, Christmases, New Years. Melania was the first to call Ungaro’s son Giovanni every birthday, 7 AM, Secret Service arriving with presents. When Ungaro was taken — ten police breaking into her Miami home in an arrest she says Zampolli orchestrated through an ICE contact who has since been promoted — she got word to the First Lady and asked for help. “She looked like she was in shock, but she didn’t do anything,” Ungaro said. Three and a half months in detention. A prosecutor who tried twice to convert it into prison time; an email found by her son in which Zampolli wrote she should serve six years. “She knows me since I’m 18 years old. She knows who Paolo is. For me, it’s done. She lost her values.”The AgreementThe interview’s most consequential thread ran through the East Wing. Zampolli’s claim to fame — that he introduced Melania to Donald Trump in 1998 — is, Ungaro said, a story he maintains by arrangement. “The investigators, they have proof it was Jeffrey Epstein” who made the introduction, she said. Zampolli’s reward for keeping the official version alive: access. He is close to Melania, not Trump — “they text each other all the time.” He asked the First Lady for an ambassadorship — Paris, London, or Rome — but, as Ungaro put it, a man like Zampolli could never pass a security clearance. The consolation prize was Special Envoy for Global Partnerships, a title with no apparent duties beyond travel and photographs with Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. When Melania made her extraordinary unprompted statement in April denying any relationship with Epstein, Ungaro believes the First Lady was preempting her — responding to a post Ungaro had put online days earlier.The Epstein files provides several documents that bolster the claims that it was Melania Jeffrey Epstein, not Zampolli, who introduced Melania to Donald Trump The PlaneUngaro was 16, a working model recruited out of Brazil at 13, when her agent Jean-Luc Brunel told her they’d catch “a friend’s plane” to a New York job. She boarded Epstein’s 727 and counted close to thirty girls — 14, 15, 16 years old, sitting on laps, worked by Ghislaine Maxwell “like best friends.” “They don’t look like models,” she told Brunel. “They look like students.” When they landed in New Jersey, Brunel tossed her a small bag and told her to put it in her purse. She realized it was drugs and threw it back. He threw it again. She threw it back again. She never saw Epstein after that day — but her name was on the manifest the DOJ released in 2021, beside Brunel’s.PAID SUBSCRIBERS CAN ACCESS A DEEPER DIVE BELOW THE PAYWALL

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.narativ.orgSomebody carved a hole the size of 47 swimming pools out of Jeffrey Epstein’s New Mexico ranch — and the timing is the tell. According to a New York Times account cited on the show by Albuquerque radio host the Rock of Talk, Eddie Aragon of KIVA, the excavation broke ground at the end of January, the start of February this year: the same window the Epstein files were being released. Before the searches. As the documents went public. That’s when the digging started.On tonight’s Narativ Live, Zev Shalev walked Aragon through Narativ’s scientific evidence that a structure was built under Zorro Ranch in 2014-2015 and then removed the week the Epstein files were released. Aragon had once worked for the firm that laid the ranch’s original foundation — through the evidence frame by frame. The conclusion they reached isn’t that they know what was under the ground. It’s that the ground itself proves something was there, and that someone went to extraordinary expense to take it out.What the ground showsThe cut measures roughly 1.7 acres — about 76,000 square feet — and runs 20 to 25 feet deep, gauged against the 25-foot buildings beside it and confirmed by shadow analysis. That’s 155,000 cubic yards of displaced earth, the dirt volume of 47 Olympic pools, hauled out and then back in to refill the hole. It sits directly next to the main mansion, not out in the hills. A box cut, squared and leveled, on undulating high-desert terrain that doesn’t square itself.Foundations don’t go this deep, this clean, this close to the house, with the spoil staged to bury it again. The geometry reads as removal, not construction. As Aragon put it: there is no ordinary reason to dig that up like that.PAID SUBSCRIBERS CAN ACCESS A DEEPER DIVE BELOW THE PAYWALL

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.narativ.orgSarah Kellen sat in front of a congressional committee this week and dismantled the only version of herself the public ever knew. “I have read articles online labeling me as Ghislaine’s lieutenant,” she told the members. “That is a gross misrepresentation. I was a literal indentured slave. In fact, she even referred to me as her slave and minion.”For years Kellen has been the villain in the margins of the Epstein story — the assistant, the scheduler, the woman named alongside Maxwell in the 2007 non-prosecution agreement. Her transcript, released this week and read aloud on tonight’s Narativ Live by Ellie Leonard of The Panicked Writer, tells a different story. Kellen started where most of Epstein’s girls started: with nothing, and nowhere to go.She was raised, she testified, in “a religious cult of Jehovah’s Witnesses” in North Carolina, “in a faith where women did not speak unless spoken to.” At thirteen, an eighteen-year-old man began pursuing her. She dropped out of school at fifteen to marry him, did marry him at seventeen, and was carried off to Hawaii thousands of miles from everyone she knew. Three years later he served her divorce papers at an airport — she signed without a lawyer because she did not know she was allowed one — and had her excommunicated. From one day to the next, her parents, her siblings, every friend she had were forbidden to speak to her. She was twenty-one, marooned on an island, no degree, no family, no money.That is the raw material Epstein hunted. He did not have to break Sarah Kellen. Someone had already done it for him.The introduction came through a celebrity hairdresser, Frederick Fekkai, who flew her to Maui for a hair show that did not exist and assaulted her in his hotel room. Then he offered to introduce her to his friend Jeffrey Epstein, “a scout for Victoria’s Secret.” Epstein flew her to a hotel casting, told her to undress, told her to come back at four. She had a plane to catch. She figured she would never see the man again. About a year later, a coworker mentioned a wealthy couple in New York who needed an assistant. The couple was Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. “Unfortunately,” Kellen testified, “I got the job.”Ellie called the coincidence what it was on air — not a coincidence. The same man, surfacing ten months later through a different mouth, in a different city, to close the door he had left open in a Hawaii hotel room.What followed she described as indentured servitude. Twenty-five thousand dollars a year, on call every hour of every day, months at a time with no day off. “I understood the math exactly,” she told the committee. “I was being paid in part to be raped.” The abuse, she said, ran weekly and turned violent — a night in the Palm Beach gym where Epstein lowered the hurricane shutters, blasted the music so no one could hear, choked her and raped her. It continued, she testified, while he was supposedly serving his Florida sentence, by Skype, from a computer inside the Palm Beach County Stockade.And all the while she sat in the most powerful rooms on earth. A room in Cuba with Fidel Castro. Asia and Africa with Bill Clinton, including lunch at the home of the Sultan of Brunei. Princess Beatrice’s eighteenth at Windsor Castle. Across a table from Ehud Barak in Israel. “I was a silent body in a chair beside men who started and ended wars,” she said. In 2007 two FBI agents approached her and another young woman at the St. Thomas airport. Epstein told them to wait, walked over, spoke to the agents himself, came back ten minutes later and said, “Let’s go.” The agents were gone.Then the government did to her what Epstein had been doing all along. Later that same year, federal prosecutors wrote her name into Epstein’s non-prosecution agreement as a co-conspirator. No one asked her. No one questioned her. She learned her own name was in the document only after it was signed and made public. The United States branded her a criminal in a secret deal with her own abuser, and never spoke a single word to her.PAID SUBSCRIBERS CAN ACCESS A DEEPER DIVE BELOW THE PAYWALL

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.narativ.orgOn Monday, New Mexico’s Epstein Truth Commission met for the first time and aimed its subpoena power. More than a dozen subpoenas are going out — to banks, to federal agencies, to law enforcement. The first focus is not a flight log or a wire transfer. It is a single email.A former Zorro Ranch staffer sent it in November 2019, three months after Jeffrey Epstein died in his Manhattan cell. Two foreign girls, the email said, strangled during fetish sex and buried in the hills on the orders of Jeffrey and Ghislaine. One Bitcoin for the proof.Narativ found that email buried in the FBI’s own released files soon after the Epstein Files were first published in compliance with the Epstein Transparency Ac. Our exclusive — The Bodies Buried at Zorro — was the first report anywhere of a logged federal tip alleging murder at the ranch. No other outlet had touched it. Congresswoman Melanie Stansbury later carried the same document to the state attorney general. Every search and every subpoena that has followed traces back to a tip the FBI chose to ignore and a document we chose to publish.The man who carried itEddy Aragon has lived with that email for six years. Albuquerque knows him as the Rock of Talk. He received the tip, recognized that whoever wrote it knew the property from the inside — the shorthand “Madam G,” the staff-only details — and walked it straight into the FBI’s Albuquerque field office, handing it to the agent who logged the intake. The Bureau dropped it into case 50D-NY-3027571 and stamped it “Pending Inactive.” Filed. Forgotten. In six years, Eddy told me tonight, not one agent ever called him back.He is blunt about what that means: without his tip, there is no state investigation, no truth commission, no subpoenas this week. He is right. The federal government had the same document and sat on it. A radio host in New Mexico did the work the FBI would not.PREMIUM SUBSCRIBERS CAN ACCESS A DEEPER ANALYSIS BEYOND THE PAYWALL: What one survivor alleged happened underground at Zorro — and discover why our upcoming special report could change the investigation forever.

Thank you Hal Gill, Patris, Nick G, A Dude On The Couch, Ms. H, Pamela, and many others for tuning into my live video with Ellie Leonard! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

Christopher Armitage came on Narativ Live tonight to argue, in plain language, what most of the legal-political world has been too cautious to say aloud — that Justice Clarence Thomas could be indicted next Monday, in a Fairfax County courthouse, on charges already supported by the public record. The case does not require Congress, the Department of Justice, or the Supreme Court itself to do anything. It requires three Virginia officials who already have the authority to act, and the will to use it.Armitage’s argument rests on a doctrine the Supreme Court has affirmed as recently as the 2019 Snyder decision — dual sovereignty: states are allowed to enforce their own laws, even on federal officials. The Roberts Court has narrowed federal fraud, bribery, and corruption statutes to the point that the federal-level case against Thomas may no longer be winnable, but Virginia’s laws are not bound by John Roberts’s reading. Thomas lives in Fairfax County. He files a Virginia resident income tax return. The twenty years of private jets, superyachts, summer compounds at Harlan Crow’s Adirondacks property, tuition payments for a child he was raising, and a quarter-million-dollar motorhome from a separate benefactor — totaling, by Armitage’s accounting, more than twenty million dollars in gifts, of which roughly ten million are documented and unreported and another eleven million are estimated from gaps in the record — are income under federal tax law unless they meet the Supreme Court’s own 1960 “detached and disinterested generosity” test in Duberstein. A politically active billionaire whose business and ideological interests appear before the Court does not meet that test. Leaving that income off a Virginia return, with intent to defraud, is a felony under Virginia Code § 58.1-348.The intent question — usually the hardest piece of a tax-fraud prosecution to prove — is the easiest one to read in Thomas’s record. He disclosed his first Harlan Crow flight in 1997, then stopped disclosing them for the next twenty years while continuing to take them, and amended his forms only for the specific trips reporters had already proven. He used to report large gifts as taxable income. He stopped. He knows.The deeper contribution Armitage brought to the conversation tonight is the four-tier taxonomy of state resistance his soft-secession academic work has built — Tier 0 cooperative federalism, Tier 1 uncooperative federalism (Heather Gerken’s 2009 contribution, we don’t have to help you), Tier 2 soft secession (we don’t need you — Washington State’s economy alone exceeds plenty of European countries that maintain full safety nets), Tier 3 oppositional federalism (state criminal law turned on federal officials), and Tier 4 constitutional noncompliance (active intervention against federal action, such as state National Guards refusing to participate in mass deportations). The Thomas case is Tier 3. So is the fifty-thousand-dollar bribe Tom Homan took on Texas soil and could be charged for in a Texas courtroom if Texas had Democratic leadership. So is every federal corruption case the Roberts Court has narrowed out of federal reach and left lying in state jurisdiction. Armitage’s frame names what the right wing has been doing for fifty years — building state-level pressure that the Supreme Court eventually has to ratify — and asks why Democrats are not running the same play, applied for good.On Pam Bondi’s testimony before the House Oversight Committee tomorrow on the Epstein files, Armitage’s instruction was direct. Every Democratic member with questioning time should open by stating, on the record and to her face, that they will pursue criminal perjury charges if she lies under oath. Then they should follow Ted Lieu’s example — start their questions by saying the president is a pedophile who is named in the Epstein files. Refuse to grant Bondi the lawyerly courtesy that has, until now, allowed every Trump-regime official to stonewall a hearing without consequence. “Call her a liar,” Armitage said. “Do it.”On the November midterms, Armitage offered a deliberately bleak prediction: no veto-proof majority for the Democrats, a rigging campaign the existing checks cannot fully stop, and a Democratic Party whose own approval rating sits below Donald Trump’s because it has no counter-incentive plan for its voters. The fight, he said, is not about the outcome — it is about the daily practice. The right wing waged a fifty-year campaign to overturn Roe v. Wade because they took the long-shot cases and refused to be told the cases could not be won. The same tactic, applied for good, can charge Clarence Thomas in Virginia on Monday, indict Tom Homan in Texas, and unwind the federal capture from below — one county, one statehouse, one indictment at a time.The action items Armitage handed our viewers were not federal. Pressure your state attorney general. Pressure your county prosecutor. Pressure your statehouse representative. Pressure your city council member if that is what you have access to. Treat the prosecution movement the way the right wing treated Roe — a multi-decade campaign of state-level pressure that culminates in courthouse doors opening, not closing. Steve Descano, the Fairfax Commonwealth’s Attorney, spent six years in the Justice Department’s Criminal Tax Division and knows how to read this case. Governor Abigail Spanberger has the authority under Virginia Code § 2.2-511 to ask Attorney General Jay Jones to take it up. None of them has moved. All three of them can.What came through most clearly tonight is that nothing about this requires permission from the institutions that are failing. It requires a county prosecutor in Virginia who is willing to do his job, and enough constituents writing, calling, and showing up to make doing that job the safer political bet. Charge him on Monday. Then charge the next one.Christopher Armitage publishes The Existentialist Republic and is the architect of the soft-secession framework — academic working paper, free booklets, and tools at the link.Thank you Dr. Eric Lullove, Lalisa, Truthsayer, Dannys, Richard, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

Andrew Lownie sat across from me in shorts on Monday afternoon. The paperback of The Rise and Fall of the House of York drops Thursday in the States — the book Simon & Schuster pulled to delete a single line was published as a paperback in Britain and is tracking for number one. Next, American readers get the book on Thursday.Lownie referenced an FBI intelligence document dated January 2026, headed RIS and the People’s Republic of China. The subject is Andrew Mountbatten Windsor. The links being mapped: Russian criminal gangs, Russian intelligence services, Chinese state intelligence. Andrew served at the Ministry of Defence. He was a trade envoy. He collected secrets in both roles. Lownie writes about that document in the new paperback.“In some ways Epstein was a player in a bigger story,” he said. He thinks Epstein was a Russian asset recruited much earlier than people realized. That, he said, explains where the money came from.I pushed him on the timeline. I told him what Stephen Hoffenberg told me before he died — that Epstein and Maxwell knew each other in the 1980s, that Epstein was working with Maxwell on his financial issues in the dying days of Maxwell’s life. I told him what Ari Ben-Menashe told me on the record — that he met Epstein in Robert Maxwell’s London offices during Iran-Contra. That Maxwell wanted to bring Epstein onto the operations team. That Tel Aviv — the Military Intelligence Directorate — had already approved. That Ghislaine and Epstein were an item at a very young age. That Robert Maxwell thought Epstein was going to marry his daughter.Lownie did not flinch. He said it lines up with what he is hearing from a source on the periphery in the mid-1980s — Epstein, Ghislaine, and Andrew running around London, doing the same things they would do later.If that’s true, the official story is wrong. The Concorde story — Ghislaine penniless, flying to New York after her father’s death, falling into Epstein’s arms — is a cover. They had already planned to take over Robert Maxwell’s business.The Rothschilds keep showing up. Evelyn de Rothschild was close to the Queen. Lynn Forester de Rothschild was close to Epstein and close to Andrew. The witnesses at her wedding to Evelyn were Peter Mandelson and Prince Andrew. Lownie said the mainstream press will not touch her — she is rich and litigious. Australian television spiked his interviews on this subject.I asked him about the Queen. Did she know.“The Queen knew everything,” he said. Intelligence officers worked inside the palace. Letters were written to her for fifteen years. Intelligence officers came to her and were turned away by her private secretaries. The 2010 Ferguson access-selling story. The 2022 High Court case where the Yorks could not explain £1.3 million in their account. Nothing was done. The cover-up ran from the Queen to the King. It would still be running if the Epstein files had not dropped at Christmas.I asked the question every Narativ reader wants answered. Does Andrew face real justice.Lownie does not think so. He thinks Charles will not let his brother stand trial because Andrew might call the King as a witness. He thinks Mandelson is different. Mandelson, he said, goes to prison.We ran out of time. The notes match from two angles. The story begins earlier. The network is bigger. The cover-up has been running for fifteen years and is breaking now because Substack reporters keep digging.Andrew Lownie’s The Rise and Fall of the House of York is out Thursday. Buy it. Subscribe to his Substack. He has paid for every page.Watch the full conversation on Narativ Live. Subscribe at narativ.org.Thank you Amy Gabrielle, PJ Schuster, Catherine Mommsen, Gretchen Theodorakis, Dominique, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

House Republicans didn’t lose the Iran war powers vote tonight.They pulled it — because they were about to lose.For three roll calls they defended Trump’s war on the floor. Tonight, with Golden flipped and their own members gone home, they wouldn’t let the floor be counted at all.Asked point-blank what happened to the vote, the chair said only: “that was a women’s history museum.” Then moved on.A pulled vote keeps the loss off the books. It’s barely better than losing — and they know it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.narativ.orgEddy Aragon broadcasts from Albuquerque on KIVA — “The Rock of Talk.”When Jeffrey Epstein died in August 2019, the FBI searched his Manhattan townhouse, his Palm Beach mansion, and his Caribbean island. One Epstein property was left alone: Zorro Ranch, in the high desert south of Santa Fe. The local ABC, NBC, and CBS affiliates would not touch the story. The people who had worked on the ranch called Aragon’s station instead. His AM signal carries to the small towns around the property — Edgewood, Moriarty, Stanley — and for seven years the leads came to him because there was nowhere else for them to go.In November 2019, three months after Epstein’s death, one of those leads arrived as an email. The sender said he was former Zorro staff — “a person that has been there and seen it all.” He said he had taken material from Epstein’s home “as my insurance.” And he wrote one sentence: two foreign girls had been buried in the hills outside the ranch, on the orders of Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.Aragon did what a citizen is supposed to do. He took the email to the FBI in person, sat for a formal intake — name, Social Security number, a background check — and handed it over.The Bureau did nothing with it. For six years.That was not the only door Aragon tried. In 2019 and 2020 he helped convene a citizens’ grand jury on behalf of Chauntae Davies, an Epstein survivor who has said she was raped at Zorro Ranch. The filing was stamped and delivered to the Santa Fe courthouse. It was never examined — not by the county sheriff, not by the state Attorney General.The work cost him. Aragon says his FM tower on the Sandia ridge was taken down, and his videos were stripped from every social platform he was on. The more he said about Zorro Ranch, the more the pressure came.He was also right to keep going. The New Mexico Truth Commission now investigating Zorro Ranch — the first official inquiry into the property in its history — exists, Aragon says, because of the email he forwarded in 2019. Congresswoman Melanie Stansbury found that email in the public Epstein files and carried it to the state Attorney General. The tip the FBI buried for six years became the document that reopened the case.Aragon’s instincts run further than the documents, and on Narativ Live we drew that line plainly: the speculation about ritual and the occult is not something our reporting rests on, and Narativ’s investigation of the Epstein files has found no evidence for it. What Aragon has earned is narrower and harder. He received a credible insider’s allegation of bodies buried at Zorro. He handed it to the federal government. And he watched the government do nothing for six years.What is actually beneath Zorro Ranch — who built the house, why the wells were drilled far past anything a ranch could use, who owns the land that rings it, and what one survivor says was done to her in a room below ground — is the subject of our investigation. THE GREATEST HEIST, Book 3, Part 2: ZORRO, publishes this week.Aragon has one wish for the property, he told Narativ Live. If he could walk it, he would go straight to the mechanical rooms. “I know,” he said, “that everything is in those mechanical rooms.”Thanks to everyone who came here in good faith — you’re the reason this space exists. The conversation on this post has run its course, so I’m closing the comments here. The rest of Narativ stays open, and I’ll see you in the next one.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.narativ.org`Thomas Massie is out.The Republican congressman from Kentucky’s 4th — the only Republican to vote against Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, the man who filed the discharge petition with Ro Khanna to force release of the Epstein files, the libertarian who called the war on Iran illegal — lost his primary tonight to a Trump-endorsed retired Navy SEAL named Ed Gallrein. Decision Desk HQ called it. NBC called it. CBS called it. Massie walked on stage and conceded. He said the race “went on longer than Vietnam.”The bill came to $35 million. The most expensive House primary in American history. $19 million spent against Massie. $16 million for him. The Republican Jewish Coalition put up $4 million. AIPAC’s United Democracy Project added $2.6 million. Israeli-American billionaire Miriam Adelson — the woman who paid for Trump’s 2024 campaign — moved millions through aligned channels. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth flew to Kentucky on Monday to campaign for Gallrein in his “personal capacity” — a phrase that means the Pentagon would rather not own it on paper.PAID SUBSCRIBERS CAN ACCESS A DEEPER DIVE BELOW THE PAYWALL

Today’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche quietly signed and posted to the Justice Department’s website Tuesday a one-page document giving Donald Trump, his family, his businesses, his trusts, and every Trump-affiliated entity perpetual immunity from any IRS audit. The one page memo was signed today and was only made public by the New York Times after Blanche testified before a senate committee. The document was made public after Monday’s surprise resignation of Brian Morrissey — The Treasury department’s Senate-confirmed general counsel of seven months — who walked out of the building Monday night, hours after the slush fund was announced, but before the tax audit immunity was made public today. We now know why.Section C of Blanche’s document “releases, waives, acquits, and forever discharges” Trump and “related or affiliated individuals … family or others filing jointly … trusts, parents, sister or related companies, affiliates and subsidiaries” from any future IRS pursuit. Section D adds that the United States cannot be held liable for any action flowing from the related $1.776 billion fund, including fraud. Attorney Anne P. Mitchell, on Narativ: “He is foreshadowing there’s going to be fraud, and there’s going to be tax fraud, more of it. And now he has this piece of paper that says he is immune from that.”Trump sued his own IRS for ten billion dollars. Ninety House Democrats warned the presiding judge any settlement would be “a specter of corruption unparalleled in American history.” Before the judge could rule, Trump’s Justice Department dropped the lawsuit. DOJ released a nine-page settlement Monday creating the $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization fund” that pays January 6 rioters and other claimed “victims of lawfare” out of the Treasury. The audit pardon was the second document, posted Tuesday — not in the public settlement. No court reviewed it. No judge approved it.What Blanche signed is the forward-looking presidential pardon Trump cannot give himself, applied to his family instead. The Supreme Court’s 2024 immunity ruling protected Trump for official acts during his presidency. It does not extend to his children, his trusts, or his joint filings. The audit pardon does.Anne P. Mitchell, Esq. — attorney, law professor, Army veteran — walked through the legal vulnerability live on the broadcast. The lawsuit was dropped before any judge could approve a settlement. The document Blanche signed is a contract that refers to a “settlement agreement” no court has ever seen. “Todd Blanche doesn’t even have the authority to say that about the United States,” she said. “He is not the United States. It’s a contract. Contracts break.” State attorneys general are already being briefed.The timing is visible. The U.S. Office of Government Ethics disclosed last week that Trump personally executed 3,700 stock transactions in the first quarter of 2026 — $220 million worth — with matched-day purchases of Apple shares the day he praised Apple, Thermo Fisher shares the day he toured the plant. CNBC’s Jim Cramer was handed the news on air Monday and went silent for ten seconds. The audit pardon was signed Tuesday.Denver Riggleman — the former Republican congressman who served on the January 6 Select Committee — joined the Narativ broadcast and said it on the record. “Anybody who signs off on this money going downrange, including Todd Blanche, I think is an enemy of the United States. I’ll state it directly.” The first piece pays the rioters. The second piece protects the family. The third piece is whichever state attorney general files first.Today’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.Tonight’s Narativ Breaking News special was brought to you by Ground News. Forty percent off the Vantage Plan at groundnews.com/fivestack. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

Scott MacFarlane joins us from Washington with an insider’s view of the week that was. This week, every guardrail in Washington got stress-tested at once. From the seven seconds of gunfire on the Hilton ballroom floor, to a Supreme Court ruling that quietly redrew the American South, to a war that just hit Day 60 with no off-ramp. Watch the show and support Scott MacFarlane’s Substack - you’ll get plugged into the daily events before they happen. Thank you Rick Kohut, LeftieProf, Lalisa, PJ Schuster, Assemblywoman Debra Mazzarelli, and many others for tuning into my live video with Scott MacFarlane! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

Like most of the content on Narativ, this video and post is free for everyone. Sign up below to get more posts like this for free, or become a paid subscriber to support our independent investigations.Yesterday the Supreme Court came down 6-3 in Louisiana v. Callais and gutted what was left of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The ACLU is calling it Jim Crow 2.0. Barack Obama said the Court has abandoned its role in our democracy. The opinion was written by Chief Justice John Roberts. Today, on a special early edition of Narativ Live, Christopher Armitage came on to explain why he has filed a complaint with the DC Bar to have Roberts disbarred — and why anybody watching can do the same thing in ten minutes.The Callais ruling rewrote what it takes to challenge a discriminatory map. The plaintiff now has to prove that the people who drew the lines intended to discriminate, not just that the map does. Roberts has been working to dismantle the Voting Rights Act since the Reagan administration. He wrote the 1981 memo calling the effects test a quota system. He wrote the 2013 Shelby County opinion that took the teeth out of Section 5. Yesterday he finished the job on Section 2. Forty years. Same hand. Same project.For sixteen years, Roberts has been calling something on his federal disclosure forms a salary that is not a salary. His wife, Jane Sullivan Roberts, is a legal headhunter. She places senior lawyers — the kind leaving government, the kind firms pay top dollar for — at law firms that argue cases at the Supreme Court. WilmerHale. Hogan Lovells. Davis Polk. When one of those firms hires her candidate, the firm pays her a commission. Sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars per placement. A 2022 whistleblower complaint from inside her former firm walked the spreadsheets to Congress: more than ten million dollars in commissions over seven years. Add the years that followed at her next firm, where the public numbers go dark, and the floor estimate runs past twenty million dollars. From the firms that argue in front of her husband.Roberts called it salary. “Commission is influenced by outcome in a way that salary isn’t as directly,” Armitage said. The Chief Justice picked the word that hides the conflict. The whistleblower was a clerk and an attorney. She knew what she was looking at. Congress held a hearing. The story quietly disappeared. About a third of the cases Roberts has weighed in on have involved firms his wife recruited for. He has not recused from a single one.Like most of the content on Narativ, this video and post is free for everyone. Sign up below to get more posts like this for free, or become a paid subscriber to support our independent investigations.There is also an equity stake. Jane Roberts holds equity in one of the firms. A company with business in front of the Court appeared before her husband. The stake went undisclosed for three years. Bloomberg got hold of it. Roberts then filed an amended form and called the omission an error in judgment. “People have gone to jail for that with the same excuse,” Armitage said. George W. Bush’s White House ethics lawyer — when that was still a job — said Roberts fudged the paperwork in a way that is misleading. Misleading on a federal form is a crime. The Chief Justice of the United States knows that. He counted on nobody reading the forms.The pattern holds across the conservative bloc. Ginni Thomas took money for years from conservative groups with business at the Court, then texted Mark Meadows trying to overturn the 2020 election. Clarence Thomas did not recuse from the January 6 cases. ProPublica then walked the country through more than twenty years of undisclosed gifts to Thomas from the billionaire Harlan Crow — yachts, private jets, real estate. Sam Alito took a private-jet fishing trip to Alaska with the hedge-fund billionaire Paul Singer, did not disclose it, did not recuse when Singer’s fund had a $2.4 billion case at the Court, and voted with Singer. Three of the nine. Three sets of millions. Three sets of forms with the truth missing. “The Republican Party is a criminal organization primarily,” Armitage said. “What they sell is influence.”Disbarment will not remove Roberts from the Supreme Court. The Constitution requires only nomination and confirmation. But the DC Bar holds federal judges to the same standard as everyone else who carries its license, and Armitage’s complaint argues that on its face, sixteen years of false household-income disclosures and a hidden equity stake are a textbook violation of the recusal statutes. The DC Bar has disbarred federal judges for less. Attorneys across the country are now filing their own complaints. Retired judges are filing them. The ACLU picked up the story today. “If we get him disbarred, he will forever live in infamy as the Chief Justice whose corruption got him disbarred,” Armitage said.History rhymes. Six years ago Narativ reported on the Federalist Society money pipeline that bought the bench Roberts sits on. Yesterday’s Callais opinion is what you get when the man at the top of that bench has spent four decades waiting to write it — and sixteen years quietly collecting on the side. The mechanism doesn’t change. The names do.Armitage publishes The Existentialist Republic on Substack. His complaint is posted in full there at no cost. The DC Bar accepts public complaints by email and at 515 Fifth Street NW, Washington DC. Ten minutes. Your own words. Armitage was deliberate about waiting a week before posting his own filing — he wants people to write their own letter, not copy his.Roberts has spent sixteen years counting on the certainty that nobody would read the forms.Today, somebody read the forms. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.narativ.orgTwo new photographs of Jeffrey Epstein joking with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman landed in Ellie Leonard’s signal threads this morning, hours before The New York Times published a long account of the same network. Both pictures show the two men close, intimate, at ease. The Times piece tracks the rest of it — tapestries from the Kaaba in Mecca shipped to Epstein’s island, tiles from Uzbek mosques, a golden dome modeled on ancient Syrian temples, and a 2014 photo of Epstein with the Emirati executive Sultan Bin Sulayem, who was later fired from his job at DP World over his Epstein ties. The point, Leonard noted on the show, is that Epstein “didn’t really know how to design a mosque” — he bought what cost the most because the price was the relationship. The mosque on St. James Island is not a mosque. It is a meeting room with a Mecca tapestry on the wall, built to impress the Saudis who came to dinner.The Saudi connection runs back to the eighties. Adnan Khashoggi, the uncle of the murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi, trained Epstein in what I called “the finer arts of criminal money laundering.” Decades later, Epstein discussed Jamal Khashoggi’s 2018 murder with Steve Bannon over email in language Leonard described as “crass.” Mohammed bin Salman, Bannon’s Saudi counterpart, is the man American intelligence holds responsible for the killing. The same Mohammed bin Salman who took meetings with Epstein and kept a photograph of the two of them together on a side table in his office.PAID SUBSCRIBERS CAN ACCESS A DEEPER DIVE BELOW THE PAYWALL

Attorney Anne P. Mitchell, Esq. and I break down the affidavit and come to an alarming conclusion. The FBI affidavit is supposed to read as the chronicle of a near-assassination of the President. Read with discipline, it reads as the chronicle of a man Trump knew could not reach him. This post is free for everyone. Sign up today to get more posts like this or become a paid subscriber and help us grow our platform for independent journalism1. Allen chose the only door he could not get through.The Washington Hilton has at least four other paths into the International Ballroom. Only one had a secret service-manned magnetometer screener. According to Aaron Parnas, a Hilton guest reported that the elevator key card system was disabled the evening of the dinner — any guest could ride to any floor unscreened. Despite these other options, Allen took the staff stairs down from his tenth-floor room and walked past every unguarded route to the only entrance with armed Secret Service agents standing in front of it. A Caltech-trained engineer who built drone targeting systems for the Pentagon does not pick that door if he intended to kill the president.2. Allen Wasn’t even on the same floor as Trump The dinner was on the Concourse Level. Allen ran at the magnetometer line on the Terrace Level — at least one floor up. Between him and the President: a bank of escalators, a thousand people, and several feet of concrete. There was no line of sight. There was never going to be a line of sight.3. He exempted nearly everyone in the building.Allen’s Rules of Engagement: hotel security, not targets unless they shoot at him. Capitol Police, same. National Guard, same. Hotel employees, not targets at all. Hotel guests, not targets at all. Buckshot, not slugs — in his own words, “to minimize casualties. There’s less penetration through walls.” Real assassins do not exempt the room.4. He carved out law enforcement explicitly.The email names FBI Director Kash Patel as the one administration official written out of the target list. As internet-law attorney Anne P. Mitchell put it on Narativ Live this afternoon, Allen “obviously thinks law enforcement is to be respected.” A man trying to assassinate the President does not write a respect-for-law-enforcement clause into his own document.5. Trump used a secure route Allen never came near.Since the Reagan attempt outside the Hilton in 1981, presidential visits to the venue go through a hardened entrance — drive into the garage, then directly up to the ballroom through an internal corridor sealed off from the public. Trump entered that way Saturday night. Allen approached a public stairwell on a different floor. The two routes never crossed.6. Trump told the agents to wait.He told Norah O’Donnell on Sunday’s captured 60 Minutes that he asked Secret Service to “wait a minute” so he could “see what was going on.” Vice President JD Vance was escorted out before him. Trump stayed seated for roughly eight seconds. Real Secret Service does not ask permission to move a protectee. A real protectee does not refuse to move. The detail behaved like a detail that knew the situation was contained.7. He has demanded no investigation.Survivors of assassination attempts demand accountability. They demand firings. They demand Senate inquiries. They demand audits of the security plan. Trump has demanded none of that. He has called the people asking these questions “conspiracy theorists.” He has demanded one thing: that taxpayers pay to build his stalled White House ballroom. Senator Lindsey Graham introduced the bill today.A man who has just survived an attempt on his life — and on his wife’s — would ask “how did this happen?”. He isn’t pushing a doomed ballroom build. The Conclusion He was not in the same room. He was not even on the same floor. He had four other paths into the ballroom and chose the hardest. He fired one round, hit a ballistic vest, and fell to the ground. He was nowhere near Donald Trump.The Trump regime continues to frame him as an assassin. He was not. At best, Cole Tomas Allen was a politically frustrated American who chose a public act as his expression of that frustration — a statement made at the potential cost of his own life, not the president’s.The federal government’s charging document does not survive that read. Allen’s assassination charges will not hold up, and neither will the regime's use of Allen’s words to brand its political opponents as accomplices to an assassination that was never going to happen.Thank you "Sushi"(Jen) of MIND HAVEN, Dr. Mary M. Marshall, Eric Lullove, Noble Blend, Sarah, and many others for tuning into my live video with Anne P. Mitchell, Esq.! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

Breaking News is always free at Narativ. Sign up to get more coverage like this for free or become a paid subscriber for our investigations and analysis.Just after 8:30 Saturday night, Secret Service officers pulled Donald Trump and Melania Trump off the stage at the Washington Hilton. Five shots rang out at the magnetometer line outside the ballroom of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. A 31-year-old man from Torrance, California — identified in reports tonight as Cole Tomas Allen — charged the security checkpoint with a shotgun, a handgun, and multiple knives. He had assembled a long gun in an unsecured back room of the hotel. He fired. A round struck a Secret Service officer in his bullet-resistant vest. The officer is alive and, in Trump’s words, “in great spirits.” Allen is in custody. He is alive too.Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Education Secretary Linda McMahon were in the ballroom. None were injured. The Hilton went on lockdown. The dinner was canceled. Trump said it will reschedule within thirty days. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said charges will follow shortly. FBI Director Kash Patel said the Bureau is examining ballistics, the long gun, and shell casings, and is interviewing witnesses. Trump described Allen as a “lone wolf” and “a sick person.” This is the third time in under two years that Donald Trump has been the target of a confirmed attempt — Butler, Pennsylvania, July 2024; the Palm Beach golf course, September 2024; and the Hilton tonight.Three things from the night sit uneasily next to those facts. Hours before the dinner, on Fox News, White House Press Secretary Karoline Levitt previewed the evening with these words: “It’ll be entertaining. There will be some shots fired tonight in the room. So everyone should tune in. It’s going to be really great.” Ninety minutes after Secret Service pulled him from the stage, Trump returned to the White House and framed the night as a unification — “I saw a room that was just totally unified,” “a tremendous amount of love and coming together” — and pivoted to his East Wing ballroom project, calling the Hilton “not a particularly secure building” and saying Secret Service and the military “are demanding” the new ballroom. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer told viewers on air he watched a gunman fire a “very serious weapon” at least six times from a few feet away. Blitzer was inside the ballroom. The shooting was at the magnetometer line outside.The facts are not in dispute. The officer was hit. The suspect was real. The weapons were real. The President was rushed off a stage by Secret Service for the third time in twenty-one months. The unease is in the speed and the polish of the framing around the facts. Butler is still unresolved for many. The same questions follow this president time and time again. Real events do not unfold this swiftly and coherently. Narativ will follow the investigation. History Rhymes. That’s how we know sooner.Thank you Mike Godwin, Sharon Dymond, Lisa 🌿🔍🔎🌿, Suzanne Sky, Jai C. Porter🇨🇦, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

Ellie Leonard finished reading every page. Eighteen hundred of them. Five hundred and thirty-three documented email exchanges between Michael Wolff and Jeffrey Epstein across nine years and six months, ending forty-four days before the FBI arrested Epstein at Teterboro. The picture she came back with is not a writer and a subject. It is a service agreement hiding in plain sight.Like most of Narativ’s content, this special report is available to everyone for free. If you’d like to get more content like this sign up below, or become a paid subscriber and support our independent journalism.Leonard and Lev Parnas joined Narativ Live tonight for a special report on what the emails actually show. The friendship did not begin in 2009 with a casual note to Epstein’s assistant Leslie Groff. Wolff flew on Epstein’s plane to a TED conference as early as 2001. In 2003 Wolff tried to facilitate the sale of New York Magazine to a consortium that included Epstein, Harvey Weinstein and Donnie Deutsch. The paper record picks up in 2009, goes silent for a year, then comes roaring back in February 2011 with Wolff writing, “Have been defending you to the world’s press.” That email is the moment the relationship becomes commercial. “He is now being paid by Jeffrey Epstein for a PR operation, a reputation cleanup of Jeffrey Epstein,” Shalev said. “Their friendship is not really a ‘friendship’. It’s a service agreement between a client and a PR guy that was masquerading in front of everybody else as a friendship and as an author-subject relationship.”Leonard catalogued the mechanics. Wolff worked with British PR operative Ian Osborne and five other publicists over the course of the correspondence. An Osborne and Partners memo recovered in the files lays it out in bullet points: “clean up Google,” retain search engine optimization firms, hire “Israeli experts” to scrub the internet, target a specific list of journalists — Gerald Baker, Lionel Barber, Andrew Sorkin, John Micklethwaite, Josh Tyrangiel — who between them ran the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the New York Times DealBook, and Bloomberg Businessweek. The Gates Foundation relationship was the planned vehicle for rehabilitation. When Virginia Giuffre named Prince Andrew in January 2015, Wolff drafted a seven-thousand-word New York Magazine feature built around the Gates angle. Epstein’s lawyers killed it. Wolff kept working. He did not believe Giuffre. He defended Prince Andrew. He treated the #MeToo movement, in Leonard’s words, as “absolute bunk” while simultaneously finding graduate-student assistants for Epstein to hire.On October 22, 2017, Wolff brokered the first meeting between Epstein and Steve Bannon at the Gramercy Park Hotel. By January 2018 Fire and Fury was the number one book in America and Epstein was hosting a theatrical “Fire and Fury birthday party” for himself with Bannon, Tom Barrack, Woody Allen and Obama’s former White House counsel Kathy Ruemmler in the room. By February 2019, Wolff was forwarding early drafts of Siege to Epstein for editing. “Epstein was editing, helping him write and edit his books too,” Leonard said. “The Trump books, they were editing Trump’s book together.” The hundred hours of recorded interviews Wolff has been selling on Substack as his insider archive are not journalism. They are the raw material of a nine-year fixer operation. Wolff himself told Epstein in writing that he used the existence of the tapes as leverage — if a source refused to cooperate, “remind them that I have these tapes and I have these interviews.”Parnas flagged the part that does not sit right. Donald Trump has not sued Michael Wolff. He does not treat Wolff the way he treats other reporters who claim to have evidence against him. “The relationship, there’s something about it that doesn’t smell right,” Parnas said. “Wolff talks about Donald Trump. I have the goods on Trump. Trump is everything, but he never produces it.” If Wolff sold Epstein a liberal-media-guy-who-understands-you reputation fix, the question is whether he sold Trump the same package. The pattern in the emails — saying one thing to Epstein and the opposite to Bannon, saying one thing publicly and the reverse behind closed doors — does not rule it out.History rhymes. Narativ wrote on March 30 that Wolff was Epstein’s fixer (narativ.substack.com/p/michael-wolff-was-epsteins-fixer), working from the first pass through the files and Leonard’s early transcription. Tonight’s show is the full receipt. The cross-reference map of all 533 exchanges, the eight chapters of the friendship, the peak months that line up exactly with Epstein’s legal crises — it all sits in a single fact sheet now. What looked like a prolific journalist covering the powerful was a paid reputation manager working inside Epstein’s defense for the entire decade Wolff was also writing America’s definitive books about Donald Trump.Thank you to Ellie Leonard and Lev Parnas. Leonard writes The Panicked Writer on Substack and is continuing the Hilton Head investigation. Parnas is a Narativ regular and a congressional candidate who lived inside Trump’s orbit during the years Fire and Fury and Siege were being written. The Wolfpack — the viewers crowdsourcing this investigation in real time — earned their name tonight.History Rhymes. That’s how we know sooner.Narativ Live is a production of narativ.org. Subscribe for breaking news alerts, the weekly video podcast in HD, and email notifications of live broadcasts.Thank you Amy Gabrielle, Rolf Kvalvik, Robin Payes, Elaine Cimino, Yvonne Evans, and many others for tuning into my live video with Lev Parnas and Ellie Leonard! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.narativ.orgDonald Trump told CNBC’s Squawk Box this morning that an extension of the Iran ceasefire was “highly unlikely.” By three this afternoon he had posted to Truth Social that he was extending it after all, citing a “seriously fractured” Iranian government. Between those two statements, Iranian negotiators refused to meet with the American peace envoy in Pakistan. Their reason, repeatedly reported and acknowledged on tonight’s broadcast, was direct: the peace envoy represents Israel, not the United States.The peace envoy is Jared Kushner.Kait Justice, writing at Downwind of Truth, has been tracing the Kushner thread for over a month. Tonight she laid the pieces out together. In 2021, at the close of Donald Trump’s first administration, the Saudi sovereign wealth fund put two billion dollars into Kushner’s newly formed Affinity Partners. The fund’s own board advised Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman against the investment — Kushner, the board said, had neither the experience nor the track record for the money. The Crown Prince overrode the board. Affinity Partners now reports six billion dollars under management, up from four-point-eight billion in 2024. The mission of the firm, Justice said on air, is to create an investment channel between Saudi Arabia and Israel.That mission has a paper trail that runs through Jeffrey Epstein. In emails surfaced in Justice’s reporting, Epstein wrote to a Qatari royal that “if the people would allow your country to recognize Israel, it could be interesting to discuss.” The email predates the Abraham Accords — Kushner’s signature first-term diplomatic achievement — by two years. In a parallel thread, Epstein pitched the Saudi royal court on an oil-backed currency and a compliant cryptocurrency, claiming on the page that he had already spoken to the founders of Bitcoin. Kushner’s network picked up the pieces Epstein left behind, and built the firm Riyadh now writes the checks to.PAID SUBSCRIBERS CAN ACCESS A DEEPER DIVE BELOW THE PAYWALL

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.narativ.orgOn the opening night of Narativ’s five-part investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, independent journalist Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez — whose document reporting at The Pugilist is the proximate cause of the 2026 New Mexico Department of Justice criminal investigation into Zorro Ranch — sat down with Zev Shalev to walk through the archive she has been building around the 7,500-acre property halfway between Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories where Jeffrey Epstein ran his New Mexico operation for nearly three decades.Valdes-Rodriguez led with the microwave link. Zorro Development Corporation, the Epstein entity that held the ranch, filed five FCC microwave licenses; the estate maintained them after Epstein’s 2019 death, and when Texas millionaires Donald and Mary Catherine Huffines purchased the property in 2023 they cancelled three of the five and kept two. “It’s a bidirectional system,” Valdes-Rodriguez told Shalev. “One of them transmits from the ranch to the top of Sandia Crest.” She has pulled DOJ emails in which the general contractor who installed the system described it, in his own words, as “a military-industrial grade system, and very expensive.” The ranch next door, which shares more than two miles of fence line with Zorro, is owned by the estate of Henry Singleton — founder of the defense contractor Teledyne and, as Valdes-Rodriguez noted on air, a trustee of Ronald Reagan’s blind trust. Teledyne was later fined for knowingly selling non-functional components to Sandia. The two microwave licenses expire on July 12, 2026.Shalev walked the audience through the Robert Maxwell FBI file — 105-25063, opened by J. Edgar Hoover on December 9, 1953 under the classification “Internal Security — R & GE” — and the parallels between Maxwell’s October 1954 attempt to recruit the directors of Oak Ridge, Brookhaven and Argonne National Laboratories through a journal he owned and Epstein’s later endowment of a chair at the Santa Fe Institute in Robert Maxwell’s name. “The simplest explanation for all of these things,” Shalev told viewers, “is these guys were spies, and they were trying to get nuclear secrets to their countries that they could sell them.” Valdes-Rodriguez reminded viewers that Ghislaine Maxwell, Robert Maxwell’s daughter, is on record saying she was the one who first brought Epstein to New Mexico.Then came John J. Kelly. Kelly, Valdes-Rodriguez explained, was a private Albuquerque attorney and the chair of the New Mexico Democratic Party, introduced to Epstein by the sitting governor, Bruce King. Kelly signed as Epstein’s Power of Attorney on the 1993 Zorro purchase and on the state-land leases that expanded the property by thousands of acres. Eight months later, Kelly was confirmed as United States Attorney for the District of New Mexico. He served through the end of the Clinton administration. Maria and Annie Farmer began reporting Epstein to the FBI in 1996. “He never, in his entire tenure as U.S. Attorney for this district of New Mexico, ever opened any kind of investigation into Jeffrey Epstein,” Valdes-Rodriguez said. When a local TV reporter years later asked Kelly why his name appeared in Epstein’s files, Kelly replied: “You’ll have to ask Mr. Epstein.”PAID SUBSCRIBERS CAN ACCESS A DEEPER DIVE BELOW THE PAYWALL

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Five nights. Five of the independent investigators who have been digging where the DOJ and the FBI would rather you didn’t. Five secrets that haven’t been told, and in some cases have been actively buried for decades.Monday at 8 PM ET, we begin with Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez on the Zorro Ranch.A new secret every night this week. 8 PM ET.WATCH LIVE FOR FREE — every night at 8 PM ET on Narativ. No paywall on the live broadcast.SUBSCRIBE TO WATCH LATER — paid subscribers get on-demand access after each show.PAID MEMBER Q&A WITH THE WRITERS — every night this week, each investigator stays after the broadcast for a private Q&A with paid subscribers. Bring your questions. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.narativ.orgFormer Attorney General Pam Bondi is trying to walk away from the biggest cover-up in American history — and the White House is helping her do it. On Narativ Live, Zev Shalev and Epstein archive researcher Ellie Leonard unpacked the Bondi escape plan, then dove deep into 1,800 pages of newly analyzed emails between Jeffrey Epstein and journalist Michael Wolff that reveal a decade-long criminal syndicate connecting Epstein, Wolff, Steve Bannon, and the Saudi royal family.Bondi, who was subpoenaed by the House Oversight Committee while serving as attorney general, is now refusing to testify after abruptly leaving her post. New AG Todd Blanche — Trump’s former defense attorney — says she no longer needs to appear. But as Oversight Committee members have pointed out, the subpoena was issued to Pam Bondi by name, not to the office she held. “Whether she’s attorney general or not really is a moot point,” Leonard said. “She knows what she was asked to not present to the American people, what to redact. She knows how many times Donald Trump is in those files.” The reason for the maneuver appears to be the Fifth Amendment: as a sitting attorney general, Bondi likely could not plead the Fifth before Congress. As a civilian, she can. “Which is why they fired her,” Shalev said. “They realized if she stays in the job, she’s got to go in there and lie. That’s perjury.” Hakeem Jeffries said Friday morning he was determined to make Bondi testify. The questions she needs to answer go beyond what’s in the Epstein files — who ordered the redactions? Did the president of the United States tell his attorney general to cover up his own criminal history? “Now you’ve got a conspiracy to obstruct justice at the highest levels of American politics,” Shalev said. “It’s the biggest scandal we’ve had since Watergate.”PAID SUBSCRIBERS CAN ACCESS A DEEPER DIVE BELOW THE PAYWALL

Netanyahu forced into Lebanon peace talks after 254 dead and global backlash cracked his diplomatic shield. Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz — 20% of the world’s oil. The ceasefire is falling apart.Into the middle of this, the White House sent JD Vance to Pakistan. His pitch? His wife likes skydiving. The Iranians also want to jump — out of the path of American bombs.Then Melania Trump did something she never does: walked in front of cameras and denied knowing Epstein. Named the Daily Beast, Carville, HarperCollins. Demanded Congress hear the survivors. Nobody asked her to do this. Something is coming.And the American right spent the day mocking a Canadian MP’s acronym instead of asking whether the world is safer tonight than it was yesterday.It isn’t.Thank you Thoughtful Suzie, Deb J, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

In an extraordinary and unprecedented appearance before the press corps at the White House this afternoon, First Lady Melania Trump delivered a video statement carried live on C-SPAN flatly denying any meaningful relationship with convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell. The First Lady, who almost never speaks publicly, called the reporting about her ties to Epstein “lies” from people “devoid of ethical standards, humility, and respect,” and demanded Congress convene a public hearing for Epstein’s victims. “I’ve never been friends with Epstein,” she said. “Donald and I were invited to the same parties as Epstein from time to time, since overlapping in social circles is common in New York City and Palm Beach.” She insisted Epstein did not introduce her to Donald Trump, claiming instead that she met her husband “by chance” at a New York City party in 1998, and that her first encounter with Epstein wasn’t until 2000.The statement caps weeks of an aggressive retraction campaign by Melania’s attorneys. The Daily Beast pulled a story. Hunter Biden received a cease-and-desist letter. Michael Wolff is reportedly being sued over a legal threat. James Carville and HarperCollins UK have been pressured into public apologies. But today’s on-camera appearance goes dramatically further than anything we’ve seen before — and as I said on air, “For her to come out and do a press conference and an announcement ahead of what might be further disclosures about her and Epstein may only just heighten the interest in what we’re going to find out in the coming weeks.”The timing is conspicuous. Narativ’s own reporting from the Epstein Files tells a very different story than the one Melania delivered from the podium. A congratulatory email sent to Jeffrey Epstein on the morning of November 9, 2016 — hours after Trump won the presidency — contains a devastating aside from the sender: “I remember flying back with Donald on his plane the first weekend I went to visit you in Florida was the weekend he met Melania. He kept on coming out of the bedroom saying, wow, what a hot piece of ass.” That note, recovered from Epstein’s email account and released under the Epstein Transparency Act, places Trump meeting Melania on the same weekend as a visit to Epstein’s Palm Beach estate — directly contradicting the “chance meeting at a New York party” story Melania repeated today.Three years later, on July 12, 2019 — three days after Epstein’s arrest — a former model who had worked as Epstein’s assistant from roughly 2005 to 2006 sat down with FBI agents and federal prosecutors in West Palm Beach under a proffer agreement and gave a strikingly similar account under oath. Before going to work for Epstein, that witness was connected to modeling agent Paolo Zampoli — the same man who claims to have introduced Donald and Melania at a Kit Kat Club party in 1998, and whom Trump later appointed as his special envoy for international partnerships. The documentary thread running through Zampoli, Epstein’s modeling operation, and the Trump marriage is not a social-circles coincidence. It’s a network.Epstein investigator Ellie Leonard, who joined me on air moments after the statement, called the performance “frantic and a little pushed.” As Ellie put it, “You can hardly see Donald Trump’s lips moving.” The dates don’t line up. The photographs of Melania with Ghislaine Maxwell don’t line up. The idea that Donald Trump — Epstein’s best friend during those years — simply left Melania behind every time he socialized with Jeffrey doesn’t line up. “It’s so able to be deconstructed, like every piece of what she’s saying,” Ellie said. “It’s better for them to probably say nothing at this point.” That they chose to say something — and chose to put the First Lady herself in front of the cameras to say it — tells you everything about what they’re bracing for.This is a preemptive strike. The First Lady of the United States does not break a years-long public silence to deny a story that’s already out. She breaks it to get ahead of a story that’s coming.Narativ is an independent investigative newsroom. Support our reporting at narativ.org.Thank you Leah Anderson, Skutt Hope, Miss Myra, CO, Lori Modafferi, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

President Donald Trump has declared a two-week ceasefire in the war with Iran, announcing the suspension in a Truth Social post timestamped 6:32 PM Eastern — eighty-eight minutes before his own 8:00 PM ultimatum to begin destroying Iran’s bridges, power plants and hospitals was set to expire.Trump described the agreement as a “double-sided ceasefire.” According to his post, the suspension was triggered by direct conversations with Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Field Marshal Asim Munir, who asked Trump to hold off the bombing in exchange for Iran agreeing to “the complete, immediate and safe opening of the Strait of Hormuz.”Trump also said the United States has received a 10-point proposal from Iran that he describes as “a workable basis on which to negotiate,” and that “almost all of the various points of past contention have been agreed to between the United States and Iran.” The two-week pause, in his words, will allow the agreement “to be finalized and consummated.”The announcement ends — at least for now — the most acute U.S.-Iran military crisis in a generation. As recently as this morning, Trump was telling the world on Truth Social that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” Tonight’s strikes are not happening.There are still significant unknowns. As of this broadcast, Tehran has not publicly confirmed the ceasefire terms. Pakistan has not issued an independent statement. We do not yet know the full contents of the alleged 10-point Iranian proposal, and we do not know whether Israel was consulted before Trump went public. The single most important data point in the next 24 to 48 hours is whether the Strait of Hormuz actually reopens. The word “immediate” in Trump’s post is doing a lot of work. If commercial tankers begin transiting the strait in the next few hours, the deal is real. If the strait stays closed, this was either a bluff or something else.There is also a real possibility that the entire announcement is theater — what Trump’s critics have been calling “Taco Tuesday,” a manufactured climbdown dressed up as a triumph. Trump will play this to the hilt either way. Expect him in the coming days to claim that his threats worked, that the bombing schedule itself forced Tehran to the table, and that this is “the art of the deal” in action.The honest read from Narativ is this: Trump has been telegraphing a confrontation he never fully wanted. He admitted yesterday at the podium that the American people did not want him to do this. He went into a war for unnecessary reasons. He has burned through American ammunition at a rate the Pentagon will spend a decade replacing. He killed the so-called regime leadership in Iran but did not produce regime change — he simply replaced the old leadership with a younger version of the same thing. None of that is a victory. But Donald Trump will sell it as one.Earlier today, Narativ published a special report arguing that this conflict was, at root, about oil — about reactivating the Eilat-Ashkelon pipeline, about pushing Brent crude above the $120-per-barrel war floor, and about a syndicate of interests that runs through Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, and the MAGA franchise of the global oil economy. Tonight’s announcement does not contradict that thesis. If anything, it confirms it. The condition Trump set is not Iran’s nuclear program. It is not regime behavior. It is not hostages or proxies. It is the opening of the Strait of Hormuz. That is a commercial demand, not a security demand. It is the demand of an oil syndicate that has gotten exactly what it needed: a war premium high enough to reprice every barrel in the system, and now a path to normalize Iranian oil flows back into the West — possibly alongside Russian flows, since those sanctions have also been quietly eased.In other words: the war was the catalyst. The ceasefire is the deal. And the deal is about the oil.We will continue to follow this story closely over the coming days as Tehran, Islamabad, and Tel Aviv respond. For now, what we know is this. Trump says there is a ceasefire. He says it is double-sided. He says it was negotiated by Pakistan. He says strikes are delayed for two weeks. And he says the price is the immediate and complete reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.The 8:00 PM deadline is over. Tonight, the bridges of Iran will not fall.Narativ is a reader-supported investigation into the syndicate behind the news. Subscribe at narativ.org.Thank you Cathy Stein, Tracy Giddings, Jason Gael, Kathleen, Sandy W, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.narativ.orgThis morning on Truth Social, Donald Trump doubled down on the ultimatum he issued from the White House yesterday. Tonight, 8:00 PM Eastern. Surrender — or every bridge, every power plant, every hospital in Iran goes dark. 93 million people pushed into the Stone Age by deadline.His exact words this morning: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”That is the most audacious threat ever issued by an American head of state — death, corruption and extortion deployed openly against a sovereign nation of 93 million people. And he is using the very same tactics he claims to be ending. We are hearing from the ground that Iran is not defeated, there is no regime change, and there is certainly not going to be the end of a civilization. But the threat itself tells you everything you need to know about who Donald Trump is right now.So why is he doing this? The answer is money, money, money — and oil, oil, oil. Tonight on Narativ, we showed exactly how Trump’s interests align with Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu to make sure American troops and American firepower are being used to secure oil for our adversaries.PAID SUBSCRIBERS CAN ACCESS A DEEPER DIVE BELOW THE PAYWALL

Lev Parnas had a contrarian take on the Bondi firing. “She’s not getting fired. She’s not being reprimanded. She’s being put out to pasture making hundreds of millions of dollars as the ex-attorney general,” he said, calling the move theatrical — a Trump news cycle play designed to distract from a failing Iran war, collapsing poll numbers, and the Epstein files bearing down on the White House. Parnas argued that the real action was not the firing itself but what it accomplished: buying time, prolonging the cover-up, and ensuring Todd Blanche, who was already managing the Epstein file, now has full control of the Justice Department. “Don’t listen to what they say, watch what they do,” he said. Shalev pushed back — this is a massive story, the attorney general fired twelve days before a sworn deposition on the Epstein files — and Parnas conceded the point. “It’s a big story,” he said. “But tomorrow everybody’s going to wake up and say, what changed? Todd Blanche is in charge.” Worse, not better.And Blanche is deeply compromised. Ellie Leonard laid out exactly how. Blanche conducted the two-day proffer interview with Ghislaine Maxwell in July, in which Maxwell gave a clean statement about Trump being “a nice guy and completely uninvolved.” Leonard noted that whenever Maxwell began to say something that might have yielded real information, Blanche steered her away. Immediately after the interviews, Maxwell was upgraded to a lower-security facility — “what we call Club Fed, where she’s got Pilates and a puppy,” Leonard said. Maxwell perjured herself throughout those proffers, Leonard added, and it was easily provable from every file that came out afterward. She claimed Epstein had no computers when the FBI found roughly a hundred hard drives. She claimed she never saw him with young girls or with Trump. Blanche let all of it stand.Leonard warned that the Epstein files themselves may now be at risk. “Go download everything you can,” she told viewers, “because my guess is this is going to disappear.” With Blanche running the DOJ, she expects the department’s search pages and publicly available records to be quietly pulled or altered rather than expanded.Shalev connected the firings into a pattern. Kristi Noem at Homeland Security. Pam Bondi at Justice. Potentially Tulsi Gabbard at Intelligence — Parnas reported he believes she could be gone imminently. All three are women, all three led agencies central to the president’s internal and external security apparatus, and all three faced situations in which telling the truth under oath could incriminate the president. “We’re not talking about stealing something from the corner store,” Shalev said. “We’re talking about the rape of a thirteen-year-old girl.” The DOJ and FBI cover-up of the Jane Doe 4 allegations remains at the center of the crisis.Leonard has been investigating the Jane Doe 4 case out of South Carolina and described it as “a second chance to get it right” — a reference to the Katie Johnson case, which she said did not receive the investigative attention it deserved at the time. She credited the Post and Courier of Charleston for doing extraordinary local investigative work that has verified details many thought could never be confirmed, including connections to the Renaissance Weekend, a gathering on Hilton Head Island organized by Philip Lader that became Bill Clinton’s inner circle in the 1980s and 1990s. Epstein’s emails confirm his awareness of the event, and flight logs place him in the area repeatedly in later years. The organizers told Leonard they swear Epstein was never there but cannot produce records to prove it.The conversation turned to Michael Wolff, whom Leonard described as having functioned as Epstein’s journalism fixer in New York — making stories disappear and discrediting reporters who covered Epstein. Wolff conducted roughly a hundred hours of interviews with Epstein, and Leonard said that when you have that volume of material from the head of a thirty-year global crime syndicate involving children and billions of dollars, it must be made public. “If we had a hundred hours of interviews with Al Capone, you bet those would have been made public,” she said. Leonard has been in contact with Joanna Coles, the senior editor at the Daily Beast who co-hosts a podcast with Wolff, and has shared email threads that carry potential legal implications. Parnas added that Wolff and Coles have been releasing snippets of the Epstein tapes strategically on their podcast to drive traffic — but withholding the most damaging material. “They’re not releasing the tape where Epstein says Melania and Trump slept on my plane,” Parnas said. Shalev called it what it is: if people are sitting on evidence while a crime is still in progress, that is obstruction of justice.Breaking news landed during the show: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth asked Army Chief of Staff General Randy George to step down and retire, an extraordinary move amid the Iran war. Shalev noted this followed reporting about Hegseth’s broker attempting trades before the Iran strikes and Trump’s private admission at the leaked Easter lunch that seizing Iranian oil is a non-starter — a direct contradiction of his public address to the nation hours later. The military, Shalev suggested, may have told the president no.The administration is in trouble — cornered on Iran, hemorrhaging cabinet members, cratering in the polls. But as all three agreed, this is no time to take the heat off. The cover-up has a new gatekeeper, the Epstein files face a more compromised DOJ than ever, and the midterms are the only mechanism left for accountability.Parnas closed with a call to action. In coordination with Defiance.org and MeidasTouch, he is organizing a daily national phone and email campaign targeting members of Congress — a modernized protest designed to flood congressional offices until elected officials respond. The first demand: kill the Save America Act, which Parnas called an unconstitutional attempt to suppress mail-in voting through a national registration list administered by the U.S. Postal Service. “This midterm election is our presidential election,” Parnas said. Shalev agreed. If Democrats take the House in November, the Speaker could become president — and this regime, on its current trajectory, may not survive the accountability that follows.Narativ Live is available as an audio podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Narativ is produced at narativ.org.Thank you Lyudmila and Daniel, Rick Kohut, Sharon Dymond, Jude T Conway, LC - Silence is Complicity, and many others for tuning into my live video with Lev Parnas and Ellie Leonard! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

I joined Wajahat Ali on The Left Hook to talk about what nearly a decade of following the Epstein-Trump money trail has revealed — and why the financial crimes matter as much as the abuse.The conversation started where The Greatest Heist leaves off: Jeffrey Epstein wasn’t just a human trafficker. He was a criminal financial mastermind who helped design the derivatives that seeded the 2008 crash, buried a vehicle called Liquid Funding inside Bear Stearns that got bailed out to the tune of $6.7 billion with taxpayer money, and was actively advising Vladimir Putin on how to leapfrog the American economy using cryptocurrency. “We’ve got all the receipts to prove that’s what happened,” I told Wajahat. “And it’s interesting that as we were discovering that, Howard Lutnick’s name showed up in the same scheme back in 2008, also part of that trigger of the 2008 crash.”The Lutnick-Tether closed loop is one of the most dangerous financial arrangements in the country right now. Tether, the stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar, has $133 billion in U.S. Treasuries locked inside Cantor Fitzgerald — Lutnick’s former company. When Lutnick became Commerce Secretary, he sold his stake to his children through a trust that was financed by Tether itself. “So Tether not only owns the cryptocurrency, it owns the custodian of that cryptocurrency, and it owns the family that supposedly is looking after this whole thing,” I explained. “And Lutnick is the guy in the White House who can actually determine whether they’ll get a bailout or not if it all crashes.” The first thing Todd Blanche did when he walked into the DOJ was kill the cryptocurrency investigations — all of them — including the one into Tether that was active under the Biden administration in December 2024.Wajahat drew the chain in real time and it was striking to hear out loud. Donald Trump and his family have made up to $5 billion through World Liberty Financial. The person who helped them make that money — CZ of Binance — got pardoned by Trump. The Genius Act, the first pro-crypto legislation, was pushed through by Trump. David Sachs, the AI and crypto czar, came up through the PayPal mafia with Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. Thiel was buddy-buddy with Epstein and shared his eugenics worldview. Musk gave Trump the most money to win the election. None of that is conspiracy theory. It’s all documented.We went deep on Leon Black’s $158 million payments to Epstein — supposedly for tax advice, but much of it, we now know, went to pay off women that Black had abused. Black was also the only American on Russia’s RDIF board, led by Kirill Dmitriev, and there’s a photo of him at a board meeting with Putin two seats away, smiling. Black worked at Drexel Burnham Lambert when it collapsed in the 1987 crash, then opened Apollo — a firm with deep Russian business ties. When Epstein needed to make a Leon Black abuse allegation go away, he contacted Sergei Belikov, an FSB-trained official at Russia’s economic ministry, for information to kill the lawsuit. “That’s the kind of stuff that — I mean, I don’t know how to do that,” I said. “You know how to call someone at the FSB and say, hey, my friend’s got a problem. How do I kill this thing?”The Rothschild connection surfaced through Leslie Wexner’s recent deposition testimony, where he revealed that he got a reference for Epstein from the Rothschilds. A working-class kid from Brooklyn getting recommendations from Elie de Rothschild because he’d been working for the Rothschild bank in Europe. Last week, Rothschild Bank was raided in France in connection with the Epstein investigation — joining a pattern that includes Lord Mandelson’s resignation as UK ambassador over his Epstein ties and Prince Andrew’s arrest for passing sensitive documents to Epstein.Both Wajahat and I addressed something critical: how to report on networks that include prominent Jewish individuals without feeding antisemitic conspiracy theories. I’m Jewish. Wajahat is Muslim. We both believe the answer is more specificity, not less. As David Kleon wrote in Jewish Currents, Epstein exploited Jewish in-group bonds to cultivate his network. But the Epstein class includes Jews, Christians, atheists, and Muslims. It is the world’s 1% of the 1%. The danger is that when you refuse to investigate specific criminals because of their background, you create a vacuum that actual antisemites like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Nick Fuentes fill with blanket accusations against all Jews. The vast majority of American Jews are liberal-minded, centrist, hardworking people who have contributed enormously to this country. The small extremist networks that Epstein operated within are weaponizing themselves against those very communities — and rising antisemitism is the result.The bottom line: an estimated $80 trillion has been pulled out of the U.S. market and taxpayers’ pockets over 40 years through repeated pump-and-dump cycles — 1987, 2008, and now what looks like an AI-crypto bubble ready to burst. The same architects keep showing up. The sovereign funds of Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, and Russia keep buying American assets at pennies on the dollar after each crash. And the people holding the bag, every single time, are ordinary Americans who lost their homes, their retirement savings, and their children’s futures.This is personal for every American. And it’s treasonous.Watch the full conversation on The Left Hook with Wajahat Ali.Zev Shalev is an Emmy-nominated, Murrow Award-winning investigative journalist and founder of narativ.org. The Greatest Heist is available at narativ.org. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

Michael Wolff arrived on Substack like a hero. He had 100 hours of recorded interviews with Jeffrey Epstein, insider access to the darkest corners of the network, and the credibility of a bestselling author who had gone toe-to-toe with Donald Trump. Then 1,800 pages of his emails with Epstein were released, and the picture changed completely. “You start to see this different side of Michael Wolff,” Leonard said. “He’s getting manuscripts for books about Epstein before they’re published and trying to warn Epstein. He’s helping with Wikipedia cleanups. He’s trying to crush Nick Kristof’s reputation. You realize he has become Jeffrey Epstein’s fixer.” Wolff arranged dinners with Woody Allen, caught and killed stories about Epstein’s sex trafficking history, and coached Epstein on counter-narratives — all while presenting himself as a journalist. He even tried to discredit Julie K. Brown’s Miami Herald investigation, the very reporting that led to Epstein’s arrest. And those 100 hours of interviews? Nobody has ever heard them. Leonard believes the recordings contain material that would damage Wolff’s reputation and undermine his franchise of writing about Trump — who was, after all, the subject Epstein was most willing to discuss.Then came the podcast. Wolff appeared on Michael Cohen’s Mea Culpa, where the two men dismissed Shalev, Leonard, Lev Parnas, and Dean Blundell as “conspiracy buffs” and “far left wing activists” who live in a “fantasy world.” Cohen, who spent 12 years as Trump’s personal attorney during the height of Epstein’s power, continues to insist he knew nothing about any of it. DOJ documents tell a different story. Cohen tried to separate the Katie Johnson rape allegation into two different cases during a Patrick David podcast appearance, but his own timeline collapsed — the same lawyers represented the accuser across all filings, and the private investigator Cohen sent to the accuser’s address described a “vacant parking lot” that turned out to be a house. “All you’re doing is literally just pulling up documents that already exist and turning them around and showing people,” Leonard said. “There’s no opinion involved.”The deeper question is why Wolff would even appear with Cohen. Shalev argued it only makes sense as a network operation: Cohen is pursuing a pardon deal, offering to recant his Stormy Daniels testimony in exchange for Trump cleaning his record. The network needs Cohen credible, which means the people reading the files need to be discredited. “They’re coming after the people who are exposing the truth about them,” Shalev said. “Because they don’t want the truth out there.” Leonard and Shalev noted that Wolff and Steve Bannon operated as parallel personalities in Epstein’s orbit — both claiming 100 hours of interviews, both offering the same cover story of image rehabilitation, both serving as go-betweens in a world where friendships were transactional intelligence operations. Leonard is continuing her work on the Wolff emails, the Hilton Head South Carolina investigation that gained mainstream pickup this week, and what she describes as things happening behind the scenes. The invitation to both men remains open: come on the show and answer questions from the conspiracy buffs.Narativ Live streams on YouTube, Substack, and narativ.org. Follow Ellie Leonard at The Panicked Writer on Substack.Thank you Centered America, Amy Gabrielle, Caro Henry, LC - Silence is Complicity, Bre Phillips, and many others for tuning into my live video with Ellie Leonard! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

On the day that may go down as the largest protest in American history, Narativ Live went live with Army veteran Nick Paro to cover No Kings Day as it unfolded across the country. With early estimates placing domestic participation between 8 and 12 million people, the third No Kings action shattered all previous records — and broke the critical 3.5% threshold that has historically preceded the fall of every authoritarian regime that faced sustained peaceful resistance.The flagship rally at the Minnesota State Capitol drew over 100,000 people to the city where ICE killed Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti earlier this year. Bruce Springsteen debuted “Streets of Minneapolis,” a song written for the occasion, calling out “King Trump’s private army from the DHS” and honoring the two Minnesotans by name. “They picked the wrong city,” Springsteen told the crowd. “Your strength and your commitment told us that this is still America. And this reactionary nightmare and these invasions of American cities will not stand.” Bernie Sanders, Ilhan Omar, Jane Fonda, Joan Baez, Maggie Rogers, Tom Morello, the Brass Solidarity Band and the Resistance Choir all took the stage in what became part protest, part concert, part memorial.Jane Fonda read a statement from Becca Good, Renee’s widow, that brought the crowd to silence. “My wife sparkled with sunshine and shone with kindness that is unmatched,” Becca wrote. “We were robbed of an incredible human. It has made people pause and take a breath and have to choose sides. We choose the side of love.” She called for “radical kindness” — a phrase that became the emotional throughline of the day.Minnesota Governor Peggy Flanagan, a member of the White Earth Nation, delivered the day’s most forceful political speech. “When federal agents kill our neighbors in the streets, when cowards vote to steal healthcare and food off the table, and billionaires rip off everyday people, and wannabe dictators start illegal wars — we will not be silent,” she said. She invoked Paul Wellstone: “Sometimes you gotta pick a fight to win one.”Paro, who traveled to Minneapolis weeks earlier with Veterans Fighting Fascism for an Abolish ICE event honoring Good and Pretti, described a community transformed. “They are so mad. But they are so together,” he said. “They have solidified around each other and the love for each other. Prince said a long time ago that Minnesota would be the start of the revolution. I don’t think he was wrong.” He noted that zero protesters were arrested — a sign, he said, that ICE stayed away from the sheer scale of the mobilization. Paro tracked crowd estimates throughout the broadcast: New York City drew 350,000, Washington D.C. at least 200,000, San Francisco over 220,000, Boston more than 100,000. International solidarity marches took place in Paris, Berlin, Rome, Madrid and across Canada — organized under the banner “No Tyrants” out of respect for nations that have constitutional monarchies.Zev also shared his post “We Are The Light,” a meditation on the America that was promised versus the America that exists — the one bombing Iran without authorization, jailing journalists, criminalizing peacemakers, and deporting five-year-olds. “The presidency is occupied. The House and Senate are captured. The courts are cornered,” he said. “But the people — the people are free. We are the people. We are the light.”Joan Baez and Maggie Rogers dueted on “The Times They Are a-Changin’” — the song Baez first sang with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Grenada, Mississippi, and again at the March on Washington. Tom Morello jumped in for the final verse with the lyric adjusted for the moment: “So get the f**k out the way if you can’t lend a hand, for the times they are a-changin’.”Thank you Cheech Previti, Pamela, Leah Anderson, Eric Lullove, Skutt Hope, and many others for tuning into my live video with Nick Paro and Banner & Backbone Media! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.narativ.orgTonight we published Chapter 9 of The Greatest Heist, Book 2 — “The Windfall” — and sat down with two people who helped build the picture: Lev Parnas, who did business with Cantor Fitzgerald in the 1990s and early 2000s, and Ellie Leonard of The Panicked Writer, who has spent months in the Epstein files alongside us.The chapter reveals that Howard Lutnick’s Cantor Fitzgerald appears to have been operating as a Russian front — a primary dealer with direct access to the Federal Reserve that two separate FBI whistleblowers, four months apart, linked to Russian money laundering.Read the full chapter: Lev took us back to the 1990s, when the Russian mob was flooding into Wall Street through unregulated pink sheet stocks and penny stocks. The Italian mob got there first, but the Russians took it a step further — they had real money to invest, and they understood the system. Pump and dump, boiler rooms, shell companies. The schemes were identical at every level. What Jordan Belfort did with penny stocks, the same network did with sovereign wealth funds and toxic mortgage securities. As Lev put it: it doesn’t matter if it’s a pink sheet stock or a New York Stock Exchange stock — the scheme is the same, the information is the same, the way it’s done is the same. Just different levels.This Deep Dive is for paid subscribers. Read more below.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.narativ.orgThey walked into the National Endowment for the Humanities in March 2025. One was a college dropout who idolized Peter Thiel. The other was a private equity associate with a commerce degree and a German minor. Neither had ever administered a grant. Neither had read a humanities proposal. Neither knew what the Administrative Procedures Act was. They were just two guys from Elon Musk’s world armed with ChatGPT and six weeks to gut a federal agency. By April 1st, $100 million in grants was gone. Sixty-five percent of the staff was fired. The agency’s own employees didn’t even know it was happening. One NEH staffer emailed a grantee: “I’m terribly sorry to tell you that DOGE did indeed cancel your award. NEH staff, like myself, didn’t realize it was happening.”Their method was as crude as it was discriminatory. Justin Fox created a keyword checklist and fed it into ChatGPT to screen every grant. The list read like a target sheet: LGBTQ, homosexual, tribal, immigrants, diversity, inclusion, queer, transgender, non-binary, indigenous, native, diaspora, refugees, asylum, equity, marginalized, BIPOC, social justice — and just in case they missed anything, the word “gay” at the end. Notably absent: white, Caucasian, heterosexual. When a lawyer asked Fox why “heterosexual” wasn’t on the list, he shrugged: “Very well could have put heterosexual.” He never did. When asked if he did anything to ensure ChatGPT wouldn’t discriminate on the basis of sex or religion, his answer was chilling: “We did not need to do that.”PAID SUBSCRIBERS CAN ACCESS A DEEPER DIVE BELOW

Hillary Clinton testified behind closed doors today in Chappaqua before the House Oversight Committee, and within minutes the circus began. Rep. Lauren Boebert passed a photo from inside the closed-door deposition to conservative influencer Benny Johnson, pausing the hearing. Clinton demanded the session be public. Comer refused. Clinton’s opening statement was direct: she never met Epstein, never flew on his plane, never visited his island. Ellie Leonard noted the absurdity of the Pizzagate-era framing still driving the committee’s agenda while the man with thousands of mentions in the Epstein files sits untouched in the Oval Office. Meanwhile, a photo surfaced from the Epstein files showing Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick with his two sons on Little St. James Island, an image that has since been scrubbed from the internet.The DOJ’s Epstein files search database went completely offline during the show. Ellie confirmed she could access previous searches through the back end but could not initiate new ones through the front page. The timing raised immediate suspicion, coming the same day NPR confirmed 50-plus pages were withheld from the release, including four FBI 302s from a woman who accused Trump and Epstein of sexually abusing her when she was between 13 and 15. Lev Parnas called the missing 302s the most important documents being hidden, noting that the FBI conducted four separate interviews with the accuser, provided her legal representation, and followed up repeatedly, all markers of a credible case. “The number one protector of pedophilia of Jeffrey Epstein is Donald Trump and his administration,” Lev said.Zev presented new Narativ reporting on the Rothschild-Epstein-Trump financial network. Emails from the Epstein files show Jeffrey Epstein claiming descent from the Ritter von Epstein banking dynasty of 1870s Vienna, a claim taken seriously by associates including Harvard professor Martin Nowak, who photographed ancestral tombstones in Europe and sent them to Epstein, and Ariane de Rothschild herself. Zev connected this to Wilbur Ross, who ran Rothschild’s bankruptcy practice and bailed out Trump’s casinos in the 1990s, and to the Commerce Department seat passing from Ross to Lutnick. Ellie added that Linda Rothschild, not Ghislaine Maxwell, was the person who introduced Epstein to Prince Andrew.Lev Parnas confirmed that a Washington Post report validated what his sources had been telling him for months: the White House is circulating a 17-page draft executive order to declare a national emergency over elections, claiming China interfered in 2020. The order would ban mail-in ballots, mandate voter ID, and give the president power over how votes are cast and counted nationwide. Lev said his source inside the administration had been urging him for weeks to keep mentioning Tulsi Gabbard and China, warning it was coming. Wajahat Ali connected it to a broader pattern of voter suppression including the SAVE Act, gerrymandering, ICE at polling places, and Gabbard’s involvement in the Fulton County FBI raid. Trump is down 10 points underwater in Texas and 22 to 26 with independents. “It’s not who votes for you, Donald,” Lev said, quoting what Putin told Trump. “It’s who counts the votes.”The panel discussed Netflix pulling out of the Warner Brothers acquisition, clearing the way for Larry and David Ellison’s Paramount-Skydance to merge with Warner Brothers. Wajahat Ali laid out what that means: the Ellisons, hardcore pro-Trump and pro-Netanyahu, would control TikTok, Paramount, Warner Brothers, CBS, TNT, TBS, Discovery, HBO, and CNN. David Ellison sat with Lindsey Graham at the State of the Union. Paramount has already blacklisted talent who spoke against the genocide. John Oliver’s contract expires next year. Ali called it a deliberate territorial expansion where the return on investment is not profit but control. Zev warned that consolidating newsrooms means fewer reporters covering each story and a drift toward state-run media. Lev cautioned that even Substack could one day be bought out and urged the independent media community to grow so large that abandoning them becomes too costly.Narativ Live is available as an audio podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Narativ Live is a production of narativ.org.Thank you Cheech Previti, Mary Kay Elloian, MBA, JD, Esq, Elaine Cimino, Iulia Huiu, Nancy McAllister, and many others for tuning into my live video with Lev Parnas and Ellie Leonard! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

For the first time, Narativ Live showed never-before-aired video from inside the Special Housing Unit at the Metropolitan Correctional Center — the exact cell where Jeffrey Epstein was found dead on August 10, 2019. This footage, embedded deep in the Epstein files released by the DOJ, is a police evidence tour conducted for evidentiary purposes. Prosecutors and defense attorneys have seen it. The public has not — until now.The video walks through the SHU’s shower area, the toilet facilities, and the barred imprisonment corridor before entering Epstein’s cell itself. What strikes you immediately is the scale. The bunk beds — the structure Epstein allegedly used to hang himself — sit roughly four feet off the ground. The cell was designed to be suicide-proof, as any federal facility housing inmates on psychological observation would be. Inmates who have spent time at MCC have described it as the worst place in humanity. It has since been shut down.The footage raises the same questions that have haunted this case since that August morning. After the July 23 incident, when Epstein was found with marks on his neck — an event he first attributed to his cellmate attacking him, then changed to a suicide attempt — the Bureau of Prisons required he be housed with a cellmate at all times. On August 9, the day before his death, that cellmate was transferred. No replacement was assigned, despite at least eight jail officials knowing Epstein was not to be left alone.That same day, the Second Circuit unsealed 2,000 pages of Ghislaine Maxwell civil litigation documents. That same evening, MCC staff allowed Epstein to make an unrecorded, unmonitored phone call in violation of BOP policy. He told staff he was calling his mother. He was not. That same night, guards Tova Noel and Michael Thomas — one working forced overtime, the other a material handler not regularly assigned as a corrections officer — stopped conducting their required 30-minute rounds after 10:40 PM and falsified records to show the checks had occurred. Nearly all cameras in and around the SHU failed. The Digital Video Recorder system had malfunctioned on July 29 and was not repaired until after Epstein’s death.The cascade of failures is not explainable by coincidence. It is a sequence that, taken together, left one of the most high-value federal detainees in American history completely unmonitored, alone, in a cell full of excess linens that had been ripped into nooses, for approximately eight hours.The New York Chief Medical Examiner ruled suicide. Michael Baden, the forensic pathologist retained by the Epstein family, found fractures in the neck bones — including the hyoid — more commonly associated with strangulation than hanging. Stephen Hoffenberg, Epstein’s former business partner who spent 18 years in prison for crimes Epstein orchestrated, told Narativ the morning of August 10 that he was certain Epstein had been murdered. He later filed a report with the FBI naming Donald Trump.Mark Epstein, Jeffrey’s brother, has reportedly never received a death certificate.Tonight’s broadcast also previewed deposition footage of Ghislaine Maxwell from 2016 and video clips and photographs from the Epstein files showing scenes from Little St. James, Zorro Ranch, and gatherings with figures including Richard Branson, Lord Peter Mandelson, and what appears to be Walter Cronkite. The broadcast also touched on the Alfredo Rodriguez deposition — the Epstein houseman at the Palm Beach mansion who stole the “Holy Grail” black book, was arrested in an FBI sting when he tried to sell it for $50,000, and was sentenced to 18 months in prison. He died before he could testify further.The timing of tonight’s show matters. Prince Andrew was arrested in Britain — the first royal family member detained in 400 years. Lord Mandelson was charged. In the United States, heads are falling at Goldman Sachs, CBS News, and elsewhere. What we are witnessing is a rupture in the way the world has operated for decades — a clearing of the house forced by public pressure and, by all indications, by Prince William and Princess Catherine’s insistence that the Crown cannot enter its next era carrying this baggage.The Rothschild connection surfaced as well. Leslie Wexner’s recent deposition confirmed what the archive has long suggested: the Rothschild family hired Jeffrey Epstein as early as the mid-1980s, and he was still working for them in 2019 when he died. Ariane de Rothschild is the single most frequent correspondent in Epstein’s email records, communicating with him almost every other day. Lynn Forester de Rothschild introduced Prince Andrew to Epstein and maintained deep ties to the Clintons.None of this is conspiracy. It is what the documents show.Bill Clinton’s deposition is imminent. What he decides to do — speak the truth or cover for himself — may determine whether the full scope of this network is ever exposed through official channels. The files have already validated years of independent reporting. The evidence tour of Epstein’s death cell is one more piece of a picture that demands a complete, unflinching investigation.The evidence is in the files. The question is whether the institutions will finally act on it.Thank you This Will Hold, Cat: Poli-Psych, Stephanie G Wilson, PhD, Richard Hogan, MD, PhD(2), DBA, Natasha K., and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

Michael Cohen secretly taped a two-hour interview with far-right podcaster Patrick Bet-David in early January — and told that audience things he’s never told his Substack subscribers. He said he never wanted to testify against Trump. He called the Russia investigation a “hoax.” He praised Trump as a great baseball player, reminisced about their breakfasts together, and admitted that if someone had shown him “a shred of loyalty,” he would have kept his mouth shut and done three to six months like Allen Weisselberg. “I would never have testified,” Cohen said. “I didn’t want to.” Even the right-wing host seemed stunned.Lev Parnas, who lived that world and broke from it completely, was blunt: this wasn’t meant for MAGA. It was a two-hour plea to Donald Trump. Cohen himself said his Substack audience “would kill me” if they knew. Parnas noted that Cohen never actually cut ties with Trump’s orbit — he still knows Lutnick, still knows Witkoff, still operates in that world. “Michael Cohen never had a mea culpa,” Parnas said. “He never gave up that world.”Cohen also tried to separate the Katie Johnson rape allegation into two different cases on PBD, claiming he only handled a “Jane Doe” complaint. But his own timeline collapsed. He described sending private investigators to the accuser’s address, calling it a “vacant parking lot.” Shalev pulled up the actual location — it’s a house. And the lawyer Cohen contacted turned out to be the same lawyer connected to Katie Johnson. His own words confirmed what investigators had been saying: it was the same case all along.The timing matters. Around that same interview, Cohen advised 100 university presidents on a Yale-hosted call to settle with Trump rather than fight — the exact opposite of what works against Trump’s bullying. He was spotted near Mar-a-Lago. And he published a Substack letter claiming prosecutors coerced his testimony, which Trump himself reposted. Parnas and a team of volunteers drafted a letter to every university president who attended, warning them about Cohen’s motivations and his connections to the Epstein files.Before the Cohen exposé, Shalev reported on his investigation connecting Peter Thiel to Jeffrey Epstein and Russian intelligence. The Epstein archive reveals Epstein arranged meetings for Thiel with two senior Russian officials connected to the FSB — Sergei Beliakov, deputy minister of economy, in 2015, and Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s UN ambassador, five weeks before the 2016 election. During this period, Epstein invested $40 million into Thiel’s Valar fund while Thiel was simultaneously one of Trump’s biggest donors and a key member of the transition team. Parnas added that Thiel lent his private jet to Parnas and Rudy Giuliani for a 2018 midterm campaign swing.Meanwhile, accountability is happening everywhere except America. A UAE sultan with close Trump ties was arrested. Norway’s former prime minister was arrested. Goldman Sachs lawyer Kathy Rumler resigned. Prince Andrew faces new charges. Around the world, people in the Epstein files are losing titles, jobs, and freedom. In the United States, Lutnick, Bondi, Witkoff, and Trump remain in power.Parnas also announced that a coalition of independent journalists has established a direct crowdsourcing channel with House Democrats to deliver Epstein file research to Congress, with a 30,000-signature petition to be delivered next week.Subscribe to Narativ and the independent journalists doing this work. The truth has teeth.Narativ Live streams Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 7 PM ET. Subscribe at narativ.org.Thank you Ellie Leonard, Nick Paro, Cat: Poli-Psych, Lyudmila and Daniel, Stephanie G Wilson, PhD, and many others for tuning into my live video with Lev Parnas! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

The White House is in full meltdown — and it’s not because of what’s already come out of the Epstein files. It’s because of what they don’t know is still coming.Lev opened by dropping a bomb: his son Aaron broke news that Howard Lutnick wasn’t just a neighbor of Epstein’s on the island — he was in business with him. This goes far beyond the “my wife said he’s disgusting, I never went back” story Lutnick sold the public. Emails show Lutnick bringing other people’s children to the island, ages 7 through 16, and maintaining contact with Epstein all the way through 2019. With only a fraction of the 3.5 million document dump reviewed so far, the panic inside Trump’s circle is about the unknown — what else is buried in those files.Zev Shalev joined to break down the Russian intelligence angle. He revealed that Epstein held multiple Russian visas from 2002 onward — at least four — and on two occasions listed his destination as Vimpel, an FSB-linked organization, and Putin’s Ministry of Economic Development. Shalev connected this to $1.1 billion in transactions through now-sanctioned Russian banks, at least two Russian women in Epstein’s circle with direct ties to Putin, and the proximity of Russia’s UN office on 67th Street — just four blocks from Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse, where Ambassador Churkin was a frequent visitor.Shalev traced the financial warfare back to the late 1980s, when about $50 billion exited the Soviet Union as part of a deliberate KGB strategy to corrupt Western capitalism. Robert Maxwell facilitated much of that money movement. The operation created billionaires out of nowhere, engineered market crashes, and planted seeds that grew into the system now controlling the U.S. government.Lev added firsthand testimony about the Russian mob’s takeover of New York’s underworld — the gas tax scam that generated billions, the weekly runs to Trump’s Taj Mahal casino to launder millions in cash, and the direct lines between the Brighton Beach mob, the Italian crime families, and Trump’s real estate empire.On breaking news, Dean laid out the Tulsi Gabbard whistleblower situation: an NSA analyst intercepted a call between someone in the Oval Office and a foreign intelligence service, taking direction on U.S. policy. Gabbard took a paper copy to Susie Wiles, who ordered it buried. Eight months later, the whistleblower is talking.Lev also revealed that Trump is terrified of the Clinton testimony precedent — not because of what Bill might say, but because if Democrats take the House, Melania gets subpoenaed next.Nick Parro closed the show with a warning about the SAVE Act — disguised as immigration enforcement but designed to strip voting access from 86 million women and anyone who’s changed their name. “This is the new Confederacy,” Parro said. “Come try it, Donald Trump. See what happens.”Share this far and wide — and sign the Epstein petition before Lev hand-delivers it to Congress on February 11th.Oh and Happy Birthdays to Lev and Dean!Thank you Cat: Poli-Psych, Lyudmila and Daniel, Cheech Previti, John Liccione, ESBC NFL And SportsBetting, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dean Blundell, Lev Parnas, and Nick Paro! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

Two separate individuals, calling the FBI years apart, made the same allegation: that girls were murdered at Donald Trump’s Rancho Palos Verdes golf course in California and buried on the property.The allegations appear in documents released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Both reports describe sex parties hosted by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell at the Trump facility. Both name Robin Leach—host of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous”—as present. Both claim a young girl was strangled to death during rough sex. Both say she is buried behind the 19th hole.These are not anonymous tips forwarded without vetting. These are FBI intake documents—reports serious enough to be logged into the Bureau’s National Threat Operations Center system. One was filed in 2021. The other in 2025. Two people. Two separate reports. Years apart. The same allegation.THE FIRST REPORTDocument EFTA01249507, dated June 21, 2021, contains detailed allegations from a complainant identified only as “X.”According to the intake, X called the FBI to report that Donald Trump “knew about and funded underage sex parties” at the Rancho Palos Verdes golf course. The parties were brokered by Ghislaine Maxwell.X claims to possess recordings of Trump, Epstein, and Maxwell “discussing marketing strategies for high profile sex parties” at the facility. In these recordings, according to the document, “Trump stated he was aware of the underage sex parties and charged the house money of the golf course to fund the sex parties.”X witnessed Robin Leach strangle a young girl during one of these parties. “He claims she is buried behind the 19th hole at the Donald Trump golf course.”The complainant says he is “aware of three separate occasions in which girls were murdered and buried” at the facility.X was told that if he ever spoke about what he witnessed, “he would end up in the hole as well.”The document also states that X “gave Maxwell the idea to put cameras in the golf course to review the cartel members and understand how to market the 12 to 14-year-old victims to the cartel.”THE SECOND REPORTA separate FBI intake, filed in 2025, contains a strikingly similar account from a different complainant—this time a woman.This second individual also reported sex parties at the Trump golf course. Also named Robin Leach. Also described a girl dying during rough sex. Also said she was buried on the property.Two people. Two genders. Two separate reports. Years apart. The same allegation.WHAT THE FBI DID NOT DOThere is no indication in the released files that the FBI investigated these claims.No cadaver dogs. No ground-penetrating radar. No search of the property behind the 19th hole.Robin Leach died in August 2018—before either of these reports was filed. He cannot be questioned. He cannot face justice.But the property still exists. The ground behind the 19th hole can still be searched.1994In 1994, Robin Leach sat across from Donald Trump on “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” The subject turned to Trump’s one-year-old daughter Tiffany. When asked what she inherited from her parents, Trump replied she had “Marla’s legs.” Then, gesturing toward his chest, he added: “We don’t know whether or not she’s got this part yet, but time will tell.”That same year—1994—a 13-year-old girl named Katie Johnson alleges she was repeatedly raped by Donald Trump at parties hosted by Jeffrey Epstein. Her federal lawsuit describes “extreme sexual and physical abuse” including “forcible rape” over a four-month period.Also in 1994—according to the FBI documents—sex parties were being held at Trump’s California golf course where girls would later be murdered and buried.Robin Leach. Donald Trump. Jeffrey Epstein. 1994.THE FIFTH AMENDMENTIn 2010, Jeffrey Epstein was asked under oath: “Have you ever socialized with Donald Trump in the presence of females under the age of 18?”Epstein paused. Then he replied: “Though I’d like to answer that question, at least today, I’m going to have to assert my Fifth, Sixth, and 14th Amendment rights, sir.”What did Epstein know about Trump and underage girls that he refused to answer?“A PIECE OF ASS”Trump’s comments about his own daughters form their own pattern.About Ivanka: “If Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her.”Asked what he and Ivanka have in common: “Well, I was going to say sex, but I can’t relate that.”About Ivanka’s body: “She’s six feet tall. She’s got the best body.”On Howard Stern, when asked if he could call Ivanka “a piece of ass”: “Yeah.”About one-year-old Tiffany’s future breasts: “We don’t know whether or not she’s got this part yet, but time will tell.”These are not isolated comments. This is a pattern of sexualizing his own children in public—the same man now accused in FBI documents of funding sex parties with 12 to 14-year-old victims.THE PATTERNAt Zorro Ranch in New Mexico, a former staff member reported in 2019 that two foreign girls are buried in the hills—strangled during “rough, fetish sex” on orders of “Jeffrey and Madam G.”At Trump’s golf course in California, two separate FBI complainants report girls murdered and buried behind the 19th hole.The allegations span decades. The properties span the country. The pattern is consistent: rough sex, strangulation, burial.Survivors have described Epstein’s preferred victims as “waif-ish girls” who “looked younger, were thinner, less strong, felt weak, looked childlike.” When you combine that with men whose thing was to choke girls until they passed out—like Ehud Barak, according to testimony—the likelihood of someone not coming to because someone took it too far is not unlikely.They weren’t going to call the EMT to revive a girl from an Eastern European country who came in with no name. They would just deal with it.Thank you to our panel Lev Parnas, THE LEFT HOOK with Wajahat Ali, Ellie Leonard and Kait Justice for the tireless work that you do to expose the truth. Please subscribe and support their individual publications. Thank you THE LEFT HOOK with Wajahat Ali, Notes from the Apocalypse, Cat: Poli-Psych, IAMPEGS, Richard Hogan, MD, PhD(2), DBA, and many others for tuning into my live video with Lev Parnas, Ellie Leonard, and Kait Justice! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

Sebastian Junger has spent decades documenting war, and his family has spent generations fleeing fascism. So when the bestselling author of The Perfect Storm, War, and Tribe sat down for Narativ Live, he brought a perspective few others can offer on America’s current moment.His father Miguel fled fascism twice before turning 18 - first from Franco’s Spain in 1936, then from Nazi-occupied France in 1940. “I like to say that because of the fascists, my father spoke five languages fluently,” Junger said. That father became a physicist, raised his son as a rationalist and atheist, and never returned to Europe because he wasn’t convinced fascism wouldn’t come back.Now Junger watches America with the same question in mind. He calls Trump “a wannabe fascist” who “fulfills the definition of fascism” - noting Trump once asked a general if the military could shoot protesters in the legs. “That’s the kind of thing fascists say,” Junger observed. But unlike many on the left, he believes Trump will fail. “Dictators always look good until the last five minutes,” he said, quoting a Czech statesman who watched fascism rise in the 1930s. “Only Franco survived to die a natural death. It’s a very, very unstable form of government.”Junger pointed to Trump’s string of failures - Greenland, the wall, Minneapolis blowing up in his face - and the Democrats winning special elections in conservative Texas districts. “Bloodbaths for the ruling party do not happen in a fascist state,” he said. “We are not a fascist country.” He attributes America’s resilience to 250 years of democratic tradition that Germany in the 1930s simply didn’t have.But the conversation took its most profound turn when Junger described the summer of 2020, when a ruptured aneurysm nearly killed him at his Cape Cod home. He was bleeding internally at a pint every 10-15 minutes, an hour from the hospital. “I was literally a human hourglass,” he said. In end-stage hemorrhagic shock, minutes from death, something extraordinary happened: he saw his dead father.“A big black pit opened up underneath me that I was getting pulled into, and I was terrified of it. And my dead father appeared above me and basically communicated to me: it’s okay, you don’t have to fight it, you can come with me, I’ll take care of you.” Junger, the lifelong atheist, the son of a physicist, had no framework for what he experienced. “There aren’t words in English for what I was looking at. It was his essence. An energy field that was immediately and intimately recognizable to me as my father.”What haunts him isn’t the vision itself - science can explain dying brain chemistry - but the universality of it. “The dying seem to all have the same vision. If you give a roomful of people LSD, they see wildly different things. But the dying see the dead - even people they didn’t know had died.” He can’t quite explain that through brain chemistry alone.The ICU nurse who saved him offered a reframe he’s been thinking about ever since: “Instead of thinking about it like something scary, try thinking about it like something sacred.” His latest book, In My Time of Dying, is his attempt to follow that advice.Junger now lives on Manhattan’s Lower East Side with his wife and two daughters. He doesn’t own a smartphone - “I think they’re ghastly, addictive, and awful” - and plays accordion for strangers in Tompkins Square Park. At 64, having nearly died while his daughters were still babies, he has a different relationship with time. “I’m an older father. I have an awareness of mortality that many younger parents might not have.”When asked what gives him hope, Junger didn’t offer easy comfort. “I don’t think good really won in the early 1940s until ‘45 rolled around. It’s a tennis game.” But he pointed to the brave people who have vowed with their lives to fight sociopaths. “Human morality comes from humans. It’s not divinely directed. And to me there’s great hope there.”His father fled fascism. He will die an antifascist. But he doesn’t think Americans need to run - not yet, maybe not ever. The system is holding. The question is whether we can hold it together.Watch the full conversation on Narativ Live.Sebastian Junger’s latest book In My Time of Dying is available now. His Substack, Tribe, is free to subscribe.Thank you Lyudmila and Daniel, Stephanie G Wilson, PhD, Richard Hogan, MD, PhD(2), DBA, Karen Hinton, Social SLP, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

For the first time, the public has heard Jeffrey Epstein speak at length about the 2008 financial crisis, and what he reveals is stunning. A two-hour interview between Epstein and Steve Bannon, recorded in 2019 and released this weekend, shows the convicted sex offender describing in detail how he advised world leaders and financial institutions during the worst economic collapse since the Depression - all while sitting in a Palm Beach County jail cell. As Zev Shalev explained on Sunday’s special edition, the footage is remarkable because we’ve never heard Epstein discuss anything at this length, and what he says confirms much of what The Greatest Heist investigation has been documenting about his central role in the financial crisis. The interview is believed to be Epstein’s last before his death later that year, and it was apparently part of a media rehabilitation campaign that Bannon was helping orchestrate.The most striking revelation comes when Epstein describes September 14, 2008 - the night Lehman Brothers collapsed. Epstein was in an 8x10 cell in Palm Beach County Jail, wearing a brown jumpsuit, confined to a metal bed with a chrome sink and toilet. A guard informed him that Wall Street was crashing. Epstein was allowed two collect phone calls per day, and he used both of them that night in a way that reveals the depth of his financial network connections. His first call went to Jimmy Cayne, the president of Bear Stearns, the firm that had collapsed six months earlier in March 2008, triggering the crisis everyone was now watching unfold. His second call went to a contact at JP Morgan, the bank that was trying to buy what remained of Bear Stearns. As Shalev described it, Epstein held both phones simultaneously, one in each hand, advising both sides of a major financial transaction from his jail cell during the worst financial crisis in 80 years.But Epstein’s influence extended far beyond those two phone calls. In the interview, he confirms that he was in contact with the Treasury Secretary during the crisis, offering advice on how to handle the collapsing financial system. Even more remarkably, Steve Bannon at one point in the interview reveals Epstein’s client list for financial advisory work - a list that includes Vladimir Putin, the President of China, and the King of Saudi Arabia. Epstein doesn’t dispute this, and the exchange makes clear that world leaders were consulting with him about American financial decisions even as he sat in jail for sex crimes. Lev Parnas emphasized the significance of this timing, noting that in 2019, while Trump was in office, Bannon and Epstein had this level of interest, control, and influence over global financial matters. The interview also addresses whether institutions like Harvard should accept donations from a convicted sex criminal, with Epstein defending the practice by invoking the Derek Bok principle that taking money for good causes is a good thing, regardless of the source.The interview comes at a critical moment as independent journalists continue to dig through millions of newly released Epstein files. @EllieLeonard, who first flagged the Bannon interview footage, has been working late into the night reviewing documents alongside researchers like Kait Justice Justice, and others in a crowdsourced investigation that could be the biggest of all time. Aaron Parnas and Joy-Ann Reid and Lev Parnas continue to advocate for greater transparency Parnas says the DOJ never anticipated would be so effective. As Shalev noted, every single bit of evidence they find confirms they’re on the right path, showing clear connections between financial crimes, sexual crimes, and the network that helped elect Donald Trump. Parnas announced that he and others will travel to Washington DC on February 11-12 to meet with survivors, face Attorney General Pam Bondi, and deliver investigative packages to every member of Congress they can reach. The goal is to ensure that elected officials have the real proof they need to pursue justice, walking the halls of Congress to personally hand-deliver the evidence that has been painstakingly assembled by this growing community of investigators.The full two-hour interview reveals Epstein as articulate and affable, which Shalev acknowledged was clearly the point of the media training exercise Bannon was conducting. While Epstein doesn’t confess to collapsing the 2008 market, he certainly confirms that he was involved and talking to all the key parties at the exact moment when the financial system was in freefall. The footage provides an unprecedented window into how Epstein presented himself, how he justified his actions, and how deeply embedded he was in the global financial and political power structure - right up until the end of his life.PAID SUBSCRIBERS CAN ACCESS A LONGER CLIP OF THE INTERVIEW BELOW. This is a special Sunday edition. For more investigative reporting on the Epstein network and the 2008 financial crisis, visit narativ.org.Thank you Ellie Leonard, Cash Flow Collective, Lesley Jane Seymour, Cheech Previti, Debbie Hupp, and many others for tuning into my live video with Lev Parnas! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

The Department of Homeland Security says a man “approached Border Patrol officers with a 9mm handgun” and “violently resisted efforts to disarm him.”The video shows something completely different.We synced three angles of the shooting. What you see is clear:An agent in a gray jacket pulls Alex Pretti’s gun from his pants while Pretti is restrained on the ground. The agent walks away with the weapon. Pretti is now disarmed. Both arms are secured by federal agents. He cannot move.Then—and only then—do you hear the gunshots.At least 10 shots fired into a restrained, disarmed man surrounded by six federal agents.What Actually HappenedAlex Pretti was filming federal agents with his cell phone. First Amendment activity. Legal.An ICE agent assaulted a woman. Alex intervened to help her.Federal agents tear gassed him.They tackled him to the ground. Six agents surrounded him. Both arms secured.While he was restrained, an agent reached into his clothing and pulled out his legal firearm—Alex had a valid Minnesota permit to carry.That agent walked away from the scene with the gun.Alex was now completely disarmed. Restrained. No threat to anyone.Federal agents shot him anyway.Multiple times. While he was pinned to the ground. While his hands were secured. After his gun had been removed.This Wasn’t a ShootingThis was an execution.Executed by the federal government on a Minneapolis street for filming police and helping a woman.Alex Pretti was 37 years old. He was an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA Health Care System. He cared for America’s veterans. He had no criminal record—just two traffic tickets in his life.He was a U.S. citizen exercising his First Amendment right to document what federal agents were doing in his city.And federal agents executed him for it.Stephen Miller Called Him a TerroristWithin hours of the shooting—before any investigation, before Alex’s family was even notified—White House advisor Stephen Miller called Alex Pretti a “domestic terrorist” who “tried to assassinate federal law enforcement.”An ICU nurse. Who saved veterans’ lives. Who was filming police. Who was helping a woman being assaulted.Stephen Miller called him a terrorist.They Blocked the InvestigationAfter killing Alex, federal agents prevented Minneapolis police from accessing the crime scene. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension—the state agency responsible for investigating officer-involved shootings—was denied access. Even with a search warrant.BCA Superintendent Drew Evans, with over 20 years in law enforcement, said he’d never seen anything like it. Federal agents controlled the scene. Controlled the evidence. Controlled the narrative.Then they released that staged photo of the gun—the gun their own agent had removed before shooting Alex.This Is the Insurrection Act StrategyThis execution isn’t random violence. It’s part of a documented strategy:* Deploy federal agents to create confrontations* Execute U.S. citizens* Stage evidence to justify killings* Fabricate narratives about “violent resistance”* Block state investigators* Smear victims as terrorists* Provoke local officials* Use “chaos” to invoke Insurrection Act* Remove elected officials* Install federal controlWe’re at Step 6. Governor Walz activated the Minnesota National Guard today. They remain under state control—for now. But that activation is exactly what Stephen Miller needs to claim the state has lost control.Watch the Full AnalysisTonight’s Narativ Live show breaks down the video evidence frame by frame. We show you the agent in the gray jacket. We show you when the gun is removed. We show you the execution.Warning: The footage is disturbing. But it’s important you see what federal agents are doing on American streets.Say His Name:Alex Jeffrey Pretti37 years old. ICU nurse. U.S. citizen. Legal gun owner. No criminal record.He filmed police. He helped a woman. Federal agents tear gassed him, restrained him, disarmed him, and executed him.This is what America becomes when we let it happen.Don’t let them get away with this.Watch the full forensic analysis on Narativ Live. Share this story. The video proves everything.Thank you Dean Blundell, Nick Paro, Cat, John Liccione, Caro Henry, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

This show connects the dots on the last few weeks. Coordinated attacks on Substack from Don Lemon to disinformation operations intensified at the exact moment Substack investigators via Ellie Leonard exposed a secret in Michael Cohen’s files. Tonight’s Narativ Live with Lev Parnas, Wajahat Ali, and Nick Paro revealed the pattern: independent journalists pushed the Epstein story when mainstream media refused to touch it. Then came the discovery of a secret proffer attempt by Michael Cohen reveals he knows more that he is saying. Why does Michael Cohen matter? Because he was Trump’s fixer during the critical period when Trump was allegedly raping children at Epstein’s properties, when multiple women came forward with allegations that were then buried. Cohen admitted under oath he threatened over 500 people to keep them quiet for Trump in 2016, the exact year Katie Johnson accused Trump of raping her at Epstein’s mansion when she was 13, then withdrew her lawsuit after death threats. And that is why Cohen feels he can get a pardon from Trump - if he helps Trump by claiming his testimony was coerced. And Trump may give in because nobody has ever asked Cohen under oath whether Katie Johnson was one of those 500 people he silenced. The clips played tonight demonstrated Cohen’s methods, his access, and his willingness to do whatever Trump needed. That’s why his silence on Epstein specifically is so telling, and why the growing petition demands Ro Khanna subpoena Cohen, Michael Wolff, and Steve Bannon about what they know.As Wajahat Ali emphasized, this is a generational moment, potentially the only real opportunity in the next decade to force accountability before Trump consolidates power further. The independent journalism community forced Trump into defense, attacks on Substack revealed they’re desperate to shut down the investigation.Subscribe to support tonight’s independent voices: Lev Parnas, THE LEFT HOOK with Wajahat Ali, Nick Paro and Zev Shalev Thank you THE LEFT HOOK with Wajahat Ali, Stephanie G Wilson, PhD, Cat, Cheech Previti, Caro Henry, and many others for tuning into my live video with Lev Parnas and Nick Paro! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

One year after Donald Trump promised a “golden age,” the president marked his anniversary with a 90-minute press conference threatening to seize Greenland by military force. The first year delivered broken promises across the board: Ukraine war still raging despite Trump’s “24 hours” pledge, inflation rising from 2.3% to 2.7% after his tariffs, 22 million Americans losing health coverage, half the Education Department eliminated, and negative net migration for the first time in 50 years. Tonight’s Narativ Live examined three critical stories revealing the stakes of year two with three extraordinary members of thsi extraordinary community Olga Lautman, Janessa Goldbeck, and Ellie Leonard.🌍 NATO CANNOT SURVIVE Olga Lautman delivered a stark assessment of the transatlantic alliance: “NATO is finished. I can promise you there is not one European country who feels comfortable with Americans today.” She explained that whether Trump uses force to invade Greenland or not, the trust essential to NATO has been irreparably broken. “Once you break that trust, it’s finished. So NATO, as we know it, is finito.” Lautman advocated for a reconstituted alliance excluding the United States and Hungary, while including Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Japan, and Ukraine—”the only country that has fighting experience.” She warned that Europe’s biggest obstacle has been itself, but with 1.5 million standing troops and advanced military technology, European forces are formidable. “This is not one of those forces that you can just overrun,” she emphasized, noting the interconnected nature of global conflicts as Russia and China conduct joint surveillance flights near South Korea and Japan.⚖️ FIRST AMENDMENT UNDER SIEGEJanessa Goldbeck, Marine Corps veteran and CEO of Vet Voice Foundation, discussed the extraordinary amicus brief filed by 41 former military leaders defending Senator Mark Kelly against censure by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Kelly reminded service members of their duty to refuse illegal orders—settled military law since Nuremberg—and Hegseth responded with formal censure and threats to retirement benefits. “This is an extraordinary story,” Goldbeck explained, noting that filing the brief required these distinguished officers to risk retaliation themselves. The brief emphasizes that veteran participation in public discourse “is not a threat to civilian control of the military—it is a safeguard.” With nearly 100 members of Congress being veterans, plus veterans throughout state and local government, businesses, and the press, silencing these voices would devastate democratic oversight. “If Hegseth can punish a sitting U.S. Senator for accurate statements of law, what protection exists for anyone else?” The case sets precedent for every veteran in America.🔍 THE SASHA RILEY INVESTIGATIONInvestigative journalist Ellie Leonard presented findings from her weeks-long investigation into the Sasha Riley Substack account, which published explosive Epstein claims that spread through the investigative community before raising red flags. Leonards explained her verification process: “I pull police records, I pull court records, I pull obituaries, I pull newspaper articles from the time. I mean, anything that can give me a timestamp and verifiable information.” Key concerns emerged around timeline inconsistencies, particularly claims involving Jim Jordan that didn’t align chronologically. The Bill Reilly reference—matching a name from the actual Epstein investigation rather than providing new information—suggested someone “had picked a name in the Epstein world and sort of matched it versus the other way around.” While Leonard emphasized she cannot definitively prove the account is disinformation, the inconsistencies were significant enough to warrant skepticism. The investigation serves as a critical reminder about verification standards when dealing with powerful networks capable of weaponizing both truth and lies. “If we can’t tell the difference between genuine survivors and sophisticated disinformation, we become tools of the very networks we’re trying to expose.”Three stories. One through-line: institutions under attack, truth under siege, democracy defenders standing ground.Ready to publish! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

“IT FEELS VERY KREMLIN-Y”The ICE agent who shot Renee Good was identified today: Jonathan Ross. In June 2025, Ross was dragged 100+ yards by a vehicle. Documented trauma. PTSD from a vehicle attack.Now this traumatized agent is the alleged shooter of Renee Nicole Good, who Kristi Noem and other DHS officials claim was following the shooter. Video of the shooting reveals the shooter was not hit by the car, yet this agent still killed Good. The odds that the ICE agents did not know who they were approaching is very unlikely considering their facial recognition and surveillance technology.“It feels very coordinated,” I said tonight. “Someone previously dragged, now positioned in a shooting—it seems almost like an active measure.”Olga Lautman said she believed the shooting was organic but agreed that the coordinated reaction to the shooting had the hallmarks of a Russian operation: “Watching Vance today—was I watching the Russian press briefing or American?”She explained: “In Russia, security services latch onto attacks immediately. Everything looks like the Kremlin—manufactured facts, propaganda. Everyone repeats it. This is what it feels like.”Jacob Kaarsbo, former Danish intelligence officer and author of Subverted (releasing February 5), added context about how these tactics mirror authoritarian playbooks: “Trump is in violation of the articles in the NATO treaty already. And Congress should hold him to account. But of course, the GOP in Congress are part of this cult and are collaborators.”Within hours, Trump, Vance, Noem used identical framing: “domestic terrorist,” “violent attack.” Talking points ready. Video edited and released. Trump shared fake ramming video.Actual video shows Ross stepping aside—out of Good’s path—before shooting her point-blank. The “hospitalized” officer? Walking away.Today FBI shut out state investigators. Minnesota Bureau “reluctantly withdrawn.” Governor Walz “pessimistic.” The entire event looks to be swept under the carpet.VENEZUELA: FIVE GOP SENATORS BREAK RANKSToday the Senate voted 52-47 to advance a War Powers Resolution on Venezuela. Five Republicans broke ranks: Rand Paul, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Todd Young, and Josh Hawley.The resolution requires removal of U.S. forces from hostilities without congressional authorization. Trump’s response? He declared the War Powers Act—a law upheld for 50 years—”Unconstitutional.” JD Vance called it “fundamentally fake.”The claim: The President can unilaterally bomb any country, topple any government, occupy any nation indefinitely—and Congress cannot restrain him.GREENLAND: RUBIO’S CASH OFFER NEXT WEEKSecretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed he’ll meet with Danish and Greenlandic officials next week (January 12-18) to make an offer: cash payments to Greenland’s citizens to secede. Reuters broke the details: $10,000 to $100,000 per person. With 57,000 residents, that’s potentially $5.7 billion to convince a population to leave their country.Jacob Kaarsbo, former Danish intelligence officer, put it bluntly: “That whole proposition that a meeting with Marco Rubio will help clarify anything is nonsensical and naive. Marco Rubio will throw sand into the eyes of the decision makers at best. Trump said it today—the Greenland issue could be a choice between Greenland or NATO. Why? Because Trump doesn’t want NATO. Trump is in violation of the articles in the NATO treaty already.”Day 354.Watch: Trump Tyranny Tracker—Tuesdays and Thursdays, 7 PM ETFollow: Zev Shalev | Olga Lautman | Jacob KaarsboThank you Ellie Leonard, Robin Payes, Social SLP, Leah Anderson, Laura A. Drury, and many others for tuning into my live video with Olga Lautman! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe