Narativ with Zev Shalev (Audio)

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.narativ.orgOn 7 January 2011, JPMorgan’s own people wrote down why Jeffrey Epstein still banked there.“Catherine made sure we knew that no one on today’s call was in favor of having retained him as a client,” the email reads. “Seems it all is due to Jes’s personal relationship. Note, he has about 212 mil in the bank.”Catherine is Catherine Keating, who ran the private bank. Jes is Jes Staley, who ran the investment bank and had been Epstein’s friend since the 1980s. The House Oversight Committee put that email in front of Staley in July and asked whether the bank kept Epstein because of him.“No. No, I would not,” Staley answered. The bank had the authority to close the accounts, he said, “from Catherine Keating on down,” and chose not to. He was not involved.“You’re mentioned throughout this email, though, multiple times, by multiple people,” counsel said. “Clearly, you are central to this entire decision.”“No.”His own lawyer cut in: “Question, answer.”PAID SUBSCRIBERS CAN ACCESS A DEEPER DIVE BELOW THE PAYWALL

Lev Parnas says Jared Kushner sat in a meeting about what happens after the midterms and named Hakeem Jeffries the weak spot.Kushner had his reasons, Parnas told Narativ Live Tuesday. Kushner worked alongside Jeffries on the First Step Act last year and came away with a read on him. Trump sent Kushner rather than anyone on the payroll because Kushner holds no official role — “plus, he could talk about things that people in the administration can’t,” Parnas said. Kushner also swims in the donor world, and Jeffries now raises heavily from the Wall Street corporate money swimming there with him.Then the tell.The New York Times reported that Kushner recommended Jeffries speak to Susie Wiles. Parnas recognized that hand-off, because he ran it himself. Trump sent him to Volodymyr Zelensky in 2018 and 2019 to deliver the threats “that Bolton or Pompeo would never say” — cut the aid, all of it. “When I was done with that and they agreed to do it, that’s when I would hand it over and say, okay, now Pompeo could go do the official business and sign the deal,” Parnas said. He reads the referral to Wiles as the signature on a bargain already struck. “I do believe that there was a deal cut,” he said.Parnas is careful about what he holds. “I don’t have the full detail of what happened,” he said. He reported the run-up and read the rest off his own years inside the operation, plus Jeffries on CNN that day, sliding back into old Democratic deal-making language.Nobody stops every investigation, Parnas said. He described a trade: “concentrate on these, but stay away from these type of situations.” He named what he believes is walled off — the Kushner and Witkoff money, the Trump money — and what has quietly left the conversation entirely: DOGE.Zev put it flat. “It sounds to me like he’s trying to buy him off.”Parnas says the offer works because the Democratic Party is at war with itself. Jeffries came out against the DSA that day, and so did Jared Moskowitz. Trump’s people widen that rift on purpose — “the money is being pushed into both sides of the field.” He drew the darkest version himself: Democrats take the House, arrive discombobulated, and Jeffries spends his term holding the caucus together instead of issuing subpoenas. “That’s exactly what my job was, to do these little things,” he said. “So for me, it’s like PTSD.” Trump is also letting gas prices run high on purpose, he added, so the pain becomes the Democrats’ problem the day they win.Zev opened the show on the Supreme Court’s USPS order, saying he had heard the semi-nightmare version — not the cliff, but not fine. Mitchell confirmed it, then turned on the coverage. Outlets were “screaming... Supreme Court hands Trump win,” she said, “and that is so totally not accurate whatsoever.”Mitchell explained the ruling: the case was not ripe. Nothing concrete had happened, so no court had jurisdiction. “Courts aren’t allowed to future trip.” The order lets Trump go forward with the rule — “but that doesn’t mean he gets to implement the rule.” In the paragraph that matters, the justices say the administration may try. “That doesn’t mean that will be lawful.” The last sentence, she said, shows the Court already expects the merits on appeal.Zev pushed back. The USPS has issued the official rule from the Postmaster General and intends to institute it. “It’s going to be only some people that get their ballots,” he said. Then the fear, out loud: “By then they would have rigged the election and won the election and it would be too late to do anything about it.”Mitchell walked through the machinery. Trump’s people need a portal, and they need states to upload their mail-in voter rolls. “And the moment they start the first one, that’s when the lawsuits that will be ripe are going to hit the courts.” She is “100% confident” the filings sit drafted already. Seventy days is short. “But in court time... that’s enough.”Parnas prayed she was right, then said why he worries anyway. Russ Vought and Stephen Miller do not need to win. “The win is sometimes not actually getting a win. It’s delaying and causing chaos.” He fears something physical: the mail ballots never go out while the courts sort it. He is not worried about 2028. He is worried about November.Mitchell reads Trump the way she reads a filing. He is already “greasing the wheels for the excuse for why they’re going to lose these midterms” — “well, you know, if I was on the ballot, but I’m not on the ballot.”Judge Engelmayer spent 67 pages telling Ghislaine Maxwell she gets no new trial. Maxwell has been filing pro se, Mitchell said, “which means without a lawyer, which is always... basically stupid.” She filed a voluminous addendum past his deadline; he took it anyway, so the ruling would survive appeal. His answer to her newly-discovered-evidence claim, in Mitchell’s summary: “no freaking way.” His first paragraph sets her alongside, in its own word, “the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.”Zev raised the trap himself. A pardon means “you can’t always plead the fifth afterwards because you’ve lost that excuse.” Mitchell flagged that she is “not a pardon attorney,” then laid out the doctrine and got it right. A pardon “wipes the slate clean... it’s like it never happened,” so “you don’t really have the Fifth Amendment right.” A commutation “still keeps the conviction on the record,” and the privilege survives it. Both reached for Dr. Fauci.Mitchell said Congress can offer immunity for testimony about a particular act, though it cannot touch her conviction. Maxwell has a great deal to offer a future prosecutor, Zev noted, or a Democratic-led committee.Watch what Trump does, not what his people say, Parnas said. Todd Blanche says no pardon. “But meanwhile, she was transferred to a facility that we speak about every day that should never happen.” Trump left Paul Manafort in prison for two years because the connection was toxic with an election coming, while Bill Barr intervened over a Rikers transfer and kept him in federal custody. The pardon came right before Trump left office. Parnas watches the transfer, not the denial.Lisa Phillips, a survivor, is in the UK working to bring charges against Maxwell there, so a pardon in Washington would not leave her free anywhere. Parnas offered to help.Then he warned anyone waiting on a Democratic House to open the files. “The Democrats are not some kind of heroes when it comes to the Epstein files because they also covered up the Epstein files,” he said. Both parties. “The cover-up is worse than the crime in this one.”Parnas says he is digging now for who set the Kushner meeting and what changed hands in it. Seventy days out, Hakeem Jeffries could answer that himself.Thank you LC - Silence is Complicity, Jason Gael, PJ Schuster, Assemblywoman Debra Mazzarelli, Lori Modafferi, 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

Sean Wiswesser ran CIA stations for three decades, and he knows what one Russian submarine is doing off the coast of Britain. It is a stretched missile boat with a smaller submarine fixed to its belly. That one carries divers. The divers train on cables — the fiber-optic lines on the seabed that carry the money, the traffic and the military orders between Europe and America. “These are preparations for war,” Wiswesser told Zev. He counted three places one could start this year: the Baltic, Taiwan, and the Strait of Hormuz.Narativ called the first of them nine years ago. On January 10, 2017, ten days before Trump took the oath, this publication reported Putin massing nuclear weapons in Kaliningrad and warned that if Trump distanced himself from NATO, “Russia can expand its Ukrainian-style campaign to other states along Russia’s border.” Wiswesser now puts that campaign at the top of Putin’s list.Russia is not waiting for a war to start it. At Leipzig-Halle, the airport NATO leans on to move cargo, one Russian drone crashed. A second one, armed, landed intact beside the Ukrainian freight terminal and sat there. Nobody set it off. That was the message. “They’re trying to say, hey, we can detonate this thing anytime we want. Your air defenses are hollow,” Wiswesser said. He called his column on it The Danger of Empty Deterrence. Empty is the word doing the work. In July 2024, Russia’s military intelligence service mailed incendiary devices out of Vilnius into Europe’s air cargo network; one ignited in the DHL depot at Leipzig, the same airport. Investigators read the run as a rehearsal for parcels bound for North America. “When Al-Qaeda did that, we went to war because of airline plots,” Wiswesser said. “The GRU did it, and we got precious little attention in the United States. We didn’t respond at all.”The prize is a sixty-five-mile strip of Polish and Lithuanian farmland between Kaliningrad and Belarus. Take it and Russia owns a land bridge to Kaliningrad while Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia lose their land link to NATO. Zev pushed back — Putin cannot finish Ukraine, so where does he find a second army? Wiswesser answered with a calendar. Planners used to say Russia needed until 2030 to rebuild. Most now say 2028. Ukraine is ahead of Russia at drone war. Russia is ahead of everyone defending Europe.PAID SUBSCRIBERS CAN ACCESS A DEEPER DIVE BELOW THE PAYWALLAmerica is answering the second front by leaving it. The Navy pulled its only aircraft carrier out of the Pacific. The Pentagon scaled back exercises with South Korea, and the president explained the retreat as a friendship with Kim Jong-un, who denied the friendship this week and fired ten missiles. Xi Jinping has told his generals to be ready to take Taiwan by 2027, sixteen months out. Wiswesser would not touch the politics; the commander in chief sets foreign policy, he said, twice. He also would not pretend to follow it. “What has the North Korean dictator done to earn de-escalation from our side? He hasn’t done anything.”Iran has already tested the answer and found it thin. The United States and Israel destroyed Iran’s air defenses in days, which by the old arithmetic of the Gulf War ends a war. It didn’t. Iran had stockpiled thousands of missiles and tens of thousands of drones, and fired them at American bases across the region. Iran hit Bahrain hard enough that the Lincoln can no longer make port there. Iran now holds the northern half of the Strait of Hormuz while the Navy escorts tankers through the southern half. Wiswesser kept returning to Colin Powell: use force rarely, overwhelmingly, and with a stated objective. “What were we trying to accomplish, and what did we accomplish? Now we’ve got a divided Strait of Hormuz we didn’t have before.”Wiswesser wrote a column called The Bear and the Dragon, and its argument is why the three fronts are one problem. Beijing and Moscow need no treaty to help each other, only an opening. Iran handed Russia the drone design; Russia improved it and sent it back. Chinese and Russian weapons and satellite targeting now reach Tehran. Every interceptor America burns over one front is one it does not have over the next, and American stocks are running low. Xi can count.Wiswesser closed on his own will. The agency made him write one before it sent him to Afghanistan, and he put a line in it about the right of a single person to choose their own path. “These things are worth my life and more,” he said. “That’s what I put in my will as a young CIA officer.”He gambled his life on an order Putin now tests with divers, Xi tests with a deadline, and Iran tests with drones. Nine years after Narativ said this was coming, nobody has answered.Tradecraft, Tactics, and Dirty Tricks: Russian Intelligence and Putin’s Secret War is out now from Naval Institute Press.▶ Watch the full conversation: 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

Jacob Kaarsbo, fifteen years in Danish intelligence, told Narativ Live what was inside it — and why he thinks the South Korea withdrawal is not a pivot to Asia at all.Two advanced drones flew into Leipzig, the airport NATO uses to move weapons into Ukraine. One of them carried between 600 and 800 grams of Semtex in an airtight container, and it sat close to a Ukrainian transport plane. It did not go off.“I know for a fact,” Jacob Kaarsbo said on Narativ Live on Tuesday, and then gave the numbers. He spent fifteen years in Danish intelligence. On the failure to detonate he was blunt: “it was only due to pure luck that it didn’t go off.” German investigators have since established that the ammunition had been taken off the Ukrainian freight plane before the drones arrived. Kaarsbo does not find that reassuring — there was still jet fuel.Leipzig has been hit before. In 2024 someone put a firebomb aboard a DHL plane there, timed to explode in the air. The flight was delayed, so it burned on the ground and nobody died. German counter-intelligence later uncovered a Chinese operation working the same airport, collecting flight schedules for weapons shipments to Ukraine; a member of the far-right AfD is under investigation as part of it. Whether the schedules reached Moscow, Kaarsbo would not say. He does not assert what he cannot show.In the past fortnight, ammunition factories have exploded in Bulgaria and in Italy, and there has been an attack in the Netherlands. Europe, he said, is “too slow to react and cannot create the deterrence against Russia at this point in time, simply not decisive enough.”That is the war nobody is calling a war. The other half of the hour was about the one America is walking away from.For a year the administration justified its treatment of NATO as a necessary pivot — resources conserved in Europe, moved to the Pacific. Kaarsbo’s verdict on that: “The curtain is falling and he’s doing the exact opposite. There are no more aircraft carriers left in the Pacific theater.” Months ago the Secretary of Defense called South Korea a model ally. This week Trump cut the exercises with it.Then the line the show turned on. “This whole ordeal about South Korea is not a pivot to China or a pivot to Asia. It’s a pivot to Pyongyang.”What Trump wants from allies, Kaarsbo argued, is not burden-sharing but obedience: he is “using these alliances now for political submission,” turning allies into “vessels, just like the Warsaw Pact back in the day.” He pointed at reporting from Friday that the administration had sent European governments a report card — grading them on whether they had publicly supported its foreign policy, whether they buy American weapons systems, and whether they are working to obstruct Europe’s push to build its own.He took it personally, and said so. “Donald Trump has threatened to take over Greenland by force. And it’s a blatant violation of the NATO Treaty, Article 1.” Greenland is Danish.The show played Trump’s own account of the South Korea call, which needs no gloss. He asked Seoul for help against Iran and was refused. “We have 39,000 soldiers over there guarding you from Kim Jong-un, your next-door neighbor, and you’re not going to help us on a very easy military operation in Iran?” On NATO he was working the same arithmetic: “they don’t want to get involved with guarding the straight where they get most of their oil.”Nobody in that account is defending anything. It is an invoice.There is a cost to the arithmetic that Trump left out. North Korean ballistic missiles hit Ukraine most weeks. North Korean troops have fought for Russia. In the same breath, the president called the North Koreans unthreatening and respectful. Kaarsbo, who has spent his career watching Moscow and Pyongyang, put the reaction plainly: if you support Ukraine and think international law is worth something, “you’d sit there and say, what?”Seventy-seven days out from the midterms, the conversation ended where it had to. Trump is already staffing an election he expects to contest, with a thousand Justice Department monitors and no list of where they go. Kaarsbo has heard Europeans say the midterms will sort it out. He does not believe them. “If you followed what happened on January 6th and the prelude to that, then he’s doing the exact same. And it shows you how far he will go.”He offered one piece of evidence for optimism: Hungarians voted Viktor Orban out despite everything done to stop them.Michael Cohen once said his former boss would start a world war to keep power. The hour did not prove he is doing that. It showed the doors being left open, one theatre at a time, by a man who has told everyone what a war does to an election.Thank you Cheech Previti, Shulamit Elson, D Egger, An Mcgreevy, Chardonai, and many others for tuning into my live video with Jacob Kaarsbo! 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

“There was no threat to that plane whatsoever. I call it b******t. I call it a setup. I call it a wag-the-dog situation,” Lev Parnas said on Narativ Live Wednesday — and then he told the audience what he thinks the catering truck was actually for.Parnas, who spent years inside Trump’s orbit before turning whistleblower, laid out his case on the air. American intelligence would never load a genuinely targeted plane with the White House press corps, the Secretary of State and the Treasury Secretary. A president facing a real assassination attempt would bury the story as national security and hunt the leaker; instead, Trump confirmed it and rode the coverage. “By allowing the media to continue running with the story, not having anger tantrums, investigations, who leaked the story — there’s a bigger story,” Parnas said. His read: the decoy wasn’t about a missile. “He needed to ditch the press corps. The advisors were the distraction.” Somewhere between Ankara and the UK stop, Parnas believes, Trump held a meeting nobody was supposed to see — connected to Iran and the Middle East — and Parnas says he will break the full story in the coming days.Zev put the stakes plainly: whatever the plane switch hid, ditching the press pool is not a stunt. A president has a duty to be covered; a maneuver to escape coverage is a lie to the American people and an attack on the idea of transparent government. Anne Mitchell added the detail that doesn’t fit the official story — the administration’s immediate move to subpoena journalists over the leak. You don’t subpoena reporters for covering your rescue.Mitchell, attorney and law professor, then took apart the week’s second manufactured case. Jeanine Pirro’s new special grand jury in the Reflecting Pool matter can investigate but cannot indict — it can sit eighteen months and publish a report naming people it never charges. Parnas’ sources say Olympic canoeist David Hearn remains a target, that Norm Eisen has asked the judge to convert the dismissal to with-prejudice so the case can never return, and that Pirro’s move has set off pushback inside her own Justice Department. Mitchell noted any re-indictment would require new facts the government has never produced. “It saves face for Pirro... giving Donald Trump what he wants,” Parnas said. “Here’s your lollipop for now.”Then Mitchell delivered the segment worth bookmarking before November. Judge Indira Talwani’s injunction this week blocked Trump’s mail-in ballot order nationwide, and Mitchell read the language on air: “enfranchisement heavily outweighs the executive’s attempt to unconstitutionally insert itself into the domain of election regulation.” The administration slow-walked its own USPS rule — Mitchell suspects deliberately — to keep the issue from ever ripening; the court called time anyway, and inside 90 days of the midterms no election rules change. Her bottom line, aimed squarely at the doom-posting in the chat: the states run elections, not the president. “He can try whatever the hell he wants, but it will be smacked down right away.” The real weapon left to him is fear itself — convincing worried voters to stay home. Don’t.The hour ended where tomorrow begins: Todd Blanche, 1 PM, Judge Sullivan’s courtroom, 37 pages of Epstein material the public has never seen. Mitchell predicts an extension motion, and flagged the wrinkle most coverage has missed — several victims have filed their own motions to keep their names sealed, so the fight over the redactions is no longer only Blanche’s. Parnas closed with where this story has pointed since Narativ’s Baku reporting: the Epstein files frighten powerful people less for the crimes than for the Russia and global-power connections written through them.Blanche has until 1 PM. The victims want their names protected. Trump wants the file closed. Sullivan wants his answer. Somebody leaves that courtroom disappointed.Thank you Cat: Poli-Psych, Jason Gael, Grace Alexandra Hayden, PJ Schuster, Miss Myra, and many others for tuning into my live video with Anne P. Mitchell, Esq. and 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

Jeffrey Epstein was inside Trump Tower on November 13, 2016 — the morning Donald Trump picked his first cabinet. Ellie Leonard proved it on Narativ Live today, document by document, from the government’s own files.Leonard opened with a text thread from the DOJ release — EFTA01620474 — between Ken Mapp, then governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands, and a contact the file labels only “unknown.” The two discuss permits for Great St. James, the island Epstein had just bought. On November 13, five days after the election, the unknown number writes: “Seeing Trump people today, can we speak?” Pages later: “With regard to Donald, we will talk face to face.”Then Leonard named the unknown. Epstein emailed himself that same day — EFTA02669184 — and the email repeats, word for word, an odd aside about sneezes and legal advice that the unknown number had just texted Mapp. Same words, same day, one author: Jeffrey Epstein.A second thread seals the date. Linda Stone, a Microsoft veteran then at MIT, emailed Epstein on November 13 — EFTA01744330: “Just had a great time with Joy. Are you still in Paris?” Epstein answered: “No, Trump Tower.” Stone had already asked him in September, weeks before the vote, whether he would hold a cabinet position in the new administration.Trump spent that same morning inside Trump Tower choosing his senior cabinet — contemporaneous press coverage places him there. Epstein’s circle treated a cabinet seat for a registered sex offender as an open question.Lev Parnas pulled the thread to Michael Cohen. Cohen worked Trump Tower “every day from morning to night” through the transition, Parnas said — and Cohen insists to this day he never heard the name Jeffrey Epstein. Parnas added research he has yet to publish: the donors who financed Trump’s rise, he said, are the same names that populate Epstein’s network. Years later, in a recorded interview, Steve Bannon told Epstein he had always worried Epstein would be “the one who could sink us.” Epstein agreed: “I would have been the one.”Christopher Armitage brought the indictment. Todd Blanche questioned Ghislaine Maxwell for nine hours in Tallahassee last July — no line prosecutor in the room, limited immunity on the table — and Maxwell delivered claims the Justice Department had already branded false in front of federal judges, Armitage said. A week later the Bureau of Prisons moved her to a minimum-security camp in Bryan, Texas: a camp capped at five-year sentences and closed to sex offenders, holding a woman with a twenty-year sentence and a trafficking conviction. Three and a half million released pages contain no authorization for the move. Witness tampering. Falsified evidence. Obstruction. Armitage says those are crimes on New Mexico’s books, and under the dual-sovereignty doctrine Raúl Torrez, New Mexico’s attorney general, needs no permission from Washington to convene a grand jury. The Senate confirmed Blanche at 4:31 Saturday morning, 50 to 49; he formally took the department hours after the show ended.The next date is Wednesday. Judge Emmet Sullivan hears Phang v. Blanche at 1 PM Eastern, where Blanche owes the court records he has withheld — among them the handwritten FBI notes from the Jane Doe 4 case, a 13-year-old’s file out of Hilton Head Island that stayed buried until reporters spotted the missing serial numbers. Of 53 missing pages, the government has produced 16 — never the agents’ handwritten notes. Anyone can listen to the hearing live: 1-833-990-9400, meeting ID 712190216.Blanche now runs the department that holds every record of the deal he cut. The federal government will not police its own attorney general. The states can — and Narativ takes the case to Raúl Torrez’s office this week.Follow the panel: Ellie Leonard at ellieleonard.substack.com · Christopher Armitage at The Existentialist Republic (cmarmitage.substack.com) · Lev Parnas at Lev Remembers.PAID SUBSCRIBERS CAN ACCESS A DEEPER DIVE BELOW THE PAYWALL INCLUDING THE RELEVANT DOCUMENTS Thank you Anne P. Mitchell, Esq., Kait Justice, Cat: Poli-Psych, LeftieProf, Grace Alexandra Hayden, and many others for tuning into my live video with Ellie Leonard and Christopher Armitage! 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

Capital One’s lawyers wrote one sentence into a federal court file — a demand for Trump’s Baku wire records — and on Wednesday’s Narativ Live special, Lev Parnas picked up the phone and put names to the money. Zev Shalev pulled the discovery demand off the docket hours before air: Request No. 15 in Trump’s own debanking lawsuit compels the family to produce documents on wire transfers for the Baku tower, routed from United Kingdom counterparties through bank accounts in Estonia, 2012 to 2015. Nobody else has reported it.The court record alone runs far. Capital One told Judge Roy Altman’s court on July 31 it closed roughly 300 Trump accounts in 2021 “for anti-money laundering reasons” — and a hearing transcript from last week shows the bank ran a program called Project Safeguard, reviewing every Trump transaction weekly from 2017 forward. “This time they came out with the guns blazing,” said Anne P. Mitchell, the attorney and federal law author who walked viewers through the case’s three complaints and three dismissal motions. The bank’s underlying memos sit sealed, and Mitchell read that seal precisely: “They have to have more in them than what Capital One said in this motion.”Then Parnas took the Baku end. The Trumps’ partners, the Mammadovs — transportation minister Ziya, son Anar, brother Elton, the family behind Garant Holding — were doing business with the Darvishi brothers and the Azarpassillo construction firm, “directly connected to the IRGC,” Parnas said, naming Habil, Kamal and Kiumars Darvishi and citing the American diplomatic cable that tied their Nasr operation to ballistic-missile materials. One Mammadov relative, Gunduz Mamedov, later turned up as Crimea’s prosecutor — and in the entourage that flew to New York to hand Rudy Giuliani the manufactured Biden dirt, a trip Parnas ran. “You can’t make it up,” he said. He meant it as reporting, not a figure of speech.Parnas added a claim Narativ has not verified and flags as his sourcing alone: that the Trump Organization was told in 2015 — the year Trump rode down the escalator — that IRGC-linked entities sat inside the Baku deal, acknowledged it, and stayed until December 2016. The dates in Request No. 15 stop at December 31, 2015. “That’s when I told you they got — this is exactly the dates I told you,” Parnas said, reading the demand live on air.The show’s second document was Parnas’s own archive. Video from a 2017 Republican event at Mar-a-Lago shows him backstage with Steve Wynn — then the RNC’s new finance chair — and Farkhad Akhmedov, the Baku-born oligarch whose $500 million yacht Luna sat in Miami while Parnas, in his words, babysat its owner. Filling out the Secret Service paperwork to stand near the new president, Parnas discovered Akhmedov ranked fourth on the Treasury list of Putin’s circle. He introduced Akhmedov to lobbyist Brian Ballard on the boat; Ballard’s firm later signed Azerbaijan’s government at $50,000 a month. Michael Cohen wandered through the frame of the video. “He was still on the outskirts back then,” Parnas shrugged.Shalev put the routing in its family tree: UK shells paying through Estonian accounts is the signature of the Danske Bank scandal that washed Russian billions into the West. “We see the same players over and over again, the same institutions, the same places,” he said. “That’s not coincidence. This is a network map of everyone involved in the Trump family business.”Mitchell, who spent years drafting discovery, gave the demand its legal weight: “It’s not a fishing expedition.” A bank does not name Baku, the UK and Estonia in one sentence about a former president unless its lawyers know what the answer looks like. Trump’s response to the dismissal motion comes by mid-August; Altman then either ends the case — leaving the money-laundering verdict and the surveillance program as its only public products — or sends the sealed Baku files toward trial. 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

Vladimir Putin will aim his interference machine at the November midterms, former CIA station chief Sean Wiswesser warned on Narativ Live Wednesday — exactly 90 days before the vote, with the operation already running at a scale no troll farm ever reached. Election interference “is a primary tactic of the Russian intelligence services,” Wiswesser said. “It has been for 100 years.” He ran CIA stations against that machine across 28 years, five joint-duty assignments and a war zone, and his book — Tradecraft, Tactics, and Dirty Tricks: Russian Intelligence and Putin’s Secret War, back at number one on Amazon’s Russia list — is a manual of the other side’s methods. For an hour, on the Narativ special report T Minus 90, he opened it.Wiswesser brought the case file to match. A flash mob formed in a small Midwestern town, two crowds screaming across a street — one swearing nobody would take its guns, the other swearing nobody would hand guns to schoolchildren. Police pushed in and asked each side for its leader. Neither had one. The FBI pulled the thread and found the summons hadn’t come from either side — or from anywhere in America. “It was our adversaries playing us for suckers,” Wiswesser said.The method has a name: active measures — the Kremlin now prefers “measures of support.” Wiswesser reached for defector Vasili Mitrokhin’s KGB archive to define it: intelligence as politics by other means. The SVR runs an entire directorate for it — thousands of officers, he said, whose sole job is meddling in the United States and its allies. The FSB, Putin’s alma mater, fields roughly 400,000 people and a hacking unit, Center 16, that worked the 2016 and 2020 elections. The GRU’s Fancy Bear cracked the DNC’s servers — while the FSB, hacking the same building, nearly tripped over them. “They don’t coordinate,” Wiswesser said. “They’re all after the United States.” The services conscript criminal hackers to fill the gaps: hack for us or go to the Gulag.What changed since 2016 is the engine. “What happened 10 years ago that was done by human actors, now cognitive AI can do,” Wiswesser said. “The amplification is 10,000 or even 100,000-fold.” Prigozhin’s troll farm needed people; the 2026 version is machine-enabled, and it feeds on the same fuel — the rawest wound in any democracy, amplified until neighbors hate each other. The Venezuelan voting-machine story, the one Attorney General Bill Barr called “b******t” — his word — is the template: find a thread of grievance, spin it, repeat it until Americans stop trusting their own elections.Zev pushed where the guest could not go. Wiswesser, who still contracts for the Defense Department, held the professional line — the SSCI report Marco Rubio signed found Moscow meddled against democracy itself, and any benefit to a candidate “is incidental to the larger goal.” Zev answered with his own read: one American party trends toward autocracy, the other toward democracy, and a power whose stated target is democracy knows exactly which outcome serves it. The guest didn’t take the bait, and didn’t need to. Hungary made his point for him: Moscow ran more intelligence officers in Budapest under Viktor Orbán than ever before. “They didn’t trust Orbán either,” Wiswesser said. “They don’t have any allies.”Zev has met the secret war himself, and told the story on air: a woman, plainly Russian and plainly out of place, cornered him at a Tony Awards after-party, claimed Oliver Stone wanted to work with him, and offered to fund his journalism. Somebody had tracked a reporter to a closed room full of people who sing for a living.Wiswesser’s prescription for the drones now probing Romania and the cables cut on the Baltic seabed is the one Kennedy used on Khrushchev: a deterrent with consequences. “Shoot down those drones,” he said. “Right now we have an empty deterrent.” The night before he spoke, a Russian strike killed 17 people around Kyiv — while American interceptors sat undelivered. Ukraine, which he rates among the world’s top five intelligence services, keeps teaching the lesson anyway: Operation Spiderweb’s drones crawled out of trailers and burned Russia’s strategic bombers where they parked. Britain handed America radar in 1940, he noted. Kyiv is offering the drone.Ninety days out, the target is not a candidate. It is the thing on the ballot underneath every name. Wiswesser spent a career meeting Russians who risked their lives for the CIA because they believed America was the city on the hill. The people trying to burn the city down are counting on Americans to strike the match themselves.Thank you Robin Payes, Skutt Hope, Farmers AGAINST trump., Jami, Kim G, and many others for tuning into my live video with Sean Wiswesser! 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 phrase sounds like a warning from a war room: the merging of two wars. Olga Lautman traced it to a sales campaign.“Everywhere you see this merging of two wars coming from Iranian agents, from Russia’s influence agents,” the Russia analyst told Zev on Narativ Live. “I guarantee you that Russia is behind this narrative — because in December they were completely quiet.”December is the tell. Ukraine first struck Russian vessels in the Caspian Sea last December — ships Kyiv says ran weapons between Russia and Iran, cargo invoiced as bananas. Nobody objected. “The Russians didn’t say anything. The Iranians didn’t say anything. The Americans didn’t say anything,” Lautman said. This week Ukraine hit the same route again — and Tehran erupted. A senior Iranian parliamentarian threatened Ukraine on Twitter, in Ukrainian. Iran claimed the struck vessel as its own; Ukraine says it hit Russian ships. The difference between December’s silence and this week’s screaming, Lautman argued, is an audience of one — the story exists to tell Trump that Ukraine is wrecking his Middle East plans.The wars did merge — years ago, and in hardware, not headlines. Iran handed Russia its Shahed drones in 2022, then opened joint drone factories inside Russia. China ships military components and helps Moscow dodge sanctions; Russia trains Chinese troops for an invasion of Taiwan, Lautman said, while North Korea sent 10,000 soldiers last year and, per new intelligence she cited, prepares 30,000 more. “Ukraine has been the laboratory for this.”And the country supposedly dragging America into world war keeps picking targets a general would choose. “Ukrainians are going after logistical routes,” Lautman said — refineries and export terminals 1,300 kilometers inside Russia, supply lines “choking off Russia’s reach into Crimea,” even Wildberries, Russia’s answer to Amazon. The bill so far, she said, citing the British Defence Ministry and U.S. intelligence: 1.4 million Russian casualties, several hundred thousand of them dead.Then came Navy Day. Putin marks it most years by reviewing the fleet. This year the fleet stayed out of sight — Ukraine has sunk roughly 30 percent of it, Lautman said — so Putin reviewed a painting. “They couldn’t bring the vessels, so Putin had to deal with the banner of a submarine.” Even the wall behind him was painted on.That humiliated navy shares the Black Sea with Romania, where Russian drones crossed the border three days running — Friday, Saturday, Sunday — and Romanian F-16s shot down all three, the first such kills in the country’s history. On Monday, Bucharest declared a Russian embassy staffer persona non grata after prosecutors confirmed the wreckage as Russian. Moscow denied aiming anything at Romania and promised retaliation.Lautman set the incursions inside a warning European intelligence services keep raising: Russia “might test Article 5” — strike a Baltic state or Romania — “to see how NATO will respond” while Trump sits occupied elsewhere and cold on the alliance. And the test would not look like tanks. “They can do drone swarms and hit Romania or Estonia or Lithuania, and that would be enough,” she said. Russia rehearses with 200, 300, 400 drones a night over Kyiv. Ukraine now sends the same numbers back.Her oldest warning ties it together: Russia moves on Europe while China moves on Taiwan — one axis, two theaters. The merging of two wars is propaganda. The merging of four regimes is documented.Thank you LC - Silence is Complicity, Lalisa, Chardonai, Deborah J., Kelly, 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

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.narativ.orgAn internal DOJ email — EFTA01648946, surfaced by Narativ on Friday — lists the men accused in the Epstein files. The last entry: “William Barr, for being present when a girl was raped.”The allegations are likely witness allegations, not proven acts, attorney Anne P. Mitchell said on Narativ Live. The point is what the DOJ did with them: “They took them…

Zev surfaced a document Friday that no outlet had reported: an internal DOJ email cataloguing the most serious allegations against Donald Trump, Bill Barr, Howard Lutnick, Les Wexner and seven other men — dated July 24, 2025, the day Todd Blanche sat down with Ghislaine Maxwell. Zev runs daily AI searches of the Epstein files; his system flagged the email Friday morning, and he took it to air within hours, joined by attorney and advocate Anne P. Mitchell and congressional candidate Lev Parnas.The email began as a request. One DOJ official asked another: “Can you write me a sentence or two… [on] the salacious statements made against the individuals in the file? Feel free to add if I missed someone.” The reply came back as a roster — Trump, Barr, Lutnick, Wexner, Jes Staley, Leon Black, Prince Andrew, Harvey Weinstein, Alan Dershowitz, Bill Clinton — with each man’s entry drawn from victim statements in the files.The Trump entry, as the file records it: Epstein introduced a woman to Trump, “who subsequently forced her head down to his exposed penis.” She bit him. Trump punched her in the head and threw her out. A second redacted account has Epstein introducing another woman with “this is a good one, huh?” — and Trump answering yes.The date carries the story — and Zev did the legwork before air, verifying the email against the Blanche–Maxwell interview transcript name by name. Blanche — Trump’s former defense lawyer, then running the DOJ’s Maxwell interview, now weeks from a confirmation vote for attorney general — asked Maxwell about nearly every name on the list. On Trump, Maxwell answered: “Absolutely never in any context. The president was never inappropriate with anybody… he was a gentleman in all respects.” On Barr — who the file places at an Epstein model event, with a second account claiming he was “present during some of this abuse” — Maxwell answered “no,” then “I don’t recall.” On Wexner, the file states he sat at number one on Epstein’s speed dial and that “Epstein earned his money from having sex with Wexner” — the first time that alleged relationship appears in writing anywhere in the files, and something sources close to Epstein told Zev years ago. Maxwell confirmed only “the one very famous client everybody talks about.”One name Blanche never raised: Howard Lutnick.The file repeats what Narativ first reported months ago — Epstein sold Lutnick a home for $10 that later sold for millions — and Maxwell volunteered, unprompted, that Epstein’s cohort included men “in your cabinet, who you call your friends.” Weeks after the interview, Maxwell moved from prison to a minimum-security camp.Mitchell traced the paper trail on air: the joint DOJ-FBI-SDNY task force slideshow that circulated this year was built from this document, compiled July 22–24, 2025, forwarded to Kash Patel on August 7, 2025, and released publicly in January under the Epstein files mandate. The email sat in the public files for six months; Zev’s daily searches never returned it until Friday. “We have to ask whether it was somehow not visible to everybody,” he said.Parnas added a third thread: Maxwell’s attorney, Oscar Marcus, hosted Blanche on his podcast twice — once before the Maxwell interview, once after.Mitchell put the question that hangs over the whole document: why would anyone prepare this list for Blanche if he believed none of it was true?Blanche faces his confirmation vote already under a $1,000-a-day fine for defying a federal court order to release Trump-related Epstein documents. Epstein’s survivors met him days ago and left distressed, recounting his words to them: “They wanted something from me I can’t give them — justice.” Zev closed on that line: if Blanche held this email when he looked those survivors in the eye, how can he possibly be the attorney general of the United States?The document is posted below this video. Narativ viewers are sending it to the Senate Judiciary Committee — email it, then call.Subscribe free — Narativ: Where Truth Lives. Know Sooner: 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

The Trump family crossed $5 billion in presidential profit on July 10, and nobody marked it — no network cut in, no chyron, no headline. So Narativ built a clock. On Tuesday afternoon Zev Shalev put the counter on camera, and at 5:01 PM Eastern the audience watched it tick past $5,100,000,000 — the first billion-dollar line of the Trump grift crossed live, on the record, in real time.The clock counts three streams and only three: the family’s crypto ventures, the real-estate holdings foreign governments keep handing over, and the licensing deals signed since Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2025. “This is money that belongs to the taxpayer,” Zev said as the digits turned, “money that’s being grifted out of the U.S. Treasury.”The number is a floor, not a ceiling. Along the bottom of the clock runs the ledger of what Narativ left out: the $400 million Qatari jet handed to Trump as a gift, the fines and restitutions erased through pardons, the no-bid contracts steered to friends and family, and $1.12 billion in Trump Media stock. Add those and the take climbs well past the headline figure. Narativ printed the conservative number on purpose — the one no lawyer can argue down.The pace is the story. The clock added $100 million in ten days — $116 every second at its current rate. Every 12 minutes it swallows what a median American family earns in a year, $83,730 by the Census Bureau’s count. The special report opened at 4:59. By the time Zev signed off, a family’s entire annual income had crossed from the public’s side of the ledger to the Trumps’. “Maybe when they say the golden age is here,” Zev said, “they mean the golden age is here for them.”Then Zev priced the grift in the currency the country actually lives on. The full $5.1 billion equals the annual income of 61,000 American households — a city the size of Fort Lauderdale working a year for the Trump family’s eighteen months. At Feeding America’s $3.58 a meal, it buys 1.4 billion meals — 30 for every one of the 47 million Americans facing hunger. Routed through Medicaid, the National Bureau of Economic Research’s mortality math says it saves 944 lives — 28,500 years of human life. Or it buys a full year of family health coverage for 189,000 households, at KFF’s average premium. The family that pocketed it instead governs a country paying $4 a gallon for gas.The clock doesn’t stop because the broadcast did. Narativ will keep it running through the election season and return to air at every meaningful crossing — the next hundred million, the next billion. At $116 a second, the wait won’t be long.Watch the full special report at narativ.org. The Narativ in your inbox every morning — free. Know Sooner.Thank you Lisa 🌸🌞☮️, Sheila Avrin McLean, Gary Law, Benga Harrison, Christine Walsh, 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.orgThe Tate brothers are betting their freedom on a rescue from the administration that sprang them once before. On Monday’s Narativ Live, the two guests best positioned to judge that bet — Dave Aronberg, the former Palm Beach County state attorney, and Lev Parnas, who lived inside the Trump-world protection racket — called it the same way: the rescue isn’t coming.“There’s zero support for these guys in the administration,” Parnas said, citing his own sources inside Trump world. “Once your credit is no good, you are shipped off. And the Tate brothers right now are more than credit no good.”The legal road ends at Rubio’s desk — and Rubio won’t signAronberg walked through the extradition machinery the cable networks are skipping. The defense has three offramps — mistaken identity, non-extraditable offense, no probable cause — and none of them work against 59 UK charges spanning seven women, some underage, from 2010 to 2017. “Probable cause is such a low standard,” Aronberg said. After the appeals run out — he estimates one to two years — a single signature ships them to Britain, and under Article 4 of the 2003 US-UK treaty, Secretary of State Marco Rubio could refuse on political-persecution grounds. That is exactly what Tate lawyer Joseph McBride is building toward; the show played his courthouse claim that “the process is the punishment.” Aronberg’s verdict: “That is not going to be the hill this administration dies on — especially a guy who may want to be president.” He knows Rubio personally: “The Tate brothers aren’t his jam.”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.orgThe tape opens with a gift. Paolo Zampolli — the State Department’s special envoy for global partnerships, Melania Trump’s oldest friend, the man Narativ has spent weeks tracing through Russian diplomatic circles — hands Andrew Tate a copy of the US Constitution. Tate thanks him and says the quiet part into the microphone: “I’m gonna read this and I’m g…

US Marshals arrested Andrew and Tristan Tate in Miami early Saturday. The marshals approached the brothers and asked for a signature — the kind of approach the Tates know from fans. The paper was an arrest warrant. Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service had filed 38 new charges after police identified four more victims — seven women in all — bringing the total to 59: rape, human trafficking, and offences relating to indecent images of a child. Andrew Tate faces 42 counts, Tristan 17. Britain wants them extradited. The brothers deny everything; their lawyers call the prosecution false.Lev Parnas came on Narativ’s Sunday special with a warning the wires don’t have: the machine that protected the Tates for seventeen months is already working to spring them. “From what I’m hearing behind the scenes, there’s a major push by the Tate brothers and their advocates in the Trump world,” Parnas told Zev. “They’re going to try to block this extradition.”Parnas has lived inside this machine — the favors, and the day the favors stop — and he walked the audience through how the protection was built. Donald Trump’s administration pressed Romania in February 2025 to cut the brothers loose from their stalled trafficking case, and Romania folded. The Tates flew to Florida “under Trump’s umbrella,” Parnas said, and bragged about it — Andrew Tate boasted of his relationship with Barron Trump. This April they sat near the President at UFC in Miami. Alina Habba, Trump’s former lawyer and his pick for US Attorney of New Jersey, gushed on camera that she’d been a fan of Andrew Tate “for a very long time.”Then the protection lapsed. The Tates’ own lawyer revealed the seam in a letter Parnas dissected on air: the arrest, the lawyer complained, was approved by “a low-level DOJ employee,” not the top — and he expressed hope that “once the proper people see this,” it will be taken care of. Read that the way Parnas does: local Miami officials did their jobs before the fix could arrive. “The corruption is just about to start,” he said.The extradition now runs on two tracks. In court: a judge, a bail fight, an extradition hearing. In politics: the surrender decision lands with Trump’s administration — Zev pointed at Marco Rubio’s State Department for the final call — and Parnas has watched that lever pulled before. He was involved in the Dmitry Firtash extradition saga; Trump’s first administration let it die in Vienna. He predicts the same choreography used on Ghislaine Maxwell: keep it quiet through the midterms, then deliver the favor. His prediction for the Tates — watch whether the process stays noisy or goes strangely peaceful. Peaceful means a deal.Narativ’s own reporting put the arrest inside a wider frame. Seven days before the handcuffs, a photo shows the brothers at the congressional office of Representative Wesley Hunt of Texas — and they spent the weekend as guests of Paolo Zampolli, the State Department’s special envoy for global partnerships, the man who discovered Melania Trump, brought her to America, and introduced her to both Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump. Narativ’s investigation with Amanda Ungaro’s email trove shows Zampolli’s decades of contact with senior Russian diplomats — Churkin, Lavrov, Voronkov — and his alleged proximity to Russian organized crime. Another photo, taken at Bedminster, shows Zampolli alongside Andrew Giuliani — now running the White House task force on the 2026 FIFA World Cup — and Paul Ingrassia, Trump’s General Services administrator. The men who ran cover for the Tates sit inside the government, on the taxpayer’s dime.The show closed on the war. American forces flew a seventh straight night of strikes across Iran; two US soldiers are dead and one missing in Jordan, four more wounded, and the conflict Zev called “a world war in waiting” has spread to Kuwait, Bahrain and Jordan. Parnas connected it to the ballot: Israel’s government is reportedly spending $45 million on an AI campaign to divide Democratic voters before November, the same play Elon Musk ran with $30 million in 2024. His answer, and Zev’s: blinders on. The only division that matters is democracy against autocracy.The Tate file moves fast from here — a courtroom in Florida, a decision on Trump’s desk, and a base watching to see if he protects two more predators in the summer of the Epstein revolt.Lev Parnas writes Lev Remembers on Substack and is running for Congress at levforcongress.org.Thank you Cathy R. Payne, Jason Gael, More Than Poetry, Lalisa, Noble Blend, 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

Jacob Kaarsbo spent a career inside Danish military intelligence. From 2005 to 2007, on loan to Denmark’s foreign ministry, he sat at the United Nations Security Council during Denmark’s rotating turn — working Kosovo, Bosnia and Georgia, and meeting Russia’s ambassador Vitaly Churkin more than once a week, in the open sessions and the closed chambers behind them. “He didn’t look like your typical Russian diplomat,” he said. “He looked quite fit… He spoke English really well.” Churkin, he said, was “a pro.”Then Zev asked the question the whole story turns on: diplomat, or intelligence officer? Kaarsbo did not hedge. “Exactly,” he said. Churkin carried the diplomatic dossier and, in Kaarsbo’s assessment, “another dossier where he was likely an intelligence professional — also an operative.” A spy in an ambassador’s chair, and a good one.Kaarsbo learned the rest the way most people did — later. Churkin dropped dead in New York in February 2017, a month after Donald Trump’s inauguration. No U.S. autopsy followed; the Russians handled it. “His cause of death could be anything, because we only know this from the Russians,” Kaarsbo said. Then he offered the line that framed the hour: “Coincidence takes a lot of planning.”He went further than Zev expected. Shown the shape of the network — Churkin to Epstein, Epstein to Trump, the same names surfacing again and again — Kaarsbo named it plainly. “This is indeed a Russian operation,” he said. He described the method he knows from the inside: Moscow gathers a little compromise, leans on it for more, and wraps a “treasonous web” around a target who may not, at first, know he is caught. When Zev raised the counter-narrative — Vice President JD Vance’s claim that the Epstein affair is “all Mossad and CIA” — Kaarsbo waved it off. Every time he digs, he said, the same thing surfaces. “It was not a hoax. It’s Russia. It’s all over.”To reach the root, Zev went back to 1983. He played a clip of the former KGB officer Yuri Shvets describing how the KGB moved to cultivate Trump — through the Soviet ambassador Yuri Dubinin and his daughter, whom Shvets believed to be an intelligence officer — and found in Trump “the ideal target”: vanity, narcissism, greed. Churkin, in those same years, helped organize Trump’s 1987 trip to Moscow. Kaarsbo said he had watched the same Shvets interviews before he published his own book in March, which traced the economic links; the Epstein files, released afterward, “put everything into perspective. It does add up.” Watch the interview with Yuri Shvets below (Paid subscribers)This post has bonus content for paid subscribers. Upgrade to get full access.Paolo Zampolli — the Italian who represented a Caribbean island at the UN, moved in the trade of black-market diplomatic passports Kaarsbo described, and stood closest of all to Churkin — is the man who brought Melania to America and now serves in Trump’s government. Kaarsbo placed the recent Budapest trip: Zampolli traveled there with the Vice President to rally the crowd behind Viktor Orbán. Zev put the stakes to a European: if a Danish first lady kept a decades-long friend who was a Russian operative, wouldn’t it be the only story in the country? “Of course,” Kaarsbo said. What baffles him is the silence — a party and its institutions that look at “obvious, obvious, deep links” and do nothing.Zev closed on the scale. Fifty years, one operation, kept quiet and effective — America caught off guard. Kaarsbo reached for John Bolton’s image: the Kremlin “drinking vodka straight out of the bottle” over what it pulled off. “It is actually a remarkable intelligence operation,” he said, “and one of the most successful.” Then, once more, the line: coincidence takes a lot of planning.Thank you Nick G, A Dude On The Couch, Lori Modafferi, Dominique, Patricia Wren, Deborah J., and many others for tuning into my live video with Jacob Kaarsbo! 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.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. 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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