Narativ with Zev Shalev (Audio)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This morning, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed a woman in south Minneapolis during what the Department of Homeland Security calls “the largest immigration operation ever.”The shooting happened at 34th Street and Portland Avenue around 10:45 AM local time. The woman - a middle-aged white woman not targeted by any investigation - was blocking an intersection when a federal agent approached her vehicle on foot. The vehicle began to drive away. At least two shots were fired. She crashed and died from a gunshot wound to the head.ICE immediately labeled her actions “domestic terrorism.” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem claimed the woman “weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers.”Video of the shooting tells a different story. The footage shows the woman’s car driving away as the ICE agent opens fire - not ramming anyone, not threatening anyone. Just trying to leave.Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey saw the video. Here’s what he said at a press conference this afternoon:“To ICE: get the f**k out of Minneapolis. We do not want you here. Your stated reason for being in this city is to create some kind of safety, and you are doing exactly the opposite. People are being hurt. Families are being ripped apart. Long-term Minneapolis residents are being terrorized and now somebody is dead. That’s on you. And it’s also on you to leave.”Then Frey issued a warning to Minneapolis residents - and it’s the most important part of his statement:“We all know that the agenda of this Trump administration is to create chaos. They want us to respond in a way that creates a military occupation in our city. They want an excuse to come in and show the kind of force that will create more chaos and more despair. Let’s not let them.”This is the trap. This is what they wanted.Three days ago, 2,000 ICE agents were deployed to the Twin Cities. Yesterday, Governor Tim Walz announced he will not seek reelection, ending his campaign amid sustained federal pressure over fraud allegations. Hours later, the Trump administration froze $10 billion in federal funding to five blue states - California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota, and New York.Now a woman is dead in the streets of Minneapolis.This is the pattern: deploy federal agents, cut federal funding, force Democratic governors out of office, then use any resistance as justification for military occupation.Frey sees it clearly. He’s urging peaceful protest. He’s asking Minneapolis not to give Trump the excuse he’s looking for.But one woman is already dead. And Homeland Security is calling her a domestic terrorist.After Venezuela, after Greenland threats, after seizing oil and threatening NATO allies - federal force is now being used on American streets against American communities. And when communities resist, ICE opens fire.Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara confirmed what the video shows: “It is obviously very concerning whenever there’s a shooting into a vehicle of someone who’s not armed.”The FBI and Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension are now investigating whether state laws were violated. But the damage is done. The provocation worked. A woman is dead.And 2,000 more ICE agents are coming to Minnesota in the weeks ahead.This is what occupation looks like in a liberal American city in 2026.Watch the full press conference and video coverage at NARATIV.ORGThank you J Dziak, Cat, Robin Payes, Pamela, Noble Blend, 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

Five years after January 6, Trump is threatening military force against NATO allies while his Justice Department buries Epstein evidence. Tonight Olga Lautman joined to discuss Greenland, then Kait Justice and Ellie Leonard revealed what’s being concealed in the files.The White House confirmed military options are on the table for Greenland. Trump expects to acquire the territory this term. Olga explained the strategy: “He cannot exit NATO because of Congress, so there are two ways to exit NATO. One would be starting a war with NATO countries.” Venezuela proved he’ll use force without authorization. Denmark’s Prime Minister warned a US attack would end NATO and democratic rule. Olga pointed out Europe has triple America’s population and comparable wealth. “All planning needs to be without the United States,” she said. They need a democracy force including Canada, Japan, and South Korea, because NATO can’t defend against the country threatening them.Kait Justice discovered the FBI never searched Zorro Ranch, where Annie Farmer testified she was abused. They searched Manhattan and Little St. James, but no warrant for the ranch Maxwell’s indictment cited as a crime location. Federal prosecutors asked New Mexico to stop investigating in July 2019, then never searched it themselves. The property sold in August 2023 to a shell company formed three weeks earlier. Beneficial owners unknown, sale price secret.The Justice Department released 12,285 files but two million more remain under review. At this pace, completion takes eight years. Trump promised to release everything, now his DOJ buries evidence while he attacks Democrats on Truth Social.Kait also revealed emails from Zubair Khan pitching Epstein a tool designed to manipulate and influence voters. The tool pulled Twitter data but shut down because accessing that data was too expensive. Now Musk owns Twitter, gutted election integrity teams, and spent $290 million on Trump’s campaign. France is investigating X for election interference. America has no investigation.Ellie Leonard discussed Ghislaine Maxwell’s husband Scott Borgerson, who runs CargoMetrics, a shipping data company. Coast Guard Academy background, advanced degrees in law and international relations, then CEO of a global shipping intelligence firm. As Ellie noted, it fits the pattern.Representative Garcia requested Inspector General investigation into FBI failures on Maria Farmer’s 1996 complaint. New Mexico proposes a truth commission for Zorro Ranch. Annie Farmer asked if they protected Epstein because of his government relationships. Same pattern everywhere: crimes occur, investigations stop, files concealed, institutions captured.Narativ Live is available as audio and video. Subscribe to Narativ.org for more investigative analysis and The Greatest Heist series examining the Epstein network.Thank you Caro Henry, Debbie Hupp, Pamela, Leah Anderson, Lalisa, and many others for tuning into my live video with Ellie Leonard and Kait Justice! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

The Air Defense Systems That Didn’t FireWe spent hours breaking down the Maduro capture operation. The anomalies kept piling up. By the end, the panel was shouting at each other about what America just witnessed.At 2 AM Eastern, Delta Force helicopters flew straight into Caracas. Three hours and 34 minutes later, Nicolas Maduro was aboard the USS Iwo Jima heading to New York. Zero American casualties. No equipment lost.That’s the official story. But the anomalies tell a different story.The Stand-DownI laid out the first anomaly: “The Russians have deployed the Buk-M2E air defense system. They have thousands of these in Venezuela. These are very good air defense systems. These are not the kind of air defense systems that would let something like this happen unnoticed.”Venezuela had 5,000+ Igla-S MANPADS. Surface-to-air missile batteries. Pantsir anti-aircraft systems. Su-30 fighter jets. Russia had been shipping them armaments for months.None of it fired.Nick Paro—a veteran who knows military operations—confirmed what I was seeing: “They just went in. They aren’t moving in a pattern that would be avoiding air defenses. They just went in straight in in a straight line formation almost. They didn’t have the shock and awe that we saw in Baghdad because they didn’t have to knock out the air defense systems.”American helicopters flew during a near-full moon—the worst possible stealth conditions—and dropped into the heart of Caracas unopposed.Someone gave the stand-down order.Who’s Running Venezuela?this was a law enforcement operation, Maduro goes to trial and Venezuela’s government continues. Three people had legitimate claims to lead:Delcy Rodríguez - Vice President under Maduro, acting president under Venezuelan law. She’s demanding “proof of life” for Maduro. Marco Rubio is talking to her - which contradicts Trump saying “we’re running it.”Edmundo González - Won the July 28, 2024 election with 70%+ of the vote. The US State Department recognized him as the legitimate president in August 2024. The European Parliament called him “the democratically-elected president.” Trump bypassed him.María Corina Machado - Won the 2023 opposition primary before Maduro barred her from running. Just awarded the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize. Trump’s response? She “doesn’t have the respect” to run Venezuela.Trump said he’s running Venezuela. But Rubio is negotiating with Maduro’s VP. Meanwhile, the actual elected president and the Nobel laureate are sidelined.The contradictions keep stacking.Twelve Hours, Two StoriesAt dawn, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced narco-terrorism charges. By noon, Trump was at Mar-a-Lago talking about oil.“We’re going to be running it with a group, and we’re going to make sure it’s run properly. We’re going to rebuild the oil infrastructure, which will cost billions of dollars. It’ll be paid for by the oil companies directly.”Nick called it exactly what it is: “This is a distraction to get oil and rare earth minerals and do a hemisphere-wide domination effort for the US.”The operation went from “law enforcement arrest” to “we’re running Venezuela” in twelve hours.The Perception DivideThat’s when the panel exploded.Lev Parnas was on. He was Trump’s point person on Venezuela negotiations during the first administration. He brokered oil contracts for 2+ billion barrels. He knows these players personally.“This was coordinated,” Lev said. He laid out the January 1st secret conversations—Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff, Kirill Dmitriev. “Maduro was effectively handed over. That’s why Trump spoke with such certainty.”A West Point history professor pushed back hard on the coordination theory. Academic skepticism versus insider knowledge.Then Wajahat Ali jumped in with the political angle no one else was seeing: “There’s going to be a massive fissure. America first isn’t just white nationalism. America first is no military interventionism, no support to Israel, no $40 billion to Argentina, and no frigging world policemen and regime change.”Marjorie Taylor Greene is already breaking with Trump on this. Thomas Massie too. The MAGA coalition that voted for “no more wars” just watched Trump invade a country without congressional approval.The debate got heated. Voices raised. Lev apologized to the professor: “I did not mean to, we get passionate in debates, especially some of the stuff that’s going on because I haven’t slept all night. I’ve been on the phone with my sources breaking a lot of the stuff that’s happening.”That’s the divide. Academics seeing historical patterns. Insiders reading chess moves in real time. Progressive analysts watching the MAGA coalition fracture over intervention.What Nobody’s AskingWe covered it for hours. The air defense stand-down. The narrative shift from justice to oil grab. The democratic leaders Trump bypassed. The Cuban intelligence services still running Venezuela’s military. The potential trap American forces just walked into.But the biggest story is the perception gap.Half the country sees a successful operation against a drug lord. The other half sees a coordinated handover that Putin orchestrated, Trump executed, and the media isn’t questioning.The helicopters flew unopposed. The systems didn’t fire. Trump said he’s running Venezuela now.Those are facts. How you interpret them reveals everything about what you think just happened in the Western Hemisphere.Thank you THE LEFT HOOK with Wajahat Ali, Lev Parnas, Lesley Jane Seymour, Caro Henry, Debbie Hupp, and many others for tuning into my live video with Nick Paro and Banner & Backbone Media! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

We’ve all had that moment. A friend says you’ve gone too far.This is that conversation. Not because Michael Cohen deserves to suffer. Because people who care tell you the truth.Watch the conversation between Lev Parnas, Dean Blundell, and Zev Shalev. No Fox News gotcha energy. Just concern from people who’ve been through their own transformations.Lev knows transformation. Six years tormented, investigated, vilified. He came through by telling the truth.“The truth will set you free,” Lev told Michael. “You will probably be a hero.”Michael Cohen spent 14 years as Trump’s fixer. He’s testified eight times before Congress. Built a podcast on being the insider who came clean.But on three documented matters, his story falls apart. And they point to a fourth question: what else don’t we know?1. Katie Johnson and the Private InvestigatorsWhen Katie Johnson filed her lawsuit alleging Trump and Epstein raped her as a child, Cohen says he sent private investigators. Wrong address, he claims.Why send investigators to someone accusing your client of child rape?Cohen claims Jane Doe was different from Katie Johnson, but they’re the same lawsuit, refiled anonymously by Lisa Bloom.Either there’s another case he knows about, or he’s avoiding the truth.2. The $95 Million House That Putin BoughtIn 2008, Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev bought Trump’s Palm Beach mansion—formerly Leslie Wexner’s—for $95 million. Trump paid $41 million. The profit was staggering in a collapsing market.Cohen was the lawyer on that deal. In his own book, Cohen writes that Trump told him Putin bought the house.Epstein’s emails suggest Russian money laundering. Senate investigations examined this closely. The evidence is overwhelming this wasn’t ordinary real estate.Yet Cohen dismisses it today as routine. Nothing to see.If you’re coming clean about Trump’s crimes, why protect this one?3. The Vekselberg PaymentsAfter Trump’s inauguration, Cohen received over $500,000 from Columbus Nova—run by Andrew Intrater, cousin of Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg.They called it “consulting.” Cohen took the money.Vekselberg connects to Ehud Barak, who connects to Epstein, who connects to Peter Thiel. The network is documented. But no Russian oligarch names appear in the Epstein files.Yet Cohen was in the middle, taking Russian oligarch money through American cutouts right after Trump took office.Routine consulting work, Cohen says.4. The UnknownIf Cohen was in the middle of Katie Johnson, Rybolovlev, and Vekselberg—what else?Cohen reminds everyone: 14 years by Trump’s side. Nothing happened without him knowing.But press him on Ukraine, Epstein’s network, Russian operations—nothing. His testimony: Stormy Daniels and clearing his name.Three documented cases. Three dismissals.After 14 years, what else hasn’t he told us?What Shane Yirak FoundShane Yirak at The Firebrand Project just released the third Kushner Files on Affinity Partners—$2 billion from Saudi Arabia’s MBS after Kushner left the White House.Shane traces the pattern: Kushner entered Trump’s orbit from desperation after disastrous deals at 26.Yirak reveals a familiar familial tale of a family grappling with succession issues. It’s well-known that Charles Kushner hired someone to film his brother-in-law with a prostitute, sent the tape as revenge. The family went to the FBI, yet Yirak points out that many of us have missed: Jared stayed loyal.That loyalty—staying silent, protecting crimes—is the what all these stories have in common.The Invitation, Not the IndictmentNobody wants Cohen to suffer.But redemption isn’t a performance. Real redemption means telling the whole truth. The parts that implicate people you worked with. The parts that expose the machine. Not to harm your funders and allies, but to reveal the truth to helps ave democracy.“Just come clean, my brother,” Lev said. Not as a prosecutor. As someone who’s been there.This is people who care enough to have the hard conversation. To invite him to finish what he started.The PatternKatie Johnson. Rybolovlev. Vekselberg. Three documented cases where Cohen was directly involved.In each case, he dismisses it as routine or claims selective memory. He can talk about Stormy Daniels because it’s not structural. He can’t talk about Russian money laundering or silencing rape allegations because those expose the machine.The same machine Kushner entered from desperation. The same machine that compromised Cohen for 14 years.Beyond these three documented cases—what else? What’s the full scope of what Cohen knows but won’t tell?Cohen knows the answers. And he knows what else he hasn’t told us.The people asking aren’t enemies. They’re people who’ve been through this. Who know how hard it is. Who know how liberating truth can be.The door’s open. Come clean completely—or prove us all wrong—about Katie Johnson, Rybolovlev, Vekselberg, and everything else from those 14 years.That invitation stands. From people who care enough to ask.The Kushner Files by Shane Yirak is available at The Firebrand Project. Support independent journalism that asks the questions establishment media won’t. 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

📁 Epstein Files Deadline—Will DOJ Actually Release Them?Tomorrow is December 19th, the deadline Trump signed into law requiring DOJ to release FBI’s Epstein files. The silence from Justice is deafening. House Speaker Mike Johnson sent everyone home and closed the House for tomorrow. Dan Bongino, who hyped these files as a podcaster before becoming Deputy FBI Director, just resigned.Today House Democrats released 68 photos from Epstein’s estate—a fraction of 95,000 images. Bill Gates with an unidentified woman. Steve Bannon, whose Wall Street past connects him to Epstein’s financial crime networks. Noam Chomsky on a plane. Text messages recruiting an 18-year-old from Russia. Passages from “Lolita” handwritten on a woman’s body. Redacted passports from Ukraine, Russia, Eastern Europe.This is what they’re showing us. Tomorrow we find out what they’re hiding.🏛️ Trump Renames Kennedy Center After Himself—IllegallyTrump added his name to the Kennedy Center. Federal law explicitly prohibits installing additional memorials there without Congress. He did it anyway.The board “vote” was on Zoom, run from someone’s house. Representative Joyce Beatty tried to object—she was muted. Others with concerns were muted. The White House claimed unanimous approval. It wasn’t.The website already says “Trump-Kennedy Center.” A memorial Congress designated for JFK after his 1963 assassination now bears Trump’s name at the end of a disastrous first year. Maria Shriver called it “beyond comprehension.” The Kennedy family should sue immediately.⚓ Venezuela “Total Blockade” Declared—Act of WarTrump declared a “total and complete blockade” of all sanctioned oil tankers entering or leaving Venezuela, designating Maduro’s government a “foreign terrorist organization.” The U.S. military has already killed at least 90 people since September in vessel strikes Trump claims are drug interdiction but provides no evidence for.Venezuela condemned the blockade as “illegal and reckless.” Russia warned of “unpredictable consequences.” Under international law, a true naval blockade is an act of war.Trump’s “largest armada ever assembled in South America” rhetoric sounds like preparation for military action. Watch this space.🏗️ Trump Bypassing Law to Demolish Historic Federal BuildingsA former GSA official filed a court declaration alleging Trump is soliciting demolition bids for four historic federal buildings in Washington, bypassing normal review processes. The list includes HUD headquarters—a brutalist architectural landmark—and buildings with iconic New Deal murals.Trump can relocate departments. But there’s a process for demolishing historic buildings. He’s ignoring it, just like he ignored the process for gutting the White House East Wing.If he gets away with demolishing these buildings, he’ll demolish anything, anywhere. This is the people’s architectural heritage, not his personal property.📱 ICE Scans U.S. Citizen’s Face Before Releasing HimICE agents detained a 23-year-old U.S. citizen in Chicago, ignored his claims of citizenship, handcuffed him, and only released him after scanning his face with facial recognition technology that confirmed his status.There was no legal basis for the detention. The scan revealed the system is linked to multiple government databases, providing instant access to comprehensive personal information through a portable device.Combine this with CBP’s 500 new surveillance drones operating “beyond visual line of sight,” airline data on domestic travelers, and license plate readers—we’re living in a surveillance state. Today it’s deployed against immigrants and people of color. Tomorrow it’s all of us.The pattern is clear: ignore the law, silence opposition, declare victory, surveil everyone.Day 332 is just another day in an administration that treats accountability as weakness and oversight as optional. We’re tracking every development, every connection, every norm violated.Because someone has to.The Trump Tyranny Tracker airs Monday-Thursday at 2 PM ET. Follow @OlgaNYC1211 and subscribe to Trump Tyranny Tracker on Substack. Join me for The FiveStack with Dean Blundell at 3 PM ET.Follow Olga Lautman’s essential tracking of authoritarian developments at Trump Tyranny Tracker on Substack. Join me for The FiveStack with Dean Blundell at 3 PM ET for the top 5 stories of the day.Thank you Nick Paro, Richard Hogan, MD, PhD(2), DBA, Jeanne Elbe, Stuart Cohen, Susan Gaustad, 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

PENTAGON POINTS FINGER AT HEGSETH AND TRUMPThe Spider-Man meme came to life at the Pentagon today. Spokesperson Kingsley Wilson was asked about the Caribbean strikes and made clear: these were “presidentially directed.” The chain of command “functions as it should.” The secretary and the president “are the ones directing these strikes.” Translation: the military brass is putting daylight between themselves and what increasingly looks like a war crime.Archive footage from Fox News shows Hegseth bragging about watching the strike live. “We knew exactly who was in that boat. We knew exactly what they were doing.” The kind of thing you should not say on television while committing a war crime—but there he was.In 72 hours, the story went from “fake news” to both parties in Congress demanding investigations. Senator Wicker is involved. Republicans and Democrats are using the words “war crimes.” Britain has already stopped sharing intelligence because they don’t want to be complicit in extrajudicial killings.As Olga put it: “They’re all trying to put the liability on this.” The military is pointing at Hegseth. Hegseth pointed at an admiral. Everyone’s saying “he did it.”NOEM BRAGS ABOUT DEFYING FEDERAL COURTDHS Secretary Kristi Noem one-upped Hegseth by openly admitting she defied a federal court order on deportations to El Salvador. The judge reopened contempt proceedings Friday. By Monday, Noem was confessing. “This country has turned into such a banana republic,” Olga said. “I follow autocratic regimes. I’ve never seen anything like it.”KUSHNER IN MOSCOW WITH PUTIN AND DMITRIEVMeanwhile, Jared Kushner was in Moscow meeting with Putin alongside Steve Witkoff and sanctioned oligarch Kirill Dmitriev. This is the same Kushner who asked Russian Ambassador Kislyak for a back channel in 2016, who dined with Abramovich and Vekselberg, whose buildings were financed by Russian money. Olga traced his Russian connections back to 2014-15. It’s a business deal at Ukraine’s expense.PENTAGON BARS AP, REUTERS, CNN—INSTALLS LAURA LOOMERThe Pentagon barred major news organizations from Hegseth’s briefings. Access now goes only to pro-Trump outlets and extremist influencers. Laura Loomer was broadcasting from inside the Washington Post’s former Pentagon office. Russia does this too, Olga noted—except their propagandists are trained professionals who receive morning briefings on what to push.E = MC²: EPSTEIN’S MODELING PIPELINE EXPOSEDThe second hour brought investigative researcher Ellie Leonard onto the show to discuss the House Oversight email dumps—and the picture emerging is darker than anyone imagined.MC2 Model Management wasn’t a modeling agency. It was E = MC², with E standing for Epstein. Three offices: New York, Miami, Tel Aviv. The Tel Aviv office provided visa cover, laundering Eastern European women into the United States on O-1 “Einstein” visas through Israeli modeling contracts. JPMorgan financed it all, despite their own employees flagging human trafficking red flags.RUSSIAN INTELLIGENCE GRADUATES IN EPSTEIN’S ORBITOlga traced the pipeline directly: Svetlana Pozhidaeva, a graduate of Russia’s foreign ministry academy (MGIMO), sent a lingerie photo to Maxim Russia, got picked up as a model, dropped out of diplomatic training, obtained an O-1 visa through Epstein’s network, and ended up as his assistant—with a mission to infiltrate American AI research. Her grandfather is buried in the Russian equivalent of Arlington Cemetery. He was GRU. Her father signed a lease listing his job as GRU.“There is only one explanation,” said KGB defector Yuri Shvets. “She was an agent infiltrated with the help of Jeffrey Epstein to penetrate the American network linked to supercomputers and artificial intelligence.”THE EMAILS THEY NEVER WANTED RELEASEDEllie has been combing through tens of thousands of emails. The names on her list: Bill Gates, Jean-Luc Brunel, Leon Black, Michael Wolff, the Dubins, Ghislaine Maxwell, Larry Summers, Cathy Rumler (Obama’s White House counsel). The Larry Summers exchanges read like “two 12-year-old girls talking to each other,” she said. “Geeky guys who can’t lay anybody” who suddenly had access to women they could never have gotten on their own.The emails reveal Epstein defending Woody Allen, ranting against Mia and Ronan Farrow, and joking with Michael Wolff about surviving the MeToo movement. “You and I are old news,” Epstein wrote. “Maybe we got missed.” Wolff’s response: “Let’s cross your fingers.”JUDGE BERMAN TAKES CONTROL OF FILE RELEASESJudge Berman is actively involved in ensuring the next document release contains the right materials. Files from as early as 2003 could drop before Christmas. The network connecting Trump, Epstein, Dershowitz, Ken Starr, and Wexner is becoming visible in the documentary record.Follow Olga Lautman at Trump Tyranny Tracker and Ellie Leonard at The Unpaid Panicked Writer on Substack. The Greatest Heist Chapter 4 is now available at narativ.org. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

The RecordingOn Day 310 of the Trump administration, Bloomberg dropped an explosive scoop: they obtained an actual recording of Steve Witkoff—Trump’s special envoy—calling Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s advisor, on October 14th to coach him on how to pitch Russia’s Ukraine surrender plan to Trump. The call came one day before Trump’s phone call with Putin.Let that sink in. The American president’s envoy was advising the Kremlin on how to sell their demands to make it look like the plan originated from Washington. Witkoff also helpfully tipped off the Russians that Zelensky would be visiting the White House later that week.This isn’t negotiation. It’s coordination. In any functioning democracy, this would trigger an immediate investigation.The “Seditious Six”Instead, the FBI busies itself with more pressing matters—like interviewing six Democratic lawmakers who reminded service members they can refuse illegal orders.Senator Mark Kelly, a decorated Navy captain and former astronaut, now faces a Pentagon investigation that could lead to court-martial. His crime? Stating the obvious: that the Uniform Code of Military Justice requires troops to disobey unlawful orders. Trump called for these veterans to be arrested and executed for “sedition.” Defense Secretary Hegseth labeled them the “Seditious Six.”Indiana CavesIndiana’s Republican leadership caved to Trump’s bullying campaign. After publicly attacking holdout lawmakers by name, calling them RINOs, and promising to primary anyone who resisted his redistricting demands, the state legislature reversed course. Several lawmakers reported being targeted with swatting and death threats. Democracy by intimidation.Foreign Trolls ExposedX’s new “About This Account” feature accidentally confirmed what we’ve been saying for years: much of MAGA’s online army isn’t even American. Accounts like MAGANationX (”Patriot Voice for We The People” with 390,000 followers) turned out to be operating from Eastern Europe. MAGA Scope, featuring Trump in a tuxedo with American flag emojis, was created in Nigeria in 2024. As Olga noted, Nigeria is a known hub for Russian bot operations—these aren’t random scammers, they’re nodes in a coordinated influence network.The FracturingTrump’s approval has sunk to 38%—his lowest of the second term—with a 19-point gap between approval and disapproval. The MAGA coalition is fracturing over Iran policy, the Epstein files, and the Argentina bailout. Even Marjorie Taylor Greene is reportedly eyeing the exit.Keep Ukraine in Your ThoughtsThis Thanksgiving, as Olga reminded us, keep Ukraine in your thoughts. People are still being pulled from rubble after the latest Russian bombardment. Missiles keep falling while Washington pretends to negotiate a “peace plan” that Moscow literally wrote.Follow Olga Lautman’s essential tracking at Trump Tyranny Tracker and Unmasking Russia. The Trump Tyranny Tracker airs Monday through Thursday at 2PM ET.SHOW NOTES: Day 310 TTT — Bloomberg obtains recording of Witkoff coaching Putin’s advisor on how to pitch Russia’s plan to Trump. FBI targets Mark Kelly and “Seditious Six” lawmakers. Indiana GOP caves to redistricting after swatting and death threats. X feature exposes MAGA accounts as foreign trolls from Nigeria and Eastern Europe. Trump approval sinks to 38%.Follow Olga Lautman’s essential tracking at Trump Tyranny Tracker and Unmasking Russia. The Trump Tyranny Tracker airs Monday through Thursday at 2PM ET.Thank you Autumn Morrison, Julie, Gordon Soukoreff, Jann McCarthy, Damara Shanmugan, 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

Investigative journalist Zev Shalev joined Stephanie Wilson on Freedom Over Fascism Live to break down the newly released Epstein-Maxwell emails from House Democrats, revealing how Jeffrey Epstein coordinated damage control with author Michael Wolff during Trump’s 2015 presidential campaign and managed Prince Andrew’s scandal through Ghislaine Maxwell. The emails expose a sophisticated operation spanning 2011-2019, raising questions about Epstein’s Wolff’s role as intermediary between Trump’s campaign and Epstein, while Zev connected these revelations to his ongoing “Greatest Heist” investigation into Trump-Epstein financial crimes. The conversation traced how billions of dollars moved through Epstein’s accounts—a college dropout fired from Bear Stearns who somehow became a near-billionaire—and why mainstream media continues suppressing these financial crime networks that stretch from the 1980s to today’s political landscape.Thank you Lesley Jane Seymour, Robin Payes, Peter Thomas Lang, Pamela, Noble Blend, and many others for tuning into my live video with Stephanie G Wilson, PhD! 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

NARATIV has obtained three previously unreported emails that directly implicate Donald Trump in knowledge of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking operation. These emails, sent between 2011 and 2019, show Jeffrey Epstein explicitly stating that Trump knew about “the girls” and asked Ghislaine Maxwell to “stop.”One email reveals that a victim spent hours with Trump at Epstein’s house - but was never mentioned in testimony.Another shows Epstein and journalist Michael Wolff strategizing about how to leverage Trump’s denials for “political currency” during the 2016 presidential campaign.These are Epstein’s own words, in writing, to Ghislaine Maxwell and Michael Wolff.DOWNLOAD THE EMAILS EMAIL 1: “THE DOG THAT HASN’T BARKED” The first email was sent on April 2nd, 2011 - exactly one month after British newspapers published explosive exposés about Prince Andrew and Virginia Giuffre. Jeffrey Epstein writes to Ghislaine Maxwell: “I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump. [VICTIM] spent hours at my house with him, he has never once been mentioned.” Let me repeat that: A victim spent HOURS with Trump at Epstein’s house. Epstein is noting - with apparent satisfaction - that despite this victim’s testimony to authorities, Trump’s name “has never once been mentioned.” The context here is critical. This email came just weeks after the Mail on Sunday published photographs of Prince Andrew with 17-year-old Virginia Roberts at Ghislaine Maxwell’s London townhouse. Prince Andrew was facing global media scrutiny. His reputation was being destroyed. But Trump? According to Epstein: the “dog that hasn’t barked.” Lev Parnas: “Now We Place Him in Epstein’s Home With a Victim” Lev Parnas, former Trump associate who has been cooperating with investigators, put it bluntly: “Trump kept boasting to everybody that he’s never been to Epstein Island. Well, now we place him in Epstein’s home with a victim for several hours. So these are very damaging.” This email doesn’t just show Trump’s connection to Epstein - it shows Epstein actively tracking which victims could or couldn’t implicate Trump.EMAIL 2: “HE KNEW ABOUT THE GIRLS”Fast forward eight years. January 31st, 2019.The Miami Herald has just published Julie K. Brown’s devastating “Perversion of Justice” investigation.Federal prosecutors are circling. Epstein will be arrested in just five months.And Epstein is emailing journalist Michael Wolff - the author who had unprecedented access to Trump for “Fire and Fury.” Epstein writes: “trump said he asked me to resign, never a member ever. of course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop” “Of course he knew about the girls.” “He asked ghislaine to stop.” This is Jeffrey Epstein explicitly stating that Donald Trump: - KNEW about the sex trafficking operation - ASKED Ghislaine Maxwell to stop These are not allegations from victims. This is Epstein himself, telling a journalist that Trump had direct knowledge. EMAIL 3: “POLITICAL CURRENCY”December 15th, 2015. Trump is the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination. CNN is hosting a debate in Las Vegas. And Michael Wolff emails Epstein with a heads-up: “I hear CNN planning to ask Trump tonight about his relationship with you--either on air or in scrum afterwards.” Epstein replies: “if we were able to craft an answer for him, what do you think it should be?” Now listen to Wolff’s response: “I think you should let him hang himself. If he says he hasn’t been on the plane or to the house, then that gives you a valuable PR and political currency. You can hang him in a way that potentially generates a positive benefit for you, or, if it really looks like he could win, you could save him, generating a debt.” This is a calculated strategy. Let Trump lie about the plane, the house. Then either expose him for “political currency” - or SAVE him to create a debt. Lev Parnas: Trump Was “Part of the Cover-Up” “What we’re starting to see is that Donald Trump was part of maybe the cover-up going back then, protecting himself and maybe laying out Epstein.” This suggests Trump wasn’t just aware of Epstein’s operation - he may have been actively involved in managing the fallout and controlling who got exposed. THE TIMELINE Subscribe to follow this investigation Share this story. Contact your representatives and demand a full investigation into Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Thank you Ellie Leonard, Stephanie G Wilson, PhD, Cat, Cathy R. Payne, Pamela, 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

🌍 INTELLIGENCE COLLAPSE: The Five Eyes Alliance FracturesThe United Kingdom suspended intelligence sharing with the United States in the Caribbean after determining that Trump’s policy of bombing suspected drug boats amounts to illegal extrajudicial killing. British officials concluded their intelligence was being used to select lethal targets for strikes that have already killed 76 people. Canada and U.S. military lawyers echo Britain’s assessment: these operations violate international law.“I don’t think people understand how consequential this is,” Olga noted on today’s show. “US and UK have the closest intelligence sharing and are the closest allies forever. And here you have the UK concerned that the information they were providing was used to carry out these killings and they don’t want to be complicit in murder.” This marks the first time in the post-World War II era that Britain has cut intelligence cooperation with America over concerns about complicity in extrajudicial violence. The Five Eyes began fracturing in February after Zelensky was thrown out of the White House. In August, Tulsi Gabbard blocked allied access to Russia-Ukraine intelligence. Last month, Dutch intelligence publicly cut back NSA and CIA cooperation. Now Britain has made the break official and public.🔍 BROKEN PROMISES: Patel’s Betrayal of MI5FBI Director Kash Patel promised MI5 he would preserve a critical FBI liaison post in London that coordinates Five Eyes surveillance, including monitoring of China’s new embassy. He then abruptly eliminated the position as part of his bureau purge, reassigning the agent without notice. The betrayal reveals how Patel’s systematic gutting of counterintelligence veterans serves to isolate America from allied cooperation.⚖️ JUSTICE CORRUPTED: Rewarding Coup Plotters, Hunting InvestigatorsTrump issued “full, complete, and unconditional” pardons to 77 allies tied to the 2020 election subversion effort — Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows, Sidney Powell among them. Many face only state charges his pardons cannot legally touch. The Justice Department simultaneously opened a criminal inquiry into the intelligence officials who authored the 2017 assessment of Russian election interference, issuing up to 30 subpoenas targeting John Brennan, Peter Strzok, and Lisa Page. The 2017 assessment was validated by every subsequent investigation, including the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee. Yet Trump now criminally investigates analysts who reported accurate intelligence because he dislikes their conclusions.🔒 PRISON PRIVILEGES: Maxwell’s Special TreatmentA whistleblower told Rep. Jamie Raskin that Ghislaine Maxwell receives banned privileges in federal prison: custom meals, expedited mail, after-hours recreation, a service puppy in training, computer-enabled visits — all while preparing a commutation request for Trump. “Can you imagine every survivor who this woman basically raped and delivered to wealthy people?” Olga asked. “They’re sitting there locked within their horrors and their mind. And this woman is playing with f*****g puppies.” Meanwhile, Alexander Smirnov — the FBI informant who admitted fabricating the Biden-Burisma conspiracy — vanished from federal custody despite a six-year sentence, officials claiming he was “furloughed” with no forwarding address.👁️ SURVEILLANCE STATE: Mass Tracking Deployed at Public GatheringsDHS deployed the Homeland Security Information Network at college football games and campus protests, integrating live feeds from CCTV, drones, body cameras, and private cameras into real-time facial recognition searches. The surveillance infrastructure operates without disclosure to attendees and far exceeds what the public is told. Testing mass surveillance at football games normalizes the technology before deploying it against political opposition.Trump Tyranny Tracker airs Monday and Tuesday at 2PM ET on Narativ.org. Follow Olga Lautman’s essential tracking at OlgaLautman.Substack.com.Thank you Ellie Leonard, Richard Hogan, MD, PhD(2), DBA, Julie, HoldingTheLine, Maureen Drews, 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.orgTara Palmeri has done extraordinary work documenting Jeffrey Epstein’s survivors in Tara Palmeri The Red Letter, giving voice to Virginia Giuffre and the women trafficked to the most powerful men in the world. She brought Bloomberg’s latest: federal prosecutors built a parallel money laundering investigation alongside the sex trafficking case. Simultaneous. And Eps…

Democrats swept every contested seat Tuesday night, from Mississippi to Georgia to Staten Island. The margins weren’t close. Twelve-point, fifteen-point victories in races where polls predicted tight finishes just days before. Record turnout across red states and blue states alike delivered a verdict the Trump administration couldn’t muddy or steal, despite laying groundwork to challenge results through coordinated disinformation from MAGA operatives and Russian bot networks claiming fraud at polling places.The victory matters because it demonstrates what Olga Lautman has insisted throughout nine months of tracking authoritarian developments: when enough people show up, no amount of election rigging or propaganda can stop them. The power of mass participation overwhelmed the infrastructure being constructed to control outcomes. But that infrastructure didn’t disappear Tuesday night. It’s still being built, piece by systematic piece.The Department of Homeland Security released Mobile Identify this week—an app available on Google Play that puts facial recognition technology in every local police officer’s pocket. Any sheriff or cop can now scan faces and check immigration status in real time, instantly retrieving personal data and deportation orders from federal databases. The tool extends DHS’s surveillance reach beyond ICE into thousands of municipal police departments nationwide.The technology doesn’t limit itself to immigration enforcement. Today it searches for immigrants. Tomorrow it searches for whatever list gets loaded into the system. That’s the pattern with surveillance capabilities once deployed—they find new applications regardless of original intent. Privacy laws that should prevent this kind of warrantless scanning have been circumvented entirely. States have leverage to push back, but doing so requires recognizing the threat.Meanwhile, DHS is building a biometric database that will store facial recognition data and personal information from every foreign traveler entering or leaving the United States—for 75 years. The retention period reveals the purpose. No legitimate security function requires keeping facial scans for three-quarters of a century. That timeframe serves permanence, not protection. The database will start at airports before expanding to land and sea ports, creating what cybersecurity experts immediately identified as a massive honeypot for hackers and state actors.The third element connects the others. DHS plans to merge state driver’s license databases into its SAVE system, creating a national citizenship verification tool that links Social Security numbers, passport records, and visa information. Privacy experts warn the architecture enables both mass surveillance and systematic errors that could strip citizens of rights through false flags. The federal government is essentially compelling states to hand over DMV records for a backdoor national ID system that will interface with every other database being constructed.Connect these three initiatives and the design becomes clear: local police with facial recognition apps checking against 75-year biometric databases, all cross-referenced through a national citizenship verification system. Each component amplifies the others. This is infrastructure for tracking and controlling movement at scale, being deployed before it’s needed for its ultimate purpose.The information environment is being shaped simultaneously. Laura Loomer received Pentagon press credentials this week, joining Gateway Pundit and LindellTV in a Trump-aligned press corps gaining access as major outlets—including Fox News—walked out over new rules banning journalists from seeking information not pre-approved by the government. When propagandists replace journalists at Pentagon briefings, that’s not coincidence. It’s information control following the Russian playbook from the early 2000s, when regular journalists got pushed out and replaced with state media.The Pentagon specifically matters because they’re not just cutting off legacy media—they’re banning personnel from speaking to Congress. No accountability to elected representatives, no independent reporting, just information filtered through loyalists like Loomer who have built platforms attacking officials deemed insufficiently loyal to Trump.And here’s where Tuesday’s election intersects with the surveillance infrastructure: Trump-appointed election denier Heather Honey and conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi are still publicly calling for Trump to declare a national emergency to federalize election administration. Corsi claims he’s drafting the executive order for future implementation. The person who led Stop the Steal efforts in Arizona now holds a position inside DHS telling state officials how to secure their elections—the definition of putting the arsonist in charge of fire prevention.Tuesday proved mass participation defeats prepared theft. Democrats didn’t just win—they won big enough that pre-positioned disinformation couldn’t muddy results. Voters showed up in California for a state proposition in numbers that signal where public sentiment stands. Young voters turned out in impressive numbers across the board. The blue wave overwhelmed the machinery being assembled to prevent exactly this outcome.But the machinery persists. The surveillance systems being deployed, the press access being restricted, the emergency powers being drafted—none of that went away Wednesday morning. The 75-year database still gets built. The facial recognition apps still get distributed. The citizenship verification system still gets merged. These aren’t tools for governing. They’re tools for control, being put in place while they can be justified as routine security measures, ready to be activated when the next crisis provides pretext.The victory Tuesday matters. It proves resistance works. It demonstrates that turnout can overcome rigging when margins are big enough. But it doesn’t eliminate the need to understand what’s being constructed in parallel. Authoritarian infrastructure doesn’t announce itself with dramatic reveals. It accumulates through bureaucratic expansion until the architecture is complete.That’s Day 290. The people showed up Tuesday. The question is whether they’ll stay engaged enough to dismantle what’s being built while it’s still under construction.Thank you Nick Paro, Noble Blend, Stuart Cohen, Maggie Birmingham, Bud Jones, and many others for tuning into my live video with Olga Lautman and Ellie Leonard! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

I joined Shane Yirak on Firebrands United to discuss yesterday’s Democratic sweep and what it actually means. We talked about how Mamdani’s victory shows voters want policies that work for the middle class, not more identity politics. The conversation moved through corruption in both parties, the power of independent journalism, and how open-source investigation lets a 25-year-old in a dark room find answers that used to be hidden. I talked about my Greatest Heist investigation—specifically the second book documenting Epstein’s role in the 2008 collapse and JP Morgan Chase’s involvement. Shane and I agreed we’re in an information war. The weapon is truth, documented and verified. That’s how we win.Thank you Centered America, Pamela, P. J. Schuster, Jeanne Elbe, Jennifer Wells, and many others for tuning into my live video with Shane Yirak! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

Two weeks ago, Michael Wolff received a letter threatening a billion-dollar lawsuit if he didn’t retract statements about Melania Trump’s connections to Jeffrey Epstein. Instead of backing down, Wolff did something remarkable: he sued the First Lady first.“I certainly wasn’t gonna say that this was not true, recant it, apologize for it, no less pay them a billion dollars,” Wolff told me. His lawyers explained the Trump playbook: file lawsuits you know you won’t win for the express purpose of causing “so much brain damage that people relent. They say, okay, fine, I’ll just walk away from this.”This wasn’t retreat—it was a calculated offensive that transformed Wolff from threatened journalist into subpoena-wielding prosecutor. Under New York’s anti-SLAPP laws, designed to protect free speech from intimidation lawsuits, Wolff now has the power to compel both Melania and Donald Trump to answer questions under oath about their relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex trafficker who died in federal custody under suspicious circumstances.“To be perfectly honest, I’d like nothing better than to get Donald Trump and Melania Trump under oath and actually find out all of the details of their relationship with Epstein,” Wolff told me during tonight’s interview. That prospect—Trump under oath discussing Epstein—represents the disclosure the Trump family has spent years and millions of dollars trying to prevent.The Photographs No One Has SeenWolff’s credibility on this subject comes from direct observation. In 2014, while interviewing Epstein for a potential biography, Epstein unlocked a safe in his Palm Beach home and displayed photographs “like playing cards” on a table—images showing Donald Trump with young, topless women. One photograph captured Trump in light-colored pants with a visible stain while multiple girls around him pointed and laughed.When Wolff urged Epstein to make these photographs public once Trump became president, Epstein refused, suggesting he “wasn’t crazy” enough to cross Trump. The implication: even Epstein, who trafficked underage girls and blackmailed powerful men, feared what Trump might do in retaliation.These photographs exist somewhere. The question is whether they’re buried in FBI evidence rooms or hidden in the still-unreleased “Epstein files” that both parties claim they want public but somehow never materialize.The Modeling ConnectionBoth Trump and Epstein were obsessed with models—supermodels, runway models, catalog models, girls who dreamed of being models. This wasn’t casual interest; both men invested in modeling agencies and used them as recruitment pipelines. Melania fits directly into this ecosystem, arriving in New York in the 1990s when both Trump and Epstein were prowling the modeling circuit.Photographs place all three together—Trump, Melania, and Epstein—at Mar-a-Lago in 2000, alongside Ghislaine Maxwell and Prince Andrew. This wasn’t a chance encounter; this was their world. The lawsuit threatening Wolff objects to him saying Melania “knew” Epstein, despite photographic evidence of exactly that.The Trumps aren’t suing because Wolff is lying. They’re suing because he’s telling the truth, and they’re using litigation as a weapon to exhaust, intimidate, and silence anyone who connects those dots publicly.Epstein’s Tapes and Trump’s BubbleWolff has released portions of his recorded interviews with Epstein, including Epstein casually describing himself as Trump’s “closest friend for ten years” and boasting intimate knowledge of Trump’s sexual habits. On tape, Epstein claimed “the first time [Trump] slept with [Melania] was on my plane”—suggesting their relationship began within Epstein’s orbit, on the infamous “Lolita Express.”“I’ve long since come to understand that there are many things going on simultaneously in Jeffrey Epstein’s life,” Wolff reflected. Epstein operated under a “complex web of cause and effect that seemed like it could at any time take him down or make him rich.” Yet somehow he survived—until he couldn’t. It’s a tale of two friends: one becomes president, the other dies alone in a jail cell.When I asked Wolff how Trump would react to his electoral defeats in Virginia, New Jersey, and New York, his answer revealed something crucial about Trump’s survival mechanism: “Donald Trump lives in his own world. It’s a bubble reality. In his mind, the world is as he wants it to be, and he pushes forward on that basis and only on that basis. There’s never a recalibration.”Trump is “a man without an inner life,” Wolff added, which explains how he compartmentalizes everything—including his friendship with a sex trafficker who knew too much.This explains how Trump survived four criminal indictments, a conviction, and now mounting evidence of his Epstein connections. He simply denies reality exists and assumes his will wins in the end. It’s worked so far.What Comes NextWolff isn’t just defending himself—he’s going on offense. His new Substack, “Howl,” will document the legal case in real-time while methodically telling the Epstein story and covering Trump’s White House. He’s launched a GoFundMe to cover legal expenses because taking on a sitting president and First Lady requires serious resources. The Trumps have threatened or sued James Carville, The Daily Beast, and others over Epstein connections—most backed down or settled. Wolff’s fighting back, and he needs support to sustain a legal battle against unlimited Trump family resources.“Right now, I’m just suing the First Lady with an eye that that might be the ultimate book,” Wolff quipped. He’s not planning another traditional Trump book—he’s done writing about White House chaos from the inside. But a legal discovery process forcing Trump to answer questions about Epstein? That’s a different book entirely.But the stakes justify the cost. If Wolff succeeds in forcing Trump to testify under oath about Epstein, it could crack open the scandal that Trump has spent a decade trying to bury. We’ll finally get answers about the nature of their friendship, what Trump knew about Epstein’s trafficking operation, and whether Melania’s introduction to Trump happened through Epstein’s network.The legal threats from Melania’s lawyers included James Carville and The Daily Beast among their targets. Most backed down. Wolff didn’t. He turned their billion-dollar threat into subpoena power, their intimidation into investigation.Trump’s bubble reality may have protected him from four indictments, but it can’t protect him from sworn testimony. And that’s why Melania’s lawyers are threatening everyone who mentions Epstein’s name—because once Trump has to answer questions under oath, the bubble pops.Michael Wolff just called their bluff. Now we’ll see if they’re willing to actually go to court and defend what they’ve spent years trying to hide. Wolff needs resources to sustain this fight—the GoFundMe link is available on his Substack. This isn’t just about one journalist’s legal defense; it’s about whether anyone can force Trump to tell the truth about Epstein under oath.Michael Wolff ’s Substack “Howl” provides real-time updates on the Melania lawsuit, methodical Epstein reporting, and Trump White House coverage. His GoFundMe for legal defense is linked on his Substack at michaelwolff.substack.com. Subscribe to support independent journalism that powerful people are trying to silence.Thank you Ellie Leonard, J Dziak, Debbie Hupp, Robin Payes, Ang Traders, and many others for tuning into my live video with Michael Wolff! 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

Democratic institutions are being systematically hollowed out, replaced with performance and propaganda while actual power consolidates behind closed doors.🏛️ Senate Theater While China WinsThe Senate passed three resolutions this week opposing Trump’s tariffs—51-47 against global tariffs, 50-46 on Canada, 52-48 on Brazil. Four Republicans crossed party lines in each vote: Rand Paul, Mitch McConnell, Susan Collins, and Lisa Murkowski. The headlines wrote themselves about bipartisan pushback and cracks in Republican unity.But the House enacted rules blocking these resolutions from ever reaching the floor. Trump’s tariffs remain fully in force. The votes were theater—carefully staged resistance that changes nothing.While senators performed their constitutional duties for the cameras, analysts assessed Trump’s Beijing summit with Xi Jinping. The verdict was unanimous: China won decisively. Beijing secured immediate tariff rollbacks and suspended rare earth export controls without making a single structural concession on intellectual property, forced technology transfer, or Taiwan. Trump received publicity around soybean purchases and fentanyl cooperation—talking points for farm country ahead of 2026. Both leaders declared victory, but only one side extracted concrete gains.The juxtaposition reveals how power actually works now. Congress stages symbolic votes while Trump hands authoritarian allies what they want. American consumers pay 47 percent more for Chinese goods nearly a year into these tariffs, and the Supreme Court hasn’t even ruled on whether Trump had legal authority to impose them. If the Court strikes down the tariffs, the trillions collected become an accounting nightmare—how do you rebate tariffs incorrectly charged to every American?⚔️ DOGE Seizes Military ControlBut the tariff theater obscures something more dangerous. Trump’s DOGE unit, which came top life under Elon Musk, is executing a military takeover in plain sight. DOGE now controls the Pentagon’s drone overhaul, bypassing traditional procurement to acquire 30,000 drones. Separately, Rear Admiral Kurt Rothenhaus—a decorated officer who oversaw billions in naval research funding—was removed and replaced by Rachel Riley, a 33-year-old former DOGE employee and McKinsey partner with no naval experience. Riley previously pushed for mass layoffs of 8,000 HHS employees before being moved to control naval research.Senator Mark Kelly, a former naval aviator, called the appointment “highly unorthodox.” That understates what’s happening. The Office of Naval Research, created by Congress in 1946, has historically been led by senior military officers with extensive experience in technology, science, and engineering. Now a civilian political operative controls billions in military research funding and weapons procurement. This isn’t efficiency—it’s the systematic replacement of military expertise with personal loyalty.🔒 Democrats Locked Out of War BriefingsThe military purge extends to information control. The Trump administration held a Republicans-only briefing on U.S. strikes near Venezuela that killed nearly 60 people. Democrats were systematically excluded from discussions about military operations that have resulted in at least 61 deaths across 14 known strikes in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific over two months. Senator Mark Warner warned this politicizes military decision-making and eliminates congressional oversight of escalating Caribbean operations.When the opposition party loses access to information about ongoing military strikes, oversight becomes impossible. The bipartisan briefing system that survived previous administrations—including genuine national security crises—has been discarded. Congress can’t check what it can’t see.📝 Erasing January 6 From HistoryThe Justice Department, now under Jeanine Pirro’s control, is erasing January 6 from official records. Two federal prosecutors were placed on administrative leave after describing the January 6 crowd as a “mob of rioters” in a sentencing memo for Taylor Taranto, a Trump-pardoned insurrectionist later arrested near Barack Obama’s home with weapons. The DOJ replaced their memo with one that omits any reference to the Capitol attack or Trump’s role in inciting it. Prosecutors are being punished for stating facts in court documents. The written record is being rewritten in real time.📱 Facial Recognition Deployed on CitizensAnd the surveillance state is expanding onto American streets. Videos show ICE and Border Patrol agents using facial recognition technology called Mobile Fortify on people in public spaces, including minors, to “verify citizenship.” An agent in Chicago pointed a phone at a teenager’s face after the teen said he had no ID, then asked him to confirm his name. Technology once justified for border security now scans citizens without warrants, legislative authorization, or public debate.🔴 The Pattern Is ClearDay 283 connects: symbolic congressional votes that change nothing, military functions controlled by political operatives, opposition lawmakers locked out of war briefings, prosecutors punished for documenting violence, and facial recognition deployed on citizens. The pattern isn’t complicated. Democratic guardrails aren’t bending—they’re being systematically dismantled and replaced with mechanisms of authoritarian control.The Senate can vote all it wants. But while they’re voting, actual power is being transferred to unelected loyalists, opposition oversight is being eliminated, history is being erased, and surveillance is expanding. Theater can’t stop what’s happening when the stage itself is burning.Trump Tyranny Tracker airs Tuesdays and Thursdays at 7PM ET with Zev Shalev and Olga Lautman. Follow Olga’s essential daily tracking at Trump Tyranny Tracker on Substack. For more investigative reporting, visit Narativ.org.Thank you Cathy R. Payne, Rachel Hendricks, Agent#99, Yvette, GW B, 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

Technical issues kept us from going live on Substack but thankfully we recorded the show. The final assault on voting rightsThe Supreme Court heard arguments today on a Section 2 case that will determine whether Congress retains any power to enforce constitutional limitations on presidential authority. The case centers on Republican efforts to eliminate congressional seats currently held by Black Caucus members through aggressive gerrymandering. Legal experts expect the conservative majority to approve these changes, potentially handing Republicans 19 additional House seats while delivering what Olga Lautman calls “the final nail in the coffin of the Voting Rights Act.”Congress on permanent vacationThe timing matters. While the Court systematically erodes voting protections, House Speaker Mike Johnson has kept Congress shuttered for over a month—an unprecedented taxpayer-funded vacation during a government shutdown. Federal workers and military families stand in food bank lines while their representatives refuse to work. Johnson hasn’t even sworn in Arizona’s elected representative after five weeks. The House closure has nothing to do with the shutdown impasse; Johnson could bring members back to conduct the people’s business without addressing budget negotiations. Instead, he’s created a power vacuum that serves Trump’s interests perfectly, eliminating congressional oversight precisely when it matters most.Pentagon builds wall of secrecyThat vacuum becomes dangerous when combined with Pentagon stonewalling. Both Republican and Democratic senators are demanding information about Trump’s military buildup in Latin America—aircraft carriers, fighter jets, thousands of troops operating under unprecedented secrecy. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has imposed non-disclosure agreements on military officials involved in the operations and simultaneously cut off congressional access and press briefings. The response to bipartisan congressional inquiries? Nothing. The constitutional requirement for congressional oversight of military operations has been replaced with a wall of silence that conceals not just operational details from the public, but the very existence of these buildups from Congress itself.When utilities become weaponsMeanwhile, essential services have become surveillance infrastructure. Court records reveal that ICE and the FBI obtained Con Edison customer data, but the utility refuses to confirm whether warrants or court orders were required. The company’s silence follows revelations that federal agents conducted searches of its data systems. In a city where Con Edison holds a monopoly, immigrant communities now face an impossible choice: maintain electricity or risk deportation. The pattern extends beyond immigration enforcement. As Olga notes, utilities cooperating with federal authorities today to target immigrants can easily expand tomorrow to anyone who speaks out against the regime. When basic services become weapons of state control, everyone becomes vulnerable.Monuments to authoritarianismTrump completed the week by purging all six members of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts—the independent body tasked with reviewing his $300 million White House ballroom and triumphal arch. The Biden-appointed commissioners received termination emails just as they prepared to assess projects designed to glorify Trump’s presidency. They’ll be replaced with loyalists who won’t question the demolition of the people’s house or the anonymous donations funding its transformation into a palace. The scale suggests this is merely the beginning—a symmetrical expansion that will remake the White House into something approaching Mar-a-Lago’s gaudy ostentation, paid for through untraceable contributions that function as another avenue for pay-to-play schemes with foreign governments.The through-line connects each story. Courts eliminate voting protections while Congress remains deliberately inactive. Military operations proceed without oversight while utilities hand over customer data without warrants. Independent commissions get purged to approve vanity projects that glorify authoritarian power. Each institution designed to provide checks on executive authority either lies dormant, actively collaborates, or gets replaced with loyalists.Olga’s warning cuts through the noise: “It might seem like nothing right now, but it’s going to creep into your lives. It’s going to creep into your workplace. It’s going to creep into your futures, into your children’s futures.”The machinery of democratic accountability isn’t breaking down. It’s being systematically dismantled, piece by piece, while those elected to defend it take five-week vacations. 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

Heather Honey spent six months in 2021 searching Arizona ballots for bamboo fibers and hidden watermarks. The Cyber Ninjas audit she helped run became a national punchline—faulty analysis, inaccurate claims, misleading conclusions. Maricopa County officials eviscerated their work. The conspiracy collapsed under scrutiny.In August, Trump made her Deputy Assistant Secretary for Election Integrity at the Department of Homeland Security.A month later, Honey convened a conference call with election officials from nearly all 50 states. Instead of briefing them on protecting the 2026 midterms, she questioned whether DHS cybersecurity experts had overstepped by combating election misinformation. She accused the Federal Election Security Center of censorship. Officials left the call alarmed. One told reporters: “I don’t know if she’s stupid or lying.”Honey’s mentor is Cleta Mitchell, the lawyer who sat beside Trump on that infamous call pressuring Georgia officials to find votes. Mitchell now runs the Election Integrity Network, training what investigators describe as an organized cavalry of activists to embed as poll watchers and election monitors across battleground states. Recently, Mitchell floated something more audacious: Trump might invoke emergency powers to override state election authority, claiming threats to national sovereignty justify federal intervention.The Constitution forbids this. Even during declared emergencies, presidents have no authority over how states conduct elections. But constitutional limits only matter when people enforce them.Trump personally called Texas Governor Greg Abbott in August, ordering mid-decade congressional redistricting. The legislature complied, creating five new Republican-friendly districts. North Carolina passed their gerrymandered map last week, targeting Congressman Don Davis—one of only three Black representatives from a state where a third of residents are Black. Indiana Governor Mike Braun called a special session for November 3rd, making Indiana the fourth Republican state pursuing Trump’s redistricting scheme. Indiana Republicans already hold seven of nine congressional seats. They want all nine.Wednesday, the Supreme Court hears Louisiana v. Calais, designed to gut Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. If the conservative majority rules as expected, Republicans could eliminate minority-majority districts across the South and gain 19 additional House seats, wiping out 30% of the Congressional Black Caucus in a single legal strike.Meanwhile, Trump’s Justice Department is sending election monitors to California and New Jersey—not to protect voting rights, but to surveil Democratic states holding crucial off-year elections on November 4th. The surveillance runs in reverse now.Then there’s Dominion. Trump spent years attacking the voting machine company, forcing them to sue Fox News for defamation. Fox paid $787 million to settle. In October, Dominion was sold to Scott Leyendecker, former Republican elections director in St. Louis. He immediately rebranded the company as Liberty Vote and promised compliance with Trump’s executive orders. The machines Republicans claimed were rigged against them now belong to Republicans.Lauren Groh-Wargo, CEO of Fair Fight Action, frames the threat plainly: “We are under an autocratic onslaught at all levels.” The New York Times investigation she references shows Election Integrity Network operatives discussing how to manufacture pretenses for declaring national emergencies as far back as March. Max Flugrath, also of Fair Fight, emphasizes what too many miss: “Even in the event of some sort of national emergency being called, there is a very detailed list of powers that a president has. Any authority over how states run their elections is not one of them.”But authority and action diverge when institutions fail to hold the line. Trump declared Antifa a terrorist organization—Antifa isn’t an organization. He does and says anything that advances his agenda, normalizes the previously unthinkable, and depends on state-level sycophants to implement it.The machine operates across multiple fronts simultaneously: federal appointments of conspiracy theorists, mid-decade gerrymandering, Supreme Court cases targeting voting rights, partisan control of voting infrastructure, and systematic preparation to reject results that don’t favor Republican control. Each component reinforces the others. Together, they form something more dangerous than scattered tactics—a comprehensive system designed to ensure Trump controls Congress regardless of how Americans vote.Groh-Wargo stresses that partisan resistance alone cannot counter an autocratic threat of this scale. “To beat back this threat, we cannot just be in a partisan fight. We have to build a very, very broad coalition across ideology, across race, gender, across citizenship.” The coalition required spans beyond party politics into civil society, corporate America, higher education—anywhere capitulation currently replaces confrontation.The 2026 midterms represent the critical test. If Democrats can retake the House or Senate, constitutional checks on executive overreach might hold. If they cannot—if the election machinery Trump is installing delivers the predetermined results it’s designed to produce—the path forward darkens considerably.Fair Fight Action is organizing volunteer networks, legal challenges, and public awareness campaigns. They track developments, coordinate resistance, and build the broad coalitions necessary for sustained democratic defense. The work requires participation beyond clicking and sharing. It demands showing up, speaking out, refusing compliance with autocratic directives wherever they emerge.The coup didn’t end on January 6th. It paused, regrouped, and professionalized. Now it holds institutional power and knows exactly how to wield it. There is no time to spare. Every American should realize what’s at stake and do whatever you can legally do to stop it.Learn more and join the fight at fairfight.comThank you Ellie Leonard, Diane L. Green, Kendeth Sissy Young, Mary B, Natasha K., and many others for tuning into my live video with Max Flugrath and Rights & Insights! 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

🏛️ TRUMP DEMOLISHES 1942 EAST WING FOR BALLROOMTrump’s crew is tearing down the entire East Wing—built in 1942 under FDR during World War II—without consulting the preservation commissions designed to prevent exactly this. The two-story structure housed the First Lady’s office and concealed the Presidential Emergency Operations Center bunker beneath it. Trump promised in July the project “won’t interfere with the current building” and wouldn’t be “touching it.” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in September that “nothing will be torn down.” Both lied. The entire wing is gone, replaced by a 90,000-square-foot ballroom that overwhelms the 55,000-square-foot White House. This isn’t Trump’s property to destroy—it’s the people’s house. The bunker renovation echoes Hitler’s Reich Chancellery design, with its grand ballroom positioned above the Führer’s underground bunker.⚖️ TRUMP PARDONS BINANCE FOUNDER WHO BACKED FAMILY CRYPTO VENTURETrump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, Binance’s convicted founder who pleaded guilty to money laundering violations, just months after Zhao backed the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial crypto venture. The pardon ends Zhao’s U.S. criminal liability and could lift restrictions on Binance’s return to the U.S. market despite the company’s $4.3 billion money-laundering fine. The pardon power has become a purchase point—invest in Trump family ventures, receive presidential clemency. This creates an explicit template: financial backing of Trump businesses buys freedom from federal prosecution.🛢️ TRUMP’S SANCTIONS THEATER: TEMPORARY PRESSURE ON PUTINTrump sanctioned Russia’s largest oil companies—Rosneft and Lukoil—after canceling another Putin summit, but immediately said he hopes they “won’t be on for long.” This is the same cycle since January: Trump sides with Russia, Europeans pull him toward Ukraine, Putin calls and reels him back. Last week he promised Tomahawks to Ukraine. Days later he screamed at Zelensky after talking to Putin. Lavrov made impossible demands to Rubio, the meeting collapsed, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte flew to Washington sounding alarms, and now we have temporary sanctions that won’t survive Putin’s next phone call.🎖️ HEGSETH LOCKS DOWN PENTAGON: CONGRESS AND PRESS CUT OFFDefense Secretary Pete Hegseth is consolidating authoritarian control through two simultaneous moves. First, he ordered all Pentagon communications with Congress to receive prior approval from his office, restricting even senior military leaders from independently briefing lawmakers on constitutional oversight matters. Second, the Pentagon created a “next generation” press corps dominated by pro-Trump outlets—The Gateway Pundit, LindellTV, Turning Point USA—after mainstream media rejected restrictive access rules. The New York Times and CNN surrendered credentials rather than submit to severe limitations. With Congress cut off and independent journalists excluded, accountability for military actions has been eliminated.📚 BONUS INTERVIEW: ELLIE LEONARD ON VIRGINIA GIUFFRE’S MEMOIRJournalist Ellie Leonard joined to discuss revelations from Nobody’s Girl that major outlets are burying. Giuffre describes secret rooms in Epstein’s mansion containing floor-to-ceiling photographs of underage victims, pinhole cameras recording everything throughout the house, and Palm Beach police working as Epstein’s private security—likely tipping him off before FBI raids so hard drives could be removed. This wasn’t just trafficking; it was an intelligence operation designed to compromise powerful people and facilitate criminal financial activity. Jamie Dimon’s JP Morgan provided banking infrastructure for 15 years. Bill Gates, Trump, Ehud Barak, Harvard administrators—all connected to an operation that has metastasized into networks now controlling the presidency. When Weinstein’s crimes broke, the Times fought to expose him. When Epstein’s operation gets documented—involving infinitely more power and money—silence. The girls weren’t the crime. They were insurance protecting much larger crimes. This is the origin story of the corruption that delivered us here, where presidents destroy landmarks without permission because oversight institutions were compromised decades ago. The demolition crews in the White House are making visible what’s been happening to American democracy for years. 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